STARSITE: VAGABOND ACTUAL - SCP Foundation

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F.A.Q.

Q: State your name for the record.

A: Case Temple.

Q: Your full legal name, please.

A: Erin Casey Temple.

Q: Thank you. What is your current place of employment?

A: Foundation, Research Department, Stellar Affairs Division.

Q: And what's your position?

A: Until about forty-eight hours ago, I was Deputy Director.

Q: And now?

A: That's a really good question.

In 1954, we reached out to the stars, and were sent crashing back down to Earth.

We being the Foundation, of course. The Sixth Occult War had drawn to a close, the rest of humanity was still busy licking their war wounds, and two former allies were just starting to give each other the stink eye. We had gotten through not just unscathed, but hardened, stronger than when we had started. We were optimistic, and we were bold enough to follow through on it. Which is why in 1952, Overwatch Command authorized Project SABER RIBBON: a mission to use a combination of cutting-edge engineering and the anomalous to put a man in space.

It was well-funded, well-supported, and well-planned. We had a wonderful spot all picked out in the Indian interior, and our engineers worked tirelessly for two years to construct a prototype of the FSV Dagger. It was little more than a container, just enough room for three crew, and strapped with a hell of a lot of anomalously-modified rocketry and heatshielding. If I seem like I'm underselling the work involved, it's because I am — SABER RIBBON was an incredibly complicated and intricate project that inspires a level of technical awe when you consider the times and what we were working with. But that's not why I'm talking about it.

No, I'm talking about it because on June 5th, 1954, we launched Dagger into the vast unknown, eyes wide with hope, the stars reflected in our vision. And we watched it breach upward, upward, until it began to crumble away into nothingness, breaking apart as it careened fatally to its side. It came apart in bits and chunks, spraying down into the Indian ocean. It failed, miserably. Three good men (and a lab rat or two) died. It was a tragedy, and we mourned.

But in the end, we got back to work. The Foundation isn't deterred that easily. Humans aren't deterred that easily.

Q: Could you explain the nature of your work at Stellar Affairs?

A: It's kind of complicated. Not exactly the sort of thing a layman would easily understand.

Q: Simplify it for me.

A: Are you seriously going to make me sit through this preposterous exercise?

Q: Ms. Temple —

A: Lieutenant Temple. I earned the damn rank.

Q: You're correct, I apologize. Lieutenant Temple, RAISA protocol demands—

A: A clear and comprehensive summary of background information and events. I know.

Q: Then why are you being obstinate, Lieutenant?

[Silence.]

A: Yeah. Yeah, okay. Sorry. It's been…. a day.

Q: I imagine. Now would you please answer the question?

But much as the people on the ground would've loved to get back to shooting rockets into the sky, bureaucrats tend to get cold feet at the first sign of sacrifice. The institutional support for SABER RIBBON evaporated, and the fledgling Stellar Affairs Division was sent back to the drawing board, trying to come up with a way to safely get humans into orbit. For a few years, we took a backseat and watched from our moldy office chairs as America and the USSR raced each other into the heavens. Maybe the anomalous wasn't a benefit here — maybe conventional engineering really was the way, and we just had to wait for the Space Race to solve the quandry for us.

At least, that's what the aforementioned yellowbellied bureaucrats said, not-so-subtly telling us to sit down and shut up. They wanted to go to space to do research, or to establish a preemptive dominant foot in the theatre, or any number of shortsighted reasons. It was a cost/benefit for them. For us? We wanted to go up there for the same reason the caveman walks to the distant hill, why the explorer crosses the ocean, why a famous mountaineer became the first person to summit Everest: because it was there. It's the horizon.

So we kept at it. Designing, planning, doing the math, working out the kinks. By the time we finally had a suitable shuttle design in 1959, Stellar Affairs had quietly expanded from a dozen engineers to nearly a hundred strong, all already dreaming of the next horizon: a human habitat in space. I'm told by the oldtimers that watching that first rocket carrying the piece of the station go up in 1965 was like seeing your child be born, go off to college, and walk down the aisle all at once.

FSS Hecataeus was a watershed moment for us. It took an incredible amount of labor, materials, and cost, but by 1971, the last of the dozen modules clicked into place and the Foundation's first off-planet facility was finished while the rest of the world was still cheering about the moon landing. To their credit, we hadn't gone to the moon. Yet. It had a crew of just over a dozen, mostly doing research on Safe anomalies in space. Really, its value was proving to ourselves that we could do it. That we had what it took to chase the horizon and win.

A: We handle anything that's off-planet.

Q: Could you be more specific?

A: Sometimes anomalous stuff, but usually not. Stellar Affairs' purview covers a number of offices and projects — Stellar Anomaly Surveillance, Off-Planet Maintenance, and yes, Extraterrestrial Surveillance, just to name a few. We work with RAISA to handle the Atreus Array satellites, we make sure our FSVs are ready to go, we ensure NASA and the rest of the space agencies are either in tune with us or don't find the stuff we don't want them to find. We investigate possibly-anomalous activity offworld, within a limited sphere.

Q: How limited is that sphere?

A: Mostly Luna, right now. Starsite-1 is in constant contact with us. We're planning on establishing an FOB on Mars — or at least, we were.

Q: Until today.

A: Yeah. Until today.

Starsite-1 was, until recently, our greatest triumph. This time, it wasn't accompanied by a sudden expansion of our personnel count — by 1980, a hundred engineers with modern computers could accomplish what would take a thousand engineers in 1959. We didn't even wait until Hecataeus was complete to start work on it. The pendulum swung back in our direction — as an entire globe gawked at the site of the first man on the moon, there was a new fever from Command, a new drive to supply the rinky-dink Stellar Affairs Division with whatever it needed to accomplish the dream that humans had had ever since we crawled out of our caves to look at the orb in the sky: what if I could live up there?

Incidentally, this was around when my boss joined the Division. The Director was just a regular old administrator back then, but he was put in charge of the mother of all projects: establishing a permanent Foundation facility on the Moon. We had a good start with the technology and anomalous applications and most importantly, the knowledge we'd gotten from Hecataeus. But this posed a unique challenge. It wouldn't be enough to be one prefab habitat plonked down on the lunar surface. No, having a dedicated facility on the Moon would be invaluable for containment efforts. The O5s were watching us. This one had to be perfect.

Enter the MISTLETOE system.

A stroke of genius, honestly. The two problems with a permanent lunar outpost were the design of the outpost itself and the delivery vehicle. So, two birds with one stone: the outpost was the delivery vehicle. A huge cylinderical vehicle, multiple stories tall, with a corkscrew design, carried from a shuttle and shot into the lunar surface. The anomalous shielding would make sure it didn't explode on impact, and then it would screw itself about two-thirds into the regolith of the dark side of the moon, laying down support struts to keep itself steady. Underground, we were nice and protected from the radiation inside the mass of the Site — and then auxilary structures could be built around the main facility as needed.

Sounds fun on paper, right? Now imagine how fun it is being up there.

Yeah, that's right. I was up there, baby. It's freeing. Not quite weightless, but it's unearthly. You shoot from wall to wall like it's nothing. And the view. When I signed up to be an astronaut, I thought it was implicit I'd never actually be going up there. Maybe a spacewalk around the ISS, at best. And then, suddenly, here was this guy saying he was the director of an independent space organization who wanted to send me to the goddamn Moon. I said yes in a heartbeat. I haven't regretted it since.

I went up in 1980, a year after the station went online. Back then, of course, augments were the norm. I'm sure that's goddamn insane for you to hear. Nowadays they're reserved for only the most elite and trusted of the Foundation's combat operatives. But pre-1984, something like one in ten Foundation personnel had some kind of paratech augment. The Foundation paid for it straight from Prometheus, and it was just better — no need to worry about muscle atrophy with mechanical limbs, and maintenance is easy when everyone and their mom is an engineer. 65% of the initial wave of Starsite-1 personnel were augmented. I was one of them — both my legs, up to the knee. Prometheus KRAKATOAs.

Those 4 years spent up there were the best of my life, hand to God. We weren't containing anything major — it was mostly a backup, an ace in the hole. Me and three dozen other Foundation astronauts, in our red-and-white jumpsuits, doing anomalous experimentation, communicating with the ground, I was living my dream.

And then 1984 happened.

I didn't even know what had happened at first. We just got the transmission from Command to begin bringing Starsite to what's called a 'cold stop', shutting down everything nonessential to conserve power. Only to be used for emergencies. We were confused, but complied — and then were told that an FSV was on its way to pick us up and bring us back to Earth within the week.

I didn't know what to do, so I just put on my best brave CO face and assured my crew that it was probably just an issue on the ground and they wanted to be safe rather than sorry. The FSV came by a few days of bored, anxious waiting around later, and we completely shut off the facility's power draw before piling in. We took off, rocketing towards Earth at thousands of miles an hour. If I knew that was the last time I'd ever be in space I probably would've savored it longer.

We were kept in the dark until we got down to Earth, splashing down off Cape Canaveral. I expected a hero's welcome. Instead, we got taken to a holding site, stripped down, inspected, interrogated, debriefed, interrogated again, and repeat. They took my fucking prosthetics. Can you believe that shit? They asked me questions I had no way of answering: "Does the name Robert Aram remind you of anyone?" "What does the word 'Bumaro' inspire?" "Have you had thoughts of betraying the Foundation?"

They affirmed us as clean a few weeks after that. I obviously didn't learn the whole story for another few weeks. But I could sense the stares everywhere we went anyway. Then, eventually, we found out some nutjob researcher in the desert halfway across the world had gone batshit insane, and now every single one of us was grounded, pending review on our cybernetics.

I was lucky enough for the Director to offer me a desk position in the Division. I knew a lot of good people that got transferred out, or just amnesticized and fired. I got to keep my prosthetics, and I just had to suck up the fact that I wasn't going to be able to live out that dream of floating weightless in the starry sky. I learned to like my job — there's a unique pleasure to organizing everyone else's duties and functions, one I've always enjoyed. I even got to help Starsite-1 get restaffed, after it lay empty and cold for a year. I just had to accept I wasn't going to be one of them — nonaugmented personnel only. But every time I went out at night, and looked up into the Moon, and remembered the half-decade I'd spent up there?

Nothing better than that. Nothing could possibly compare.

Q: Could you explain what happened early yesterday morning?

Fast forward sixteen years later. It’s been nice, I mean. It’s nothing compared to being on the goddamn moon, obviously. But Stellar Affairs is in a good spot. The skills and knowledge I had as a rocket-jockey are still useful in meetings and behind desks. In the end, it’s all just rocket science. I got deputy director four years ago. The Director is rarely at Site-69 (trust me, you’re not the first person to make that joke — you’re not even in the first five-hundred) so it falls on me to coordinate our two-dozen offices and projects and the absolute dregs of humanity, mechanical engineers.

Normally, my day starts after I drag myself out of my office at seven in the morning and basically attach an IV drip of coffee into me. I sit in on the first of two bidaily briefings on the goings on at Starsite-1. Then when they inevitably tell me everything is fine and perfect and dandy, I go around our big-ass monitoring room where a legion of techs sit in front of a satellite map, investigating abnormal reports from any of our satellites, monitoring stations, embedded agents inside NASA, ESA, and Roscosmos. A Starsite-2 briefing after that - you don’t have clearance for that, so don’t bother asking what it is. By then it’s eleven, and the rest of my day is, you guessed it, meetings with a cornocupia of rocket scientists insistent their project is the most important. Lately, that’s been Mars ideas.

Except today really, really hasn’t been a normal day.

A: I woke up, had breakfast, had my daily Starsite briefing, as usual.

Q: Where was the Director?

A: Away.

Q: Pardon me? Where?

A: You don't have the clearance for that, hon. I'm the person that takes the briefings.

Q: Was anything out of the ordinary reported at Starsite-1?

A: No. Nothing. At the time, it had a full crew complement of 47 — everyone was at work, experimenting, containing the anomalies we keep up there, running communication lines. An away team was out setting up the groundwork for a new module.

Q: I see. And when were you informed of SCP-8969?

A: An hour later, when I was taking a leak.

A nice part about being Deputy Director is that I have my own personal bathroom attached to my office. No using the regular bathrooms for this big cheese. A not-so-nice part about being Deputy Director is that I'm always needed, somewhere, by somebody. I'm expected to be constantly reachable. Which is how I found myself having an intelligence briefing with my pants around my ankles through a stall door.

"Ma'am, Satellite ARCHIMEDES-2 is giving us some strange results. We need you in the control room."

I'd made the exceptionally poor decision of consuming a Philly cheesesteak that had been marinating in my office minifridge overnight as brunch. I suspected trying to make it to the control room right now would make me the latest casualty of the Foundation Space Program. "Okay. Okay, I'll be there in a minute. Just, give me the overview for now."

"Ma'am?"

"Seriously, Josh."

"Uh, okay. About twenty-five minutes ago, ARCHIMEDES-2 began transmitting a lot of weird energy readings back to Starsite-1. They tried to clean it up but as far as they can tell, the data's good, so they passed it on to us."

"Where is Two?"

"Right now it's above the SPA Basin on the far side. The readings began to get malformed about 1100km from home."

I furrowed my brow, and this time, it had nothing to do with the cheesesteak.

"Wait, isn't Four also above the SPA Basin?"

"Yeah. But only Two is transmitting the weird responses."

"It's probably a software issue. Recall and debug."

I heard Josh hiss through the stall. It's the little ejection of air he makes when he's heard something I've said and thinks he knows better. It's deeply irritating that he's usually right.

"We got a big uptick from background conditions on the Terikof Exotic Radiation Array. Coherent tetryon emissions shot up from 0.1 to 34.7 in the span of an hour, just as it passed over Aitken, and then a sharp drop back to 0.75. Still well above average."

"Terikof. Why does that sound familiar to me?"

"Budget cuts."

I was silent for a few seconds.

"Ma'am?"

"Gut feeling, Josh."

This time, it was his turn to be silent for a second. Then he responded.

"It's something. I don't know what, but it's something."

"Go. Tell Starsite to get a team and a probe out there double-time. I want eyes on anything in there, and I want them now."

He didn't even respond — I just heard the racing of feet and the door swinging shut. I sighed.

Q: You're going to have to explain some of that for me, Lieutenant Temple.

A: ARCHIMEDES-2 is one of 4 of our satellites currently on an eccentric lunar orbit. Each ARCHIMEDES sat is equipped with monitoring equipment that hooks to an uplink at Starsite-1, which in turn feeds the data back to us. They get mundane data, mapping, topology, penetrative sonar, and then Hume levels, alternative energy readings, that stuff.

Q: And the SPA Basin?

A: That's the South Pole-Aitken Basin. It's the largest, oldest, and deepest impact crater on the dark side of the moon — about as half as wide as the contiguous 48 states. Likely formed millions of years ago when another large body bumped against Luna. It's so huge that it has other craters inside of it — one of which is its namesake, Aitken.

Q: So — correct me if I'm wrong — this satellite passed over this Aitken crater and a piece of technology aboard it began returning malformed readings? Indicating something was down there?

A: Essentially, yeah.

Q: Why were you so surprised by the mention of the… Terikof Exotic Radiation Array?

A: ARCHIMEDES was never terribly well-funded, relative to some of our other projects. Put simply, the moon just… isn't very anomalous. There's nothing up there humans didn't put ourselves. Originally the plan was 7 comprehensive satellites, but it got trimmed down to 4 specialized ones. Not every ARCHIMEDES sat has the same monitoring equipment, is what I'm saying.

Q: So ARCHIMEDES-2 is the only one with the equipment, I see.

A: It was considered largely unnecessary and stripped from the other three.

Q: And what does this equipment monitor?

A: It detects the unique radiation and energy readings put out by Class-W dimensional gateways.

Q: Ways.

A: We call them wormholes here. But sure, if you're a lit major.

I first laid eyes on SCP-8969 hours later.

By the time I got back to the control room, news had leaked out. About a quarter of our monitors are dedicated to just the Moon. The remaining ones are split nearly half amongst solar system and deep-space anomalies. Monitoring your 179s, your 2399s, versus your weird deep space transmissions or signals. But the Luna team, like I said, doesn't deal with the anomalous. Which is why they were in such a tizzy when I came in.

I told them to settle down — despite whatever Josh had said, it was very likely that it was still just a random bug. Same kind we get a dozen of every month. Either way, we wouldn't see a damn thing for a few hours. So it was better that we all get back to work. I said that all straight faced, sending them back to their stations, and then walked away with a bounce in my step, the exact same giddy excitement brewing in my stomach.

Same feeling I got when I was told I'd be going to Starsite-1 nearly twenty years ago. It's the thrill of realizing you're on the edge of something great, something no one else has seen before. So I went back to my office, and got back to work, and when I got the page three hours later that the away team had arrived at Aitken, I took off down the hall so fast that I nearly flattened a junior researcher.

When I came into the control room, every single person was staring at that screen. Which was utterly black, of course — we hadn't actually patched in to the team yet. Every minute of live video communication with Starsite is bounced across three of the Atreus Array sats, and there was no point doing all that for a 5 hour drive. So I ordered a video patch-in. And we waited. And we waited, and then three minutes later, it started to come through.

The suit camera of one of the astronauts — a Researcher Delmar — showed the two others in the away team seated in the buggy. It's a Foundation original, a modified, more powerful, more rugged version of the original LRVs the Apollo astronauts used. The far side of the moon is a lot rougher terrain, and we were more than up to the challenge of traversing it. But I digress.

Behind it, the buggy towed the probe. The thing was about the size and shape of a smart car, with six wheels — it had its own motor, but that was pretty slow. It had to be towed if you wanted to get it anywhere fast. Delmar's radio patched in, and I greeted him. They were at the base of Aitken, and were about to progress up — slow going uphill with the probe, but I told them to carry on while we watched in rapt attention. The drive up the lip of crater took another twenty minutes, but I didn't mind.

Honestly — just seeing it again was phenomenal. If you've seen it in person, the lunar surface isn't something you can ever forget, not as long as you live. On the far side, the stars litter the sky, like little bits of glitter tossed over a sea of matte black. The near side has these vast, untouched open plains. The dark side is peppered with impact craters ranging from the size of a car to the size of a continent. There's no sound, and you feel like you're floating as you jump from crater to crater. It really is just alien.

And that was the most alien thing I thought I'd ever see in my life until Delmar's camera peeked over the lip of the crater, giving us a view inside, and my jaw dropped.

Q: Can you describe what you saw?

A: Have you ever seen a rainbow in a puddle of oil?

Q: Sure.

A: No, you haven't. Those rainbows only show up when there's a sheen of oil floating on top of water — the oil refracts the light in such a way that when it passes through, bounces off the underlying water and back through the oil, it forms an iridescent rainbow and wow, I sound like a jackass right now, don't I?

Q: Just a bit. Your point, Lieutenant?

A: It was like seeing a puddle of oil and water that filled up the entirety of the crater. Aitken is about six kilometres in diameter and roughly circular, and it all looked like that, about six feet above there the base of the crater should've been. The entire 'base' was this purplish iridiscent sheen, but it wasn't physical — it phased in and out of my vision, like a heat mirage. Through it, I could still see the underlying regolith. It wasn't a trick of the visuals, either — Delmar's 'what the f*ck' made that much clear.

Q: And what did you do at that point?

A: I gave the order to let the probe roll down the hill, then turned around and called the Director.

Frankly, no reason it should've worked. That's just not how signals work! Signals don't work through dimensions. And yet, an hour later, we were still getting visual data from the probe.

When it rolled down the inside slope, it slipped into the Way without resistance, like it was falling into water. In a few seconds, it was swallowed up entirely. And then we waited. Starsite-1 began getting data almost immediately, while I was still on the phone explaining the situation to the Director. At some point, he put me on a conference call with a group he addressed as the VAGABOND Task Force. I had no idea who else was there and honestly, I was only half paying attention the moment the cameras on the probe started streaming.

At first it was nothing but blackness. I thought the feed was just busted, and the wind went out of my sails. Then I caught a flash of something and realized it was still on. As the seconds ticked by, I realized there were a number of little flashes in the black stars, whizzing by, as the probe spun wildly, and the video wasn't good enough to give us quality with movement. Gradually, painfully slowly, it slowed down to a point where the video could compensate, and spun clockwise.

The entire monitoring room was silent. We were somewhere. Probably not in this dimension, but somewhere in space. We could see a planet — about the same visual size as Earth from the moon, which meant we were either at the same distance and it was Earth-sized, or that we were closer and it was smaller, or that we were farther and it was larger. So basically, we didn't know squat. We watched in rapt attention as the probe continued to spin, exposing a distant, light blue star. I couldn't see any other planets, but that didn't really mean anything — you can't see most other planets from the Moon, either. The one we were looking at came into focus, and something slipped into frame behind it.

Oh.

It wasn't a planet, it was a moon. Specifically the moon of the huge purple gas giant hovering imposingly in the background. A few other bodies were visible in the distance. I'd love to say something shocking and mind-blowing happened, but that's really just not the reality of these situations — for the next six hours, we watched in a quiet blend of fixation and boredom as the probe spun in circles, as it drifted forward, slowing once the initial force of the ejection wore off. Then, eventually, getting faster as it was pulled into the moon's gravity.

That's when the real data started coming in.

Q: The probe reported that that the atmosphere was composed of breathable gases?

A: Yes.

Q: And that the temperatures near the equator were conducive to life.

A: Also yes.

Q: And that while the probe began rocketing through the atmosphere, you saw oceans of something. And what could possibly have been plant life.

A: Yes.

Q: Lieutenant Temple, your analyses aren't supported by hard data. You realize that, right?

A: I watched the probe break up on reentry. You don't have to tell me twice.

Q: Yet in your official report you submitted that the moon could be landed on, in your opinion.

A: I did.

Q: Could you explain to me what inspired that decision?

A: Why I think we should land on it?

Q: Yes.

A: Because it's there.

The rest of the day and the next was a blur. Meetings on meetings on meetings, with the Director, with the Research Director, and with the Council. It wasn't my first time in a room with a Council member, but it was just as terrifying — this one was an impossibly-old man in a wheelchair. He asked me questions, I answered to the best of my ability, the Director patted me on the back and assured me I was doing great, and then as fast as it began, it was over. Then I was sent home, and came back the next day for another round of meetings.

The air of excitement in the Site was so intoxicating and pervasive that it took me halfway into my second meeting with my enginering advisors to check my schedule. Every single meeting was with a rank or staffer lower than me, and nothing where I could exercise any power — just factfinding, assembling, and organizing. No meetings with the Director, with Stellar Affairs Council, nothing. I wasn't in the room where the decisions were being made. That's when I started to panic a little bit.

Was sending a probe in the wrong decision? Was my report wrong or faulty? Had I made a mistake? Had something horrible happened when I was asleep that they didn't want to tell me about? Was I being fired? If not, why was the Director shutting me out? Twenty years, he'd never shut me out like this. And then, on the apex of our greatest discovery not just as a department but maybe as a species?

Radio silence. So I sat down, and took my meetings while half my brain was freaking the hell out, and tried to be useful and to advise and to take input. A good amount of information just whizzed over me. And then eventually, around noon, I heard a soft ding as my schedule updated. I checked my tablet.

Everything was gone. I was cleared for the day. I was to summon to a RAISA debriefing in my office immediately.

Q: Lieutenant Temple, if I may?

A: I sense that I don't have the option to say no.

Q: You are very lucky the Director agrees with your analysis.

A: What?

Q: I work for RAISA. Our sphere of influence is substantially different from yours but it is incredibly far-reaching.

A: What's your point?

Q: That even as Deputy Director, there are things about Stellar Affairs we have been tasked with making sure you don't know. Would you take a look at these documents?

[Silence.]

A: These are schematics for Starsite-1. The MISTLETOE system.

Q: Close, but not quite. Those are the schematics for the FSV Otrera. When Starsite-1 was founded, the Foundation took great pains to ensure its success — including building a backup prototype if the first went awry. After the success of Starsite-1, it was clear it wasn't needed. But we knew we one day might. For the past twenty years, the Otrera has been hidden in a crater on the dark side of the moon, and for the past ten, it has been under active, ongoing modification by our alchemists, engineers, and thaumaturges for an eventual landing on Mars. It has expanded from a small landing craft to humanity's first proper starship.

A: No f*cking way. How did I not know about this? Why did I not know about this?

[Silence.]

A: Oh, you have got to be kidding me.

Q: Augmented personnel have never been entirely trusted after Amoni-Ram.

A: Skating right past that total bullshit — I don't understand the connection. A starship is useless for a Way.

Q: That's because, after extensive consultation with Sigma-3, we've determined that SCP-8969 is not a Way.

A: What? Then what is it?

Q: Ways are interdimensional gateways, most leading out into the Library and requiring a specific ritual called a Knock to access. SCP-8969 clearly doesn't lead out into the Library, and doesn't need a Knock. Its energy readings are similar but not identical to that of a traditional Way. It's not an interdimensional passage — like you said, it's a wormhole, connecting two places in space and time. That said, much of its behavour does mimic a Way's — Sigma-3 are of the opinion that the probe was so easily torn apart on entry because it sustained significant 'stretching' — consistent with what happens to humans who travel through an immature Way.

A: Immature?

Q: I'll spare you the details, primarily because you're not cleared for knowledge on the Wanderer's Library. But Ways follow a predictable formation process. Sigma-3 predicts that SCP-8969 will reach its peak stability in approximately three months before rapidly dissipating. Stable enough to sustain travel.

A: We could go through it.

Q: We will go through it. Since last night, the Stellar Affairs Director and the Council have been in private session with a group named the VAGABOND Committee, responsible for executing Operation VAGABOND, a plan of action in the event of an opportunity to colonize an extrasolar planet.

A: We have a plan for that?

Q: We're the Foundation. We have a plan for everything. In three months, the FSV Otrera will be designated Starsite-3, equipped with a full crew complement, dropped through SCP-8969 to land on the moon, and will establish a forward operating base for the Foundation and for humanity.

A: But… Sigma-3 said SCP-8969 will probably dissipate after being stable enough to go through.

Q: That's correct. This is the mother of one-way trips, as it were.

A: This is insane. This is insane, but what does it have to do with me?

Q: Every ship needs her captain, Lieutenant Temple. How do you feel about finally earning those other two stripes?

A: Me? But… my legs.

Q: The Director has nominated you: you are his choice, and he is of the opinion that augments are a boon in interstellar travel and the Foundation overcorrected after Amoni-Ram. And recent events have made the Council much more amenable to his position — at least in the case of offworld personnel.

A: This is… a lot to take in.

Q: I need an answer, Lieutenant Temple.

A: Can I think about it? I mean, you're asking me to leave behind my family, friends, partner, my life for a trip I won't come back from.

Q: You have no surviving family, few social connections outside immediate colleagues, and are single.

A: Way to be gentle about it, man.

Q: It's part of why you were chosen.

A: Still, I… need time to think.

Q: You have the rest of the hour. We're on a clock, Lieutenant. I suggest you start thinking like it.

The history of humanity is hung on a timeline of exploration. Once, it was the land, then the sea, then the New World. For the past half century or so, it's been the stars. We took to orbit, we stood on the moon, and we set our eyes on what lay beyond. We've been given an opportunity to chase the horizon to lengths unknown. The rest of the Foundation has a job to do, people to protect at home, but here at Stellar Affairs, we're still what we've always been: the explorers.

I said I'd take the hour. Ten minutes later, I came out with my answer. I don't do indecisive and thankfully, neither does the Foundation. I could run you through what happened in the time between, but let's face it, you're not interested in the ephemera of training and seminars and a whole hell of a lot of learning-as-I-went and I'm not interested in relaying it.

What both of us are interested in is that a month later, I was strapped in to the FSV Iskander, twenty years older but the same stupid grin on my face under my helmet as I and yet another crew of engineers and techs rocketed out of the atmosphere at eighteen thousand miles per hour. I was going back. We were going back.

What both of us are interested in is the inaudible hiss as the craft depressurized and I walked down the ramp and took my first steps on the lunar regolith in sixteen years. Metal limbs clanking slightly inside my suit as I dropped to my knees and touched the grey rock, hardly daring to believe it was real. Seeing the spire of Starsite-1 in person again, this time surrounded by a veritable colony of auxiliary buildings, rovers, and astronauts slowly leapfrogging through the air to greet us.

What both of us are interested in is the look on my dumb goddamn face when the buggy stopped by a lunar crater with a metal covering, and we slid inside to see the long, cylindrical and gargantuan form of my new commission. The FSV Otrera, its makeshift hangar a hive of activity as dozens of engineers worked in zero-oxygen, cold-welding more panels onto the long white ship. I laid a hand against it, and even though the roof of the crater was fully covered, I felt the cosmos.

In 1954, we reached out to the stars and lost. In 2001, we're going back for round two.

STARSITE

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