"There's coffee in that nebula."

Part One:

Part Two:

The day-night cycle continued to abide by Cape Canaveral's watch, making it a fresh, breezy morning on the Yggdrasil. Captain Steven Hastings heaved a solitary coffee bean into the grinder. One "coffee, americano, hot" later and he was plonking himself down in the Captain's chair with his morning beverage, sipping it as he reviewed the night's readouts.

Four months out from Earth, all systems were running like clockwork. Even the Chaos Generator, which fluctuated temperature and weather of the internal environment within safe-but-interesting parameters to prevent the crew from succumbing to monotony-induced psychosis, was working like clockwork. They had completed the hard acceleration from Earth, jettisoned their booster rockets, and were now all but coasting towards Jupiter, whose gravity would help fling them out of the solar system.

Yggdrassil's minimal acceleration provided barely a third of Earth's gravity and the coffee slopped in its cup. Hastings clipped himself into the seat for the secure sense of weight it gave him. His buttocks were considerably larger -relatively- than they had been, and there was always the feeling that they might bounce his diminished body clean out of the seat like a pair of space hoppers whenever he shifted his weight.

While they monitored the machines, the machines monitored them, harvesting biometric data on their decision-making and response times and beaming it routinely back to Houston, where an expert team of psychotherapists and gene-surgeons scrutinized them, like insects under a microscope, to ensure no degeneration of their mental or physical health. Out of all the ship's components, the biological ones were the weakest link, the true chaos generators, and a thousand protocols were in place for any psychological decline. The Commander's mental health metrics had been tracked throughout his genetic alteration. The graph was a flatline. There was something almost unsettling about just how flat it was. Not a blip, not during his first period, which had been the last box to be ticked prior to launch and occurred to much fanfare, nor even when he was vomiting out 99% of his human biomass. He was unflappable.

NASA had of course done everything to smooth the transition. They had transferred both members of the command crew into comfortable quarters on the ship early, once the weight and inches began to fall off them, so that they could experience the vertigo-inducing shrinking process away from looming, clumsy humans. The control room, embedded several meters up Yggdrasil's trunk, looked out over the lush vivarium of the biodome and was a light and airy space, sized perfectly for them and decorated with scaled-down plastic replicas of potted plants and framed Earthling landscapes to enhance the homely feel. It was only when they stepped out of the control room onto the landing pad and looked up at Yggdrasil, the tree that towered a kilometre up through the biodome, filling the ship from stern to bow, that they were reminded of their shrunken state.

Hastings was so deep into the work that the whole fairyization had slipped his mind again. He leaned back, wincing as one of his wings folded painfully beneath him. "Blasted things," he grumbled.

"I keep sleeping on mine," said Darius, looking up from his terminal. "Every time I roll over, it wakes me up."

"You think you have it bad. You can sleep on your front," Hastings said, gesturing to his plump, sensitive chest. "Try sleeping on your side with them hanging over the edge. It's the only angle I've found that works."

"Makes you wonder why they made them so big."

"The wings?"

"The beds. All that space. Either the designers oversized them or they undersized us, because I feel like I'm rattling around in it."

"Hmm, yes..." the Commander murmured into his coffee, scrutinizing the officer shrewdly over the mug's brim. "A little early for flirting, isn't it? You're not scheduled to impregnate me for another ten years." The man flushed red, blurting a denial. Hastings chuckled. "Yesterday you were asking if my sleeping quarters were as chilly as your own. Keep in mind I was a man for thirty years; don't think I can't see where these topics are leading." He continued placatingly. "It's perfectly fine. You're simply planning ahead for certain ahem docking maneuvers. That's a good trait to have in a subordinate. But let's try to stick to the schedule laid out for us, shall we? We still need to leave the solar system and I can't be expected to plot a double slingshot maneuver with little ones underfoot. Littler ones," he added. "I tell you what. Any time you feel like flirting, write it down in a journal. Once we're past Uranus, you can run them all by me. I'm sure I'll be very receptive then."

"Yes, sir," said the copilot glumly, sinking into his seat.

Hastings reached across the console to give the young man the most avuncular slap on the shoulder he could muster. "Cheer up, lad. It's only a decade. It'll soon fly by."