Justin Klaassen

The year: 2031. The place: Deep in the unknown universe. What's left of mankind has traveled five light years on our journey to Darwinia, a distant planet orbiting Alpha Centauri where we will make our new home. Mission Darwin discovered the planet in 2015, years before the Great War, and the advances in the years that followed have made the long journey possible. The cold fusion cell, the creation of Liquidmetal, and the discovery of high-efficiency ion engines allow spacecraft to reach a velocity approaching the speed of light. Finally, technological advances have been harnessed for the good, after so many years of destruction.

I am the chief electrical engineer aboard the Modular Transport Vehicle I, the MTV I for short. The lives of the entire crew and the success of the journey rest on my shoulders. As Ben Parker says in Disc One: Chapter 8: Verse 7 of the Book of Spiderman (the only surviving relic of the ancient Marvel religion to survive the War), "With great power comes great responsibility."  Surely there is no philosophy more fitting for an electrical engineer. Although, there was a time I was not so sure I would be an electrical engineer. I remember applying to college with no idea what sort of engineering to pursue, knowing only that I wanted to be an innovator, a problem solver, a creator. It was not until my first year at college, when I led the Engineering Team to an improbable victory in the DARPA Flying Car Challenge by wresting the throttle away from Stephen Hawking 3.0 and deliberately overloading the Flux Capacitor, that I realized my true calling. Now, every part of every system of the ship relies on my work and me. Without me, the power from the cold fusion cell would never reach the navigation computers, life support system, or ion thrusters. Without my electronic impact sensors, the materials engineer would never know where his precious Liquidmetal hull is compromised. Without me, the neutron rehydrators would dry out and the parsecburgers would taste like protondogs. Yuck. It's all part of the job, and I am doing what I love the most. But despite my passion, I still dream of saving Earth from itself. I still dream of the day when I can go back – when we all can go back – to the time before our greatest accomplishment became our ultimate downfall.

Nuclear fission, discovered by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in 1939, was that accomplishment. Finally harnessing the potential of the universe's smallest building block, fission provided the eternal solution to mankind's energy needs: so efficient, the reactors could power an entire planet with only a truckload of materials, but so powerful that it turned man's mind to evil. In 1941, the scientists of the Manhattan Project first proposed the atom bomb. In 1945, the first atomic test in the Alamogordo desert was a success. One month later, the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Fifty-nine years later, noted physicists Bono and the Edge, discovered the secret of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. Sadly, it was too late. How did something so promising become so dangerous?

            It only took a few minutes for half of the Earth's population to be wiped out. The remaining members of mankind were forced to bide their time on a dying planet, condemned to watch endless looping reruns of Star Trek. (Final frontier? Boy, were they wrong!) I was one of those survivors. Now, as I sit at my desk in the hull of the ship, listening to my iPod Pico, I look up at the picture of Earth hanging on the wall: a reminder of where we have come from and what we must do for the future.