Excursion

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. But I wasn’t in the vacuum of space. I was stuck in a glorified soda can hurtling towards the moon at 26.85 thousand miles per hour, less than two feet from a guy who I swear to god did not stop screaming from the moment we left the landing pad. Honestly I’d probably have been impressed by his lung capacity if I hadn’t been devoting one hundred percent of my concentration to trying to pass out so that I could experience the only form of escape available to me at that moment.

I don’t normally like to judge people based on something as out of their hands as their birth name, but I’m just gonna say it; when I saw the name Wade Metason on the shortlist for this year’s excursion, I knew exactly the kind of person he would be. And the hearing loss I’m most likely going to have to have corrected when we get back to earth - if we get back to earth - is proof that my assumptions were spot on. The name Wade Metason screams money. Not literally of course. Wade Metason himself was the only one literary screaming. Which, you know, is to be expected when everyone else who made the excursion list got there by, uh, excelling at something other than being the son of a multi billionaire?

Anyway. Thankfully the medic, E.M. I think his name was... he slapped some sticker on Wade’s arm the moment the seatbelt light turned off and within seconds the noise finally stopped. Or, at least I assume the noise stopped because Wade was flopped forwards like a decommissioned bot but honestly the ringing in my ears was so bad that I couldn’t really tell at what point he actually stopped screaming. Initially I assumed it was a standard issue patch and I’d just tuned out during that part of the first aid briefing but when we made our mid flight recording, E.M. listed Wade’s status as unconscious due to nervous system overload and I swear to god he winked at me as he said it. I guess no one else had seen him apply it, and the patch was near invisible unless you looked closely, so I decided I’d try and catch him alone once we got to the outpost because I was curious as hell.

But that was days ago now. I think. God it’s hard to judge time up here. Whenever it was, the patch doesn’t even rank in the top hundred questions I want answered now. But I’m getting ahead of myself. So anyway, the mid flight report was basically a non-event aside from the patch thing. Ground reported that everything was unexceptional on their end and we reported that everything was unexceptional on our end and Elle, (excursion leader... and my best friend since we were like three) ended the transmission and then the five of us (Wade excluded) just sat there in silence for a full minute, each of us looking from one face to another. Elle was the first to crack. It started as one of those near silent laughs where you just like, start exhaling violently through your nose as your stomach muscles practically convulse. E.M. seemed a little concerned, but I didn’t even need to glance at her to know what the sound meant. My laughter was a little less subtle... which honestly felt far more appropriate for the situation. The others soon started laughing, albeit a little less enthusiastically, as Elle and I gasped for air, tears streaming down our faces.

“Un... excep... tional!” I finally managed to get out.

Elle somehow managed to regain enough composure to get out a full sentence between jagged breaths. “Yeah, they really... needed to think of a better term... to describe successfully leaving the planet.”

We all fell silent again as reality hit on a new level.

We’d all grown up knowing we might be selected for an excursion in our final year... but when you’re a kid, you think seventeen is basically an adult. You think it’s a no brainer that you might end up on your way to an outpost, with five other seventeen year olds, in a glorified soda can. You probably had relatives who’d made the trip when they were seventeen. And you’d definitely played out the adventure hundreds of times in your spare time, you and your friends using your family’s VR system to explore every possible scenario you might face. Or at least, what you thought was every possible scenario. What the program designers thought was every possible scenario. But even in that moment back on the shuttle, not knowing what awaited us at the outpost, every one of us knew that there was nothing unremarkable about what we were doing.

Except for Wade. Wade probably knew shit all in that moment on account of being unconscious.