Directives

The planet Origin revolves around a super artificial intelligence called Anna, where it assigns the most appropriate occupation, based on the calculated potential growth of an individual from birth. In case a child is born with more than one potential growth route they can take, with similar efficiency, the parents are given the right to decide.

Heki Tike was a newborn child, with a lot of potential, but instead of going for one of the high income, but heavily restricted jobs, her parents choose the job called space explorer for her, since they thought, their child could have a bit more freedom with this job, than with others. During her years of education, on a holiday Heki and their family was at the site of a terrorist attack by an organisation called Anti-AI. During the attack both of Heki’s parents suffered fatal wounds and died soon after, Heki herself survived, but had a concussion to her brain.

Due to losing her parents, Heki became the target of bullying from the children, received too much empathy from the adults and got ripped-off by her “relatives” multiple times, although in the end those swindlers were chased away by the state assigned legal guardian. Due to these and the effects of the damage to her brain she maintained minimum interaction with others, suppressed her emotions, and gradually became closed off to the world. Instead of socialising, she spent their free time studying or reading research papers.

After she graduated, she immediately joined the workforce, and bought a spaceship with part of her parents’ insurance money, the rest went into her savings. A few years later a new law went into action, which imposed a lot more regulation on spacecrafts and the once free job of space explorer became heavily state regulated. Not only selling materials, but their mining also came under regulation, due to Origin, the asteroids and planets near it having their resources depleted.

Directives were sent out to all space explorers and they had to comply with them. Their spaceships were bought up by the state and the whole sector was nationalised. Each spaceship had an AI installed on them, and they had also been equipped with all the necessary monitoring devices, to make sure, that the explorers didn’t “steal” any of the resources or “hid” any of the data. With their new supervisors the space explorers set out to find planets and asteroids with resources. Heki wasn’t an exception.

Decades passed. Thanks to improvement in both the medical and technological field, humas were able to extend their life by a lot, in some cases even a millennium was possible. Though they weren’t without pay-offs. A chip had to be installed into the brain, which meant more control and better supervision by Anna. Heki was considered as a valuable asset by the AI and was also given one of these chips during one of her medical checkups. She was also given a new spaceship, with which they could travel further into the depths of space, find & extract materials much more efficiently.

Thanks to the explorers’ work and the plentiful materials they brought back, research was going faster in many fields. Self-maintenance and self-repairing devices became widespread, special all-purpose medical pods were developed, so explorers could go on longer missions. Special atomic-structure modifier devices were given to some. These allowed the production of food, water and resources for maintenance. Though they could only be used at specific locations, with minimal outside interference and required a lot of power. Also, they couldn’t create something from nothing, so you also had to feed them resources.

With these devices and many others on-board Heki completed many missions and decades later took the top spots, for resource veins explored and longest mission completed, both in time and distance as an individual. Decades later she got a brand-new ship, and started her exploration with it. This is where our story begins.