The Voyager’s Return and a Note from the Stars (Incorporating New Annotations)
By Gensher Kissinger
The first message I received today was: “Urgent, Meet me in the docks, teahouse, level 2a, Geen.” Whom do I know, who’s called Geen, and I wouldn’t normally comply with such requests. “Sorry, just arrived, off-boarding is a crunch, in an hour? G.Grimson”
Well, the Oort Cloud Main Station docks were buzzing, a rare kind of energy filling the cavernous space usually reserved for the slow, predictable ballet of sub-FTL arrivals and departures. Today was different. Today, the icon of the Chop Hop Voyager was coming home.
More than three months ago the Chop Hop docked in Nova Arcis, last week’s news, or let’s put it in another way around. The current, latest official messages from Proxima are four years old, having travelled at the speed of light. So whatever Geen Grissom has to report is first-hand, a dispatch delivered faster than reality itself. Nine years!
Nine years since she’d left, a sleek, experimental dart aimed at Proxima Centauri, carrying four brave souls and humanity’s audacious hope for faster-than-light travel. A X-ship unlike any we have witnessed before. Nine years measured by the slow calendars of our solar system, but for the crew… well, that was part of the story, wasn’t it? The “dilation paradox,” Elara Kovacycy had called it. A subtle, almost cruel reminder that even when you fold time and space, the universe still keeps its own score. For the crew the journey only took eight years and nine months.
I managed to arrive at the teahouse just right in time, around the corner stepped Geen Grissom a few hours after debarkation. He looked… good. Tired, yes, with that thousand-yard stare common to anyone who’s spent too long with nothing but stars for company, but vital. Younger, perhaps, than the nine years should have allowed, just as the eggheads predicted, or was I blinded by my imagination? We found a quiet corner in one of the teahouse’s open-air gardens, a bird’s song a strange counterpoint to the activities grinding grumble of the docks.
“Geen,” I started, my recorder discreetly on. “Welcome back. Nine years is a long time.”
He chuckled, a dry, dusty sound. “Felt longer, sometimes. Shorter at others. Boring on the ship. Time gets a flexible concept, out there.” He paused, looking past me, as if still seeing the time folded trails. “Proxima B. It’s, well, new, different, even the probes’ data streams could not tell the truth. And - they’re building.”
I pressed him for details about the arrivals of the slow ships, the ones I had seen off myself. “When we were there,” he explained, “the Amara Homework had already been in orbit, the first 3000 settlers on the ground for about four of Terran years — 357 Proximan years, that is, which is a confusing measure. They had already established the first settlement. We arrived in ‘93, just some month or two behind the second ship, the Varna Homestead. It was an incredible sight, meeting under those alien stars. Two ships, one from a fifteen-year crawl through the dark, one from a four-year sprint across spacetime, both arriving to see a world being born. We stayed for half a year, helping with system setups and sharing data. By the time we left, the third ship, the Elara Homeland, was still years away from arriving. The official light-speed confirmation of its arrival probably hasn’t even reached you here yet.”
We talked about the technical details, the constant, nerve-wracking hum and thrum of the experimental drive on the Voyager, and the moments of sheer terror during the jumps - seconds of violent, disorienting chaos that felt like an eternity. But he also spoke of the years of monotonous isolation, the endless system checks, a universe of silent, cold blackness. He described Proxima B, “Amara,” with a pilot’s pragmatic eye, not a poet’s. The probes, he explained, had sent back beautiful but ultimately sterile data. They couldn’t convey the reality of the pervasive reddish-brown dust that worked its way into every seal and joint during the dry season, or the torrential, mud-creating rains of the wet season.
“You say they’re building their own world,” I prompted. “How do they feel about us, back here? Does news from home even matter when it’s four years out of date?”
He thought for a moment. “It matters, but not in the way you’d think. They treat old OCN news streams like historical documents. They value the connection, but they are fundamentally living in their own present. I saw a group of settlers gathered around a screen, watching a four-year-old zero-g hockey championship with the same detached, scholarly interest someone might watch a historical re-enactment. It’s their heritage, not their reality.” He shook his head. “Their own sense of time is a mess, too. The planet’s year is only about four of our days long, but a single day-night cycle is over five of them. They’re trying to invent a whole new calendar just to keep things straight. They are profoundly, and completely, on their own.”
Then he reported about the settlers’ first small victories: the successful adaptation of Earth-native algae in the local water, the first hardy root vegetables harvested from the half-subterranean biodomes they had constructed. They were learning, he said, that their fifty years of meticulous preparation and probe data was a vital starting point, but not the final solution. Every settler, from the Martian-trained terra-formers to the Earth-born agronomists, had to relearn their craft in this new context, a world where everyone had to be a farmer, an engineer, and a student.
He mentioned the monumental task he witnessed them undertaking with their first arrival vessel, the sub-FTL colony ship Amara Homework. They had carefully detached the massive, spinning habitat ring to serve as the foundational core of their first orbital station—the seed of what would become Varna-Station. The remaining hull, containing the powerful but now obsolete interstellar sub-FTL drive and immense fuel tanks, was already being repurposed in orbit into smaller, powerful intra-system vessels for exploring the Proxima solar plane.
It was a testament to the Asterion Collective Paradigm in action: not a grand, top-down plan, but a gritty, collaborative, and ongoing act of creation.
Then, almost as an afterthought, he reached into a pocket of his worn flight suit. “Almost forgot. Someone asked me to pass this on. A family. The Pepelinos, I think the name was - Kraken and Missy and Zac? Met them just before we left Proxima. Said you know them.”
He handed me a small, folded piece of paper in an envelope. It was simple, handwritten, the ink slightly smudged as if it had been handled often. I unfolded it carefully.
Dear Gensher,
If this reaches you, it means the Voyager made it back. A miracle of engineering. We are here, and it is real. It is harder than we ever imagined. The dust of the dry season is a fine, abrasive powder that coats everything, a constant battle. The rains of the wet season turn the plains into a sea of red mud that can swallow a half-built foundation overnight. But we are winning. We are building.
The greatest victory, Missy has proven it, is the soil. The fifty years of probe data was right in theory but couldn’t show us the truth of it. The native fungai network, the micro-biology here… it is compatible with our own. It is an astonishing, beautiful symbiosis. Missy has shown that the soil not only takes the tea plants, but that they are thriving, growing stronger and with a unique flavour we have never tasted before. We are no longer just surviving on hydroponics; we are becoming farmers on a new Earth.
I am teaching again. The children, Zac among them, are our most important crop. They are a new generation, star-born and curious. They ask about the stars every night, but more than that, they ask about a life on Earth they will never know. I teach them our history not as a cautionary tale, but as a foundation. We carry the memory of Mars and the hope of the Collective in our minds. Zac is growing like a weed, and he sends his greetings to the journalist who saw him off. Tell everyone back home it’s real. The dream isn’t just a dream anymore. It is our home, and it is growing.
With all of our hearts, Kraken & Missy & Zac
In the envelope there was a stack of old fashioned printed photos and a media-card.
I stared at the note, my professional composure completely gone. My mind flashed back years, to this very station. I saw Kraken and Missy, their faces a mixture of terror and defiant hope. And I remembered holding Zac, a small, warm weight in my arms, a sleeping symbol of their insane, beautiful gamble. Now, in a photograph, he was a lean, strong teenager, his smile a perfect fusion of his parents’ resilience, standing in a field of lush green under a violet sky. The audacity of their dream, the sheer, grinding reality of a fifteen-year journey through nothingness, and now this… this proof of their success. It was overwhelming. I looked around the teahouse, at the jaded, weary faces of the freighter crews and station workers, and contrasted it with the vibrant, hard-won hope in these small, faded images.
Geen was watching me. “Good news?” he asked, smiling.
“Good news,” I confirmed, my voice a little thick. “Far better than those shortened, scattered OCN transmissions, if they’re personal at all. The data from Proxima is general and scientific. This… this is real.”
“Sure, I know,” he said. “The settlers made a compilation for us. It was life-saving on the return flight, kept us sane. It was… a duty. More than a duty. It felt like we were their only connection back. We became their messengers. They would come to us every cycle with these little notes, these photos. Do you remember, Gensher? On Earth, a long time ago, they used to send private messages on paper, in the post, not just the formal, final documents we use now. It was like that. We were carrying their hopes.” He paused. “Did you know, the newest movie they know is twenty years old?”
“Exactly!” I said, seizing on his point, a new thought sparking in my mind, bright and sudden as a jump transition. “Twenty years! Think of the cultural isolation. The scientific data gets through, but the life, the stories, the art, the personal news… it all dies in the delay. But this…” I tapped the note, feeling its physical reality. “…this is different. This is a human story. And it arrived now.” The implications hit me with the force of a solar flare.
“Geen,” I said, looking up at him, the bird twirps fading into the background. “This! This changes things. Communication. News.”
He blinked. “News? We had the OCN bursts, when they could catch us.”
“No, not just the data bursts,” I insisted, my mind racing. “Real news. Real stories. From the colonies, delivered at FTL speeds. Imagine. No more waiting years for updates. No more relying on outdated, four-year-old information carried by slow ships. We could have news from Proxima, from Barnard’s Star, from wherever we jump to, almost as it happens. A network. A news network that travels faster than light.”
Geen leaned back, considering. The thousand-yard stare was replaced by a look of dawning comprehension. “News faster than light. Carried by ships like the Voyager. I’d never thought about this before. For Proxima, this will be true, though we will not be on another star so soon. I think you are looking far ahead into the future!”
“It might be,” I said, “but it’s also the oldest idea in human history, Geen. It’s the postal service.” The irony of it, the beautiful, simple logic, hit me with the force of a revelation. We had spent centuries building this incredible digital network, this system of time-delayed data-bursts and OCN reports, only to discover that in the vast, silent emptiness between the stars, the most revolutionary idea was a mailman who travels at faster-than-light speeds. We wouldn’t just be creating a news network; we’d be reinventing the post, but for a new kind of frontier where the distances were measured in years, not kilometres.
He looked at his own hands, the hands of a pilot who had just wrestled with spacetime itself, a faint, ironic smile touching his lips. “So, all that,” he murmured, “all the engineering, the physics, the risk… it was all to build a better mail route.” He shook his head and let out a short laugh, a sound of pure, profound irony. “I’ll be damned. The universe has a sense of humour.”
I refolded the note from Kraken and Missy, feeling its physical weight in my hand. It wasn’t just a personal message anymore. It was a proof of concept, a signal of a time to come. This small, smudged piece of paper was the first interstellar news dispatch, delivered by hand across 4.2 light-years, triggering an idea that could bind all our scattered worlds together.
The dream isn’t just about settling new worlds. It is about connecting them, us. And perhaps, just perhaps, a journalist like me had a new role to play in this expanding universe.