Authors: Jack McDonald Burnett
A week later, the site,
The Lone Gunman
,
published the police report from Conn’s traffic stop the previous November. Conn had been stopped for a broken taillight on her rental car, but according to
The Lone Gunman
, she had been pulled over on suspicion of impaired driving.
The Lone Gunman
couldn’t explain why there had been no field sobriety test administered but it took pains to insinuate that Conn was let off the hook because of her celebrity.
Conn suspected that someone had doctored the police report, but who knew? As far as the world was concerned, it was official, and there was nothing she could do to effectively rebut it.
Conn’s stress level was through the roof. At her worst, she told Peo she might not want to even go to the moon, if these smears were going to keep up. Peo didn’t believe her any more than she believed herself.
“You’ll go,” Peo said. It sounded less like encouragement and more like a statement of the way things were.
But the hits kept coming. January turned to February, and it came to light that Conn’s sister, Cora, had been charged with driving under the influence when she was seventeen—only a 0.02 blood alcohol level, not enough to impair her driving, but Illinois had a zero-tolerance policy for minors. Her driver’s license had been suspended for three months. Because she was a minor, the arrest was kept out of her permanent record. But somebody had dug around and found out.
Half a dozen feeds and sites covered the revelation about Cora as hugely important news, and used it to imply that recklessness ran in the family. Conn called Cora to apologize but Cora wasn’t in the mood to talk. She was humiliated. Having the incident not appear in her permanent record was supposed to ensure that nobody, no prospective employers, no friends or even family, found out about it. That was shot to hell. Conn felt about an inch tall. She had really thrown a wrench into Cora’s life.
Peo took all these smear campaigns hard, convinced they were punishment for her refusal to cooperate with the CIA and Homeland. She called Deputy Director Raich at the CIA and offered her full cooperation. Raich said she appreciated the call and would await Peo’s list of who knew about the alien invitation. Peo got it to her the next day.
But it didn’t help. Two weeks later, a story revealed that Conn’s dad had been the subject of an investigation by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services when the girls were nine and seven.
This, Dad would talk about. He’d gotten into a fight with Conn’s fourth grade teacher, who called DCFS out of spite, and the agency was legally obligated to investigate any accusation that children might be in danger, regardless of the credibility of the source or an obviously malicious motivation. The teacher was fired (this incident being among the cumulative reasons), and the DCFS gave a positive report of the family situation and Dad’s parenting.
But the details and nuances didn’t matter to the likes of
TMI
and other sites that preyed on celebrities. And now, as far as much of the public was concerned, Conn made family life so hellish that her own mother abandoned her, then she was raised so sloppily by her dad that the government had to step in. Many were the times Conn screamed at her monitor or into her pillow at night.
She always feared that the next revelation would be about her being bipolar. But three of the four stories to date were sourced in some kind of public record, and Conn had never disclosed her condition on as much as an employment application. Her dad hadn’t sought concessions for her in high school, with Conn only a few months from graduation after her diagnosis, so Chicago Public Schools wasn’t even aware. Maybe it wouldn’t come out.
When February became March, it was time to put the moon mission aside and devote all of the company’s attention to the Saturn mission, scheduled to depart on March 19. Peo hired a full time PR person. Conn tried not to see it as a personal failure.
On March 23, four days after the
Bebop
launched for Saturn,
TMI
reported that Conn was bipolar-A and couldn’t function normally without constant medication.
March, 2034
Peo gave an exclusive interview to
Popular Science
the week after the revelation. “Of course Dyna-Tech has been aware of Conn’s condition. She’s a remarkable, bright, brave, accomplished young woman who, like twelve million other Americans, is successfully managing bipolar disorder.”
Privately, Peo tried one more time to put a stop to the smear campaign: she called the Director of the CIA to remind her of Peo’s full cooperation with their vetting of her employees. The Director’s response was noncommittal about the entire situation, even whether the federal government was behind the attacks at all. Well, if they weren’t, they could certainly make them stop.
So Peo called Nate Petan, Director of NASA, and informed him she would go public with word of the alien invitation to the moon on April 3 (the first business day of April) unless the attacks against Conn stopped immediately and completely.
“I don’t have anything to do with that,” Petan protested.
“I don’t care,” Peo retorted. “Either you’ve got the pull to stop them, or NASA is so irrelevant that there’s no reason for me to keep quiet anyway.”
That night Peo and Conn had dinner together.
“I’m going to need to scale back my activities at Dyna-Tech,” Peo said. “Doctor’s orders. Actually, she thinks I should take a leave of absence from Illinois Tech as well. I may do that next semester.”
“That’s OK, I’m busy next semester anyway,” Conn said, thinking of her moon mission. She thought of little else, most of the time.
“The cancer has moved to my stomach,” Peo said.
Conn felt her face redden. She felt helpless. “What are they going to do?”
“Try irradiating it, but they’ll probably have to remove it.”
“Oh, no. Peo, I’m so sorry.”
“I’m getting radiation therapy now. Have to leave for Chicago tonight, I’ve missed one.”
“Don’t do that,” Conn said.
“Conn, I’m so sorry about these attacks against you. They’re—”
“They’re not your fault,” Conn said.
“They are,” Peo said. “It was almost certainly my treatment of Raich and her Homeland friend that brought this down on you. I want you to know—” Conn made a sound to interrupt, but Peo talked over her “—I hope it doesn’t need to be said, but I want you to know without a doubt that none of what has come out, even considered in the worst light possible, is even close to an issue for me.”
“I know,” Conn said, “and I appreciate that. I don’t appreciate your blaming yourself. You’re sending me to the moon. You’re giving me what I’ve wanted since I was eight years old. And as for the CIA and Homeland people, you did the right thing. They can’t come in and act like they’re entitled to something of yours just because they decide they need it. That’s not how it works.”
“It’s exactly how it works, more often than you think,” Peo said. “What do you think taxes are?”
“I think taxes are enacted by a legislature with the authority of the Constitution,” Conn said. “Not some deputy director of something deciding what’s yours is hers.”
“Still. It’s not as though that was the first time someone from the government overstepped their bounds around me. I should have taken into account what was at stake. What they were capable of.”
“Easy to look back and think you should have done something different,” Conn said. “You did the right thing at the time.”
“Well, they have the list now. Skylar Reece called me in a panic when they started investigating her background. I had to assure her that she wouldn’t turn up on
TMI
.”
“She was worried?”
“I guess so.”
“Special much?”
The two women laughed, laughs weighed down by worry.
Grant asked for and received permission to talk to Conn privately when the
Bebop
was a week out.
“Man, they’re really pouring it on, aren’t they?” Grant asked, companionably.
“That’s one way to put it,” Conn said. She was frazzled, but trying not to show it.
“Maybe you can sue somebody.”
“I’m told that would make things worse.”
“Probably. And anyway, is it—I mean, is what they’re reporting...is it true?”
“Which part?” Conn growled.
“Specifically, you being bipolar,” Grant said. “Is that—is that new? Something that just happened?”
“What are you talking about?” Conn said. “Is it—no, I’ve been that way all my life. I was diagnosed when I was a teenager.”
Grant paused, adding to the lag caused by how far the
Bebop
was from Earth. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Conn huffed. “I didn’t tell anybody.”
“I could have helped you. We all could have helped you.”
“Helped me do what?” Conn said. “I’m fine, with medication.”
“I just—I wish you had trusted me.”
“I told you, I didn’t tell anybody. It’s not like you were special.” Conn immediately regretted the remark. She spent the seconds it took to get to the
Bebop
wishing she could take it back.
Grant obviously wished she could, too. Their conversation was over after that.
Glenn Bowman was in his early fifties, a lifestyle coach with a fair-to-middling client base. Whether the former priest had been kicked out of the Catholic church or left of his own accord was never clear.
He had a solid, wide chin. His ears and the bulb at the end of his nose were prominent enough that cartoonists’ jobs were basically done for them. With his dark, bushy eyebrows and receding salt-and-pepper hair, and the rimless glasses he sometimes wore over his striking blue eyes, he looked like everyone’s favorite uncle. He was not the most photogenic person, nor the one with the most intellectual heft. But he was earnest without being overly intense, and even the most cynical observers came away thinking that Bowman genuinely believed everything he said.
His résumé, after the Catholic Church, was impressive: he ran a foundation that helped orphaned children find and reunite with extended family. He purchased a pet control shelter and made it no-kill. In his spare time, he played tennis like one of the demons he saw staring back at him from the moon.
He knew the moon shower was not good news for humanity. He told anyone who would listen that monsters were real and just beginning to show themselves. He found a following in people convinced that the moon, constantly disguising itself, ever-shifting, consumed monthly by darkness, was itself a talisman of evil, the devil’s charm. They believed, as he preached, that the scientific explanation for moon phases made little sense: an object orbiting the Earth should pass in and out of the shadow of the Earth relatively quickly. To them, the methodical, slow waxing and then waning of the moon from full to new was a warning to humankind:
all that bathes in the light shall pass into darkness
.
None of them seemed to ever entertain the thought that it might be the other way around as well.
Glenn Bowman weighed in on Conn and her celebrity more than once, and depending on the sympathies of the interviewer, cast her as either an unwitting tool or a prime mover of the coming evil. And as the moon missions approached, Bowman’s star was ascendant.
April–July, 2034
Conn loved the suggestion from Marion Mitchell Morrison Middle School in Winterset, Iowa that the command module and lander be named after Don Quixote’s horse and donkey, respectively:
Rocinante
and
Dapple
. But Jake wouldn’t commit to naming the command module
Rocinante
, and she wasn’t going to have a
Dapple
without a
Rocinante
.
Eight schools nominated names from Conn’s favorite novel from when she was a girl,
A Wrinkle in Time
. She wanted to name the lander
Mrs. Whatsit
, and suggested Jake call the command module
Mrs. Who
. Jake replied via text:
Dislike Mrs. Who as name, much prefer Aunt Beast.
Conn couldn’t help but grin.
Conn was pleasantly surprised by the general public reaction to the revelation about her bipolar disorder. Consensus, at least in America, was that Conn was brave for pursuing her dreams despite disability. There was an almost tangible sense, too, that the campaign against her had gone too far.
Simulators for both the Dyna-Tech lunar lander
Mrs. Whatsit
and the European lander were sent to Houston for the last three months of mission training. The Dyna-Tech simulator was submersible, and Conn spent hours each day underwater in zero-G and one-sixth G conditions, playing out scenarios of lunar landings and liftoffs. During simulated landings, safety divers attached weights to her ankles at the appropriate time to mimic the transition from the zero-G of space to lunar gravity. On simulated liftoffs, they did the opposite. Their thoroughness made Conn more confident—they were thinking of everything.
During their morning stretches and jogs, Eyechart pointedly avoided Conn, turning away when she set herself down to stretch next to him, speeding up or slowing down to avoid jogging alongside. Nate Petan and other muckety-mucks, two of whom she later learned were the head of the ESA and of Roscosmos, made themselves visible often during the training: Conn supposed Petan was making sure nobody sabotaged these last three months for her. Surely he had other business there, too, but Conn liked to think maybe she had someone on her side for once. And whatever the reason, there was no repetition of the bad behavior she’d previously had from her instructors in Houston.
Jake showed up, as did the other joint mission astronauts, Scott Daniels and Didier Gonalons, having moved their training to Houston. Once all the astronauts arrived, the missions were segregated, and Conn didn’t so much as get to meet the other mission’s crew. In the case of Scott Daniels, she was particularly disappointed.
With the arrival of a submersible simulator of the new command module, Jake got some zero-G practice in over the next six weeks, a luxury he had done without in 2022.