Unchosen

My delicious frozen dinner doesn’t invoke much enthusiasm, but it breaks up the monotony. On the view screen, as usual, is a display of the nearby stars, lost against the backdrop of the Milky Way. Helpful icons feature range and closing data for the nearest ten. The numbers aren’t exactly scrolling by. Most shifts, you consider yourself lucky if a single digit changes.

I’m in a bussard ramjet. It’s blasting out of the local arm at a steady 0.08 G in the general direction of 3 Sagittarii, toward galactic center. Our current speed is just about 0.8C, still slowly climbing but ultimately limited to 1.0.

In the cargo bay is my frozen wife and daughter, and an enormous stock of frozen seeds and embryos. They saved everything they could, but I don’t know if we’ll ever arrive anywhere livable. The computer still hasn’t selected a specific target; it hasn’t scanned any promising “possible habitables” yet, if it ever does. I need to get back in the freezer. The system only awakens me every dozen years for status checks.

It was magnanimous of the invaders to let a few of us go. It just sucks to be among the refugees.