On Monday, 4 May 2020 10:53:57 UTC+10, stephan Beyer wrote:
I had so many questions about this character, so eventually, I decided she needed a backstory. Images, no matter how appealing, are not enough.
Dale-Husband
“88”, real name Diana Miller, is the 88th Caretaker of the sleeper ship Salvation that has been traveling from the ruined planet Earth to an Earthlike world that is over 100 light years away from the Solar System. The Salvation can only go as fast
as one-tenth the speed of light, so the ship was intended to take a total of 1,000 years to reach its destination.
Though she appears to be a teenage girl, 88 is actually over 1,000 years old, having spent most of her existence in suspended animation along with thousands of other teenagers dispatched from Earth as its biosphere was slowly collapsing. She was
awakened from her sleep by the 87th Caretaker, who intended Diana to take his place while he returned to sleep. To prepare her for her lonely task of overseeing the Salvation’s operations, 87 had Diana undergo severe mental conditioning which
suppressed both her normal human emotions and her sex drive, making her rather like a Vulcan of Star Trek. Well, not quite; sometimes her original personality does surface anyway and makes her feel very depressed.
Despite her lack of emotion, 88 still needs to be entertained, and she mostly gets it in the form of video games. The Salvation’s computer has hundreds of video games programmed into it, but 88 also has access to game consoles that were taken from
Earth and were originally owned by an earlier Caretaker who collected them; now they are hers.
About two years after 88 began her duties, the ship arrived at the targeted planet and she found the world to be suitable for colonization, so after the analysis of the world is complete she will begin reviving the other people on the ship, including
the other Caretakers who served before her. Once they are all revived, 88 hopes to have her conditioning reversed so she can live like a normal teenager again (something denied to all the other Caretakers, who served until they were middle aged). She
knows that she will likely be expected to have children quickly to help populate the world too.
He chose 88? That's a neo-Nazi dog whistle, if there ever was. 88 is supposed to be "Heil Hitler" in neo-Nazi code.
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