The Last Launch
The sky burned orange against the horizon as another Prometheus-class ark tore through the atmosphere, its fusion drives painting contrails of superheated plasma across the twilight. Astro pressed his face against the grimy window of his studio apartment, watching the ship climb toward the stars with the slow, terrible grace of inevitability. Behind it, the skyline of Houston flickered with emergency broadcasts—red warnings scrolling across every surface, every screen, every pair of augmented reality lenses still functioning in the chaos below.
"Asteroid 2025-XT7 impact in 72 hours. Final evacuations concluding. Shelter protocols in effect."
The words meant nothing now. Shelter protocols. As if concrete and steel could stop a mountain of iron and ice traveling at forty-seven kilometers per second.
In the streets below, fires bloomed between abandoned cars. The evacuation convoy routes had collapsed three days ago when the last of the Selection Committee's chosen families boarded their assigned vessels. What remained was the mathematics of abandonment: eight billion human beings, and room for perhaps fifty million among the stars. The actuarial tables had been ruthless in their precision.
Astro pulled back from the window, his reflection ghostlike against the burning sky. Twenty-six years old, thin from months of surviving on instant noodles and bitter coffee, with dark circles carved beneath eyes that had spent too many sleepless nights calculating orbital mechanics and dreaming of impossible things. His NASA rejection letter still sat on the kitchen table, edges curled from handling. "Insufficient practical experience. Recommend reapplication after gaining relevant industry background."
Three years of graduate school. A thesis on theoretical propulsion systems that his advisor had called "brilliant but unmarketable." And in the end, they'd wanted experience he could never afford to get.
The irony tasted like copper in his mouth. Tomorrow, when the asteroid completed its patient journey across four and a half billion years of space, none of it would matter. Not the Selection Committees, not the practical experience requirements, not the careful hierarchies that had sorted humanity into the worthy and the disposable.
But twelve months ago, none of this had seemed real.
Thirteen months earlier
Astro straightened his tie for the seventh time, his reflection multiplied endlessly in the glass facade of NASA's Johnson Space Center. The building rose before him like a temple to everything he'd ever wanted—clean lines and purpose, the kind of architecture that suggested humanity might actually deserve the stars.
His palms were sweating. He wiped them on his pants, checked his watch, and mentally rehearsed his opening statement one more time. "My name is Astro Kinoshita, and I believe that humanity's future lies not just in reaching space, but in making it home."
Too grandiose. They'd think he was another dreamer with his head in the clouds.
"My research focuses on closed-loop life support systems with particular emphasis on atmospheric recycling efficiency..."
Too technical. They'd already read his transcripts.
He took a deep breath and stepped toward the entrance, badge scanner ready in his hand. This was it. Everything he'd worked for since he'd first looked up at the night sky and realized that the points of light weren't decorations but destinations. The scholarship to MIT despite his parents' doubts. The graduate program that had consumed four years of his life. The theoretical frameworks he'd built in solitude, late at night, when the campus was empty and he could think without interruption.
The pain struck like a lightning bolt behind his eyes.
Astro stumbled, his vision fragmenting into prismatic shards of agony. The world tilted sideways, concrete rushing up to meet him, and then—
Blue light bloomed in the darkness behind his eyelids, clean and electric and impossible.
Text materialized, floating in the space between thought and sight, sharp-edged letters that seemed to burn themselves into his retinas:
Task 1
"SELL EVERYTHING YOU OWN. BUILD A SPACECRAFT."
System integration not complete
He gasped, the pain receding as suddenly as it had come, leaving him crouched on the sidewalk with his hands pressed to his temples. A security guard was approaching, expression shifting from concern to wariness as he took in Astro's appearance—young Asian man in a cheap suit, acting erratically outside a federal facility.
"You okay, son?"
Astro blinked rapidly, the blue text fading like afterimages. Migraine. Had to be a migraine. Stress-induced hallucination brought on by interview anxiety and too much caffeine. He'd read about such things in neurology papers, visual auras that could manifest as geometric patterns or even words.
"I'm doing fine," he said, straightening up. "Just... low blood sugar. I'm here for an interview."
The guard's expression softened slightly. "Building Two. You sure you're feeling up to it?"
Astro nodded, not trusting his voice. The words still echoed in his mind, luminous and absurd. 'Build a spacecraft.' As if he were some billionaire tech mogul instead of a graduate student whose greatest engineering achievement was keeping his decade-old Honda running.
He made it through security, through the maze of corridors lined with photographs of launches and spacewalks and Mars rovers, through the small conference room where three interviewers sat behind a polished table like judges at a tribunal.
"Mr. Kinoshita," said the woman in the center, Dr. Patricia Chen according to her nameplate. "Thank you for coming in today. We're impressed by your academic record, though I have to say your thesis topic was... ambitious."
"Theoretical multi-generational spacecraft design," added the man to her left. "Interesting work, but perhaps a bit ahead of its time."
Astro felt the prepared words die in his throat. The blue text flickered at the edges of his vision, insistent and impossible. He blinked hard, forcing himself to focus.
"I believe long-term thinking is essential for any serious space program," he said. "If we're going to survive as a species, we need to start planning for journeys that might take centuries, not decades."
Dr. Chen made a note. "And what practical experience do you have with spacecraft systems?"
The question hit like a physical blow. Practical experience. As if theoretical frameworks and mathematical models weren't practical. As if the hundreds of hours he'd spent in simulation software, designing and redesigning life support systems and propulsion configurations, were just elaborate games.
"My experience is primarily computational," he said carefully. "But I've validated my models against existing systems, and the efficiency improvements are significant."
"Computational." The third interviewer, an older man with silver hair and skeptical eyes, leaned forward. "Mr. Kinoshita, we're looking for engineers who can solve real problems in real time. Space doesn't care about your theories."
The words stung because they were true, and false, and irrelevant all at once. Astro felt something cold settle in his chest, the familiar weight of disappointment wrapped in professional courtesy.
They went through the motions for another twenty minutes, asking questions he answered correctly but without enthusiasm, discussing timeline and expectations he knew he'd never meet. When they shook his hand and promised to be in touch, he could already taste the rejection.
Outside, the Houston heat pressed against him like a living thing. He sat in his car in the parking lot, hands trembling slightly as he started the engine. The air conditioning wheezed to life, blowing stale air that smelled of anxiety and failed dreams.
His phone buzzed. A text from his roommate: "How did it go???"
Astro stared at the screen, thumb hovering over the keyboard. How could he explain that it had gone exactly as he'd feared? That all his knowledge, all his passion, all his carefully constructed plans had collided with the simple reality that he was nobody special in a world that only made room for the extraordinary?
Instead, he typed: "Won't know for a few days."
The drive home passed in a blur of strip malls and traffic lights. His apartment complex squatted beside a highway on-ramp, brown brick and optimistic landscaping that had given up the fight against Texas heat. He climbed the stairs to his unit, key sticking in the lock that the landlord had promised to fix three months ago.
Inside, the familiar chaos of his life surrounded him: textbooks stacked in precarious towers, whiteboards covered in equations, a desktop computer that hummed and wheezed through complex simulations. The detritus of someone who lived entirely in his own head.
He sat at his desk and opened his laptop, muscle memory carrying him to the CAD program where his latest design lived in crystalline digital perfection. A theoretical spacecraft for a crew of four, designed for decade-long journeys to nearby star systems. Elegant curves and efficient systems, every component optimized for mass and reliability.
Beautiful. Useless. Theoretical.
The blue text flickered again at the edge of his vision, and this time welp he considered doing it," but for some reason "
"Right," he said aloud, voice bitter in the empty room. "Because that makes perfect sense."
But his hands were already moving, opening new files, sketching rough parameters. Not a ship for interstellar journeys—that was fantasy. But something real. Something he could actually build with his own hands, given enough time and determination and willingness to eat nothing but ramen for the foreseeable future.
Crew of two. Five point eight meters long. Three meters in diameter. Small enough to fit in a standard garage, large enough to sustain human life for... how long? With perfect recycling systems and stored supplies, maybe six months. Maybe more.
It was insane. It was impossible. It was the most practical thing he'd ever considered.
The rejection email from NASA arrived three days later, professionally worded and utterly predictable. "While we were impressed by your academic achievements, we have decided to move forward with candidates whose experience more closely matches our current needs..."
Astro read it twice, then closed his laptop and walked to his bedroom closet. In the back, behind winter coats he'd never needed in Houston, sat a cardboard box filled with childhood treasures: model rockets, astronomy books, a telescope he'd saved three summers of lawn-mowing money to buy.
At the bottom, wrapped in tissue paper, was a plastic Space Shuttle from the Kennedy Space Center gift shop. He'd been eight years old, dragging his parents through every exhibit, memorizing specifications and mission parameters while other kids played with interactive displays.
The shuttle fit perfectly in his palm, white ceramic nose and black heat-shield tiles rendered in miniature precision. He'd carried it everywhere for months, launching imaginary missions to Mars and beyond, until embarrassment finally relegated it to storage.
Now he set it on his desk beside his laptop, a talisman from a time when building spaceships had seemed like the most natural thing in the world.
His phone rang. His mother, checking in with her weekly mixture of concern and gentle disappointment.
"How did the interview go, sweetheart?"
"They went with someone else."
A pause. "I'm sorry, Astro. But maybe this is a sign. There are other opportunities, other career paths..."
He closed his eyes, seeing blue text burning against his eyelids. Build a spacecraft. The most ridiculous advice anyone had ever given him, hallucinatory or otherwise.
"I know, Mom. I'll figure something out."
After she hung up, he sat in the gathering darkness of his apartment, surrounded by the accumulated weight of his failures and dreams. Tomorrow he'd start looking for a job—something to pay rent while he figured out what came next. Maybe teaching, or software development, or any of the thousand practical compromises that awaited dreamers who dreamed too big.
But tonight, he opened his CAD program and began to design something real.
The first component was the life support system, because everything else was meaningless if you couldn't breathe. Oxygen recycling, carbon dioxide scrubbing, water reclamation—all the unsexy engineering that kept astronauts alive while they did heroic things in magnificent voids.
He worked until dawn, fueled by coffee and the strange electric clarity that came from finally having a purpose, however insane. By morning, he had preliminary specifications for a ship that could theoretically keep two people alive indefinitely, assuming perfect maintenance and no catastrophic failures.
Theoretical, but not impossible. Difficult, but not beyond the reach of someone willing to sacrifice everything else.
Over the following months, as his savings dwindled and his job applications yielded nothing but polite rejections, the design grew more detailed and more real. He researched suppliers, calculated costs, mapped out construction sequences. The ship took shape in his mind with crystalline precision—every wire and valve and life-sustaining system optimized for survival in the merciless environment beyond Earth's protective embrace.
He found work eventually, a part-time position at a McDonald's near the university where he could earn enough to cover rent and ramen while spending every other waking moment on his impossible project. His coworkers were mostly students like himself, bright young people marking time between classes and futures, but none of them looked at him the way the NASA interviewers had.
Here, he was just Astro, the quiet guy who worked the early shift and never complained about cleaning grease traps. No one cared about his degrees or his theories or the spacecraft components slowly accumulating in his garage like the scattered pieces of an enormous puzzle.
The irony wasn't lost on him. While the world's greatest minds worked on humanity's grandest engineering projects—fusion rockets and generation ships and planetary defense systems that existed only in classified briefings—he assembled his tiny vessel in secret, driven by nothing more than a hallucinatory command and the stubborn refusal to accept that dreams were supposed to stay theoretical.
The blue text never appeared again, but he didn't need it to. The ship was its own imperative now, each completed component proof that impossible things were just difficult things that required more time and determination than most people were willing to invest.
By the time the asteroid was discovered—a mountain of ice and iron tumbling out of the deep void with Earth's name written in gravitational ink—his spacecraft was finished. Beautiful and compact and utterly real, hidden in pieces throughout his garage like a mechanical secret waiting for the right moment to reveal itself.
But there was no launch pad in his backyard, no gantry to lift his creation toward the stars. It remained what it had always been: a magnificent gesture, a proof of concept, a love letter to the infinite written in aluminum and carbon fiber and the desperate mathematics of survival.
Astro still couldn't understand the function of the blue holographic shit that gives him headache