This is the title story in a series of short stories I have been wanting to write for a while. I am writing it on the fly so it might be a lot rough around the edges, a real bonus for those of you who love it rough around the edges.

A generation ship is a hypothetical starship that travels across great distances between stars at a speed much slower than that of light. Since such a ship might take from as little as below a hundred years to tens or even hundreds of thousands of years to reach even nearby stars, the original occupants might either grow old or die during the journey and leave their descendants to continue traveling.

Johnny was born on the ship, his parents wore born on the ship and their parents as well. There were records on the computer dating back to the begining and if Johnny wanted to know he could probably find out just how many generations before him were born on the ship.  Johnny didn’t care about that though. Johnny was an oddity on ship full of people who had spent there whole life in space, Johnny loved the stars.  He would stare out the windows for hours into the deep vastness of space. He would imagine that somewhere out there that there were creatures who flew throguh space like a fish swims through the waters. Creatures of the vastness of space, and Johnny would imagine that he was one of them. That is why Johnny for as long as he could remember wanted to work on the maintenance crew.

Maintenance wasn’t a glamerous job, no the glamerous job was comand. Johnny never had the test scores for comand and he didn’t care for the idea anyway. Maintenance wasn’t the respected job. The respected jobs were the science jobs. The science jobs recorded the kind of information that only long term space flight can generate. The science jobs devolped new ways to be more effecient and proplong life spans. On the list of all the jobs that one could have on a generation ship, maintance was near the bottom. Maintenance and agriculture were at the bottom of almost every kids list of jobs they wanted to work. So why did Johnny want to work maintenance? Because maintenance was the only job on the entire ship that ever got to go outside.

Johnny woke up before the morning alarm went off, in fact he never really went to sleep the night before.  Today would be the day that Johnny went outside the ship for the first time. He walked down the hall and everything seemed to be in slow motion. He was on cloud nine, or he would be if there were clouds on the generation ship. Johnny suited up properly, he did everything by the book.  He loved every minute of his space walk, he felt free and alive for the first time in his life. Johnny did his repairs effeciently, but not especially quickly. He wanted to enjoy every minute of his time outside. He did make one mistake though, in all the excitement of being free and in space he ignored is comunications link. Sadly this would be the last mistake he ever made. He didn’t hear the warnings over the comm telling him to get back inside quick.  He didn’t get a warning telling him an astroid storm was coming.

Johnny had no warning that astroids were hurtling towards him and it came somewhat as a suprise to him when he was knocked away from the ship. He panicked at first, but after about ten minutes that passed. At about 20 minutes he started chuckling. You see it occured to him that he would get to spend the rest of his life free. He would spend the rest of his life swiming through space. He wouldn’t be able to get back to the ship but that was ok, he was happy, he was at piece and an hour later he was free.

Tags: Generation Ship, NaBloPoMo '08, Sci Fi