by Kaz Morran
At the side of the hub opposite the bank of windows, the Aviator emerged from a stairwell, which led down a corridor, inside of which Taiyo could just make out the tops of several doorframes, probably crew quarters.
The Aviator paused at the opening to the hub and surveyed the occupants. He dragged a stool away from another wall counter, looked at it, looked at the crowd of people, looked at it again, put it back, retrieved it once more, and at last took a seat. Facing Ethan and the AsCans at the center table, he began his briefing: “Ladies and gentlemen,” he called out, and had to repeat three times before anyone paid attention. “Ladies and gentlemen … Congratulations. You are about to start the final phase of the Project Daintree simulation.” He adjusted his posture to straighten his back. “You are about to go underground.”
“Metaphorically?” Walter muttered from his seat with the other AsCans at the central table. Kristen shushed him.
The Aviator continued. “A pair of American explorers found it …”
Walter and Kristen started to nod, but Ethan interrupted. “Nah. I don’t think so, mate. It was two pommy hikers tripping balls on toad-licking. They came across it like an epiphany.”
The Aviator took his sunglasses out if his shirt pocket, stared past Ethan and the candidates, faked squinting at the glare coming through the windows, and put them on. He fiddled with their position on his nose until he was able to stare down over the rims at Ethan. “You know—”
Ethan didn’t let him finish. “Doesn’t matter, mate,” he said then waved his hand at Ethan as if wafting away a fart. Then Ethan told the AsCans, “The abos sussed the place out way before any whites did, anyway, and a month after the backies found it, the Aussie space agency was pinning it down with satellites.”
The Aviator faked a cough, and when he’d regained everyone’s attention, he continued. “For the first three days down there you’ll do science and mapping. Take whatever route you want, but there’s a checkpoint you have to tag by the morning of day four.”
“Yes, sir,” said Walter.
“The goal’s not to rush through it, though,” said Ethan. They were to fill those three days as productively as possible.
The spelunking adventure, said the Aviator, would be the AsCans chance to show their respective space agencies how they could work with others while being pushed to the mental breaking point. To Taiyo, it sounded a lot like university but blissfully shorter. Anything could be endured for three days. Compared to the trek, three days playing Indy Jones in a cave sounded like a retreat.
Over the past year, three expeditions had gone in to explore the network of lava tubes beneath Kambi Valley, but the system was so vast they’d only surveyed about 10 percent so far. Ten percent was just an estimate, of course. No one knew the full extent of the system.
The most recent expedition, Ethan said, had been conducted by a T3-sponsored team to prep for Project Daintree. “Shifty Stevie and Whiz Kid over there …” a pair of hunched over young men in with identical pointy beards looked up from their laptops and gave a light wave. “And somewhere round here are Kelly and Steph—we call her Stephanie Dodd the cephalopod. …”
Although indoors and wearing sunglasses, the Aviator cupped his hands over his eyes to mimic searching for them. He came over and slapped Ronin on the back, saying, “Right about the time of your whitewater run down the river, we had the kids down under, so to speak, checking your air levels and whatnot. Doing crate inventory and installing com relays, or some shit like that.” He stroked his chin, tossed a nod to Ronin, and said, “By the way, nice work teaching Big Bird a lesson, bro.”
“He means the cassowary,” Ethan told Taiyo, to his left. Then, Ethan clutched the rim of the table and leaned over someone’s abandoned plate of crumbs and spoke to Ronin while casting a pinched-brow gaze of disapproval. “We all saw the footage, ay.”
Someone in the background made a snort of a laugh.
Taiyo kept his eyes on the table, afraid his expression might give away his satisfaction. If T3 had seen the footage, then JAXA probably had, or would, too.
After meeting virtually, via a laptop, with a geologist, a biologist, and a speleologist to review protocols and checklists outlining everything from sample collection and mapping, to communications, equipment checks, safety and emergency procedures, logbooks, data entry, atmospheric chemistry, sanitation and hygiene, and mental wellbeing, Taiyo was exhausted.
It wasn’t yet suppertime, but knowing the facility around him contained real beds made his overworked body crave a shutdown. He perked up, however, when the astrobiologists came on screen.
While in the cave, on top of mapping and geological sampling, the AsCans would search for the signatures of life that may have adapted to an environment without sunlight. Discoveries the AsCans made in the cave had the real potential to aid in the search for life on other worlds—an endeavor shared by MONSTAR-X. JAXA might have killed the proposal, but Taiyo still held a flame for the 550 AU vision.
“So, we’re doing real research here,” Taiyo nodded and said to no one in particular.
“And you’ll get proper credit for proper work,” said Ethan.
Their results would be combined with the results of future teams, and the redundancies would help weed out anomalies and errors in the data.
“Proper credit,” Taiyo repeated, and he side-eyed Ronin.
“Something in your eye, hafu?” Ronin dipped one shoulder and pitched with his gaze at Taiyo.
“Just a fleck of hypocrisy. You know how it is with the air in artificial environments.”
***
Taiyo saddled up with Nel and Anton, who’d beaten him to the central table of the hub floor. Out the nearby bank of windows, the sky showed the first hues of evening orange.
Beside them, Ethan stood and was chatting up Dr. Wilson. Her bangle bracelets and loopy earrings jingled in time to her pitch-and-yaw mannerisms, and they sounded like shattered glass when she threw her head back and hyena-laughed at something Ethan had told her. When she caught Taiyo staring at her and the instrument in her arms, she broke from Ethan and said she’d be showing the AsCans how to use a nifty little invention she called the Zeel-5.
“Can I hold it?” asked Anton. He stood and held his hands out for the sleek, shoebox-sized quad-copter.
“Umm. …” She drew in her elbows and tensed her shoulders. “Well, I— I guess you’ll have to soon enough anyway.”
Dr. Wilson’s posture relaxed a little. She moved closer to Anton to minimize the transfer distance. “Okay, like this.” She exaggerated the cradling of her arms to show him. “Have you held a baby before?”
“Two grown baby daughters,” said Anton. He smiled at the woman warmly. Taiyo had no doubt about Anton being qualified to cradle an infant, or a machine that had to be handled like one. In the short time Taiyo had known Anton, the medic had shown nothing but composure and patience.
Dr. Wilson cackled and then brought the Zeel-5 up to Anton’s chest. She held onto it a few seconds even as he tried to take it. “Just like— Right, and put your hand under— No. Under here. Okay, now turn it. Um, okay. … But a little more over this way, like— That’s right. Okay, like that. Gentle, though. Right. But not— There you go.” She eased her hands away from Anton but hovered nearby just in case.
Once Anton had gained Dr. Wilson’s trust, she asked Nel, “Would you like to hold it, too, dear?”
“I already have,” said Nel.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The Zeel Two, I think, actually.”
It took the woman a second, and in that time her face morphed from scrunched up to a mouth-gaping cackle upon realizing what Nel was getting at. “Oh, yes!” she squealed. “Ha! Devon Island, right? Yes, yes. It was on Devon. I’m Sylvia. You remember of course. Dr. Sylvia Wilson. Oh, sweetie, but I forget your name.” Nel reminded her.
Nel didn’t stand but let Dr. Wilson take her hand and continue with the parade of exclamations. Once calm, Dr. Wilson added, “We wer
e hardly different than any other TAMS concept back then. One three-minute hop a day was all we could do.” She paused to cackle. “We hadn’t solved the battery density problem yet.”
“I remember that.” Nel’s slow, steady tone and unwavering posture contrasted the flailing woman in front of her.
“Of course, these days, any off-the-shelf lithium-ion is better than what we had back then. Thank Elon.” Dr. Wilson crossed her heart. “But nothing beats pulling your electricity out of thin air, now, does it?” Her eyes doubled in size, and she aimed them at everyone in range then threw her head back and cackled.
That put a few wrinkles in Taiyo’s forehead. “What do you mean?” he said. “How can it pull electricity from the air?”
Dr. Wilson slapped Taiyo's arm and laughed as if he’d made a flirty joke, so in place of an answer, he watched Nel handle the drone.
It had a curious shape to it, like some other aircraft he’d seen somewhere, but he couldn’t quite remember where. The propellers notwithstanding, the components of the body flowed together to eliminate hard angles or edges. Tiny contoured fins flared at the rear, and the nose broadened into a duckbill.
Ronin, Kristen, and Walter came up the stairs from their quarters and joined the others at the table. Dr. Wilson took the device back from Nel. “Little Zeely here scans as it flies,” she told the group of well-rested AsCans. “The embedded IR beams fan out and oscillate. … And this part here is the autonomous navigation unit—that was the tough part to nail down. I literally spent nine months on that one little component. It’s like I carried a baby.” More cackling followed. Taiyo couldn’t imagine spending more than a day confined on a mission with Dr. Wilson without picking up the closest blunt object and bashing his own head in, but for the moment he found her merriment contagious.
Taiyo smiled and nodded along. As soon as he got a chance, he stood up and said, “The instrument housing …” He pointed around Dr. Wilson's clutching arms to the drone. “Is the morphology just for aerodynamics, or is it related to the power-from-thin-air you mentioned, or … ?”
“I’d be out of my jurisdiction if I tried to explain too much,” she said. Taiyo waited for the cackle to pass. “You’d have to ask Andy and Zhang and all our engineers.” She seemed to anticipate Taiyo’s frown. “I can say, though, that the shape is quite significant to the Zeel’s flight and propulsion.”
“So more than just aerodynamics, then.”
“Mm-hm.” She couldn’t keep the rest to herself. “You see the intake here?” She raised the drone to chest-level and angled it to show him the open mouth of the duckbill, which resembled a harmonica, complete with the vertical slats.
Looking at it now, Taiyo knew where he’d seen the design. He kept nodding as Dr. Wilson explained, but a part of him drifted. He drifted back to the Kakuda Space Center near Sendai. The memories swarmed.
Barbwire fencing and camera masts lined both sides of the road, standing out against the cedars and tall fencing that veiled the base. Out the car window, through the gaps in the trees, he spied neat rows of tanks and personnel carriers, and even a few tanks and helicopters.
Dad turned off the main road, and a guard stepped out to wave them into visitor’s parking. Dad must’ve taken young Taiyo to Kakuda a hundred times. Of course, that was back when they still let Dad in. Although the policy changes didn’t technically bar foreigners from visiting, even permanent residents who weren’t Japanese by birth now had to apply for security clearance thirty days in advance. For Dad to apply, he had to submit all past and present entry and residency permits, a declaration of good character from a Japanese-born guarantor, and an official translation of his Canadian passport.
Once out of the car, little Taiyo would run across the grass, past the pruned down sakura trees, and straight up to the scaled down H-2A rocket to see how much he’d grown since the last visit. The two-room visitor’s center housed a handful of nozzles and engines—one stood taller than Dad, and another, which had been recovered from the bottom of the ocean, had a big crack in it from the undersea pressure.
On every visit, Taiyo saw the same man. He wore a blue cap and jumpsuit, each embroidered with the JAXA logo. Even at age four, or six, or eight, Taiyo knew the man most likely did little more than cleaning and grounds keeping, as evidenced by the broom or hedge trimmers he usually carried. But the man might have been an astronaut. He also might have been retired and just liked to hang around. He sure looked retired. Scared to have his delusion snapped, Taiyo had never asked about the man’s role, but the two of them would often chat about the ins and outs of the facility and agency.
The man was thin. Like Taiyo’s grandfather, his jaw wobbled a little when he spoke, and his head and feet stuck out farther than his shoulders and tummy. “It’s not really the scientists and engineers that are at odds,” the man once said.
Taiyo had been sitting on the bench in the hallway, across from the shelves of books and paper spacecraft models. The man had stopped sweeping when he got to the bench, and Taiyo stopped swinging his feet and shut the book in his hands to listen.
“The scientists get excited if you give them money to go gather new data. The engineers get excited if you give them money to build new hardware. But they both want to explore the universe.” Taiyo sat up straight, folded his hands on top of the book in his lap, and looked up at the man. He’d learned that if he kept his eyes on a grown up and didn’t fidget, they’d say a lot more than they wanted or than they thought kids could understand. “The problems come from the people in charge,” the man continued. “The people in charge get excited when the scientists and engineers spend the money. Do you understand?”
Taiyo started to nod yes but corrected himself and shook no. He wanted to be smart a lot more than he wanted to look smart.
The man looked down the hallway, left and right. Seeing nobody except Taiyo’s dad, who was heading into the restroom, the man set his broom against the bookshelf. He paused to wipe the dust off the solar panels of papercraft Akari space telescope before taking a seat beside Taiyo on the bench. “The way the people in charge see it,” he said, “it’s easier to spend the money doing the same thing as before than it is to spend it doing something new.”
“But then why bother doing anything?”
“Well, if they do new stuff nobody knows how much it’ll end up costing or how long it’ll take until it’s done. They don’t know if their friends that made the old parts can make the new parts, and if they can’t, they have to pay somebody else to make them and then the old friends might get upset. The whole chain gets kinked when they try and do something new. New things are risky.”
“Well, that’s pretty dumb. I thought the X in JAXA stands for explore. Somehow.”
The man laughed softly. “You’re a smart boy,” he said.
Taiyo put his hands on the edge of the seat of the bench and looked down at the grey linoleum, searching for patterns as he often did to make his brain do something else. “Yeah, I know,” he said without looking at the man.
People always called him smart, like that one word explained away how he knew stuff. He guessed it was easier for them than saying he’d done a good job learning stuff and figuring things out. But he still didn’t like it. It felt the same as how people thought words like gaijin and hafu—foreigner and half-Japanese—explained why he did stuff. He’d been reading and writing Japanese kanji since preschool, years ahead of everyone else, but if his fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Morita, thought even one stroke looked off, she’d write home to say he was having trouble, but not to worry—kanji is hard for foreigners. With a little Japanese-like effort, he’d catch up.
Other visitors to the Kakuda Space Center were rare, and they never lingered. So, as well as getting to talk to the old man with the broom, Taiyo got to take his time admiring the Center’s crown jewel.
Standing in the doorway of the only other exhibition room, one smaller than the lobby with the vending machines, his eyes would scour the floor map of Japan a
nd land where so many people had pointed to Kakuda and Sendai with their feet that a grey patch of exposed cement had taken over the Pacific coast. Then he'd look west, across Honshu and the Sea of Japan. Around where Korea or China would've started, a repurposed microphone stand served as the mount for the spherical casing that contained the spaceplane.
Hardly bigger than his RC car, the test model of the HOPE-X scramjet hovered inside the sphere, poised above Japan on its way to the planets. The model would draw him in slowly. He’d approach from the side as if he were an incoming spacecraft being captured into orbit and then make tighter and tighter ellipses until he had no choice but to stop and place his hands on the display case. He’d peer through his fingers at the sleek, silver glint of the spaceplane and pretend the project hadn’t been canceled.
But it had been canceled—a day short of his ninth birthday.
Instead of relying on a complex booster system like the seven-person Shuttle had, the four-person HOPE would’ve launched atop an H-2 rocket, but a string of failures during Mitsubishi’s development of the H-2 caused Japan to scale back its rocket of the future, and the rebranded H-2A relegated Japan’s spaceplane ambitions to a smaller, uncrewed, Space Station resupply vehicle.
The iteration on display at Kakuda had come even later; it still looked like a duckbilled Space Shuttle, but the design did away with rocket propulsion altogether. Instead, the spaceplane would rely on a scramjet engine built into its belly and would be dropped from a jet rather than launched from a pad.
In a regular jet plane, the engine does the compression work. In a scramjet, however, the supersonic speed of the plane would compress the air intake as it underwent combustion and was forced out the back of the engine, giving the plane enough thrust to push it into space.
Engineers had tested that very same mini HOPE-X model in the wind tunnel across the road from the visitor’ center, and they’d even flown a larger demo model in the Australian outback. By all accounts, the tests had been successful.
