Captain’s Log Day 8135

The General Assembly voted to go ahead with the plan. Ideally, we could still perform a wide gravity-assist maneuver and end up where we want to go, albeit much later.

Captain’s Log Day 8138

We went out to harvest the cloud and there was nothing. Dallas says it’s a multiple-system software error, possibly due to cosmic ray strikes. Apparently radiation-hardening and using physical-etched media to maintain computer integrity isn’t enough.

Rumors and panic have run rampant: Can we make it? At what cost? We’ve run the simulations; they say we can still make it. The catch is that we’d have to reduce the crew size and recycle the ones who would be…reduced.

I can’t bring myself to tell it like it is. My mind refuses to accept it. Hasn’t there been enough mass death already? Is there no more sand in our hourglass?

Someone, I forget who, asked how we would choose who lived and who didn’t. Someone else dryly said we’d have to draw straws.

I fear he’s going to be right.

God help us all.