Eight years. She would’ve been eight years old now, but she never made it out of the womb. Every anniversary of that day, that horrific moment when all time and purpose ceased, I celebrate. She lived, so I celebrate. I never met her. I never had the chance to hold her in my arms, and yet I still carry the remnants of her soul in mine.

The long sleep. Like a hallow dream, I’ll wake with nothing to show for it. Nothing but millions of miles between me and all that I once knew, or at least, what I thought I knew. Since the day Claire miscarried, the world has become a shell - the low drone of our existence resonating across the surface of an indifferent planet. My daughter fell victim to the slow collapse of our civilization, of our species.

I volunteered for this mission, but I’m not here to try and save what’s left of humanity. My reasons are more complex and far less noble than those of the orange suits boarding beside me. I said what I had to to be here. To be selected, standing on that bridge as the shuttle bay door opened. Now, as I sit on the edge of a smooth, white egg-shaped cocoon, I’m relieved. I am relieved that the constant frequency of violence, famine, war, and desperation will be drowned out. This coma, induced by a concoction of experimental drugs, will be my brief sanctuary.

My body sinks into the self-molding foam bed as I rest my head. They manufactured each of these pods specific to its user. Every care was taken to design the dimensions exactly to our measurements. Through years of relentless training to fit in this tomb, I had to maintain my weight down to the pound. Like the build specs of each milled and molded surface, we had tight tolerances to keep of our own. Through years of research and development, prototyping, and meticulous manufacturing, the ISP built these marvels of modern science. In conjunction with regular injections, these beds will maintain our nutrition and muscle mass. A thin-ringed device that rests atop my scalp will regularly send electrical pulses to my brain, keeping the neurons firing. No one has ever attempted this long of a blackout, or Life Sustaining Stasis Sleep, as we were instructed to call it in press interviews. Then again, no one has ever attempted to travel this far from Earth before. If the bed fails, a slow slide into the abyss wouldn’t be the worst way to go out, given everything happening below. But that won’t bring them back.

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To my right reads an inscription, the creed of this mission. But to me, they’re just words in a sequence with little bearing on the success or failure of this endeavor. They call us the New Navigators. And our vessel, the Trinidad. We stood upon the shoulders of giants, and yet the giants fell - toppled by the weight of our sins. We are not colonizers. We are not explorers. We are desperate travelers looking to the heavens for our salvation. Civilization was lost until what was once NASA picked up a frequency from the far reaches of our cosmic neighborhood. The message, sent in the universal atomic language, was the key to a sustained fusion reaction. Like a lighthouse battering our hull in a storm, they extended their saving hand. That was long ago now, and not even the promise of unlimited energy can save us from ourselves. We had no choice. This voyage will be the last gamble of our decaying species.

These were my final musings before going under. There was a certain inevitability about what would come next. Next. A concept of time I still have trouble wrapping my mind around. Are we here right now? Or someplace, some time else? The world changed, and yet I remained the same. A relic of a time long past. A man with no nation. I am neither salvation nor destruction. All I want is to free my wife and daughter from their fates, and they will show me how to break the bonds of time keeping them from this world.