Well, let me tell you something about how rigorously Javelin candidates were screened, how high their standards. All you really need to know about the process is that they let me aboard. Without question.
Yeah, we’re in trouble.
Aspen Greaves was expecting to wake up from chronostasis in orbit around their new planet, to be checked over by medical staff on a crowded ship, and to be sent straight down to their new, permanent home. They were not expecting to wake up alone on a damaged ship in the dark, five years away from their destination, with only the universe's least helpful AI to advise them on what went wrong and how to fix it. But with almost five thousand sleeping colonists in their care and the crew mysteriously dead, Aspen needs to figure out what went wrong and how to actually make it to Hylara.
If only they knew anything at all about being an astronaut.
Time To Orbit: Unknown
is a science fiction web serial written by Derin Edala which began publication in 2022.
Tropes:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: A very complicated situation! The ship's AI isn't exactly evil, but it is often unhelpful. Its function is somewhat based on 2022-era large language models, and getting information out of it can vary based on exactly how you asked the question and what context you forced it to consider. The AI has also been convinced by previous users to hide certain information, and occasionally takes action on its own to fulfil what it sees as its primary goals. Those goals do include trying to keep as many colonists alive as possible, so it's not too murderous, but it will make sacrifices if it thinks they're necessary to protect others. And then there's the issues of the colonists' brains...
- Colony Ship: The Courageous is fired off from Earth with the same goal as any other Javelin ship, to create a new colony on Hylara.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Aspen is famous for their books about the Exodus Phenomenon and is credited with kick-starting the entire Javelin project, but they hate talking about it, and say that they never should have been chosen as a colonist. It takes a very long time before they explain why.
- Explosive Leash: The convict colonists have all had killswitches implanted so that they can be instantly killed if they resist orders from the civilian population.
- Foreshadowing: When trying to describe in the first chapter how low standards actually are to be a colonist in the Javelin program, Aspen cites the fact that they were let in without question. This isn't simple self-deprecation — as we eventually learn, there are reasons why Aspen in particular should have been filtered out.
- Future Imperfect:
- The "Doom runs on everything" meme is remembered as a sacred ritual of technology consecration, and it is believed that pre-Neocambrian people (i.e. us) believed that something only became a computer once it had run Doom for the first time.
- The original Dawn of the Dead has become lost media in this setting, but an in-universe remake has been made based on other media's references to it. A plot point in this version involves the use of technology that hadn't yet existed in our time.
- The United States of America is remembered as the "Nameless Nation", due to the people of the future misinterpreting its name as a description and believing the true name to be lost. The same thing has also happened to Bee Movie.
- Gambit Pileup: The situation on the ship was ultimately caused by factions back on Earth who had secret plans for the ship. Several more problems on the ship happened as a result of crew trying to sabotage or counter-sabotage these plans. Aspen and their crew spend most of the story trying to figure out what happened.
- I Want My Jetpack: Tal says that this is the drive behind zeelite and cyberlite culture - wanting to live in an era where it was still possible to imagine a future with jetpacks or ray guns or AIs that are as smart as a person.
- Motor Mouth: Tal tends to ramble and get off topic. Ke says that ke likes talking to the AI because it doesn't interrupt kem.
- Mundangerous:
- Aspen manages to break several bones falling off a ladder.
- After all the insanity with the AI, the conspiracies, and the sabotage, what finally finished off the crew in the front half of the ship? Pneumonia. It's so mundane that Aspen almost doesn't believe it.
- Never Trust a Title: The time to orbit is one of the few things that IS known for sure.
- Older Is Better: Many of the Courageous's systems were designed to use older technology that would be much easier to repair if it broke. Taken to extremes when they have to disable the AI and start manually operating the ship's systems.Denish: Do not worry. We will arrive in pressurised box with big rocket on one end like pre-Neocambrian astronauts.Adin: It is so depressing that that’s reassuring.
- One-Steve Limit: Deliberately averted with the Public Universal Friends. Due to their nature and beliefs, it's forbidden to even give them nicknames, forcing other characters to use roundabout descriptions such as "the Friend who is a pilot" to differentiate them.
- Playful Hacker: Tal is the crew's computer expert, and the most comedic of the crew. Ke's a zeelite who dresses in colorful Raygun Gothic fashions, makes frequent pop culture references, and seems to have become a hacker for fun as much as for profit. Ke mentions that ke once hacked the lighting systems of an apartment block to play Doom.
- Prisoner's Work: A lot of prisons, particularly in the Republic of Texas or Luna, make extensive use of convict labor. And a high proportion of the colonists are convicts, intended as a disposable labor force.
- Raised by Robots: The other colonists were sent through space as modified embryos, to be decanted and raised by AI.
- Sleeper Starship: Most of the people on board the ship are held in near-suspended animation, a complex procedure that requires some artificial nerve structures to maintain the body's fitness during the long period of immobility. Most people will be incredibly ill for a while after waking, and a few will die. The process can only be undergone once with any degree of success, so once you're awake, you're awake.
- Speculative Fiction LGBT: Most of the future runs on a gender ternary of male, female, and "brennan", a gender that goes by ke/kem pronouns. Non-ternary genders are acknowledged to exist but tend to get lumped together into an "other" category.
- Third-Person Person: Public Universal Friends have given up their individuality, and so never refer to themselves in first-person, instead using phrases such as "this Friend".
- Unnecessarily Large Vessel: The Courageous is very, very large for its intended 20-man crew, because it's intended to double as a colony base once it actually gets to Hylara.
- Un Reveal: The crew spend many chapters speculating about how Dor Delphin might be involved in the conspiracies surrounding the Courageous. They finally decide the time has come to wake him up and ask him. He dies immediately.
- Wetware CPU: Some of the sleeping colonists's neural systems have been hijacked to serve as extra processing power for the computer. They can't be disconnected without killing them.
- Wham Episode: Vault. Hylara has a FTL teleporter that allows them to receive supplies directly from Earth; the entire purpose of the colony is to be a link in a teleportation shipping network.
- You Wake Up in a Room: How the story begins.
- Zeerust: Invoked by the zeelite and cyberlite cultures, which deliberately dress and act in ways that evoke 1960s Raygun Gothic and 2000s Cyberpunk, respectively.
