The Moonlighter slipped silently into the moon's shadow. Where the sun should be there was only a large void like a black hole. Still visible, the Earth was a blue crescent rimmed in red. The night side was covered in lacy lights separated by swathes of emptiness—the oceans. At the poles were wispy rings of green and purple auroras.
The shakes had stopped, but Bobby was covered in clammy sweat.
He listened in on the civilian comm bands. Just people talking, speculating, commiserating, sometimes disagreeing—but never too strongly so as not to trigger the moderator AIs. One at a time they dropped out, leaving only the emergency channels. The updates were clinical and emotionless as if dictated by a bot. Running through the background was a low hiss of static with the occasional pop.
On Earth, the auroras gradually brightened and turned angry. Crimson now, they spread out from the poles like gauzy devil hands trying to squeeze the Earth between them. There was a pinpoint flash followed by several more. Satellites shorting out. It was easy to imagine a space battle taking place at a distance. Meanwhile, the static had gotten so bad it distorted the voices into harsh, alien tongues.
Bobby shook his head to snap himself out of it. He cut comms and headed toward the mess. He didn't want to be alone.
* * *
The marching beat and rattle-tattle of snares kept Tayen grounded as she went through her lab routine. She was optimistic the raspberries in the crew garden would bounce back. Milo had caught the problem early. A clogged water line was to blame, an easy fix. The more resilient peppers, which were on the same line, were barely affected. She double-checked the experiments, including the auto-labs, which were ordinarily Milo's responsibility. Only then did she allow herself to focus on her favorite project.
It went by the unpronounceable name of SRCPLIV: Self-Replicating Chain Polymers with Light Induced Vectors. But Tayen thought of them simply as artificial plants that could grow in space. Space weeds, Milo called them. Out of the dozens of experiments, this one had instantly captivated her. It combined the seemingly unrelated domains of engineering and plant husbandry.
There were serious—some would say insurmountable—challenges to growing something in the vacuum of space. There was obviously no air, soil, water, or nutrients, and without gravity, plants literally didn't know which was way up. What space did have was abundant sunlight, but it was too much of a good thing. Unfiltered, the more energetic wavelengths shredded chemical bonds.
Yet there were good reasons to pursue research into space plants. They could be used to create massive light harvesters beyond even the largest solar arrays. They could colonize asteroids and convert dust and rock into usable materials, possibly even edible food. It could be the dawn of space agriculture.
Every attempt to adapt a natural plant or fungi to space had so far failed. But what if you started with an empty slate and designed a new, synthetic organism from the ground up? Technically speaking, it didn't have to be alive. It just had to function as if it were.
The result was a self-propagating wire fed from a stock of nutrient gel. Growth was stimulated by applying an electric current. At full power, a wire could grow by as much as four inches an hour, outrageously fast for a plant but still too slow for the human eye to detect except for the occasional twitch. But growth was only the first step. How to get the wire-stems to go in the desired direction? Left to themselves, they created a squiggly, tangled mess like clown hair. The tips were supposed to provide steering through an affinity to light, but Tayen hadn't managed to get one to travel straight for more than an inch or two before curling. She tried different light wavelengths and modulations along with guide sticks, meshes, and magnets. Nothing worked.
When she got to trial 246, she couldn't believe what she was seeing. A twisted braid, like a miniature beanstalk, reached from the Jello-like layer of stock on the bottom all the way to the light source at the top. She checked its parameters. It was a poly-nucleated sample with multiple wire-stems sprouting in a ring. Rather than branching off in different directions, the wire-stems spiraled around and supported each other.
She pulled the cube from its slot and gave it a tilt. After flexing in the direction of momentum, it faithfully rebounded to its upright position. Amazing. She had grown the first artificial stem in space. The strength was not in the individual thread but in the braid.
* * *
Jess gave the Mars globe a shake, causing the reddish-gray "dust" to rise around the figure of Vikki Landry, the first Martian. Vikki's resolute face could be seen clearly through the bubble helmet of her lightweight, salmon-colored suit. Holding out her right hand, all around her stretched the plains of Mars, their rusty colors reminiscent of the Grand Canyon. If Jess tilted the globe in just the right way, she could get the dust to swirl like a miniature dust devil.
Jess experienced a mix of feelings as she gazed into the globe. Tenderness. Sadness. Pride. And now a secret guilt. The keepsake was a gift from her aunt in celebration of the day she was accepted into Project Liftoff. She said she had had it custom made after Uncle Henry passed away and was just waiting for the right moment to give it to her. Made of lightweight plastic, it weighed less than twelve ounces, well within the three-pound allotment for personal effects.
Every night before bed, her uncle used to read her biographies of the astronauts. Vikki Landry had always been her favorite. Vikki was an identical twin. Her sister was a scientist on the first Mars launch which had exploded during the separation stage less than forty seconds after takeoff. Vikki, who was a standby, went on to captain the second attempt.
When Vikki stepped onto the planet's surface, her head-mounted camera panned around the ancient landscape. With intention in every movement, she crouched down, scooped up a handful of Martian soil, and held it out at arm's length. Then she slowly rolled her palm over, letting it pour out. The wind spread it into a rooster tail. "We are stardust borne on the cosmic wind," she uttered. "The wind has taken us here. Where will it carry us next?"
In Landry's biography, she had wanted to carry her older sister's ashes to Mars and spread them on the wind, but the mission planners wouldn't allow it. Even if the ashes were inert, it would set a bad precedent. Later, when a crafty entrepreneur began selling space burials, "Turn the ashes of your loved one into a shooting star," it was made illegal to transport human remains to space. Traveling at orbital velocities, even ash particles could wreak havoc on satellites and vessels. Only deaths that occurred in space could be disposed of there, and then only under stringent conditions.
When her uncle died, he was cremated, and his remains were placed in a granite urn. Jess would never have considered taking even a pinch of his remains to space. Rules existed for a reason. It never occurred to her that she would become an unwitting rule-breaker.
The first thing Jess did when she got out of the bunker after the solar flare was call her aunt. "Before your uncle passed, he had one last request," Aunt Jillian told her. "He wanted to have his ashes laid to rest in space. 'Like dust on a cosmic wind,' he said. I remember when Far Horizon set up a launch base just outside of town. Your uncle was so thrilled. He talked all the time about how, when we had children, they would look out their window and watch the rockets go up. And maybe one of them or their children or grandchildren would become an astronaut and ride one of those rockets to space. He wanted to be a part of that journey even if he wasn't alive to see it. But since we never had a child of our own, it's up to you now to carry out his wishes. I'm sure you will find the right place for his ashes. He would be so proud to see you now."
"What can I do?" Jess said. "His ashes are at home in the urn."
"Not all of them. Do you still have the Mars globe I gave you?" Aunt Jillian asked.
"It's right here." Jess gave it a shake and held it up to the phlex for her aunt to see.
"Remember when I told you that you would carry a part of your uncle along with you? It's true. That's not Martian dust in there."
* * *
Vivian checked her phlex for the hundredth time. No notifications in the past ten minutes since the CME started. None. Zilch. When was the last time that had happened?
Checking her phlex was as compulsory as breathing, the urge growing with each passing minute. The 99+ indicator on her social apps was a measure of vitality no less significant than a blood oxygen level. Whenever she cleared them, they would fill back up again in no time: all those upticks, scribes, twixts, tweeks, and re-tweeks. How could there be none? Even in space, she had never been cut off for more than a few minutes.
The longest blackout had been during the launch itself. An entire three minutes. The first thing she did when they reached orbit was check her phlex, which had already re-connected to the nearest sat link.
Cut off from the Vorld, Vivian felt alone in a way she hadn't since she was twelve years old. Face Day. Her first sesh using her real identity. Owing to child protective measures, viewers outside her immediate family would only have seen a face-morphed version of her up to then—the version her parents portrayed to the world. As a result, no one in the Vorld knew her real identity or that she had a deformity—and she intended to keep it that way.
She put on a new blouse and fluffed out the wild, red hair she usually wore back in a ponytail. She practiced for days, getting the camera crop-off just right, and trying on different expressions like hats. She spent hours perfecting the signature sign-off she would still be using more than a decade later. In that first sesh, her favorite stuffed animal, Polly-Glot, asked her questions like why it was important to believe in yourself. She felt like a cocoon opening up to release a new idea that would spread its wings and fly off into the world. But there was an emptiness too. Something was gone. But gone where? Had her idea died out there alone?
Then it happened. Her first uptick. Her idea was alive! It had landed in someone else's phlex and entered their brain to take flight in their imagination.
Another uptick. Then her first twixt. She remembered it word for word. You are a beautiful person inside and out! Happy Face Day! Keep being awesome.
From that moment, Vivian was hooked.
Looking back, she now understood how her parents were able to be such good Christians, never losing their tempers or caving to greed or sexual temptation. If asked, they would have said it was due to the power of the Holy Spirit and their desire to be like Jesus. But that wasn't all of it. It was the power of constant self-surveillance made possible by the omnipresence of the Vorld and phlexes. They lived every moment as an example to others. It was strangely egoistic. They saw themselves as the center of a human web, their church. It was up to them to anchor the threads and keep it from coming unraveled.
Vivian was not deeply religious, but she had fallen easily into the same pattern. She was now the center of a sprawling social web that dwarfed anything her parents had achieved. It wasn't just that others depended on her; those radiating tension lines were what held her fast. Without them, she would just be a disconnected point drifting aimlessly through space. Like now. Never before, not even during the spacewalk, had she been so aware of the vast expanse of emptiness that surrounded her. There was not another living soul in thousands and thousands of miles.
Except for the crew, she reminded herself. A social network of five.
When Vivian drifted into the mess, Jess, Bobby, and Tayen were already there.
* * *
Milo sat on the bench in the men's triad looking at the d-pic of his Kentucky college team. He wondered how they were all getting along down on the planet. There was Skinny Rich who had gotten married right after graduation, the first of the group to do so. He already had a son. "Mike the Spike" Mohammad Atta, who was an observant Muslim. Towering and full-bearded, he had a searing temper that no amount of praying could bring under control. Squeaky, the whitest of two white boys on the starting squad. Sandy-haired and freckled, he loved gospel hip-hop, which the rest of the team ribbed him endlessly for. James Myers, a dark-skinned boy from the burbs who was always ready with a famous quote. Amos Rubinstein, a foul-mothed Jew from the Bronx, and Tanner, who didn't talk or share much but was their best outside shooter. And Milo—the speed, the show, the playsetter. The cripple.
He pictured them down on Earth sitting around a foldout table eating fried chicken, playing poker, and giving each other shit. Reminiscing. Maybe they were still talking about crazy Milo and his fast break at the end of a lost cause. Damn nut job. Didn't he know when to call it fucking quits? Skinny Rich would motion to his wife to put the baby to bed. He shouldn't be hearing this kind of talk.
"He might as well learn his ABCs now," Amos would say. "A is for asshole. B is for bitch. C is for cunt. D is for damn whore. E is for..." he stumbled.
"Engina," Mohammed said.
"It's angina with an A," said Amos. "And it's not even a bad word. You're thinking of vagina."
"I bet he's never seen a vagina." Coming from Squeaky, it was even funnier.
"Stop all that dirty talk," Skinny's wife would say. "You're all a bunch of shitheads."
For them, the CME would be like a snowstorm or hurricane. Something they could board up for, fill the fridge with beers, and ride out. He missed them. If he could go back in time and avoid getting injured, go on to win a conference championship, maybe play a couple years in the NBA, and keep his teammates as lifelong friends, would he? A week ago, he wouldn't have hesitated. What had changed?
He went to his phlex settings and selected the option to set the d-pic for his home screen. What to? He thumbed through images until he landed on that idiotic shot when the High Five name had been chosen. He examined the faces of the crew caught in an unguarded moment. In the way they looked at each other, they were sharing more than a private joke. Trust. Respect. Pride. They were all in it together.
When he arrived at the mess, he found the rest of the team already gathered, playing poker. He took a seat at the table. "Deal me in."