First Light

(submitted to the New Worlds challenge)

CHAPTER ONE: GENESIS

"Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say," I ruminated, peering into the eye-socket of the telescope, "for man was not made to venture so far and so deep- Wait! Captain! Hostiles! Pewpew! Pepepepepewww!"

I swung the telescope around, strafing the night sky with imaginary fire. I was no longer on a hillside in the middle of nowhere in the Northern Hemisphere of Earth. I was on the Mars Colony, fighting drones sent by anti-democratic militants. They were coming in from all sides, but I held my ground as my team fell around me.

It was just me alone now, the last man standing, but I fought on. I, Marco Shackleton, a mere twelve years old, would win the UN Medal of Honour. I would-

-"MARCO! THAT WAS EIGHT THOUSAND DOLLARS!" roared Lee.

The assault ceased at once. I was back on the hillside.

It was $8000. And even at that age, I knew my older brother had a right to be pissed. $8000 was a lot of money in those days. He'd saved for an entire summer to get it.

It would be the last thing he ever bought.

I held my breath, waiting for his knuckles to force the air out of my lungs... But they never did. Instead, Lee stood over me, his eyes - far too intelligent for a seventeen year old's - cut into my conscience so sharply that I had to stare at my feet.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"It's alright," he said, "but if you do it again you're riding home in the trunk."

I grinned.

He was going easy on me. I was out with him in the middle of nowhere against my will, and I knew that he was trying to win me over.

He started tapping coordinates into his iPhone Millennium and watched patiently as the telescope responded by slowly readjusting to its orientation. It was easy to forget that he was as much a jock as he was a nerd.

He gave me a couple of side glances when he thought I wasn't looking. Eventually, he broke the silence:

"You know, if you wanna shoot stuff, you should join the peacekeepers, but if you wanna see the really scary shit, you should go to space."

He was trying to pique my interest. It didn't land. I slumped down on the ground. We'd driven a million miles from home on a perfectly good gaming night, and my twelve year old attention-span was not coping. I pulled out my own iPhone and made do with an old version of Call of Duty: Ukraine.

To anyone other than my brother, it would have been a fool's errand to try to get me interested in interstellar travel. But Lee was determined. He'd been determined since the previous night when I reacted with my characteristic "So?" to the news that the first ever faster-than-light voyage was a success. Though I wasn't listening at the time, in the coming months I would learn that this voyage had sent the ship to the edge of our solar system in just a few minutes, far faster than expected. But, at the time, my apathetic reaction to this extraordinary news had sent Lee into a rage. He demanded - then pleaded - that our parents let us go stargazing the following night...

So far, it was going about as well as I, or anyone other than Lee, would have expected. I was a child. What the hell did I care about exponential drives, space-time warping, or antimatter. I barely scraped through reading and writing, let alone arithmetic.

"There," Lee said finally, checking the telescope one final time, "You ready?"

"Uh huh..." I said, not removing my eyes from my phone.

Lee paused,"so that'll be a 'no', then..?"

I started to get up, "Sure, let's get this over wi-"

-"Stop. Don't get up," he said.

He sat down beside me, then clicked off my phone and chucked it on the grass.

"Hey!" I snapped.

"You'll thank me in a minute," he said.

I slumped again.

"Right," he said, "Close your eyes..."

I began to obey but then caught myself:

"You're not gonna hit-"

-"I swear, I'm not gonna hit you," he said, "Just trust me. Close your eyes real tight."

With one final suspicious glance, I closed my eyes tight.

"Good, he said, "Keep 'em closed. Now lie back. Don't worry, I got you... Good. Right, now spread your arms out wide. Yep... now, I want you to squeeze your eyes closed even tighter, as tight as you can."

I squeezed my eyes closed so tight that colours burst out of the darkness.

"And... get ready..." Lee continued, "And... Open!"

My eyes flew open at his command.

I was looking at a different world. The night sky - no longer a ceiling over the hillside we were lying on - was now an empty void pulling me in, and only the grassy ground under my back was stopping me from falling.

"Okay, now really look at it... All of it..." said Lee quietly.

The stars that were once blurry blots were now an overwhelming dome of glimmering lights. I could feel the distances between them. The nearer stars were a shade brighter and sharper, and yet, the more distant ones somehow drew my attention, calling me closer.

I had seen the sky before, but the sky in front of me now was pure and uncorrupted by the glow of artificial light that poisons the skies above cities. The sky that our ancestors had revered as a thousand distant gods, that sailors had guided their ships with, that prophets had told fortunes by, I had gone twelve years without ever seeing it. Up until that point in my life, I had never seen anything that I would have called beautiful, and in doing so, for the first time, I felt mortal.

It would not be the only time that night.

It was either a few minutes or a few hours later when we finally got up and stood by the telescope.

"You ready?" said Lee.

Without answering, I placed my eye over the socket. I had been expecting to see a star. Instead I was looking at a swirling technicolour mass of light.

"A galaxy," said Lee, answering my unvoiced curiosity.

"Wow..." I said. I had abandoned the pretensions of a boy on the verge of adolescence. I was a child again.

"Look," he said.

He held up his iPhone Millennium. It read: 'Est. Distance: 65 Million Light Years'.

That number rang a bell. Dinosaurs were the one science-related subject that I'd shown any interest in growing-up.

"The dinosaurs..." I began.

"Yeah, that light is 65 million years old," he said, "As old as the dinosaurs. That galaxy might not even be there anymore. Its light took 65 million years to get to us so who knows what has happened since then."

He had my curiosity, and he needed it. I was on the verge of understanding but he was going to have to guide me there. Looking back, I don't envy him. Explaining to a scientifically illiterate child that light has a constant speed, and that the light reaching our telescope now was only a reflection of the past would have been no easy task for an adult, let alone a seventeen year old. But Lee was as much a nerd as he was a jock. He got me there. And he came alive doing so. It was as if a dam had broken and he could finally share his passion with his little brother. He quoted names like Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking. Names that I had never heard but would come to know very well. But there is only one quote that has stuck with me from that night because of the idea that it lead to:

Lee showed me a picture of a cluster of nascent galaxies. He explained to me that the light in that picture had travelled 13.4 billion years to reach the James Webb Space Telescope back in 2022.

"My professor is always saying something," he said, "She says: 'History is written in the skies, and we can read almost everything.'"

By this time, we had abandoned the telescope and were sitting back down on the hillside. We sat for a long time until a strange thought came to me.

"Almost everything?" I asked.

"Hmm?" said Lee, coming out of a reverie.

"You said 'Almost' everything," I said.

He thought for a moment.

"Well, yeah. I mean, we can't see our own past..." he said, "And we can't see the beginning."

"The beginning?" I said.

"The big bang. The birth of the universe," he said.

"Why not?"

"Well, because we can't," he said.

"You sound like Dad," I said.

He understood that this was a challenge to do better.

"The light... isn't..." he began

"Is it gone?" I interrupted.

"No," he said.

"Then where is it?" I said.

"Well... not here... not anywhere nearby either... It's... well it's very very far away." he said.

"How far?"

"Put it this way: the light from the birth of the universe would be where nothing else has ever been, because it was the first thing to ever happen." he said.

"Then we'd be the first people to see it." I said.

"What?"

"If we went there," I said.

Lee burst out laughing. He retreated back into his reverie for some time. I sat there, borderline-stunned that I had thought of something that Lee hadn't. He seemed to be thinking the same thing.

"Fuck me, Marco," he laughed, "Not bad."

"So? D'you wanna go?" I asked, as if we were deciding whether or not to go to the theatre that weekend.

"You wanna film the dawn of time?" he said.

"Yeah," I said.

"Well, I can't say it's impossible now, can I? The potential of exponential drives is virtually limitle-"

-"Yeah, but do you wanna go?" I interrupted again. I had to cut him off before he got distracted.

He paused.

"Sure," he said with a grin, "Why not. Someone's gonna do it one day. Might as well be us."

We started making plans... in the way that two kids who know nothing about how the world works make plans. We had a way of egging each other on. Whatever dangers we would face, we would overcome them. We were the exceptions to the rule. Lee mused about what it would mean for the human race to see the birth of existence. I revelled in the glory of it all, of being the first to do something truly great. Gazing into the depths of the starry sky, I no longer felt small or fragile. I felt excited. We would be explorers. We would burn our names onto the first page of every history book. Marco and Lee Shackleton would conquer existence itself.

But it would only be me.

It was getting late, far too close to midnight. Our mother videoed in and tore us to pieces for not having left yet. It was a school night. If we didn't get back we'd be grounded all weekend. We scrambled back to the car.

The country road was dark, but straight. Lee knew the way. To me he knew everything. He didn't even have the GPS on, and the speed cap wasn't active outside of the suburbs. We could go as fast as we wanted.

He sped up momentarily. I laughed. He sped up again. I laughed even louder. I felt a little wary, but it was okay if Lee said it was okay. I wrote it off as a thrill. He sped up again - I laughed even louder, thumping my car seat. We had a way of egging each other on. Again and again we sped up and slowed down, each time dropping down less than we were speeding up. Soon we were going so fast that I could feel the car lift off the ground at every dip in the road. We soared, howling like coyotes. It was safe. My brother always knew what he was doing. If it was dangerous he would have slowed down. The dust cloud behind us blared in the empty night. The beams from our headlights could barely keep up with us. The darkness was getting closer and closer to the windshield. Then... There was nothing. Just darkness.

I didn't recognise Lee when I woke up. I only knew it was him from the shirt that he was wearing. His tops of shoulders were pressed up against the windshield. The roof had caved in from the weight of the car that was now above it. I hung upside down. The mist of torn up gravel and burned rubber that curled against the cold night air around my face made whatever was outside the car window indiscernible. It was just me alone now, left in an empty void that was pulling me down and only the seat belt cutting into my chest was stopping me from falling.

I tried to cry out against the burning of my ribcage. Nobody could hear. I tried to scream. Nobody could hear. Not my parents. Not Lee. He was seventeen years old. My god, he was only seventeen. I was just a child, trapped out there in the enveloping dark, completely helpless.

I suppose that I am still a child now as I watch what's left of my crew of like-minded dreamers slowly freeze to death in the only place in the universe where light has never been. We believed that we were the exceptions to the rule, desperate to burn our names into the history books. Now we might die waiting to see if those thin traces of red light, sent 13.7 billion years before, will touch the glass of our telescopes now, in a year, or in our lifetimes? I christened our ship The Icarus with irony. Now I realise it was prophecy.

All of this to fulfil some stupid childhood vow sworn standing over my brother's coffin. That vow set the course of my life. A course that would hurl me above the clouds, through the atmosphere, past the stars, and into the deepest vacuum of space. In that vow, I became the man who would film the dawn of time... And now it seems I will die trying.