Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

Like most people his age, he had grown up with dreams of Terra-Two. Built papier-mâché models of the habitable exoplanet in kindergarten. He had been seven or eight when the Search for Life on Terra-Two had started, with unmanned satellites landing on alien shores and sending back images of the verdant earth, clean-water lakes, a thriving ecosystem and no humans. By the end of the twentieth century, many countries had mastered interplanetary travel and set their sights on neighbouring stars. When the grainy footage of this new and beautiful planet was broadcast across the globe, Terra-Two ignited the imagination of every child Jesse’s age.

The tabloids had declared it habitable long before NASA issued an official statement, and soon after that the race to colonize T2 truly began.

The UK Space Agency put out a nationwide call for healthy twelve-to-thirteen-year-olds with an aptitude for physics and biology to join a team of experienced astronauts on the twenty-three-year-long journey to the new planet. The group would be called the Beta, and they would be chosen from a pool of students enrolled on an accelerated course of study at the Dalton Academy for Aerospace Science in the suburbs of London. A school founded to train a generation of astronauts, engineers and employees of the UK Space Agency. Jesse was eating dinner one night when he heard that the organisation were looking for people his age. It occurred to him, then, that perhaps he was not destined to die at twenty after all. Perhaps leaving Earth on board a space shuttle had been the prophecy instead.

The application process involved months of interviews and physical assessments, and several rounds of gruelling exams. Jesse was thirteen when he was finally admitted to the Dalton Academy. The main building was a repurposed sanatorium, the words ‘New Addington Home for Incurables’ still conspicuously etched into the crumbling stone architrave.

The initial adjustment was difficult for Jesse, who had been the brightest in his school – two years ahead of the other students his age – but was now amongst his academic peers. His days began before the first glimmer of dawn, at 5.30 a.m., with a compulsory run around the training facility, a cold shower before breakfast and then classes that began at 8 a.m and finished at 8 p.m. That first year involved cramming four years’ worth of exams – GCSEs and A-levels – into thirteen punishing months. He staggered through those weeks, along with the still starstruck students in his class, only to find that there was no time to rest on the weekends. Saturdays were for training and tutorials, and after lunch on Sunday they were herded into the library for six hours of silent study. With only three weeks a year of summer holiday, months ran drearily into each other. Every vacation, every summer’s day, every light-limned afternoon was sacrificed to the laminated textbooks he hauled around like bricks. Scribbling up flashcards. Tackling incomprehensible worksheets. Watching his sister sunbathe out in the garden as he memorized tables of data. Tempted every hour by the mid-August barbecues and the sweet smells of sizzling beef, the sounds of his parents’ laughter drifting through his bedroom window as he rewrote and rewrote and rewrote specific biochemical pathways so many times that they became muscle memory.

The stress was sickening, and many of the school’s students broke under it. During his first term, Jesse had been grouped with a team of six called an ‘expedition’, and by the end of the first year one of them had dropped out voluntarily and two had been expelled after failing an exam. When he returned to Dalton the next year, at age fourteen, their initial cohort of 300 had halved. They began studying aeronautics, degree-level physics, geology and propulsion engineering. Two months into the new term, Jesse returned from a weekend away to find that his roommate had been in bed for three days, sheets soaking wet, eyes vacant and haunted. ‘I just can’t do it anymore,’ he told Jesse, ‘I can’t even move.’ He’d been collected an hour later by his parents and a mental health officer. That same year, a boy drowned in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab and, although there was an investigation, Jesse was horrified to find that life at Dalton went on as normal. Classes continued the next day without interruption, although one morning run was cancelled, and the flag above the observatory flew at half-mast for the rest of the week.