Latency

Em passed the time as she always did: watching the stars. They churned slowly over the course of the journey. They would arrive at Kolmaya 24-b eventually. It was only a matter of time. For the long haul voyagers of the Sisyphus, time was in great supply.

"Four hundred-thirty-eight years, seventy-six days until we reach low orbit. Six day margin of error - not bad," Abi said, sipping water from her old mug. It had been glued back together at least six times, and Em wondered why she didn't recycle it and forge a new one.

"I don't know why you still count," Em asked.

"The clock does it for me, I just like to check," Abi said. "Plus, everyone needs a hobby."

Em nodded. That was true. Nanites stimulated the production of stem cells in their bodies, forced mutations in emergent cancer cells to trip their immune systems, and generally kept everyone in the physical prime of their lives - so long as they exercised, ate, and drank what they needed, they'd live forever. 

Their mental health was less quantifiable.

The need for stimulation was not on the list of problems that medical technology had solved - mostly because in the average person it didn't really need solving. Video games, conversation, meditation, art, and a thousand other activities that had existed for a millennia could keep anyone from going latent for a hundred thousand years. The absence of those things only invited the creation of activities to replace them, after all.

Memory, then, was the only problem that was never approached. Life experience required medium for capture - whether that medium was grey matter, solid state storage, or something more whimsical like a physical diary, there were limited places to store data. 

There was as yet no way to fully capture the experience of the immortals that rode the Sisyphus to Kolmaya 24-b. Keeping the brain in good repair - like Abi's mug - didn't add to its capacity. So it was journals, electronic storage, DNA encoding. Or, the eventual fade to latency.

But, in many ways, a latent memory could be a blessing in disguise. Trauma, on a long enough timeline, faded as surely as light from dying stars.

Em, if she still bothered to look at the cesium clock that Abi checked, would have realized that the few faint memories she still clung to had been with her since the beginning of their journey, roughly eight hundred years ago.

She couldn't remember exactly why she left anymore, but she still remembered the feeling. A void in the pit of her stomach, that pulls her edges inward and made her feel sick and hungry. She could - and did - forget every thing that had caused her to feel that way. But she couldn't forget the feeling. 

Now she could only theorize about what burrowed itself into her and drove her away from home. Despair? Loneliness? Trauma? Despite her strong sense of wonder and wanderlust that only the stars could mend, she knew that she'd been driven away, rather than pulled towards.

She imagined that most people on the Sisyphus probably felt the same way about one thing or another - especially with regards to why they signed on. Whatever happened to them all before they decided to take their one-way trip (conceivably, unless they managed to find a way to gather or otherwise enrich more tritium to power a flight back to Earth) didn't seem to concern the leaders of Project Charon enough to keep them off of the Sisyphus.

So, there they were - a crew of fifty on a long trip, the news of which would take at least fifty years to announce back on Earth using the laser relays they dropped like breadcrumbs from that figure of speech no one could explain.

Abi had already left the rotunda to return to the bridge. Navigation required a level of vigilance that Em only had for the stars. Immortals with limited memory were much more manageable for the ship counselor. She still had faith that, with time, everything would mend.