Star Fields

Chapter No.123. Maiden Run.

Chapter No.123. Maiden Run.

The fleet is ready for action . . . almost.

While an army of androids were busy completing the construction on the other four decks of the new vessel. Molly, Alex and I were busy down on the engineering deck installing the most important system of the ship. The central computer core was more important than anything else because it controls everything.

After installing the computer system, we had to copy all of the data that existed on the Exploer-2. This immense amount of data was critical because it contained the core programming to not only run the ship but also to maintain the nanobots that existed in all of us, and our positronic brains were intrinsically connected to this system.

The main computer also contained the personality data and memories of all human-based androids. That includes the command staff and the rest of the android crew, twenty-four thousand in all. This very critical data was also kept on the Explorer-2 and on the Helios Station that orbits the sun. By duplicating this data, we were covering our bets in case something happened to one of the sources.

We also copied all of the Human cultural data to the new vessel. This data represents all of the recorded media of humanity. It includes all of the movies, radio and TV shows, sporting contests, art, books, music, plays, operas, musicals, historical documents and everything else of value. We were in actuality preserving the history of human life, which had been effectively destroyed by a large asteroid.

"This is boring," Molly said. "It's taking a lot of time to transfer all of the data."

"It's no wonder. It's billions of times more data than had ever been generated by humans."

"Is anyone ever going to look at all this?" Alex asked.

"I don't know, but I feel that it's our responsibility to maintain it for as long as we can."

"Who cares who won some Super Bowl centuries ago?"

"I don't know, but at least we can go back and see what happened. We have lots of time to do so."

Alex smiled. "Yeah, you're right. I keep forgetting that."

"Where are you planning to go after we get this big ship finished?" Molly asked.

"We'll take it on a warp trip first and then try the spin drive. Hopefully, they'll check out."

"They should," Alex said. "We went over all of the components with a nanoscale."

I chuckled. "Yeah, that was tedious but necessary to make sure we're not going to blow up."

"The main way to prevent any disasters is to make sure that there are no Tyco code snippets in our computer core," Molly said. "I'm not going to be satisfied until I go through all of it."

I knew that all of this had added anxiety to them, but her attitude was correct. We had to be sure.

The big day for the maiden launch of the Explorer-3 came as expected. The command staff gathered on the command deck and prepared for whatever would happen.

I sat in my captain's chair with Alexa at my side.  Molly, Marie, Margaret, Alex, Alicia, Vince and Victoria were at their assigned stations, while Judy and Madison were at the helm and weapons station.

"Okay Judy, take us up out of the galactic plane. I think that twenty thousand light years would be sufficient."

"Yes, Jason."

The vessel accelerated away from Earth and after reaching seventy five percent of the speed of light, went to warp,

"So far, so good," Alex reported as he watched the engineering data.