I woke up happy. It still felt weird, even after almost two years. Next to me, Martin was snoring. He had some stubble on his chin, and his hair still smelled faintly of acid rain. The air was oppressively hot, despite the best effort of the building’s “energy-efficient” air conditioning system. But I was happy. He was there, and I could press my body to his and feel his warmth and his heartbeat. He yawned, opened one eye and smiled faintly, and one of his hands slid over my breast, cupping it. I leaned in to kiss him.

And then I woke up, this time for real. I woke up alone and hurting. I was in a perfunctorily personalised coffin, full of hot, stale air endlessly recirculated by the life support of the colonist transport vessel. Bound for Mars.

Those dreams were the worst, the ones where everything was all right, where Martin was still alive. I took drugs to take the worst edge out of grief, but their effect was limited. I needed to be able to live my life somehow, and as long as I was able to think and remember, I would grieve.

I hoped Mars would help. The Mars project was over sixty years old and still in its infancy, but it would provide a change. And a chance of death. It’s really, really hard to effectively commit suicide in a modern hive city. The city AI sees all, there is a medical drone minutes away and no weapons of any kind available to an average citizen. I could always hope for some catastrophic weather event to kill me, like it did Martin, but Earth weather was highly random and chaotic and I had no guarantees.

On Mars, there was no weather, but its lifeless environment was consistently, permanently lethal. It took me two tries to get past psychological screening, but the Mars Program had only basic level shrink AIs, so I managed to convince them that the I have recovered from the death of my husband within a year.

A hundred years will not be enough.