Trans-Neptunian: Chapter One

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. This thought flitted in and out of my mind countless times during my studies at the Academy. It didn't always feel like fear. Sometimes that thought rode on the back of curiosity, or fantasy, or excitement. Can you imagine emptying your lungs in the vastness of the universe where no one, friend or foe, could do a thing about it or even know it happened? But sometimes there was a twinge of anxiety. It could come from something as obviously unsettling as a lecture on the history of critical malfunctions in the zero-g environment, or something as innocuous as an equation to calculate the amount of oxygen needed for a spacewalk. One errant decimal place may be the last decimal you ever place.

My grandfather says he remembers a time when a trip to the moon was still a big deal. It cost tens of millions of dollars and required dedicated teams on the ground just to get a small crew to Luna and back. Now in the 2060s new astronauts aren't even required to make the Luna trip unless they're working on a pilot's license. Most of us have been there a few times as kids, long before we knew we wanted a career in space. No, these days the standard rookie mission is Mars. We've made great strides in space propulsion in the last 20 years, but to the average tourist, the trip to Mars is just “tolerable”. The ride is long, the planet is dead, and the science left to do is, frankly, a bit boring. All of the excitement of exploration is behind us. These days, you have to be really into geology if you expect to get anything out of Mars beyond mission experience. I am not geologically inclined.

But I'm not recording this to bore you with the details of my undergrad missions. This document (a memoir, maybe?) concerns the 2063 American Aerospace Supply mission to the Sol 3 station, located sunside of the Kuiper belt. I'll say this upfront, this report is going to get heavy, so forgive me if I allow myself the occasional light-hearted aside. For instance, I have a piece of trivia for you. The eccentric billionaire who founded the AAS initially filed the paperwork under the name American Space Supply. Apparently his lawyer had a stick so far up his rear he didn't even notice the acronym. The good scout who received the paperwork took the time to confirm the name of the company. Said billionaire thought it was hilarious. Said lawyer disagreed. The lawyer had the name changed and had the good scout bribed to never speak of it again. The billionaire tweeted the whole thing immediately.

In December of 2062 I received my orders for the resupply mission. The orders came only a week after graduation. I thought I would have more time to loaf around my apartment without a dark cloud of responsibility hanging over me. The weekend before takeoff, I made sure to do as much of said loafing as I could tolerate. I'm sure my behind left an imprint in the sofa that's still there to this day. That Sunday evening, my partner brought home Chinese food and we watched the 2014 classic, “Interstellar”. This might be a bit too personal to include in a report, but what the hell, there's nobody here to stop me.

My partner, Mica, who could never sit right on a chair or anything else, was pretzeled around a tub of popcorn next to me on the sofa. About every third time I reached for some popcorn, they tried to take a bite out of my hand. Absolutely adorable. Anyway, at some point Mica asked whether I could be assigned to a mission involving time dilation. My recent-grad-brain answered, of course, even objects in Earth's atmosphere experience a degree of time dilation.

“That's not what I meant,” Mica said. They gave me “the look”- the one that means I need to consider the emotional weight of the topic at hand. I never was good at that. God, Mica is so patient with me.

“No, not like that,” I tried again. “They do have some long-haul missions in the works, but they don't send rookies. There's a heck-ton of training and even more paperwork involved before they'll even consider you for something like that. The worst you and I might contend with is a difference of a few days when I come home.”

Mica snorted softly while chewing a mouthful of popcorn and swallowed. “You should hold onto that factoid for the next time you forget our anniversary.”

Mica... I'm going to hold onto that entire day for the rest of my life.

We received our briefing en-route to the launch site. We were a five-person crew aboard a small freighter loaded with food, scientific instruments and miscellaneous essentials to keep the outpost manned for another year. Three seasoned astronauts, Jackson, Ikeda and Schreider, were to remain aboard Sol 3 to relieve three who were scheduled to return home. Myself and La Hargrave, one of my classmates at the Academy, were tasked with getting the ship there and bringing it back. Four months there, two-week stay, four months back.

The trip out was uneventful, and you have logs of that anyway. The old-timers didn't give us rookies too much grief. Ikeda said a few days of fun hazing newbies isn't worth the weeks of resentment while we're stuck in a tin can together. I can appreciate that. They did get to have a little fun though: La's name is actually Stella. “An astronaut named Stella?” She kept it quiet at school as much as possible, but you can't exactly hide your name on a duty roster. People like to get a rise out of her. La says it's because she's a short Asian woman. I don't see the connection.

Anyway, the trip was smooth and we arrived at Sol 3 as scheduled. Commander Andix was very welcoming and insisted we take the rest of the day to relax and get acquainted with the outpost and its inhabitants. That's a task that would only take a day; it's very small and only houses about a dozen people at any given time. Still, it was nice to stretch out and swap stories about Academy life, the veterans eager to hear whether the old groundskeeper was still alive and to find out which professors were still teaching. After that it only took one nonstop workday to unload our cargo, break things down and pack things up for the return trip.

I spent the bulk of the next few days in the hydroponics bay. One of several ongoing experiments aboard Sol 3 is to maintain a garden as far away from Earth as we could reliably get. The plants are all familiar to anyone who's ever encountered a vegetable garden. Science has come a long way in learning how to grow food in space using methods and materials familiar to Earth. This setup is more about studying how extraterrestrial factors affect plant life. There's space dust, and asteroid soil, and vacuum testing... Look, I know you know this already. I just find it fascinating and, well, it's going to be relevant later.

If you examine Sol 3's medical logs the week of our arrival, you'll see a brief note about Lt. Briar experiencing an acute panic attack. I don't know whether they made a personal log containing details of the incident, so I'll include them here. At approximately 18:30 Briar and I were eating dinner in the mess room. They were fine at first, but Briar seemed to become agitated, turning their head about and fingering their hair as if trying to shake off some sensation or an itch.

I asked if they were all right, and Briar said, “Get it off me!”

“Lieutenant?” I probed, not catching their meaning. Before they could answer, Briar began to hyperventilate and curled their body into a ball. I jumped up and paged the medic.

Briar was treated and released. Medical didn't find anything, and it's not unheard of that acute psychiatric episodes occur when you've been in space a long time. In fact Briar said that's probably what it was. They were scheduled to return to Earth with us after a 2-year assignment nearly 30 au from home. Maybe they were just antsy to get back on solid ground.

Maybe. With the benefit of hindsight, I think this was the first indicator that something was going on, something anomalous. After the others had gotten Briar out of the mess room, I stayed behind to clear our places. There was one detail I saw so briefly that it didn't even register until I replayed the scene in my head as I tried to make sense of it all. As I dumped Briar's tray, there was something that looked a bit like hair on it. The way Briar had been moving about could easily have left a few strands behind. In the days since, I've encountered something else which may provide an alternate explanation.

And that's probably about where the logs end, I'm guessing. I have no way of knowing whether anyone or anything beyond that made it back to Earth or even to Sol 2. Hell, maybe nobody is ever going to listen to this either. Sorry to leave you hanging, but I have to take a break. Mostly I need to collect my thoughts, but partially there's something different about the look of the horizon of this... wherever I am, and I want to be ready just in case. Ensign Aspen Pelletier, signing off.