For the record — and there is, deliberately, no record — at two o’clock this morning nobody was in the building in any official capacity. The street was empty. The cameras were, by coincidence, looking elsewhere. Four members of staff happened to be standing in the garage at the same time, for unrelated reasons, none of which we are minuted as having.
I want it understood that I came down to advise against this. I had a list. The list had eleven points. I got to point two and then somebody pulled the dust sheet off and I put the list in my pocket and I have not seen it since.
She needed a name
You cannot fly a thing with no name; it’s bad manners. So we stood on the garage ramp at 02:04 and had, in whispers, the shortest and most heated naming meeting in the agency’s history.
The Registrar wanted an accession number. The Oracle wanted something kind. Dervla wanted something “defensible in the event of an inquiry.” And then the Founder, who had not said anything, said one word.
“Prometheus.”— the Founder, settling it. Nearly.
Nearly. Because the Oracle, who notices everything, narrowed her eyes.
The Oracle We can’t call the ship Prometheus. You got that from Stargate SG-1.
The Founder O’Neill wasn’t allowed to call the Prometheus the Enterprise. That’s enough injustice for one lifetime.
The Oracle Hmmmmm.
And that settled it — properly, this time. It is a very cool name. It still, annoyingly, fits. We all agreed at once that it was right and at once that it was a bit much, which is the surest sign of a good one.
I noted, for accuracy, that Prometheus stole fire from the gods, gave it to people who were not supposed to have it, and was chained to a rock for the rest of time as a direct consequence. I was told this was “on theme.” I have catalogued worse names. I have not catalogued a better one.
It went up the way a held breath goes out. Vertical, and then very fast, and then extremely fast, in a silence that was somehow louder than a sound. There is — we were relieved to find — a proper pilot’s seat, a control stick, a throttle, and a console of switches and dials, all of it sensibly laid out and clearly meant for hands. The Founder dropped into the seat, took the stick, and flew her, calling the moves out loud as we climbed. Once we were properly moving she rolled us over — sky now behind, the way we’d come down below — so that for the rest of the climb we watched it all out of the front and the back, the world falling away behind us like a dropped coin.
The controls make sense the instant you sit down: a stick that wants to be held, a throttle that wants pushing, more switches than a cathedral organ, every one of them labelled in a hand I find I can read. I flew the ship. With the controls. Like a person. I had not laughed in some years. I laughed.
London, from directly above
Then it tilted us to look down — properly down, the ground at ninety degrees, the whole sleeping city laid flat beneath us like a circuit board left on at night. We found our own building. We could see the window we’d left the light on in. We all, independently and in perfect unison, said the same short word.
From up there you cannot see a single thing anyone is worried about. You can only see that it is all lit, and all still going, at two in the morning, and that someone has to keep the lights on for everyone asleep under them. I blessed it. Quietly. It seemed the least I could do.
The bit that got hot
Climbing that hard, the air ahead of us couldn’t move aside fast enough, and it complained about it: the ring wrapped itself in a sheath of orange fire, drag and heat sliding off the hull in ribbons. The Registrar tried to photograph the temperature. Inside the cabin it stayed perfectly, eerily cool, and the running lights kept their slow patient breath as though none of this were remarkable.
And then there wasn’t any more sky
The fire fell away all at once and we were out, above the thin bright line of the atmosphere, the planet curving away blue and enormous and quiet beneath us. Nobody spoke for a while. The Oracle cried, a little, in the happy way. Dervla took her list back out of her pocket, looked at it, and put it away again for good.
The dome lit up
The Founder reached to a second console and a single covered lever under a flip-guard — because of course there is one — lifted the guard, and pushed it home. Light poured up into the dome from somewhere under the floor and went racing around the ring, gathering. Every clock and dial in the cabin agreed on the time. The time was 02:17. Of course it was.
My exact words, on the record I keep promising there isn’t one of, were: “Is this allowed?” And then, about half a second later: “I don’t care.” I would like both halves of that minuted, please. I stand by both.
Through the tunnel
Inside, time went soft and generous. The light streamed past on every side in long bright rivers and we sailed down the centre of it like the ship had done this a thousand times and was pleased we’d finally caught up. Somebody put music on. Somebody else was crying again. It was, all four of us agree, the best we have ever felt.
It looked like the inside of a kind thought. I have spent a year telling people the divine is on the org chart and means well. I would now simply like to show them this. Bring nothing. You already have everything you need.
And then we were there
We fell out of the tunnel beside a hard white diamond of a star, and there was a whole cold green world turning slowly in its light — green the way deep water is green, capped white with ice at both ends — and, riding wide around it at a good distance, the thing the lawyers say is ours: a small pale moon, almost all ice, with one thin band of green about its equator. We did not land. We had agreed, in advance, that on the first night we would only look.
It is a good moon. It is quiet. We will go back, and next time we will land, and we will do it properly, with sandwiches. Then I turned us around and took everyone home, because some of us had a stand-up at nine.
Home before the milk
We were back under the dust sheet by twenty past three, the garage exactly as we’d left it, the pool car none the wiser, the bicycles undisturbed. If you go down there now it is just a covered shape between a hatchback and a bike rack, and the running lights are still going, slow, under the sheet, like something pleased with itself that is pretending to be asleep.
We are not telling anyone. We are telling you, because you found this, which means you were reading much too closely, which means — congratulations, and welcome — you’re one of us now.