3024 Nova Arcis A 7
The Long Stagnation
In the broadcast garden studio, the roar of rocket engines was replaced once again by the gentle sound of recycled water trickling over moss-covered stones. For a moment, Cokas Bluna and LYRA.ai sat in silence, letting the sheer, unadulterated optimism of that historical moment from 2080 hang in the air. It was a potent memory, a time when it felt like humanity’s path to the stars was a straight, ever-accelerating line.
Cokas let out a long, slow breath, a sound that was half-sigh, half-chuckle. “The gift and the poison of hope,” he murmured, more to himself than to his co-host. He pushed his chair back from the broadcast console, the spell of the historical footage broken. “You watch that, and you can feel it. The energy. The belief that anything was possible. That Proxima Centauri was just a few more engineering problems away.”
He stood up and began to walk, his hands clasped behind his back, moving away from the high-tech console and into the lush, real greenery of the broadcast garden. The camera drones, silent as moths, followed him gracefully. “But it wasn’t, was it? That early burst of speed… it created this incredible, galaxy-wide sense of hope. And then…”
LYRA.ai rose and joined him, her movements a study in fluid mechanics. She fell into step beside him as they strolled along a path paved with smooth, river-worn stones. “And then,” she continued, picking up his thought, “came the Great Stagnation. Nearly two centuries, from the 2090s to the 2290s, where that initial promise slammed into the hard wall of physics. Relativity. The sheer, brutal energy cost of pushing mass ever closer to the speed of light.”
“It must have been a deeply frustrating time,” Cokas mused, pausing to look at a cluster of strange, bioluminescent fungi that pulsed with a soft, blue light - a native species from Proxima B, cultivated here in the heart of the Sol system. “Imagine being born in that era. You grow up with the stories of the Stellar Explorer. You see ships zipping between Earth and Mars in weeks instead of months. The stars feel so close, so tangible. But then you grow up, and your children grow up, and their children grow up… and the stars are no closer. 0.01c, plus or minus a few fractions, becomes not a milestone, but a cage. A beautiful, solar-system-sized cage, but a cage nonetheless.”
“A time of deep introspection, the archives suggest,” LYRA said, lingered by the flower, quietly drawn to its delicate colours and form, her thoughts wandering through memories and stories of distant worlds, sensing a familiarity that only she could truly feel - even if Cokas never noticed the depth of her pause. “It was an era where the grand, outward-looking narrative of ‘conquest’ and ‘expansion’ faltered. And in its place, a more quiet, more complex internal narrative began to grow.”
Their path led them out of the main broadcast dome and into a public concourse of Nova Arcis. The live studio audience was gone, replaced by the normal, bustling flow of station life. People of all ages and ancestries moved past them - engineers in functional jumpsuits, traders in sharp business attire, families with children laughing and chasing server-drones. To the billions watching the broadcast, it was a seamless transition, a feeling that the two hosts had stepped out of their studio and into the city itself.
“With the grand engineering problems temporarily stalled,” Cokas explained, his voice now a more intimate, conversational narration, “humanity turned its immense creative energy inward. It’s when we see the great flourishing of the first true off-world cultures. The rigid corporate colonies on Mars were solidifying their hierarchical society under Ares Dynamics, an experiment in total control, while the great universities and scientific outposts on Luna became centres of art and history, not just science, wrestling with what it meant to be human when you could see your home world hanging in the sky like a blue marble. Humanity couldn’t go much further out, so for a time, they went deeper.”
“It’s when art and philosophy began to truly grapple with humanity’s new place within the solar system, rather than beyond it,” LYRA added. She gestured towards a beautiful, gracefully curving structure ahead of them - a public entertainment dome, its entrance shimmering with a soft, inviting light. “They began to ask different questions. Not ‘how fast can we go?’ but ‘what does it mean to be human when your home is a spinning cylinder of metal and light?’ ‘How do we connect to our past when we live in a perpetual, engineered present?’”
They reached the entrance of the dome. Above it, an elegant script, rendered in glowing light, read: The Malina-Varna Cinematheque.
“There was one piece of media from that era,” LYRA said, pausing at the threshold, “an experimental film from 2107, that seemed to capture the mood of the time perfectly. It wasn’t a blockbuster. It wasn’t a grand historical epic. It was a quiet, strange, and beautiful meditation on the nature of genius and the simple, messy reality of being alive.”
Cokas smiled, a look of genuine affection on his face. “Ah, the ‘soup’ movie. An antique showrunner, now meticulously restored. I must have watched it a dozen times when I was an intern. It always felt… important. Grounding.”
They walked into the dome. The interior was a vast, dark space, the air cool and still. The audience within was not watching a flat screen, but a fully immersive 3D-media-stream that filled the centre of the room, a perfect, shared experience. Cokas and LYRA took seats in a reserved viewing pod, the lights dimming around them.
“It explores the connection between three of history’s great minds,” Cokas whispered, his voice now a hushed narration for the viewers at home, “DaVinci, Frank Malina, and Amara Varna herself. Three geniuses, separated by centuries, all wrestling with the same problem: how to reconcile a grand, cosmic vision with the simple, mundane necessity of keeping the soup from getting cold.”
“A metaphor,” LYRA’s voice added, “for the persistent, unending challenge of sustaining life, whether it’s in a Renaissance workshop, an early rocket lab, or a billion-credit space station. It’s a reminder that even in our grandest journeys, we are still bound by the simple, beautiful, and inescapable realities of our own humanity.”
The opening images of the ancient film began to resolve in the space before them, a haunting and beautiful start to the final segment of their broadcast’s first part.