...I was part giddy with joy, part fearful of the unknown; having dreamt of space travel since a boy. Asthma kept me out of the state funded junior space programs. Programs designed as a pipeline for the kiddy appetite of the Global Space Alliance, beginning at the age of eight. I still felt the pain. With the abundance of cures, why not one for Asthma? I mentally backtracked to Miss Dorsey. Asthma was not the only element of my life which “soured the milk.” Which flagged me as an 8 year old reject; always sick and absent from her math classes, she frequently branded me the class "dummy" and reported same to the GSA. Venom that circulated until calculus, which I found easy. Her poison still present but waning; her rattle silent. No longer would children be scheduled into her pit. I was alive and she, very aged at the time, was dust.

For long moments I sat eyes closed and absorbing the dull thumping of passenger's steps as they filed in. The short clipped, women; the random uneven, children; the longer and measured, men. Cracking puffy lids, I paired steps with their faces, watching as they entered under the royal blue glow of the cabin's mood lighting. This, teamed with a recording of a singing tenor just above the background hiss of pressurizing air, relaxed me. I sighed and decided to push the evaluations off for awhile.

Ironic. I was finally going into space! Not as a hotshot GSA pilot, rather, as a most wanted man; a branded stalker and much worse. Under the guise of a research scientist with Solar-Blue Incorporated, I was on my way to Divinci Station; the mystery over as to what was living in me. Still, with all my supposed training, so focused was I on this last-ditch effort to reach Defense Net, I missed the idiot in the rear, the one perspiring in the cabin's chilly air, hands shaking and fiddling with...something.