The Kingdom Ships: A Story Universe

By Iolanthe Portmanteaux

Imagine an entire city enclosed in a ship, a ship so gargantuan that it’s impossible to feel “enclosed.” Every common part of the ship is either so wide, or so long, or so high that it’s impossible to feel claustrophobic, or have any sense of being “inside.”

That is one of the essential elements of a Kingdom ship: that just like any city, you’d know some parts better than others, and some parts not at all. Big enough to get lost in. Diverse enough that you’d have no sense of sameness or monotony.

The first Kingdom ship, the Jepson, launched in the latter part of the fourth millennium, in August of 3811. The effort to create the Kingdom ships started one hundred and fifty years earlier, in response to the depletion of the Earth’s resources. The goal was to find habitable planets and in that way provide a future for the human race. Obviously, this was a one-way effort: the ships had no timely way to communicate back to Earth. They did launch small probes, nicknamed bongo balls to carry important dispatches back to Earth. As they flew, the balls would transmit their highly compressed messages toward Earth, but the ship's crew would never know if the information ever made it back to Earth.

In spite of their gargantuan size, the ships were highly automated, and only required a crew of 150 to run. However, each ship carried a total crew of 3000 bodies, half of them men, half of them women. This meant that there were 20 complete crews. In addition, there was an executive group whose size varied from one ship to the next, but was always a minimum of 20. They were responsible for major decisions, such as whether to leave a crew (or even two) on a habitable planet.

The ship also carried a vast number of frozen embryos, and each crew that was set on a planet would receive a portion of those embryos and two gestation stations, which would carry the embryos to term, and “birth” them.

Since only one crew of 150 was needed to run the ship, the remaining crews would enter cryo-sleep in the ship’s sleep pods. Each crew would wake for three months of duty, or once every five years. For every hundred calendar years, a Kingdom-ship crew member would age only five years, or 50 years for every thousand calendar years.

They would age 50 years, if it weren’t for another device: the rejuvenation beds. The beds had two functions: one, the standard function was like a day at the spa: it would relax and repair you. It removed toxins from the body, including lactic acid in the muscles. It balanced your brain chemistry, and knit up your DNA. DNA tends to fray at the ends as people age, and since new cells are given copies of an existing cell’s DNA, the copies tend to degenerate on account of the fraying. The regeneration beds knit up the unraveled ends of the sleeper’s DNA.

The beds also had a RESET function, which would turn back the clock and literally take years off the sleeper. Using body scans taken from each crew member when they were young, the beds return to the sleeper to the age and state at which they joined the crew.

The sleep pods and the rejuvenation beds were creations of Dr. Herman Idlewild. He also discovered and perfected the Idlewild Protocol.

Dr. Idlewild discovered a process by which certain men could be converted into women. He then developed a series of tests that identified men who were susceptible to this process. The Idlewild Protocol was classified at the highest level of secrecy, and not even the men who were identified as susceptible knew anything about it. They may have known that they were “Idlewild Candidates,” but they didn’t know what it meant and weren’t allowed to talk about it.

The reason for the interest in Idlewild’s discovery was redundancy: procreation and the survival of humankind were the point of the entire Kingdom project, and the idea that more women could be produced nearly out of thin air was irresistible.

There were certain parameters that would automatically invoke the Idlewild Protocol, but it would only be applied at the discretion of the executive group.

As noted above, each ship carried twenty crews, only one of which was awake at a time. The other crews were in their sleep pods, which were grouped in “nests” of 150 sleep pods, distributed throughout the ship. There was also a twenty-first nest, into which the awake crew would rotate at the end of their three months of duty.

Ideally, each ship would identify 20 habitable words and seed them with a crew, a stock of embryos, and a mass of equipment aimed at making the new planet a home both for the crew and for future generations. The ship itself was designed to land at the last habitable world found. Once it landed, the ship would be unable to take off again. Obviously, the characteristics of the planets encountered, and the decisions of the crew could alter the ideal plan in any number of ways.

A small number of the first-generation Kingdom ships had a fatal programming defect in the female sleep pods, resulting in the death of all female crew members. The defect was identified in long-term simulations on Earth, and was corrected in all subsequent ships.

The Idlewild Protocol and the associated device were one of the defining features of the second generation of Kingdom ships.

The third generation of Kingdom ships saw the introduction of the virtualizer, which allowed crew members to remain asleep, but to interact with the ship as avatars. This allowed the crew to interact, run, and repair the ship, as well as interact with each other. Not every function could be carried out via avatar, however, so individual crew members were awoken as the need arose.

There was some concern that the use of the virtualizer might lead to dissociation and other psychological issues, but since its use was completely under the crew’s control, this was left to the crew to study and (if necessary) resolve.