2 – Worldship

Light poured in through apertures in the hull. The many photons they admitted were focused by the ship’s interior lenses and directed towards the center. Where they met, a bright apparition hovered in midair, visible to everyone on the curved ground below. This “Sun,” which they had brought with them through the miracle of engineering, painted the landscape below in a warm light, drawing attention to every tree, structure, and ripple in the water.

It was appropriate and soothing for someone who had just arisen from cryosleep. Placing his cup down on the parapet, Dube took a deep breath and drew in the morning air. The landscape was quite accommodating, generating dew that formed on the grass and leaves. When the morning light came and turned it into water vapor, the result was fragrant ozone. Were it not for the vertically-sloping skyline, it would have looked, smelled, and felt like home.

Dube got a strange flash of recollection. He remembered standing somewhere, feeling the sights, sounds and smells of home. But he also recalled that there was a voice telling him that it wasn’t home, not anymore. The rest was darkness…

It was like something out of a bad dream that he could only remember in the vaguest sense. Dube knew that such recollections were natural after waking from cryosleep. The dreams one had, especially as they were coming out of dormancy, were known for being vivid. But as time went on, they became foggier and harder to retrieve.

If that were true, the indeterminate recollection was meaningless.

Then again, there was the extraction process that he and the other Engineers had undergone. So many memories from their training sessions had been removed afterward and put in storage, only to be reloaded when a specific Contingency occurred. A common side effect of the process, they had been forewarned, was vague recollections and moments of déjà vu.

If that were true, then Dube was sensing something from a training session, something that he elected to forget. He didn’t see how scenes from home and discussing where home was could possibly be related to contingency-specific training. But until he could retrieve something more of the memory, he had no way of knowing.

Dube huffed. Apparently, another symptom of cryosleep was endlessly poring over trivial matters. Vivid dreams were certainly to be expected during cryosleep, but not any particular obsession with them. Meanwhile, the ship’s artificial dawn was spreading in front of him and he had barely noticed.

There was much to notice too. The last time he had stared out onto the landscape of the ship, it was in the process of being spun up. The grass, trees, and foliage had just taken root, the deserts and transitional zones stood silent, and the waters reflecting the artificial dawn were not yet flowing. But in the years since their departure, the landscape must have blossomed and died many times over.

To look out onto the inner world that was the Transverse today was to look upon an environment that was at once familiar, yet alien. It was exacting in its biomimicry, every patch of the landscape adopted from the original example. But the biosphere had still evolved to become its own unique lifeform, with one generation of life dying and making way for the next. Even though the layout and distribution were as he remembered them, every organism that currently existed inside the ship was different than the ones that came before.

Like the human body, which swapped all its cells every seven to ten years, the landscape Dube beheld was the latest skin covering the same giant organism. That organism would continue to procreate and see its spawn mature and die. It would happen many more times as the ship made its way towards their destination. If necessary, it would continue to do so long after they reached it. The symmetry of that made Dube smile.

It also filled him with feelings of insignificance at the same time. From one end to the other, they had created a closed-loop system that mimicked (as closely as possible) the entire environment of Earth. Within a single structure, the entire biosphere of Earth was recreated.

In the center, there was the massive rainforest belt made up of the Amazon, Congo, and Borneo sections. Capping this section on either side was the patches of savannah and desert, gradually giving way to grasslands and temperature forests.  Stretching perpendicular to these were the three saltwater seas that ran the length of the interior – Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian – eventually emptying into the Arctic and Antarctic oceans.

Further down the ship’s spine, Dube could make out where the verdant hills and lakes of the Precambrian landscape gave way to the next geographical region of the interior. This was the Prairie-Steppe of the northern hemisphere, which distinguished them from the Pampas of the southern. While the view was somewhat hazy, thanks to all the moisture-laden air between Dube and that section, they were distinguishable based on their comparatively flat profile and large tracts of grasslands and shrubbery.

Light from the sunband painted the many structures distributed across this landscape, casting shadows beneath them. Down there, crewmembers were tilling the fields, planting the seeds of the previous harvest to grow the next.

A glance in the opposite direction revealed a different transition. The fields of the Borealis seemed to go on forever, until they thinned to make way for the Tundra. Beyond that, in the barely-perceptible distance, was the northern ice cap – a frozen field that wrapped the front section of the North Habitation module. Dube felt a chill just looking at it.

Picking up his cup, Dube took another sip of his coffee. The dose of restoratives Jonas had added was swarming through his insides now, meeting up with his dormant medimachines and giving them a blast of chemical energy. Once that was complete, they would come together to administer repairs to all of his bodily systems.

He could already feel the cobwebs in his brain being combed away.

Looking to his left, just above his eye level, Dube saw Lake Ontario, the central freshwater lake in the northern section of the vessel. The sunlight reflected from the surface a fine patchwork, indicating where wind and Coriolis forces caused ripples on the water. From his vantage point, the lake looked like something Dube would expect to see from Low Earth Orbit, and perhaps flying over Mars and Venus someday. The experience was known to trigger vertigo to the uninitiated, but Dube had seen it enough times to become comfortable with it.

His eyes came to rest on the small chain of islands that were grouped along Ontario’s narrowest point, the Engineers attempt to reproduce the Thousand Islands and the complex Frontenac Arch biosphere. Already, there were people in small boats out to the open water with their fishing implements. Perhaps they would even catch something. The pike, trout, steelhead, and bass had been awake longer than any of them, after all.

[Engineer Dube. Have you had adequate time to recuperate?]

Dube sighed. [Yes, Jonas. And just to save us both some time, I will be heading for the Bridge right now.]

[Thank you, Engineer Dube. I shall see you there.]

“Of course, you shall,” he sneered.