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How things were supposed to be

Fast-than-light travel is impossible, but there are manners to go around it.

The first natural occurring wormhole was discovered in a high orbit over Saturn, it had been first encountered when the Voyager I space probe suffered what was at the time an unexplained alteration in vector, the mystery would last for many years, eventually even dismissed as a flunk caused by faulty equipment.

Then the Cassini probe was sent in what had been expected to be a mission to orbit Saturn and release a probe to land on the planet, but as the first images arrived back on Earth it became evidently clear that something was disturbingly wrong.

It would take ten more years to correctly pin point the orbit of the wormhole and then to send a couple of probes trough it to explore this new system that had suddenly been opened to us.

And then, in 2012 the probe New Horizons sent home pictures and data about the planet so far known as Artemis, humanity was shocked to see for the very first time another planet covered in green and blue. All over the globe there was talk about sending manned missions to explore or even colonize this new paradise, the possibilities of finding intelligent life forms, the dream of meeting real aliens.

But the reality of harsh economics and logistics slowly smothered the flames of these beautiful dreams.

Saturn was 1,2 billion kilometers away, even the fastest human probe would still take several years to accomplish the journey, then you had to endure a similar journey on the other side. Try to imagine the vessels that would be needed for such a mission: They'd be the size of small moons and packed full with living, eating, breathing, defecating humans and the supplies to make sure they would keep living, eating, breathing, and defecating for many years. There were the sanity thresholds to consider, how could you keep all of these people from descending into madness after years confined into an enclosed space where any small failure could spell slow and agonizing death.

A few prototypes were suggested, projects that would cost trillions of dollars and all that investment for what in the end? Some rocks? With some luck a specimen or two? Even if they somehow could mine the mineral riches present on the planet, the costs of bringing them back would make any such endeavor a certain failure. Most governments or Corporations didn't even wanted to think about the nightmare that would be finding intelligent life and having to deal with all the repercussions that would come out of it.

No, Artemis was a good source of inspiration to the artists, but it was to remain only that for the years to come.

America, Russia, China, India, and the EU all sent probes to explore this magnificent new world, the photos were a constant source of amazement on the news even as the wars in South America turned nuclear and America enacted harsher embargoes on the nano-fabricators.

It was India that sent the first “manned" mission towards Artemis to the complete shock of the rest of the world.

Their solution was simple and elegant. The Arjuna was a ship like no other, it core was small and compact nothing but the bare essentials, built mostly in orbit and using mostly material scavenged from old satellites and the abandoned ISS. It had four main stages, the engines were four nuclear turbines, each capable of generating eleven megawatts of raw power, on the back there was a small compartment filled with water and aluminum mined from the moon that served to protect the rest of the ship from the harmful radiation. The second module was a fully automated machine shop equipped with India's only nano-fabricator, bought at great expense from the Americans, capable of assembling drones in varying sizes to take care of small repairs or even mine valuable components during the travel. The third compartment was comprised of thousands of frozen embryos and a hundred artificial wombs. The last compartment housed a powerful artificial intelligence that would guide the ship to its destination and make the newly born humans ready to conquer this new world.

I was one of those embryos, proudly donated by my mother to take part in the program with the hopes that one day we would colonize this new world, that we would bring humanity to a new age.

If everything happened as expected at the end of the journey we would be thawed, then chemical triggers would be used to resume our development as if we were in our mother's wombs.

Then, fed through the same amniotic fluid we breathe, we would be slowly transformed into babies, dutiful children, and finally: fully formed adults. All the while, the training programs of the artificial intelligence taught us the things we need to know and nanobots would slightly alter our bodies to make us better adapted to our new world.

The growing process would normally take twenty years. Two decades spent in vats of perfect nourishment as our minds would be educated by the artificial intelligence, and our muscles electrically stimulated so they would grow strong. And when we emerged, a hundred of us in each batch, specialists in each of our own fields, we would begin the arduous task of conquering our new world. We would be the first generation of the hundreds it might take to colonize and dominate an entire planet, to mine its resources, to reveal its secrets. Meanwhile, we'd hope that our example would spring the other nations of Earth into action and into a golden age, that we eventually would see other colony ships coming to our planet.

During those years of gestation, our colony lander would be busy preparing our new home. We would awaken to find it had been growing and dividing alongside us. Drones freshly built would dig loads of ore so new drones could be produced to till the soil, build shelters, and the entire necessary infrastructure for our new civilization.

We would have the eyes of Earth over us, lauding us as the pioneers of a new age of human exploration. New wormholes would be found, new colony ships would be built and humanity would extend to the stars.

That's what should have been.