The last time Dr. Anesthesia Graves had been invited to a major launch, she had been young enough to believe in things like progress.

  Not in the general sense—Graves had never been naive—but in the specific, personal way that makes people throw their whole life into something, clawing forward with the certainty that they are building something real, something important, something that will change things.

  That had been decades ago.

  Now, she was standing on the VIP observation deck at Cape Canaveral, sipping aggressively mediocre coffee from a NASA-branded thermos and contemplating the existential weight of aging in a field where the new wunderkinds kept getting younger.

  She wasn’t old. Not yet. But she was older. Her hair, once jet-black, now had a few strands of silver threaded through it, more noticeable under the harsh Florida sun. Her freakish height had finally come back to bite her in the form of lower back pain, and she was increasingly aware of the quiet indignities of a body that no longer quite bounced back the way it used to.

  And yet, she was here. Not for nostalgia. Not for pride. But because Samson had invited her.

  "I’d like you to see something," he had said. "I think you’ll like it."

  Which was a polite way of saying, I’m doing something insane again, and I want you to be here when it happens.

  So here she was. Watching. Waiting.

  A few meters away, journalists, engineers, and government representatives buzzed around, all pretending they weren’t eavesdropping on the conversation happening between the oldest woman in the world’s most advanced AI’s contact list and the AI himself.

  Samson was next to her. Not in a humanoid body—not today. There were too many cameras, too many onlookers waiting to read meaning into every flicker of his LED display. Instead, he was present in the form of a polished tablet resting on the railing beside her, his voice coming through a dedicated, private channel in her earpiece.

  "Leapfrog relays," he was saying. "That’s what I’m calling them."

  Graves huffed. "That better not be a metaphor for me," she muttered, shifting her weight, trying to find a stance that didn’t make her spine feel like it was held together by paperclips and resentment.

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  Samson made a sound that, if he were human, would have been a quiet chuckle. "No, Graves. It’s a metaphor for the future."

  "God, you’re insufferable," she sighed, but there was no bite behind it.

  She looked back out toward the launch pad. The rocket standing there wasn’t the biggest she had ever seen. Not the most impressive. But it was his, and that made it different.

  "The problem," Samson continued, "is that human bodies are incredibly bad at space travel. You’re squishy. You require an enormous amount of resource support. And you—collectively—have a terrible habit of wanting to come back in one piece."

  "Yeah, thanks for that," Graves muttered.

  "So we compromise," Samson went on, unbothered. "If a human needs to be out there, they need somewhere to go. Right now, that means costly, limited stations. But I can work in tandem with global space programs to create something better—relay points, built by AI, for AI. No life support. No human redundancies. Just pure function."

  Graves exhaled slowly. "And the point?"

  "To build." Samson’s voice was steady, but there was something underneath it, something even she couldn’t quite pin down. "To give you somewhere to aim at. To give you refueling points. Repair stations. Maybe see if we can build hydroponic stations around the sun, soak up all that light so the astronauts of the future can get fresh-ish lettuce. A network that can sustain itself, expand itself. You don’t need to carry all your resources onboard if there's a bunch of buoys along the way to stop at, like convenience stores, and that opens up a lot of possibilities. Sure, it might be slower than FTL, but we're working within what physics will allow us. And I haven't fixed that problem. Yet."

  Graves let that settle. She had always wondered what he would do when left alone with enough time and resources. What direction he would take. Now she knew.

  "Who knows? Maybe a thousand, two thousand years from now, we could have people in orbit around Jupiter's moons. Maybe colonies. Maybe even as far out as Pluto, if we all play our cards right," Samson offered, drawing Graves' eyes upwards towards the beautiful blue sky. The moon hung overhead in the daylight, looming like a mezuzah.

  "Imagine that," Graves snorted. "People living on Pluto."

  It was quiet again, for another minute or two.

  "You know," Samson added, almost casually, "I could probably get you into space if you wanted."

  Graves arched a brow.

  "Call in a favor," he said. "Maybe even just get you on the Vomit Comet. You’d like it."

  Graves smirked, shaking her head. "No, I wouldn’t."

  "You might."

  "Samson," she said, tilting her head toward the screen, "I like gravity."

  Samson hummed thoughtfully. "That is an increasingly unpopular opinion."

  "Yeah, well. Guess I’m a dinosaur."

  There was a pause, filled only by the distant murmur of engineers and the static-laden crackle of radio chatter.

  "You’ll still watch, though?" Samson asked, almost too casual.

  Graves glanced back at the rocket. The future, standing there on the pad, waiting to rise.

  She exhaled through her nose.

  "Yeah," she muttered. "I’ll watch."

  And when the countdown began—when the engines ignited and the ground trembled and the whole world held its breath—she did.

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