Chapter 1

The starship “New Ark” has been my home for almost seventy years; I was orphaned by the Hemisphere Wars when I was a baby, but my parents, who were influential in the Green Earth Society, made provisions to have me taken aboard the giant interstellar vessel when the world political situation deteriorated. After my parent’s death I was adopted by a young family with two daughters, also members of the society, and raised as their own child.

Earth had descended into a state of almost perpetual warfare with major conflicts spaced about 20 years apart. Just long enough so that the generation that fought the previous war could forget about the horrors of combat and send their children off to fight the next war. Most of the conflicts were caused directly or indirectly by nations who saw warfare as a way of guaranteeing access to oil, water, and minerals, increasing profits of domestic industry and opening previously closed markets.

The Green Earth Society was dedicated to restoring Earth’s woodlands, seas, and prairies to a state where humanity could live and prosper in dignity. This agenda ran afoul of the vested interests of industry and commerce whose own agenda was full exploitation of natural resources.

Governments allied with the short term goals of commercial interests harassed and impeded the efforts of the Green Earth Society. People took sides. Conflicts erupted and eventually grew into what would be known as the Hemisphere Wars where nations tried to secure their necessary resources by force. Earth was in chaos. Weapons of mass destruction were widely used, killing millions, including my parents.

The members of the Green Earth Society wisely chose to avoid alliance with either side of the global conflict. Instead they embarked on the ambitious task of creating a spaceship which would colonize one of the newly discovered extra solar system planets capable of supporting human life. Mars, the closest planet in the solar system, had already been settled and was divided up into factions which mirrored those on Earth.

Late in the 21st century probes that had been sent out decades earlier returned with the information that several nearby star systems had potentially habitable planets with liquid water. The closest star system to Earth, Alpha Centauri, had two such planets. Alpha Centauri was really a double star system. Alpha Centauri A, the bigger star, had an earthlike planet in its habitable zone. Alpha Centauri B, the smaller star, had an earthlike planet at roughly the distance of the orbit of Venus in our own Solar System.

The planet chosen as our destination was the planet orbiting Alpha Centauri A, our closest stellar neighbor. It was in in the star’s Goldilock’s zone, at a distance of roughly 1.3 AU, just slightly greater than Earth’s orbit around our Sun, it had an oxygen rich atmosphere and large expanses of liquid water. The probes detected vegetation but no animal life. Conditions might be strange but no serious sources of toxicity were apparent. The fallback landfall was the planet around Alpha Centauri B.

Our transportation to the stars was a huge spaceship, assembled in orbit. While not constructed in secret, it escaped the immediate attention of national authorities. Most were more concerned about supporting their own military establishments. Besides many felt that it distracted members of the Green Earth Society from the political concerns of the day and, when launched, would be manned by many of the more active members of the society. Officials of the warring governments saw it as a win/win situation.

“New Ark” is basically a spaceship designed to rotate slowly and create artificial gravity for up to 3,000 people living inside. We didn’t need that many people for the voyage but we wanted to have a sufficient number to insure that our colony would be successful.

From outside the New Ark must look like a giant wagon wheel on a long axle, slowly spinning on its axis as it makes its way through space. People live on the inner surface of the rim of the wheel where the gravity is greatest, about 60% of Earth’s gravity. The axle is the long central core of the ship, nearly half a kilometer in diameter, which houses all the equipment necessary to support life aboard. The wheel is a circular ring, 6 kilometers in diameter and almost 5 kilometers thick attached to the central axle by 24 thick spokes.

The ring itself is constructed like a large layer cake. The foremost layer, nearly half a kilometer deep, houses supplies, and raw materials. It also provides shielding against both radiation and micrometeorites which might be swept up by the ship’s passage. The four kilometer broad middle layer is the habitable space.

The aft most section of the rim contains all the life support equipment necessary to keep the ship functioning for an indeterminate time and provides additional radiation shielding. Most of the ship’s atomic power generating equipment is contained in a bulbous compartment at the rear end of the core, heavily shielded from the living area.

The ship was assembled in orbit. Sub assembles were lifted by space freight elevators that had been developed earlier in the century to supply solar system colonies. The New Ark sounds big but in reality the total mass was no greater than that of a large cruise ship or a twentieth century battleship. Aluminum is much lighter than steel and there is no need for 12 inch thick armor plate. Structural elements were thin, about like a conventional airplane. The acceleration forces on a trip to the stars would be very low and the ship was never intended to land on a planet.

Heavy supplies like water and building materials that didn’t mind high acceleration were packed in containers and boosted into orbit by a mass driver constructed into the side of a Peruvian mountain. Fortunately a number of very wealthy people were interested in the program of the Green Earth Society. Money was never a problem.

I was told that the ship was constructed by building individual wedges which formed sections of the wheel rim. Each was moved into position and fastened in place. The walls between wedges helped support the ship’s structure against the forces of air internal pressure and our rotational “gravity.” In addition, the wedges served as a safety feature against the perils of space. In the event that a rogue meteor punctured one of the compartments, the openings between that compartment and its neighbors could be closed and people evacuated to the safe areas while the breached compartment was being repaired.

Strategically placed light fixtures on the surface of the innermost portion of the wheel rim provided an illumination designed to mimic Earth’s sunlight. The climate in each compartment could be individually adjusted. The compartments devoted to agriculture were kept warmer and more humid than the remainder of the ship. The lighting was also brighter and the lights kept on constantly for a longer growing season.

Glass windowed observation rooms were scattered along the rim of the living area. These were not actually necessary but the designers figured that being able to look at the heavens outside would make people realize that the universe was bigger than the interior of the New Ark. It would stop crew members from forgetting the purpose of their voyage. The “glass” of the observation rooms was actually a multilayered glass/ plastic composite every bit as tough as the metal walls of the ship. However it was not impervious to hard radiation and the rooms were evacuated during solar and stellar flare ups. I spent a lot of time in the observation rooms looking out at the stars.

Fastened to the outside of the starship were a number of shuttle craft designed to ferry people and supplies to the surface of the planet when we reached our destination. I imagine that they could also be used as lifeboats in case something catastrophic happened to the New Ark but since we would be traveling most of our voyage in deep space, there would be nowhere to go.

At the very front of the spaceship was a large combined laser and radar. The radar detected solid objects in our path and the laser was used to either disintegrate them or nudge them out of our path. One of the engineers on board told me that the idea was inspired by the Startrek TV shows of his youth.

Although I barely remembered the cities of Earth, the older people said the inside of the New Ark resembled a quiet suburb or small town, with small apartment blocks, parks, farms and rivers filling the inner surface of the ring. The temperature was balmy, the light even and well diffused. My stepmother said it was like springtime in New England. I didn’t remember much about spring or winter.

The designers made full use of stagecraft tricks to provide the illusion that the interior was much larger than its actual dimensions. But there was actually plenty of space for everybody. According to the old timers, it was like living in a small town.

Given the ring’s diameter, the ship provided about 75 square kilometers of living area. When fully manned, the population density would be roughly that of the Hawaiian Islands, about the same as that of a rural village. All I knew is that it was a nice place to live.

The New Ark was intended to be the first of a series of starships to colonize earthlike planets. The crew was carefully selected to provide a mix of skills and capabilities suited for colonization. There were geologists, farmers, builders, scientists, medical personnel, artists, musicians, teachers - in short everyone necessary to run a well ordered community. Those chosen were of all ethnic groups and nationalities. All were young enough to have several decades of productive life after we reached our destination.

What was most important was that they had to be willing to go on a trip from which there was no return. They would have to sever all ties with friends, relatives, and careers on Earth and face the challenge of the unknown. Conditions on Earth were getting so bad that there was no shortage of candidates. Unfortunately while the New Ark was the first starship, it was the only starship. There was no follow-up.

Originally, “New Ark” was propelled by a light sail, a vast parachute rig of very thin reflective plastic sheeting, designed to catch photons beamed at the ship from a laser in Earth’s orbit. The light sail was designed to enable the New Ark to reach 15% of light speed for the journey. Had it done so the trip to Alpha Centauri, 4.37 light years distant, would take less than 30 years. Unfortunately we lost the laser just a year into the journey. The New Ark had only reached slightly more than 1% of light speed when propulsion failed.

News broadcasts from Earth informed us that the laser had been disabled by forces of the Euro Federation. Military governments of Earth were strongly opposed to the Green Earth Society. There was no possibility of turning back and it was unlikely that the Euro Federation would launch a rescue mission. Our only course was to continue on. But without additional propulsive power a trip to Alpha Centauri A that should have taken half of my lifetime would take several centuries.

New Ark is now a generation starship although it wasn’t intended to be. We knew that the ship’s supplies would be sufficient for the 30 year voyage to the nearest inhabitable planet of the binary star Alpha Centauri system. Extra supplies were on board to support a startup colony until it could become self- sufficient. But the failure of the laser forced a change in plans. The ship was reconfigured during the early stage of the voyage to last much longer. The ion drive designed to slow us down as we neared our destination was converted to a main propulsion unit. It didn’t have much thrust but it would serve to carry us to Alpha Centauri A in about 400 years.

The New Ark needed a lot of electrical power both for the ion drive and to maintain all its systems. This was a case where the designers did themselves proud. The power was supplied by a bank of thorium fueled nuclear reactors. Each one was more than sufficient to supply the needs of the starship and used sequentially, they should last more than long enough. One of our engineers calculated that we had enough power for 1000 years at a minimum, maybe even much longer. I sure hope our voyage doesn’t take that long.

Everyone on the ship already knows all this but this record may survive our interstellar journey. I’ve written it from a purely personal perspective, describing all the intimate details of my early life aboard from the ages of 14 through my mid-20s. It is primarily a record of my teen and early adult years. I’m getting on in age so I’m writing it down now before I forget all the details. I would caution readers that it is not suitable for children. Social and sexual mores have changed a lot since we embarked and I might be looking at things from the perspective of a senior citizen. Still, a personal record may be useful for historians of the future. Imagine how delighted an Earth historian would be to find a diary of a teen aged resident of Athens during the Golden Age.

The disabling of the light sail propulsion system wasn’t the end of our problems. Several years after the laser went down, the men and boys on the ship started dying. Within a year they were all dead. It appeared that the Euro Federation had planted a biological time bomb, sabotaging our life support system with an engineered plague virus. The virus was specifically aimed at males, attacking the Y chromosome, and only about 50 young boys survived. I was one of them. As it happened, all of the children in my school were quarantined in the ship’s hospital with a particularly severe strain of Asian influenza. The hospital, in one of the airtight compartments aboard New Ark, was isolated from the rest of the vessel. Ironically that disease, also foisted on us by the Euro Federation, saved my life.

The starship’s population was now a fraction of what was originally intended, few enough so that the ship’s resources could be made to last for an indefinite period. Everything was recycled. Water was purified and reused. Waste products were reconverted into their basic components and used as raw materials or as fertilizer. Areas originally designated as park land were now repurposed as high yielding farmland, both to augment the food supply and provide a breathable atmosphere. The bodies of crew members who died were recycled too. Nothing was wasted.

It was expected that births during the final years of the voyage would increase the population to the ship’s capacity, a population sufficient to colonize a new world.

Like all modern spaceships, New Ark’s critical functions were controlled by computers. Manual backups were provided for emergencies. Immediately after the plague all the computers were shut down and the manual controls activated in case the computer programs had been sabotaged as well. Every computer mediated function, and there were many of them, was carefully analyzed and new software written before it was brought back on line.

I stayed in the sealed hospital ward with other boys, ages 10 to 14, while the ship’s women systematically flushed the plague virus from the life support system, and tossed the corpses of their fathers, brothers, sons and husbands into the recycling system. When I was finally let out of the hospital, now 11, I found I was treated like a priceless jewel.

Girls fussed over me, and women intervened whenever it looked like I might be doing anything remotely dangerous.

But it was the same with all the other boys. We represented the only hope for the population’s survival. I didn’t understand that at the time. All I could see was how traumatized my stepmother was with the death of her husband, and how much my stepsisters Jane and Eva, ages 12 and 13, missed their dad. It took almost a year before our family returned to something like normalcy. We were very close knit family. Mom was very loving and kind, Eva, an irrepressible extrovert, Jane, a serious student. Me, just a boy. We joked, played tricks on each other, and loved each other deeply. By a curious coincidence Eva and I had birthdays on the same day and Jane’s was only a couple of days later. We celebrated out mutual birthdays in a familial party which bonded us even closer together.

After a catastrophe like the plague, things were never really normal again. Women took over all the jobs men used to have, from tending out hydroponic farms, to life support maintenance, to ship mechanics, and we boys continued to be pampered.

Physical exercise was part of our daily regime but we boys were forbidden to engage in sports where we might get hurt. No fighting or wrestling, no sports involving throwing hard balls, naturally no football. We did a lot of running, swimming in our miniature lake, calisthenics and even gymnastics. The lower gravity aboard the New Ark made some of the gymnastics routines spectacular.

We read a lot, actually from computer and tablet screens, since paper was a precious commodity. We watched videos, mostly educational. We listened to music or tried to learn a musical instrument. I had no real talent for that. While we boys were held in protective custody, the girls seemed to have all the fun.

Boys became somewhat of a curiosity, especially to young girls. Every week or so my sisters would come into my bedroom at night and ask to see my sexual parts. They were so different from their own. Eva, my eldest stepsister would fondle my penis and was always amused when it became erect. One night she rubbed it to see if my little cock would actually emit some of the semen that she had learned about in her biology class. All she got was a little thick, slippery, colorless fluid. I, in turn, got my first tiny climax.

But both of us liked what she did. Over the next two years, until I was 13, Eva would occasionally come into my room at night for a little game of mutual exploration. I learned that girls have a slit with soft lips where boys have a penis. It was like a little mouth. Eva let me touch her slit and her apple sized breasts. She said that when I gently touched them, it felt good. She really liked me to rub the little bump at the front end of the slit. She wouldn’t let me put my finger inside though.

She, in turn would handle my penis. It had grown quite a bit in the last two years, as had I. Mom said that at 13 I was nearly as big as my stepdad. Eva seemed fascinated by the head of my cock. My birth parents were Jewish and I had been circumcised as a baby. Circumcision had fallen out of fashion recently and most of the boys in my class had normal foreskins. I think it was the first time that Eva had ever seen a naked cock head. She would hold my stiff penis in her hand and rub it up and down, watching the head of my cock turn big and red. I liked her to stroke it. I had done it to myself. I even masturbated a bit. What boy hasn’t? But this was the first time another person had ever touched me sexually.

One memorable night she came to my room and asked me to suck her growing beasts and nipples. She said the girls at school told her it would feel really nice. I wrapped my lips around her nub and started sucking. The nipple grew a little and got hard. She, in turn, stroked my penis. We were both getting pretty excited from this intimate contact. I reached my hand down and rubbed her slit. I could feel it get wet and a bit swollen. I caressed the little bump at the end of the slit. By this time my penis was rock hard and both of us were shaking and squirming. I sucked harder and had nearly all of her apple sized boob in my mouth. Her hand gripped my prick harder and moved faster. Each of us was lost in pleasing the other.

I don’t know how it happened, luck I guess, but both of us had nearly simultaneous orgasms. Eva gasped and muffled a scream. I spewed cum like a fountain. The volume of my ejaculate really startled her. She thought she had hurt me.

“No, Eva,” I said. “I really liked it.”

After we wiped up all the sticky cum, Eva kissed me on the cheek. Then she leaned over and kissed the end of my cock.

“Can I come back tomorrow?” she asked. I said I hoped she would.

I have no doubt that she would have come back regularly and we probably would have ended up making love to each other but a strange thing happened.

Women became pregnant all over the ship. That included my 8th grade teacher, our school principal, and my stepmother. It was three years after the men had died. Mom was embarrassed, she didn’t even tell me until she was six months along, and it was pretty obvious something had happened.

“But how can you have a baby without Dad?”

“Oh, David,” Mom said, embracing me as best she could, with her swollen belly between us; “Mommy had to have some help, now that your Dad is gone...”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the plague took away all our men,” Mom said, tearfully, “but we have to have babies to keep the colony alive...”

“So?”

“So Mommy had to have some help ... to make another baby...”

Mom didn’t clarify that. She was pretty upset talking about it. But I soon got a full run-down on the situation. At the age of 14, just after I started the 9th grade, my beautiful teacher, the widowed Mrs. Amy Bergen, took me aside for a private meeting after school. I felt a little awkward about that although I had only just entered her class.

I had seen her around the school before. When I first discovered masturbation a year earlier, she figured prominently in my fantasies. She was a very young looking woman, in her late 20s or early 30s I would guess, who could have easily been mistaken for a teenager. She had a pretty face and long red hair that she kept swept back with a barrette. Large breasts and sexy legs, generally complemented by strappy high- heeled sandals, made her seem out of place in a classroom. Particularly her legs. They were spectacular. Her calves were full and nicely shaped. Her thighs were muscular pillars of flesh that terminated in a compact rounded butt. I didn’t see all this directly, of course, but her mini skirt left little to the imagination.

She looked like she belonged in a Broadway show rather than on an interstellar spacecraft. Every boy in school had a crush on her. Prior to our departure from Earth she had been a dancer but now she was our teacher. Although pornographic material was forbidden aboard the spacecraft, some of the boys had girlie magazines, almost certainly inherited from deceased male relatives. Mrs. Bergen looked just like the centerfolds in some of the magazines.

“Did you want to see me, Mrs. Bergen?”

“Oh yes,” she said, inviting me to take a seat opposite hers.

“David, have you heard of the Seed Project?”

“The what... ?”

“Well, I’m sure you’ve noticed that a lot of our women have been having babies recently. To be frank, that’s because Captain Scotia has ordered a crash-breeding program to reconstitute our male population. All our surviving males ages 14 and up are being asked to copulate with random, anonymous partners.”

At this point, Mrs. Bergen crossed her legs. I could hear the slight swish as one thigh moved over the other and I felt dizzy, both from catching a glimpse of her panties beneath her skirt, and from trying to understand what she was saying.

“We haven’t involved the younger girls yet,” she continued, “but that’ll be changing soon. What I need to know is if you would be willing to have sex with some of the women aboard so they can have babies.”

Suddenly, thinking about the many older girls and women I knew, I felt the blood draining from my head. I thought about the girls I’d had crushes on, the 10th grader Lara, my classmate Keiko Nakayama, Mrs. Bergen herself. I nearly passed out. I tried to steady myself as I leaned forward and my hand pressed against the calf of Mrs. Bergen’s crossed legs. It was the first time I ever touched her.

“Easy there, David,” Mrs. Bergen said, catching me as I reeled in my seat; “it’s not as exciting as you think.”

“Huh?” I said, woozily. I could smell Mrs. Bergen’s perfume, vaguely resembling a fresh field of wild flowers, and recovered my senses.

“You’d have to do it in the dark,” Mrs. Bergen explained, “and there’s no talking. It has to be impersonal, so you and your partner don’t recognize each other.”

“What if a girl ... doesn’t want to do it?”

“Well, that’s not an option; the captain wants the population built up now, before you boys get older and families start re-forming with husbands and wives. You can imagine, a husband wouldn’t necessarily want his wife to be going off to get poked by a random stranger every weekend.”

“Does this mean I can’t have a girlfriend? Would that be disruptive?”

“No,” Mrs. Bergen said, smiling, “Project Seed is just for the short-term; eventually, boys and girls will go back to having normal lives.”

“So, should I ask my Mom if it’s okay?”

“No, she already knows we’re having this talk. So what do you say?”

“I think I’d like to do it,” I said.

“Good man. I knew you’d be a team player.”

She uncrossed her beautiful legs, breasts swaying a bit as she rose from her chair and opened the door. I almost passed out both from the sight and from the idea of really having sex.

Somewhat sheepishly, I told Mom about Project Seed. She blushed. Kissed me, and said that she already knew all about it. That was where she had gotten pregnant for her baby. My sisters were a lot more embarrassed. They would be partners for someone too. But not me. I was assured by Mrs. Bergen that the computer wouldn’t assign me to a close member of my family, a sibling or a blood relative.

But who would be my first partner? I didn’t know many girls except for those in my class and my sisters. I sort of liked Lara Basu. She was pretty, dark, had deep black eyes but she was a full year older than me. Keiko Nakamura was in my class. She had been my science lab partner and we got along well. She was beginning to grow breasts and had nice legs. I thought she was quite attractive. She had a nice smile and a sparkling laugh. But I didn’t really know her that well. We had only talked about science projects and school work. She was Eurasian with a French mother and a Japanese father. He had been the ship’s chief computer engineer until he died in the plague. Keiko missed him terribly.

I wouldn’t have minded if the computer assigned me to my older sister, Eva, but that was unlikely. There were at least 1000 women waiting to be impregnated so the chances of getting any specific person would be like winning a lottery.

So I waited, impatiently, for my first appointment with a random partner. It would come the next weekend at the Ship’s Nursery where the anonymous coupling in our area of the spaceship had been taking place. So, irrationally, I stopped masturbating, wanting to be as potent as possible.

Unfortunately, that meant my balls were positively aching with pressure by the time I showed up for my session, and the woman who greeted me could tell I was feeling uncomfortable. A nursery worker, her name was Selina Quintanilla, and she had a very maternal manner, generous and comforting, complimented by her nice chubby body, and a pair of positively gigantic breasts.

“Are you my partner?” I asked, stupidly, as she guided me into a bedchamber.

“No,” she said, “I’m just here to show you how things work.”

The chamber, I noted, was softly lit with low red light. It revealed a king-sized bed with plush sheets, and some other minimal furniture. The walls were thick and it seemed thoroughly soundproofed. Selina told me that there were a number of similar chambers located in other areas of the ship since one couldn’t accommodate the need.

“We’ll turn down the lights all the way,” she said gently, “for your partner.”

“Should I get undressed?”

“Here, let me help you,” Selina said.

She said it so matter-of-factly, I didn’t even think to protest. A few moments later, I was sitting naked on the side of the bed, with Selina standing fully clothed beside me.

“Ma’am,” I said, “what’s it like ... the first time?”

She smiled. “It’ll be special. The girl knows it’s your first time.”

“Well, geez,” I said, “what if I cum too soon? I don’t want to embarrass her.”

Again, the matronly Selina smiled. “Well, maybe I can help a little,” she said.

Then, to my utter amazement, she put her hand on my shoulder, and pushed me onto my back on the bed. Then, still fully clothed, she got on the bed with me, straddling my hips, and took my cock in her hand; I was rock-hard in a second, but before I could even react, she lifted up her skirt with her free hand, pulled her panties aside, and settled down on top of me. I felt my drooling cock-head touch her velvety- soft labia, then slip inside her as she sank downward, sliding a wet sheath of fertile flesh down around my stiff penis.

“Oh, fuck... !” I gasped, feeling the head of my dick touch her cervix; I looked into her eyes--the eyes of a mother, compassionate and loving--and exploded deep inside her.

“Oh god... !” I grunted, suddenly grasping her hips and thrusting upward; she took my thrusts, groaning slightly as my sperm squirted into her belly. I felt her inside muscles holding me, milking the cream from my balls. Then it was done. I relaxed and she knelt forward, still impaled on my cock, to kiss me on the cheek.