Nova Arcis C 11
The Chronicler’s Choice
The picture from Gensher Kissinger’s interview with Geen Grissom—the old, worn photograph of the Pepelinos family, a tangible piece of a distant world held in the hand of a man who had just crossed the void—lingered in the 3D-media-stream. It was a perfect, beautiful moment: the triumph of technology and the simple, enduring power of human connection, all captured in a single frame a symbol of a promise kept across four light-years, before it gently faded.
Cokas Bluna and LYRA.ai stood for a moment longer before the immense, silent form of the Elara Homeland. The ship, now bathed in the soft, golden light of the museum, seemed to hold the echoes of all the stories they had just told—the quiet brilliance of Elara Kovacycy, the audacious hope of the first settlers, and the thrilling return of the first FTL crew.
Cokas let out a long, slow breath, a sound of deep, professional satisfaction. “That’s the moment,” he said, his voice a low, reflective murmur. “Right there. The instant Geen Grissom hands him that photograph. That is the precise, historical moment when the tyranny of light-speed was truly broken for information. Not just for travel, but for us. For OCN.”
LYRA.ai, her own studies of this period providing the synthesis, continued the thought. “Before that moment, Cokas, news could only travel as fast as a radio wave. The story of an event would arrive years after the event itself. After that moment, news could travel at the speed of a ship. Four light-years in less than four years. It was not instantaneous, not by our modern standards. But it was a revolutionary leap. It was the birth of the ‘news as cargo’ business concept.”
“It was the birth of the first ‘news faster than light’ era,” Cokas agreed, a profound admiration for the journalist in his voice. “And you can see it on Gensher Kissinger’s face in that old recording. He wasn’t just a reporter getting a scoop. He was a witness to a paradigm shift. He understood that a conversation could now be held between star systems, albeit a very, very slow one. He realized the story of humanity was no longer bound to a single star system. The narrative had just gone interstellar.”
He turned from the Elara Homeland, beginning a slow walk away from the exhibit, his posture that of a man concluding a long and satisfying chapter of his chronicle. LYRA fell into step beside him, their journey through the museum, and through history, moving forward.
“And that realization,” Cokas continued, “that profound, career-defining moment, it presented him with a choice. He had the greatest story in a thousand years. He could have returned to Earth or the inner planets. He would have been celebrated, famous, his future secure. He could have become the most respected voice in the Sol system.”
“But the archives show he did not,” LYRA interjected gently, guiding the narrative to its inevitable conclusion.
“No,” Cokas said, shaking his head slowly. “He didn’t. Because Gensher Kissinger understood a fundamental truth of his profession: the real story is never in the centre. It’s on the edge. He knew his life’s work was no longer in the comfortable, established world of the Sol system, a place that would now only receive echoes of the future. He knew he had to follow the story to its source.”
Their walk had brought them to the end of the “Dawn of FTL” exhibit. Ahead lay a new gallery, its entrance marked by a simple, elegant title: “A New Earth: The Founding of the Republic of Proxima.”
“And so,” Cokas said, his voice now a warm, respectful tribute to the man whose journey they had followed for the last hour of their broadcast, “the chronicler made his choice. He left his old life behind. He booked passage on this very ship,” he gave a final, parting glance back at the Elara Homeland, “and made the great journey himself. He followed the echoes back to their source. He went to Amara.”
LYRA.ai provided the final piece of the historical puzzle, her voice precise and curatorial. “Gensher Kissinger spent the next three decades of his life on Proxima B. He did not become a politician or a colonist in the traditional sense. He remained what he had always been: a witness. He founded the ‘Proxima Echo,’ a physical newspaper, a tangible record of their new lives, a way for a small, isolated community to tell its own story to itself, and eventually, to the stars.”
“He became the voice and the conscience of humanity’s first extrasolar home,” Cokas concluded, his admiration for the man clear and undisguised. “He documented their triumphs and their struggles. The dust storms, the challenges of adapting to an alien biosphere, the quiet, everyday moments of building a new society from scratch. He understood that the grand, dramatic story of the journey was over. Now, the harder, slower, and more important story of actually living there had begun.”
He paused at the threshold of the new exhibit, looking back one last time at the hall of ships and technological marvels they were leaving behind. “He was a man who chose to live his life four years out of sync with the rest of humanity, just so he could be there to write the first draft of our future.”
He turned back to the camera, a final, warm invitation in his eyes. “For our final segment in this part of our journey, we present the last of the restored Kissinger files. Not a story of high-speed travel or grand discoveries, but a quiet, unvarnished look at the hard, patient, and deeply human work of planting a garden on another world.”
The giant museum around them dissolved, replaced by the grainy, evocative opening of Kissinger’s last known report: a shot of a red, alien sky, the sound of a strange wind, and the quiet, determined faces of people trying to make a home in the dust and dreams of a new Earth.