Prologue

The soft swish of the sliding door as it was pushed aside with gentle grace woke me from my dozing.

The need to cat-nap was one of the things that had come with age. I could no longer make it through the day without nodding off a few times. It wouldn't last for longer than twenty minutes, but I needed those little naps every few hours. Who'd have thought that I'd live to a biblical one hundred and thirty and still be able to move on my own? Even though the word 'barely' did need to be mentioned in the same sentence.

My dear wife shuffled in, her gait no longer as graceful and steady as it had once been, but even though one-hundred and sixty-five years of her life had left their unmistakable traces in her face and body, for me she was still the same beautiful and enigmatic woman she'd always been. No wrinkle on her features would ever change that. The body had aged, but her mind and soul were still the marvelous gems that I'd had the privilege of enjoying all those years.

Every bone in my body seemed to creak as I struggled out of my chair and waddled off to meet her. It was ridiculous, considering that she was in much better health than me, but old habits die hard and I took the stack of paper from her. She didn't offer any protest. After almost a century of marriage she knew when to let me do as I liked and when to put her foot down.

"I still do not understand the logic in writing your memoirs, let alone using such an archaic method," she said softly as she sat down across from me. Her hazel-colored eyes had lost nothing of their exotic sparkle and even more than a century after first meeting her, I could still forget everything around me and get lost in the fascination of just looking into those dark orbs that let me look into her beautiful soul.

"There's only three of us left, darlin', and after the fire at Memory Alpha, there's nothing left to tell the tale of humanity's first deep space mission. God knows how many years I've got left, but even when I'm long gone I don't want that one day someone cooks up a tall tale using that new-fangled holo-suit stuff without any proper data to go by. With as little as is left of our logs they could just as well think I'd killed myself senselessly."

I was waiting for her long-suffering eyebrow to creep up (after all, I'd played a major role in developing the holo technology to begin with), but instead I saw her face fall ever so slightly. The glint disappeared from her eyes and was replaced by abject sadness. My eyes filled up with tears instantly.

"Hoshi didn't make it, did she?" I asked, and my own voice sounded alien to me at that point. We'd both known that it was only a matter of time, after all Hoshi was only eight years younger than I, but realizing the time had come hurt so badly, I could barely breathe. My wife just nodded.

"Can you make arrangements for us to attend the funeral?"

She nodded again and stood to leave. I didn't need to tell her that I wanted to be alone to bury myself in my writing. When she left she was a little more bowed by age and sadness than when she'd come in.

I sorted through the already finished pages until I found the cover page. As a tear dropped down on the white paper I grabbed my stylograph and wrote with a shaky hand:

Chapter 1 »