Imagine infinity. That is what I see every time I look out the window that isn’t glass, being as glass couldn’t support the constant stress the Aspiration is constantly bombarded with. I can see stars in the distance, just like they can from Earth, or so I’m told. Well, not quite I guess, they say it’s similar to the places on Earth that have little to no light pollution, like either pole as I’ve been shown, but there are a lot more stars out here, and these stars progressively change.

My name is Magellan Schaefer, and I was born on the Aspiration. I have read countless books, and I have had countless classes on planet Earth, but I am much more familiar with several foreign planets than I am with the planet my people hail from. It’s like this…

Imagine being at sea, but on a planet that is ninety five percent water. You never see land and you never know when you are going to see land again, but you know it’s out there. That is space. We find a planet, scan it, explore, maybe even make first introductions to new species, stay for a bit, and then we are off again, never knowing when the next time we are going to see another planet will be .

Thankfully, we have a form of zero-point energy that relies on magnetism, particle acceleration, hydropower, solar power, and certain compounds that can apparently react with dark matter and dark energy, but that is way more than I can even pretend to understand. I know the moisture in the ship gets constantly recycled, including our pee. I also know that waste is recycled for fertilizing purposes. There was a rumor that a ship tried to reconstitute fecal matter into food, but as far as I know, and severely hope, those rumors are false. Unfortunately, however, we get a vast majority of our nutrition either through pills or intravenously, though we do eat once a day, via hydroponically grown fruits and vegetables and cloned meat.

We aren’t colonists, we’re explorers, though we are allowed to have families, hence how I came into being. We have projections and estimations, but it can be deliriously horrifying to not know if you are just heading out into the blackness of space, never to touch land again. We can find evidence of planets in certain places, but often we can’t tell how hospitable, if at all, they will be to us. We have had close calls before, where we hadn’t seen a planet we could land on in so long, people legitimately started to go space crazy.

I was young at the time, so I didn’t know or care, and can barely remember, but when I hear the stories, I am thankful I remember so little.

Another terrifying aspect of this voyage is knowing the lives of so many people depend on the choices of essentially one person. I love and respect the captain though. He hasn’t killed us yet, like his father before him, who also hadn’t killed us. Not that it had to be parental lineage, Captain Weaver’s son just wanted the position more than anyone else, so he worked the hardest. 

We also have plenty of back-up captains, and the beta crew commander, Captain Hudson, and about seven first officers that have the potential to be captains should the need ever arise.

I could have even started training to become a first officer if I had wanted, but that has never really been my thing. I have taken all the required courses to be on the main deck though, but only in the navigation area. I have taken some classes in the actual flying of the ship, well as far as what does what and how to read the projections the machines display. Those were required courses, of course, as were general maintenance courses, general mechanical courses, programming courses, engineering courses (both basic and advanced), the normal school courses like biology, mathematics, and history, and, like my girlfriend Cassiopeia, botany and nutrition. They also had courses in alien languages, but I will discuss those later.

Cass studies how food from different planets might affect us, which I find to be a deeply fascinating job. I was actually enrolled in that specialty before I switched over to navigation. In fact, that was how I met Cass in the first place. She was way better than I was though, she seemed to completely understand how to read and interact with the mock-digestive system involving real working organs, nestled inside one of the fully anatomically correct androids with no thinking capability, but a complete, working body made of synthetic flesh. They even bled, defecated, and required sustenance. I think Cass knew the “synths” better even than the teacher. 

No, I decided to go down the path of navigation. Don’t get me wrong, figuring out how we interact with other planets and their resources is amazing and I am constantly intrigued or awed by what Cass tells me, like this one time, she told me about this fruit that literally became a parasite when it was eaten. It used the host to fertilize itself, changing from a plant to a living organism, which then gave birth to hundreds of little parasites that ate the host from the inside. The inhabitants of the planet had built up immunities, so they could eat the fruit just fine, but if we had tried it… excruciatingly painful death. That was pretty intense. Still, there is definitely something to be said about navigation.

Charting and cartography are cool fields, they require fun and complex problem solving. See, even though space is vast, there are all kinds of things to look for, like comets and debris, blackholes, solar flares, space storms, and there are even anomalies out there that we don’t understand anything about at all. Those are my favorite. Like this one time, we found a sentient space cloud that turned out to be the entire collective consciousness of a planet that had been destroyed, that had launched itself into space in a last-ditch effort to preserve itself. That was epic.

The best part of navigation, however, is being the first person to see the signs of a new planet on the horizon, then to finally see that new planet come into view, to be the first people, well Earthlings at least (though not a single one of us had ever been on Earth), to see that new planet that no one had ever encountered before, that is magical. That only happens every couple of years though, and it’s been two years since the last one we discovered, which was when I first started on the navigational team. I didn’t get to actually do anything then but watch, but I was present when the planet came into view. I was one of about twenty people, the first Earthlings to ever see Arturos, the remains of a once-civilized planet that seemed to have destroyed itself. 

It is also kind of cool to send transmissions back to Earth to report our progress and hear their ecstatic reports about our new discoveries. It is almost unreal when we get reports back from Earth, especially being that at this point Earth might as well be another planet, being that we will never be any closer to the planet than we are right now. We have stories, pictures, and video and audio representations of much of what they describe, and we can neurally-connect with ship archives so we can basically visit, but deep down, you always know, and besides, we visit what it was like before we left, and I am sure it has changed much since then.

Aside from Earth, there are three sentient, space-capable alien cultures that we are aware of. Their languages are courses we teach on the ship, well not the Gwanzulums, they are exceedingly hostile, but we have the option to learn the language of the Klevarians, a strong and resilient warrior race, and the Jalaloxians, basically a race of intelligent giant insects. We have treaties with both species, but like I’ve always been told, on Earth, they could never get everyone to follow the rules and agree, so space should be no different. We have engaged with Jalaloxian ships on several occasions and almost with a Klevarian ship one time, but half of these interactions occurred before I was even born. Truth be told, we simply do not run into much of anything out here.

That’s okay though, we get by. No one ever heard of an easy, safe adventure without any hardships. It wouldn’t be any adventure then. I am done with my duties for the day and am now allotted recreational time to do with as I please. Cass usually works a couple hours later than I do, so I usually have some free time to myself before we meet up. I decided to go to my bedroom, lay in my bed and stare out my window.

I sometimes wondered how space really looked from Earth. I have often seen a blue sky in pictures and simulations, and that was almost terrifying. I couldn’t imagine it for real. Or a sunrise, or sunset… All these things I have read about or learned about, or have seen variations of on other planets, but to actually take one step onto the soil of planet Earth, that would be my Heaven. I would love to catch a fish or build a snowman or ride a wave, and I can on occasion do some of these things on other planets, but even when we do find them, we never stay for more than a couple months, and still, they are not Earth.

Sometimes I wonder if I really am an Earthling, being as the last couple of my ancestors had never even stepped foot on the planet either. I wonder if we even look like Earthlings anymore, being as we are by far, the farthest ship out away from home. I imagine meeting another Earthling sometime, even if it was on a ship like ours, so far removed from Earth, but just to meet someone of my own species who didn’t grow up on this ship would be amazing.

That will never happen though. There is no return journey for us. Part of the time we spend at every planet we encounter involves learning how to use their resources to replenish our own and to repair our ship. Our technology is beyond impressive, and I don’t understand how much of it works, but the Aspiration was designed to be able to go thousands of years on her own accord. It will likely continue traveling through space for hundreds more years after I am gone, until one day, when it finally does give out, then it will just float around being a space graveyard from a couple thousand years probably, unless we get destroyed by some unforeseen means or all go crazy first. We’ll see what happens I guess, well, hopefully I won’t.

These are only some of the things I think about, in my quarters, gazing out into space and knowing that some of the stars I am looking at can be seen from Earth, while some are much too far for Earth to ever know. I think about those little twinkles I am looking at, wondering which ones Earth can see too, knowing how far away Earth is, and knowing that I could choose any star visible in my porthole, and chances are, not only I would die before the Aspiration could ever reach that star, if it were our destination, but also my grandchildren would probably be dead as well, and maybe even their grandchildren too.

Sometimes I dream about Earth, but even if we turned around right now and headed back, we wouldn’t return until long after my death. For all I know, one of those stars out there could be Earth’s sun, and I wouldn’t even know. Sometimes it hurts my head to think about how far away we are from anything, and sometimes it makes me queasy to think about how much of the black, empty void of space still lay before us. It might be, and probably will be, years before we reach another planet.

There is something kind of cozy about all of this though. It is like the Aspiration is her own little planet, just floating in space, like my room is a small but important part of a self-contained terrarium, an ant farm afloat in a vast ocean, hoping not to be destroyed. There is something empowering about simply existing, being an insignificant speck, but trudging on anyway, knowing home is an unimaginable distance away, not knowing what lies ahead, and knowing that whatever lies ahead is still years away, even as we rocket at mind-boggling speeds through the vast dark matter and dark energy oceans of space. Sometimes… almost never, but sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to be out there, not aboard the ship, less than a speck, lost forever in infinity the moment you are out of sight.

I try not to think about that though. Cass doesn’t like when I talk about it either. It is just hard to imagine being smaller than the smallest cell in the human body, like being nothing. In comparison, the Aspiration isn’t much bigger, but we don’t like to think about that either.

The End