Arrival

Dear Mom,

It's been six months since I last talked with you. I know I've been away from home before, but this time it's different. We won't see each other any more. I'm too far out in space to be reached, but I'm told that I can send a data stream back to let people know how things are going back on Terra Prime. I've reached my post on the edge of the Universe.

There isn't much here, but I'll be going on scouting missions and be interacting with people in the Forgotten Colonies. It's funny, as much as people back home talk about this place like it's some mythical land where there are rivers of milk and honey flowing, it's more like those places people could reach by taking a trip to the edges of the system. Except here, it doesn't stop. There is no center, there is only one all encompassing expansive space where those places on the edges of the systems that we know dot the solar plane.

My post is on a desert planet converted to suit human needs, though it's plain to see the dust as it blows over this place. It leaves a thin layer of soot that needs to be cleaned off of everything each cycle. Sometimes I let it pile up and don't think about it. Mostly because there's also nothing but time here. I usually let the soot pile until the day before I know there's an inspection. They're never a surprise. No one wants to be here. No one wants to come here. Everything is out of the way. The only benefit is that the post is so close to Ecumenopolis. That's where I told you I wanted to live someday.

I haven't been able to muster up the time to spend to putting in for a transfer to there. The paperwork is unfathomably long. I've already got my Academy Correspondence Courses to deal with for another year. That'll be when they boot me off this rock to another one if I can't pick up a position in the private sector in Ecumenopolis.

I hate to be brief, but there's plenty of unpacking to do, as well as tidying up after the last guy who was here while I was on furlough. Apparently, he didn't bother cleaning the soot off anything so the outpost looks like just another set of dunes, save for the broadcast antennae protruding from them.

I know I was told that I can't go home, that the wormhole had closed too tight to send matter through, but maybe someday I will make it back home to see you. I know you'll be by my side in spirit, even if that's just another myth.

Your Loving Son,
Tomaro