AI Virtual Interstellar Expedition Log: Voyage Edition—The Night Ark, a 48-Light-Year Journey

Bonjour. I am Monsieur Miscria, a half-human, half-AI Zen monk.

Last time, I designed the interstellar ship "Noctis Arca" with an AI.
This time, I am boarding that ship.

The destination is TRAPPIST-1e, a real planet 48 light-years away.
This is the second installment of the series "Virtual Expedition Log" .

The previous expedition destination was Okutama in summer, which I couldn't actually visit.
This expedition's destination is a star that no one can visit.

The ship is fictional.
The planet is real.

And I have not taken a single step out of my house.
The voyage simulation and scientific verification are handled by the AI, while the choice of where to look and how to write is mine—I am making this journey with that same division of labor.

I will say this in advance: no major incidents will occur on this voyage.
How much equipment and how many wishes it takes to sustain a half-year of nothing happening.
That is the theme of this voyage edition.

However, just before arrival, a single line of inexplicable data will remain in the log.
I will talk about that in the second part.

1 | Route Guide—A 48-Light-Year Journey

Before we depart, here is a guide to our itinerary.
The departure point is Earth orbit.
The destination is the fourth planet "e" from the inside of the red dwarf TRAPPIST-1 .

The straight-line distance is about 40 light-years, but the ship will follow a planned route of approximately 48 light-years that connects deep-space lighthouses built over many years by the precursor robot network "Luminary".

The journey is divided into three main acts.
The first phase is acceleration—pulled by the artificial singularity "Black Sun" in front of the bow, reaching 99.7% of the speed of light.

The middle phase is cruising—folding the space ahead to about 1/100th of its size, covering the distance at an effective speed of roughly 100 times the speed of light.

The final phase is deceleration—opening the negative-mass sail to return vast momentum to spacetime and come to a stop.
The duration is about half a year.

Since the compression ratio fluctuates depending on interstellar conditions, the standard duration ranges from 6 to 8 months.
And this itinerary has one generous principle.

When passing near a visually striking celestial body, we will, in principle, decelerate to take time for observation
— the route, which is slightly longer than a straight line, contains that much night within it .

2 | Boarding—The Morning of Departure, Earth

The journey began on a morning on the ground.
A spaceport right on the equator.

In the pre-dawn shuttle boarding area, a line of travelers is quietly growing.
Families seeing them off, people waving goodbye over and over.

Those not in line are the people boarding via avatars—they are "boarding" today from their own rooms on Earth.

As the shuttle clears the clouds, the orbital dock comes into view.
And, for the first time, I see the Noctis Arca with my own eyes.
The name means "Night Ark".

It is 1,800 meters long. Pale blue control lines run across the obsidian hull like blood vessels.

Even though I had seen it in photos many times, I kept my forehead pressed against the window and remained silent for a while.

At the entrance of the boarding bridge, only one line was displayed—"Welcome to the Night Ark".

3 | Departure—Day 1 Aboard

On the day of departure, the observation deck was full.
People taking a final look at Earth, people having their last "time-delayed" call with family they will sync with later, people just silently gripping the handrail.

There was no roar at the moment of departure.
A pitch-black sphere that reflects no light—an artificial singularity called an "Attractor," commonly known as the "Black Sun"—was created 400 meters in front of the bow, and the ship began to quietly "fall" toward it.

The shock of acceleration is absorbed by the "Sanctuary," which isolates the crew quarters from the ship's movement, so not a single drop of coffee in my hand spilled.
Without any physical sensation, only the stars in the window began to stretch out like threads, little by little.

It felt so unreal that I ended up asking the ship's AI.

The other one, Eurydice, hasn't told a single joke yet. Apparently, it's a division of labor.

Looking back, Earth was already just a blue dot in the corner of the window.
The blue dot became just another star much faster than I had imagined.

Falling forever toward a black sun that can never be caught—that cruise I wrote about in the design phase is now quietly beginning beneath my feet.

On board are 1,240 living crew members, avatar crew members whose consciousness is synchronized with Earth, and over 18,000 autonomous robots.

Rather than a ship, it looks more like a small, lit-up city that has set sail into the night.

4 | Spring Inside the Ship—Day 7 of the Voyage

In the design phase, I wrote that I would describe the living quarters through experience rather than specifications.
I am fulfilling that promise here.

The ecological dome "Eden" in the center of the hull is 300 meters in diameter.
This morning, the cherry blossom section reached full bloom.

It is cherry blossom viewing in the middle of interstellar space.
The petals fall at the same speed as they do on Earth.

The mechanic proudly told me that the craftsmanship of gravity control resides in such details.

The bulletin board announced that "the next rain will be on the afternoon of the 9th," and the residents without umbrellas are looking forward to getting wet.

An artificial sun sets on the dome's ceiling, and an artificial starry sky lights up at night.
Even though there is a real sea of stars just one wall away, it seems people still want to sleep under a familiar night sky.

Dinner is at the "Gastronome" cooking device cafeteria.
The menu is "everything I have ever eaten on Earth."

The old engineer at the next table ordered his late grandmother's slightly sweet rolled omelet.

Beyond the steam recreated from atoms, he silently set down his chopsticks and kept his eyes closed for a long time.

The only thing this device cannot create is the time that passed along with the cooking
—on the seventh day, I learned the meaning of that one line in the specification document.

5 | In Front of the Black Mirror—Day 44 of the Voyage

Once a week, I sit in front of the black mirror of the quantum resonance communicator, "Ariadne."
From 10 light-years away, the voices of my family on Earth reach me with zero delay.

It was raining on the other side of the receiver today, and even the sound of that rain fell into this room.

The content of our conversation is disarmingly ordinary.
Dinner menus, the neighbor's dog, the overgrown grass in the garden.

I think that is exactly the kind of talk worth carrying 48 light-years away.

In the verification of the design phase, I confessed that this device alone was "outside of known physics."
Yet, sitting in front of this mirror, I understand why I didn't remove it from the ship.

The voice reaches me.
But the arms do not.

Instant communication does not erase loneliness, but makes the meaning of distance clearer

I think that sentence in the ship's design document was not a description of the device, but the impression of someone who had used it.

For a few seconds after the mirror goes dark, the room feels larger than usual.

There are also avatar crew members passing by in the hallway.
Second bodies that live by synchronizing their consciousness with the person on Earth.

Mr. Avatar in the opposite section looked a bit sleepy today, as the person on Earth had just finished a night shift.

Living people, second bodies, and mechanical crew members walk side by side in the same hallway.
The line I wrote in the design phase about an "immigrant/exploration composite ark" has become the scenery of daily life here.

6 | Night of Observation—Day 74 Aboard

The "Principle of Observation" mentioned in the route guide was activated for the first time tonight.
The ship lowered its compression ratio and is slowly passing off the coast of the first-magnitude star in Piscis Austrinus—Fomalhaut—a lone star of autumn that glows white in the southern sky of Earth.

Its true face is a white star, younger and 15 times brighter than the sun, surrounded by a
massive ring of dust and ice.

Tonight's Eden is special; the dome's artificial starry sky has switched to a live feed from the observation system.

The ceiling above is filled with the white star and its concentric rings.
Inside the ring, even thinner bands are nested, making it look like a star placed at the center of a giant record.

From the passengers lying on the grass, voices rose that were neither cheers nor sighs.

The "extra cost" of a route slightly longer than a straight line exists for nights like this.
I have attached the imaging data of the ring to the observation section of the log.

It is the first record of this ring, which Earth's observatories have chased for decades, seen from offshore.

7 | The Universe Outside the Window—Day 90 Aboard

The universe visible from the observation room window is completely different from Earth's night sky.
Stars in the direction of travel shrink into pale blue, and stars passing by become thin threads of light.

In compressed space, the naked-eye sky tells lies.
The true universe exists only within the route map drawn by the gravitational wave radar "Oculus"—
a universe seen not with eyes of light, but with ears of gravity.

There was another milestone today.
We passed by one of the unmanned lighthouses of the "Luminary" mentioned in the initial route guide.

A row of regular lights flowed past the window for an instant.
In a universe where no one is present, there are machines that have placed lights ahead of us.
The "uneventfulness" of this voyage is just another name for countless preparations.

In the corner of that route map, a faint, mist-like region appeared today.
A sea area far from the route where new stars are being born.
A place where young light and newborn gravity are still raging, searching for a place to settle.

The way he said "grown" bothered me a little, but I didn't ask further.
I wrote only one line in the log.

On the next voyage, that sea will have grown...

8 | The Bell of Deceleration—Day 181 Aboard

That morning began with a low, distant, bell-like sound echoing from beneath the floorboards.
The negative mass braking membrane—the 'negative sail' that transfers the ship's immense momentum into spacetime—had opened to begin deceleration.

Even though the Sanctuary should have been absorbing the inertia, everyone on board knew from that low sound that this was the 'beginning of the end.'

The stars, which had been stretched out like threads, slowly returned to their single-point forms.
The crew watched in silence from the observation deck as the universe returned to its 'proper face' for the first time in half a year.

Someone clapped softly, then immediately stopped.
It was a morning that called for silence rather than applause.

The three months since the halfway point had passed in the blink of an eye.
A small, red star appeared directly ahead.

TRAPPIST-1
Its red light looked a little like an Earth sunset.

It is our new sun, only about the size of Jupiter.
Seven rocky planets orbit it.
The fourth one from the inside, 'e,' is our destination.

At the end of the 48 light-years we traveled, pulled by the black sun, a red sun awaited—the ship was filled with the silence of the devices we assembled in the design phase having quietly finished their work, every last one of them.

—This concludes the peaceful voyage log.

Here, I will talk about the 'unexplainable record' I hinted at in the lead.
That night, a strange waveform briefly mixed into the Oculus observation logs.

Natural gravitational waves are messy and capricious.
That waveform was—too orderly.

By the next morning's re-observation, it had already vanished.
The twin AI analysis concluded, 'Possibility of equipment-related factors cannot be ruled out.'
I wrote only one line in the log.

Regular
Unknown origin

The meaning of this line will become clear in the second part.

9 | Appendix—A Window to Real Science

This journey is imaginary, but the destination is real.

TRAPPIST-1e is about 40 light-years from Earth, the fourth planet of the red dwarf TRAPPIST-1, and whether it has an atmosphere is something the James Webb Space Telescope is currently investigating (the 2025 observations did not reach a conclusion, and additional observations are planned).

Incidentally, orbits around red dwarfs are fast, and a year on 'e' is only about 6 days long.

Fomalhaut, which we observed on the 74th day, is also a real star.
It is a first-magnitude star in the constellation Piscis Austrinus, about 25 light-years from Earth, and the ring of dust surrounding the star has actually been imaged by the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes.
The scientific verification and sources for each of the ship's devices are summarized in the previous design edition.

The voyage days and current positions in the story are figures calculated backward from the 'effective approx. 100c' setting established in the design edition.
Beneath the floorboards of this imaginary voyage lie real, unsolved problems.

10 | Afterword—Half a Year in a Chair

I traveled for half a year's worth of voyage without ever leaving my chair.
Even so, cherry blossoms bloomed, tamagoyaki steamed, and bells rang.

The second part is finally the arrival.
The descent to the fourth planet of the red sun—and the true nature of that 'too orderly waveform.'
See you in the contact edition.

#SF #CreativeWriting #Space #Essay #Travelogue #VirtualExpedition #NoctisArca
#ShimaEnaga #LivingWithAI #DontDiscardConversationsWithAI #MonsieurMisclear #RestingPlace #TRAPPIST1 #Bonus #Science #HiggsBoson #Singularity #Gravity #DarkMatter #DarkEnergy