TRANSMISSION LOG — COLONY VESSEL MERIDIAN CROSS — DAY 2,847 Operator: Chief Communications Officer Adaeze Nwosu Status: DEGRADED — 43% array functionality For whoever receives this. We have been transmitting for nineteen days on all available frequencies and have received no response from the relay network. Either the network is down, or something has changed at home that we do not have the context to understand. I am going to keep transmitting anyway. It seems important that someone should.
There are 1,104 people on this ship. Families, mostly. The colony board selected for families — the thinking being that people with something to live for make better settlers than people who are only fleeing something. I do not know if this was wise. What I know is that every day I walk to the communications bay and the children of this ship wave at me in the corridors, and I smile back, and I go into the bay and I call into a silence that has begun to feel less like technical failure and more like an answer.
We are eight months from Kepler-452b. The ship's systems are nominal. The food stores are adequate. The medical bay reports no outbreak, no crisis. Everything is fine in every way that can be measured, and I am the only one who sits with the particular dread of knowing that the universe has stopped answering us, and that I must decide, every morning, whether to tell the others. I keep transmitting. I keep smiling at the children. I have not yet decided which of these things is the braver act.
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