Out Among the Stars

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. That would almost be true, but they forgot a key factor: the screamer. I can say from experience, your own ears can hear the screech that leaves your throat, and you can feel yourself do it. You don’t focus on that part much to be honest, your flailing limbs reaching out for nothing are what holds much more of your attention.

I had worked hard to get where I was, and I mean that. Maybe I sound too proud, but when you start gearing towards a career in elementary school, it’s something that is a part of you for a long time. I was that very science fair, space camp, graduating high school early to start college at 16 type of kid. I’d taken every class NASA recommended and joined the space program as early as I possibly could.

As I saw the station we were working on blink out of sight from the distance, I stopped fighting or screaming. That wasn’t how I wanted to die. I knew I was dying then - I wasn’t attached to enough oxygen. I closed my eyes in the already-dark and tried blanking out my mind, tried to die a peaceful death.

I was 6 when I was in Mrs. Stevens’ class and became obsessed with the orbiting planet display she had. When I learned that astronauts had actually been on the moon, it was all over for me with any other topic. I loved the stars, and begged my dad for those glow-in-the-dark ones; he bought probably 10 bags and covered every inch of my ceiling and the tops of my wall in them. I had shuttle model kits that I labored over like I was making the real thing and hung from my starred ceiling.

I was an only child and my parents were pleased to instill an interest in me that could be so fruitful. I was lucky in that both of my parents worked STEM careers, if not in the field of space. My mother was a surgeon and my father was a mathematician. This offered me parents that took my hobby seriously, and also a household with the income to indulge one child’s fantasy endlessly.

In middle school our classes handed us information on Greek, Roman, Egyptian gods and more. Their connections to pieces of outer space thrilled me. I went through a teenage phase of researching astrology. I wanted to know who ruled each planet, each asteroid, each piece of star. I memorized family lines and stories alongside calculus and astronomy. I was lucky to be in the family I was in and the circumstances that brought to my life, but I would be lying if I’d said being an only child with working parents wasn’t lonely. I wanted to reach out to something that would reach back.

By the time I was in high school I had proven that I was someone who was going to be taking school seriously, so my parents went ahead and spent the money to put me in a private accelerated-learning college prep school. It was easy to focus on my schooling, since it held most my interests, and we had learned when I was younger that sports weren’t going to be for me. I just didn’t have the coordination required. My extra-curricular leaps were done instead through theater class. I graduated high school at 16 with early credits already under my belt, and was accepted into Purdue.

I was one of the youngest NASA had sent into space, heading out for the first time when I was 24 years old. Every single one of us to make it up there was thrilled, don’t get me wrong. Each of us was elated to find ourselves living what we’d worked so hard for. The work is rewarding, but as with most jobs that you travel for (especially staying in confined spaces), my coworkers were always just as happy to go home at the end as they were to get up there. I was surprised to be the only one who didn’t feel a need to go back. I tucked that away under a hefty serving of guilt, knowing that the parents who put so much into me being able to do this were the people waiting for me back on Earth. I was selfish for not wanting to go home.

Out here now floating in space, my mind felt sporadic and floaty, I was sure I was drifting in and out of consciousness. Everything was so black I didn’t know if my eyes were opened or closed, but if I was dying maybe I couldn’t see anymore anyway. It felt so stupid, now that I thought over all of it. They always said your life flashes before your eyes when you die, and here I was now, taking it all in, so I figured they were right.

All those years of education and obsession, to float away from my docking station at 27 years of age. The ignorance of shoving physical education to the side, to lose out from not having been athletic enough to hang out. The shame, hurt and embarrassment for my parents, to raise their only child to do this, and then lose her this way. I had ignored friendships and relationships to make it this far so fast, and now I had overshot and was going to experience none of that. Alone, floating in nothing, I began grieving for myself.

As I felt my eyes well up, I paused in my heartbreak. If I was crying, and thinking, I wasn’t dead. In fact, I realized my thoughts had only been solidifying for the last few minutes. Maybe I had been unconscious before, but I wasn’t dying - I was waking up from having passed out. Fear struck me, as I feared that some sort of pain or extreme cold would hit soon, and I would still have to experience a horrid death alone.

More time ticked by while none of that happened. I found out my eyes were indeed closed when a light near me went on. I looked over to it now, groggily, feeling like I was coming out of a daze. I couldn’t see what it was coming from. I was definitely floating in zero gravity still, but wherever I was must be contained, because the area I was in was filled with fog or steam of some sort. It looked like there was white past that, but I really couldn’t see well more than a foot in front of my face. I slowly lifted my hand and saw my glove raise up in front of me - I was still safe in my suit.

A sound buzzed and I was slowly lowered to the ground. The fog began to dissipate enough for me to see that I was in a very small chamber barely bigger than it needed to be for me to have been floating inside. All was white and it looked like a sterile room at a hospital or a gym shower. Another sound buzzed and I heard a swish behind my head. It made me nauseous to turn toward it, but I did so, needing to know what was happening.

“You may rest until you are ready. Then you may enter. Retain your suit,” a deep but calm voice said from the other side of the door. I heard “rest” and took the opportunity. Frankly I felt a little unwell and I was relieved I wasn’t suddenly in a second fight for my life.

I dropped out of consciousness again, I didn’t know for how long. I opened my eyes to the exact situation I had fallen asleep to, but feeling much better. I stood up, expecting to be shaky, but I had apparently slept long enough to really refuel myself. Whoever was on the other side of that doorway must have a lot of patience. And hopefully they would have some sort of food. I was sure I was alive and not in some weird afterlife, because at this point I was practically starving.

I looked straight through the doorway now, and I could see that there was little beyond it because it opened into a hallway. I hadn’t been looking into a deep room, I’d been looking about five feet on to a dark gray wall of a corridor.

“I’m coming,” I called out nervously, no idea who I was talking to. If I was on a craft from some other country, I didn’t want to tear around the corner and startle someone, sending myself into an international crisis .This shouldn’t be possible by any current standards I was aware of, but I thought maybe another country hadn’t been fully honest with us about their current tech and had been able to save me. I needed to handle this delicately.

I walked out and turned to head down a hall maybe 10 feet long. There were 2 thin doors on the right side, the one I was leaving being the third and last. Presumably those other 2 doors led to similar small chambers. At the end to the left was a wide opening into a large antechamber. Once I turned in, I barely saw what the surroundings looked like; I took one moment to take in the walls and floors that looked like marble in different shades of gray, if the lines of the marble shifted a little bit at all times. Those barely mattered to me, as the room of those waiting for me took the bulk of my attention.

The largest man I had ever seen sat smiling, sitting cross-legged on the floor. There was no cleaner way to put it - he was a giant. He seemed like the giants of fables that we were told never existed in our world. His ears, arms, hands - everything was in the same place as any other human, but all of it scaled larger than should be possible. There were some key differences, however. He had veins like we do - I’m certain because his skin was so pale that I could see the gray blood moving through him. His hair was silver and wispy.

He had enormous wings that stayed behind him, I could have sworn he was trying to tuck them together behind his back. His hands were out, palms up, and I knew this was all an attempt to appear unthreatening. I can’t say I didn’t appreciate it - whoever he was, he knew I was going to be afraid, and did his best to avoid that for me. I’m sure that’s why he kept trying to keep his gargantuan smile to a regular measure, and not beam at me manically, though he was clearly excited.

The most fearful part was his eyes. The same placement as any person’s yes, but where one would usually find a pupil, there was instead constantly rotating pieces of light. I say “pieces” because the way they spiked out reminded me of those kush ball toys from childhood, if they’d been made of raw energy instead of rubber, obviously.

Within the room were others, but most were my size, or only so large that they could have passed for extra-tall people. However he took the center of the room and they all looked toward him. I didn’t get a good look at anyone else but to see no one looked familiar - most looked as human as I, but a few here and there had see-through skin like his, or had proportions that didn’t fully make sense, or had eyes that did not glow but were spinning like his.

It was impossible to look away from him for more that a short while, as he was by far the most impressive thing in the room, and also was staring at me like I’d been brought as a gift. I was genuinely nervous I might be for eating, which made me appreciate the effort he seemed to be putting in to not scaring me. You don’t comfort your dinner first, right?

“Hello?” I managed, unsure what to say. I had been expecting to see people from another culture perhaps, but I hadn’t truly prepared for anything beyond that.

“Hello!” he boomed back. He seemed like he was trying to make sure he wasn’t overly loud, but it was almost impossible with a voicebox bigger than anyone else’s.

“You’re confused right now, but we’re going to settle you back in!” he said excitedly.

“You’re going to send me home?” I asked, assuming that was what he meant.

“Earth?” he asked. He waited for an answer - it was a genuine question.

“Yes,” I said firmly. “Earth.”

“Probably,” he said, shrugging, seeming a little disappointed. “Eventually your work will lead you back there since that’s where all the coding you just built up is for. But,” he added, in a much more cheerful tone, “You’ll get to stay with us while you reabsorb yourself, and you’ll get to start coming home now!”

He and I stared at each other. He, like someone who just announced to a child that they are getting a puppy and is waiting to see the excitement. Me, like someone who is trying to have a reasonable conversation with an insane person.

“I don’t know much coding, I work for the space program literally in the field, I didn’t code any of the equipment, I’m not in tech. I don’t think I need to reabsorb, I’m all here inside my suit, safe and sound. I just need to be returned to Earth.”

“Right! That’s your most recent twenty-seven. Now that you’re at the end of that cycle, we can reupload you to yourself and you’ll get the knowledge of your soul back!” And we then did another round of staring at each other exactly the same way as before. He definitely wanted me to be excited about this, and I was starting to go back to assuming I was dying in space and this was my brain shooting out the final electrodes as a hallucination.

“What,” I finally said, “Are you talking about?”

“I’m going to have your cousins and siblings here talk to you more about it,” he said, gesturing to everyone else in the room. A couple people waved politely. “We have multiple others who rebooted on Earth and they’ll explain this all to you in terms of what it means in the culture you just came from. But,” he took a deep breath with a great big smile like someone does before they yell surprise, “You’re home Astraea!”

“My name isn’t Astraea. My name is Alysa,” I said back lamely, unable to think of anything else more productive. He turned his head, giving me a smirk.

“You are innocent. As you should beautifully be. But you already know, all that you need to know, to know,” he said smugly.

I wanted that stupid, indulgent, pointless sentence to mean nothing to me. But after spending all those years reading myths, I knew against my own desire of knowing, that Astraeus, the god of dusk and Eos, a goddess of the dawn, were married eternally, and said to have many children together. Several of their sons made up the winds, and others represented planets. Astraea was their only daughter, and had represented innocence and justice, being the last of the immortals to finally abandon humans on Earth, when their crimes became too much to bear. But these were myths, from religions falling out of use.

My mouth dry, I made claims against myself. “She left in the Iron Age. She fled and became the constellation of Virgo. I cannot be someone who is an entire constellation.”

“You were reborn. You promised to return. After everything they did, you wouldn’t just leave them.” He looked at me proudly, and with a love I didn’t feel I’d earned, as I had met him all of 5 minutes ago.

Wracking my brain for the information, I felt myself heat up from embarrassment.

“She was…she was said to be returning to herald the new Golden Age. To help. I ignored. I learned math, obsessed over science. I didn’t go into the humanities,” Tears were streaming down my cheeks now. I didn’t know if I was going crazy, to accept any of this, but on a long list of reasons I didn’t want to be Astraea, having failed at being her correctly was on the list. “I didn’t usher in anything. I left Earth the second they gave me the chance.”

A soft look from this man, almost pitying. “You did right, my daughter. You took in the world around you while you were there, absorbed information about their current times and cultures. You were coded to work this hard to make it home as soon as you possibly could. You have come home to begin the second half of your training. When you return to Earth, you will have all the information you learned there, and what we will give you here. You will be ready.”

“When?” I asked, unable to process everything at once, only wanting to hear when I would return to a world that I had thought myself bored of before this.

“Fifteen years was the goal,” he said calmly, as casually as if he was telling me my plane delayed. He may have said it that way, but must have known the information would hit me hard. This time as I felt myself fainting from the stress and the shock, he held out his massive hand and caught my entire body in it gently, and even as I blacked back out, I knew I would wake up safe. And apparently, “home”.