User:Narc/Dialogue with Allison

This page takes the form of a dialogue with the completely fictional character named Allison. By asking her questions and recording her answers, we can get a good picture of her background, and hopefully produce a good starting point for a story.

First of all, hi. Why don't you introduce yourself?
Hi, my name's Allison and I'm 24 Earth years old. I was born and have lived all my life in the town of Landing, on New Terra -- humanity's first extrasolar colony! I'm very excited to be speaking to the past here, as it were. Thank you for offering me this opportunity!

You're welcome. Tell us about Landing, what's life like there?
Well, it's a really small town -- from the library texts, it would be called a village -- there are only a hundred of us living here. There were even fewer in the early days -- just 32 people came on the Ark from Earth, but there were lots of frozen sperm and eggs to let them populate with some genetic diversity. I wouldn't really know what it was like, though -- I was the first person to be grown when they got the artificial wombs sorted, three years after arriving.

So your colony is just 27 years old?
You're forgetting time in the womb, so 28 years. But yes, it's a really new colony. I was 12 when the first messages came in from Earth, congratulating us on finally arriving and setting up shop. Everyone was so happy, and I couldn't figure out why. I understood pretty soon, though -- 8 light-years is a long way!

Sure, it's 16 light-years for a round trip. How much do you know about Earth?
Well, Earth history was a major subject in school and we were all expected to know a bunch of stuff, but to be perfectly honest, I've forgotten most of what I learned then. I know Earth is far away and I'll probably never see it within my lifetime, so I don't really consider it worth worrying about. Pretty much everyone else born here seems to agree, and the original colonists seem to be thinking along the same lines nowadays.

But they didn't used to?
Well... think of it like this: if you'd left everything you ever knew behind to go somewhere else, and could never come back, wouldn't you get a bit homesick after a few years? I think it took the original colonists a long time to get used to never going home again, but they've made good, happy lives for themselves now and they don't pine so much anymore. Or maybe they've gotten better at hiding it, I don't know.

You said there were a hundred of you, but only 32 original colonists. They're clearly outnumbered.
Yes, and getting old now. Most of them were in their 30s when they arrived and now they're getting into their 60s... Though, on the other hand, the cryo-sleep does seem to have worked very well, and they're very healthy for their age, according to our colony doctor. "Like they were just in their mid-40s," she says.

What's your specialty? What do you do?
I'm an engineer. Give me just about any electronic gadget or toy and a service manual and I can fix it up like it was brand new. For now, I'm just apprenticing for Gabe, the original engineer who came on the Ark, but he says it won't be long until he leaves me to do the work in his place. He also says I do it better than he does, but he's just being nice -- I've seen him work!

Is there a lot of work for an engineer?
Oh, yes. Our equipment, most of it, has been working non-stop for years. Though it was built to last, it is definitely showing signs of old age. Luckily, the fabbers work perfectly and the Youcees are bringing in plenty of building material so we can replace parts when they break, or even whole machines if we need to.

Hold on, what are "Youcees"?
UCs, or Universal Constructors, is what prof. Von Neumann called them. They're basically self-replicating machines designed to build themselves out of large-ish amounts of metals and other materials available. When a UC has built a copy of itself, it returns to us for instructions, and we either take it apart for its materials or send it out to build another, if we feel like we don't have enough of something.

And how safe are these UCs?
They're perfectly safe. Really, I get that a lot of fiction from your time is all about the scary possibility of machine evolution, but these guys really aren't smart enough to evolve on their own. If we all suddenly vanished for some reason, they'd all just return to base and get no more instructions, powered down forever.

All right, I'm convinced. And the fabbers?
They're just what it says on the tin: fabrication units. They can build anything you want, including more fabbers, depending on what you ask of them. All they need are the raw materials to start with. They're as big as houses, of course, but we have three of them for now and they're more than we can really use for now. We've been using one to build a new space-ship, to look around our solar system. We still haven't charted it as well as we'd like.

So... Landing, eh? That's pretty original.
No more so than "Earth", or all those "New whatever" cities you've got back home. Did you know there's a New New Amsterdam now? Of course, it's an asteroid base, but still. Humans, especially committees of humans, aren't very original.

That's true. Ok, different subject: what happened to the Ark?
Well, the Ark, the part that landed, anyway, was turned into the first fabber -- that was by design. To hear the stories from back then, it was a pain to get it running, too -- their first fabrication was another, more reliable fabber. The rest of it is still in orbit, acting as a relay for our broadcasts to Earth, as well as being a weather satellite, a remote imaging sat, and a space-borne telescope. It's also our most offsite backup location.

Do you have any other satellites in orbit?
Not yet -- I told you we're still building our first spaceworthy ship, but once that's ready we'll be able to send it up with some new satellites to put into place. You know, when I think about it, landing here must've been terribly scary for the original colonists. They knew that, once they landed, there was no way back, and if their technology failed or if there was some pathogen or animal here that could kill them, there would be no getting away from it. But, then again, they couldn't have left anyway -- the Ark only had enough fuel to go one way.

How about exploring? How much of that has been done?
Some... not a lot. Mostly our immediate area, out to maybe 50 klicks in some directions. The UCs are the only ones who go further than that, but they're very simple machines. We do watch the video feeds from them sometimes, though. One of them stopped transmitting a few weeks ago and we all wondered what had happened -- but then we looked at the archives and it had just gone into a really deep river. It came back out the next day and everything was fine. These guys are built pretty tough!

What about the fauna and flora native to the planet?
There isn't much fauna that we've seen. A few hundred kinds of insects, various fish, mostly inedible, but not much beyond that. It's a pretty young world, so it makes sense that evolution hasn't had time to work its magic much. There's a lot of variety of plants and fungi, though, and some of them are very edible (and tasty)! Unfortunately, the soil here is somewhat lacking in magnesium (compared to that of Earth, anyway), so we'd be at risk of some very bad illnesses if we tried to survive solely on native foods.

So I assume you're growing plenty of Earth foods?
And how! We've got a few great big greenhouses where we grow a lot of grains and fruit, and a lot of smaller ones for vegetables, and it turns out cows and sheep can feed on the grasses here if they get regular magnesium supplements, so we have those, too! Plus chickens, of course, though we keep them indoors. The one food animal I've seen referenced in the library that I haven't seen yet are pigs, but we're going to have some piglets soon. I can't wait to try pork! It sounds delicious!

Any work animals? Pets? Horses, cats, dogs?
Not really, though we do have eggs and sperm for all of those and many more. To be honest, we can't really afford them yet -- we barely have enough manpower for what we're doing now, what with more than half of the colony still under 18. But there will be time for them all later.

It sounds like a lovely world you have there. What's it like geologically?
It is a lovely world, thanks! Geologically and astronomically, it's like this: we are orbiting a G5 star at about the same distance as Earth around Sol, so it's a pretty cold planet. Plus, it has a relatively low ratio of greenhouse gases, which makes it even colder still. On the other hand, the planet does feature about 45% landmass, in two great big continents, and Landing is pretty much on the Equator. Likewise, the planet's axial tilt is just 5%, so we don't have much seasonal difference in the weather. So we're essentially in the warmest spot on a cool but not terribly cold planet, which adds up to a very comfortable temperature for us -- something like spring in the temperate climates on Earth, but year-round. Oh, and our year is 342 Earth days long and our days 23 hours and 37 minutes long.

How do you keep track of time there, by the way?
Well, our clocks are just standard 24 hour clocks that jump forward from 23:37 to 00:00. Years are more interesting -- a local year is a bit over 347.5 local days long so for now we've had about 3 out of every five years be leap years. We'll undoubtedly refine that further as we go. As for months, we've kept the same old 12, but they're all just 29 days long, except February, which has 28 days on non-leap years.