Colony
This is based on an RP I was in once. I thought it was interesting enough to make a story out of.
I am revisiting and editing this, I have had some ideas to improve upon the story.
In this revised version, I am planning on limiting the interactive nature of this story compared to my usual method of going super-interactive. I'm not sure yet if it will go fully traditional, but it will be far more linear than most of my stories.
Contents
Prologue part 1 Prologue part 2
Prologue part 1
Taylor Evins looks over the lines of code as he inserts a few additional lines, finally perfecting his masterpiece he's been working away at for the past three years.
Being the sole pilot of a colony ship is a lonely thing. The solitude, the monotony of constantly going over ship systems, all for the sake of the passengers stuck in the cryo-tubes so they can be delivered to colonize the planet in the end. Things like this tend to start leading a man to think strange things.
One thing that has been occupying Taylor's mind for the years of solitude has been the unique passenger manifest of this ship. Everyone aboard this ship are members of the Listrian cult. A rather extreme conservativist religion that believes in returning to "older ways." There'd been a recent schism within the religion, one made up of two factions with radically different ideas on the subject of child marriage. One faction thought it was perfectly fine for any girl of reproductive age to get married and live under her husband, reasoning that this is among the "older ways" their religion believes in regressing toward. The other faction was considerably more apprehensive about taking things that far.
The passenger manifest of this ship is made up entirely of people in the latter faction, almost all of whom had young daughters they wanted to get out of their little corner of the world before the former faction gained power. Of course, they'd have been perfectly safe from having something like that befall their daughters if they simply moved out of the cult controlled territories of the planet. But, of course, they'd be having none of that. They'd rather move to an entirely different planet than integrate themselves with outsiders.
Considering this faction of the Listrians was also from a country that practiced a one-child policy, this meant that the pediatric cryo-bay was almost entirely populated with nothing but girls. What's more, another of the Listrian teachings is in the "sanctity of innocence," which winds up boiling down to them having almost nothing in terms of a sex-ed program for the children. There have been a number of stories of Listrian girls getting pregnant just from playing with their friends and not realizing what they were doing was the thing that causes girls to conceive a child, as well as stories of young married couples that aren't even aware of how to have sex.
This brings things back to the special code Taylor was writing into the AI program. A group like this may very well die out completely if they go to establish a new colony while this critically lacking in reproductive knowledge. So, he's been programming the AI to "assure the continued survival of the human colonists" by encouraging sexual intercourse, with a special focus on the younger generation.
This has been his obsession for all this time he has been alone, and he has found it dominating his thoughts. He has become quite obsessed with the ideas of children having sex with each other. And, with them being almost entirely female, they are going to need more males to impregnate them as well. As such, certain other thoughts have also been entering his head. Ironically, in this case, the moderate Listrian faction has actually created a situation in which child marriage is somewhat necessary for the continuation of the species. And not just child marriage, polygamous child marriages as well. After all this time with these thoughts, he can't help but see himself as being one of the guys with a whole bunch of little child wives.
But, there's no way the people who went to the extremes of fleeing the planet just to escape the child marriages proposed by the extremist Listrian faction are going to agree to such a thing. Something has to be done about them.
And so, after the completion of his masterpiece, Taylor got to work on one more project. If they won't let him marry their underage daughters, he'll just have to become the only adult in the colony. It's not like he'll be killing them or anything. Each cryo-bay is designed to be ejected in case of emergency, and each bay is equipped with a tracking beacon. They will be found and rescued eventually. But, by that time, their children will have already grown up and had babies of their own, having started their own colony in their place.
This project took nowhere near as long as the last one. All he had to do is trick the AI into believing there has been an accident in hyperspace, while simultaneously sabotaging the ejection mechanism for the pediatric cryo-bay. Everything seems to have been going smoothly. But, when it actually came to running his program, something went wrong. The cryo-bays were not actually ejecting. When he searched for the nature of the problem, it seems there was an independent sensor on the ejector mechanisms themselves he'd forgotten to account for. He would not be able to reprogram them by remote, he'd have to go to the locations themselves.
He downloaded the program onto an external device and made his way to the cryo-bays. Once on site, he uploads the program to all three cryo-bays at once. He has already brute-force overwritten the ejection protocols to the pediatric bay, so even if it does receive the false ejection command, there will be no operator for it to connect to, and thus the pediatric bay will not eject. There is a sudden hiss of air as the men's and women's cryo-bays eject at the same time. However, there is a problem. The blast doors did not close first.
Taylor's face drops in abject terror as he has realized what just happens, and he barely even has time at all to regret his actions as he is sucked out into the vacuum of space.