I have an extra 24 hour period on after the rest of the crew has gone to cryosleep to make sure they all go off to dreamland without a hitch. So far I’ve listened to everyone’s playlists, read most of their messages home (which won’t reach home for another three weeks), and am going through the ship’s audio library listening to the sounds of an Earth I never knew.
My last task, before I climb into my icy popsicle tube, is to choose a sound which will wake us all when we reach Titan. As with everything on this voyage, there’s a list of chirpy suggestions from SpaceX’s psychology team.
The wake-up call should be from the natural world, within a certain hertz range and, if a human voice, female. Also acceptable are wind instruments and sounds like rain on leaves. These, apparently, all prime the brain for a sense of calm optimism and positivity.
There’s a four-note song by some bird I’ve never heard of – I’ve played it for the last two hours as I jogged through the ship, giving my legs (which evolved for something completely different) a last chance to perform their function. It’s a delightful sound: tiny, delicate, fragile, hopeful. My heart, which also evolved for something other than this, leaps every time the song sounds.
My brain feels my leaping heart and reminds me that it’s just a file, captured more than a century ago, and that even then the bird was a prisoner in some collection. My brain seems to have been evolved for exactly this task.
Actually, I failed the psych battery. I’m only on the mission because someone else was injured. I should be back on Earth, boiling and fighting for water, eking out a living in the Scorch and looking hopefully at the sky for a message that says, Yes, come. Come and start again. Start over. Do better this time.
But instead I’m here, listening to the song of a dead bird, watching the sleep of a half-dead crew, moving through space from a dying planet to a new home.
I am one of the lucky twelve who have been chosen to see the morning of Humanity 2.0. (This was what the same psychologists came up with as the mission’s motto. It followed the name of the ship: Aurora).
The President shook our hands and said things about hope and anticipation and I really thought hard about them as I turned off the life support to the cryo-units. Poor President, in his bunker, governing no one, letting the burning night close in on him and twelve billion fevered souls.
Alone here, I will freeze, rather than burn, when the ship’s main life support switches off in a few hours. There are no mornings in space. No birds, no song, and no night. There’s no new world that we will ruin, and only the hope that we will all go to sleep, and that after us, some time, birds will once again sing.
(24 mins)
The Craft of Writing 
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