One Giant Leap

by Heather Kaczynski

  It was hard to tell, without seeing them, but I think it’s safe to say they were furious. I’d given them no choice. Compliance or destruction.

  Same as they had given the vrag.

  The rest happened mostly without me. Luka oversaw the creation and exchange of the virus. A few weeks later, when I was fully functional again, Luka, Hanna, and I were brought aboard the vrag mother ship. The vrag were obviously bereft without God-Mother; they floated aimlessly through their empty caverns, their colors muted and dull. Dying.

  I picked out one of the larger ones, who approached me curiously, a friendly stray. I reached out my bare hand, covered with a shimmering electronic tattoo made of conductive gold leaf, that would act as a conduit and allow me to communicate—theoretically—without a direct neural link.

  The air was chilly in here, like a basement in winter. My fingers slowly grew colder as the vrag reached a tentative arm toward my hand. “That’s right,” I encouraged it quietly. Luka and Hanna waited beside me with bated breath.

  The moment its nerve endings touched my own amplified ones, the message we’d programmed—with help from a reluctant megobari commando—was transmitted.

  It was a question. As simple as we could form it. We had no idea how much the individual vrag knew about what had happened, what they could comprehend or communicate, why their God-Mother had abandoned them, how much they could even understand about the world around them without God-Mother’s influence.

  It was an offering of peace, if they chose to accept it. Of freedom, albeit in a different sort of life.

  We didn’t know if they would even accept. They had never known “freedom.” They had never known anything but life aboard this ship, and the directing of their daily lives. We didn’t even know if they’d survive the procedure.

  A tremor went through the vrag, and its arm wrapped securely, though not painfully, around my wrist. With another yards-long arm, it reached out to one of its companions. The message traveled this way, through touch and through bright, arcing colors to those too far away to reach.

  In moments, we had a unanimous response.

  Yes.

  Forty-Two

  “WELL, CASS, YOU did it. Ended an intergalactic feud that destroyed two planets. Stopped the Earth from burning in the fire of a thousand suns. Brokered peace between the Capulets and the Montagues. Saved a dying species by giving them a new life on Earth. Well, maybe even two species, if we can all get our act together.” Emilio was ticking them off on his fingers. “What are you going to do next? And don’t say ‘I’m going to Disney World,’ because that’s what EVERYONE picks.”

  I groaned, throwing myself back on the couch and closing my eyes. “Number one: eat popcorn. Number two: survive my birthday party. Number three: go back and finish my last year of high school so I can graduate, probably?”

  “Holy shit, I forgot. You haven’t even graduated yet. Goddamn, you make me feel like I’ve done nothing with my life.”

  “Seriously, Cass? They’re going to make you go back to high school? Can’t they just retroactively award you valedictorian and mail you your diploma, with many apologies for being late and also a great big ‘Thank you for saving our butts’ bouquet made of money and/or chocolate strawberries?” Mitsuko plucked the bowl of popcorn from Emilio’s lap and wordlessly shared it with Michael, who was sitting on her other side.

  “If only. Anyway, I kind of like the idea of intimidating all my classmates and teachers with my heroic and godly presence.” But also, I wanted to try to go back to that time when I was normal, and a nobody—even though I wasn’t sure that would happen anytime soon. And I wanted to earn my diploma. Actually earn it. I’d already worked it out with my school to let me come back. Extenuating circumstances, after all. “Geez. It’s so weird having all of you in my house. Where I live.”

  “Worlds colliding, huh?” Emilio grinned.

  They were all here: Emilio, Mitsuko, Michael, Luka. All of us crammed onto the small couch in the same living room where I’d first pleaded my case to my parents to let me go try out for NASA. It seemed insane now that they’d let me go. They probably figured it was like a summer camp, that I’d be home in a week, two tops.

  It had, in fact, taken almost a full year.

  I’d gotten mostly back to normal, though I sometimes had nightmares where I was paralyzed in an HHM as the Earth blew up around me, leaving nothing intact except me.

  Luka kept in regular communication with the megobari contingent on the moon, and they in turn had entered talks with receptive Earth governments. I hadn’t communicated with them again. We hadn’t ended on the best terms, after all. But they seemed to care about Luka and his well-being, and were actually considering our proposal. So that was something.

  Luka was on my other side, holding my hand. He’d meant it when he’d told me he wouldn’t leave. But he had no home left anymore. We’d had to petition the government, through Crane, to help craft him a new identity. His father had left him some money, and it hadn’t taken long for him to find a job here at Marshall.

  I also had a job waiting for me when I graduated. Pierce had called and offered it to me personally. I could have my pick of locations, he’d said. Pasadena, Houston, Florida. With all that was happening, Congress was falling all over themselves to throw money at NASA. They’d passed the biggest budgets since the Apollo programs.

  My dad had laughed with joy when he’d heard how much his department was getting funded next year. “With this kind of money? We will catch up to your megobari friends in no time.”

  I’d told Pierce I wanted to stay at Marshall. Though I wanted to be in an engineering department this time.

  Pierce told me not to worry about college. As long as I worked with NASA, they’d send me to school to learn whatever I wanted.

  I hadn’t told Mitsuko and Emilio that I wouldn’t be going back to Houston with them. I’d lost a year with my family. I couldn’t leave them again so soon.

  Life was short. My family wouldn’t be here forever. Dadi wouldn’t be here forever.

  She came through the doorway now, as full of life as ever, holding a massive tray of food. “What are you doing, silly girl, eating popcorn when I’ve slaved all day to provide this feast?”

  “It’s my birthday, Dadi!”

  “Yes, yes, it’s your birthday, but that does not give you the right to fill up on junk food! Have some respect for your elders!”

  I jumped up off the couch and took the heavy tray from her hands, kissing her cheek. “I love you, Dadi. And I appreciate you cooking for me.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  My uncle Guaresh’s voice came from the open door to the backyard. “Where is the birthday girl? Everyone out here is hungry!”

  “Coming, Chacha!” I called. I shot a glance at my friends on the couch and jerked my head toward the direction of the door. “Leave the popcorn!”

  A cheer went up at the long picnic table my parents had set up in the backyard. It was August first and oppressively hot, but my entire extended family had gathered from across the country, and in some cases across the globe, to be here today, and we didn’t all fit inside the house.

  August first. On this day last year, I’d stepped into the Johnson Space Center and my destiny. Now I was closing the chapter of my eighteenth year and . . . kind of had mixed feelings about it.

  I’d lost half of that year asleep, hurtling through space. But I’d packed more than one lifetime in the remaining months.

  Maybe I had peaked at eighteen.

  My friends filed out behind me and were lost to the noise and chaos of my welcoming family members, who were now ignoring me in favor of these new people they could pester to death with questions.

  I put the tray down on the table and sighed. Before this year was out, the megobari fleet would arrive. Would we have to do this all over again? Luka had sworn to me that his people would not risk a violent confrontation with humans. Most of us are not like that, he’d said. Desperate t
imes, et cetera.

  That remained to be seen. But it wasn’t something to worry about now. There would be a place for me at the negotiation table; Luka had offered it to me, if I wanted it. I hadn’t decided—not sure that I was the kind of person who needed to be in charge of such decisions. I’d made a lot of mistakes.

  Or maybe I needed to be there, to help others keep from making similar mistakes.

  I looked up at the Alabama sky, as blue as a blessing, immaculate. God-Mother had saved three peoples with her sacrifice: hers, ours, and her enemy’s. And no one on Earth knew it. I’d have to do something about that.

  The world was about to change wildly—and, hopefully, for the better.

  “Looking up?” Luka came up behind me, close and safe and warm. He reached around me to show me his cell phone. It was open to a news site, a small article buried in the depths of the science section:

  Scientists baffled by mysterious gamma-ray burst in Milky Way galaxy: Earth safely out of range

  I smiled sadly up at him. “We owe her everything. You know that? She deserved more.”

  “You gave her what she wanted: all her children are now frolicking happily in Earth’s oceans.”

  This was true. We’d allowed the vrag to each choose whatever animal, including human, they wanted to become in order to live on Earth. All of them had chosen the sea as their home. Most of them jellyfish, coral, or octopuses; it was a closer, more familiar form. “Yeah. To Earth’s polluted, overfished ocean. Not much guarantee of a happy life.”

  “We’ll change that. And there’s never a guarantee of a happy life. We can only help others, and try to find happiness ourselves.”

  We still hadn’t had that talk—about what this all meant for us. We were still just feeling our way. But I had told him that, even though I cared about him, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be interested in doing much more than kissing. He’d been more supportive than I’d expected, promising we’d never go further than I wanted.

  We’d been through a lot in a short period of time. We’d supported and relied on each other. And while the future wasn’t certain, I was starting to wonder what it might be like to want to do more. Maybe I’d come to feel differently a few years down the road, and maybe not. But right now, we were happy.

  I squeezed his arms tighter around me, and hoped actions spoke louder than words.

  I’d heard that they were recalibrating Pinnacle’s programming under the direction of the FDA, so it couldn’t be abused—a movement reportedly spurred on by very powerful female lobbyists, who were apparently appalled that their daughter was able to be rendered comatose and have her body taken out of her control by SEE’s computer program.

  Sunny, meanwhile, was a permanent fixture in my brain. I had been hearing her less and less, and was beginning to wonder if she was becoming part of me, or I was becoming a part of her. Hanna had sent me a message a few weeks ago, promising to keep in touch without Crane’s influence, so we could help each other monitor the progression of our new . . . status. Pretty sure she was hoping to get some kind of new patent out of the deal. There weren’t many like us, but there were a lot of people eager for technology like this to improve their lives, and willing to volunteer for trials.

  Soon, there’d be a lot more people with implants like ours. Computers that would help physically disabled people communicate better with their robotic prostheses, or electrodes that could help reestablish communications between a paralyzed person’s brain and body. It had been possible for a long time, but the technology had been in its infancy—and now was becoming an entirely new field. The fact that I was on the forefront, a prototype, was both exciting and a little nerve-racking.

  Not only that, but with the coming megobari fleet, I was one of only a very small number of people who would be able to communicate with them, using Sunny as an intermediary. I’d already agreed to become one of America’s translators, when the time came.

  I’d heard that Hanna, using Pinnacle, was translating for the EU. Mitsuko was competing for the chance to be Japan’s official spokesperson for their own seat at the discussion table, using their own computer program. I had hopes that we would all be there to help guide the future of human and megobari relations.

  My mom was already fielding calls from researchers looking to include me in studies.

  “Call back when she graduates high school,” she always said before hanging up.

  I hadn’t expected Hanna to come. She hadn’t RSVP’d to my invite or even spoken to me for weeks, beyond an occasional message asking me about how I was faring with Sunny. But then she was on my doorstep, an hour late to my birthday party, chagrined and cautious. She’d kept the darker brown color in her hair, just as I’d kept my short haircut, both of us choosing to own the ways we’d changed. It made her look older, and softened her a little.

  “Can we talk?” she asked.

  I stepped out onto the porch and closed the door behind me, muting the sounds of my little cousins chasing each other with lightsabers in the living room. “I didn’t think you were coming.”

  She shrugged noncommittally. I waited a long moment for her to speak, and then reached impatiently for the doorknob.

  “I thought I was doing the right thing,” Hanna blurted. She was facing the front yard, looking out over my street, as though she might leave at any moment. “Taking Skyfall to Crane. It was a mistake.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “How long did it take you to figure that out?”

  “As soon as they hooked me up to it.” She whirled on me, fists clenched at her sides. “I came really close to destroying everything. I stole Skyfall—”

  “—and Mitsuko’s rental car.”

  “And the rental,” she added with some extra venom. “Things were looking bad. You and Luka, sacrificing yourselves. I thought giving the weapon to Crane was the one thing I could do. And, yeah, I thought it’d help smooth things over with him. I really did come on my own to help you, you know. But I didn’t really trust Luka or your judgment, to be honest. So I took matters into my own hands. And I guess I . . . need to . . . apologize.”

  To her credit, she lifted her chin and met my gaze. And she wasn’t cowed.

  But she was sincere.

  I raised my eyebrows. “Is this the first time you’ve ever apologized?”

  She gave me a mocking look. “Shut up. I’m trying to make amends here. I realize I screwed up, okay? I can’t stop thinking about how close we came.”

  “I know.” I still had nightmares about the ways things might have gone. “But you’re not the only one who screwed up. If we hadn’t brought back the weapon. If Luka’s family had told us the truth about it. If the megobari hadn’t invented Skyfall in the first place. Long chain of screwups got us to this point. Mine still haunt me. Yours was hardly the worst of the bunch.”

  “Really?” Hanna looked incredulous. “Just like that?”

  I shook my head, suddenly tired. “Life’s too short, Hanna. We just can’t make the same mistakes again.”

  She nodded slowly.

  “Are we good now? Because I feel like we need to be good, you and me. We’re not quite done yet.” I held out my hand.

  She bit her lip in a moment of hesitation, and then grasped my outstretched hand. “In the future, I’ll call you out on your shit, if you call me out on mine.”

  I laughed. “Deal. Now get in here.”

  We went inside together and I wound my way back through the house, finding Luka on the way. Hanna went on to join the party without me, giving me one last nod.

  “You okay?” he asked, reading my expression and watching Hanna walk away.

  “Yeah.” I smiled. “Let’s eat.”

  The chairs at the table on the back porch were filling up. “We should probably find a place to sit down,” I told him.

  “No, no, no,” my father said, taking hold of my shoulders. Dadi was with him. The four of us stood at the head of the table, and dozens of pairs of eyes were now looking at us. �
��You’re the guest of honor—you’ll stay right here!”

  Luka, holding back his laughter and ignoring my silent pleas for help, left me to be the center of attention and took a seat at the table. He shunned the limelight as much as possible. Only a few people knew his true identity, or his actual role in everything that had happened.

  Stragglers found their seats, and silence slowly descended over the backyard.

  “Today,” my father began, “my daughter turns nineteen. She has accomplished amazing things in those short years. She has become her own person. I remember when she was born, how small and helpless and beautiful she was. I was proud of her from her very first breath. Her every accomplishment has swelled my heart with pride, from the first moment she reached her hand out and grasped my own. The smallest thing, but it was the biggest thing imaginable. She has now gone further in her life than her mother and I could have ever imagined. She has shown that there is no limit to what she can accomplish. No matter what you do, my girl, you are the pride and the joy of my heart.”

  He kissed the top of my head, and my tears fell onto his plaid shirt. The table broke out into cheers and whoops, and I recognized the voices of my friends.

  “Can I say something?” I asked, struggling to clear the tears from my eyes and voice.

  “Oh, fine. But keep it short, people are hungry!” Dadi said, giving me a sly smile.

  I was overwhelmed. Words weren’t fitting together quite right. The smiling, expectant faces before me kept blurring. “Just that . . . I’m here because of all of you. Thank you for your support. Okay, I sound like a politician, but . . . really. I wouldn’t be here without all of you. And I wouldn’t want to be. So, thank you all for coming so far just to celebrate my birthday with me.” Luka had cleverly dodged the spotlight by maneuvering around the table. He now stood at the edge of the patio. I met his eyes. “And . . . I love you.”