“I’m sorry, you guys,” said V bashfully. “I’m so psyched you didn’t eat that candy! It was drugged—it would have knocked you out and then we might never have survived. I’m so sorry.”
N chipped in. “We were promised a television deal and a modelling contract if we made it through the process to become Mars astronauts,” she said ruefully. “So it kinda seemed worth it for us to cheat.”
“But it wouldn’t have been,” admitted V. “Because if we had taken Annie out … ,” She trailed off. The two sisters looked at each other and shook their heads.
“I dunno, V,” said N. “Let’s take up tennis instead.”
“Yeah, good plan,” said V. “I don’t really want to go into space now.”
“What about singing?” mused N. “We’re pretty amazing at that.”
“Or we could start a fashion line,” said V.
“We’ll think of something,” said N. “We always do.”
They both turned and beamed at Annie and Leonia. It was impossible not to smile back at this pair. There was just something about them.
“We’ve opened the hatch,” said V. “And we’ve put out the emergency slide. The other two are leaving the plane now.” From the cabin, they heard whoops of excitement as the other pair of kids slid down the plastic chute, landing on the runway at the bottom.
“Oooh, I’ve always wanted to do that!” exclaimed Annie. She jumped up and squeezed past the others. V and N followed her, and behind her came Leonia, who had for reasons known only to herself decided to bring the robot pilot with her. One by one—or in Leonia’s case, two by one—the girls jumped onto the slide and reached the bottom, arriving just as a vehicle from spaceport finally showed up and a couple of very anxious Kosmodrome 2 staff leaped out and started quizzing the astronauts.
“Don’t tell them anything,” Leonia whispered into Annie’s ear. “I don’t trust them.”
Annie nodded. They piled into the small van, the staff so preoccupied that they didn’t even seem to notice that Leonia was carrying the robot pilot. Once they arrived back at the accommodation wing of the Kosmodrome 2 facility, the six astronauts filed back to their pods in a group huddle, with Annie, Leonia and the robot pilot in the center. As they walked, Annie said quietly to Leonia, “I need to find my friend George. I’ve got to talk to him about what just happened. And I have this weird feeling that he wants to talk to me too.”
Leonia nodded. “Go,” she said quietly. “Take this. It might help you.” She took off her anti-drone watch and gave it to Annie. “It has a light too—press here.” A beam of light shot out of the watch. “Sneak off. I’ll put the pilot in your hammock, so if anyone’s watching us through the cameras, it’ll look like you are sleeping. V”—she poked one of the sisters—“can you cause a distraction?”
“Can I cause a distraction?” said V, popping out one hip and striking a pose. “You came to the right place! N—let’s hit it!” She let out the most extraordinary high note and N chimed in with a counter-harmony. A cappella, the two of them broke out into song in the corridor. They didn’t just sing—they started to dance as well, the music, the energy, and the fluid movements striking a chord with the other recruits who had been, only a short while ago, in terror for their very lives. Something about the way V and N’s beautiful voices rang through the corridor seemed to release all the pent-up emotion in the trainee astronauts, who had been so stressed, exhausted, worried, and scared. Less tunefully, but just as enthusiastically, the others joined in, cheering, shimmying, and singing for all they were worth—even Leonia, though it was clear this was all rather new to her. It was as though a carnival had just broken out, there in a bland corridor inside the Kosmodrome 2 grounds.
Annie slipped away. She had no idea where she might find George. But she had to try. He could be in real danger! Between them, she knew they could solve this just as they had with so many challenges in the past. And she also wanted to let any of the other recruits she came across know they might be in danger too. And that they mustn’t compete with each other anymore—they must stick together and help each other instead.
She had to let the others know that the astronaut training process was going horribly wrong. Why had all these talented, clever kids been brought here? As Annie sidled along the endless web of corridors that seemed to make up Kosmodrome 2, she realized none of them even knew how to get out of the place to go home. They didn’t have their phones or their tablets; they relied on the increasingly scarce Kosmodrome 2 staff to give them messages from their families. They were, she realized, trapped, with no way of summoning the outside world to help them.
Suddenly the lights in the corridor went out. The automated system in Kosmodrome 2 had decided it was time to flick the switch. At least, Annie thought, this gave her a little cover of darkness. She stole along the corridor, wishing she had the Google glasses she and George had used on a previous adventure to navigate across their whole hometown when the lights went out after someone had interfered with the power supplies to the whole country. Those glasses had also given her night vision, which had been pretty useful in a total blackout. Annie sighed. Now she had no technology other than Leonia’s watch to assist her, just her own eyes and ears and her own brain to work it out. It all felt very low tech for Annie, and very old school.
But, she thought to herself, if I can land a plane, I can do this too. She stopped and let herself listen to the sounds around her. From somewhere far away, she heard again the distant noise of a young child crying. It was a sad and heartbreaking sound. Annie tiptoed along the corridor toward it. It got louder and louder, and Annie sidled up to an intersection and peered round the corner. To her surprise, she wasn’t the only one of the trainees to have heard the noise and come to investigate. A much smaller girl, named Farah, was approaching from the other direction, also clearly intent on finding the source of the crying. But as little Farah approached the door off the corridor from where the noise seemed to come, a robot stepped out of the door, grabbed Farah, picked her up, threw her over his metal shoulder, and stomped away in the opposite direction from Annie. Farah, who was kicking and struggling against the robot, lifted her head to look back. Her eyes locked with Annie’s.
“RUN!” Farah mouthed.
Annie didn’t need to be told twice. She sprinted away. Wrenching open a door at random, she ran through it. It took her to a staircase that only led down. She followed the stairs to the bottom, where she found herself in a long downward-sloping corridor. Thinking it was better not to stand still at the moment, she jogged along this dim passage until she reached another staircase at the other end. She clambered up it and popped out into what must be another block of the Kosmodrome 2 facility.
It was quite unlike anywhere that Annie had so far visited. Around her, everything was brilliantly white and brightly lit. It looked—and smelled—like a hospital. It was also silent except for a beeping and a rhythmic whooshing noise. Looking up and down the corridor, Annie could see no clues as to what this block held. Except that here there were no drones. Perhaps that meant that no trainees were ever meant to come here, as otherwise there would be drones to monitor their activities. Perhaps this was a forbidden block with restricted access so it didn’t need the same security measures?
Then she heard the brisk tapping of a couple of pairs of footsteps coming toward her.
Annie dived through a door, closing it behind her. Inside the room, it was dark and still, but the noise of beeping and whooshing was louder. Annie pressed a button on Leonia’s watch, giving herself a tiny but brilliant beam of light that she used to look around the room. It seemed to be lined with long rectangular boxes, perched against the wall at a gentle angle.
She shone the light on one of them. It was around six and a half feet high and about two feet wide, with a heavily frosted glass top and white walls and bottom. Inside the box, Annie could see an object, but she couldn’t tell what it was. More clearly, she could see that attached to the box was a whole series of wi
res and tubes. The wires led to monitors where squiggly lines of colored light passed across a screen at regular intervals. The tubes linked up to a machine that looked like some kind of pump, going up and down and making a gentle whooshing noise as it went.
Annie directed the beam onto the next box. It was exactly the same—the same setup. All around the room, each rectangular box looked identical, all gently pumping and buzzing as some kind of input and output traveled through the wires and tubes.
Annie’s light moved on—and lingered on one box where the door was open and it was clearly empty. The footsteps she had heard were now getting closer. She steeled herself to ask herself the question: What’s inside those closed boxes? She moved the beam of her light back.
Nooo! she thought. It can’t be … Through the dim light, it was difficult to see properly, but she was sure she could make the outline of a—
Just then, she heard voices right by the door to the room she was hiding in. With no time to do anything else, she jumped into the open box, closing the lid as far as she dared. She couldn’t risk closing it entirely or it might never open again.
The door to the room opened and a dim light came on. Through the glass, she saw two figures in white coats enter. They seemed to be checking the monitors and pumps attached to the other boxes.
“Blood gas levels are normal,” she heard one voice say. “Gas exchange is good, weight remains stable, blood pressure within the healthy range.”
“So, Doctor,” laughed a horribly familiar voice. “The only health problem that our volunteers are experiencing right now is that they are fast asleep!”
“If we were to bring them around, they would be in perfect health,” said the doctor.
“And can we do that?” queried the other voice. “Can we wake them up?”
“Oh yes,” said the doctor confidently. “I can bring them out of suspended animation any time you wish to end the experiment.”
“Yes, yes. Will you be able to transfer them safely to Artemis?”
“As soon as you give me the command,” said the creepy doctor.
“I want them moved immediately,” replied the other. “Artemis is preparing to leave. Their life in a ‘bubble’—on this planet or another celestial body—looks set to continue without interruption!”
“Tell me,” said the doctor. “How did you source volunteers for this project? Who would possibly want to be put to sleep in order to travel across the Solar System?”
But the other laughed again, a grating, menacing sound, which had nothing to do with joy or happiness. “I can be very persuasive when I want!” she said. “And without realizing it, they may find themselves responsible for the greatest discovery in the Solar System this century! They may hold the key to life itself.”
“Just where are you sending them?” The doctor almost sounded suspicious. “Where are they going to make this great discovery?”
“Oh well, let’s see where the spaceship takes them!” she replied airily. “What an adventure! Now come, Doctor, there is much to be done.” With that, the pair left the room, switching the light off as they went.
As soon as they were gone, Annie burst out of her box, which she had suddenly realized looked just like a coffin. “They’re people!” she said to herself, starting to shake. “Inside those boxes are people! And they’re still alive!”
What Is Reality? by Dr. James B. Glattfelder
Every day you wake up. Returning from the wonderful adventures you may have been having in your dreams, you become you again. The memories of who you are and what you have been up to in your life come back. And you also realize that there is a world that lies outside of yourself, simply called reality. Then you get up.
This all seems very ordinary and not very exciting. However, all of this is linked to the hardest question that humans have ever asked themselves: What exactly is reality? What is this thing, made up of space, time, and objects, we live in?
After thousands of years of trying to understand the world and our place in it, we still have no real answers to these puzzles. We are like fish swimming in water without ever realizing that the water is everywhere around them. This is reality: we live in it, it is everywhere, we are even part of it—but we cannot see it.
Now, you may disagree and say that you see reality very well. You can even touch it, hear it, and smell it. Well, here things get interesting. The scientists who look at our brains and try to understand how they work are called neuroscientists. In recent years they have discovered a very important thing about how our brains know about reality.
Imagine sitting in a dark room. Suddenly, in front of you, a screen lights up and a movie starts to play. You see images of mountains, trees, and lakes and you think to yourself, What a wonderful place that is. However, the images you are seeing have been generated by a computer and do not exist outside the theater you are sitting in. Now imagine putting on a pair of virtual reality goggles. You enter into a computer-generated fantasy world you can interact with: you can fight battles or learn new skills. Suddenly a computer game has become your reality.
This is the biggest and most impressive illusion that your brain can do. It is convincing you that you are experiencing a world outside of your mind. But what is actually happening is that your brain is generating these sensations of the world inside of your mind. What you are really experiencing is just a simulation—a virtual reality.
Put in other words, when you are awake, you are really just dreaming the world around you!
Now, you may say, “Well, okay, but this doesn’t really matter, as the world actually does exist outside of my mind. So it is like I am seeing reality through the sunglasses of my brain.”
Unfortunately, this is also not so! Not only do we not experience reality as it is—but reality itself is also an illusion. Quantum physics is the part of science that tries to understand what reality looks like when you zoom in with a very powerful microscope until you reach the tiniest of atoms. For over a hundred years now, scientists have been trying to understand what quantum physics is telling us about the nature of reality. Still, today, we don’t know how to understand this quantum reality, as it is a truly amazing place. Everything is in a state of change as quantum objects constantly alter their shape, appear from and disappear into nothingness. Also, everything is always instantaneously connected to everything else, as nothing exists in isolation. And just by looking at reality, you, the observer, change its behavior.
A truly bizarre basis upon which our reality is built. What looks and feels like solid objects to us is mostly just empty space with some quantum particles dancing in it and creating the illusion of matter.
This may all come as a big surprise. The ordinary act of waking up every day raises very deep and hard questions we cannot answer: What is reality and what am I? One clever thinker once said: “The only thing I can be sure of, is that I am experiencing something right now. However, I can never know what this something is and I also don’t know what exactly ‘I’ am in the first place.”
But perhaps our confusion about ourselves and the world comes from a very simple fact. Maybe we have been told the wrong stories of how to think about the world. Perhaps the illusions have been so convincing for so long, that only now we are very slowly starting to rub our eyes and realize our mistake in believing that the illusions are real.
Since the beginning of mankind we have believed that space and time are the stage on which the Universe, made up of stuff, performs its grand play. During this performance, the Universe got more and more complicated. Then, suddenly, life emerged from this newfound complexity. Finally life developed the human brain and our minds started to ask the question: “What is reality?”
But maybe this story is told the wrong way around. Perhaps we have not been thrown onto the stage of reality and expected to act? Maybe our minds in fact conjure up the stage on which now space, time, and objects perform their play? Remember how in virtual reality a computer creates reality for you? In a similar
way your mind and thoughts create the world outside of you as well!
Or perhaps the mind and the reality we experience are in fact very closely related? Like the two sides of a coin. They can appear to be very different but are actually part of a bigger whole. Could it be that the world and our minds are phenomena that are made up of the same essence? Pure fields of information organizing themselves into physical illusions? In other words, if we look deep enough into our own minds, do we see the same source as when we look deep into the structure of reality?
Or will reality, including ourselves, in the end turn out to be part of a computer program running in a huge cosmic computer? The Universe has now become the virtual reality computer and it is computing reality including yourself: an epic saga starting with the Big Bang and currently continuing with you reading this sentence.
For millennia, the question of what reality really is has been attempted to be answered by philosophers and religious people. Now, for the first time in history, science has expanded its understanding and has only just started to uncover all the illusions surrounding us. There are quite a few scientists who, after thinking deeply about these things, slowly dare to believe in such crazy ideas as those mentioned above. And if any of these ideas turn out to be true, it would mean a very big shift in the way we humans understand reality and ourselves. But for the moment we can comfort ourselves with two answers to the question, “What is reality?”
One is that reality is a much bigger, richer, and more complex thing than we ever dared to dream.
Or a short answer could be, “I create my reality!”
Chapter Fifteen
While Annie was unexpectedly flying a plane earlier that day, George had been trying a virtual reality moonwalk challenge. It was a timed challenge where he and Igor had to collect samples in VR from the surface of the Moon and return to a lunar landing capsule before it departed, leaving them stranded.
George and the Blue Moon Page 14