Juni: I remember now that my amnesia was self-inflicted. It was in order to keep Tamu happy.
Dr. Goldberg: Why would you do that?
Juni: I had been reckless with an experiment, and he thought that caused some damage to my "psyche."
Juni: I had these new... notions, but I got them before the experiment.
Juni: [[voice-over]] The repository had been broadcasting a signal. It was the first thing I noticed with the [[Kajoshi]] sparkle... It sounded like vague words that I could understand but not quite, like things said in a dream.
Juni: It all made sense but disagreed with common knowledge about our world.
[[A human with a shoulder patch reading "1592 A" sits in strapped into a chair, holding their pet platypus, with rocket engines firing out a window, Earth and several large arks in the background.]]
Dr. Goldberg: Oh? And why is that, exactly?
Juni: I know this sounds crazy, but we were brought aboard to support an ecosystem, and colonize natural masses. This vessel was never intended as a permanent home.
Juni: At this point it's not even supposed to exist anymore. We're what's left over.
[[The same human is in a transport pod, entering the staging area of an ark, the pet platypus tethered to their luggage.]]
I was motivated by this strip to re-read Ursula K. LeGuin's "Paradises Lost", out of The Birthday of the World. It's a pretty interesting variation on the generation-ship theme, but they don't bring any monotremes with them, or any animals of any kind.
So excited to see where this is going! One of the first things that really pulled me into the strip was at Chandra/Kandra's lecture, where the different environment led to different preconceptions about what "natural" planets are like.
Unity's designers appear to have decided to rabidly over-engineer it to be durable beyond all durations of possible durability. There's just something about the challenge of a generation starship that inspires people to outdo themselves, I guess.
Transcript
Comments
-bill