We moved to space. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
So we made rockets and launch segments and fuel tanks and engines and we moved ourselves up into space, piece by piece, part by part, spanner by spanner, bolt by bolt, then finally body by body.
And we were in space. Because space was completely empty, and it was the future.
***
We moved to space. It was full of nothing, but that just meant it was full of possibility.
So we made factories and parts and pieces and special tools. It took forever and ever and ever because every single module and gear and bolt had to be lifted up out of the bottom of a planet’s entire gravity well.
So we built a space elevator. This took even more factories and parts and pieces and special tools. It took forever and ever and ever and ever because it required ultratensile materials that were only theoretically possible in the same way that there was no rule saying your molecules COULDN’T line up just right to let you walk through a wall if you kept trying for the entirety of the universe’s lifespan times infinity, but that was just an insult to our can-do spirit and heroic goals so we tried anyways.
It fucked up and split in half and in half again and again and again, which was actually really good because it prevented it from whipping around the planet repeatedly and instead flung a lot of it out into space. The rest slammed violently into the planet hard enough to leave giant holes everywhere and killed a lot of people and destroyed a lot of people’s homes and made life harder for a lot of people.
Their sacrifices were just and noble. Because we were going to move to space.
Cleaning it all up took forever and ever and ever and ever and ever, though.
***
We moved to space. It took a lot of work, and we mean a LOT of work, but that just made it heroic.
There was an obvious problem, in that although there was infinite amounts of space and finite amounts of us, getting any of us into space was still sort of hard. So we compromised and sent those of us into space to work that were brave and hardy and courageous and also didn’t mind the tiny tiny tiny tiny chance of being decompressed or suffocating or suffering an embolism and also the complete and total certainty of undergoing rapid skeletomuscular degeneration and quickly accumulating life-changing amounts of radiation exposure.
They were happy to do it. We HAD selected them for that, after all. And most of them even stayed happy after they withered up and shriveled up and had bits snap or drop off. Because they got to move to space, albeit to help other people move to space, and they floated around until they couldn’t anymore and we buried them by launching them at their home planet below and or out into the empty universe as per their request.
Most of them wanted to be shot into space. This wasn’t totally surprising.
***
We moved to space. At last.
Things started breaking right away, of course. Maintenance is tricky and tough enough when you can breathe and wear gloves instead of giant insulated mitts attached to rigid full-body casketsuits. And sometimes you’re tired or you’re bored or you’re hungry or you’re thirsty or a thought crossed your mind at just the right moment and you maybe miss a little something that doesn’t mean anything, so you don’t care and then you do it again and again and maybe someday it’s a BIG something and other days all the little somethings turned into a huge something and someone may or may not or maybe gets sucked out an airlock or maybe suffocates or finds out that the entire tank of #6 Spicy Sou’wester Barbecue Sauce got a leak and they don’t have any more and they maybe start a maybe completely justified riot.
There are many hardships in space. Which is like being an adult, which is inevitable, so of course we had to move there. Where else would we be?
***
We moved to space. This meant we didn’t have to care about a lot of things.
In places that weren’t space, people were dying and suffering and starving and screaming and so on. There’s no sound in space so we didn’t have to hear it, and you’re too far away to see anyone or anything. No countries or borders and no armies and no famines and no people and no forests or mountains and no life and nothing, just a big smeary blue ball.
We didn’t look out the viewports on that side anyways. It wasn’t space.
And we didn’t have many viewports. They were structural weaknesses. Additional structural weaknesses.
It was pretty annoying when the deliveries got more erratic. And more expensive. And more and more and more people started complaining about us being in space, asking what the hell we were doing up there. But they were busy with problems that weren’t in space, so sooner or later they would be distracted or dead due to something that wasn’t about space.
We’d moved to space. What the hell did they think it meant?
***
We’d moved to space. Now we could get to work on the important things.
So we made stuff, from things we had to haul to space, and we either used it to fix the problems we had in space or we launched it back down to earth and they used it to make things to haul stuff back to space so we could make stuff.
It would’ve been easier if we had the space elevator but there had been totally unforeseeable problems with that. So instead we complained about the gravity well. Bad enough that our skeletons missed the planet so much they kept crumbling into bacon bits; everything that needed to be moved into space was very reluctant about it and kept wanting to dive back down until it was properly heaved shoved pushed and launched on a column of carbonized fire.
Why was everything so stubborn? Why did it want to stay where it was, rather than moving to space? There was so much space in space. There wasn’t much else, but that was the appeal: imagine, having as much room as you needed to do things and nothing in your way and nothing with you and nothing being you and all around you nothing but nothing but nothing but nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing
nothing.
***
We moved out of space.
It was not a decision lightly made, and many of us protested it at the time. But it wasn’t our call. Bits and parts and people fell off and seized up and powered down and passed away until there wasn’t much there.
Just space.
***
We moved to space. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Turns out the only stuff in space is what you put in it.
Who knew?