Have Future, Will Travel

Information doesn't weigh, the motto of Slow Boat Captains, information doesn't weigh much, that of every Master Futurist. The Slow Boats travelled in sub-light between the constellations, carrying information, rare technologies, new inventions, long-life drugs, and a host of artefacts that helped sustain a shared humanoid culture across the galaxy. However, since the trips could take years or decades, the crews needed to predict the future trends of their target planets, ensuring that Tradesaction was profitable. Hence the Slow Boats carried Master Futurists and heuristic AIs, experts at choosing future-proof cargoes that were loaded from the nodes of the Tachyon-Webs of the rich, inner systems.

Travelling out from the Procyron tachyon-web, it had taken the Illion fifty standard years (six years ship's relativistic time) to reach the colony world of Kypri II, which planned to terraform the nearby Soltani system. Alas, the Penultimate Simulation Gaming revealed a stunning prediction. If the Illion made port, then the planet would be destroyed in a wave of anti-matter explosions, leading to a nuclear winter that would kill all human life there. The only likely source for such anti-matter weapons was the Illion itself.

Captain Immogen demanded that the Boat continue a normal Tradesaction with the planet, ordering Master Futurist Rowan d'Allura to find a solution. Little did they know that this command would result in a sustained Wargame with Kypri II, and was part of a wave of change that would threaten to sweep away the Guilds and the Slow Boat Culture itself. Driven by an exiled Master Futurist, Kypri was part of a grand strategy to change the balance of forces in the galaxy. If the 'Great Transformation' was beyond stopping, then the Illion would need to survive and transform it.

Have future, will travel had been the motto of the Slow Boats. But that underestimated the ability of humans, AIs and transhumans to create possible futures, not just predict them. Choose the future, we will ride it would be their mantra. The future is closer than you think.