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10 Years of Space
10 Years of Space
10 Years of Space
BEN MEKKI
10 Years Of Space
K. Antonio
SCIENCE FICTION LGBTQ+
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CONTENT CREATOR – TEACHER - MR. BEN MEKKI
A few years later, our tastes matured, slipping our summers into memories and
substituting them for leather jackets and motorcycle rides on the empty freeway. He
and I would stop on the roadsides by green fields that looked blue under the night
sky. We'd sit under the blanket of stars and watch the moon while dreaming up our
futures after high school.
I'm going to apply for a sports scholarship and get the fuck out of this town, he'd
always say. How about you?
I don't know. I shrugged. Maybe I'll go work with my dad as an apprentice at his
accounting firm.
What? Come on, man, you got to apply for university too. You're a freakin
brainiac. I'm sure you could get into any school.
Out the bay window, I see the lunar triplets: Euphrosyne,
Aglia, and Thalia dancing around what the New Worlds Association likes to
call Undine, the flooded, blue planet, equivalent in size to Jupiter, that I've been
studying for what would be measured, on planet Earth, as eight months.
The journey to this specific star system took four years. The rest of the crew and I
have enough resources to last another sixteen Earth months. By then, we'll have
made a substantial dent in our research. Our food, water, fuel, along with our
tolerance for the presence of one another, will have depleted, and we'll go into
cryosleep for our return. A decade, that's how long we'll have been apart.
So you'll be asleep, frozen in a coffin for about eight years?
I assured him that it was completely safe, that I wouldn't die in transport.
But doesn't that mean that you'll come back looking almost the same as when you
left? Won't you technically be younger than me?
I think about his current age. How it's already been more than four years, and how
unfair it must have seemed to him; that he'd miss me in the entirety of all that
elapsed time while I'd be sleeping almost all the years away, except for two.
Sometimes I wonder if he tells his other friends and customers about me. My
buddy's up in space, I imagine him saying. What's he doing up there? He's
researching a new planet, someplace better than this shit hole we're destroying.
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CONTENT CREATOR – TEACHER - MR. BEN MEKKI
Undine registers an oxygen signature similar to Europa and planet Earth. The
oceanic surface covering the entire planet could host a form of phytoplankton or an
entirely new plant species capable of producing oxygen as a byproduct of their
natural photosynthetic process. In other words, Undine could, in theory, host life.
If I'm being honest with myself, sometimes I feel that my role on this ship isn't as
relevant as the other crew members' works. That perhaps what I'm doing isn't as
impacting, that it's less exciting. I'm not spacewalking or trying to merge chemical
compounds under zero-gravity conditions. I barely passed the physical exam, and
my score on the simulatory emergency program ranked me as the fifth in command
if anything were to happen to our pilot or the others of my crew.
So what? He'd fire. You'll still be one of the few guys part of the human race to
have ever gone up to space. You'll still have broken records, be mentioned in the
history books. You'll have gone places no one has ever been to.
It was always like him to see the bright side in situations. When he didn't get his
full-ride to college, he applied for the town's undergrad program at the local
college. Don't worry, man, I'm still going to make it back and get myself out of this
place.
When he couldn't juggle both his academic life and work to help his folks pay the
bills, he still didn't crumble under all the pressure. I'll take a break this semester,
and then on the next one, I'll go back.
He never returned to school to finish his undergrad. Maybe college just isn't for
me. He opted to continue working, helping out his folks, and eventually went to,
and finished, trade school. I'm thinking about opening a restaurant. He told me
years ago. What about you, what are you thinking about doing with your life, huh,
Mr. Big Shot Imma certified scientist?
I laughed at his remark. I don't know, I answered. I guess I could teach or go for
my Ph.D.
What? But you just finished school, now you're thinking about going back? He
commented while scratching his beard. He tugged on the bill of his baseball cap
and shook his head in disapproval. You're nuts, man!
Yeah? And what do you think I should do?
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CONTENT CREATOR – TEACHER - MR. BEN MEKKI
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CONTENT CREATOR – TEACHER - MR. BEN MEKKI
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CONTENT CREATOR – TEACHER - MR. BEN MEKKI
acrobat in the depths of space. We have a medic doing research on the proliferation
of diseases under low gravity conditions.
They all sound like show-offs, that's what!
There's also a physicist and a botanist. Our pilot's one of the few men to have
traveled multiple times to the moon and Mars, as well as a skilled photographer
who captured high-definition photos of cosmic dust clouds, and then there's me, a
certified scientist, as he'd like to say.
A certified scientist who won himself a round trip ticket to space.
Weeks before my leave, we were lying close to one another in a field of dark-blue
grass. You're going to do big things up there, he said. He turned and shined me his
crooked smile. And when you're back, everyone is going to know your name.
You know I don't care about any of that stuff. I'm much more interested in seeing
the planet with the three moons.
I swear, man, only you.
Everyone here talks about their projects, comments on how much they miss their
family. Our captain left his wife three months pregnant back home, our mechanic
and our medic, two kids each. When they turn to me and ask if I've left anything
important behind, the first person that comes to mind isn't my mother or father, a
house or a car; it's him.
I'm the quiet one up here. Space is already deathly silent, but it and I enter into
staring contests with each other through the bay window, my eyes
versus Undine's three moons. I watch them, the triplets that grace the aquatic
planet, drawing up conclusions as to what might occur if one of the lunar bodies
were to simply explode. Obviously, there'd be no sound, but I'd watch the floating
remnants, mesmerized by the rubble as if catching the sight of fallen snow.
In this particular star system, aside from all the planets and moons spread out
across the field of space, there's also a bright celestial body similar to the sun back
home. The lone star is distant from everything, the same way that I'm years away
from my planet and from the only person more important to me than anything in
the whole universe.
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CONTENT CREATOR – TEACHER - MR. BEN MEKKI
How do you think things will be like once I'm back? I asked him before I left for
my physical and mental training.
What do you mean? He returned.
Will we still be —
You're kidding, right? Come on, I know you're smarter than that.
He hugged me, and for a moment, I wished he had begged me not to go. I
considered the idea of staying, of resisting the money, and even the chance to see
the moon.
Promise me you'll be here when I get back.
I wouldn't dream of leaving this place without you. I'll be here waiting for you. Me,
and this planet with nothing but a single moon.
At times I question myself. What's so great about a planet that's essentially all
water and almost no detectable land? And I'll hear him saying how we could build
floating houses or architectural structures like the Maldives, or that we can bring
out a boat from Earth just like Noah's Ark and spend our days searching the blue
world for a paradisiac island. Who knows, maybe we could even live in underwater
domes like The Atlanteans?
I'll nod and chuckle to myself and say sure as if it's all so simple. I'll picture us both
on Undine drifting together in its never-ending pool. He and I, in our own private
world, where we'll swim in our t-shirts and play with Michaelangelo.
Before I left, he gave me an envelope, open it only once you're far away
from Earth. It's because of what he wrote that I know I'll return, that I'll tell him
everything, from what I saw to what I dreamt. I'll say how much I remembered,
how much I missed him, and I'll repeat the exact verse he wrote at the end of his
letter; three words more significant to me than Undine and its three moons.
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CONTENT CREATOR – TEACHER - MR. BEN MEKKI
THE END