Interstellar Colonization

In 2297 AD, humanity's first true interstellar colony ship, the Daedalus, reached Kepler-942c, 41 light-years away. Aboard were 10,000 waking crew and 100,000 colonists asleep in cryo-bays.

Departure had been 4 years earlier, in 2293, out of Earth. It was the first time humanity had packed the seed of an entire civilization into one ship and sent it to another star. The mission was written on the first page of the departure documents: land, build the base, wake the colonists, stay alive in the new world.

Underneath the mission sat a contract. Before departure the command tier had signed a Mission Performance Clause with the United Colonial Bureau. Article Seventeen laid it down: within 24 hours of arrival, the ship's broadcast bay must complete the act of issuing the first arrival report. The timestamp of that issuance would be written into the ship's automatic contract log, and would trigger the contract beacon at the same moment — a closed channel whose power cost ran so high it could not carry a whole sentence, only 2 status codes:

SIGNED    Contract fulfilled, motion passes
DELAYED   Contract delayed, motion goes to risk review

The report itself would spend 41 years in the deep-space queue before it reached Earth. The status code would not. What the motion chamber back on Earth would be looking at was those 2 words, and the launch motion for the tenth colony ship sat on the agenda table at hour 28 after the Daedalus arrived.

So on the day of arrival, every team aboard was talking about a different thing. Engineering stood in front of the projection arguing over the geological scan of the landing site, over gradient and bedrock. For the past 3 months the biology team had done one thing only — confirm whether anything on the surface could kill the colonists. The conclusion field read "no". The command tier's schedule held nothing but that 24-hour countdown. The security officer's list was an SOP anybody aboard could recite.

The ship had always been split into separate systems of logic, each minding its own piece: the security team carried SOP article numbers, engineering carried the gradient and bedrock of the landing site, biology carried amino-acid tables, the command tier carried contract clauses and motion schedules. Where they met, the master AI did the coordinating, and in 4 years under way nothing had gone wrong. On the day of arrival, those systems of logic had to speak to the same set of data for the first time.

The coffee tasted of plastic. After 4 years under way, nobody should expect the real thing.