In Ascension

by Martin MacInnes

Rather than getting divers in – too expensive, too laborious, and anyway the obstruction was likely much too deep – investigators leased an orbiting satellite for a new depth reading.

Lol

‘I think,’ he said eventually, still looking ahead, ‘that life on Earth is already stranger – much stranger – than we credit. It’s perhaps difficult to really face this; certainly it’s difficult to do the idea justice. I think we might share this frustration.’ ‘Yes. I think we do. That’s why I get up every day and go into the lab – because I want to face it, this strangeness.’

Life as a repeated failure to apprehend something. Coming close then veering away again, sensing this unnameable category, music heard distantly through a series of doors, a dull, echoing bass, a sound hitting your body. A distant humming, a smudge of darkness on the otherwise clear horizon –

‘In my experience, when people look to astronomy for causes, they’re pushing the answer further away; it’s a form of giving up.’

It was surprising how quickly a group of experienced professionals could develop something like superstition, and it was fascinating to watch. Whatever reasonable objections people raised – higher aluminium levels, a possible toxic run-off from the minerals – underneath it was a simpler, older, baser fear.

feeling supple and loose.

Stop

The possibility of life, mineral into organic, objects creating themselves in a frenzy of feeling, striving not to end, briefly distinct from what surrounds them before coming apart again, back into disparate chemicals.

I resisted being so easily explained,

I submitted to the airport, directed by officials, shepherded through gates, scanned by thermal cameras and temperature gauges, ushered into a row of uncomfortable plastic seats gripping my carry-on as if it were the most precious thing in the world.

How it feels

In truth, the relationship had been on the verge of ending anyway, and the job offer was an excuse. Dana did her best to disguise her relief when I told her the news. Eighteen months together and still we lived apart. I liked staying at hers, having the option of a separate place to go to. Relationship as vacation, addendum to real life.

told him I was fine. I didn’t want to be unprofessional – that’s how it starts, then suddenly the work slides and the months pass and I’m quietly let go, and for all the time I’m preoccupied, resenting my weakness, my inability to separate family and work, resenting, as well – the really unconscionable part – the presence of my mother and my sister in my life.

Maybe she’d fallen for us, to show us how alone she was, how difficult it had been since Dad died and she came home only to herself each night. The difference, when you get in at the end of the week, close the door behind you, put the keys on the worktop and take your shoes off and realise that the week’s completion entails only itself, that there is nothing after it, only yourself and the beginning of the next week and the one after, that all weeks forever are pressed into a seamless block, there is nothing outside of it, no relief in something shared, no brief escape or refuge – you realise that it’s gone.

Damn

This is probably the case across the galaxy, across the universe even, quintillions upon quintillions of planets, all of which are generating this frail, rudimentary, soupy kind of life. And it stays this way, for billions of years on every suitable planet, incomprehensible numbers. So life as a microscopically differentiated liquid capsule, defining itself against what’s around it only in the loosest possible sense.’

Weirdly, it appeared to increase speed as it travelled away from the sun.

Solar power babyyyy

string of numbers. The

Omg numerology I’m schizophrenic too

Preserved proto-cells; impenetrable languages; the rendered architecture of a vast, long-extinct civilisation. It wasn’t a good idea, looking up. How could I sleep, how could I lie down under this? And how could I speak to my sister?

Any sufficiently advanced technology will appear indistinguishable from magic. There was now general agreement that the thrust design was an alien technology transmitted through Datura. The dreams that delivered the information to the engineers were connected to the ovals carved onto the object and to the empty-brackets message sent back from the Voyager space probe.

our ability to harness a volatile system. Even the designers admitted they knew so little about this that it wasn’t safe to conduct a full-scale trial on Earth. The flashes of colour, the alien appearance of the aircraft, the unprecedented take-offs and landings, were like tantalising hints of a concealed violence.

I stopped doing much at all, other than work, pool, gym. I began several emails to Helena, but closed them before sending.

Damn real

when he was unoccupied, holding, throwing, squeezing this little red rubber ball, turning it over between his fingers, pressing on it, an aid to thinking, a nervous tic, a barrier between him and pure vacancy. Four siblings. Military family. Careful stubble, big appetite, reads biographies, no apparent interest in music. Music is a ‘cheat’, he says. ‘You don’t need to dress it up. It’s enough as it is, or should be.’ I never asked him what ‘it’ was.

The present, regardless of what it entails, almost always comes with an in-built inertia, a resolute, robust banality. When I looked back, I felt an almost overpowering desire to relive certain moments with the recognition they deserved. My father’s funeral; my first day at Ridgecrest; my conversations with Helena as it slowly dawned on us our mother was unwell. As difficult as each of these experiences was, none of them at the time seemed remarkable. Driving the three hours between Pasadena and my apartment, I could see that this was a strategy aimed purely at my survival. Real life, present life, was often just too much.

Talking was only going to become more difficult: her pauses were getting longer, she repeated herself, sometimes struggling to name things, as if the world was getting further out of reach.

This is my worst nightmare I would off myself

straw-clip which we opened by blowing softly twice, feeding us water and protein paste.

Need

The trick, always, was to keep constantly busy, to give yourself little time to reflect or prepare, to learn of the latest exercise only at the last possible moment.

While we waited for updates I tried to meditate. To focus on the light, on time distilled as a golden thread across the white plaster walls, Earth’s rotation expressed through a coffee table, a laptop, the struck eyes of a crewmate.

What Teller’s calculation told him, apparently, was that there was a negligible but nevertheless real possibility that initiating Trinity on 16 July would detonate an explosion that would consume the world.

Fake news I saw a video about the specific calculations and the probability was infinitesimally small

The source of the thrust design, the pattern on the object, the thing that will carry the ship. The whole of the propulsion system will be sealed from the crew. It isn’t just advisable, it’s essential. If you try to observe it, it disappears.

Oooo quantum something or other

It resists containment because it is itself a container.

What is this even supposed to mean

The alien may be a particular way of calibrating energy, not constituted in any one of the properties that delivers the power, but in the act of delivery itself. A state and not a body, a pattern not a form.

I actually have no idea what this means

Historically NASA gets the most photogenic staff out and puts them in the wide glass-fronted offices broadcast live. Something like half the people standing and wiping down their brows and hugging each other in shirtsleeves as the rockets launch are secretaries, junior staff, relatives of directors. The offices are literally a front. The real work goes on behind. The people who built the ship and work with the crew and listen to their quickened breath are in no fit state to be recorded. They are worried about their friends. They are studying in great detail every one of the tens of thousands of malfunctions that could bring the ship down over the Atlantic.

Our velocity after acceleration is such that the smallest fleck of dust may destroy us. (The system trained on 50,000 simulated voyages, and only once hit anything.)

Geez I’m sure this isn t foreshadowing

Earth was diminishing all the time and Mars growing larger, casting a red glow through the dimmed mid-deck. According to the display, our next scheduled meal would coincide with our first planetary fly-by. I brought my arm towards the porthole and skimmed its surface with two fingers, trailing them across the planets. Tyler and K had done the same – a primitive compulsion, an inability to acknowledge scale. Allen would like it, the psychologists too – the desire to touch the fibreglass when planets appear.

So many times I had identified errors – in my work and in my relationships – stemming from the original mistake of too many assumptions, of predicting rather than perceiving the world and seeing something that wasn’t really there.

One of the first things she’d said to me, back in Ridgecrest, was that I reminded her of her daughter. I gathered they weren’t especially close. It was the usual story: overwork, deferral, inability to communicate, a baseless belief that one day you might make things right.

Saturn’s body. The planet’s ammonia yellow hue lights the mid-deck and strikes our faces. The discs have sublime geometry, the first truly perfect objects I have ever seen.

Uria will miss the pregnancy; she’ll miss most of the first year of her grandchild’s life. I feel a sense of shame, and in that moment Nereus’s mission, our nineteen-month voyage, seems insignificant. We should never have left. If it means that only one woman could be there for her daughter, we should never have left the ground.

So much is at stake, always, but so clearly now. A journey to an unknown presence at the far side of the solar system, and the routine birth of a child. Anxious phone calls to Maria and transmissions to the ship. If there’s bad news, will Uria tell us? Will it affect the way her voice sounds, and what will we read into this, not knowing the cause? The transfer works the other way too: a problem on Nereus, Uria alerted mid-sleep in the motel, a car brings her to Room 1 but it’s too late, it’s already happened, all that’s left of us is light, and she’s distraught as Maria calls her but she can’t tell her why, not yet. Maria, in turn, is upset. Her diet changes, she finds it harder to sleep, her stress levels shoot up and increase the chances of premature and low-weight birth. Every single frame in each millisecond is pivotal. How do we go on like this? How do Uria, Maria – how does anyone – go on?

Even at the peak of it, the two of us quietly eating our sandwiches on the lawn on a plaid blanket, I couldn’t lose the sense that this was ending, that the more the experience developed, the more I lost it. The closer it got, the quicker it fled. When I sobbed, later, in the station bathroom, my mother holding my head gently in her arms, shushing me and telling me it would be OK, everything would be OK, what was streaming out of me wasn’t, as she might have thought, prompted by a specific fear about returning home to Geert. It was about happiness. The richness of our day had been too much for me. And even now, as I remember the days, the strange, quiet trips to that oddly deserted town, and I picture my mother, her patient, tired smile, the way she carefully adjusted her stride to keep by me, doing this for one reason only – to give me pleasure; to make me feel good; to offer me, for this one day, or this moment, happiness – it’s too much, and I burst into tears, holding my breath where I can to gather in the sound so the others don’t hear me through the walls separating us. I should have been there for her; I wanted to but couldn’t tell her how I felt, and now everything has gone.

‘Galaxy’ comes from the Ancient Greek for milk. People looked at the density of stars and saw birth, maternal sustenance scattered across the sky. A miracle, something over nothing. Fenna says my first word was ‘da’, that Geert liked to say I’d picked up English. But ‘da’, in my third language, means ‘there’ – a gesture, a directive, a hand that’s pointing. I prefer this reading. It’s there. Like the blank message sent from Voyager 1, a bare, empty fact. A world, a thing. It’s there. It can’t be, but it’s there.

‘I’ve always been afraid of a lack of volition, of doing things for reasons outside my awareness.

The heliosphere isn’t really a sphere at all, more an elongated teardrop shape. The whole inner system – the planets, the sun, the moons, the incalculable asteroids and micro debris – appears as a single curved body drifting through space. Like the juvenile stage of an aquatic life form. Was this all alive, on a completely non-appreciable scale? Was all this – 13 billion years – a brief beginning in a form that was yet to mature?

Senility rises exponentially. In many ways it’s a crisis of language, words taking longer to emerge and disappearing quicker. If she believed in such things she might say this was a pathology developed by the species to protect itself, turning away from an increasingly insupportable reality into denial and hallucination.

So Geert occasionally slapped them lightly. This was just what fathers did back then. It certainly hadn’t been excessive, not as she remembers it. Leigh’s smile suggested she knew something Helena didn’t, and these are the only moments she can recall of her sister displaying a superior attitude towards her. As if her experiences privileged her to something Helena could never understand. She wishes she’d told her to just let go. Leigh insisted on letting her childhood define her. The proof of an alternative was right there in front of her – Helena – and Leigh always resented this.

Lmao

She was worried on the flight over that they’d try to fill the time with anxious small talk, but it was so natural, the words and silences too.

A family is a group of strangers with a destructive desire for common nostalgia.