“This planet is our home,” she’d said over dinner a few nights after the accident. “I’m not leaving just because we can.” Our dining table was covered with data from our tests, blueprints of the starship nearing completion at Area 51. From what little I’ve seen that wasn’t redacted in the documents from the Department of Defense, the ship has been in the works for years, reverse-engineered from extraterrestrial technology recovered from a crash in the forties. Apart from our work, Theresa has spent a lot of her time decorating our townhome, purchasing furniture like this table made of wood salvaged from forest fires, adorning the walls with artwork, including a painting she did herself of a fantasy star system that now hangs over the fireplace. She called the work Possibility, a purple planet surrounded by a halo of light and orbiting three red dwarfs.
“I thought you would want to see what’s out there,” I said, pointing to her painting. “After all, you played a small part in creating the energy source that will make the starship’s engine run.”
“I want humanity to be out there,” she said. “Of course. You have no idea how much I want that, but that doesn’t mean I want to be out there. Things are getting better here.”
“Rising sea levels, California burned to a crisp every year, plague wards filled with patients . . . yeah, it’s a party down here,” I said. “I mean, really. People are training for this mission. The crew has been selected. A public lottery is set to release any day now. The ship is going to leave as soon as we run operational tests, maybe a few practice journeys beyond the Kuiper Belt and back. The government is committed to establishing a colony out there. That way if the shit hits the fan, we’ll have someplace to go. And in case you didn’t get the memo, I think the shit hit the fan and it’s all over the goddamn ceiling.”
“Did you see that researchers think they might have found a lead to a cure?” Theresa said. “It was on the news the other day. Some anonymous package with a vial left outside one of the leading labs with a note that read ‘A little help .’ They don’t know what to make of the substance. One researcher confirmed that it’s genetically related to the virus. They said it was glowing bright white.”
“And people in the Bible Belt are baking themselves in the sun, thinking they can pray it away, burn it away,” I said. “We’ve been promised a cure many times before.”
Theresa is a champion at throwing daggers with her eyes. She twirled the purple crystal pendant she wore on a silver chain around her neck. She’s worn it for as long as I’ve known her. I used to watch her play with that necklace when she was helping lead experiments in my lab, notice how it refracted light across the room, casting rainbows over the whiteboard.
“I’m doing this work because of everything that happened,” I said. The several rounds of drug trials that ended with me cremating my daughter, Petal, a few months after her grandmother died of cancer and my first wife, Cynthia, from experimental plague treatment complications. Sometimes I wonder about the real reason I made such an “error”—and think maybe I went to work one day and said fuck it to the sympathetic stares and the judgmental gossip over my getting remarried so soon, with our lab’s funding dwindling, my son treating me like it’s my fault the resident genius couldn’t save our own family. “I don’t expect you to understand what I went through.”
“No, I guess I wouldn’t,” Theresa said. She walked around the table, cleared away my dishes. “It’s not like everyone in the department doesn’t already think I jumped into bed with you so I could land a coveted spot in your lab. Not like I didn’t catch you crying in your office more times than I can count. Not like I wasn’t there to teach your classes when you needed the help.”
“I didn’t mean . . .” I could hear my preteen, goth son, Peter （now going by Axel）， stirring in his room, probably wanting to come downstairs. But he knows not to barge in when we’re working on classified material.
“Does it hurt?” Theresa touched my head with her hands, as if she could somehow sense the gravitational pull, the Hawking radiation pulsing from my forehead that my colleagues were working to translate into usable energy and thrust.
“Not at all. It’s not going to affect me like that. I mean, no one really knows what it’ll do.”
We rechecked the data when we realized what had happened. As a physicist, I always wanted to uncover the secrets of the universe. But as a human being and intermittent father, I wanted my surviving child to live well into adulthood, a long, healthy life away from the plague and floods and record-breaking hurricanes. I even wanted my dipshit brother, Dennis, who seemed hell-bent on spending his entire life at that elegy hotel, to have a second chance after the loss of our mother.