Torve: A Metanumeral Thought Experiment

    Recently, I have been playing with the whimsical idea of a fictional number, one that everyone has somehow missed when counting from four to five.

Two-Hundred-Million Miles Up - Ch.01 (2nd re-write)

    You have been lied to. Not by me, not even directly, really, by anyone specific.

    But I want you to ask yourself, where is the Earth? Where is space? You say to your self, the Earth is floating in space, and space is all around us. Space, we imagine, is a big black canvas, and stars and planets are little dots painted on its surface. This is a very neat and tidy way to picture the universe around us, but it is not a useful model, and from a practical sense it is very wrong.

    To begin with, space is not. It isn't anything, anywhere. It is no thing, and no where. Air and other matter likes to stick to itself, so the regions in between the concentrations are a profound absence of material. Sub-atomically speaking, space is a writhing mass of average nothingness, where particles pop in and out of existence constantly, but happen to mostly cancel themselves out into a vacuum.

    If you were floating in space, you wouldn't be floating at all. No matter where you go, you would be falling towards something, very slowly. Gravity has no drop off, it just gets weaker. But if you seemed to be floating in space, looking out at the Earth, you might say that the Earth is also (not) floating in space, that space is all around it. And from that perspective you may be correct.

    But we are not floating in space, we are down here on Earth. You are on Earth. If you are a human being, you are on Earth, with a few exceptions who are very high up in the air falling around the Earth. I would go so far to say that if you are not on Earth, you are not a human. You may question me here, but you'll understand soon enough.

    Up and down are relative. This one should not be a controversial statement, I think. You already know this. It's like left and right; nobody older than two needs to be told that my left isn't your left if you're facing me.

    And yet, most of us still have to stop and think about it, for a fraction of a second maybe, every single time we need to tell someone they have something on their face.

    So up and down are like this. My father used to tell me "Ezra, get off the ceiling."

    "But I'm not on the ceiling" I would say, perfunctorily, as if I hadn't heard the joke five million times.

    "That's not what that fly told me!" he would say, pointing somewhere up on the wall where there may have been (but likely wasn't) a fly. He did this for my mother, I guess, who loved each of his five or so jokes, told nearly daily. She always laughed.

    Love is like this-- nonsensical. Our most aggravating traits are transmuted into "charm" and "quirk" like a personal rebranding campaign. This is a subset of a larger pattern of affectionate self-delusion.

    I have a phobia of heights. Or, if you prefer, I am particularly well grounded. Neither ways of phrasing make it a great trait for a pilot to have. But here we are. 

    The reality is that flying has never frightened me. I became particularly well grounded when I was twelve, and I fell out of a tree. I managed not to break any bones, but gravity and I never got along very well after that. Which I think is exactly what makes flight so wonderful. 

    When you're out on a balcony, ten stories up, you have no control over gravity, no control over whether or not, or how fast you will fall, should the railing you lean on decide you aren't as grounded as you should be. But in the cockpit, you have all the control. You can pass out when you're flying a plane, and you don't drop out of the sky. Planes today will fly themselves home if they decide you aren't up to the job.

    Everything, of course, is effected by gravity. But this is another one of those things, like left and right, that we have to think about to know it's true. When you fire a bullet, the bullet travels in an arc, as any projectile would. And when you're a true marksman-- particularly a sniper-- you have to learn to intuit this. The bullet is going to hit somewhere below where you aim the barrel. 

    So there is something about traveling very fast that makes the gentle pull of the earth feel less relevant. When you're a mile up, pulling hundreds of knots, you have taken complete control of acceleration, pointing it whichever way you like.

***

    My father was a pilot, but not in the same sense as I. He flew passenger jets. Very elite, very bougie. No one unimportant flies anymore of course, so there's an air of sophistication about the job, (another of his jokes). My mother would say he was a pilot so he could fuck flight attendants, and this was probably true. I don't know what flying meant to him really. I know now that he never really piloted much of anything. For passenger jets, the pilot is the king of his aircraft; which is to say, he is an overpaid figurehead with no power. A computer controls take-off, cruising, and landing. Planes take-off all the time, I am told, without their pilots, who got themselves drunk in the airport and missed the flight.

    Naturally, he never described his job this way, when I was young, and I idolized the image of him as a dashing master of the air. By the time I became a pilot, he was several years dead, but I doubt he would have cared much anyway. By then, the goal was mine alone.

***

    So up and down are relative. Like I said, we know this. We know that up for you and I is the opposite of up for someone opposite us, on the other side of the planet. When you're flying, you almost can get a sense of the curvature of the earth, if you get up high enough, and go fast enough, it almost feels like you're moving about a globe, but in every other way, our monkey brains cannot conceive a true horizon, and imagine the world is flat. Everything in the sky, then is up, be it clouds or the moon and stars. I imagined, when I was young and naïve, that the relativity of up and down would hold true up in the air, out of the air, far from our home in outer space.

    When we picture space, space travel, we do so with analogies. Our first great voyages were over the ocean, and we inherit our terminologies from this tradition. So too, we picture space ships, navigating space laterally, hopping from one round little planet island to another, as if there were a solar sea that all the world bob on the surface of. Our models of the system show each planet in a neat little row, radiating out from the sun. I think this is the only way we have to make sense of it. But like, think about it.

    Just picture it in your head. From the perspective of someone here on earth, a space shuttle takes off, and it travels up.  into the sky. And it keeps going up. Our ship is sailing to mars. We look up, and there is mars up there. you can point to it, above your head. Or the moon. We land on the moon, and the lander is hanging off of its face, dangling over your head, back down on the earth. The moon has just scarcely enough influence to convince you that being grounded means staying put on its surface, just try not to jump too high. It isn't terribly convincing, after all.

    With a hard enough hit, you can put a baseball into orbit, from the moon's surface. It's true.

***

    The moon is very interesting, but lets talk about Mars. None of us call it Mars, of course. If you've been to Mars, you probably call it Hell, or something more vulgar. Hell is a concept we imagined to describe a place most conceivably anathema to mankind. Hell is de-humanizing by definition. It is human to adapt to any environment, to numb ourselves to pain, to alter our selves or our surroundings so that we may flourish wherever we go.

    So for a place to be truly dehumanizing, to be an un-dullable pain, it must remove from us whatever makes us human. So to be in Hell is to cease to be human at all.

***

    Uniquely, I may claim to have been married to a Martian. I say uniquely, because there is, and only ever has been, one native born Martian, and she only married once, and it was to me, however brief. The nature of Marguerite's birth is fairly well known, though it isn't a story we see fit to tell school children without some censoring. Margie was born during the last Mars mission run by the First Committee. It's often said that the circumstances of her birth are precisely what lead to the First Committee being dissolved, but this is a silly notion if you're familiar with the mars missions at all. The whole program had been a shit-show, and dear Margie was just a rotten cherry on the very moldy cake.

    I met Marguerite in a bar in Giza. When I say "I met," what I mean is I was told that I met. Just like I was told that I married, and then later, was told that I divorced. That isn't to say that I remember none of my marriage. We spent a couple years together, it is merely the prologue and epilogue of our marriage that remains hazy to me. I couldn't begin to tell you what drew us to one another, each of us piss drunk and otherwise miserable. I know I am less than a joy to spend any length of time with when drunk, but perhaps that is precisely what we had in common.

    Giza sprung up out of a war-torn Egypt as a re-born tourist trap in the late twenty-first century, modeled after Las Vegas, the American casino capital-turned-ghost-town, after it stopped making economic sense to pump millions of gallons of water into the middle of a desert. Just as the Luxor had loomed an aped-Egypt over the Las Vegas skyline, so too do the real pyramids loom pregnant with fossilized potential behind the Giza skyscrapers. Locals like to call the city Vegas, and they talk about how great Nex' Vegas will be, just as Giza is so much better than Las' Vegas ever was. 

    So, there were several hotels and bars around Giza called Nex Vegas, and the one where I met my ex-wife was one of them. This particular Nex had a retro-futuristic theme to it. Where else would the next Vegas be, but on Mars? Naturally, it was favored spot of ex-astronauts of a certain age.

    The name Vega, as in the star, comes from an old Arabic word meaning "falling." So, in the confused manner in which Giza mashes up languages, the marketing for the city likes to say that "Vegas is for falling in love," and maybe this is true. I think Margie and I loved each other, in a way. The air-raided ruins, where the real native Gizans huddle out of sight, perhaps that is a "quirk," and I should see my liquor born marriage as "charming."

***

    In as much as Mars is Hell, Marguerite was truly a hellion as I knew her. The older astronauts called her Dante, affectionately, for having been the only person to set foot on mars and then return home, until the Third Committee Missions anyway. The night her and I met was several nights after I first noticed her. She kept to her self at a specific seat she liked at the bar. It was circular and glass, painted to look like the rings of Saturn. An interesting detail I doubt many people notice: each of the twenty or so seats has a different moon of Saturn pasted on it. Its the big important ones featured, of course. Saturn has over one hundred named moons. Margie always liked to sit on Titan, the gauzy orange gem-stone, the most famous of Saturn's many subordinates. Most nights, I sat across the rings from her, as the moons nearest to Titan were typically filled by her own usual satellites.

    One of these was frequently Maven, a good friend of mine. Him and I were both in the same training program-- we were both still in training, in fact, around this time. He would go on to become Marguerite's second husband. A much better fit for her, I think. 

    I have been told I am an abrasive asshole. Or, if you prefer, I am uncharacteristically honest. Margie is also very honest. You might think that would make us all the more compatible, but it seems that no matter how honest you are, you still may have a low tolerance for truth coming from others.

    Maven wasn't an honest person at all. Which is to say, he was exceptionally charming, and very easy to get along with. The most cheerful person in any room he enters. He denies this, but I am certain he introduced Marguerite and I the night I am told that we met. He was always making her laugh, even then.

    Margie was not an astronaut herself, except technically. She had a love for the earth all her life-- ironic, you might say, for someone not born on it, but perhaps she had an outside perspective on our planet that the rest of us take for granted. She liked to walk barefoot. She wore her hair in tight, practical braids. She often looked angry when she wasn't laughing, but this was merely the face she made when she was thinking, and she was always deep in thought.

    Physically, as in personality, Maven was her opposite. He was tall, broad shouldered. His face was already creased in his youth with laugh-lines. When he graduated the training program, he shaved his head bald in celebration, but back then he had a big mop of sandy-colored hair. Margie was the sort to speak softly, no-matter how raucous her surroundings, forcing anyone who cared to listen to lean in close to her, so Maven could often be seen hunched over down close to listen, only to spring back up in posture to bellow his infectious laughter.

***

    The mid twenty-first century used to be thought of as a renaissance in space travel. That was the era of Elon Musk, famous for putting the first human beings on Mars. They were, of course, also the first human beings to die on Mars. As is typical of history, the former tends to be talked about a lot more frequently than the latter. Musk's company fell over itself at the time, struggling to find a warm body to peg the disaster on. Ultimately, it was probably just really bad luck. A bit of heat shielding came loose when they entered the Martian atmosphere, and resulted in a catastrophic hull failure on take off.

    Still, history found itself a scape goat. Though he was acquitted, Simon Quaite was deemed guilty in the court of public opinion. He was the lead engineer on the team that assembled the first Mars shuttle, and was the head designer of the software that ran stress testing simulations. He had probably never even handled one of the heat-shield panels personally. In the end, he did what any decent human being does when the world turns on them. 

    He shot himself.

Two-hundred-million Miles in the Air - Ch.1 (rewrite, rough draft)

"As you can see," projected the tour guide, "Base Five was dedicated to Elon Musk." She jestured towards the gaudy half-time portraits painted on the wall in front of us. "Musk was North-America's first trillionaire, and was a life long advocate of the Mars Program." She smiled perfunctorily. "Base Five is often referred to by _Martians_ as 'Musk Station,' isn't that great?" This is false, but I don't say anything. The guide and the tourists following her continued on into the next room, but I stayed for awhile. I liked the mural. Printed with small dots of color, it was the type of image that didn't look like anything untill you were far away. 

I made my way out of the hangar into the hall that the tour group was still percolating through. Lining the wall were portraits of each of stations "Martians" in order of their missions. Maven's freckled grin stared down at me, forcing me to avert my eyes to the following portrait. Captain Ezra Landon, read the brass plaque, with my own humorless face seeming to stare through my head at the wall behind me. It was supposed to say _Langdon_, but I'd never bothered to correct them.

I felt stupid staring at myself. No one ever paid any attention to the portraits anyway. A good thing, or I might have been recognized. I continued down the hall, avoiding eye contact with any further portraits. The tour group had crowded around a waist-high display in the middle of the broad lounge room. It had a little scale model of "Musk Station," surrounded by lilliputian recreations of Mars' riveting geological features: dirt, with the occasional rock.

I push my hands into my pockets and turn around to look out the large window along the back wall, showing the same _breathtaking_ view of fucking nothing, all the way to the featureless, uninhabitable horizon. If you were lucky, and I mean _real_ lucky, you might catch sight of a pathetic little dust devil kicking up a pathetic little whirl of dust. Those only happened on days Mars had constituted wind in its wan, hateful atmosphere. No dust devils to be seen today, I turn towards the corner, where there is a door that appears to lead directly out onto the martian surface.

Unfortunately, there is no rush of wind as the atmosphere rushes out of the station, killing all of us. We weren't on Mars. We were in Texas. The former training facility was just outside of Houston, and the recreation of Base Five in its basement had been been the maintained lovingly all these years, turned into a lucrative tourist attraction.

I exited the stairwell out a second door, out into the very un-martian heat to enjoy a luxury forbidden strictly anywhere but the good ol' Earth's surface. A cigarette.

***

The whole martian program was a lot like that big halftone portrait in base five. Nice to look at from a distance, but more and more meaningless the closer you look. [Section introducing Mars Program as pointless for various reasons]

Two-hundred-million Miles in the Air - Ch.3 [rough draft]

The feeling was inescapable, but you might describe the vertigo as an ever present backdrop to everything else. Anywhere I went on the base, the longer I stayed the more I noticed evidence of the previous inhabitants. The drones were very thorough in their sanitizing. There were no bloodstains or broken glass. No teeth lying around. But there were dents. The frighteningly flimsy aluminum shell that partitioned us from death was remarkably easy to dent. There was clear evidence of violence done in many rooms. There were partially buffed out scratches from nails or otherwise. Mave had mentioned all this, but seeing it was different that it seemed in his ever joking tone.

My report on Captain Larson's apparent and sudden suicide had been as thorough as possible. Despite the insanity of this place, a suicide of a lone crewman was unprecedented. Parceling us out one at a time seemed to have solved all the problems. So naturally they were livid to have their perfect streak ruined. They screened us very _very_ thoroughly for this exact reason.

Now, don't get me wrong. Several former martians offed themselves after getting back home. But the media had never made a very stink about it, and the MMC weren't going to raise any alarm bells.

Following the report, I was asked to do a full diagnostic of essentially every system at base five. There were typically three redundancies for everything, but in one of the early missions, one of the more chaotic ones, an engineer had tampered with the system that reported diagnostic info back to Houston. The report system had then delivered home a warning that oxygen levels had risen to a dangerous concentration. The crew had long sense stopped responding to communication attempts at this point, so mission controll sent a remote command to the oxygen recycler to pause oxygen production and run a systems test. However, oxygen levels were, in fact, dangerously low due to a hull breach. The crew nearly suffucated before the issue was caught.

The following team fixed the system, but Houston never really trusted it again, and it was my understanding that atleast a cursory check up was normal first order of business for every new arrival.

It felt more serious now though. Missing controll wasn't certain exactly how many days Mave had been dead for when we found him. He could have been scuttling arround in the dark for days before killing himself, doing God knows what.

The first thing I found of note was Maven's journal. It was, I guess, exactly what I expected. Ninty-nine percent utterly boring, untill the entry about two weeks ago. The mind-numbingly consistent pattern of the journal entries had been simple little notes, indicating completion of daily chores, interesting thoughts, meals, etc. Little more than data to he refferenced in some later report about how banal the whole experience would be. Each page had a big obvious number in every corner, counting down the days, presumably written in advance. The final legible page had a "7" that had been violently scribbled over with a "14" and the following numbered corners had all been ripped out. Their pages were blank.

You could tell that the fateful call from mission controll had happened between "measured growth of soybean shoots in hydroponics" and "ate four protein bars for dinner" because his handwriting had turned into a shaky mess. I couldn't make out what he wrote after that. There were spots of ink smeared where tears had landed on the page.

What makes a man lose his mind over a handful of days? Mave loved life. He had a beautiful wife, a fulfilling career. The man had done two tours in Uyguristan, and Dinah had held on to him all the same.

He was a hard man, but always managed to crack a joke to lighten the mood. Christ, I sound like I'm giving a speech at his funeral. My point is, how does _that_ guy choke himself to death over seven extra days on Mars? They call it Hell for a reason. I figured then that maybe I wouldn't understand untill my time there was almost up. 

Asimov started writing about mars nearly two centuries ago, and back them Mars was this totem of future human achievement. We were going to colonize Mars, and terraform Mars, and it would be this magical stepping stone out into space beyond. To be honest, it's a miracle we even still send people up here at all, but it's all PR I'm told. The powers that be need public support and approval before they can dump taxpayer money on anything new. NASA has been talking about trying to float a habitat on Venus. Let me tell you, Mars would lose his nickname fast if they start sending people to literal actual fire and brimstone Hell.

Optimism for Mars waned as people began to realize that if we had the power to "terraform" any planet, then our best option would be to use that technology to fix the rock we already fucking lived on. Geological coal, methane, and petroleum ran out ages ago, and we _still_ struggle to build enough sequestration plants to keep up with emissions.

Even if we ignore the fact that living on Mars could only ever mean living in little tin cans, exodus to another planet was never going to solve anything on earth. The cost of trying to ship enough huddled masses off the surface to keep up with overpopulation would require centuries of nonstop production of synthetic rocket fuel. The funding and resources for that just don't fucking exist.

These days, the utopia de jure that folks talk about involves space elevators and orbital stations, and so forth. I can't shit on that too much. It feels plausible, maybe. That said, it still requires plenty of scientific advancements to happen that have failed to show themselves in the past hundred years we've been looking.

Maybe I'm biased. You'd never catch me on a fucking elevator to space anyway.

Two-hundred-million Miles in the Air - Ch.2

     Don't get me wrong, when I first set foot on the surface of Hell, I was elated. It was, maybe, one of the best moments of my life. Just that feeling of achieving something you've been working towards for years. Plus, I was really fucking happy to be walking on a nice solid surface with honest to god gravity. The transit shuttle has an exercise centrifuge to keep your muscles from shriveling up over the months you spend in space, but it is not remotely the same. The viewport that looks out over the rest of the ship makes you feel dizzy as you spin, and there is this disgusting feeling of your feet feeling heavy while your head feels nearly weightless.

    So yeah, it was great. I had that feeling like, I imagine, everyone does. That feeling like all the horror stories you've heard are over-blown bullshit, and this is going to be the best six months of solitary confinement of your life. That feeling lasted all of like, thirty seconds. Right up until I caught sight of Maven.

    Maven Larson was a great dude. We were part of the same training program, and had actually spent a good bit of time together. His mission fell right before mine in the scheduling- which was completely fair. The system ranked him a few points higher than me on the personality scoring. Maven had wife, and was definitely more of a people-person than I am-- both of which are actually not great features for a Mars-candidate. But he was significantly more physically fit than me, which I guess counts for more. Romance and I have never gotten along so great. I'm in shape, but I haven't exactly spent all my free time doing pushups.

    Maven and I talked pretty regularly on the ride over. The way the missions line up, the guy that replaces you ends up leaving earth around the same time you touch down on Mars. The closer I got to mars, the longer the delay in messages to-and from earth. When the earth and mars are at their closest, its around three minutes. At the furthest it's around twenty. Its the opposite, of course, for communicating with someone on mars as you head their way. It got easier and easier to hold an ordinary conversation, which is nice to have when you're alone for months.

    Maven took his stint in Hell really well, actually. Surprisingly well, it seemed. He had a pretty cherry attitude every time we spoke. He had always said he was going to break the streak of sourpusses that came home from Mars, and planned to have a great time. It had seemed as though he was true to his word, right up until the last couple weeks of travel. You see, my take off had been delayed by a week. There had been something wrong with one of the rocket's redundant fire prevention systems that had to get fixed last minute. Then the weather was bad for several days. This is pretty normal, but I guess it hadn't been communicated to Marvin clearly. He had been, apparently quite privately, counting the fucking minutes until my ship arrived to get him off the red rock, but hadn't realized he was going to have to spend a whole extra seven days on Mars beyond the point he was expecting his stint to be over. He'd made an off hand comment, two weeks until arrival about that being his last week, and someone at mission control had corrected him. And he went batshit.

    Like I can't express to you how fundamentally this guy's attitude changed. He stopped chatting me up as frequently. In fact, I only talked to him a couple more times, but he'd apparently been ranting non-stop to Houston about the situation, and they were like... the fuck do you want us to do? teleport the shuttle to you? First day into the last week he stopped communicating all together. The operator monitoring Base Five's cameras could still see him storming around the habitat, growing more and more agitated. Second day in, he seemed to have become aware of this fact, and shut all the lights off. Mission control talked about him like he was a child throwing a tantrum, and had asked me to tell him all sorts of things when I got there, since they couldn't get through to him. I don't remember what they said. Something about being court-marshaled when he got home. It doesn't fucking matter.

    I was a short walk from the landing pad to the airlock. My concern for Maven vanished as I took in the sight of it all. The hallway that the airlock opens up into lacks a camera for some reason. I would later find that there were all sorts of blind spots in the monitoring system. Maven had managed to loop an extension cord around the hall's light-fixture and had hanged himself. His bloated corpse was positioned to stare me right in the eyes as the airlock door swung open. It was surely unintentional- nothing about the suicide seemed particularly thought out-- but it felt like a personal gesture. As if I was at fault for his ride home being a few days late.

    The smell was absolutely indescribable, so I won't bother trying, except to say that the scent of own my vomit that came soon enough was almost a relief. I considered, for an upsetting few moments, smearing some under my nose to mask the smell. I couldn't exactly escape the situation. There was, after all, no one in the station but me. The sanitation drones would take care of my puke, and had already tidied up whatever piss and shit had dripped to the floor under Maven, but had no means of disposing of a body, much less getting him down from the ceiling.

    Saying I couldn't escape wasn't exactly true. The return shuttle was primed and ready to take Mave home. I could have hopped on and bailed on the whole mission right then and there. Would have looked pretty fucking shitty on my record. Ezra Fletcher, the chicken-shit that spent ten minutes on mars and ran home. That said, I didn't have all the time in the world to sit and puzzle about it. Despite what the delay that led to this mess might imply, Mission control run a tight schedule. We were lucky to have had the luxury of waiting a week to take off, and in meant that there was absolutely no room for delay upon arrival. They wanted Mave on that shuttle and ready to launch within three hours of me landing.

    I've thought about offing myself before. Who hasn't? Hell, I even thought about having to kill myself during the mission. Like, what would happen if an asteroid hit the earth while I was there on Mars? My hand and I can't exactly re-populate the species, and I'd be damned if I would spend the rest of my life alone on a sandy red shitpile of a rock. I'd imagined firing up the emergency gas-generator, and sitting around inhaling the fumes would be easy and painless enough. 

    I mention it because I recon Maven took the slowest, most painful way out imaginable, outside of gutting yourself with a box cutter. Mars has gravity, but it isn't as much as Earth. You're effectively a third your normal weight on the Martian surface. That makes relying on your own body-weight to strangle yourself much more difficult. Whatever his reasons for doing in, Maven had to have been extremely determined. It would have been easier to just walk outside and ditch your helmet. He did it this way on purpose.

    Anyway. He'd been considerate enough to leave the stepladder he had used to hang the extension cord leaning up against the wall, so it took only a couple minutes to get him down. A couple more dry-heaves later, I'd built myself up enough to drag Mave into the airlock. I then began the nightmare of stuffing him into a pressure suit. While it probably seems like a silly thing to do-- its not like he needed air or something, you have to keep in mind how fucking cold it is on the surface of mars. On a good day, its minus-eighty-fucking-degrees Fahrenheit. He'd be frozen solid before I got him to the shuttle, making hauling his sixty some odd pounds of corpse that much more difficult. I couldn't just stuff him in a crate or something, the system literally would not take off without a body in the launch seat. Besides, he'd be a bit less likely to permanently stink up the cabin in a sealed suit. I'm very considerate.

    The first check in with mission control was fun. The were losing their minds; they'd just watched my scrawny ass drag (what they assumed to be) an unconscious Captain Maven Larson out of the airlock and stuff him into the shuttle. His state of decomposition had warmed his meat enough to fog his suit's visor, so they hadn't been blessed with the sight of his five-or-six day dead countenance just yet.

    "What the fuck do you mean he's dead?" said the beet-red face in the center of the comms screen. It was a conference call, so there were several faces staring at me, but mission director Knox was the only one saying anything. After pinging mission control, I had delivered my message, trying to convey the details as evenly as possible. I was supposed to be a professional, but it wasn't really difficult at that point. I was pretty numb. To my horror, however, I saw Maven's wife's face appear in the conference grid during the six or so minutes I had to sit and twiddle my fingers between message deliveries.

    "We- we just spoke to him last week Fletcher! He was cheery as a nun in church, just like he god damn always is!" Knox stormed off the screen to, I don't know, get some air or something. I don't remember really. The only face I could watch was Dinah's as she heard my curt mechanical report of her husband's death. I really should have lead with something different.

    I told the conference I'd need to send a written report, and left it at that, signing off to lay woodenly on a bed in the rest quarters. I listened to the roar of engines as the shuttle took off into the air, thankful I hadn't gotten back on the shuttle. I don't think I'd have made it home alive. I imagined Maven's body, strapped limp into the launch chair for the next several months. I stared at the ceiling, feeling as though I could see through it, imagining the shuttle growing fainter and fainter, until I it was out of sight.

Except.

    That night, the earth would be hanging in the sky over me, a pale blue dot in an endlessly black void. And it was then that it felt so distinctly like the earth was not above me. But rather that I had taken off its surface in the same shuttle that was now playing the role of Charon, the ferryman, delivering Mave back to the same dirt every other human being had been buried in for all of time. I was hanging in the sky above that earth, two-hundred-million miles up in the air.

Two-hundred-million Miles in the Air - Ch.1

    To me, its always felt like folks look at space from the wrong direction. Like, we use all this nautical terminology with space travel, which I get. The concept of crossing a vast, inhospitable ocean translates easily to space. Space space, space, that's all there is out there, a big fucking void, just like the ocean is water and more water as far as you can see. So anyway, people think about it like Earth is an island, and when we blast off, we head out away from it, to the side. We even depict it that way, right? Each of the planets in a cute little row beside the Sun. I think we kinda have to think about it that way, you know, for it to make any practical sense. We evolved in a lateral world, so we extend the model out laterally. Maybe if we'd grown big brains while we still lived in trees, instead after learning to walk, maybe then Up wouldn't be this thing you can't hardly reckon about at scale.

    It barely even makes sense to talk about. You can't really get around it, though; when we go to the moon, we're going fucking Up. The moon is up there, up there, over our heads, all the time, no different than clouds, just a hell of a lot further away. Standing on the moon, you're standing on a big rock that just happens to be sufficiently large enough to keep you barely stuck to its surface while you hang millions of miles above the earth's surface.

     I imagine that, if the world were flat, this wouldn't be such a weird concept. Like, if the horizon never wrapped itself up into a neat little ball the higher you got. But you get up there to the edge of space, and suddenly the Earth doesn't look any damn different to any other thing we're used to seeing floating over our heads. We shift our frame of reference to keep ourselves sane; that is to say, we have to keep our definition of up and down relative to ourselves. The earth becomes the thing a million miles in the air, and the moon, for instance, becomes the ground. Theoretically.

    And, like, I'm not saying this isn't a sane thing to do. If I'm in Taiwan and you're in France, one of us is hanging upside down from the other's perspective-- like I said, the earth is round. But those two reference frames are always like that, opposite one another. You could say all of space, all the other planets, its all over head at some point or another. And when you're up there, the earth revolving without you doesn't make it feel any less the ground you took off from.

    Maybe it's just me. You'd think vertigo wouldn't be an ideal trait for an astronaut, but when I was just an airplane pilot it was never an issue. When I used to fly, it felt like exactly that-- flying. When you're in the cockpit, there isn't any sense for me like I'm gonna fall. You're going. You're rushing forwards at a hundreds of knots. You can pass the fuck out, and the plane still won't nose dive. Put me on a balcony ten stories up and I might puke, but not when I'm flying. When I'm flying its like I'm in control of gravity, not the Earth. And there's nothing like seeing the countryside below rushing beneath your feet.

    NASA was the next logical step for me. I didn't think it would be any different-- why would I? But there's this sense when you're taking off-- it isn't like in a plane. You're going straight the fuck up. You're going several times faster in a rocket than you ever do in an air breathing plane, but you don't feel it. You don't get to see the ground flying under you, you just have a sense that the ground is getting farther away. Farther and farther, higher and higher. No real sense of control either. People don't fly rockets, math does. Then gravity cuts out all-together, and that just makes it worse. Maybe if this was fucking star-trek and we could waltz around the ship with a magical gravity field insisting that down is now wherever you want it to be, maybe then it would be different. But they call it free-fall for a reason. It makes me sick.

    Drugs help, but only so much. I put up with that baseline dizzying feeling all the way to Hell. No one in the industry calls it Mars anymore. All that twenty-first century optimism and romanticism about the red piss-hole dribbled away when it started eating people. Mars isn't really a place, it is a vacuum of a place, an absence of a where. Literal space is more interesting and engaging than Mars. Hell is an endless desert. More dry than the Sahara, more cold than Antarctica. No weather, no life, barely any geology, every day is the same unending nothing that aches to kill you as quickly and thoroughly as possible if it is given the slightest glimmer of a chance. There is no relaxing. It even lacks the sterility of space; every excursion out of the habitat means bring dust back in. Sharp, machine fouling, lung tearing dust.

    Ezra, I hear you saying. Why the fuck do they keep sending people to Mars if it sucks so fucking much? What an absolutely fantastic question, I'm so glad you asked. I have absolutely no idea. 

    That's a lie, I know exactly why. Its because before you go to Hell, everyone, including myself, thinks what the fuck are they talking about, it can't be so bad. Its another planet, you get to walk on another pissing planet for Christ's sake. I can't pass that up.

    Well, here is my experience. I had been running missions to and from the space stations for several years-- hating every moment of it, mind you. The pay off, for me, was the ol' Red Bastard. I wanted to know what it was like, to feel it. I figured, I could put up with all the free-fall, all the hanging in the air, all the bullshit would be worth it because its another planet. It wouldn't feel like Up any more when I got there. My poor little monkey brain would feel like it was safe and sound on the ground again.

    The regular missions to Mars began several decades ago. The facilities there were set up remotely. There wasn't much consensus on what constitutes an appropriate habitat for several humans for several months, absolutely cut off from the rest of humanity. But the accommodations are fine, I think. All sorts of entertainment, research to lose yourself in, space enough to feel comfortable without it being so big you can really get lost. The first crew was five people, two men, three women, several million crickets. It took them seven months to kill each other.

    The MMC, the Mars Mission Committee, they tried several experiments. More than six or seven crew members felt too crowded. Less than four had other problems. Humans are absolutely fucking predictable. It doesn't matter how professional the astronauts are. How long they've known each other, or how attached/detached they are from family, careers, passions back home. It doesn't matter if the crew is all men, all women, co-ed, whatever. Trapped in a tiny box, effectively a whole universe away from the earth, every single person tries to fuck one another, then they try to kill each other. 

    For a few decades, China held a majority of the committee seats, and passed the wildly unpopular decision to keep the crew on libido blockers for the extent of the mission. The results of that "experiment" had, invariably, one of two outcomes. Either they would, one by one, just stop taking the pills, or they would opt to skip the "fuck" step and mosey right on ahead to the "kill" phase of the the pattern mentioned above.

    Despite what the internet likes to say, mars isn't cursed. This would happen anywhere sufficiently isolated from earth, I think. Its the isolation, the boredom too. It doesn't matter how big a media library they give you. When the view outside your window literally never changes, and you can't go out there and plant some flowers or something, the window stops feeling like a window. The breathtaking views of yawning Martian vistas of bullshit sand and rocks stop being Mars, and start being cute little museum dioramas inset into the walls. Very expertly crafted shadow boxes. You stop feeling convinced that you aren't just in the basement of one of the training buildings, where they literally do have a simulated habitat like that, with fake windows and a conspicuous lack of the fucking murder dust.

    That was my first impression, anyway. After the committee had its fill of love-triangles and murder-suicides, they came to the decision that it would be best for every one involved to send a single astronaut for each mission. AI could pick up the workload slack easily enough. Ironically, this actually necessitated increased funding, because again, contrary to sense, everybody still wanted to go to mars. That meant more frequent missions-- also because the missions had to be somewhat shorter to keep the poor bastards they sent from losing their minds. That still happened often anyway. Nobody went to mars twice. Nobody, that is, except for one poor, stupid bastard. Me.

Notes on Spiritual Division

 Additional notes on spiritual entities, re: the spiritual framework touched on in the last post,

specifically the non-atomic nature of the soul, and the circumstances which result from its subdivision.

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Spirit-cleaving

 - post mortem, a once continuous soul may differentiate into separate parts. The positive aspects of a spirit may ascend to an afterlife, and/or mythic reverence, while a primitive portion may remain bound to physical associations. A barrow-wight is a portion of a strong spirit, burried with their belongings, or at a place of personal significance. The mythic portion may stay associated with the remains for a time, but certain types of burial lend themselves to dissociation from the departed, such as forest overgrowth, or simply being forgotten after a great deal of time. The mythic portion may be revered elsewhere, while the primitive animate identity remains bound to treasures. If enough of the will remains in the ghost, it's strong connection to a particular place or items may allow it to animate it's bones and manipulate the living.

 - this can, under rare circumstances, occur to the soul of a living individual. If, for instance, one endures a particularly traumatic event, if that new self-aspect cannot cohabitate with the rest of the identity, it may split off from the soul, effectively removing from that person's identity it's influence, remaining as a fragment of that identity haunting, typically, the location of the trauma.

 - various types of spiritual entity form this way. A poltergeist is typically the embodiment of childish playfulness cleaved away from the soul of a child, particularly during a trauma that robs the child of their innocence, and life, though again, not always the case.

 - the degree of danger posed by a phantom tends to be proportional to however much agency remains in the fragment. Agency may or may not fade with time. This spans the spectrum from a barely sentient will'o'wisp with little agency, to a well defined poltergeist, that may be persuaded or communicated with as one would an actual child.

 - it is uncommon that the fragments of a soul may be reunited after differentiation. Even after a short time, the fragments will have developed their own separate associations that further the divide.