I’ve been awake for 4 days now. Everything feels so weird still. I feel like I don’t know who I am without home. Without Darren. Without Lisa. How Why do mom and Dad just expect me to move on? Don’t they care? I never even see Dad anymore. He’s always busy. Mom barely makes eye contact with me. All she does is make small talk and insist she’s fine. I don’t know anyone else in this fucking prison. I miss Darren so much. I couldn’t bring any of my stuff so I don’t even have anything to remember him by anymore. Slowly, I’ll forget what he smelt like, how it felt to be held by him and then how he sounded. I really don't want to.

My memory has come back for the most part. The first two days were, as anyone would expect after 63 years of sleep, very rough. Mom said I was rambling about random nonsense. Dad said he had seen worse. He told me 7 people hadn’t recovered their memories at all after the hypersleep. “A 0.05% error rate! Well below the margin,” he declared proudly. As if He’s been working non-stop to prepare everyone for our arrival at Dion. He’s technically only in charge of the F sectors but he helps out everywhere.

There’s still 8 months, 9 months till our arrival. They woke us up early to get us used to all the weird stuff we’ll encounter on Dion. There’s 14 28-day months now. With a leap year every 5th year adding a day to the first month. I don’t remember what they are calling the months. Pretty sure they all end with ‘ion’. Dion spins faster so it has 17 hour days. They’ve been trying to get people to sleep for around 6 hours a day and stay up the rest but it has been a nightmare. Barely anyone can adapt to it. Dad has of course. Mom doesn’t even try. Oh and the hours are 58 minutes now. So weird. I hate it. Darren would have hated it too. I really wish I could I can’t stop crying every time something reminds me of Darren. And every damn thing does.
The disgusting food reminds me of the times he tried to cook for me. He was so adorably bad at it. Not one good meal in 4 years.
I can’t even bear to go to the observation deck. The constellations look all weird. He taught me some when we met for like the third time ever. That’s when I first figured he had a crush on me. I still remember Orion but it’s wrong now. It just looks so wrong. Everything here is fucking wrong. EveryONE is fucking wrong. They think they can just leave all that behind? Am I the crazy one? Why is everyone not losing their fucking minds? Are these rich fuckers that dense? Can they even comprehend what the fuck this is? 8 BILLION OF US ARE DEAD AND WE ARE JUST MOVING ON FROM THAT? WHY HAS NO ONE FUCKING KILLED THEMSELVES WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE I DONT WANT TO BE THERE WITH THEM I WANT MY LIFE BACK I WANT MY FUCKING LIFE BACK I WANT TO GO BACK

They’re going to start turning up the gravity in a few days. They said we would barely notice it since they’re gonna do it gradually over 6 months. They’re keeping all the fat people overweight people in a different wing. It’s going to be tougher for them to adjust apparently. Something about cardiovascular health or whatnot. Mom got assigned a job in Cyber-reviews for this 10 website internet they have going within the ship. She threw a tantrum but Dad got her to calm down. Almost felt like home for a bit. He told me to be ready to do my part for the “new humanity”. “Fuck humanity,” I would have said if I had the balls. It’s not his fault though. He’s doing his best. I can’t really do anything about the people whose fault it really is because they conveniently managed to get themselves killed after murdering 8 billion.

Dad showed me a video from the site. Of the very first thing that came through. I’d never seen anything like it. I doubt there’s anything weirder on Dion even. It was a hollow cylinder of sorts. The outer layer was made of erratic translucent crystal fractals. Sharper than blades. Inside you could barely see an extremely viscous, almost opaque liquid, it looked like frosted glass but it moved like a liquid. Only it moved so slow that it seemed like time was moving differently for it. The bottom of the container was more of the fractally stuff but at the top there was an opening wrapped completely with thin white strands that looked exactly like hair.
Dad didn’t tell me how he got the video but he said he tried to get the Chinese govt. to let him help. He looked sad for the first time in a while as he said “Maybe I could have stopped all this.” I should have said something but I just looked at him awkwardly and he left after a bit. I’ll ask him for more details if he gets time.

I screamed at mom today. She’s exhausting. She hates her life so she’s trying to force me to like mine. It’s not my fault. I can’t move on and there’s only so many times I can hear her tell me to “forget Darren”. How dare she. I doubt she even loves I can’t move on. I don’t want to and I can’t even if I did want to.

They are changing the lights now. Dion orbits a K-dwarf, so they say the light will be a bit warmer. I am not even sure what that fucking means. I’ll see tomorrow I guess.

Dad wants me to write a section in the ship’s newsletter. Wants to put my half-completed English degree to use. I can barely write this. I told him no. He’s asked

All that overworking finally caught up to Dad. He fainted. He’s on bed rest for a week. That would be less than 5 earth days. I don’t know why we’re still using the same names. Could’ve called it something cooler. Like a packet. A packet of 7 cyclics. Sounds The doctors were worried about the head injury causing some memory problems, especially since hypersleep already messes with the cerebral cortex. But he seems like himself when he’s awake. He finally has time for me now. He’s been telling me stories. About the first month on the ship. About the planning for this spaceship in 2012. About my childhood. I think he’s just trying to make sure he doesn’t forget anything but I don’t really care. I missed this. It’s been a while since it’s just been us. Over 70 years technically.

He’s sleeping as I write this. He fell asleep telling me about the experiments. Dad had an informant. Technically it was just a good friend of his. I even know him but Dad prefers to call him his informant. He could only send Dad videos of the objects themselves as they were being moved to the labs. There were four he had videos of, including the weird cylinder thing. Dad told me about the next two that came as he was lying in bed.

The first was a cuboid, about half the size of a brick, made of slightly hazy mirrors on all sides. Only the mirror reflected things with a 50ms delay. You could look away and still feel your own eyes staring back for just a bit. It had thin columns running along its sides, also made of the same material and it made five-tone beeps that apparently sounded different to each person. Even the same recording sounded different depending on who listened to it. They knew there was a mechanism inside that was making the noise. The scans found extremely intricate patterns in there but they never got to the point of breaking it open.

Dad said the second item was extremely similar in build but behaved differently. It was wider and thinner. Seemed to be made of the same material but it was dark. Not black, but dark like your phone screen goes when you place a thumb on the camera. It flashed every 31.4 seconds with a colour Dad described as “Purple but like closer to blue.” The weirdest thing was that after it came through The Peel, it made an extremely loud noise for exactly 31.4 seconds and then never again. Before Dad could tell me more, the doctor came in and told him to get some sleep.

I don’t know what to make of any of it. I mean, the people on the other side definitely are more advanced than us because we don’t have any idea how to even comprehend the things they are sending us. I almost want to wake Dad up for more but he needs the rest. I’ll ask him tomorrow.

Dad just showed me the video of the fourth thing that came through. I know I keep calling things weird but it really is the weirdest thing yet. It was a floating spectre of sorts. Red and black with a bit of orange mixed in. It had a spherical centre with a comet tail-like projection following it. The projection also had layers of tiny squares of glass that rotated as it moved, all floating in complete unison about half a cm from each other. The weirdest part? It was dead silent. No sound at all. Dad said his friend informant told him no instruments could pick up ANYTHING. It was like a hologram. It phased through all solid matter, EXCEPT humans. It bounced off one of the employees, like a tennis ball in extremely low gravity. The fucked part was, they couldn’t figure out how to contain something that only seemed to collide with people before it went through the floor. It fell through the ground and they FUCKING LOST IT. Dad said he didn’t really blame them for that part. It seemed like an impossible problem. He blamed them for sending stuff back through.

Each time we received an object, we sent something that would tell those on the other side something about life on Earth. When we received the cylinder, we sent an apple. Assuming the mucous liquid inside the cylinder was their food, we decided to share ours. After the first cuboid we sent a video camera. Dad said the scientists must have assumed the beyonders were sending their technology and so they reciprocated. After the second cuboid, we sent a sample of soil. Dad said he didn’t know what the fuck that was about. I saw Dad get a bit angry as he told me how much he hated what they sent after the orb. The scientists probably got desperate, after losing the floaty thing and being unable to get anything useful from the others and decided to share the most technologically advanced thing they had. A self-propelled drone that could store 3000TBs worth of video and project it onto any suitable surface it could find. Dad listed about 20 things wrong with this. I don’t remember any except something about showing them experimental technology being downright stupid. He said the r word ins

He stopped after that. Spaced out for a bit. I probably should have sensed he didn’t want to talk anymore but I wanted to know. I wanted to know what took Darren away from me. What pushed us out of Earth and onto this awful journey to Dion. I wanted to know what took my entire life away from me.

I’d never seen Dad cry before. He tried to hide it but just couldn’t. He was telling me he didn’t know anything about the final thing that came through. He was sure there was one because his friend had managed to call him right before he…

“He didn’t try to escape, Julie. He made sure we were all warned so we could make it out. So humanity could live. The very first thing that came to his mind, as he was probably seeing his coworkers around him die those horrible deaths the virus handed out impartially, was about humanity’s future. He wanted us to live, Jules. He could have called his family. He could have said goodbye but instead he saved all of us.”

I felt awful. I probably should have hugged him or at least said something but I just froze. I didn’t know how to deal with Dad crying. I felt my own eyes tearing up but Dad cleared his throat and asked me to get him something to eat. I left quietly. We didn’t talk about it again.

Just getting ready for bed. I can’t believe we’re just a few months away from landing! You can see Dion from the observation deck now. It’s like a dot but it’s still cool. They’ll send a couple scout ships when we get into Dion’s orbit. Dad was asked on the crew but he said he wanted to see Dion up close for the first time with his family. Mom kept insisting he should go but he convinced her to let it rest. I still miss Darren and Lisa and my life back on Earth. I still feel so much hate for those chi scientists. But I also feel excitement now. I want to see Dion and the weird life that must exist on it. I want to learn about its star and the other planets in the system and about its moons, Saetyr and Maenad. Even though I don’t know about the moons themselves, I read a bit of mythology in my first semester and so I published a tiny article about the origin of those names on ARPANET as we’re calling it now. Dad said he loved it. Mom is still reading through it.

I will never forget my friends. I will never forget my life. I will never forget what I have left behind. But it would be stupid to let my past stop me from appreciating the beauty and marvel of what lies ahead. I have to move on. For Dad, for Darren, for Lisa and for the new humanity.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.