The departure terminal smells of recycled air and goodbye. Seven billion people live below, and you are choosing to become no one's neighbor.
They told you the journey takes fourteen months. They didn't tell you about the silence. Not quiet -- silence. The kind that has weight, that presses against eardrums evolved for birdsong and traffic and the sound of someone else breathing in the next room.
You packed three photographs. You left behind eleven thousand.
Name. Origin city. Reason for leaving. The form doesn't have a field for "everything I'm afraid of." It should.
"I dream about rain every night. There is no rain where we're going."
Month four. The ship hums at a frequency that becomes part of your skeleton. You stop hearing it. You become it.
"My daughter asked me what blue sky looks like. I couldn't remember."
The viewport shows nothing. Not darkness -- nothing. The human eye was never meant to see this far from a sun. Your brain invents stars where there are none, because it refuses to accept void.
"They say you get used to the recycled air. You don't. You just forget what real air tasted like."
Someone starts a garden in hydroponics bay C. They grow basil. The smell travels through the ventilation and for thirty seconds, the ship smells like Earth. People cry in the corridors. No one talks about it.
"I volunteered. I need you to know that. No one made me leave. I chose this. I chose this. I chose this."
The ochre landscape unfolds beneath the ship like a wound opening. This is where you will die. This is where your children will be born. Both things are true at the same time.
First breath of filtered Martian air: cold iron and something else. Something that has no name because no human tongue has ever needed to describe it.
The hab modules look nothing like the brochures. Smaller. Dimmer. But the window faces east, and you will learn a new sunrise.
"The first generation mourns. The second generation adapts. The third generation forgets. That's how worlds are made."
Someone plants the basil again. It grows differently here -- shorter, broader leaves. It doesn't taste like Earth basil. It tastes like Mars basil. This is how things begin.
Footprints in rust-colored dust. No wind to erase them. They will be here longer than you.