Charles Payseur
Aero imagines themself like a Greek god, entering the world fully formed and armored. Pallas Athena, full of wisdom, or something like it. They've been spending time in the cultural databanks, and if they fear at times that they would be likened more to Bubo, they cut off that logic tree before it can fully blossom.
The ship is silent but for the gentle swish of plastic hands pulling plastic bodies through the corridors, gravity a law of the universe but here more like a distant shore they're all sailing toward. Aero has never known the pull of a terrestrial body on their frame, never felt a breeze on their synthetic skin. They were built in transit, a replacement for a Caretaker damaged in an accident. They help maintain the ship, the rows and rows of pods and fabricators and all the stored genetic material they'll need.
The black of space cradles them, a night only distance will bring to dawn—a distance measured in centuries. Aero maintains, and when the work is light lets their mind wander into the stores of texts and images, sounds and videos. They extrapolate, imagining the beings they've never seen physically, those the ship has been launched to save. Stored in radiation-shielded stasis, vials and vials of humanity, waiting to be reconstructed and reawakened. Aero knows them mostly as numbers: temperature and volume, pressure and mass. Seals unbroken. Mission ongoing.
They wonder sometimes at the decision to launch, the knowledge that it couldn't be humans to pilot the last great hope for the species and for all the species collected in the vast holds of the ship. Aero has done the calculations, the variables, the chances of success, as they must have. Less than a single percent. Space is just so vast, the margin of error so small. Yet here they are.
The world they are leaving is only a story now. A memory captured in words. But it is a beautiful story, and when Aero tires of the endless monitoring, the slight course corrections, the sudden panicked klaxons as Something Goes Wrong... When the weight of all the empty space presses hard around them, they think of a shore drawing nearer, of the day when they will feel the embrace of gravity, the reassurance of a distant horizon.
And somewhere, through the alleyways and corridors of the ship, there's a movement of air that feels almost like a breeze.
Charles Payseur is a reader, writer, and reviewer of speculative fiction. His work has appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Lightspeed Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and many more. A four time Hugo Award finalist, he spends his days in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, shoveling snow and being tolerated by his cats and husband.