It is impossible to reach the stars in a human lifetime, they are too far away. The speed of light remains a hard limit, but our ships do not come close. Our probes can perhaps manage a fifth of it, but our massive colony ships can barely achieve a tenth. At that speed, it would take four decades to even reach Alpha Centauri, but our destination was Tau Ceti d, meaning a journey of a hundred and twenty years. You cannot live that long.
Fortunately, you don't have to. You can sleep the cold sleep instead. Some say they dreamed while in stasis, but I remember nothing between going under in high Earth orbit and surfacing above our new world. A hundred and twenty years, gone in an instant.
All the same, I looked down on our new home and rejoiced.
Tau Ceti d is surprisingly Earth-like. All the basic planetary parameters, distance from sun, length of day, gravity, atmospheric composition, you name it, are amenable to human life. The archipelago where we landed could have come from a beach holiday dream. The ocean was beautiful and its waves lapped onto beaches of fine golden sand. A bit further inland there were plains and forests of green vegetation, although close inspection revealed the plants not to be so similar to Earth's. It would have made the perfect postcard. Of course, it has all been developed by now. The weather still tends towards the excellent.
We did not act like we were on holiday though. Too much work needed to be done. Even during rest periods we were careful. We were on an alien world, no matter how amicable it appeared. As inviting as the ocean seemed, almost no one went swimming, fearing what creatures might call the depths their home. On land, wolf beetles were a worry, but at least you could see them approach. And our scouts reported patches of a strange miasma where the aliens thrived, but which sickened humans exposed to it and seeped into all but the best exosuits.
It would be disrespectful towards the first colonists to say that establishing ourselves was easy. But as difficult as some circumstances were, we had studied surviving in harsh environments. Nothing here was as bad as the worst Earth still had to offer thanks to our Great Mistake. We were well prepared for the challenges. With the necessities of survival taken care of, we were soon able to set our sights on loftier goals of culture, science and happiness.
The first major such project was a memorial to our homeworld. We built a place worthy to display our relics of Earth, something between a shrine and a museum. I know the place well. Unlike most of our colony, its basic appearance has barely changed over the centuries. It actually fits in better now than when it was built. Its architecture calls upon some of the classical styles of our old country, hinting at another fact. Nationalism remains, even light years away from the nations that sponsored the seeding expeditions. In our case I should call it patriotism instead.
Why am I making special mention of this museum? I'm an exhibit there most of the time, albeit not in a part accessible to the general public. For security reasons, not because I'm uncomfortable being gawked at. Only the conscious care.
The suggestion was made at the grand opening of the memorial. Stasis can do more than bridge the distances between the stars. I would be their eternal leader, like Arthur and his fellow kings in mountains, not dead, merely sleeping. I would be their anchor to the past and in return, they would take me to see the distant future. It wasn't my idea, but I assented to it.
The plan meant giving up on the present. Sleep is the metaphor of choice for stasis, but it isn't quite right. It isn't a simple pause switch either. As much as it allows an escape from time, entering and leaving stasis is a serious strain. You can't just wake up for one day a week or even once a month to keep up with current events. Stasis can only be used effectively if you are willing to submit to it for years at a time, unaware of what transpires in the universe around you. Someone could switch your pod off and you would die without ever knowing.
I assented to it. I do not dream while in stasis, but it offers the dream of immortality.
The first stint lasted just over a decade before I was woken by white-suited technicians. I was to inaugurate a new base. I had not known one was being built, but that didn't matter. My role was ceremonial. I showed the required gravitas and brought in just the right amount of levity. My speech was met with applause. Old friends of mine were present and they told me about what had been happening. What discoveries we made, what we built, who had given birth and who died. It was all very pleasant. Then it was done and I went back into stasis, to be woken the next time my colony had need of me.
And it did need me. The second time I was woken I was to comfort and console after a Siege Worm had torn its way through our installations, leaving devastation in its wake. The land was scarred by its tunnels, which were large enough to drive a rover through. It had decimated the platoon of soldiers sent out to stop it. Even the colony's heavy artillery was barely able to scratch it. Mercifully, the worm turned away, continuing to churn its tunnels beyond our borders. If it had attacked our cities... Whether our artillery deterred it or it followed its path for its own unfathomable reasons remains a mystery. It was a stark reminder that this wasn't Earth.
After that I'm not quite so sure of the chronology. It was the last time I saw anyone whom I had walked with back on Earth. But that was the obvious price of being a fugitive from time. The exact sequence of events isn't that important anyway.
I was eventually asked to stand next to the vast corpse of the Siege Worm and praise the courage of our troops. Their courage and their vastly superior armour and weaponry. But it was the worm that interested me, not the soldiers. I walked around the part of the creature that was above ground when it finally died. I ran my fingers across its spiral segments, touched its wounds where our projectiles had seared flesh and embedded themselves into muscle. It must have been an ancient creature, likely centuries old before we even made planetfall, but it had needed none of my tricks for its longevity. It would no longer ravage our lands, but it wouldn't have anyway. We had sonic fences to protect our core territory by then. A part of its carapace is displayed in my museum now. We are very proud to have killed it. I am sorry that we did.
We founded more bases and I gave more speeches. I baptised ships and the occasional baby. In later periods I sometimes talked to historians and other curious people after the main events were over.
Most importantly, I posed with the political elite of the day. The faces changed while I lay in stasis. The names stayed similar. Our seeding mission carried a little over ten thousand people, so there were only a small number of surnames in the first place and prominent families established themselves quickly. Their descendants and descendants' descendants still dominate the political scene of our colony.
Something not asked of me is decision making. Since my bid for immortality, I was only once in a position to make a choice that would truly affect the future of our colony. And what a choice it was! I hated having to make that judgement, although I didn't say that. I was asked because the policy makers were unable to reach a decision on their own and wanted me to break the stalemate. Or possibly shoulder the blame if things went wrong. At least the meeting was behind closed doors.
They wanted my input regarding what philosophy the colony should primarily follow, how our segment of humanity should define itself. There are excellent arguments for and against all three of the suggestions and other colonies have followed those paths. I was promised that all would have significant military applications, because that seemed to be the main value of philosophy. For me only one was genuinely appealing.
Trying to live in harmony with our new homeworld is a good idea. Achieve an understanding of the indigenous lifeforms. Appreciate them and realise that they are the true owners of this world, while we are but guests. Adapt. Live in the present. But I don't live in the present. As much as I may complain about my current existence, being brought out of stasis and asked to live and die in a world that was not only alien from the start, but among people who became alien while I slept... That is a terrifying prospect.
As I want to avoid dying, putting technology above all else seems like the most promising path. The dream of Supremacy is to merge our bodies with machines, overcome our weaknesses with cybernetics and steel, and finally escape death by uploading our consciousness into machines. The Singularity or, as critics put it, the Rapture of the Nerds. Something they also said about the seeding missions actually, but never mind. I could be immortal while experiencing it, assuming such a thing was not just wishful thinking.
Would the powers of the day want me to though? If King Arthur returned, how would he really be welcomed? He might be heralded as a saviour by the masses, but he would not truly understand the strange future he'd been thrust into. And the temporal powers would not welcome a competitor. I was a useful propaganda piece, but a potentially dangerous one if they gave me real power. Like I said, since I entered this agreement, I have only been asked to make a choice of real consequence once. I would probably suffer a fatal mishap during the neural upload. The technicians responsible would no doubt be harshly punished.
Perhaps this was a little paranoid, but if I want to be immortal I cannot take risks.
I favoured Purity. One of the criticisms of it is that it clings to an imaginary glorious past. That was why I loved it. That vision would always have a place for me.
Selfish? Yes. But disconnected from time, who but myself can I relate to? It must have been considered an acceptable answer as I was woken again for other duties. As far as I can tell, they heeded my advice, but I am glad that I have not been asked again. It is ultimately unfair that I should make decisions for the entire colony when I am not really living in it.
I was also woken when other expeditions arrived. As Earth-like as our planet is, that so many groups sponsored a colony here surprised me. Given the vastness of the universe, I would have expected humanity to spread out more. Perhaps the distances to other interesting worlds are just too great. The colonists probably wouldn't want to sleep for millennia when they could arrive in just over a century. More importantly, the sponsors themselves probably wanted news of their project while they could still hope for their heirs to be in power, or at least before their descendants had forgotten all about it. Regardless of their exact reasoning for choosing this planet, it was my duty to greet them and I did so gladly.
That tended to be the last of them, unless I was to convince our people that war was necessary. Then I would lambaste the other expeditions, denounce their inhuman ways, tell everyone how they were maliciously interfering with our interests, depriving us of our birthright. Fortunately I no longer wrote my own speeches and just performed what was given to me. I wouldn't have known what to say. And, despite all my fiery rhetoric, it was rarely more than a handful of awakenings before I was brought out to stand and smile while the peace treaty was signed. I'm grateful for that. I do not want war. These people are strangers to me. I bear them no ill will.
But there is one exception. That a seeding sponsored by the Kavithan Protectorate should choose this planet would not have upset me. Their beliefs are not mine and I dislike their mysticism, but I am an ambassador, not a theologian. Their religion need not have concerned me. All I'd have to do was smile and try not to roll my eyes.
No, what I could not abide was that Kavitha Thakur herself led the expedition. While I have mentioned that I felt a kinship with the ancient Siege Worm, Thakur's apparent immortality inspired nothing but jealousy. If she were using my trick, I would not mind, but she has something far better. While she often cloisters herself for months to meditate, her public appearances are too frequent for the cold sleep to work. It has been like this for centuries, since long before I was born, back on Earth.
It occurs to me that she might even have spent the journey to Tau Ceti awake. What better time to contemplate her father's visions of space than as the only waking soul aboard her ship? Had she spent more than a century pacing the silent corridors of The Prophet's Dream, surrounded by her sleeping followers? That seems horrible to me, but maybe it appeals to a mystic. Or perhaps she did choose to enter the cold sleep, more to escape loneliness than time.
But that speculation is tangential. The point is that while gods may have blessed Kavitha Thakur, I hate her. I despised her from the moment she landed on my world.
When I awoke to the news that we had declared war on her protectorate, I relished the prospect. Our troops had killed a Siege Worm and had only become more powerful since, we surely had the strength to deal with Thakur's followers. I spoke of glory and triumph, of the necessity and justness of this war. And I meant it. During real sleep, not stasis, I dreamt of seeing Thakur being brought before me and forced to surrender her secrets. I do not believe for a moment that her gods granted her immortality. I dreamt that I would not only see the future, but live it.
I know that I've already mentioned my doubts that I would would be allowed such a thing. Whether that dream was in any way realistic is beside the point, as I am not someone who makes decisions. I am allowed to dream between my imprisonments.
But as exceptional as this war was for me, it was simply politics for the leaders of our colony. When I was awakened this time, I was told to travel to Palatine, a neutral station, to be present at the signing of a peace treaty. The bitter taste was more than the chemical residue of stasis.
On the flight, my suspicions that it would be a White Peace were confirmed and worse, that Thakur too would be there. I did not protest and meekly reviewed the protocol for the event.
But when I met her, in Palatine's grandest hall, she did something terrible. It was so subtle that no one beside me could see it. Perhaps she did not even realise what she had done herself. But it was something that made me want to strike her down where she stood. To test what good her gods and visions were against me. To destroy the peace our diplomats had negotiated, for it was worthless given the insult.
What she did? She embraced me and said, "You look young."
I admit that my feelings are deeply irrational and quite dangerous, but they are mine.
Besides, as violent as my desires were, I obviously did nothing of the sort, although I didn't quite manage to fight back the tears as I forced myself to thank her. But Kavitha is used to people crying in her presence.
Had I acted on my urges, it would have been a pyrrhic victory at best. Even if Thakur's people did not kill me, I would still lose my immortality. My own people could and would not let me act as their figurehead in the future if I did such things.
Cowardly? Yes. But cowardice has allowed me to live this long and I am not about to give up on it. The agreement was signed off without incident. We said that we hoped for eternal peace between our people, but eternity might not be such a long time for me.
I will soon return to my scientific slumber, sure that my colony will someday be interested in waking me. Maybe to again sound a call to war against the Kavithan Protectorate.
I will get to see the future. It is too vast for a human lifetime, but I can sleep the cold sleep instead.
The End