I was eight years old and that three-page article caught my imagination like a flame. Ten to twenty years’ time, they wrote. A mere ten to twenty years. We could travel to other planets in the time it took to cross the city. With the right technology we might even travel to far-reaching solar systems and galaxies. Ever since I’d first learned about the real constraints of space travel – muscle and bone loss, one-way trips to other worlds, the dangers of breaking Earth’s atmosphere at the peak of what were essentially huge bombs – I’d been filled with melancholy. Why couldn’t we travel to the stars? All the stories I’d read made it seem easy. In those fictional worlds all problems were solved. Part of the reason the memory of that day was so arresting is because I’d finally read a factual article about space travel that was optimistic about exploring the cosmos. There would be a man or woman on Mars, providing the WiSP drive worked. Maybe even a colony.

I read other articles in Space and Time that summer, but nothing stuck like the knowledge that the WiSP might exist. What I didn’t know, but half guessed in my excitement, was that an article on the drive meant it was close to reality. They were preparing the world, step by step. And it would happen in my lifetime.

At first, like any child dreamer, I wanted to go. I scoured the zone for details of how to be an astronaut. Spent hours hunched over my keyboard when I should have been in bed, or doing homework. But it was no good. I was a small child, thin, with bad eyesight and worse asthma. Too much late-night reading, my dad said. The air wasn’t good, too polluted after the wars. My mum said I could always get corrective surgery as an adult, and my teenage years might take care of the rest. I lived in hope until I reached sixteen. Nothing had changed. I still needed glasses, I was still bamboo-thin, and I still used a respirator on the hottest nights. I wasn’t sporty, much preferring to solve coding than be on the football field. So that was it. I still had an interest in all things interstellar, but I wasn’t going to the stars. Maybe I could find another way.

I studied a bit of astrophysics in college and didn’t do badly, but followed my heart and went into media and journalism at uni. I met and fell in love with Juanita during my second year. She was reading geology to keep her parents happy while she lied about her love of twentieth-century performance poetry. She was small and dark and Cuban, everything I loved. She would come to the flat I shared with two friends to cook us spicy tofu with vegetable rice. I kept my hand in by joining the ______ society while I studied, and also kept a close eye on what was going on with the WiSP. When I graduated it had fallen behind schedule, so society gossip went. The drive was the stuff of bad jokes and cryptic discussions. No one really believed it would happen.