Departure: 2154
Travel Time: Approximately 66 years
Arrival: 2220
Original Population: Approximately 6,840
Population after the Collapse: 463 confirmed survivors
Population upon arrival: 557
The Aster Vale initially performed almost exactly as designed.
For more than three decades, its population grew slowly. Schools operated. Agricultural yields remained stable. Children were born who had never seen a natural sky.
The ship's greatest disaster occurred in 2189.
ARKT records call it simply the Breaking.
During the Crossing, the vessel encountered an unusually dense stream of interstellar particulate matter.
The forward shielding absorbed most of the impacts, but a cluster of larger grains penetrated successive sacrificial shielding layers and damaged coolant, electrical, and environmental conduits running between the forward agricultural systems and the primary habitation cylinders.
The ship survived the impacts.
Its ecosystem did not.
Failures spread through systems that had never been expected to fail simultaneously.
Several hydroponic reservoirs became contaminated when damaged piping allowed nutrient solutions from separate agricultural loops to mix.
Temperature fluctuations destroyed stored microbial cultures.
Two major algae vats overheated.
Large portions of the agricultural complex had to be sterilized.
Food production fell.
Then something worse happened.
A normally harmless bacterial strain used inside waste-processing systems began spreading through damaged nutrient loops. It formed resistant biofilms inside equipment that could not easily be dismantled without shutting down additional agricultural systems.
Attempts to eliminate it killed useful organisms as well.
Within months, the Aster Vale was consuming stored food faster than it could replace it.
Rationing began.
Then came disease.
Malnutrition weakened immune systems. Respiratory infections that normally caused minor illness became deadly among children and elderly passengers.
Sections of the ship began sealing themselves off.
At first this was medical quarantine.
Eventually it became something else.
Families refused to open doors.
Maintenance crews were denied entry to compartments.
Food shipments disappeared.
People began accusing neighboring habitation sections of concealing supplies.
Security personnel attempted forced inspections.
Violence followed.
ARKT historians call the following twenty-seven months the Closed Years.
People who opened sealed compartments sometimes brought disease inside.
People who refused to open them sometimes survived.
Entire habitation blocks died behind locked pressure doors.
Some from infection.
Some from starvation.
Some because nobody outside realized they were still alive.
The ship's government effectively ceased to exist.
When central authority finally re-established reliable contact across the surviving compartments, only 463 people could be confirmed alive.
More than six thousand were dead.
The Continuity Ledger
The survivors immediately faced another problem.
Their population was now dangerously small.
The original colony had been selected partly because of its enormous genetic diversity, but most of the living population was concentrated among a handful of habitation sections that had successfully isolated themselves during the Breaking.
The surviving medical staff created what became known as the Continuity Ledger.
Initially, it was simply a genetic-management database.
Every survivor was sequenced.
Family relationships were reconstructed.
Carrier conditions were documented.
Remaining frozen embryos and gametes were catalogued.
Computer models were used to determine how much genetic diversity could realistically be preserved.
For the first generation after the Breaking, the system was brutally practical.
Some couples were advised not to have biological children together.
Others were strongly encouraged to do so.
Some children were conceived using archived genetic material from people who had died decades earlier.
A few surviving women carried embryos whose biological parents had never boarded the ship.
It worked.
The population stabilized.
And because it worked, the Ledger acquired an authority its creators had never intended.
Medical advice became tradition.
Tradition became expectation.
Expectation became law.
By the time the Aster Vale reached Epsilon, the distinction between family history, medical record, citizenship, and identity had almost disappeared.
