1.
Alex had been in space for only six days when Carl Bouchet, who was a real astronaut, told him to put on his suit and go outside.
To “go outside” the station was a procedure that Alex had practiced just twice during his summer of training, and that had been in a zero-gravity simulation chamber. Not the same at all. Carl had assured him then that this was emergency training, to be used only in the unlikely event that he needed their assistance. Maybe the others had been disappointed to hear that, but Alex had taken a deep, quiet breath of relief. He hadn’t minded Carl’s arrogance, in this context. It made him feel safe.
“Me?” he asked Carl now. “What about Irma? Malik? They’re probably more—”
“They’re coming, too. Battery refresh.” Carl turned away, and when Alex hesitated, Carl turned back, right hand on his belt, where he wore two spools of retractable cording with clips at the end. He started to pull out a line and offered the end to Alex.
“You want a tow?” he asked.
“No, no,” Alex said, and he pushed off the wall behind him to follow, pulling up Carl’s training sessions in his phone’s archive: training, Ground, space walk, “unlikely event.” He was certain he remembered nothing. When he found it, he sped up the footage to 4x with captions. Two Carls, now: Carl-of-the-past instructed him, the footage like stained glass over the Carl who floated in front of him. That Carl slid open the door to the suit room. He turned around just as Alex shook his head to stop the video.
“You’ll be fine,” Carl said.
Inside, their pale, pearly space suits were lined up along the wall. Malik and Irma were already getting dressed, and when they looked up to greet Alex, they did not look afraid, and they did not look like they were reviewing training footage at 4x.
“It’s happening,” Irma sang.
Alex laughed uncertainly, the only way he laughed lately, and floated toward his own suit. On the wall next to it were three numbered packets of underlayers. Malik and Irma were into their second layers already, full-body leotards that covered them from the tips of their fingers and toes up to the tops of their necks. Alex pushed his limbs into the tight tubes and tried to catch up.
“Don’t rush it,” Carl reminded him. “That only makes it harder.”
A space walk on day six was surely rushing it.
When all four of them were in their complete underlayers, they carefully opened the seals that made their three-piece space suits into one body. Now each suit was a boot-pant piece, a torso-to-glove piece, and a helmet. “Remember,” Carl said. “The suit stays put, and you move into it. Legs first.”
Alex pulled himself up along the ridged wall until he was just above his target, the open waist of his pants. He slid his legs inside, and the pants crunched down with his knees. Carl had to come pull them up for him. But when it was time to put on his top half, Alex had no trouble at all. Malik struggled with his seals, and Irma got her gloves twisted, but Alex slid into his floating empty astronaut body with ease.
He was nine-tenths astronaut now. The last tenth required opening the hatch.
• • •
What was Alex doing up here, if he was not a real astronaut? For the last twenty years, Alex Welch-Peters had been manipulating algae in hopes of creating a new species that captured more carbon dioxide than naturally occurring species did, resulting—if he cracked it—in less CO2 and more oxygen in the atmosphere: a slowing of global warming. Scaled up, it might begin to reverse the damage of his own species. It was not a question of whether it could be done, because Alex had done it—once, a little less than a year ago. Tray 182. Alex believed with all his brain that he could replicate that result here, and he believed with all his heart that he must, but that was a little different.
Alex had been offered three years of support and a completely controlled environment to create a means for carbon capture on this private space station. The owners of Parallaxis I wanted frontier scientists, unconstrained by the pressures of home, to show off to their billionaire clientele, and those billionaires would need air to breathe. Alex had been a lousy husband and father for the last several years while he tried and failed to save the world, and he had lost his marriage because of it. The offer had come at the right time. If he succeeded here, his children could carry with them the knowledge that their father’s absence had not been in vain. That his work was for them, and that it had been worth it.
• • •
Except for his helmet, which, tethered to his neckline, floated at his shoulders like a second head, Alex was fully suited now. While Carl slipped easily into his own suit, Alex, Malik, and Irma looked one another over, experimenting with their new exoskeletons. It was helpful to think of the space suit that way: not a costume but a protective shell, evolved ideally for his survival.
“Nervous?” Irma asked him. Her dark cloud of curls floated around her face like cotton candy. She tried to look sympathetic, but her cheeks looked ready to pop.
“A bit,” said Alex.
“Ginger chew?”
He nodded and, with some difficulty, took the little lump from her outstretched glove, where it slipped right through his fingers and he had to catch it in the air like a fat, slow fly. In his mouth the ginger chew was squishy, spicy, and familiar. Meg had gone through a dozen a day when she was pregnant with Shane. He didn’t think he’d had one since.
“Finish up quick,” said Carl.
Alex imagined suits for his family hitched to the wall—for Meg, for Mary Agnes, and a tiny one for Shane. His was the one that punctured the fantasy. No one was making space suits for six-year-olds.
Alex was one of eight newcomers to Parallaxis: three research scientists, including himself, a robotics engineer, two doctors, a 3D fabricator, and Carl the Astronaut. Irma Garcia, one of the other research scientists, called herself a space gardener. She would grow food so that they would not have to live on reconstituted mushes and go-gels alone. The other was Malik Cobb, who had created Parallaxis’s water supply by designing mechanisms by which ice was mined from the atmosphere’s noctilucent clouds. Alex did not exactly understand it. What he understood was that Irma and Malik were brilliant and proven. They knew that they belonged here.
Carl knocked on the inside of the doorframe for good luck and led them out of the suit room and up to the airlock. Alex’s ginger chew was gone, but the spice was still hot in his throat, a little too much like fear.
“Hey, you all right?” Malik floated up next to him.
Alex swallowed. “I am all right, yes, but also, I think some nervousness is a pretty rational, warranted response to an unexpected space walk?”
“Yeah, for sure,” said Malik. “But you look—”
“I’m fine,” said Alex.
“We all had training, the exact same training,” he said. “It’s the same motions, just different scenery.”
Alex turned to see if Malik really believed this.
Malik coughed. “What I’m saying is, since you’re no better or worse prepared than I am, all this sweat on your face is stressing me out.”
“The suit is hot,” Alex said.
“The suit is hot,” said Malik. “We’ll go with that.”
• • •
Parallaxis I, 220 miles from Earth, was shaped like a ring, or a tire. In a few months, it would begin to rotate around a central axis, as a wheel does. Like a Tilt-A-Whirl, this spinning would draw everything and everyone floating in the ring outward until they were flat against the outermost wall. Not stuck, though—once they had their strength back, they would be able to stand, walk, set down a cup of coffee and have it stay put. They would be able to walk all the way around the ring and end up right back where they started. Parallaxis I was a big station by historical standards and small by fantasy ones: to walk a lap would be like walking around four city blocks in Chicago or Melbourne or the perimeter of four Wrigley Fields that shared the same home plate. There would be a gracious central promenade with ambient lighting that changed to evoke the hour of the day, and dozens of precisely designed pods—labs, homes, closed storage, staff areas, and exquisite recreational spaces—on either side of it, a few entered by intimate corridors that would function like private driveways. These would be for the billionaires who would start moving in later this year, once Alex and his colleagues had built all of this.
For now, the ring was mostly empty, except for the simulated Sky and the slapdash barracks that housed Alex and his colleagues: four walls zip-tied together and seven cots mounted upon them, with seven fleece sleeping bags and stretchy straps to keep them tucked in. Not comfortable by any stretch, but they would rather sleep together in their barracks than in the Helper station, which was tiny, old, and smelly. Docked to the inside of the ring, the Helper was a kind of baby station inhabited for the last eight years by the rotating cast of astronauts and former marines who had built Parallaxis I. The only remaining inhabitant of the Helper was Josef Mozgov, their captain. He had been up for all eight years.
Alex hadn’t seen Mozgov since their first day. When their shuttle had docked to the Helper, it had been Mozgov who opened the airlock for the seven frightened newcomers, all gray-faced with nausea.
“Welcome,” he’d said.
His remaining crew, two exhausted astronauts trying to make it just one more day before they were sent back home to Earth, had released them from their confinement in the shuttle. The newcomers had been instructed to hold hands, and in this fashion they were pulled slowly through the airlock into the packed and grimy Helper, through the second airlock, and finally into the cavernous donut that was Parallaxis I. The crew had let go of their charges’ hands and tried to demonstrate that it was safe to move around. They’d waved their arms and shaken their hair, which floated off their heads in greasy ropes, like seaweed. One had managed enough enthusiasm for a slow flip. They would be gone the next day.
The newcomers floated together like a school of fish. Alex saw no doors, no floor, only the expanse of moonlit night sky that stretched out right in front of them, threatening to pull him out into it.
“The Sky is a screen, just a screen,” Mozgov said.
Right. He knew that.
“It will help if you orient yourselves this way,” Mozgov said. He rotated himself ninety degrees so that the night sky was overhead, and raised his index finger. “That’s ‘up.’ ”
The floating huddle broke up. Alex wiggled around to get the Sky overhead, where he didn’t have to look right at it. Its depth and darkness looked too real. How could you face the deep night sky without your feet on any ground?
“They could have set it to morning,” Malik whispered to him. “Might have been more welcoming.”
Mozgov and his crew unfurled a long cord and had the newcomers hold on to it in a line, like preschoolers on a field trip, and led them around the ring on a tour of their new home. Alex was in the middle of the pack, behind Macy Slivens, the doctor, who twitched her head from side to side like a watchful bird, and Malik, whose quiet sighs were unsettling at best.
The station was not nearly as complete as they had been told. To Alex, it appeared that just enough had been done so that they wouldn’t need their space suits inside, and nothing more. Certainly no luxury apartments or viewing lounges. He hoped they’d double-checked all the joints so that no one would be sucked out through a hole if a piece of wall fell off. The heating and electrical systems were working, but that was about it.
Mozgov pulled open a panel to reveal the mechanicals running beneath the ground, or what would be “beneath” and “the ground,” someday. He showed them the lots for the client homes, not yet built, and their own lab pods and home pods: all blank space.
“Raw possibility,” said Irma, her voice light, almost bouncing. She was first among them to master the backflip.
• • •
“Line up,” Carl told them now. “Tether together.”
He and Irma would be first and last, and they would clip to the exterior of the station. They would be the ones refreshing the batteries, with Malik and Alex between them in supporting roles. Mozgov would supervise from Control in the Helper. “The people before us did this repair without a hitch,” Carl said. He said nearly everything as though he’d told them already and didn’t trust them to remember, which Alex appreciated, though he could tell Malik did not. “We expect no problems.”
They entered the airlock, and the door to the station slid shut. “Ready?”
Helmets, down. Seals checked, double-checked, triple-checked. One, two, three, four human beings, clipped into formation, ready to face the dark unknown.
“Ready?” Carl asked.
“Cobb ready.”
“Garcia ready.”
“Welch-Peters ready.”
“All ready,” said Carl.
The hatch slid open, and outside, there was nothing.
• • •
The edgeless darkness, the thinness of it—it didn’t matter that Alex had already seen it through glass. The darkness filled his eyes first and drew the breath right out of him. And then, looming behind him was Earth, huge and round and real. White streaks wrapped the blue and green marble like cotton, protecting it. The sight was hard to reconcile with the ground he lived on—had lived on, until a week ago. In his country alone, California was on fire nine months a year, half of Texas was flooded with mud, and the hurricanes that turned coastal towns into mulch no longer kept to any calendar, but from up here, you would think the whole planet lived in verdant spring bloom.
Then he noticed the silence, one he had never heard before. At home silence meant that he had erected a thick barrier between his brain and the ceaseless noise around it. This silence was the opposite: empty. He could not hear the bodies moving next to his. He watched Carl pulling himself along the gray exterior of the station, hand over hand toward the solar panels, and his mind expected bumps, crunches, and squeaks, but he didn’t hear anything at all.
“Alex.” Carl’s voice was as clear and close as if they were still inside together. “Do you have the hiccups?”
“Yeah, I do,” said Alex. “Is that okay?”
“They won’t kill you.”
Alex faced the solar array, a grid of blessedly familiar rectangles and flat surfaces. If he looked down, up, or sideways, it was there: space. He looked at Irma, half dreading her jubilance, because if she wasn’t at least a little scared now? He knew she could be reckless—all her stories were adrenaline safaris. But Irma was focused on the battery compartment before her, her gloved fingers slowly working through the latches. She did not ask him for support.
Alex raised his eyes past the solar panels, blinking at the stars and the light they seemed to smear around them, at the giant Earth again. He was staring straight at the Great Lakes, tracing southward from Lake Michigan, and while Michigan was, as usual, obscured by clouds, he knew he was looking at home. He didn’t know what his children and Meg were doing right now, but he wished they could know that he was outside, right this minute, looking for them.
His hiccups were gone.
Twenty-seven minutes later, they finished, and moved tidily back toward the airlock. When they were back inside, Alex’s legs were jelly trembling in the air. He was not the only one overcome—Irma was flushed behind her freckles, and Malik was smiling insanely with only half his mouth.
Even Carl broke, just a little. “Well done,” he said. “It’s good to know you can do that, isn’t it?”
• • •
Though the Son sisters had hired him to make clean air for Parallaxis, helping the wealthy to self-isolate in outer space had never been Alex’s ambition. He wanted to save his planet, and with each disastrous year, his work became more necessary and less possible. So often, he had caught himself—in the mirror, say, brushing his teeth, foamy around the mouth—and shrunk from the sight of his meager human-scale abilities in the face of screaming catastrophe. What helped was to remind himself that thousands of scientists in every field were working against the same fate, and at least thirteen other biochemistry labs were working on it the same way he was, through algae-aided carbon capture. Only one of them had to crack it, and they’d all gotten close, at times. It didn’t matter who solved it, but they all had to keep trying.
“Are you sure it doesn’t matter who solves it?” Meg had asked him with withering calmness shortly before the split.
“Are you serious?” Alex answered her. “I would love someone else to solve it. Anyone.”
“I think you’re about sixty percent serious, when you say that,” said Meg. She paused for a long moment, and Alex was so angry he wanted to laugh. “But the rest wants it to be you, your lab.”
He didn’t laugh. This conversation had occurred on Christmas Eve, while Alex was putting on his snow boots to head back into the lab. He had done family dinner, the ritual pajama exchange, he had been there. Meg said it didn’t count, not at all, if he was working on his phone the whole time. Maybe they couldn’t see what he was doing but they could tell—Meg, Mary Agnes, even Shane could tell—that he didn’t hear anything they were saying. Shane, Meg had pointed out, never said only “Dad.” Instead, he said “Dad—Dad?” as if Alex’s presence were always a question.
Alex stood in his muddy snow boots at the edge of the kitchen door. If she weren’t starting an argument right now he’d be out the door, sooner into the lab and sooner home again. Instead, she started peeling an orange, no hurry at all.
“It would be easier,” she said, “if you just admitted you wanted to be the hero.” She dropped a section of peel and started on another without looking at him. “I mean, I can admit that. In my work, I wanted to be the hero to those girls. I wanted to be the one to help.”
She had given up her own career as an aid for pregnant teenagers when Shane was born, in part so Alex could continue his. Now she was a remote-floater high school guidance counselor for their well-funded district, which meant she mostly wrote college recommendations. She hated it, but somebody had to be in charge at home, and Alex had always made sure it wasn’t him.
“I’ll be back by morning. They won’t know I was gone.” But as soon as he’d shut the back door, Mary Agnes messaged him from her bedroom. Can I help tonight? Or just come and watch?
He missed the old days, before Sensus phones, when you could say you’d left your phone at home or that you hadn’t felt the buzz through your heavy coat. There was no forgetting your phone anymore, and with each message scrolling right into your vision, there was no way to pretend you’d missed it.
Not tonight. Cover for me, if your brother wakes up?
Will do, she said. When he pulled the car out of the driveway, headlights off, she waved at him from her bedroom window.
• • •
Alex’s plan was this: Human beings, the invasive species to end them all, would never change their ways, not with money, power, and convenience at stake. A new invasive species, however, might begin to counteract the ill effects of humanity. Green algae had been around for at least one billion years to Homo sapiens’piddly two hundred thousand, and it was algae, Alex was certain, that would save them from themselves. Algae cleaned the air, cleaned waste, fed plants and animals. It could provide a thermal control in waters with rising temperatures. What the planet needed was superalgae, super-efficient and super-hardy cyanobacteria with dramatically increased carbon capture properties, that could grow in the open ocean or anywhere else it was needed, gobbling up carbon and scoffing at the temperature swings that slowed its nonmodified cousins.
Alex had been working on this problem since his second year of graduate school, and he’d gotten close when he was twenty-six, a postdoc glowing with promise and rich in grants. But he didn’t crack it then, and by the time Shane was born, his funding streams were mere trickles—not because his project had lost its luster, but because he had. He was thirty-four then, and the amount of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere had hit 450 parts per million ahead of even dire predictions, and he had brought two more humans into this world, back when he had been slightly more optimistic about the future of algae-aided carbon capture. More like delusional, he’d thought when Shane was born early, small, and allergic, it seemed, to everything outside, like someone who should have been born hundreds of years in the future, when people would be smaller and didn’t go outside anymore.
Alex had been, for several years, in a dark place. His dread of the planet’s death was perhaps more visceral than that of most people outside his field, not only because he had made climate catastrophe his life’s work but because funding that work required that he often describe, in vivid detail, the utter nightmare that life on Earth would soon become for all but the very, very rich, if humankind did not find a way to reverse some of the damage done. That was how he got all those grants, by first detailing his data-driven nightmares and then by revealing his solution, always just around the corner. But by his fortieth birthday, his doomsday ravings were all he really had to show for himself. He imagined quitting with a final paper. Abstract: Editing genes to increase the efficiency of marine plants has proved intractable; ergo, we are fucked.
“Maybe you can join your lab to another, do something more collaborative,” Meg had said on Christmas night. They’d paused the argument for the day, and now that they were alone again, Meg picked it up. She sat on the edge of their bed, braiding her hair. “We’ll move! It’s not that I want you to give up.”
She sounded more optimistic than she had the night before, he thought, less accusing.
“I would never ask that of you,” she said quietly. “But something has to change.”
“I have a new grad student coming on this spring,” he said.
Meg pressed her lips together and dropped the heavy braid unfastened on her shoulder.
“That’s not what I meant,” she said. “You just pass right through us. I’ve gotten used to it, and that might be the worst part.” She balled her hands into fists at her sides. “The kids are used to it, you floating in and out when it’s convenient—oh, don’t get all puffed up, you know what I mean. You’ve trained them not to expect you.” She opened her hands and stretched out her fingers, and Alex found himself watching them so he wouldn’t have to see her face for whatever she said next.
“Something has to change—now,” she said. Meaning that if he didn’t change anything, she would make a change without him. She’d gotten used to making decisions alone. They separated two months later.
• • •
He had made one change, just not the one that mattered to Meg. Alex had spliced cyanobacteria DNA with that of many different plants over the years, but hydrilla, an Asian water weed, was new to his lab. Hydrilla had been popular in American aquariums in the 1950s and, since its disposal into the freshwater supply, had wrecked Florida’s freshwater. Now it had adapted itself to saltwater environments as well. Hydrilla could grow in the deepest, darkest waters where little else could, each spiky tendril advancing an inch each day.
Hydrilla was a monster. Hydrilla was the answer. Alex’s algae-hydrilla hybrid flourished in Tray 182 with a 130 percent increase in photosynthetic efficiency compared to his nonmodified algae.
None of the others. Just 182.
Meg had already left him. She was still the first person he called.
One of the undergrads who worked in his lab blabbed to a friend, and before Alex understood how Tray 182 had happened, the media descended. It did not matter how Alex hedged and qualified, Tray 182 was declared a hero and shared over forty million times, with worse and worse information attached to it. One cool trick to save the planet. Quickly, the insistence of intrusive strangers that he had achieved the impossible mingled with a niggling doubt: he did not know why Tray 182 had succeeded where trays 1–181 and 183–200 had failed, and how could he concentrate with all these people shrieking at him with their premature euphoria?
He was in the lab at all hours, terrified that the environmental chamber would crash, that something would happen to Tray 182 before he knew its secrets. Twice a day he did cell counts, checked chlorophyll-a fluorescence, and measured the cells’ health with PAM fluorometry. He didn’t understand why Tray 182 was working, but at least he knew it was happy and healthy. But nine days into Tray 182’s life, the PAM fluorometry measurement plunged from its solid 0.8 to 0.6, which meant that the cells were stressed.
By the next morning, the measurement was 0.5 and the vibrant green culture had turned a sickly yellow. He transferred samples from Tray 182 into six other cuvettes, trying to save them, and the measurements of all plummeted to 0.3 and 0.2. Two days later, Tray 182 was bleached white and dead. He didn’t know why it had come into the world, and now he didn’t know why it had gone.
Over the next two months, his lab failed to replicate Tray 182, and Alex wanted to crawl into a hole in the ground. The best thing he did during those months was spend more time with his children, who saw his weaknesses and somehow loved him anyway.
• • •
Then Rachel Son had called. Would Alex like to pursue his research on Parallaxis I, the first private luxury space station intended for long-term habitation? He would advance his superalgae in space, where it would clean the air that the space colonists breathed.
“Algae can do even more than that,” Alex said. “It will revitalize your air, it will provide biomass for crops, it can remediate waste streams—both fecal and urine—and provide thermal control. I don’t know if you’re planning on raising fish or mollusks, but algae can be their foodstock—”
“Exactly,” she said. “We want you and your superalgae.”
He would have a controlled environment complete with simulated gravity, unlimited research funds, and no mediawhatsoever. His lab would not get shut down without warning every few weeks because of tornadoes, ice storms, heat waves, plague, or dried-up funding: stability. Five hundred thousand dollars a year with a three-year contract, comprehensive health insurance from signing for a period of ten years, to ensure care for any reentry issues. All research, travel, and living expenses paid, obviously.
“And Sensus would own my research,” Alex said.
“Parallaxis would own the rights to any new findings,” she said. “But the university owns you now, right? And when you figure out how to save the world, we will have the reach to help you do it.” She laughed in a friendly way. “We want to boast about our role in your success.”
“Oh, wow,” he’d finally said. “This is a lot.”
He would have to think about it.
He had his family to consider. His children.
He had no training in astrophysics, engineering, anything remotely related to—
“Doesn’t matter,” Rachel had said. “You won’t be expected to be an astronaut—or anyone but who you are. We need you with us.” She had known just what he needed to hear.
• • •
After they’d hung up their suits, all Alex wanted to do was strap himself to his cot in their barracks and close his eyes, but Malik and Irma rushed to tell the others, following the sounds of crinkling plastic and cracking joints that bounced around the station. As they drew closer to the huddle, Alex heard Macy giving someone instructions, and he winced, anticipating her jealousy. She was a marathoner, and ex-military, without a wavering nerve in sight. Carl should have asked her to do a space walk, not him.
Macy didn’t say that, not outright. She sucked down a go-gel. “Next time, I’m going,” she said.
But what next time? There shouldn’t be a next time. “Carl didn’t need three of us to help him refresh two batteries,” he said quietly, so that only Irma would hear. “He probably didn’t need any of us.”
“I guess he wanted us to know we could do it,” Irma said.
“But why?” asked Alex. Macy was watching, listening now. “Our whole training, he told us what we can’t do. And then six days up here, he shoves us out the door? Me?”
“Boot camp structure,” Macy said. “You tell the new guys they can’t do shit to make sure they pay attention, and then you give them a common enemy and show them what they can do, if they have to.” She curled her lip. “It works.”
“What enemy?” Alex asked. “I’m not military. If you tell me I can’t do something, I believe you.”
“You’ve been chasing superalgae for twenty years,” Malik said. ...
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