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2




NASA Headquarters

Washington, DC


Jacqueline Cheever was not known for her good humor, particularly when receiving unpleasant news—and the daily conference call with the various NASA center directors under her frequently involved unpleasant news.

Her prior role as the space agency’s Planetary Protection Officer had been in continuous danger of being overlooked by the more jaded managers from the operational divisions, and she had ascended to the top office with a determination that others would take her as seriously as she took herself.

As an evolutionary biologist, Planetary Protection, and by extension Earth Sciences, had been her passion. To her, protecting Earth’s neighboring planets from inadvertent contamination by data-seeking probes was a high calling. Humanity had already fouled its own nest, and she’d been determined to prevent from doing the same to the rest of the solar system. As NASA administrator, Dr. Cheever was in a position to make her priorities everyone’s, if she could just keep them corralled into doing their jobs. It surprised her how often that required intervention.

As the project manager from Goddard droned on about the latest snags in the Climate Change Action Plan, Cheever became visibly displeased, her sharp features exaggerated by the taut bun of her jet-black hair.

“I need to emphasize the CCAP team is meeting all project goalposts,” the portly engineer insisted. “From our perspective, Project Sunshade is on track.”

“From your perspective,” Cheever said, her eyes locked on his. “Yet somehow the schedule keeps moving to the right.”

“As I said, the team is—”

She held up a bony hand to silence him. “Let’s be clear: Your team can’t do anything on its own. That’s a convenient distinction for you, since you don’t control the production or the supply chain.”

“Yes, ma’am, that’s true,” he stammered, forgetting how much traditional gender honorifics annoyed her. “We’re constrained by our contractors—”

“And have you made our expectations clear? It doesn’t seem to me that you have.”

“They have to work with the materials they have on hand, Dr. Cheever. Not to put too fine a point on it—”

“By all means, please do. It would be refreshing.”

The project manager bit his lip. “Very well. Selene Gas & Mineral is the bottleneck.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Max Jiang’s company.” They had never been as committed to the Sunshade project as she’d liked, and now their slowdowns were threatening the entire global cooling program. Cheever was continually appalled at how many in the mining and petroleum industries refused to treat climate change with the urgency it deserved, including the “off-worlders” like Jiang. “Their enthusiasm for this project has always been suspect,” she groused, “even though we were throwing money around like drunken sailors in a strip club. The pigs always find their way to the teat.”

The other directors shifted uncomfortably while keeping their practiced neutral expressions. They all understood the unspoken reason why Jiang had signed on: SGM was the only game in town, and thinly veiled threats to his Earthbound drilling leases from both Interior and EPA had nudged him to the bargaining table. Building a web of sunshades at Lagrange Point 1 required enormous mineral resources and getting them from the Moon was cheaper in almost every sense. But as the project wore on, the iconoclastic Jiang had become ever more skeptical of its goals. As she saw it, his personal recalcitrance was now translating into delays which she would not countenance.

Cheever made a tsk sound and moved on to the next agenda item, this from her own assistant at the other end of the table. Blaine Fitzgerald Winston had worked for NASA years before, leaving under a cloud to apply his skills to a number of trendy non-governmental organizations. There’d been talk of intelligence breaches which in the end had yielded nothing of substance—which didn’t mean there weren’t any, only that nothing had emerged. In Washington, that could just as easily mean nothing had been allowed to emerge.

The young man had ingratiated himself to her early on, displaying a gift for bureaucratic craftiness that she found more valuable than a dozen technocrats. Brilliant engineers were a dime a dozen at NASA; give her an aide who could navigate the byzantine maze of proposals and appropriations any day. Best of all, the young man had tons of connections, an ear for insider gossip, and the brains to keep things to himself until it mattered.

For these reasons, she’d taken the unusual step of making him her personal liaison for the space agency’s most ambitious project, the Great Filter. Primarily funded by concerned tech moguls, the scheme to place a network of sunshades at L-1 would be even farther behind were it not for the pressure those NGOs brought to bear. Diminished economic status or not, getting the United States to lead the world in addressing climate change once and for all was key to the project’s success.

Cheever pointed to Winston, his bright tie accenting a mop of curly hair that contrasted with his otherwise conservative, standard-issue Washington suit. “Go.”

The young man cleared his throat. “I must emphasize this information is confidential, and must not leave this room.” His body language suggested he was uncomfortable with the information he was about to present. In reality, he was anything but. “The Currents Foundation and Global Action Project have a different perspective on solving CCAP’s supply chain issues.” He paused for effect. “They don’t see it as either logistics or engineering; in fact I think we all recognize it’s a question of SGM’s management commitment. To this end, they are launching a coordinated PR campaign that will coincide with Selene’s next shareholder meeting.” He effected a satisfied smile. “If this doesn’t prod Mr. Jiang into doing the right thing, the Securities and Exchange Commission is prepared to investigate his activities.”

Cheever smiled to herself. If the NGOs couldn’t change his mind economically, the market regulators would do so legally. Either way, Jiang would be brought onboard. If all else failed, they always had the threat of Congress nationalizing his business for the public good. One man’s recalcitrance would not be allowed to doom the planet.

“Very good, Blaine,” she said, making it obvious that he was the sole presenter to escape her scorn. “Is there anything else?”

“Just some administrative loose ends with another contractor, which I believe we can tie up soon,” he said nonchalantly. “They’re not germane to this meeting, ma’am.” It was his way of letting her know he had something big for her.

“Same time tomorrow, then,” Cheever reminded the others, and closed the meeting. The room’s holographic screens went blank and she waited for Winston to ensure the conference phones were all off. “Clever way of mentioning the HOPE gang without actually mentioning them,” she said, and gave him a “get on with it” look. “What are they up to?”

Winston removed a folder from his briefcase and pushed it across the table to her. “They’ve reestablished contact with Magellan.”

Cheever paused as she reached for the folder. “It’s been what, five years? Didn’t we have Templeton declared dead?”

Winston seemed uncharacteristically awkward. “That was our official position after his spacecraft disappeared.”

She opened the folder with a raised eyebrow. “What are you holding back, Blaine?”

He smoothed his tie, still somewhat uncomfortable. “Ultimately that’s not something we can control. Templeton gave power of attorney to his sister before he departed Earth, and she refuses to acknowledge the reality of the situation.”

Cheever frowned. “I suppose that is her legal prerogative,” she said with an exasperated sigh. “If big sis doesn’t want to collect the death benefits, then that’s on her.” She flipped through the pages of summaries, her eyes widening as they landed on a particularly surprising passage:


HELLO WORLD. I’M STILL HERE.

TELL TRACI HI.


She looked up at Winston, her face a mask of annoyance. “In this case, she may have been correct.”



Johnson Space Center

Houston, Texas


“You’ve recovered your gross motor skills,” the therapist said. “It’s your fine motor skills that still need some work.”

Traci Keene didn’t have to be told that. She could move around without assistance and had no issues with balance or coordination. She’d even been able to start running again without someone supervising her on a treadmill. The occupational therapists would’ve lost it if they’d known she’d been running on her own, outside on an actual track. “What I need is something more challenging than counting beans or learning different ways to tie my shoes.”

“Still thinking about flying again, aren’t you?”

“Of course.” Why wouldn’t I be? She thought with irritation. “It’s what I do . . . or what I used to do.” What the space agency therapists couldn’t appreciate was just how much of a pilot’s identity was tied up in the act of precisely controlling high-performance machinery.

“One step at a time,” he said with studied patience. “You’re talking about discrete skills. Eye-hand coordination.”

“I need to be able to reach for a switch and know I’m in the right place by touch and muscle memory. Rapidly. If I have to look down and think about what I’m doing, it’s too late. The airplane’s gotten ahead of me, and that’s when bad things happen.”

The therapist pursed his lips and nodded, resolving an internal argument. “Then let’s try something new,” he said after a moment, and led her to another room. Inside was a chair in front of a desk that held a video game console. Beneath the desk sat a pair of pedals. He handed her a virtual reality headset and a pair of haptic feedback gloves. She slipped them on with a questioning look. This promised to be more interesting than the simple activities they’d had her performing the past several months, but she halfway expected it to be a higher-tech exercise in throwing a ball or sorting blocks.

When the therapist turned on the console, she was elated to see a 3D representation of an aircraft cockpit sitting at the end of a virtual runway. “Cessna 172,” she said with a tinge of disappointment. “I haven’t flown one of these since college. Do you at least have a T-6 in here? Something with a turbine?”

“Small steps,” he reminded her. “Think of it as flight school.”

Right. The virtual cockpit was realistic enough, right down to the pebbled grain of the crappy Kydex plastic panel and antiquated six-pack instrument gauges. She started from memory, her hand reaching for the virtual battery switch. She felt its ridged surface, pressed in the rocker buttons, and was rewarded by gauge needles jumping to life. She then reached for the old-fashioned rotary key switch to turn on the magnetos. Deciding that needed to be the extent of her relying solely on memory, she reached for an icon that brought up a pre-takeoff checklist in the corner of her vision and dutifully went through each item. The final task was a control check. She reached for the yoke and gave it a twist in each direction, looking left and right toward each wingtip to see the ailerons moving with her input. Turning over her shoulder, the elevator responded in kind as she pulled at the yoke. She glanced down at her feet and went through the same exercise with the rudder pedals.

Satisfied the “airplane” would be controllable, she set takeoff flaps and advanced the throttle plunger. The digital machine began to roll down the simulated runway.

The rest she knew from memory. Airspeed came alive, and at sixty-five knots she began to smoothly pull the yoke toward her. The runway fell away beneath her and she climbed into blue sky, with just enough clouds above to offer perspective. She retracted flaps and scanned the instruments, her eyes darting to each one in a pattern long ago instilled as habit. The heading indicator didn’t drift at all; she was still perfectly aligned with the runway as she climbed through a thousand feet. No wind, she thought. They were making it easy for her.

“Once around the pattern,” the therapist said as if he were a flight instructor. “They tell me landing is the hard part.”

Maybe for a rookie. She turned left, then left again after a few moments, flying back the opposite direction parallel to the runway. As she passed its threshold she pulled back the throttle, added flaps, and began turning back to the runway in a gentle descent. As the black pavement edged into view she made a final turn, centering the runway in the windscreen and keeping her eyes on its far end. One more notch of flaps, pull power, let it glide in.

She drifted across the threshold. Too high, she realized, and lowered the nose. Too steep. Gaining airspeed when she needed to lose it. Stupid. She pulled back, too hard, and a stall-warning horn buzzed angrily in her ears. The plane flopped down onto the runway and bounced back into the air before coming down hard one final time, the yoke shaking through her gloves.

“Good work for a first flight,” the therapist offered hopefully. If he’d been a real flight instructor, he’d be screaming at her for not watching her airspeed on final.

“Not good enough,” she grumbled, tempted to blame it on the Cessna’s famously mushy controls. It was an easy, forgiving airplane, which was what made it so popular with students and newly licensed pilots. And she’d just made her worst landing ever in it, virtual or not.

“Small steps,” he reminded her.

“Right,” Traci muttered to herself. But she now had a new goal in mind. Perhaps it was time to invest in a serious gaming setup. She knew of some good home flight simulators.


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