The colonists awoke from a 3,000 year slumber, and struggled to understand why man-sized Tardigrades were maintaining the ship.
The peaceful race explained they were descendants of crew awakened early, then modified to shepherd a damaged ship for a millennia.
Copyright © 2018 by Jason H. Abbott, All Rights Reserved.
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Aethereal Engineer 
So inbred.
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Actually, it’s a really big generational ship. The pool of caretakers is large and diverse enough to avoid a lot of overlap. Plus, who knows how their genomes have been modified. ;-)
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