Amid the deep, cold black of space, the generation ship Hermes cruises her way toward finding a new home for humanity at Tau Ceti. Or, at least the thousand souls who are aboard her. Unusually, though, these are not the same thousand who left Earth centuries ago. Humanity figured out hibernation, but not cryogenics: its sleeping souls will age and die just as their predecessors on Earth did. A complex system of robotics and AI aboard the ship monitors the occupants and maintains the “stock”, recycling those who reach 70 and replacing them with newborns created artificially from the genes of the occupants.

But one of Hermes occupants is different: the Monitor, a person selected in their young adult days to serve as the ship’s hands, to do the work its robotic systems cannot quite manage. Orion is the sixth monitor of the Hermes’ life, having been effectively raised by “Dan”, the ship’s artificial intelligence: it was that intelligence that taught him to read, that educated him about the Hermes and its mission, of Earth-that-was’s fate. He has never felt a human touch other than his own, never heard another voice that was not the computer’s. And now, as he nears the age of 50, it is time for Orion to choose a successor and return to his own sleeping pod, where he knows in 20 years hence that same successor will supervised his own recycling — clearing the tube up for another newborn. And he….really doesn’t want to go.

This Long Vigil is an interesting spin on the ‘generation ship’ trope, one that places an extraordinary psychological burden on its protagonist: not only are they tasked with helping dispose of old crewmembers, but when they chose their successor they do so knowing it’s the last thing they will ever do, as Monitor or anything else: Orion will retire to his pod and sleep for twenty years until his own life is terminated. This was powerful emotional drama for me, but one that was sabotaged to a degree by the strange setup aboard the Hermes. What on Earth-that-was will happen when the Hermes arrives? How will Dan and the successor-monitor turn 999 “babies” of differing ages into a human population fit to take over a world? Yes, they have all the world’s knowledge in their databanks, including art and song, but….there’s no “culture”, so to speak, no experience coping with emotions — no maturity born of trial and adversity, no character to these people. It’s a profoundly unsettling premise. Despite that, though, I couldn’t help but sympathize with Orion, especially in his yearning for human touch and desire to live and not merely exist and serve.

This is the first of what may become a series, of short story reviews. Seems a fun way to end the week on, and I might use it to spotlight indie fiction or even fan fiction.