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thoughts, I’ll think. If I want music, I’ll hum. And I can always get much of the aforementioned services with a little extra effort, via the traditional method, by accessing the max .
    There were other amenities, all of them so fascinating, so user friendly—and so very tiresome. I crushed the smaller items under my boot heel, and disposed of them down the toilet. The larger items went the way of the syntho-sox, into the communal, hopefully anonymous, recycle bin.
    We are supposed to wear grip slippers whenever we venture outside our rooms. I will comply with this because the floors do tend to be a bit slippy. Lack of foresight is evident in this detail. Why didn’t they install non-skid flooring? I would prefer to go barefoot in the hallways, but I have found from experience that exposing my feet in public spaces makes other people nervous. A Quasimodo lurching through the town square. Within my little cosmic homestead, however, I go barefoot. The floors and walls are set to body temperature—just like summer weather in my real home—though it can be lowered if I wish.
    Along with the copious voice memos that I hope to record in my max , I will keep a more slender paper record of my observations, thoughts, ruminations of dubious quality, and useless asides, anything that strikes me along the way. I am interested in textures, nuances, surprises, more than the wonders of technology. If I should ever return from this trip, these will provide some amusement in my old age—my actual old age. I am now how old? Sixty-eight, I think. Just checked my personal profile in the archive, and yes, I am sixty-eight.
    If space / time theory is inaccurate, proving to be limited in ways we did not foresee, or alternatively, more complex with event-dimensions that we could not have guessed, these personal age measurements may become meaningless by Earth time. In any case, I am still free to play with imaginary scenarios. If I survive the voyage, I see myself returning to my little garden in the Santa Fe mountains only eighty-seven years old, by ship time, a relatively young old man. Thank heavens for modern medicine! That will give me a few good years to collate these notes into a book, and maybe a few bonus years, after that to slip into alzheim2, maybe a3. By then, it won’t matter to me at all.
    Day 4 :
    Yesterday I made my first onboard notations, but must not omit mentioning a happy meeting that occurred on Day 1:
    On every deck, there is a large panorama room, at the fore and aft of the ship, eight “theaters” that offer a view of outer space. Irrationally, I presumed that the view from the topmost public deck would give me a higher perspective. After doggedly climbing the stairs to A, avoiding the elevators for the sake of my general state of fitness, I entered the chamber to find that a crowd of people were already present, gazing raptly at the receding planet Earth. The panorama wall was a hundred feet wide and twelve feet high, displaying a scene that was not so much what one would see through a window overlooking space but rather the absence of a window, the absence of anything that would prevent the entire contents of the ship being sucked out into the void. I knew that there was indeed a wall there, in fact several layers of walls, but the effect was disconcerting, a 3D digital luminization of data the onboard scanners were transmitting to the screen in a resolution of 1.7 megapixels per cubic centimeter.
    At the moment, the picture was in real proportion, the planet the size of a softball, the moon a shrinking golf ball. Within a few hours, the Earth would be no larger than a bright star, and Mars would appear on the left side of the screen. Then, the optics people would probably magnify the image for a quick fly-by view of the colony.
    The crowd thinned a little, and I edged forward into a gap at the front. I watched for a while, enthralled but still disbelieving. When an elbow nudged me pointedly, I looked down to