Habitable exoplanets may have been lost on me then, but metamorphosis never was. It has always been a thing of beauty to me, the fluidity of form.

Waking from torpor is not my favourite experience. On the scale of discomforts, I’d put it on par with a moderate hangover, or the kind of cold where your sinuses creak if you press on your face. The actual sensation feels like neither of those things. Physically, I feel a little stiff, a little weak, but otherwise fine. Waking is more of a mental discomfort, a period in which your consciousness has to reassert itself after years of dormancy. Keep in mind that medically-induced torpor is not the same as sleep. Sleep conveys the passage of time, even if you don’t dream. Not so with torpor. First you’re awake, then you’re not, then you’re back . . . but something’s missing. Something’s missing, and you’ll never be able to put your finger on what.

As soon as the Merian established orbit around its first target, a signal was sent from the navigation computer to our crew’s torpor chambers. An automated system added a chemical solution to our nutrient drips, and that solution made its way to our respective brains, where it began the business of waking us up. I am told this process takes about an hour, but from my perspective, it happened in an instant. Light. Shapes. Confusion. I had to walk myself through the basics, as if I were reviewing every fact I’d learned during infancy. I have hands. I have a mouth. Those things I see are colours. I’m Ariadne. I exist. Then came memories, and context, and finally, a smile.

We’re at Aecor.

I began to unpack the proverbial cotton from my mind, and walked myself through protocol. First, I pulled on the tabs that freed my wrists from their soft fabric restraints, then undid the ties around my waist and ankles as well. This may sound macabre, being tied up inside what amounts to a high-tech shipping crate, but the restraints are for a good cause, and removing them by yourself is a breeze. They’re snugly attached to the sides of the torpor chamber, keeping me suspended in the middle of the container while I’m unconscious so that I don’t float into the sides. This is far preferable to waking up with bruises all over.

Once my limbs were free, I hit the button that opened the chamber door. The light in my room was low, but I winced all the same as my eyes remembered how to adjust themselves. Torpor chambers regularly wash their occupants, but a daily spray of cleaning solution isn’t the same as a proper bath. My eyes, nose, and mouth were all crusty around the edges. Twenty-eight years without a real scrub will do that to you.

My hair, shaved before launch, had grown well past my shoulders. My nails had reached a hideous length as well, about what you’d expect after two years of no clipping. That’s about how much I aged in twenty-eight years of transit – two years. Torpor slows you down, and interstellar travel at half the speed of light further stalls the clock, but neither presses pause entirely. Cells divide and the heart keeps beating. We buy ourselves time while in torpor, not immortality.

I opened the hygiene kit, which some clever interior engineer had bolted to the wall within arm’s reach of my chamber. Nail clippers were the first item I retrieved, followed by a tiny collection bag. I pruned myself, returning my digits to usefulness. Curved keratin shards floated unattractively before me; I hid them away in the little bag as quickly as I could. My unruly hair would have to wait, but I took an elastic band from the kit and tied back my mermaid-like floating locks. The ground teams really do think of everything.

One by one, I removed the electrode patches that covered me from face to feet. Their steady pulses had kept my muscles from atrophying, and for that, I was grateful. Next, I removed the nutrient drip from my arm, bandaged myself, and collected the few drops of blood that had floated free. I then took a breath, readied some therapeutic profanities, and removed the catheter from the place where catheters go.

Ah, the glamour of space travel.

I could hear the faint rustle of my crewmates going through the same checklist of waking. The walls aboard the Merian are thin, but there are walls, and that point’s key. I’ve seen stills from classic movies in which space-travelling crews are put to sleep, but their chambers or pods or what have you are always lined up side by side, these grim rows of morgue-like containment. Let me be clear on this point: when you’ve woken up from nearly three decades of induced unconsciousness, and every orifice has gunk around it, and your nails look like talons, and your skin smells like a cross between a freshly-washed hospital bathroom and an abandoned pen at a zoo, and you’ve just pulled a tube wet with urine out of yourself . . . you need a minute alone. And that’s only taking basic hygiene and vanity into consideration. There’s an even more important psychological matter at hand during this time.

The mirror.

Once you remember who and what and where you are, your first impulse upon leaving torpor is to look. But just as waking up after a visible surgery can be jarring, so, too, can be those first moments taking in your altered body. You’re different. You need a moment to prepare, and likely several moments to process, and you definitely don’t need to be working through all of that in a group setting. And so, every astronaut’s cabin has a full-length mirror, which is yours and yours alone. The mirror is not facing the torpor chamber. It’s on the wall to the right of it, out of your line of sight but visible the minute you decide to float forward. The mirror knows you’re anxious to see yourself – but take your time, it says. I’m here when you’re ready, and not a second before. It is the kindest object placement I’ve ever seen.

On the chance that our methods have been forgotten or misrepresented – or you simply never learned about them – let’s take a moment to discuss somaforming.

Say what you will about Homo sapiens, but you can’t argue that we’re a versatile species. On Earth, we can survive a decent swath of both heat and cold. We eat a mind-boggling variety of flora and fauna, and can radically change our diets according to need or mood. We can live in deserts, forests, tundras, swamps, plains, mountains, valleys, shorelines, and everything in between. We are generalists, no question.

But take us away from our home planet, and our adaptability vanishes. Extended spaceflight is hell on the human body. No longer challenged by gravity, bones and muscles quickly begin to stop spending resources on maintaining mass. The heart gets lazy in pumping blood. The eyeball changes shape, causing vision problems and headaches. Unpleasant as these ailments are, they pale in comparison to the onslaught of radiation that fills the seeming void. In the early decades of human spaceflight, six months in low-Earth orbit – a mere two hundred miles up – was enough to raise your overall cancer risk a few notches. The farther you head into interplanetary space, away from the gentle atmospheric shores of Earth, the worse the exposure becomes.

Human spaceflight was stalled for decades because of this, crippled by the technological nut that could not be cracked: how do you keep humans alive in space during the length of time it takes to reach other planets? We beat our heads against the drafting table, trying to build tools that could do what our anatomy could not. We wrapped our brains around algorithms, trying to create artificial intelligence that could venture to other worlds for us. But our machines were inadequate, and our software never woke up. We knew there was life on other worlds, yet we couldn’t leave our own front yard. And while probes and space telescopes shed ever more light on our galactic neighbourhood, there’s only so much you can see looking through a peephole. To properly survey a place, you need boots on the ground. You need human intuition. You need eyes that can tell when something that looks like a rock might be more than a rock.