CT can't help but laugh at the thought of little kid Gaeta, stickler for the rules in a way little kid her never was. She can just imagine him looking up at the ships passing overhead, daydreaming of being up there too.

"It sounds nice." Simple words, but genuine. It's the kind of nice that she struggles to actually imagine, so used to the way her own world's space age has shaped itself. "I was— well, I was the opposite. I was the quietly rebellious type, always breaking rules so long as I thought I wouldn't get caught. And I was terrified of space, just pants-shittingly scared of it. I thought I'd live and die with my feet firmly on the ground—or, at least, on a building. The military only became the plan when I needed college money and even then, it was only the Project that got me into space. Which meant getting comfortable with some things very quickly, but the idea of wide, open space still gives me goosebumps sometimes."

(There's some grim poeticism, to the final moments she spent with her original team being in open space. Crossing the distance between the drop point and her contact was almost as hard as accepting she had to leave in the first place.)

"What I loved more than anything was coding. And the city was full of easily exploitable technology. I hijacked the screens so many times."