"Sir, please return to your berth and initiate re-freezing procedure."

"Sure, I'll get right on it," I reassure the service drone, neatly dodging round its bulk with my armful of cookies stolen from the galley on sub-level 3. "Headed straight back for that liquid nitrogen embrace, you betcha."

It beeps and boops at me while it thinks further, but finally hums its ways further down the corridor, and I breathe a sigh of relief that unfortunately causes me to drop a cookie. Oh well, I still have twenty or so stashed in my arms. I pad happily down the long corridors up to the bridge, the utter emptiness of the ship filling me with deep satisfaction.

Once there I swing my legs over the captain's chair and gaze out into the starfield ahead of the ship, blue-shifted by our velocity, an appreciable fraction of c.

"Computer, what's our time to destination?" I ask, as I always do, and giggle slightly. "Time to destination five decades, eight years and three months," the computer's voice informs me, and I nod solemnly, suppress another giggle, and begin to eat an oatmeal cookie. The crumbs that fall will be swept up, some time after I leave, by a dedicated cleaning robot ultimately powered by the sunlight that falls on the ship's hull. By then I will be long gone, possibly to the hammock I've improvised inside a janitor's closet.

That's the one downside to this trip. All the conventional beds are taken up with actual colonists, sleeping off their half-century with the assistance of cryoprotective chemicals. I haven't had a good night's sleep in a decade, but then, there hasn't been an actual "night" in a decade, just the periodic dimming of the artificial lights that the ship arranged for my benefit after I bamboozled it sufficiently.