Space, the final frontier. At least, that's what I was always told. Always pushed towards becoming a pilot for the exploration program as a kid. I didn't like it very much, in fact I resisted the lessons and classes as much as I could, little did I know it wouldn't make a difference when I grew up. In 3918, our world began failing. Wars had pushed us to near extinction, with only a total population of twenty million humans left. The animals? Gone. Radiation from the increasing activity of the suns outbursts had fried them. Whatever was left, well, I couldn't even call them animals to be honest. Just moving husks of radiated flesh. Even as these hardships plagued our world, kids were still being kids. As time passed, and our population grew ever smaller, the government began the exploration program. They would choose healthy kids, and begin schooling about rocketry and biology, then move onto astrophysics, and finally galactic mapping. I guess I could be called one of the lucky ones. We were taken from our parents and put through rigorous training. At least they provided food and shelter from the wasteland above that was our planets surface. I wasn't spectacular to say the least, I guess average in our class. The only parts I ever enjoyed and aced, was biology. That lead me to taking a botany class, which I also aced with flying colors. As years passed in my schooling and I began making short trips into space with my team, seeing the earth from out there really brought what we were training for into perspective. Once we left for our final mission, we weren't going to come back. We were looking for a new planet with a hospitable climate to inhabit, and we had to leave everything we had behind but our team, our ship, and our suites. Once my "graduation" day neared, I was sent to the surface to help prepare our large ship for our journey, we had to have everything necessary to cultivate life on another planet, and we had to make sure our ships cryogenic chambers were working properly. A journey across the universe takes a lot more then our average lifetime. With cryogenic freezing though, you could be frozen in time for tens of thousands of years, and not age a day. It was impractical to think about it, the fact that if our mission failed, there would be no rescue. After all, we would be millions of light years away. Our ship could make "jumps" as we called it, several thousand light years gone by in a snap of a finger by bending the space time continuum. It took a lot of careful planning though, as the destination could not be exactly calculated. After another several days had gone by, and our ship was fully prepped for our "graduation", our team boarded the ship, sitting in the normal upright position and buckling themselves into their assigned seats. I sat in the back, as my navigation wasn't the greatest. The countdown began, and once the timer hit zero, we all felt the force of a thousand trains as we shot into the unknown. Once we were several million miles away from earth, our ship slowed slightly, the cryogenic process ready. Our commander prepared the jump's coordinations as we got into our pods, a small needle extending from the pod into the back of my neck, administering the anesthesia. Our commander finished preparing the jump, and got into his own pod, pressing the button to close our doors. My vision blurred as a timer appeared on the screen in my pod, ten thousand light years. I sighed, my eyes closing as the darkness overtook me.
