The following is the transcription of a recording. Warning! It ends abruptly and you'll have to fill in the gaps.

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The first successful brain transplant, read the headlines. I don't remember much. One minute we were in the car, the next we were flying through the air. My lover was driving and was lucky enough to walk away with just a few bruises. I, on the other hand, well, my body was broken. Literally. There was no other option for me, but this pioneering medical act. Since I have no close relatives, the decision had to be made by my partner. It must not have been easy, but still I wonder whether the decision was not a bit easier due to some weird sexual fantasy. After the surgery, when I woke up and looked in the mirror, even though I had looked in the mirror thousands of times before, it felt like the first time. The image I was used to see, was no longer there, replaced by this usurper. What does one do, when one wakes up after cheating death and realizes one is the opposite sex? I'm the usurper. But I'm alive. That's what I do now: I live and I usurp. My donor was an athlete, and this body is amazing, but holy shit, how am I supposed to get used to living in the body of a...?

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I always thought sunrises would look different on Mars. I expected a spectacle I’d never seen before, but instead I got an ’80s dystopian Hollywood movie. There is no colorful light show, just a bland evaporation and shades of endless ochre. The Ochre Planet, they should have called it. But I guess things look different from afar, just like the Earth, hanging carelessly in the distance, as if it wasn’t actually rotting away, slowly, but surely. Light takes 182 seconds to reach us, so if home would go away forever, we wouldn’t know for three minutes and a heartbeat. A few of us have fled the doom, thinking we could cheat our destinies, but time is merciless and drags us all into the abyss that feeds on our greed. We haven’t escaped, we just extended the leash. It’s ironic, we look for hope on this barren planet that bears the name of the god on the altar of which we have sacrificed our home. But in spite of all this, when I think about tomorrow in the hazy twilight of the martian dawn, the Earth always rises in the East.

Dragon's tail I saw in the dark of night

Fiery burned the slithering sight

Emerald scales like glass was its hide

Bone crowned and embery eyed.

It gazed into my soul and saw I was pure

No harm was upon me, of that I was sure

For it was no dragon of the fairy tale kind

But the sacred Kirin in mystery entwined.

When Kazuyoshi was a small boy, he used to climb atop the precipice that towered behind his house to watch the night sky and holding his father's hand he would declare: "When I grow up, I'll go there".

This memory popped into his mind as he listened to the last transmission received from the USS Clarke. Now he was among the stars setting course for the coordinates of the colonial ship. He wondered what he would find at his destination and played the message back once more. A whimpering voice was murmuring: "...in other words, hold my hand...".