Sage’s alarm doesn’t chirp or play a gentle tune. Instead, the walls of his room illuminate slowly, simulating a sunrise within the confines of his suburban Pasadena home. At 61, his body no longer springs out of bed, but he doesn’t mind the few extra minutes he spends stretching out the aches. It’s 2064, and the marvels of modern medicine have kept him going—albeit with reminders of his youthful recklessness.
He navigates his home, where screens and devices respond to his presence, announcing air quality and traffic with chirps and holographic displays. Breakfast is a solitary affair with his wife Mia already immersed in a virtual classroom, her avatar teaching kids across the globe. Sage’s oatmeal materializes from a machine that prints food with nutritional precision, and he chews thoughtfully, his gaze fixed on a live feed from Mars—a planet he’s helped to explore, through the probes and robots he’s engineered and vicariously through his old friend Bri, the first person on the Martian surface.
Sage Waters' drive to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is as smooth as the surface of the road his self-driving car glides over. The vehicle is an autonomous pod, sleek and efficient, its electric hum a testament to the era's achievements. The cityscape of 2064 Los Angeles stretches around him, a mosaic of green rooftops and chrome structures. Above, drones buzz like bees in a high-tech hive, their paths weaving a complex dance of progress and innovation.
Inside the car, Sage is insulated from the noise. He flips through digital papers on his tablet, the screen’s soft glow illuminating his focused face. The articles are dense, filled with the latest theories on propulsion and the mathematics of space travel. Sage absorbs the information, his mind always hungry for knowledge, always reaching for the next puzzle to solve.
Arriving at JPL, Sage steps out into the buzz of scientific endeavor. His day is filled with the extraordinary masquerading as the mundane. He sits before screens displaying data from spacecraft that are mere specks in the vastness of space, their findings beamed back across the solar system to his workstation. He converses with AIs, their voices devoid of inflection but rich in information, discussing anomalies and patterns in the cosmic winds.
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Lunch is a brief respite, shared in the company of June and her robotic companions. The dogs, if one could still call them that, are marvels of technology, their synthetic fur indistinguishable from the real thing. Sage listens to June's stories of her latest project, her words painting pictures of a future where humans and machines are indistinguishable.
As evening blankets the city, Sage returns to a home that’s too quiet. Mia's presence is virtual, projected across states to eager students. Dinner is a solitary event. The food synthesizer churns out a meal that looks like chicken and tastes like nostalgia, but Sage knows it's all plant-based, tailored to his lifelong vegetarianism.
Later, in his workshop, Sage is a craftsman of dreams deferred. His hands, once agile and sure as they built models that could pierce the heavens, now move with a deliberation that comes with age. The model rocket takes shape under his skilled fingers, a homage to the boy who once dreamt of space.
The silence of the house is broken by a chime. A screen on the wall flickers to life, and the faces of his daughter's family beam into the room from their home across the country. Smiles spread across their faces as they catch sight of him.
"Grandpa!" the youngest, Lilly, squeals, her image pixelating with her excitement.
Sage's heart swells as he settles in front of the screen, the grease on his hands forgotten. They talk about school projects and backyard adventures, about life on a planet still brimming with mysteries. His son-in-law, an environmental engineer, discusses the latest in climate restoration, and Sage listens, his mind tracing the parallels between healing the earth and exploring the stars.
When the call ends, Sage sits back, the model rocket on the desk before him, the stars beyond his window. It’s another day in a long line of days, a blend of the exceptional and the everyday—a life lived in the pursuit of knowledge, surrounded by the love of family, and always, always under the watchful gaze of the cosmos.
Sitting on his back porch later, a glass of something that tastes suspiciously like whiskey beside him, he doesn’t have to look far to see the stars. They’re right there, a touchable canopy above his head, a reminder of the vastness he’s a part of. It’s a regular, uneventful day in the life of Sage Waters, but in the quiet, he finds a connection to the boy who once dreamt of flying among those stars.