Flights of Fancy

The Edge of Never

The solar sails had, over the course of the long journey, managed to fully charge the enormous bank of reserve batteries. With full power again available, the re-animation protocols initiated and life support soon provided a habitable environment.

Captain Jamira Shadas was the first to awaken, followed by 12 crew. Eleven others were not so lucky, minor faults in their pods had doomed them and in the countless millennia that had transpired, their bodies had become dust, with only a few teeth remaining as evidence that they had ever existed.

It took several days of chemical and electro-stimulation therapy before the surviving crew-members could leave the confines of their pods. It was three more before they managed to reboot all the systems and begin to grasp the gravity of their situation.

Captain Shadas realized that the original mission was an utter failure. She was also well aware that neither she nor any of the crew would ever be able to contact anyone. It was only the discipline of her training and dedication to protocols that allowed her to maintain her sanity in light of the present situation.

It was with this mindset that she followed the required procedures. She took inventory and tried to form an idea of what had happened. She sat in front of the control console to add her recorded account to the ships log, knowing that no one would ever read it. It should've seemed pointless, yet somehow to her, it seemed important.

"This is Captain Jamira Shadas," she began, "commander of the starship Es-Iblis. Our original mission has failed. As hard as it is for me to believe, we have been traveling for hundreds of millennia. An exact amount of the time passed is impossible to determine. We were without power and the computers failed to do any more than maintain minimal life support, even failing to mark time. The only basis we have for elapsed time is our nuclear reactors, the radioactive isotopes are completely depleted. The half-life of this isotope is over 124,000 years and to reach the non-reactive level it is at now would require at least ten half-lives. It staggers the imagination. We have reached what appears to be the edge of the universe. We have nowhere to go. There is a barrier, a filament of sorts. It is pliant yet impenetrable.

"We have enough supplies and recyclable technology to allow the surviving crewmembers possibly 5 to 8 years of sustenance. There does not seem to be a point in going back into cryogenic stasis. It would only be delaying the inevitable.

"We are going to attempt to explore and more carefully examine the barrier that impedes our way. It seems the thing to do, though possibly pointless. But that is what humanity does, try to find answers to questions we have never known to ask. The crew is in surprisingly good spirits after the initial devastation of our situation. I will be making further reports. Captain Shadas signing off."