My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible

The four staff in the lounge found themselves standing there, staring at the Synths.

The one in the lead had just said good morning and told them they were ready when they were, and for a moment nobody moved. Not because they hadn’t heard it. Because the voice had been so calm and so ordinary that it had taken a second for the words to land against everything else — the shuttle on the tarmac, the morning they’d been awake through, the fact that this was actually happening.

They had been expecting to hear a mechanical and monotone voice, not something so fluid.

The physical therapist from Toronto recovered first.

She picked up her bag, slung it over one shoulder, and nodded. "Ready."

That was enough, as the word broke whatever had been holding the others in place. The three other staff immediately picked up their things, ready to go.

The lead Synth gave a small nod and turned toward the door. The other two gestured to the staff to follow before walking behind them.

The group moved out of the lounge and down the corridor toward the boarding zone, their footsteps quiet against the terminal floor.

The physical therapist from Toronto was at the back of the group. She looked out the terminal window as they walked, at the shuttle sitting on the tarmac in the pale morning light.

She had laughed when it landed. She wasn’t laughing now. What she felt now was disbelief and a bit of nervousness.

She understood that getting on that spacecraft would cross a line and there was no crossing back from it.

Just stepping on the space shuttle alone would be enough to reset her understanding of everything she had ever known. The flight through space would expand that understanding and the base would make it worse.

She looked forward again and kept walking.

She wasn’t the only one feeling that way, as it was the same for the other three. They all couldn’t help but think of the things that would change when they got back.

How they would be treated. The questions that would follow them everywhere. The particular gap that opened between a person who had been somewhere extraordinary and everyone who hadn’t, a gap that no amount of description could fully close because description wasn’t the same as experience and never would be.

What would change wasn’t the only thing that was on their minds. They were in full anticipation of what the interior of the space shuttle would look like, what the space flight would feel like, and what the base would look like.

Their anticipation was stoked and they couldn’t wait, even though they were just a short distance from the space shuttle.

The boarding zone door opened as they approached it, and the cold morning air came through.

The tarmac stretched ahead of them, and the shuttle sat at the end of it.

It was larger up close than the terminal glass had made it seem. The dark surface absorbed the morning light without reflecting it, the hull smooth and unbroken in a way that made it difficult to judge depth or texture.

Standing close to it was a different experience than watching it descend from a perimeter road. The scale registered differently when you were walking toward it.

As they walked to the space shuttle, camera shutter sounds filled the air, as everyone took videos and pictures of them, posting the media on LucidNet.

The news channels’ cameramen also had their cameras trained on them.

Diana Reeves, the local network reporter who had delivered the landing commentary, was still live. Her camera operator had repositioned to give her the boarding zone in the background, the shuttle visible over her left shoulder.

"What you’re seeing now are the first confirmed human beings to board a Nova Technologies spacecraft on camera. Four individuals — selected through the recruitment process Nova Technologies announced several weeks ago — are crossing the tarmac at John F. Kennedy International Airport toward the vehicle that landed here approximately thirty minutes ago," she said and paused, watching them walk.

Her camera operator held steady as the group continued across the tarmac.

"We still do not have confirmed identification for any of the five individuals who arrived on the shuttle who are escorting the selected staff to the boarding platform. They have been courteous and professional throughout the coordination process, according to airport staff we’ve spoken to." She watched for a moment. "The staff don’t appear to be in distress. They look like people walking toward something they’ve decided to do."

On a cable network feed running split-screen, a veteran foreign correspondent had taken over the anchor desk for the morning coverage.

He had spent twenty years reporting from conflict zones and disaster sites and had developed the particular economy of language that came from having witnessed too many things that resisted description.

"The boarding is underway," he said. "I want to offer some context for viewers who may be joining us for the first time this morning." He let the footage run without talking over it for several seconds — the four staff members and their escorts crossing the tarmac, the shuttle waiting, the pale morning light over Queens.

"What you’re watching is the first voluntary civilian departure to an off-world facility in recorded history," he said. "These four people were selected through a public process. They applied. They were chosen. And they are now, as of this morning, walking across a tarmac in New York toward a spacecraft."

He watched the footage.

A third broadcast — a morning news format with two anchors at a desk — had been running panel discussions and expert commentary since four AM.

The anchors, a man named Marcus Webb and a woman named Joelle Fontaine, had been trading commentary throughout the morning. Now both of them had stopped talking and were watching the monitor feed. Webb spoke first. "They’re almost at the platform."

"I can see that," Fontaine said.

"I feel like I should be saying something."

"I don’t think there’s anything to say right now."

Webb nodded. They both watched.

The lead Synth moved at a steady pace and the staff followed without instruction, their bags in hand, footsteps audible against the tarmac in a way that felt too ordinary for everything surrounding them.

One of the staff, a nurse from Atlanta, looked up as they walked. The shuttle’s underside was clean and featureless except for the boarding platform, which was already lowered, waiting. He looked at it for a moment and then looked forward again.

Another staff member, the translator, hadn’t spoken since the lounge. She was watching where she was walking and nowhere else, as though the act of placing one foot in front of the other required her complete concentration.

The physical therapist was still at the back.

The two Synths who had been standing guard beside the platform since landing turned slightly as the group approached.

The lead Synth stepped onto the boarding platform and turned to face the group. It gestured toward the platform with the unhurried motion of someone indicating a door they had held open many times before.

"When you’re ready," it said.

The physical therapist looked at the platform. Then at the shuttle above it and the opening where the boarding platform had detached from, then back at the platform.

She stepped on first.

The others followed. One by one, in the same order, they stepped onto the platform without speaking. The nurse from Atlanta was last. He placed his foot on the platform, shifted his weight, and looked back once at the terminal building, at the glass wall of the lounge they had just left, at the pale morning sky above the roofline.

Then he turned forward and the platform began to rise.

The tarmac dropped away beneath them. The perimeter road became visible beyond the fence line, and from this height they could see the crowd — the phones still raised, still recording, still watching — and the news vans with their satellite dishes, and the pale grey sky stretching in every direction.

The physical therapist looked out at it and felt the cold air on her face and understood, in a way she hadn’t quite managed until this specific moment, that she was leaving.

The platform reached the shuttle’s underside and the opening above them was warm and lit, and one by one they stepped through it and the tarmac and the crowd and the pale morning sky disappeared beneath them as the platform sealed closed.

The boarding platform descended once more and the four Synths stepped onto it, and it ascended back.

The space shuttle’s fusion fired up with a blue glow, soundlessly, and the spacecraft lifted off the ground slowly, vertically ascending into the sky, with every camera and detection system trained on it.

As the space shuttle ascended, it oriented itself, turning in the direction of its next destination.

When it reached more than seven thousand feet in the air, it shot forward, flying toward its next destination.