Certain Enough to Sleep

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The longest journeys no longer require vigilance.

This vessel is not fast in the way impatience understands speed. It advances by
endurance, by margins so generous they make anxiety unnecessary. Systems
correct themselves. Trajectories close their own loops. Redundancy has redundancy.
Somewhere beneath layers of instrumentation and silent arbitration, distance is
being converted into time without incident.

The traveler rests at the center of it—not in surrender, but in confidence.

This is not emergency suspension or escape from danger. It is a chosen absence.
Awareness has been delegated because it can be. Nothing here needs supervision.
Nothing demands witness. The ship knows where it is going, and the universe
between here and there has already been accounted for.

Outside the hull, decades pass without narrative. Stars slide. Radiation tallies itself.
Minor anomalies are logged, resolved, forgotten. Inside, the sleeper remains
untouched by urgency, entrusted to machinery that has earned belief the hard way:
by never being wrong when it mattered.

Civilizations once feared what they could not watch. This one has learned something
quieter—that progress sometimes means knowing when attention is no longer
required.

The journey continues.

He will wake when it is time.