From: steverpb@yahoo.com   
      
   I had so many questions about this character, so eventually, I decided she   
   needed a backstory. Images, no matter how appealing, are not enough.   
   Dale-Husband   
   “88”, real name Diana Miller, is the 88th Caretaker of the sleeper ship   
   Salvation that has been traveling from the ruined planet Earth to an Earthlike   
   world that is over 100 light years away from the Solar System. The Salvation   
   can only go as fast as    
   one-tenth the speed of light, so the ship was intended to take a total of   
   1,000 years to reach its destination.   
   Though she appears to be a teenage girl, 88 is actually over 1,000 years old,   
   having spent most of her existence in suspended animation along with thousands   
   of other teenagers dispatched from Earth as its biosphere was slowly   
   collapsing. She was awakened    
   from her sleep by the 87th Caretaker, who intended Diana to take his place   
   while he returned to sleep. To prepare her for her lonely task of overseeing   
   the Salvation’s operations, 87 had Diana undergo severe mental conditioning   
   which suppressed both    
   her normal human emotions and her sex drive, making her rather like a Vulcan   
   of Star Trek. Well, not quite; sometimes her original personality does surface   
   anyway and makes her feel very depressed.   
   Despite her lack of emotion, 88 still needs to be entertained, and she mostly   
   gets it in the form of video games. The Salvation’s computer has hundreds of   
   video games programmed into it, but 88 also has access to game consoles that   
   were taken from    
   Earth and were originally owned by an earlier Caretaker who collected them;   
   now they are hers.   
   About two years after 88 began her duties, the ship arrived at the targeted   
   planet and she found the world to be suitable for colonization, so after the   
   analysis of the world is complete she will begin reviving the other people on   
   the ship, including the    
   other Caretakers who served before her. Once they are all revived, 88 hopes to   
   have her conditioning reversed so she can live like a normal teenager again   
   (something denied to all the other Caretakers, who served until they were   
   middle aged). She knows    
   that she will likely be expected to have children quickly to help populate the   
   world too.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)