I wish I could bring you with me.

Purely for selfish reasons.

Whoever you are, I’d like you here.

I’m doing something I’ve only read about until now, and it’s terrifying.

I’m one of two Earthlings in an entire galaxy.

And it’s time to release another child of the Dancer.

This is the one we talked to personally. A sentient bacterial colony with its own little starship that looks like the cross between an almond and a housefly, if it was the size of a building. And it’s ready to leave the womb of the Sunspot shipyard.

Each Dancer is now fitted with a Tunnel Apparatus, so that it can continue to communicate with us and with its parent, who still rests in one of the larger shipyards. So they are extra eager to leave, not having to fear abandoning their family to relativity, and tend to shoot off into interstellar space with the exuberance of an apple seed squeezed between fingers.

Niʔa is excited and has invited me and Goreth out on a spacewalk to watch it go.

Our nanite exobodies are impervious to the vacuum and are easily magnetically locked within any number of meters of the hull. If something were to happen, it would be several hundred thousand kilometers before we were out of range of the Sunspot’s Network. And with the gentle acceleration of the Sunspot itself, it would take some time before that happened.

But we also have other safety mechanisms built in.

Niʔa knows our true range is measured in hundreds of thousands of parsecs, if we know where life is and recognize it.

You would think I’d be dissociating so much from this experience that I’d feel like I’m watching a movie or experiencing a dream, but I’m as present as ever.

The dumbass Network protocols of my Avatar and exobody continue simulating the experience of moving through and breathing air for me, just to keep me from panicking or something. It’s certainly not like actually hanging out naked in space, but it keeps me comfortable and alert. Like a spacesuit might, perhaps.

I can barely remember the process of jumping to the body as it extruded itself from the shipyard nozzle, nor the experience of drifting down and outward, out through the opening shipyard doors with Niʔa and Goreth.

I’m too overwhelmed by the galaxy around me, and the spectacle of the Sunspot itself.

The lensing effects of near luminal travel are not like in most movies. The most popular ones get it all wrong for the sake of exciting action, or a stately, placid sense of constant movement.

This galaxy, whatever and wherever it is, creates a milky ribbon around us, just like yours does. But in the middle of the direction that we are traveling along with the Sunspot, all the starlight is shifted visibly into the blue. And this is framed by the gargantuan blue corona of the Sunspot’s Bussard collector. And behind us, beyond the trail of plasma that propels the great Exodus Ship forward, they’re orangy red and very, very dim. Still visible, but dim.

There’s obvious lensing going on, due to our velocity, as well. Because, looking perpendicular to that line of travel, in a great ring around us, the stars have faded to near invisibility. Super thin streaks, the light that’s usually concentrated in a point elongated across tens of degrees of vision. We can still see them, of course, if we let our nanite senses extend beyond our simulated biological defaults. Or if we use our other senses.

I can pick any one of them out and get an intuitive sense of how quickly it is parallaxing relative to us, behind the stars that are nearer, and in front of those that are farther away. But the few stars that are near enough to move with a visibly perceptible velocity are come and gone in a blink, stretched from fore to aft before I can count them in any human sense of time. And those that are farther away than that move slower than an hour hand.

It maybe has to do with where in the galaxy we are, and what the local structures of matter are like.

We’ve had maybe thirty seconds or so of time to adjust, floating about a hundred meters from the shipyard hatch, which is still in the process of opening. But it’s open wide enough now, and the Dancer’s child, also called the Dancer, is preparing to leave.

Like I said, we’re locked to the hull of the habitat cylinder, so that ribbon of galaxy I described is rotating around us slowly, like the hand of the wrong kind of clock. Counterclockwise. It’s visible, but too slow to be a second hand, and far too fast for minutes. The four Bussard spires of the Sunspot move with it. Maybe a little faster, counter rotating to the cylinder.

Even from where we rest, those spires reach so far out into space their tips almost intersect my vision of my feet as they pass by, when I look down into the blackness. And really, we’re so close to the habitat cylinder, it’s like the surface of a moon that we’re about to plow into headfirst above us.

The interplay between centrifugal force and magnetic lock fools my psyche into overcompensating a little. And the spin of the stars doesn’t help. Sometimes I feel like I’m falling away, and sometimes I feel like I’m falling toward my new home, depending on which direction I’m looking. But, I know I’m held firmly in place.

The Dancer, when it starts moving, does so with far more confidence than I ever could in this environment.

This is where it is meant to live.

At first it just lets itself fall, released from its harnesses. It’s maybe a little more than one g of acceleration. It’s like as if someone was holding it and just let go. But the scales involved mean that it’s a building falling out of a city. It’s also a tiny bit like movies I’ve seen of a naval ship being let out of a dry dock into the waters of a bay.

But then it gets within a few meters of the still opening doors of the shipyard, and knows it can move with a precision that allows for its maximum acceleration, and that it can do so without harming the Sunspot.

And it’s gone.

It’s become one of the elongated stars alongside us. It’s traveled so fast, with an initial velocity so close to ours, that it doesn’t fall behind. And I can pick it out. I know exactly where it is. Niʔa doesn’t even have to point, but before too long my technological senses are no good and I must rely on my gifts from Phage to track it.

I like to imagine it shouted something like “Wahoo!” as it went.

Goreth is crying. I know their maternal drive has only been getting stronger. We’ll have to figure something out.

Before we return, I take a moment to try to reckon or sense where Sol and the Milky Way are in relation to us. But maybe they’re too far. Or maybe I need more of a clue before I can pick them out.

I wish our other selves could serve as a beacon of some sort. I wish we could constantly stay connected, and somehow could give you all a feed of this. But you get books.

But it’s been a long day of stretching our abilities and doing things we never even really dreamt of as children.

And the dent we made in the social trajectory of the Earth was infinitesimally small.

I honestly can’t convince myself that it might be better that way, even though when we first encountered all this stuff we told ourselves it would be.

We destroyed the only collection of Ktletaccete nanites found on the planet over a year ago now, and maybe we shouldn’t have.

Maybe that tiny, wet ball of rock and metal needs some real supervillains.

It’s always been too easy to think that, but the further away I am from it, the easier it is to do so. I lose perspective, and my personal bitterness sets in harder.

I know that back on Earth, through time reckoned by Tunnel travel, we should be checking out of our motel about now, the day after our visit with our family, and walking to the diner for a brunch of some sort before we catch the bus back home, where we’ll hug Abigail and Peter and watch cartoons while eating doctored freezer pizza. 

Through time reckoned by light, we have no idea. You could be in the Precambrian era for all we know.

But, here, for now, it’s time for bed.

And a couple of cuddle piles with our families near and far.