I was instructed to drive to a NASA facility even though NASA was one of the first government agencies to shut down after the Great De-evolution began. Travis Anderson had purchased the entire campus, located in the California desert, and turned it into part of Anderson Industries.
Upon my approach, there wasn’t a single indication of who the previous owner had been. Gone were all of the NASA flags with the symbol of a blue circle filled with stars and a red flame streaking through it. There wasn’t even an American flag. The only banner I saw, and it was hoisted atop the giant flag pole in front of the main building’s entrance, was the black and silver matrix that formed the letters A-N-D-E-R-S-O-N.
The disappearance of NASA wasn’t particularly concerning. If it didn’t bother me that schools no longer existed, it certainly wouldn’t bother me that a government agency had shut its doors. Nor was it alarming that a building had been transitioned from its original use to something else because the same thing had happened to elementary, middle, and high schools.
A decade after the Great De-evolution began, all of the elementary schools had closed and been turned into factories to make incinerators. This was so people had a way of disposing of garbage once they were left to fend for themselves. Three years later, the same thing happened to all the middle schools, which were turned into power generator assembly lines so each home could create its own electricity when the grid went down. Four years later, the high schools were turned into factories that made food processors that allowed users to make food without growing it or buying it from a store.
Each former institution of learning was transitioned into a place that would manufacture society’s basic needs so a declining civilization would have everything it needed when the government, utilities, and infrastructure deteriorated.
In addition to NASA, the army had disbanded. Technically, some of the northern states still existed but this was in name only. The actual state governments were gone.
For my parents and me, that gradual decay of society was the most important aspect of the Great De-evolution. For people like Travis Anderson, it was undoubtedly another factor. A green one.
The inevitable decline in the value of money was already in progress when I arrived at the Anderson Space Center. With everyone knowing the human population had a limited number of years remaining, people had a rapidly declining list of things they needed to buy. This, in turn, brought about a shift in consciousness. People realized that money was nothing more than paper and, as a result, pretty freaking worthless in the face of certain extinction.
As such, Travis Anderson, technology and internet mogul and, more important in my immediate life, my new boss, had to pay engineers and programmers twenty times what they had been paid by NASA only a couple years earlier. The average person working on the shuttle’s development was making a couple million dollars a year. There wasn’t much the income could do for these people and they knew it, but it was neat to be able to say they made so much money while they got to work on a project they would have gladly volunteered to be on anyway.
The game many of the engineers played and that I only found out about later was taking a hardline negotiation with Travis when he tried to hire them. The billionaire had no concept that this was work the project team loved doing, he merely thought of things in terms of dollars. So each scientist, mathematician, and engineer made it their goal to threaten to leave the project unless Travis gave them inordinate raises. Some demanded their own private planes or yachts. None of them meant it, they just wanted to see who could win the game of getting paid the most.
It was pretty much the exact same thing mankind had done for hundreds of years, just with less career mobility and with no actual intention of switching jobs. Poor Travis was brilliant with computer code but he was a sucker for the games that scientists played on him as civilization declined.
Soon upon my arrival at the Anderson Space Center, I learned that the idea was to send two people into space. Travis would go because he was a billionaire and it was his money that was funding the entire effort. I would go in order to be his assistant and wait on his every wish.
“Don’t worry,” one of the senior project leads whispered to me.
This was said to me as I set eyes on Travis for the first time. In addition to being ten years older than me, he was taller and more physically fit. His hair looked like it must have been trimmed each morning and there wasn’t the slightest hint of stubble on his face. He looked like the guy in those movies who always has a model by his side and is wearing sunglasses even when it isn’t sunny. As I watched, Travis yelled at a janitor for not cleaning up the billionaire’s spilled coffee fast enough.
The janitor faced Travis, took a deep breath, then broke the mop handle over his knee. The janitor then shouted a bunch of curse words that would have made my mother gasp, said he didn’t need to put up with this nonsense if the world was ending, and tossed both halves of the mop at Travis’ feet. Rumor had it that Travis was paying the janitor half a million dollars to stick around and clean the floors.
“Don’t worry?” I whispered, horrified at the prospect of spending the rest of my life in close quarters with a tyrant. “Easy for you to say, you aren’t the one who’s going to be in outer space with an asshole for a couple decades.”
The project lead chuckled. “Yeah, like I said, don’t worry. He’ll never make it.”
Truer words had never been spoken. The very first time we had to board a simulator that would recreate the g-forces necessary to launch the shuttle and carry us out of Earth’s atmosphere, Travis started screaming.
“Stop! Stop!” he yelled. And then, as the machine gradually powered down, “I said stop! Don’t you morons understand? Stop!”
It was obvious to everyone in the room that the machine would take a couple minutes to cycle down. Even I understood that and I knew as much about the simulator as I did about a normal childhood, which, thanks to the Great De-evolution, is to say not much at all. Obviously, the machine couldn’t just go from recreating thousands of pounds of thrust to none at all without injuring us.
However, the only thing that mattered to Travis, my billionaire funder, was that he stop feeling nauseous right that second. I watched the color drain from his face, saw him blink, then squeeze his eyes shut. A moment later, he threw up all over himself.
“I said to stop,” he said again, but this time, instead of shouting he was crying.
One of the technicians waited for the simulator to stop moving before walking over and unbuckling Travis from the harness. The billionaire stumbled away, cursing and pushing away an assistant who came over to try and clean him off.
One of the other project members must have seen a face I was making and guessed what I was thinking.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “He won’t cut funding to the project just because he’s done. And anyway, even if he does, there aren’t any cops or lawyers anymore. He’d have to remove us himself.”
She winked and looked back over her shoulder. My eyes followed just in time to see Travis attempt to take his sweatshirt off and instead smear vomit over his face, which in turn made him so helplessly upset that he screamed noises that weren’t close to any human language I’d ever heard before.
The people working on the Legacy Project would keep using Travis’s money to build the shuttle but it was now a mission for one person rather than a pair of people. I would be spending the rest of my life amongst the stars by myself while the human population slowly faded away.
Aboard the Legacy, I spend hours looking through my telescope. In space, millions of miles away from Earth and from the light pollution that hampered my ability to see much of the night sky, my tiny telescope is capable of seeing amazing things. I see clusters of stars, thousands of them, grouped together to form what look like soft blue clouds in the distance. All of these stars, suns just like our own, form a spiral around a bright white middle. Some of the larger suns in the spirals appear pink. Others are tiny white
dots. A few are a blue that add to the glow of the cosmic cloud around the cluster.
In another region of space, I zoom the telescope in on a sun so far away that looking at it will never hurt my eyes. Through the lens, though, if I squint, I can see lines breaking away from the bright sphere, and I wonder if they’re solar flares or if different types of suns act differently than what I know about our own sun.
The trip makes me wish I knew everything about space. I find myself asking questions I’ll never be able to gain answers to. Have I looked at a black hole? Hidden in the emptiness of space, I’d never know if I had. How many suns make up the cluster I saw? How many of those suns have planets like the ones I’m going to be flying past during this journey? Almost as many questions as there are stars.
5
A couple weeks after passing Mars, I watched a comet race through the solar system. When I was a kid, I saw the occasional shooting star with my mom or dad. They were brief glimpses of what the galaxy had to offer, visible one second and gone the next. The one I saw from the Legacy was visible for nearly five minutes, and it was large enough that it was brighter than any star I would have seen back on Earth.
The front and sides of it glowed blue, giving way to a bright white interior. It left a trail of light behind it that faded after a few seconds. The comet’s streak was at least ten times longer than the actual chunk of ice or rock or whatever it was made of, making it look much more significant than it actually was.
I couldn’t help but wonder, as I watched it from the shuttle’s viewport, if the comet would be visible at all from Earth or if it would continue on its journey without another human eye ever seeing it.
I also couldn’t help but wonder what the chances would be of a similar comet happening to streak through the exact same section of space that the Legacy was travelling on. Of course, the odds were astronomically low (a phrase that carries increased significance with me these days), but I couldn’t help but wonder if that was how I would meet my end or if it would be something much more ordinary, like an oxygen tube unraveling and causing a brilliant explosion.
I still remember what one of the mathematicians said to me a couple weeks into my training. His name was Shabby and he was standing behind me at the computer where I was learning about life in a zero gravity environment. He was one of my favorite people on the project, a guy whose smile never wavered, not even when more reports filtered to us of another city becoming vacant or another country formally disbanding.
Shabby wasn’t his real name. I had no idea what that was.
When I asked, he smiled and said, “For someone who came here knowing diddly about space and is getting ready to be by himself for a couple decades, you sure ask some weird questions.”
Shabby maintained his trademark smile as he asked if I thought I’d make it past the asteroid belt. At first, I was so confused I wasn’t sure if he meant, “Will the Legacy malfunction and kill you before you reach the asteroid belt?” or “Do you think you’ll be lucky enough to navigate through the asteroid belt?”
However, a much more important question forced itself to my mouth. “There’s an asteroid belt?”
Why in god’s name was I just now hearing about this?
In reality, like most things in life, it was nothing to worry about. But, like most things, at the moment I was hearing about it, it seemed like a life or death situation.
Shabby shook his head as he laughed. “What kind of guy volunteers to be rocketed out into infinity and doesn’t know about the asteroid belt?”
He was smiling when he said it but I could tell there was an undertone of annoyance behind it. The odd thing, and I had seen this firsthand, was that his smile existed no matter what he was saying and what emotion he actually had. Early in my time at the Anderson Space Center, I saw Shabby get into a screaming match with another team member. It’s a truly creepy thing to watch someone smile while they’re yelling.
I had no idea what was provoking his irritation this time, though. Maybe he wished he could go on the trip himself. Perhaps it was the opposite end of the spectrum and even though he was a member of the project team he thought it was irresponsible for anyone to leave the planet when people needed each other more than ever. I didn’t ask and I didn’t care.
“Call me crazy,” I said, “but I’d rather see what the solar system has to offer than watch the entire human race slowly disappear.”
It was possible that I passed whatever test he had in mind because he smiled again, but this time there was a genuine kindness behind it.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “The total mass of the asteroid belt is only four percent of our moon but it’s spread out across a giant area of space between Mars and Jupiter.” I must have looked at him with a blank stare because he added, “Most of it is the size of space dust. The chances of actually hitting a chunk of rock big enough to damage the shuttle is less than one in a billion.”
For a moment there was silence between us.
“So you’re saying there’s a chance?” I finally offered with a deadpan seriousness.
He thought this was much funnier than I did and gave me a good pat on the shoulder.
“So who was your favorite character?” Shabby asked after enjoying my discomfort at the possibility of breaking into pieces and dying a much more rapid death than my counterparts who were watching the Great De-evolution unfold.
Initially, I had no idea what he was talking about. I returned his playful grin and cycled through the previous day’s conversations.
Nothing.
Nor had I talked with anyone else that week about a particular book or TV show or movie. I saw Shabby’s eyebrows arch with a little bit of disappointment.
Finally, I gave up and revealed the depth of my ignorance. “Huh?”
His smile returned. “You’re favorite Star Wars character,” he said, as if this had been obvious all along.
I almost repeated my grunting question a second time when I finally figured out what he was talking about. On my application to be a part of the Legacy mission, one of the forms had asked why I would be interested in leaving all the people I knew in order to go out into space. My response had been along the lines of:
Ever since I was a little kid I’ve loved Star Wars. It captured my imagination and was more formative in my childhood and my dreams than anything else I can think of. It made me want to go out into space. In fact, it made me want to go to a galaxy far, far away.
Without a better answer to provide, that had been the one I’d chosen, mainly because I figured a bunch of guys who were interested in outer space would naturally gravitate towards anything that involved galactic battles and adventure.
“Jar-Jar Binks,” I said and smiled.
All signs of congeniality dropped from Shabby’s face. Even when Shabby told one of the other engineers that he hoped the guy got syphilis, he’d had a smile on his face. This was the first time I’d ever seen him without a grin and it wasn’t pleasant. For a second I thought he might actually punch me.
“He was definitely the most memorable character,” I said, trying to give some sort of peace offering to what I was guessing had been the wrong answer.
Shabby narrowed his eyes and said, “Are you gonna keep being a jerk, or are you going to tell me the real answer?”
How could I tell him the truth, that I’d only seen Star Wars once and that had been back when I was in elementary school? In actuality the movies hadn’t made much of an impression on me so I mentioned the first character’s name that came to mind.
How could I tell him I wanted to go out into space for the rest of my life and ignore the human extinction going on all around me because my cat had died? How do you tell someone that an animal is more important to you than the people in your neighborhood or the caravans passing through town on their way south?
You can’t, so you don’t. Instead, I remained steadfast about some character named Jar-Jar.
“You know,” Shabby said the next day, �
��if anything happens up there, you’re on your own.”
Of course, he was smiling, which made my supposedly impending doom sound really creepy. It was also the fiftieth time someone there had shared the same sentiment. It wasn’t, however, the kind of pep talk that inspired confidence.
Shabby must have been inwardly impressed by my nonchalant shrug or else disappointed that his comment hadn’t made my legs go weak because he doubled down on letting me know exactly how precarious my situation would be.
“Very few catastrophic events will be quick and painless. The launch is the easiest way for the entire shuttle to blow up and for you to go into the great oblivion without knowing what happened. But once you get out into space, most scenarios we ran through the computers end up with you struggling for a couple days or weeks before you die a pretty ugly death. A faulty food processor. A leak in the water cell. No matter how early you notice the problem, if you can’t fix it yourself, you’re out of luck. Where you’re going, there are no emergency shuttles. This is it, the last trip.”
Again, all I could do was shrug. Shabby must have either thought I was the wrong guy for the mission or else I wasn’t taking it seriously or both because he scoffed—still grinning—and gave me the middle finger. Then he walked off.
The asteroid belt came and went without me ever seeing it. For the couple weeks that the Legacy passed through that section of space, I kept my eyes peeled for any sign of space rocks. There was nothing.
Instead, for weeks on end, all I saw were more stars. Stars everywhere, an impossibly large amount of them all around me. Some of them have become so bright that I can no longer make out the same constellations I used to be able to see from Earth. There, it was easy to spot Orion’s Belt or any other number of constellations because I could only see a couple dozen stars in the night sky. Here, I see millions, and their combined glow makes individual chains difficult to notice.
Orphans In the Black: A Space Opera Anthology Page 61