In Ascension

by Martin MacInnes

In my mind, the world is not reasonable, and can never be made reasonable. It is much more interesting than that.

The stones pressed through my thin soles as I put my weight down, and every time I left the beach I told myself all I had to do was put those same stones in my pockets and walk out into the water and I would never have to go home again. It was an effective fantasy; I was able to carry on because I knew I didn’t have to.

Nothing made the slightest sound; no thudding in my ears from the water pressure, no chattering voices competing in my head. I gazed at the scene, hanging horizontally, suspended beneath the surface, no further movement to cloud my vision, and as if from nowhere I realised, suddenly, with appreciation, that absolutely everything around me was alive.

I didn’t look through the water towards life, I looked directly into water-life, a vast patchwork supporting my body, streaming into my nostrils, my ears, the small breaks and crevices in my skin, swirling through my hair and entering the same eyes that observed it. In what felt like minutes, but must have been only seconds, I saw a completely different world, a place of significance and complexity, an almost infinite number of independent organisms among which I floated like a net, scooping up untold creatures with every minor shift and undulation of my body.

It adapted to every aspect of our behaviour; if animals were shaded out, and microorganisms illuminated, then our ghosts would be clear in these bright peripheries.

He gestured at the water – ‘It anticipates us, contains us, outlives us. And we are right here with it.’

At their base, archaea – the ancients – feasted on methane and sulphur, converting gases into sugars and founding the food chain. The archaea – small, structurally simple, distinct from bacteria – were some of the first living things, appearing 3 or 4 billion years ago in a chaotic era of mass volcanic eruptions. At some point long after this, something even more radical happened, and archaea grouped with bacteria to form a new kind of cell, containing a nucleus. All multicellular life – plants, fungi, animals – come from this. But archaea still exist. They’re drawn to inhospitable regions – Antarctic ice-sheets, the salt plains of Chile and Eritrea – but their most exotic site of all, arguably, is in our stomachs. Presumably they act symbiotically, and help us in some way. No one’s really sure. Among other strange characteristics, archaea have the ability to become dormant, and to reanimate after tens of thousands of years.

This is all so cool!

I started to get pains in my stomach, and rather than thinking they were caused by my father, a manifestation of fear, I imagined instead I was part of an ancient story, colonised by strange creatures building biosedementary structures on the seafloor. It was an escape, a flight from autobiography. I never believed I would actually go there.

‘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 mean I want to explore this strangeness as rigorously as I can, and to see myself in it too.’

‘I don’t want to “other” the strangeness. I want to accept it and recognise it. One of the first things that excited me – really excited me, and I can remember this vividly – about the ocean, was the knowledge that it already contains everything. It’s like you said earlier: the stuff of the body – of every body, of every living thing – it’s still there.’ ‘The body before it was cast,’ he said.

‘The cell is basically an ocean capsule. A preserved primordial capsule, holding the original marine environment inside. This is . . . this is just beyond incredible, isn’t it? I mean, you could describe us as both people, and as mobile assemblages of ocean.

‘It’s what we’re hearing now, sloshing beneath us as the ship goes through it. It’s a mistake to think of our origins, of all life’s origins, as belonging only to the past. It’s still there.’

it was as if we had returned to an earlier age, crossing the ocean with no sense of what we would encounter on the other side.

If we were blind to anything representing a new category, then our individual histories might have amounted to a series of glancing encounters with unspeakable wonders –

When I woke I felt much better, clearer and more familiar, but still with an odd sense of recklessness and exposure, a kind of self-sabotaging urgency.

This is how i feel all the time

I relished these first moments of recovery, the fleeting unfamiliarity and gratitude towards ordinary things.

While the water continued to pull me in, I was drawn, equally involuntarily, to my past. I returned to the ocean, as I returned to my childhood in Rotterdam, to Geert’s inexplicable beatings and to the nights following when Fenna mended me, kneaded me, and ushered me back as best she could. I looked back on the events as if they’d happened to another person, pitying this character as I would a stranger. But if she was a stranger, she’d still shaped the person I’d become. I didn’t want to think about this connection to her, didn’t want to admit it, sitting out on my towel in the sunshine.

I resisted being so easily explained, but I couldn’t help suspecting there was something in it. I wanted desperately for my life to be my own creation, to not have my present behaviour reduced to things that happened when I was young. My swims in the Nieuwe Maas were a reaction to Geert’s beatings and the site where I first discovered hope. Going into the water was in the first instance an escape, and maybe in some sense it still was. Maybe what I thought was an objective and impersonal interest in the origin and development of cellular life was in fact something smaller, an attempt to flee my own history but also an acceptably disguised way of exploring it. Maybe, rather than investigating the origins of life, I was merely and regrettably pursuing my own individual history.

While I opened my eyes and with difficulty raised myself on deck, gazing out again into the ultramarine, fierce sunlight bouncing off the blue, I recalled the life forms I studied, further insight into which I believed existed in the vent below us now, the same organisms that populated and substantiated the pain I felt as a child. They were, in a sense, the physical constituents accompanying and embodying that earlier drama, my nine-year-old self hugging her cramping stomach the day after a beating. But they were more than that – their purpose was infinitely variable, they were the source, I thought, of joy and exhilaration as much as they were terror, pain. They were the source of everything, inside us and beyond us, before us and long after we were succeeded. While I studied it, I had to admit I was entangled in it too. It couldn’t be otherwise – I came from it. And as part of this honesty I might have to face that my mind – my ‘character’, as I might call it, which I still willed in some naive way as my own creation, an infinitely regressive loop – was not separate and cut off either. Entangled in its thicket, I looked into t...

The upper distances implied the gulf open beneath us, and as the stars were like punctures through darkness the vents such as the Atlantic crater and the Mariana Trench were similar holes cut in Earth’s crust, the light of distant stars and the light of Earth’s furnace, contrasting indications of a generally hidden illumination. Above us and below us this brilliant radiance.

The fact that this person could still be surprised by little things like this, someone considered to be old, seemed incongruous and unlikely, even absurd. She was still a child. We all were. This never changes, it never leaves us, this sense of beginning, of always beginning, of always being young.

If there’s a problem with Tier 1 observation, it’s that it’s overly sensitive. It over-reports, and almost all the data it flags is insignificant. In human terms, you might say Tier 1 occupies a state somewhere between vigilance, paranoia and psychosis.’

Voyager contained its own description, in elaborate and exhaustive detail. It described Earth in images, and described how to read those images. It built itself recursively, through self-description, just like DNA did. DNA’s helical loop was wrought onto the record, next to pictures of cells and cell division. There was a fertilised ovum, a foetus, a newborn child. A diagram illustrating continental drift appeared next to a photograph of a young woman in a supermarket. There was a telescope, a microscope, a seashell, a leaf, a house being constructed, a large factory interior, dolphins, larger whales, the Greenland shark. There was a highway, a string quartet, representations of sheet music next to the instruments required to play them and the source forests. There were bonobo chimpanzees, the parameters of the solar system, a description of set theory, an Antarctic expedition record, astronauts orbiting the moon. There were the inner planets, a calibration circle, the Voyager 1 craft itself, the faces of the 17,000 men and women who had built it; the common fruit fly, the human eye, spindrift over the Mojave, chains of mountains above and below water. There were pictures of recent advances in computing, the metals used to build hardware in pure form, a dam, a windmill, an ant; a Texan oil refinery, a wheel, an octopus in various stages of colour display, a single crystal of sand in extraordinary detail, the craters of the moon, the ridges and creases and lumps of the huma...

This is wild. Blows my mind.

Some of the visions were insane. One paper circulating in China Lake promised that with each new generation, ‘auto-ships’ would become more complex and self-sustaining, repairing and improving themselves mid-journey, growing and harvesting new parts. This wasn’t limited to uncrewed probes, but included large multi-passenger ships. More distantly and speculatively, we’d see whole ships grown entirely from organic materials, with the frame, the shielding, the interior, the air and water and food supply, the fuel, even the computing systems all grown and hewn from algae fundaments. New ships would be birthed, unfolding out of giant algal sacks on orbital farm stations. The recycling capacity – and so the cost savings – would be substantially greater than anything seen before, with each ship harvesting its own interior for fuel, the crew eating and drinking from the walls, taking the craft apart from the mid-part of the mission, corroding it by eating it, reducing weight costs for deceleration periods and re-entry. The crew would be travelling inside something that lived, that breathed out oxygen as if looking over them. On longer journeys, as crew members died in greater numbers, bodies could be recycled into the food supply alongside placentas and waste – mythologies would spring up around these vessels, whose identity drifted somewhere between cities and gods.

The absence of clouds made the sky feel unlimited.

The first stirring of a cell. Ascension: bodies rising and lifting off the ground, all of us airborne, all of us unlimited. We only look like we are rising when really we are falling. I barely recognise the faces around me: I have never seen them as expressive, as exquisite, as this. So much of the face is ordinarily buried, only two or three times in a life falling into expression, into joy, like this. I am floating through the air, and I almost remember something.

This is why I want to go to space!

I imagined time was accelerating, that I was ageing prematurely, that as my mother regressed in our childhood home I was possessed of an age and experience I could scarcely conceive of.

That's deep.

A thought travels 120 metres per second, and it isn’t enough.

It amused me, the way even the most dramatic events snuck up on you, their true significance only apparent in retrospect. There was no single moment of transition; everything happened by degrees, each step seeming logical and reasonable at the time. This was a lesson I was unable to learn, despite a lifetime’s demonstration. 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.

Real life, present life, was often just too much.

With a child’s logic, I reasoned that if a message couldn’t reach me, its potential content could never be realised.

This is why I don't read/watch the news.

‘A description of the body in such a way that it won’t be annihilated in space,’

‘Space travel and dying are the only two ways of leaving the earth.’

as there was no one moment when we left the ground there is no single moment when we’re no longer of the earth.

You realise you’re hanging in this intermediate darkness, transported in a small vehicle surrounded by the closest thing possible to infinity.

Without Earth’s confirmation, we’re not really sure we’ve survived at all.

Would we still be ourselves, in any way that we recognised? Would Control still understand us, after our exposure to the power? And if not ourselves, then who, or what, would we have become?

Something in the rendering of Jupiter looks too virtual, too predictable. It’s exactly like the images I’ve seen of it before. This is a senseless thing to say, of course, but I expected the gas giant to appear different when I saw it myself, so close. It looks too perfect, too controlled. It lacks independence, as if conforming to our expectations, which is ironically not what we expected at all.

You’re flawed, and the world you see corresponds to these flaws. Weaknesses define you, drive new and original strategies to cover them, and they make you who you are. You don’t exist without them. Correcting the errors – seeing perfectly and objectively – is neither desirable nor possible.

I was moving in a world largely of my own creation, a dream of the future built from an understanding of the past. Exactly like the two points along the display.

The discs have sublime geometry, the first truly perfect objects I have ever seen. I smell my tears before I feel them moving down my face, the novel saline intensity. The rings appear so close, so deceptively full of body, it’s as though we could reach out and touch them.

I love this description of Saturn.

Ontogeny and flight plan converge: first limb buds unfolding on the pass across the Kuiper belt; neural cells cascading through escape from the heliopause; birth, at the end, as we hit terminus, alighting on Voyager 1 at the edge of the Oort cloud. Information crossed over, symbiotic. One journey slipped into another, breakthroughs drifting across strata.

Our depth fields are weakening in reaction to the limited space. I’ve tried everything: the games, the headsets, holding my gaze on the pinpricks of light through the rendered porthole, but nothing works. Everything’s flattening out. My hand looks less substantial when I hold it inches from my face; I can’t believe what’s inside it really exists. I contain nothing. Soon the whole ship will be in two dimensions, like moving through a painting.

Where earlier we’d grown apart, our stats now started to converge: sleep length, pulse, temperature and metabolic rate. It was as if we were becoming a unified prototype astronaut, that as no one individual was equipped to survive this, we had amassed ourselves into something greater.

‘We’re farming it, but it’s farming us too,’ Tyler said. ‘Feeding on what we recycle. Feeding on us, in a sense. We should remember that.’

As I took the last of the cuttings, releasing a briny sea smell, it all flooded back to me, the many years of preparation that had led me to this moment. From my awakening as a child in the Nieuwe Maas more than two decades earlier, to the month on Endeavour in the mid-Atlantic, my inclusion in the food programme at China Lake, my years in crew training and my launch from Kourou spaceport; everything culminated in this pivotal moment of consumption. Shortly after, with K, Tyler and I sitting attached to the table over our covered pasta trays mixed with ground green algae, I made a toast, and said nothing would be the same again.

the simplest thing in the world, a green plant growing, but a miracle too, and we celebrated it against the darkness around us, the limitless, edgeless black, and it carried us.

I was possessed by an unbearably bittersweet awareness of the preciousness of each moment passing, each moment that would never be retrieved.

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.