Gold Rush, page 18
“Just after three.”
“In the morning, right?” Dice asks immediately, and then he settles in for another long wait for her reply. It’s funny. The temptation is to blurt out a lengthy message and try to cram as much into each transmission as possible, but that’s akin to talking to oneself. Dice would rather pretend the long pauses don’t exist. He doesn’t mind being alone with his thoughts.
“Yep,” Suzanne replies with a laugh twelve minutes later. “So you’re up already, huh? You’re supposed to be asleep. I’m guessing you saw me sitting here at the console, huh? Yeah, like you, I can’t sleep either.”
“And today? What do we have on today?” he asks as though she were sitting next to him, and his heart sinks at the realization there won’t be any reply for another twelve minutes. He breathes deeply and closes his eyes. The lights are dim within the Dragon. He could close the shades if he wants to keep the sunlight out, and yet there’s something therapeutic about the metronome-like regularity of the sunlight rolling around the inside of the spacecraft as it twists. Even with his eyes shut, he can see the shifting light around him, but it doesn’t bother him. He drifts off to sleep for a moment before Suzanne’s perky voice wakes him.
“Hey, it’s a big day today. We’re launching the probes. Scattering them into the gravity well around Venus. You must be excited.”
Her voice is upbeat, which must take some effort when it’s the middle of the night for her as well, but Suzanne is a legend. She knows how emotionally isolating his flight must be, and she’s there for him, with warmth in her voice. Damn, he misses her.
Suzanne isn’t telling Dice anything he doesn’t already know, including the time, although it’s moved on by now and is close to 4 am. Dice likes hearing her voice.
For the duration of the mission, she’s sleeping in quarters located in the same building as Mission Control. In his mind, he can imagine the walk along a windowless corridor beneath neon tubes. Signed pictures of astronauts and mission directors line the hallway in identical wooden frames. At the back of the building, there’s a T-junction with a fire door leading to the parking lot. Turn left before the door, and there’s a 24-hour cafeteria with line cooks ready to rustle up chicken-fried steak or a brisket burger with curly fries. Turn right, and there’s a nondescript steel door next to the bathrooms that leads to a short corridor with four overnight rooms, two on either side. The decor is courtesy of Motel 6 or perhaps Days Inn. Functionally austere is how Dice would describe them. They’re the kind of rooms that encourage people to move on. As cramped as it is in his capsule, Suzanne doesn’t have much more than a single bed, a bedside drawer, a cupboard, and a narrow desk. There’s a picture of Yosemite in lieu of a window, and the soft hum of air conditioning. There’s an attached bathroom with a shower, but it’s shared with the next room. Suzanne doesn’t need to be on call 24/7 as there are other astronauts assigned to rotate in as CapCom, but he knows her all too well. She might sneak away for a couple of hours here and there, but she wants to be there for him, and he appreciates that.
Right now, she’ll be sitting with the graveyard shift in Mission Control. For a crewed mission, that will mean a comms officer, a flight surgeon and a flight controller, but the normal crew of 18 specialists won’t be in for a few more hours. As the CapCom desk is next to the Flight Director’s and he’s definitely asleep, this is one of the rare times when they can talk without direct oversight, even though every word is logged and transcribed.
Mission Control is more of a theater than a room. And there’s more than one Mission Control. Each mission has its own control center.
Vulcan is being managed out of 3B, but not because of any lack of importance. The Astronaut Officer requested 3B to limit access by the public and press. The room itself is three stories in height. Massive digital screens adorn the walls, but in practice, no one beyond dignitaries and senior NASA directors ever looks at them. Anyone with any operational responsibility has three monitors at their own station with their dashboards mere inches from their eyeballs, which is far more effective, but the idea of a single, unified view has permeated NASA’s culture since the ‘60s. And it looks good. The NASA hierarchy may not like to admit it, but image is everything. In an age where public outcry can see the Senate clip billions off the NASA budget allocation, it’s important to be seen as efficient and effective. In reality, Mission Control could run without any of the wall screens, but they give the room a sense of gravitas. They look spectacular and lean on NASA’s history, proudly displaying its spaceflight engineering.
At a guess, Suzanne is leaning back in her chair with her feet up on the desk. Her shoes will be arranged neatly beside her. And she’ll have her hair pulled back into a ponytail to avoid loose strands catching in the headphones. Dice can picture the microphone mere fractions of an inch from her lips.
“And you?” she asks after another long silence. “Thirty-six days alone in space. How do you feel?”
He says, “I’m good. Vulcan is good. IMU is good. Sweet-Sue is green,” rolling the acronym CWTSU into more familiar words. “And we are ready for deployment.”
Although her reply takes a while, in his mind, time is concatenated, and she seems to respond almost instantly. Damn, he’s been in space too long.
“Copy that. Sweet-Sue is green.”
To anyone looking at the transcript in years to come, their conversation will seem banal and be quickly overlooked as a technical discussion in the middle of the night. In reality, he’s speaking from the heart. IMU is code for I miss you, while Sweet-Sue or CWTSU is Can’t Wait to See You.
Dice smiles. It’s nice to speak in soft, tender tones—no, human tones. Even on quiet days, spaceflight is formal. Flying into the history books with a comet striking Venus and the approach of an alien spacecraft is extraordinary. Dice feels as though he’s living under a microscope.
As he drifts inside the white cabin of his spacecraft, he wonders about the approaching aliens. Just how alien will they be? They’re alive. They’re intelligent. Is that all they have in common with humanity? Apart from their ability to achieve spaceflight, what other comparisons will there be with Homo sapiens? Do they know he’s out here? They’re about to see a swarm of MiniSats move into orbit around Venus. Will that worry them? Will they even notice? Will they care? Just how alien are they?
Dice isn’t bothered by what they may look like. He’s more interested in their cultural leaning and the attitudes and temperament they have toward others. In some ways, he hopes they are truly alien and nothing like humans at all. In his opinion, humans have the dubious distinction of being the most underrated and overrated species on the planet at the same time.
Scientifically, humans are known as Homo sapiens sapiens, with the double reference distinguishing humanity from extinct sub-species like Homo sapiens idaltu. The self-appointed name Homo sapiens sapiens means the wisest of the wise humans. And the title is not without merit. Humanity is a species of accomplishment: the pyramids, the statue of David, the sonatas of Mozart and the symphonies of Beethoven, the plays of Shakespeare, the musings of Voltaire, the essays of Oscar Wilde and the novels of Virginia Woolf, the paintings of Rembrandt, Monet, van Gogh and Picasso, the observations of Galileo, the mathematics of Newton, the theories of Einstein and Planck, the voyage of Darwin on the Beagle, the kindness of Florence Nightingale, the compassion of Ghandi, the insights of Pasteur, the courage of Jonas Salk, and the first, faltering flight of the Wright Brothers on a windswept sandy beach being followed within a century by astronauts riding into the sky on a column of fire. These are accomplishments without equal in the natural world. And yet, humanity is a contradiction. All of these accomplishments are set against a species at war with itself. Superstition reigns over reason. Beliefs trump facts. Selfishness is the god of fools, demanding the sacrifice of those with less social standing. Money is worth more than morals. People are judged based on slightly different wavelengths of light coming off their skin or on their reproductive organs, which are perpetually hidden from sight. In short, humans are a paradox. Dice hopes aliens are simple, because humans sure as hell aren’t.
Dice wonders what they’ll make of human culture. They’re going to look at a single planet divided into two hundred countries and anywhere from five to ten thousand different cultures with overlapping languages. They’ll see a single species squabbling with itself, obsessed with self-importance.
Suzanne breaks his train of thought.
“Between now and oh-nine-hundred, we’re going to need you to run a deployment comms simulation.”
“Again?” Dice says.
Suzanne is giving him a heads-up on changes to the beat sheet for the day. There’s nothing routine about deploying several hundred MiniSats and CubeSats to monitor the impact of Comet Yakov on Venus. Dice has run three deployment communication tests already.
Planets are small in the vast expanse of space, but they’re rather big compared to satellites and spacecraft. Communication requires a line-of-sight connection akin to kids running a piece of string between two paper cups to talk to each other. It’s impossible to talk through a planet like Venus, so those satellites on the Earth-side will cache their data, sending basic imagery directly back to Houston, while waiting to sync with the Vulcan when they round the planet. Those satellites on the far side of Venus won’t be able to send anything back to Earth, but they’ll get a fantastic view of the shockwave from the impact circling the planet several times as the energy dissipates like the ringing of a church bell. They’ll send their data to the Vulcan and sync with Earth when they round Venus. As complex as it sounds, the plan is akin to having two people standing on either side of a building, covering all the angles as a band plays on the roof. The communications simulation is a dress rehearsal for the celestial rock and roll concert of the century.
At its closest approach, Venus is still a staggering 38 million kilometers from Earth, or more than 20 million miles away. When it’s on the far side of the sun, the distance blows out to 260 million kilometers or well over 160 million miles. As Venus is closer to the Sun than Earth, it orbits faster than Earth, racing around on the inside track. During the impact of Comet Yakov, Venus will be 60-70 million miles ahead of Earth and moving even further away as it rounds the Sun.
Normally, a Hohmann Transfer Orbit between Earth and Venus would require a change in velocity of only 2-3 kilometers per second, but the journey would take anywhere from 100 to 150 days. Rather than cruising to Venus at a leisurely pace and missing the impact, the Vulcan is on a ballistic transfer orbit, moving with a fuel-inefficient but more effective difference in speed of 15 kilometers per second. Basically, the plan is for Dice to dive in toward the Sun, grazing the gravitational sphere of Venus before racing back out toward where Earth will be in 60 days’ time.
His primary fuel tanks are already exhausted. By the time he reaches the orbit of Earth, Dice will essentially be flying a brick. His reserve fuel has enough to blast him out of the gravitational well around Venus in an emergency, but that will make intercepting Earth tricky, to say the least. If the recovery Dragon mission fails to intercept him, he’ll enter a highly elliptic orbit around the Sun similar to that of several near-Earth asteroids and a bunch of old Apollo hardware. Once every couple of years, he’ll cross the path of both Venus and Earth as a French fry. He’ll be dead long before then. If the other Dragon misses the rendezvous, there’s no possibility of a second chance. Dice would be dead within about a week once his carbon dioxide scrubbers fail. The Dragon’s internal systems are run by solar power, so they could remain active for decades, but eventually, they, too, will die. Then, instead of freezing into a popsicle, his haggard, decomposed corpse will roast as the Dragon settles into a stable configuration, no longer rotating, and taking the full heat of the Sun on one side. As perverse as it sounds, Dice finds comfort in knowing precisely how his death will unfold if anything goes wrong.
From millions of miles away, Suzanne says, “There are a lot of nervous people down here.”
“Well, there’s only one nervous person up here.”
Church
Aaron Swagger wakes to sunlight breaking through a gap in the blackout curtains of a penthouse apartment in Manhattan. He was dreaming, struggling through a nightmare that fades like fog over a lake at dawn. Within seconds, concerns that consumed his mind moments ago are gone, and the real nightmare descends—reality sucks.
He picks up his phone. Dozens of notifications and messages adorn the lock screen. Aaron thinks about taking his phone off silent, and then thinks better of it, leaving it muted. It’s just after 10 am. There’s a sick, sinking feeling in his stomach, a looming sense of doom following his interview yesterday on Tonight with Will Rogers, but the imposters have to wait. He needs to pee.
Aaron wanders into a bathroom with a level of luxury that would make King Louis XVI of France blush. A chandelier hangs from the ceiling, reflecting light off the marble tiles. A granite stone bath dominates the bathroom. It’s as big as a queen-size bed. Steps lead down into crystal clear water. A gentle current circulates the tepid water, causing it to rise and roll across the surface, inviting him to turn on the jets, but he’s not interested.
After relieving himself, Aaron brushes his teeth and ruffles his hair. No amount of money can separate him from the necessities of life, and that in itself is humbling. He gets dressed, ignoring the notifications flicking across the lockscreen of his phone.
Angela is gone. Ostensibly, his girlfriend left last night to visit her mother, but Aaron understands. No one wants to be with a loser, a failure. She’s supposed to stay for five days, but that’s a plausibly deniable distance in both time and space for her to break things off quietly. It was the lack of a kiss when she left that was telling. He always suspected she was a fair-weather friend, which is no friend at all.
Breakfast is already sitting on the table in the adjoining lounge, which looks out over Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan. In the distance, out across the gloomy water, the Statue of Liberty rises out of the harbor, holding a torch to the sky.
A burner on the table keeps eggs and bacon warm. As he enters, one of the statues moves, and it takes him a moment to realize it’s a waiter—literally someone who’s been waiting to serve him since well before his normal waking time of 6 am. The poor bastard in a dark suit is probably bursting to relieve himself, but he would have been under strict orders to wait for Aaron to awake.
“Coffee?”
“No, thank you.” Aaron waves him away. “You can go now. I’ll be fine.”
The waiter nods and leaves without making a sound, which Aaron finds peculiar. The waiter’s polished dress shoes make neither a click nor a squelch on the marble floor. And Aaron hates himself. Privilege is a drug, and he relapses time and time again. Like an alcoholic, he knows the bottle will kill him. He’ll attend an anonymous meeting in his own mind, confess his sins to himself, be strong for a day, a week, a month, and then drink from the well of privilege again. Seeing the waiter trying so hard to be quiet is disheartening. There’s no difference between them, nothing beyond a bunch of zeros in an electronic register. And on days like today, privilege burns like acid.
Everyone tries so damn hard not to offend or annoy him to the point where they walk as though on eggshells, but his investors don’t—won’t. They’ll happily drag him through the mud as yet another series of notifications arrive on his phone. Yet again, Aaron ignores them. They won’t go away, but, like King Louis XVI, Aaron’s in no rush to climb the wooden steps leading to the platform with the glistening blade of a guillotine rising high in the air. Waiting for its thundering release is torture.
Aaron walks into the kitchenette and slips a mug beneath the polished chrome of a Dutch Kees van der Westen Speedster coffeemaker. At a cost of $30,000, it makes exquisite coffee. A smile rises on his face. The Speedster is as much a work of art as it is a machine, looking very much like something from a steampunk movie. He pulls the handle to one side, and fresh coffee beans are ground and compressed into the chrome portafilter. Boiling hot water drips from the head into his mug. It’s strange to describe a smell as being deep, dark, and alluring, but that’s the only way he can think of the scent wafting from his mug. He holds a chrome jug beneath a steam vent and hot milk froths before him into a creamy foam. Aaron pours it on top of the coffee and returns to the table.
A folded newspaper sits beside his plate. He opens the New York Times. Front page. Right column. Swagger Stumbled: TechBro Humbled. It seems the Times editor wants full marks for some clever alliteration.
“No shit.”
He sips his coffee and reads a recap of his interview and comments from several other senators and the White House Press Secretary.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
Aaron hates himself. He hate-eats eggs and bacon, not because he wants to, but because he has to eat something. He didn’t eat anything before the interview last night, but now his stomach demands food.
Finally, Aaron relents. He opens his phone. Sixteen missed calls. Forty-seven unread text messages. A hundred and eighty-two notifications through social media.
“What a goddamn train wreck.”
He turns off his phone and picks up a TV remote resting on the table. The 100-inch television on the wall looks large enough to step into. As he’s in New York, just a few blocks from Wall Street, the television is set to turn on to a local channel that perpetually follows the stock market.
A young, blonde woman with immaculate teeth provides commentary to images of chaos on the trading floor at the New York Stock Exchange.
“…and the fallout continues from the announcement that the US Federal Government is taking over Aaron Swagger’s ambitious Project Aphrodite. Billions have been wiped off the X-Corp conglomeration of companies, with the crown jewel, RockX, being effectively nationalized. Margin calls led by Goldman Sachs have crippled the stock price. Barclays Bank, J.P. Morgan and BlackRock quickly followed suit, with a fire sale leaving the share price teetering at a mere twenty-four dollars. That’s a fall of well over three hundred dollars a share in less than 24 hours.”
