Hope 91
Day 715
MY NAME IS Alex White. I am nine years old, and I live on a spaceship called Hope 91.
Gertie told me I have to start keeping a journal, so here goes, I guess. She’s mostly ok, but sometimes annoying. I told her she can’t tell me what to do because she’s a droid. But she tuts and laughs and makes me do the chores anyway. I hate it. But she’s all right.
Let’s see. I have to fill three whole pages, so I guess I should start typing. I’ve been on Hope 91 for almost two whole years now. But I just woke up a month ago. It’s very small. There’s just room enough for me, Gertie, Max, Philae, and the other droids but they don’t count because the rest of them only have one job, like the autopilot. I didn’t name him, because he doesn’t even talk. And Sally the chef. All she does is cook. But she doesn’t even have a head. Just a bunch of robot arms in the galley.
Gertie’s the nicest. Max is the funnest. And Philae is the weirdest. That’s good because otherwise I’d be REALLY bored.
You see, I used to live in Baltimore, but, well, mom died. I still miss her a lot, but Gertie’s been so nice to me. For a robot. Anyway, it’s good that I’m up here. They say that I’ll be one of the first people to live on Sephardia.
Who are they, you ask? They are everyone back on Earth. They are the ones who don’t get to live on Sephardia. And the funniest thing of all is, they are all DEAD. Ha ha, I know, that’s not funny. It’s not like they all died in a big volcano or something. They all died two hundred years ago. There’s new people living there now. People I’ll never know.
They explained it to me once. You see, I was asleep for two years. And while I was asleep they fired the engines so the ship could speed up REALLY fast. I had to be asleep or else it would hurt me, or something. And now I’m going so fast that I’m TIME TRAVELING!!!! THAT IS SO COOL!
Anyway, I should get to Sephardia in about sixteen more years. But I’ll have to sleep for two more whole years while we slow down. Eighteen years on a tiny spaceship. Yay. I can’t wait. Gertie also says that I’m too sarcastic.
Anyway, Gertie’s saying it’s time for cleanup, then dinner, then more lessons with Philae, then a game with Max, then bed. I guess brave space explorers still have to do their chores.
Until next time!
Day 730
Gertie kept telling me to write in this thing, but I kept putting it off. Now I don’t even know what to write about. I guess I’ll describe the ship. It’s called Hope 91. It’s not big. I remember living in Baltimore. We had this house that was so big, I had my own bathroom, and the kitchen was big enough for mom and me to both sit down in, and there was a living room, and room to walk around. And a yard I could play in.
Hope 91 is mostly a lot of ladders. It’s speeding up enough that I weigh half what I used to, but Gertie says that to grow right, I have to exercise a lot. I guess that’s why they put all the ladders in. It makes me climb all the time, and makes me really tired.
The bottom floor is the engine room. I’m not allowed to go in there. The second floor is storage. It’s where we keep all the food that I’ll eat for the next thirteen years. Well, it’s not food food. It’s more like “add water” food. It tastes ok, I guess. Sally the chef does a good job. Better than mom ever cooked. She was always working and never had time for me anyway. She was always working so hard on something, which she never even told me anything about. Maybe it’s best that she died and I left.
Now I feel horrible for typing that.
The third floor is where lots of machines are kept. Like the water recycler. And the air purifier. And all sorts of other stuff that Philae promised me he’d explain to me someday. He said that in a few years I’ll get to choose my profession. He says I need to become good at all the spaceship’s machines eventually, but that it would be best if I focused on one. I hope he doesn’t make me learn to be a toilet expert. That would suck. Literally. The toilet here is not like the one in our house. It really sucks the poo out of you. I don’t know why they just couldn’t give me a real toilet.
The fourth floor is the kitchen. Sally the Chef’s arms hang down from the ceiling and prepare all the food. But she doesn’t clean. Really, people? You can design a robot that cooks me dinner, but that can’t clean up after itself? I keep asking Gertie if she’ll clean for me, but she just laughs and says I need to learn to clean up after myself. She says I have to be prepared for marriage. That’s when I know she’s just making fun of me. There’s no one but me on this ship. And I won’t get to Sephardia until I’m twenty-five. That’s way too old to get married. Even if there are any girls there.
The fifth floor is my bedroom, and next to it is the game room where Max hangs out. He’s the fun robot. Always inventing games for me to play with him. Sometimes he makes me invent games too, which is really fun.
The sixth floor is the school room. It’s where Gertie and Philae both teach me my lessons. That is the most boring room ever. Every day. Four hours of Gertie. Four hours of Philae. Sometimes I wish the builders had packed me a gun.
The seventh floor is my favorite. It’s the observatory. It has the most windows on the whole ship. The roof has windows too, and there’s this loft I can climb up onto and lay on my back while I look up at the stars. It reminds me of laying in the back yard with mom in the summer, watching meteor showers. She always liked space stuff and astronomy, and we’d lay out there for hours. Sometimes she liked it so much that she’d even cry. I don’t know why.
You can’t see anything through the window but stars. There are no planets or nebula or anything more interesting. Just stars and more stars.
So that’s it, seven floors, three robots, an autopilot, Sally the Chef, and me. Alex White.
Wow, that was a lot. Goodbye!
Day 739
Gertie thinks she’s my mom. Or at least that’s probably how they programmed her. Sometimes she tries to hug me, but it’s a little creepy. I let her anyway, because I don’t have the words to tell her why it makes me uncomfortable, so I just let her do it. And she mentioned me getting married again today, which creeped me out. I asked her not to say that again, but all she did was smile and said something about Willow getting to meet me someday. Then she changed the subject really fast. I asked her who Willow was, and she said I must have heard her say something else, and then she made me go up to bed, an hour early! Ugh, I’m getting so sick of Gertie. Luckily, Max played a new game with me at bedtime. I think he sensed I was annoyed at Gertie. But now he’s gone and I still had ten minutes before the lights turned out, so here I am.
Day 741
Today I tried to trick Gertie into telling me who Willow was. I lied and told her that Max and I talked about her last night before bed, and that he told me all about her. I thought she was going to cave and finally tell me, but instead she climbed up into the game room and punched Max in the back of the head. I think it was all worth it just to watch the two of them go at it. I think Gertie damaged one of Max’s servomotors because his left eye has trouble blinking now.
Anyway, Gertie’s not talking. She just makes me do my chores and does my morning lessons like normal. Every time I asked about Willow she just ignored the question and kept right on teaching. Today was all on commas and periods and punctuation. Seriously. Am I really going to need punctuation as one of the first settlers on a new world? So unfair.
Day 1010
Wow, so it’s been awhile since I wrote. Like almost a year. I’m ten now, and the day after my birthday, all of the sudden Gertie starts blabbing about Willow! Like it was just part of her programming or something that she wasn’t supposed to talk about until after I’d turned ten or something. She’s a girl (duh!) who’s in another spaceship called Hope 92. Gertie said I could talk to her sometime this year, but that first I’d need to prepare. I asked her what I needed to prepare, and she kept on saying stupid things like, Oh, you need to be ready for her, or, all in good time, my sweet.
I begged her to let me talk to her, but nothing worked. All Gertie did was continue with the morning lessons. Today it was … I can’t even remember. All I could think about was Willow. I think Gertie does the morning lessons because that’s when I’m most awake and least likely to fall asleep. Philae’s lessons are in the afternoon. That’s when I’m already tired. But his are so interesting that I can’t fall asleep. For robots, they’re pretty smart.
Philae seemed pretty weird at first. He’s still a little weird. He gets so excited about whatever our lesson is for the day. Like today, he taught me about seeds and germination and planting strategies and stuff, and I got to put on the VR headset and he showed me how to do it. He doesn’t have to wear the headset since he’s a robot, but we were both there, digging in the dirt and watering the seeds. He fast forwarded the time, and I got to watch our crops grow up in less than a minute. Then I learned how to run a harvester and chop and process all the wheat and corn. The whole time he was bouncing up and down in the tractor’s seat next to me, telling me how combustion engines work, and just acting like Philae.
Then I asked him about Willow, and he said he wouldn’t talk about her yet. Then he started talking about how learning how to grow all this food would help me feed my kids. That was weird.
I asked Max if I could move my bed from my bedroom to the top of the loft in the observatory. I want to fall asleep watching the stars. Even though they just look like points of light and nothing else, well, it reminds me of mom. I miss her.
He said no. Stupid robot.
Day 1121
It’s been almost four months since Gertie first told me about Willow, and still, FOUR MONTHS LATER, she hasn’t let me talk to her. Why are they making me wait so long? I’ve been sitting on this spaceship for over three years, and it seems like all I do is wait. That’s the purpose of my life: wait. I’m waiting eighteen years just to get to my new home. And every day, all I can do is wait for the interesting lessons with Philae. Or wait for Sally the Chef to finish making dinner. Or wait through all my lessons to be able to play games with Max. And now, I have to wait months and months to finally talk to the only human I’ll have gotten to talk to in years. I hate my life sometimes.
I finally convinced Max and Philae that I should get to spend two nights a week sleeping up in the loft in the observatory. Since there’s three of us, we out-vote Gertie, who said that I couldn’t sleep outside my bedroom. She thinks I might roll around in my sleep and fall off the loft. But I won’t. I’m good with heights. I climb at least five hundred meters every day, since I go up and down those ladders over and over and over again.
Max calls the two nights I spend up there in the loft my slumber party. I asked him what that was, and he was surprised I’d never had a slumber party before when I was little. At least, I can’t remember if I did. Mom moved us around a lot after dad left when I was really young. I remember living in three separate houses before she finally died. She never even told me why dad left. She said he was in the military, but never said anything else. She seemed really sad about it.
Anyway, I finally told Philae that I’d decided on a calling. I guess I should explain that. I’m supposed to choose a profession and a calling. The profession is some special skill that I’ll learn and be an expert at that will be super useful to the colony when I get there. Farming. Building and programming computers. Being a doctor. That kind of stuff. But my calling is what calls to me. It’s what I’m interested in doing and learning about that doesn’t exactly help the colony, but is something that I want to learn about and be good at. For fun.
I chose astronomy. Well, actually I chose telescope building, but that’s so I can look through the windows in the observatory and actually see stuff instead of just stars.
I get to start building my first telescope tomorrow. I’m so excited. I have a secret about the real reason I’m building the telescope, but I won’t say it here because you-know-who is probably reading this.
Day 1128
I finished my first telescope. I spent a few days reading on the computer to learn how. There are lots of different kinds. I didn’t know that before I started, so I chose the simplest one. Something called a refractor. It’s just two lenses at different ends of a tube. After reading about what size lenses I needed and how far apart they need to be, I went to the printer and gave it the designs. A few minutes later I had the lenses and the tube, but then I realized I had no way to connect the lenses to the tube. So Philae gave me some hull sealant. That’s the stuff they’ll use if there’s ever a hole in the wall of the spaceship from a micro-meteor. That’s the biggest fear the robots have, is us hitting a tiny tiny piece of dust. Since we’re moving at close to the speed of light, it’ll hurt us bad. But there’s no way to see one coming. Luckily, the robots say that deep interstellar space is super empty, and that we shouldn’t have to really worry until we get close to the star system we’re heading for. And right before landing on Sephardia will be most dangerous part of all.
Anyway, I used the hull sealant and glued the lenses in the tube. I took it up to the observatory, rested it on the loft pointing out the side window, then laid down to look through it.
AND IT WAS FUZZY! I was so mad. All that time I spent studying and printing and glueing, and it was fuzzy. I think I glued the lenses in at the wrong spot, or maybe I made the tube too short or too long.
But I think I figured out a way around that. Tomorrow I’ll make a tube with two parts that slide against each other, so I can extend the tube or make it shorter. That way I won’t have to glue the lenses exactly in the right spot.
Gertie has me doing stuff she calls “etiquette lessons.” Basically, how to talk to girls. She’s so weird. Aren’t girls people? I used to talk to people all the time. Why can’t I just talk to Willow?
Day 1129
I built the new tube. It works perfectly. Well, almost perfectly. I can slide the two parts of the tube in and out, and put them in just the right spot so the image is not too fuzzy. The thing is, it’s still a little fuzzy, but I think it’s from another problem. I read more about lenses, and I think it’s something called astigmatism. That’s when the lenses are crooked.
Man, this astronomy business is hard. Maybe I’ll choose something else for my calling.
Hmm… . But if I change, I won’t be able to do my thing I have planned. Gertie—stop reading my journal!
Day 1209
Over two months ago, I built that first telescope. It sucked. Now I’ve got a pretty decent one. It’s still a refractor, but the lenses are a little bigger. The tube is not adjustable. That’s because I figured out how to print out some lens holders that will clamp onto the tube. And I even printed out a tripod, and a clamp to hold the telescope on and move it around.
The bad news is, my plan didn’t work. I tried to use it to find Hope 92. But I couldn’t find it. I spent every night for a whole month looking for it, out every window of the observatory. Looks like I’ll never get to talk to Willow, or see her or her spaceship. It’s so unfair. Just like when dad left. Just like mom dying. Just like being sent out in this stupid spaceship. I should have never said yes. Why did I say yes? I was only seven. They can’t just send seven-year-olds out into space, can they? Can they?
But now everyone back on Earth that sent me is dead, because for them, I left almost three hundred years ago. Life is so unfair.
I just want to talk to somebody. Gertie is annoying. Max is getting boring. Philae is the only interesting one, but I only get to talk to him for a few hours in the afternoon before he goes down to the engine room to take care of the ship. But he’s not human, he’s a droid. I mean, he has a human face, and he looks human. But it’s just not the same. Not the same, and not fair.
I just want to talk to somebody.
Day 1210
I woke up today, and Gertie surprised me at breakfast.
She said tomorrow I get to talk to Willow.
I’m in bed now, but I can’t sleep, so I’m writing in my journal. And I can’t even concentrate to do that, so I’m going to read about telescopes. Goodnight.
Day 1211
I talked to her! Willow is a real person. She is ten years old. Like me. It is day 1213 for her, so she’s been in space for two days longer than me.
I think that explains it. Since she launched two days before me, maybe it took us this long to catch up! That’s why Gertie didn’t let me talk to her, because we couldn’t. And that’s why I couldn’t see her spaceship in the telescope, because it was in front of us.
Anyway, I got to talk to her for twenty whole minutes. It was the most amazing thing. We talked about everything. We compared our ships. We compared our robots. She has a mom robot, a fun robot, and a teacher robot, just like me. Her kitchen robot is like mine, except Willow calls him Jeeves. That made me laugh.
We even had a few minutes where we didn’t say anything at all. But that was ok. It was just so nice to have someone real to talk to. So nice, that even that awkward silence was amazing. It was like I could hear her smile in the silence. I hope she could hear me smile.
I think I could get used to this.
I’m in bed already. I didn’t even have time to do telescope work today! How can I have time for telescopes when there’s a real person out here to talk to!
Day 1225
I’ve been talking to Willow for two weeks now. It’s like I’ve known her forever. We’re best friends, and we talk about everything. And I mean everything. We talk about our robots. We talk about what professions we think we’ll have. It’s still a few years before we need to decide, and I still have no idea what I want to do. Neither does she.
But she has chosen her calling. Willow is an artist. She says her mediums are colored pencil, watercolor, and electroglass. I thought it was funny she said mediums instead of saying, I like colored pencils. I laughed at her. But then she laughed at me for wanting to build a Cassegrain, so we’re even.
A Cassegrain is a type of telescope. It’s where light goes in one side, but instead of going through a lens, it hits a curved mirror at the other end. Then it bounces back and hits another smaller mirror at the first end. Then the light goes back to the second end and goes through a really small hole in the first mirror, where it comes out the tube and into a small lens in an eyepiece. I explained it all to Willow, and she’s really excited for me. It makes me happy to know she’s excited. It makes me want to see her art.
Day 1250
Gertie keeps on getting after me for talking to Willow so much, but I can’t help it. She and Philae tried to limit me to one hour per day, but me and Max outvoted them. Well, it’s a tie, but we made a new rule on the spaceship that ties go in favor of the way something is already done, and since I already talk to her about two hours a day, that’s how long I get to keep talking to her for. I love democracy. That’s what Philae has been teaching me about. Democracy, monarchies, oligarchies, republics, theocracies, autocracies, military juntas, banana republics, it seems like it’s one of Philae’s favorite subjects. Except that every subject seems like Philae’s favorite subject. Good old Philae. He asked me what system I thought we lived in on the ship, and I said Alexocracy, since I’m the only human onboard, I’m in charge. He did that snorting thing where his chest bounces while he laughs.
I asked Willow about her parents, about why they sent her up here to settle Sephardia without them. It was weird, Willow got all quiet and changed the subject. She’s never done that before. We talk about everything. We don’t keep secrets from each other. I’m worried I upset her, and then I realized what a stupid question it was, that maybe if I was sent up here because my mom was dead and my dad gone, maybe hers were dead too and I reminded her. Damn, I can be so stupid sometimes.
I just wrote damn. I think I can swear here. Who’s going to stop me?
Gertie, if you’re reading this, I swear I’ll figure out a way to deactivate you.
Day 1252
I did it. I’m not sure why I did it, but I did. I asked Willow if her parents were dead. She said of course they were, because they died three hundred years ago. I guess she has a point. Even if mom hadn’t have died before I left, she would have been dead anyway before I woke up from my two year nap. I asked her if they died before she left, and she told me to ask her again sometime, but not now. Ok, I guess. Whatever it is, seems like it’s too hard for her to talk about.
We had a pretty big scare today. Philae thinks we passed through a molecular cloud. Now, when I hear the word cloud, I think of big white clouds back on Earth. But he said this was different than that. He says that there’s hydrogen everywhere in the galaxy, like one atom per centimeter. And going so fast, we pass through a lot of it, but we have special equipment on the front of the ship that pushes it out of the way before we run into it. But this cloud was like a thousand times normal, so like a thousand atoms every centimeter.
Anyway, because we rammed through so much hydrogen, the outside walls started to heat up a lot, and the alarms went off. Gertie was scared that I got hit with too much radiation, but Philae thinks I’m fine. They’re going to test me tomorrow to make sure. But it was just a nice reminder that we’re in space, and space is dangerous. I sure hope we don’t hit anything bigger than an atom, because that was scary hearing the alarms like that.
Day 1500
I thought I’d finally write again since it’s a special day. Day 1500. I don’t know why that’s special, but round numbers seem special, so there. Willow thinks I’m a goon for saying stuff like that. If it were up to her, we’d celebrate day 1581, and when I ask why, she’d say, because One Five ate One! She’s funny like that, always playing with words. She talks about her art every day. I wish I could see it.
We’re both eleven now. I had my birthday a few weeks ago, and hers was a month before that. For her present I made her really simple plans for a telescope that will be really easy for her to put together. But she hasn’t even touched the plans yet. For my birthday, she said she painted me a picture. But since I can’t see it, she has to describe it to me. She explains pictures and things a lot better than me, I don’t think I could describe the picture like she could. When she describes it, it’s like I see it in my mind. She said it was a valley, with sunlight streaming through clouds. The light shines on a little house, and I’m in the front yard of a house digging in the dirt. I think she had me doing that because I chose my profession a few months ago. I decided I’m going to be a farmer. I used to love playing in the rocks and dirt in our backyard, and in all our VR simulations with Philae, I love the ones where we learn stuff about planting and harvesting and fertilizing and all that.
Day 1504
Willow woke me up today early. She was crying. She kept on saying she wished she had someone to just hold her, because she was really sad. Sadder than usual. Then she told me it was because today was her dad’s birthday. She said that when her parents dropped her off at the launch, they made her promise to remember them on their birthdays, and they’d remember her on her birthday. And then Willow said something weird about them only getting a few birthdays after that. When I kept asking why, all she did was cry, so I tried to say funny things to calm her down.
I felt so bad I couldn’t hug her and hold her and help her feel better. All I wanted was to make her not be sad anymore.
This is so unfair. Why did we get sent out here? Is starting a new colony halfway across the galaxy really so important that they need to make me waste my childhood locked on a spaceship? It seems so cruel.
Day 1505
Max had amazing news for me today. He likes to be the one to give me good news, and I even overhear the three droids fight over who gets to give me the news, whatever it is.
Instead of telling me, he took me up to the observatory, and pointed. I looked out the window, and didn’t see what he was pointing at. Just stars. Look closer, he said. So I followed his arm and finger, and saw that it was pointed at a spot really close to the shield at the front of the ship. I still didn’t see anything. Look closer, he said.
Then I understood what he was telling me to do. I grabbed my telescope and pointed it at the spot he was pointing to.
And there she was. Hope 92. Willow’s spaceship. We finally caught up with it.
You know, for a year now I’ve kinda worried that Willow wasn’t real. That it was too good to be true that there was actually someone else out here with me. I expected to wake up any morning and hear Philae tell me it was all a test to see if I would respond to a real human like I do to droids, or that Gertie would say that the whole thing was a dream.
But she’s real. I can see into her windows. I can see pictures hanging up on her walls. Every wall that I can see is covered with pictures that she’s drawn or painted. I even saw her. Not very well, because she never held still long enough for me to really see her. She never just stopped and stared out the window for me to get a good look.
But she’s beautiful.
I didn’t tell her what happened. I didn’t tell her that I could see her. Instead, I’m going to surprise her. Today when we talked, I begged her to finish the telescope. The plans I sent her are so easy. She should be able to build it. I finally got her to promise me she’d finish it. Even though she’s still really sad after her dad’s birthday yesterday.
Then I’ll have her point it at a certain spot in her window. And when she does, she’ll see what I taped to my window.
I drew a picture last night of me and her. I’m holding her. Giving her a hug. Maybe seeing that will help her feel better.
Day 1506
She still didn’t build it. Instead, she cried more. She must be really sad. I hope she gets over it, whatever it is.
Day 1507
Still no telescope. I made her triple promise me today that she’d do it.
Day 1508
Still no telescope. But she sounds better now. She didn’t cry once when we talked today, but she still didn’t sound happy.
I was thinking this morning. Why did her parents send her off in the spaceship without going with her? I mean, in my case, mom was dead, and I hadn’t seen dad for a few years. I didn’t have anybody there anyway, so it made sense to send me. Why her?
Day 1509
She built it! When she told me, I shouted over the radio, and whooped and hollered. I told her where to point it, and she did, and when she finally figured out how to focus and saw me through the window, she started yelling too. She sounded so happy. Then she saw the picture I drew, the one I taped to the window. And she got very quiet. I asked her if she was ok, and she said yes. She said she felt better than she’d felt since she left Earth. She said she felt loved.
That made me happy.
Day 2200
Happy birthday to me! I’m thirteen!
And, as a reward, Gertie started her lessons this morning talking about stuff a girl droid should never ever be telling a human boy like me. She called her lesson the birds and the bees.
Gertie, no. No, Gertie. Just … no.
I asked her if Philae could take over the lesson, and she said he was programmed to teach me the hard sciences and history and practical things like farming. It was her job to teach me about penises and vaginas and why I keep waking up with wet sheets. No, Gertie. Just stop.
Anyway, I’ve been practicing my drawing, so I can impress Willow. I’ve been practicing on her. I’ll stay up late drawing her face and her body. It’s not very good, but it’s a start.
I’ve started a big new telescope project. It’s called a Newtonian Reflector, and it’s going to be HUGE. All this time using the Cassegrain has been nice, but I can’t really see very much detail when I look at Willow’s ship. I can recognize her face, but it’s still really small. I can see her drawings, but I can’t really catch the finer details because the telescope is just too small. The Newtonian will have a seventy centimeter mirror. It’ll be so big around that I won’t even be able to wrap my arms around it. When it’s done, it’ll be like Willow is in the same room with me. It’ll be so awesome.
Day 2234
Willow said something strange today. It’s her dad’s birthday again, and she was sad just like last year and the year before.
But she said she wished her parents had died before she left Earth, just like my mom. She said she was a little jealous of me, because she had to live with the knowledge that her parents lived for a few years without her, while my mom was already dead.
I asked her what she was talking about. Why would her parents live for only a few years? She said it was a secret, that she wasn’t supposed to tell me. I asked her who was around to even tell her what to do anymore. I told her she didn’t have to do what the droids said. It seemed like I was close to convincing her, but then she closed up and stopped talking. It’s making me really mad that she feels like she can’t tell me some things. Not mad at her, really, but mad at the droids. How dare they keep important information from me? It sounds like something was going on on Earth before I got sent away. Something about the clues Willow keeps dropping. It’s like she’s convinced there’s not even anyone back on Earth anymore, that they’re all dead. I mean, of course everyone we ever knew was dead, but those people had kids, and those kids grew up and had kids, right?
I’m about to finish the Newtonian Reflector. It’s been harder than I thought. The printer can’t print a mirror that large, so I have to print it in sections, and then I have to join them perfectly, and it’s just a lot harder than I thought. But I’ll get there.
Day 2235
I beat up Max today. I felt awful about it. But I did it, and I’m glad I did. When all the droids were together this morning, I asked them about what Willow’s been talking about. Why her parents were alive while my mom was dead. Why we were launched into space. Why Willow keeps on talking like no one is left back on Earth.
They wouldn’t tell me. They all clammed up. It made me so mad. So I started yelling really loud and throwing things around. Philae tried to make some big intelligent-sounding speech about some things being better not knowing about them and Gertie tried to hug me and calm me down, but I cracked. I exploded. I decided I was going to force the truth out of them.
So I tackled Max and started pounding on his head with one of my telescope tools. Not hard enough to really hurt him, but I yelled at them that I’d start hitting hard enough to really do some damage. And that when I’d broken Max, I’d come after the rest of them. I don’t know what got into me. It just made me so mad thinking about my mom dead, but Willow’s mom and dad alive.
So they finally told me.
I … I can’t talk about it right now. Maybe tomorrow.
Day 2242
A week ago, they finally told me everything. Well not everything everything—they gave me access to a section of files in the computer that I didn’t have access to before. The ones that told about The Disruption. That’s what they called it. They even capitalized it, just like I did.
The Disruption.
A few years before I was born, astronomers discovered something called a brown dwarf. A really really small one. It’s basically a star that failed to ignite, so you can’t really see it from far away. But it’s way bigger than Jupiter. And they discovered it was flying really fast from above the plane of the solar system, and was supposed to come really close to Earth. It wouldn’t hit the Earth, but it would come about as close as the moon.
And because it was that big, and was going to come so close to Earth, they figured out that Earth was going to be ejected from the solar system. And within a few years the atmosphere would freeze. Most people would die when the brown dwarf flew by because of huge tides and shifting continental plates making volcanoes erupt and triggering earthquakes, and those that survived would eventually either freeze or suffocate or starve.
I felt like I was going to throw up.
I told Willow about it, and she said she knew the whole time, but her droids told her she was forbidden to tell me. That’s just crazy. Why keep that from me? Philae told me that they (meaning the people on Earth that sent me up here) thought that it would just distract me, that it would be better if I didn’t know so I could focus on my new life. But that’s just stupid.
So that’s why Willow’s been so sad every time it’s her mom or dad’s birthday. They didn’t live for very long after she launched.
And now I’m starting to wonder when my mom died. And why my dad left. I was only four, but I never remember them fighting. Not once.
This is so unfair.
Day 2250
The Newtonian is done. Of course, I’ve been telling Willow about it this whole time, telling her what it meant, that I could see every detail of her face, and I could really see and appreciate her drawings. She was excited too. I pointed it at Hope 92, and looked for her. She wasn’t there. But I saw her painting, the one with me in the valley and the sun streaming down through the clouds, lighting up the green and yellow grass and the blue hills behind, and me in the dirt, digging. And next to the painting, on just a plain piece of paper she’d taped to the window, was a message. One that I’d never have been able to read before the Newtonian. It said, look closer, and there was an arrow pointed at the old painting.
I looked closer. On the hill behind the house, really small, was a person. With a bunch of sheep or something. It was Willow. At the bottom of the painting, just above her name, she’d written, I love you.
I saw something else. On the wall, behind the pictures she’d taped to the window, was another painting. It was the exact same drawing I’d made of us a few years ago, the one where I was giving her a hug to help her feel better, only it was much, much better.
Then she
Day 2252
Sorry. I didn’t mean to cut off like that. But something happened. Something horrible.
Horrible.
I don’t know what I’m going to do.
The day we’ve been dreading came. I mean, it wasn’t as bad as the droids feared. The piece of dust didn’t directly strike the spaceship.
But it hit the antenna. A one-in-a-million shot. I mean, just hitting the spaceship would have been a one-in-a-million shot. This was one in a billion.
I can’t talk to Willow. I can’t talk to my best friend. My only friend.
I can’t talk to Willow.
We looked at each other through our telescopes. I waved at her. She waved at me. I pointed to my eye, then my heart, then at her. I saw her laugh. Then she did the same thing. All we can do is look at each other. She wrote me a little message that she taped to the window. It said, We’ll figure this out, don’t worry.
I hope she’s right.
Day 2601
I’m fourteen.
Mom didn’t die before I left. She lied to me. I guess she wanted me to feel like there was nothing left for me back there. I guess she wanted to make it easier on me. I mean, she was going to die anyway. She didn’t want to have to face me on that launchpad like Willow’s parents had to do. To say goodbye. Instead, she faked a disease and left.
I’ve thought about this for months. Can I forgive her? I don’t know if I can. She’s been dead for hundreds of years, just like everyone else back there. But for me, it was only seven years ago. I mean, that’s half my life. I just don’t know what to think about it, so I try not to think about it.
Dad didn’t leave. Well, I mean, he did leave. But they didn’t split up. And he might have even died before I left—the records are spotty. He worked for the defense department. In the decade before I left, Nasa and the defense department and every other government on Earth got together and tried to figure out how to stop The Disruption. Dad was in the marines, and he was also a tech guy. So he volunteered to go up in a big fleet of spaceships and try to land on the brown dwarf, and do something to push it far enough out of the path of Earth that maybe Earth would be spared.
It didn’t work, of course. I read a few of the news reports after they tried. You can’t land on a brown dwarf. It would be like trying to land on Jupiter. But they had to try anyway. And they failed.
Dad didn’t leave me. He didn’t abandon me. Not like mom.
Day 2602
Willow and I have worked out a pretty good system for talking. I can’t hear her, of course. But we made up a sign language. I look into the telescope while she signs to me, then we switch and I sign to her. Our vocabulary isn’t huge, but we learn two words a day. It’s mainly a language she makes up, because since I have the bigger telescope I can see stuff she writes down on paper and tapes to the window. She can’t see what I write. So she makes up a few signs, and writes the words next to the drawing of the signs, and tapes it up, then we practice it.
Her paintings have gotten really good. And she chose her profession. She’s going to be a doctor. She says she likes the idea of helping people feel better.
Day 2603
In two years, we’ll do the Big Turn. Philae is a little worried about it, and keeps checking and rechecking the original calculations they did seven years ago. The Big Turn is where we’ll shut the engines off for a few hours, turn the ship around, carefully point it in just the right direction—straight towards Earth, then turn the engines back on.
That way we can start slowing down so that by the time we get to Sephardia, we’ll be slow enough to enter orbit and land.
And this way I’ll still have gravity.
But Gertie worries and worries, and pesters Philae to recheck again to make sure everything goes just right. She’s been a nervous wreck ever since I beat the crap out of Max. I mean, Max is fine. He’s as happy as ever. We still play games every night before bed. I switched my bedroom up to the observatory—I sleep there every night now, just staring at the stars, watching Hope 92 through the Newtonian. I always go to bed later than Willow, so I just stare at her paintings.
Day 3302
Tomorrow is the Big Turn. Philae is confident we’ll do it perfectly. Most of the systems are automated, of course, but he’s agreed to let me help perform the actual maneuvers. We’ve been practicing in the VR, running through the steps over and over again.
Of course, if I do anything wrong, the autopilot will take over. But it’ll be fun to actually get to fly the ship, even if for only a few minutes.
Willow’s ship is doing the Big Turn at exactly the same time. She’s not flying her ship, just watching. She’s gotten really good with her art the past year. Like, she’s taken it to a whole new level. I look at pictures from artists back on Earth, and I can’t see that they’re any better.
She’s also a kick-ass … medical … person, ha ha. Not a doctor yet, of course, and she hates the word nurse. She fell off a ladder the other day and landed on one of her easels, and cut her arm open pretty bad. And she sewed it up herself, without help from her droids. Let me repeat myself. SHE SEWED HERSELF UP. That girl is bad-ass. And I love her.
Day 3303
The Big Turn happened today. I messed up. I can’t talk about it yet. I can’t believe what I did. It’s all over. It’s all over.
Fuck me, it’s all over.
Day 3310
I don’t leave the observatory. I can’t. All I can do is search the stars behind us for Hope 92. It’s back there, somewhere. During the Big Turn, I did something stupid. I accidentally pushed too hard on the accelerator, which means that for about an hour, without me knowing it, we decelerated much faster than Hope 92. By the time we figured it out, it was too late. For some reason we don’t understand, the autopilot didn’t kick in for me. I fear I accidentally shut it off.
Our nose is pointed towards Earth, our rear towards Sephardia, and somewhere back there is Willow, in the shadow of our own hull.
I’ve lost her.
I’ve directed the autopilot to decrease our deceleration so that we eventually catch up with her, but Philae says it could be a year before I see her again.
Day 3425
Still no sign of Hope 92 and Willow.
I’ve started studying physics with Philae in the mornings instead of time with Gertie. Things are a lot different here than they were a few years ago. After my episode with Max, I think the droids all decided it was time to let me have more autonomy. Since then, it’s basically been an Alexocracy. My word goes. So, last month, I decided Gertie’s lessons were out, and Philae’s physics lessons were in.
I just want to understand what my dad was up against as he tried to move that brown dwarf out of the way and stop The Disruption. I want to understand what my mom was trying to figure out—I learned she was a scientist too. She worked for Nasa in the decade before The Disruption, but I don’t know what she was working on.
And I just want to understand what went wrong with my part in the Big Turn, and maybe figure out how to reach out to Willow again. I don’t know how, or if it’s even possible. But I’ve got to try.
Day 3499
Why didn’t anyone ever tell me physics is hard? Seriously. This stuff is crazy. I’ve learned all about Newton, gravity, inverse square laws, Poynting vectors, flux and Green’s theorem, and the Schrodinger equation, and wave-particle duality, and all kinds of stuff that I had no idea ever existed.
Still nothing on the Willow front. I look every day down there towards Sephardia, but no ship, no Hope 92.
I’ve kept up my drawings. I’m trying to get her face just right. I don’t want to forget her.
Day 3700
I think I’m starting to forget her face. Some days I don’t think it’s possible, but others I have to go look at the pictures I’ve drawn to remind myself what she looks like. My secret fear is that I’ll lose her, just like I lost mom, just like I lost Earth.
It’s been over a year since the Big Turn, and still no sign of Hope 92. And now I’m seventeen. Seven years to go.
Physics is going great. I’m moving on to relativity soon. Just special relativity—Philae says that general relativity will be beyond my reach for a few years yet, so we’ll stick to the basics. I already got the gist of it—I mean, I am aboard a spaceship flying at relativistic speeds compared to Earth, you’d think I’d have picked a few things up.
Day 3755
Everything is a lie. Mom lied to me. The people on Earth lied to me. Dammit, even the droids have been lying to me. I can’t even trust Philae anymore.
I haven’t been seeing real stars. I don’t even know if I’ve been seeing Willow. Turns out, physics has consequences. I’ve been studying relativity with Philae, and combining it with my earlier studies of electromagnetism I figured out something pretty troubling.
We’re traveling at a pretty large fraction of the speed of light. Something like 99.999%. There’s this pesky little thing called redshift. If you’re traveling away from something, its light gets redder. Traveling towards something, the light gets bluer. But we’re moving so fast that the stars in the direction of Earth should be shifted far into at least microwaves, and the stars in front of us should be shifted well into the x-rays. All of them invisible. Instead, all I should see is a huge globe of light in front of us, the color depending on our exact speed. That globe would be the blue-shifted light from the microwave background of the universe. I should only be able to see the light from the universe’s birth. That’s all I should see. Nothing else.
These windows aren’t windows. They’re holographic projectors.
I’ve been looking through my telescope at a lie.
Please. Please let Willow not be a lie, too.
Day 3802
I finally confronted Philae about the holographic projectors. He said he was wondering when I’d figure it out. He said the people who designed the ship thought it would feel a lot better for me to be able to see stars. To see the outside of the ship. Otherwise, living for eighteen years closed up inside a box with no walls might make me go crazy.
Crazy or not, it was all a lie.
Philae swears Willow wasn’t a lie. But how do I trust a droid that’s already proven he has no problem lying whenever it suits him? Gertie tells me to trust them. Even Max got serious for the past few days and tried to convince me they were only doing what they’re doing to help me.
I don’t believe them.
Mom lied. Dad lied. The droids lied. Let me guess, is the Earth still there? Did they just send me away because they were tired of me? Or am I a guinea pig? To test out one of these spaceships, to make sure they work?
Day 3855
Philae convinced me to look through the telescope again. I don’t know why I agreed to, but I did. There it was, Hope 92, finally caught up with us. Or us caught up with her. All I can see is the top of their shield. No windows yet.
I just don’t know if I can believe them.
I mean, I see why they did it now. If all I had were actual windows, the x-rays would have fried me within a few days of leaving Earth. Behind the holographic projectors is a meter of lead and water shielding, with the water serving double duty as heat suppression. I’m literally in a lead box.
I think I liked my life better during the blissful lie. It was more beautiful, even if it wasn’t real.
Day 3856
I’ve forgiven Philae. The more I look at the holographic setup, the more I realize how necessary it was. It protected me from radiation. It saved my life, most likely. And really, the projector shows me what’s out there—it just takes the light that it sees, and converts it to a wavelength that my eyes can actually detect. Those stars are real. Hope 92 was real.
In a sense, it’s like the truth was too horrible, too painful to accept, so the holographic projectors had to lie to protect me. They needed to give my eyes a version of the truth that wouldn’t kill me.
It was all real.
It better have been real.
Willow better be real.
I hope she is. Hope is all I have at this point.
Day 3931
Yesterday was my birthday, and for my eighteenth birthday Gertie gave me The Letter. From mom. I’m still too numb to even talk about it.
And Hope 92’s windows are finally visible. But no sign of Willow. I can see her picture of the sunlit valley which is still taped up to the window, but she never appears next to it. There’s another piece of paper taped up, but the ship is still at too steep of an angle for me to be able to read it.
I’ll talk about The Letter tomorrow.
Day 3932
The Letter. I’ve read it about a billion times, just to be sure. Just to wrap my head around it. She goes into a lot of detail—lots of things I’d already figured out for myself. She talks about the brown dwarf, and how all of humanity mobilized against it, sending out mission after failed mission. She talks about preparations for The Disruption, and something she calls The Long Night. I guess, in addition to sending out a few thousand ships to Sephardia, each with a single person and a few droid companions, humanity also started up something called The Ground Initiative. The details were fuzzy, but they tried to dig a huge underground living space underneath North America, and another under France, and set up to keep the human civilization alive indefinitely underground. At least until technology would develop to get everyone off the planet, or steer the Earth back into orbit.
It failed.
But that wasn’t the important part of The Letter. The real reason for The Letter was to admit to me that she lied. She said she just couldn’t bear the thought of seeing me one last time on the launch pad, that she couldn’t bear the thought of sending me off into space with me knowing that she sent me away. She thought it would be easier for me if there was a clean break. If she was already dead.
And she apologized for it. She realized she was wrong, after seeing me blast off and accelerate away.
She sent The Letter just before The Disruption. It was received by our computer after I woke up from my hibernation, when I was ten. Knowing that she realized she made a mistake, and wanted to go back and change things, well, I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or worse.
Anyway, I can’t think about it anymore. All I can think about is Willow. I still can’t read what she wrote. Maybe in a few weeks it’ll come into view.
Day 3946
The note says: Very sick. Have space sickness. In hibernation. I love you.
I’m not sure what to think. Is she real? I want to think yes. I desperately want to think yes. But other times I think this is another lie that Philae has contrived, or a game that Max has invented, or some scheme by Gertie to keep me focused on something other than myself. If they can lie about everything else, why not invent a fake girlfriend for me? One I’ll never meet, one I’ll never touch. One I’ll never get to have sex with. One I’ll never really get to share my life with. Just a story to believe in. Something to get me to wake up in the morning and forge onward, thinking I’m not alone.
I have to believe I’m not alone. She really was there. We shared something. We shared our lives together. We grew up together.
I gave up on the idea of my mom a long time ago. And, years later, learning that she’d lied to me, I gave her up again.
But I can’t give up on Willow. Even if she is a lie.
Day 5000
I’m almost 21. I’ve built telescopes. I’ve piloted a spaceship faster than any human in history. I’ve lived my entire life as a single, solitary pioneer. I’m a physicist. I’ve learned it all, from general relativity, to quantum mechanics, and even finally figured out how our engines work, how they scoop up energy from the virtual particle background. I’ve even learned how to draw properly, though I’m still but a shadow of an artist compared to Willow.
I’ve come so far. And now I’m sick. Came down with the same space sickness that Willow did. I’m no doctor, I don’t really understand medicine and how the body works—that was my one area of academic deficiency. But something about the constant radiation combined with the lower gravity and the food I’m eating every day. I’m weak, shaky, have bad diarrhea every day, I’m lightheaded, I pass out a lot. The only solution is to go into hibernation early.
I’m still two years out from when I was supposed to enter hibernation for the Big Stop. That period of extreme deceleration is supposed to last two years. But I can’t live like this. Philae says that going into hibernation will cure me.
Before I go, I’m drawing one last piece. I know I’ll never, ever be even a thousandth as good as Willow, but I tried to get it right. I painted a picture of her, and me, holding each other. Just like that one stupid little stick figure drawing I drew all those years ago. But this time it’s a masterpiece. At least, for my skills it is. I’m taping it to the window. If she’s real, if she’s still alive, and if she ever wakes up, and if she survives the Big Stop, then maybe, just maybe, she’ll see it.
And remember me.
Day 6421
I’m awake.
More on this later. Damn, my head hurts.
Day 6422
Yesterday was awful. Today’s still bad—I have to dictate this instead of type. Gertie finally got me the right combo of pills, and now I can actually think. I can move without screaming. Still so tired. I kept asking Philae how much time passed. If we made it. If Willow made it. He wouldn’t say. He said it’s best to discover these things by ourselves. He said something strange—he said the most devastating lies are the ones we tell ourselves, but the most liberating truths are the ones we discover on our own.
Sleep now. Hopefully tomorrow I can get out of bed.
Day 6425
I spent three more days in bed, down with a high fever. Something about the space sickness lingered, and triggered an immune response. But I’m better now. Much better. I’m out of bed, but there’s no way I can climb that ladder. And no windows down here in the equipment room where they kept me near the hibernation chamber, so I hope I have strength to climb tomorrow.
Last Day.
6426
I climbed up the ladder. All the way to the seventh floor, to my observatory. When I looked out the window, I noticed something strange. The stars were there, just as it appeared they always were, but these looked different, somehow. And the observatory was lit with a strange glow. When I looked out the window, I saw the source of the light. It was so bright that it hurt my eyes—I saw a terrible black circle, an afterimage, for ten minutes afterward.
That meant one thing, and only one thing.
The holographic projectors were off. I noticed the edges of the window—the lead shielding had been folded away. I was really looking out the window. At real stars. At a real sun. When I pointed my Newtonian at a particularly bright star, it wasn’t a star.
It was a planet. Finally, after all those years of studying astronomy, building telescopes, trying to find things to point my refractor at, and then my Cassegrain, and then my Newtonian, finally I found something different.
But I’d always had something worth looking at.
I turned my scope down, to where she was. To Hope 92. And there it was—it was so close, closer than it ever had been before, so close that I almost didn’t need my Newtonian to look at it.
But I looked anyway. There was the picture of the valley glowing in the late afternoon sun. Behind it, taped to the wall, was the old stick figure picture I’d drawn. The one that made Willow feel loved. And near that was her refractor, assembled from the plans I’d made her.
She wasn’t there.
But taped next to the valley painting, written in beautiful script, was a note.
Alex. I’ve been waiting for you for so long.
I’m real, I’m alive. And I love you.
You’ll be a farmer. I’ll be a doctor.
You’ll be an astronomer. I’ll be a painter.
You’ll be glad to see me again. And I’ve waited so long to see you.
Welcome home.