“Listen, we've been over this so many times already. I’ve spent years of my life and a ton of money to get on the crew. It was a sheer stroke of luck that the primary candidate broke his arm. Don’t you understand?! My whole life has been leading up to this flight. And when they told me I qualified only as a backup crew member… and then this chance…” I continued after a pause. “Do you really want me to throw it all away?”
“But you're not coming back, are you?” she asked, choking back tears.
“No. It's a one-way ticket. But I was honest about that when we first met, and I think it played an important role in what we had. You've always been flattered to be an astronaut's girlfriend, haven't you? Making your friends go green with envy.”
“I always thought you'd stay. I never thought it was serious. And, like you said, you… you were just a backup.”
She started crying again. But I wasn't thinking about her anymore. I was re-living that elation I felt when I found out that Alan broke his shoulder during hockey practice. There I was, standing still, gazing upon a monument to the first astronaut, Yuri Gagarin, but my thoughts were far away in the sky. I will fly, I will be there, I will become one of the first settlers on another planet. Out of billions of people, I was one of the lucky five.
But now… I shrugged away the memories, the picture changed. It’s over. Cancelled. What if we don't fly anywhere at all? So much time, money and hopes wasted. The Hope. That was the name of our ship. It was an allegory, the hope of humanity. Our planet was almost irreversibly destroyed, and we could not prevent its further deterioration. So-called presidents and prime ministers of developed countries paid lip service to environmental protection, participated in various congresses and public organizations, but all of them still remained miserable slaves of private capital, which was bleeding the planet dry. Oil, natural gas, shale gas, open-pit mining, deep-sea mining, carbon dioxide emissions, greenhouse effect, ozone holes, endless wars and much more. The planet was dying and there was a part of society that understood this very well. Among those were some very rich and influential people who managed to push the corruption-riddled United Nations into arranging an international space expedition.