Launch Pad

by Jody Lynn Nye

  Decision Day is two days away.

  5.

  Today was awful with unexpected news. A girl in Pod 8 killed herself this morning. I knew her only in passing. She had a thin face and unruly brown hair and heavy hips. An unsmiling girl, the kind I see in my bathroom mirror every day. Somehow she evaded the security scanners and triggered an emergency airlock. She took off her clothes before she stepped outside; how brave. Corporation banned the video but I can imagine it clearly. Under the rising sun, she spread her arms wide and embraced the sky. Picture her as a religious figure, a martyr to the loneliness and bleakness of this planet. Stripped away of artifice and hope and a future. No one survives unprotected out there. Mars freezes your skin and poisons your lungs. It is the antithesis of Earth; the dark twin to Earth’s beauty. She is not the first to succumb to the wrongness of this world; she won’t be the last.

  Rumor says that she wanted to join the Explorer Corps. She wanted to lift herself from Mars and sail across the void to the Jovian frontier. But her scores were too low to qualify. Scores define us here. They define and limit us, put us into tiny boxes of potential, hammer the lids shut.

  If I were brave enough, I would forge a hammer and smash away at the constraints. But I’m such a coward. A frail, uncertain coward with none of the strength or motivation that I always pretend to have when the boys look my way.

  Today was full of tears for the poor dead girl. I suppose I cried, too, but with bitterness. If I stripped myself bare and walked out an airlock they would only say that I did it for attention.

  6.

  Decision Day. I chose Agro Services and Hub 1.

  7.

  Dr. Hardy has put a stop-hold on my graduation. He says he won’t allow me “such a self-destructive indulgence” and threatened to keep me in pod until I’m a doddering old woman with gray hair. I’m touched by his caring. He doesn’t see Hub 1 as I do: a promised land free of bureaucracy, career woes, and the slow blood poisoning of letting others decide your fate.

  The girls in my pod think I’m crazy. The boys think I’m joking, but their gazes seemed unsettled, nervous. John took it upon himself to explain in boring detail that I was wrong, so very wrong, such a misguided girl, you’ll be sorry, Sylvia. With a deep line of anxiety between his eyebrows, Marquez said I’m too idealistic. I don’t feel idealistic. For the first time in years, I feel weighted down (how ironic) and tied to a future that I am forging for myself.

  8.

  In my quarters, everything sterile and white, silence like a suffocating blanket. I’ve tried listening to music, old lectures, and even the grim news of America at war again. I wish we had war here. Mars is named for the war god, after all. During battle heroes would rise and cowards would fall, and we would face each day with cold uncertainty that would test our resourcefulness. But there is nothing here but boring peace, so I tuned to the recorded sounds of Earth whales in their briny depths. I think whales must be marvelous creatures, enormous yet graceful, not like ugly girls on a Saturday night with no social invitations to accept or decline, no stammering or self-confident boys on her doorstep. How sad a creature I am. Whales swim in pods, but my pod has moved in a direction that no longer includes me.

  9.

  Mother’s face, mottled pink with anger and disappointment. Her lips thin and tongue sharp as she delivers disapproval. “You think only of yourself, Sylvia” and “How will you take care of me in the future?” I don’t know who told her of my decision or why I answered her call from Hub 2 when I was already feeling sick and weary. She says she will tell Dr. Hardy’s superiors that I was distraught by my classmate’s suicide. That I should not be held accountable for decisions made in the disorienting freefall of grief.

  I didn’t point out that my life has already been one long continuous swell of grief punctuated now and then by fleeting pleasures; a glass of sweet almond milk, a fragrant rose newly in bloom, the press of a hot kiss at the hollow of my throat. The slow, building joy of an evening with someone who respects and admires a girl for her brain as well as her body. The sharp burst of pleasure at a difficult physics problem solved, all the perfect mathematics aligning with the universe.

  Perhaps I would not be so melancholy if Father had lived. He was not a handsome man but in his thick, doughy face one could see the ancestral line of hardy peasants, farmers and soldiers. I remember his small, approving smiles at my early schoolwork, as juvenile and amateur as it was. The way he would sit at a desk and write the old-fashioned way with swirls and curls of black ink on crisp white paper. The smell of his shirt as I pressed my nose to his chest. Last night I dreamed he was standing on the horizon of ocean while I remained trapped on shore, and he kept calling my name the way my family did when I was young: Sivvy, Sivvy.

  Youth is the perfect time if you have the shelter of caring parents. They indulge you in golden stories of fairies and elves, of Hobbits and orcs, of purple dragons in the nighttime sky, music and magic melding together, and only gradually do you realize those are stories of an illusory world. The glow fades and darkness emerge as you are squeezed forward into the mold of adulthood, where men see women as little more than sex machines created for their pleasure. Where corporations deny you the basic civil right to pursue your own dreams and passions. Where you must constantly compete with others on the shifting fields of charm and sexuality, painfully aware that your family name has no influence and your intelligence is derided because of your gender.

  We are born in optimism only to learn that we are infinitesimally small cogs in the galactic machinery. To discover that death stalks your loved ones and will cruelly rip them from you, regardless of how much you gnash and wail. To realize that being smart means the others will try to tear you down out of jealousy and spite. To feel your body develop a maddening deep itch that can only be soothed by a boy’s hands and attention. To come to the painful recognition that your worst enemy is the one lurking within, smearing oily dismay and cold doubt over every small accomplishment. To realize that the Milky Way spins around a similar core of destruction, and there is no escape once the black hole starts to suck you in.

  10.

  An exuberant evening last night with Antoine, who had passes to the new planetarium show and decided to share them with me. Antoine is slimmer and taller than I am. He spent most of his life on Hub 2 until his family won an upgrade in the lottery. He has dark skin and green eyes and smiles often, although never quite laughs.

  The planetarium is an old machine, almost a relic, but its popularity endures among those of us who can never go outside and look up into the true nighttime sky. We sat near the center, warm hands entwined, and tipped our chairs back in the velvet darkness. Grand music swelled up exactly as an old composer had written it. Above us, stars faded into life and we ascended from the peak of Olympic Mons into the nighttime sky. Phobos whipped by us on its endless, fruitless loop around the planet. Deimos crossed our path in its more leisurely fashion. Onward we sailed through the asteroid belt with its lonely rocks, and soon Jupiter appeared: the patriarch of the solar system, wearing a uniform of red storms and brown eddies, war ribbons and ceremonial loops. The pressure of Jupiter would crush us within seconds if we tried to descend to its mysterious core, but Io is a fiery moon of volcanoes and lovely Europa hides an ocean under her cloak of ice. Past the satellites we flew, toward Saturn and her spinning ice rings, onward toward Uranus and Neptune and the Kuiper belt, through the heliopause, into the great mysterious Oort Cloud. I was overcome with dizziness not from the shifting visage but from realizing how thunderously wrong I’ve been, how thick-headed and strange. I felt my body hurling across the galaxy as a spot of light among a billion other illuminations of thought and space and time and knew, suddenly, what I had to tell Dr. Hardy.

  Afterward Antoine walked me home and in the darkness kissed me. I was full of tenderness for him but my brain remained disconnected from my body, zooming onward and onward.

  11.

  Dr. Hardy met with his superiors,
and they agreed to let me recast my decision on the condition that I meet with a doctor about my alleged debilitating grief over J’s suicide. The doctor was a thin woman with dark red hair and eyes rimmed with dark pencil. We talked about J in a perfunctory way. I answered the way I’d practiced. I felt very much in control of myself. She asked me if I’d ever considered suicide. How casual a question. How politely professional. I thought about airlocks and culinary knives and the cotton belt of my skirt and the bitter white pills the infirmary gives out when you can’t sleep. I have a stockpile of those under my socks in the second drawer of my closet.

  “No,” I told her. “What a waste, to end your life when there’s so much to live for.”

  12.

  Tomorrow we launch. All these months of planning, preparing, training, and troubleshooting will pay off in our transformation into little gods of spaceflight. I have said my farewell to Mother, who I will never see again. Once you go to the frontier you don’t return. I told her to paint a dot on her ceiling for Europa and imagine me swimming in its oceans, a merwoman finally returned to her home after being imprisoned far, far away. She doesn’t like it when I call Mars a prison. She and Father chose it, she said, to give me their only child opportunities I’d never have on Earth. She thinks they sacrificed their lives for me. I think I was the sacrifice, but there’s no use quarreling over it now.

  A few minutes ago, Ted left my room. He is our mission commander. He is handsome and brilliant and I want to devour him whole. However, we have vowed not to announce our relationship until we reach Europa. He is exactly the kind of man I have always longed for: magnificent, towering, full of kindness for me. He supports me wholeheartedly. He respects my brain and body both. He makes all other men seem like shadows. Together we will raise Europa’s colonies and our family, and we will know perfect bliss.

  I’m too excited to sleep. Too jittery with joy and anticipation. Tomorrow my whole life changes. For now maybe I will swallow one of these bitter white pills, and let dreams of the ocean pull me under.

  ***

  Glitches

  By Doug Farren

  “That’s it,” Brian announced, sliding the keyboard into the console. Standing up, he rubbed his hands together as if to brush off some imaginary dust. “Xavier, do you agree?”

  “I concur,” a male voice replied from the overhead speaker. “The ship is configured for cruise-plus mode. I have full control of all systems.”

  Brian Sokolowski, the New Hope’s 36 year-old executive officer, turned to face the only other person on the bridge. “Well Captain, I guess it’s time for us to join the rest of the passengers and begin our long sleep.”

  Captain Stan Holbrooke nodded in agreement. His head, as well as Brian’s, was shaved. The stubble had clear gaps in the front and top where no hair would ever grow. Although he was only seven years older than Brian, his hairline had been receding since his 30th birthday.

  Stan headed for the door, his magnetic shoes causing him to walk in a strange, jerking motion. Each step he took emitted a double click, making him sound like a tap dancer slowly practicing his routine; the heal-plate hit the floor first, followed quickly by the toe-plate.

  From behind, Brian said, “I can’t shake this feeling we’re forgetting something; like, maybe we left the stove on.”

  “All appliances in the galley are powered down,” Xavier said.

  The Captain chuckled as they reached the hatch. “You’re not one of those people who would turn around after an hour on the road because you thought you forgot to lock the doors are you?”

  “No,” Brian replied stepping over the knife-edge of the hatch. “But this is different. We’re putting on the cruise control and going to bed for a 200 year nap.”

  Stan paused at the hatch to take one more look around the bridge. Most of the consoles in the twenty-meter square room were dark and would remain that way until they reached their destination. “Xavier is much more than just a simple cruise control,” he said, closing the hatch.

  Brian ran his hand over the top of his head. He used to boast a thick mass of dark, red wavy hair, a gift from his Irish-born father—now it was just a stubble. “It’s still a machine,” he replied.

  “He,” the Captain corrected, spinning the handwheel to firmly dog the airtight door.

  “He,” Brian emphasized the word, “is not human and therefore doesn’t have a gender.”

  Stan waved his hand in the air. They’d had this argument too many times in the past and he was in no mood to get into it again. “Xavier will wake one of us if he gets into a situation he can’t handle. If you’re not comfortable with his abilities, you’re more than welcome to keep him company until you die of old age.”

  For a moment, Stan had the wild idea that Brian was actually considering the suggestion. “No thanks,” Brian finally said.

  The pair made their way down a long, wide passageway which ran from the bow all the way to the engineering section at the aft end of the massive ship. It could easily have accommodated four people walking abreast. Prior to the New Hope’s launch, this had been a very busy corridor. It was now empty and, except for the echoing clicks of their shoes, silent.

  The hibernation prep-room had been built to accommodate twenty people at a time. Two pods stood waiting, their clear plastic clamshell covers open as if inviting someone to lay down inside. Two of Xavier’s humanoid robots were also in the room.

  Pulling his shirt over his head, Brian said conversationally, “They claim you don’t dream in hibernation.” Casually tossing his shirt to the nearest robot, he began working on removing his pants. “If that’s true, then as far as we’re concerned we’ll be arriving in another star system in a few minutes, even though nearly 200 years will have passed.”

  The Captain pushed his pants down to his ankles and stepped out of his shoes leaving them stuck to the metal deck. He grabbed a handhold before gently pushing off the floor. He executed a slow-motion ballet into the waiting hibernation pod. “I’ve heard some people do dream,” he said, sliding his legs into the tubes designed to accept them. “See you in 189 years.”

  The clamshell closed, cutting off all further conversation. Stan saw Brian mouth a reply as the robot began gathering up his discarded clothes. They would be cleaned then carefully folded and vacuum-packed to keep them fresh until needed again. A slight hiss marked the release of the anesthetic gas and a moment later he was asleep. A thin sheet was pulled over his limp body up to his neck. A slight vacuum caused it to tightly adhere to every square inch of his exposed skin. The sheet contained thousands of tiny sensors as well as electrical stimulation points to keep his muscles from atrophying during his extended sleep.

  The pod’s computer waited until it was satisfied that its occupant was completely unconscious before moving itself into what the crew referred to as the meat locker. It traveled along a light rail system until it reached its destination where it was locked in place, joining the other 100,000 colonists already in hibernation. The air inside the pod was infused with a mixture of exotic gases as the temperature was slowly lowered. The Captain’s heart rate slowed to a single beat every 15 seconds. His breathing became shallow and very slow as his metabolism entered a state of chemically induced hibernation.

  The New Hope was a gigantic spaceship. Funded through a combination of private and government donations, the ship had taken sixteen years to build in lunar orbit. The main part of the vessel consisted of two groups of five cylinders, each one 800 meters long and 200 meters in diameter, stacked together like giant pencils around a sixth. A huge, half-meter thick erosion plate was mounted on the bow. The habitat section was coupled to the engineering section at the rear. The engineering component was half again as large as the habitat section, most of it consisting of fuel.

  Four months ago, the New Hope’s mighty antimatter-enhanced VASIMR engines had ignited, propelling the ship out of the solar system at a steady acceleration of 0.1Gs to achieve a speed of 3.389% the speed of light. Two days a
go, the last of the fuel tanks, along with the VASIMR engines themselves, had been jettisoned, ending the boost phase. The more efficient but less powerful ion engines would continue to accelerate the ship at 0.011Gs for the next ten years—the cruise-plus phase. Following the shutdown of the ion engines, the cruise phase of the journey would begin with the ship coasting along at 26.07% the speed of light for the next 156.5 years. Xavier would then spin the ship end-for-end for the final phase—cruise-minus, where the ion engines would run continuously for 23 years to decelerate the ship.

  Xavier’s electronic presence roamed the empty, silent ship as it glided through space. His primary mission was to protect the colonists tucked away in the meat locker and to ensure the ship made it to their destination, a star designated as 18 Scorpii. They were heading for the fourth planet of that system. A planet believed to be much like Earth.

  O O O

  Captain Holbrooke opened his eyes to see one of Xavier’s robots looking down at him. Reaching up, he stroked his chin and suddenly came wide awake. When he had climbed into the hibernation pod his chin had been smooth and freshly shaved. It was now covered by a heavy stubble. If he had been in hibernation for as long as expected he should have had a full beard by now. “What’s wrong?” he asked, sitting up.

  “I have lost communications with all group 11 hibernation pods,” Xavier replied. “Six robots have been stationed in the area to monitor the local indicators. The troubleshooting algorithms have been unable to locate the fault.”

  The Captain gently launched himself out of the pod. “How long have I been in hibernation?”

  The robot backed away as Stan performed a graceful somersault to the floor. “Eleven years, three months, and nine days. I have prepared a solid meal for you. You should eat as soon as possible.”

  Although his body had been fed liquid nutrients during his slumber, his stomach was empty and the mention of food triggered a sharp pang of hunger. “Let me get dressed first,” he said taking the pants the robot was holding out for him. What have you done so far to try to restore communications?”