Let me tell you about a dream I had once.

The dream starts out as a memory. I am back in Guìzhōu, seven years younger. Fifty-seven, if you ask someone else. It is a cool autumn night up in the mountains, something that forty years ago you couldn’t get, same for the clear sky. Despite the cool air, every square inch of my skin has that sickly sheen of sweat that practically glows in the moonlight.

It’s not from exertion. The hill I’m walking up is a gentle slope, and I’m young and healthy. Rather, it’s the sweat you work up when you make the most important discovery in the history of humankind, and your heart is pounding in your ears as you double check the data, and then the workplace explodes into celebrations and congratulations when the results stay the same.

It was complete chance. I was simply running a routine test of the radio telescope, and part of that test had entailed pointing it at an insignificant red dwarf. I wasn’t expecting to detect a powerful signal that had been directed right at us, smack dab in the water hole frequency and easily reaching an 8 on the Rio scale. Not just powerful, but close, enough that whoever sent the signal knew about us, and could hold conversations within a human lifetime.

The only way it could’ve been more incontrovertible as proof of alien life was if a little green man had beamed down at that moment and given me a handshake.

I was already sweating buckets when I alerted the others working at the observatory, so you can imagine how I looked when the other observatories confirmed what I’d found. In the photos taken of that night, in the middle of the sea of smiles and teary eyes and red faces provided by my work unit, I manage an awkward smile. The kind you might make when you get the wrong order at the restaurant, but you don’t want to kick up a fuss.

The internet makes a meme of it later on, as they do. I wonder if the launch revives its popularity.

But I am not thinking about how people would react to my own reaction, as I desperately try to survive the party. All I am feeling is overwhelmed, crushed by what I’d just accomplished, and pressed in by the uproar.

I had gotten away from the immediate celebrations after an hour or so, and now I make my way up to the top of the small hill, sitting down and hugging my knees to my chest. It is a place I have visited many times in my three years with SETI, whenever I need peace. From there, you can get a good look at the five hundred meter wide aperture in the ground that is Tiānyǎn, fourth largest radio telescope in the solar system.

The peace won’t last, I know. In a few hours, when press arrives and the World Commune brings its attention on our accomplishment, I’ll have to return. I’ll have to endure the eyes of billions boring into me, unseen but felt all the same, and sit through question after question from people whose curiosity I can’t fault.

But until then, I will sit on the hill and enjoy the peace.

I like it there, sitting in grass that waves and sighs in the gentle breeze. It’s quiet, but that isn’t a rare quality these days, not after everything. What is really nice about it is how removed from the world it is. There, I can’t see the gradually shrinking sea walls of the cities, or hear the hustle and bustle of the nature reclamation projects in the countryside. The past and the future don’t exist- there is just me, the telescope, and the sky.

Eventually, my heart stops hammering against my ribs, and I feel like I can breathe again. I lay a hand on the dry grass, feeling it crunch beneath my palm. The ground is cool, but not so frigid as to banish the minuscule insects crawling and climbing between the leaves. A beetle crawls over the back of my hand, and I gently raise it to take a better look.

I watch it trudge across the treacherous valleys that are my palm lines, then say, “Guess you wouldn’t really care about this, huh? Who cares what a bunch of hairless apes found out today, after all. Someone being out there doesn’t change a thing for you, does it?”

The beetle doesn’t reply, being quite rude, and I lay it back on the grass so it can continue to forage. Sighing, I look back up.

I know it’s impossible, and yet I still try to look for Kapteyn’s Star that night, scanning the heavens with nothing but the squishy equipment my parents gave me. It’s only a magnitude nine star, after all, too dim for anything but good binoculars or a telescope. I know its position in the sky, but when I look all I see is empty space.

Not too far over is a star I can see, though calling it a star would be misleading. That, I remember, is the Parasol, being constructed in orbit. They haven’t put the sails in, not yet, but the actual habitat was still visible from where I was. In a few years, the press said, it would disembark for its long mission to explore Alpha Centauri.

Well, that flight never happens, and I’ll give you one guess why.

But neither the ship nor the star are really at the forefront of my mind this night, as I sit in the grass. At least, not directly. What really preoccupies my thoughts is simply, I feel like someone should be here with me.

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Why shouldn’t I be feeling that? I’ve seemingly hit the peak of my career in a way that will change the course of the human species, and instead of celebrating my accomplishment with someone, I am just sitting outside, looking at a star I can’t see.

Now, the utterly brilliant solution some of you would undoubtedly tell me would be to just go back to the party. But that isn’t what I want. I don’t want to be crushed in uncomfortable hugs by acquaintances, made to pose for photo after photo, or have to explain time and time again why I don’t drink. I just want someone to be there with me, if not to talk, then to just enjoy the silence with me.

At this point, you are probably thinking, “How is this a dream again? She’s just been talking about a memory.”

Well, to answer that question: in the memory, I just sit there in the grass for an hour, all alone, and then I go meet the press while fighting the urge to retreat and hide in a corner like a spooked animal. I answer a wide range of questions for three hours, stand for more photos while looking more and more like a waterlogged corpse, then get escorted home so I can collapse on my bed and fall asleep with my work clothes on.

In the dream, I am not alone.

I can’t see them. I don’t even know who they are, only that they are sitting with me, looking for Kapteyn’s Star right by my side. And for the first time in who knows how long, I am completely comfortable. No, not just comfortable. Content. Happy.

But all dreams had to end, even one as long as this, and eventually it all fades away. But I am still carrying that warm feeling with me, as I wake up a hundred trillion kilometers away from home.

-o-

I don’t know exactly the moment I came to, only that my first impression of interstellar travel was of biting cold.

No, not the biting cold you’re thinking of. I know we love to associate the dark depths of space with the cold, but in a spaceship with any form of power generation, the problem is actually getting rid of heat. Virtually none of the stories I read and watched growing up every actually bothered to show the massive radiators any true starship would need to keep the crew from cooking inside.

And neither was the feeling because of my half-century tenure as the frozen pork you forgot was still at the bottom of the freezer- as theatrical as it would be, you aren’t woken up immediately. There’s no opening your eyes while still in the dark tube, submerged in subzero antifreeze. No painful gasping as you clamber out of the slime, naked as the day you are born, just like how the movies would do it.

That’s not regulation-compliant in the slightest. Could you imagine if they let people just wake up alone after open heart surgery? It’d be a recipe for disaster.

If protocol went right, which it certainly did considering the professionals onboard, they hadn’t woken me up for a full day after taking me out of the chamber. That gave time for them to give me my blood back, fix any chemical imbalances, and make sure basic things like my heart and brain were back in working order.

Overall, waking up from fifty years of suspended animation was no different from waking up after a mild operation, even if I had beaten the record by about forty years. Going under had been more climactic, and even then I’d been put under general anesthesia before going into the pod.

No, the reason why the first thing I noticed was the cold was because I had been dressed in a threadbare medical gown, and the cool breeze from a ventilation port was going right up it.

That was enough to make my eyes flutter open, only to close them again. I hadn’t had to see jack in decades, and even a gentle light was asking too much of me. Making an incoherent moan like a deflating tire, however, was doable.

“Liú?” a voice asked, accent clipped. “Dr. Liú, can you hear me?”

My response was to croak.

A sigh reached my ears, and an unseen hand pulled my jaw down. There was the tell-tale puff of someone spraying from a bottle, and warm mist hit the back of my throat. My next breath was smoother, and I found I could move my tongue a little easier.

“Can you hear me, Dr. Liú?”

“I-” I licked my lips, which tasted like I’d been swimming in a chlorinated pool. “I hear you.”

Just trying to talk was difficult. Everything felt heavy, like someone had taken my blood out and replaced it with mercury. There wasn’t any pain, however- I was still on some potent anesthetics.

“Welcome back to the land of the living, doctor,” the voice said again, and now I recognized the owner as Amavasya, the Parasol’s chief biologist and physician, along with a slew of other minor roles.

“You too,” I said without thinking, then immediately wanted to go back into the freezer.

The good doctor simply chuckled. “Well, it looks like your sense of humor’s intact as well. Heart, nervous system, muscles… everything’s in working order, at least as far as the physical could tell. How are you feeling?”

“Sleepy,” I murmured.

“That would be the anesthetics I gave you. They’ll wear off in a few hours, and hopefully by then you’ll be ready to debrief. Do you need anything right now? Are you in discomfort?”

I considered asking her to do something about the ventilator freeze-drying my land down under, but for some reason my drug-addled mind decided that’d be rude and asking too much. So I just shook my head. Or maybe I vaguely made the effort to shake my head, considering how leaden it felt.

“Okay. I’ll be here until you’re ready. If you need anything, you can call for me, or squeeze the sensor in your hand.”

“Ēn,” I grunted.

I heard her feet gently pad down the grating to her workstation, followed by the patter of her typing. Slowly, I forced myself to open my eyes, and looked for the indistinct blur that was her.

“We made it?” I asked, barely better than a slur.

She looked up at me, and I could see that her black hair now had some gray in it.

“Oh, we made it,” she said, managing a smile.

“Nice.” I gave up even trying to raise my head, and just relaxed into the scratchy sheets. “We made it.”

Yeah, I’d made it. I was farther away from home than anyone had ever gone by nearly four orders of magnitude, shattering just about every other spaceflight record in the book. I and four others had made a jump arguably greater than the one Gagarin made when he first ventured into the void in a rickety capsule, two centuries prior.

That wasn’t even the biggest jump we’d make in this mission, if everything went as planned.

The mission could wait for the time being, however. Right then, all I could focus on was trying to close my legs to block the cool air from the ventilation port. With my tranquilized quasi-corpse of a body, that felt more daunting a task than whatever the aliens would have in store for me.