Chapter 2: Sitting on the Edge of Forever



“Its weird to think space is just below our feet like this.” Harper said over the loudly flapping tarp and the whistling of the wind.

“Why’s that?” Lily asked. She withdrew a paintbrush that had been held in her hair and gingerly poked the space rock with the wooden end of it. “Even if we were on Earth, space would still be below our feet. Everything’s space. We’re space.”

I scratched my nose and lit a cigarette, leaning against the wall of the room we were in. It had taken almost an hour to thread our way downstairs through the damaged basement levels until we reached the asteroid’s resting place. I watched as the cloud of smoke drifted towards the hole in the floor and was sucked out into oblivion.

“I don’t think we should get to close that. You don’t want to get flung into deep space.” I shuddered at the thought. That tarp wouldn’t stop anyone from falling. Of course though, no one was supposed to be down here. We had broke in.

“You think we should tell anyone about this?” Seth asked, stuffing his hands into his pockets. “I mean, there’s a hole in the colony, that seems like sort of a big deal. What if all the air is sucked out into space and we suffocate in our sleep?”

“It doesn’t work like that.” Harper answered him. “For one, the entire colony has some huge backup tanks, enough to last like, a thousand years at least. But more importantly really, even just our own cylinder is massive. There’s so much air inside it that it would take decades for it all to get sucked out through a hole this size.”

“So they’re just going to leave it?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Well they can’t just leave it, leave it,” Lily said as she snapped pictures of the rock on her phone. “But they could put it off, ignore it as long as it doesn’t seem to cause any immediate issues, pass it off to the next administration after an election, its politics Regan. How long does it take them to fix the roads when they get damaged?”

“And hey, there’s a tarp, they totally fixed it. Just look at that bang up construction work. They even screwed it down.” Harper sarcastically pointed out.

“I could have done a better job of fixing it with a spare sheet of metal and two hours with my dad’s welding torch.” I said with a snort.

“It seems weird that they’d keep it a secret like this.” Seth said, sitting down next to me and stealing my cigarette from between my fingertips. I grumbled and fished out another one. My phone started freaking out again as my parents called once more. I waited for the call to end and then turned it off again.

“I don’t think it’s that weird.” Lily said as she shoved herself hard into the asteroid, causing it to rock back and forth but not move otherwise. “People might freak out over it, and if it really isn’t a big deal, there’s no reason to create panic over it.”

“Yeah the colony is over a century old. This sort of stuff probably happens more often then you’d realize, and it just isn’t talked about.”



I watched the smoke as it was continually drawn towards the hole and sucked out into space. Lily tried again to budge the space rock, but it was too heavy and imperfectly round to roll it.

“What are you trying to do Lily?” I asked her finally as she slumped against the side of the boulder.

She knocked her hands against the stone. “Souvenir. Haven’t you always wanted an asteroid of your very own?”

“Not really.” Seth said taking a drag of the cigarette he stole from me. I hopped up and went over to the rock to help her. With the two of us pushing, we managed to roll it over once.

“What are you going to do with it if you can get it out of the basement?” Seth continued.

“Paint it, obviously.” Lily responded curtly. The side we’d rolled it onto was slightly flatter than how it had been resting, and it refused to budge. Lily gave up and sat on top of it, I leaned against the side of the cool stone and slumped to the floor.

“I wonder if it’d be dangerous to just stick your head outside and peak around inside the airstream.” Seth pondered, stroking his attempted whiskers.

“Don’t do that.” Was my suggestion. “Even if there’s technically enough air in the opening to breathe, its all blowing through there like a jet engine. You might get sucked out, or the air rushing by might just suck the air straight out of your lungs.”

“Kinda sucks. It’s like there’s this portal to a whole other world sitting right there in front of us, and we can’t go through it. Remember earlier Regan, you were talking about wishing we could just run away from home. What if we ran away to space?”

I snorted, smoke curling out of my nose before the breeze whisked it away. “Ran away where? We’re on a ship in interstellar space. Where would we go?”

“We could fly around to the other ships in the colony, we could explore nearby asteroids and comets, maybe there’s even a rogue planet or two out there nearby.” Seth grinned, taking a long drag of his smoke and tossing the butt onto the tarp, where it was quickly sucked through a hole and thrown into space.

Harper scratched his head, sitting down in front of the hole. “You can’t just fly down to a planet. The colony is moving at 175,000 kilometers per hour. You’d have to bleed off all that speed to drop into orbit of a planet, then if you wanted to catch back up to the ship, you’d have to burn even more fuel to get back up to our speed.”

“How much fuel are we talking about? I mean, we can always make fuel by electrolysing water right? I remember doing that in science class.” I suggested.

“More than we could make easily. Haven’t you ever heard the term, tyranny of the rocket equation?” Harper explained. “As the mass of an object whose speed you want to adjust goes up, the fuel needed goes up exponentially. And of course the fuel also has weight, so the fuel requirements get really high, really fast.”

“What about going to another ship in the fleet? Some of them are close enough to see out the windows sometimes, and they share our relative velocity.” Seth suggested.

“Well yeah, we could do that, but wouldn’t it be easier to just take a shuttle?” Harper asked.

“Yeah but where’s the fun in that?” Seth laughed. “We could hide out on our ship, traveling along with the fleet, go back to the colonies to get supplies when we need them, and just hanging out in space on our own ship.”

“I feel as if this isn’t the first time you’ve considered this.” I said with a chuckle.

“Our little Sethy wants to be an astronaut.” Harper teased.

Seth ignored Harper and responded to me instead. “I’ve thought about it before, but this is the first time I’ve thought it might actually be possible.”

“How? We’re going to build a spaceship out of junk and fly it out that hole? Its barely the size of a person.” Lily asked, pacing around the tarp.

“No no, we built it outside on the hull and just use the hole as a door to get in and out through.”

“And how would we do that?” I asked him. “We don’t have spacesuits.”

“Actually…” Lily said, her voice trailing off. “My dad has an old suit from when he worked as an EVA specialist. My mom kept it for the sentimental value, I think it’s in our basement somewhere.”

There was something of a manic twinkle in Seth’s eyes as he considered the possibilities.

“I think we could do it.” I said softly. “I mean, if we can get enough metal and stuff to work with, my dad’s welder works in space, he bought it secondhand online, I think it was originally meant for EVA work.”

“Speaking of parents.” Harper said, causing all of us to collectively groan. “We’re probably all in a lot of trouble. Well, except for you Lily, I doubt your mom is sober enough to notice you’re gone yet.”

“Mine have been calling my phone every time I turned it on. I think I can safely say I’m probably in trouble.” I chuckled, then reached into my bag and took out the sandwiches we’d bought earlier. “Lets eat, maybe crash upstairs for the night, I’ll call them in the morning and tell them I just stayed over at Seth’s house.”

“That might work, Helen never comes into the basement, so I can just say we were down there the whole time. We can sneak back in early in the morning while they’re asleep and I don’t think they’d catch on.” Seth suggested.

“You left your music running when we went out right?” I asked him.

“Yeah, so I can just say I didn’t hear them if they were calling for me or something.” Seth shrugged.

“I’m still probably grounded.” I said with a sigh.

“Just go out your window like you always do.” Lily suggested.

“I was thinking of like, actually confronting them about their stupid rules. I’m legally an adult. I could be in a porno if I wanted. I can join the navy and buy cigarettes in the store. They need to stop treating me like a child. I’m not some little kid anymore.”

“You really want to have that argument with your mother?” Seth asked wryly. “I mean, even if you are an adult. They still feed and house you and pay for everything.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m their property.” I said indignantly.

“Of course not.” Lily said soothingly. “But they’re your parents, they care about you and want what they think is best for you. They just think what’s best for them is best for you too.”

“Well, they’re wrong.” I aped. “I’m an adult, I get to say what’s best for me.”

“Maybe you need to do something to show them that you’re really your own person.” She suggested to me.

“Yeah, you could turn gay, or apply the navigators or the navy or something else really out there like that. Maybe take up a hobby they hate,” Harper said. I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not.

I took a bite of my sandwich and thought about it, mostly tuning them out. I looked a lot like my mother: blonde hair, grey eyes from my dad, her laugh, and her scrunched nose. I frowned.

They can’t really think I’m just some miniature version of Mom. But maybe that was part of it at least.

“I’m going to dye my hair.” I announced to the room. “I’m gonna dye it bright blue.” I grinned. “You wanna help Lily?”

“Uh, sure?” She asked, “Right now?”

“Why not?” I shrugged, “It’d send a message when I do finally go home. Maybe I can get my nose pierced too, I still have some money left from when I worked at the recharging station last winter.” I was not a clone of my mother.

“She sighed. “Mom’s probably passed out on the couch anyway. And I don’t think she’d care.” She finished her sandwich and neatly folded up its wrapper, putting it in her purse.

“Yeah, and we can check your basement for that spacesuit!” Seth exclaimed with a grin.

“You’re really down for this space idea huh?” I asked him as I finished my own sandwich, wanting to deflect the topic from my home life if I could.

“Its space Regan, its the final frontier. I mean how awesome is that?” He responded earnestly. I could hear the childlike fascination in his voice.

“We already live on a spaceship, in space. How much more space do you need?” I asked him.

“The colony isn’t really space.” He answered, “The whole point of it is to make it as not-spacey as possible, so people can deal with it. That’s why we live in this stupid model of an American town.”

“So you think most people just ignore the fact that we’re in space on a giant machine built a hundred years ago?” I asked him, taking another bite of my sandwich.

“Its just ‘the colony’ no one really thinks about what it is or how it really works unless it’s their jobs. You could live your whole life, happily, within the confines of one side of the colony.”

“Like the Lewis family.” Harper interrupted him. “You know Alexandra Lewis? she was in our grade, and I think she has three sisters who’re in the lower grades. Her family owns all the land up on Alleghany Road, and they’ve lived there for at least a hundred years.”

“See that’s my point.” Seth said. “To a lot of people, the colony is just the name for the ground you stand on. Its as solid as the Earth. That’s the whole point. Its a wrapped up little tube of not-space.”

“Well you could always join the navigators, or the navy, you get to see space that way.” I suggested.

“That’s all boring government work though. You sit up in the spindle in zero gravity all day, pushing buttons to keep everything working.” He responded in a bored tone. “The most interesting job might be doing EVA work, but even that is really heavily restricted, because of radiation exposure when you’re not shielded by the hull.”

I blinked, looking down at the huge hole in the ship. “I really hope that tarp has its own radiation shielding.” I stood up. “And perhaps now we should leave.”

Harper actually went over to the rim and inspected the tarp closely. I could not quite articulate how insanely foolish that was and my brain just fizzled into a halt and I ended up simply grinding my teeth in the doorway as goosebumps raced across my skin.

“This is totally faraday shielded. Its safe here as long as we leave the tarp alone.” Harper declared, drawing his arm back.

“Don’t you dare litter space Harper Jordan!” Lily suddenly exclaimed from her perch atop the asteroid. Harper froze in his throwing position, then sighed and stuffed the wad of sandwich paper into his pocket.

I ate the last of my sandwich and did likewise, with my hands quickly following it.

Lily hopped lightly off her perch. “Okay, who’s going to help me get this rock upstairs?” She asked. We collectively groaned.

“I think I could probably rig up a pulley systems that could lift it, but that would take a while, and it would take stuff. We’ll just have to come back here. Lets go to your house and look for that spacesuit.” Harper said following me towards the door. “Its clearly not going anywhere.”

Lily crouched down and touched the smooth face of the rock with her palm with a sigh. “Alright fine. And the pharmacy is open all night, we can grab hair dye on the way.” She smiled to me.

I was still the first to retreat from the room. No cancer for me, thank you very much.

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