Dare Mighty Things Read online

  I laughed without much humor. “I was just thinking the same thing. Almost every astronaut ever was a trained military pilot, maybe the occasional scientist. And it took them two years to qualify for space. Why the fast track? Why are we so special?”

  He sighed. “I really don’t know, Cass. We’ve yet to even touch any kind of technology that is involved in operating a rocket to space. They’re focused more on our brain waves and psychology than us actually knowing how to work a spacecraft. We’re not being trained, we’re being studied.”

  I picked at a dry blade of grass. “There are going to be real astronauts on the mission, though. Maybe they’re counting on that.”

  “Then what are we, an experiment?”

  It gave me a little chill. An experiment. Hanna had said it and I had thought it. Now it was coming from his mouth, too.

  I wasn’t ready to contemplate this. “Not to change the subject, but—seriously, what happened with you and Hanna out there?”

  “Cass . . .” I felt for a moment he might actually spill, but then he shook his head. “Sorry, buddy. That’s something I’ve got to keep for myself.” His lips pressed together.

  My instinct was to let it go. But then I thought back to all the times Emilio had helped me—listened to me vent, given me advice. He didn’t have to. He’d just shown up and been a friend, right from the start. And I hadn’t even tried to be the friend he deserved in return.

  I didn’t want to be that kind of person anymore.

  “I’m not trying to pry. You’ve just seemed really down ever since, and I don’t like seeing you that way. Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it? I could just listen, if you want.”

  I waited a long time for him to speak again, until the sunlight was gone and the stars twinkled through the indigo-velvet sky. And then the exterior lights came on, bathing us in an artificial yellow glow.

  Then he turned on his side, head propped in his hand, elbow buried in grass. “Yeah, okay,” he finally said quietly. “Be nice to get off my chest, I guess. So. I’ve liked Hanna for a while. Out in the swamp, I took a chance and I kissed her. I mean, we were alone, and I kinda was getting a vibe from her . . . anyway, it was nice at first. We made out for a while, actually. Then, like a jackass, I go and tell her how cool it is that she likes me and how long I’ve wanted to do that.” He groaned and collapsed to his back, rubbing his face with both hands. He kept his hands over his face, muffling his voice. “And she’s like, whatever, dude, I was just bored and you were convenient. So that sucked. And then we just . . . argued. She took off for a few hours and left me alone, and I wasn’t going to leave her, so yeah. She came back eventually, but we wasted a lot of time being stupid like that. The whole thing was about teamwork, and we showed we couldn’t work together for even twenty-four hours.”

  He sighed heavily, his chest falling with a long, exasperated exhale. His hands fell to his sides, and he was quiet awhile. “You can imagine why I’m not super anxious to tell anyone.”

  My heart clenched up for him. Ugh, Hanna, why Emilio? He was like a puppy, and she just couldn’t resist kicking him. “Hanna does what she wants, other people be damned.” He didn’t respond. “I’m sorry. It’s just too bad you couldn’t have been partnered up with someone nicer to make out with.”

  At least that got a laugh out of him, though it wasn’t a particularly happy one. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t think I’m going to be here much longer.”

  My head whipped around but he didn’t flinch, didn’t even meet my eyes. “What?”

  “I’m not going into space. Not this time.”

  “Why not?” I demanded. “You’re doing well in the tests. Everyone loves you. You’ve had a solid rank this entire time. You—you’re great.”

  He shrugged. “I can’t explain it. I’m not giving up just yet, but this place is too intense for me. I don’t like what it’s doing to me. What it does to . . . everyone.”

  I stared at his profile, willing him to unsay what he’d just said, and surprised that I wanted him to take it back. How long had he felt like this? “If you’re saying this because of what happened with Hanna, it was just one test. Remember what you told her? One test isn’t the end. If you want this, you shouldn’t give up.”

  “That’s the thing, Cass. I’m not sure anymore.” His hands were unconsciously clenching in the dirt. “If I go, I go. I’ve made peace with it. The only thing is, I’d miss the people here. Anton and you and Mitsuko and . . .” He trailed off.

  “Hanna?” I supplied, and then wished I hadn’t.

  He smiled tightly. “Anyway. Cass, I think you can go all the way. You do the right thing when it matters.”

  “Stop it,” I said. He had obviously created a picture of me in his mind that wasn’t true. “I’m not that person. You know that I’ve never had a friend like you?” My voice got a little too high and frantic, but I couldn’t stop. “Before I got here, I thought a friend was someone you competed with on test scores and who kind of agreed with you on who were the stupid kids in class. I’d turn in my classmates for cheating if I thought it would help me. I had this huge complex about how great I was and nobody else was good enough and I—” I flashed back to my classmates, my coworkers. I’d snubbed all of them. No wonder I didn’t have any friends. “You don’t really know me.”

  Emilio shrugged it off. “Who isn’t awful at least once in high school? You have the capacity to be better, though. You’re already better. I haven’t seen any of that stuff here. You’re not as big and bad as you think you are. That’s why I wanted to warn you. I don’t want to throw you off your game when I leave.”

  He gazed skyward, his mind seeming to drift. “Look at all this sky. If it weren’t for these lights, you could see Orion pretty well. If we could just jump this fence and hike into the prairie a few miles, I bet it’d be gorgeous.” His eyes came back to earth, studying the slender, rustling shadows of prairie grass beyond the fence. “But we’re still too close to the city. There’s this amazing place back in Colorado. Out in the mountains. The sky is ink black and the stars just look like they’re alive. You can’t believe how many there are, trillions of stars that are above us all the time and you’ve never seen them before. That’s where I want to go. That’s why I came here.”

  My head tilted back. He was right. I could see Orion’s belt and Venus and a waning gibbous, but not much else. “Me too.”

  “It’s almost like a completely different sky. I’ll take you out there sometime.” For some reason, he seemed suddenly angry. His hand wrapped around a rock and pitched it like a baseball, lobbed it all the way to the fence with a tinkling rattle of metal. “Don’t let this place get the better of you, Cass. If you have to get out, get the hell out. There are private companies that can take you into space if you really want to go. It’s not worth becoming some . . . secret government weapon or something.” Now I could tell he was kidding.

  “Yeah, like I could ever afford a private jet to low-Earth orbit.”

  He grinned at me; his teeth shone for a second in the light, and then he was serious again. He stood, brushing dried grass from his shorts, and offered me his hand. “I’m gonna hit the hay. Are you coming?”

  “In a few minutes.”

  I heard his tennis shoes crunching on the grass, and then I was alone with the sky.

  “Good morning, and congratulations for making it this far,” Felix said, altogether too cheerful for the hour. We were back on a classroom schedule, bright and early the next morning. But this was new—Felix had never come into the classroom before. “We have touched on the science of meditation and its effect on brain waves. Today we’re going to put it into practice.”

  I fought the urge to roll my eyes, but then he caught my attention. “Let me show you what I mean. Any volunteers?”

  Felix picked Emilio and gestured for him to sit in the chair in the front of the room. He fitted a few electrodes to one of the shaved sides of Emilio’s scalp.

  We sat quietly
as Felix coaxed Emilio with soothing tones into a supposedly meditative state and watched the EEG scratch out a change. Emilio’s eyelids closed and he looked normal, even bored.

  “Now,” Felix said, “Emilio is still conscious. Aren’t you, Emilio?”

  “Yep.” His voice was calm but alert. He didn’t sound like a zombie.

  “But his neural oscillations are slightly different than ours are right now. At the moment all of you are probably in a beta state, alert and focused. Emilio’s reading a higher output of alpha oscillations. Which means he’s relaxed, but still able to react and respond to outside stimuli. Would you agree, Emilio?”

  “Sure, boss.”

  “Thank you. You may go back to your seat.” Felix peeled the electrodes off.

  Emilio’s eyes opened and he blinked. “Yeah, that didn’t feel like much, doc.” He moved back into his seat. “Honestly, felt like I was falling asleep.”

  “Exactly. What we want you to be able to do is enter a state between sleeping and waking. When you sleep, your muscles relax, your blood vessels relax, your body consumes less oxygen. Your digestive system slows down and you need fewer calories. This is the ideal state in an environment where every ounce of mass costs us in fuel. If we can reduce the need for oxygen and chemical energy, we can reduce the load that rocket engines will have to push out of Earth’s gravitational pull and increase how long astronauts can survive on a deep-space mission.” He cleared his throat, appearing a little uncomfortable. “But we do not want you to actually sleep. We want you to be able to maintain some awareness of the outside world. Someone needs to remain conscious on board should anything go wrong. We want to achieve a . . . hibernation, of sorts. There’s a specific range of neural oscillations we’re trying to achieve, and the person who is able to maintain that range without drugs will be a much more competitive candidate.”

  I shot a sideways glance at Luka.

  “Who would like to go next?” Felix asked.

  I didn’t even raise my hand; I just stood up and sat in the chair next to Felix before anyone else could get there first.

  Felix hooked me up and then talked me under, his voice low and soothing. “Picture a place where you feel most relaxed. A sky full of clouds. Hear waves crashing on a sandy beach, wind rustling through trees. Feel your muscles relax. Let go of your anxieties.”

  All this hippie nonsense was making me angry, not relaxed. It wasn’t working. I could tell from Felix’s frustrated little murmurs, which he probably thought I couldn’t hear, that something should be happening by now.

  I rifled through my mind, looking for some memory that made me happy. The first thing I could find was music. I buried myself in the memory of piano notes—the satisfying way the keys plinked under my fingers, the cool, smooth surface of the ivory, the music seamlessly streaming from my brain to my hands to the instrument and then filling the air like bubbles. Taking that indefinable magic from my imagination and making it a reality, a beautiful melody.

  The world outside of my body—the tangy smell of Felix’s aftershave, the feeling of the cold chair beneath my skin, and the sensation of everyone watching me—all faded like an old photograph. I was nothing but the blackness on the inside of my eyelids and the music inside my head.

  He coaxed me out of it after a while, and it felt like I was slowly rising to the surface after being underwater for a very long time. When I opened my eyes, the lights felt too bright, and Felix looked perplexed as he removed the electrodes.

  “What?” I pressed. He was looking at me like I’d grown a second head.

  “You did it.” He swiveled the EEG readout screen toward me and pointed. “Right here, this dip . . . you . . . you’ve balanced perfectly in semiconsciousness, right where we want you. And on the first try. What were you thinking about?”

  “I was just . . .” I didn’t exactly want to share my method with everyone. “Relaxing.”

  “Well, it worked. Good job.”

  Emilio’s mouth was hanging open a little. He flashed me a little hidden thumbs-up without smiling, and I felt a twinge of guilt. Despite what he’d said on the track, I wondered if he’d already given up.

  I got out of the chair and went back to my own. Kendra stared at me as I passed. Hanna ignored me.

  Luka’s expression was unreadable, almost angry, focused on the wall in front of him. We hadn’t spoken since leaving Pierce’s office, and it felt strange after how close we’d been during wilderness survival. I wondered if he blamed me for his first less-than-perfect placement. But wilderness survival hadn’t seemed to affect his ratings at all; Luka was still number one.

  Felix examined the readout a few minutes more before he remembered he was supposed to be teaching. “Marine mammals and some avians have evolved the ability to put one half of their brain to sleep while the other remains awake. This way, they do not drown or get eaten, because they are never fully unconscious. The brain is still sending and receiving signals from external stimuli even while the body is in a relaxed and motionless state. We’ve studied these phenomena for years, and I believe we now understand the type of neurotransmitter that is responsible. The astronauts chosen for this mission will be given this drug transdermally to induce this half hibernation.”

  He was animated, excited, carried away—but the looks on our faces stopped him, and his countenance changed. “I know how that must sound to you, but if you are uncomfortable with science that has not been fully proven to be safe, you know where the door is.”

  I sucked in a breath and held it.

  They wouldn’t need this technology if we were only going to the moon, or even back to Mars. This was something huge. And I was so close.

  Felix nodded slowly. “Let’s continue. Hanna, would you come up here, please?”

  Hanna did well. She maintained the right balance, stayed in control. Almost as long as I had. One by one, the entire class took their turns.

  No one did better than me. Not even Luka. He struggled to relax. His brain waves rarely shifted out from beta. He was always alert, and that was his weakness.

  No EEG the next day. Instead, we were told to meet at the training pool. Once there, we donned thin, short-sleeved wet suits, our shins and forearms exposed, and gathered like a team of divers a few feet from the water’s edge.

  I could tell Hanna was shaking just standing next to the pool.

  The last time we were here, there were so many of us that I had had to be careful not to get shoved and fall into the water. Now the ten of us were spaced as far apart as asteroids in front of Colonel Pierce and a tall, elderly but athletic white guy in an expensive black suit. His face was plastered into an almost-smile, which was maybe supposed to be reassuring, but the expression was so wooden it was like looking at a marionette. His face was almost shiny in the watery light—like maybe he’d had a good amount of plastic surgery—which didn’t help the whole puppet-face thing.

  We stood in front of a large silver tube that looked suspiciously like a space-age coffin, propped upright. Except that coffins don’t have tiny plexiglass windows in the lid.

  I flashed back to class with Copeland, what seemed like weeks ago. The specs she’d shown us. It hadn’t been theory. They had actually built this thing. They actually had the technology for human hibernation, which they intended to use. And they had, for whatever reason, kept it a secret.

  I felt a thrill. That could only mean we were going somewhere far, far away.

  “Welcome, candidates,” said the marionette-faced man after giving us time to be properly in awe. His smile widened, exaggerating his already-prominent cheekbones, in obvious pride. “My name is Clayton Crane, founder and CEO of the Society for Extrasolar Exploration. I’m joining you today to observe this particular test, because the odd-looking thing before you is something my company built. We call it the Human Hibernation Module, or HHM. It is with this technology that we plan to boldly go farther than we’ve ever ventured into space.” His face held a cheeky grin, and his eyes sparkled
in electric excitement.

  I found myself sharing a glance with Hanna. She looked a little terrified and a little angry beneath her otherwise stoic mask. This was not going to be easy for her. I looked around at Mitsuko and Emilio, but both were focused on the pair of men before us, Mitsuko’s jaw set.

  I steeled my will. Mr. Crane was here personally to observe; I had to be the best.

  The colonel picked up where Crane left off. “The astronauts on this mission will enter the HHMs after exiting Earth’s atmosphere and routing their course, upon which the ship will switch to autopilot for the duration of the flight. Each astronaut will wear a space suit with a specially fitted helmet allowing the computer to monitor their breathing, brain waves, and other vitals. The problem with the vital-sign monitor is that it can’t take any action while the astronauts are in the HHM beyond its normal homeostatic capacity. Should there be an emergency, an alarm will sound. A human brain needs to be alert for that alarm, in a state from which it can be easily roused in order to take any lifesaving action that may be necessary. The rest of the crew will be in full hibernation, unconscious. The crew slot you all are attempting to fill will require you to remain in the lightest form of sedation with minimal drug influence, in order to maintain constant communication with the monitoring computer.”

  The pieces began to fall into place: why we had to learn to sleep with half our brain, like dolphins. Because we were the fail-safe.

  “Today we’re going to simulate the experience of being inside the HHM. In a real-world scenario, you would be fitted with heart-rate, oxygen-consumption, and brain-wave monitors, just to name a few, and an IV to provide you with nutrients, water, and other things necessary to life, as well as hormones to suppress any nonvital functions and a variety of waste-disposal systems. But today, your face mask will do little more than provide oxygen and protect your eyes. We’re doing this today with only wet suits, so you can get the full experience of the cryogel. Don’t worry; it’s not going to hurt.” The way he emphasized the word made me pretty sure he was lying. “The capsules will fill with gel that will help protect you from radiation and micrometeoroids, and serve as a cushion in the case of any turbulence. Now, once we fit you inside, we’ll shut the door and fill the tube. We’ll start you off with five minutes, and if you can handle it, we’ll go for fifteen minutes so you can get a good feel for the experience.”