Excellent dream
Apr. 21st, 2018 01:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethDreamed I was married to someone played by Christian Kane
but then the dream time skipped and he'd converted to a version of christianity that said sex was only for making babies and infertile couples shouldn't have it.
... that does not sound like an excellent dream, I am aware.
But the whole thing had plot and worldbuilding and interesting characters and science fiction stuff everywhere, which I've been dozing and daydreaming to tidy up since I woke up.
Also there were Daleks and running and hiding from Daleks. Which is less fun but more adventure.
And a method of space travel that was technically better than instant, but would drive you mad without beer.
Special beer. The active ingredient dissolved in alcohol and you needed to keep drinking it if you started to surface en route and somehow this added up to tins of beer. Yellow tins with black writing, that kind of looked like warning signs full of liquid.
By the time of this dream, our ship was down to only the dented tinnies left in corners of the really big store room. Maybe enough for three or four each, and four cans was how much I'd needed on my first jump. So that was going to be a challenge.
My first jump was supposed to be my only jump, partly because I hate drinking alcohol and hadn't done space travel because I had an actual ethical conflict about the whole alcohol portion of the experience. But mostly because there was a 90% chance of making it through one trip fertile.
We had done a few more trips than that, since then. And the last crewmember standing with any biological expertise had declared that we were all by now ... well, they said spayed, which is unpleasant, but they only meant chemically induced infertility.
Seems like someone should have developed better chemicals.
Or learnt to travel without them.
That part was all a little CJCherryh though, spacers drug themselves to avoid crazy there, though it's the long life drugs that necessarily involve infertility, space just hits you with way too much radiation so it's best to get the kids made early ish.
This ship did not so much have a radiation problem. Mostly. Not from the FTL part anyways, do the calculations right and you arrived where you wanted to be. Physics said it was instant, or even better. Biology disagreed to the tune of three or four beers. Psychology disagreed really strenuously, since the basic problem there was the experience felt like forever.
Also, if you do the calculations wrong, or don't know you need to do the temporal element, well, you could come out anywhere and anywhen.
Which had potential to be nifty cool, but one of the crew was Old Spock, so you can import the whole doom of Vulcan into the starting assumptions about time travel here. Like, yes, it can happen, but you actually probably would prefer to have a species that survives. Maybe even a home planet. So, people do not go back. Not deliberately, anyhow.
I arrived in the future by being one of the early volunteers for space travel. Not the earliest, when they were under the impression the drive would work, they sent actual astronauts for that. Somewhere in the middle. The launch that let them figure out the problem was three after mine, but there'd been 15 more before he actually arrived, and he weren't in any shape to explain it. But they could figure from the logs that the trip had been physics instant from the inside, just took ten years from Earth's point of view. So then they got around to figuring the temporal equations and settled in to wait for the rest of us to arrive.
Which in my case took a few thousand years.
Society drifts some in a few thousand years.
And you arrive somewhere quite different than you expected.
Also, experiencing somewhere that time does not apply to is really weird to come back from.
So it was like ten, twenty years later and I'd spent them in the apartment they'd assigned me. Mostly people thought I was sitting around drooling and staring at forever. But I'd actually got over that bit pretty quickly? I had benefited from experience of other travelers, since undrugged trips had happened for one reason or another a LOT by then, and I had done much better than expected even by the optimistic medics. I had a theory this was because I'd started out crazy anyway. Neurotypical people don't have a map when their brain breaks.
... I'm not saying it was a good theory, just, you know, that came up.
And humanity out among the stars had tried to leave behind a lot of genetic traits, so they had a narrower range of experience with difference. Which was a worry, since genetic diversity is a wee bit important to colony viability.
But while I was hiding in my flat learning how to never have that trip happen to me again, a whole lot was going on out in the dark spaces. Which weren't necessarily out compared to any particular point, maps were more associative now, the travel method made it theoretically easy to get anywhere so it was just a question of who had the numbers for who and you had to collect the good math and redo the temporal elements from when you were setting out. So people who got lost stayed lost, since they couldn't redo the math, unless they started from first principles like old Earth and did a lot of observation. Lost colonies were a staple of fiction. And occasional fact. But it wasn't like towns on a planet, with actual physical barriers between or differences in transit times to take account of. If everyone wants to go to New York, they can go to New York.
The local equivalent of New York had to have some epic complex air traffic control to try and get all their trade partners to arrive in sequence rather than all in the same space time.
Many traders took lower risk routes to less frequented places, but of course they were less frequented for some reason or another.
Some places just ended up islands, no visitors, low population that only ever left. You wouldn't draw them on the fringes in an astrographic map based on spatial relationships, but such a map didn't make sense when anywhere was neighbours, so they ended up pushed to the edges of associative maps. Like a heat map for transit, activity lighting the busy places up. The edges went dark.
And out into the unknown was the darkest.
Somewhere out in the least frequented places, something happened. They went quiet, and then silent, and by the time anyone knew they needed to notice, Daleks.
And then enough Daleks to take out the New Yorks.
Space was in serious trouble, fast, and out of relative nowhere.
And there were a couple problems with Daleks, like, why the hell did they look like a kids TV show, and, how did they even work, and, what were they doing? Space was huge and Daleks were the first non Terran life we'd ever found out there. Why compete? So of course a whole lot of people figured they *were* Terran, which would answer the kids TV problem too, they were Terran with a terrible sense of humour. And humans can always come up with an answer for why kill other humans. Seemed to make more sense than finding out we had one neighbour in all creation and they were genocidal.
(How do you colonise when there's no non Terran life? You cheat. You totally epic time travel cheat. You can seed a planet at intervals with remote drones, and find the spatial *and temporal* coordinates of the first point at which it becomes habitable to humans. And yes, this takes a long time, but you can start as soon as the planets coalesce and just... terraform them in geological time, but a couple of days for you. And at some point this logically becomes the *reason* there's only Terran life out there, but, have you met humans? We would totally do. So we did.)
(Why would non Terran life want to kill some neighbour so benevolent? Gee let me think...)
Time travel also solves the problem of why there's images of Daleks through history, but not why they haven't killed us before. So everyone figures they're abiding by some sort of history protection rules of their own, like we are, where everyone has agreed they arrive at inhabited planets the day after they leave. Don't always manage it, but have agreed to try.
... no obviously you wouldn't get 'everybody' doing that. There are serious screening processes for navigators and pilots.
And there's only one source of beer.
... logistically that can't quite work. Beer planet would be visited by every ship in existence. But there's only one source *we* know about, we can only restock from that one place, and the Daleks just trashed it.
Hence beerless problems.
So all this is unpacking background from like three scenes of dreams? Which, I'll grant, is a fractal unpack. But.
First there's running around the ship, huge ship for the dozen or so crew left surviving, playing cat and mouse with the hopefully lone remaining Dalek. Ship had store rooms and warehouse racks and laundry on lines and many, many corridors. We were pretty sure the dented Dalek was the last, but if we were wrong, woah we were screwed. So, Dalek hunting and hunted.
Then there's the discovery of the beer. So little beer left, we're only maybe going to get to any given destination with our minds intact. And we'd already been running for so long, to use up all the rest of what should have been a big warehouse room full of beer. We kept arriving places we were sure they wouldn't have heard of and having to duck out pretty much straight away because Daleks again. Humanity was so screwed. So now we were down to a sheet of planets that hadn't been in our first sort, none of them English speaking, all of them scrounged up by Spock, many straight from his memory, since he'd been more places than any of us. With no Dalek left on the ship we could risk going to one of them. But which one?
And before we all go to our couches and chug, when we were sorting out who could do what with the controls because there wasn't one who shift left, CK ran up and jammed a wedding ring on my finger and his wife's. Which was a bit of a surprise in timing but not in content, we knew he'd wanted to. It was just, generally there's a bit more ceremony to it, even if just from a captain. But there weren't anyone left standing as was generally acknowledged captain, just some olders and random survivors. So he, looking a tiny bit manic Jake Stone after the apocalypse, ran up and married us like that. I got a plain gold band and his wife got an elaborate enameled thing that was green with flowers on. She was the biologist. She liked hers as much as I liked mine. But neither of us had rings for him, nor did we have time to scrounge them up. Heck, he didn't have time to stay still for the kiss the spouse part. Still, it was like a promise, til death do us part, which is clearly not going to be in five minutes when we limp in to our last jump with our brains broken.
... then the dream took the time skip to a year after arriving. Everyone was trying to learn Latin, though we could only afford lessons for one of us, so she was studying and teaching by turns, which ain't efficient. We were in immigrant quarters together, which were basically just a long shelf with some plank dividers just about far enough apart to lie down between. Take the two plank tall dividers out between beds and pile them up beside, and lo, marriage bed. Me and CK's character lying there beside each other. Fully dressed. Him reading a book. While a religious service was going on, hymns and all, outside.
The religion had mutated some in the thousands of years in space. Bits of it were recognisably descended from christianity, but they'd somehow ended up seeing him coming out of the cave as the important bit, analogising it with coming out of a colony ship, and they told the story of him arriving with all his children to have a new and better life. But they meant biological children, and made much of how many of them he had, and fertility was a huge big deal with them.
Which didn't make no sense because we had the tech to freeze eggs, which I had done before I travelled and had stored them on the ship, or at greater expense to start with any cell and make any cell, so clones were possible and also replacement organs if necessary.
But Christian husband was lying beside me with his left arm next to me, the one with the rounded off end. Got no hand left. Very trust, not very nice.
So the stuff on the ship could fix a lot for a lot of us, like for a start we had actual rooms each, but the ship had been impounded and quarantined, because at the very least we had blown up bits of Dalek in there. And we had been quarantined, and anything they were dubious about removed. This may have included cybernetics. Prostheses. And the colony, in general, was a much lower tech level than expected.
It was a tiny one at its founding, a thousand families, and while there had been immigration after, there was a lot more cloning to keep the numbers up in the early days than had been at all wise. Genetically this place needed numbers, fast, or it was on the way out.
But it didn't consider immigrants citizens, and it spoke Latin and had some of the habits of Rome, and basically slavery might be in the colony's future.
... there were *reasons* this was nobody's destination holiday. Reasons it was real low on anyone's options.
But hey, no Daleks today, that's a start.
So religion had gone weird, with this future christianity wearing black and white and singing about children, but also future Latin being very pay to pray about their gods. And they didn't have democracy, they had formalised and public bribery. Like, you could tell if someone was paid and didn't keep their end of the deal, but everyone agreed that of course you had to pay them. And the ones that put more money in to a project obviously got more say in how it turned out. That's just sense.
... this was not a very nice place to visit if you'd had your stuff impounded with no compensation.
... and couldn't speak the language to argue your side.
... and pretty much expected death from the skies any day now.
So, available solutions:
to sort out my marriage, sort out the fertility thing, and possibly unbrainwash my husband, wtf, getting religion is one thing but the particular religion he got was... awkward. I mean, I had some theological issues with how they chose to be. But somewhere in the time jump he'd stopped wanting to listen if I started asking the wrong kind of questions, so I decided to keep him and bide my time.
But I had read a bible once, and nobody out here had, so I felt I had some trump cards in this discussion.
I had also started in on the neo Latin religion, because Janus, but that wasn't getting anywhere without 'better' offerings.
And the planet's resources were survivable but not optimal.
Those three scenes, Dalek, ship before jump, crew a year after, they had a rich set of details to spin worlds out of.
So my plan was to go visit another planet. A bigger, richer planet. With resources both genetic and material.
No I didn't have new beer, but I'd survived that once before. Was pretty sure I could again.
... would have to talk at least some of the crew into going again. I could navigate, in FTL, but that was about it. Don't know how many positions was minimum, but Old Spock could do external sensors only, and my husband's specialities were all offensive. Seems to me that left sub light flight for barest minimum, preferably some kind of engineer, and a biologist would be really handy.
But after explaining the whole 'lets go crazy and count on coming back' part of the plan there weren't a whole lot of volunteers. And our wife was not among them. She had a planet full of biology, she was going to explore other options, she was sure she could buy in to fertility tech eventually, etc etc.
But my husband was with me. Don't know why, just, guess he was crazy enough to risk the rest.
Old Spock had lost worlds already, the creeping death of humanity and the potential of time travel were both more real to him than the rest of us. He was in.
... yes, time travel. If the future is fucked and full of Daleks, try the past.
So I'd spent years and years learning the navigation math that would explain why I wasn't where I expected to be. I knew one set of coordinates and their math well enough to calculate a route from anywhere. The place and time I was supposed to be. One day after I left.
If I arrive back with an empty space ship and a shopping list, I also knew a whole lot of people who were still desperate enough to be on the astronaut program after it was disappearing everyone. People who might not be the most qualified any more, since they were basically sending us instead of Laika, but, hey, many people. Genetics all over the place.
And we had store rooms we could fill up with all kinds of everything.
As well as data banks. Thousands of years of culture later, there were a few texts missing, link rot being as big a problem as physical library destruction. I was going back with Gutenberg just for starters.
So yeah, after all that complex worldbuilding in the future tech and FTL and colonies and time travel, I end up with one of my favourite problems: If you're building a space colony, who and what do you bring with you.
Only, couple of problems
you will very probably arrive staring into eternity wondering how this whole linear time thing is meant to work
and have to figure it out fast before little things like starving or possibly forgetting to breathe happen
(which would be why biologist wife stayed behind really, if we ever get back to her she'll be in one piece to help us)
and
if we actually haven't cleared out the Daleks?
we become the Why of the thing. Ouroborous on their creation, bring one back to the dawn of spaceflight and trash humanity's chances.
Which could be considered pretty big problems!
But
Just by existing? Having our cells handy for future people's colonies to use? We would make a giant difference.
And if we managed to bring back a seed bank, let alone a sperm bank, the future of humanity would be radically altered, possibly even saved.
Or, we could stay in the past, know we'd left one third of our heart in a future we were erasing, and work on building a future that was massively more survivable for everyone.
But also know that when Old Spock tried it he watched his homeworld die instead.
So that one is high stakes risky.
Do you risk a few thousand years if you know they're the last few thousand years?
Are you actually sure enough the worlds are all ending, if maps are like memorising phone numbers and it's entirely possible there's a whole network which you've never heard of?
Why on earth would someone looking like Christian Kane marry me in the first place?
These and other questions are available for future plot bunny purposes, if I want to go building in this world.
So that's potentially fun.
... but the actual dream parts one can obviously imagine being more fun.
I mean I liked the parts where CK played someone who was clearly a partner through thick and thin, but, that is a very pretty guy to be dreaming about chastely.
Eh.
Plot.
Lots of interesting bits.
but then the dream time skipped and he'd converted to a version of christianity that said sex was only for making babies and infertile couples shouldn't have it.
... that does not sound like an excellent dream, I am aware.
But the whole thing had plot and worldbuilding and interesting characters and science fiction stuff everywhere, which I've been dozing and daydreaming to tidy up since I woke up.
Also there were Daleks and running and hiding from Daleks. Which is less fun but more adventure.
And a method of space travel that was technically better than instant, but would drive you mad without beer.
Special beer. The active ingredient dissolved in alcohol and you needed to keep drinking it if you started to surface en route and somehow this added up to tins of beer. Yellow tins with black writing, that kind of looked like warning signs full of liquid.
By the time of this dream, our ship was down to only the dented tinnies left in corners of the really big store room. Maybe enough for three or four each, and four cans was how much I'd needed on my first jump. So that was going to be a challenge.
My first jump was supposed to be my only jump, partly because I hate drinking alcohol and hadn't done space travel because I had an actual ethical conflict about the whole alcohol portion of the experience. But mostly because there was a 90% chance of making it through one trip fertile.
We had done a few more trips than that, since then. And the last crewmember standing with any biological expertise had declared that we were all by now ... well, they said spayed, which is unpleasant, but they only meant chemically induced infertility.
Seems like someone should have developed better chemicals.
Or learnt to travel without them.
That part was all a little CJCherryh though, spacers drug themselves to avoid crazy there, though it's the long life drugs that necessarily involve infertility, space just hits you with way too much radiation so it's best to get the kids made early ish.
This ship did not so much have a radiation problem. Mostly. Not from the FTL part anyways, do the calculations right and you arrived where you wanted to be. Physics said it was instant, or even better. Biology disagreed to the tune of three or four beers. Psychology disagreed really strenuously, since the basic problem there was the experience felt like forever.
Also, if you do the calculations wrong, or don't know you need to do the temporal element, well, you could come out anywhere and anywhen.
Which had potential to be nifty cool, but one of the crew was Old Spock, so you can import the whole doom of Vulcan into the starting assumptions about time travel here. Like, yes, it can happen, but you actually probably would prefer to have a species that survives. Maybe even a home planet. So, people do not go back. Not deliberately, anyhow.
I arrived in the future by being one of the early volunteers for space travel. Not the earliest, when they were under the impression the drive would work, they sent actual astronauts for that. Somewhere in the middle. The launch that let them figure out the problem was three after mine, but there'd been 15 more before he actually arrived, and he weren't in any shape to explain it. But they could figure from the logs that the trip had been physics instant from the inside, just took ten years from Earth's point of view. So then they got around to figuring the temporal equations and settled in to wait for the rest of us to arrive.
Which in my case took a few thousand years.
Society drifts some in a few thousand years.
And you arrive somewhere quite different than you expected.
Also, experiencing somewhere that time does not apply to is really weird to come back from.
So it was like ten, twenty years later and I'd spent them in the apartment they'd assigned me. Mostly people thought I was sitting around drooling and staring at forever. But I'd actually got over that bit pretty quickly? I had benefited from experience of other travelers, since undrugged trips had happened for one reason or another a LOT by then, and I had done much better than expected even by the optimistic medics. I had a theory this was because I'd started out crazy anyway. Neurotypical people don't have a map when their brain breaks.
... I'm not saying it was a good theory, just, you know, that came up.
And humanity out among the stars had tried to leave behind a lot of genetic traits, so they had a narrower range of experience with difference. Which was a worry, since genetic diversity is a wee bit important to colony viability.
But while I was hiding in my flat learning how to never have that trip happen to me again, a whole lot was going on out in the dark spaces. Which weren't necessarily out compared to any particular point, maps were more associative now, the travel method made it theoretically easy to get anywhere so it was just a question of who had the numbers for who and you had to collect the good math and redo the temporal elements from when you were setting out. So people who got lost stayed lost, since they couldn't redo the math, unless they started from first principles like old Earth and did a lot of observation. Lost colonies were a staple of fiction. And occasional fact. But it wasn't like towns on a planet, with actual physical barriers between or differences in transit times to take account of. If everyone wants to go to New York, they can go to New York.
The local equivalent of New York had to have some epic complex air traffic control to try and get all their trade partners to arrive in sequence rather than all in the same space time.
Many traders took lower risk routes to less frequented places, but of course they were less frequented for some reason or another.
Some places just ended up islands, no visitors, low population that only ever left. You wouldn't draw them on the fringes in an astrographic map based on spatial relationships, but such a map didn't make sense when anywhere was neighbours, so they ended up pushed to the edges of associative maps. Like a heat map for transit, activity lighting the busy places up. The edges went dark.
And out into the unknown was the darkest.
Somewhere out in the least frequented places, something happened. They went quiet, and then silent, and by the time anyone knew they needed to notice, Daleks.
And then enough Daleks to take out the New Yorks.
Space was in serious trouble, fast, and out of relative nowhere.
And there were a couple problems with Daleks, like, why the hell did they look like a kids TV show, and, how did they even work, and, what were they doing? Space was huge and Daleks were the first non Terran life we'd ever found out there. Why compete? So of course a whole lot of people figured they *were* Terran, which would answer the kids TV problem too, they were Terran with a terrible sense of humour. And humans can always come up with an answer for why kill other humans. Seemed to make more sense than finding out we had one neighbour in all creation and they were genocidal.
(How do you colonise when there's no non Terran life? You cheat. You totally epic time travel cheat. You can seed a planet at intervals with remote drones, and find the spatial *and temporal* coordinates of the first point at which it becomes habitable to humans. And yes, this takes a long time, but you can start as soon as the planets coalesce and just... terraform them in geological time, but a couple of days for you. And at some point this logically becomes the *reason* there's only Terran life out there, but, have you met humans? We would totally do. So we did.)
(Why would non Terran life want to kill some neighbour so benevolent? Gee let me think...)
Time travel also solves the problem of why there's images of Daleks through history, but not why they haven't killed us before. So everyone figures they're abiding by some sort of history protection rules of their own, like we are, where everyone has agreed they arrive at inhabited planets the day after they leave. Don't always manage it, but have agreed to try.
... no obviously you wouldn't get 'everybody' doing that. There are serious screening processes for navigators and pilots.
And there's only one source of beer.
... logistically that can't quite work. Beer planet would be visited by every ship in existence. But there's only one source *we* know about, we can only restock from that one place, and the Daleks just trashed it.
Hence beerless problems.
So all this is unpacking background from like three scenes of dreams? Which, I'll grant, is a fractal unpack. But.
First there's running around the ship, huge ship for the dozen or so crew left surviving, playing cat and mouse with the hopefully lone remaining Dalek. Ship had store rooms and warehouse racks and laundry on lines and many, many corridors. We were pretty sure the dented Dalek was the last, but if we were wrong, woah we were screwed. So, Dalek hunting and hunted.
Then there's the discovery of the beer. So little beer left, we're only maybe going to get to any given destination with our minds intact. And we'd already been running for so long, to use up all the rest of what should have been a big warehouse room full of beer. We kept arriving places we were sure they wouldn't have heard of and having to duck out pretty much straight away because Daleks again. Humanity was so screwed. So now we were down to a sheet of planets that hadn't been in our first sort, none of them English speaking, all of them scrounged up by Spock, many straight from his memory, since he'd been more places than any of us. With no Dalek left on the ship we could risk going to one of them. But which one?
And before we all go to our couches and chug, when we were sorting out who could do what with the controls because there wasn't one who shift left, CK ran up and jammed a wedding ring on my finger and his wife's. Which was a bit of a surprise in timing but not in content, we knew he'd wanted to. It was just, generally there's a bit more ceremony to it, even if just from a captain. But there weren't anyone left standing as was generally acknowledged captain, just some olders and random survivors. So he, looking a tiny bit manic Jake Stone after the apocalypse, ran up and married us like that. I got a plain gold band and his wife got an elaborate enameled thing that was green with flowers on. She was the biologist. She liked hers as much as I liked mine. But neither of us had rings for him, nor did we have time to scrounge them up. Heck, he didn't have time to stay still for the kiss the spouse part. Still, it was like a promise, til death do us part, which is clearly not going to be in five minutes when we limp in to our last jump with our brains broken.
... then the dream took the time skip to a year after arriving. Everyone was trying to learn Latin, though we could only afford lessons for one of us, so she was studying and teaching by turns, which ain't efficient. We were in immigrant quarters together, which were basically just a long shelf with some plank dividers just about far enough apart to lie down between. Take the two plank tall dividers out between beds and pile them up beside, and lo, marriage bed. Me and CK's character lying there beside each other. Fully dressed. Him reading a book. While a religious service was going on, hymns and all, outside.
The religion had mutated some in the thousands of years in space. Bits of it were recognisably descended from christianity, but they'd somehow ended up seeing him coming out of the cave as the important bit, analogising it with coming out of a colony ship, and they told the story of him arriving with all his children to have a new and better life. But they meant biological children, and made much of how many of them he had, and fertility was a huge big deal with them.
Which didn't make no sense because we had the tech to freeze eggs, which I had done before I travelled and had stored them on the ship, or at greater expense to start with any cell and make any cell, so clones were possible and also replacement organs if necessary.
But Christian husband was lying beside me with his left arm next to me, the one with the rounded off end. Got no hand left. Very trust, not very nice.
So the stuff on the ship could fix a lot for a lot of us, like for a start we had actual rooms each, but the ship had been impounded and quarantined, because at the very least we had blown up bits of Dalek in there. And we had been quarantined, and anything they were dubious about removed. This may have included cybernetics. Prostheses. And the colony, in general, was a much lower tech level than expected.
It was a tiny one at its founding, a thousand families, and while there had been immigration after, there was a lot more cloning to keep the numbers up in the early days than had been at all wise. Genetically this place needed numbers, fast, or it was on the way out.
But it didn't consider immigrants citizens, and it spoke Latin and had some of the habits of Rome, and basically slavery might be in the colony's future.
... there were *reasons* this was nobody's destination holiday. Reasons it was real low on anyone's options.
But hey, no Daleks today, that's a start.
So religion had gone weird, with this future christianity wearing black and white and singing about children, but also future Latin being very pay to pray about their gods. And they didn't have democracy, they had formalised and public bribery. Like, you could tell if someone was paid and didn't keep their end of the deal, but everyone agreed that of course you had to pay them. And the ones that put more money in to a project obviously got more say in how it turned out. That's just sense.
... this was not a very nice place to visit if you'd had your stuff impounded with no compensation.
... and couldn't speak the language to argue your side.
... and pretty much expected death from the skies any day now.
So, available solutions:
to sort out my marriage, sort out the fertility thing, and possibly unbrainwash my husband, wtf, getting religion is one thing but the particular religion he got was... awkward. I mean, I had some theological issues with how they chose to be. But somewhere in the time jump he'd stopped wanting to listen if I started asking the wrong kind of questions, so I decided to keep him and bide my time.
But I had read a bible once, and nobody out here had, so I felt I had some trump cards in this discussion.
I had also started in on the neo Latin religion, because Janus, but that wasn't getting anywhere without 'better' offerings.
And the planet's resources were survivable but not optimal.
Those three scenes, Dalek, ship before jump, crew a year after, they had a rich set of details to spin worlds out of.
So my plan was to go visit another planet. A bigger, richer planet. With resources both genetic and material.
No I didn't have new beer, but I'd survived that once before. Was pretty sure I could again.
... would have to talk at least some of the crew into going again. I could navigate, in FTL, but that was about it. Don't know how many positions was minimum, but Old Spock could do external sensors only, and my husband's specialities were all offensive. Seems to me that left sub light flight for barest minimum, preferably some kind of engineer, and a biologist would be really handy.
But after explaining the whole 'lets go crazy and count on coming back' part of the plan there weren't a whole lot of volunteers. And our wife was not among them. She had a planet full of biology, she was going to explore other options, she was sure she could buy in to fertility tech eventually, etc etc.
But my husband was with me. Don't know why, just, guess he was crazy enough to risk the rest.
Old Spock had lost worlds already, the creeping death of humanity and the potential of time travel were both more real to him than the rest of us. He was in.
... yes, time travel. If the future is fucked and full of Daleks, try the past.
So I'd spent years and years learning the navigation math that would explain why I wasn't where I expected to be. I knew one set of coordinates and their math well enough to calculate a route from anywhere. The place and time I was supposed to be. One day after I left.
If I arrive back with an empty space ship and a shopping list, I also knew a whole lot of people who were still desperate enough to be on the astronaut program after it was disappearing everyone. People who might not be the most qualified any more, since they were basically sending us instead of Laika, but, hey, many people. Genetics all over the place.
And we had store rooms we could fill up with all kinds of everything.
As well as data banks. Thousands of years of culture later, there were a few texts missing, link rot being as big a problem as physical library destruction. I was going back with Gutenberg just for starters.
So yeah, after all that complex worldbuilding in the future tech and FTL and colonies and time travel, I end up with one of my favourite problems: If you're building a space colony, who and what do you bring with you.
Only, couple of problems
you will very probably arrive staring into eternity wondering how this whole linear time thing is meant to work
and have to figure it out fast before little things like starving or possibly forgetting to breathe happen
(which would be why biologist wife stayed behind really, if we ever get back to her she'll be in one piece to help us)
and
if we actually haven't cleared out the Daleks?
we become the Why of the thing. Ouroborous on their creation, bring one back to the dawn of spaceflight and trash humanity's chances.
Which could be considered pretty big problems!
But
Just by existing? Having our cells handy for future people's colonies to use? We would make a giant difference.
And if we managed to bring back a seed bank, let alone a sperm bank, the future of humanity would be radically altered, possibly even saved.
Or, we could stay in the past, know we'd left one third of our heart in a future we were erasing, and work on building a future that was massively more survivable for everyone.
But also know that when Old Spock tried it he watched his homeworld die instead.
So that one is high stakes risky.
Do you risk a few thousand years if you know they're the last few thousand years?
Are you actually sure enough the worlds are all ending, if maps are like memorising phone numbers and it's entirely possible there's a whole network which you've never heard of?
Why on earth would someone looking like Christian Kane marry me in the first place?
These and other questions are available for future plot bunny purposes, if I want to go building in this world.
So that's potentially fun.
... but the actual dream parts one can obviously imagine being more fun.
I mean I liked the parts where CK played someone who was clearly a partner through thick and thin, but, that is a very pretty guy to be dreaming about chastely.
Eh.
Plot.
Lots of interesting bits.