Skipping Ahead

by Zachery Brasier
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​    Fires raged from horizon to horizon, back-illuminating the Rocky Mountain peaks with an eerie red glow and marring the nighttime skies with thick plumes of dirty brown-gray smoke. As Lyle Fischer waited for his walk signal, he tried to distinguish which ones were forest fires and which ones were caused by drone strikes. There was no way to tell. In essence, they were side effects of the same phenomenon.

    Despite the apocalyptic scene, he felt happy, the same sort of giddiness he remembered from when undergrad college exams got canceled at the last minute. It was his last day on Earth. Although, more accurately, it was his last day in This Time.

    Interstellar travel came fast. To the world, it seemed like they woke up one day to the news that humanity could, finally, send people to the stars. The United Nations Space Council hadn’t even embarked on a focused research project. Instead, the thousands of necessary technologies had been developed individually throughout the world: long-term hibernation, closed loop life support systems, constant acceleration nuclear-electric propulsion, ultra-strong spaceframe materials. In a flash of insight the UNSC leaders looked at human scientific progress holistically and realized: Hey, we can do this.

    There were two catches. One, any voyage would necessarily take centuries; anybody who embarked on such an adventure would return to Earth in a completely different time, everyone they had known having long ago passed away. Two, interstellar vessels were a massive allocation of resources. Humanity could only build a few. And those few would take away funding from other space projects or government services. 

    The UNSC sold it well; the people were on board. They were given detailed explanations of the positive outcomes, but there was an unspoken understanding that at the end of the day the ships would be launched mostly because humanity could. The planet also needed something to believe in.

    The Magpie was the first, having rocketed off two years prior, sailing to Proxima Centauri b. Lyle’s ship, the Petrel, was undergoing final checkout in orbit. The ship was a thick white cylinder with holes at one end for the electric propulsion. To most, the Petrel didn’t look much like a spaceship, and the woven thermal blankets covering its exterior seemed almost comically low-tech. They weren’t designed to fulfil people’s science fiction fantasies though.

    Tomorrow they’d put him under then fly him off to Gliese 667 Cc. It was 23 light years away, a rocky world in a trinary star system. He’d come back in three hundred years. His previous spaceflight had been a six month low-earth-orbit stint.

    The walk sign illuminated, but before Lyle could step onto the crosswalk an echelon of armored personnel carriers roared around the next block up and floored it through the intersection. A line of fire trucks followed the military vehicles, sirens blaring. The olive green machines sped down the street, gunners on the tops sweeping their fifty-cals back and forth, watching for anything that’d endanger the fire crews. Cars on the road flipped on their hazards and quickly got out of the way. Lyle looked down the street and could see flashes behind the peaks. He waited until he was sure there were no more APCs or fire trucks coming and scurried through the intersection with five seconds to spare.

    To fly the mission the UNSC needed astronauts thoroughly disenchanted with the modern world, space-trained explorers willing to throw their time away, risk it all in the hope that not only would they make it to their destination and back, but that there would be a home waiting for them when they returned. Lyle Fischer fit the requirements. One way or another, he wanted a ticket out. Rolling the dice on the future of humanity was the only way he could see.

    But, despite his generally upbeat mood, he wasn’t looking forward to the last thing he had to do.

    After a short walk he came to The Green, his favorite local bar. The interior, surprisingly, didn’t have much green, and in general wasn’t exceptional. He liked it for what it was though, it had the homey comfort of a well-frequented drinking spot. He’d miss it.

    Entering, he scanned around the room and caught sight of Mark Rodriguez, his oldest friend. They had met in middle school, bonded over their shared video game tastes, fell out of contact in college, reconnected in adulthood, and had been inseparable ever since. Mark was the closest thing Lyle had to family--he had been there to watch Lyle’s first rocket launch.

    Now it was time to say goodbye.

    Mark waved and patted the seat next to him. Sitting down, Lyle gave his friend a side hug, and asked, “What’re you having?”

    “Manhattan, and I’m buying.”

    “You sure? I’m not going to need money where I’m going.”

    “Take the drink as a social thing then. Manhattan, right?” Lyle nodded. Mark raised a finger to the bartender and ordered drinks. When they arrived Mark side-eyed his friend and said, “You know I’m going to try to convince you to stay.”

    “And you know I’m going to say no. I’ve already trained, they're expecting me.”

    “Don’t they usually have, like, backups?”

    “Not for this,” Lyle answered and stared straight ahead into the mirror behind the bar, the reflection he could never quite connect to. He took a sip of his drink and let the rye singe the back of his throat. 

    “What exactly do they need you for?”

    “EVA checkouts once we get there.”

    Mark sighed and slipped into silence. Lyle knew there could be no small talk anymore.

    “Is it really that bad here?” Mark asked, breaking the impasse.

    Lyle turned to look his friend in the eye. “You’re kidding.” He pointed out the bar’s windows at the distant fires. “This is a disaster.”

    “Yet we’ve managed interstellar flight, so we’ve got some things going for us. Man, everybody thinks their time is the end of the world. Be honest, do you want to explore or just get away?”

    Lyle sighed and didn’t answer.

    “That’s what I thought,” Mark sighed. “Look, I’m happy. I have a job, a family, an apartment...”

    “People used to own homes, Mark.”

    “And before that, mansions!”

    “You know that’s not...” The bar erupted into a cacophony of sirens. Every phone emitted a warning at once: air raid in the area. The patrons went silent, waiting for a blast that might not come, glassy eyes seeking momentary comfort from their drinking neighbor. Nobody hid. What was the point? 

    A muffled explosion distantly boomed. Jet engines shrieked overhead. At the far end of the bar a bearded old man mumbled into his beer. “Go get ‘em boys.”

    “Which faction do you think that was?” Mark asked but Lyle didn’t answer. He looked down at his shaking hands. He reached for his drink to calm his nerves but thought better of it. Instead he bent down and sucked at the rim of the coupe glass, bringing the Manhattan down to a level that would be harder to spill.

    “You wonder why I’m leaving...” Lyle whispered.

    They can’t take territory with drones,” Mark shrugged, “It’s not ideal, but it’s not the worst thing.”

    Lyle swiveled on his stool to face his friend. “Do you hear yourself? I know you can’t go, but why are you doing this? Why now?”

    Mark’s face cracked. His smile fell, his eyes went red. He ran a hand through his hair. “Just going to miss you man. And I don’t like seeing my oldest friend consumed with such a...death wish.”

    “Hey now.” Lyle rubbed his friend’s shoulder. “Sorry. I promise it’s not a death wish, think of it more like a gamble.”

    Mark snorted, “Hope you get a royal flush.” Guess we do need some small talk. They spent the next hours talking, reminiscing about old times, spitballing ideas for the future of Mark’s kids. It started getting late, and Lyle had a big day. Mark paid up and together they slowly walked down the street. When they reached the intersection where the APCs had traveled, they prepared to split; Mark eastward, Lyle southward.

​    They hugged. Lyle held his friend for a long time, the best man he had ever known. When they let each other go, he could see that Mark’s eyes were brimmed with tears.

    “Take care of yourself. Give my love to Maria and the boys.”

    “If there’s an afterlife, I’ll catch you there.”

    “Yeah. ‘Till then.”

    They went their separate ways.

    That was awful, Lyle thought as he laid in his bed in his completely empty apartment. Painful though the goodbye was, the excitement of the next day overwhelmed everything else, keeping him from falling asleep. His body would have a long time to sleep soon but from his perspective he’d be orbiting an alien world within the day.

    After a fitful sleep, he showered one more time in the 21st century. He dropped his keys in his mailbox for the landlord and drove to the medical center. Sandbags surrounded the exterior security fence, metal reinforcements were bolted to the bottom floors to deflect shrapnel blasts. All the windows were shuttered.

    Smoke drifted from the mountains, dimming the sun and bathing the ground in an ugly brown-orange light. Lyle waved at the guards as they opened the security fence. He wanted to run through the parking lot, but settled for a brisk walk.

    The doors to the hospital slid open. He nodded at the military police and the front desk crew, turned to the elevator and took it up to the fourth floor. They checked him in and ushered him through three sets of double doors to a bright white room. The room was surprisingly large and perfectly circular. Tubes and monitors snaked across the ceiling, breaking to allow overhead lights to shine down and blanket the interior with a monochromatic glare. Alcoves hid more of the hibernation equipment. He would never see any of it; the first step of the process, general anesthesia, would be the only one he experienced.

    “Hey Lyle,” the mission doctor greeted him with a singsong voice, her back turned towards the door as she fiddled with her computer equipment. Years of training had built up a breezy informality between the crew members.

    “Morning Nora, ready to fly?”

    She swiveled around on her stool, “Gotta get you all to bed first.” Nora was an odd one. She was only five feet tall and had delicate elven features. Her hair was an almost translucent white, cut to her shoulders. In the right light it reminded Lyle of fiber optic cables. He found her strangely alien, and at first had felt weird referring to her as a “she,” as if she existed in a realm beyond that. 

    She was actually from Cincinnati.

    The little doctor ushered him to the single medical bed in the room’s center. She attached a blood pressure cuff and started poking him with thermometers. “Any pain? Coughs, colds, anything like that?” Lyle shook his head. “Last minute drinks last night?” Lyle nodded. “Told you not to do that, but thanks for being honest.” She started pressing on the sides of his neck. “Feels good. Alright, lay down and get comfortable.”

    “I’m not the first, right?” Lyle asked as he shimmied to get comfortable.

    Nora cocked a thumb at a big panel inset in the wall. “Nyugen, Astra, and Bill are already under.”

    “How’d it go?”

    She walked over to a desk and retrieved a tablet computer. “See for yourself,” she said as she handed it to him. Three massive blocks of numbers and acronyms were displayed. There was nothing highlighted in red. He placed the computer next to him. 

    Nora rolled a large machine over, unwinding a tube and gas mask. “That’s just the anesthetic though, the hard work is later.” She spoke into her lapel mic, confirming a go-no-go call. “Comfy?” He nodded. “Alright Lyle, I’m gonna attach this, get it running, and count down from ten.” 

    With precision, she attached the mask; he could hear gas pressurizing in the machine. She stood over him, staring directly into his eyes. Unblinking. He never noticed that her irises were sea green. 

    Ten. (The gas started circulating.) Nine. (He could smell it.) Eight. (She was really quite alien.) Seven. (Last chance.) Six. (Her voice was modulating.) Five. (It stretched.)

    Lyle Fischer never heard four.

    He woke up one-hundred and fifty years later.

    The ceiling looked almost the same as the one in the hospital; only a discerning eye could have picked out the differences in ducting and wiring, overhead lights and fire suppression sprinklers. Nora was still (or, again?) standing over him. Her hair haloed her face. Floating. “Hey there.” She handed him a bottle of water. 

    “Did it work?” he asked scratchily after he took a sip from the straw. 

    “Oh yeah.” She beamed down at him. “It worked. I’m going to loosen up the straps now.” His body floated up from the bed and his inner ear told him he was falling. Zero-g. 

    Experimentally he raised his arm and rotated his wrist. He looked down at his feet and did the same thing with his ankles. “Weird. It’s like I woke up from a nap.”

    Nora gave a sloppy little salute. “That’s why they hired me.”

    “Earth?”

    “Still there, as far as we can tell. They set up a beacon before we left and have been pinging us ever since. Low bit-rate, of course, so it’s not much more than a notification that there are still humans there and the Earth wasn’t, I don’t know, sucked into a wormhole or something. Been holding steady since we left. Just lay there for a little bit. Undo the straps when you’re ready. We’ve got a crew meeting in an hour, and I’ve got to check on my other patients.”

​For the first time Lyle took in the cabin. It was much smaller than the cavernous room he had set off from, everything within easy reach for convenient maneuvering. 

    Nora pushed off his medical bed, translating over him. Before she floated out of the room he asked, “How’s the planet?”

    She braced herself against the circular airlock, turned, and smiled. “Pretty cool.”

    It was indeed pretty cool, he thought the next day as he floated anchored to the outside of the Petrel’s hull, monitoring the solar arrays as they unwound themselves from their housings, transforming the cylinder into a golden flower. He could still do work, he was pleased to learn. While they had been out cold, parts of the ship’s interior had spun fast enough to simulate gravity and maintain the crew’s muscle and bone density. With everybody awake, that rotational speed would be way too fast for comfort; the Petrel just wasn’t wide enough. So from his body’s perspective, he had only been floating for a day.

    The exterior of the Petrel was no longer white, having spent a century-and-a-half being blasted by the high-energy cosmic rays permeating interstellar space. Leaving the Earth’s protective magnetic cocoon was bad enough for a spaceship, but punching through the heliopause was even worse, exposing the exterior hull to the full radiative blast of everything.

    Although, it was hard to tell how much of the color came from radiation damage and how much was coming from the Gliese 667 star system. Something he knew intellectually: stars have different colors. But it was strange to see it in real life.

    Gliese 667 was a triple star system. Two K-type orange stars (A and B) orbited each other, sharing a barycenter and whipping through the system on big elliptical arcs. The third star, a faint red dwarf (C), orbited the pair at a distance roughly two-hundred times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Cc (“Ceecee” as the crew called it) orbited the red dwarf, but the orange stars still shined bright in the sky. They bathed the ship in orange light, their angular separation creating a pattern of bright and dark orange patches. Overlaying that pattern was the red dwarf’s crimson glow, prominent in the shadows of the K-types, fading away where the illumination of the pair doubled up the orange. Lyle spent a few minutes once he got outside looking at his hand, rotating it around to see how the three-point illumination played across his white glove.

    The Petrel streaked over Ceecee in a tight orbit, deploying hundreds of drones. Some of the crew were riding down in capsules, conducting phasing maneuvers to get closer to the planet. They didn’t have anything with the capability of landing and coming back up--Ceecee was almost four times as heavy as Earth.

​  “Alright, we’ve got C-set coming up, B-rise a minute after, then A-rise after that,” Farah called from EVA Control.

    “Copy that, thank you very much,” Rose, Lyle’s EVA partner, called back. Her South Carolina accent was getting more pronounced as the EVA went on.

    Lyle looked behind him as the big red disk of C approached Ceecee’s atmospheric limb. The star was faint, kicking off most of its light in infrared, but the disk was larger than the sun looked from Earth orbit. With nothing to do at the moment, Lyle rotated around to look down at the planet's surface.

    They were sailing over a series of escarpments, jagged peaks illuminated by dim red light. The flatlands between the formations were speckled with black lakes of liquid water. In the visible range, the light from C made it hard to pick out features and gave the ground an unwelcoming darkness. 

    But, if he switched on the infrared filters, the terrain would explode into a rainbow. The lakes would turn into swirls of fluorescent cerulean; the mountains would become a twisting psychedelic pattern of greens. While the flatlands had seemed empty in visible light, they were covered in red pinpoints when filtered: patches of whatever counted as plants on Ceecee’s surface, or at least some lifeform that was giving off a similar infrared signature to Earth vegetation. It was easy to get lost in all that false color, as easy as it was to forget that those spots meant that the crew had technically discovered aliens.

    Looking retrograde, he watched C dip below the purplish limb. C-set was a much more subdued affair than Earth’s orbital sunset. Exterior lights snapped on, illuminating the hull. For a minute the surface was pitch black, like the Pacific at night. Then B broke over the posigrade limb, tinging the atmospheric line a muddy brown. The ground experienced day again, orange light illuminating a new mountain range from the opposite direction. A-rise followed shortly, adding a second light source to the ground, transforming the vista into a baffling pattern of brightness and shadow. The escarpments gave way to an immense flat plain, gently inclining up to an ice-covered plateau. The terrain reminded Lyle of the Great Basin, except it was tinted orange.

    As the twin stars arched through the sky, the solar panels continued to unfurl. The Petrel’s control computers began taking the power load off the reactors. 

    “A-set and B-set coming up,” Farah announced, “you should expect 30 minutes of night.”

    “Roger,” Lyle confirmed.

    The two stars slipped below the limb, plunging the two astronauts back into darkness.

    Laylah, Ceecee’s only moon, shot over the horizon and streaked across the sky. Within minutes it was directly above the Petrel. The moon was bright and elongated, not having sufficient mass to reach hydrostatic equilibrium and form a sphere. It was also in a retrograde orbit, so the combined velocities of the moon and the Petrel made it appear to launch itself across space. She vanished below the horizon.

    A blue star was shining. That was the mini-Neptune, the other planet in the system. The crew had yet to determine a name for it, having now held multiple rounds of voting with no conclusive winner. Probably because it was stunning. The gases that composed it were naturally blue; the red and orange stars casted an ever-shifting pattern of color on the clouds. It was small, tidally locked, and close to its sun, creating extreme weather conditions that tore apart continent-sized bands of clouds and sent their remnants zipping around the world.

    “C-rise in five.” And there it was.

    After a month of studying, the crew of the Petrel bundled up all their data and prepared for the ride home. The mini-Neptune had finally gotten a name: Cyclone, with the caveat that the name should be rendered in whatever was one’s native tongue. 

    Lyle strapped himself to his medical bed while Nora shined a penlight in his eyes, directing him to follow it so she could get a look at his blood vessels. She gave a thumbs up, then pitched forward, opened a locker underneath the bed, and pulled out a gas mask. 

    “Ready?” she asked after strapping on the mask. Lyle gave a thumbs up. “Ok, you know the drill.” But she didn’t start tapping on the touch controls immediately. “By the way, thank you.”

    “For what?”

    “Trusting me.”

    “Yeah, of course. We all do.”

    She grabbed his hand and began counting down. Lyle didn’t make it to five this time; woke up a century and a half later with Nora holding his hand again.

    “Welcome to the future!” she trilled, starting to stretch out his fingers. “How’d that one go?”

    He hadn’t even felt anything. “Smooth as hell. Creepily smooth, even.”

    “Aw, you’re a charmer. The equipment held up nicely. They really designed her to last.”

    “She’s got a good interstellar medical officer too.”

​    “Keep that up and I’ll let you buy me a drink someday.” Nora giggled and then tapped on the restraint controls. “And here comes the float.”

     “Am I your type?” Lyle asked platonically as his inner ear recalibrated and threatened to make him gag.

    Nora looked off to the side, “Now that you mention it, probably not. You’re a good friend though.”

    He couldn’t stand the excitement anymore. “How’s Earth?”

    Nora cocked her head and frowned, “I’ll be honest, I think I’d describe it as a ‘mixed bag.’ To us, it doesn’t look great. They’ve been through a lot. They don’t seem to know any better though, and they are very nice and extremely happy to see us.” Now she smiled, “Also, they’ve done some cool things. But, I just want to warn you so it doesn’t come as a shock later: there’s only a million of them.”

    Lyle was still struggling to emotionally grasp that revelation days later as a series of automated transfer vehicles climbed up to the Petrel’s parking orbit and began loading up the crew for the descent down the gravity well, but not all the way to Earth. It wasn’t just that there were only a million humans left, his mind couldn’t wrap itself around the fact that nobody lived on Earth anymore.

    As he looked at the planet as the transfer vehicle descended, it was mostly like he remembered it, but the subtle differences revealed hundreds of years of turmoil. For one, there was no northern ice cap, and Antarctica was a small patch of white. There were a lot of clouds, covering a good three quarters of the planet at any moment. When they broke, he could see that the coastlines all looked different, each continent having shrunk under higher sea levels. The nightside was completely empty of lights, the cities long extinguished.

    Humanity’s new home was space, with two hubs at the Lagrange points. The transfer vehicle crossed into the L4 sphere of influence and quickly rotated, rolling the Earth out of view and replacing it with one of the objects Nora had described as “cool things.”

    It was like somebody had taken the abstract idea of a sphere, constructed a tube running down the center, and then built big wheels on the latitude lines. The equatorial wheel was massive, speckled with thousands of lights, a city built in polar coordinates. Each wheel heading northward and southward got gradually smaller. Each latitude wheel spun to provide artificial gravity, but each spun at different rates, the equatorially section almost imperceptibly moving, the sections near the poles rotating quite fast.

    They had tried to get a name for it, but the inhabitants struggled to understand what they were asking for. The crew had woken up to a notarized statement loaded into their flight computer. It started: “We, the citizens of the world, congratulate you on your...”

    Surprisingly, everyone spoke English, but when they started voice communications Lyle was baffled by the accent. Every word seemed to have a different accent, each one born from a different Earth language. He could recognize the intonation shifts, but he couldn’t figure out a pattern to them. In one sentence he would hear words spoken with what he recognized as accents of native Spanish, Chinese, German, etcetera speakers, all jumbled together. 

    In the direction of L5 a sparkling gold star shined. The welcome packet called it Cluster, and it was a similarly sized sphere but with nobody onboard, composed only of supercomputer cores. The moon had a few spots of light on it, and there was a constellation of small space stations circling in cislunar space. A handful of long term missions were either en route to the planets or coming back from them.

    When they docked they were greeted by a huge auditorium full of people. Government power was more decentralized than the crew’s time, and it was hard for Lyle to understand who was actually in charge. They gave each crew member a cabin, each about the size of a studio apartment, and assigned them an official guide to help them get acclimated to the future. His guide was a tall man with long black hair named Deneb.

    Lyle spent his first day looking out his cabin window at the empty Earth, crying.


    “Nobody lives on our home planet anymore though, surely that's a bad thing.” 

    Deneb stopped and grabbed onto the swimming pool edge next to Lyle’s dangling feet, breathing heavily. “But in your day there were only a few hundred people, tops, in space at any given time. Now we have a million.” He took a deep breath, spun around, and pushed off the pool wall, streaking away, powered by his soft yet toned back muscles.

    Lyle sighed and laid down on the warm white metal under him, keeping his feet dangling in the pool. Deneb’s splashes echoed through the big, open, gently curving space. The whole facility (he struggled to find words to differentiate the internal spaces of the world), was roughly as big as the supermarkets from his childhood, but completely empty, caught in the middle of a reutilization program. While the citizens deliberated future plans for the big room, they had pried off some of the floor panels and made a rectangular pool. Long fluorescent strips on the ceiling bathed the pool with even white light. Lyle heard a door open to his right, followed by echoing voices.

    Deneb stopped at the poolside again. “It’s not impressive to you that the whole human race is living in space? Wasn’t that the dream for your people?”

    Lyle sat up. “In science fiction stories maybe.”

    “So the answer is yes.” Lyle shrugged. Deneb kicked over to a ladder and climbed out of the pool. He swam nude. Lyle blushed and looked away, tossing Deneb his towel. The man walked over and plopped down next to Lyle. “You’re kind of a prude, you know that?”


    “So the Cluster makes your decisions?”

    “On a large scale, yes,” Deneb answered, sipping his beer and further reclining into the observation lounge couch the two had snagged. Lyle leaned forward, looking out a set of two story tall windows. The lounge was on a northward wheel, one of the earliest world segments, and had to spin faster than the equator to maintain one-g, creating an ever shifting pattern of stars shining through the windows. Gentle electronic music created an air of quiet sophistication; the interior was dimly lit and decorated with rich blue fabrics. “And it’s just Cluster. No the.”

    Lyle didn’t understand the distinction.

    “You look upset,” Deneb observed. “Is there something you need?”

    “Mountains, or a forest.”

     Deneb frowned and reached over to rub Lyle’s upper back. “Come on, sit back.”


    After Lyle had spent five straight days in his studio apartment, Deneb came over with good news. “Karrl Sergeivich wants to see you. That’s the head of the space agency. Are you up to it?” Strange to hear anybody referred to as having a position of authority, but Lyle assumed that Deneb carefully chose his language to bridge the cultural gap.

    He pulled himself away from the porthole. “Can we go to the moon?”

    Deneb seemed unperturbed by the non sequitur, or at least was being polite enough to not point it out. “Sure, I’ll just need to check the schedules. I’ve never been out there.”

    “You’ve never been to the moon?”

    “Oh, that was a big deal for your time wasn’t it? No, I haven’t.” Deneb cocked his head to the side with innocent curiosity. “Did you visit powerplants for vacations back in your day?” 

    Lyle groaned. Deneb’s face fell when he realized he had further pushed Lyle into his existential pit. “Come on,” the tall man said, gesturing out the door, “let’s get you out of this room. It will do you good.”

    They walked down the spotless corridor of the habitation node, passing the hustle and bustle that seemed to emerge from any city-sized human population even if the sky was actually a roof and only five stories up. They entered an underground (below deck) station, caught a ride on the transit system that Lyle could think of as either a subway or elevator depending on his perspective that day.

    The United Space Agency’s office was at the southernmost wheel, with an uninterrupted view of the stars. Curiously, the Agency didn’t coordinate the operation of the world, only ​transfers between habitats and missions to distant planets. Lyle was starting to understand that these modern people had a different concept of where space began and ended than him.

    Deneb guided him through a twisting set of hallways and offices; working spaces hadn’t evolved much in three hundred years. They checked with Karrl’s secretary, and only waited a few minutes before Lyle was ushered in. Deneb looked him over, rearranged some of Lyle’s stray locks of hair, and gave him a hug. “I’ll be out here.”

    Karrl’s office was small, but the back wall was one uninterrupted curved pane of glass. He sat facing the door, the stars backdropping him. The man was old, had a white beard and long wispy hair. With a friendly wave he beckoned Lyle in and gestured for him to sit in a chair facing the desk. 

    “How you doing, Lyle?” Karrl asked.

    “Good.” Lyle answered monosyllabically.

    “So not so good.” Karrl steepled his fingers, “This has been tough for you hasn’t it?”

    Lyle felt his face fall and he nodded. He tried to gather his thoughts into some sort of summary, but failed to get it together. All that came out of his mouth was, “How do they not know?”

    Karrl nodded understandingly and leaned forward. The sun crossed the right side of the window and the glass automatically dimmed to filter out the light, but somehow managed to keep the stars bright. “They don’t know any better. Maybe they do in an intellectual sense, but it’s hard to get people to understand the whole emotional weight of their context if it’s all they have ever known. Your time was the same way. You know that. Why else did you come to us?”

    “And you do?”

    “Spacefarers tend to have a more comprehensive view of things.” Karrl sighed, “Yes, it’s not ideal. But we are holding together, we’ve made a lot of progress, and things have been stable for a long time. You haven’t caught up on history yet have you?”

    Lyle shook his head, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to do it; not even checking on what happened to the Petrel’s sister ship.

​    “That’s probably a good thing, but if you did you would understand why someone like Deneb struggles to think of this as a decline. Inarguably, that mindset is for the better.”

    The wheel kept rotating. The sun disappeared and was replaced by a crescent moon.

    “Look,” Karrl continued, “your mission was not well thought out, nor was you signing on to it. One thing we’ve managed to do is improve our long term planning. This time was always going to be a strange fit for you, and I want to offer you a way out. In a way, we feel like we owe it to you. It’s the same way out as before, but, before you say yes, let me show you something first.”

    Karrl opened a drawer to his desk and pulled out a little black box and two forehead electrodes. “The closest thing to this that you’d recognize is what you called virtual reality. That’s not a bad name for this piece of technology,” he tapped the box, “but it misses much of the nuance. What I want to do is attach these to your forehead and show you where we are going. If you consent to that, of course.”

    Lyle nodded. Karrl stood and leaned over his desk, attaching the electrodes. “Here we go.”

    Five seconds passed but they covered one thousand years. Lyle didn’t perceive the length at all, it was as if the images suddenly appeared in his brain, were processed, and then stored: memory and the future rolled into one. Humanity flashed through his neurons, shimmering in gold light.

    He took a breath and felt his eyes brimming with tears. “Goddamn. You’re kidding.”

    “It’s already in motion,” Karrl said, “you should see the projections from Cluster--there are a lot of nines. If you want it, you can live there. Think of it as our society making amends for what happened to yours.”

​    Lyle thought that was strange. Why would they need to apologize to him? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

    “You’ll just need to visit another star. We’ve got a potentially habitable exoplanet we want checked out. We’ll soup up the Petrel as much as we can, but it will still be a 960 year round trip. I would tell you to think about it, but you’re going to say yes aren’t you?”

    “Yeah, of course. Yes. No offense.”

    “None taken. You showed up a millenia too early. We’ll be ready in a month, so please try to enjoy yourself in the meantime. We really thought quite hard about the amenities.”

    Lyle stood and walked to the door. Before he left the office he stopped and turned around, having caught a nagging thought. “Why don’t you come with us, if you have as comprehensive a view as you say? Now that I’ve said that out loud, why doesn’t everybody try to leave?”

    The old man stroked his beard. “I was born in this time, it’s all I’ve ever known. Plus, traveling to a distant star scares the hell out of me, and somebody needs to make sure that there’s a home for you to come back to. For everybody else? It’s too far away. Might as well be talking theology to them.

    “Anyways,” and Lyle could hear the tone of voice change to one suited for logistical explanations, “there are only so many berths on the Petrel. Interstellar flight is as much an expenditure as it was in your day, it’s not like we can just crank out spaceships.”

    “So is it technical or philosophical?”

    Karrl chuckled, “A little of both. Space travel’s always been that way.”

    A month later he was back on the Petrel, strapping himself to his old medical bed. Nora floated into the cabin, graceful as ever. “This isn’t really my thing,” she had explained when Lyle found out she was shipping out too. Some of the old crew decided to stay; some of the modern people decided to take their place.

    “Ok champ you know what’s coming,” she said as the equipment spun up, “this future tech is really nice, so it will be even smoother than my already soft touch.

    What’d you think about that VR footage?” Lyle asked to make some small talk as she worked.

    “Huh?” Nora looked down at him, “Was there a movie I was supposed to watch?”

    Lyle burst out laughing. Nora smiled with skepticism.

    “You’re in a chipper mood,” she said as she pulled out the gas mask and attached it to his face, “excited to go find some alien animals? Ceecee only had those weird not-plants, so I’m ready to see something really out there.” She tapped on the touch screen controls.

​    “Here comes the gas, let’s count down together.”

    Those sea green eyes stared unblinking as the anesthesia hissed.

    Ten,

    Nine,

    Eight,

    Seven...

​ 
Zachery Brasier is a science fiction writer and space artist residing in Salem, MA.
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