She hazarded, “And with love?”

“Love, yes! And though we have talked of long loves, time is short — at least, in the longer view of the Transcendence. We are all diverging from each other, we different sorts of humans. There may come a point when we can no longer talk to each other, even recognize our commonality. We have to find our way back together again before we lose each other completely…”

The post-humans, swimming beneath the platform, were baffled. They had responded to the subsonic beacon that drew them there, but there was nothing for them, no food, no mates. Disappointed, in pairs and family groups, they drifted away.

Once I’d surfaced from VR I tried to get down to some work, which I figured was the best way to waste the days I had to endure before I could get into that plane seat. With a fat mug of coffee I went to my mother’s study, which had the best connection and display facilities in the house, and closed the door.

The first thing I did was bring up a VR of the current design-freeze of our space probe. The bulky main body unfolded, bejeweled with lacy antennae, attitude thruster nozzles, and instrument booms, hanging in the air before me like a beautiful toy.

Just looking at the thing was calming. This was my pet starship.

It was called the Kuiper Probe, in the requests-for-tender documents from NASA and the USAF that defined it. If it ever actually got built it would no doubt be given some more exotic name. I inspected the liquid-lead coolant tanks and the neutron shield and the instrument buses, and the suite of tiny probes we planned to drop off on the way out of the solar system, and the Higgs field power plant at its very core.

Strictly speaking it wasn’t really a starship, of course. For one thing it was unmanned, and for another it wouldn’t go to the stars. But it was an “interstellar precursor mission,” in the jargon. It would fly a proving flight for the key technologies that might one day take our machines, or even us, very much further.

Our probe was designed to sail a thousand astronomical units from the sun — that is, a thousand times as far as Earth is from the central star. By comparison the furthest planet, Pluto, is a mere forty AU out, but the nearest star, in the Alpha Centauri system, is more than a quarter of a million AUs away. But our probe’s ten-year, thousand-AU mission would be a first step, a preliminary sail out of the cozy harbor of the inner system. Nothing had traveled further from Earth save the long-derelict Voyagers and Pioneers, planetary probes from the 1970s. And where the Voyagers had had to rely on gravitational slingshots to hurl them so far, we would be going under our own steam, fueled by cosmic might.

There was even good science to do on the way. We would be able to explore the outer solar system, far beyond Pluto, where flocks of ice moons, the Kuiper objects, fly through the frozen dark. Our trajectory would give precise measurements of such huge numbers as the total mass of the solar system. We would pass through the heliopause, where the wind from the sun disperses into the wider interstellar medium, and study whatever strange cosmic particles and radiations from deeper space are blocked from Earth’s view.

And, most significant of all, we could visit the Kuiper Anomaly. That glimmering tetrahedron had continued its own long, aloof orbit around the sun ever since its discovery in the first decade of the century. Now was the time to go confront that strange visitor.

That, in fact, was the reason the USAF was involved. In our little design community there was even a rumor that in among the reserve payload weight, set aside for contingencies and late additions, was an allowance of fifty kilograms or so for a small bomb.

I tried to focus. I had plenty of challenging work to get done; I was in the middle of involved structural analyses of the Probe’s propulsion system. But my concentration wouldn’t gel. Designing a starship as therapy: it often worked, but not today.

I was deeply relieved when Shelley Magwood, my nominal boss, spotted I was online, and logged on to talk to me.

Shelley coalesced in my mother’s study. She was sitting in a fashionable molded-ceramic chair projected from her office in Seattle. She had heard about my troubles. “I don’t know what you’re doing sitting there working on the damn Probe,” she snapped. “The Probe can wait. The Kuiper Anomaly isn’t going anywhere…”

Shelley was thin, intense, with a strong face, high cheekbones, and a Roman nose. Her hair was dirty blond, but I suspected she was already dyeing it, in her thirties. I always thought she worked too hard, burning herself up in her energetic pursuit of too many projects, but there always seemed to be a smile, just behind the door of her face. Nowadays she was more a manager, an entrepreneur, than an engineer, and I suspected she indulged in this deep space probe proof-of-concept project as a sanity release, just as I did. I liked her a hell of a lot.

“You should be with Tom,” she said. “Get your fat backside on a plane.”

“I’ve tried that,” I said. “I have a seat lined up. The protocols—”

“Bugger the protocols. Look, if you need help—”

“Thanks. I just have to be patient.”

“I’m sorry about Tom.”

“Don’t be. The work is helping.”

“Oh, is it?” Through some fancy projection-software interpolation her VR was made to look as if it were peering at the same diagrams I was. “Just sit tight a minute,” she said sternly. “I’ll check over what you’ve done. The state you’re in you’ll probably screw the whole thing.”

“Thanks for your support.”

“I mean it,” she said. No doubt she did. She frowned, focusing on the schematics, and I sat back and waited.

So a kid who had once watched space shuttles launching from his backyard had ended up designing a real-life spaceship, after a fashion. It had been a long journey, though.

My primary ambition, as a small kid, had been to fly in space myself. But as I grew older it quickly became apparent that that would never be possible. Not only were the only manned space missions on the cards endless round-the-block tours on the Space Station, for which there was a whole queue of candidate astronauts lined up before I reached age twelve, but I soon learned that my personal spacesuit, my body, wasn’t up to the task of taking me off the planet.

So my ambitions downscaled a bit. If I couldn’t fly myself, maybe I could be involved in designing the next generation of ships. But even that got compromised.

I majored in math and engineering at college. But when I graduated in 2017, it was quickly apparent that there was no work to be had in designing spaceships. There were only a few proof-of-concept projects sponsored by NASA, ESA, and the other space agencies. But even this was playing; there was no serious money in it. This was not a time for flying into space: it was an age of entropy, when the oil was running out and energy running down, and our attentions were increasingly absorbed by the need to cope with the Warming, and other hazards of the Earthbound future.

But I was an engineer. I wanted to work on something that would get built — and, incidentally, that would pay; I had no ambitions to be poor. So I looked for opportunities.

What was coming up at the time was a new generation of nuclear power plants. Whatever its drawbacks, nuclear power had become fashionable again, as it was not a source of carbon dioxide emissions — and as a source of energy, a lot less problematical than chasing down the world’s remaining oil supplies.

So I went into nuclear engineering. I spent eight years working on a plant that eventually opened in 2027.

It was what we called a fifth-generation design. The core worked at nearly a thousand degrees, a temperature that would have signaled the start of a meltdown in early generations of reactors. Those high temperatures offered much greater efficiency, but to achieve them we had to go through an immense program of research and development, for instance in ultra-hard materials that were resistant to intense heat and neutron bombardment. We actually cooled the thing with a huge vat of molten lead; I learned a great deal about refrigeration principles on that project, principles I applied later to the Kuiper Probe.