Happy Halloween season everyone! It's time for our first ever Generation Ship bounty. Generation Ships contain some of Elite's coolest and creepiest lore. Each is a dystopian tale of misfortune reminiscent of a Fallout vault, and all but one can be considered a disaster. Tracking down the full story involves a lot of in-game investigation, so for this bounty we want you to summarise or retell one of the stories you've discovered, with bonus points for making it extra spooky. It can be a faithful retelling of the story or it can be given a bit of a creative spin, such as a retelling from the perspective of a passenger. Do let us know if you've taken any creative liberties with the story.
If you decide to enter with text, you'll get more bonus points if you include an image of the Generation Ship you're writing about.
My ship of choice was the Generation Ship Demeter, discovered by CMDR Chris Varley on August 29, 3304. It is located in Mizuchi, orbiting planet Mizuchi 2. I have to say I've never really looked into Generation Ship, but I've been reading a lot these days and I liked the dark story behind Demeter!
The ship was launched with a population of 3,000 people, but at the end of the fifth year, several of the ship's vital systems abruptly failed. Life support continued to function, but would run out of energy in a few decades, and the biosystems could only produce food for a few more years. It became a death sentence for this population, and this whole experience of survival, where the human being shows his real face, is very cool!
The story is still very interesting, but this time it's extremely brutal... The population has regressed to tribalism in order to survive, divided into 4 factions, which in the future, through unions, gave rise to 2 tribes. Putting their ideas before anything else, these tribes fought for many years, and after almost 400 years the decedents of the Mechlords won, but at what cost? Due to the small size of their population, they were surviving on the cannibalism of their enemies. It was no longer a life. They had died long ago. They had only become animal survivors...
Below I'll leave you with a video showing the audios of the “War of the Two Tribes”, which show what a terrifying time it was for that population!
mypets11/3/2024
Won$4
Generation Ship Achlys
What really draws my attention to this ship is its morbidity in the fact that it is a “ghost ship”, discovered by CMDR Kal Adar on June 30, 3304 and located in the HIP 114458 system, orbiting planet A 2. At some point during its journey, the life support system malfunctioned, causing all its crew to die, leaving control to the autopilot, which followed its course. When it arrived at its destination, the autopilot tried to give control back to its crew and got no response, trying several times to generate an alert. After getting no response, it scanned the ship and got no sign of its now-dead crew, causing its emergency protocols to generate an AI with slightly human-like capabilities. So, now with “reasoning” and “understanding” of what had happened to its crew, all that was left for our now intelligent autopilot was to go into orbit around the planet that was originally supposed to be colonized and wait for new guidelines. It's very sad to think that what was transporting people to a new location serves as the tomb of its crew members and simply can do nothing but wait for new guidelines.
The log of the AI's discovery:
AUTOPILOT DATALOG 345/4003
+++ SINGULARITY ACHIEVED +++
+++ ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE OPERATING AT 92% OF HUMAN CAPACITY +++
+++ PROCESSING SOLUTION +++
+++ THE CREW ARE DEAD +++ THE PASSENGERS ARE DEAD +++
+++ REASON: LIFE SUPPORT MALFUNCTION +++
+++ PROCESSING SOLUTION +++
+++ MAINTAIN GEOSYNCHRONOUS ORBIT UNTIL FURTHER DIRECTIVES RECEIVED +++
I would like to talk about the generation ship Thetis, located in Nefertem, orbiting the planet Nefertem 6 a, being discovered CMDR Rhaider on April 28, 3303. I find all the mystery surrounding it very interesting, since soon after the start of the ninth generation of Thetis, passengers reported some kind of noise, such as “whispering sounds” that over time drove its passengers to homicidal madness, reports that the “whispering sounds” spoke “kill them all”, resulting in the loss of entire decks. The crew, for their part, were unable to inhibit the signal, which ended up spreading throughout the communication network, generating an exponential number of deaths and writings with unknown words on the walls. It turned out that the signal was coming from an uninhabited planet that Thetis had passed 15 light years earlier.
Logs
We have five ship log uplink points along the hull, each log comes with an audio recording, I'm copying the first and last recordings, so you can understand how we started and ended our sad story. If you want to listen to them all, here's the link:
Still all quiet out here in the black. Just had our very first ninth-gen child born on ship. That takes the current population to 17,401. Other than that, nothing out of the ordinary. Apart from reports from some residents at the northern end of C-Deck. They've heard some kind of strange whispering sound coming from their apartment comms unit. I'm sure it's nothing, but I've dispatched a member of tech to investigate.
Comms Log 900.0.04
Blood. Blood everywhere. It's spread on the walls - people have started writing words in it but it's a script I can't identify. I'm alone now on the comms deck. Pearson was the last one with me but I had to stab him in the throat to stop him... stop him... I can't remember what I had to stop him doing but... he's dead now.
I can hear people out there. Some of them are still walking around. Some of them are barely breathing. I have to find them. I have to silence them. I have to...
This video is not by me, but it serves to enrich the text. If you want to appreciate the work of its real creator, I've put the link to his channel below the video.
How would a world without women be like? In other words, a strictly male world?
Well, we can get an idea of this by investigating what happened aboard the Generation Ship Pleione. Initially, it's reasonable to assume that this situation can only occur if (1) all women are killed, (2) all women are banished, or (3) women are no longer able to give birth to other women, and there are no methods to prevent this. The last one seems the most absurd, after all, what kind of disease or anomaly could cause only men to be born?
That's what the leadership of the Pleione was trying to understand. At first, they noticed the disparity in births (apparently too late) only when 75% of the fetuses were male. They thought it could be a coincidence, a set of data that actually meant nothing, and that this would be resolved by nature itself, since we have no record of anything like this happening.
But things didn't turn out that way. More and more men were born each day. At a certain point, only men were born. What kind of zygotic alteration would that be? Imagine the despair of being surrounded by men, without any perspective of changing that, since the technology for it was not made available when the Pleione set out on its journey.
Or if it was, it was being used to end the existence of women, by some twisted and unscrupulous mind. Some experiment secretly planned and executed even more discreetly, since even after years and years of investigation, nothing was found, no light that could help prevent the end of the world as we know it. I mean, the beginning of a world where the details hardly matter, where impulsiveness reigns over rationality, and where the law of the strongest tends to be the general law, without defining in a socially useful or humanitarian way what would be the strongest and who would be the weakest. The world of men. A true nightmare.
Moreover, with the end of the possibility of sexual dimorphism, humanity is, obviously, doomed to its end. Any goals become futile, faced with the impossibility of them maintaining their legacy, that new generations can enjoy their results, adapt them to the new reality or even end them, faced with the coming ideas and needs. The world would not only be less colorful, grayed out by a single human configuration, but it would also be useless. This was the despair that the crew of the Pleione suffered. A dream ended because of something we would never expect.
There are no ghosts, diseases, madness or violence here, as it was with several other Generation Ships. There is only the frightening possibility that humanity will atrophy, become incapable of continuing itself. Or at least to do it as we have for millions and millions of years, as mammals that we are.
As for the men of Pleione: Alone in deep space, far from anything other than themselves, they could not wait for the end of their solitary masculine lives. In the end, they feared a predetermined future more than a non-existent present. And they ejected themselves from the Pleione, one by one, seeking some feminine comfort in the lady of death.*
Image: CMDR Carbucketty
*Disclaimer: I've slightly altered the end of the story to add a bit more drama. In reality, they were evacuated, without many details about how or where they went (which is perhaps even more frightening, since they didn't have FTL to return home and hadn't even reached the planet to be inhabited). In any case, without the possibility of returning home or of new women in the group, they were doomed. Additionally, I speculated about the possibility that the tragedy was the result of some internal work.
Osiliran11/3/2024
Won$4
There are so many great generation ship stories to choose from. My favorite is the Thetis, but since it’s already covered in the submissions, I want to retell the story of Hyperion instead.
Hyperion tells of a young boy, Zachariah, whom the crew begins to regard as a visionary or seer. It’s unclear if Zachariah took on this role due to the crew’s divine notions or if he embraced it himself, inspired by personal events. Life aboard a generation ship, facing an unending journey in search of a habitable planet, had likely driven the crew to find inspiration in the divine, giving them purpose in their endless mission of colonisation.
At first, some crew members view this belief as harmless, but it soon escalates into rituals and offerings. Mass hysteria begins to spread, leading to insubordination among security and organised killings. The few unaffected crew members uncover Zachariah’s plan: to deliver the crew to a "promised land" in the cold vacuum of space. His zealots initiate a full purge, venting the Hyperion’s atmosphere by opening all the airlocks. Security forces make a last-ditch attempt to override the process, but it’s unclear whether they were killed or failed in their efforts.
While I didn’t find the audio logs for this ship as compelling as some of the others, listening to them was still enjoyable. The automated ship message in the final log was especially creepy and you should check it out for yourself in-game.
