Departure: 2157
Travel Time: Approximately 61 years
Arrival: 2218
Eden's journey was intentionally slow.
Her propulsion system was reliable but conservative, and the enormous biological payload made aggressive acceleration undesirable. The expedition's designers believed ecosystem stability mattered more than reaching Epsilon quickly.
For the first seventeen years, they appeared to have been correct.
Then came what EDEN now calls the Withering.
A fungal pathogen escaped containment in one of Eden's major agricultural drums. Under normal circumstances it would have been manageable.
But the fungus was only the first failure.
Attempts to sterilize infected growing areas disrupted microbial communities within the soil. Agricultural technicians compensated with nutrient systems designed for hydroponics. Those nutrients altered soil chemistry. Several beneficial fungal species collapsed.
Pollinator populations already weakened by declining genetic diversity then crashed.
Crop yields fell.
The agricultural command staff responded by increasing production demands on surviving growing decks.
That made everything worse.
Within three years, Eden had lost nearly forty percent of its reliable food production.
Then a refrigeration failure damaged sections of the primary seed archive.
Species that had survived the destruction of Earth now vanished because of a malfunctioning cooling loop millions of kilometres from any repair facility.
The psychological effect was devastating.
People had believed the vaults were humanity's insurance policy.
Suddenly they understood that extinction could happen because someone failed to replace a valve.
Food rationing began.
Livestock populations were culled.
Several animal species were deliberately terminated because feeding them could no longer be justified.
The decisions remain controversial generations later.
A faction of agricultural managers argued that only high-yield staple crops should remain.
Ecologists argued that simplifying the ecosystem further would make another collapse inevitable.
The dispute became known as the Yield Crisis.
It nearly became a civil war.
The eventual solution came from agricultural workers and soil biologists who had begun experimenting with abandoned growing compartments.
Instead of creating clean, controlled agricultural environments, they did the opposite.
They mixed surviving soil communities.
They planted multiple crops together.
They introduced fungi, worms, insects, bacteria, decomposers, weeds, and species previously considered inefficient.
The compartments became messy.
They also became resilient.
Production initially remained lower than the old intensive systems, but failures stopped propagating catastrophically.
The lesson transformed Eden.
The ship gradually abandoned monoculture agriculture in favor of interconnected ecological systems.
Waste became compost.
Agricultural compartments became miniature ecosystems.
Children learned soil biology alongside mathematics.
Before long, maintaining biodiversity was no longer considered a scientific specialty.
It became a civic responsibility.
The generations born during the famine began calling themselves the Children of Eden.
The name endured.
Approximately 13,900 people survived to reach Epsilon.
Thousands had died from famine, disease, accidents, and the secondary consequences of the Withering.
Hundreds of species stored aboard Eden did not survive the crossing.
Nobody knows exactly how many.
EDEN maintains a memorial containing their names.
Not the names of the people.
The names of the lost species.
The human dead have another memorial.
