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Chapter 1
Chapter 1: The Pitch
The recruiter wore a charcoal suit that probably cost more than George Pettersen's monthly pension. He sat across the kitchen table in George's Anchorage bungalow, hands folded, projecting the calm patience of a man who had delivered this speech ten thousand times and still believed every word of it.
"Seventy-three isn't old anymore, Mr. Pettersen. Not the way it used to be."
"Feels old," George said. He shifted in his chair, and his left hip announced itself with the grinding click it had developed sometime after his seventieth birthday. The kitchen smelled like reheated coffee and the faint chemical sweetness of the countertop cleaner he'd started buying because Karen had always bought it, and stopping felt like another small surrender.
"That's exactly my point." The recruiter—his name was Lund, Specialist First Class Lund, Terran Expeditionary Corps—tapped the tablet between them. A holographic model bloomed above the screen: a human body, idealized, rotating slowly. Male, mid-twenties, the kind of physique that belonged on a recruiting poster. Which, George supposed, was precisely what this was. "What I'm offering you isn't a second chance at youth. It's a second chance at purpose."
George looked at the spinning body. Then he looked past it, through the kitchen window, at the November darkness pressing against the glass. Anchorage in November. Seventeen hours of night. He'd lived through sixty-eight Anchorage Novembers, minus the five years he and Karen had spent in Seattle when the kids were small, and every year the darkness got heavier.
"Tell me again about the body," he said.
Lund leaned forward. "Vat-grown from your own genetic template, with targeted enhancements. You'll be faster, stronger, more resilient than you were at twenty-five. Nanotechnology integrated at the cellular level—accelerated healing, enhanced sensory processing, a neural implant suite for communication and tactical data. The body is designed for survival on hostile colony worlds."
"And you want me in it."
"We want experienced minds in young bodies. That's the whole program, Mr. Pettersen. The Colonial Defense Initiative isn't looking for eighteen-year-olds who think they're immortal. We're looking for people who've lived long enough to know what's worth fighting for."
George turned his coffee mug in his hands. It was the blue one, the one with the hairline crack running up from the base that Karen had said made it "characterful" rather than broken. He'd been a structural engineer for forty-one years. He'd designed bridges that carried thousands of people every day. He'd designed the reinforced foundations for the Anchorage Seismic Resilience Center. He'd built things that would outlast him by centuries.
And then Karen had died—pancreatic cancer, fast and merciless despite every medical advance of the last fifty years—and the things he'd built started to feel like monuments to a life that was already over.
"The contract is ten years," Lund continued. "After which you're free to return to Earth in your new body, settle on a colony world, or re-enlist. Full pension, full benefits, full citizenship rights wherever humanity has a presence."
"And during those ten years?"
"You'll defend humanity's colonial settlements on the frontier. I won't pretend it's safe. The galaxy is more crowded than Earth's governments have publicly acknowledged. There are other species out there, and some of them want the same real estate we do."
George set the mug down. "How many species?"
Lund paused—the first crack in his polished delivery. "That information is classified until you're through processing. But I can tell you this: we need people like you, Mr. Pettersen. Engineers. Problem-solvers. People who understand how things are built and how they come apart."
The house was quiet. It was always quiet now. His daughter Lise called every Sunday from Portland, and his son Erik called every other Wednesday from Fairbanks, and between those calls the house filled up with silence like water rising in a basement.
"I need to think about it," George said.
But he already knew.
---
He told Lise first because she was the one who would take it hardest. He drove down to Portland on a Tuesday, which should have been his first warning that something was off—George Pettersen did not make spontaneous Tuesday road trips—and found her in the small veterinary clinic she ran on Hawthorne Boulevard, elbow-deep in the annual checkup of a deeply unhappy Maine Coon.
"You're what?" she said, still holding the cat.
"I'm enlisting. The Terran Expeditionary Corps."
The cat yowled. Lise set it gently back in its carrier, stripped off her gloves, and turned to face him with the expression she'd inherited from her mother—the one that said she was simultaneously furious and trying very hard not to cry.
"Dad. You're seventy-three."
"That's sort of the point."
He explained the program as best he could. The new body. The ten-year contract. The frontier colonies. Lise listened with her arms crossed, and when he finished she said, "This is because of Mom."
"It's because of a lot of things."
"You're running away."
"Maybe." He reached out and took her hand. Her fingers were still warm from the examination gloves. "But I'm also running toward something. I haven't been able to say that in two years."
Lise cried. George held her and felt the familiar ache of being a parent who was about to cause pain he couldn't prevent. Then she pulled back, wiped her eyes, and said, "You'd better come back."
"Ten years. Then I'll be on your doorstep with a body that can actually keep up with your hiking trips."
She almost smiled. Almost.
Erik took it differently. Erik had always been the pragmatic one, the one who'd inherited George's engineering mind if not his career. He worked pipeline maintenance in the interior, and when George called him, Erik listened in silence for a long time and then said, "Good."
"Good?"
"You've been dying by inches since Mom passed, Dad. At least this way you're choosing something."
George hung up and sat in his truck in the clinic parking lot and watched the Portland rain streak down the windshield and thought: choosing something. Yes. That was exactly it.
---
Processing took three weeks. George reported to a facility in Juneau that looked like a hospital crossed with a military base, all white corridors and uniformed personnel and the persistent hum of equipment he couldn't identify. They ran every test imaginable on his old body—blood, bone density, neural mapping, psychological evaluation, a full genomic workup that took two days—and then they put him under.
The last thing he saw before the anesthetic took him was a ceiling tile with a small water stain in one corner, and the structural engineer in him thought: that's going to spread if they don't fix the membrane above it.
Then he was gone.
---
Waking up was the strangest experience of George Pettersen's life, and he'd once been inside a parking structure during a 7.1 earthquake.
The first thing he noticed was that nothing hurt. He'd lived with background pain for so long—the hip, the knees, the persistent ache in his lower back from a fall off a scaffold in 2038—that its absence was more shocking than any new sensation could have been. It was like stepping out of a room where a television had been playing static for twenty years and suddenly hearing silence.
The second thing he noticed was his hands. He held them up in front of his face and they were his hands—the same proportions, the same slightly crooked left ring finger—but smoother, stronger, the skin taut over muscle and tendon in a way he hadn't seen since his thirties. He flexed them and felt the response ripple up through his forearms with a precision that made his old body feel like it had been operating on a three-second delay.
The third thing he noticed was the voice.
Not a voice, exactly. More like a presence at the edge of his awareness, a gentle informational pressure that resolved into text when he focused on it:
SYSTEM STATUS: ALL NOMINAL
NEURAL INTEGRATION: 97.3%
NANOTECH SUITE: ACTIVE
WELCOME, PRIVATE PETTERSEN.
"Jesus Christ," George said, and his voice was deeper than he remembered, steadier, coming from a chest that felt like it could power a bellows.
A medic appeared at his bedside—young, brisk, professionally cheerful. "How are we feeling, Private?"
"Like I'm wearing someone else."
The medic smiled as if he'd heard that exact response a thousand times. "That's normal. Give it a few days. The neural integration is already at ninety-seven percent—that's excellent for your cohort. You'll feel like yourself soon enough."
But George wasn't sure about that. He swung his legs off the bed and stood up and the floor was too far away—he was taller, he realized, by maybe two inches—and his balance was too good, his proprioception too sharp. Every surface in the room registered with crystalline clarity: the grain of the floor tiles, the weave of the medic's uniform, the faint vibration of the station's life-support systems thrumming through the walls.
Station. He was on a station. Orbiting Barnard's Star. Six light-years from Anchorage, from Lise, from Erik, from Karen's grave in the Angelus Memorial Park with its view of the Chugach Mountains.
George Pettersen looked down at his new body—at the stranger's skin he now inhabited—and thought: well, you chose something. Now live with it.
