(This makes the agreement to colonize where the CU tells you to colonize something of a moot point—since they're the only ones with the ships, you go where they take you anyway. It's not as if they're going to let you drive the starship.)

A side effect of the Quarantine Laws and the skip drive monopoly is to make communication between Earth and the colonies (and between the colonies themselves) all but impossible. The only way to get a timely response from a colony is to put a message onto a ship with a skip drive; the CDF will grudgingly carry messages and data for planetary governments this way, but anyone else is out of luck. You could put up a radio dish and wait for communication signals from the colonies to wash by, but Alpha, the closest colony to Earth, is eighty-three light-years away. This makes lively gossip between planets difficult.

I've never asked, but I would imagine that it is this paragraph that causes the most people to turn back. It's one thing to think you want to be young again; it's quite another thing to turn your back on everything you've ever known, everyone you've ever met or loved, and every experience you've ever had over the span of seven and a half decades. It's a hell of a thing to say good-bye to your whole life.

I signed.

"Paragraph six—final paragraph," the recruiter said. "I recognize and understand that as of seventy-two hours of the final signing of this document, or my transport off Earth by the Colonial Defense Forces, whichever comes first, I will be presumed as deceased for the purposes of law in all relevant political entities, in this case the State of Ohio and the United States of America.