Over the last few years it was getting harder and harder, even for large material rewards, to recruit those willing to fly to space for two to three years to collect the lichen that leaders were dependent on to prolong their life. Rumors began to circulate among the people that after returning from space all surviving recruits were placed under quarantine in special barracks where they were half-starved and forced to strenuously expel the ambrosia-rich air (that they had accumulated from the planet’s atmosphere or from the moss they ate) until they were dying from exhaustion and starvation.

Yet, ambrosia stockpiles were quickly running out, and already less notable officials had to visit the health center to breathe in the therapeutic air exhaled by not only those condemned to death but also all quarantined miners – they were in short supply as well due to high mortality rates. The authorities had no choice but to add a regular fly spray into the air conditioning system in the visitors’ rooms to at least mask the fact that the garlic smell was no longer noticeable. Still, it seemed there was no solution to this insurmountable problem and the ambrosia shortage kept growing like a snowball rolling down a hillside, but a lucky strike saved the day.

The Earth’s brass hats were continuously dispatching spacecrafts with geologists and botanists on board for outer space reconnaissance missions in order to search for similar planets where the wonder lichen grew, but for a long time their efforts proved fruitless. Until finally, the explorers of the star Alpha Centauri were tipped off by the locals (those who had been marooned due to their status as a security risk) that the wonder-weed was plentiful on a remote planet, an easy-to-miss star called Asteroin in the binary star Cor Caroli (Heart of Charles) system within the Canes Venatici constellation. The star Asteroin had a lone planet slowly rotating around it, humbly named Hopus. The health-improving weed abundantly growing there not only could prolong life, but also would make a person eating it all the time flat out immortal. The test flight by the “pilgrims” (a name Earthlings had given to explorers travelling one-way off-world) to this planet helped discover this wonder-weed and test it on lab mice living on the pioneers’ starship. And the tests demonstrated that during the ten-year flight back to Earth, none of the mice had died and they thrived in good health on the ship to this day, while all the crew members died on the return journey from incurable diseases and poor quality nutrition. However, there was a downside: the travel time need to reach Asteroin and the lonely planet orbiting this star was three times longer than the average flight. Hence, both the fuel and resources (such as food, oxygen, and water) necessary to support the spacecraft and lives of the recruits onboard would be required threefold. But as a result the starship was overloaded above the maximum weight limit and could simply not get off the ground or was unable to decelerate when approaching the discovered planet, due to its monstrous mass and inertia. And who could guarantee that “the sprogs,” having learned about the miraculous power of the weed would even want to go back to Earth at all? It wasn’t unreasonable to have concerns that they all would stay there with the crew forever. The planet Hopus was even nicknamed “Hop” due to its inaccessible nature, taking cues from the old proverb – “Don’t say hop until you have hopped over.” The best scientific minds of Earth had been scratching their heads for a long time trying to come up with a solution to the problem until they came up with the following:

1. To accomplish this task, a supercomputer must be built. It should be able to autopilot the spacecraft and manage the people on board, be capable of anticipating all possible emergency scenarios that could arise during the flight, and making decisions to above all else ensure the wonder-weed is successfully harvested, packaged and shipped back to Earth.

2. The return home should be without the miners who must be left behind under any pretense, even resorting to euthanasia if necessary. This would increase the number of rooms for storing the product and cut the deadweight in half for the trip back to Earth.

3. The return flight must include the spacecraft pilot (who may not necessarily be the commander) and three cryogenic engineers who would ensure that the temperature conditions in the refrigerating modules and the vacated cabins are conducive to successfully preserving the precious wonder-weed.

For two years, the programmers and designers on Earth had been racking their brains over this problem and, finally, built a supercomputer superior to all previous versions by a thousand times. It was called GASSOS, an acronym for a long abstruse name for the super brain of the spaceship – the Global Automated Science-based Spaceship Operating System. But the developers themselves – and the spacemen later on – began calling it just GAS for short, and the computer answered to this nickname with pleasure, accepting it as its proper name.

When installed into the starship, GAS could perform each of the ship’s tasks on its own without any human assistance. It handled all of the starship’s vital systems, charted and set the optimal course mid-flight, toggled on and off the mechanisms necessary to maintain flight, arranged meals for the crew, calculated the minimal daily requirements for air and water, and the controlled the temperatures in the cabins. It could even entertain its passengers with various lectures, songs, stories, jokes, and just have heart-to-heart conversations with them. It knew everything: about the crew, the flight to Hopus, the ship’s functional capabilities, the Solar System and all the stars humanity had studied. GAS’ developers had accounted for everything and programmed it in such a way so that it only obeyed commands from the Center; when it is out of communication range, it should work according to its preprogrammed directives – its main goal was to deliver Hopus’ wonder-weed to Earth. Everything else for GAS was secondary and expendable to the task at hand. Of course, all possible contingencies over such a long journey cannot be foreseen, so the programmer implemented a machine learning function to GAS, functioning much like the human brain, so that it can decide on the optimal course of action in an emergency while following the principle “do no harm to yourself and the cargo.” To assist GAS on the ship the inventors built two androids capable to carry out simple jobs on command related to the servicing the machinery, serving the crew and system repairs if necessary.

While the problem of figuring out how to operate the ship during the long journey was solved, the developers still struggled to find a way to reduce the ship’s total weight to ensure the ship’s return to Earth while in accordance with the approved supplies requirements. The routine calculations for the necessary spaceship supplies were made by the experienced planners and logisticians who were located a floor below, and didn’t fit into the takeoff weight of the experimental long-haul journey. To make these calculations, a separate group of classified specialists was formed to assess the most extreme conditions the flight could undergo. Much like the staff from the old department, they worked in secret during the preparation activities of the classified department to prevent information from leaking to the people, as it often happens.

Thanks to the on-board artificial intelligence, it was decided to down the size of the crew to half, and as for the miners of the wonder-weed, all of them were to be left on the planet, possibly euthanizing them (if there is no other method) so they can’t prevent the last working shuttle from taking off into orbit, where the mother ship is to be waiting for them at all times. During the flight to Hopus, the computer is to put all passengers onboard into hibernation for four years, supplying their sleeping chambers with a special concentrated gas consisting of all necessary nutrients while they are asleep. Trial experiments on prisoners had shown satisfying results – eighty percent of the subjects had survived after an almost two-year sleep, and sixty five percent of the survivors were still capable of doing the necessary physical labor. All these measures allowed reduce the load by three quarters and additionally double the ship’s payload of the precious cargo.