In Ascension

by Martin MacInnes

Some of the visions were insane. One paper circulating in China Lake promised that with each new generation, ‘auto-ships’ would become more complex and self-sustaining, repairing and improving themselves mid-journey, growing and harvesting new parts. This wasn’t limited to uncrewed probes, but included large multi-passenger ships. More distantly and speculatively, we’d see whole ships grown entirely from organic materials, with the frame, the shielding, the interior, the air and water and food supply, the fuel, even the computing systems all grown and hewn from algae fundaments. New ships would be birthed, unfolding out of giant algal sacks on orbital farm stations. The recycling capacity – and so the cost savings – would be substantially greater than anything seen before, with each ship harvesting its own interior for fuel, the crew eating and drinking from the walls, taking the craft apart from the mid-part of the mission, corroding it by eating it, reducing weight costs for deceleration periods and re-entry. The crew would be travelling inside something that lived, that breathed out oxygen as if looking over them. On longer journeys, as crew members died in greater numbers, bodies could be recycled into the food supply alongside placentas and waste – mythologies would spring up around these vessels, whose identity drifted somewhere between cities and gods.