Story 8 – The Witness Gallery

The Witness Gallery stands on what was once plot 62 of the Generation Ship site. Originally a mile  away from the building that housed mission control, it sat undeveloped during the construction and launch of the first two ships, Venture and Wilhelm.

During the construction of the third ship, Aiko, it was designated as the site for the messaging hub. The hub would be where all communication from the ship that was not sent from the bridge would be routed. The hub would take the messages from the individuals onboard, the personal and private messages, and see that they were passed on to the relevant families.

Plot 23 was the messaging hub for Venture and plot 35 fulfilled the role for Wilhelm.

Recruiting for the role of message co-ordinators was quite simple. Applicants had to speak a least one of the six languages spoken aboard. They had to be technologically literate enough to route messages to the correct addresses and had to have a literacy level that 72% of the world had achieved. It was not a demanding role, but any opportunities to work for the Generation Ship project or just for the Earth Space Agency at all were highly sought after.

Long after the launch, the first group of what would come to be called Witnesses would say that their second busiest period was during the first week after launch, when everyone on board were sending constant updates to friends and family who remained on Earth. The same as the messaging hubs for Venture and Wilhelm.

Their busiest period, the time that was the hardest to keep up with, came eight months into the journey. The week following the Incident.

The exact nature and cause of the Incident has never been fully explained.

What is known about the Incident is that two hundred and forty three days into the voyage, just six days after AIko exited the Solar System, something catastrophic happened and there were two major results.

The first was that the bridge crew and many of the ships officers on stand by were killed. The bridge became inaccessible.

The second is that AIko started to continuously accelerate.

The first anyone in Mission Control knew there was a problem was when they received a call from Joaquin Torr, the man who would become known as the First Witness. Whether he was the actual first to receive a message from the doomed ship is debatable, but he was the first to contact someone about what he was told.

The First Witness relayed a message he had received from one Tak Hashimoto, a gardener. The panicked man had been screaming and crying, telling his mother that he loved her. That something was terribly wrong. People were crying and that alarms would not stop going off. Tak said goodbye.

The First Witness would have assumed some form of poor taste prank, similar things had been attempted before but had always been filtered out and never released to the intended recipient. This time he heard the alarms, making it hard to hear Hashimoto, he also saw others running and screaming. The message was forwarded to Mission Control.

Within minutes multiple reports of similar messages began to come through. However, nothing on their systems showed a problem. The bridge had not contacted them to say there as a problem, the Aiko’s course had not changed. Nothing that came into Mission Control indicated that there was a problem with the Aiko. To be on the safe side, they did issue a blanket ban to the messaging hub. No messages would be passed on to anyone outside of the site until they could verify there was a problem or discover if this was an elaborate joke.

Twelve hours after the First Witness made his report, it was observed that AIko was outside her estimated speed projections. Twenty four hours later, she was obviously increasing speed at an exponential rate.

During this time the messages did not stop coming in. Any staff for the hub were called in from breaks and holidays. Now messages needed to be sorted, not just by sender an recipient but by type. Very quickly some basic categories were devised, rough ideas that were not put together with thought for how they would look to outsiders when the inquiry began.

There were the Screamers, people whose entire message was a scream of terror, often times so loud that even with the equipment aboard Aiko and that in the hub, their voices would push past the microphone and speaker’s tolerances, distorting the sound. Their faces would usually be flushed and many of them showed signs of self harm, four lines down each cheek where they had clawed at their own faces.

Cry Babies, the messages who sobbed so hard that snot ran from their nose. Unintelligible sounds instead of words as their throats hitched. They would very rarely look into the camera, instead their eyes were constantly darting about, as though they were looking for that one thing which could save them.

Whisperers, who spoke so quietly that their voices could not be picked up by the microphones. These usually stared blankly, their eyes unfocused. Many early Witnesses would later say that they could not look at a Whisperer, it was like looking at someone who was dead but still moving.

The Bastards, chosen as the least crude name possible, would simply swear in their messages. Most times these messages were directed at the staff of he ESA, almost none were intended for anyone outside. Witnesses said these were the most varied in their look, some would be red faced with raged, some woul be crying, some would be very calm and near smiling as they unleashed a torrent of filthy invective towards those they blamed for their impending doom.

Smilers sent silent messages where they simply smiled into the camera. They did not speak. After Whisperers, the Smilers were the ones that Witnesses found the hardest to watch.

The Farewells sent short messages of goodbye. Some would cry a little, some would speak of the good memories they had of their friends.

The Details were the least common, but were the most useful for the staff on the ground. They gave running reports of the situation aboard ship. Most of them were engineers and medical staff but there were often less technical members of the crew who simply relayed information about the state of emotions aboard ship. These were the only messages they were sent on from the messaging hub. From these messages Mission Control began to get a picture of the state of ship systems.

When the Aiko suffered the Incident, the delay on messages being sent to and from the ship was twelve minutes fifteen seconds. Two days after the Incident the delay had increased to fifteen minutes six seconds.

On Incident +3, AIko dropped her first signal relay satellite. This was an automated program, seemingly unaffected by the damage the ship’s systems had suffered. The satellite’s were designed to boost the signals to and from the ship, to keep the communication delay at under an hour for the first year of the ship’s operation. They were released based on her distance from Earth. By year three, under normal circumstances, the delay would be seven hours. This system had worked perfectly on the Venture and Wilhelm.

The first satellite dropped the delay to sub twelve minutes. By the next day the delay was twenty minutes sixteen seconds.

On Incident +5, Aiko dropped her second satellite. It should not have been released for six months. The ship was out of control and accelerating faster than even the most optimistic projections had ever contemplated.

By Incident +7 the delay was over a day. No meaningful communication was possible from Mission Control any longer. Any problems relayed to them would either have been solved or escalated past the point where their information would be relevant. Most of Mission Control was sent home. Only telemetry remained, tracking the course of Aiko as she beat the distances reached by Venture and Wilhelm, who had sent off five and three years earlier, respectively. Those who survived on the Aiko had gone further than any humans in history.

Aiko had enough satellites on board to release them on a regular schedule for ten years. By Incident +17, they had all been deployed.

The staff of the messaging hub began to suffer from emotional burn out. The variety of the messages meant that the computers could not organise them, each one had to be seen by a human. By the end of the first week seven staff quit, three had emotional breakdowns and were removed. There was one suicide, their name is not available to the public.

Away from the messaging hub, decisions were being taken about the future of the operation. Normally, most messages would be stored on site for three months and then deleted, the onus was on the recipients to save any they wished to keep. However, so many messages were coming in, so quickly and of such sizes that the storage was deemed only large enough to keep one month’s worth.

Arguments were made for deleting any that did not provide information about the state of the ship.  The counter-argument was that these were likely to be the last testimonies of those on board. Storage was cheap enough that they could easily expand their capacity.

The decision was made to keep all of the messages sent through, for the foreseeable future. To create a living record of the ship and the psychological state of those onboard.

The second item was the restaffing and restructuring of those who worked in the messaging hub. Their original criteria for suitable candidates was no longer enough.Now they would need people of a psychological profile that could cope with hearing the words of the dying, hour after hour, day after day. They had been lucky enough to have inadvertently recruited a core number who could handle the work, but even they would reach their limits if they had no relief.

So, a program was put in place to find those who could both understand the messages and deal with the emotional strain.

It took two weeks for the first candidates to be interviewed, those who were successful were sent straight to work.

This was the beginning of what would come to be known as the Witness program.

By the time the first of the new Witnesses started at the building now renamed Archive, the volume of messages from Aiko had slowed. 

Analysts began the work of watching the videos and reading the transcripts. Everyone now knew that the Aiko was lost, unless she received help from an outside source. No human technology had the power to catch her.

The Aiko had set off with a total complement of ten thousand three hundred and seventy one. Two babies had been born before the Incident.

The systems that should have told Mission Control how many were still alive aboard had been damaged or destroyed in the Incident. They were never restored. So the analysts were brought in to deduce the current number of survivors. The listened for messages that mentioned someone dying, cross checking with official manifest. After three weeks more analysts were required as they had only managed to process the messages for the first two days.

Six months after the Incident, they reported that nine thousand eight hundred and sixty four people had remained alive after the Incident.

The news sent shockwaves through the general public, so few had died, compared to estimates that placed the number at around half the ships complement.

The Witnesses were not surprised. They had long since started to organise the messages by sender, before categorising the messages sent in separate sub folders. Their own tally of how many still remained alive closely matched the work done by the analysts. What they had noticed, due to their daily logs and information shared between each other, was that the crew on board was starting to die. First it was when regular communicators stopped sending messages without warning. Other Witnesses saw crew members take their own lives, a last message to those at home that they could stop wondering about their fate.

Whatever was happening onboard the Aiko, it was not getting better.

Over the next seventy eight years, thirty five more generation ships were launched, each was sent on a route that would take them away from where the Aiko Incident had taken place. The cause was still unknown and remains so.

Other messaging hubs were set up and worked as normal.

Aiko’s messaging hub, after becoming the Archive would later be renamed the Witness Gallery.

Among the nations who had contributed crew to the Aiko, a decision was taken that as any message could be the last one sent by a crew member, each one should be witnessed by human eyes. The job of the Witnesses was to be the last human contact for the crew of the Aiko.

Working in the Witness Gallery was considered one of the great honours of the world. People went to University and studied for years to be qualified enough to work there.

The simple, squat building the messaging hub had once been was now the most beautiful on the generation ship base. It had become a cathedral in the intervening decades. Great artists had created artwork that filled the atrium. Walls were banks of screens, playing randomised messages, with the most violent and profane carefully edited out from the selection. Family members and academics could request side rooms and watch any message, unedited.

All of this serenity and sadness surrounded the central rooms of the building, where the Witnesses still did their work.

Seventy eight years, two months and six days had passed on Earth since the Incident. On board the Aiko it had been six months and twenty two days.

The original Witnesses had long since retired and most had passed on. Their replacements were career Witnesses, dedicating their life to witnessing the final moments of people who were lost, far from home.

For the last six years only one person had sent messages back to Earth, his name was Ramon Pena. He had been a teacher, but he no longer had any students to teach.

During he past six years Ramon had sent eighteen messages, the last message not from him had been from a cleaner named Mary Goode. Her final message had shown her cradling a dead child, looking pale and holding a drink. She had screamed and wept into the camera before calming down enough to simply say “Goodbye.” Then she had drunk her drink and ended the message.

Ramon’s messages are known better as The Last Testament of the Aiko.

Seventy eight years, two months and six days after the Incident, the final recorded message from the Aiko was received.

Ramon is centred in the video. His face is grey, he has bags under his eyes. His hair is falling out in clumps, either through illness or damaged by himself. He takes a moment to settle himself comfortably in the chair. Behind him he is clearly in a cabin, analysis has revealed it was not his. Ramon raises a glass of whiskey and bites a chunk from a ration bar.

“It’s an interesting flavour.” He declares.

Placing the glass on the table beside him, he tosses the ration bar over his head, only a single bite taken from it.

“No point worrying about wasting food, there’s enough to last me several lifetimes.” He stops and barks a single sharp laugh “Not that I’ll finish one completely.”

He sits in silence for four minutes and twelve seconds, staring into the camera.

“We’ve not heard from you in six months. Are you even receiving these?” Ramon runs his hand through his hair, a noticeable amount comes away in his fingers.

“Today’s report. I can’t find Mary, Esteban, Junichi or Gloria. I’ve searched everywhere in this section. Maybe they decided to go exploring without me.” He sighs, a tear forms in the corner of his right eye and runs down his face.

“I’ll go look for them elsewhere, I suppose. Won’t take me more than a few days to search everywhere. I’ll call you back.”

The message ends.

Two hundred and sixteen years, seven months, two days, fourteen hours and twenty four minutes after the Incident, a message comes through.

It shows an empty cabin, all furniture and fittings that could be removed have been. Every identifying marker, every personal item, everything that could be used to tell which of the eight thousand cabins on board it is, has gone.

A piece of paper is stuck on the wall opposite the camera. One single word is printed in large letters upon it. It simply says “Sorry.”

Two hundred and sixteen years, seven months, two days, fourteen hours and twenty seven minutes after the incident all telemetry from the Aiko ceases.

All Witnesses are released from their vows.

The Witness Gallery is enshrined in law as a permanent memorial, humanity is charged with its protection.

Visiting hours are restricted, special permits must be applied for to gain entry and become a minor Witness.

The crew of the Aiko are never forgotten.

© Robert Spalding 2020