Elevator Dreams

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. The idea frightened generations and was the number one visceral reason everything else was going to have to be as safe as humanly possible before I would even consider following my hearts' call out here. No way I was going to risk that agony unless the odds were very, very low that anything else would go wrong.

Riding smoothly upward now to where, soon, there would be no more ups and downs, was as thrilling as it was terrifying. “So we just keep going so far up we’ll eventually be upside down again?” my brain perturbed almost out loud. But the folks riding along the tether with me had heard me say it enough before, so thankfully, this time, it just rang in my head as an echo of previous musings.

Only ten short years ago, despite the popular notion that rockets were the only way up here, I still felt strongly called to some inevitable personal destiny in space. Yet sitting on top of a towering inferno, even if it was a highly engineered one, was still being escorted to glory by a bomb in my mind. So no… unfortunately, simply hoping the whole ride up that the lives placed delicately in the tip wouldn’t disintegrate was an unacceptable proposal, I rationalized, for anyone who was in love, had kids they cared about more than the mission, or just really didn’t want to die yet. And I had at least one of those at that moment. So what was going to be the way up for me? I obsessed over this for years.

For sure the trip would have to be somewhat relaxed, with time to be patient and in awe. Definitely time to be in awe. There would have to be plenty of redundant safety measures, and a perceived acceleration familiar from our highways. Yes, it might take a day or two, (or a week) to climb to orbit like that. And once we were actually in space many safety bets were certainly going to be off regardless. But there had to be another way because I could see myself not just being up there, but living for a while, so vividly. And peacefully. And still, I knew for sure, no shaking, multi-million dollar bottle of oxidizer and fuel was gonna be strapped to my butt… hopefully ever. Sometimes I would fall asleep thinking “how does one build an elevator that big” until the answer finally came.

I thought about taking a nap now, and actually believed I could because the excitement of departure had worn off twice already. First at lift off, if you could call it that. Then again not long after passing through the ever fluctuating Karman Line, as we crossed wide-eyed into the “black,” which was definitely as cool as it sounded. It was truly thrilling what had happened a while ago now, the celebration of being one of the first 15 humans to ascend this slowly to space; but since things were already about half as good as I dreamed they could ever be, and we wouldn’t be experiencing the super important micro-gravity until this thing paused to slow down again, in about about ten more hours, I suddenly felt very tired..

Someone yawned.

“Bored already?” Dušaan, our Main Pilot, Second Flight Engineer, and one of 9 people assigned to command these shuttles up the first ever space elevator, laughed as he made the joke.

“Ummm noooo.” Carle, finished from his involuntarily stretched mouth. “Must be the altitude change.” Carle was in this shuttle because, unlike the remaining three of us, he paid his way onboard. He and his partner, Jo, were young and wealthy, and they both paid for their own tickets making them the first couple to go to space together who were also gonna pay for their own meals. It read great in the media and they became quite famous for what they were about to do up there. She rode in one of the other two pods making the ascent with us and it wasn’t hard to feel what was on either of their minds.

We didn’t have them separated because of that though. They were in separate shuttles because of safety. Or so I believed when I set the rule. I knew it was going to feel kind of cold that people who were so close to each other weren’t going to get to hold hands during the ascent, but it seemed necessary to me because there would be plenty of time for that later. And, in an emergency, I wanted there to be no need for heroics or a group dynamic that immediately pit two against five on some deserted island we might glide to half-way around the globe. He leaned just a little to his right toward her pod, and I am sure she was doing the same towards ours as they added just that much more force to those powerful magnets keeping the three shuttles together.

“Ummm, noooo-” Sua, the proud medic sarcastically, quipped, “it’s just your fight or flight mechanisms finally shutting down after all the thrill. We should probably all get some sleep.”

Sam yawned just before I did as well.

“Like I said… bored already!?” Dušaan laughed again at us all.

“MmmHmm,” I groaned back and clicked on the noise cancellation. I closed my eyes for the first time like I was laying on my bed at home, one perfect, full G keeping me, and the sheet I pulled up, in position. Which, by now, was about 400 miles off the surface with nothing but empty vacuum a few feet in every direction.

The dream from ten years earlier sat stubbornly at the origin of this moment and it immediately filled my mind. Again. “Are you actually going to sleep through the very realization of your dream?” The words of my higher self resonated from a place seemingly above the capsule. I smiled uncontrollably and almost chuckled out loud. I was, in fact, trying to sleep, and maybe even dream, in the very craft, while doing the very thing that had originally come to me, itself, in a dream. And talking to myself about it. It was as if I had fallen asleep a decade ago and was waking up now. Then arguing about going back to sleep because manifesting the dream had been so exhausting.

I opened my eyes at the chaos of it all. The emptiness beyond the panoramic window was obvious, and many of the stars were visible. So was the window itself. The little LED indicators and screens were lighting the capsule just enough that everything danced off the crystal clear plastic in streaked curves of green and red in the shapes of our bodies and gear.

I turned the comms back on.

“Hey ya’ll?” I asked extra patiently, masking my suddenly racing heart.

“Mmmhmm... Go ahead,” a small chorus of curious voices responded in near unison.

I hesitated, my heart becoming parent and child in one, and waited for the words to come out, “Anyone else ready to turn off the lights for a nap?”

“Yes!” a couple of voices yelled at once and everyone laughed a little too loud into their mics as we were all excited to really see what we could see.

“Ok then, in three, two-,”

“Wait!” obviously it was Carle that yelped.

“Just kidding,” Dušaan eased, “in five ok?”

“Ok!” the other four in our pod answered.

“Ok. Five, four,” and he shut the lights… resulting in one groan, three gasps, including my own, and a late, “oooh my God,” from Carle when he finally looked up from whatever he was searching for. We all moaned in agreement with him. The window vanished and we were suddenly, really seeing space, from space, for the first time. It was truly as I had envisioned ten years earlier, and had been the design feature I was made to fight the hardest for. It was as if there was no barrier between us and all of that light-filled nothing and I felt as vindicated as I was stunned in awe. I don’t think anyone breathed.

For a while.

Until the tension of it all became too much for me.

“Have a nice nap,” I snapped to everyone and we all laughed again at the ludicrous prospect.

* * *