Today's Reading
"I want to say I'm surprised that they haven't forked out the cash to update the security system at all in twenty years," she muttered, just as the door slid open with a clunk. Kaleisha brushed past her and through it, leading Abe and Ros along with her. "But I'm also not surprised at all."
Abe laughed. "They couldn't have possibly accounted for you, Hack-ie Robinson."
Cleo grinned back and bounded into the elevator. "What have I told you about leaving the nicknames to me?"
"Hack Skellington," he said. Kaleisha pushed the lone button on the wall panel, and the elevator doors grumbled shut.
"Keep going," Ros said as the elevator lurched upward, clattering loudly. "You can do worse."
"Hold on, hold on—Hack Kerou-hack."
"Aw, babe." Kaleisha reached up to ruffle Abe's hair. "That was your worst yet."
Cleo wanted to keep the bit going, but then the bit didn't matter because they were flying stories and stories into the air, and Cleo got distracted by the surface of the Providence whizzing past them almost close enough to touch. She pressed her nose to the elevator window, watching wide-eyed as they ascended past the rockets, the wings, the name of the ship in silver letters taller than Abe twice over—then the hatch that led to the flight deck. And the elevator was stopping, and the door was opening, and they had arrived.
* * *
Once upon a time, there was a spaceship that never took off. It was supposed to, of course, full of people and bound for another world. It was going to be the first mission of its kind, the first with the goal of putting a population on an exoplanet—Proxima Centauri B, specifically, an Earth-sized number orbiting in the habitable zone of the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri. It was going to be the ship that launched humanity into a new age. That's why they called it
Providence.
A generation of children grew up watching this ship on television. These kids watched documentaries about astronaut training every Saturday morning, traded details about the 203 people on the crew like baseball cards, and hung on every word the captain and the chief engineer said in the Erebus-branded educational videos they watched in school.
They were all raised on the same delirious idea: that Providence I would change everything; that even if they weren't on it, they would be on another ship like it someday. They could dream as no one else had ever been able to dream: of distant worlds, of impossible creatures, of uncovering the secrets of the universe.
And then, on the day of the launch—marked by celebrations and breathless news reports and the entire world watching the same broadcast for the first time in living memory—something went wrong. To this day, nobody on Earth knows exactly what happened. Oh, there are theories, each one stupider than the last. But the only thing anyone knows for sure is what they could all see with their own eyes: that the dark matter engine was engaged, and there was a blinding flash of light, and then every passenger on the ship was—is—gone. Not dead. Not vaporized. Just gone, as if they had never been there. And a generation of children, ready to punch a hole in that exhilarating unknown, got to watch on live TV as the unknown punched back.
In the aftermath, there was chaos. Grief and confusion and anger, of course, but also existential fear. Fear of what could happen if Erebus tried again, and fear of what would happen if they didn't. What happened? Was it even possible to know? Was staying on a dying planet officially a better option than throwing more sacrificial lambs into the universe's gaping maw? The only surviving member of the crew, Chief Engineer Kristoff Halvorsen, might have had answers, or at least acted as a guiding light. But he retreated from the public eye immediately after his failed countdown was seen by every eye on Earth, and then disappeared on the first anniversary of Launch Day.
So the Providence I mission was canceled, obviously. And future missions around the world were shuttered, their resources redirected toward figuring out what the hell just happened. The human race told itself it was taking time to grieve. But as months stretched into years with no answers forthcoming, the remaining scientists started quitting their jobs out of frustration and disappointment and barely repressed trauma. The hallways and computers and unused common rooms of Providence I started gathering dust, and it became clear that no one was left who wanted to try again. No one wanted to find out the hard way what had happened. No one wanted to go to another world. So instead of using it, Erebus Industries just left the Providence where it was, as a monument to whatever the hell 'that' was. And maybe, sort of, as a warning.
That generation of children became a generation of adults, full of the bitter nostalgia that comes with knowing what could have been. And they never got over that loss, that wistful grief, that desperate sense of 'if only.' The irony is that those kids, the ones who spent their formative years soaking up information about relativity and flight control algorithms and dark energy scalar fields, grew up to be the most STEM-obsessed adults in a century. Turns out that growing up with a space captain and an engineer as your heroes tends to make people want to go to tech school. And as the years stretched into decades, those young people were often the only ones still arguing for a renewed space program.
Many of them thought, privately, that another mission would be worth the risks. Some of them argued, loudly, that they were owed another shot at the stars.
And four of them decided, idiotically, that if no one else was going to solve the mystery of Launch Day, they were going to do it themselves.
* * *
...
