Morning Star- The Shining One

Every generation has a lie. Something to keep the wheel spinning, to tell themselves that they are doing something to better humanity.

The biggest lie that I grew up on was being told that we needed to go out into the stars, that out there was where was.

My parents were NASA scientists with the instilled feeling that our destiny lay somewhere out there in the stars.

That feeling was ingrained in me. My Dad was a member of the MARS 2 crew of 70 and one of the first to leave the planet when he realized how elitist the planet was becoming.

My Mom managed to restart the life cycle of the first Europa rover remotely on some classified location on, so about some 500 million miles away.

To put it bluntly, I always felt like I had huge shoes to fill.

They loved everything about science and the way our solar system was. I remember I would joke with them and tell them how surprised I was that they gave me a name as basic as Maggie.

They were married for about a year when I was born, they were so caught up in their work that my Mom didn’t even realize she was pregnant with me until she was going into labor.

They were on a permanent Moon settlement on Mare Nubium when I was born unexpectedly early and at the worst possible time.

Lack of communication and delayed trips to the main settlement on Tycho meant that I spent the first nine years of my life on the Moon.

It was during that time that I went on my first walk on the moon, learned four different languages and got a black belt in Karate, all awhile my parent’s marriage gradually fell apart.

All awhile, the frontier towards the stars was seen as the most challenging yet rewarding adventure in the history of man.

For every settlement there was on the Moon, there was a malfunction that took the lives of astronauts in the same way there were rockets that barely took off from the ground.

But we still found a way...first person in space, first person on the Moon, first person on Mars and first person on Venus.

I remember even when I was young, wondering how mankind could achieve all of those things and come so far but my Dad couldn’t be discreet about the fact that he was cheating on my Mom

By the time I finally arrived on Earth, I was taking physical therapy classes to adjust to the gravitational change between Earth and the Moon.

Amidst the transition, my parents had finally gotten a divorce and I was struggling to adjust to the educational system in the United States, which was so behind what I learned on the Moon.

I was desperate to return to space, I genuinely felt there was nothing for me on a planet that was too crowded, with too much adversity and nothing left to explore.

There was a point where every night that I looked out to the Moon, I couldn’t help but feel that something was taken away from me.

My test scores were off the charts so I was free to go wherever I chose, for me I wanted to go back to the stars as quickly as possible, so I went the Space Force route.

I graduated from the United States Space Force Academy at the top of my class at the age of twenty-one and was free to choose my life.

I deployed to the MARS 4 settlement on the South Polar Cap as a research advisor. We were trying to figure out how to solve the great water drought of the Red Planet.

The crew I worked with was smart. They weren’t like some of the other settlers you would find on Mars, you know the ones who would go through eight weeks of training and suddenly they were experts.

Those ones were worse than the space tourists, they were like the kids who cut in front of the line.

It made me see the power divide, those people who settled on Mars were the ones who had money to burn, the ones that could simply walk away from the problems of Earth.

Our conflicts in the Middle East, the political divides, the threats of nuclear war and way we poison one another with the things we say and do.

That’s when I decided to go back to where it all started. Earth, the root of the problem but also the foundation point for everything good in humanity.

I returned to the Academy at the age of twenty-eight as a professor’s assistant. The president of the school once called me the most important alumni is the academy’s 25-year history.

I met my husband the first day of classes, he was the ‘hot assistant guy’ to the students, to me he was just Robert James- Assistant Professor for Aerospace Dynamics 132.

We were just friends for the longest time and then him and his girlfriend broke up, and he opened up to me and a few months later he asked me out. It wasn’t a question for me.

I saw a good guy who dated a witch for seven years. We married a year and a half after our first date, we were both thirty-two and ready to start a life together.

Our daughter Aurora was born two years later and for two years, her and Robert brought great joy into my life.

Robert would take three days, three days off teaching at the academy and I would be gone for weeks at a time sometimes, but we would make it work.

I could tell Robert or anyone else important in my life what I was doing, and I never got the opportunity to tell him or my daughter as she grew older.

You never forget getting a phone call like that. About a drunk driver hitting your SUV and killing the two passengers inside, in this case the two people who held me together.

For all the advancements we made in the world, we still couldn’t find a way to stop someone drunk off their ass from getting into a car, turning it on and driving off. And killing my husband and daughter.

I returned to work despite NASA offering me paid leave. I did maintenance for interplanetary probing systems for awhile.

They saw me as a valuable asset for the mission they were so hesitant on telling the world, so week after week I was given a new psychological test and required to meet a new PR with my physical training.

I was thirty-seven when the announcement was made for JUPITER ONE, mankind’s first mission to Europa and I was the co-captain.

There were 21 of us and it was like we had the pressure of the world on our shoulders.

We were going to be the first men and women to ever be the moon, the first group of people to establish a settlement and the first group to drill into the surface.

We were potentially about to find out whether or not there was life in our solar system.

Of course, we know the answer to that question now.

Back then, before we departed, a reporter on CNN asked me a question about everything that I experienced personally.

He asked if I feel “ready to embark on the greatest mission known to man given everything you’ve gone through in the past several years?”

My response was simple.

“I am going on this mission because if my daughter was here today, I would want her to see that some of the first people to go to one of the farthest depths of the solar system were women.”

But of course that is only part of the truth.

I think a part of me was trying to escape everything that defined me up to that point.

The Moon was where my Mom and Dad divorced, Mars was where I lost faith in humanity and Earth was where my husband and daughter died.

I didn’t want to be anywhere that reminded me of my losses in the same way I didn’t want to be someplace that reminded me of how shallow and greedy humanity can be.

I wanted to do something that could change the world, we may not find life on Europa but at least I was a part of something bigger than myself.

On the day we took off, I was convinced that Europa was going to be the place I died. All I asked was when I died, my body be sent to Earth and buried with my husband and daughter.

The mission took six months, six months of doing teamwork simulations, ship repairs, reporting back to command and doing the occasional psychological profile.

It was Day 291 after we landed on Europa when everything happened. I was instructed not to get into the specifics of what happened.

I think it’s public knowledge that 15 people lost their lives after what happened. That’s when people began pointing fingers and when the conspiracy theories came out of the woodwork.

Let me reassure you that we are alone in the Solar System. We drilled a hole into the ice shelf and we found absolutely nothing, that was the scary part.

If you want to know what got 15 members of my crew killed, you should contact my superiors. Maybe that’s why there’s only 3 people on Europa right now……wait, you knew that right?

So here I am undergoing psychological tests once more, the only big difference being that at least it’s on the International Space Station.

I’m not leaving to go out into the stars again anytime soon, of course that’s until someone needs a favor and I will fulfill that obligation.

Just living a lie, but that’s what we all do right?

END?