I hold out my hand and he gives me his phone.
“It’s me,” I say.
I hear words and Mae has the kind of voice doctors on TV use when they come into the hospital waiting room with really bad fucking news. But I don’t know what she’s saying because I’m looking at Micah’s screen. And I see it.
I see the wave.
3
Mae
ISS Location: Low-Earth Orbit
Earth Date: 30 August
Earth Time (PST): 09:52
A tsunami can travel at 500 miles per hour, as fast as a commercial jet.
The tallest tsunami ever recorded was in Alaska. It was 100 feet.
Rossby Waves, which aren’t tsunamis, just large-scale ocean waves, take roughly 221 days to cross an ocean. A tsunami? One day. Sometimes less than one day.
Tsunamis rush the shore at the speed of a major league pitcher’s fastball. Faster, even.
They’re caused by underwater earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or other explosions under the ocean’s surface, movement in glaciers—even meteorites crashing down from space.
Many survivors report that a tsunami sounds like a freight train and that the water is gray-brown because it’s churning up the ocean floor.
The water is full of all sorts of things:
Metal
Pieces of buildings
Cars
Shards of glass
Toys
Palm trees
Beach umbrellas
Gold watches
Cell phones
Bathing suit tops
My parents
It takes eight to ten minutes to drown in seawater. Fresh water is two to three minutes. You die from cardiac arrest. I didn’t know that. I thought it was your lungs filling with water, but it’s your heart that gives out. That gives up.
For the past seventeen minutes and thirty-two seconds, I have been on a mental EVA—Extravehicular Activity, more commonly referred to by laypersons as a space walk.
It is ten years in the future, and I am on the International Space Station, scrunched into a tiny window seat.
There’s a bright blue line on the horizon, mixing with the emerald smoky green of the aurora that swirls over Earth’s surface like a potion in a cauldron—another sunrise, one of the sixteen I get to see up here every day on the ISS. Since we orbit Earth every ninety-two minutes, that means sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets. How’s that for a life?
We race toward it, toward the light, and neon cerulean turns to blinding gold as the sun rises over the east, spilling across the beaches of Malaysia right below us.
Up here, I can just make out the rocky coastline of the islands, edged by white sand, green water giving way to the darkest blue of the ocean. A raft of clouds floats by, covering my view, and then we’re speeding past those beaches, heading toward our next sunset.
Mad Matter Magazine Vol. 4, No. 12
Today, we’re sitting down with theoretical physicist Dr. Greg Winters to talk dark matter, the nature of the universe, and time travel.
Mad Matter: Dr. Winters, you are one of the world’s leading physicists, doing groundbreaking research on the very nature of the universe. NASA calls you when they’re stumped. People say there might be a Nobel Prize sitting in your office someday. Yet you’ve taken a sabbatical. Why?
Dr. Winters: My research on dark matter and dark energy—
Mad Matter: For our readers, I’ll just interject here: This is the stuff that makes up ninety-five percent of the universe, but we have no idea what it is.
Dr. Winters: Correct. My work in this field has inadvertently created a, shall we say, event horizon of sorts in my life—not to get all heavy on you with general relativity and spacetime.
Mad Matter: [Laughs] Give us your best explanation of what an event horizon is.
Dr. Winters: An event horizon is the point of no return. It’s a terrain in spacetime that’s created when the gravitational pull of a massive object is so great that escaping it is impossible. Imagine a huge magnet, pointed at you, and you’re covered in metal. There’s no avoiding its pull. When that massive object is coming your way, it’s creating that point of no return. You can’t escape the object. You have to face it.
Event horizons are mostly discussed in relation to black holes, but they’re a great metaphor for life, too.
Mad Matter: How so?
Dr. Winters: Well, all of us, at one time or another, are going to have something happen that creates an event horizon—a point of no return. The first thing is to accept that we can’t escape it, and so we need to face it head-on. Next, we need to look for the potential this event horizon presents us with.
Mad Matter: What is the potential of an event horizon?
Dr. Winters: Theoretically, if you could actually make it across the event horizon, you could see the entire history of the universe playing out before you. You see Napoleon on his horse and your ancestors in the fields and the suffragettes marching in the streets of New York City, and you see your children sleeping in bed in the other room and you see the cancer diagnosis you will get five years from now. You see every bit of it. All of time is happening at the same moment all around you.
Now, here on Earth, we can’t get ourselves to actual event horizons that let us see the future and thus help us make better choices in the present. We can’t time travel. Yet.
Mad Matter: So how does it help us—knowing event horizons are out there, and that there’s potential to see all of time playing out at once?
Dr. Winters: For me, it makes life on Earth a little more bearable: There’s comfort in knowing that whatever is going to happen is already happening right now. In spacetime. It takes the pressure off. The deaths and births and screwups and victories—it’s already playing out. There’s nothing you can do to stop it.
4
Mae
ISS Location: Low-Earth Orbit
Earth Date: 30 August
Earth Time (PST): 11:30
Anything can happen in space.
It’s an environment in which human life is impossible. But if you’re an astronaut, you’re human. WHICH MEANS YOU’RE DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE. You’re floating around in a tin can with a finite amount of oxygen, in a very vulnerable body, hoping that the math is right because it’s the only thing that’s going to keep you alive.
Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. There are things you can control, like how well trained you are, the ability to stay calm under pressure—literal and figurative—and your intelligence. And if you’ve got a good crew, like the kind that would go into Mordor with you, and they are well trained and intelligent, then you exponentially increase your chances of survival.
The fact that we can go to space and survive there is proof positive that we can do impossible things. That’s what my dad is always saying—We can do impossible things.
When I was six, I alerted my father to the fact that maybe there are certain conditions in society that make it impossible for female members of our species to do impossible things. Such as, women make up less than eleven percent of humans sent into space. I informed my father that the probability of me wearing a NASA space suit wasn’t great. His answer was to sit me down to watch an interview with astronaut Peggy Whitson, who would go on to become the commander of the International Space Station and would break records for time spent in space: 665 DAYS, the most of any American woman. “We can do impossible things,” he said. Then we went to the Griffith Observatory to look at stars.