Earlier, scientists and political strategists had frequently noticed that after contact between the leaders and their electorate, the latter were imbued with extra energy having inhaled the garlicky exhaust from the mouths of the dignitaries, and could work for free for a while if fed simple peasant foods. And thus a question was raised: what was the point of executing the convicts right away if they could still be of use to the law-abiding populace of Earth?

The brass hats made the right call. They began placing convicts in specially built barracks with a powerful exhaust ventilation, and next to them compact health care centers were being built, equipped with the powerful system sucking in the garlicky air coming from those barracks; these became health resorts where the honored laborers working for the good of the motherland could enjoy rest and relaxation and so that worthy working classes could too taste – or rather, inhale – the elite garlic aroma in order to lessen the divide between the rich and the poor and, if possible, to prolong length of service of the able-bodied, rank-worshipping flock.

However, the surplus of the lichen brought from Abba kept depleting all the time. Whether because its reserves found in the planet’s hollows and caves were getting exhausted or theft of ambrosia had become more creative. At the same time, the number of the relatives of Earth’s elite kept growing exponentially due to increase in life expectancy and, accordingly, more numerous offspring. It became necessary to either cull the list of those worthy to receive ambrosia – something the public servants would resist with all their might, culminating in all-out brawls amongst one another – or to increase punitive measures against those caught embezzling the longevity elixir on the spacecrafts returning with the valuable cargo – that was extremely undesirable.

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.