Cycler

The year is 2105. Alice is staring out the window of the cycler. It's been many years since it has done a flyby of a planet. And it will be many years before it does again. But it will. She remembers the fanfare of the ship arriving. The carnivals. The new foods and manufactured goods from off world. She'd decided to get on the cycler to live in space and see new worlds first hand. But it was just so empty. She liked to walk out of the ship in a suit and sit inside the rotating ring, at the edge outside the safety railings, dangling her feet of the edge. She'd get messages from home, and send back replies. It was great, but she couldn't talk to the family and friends she'd left behind in person. It always took awhile to get a reply, and it was taking longer and longer as the cycler got further away from the planets.If it weren't for the fusion reactor, they'd be cold and dead by now.Sometimes she thought of trying to turn it off, just to see what the others would do about it. But she dismissed the intrusive thought as ridiculous. She connected to the neural aggregator to share her dreams from the previous night, and knew if any of her thoughts were really that far out of the norm she'd get a notification telling her as much.It was a dream of walking around in on a floating world, with a sky above and as far below as could be seen when standing at the edge of it. she was trying to keep someone from falling off the edge but she couldn't stop them, and she'd woken up with tears in her eyes. It was someone important to her, but she couldn't remember who, or why they were going off the edge. They just faded away into the clouds. Her friends said it looked like the view from the venus colonies after a few hours. And she thought of Sal. He'd been so engrossed with his research, she'd never had a chance to say goodbye to him before she had to go. But he was still working trying to convert brain activity into real digital copies of people that could be sent via light wherever a radio receiver was. Perhaps then she could talk to him again. But it wouldn't really be him. Just a close copy. Maybe that would be good enough. She decided to send him a message. And try to advance the research the research herself. Even if it was just a little bit. Even if the research itself wouldn't ever be enough for her. Working on it with her friends back home. That might be enough.