22 EPILOGUE

Epilogue Part One TRANSMISSION November 13, 2043 From: Dr. Chang Kowalski, PhD Department of Lunar Science National Aeronautics and Space Administration Jet Propulsion Laboratory Pasadena, CA To: Dashiell Gibson Subject: Re: Can you take a look at this? Dash! Just took a look at the equations you sent me. Holy cow! I knew you were smart, kiddo, but this is off the charts. We're talking game-changing stuff here. Huge implications for humanity. To be honest, some of this is even a bit beyond me, so I guess it's a good thing you sent it to Dr. Brahmaputra-Marquez too. Together, we've been able to analyze it all, and she's in agreement with me that this is Einstein-quality work. We have to talk about this ASAP. I'm dying to know how you even came up with it. I just tried to call you, but didn't reach you. I'm betting you're surfing. Or maybe chasing girls. Anyhow, genius, call me IMMEDIATELY when you get this. Chang

Epilogue Part Two FAR-FLUNG DESTINATION Earth year 2075 Bosco day 1 The planet is bigger than I expected. I am used to looking at earth from space, and while the earth is certainly not small, it is significantly smaller than this. This planet's circumference is about 50 percent larger than earth's, which means there's a lot more planet. And nearly the entire surface appears to be water. There is some land, most likely formed in similar ways to the land on earth: by volcanic eruptions and the smashing together of continental plates. This planet, like earth, has a dynamic surface. However, the land masses are dwarfed by the oceans, and they are few and far between. Even the biggest mass, one

the size of North America, looks puny compared to the enormous blue sea around it. It's no wonder that intelligent life here stayed in the oceans. I can't believe, after all this time, that I am finally here. This has been my whole life's work, figuring out how to think myself here. It was evident, right after I returned to earth from MBA, that the human space program was never going to get me this far. Not in my lifetime anyway. Even colonizing our own moon was far more difficult than we'd hoped. It was years until NASA could even get MBA re-established, and five times that before Moon Base Beta was up and running—and things still aren't working perfectly there. Interstellar travel might be a possibility someday, but that day is centuries away, if not more. So I have been working at this instead. I've been practicing for decades now, taking what I learned from Zan and combining that with things I have figured out by myself. I realized, after that time on the moon when Lily Sjoberg was trying to kill me, that it was tied into the extreme desire to be someplace else, although it obviously wasn't as simple as wishing yourself there. It was more about

channeling that desire—and some extremely complicated subatomic physics. I worked on it all through middle school and high school, making very little progress at first, doing whatever I could to recreate that brief moment when I had made contact with Riley Bock on Hapuna Beach, or when I had projected myself to the safety of the air lock. Well, actually, I didn't make any progress at first. But I kept trying, because I'd done it twice, and so I knew it was possible. I didn't have any trouble getting into college, given my work on what became known as the Kowalski-Gibson equation. (Chang had made some refinements, and though he always tried to give me the bigger share of credit, he was the famous genius, and I was just a kid, so people tended to assume he was the brains of the operation.) I went into astrophysics and studied under Dr. Brahmaputra- Marquez. Together we made a lot of amazing discoveries about space and time and distance, though I never let her know that I had an ulterior motive throughout, that the only reason I was doing this was to see if I could master thinking myself across the galaxy the same way that Zan had. The only one I told about that was Violet.

She has become a world-famous scientist herself, although in a very different way than I have. Violet has always had a flair for the dramatic, and people have always loved watching her, so it was never a surprise to me that she ultimately became one of the great spokespeople for science, lecturing to huge crowds at conferences, hosting the fifth incarnation of Cosmos, and making the occasional cameo in Star Trek movies. Violet is the only one who has ever known about Zan besides me. She never had the chance to think herself anyplace, the way I did, but she always accepted that it was possible, and she worked at it with me. It took decades, but eventually, one day long after we had returned to earth from the moon, when we were both home visiting Mom and Dad in Hawaii, I thought myself across the house to her mind. In a sense, figuring that out was the hardest part. Once I knew how to do it, I simply had to hone the skills. After a while, I could think myself across much larger spaces to Violet, and then from one side of the earth to the other, and then I could project myself to other minds as well, to dogs and rabbits and wildebeests. (Zan was right, wildebeests

don't have much going on. Although communing with dolphins was amazing.) Occasionally I could think myself to another person, but I had to be careful about that, because I didn't really want other people to know I could do it. I figured it would be way too unsettling, or that the CIA might try to recruit me to work for them. I never even told Riley what I'd done. She simply assumed that she had dreamed my visit to her that one day on the beach, and I always let her believe that was true. It was much easier than explaining what had really happened. I still dropped into her mind from time to time, though, just to freak her out and make her think she was having visions of me. So I had mostly communicated to Violet, and after a while she had learned how to do it and think herself back to me. She wasn't as good as I was, but we definitely got to the point where we didn't need the telephone. (Although we still used the phone most of the time, because thinking yourself into another person's mind is always a little weird, and there was always the chance that I might accidentally appear to Violet while she was on the toilet. Or vice versa.)