Archivist

The ship had run for two hundred years without complaint, and Iris was hired, at great expense, to read the complaints it had never filed. The Quiet Engine was a generation ship of the old patient kind, built to cross the dark slowly and deliver, eventually, descendants. Its archive was immaculate. Every birth, every repair, every ration adjustment, logged and cross-referenced and dull. Iris had spent a career in dull archives. She had learned that the dull ones were dull because someone, somewhere, was working very hard to keep them that way.