Our shuttle touched down on the hangar floor a moment later, and when the engines cut out, an abrupt silence filled the cabin. The others were all pressed to the windows, but I couldn’t look. I just sat there frozen in my seat, paralyzed by oscillating waves of anticipation and dread.
Meadows’ ATHID emerged from the cockpit and used one of its clawed hands to slap a large green button on the bulkhead. The safety bars around our seats retracted up into the ceiling as the doors opened with a hiss.
“Leave your gear and follow me,” Meadows told us over the drone’s comm speaker. Then the ATHID turned and exited the shuttle, motioning for us to follow.
Whoadie immediately unbuckled her harness and literally jumped out of her seat. She was already running when her feet hit the floor.
“I can’t believe we’re on the moon!” she said in childlike wonder, stretching her arms out wide as she leapt through the shuttle’s open hatchway. I saw her sprint off and noticed that she didn’t bounce as she ran, the way the Apollo astronauts always did in footage of the moon landings, which meant the gravity up here was somehow being altered to match that of Earth.
Chén struggled to get free of his own harness, then scrambled outside after Whoadie. It took Milo slightly longer to extricate himself, but then he exited the shuttle, too, grinning like a little kid on Christmas morning, leaving Debbie and me alone in the passenger cabin. She unbuckled her safety harness and turned in her seat to face me.
“You ready to head out there, Zack?”
I started to nod, but ended up shaking my head.
“I’ve spent my whole life fantasizing about this moment,” I told her. “And now … I think I’m too terrified to even go out there.”
“It’ll be all right,” she said. “He’s probably just as nervous about meeting you. Maybe even a little more.”
Meadows’ ATHID stuck its head back into the cabin, with his telepresence monitor now deployed. He smiled at Debbie through the screen, then rotated his drone’s head to address me.
“The general is right outside in the hangar bay, waiting to meet you, Lieutenant.” He turned to Debbie. “He asked me to escort you and the other new arrivals down to Operations, so that he and the lieutenant can have a few minutes in private. They’ll join us there shortly.”
“Of course,” Debbie said, standing up. She brushed a lock of hair off my forehead, then squeezed my shoulder and gave me another smile. “See you in a few minutes, okay?”
I nodded. “Thanks, Debbie.”
She gave me one last smile before she departed with Meadows’ ATHID.
I sat there alone inside the cabin for a few seconds, summoning my courage. Then I thumbed the release latch on my safety harness and shrugged it off as I slowly got to my feet.
When I finally stepped outside, he was right there, waiting for me.
He was just a few yards away from me, standing at rigid attention in a uniform just like the one I now wore. My father, Xavier Ulysses Lightman. Living and breathing.
And smiling.
He was smiling at me—with my own smile, on an older version of my face. The man standing in front of me could have passed for my time-traveling future self, come back to warn me of our shared destiny.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Meadows’ ATHID escort Debbie through a pair of armored doors at the opposite end of the hangar. Chén, Milo, and Whoadie were waiting for them just inside the tunnel on the other side, along with an EDA officer I didn’t recognize, who had a Japanese flag on his uniform. The entire group gaped at us through the open airlock doors until the doors slammed shut again a second later with a dull boom that echoed through the vast hangar.
I was only vaguely aware of their departure, or of my new surroundings, because all of my senses were now acutely focused on my father. The paternal ghost whose absence had haunted my entire adolescence now stood before me, miraculously resurrected. I found myself staring at a drop of sweat that had formed on his brow, and then watching as it rolled down the side of his face, as if this detail were proof this was really happening. It made me think of a scene in the original Total Recall—another movie I knew by heart because he’d once owned a copy on VHS.