At the Zulu dark hour, I arrive at the Mutsu Takeoff Facility in the shadow of Mount Kuwahatayama in the Aomori Prefecture. As the lifter touches down on the L.Z., the morass of the Complex looms in front of the kilometer-high Barrier Tower, its red and green navigation lights blinking slow and steady. The moonlight glistens on the freshly-fallen snow that covers the ground. All is cold in the dead of winter.
The experts call it “barrier shift,” which has something to do with Earth’s orbital position and the Coriolis force. To make a long story short, the Barrier Tower harnesses this barrier shift and, in short order, opens the Window through Owen Space to a star system light years away. Once the Window stabilizes, one can, theoretically, send an object through.
This is where I come in. I am the object. I’m the first modified human to make the trip through the Window.
My destination? Trappist-1f, an Earth-like planet a mere forty light years from good old Terra Firma.
I’ve trained for five years for this. Underwent the genetic MODS to make my body compatible with Trappist-1f’s atmosphere that, if you believe the probe data, is remarkably like Earth’s.
Now, I wait in the sterile chamber, nicknamed “The Womb,” for the countdown to commence. Side effects from Window passage will be a bummer, I might add. Mostly strange quantum distortions. The usual stuff when one screws with the fabric of space-time.
Outside the Womb’s transparent wall, the clouds are rippled in the early-morning sunlight that harkens back to the rippled space-time created by the Fold Wake from my TATA-8 starcraft on the last day of forever before I transjumped from the Kuiper Belt just after Barrier collapse when all hope was lost.
We humans were adrift, which brings me to the reason for my upcoming journey. You see, long ago as is the wont of humans, we assembled a group of people for a voyage to the stars. A journey of three centuries in the cold void of space to a nearby star system called Trappist-1. The people from long ago will be arriving at Trappist-1f soon, and I’m the emissary who will be there to great them.
Ironic, but so is human.
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