He scrambles to his feet and runs to where she stands, facing the wall. Santi stares up at the giant image, trying to understand what he’s seeing. A man and a woman in loose blue jumpsuits, tied up in tubes and wires, their eyes closed. He thinks he’s looking at a still picture until he sees a green light moving infinitesimally along a small black screen. Over the minute and a half that he and Thora stand silent, it draws a crawling peak and subsides. A heart monitor in slow motion. In a flash of insight, he understands the humming sound: breathing, slowed down a hundredfold.

The man’s hair is long, his beard untrimmed. The tips of the woman’s hair are dyed blue. Santi’s eyes flicker across the image, landing on the tattoo of a constellation on the woman’s wrist.

“I don’t understand,” Thora whispers.

Santi looks into her eyes. “Thora,” he says. “That’s us. That’s where we really are.”

Thora stares at him in desperation. “Where?”

Santi steps back, looking for the final piece. A glass case under the video wall. He and Thora head for it at the same time. He leans over to see a model spacecraft, the top cut away so they can look inside. Fuel tanks, oxygen, water, supplies. And two tiny figures in separate compartments, the simulacra of the people on the screen.

He becomes aware of a sound, a ticking like an irregular clock. It hypnotizes him until he realizes it’s Thora, tapping a silver plaque on the front of the case. Peregrine, it says. Below is a smaller version of the star map on the ceiling. Santi traces a course from Earth to an exoplanet orbiting Proxima Centauri.

For a long time, Thora doesn’t speak. Finally, she looks up at him. “You’re telling me we’ve spent lifetime after lifetime struggling and striving and longing to go to the stars, and we’re already fucking there?”

It’s such a Thora response that he laughs aloud. His laugh breaks through some wall in her. She laughs too, throwing her head back. “Santi, this is absurd. How could we—we can’t be . . .” She’s faltering, his endlessly argumentative Thora finally running out of words. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“It does.” Santi taps the plaque. “Remember his name?”

Thora traces the letters. “Peregrine,” she says softly. She straightens up, turns it into a summons. “Peregrine!”

He walks in as if he has been waiting outside. As the man in the blue coat limps toward them, Santi meets his eyes. Sad eyes, anxious eyes, like someone carrying a great burden.

“This is you?” Santi asks, pointing to the model ship in the glass case.

“Yes.” Peregrine looks at Thora, his expression flickering from awe to tenderness to grief.

“He’s an interface,” Thora says. “Between us and the ship.”