Tales from the Goliath

THEN: 13 NOVEMBER 1926:
[Extract: BBC, Empire Service News Broadcast]
This Year's Event: Launch of the latest and greatest addition to the White Hart Line - The Goliath!
Taking ten years to build, she is a colossal feat of engineering, measuring a mile and a quater from bow to stern and a half-mile keel to bridge and with a three hundred yard beam, she is broader than Titania was long.
Due to her vast size, she was constructed in sections - employing the entire resources of 4 civilian shipyards - and later pieced together in the gigantic floating dock off the Isle of Wight.
More sea-faring city than cruise liner, she will house twenty-eight thousand, eight-hundred passengers and a further eight thousand crew on her maiden voyage to the New Amsterdam capitol of Arcadia.
With its acres of parks, recreational areas, a railway and even a zoo, the Goliath is truly a wonder of the modern age!
There is no doubt that she will find herself a place in the history books...

NOW:
Below a deep, starless sky, on an unfathomable black sea cruises an immense vessel two kilometres long, a quarter of a kilometre wide and nearly a kilometre deep. Her once gleaming white hull is now discoloured, grimy, in need of repainting along with its name pennants and the emblem emblazoned across its prow heralding it as belonging to the White Hart Line.
The once-proud vessel has seen better days, but it is not stain of battle so discolouring her hull and superstructure, but the stain of fatigue, of prolonged voyaging through the non-ending vista, of misadventure...