Chapter 1

I was living in a run-down slum-house in the year 3000.

My parents had died when I was sixteen and I was left alone in a run-down shack of a house that I didn’t much care for so that was when I decided to pack my few items that were left in the house and head to the spaceship bone yard just a few miles down the road from where I had been living.

I had had enough of living on Earth. The air quality wasn’t the best, and the prospects for any improvement were about nil. Since I was an asthmatic, and had been for as long as I could remember; living here offered no respite. It was time to go.

Oh, by the way I’m JD which is short for John Daniel Martinson.

I was an adult now having reached 21 years of age, but the prospects were anything but thrilling.

What little I owned was now in my old high school backpack. I walked out the front door, slamming it on my way out. So hard it shook the run-down house façade that I had squatted within that a resonance developed, and it started to fall down. As I walked away, the house literally collapsed. My neighbors probably wouldn’t be pleased, but at the time, I couldn’t care less.

I walked away from any responsibility and whatever prospects for employment that living in town might offer. I headed towards the space junk boneyard that I knew stretched into the horizon farther out of town. Thirty-five minutes later I arrived at a locked gate. Since it was getting late, the place was now closed.

Never expecting to just walk in, I wandered around the perimeter fence until I found a hole visible in the desert moonlight.

Without even a casual glance either way, I pushed my back pack through the opening; then I climbed in after it.

I walked around the deserted ship boneyard a bit, looking for a place I could sleep for the rest of the night. Most of the craft stored here were cocooned in a white rigid foam protective covering.

One abandoned vessel I approached was an exposed derelict that had remained uncovered. Having no such preservative shroud, I found an open airlock in the side of the large spacecraft near ground level. I decided to explore inside.

I would later discover that this was the hull of a decommissioned spacecraft, a former battle ship, not that I would have ever have known such at the time. I climbed through the access into the ship, closing the exterior opening after I had entered. I also opened the interior airlock, since there was at least a minimal passive lighting luminating the entryway and corridors. While the entrance was a bit dusty, the weak lighting was enough to show that the interior was completely free of debris, dust, or litter. Something or someone was probably maintaining this abandoned spacecraft. I was able to find my way to some long unused sleeping quarters.

I walked into the room and found a fold down bed with a thin rolled up mattress covered with a heavy cloth liner. It would be better than the bare metal floor to sleep in. I found some clean linen in a bathroom cabinet and made the bed. I realized that I was already better off than when I had been living in the slum housing in town. This particular room had an En-suite, so I used the toilet before getting ready for bed. Amazingly, the plumbing worked and the faucets produced clean water. Clean to the smell and feel, at least all I could tell from the dim lighting.

I quickly stripped off my clothing and climbed into the empty berth, falling asleep quite easily. Perhaps I should have been more circumspect, but being tired and hungry; I guess nothing would have mattered to me anyway.

I slept completely unaware that I was being quietly observed by the ship’s still functioning Artificial Intelligence (AI).