Prologue

He was neither tall nor short. Not too broad but certainly not thin; utilitarian in design but not overly so; it wouldn’t do to scare the children – no extra arms, in his most basic mode. His face, clearly artificial, was the type that grew on you over time; something he and his new crew were about to have a lot of.

He had nothing he didn’t need, nor was he missing anything he did. He was just right.

By design, he was as perfect as the vessel he had been placed in charge of – EARTHSHIP.

For more than a century, Dominick floated through the empty passageways of the kilometer long vessel. There wasn’t much to do, and truth-be-told, he could have done anything that needed to be done from the ship’s Command Center. His multiple sub-minds scrambled throughout the ship like miniature spiders; providing him with a constant stream of data, including visual streaming.

But he liked to be out and about.

There were nano-baths to tend to. He liked to check in on the huge tanks, brimming with programmable nano-bots; they where the closest thing he had to company – at least for now. While a single nano-bot was little more than an inert, molecule size machine, a few trillion working together tended to behave almost as if they had become “aware.” Of course, that was just an illusion caused by the quantum probabilities that ruled the world of the extremely small.

Dominick made it a point to visit every compartment of the ship at least once a week. That meant he had to stay on the move almost continuously. His Mag-Lev foot pads whisked him silently along, his head swiveling from side to side as he took in every nook and cranny, looking for something out of place.

Nothing ever was.

The one place he would stop and pretend to rest was the Birthing Bay.

This was where it would all happen. One day, maybe tomorrow, maybe a thousand years from now, a probe would come back positive. When that happened, it was Dominick’s task to make sure the crew gave birth to a hundred and fifty colonists.

They would be children of the ship. Since Dominick and the ship were one, the children would be his.