Going Interstellar Read Free

another human being.
    A memory was slowly returning.
    Hibernation. Sleeping during the journey and being awakened when their new home world was reached. Now he remembered.
    Peter Goss was on board the interstellar colony ship New Madrid bound for the Epsilon Eridani star system ten light years from Earth. As in his dream, he was a member of the initial survey team that was to awaken and scout the environment of their new home while the rest of the crew, and the fifteen thousand colonists, were being awakened.
    Goss slowly lifted himself to rest on his right elbow. The other people were gone. Part of the dream. Still, he shouldn’t be alone. He wasn’t supposed to be the first to wake up. The ship’s commander, first officer and two medical officers should already be up and about, supervising the awakening of the survey crews to begin their mission. Waking the colonists would come later.
    The ship was quiet. The only sound Goss heard was his own breathing and the sloshing of the liquigel in which he found himself. As he pulled his naked form out of the tank, he realized that the liquigel had probably formed the basis for his swamp during the hibernation. Slowly and with great care, Goss sat up and put his feet on the floor. Mindful that he had probably been in suspended animation for perhaps hundreds of years, he wasn’t sure that his muscles and bones would be strong enough to sustain his weight in the simulated fifty percent Earth gravity in which he found himself.
    He stood.
    To his great relief, he found that the electrostimulation of his muscles and bones had kept them healthy and fully functional throughout his long sleep. Just as the electrostimulation had kept his body functioning, the virtual reality generator had kept his mind from atrophying. His “adventure” on the water world with the tower had been just that. A machine-induced training session to keep his mind functioning through the centuries required to cross the vast interstellar distances between Earth and the intended colony’s destination.
    That means Julie and Charlie are not dead! Thank God. It was just a simulation. They were safely asleep onboard the New Madrid .
    As he struggled to get his bearings, the weight of nearly a thousand years of dreaming came crushing down upon him. In his chosen artificial realities, he selected a succession of planetary exploration missions—all created by the ship’s Artificial Intelligence to help train him for any eventuality he might encounter in the real world. Before awakening, he realized, he must have visited hundreds, if not thousands, of new worlds—all different, and all created by a computer simulation program.
    But this was real and it wasn’t as it was supposed to be. Where was Commander Vasquez? Where were the med techs? Anything could happen upon revival and it was not protocol for it to happen like this.
    He moved to the side of the room and opened his locker. Inside, and as perfectly preserved as he, were his clothes. Thanks to vacuum storage, they looked and felt as fresh as the day he took them off and put them there—so very long ago.
    How long have I been asleep? Where are we? He had more questions than answers.
    After cleaning off the gel and getting dressed, he ventured out of the sleep chamber and into the hallway that led to the ship’s control room. He thought that Vasquez must be there, supervising the orbital encounter with Epsilon Eridani Four, the destination world that the telescopes back on Earth had found to contain an atmosphere suitable for Earth-based life.
    During the latter half of the twenty-first century, more and more planets had been found orbiting other stars. Not only were they pinpointed and their masses estimated, but large telescopes optimized to look for certain chemical signatures determined that some of the newly found planets had atmospheres, and that at least two of the nearest worlds harbored atmospheres in which humans could live without wearing masks or