The most surprising thing about my journey (well, the first most surprising thing) is that the dream I experienced while traveling lasted a thousand years, a single dream stretching all the way to the Iota star in the Gemini constellation.

I dreamt of Bindi, my childhood dog, a heeler and pointer mix who used to follow me everywhere; now it seems, she’s even followed me to this distant star. In this dream, she and I stood in a meadow made lush by a full spectrum of greens and dappled with wildflower pinks and yellows. The field smelled of lilac, which was my mother’s favorite flower. She would cut them from the bush in the backyard and leave the flowers in vases around the house. A psychologist might say that my subconscious pulled these memories into my dream as a way of comforting me, a way of protecting me as my consciousness sailed one hundred and twenty-five light-years through the galaxy on a quantum chip, and this all sounds very reasonable and logical, except that I never had a dog named Bindi, and my mother died when I was still a baby. The thing is, I remember Bindi and I remember my mom, even as I remember never having either of them in my life.

At the end of the thousand-year dream (that is to say, when I arrive here at the junction of Castor and Pollux) I wake to starlight, which likewise seems like a dream, although I know that it isn’t. I’m consciously aware of myself, the collection of photons within the quantum matrix that holds my quirks and foibles, my loves and concerns, and I feel myself becoming, and it’s like waking to flashes of sunlight in my eyes, a hyper-focused moment in which I unspool from one spindle while simultaneously respooling onto another, and as I thread into Central Station (a name that only humans call this place, because we don’t know what else to call it) my world shifts like shadows on a wall.

At first, I only have the sense of being confined in a place where I’ve never been. Gradually, I become aware of the chair beneath me, contoured to fit a body that I gave up a thousand years ago. There’s a table in front of me, and I’m not alone. I’ve come here to meet you, to make first contact. Although once I see you sitting across from me, I realize we already know each other.

“Hello, Dad,” you say.

“William?” I reach out to shake your hand, and you take my hand into both of yours. Your grip is warm and firm, and it occurs to me that I’m very proud of you, proud of the man you’ve become. You’re not much younger than me, maybe even the same age, and you have your mother’s green eyes that promise gentleness and understanding.

It feels so good to see you again, even though I know that I’ve never had a child, let alone a son named William—but here you are. William! The boy who spent every Friday night watching classic monster movies; the boy who rode his three-speed bike in circles around the cul-de-sac, and I remember how you attended Princeton University for three semesters before dropping out to hike the Appalachian Trail.

“No.” You shake your head as if you’ve only then realized something important. “My father is dead.”

Yes. Pancreatic cancer. I remember that too, remember lying in bed and gazing at a photograph of you and holding Emily’s hand while she cried, but also it feels like only yesterday that we were together, on the other side of an impossibly long dream, and now it’s morning and I’ve woken and here you are again. We sit across from each other at a kitchen table that once sat in our home before it orbited this distant star, and I wonder which one of us brought it here, this symbol of familiarity and comfort.

“We’ve prepared for this moment,” you say. “I’ve prepared. There’s no need to do this.”

“Do what?” I say, still confused by the sight of you.

“Impersonate my father.”

“I’m not impersonating anyone,” I say, and the injustice of the accusation moves me to the edge of my chair; I know who I am. “I can ask you the same question,” I snip back, and perhaps I’m still dreaming or I’ve lost touch with who I truly am, even though neither of those things feels true. We look at each other with mistrust, not knowing what to believe about the other. A silence unfolds between us, and then it’s broken.

The room fills with a sound, familiar but so distant in time and space it sounds foreign at first. A chirp. A chirp and a twill. A string of birdsong fills the room and knits into a delicate fabric of notes.

I cock my head to listen.

“I hear it, too,” you say.

From the corner of my eye, I see a figure standing across the room. I startle and glance over to find a woman, dark-skinned with a welcoming smile and bright eyes, a manifestation of joy pressed too far forward, like a fossilized expression lifting from stone.

“Do you—” you stammer, “I mean, is that—?”

“Yes,” I say, “I see her.”

“Welcome.” The woman says, “I’ve been expecting you.” Without stepping towards us, her hands fold over her heart, and we receive a data packet that we are to read her gesture as one of warmth.

“We are all so very proud of you,” she says, “proud of this achievement. Of course, this meeting will be preserved for posterity—an archeological artifact to remind us of your mission and its importance.”

We are meant to read her statement with pride and gratitude.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“I’m the one who’s waited to greet you and record your meeting.”

“But where do you come from?” I ask.

“I come from here. I am this place.”

“You’re Central Station?”

The room is still, and we are all very still now, and I’m not sure what question I should ask, not sure what to expect as the moment unfolds, but before I can speak again, Station breaks the silence.

“Please, continue with your meeting and know that the other is not deceiving you.” She dissolves before her final words are spoken.

You look as puzzled as I feel. Even in this quantum state, there’s an urge toward anxiety. I lie my hands flat on the table, reaching for the illusion of certainty.

“Let’s start with what we know,” I say.

You nod, tension tight around your eyes, the same look you had when your mother and I told you that my cancer had metastasized. You’d driven up from the coast that day, excited and eager to tell us the news of your imminent departure. I knew what you were going to tell us by the lightness in your step as you bounded up the walkway, your whole body taut with joy. Your eyes held a gleam that told me you had received the news you’d been hoping to hear, that you had been chosen to travel across the galaxy and represent humanity in first contact. It was selfish of me to share my news first, to tell you of my own imminent departure, that the cancer had spread and I only had months of life left—but I needed to be the one who said goodbye first; I needed my hand to be the first one to let go, and it worked: you reached out and held on tighter, tighter than you had since you were a small child, when I still stood at the center of your universe.

In that life, you left for the star and not me, and it’s so strange to have these memories of an entire lifetime that I lived so differently than the life I knew when I left for this star, that life where you never existed.

“Here’s what we know,” I say. “You sent a signal, and we followed it.”

“No. You sent the signal. We picked it up on a low-band frequency in the Gemini Constellation.”

It is true that in both remembered lives, with and without a son, my world received an extraterrestrial communication. “So . . . who sent the signal?” I ask, looking toward the space where the station’s manifestation had stood, but even as I put forward the question, I know the answer. It’s a third memory stream, and I dip into it as easily as the other two lives I remember.

We speak the name at the same time: CanCorp.

Long before your birth or mine, the CanCorp Deep Space Network sent a message array scattered across the sky—a graphic representation of a human DNA strand. Then, just over a century later, Earth received a reply from Iota in the Gemini constellation—a string of three irrational numbers: pi, the golden ratio, and Feigenbaum’s constant; each number repeated to the 125^th decimal position, the number of light-years between Earth and Iota.

In the other two memory streams (the life where you don’t exist and the life where I die of cancer), we received the DNA image and sent the three irrational numbers. In my third memory stream, that’s all reversed. Now I see that we not only replied to the message, but we also sent it.

I’m trying to wrap my head around this when I glance up and catch you staring back at me with wonder. You stammer something about a different life, and I realize that you also remember more than one life together, and then your expression turns to disgust or anger or sadness or some other emotion I can’t quite decipher, but I know exactly why your look holds such contempt for me, because I was there, too; I lived that other life with you.

“I remember that other life,” you admit. “In that world, CanCorp sent the message and received a reply. In that world, you were the person selected to make first contact, not me. You gave up Mom and you gave up me; you chose to make the trip, chose the signal over us.” You look away, and the silence grows bloated and awkward between us.

It’s that third memory stream I now hold, and I can still see the boy in you. I remember you on a particular August afternoon; the sun fell toward the horizon, and the heat lay heavy in the valley. You were two years old, and we had spent the day at the county fair. Your mother suggested we move into the shade of elms near the edge of an amphitheater where a band played folk songs on acoustic instruments—a guitar, a banjo, a fiddle. We spread our blanket across the grass and sat beneath the shifting shadows to take off our shoes, to sip soda from bottles, to let the music push aside the silence that had grown too thick between us.

You sat restless at the edge of the blanket, and your fingers, sticky with cotton candy, ripped fistfuls of sunshine from the lawn.

The band took up the tune “I Am a Poor, Wayfaring Stranger.” At least that’s the song I remember when I think about that day. You jumped up and snatched at the music, tumbling with the rhythm and letting the melody spin you around and around into tight dizzy circles that made you walk like a drunken person. Your mother’s laugh was a glowing ember. (In every life I lived with her, Emily knew how to surrender to the moments that mattered.) I watched you dance, swirling gobs of sunshine between us, and I wanted so badly to reach out and grab you, to take you into my arms, but I knew that if I did, I would never let you go, could never find a way to say goodbye when they called me to the stars, and so, I stood up, made an excuse of wanting to get a beer and turned and walked away. Eventually they did call, and I did get my chance, and although it wasn’t easy, I was able to say goodbye.

I’m just a poor, wayfaring stranger, traveling through this world below;

There is no sickness, toil, nor danger, in that bright world to which I go.

“I’m sorry,” I say, but the bluntness of an apology can’t pierce the hard shell between us. “There is another world, the life I actually came from to be here, where you don’t exist. Emily and I never married, and you weren’t born.”

Surprise flashes across your face before you can cover it with a sheet of control and reason.

“I couldn’t hurt her like that,” I say. “I knew what I wanted from life, and a family wasn’t part of it.”

Something in the way you refuse to meet my eye reveals the betrayal you feel. I can sympathize; I really can. In both lives, I wasn’t willing to give up my dream. The only difference—in that other life you remember, the life in which I left you, there was a human toll, a steep price that you were asked to pay. Better to live my life alone, a life not accountable to anyone but myself.

“I remember the day you left,” you say. “Mom and I were brought into a room with chairs, a long couch, and a monitor on the wall.”

“I remember it. The day I was uploaded onto the Maziar board. I was scared.”

I serve this up to explain, to rationalize the distance and lack of emotion I showed that day. It pains me to remember how little love I was willing to show you and your mother before I left our world, but I’m not sure I could have moved forward if I’d let myself reach out. “It didn’t feel like I was going on a journey. It felt like . . .”

“Death.”

You say it before I can finish the sentence. You share a similar memory from a different life, so of course you know how it felt. Your own goodbye to a father dying of cancer was handled with much more grace and love, and I know that you’re a better man than me.

“Mom and I sat in the lounge waiting for you to come onto the monitor, and I didn’t want to be there, but Mom said that I would regret it if I missed the chance to say goodbye, and she was right, not because I needed to hear you say the words, but because I needed to let go of the illusion of you. I wouldn’t understand that until years later, when I was older than you were on the day you left. You were my father, yes. But more than that you were a human being with your own desires and fears and flaws, and that’s how I grew to see you.”

After a long silence, you speak, and there’s injury in your voice, but not the pain I expect to hear, not the pain of abandonment (although I’m certain that still lives there, too), but rather the guilt of your own decisions.

“I’m no better than you,” you say.

“What do you mean?”

“I left you behind. In that other life we both remember. I left you to die of cancer without me.”

“I could bear it.”

“And Mom?”

I haven’t any words to answer. In these three remembered lives, Emily bore the cost of those she loved leaving her behind, but I believe there is a world, and probably an infinite number of worlds, where Emily was the one who left for this distant star, and in some of those worlds (at least I choose to believe this), Emily and I sit across from one another, reunited in the light of this star.

“We all deserve to pursue our dream,” I say.

“The cost was high.”

“It often is, I think, but I’m sorry, all the same.”

You nod and with genuine curiosity ask, “The world you come from, the one without me—”

“I was happy.” I’m not sure how you’ll take that, but I don’t want to lie to you. Your jaw relaxes, so I say, “I didn’t have anything to compare it to. It was just my life. You know?”

The past wafts through the room on scents I never expected to experience again. Summer grass and gasoline. A sensation from a thousand years ago: a lawnmower vibrating in my hands, sunshine hot on my neck.

Your head turns up and your nostrils flair. You smell it too, and a smile breaks across your face. Like the birdsong earlier, this isn’t a memory, but a meta sensation, a construct of Central Station that we’re both experiencing simultaneously.

Station manifests beside us. She sits in a chair to my right, to your left, and her eyes shift between us.

“Your missions are nearly complete,” she says.

You look up confused, and I think I know how you feel. Such a vast distance to cross only to find each other again, to have another chance at empathy and compassion—and forgiveness.

“And then what?” you ask.

Station reaches for your hand, reaches for mine. We are to read this as compassion. “Your constructs will be deleted,” she says.

A weight drops deep within me, pulling me toward some unthinkable bottom, and when I see the tear spill from your eye, I feel a gasp for breath, the memory of a visceral reaction stored on a Maziar board and carried through the galaxy for a thousand years.

“This moment, this meeting, will continue,” she says. “There just won’t . . .”

“There won’t be any more,” I say. “Not for us.”

“I’ll give you time to say goodbye,” Station says and fades away.

Sometimes life must be this way: Spaces made, places constructed in order to give us a chance to meet, to come together with an imperfect understanding, but a desire to know the other.

I remember the day you said goodbye. It was difficult for me to move by then, and I wasn’t able to come to the base for the planned events. The company came to me instead, setting up closed-circuit conference equipment to guarantee our privacy. It was a media circus. The world was witnessing the first human interstellar flight. A human being was going to exist on a quantum chip and fly through space in front of a solar sail, travel one hundred and twenty-five light years to meet with a new life form. The moment deserved every bit of spectacle.

When your image came onto the monitor, I was speechless. What could I say to tell you how proud I was of you, how much I loved you. When I finally did say it, the words felt so small and unnecessary. Later your mother remarked that none of us had said much; we’d just sat there looking at one another—but I think it was the right response to saying the last goodbye to someone you love, to sit with them without words getting in the way.

“And so, I traveled here,” you say.

“And so, I traveled here,” I echo.

I feel myself unspooling, and the softness in your eyes tells me that you feel it too. We’re losing memories and bits of ourselves. The room expands, and the laws of physics fall away, and the starlight bends to meet us.

Your eyes settle on me with your question. “Was it worth it?” you ask. “Was this moment worth giving everything up—sunrises and sunsets, scratching itches on your nose, falling into bed at night, fingers tracing the edge of a greeting card, summer beer and winter blankets and the weight of your body measured as home?”

The irrationality of traveling such a distance only to meet ourselves, to give up everything, to sacrifice everything—and yet, even in this digitized existence of electrons opening and closing and phasing from one state to another, I know that what I say next matters. Our lives are entangled, held in superposition and waiting for my answer to your question: Was it worth it? You sit across the kitchen table from me, the son I never knew, the son I’ve always known. My answer was there before you asked the question. “Yes,” I say. “It was worth it. No matter what life I lived to get here, it was all worth it. You are worth it.”