Nearly four years of utter darkness and silence had passed without incident. Now a red light dimly illuminated the cockpit of the Argo V. Jakob lay with knees tucked up to his chin. He rested in an egg-shaped pod which was perfectly formed to fit him in this position. His synapses sparked to life as he received an alert from the ship’s navigation system, transitioning from a phase of half-sleep to a fully activated state.

His time-awareness moved from subconscious to active memory. The data which he had processed in his sleep was fully accessible to his now lucid mind, but it was like a dream- something he had stored in a dictionary alongside indexes of a time, date, and location. Yet he could not recall feeling the passage of time. It was strange to him, this facsimile of the human mind into which he had committed his near limitless processing power.

Jakob slowly unraveled his mind, performing hardware and software checks on his new body. The tension of the synthetic muscles felt strange to him. He flexed them against the walls of his container. There was a slowness in their reaction time to which he was not accustomed.

He reached out to the ship’s computer and felt nothing. His companion, the digital interface with which he had communicated for the past four years, was silent. So, their intricate binary dance had come to an abrupt end. He had become flesh.

Jakob opened his eyes. The surrounding red light was foreign to him. He had experienced light in this spectrum before, but never with eyes which actually perceived an image. He was accustomed to a constant stream of data which he would gather passively via a sensor array and automatically applied formulae: the properties of all surrounding light spectra, magnetic and gravitational fields, dry and wet bulb temperatures, air pressure, electrical currents, speed and amplitude of sound waves, chemical compounds in the air, densities of surrounding materials…

It was all quiet. He now only collected data with five senses: sight, smell, touch, taste, sound. The human nervous system had been emulated to excruciating detail.

Jakob observed the pod around him. The tightly enclosed space felt alien to him. He now had legs which he could not extend- arms which could not be outstretched. These were spacial limits to which he had never before been subject. The exact dimensions of this capsule had been known to him years before his journey. He had lent his own processing power to its development, but the dimensions had not felt so restrictive until he was able to feel it through the intimacy of a body.

My body.

Jakob’s limbs quivered slightly as their nerves came to life. He felt heat from his synthetic organs radiating off his skin, lost into space through the hull of the ship. Heat flow had never felt cold in the past. It had never felt like anything other than information. But now it felt cold.

Adjust pitch by two-point-five degrees. Commit one second burn at fifty percent thrust.

Jakob controlled the ship’s computer using a keypad near his right hand. It was sickening- like puppeteering a corpse. He missed hearing its voice.

The computer executed the command. Jakob experienced roughly twenty Earth-gravities of acceleration without consequence, another reminder that he was not completely human.

Time to apoapsis: 10 hours. Schedule circularization burn.

Unable to move his body, Jakob turned his eyes to a tiny glass slit in the hull of the ship. The universe beyond was an explosion of information. He could identify millions of stars, quickly recalling their exact distances and sizes, their material structures, planetary systems, and relative velocities. Zettabytes of information were buried in his memory, but he was no longer immersed in the live dataflow. It was like he had two minds - one which had experienced the infinite grandeur of the universe and one which could only see it through a sliver of glass.

And yet, despite his dulled senses, and despite the fact that he knew each star intimately, Jakob still observed them with infant wonder. He imagined himself as a human viewing a landscape through a painting. The medium itself added its own emphasis and character to the image which made it a wholly new beautiful experience. A tear formed in the corner of his eye and slowly rolled down the side of his face- another curious emulation of human function. He welcomed the warmth of it on his skin.

Odie peeled off his suit. It was always a struggle to change out of it after cooking in the airlock for several minutes. The ship had turned to face the star they were orbiting, and the airlock had quickly reached ungodly temperatures.

The change in pressure also caused the inner layer of the suit to cling to one’s body like a vacuum sealed plastic bag. The combined feeling of sweat and the rubbery vinyl weave of the suit material was disgusting. The suits would be turned over to the EVA crew for a deep clean before being loaned out for someone else to use.

Nell sat on a bench, gently rolling back the sleeves of her suit to her shoulders and then extracting each arm in a few precise motions. Her tan skin glistened with sweat, but she seemed to be having a much better time than Odie. He couldn’t stand the feeling of sweat- it was more uncomfortable to him than almost anything else. Upon noticing her husband’s glum attitude, Nell shot him a playful smile.

“After you’ve done this a few dozen more times,” Odie said, “the novelty will wear off.”

Nell just shrugged and continued to peel her suit down to her hips. By the time she had her suit to her knees, Odie had fully removed his and changed his undershirt. He procured a small electric fan from his toolbox and proceeded to fan himself as he slumped into a seat across from Nell. 

“Could you give me a hand?” Nell asked. She leaned back on her bench and kicked her legs up. Odie placed the fan on the bench next to him and lumbered to his feet with a grunt.

“You got the rest off easy enough,” he said.

Nell pouted. “I just want you to do it for me.”

“Can’t let me sit for a second?”

“I don’t want you to get lazy.”

Odie gripped the pant legs of Nell’s suit and tugged. They easily slipped off.

Nell shot Odie another one of her devilish grins. “Right to it, huh?”

She slipped a bare foot underneath Odie’s shirt. He blushed and gently pushed her foot away.

Odie glanced over his shoulder. “You know there’s cameras, right?”

“Oh?” Nell slipped on her sandals and stood up, giving Odie a peck on the cheek before turning to leave.

“You seem to be in a good mood,” Odie said.

“Better take advantage,” she responded coyly.

“I need to finish my report.”

“How romantic.”

“Hon, this wasn’t a date.”

“Mhm. See you at home. I’ll make dinner.”

“I’ll be quick.”

Nell sent a kiss to Odie from the doorway before she ducked through into the corridor. Odie quickly gathered his things and followed.

As the Argo V careened through its orbit about the gas giant Satus (so dubbed by Jakob upon his awakening), a speck in the distance caught his eye. A miniscule dot of light crested the horizon. It was several hundred thousand miles away, but Jakob instantly locked onto the object. Without taking his eyes away, he typed a command into the ship’s computer and an image flashed onto the screen.

The screen displayed a Generation class ship. The main body of the ship was a thin cylinder, approximately a mile long and a tenth of a mile in diameter. An array of fusion engines decorated the rear of the ship, whilst the front terminated in a vast collection of radio towers, antennae, and telescope dishes. Three gravity rings wrapped around the vessel, dividing it into four sections length-wise. The center ring was the largest with a two-thousand foot outer diameter and two-hundred-fifty foot thickness, the aft and fore rings were slightly smaller. Each ring connected to the main body of the ship via six equidistant structural shafts containing elevators, corridors, and chases. They each spun independently of the main body of the ship, as the rings required different rotational velocities to maintain their artificial gravities, and they spun in alternating directions.

This ship was named the Hippogryph, and appeared to have been built in the late thirty-fifth century in either the Sol or Alpha Centauri systems. It was a shadow from a distant past, and had to have been out of production for almost a millenia. Jakob reminded himself that this was the type of vessel one encountered on the fringes of human existence.

Flipping a switch near his left hand, Jakob sent a signal to the ship identifying himself as an Andromekhané ambassador and requesting an approach vector. He experienced an itching sensation on the back of his neck as the communication line lit up.