Dedication

For Humanity

Epigraph

Memory is a dangerous thing. It lets you visit places you can never return to. It convinces you they're still waiting. Maybe that's why I'm telling you this. Maybe that's why you're listening.

The Blue Hour - The Glowing Stars

INT. SPACECRAFT - OBSERVATION WINDOW - NIGHT CYCLE

The glass is cold against my forehead.

Not cold like anything I remember. Cold like something that has never once touched warmth and doesn't know what it's missing. I press my forehead to it anyway, and I watch the dark do the thing it does out here, which is nothing. No wind. No shift. No proof it's even moving, except that I know it is, because everything is always moving, whether you can feel it or not.

I don't know how long I've been laying like this. Time works differently when there's nothing to measure it against. No sunrise. No school bell. Just the low hum of the ship breathing around me, and my own breath fogging the glass in a small circle that disappears every time I stop watching it.

I used to think I'd feel small out here.

I don't. That's the strange part. I feel like the only thing that's real.

My eyes are heavy in that specific way they get right before a memory decides to pull you under instead of asking permission.

Somewhere behind me, a low static hum kicks in, one of the ship's systems cycling, and for a second it doesn't sound like machinery at all.

It sounds like a voice trying to find its signal.

It sounds, almost, like the beginning of a story.

(SOUND BRIDGE: the static thins, and underneath it, faint, a man's voice, warm, unhurried, already mid-sentence)

...and whole worlds just sitting there in the dark, waiting for somebody to point a telescope the right way.

The static clears completely.

It isn't static anymore.

It's him.

INT. CHILDHOOD BEDROOM - NIGHT

I am eight years old and the ceiling above me is glowing pale green.

My father is sitting on the edge of my bed, the mattress dipping under him, and he has that voice he only uses at night, low and unhurried, like he has nowhere else in the world to be but exactly here.

"Do you know what's out there?" he says, nodding up at the crooked stars he stuck up there himself, none of them in the right place, all of them somehow perfect anyway.

"Stars," I say, because I'm eight and I think that's the whole answer.

He shakes his head slow, the way he does when he's about to tell me something is bigger than I think it is. "Stars," he says, "and the things around the stars. Planets we haven't even seen yet. Whole worlds just sitting there in the dark, waiting for somebody to point a telescope the right way."

He tells me about a star so far away that the light I'd see, if I looked at it right now, left that star before I was even born. He tells me some of those stars might not even exist anymore, they might have already died, and we'd have no way of knowing yet, because the light is still traveling toward us, still arriving late to tell us the news.

I don't fully understand that. I understand it enough to feel a little bit dizzy.

"So maybe," he says, "somewhere out there, on one of those worlds we haven't seen yet, there's a kid your age. Lying in her bed. Looking up at her own ceiling."

I go very still.

"Do aliens exist?" I ask him.

He doesn't answer right away. That's the thing I remember most, actually, more than the question itself. He takes his time, like the question deserves better than a fast answer, like fast answers are for things that don't matter.

"The universe is big," he says, slow, the way you say something you actually want to land instead of just be heard. "Bigger than big. If you started counting the stars right now, out loud, one every second, you'd be an old woman before you finished counting the ones in just our sky. And our sky is only a tiny piece of it."

I try to picture that. I can't. My face must show it, because he smiles.

"So somewhere in all of that," he says, "there's probably someone. Somebody, something, some kind of life. We just haven't found them yet. That doesn't mean they're not there. It just means nobody's looked hard enough. Not yet."

"But what if we never find them?"

He thinks about that one too, same as the first. Then he taps the tip of my nose, once, gentle.

"Then maybe you find them," he says. "Maybe one day you're not lying under this ceiling anymore. Maybe you're standing on a whole different planet, looking up at a whole different sky, and somebody down here on Earth is still wondering if life exists out there."

I blink at him.

"And you know what that would make you, standing there, looking like you do, from a world they've never seen?" He grins. "It'd make you the alien. You'd be the one someone else stays up wondering about."

I don't know it yet, lying there under that ceiling, but that sentence is going to live in me for the rest of my life. Not do aliens exist. Something quieter, something that took root without me noticing, something closer to maybe I could be the thing someone else is looking for.

He kisses my forehead and turns off the lamp, and the crooked stars glow brighter in the dark the way they always do once the real light is gone, and I lie there a long time, wondering about a girl I will never meet, on a world I will never see, staring up at her own ceiling, wondering the exact same thing about me.

INT. SPACECRAFT - OBSERVATION WINDOW - NIGHT CYCLE

The static returns, low, and fades itself out this time, the way it came.

The glass is cold against my forehead.

I'm back. I don't know for how long I was gone, a minute, ten, it doesn't work like it used to. I open my eyes and there's no ceiling above me anymore, no crooked stars, just the dark doing the thing it does, which is nothing, and everything, all at once.

I still don't know if aliens exist.

But I know what I am, out here, further from that ceiling than he ever could have measured. Somewhere down there, if anyone's still looking up, I'm the thing they're wondering about now.

I press my hand flat against the glass, like I used to press it flat against my ceiling when I was small enough to think I could touch the stars if I just reached hard enough.

I still think that, honestly. Some nights out here, I still think that.

The cold finds my skin eventually, no matter how long I lie still and pretend otherwise. I glance at the panel by my bunk. Sixty five degrees.

I reach over and nudge it up, past seventy, stopping somewhere around seventy six.

Nothing happens right away.

Then, somewhere behind the wall, something answers. A low click first, almost nothing. Then a hum, patient, mechanical, working its way up through the frame of the ship until I can feel it in the mattress under me, a small steady vibration.

(SOUND BRIDGE: the hum thins, and underneath it, faint, a man's voice, whispering, already mid-sentence)

...the one you were watching yesterday.

The hum clears completely.

INT. CHILDHOOD HOME - BEDROOM - EARLY MORNING

"Wake up."

I am eleven, and it's still dark, and my father's hand is on my shoulder, and his voice is barely more than breath.

I sit up on instinct before my eyes even manage to open all the way.

"Get dressed," he says. "Quiet."

I don't ask why. Not yet. I pull my shirt on backwards and don't notice, and it's only once we're already in the hallway, his hand steering me past my mother's closed door, that he leans down and finally tells me where.

"We're going to go see that launch," he whispers. "The one you were watching yesterday." "Don't tell your mother."

We're almost at the front door when my father raises his voice toward the stairs, not stopping, not even looking back. "Dropping Ira to school," he calls out. "I've got work after, so I'll head straight there."

The door shuts behind us before anyone answers.

The second we're in the car I can't sit still. My knees are bouncing, my hands won't stop moving, and I'm talking before my seatbelt is even on, asking him how close we're going to be, if we'll hear it before we see it, if it's true that the fire is taller than a building.

He laughs, actually laughs, the kind that comes from his whole chest. "Slow down," he says, "you're going to run out of questions before we even get there."

"I won't."

"You will."

"I won't!"

He turns the radio on, and it's already talking about it, some early morning host running through the same countdown clock ticking on the screen we watched yesterday, and I only half listen to the words, because all I can think is that this is real, an actual machine, sitting somewhere not far from us right now, about to go to the exact place I've only ever seen in movies, and my father turns it up instead of down, and for three hours the sky outside goes from black to a bruised kind of blue to something almost orange at the edges, and neither of us mentions school even once.

We park in a field already crowded with cars. Families spilling out of them with blankets, foldout chairs, thermoses of their own, all of them drifting toward the same open stretch of grass, all of them facing the same direction, like something has already told them exactly where to look before it's even happened.

My father finds us a spot close enough to see and far enough to be allowed, and instead of setting down blankets like everyone else, he lifts me by the waist and sets me down on the roof of the car, then stands beside it, one hand resting flat near my feet. From up there I have a clear line straight to the horizon, over the heads of every family still spreading out their chairs below.

The waiting has its own shape up there. Twenty minutes. Then ten. The murmur of the crowd thinning out into something closer to held breath, until entire families, strangers to each other, go quiet at exactly the same moment, for exactly the same reason.

I don't know yet that this is what devotion looks like from the outside.

The countdown reaches its last few numbers, and the field goes a kind of silent that has weight to it, a silence you could set something down on. My father's hand finds my ankle, steadying me on the metal roof, and I don't need steadying, but I let him anyway.

I feel it before I see it. A tremor, low, enormous, the ground clearing its throat. Then the light, a white so complete it doesn't look like fire, it looks like something being born. Then the sound, arriving half a second late, a violence I feel in my chest before I feel it in my ears, and the rocket climbs on a pillar of its own fury, slow at first, impossibly slow for something moving that fast, and then faster, and then gone, swallowed by a sky that somehow got bigger just to hold it.

I don't blink until it's a spark. Then a rumor of a spark. Then nothing at all, just blue, and a few hundred people exhaling at once.

I could see a shine in my father's eyes, and when I look up at him he smiles.

"That's the smallest that ever felt," he says. "Everything down here. All of it. Small for a second."

I don't understand him. Not really, not yet. But I file the sentence away somewhere it won't get lost, trusting the meaning to come find me later, once I'm finally ready to carry it.

(MATCH CUT: the rocket's fading spark becomes a single indicator light blinking steady on a control panel, the roar of the crowd fades into the low hum of the ship, still settling into its new temperature)

INT. SPACECRAFT - OBSERVATION WINDOW - NIGHT CYCLE

The hum settles. The room is warm again.

I'm back. Behind me, the other two haven't moved.

You're probably wondering how I ended up here. Floating in a metal room, further from home than anyone I love has ever been, telling you about crooked stars and a rocket launch like they matter more than whatever's happening to me right now.

They do matter. Just not for the reason you'd think.

I press my palm flat against the glass, and somewhere out past the reach of my own hand, Earth is red now.

I haven't looked for it tonight.

Some part of me isn't ready to look at what it's become.

I should tell you who I am. Properly, I mean, not just the girl on the roof of a car, not just a kid under some crooked stars.

There's more of me than that. There has to be, doesn't there, for me to end up out here.

So let me back up. Just a little.

The Blue Hour - Crooked on Purpose

INT. CHILDHOOD HOME - KITCHEN - MORNING

The letter is sitting on the counter when I come down for breakfast, already opened, already read.

My mother doesn't look up from the stove. My father doesn't look up from his coffee. Neither of them says my name, which is somehow worse than if they had.

I pour my cereal. The milk sounds too loud in the silence.

"Sit," my mother says, finally, and she still hasn't turned around, and I sit.

She turns around.

"Three days," she says, and slides the letter an inch closer to me, like it needs to be closer to be real. "Unexcused. It says here they tried calling twice."

I look at my father. He is very interested in his coffee.

"I wanted to see the launch," I say, because it is the only true thing I have.

My father almost smiles into his mug. "Come on," he says. "Kid's gotta live a little too. What's one day of school, really, against something like that?"

My mother doesn't laugh.

"She should go to school," she says, and her voice has gone somewhere flat and cold that I haven't heard before. "That's what a day is for. You're spoiling her."

"I'm teaching her."

"You're spoiling her." She turns fully toward him now, and I feel like the letter, like the cereal, like something in the room that isn't the point anymore. "And you would know, wouldn't you? You've had a lot of practice."

"That's not fair."

"This is her whole life," he says. "Not school. Not any of this. This, right here, what she felt out in that field today, that's going to be the whole shape of who she becomes."

My mother laughs. "You can feel it," she says. "Just like you felt it about your own life too. Look where that got us."

Nobody looks at me now. It's like the letter on the counter became the only thing in the room that matters, and I'm just the reason it exists.

I eat my cereal very slowly, and it goes soft in the bowl, and I don't finish it.

INT. GARAGE - NIGHT

I can't sleep, so I go looking for the only other person in the house who probably can't either.

He's sitting on an overturned crate, a cardboard box open at his feet, and he doesn't hear me at first, too busy looking at something in his hands.

"What's that?" I ask.

He almost puts it away. Almost. Then he doesn't.

"It's a folder." Inside is a yellowish, tinted letter. He hands it to me.

We regret to inform you that you have not been selected to continue in the astronaut candidate program, the letter said. A date from before I was born.

"You wanted to go," I say.

"More than anything." He takes the letter back. "Failed one of the medical exams they run you through before they'll even consider you. Something with my ears. They said try again next cycle."

"Did you?"

"Twice." He almost laughs, but it doesn't go anywhere near his eyes. "Third time, your mother was pregnant with you, and I had a choice between one more application and an actual job that actually paid, and I picked the application."

(the garage light humming faintly overhead)

"I told myself it would work out eventually. That's the thing about chasing something big, you always think you're one try away. I wasn't. I just wasn't good enough at the thing I wanted most, and I spent years finding that out the expensive way."

He folds the letter back into the box, closes it, sets it aside.

"Your mother watched all of it happen. The waiting. The money going nowhere. She's not wrong about any of it."

I don't know what to say, so I don't say anything.

"That's why I take you to see things," he says, quieter now. "Not because I want you to be me. I put those stars on your ceiling crooked on purpose, you know. Nothing about reaching for something has to be perfect to be worth doing. I forgot that about my own reaching. I don't want you to forget it about yours."

He looks up at me then.

Then he ruffles my hair and tells me to go to bed.

You've reached the end of the preview. Act I will be available to read here in full soon. The remaining acts will unfold with the release of The Red Planet.

The Blue Hour - Somewhere in Between

INT. GARAGE - NIGHT

(MATCH CUT: the garage bulb's dim yellow hum stretches thin across the dark, bends, and pours itself into a different light entirely, cooler, flickering, restless, already mid-motion, the way a single note held long enough turns into a completely different song)

INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT

I am thirteen, and the only light in the room is coming from the television, throwing pale blue shadows across the carpet.

Everyone else is asleep. I found this on my own, scrolling long after I should have stopped, a film called Perigee, the poster just a single astronaut and a wall of black. Something about the description made me sit up instead of scrolling past it, a man alone on a routine spacewalk when his tether fails, the whole film just him, drifting, trying to find his way back before his oxygen runs out.

I turn the volume down low enough that it won't carry through the walls.

His tether snaps forty minutes in, no warning, just a jump cut from routine to wrong, and mission control goes quiet for three full seconds before anyone even reacts. That's the moment that gets me. Not the drifting after, the three seconds before anyone says a word.

Every time the camera pulls back to show how small he's gotten against all that black, my stomach drops like the couch just tipped backward.

I don't check my phone once.

By the time he's a single dot against a canvas that doesn't end, the sound cuts out completely, and I realize I've stopped breathing right along with him.

I used to think quiet meant nothing was happening.

Watching this, I understand for the first time that quiet can be the loudest thing in a room. It can be the whole point.

The movie ends around two in the morning. The credits roll and I don't move.

The screen switches the second they finish, a recommendation, a romantic comedy, two people laughing on a beach, sunlight everywhere.

I stare at it.

It clearly has no idea who I am.

INT. LIBRARY - AFTERNOON

The book is exactly where it was two weeks ago.

I don't even need to look for it anymore. Fourth shelf, third from the left, spine so soft now it barely holds its own shape.

The librarian already has it waiting when I walk up, sliding it across the counter before I even ask.

"Back again?"

"I wasn't able to finish it," I say. "It's too big."

"Oh, you tiny human," she says, and smiles.

I take it to the same spot on the carpet, near the window, and open it flat to the fold-out page, the one that unfolds twice, wider than the book itself, every planet drawn to scale against the sun, a little block of facts printed beside each one.

I lie down next to it and read down the row of facts as I go, turning each one into something I can actually picture. Mercury barely seems to stay still long enough for me to imagine standing on it, done circling the sun before Earth's even a quarter of the way around. Mars, I decide, just needs a good scrub, all that red really just rust, an entire planet slowly turning the color of an old nail somebody forgot outside. Jupiter has a storm bigger than three Earths, and I try to imagine what that would even look like from a window, and I can't, not really. Saturn, apparently, would float, if anyone ever found an ocean big enough to drop it in, and I spend an embarrassing amount of time wondering who exactly had tested that. Uranus is tipped completely on its side, rolling around the sun instead of spinning upright like the rest, and something about that feels a little bit like it's doing its own thing on purpose. Neptune has winds fast enough to outrun sound itself, which I think about longer than I probably should, trying to imagine what silence sounds like out there, right before it gets left behind.

Venus is the one I keep coming back to. It spins backwards, the only planet that does, and because of that the sun doesn't rise and set on it the way it does everywhere else. That same backward spin, the book says, is part of why we catch it low in the sky right after sunset and again right before sunrise, close enough and bright enough to be mistaken for a star. People once called it two different things because of it, the Evening Star and the Morning Star, and I like that best of all, a planet that gets seen twice a day and still manages to be mistaken for something it isn't.

(MATCH CUT: the paper planets fold back down into a flat page, and the page becomes a chalkboard, white letters on green)

INT. CLASSROOM - DAY

The word on the board is a question.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Miss Carter writes it slow, like she wants the chalk dust to have time to settle before anyone answers. She's young enough that half the class still isn't sure if she's a teacher or just someone's cool older sister who wandered in one day and never left.

"No wrong answers," she says, capping the chalk. "I just want to hear it. Emily, you start us off."

"A vet," Emily says, immediately. "I already have three stuffed animals I practice on."

"Doctor," says the boy behind her.

"Okay," Miss Carter says. "Next."

"Lawyer. My dad's a lawyer."

"A basketball player," says Ethan, standing halfway out of his seat.

"Teacher," says a girl by the window, quietly.

"A YouTuber," says Noah, and half the class laughs.

"Engineer."

"Nurse, like my mom."

"I want to own a bakery," says Olivia, and someone in the back mutters something about cookies, and Olivia says she'll consider hiring him if he behaves.

"I don't know," says the boy near the window, and Miss Carter says that's fine too, and moves on before he can feel bad about it.

"Ira?"

I don't have anything lined up.

"I don't know," I say.

Miss Carter nods and moves on to the next row.

The bell rings. As everyone packs up, Miss Carter calls out over the noise.

"If you guys don't know yet, that's perfectly okay. But when you get home tonight, spend a little time thinking about it. You don't need the answer today. Just ask yourself the question."

Kids fly out.

EXT. NEIGHBORHOOD STREET - AFTERNOON

The walk home is the same as always.

Today there is a dog.

Not just a dog. The dog. Enormous, blond, fur so thick it looks like a cloud, on a leash held by a man standing off to the side.

I stop walking entirely.

"Can I pet him?"

The man says sure, and I crouch down, both hands in his fur, and he's so soft I actually say "come here" out loud like the dog has a choice. The man just checks his phone.

I say thank you about four times.

INT. KITCHEN - AFTERNOON

My mother is at the counter when I burst through the door, and she doesn't even get out "how was" before I'm already answering.

"Amazing," I say, dropping my bag half on a chair and half on the floor. "Mom, I saw the fluffiest dog ever. Like actually the fluffiest thing I've ever seen in my life. Can we please get one?"

"No."

"Mom."

"No." She's laughing already, wiping her hands on the towel over her shoulder. "We are not getting a dog because of some man on the sidewalk."

"He was nice."

"That's what they all say."

"Go change out of your uniform," my mother says.

I grab my bag and head for the stairs. I'm three steps up when it hits me. Cookies. Fresh ones, the smell climbing the stairs faster than I am.

I drop the bag right there on the landing and sprint back down, wrapping both arms around my mother from behind while she's pulling the tray out.

"I love you," I say, into the back of her shirt.

She laughs. "I love you too. Now go change, you're going to get flour on your uniform."

I don't remember letting go of her. I just remember running back up the stairs, still smiling.

EXT. NEIGHBORHOOD STREET - EVENING

Homework gets done, loosely. By six, I'm on my bike, just roaming around the block with a couple of kids from my street, just enjoying the weather before it gets dark.

The whole street feels soft around the edges. Someone's grill going a few houses down. A sprinkler ticking back and forth across a lawn. A couple walking a dog that is, disappointingly, not nearly as fluffy as the one from this afternoon.

Around six thirty, heading back up my own street, I look up. It's there, low over the rooftops. I know it now. Venus, not a star.

INT. KITCHEN - EVENING

"Ira! Go freshen up! Dad should be home any minute!"

My mother's voice carries through the entire house. I abandon my bike in the garage and take the stairs two at a time again, a quick shower before I head back down.

By the time I'm back downstairs, he's just walking in the door, and I hit him at full speed.

"Did you bring me anything?"

"Hello to you too," he says, but he's already reaching into his jacket pocket, and there it is, my favorite chocolate bar.

My mother watches the two of us from the stove, not saying anything, just smiling.

Dinner is loud, the usual way. My father asks about school and I tell him about the dog before I tell him about anything else. My mother brings up the cookies, and he pretends to be personally wounded that none were saved for him, and there's a whole negotiation over the last one that ends with my mother splitting it three ways down the middle with a butter knife like she's defusing something.

INT. MY BEDROOM - NIGHT

Later, after the dishes, the house goes quiet. I sit on my bed with my laptop balanced on my knees.

Miss Carter's question finds its way back to me now.

I don't have an answer. I still don't, not really.

I open a new tab.

I type six words.

How do you become an astronaut?

I hit enter.

You've reached the end of the preview. Act I will be available to read here in full soon. The remaining acts will unfold with the release of The Red Planet.

The Blue Hour - The New Normal

(MATCH CUT: the laptop's glow dims and stretches, thinning into a single line of light, then splits wide again into a bigger screen, harsher, flickering blue-white against the dark)

INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT

Dinner's barely settled, plates still stacked in the sink for later. My father is in his usual chair. My mother is curled into the corner of the couch with her tea. I'm on the floor, back against her knees, just scrolling through my phone.

It's the same as most nights.

I am seventeen.

The television plays on low, mostly background. A panel show, some studio lighting too bright for the hour, a host and three guests behind a desk.

"Doctor, in plain terms, what are we actually looking at?"

I'm watching without really watching.

The woman in the middle folds her hands. "If current trends hold, large parts of the planet will become functionally uninhabitable within the coming decades."

My thumb stops.

The host blinks. "Sorry, decades?"

"Yes," she says.

"And what's being done, right now?"

"Colonization efforts are already years underway."

I sit forward, elbows on my knees, not blinking.

My mother watches me watch the screen.

"They've been saying versions of that for almost ten years now," she says. "Nothing's happened. Nothing's going to happen. It's easier for a government to send a rocket up than do what's actually needed for people down here."

"Maybe it's true this time."

"It was true every time. That's what nobody tells you about the end of the world. It just keeps almost arriving, forever."

(MATCH CUT: the television's blue flicker stretches into a hard white, then resolves into a grocery store's overhead lights)

INT. GROCERY STORE - DAY

The eggs have a new sign over them. A limit, printed, official-looking. TWO CARTONS PER HOUSEHOLD.

My mother reads it and says, "Since when."

A man near the bread aisle is on the phone, low and irritated. "I don't care what the app says, that's not the price it was on Tuesday-"

A few feet away, a woman picks up a small tub of butter, looks at the price, and puts it back on the shelf without a word.

We leave with less than we came for.

On the drive home, sprinklers sit coiled and dry against front lawns. Every few houses, another sign staked into the grass: WATERING RESTRICTED - ODD DAYS ONLY. Somebody has spray-painted over a billboard down the block. I catch the words ENOUGH ALREADY before we're past it.

INT. CLASSROOM - DAY

A teacher I don't recognize is showing a chart on the board, a red line climbing toward the corner.

"This is last year's harvest data for the region," he says. "This is this year's."

The class is quiet.

Someone in the back mutters, "My uncle's farm didn't get a second cutting this year at all."

EXT. CITY STREET - DAY

Crowds. Signs I only half read as we drive past - WATER IS A RIGHT, WHO DECIDES WHO EATS. A line of police in reflective vests, just standing.

My father doesn't slow down to look.

INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT

The television again. A different host, a different desk, a photo behind them of a red desert with a cluster of silver domes sitting on it, half-built.

"-officials confirming the second launch window has been moved up, citing what they're calling accelerated timelines-"

Two other countries' flags flash on screen after that, a scroll of names, programs I've never heard of.

My parents and I just stare at the TV.

INT. KITCHEN - MORNING

The radio is on low while my mother makes toast. A woman's voice, official.

"-residents are reminded that current conditions are within expected seasonal range, and there is no cause for-"

My mother turns it off halfway through the sentence.

INT. MY BEDROOM - NIGHT

I sit on my bed with my laptop closed on my knees. I don't feel afraid, exactly.

Everyone around me keeps saying the word normal like it still means something.

I think about the woman on the panel, decades, then twenty. I think about the water schedule. I think about the flags scrolling past like a countdown.

I open the laptop.

Someone was going to leave eventually. I wanted it to be me.

INT. KITCHEN - NIGHT

"I want to do this," I say.

My mother doesn't look up from the dishes. "Do what."

"Become an astronaut. Actually try. College. All of it, starting now."

The water shuts off.

"No."

"Mom."

"No." She turns, hands still wet. I know this face. I saw it once before. "You watched a segment on television and now you've decided you're an astronaut."

"It's not about the segment," I say. "It's the eggs. The water. The protests."

"That's not the same as-" she starts.

"It's exactly the same," I say. "Everyone keeps saying it's fine. Nobody actually believes it's fine."

"Believing something doesn't make it true." She dries her hands slow. "But I'm not telling you what to study, Ira. Study whatever you want."

"This isn't the same as Dad."

"It is exactly the same as your father. Same fire. Same absolute refusal to hear anyone tell you it might not work out. I lost to that fire once. I won't lose again."

"I'm trying to save something."

"You're seventeen. The world is not yours to save yet."

My father is standing in the doorway. I don't know how long he's been there.

"She isn't wrong to look," he says quietly.

She just says, "Don't."

"I'm not fighting you on this. I'm only saying something's different this time. The funding. The timelines."

"You've been reading things for thirty years."

"The difference is." He stops. "They're already choosing who goes."

Nobody says anything to that.

(MATCH CUT: the dark kitchen doorway narrows into a single rectangle of light, then widens again into a laptop screen, glowing)

INT. MY BEDROOM - SAME NIGHT

I open my laptop again.

I find the requirements, buried under agency language. The right kind of degree first - engineering, biology, physics, math, nothing else counts. A master's after that, or years toward a doctorate. Then experience, years of it. Then a single application, one cycle every few years, thousands applying for a handful of seats.

I do the math on a decade, twice, just to be sure. Ten years puts me at twenty-seven. Old enough to have it all behind me. Young enough that it still counts as early.

I open a blank document and start typing before I've fully decided to. Biology, because bodies are the part of this nobody talks about enough. Computer science, because everything up there runs on something someone has to understand. Math holding both of them up.

By the time I close the laptop, the plan has stopped feeling like a fantasy and started feeling like a syllabus.

(MATCH CUT: the laptop's glow fades to black, and the black bleeds gray, then gold, morning light finding the same room from a different angle entirely)

INT. KITCHEN - MORNING

My mother is at the counter, the kettle just starting to climb toward a whistle.

I set the laptop down next to her.

She wipes her hands and picks it up.

I watch her actually read it.

"This is a real degree," she says finally.

"Three of them. Kind of."

"That's insane."

"I know."

She sets the laptop back down. For a moment, her hand stays flat on top of it.

"I can help with this part," she says. "The school. The tuition. Whatever you need for this part."

"And the rest of it?"

The kettle finally whistles behind her, and she doesn't move.

She thinks for a moment, then says,

"The rest of it, we are not discussing today."

You've reached the end of the preview. The rest of the story will unfold with the release of The Red Planet, coming this winter.