The Kampyle of Eudoxus was a mid-size luxury liner that was designed to be the prototype for a fleet of interstellar ships that would bring the upper and middle classes to the stars in high style. Unfortunately, the money ran out before a second could be built and Gustav Mfume, the designer and idea man, was forced to sell tickets for the maiden voyage to make up for cost overruns during construction.

The Kampyle launched with great fanfare towards the outpost orbiting nearby Wolf 359, but never actually made it to its destination. Overdue by three days, the passengers began to straggle in on the emergency shuttlecraft from the ship. Their stories were mixed and confused and it took several weeks for an inquisition to figure out that the ship had been hit by a stray proto-comet as it approached Wolf 359 through it’s Oort Cloud.

Given the nature of the disaster, comparisons between the Kampyle and the Titanic were inevitable. The major difference between the two, of course, was that the Kampyle had no ocean to sink into. Instead, the remains of the ship drifted in the vast emptiness of space – a far larger void to get lost in.

Over the next few decades, several different salvage expeditions set out in search of the luxury liner, but none were able to find it. The received wisdom among salvage operators and ships crews was that the Kampyle had drifted into an orbit as complicated and obscure as the mathematical function for which it had been named.

Twenty years after the destruction of the Kampyle of Eudoxus, Gustav Mfume died a penniless, broken man, leaving two sons and a mountain of debt. His wife had left him for a dirt farmer in Iowa and neither son was willing to take responsibility for their father’s mistakes. Forty years after his death, his eldest grandchild, one Miranda Mfume, stepped forward in defiance of her father and went on a grand quest to return honor to the family name.

Miranda spent almost twenty years scouring Wolf 359’s Oort Cloud, examining the reports of the accident and calculating trajectories of the emergency shuttlecraft as they approached the outpost. In the end, her research paid off when, on a Saturday morning in July, she discovered a metallic debris cloud orbiting an ice ball the size of Manhattan Island. On that ice ball was the remains of the Kampyle of Eudoxus, frozen, cold and abandoned – in the same condition that it’s passengers had left it in almost 80 years earlier.

Miranda’s announcement was the flavor of the week, as were her plans to salvage and refurbish the ship for another generation of passengers. She found backers who were willing to defray her costs due to the historical nature of the vessel, but she soon discovered that no one shared her dream of returning the Kampyle to active service. Among those who moved between the stars, the Kampyle of Eudoxus was a cursed vessel, a ghost ship. It was an ominous portent and not something one traveled on for fun.

In the end, Miranda returned the Kampyle of Eudoxus to full operating status and donated it the to the L-4 annex of the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum. Although the journey from Wolf 359 was a beautiful moment, lovingly documented by various news agencies, it was, for her, an admission of defeat. She died with her dreams only a few months later.