Oceanworlds

  The industry finally heard the dreaded battle cry. But let’s put things in perspective: SpaceX’s most popular video has a few dozen million views; last decade’s Latin song Despacito gained 6 billion views in its first two years.

  To exert real, unrelenting, and lasting change, we need the entire world in a state of frenzy. We need a Kennedy moment, when dreams came with wings. We need to capture the soul of our generation. And for that the appeal can only point to our hearts.

  What we need is a private mission, where failure is not a congressional investigation. A private mission of heroes willing to take immense risks for the greater good of humankind. To venture beyond the unknown. Further than any woman or man has ever dreamed. So, when they do, it is July 20 1969 all over again. The distance vanishes as they touch our essence and move every single one of us into a catharsis of transfixing optimism, awe, pride, gratitude, and kinship for all of us that live in this fragile, unique, and irreplaceable village called Earth.

  The future is not what it used to be, but some of you dear readers can make it whole again.

  Buzz Aldrin said that exploration is wired into our brains. If we can see the horizon, we want to know what’s beyond it. But one does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. Godspeed. May you start soon.

  i. A sense of proportion: for each dollar of US military spending, NASA gets three cents. NASA’s budget peaked at 4.5 percent of the federal budget in 1966 and has been in steady decline to today’s 0.4 percent.

  ii. On April 16 2018, an asteroid larger than the 200-foot-tall Siberia asteroid—designated 2018 GE3—missed Earth by half the distance to the Moon, barely one day after it was discovered.

  6 | Dare

  Four months later, April 2024

  SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

  James woke entwined in sticky sheets with pasty palms and a feral heart rate. A waterbed in all but functionality. The apocalyptic vision was back, welding night with day. Weary eyes sized up the spartan bedroom, still undecided on which reality was more plausible.

  Find the telltales. The Reese’s chocolate smudge on the tall Lego Apollo Saturn V rocket over his desk looked legit. But it was the slanted framed photograph hanging from an otherwise blank wall—of himself shaking hands with Vladimir Putin as if there was a fence between them—that tipped the scales this way.

  His body felt heavier than last night as he walked to the middle of the loft and swung the curtains open. San Francisco Bay in its morning glory, fog almost hiding a cargo ship gliding under the Golden Gate Bridge. He opened and promptly shut the window. Breathing marine swell brought back the wrong memories today.

  James turned on the television.

  “—of what’s been obligatory conversation from bilateral meetings to airport chit-chat to bar brawls. It looks like 4th of July weekend here at Tappan Zee Bridge, as hordes of New Yorkers escape the city that never sleeps to catch some darkness for the best night of the year to see Arcturus—sir, sir, where are you heading?”

  “Our buddies meetin’ at The Gunks for some astro action. We’ve all turned into amateur astronomers, you know.”

  “Any instruments to watch the sky?”

  “Got these birdin’ binoculars from my old man.”

  “However, it may all change today when a joint press conference of several international organizations, including NASA and the European Southern Observatory, will announce the results of five months of feverish research around the discovery, made by Janusz Lisowski and Derya Terzi, of Arcturus being a binary star. A leaked document confirms that the white dwarf is near the end of its lifetime, but a potential supernova event has no chance of happening for at least a million years. A concern, but one for far-in-the-future generations.”

  The crunchy kick from the new cereal box vanished.

  As James walked along, pushing his commuter bike through the crowd to the Powell Street metro station, an old homeless woman grabbed him by the arm. He was going for his wallet when they locked eyes. She pointed up and produced a wrinkled paper from her wool coat and handed it to him.

  “What is it, ma’am?”

  “Don’t waste your time. She’s a mad, mad cow; deaf and mute,” another homeless person replied. “I could use some of that wallet though.”

  Confused, he continued walking.

  After stepping down into the station, he opened the piece of paper. Stopped cold and then dashed back up the stairs, identifying the off-season coat among the faceless mass. James encountered a pair of lost eyes, clueless to the world.

  “Want to join the club? Membership’s free. San Francisco even pay us for staying!” shouted the other homeless person when James returned hesitantly to the metro. “We attract tourists to the city don’t you know!”

  STANFORD UNIVERSITY

  Two hours later, the volatile cloudy temper of San Francisco had been traded for another picture-perfect sunny day around Silicon Valley. James and his mentor Leonard walked through the university’s famous inner courtyard toward the Mechanical Engineering building, where the former taught the ultra-popular ‘Space Flight 101’ class for undergrads.

  “You’re reacting impulsively. Based on a hunch. What’s the plan? Reshuffle our nation’s space priorities because of that dream you’ve been having?” said Leonard in his raspy voice.

  “You saw the smoking gun.”

  “No. There was a discovery of a binary star and with it a hypothesis. Extensively researched with a thoroughness commensurate with something on which our entire civilization may hinge.”

  “What I’m—”

  “Anyone who’s anyone in astronomy and astrophysics studied it at length and it was finally discussed and agreed on unanimously among 400 scientists during a three-day symposium. You heard the results and tripped out. That’s a tantrum. Maybe you saw ‘sometime soon’ without reading further: ‘astronomically speaking.’”

  “I saw the end. Of everything.” It elicited no reaction from Leonard. “The Virginia Senator died last night, a day before the announcement.”

  “And? Excellent man, sign of the cross and all, but what? Should I start reading the horoscope right after brushing my yellow teeth every morning?” Leonard was pulling on his aspiring Gandalf beard, an impatience reflex.

  James explained the puzzling encounter from earlier and handed him the paper. Leonard inspected it.

  “And she pointed up?”

  “Yes!”

  “Powell with Market Street?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then she was pointing to that Burger King on the second floor—hey, I should be the one getting annoyed. You see planets in this scrap of paper? Well, I see polka dots. You see Saturn? I see a Mexican sombrero. And you know what? We’re both right. Wanna know why? Because we are both falling prey to humans’ amazing ability to find patterns, even when there are none.”

  James re-embraced science. “Arcturus has decreased humanity’s life expectancy by a thousandth. Earth was going to be fine for 3 billion years and now we’re down to a million.”

  “We were frolicking and fornicating with Neanderthals 35,000 years ago. A million’s thirty times that. Not so modest anymore, huh? But it’s more than that, Jimmy. Look at me. I’ve been smoking since I was 12—cigarettes, the other stuff came later—even though I knew it would probably kill me within decades. And I still smoke. Why? Because we are really bad at giving the future its proper weight and importance. If a single person flounders, try asking a society—which must come to an overarching agreement—to do anything for a threat a thousand times further into the blurry future.”

  They walked past Rodin’s Les Bourgeois de Calais. One sculpture held his head between his hands. Another hid his face with a palm. Another looked down, seemingly lost in tribulation.

  “Let’s do this little experiment: set the end of the world for one hundred years … a third of the population has just been given a reason to smash the place up: defecate over Earth’s immaculat
e face, vomit in her lap, punch her in the stomach, gangbang her dignity and virginity away. Another third reasons: ‘We’ll figure it out, we always have,’ before hastening back to dancing La Cucaracha or watching whatever game is on TV. The final third starts symposiums, new religions, fundraising campaigns. But after a few years of dog work they get pissed with all the moochers and tightwads, including the future versions of themselves. ‘Let them figure it out, bunch of ungrateful shits.’ Why do I know this? Because contrary to you, I don’t pretend to have seen the future. I observe the present and this is what’s happening now. Not just runaway greenhouse gases, but risking an ecological collapse that makes it impossible for us to continue as a species.”

  James shook his head.

  “And if this is still insufficient, my dear boy, your rock from the sky strikes me as worrying about spilling hot coffee on your chest right as the airplane you’re in is about to crash. If Arcturus goes supernova, I will be more worried watching the wave of fire from Hell about to engulf our entire Solar System than holding my breath for the pebble.”

  “Then the cause may not be the supernova.”

  “Ahh! But then you don’t have a motive anymore, do you? Where’s the trigger for your comet? See? You’re trying to unearth a spark, so you can establish causality, so you can rationalize your vision.”

  They entered the classroom. A few early students greeted the celebrity mechanical engineering professor and the old man with piercing eyes.

  “Science, you know better than most, is not in the business of following prophets. Those were the Dark Ages. Jimmy, credibility is earned through sweat and lost in a breath … you’re exhausted. It shows. You have leprechauns jumping between your eyes while you try batting imagined comets before they do us in—take time off, see friends, go travel …”

  James wished Leonard’s grainy tuba voice was quieter. James’ students wished it was louder.

  “There’s no reset. I can’t forget. I’m enslaved to what I saw. I will die trying if that’s what it takes.”

  “Trying what? To convince people? You’re no Jesus. You may get a few misfits and enroll a few sects, but that’s the extent of your sphere of influence. Didn’t I just tell you? We have a much more immediate concern, the avalanche of climate change, yet we snail our way out of apocalypse. Your cause doesn’t even make it into the Top 100, yet you demand a mobilization of resources amounting to a new Space Race. Want to create a tipping point? A before and after? Read history, goddammit. Don’t coerce, enthrall. Don’t scare, inspire. Want to awake humanity? Take us beyond our wildest dreams. Prove it can be done.”

  Just because the idea is crazy doesn’t make it wrong, thought James. The two had long fantasized about it.

  “Keep your motivations confidential and to yourself. Never threaten by saying: ‘We must go to space to dodge death.’ Flip the argument. Arouse the child in every one of us by volunteering to go there to find life.”

  James realized that the idea had long escaped its cloister and had metastasized all over his mind without him being conscious of it until now.

  “If anybody can do this—and as I’ve said before, I’m not implying it’s feasible—it’s someone like you. Test it out. Do one of those, what’s the name, Kickstarter things. Maybe people will care. But then again, they may not. And there will lie your answer. Don’t ask me, ask the world,” said Leonard.

  ‘The Hunt for Extraterrestrial Life’ will be the crusade. But—but the Trojan Horse is the mission. You don’t need to find a thing to change history; you just need to get there, thought James.

  Leonard continued far back in James’ consciousness, “If NASA is looking at Mars in fifteen years … your mission should look at Saturn in seven. For if you get there, you will carry us all. For once you conquer the impossible, you smash the gates open forever. Go beyond Odysseus, beyond Columbus, beyond Apollo, further than any man has ever gone!”

  7 | Yi Meng

  Three months later, July 2024

  SOMEWHERE IN THE SOUTH CHINA SEA

  Yi saw a still, uninterrupted ocean in his entire field of view. Except for the shimmering sea and lack of main subject, it could have been one of those Renaissance paintings from the West, heavenly cumulus clouds pierced through by sabers of daylight.

  He forced himself to look at the windsurf sail resting flat on the water, ripped from the longboard on which he was laying facing down. The culprit, a storm darkening a great expanse and criss-crossed by lightning rods, retreated into the horizon. No signs of land or help anywhere.

  He opened a small compartment in the front of the board, inside of which two bottles of water, a few nutrition bars, a flare gun, and a phone rested snugly. He slowly removed his right rubber glove. The hand was shaking, but not from cold. With the care of a barber shaving Chairman Xi Jinping, he took the phone out.

  For a long time, he did nothing. The blood from his tongue tasted metallic, like licking a battery. Stalling, he dipped his lips in the sea and washed out his mouth. Bad idea. The salt instantly pinpointed the wounds, promptly setting off fireworks through his nerves. Besides, no sense in arousing the sharks so early. Barring a miracle, there will be plenty of time to make their acquaintance.

  Before, when life was round and whole, planning for the solo sailing trips was a thorough affair. But those days were gone. And I get it. Fate finally lost its patience. I would have done the same.

  He turned on the phone: no signal and 70 percent battery. He opened the wind and currents app. It hadn’t updated for hours but the currents information was still relevant. The wind blew decidedly back to the coast, but without the means to profit from it, all depended on the little current arrows on the screen. And they were pushing keenly away from the coastline.

  He carefully stored the phone back in the compartment, covered both temples with his hands, and howled his soul out.

  Arguably the most decisive day of his life. The Gaokao, the higher education entrance exam of the People’s Republic of China. For a son of peasants from inland, his odds were a lot worse than the 1/1,000 for the 10 million other students. A swarm of desks were arranged in rows and columns, with hundreds of students bent over their exam papers. Yi stared at his crooked right index finger, the physical token of countless hours of study. He took in the moment, checked one last time, and stood up. He was the only one walking down the aisle. Furtive looks from the examinees. The exam officer, confused, squinted up at the wall clock.

  It was pitch dark and a veil of rain peppered the sea.

  Yi longed for the Sun that smoldered his skin earlier. The shivering was building up lactic acid for an unforgettable night. His stomach felt as if a pair of hands were trying to milk his guts. The sea splashing and spraying was sapping the life out of him—heat transfer in water is damn efficient. Body and mind were utterly spent but this clearly no longer guaranteed sleep.

  The phone’s GPS showed his position on the screen slowly, surely drifting away from salvation. A wave of terror lurked ready to assault. His analytical mind tried to compensate: he was in the South China Sea, one of the world’s mercantile hubs. The current was drifting him away from the continent but at some point it should trend upward to Taiwan. His paltry shipwreck would soon start crossing commercial trading routes—but these were gigantic Panamax, almost crewless cargo ships with decks 150 feet above water, and not really looking for flotsam.

  It was the year of the Dragon, which was supposed to bring him good luck and prosperity. Not for the first time, he wished he wasn’t agnostic.

  He fell into a restless snooze, jolting with the slightest variation in rocking rhythm. Time elongated. Coldness became numbness. The here and now were adrift.

  At the back window of the departing provincial bus, a 10-year-old Yi gazed at his family in the middle of the snow-covered dirt road. As his mother dragged her hands to her chest, Yi grabbed the wooden carved Buddha hanging from his neck. Her knees weakened and she rested against his father who stood frozen like a terracott
a statue. The brother’s head looked away at the harsh Inner Mongolian winter.

  Having traveled days for his graduation from Tsinghua University—the Everest of higher education in China—mother and father looked like they were from a different era as they moved shyly among the mass of urban parents to take their seat. Their faces were dizzy with pride. She was there by their side, explaining. The two women had finally met. That day he could have touched the stars.

  Yi half broke from his stupor in the middle of the night and for a moment the weight lifted as he came to the conclusion it was all just a bad dream. It was, the nostalgic past knocking on his conscience. He was still lost in a never-ending ocean, his own personal purgatory. Pitying himself, he tried to cry but only managed a nasal groan and a tearless rictus grin. The grin gave way to a long, deranged laugh. This time the phone came swiftly out of the board compartment, a reflection of its decreased importance as it clung to 2 percent battery, the icon red and flashing angrily. It had been twenty-one hours since he left the continent, yet he was almost one hundred nautical miles from it now. The phone slipped or was let go, he wasn’t sure which. The bright screen sank into the unfathomable deep, a dying light in the night.

  Life has a way of upending when you least expect it. Seven months before, he had made it: the co-founder of a fast-growing robotics company and about to marry The One. Far, far from the cabin in the Mongolia prairie where his widowed mother still lived.