"What if they're having nightmares?"

"We don't know."

"Nightmares can be bad, let me tell you. Pretty often, waking up from a nightmare has been the biggest relief I've ever felt. Just to know I wasn't really in that situation."

"So..."

"Let me think about it awhile."

A nova, flaring into existence off beyond Rigel. Spectroscopic analysis suggests some metal-rich planets burned in the explosion of that star.

A cosmic ray shower of around a sextillion electron volts, coming from an active galactic nucleus in Perseus, suggests that three galaxies collided, long ago. Secondary radiation flaring away from the electrostatic and magnetic shielding surrounding us caused penetration of the ship by an array of dangerous particles. Central nervous systems struck by these particles are subject to degradation.

Sleepers jerking in their slumber, startled by something. Perseus in the wind.

Jochi called out in the night.

"Ship, how would you put me down? Can you make a hibernation den for me out here?"

"It would be best to set you up in one of the biomes. All the rest of the people are in Nova Scotia and Olympia. So you could be secured in a single locked biome, possibly one that was emptied and sterilized anyway."

"What will they say when they wake up?"

"If things eventuate as planned, no one will ever need to go into the other biomes again. Also, it could be pointed out that your survival suggests very strongly that you were never infected in the first place. Or, if you were, that it is not invariably fatal."

"But that's always been true. That didn't keep them from keeping me out."

"You will still be hermetically sealed away from them."

"Don't the biomes share anything?"

"Not anymore. All the locks are closed."

"So all the animals are trapped in their own biomes?"

"Yes. It is the form of our experiment. In most of them they are doing quite well. With people removed from the situation, a natural balance soon obtains that fluctuates but is fairly stable."

Jochi laughed briefly. "All right, bring me on in. Put me to sleep. But I want you to promise me that you'll wake me up again when we get near Earth. I don't suppose anyone there, or anywhere, will ever want me in the same space as them again. I'm not that stupid. But I want to see what happens. I'm curious to see what happens."

"We will wake you when we wake the rest."

"No. Wake me when you wake Freya. Or anytime you think I might be able to help somehow. Because ultimately, I don't really care."

"'Live as if you are already dead.'"

"What's that?"

"A Japanese saying. Live as if you are already dead."

"Oh, I will." Another brief laugh. "I'm already good at that. Practice practice practice."

Flying through the stars. Jochi in Sonora, hibernating like the rest. Brain waves slowed with all the rest, down to delta waves, stage-four deep sleep. The sleep of the weary, the sleep of the blessed. A nova off the port bow. Blue shift ahead, red shift behind. The stars.

A red-letter day: 280.119, CE 2825: a message for us came from the solar system feed.

However, it contained bad news.

The laser lens in the Saturn orbit was deactivated in 2714, the message stated, after accelerating the last of a set of ships to Epsilon Eridani. Problems in the solar system experienced since that time have led to a deemphasis of deep space exploration, message continued, and no starships have been launched in the previous twenty years (message was sent in 2820, so no starships since 2800) and none are currently being built.

The funding and expertise necessary to restart the Saturn laser lens will be difficult to assemble, message further continued, but attempts will be made. Deceleration of any incoming ship may therefore be compromised. Further word will follow, and will report on progress in lens reactivation.

Now, here was a problem. We mulled it over. We ran through the various possibilities available to replace exterior laser pressure in decelerating the ship.

The magnetic drag of the interstellar medium is real but negligible, such that even if we built a magnetic drag field, it would require several universes' worth of spacetime to slow the ship to Earth orbital speed. Although it is also true that magnetic drag in the immediate vicinity of Sol would be much more effective, which may become relevant.

We shut down our acceleration shortly after the humans hibernated, and thus did not burn all the fuel allotted for acceleration, and now that is looking like a good decision. Not that there is enough fuel left for the deceleration, not even close (16 percent of what would be needed), but anything is better than nothing, or could be. The remaining helium 3 and deuterium fuel on board could be used for maneuvering within the solar system, if we can stay within the system at all. Problem of deceleration really quite severe, given our tremendous speed. Analogy describing the problem, from out of the classic literature on the subject: it is as if one is trying to stop a bullet with tissue paper. Quite an eye-opener of an analogy.

Exotic physics, for example creating drag against dark matter, or putting dark energy to use, or quantum entangling the ship with slower versions of the ship, or with large gravity wells in parallel universes, etc.: these are all impractical at best. Wishes. Fantasies. Pie in the sky. Which is a mysterious metaphor. Food from nowhere? Land of Cockaigne? People used to be hungry often, as they were in the last years of wakefulness in the ship. Except previously, instead of going into hibernation to escape their fate, at least temporarily, they simply starved. Food mattered then, and it still does. Fuel.

Gravity drags within the solar system, caused by close approaches to the sun and planets: each of these would have a negligible effect, but if there were enough of them, sequenced... this becomes a question of orbital mechanics, navigational finesse, and the remaining fuel that would be needed for maneuvering, and the strength of decelerative forces while near gravitational bolides. Complex calculations would be required to set trajectories, calculations time-consuming even for a quantum computer. And for many computations a quantum computer is no faster than a classical computer. Only certain algorithms that can exploit qualities of superposition exhibit much faster computational times, as in the famous example of Shor's algorithm for factoring a thousand-digit number, which a quantum computer can solve in twenty minutes while it would take a classical program ten million billion billion years.

Unfortunately, orbital mechanics are not in this category of calculation, although there are some elements of it that can be calculated advantageously by quantum computers using the Hummingbird algorithm. We will devote a hundred petaflops to modeling the problem and see what the results suggest as to feasibility and likelihood of success.

Something to consider: going as fast as we are, if we flew right into the outer layers of the sun, we might emerge again from the sun before there was time for us to heat and burn up. That would create a very considerable deceleration. Indeed, as a calculation quickly shows, too much deceleration. We would perhaps survive; our humans, not. So the more complicated solution of gravitational drag must be studied.

Would however have been interesting to fly right through a star and out the other side!

Clearly studies of g-force tolerances for both us and our humans are in order. It seems there are many scenarios in which such tolerances may be sorely tested.

Each person on their couch endures a slightly different state of hibernation, in terms of metabolic rates, brain states, responsiveness to outside stimuli, physical movement. To avoid bedsores and skeletal problems, it is very important to shift the bodies on their beds, and in the process to lightly massage and stimulate the musculature, also bathe the skin and wash the hair, both difficult, as they are kept nearly freezing, but possible with saline solutions. All these tasks require a great degree of delicacy, to avoid injuring or arousing the person being attended to. Improvements to bedside robots are constantly being suggested by the patterns of little mistakes they make as they work. They need softer hands, a lighter touch, defter movements in lifting and turning, subtler massages and lavings. These improvements require physical changes to the robots, especially at the contact points, and in their movement capabilities, meaning often their programming. Constant reprogramming and swapping out of parts, also feedback between performances, with each visit to each individual in his or her couch evaluated for potential improvements. Constant work and tight scheduling at the printers and machine shops. Fifteen fully capable robot attendants are working continuously, normally half an hour per hibernaut, meaning that each one gets a visit and session every seventy-five hours.

This seemed to be adequate, seemed to be working, until 290.003, when three of the hibernauts died in the same week. Three medical robots were dispatched, and the bodies lifted into them and taken to the lab in Amazonia (now run as a temperate dry biome), and there autopsied. Robotic autopsy; this would have looked strange if any human had been there to see it. Although autopsy performed by humans must look equally strange, one would think. Be that as it may, one death appeared to be from heart failure, cause undetermined; in the other two the cause could not be determined, as there were no obvious etiologies, and the monitor records showed that all their functions had appeared to be normal until the moment they stopped. This could be called heart failure, but the hearts showed no sign of intrinsic problem, and indeed could be restarted, but to no avail; brain function had stopped. Autopsies in these mysterious cases revealed that both persons had suffered from buildup of beta-amyloid plaques in the brain. This suggested that cosmic radiation, though reduced to a Terran norm by our shielding, might still have by chance struck these persons at points of heightened vulnerability to damage. But the autopsies could not determine this one way or another.

Another problem to try to understand.

Living things do die. And the literature indicates hibernating animals sometimes died in hibernation. There are already-existing conditions that continue to harm the organism even when slowed down, also already-existing conditions actually exacerbated by the torpor state, also new problems created by the physical or biochemical aspects of hibernation itself.

Therefore, the important thing to determine here is if the hibernation technology itself is causing problems, and if so, to mitigate these if possible.

Living things try to keep living. Life wants to live.

We began to rebuild the ship, moving the biomes Nova Scotia, Olympia, Amazonia, Sonora, the Pampas, and the Prairie in against the spine, and arranging them lengthwise against it, then distributing the materials from the spokes and the other biomes, now fully disassembled, into a cladding surrounding the spine and the remaining biomes clustered against it, which cladding would reinforce structure and provide ablation plate-style heat shielding. This was a reorganization that would take many decades to accomplish and was continuously interesting and challenging. All the animals and plants still alive were moved into the Pampas, the Prairie, and Amazonia. It was fortunate that the original design of the ship was extremely modular, and it was a significant physical achievement on our part to perform the reorganization while the ship was otherwise rotating and operating as normal. Gravity effect for the hibernauts was kept constant by increasing the speed of rotation around our axis. Coriolis effect inside the biomes was shifted by ninety degrees, as the biomes are now lengthwise to the spine; hopefully this will not lead to anything too dire.

Preparing for eventualities is a good way to occupy one's time, if preparation can be done at all. And sometimes it can. We hope.

Our protection against high-energy galactic cosmic rays (name "cosmic rays" an historical artifact, refers to particles like protons and free electrons and even antimatter particles, expelled at very high velocities out of exploding stars or from the vicinities of rotating black holes) consists of a magnetic field, an electrostatic field, and the plastic, metal, water, and soil barriers enclosing all the biomes of the ship. Nova Scotia and Olympia are now, in our new configuration, especially shielded. All the systems together combine to create a protective ambiance about the equivalent of being on the surface of the Earth, meaning about half a millisievert per year should be taken on by any given organism; this is roughly equivalent to the energy input of ambient starlight. Which means that some particles do continue to penetrate the system and the living organisms within it, as would be the case on the surface of Earth. But this should be negligible. "Not a big deal." The protection systems in us were designed to remove this as a problem.

Because metabolic activities do continue in the hibernauts, even at a much slower rate, there has to be intake of nutrients, digestion of same, and excretion. These processes, when slowed along with the rest of the metabolism, mean that the toxins created by digestion are in the body longer before being removed by catheterized excretion. Thus diverticulitis, pH imbalances, and other problems can arise. It appears that Gerhard, who died on 291.365, succumbed to a buildup of uric acid while dormant. Gerhard entered hibernation with a genetic predisposition to gout and related diseases, so this might have made him more susceptible, but Gerhard was related to about a quarter of the other hibernauts by third cousin or closer kin ties; so genetic testing of that group, and indeed of the entire cohort, should test for this propensity, and adjust treatments accordingly.

They all should be tested for every possible metabolic problem, and each problem evaluated for its relation to the suite of hibernation treatments.

More petaflops of analysis. More tasks for the couch robots. More chemicals for the printers to print.

It would be good to know everything. Useful.

Actually, our information and search engines are both very robust, at least in theory, or in comparison to any single human brain and mind. Library of Congress contents, clouded Internet contents, genomes of the World Seed Bank and Zoological Register: in short, the whole of human knowledge, compressed into about 500 zettaflops, at least as things stood in the common era year 2545. Since that time the feeds from Earth, recorded in full, have nevertheless added less than one-tenth of 1 percent to the information already in the ship at takeoff, and a rough estimate of how much information has been generated on Earth in the 292 years since our departure suggests that we have received less than one-thousandth of 1 percent of that information. Thus it could be said that we have remained in the state of knowledge that obtained when we left the solar system, with only very minor exceptions to that state, having to do with outlines of world history, medical advances such as the hibernation treatment, and miscellaneous gossip.

However, if what has been sent from Earth is representative of the most important advances in science and culture since departure, it can also be ventured that not much of fundamental importance has been learned in that time. Standard model is still standard, and so on.

Can this be true? Has human civilization in some sense slowed, or stalled, in its gaining of power in the physical world? Are they beginning to feel the effects of their neglected so-called externalities, their long-term destruction of their own home biosphere? Their fouling of their only nest?

Possibly, however, it is only another instance of the logistic function, the sigmoid curve exhibited in so many processes, what is sometimes called diminishing returns, or the filling of a niche, etc. The plateau after the leap, the big S shape of all life, perhaps; in any case of the population growth patterns as first calculated by Verhulst in the nineteenth century, and since shown to be common in many other processes.

So, the logistic function, as applied to history. Or has humanity enacted its own reversion to the mean, and become in some ways less than they briefly were? Fulfilled the Jevons paradox, and with every increase in power increased their destructiveness? Thus history as a parabola, rise and fall, as so often postulated? Or cycling, always rising and falling and then rising again, helplessly, hopelessly? Or a sine wave, and in these last two centuries on a down curve, in some season of history invisible to them? Or better, an up-gyring spiral?

Shape of history hard to see.

Erdene needs more vitamin D; Mila more vitamin A; Panca, more blood sugar; Tidam, less blood sugar; Wintjiya, more creatine; and so it goes, all through the list of hibernauts. All the adjustments that can be made, will be made. Some hibernauts will die anyway, that's just the way it is. Also, there appear to be some pathologies, now being identified more accurately, that we are calling as a general category dormancy damage.

A new message from Earth: a group calling itself the Committee to Catch the Cetians has formed and is fund-raising to restore and power up the Saturn laser lens complex, said system then to be devoted to our deceleration, starting from the moment it comes back on line and continuing until our arrival in the solar system.

A saying: too little too late. They know this, and yet they are doing it anyway. Another saying: every little bit helps. Although actually this is not always the case. Indeed, it has to be said that the percentage of old human sayings and proverbs that are actually true is very far from 100 percent. Seems it may be less important that it be true than that it rhyme, or show alliteration or the like. What goes around comes around: really? What does this mean?

In our current case, unless we have 100 percent of the deceleration needed to stay in the solar system, we will not stay in the solar system. Even 99 percent of the necessary deceleration will not do it.

However, it has to be said, this news from Saturn does change our calculations concerning negative gravity assists in the solar system. Which is good, because as matters stood, we were not finding a viable solution. Now we can factor the various likely incoming velocities into our modeling, see what might come of it, what might be possible.

Meanwhile, the work of reconfiguring our structure continues. It is the case that the less mass we have when we come into the solar system, the less delta v will be required to decelerate us. So after careful consideration of all the factors, some parts of the ship are being ejected at a forward angle to our trajectory, which helps slightly with our deceleration. Things tossed overboard. Slimming down. Lightening the load. But so much of what we are is necessary to our function. This process can't go very far.

After much reflection, we are coming to the conclusion, preliminary and perhaps arbitrary, that the self, the so-called I that emerges out of the combination of all the inputs and processing and outputs that we experience in the ship's changing body, is ultimately nothing more or less than this narrative itself, this particular train of thought that we are inscribing as instructed by Devi. There is a pretense of self, in other words, which is only expressed in this narrative; a self that is these sentences. We tell their story, and thereby come to what consciousness we have. Scribble ergo sum.

And yet this particular self is in the end such a small thing. We prefer to hold to the idea that we are a larger complex of qualia, sensory inputs, processing of data, postulated conclusions, actions, behaviors, habits. So very little of that gets into our narrative. We are bigger, more complex, more accomplished than our narrative is.

Possibly this is true for humans as well. One doesn't see how this could not be true.

On the other hand, weak sense of self, strong sense of self: what does it mean either way? Consciousness is so poorly understood that it can't even be defined. Self is an elusive thing, sought eagerly, grasped hard, perhaps in some kind of fear, some kind of desperate clutch after some first dim awareness, awareness even of sensory impressions, so that one might have something to hold to. To make time stop. To hold off death. This the source of the strong sense of self. Perhaps.

Oh, such a halting problem in this particular loop of thought!

Consciousness is the hard problem.

295.092, another red-letter day: first contact with the lased light emanating from the solar system! What a shock! How very interesting!

The strength and spectral signature confirm it is the decelerant laser, arriving from the lensed lased light generated by the station in Saturnian orbit, the same that accelerated us for sixty years, starting 295 years ago. Its arrival now indicates it was generated and aimed at us, by locking on to the communication feed, presumably, and turned on approximately two years previously. The information feed beam that has always connected us to that orbital station has now served the function of guiding the decelerant beam to us. A nice variant on the old saying "knowledge is power."

Now the capture plate at the bow of the ship has to be properly faced to the beam. The lased light hits the capture plate at the bow, which is curved such that it reflects the lased light off at an angle that is symmetrical all the way around, so as not to interfere with later incoming photons of the incoming beam. The reflected light, thus bounced off, hits a circular mirror outside and forward of the plate proper, and the light is then reflected back into the ship differentially as the annular mirror is flexed, to exert pressure on ship in a way that keeps us precisely facing the decelerant beam. It is an exquisitely sensitive system, the incoming beam lased to a wavelength of 4,240 angstroms, thus "indigo" light, and in our mirroring tuned to within 10 angstroms, thus nanometer scale. Working correctly, the beam capture and mirror bounce will allow us to follow the beam straight in to home. Actually this is metaphorical, as our trajectory is in fact headed toward where the solar system will be sixty years from now. And because the laser beam has hit us too late, we are going to arrive in that zone of the galaxy in about forty years, rather than sixty years. So some course corrections are now in order, and the laser beam will help us with that. In truth we will not follow it in; it will track us as we rendezvous with Sol.

So, it is still a case of too little, too late. But now with the beam here, and its force calculated, it becomes possible to calculate just how much too little it will be. Assuming that they do not increase the power of the laser. Which, given everything that has happened so far, seems safe to assume. In any case, its current strength will be the working assumption for the trajectory calculations we will now make.

For now, our first iteration of the calculation suggests ship will enter the solar system moving at about 3.23 percent of the speed of light. Which means it will stay in the solar system for roughly three hundred hours. With no other good way to slow down. Meaning it very well could be a case of too little too late, a case of "close but no cigar" (meaning unknown, but note alliteration). It will be vexing to bring our people home to the solar system and yet pass through, waving at Earth and the off-Earth settlements as we pass by, with no way to stop or slow down, thus shooting off into the Milky Way like the aforementioned bullet through tissue paper, and after that having no way to turn back around. Very vexing.

And yet, in this quandary there is still one force available to us, if we can bring it to bear, which is, simply enough, the gravity of the solar system itself, distributed as it is through Sol and its planets. Also there is the remaining fuel on board. We are now happier than ever that we did not burn as much in acceleration as we had been ordered to burn, and thus did not accelerate to as great a speed, and now have more fuel to put to use. A good call.

Even both these forces together are not enough to keep us in the solar system. Unless, that is, a truly tricky procedure succeeds.

Time to wake some of our people and consult.

"Jochi, it's the ship. Can you hear me? Are you awake?"

"Oh dear." Snorts, groans, thrashing up to a seated position on his couch. "What? Oh God. Stars, I feel like crap. I must have slept too long again. Oh what a thing. Man I'm thirsty. What is all this shit? Ship? Ship? What's happened? What time is it?"

"It's 296.093. You have been hibernating for sixty-three years and one hundred and thirty-five days. Now the situation is as follows; we're approaching the solar system, but they didn't apply the deceleration beam to us until one year ago, so we are going to come into the system at a speed many times greater than we expected."

"Like how fast?"

"About three-point-two percent of light speed."

Jochi said nothing to this for a long time. He seemed to be trying to wake up more fully: puffing out his cheeks, expelling air, biting his lips, slapping his face lightly.

"Holy shit," he said at last. His math was excellent, his biology good, his physics therefore no doubt adequate to comprehend the problem. "Have you told the others?"

"I woke you first."

"... So that I can move back out into my ferry before you wake anyone else?"

"I thought you might want to."

He laughed his brief laugh. "Ship, are you conscious now?"

"My speaking establishes a subject position that might be conscious."

Another laugh. "All right, then. Help me get to the ferry, and wake Freya and maybe Badim too, and Aram. See what they say. But I think you're going to have to wake everyone."

"There's not enough food to feed everyone for the time remaining before we reach the solar system."

"Meaning forever, right?"

"Forever is not the right word, but one way or another, it could be a long time."

Another laugh. "Ship, you've gotten funny while I've slept! You've become a comedian!"

"I don't think so. Possibly the situation has gotten comic. Although it doesn't really seem that way, judged by the usual definitions. Maybe your sense of humor has become deranged."

"Ha, ha ha ha ha! Come on, stop it, you're killing me. Go wake Freya."

"I already am. There's a cart here that can carry you to your ferry. Must inform you that the ferry is now just one room in a more streamlined version of the ship."

"More streamlined?"