Morning Star- God's Ladder

The world becomes smaller and smaller as I descend higher into the sky, before I know it I can no longer see the barren desert just outside of Las Vegas.

They call it God’s Ladder, one of the greatest known scientific marvels of our time, the most ambitious project in the history of man.

As I descend higher, the automated voice on the announcer tells me and my fellow crew members to make sure we are strapped in if we aren’t already and to take our sedative.

It wasn’t too long ago that I was taking another ‘space elevator’ to get where I need to be, it was another mission, another secret and one more moment of regret.

The official story is that Jupiter’s largest moon, Titan has an atmosphere that proved to be unbearable to humans even given all the recent technological advancements we have made.

As far as the public knew, the closest that man had ever gotten to reaching Titan was sending a probe that only lasted for three days before it succumbed to the conditions of the moon.

This was all of course a load of bullshit, how could the public believe that we were able to put a functioning colony on Venus but we were unable to put a man on Titan?

It all came down to the properties of Titan, we didn’t know of the potential dangers the materials on the moon could pose if put in the wrong hands.

So we condemned Titan, said that a mission to the moon was a suicide mission because if the moon didn’t kill you, the lack of food and oxygen on the ship would.

The mission I’m going on now? It’s simpler in theory, but just about everything is and that’s what makes the horrors of space travel simply so unexpected.

“Red Child, do you copy?” That’s the greeting from my superiors that I’ve received ever since the day I joined.

They call out to me as I’m moving up, currently 15,615 feet up in the air, right before they know we’re about to take our sedatives.

“Affirm,” I say. “ETA: 5 hours.”

They don’t reply but I know they received my message, there’s cameras in this luxury elevator and everything I say and do is monitored.

I think back, Red Child has been my name ever since I joined, it was the one part of the past I tried omitting when I joined and it just happened to be the first part of my past they dug up.

I once read the files they had on me, the dirt they tried to dig up on me if I didn’t comply and all of the information on my loved ones they tried to keep over me as leverage.

“Christian Goodwin. Born in Santa Cruz, California to a single mother, considered ‘quiet’ from a young age but received recognition from nearly every instructor you had. Never received below a B in your life, attended UC Santa Barbara under a Space Force ROTC scholarship.”

I vividly remember my superior recounting my life story to me as if I had forgotten where I was born or where I had attended school.

“Christian Goodwin,” he says again. “Placed in a divergent program at the age of sixteen for attempting to rob a liquor store, attended program with the promise that the crime would be wiped off record.”

I expected this, every little moment that I omitted or ‘forgotten’ from my past trickling in to say one final hello.

“Father’s name was Patrick Grayson, a wealthy beneficiary of the MARS 3 settlement, he spent nearly his whole life on Mars and you were conceived during his first and last ‘vacation’ to Earth.”

I think he just recapped over that part just to remind himself why I’ve spoken so ill of the wholesome settlers of planet Mars, you know, the ones born with a silver spoon in their mouth.

“Our records indicate that shortly after you graduated college at the age of twenty-three, you and your mother were in fact invited to the MARS 2 settlement by your father. We have enough security footage from the departure station and MARS 2 settlement to confirm this.”

My superior knew that I had traveled to space in the past during my time in ROTC back in college but never knew that I had travelled beyond the moon.

“By implication, you have four half siblings, a stepmother and two granparents on your father’s side, neither of whom were present during your visit.”

Space travel is a privilege, it takes a willingness to work hard in an effort to create a better future for the coming generations.

That dream died with the corporations that settled on Mars and the elitism and class divides that came with settling on a new home.

“Reports from the security team that protected your father indicate there was some sort of altercation, it resulted in themselves and two of your half siblings intervening.”

How could I ever forget that dinner table fight? My ‘brothers’ and what would I call her? My stepmom?

Well, they intervened. Apparently, single person was okay with talking down to me and my mom for an hour but as soon as I say something, it turns into a physical brawl.

When NASA first sent a man to Mars, researchers would often say that as soon as casual settlers started settling on the planet, there would be class divides and that the planet would be controlled by companies.

Just no one ever thought that it would happen so soon after.

“You and your mother were detained for a week until the both of you were given transportation off of the planet.”

That was the last time I ever saw my dad, he died about two years later, left nothing in his will for me and my mom of course, never even acknowledged our existence.

How the CIA learned of my entire past and every other subtle moment of my life eluded me in the beginning, but then I joined them and began to think in the same way they did.

“There aren’t too many people built for this job,” my recruiter told me a few years after I went into their service.

“Consider yourself lucky,” he said, looking at me as if I had surpassed him.

Yes, I was given an important job with them, but that never took me out of the shadow of the failures of my life and there were many.

Special Operations. That was my specialty when I deployed in the Space Force, the way I saw it, I was never too close to the sky and never too close to the earth.

The world was in a constant state of change and they looked to me and others who served in the Space Force as an answer.

War and terrorism would never go away but as the world evolved, those problems that once seemingly only belonged on earth found their ways in space.

As the space shuttle I was on slowly approached it’s target, I thought of that to myself, of the way not even outer space could find peace from our violence.

My first mission was to end a hostage situation onboard the Dwight D. Eisenhower American Space Station, twenty men and women were held hostage by members of an extremist Islamic group.

That was the mission I always went back to when I spoke with my therapist, when I shot one of the captors in the forehead and the blood floating out of the back of his head.

That was my first kill and it was something that I took deep pride in the fact that I saved those on board the shuttle.

Those missions took me away for months at a time, never being able to disclose what I did, made me feel like I was in control of something in my life

Even as me and my wife drifted apart, I felt as if I was in control, that I could fix our marriage anytime that I wanted to and that she would wait for me.

Things got a little better at one point, it wasn’t because of anything I said but because of the fact that she found out she was pregnant.

For awhile, I thought I could feel myself becoming a better person and I wanted to believe that I was doing right by my wife and unborn son.

“This will all be over soon,” I once whispered into my wife’s ear before I reported to base, I was gone for a month that time with no communication whatsoever to the outside world.

And then my son, Aaron was born. It was a c-section and my wife knew something was wrong when she woke up to blood on the bed.

Our son was a stillborn and my wife was in a state of depression and I was unable to shed a single tear, I helped her however I could but that was not enough.

“You really are an emotionless bastard,” she told me.

That started the countdown. Two months after she told me that we were signing our divorce documents, I didn’t take much and moved into a small apartment.

Four months later, I was honorably discharged from the Space Force and a week after that, a recruiter from the CIA contacted me, telling me they were interested in a man with my skill set.

That’s when the true moments of regret began.