Necroserver

There are two ways to make this trip, asleep or dead. The words that the fat customs officer repeated with a tired ring to the people queuing to get onboard the ark ship were meant as a dark joke and a reminder of the grim possibilities that awaited anyone foolish enough to make a mistake around the premises.

The more evident became the reality that Earth was dying, the more serious they got about the Colonisation Pathways that would bring humanity to the stars. Resources were allocated, ships were built, and technical issues were overcome. One of the most difficult challenges was the huge supervision and maintenance requirements that the ships would have during the long trip. Most of the physical work could be easily done by robots, but the overseeing required human capacity, especially after the Great AI Flop of the mid-XXI century, and the trips could span a few hundred years in some cases.

It was easy to put a few thousand settlers or crew in stasis for a few centuries, but it was impossible to wake them up at demand to respond to the ships requirements. It was then that they came up with the necroservers.

Through a series of surgical procedures and implants, they managed to bring individuals to a point of near-death that converted them into mere computers, devoid of personality but with slight traces of conscience that allowed them to perform some basic routine decision-making.

They started using the victims of terrible accidents, people who were not meant to be still alive anyway. But, as the moral boundaries relaxed and the situation on the planet worsened, the need for this new asset surged, and they had to get creative. The Extinction Dilemma, as the news outlets called it, had generated a huge worldwide inmate population, due to protests, scarcity and skyrocketing crime. Nobody would miss these people, and they would redeem their crimes by serving a higher purpose.

It took Rashid more than two hours to pass through all the security controls and finally board the U.S.S. Kim Kardashian, a huge ship that dwarfed the spaceport in which it was docked. These ships, named after great personalities of a distant past, were an overwhelming presence that could be seen from miles away and setting foot inside one of them finally, was some sort of defining moment. All his life would be left behind, on the other side of the gigantic hydraulic blast doors of the ships main entrance.

Move on to your assigned collection points and wait for the accommodation personnel, said one of the ships reception officers before leaning over a reddish dim-lit screen that was being operated by another crewman. Rashid took a second glance, and then he saw it. The second crewman had no arms or legs. It was just a human silhouette hooked up to the ships consoles by multiple connectors. The red glow of the screen projected an eerie aura over the mummified skin of his head, with changing shapes dancing over the milky eyes as the sequence of commands iterated orderly on the screen.

Humanitys salvation required paying a high price. But some people would always pay even a bit more.