ONE

“What is that?”

As the world looked on, those were the terrfied last words spoken by the Commander of Apollo 11, first person on the moon. Commander Grace, our greatest astronaut, renowned, admired, beloved. Stone-Cold Grace, the Stoic, the Fearless, the Conqueror.

Afraid?

I remember sitting in front of the television when it happened. My father was retired Earth Alliance Space Agency, EASA. I will never forget his face as the signal from the Moon went dark. He was the one who handpicked Stone-Cold Grace from the crop of youthful hopefuls. The mentor to EASA's greatest Commander.

Her last words hung in the stale air of the living room - the sound of terror that she expelled stuck to our skin - when the shrill yell of the phone tore us back to reality. He stood up and cradled the phone against his ear. 

A few seconds went by.

Then he began to shake. His knees trembled. The back of his neck was soaking his collar with sweat. He stood there, phone in hand, trembling and shaking and sweating for twelve minutes. 

I counted every second.

Then he simply said “I understand” and hung up. After hugging Mother and I, he walked out, out of our house, out of our lives, for the next twenty years.

Not surprising, then, when I did everything I could to make sure I could be there with him.

Studied.

Trained. 

For the darkness. 

That’s what we all said. For the Darkness! Thousands of us. The Last Transmission 

from Commander Grace spurned an entire generation of hopeful astronauts. 

We all wanted to know. 

I saw so many burn out of the program. The nation's best and brightest reduced to a quibbling pile of frayed nerves and broken bodies. 

Year upon year. 

Anti-grav close-combat exercises. 

Deep-water weightlessness drills. 

Extreme G-Force tolerance-enhancement protocol. 

Voidless-explosive construction and detonation procedures. 

My body, broken over and over again. They forced the weight of the world on our bones - thick stacks of endless encyclopediec knowledge, days upon days of muscle-mass building in zero-g...

The hopes of Earth. 

I thought I was lucky, when finally chosen. Fortunate. Twenty years to the day that I, the World, heard The Last Transmission. and no one had ever been to space since. 

There had never been a  rescue mission. 

No investigations. 

No press briefings.

No articles. 

No books. 

Mere minutes after the Last Transmission aired, EASA'S bases all over the globe went completely and utterly dark, and have remained dark to this day.

Not a single statement. Not a single comment. No phone number you could call. No mailbox you could write to. No door you could leer into. 

If you tried to drive anywhere near them, a drone-like worker-bee soldier would gun-point you back the way you came. 

Even the airspace arond their base of operation was restricted. 

My father was equally elusive. My memories of him during the Trainings are fleeting: glimpses of his harried face through the crack of my bedroom door when he thought I was asleep, his withered hands running through his thinning hair as he and my mother argued in the kitchen. He was a ghost. I had an idea of who he was, but the reality of him slipped through my fingers like sand. 

We had not spoken in 10 years. Not since the riots, the protests about EASA and their silence. A global, co-ordinated outcry of injustice at the utter lack of action taken in the name of Commander Grace and the 5 other crew members. put my Father in the unenviable position of having to bail me out of prison.

He chose not to.

I chose to go all-in with EASA. 

The day I was chosen as Commander, I was summoned to the ISLAND [Internal Space Land Asset Non-Disclosed]. An almost mythical place. Any who are accepted into EASA are summoned to ISLAND.

None who go ever return. 

Blindfolded and stuffed into a transport helicopter, my day ends on my knees, in front of EASA's fabled headquarters, the very beating-heart centre of ISLAND. 

I did not know such a thing could exist. A never-ending tower, an ever-stretching bone-like structure, joints of concrete and glass swelling at various places along the spine, reaching so high it cut into the clouds. Above the world itself.

The elevator ride to the top took twelve minutes. 

The doors opened to a bare room, save for a single mounted television screen on the back wall. His image suddenly appeared and it took everything I had not to scream. My Father.

Or something that used to be.

He had been...changed. Enhanced. An intent to improve turned into an inhuman monstrosity.  His frame filled the screen, his body a twisted display of surgically-enhanced muscle and robotic parts that had been fused to his body in various places. I struggled not to vomit.  I looked down to my own arm, the small piece of machinery attached to my skin suddenly looming in my vision. 

We become this?

“Please, sit down”. 

His voice almost floors me. Thundering and alien. What are you?

“My child, I fought against this. But now you will know. 

.

.

.

You are Commander of Apollo 19.”

Apollo 19? Seven before me?

“What the world knows as ‘The Last Transmission’ from Commander Grace is incomplete.

.

.

.

To You. 

.

.

.

Now you must know. 

.

.

.

Now you must see.

.

.

.

My child, I am sorry. 

                                                       ---------------

Blackness. The screen reflects my pale face for a second before I see her.

Commander Grace. 

“What------------is-------------that?”

The moment is stretched out, the shot I know so well, Commander Grace, eyes widening, the whites of her eyes piercing through the blackness that surrounds her. 

What did she see?

I know now. There was twelve minutes of footage following those fateful last words. Of a black screen. No images were captured. 

Only audio.

In the moments after, those eternal few seconds after the Last Transmission truly ended,  I remembered the phone call. The one my Father took after the original broadcast cut out. When the world went dark. My Father, just standing there, knees trembling, hands shaking, neck sweating. 

He was listening to her scream.

                                                         --------------

I think of you now, Commander Grace, as I stare out into the black. Your screams, the ones they ripped out of you for twelve minutes, are a plague upon me. Let I, and the warriors behind me, strapped to the vessel that is now hurtling towards the Moon, finish what the Seven before me could not.

The Lunari. That’s what EASA calls them. 

Wish me well, dear Father, and pray if I do not come back, nothing else does.