Woe Unto the Third Generation

by johnnedwill

Second Engineer Miranda Kline cursed loudly and volubly as she manhandled open the maintenance hatch. Even braced against the hull of the starship, the effects of vacuum welding were difficult to overcome. The light on the shoulder of her vacuum suit illuminated the cubby behind the hatch, revealing neat rows of insulated cables running between brightly-coloured junction boxes. She chinned the microphone in her helmet. "Hey! Costas - or whatever your name is. Pass me a wrench. One with a - ." Miranda paused to look at the bolts securing the junction box lids. "One with a ten millimetre hex driver."

A gloved hand holding a stubby cylinder reached out towards her. "Ten millimetre hex driver. Check."

"Thank you." Second Engineer Kline took the tool, securing it to a ring on her suit with a lanyard, before undoing the bolts on a red junction box. As each bolt came loose, it was stowed away in pouch on the thigh of her suit as carefully as if it were a precious stone. Miranda was all too aware that if a bolt was to drift off into the interstellar void, there were no supply dumps within two light years. "Alright, Costas. Time to show me what you know. Take a look in here and tell me what you think is wrong." Miranda grabbed a nearby handhold and pulled herself a metre along the ship's hull, leaving room for Apprentice Costas to take her place at the hatch.

She watched Costas glance from side to side and lick his lips - a nervous tic that had not endeared him to her. "It's the main circuit to the boom actuator. The circuit breaker has tripped."

"So far, so good, apprentice. Now, tell me why?" Miranda listened as Costas ran through a list of possible faults, stumbling over some of the more complicated pieces of technical jargon. She was sure that she could see red lines of text scrolling across the HUD built into his suit faceplate. Finally, when the would-be engineer came to an uncertain halt, Miranda nodded. "Very good apprentice. Textbook perfect - which is the problem."

"I don't understand."

Miranda sighed. "You looked it up in the manual, didn't you?"

"Of course. Isn't that what the manual is for?" There was a petulant whine to Costas' reply.

"No. Not it isn't. The manual is only meant to be used if you come across something unusual. You're supposed to learn - to remember what you've been taught and to apply that knowledge. That's why you're here." Even through the bulk of his suit, Miranda could read Costas' body language. She wondered if she had been as resentful of authority when she was an apprentice engineer, some twenty years before. "Now, tell me what caused that circuit breaker to trip?"

Costas licked his lips again. "Well, the most likely cause is - ."

Engineer Kline cut him off. "Is the wrong one in this case." She nudged Costas aside. "If you take a look at these terminals, you can see a residue from outgassing on them. That means the cable has overheated due to a flaw in the core. You have to learn to look rather than rely on what the book says. If you'd just restored the power - as you were about to do! - there might have been a flashover." Miranda gave Apprentice Costas a moment to digest this information.

"So what do I do?" Having been presented with the possible consequences of his action, Costas was now paying attention to his mentor.

"Watch and learn."

Miranda went through the repair steo-by-step, allowing Costas to assist her when she needed an extra pair of hands. With slow, deliberate movements she removed the offending length of cable and stowed it in a ballistic cloth bag. "We'll take this back for refaccing, and pick up a new piece of cable to replace it. Then we'll come back on the next shift and finish the job."

"But, we've rerouted the circuit. Haven't we fixed the problem?" Costas protested.

Kline glared at the apprentice. "Remember: anything you take with you can kill you ... ."

"As can anything you leave behind," Costas finished the couplet.

"So, we replace it. Now, let's go back."

Miranda allowed Costas to close the maintenance hatch and dog it - under her watchful eye - and the pair made their way back down the hull of the starship to the service lock. She paused to glance along the ship's main axis: forward to the great shadow shield that protected them from interstellar debris; aft towards the bell-shaped protrusions of the ship's now-dormant nuclear thrusters. Then she followed Costas into the airlock.

The Exodus was a generation ship, bound for Barnard's Star. It had taken fifty years to cover a distance of two light years, and would not arrive at its destination for another century. So far, three generations of crew had been born on the Exodus: Miranda Kline counted herself among the second generation of the ship-born; Apprentice Costas was part of the third.

When planning the mission to Barnard's Star, the designers of the Exodus had been confronted by one key issue: how to make sure a viable cargo of human beings reached their destination alive and well? Given sufficient supplies, the passengers would survive the one hundred and fifty year voyage. However, it would not be possible for the Exodus to carry enough supplies to ensure the colonists' survival; such was the tyranny of physics. So, the designers of the Exodus had tried to make their ship a closed ecosystem. This was fine for organic life. Given the right conditions, it would reproduce indefinitely. However, inorganic components would wear out or degrade over time and, with no possibility of resupply, this would lead to the ultimate failure of the mission.

The development of nanofactories had come just in time to support the journey from Sol to Barnard's Star. Nanomachines could be used to process feedstock into the necessary components. These could be used to replace old components which, in their turn, could be 'nanofacced' to make the raw materials for new components - even to replace the nanomachines that did the recycling. Some loss of materials was unavoidable, but t could be kept low enough that the Exodus and its crew would survive.

In the ready room, Miranda pulled the faulty cable from her bag and handed it to Costas. "What are you going to do with this?"

Costas licked his lips. "Take it to the fabricators?"

"Exactly. Get them to exchange it for a new cable. Then we can fit it in place on our next shift."

"Don't worry. I'll make sure it gets done."

Miranda watched Costas propel himself down the zero-gee spine of the Exodus, heading for the ship's nanofacs. Then she pushed herself off in the opposite direction, making for the gravity ring. The gravity ring was a torus that surrounded the Exodus's spine, in the lee of the shadow shield. It contained the habitation areas of the ship, along with those systems that needed gravity to operate properly. More importantly, the gravity ring was where the engineers' mess was located.

As a second engineer, Miranda Kline was a well-known member of the mess. The engineers who were already there called out to her; she in turn acknowledged their greetings. With a few exceptions, the engineers elected to the mess were second generation ship-born. Miranda took a place at the steel table that served as a bar and waited for the duty steward.

"Give me a rocket fuel," Miranda said.

The steward, also an engineer and one of Miranda's classmates, handed her a beaker filled with a red liquid. "There you go. How was the EVA?"

Miranda picked up the beaker and took a long swallow. Its contents - the 'rocket fuel' - were rough and had a chemical taste. But, right now, Miranda was more interested in the alcoholic content. "The EVA went fine. Tell me, were we tankheads when we were apprentices?"

"I think it's one of the eternal truths. We start off thinking we know everything and the older generation is holding us back. Then, when it gets to our turn to be in charge, we spend our time cursing the next generation and apologising to the one before us for being such idiots."

Miranda stared into the beaker, watching the dye form intricate patterns in the alcohol. "No," she said after a moment's thought. "That's not Costas' problem. I could deal with him being a pain-in-the-ass know-it-all. This is different. It's more like he couldn't think for himself."

"But he must have passed the aptitude tests?"

"He's technically competent. He can follow instructions, but ... ." Miranda shrugged her shoulders. "I don't know what his problem is."

"It's the third generation problem," said a voice from the other side of the messroom.

Miranda glanced back over her shoulder and smiled. She recognised the person sitting alone at a table by the far bulkhead. "Hey - Anila! What are you doing here? I thought you had been promoted."

Anila Devi was one of the original crew, brought onboard the Exodus by her parents. She was old enough to remember living under blue skies and breathing natural air. She was also young enough to still be useful to the mission. Before she had become one of the Steering Committee, Anila had been an engineer and Miranda's tutor.

"That's Councillor Devi to you," Anila said, wagging her finger in mock admonishment. "And don't forget it. I thought I'd come down here and show you what it's like to really work for a living. It certainly wasn't for this." She rattled a plastic beaker identical to Miranda's. "It's worse than I remember. what are you using for flavouring?"

The duty steward shrugged. "You'd have to ask our budding cohort of biochemists. But I doubt they'd be able to do more than parrot some chemical name at you."

"Like I said - ."

"Third generation problem." Miranda got up from her seat at the bar and went over to join Anila at her table. "Whatever that is."

Anila pulled a face as she took another sip from her beaker. "It's a theory that the psychologists were bandying about before we left Terra. It's in the archives if you want to do some research of your own."

"What's it got to do with Apprentice Costas?" Miranda asked.

"Probably quite a bit."

Miranda made herself comfortable. Having been Anila's apprentice for five years, she had learnt how to read the older engineer's body language. From the way that she was sitting, Miranda could tell that Anila was about to launch into one of her lectures. "Alright, Councillor Devi. Tell me. I'm listening."

Anila put down her beaker and folded her arms. "It's a theory about decay of knowledge in a system."

"But knowledge doesn't decay. We've got redundant storage systems."

"The information may not change, but the ability to make use of it does. The first generation is those who discover something for themselves, the people who understand the principles underlying something. The second generation is those who learn from the first generation. They know why something s done a certain way. After all," Anila nodded at Miranda, "they've had the first generation beat it into their thick skulls. And then there's the third generation."

"Let me guess - they're the ones who learn from the second generation. But surely they would know more and would be able to build on the knowledge they already have?" Miranda gave Anila a questioning look.

"No. According to the theory, the third generation is where things start to fall apart. The third generation do things by rote. They don't understand why things have to be done in a certain way. So, when something happens that isn't covered by their training, they can't cope."

Miranda drained her beaker and held it out for a refill. "That sounds like Costas. Does he fit your definition of the third generation?"

Councillor Devi shrugged. "I don't know the kid the way that you do. The problem is that we don't have any of the original designers or mission planners on the Exodus. We have been living off the knowledge they passed on to us decades ago."

Miranda forced a smile. "Well, we haven't fallen into chaos. So I guess that puts the lie to your theory."

"Not yet. Psychology is not an exact science. If it was, then we wouldn't be sitting here talking about this. Remember - we don't have any input from outside, except for the update transmissions from Terra. We're still a closed system subject to entropy." Anila heaved herself onto her feet. "And you know what the Laws of Thermodynamics say about that."

Miranda reached out to tug at the sleeve of her old mentor's overshirt. "What if you're right? Is there anything that can be done to stop things going wrong?"

"I don't know. I wish I did." Anita pulled herself free of Miranda's grasp and hobbled out of the engineers' mess, leaving her ex-apprentice to ponder her words.

Miranda spent her off-shift deep in thought, trying to come to terms with what Anila had told her. Of course people trusted in the their elders - but wasn't that how it was meant to be? After all, age and experience brought with them knowledge and wisdom. Things like that could not - must not! - just vanish. If that was the case, then the Exodus and its mission had been doomed to fail since they day they left orbit around Terra. It was unthinkable that thousands of people had been condemned to die because of some untested theory.

Just before the start of her shift, Miranda made her way to the engineering section in the spine of the ship to prepare for the EVA. As she made her way through the passageways and compartments, it was as if she was paying attention to the systems that made up the Exodus for the first time. Over the years of the mission, everything must have been replaced at least once: everything from the panels that hid the cableways and conduits, to the crew itself. Was the Exodus really the same ship it had been when it had left the Sol system fifty years ago? Or was it just a real-world version of the Ship of Theseus?

"Are you alright, Engineer Kline?" Apprentice Costas' words broke into Miranda's thoughts.

"Yes." Miranda tried her best to sound reassuring and professional. "I just had a bad night. Now what's our task for today, apprentice?"

"To finish the repair to the boom actuator." There was a confidence to the apprentice's reply that Miranda hadn't noticed before.

"Right," Miranda said. "Let's go."

The pair prepared for their EVA: donning their vacuum suits and going through the checklists, before entering the airlock to flush their suits with oxygen. Eventually they were both on the hull of the Exodus, pulling themselves along the handholds to the maintenance hatch and equipment cubby where they had spent their last shift. The equipment in the cubby was exactly as they had left it, still missing the second link between the junction boxes in the boom actuator circuit.

"You remembered to get the cable from the nanofacs?" Miranda asked.

Costas held up a ballistic cloth bag that he had clipped to a loop on the belt of his vacuum suit. "Right here."

"Good. Why don't you ... ." Miranda hesitated. She had been about to tell Costas to pass her the cable so she could finish the repair; but Anita's words came back to her. The boy needed experience, and to learn how to do things. "Why don't you carry out the installation yourself?"

"Really?"

"Really." Kline pushed herself away from the hatch, leaving enough room that she would not get in Costas' way but still be close enough to watch him and make sure he would not be about to do something that would put the ship in danger. "Show me what you can do."

At first Costas was hesitant, continually turning to look at Miranda and to seek her approval at each step of the procedure. Miranda refused to comment; instead waving at the apprentice to continue. This seemed to give Costas more confidence in himself, and he began to focus more on the job at hand than pleasing his mentor. Indeed, during the two-hour procedure Miranda only had to intervene once - and that was at Costas' request. Finally, the apprentice closed and locked the junction boxes.

"Ready to energise boom actuator circuit for test," he said.

"Proceed," Miranda ordered.

Costas reached out for the handle on the circuit breaker and pulled it down. There was a blinding flash of light that split the junction box. Instinctively Miranda turned away and raised her arms to protect her face. The faceplate of her suit polarised to protect her eyes, and she felt dozens of tiny impacts on her arms and the side of her body closest to the hull of the starship.

It was a flashover. Some flaw in the circuit - either in the circuit breaker or the replacement cable - had given way as soon as the electric current began to flow. That flaw had generated an arc, which in turn had converted the copper of the circuit into an incandescent plasma. This had expanded violently, burning its way through armour and insulation, to send droplets of molten metal shooting into the void.

The HUD in Miranda's helmet lit up red, indicating a slow but steady drop in the internal pressure of her suit: the result of a dozen microscopic holes. Miranda did a quick calculation. She was in no immediate danger. The loss of oxygen was well within the replenishment capabilities of the suit's systems. All she had to do was get to an airlock and report to the damage control teams that something had gone wrong. Certain that she was safe, Miranda turned to check on Costas.

"Are you - ," Miranda began, then stopped. There was no point in asking Costas anything. The apprentice had been closer to the flashover, and obviously looking directly toward it when it happened. The spallating metal had pierced the front of his suit, shattering the faceplate and burning through whatever lay behind it. Miranda turned away from the apprentice's ruined body, numb with shock.