Jack chuckled heartily. ‘You’re not doing much better, mate.’
I floated over to the comms monitor. ‘We’ve got files coming in,’ I said.
‘Anything urgent?’ Elena asked.
Any information OCA had sent us would be fourteen years out of date, but even problems that old were well worth knowing. I skimmed over the download list. No protocol updates, no emergency notices. I shook my head. ‘Parameters are unchanged,’ I said. ‘Mission is a go.’ I watched the progress bars inch forward, byte by byte, and the sight sparked a warmth within me, the same sort I’d got whenever a drone had dropped supplies at the OCA mobile base in Antarctica, or when my parents had sent me care packages while I was away at school. When the world you know is out of reach, nothing is more welcome than a measurable reminder that it still exists.
In terms of formal training, I’m not a scientist. I’m an engineer. I build the machines and provide the propulsion that gets scientists where they need to go. I’m a support class, in essence. I’ve always felt most comfortable in that role. The day I applied for trainee work at OCA – just shy of nineteen – I walked in the door of the Vancouver campus with no thought beyond keeping my feet firmly on the ground. I imagined a life of craning my neck back as my work vanished into the clouds. I had no idea how far I would go – but then, I’m not sure OCA knew that about itself, either.
It’s understandable why humans stopped living in space in the 2020s. How can you think of the stars when the seas are spilling over? How can you spare thought for alien ecosystems when your cities are too hot to inhabit? How can you trade fuel and metal and ideas when the lines on every map are in flux? How can anyone be expected to care about the questions of worlds above when the questions of the world you’re stuck on – those most vital criteria of home and health and safety – remain unanswered?
Keeping probes and satellites spinning is one thing; keeping astronauts alive is quite another. In the throes of the Great Shift, there were none with sufficient stable resources – human, monetary, or material – to keep that latter work going. Even if there had been, those who held the purse strings so often had motives beyond the glorious dawns they claimed to support. If you wanted the funding and facilities for spaceflight, you could either appeal to your government, whose support for the sciences might prove hollow as soon as there wasn’t a war to win, or to a corporate entity, which would chase scientific progress provided that there was a positive correlation to their bottom line.
So much for the benefit of all mankind.
For the people who worked on those programs – the astronauts, yes, and the breakthrough scientists, yes, but also the thousands upon thousands of everyday engineers, mathematicians, doctors, lab grunts, and data hounds whose names and stories are lost to us – these were not the futures they were chasing. They’d been sold on a vision of discovery and progress accessible to everyone. A global mindset. An enlightened humanity. Instead, they found that dream inextricably, cripplingly anchored to the very founts of nationalistic myopia and materialistic greed that said dream was antithetical to. I imagine many despaired at this reality, and perhaps lost heart.
But our history remembers those that did the opposite. People of science, after all, are stubborn beyond the point of sense.
Have you ever been in a place where history becomes tangible? Where you stand motionless, feeling time and importance press around you, press into you? That was how I felt the first time I stood in the astronaut garden at OCA PNW. Is it still there? Do you know it? Every OCA campus had – has, please let it be has – one: a circular enclave, walled by smooth white stone that towered up and up until it abruptly cut off, definitive as the end of an atmosphere, making room for the sky above. Stretching up from the ground, standing in neat rows and with an equally neat carpet of microclover in between, were trees, one for every person who’d taken a trip off Earth on an OCA rocket. It didn’t matter where you from, where you trained, where your spacecraft launched. When someone went up, every OCA campus planted a sapling.
The trees are an awesome sight, but bear in mind: the forest above is not the garden’s entry point. You enter from underground.
I remember walking through a short tunnel and into a low-lit domed chamber that possessed nothing but a spiral staircase leading upward. The walls were made of thick glass, and behind it was the dense network you find below every forest. Roots interlocking like fingers, with gossamer fungus sprawled symbiotically between, allowing for the peaceful exchange of carbon and nutrients. Worms traversed roads of their own making. Pockets of water and pebbles decorated the scene. This is what a forest is, after all. Don’t believe the lie of individual trees, each a monument to its own self-made success. A forest is an interdependent community. Resources are shared, and life in isolation is a death sentence.
As I stood contemplating the roots, a hidden timer triggered, and the lights faded out. My breath went with it. The glass was etched with some kind of luminescent colourant, invisible when the lights were on, but glowing boldly in the dark. I moved closer, and I saw names – thousands upon thousands of names, printed as small as possible. I understood what I was seeing without being told.
The idea behind Open Cluster Astronautics was simple: citizen-funded spaceflight. Exploration for exploration’s sake. Apolitical, international, non-profit. Donations accepted from anyone, with no kickbacks or concessions or promises of anything beyond a fervent attempt to bring astronauts back from extinction. It began in a post thread kicked off in 2052, a literal moonshot by a collective of frustrated friends from all corners – former thinkers for big names gone bankrupt, starry-eyed academics who wanted to do more than teach the past, government bureau members whose governments no longer existed. If you want to do good science with clean money and clean hands, they argued, if you want to keep the fire burning even as flags and logos came down, if you understand that space exploration is best when it’s done in the name of the people, then the people are the ones who have to make it happen.
And we did.
Their names are on the root-level glass, those original twelve, in font no bigger than any other. So are the names of everyone who has ever given anything to the cause. Doesn’t matter if you’re a millionaire who kept our lights on every year or somebody who donated a spare tip to the cause a grand total of once. The amount a person can spare is relative; the value of generosity is not. All those little cobbles were enough to pave the road back to Luna, then to Mars and the asteroid belt and beyond.
I tried to find my name on the wall – I’d given all my beer money to an OCA employee I’d heard speak at school four months prior – but the lights came back before I located myself. I was returned to the world of tendrils and worms, fungus and rock, locked together in an unbreakable web. Viewed in this way, you can never again see a tree as a single entity, despite its visual dominance. It towers. It’s impressive. But in the end, it’s a fragile endeavour that can only stand thanks to the contributions of many. We celebrate the tree that stretches to the sky, but it is the ground we should ultimately thank.
A hundred and fifty odd years of people making spacecraft that can land themselves on other planets has made my responsibilities as pilot more of a backup plan than anything else. I absolutely need to be there with my hands on the proverbial wheel in case something goes wrong, and I approach that job with deadly seriousness. Even if nothing ever does go wrong, I have to prepare as though it might.