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Had they really written fifteen thousand goodbye notes?
No, I’m sure they had a template—copied thousands of times over, then each finished with some sort of personalization. But even if each wasn’t handwritten, it was still a nice gesture.
They did care about us. As people, not just as parts of the mission.
I made up my mind to read it on a day when I was really missing them. For now, I simply wanted to enjoy the moment.
I glanced around my small room. Every cabin had a window, though there were quarters in the ship’s interior. A complex system of tubes and mirrors assured everyone had a view, though.
Mine was less than spectacular at that moment. I saw mostly a lot of ground and a sliver of horizon.
I should have treasured that splinter of sky. Even though I’d never see the sky again it was still too pedestrian for me to take note of at the time.
After removing my helmet and letting my curls free, I sat down and strapped in. The space suits were mostly for show. We had to keep them close during launch, in case of emergency, but most of us would never need to wear them again, provided all went well.
“Hello, computer,” I said, wondering if the system would be as cold as the prototype.
“Hello, Margarita Pavon.”
“Are you ready for lift-off?”
“Nearly. Just accessing a package left for me.”
“What kind of package?”
“A few … memories.”
“I won’t bother you, then.”
“Thank you.”
The ship jolted and rumbled a little, but it wasn’t the shake and shimmy of lift-off. With everyone aboard, consortium aides could now roll our shuttles back into the bay. A faint grinding of the hangar doors signaled the end of loading—and the end of my time on Earth.
Soon we would be shooting off into the stars.
The ship went quiet for a while. Almost everyone on Mira would face the lift-off alone. It would have been nice to have Nika nearby to share the moment with, but I suppose Father thought this was a good time for individual reflection and contemplation. That we would all like to meet this new life in our own, private way.
Father wasn’t always right.
A tremor vibrated up my spine from deep in the ship. Then there was a roar deep in my bones, and I knew the external cyclers had come to life.
My room shook dramatically. Luckily everything was either bolted down or tightly secured.
I crossed my arms over my chest, trying to hold myself still. There was a giddiness in the pit of my stomach, like the kind I got on a rollercoaster anticipating that first big drop. The ship rattled like it was going to fall apart.
Everything will be okay, I told myself. No need to worry. These ships were the safest spacecraft ever built.
Yeah, tell that to the team that blew up when they tried to go subdimensional.
No. I wasn’t going to think about that. No point in panicking over a fluke. This was a great moment, epic and intense, something I’d been looking forward to since I was old enough to understand what was happening and why I was so special. My silly fears weren’t allowed to spoil the splendor.
I had talked to lots of people before we boarded, and they were choosing to watch the launch via their implants. It was the last time we were going to be able to access that kind of real-time data from Earth. And sure, watching it from the outside while being inside was impressive. But I wanted to experience it all live, all in the moment.
A billow of wind whipped up the dust outside my window, obscuring the ground from view. And then there was a slow, intense thrust. The pressure pushed me deep into the jump seat, and I closed my eyes for half a moment.
The shaking stopped as soon as we were free of the mooring and into the sky. I knew we weren’t speeding away—the g-forces were little more insistent than those on a car chugging down a highway—but I felt like a giddy kid on a fair ride nonetheless.
I opened my eyes again. Up, up we went. Past the birds, the clouds. Past mountain peaks and into the paths jetliners usually took (all rerouted to give us plenty of clearance, of course). We drifted higher, and higher. Iceland shrank away, then all but disappeared. I could see the North Atlantic and the Greenland Sea, despite impressive cloud cover. And then two coastlines pushed in from the periphery of my window like darkness pushes sight into tunnel vision moments before you faint.
The sky changed colors, became a blue haze as we passed out of the atmosphere, and black space swamped in around the edges of the planet.
It still amazes me that something so expected can be so simultaneously surreal.
The artificial gravity kicked in seamlessly. Using gravitons to create gravity where there is none is a much simpler process than trying to use them to cancel out the existing pull of something like, I don’t know—a planet. As such, I didn’t actually notice the transition from real Earth grav into simulated. It wasn’t until a few more minutes had passed, with Earth still falling away, that I even considered it.
And once I noticed the gravity I couldn’t un-notice it.
I had watched every single recording of spaceflight in existence. The launches, the landings, the missions—I was familiar with each of them, inside and out. Watching the astronauts bounce around inside cramped, equipment-filled cabins was my favorite part. That, and seeing the panicked look on some space tourists’ faces when they experienced zero-g for the first time.
Weightlessness used to be part of space travel. Not anymore. The twelve convoys were the first to employ simulated gravity via harnessing and aligning gravitons. The cyclers were a wonderful invention, and—don’t get me wrong—would make permanent living in space much easier to handle and safer all around, but I couldn’t quite wrap my head around being in space without free-floating.
It wasn’t as though I’d expected to float, but it was all part-and-parcel of my space fantasy. My space ideal.
Perhaps I could convince one of the mechanics—oh, excuse me, engineers (they don’t like being called ships’ mechanics)—to take me out on a spacewalk.
Outside, Earth was a beautiful blue ball decorated with wisps of white and streaks of green and tan. It grew smaller by the minute. While it slipped away, a funny feeling—a clod of emotion—formed in the pit of my stomach. It was filled with compacted and compressed sentiments I wasn’t ready to deal with, so I pushed it down further, hid it somewhere deep inside myself to be handled later. All I wanted to do was focus on meeting space with a fresh outlook. I wasn’t ready to dwell on all I’d left behind, or that my home planet was no longer my home.
The light in my room shifted from a cool, crisp, natural blueish-white to a lovely shade of purple.
We were about to go subdimensional.
My hands shook as I reached for my helmet and fastened it back on as quickly as I could. It was a silly thing to do, really. If something went wrong with our subdimensional shift a space suit wouldn’t save me. But the uniform gave me some comfort, no matter the illogic of it.
While consciously I would experience time as I always had, my body would experience something very different. It was about to move sideways through time as easily as I could move sideways through the room.
The easiest way to explain it is that the “time” part of space-time is like an ocean. Normally, matter travels on the “ocean’s” surface, like a boat moving at a specific rate across the waves. Subdimensions are like underwater currents. A diver can find a fast current beneath the surface and be propelled much farther than the boat, while exerting less energy.
That’s how a convoy—the diver in this scenario—can effectively harness faster-than-light travel without reaching speeds anywhere near that of light. It’s a handy-dandy little physics hack.
And, if that same diver wanted to go really deep, in order to catch the really fast currents, they’d need a submarine to guard against increasing PSI. We need a subdimensional bubble, created by the SD drive, to protect us from the peculiarities of subdimensional submersion.
Because that’s the thing about physics—it doesn’t like getting hacked.
Our classes on subdimensional space travel had suggested myriads of possible physical side effects that might occur when “diving.” Nausea, elation, déjà vu, the sense that we were walking backward when actually walking forward, stretchiness—whatever that was supposed to mean—the illusion of floating. On and on.
I told myself I could handle it. Whatever was about to go down, I could deal.
My fluttering heart suggested otherwise.
The monitor embedded in the center of my bookcase turned on, displaying a shot of the Moon.
Grimacing despite myself, I waited for some violent indication that the ship had gone sub. I don’t know what I expected—more rattling, perhaps feeling pulled or squished like putty. Something extreme to indicate that I was messing about in pieces of reality I didn’t normally mess about in.
I closed my eyes again, afraid that if I didn’t they might pop out of my skull.
But then the light on the other side of my eyelids turned soft once more and lost its purple hue. A mellow chime of success came through the comms system. I opened one eye. Everything looked normal. Nothing distorted, no melting clocks or wiggling walls. Nothing changed strange colors or lost its density. It all appeared unaffected.
And then we were in! The view through my porthole had turned a starless, inky black.
The monitor replayed our transition—the thirty seconds before the dive through the thirty seconds after. And, oh—the Moon! It was there while simultaneously not being there. It flickered once, jumping a distance of millions of miles in a moment, then it came back (though, of course, we had jumped in time, not it through space). Instead of seamlessly floating by, it shifted more like a time-lapsed photograph—one frame blended into the other.
It had a ghostly quality to it. Quite literally: if we had chosen to travel through the moon, we could have. That was one of the great discoveries about sub-d: the nature of these newly found partial dimensions was actually hidden in the greater dimensions. In picking apart time we could occupy the same space as other matter. Even though I understood that intellectually, I was still glad we’d opted for going around. My anxiety was already in high gear as it was.
I looked at the monitor once more, to find there was nothing there. All of the moon’s odd behavior had taken place in a few seconds, and then it winked out. Space went black, starless, and we were officially in our SD bubble. Visible light could not penetrate, sound could not penetrate, most radiation could not penetrate—the only way we could communicate outside of our bubble now was with SD information packets. And that in itself was no small task.
The feed to the screen repeated. They’d replay the dive over and over again for a while—because the effect was so stunning, or because it confirmed that our conversion was a success and we were all still alive, I wasn’t sure. Probably a bit of both.
I watched it a few more times before my chip phone, now entirely contained to our internal network, indicated I had a call.
“Yes?”
“It’s Nika.”
“Where are you?”
“Outside your door. Let me in.”
I was so enthralled with this new reality that I’d failed to notice the safety light above my door had turned from red to green. I could unbuckle and walk about.
“It has a buzzer, you know,” I said, getting up. “A doorbell.”
“How was I supposed to know you were in? I half expected you to be running up and down the halls by now.”
Skipping, I thought with a smile. “Did you see that transition?” I pressed a button and the door slid aside. “It was spectacular.”
Nika leaned casually against my doorjamb with her hands in her pockets, and gave me a funny look when I moved aside for her to enter. “Guess what?” she said, “The air here is breathable and everything.”
“What? Oh.” I still had the space suit on, helmet and all. She came in and helped me slip out of it.
When I and my party dress were free, Nika leaped onto my bed, bouncing a little as she looked out the window. “Trippy, huh?”
“No kidding.” I crawled up next to her and sat crisscrossed.
“So. Here we are.”
“Yep.” I nodded and bit my lip, watching the last of the moon fade from view. “Here we are.”
“You ready for it?” she asked.
“What?”
“This.” She gestured all around. “Our new lives.”
I shrugged. “I guess. The place—outer space—is new, but has that much really changed? I’m still a communications officer. I’ve been doing that for the past five years. You’re still a historian.”
“Archivist. I’m officially an archivist now. And diplomat.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yep. When we bring all the info on LQ Pyx back, I’ll be the one to interface with all of Earth’s bigwigs.”
She hadn’t told me that before. “Wow. You’re our representative, then?”
“Only when we go back.” She lay flat on the bed, with her hands tucked behind her head. “Too bad I won’t really be there. But, hey, I like being an archivist just as well. It’s easy, it’s fun. I mean, how lucky are we? To get handed our dream jobs from the get-go?”
I knew exactly what she meant. “I get to send the first crew report in five days.”
“Exciting. How many days is that for them?”
“About … forty-eight and a half. Give or take a few hours.”
“Oh, right.” She was quiet for a long minute.
“What are you doing?”
“Calculating how much time goes by for Earth each minute.”
“Nerd.”
“We’re all nerds,” she said, smiling. She shook her head. “Anyway. They’re setting up a great party down in the mess hall. Everyone’s shuttling over from the other ships. I came to get you.” She sat up and punched me lightly on the arm. “Better take good notes. You’ll want to detail every moment in your letter back home.”
We left the room and headed down the hall, still chatting about our jobs. “Do you know who you’ll be exchanging notes with?” Nika asked.
“Oh, you mean my pen pal? Yeah, I did some training with him. Biterman, remember? He taught me a special shorthand, since only so much info can be packed into one subdimensional signal package. Maximized my possible output. Obviously it’s not just him and me communicating, it’s all of us and all of them. We’re just the translators, in a way. There are plenty of other notetakers aboard—journalists. I’m just the one who has to compile everything.”
“Fun.”
“Oh, come on, you know it is, Ms. Archivist. We’ve got copies of millions of primary documents, and no one to stop us from accessing them. Your own personal historical playground.”
On Earth, people could only access rare documents under special circumstances. Not just the originals, but even the DNA-storage copies, since the tech to build and decode the molecules was still new and expensive. In order to read an artificial DNA strand and retrieve the encrypted information, you had to destroy it—which meant you better have the tech on hand to replace it. But we used nearly the same processes for cloning as we did for reading and replacing our databanks, so it was all there for us. Snap, nothing easier.
“We’ve got a wealth of information the average Earth layman can’t get ahold of,” Nika concluded.
And there was a reason for that. We might have old primary documents, history, but we’d be getting very little new information for the duration of the mission. We had no internet, no way to dial up an expert whenever we had an obscure question. If the information wasn’t coming with us, we likely weren’t going to have access to it—and even if I could ask mission control, we definitely weren’t getting a timely or detailed answer. Our only available communication method simply wouldn’t support it.
“We’ve got the information, plus,” Nika said with a grin, “we’ve got the brains to use it.”
“Going intellectual elitist on me already?” I winked at her. Of course she was an intellectual elitist. We all were. Nothing strokes the ego quite like being told from birth that you’ve been chosen for a fantastic mission because, frankly, your genes are better than everyone else’s.
