Naomi glanced at the audience. They’d all heard of Cavendish, of course, but it’d been a nebulous thing, still out of reach. With that artwork, they could imagine themselves standing on the shore. Free from a filter mask, from haze in the sky from smog or fire. It looked lush, primordial—like Earth back in the Jurassic era, before humans had come along to interfere.

The projection blinked to show our solar system, then Earth, rotating gently in a near mirror image to Cavendish, a sickly older sibling. Valerie gave the audience time to take in the differences between the worlds before zooming back out to a view of both Earth and Mars.

“Until relatively recently, we never thought we’d actually be able to journey to our neighbour stars and planets. Even Alpha Centauri seemed decades away. But with Hawthorne and NASA working together to harness negative energy and demonstrating that the Alcubierre drive is a workable concept, the universe is at our fingertips.”

Whispers rustled around the room, less aggressive than before. Another flick of Valerie’s manicured nails and the ceiling showed the warp ring around Mars, still under construction. The materials had been mined from Mars or nearby asteroids, built in situ on the planet by Hawthorne robots, then ferried up to the construction hub.

“I’m sure most of you here have been following the reports,” Valerie continued. “The construction of our Atalanta interstellar spacecraft is ahead of schedule. Successful jumps of unmanned probes elsewhere in the solar system, and then out to Ran once we accurately calculated where we’d want a spaceship to appear on the other end of the jump. We’ve proved we can bring back biomatter from Cavendish, and we have successfully transported Earth specimens through the ring and back again.”

Valerie neglected to mention that the first rounds of rats under Hawthorne supervision also returned dead as doornails. Like Laika, who overheated to death above the Earth in the 1960s, another stepping stone in the space race. The plants hadn’t fared much better. The soil and seeds from Cavendish had arrived still viable—a highlight of Naomi’s career a few years ago, when she’d last worked at Hawthorne.

Yet they would need Earth plants to survive on Cavendish as it had no food crops. Every experiment they conducted with soil and light that mirrored Cavendish levels had failed. For months, the seedling kept dying.

Fortunately, following the changes in gene expression patterns over the time it took the last round of seedlings to die had allowed Dr. Dennis Lee to come up with a series of modifications to their developmental pathways. These accounted for the dimmer light and differences in iron concentrations and pH in the Cavendish soil. It was only the last few tests that had proved promising, so hopefully once they landed on the tantalising, lush, untapped world, they wouldn’t slowly starve to death.