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"What sort of person volunteers for a mission that never returns?" The reporter raised his eyebrow when he said person, as if he were using the term loosely and wasn't sure it still applied to me.

To be honest, I don't know how much "person" applies to me either. I mean, I'm still me, but what makes a person a person? Is it the emotional connection? Ambition? Obsession? If so, I am one-for-three, but then, I always was.

";) Oh, you know me; I always gotta be going somewhere else!" I texted. We were doing the press conference with only the text communication interface in order to demonstrate how it would be on the II Explorer 1. A voice interface would be wasted on board a survey spaceship; I mean, who would I talk to? The reporters laughed, and my handler seized the opportunity to end the press conference on a high note. The II program needed all the positive press they could get.

II, that's 'Integrated Intelligence' where man is turned to machine as opposed to AI, artificial intelligence, where people attempt to turn machine into man. Turns out, it's easier to do II than AI – don't ask me why, I'm not the specialist.

I'm not sure what they did or what parts are still intact, but the memories, the personality quirks, the neuroses from my mother – all still intact.

My mother – she's the real reason I signed up. When I was growing up, my summer break Tuesdays were always the same. On other days I would be stuck doing chores for the old lady next door, but Tuesdays were special. My mother worked two jobs, and Tuesday was her one day off. After breakfast, we would dress in our best clothes, get in the car, and start the two-hour journey to the airport in the city. Maybe she went by herself when I was in school; I don’t know. I do know it was the furthest she ever travelled from town in her life.

It might seem silly to dress up to go to the airport, but the airport was fancier than any place in our small town. We would go to the eating area and pick a table right in the middle.

The honeymooners, the business travellers, the soon to be divorced couples, the tired families, the foreign visitors, the young, the happy, the sad, the old – none escaped my mother's scrutiny.

While she was observing them, I observed her. A casual observer might describe her as indifferent. Most of the time, they would be right; she was not an emotional woman. Most of the time, my mother went through life. Not happy, not sad, she just went through life. But I was not a casual observer, and in the airport I could see in her normally inscrutable eyes a spark of emotion. They say the eyes are the windows to the soul; if that's the case, her windows had been welded shut, curtains drawn, and boarded over for as long as I could remember. But in the airport, I finally saw something in my mother's eyes.

It took me a while to understand what I was seeing. I used to think she was incapable of feeling emotions, and so when I saw that spark in the airport, I became obsessed with the whats and whys of it. At first I thought it was jealousy. But it was more than that. But it needed words to describe that I hadn't learned yet like feral, primitive, and wanton desire.

I never got the courage to ask her what the travellers had that she craved. Some fearless adventurer I am, huh? But that was the dynamic of our relationship – I would ask no questions, she would share no answers. Except finally, in her own way, she did share. I was 18 and going to college on the other side of the country. She took me to the airport one last time. She extended the one-way ticket towards me, and as I reached to take it, the force of her hungry gaze caught me. For one long moment we stood like that, not touching each other, but each grasping the ticket. Then she released the ticket, clenched her hands at her side, and told me, "Don't ever come back. Always be going somewhere else."

I never saw her again. I could say that I was a poor student and couldn't afford the tickets home for the breaks during college. Or that I started work immediately after college and my job kept me really busy. Those were excuses, not reasons; the sort of things you told nosy people who wondered too much about things that really weren't their business in the first place. Honestly, though, I knew she didn't want me there. She didn't want me to go back, but most people wouldn't understand that. When she died, her will forbade me from attending the funeral. Probably it caused a lot of talk around our small town; people who didn't know any better no doubt thought she didn't care for me. But I understood; in her own way, that instruction in the will was how she showed she cared. She cared enough to prevent me from going back.

That's why I signed up for the II Explorer project. After a while, you run out of places on Earth that are somewhere else from where you've already been. Not that one person could possibly go everywhere, but there are enough you've-seen-one-you've-seen-them-all places that it narrows down the possible somewhere elses, and I need to be going somewhere else. And soon, I'll always be going somewhere else. Mother would have approved.