Forbidden Thoughts Read online

  Of their presumed approval, and as their voices fade,

  I find, to my surprise, that the world doesn’t end.

  SAFE SPACE SUIT

  By

  Nick Cole

  How safe is it to be protected from criticism?

  It was John who killed them all.

  Killed the flight crew of Unity One. Killed them before they’d even boosted into warp. Killed them before they’d even had the chance to set foot on Mars. The first mission to Mars of many more to follow.

  It was John who’d killed them all.

  He’d been Captain Jemison’s chief pom-pom boy. He’d championed her all the way through selection, pushing hard for an African-American Lesbian Woman to be the first human to set foot on the long-delayed Mars mission.

  That had been the most important part of his job as Mission Controller. Director of the UN Global Space Directorate. Putting the right person in the left seat of Unity One had been the crowning achievement of his life.

  And to him that meant Jemison.

  Regardless of the fact that she was rated in the lowest percentile of pilots applying to the mission. Regardless of the fact that she’d been white-gloved through all the tests to ensure there was no bias. Regardless of the fact that her entire campaign, and career, had been based on pointing out that there was a bias. Every instructor and proctor had known that what was happening now was the most important thing to ever happen. Their entire educational and professional careers would have cried “rape” had they made any other choice than to pass her on with flying colors. Regardless of the fact that she could barely fly a sub-orbital transport, much less the State-of-the-Art interstellar Dart that was Unity One.

  It was John.

  He’d killed them all.

  He’d killed them by pushing hard for Jemison to fly left seat, and for Haldeman to ride right. That had been one of the first choices John made that killed them all. Haldeman was old school. Veteran fighter pilot. A warrior. A confirmed kill at Mach One in a jet. They’d put Haldeman in there to back Jemison up. Carry her. Everyone knew that. It was known. And the few that voiced opposition had been re-assigned by John. Re-assigned straight out of the program, in fact. We don’t need that kind of hate, he told everyone in the Arrival Program. Everyone had agreed. As they must. As they should.

  The Arrival Program.

  They didn’t use a word like “Colonization.” Even though that was really the intent of the mission. That word was just far too ugly. And words had meaning, unless the meaning could be changed to something more acceptable. Just as “theory” had morphed into a “widely accepted fact.” “Colonizing” Mars was ugly and hateful. A holdover from a lost age of imperialism that everyone agreed had been filled with barbarity and a distinct lack of diversity. Unity One would do the trip in eight minutes with one short burst of a Warp Drive that would do interstellar journeys, but hadn’t just yet. If this jaunt was a success, then the Arrival teams could start.

  Not colony teams.

  No. Especially not after Jemison’s screeds in every blog and online newspaper about De-Colonizing STEM careers. No, we can’t be colonizing anything anymore. Ever again. Too racist. Won’t do for the future. We’re de-colonizing.

  We’re arriving.

  They came up with that when the ablative nano-graphene was drying on the massive Dart that was Unity One. It was bad enough that the stuff was white. So they needed something to distract everyone from that non-pc color. John had begged the labs to come up with a different color for the quantum field deflection graphene adhesive that would protect the ship inside the warp envelope. Any other color.

  But the engineers insisted that it be white.

  That’s the way it worked. Otherwise the crew would be roasted by the maelstrom within the bubble. Had to be. John was finally forced to live with that after firing three different Department Heads in R&D. About other things. Of course. They’d had the wrong politics anyway. Once their email and social media feeds were trawled, it had taken a matter of hours to declare them unfit to sully the Arrival Program. One guy had even worn a shirt, posted on his wall from a party years ago, that featured a busty Wonder Woman. What a pig!

  In the end, the white nano-graphene ablative shield encompassed the Dart. But John didn’t like it. The very sight of it set off his trigger empathy. A skill he’d honed to hack his career for optimal advancement. To deflect, he’d come up with the whole “Arrival” meme-campaign. Just so everyone knew they, he really, were landing on Mars the right way.

  It was John who killed them all.

  All seven of the Unity One crew members. Not because of the white paint which got the Unity through the actual warp transit. They’d transited, that much was clear. But where? That much was not.

  Still, John had killed them all.

  Because he’d put Jemison in the left seat and she couldn’t fly worth a damn, though every blog, pundit and even the President, told everyone she was a natural pilot. The best in fact. The best ever. They just knew it. A truly great pilot. Lindberg, Earhart, and Jemison. The three greatest pilots ever. Though Lindberg made them nervous when they repeated that meme-campaign in the weeks prior to launch. But people didn’t know much of history anymore and things could be edited on Wikipedia just to make sure.

  So Jemison couldn’t fly and they’d put the old guy, Haldeman, in there to cover her. Just in case. He could take the stick even if they lost fly-by-wire and hydraulics. If he had control over the trim, he could do it. He’d done it once in a stricken F-22 after a Russian SAM knocked out Fly-By-Wire and hydraulics over Syria back in Three. He put that bird down on the deck of the Hillary Clinton Super-Carrier smooth as grease using trim tabs alone. So they’d put Haldeman in there even though Jemison was so great. Just in case.

  Then, the “just in case” happened.

  So Haldeman could’ve saved them.

  But he didn’t.

  Couldn’t bring himself to.

  He couldn’t save the Unity One as they overshot the approach on re-entry. Couldn’t bring himself to take the controls away from Jemison who was making mistake after mistake. For the record, it wasn’t her fault that the Warp Drive had suddenly gone psychotic two minutes into the flight. Martin and Wendig, the first gay couple in space, both top-notch Physicists according to everyone on Wired4Salon.com, couldn’t stop telling the flight crew what the Warp Engine should be doing as opposed to the realities of what the Warp Engine was doing.

  Or to be more specific... what Martin and Wendig wanted it to do. That would’ve been the best outcome for them. If the intersection of Quantum Physics and Relativity had collided as predicted in their theories about how things should behave as opposed to the way they were. Four minutes in and way off course within the bubble envelope being generated by the Warp Field, the two physicists were feeding Jemison bad data based on the way they wanted the world of quantum physics to behave, as opposed to what it was actually doing, which was quite extraordinary.

  They could have cared less for the wonder and mystery that was taking place in this science fiction collision of radical theories. Instead, they really had this idea of how it should be, and they were sticking to the plan regardless of the facts.

  Still, even though that part wasn’t Jemison’s fault, the bad piloting was. No matter what... the pilot flies the aircraft regardless of what’s going on. Every pilot knows that. The dead ones too.

  Maybe she’d been too busy being all those other things instead of just being a pilot. An African-American Lesbian Woman and all the “firsts” the media had been shackling her with in the blitz to sell her as the right choice for the mission, may have distracted her from just flying the craft. Especially when all those “right” reasons for the choice had nothing to with being a pilot.

  Haldeman listened to the chatter between the flight crew and the Warp Engineering team in the back as he nobly resisted the urge to offer practical advice to Jemison on what they should be doing, as opposed to what they were actu
ally doing within the Warp Envelope.

  Why?

  Well...

  Haldeman had once been asked what the greatest science achievement in U.S. history had been within the last forty years and he’d by-passed nanotechnology, the internet, Advanced Longevity, the Warp Drive, and a bunch of other stuff in favor of going with electing a President on the basis of his skin color as the Numero Uno most important thing that had ever happened. In Science. The question had been asked regarding the world of Science. Specifically, the talking head had been asking what was the most important development in the world of science in the last forty years? And that had been Haldeman’s answer. Skin Color. Skin color and the world’s stupidest popularity contest, becoming the next U.S. President, was somehow science to him. It wasn’t. He was smarter than that. He was a military pilot after all. But he really wanted to fly the Dart. Badly. And he knew what he needed to say to make that happen because they didn’t let just anyone in there. You had to say, and think, the right things to even be part of the contest. It had been drilled into him for more than twenty years. So there was no way he, an aging tough-as-nails jet jockey white guy with a big Omega Sea Master Watch on his wrist, was going to violate his deeply-held pride in recognizing the correct skin color for any given job, and assert some sort of archaic privilege over his correctly skin-colored Captain in order to save all their lives as things went seriously south within the Warp Envelope.

  You had to say and do the right things to get the right jobs. Everyone knew that. Haldeman knew that. Regardless of how competent, or incompetent, you were. He was not going to harm this historic, important “first” moment in the least. Not on his Omega Sea Master.

  But on his life...

  So they hit the atmosphere hard. And at the wrong angle, never mind that gyro-synch had no readings from MOTher, the automated Martian Orbital Traffic satellite parked around Phobos. What he saw as they slowed from superluminal velocity... shocked him. What they were approaching made no sense. They had no right to be here.

  He had about thirty seconds to live.

  Jemison could not get the bird to behave. It wallowed across the HUD approach, refusing to center at Mach 4. That they were going to crash was inevitable, and all Haldeman could think of was how bad this was going to look for Jemison.

  Fox News and all the hate mongers were going to have such a field day with this. He hated them so much, he began swearing into his Safe Space Suit which registered this as a valid form of JustAggression and didn’t dope him as it might have had he say, seen a news report about Detroit, Los Angeles, or Washington DC. Or unemployment. Or crime.

  Then it would’ve bumped him with a little Chillex, giving him a supreme sense that the new information he was experiencing was just plain wrong. Stick to what was known. What had been taught and reinforced since childhood. “Relax, you’re right,” it would have told him through modified endorphin releases targeting his medulla, specifically where conformational bias centers were located. Regardless of his impending demise, he would’ve felt a supreme sense of right.

  Engineer Correia on the other hand, the only one with a live feed on the cockpit’s forward view, screamed an expletive at seven minutes and forty-five seconds into the voyage. Five minutes into the worst earthquake any of them had ever experienced. If it weren’t for the fact that he’d designed the Dart, Correia wouldn’t have been on board. He just wasn’t a real astronaut according to John. But he’d made it anyway, what with the hundreds of hours in space and a universal agreement that his ship design was the best for the Unity One mission. Corriea knew they were about to die and pushed the crew eject overrides. He had that authority. He could eject all five mission specialists from his station in payload, but not the flight crew. And he knew instantly from what he was seeing on the live feed that no one was surviving the Dart’s arrival and subsequent impact.

  Five Cradles exploded away from the top of the Dart and fell from forty-five thousand feet up. Their egress left smoky flower petals peeling away from the streaking Dart. The five survivors fell through a hazy yellow-orange sky into the red rust of the planet below. In the distance, a vibrant green ocean spread away to the south.

  Forty-five seconds later, Unity One plowed into the dusty arroyos of what the locals called No Man’s Land, killing both Jemison and Haldeman. Haldeman felt so bad in those last seconds that Jemison had been dealt such a bad hand. All of this surely had to be someone else’s fault.

  That was his second to last thought.

  His last thought was that they weren’t in Kansas anymore.

  The only one to actually survive ejection was Arrival Specialist Tanya Stark. Iron Woman. Former Olympian and Sports Illustrated Athlete of the Year, Swimsuit Edition. Yes, she was white. Yes, she was gorgeous in that Nordic Viking Valkyrie Battle Maiden way, but lithe. All of these factors had weighed heavily against her during selection. But her Twitter following was gi-normous and she’d done some bisexual stuff, which had gotten hacked off her smartphone and conveniently released during the most critical period in the selection process.

  TMZ went nuts and collapsed the server it was running off of from traffic overload. FacebookXiHua literally broke.

  That, and that two women, both sexually triumphant for the landing team, made it a no-brainer for John to pick Tanya. Jemison would be the first to set foot on the red planet. Of course. Stark the second. Both women! Both Gay, or kinda! Win again. Tanya’s name-comic book tie-in was nerd-gold as the GSD caught tons of click-through on anything featuring Tanya Stark, AKA Iron Woman. Legions of Avengers fans spent much of their day surfing for anything related to their imaginary heroes to distract themselves from their pointless government jobs and mind-numbing near-poverty existences. Super Heroes, it had been tested, made people feel good about themselves regardless of the viewer’s weight, income, or lack of success, and regardless of the amount of government-funded Anti-Depressants they were taking. So Tanya was in.

  And she was the only one that survived.

  For four days.

  The life support package, or the Cradle, as it was called, feathered after safely dropping out of the Mach-wash of the Dart’s re-entry. Next it became a glider as the onboard AI took over until Tanya re-gained consciousness via cortisol stimulants and Adderall mist. The Cradle and Tanya were at ten-thousand in heavy chop and headed into some sort of massive gash within the landscape below. An extensive canyon system that looked like a horrific rent in the planet.

  Had to be the Mariner Canyon system east of the Tharsis Bulge, thought a dizzy Tanya as she wandered back to conscious thought and tried to remember a little of the short course on Martian geography that had been podcasted for them and read by an aging Star Trek actor. Which meant that the Unity One had been way off target during approach. Way, way off, from what she remembered of the mission parameters. Not really her business. She’d been concentrating all her prep time on the landing and preparing a few athletic stunts for the GoPro Self Worship camera system that were part of John’s “Arrival” script.

  Now she checked the instruments just as she’d been trained, but stopped when she came to the clock. It was busted. Because there was absolutely no chance it was Friday, August 19th, 4154. No way.

  In the distance, in a plain beyond the canyon she was falling into, as she scanned for the Tharsis Bulge to get her bearings, she saw a mountain. A massive mountain. Far bigger than the Tharsis Bulge. Except it was like no mountain that had ever existed. It was, in fact, a pyramid. A giant ruler-straight polyhedron rising out of the rusty apocalyptic landscape. It was both distant, and tremendous.

  A moment later she fell beneath the red rust of the landscape and down into a canyon of blue shadows. She saw cities along the rim, crawling down the sides like the ruins of ancient cliff-dwelling Anazasi. Except they weren’t made of mud or sticks. They were modern. But empty. Lightless. Abandoned. She could see exposed steel girders beyond the Cradle’s cockpit. Broken glass. Dark hunched shapes galloping on all fours in packs
, racing through the bizarre ruins.

  She stalled the glider at that point.

  She’d pulled back on the stick to get a better look at those galloping things, and the Cradle, which was supposed to feather into an extended shape perfect for the thin Martian atmosphere, stalled. As though the air here was different. More dense. It had tricked her by being so buoyant, and now when she needed it, she’d stalled the Cradle at a dangerous altitude.

  The Cradle dropped off on its left delta wing and began to spiral-flutter down into the darkness of the deep canyon. It was like falling into a blue inky pit. Tanya mindlessly fought with the stick, attempting to force the aircraft to turn in a way it didn’t want to turn. And it wouldn’t turn. The flight AI, sensing her inexperience, she wasn’t a pilot after all, she was a bisexual Olympic-athlete model celebrity newsperson, took over and after ten seconds realized they were now in too tight a spin for recovery. Ground Radar predicted an imminent collision and bleated accordingly. The AI ejected Tanya once again as the Cradle, and it, smashed into the shallows of a primeval river basin.

  She came to an hour later and activated her Safe Space Suit Survival System. She was immediately assured by the suit’s AI that she was alive. She was healthy. And a valuable, contributing member of the human collective. Even more so because her beliefs were the right beliefs. She hated hate. While her vitals were being scanned, she was prevented from knowing that her body was being overrun by tons of background and active source radiation. The reason for this was two-fold. The Safe Space Suit felt Tanya might not be in the right frame of mind to receive this terrible information that she was being poisoned by the local environment, and two, the radiation seemed to be in the spectrum that was grudgingly classified as weapons-grade uranium and of cobalt origin. Had the radiation been man-caused by the greenhouse effect brought about by Climate Terror, the suit AI would not have hesitated one pico-second to announce she was a victim and suffering said effects. As an eyewitness-victim to Climate Terror, she was guaranteed subsidies and advanced scholarships in exchange for testimony at the next Global Do-the-Right-Thing summit.