Teacher comes, as usual, at settling-down time— or, more accurately, that’s when you summon her. Right as you’re trying to acquaint yourself with the darkness, to round its corners with pillows and soften its edges with blankets. She’s mostly corners and edges, from the severe lines of her high collar to the cut of her jaw, but you want her there anyway. She’s been your favorite for a long time, both guard dog and reassuring hand— you’ve always loved your women like this, terrifying but gold-hearted. 

How’s Boy Hero, you ask, rolling onto your stomach and pulling a pillow under your chin. 

You can’t see Teacher in the dark, of course, but you imagine that you can hear the roll of her eyes, a fond rotation that has never once fooled anybody. Frightfully earnest, she says, and her dry tone doesn’t fool you either. Teacher would lay down her life for Boy Hero in a heartbeat and you both know it. 

Once, you would have, too. Maybe you still would— that’s less certain. What’s certain is that he would never want you to. But of course, no one gets to be the Boy Hero by encouraging other people to self-sacrifice. It would be the wrong kind of cosmic math. 

There’s nothing he could have done, you say now, with the kind of sigh you often leverage at Boy Hero even when he isn’t here. He knows that, right? That he’s not omnipotent? 

Teacher snorts. What he knows and what he knows are often two entirely separate issues, she says levelly. 

Yeah. Meddling Old Man really did a number on him. 

There’s silence after that. Neither of you wanting to acknowledge the obvious, that you can’t pin Boy Hero’s problems— or your own— on Meddling Old Man at all, however much you’d like to. (That this isn’t new information is incidental.) 

Teacher sighs, and the bed settles with her weight as she stretches out in the scant bit of space you’ve left between you and the wall. (That maybe it’s just your own weight shifting as you budge over is incidental.) You ease into her then, nestling your cheek against her collarbone. It’s been years since you could sleep outside her arms. Her fingers card through your hair, and it’s not your own hand moving; surely it isn’t. 

◆

 

The trouble is the emptiness, the cold and dark vacuum of space. Without even taking into account the gravity, altered or missing, or the mechanics of launch or orbit, or even the prohibitive cost of sealing a person into a canister and shooting them away from the earth at however-many miles per hour, the trouble with moving beyond the planet’s edge is, first and foremost, the loneliness. 

– from The Solitary Astronaut: Preliminary Notes on the Human Isolation Trials

◆

 

Boy Hero was the first one you met, even before Teacher. You were ten and you’d been sealed away in the training room for just over a year. There’d been internet for a while, but it was dial-up and shit, and you only got it for an hour a day, anyway— just enough time to read instructional emails from your monitoring team and make a doomed attempt or two at sending a message to your parents. Those always bounced back to your inbox with the same error notification: external messaging not permitted. So you sank everything into your assignments; you were young enough to be concerned that something truly bad would happen to you if you failed to complete the muscle-tone exercises or learn algebra or figure out how to build a circuit. That’s why you were here: to be a good little prodigy-slash-experiment. And it paid off, didn’t it? Once you had mastered polynomials, the books started coming with some regularity, tucked into the dumbwaiter that carried up weekly supplies: LM Montgomery, Marguerite Henry, Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Make sure to take some time for recreation, said the email from the child psychologist who was— theoretically, loosely— responsible for your well-being.

You’d never been much of a reader before the training room— too busy with chess club and Science Olympiad and other parentally-approved prodigy activities. But after a year in isolation, with only equations and email for company, you craved those battered paperbacks about orphans and monsters and wild horses, longed for them like they were the only thing that could save you. 

It was October when the first one of the Author’sbooks slipped in amongst the bottled water, vitamin D capsules, protein powder, and measured-out-to-the-calorie prepackaged meals. The rest, as they say, is history. You can’t be sure what was different about this one, what made you beg the child psychologist for the next volume, but nothing was ever the same again. Not once you closed the book, turned on your side, and saw Boy Hero perched on the edge of your desk: scrawny, his messy hair and odd scar just as you’d imagined, waving with a shy grin and thin fingers. 

◆

Teacher has informed me that you’re not sleeping, says Misanthrope with his usual scowl firmly in place, glowering under black brows and black eyes. You do realize that’s pure foolishness? 

I’m not actually in control of that, you reply. I’m not actually in control of anything, you think. 

Misanthrope harrumphs. You’ve always thought that this is him showing he cares, in his own black-hearted way. If this… instability carries on, they’ll remove you from the program for being unfit, he continues. You’ll have wasted fifteen years in here with nothing whatsoever to show for it. 

Really, what was I meant to have to show for it, you ask, even-toned and reasonable. Misanthrope doesn’t handle himself well when emotions run high. 

He’s been scowling this whole time, but somehow he scowls more. Go to sleep, you daft girl. 

Have you been sleeping? You raise an eyebrow at him, a doomed attempt to beat him at his own game. Since you found out what the Author’s been saying? 

Misanthrope scoffs. How entirely senseless of you to assume I give a damn about anything that woman says or does, he says. Besides— I’ve been dead since 1998, or 2007, or whatever the rot. The imbecile quite literally killed me off. Get a little perspective. 

He turns on his heel and vanishes with a flourish, and you stare at the spot where he stood, wishing that just once, he would leave a footprint. 

◆

Humans are resilient creatures. More than one celebrated thinker worth their salt has posited that a human being could get used to anything. Thus, the space travel problem is theoretically solvable— given enough time and the right kind of person. The mind of a child, in particular, is malleable in the extreme.

– from The Solitary Astronaut: Preliminary Notes on the Human Isolation Trials

◆

 

Boy Hero was your age at first, eleven years old to your ten. But he aged more quickly than you did, your conception of him advancing a year with every successive volume. By the time he was seventeen, you were twelve, shooting up like a peculiar weed that could grow without sunlight. You’d gone from playmate to worshipful little sister in the blink of an eye. And then, of course, you caught up. And kept going, aging. Part of you had thought that you’d be chasing after Boy Hero’s heels forever, endlessly frozen with him in his moment of teenage triumph. When you turned eighteen (and he didn’t), you cried a little as you signed the digital release form that bound you to the training room all over again, this time of your own free will instead of your parents’. Seventeen, eighteen—it felt like a distinction but wasn’t, not when everything you knew how to be was wrapped up in a path that had already been chosen for you. 

That was the first time you’d needed one of them to stay the night, as if to reassure yourself that just because you’d done the impossible and reached adulthood in this box, just because they stayed constant while you shifted, transfigured, it didn’t mean that they would leave you. 

(It wasn’t Teacher, that first night, who stayed. It wasn’t even sweet, dependable Comic Relief, who you’d experimented with in the first blush of hormonal adolescent insanity. It was Boy Hero’s own Beloved, who knew all too well how to love someone while their world burned.) 

◆

 

You set too much stock in the words and actions of another, says Meddling Old Man, tilting his head and regarding you over his half-moon spectacles. 

And you sound like a greeting card, you reply, hauling yourself up on the chin-up bar and focusing on the burn in your arms rather than his unwelcome presence. You haven’t been on speaking terms with Meddling Old Man for years, even though he was once something of a favorite of yours, the kindly grandfather you’d never actually had. That illusion shattered rather quickly, all things considered, once you witnessed his manipulations of Boy Hero. If there’s one thing you can’t stand, it’s adults using children as tools— whatever their justification for doing so. You understand justification—every page of The Solitary Astronaut is as heavily laden with it as one of Meddling Old Man’s pontifications—but it’s long since ceased to mean anything besides excuses, and abandonment, and not caring who gets hurt. 

My girl, you have seen so very little of the world. Meddling Old Man’s voice is kind, and you hate him for it. How can you be so certain that you understand what the Author has done? 

You drop your right arm to your side, forcing the left to bear your weight. I don’t need to have seen the world, you say through gritted teeth. Anyone with internet and half a conscience can tell she’s in the wrong. 

Perhaps the Author is wrestling with demons you cannot know, he muses. 

You drop to the floor, facing him fully for the first time since the conversation began. We all have demons, you say. Demons don’t have to make us monsters. Now, go away. I haven’t wanted to see you in years. 

Oh, my girl, he says sadly. You close your eyes rather than watch him fade away like a mirage. If you didn’t want to see me, I wouldn’t be here. 

◆

How does the social animal develop when removed from all society? Will a person still be dependent upon other people if they have not had a human interaction since early childhood? Can we alter, in short, our understanding of what it is to be human? That’s what at stake in these trials, after all: the future of humanity. A new kind of human for a new journey into the stars. 

– from The Solitary Astronaut: Preliminary Notes on the Human Isolation Trials

◆

The thing with Comic Relief was inevitable, in hindsight. You were fourteen, after all—five years into an experiment in loneliness and beginning to burst at the seams with unrealized sexual potential. This certainly wasn’t anything that the child psychologist had thought to warn you about. Comic Relief, meanwhile, was tall, athletic, and good-natured; the kind of boy you vaguely remembered from the family-friendly movies you had been allowed to watch as a child if you aced a test or won a chess match. His freckled cheeks flushed nearly as red as his hair when you kissed him for the first time. It went farther the time after that, and all the times after that time— as far as it could go with one inexperienced participant and one imaginary one.  There was something sweet about the whole thing, an innocence that still makes you smile when you remember it, even though you eventually exchanged Comic Relief for Beloved (and still later, when you began to feel more adult than child, for Teacher). The guilelessness of a first that you weren’t meant to have, but somehow found your way to anyway. The victory of something that the experiment wasn’t able to take from you. 

That’s what all of them were, really. Something you weren’t meant to have, but that no one could take from you: a brother and grandfather, friends and lovers. 

◆

When Comic Relief sidles into view, he does so with a sheepish smile and Beloved close on his heels. He pantomimes knocking on the doorframe, even though he didn’t start on the other side of the ever-locked door. 

Hey, he says, smile going a little lopsided, and his self-consciousness makes you, in turn, self-conscious. That was the fallout from your sexual escapades, at least with him. Beloved took your continued aging (or rather, her lack of it) in stride when you called it quits with her, and with Teacher you never called it quits at all. Comic Relief, on the other hand, seems to be incapable of squaring a twenty-four-year-old version of you with the girl who spent her first blush of romance on him nearly a decade ago. But then again, Comic Relief has always been a little awkward about… well, everything. 

Hey yourself, you parrot, making Beloved laugh a little bit at the both of you. As always, you ache a little bit at the dumb teenage banter. It falls somewhere in the gray space between too real and not real enough. 

How’s the outer space nonsense going? asks Beloved, hopping onto the desk and swinging her legs, reminding you of Boy Hero that first day you met him. The two are almost eerily well-suited, really. Giving them each other is one of the few things you don’t fault the Author for these days. 

The same as always, you respond with a groan. Beloved and Comic Relief tend to make you feel and act less stoic, more authentically young. (Or what you imagine is authentically young, anyway.) I’ve started studying quantum physics, you continue. I’m not sure what use that’s supposed to be, but they’re running out of practical sciences to give me. 

Mate, says Comic Relief slowly, you have got to get out of here. The horror in his voice, you’re well aware, is in response to your perceived academic tribulations rather than anything more meaningful. Comic Relief is no scholar. 

That’s the idea, you answer dryly, but the earliest they’re sending anyone up is the end of the year. I’ve got a bit longer to wait yet. What have you two been up to?

Looking after Boy Hero, mostly, says Beloved, her brown eyes meeting yours with a steadiness that Comic Relief does not possess. He’s bent out of shape about the Author, she continues, gaze practically boring a hole into yours. It’s a pensive, loaded expression that suggests she knows what you’re thinking. Beloved has always been a little too perceptive for her own good (or for yours). 

That bint, growls Comic Relief. Where does she get off telling people who they can and can’t be? It’s rotten, that’s what it is. 

Rotten, you think, doesn’t even begin to cover it. Neither does bint. Comic Relief has been blessed with the dubious gift of understatement. But you also don’t think that he can understand how deep all of this runs, how you’d once felt like the Author herself had somehow sent the others to save you—like she was proof that someone out there understood what it was to be young and trapped, and consigned to destiny’s indifferent hands. 

The three of you sit in silence for a moment. Comic Relief scratches his nose. Beloved’s swinging feet kick at the legs of your desk, each blow landing a little harder, like she’s working up to something. 

Do you remember my first year at school, she asks suddenly, in a rush, like she’s trying to get the words out before they can burn her. When the Enemy was controlling me? 

You and Comic Relief wince in tandem, because no one likes to think about that particular fiasco. But of course you remember. 

I think that’s what he feels like, she goes on, ignoring your expressions. Boy Hero, I mean… he thinks he’s tainted, or a puppet. Like he’s not his own. 

You don’t answer, but Beloved’s words linger in the room well after she leaves. You have never been your own, you think. Not before the training room, and certainly not now, weighed down by the realization that all of your past solaces have hidden teeth. That the vast reaches of space you’ve been promised are just another, slightly roomier loneliness, empty of whatever it was that was supposed to be waiting for you.

◆

Humans are selfish by nature. Maybe what we need, fundamentally, is to develop less of a self. 

– from The Solitary Astronaut: Preliminary Notes on the Human Isolation Trials

◆

It’s not that you’ve had nothing else. There’s the mission, of course, hovering over everything like miasma: a haze of particle physics and mechanical engineering, of push-ups and breath training. You like feeling physically and mentally fit, as if it means that someone, somewhere, made the correct decision to involve you in the world’s most fucked up astronaut training— the government, maybe, or your parents, or you, when you signed that release. As if you, through your successes, can erase a panoply of terrible decisions. 

Then there’s the internet. The time limit has stayed strict, and emails from your monitoring team eat up a lot of that time, but the bandwidth got better and even an hour a day starts to add up after a while. (You stopped trying to contact your parents sometime during the third year.) This tiny sliver of your life contains a hundred percent of the variety: you race through news articles, gossip columns, and message boards, cultivating a fairly good grasp of current events. You watch videos of people interacting, eyes glued to the micro-moments where hands grasp or shoulders brush, heart beating fast at the thought of all that casual contact. Increasingly, you read about the Author. (Increasingly, you wish you had never read about the Author.) 

There is a whole world of people out there, you learn, that care about what the Author has created almost as much as you do. But that one distinction, that one almost, does a lot of work. You have to wonder if loving something in moderation means that you’re safe when that thing goes sour. 

You consider, more than once, throwing the Author’s books against the wall. You consider throwing your copy of The Solitary Astronaut instead. You wonder what the child psychologist would make of that.

◆

 

Would you want to go to space? you ask Teacher. If it were you? You’re sitting cross-legged on the floor, paging through a microbiology textbook. She’s lying on your bed and contemplating the ceiling, looking lost in thought. 

I’ll confess I’ve not considered it much, she says, lips pursing. 

You narrow your eyes at her. Teacher, there’s nothing you haven’t considered to death. Out with it. 

She sighs. When I think about space, she begins slowly, I cannot seem to think of anything but what it’s cost you. The pursuit of it. If mankind wants so badly to voyage out among the stars that it would condemn a child to the kind of life you’ve led… it seems a cruel means to an end. Rather too cruel for the end, I think. 

You blink at her. 

Besides, she continues, calculatedly oblivious to the effect of her words, it will be me, if it comes to that. I don’t suppose you’d enjoy being alone in a spaceship any more than you enjoy being alone in this godforsaken room. 

Closing the textbook, you let your gaze drift about your surroundings: this mid-sized hexagonal room, your practice spaceship, just a bed, desk, exercise equipment, and kindly hallucination. Imagine it emptier than it already is. 

No, you say. No, I don’t suppose I would. 

◆

Properly un-socialized, the human isolate could withstand longer voyages than any astronaut in history has yet attempted. Add to this fact the ability of the human isolate to devote their life to study, and their potential becomes even more clear. Why equip an entire crew when in the human isolate there could be mechanic, mathematician, geologist, and physicist all in one?

– from The Solitary Astronaut: Preliminary Notes on the Human Isolation Trials

◆

 

It’s not that you’re crazy. Or rather— you are, and probably have been for a while, maybe since the very first week they put you in here, but in the end, what were you supposed to do about it? What would sanity have looked like— shooing Boy Hero away, that first day? Not reaching for Comic Relief, four years later? Fighting the urge night after night to bury your face in Teacher’s shoulder, in what is certainly Teacher’s shoulder and not your pillow? 

Were you supposed to raise yourself? 

◆

 

You’ve been avoiding me, Boy Hero says. His eyes are so brightly green behind his glasses that they hurt to see. 

No, I haven’t. The lie is dull coming off your tongue. 

You have. But it’s okay. Boy Hero smiles, and it might be sadder than anything you’ve ever seen. I’ve been wishing I could avoid me, too, he admits. He looks unbearably young to you, seventeen-year-old and eleven-year-old faces blurring together until you can’t really assign him an age, can’t think anything but child, child, child. You want to run from him and reassure him all at once. Someone— Meddling Old Man, the Author, you?— should have protected him. (But of course, no one gets to be the Boy Hero by being protected). But you trust Meddling Old Man about as far as you can throw him, and the Author even less than that, and the thought that maybe it was all up to you is simply nauseating. 

It’s not your fault, you say. The words ring hollow even though they must be said. But you press on. You know she’s not your fault, right? That you can’t control where you came from? 

When I fought the Enemy, he says as if he didn’t hear you, I thought that was it— that I’d won. But I’ve just been in a holding pattern since then, really. So what did I win? 

You didn’t used to be this existential, you grumble. 

Yes, well, I didn’t used to identify as the brainchild of an enormous bigot, either. Things change. And they’ve got to go on changing, or what’s the point? 

You swallow, throat unexpectedly tight. His words are so casual, so final, that they shock you. You’ve never imagined things changing, having a last conversation— a last anything— with Boy Hero, or with any of them. You’ve always assumed that your future will mirror your past, that everything has been set in stone since you opened the first volume, or since your parents dropped off their pleading child at the isolation center. (Odd, how you can hardly recall what they looked like, but fourteen years of press photos and article headers have imprinted every quirk of the Author’s half-smiling mouth onto your mind’s eye. Odd, how quickly you traded one betrayal for another.) 

You never thought that you got a choice. 

Ah, says Boy Hero, like he can tell the penny has dropped. For just a moment, you think he looks different: a flash-forward, a prediction, a man with a life instead of a boy with a burden. It strikes you that he looks wiser than Meddling Old Man ever has. 

You’re right, you know, he continues. You can’t control where you came from. But you can control where you go.