My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible - Chapter 559 Volunteers Departing For The Base

The volunteers and observers had all arrived through the night and into the morning.

The next morning, the four volunteers had their identity documented and each one were asked to sign the consent form before the final check.

The final assessments ran cleanly. Dr. Park ran the MedScan on each volunteer one last time. The data updated on the monitoring displays and transmitted to the base. There was no surprises and everyone was stable enough for transit.

Thomas confirmed the last signature and looked at Dr. Brenner. “We’re ready.”

The boarding was smooth after that.

The Synths had already packed everything back into the floating boxes and loaded them onto the platform.

The cots folded back into the larger container, the emitter sets collected and stored, the food containers secured. By the time the staff were ready to move, the lounge looked as though nothing had happened in it.

The volunteers boarded alongside the staff. The platform descended twice — once for the staff, the volunteers and their families. Then for the Synths and the boxes.

When the platform rose and they cleared the shuttle’s underside into the cabin, the volunteers looked around with the wide-eyed, at the shocking view in front of them.

The cabin was warm and clean, with seats arranged along both sides and viewports running the full length of both walls. The staff moved through the cabin, guiding each family to their seats, helping those who needed help, and pointing out the call system in each armrest.

Then one of the staff mentioned the sleeping compartments at the rear of the cabin, for volunteers in serious condition who needed to lie flat during transit.

The response was unanimous.

Diego spoke first, through Marco. “Is there a window?”

Marco looked at the compartment door, then back at Diego. “No.”

Diego shook his head. “Then I’m staying here.”

The volunteer from Mexico City looked at the compartment and said simply, in Spanish, that he had not come this far to watch a ceiling.

His wife laughed. It was the first time Thomas had heard her laugh.

The Guatemalan volunteer, Maya, had already pressed her face against the nearest viewport before anyone had suggested the compartment at all.

The Synths finished their final checks and took their positions. The lead Synth walked to the front of the cabin, past the seated volunteers and their families, and settled into the pilot seat, and holographic screens materialized around it.

The fusion drive ignited and the shuttle lifted from the tarmac, rising vertically, the airport falling away beneath them.

Mexico City spread out below the viewports in every direction.

Ernesto’s wife, who had lived in the city for thirty years, pressed her palm to the glass and looked down at it. The grid of streets, the parks, the expressway where crowds had gathered to watch the shuttle land the previous day.

From up here it looked like something she had never quite seen before, familiar and completely new simultaneously.

“Mira,” she said quietly to her husband. Look.

Ernesto turned his head slowly and looked through the viewport. His hands were folded in his lap, the movement of his body limited to his eyes and the slight turn of his neck. He looked at the city for a long time.

“I know this city,” he said.

“I know,” she said.

“It looks different.”

“Yes.”

He kept looking until the cloud layer came up and swallowed the view.

Maya had said nothing since they cleared the airport. She sat with both hands in her lap, her face turned to the viewport, watching the sky change.

Her mother Rosa sat beside her with one hand resting on her arm, as she remained for her, the same light contact as always.

The blue sky deepened and the pale morning color darkened through stages, and Maya tracked every one of them without blinking, as if looking away might cause her to miss the exact moment of transition.

When the stars appeared she made a small sound, too stunned to say a word.

Rosa looked at her daughter’s face. In the viewport reflection she could see Maya’s expression.

“Mamá,” Maya said.

“I’m here.”

“I can see stars. In the daytime.”

Rosa looked through the viewport. The stars were visible, steady and countless, against a darkness that had no bottom.

“Yes,” she said. “You can.”

Maya’s hands, which had been still in her lap, moved to the viewport glass. She pressed her fingertips against it.

The glass was cold. She left her fingers there anyway.

Diego had been watching through the viewport since the city disappeared.

He couldn’t stand to look through the viewport properly and the angle of his seat made it difficult without the legs that were no longer there to brace him, so he had shifted sideways, one arm braced on the seat frame, his face turned toward the glass.

Marco, who had taken the seat beside him, had been quiet for most of the ascent. He wasn’t translating because Diego wasn’t speaking. They sat side by side and watched the same view.

When the full curve of the Earth appeared, the blue and white and the impossible blue of the oceans, the terminator line cutting sharp across the surface, Diego exhaled slowly.

Marco waited.

After a while Diego said something.

Marco translated without turning his head. “It looks like it shouldn’t be real. He says it looks the way they describe it in books and he never thought the books were accurate.”

The shuttle kept climbing and Earth filled more of the viewport, larger and more detailed, the cloud systems visible as slow spirals over the ocean.

Diego reached out and pressed his hand against the viewport glass.

He held it there for a long time.

***

Back on the space shuttle sent to Warsaw, that was now flying through space back to the Base, one of the volunteers, Piotr had said nothing since boarding.

He sat with his coat still on, his hands in his lap, watching through the viewport and making sure to store everything he was seeing carefully.

The moon grew visible in the upper right of the viewport. A crescent from this angle, the surface detail sharp in a way that no atmosphere had ever softened.

Piotr looked at it for a long moment.

Then he looked at his hands in his lap. Then at the moon again.

He thought about Warsaw. The grey flat sky that morning. The building’s facade and its ordinary windows. The three seconds he had stood looking at it before getting in the car.

He looked at the moon through the viewport and understood, in a way that hadn’t been fully available to him until this moment, that he had made the right decision.

He had not been certain of that, entirely, until now.

He kept his hands in his lap and watched the moon grow in silence.

***

At fifty-three minutes, the lead Synth’s voice came from the front of the cabin.

“Approach to Lunar Base Sanctuary in seven minutes. Please remain in your seats.”

The volunteers didn’t move. They were already where they wanted to be.

Through the viewport, the lunar surface filled the lower half of the frame — grey and crater-edged and ancient, stretching in every direction without atmosphere to blur its edges.

And built into it, pouring light outward into the lunar dark, was the base.

Maya saw it first.

She pressed both hands against the viewport glass and said, in a voice that had no Spanish word adequate for what she was looking at: “Mamá.”

Rosa looked.

She said nothing and simply kept her hand on her daughter’s arm.

But she was finally starting to believe more in the possibility that her doctor might be really be able to walk without aid soon.

A bright and hopeful smile spread on her face.