They called it a ship. The first generation, the Originals, who built it in the high orbit of a dying Earth, used words like that. Starship. Vessel. Ark.

To Elara, of the Ninth Generation, it was simply the World. Its true name, Chrysalis, was a word from Earth-history, a thing from a planet she knew only through the Archive’s shimmering projections. It meant a shell, a waiting state before a transformation. She felt that in her bones.

The World was a spinning needle of light and life, thirty-six miles of crafted eternity. From the observation blister at the zero-g Spine, Elara could see its whole impossible length. At the fore, the great hexagonal shields of ice and metal—the Whispers—deflected cosmic dust. Along the central truss, the three immense rotating rings turned with a stately, silent certainty. Alpha Ring, a band of green and gold, was the Farm. Beta, a spiral of soft lights, was the City. Gamma, a place of deep hum and ordered shadow, was the Heart, where the fusion suns burned.

Her people, all 2,402 of them, were born to a single, sacred truth: We are the Journey. Their purpose was not to arrive—that was for a generation they would never meet, four centuries hence. Their purpose was to preserve. To keep the World alive, and balanced, and on course.

Elara was a Tender, of the Botanical Guild. Her domain was a sector of Alpha Ring called Sylvan Glade—a forest of engineered oaks and pines whose roots cycled water and whose leaves scrubbed the air. The soil was real, built from the recycled minerals of their ancestors. The light from the arched sun-strips above mimicked a day on a place called Pacific Northwest. She knew every tree; she could hear the slight change in the hum of the irrigation veins when a root cluster was thirsty.

Life was measured in Cycles, not years. A sleep-wake cycle. A growth cycle. A generational cycle. The great clock in the Central Plaza of Beta City counted down the megaseconds until Arrival, a number so vast it felt like a philosophical concept, not a date. 12,614,400,000 seconds to go. The number was their god, and their prison.

They had their rituals. The Day of Remembrance, where the Archives showed the blue marble of Earth cracking under storms of its own making. The Festival of Proxima, where they celebrated the faint, ruby pinprick of their destination, and the imagined oceans of Proxima b. And the Naming, when a child turned ten and was given a role: Tender, Engineer, Archivist, Medic, Peacekeeper.

Elara’s closest friend, Kael, was an Engineer of the Spine. He worked in null-gravity, monitoring the gentle but inexorable push of the pH๏τon sails, vast membranes thinner than thought that caught the laser beams still being sent from the Sol System. He spoke of pressure differentials and quantum efficiency. She spoke of fungal symbiosis and apical dominance. Together, they were the World.