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Samantha adjusted her hoodie and turned towards the sliding doors of the docking station. Behind them was a large, branching tunnel which connected directly to the various entrances to the starship. Several dozen humans walked through to the main hatch alongside Sam, with a few standout alien tourists gleefully following behind them, while a single, large tank of green liquid with a dark figure inside got carted into the aformentioned transporter.

The hatch opened to reveal a rather modestly furnished giant cylindrical segmented capsule, with spacious, soft seats facing the ship's bow placed along both sides of it, and gigantic transparent panes giving the passengers a good look of the starry sky just outside of the ship.

The vessel itself was little more than a giant, bulbous main section attached to half a dozen cylindrical capsules, each painted with orange stripes with radial pantograph antennae going around the center of each. Soon after everyone had settled down, the antennae extended, and with a brief shimmer of blue light, both a forcefield and a subspace projection field were established around the whole ship.³ As the six giant plasma engines embedded into the head of the ship powered up, Samantha quietly said goodbye to Ganymede, which began to rapidly shrink in her view. Most of the ship, however, was looking directly opposite of her, focusing their attention to the much bigger (and much more impressive) gas giant, which soon, too, became nothing more than a pale brown dot in the distance.

As the ship slowly accelerated to quarter light speed, Sam pulled out her work PDAP out of her pouch. The Personal Data Access Point was the main tool in the modern technician's toolbox, being a medium-sized, rugged metal tablet with a physical sensory display, several wirelessly connected port cloners (the tangled cords of which were stored in the very depths of Sam's pouch) and a tiny combined camera and projector embedded into the top middle of the back panel, used primarily for projecting wiring layouts onto walls. Right now, Sam was using the PDAP to connect to her work network to view the details of her assignment.

Which were scarce, to say the least.

Technicians of all varieties were accustomed to receiving little information regarding their work, ranging from "I pressed a button and it broke" to "hypothetically speaking, how would one restore a permanently deleted database?" Right now, Samantha was looking at the 26th century equivalent of one of those, namely: "General System Error at Terminal #171. Location: The San Francisco Informatics Museum." At least she lucked out with the weather.

Feeling the gentle humming of the engines and the copious amount of pain relief medication lull her to sleep, Samantha set a timer for 3 hours and put the PDAP back in her bag, letting her mind slowly drift away.

And, just as they had passed the Moon's orbit, she was rudely jolted awake by the loud vibrations coming from her pouch. Sam scrambled to stop the alarm and let out a prolonged, silent yawn, which several alien children stared at in amazement.

  A robotic voice, the same as the interface in her apartment, came through the intercom: "Now arriving: Near Earth Station "Galileo", docking port 03. The exits will unlock once a hermetic seal has been established. Mind the gap."

By then, less than a quarter of the seats were filled, as most tourists wishing to explore the Solar System left for Mars half an hour earlier. While Earth was still a popular destination for so-called "human tourism", having most of the museums, landmarks and historical sites, the majority of visitors chose Mars as their first stop, serving as a sort of "resort" of the Solar System.

While the rest of the passengers followed a green line on the floor of the station to the general transporter room, Samantha instead turned the other way, going into the staff section to use the private transporter they had installed for maintenance crews. Samantha punched in the coordinates given to her by the PDAP and stepped into a large, semicircular chamber, with five glowing circles on the floor indicating the position of the dematerializing coils. She heard the whirr of the matter-energy converters in the walls get louder as a bright light filled her vision, if only for a moment, before her eyes were instead overwhelmed by the bright Sun above her.

She materialized in a small open area just in front of the Informatics Museum, overlooking the giant satellite dish that was standing between it and the local park. Though its days as the giant ear of researchers peering into space were long gone, children going on tours were still occasionally allowed to control the direction of the antenna and listen in on the background noise of the universe.

Samantha spun around and looked over the giant building in front of her. About a dozen granite steps led up to the engraved front doors, through which she stepped, and turned to her PDAP for directions. An overlay of the floor map appeared on the screen, with arrows pointing in the direction she needed to go, first passing by displays of various ages of human technology, before opening a service hatch and descending underground. The museum was surprisingly empty, with only a few curious souls staring a dissected hard disk drive down one of the halls.