The star ahead of us is too faint for the eyes I was born with.
I can see it anyway. It hangs beyond the forward shield, a small red ember among the sharper lights, and I know its position with the same unspoken certainty with which I know the position of my left hand. About three hundred and twenty-five light-years from the house where I once worried about the mortgage, an ocean may be moving beneath an unfamiliar sky.
The world we are travelling to, beyond TOI-1749’s three close-in planets, still has only its survey designation. Our children will probably call it something else. They tend to rename anything they can climb on.
The bridge is quiet. Along the far wall, a curve of pale wood runs beneath the observation window. The wood is real, grown in a nursery outside Oslo, and someone has left a cup on it. A tiny bead of coffee clings to the rim. Beside the cup stands my wife, Nora, her hand lifted towards the glass. Her thick blonde hair falls in long waves behind her shoulder. One loose strand rests against her cheek.
I find myself looking at that strand instead of the star. I have let my thoughts rise to three hundred times their unenhanced pace. Her hand seems almost motionless.
Behind us, along the ship’s long protected spine, one hundred and nineteen other people are preparing for the passage. With Nora and me, that makes one hundred and twenty-one. Most have come with family, hoping to make a home. Morrow, the ship’s AI, was first activated when the vessel became operational. It answers what we ask, attends to what needs doing, and falls silent when the work is finished. For now, it refers to itself simply as the ship. We use its name.
It is 2112. My name is Elias Lind, and I am the captain of Open Hand. I was born in Norway in 1972. At twelve I rewound cassettes with a pencil; at one hundred and forty I can watch a distant star with senses that have no counterpart in the body I grew up in.
This body looks about twenty-seven. I kept my old nose, my uneven smile and a small scar on my hand. The scar contains no damaged tissue now. It is maintained because I want it there.
For years I was a psychiatrist. I prescribed medicines, listened, argued, stayed late, and sometimes stood in the kitchen without speaking because I was too tired to talk. Now I am warm, alert and glad to be beside Nora, with nothing ahead that I have done before.
Nora is looking at the star. We have not spoken since entering the bridge. Around us, the ship's engines, living materials, optical processors and mechanical systems are keeping us alive. My neural interface brings me their reports. I can feel the forward shield’s temperature as a distant coolness that has no location on my skin.
When I was young, this would have been called becoming a machine. It does not feel like that. It feels like discovering that the room has another window.
I came partly for the adventure. As a boy I read about voyages like this, and I am still a little embarrassed by how much it means to be on one. There are easier adventures now. I can spend an afternoon in a simulated city hanging inside a waterfall, speak with people who never existed, and return with the full bodily memory of rain.
Here, we will have to deal with whatever we find.
There may be life there. There may be only chemistry, weather, stone, and a long history without witnesses. Either possibility is enough to bring us. We have brought the means to build homes, laboratories, gardens, and further ships. The instruments will reach the coast before we do.
I open the programme's navigation map in my mind. It shows successive settlements launching their own expeditions, spreading across the galaxy over two hundred thousand years. That is the estimate, if the mission's assumptions hold. Some of us will travel on; others will stay and build homes.
I could experience most of that expansion in a hundred or two hundred personal years. I could also spend the next century learning one coastline. The choice remains mine.
My hand rests on the rail. The texture beneath my fingers resembles the polished edge of an old hospital desk. I had not requested it. I wonder whether Nora chose it for that reason.
It brings back a patient who used to sit across that desk and ask whether he was going to be like this forever.
On the morning I remember, he asked again. He wanted to wake up and get dressed without first having to face his disappointment at being alive.
The radiator clicked behind him. I was tired and ashamed of how much effort it took to listen. We had helped him before, but the improvements rarely lasted once he went home. That morning I had another treatment to offer, based on a much better understanding of what was making him ill.
The new AI systems had shown us how many different conditions we had been calling depression. Similar symptoms could arise from different failures, while illnesses we had treated separately sometimes had a common cause.
The first models were incomplete, and their apparent precision could mislead us. What changed was how quickly we could test and correct them. Experiments that had occupied a laboratory for months became steps in a continuing sequence. Sometimes I arrived in the morning to find the treatment I had spent the evening studying already revised.
People later placed the beginning of the First Singularity around 2035.
We had just come through the war of 2032 to 2034: a struggle over resources and the future of AI, fought largely through networks and disrupted supplies, with military skirmishes between the great Eastern and Western blocs. Cooperation followed. The sides brought their AIs together, and in 2035 the problem of keeping powerful AI aligned with human purposes was solved. Agreement about what humans should want remained our work.
Daily life took a while to catch up. Someone at the hospital circulated a document about appropriate use of shared refrigerators. Meanwhile, treatments were becoming available faster than we could revise the protocols for using them.
It was the year I turned sixty-three. I had begun thinking about which parts of my work I could bear to leave behind. I expected retirement to be an adjustment I would have to make. I had not expected the profession to leave first.
Between 2035 and 2045, medicine became almost unrecognisable. Some changes were replacements: a better drug, a better procedure, a diagnostic error that no longer occurred. Others removed the reason for the procedure. A failing organ could be repaired before its owner felt ill. A malignant clone could be recognised while its entire population would still have fitted beneath a fingernail.
In psychiatry, our patients began to receive explanations of their own conditions that went well beyond what we had learned in training. I had to study alongside them.
The man beside the radiator received a temporary interface first. His memories stayed intact, including the terrible ones. The treatment changed the activity that kept returning him to the same hopeless conclusions. Gradually, he could take in things he had been unable to notice or believe.
For several minutes he sat looking at the floor.
Then he asked whether the window opened.
That was all. He wanted some air.
Outside, somebody was cutting the grass. He stood beside the open window with his shoulders slightly raised, as though expecting the familiar weight to return. We waited together. The smell of cut grass reached us over the usual disinfectant.
Eventually he said, “I think I could make dinner.”
My final clinical year was 2045. There was no grand closure. We reduced the beds, changed their purpose, then removed the locks. The remaining work was increasingly about recovery, relationships, and what a person wanted after illness stopped organising the day. Those questions needed other people. They did not need me to hold the prescription pad.
I told myself that this was what we had always wanted.
Then I went home and became unpleasant about a dishwasher.
Nora listened while I explained what it meant to lose a profession. I had quite a lot to say. Eventually she put down the tea towel.
“I know you miss the work. But I’d like to get this finished.” She held out a wet plate. “Will you dry?”
I took it. We worked for a while.
“They don’t need me,” I said.
“I know.”
I had been hoping she would tell me I was wrong.
For months, an empty afternoon made me feel I had neglected something. I checked messages that did not need checking. Sometimes I imagined a failure in the new systems that would require me to go back. I disliked how much I wanted that call.
There were still safeguards to study, failures to investigate, and people choosing older forms of care. Medicine had not become forbidden. It had become a much smaller part of how we kept one another well. I had been needed because so many people were suffering. I could miss the work without wishing the need back into existence.
I met the man from the ward again at a public garden. He was carrying two bags of vegetables and arguing cheerfully with a companion about a particular tomato. He recognised me, stopped, and asked what I was doing now.
I nearly told him about the work we had finished at the hospital. He had asked what I was doing now.
“I’m, um, not entirely sure yet.”
He smiled.
“Good,” he said. “You’ve got time.”
I didn't know what to do with all that time yet.
That evening I enrolled in a course on cellular engineering. My first submission came back with a detailed correction from a system that had not existed when I qualified. I made tea, opened the correction, and discovered that I could enjoy being a beginner when nobody’s life depended on my getting it right.
Morrow sends a message through my interface: our chambers are ready.
I turn my attention back to the bridge. Nora's fingers have reached the glass. She is beginning to turn towards me.
I check how long it has been.
Elapsed ship time: 1.4 seconds.
Less than a second and a half. Nearly seven minutes for me.
The bead of coffee has left a thin brown line below the rim. The loose strand beside Nora's cheek has shifted.
I slow my thoughts to one-to-one: one second experienced for each second aboard the ship. I hear the ship's low hum again and feel air moving over my skin. Nora finishes turning towards me, tilting her round face up to mine. One corner of her mouth lifts, and her blue eyes meet mine.
“Ready?” she asks.
“Nearly.”
Her hand finds mine. We stand together for another minute, watching the star.
“I've changed something in the first habitat,” she says.
She sends me her revision, and I picture both versions together. The original plan has the families in separate residential volumes around the working centre. Hers brings their doors closer together. A broad space between them has no assigned function.
“You've moved the stores.”
“A little. I'd like to grow things there, sit with people. See who comes through.”
I follow the longer service route. There is a clean way to shorten it through the space she has left, and I am about to show her when she touches my arm.
She releases my hand to pick up the cup. Her thumb meets the wet trace below the rim.
“Could you look at the rooms first? Imagine coming home.”
“I will.”
She carries the cup to the door. I follow, keeping both plans in memory.