The old man screwed in the last broken pipe for the day, standing back every now and then to admire the effect, like an artist admiring their own work. He felt for the damage, applying just as much paste as was needed, and sealed it perfectly. His was an expertise born of decades, centuries rather, of trial, error, and more error.
He stood up, feeling his back creak alarmingly as he did, before starting through the gleaming white corridors. He knew all of them better than he knew the back of his hand. Confined to the relatively small starship as he had been for the last couple of centuries, he had had no other pass-time than roaming its corridors. He stopped at a nearby window. The majesty of space was lost to him. He wanted to know how much progress the ship had made. He laughed. Navigating by the stars took on a whole new meaning with him.
Infinite blackness stretched out to the end of the horizon and beyond, dappled with little tiny spots of light. Nothing of note. The scene had been the same for the past 627 years and 21 days. Or was it 621 years and 27 days?
The man shrugged to himself. It didn't matter. He strode on, to his last duty for the day before he could tuck himself in with some artificial cocoa and look at pictures of Earth, pictures of home. Pictures of himself, Pictures with a family he didn't remember in a place he didn't recognize.
He half-remembered a time when he had been a smart young man, proud that he had been chosen to escort humanity to the next frontier. The novelty had faded soon. Now he wondered. Would he ever feel the sun on his face? He shook his head. He knew the answer. The only reason he hadn't ejected from the ship was because of his promise to the world. He only had his promise to hold on to. He was Earth's only hope.
Someone had said something of that strain to him once.
The wants of the many… something, something, something… few? The man sighed, and trudged wearily onward.
The 'Nucleus' as he had coined it, hissed open at his touch. He walked in. Surrounding him were 1,346 developing fetuses, cryogenically frozen indefinitely. Each pod had details of the child's name and gender. He considered all of them his children.
They trusted him, and he couldn't leave them. More than the promise, he knew that he couldn't leave 1,346 babies, full of hopes, passion, dreams… He couldn't leave them to float forever.
He ran his hands across the glass containers, more for the feel of warmth on his fingers than to check for leaks or cracks. After he had completed his rounds, he sat down, on his red velvet roller chair, picked up a book at random, and started to read aloud, to his 1,346 silent listeners. Many of the pages were torn or bleached, so he used his imagination. Or what was left of it.
So he told the age-old story of how Goldilocks, the great hero, murdered three big, bad bears by spiking their porridge, rigging their chairs to explode and hiding a knife in each of their beds.
He didn't exactly see how this was child-friendly, but the reading material was someone else's choice, and they probably knew best.
He put his book down, said good-night, and started the long walk to his tiny room at the very bottom of the ship.
Bzzzzzzz. Bzzzzzzz. Bzzzzzzz. called the watch in his pocket, demanding attention. He sighed and took it out. What was the emergency now?
He glanced at it quickly, then looked again. The watch flashed green.
He stared in mute disbelief, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. In all his years, the watch had never flashed green. He had begun to believe it never would. Because green meant…
He dashed to the cockpit with an agility that belied his years.
And there it was, Crebla 41-B. The closest planet with life. Shimmering blue seas and green patches of land. It was so similar, yet so different. He dispatched a drone, recalling codes that were centuries-old. He waited. Until with a flash, the monitor whirred to life.
The bright lights from the monitor hurt his eyes, but he could not look away.
From a distance, this blue planet reminded him of another planet that had been blue, once. The drone sped through the atmosphere, dipping lower and lower. The sea glinted in the afternoon warmth of this young sun and clouds moved sporadically to the whims of the ever-changing wind.
The drone had reached the surface now. Huge creatures of myth swam above and below the surface of the sea, casting gentle ripples when they contacted the surface. Furry birds screamed and roared in the sky, daring each other to new heights.
But in the middle of it all. Humans. Exactly like on earth. But these humans didn't pollute. The sky was free of smoke.They weren't constantly vying to be the best, to be the top of the food chain. They helped keep the food chain moving, oiling and greasing the machine. They were the caretakers. Not the most powerful, or majestic. But they were there, fixing and healing, keeping the world together.
The man didn't know how he knew this, but he did. It was from a perception born of centuries of only knowing one living thing. Himself. They were the caretakers, the fixers. He saw himself in them. He hung his head, then made a decision abruptly.
He turned off the feed with a snap.
He knew what would happen to these people if humans invaded. Maybe not in a hundred, or a thousand years, but eventually, these seas would turn black, the trees would crumble into dust.
His hand hovered over the button, the big red one. The fetuses would start breathing. They would start developing. If he pressed the button, there was no going back. The fate of not one, but 2 worlds depended on him. With a sigh, he moved away from the button and set course to Scythia 79-D2, which had been the backup he had been assigned. Full of resources, but no sentient life to take over. The command center saw it as sub-optimal. He thought it was ideal.
But heading to Scythia would mean another 600 years of isolation, loneliness and neglect. 600 years of talking to plexiglass containers every night. 600 years of harrowing thoughts and dreams of a better time.
The worst part was, with his engineered and altered body, he knew he would be alive for every second.
As he turned the ship around and zoomed back into the cold embrace of space, he remembered the phrase he had been told that fateful day.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
He wasn't sure who was 'many'- the residents of the nucleus, the inhabitants of Crebla 41-B, or humanity at large, but he knew who was the few.
The old, old man flew, tears blurring his vision.
He never even noticed the black hole in his way.