012: The Long Burn


  

The Great Fleet: Voyage to TRAPPIST-1

Chapter 12: The Long Burn

Excerpt from the Parchment Memoirs of Orion Voss-7

Even in steel corridors beneath artificial ruby light, hope can still grow — tended by more aunts and uncles than any child could ever need.

The Discovery was never spacious. Fifty-eight souls — later seventy-one with the births of the first Rubyborn — lived in a habitable volume roughly the size of an old Earth football field. For twenty-one years they would call this long silver arrow home.

Humans are humans, even among the stars.

The psychologists had been thorough. Every crew member endured multiple assessments and training in dispute resolution. Yet no simulation could fully prepare them for the crushing monotony of the Long Burn: the same curved corridors, the same faces, the same ruby-tuned lighting, the same low thrum of the fusion torch that never slept.

Small frictions inevitably arose. Snoring became legendary. Two engineers stopped speaking for nineteen days over a trivial scheduling dispute. A botanist broke down in the greenhouse because “the tomatoes all look the same and so do the walls.”

Commander Elias J. Voss understood the danger. In the fourth year he instituted three traditions that became the living rhythm of the ship:

  • The Ten-Day Rest — One full duty-free day every ten days for sleep, reading, art, or cross-training in another department.

  • The Calendar of Light — Every birthday and adapted Earth holiday was celebrated ship-wide.

  • The Shadow Walk — The right to follow any crew member on your rest day to learn their work.

These breaks in the monotony kept the crew sane. They did not eliminate conflict, but they gave it room to breathe.

It was into this world that the first child conceived and born entirely under torchlight arrived in the sixth year of the voyage.

Her mother was Dr. Lena Ruiz, senior agronomist. Her father was Tomas Ruiz, propulsion engineer. They named her Virginia Dare Ruiz — a deliberate echo of the first English child born in the New World. A child of hope and uncertainty.

Commander Voss visited the nursery hours after her birth. He looked down at the tiny infant and said softly:

“Virginia Dare Ruiz… You are the first of the true Rubyborn. May your life be longer and luckier than your namesake’s.”

The name spread like a quiet prayer. She became living proof that the journey was about more than reaching TRAPPIST-1 — it was about beginning something new among the stars.

Why the Torchships Were Shaped as They Were

Virginia learned early that a Torchship is a hard place to be a child. There was no grass, no blue sky, no real weather. Her playground was narrow corridors and hydroponic domes. Her sky was the reinforced viewport where stars streaked like silver rain. Her butterflies were small bright drones flown by the OPTIMUS crew.

She also learned why the Discovery was shaped the way it was.

Even though space is a near-perfect vacuum, the ship was never built like a floating cube. At the velocities we would reach — more than 99.875% of lightspeed — even a single grain of interstellar dust becomes a deadly projectile. Over twenty-one years of continuous burn, a blunt hull would have been worn away like sandpaper.

So the Torchships were shaped exactly as the old dreamers (von Braun, Heinlein, and others) had imagined: long, sleek, and sharply tapered at the bow. Every square meter of frontal cross-section was a target we could not afford. The fewer atoms we presented to the onrushing darkness, the safer we remained.

The nose cone was a masterpiece of layered defense — advanced composites, ablative ceramics, and self-healing metamaterials. But our true guardian was the forward energy barrier: a powerful electromagnetic-plasma sheath generated by the torch itself. It projected ahead of the ship like an invisible bow wave, pushing aside gas molecules and dust for thousands of kilometers.

When we reached the midpoint and flipped for deceleration, the brilliant torch plume streamed forward and became our shield once again. Our own exhaust protected us.

Thus the Torchships were living arrows — sharp, purposeful, and fiercely defended — built to slice through the dark between the stars at speeds no earlier generation had dared dream.

Virginia Dare Ruiz grew up bright-eyed and curious. She spoke flawless Esperanto with a slight Martian lilt. She could do mental arithmetic in Base-12 before she turned eight. And she developed a habit that warmed the entire ship: whenever she passed a bulkhead, she would press her palm against it for a moment, feeling the constant heartbeat of the fusion torch.

One night when she was six, she asked me in the observation blister, “Orion, why don’t we have real butterflies?”

I answered carefully. “Because we are carrying the memory of butterflies inside us. One day, on TRAPPIST-1e, you will help plant the first gardens. Then the butterflies will come — and they will be partly yours.”

Every cycle her parents would press her small hand against the warm bulkhead.

“This is the sound of every dreamer who came before you,” Tomas would whisper. “Never forget it.”

When she was nine, she looked up at Commander Voss during a family meal and asked the question every adult had been quietly dreading:

“Uncle Elias… what if the Ruby Worlds aren’t as beautiful as we dreamed?”

Commander Voss answered with complete honesty.

“Then we will make them beautiful, Virginia. That’s what pioneers do. We carry the dream… and we finish it.”

Virginia Dare Ruiz — and the fourteen other children born during the Long Burn — proved something important: hope travels best when it has small hands to carry it forward.



 

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The Great Fleet: Voyage to TRAPPIST-1
V 3.0

NOTE: this is a unfinished Draft of a in progress work.  © Curtis Neil, May 2026

ARTISTS COPYRIGHT, Curtis Neil May 2026 

Curtis Anthony Neil/Grok 4.0/ LibreOffice. MAY 03rd. 2026 AD. MAY 08th.2026

Bakersfield, California, USA, North America, Planet Earth (Terra), the third planet from the Sun (Sol), Solar System, Orion Arm, Milky Way Galaxy


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