Abinla's Lift-Off

Credit: NASA

“So this is really happening, isn’t it?”

Her voice was a whisper in a wilderness, drowned by the gusts of my own little wonder. The shuttle loomed tall in the distance, glistening in the motherland sun for all to see. 10 years, 10 unbelievable years, and here we stood, at the edge of the unknown, ready to take a great leap, the first great leap my people had taken in a very long time.

“Aby!”

“What?” I said.

“You’re doing that thing you always do again,” said Priye.

“Sorry,” I said, smiling at my own silliness. “It’s just… surreal... even after all this time...”

I reached for her hand, the puffy gloves making the gesture awkward, but no less heartfelt. From the corner of my eye, I saw the car approaching, a white glint hurtling through the daylight, ready to convey us to our vessel, as the crew that had helped make all of this possible looked on from the Agency building, much of which was still in the final stages of construction – oh, what we could achieve when the will to do so was strong enough!

The communication line opened with a soft crackle, and Kwame’s voice rung clear.

“You ladies ready?” he said.

“No,” said Priye and I in sync.

“Well, you had better be. It would be a very embarrassing broadcast if you backed out now.”

“We’re not going anywhere, Kwam,” said Priye, as the car glided to an autonomous halt in front of us, as a young intern walked forward to open the back door, bidding us a warm “Good luck”, and we took our seats inside. There was only so much comfort to be found sitting in these spacesuits, but the glory that lay ahead was well worth the odd squeeze downstairs.

“How many people again?” I said over the comms. I had asked over a dozen times so far, but every time the answer came, I would try in the moments that followed to comprehend it, and fail miserably. Kwame heaved an exhausted but empathetic sigh.

“500 million viewers and rising,” he said. “News networks, synced-up sites, and of course, our YouTube channel. The whole world is watching you two.”

“Watching us,” said Priye. This time she took my hand. “They’re watching all of us. We did this.”

We cruised down the long road until I could just make out the engineering team shuffling across the launch complex, making sure everything was right, down to the last redundancy. The comms channels were a-buzz with queries and confirmations. I eavesdropped on a few exchanges, my neural implants navigating through the network like a fish through an ocean current. Clear skies. Boosters fueled. All systems... go!

Memories took me as we hopped out of our ride and were led forward to the complex’s lift, a spacey structure in a clear meta-glass tube. I remembered the mind-numbing pitches and endless meetings in the days following the Great Reform, a sociopolitical revolution that transformed our broken continent into a true African Union. The echoes of our dark past still remained, and were hard fought. But we pushed on, past doubts and fears, past illusions, a people united on Earth, now looking to the stars, joining the rest of humanity in this transcendent quest. It was the busiest decade of any of our lives. Everything was changing so fast. Policy, commerce, education, innovation, research... all lifted by the same rising tide. Hunger, disease, pollution, corruption... all fading into the annals of our history at a slow but certain pace. Whole nations were merged, borders dissolved, while the malevolent forces that thrived on old divisions met a well-deserved end. Friendships blossomed where they were never thought possible, giving voice to a truth that had always been known. And in the middle of all that... there I was, a young physicist engineer trying to get a space program together.

Getting the go-ahead from the Council was the easy part. What took the remaining 9.6 years was the architecture, the team-building, drafting the program itself, discretely pushing past limitations our foreign counterparts had yet to overcome. That was the hard part. And now to be here, ascending towards the command module of a shuttle I had helped design, with my closest companion through it all, here to share this moment with me… It had taken all of a century and half, but the visions of our heroes past, our ghostly fathers, had finally become reality.

“Crew approaching command module,” came the voice from mission control, announcing our progress to the entire human race. “All systems in the green.”

The lift slid to a stop. We stepped out onto the bridge, waving our escorts off as they descended from sight, and proceeded to the module’s open hatch. It was all us from here on out. I had seen the craft a thousand times before, supervised every step of its engineering, every piece falling into place. But not a single one of those moments compared to this, to being inside it 700 feet above the ground, and soon, even higher.

Priye placed her hand over the lock panel to seal the door. We took our seats, sliding our visors into place and activating our private comms channel. Telemetries glowed a calm blue across the monitors before us, a green block pulsing beneath each module’s avatar, indicating all was still well.

“All systems green from our end,” said Priye, to mission control.

“We’re all good here,” said I. Then I switched to the private channel. “Care to do the honors, babe?”

With a coy smile that set my heart a-flutter, Priye reached out to the screen in front of her, and tapped on the launch button to begin the sequence. I had expected anticipation to slow time down, but it seemed before I could even take my next breath, ‘T-minus 10’ flashed across the central screen, and every cell in my body began to vibrate with the rest of the vessel.

9…

8…

7…

We reached out to each other, our other hands griping the chair handles for dear life.

2…

1…

“Lift-off!” came the voice from mission control, as the tremors multiplied, and the long months of training kicked in. Live video feed from key points on the ship’s structure popped up on automatic cue, showing the land around us falling away in high definition, air friction and clouds soon making a dreamy haze of the world below. The perspective was breath-taking, the Agency building shrinking into a bright dot, the surrounding farmlands becoming a mural of shades...

And then... the sky above... darkening as we escaped to orbit, and the reusable boosters fell away, leaving us to our own devices.

I widened the feed of the ship’s fore, dimming the lights, and the beautiful universe our little home planet floated in was a humbling sight. Priye’s laughter was musical as we unstrapped from our chairs and enjoyed a moment of childish play with our weightless states, flipping around the place like idiots. Then I glided back to the monitors, punched in the coordinates of our destination, and soared with spread arms towards the changing room to get out of my suit. The International Space Station was a twinkling star in the distance, waiting to greet us in 2 days.

***

© 2020 Barra Hart. All rights reserved.

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