ARCHIVED: SMS Conversation — Kaleisha Reid, Ros Wheeler, and Abraham Yang, July 10, 2061
ROS WHEELER
Alright, who’s gonna be on Cleo duty tomorrow
ABRAHAM YANG
What do you mean???
KALEISHA REID
Ros believes that our very best friend Cleo is in danger of, among other things, blacking out when she sees a spaceship in person for the first time and doing something stupid and killing us all
ABRAHAM YANG
No way!! Cleo is extremely smart and not at all stupid, Ros
ROS WHEELER
You know I know that
But you ALSO know that Cleo can be a bit ah
Impulsive?
Incautious??
Prone to ignoring things like hazard signs when there’s a cool new gadget she wants to touch???
KALEISHA REID
She doesn’t need us to babysit her, Rozzy
By which I mean, I am not going to babysit her
And neither will you
We have a plan! We love the plan. We’re gonna follow the plan
ABRAHAM YANG
Seconded!!
ROS WHEELER
Fine yes alright
I reserve the right to be an anxious wreck about it
KALEISHA REID
I will give you a shoulder rub when it’s all over
ABRAHAM YANG
Me too!! Prepare your shoulders
ROS WHEELER
Ugh
* * *
Twenty-seven years of obsessive amateur research had not prepared Cleo McQueary for how simple it was to break into the Erebus Industries compound. She’d seen the exclusive news reports, the official behind-the-scenes TikToks, the infamous photos of impassive security officers restraining bereaved family members at the compound gate—Cleo knew that this place had been crawling with guards and dripping with unbreakable security measures, once. But now, the only thing protecting each spiraling level of the circular compound was a dusty steel door, locked by a decades-old retinal scanner and a series of cascade ciphers. Cleo could have cracked them all in her sleep, which was a shame—she liked a challenge.
“Well,” she said, punching the last sequence into the last keypad and thinking that the rare excuse to wear fingerless gloves with her most practical pair of coveralls almost made up for the disappointment,
“there’s no turning back now.”
“Corny,” Kaleisha whispered behind her, also looking incredibly heist-chic in her black dress and leather jacket, locs tied back in a ponytail and killer green eyeliner standing out against her dark skin. Cleo stuck her tongue out. Thanks to Erebus Industries’ bankruptcy, they were the first people to walk through these long-abandoned doors in a decade; a little melodrama was absolutely warranted.
Abe fidgeted with the straps of the backpack he’d meticulously packed with things they might need (Band-Aids) and things they definitely wouldn’t (Kaleisha’s tarot cards). He was Chinese American, tall enough to rest his chin on the top of Cleo’s head, and bouncing on the balls of his feet so rapidly that his floppy black hair was getting in his eyes.
“Actually,” he whispered a little too loudly, “I think this would be the perfect time to turn back, if we wanted to.”
“Yeah, isn’t this the part where Cleo says, That was easy . . . Too easy?” Ros said. They tucked a long ginger curl behind the ear that wasn’t adjacent to their undercut, a smile masking the on-edge jitters that Cleo knew they were hiding. “And then a bunch of robot ninjas jump out to foil our plan?”
Cleo winked at Ros as the last gate—blazoned, as all the others had been, with the grayscale sunrise of the Erebus Industries logo—slid open with a metallic clunk. “Don’t worry. Fighting robot ninjas is the first thing they teach you in engineering school.”
Kaleisha smacked Abe lightly on the ass to shove him toward the gateway. “You’re not getting soft on us, are you, Yang?”
“I’ve always been soft, and you love it.”
“I do.”
Behind their backs, Ros made a gagging sound. Cleo mimed a dry heave back. “Can we focus on how I just hacked the last gate open, you nasties?” she whined as Abe kissed the top of Kaleisha’s head. “It was very impressive, probably.”
“Extremely impressive.” Abe cut Cleo off with an easy ruffle of her curly brown bob. “I’m going through first, though.”
“Very sexy of you,” Kaleisha said, and she took Ros’s hand, who took Cleo’s hand, and tugged them all after Abe and into the wide-open launch complex at the center of the Erebus space center.
And there it was, looming over them like a skyscraper, steepled black against the starry sky: Providence I. The other three stopped just inside the wall to stare up at the thing, so Cleo stopped too, and did the same.
Oh, it was beautiful. Probably the most beautiful thing people had ever built, Cleo thought, just as she had when she’d first seen it on TV all those years ago. Everything about the spaceship
was darkly glittering ceramic quartz and gracefully curving lines; it was sheer artistry, the way the wide, winged base swooped upward into the delicately pointed nose. It was right in front of her, just like she’d always impossibly dreamed, and it stirred something she hadn’t realized she’d forgotten—not just a feeling of wonder, though of course she was in awe of it. There was something rising in her throat that she hadn’t quite felt since she was a kid, watching the lead-up to the launch on TV. Hope, maybe. Faith in humanity, even.
“Alright, gang, Operation Space Heist is a go,” Kaleisha said, knocking them all out of their reveries. “Let’s roll.”
Cleo blinked away the tears that were threatening at the corners of her eyes and quickly stopped fingering the logo on the arm of the old, thrifted NASA jacket she’d stolen from her dad when she went to college. “Who’s corny now?” Kaleisha lovingly flipped her off.
They all speed-walked toward the ship, very aware of how exposed they were, trying not to crunch their feet on the twenty years of accumulated trash and leaves that drifted across the tarmac. Abe’s head swiveled like an owl’s, but no floodlights flickered on, no speakers screeched at them from the nearby mission control tower, and no beefy guards emerged from the darkness. If this had been a government site, the security might have been a little tighter. But all-but-defunct private companies didn’t spend precious dollars on their long-abandoned mission centers. Cleo almost told Abe to chill, but she knew her friend—he had an impeccable mental map of their surroundings, thanks to all his research, and he would never chill while there was even the slightest possibility that they were in danger.
Plus, the place was kind of spooky. Full of history and grief and the shadows thrown down by the clouds as they crossed the moon.
“Lots of ghost energy,” Cleo whispered to Ros.
Ros snorted, which belied the fact that they were looking even paler than usual. Cleo knew Ros well enough to recognize the telltale sign that they were internally flipping out: sarcasm. “Space ghosts?”
“Space ghosts.”
When they reached the base of the Providence, Kaleisha stood aside and waved Cleo toward the entrance to the external elevator tower that still stood clamped to the side of the ship. Another outdated keypad, more old-ass software. Cleo cracked her knuckles and dove into the code. She’d broken more complex encryptions in high school. She deciphered the initialization vector in seconds.
“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.
* * *
The lights flickered
on with a sizzle and a groan as the four of them climbed through the hatch, and they could see the flight deck in all its glory: brightly colored buttons and dusty screens covering every inch of the piloting console and the steel-gray walls, two enormous chairs outfitted with harnesses and countless toggles, and a window stretching most of the way around the semicircular room, through which they could see the night sky and the empty, rolling plains surrounding the complex.
They all stood and looked for a moment, mouths hanging open. And then Cleo couldn’t take it anymore.
“Dibs on the captain’s chair!” she called—but Kaleisha flung a hand out to catch her in the chest before she could go anywhere.
“Hold up,” she said. “We have a plan, remember?”
“Search the ship for clues, record everything, and don’t touch anything that might get us zapped out of existence,” Abe recited, his voice muffled by the window he was pressing his face against.
“I am a fan of existing,” Ros said. “Not being a pile of dark matter dust is my ideal scenario, medically speaking.”
“Listen to the good doctor, Cleo,” Kaleisha said as Abe took out his phone and started shooting a panorama of the flight deck. “You can sit in the chair later, as long as Ros determines it’s not covered in instant death goo or whatever.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
Abe finished his panorama and moved around the room, snapping pictures of everything from the chairs to the tape over one of the switches. Ros went over to the door opposite the hatch and bent down to look at the small, silver button next to it.
“I think we can safely assume,” Cleo said, with only a trace of sarcasm in her voice, “that the button opens the door, and doesn’t start up the dark matter engine that’s gonna kill us all.”
Ros wrinkled their nose at Cleo and pushed the button. The door slid open with a whoosh and a ding, revealing another elevator. Ros stuck their head in and peered around.
“Alright,” Kaleisha said. “Where do we want to go first?”
“Med bay?” Ros said, their words echoing around the elevator.
“The crew’s quarters?” Abe offered.
“Engine bay, engine bay, engine bay—”
“I agree with Cleo,” Kaleisha said, stowing Abe’s phone back in his backpack as Cleo stopped chanting to pump her fist in victory. “The only thing we can be relatively sure of is that the crew’s disappearance is linked to the dark matter engine, so we should look there first.”
“Thank you!” Cleo nudged past Ros into the elevator and held her finger over the bottommost button, marked E. “Come on, slowpokes, I wanna see the greatest engineering achievement in all of human history. And you know I’m gonna need some alone
time with her.”
* * *
It started as a joke, initially. It was the twentieth anniversary of Launch Day, and it had been McQueary’s idea to turn the president’s cookie-cutter address into a drinking game.
“The crew of Providence I were the best of us,” the president said. Drink. “We must ensure that their sacrifice will never be in vain,” he said. Drink. “In their honor, we are reviving our off-world colonization efforts,” he didn’t say. Drink.
By the end of the night they’d all had too many of Reid’s notoriously lethal dark ’n’ stormies. They were young and exhausted and far too smart for their own good, and, in that moment, it was the funniest idea McQueary had ever thought of.
“What if we broke into Providence I?” she said, and they all laughed their drunk asses off.
But that hypothetical hung in the air, electrifying, and became a conversation that kept them all up into the early morning. It stopped being funny and started being a familiar kind of exhilarating, the idea that they could steal into the most infamous crypt in the world, and—what? See how the engine worked? Find out where the passengers had gone? They didn’t know, but that night the four of them felt more driven, more inspired, more alive than they’d felt since they were kids, watching the broadcasts. They were goners.
From there, it became a project, a word problem to be worked out together on Saturday nights, sitting on the floor of their living room surrounded by empty pizza boxes and notepads full of equations and crackpot theories. They were all perfectly matched, all with something to contribute: Ros Wheeler, the medical resident, with their ideas about what dark energy might have done to all those human bodies. Kaleisha Reid, the brilliant botanist, with an eye for details and a fascination with all forms of life. Abraham Yang, the history of science PhD, with an encyclopedic virtual archive of information on the Providence mission that he’d been building for his postdoc research, and a heart too big for his own good.
Then there was Cleo McQueary. The one who had spent her childhood stealing her mom’s tablet to watch Providence news past her bedtime and filling up graph paper notebooks with mission trivia and dark matter facts. The one with a PhD in computer engineering, who could do anything if it involved machines or computers, and who was the only reason the rest of them could even consider the possibility of getting anywhere near the ship.
And don’t forget the most important part: These people were more than friends, they were family. In high school, McQueary, Yang, and Wheeler had discovered that Reid’s house, full of plants and fluffy blankets and the smell of her father’s famous chocolate hazelnut cookies, felt like a home in a way that the houses they’d been raised in never had. Together they’d gotten through hurricanes, through grad school applications, through the months of oblivious angst that preceded Reid
and Yang getting together their sophomore year of undergrad. If anyone was ever fully and utterly prepared to leap into the void together, it was these four.
The Space Heist, as Yang took to writing across the tops of the pages of his yellow legal pads, stayed an “if” scenario, technically speaking. Until one night, McQueary said “when.” When we do it. When we break into Providence I. And they all went quiet, waiting to see if anyone else would correct her. And when no one did, they carried on.
* * *
ARCHIVED: Briefing on Exoplanet Proxima Centauri B for the Crew of Providence I, February 1, 2040
Proxima Centauri B is a 1.27 Earth mass rocky planet orbiting in the habitable zone of the M-type red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, and your future home. You have all made the tremendously brave decision to join the first outer-system colonial expedition in human history. Rest assured that we at Erebus Industries do not take the enormity of your dedication to the future survival of the human race lightly, and we thank you, on behalf of ourselves and the rest of the world.
Proxima B is, despite its perfectly breathable atmosphere, a hostile environment in many ways. The planet is tidally locked in its orbit around the host star, resulting in a surface that is scorched by perpetual daylight on one side and intractably cold and dark on the other. The result is a 30-km-wide habitable zone at the planet’s terminator line, or twilight zone, where you will live in perpetual sunset at temperatures of about -30°C, due to the relatively low heat output of the host star.
As you will remember from the Starshot probe expeditions of twenty years ago, the surface of the terminator zone is covered in water ice, leading us to believe that liquid water could be present at the edges of the zone or in the measurably warmer underground tunnels detected by the probes’ seismological pulsors. Note that, as living flora and fauna—lichen-like organisms as well as signs of small vertebrates—were discovered on the surface, colonists should be prepared for more life to be present in these underground caves.
We know this doesn’t paint the most welcoming picture of Proxima B. However, we trust that, as you acclimate, you will find comfort and even beauty in your new home. In that vein, a final observation. Proxima Centauri is a highly active flare star, meaning Proxima B is consistently
buffeted by solar winds; we also know that Proxima B’s super-Earth level mass and powerful magnetic field keep its robust atmosphere in fighting shape. All this to say: The skies of Proxima B will be near-constantly alight with auroras in every color of the rainbow. We can only hope that you send us postcards.
* * *
No automatic lights came on when they entered the engine bay; the elevator door closed and left them in almost total darkness. Abe took a flashlight out of his backpack and shone it around. From what Cleo could see, the space was positively cavernous—the ceiling stretched at least forty feet above their heads, and rows and rows of server stacks and other hulking, shadowy machines she couldn’t even begin to comprehend towered over them, dusty and dead like everything else on the ship.
“Guys,” she whispered, since a reverent whisper seemed the right way to go, “I think I’m in heaven.”
“Awfully dark for heaven,” Ros whispered back, though they sounded just as astounded as Cleo was.
And then Abe swung the flashlight beam down another aisle and there—there was the dark matter engine. Cleo was sure her brain would explode.
They had never shown the engine itself on TV, see, because it was top fucking secret, because no one outside the research team could be trusted with that kind of technology, or maybe so Erebus could keep it all to themselves. Captain Wilhelmina Lucas, in all her months of glitzy press conferences and slick appearances in documentary footage, had only ever dropped a few crumbs about the newly discovered type of physiochemical reaction. Despite Cleo’s lifelong obsession with Captain Lucas, her very shiny blond ponytail and the old-fashioned tape recorder into which she was always muttering her certainly genius notes-to-self, Cleo remembered her own childish exasperation at the cageyness surrounding the revolutionary technology, one that would apparently eliminate the need for fuel as we knew it. All very proprietary, of course, you understand. And twenty-seven-year-old Cleo understood the secrecy, on a cerebral level, but the piece of seven-year-old Cleo that still lived inside her was screaming out in smug euphoria—I’m
looking at it, you jerks, and there’s nothing you can do about it—because there it was, massive and shining even under the dust of two decades, a patchwork ring of fiberglass and metal standing on its edge, reaching almost to the ceiling. As Cleo drew closer, her eyes drinking in every detail Abe’s annoyingly small spotlight managed to catch, she almost would have believed that the engine was prehistoric, eternal, some kind of portal to another dimension that the ancients had built and worshipped.
Kaleisha crept up next to her and squeezed her hand. “It’s really something,” she said softly. Cleo nodded. “You think you can figure out how it disappeared everyone?”
“No idea,” she breathed. Then louder: “I’ve gotta touch it.”
“Whoa, hey,” Ros called out from behind her, “let’s maybe consider the benefits of not doing that—”
“This thing is our biggest clue, right?” Cleo marched over toward its base, glancing back at Ros’s concerned face. “I’m gonna have to get a little bit up in its business to deduce anything.”
Ros met Cleo’s eyes and must have seen all the endless determination in them, because they nodded, though their concerned frown didn’t go away. Cleo heard them brushing off Kaleisha’s and Abe’s soothing murmurs as she turned back to the engine.
The ring was almost twice as thick as Cleo was tall, and up close she could see that it was built from several giant fiberglass tubes, held together with countless crisscrossing wires and overlapping panels of titanium alloy. ...
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