3.11
01 November
I.R.V. Intercession
Extra-Kuiper Space
3,336 A.U. from Earth
Harv slept poorly that night. He often slept poorly, so that was no surprise, but this was no ordinary night. No, this was more like the night before he fried his brain in a neuro-quantum time machine. It was so much like that night, twelve years and a lifetime ago, that he couldn’t help replaying those events in his mind. It had all made sense, right? It was something he had to do, right? The results had been amazing, right? And yet, the experience had broken his career and his personal life, and left him absent-minded and prone to headaches. And a laughingstock, too, as he had no ironclad way to prove he’d sent his consciousness backward in time.
And here he was again, about to subject his brain to unnatural stimuli in hopes of gaining arcane knowledge of he-knew-not-what. Some people never learn.
Could he back out? Yes. It was in his contract. Would he? No way. It wasn’t in his nature. But, once bitten and twice shy, he at least had the good sense to be nervous about it. Very.
Thenbecca spent the night drifting, untethered, within the confines of her closed cabin. She’d been apprehensive about going to space the first time, and apprehensive about launching on a starship powered by ten tons of antimatter. And she was apprehensive now.
There was no way to work off the tension on the dead-quiet ship, so she put the lights down to their lowest setting and simply floated, banging gently into the walls and ceiling and padded bunk, sometimes singing in whispers, sometimes praying, sometimes reciting recipes in her mind.
Would she be changed by what was about to happen? Would the changes be for the better? She didn’t know, and couldn’t know, and so she drifted, until—after a long time—a light sleep finally settled over her.
Michael was generally a good sleeper, but even he had trouble.
Finally, it was time. Michael exited his cabin and poked a head into the Encounter Bubble, where it seemed nearly everyone was out of their sleep sacks already. As he hovered silently by, those who were still cocooned, and who weren’t awakened by the activity around them, were gently shaken awake by their fellow passengers.
“Wake up!” they said. “Wake up and make history!”
It was 4:55 a.m.
Michael returned to the crew quarters to find Harv and Hobie both opening their rollup doors and peeking out.
That noise prompted Thenbecca, who opened her door and said, “Oh, thank God. I’ve been awake a long time.”
That got Igbal and Rachael up, and soon Dong followed suit. Meaning everyone was up except Sandy.
“I think she might actually be asleep,” Igbal said with some amazement.
“Should we wake her?” Rachael asked. Rachael, who had gotten a total of perhaps eight hours of sleep over the past two days, but looked as wired-fresh as she ever had.
“Let her sleep,” Igbal said. “Let’s get everyone fed, and do what we came here for.”
Breakfast was light—a granola bar, a pouch of synthetic, non-dairy “yogurt,” and a pouch of that century-old astronaut favorite, Tang. All easy to digest and not much of any of it, so that in an hour everyone’s stomachs would be basically empty again, though with stabilized blood sugar. Sandy woke up toward the end of it, and ate and drank in hasty silence.
In the Bubble, people were careless with their crumbs and trash, prompting Michael to scold: “Listen, the crew’s got better things to do than clean up after you lot. I want this place spotless, and I think it isn’t much to ask.”
And then it was really time. Igbal took a big plastic case out of storage, and each crew member grabbed two big handfuls of vape pens and started passing them out to the passengers.
“Don’t puff on it until you’re told!” Michael called out to several miscreants. He supposed it didn’t actually matter whether they all dropped into the spirit world at exactly the same moment, but it was one of the few things Igbal had concretely planned, and Michael thought he deserved that much, after bringing them all here like Nerd Moses.
But then everybody had a vape pen in hand, including Michael himself, and he found he was a lot more nervous than he’d expected. Some of the things people said about psychedelic drugs were flatly terrifying, after all, and Michael did not particularly want to “spend years drifting in a peaceful void” or any such thing. For that matter, he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to meet the Beings, on their terms or any other. Such a life-altering prospect was the very biggest of deals, not to be entered into lightly. But on the other hand, he did want to, very much, for they were also God’s children. How much did they know, that humanity could only guess at?
“Speech!” people in the crowd began to say. But this time they were looking at Michael, for Igbal had promised them he would say a few words.
He foolishly hadn’t prepared any, but he held up his hands now and cleared his throat.
“Ladies and gentlemen and others, we find ourselves on the precipice of discovery, and I, for one, find the step ahead of us more daunting than I had supposed years ago, when I first agreed to take part. We do not know what great or terrible or wonderful things may await us on the other side, and there is no shame in backing out now. Indeed, we may have reason to be grateful if a few of you do exactly that.”
“Fat chance!” said someone from the crowd, provoking scattered, nervous laughter.
“In public I don’t speak often of God,” Michael said, “as many people find this off-putting, not least because His name has been invoked to justify innumerable atrocities. But I’ll invoke it now, to remind you all how improbable it is, for a universe to exist that contains this moment, and all of us, within it. If you don’t mark this as evidence of a loving creator, then perhaps at least mark it as your own great good fortune.”
He paused there, and though he might have said more, a scattered clapping broke out, and then a sort of sigh ran through the crowd, like a breeze that swept away the smell of fear.
“Igbal,” Michael said, turning to find him almost eclipsed by the hull of the ship. “Would you like to count us down?”
Smiling, Igbal said, “Aw, hell. Puff ’em dry, everyone. Go! Go!”
And then some people were lifting the vape pens to their lips, and some were laughing too hard to puff, and Michael, who had never ingested any drug stronger than wine, took a long drag, held it, exhaled, and then—before he could lose his nerve—drew deeply from the pen once again.
And the universe, for better or worse, was changed forever.