Temporis XXIX - The Epicenter

The passage to Capricorn V

1
Sometimes I catch myself thinking about time. I'm not sure exactly if it may be considered a trustworthy friend in space. He remembered that when he was in the military space school, one class in special caught his attention. The teacher reinforced the necessity to start space travels only when our children were above twenty years of age. The reason seemed simple at the time. If you went on long journeys in space while your kid was still a toddler, probably when you come back, he would be too old to need your advice or paternal love.
Children above twenty? He remembered his chuckles.
Most students in his class was below that age. We were still kids from the perspective of this cybernetic teacher. We didn't even have plans for kids, and we were being trained for long space travels.
He took a specific situation and turned it into a rule. Most people (so called human beings) don't live a normal biological life, except those religious extremists' groups or a bolder dreamer.
However, today this is just a thought in long night awake. What does it mean when you have been in space for more than fifty years? The night was just a reference and it didn't mean much these days. I thought, seated on the edge of the bed.
I looked outside the window and saw the empty space scattered by small dots of light.

Sometimes I was interrupted by the subtle involuntary movements of my wife that was in a virtual expanded reality session behind me.
When I was a child I dreamed of being the captain of a spaceship and get to know other alien civilizations (a frequent joke among the crew of spaceships) and explore new worlds and live eternally in search for adventures. A child's dream.
A new movement of Rebecca was the trigger to bring back my mind to the present.
I notice my disturbed reflex on the window and asked myself, why the heck they always put a window in the captain's cabin. There are only stars and the void outside. Is it a bad joke? He looked around the bedroom and his eyes stopped at where there were some decorative flowers. He's never stopped surprising himself at how it was possible to recreate life in such a realistic form. He could feel life in those plants. All the details were there. The perfection in harmony with all its imperfections. The colors, the details were almost miraculous and the eternal search for the light. Impressive!
He looked around even closer and noticed his journal. Well, at least that's how he called that virtual object that simulated a journal. It's been ten years since the last time he wrote something. He smiled.
On the first day of his journey, he had a plan to write a long journal. He had an initial idea, very ridiculous, that if he dictated a page a month, he would have a journal of at least three hundred pages by the end of the year.
This is the first line of many that will be registered here. The sentence now seemed more like an ominous warning for a writer's block than a self-help message.

He wanted to discard that journal a long time ago, but an internal voice compelled him not to, at the very last moment. Is it possible that this is what the ancient called hope? A sensation that something might be concluded even though the possibilities proved otherwise. He liked that feeling.
The shine of his wife's dream machine caught his attention. Sleeping wasn't necessary, but to live in fantasy worlds designed to entertain the mind proved to be essential to cope with space travels. The dream machine was a simulator of virtual reality. Its powerful computers kept whole worlds inside them, and it was possible to live other lives while it was not necessary to act in the real world. It's amazing how it was possible to come back to that existence where you had left it. If the ongoing story didn't please you, it was possible to restart at any point. Of course, it was possible to share these virtual worlds with other dreamers. Although the rules were more restrictive and the restauration points or the come back in time, required the approval of all the VIP dreamers. Recently he has been part of three distinctive dreams. One shared with his wife, another with his crew and a third of his own. The computer simulators learned how the dreamers thought. Even when they were not on virtual dreams, the machines made the decisions for them in certain predictable cases.
When the dreamer entered this world, these actions were incorporated in their memories. The shared dream with his wife was a medicine for the solitude in space. They lived on a farm happily with their four children. They have shared this dream for a decade and for this reason, at some moments he and his wife felt the same feeling, that the simulation was better than the real life.
With his crew, he normally would have battles and critical situations where the command was the key to triumphant success or total failure.