Alexa takes the time to consider it--really imagine it. Ships, traveling between planets like sparks between points of light. Of machines, long dead, now spinning to life again. The galaxy, healing, living, as once it did before.

Gently, she strokes Dolce's fluff, seeing it in her mind.

No, no, not like it did before. Not as it does now, with each niche carefully built and filled by perfection. Mice and sheep built for service, ordained to be a product. Kaeri and Alcedi, destined to throw themselves gladly on the spear of other's dreams. Ranks of uniform masked scavengers, tearing apart ships and recycling them together. Constant iteration, all to fill the engine room with only those perfectly suited for the task.

A mix. Something new. Freedom to choose to work where they please, or not at all. 

Freedom to travel. Lights zipping through Two hundred years of entropy and stagnation, ending in an explosion of culture. People, trapped in cycles of oppression, discovering new places, new ways to think. 

Atlas, torn apart, scavenged for parts, and put together again. Not in search of perfection, in subsuming efficiency, in lives given in support of empire, but in impossibilities of expectations defied and redefined.

A world where the idea of being defined by your position is laughable.

"It's a good wish," she admits, and she can't keep the longing for that future out of her voice. Freedom--not just for her, but for everyone. Real freedom, the kind that can't be won individually.

She doesn't say it's worth it. It would be, absolutely. But it's not her wish. It's not her journey. She can't cross this rift for you.