Chapter Text
The Space Race was at an end. The United States and the Soviet Union had come to a tentative agreement and started working on easing their strained relationship. After eighteen years of competing for supremacy in space exploration, the Americans and the Soviets had decided to join forces. At a summit in Moscow in 1972, Nixon and Kosygin had signed an agreement and paved the way to the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. It was a symbolic mission more than anything – all the American and Soviet crew had to do was dock their spacecraft together while in orbit.
The Apollo launched on July 15, 1975, and it planned to dock with the Soyuz two days later. On the Apollo, Deke Slayton was taking pictures of the Soyuz. He was the docking module pilot, which meant that he was in charge of all the manoeuvring that was to be done on the American side once the docking procedure began. It wasn't going to begin in another forty-five minutes, so he had given himself enough free time to enjoy the view of the Earth from above – which was nothing remarkable once you got used to it – and to observe the Soviet spacecraft moving lazily towards them, which looked like it was made out of green parachute silk and some staples, at least from where he was weightlessly floating.
He had flown fifty-six combat missions as a bomber pilot during the war, but this was Deke Slayton's first space flight. He was supposed to be one of the Mercury Seven, the first seven men that NASA had ever sent into space, but a heart murmur had grounded him until now, finally, he was able to fly and see something he had only looked up at before. He consciously tried to dismiss the magnificence of it all, but there was still a part of him that was as giddy as a child on Christmas morning. He felt like singing or laughing, but his two fellow astronauts were both too busy with their work, and besides, he was fifty-one – the oldest person to fly in space, they'd told him – and somehow he didn't feel it would be appropriate. He'd sing when they docked, he decided. He wondered if the cosmonauts knew anything by the Beach Boys.
"Gentlemen, I'm picking up some odd readings from the radar," said Vance Brand, the command module pilot.
"What is it?" Commander Thomas Stafford wanted to know.
"It looks like—"
And then Deke saw them. The meteoroids coursed past the window as he was trying to take another picture of the Soyuz. It was like looking directly at a light bulb – his eyes watered and stung, but he kept on looking as they plummeted towards Earth. There were two of them, roughly the same size, travelling on the same trajectory.
"Stay on course!" the commander shouted.
Deke squinted, leaning closer to the glass so that his nose touched it. He thought he'd imagined it – he moved away again to wipe the glass, but when he moved closer it was still there. No mistaking it: there was a speck of something dark on each of the meteoroids. He wiped the condensation that his breath had made on the glass, and then focused again.
One of the dark specks looked like a baby, Deke realised with mounting horror. It jousted for dominance with incomprehension as he saw that the other speck looked exactly the same.
There were two babies riding on meteoroids.
He took a deep breath and looked away from the window until the meteoroids passed, deciding that it never happened, because children weren't built to sustain that amount of heat and pressure. He listened to his fellow astronauts ascertain that the worst thing that had happened was that they'd been knocked slightly off course, which could easily be rectified.
He looked down towards Earth and the blazing meteor trails, and decided that this was going to be his first and only space flight. He was getting far too old for this.
Getting back on your feet after running away from home at sixteen is a much easier venture if you're especially canny with new technologies, an eager risk taker and if you have a twin brother who remembered to pack your mother's cheque book and the details on how to access your joint trust fund in your duffel bag when you left home on a cold January evening.
Despite all of these advantages, it still took Jade some clever manoeuvres, a lot of lessons in marksmanship, a certain number of purloining lost historical artefacts for interested parties and a sufficient amount of years until she was able to move up in the world. She didn't forget the green-skulled monster and she wanted nothing to do with the creature who pretended to be her mother, so as soon as she could she changed her last name to English, as an attempt to not let the Condescension forget her.
In 1975, Crockercorp had officially announced its first microcomputer, Betty's Smartbox. The same year, Jade started a company she called Skaianet, after the blue planet that looked almost but not completely different from Earth that she'd seen in her dreams. She branded it with green skulls and garish colours, and everyone in the media wanted to know how this middle-aged woman had managed to patent and produce a hand-built personal computer kit and have it sell better than Betty's Smartbox. Very few connected her face with the child in the old war posters, and even fewer remembered the Crocker twins anymore. But Jade was always wary of one day waking up to the Condescension on her doorstep.
That fear did not come true until seven years later, when Jade was taking a flight from Sydney in her private plane. When she woke up from a very long nap induced by motion sickness medication somewhere over the Pacific, she had another look at the crew and realised that she didn't recognise any of them.
She was poking at her in-flight meal, macaroni and cheese which she now knew came out of a Betty Crocker box, when the P.A. announced, "This is your captain speaking. We will be landing slightly ahead of schedule."
The flight attendant walked up to Jade. "We're very sorry for the inconvenience, ma'am," she said, "and we do hope that you'll enjoy the rest of your flight."
Jade grabbed her fork and swung it at the woman. The flight attendant raised an arm to block her swing, and the plastic tines snapped on her forearm. Jade scrambled to unbuckle her seatbelt, but the woman was quicker. Jade didn't even see the syringe until it was buried in her upper arm.
"Please stay in your seat, Miss Crocker," the flight attendant said. "And enjoy this, complimentary of Betty Crocker." Jade tried to struggle, but she could already feel her hands going limp. With fumbling fingers, she managed to unbuckle her seatbelt before they ceased obeying her entirely. Her head fell back on the headrest, and just before she lost consciousness she thought she heard the flight attendant whisper, "Your mother still loves you, Jade."
Jade woke up to her heart hammering painfully in her chest. She opened her mouth to drag in breath, and water flooded her lungs. She opened her eyes, and saw nothing but blurry dark green. She kicked immediately, striking out with her hands and feet in an effort to reach the surface, but all it did was pull her further down. Bubbles shot out of her mouth and nose, and she could feel the lack of oxygen pushing against her chest, like she was in a vice that was getting screwed up tighter and tighter until she felt as if her sternum and spinal column would snap.
She tried kicking her feet again, her long skirt slowing the movements, the weight of the wet fabric dragging her down. She tried turning her head to where she thought the surface was, and saw light, emerald green with a big, dark green splodge. She expelled another burst of bubbles out of her lungs, and from the way her chest hurt it felt like it was the last she had.
Using her last reserve of strength, she struggled to swim upwards until her lungs felt like bursting. She could feel her legs giving out, and then her hand touched the dark green splodge. Plastic – a part of the plane. Jade's arm shot out of the water, and she pulled herself onto the piece of debris, clutching it for dear life. She spat out sea water, hacked out some more of it, and then started vomiting in earnest, taking greedy gulps of air in between bouts of emesis.
Every muscle shaking, she was too weak to pull herself up onto the piece of debris so she just clung onto it as firmly as she could. Jade opened her eyes and had to squint immediately on account of the glare of the sunlight off the sea. She was floating amidst scattered parts of her plane, some of which were on fire. She looked just in time to see the rudder with the Skaianet logo turning vertical with the surface of the sea and sinking out of sight.
Beyond it, Jade saw an island. It was an atoll with a strange, man-made structure in the shape of a frog in the middle of its lagoon. The current was carrying her straight towards it. Her muscles protesting, she kicked her legs and tried to speed up the process as much as she could.
In the distance, a white whale surfaced and expelled water from its blowhole. When it sank back down again, it sang a warning to the others nearby.
There was going to be a new inhabitant on the island soon.
TT: I do not know how aware of this information you are, since I gather you were a child when most of this occurred, but the research we have done has uncovered that she had orchestrated a lot of the technological advancements of our society, most notoriously acting as an éminence grise in the development of nuclear energy and the atomic bomb in the 1940s.
GG: yes, i know! i didnt understand that all these men who came to our house at the time were all working on the same thing
GG: but after doing some digging around i had managed to connect the dots
TT: I think it extremely ironic that the man who introduced the Fermi Paradox was not aware that he was working with an alien. Maybe he would not have asked where everybody was had he known that Earth had been visited not so long ago.
GG: or maybe he had inklings that it had happened but he didnt want to risk his reputation
GG: so he went with a roundabout way of saying it
GG: i guess we will never know now!
TT: I wanted to say something else. Please let me know if I'm unnecessarily wasting your time.
-- gardenGnostic [GG] is now an idle chum! --
GG: go on!
GG: you're not wasting my time, don't be silly!!
GG: sorry, im working on something right now and i think im finally getting somewhere
GG: but dont let that discourage you from talking to me!
TT: Okay.
TT: I know that the disparity in our age is considerable, Mrs English, but I hope that won't deter you from cooperating with me.
GG: call me jade!
TT: Only if you call me Rose.
GG: sure!
GG: any kind of help would be appreciated, rose, although i dont know how much you can do right now
GG: since her company is stronger than its ever been and skaianet isnt doing so well
TT: We both know that she's been sabotaging you, since you are her greatest enemy and fiercest competition.
TT: I am just saddened by the fact that more aren't aware of the danger she poses.
TT: I hope that our working together will change that.
TT: Jade? Hello?
GG: AUTO-RESPONSE: Idle since 04:52 (UTC-10)
TT: I will talk to you some other time, then.
-- tentacleTherapist [TT] ceased pestering gardenGnostic [GG] --
Jade woke up with a start to find that she had dozed off at her workbench. Her laptop showed that it was gone five in the morning, and that her conversation partner had disconnected some time ago. She'd first started talking to Rose Lalonde on an anti-Crockercorp message board. Unlike everyone else Jade had ever talked to, Rose was ready to believe her about the true nature of Betty Crocker. Jade was extremely wary of her at first, thinking her a Crockercorp spy, but then Rose mentioned that she had dreams sometimes too, of purple spires, a pastel landscape with rain-heavy yellow clouds, and most importantly, several grey-skinned, orange-horned creatures. It could have just been a coincidence, but Jade had been through too many bizarre things to believe in coincidences anymore.
She wondered what had woken her up. She was working on rewiring what she had affectionately started to refer to as the fourth wall, trying to make it show anything other than just blackness and the occasional acid green compression artefact. It turned out that crashing near the Pacific island thirteen years ago was some sort of godsend. Instead of sabotaging her flight and killing her, the Condescension had inadvertently provided Jade with all the right tools to facilitate her downfall.
Having had descended into the bowels of the Frog Temple all those years ago, Jade found the same kinds of platforms that she and John had used on the alien ship when they were children, a yellow and purple one. The purple platform in the Frog Temple led to the same location as the one on the alien ship: the purple city that Jade learned was on a planet called Derse. With help of the wreckage of her airplane and pilfered Dersite technology, the biggest of which was definitely the fourth wall from the Arch Agent's cubicle of vigilance, Jade had managed to build first a tolerable, and then a comfortable life for herself on the island.
Nobody had come after her yet, but she never let her guard down and kept her rifle close at all times. Maybe they were ordered not to go to Earth, or maybe they were just scared of the strange creatures that freely roamed the island. The creatures never gave Jade too much trouble, apart from the tiny little fairy bulls who sometimes flew in through her bedroom window while she was asleep and tried to cuddle with her. She'd learned not to swim in the lagoon after sunset, following an unpleasant brush with a vicious old seagoat.
Jade closed her laptop and grabbed her rifle from the workbench. Checking that it was loaded, she stepped outside. In the feeble dawn light, she saw a large plume of smoke rising from the southernmost part of the jungle. She picked up her binoculars from their peg next to the door, and pointed them towards the smoke. A part of the jungle was on fire. When the wind blew some of the smoke away, Jade could make out the wing of a small airplane sticking out at an almost vertical angle with the ground.
She removed the binoculars from her eyes, hung them back on their peg and sprinted down the sloping path that led from the hill where her house stood. She stopped at the bottom to catch her breath and wipe the sweat from her face, and then continued through the jungle. The day was breaking, and so she knew that she was safe from some of the more bloodthirsty creatures that roamed the jungle, at least for a while. They didn't come out of their lairs until the sun was over half way across the sky.
By the time Jade had reached the crash site, a warm drizzle had started falling and put out most of the fires. She saw that it was mostly the underbrush and the creeping vines on the ground that had been affected – there was no fire damage to the trees, although one of them had been split in half by the force of impact.
The wing of the plane had letters and numbers written on it, but Jade could only see that the last three were 20 – the rest had been eaten away by rust and overgrown by the jungle. She realised that the plane hadn't crashed today at all. Judging by the ruinous state of it, it had been there at least forty, if not fifty years. Even though she had explored every corner of the island, Jade had never noticed it before. She probably would have never noticed it if it wasn't for the crash, considering how thick the jungle was around it.
The plane was cleaved in half, and in the middle of the wreckage was a huge, still slightly smoking perforated piece of rock. A meteorite. And on it, lying in a deep groove and thoughtfully sucking his thumb, a baby.
Jade lowered her rifle and stepped up to the meteorite. The baby watched her quietly. When she got close enough, he kicked his chubby legs and grabbed his toes.
"Hello," said Jade, giving him a small wave. "How did you get here?"
The baby's eyes were huge and dark green. He let go of his toes and made a grabbing motion towards Jade. She slung her rifle over her shoulder and bent down to pick him up. He was tiny and warm in her arms, and she didn't even mind how damp and dirty he was. She supported his head with her hand, and felt him go limp and relaxed against her.
Jade began walking back through the jungle to her house as the drizzle turned into rain and murmured on the leaves.
It was December 1, 1995, Jake English's first birthday.
Jade had told Jake everything about her childhood – about the evil witch who pretended to love her, the clever dog who raised her, the man enchanted to believe he was a father, and the doubting brother who started believing in witches just before it was too late. At six, Jake was still too young to know or understand the real truth, but she did her best weaving fairy tales for him that had him shooting his slingshot at rubber trees, pretending they were an evil witch. She promised herself that she would tell him the complete truth when he was old enough. In the meanwhile, she taught him the joy of adventure, the basics of survival, and how best to escape overprotective fairy bulls.
It was nearing Jake's seventh birthday. Jade had planned to surprise him with one of the water lily flowers that bloomed in the lagoon – they were edible and delicious, but dangerous to obtain due to the fact that they were the favourite food of the seagoats that inhabited the lagoon.
She had got to the beach and was about to step on the first of the many lily pads leading to the Frog Temple when she heard a tumultuous roaring from overhead. Jade looked up, and noticed it in the sky above the volcano – a giant, post box red ship. There were two curved spikes coming out of its middle that met on the bow, giving it the look of a three-pronged fork. On its underbelly, Jade saw a painted white trident. Betty Crocker colours.
Jade grabbed her rifle and took a step backwards, stepping onto the lily pad. She had found her. Jake was safe in the house, there was an underground bunker she'd built should this occur, but she was completely exposed.
She stepped onto the next lily pad, her hands going clammy on her rifle. She chanced a look down so she wouldn't slip, and noticed the ripples in the water. They weren't coming from the lily pad that she was standing on.
Rifle held ready, Jade spun around.
Her stepmother was standing on a lily pad. She held a long, double-ended golden trident, and when she grinned her many-toothed grin, it did not reach her cruel fuchsia eyes.
"Hello, daughter of mine."