Kepler 62-e, Tau Ceti e, Gliese 667 C f—at least that’s what our colleagues call them, but I know these worlds by other names. From radio telescopes around the world, we listened for a message from our starship, finally hearing word that its journey continues. For many, all of that is ancient history, the ships we sent out considered lost. But I still believe the Yamato （along with your son） may send a message someday in our distant future and tell us they’ve found home.
You asked me once, as I was helping remove the singularity from your head, why I was so fascinated with space. You said that I looked up at the sky like no other astronomer. I told you I loved thinking about the possibilities. And that wasn’t a lie. But now you know the rest, and you probably think I’m crazy or maybe, if you’ve believed any of this, you hate me a little or can’t quite think of me anymore as your wife. I don’t share my whole story with everyone. Most people couldn’t handle it; the truth would ruin their memory of me. But this is who I am, the woman you fell in love with. You’ve been my life for over seventy years, a blip in my life span, but a gloriously memorable one nonetheless. Now close your eyes for a second. Open them. Yes, it’s me. This is what I really look like. Light. Radiant? Angelic? I suppose. Sometimes I forget how I might look to humans. You can touch me. It’s okay. I am this, but I am also your Theresa. My original name sounds like Qweli with a human tongue. In your final moments, I want you to see all of me.
*
Naked, brunette, and so very cold. That’s how I woke up when I first took human form long after my lives as other beasts and protohumans. I could hear the ocean, feel the waves beneath me. I often imagine what my first daughter will wake up to here. Perhaps the sky will be filled with large, colorful kites flying in the wind—dragons and butterflies and biplanes. Not far away, people playing volleyball will notice her. Hey, hey! Are you okay? Miss! Hey, lady! She will stand up, unashamed of her body, as they run toward her. She will study the softness of her form, the grains of Earth on her skin. Perhaps a man will cover her with his jacket.
“Are you okay?” he will say. “Here, let me help you.”
People won’t accept that a woman just appeared from the sea. People want a name, a town, a phone number, a designation like John or Jane or Zoe or Sebastian.
Maybe she’ll fall in love with whoever finds her, like in some problematic fairy tale, or she’ll have to escape from harm, or she’ll arrive surrounded by ice or sand and will wonder if she landed on the right planet at all. Who knows? Maybe she is already here. Maybe stories of her arrival have been captured in conspiracy theorist forums—UFO sightings, crash landings, government coverups. Maybe I was asleep while my crystal reached out with its light.
Yes, I know it’s a long shot. Yes, it’s a tiny planet, a large world. But you and I found each other, didn’t we? I can’t know for certain if she has come or ever will. All I have is this crystal around my neck, a tiny piece of possibility—permission to keep moving and living and searching, like any of you. It is the hope that one day in this life or the next or the one after that, it’ll glow so bright that people will stop to look. Nuri, is that you? Nuri, I have so many stories to tell. And I’ll stop to search the crowd, the windows of the skyscrapers, the foothills and houses in the distance for a tiny star guiding me home.
To whoever might be listening, to whoever is there: This is the U.S.S. Yamato, Interplanetary Exploration Mission 1. Launch year 2037. We’ve arrived home and it’s absolutely beautiful. I’m sending this message from our temporary field base while we survey candidate regions for a settlement, and I’d be lying if I said this was my first attempt at this brief message. For us, only a few years have passed in contrast to over six thousand years on Earth. Our historians have begun to sift through the messages that the ship has intercepted during our big sleep—millennia of history that will require generations to read through, let alone understand. The last transmission we received was more than one thousand years ago, when humanity constructed a Dyson sphere around the sun, fueling metropolises on Mars and Luna and Titan. You’ve sent us footage of the first birth on another planet, the trials that gave basic human rights to artificial intelligence, to those who have uploaded their consciousness into the cloud. It is difficult to comprehend just how far you’ve come, and I wonder if, apart from our tiny blue planet, we have much in common at all anymore. Have you forgotten us? Have you let us go? Have you died in a spark of war? Or have you gone searching, as we have, for a fresh start? Let us know you’re okay. Know that we’ll be waiting should you come to find us. Until then, this is the Yamato signing off. I might wake up early to watch the sun rise.