I once read a Mental Floss article about what happens if you suddenly find you have been spewed out into space without adequate protection. You will suffer horrific sunburn, while at the same time being subjected to an agonising chill. You will fill up with gas bubbles and double in size. The moisture on your eyes and in your mouth will boil. If you hold your breath, your lungs will rupture. If you don’t, you’ll suffocate.
I turn to the people at my table, scanning name badges. Who do I want to kill? There’s a guy with a white goatee opposite me called Yuri. There’s no way that’s his real name. I instantly hate him. We should chuck him out first.
Before I have the chance to poison the group against him, the woman on Yuri’s left, Carol, who has short grey hair and a kind face, takes a deep breath and says: “I volunteer to die.”
What? Is this how we’re meant to play the game? The people who are willing to sacrifice themselves are the ones who get to take part in the most ambitious space project known to man?
Yuri looks at Carol, takes her hand in his, and says, “I also volunteer to die.”
Bloody hell. At this rate, we’ll have nobody left.
I lean forwards and lock eyes with Yuri. “I’d very much like to stay on the vehicle,” I declare forcefully. “I want to live.”
A couple of people at the table fidget, and then, shamefaced, they murmur: “Me too.”
“Excellent,” I say. “Well, let’s see who’d work best with me.” With those words, I’ve become the leader.
Yuri and Carol remain eerily quiet throughout the ensuing conversation, no doubt feeling that their martyrdom has already proved far more than words ever could. I, on the other hand, become supremely, uncharacteristically loud. I use words like determine and subset and perfunctory. When Brodie comes over with a clipboard to observe us, I even make a joke.
“You think we need a chef on Mars?” I say to Angelika, the woman next to me. “Your food had better be out of this world!”
Brodie, whose cap says “You rocket” above the peak, laughs. After he’s finished laughing, I catch him looking at my name badge. Oh yes. I can do this.
After Brodie walks away, I turn to Raissa, the one person in our group who hasn’t said anything yet. “What about you? What do you do?”
“I write haikus,” she replies shyly.
“You’re in,” I tell her.
At the end of the exercise, we’ve whittled our crew down to a robust four. I’m on the crew, naturally, and there’s also: Katie (an endocrinologist), Landon (a molecular biochemist), and Raissa (a poet). Rejected are Angelika (a chef), Carol (a Christian missionary), and Yuri (a painter).
“Interesting choice,” says Brodie when it’s our turn to report back to the room. “What made you decide to take the poet?”
Raissa bites her lip and I speak for her. “It was a toss-up between taking her or a rocket scientist,” I say. “Just kidding.”
Everyone chuckles. I’m really getting the hang of this.
Now, I clear my throat. I tell Brodie that we decided it was important that we document such a momentous occasion. I tell Brodie that nobody knows exactly what’s going to happen when we get to Mars. I tell Brodie that it’s vital that such a significant milestone for the human race be communicated with heart.
Brodie holds out his clipboard, and he writes something down, slowly and deliberately.
“Time for the next activity,” he says at last. “This one’s called ‘The Point of No Return.’”
21
As I’m about to break free of the conference room, Brodie calls out: “Don’t forget to line up in the foyer for a photograph!”
“What’s the photograph for?” I ask the girl filing out of the room ahead of me.
“Apparently, they’re going to put our pictures online; then the public have to vote for who they like the best.”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s how they get it down to a shortlist of one hundred. It’s going to be high-key amazing.” The girl looks barely eighteen. She’s wearing false eyelashes.
“So, our success in this competition is based on a photograph?”
“Lol,” says the girl. “Not just our pictures. They’re putting up our essays too.”
“Jesus.”
The girl takes a lip gloss out of her pocket. “You coming to the activity centre after this?” she asks as we shuffle forwards. “A group of us are going to Laser Combat.”
“Maybe,” I lie.
Naturally, the photographer is incredibly photogenic. She’s wearing leggings and a vintage jumper, looks about twenty-five, and has poker-straight hair. “Stand here please,” she instructs me through a lens.
I imagine her uploading my image onto her computer later tonight. She’s surrounded by mid-century modern furniture and sampling a chilled white wine as she clones bits of my “good skin” from anywhere she can find it, then pastes it liberally over my wrinkles, eye bags, moustache hair.
“It would be great if you could smile,” she says. “Think about how much you want to go to outer space.”
Maybe this trick has been working on some of the others, but I feel like a patronised child. How much I want to go to outer space? This isn’t a joke. I’m not a five-year-old lying under a rocket-themed duvet cover, dreaming of becoming the next Neil Armstrong.
