Rumours were she’d been taken to task for her negligence, only to bite EASN’s head off in return. We never knew the truth. The cameras went black for an hour, the longest they’d been on standby in any of our lifetimes, we recalled during those minutes of dark screens and perplexed faces. What the hell? When they came back clear lines had been drawn. The Mimas 4 crew didn’t pay us any more acknowledgements. They stopped looking into cameras and blowing kisses. There were no telltale winks, or thumbs up when they passed us. No more would we catch their whispered asides, or self-conscious, muttered commentary. We were on our own.

And so they kept their focus on the jobs they’d been assigned, becoming the machines EASN programmed for so long. Just when the Network wanted them to display their humanity, they chose to withhold it. Maybe they weren’t angry, just nervous. No one will ever know. There’s nothing to say they even opened up to each other, let alone us watching from afar. That came later. When it was too late.

By all accounts it was a perfect launch. The equipment performed much like the crew, exactly as it should. The ground staff checked their read-outs with typical efficiency and kept banter to a minimum, unsmiling and taut. Lift-off occurred practically to the second. Hoses disengaged, scaffolding swung, smoke and fire breathed from engines, and it was up, slowly at first, then it caught hold of the sky, clawing spaceward with more excitement, more vigour. First the size of a cruise ship, then a building, then a house, then a car, then a bike. Then a scooter, a pencil, a ring. A star.

Mimas 4 became the embodiment of the new world after decades of dark centuries. It promised all was right for the species, asking no more than our adoration, our love. Its disappearance almost sent the world back into the abyss from which we’d barely managed to crawl. We rocked side to side, poised on the edge of exhilaration, one firm push from plummeting into our past.

An open book laid flat. The wings of pages catching sunlight from a window, my dark curtains thrown aside. A beam of light, thick and slanted. Within that half metre or so of space, a multiverse of shifting, spinning motes turning at separate velocities. Some fast, free-falling, dizzying; some slow and feather-like, eternal. Me lying on my back watching flecks of human skin, mostly mine, marvelling not just at what I saw but what I’d read. So vivid, even now. Closing my eyes, imagining. Atoms breaking down from a construction of solid forms to the invisible. Firing like rockets across unimaginable spaces. Arriving, reassembling.