The Finest

Missions

Photo by Logan Moreno Gutierrez on Unsplash

Mossi was doing this thing with his gum now. 

He placed the stick in his mouth and chewed until the end in his mouth was soft before letting go of the other end.

He was on camera, of course, and someone from the DEFINE project would probably note it in their report.

Mossi wondered if the stress of DEFINE had spawned any other physical quirks of his of which he was unaware. He was acutely aware of the gastrointestinal and emotional toll.

He glanced at the HBD-the Human BioSustenance Device–and realized that chewing gum was not one of the amenities provided in what amounted to a fancy terrarium.

Crathers, Mossi’s undergrad roommate, had gone on to Walter Reed and helped soldiers recover from some of the most traumatic non-fatal injuries in the history of the species.

Crathers talked about some of the injuries, successes and failures over double Grand Marniers at the Whitfield.

Mossi couldn’t talk about DEFINE, though Crathers knew Mossi was a patient of Lubramin, the beloved shrink who counseled his military colleagues with TS/SCI clearances dealing with the stress of their top level clearance jobs.

Mossi had all but two of the sixty eight HBD monitors turned off at the request of the subjects.

All sixty eight cameras were recording, it was just that Mossi was not spying in real time, for the sanity of both him and the DEFINE participants.

Nano computer stations were placed throughout the HBD and the DEFINE team – who early in the project had nicknamed themselves The Finest – could communicate with him at their leisure, in between hourly debriefings.

Early transmissions from the team inside the HBD had addressed him as Doc. 

Dr. Alfred Mossi respectfully requested that they cease that honorific the day that NASA had aborted Exodus 9A.

Mossi’s thumb and forefinger were on his hard, unchewed gum as monitor 13W picked up a game of beach volleyball. Mossi’s canines and saliva softened the other end of the gum as he realized it wasn’t a game so much as two very bored astronauts aimlessly and not very competitively banging a ball over a microfilament net.

One of the many things Mossi wished he could tell Crathers was about the hard work the astronauts put in to build their world.

Nothing with adhesive could survive the process of being shrunk without the adhesive degenerating.

So both the volleyball being batted over the net and the paddles on their tiny defibrillator had to be assembled from raw materials placed inside the HBD through pneumatic tube.

Many of the raw materials were supposed to accompany the Exodus mission to Cymbaris 51, a moon orbiting Guinn 415.

The United States Government was planning to tell the world that it was an unmanned observational mission. 

A small press release, ignored by almost every major news outlet, announced that the project had been scrapped.

The groundbreaking work of Drs. Virginia Shelleton, Kabir Masood and Mossi, rather than save the human race (albeit in millimeter-sized form) had only resulted in five human beings living their lives inside what amounted to, despite the fancy name, one very sophisticated gerbil cage.

DEFINE- Diminutization Electromagnetic Functional Intelligent Nanosphere Entities were real people.

The stuff that was once Marvel Comics fantasy had transformed five extremely intelligent, athletic human beings for the express purpose of repopulating homo sapiens because Earth was going to be uninhabitable much sooner than the general public knew.

There had been so many successes, and one massive failure.

Human spermatozoa did not survive the diminutization procedure despite clinical trials outside the human body that suggested they would.

The doctor who conducted the experiments on the spermatozoa was Dr. Alfred Mossi. 

His position as primary observer of the five miniature humans (Mission Specialist Dr. Audrey Virgil, Mission Specialist Dr. Sandra Meisner, Chief Medical Officer Francois Ripert, Mission Commander Carlyle Brunting and Mission Commander Arlene Rudwalla) was as much a punishment as it was an honor.

He, more than anyone else at NASA, had assured the astronauts that there was a high probability that they would procreate on Cymbaris 51. 

For some of them, that assurance was the last step prior to stepping into the Diminutization Chamber.

They were going to continue the human race, only much smaller than life on Earth.

The amassed knowledge of the entire species would continue on a sphere 9.8822 light years from the rock it was currently confined to, a sphere with potable water and average temperatures around 11.111 Celsius at its equator.

When none of the artificial inseminations had taken root, the multibillion dollar mission was cast aside, like the lives of those Mossi had diminutized.

For their part, all the astronauts still wished to make the trek and see the new world rather than be earthbound.

But NASA had earmarked the money for other projects, and Exodus 9A was dead.

Mossi rubbed at a line of flab overhanging his belt.

He was not the perfect physical specimen like those in the HBD–those who had been brave enough  to tell their loved ones they would be living on a top secret orbiting space station, knowing that NASA planned on announcing the demise of the occupants of the fictional station in an oxygen malfunction.

But Mossi knew he was healthy enough.

Unlike the comic books, where a ray could shrink a human in a matter of seconds, NASA’s diminutization chamber took 1008 hours to transform a human into the tiny size required for the propulsion system to carry the missile sized rocket through space.

Dr. Lubramin was on board with Mossi’s plan.

Mossi pushed the rest of the gum in his mouth and chewed.

He had to convince Dr. Edward Crathers to apply for an open position in the lab, receive TS/SCI clearance, and monitor Mossi’s diminutization.

He was responsible for the humans in the glorified terrarium. It was his mistake in part that had led to the demise of their mission.

Neither Mossi, nor The Finest would be going anywhere in space.

Dr. Shelleton had retired and was living, closely monitored by the CIA, in Fiji. Dr. Masood had ended his own life.

Dr. Alfred Mossi planned to shrink himself with the help of his old college roommate.

He was going to join the miniaturized, grounded astronauts in the Human BioSustenance Device and, among other things, he was going to bring them chewing gum.

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