Prologue

By any human scale, the ship is unimaginably large. It cannot be described in terms of cars, busses, Olympic sized swimming pools or sports stadiums. It is the largest thing made by humanity to date. And once it is finished there are another three on the way.

The Enkelados Project used to be the pet hobby of a group of wealthy financiers who wanted their Science Fiction dreams to become reality. But when the news came that the sun was putting a halt to our lease on Earth, they moved entirely into aggressively furthering cryogenics by leaps and bounds, hunting down every study or piece of academia on the subject. And somehow, within a year they did what no one else had managed. They created working cryogenics that could be scaled up to carry humanity into the stars.

But then, the unimaginable has started coming with increased regularity, hasn't it?

When S-Day comes, the Solar Flares shall hopefully be nothing but a distant reflection in the ship's windows. A blink of light in the midst of the great darkness that is space. If they are any closer than that there is a good chance that they will burn through the electronics of the ship with the same deadly results as will no doubt be occurring here on Earth.

There are also rumours of several smaller ships, each taking far fewer than the billion or so souls on these giants, being planned and outfitted by other companies. But, for the most part, it is the ships made by the Enkelados Project that we humans have staked our futures on. We shall have to hope that our leaders who chose for us, chose wisely.

***

I was given the opportunity to explore the Earth-based offices of the Enkalados Project late last month. It was a disconcerting mish-mash of old and new. The building itself was a late Twentieth Century tower block, brutally square and scoured by acidic rain. Around it were buildings with their walls covered in vertical forests: the designs of twenty years ago which have stayed surprisingly popular in the meantime.

One wonders what the architectural fashions will be in the future? Whether there will be fashions, or will people merely fight to keep the ruins of the past in working order? It is impossible to say what the world will look like in a century. It may be barren, nuclear fallout from abandoned warheads creating a habitat to tough for anything to survive. Or perhaps, it will be merely humanity that cannot survive and instead nature shall reclaim the land we once thought of as our own. And those vertical forests shall no longer be oases, but branches of larger trees.

There is no way for any of us to know at present. But, in a hundred years some of you reading this may be able to check.

As my colleagues and I were shuffled through the offices, we were assured again and again, that the Enkelados method of Cryogenics was safe. The earlier news that one percent of all those using it in the original trials returned to consciousness ahead of schedule in their unmoving bodies was not denied, which surprised me. But instead, they explained that they had found a way to circumvent it from being an issue. Passengers' minds will be uploaded to a Virtual Reality, where they can while away the century of their voyage on whatever hobbies or holidays catch their eye.

They wanted to make it very clear that the problems had been fixed.

This is another thing in which we shall have to trust our leaders. Though, with a percentage chance that cuts evenly across all known demographics, we can be assured that if it does happen they would be as affected as the rest of us. And they seem willing enough to board the ships. That is probably as close to a definite reassurance that the problems will have been fixed as anything they say.