Oceana

I awaken to the gradually brightening walls of the cabin. Confused and blinking the sleep out of my eyes, I lever myself up to sit on the edge of the bunk. It always takes a few moments to orient when I wake up in a strange bed, but I come to myself pretty quickly this time. I'm here! Today's the day! Giddy, I check the station net while I shrug out of the disposable pajamas I slept in and step into the cleanser.

My inbox is a flood, mostly congratulations and goodbye messages, a short note from my dad about how proud he is of me, and one final, long, rambling plea from my mother not to go. I send a blanket goodbye to everyone but my parents, a note to my Dad about how much I love him and owe him for getting me here. I start to compose a longer note to my mother, explaining once again that I'm sure this is what I want to do and how much I love her, when the cleanser chimes completion.

It takes me a minute of searching around the cabin before I find the shipsuit nook, and I shrug into one while I put the finishing touches on the letter to my mom. None of these messages will get home until hours after I've already left, but I already said all my real goodbyes before I left the inner system four months ago.

- Grace Adeyemi, do you require assistance at this time? -

"No, Station, thank you."

- Of course. Congratulations upon your day of departure. -

I grin, it's really real!

"Thank you, Station."

Fastening the closure on my suit, I toss my bedding and pajamas in the recycler, leaving the room empty for the next colonist. With a last glance to be sure I haven't left anything (not that there's anything left to bring along, where I'm headed), I palm the hatch and head down a brightly lit, clean hallway with dozens of other cabins, many of them open, with their occupants joining me as we head to the main concourse.

Everyone is young and fit, unsurprisingly. There's a fair amount of eye candy, even with everyone dressed in identical disposables. I excuse myself when I bump into someone, who turns out to be a really cute guy with a dozen centimeters of height on me and an amazing smile.

"No problem at all."

I smile back and give him a flirty hip check. Colonization seems like a better idea all the time.

Reaching the concourse, I step out of the flow of humanity and check my schedule.

"Station, my schedule is empty, is something wrong?"

- No, Grace Adeyemi. Your link will be deactivated and removed today, prior to transfer. Station net will no longer send you updates. You will receive instructions through me. Is this acceptable? -

"Yes, but how will I hear you without my link?"

- Removal surgery is the last step before departure, and you will be alone moving through the transfer stations. I will speak to you audibly. -

I know link removal is technically surgery, but hearing it phrased that way gives me the heebie-jeebies. I've had the link since literally before I was born, but despite its mostly organic nature, it's still got a fair amount of metal in it, and that can't ride around in my head when I go through portal.

"What about my messages? I sent a bunch a few minutes ago."

- I am aware, and they have been queued. They will be broadcast in the burst scheduled for 37 minutes from now. -

"Well, what's my schedule? What do I do right now?"

- You belong to the first group of three hundred scheduled for transfer this morning. The complete process takes approximately two hours with final checkup, decontamination and link removal. You may begin any time within the next hour by reporting here. -

A schematic pops up in my overvision with a highlight on one of the departure stations. I save it off to examine later.

"Kind of cutting it close for breakfast."

- It is recommended that you do not eat for 8 hours prior to entering the portal. You may, but approximately 86% of humans experience extreme nausea upon arrival, in addition to the normal side-effects of transfer. Medical aid will be on hand to immediately assist you upon reaching colony station. -

I sigh. If I'd known last night was my last meal in the solar system, I'd have eaten something more memorable than... I think it was supposed to be beef?

"All right. Is the Sun currently occluded?" The station is situated near several large Kuiper objects, used during construction and still mined for resources.

- It is not. The Sun occludes the Earth visually for another 12 minutes and informationally for another 34 minutes. -

"Then I'm going to go to the observation dome for a last look." I pause and consult my link. "Station," I sigh, "I can't even get your clock anymore and my link isn't tracking. Please notify me when I have 15 minutes left in my window."

- Certainly, Grace Adeyemi. I hope you enjoy your viewing. -

"I'm sure I will, Station."

----

I stare across the plane of the solar system, all the way to the Sun, which is reduced to a very bright star here at the outer edge of the Kuiper belt. The view of the Milky Way is breathtaking, and I'm allowing myself a little bit of maudlin sentiment about never seeing my home again.

The trip to Kepler-62m, or more popularly Oceana, is one way. Well, one way unless you're willing to come back to the solar system a couple of millennia after you left. It's the closest known human-habitable planet besides Earth. Human habitable without enormous infrastructure, that is. We can breathe the air on Oceana, and the gravity is within 10% of that of Earth. If we, that is, humanity, had been forced to reach that planet to set up the portal and its support facilities without help, it would be another 15,000 years or so before the first extra-solar colony would have been established, if the ships left today. That's assuming we don't leapfrog the light-speed barrier, which up until recently almost no modern physicists thought we would ever do.

Humans have colonized everything over a kilometer in diameter enclosed by and including the asteroid belt, as well as all the reasonably stable moons of the gas giants. There are even a few rocks populated in the Kuiper belt, but those are primarily scientific or industrial facilities with rotating staffs rather than permanent occupants. Pluto is probably the furthest settlement from the Sun with permanent residents. It hasn't been considered a planet for hundreds of years now, but don't say that in the hearing of one of the natives.

There are also dozens of colonized artificial satellites in the inner solar system now, made by tugs hauling in asteroids or, in a few cases, some really massive Kuiper belt objects and then setting robotic factories loose on them for a couple of decades. What results are enormous, sparkling, spinning cities, some with populations now measured in the billions. That's where I grew up, in a solar satellite called New Pangaea, which is about three hundred years old now. It's not one of the biggest anymore, but it was one of the first of its kind. I lived there until I was 15 and was accepted to DeVry, the oldest, most distinguished engineering college on Earth, where I graduated two years ago. That's when I was offered the chance to be a colonist.

Extra-solar colonization. Almost no one outside of the generation-ship enthusiasts thought we'd ever colonize a planet outside of the solar system, and no one thought we'd have an extra-solar colony for thousands and thousands of years, until about four decades ago, when the Striders came knocking. One evening, as the main communications array on Pluto reckoned it, they received an incredibly strong signal that the rest of the solar system picked up over the next few hours. The signal contained a data package that had the same set of information encoded a couple of dozen times, once for each of the primary human languages still in use.

The contents of the message were that an alien ship had arrived at the far edge of the Kuiper belt, and it was extending greetings to humanity in the hopes of friendship and cultural exchange. The whole thing might have been dismissed as an incredibly expensive prank except for two things. The remainder of the message was a treasure trove of technological specifications well past what human science had achieved in a number of disciplines, and there was an artificial structure, presumably the alien ship, clearly visible at the location triangulated from the signal. Given that it was roughly twenty kilometers on a side, the idea that the whole thing was a prank was dismissed pretty quickly in a swell of excitement over the visitation.

"Striders" was the popular media name for the aliens, who could use sound to communicate, but didn't have vocal cords in the human sense, and thus no name we could pronounce. They resembled a cross between a praying mantis and a cricket, with an adult growing to about a meter in height. Like a cricket, they could signal by rubbing two limbs together to generate noise, and this was how their species evolved communication. Despite the resemblance to earth insects, they were a rather handsome race, with iridescent wings that allowed them to leap enormous distances in the low gravity of their homeworld, or straight out fly in microgravity. They were oxygen breathers, but Earth pressure and gravity would kill them almost instantly, without protection.

This fragility helped offset the revelation that there was, in fact, intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, and that it was well in advance of our own in terms of technology. The Striders just didn't look threatening, and spent the first decade of their sojourn in the system touring human settlements and trading for art and other cultural objects. There's a famous tri-v of an opera with full orchestra being performed under a pressure field on the Strider ship with the aliens flittering around the performers like mad grasshoppers. They love a lot of human music, with vocalists and stringed instruments being particular favorites.

The one bone of contention humanity had with the aliens is that they wouldn't trade for the technology to travel faster-than-light. They contended that FTL was one of a number of technologies (they wouldn't list the others) proscribed from trade by what passed for a government among the loose society formed by species that had made that technological leap. So far, every race in the galaxy that had achieved FTL had been stable and peaceful, and the thinking seemed to be that in order to join the club new species had to prove their maturity by coming to that point on their own.

Still, the technology the Striders did share was enormously useful, even transformative, and led human science to make a host of new and unique discoveries on its own. One of these new leaps was the secret of the portal housed on the station I'm standing in at the moment. Even the Striders said they had not come across its like anywhere else. It didn't violate FTL, which means it was going to be more than a millennium between the time I walked through the portal and my foot landed on Oceana, but if you constructed it far enough away from the gravity well of a star (about 50 AU, in this case), and it had a paired sibling located within, theoretically, half a million light years, it could move matter at precisely the speed of light between those two points. It could handle any kind of matter, but metals more concentrated than the iron in human blood tended to become have strong exothermic reactions to transfer for reasons the physicists haven't quite worked out yet.

The Striders took the petition the other council races, and then agreed to transport and set up the sister portal in an appropriate system once the council signed off. They even provided detailed survey information on the Kepler system to help verify that Oceana was a viable target, and transported the initial supplies and robotic factories we'll need to build the sister station to this one and get the colony self-sufficient. I don't know how many concerts, sculptures, and shiny beads that deal cost us, but whatever it was was worth it. Several decades of preparation and construction later, and here I am, one of the first wave of humans to venture outside of our solar cradle.

- Grace Adeyemi, it is time. -

"On my way, Station."

----

The departure area is one of a few dozen just like it in the station. A large room, currently with about twenty future colonists sitting or milling around waiting their turns. There's a two or three minute delay between people getting called in, and every possible human emotion is represented in the room, from nervous anxiety to giddy anticipation.

I'm somewhere in between those. I'm excited to go, mildly nervous about the link surgery, and more than a little aware that I'm never going to see anyone I know ever again. It's a pretty complex mix of emotion when Station's voice says, out loud this time, "Grace Adeyemi, please enter."

I walk through the door into the first decon chamber, and what follows is an hour and a half of amazingly invasive and mind numbingly boring medical procedures. I lose all my hair and get hosed with what must have been a half dozen disinfectants and antibacterials, so I don't carry anything into Oceana the colony planners didn't want to bring with us. I also lose a cheap little elephant tattoo on my ankle that I got on spring break one year in college because the ink turned out to be partially metallic. I'll miss that.

Finally the moment I'd been looking forward to the least arrives.

"Grace Adeyemi, please lie face down on the pallet with your forehead resting in the semicircular cushion."

I do as Station asks, and rest my arms by my sides, palms sweaty.

"Grace Adeyemi, you are nervous. This procedure will take less than five minutes, and there will be no discomfort. Would you like sedation?"

"No, Station, I'll get over it."

"As you wish. Under U.N.S. law, as a registered colonist of Oceana, you may elect to allow me, as a legal U.N.S. representative, to perform invasive cerebro-spinal surgery that will result in reduced abilities on your part, as well as removing your U.N.S. identification. Colonists arriving at Oceana will have the option of restoring their link, although DNA will be the standard form of legal identification with the Oceana governing council until you are otherwise advised."

"What do you mean by 'reduced abilities'?"

"For instance, but not limited to, your ability to access networks such as my own or other similar networks throughout U.N.S. space."

"But not, like, biological abilities, right? I'm not going to have slurred speech or anything, right?"

"No, Grace Adeyemi, there will be absolutely no loss of biological function as a result of the procedures I intend."

"All right."

"Do you consent to the procedure to remove your link, and, additionally, do you consent to whatever other procedures I deem necessary during removal to preserve your health and complete my assigned tasks? If you consent, be advised that upon removal you will no longer be a U.N.S. citizen and will have no legal standing in the Sol solar system, becoming a citizen of the Kepler solar system upon arrival. You may answer no, removing yourself from the Oceana colonization program, and return transportation to the inner solar system will be provided. Either way, the choice is final."

There's no way I'm going to back out on Oceana now, although the bit about additional procedures makes me a bit leery. I hope the removal is smooth. "I consent." As simple as that, I leave the one point three trillion people of Sol behind me to join the ten thousand in the first wave striving for Oceana.

"Please relax as I apply a local anesthetic. Please be advised that if you move excessively during the procedure, I will sedate you for your own safety."

"I understaah.."

The "local" anesthetic hits the back of my neck and knocks out feeling from my eyeballs to halfway down my spine. Robotics begin to move around the room and almost immediately feel strange vibrations that I assume emanate from whatever is happening at the base of my skull. Time seems to do weird things and I smell things that couldn't possibly be in the room before my link suddenly dies.

It's a really terrifying feeling. There's never been a time in my life that I wasn't at least aware of my own personal network and storage, and my overvision is ever-present, putting little informational labels on things I stare at for more than a second or two and providing constant recording and mapping. I have a brief moment of total panic before I manage to calm myself down.

I feel a weird tugging sensation, followed by minutes more of weird vibrations. I'm still on edge from the weird hole my left by my missing link, and for a moment I convince myself that it's not gone. For a second I could swear that something like my overvision moved at the edges of my sight but when my eyes flicked over, of course there was nothing.

Finally I hear most of the robotics receding and feel a pinch as feeling suddenly floods back. My neck feels a little stuff, but when I move my have to feel there's not so much as a scar to mark the procedure.

"Link removal is complete, Grace Adeyemi. You are no longer a U.N.S. citizen, and will be registered as a citizen of Oceana upon arrival at my sister station."

"So what's next?"

"Nothing remains but the portal."

Standing up, I wait a moment to see if I'm going to be dizzy, but I feel fine. "Well, then, lead on, Station."

A door slides back at the far end of the surgical theater, opening on to a short hallway. At the end of that is another door, which slides open at my approach. I walk into a large chamber, and I see a half dozen other bald colonists standing near opposing wall of the room. They're standing around an oval set into the far wall that represents the pinnacle of modern human technology. The portal.

"Grace Adeyemi, please wait near the portal for your name to be called, and step through swiftly. Do not pause." Station's voice emanates from the hallway I just exited.

I walk forward to join my fellow colonists, and this time the mood is almost entirely excited anticipation. This is the moment we've all been waiting for for the last two years, since the initial selection of the first wave.

"Sarah Wallace, please step through the portal. The children of Earth wish you well on your adventure."

A tall, graceful woman turns to all of us for a moment with an enormous smile, and then strides confidently through the nimbus of bluish-white light.

"Hoshino Nakayama, please step through the portal. The children of Earth wish you well on your adventure."

An incongruously red-headed man with Nordic features walks through without a backwards glance.

"Adele Beaudrie..."

"Gabriel Jackson..."

"Anh Nguyen..."

"Grey Wallace..."

Finally, I'm the last person in the room, no one else has emerged from the surgeries to join me. I can barely contain myself as I wait for the words...

"Grace Adeyemi, please step through the portal. The children of Earth wish you well on your adventure."

As I walk through the light I don't know quite what to expect. Everyone who has traveled the test portal from one side of the solar system to the other says that the transition feels instantaneous, but that there's a brief moment when it feels as though you're pushing through a wall of jelly.

Whatever they experienced, that's not what I did. I walked through the portal as though it was just a wall of light, emerging in a dark hallway lit only by the nimbus behind me, presumably twelve hundred years later than when I stepped into it two seconds ago. Only...

Something is wrong. Not only is the medical staff that's supposed to greet someone stepping out of the portal not here, I feel none of the physiological symptoms I was told to expect. I look around the featureless hallway, and uncertainly begin to make my way down it, casting glances back towards the portal as it recedes into the distance. Eventually I lose sight of it as I follow a bend in the corridor. After another twenty meters I come to a door, identical to the ones I'm familiar with back on the Sol station. It doesn't open as I approach, but it does when I brush my fingers on it.