I dreamed of stars, and birds, and flight, and above all, I dreamed of her. You aren’t supposed to dream during hibernation, they say its impossible, and I guess I to be fair I never dreamed during the actual hibernation, just during the fugue sleep that marked transition actually Neural Integrated Hibernation and consciousness. Whenever I actually did the dreaming, it was far from peaceful. I dreamt a thousand partings, from the dawn of time. Last goodbyes, deathbed wishes, men leaving on wooden ships, conestoga wagons putting a sea of grass between loved ones. One scene always dominated, overlaying all the others, a couple, two people, a life ahead of them, and one golden ticket out of the hell of the Eastern Seaboard.
Soft hands helped me from the hibernation capsule, and I was grateful for those hands as my body felt gravity for the first time in two centuries. Well, it felt like two minutes, but that was beside the point. It actually hadn’t been two centuries for the ship either, near lightspeed stretched time, and the ship’s clocks claimed a bare eight years had passed since we had slipped the bonds of the solar system. The technician who had woken me up gave a small smile, the words “Welcome to 2367” resounding in my head. Around me hundreds of other capsules were being opened by a handful of NIH technicians. Food seemed like the most pressing thing, whether I had been conscious or not, almost a decade of nutrient paste had left me grateful even of the dehydrated rations the Seed Ship carried with it.
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Turns out we’d had mixed luck in the game of interstellar colonization. The original planet marked by the Hawking Space Observatory had an atmosphere that was a witch's brew of arsenic, chlorine, and carbon monoxide. We had the equipment to handle a colony like that, but living on a planet of that made me think more kindly of the Boston Welfare Projects. Fortune is a funny thing though, and one of the gas giants had a moon that looked just on the warm and carbon dioxide heavy side of perfect. It was called Anubis, and it would be my home, and after a hopefully long life, my grave.
From the moment our shuttle landed on the planet, I knew that the world was only missing one thing. Anubis had 3 main continents, Cairo, Thebes, and Alexandria. It was 80% water, with a land area about the size of China. Instead of China’s 2 billion citizens, Anubis had 1400. The colony site was by a cobalt blue sea, the sky was turquoise, and Anubis’s gas giant hung in the sky above us, a swirling alien eye of clouds and colour. Gone were the mountains of concrete and carbon bucky buildings. I could see the sky. There were never the crashes of gunfire, and there were never days when I went without food. I didn’t pass VR addicts with burned out eyes dead on street corners. And every day that passed I knew was another day that Emily had had to live through all of those things.
She’d said that one of us had to take the chance. I’d said that we could sell the ticket, it didn’t have to be this way, we could be together, a nice house in the ring cities. She said that if I’d always been the smart one, why was I acting like an idiot. You couldn’t transfer a ticket, it was for me, and I had to take it. I said the black market might buy it, but even I knew that was wrong. Anyone caught trafficking colony tickets could be sentenced to death, and I’d only been able to enter the lottery after passing a certain threshold of intelligence and skill. I’d hoped to win a family ticket, but my luck was too good to be believed as was. Emily got her way, she always did. In another year the ship was headed for greener pastures than planet Earth, and I was aboard. Emily was lost amid millions of the poor, living out the life we’d known we’d both been doomed to live.
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5 years had passed since humanity had landed on Anubis. 1400 people had grown to 2251. The world possessed a vibrancy that Earth had always lacked. Every year the town and fields grew, a few more vehicles were built, a new village was created, a lot of children were born, and my memory of Emily faded more and more. I met a beautiful girl, we fell in love, married, and had two children with a third on the way. Daniel, who was three; and Isabel, who was one. It was in the fifth year of the colony that we were visited by news from Earth. The North American destroyer John Paul Jones dropped out of Alcubierre/Zhang drive in late October, bearing with it the first news from a planet aged two centuries from the one that we knew. Earth had changed, and while our ship had taken 203 years to crawl the 167 light years to Anubis, the John Paul Jones had made the same journey in eight months. When we had left there had been 47 colonies, with another 82 flights in progress, 72 light years had represented the frontier of human space. Currently there were 851 colonies, the farthest was New California, 1032 light years from Earth. In time Anubis would thrive, a garden of eden that would be the envy of the galaxy.
