Status report PAST DUE - please explain 1/5

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W.M. Hastings, or Current Wagon Master :

Your yearly status report is past due, even factoring in the communications lag.

Please submit your status ASAP. As previously communicated, there were several deficiencies on your last report which should have been corrected by now. To reiterate:

1- Your population growth rates, and the associated resource burn they cause, continue to be unacceptable. The Rodina was stocked very carefully based on very specific calculations. Your failure to maintain the ships population within the given safe parameters puts the success and profitability of this enterprise in extreme jeopardy.

2- The sentiment towards those passengers in the Sleeper Car continues to be negative, and we understand that anti-Sleeper literature is being distributed in some areas of the ship. You and the council are responsible for managing these general attitudes. We remind you—again—that this venture was overwhelmingly funded by those passengers in the Sleeper Car. You will ensure that they are respected and cared for in an appropriate manner.

3- The Tech/Sing oversight assigned to this venture wishes me to remind you that any tinkering with the bosonic architecture or software packages of your mil-spec automatons is strictly prohibited. Frankly, I'm much less concerned about this one, but you know how they are.

To respond to your question regarding food production, I must apologize: we have not been able to discover any significant advances in food generation. We did contract out to Terranova to explore this, but they were unable to boost production by more than a few percentage points in their labs. We worked with them for a few months, but it looks like it's a non-starter. Sorry.

Attached please find a set of updated code builds for your automatons. Matheson-Ford assures us that they are stable and provide numerous bugfixes. Please apply them ASAP.

I feel I would be remiss if I didn't stress this: your tardiness in submitting your status reports is of great concern to the company. We remind you that while it was agreed that self-government of passengers was necessary to a degree, you are ultimately all owners and employees of this venture, and have implicitly agreed to be bound by our regulations.

We hope that going forward you will conduct yourself as befits an executive of this illustrious organization. We may be a small venture, but there is a lot riding on this on both our ends.

Reeta Orav

COO, Star Trail Joint Stock Company

Hong Kong IV, Earth