Dark matter

His right antennae twitched nervously as his temporal mandibles manoeuvred the controls deftly to position the solar panels.  The routines that he followed had been drilled relentlessly in training exercises from the day that he hatched from his egg, back in the hive.  His movements resembled those of a machine, intent on accomplishing the prescribed task, and the slight twitching, of his right antennae, resembled the blinking of a hardware light on a device, merely acknowledging that the computational resources were currently being consumed and were not available for lower priority contemplation.

Factual negligences occupied his attention like honey coated flies.  His daily routine sputtered and floundered along day after day like a herd of underwater cattle attempting to cross a shallow land-bridge in some kind of migratory trek to better feeding grounds in the deeper, warmer waters off the coast of some planet lost in the millions of habitable planets which statistically must exist somewhere in the space-time continuum all around us.

Nowhere was his ignorance more apparent then at that very moment when his mouth opened and he attempted to impress whichever entity had happened to subject itself to his inane, low-tech rambling about whatever was written on the third page of the daily newspaper as was his habit.

Inconsistencies had begun to appear on the spectral analysis, disturbing the patterns which normally accompanied the technician through his daily routines at the magnetic-velocity-resonance terminal.  At near-light speeds, this particular ship required a deft hand to avoid slamming into any of the dark matter clouds which littered open space between universe's.  Normally, the patterns were simple and easy to extrapolate into matter-type/navigation decisions, but these irregularities hadn't appeared in any of the manuals that she had been trained on as a child.  Since she was born, on a ship travelling at ever-increasing speeds, towards a distant solar system, which has only a reasonable likelihood of containing a habitable planet, and which wouldn't be reached by her ship until several generations after her death, yet she continued to manage the magnetic oscillation networks which protected the ship as it passed through these abnormalities.

By now, the ships that were leaving home-port were fully automated and required much less human attention during their 300 year flights off into the unknown.  Passengers on those flights would go to sleep and wake up several hundred years older and look out their viewports at a habitable planet.  No inter-flight generations were required.

She flicked off her headset and leaned back in her seat, which automatically detected her relaxed position and changed her display to relaxing nature scenes from 'back home'. 

Her last work period was spent adjusting training materials for the next generation to account for changes in available information concerning their destination.