Free The Wizard from Earth by S.J. Ryan Page A

retrieve.  Matt should have never been seen or heard of again.
    But then in his stupor, he had somehow managed to instruct Ivan to plot a course here instead.  Alternately charging and de-charging the remnants of the magsail, Ivan had steered the pod on a hyperbolic passage near the sun that was Alpha Centauri, bending their trajectory so that they headed on toward the sun that was known as Delta Pavonis. 
    Then Ivan had utilized the damaged sail to decelerate the pod during its passage out of the Centauri Oort Cloud to a velocity of approximately two and a half percent lightspeed.  At the time it must have seemed a prudent measure, for the slower the pod moved, the easier it would have been for a rescue mission to intercept.  But no intercept mission had been sent, and the end result of the reduced velocity was that it had taken more than six centuries to cross the sixteen light years between Alpha Centauri and Delta Pavonis.
    Once it had entered the fringes of the Delta Pavonis System, the magsail decelerated against the molecular wisps of the DP Oort Cloud.  Entering the realm of the planetary system, the magsail interacted with the natural proton wind and photon flux from the star itself  and decelerated further to a velocity sufficiently low enough for tug retrieval – that is, assuming a tug had been launched and outraced him there.  Ivan's record of the pod AI's camera telemetry indeed showed the approach of tiny robots and a tug barely larger than the pod.  They had made a rendezvous with the pod during its hyperbolic departure from the sun, and detached it from the magsail (which had proceeded outward again on a cometary trajectory into deep space). 
    The tug had vectored the pod to this station and, in delicate choreography, robots had inserted it into this very compartment.  The pod camera showed the compartment's exterior door closing.  Interior lights flickered on.  A rustle of tiny particles indicated the pumping of air.  Out of a slot came a medical robot, which undid the cover plate . . . . 
    Matt punched the virtual display, causing it to vanish. 
    "Bottom line," he whispered.  "Six hundred and eighty-four years, Delta Pavonis System.  I guess I'd better get used to it."
    He waited for Ivan to give a snappy comeback.  But Ivan was programmed to give snappy comebacks only in known, safe environments. 
    Matt examined his hands.  They were encrusted with dried biogel.  Was biogel supposed to crust like that?  He had never seen it do that in the videos of star traveler revival.  Maybe it did crust, after the passage of centuries.  Biogel doesn't last forever, after all.  And neither do star pods.
    Neither do neural implants , he thought. 
    His fingernails were too long.  He ran them through his hair.  It too was too long, and tangled, and coated with biogel dust.  The ventilators were purring, but the whole chamber reeked of the minty stale smell of biogel dust well past shelf life.   
    "There have got to be people," Matt said.  "But there's nobody contacting us at all?"
    "The station keeper says he has received no contact at this time.  I have asked him if he has records of prior contact, and he says no, and that he does not keep long term records."
    "Medical science had extended human life indefinitely, they said," Matt mumbled.  "My family should still be alive.  My friends too.  Especially Synth, she should be fully ascended and all metal and energy by now so at least she would have lasted.  My mom . . . nobody left a message?"
    "I don't know if this is relevant," Ivan said, "but it could be argued that the presence of this station in this star system is a message."
    Matt was prepared to technically agree with that, but surely family and friends wouldn't be so cryptically laconic.  Unless, over centuries, their post-Singularity trans-humanism had evolved so far that they could no longer relate to the feelings of a scared more-or-less baseline-human kid.     
    He