In The Vanguard by Chloe Smith
When I’m back from a vanguard run, they all say they can’t understand me. My neighbors, my family, my lover, they all ask, how do you do it? The weeks you spend cut off from the sound of other voices, bereft of any reassuring human touch—how can you make it through? How can you stand the weight of isolation, amid an expanse so vast it defies both light and imagination?
I can’t tell them that time means little, even here, in the corridors and hive-like cabins we call home. In this flying monster of a ship, days are cycles of programmed light and dark, matching the rotation of a planet we left long ago. Weeks are tallies of numbers based on human digits. In my shipsuit, time is measured only in my heartbeats, and those I can barely feel.
As for the emptiness, it’s freeing. When I leave the hulking ark behind, I’m no longer livestock in transit. My useless, fragile meat-body is paralyzed, fluid-packed and shielded at the heart of my shipsuit’s carapace. My mind, though, is alive and exultant.
Vanguard fliers are less than motes within the vast abyss, the tiny forms of our shipsuits half rocket and half mech. On our backs, though, we carry mighty drives, capable of rending space and skipping across distances like a needle tucking cloth. Each time I align the jump ignition sequence, I feel the shipsuit respond to my intention, its answer a thrum of power I can hardly comprehend. It opens a rift in space, and I slip through.
My neighbors say, how can you bear it? Stuffed into a shell like that, constantly looking out into nothing, how can you even choose between claustrophobia and agoraphobia?
I can’t explain how that doesn’t matter. In the shipsuit, my body isn’t my body; it’s just an organ among my other innards. My neurons fire as if they’re laid along the surface of my hull, as I accelerate through systems on the far side of nowhere. I see in all directions, through my turret sensors, which register so much more, on so many more frequencies than human eyes.
Once I reach a new system, I am off, chasing the small planets and dusty moons that our ancestors named “Goldilocks,” preparing to dive into gravity wells. I have freedom here, amid the inhospitable rocks and satellites.
My parents say, the risks you have to take frighten us. It’s terrible, this fate, that we must send our children out to try new worlds. If only drones could make the jumps. If only they could bring back human judgement, along with mineral and gas and water samples. But we’re so proud of what you do for all of us.
I don’t tell them that I think it doesn’t really matter. The vanguard was created so that the search for habitable worlds didn’t run aground on machine misunderstanding. A robot can assess atmosphere and gravity, can read poisons and temperatures incompatible with human life, but it can’t quickly tell what feels like home. That requires more input than a drone can hold in its memory, not one built to cross interstellar distances and return. A human will feel, and that feeling is as much a part of the data I collect as the scrapings of dirt, the pH samples, and exobiology clippings that my shipsuit holds.
The problem is, by the time I’ve shot across yet another system and dived down another gravity well, unfolding my struts to take the impact of my landing, reaching out my mechanical arms to harvest evidence of this new world, I’m not sure I feel like a human anymore. I’m more comfortable in the titanium and ceramic of my shipsuit than I am in my own skin.
There’s another problem, which I think of every time I return to the echoing innards of the generation ship, the dull gazes of my family and my neighbors. They are spider-limbed wraiths who push themselves through the routines that keep something we call humanity alive. That problem is, I’m not sure we any of us know what home feels like anymore.
My lover crouches in our shared birth, sunken eyed and insistent. They say, I hate that you have to be gone so much. I just hope you find New Earth soon.
I want to tell them I hope I never will, that I’ll fly free across the vast black forever. I want to tell them that all our exodus crew must don shipsuits and join the vanguard.
I don’t know how I can make them hear that truth. I realize that now I’m the one afraid of the unknown ahead. I’m afraid of revealing myself, of losing the last shreds of understanding and familiarity forever, even as I chafe against the anxious questions and the atrophied arms that try to hold me tight.
I have to try to make them understand, though. It’s what we all must do: evolve forward or fade away.
END
Chloe Smith
Chloe Smith's fiction has appeared in Haven Speculative Fiction and Bourbon Penn, among other places. She is a graduate of Your Personal Odyssey 2024 and the Clarion Writers Workshop 2025. She lives in California, and when she's not writing, she works as a middle school teacher librarian.