"Burning the midnight oil?" is something people say to a person who's staying up late, typically on a work related task. I believe it refers to a time when people would have to burn oil lamps for light in order to keep working. Of course, "midnight" is a relative term on a starship. Our ship's clock is divided into 25 hours (one extra just in case). Midnight would be at zero hours, I assume, but there's no day or night, the light stays the same as we drift through the voids in the cosmos between stars. There's five shifts of five hours each, so that we can all get enough time to rest, educate ourselves, and take care of our families.
I am an engineer onboard the SS Integrity, engineer number twelve-gamma-two-four-two. I work primarily on fusion reactor number three, specifically on the magnetic bottle array. My job is very important, but there are still hundreds onboard that are either primarily or secondarily trained for my job. This is all my life will ever be, and it makes me feel pretty depressed. All I do is rearrange magnets all day, while my shitfaced foreman asks me how many more magnets I can rearrange and if I can stay for epsilon shift too, something something Jerry has COVID-98 again. So this is the part where it goes from a fantastical journey through the stars to one disgruntled guy stuck in a system of bullshit. The Integrity is a "generation ship". That means that it will take more than one generation of life to reach the destination. My generation is one of the middle ones, so I will never see our home planet, nor will I see our new home planet. I've seen the simulations, the home we left was a beautiful place once upon a time, and they suppose our new one will be. The problem our ancestors didn't foresee was a type of radiation, common in interstellar space as we now know, which they failed to shield the ship against - and this radiation makes people infertile.
The Integrity had a planned economy for the duration of our trip, and provided we followed certain rules and kept the population about level, there would be enough labor to keep the ship running and enough resources to go around. The population declined, and though we found a way to reproduce using technology, it's a lot slower, and we can't reproduce as many children at a time. Natural births are still possible but rare. The population is stable now, several generations later, but somewhat smaller. The smaller amount of available labor means that sometimes I have to work an extra shift when Jerry catches a virus or the foreman is too shitfaced to turn a wrench. The place has a real "small town" feel now, like one of my forefathers described his home in his journal. My name is Fred Ponce, by the way.
"Burning the midnight oil?" said the second foreman as he came to relieve me of duty, as if I had chosen to be there. "Yep," I replied, taking off my protective goggles and climbing down offthe scaffold I had been standing on. In a planned economy, there are still advantages to your boss liking your attitude. Getting promoted means you're more likely to get time off and get larger quarters when reallocation came around.
"That's what I like to see! You've done well Fred, go home and take a hot bath." The foreman patted me on the back a little too hard. I cracked an uneasy smile and headed for the vator.
When I arrived home, my wife was arriving at the same time. My wife teaches children, and usually her hours are beta and half-gamma shift. Today she had to work all of gamma. I had been on alpha-break-gamma schedule, but since Jerry is so unreliable I now have beta-gamma which is a bit more manageable. We made dinner and ate and watched a holofilm, something new the algorithm cooked up last week, and made love. It was quick but pleasant, and we fell right to sleep. It was rare these days that we had the energy, what with the radiation and all, but most of the other issues it caused were mitigated by the medicine all members of the Integrity were given. Most nights we just went right to sleep, even though we were young and spry. We wanted children, but our quarters were too small for more than just the two of us and my pet hamster, and even though we had viable gametes frozen, it would be awhile before our names came up in the birth queue. Limited labor meant resources were limited too.
The next day, I received an unusual work assignment. I was being moved from reactor three to the radar array for the day. We only ever used it to survey incoming asteroid fields and radiation wavefronts. They needed help with a magnetic constrictor that held the optical connectors in place. Without the magnets perfectly aligned, the laser beam carrying the information wouldn't make it to the mainframe computer, much like with the reactor's plasma stream.
"Do you think you can handle it, Fred?"
"Yes, sir," I replied to the head radar engineer. "The reactors are far more precise. This should take no time at all."
"We're taking this shift off. Riley's twins were just born and we're celebrating big time." Natural twins were an extreme rarity.
"Have a good time, tell her I said congratulations. Take some holos of the babies." It was omega shift. They wouldn't be back until maybe halfway through alpha shift if I was lucky.
Once the magnets were aligned, the optical data came through at once. What I saw was unbelieveable. We were within escape pod distance of a home-class planet. Hundreds of years early. If I told the rest of the crew this, it would change our dreary worker's life into one of settlers and pilgrims, like our forefathers envisioned. Would I be the one to change our people's lives?