Chapter 2: Gene Genies

It was a grisly business in the cryo unit. A diamond had passed through up near the roof and the shockwave had shattered the frozen bodies, all of them, as well as wrecking the capsules, the plumbing and the control units. Everything and everyone was smashed.

They worked together, with Leila directing operations, to repair the radiation-resistant hull with a patch over each hole, followed by the inner skin. They thought a brief eulogy for each of their dead crew members, before wrapping them in film, ready to cast into space next time they came near a star system, that would gradually pull the bodies into a sun. Finally they turned off the heating, to let the wrecked unit finish cooling into a sub-zero morgue, and closed the airlock behind them.

They climbed back, up and down, into the Control Unit, which also housed the living area and kitchen. They were exhausted and a bit tearful as they helped each other out of their suits and sat down at the lightweight, screwed-down table.

“I can’t believe they’re all gone,” whispered Isobel.

“No,” mumbled Melissa.

“At least they won’t have known anything about it,” offered Susan.

For a time they shared their shock and grief, until gradually their sense of purpose reasserted itself.

“So, no cryo,” Leila stated the obvious. They had about two thousand years to travel, and now they’d have to be alive for all of it, instead of one eighth of it. Nobody else would be developing the genetics while their ebbing lives were on hold in cryo.

“Okay, so we mustn’t die.” Susan could do obvious too, but it was the determination that mattered.

“We have, say, twenty to forty years left, at the moment,” said Melissa, “not to die in space, one at a time.”

“We don’t have any men, when we get there,” Isobel pointed out. “And none of us ovulates any more either.” She looked round at the other three heads of grey hair.

“Let’s eat,” proposed Leila, “take a bit of time and think about things. Then you can explain it all to me, what we’ve got to do. I mean, I know already, mostly, but take me through it to get it set out and then we can plan.”

The four old women ate in silence for a few minutes, each dealing with the shock in their own way; the shock, and what it meant.

“Alright,” Susan started quarter of an hour later, “let’s lay it all out:

“We’re a closed system. We recycle all the water and moisture; the farm cycles the oxygen; cosmic radiation supplies the energy. We have a workshop to fix things, we have as much vacuum and low temperature as we want, and a robot, so we can even fabricate chips. We don’t have much plastic to degrade, or moving parts, and what we do have we can 3-D print, with recycling and the smart cellulose we grow on the farm.”

“We can go on forever, nearly,” Isobel finished the point.

“Right,” Melissa picked it up. “It’s just us that’s the issue. We die. But body cells are all about proteins, and DNA decides what those proteins do. You start with a stem cell and then that becomes some specialised cell according to what the DNA does with the proteins. It’s just chemistry. And we age because the DNA gets damaged each time the cell is renewed.”

“So,” Susan resumed, “we’ve been making progress inhibiting that damage, identifying the genes that cause it, using RNA, enzymes, to edit them. We’ve been living longer. We use a virus as a carrier, to seed cells with our modification, then when that cell multiplies it divides with its age-resistance.

“But now that won’t do. With cryo we were switched off for twenty-eight years out of every thirty-two of the mission, while the others carried on the research.”

“So with the progress we were making,” Melissa had to join in again, “our longer lives would’ve kept pace, until we could get to the ultimate step...”

“Which is re-growing our cells,” Susan continued, “with our original, perfect DNA. Cells that aren’t damaged, and that don’t get damaged when they’re renewed. Which they don’t need to be, because the DNA is just data, fundamentally...”

“Like children’s cells don’t get damaged,” said Isobel.

“It’s just an evolutionary thing, I know,” Leila nodded. “We had to die to evolve. But now we have to not die to survive.”

“So we have to switch up early to that new stage, basically,” Susan finished.

“And solve a couple of other problems,” Isobel raised a smile to soften it, “like how not to go mad, which is a serious risk being in here, alive, for two thousand years, and what to do about our population for when we arrive...”