Date point: 4y 9m 3w 0d AV
Frank Clark was spending his 70th birthday trying to quickly force himself to throw up the birthday cake that his daughter Samantha had brought for him; hopefully before the sugar in it decided it wanted to make his foot fall off. She’d apparently forgotten that her father had been diabetic for the last ten years; that, or she had decided that he’d be better off minus one of his feet. He wouldn’t really have been surprised by either possibility if he was honest with himself.
While their father could be heard loudly hacking and wheezing in the bathroom so that he could avoid another trip to the hospital, his children were arguing even louder.
“How the fuck can I be expected to remember everything that’s wrong with him?!” Samantha screamed.
Robert snorted, “It’s literally one of like three things wrong with him! Were just lucky that I tasted it and realized you put real sugar into the stupid cake!”
“Shut up Robert, I actually cooked this time! And at least I tried at all this year! All you did today was show up and start eating every piece of food that was put in front of you!”
Kendra cut across Roberts retort before they could get any farther into the argument. “Do you think we should take him to the hospital?” Kendra was the youngest of Frank’s children and also by far the most anxious when it came to his health. “He sounds like he’s having a really hard time in there. What if he has another episode of diabetic shock?”
Samantha rolled her eyes “He’ll be fine, he only had 1 slice.” “But,” Robert started, “he also had ice cream before that as a ‘treat’ so he was already cutting it close to begin with.” “Oh, please…”
Between the renewed arguing of his children about whether he was dying, without consulting him, and having just puked up what was at one point delicious, Frank was having trouble keeping his crushing headache at bay. He resolved to just sit and pant against the wall of his bathroom and try to regain his breath and his dignity.
After several minutes he relented to the idea that he was only going to regain one out of the two, and he struggled to his feet still panting. He shuffled out of the bathroom to the kitchen where his children were now silently seething in each other’s company. He broke the silence by saying, “Look, I don’t care. Can we just forget this birthday nonsense?”
He was being callous and he knew it. His children just wanted to be with him on his birthday. Well, at least two did, but, after all the arguing and anger, all he wanted was to be left alone. He saw the flash of hurt that crossed Kendra’s face at his words and felt a sharp stab of remorse.
“Fine,” Samantha said, “I only had time for the food anyways. I have to get back home to make dinner for Brian.” She seemed relieved to be given an excuse to leave her families company. Without another word or a backwards glance she walked out of the kitchen, and they heard the sound of Frank’s front door opening and closing. Silence ensued until Robert mumbled how he had to get back to work and he also made his rather awkward and rushed exit.
Kendra sat in silence with her father for a short while. She seemed to be waiting for him to speak.
“What?” He asked flatly.
“You haven’t told them you’re doing it are you?”
Taken aback, he asked, “Doing what?” But he knew what she was referring to before she said it.
“Leaving.”
He considered her for a moment. “…No. I haven’t. How did you find out about it? I just sent out the applications a few days ago.”
“I was with you on that flight, remember? I saw your face. I haven’t seen you like that in 6 years Dad. You were smiling like a kid who just found 50 bucks on the ground. At least you were at first.” Kendra looked at her father to see the reaction to her words. “I knew that it was only a matter of time before you heard the call, compared to all this boring stuff down here.”
It was true, Frank hadn’t really felt happy, or in awe of anything, since his wife had passed of pneumonia 6 years previously. In fact he’d been sliding slowly downhill in all sorts of ways since Jasmine had died. He’d lost most of the muscle that he’d managed to hold onto through the diabetes. Eating seemed like a chore. The joints in his arms were getting bad as well, and he couldn’t use any of his guns anymore without nearly tearing his rotator cuffs. Those things just didn’t seem to really matter though. He knew he was slipping into depression, and it was affecting his health, but didn’t seem to care enough to actually try to get help. So far, ‘fading’ just seemed like the thing to do. Retirement and an empty nest didn’t offer many reasons to hang around, and Frank had figured to just follow his wife soon.
But then, that was before Kendra had decided to try and break him out of it.
Date point: 4y 5m 1w 2d AV (4 months previously)
While sitting in his lumpy recliner, Frank heard a knock on his front door, which usually meant sending some solicitor scrambling from his front porch with a stern look of disapproval if they weren’t selling Samoas. However upon shuffling to his front room and opening the door, he saw his daughter Kendra standing with a strained smile.
“Dad… Come with me.”
“ What? Why?”
“No questions, just c’mon or well be late! Bring a coat too!”
Bewildered and becoming grouchy at not being informed as to why his afternoon was being interrupted, and also being forced to grab a coat for some reason in 80 degree weather, he allowed his daughter to take his hand and lead him to her car, parked in Frank’s driveway.
20 minutes later after some minor traffic, and several deflected questions, the car turned towards the busy airport. Frank hadn’t set foot on a plane in nearly a decade. He secretly thought the things were damn well terrifying.
“Were traveling? You know I hate those stupid disease carrying contraptions! Also, I don’t have any luggage, or clothes, or anything.”
“Don’t worry.” She quipped. “We’ll be back before dinner.” She replied, smiling inwardly, knowing the real reason her father was complaining.
They walked slowly, Kendra’s pace relaxed and Frank’s breathing slightly labored, towards the crowded and bustling terminal, Frank glaring at anyone who looked at him. She changed direction before reaching the front door however. They were now walking along the sidewalk towards a smaller hanger that seemed to be buzzing with more activity than seemed normal.
When they were close enough they saw that all the activity was centered on a plane that looked like it had been converted from one of those private jets billionaires owned. Converted into what was immediately apparent from the lettering on the side that said, “MCKAY’S SPACE RACE.”
“You gotta be shitting me.”
“Nope, c’mon!”
The belly of the plane had been gutted and made flat, and then fitted with large windows that faced the ground, which didn’t really make sense considering how Frank imagined plane seats usually sat. It would be awkward to look down past your shoes at the view.
Nevertheless, he allowed his daughter to drag him to the front of the line near the nose of the plane, waving two tickets at any employee who looked at them. “VIP tickets here! We get first pick of seats!” The ticket master helpfully grunted at Kendra and waved them through the gate up the stairs into the cabin.
“Oh fuck no.”
The seats were bolted onto the ceiling instead of the floor.
“Oh fuck yes old man, you’re getting into one of those seats even if I have to T.A.S.E. your ass in order to make you do it.”
“Can I actually choose the electro shock therapy instead of this? I choose that.”
“Stop whining!”
The back of the chairs were sitting against the ceiling making it so he would need to be held in with a five point harness, looking straight down through the glass and leaving his feet dangling straight below him. There were seven rows of chairs, two across, making fourteen passengers on this deathtrap, and another two considering suicidal pilot one and suicidal pilot two.
“Jesus Christ, Kendra, why are you doing this to me? I’ll be torn apart just by taking off in this thing.”
“Nah, it’s fine dad. They’ve done a ton of these and no one has died yet.”
“I’m totally reassured. Thank you.”
A small ladder was bolted to the wall next to the seat Kendra pointed out for him, and Frank stared at it for a moment. Light hearted complaining for complaining’s sake was all well and good, but he was more than apprehensive about actually climbing a ladder and strapping himself into a seat bolted into the ceiling. Frank knew his body simply wasn’t up to the challenge. As Frank was musing on how to become weightless while still on the Earth’s surface, a man tapped him on the shoulder; the man was pushing what looked like a small scissor lift.
“Here old timer, we got ya covered. It won’t be the most ‘graceful’ ascent but you’ll get up there.”
Frank stared balefully at the scissor lift, but relented at the look Kendra shot him. Clambering up onto the lift, he did as the employee was instructing him and bent at the waist as he began to rise up to the ceiling. When his back was resting against the scratchy seat cover the lift stopped, and he began to painfully twist his body and arms to buckle himself into the harness. Frank was furious with himself for being humiliated like this due to his own physical weakness, but he knew Kendra wanted him to enjoy this, considering how anxious she’d looked on his front porch, so he flashed her the thumbs up and grunted, “Ready for take-off.”
The other passengers had begun to file in as he had taken his little ride on the lift and were all nearly ready as well.
A voice crackled through the plane, “GOOOOOOOOOOD AFTERNOON PEOPLE! I am Captain McKay, and I will be your pilot as you all fly through the stars today! It should be a quick trip up into space and then you’ll be able to either stay in your seat if you like or be free to move about the cabin once we are weightless! We’ll be departing momentarily, and remember tell your friends about us if you had fun!”
As soon as McKay stopped speaking the engines flared to life. Having not noticed that the engines were actually pointed down on this plane, Frank jumped when he realized they were already rising off the ground. Several of the passengers who had not quite finished on their harnesses yelped and began frantically strapping in. Hovering just above the concrete, the pilot maneuvered the plane into open air outside the hanger and began to point itself towards the sky as the engines rotated to where they would sit on the average turbine engine plane. Then McKay punched the engines. With a sound reminiscent of a potato gun, the Frankenstein craft shot up into the air.
As the acceleration increased, Frank felt himself being pushed farther down into his seat than he thought it was capable of accommodating. His eyes also felt as if they were trying to spend more quality time with his nostrils.
After slowly turning his head and managing to look at Kendra, he was a little smug to see she had a rather manic expression somewhere between terror and exhilaration. It seemed to be a bit more than she had bargained for.
Despite his daughters apparent second thoughts about the trip, and by ignoring a stab of protest from his spine, Frank was all of a sudden actually rather enjoying the ride. The apprehension to bursting into flames in a fiery death was still there, but took a back seat to adrenaline and exhilaration. Rollercoasters had been out of the question for years, and this was about ten times any rollercoaster he’d ever been on, and the view was getting increasingly better the longer it went on. Passing through cloud layers was taking no time at all and they were quickly past the highest layers of cirrus clouds. A few seconds later the curvature of the Earth was abundantly apparent. After that the blue started to give way to black and then tiny pinpricks of starlight. Around the time when he felt as if the wrinkles in his forehead were touching his nose, the craft began to slow.
Captain McKay was looking at his green co-pilot, Fredrickson, who seemed to be rather disappointed by the acceleration. “How come I barely felt a thing?” The newbie asked.
“We have some basic versions of the tech that they’re using on the military starships now, built right into the floor of the cockpit. Supposed to make it so we barely even know we’re moving, and to also make it so we have normal gravity in space.”
“It’s working.” The co-pilot grumbled, “What’s the point of having something that can break atmo but you can’t feel it?”
“We can if we want to. It’s just that dial on your right. And even if we didn’t feel it, the passengers in the back sure as hell could! We didn’t put any gravity plates in the cabin. That way the passengers get more out of the ride and it saves me a bunch of money at the same time. Just gotta keep an eye on that dial there.” He pointed at a display showing the G-forces in the passenger compartment. “Gotta keep it around 6G’s or less to make sure no one dies back there. Couple might pass out, like that old guy back there, but he’ll wake up. We can go up to 9G’s before everybody passes out but then well get some pissed off rich folk; never a good option if you can avoid it.” He said, sagely.
“Well gee, I’m glad they’re having so much fun! I just thought I’d get more fun out of it myself. That’s all. There wasn’t even any fire outside when we broke the atmosphere.”
“Force fields man; and just relax, like I said, we can turn down the gravity in here later if you want. Long as we all survive, and I get paid, it don’t matter much to me how exciting the ride is. I used to always have the plates off when I first started, but it gets old after the hundredth ride or so.”
Captain McKay had done this run every day now for nearly a year, ever since the first prototype engines based on alien tech became available for purchase and he’d bolted them onto a plane. He’d sunk most of his assets into this bird’s conversion, and it sure hadn’t disappointed him. He could charge ten times what it cost to actually take the whole craft up, and he charged each passenger at the ‘inflated’ rate. He could charge an extra two times by just slapping a VIP sticker on the ticket as well. A profit margin of 144:1 made it so he could hire as many people as he wanted, to do maintenance and the like, and all he had to do was fly the damn thing once a day. Not a bad gig.
While the pilots were busy talking comfortably in their 1G cabin, Frank was experiencing something he’d only dreamt of in nearly 20 years. Not one of his joints or muscles was nagging at him to relieve pressure upon it.
Mercifully there had been no urge to pass out; he didn’t think his pride could handle another hit today; however his eyesight did seem to go a bit grey, which seemed odd. When they’d broken free of the atmosphere, and then traveled past the worst of Earth’s gravity well, they began to decelerate slowly to what Frank approximated as a stop. As this happened, both of his arms had started to drift up off of his lap and sit slightly above his navel. He unconsciously braced for the twinge of ache raising his arms always brought…and was left with no pain response from his limbs.
Forgetting everything about where he was, and the fact that a thin sheet of aerospace metal separated him from death, he looked at his arms, then his shoulders, and, slowly, began to raise his arms up over his head. No pain. Not even a little bit. They just moved up and hung there, weightless in the zero G cabin.
Without another thought he slapped the center locking disk of his harness and released himself from his seat. Pushing his body out of his chair back home was a serious undertaking for Frank these days, but in zero G he only pushed with 2 fingers and began to drift from his seat. After pushing off the ceiling, he moved towards the floor, now seemingly the wall, until he mused that there was no longer an up or down.
This thought was driven from his head as, for the second time today, Frank forgot all the context of where he was and what he was doing.
The belly of the ship was staring down at Earth.
It was something out of his wildest dreams, actually being in space and looking down. Growing up in the mid-20th century, he’d followed all the space missions. He’d listened to the moon landing over the radio inside a hut, his first week in Vietnam, and cheered right along with his squad when they heard Armstrong tell the world that man had succeeded and conquered the moon.
But he never thought he’d be up here himself.
He watched as thousands of glittering satellites winked at him as they passed over the Earth, too far away to see besides some reflected light. There was a hurricane forming in the Gulf of Mexico, covering large amounts of ocean and a few small stretches of land at the far ends of the spiral arms of the storm. Thin clouds obscured large parts of the continents, but near the eastern part of the United States, night had begun to fall. A brilliant patchwork of lights was glowing along the coastline, with long tendrils of light connecting sprawling clusters of glowing landscape. His gaze wandered to the western coastline, still in daylight, and his eyes were drawn to a dark blemish. Frank felt his brow furrow, his expression turning stony. The newsreels had played in his house the same as anyone else’s. San Diego had gone up in fire, in an alien attack, and left only a smoking crater.
Kendra’s hand gripped onto her father’s shoulder, keeping herself from drifting away, as she watched his face carefully. After such a long time of faked emotion covering over a stony indifference, it was almost too good to believe the expression on his face. It couldn’t be described as anything less than wonder, but, even as she watched, a shadow crossed the aged face.
“It’s wrong…”
“What? What’s wrong? Are you feeling ok? Are you motion sick? I have a bag here!”
“Calm down, calm down, it’s not me that’s wrong. It’s that!” He said, pointing at the hole that used to be a major city.
“San Diego? You already knew about that though. It was on the news for months! It’s still on the news!”
“I know but… It just… I…”
But, the words wouldn’t come. What was it that he even wanted to say? That he’d seen but hadn’t cared? Why hadn’t he cared? He couldn’t imagine saying something so callous aloud, even though it was the truth.
“It wasn’t important.” She suddenly finished for him.
Startled out of his introspection, and ashamed that she had guessed his feelings, he looked his daughter in the eyes, expecting an accusing look. His gaze met only sadness.
“You’ve been gone a long time Dad. I couldn’t think how else to talk to you again. It seemed like time for drastic measures. I’m sorry about San Diego. I just wanted you to see something that you couldn’t ignore; the Earth in general that is, not the crater. It seems like it’s working.”
“I… I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry Kendra. It’s just, after your mother… Life just didn’t have the same appeal… the same color to it. Nobody needed me anymore.” Frank paused for a moment. “I’m old Kensy. I don’t know when it happened or how it snuck up on me. After she was gone and the burial was over and all the condolences stopped coming, I felt a deep ache in my bones. I didn’t know what to do with myself. With my life… I hadn’t felt that way when she was alive.”
“I’m sorry Dad. I miss her too.”
As the other passengers chattered around them, either doing flips or staring at the Earth’s oceans, Kendra grabbed her father’s wrinkled hand and felt him grip back. Together they turned back to the view, trying to keep their eyes focused on things other than the scar along the western coast.
“Thank you for this, Kensy.”
“No problem, Dad.”
Frank never saw the tear running down his daughter’s cheek.