The Endless Dance Card : 4 / 7

A Kingdom Ship Story
By Iolanthe Portmanteaux

During the second month of my convalescence, there was a handoff from my crew to the next. There is always an overlap as one crew prepares to go back to sleep and the next crew prepares to take over. During this overlap, both crews are awake. Remember: for the crew that just awoke, five calendar years have passed, and they need to be briefed on both the current status as well as any important events that happened while they slept. Usually three days are allotted for this overlap, but the time can be extended or shortened as needed. During the interval when both crews are awake, there is always at least one party. The parties help to break the monotony of life onboard, and they serve a big social need -- the need to have fun. There is also a great deal of fairly indiscriminate sexual activity.

Speaking of which, I did get to say goodbye to Dr Harcourt before she went to her sleep pod. She was quite embarrassed and uncharacteristically shy. I was glad to see her, in spite of all that happened, and she apologized several times for not having had the sense to stop when she didn’t understand what was happening to me. I knew that she’d been called before a review board, and was required to do some retraining. I didn't mention it, but it was clearly on her mind.

“I didn’t tell them about our sexual involvement,” she said, blushing. “They really would have creamed me if they knew.”

Even though we (the crew) were overtly encouraged to be casual in our sexual relations -- since, in the end, our mission was the preservation of the human species -- what she’d done was still against protocol. In spite of our permissiveness, there are some relationships that are explicitly taboo. What makes them taboo is the power dynamic: doctor/patient, supervisor/worker, etc. I assured her in a soft voice, “I won’t tell.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I appreciate that, especially considering what it cost you.” She squirmed for a moment, then confessed, “I have to tell you… I want you to know that I’m not just sorry that I hurt you. I’m horrified to see that I’m capable of doing such a thing.” She swallowed hard, then looked me in the eye. “When I gave in to my, uh -- to my desire to dominate you, it negatively affected my decision-making about your care.” Then, with tears forming in her eyes, she said in an almost inaudible whisper, ”I’m so sorry for what I did to you!” She sniffed hard, and wiped her nose and eyes with a napkin. She drew a deep, hard breath, and in a normal voice said, “It frightens me to know I was capable of such insensitivity and neglect.”

I shrugged. I couldn’t disagree. I mean, look at me! I’m a girl now. At the same time, I have come to terms with my new gender -- to some extent. How and why could I do that? Because I was sure that being female was only a temporary condition. I was supremely confident that I wouldn’t stay this way for very long. My hope verged on a feeling of certainty, and that near-certainty allowed me to see my history with the doctor as just so much spilt milk. “Spilt milk under the bridge a long long time ago,” my father used to say. Also, I was surprised to find that I still found the doctor incredibly attractive. I can’t say I was actually aroused by seeing her. I didn’t have the anatomical equipment for arousal. I guess that in my new world, she migrated from being my lover to being my first crush, and I had no desire to make her feel any worse than she already did.

For the next five years, one element of every handoff from one crew to the next was that, as people learned what happened to me, they’d want to meet me or at least have a look at me. It wasn’t terrible, but it was weird. Sometimes I’d tell myself, This is what celebrities experience, and other times, This is what animals in the zoo experience. People took for granted that they could stare me up and down, ask me to turn this way and that… and comment on my appearance as if I couldn’t hear them. They’d ask the most tactless and insensitive questions, but I always made an effort to answer as honestly as I could. I tried to not take it personally, but ironically what made it uncomfortable and weird was the fact that it wasn’t personal at all: most people treated me more as a freak than as a person. So that was my life at that point.

On the positive side, I don’t think anyone else onboard -- not even the Admiral -- met as many of the crew as I did. I didn’t end up meeting everyone, but almost.

Another element of each handoff was a mixed blessing. From each crew of 150, the psychs appointed one woman to be my “mother.” Their method of finding these women was very simple, almost crude: they looked at the psychological tests we’d taken before leaving Earth, and chose from each crew the woman with the highest “maternal” values. I tried to ask exactly what those values were, but they wouldn’t tell me. In any case, every three months, I’d get a new mother. In the end, I went through 16 mothers, total.

These mothers were supposed to help me navigate the process of turning into a girl. The first one spent a lot of time talking to me about feminine hygiene and physical and psychological changes. At first I appreciated it: she answered a lot of questions I didn’t even know I had, but at the same time it rankled me, because it got into the nuts and bolts (so to speak) of being a girl -- and I didn’t want to spend a lot of time thinking about that. Also, I GOT IT ALL THE FIRST TIME she explained it -- she didn’t need to quiz me or explain it a second or third or fourth time. Aside from making me uncomfortable, from my point of view the information had a limited shelf life -- especially all the business about menses. I had no intention of remaining female, and I was definitely going to bail out of girlhood before all the monthly stuff started.

My second mother was far too busy to give me any attention, and that was absolutely GREAT as far as I was concerned. I have to admit, that after the intrusive lectures and quizzes from Mom No. 1, I got way too used to the freedom I felt under Mom No. 2. I loved being on my own and doing things my way, even more than I ever had as a man… I’m sure that being physically awake had something to do with it, but also I felt as though I’d escaped from something. On the other hand, all that free time and lack of supervision meant, of course, that I didn’t learn anything at all about being a girl. Not that I cared at the time.

My third mother wasn’t bad, really, and I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I’d only done one thing: I should have called her more often. It had been a couple of months since my convalescence ended, so I was an active member of the crew again. My duties took me all over the ship, and the ship isn’t just huge, it’s gargantuan. It wasn’t possible for me to physically get back to her every night to check in. So I didn’t bother, even when I was nearby. I almost never called, and after a while I stopped answering when she called. In retrospect, I think she was the least comfortable in the role. She wasn’t sure where to start or how to get a handle on me.

This cued my next mother, Mom No. 4, to be a hyper-disciplinarian. Maybe she would have been anyway, but I felt it was partly my fault for being so dismissive of Mom No. 3.

Mother No. 4 was clever. She gave me a few days on my own, so I continued to feel free and uncontrolled. By the fourth day of her Motherhood, my guard was down, pretty much all the way down. She used those days to get hold of my work itinerary and to look over my movements from the past month. She studied me. She read my records and got into my psych files. She spoke to my supervisor and to the head of security, and came to an agreement with each of them regarding my “upbringing.” She took the whole motherhood thing very very seriously.

Once her plan was neatly in place, she invited me to her room for dinner. We had meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and green beans, with chocolate cake for dessert. I don’t usually bother with dessert, but the cake was particularly good, and intensely chocolatey. I didn’t used to care for chocolate, but that cake converted me. Then, while I was feeling full and happy, she lowered the boom. She showed me that she’d brought an extra bed into her sleeping area and told me that that’s where I’d be sleeping each night while she was my mother. Laid out on the bed was a pair of pale pink shorts, along with a light gray top. The top had the image of a winking kitten with its left fist in the air. “These are your pajamas,” she told me. “While I’m your mother, you’re going to wear what I tell you to wear.” I didn’t respond. I didn’t say anything at all. I didn’t see any point in fighting with her or taking a stand: I knew I could get whatever clothes I pleased from any of the clothes-fabs onboard. Better to let her believe she had control, and then blow her off for the next three months. She wasn’t going to be my mother forever.

She informed me, “Another thing: you are going to come home -- here to this room -- every evening for supper with me.”

“That won’t work,” I told her. This was one idea I needed to nip in the bud. “My duties take me all over the ship.”

“I’ve worked that out with your supervisor,” she replied, and she smiled in a way that I regarded as treacherous and a little frightening. “When you have to go to the other end of the ship, you can use a one-scooter, and your new work itinerary takes your travel time into account.” That’s when I began to feel her trap closing around me. I literally felt my throat tightening. However, she was far too clever to keep pushing. She set my work schedule face-down on a table behind her, and completely changed the subject by picking up a deck of playing cards. She taught me a simple but wildly funny game she called Idiot. Once I caught on to it, I liked it immensely. We played for a little over two hours, and soon the two of us were laughing together and really having a grand time. We were to play this game quite a lot during her three months of motherhood. Part of the fun -- which I initially resisted, but then came to like -- was that whoever lost a game would have to wear a silly, cone-shaped hat until they won again. I loved making her wear the hat.

In fact, the last hand ended with her wearing the silly hat. She took it off, gathered up the cards, and put it all away. “Now it’s time for your bath,” she announced, and led me into the bathroom, where a steaming bubble bath was ready.

“How did you do that?” I asked, amazed.

“Magic,” she said with a laugh. “No, seriously, I just set a timer. Better check that it’s not too hot.”

I stuck my hand in, and the water temperature was just right. She waited until I stripped and got into the water. Then she picked up my underwear from the floor. It was a pair of men’s boxers. “This is what you’ve been wearing?” she asked. “This is going to change. This is going to change. No more mens clothes. Especially no more mens underwear.” With that, she turned and carried my gear out of the room. I never saw those clothes again.

Okay, It’s true, I’d been wearing men’s underwear. Why shouldn’t I?

She came back after twenty minutes to wash my hair. It was wonderful to feel her fingers running across my scalp. Then she pulled out a bottle of conditioner. “I never use that stuff,” I told her. “You do now,” she replied, and worked the lotion through my hair.

When I got out of the tub, she wrapped me in a towel, and she brushed and dried my hair. “Tomorrow morning, first thing, we’re going to get you a haircut,” she told me. “It’s good that you let your hair grow out, but now you look like a little lost boy.”

“I can’t get a haircut tomorrow,” I replied. “I need to go to the other end of the ship. In fact, you might not see me for a few days.”

She laughed. “No, you don’t have to do anything at the other end of the ship tomorrow,” she countered. “You have tomorrow off, so that you and I can get acquainted. When was the last time you got your hair cut?”

“Wow. I guess it’s been a over a year,” I told her. “I, uh, you know, I’ve never been awake this long since I came onboard, and what with everything that happened, I just kind of forgot.”

“Mmm,” was her only comment. Then she walked me over and had me stand next to a chair in her sitting room. It was an old-fashioned chair, made from actual wood. “There’s one more thing we need to do before you put on your pajamas,” she said. With a single swift movement, she undid my towel so it fell to the floor. She sat down on her chair and pulled me to her suddenly. I found myself lying across her lap, my bare ass in the air, my face looking down at the floor. Oh, no, I thought. This can’t be happening. She can’t. She can’t.

“Your last mother reported that you were quite disrespectful and wildly undisciplined,” she told me. Her hand rested on my lower back, and kept me from standing up. “That’s not going to happen this time. I’m your mother now, and you’re going to do what I say. Whenever I call you and tell you to come to me, you will come to me. When I choose clothes for you to wear, you will wear those clothes, and you will keep those clothes clean and tidy. I will teach you and I will show you how a proper young lady comports herself, and you will conform to what I teach you. You are going to be a proper young lady in every way.”

“The hell I will!” I shouted. “You can’t make me do anything! I’ll go to the other end of the ship, and you’ll never find me!”

She replied in a quiet, firm voice. “Find you? Why would I need to find you? That’s Security’s job, not mine. If I tell them my daughter is missing, they will find you and they will bring you to me, and then this will happen.” With that, she began to spank me. Her hand came down on my ass in a slow, steady rhythm: slap, slap, slap! The sound was hard and loud. I wriggled and fought, but she was stronger than me, and I was in a weak position. “You’re going to be a good girl,” she said.

“No, I’m not!” I shouted, gritting my teeth. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of hearing me cry or whimper or any of that stuff. “Fuck that! Fuck it! I’m not a fucking girl! And fuck you, too! And fuck the fucking security! They don’t know everything, and neither do you!”

I fought for as long as I could, but she was inexorable. I could only bite my tongue for so long. Soon I was crying, then I was sobbing. I could hardly believe it, but she utterly subdued me. I couldn’t protest or fight any more. I wanted to tell her to go fuck herself, but all that came out of me was a whimper. She paused to let me cry for a bit. Then she asked me whether I was going to be a good girl. I hesitated for JUST ONE SECOND, so she renewed her spanking. My butt was burning. I’d never experienced a spanking before, and it hurt like blazes. She stopped and asked me again whether I was going to be a good girl. This time I didn’t hesitate at all.

“Yes!” I shouted. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

“Yes, what?” she asked. “Say it.”

“Yes, I’m going to be a good girl!”

“Yes, you’re going to be a good girl, who?”

I hesitated, trying to puzzle that out, so she gave my ass a sharp slap. “Try Yes, Mom,” she suggested.

“Yes, Mom, I am going to be a good girl.”

“You’re going to do everything I say?”

“Yes, Mom. I will do everything you say.”

“And will you wear whatever clothes I tell you to wear?”

“Yes, Mom. I will wear the clothes you tell me to wear.”

“Good girl,” she said, and I breathed a sigh of relief. “I hope you mean that, because if you don’t, this is what will happen. You don’t want to be spanked again, do you?”

“No, Mom.”

“Good girl. Tell me one more time that you’re going to be a good girl.”

I did. Of course I did.

When she let me up, I put on the silly pajamas as quickly as I could. Then she set a soft pillow on her couch, and sat me on the pillow. She snuggled down next to me and put her arm around me. Together we watched an old Audrey Hepburn movie. Somewhere in the middle of it, my head began to nod and I began to fade, so she helped me to my bed.

 

---

 

The next morning she showed me a bra and panty set. It was pink lace. “I don’t need a bra,” I told her.

“You’re right,” she agreed, “You don’t need one yet, but I want you to get used to wearing one. It will remind you that you are, in fact, a girl.”

The underwear fit me perfectly -- no surprise there: the clothes-fab had constructed them exactly for me. What I should have expected (but didn't!) was that the panties would suit my new anatomy far better than men's boxers. Next, Mom produced a pink dress with short sleeves. Aside from its pinkness, it was fairly plain and workable. I couldn’t help but ask, though, “Will I only be wearing pink from now on?”

She stopped short and smiled. “Fair point! I may have gotten stuck on the pink theme here. Good catch! I’ll mix it up, don’t worry.”

I shrugged and put the dress on.

“This is a skater dress, because of the skirt,” she told me. “A skater skirt is basically a circle with a hole in the middle.”

“Why ‘skater’?” I asked.

“Because skaters want the skirt to move with them.” She had me swish my hips back and forth, and then twirl. “See how it follows you? It’s a nice effect.”

We had a light breakfast, then went off to the hair stylist. She didn’t do anything wild or absurdly girly. She gave me a modern asymmetrical cut that was pretty simple and easy to take care of. “Basically I’ve just cleaned up your hair,” she said. “Got rid of the split ends, the overgrown parts… evened things up.”

“Evened things up… asymmetrically,” I joked. She froze. “Don’t you like it?” she asked.

“Oh, yes, yes, I love it!” I assured her. “I’m just being silly. Thanks, it’s really nice and cool.”

She smiled, and dusted her chair with a towel. Then she said, “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” I agreed.

“When are you going to change your name?” she asked.

“Uh… do I have to?”

“Well, I would think so. Fergus is a very masculine name. Would you like a suggestion?”

I shrugged in a noncommittal way.

“Fergusdotter. Isn’t that a nice name? Dotter is Swedish for daughter, so it means ‘daughter of Fergus’ -- and that’s kind of what you are!” She smiled triumphantly, obviously proud of her invention.

I didn’t know what to say, but Mom spoke up. “That’s a lovely suggestion. We’ll write that down, won’t we, Fergus? In the end, though, Fergus will have to find her own new name -- that is, if she wants a new name.”

The stylist stopped smiling. She couldn’t tell whether she was being complimented or being blown off.

When we were out of earshot, I said in a low voice, “Thanks for telling her to fuck off back there.”

“Hmm,” my mother replied. “My pleasure. She’s kind of nosy, so I got some satisfaction for my own sake, too.” She stopped walking, put her hand on my arm, and looked at me. “You understand, I hope, that the point of all of this isn’t just to train and guide you: the real point is that none of us wants you to go through this alone.”

All in all, she ended up being my best mother, even counting the woman who actually gave me birth. Mom No. 4 never spanked me again, or even raised her voice. She wasn’t autocratic; she considered my opinions and my tastes. She never made me wear anything that I really disliked.

Her legacy -- what she truly changed in me -- is that after spending three months with her, I never wore mens clothes again. I got to like women’s underwear, dresses, skirts, and all that. It was nice to be able to wear colors and to put together outfits. She taught me how to take care of my hair and skin and nails. She gave me good habits that I never lost afterward.

Unfortunately, after those three months, I never saw her again. I think of her often, and of all the mothers I was assigned, she is the only one I really miss.

And yet, in spite of coming to like girls clothes, I was still determined to change myself back. I didn’t want to remain a girl.

I wasn’t obsessive, but I spent a LOT of time studying profiles. They were immensely complex. Their logic wasn’t linear. Even though it was mapped out in a file, which is essentially two-dimensional, the information spanned several independent dimensions. Each profile was broken up into 27 sections, and each section contained 30 subsections. As I studied the code that ran the reset function, I found that the meaning of one value in any subsection could vary incredibly, depending on apparently random values in other sections. It was mind-bending.

At the same time, the profiles were becoming very familiar to me. I could pick out the various subsections from across a room, and I could tell that my study was stretching my cognitive abilities. My mind was struggling to build a model that could comprehend the profiles’ complexity. I was pretty sure that I could do it; after all, a human being designed the profile’s format. Whoever they were, they weren’t superhuman. If they could write it, eventually I’d be able to read it.

Something else became clear to me: I could see why my profile wasn’t validated or checked before I was reset -- a profile is so immensely complex, you’d need a huge synthetic intelligence, built purely for that purpose. It would not only have to verify that a profile was coherent and consistent -- which is a massive task in itself -- it would also need to check that the profile corresponded to the person it was being applied to. To perform the second part, it would have to be able to calculate that the profile was a younger version of the person lying on the bed. Another massive task.

I was learning so much!

One day I took a glance at one of the other corrupted profiles, and something jumped out at me. If I hadn’t spent so much time reading profiles, I probably never would have seen it. There, in someone else’s bad profile, was the same block of corrupted data that occurred in mine. It cut across the same three sections in the same way, in the same location. Of course, it was compressed, so I couldn’t be 100% positive that it was identical, so I extracted it and compared it to the junk in my own profile. They matched. Exactly. Huh.

So I pulled out the junk from the other contaminated profiles and compared them as well. They were identical. The block of garbage was the same in every single case, and it always occurred in the same spot.

I spent two weeks digging into that block of junk data, trying to make some kind of sense out of it, but I couldn’t find a decompression algorithm or a cryptological method that rendered any meaning from it.

So, I called up the current engineering lead, a man named Nelson. He is a very sleek Afro-Asian man -- incredibly handsome, and extremely professional. I explained what I’d found. He listened without comment. Then I said, “I don’t know whether this makes sense. Should we expect random junk to be more random? Is it bad for bad data to be identical in every case?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “On the one hand, you have one defect that always gives the same result. That makes sense. On the other hand, is it intentionally the same? What is this junk, and where did it come from? Where did it pull this data from in the first place?”

“Exactly!”

Nelson asked me to put the bad data on a safe stick and physically walk it over to his virtual sandbox. “I’ll set up a port you can use. We don’t want to go copying this and sending it around the ship without knowing what it is.”

“Right,” I agreed. “Also, I looked into the parts lists for every device onboard, to see if we got anything else from Herman’s Human, but it was only that one egg-shaped sensor in the sleep pods.”

“Yeah,” Nelson agreed. “Qurakas also did that very same search, but -- good thinking, Fergus. Good looking out. I’m going to note that in the official report. It helps to have independent verifications.”

“Thanks,” I said.

He paused and looked at me. I could tell he was considering whether to tell me something.

“What is it?” I asked.

“You do realize the implications of this, don’t you? The sensors, the junk data...”

“Yes,” I replied. “It could be sabotage.”

“Right,” he agreed. “Don’t repeat this, but our official conclusion is that the presence of the defective sensors was an act of deliberate sabotage. It’s rather obvious sabotage as well. You must have seen that. They wanted us to see that it was done on purpose.”

“Yes -- there was exactly one bad sensor in each box. It’s a slap in our faces.”

“Unfortunately, there isn’t anything we can do about it, other than send the information in a bongo ball, but who knows when it will reach Earth?” Bongo balls are small space probes used to send messages back to Earth. While they travel, they beam their payload ahead via laser. It’s our only way of talking to the people back home. Obviously it’s a one-way conversation.

“But…” I hesitated “what would be the point of the sabotage?”

“My theory -- and it’s only a theory -- is that ultimately they meant to kill us all. Luckily, you caught the corruption in its early stages, when it was small enough for us to cope with. I’m confident that if we hadn’t replaced the profiles, the corruption would have slowly spread beyond the profiles, seeping into other systems, shutting down the ship. At the very least, it would have screwed up some of our profiles to the point that a reset would kill. It wouldn't have to kill all of us. One kill, late in the voyage, would be terrifying. It would put everybody off the rejuvenation beds. These are just theories, though, and I realize that there are lot of pieces that I can’t prove, so don’t go repeating it. We don’t want to frighten people unnecessarily. Okay?”

A chill went through me. “Who would do such a thing?” I asked.

“Come on, you know who. The Christmas People are not above that kind of shit,” he observed. The Christmas People are a group of activists, or terrorists, depending on your point of view. They have a religious belief that it’s wrong to leave Earth, and are violently opposed to the Kingdom Ship project.

After Nelson made a few more comments about the Christmas People’s extremism, he was about to end the call. I stopped him. There was one more thing I wanted to talk about.

“Nelson, you know I’ve been spending a lot of time on the profiles, and it’s occurred to me that they could be used for some other really interesting applications. I don’t mean immediately… all these ideas would require serious development and testing, and so forth. At this point, they’re just ideas… things I can’t get out of my head.

“So, anyway, there are four areas I’ve identified.” As I spoke, I became quite nervous. I hadn’t spoken of this to anyone, and I was afraid I might sound crazy. At the very least, I was sure I’d sound impractical. “The first area is cloning: we could take a profile, and make an exact copy of a person!”

“Cloning! Why? Are you looking for a twin sister, Fergus?” Nelson asked, eyes twinkling.

“No, no,” I responded, waving my hands.

“I’m just teasing,” he assured me. “Go on, I’m listening.”

“That leads to the second area: resurrection, for lack of a better word. Suppose we lost a crew member in an accident? We use their profile to create them all over again.”

“Sounds a little dangerous... a little creepy... but still interesting. Go on.”

“The third area is storage: do you realize that if you combine two of our biggest storage devices, we’d have enough memory to fit the entire population of Earth? That’s everybody! With space left over!”

“Interesting,” Nelson commented, doing a little mental math. “We could certainly store everyone’s profile, that’s true.”

“And then, uh, we’d wake them up when we need them. We could put all of Earth’s population on every Kingdom ship that leaves Earth!”

“Hmmph,” Nelson said thoughtfully. “These are certainly big ideas. What’s the last one?”

“Teleportation,” I said. “That’s probably the most way-out, but if you consider that we already transmit profiles electronically, whenever they’re copied or accessed. It’s just a small step to send them via radio or laser or even through a wire, and in that way we could move a person from one place to another.”

“Wow.” Nelson fell silent for a few moments, considering what I’d said. “That’s really far out, creative thinking. Far, far out. It’s a whole world of possibilities and implications. However, there’s one great big roadblock to putting any of it into practice. Do you see it?”

“No, I don't.”

“Where do you get the new bodies from? What are the profiles acting on? When you make a clone, or teleport, or whatever, you can’t create a person out of nothing. So what do you apply the profile to? If you were to ‘resurrect’ someone, you wouldn’t want to apply the profile to their corpse, right? What if it only half worked, and you got some kind of zombie? Or you ‘resurrected’ someone and ended up creating a person whose body was in perpetual pain?”

I deflated. “Oh… I hadn’t thought of that.”

"And if you teleport someone, what happens to their original body? What makes it disappear? I mean, how do they actually travel? Aren't you really just making a clone, far away? I mean, you don't want to kill the person on the sending side, just for the sake of having only one copy."

"Yeah... no..." I said, feeling very stupid. "What you said is all so obvious, but none of it occurred to me."

“Hey, hey, don’t get discouraged! You’ve taken a big, bold step, but it’s only the first step. These are good ideas. Really good ideas. They need to be developed -- heh, they need to be literally fleshed out -- and maybe in the future -- maybe even in the near future -- we’ll figure out what a person could be cloned into, or teleported into. A new body? A synthetic body? Who knows?

“There's one thing you really need to keep in mind: you don’t have to solve every problem all by yourself. For all we know, someone else already has the necessary ideas, the ones that complement your own, and together those ideas could give us possibilities we can’t even imagine now.”

A little embarrassed by his praise, I shrugged and smiled shyly.

“Listen, Fergus, I want you to write all of that down, as soon as you can. It doesn’t have to be a long discourse; just get the essential ideas written, even if it's just a couple of lines, and send it to me. I’m putting together a bongo ball to report on the sabotage. I’ll put your memorandum in there as well, and send it back to Earth. Get some other people thinking about it. Maybe even Dr Idlewild himself. Okay? Good job, Fergus!”

It certainly felt great to have my ideas validated in that way. It was exciting to see that Nelson thought my ideas were important enough to include in a message back to Earth. His response gave me a lot of energy and determination to continue my work with the profiles. That’s when I began to call it my work. It wasn’t just “study” any more. It was my mission.

Nelson thought that Dr Idlewild himself might even be interested! The genius who first conceived of the Kingdom Ships, the man who invented both the sleep pods and the rejuvenation beds! Well… he at least ought to be interested to see what his inventions had done to me!

Nelson’s validation of my ideas and my new dedication to my work didn’t just help my self-esteem: they gave me a profound sense of purpose. They gave my life meaning, as corny as that may sound.

In all honesty and sincerity, its what kept me sane in the years ahead, and I really needed it, because in a couple of years my life took a wild left turn.