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He knew instinctively that he was on Earth. It was the little things, like the feel of the breeze, the denseness of the air. But everything in front of him seemed otherworldly.
Brick slabs and steel beams leaned in all directions, like a giant demolition site, stacked atop each other and extending high into a sickly sky filled with yellow haze.
And in a crater-like opening between mountains of debris was a woman, standing on a long flat metal device that hovered in the air. Crisscrossing her chest was a metal belt with glowing lights, and beneath that was skin-tight red spandex and black leather; like something straight from a sci-fi or superhero movie.
In her hand was a bazooka-shaped weapon with an overly-large barrel, held easily on her shoulder despite it being as big as she was.
He pulled back his arm, and thrust it forward. Energy flowed down his veins and lightning and green plasma shot from his gloved palm.
She fluidly curved around the green beam, and a red return beam fired toward his face.
Dan jerked awake, and pushed his hands out to the walls to keep from spinning into anything.
It was a reflexive action. He liked to sleep floating freely, but it had its down sides: it was easy to drift into things during the night, and there was the little issue of every movement being exaggerated while floating. There were only so many times someone could startle awake and end up spinning end-over-end into a rack before learning to catch themselves.
He looked at his surroundings and felt a moment of disorientation. This wasn’t his quarters.
But then he recognized the configuration of handrails, the suit storage area, the large screen where it was possible to watch the news or movies, the folded-away table, and, most importantly, the round window—the reason he’d tied his sleeping bag to a rail in the WR last night instead of floating freely in his crew quarters. He’d wanted a few last looks at the place he would soon be leaving.
Mars stared at him from the window, large and beige-orange, with gray areas that were swept free of the orange dust that coated most of the surface. He could see the volcanoes and Valles Marineris canyon. The angle of the sun, close to setting, created shadows that highlighted their details, showing off both their features and their size, all much larger than anything on Earth.
Clouds were visible in the thin atmosphere along the horizon. Soon the sun would start to move behind the planet and the horizon would glow blue, like the sunsets he’d witnessed on the surface during the past month.
He smirked as he thought back to how he’d been the first human to walk on Mars. Of course, others had stepped onto the surface moments behind him, but the public loved a first.
Speaking of, now would make a good photo op.
He pushed his sleeping bag down to his waist and changed shirts, and finger-combed his hair before tying it in his signature low ponytail, leaving his long bangs to float freely. He studied his reflection in the window to make sure everything was photo-perfect. Then picked up the camera he’d clamped to a handrail last night and took a selfie with the planet.
He would upload it to his socials later. Probably also sell a few autographed prints for thousands of dollars a piece.
The face of the planet grew dark, and he could see billions of stars peaking around from behind it. He replaced the camera.
According to his watch, it was almost time to start the day. He got the rest of the way out of his sleeping bag and rolled it up.
Sounds of a guitar, along with the words, “Do you remember the time I knew a girl from Mars?” came over the speaker. The morning wake-up call, at exactly 06:00.
He floated over to the hygiene area to brush his teeth, the electric guitars and drums following him.
“And she never told me her name.”
He pulled his toothpaste tube off of the rack and flicked open the lid, smearing a little on his toothbrush, and stuck the toothpaste back, connecting the Velcro dot. Then he sucked a little water into his mouth from a pouch to help the toothpaste foam while brushing.
He could hear his crewmates stirring, though only barely over the sound of the fans and the music.
“And I still dream of you.”
The song was finishing up, and he was done brushing his teeth. He swallowed the toothpaste and sucked his brush clean—it was done this way in space because they couldn’t let water and toothpaste splatter all over the racks.
Out in the aisle, one of his crewmates said good morning to Houston over the mic. It was a happy Tuesday the seventeenth, the middle of June—apparently a real scorcher in Texas, though the Earthly heat couldn’t be felt here on the ship.
Dan looked through assorted breakfast items in a food locker in the galley.
Two of his crewmates were in the WR behind him, having a conversation as they ate. He wasn’t paying enough attention to hear what they were talking about. It mixed with the news, the TV signal choppy, and with the normal sounds of humming equipment and running fans.
He got out a pouch of coffee and a pouch of scrambled eggs, and added hot water from the dispenser, then brought his folded food tray into the WR.
Larry paused what he was saying as Dan neared. “Good morning,” Larry said in a deep bass. He was the commander of the mission, a black man who, like a lot of male astronauts, shaved his head.
Dan grunted noncommittally in response.
He used his scissors—basically one of the standard utensils in space—to open the scrambled eggs, and unstuck a bottle of liquid salt from beside the table to add some to the pouch, along with a few other spices.
He could still barely taste it. But that was a well-known issue with space travel, sense of taste being duller. It was to be expected after going back into orbit.
A jalapeño pepper slowly somersaulted through the air overhead. Larry reached for it, but Dan was closer and grabbed it from the air.
And bit into it, deciding to eat it with his eggs.
Larry’s eyes widened. “Wait, that was mine.”
Dan said nothing.
Larry sighed then, and gave a little laugh. “I guess I can wait for the next ones to ripen.”
Dan glanced in the direction of their plant habitat, though it wasn’t actually visible from this angle since it was behind the galley.
This far into the Virgo III mission, every piece of fresh produce they had came from there.
It was a tall rectangular container in the science station area, with a door of one-way glass so it was possible to look inside and observe the plants on the shelves. Each plant poked up through a gray pillow filled with dirt and was secured to the shelf in order to keep both the plant and the dirt from floating around.
Some of the plants had been brought up from Mars’ surface yesterday and loaded into it. When they’d first arrived at Mars, about half of the original plants, along with some seeds, had been taken down to the surface for growing experiments. Most of those plants were still down there, left to continue growing through a mix of automated systems and remote robotic intervention.
NASA would collect data on how plants grow on Mars long after he and his three crewmates returned to Earth.
It was a long day of checking the functionality of assorted things on the ship in preparation for leaving orbit, from the CO2 scrubber to the waste management system to the solar arrays—examining them using the ship’s arm and outside cameras. Throughout this, Dan looked forward to observing Mars during the chunk of free time at the end of the day.
Unfortunately...
He drifted around the galley to reach the WR and its large window.
...Everyone else had had the same idea.
He frowned, crossing his arms, as he watched the backs of his three cheerful crewmates, their heads together at just the right angles to completely cover the window while they chattered with one another and took photos.
If there were no delays, tonight would likely be the last time he could see Mars up close, since tomorrow was the day they would leave orbit to head back to Earth. By this time tomorrow, Mars and its frequent sunrises and sunsets and two strangely-shaped moons would no longer be there to see.
They’d also gotten word of an unexpected Solar Particle Event heading toward them tonight, so he couldn’t sleep by the window again, but instead had to be in his crew quarters, which was shielded from SPEs through liquid insulation. ...And tomorrow morning they would have to go through a lot of the system checks again just to make sure the storm didn’t damage anything. Of course, if things did get damaged, they’d delay leaving orbit, but that time would be spent making repairs.
He sighed.
Well, sometimes things took precedence over sight-seeing.
Such as... “Hey, we were keeping the male and female spiders separated, weren’t we?” Dan asked. “Because I just noticed some specks floating around in the science area, and I think there’s the remains of a hatched egg sack in the terrarium.”
An instant later, he was rewarded with horrified intakes of breath and flailing bodies. His crewmates bumped into one another and into the racks as they rushed to leave the WR to contain hundreds of nonexistent baby spiders before they covered the entire ship. Larry called out directions for sealing off different areas.
The three of them probably wouldn’t think to check to make sure there really was an empty egg sack, or to check the seal on the terrarium.
If he was lucky, they would spend the next hour and a half searching every filter and behind every storage container for teeny tiny spiders, leaving him alone to view Mars for the entire free time.
And if they were to ask him about it later, then he must’ve been mistaken. The specks he’d seen could’ve been a number of things, possibly a few granules of dirt from one of the plant pillows.
He was back on Earth. Or that strange version of it. There were mountains made of broken walls and cracked windows, with bent support beams sticking up at odd angles; that woman with her hover craft and giant energy weapon; and the sickly sky that shouldn’t be yellow, deceptively similar to Mars but different in ways he knew but couldn’t name after being under the real Martian sky. This was definitely Earth.
While he gazed at the sky, a pink-and-green cloud formed. It was as though the aurora borealis were condensed into a swirling circle.
The swirl grew larger, and then ripped apart into a portal to outer space that stretched jaggedly across the sky, revealing deep black and pinpricks of stars on the other side.
The woman in red craned her neck to look upward, her mouth dropping open.
And an army of little green men poured down from the mountains of debris. It looked like they were saying something. As they neared, he could hear them making eerie “Wooo” sounds.
“It’s the fi-nal countdown!”
Dan woke up.
He was in his CQ, floating in his sleeping bag. And the morning wake-up call was playing.
“We’re leaving together. And hey, all is well. And maybe we’ll come back... To Mars, who can tell? I guess there’s other places to aim. We’re homeward bound! Homeward bound!”
He could hear cheers from his crewmates. The song had new lyrics specifically for them, and they were always ecstatic when that happened.
Though, beyond that, there was a message behind this wake-up call.
Dan turned on his work laptop to see if Houston had sent some updates, and to check the day’s schedule.
There had been a chance of Virgo III’s return trip being delayed because of the solar storm, but an update said the SPE turned out to be less serious than anticipated. NASA also ran some remote system checks during the night and found nothing out of the ordinary.
He and the others were still going to need to physically check a few things again, but the wake-up call was a clear message that today’s takeoff was a go.
“It’s the final countdown!” the song continued.
He took a closer look through the colored blocks in his schedule, wondering if he could really do all of that in the time given. If needed, he could cut out part of his lunch break, but he was keeping the full allotted exercise time.
“We’re headed for our home. Our home. And still, it’s the dawn. ’Cause we’re in the unknown. And they’re cheering us on... yeah. With so many light years to go. And things to be found. To be found. I’m sure that we’ll all miss her so... It’s the final countdown!”
He shook himself from his thoughts, and hurried to get dressed.
“It’s the final countdown!”
He floated through the small door of his CQ and out into the aisle without paying attention and got tangled in a loose RET cloth tether—oh, it was a makeshift leash.
Capricornus was back moving around the ship. That annoying goat. One of his crewmates thought it’d be fun to tie a goat plush to a random handrail each day. Something about animals boosting morale or whatever. The top of its head was starting to get threadbare from all the times his crewmates would give it a pet while floating by.
It was mostly just a nuisance, though. It tended to get sucked toward the nearest intake vent, leaving its leash stretched across the aisle.
Dan detangled himself and went to the hygiene area.
His mind was still on the stuffed animal as he touched up his goatee close to a vent—so the loose hair would be sucked up and not float all over the place.
A goat didn’t even make sense. The Mars missions had been named after Virgo because Mars had been predicted to be located in that constellation for the planned first manned mission on the planet’s surface—a tight schedule that had actually panned out—and also related to their main experiments being about growing food.
So a few months ago they had headed toward Virgo on the way to Mars. And they would be heading toward Pisces on the way back to Earth. Capricornus wasn’t even involved. Could’ve at least chosen a fish or a doll. Something to symbolize the mission-related constellations.
He finished up shaving and then used the UWMS, before going to get a pouch of powdered coffee to rehydrate.
He kept his breathing controlled while doing deadlifts on the flywheel.
Unlike traditional barbells on Earth, which would float in zero gravity, the flywheel had a small bar, which was attached by a flat cord to a disc at its platform. The cord and disc setup both kept it from drifting away as well as provided the resistance necessary when there wasn’t gravity.
It was simpler and smaller than the ARED machine he’d used back when he’d been on the International Space Station, and it could do more types of exercises. With the small amount of space the crew had on the ship, those properties were necessities.
Dan always took his daily workouts seriously. In outer space, muscles and bones deteriorated from lack of use. There was very little work involved in floating around, getting from place to place with just a little pull on a handrail to get going in the right direction. It might’ve been worse than just lying in bed all day on Earth—at least then your body had to work against gravity.
There was a specific amount and method of exercise each day to keep up his muscles while on missions. He refused to look anything less than ripped. He had an image to maintain, and always needed to look his best.
Dan kept an eye on the status of the engines and life support while talking with mission control on the comms and Larry in the seat beside him, as well as occasionally flicking switches and pressing buttons.
No matter how many times he’s done this before, the complexity of flying in outer space never got old. He loved being at the controls of a ship.
Dan was the mission’s pilot but Larry was the commander and thus was the one in charge of most decisions on the ship, and was closer to a traditional pilot. Dan was still annoyed at NASA for not selecting him as commander, though he subconsciously knew he wouldn’t have wanted that much work.
Everything was going smoothly so far. There hadn’t been any major errors or unexpected readings.
He and Larry had a checklist saying when to do each step, which they looked at frequently. Precision was important, it was the difference between being on track to reach Earth or flying millions of miles off-course. NASA was monitoring their progress from Earth, but the nearly-five-minute delay for radio waves to reach Mars meant they couldn’t rely on live communication.
Fortunately, NASA was very good at predicting things, and had it all planned out. He and Larry were also trained extensively for any ‘unexpected’ situations that could arise.
Even their route itself was an impressive bit of foreplanning. It’d been determined years in advance and was a path between two constantly moving locations. In the months it would take to reach Earth from here, the planet would have moved considerably. But all of that was easily calculated by NASA’s computers, and they knew exactly where Earth would be at the exact time they would reach it and the trajectory needed to get there.
They got to a specific point in their orbit around Mars, and it was time to increase their speed, which would take them to a higher orbit. He and Larry agreed that everything was good to go, and they fired up the engines and began moving higher. The speed of the ship began slowing, which was expected for the higher altitude.
The whole operation of leaving orbit took a considerable chunk of the day, needing a few planned adjustment burns, but before the day was over they were officially on the journey home, and cheers and whistles rung out, both on the ship and on Earth through the comms.
In his CQ, Dan caught up with his email and socials.
It was hard to maintain an Internet connection so far from Earth, but not impossible. Their computers were adjusted for the long wait times so requests wouldn’t time out.
He sent a tweet saying, “Heading home!” which got hundreds of likes almost as soon as it finally went live, and he wrote a new blog post about leaving orbit and what foods he ate during the day, which also quickly received attention.
Although it wasn’t unusual for other countries to have famous astronauts, the USA had been different for a long time, with the general public only knowing the names of the first people to go to the moon. Until Dan had grabbed his spot as a celebrity astronaut a few years back. Anyone in the USA would recognize the name Dan Powers, and millions of people followed him online.
It hadn’t been by accident. He had done everything he could to get people’s eyes on him. He’d built a large social media presence and aimed for high accomplishments, such as becoming the youngest astronaut at age 21, and going on as many short-duration missions as he possibly could since then—until the current mission, that is—all while keeping up his online presence, and offering live interviews and making guest appearances on talk shows between missions.
Dan wasn’t the only person on this mission to make a first-time achievement or to get media attention, like Larry being the first black person to walk on Mars. Larry had plenty of public excitement and people looking up to him as a role model. Though he wasn’t as fame-driven as Dan, or had been famous for as long.
In a way, Dan wondered if his own need for recognition, to be wanted, was from not being good enough for his birth parents.
His pondering was interrupted by a commotion outside the crew area.
Dan glanced out to see two of his crewmates hovering in the aisle.
“I can’t find him anywhere,” Moe said, “and I’ve checked every handrail I can think of.” Moe was a white man with an odd taste for brightly-colored clothes. He almost always had a few days’ worth of stubble along his jaw line, and his hair was starting to grow out after he’d shaved his head at the start of their mission.
“I remember seeing him on this rail earlier today. Maybe he came loose at some point. Let’s see if he’s up against any of the filters.”
His third crewmate poked their head out from the crew quarters below Dan’s. “I can check around some other nooks and crannies while you two do that.”
Sounded like all three of his crewmates were going to waste their free time looking for a simple stuffed animal.
Dan retreated back into his CQ before anyone noticed him and roped him into it. He had better things to do than fruitlessly look for a toy.
Their ship was mostly made up of a lab/hab module and an MPLM module—that one was used for logistics and life support systems rather than living space. Those two modules were originally created for the ISS, and, like on the ISS, items could potentially go missing for months, even years, at a time.
That goat wasn’t going to turn up until their mission was over.
Dan was certain of it.
The woman in red was before him again, her bright green eyes focused on the invaders. Before, he’d noticed her clothing; this time he looked at her features. She had a buzz cut that framed a rounded face, and her skin was a golden brown.
Her expression was determined, eyebrows furrowed and deep pink lips held in a firm line.
She was all precise movements and toned muscles as she fluidly moved from one action to the next, firing her energy weapon, throwing bolas, and flipping through the air and returning easily to her hover board. It was like a dance.
...Beautiful.
“Hey now, hey na-ow.” There was music with clapping, and a long echo of the previous words. “Have you ever seen such a beautiful sight?” And an echo of ‘night’.
Oh. That line had ended with ‘night’, not ‘sight’. Of course.
“I could almost kiss the stars, for shining so bright.”
Dan rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms and then continued to run his fingers up through his hair.
He was pretty sure he remembered that woman being in his dreams before. Or in a recurring dream?
She was probably a face he’d seen at some point in his life, though with the sheer number of people he’d seen in crowds during his multiple public appearances, he had no idea from where.
It wasn’t important.
What was important to him was where he was right now. Out here among the stars.
“Hey now, hey na-ow. This is what dreeeams are made of. I’ve got... somewhere I belong.”
He got out of his sleeping bag and started his morning routine.
“Happiness is no mys-ter-ry, it’s... here and now, it’s you and me, yeah.”
Dan posed at the flywheel machine, his feet secured under the straps at its base to keep from drifting away. A towel with a NASA logo was around his shoulders, stuck to his shirt collar with a little piece of Velcro so it floated gently around his neck. One hand held the flywheel bar, while the other held a NASA reusable water bottle.
Part of the reason NASA had been able to get people on Mars in 2004 was because of the money Dan had been raising for the past several years. Dan made a lot of money. And also did a lot of fundraisers.
Anything to get someone to take him to Mars.
Right now, Jo was floating in front of him in the aisle, holding a camera up to her face. Behind her, Dan could see the WR, located directly across the aisle from the little alcove the flywheel was in.
This was part of their work schedules for today, a photo shoot for a merchandise advertisement. Of course, it wasn’t much like ‘work’ to him—he loved these things.
Dan smirked for the camera as she snapped photos. The public loved his smirk.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Dan said. He squirted a glob of water out of the bottle, letting it wiggle and arc slowly through the air as he returned his eyes to the camera for more photos.
Getting some photos with the water should be good. Really sell the zero-g space element.
When looking at the magazine ad, people should get the sense that buying official NASA stuff could teleport them into space. They should feel as though they could be like Dan Powers if only they owned hundreds of dollars of merchandise. They could have his muscles and handsome face, could exercise without breaking a sweat, just like him, if only they had this stuff. Of course, Dan hadn’t actually been exercising before this photo shoot. He would do that later today, when he didn’t need to look good for the camera.
“Alright. That should be enough,” Dan said and let go of the bottle and the flywheel bar—which, of course, both stayed floating in the air where they were. He moved his feet from the straps at the base of the flywheel and gently pushed off to leave. “Get that water before it floats into anything. And reset the flywheel,” he said as he floated by Jo.
Her mouth parted, before snapping shut. She sent him an outraged glare. She had one of the lightest complexions he’d ever seen, along with the reddest flush of anger. She was also the only crewmember on this mission with curly hair—short blond ringlets that drifted freely around her face.
The way he could make her angry reminded him of someone else, though he couldn’t remember who.
Curly’s glare didn’t last long. Her expression quickly turned to alarm and she pushed off toward the flywheel to catch the ball of water.
It was unlikely for any two crewmembers to eat lunch at the same time, so it was normal for him to grab a few things while the others were working elsewhere. Though, it wasn’t like he couldn’t see them around. The hab module was too small not to spot someone at a science station or floating down the aisle at any given time.
The four of them hardly ever left this one module. On one end were their crew quarters, divided into four sections like cutting a pie, a small door in each slice, two on top, two on the bottom. When leaving the CQ, the science stations—including the plant habitat and the terrarium—was on the left. Across from that, on the right, was the hygiene area, where they used the UWMS when the urge hit, or took a shower—with a damp, soapy towel instead of running water, of course. Past those two areas, on the other end of the module, was the medical and exercise alcove on the right, and the galley and WR to the left. And the entrance to the airlock that divided the hab from the logistics module.
Dan was currently in the WR eating lunch. His personal food tray was Velcroed beside the window. He gazed outside while eating a burrito, the toes of his right foot under a handrail on the floor to keep from drifting away.
He could see billions of stars and the cloud of the Milky Way.
The stars had been bright down on Mars’ surface, with the thin atmosphere and lack of light pollution—at least when there hadn’t been dust in the air—but nothing could top the view of stars from space.
Despite the sheer saturation of stars, he could still pick out several constellations. They looked the same as from Earth, other than the amount of visibility. Although Mars seemed very far away from Earth, the point of view was almost the same, since each star was billions of miles farther than their little solar system.
They were heading for the Pisces constellation, where Earth and the moon shone like twin stars, but the ship couldn’t travel in a straight path there, so they were on a curved trajectory, using gravity to help them along, and were pointed a little to the side from where they were truly headed.
Right now, Dan saw the constellation Scorpius centered in the window, ninety degrees from where the ship was pointed.
They were actually flying upside-down in order to get that view, but there was no up or down in space—every direction felt the same.
It’d been his longtime dream to be out here, among the stars.
He’d worked so hard to be here. To be the youngest astronaut, and the first person on Mars.
As a kid, he’d been very driven. Math hadn’t been the easiest subject for him, but he knew from a young age that it was necessary for an astronaut, so he’d worked at his Math and Science grades throughout school. He also knew astronauts had to be in peak physical condition, so he started exercising and doing strength training. And he’d learned how to fly his adoptive parents’ plane when he’d been very young—of course with their help. He might’ve not been able to get a solo license until he was older, but there was no age restriction for being a co-pilot. And eventually he’d been able to fly jets. Getting there had cost a lot, and he’d started his social media presence while raising money, sharing his goals and his progress toward them.
Becoming an astronaut candidate had been hard. But the astronaut training itself had been harder than anything he’d done before.
Of course, it’d been completely worth it.
He was living his dream.
Over a dozen little green men were in front of him, with more arriving.
He snarled in anger and felt his blood revving up, a fuzzy static feeling forming in the air over his skin. He pushed a beam of lightning and green plasma from his palm, blasting a large hole through the torso of one of the green men, and through the one directly behind it, but they regenerated before his eyes.
He tensed his hand, and felt the blood in it thickening. He swung his arm and sent an arc of gelatinous green slime through his hand and into the crowd. It rammed into the front line of green men and pushed them back, but then they seemed to absorb the glowing slime into their bodies and began moving forward again.
He inhaled deeply, filling his lungs with as much air as possible, until his chest ached from the pressure. And then released a horrible, wailing cry from his core. The green men were thrown through the air. Glass shattered and bricks crumbled from the mountains of debris, pieces spilling down the sides like landslides.
Dan woke up feeling like he couldn’t get enough air in his lungs, his heart pounding. Confusion coated his head.
His CO2 levels must’ve been starting to get high. Each person had slightly different experiences when CO2 rose, and they were trained to recognize those sensations and what they meant. Based on his symptoms, the levels weren’t too bad yet, but, if they didn’t clear up when he changed positions, the crew would need to check on the CO2 scrubber.
His thoughts turned to his dream. And the strange, inhuman abilities he’d had in it.
Why would he dream something like that? The woman in red had used weapons, but not him—instead, he’d felt something within his very body shift with each attack. Strange energy, such destructive energy...
He began hearing a low, ominous hum. As well as an occasional thud, like the sound made by a giant drum.
A slow, slow song. “I am sailing. I am sailing! Home agaaain... ’cross the seeea.”
The morning wake-up call.
He got out of his sleeping bag and started to get dressed.
“I am sail...”
Dan frowned as a second song started to overtake the first. A much faster-paced song with higher notes.
“Far away. This ship is taking me far away.” Had they played the wrong song at first and were trying to switch? “Far away from the memories...” Static swelled and overtook the song, before fading.
“I am flying. I am flying.” It was back to the first song, slow and steady, and playing clearly.
Dan continued getting ready for the day.
“Like a bird, ’cross the sky—” Static again took the signal.
“I’ll never let you go—”
“I am flying, passing high clouds.”
What were they doing? Dan shook his head.
The first song continued, “Can you hear me, oh, can you hear me—”
Then the fast one cut in, “Our hopes and expectations. Black holes and revelations. Our hopes and ex—”
“Through the dark night, far away.”
The first song continued without any more interruptions, but Dan was left feeling a little concerned. Afterward, while doing his morning routine, he listened in as Larry picked up the mic to talk to mission control.
“Houston, Virgo III. First of all, good morning, and I wish you a wonderful Friday, June twentieth. Second, I have a question regarding today’s wake-up call. We heard two songs cutting into each other. Had that been purposeful?”
And, nine minutes later, “Good morning, and I hope you have a great day as well, Virgo III. Regarding your question, no, it was—” Static took over.
“Could you repeat that, Houston? The signal cut out during your answer.”
After another nine minutes’ wait, “No, that was not purposeful. There had only been one s—” Static.
NASA hadn’t been playing the songs for them every morning, but instead were sending song files the day before, with a crewmate setting it up on a timer to play at 06:00. With how far they were from Earth, it was normal for live signals to be unreliable. The question was how that had happened to a downloaded and locally-played song.
Curly Jo was the one to check on this morning’s song file and announce it to be uncorrupted and only contain audio of one song. That meant the file had been sent through a transmitter on Earth fine, as well as picked up and relayed by satellites between Earth and Mars fine, and had been downloaded onto their computer fine. The problem had been something related to the ship or user error, taking place after the file had been downloaded.
Jo was continuing to check the software for errors, running diagnostics.
Moe and Larry were physically checking the speakers and the wiring leading to them.
Dan was checking the antenna.
Although the song file had downloaded fine, and the wake-up call hadn’t been playing through their receiver, it was possible the unintended song had come from it. Where else would an unexpected song come from if not picked up through the antenna?
Dan watched on a monitor as he used a joystick to adjust the external camera’s view of the outside of the ship.
He was checking for damage.
It had seemed perfectly functional during the checks before leaving orbit, but it might’ve been a problem that had only now worsened enough to be noticeable.
The antenna appeared okay to him on the monitor, not dented or warped, and all the pieces looked like they were still there. He took images and some short video clips for NASA to inspect in more detail later.
Examining the receiving antenna was an extra task squeezed into his schedule for today. He still had science experiments to do after this. Once he captured all the needed camera angles, he would float over to the health and exercise alcove to take a few blood samples and test his eyes and bone density. Even the crew themselves were an experiment. NASA scientists wanted to see how the long-duration space travel and a month on the surface of Mars affected the four of them.
NASA was still examining the hardware and software data that had been sent to them, but the song issue was likely a problem with the receiver picking up random signals.
The issue had put tomorrow’s scheduled video conferences briefly into question, but, although the antenna and/or its software would need repair, NASA was sure they could keep it from interfering tomorrow.
With the assurance that the video conferences would still happen, everyone’s spirits were high during dinner—a meal scheduled for all four of them to eat together each day.
“I can’t wait to talk with my mom and dad tomorrow and actually see their faces. It feels like it’s been a long time,” Curly said with a soft smile.
“I feel the same way about my wife. We talk every night, but it’s just not the same as video,” Larry said.
“There’s just something different about seeing them.” Moe nodded. “It’s more personal than an email or phone call. And it’s amazing how much my girls seem to grow every time I see them in one of these conferences. When I get back to Earth, they’ll be as tall as me.”
“They’re five, Tourist,” Curly said with a laugh.
The three of them laughed together as Dan rolled his eyes.
‘Larry’, ‘Moe’, and ‘Curly Jo’ were Dan’s personal nicknames for his three crewmates, unknown to anyone but himself. They did have other nicknames, like Tourist, but Dan didn’t use them in his head. To him, they were three stooges.
“How about you, Phantom? Someone you’re eager to see tomorrow?” Moe asked.
Dan stared at him and said nothing.
“He’ll never answer,” Larry said with a slight smile. “Even during our two years in training, he never talked about himself. That’s why he has the nickname ‘Phantom’.”
“Well, it was worth a try,” Moe said with a shrug. “You sure are secretive for someone famous.”
“It’s not that strange,” Curly said. “He’s probably used to keeping his family out of the public eye.”
“Ah,” Moe sighed happily, “our families—we’re officially on our way home to them.”
“To returning home!” Jo said, holding up a pouch of fruit juice.
“To returning home!” the other two chorused, smiles bright.
Dan turned to look toward the window, where the sun was in the distance, resting within a black vacuum.
They were so eager to end this long mission, but Dan wouldn’t mind staying among the stars forever.
“Hey, this deserves some celebratory chocolate cake,” Moe suggested.
“I don’t think there’s any left for this week,” Larry said.
“What?” Curly asked. “Where does it all go? I haven’t had any for the past two months.”
“Me neither.”
Static tickled over his skin. His teeth were clenched, his muscles shifting. His eyes felt almost hot with anger as he glared. And he shot lightning and plasma from his hands in large blasts.
The little green men were before him, among the piles of debris. He punched large holes through their middles, his eyes searching for more to attack, more to destroy.
His gaze scanned across debris, drifting over a cracked window. His reflection.
Bright, searing red eyes. Green-tinged skin. White flames burning on his head. Fangs bared in a murderous expression of rage.
A terrible monster.
Dan gasped awake, hands missing the walls, the world spinning as he bumped against a padded wall and bounced into his laptops, until he finally caught hold of something.
What was that?!
That thing—his reflection.
He rushed to get out of his sleeping bag, hands shaking.
That wasn’t him. It wasn’t him. He had to hurry to start the day, the wake-up call was already playing.
“I want to get away. I wanna flyyy awaay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to get away. I wanna flyyy away.”
He felt jittery and his heart was pounding. He told himself it was the CO2 levels.
He hurried out of his CQ and to the hygiene area.
“Let’s go and see the stars. The Milky Way, or even Mars. Where it could just be ours.”
It was just a dream. It didn’t mean anything. Nothing at all.
“I want to get away, I want to get away. I want to get away, I want to get awaaay.”
Dan focused on wiping a stubborn stain off the ceiling of the WR.
On Saturday mornings, each of them had an area of the ship to clean. Filters were vacuumed, removing the debris sucked onto them through the week; personal items were picked up; and food splatters in their eating area were cleaned up.
Dan was usually pretty good at putting his thoughts aside while working, but floating around wiping stains didn’t use much mental power.
The image of the flaming-haired monster kept returning to his mind. He knew the panic he’d felt was mostly just from being startled. He’d been having those dreams for several days now, and had always assumed his dream self looked the same as his real-life self. And there was how vivid the dreams were. He wasn’t just dreaming about a monster, he was dreaming of being a monster—and he hadn’t even realized that until now.
Dan waited for the video conference to start. They were scheduled to be thirty minutes long, once a week, and had a little over a four minute delay for the signal to travel each way. The signal also wasn’t the best quality. The sound was sometimes choppy or staticky, the picture would blip and mouths wouldn’t sync up with the sound, and sometimes a call would just randomly disconnect, likely from some tiny object in space floating between Earth and Mars and cutting through a satellite’s path. But despite all the little annoyances, each of the four Virgo III crewmembers enjoyed these video calls.
The call connected and Dan could see someone with orange hair, her image blurred due to motion.
“Is this working? Where’s the— Oh!” Her image clarified as she stilled, her blue-green eyes looking straight at the camera and a smile forming on her face. “Hi, Dan!” Jazz said.
Dan felt his lips curl subtly upward as she set a timer and kept talking, telling him about school and everything she’d been doing for the past week.
Everyone on the crew had their own ways to deal with the long signal delay. His and Jazz’s method was to have four timed sections for their conversations—they would both have time to share new info and time to respond.
Today, Jazz would talk for six minutes about what was going on in her life, then Dan would have five minutes to respond to her plus six minutes to tell her about what he’d been doing. Following that would be the point where Dan would truly notice the nine minute round trip delay. Jazz would then have five minutes to respond to him and wrap up the call.
Every other week, Dan would be the one to speak first, followed by a nine minute wait for Jazz to say something, and then he would give the last response.
They would adjust their timing during the next few months as the ship got closer to Earth and there was less signal delay.
Jazz talked about her third or fourth thesis idea, using up her self-imposed time quickly, but it was something she was excited about.
Jazz was his half sister. She was still in high school, but was already thinking years ahead.
He’d met her a few years ago, just after finishing astronaut training, and she’d kept in contact with him ever since.
It had been the day he’d gone to Amity Park, Illinois to talk to his birth mother.
His adoptive parents had always been open with him about being adopted, and his birth mother had sent birthday cards each year. There hadn’t been much said about his birth mother’s life, but when he was nine, he found out she’d had another baby—and this time she was keeping it. Her quick note on his birthday card about him having a sister, and the small baby photo, wasn’t much, but it’d had a feeling of love. Something different from the impersonal notes he usually got.
For years, he’d wondered what essential element he’d lacked. Why his birth mother hadn’t wanted him. Why he hadn’t been good enough to keep—to love.
After finishing astronaut training, before he had his first mission, he’d decided it was time to find out the truth and lay things to rest.
His biological mother agreed to meet with him at her house, and they sat at her kitchen table.
After a few moments of her wondrously examining his features, to his annoyance, and complimenting him on how he’d turned out, she finally went into the story of his birth.
She’d only been eighteen, still in high school, and had been on a date where one thing had naturally led to another. She hadn’t expected to get pregnant, hadn’t even thought about birth control beforehand, and the positive on the pregnancy test had filled her with dread. She’d had plans for college, plans for her life, and she’d had no idea how to achieve them with a baby. She’d told no one, not even the father. The timing had at least been good enough where she could hide it during the last few months of her senior year and give birth before entering college.
If it had instead happened at a different time, if only he’d been born a decade later, she never would have given him up. She and his adoptive parents had agreed to her having at least a small part in his life. She would get photos of him, and be able to send him birthday cards.
His biological father, on the other hand, still didn’t know, even now. Maddie and him had clicked during their first two dates, but after the panic of getting pregnant, and the feelings of shame and other emotions she couldn’t name, she’d ignored the man altogether. He’d tried getting her attention for years, even throughout college, but she couldn’t even look him in the eye anymore.
Dan had looked up the guy’s name out of curiosity. He’d bought a large dairy farm just out of college, at a discount from it being rumored to be haunted, but he hadn’t had the resources or any knowledge of farming and had filed for bankruptcy after just a couple years.
Dan hadn’t tried to contact him. He figured he likely wouldn’t have wanted a surprise son.
Just after his biological mother had finished her story that day, a young girl, just barely into her teens, had walked into the kitchen.
“Hey, Mom, I’m going to the library to—” Her eyes finally looked Dan’s way, and widened in surprise. “Oh. Sorry, I didn’t know you had company!”
“Jazz, sweetie,” she’d said with a smile, “this is your half brother, Dan.”
The girl’s mouth parted in surprise. Then a moment later, “Why didn’t you tell me I have a brother?!” she’d said in excitement.
Jazz had been completely taken with him.
And even now, she’s talked with him throughout this mission, no matter how annoying it was to deal with the video conference equipment and long signal delays.
Jazz hurried to finish up what she was saying about her newest thesis idea before her timer went off.
When it did, Dan set his timer, and commented on what he could about Jazz’s ideas. He might’ve been eight years older than her, but he didn’t know much about psychology. Something about interactions between the Actual, Ideal, and Ought domains of the self. He didn’t know anything about that stuff.
He talked about preparing for leaving Mars, how smoothly leaving orbit had gone, and some stuff about their spider research. He tried his best to keep a straight face while talking in detail about the spiders. He couldn’t see her reactions live, but that was fine. The suspense was part of the fun.
During the nine minute lapse in communication, Jazz perfectly timed it to where she held up some printouts about her thesis idea for him to read during the off-time in which she was still listening to him talk. Though Dan was more interested in watching her delayed reactions.
He could hear a quiet echo of his voice from her end, which was great for letting him know what things she was reacting to.
Despite Jazz understanding the signal delay, and being the one to suggest their divided blocks of time during calls, she still instinctively wanted to respond to him in-the-moment while he had commented on her thesis idea.
“Wait, that’s not— er,” and “Well, it’s—” were just a few of her cut-off responses as his echo from a few minutes ago talked on without being able to hear her.
And when his echo started describing some of their spider experiments, he got a kick out of the way she wrinkled her nose in disgust and looked like she was debating leaving the room. She always made such amusing faces when he talked about the spiders during their conferences. Which was why he always mentioned them during conferences.
He’d almost forgotten that he’d told her he’d been having recurring dreams. They’d been on his mind a lot today, especially the one from this morning, so it’d come out while he’d been telling her about his week.
When the signal delay caught up and Jazz started her final five minute ending response, the dream was one of the main things she responded to.
“Well, dreams are the gateway to the subconscious,” she began, and Dan had a strange feeling he’d heard those exact words somewhere before. “If you keep having the same dream, it might be your subconscious trying to tell you something through metaphors.”
...Metaphors, huh?
He thought back to the attacking monster in his dreams.
What would being a dream monster stand for?
...Or was it the powerful attacks that were important? The way a monster attacked...
That—
His hand squeezed his knee unconsciously.
“You think you can beat me?” he asked, tilting his head to one side. He felt his familiar smirk on his face. “You can’t even see an attack coming.”
He was standing before the woman in red ...and also hovering behind her.
The woman gasped and started to turn around, but he was faster, grinning as he planted his palm in the middle of her back and released his gathered electricity.
She screamed, but managed to get her twitching muscles under enough control to twist around and fire at him, blasting him through the air.
He willed that version of himself to fade before he were to slam into the surrounding debris, leaving only one set of eyes on the woman.
“A duplicate?” she asked in disgust. “What a dirty trick. You can’t take me in a fair fight?”
“All’s fair in love and war, Valerie dear.”
“Yeah? Well let me teach you why you shouldn’t attack a lady!”
Suddenly she was firing a laser weapon at him with one hand and throwing grenades with the other.
He felt his grin widen as he dodged her ongoing barrage. He laughed. And heard himself think that it would be so much fun to break her.
Dan woke with a gasp.
The woman again. ...What was her name? Something like ‘Victory’? Some of the dialogue had already faded from his memory.
The dream still had the strange elements to it from before, but he thought he could see the meaning more clearly this time. His appearance in the dream was a reflection of his actions.
His dream self was a jerk.
“Tiny, tiny shades of light,” came the start of the day’s wake up call.
He got out of his sleeping bag.
“As I waved goodbye to my other life,” the song continued.
He glanced at his schedule and left his CQ to go to the hygiene area.
“Looks like I’m smiling, but I’m dying, too. We only mirror our surroundings.”
Dan finished up the last of a BOB for lunch, and went to find another of the pre-packed eight-day food bags to restock the galley.
He actually liked being the one to replace a BOB. It meant he could have first dibs at the food choices. And if a few of the next week’s pouches vanished, so what? He grinned as he came across the vacuum-sealed pouches of chocolate cake.
...Was he a jerk?
He frowned, confused by the random thought.
He rolled his eyes at himself. So what if he took a few food items for later? The others would eat them first if he didn’t.
The image of his dream-self appeared in his mind. Him being a jerk to the woman in red, and how that had manifested as a cracked reflection—himself as a monster. Fangs representing his verbal bite, flaming hair for his anger, green skin for wanting more than he had, red eyes for... Also anger? A mean spirit? There was only so much symbolic symbolism he could pick up from his Psychology-oriented half-sister over the past few years.
But it was ridiculous. It was just a silly dream.
He shook his head and took the pouches of chocolate cake to store in his CQ.
It was his favorite, and there were plenty of other things the three stooges could eat.
In the evening, his crewmembers were gathered in the WR. The table was set up and Moe was shuffling cards.
Moe’s eyes landed on Dan, who was glancing in from the doorway. “Hey,” Moe said with a half-smile, “wanna join us for some poker?”
Dan frowned, his first impulse being to sneer and say something about having better things to do, and go to his CQ to catch up on social media and post something for his fans.
Though something had him let out a sigh and shrug a shoulder instead. Maybe it had something to do with Moe making an effort to invite him, or maybe he just felt like doing something different tonight.
It wasn’t because he could imagine his dream self saying the thought-up response.
“Sure, whatever,” Dan said.
Moe’s eyebrows rose, and Larry and Curly’s heads turned his way in obvious surprise.
“It’s been a while since you’ve played a hand with us,” Curly said.
“Don’t get used to it,” Dan said. Poker wasn’t as fun on a ship with a limited supply of things to win. He floated over and hooked a foot under a handrail on the floor under the table.
Tonight’s pot had a fun-sized bag of chocolate candies, an IOU for doing someone’s chores, and an unopened washcloth—one of the good ones that would last a few weeks. It was an alright pot, he supposed, all useful items while on the ship.
He added a photo with his signature to the pot, to a few eye-rolls.
“What?” Dan said in challenge, “That’s easily worth several thousand.”
Curly Jo seemed like she wanted to say something and changed her mind. She looked away. “It’s fine,” she said instead.
Moe dealt the cards.
The rounds were played in a lighthearted manner, his crewmates paying more attention to conversation than to competition, sharing family tales from yesterday’s video conferences instead of focusing on winning.
“Mom’s planning a new flower garden,” Jo said. “I gave her a few tips I’ve learned over the past few months.”
Dan started to open his mouth to remind her of how she’d almost killed half their vegetables just last month, and that her mother would be better off doing the opposite of anything she suggested. Forget having a green thumb, she didn’t even have a red thumb.
But he paused instead.
Jo looked happy, as did Moe and Larry. Did he really want that mood to die?
...Did he want to be like that monster, causing pain with his attacks?
NASA wouldn’t have hired him if he’d been a jerk a few years back. It was important for astronauts to get along with others, especially when stuck together in close quarters for months on end.
Not that it mattered much now. He was too important to let go of. The public adored him, the money NASA relied on came from him. NASA needed him.
...But he didn’t think he wanted to be who he saw in his dreams. And the responses he’d been holding back tonight felt a little too similar to his dream-self’s quips.
He realized the conversation had moved on while he’d been lost in thought.
“We’ll get back to Earth at the end of November, just in time for my daughters’ birthday,” Moe said. “My two little Capricorns. Of course you’re all invited over, and I hope you’ll have the chance to sign Capricornus before I give him to the girls.”
Dan watched the stars from the window, while listening to the sounds of rummaging elsewhere on the ship.
He knew it was Moe quietly searching for Capricornus the goat plush, as he’d done every evening for the past four days.
Dan knew he would never find him.
He hadn’t realized the plush had been for his daughters. Hadn’t paid enough attention to his crewmates’ chatter during the past several months to pick up on it.
He grinned while blasting at the little green men. He turned his gaze toward the woman in red, who was holding off the oncoming invaders in the opposite direction.
They worked well together, when they actually tried.
She seemed to sense him looking at her, her eyes drifting his way, the confident smile she wore while attacking the invaders still on her lips.
Then he watched her smile fade. Her eyes widened, and her mouth opened as though to shout something.
Dan was with Jo and Larry, up early to get ready for an EVA to fix the ship’s antenna. Dan was EV1 and Jo was his EV2, with Larry helping them into their suits.
It took hours to prepare for a spacewalk, organizing the tools and equipment, getting on the suit’s under layers, strapping on an oxygen mask to prevent decompression sickness, squeezing into the bulkier outer parts of the suit, and after that they would need to run checks to make sure the suit was completely sealed and its systems working correctly.
“Dream, baby, dream,” came a song over the speakers. “Dream, baby, dream.”
Larry helped Dan shove on his gloves.
Jo said, “We weren’t going to have a wake-up call today, were we?”
“No,” Larry answered.
“Come on and dream, baby, dream.”
Dan’s attention was elsewhere. He could hear Moe out in the galley. He’d been listening for when the last stooge would go to make himself some coffee.
“Come on and open up your heart,” the song continued.
“Cappi?!” Moe exclaimed. “Where did you come from?! I thought I’d never find you! Were you really tied here all this time?! I can’t believe I hadn’t noticed you before! ” Loud, delighted laughter echoed through the wall.
Larry and Jo wore soft, relieved smiles.
“Come on, we gotta keep on dreaming.”
Dan shoved on his helmet.
It was harder to work while floating outside than it was while in the ship, even though both areas were in zero-g.
The EMU suit was very hard to move around in, the gloves’ fingers were too thick to handle small objects, the helmet lamps only illuminated a tiny area, and there were dozens of tethers and attached objects to keep track of.
It was slow-going to repair the antenna, planned to take four hours with him and Jo working together. Part of that slowness was necessity—try to move too fast and a person would overshoot their target, and have trouble stopping. Moving too quickly would, at best, make the EVA more of a pain to complete, and at worst lead to death in the vacuum of space.
“How do I get this thing off?”
To the side, Jo was struggling with one of her tethers, mumbling to herself. Sometimes the carabiner clips could be a little hard to use, though they were a necessity.
Dan watched as she finally got the clip where she wanted it.
Then he looked back toward the hull of the ship and positioned a wrench on one of the antenna’s bolts. A song started through his helmet’s speaker.
“She’s livin’ in a world and it’s on fiire. Filled with catastrophe.”
It was probably not a good sign that the thing was transferring signal through touching it. But at least it was just blasting him with music instead of electrocuting him.
“Looks like a girl, but she’s a flaaame. So bright she can burn your eyes, better look the other wa-ay.”
“EV2, I’m picking up music through the antenna,” Dan said in his on-air voice, and could barely hear himself over the song. “It’s too loud to be able to hear anything else, so I’m going to mute my speaker until I finish removing the bolts.”
Jo gave him a disapproving frown, her eyes narrowed behind her helmet, and her mouth started moving.
“I don’t hear you.” Like he’d just gotten through saying.
He would probably get in trouble with mission control later for muting his speaker without permission from them, but with a nine minute delay plus the time it’d take for a decision to be reached on their end... He wasn’t going to wait that long.
Jo finally raised her hand to give him a grudging thumbs up. He was pretty sure she understood why he was telling her his plans, and was agreeing to be his ears and get his attention in case anything important came up.
“This girl is on fi—”
Dan switched off his speaker and was left in silence. All he could hear was his own breathing inside his helmet and the fans in the suit. He continued to loosen the bolts on the antenna little by little.
After half an hour working on it, he felt a tug at his helmet. As though something above him pulled at his head for a moment.
He couldn’t lift his arms to check for anything—not while wearing the EMU suit—could only ignore the strange feeling and hope it was nothing. He glanced toward Jo to see if she knew anything, but she looked unconcerned.
There was a second tug, harder.
It could’ve been one of the tethers getting wrapped around the neck of the suit, or an attached tool bumping into the back of his helmet. Though it felt more like someone’s hands. And an irrational thread of apprehension formed in his chest, a fear of the unknown.
He could almost imagine invisible hands on either side of his helmet, an otherworldly being floating behind him.
But he wouldn’t have made it as an astronaut if he couldn’t ignore times when his imagination started to run wild. Nothing was out here with them in the vacuum of space. The worst it could be was a suit malfunction. They’d probably need to examine his helmet and its point of attachment once the EVA was finished. But it was definitely not little green men.
“Stop,” came a calm, unfamiliar male voice.
Dan froze. His breaths quickening, he checked that his speaker was still off. What was going on?
“Removing the helmet in that way could lead to dangerous repercussions.”
Yeah, no duh, he thought, a touch hysterically.
Suddenly there was another big yank. He flicked his speaker back on. “Jo!”
Jo looked his way. Light reflected off of her helmet, making her eyes look green for a moment.
Whatever was behind him—or possibly just in his head—released its hold on his helmet. Then pulled again.
The helmet popped off.
He instinctively sucked in a panicked breath, like a person would when underwater and craving air.
Dan gasped awake. Sucked in a noisy lungful of air like he hadn’t expected to be able to breathe again.
Which he hadn’t. Since his helmet had been removed in the vacuum of space. He had very much expected to be dead.
He was lying on his back, staring in shock at an orange sky.
There was a pair of bright green eyes above him. The woman in red stood with a helmet tucked under one arm. Her other hand was waving a gun of some sort, almost randomly, and he realized there was a circle of little green men in his peripheral vision.
The helmet she was holding wasn’t his—wasn’t at all like the helmet of the EMU—or any other space suit, for that matter. It was more like a motorcycle helmet with electrical equipment mounted on it.
“‘Repercussions’?” The woman said in derision, her eyes directed somewhere over his head. “Ha. Nothing blew up, and he’s fine.”
He tilted his head up enough to get a better view of the green men. They were mere feet away, hovering uncertainly as though waiting for orders—and, actually, based on the way they were gently bobbing in place, literally hovering in the air as well. He also realized they were all slightly translucent, as though they weren’t made up of solid matter.
He was dreaming again.
It came as a realization. He was back in the world of his recurring dreams. He recognized this place. But it was hard to fully believe he was only dreaming.
The dreams had always been detailed, but he could feel chunks of cement and whatever other hard pointy things digging into his back and the underside of his legs, and the twinging soreness that comes from being pressed against uncomfortable things for too long.
There was the harsh feeling of gravel scrapping against his forearms as he slid his arms against the ground to sit up, a feeling of weight and gravity and shifting muscles as he pushed upward. The orange haze that he recalled from his dreams now came with a smell of rust, dirt, and smoke that tickled at his throat.
Everything was so sharp and detailed in a way that felt too there to be a dream.
And...
Sitting on the ground, he flexed one of his hands, which was covered in a black glove, the fabric of which he could feel shift against his skin.
...He had control over his body.
In the dreams, it’d been like he was along for the ride. He hadn’t thought about what he should do next, hadn’t made any decisions himself, the dreams just played out on their own. And now he was here and wasn’t reciting a ready-made script or attacking.
He looked back to the woman in red, who had her eyes directed elsewhere.
He didn’t know her. Not the way he had in his dreams. Her name didn’t come jumping to his tongue.
He unconsciously followed her gaze, finding the jagged portal to deep space, holding a view of distant stars. It was now positioned closer to the ground rather than directly overhead. But it wasn’t a portal—or not just a portal. He now recognized clawed fingers, arms, the shape of a torso and a set of shoulders. And a pale face atop those shoulders that had glowing red eyes and a large pair of curling horns that were strangely reminiscent of Moe’s goat plush.
“No matter,” the portal goat said, and it was the same voice he’d heard on his spacewalk, “you’re still outnumbered, and I have more helmets.”
A few of the green men pulled helmets out from behind their backs. Dan doubted those helmets had been there just a moment before. It was like they’d just materialized out of thin air, like this place was following cartoon logic.
This whole situation was dream-like and unrealistic. Obviously beyond reality.
But strangely, he felt like he was awake.
Very awake. And, he realized, even more awake than he’d felt on the ship.
Maybe it was the gravity. Suddenly being dumped into one-g on the ground probably made everything feel more ‘grounded’. And during his spacewalk he’d had several layers between him and anything he was touching, so of course everything would’ve felt a little muted.
But... he was thinking of this current situation as though it were part of reality, and this couldn’t be reality. Not this strange version of Earth.
He looked back at the black glove in his lap. At the white-and-black suit covering his body below the glove. The whites seemed almost too bright. Even the blacks seemed to glow. There was a strange fuzziness around his fingers, similar to a halo around a bright light.
...If he squinted, could he almost see the debris on the ground beneath his body?
No, of course not.
But apprehension squeezed within his chest regardless.
“Sleepwalkers, seize them. Let’s give them their most treasured dreams.”
He didn’t want to think about the suit he was now wearing. Didn’t want to remember seeing it in a reflection during one of his dreams.
And he definitely forced his mind to blank out the face that’d been in that dreamed reflection.
Because he was human.
He was still human!
He stood to his feet, adrenaline pushing him to move.
There was a strange alien energy and rhythm within his chest that was not truly there. He was mishearing a racing heartbeat—no matter how foreign it sounded—and the feeling of building pressure was not something actually building within his body, and he was imagining the feeling of something about to burst —
A flash of condensed light blasted outward from his body, physically pushing the approaching green men away. The helmets in their hands clattered to the ground, pieces breaking off as they hit. The woman in red swooped high into the air on her hovercraft to avoid the vivid green blast.
The light froze into the outside edge of a sphere—or half of a sphere, a dome, since the ground cut through the bottom part of it.
He started to examine the swirling patterns of the wall of light in awe, when its brightness started to dim, and it dissipated altogether.
“You store power in these helmets, right?” the woman in red asked from overhead, holding up the helmet that she had been carrying under her arm. “Well, take this.” She threw the helmet—then blasted it with a red laser, the helmet bursting like a firework.
“No,” the portal goat said, his teeth bared in a furious expression. “Sleepwalkers— ...What?” His solid red eyes widened.
Some of the little green men were vanishing, bursting to nothing like popped balloons.
The crowd of green men started turning their heads to look at one another, as though wondering what was happening or which of them would be next.
The woman used their distraction to her advantage, shooting the helmets that had dropped to the ground earlier.
“Nooo!” the portal goat yelled. And, Dan realized, he was shrinking.
“Got you,” the woman said, smirking. She shifted her weight and put a hand on her hip, striking a smug pose. “Now you don’t have any stored energy left, and, against the two of us, you’re no match.”
The being, mouth small and eyes wide, shifted his head between the woman and Dan, and Dan tried his best to play along with a threatening glare.
He might not know what the woman was playing at, but he recognized that he had a role in what she was trying to achieve.
The portal goat seemed to believe the woman’s claims, flinching away and looking ready to flee.
But then he ground his teeth. “This is not the end. You may have won this round, but it’s only a temporary setback. For, while you were preoccupied here, a second group of my Sleepwalkers were tasked with reversing your precious shield’s polarity. I have claimed Amity Park.”
The woman’s eyes widened. “What?!” She jerked her head to the side.
Dan looked in the direction she turned and saw, between two mounds of debris, a blue dome off in the distance.
That was when the portal goat made his escape, vanishing in a swirling aurora, with the green men disappearing immediately afterward.
Dan and the woman in red were left in peace, standing among piles of debris under an orange sky. A slight breeze ruffled his hair and the cape he was wearing.
Dan stared out at the ruined scenery and found that this strange reality no longer unsettled him. Not now that he could remember who he truly was.
He was Dan Powers. A NASA astronaut, and someone who risked their life to help humanity through discovery and science.
