We call these tales of indomitable spirit. Each speaks of hope, strength, courage, and perseverance, whatever the circumstance, showing a vision of how the humanity present in us today shall flower unbowed on the morrow.

“It won’t feel like anything, but it is death, of a sort.” I hold one of her four hands, a cold thing, a deliberate cold, something she allows so I will know her fear. We sit in a room that imitates a world that doesn’t exist, a world of air that smells of wood and old fire, that carries the sounds of hidden insects and laughing children, a room that makes it seem as though a forest surrounds us, as though we sit on tree stumps and water flows somewhere close by, a room made to calm a race that has not felt such things in a century, a race whose constantly manipulated genes still have not forgotten their origin.

I wonder how many of these hands I have held this year. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands. She looks at me with eyes of eight, each sphere like an emerald, pupil-less, unblinking. Her skin smells of the lavender its color imitates. Her hair is pink fire. I pat her hand. I smile, and I know that it is a thing that comforts, would know this even if she did not smile back, though she does. We who volunteered gave up the right to a body of our choosing, accepted instead one made to comfort, one that would fill each client with trust, bodies like this room, based on ancient patterns, bodies with two arms, two legs, two hands, hair bright or black, skin light or dark, but never colors or forms unknown to our genes before we told them who we were and what we could be.

She does not gasp at my words—so many do. I didn’t believe the teachers when they told us that the truth, and the brutality it carried, would be the best method for any and for all, for the modified and the natural alike. I didn’t believe them until I had lied to an even hundred, had watched them enter the machine, watched them fill with terror, watched as they were Translated, saw their minds ravaged, learned that it would take weeks in real time and years in the world of Translation for them to recover.

But I learned, and my teachers were kind, and told me that all of us who volunteered could only learn the hard way, could only perform this difficult job if we learned a truth that never changes—lies only ever cause harm, especially those meant to protect.

I can feel her staring at me. I return to the moment, to the wind, the smell of earth after rain.

“It once cost a great deal to spend even a few moments in a room like this, you know. Look around. Cherish it.”

She only nods. I wait for the moment, and it comes—she looks away, and I prick her finger. A drop of blood appears for a moment, is scanned invisibly, and disappears into smoke. She winces, draws her hand back, speaks.

“Is that all?”

I smile.

“Yes. But your body cannot stay. You have to go into the machine.”

She is shaking now, and I can see the control going, so I reach quickly, grab two of her hands.

“Look at me now. Just look at me.” She looks, and tears begin dropping, a flurry from so many eyes. I whisper, the birds singing a song of morning somewhere in the woods that surround us. “Look at me. You will live on. The you we just took, the you that has been Translated, joins billions. Billions who are happy. Who breathe clean air that feels like real air. Who don’t have to work or labor like those of us who stay, no, listen,” she is pulling away, but I grab her other hand, dropping my voice further so that she has to lean closer even as she cries. “Listen, at the other end is a world that makes what we once had look clumsy and uninspired, as though the Earth was only a first, blundering attempt, as though the artist’s mastery only flowered when they created our new home, our Cherish. Look.”

I always show them. It makes it easier. I can tell she’s never looked—too afraid. I think it’s not always fear, though. Some can’t stand to see something that aches with beauty when their own world rots beneath them. The room becomes a pit of black and stars, and then I can feel Cherish rise behind me, taking up half the wall, a spinning green ball, brilliant and verdant and—

“Alive. You must look! It’s so alive, umm… your name, tell me your name!”

Staring at the floor, she mutters to me.

“Rel.”

“And you can call me Ise, if you want to. Look Rel, look at where we’re headed! Our new home.”

She looks. Her scream is short, blunt. Her third and fourth arms both raise, hands covering her mouth as she sobs and looks away. I will the view to dive to ground level, to a specific place of beauty. Her tears are a river pouring onto the tops of my hands, until finally, she looks behind me again, and her tears slow, and hear breath catches, and warmth comes back into her hands.

I know why. She sees, now, something she’s never seen in person: a green, thriving place so unlike the blasted land just outside this shack, the land she can only traverse in the radiation suit that hangs beside the hidden door.

Her jaw drops as the smells and sounds and tastes of that place flow into the room, a place of beaches that sparkle, forests that whisper, wind that cools, a place with gentle mountains covered in creatures so close to what we once knew it must be impossible. Her breath shudders, and then calms, and the tears dry, and she breathes, and closes her eyes, and I can feel the warmth of the pale blue sun of Cherish behind me, and I can see its light on her face, and finally, she smiles, and lets my hands go, and looks at me, speaks.

“Is it really like this?”

I nod, and my smile is a true smile, because I know, now, that she will Translate effectively, that her mind will play in the infinite digital world of the Translation for the countless millennia it will take The Ship to travel the empty night of the universe to this faraway place, this new home so much of humanity has come to cherish without ever stepping foot upon it. She speaks, words filled with wonder.

“It’s so beautiful.” And a sad smile now. “Will it be strange—not to have a body?”

“No. Once you’ve Translated, you won’t even be able to tell the difference between your digital self and this one.”

“Will…will it really feel like only a decade has passed before the ship lands?”

“Of course. Everything we uploaded into your mind before you came here is the truth. Once the Ship has regrown everyone’s bodies and built us all cities, you’ll wake, and even if the city that’s created for your group takes a century of real time to build, or a thousand years, you’ll never know it.” And my smile is big and warm. “Translating out will only feel like waking from a nap. It will be nice.”

I stand, and a machine appears in the room, a white sphere with an indentation sized perfectly for her body.

“It’s time. You need to get in now.”

And she does not hesitate, as I knew she would not. She climbs in, and then comes the question, the question they all ask, every one.

“Aren’t you sad you can’t Translate too? That you can’t join us?”

And I allow myself to show a smile that reflects her sadness.

“I am, but the trip will only take a few thousand years, and all of us who volunteered as crew did so because something in us is different, will allow us to handle the solitude. Now lie down please—there you go.”

And she lies down, and she closes all her eyes, and with a flash, her body is gone, and because I cannot watch them go without checking, because even in this short time, I feel so close to them, I will a projection into being, and the room becomes what it has always been—a white, streamlined box with white walls and a door—and the projection rises, and I see the eight-eyed girl with skin like lavender waking from a nap, opening her eyes, rising from a white sphere, and smiling, and I know that I have done my job well.

I stand, I walk to the door, the girl’s radiation suit flashes into the same nonexistence into which her body so recently flew, and I don my own, and walk smiling into the black waste, walk smiling toward my home, walking smiling, knowing that we are, finally, moving in the right direction.