This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2023 by Tyler Franck and Daniel Abraham

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

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ISBN-13: 9781662515729 (digital)

Cover design by Caroline Teagle Johnson

Cover image: ©oxygen / Getty

INTERVIEWER: It must feel a little strange to spend all this time preparing for something that you aren’t actually going to do.

ROY COURT: Except that I am. When the package unfolds, the Roy who comes out of the assembler is going to remember having this exact conversation with you. It’s just that he’s going to be on some other planet trying to figure out how to restart the human race, and I’m going to be here worrying about my taxes. [laughs]

INTERVIEWER: I can’t imagine knowing there’s some other me out there.

ROY: It’s not really going to be like that, though. We’ve located tens of thousands of exoplanets that look promising for colonization, but the closest really good candidates are fifteen, twenty light-years out. We call it “slow light” for a reason. The beams we’re transmitting aren’t quite as speedy as the normal stuff. That’s four, maybe five decades before the first unfold could set up a transmitter and send us a hello. We’re all mortal here. Those other Roys are going to be doing what they do long after I’m gone.

“Okay, I’m going to start the anesthetic in a few seconds here. You might get a little light-headed,” the technician said. She was a petite redhead with a small chin and dainty little teeth. If they’d met at a bar, Roy might have tried flirting with her.

Instead, he put a hand in his pocket, reassuring himself that the little velvet box really was where he thought it would be, then nodded. “Copy that.”

She shifted, put a needle into the drip feed going to his arm, and made a little sound that seemed like satisfaction. “Okay. Just count backward for me from ten to one.”

“Ten, nine, eight, seven—”

Roy opened his eyes. He was alone in the landing couch, just the way he was supposed to be. He lay there for a little while, getting used to the feeling of his body. His arms and legs felt heavy, like he’d just had ten hours of hard sleep. The knot that always seemed to rest in his belly had untied itself. He felt great.

The room itself was small, spartan, engineered to have not just the least mass but the least information that the package would have to encode. It seemed silly to take a snapshot of two hundred human bodies and brains and then try to economize with simplistic shelving, but here he was. He checked his pocket. The box was still there.

“What’s the word, folks?” he said.

“Scan went great, Roy,” Sandor, the director of operations, said through the speakers. “No data loss, minimal overhead.”

“Great. That means I can retire now?”

“Wait a few minutes to get your legs back before you start running down the street, but yeah, man. We did it.”

Roy smiled. After three years of active training, it felt a little anticlimactic. He’d come into the program at thirty years old with six years as an officer in Air Command behind him, a dual master’s in engineering and applied math, and he’d still barely qualified. The program had been boot camp and graduate school and team-building intensives all in one. And this was the last time he’d be looking up at the gray ceiling of the package module. The last time he’d be talking to Sandor and Chakrabarti and Foch. The last day he’d spend with most of the team.

Maybe not all of them, though. There was room to hope.

The farewell banquet was the next day at a hotel ballroom just off the base. Three hundred and fifty people, mostly women, mostly in their late twenties, around fifty tables with ceramic pumpkins for centerpieces and plates of rubbery chicken or gritty lentil tacos. An open bar. Sandor had given a tipsy speech about the nobility of the human soul and the work of becoming not just a multiplanetary but a multisystem species and started weeping. It had actually been pretty moving, in the moment. The president of the National Space Agency sent a message of congratulations and thanks that had been projected onto a blank wall behind the empty bandstand.

Now, Roy was leaning back in his chair with a whiskey sour in his hand while Zhang Bao and Emily Pupky leaned in on either side, talking across him. After three years of a strict no-alcohol policy, even the watered-down drink was hitting him hard.

“Bringing men at all was a mistake,” Emily said. “No offense, Roy. But every male in the package is one less uterus. And there are, what? Fifteen hundred sperm samples? We’re going to kick founder effect’s ass.” She pointed an exuberant finger at Bao. “Kick its ass.”

“Replacement is an issue, yes,” Bao said. “But how many babies are we really going to need in the first stage?”

“We’ll have to have some pretty fast or there won’t be anyone to do the work when we get old. Populations with inverted age distribution—”

“It’s going to have to be a game-day decision,” Bao said. “Every situation is going to be different. And really, Emily, do you want to commit to living the rest of your life without cock?”

Emily cackled. “You’re going to be a lucky man, Roy.”

“Oh, not me,” Roy said. “I’ve stood my watch. Now I’m going back to Ohio and looking for a job.”

He caught sight of Anjula across the room. She was wearing a pale-yellow dress that brought out the warmth of her skin. Her hair was flowing down one shoulder, and her smile was the same wry near-smirk he’d loved and hated and loved again.

Now or never, he thought. He teetered on never, then shifted his chair back. “Doctors. You’ll excuse me, I hope, from your very erudite conversation on the long-term value of cock.”

He got stopped three times as he made his way across the ballroom, people he now knew as well as his own family, all saying their goodbyes. He disengaged quickly from each teary farewell, as politely as he could. Anjula was putting on her coat when he reached her.

“Hey there, former wife,” he said, the way he often did.

“Hey there, former husband.”

“Taking off?”

“Yeah. Traveling early tomorrow.”

“Let me walk you out.”

They passed into the hotel lobby, a fantasy of black tile and fluted columns with a wide fountain along one wall. Megan Lee from the engineering team waved from across the room, looking wistful. Gabriel Hu, head of their data operations team, was sprawled on one of the couches, grinning drunkenly at everyone who passed but not making a scene. Anjula paused and bowed to him. Gabriel, unspeaking, inclined his head and waved his hand like an emperor accepting the obeisance of his subjects. They both chuckled, and Anjula moved on, Roy at her side. He didn’t touch her arm, and she didn’t lean against him. They knew each other too well for that.

“We pulled it off,” he said.

“We did. I should thank you.”

“For what?”

“Not making them choose between us. I know admin was concerned those first couple years.”

“I can see why. People get divorced, they don’t always play well together after. But I can bounce that right back at you. If you’d pushed the point, there’s no reason to think I’m the one they’d have kept.”

They reached the main doors and stepped out into the night. A warm breeze was blowing from the east, carrying the smell of the ocean. The transports waited in a sedate line, ready to whisk hotel guests anywhere in the city. The stars shone above them, billions of points of light pressing down through the backsplash of the city. They stood together for a moment, looking up, each with their own thoughts.

“I’m glad I got to know you again,” Roy said. “It feels like a blessing after . . . you know.”

“We were too young. Everyone gets to be an idiot at nineteen.”

“Here’s to getting old, right? But we’ve got a few good years left in us.”

“I hope so,” she said.

When she turned to look at him, he had the box out and open. The old ring glimmered in the new light. She looked from it to him. Her expression was surprise. Then horror.

“Oh God, Roy,” she said. “No.”

INTERVIEWER: It’s odd that this is the application we’re making of the Hamze-Grau slow light, isn’t it? If we can make copies of things from . . . what? Enriched light? Shouldn’t we be using this to make habitats for people here on Earth? Medical supplies for war zones? Food?

ANJULA FARAH: Not really. It’s an economics question. The energy it would take to manufacture something using slow light is just an order of magnitude more than it would take using traditional means. Slow light can build you a house; it’ll just cost a hundred times the energy a hammer and nails would. What makes this interesting isn’t the duplication possibilities, though that is fascinating in its own right. It’s the distribution.

INTERVIEWER: Distribution?

ANJULA: Moving matter across interstellar space has never made sense from an energy expenditure standpoint. And in that use case, suddenly duplication using slow light begins to make economic sense. There are other ways to manufacture things. But delivering and unfolding a package on an alien world light-years away in the galaxy? This is the only way to do it.

INTERVIEWER: Going back to economics, what’s the return on this investment?

ANJULA: Lots of people will give you the “all your eggs in one basket” argument for spreading out to multiple solar systems. But that’s not the reason for me. For me, some chances you take just because the possibilities are beautiful.

“Okay. Just count backward for me from ten to one.”

“Ten, nine, eight, seven—”

Roy opened his eyes. He was alone in the landing couch, just the way he was supposed to be. He lay for a little while, getting used to the feeling of his body. His arms and legs felt heavy, like he’d just had ten hours of hard sleep. The knot that always seemed to rest in his belly had untied itself. He felt great.

“What’s the word, folks?”

The silence that followed seemed to last an eternity. The voice that answered him wasn’t Sandor. It was Gabriel Hu.

“Well. Holy shit.”

Roy sat up a little too fast, and the room swam around him. Adrenaline fought against the fading anesthetic and slowly, surely won. The public address system clicked as a new connection came on. Elizabet Aldo’s voice was as bright, excited, and controlled as a puppy on a leash. “All teams, please report to your stations for startup checks. Local gravity is a pleasant one g, but let’s not hurry, people. We’re all still a little groggy.”

They weren’t on the base. They weren’t on Earth. They’d unfolded the package. The room around him, the gray, softly lit hall, wasn’t the one he’d been scanned in. Hell, he wasn’t the Roy Court who’d been scanned. The idea was simultaneously everything he’d hoped for and still totally surreal.

He walked down the hall, keeping one hand on the wall even though he didn’t feel unsteady. The air smelled like cleaning supplies and dust filters, the same as it always did. The gravity was heavy but not oppressive, so wherever they were, it wasn’t on one of the outlier worlds with significantly more or less mass than Earth. But the sound was different. He couldn’t put his finger on it at first, but there was a different resonance in the quiet. Wind hitting the base station from some unaccustomed direction. Or maybe rain or hail outside. A new outside that humans had never even seen before. Roy let that sink in for a moment.

He fought the temptation to detour through the observation deck. He wanted to see this new world, and if he was being honest, he wanted to see if Anjula was there, giving in to the same temptation. The first moment looking on the planet they were there to remake would be a hell of a time to pull out a ring.

Megan Lee was already at the reactor room when he arrived. The room was small and jammed to overflowing with their equipment. With both engineers at their workstations, they had to be careful not to elbow each other. Below them, the pocket reactor lay quiet. The control panels were up, everything on standby, waiting to kindle the little nuclear fire that would keep their batteries topped up for—if things went right—the rest of their lives. Megan looked stunned. She looked like he felt.

“Ain’t this a kick in the pants,” she said.

“You know,” Roy said, “it’s exactly what we planned for, and somehow, I’m still really surprised. You and me and all the others? We’re the first people to travel between stars.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d had the thought. It was the first time it had been true. Roy grinned.

“Prepare for check, primary reactor,” Elizabet Aldo said over the speaker. “And go.”

Megan started the system running. Each computer and subsystem cycled through its routine. Each indicator came up within its expected range.

“I’m seeing nothing but green,” Megan said. “Confirm?”

“Confirmed,” Roy said. “I’ve got green across the board.”

“Admin,” Megan said. “This is engineering. Primary reactor is good to go.”

Roy pulled up the start sequence, just waiting for the order to begin. Over the speaker, he heard Elizabet, but only distantly, like she had her hand over the microphone. Megan frowned. The voices over the speaker grew harsh. A drop of unease spilled into Roy’s blood.

“So hold up for a second,” Gabriel said over the speaker. “Megan? Roy? Tell me you haven’t started that reactor.”

“We haven’t started the reactor,” Roy said. “What’s going on?”

Gabriel’s sigh shuddered. “Turns out that if you had, it would have killed us.”

[Roy Court is looking into the camera. The right side of his face is visibly blistered. The image stutters, freezes, and begins again.]

ROY COURT: There is . . . there is a faulty coolant pressure sensor. I think it’s in the H line. It isn’t showing that there’s backflow from a stuck valve. Um. We’re on battery now. I don’t know how long we have. We’re going to try and send this out. The others are . . . Anjula’s . . . um . . . Okay. Okay. Any future missions, we need to get this to them as soon as they unfold. Like to the minute. It’s important . . . It’s critical.

[He shakes his head. His hands tremble.]

ROY: We got so far, and now this. It’s just not fucking fair.

Normally, it wasn’t a meeting Roy would have attended, but since the fault had been in his equipment and the warning had come from some version of him, Elizabet had brought both engineers to the table. Gabriel Hu was there, and Anjula. Kiko, the head of medical and psychological support. Roy and Anjula were two of the oldest people there. Most of the package had been built with people in their twenties. Roy was the oldest man on the planet. Probably the oldest within a dozen light-years.

The meeting room was small, like everything. Four benches around a fake wood-grain table. Elizabet had a mug of smoky tea beside her. The light was soft and full spectrum, designed to look like a sunny afternoon. Outside, it was stormy. If he listened carefully, sometimes he could hear the thunder.

Megan Lee gave a quick report—the stuck valve had been identified, the faulty sensor had been replaced, the reactor was up and running. Then she got out of the way to let the site group report.

“The good news is that it’s a better fit than we’d hoped. Same size and water percentage as Earth. One moon, about the same size as Luna, but about five percent farther out,” Anjula said. “The sun’s older. There’s only one gas giant, and the asteroid belt between here and there is much, much thicker, and it has a lot of activity outside the ecliptic. You get the feeling something bad happened there. The atmosphere is plausible. High nitrogen, enough oxygen that it’s pretty clear there’s something respirating out there, or was at some point. The big challenge is that there’s a lot of chlorine dioxide too.”

“Bleach planet. So no walks outside,” Elizabet said.

“Not if you enjoy having lungs.”

“Something we can terraform?” Megan asked.

“We? No,” Anjula said. “Our great-grandchildren can maybe get started on it. In theory, perfectly doable, but we have a lot of infrastructure to build and a lot of surviving to do first.”

Roy had to pull his attention away from her mouth and the memory of the way the lip balm she’d liked in college had tasted after they’d kissed. This was a serious, professional meeting as much as anything that had happened during their years of training. There was no room for him to be mooning over her like they were kids again. His hand shifted to his pocket, checking that the little box was still there.

“What’s the bad news?” Elizabet asked.

“We’re still figuring out where we are. We were expecting some lensing and occlusion to make things weird, but beyond some very consistent landmarks like the galactic core, everything seems to have moved around a lot.”

“Which means what?” Megan asked, folding her arms. Roy knew the answer before Anjula spoke, but mostly because it was the kind of thing they’d talked about back in the before times.

“It would be stranger if things hadn’t,” Anjula said. “Everything moves, everything ages, everything changes. That’s normal. Stars shift spectra; they move in relation to each other.” She lifted her hands, fingers splayed just a little like the feathers of a peacock. It was a gesture he remembered her mother using too. Genetics or mirroring. “We’ll figure it out. If we can get an idea of how long has passed since we left Earth, that’ll help a lot.”

“Yes, well,” Gabriel Hu said. “Our ears are up and listening.”

Roy shifted in his seat. This was the meat of the proceeding. The part they’d all come for. Gabriel knew that too, and he played it for effect, stroking his nonexistent beard. In another life, the data operations administrator would have been a big name in community theater.

“We were doing our checks against the original package data. Making sure that the unfold hadn’t dropped anything and that the functional package that arrived matched the expected data? It all looks fine, by the way. The alert interrupted us, and of course thank God it did. The data stream,” he said, then paused. Roy shifted in his seat. Anjula glanced at him with a do you believe this guy look that no one else would be able to parse. “The data stream is still coming in.”

Elizabet frowned. “Is there a bottleneck?”

“No,” Gabriel said. “But there is a metric shit ton of data. There are three sources broadcasting, none of them closer than eighty light-years. But they’re all on the standard frequency and using the expected coding.”

“Good that something went right,” Kiko said.

“A lot’s gone right. We’re not all dead right now,” Gabriel said. “But part of that is that the data streams are about a third handshake, a third don’t-blow-up warnings, and a third new data. The message wasn’t aimed at us in particular. The transmitters are just blanketing the sky with it.”

Roy leaned forward. “Three sources means there’s at least two packages that took, right?”

“None of the sources match Earth, so I’d say we have confirmation on three success stories out there. And the fresh data we’re getting is vast. Field reports from other unfolds, news reports from other worlds. Probably some stuff from Earth in there somewhere for folks who are nostalgic for the old homestead. But it’s going to take a long time to record and decompress, and a very, very long time to go through.”

“Define ‘very, very long time’ in this context,” Elizabet said.

“We already have centuries of other people’s history to go through, and I’m guessing we have about a twentieth of the full packet. That may be an underestimate. That’s mostly the handful that succeeded. Add in all the field reports from the ones that foundered? They didn’t have as much history, but they made it up in volume, and with the personal messages our other instances stuffed into metaphorical bottles for us, we could literally spend the rest of our lives playing catch-up. I’m feeding them all into virtual intelligence, but even that’s going to take months.”

“How many field reports?” Anjula asked.

“When I came down for the meeting, we’d identified three thousand seven hundred and thirty-two separate origin points. The ones that didn’t get the message in time and blew their reactors on startup won’t appear in the data set.”

They all went quiet. Elizabet leaned forward, elbows on the table. She pressed her fingertips to her lips. She was one of the oldest people on the mission. She was thirty-six.

“Almost four thousand tries. And three successes.”

This time Gabriel didn’t have to pause for effect. The effect was already there. He said, “Yes. But there’s something more encouraging. We’re not a prime package.”

“And that means?” Megan said.

“We weren’t transmitted from Earth. One of those three colonies lasted long enough that they’ve begun beaming out copies of the starting package. I mean, in success that was always the idea. Establish a foothold and continue to spread.”

“So that’s part of why it’s a little confusing where we are,” Anjula nodded. “Not sure of our origin point yet.”

“The incoming data should clear that up soon,” Gabriel said. Roy didn’t say it, but he thought that seemed optimistic.

[The woman in the video image has pale skin and a long white braid. The robe she’s wearing, bright red, flutters in a breeze that also makes a whuffle sound against the microphone. Behind her, a huge stone statue like a spiral made from hundreds of human bodies swimming upward together rises toward a violet sky.]

NARRATOR: Maunyu ese eh umfal imbli bes im zohn—

[The virtual intelligence mutes her, replacing the living human voice with a carefully modulated translation. The words no longer match the moving lips.]

NARRATOR: This monument was dedicated to our ancestors who first came to Sun-Home in a ray of light. We know the names of these voyagers of the vacuum, and we carry their legacy in our blood. Elizabet Aldo. Thomas Esquivel. Megan Lee. Caroline Morales. All seven billion people on the three continents, all the ten billion scattered in the stations and moons of our solar system. We are their children. The family they began here two thousand years ago is all of humanity that we will ever know. But our siblings are out there. Children of our same mothers and fathers who live under different stars who we will never meet in person. We can only take comfort knowing that our ancestors are not dead, only elsewhere, brought to life anew from the same light that once fell here, and beginning again the great adventure that is our past.

The last home they’d shared was an apartment in a high-rise. The windows looked out over the streets of Chicago’s South Loop. If they’d been on the other side of the building, they could have seen the lake. One bedroom, one bath, a little kitchen, and a main room with a red tweed couch where Roy slept increasingly often. The picture of them on the wall—black and white, taken in the first year of their marriage—looked like other people. The apartment was always immaculate. The one thing they still agreed on was keeping the living space tidy.

The end came on a Sunday.

“You’re walking away from me again. Can we please just talk about this?” Anjula said.

“I’m going to the balcony for a little fresh air,” Roy answered. “It is literally three steps from where I was sitting. There’s no cone of silence over it. I can hear you just fine.”

“It’s putting distance between us.”

“Yes, that’s what getting fresh air means.”

The lines appeared at the corners of her mouth, two thin parentheses as if everything she said was going to be an aside. Roy felt the weight of them like he was wearing one too many jackets. He put up his hands in surrender and sat back down.

“You can go out if you want to,” she said.

“I know, but I hear that you want to finish this conversation, and I want to honor that,” he said. It was the phrasing her therapist had imposed on him during the one session Anjula had guilted him into attending. If he said it with a little mockery, it was only the tightness in his jaw. He’d seen a feral dog once, when he was a child, pacing in the animal control kennel. He remembered that dog a lot these days.

“I just don’t understand why Air Command is the only acceptable plan for you,” she said.

“There’s a difference between the only acceptable plan and the best one. It’s four years active, three reserve. I get paid for finishing my degree instead of going into debt. And the academy program is one of the best in the world. It’s better than the École.”

“It’s better for you,” Anjula said. “That doesn’t make it better for us. At the École we could both work on our degrees—”

“Go into debt twice as fast, and wind up with shittier prospects when we’re done. Or I can do four in Air Command, then support the family when I’m out.”

“The family?”

“Yes, the family. By then we can have kids. They can be almost ready for school.”

“I don’t want to have kids with you.” She started, surprise in her expression like someone else had said it. Outside, an ambulance turned on its lights, but it was too far away to hear the siren. A flock of pigeons rose from the roof of the smaller building across the street, wheeling up until they were dark commas against the sky.

“Since when?” Roy said, but the wind was knocked out of him. The anger in his words didn’t even convince him.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t . . . It just came out.”

“Did you mean it?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that’s a change of plan.”

The lines were gone from around her mouth. She looked relaxed. It was worse than when she looked angry. “We’re done here, Roy.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means we’re done.”

She left that night. When he called her, she didn’t pick up. The divorce request came the next week, routed through the same legal service they’d used when they got married. He reached out to their friends, to her parents, to anyone who might be able to get her to talk with him, but nothing came of it. He didn’t hear from her at all until after he’d agreed to the division of assets. Even then, it was a text-only connection. He’d gotten it over a bowl of vermicelli with lemongrass and an egg roll at the sidewalk café they’d gone to when neither one felt like cooking.

Thank you. I’m sorry. This wasn’t your fault.

He read the words a dozen times. More. He composed replies in his head, but none of them were enough. It would have taken an essay to pour everything out—the anger and the guilt. The ache of missing her body next to him in the morning. The knot of grinding resentment at her abandonment of him. The ways he was relieved that it was over, and the ways that he wasn’t.

In the end, the message he sent back was: Did you meet someone else?

It took her ten minutes to respond. No, but I hope I will someday. I hope you will too. Who knows? Maybe it’ll even be us, when we’re both different people.

He didn’t finish his meal. He wasn’t hungry. He just tapped the screen to pay the bill and walked home. The new family down the hall was having a birthday party for their five-year-old, and the bright, syrupy chords of children’s music murmured in the hallway. When he closed the apartment door, he couldn’t hear it. He poured himself a whiskey, took her old drafting stool out to the balcony, and watched the night fall over the city. When it was dark and cold, he sent back: All right.

A month later, she sent him her engagement ring in a plain cardboard box. He didn’t see her again or know what had become of her until the day Sandor asked if working with her would be a problem.

[The image is of Elizabet Aldo. Her eyes are puffy, with bags under them as dark as bruises. She rubs her palm against her cheek.]

ELIZABET: This is the third anniversary of our unfold, at least by the calendar we brought with us. We’re still only halfway through a local orbit, which means probably another four or five hundred days of winter. The hydroponic garden isn’t flushing the way it’s supposed to. Jordan thinks the higher gravity is doing something to the pumps. That’s the most pressing threat to the colony, but the lava tube we expanded into last year is showing stress fractures. And Gabriel is refusing to take his medications. And we had two more miscarriages last month.

[She sighs, then goes quiet for twenty-seven seconds.]

ELIZABET: I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. But fuck, I didn’t know it was going to be this hard.

Roy checked the seals on the environment suit again, then cracked the air lock and turned the ATV toward the outside. It was warm out, and the air had a shimmering greenish cast. Bare dirt stretched away from the base, rising and falling as wind and rain shaped it. Here and there, thin plantlike organisms rose up from the ground, evolved through God knew how many generations to withstand the chlorine dioxide atmosphere. Tracks in the soft ground showed where the ATV had gone before like an animal trail. Which, in a sense, it was.

Roy tapped the radio. “This is a test. You hearing me, boss?”

“Loud and clear,” Megan Lee said from the engineering station. “Telemetry’s good too.”

“Okay. Starting the survey run.”

“Be careful out there. I don’t want to have to explain to Elizabet that you died because I was too lazy to go out and save you.”

“Copy that. I’ll be back in as soon as we get the data. No loitering.”

“Because what we need’s more data,” she said wryly.

“It ain’t the quantity, it’s the quality.” He guided the ATV to the east, ready to follow yesterday’s path for the first few kilometers before he looped out for fresh territory.

The data packet was still coming in, whispered on radio waves that had been traveling for decades or centuries. Only one of the three sources had gotten to the end of its feed and restarted. The other two, with larger archives to share, were still singing new songs, and Gabriel was starting to get worried about available memory. As the ATV hummed and jounced under him, Roy was collecting more—air samples, atmospheric light scatter readings, temperature, barometric pressure, and on and on and on. Even if the data packet was enough to fill all their available storage, Gabriel was going to make room for this. Millennia of other people’s history and culture and philosophy mattered less than the soil chemistry right here.

He reached the day’s turnoff mark, paused to drop a marker, and turned out, heading toward a distant cluster of rolling hills. High clouds stretched in a tall, green-blue sky, their edges glowing a little gold in the sunlight. The soil was damp. It crumbled easily under the ATV tracks. In another, less chlorinated atmosphere, it would have looked like the promise of a good garden harvest. Maybe it would be, someday.

Or maybe not. Three in four thousand were bad odds.

“What about the ridge to the north there?” Megan asked in his ear. “It looks like there’s some actual stone there. And maybe the new greenhouses could get a little shelter from the wind.”

“I can take a look,” Roy said, and bumped the joystick.

“It’s beautiful out there,” she said. “I mean in an austere, no-one-lives-here kind of way.”

“It’s nothing a few centuries of atmospheric scrubbing won’t fix.”

The other engineer chuckled. The strategy for expanding the base had been designed by some of the best minds on Earth. Roy had been drilled in it, the same as all the other people in the package. Not just the details either. The logic of it. Build new, physically separated structures to mitigate single-point failures. Set up secondary sources of food, water, and air. Diversify, scatter, dig in. Their job was to survive and raise another generation that was able to survive after them and start the whole ball of human civilization rolling again until they had the means to set up a transmitting station and send the slow light package on to likely worlds in their galactic neighborhood. It had seemed less like hubris in Chicago than it did in this vast, empty landscape.

There were so many things that were going to have to go right . . . and so few they could afford to have go wrong.

He felt the ATV start to shift before he knew what was happening. His hand went to the joystick, already moving to correct, but the ground to his right was falling away, the soil cascading down with a rumble he could feel vibrating up through the treads. The vast sky tipped.

The ground rushed up and punched him. Something hurt badly enough he wasn’t even sure what it was. The pain was like white noise turned up too loud to hear anything through it.

When Roy’s mind started coming back together, the first thing he heard was Megan talking to him. Her voice was staccato and focused and calm in a way that meant there was an emergency. He couldn’t quite parse the words, though. There was a smell like a swimming pool. They’d need to build a pool somewhere down the line, for the kids to swim in. No good having a childhood without a swimming pool in it. He tried to sit up, and he couldn’t. The ATV had him pinned in the soft ground. He could tell where his left leg was—trapped under the tread that had rolled on top of him. His right leg, also under the same tread, seemed to disappear in a cloud of pain somewhere around midthigh.

“Well,” he said. “Huh.”

“Roy? Are you there?”

“Here. I’m here. I think the ground may be a little too unstable for new construction.”

He tried to sit up, propping himself on his elbows.

“Stop moving, Roy. Roy? I need you to stop moving now, okay? We’ve got medical on the way.”

“I’m all right,” he said, though that was clearly not true.

“Just lay back and stay still until we can make sure your spine’s okay. Don’t try to get out until we get there.”

He lay back and coughed. “I think I have a crack in my helmet.”

“I’ll let them know.”

The sky above him was a beautiful blue, deepest where there was the least distance between him and the blackness of space. He tried to keep his breath slow and shallow and wondered whether this was the thing that would take him out. He hoped not. The little velvet box was still in his locker. Another missed chance.

“Hey,” he said. “If I don’t make it, could you tell Anjula—”

“You’re making it,” Megan said, and he lost his train of thought.

Something moved in the soil at his side, thin and squirming. It looked just like an earthworm. He reached out and closed it in his fist. If he died, someone else should see it.

[The woman appears to be in her middle twenties, with shoulder-length hair. She looks both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Her smile is uncertain.]

JESSICA: Hi, you don’t know me. My name is Jessica Court. Roy Court—our Roy Court—was my father. And I know you’re not him, not exactly, but I also know you kind of are. And I don’t know if you have a kid of your own out there, but if you do, there’s no way it’s me. But my dad passed away last week. I’m still kind of in shock about it.

[She begins to weep, pushing away tears with the palm of her hand.]

JESSICA: I can’t talk with him anymore, and you’re the closest I’ve got. So maybe you can hear this for him? Okay? I miss you, Dad. I love you. And I will always love you. And I will always miss you. And I’m sorry about the fighting. I’d take it back if I could. You were a good father, and you were good to Mom. You did good. You were good.

“What made you change your mind about me?” Roy asked over the orchestral roar of conversation and music.

The girl from his materials science lab—Anjula Farah, her name was—sipped from her water glass before she answered. “What makes you think I changed my mind?”

The restaurant was just south of campus in a converted firehouse. The bar upstairs served hard liquor and a selection of legal euphorics to people old enough to buy them. The downstairs was open to the spring evening, and anyone over eighteen could have a beer with their dinner. It was popular with the undergraduates because the food was decent and it was walking distance from the dorms. It was the first time Roy had been there, but he was trying to seem like a regular.

“I invited you to dinner and you said you weren’t available but to ask you again later. And then I asked again, and you said you’d think about it. And then I asked again, and here we are.”

She lifted a finger. “That’s just strategy. I know something about you now I didn’t know the first time you asked.”

“Really?”

“A lot, actually. I know you’re persistent, and you’re patient. And I know you’re not one of those guys who gets put off and then starts bad-mouthing the girl for not doing what you wanted. That’s important.”

The waiter slipped by, turning sideways to fit between the tables. The music shifted from an Afro-Caribbean piece to Spanish guitar. Roy shrugged.

“Fair enough. And it tells me some things about you too.”

She lifted an eyebrow, and he felt her expression like it was a warm breeze. He had to work to look away from her smile.

“Yeah,” he said. “You’re attracted to me.”

“Am I?”

“You are. You’re not the kind of person who lets herself get pressured into a date because she feels obligated. And you’re here. So it follows. It’s all right. I’m attracted to you too.”

She looked away, and the blush made the brown of her skin a little richer.

He learned other things that night too. That her family was from Mumbai, but she’d lived most of her life in Toronto. That her father had died when she was young, and her mother had remarried. That she was away from home for the first time, just the same as him.

He told her about his brother, the smart one in the family, who was studying at Cambridge on scholarship. About the comic book he’d done in junior high school. About the time he’d gotten lost on a hike and navigated his way out of the wilderness just as the search and rescue crews were about to go in looking for him. He told her about his ethically suspect first kiss, but not the name of the woman who’d kissed him. He never told anybody that.

They walked through the night-dark campus, moving from one pool of light to the next, drawing closer to each other in the darkness and pulling apart when they reached the light. They sat on the bridge over the river, looking down at the shimmer of moon and city on the water and talking about the books and movies and songs that were important to them. He made a mental list of them, already planning out where he’d find the time to read and watch and listen to them all. They kissed once when they reached her dorm, and he walked back to his room with his head held high and the certainty that he was never going to be sleepy again.

Five weeks later, she took him to her dorm when her roommate was away on a field study. In the morning, he lay with his back against the wall and watched her sleep. The darkness of her eyelids, the kind of look eye shadow was made to imitate. The rise and fall of her breath. The softness at the corner of her mouth. The unnatural smoothness of her forearm and the few stray dark hairs that had escaped being waxed. He was hungry. He was thirsty. He needed a shower. He stayed where he was, holding the moment close. Savoring it.

When her eyes fluttered open, she found him. Her smile meant she hadn’t been sure he’d be there, and she was pleased that he was.

“Well, that’s it,” she said. “We slept together. We have to get married now.”

“All right.”

She chuckled. He didn’t.

“No, it’s good,” he said. “Let’s get married. Let’s spend our lives together. We could dance around it and look for other people or try to play the field or whatever. Waste the time. Or we could be here. Do this.”

“Should I expect you to get like this every time you get laid?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never gotten laid before.”

She frowned, and then she didn’t. “Are you serious?”

“You can think I’m joking about stuff. You can turn me down. I will take no for an answer. But I’m gonna ask. And I think you’re gonna say yes. Our odds aren’t going to get much better with other people. You like me. I like you. We’re good together. We should do it.”

She shook her head, but like she was clearing away confusion. Not like a refusal. She sat up and didn’t cover herself with the sheet. Her eyes shifted, looking into one of his and then the other like she could read something in them.

“What do you say? You want to get married?”

“You’d actually do it, wouldn’t you?”

“I’m not afraid of taking risks. You’re not either.”

She wavered. He saw her waver. Two little lines appeared at the sides of her mouth like parentheses. Like whatever she said next was just for him to hear.

“Ask me again later.”

STATEMENT OF DIU CAVUI, EXARCH OF LAMMOS, FIVE HUNDRED AND THIRTIETH OF HIS NAME (ANNOTATED TRANSLATION)

As the ages of (humanity|civilization|thought) come to their end, we are given a choice. The empire graced by (virtue|blueness??) has aged past its apex. Plagues (spin?|rotate?) when once youth and health ruled. Strife has overcome peace. Decadence rises, degrading all that was noble and pure. As we turn to the future, the stars, the far planets, we are (called|inspired) to consider the wisdom of our birth.

Are we to gift (the universe|god|provability?) with the seed of a rotten fruit, or return to what was pure? The ancient light that shone on (the land|women?) was rich with (?) and that which was laudable grew from it. So it is chosen by the Exarch that the original seed be (resown?|uprooted?). Let the ages forget us, who had the chance at (?) and fell short. All praise to the ancestors. May their newer children serve them better than we have.

Roy hobbled down the corridor toward the cafeteria. The crutch bit into his armpit, and the black mesh cast around his knee and ankle bit into his leg, but he was getting used to both. Where he wasn’t numb, he ached.

“This is bullshit,” Gabriel said as Roy limped in. The cafeteria wouldn’t have been a hole-in-the-wall restaurant back before the unfold. It seated maybe twenty at a time, and the food was always the same: dense cakes with all the nutrients, fiber, and microbiota to sustain life in a puck the size of a pack of cards. For drinks, there was water.

“It’s not up for debate,” Elizabet said.

Roy lowered himself to the bench at Gabriel’s side. Across the small room, Emily Pupky was leaning close to Rick Hull, speaking intensely and low. Roy set himself to ignore them. “What’s not up for debate?”

“Admin is abridging my civil rights,” Gabriel said. “They’re punishing me for something I haven’t done.”

Elizabet rolled her eyes. “We’re looking through the data packet. Error analysis on the other packages that failed? It turns out that three percent of the failures were because Gabriel had a mental health crisis and vented the atmosphere.”

Roy grunted. “So we lock him out of the environment controls.”

Elizabet turned to Gabriel but pointed to Roy, the physical equivalent of You see my point? Gabriel sighed. Rick Hull rose from the other table and walked out. Emily didn’t move, chewed at her puck aggressively. Whatever was going on there wasn’t his business.

Megan Lee came in, her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. She looked at Roy and shook her head. “Stay there,” she said. “I’ll bring your food.”

“You’re very kind,” Roy said.

“Other Gabriel may have had a problem, but I’m me Gabriel, and I shouldn’t be punished for what I haven’t done.”

“He makes a good point,” Roy said.

Elizabet turned. “You think I should open his permissions again?”

“God, no. Just he has a good point. It’s pretty weird making all our decisions with a gazillion different lives to show us what went wrong. I can see it getting a little oppressive.”

“If we’re still alive in twenty years, I’ll apologize,” Elizabet said.

Megan dropped a puck and a bottle of water on the table in front of Roy and sat at his side. “We can’t die until I build a greenhouse and a hatchery,” she said. “I want to be buried with a gut full of chicken curry.”

“Amen,” Elizabet said. “Three successes in four thousand; I intend us to be the fourth.”

“Not the fourth.”

Anjula stood in the doorway. Her eyes were a little too wide, the way they got when she was a little drunk or very excited. The others saw it too. They all went quiet. Elizabet tapped on the table beside her, inviting Anjula to sit. She didn’t. She paced. “Three active now. But others may have survived for centuries. Millennia. How long does something have to last for us to call it a success? They rose, they lasted for a while, they fell. Things don’t have to last forever.”

“Not sure what you’re saying here, Anj,” Elizabet said, but she said it carefully.

“There are three signals active now. Right now. But how many were there before them? How many times did we do well enough to send out new packages into the void, and then the worlds they built rose up and lived their time and faded just because things don’t last forever?” She plopped down beside Emily Pupky, who was listening to her now as intently as the rest of them. “I know where we are. And I know when we are. And we’ve been thinking about this all wrong. We’re on Earth. This is Earth.”

They were all silent for a moment, then Gabriel leaned across to Elizabet and said, “You going to take her permissions away too?”

“This is about the thing I found,” Roy said. “The one that looked like an earthworm.”

“It was an earthworm,” Anjula said. “Or at least the unmistakable descendant of one. I don’t know what happened to the atmosphere, but there are still a bunch of simple organisms living under the soil. The ones that evolved to fit the new conditions. I’m willing to bet if we get to an ocean, we’ll find something very similar there.”

“And the chlorine dioxide?”

“It breaks down. With this much of it in the air, something has to be making it, and that means biological activity, even if it’s not the kind we’re used to. And, I mean, at some point, Jupiter blew up. I can’t explain that one, but it really fucked up the outer solar system. Left it unrecognizable. But the stars all line up if you make those assumptions. And the moon is the moon, but it’s farther away because it’s always been going out a few centimeters every year for half a billion years. The moment between when we went to sleep and when we opened our eyes was about five hundred million years.”

Roy took a bite of the food puck, but he didn’t taste it. “The galaxy’s only a hundred thousand light-years across.”

“Right?” Anjula said, lifting an eyebrow, and he felt What makes you think I changed my mind? “Each successful settlement got to a place they could transmit. They still had the original packet, the same way we do. It had worked for them, and why fix what isn’t broken? We got retransmitted. We’ve been bouncing around from civilization to civilization like the baton in a relay race.”

“Oh,” Gabriel said. “Huh. That actually explains some things. I need to go take another look at that data stream.”

“Those three sources for the data packet—” Elizabet said.

“They’re just the three that happen to still be alive right now,” she said, and tapped her knee with her index finger three times like a lawyer making her final summation. “And nothing lasts forever.”

[The message is flagged personal for Roy Court, and encrypted. The prompt is: THE NAME OF YOUR UNETHICAL FIRST KISS. When he puts in the name he’s never told anyone, the screen drops to black, flickers, and an old woman appears.]

[Her hair is stiff and white, her skin is as thin as crepe paper, and the right side of her face droops a little. But her eyes are merry, and her asymmetric smile is mischievous. When she speaks, her voice is almost too gravelly to recognize.]

MEGAN LEE: I’m not supposed to do this. They tell me it’s a misuse of the data stream, but what do they know? Here’s what you need to do, Roy. Listen close. Go to Megan Lee right now and kiss her. It’s going to save you both a lot of time and bullshit. And after that, enjoy every minute of it. Both of you. Every fucking minute of it is precious.

Three months into building the greenhouse, a vicious storm came through and scattered the half-made structures across the landscape. Four months after that, the sacks that held the packed earth walls started to split and shatter. The project was scrapped and they began again. This time, it was mud and as much fiber as they could spare from the base or scavenge from the landscape. For seven weeks, they baked adobe with heat from the sun and their nuclear reactor.

Coming up on a year later, the transparent ceramic went in, the air locks tested nominal, and the first crop of the new Earth was planted: human hands returning to agriculture that the globe had forgotten until now.

The next morning, Megan Lee appeared at work with a ring on her finger.

The celebration was in the cafeteria and the hallways, the observation deck and the recycling tanks and machine shop. Elizabet looked the other way while Jordan Gaudi tapped into the address system and played Arabic love ballads through the base. Roy danced with Tracey Dunn and Char Lafflin, but mostly with Megan. The severe, clean lines of the base seemed a little less austere. The thin faces that the food rationing had created were brighter, happier. Gabriel pressed a flask into his hand and kissed him on the forehead before dancing away again. It was whiskey, and it was good.

As the very late night shifted into very early morning, the halls started to thin out. People headed off to their bunks alone or in pairs, or sometimes more than pairs. Elizabet made a teary toast to Megan and Roy and the new fucking greenhouse and the future that they were all going to build together, by God. It was water, but they drank it like champagne.

In the end, Roy found himself alone on the observation deck, tired past thinking straight, but not ready for the night to be over. Gabriel was down at the bottom of the stairway, singing in what sounded like Greek. The stars glimmered—billions of them—as did the visible smear of the Milky Way, glowing like a promise. His belly felt full, though he hadn’t eaten more than the usual rations. His shoulders felt loose. A meteor flashed in the northern sky, then another. The only other light in the world came from the air-lock lights of the greenhouse, three kilometers away. He could see it like a candle in the darkness.

He knew the footsteps as they came up the stairs. Her work clothes hushed as she walked.

“Hey there, former husband,” Anjula said.

“Hey there, former wife.”

“Beautiful night, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

She walked across the deck, three steps. Four. She sat beside him, not touching. “So,” she said. “That ring.”

“Yeah.”

“You smuggled it through the scan?”

“Yes, I did.”

They were silent for a long time. Anjula sighed. “Was it supposed to be for me?”

“Well, we’d been working together on the project for years, and that was about to be over. I figured that it was my chance to see, you know? If we were different enough people now to try it again.”

She shook her head. “That doesn’t quite work. You could have kept it in your locker for that. You brought it to the scan.”

“I wasn’t sure it’d play out. I figured if you shot me down there, this way there’d be other chances. A thousand new worlds, and each one the chance to maybe get it right between us.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah.”

“How many times do you think I shot you down?”

“All of them.”

Anjula chuckled, but there was no cruelty in it. No contempt. No anger. He was glad to hear that laugh again. “We can live a billion different ways from here, but there’s only one path behind us. That was never going to change.”

Gabriel shifted to French, and another voice joined him: Megan’s, crooning “Quelqu’un m’a dit.” Roy smiled, listening to her. “Well, we were good when we were good.”

“And when we weren’t anymore, we stopped. That’s worth more than you give it credit for. It’s possible to be faithful to something that’s in the past. It’s not a betrayal to build something new when something old is finished.”

“Honor the past without living in it.”

“See?” she said. “You get it.”

“The data stream from those other worlds,” Roy started, then stopped for a moment. “A girl I’ve never met told me I could be a good father. An ancient Megan told me I’m supposed to stop wasting time and marry her. None of the other Anjulas ever sent me any advice. Why is that, do you think?”

“I guess none of them appreciate you the way I do,” Anjula said.

“It worked, then.” He looked over at her. In the soft glow of starlight, she looked like someone he used to know. “I wanted to get it right between us. And I think this means that I did.”

They were quiet again for a little while; then Anjula got up. Her footsteps went back down the stairs. For a verse and part of the bridge, Roy heard her join in harmony with Gabriel and Megan.

Roy stared up at a night sky filled with his infinite past.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James S. A. Corey is the New York Times bestselling author of ten novels in the Hugo Award–winning series The Expanse, which was adapted into an award-winning television series. Corey is the pen name of the writing duo of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.