Artemis I Has A Stowaway - Day 24
December 9th, 2022
You know, the very least the universe could do is let me die in peace. Why the hell does my body have to hurt so much? Why does everything have to be so loud? Just let me pass out and fade into nothing.
At the very least I could be warm, it’s freezing cold. And too damn bright for that matter. Oh man if this is that white tunnel, I’m going to be in trouble for so much stuff. Anyways, I complain too much. Just give it a few more seconds and I’ll be dead.
Why is it so bright? I open my eyes to investigate and I’m greeted with a Godzilla-stomping-Tokyo headache.
No wonder it was so loud. Four Dragon Sovereign astronauts are busy packing away space suits and yammering away with NASA on the radio like they’d never had a mission to space before.
Sarah Covington’s floating above me, like an angel descending down from heaven. Her eyes are so green. “It’s ok now. Get some rest,” she says. I don’t have to try too hard to oblige.
It takes a few hours, but eventually I get up. I got a call from the President of the United States of America. Seemed like a nice guy. Better yet, it was for doing something good. You know the weird thing about a call from the President? There was no point to the call. I mean, I think it’s a recognition thing, and it sounds cool, but the Queen tapping you on the shoulder with a sword at least has some kind of legal effect. The President giving you a pat on the shoulder is much more awkward. Was he expecting me to say something profound? Was I expecting him to say something profound? When it’s over, the only thing that’s different is you get to say, “I got a call from the President of the United States of America. Seemed like a nice guy.”
I figured since he must have made hundreds of calls like this, and I’d only ever been on the receiving end of one, I’d let him take the lead. I did make a joke about staying on Kamala’s good side. He seemed like he got it. Nice guy.
Onto important things: I did find out why that safety line I was swinging didn’t work: it did. It wrapped around the tether between two of the Dragon’s crew, and if I’d given it long enough to actually “catch” they would have been just fine. Me throwing myself out of an airlock, without any air, on the vague hope I might catch them, was totally unnecessary and actually slowed them down getting into Orion. My bad.
On the other hand, Sarah, first name basis now, said it was “the bravest thing she’s ever seen.” I spent a half an hour grinning uncontrollably after that.
One of Dragon’s crew is a doctor. Unfortunately for me he’s an “immune system specialist”, but NASA managed to talk him through a two hour physical for me. He says I’m going to lose a couple of toes, but what does he know, the toes aren’t part of the immune system. Besides, it’s two small ones. This whole space-pirate thing is feeling a bit too piratey for me… Arrr..
It also looks like I escaped brain damage (don’t say it). When I passed out, I kept breathing and what little residual oxygen was in my suit, blood, and brain seems to have held me over for the four minutes it took for Sarah to wrestle me back into Orion and reconnect my air. Lucky for me I didn’t stop breathing because all the medical supplies needed for manual ventilation were back on Earth, just like the food.
Just for laughs, and because there wasn’t much else to do, everyone took a turn on the computer game for the intercept that NASA sent up. Sarah got an 85%, her crew’s pilot got a 97%, no one else broke the 60’s. Not bad for a space-felon.
Once we’d turned in, I just couldn’t sleep. I read for a while, but I couldn’t get into Dune anymore in space than I could back on the ground. I wanted to like it, but my mind kept drifting. So I drifted out of my sleep cubby and over to the command console. Sarah was already there, looking out the same window I’d used to sight her and her crew.
“You ever notice how crazy bad people want something they think they can’t have?” she asked.
I’m basically the poster-child for that. “Best, and worst, thing about humanity. We’ve got a drive.”
“My family, we didn’t have anything when I was growing up,” she said. “But my high school did a senior trip to Europe every year, and from the first week of grade 9 it was the only thing me and my friends wanted. We talked, we planned, we saved. It was the first time in my life I’d really had a mission. It was my first time getting on a plane. I knew planes could crash, I was a little nervous during the takeoff, and landing, but I’d never seriously thought about a crash. Same with the Dragon. It wasn’t until we were working the numbers and they kept coming back bad again, and again, and again, that I really thought I might die doing this.”
I wish I knew what to say. I’d had bad hours, maybe a bad day, Sarah had been marinating in mathematically certain death for a week. “I want to fight a bear.” It feels more blurty out of my mouth with every heartbeat that follows it. “When I’m old I mean. Dying of cancer or something, basically sure to die. I don’t want to die in a hospital bed after circling the drain for weeks. I want to die quick, doing something wild. I don’t want to look back on my life and feel like I ever passed up something amazing just because it had some danger attached to it. When you’re 90, how do you want to go?”
“Switzerland. Really nice meal, a couple of pills, and drift off gently,” she paused, thinking, “but if my last thought was ‘well that was a blast,’ I think that would mean I’d lived a pretty good life.”
“Did you ever see the Star Trek episode where Worf gets paralysed?” I asked.
“I was just thinking the same thing!” she said. “Sometimes I wonder if we’re just not cut out for the modern world. Like our brain just has this old software that’s struggling to keep up with what we’re trying to do with it. Like running a whole spaceship using an excel spreadsheet. And maybe that’s why death is such a hard topic, we just can’t get the spreadsheet to figure out a good way to think about it. That probably sounds a bit crazy…”
It does not. Not at all.
***
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
You know, the very least the universe could do is let me die in peace. Why the hell does my body have to hurt so much? Why does everything have to be so loud? Just let me pass out and fade into nothing.
At the very least I could be warm, it’s freezing cold. And too damn bright for that matter. Oh man if this is that white tunnel, I’m going to be in trouble for so much stuff. Anyways, I complain too much. Just give it a few more seconds and I’ll be dead.
Why is it so bright? I open my eyes to investigate and I’m greeted with a Godzilla-stomping-Tokyo headache.
No wonder it was so loud. Four Dragon Sovereign astronauts are busy packing away space suits and yammering away with NASA on the radio like they’d never had a mission to space before.
Sarah Covington’s floating above me, like an angel descending down from heaven. Her eyes are so green. “It’s ok now. Get some rest,” she says. I don’t have to try too hard to oblige.
It takes a few hours, but eventually I get up. I got a call from the President of the United States of America. Seemed like a nice guy. Better yet, it was for doing something good. You know the weird thing about a call from the President? There was no point to the call. I mean, I think it’s a recognition thing, and it sounds cool, but the Queen tapping you on the shoulder with a sword at least has some kind of legal effect. The President giving you a pat on the shoulder is much more awkward. Was he expecting me to say something profound? Was I expecting him to say something profound? When it’s over, the only thing that’s different is you get to say, “I got a call from the President of the United States of America. Seemed like a nice guy.”
I figured since he must have made hundreds of calls like this, and I’d only ever been on the receiving end of one, I’d let him take the lead. I did make a joke about staying on Kamala’s good side. He seemed like he got it. Nice guy.
Onto important things: I did find out why that safety line I was swinging didn’t work: it did. It wrapped around the tether between two of the Dragon’s crew, and if I’d given it long enough to actually “catch” they would have been just fine. Me throwing myself out of an airlock, without any air, on the vague hope I might catch them, was totally unnecessary and actually slowed them down getting into Orion. My bad.
On the other hand, Sarah, first name basis now, said it was “the bravest thing she’s ever seen.” I spent a half an hour grinning uncontrollably after that.
One of Dragon’s crew is a doctor. Unfortunately for me he’s an “immune system specialist”, but NASA managed to talk him through a two hour physical for me. He says I’m going to lose a couple of toes, but what does he know, the toes aren’t part of the immune system. Besides, it’s two small ones. This whole space-pirate thing is feeling a bit too piratey for me… Arrr..
It also looks like I escaped brain damage (don’t say it). When I passed out, I kept breathing and what little residual oxygen was in my suit, blood, and brain seems to have held me over for the four minutes it took for Sarah to wrestle me back into Orion and reconnect my air. Lucky for me I didn’t stop breathing because all the medical supplies needed for manual ventilation were back on Earth, just like the food.
Just for laughs, and because there wasn’t much else to do, everyone took a turn on the computer game for the intercept that NASA sent up. Sarah got an 85%, her crew’s pilot got a 97%, no one else broke the 60’s. Not bad for a space-felon.
Once we’d turned in, I just couldn’t sleep. I read for a while, but I couldn’t get into Dune anymore in space than I could back on the ground. I wanted to like it, but my mind kept drifting. So I drifted out of my sleep cubby and over to the command console. Sarah was already there, looking out the same window I’d used to sight her and her crew.
“You ever notice how crazy bad people want something they think they can’t have?” she asked.
I’m basically the poster-child for that. “Best, and worst, thing about humanity. We’ve got a drive.”
“My family, we didn’t have anything when I was growing up,” she said. “But my high school did a senior trip to Europe every year, and from the first week of grade 9 it was the only thing me and my friends wanted. We talked, we planned, we saved. It was the first time in my life I’d really had a mission. It was my first time getting on a plane. I knew planes could crash, I was a little nervous during the takeoff, and landing, but I’d never seriously thought about a crash. Same with the Dragon. It wasn’t until we were working the numbers and they kept coming back bad again, and again, and again, that I really thought I might die doing this.”
I wish I knew what to say. I’d had bad hours, maybe a bad day, Sarah had been marinating in mathematically certain death for a week. “I want to fight a bear.” It feels more blurty out of my mouth with every heartbeat that follows it. “When I’m old I mean. Dying of cancer or something, basically sure to die. I don’t want to die in a hospital bed after circling the drain for weeks. I want to die quick, doing something wild. I don’t want to look back on my life and feel like I ever passed up something amazing just because it had some danger attached to it. When you’re 90, how do you want to go?”
“Switzerland. Really nice meal, a couple of pills, and drift off gently,” she paused, thinking, “but if my last thought was ‘well that was a blast,’ I think that would mean I’d lived a pretty good life.”
“Did you ever see the Star Trek episode where Worf gets paralysed?” I asked.
“I was just thinking the same thing!” she said. “Sometimes I wonder if we’re just not cut out for the modern world. Like our brain just has this old software that’s struggling to keep up with what we’re trying to do with it. Like running a whole spaceship using an excel spreadsheet. And maybe that’s why death is such a hard topic, we just can’t get the spreadsheet to figure out a good way to think about it. That probably sounds a bit crazy…”
It does not. Not at all.
***
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
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