The lights burst on, breathtakingly bright and hot as fire, beating down on the relaxed astronaut and the noticeably sweaty talk-show host below. Their skin glows white in the glare of the blaze but subsides quickly as the camera adjusts to the new contrast and the host looks forward into the empty risers.
“Hello, and welcome to the Late Show! I’m your host, Dan Donahue, and we’re back! I’ve got with me the commander of the Gaia mission that you all have heard so much about, Major Riley Vonn, only the, uh…,” he shares a bewildered look with the astronaut and then with the camera crew behind the blistering light. “The, uh… what’s the line, again?”
“Probably the most well-known astronaut in the country, Dan,” the director mutters to himself, and then again louder to the host himself. “You usually aren’t this bewildered, what’s happening?” The second phrase comes off more as a statement than the question it presents. “Star-struck or something?”
Donahue smirks, though he can’t exactly see through the light. “Thanks, Jaden, real insightful criticism, right there,” he shakes his head to the astronaut, who seems less than amused at the current events- if she ever was. He drops his gaze immediately. “You know what they say. Everyone’s a critic.”
“Tell me about it,” Vonn mutters. Her shimmery black hair- obviously full of product, a fact made all the more glaringly obvious in the starlight shining from the other side of the stage- curls intelligently at her shoulders and wispily moves side to side as she shakes her head and chuckles softly. Donahue takes note- everything she does seems to be constrained. He always tries to use these dress rehearsals to get to know the people he’s interviewing, so that the future, live event is smoother. This astronaut has not been an easy nut to crack. She only tenuously agreed to do the interview in the first place and most everyone knows her reluctance to use her fame to get ahead, let alone try to draw more of it by encouraging public appearances. And yet her she is.
But of course, Donahue, being Donahue, is as straightforward as ever. His fans love a good, straight-to-the-heart shot in the form of a controversial question, and there are plenty of controversial questions about the mission of the Gaia. It’s only the most expensive thing to ever happen in the history of ever, after all, and a large chunk of the funds have come from the federal budget that some people think would better be spent fighting the ever more aggressive Chinese socialists.
“You do not seem pleased to be here, I have to say,” he says with usually brazen swagger. “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t make it too difficult for you. I’m just here to get the ball rolling, that’s it,” he makes a show of wiping his hands clean. Vonn stares at him, trying to gauge his verity, if he has any at all.
“That’s true.”
“You won’t be this… curt, when we go on tonight, right?” He leans in, impossibly, closer and mutters, “That doesn’t make more people stand up for Gaia, that makes fewer want to have anything to do with it. I’m sure I’m not the first to drill you on the nadirs in funding presented with a discontented public shouting about the Chinese, I suspect.”
“No, you’d be right in that assumption,” she says, curtly. Donahue sighs.
“Alright, Dan, can we do it again? I think we obviously should do it again.” the director shouts over the clamour of someone failing to move a lighting unit. Vonn annoyedly raps her fingernails on the corner of Donahue’s desk, scanning the back of the studio for any clock.
“Yeah, obviously,” he says, making sure to look at Vonn straight in the face when he does. “We should run through the questions, just to be safe.”
The director nods and waits another few seconds for the intern to set down the damn light before making a gun with his right hand and shooting.
“Hello, and welcome to the Late Show! I’m your host, Dan Donahue, and we’re back! I’ve got with me the commander of the Gaia mission that you all have heard so much about, Major Riley Vonn, only probably the most well-known astronaut in the country, and about to leave on her historic and trailblazing mission to beyond the limit of our imagination!”
The crowd goes wild with applause. Vonn, now dressed not in the NASA jumpsuit she arrived in but a stunning strapless number new from Paris, waves silently to the crowd, a grim smile decorating her face. Donahue, after a stern talking-to by the director, has decided that it would be best not to try and throw a curveball to the Commander of the most important mission ‘ever’ and so he looks, if anything, a little bit miffed; but a casual observer would never peel their attention away from Major Riley Vonn for long enough to notice anyway.
Once the cheers die down, Donahue speaks. “So, Ms. Vonn. I’m sure you’ve been getting a lot of attention recently. Can’t imagine why.”
“Neither can I, Dan, neither can I,” she puts on a show of pointing to and blowing a kiss towards one of the fans who’s still screaming.
“Maybe it has something to do with your.. I don’t know, your impending mission on the Gaia?” The crowd goes wild once again and he has to wait for them to die down, once again. He’s not used to this much noise- he had President Mallory on a few months ago and there wasn’t this great of an uproar.
“Yes, perhaps that’s it. I’m getting a lot of attention for that, I hear,” she grim nature of her smile has mostly evaporated, but a careful observer would notice that her smile is not at all genuine and her eyes betray exhaustion and an annoyed disposition to the whole event.
“Yes, of course. Would you mind telling us a thing or two about it?”
She nods her head once. “Of course. As most of you know, the Gaia is an interstellar ship currently finishing assembly on orbit,” she raises her hands and holds them up, as Atlas would holding up the world. “It’s so heavy that it has to be constructed that way, it’s far too big for any single launch. It’s actually almost six hundred meters long- that’s well over two thousand feet for the older in the crowd- made to be fully self-sustaining and made to be one hundred percent efficient in recycling every atom of material onboard.”
“Yes, those are the specs of what it does, indeed,” Donahue nods. “But what does it really do?”
Vonn giggles maliciously. This isn’t on-script. “To what are you referring?”
“I’m talking the real mission. What does it do? Those are very scientific ways of saying it’s the biggest recycling plant ever launched into space, but what do you need recycling for? I’m sure there’s at least one or two people who hasn’t heard the spiel.”
“Right. Yes. Our mission is simple. We are an exploration vessel above all else. Our mission is… well, it’s simple, like I said.”
“And what is that?”
“We are to travel to the edge of the universe. We are to travel to the edge of the universe, if it even exists, and to come back, if possible, although the world would be a changed place when we arrived home. I’m sure most of you have heard the math- because of relativity, we would age around half a century on the journey, but… well, about 41 Billion years would pass by around us,” she nods mortally. “That’s what’s up.”
A hush falls over the gaggle of fans. Donahue sucks the energy up from the silence and the intimacy he’s created with his new round of questions and propels into his next. “There are some saying that this is just a dick-waving contest to show the Chinese that we have the capability to go interstellar while they continue to flounder about with perpetual motion drives. What do you say to that?”
“It’s preposterous,” Vonn retorts immediately. “This is an exploration mission first and foremost, I already told you that. We are to go out there and see what we can see, to learn the secrets of the universe that we can’t find by just sitting here for all eternity.”
“Ah, but I quite like it here, doesn’t everybody?” He gets a roar from the crowd and he loves it. “The Earth is home for everyone, except the colonists in New Rochelle on the Moon and in Olympia on Mars, if I’m right, and it’s served us well. Why are you so eager to leave?”
Vonn steals herself for whatever hairbrained scheme Donahue is pulling. She knew he would do this, she just knew it; he’s always ready to tear down even the most prestigious interviewees just to get to the meat of the development. She straightens her back, giving off an aura of confidence that she had been lacking.
“I am an explorer.: Somehow her eyes seemed sharper. “The other eleven astronauts are explorers- ask any of them and you’ll see the same. We live to discover, to fight the bonds which hold us to the Earth and float up and take our rightful place amongst the stars.” Donahue makes to say something, but Vonn isn’t finished. “I am and always have been a dreamer. I wouldn’t abandon my future for anything- in fact, I invite the unknowns we will inevitably encounter along the way. Life’s more exciting that way, and I wish everyone else would accept that.”
Donahue waits for a startlingly tense ten seconds to let that sink in. “So, you accept your fate if the ship fails?”
“It won’t fail. It’s too well over-engineered to fail. All systems have been accounted for and we are fully prepared to go ahead with the mission next month. To test the ship, next Monday we’ll do a full rehearsal and send it around the Moon with all systems and hands on board, and then it’s off for the gravity assist off of Venus.”
“I’ve heard that your engines are powered by some-,” he interrupts himself to look at his notes, because who can even keep up with all this science mumbo-jumbo anyway? He isn’t a rocket scientist. “A Bussard ramjet. Could you explain what that is, and why you can’t use it to immediately start accelerating away, into your stars?”
“It’s a simple device, she says. She knows this answer. This is back on the script. She curses his randomness, but simultaneously welcomes it open-armed. “It scoops up interstellar Hydrogen ions and smashes them together to create fusion power, which it uses to power the ship. It accelerates the ions out the back of the ship in what is probably the largest proton candle in existence, creating a constant ten meters per second per second of thrust.: Through the whole explanation, she makes ridiculous hand-motions, showing the motion of the protons inside the engine. The audience sits in silence, listening intently. Probably understanding nothing, she thinks. “It just sweeps up all the hydrogen molecules for hundreds of kilometers around it, you see. It can only get going if the intake rate is so high, and we can’t get to that amount of intake per second unless we break so high of a speed, which we can only do with a gravity assist off of Venus.”
“Why that number? Why ten?” Donahue scrunches his face in a look of mock confusion. He, like everyone he knows, pretends to understand whatever the hell NASA has done with this monstrosity. It’s unattractive to be the only one in the room who’s honest when the question of Gaia comes up, as it usually does. He can spout the proton candle business, too, but it’s not like he actually understands fusion. Like, at all.
“It’s the same acceleration as gravity here on Earth. We can simulate artificial gravity by placing all the habitation modules facing away from the engine, with the floors on the side facing it, so that we’re always accelerating at the same rate we do here. We won’t notice a difference.”
“That’s all very technical. Of course, our audience is, as always, made up of easily amused rocket scientists, I can’t imagine it any differently,” This draws a laugh, ironically. “I would go into more depth of this highly complex and expensive mission with the woman who’s scheduled to drive it next month, but we have a message from our sponsors!”
Clapping from the crowd phases them to commercial.
Vonn glares disapprovingly at Donahue. “That was dirty.”
He shrugs. “I like the truth… it’s my job, after all.”
“So you think the best way to do that is to come at me with intentionally biased questions?”
“In what way are they biased?” He purses his lips. “I just think you don’t like things going away from the plan. Me? I live off of it. My viewers love it, too. See celebrities in an organic environment.”
“I could walk out of her right now and you wouldn’t have a show, you know,” she raises an eyebrow slightly, still trying to be calm and contented for the audience.
“But you won’t. You’re curious how this ends as much as I am.”
“What gives you that idea?”
“You haven’t left yet.”
“Do you encourage your guests to leave often?”
“More than the general public knows, I suppose. But you’re not exactly the general public.”
“I at least expected you to be professional.”
He shrugs. “In what ways am I not professional? Isn’t it just as legitimate to ask the same questions, just in a different order?”
“How is that a different order? The same questions?”
“Mostly the same.”
“You asked me if I’d prefer dying in space to living on Earth.”
“It’s what the country is asking, it’s what they all want to know. We could go over what we rehearsed, or we could make this more interesting. I suggest that you ditch what we rehearsed and suit up for my questions. I think everyone would like that.”
“I don’t have to take this insult,” she whispers frantically as the camera guys visually countdown from ten.
“You don’t have to,” he smiles and waves at the crowd. “Just remember what I said about public opinion. I want you to remember that it was me who said that.”
“You’re against the mission, aren’t you?” she gasps, suddenly realizing. “You’re intentionally sabotaging me?”
“And we’re back! With me is Major Riley Vonn, commander of the Gaia!” Her question goes unanswered. “We are now going to discuss the ethics of spaceflight in general with the woman who knows it best. Major Vonn?”
“Uh, yes. Ethics. Ethics. Always a difficult position to balance alongside the exploration of the universe.”
“You are aware that many say that it’s more productive to try and fix the planet we live on now rather than try to send people out there,” he points up animatedly, “into the unknown?”
“I am aware. To those people, I say…,” she has, has to be diplomatic here. Perhaps Donahue isn’t sabotaging her as she thought in her minor epiphany, but he is testing her. Perhaps he is one of the skeptics who think that the money could have been better spent, who knows. “I say that it is our future. Our collective future as a species. Back in 1969 with the first moonshot, we stood united in our common goal to explore the heavens. The same in 2031, with the first Mars-shot. And in 2039, with the first manned mission to Venus, and so on, and so forth. That brings us to modern times, 2089; we stand on the precipice of our future looking inward. The goal of Gaia is to bridge the gap and celebrate the advances of human technology, being both an exploration mission and a proof of concept. Do you understand that? Do you?” She gasps. She hadn’t realized she wasn’t breathing regularly. She takes a moment to catch her breath, shoulders noticeably moving.
Donahue nods, and after a stunned silence the audience cheers. The host gives a curt nod and says, “That was a very profound speech. I’m still not sure, that I’m a believer. I will never go to space. I will never go to space, I will never feel the effect of this telomere therapy that you and the other Gaianauts are on. I will never take advantage of these revolutions in self-pollinating plants or radiation shielded space suits, will I?” He rattles off the list he has in front of him, Vonn presumes, of the talking points she was supposed to address instead of the ethics of the whole damn thing.
“You see,” she says coyly, leaning back in the chair and raising a hand. She finds she’s a very tactile person- her hands always seem to be in motion, her best allies in a complicated topic. “That’s where you’re wrong. Our pursuits have this side effect of making the world a better place. You see, we already have shared our advances in those fields,” she looks discretely at her hand. She actually has notes on these topics, considering they are the things they’re supposed to be talking about.. Just under somewhat less harmonious circumstances. “We are already sharing the telomere processes with pharmaceutical companies across the world. We have already given the secrets to self-pollinating plants to the poorer regions of central Asia and Africa, we have already done all these things you claim haven’t been done. No matter how our opponents spin it, we are a force for good and will stay that way for the foreseeable future.” She crosses her arms in front of her chest and looks at him expectantly and then at the audience somewhat amusedly.
“I see,” he gives a scowl. “Very good work, of course. I.. can’t imagine a better outcome for something of this scale, than to share it with the world. That is the goal of science and research, to make the world a better place, I’m sure you all will agree,” he looks at the crowd, his frustration, but above all his profound confusion, clouding his face.
“All right, all right,” his face changes somehow, becomes softer somehow. “Okay. Let’s back up. I believe we wanted to discuss those things which we referred to a few minutes ago. Let’s start simply- well, relatively. Telomeres. Could you tell us about them?”
Vonn must mute her grin- she’s won him over. Not that she really wants to, but that’s beside the point. As long as he stops his assault, that’s good enough. She can take this conversation into her own volition, as long as Donahue follows.
“Yes. Telomeres. So, your DNA, over a long time, it multiplies over and over again. Everyone knows that, of course. But not a lot of people know that over the span of all of these multiplications, the ends of the DNA- telomeres, they’re called- erode into nothing,” she says, making a scrubbing motion. “This process takes around seventy years until the telomeres are really at the edge of not even being present anymore. They are the driving cause of aging among multicellular organisms.”
“I see, all fascinating work. And how does that affect your mission?”
“Telomere therapy, as we discussed earlier, is something revolutionary in the area of medical science, because it uses a stable form of an enzyme that can cancel the erosion of the DNA caps. What that entails is that we can essentially cure aging by keeping the telomeres at full length. This has obvious drawbacks, but nothing that can’t be nullified that by the fact that we can live centuries longer than regularly.”
The audience, perhaps having never heard this fact before or perhaps being coerced into it by the crew, all gasp and give a smattering of applause. Vonn nods excitedly and smirks at the crowd, taking it all in. She doesn’t know what happened to Donahue, but she knows that this is better than she even expected coming into this. She pacified him, for now.
“And, I take it you are currently on this medication?”
“I am, yes.”
“And, with the successful perpetuation of this technology on your mission, how long could someone in your physical and mental state expect to live?”
She shrugs. “Really…. five hundred, six hundred years, as long as the telomerase continues to function, which is something we have no reason to believe would ever fail.”
The sweat is once again visible on his brow, and he makes a show of sinking back into his chair and hardly even hiding the fact that he’s reading off the cards being held up by some low-salary employee behind camera 2. “Remind us again, how are these being implemented in the regular lives of regular people?”
“NASA and the federal government still hold the rights to the procedure, but they are extracting a tax for allowing hospitals to use the procedure on those who can afford it. It is still in its virtual infancy, but… it’s as good as it’s going to get for now,” Vonn closes her thin lips and nods. “Yeah, it’s a lot to take in. I’m sure that someone like you would have no problem acquiring some in due time.”
“And.. this is a direct result of research for the Gaia mission?” He scratches his chin thoughtfully, looking to her with a look of intense interest that she could have only dreamt of. Something that talk-show hosts should do anyway, but… This is Dan Donahue we’re talking about. He’s famous for being the wildcard.
“Yes, of course. Our service mission should last around a century from the perspective of the crew, although that will be many tens of billions of years for the outside… But for us, under telomere therapy, it will be maybe a fifth or a sixth of our life expectancies. It’s revolutionary, really.”
“That is…,” Donahue sputters. “That’s remarkable, truly,” he turns to face the crowd. “For those of you who are unfamiliar with the list of other achievements of the researchers for the Gaia mission, they include, as aforementioned, the self-pollination of plants, to avoid the necessity of having to launch bees onto the ship; the implementation of a very high nutrient diet for a very low cost of space and time in the form of an altered Three-Sisters farming technique used by ancient Mesoamericans- that is, the concurrent farming of corn, beans, and squash, as well as potatoes for caloric intake and green vegetables for nutrition; and the successful development of an artificial magnetic field based around a motor unit that can protect any interplanetary crew to our colonies indefinitely for very little electric cost.”
The director makes a motion towards his wrist and Donahue gets the message. “And on that note, this has been Commander Vonn of the Gaia intergalactic exploration mission! Be sure not to miss her launch, along with her peers, on March second. That’s three Wednesdays from now. We will all be with you, Commander, as you venture forth.” He’s probably reading off a predetermined end line at this point- no, in fact, Vonn is sure of that fact- but it’s still a good gesture. “Godspeed to you all, and may god be with you as you reach the depths of the unknown. We may never see your likes again.”
Riley stomps out of the building later, having shed her dress for a much more movable pair of black jeans and a long coat. She tried- tried, so hard- to remove all the random shit they put in her hair, but to no avail. Instead, she just pulled it back into a tail and tried to forget about it- something that was exceptionally difficult to accomplish, not surprisingly. She tends to have a hard time forgetting things- they just stick in her mind like glue. Especially when she’s irritated. Then it’s really tough to ignore the small stuff.
Commander Riley Vonn is someone who cares absolutely negatively for her appearance, focused instead on her mission. She’s indebted to it for her position and future, sure, but she is also burdened with the duty of, yes, appearing on late night talk shows to attempt to explain the scope of their impending odyssey to a bunch of primates. Said primates seem intent on only caring about, what.... what they could gain from the mission? She tried to explain the true magnitude of their success or failure to the audience in there, but all they wanted was drama. Just like that Donahue character.
No one ever understands. They can’t see the big picture- they never could. She’s heard stories of how difficult it was to stir up public support for the first Mars missions back in the early century- and look where they are now. No, she’s firmly believed for years that the only good thing the general public can provide her is tax money. And thus, here she is, humiliating herself on live TV just to secure a fund which is already irrelevant. The ship is already fucking finished. It doesn’t matter what public opinion says, we’re launching in three weeks with or without their approval.
NASA, disagreed.
Without even having noticed it, she has tromped through three blocks during her internal arguments and somehow ended up at the bank of the Hudson. She looks out over the black water, ripping quietly, a vestige of silence in a city of noise and hustle.
She would go to it, sit by it, but there’s a large road and a series of docks between her and the water and the time is hedging on midnight. She has a plane to catch in the morning back to Florida, and she can’t miss it, not now. She already made a fool of herself once, she won’t allow it to happen again.
She turns on a heel and starts back, jumping out of the way of the people now surging towards her. Her march back to her hotel, at the corner of 8th Avenue and 44th Street, is relatively uneventful. She finds that if she keeps her head down and her persona thoroughly different from the mask that she wears for public gatherings, people tend not to recognize her. She does get some sideways glances from people who can probably put two and two together- her having just been on TV does not help her case, of course- and when she does she just shoves her hands deeper into her pockets and shoves her way into a crowd. NASA astronauts are, by definition, usually small people. The purpose of this is obvious- in space, weight is the enemy. It is never difficult, than, for her, shorter than most, to disappear quickly; black on black into the night.
Her room is on the 32nd floor of the Comfort Inn at Times Square- NASA spares no expense for someone as important as her (or so she likes to think). She roughly rips her card key through the door and flops unceremoniously on the bed, taking in its queer smell. It’s standard warm cotton, but the fact that it’s warm hints that it was very recently washed. She deduces that the hotel staff could predict that she’d be pack soon after her interview and made the room spotless for her return before ditching the ship and moving out.
She rolls around, stuffs two hands around the back of her neck, and exhales. Just the way she likes it. Alone. There’s no one to second guess her in here, except perhaps the surreal painting on the wall of a man formed using nothing but the shapes and colors of various fruits. If anyone’s judging anyone here, I should be judging you she thinks to the painting.
She kicks off her shoes- not sneakers, mind you, she abandoned those back at the studio- and flicks on the TV. She’s fully expecting to see herself, and so she’s not at all surprised to see that she is correct. As per usual.
She sighs even deeper and longer when she sees Dan Donahue again. It’s just some replay from the local news station, showing her ‘heated’ comments during the fiasco, both praising her quick thinking and denouncing her hotheadedness in parts. She has to agree with its assessment, really. She could have handled it better. She’ll get heat for that tomorrow when she gets back. For now, however, she just can’t care to think about it. After a time, she drifts off to a restless sleep.