A World Beyond
On the Stars: Collected Testimonies
On the Stars: Collected Testimonies
An oral history compilation. Dates and sequencing of events vary between testimonies and have not been reconciled.
Compiler's Preface
The following testimonies were collected as part of the Orbis Civic Archive's ongoing documentation of the Solarian period. Interviewees were asked a single question: When did you first know you would leave Earth?
Their answers follow. The compiler has not corrected chronological discrepancies. Contradictions in dates, durations, and personal timelines are preserved as recorded.
I. Maintenance Technician — OASIS Luna, Habitat 4
Name withheld on request | Interviewed 14.03.48
I was nine. Maybe ten. There was a broadcast — everyone remembers a broadcast, but nobody agrees on which one. I remember a ship lifting off without sound. No roar. No flame. Just motion. It went up like it had somewhere better to be and wasn't going to argue about it.
My father said it was a hoax. He was a practical man. He wanted to see the fuel bills. But I watched that thing rise and I thought: that's how it should be. Smooth. Quiet. Like the sky is just another door.
I told my teacher I wanted to go to space. She said: "Everyone says that." I said: "No, I mean it." She smiled the way adults smile when they've already decided your future for you.
Twenty-three years later, I was on Luna, replacing a regulator in Habitat 4's atmospheric processor. The Earth hung in the sky like a blue marble someone had polished by hand. I thought about my teacher. I wondered if she ever left the ground.
The broadcast I saw? It was the Progenitor — or so they tell me. The date was either 2022 or 2023. I've heard both. I don't know which is true. I know what I saw, not what year it was.
II. DXN Relay Operator — Orbital Station Clarke, Jupiter Transit Lane
Joaquin Reyes | Interviewed 21.07.50
I didn't see the launch. I didn't see any launch. I was born in 2035, which makes me part of the first generation that grew up assuming space travel was normal. My grandfather could remember when a trip to Mars was a one-way suicide mission. To me, it was a four-day CNVR flight with questionable meal options.
People ask me when I knew I'd leave Earth. I tell them: I never decided. The decision was made before I was born. The infrastructure existed. The routes existed. The economy existed. All I had to do was buy a ticket.
That sounds cold. I don't mean it cold. I mean it as a fact: we inherited a civilisation that had already done the hard part. My grandfather spent his whole life watching rockets explode on television. I spent my twenties rerouting data packets between Jupiter and the Belt.
The first time I saw Earth from orbit, I cried. I didn't expect to. It's not like I hadn't seen the pictures. But pictures don't prepare you for the real thing — the thinness of the atmosphere, the fragility of it, the way you can cover the entire planet with your thumb and think: that's everyone. That's every war, every poem, every birth, every grave. Under my thumb.
I'm not religious. But that moment was the closest I've come.
III. Architect — OASIS Mons Expansion Programme, Mars
Dr. Elian Voss (no relation to Helena Voss) | Interviewed 09.02.49
I decided to leave Earth when I was twenty-two, but I didn't admit it to myself until I was twenty-seven.
The Progenitor flight happened when I was in university. I remember the news coverage. I remember a talking head saying: "This changes nothing." I remember thinking: you're wrong, but I can't prove it yet.
I took a degree in structural engineering. I told myself it was about buildings. It wasn't. It was about habitats. It was about learning how to enclose a human-shaped volume of air in an environment that wants to kill you. That's not architecture — that's survival, made elegant.
I applied to the OASIS Mons programme three times. The first two, I was rejected. The third, I was accepted. The difference? I stopped talking about what I wanted to build and started showing them I could build it.
I've been on Mars for eleven years. The soil is toxic. The atmosphere is poison. The temperature will kill you in seconds. And I have never been happier.
The Progenitor launch year? I remember it as 2022. I've seen sources that say 2023. I don't know which is right. Memory is not a recording. It's a story we tell ourselves until we believe it.
IV. Retired Engineer — Early CNVR Prototype Division
Name and affiliation redacted per interviewee's request | Interviewed 02.12.51
I was in the room when they first ran the numbers.
I wasn't supposed to be. I was junior staff, barely three years out of university. But my supervisor was out sick and the meeting couldn't wait, so I went in with his notes and pretended I knew what I was talking about.
The room was small. Four people. A whiteboard covered in equations I could only half follow. The lead engineer — I won't name him — kept erasing and rewriting the same term. The COSMIC equations didn't converge. They refused to converge. Every time we thought we had it, the numbers drifted.
Someone said: "This shouldn't work."
Someone else said: "It doesn't work. We just haven't figured out why it doesn't work yet."
The lead engineer erased the board one last time. He wrote a single number. He said: "If this is right, we can get to Mars in four days."
The room was quiet.
I asked: "What's the number?"
He looked at me. "I don't know yet. But it's in there. We just have to find it."
They found it. Not that day. Not that year. But they found it. And when the Progenitor lifted without a sound, I was watching the feed in a control room with the same four people from that tiny meeting room. Nobody said anything. We just watched.
The flight lasted, depending on who you ask, somewhere between two minutes and three. I was there. I can tell you: it was longer than the news said. It was shorter than we wanted. It was exactly as long as it needed to be.
V. Compiler's Note
Several interviewees referenced the Progenitor launch as a formative memory. The recorded launch years vary: 2022 (Voss), 2022 or 2023 (Technician), 2022 or 2023 or earlier (Reyes was not yet born). The engineer, who was present, declined to specify a year.
The discrepancy has not been resolved. This may reflect the unreliability of human memory, the diffusion of a single event across multiple cultural narratives, or a genuine ambiguity in the historical record. The compiler takes no position.
This story is part of the A World Beyond Here & Now anthology.