Entry by: Captain of Theseus, Ilmari
Dear Logbook,
The sky is bright with all sorts of colours tonight. In my youth, we would have called this event “fireworks”, and some still do. In truth, however, nothing is fired but laser lights pointed to the sky. The effect is still there: celebration.
Fifteen long years ago, I, among a group of other survivors, stepped aboard this ship for the first time. That is something to celebrate, to be sure. We found a vessel for our dreams, a brand new ocean ship installed with the newest technology and enough room to house a large city of people. We made it our home and built it to be what it is today. Theseus, a sovereign nation of the oceans, a haven of well-being. I was happy my education as a marine technology engineer could be of so much use in the new nation, and being elected as a captain was an honor I could not have imagined before.
What preceded the birth of Theseus can be called an apocalypse, I suppose. I will try to explain to the best of my understanding and memory, although the details of the catastrophe are for the wiser to explain.
It was the flare, that some people had feared to be coming and attempted to warn the rest of us, but to no help. When the flare came, we were mostly helpless. The World Wide Web existed no longer, and most computers were fried. I was coming to work in the morning, but the harbour gates no longer recognized my face and didn’t open. The back up system didn’t work either, and our calls for help didn’t go through. Rather soon we found the city in chaos. All that I could do in that situation, a young marine tech engineer as I was, was to run grab my mother from her workplace downtown, climb over the harbour fence with her and get aboard a ship that was about to sail by evening fall.
The first weeks of sailing, we worked hard to re-establish communication systems. Once everything aboard the ship seemed to be working, we found out just how large the damage had been, as next to no one answered our calls and communication attempts. We made a decision to stop at every harbour on our way and pick up as many people as we could possibly house. From the beginning, a new type of democracy was created, one that suited the spirit of Theseus. Technological advances were given priority, as we saw that it was the only way to build a good life for the new nation that was forming. And so, Theseus came to be.
Fifteen years on this ship, with all the advances we have been able to make, is a great feast, something to be celebrated and remembered by future generations as well. To ensure the memory will remain, I have decided to create this logbook. I have designed it with a biofilm cover that will open to only the bioprints coded to it, so that it can be written in freely and the contents can’t get into the wrong hands. Tomorrow, I will gift this logbook to the person most deserving to preserve the memories of Theseus, my mother Ilona.
Outside my window, the sky is still bright with green, red and yellow. Perhaps I will seal this book and go join the celebrations on the deck.
