Jason Vannier

Elementalis

The Void A beautiful marble of white and blue, the earth so small and elegant from out beyond the moon. Looking out the window of the International Space Station, Kale was sitting at a terminal looking out the small porthole window as he conducted daily systems checks. He often did his tasks quickly without much delay, but today he felt off. Perhaps it was because he had been on the station for eleven months now and the time was starting to get to him, or maybe, it was because he had doubts about the mission and his decision to leave home. He wasn’t an astronaut after all, he had won a lottery after buying an item off of Amazon. It had been twenty-five years since the founder of Amazon had taken his first group of Outer Space Tourists up for the first time. He was still active in the company, but he was starting to get old and had spent more time off planet than on. Between the two eccentric billionaires, they had colonized the moon, moved the International Space Station out passed the moon, and had started terraforming Mars. Kale's mission was simple, can the average human with little to no training be successful on a Space Research Crew. He won the lottery thinking he would be another Space Tourist. Instead, he was asked to work as a research assistant and maintenance tech for Research Crew 1536. He had a couple of military occupational specialties through his seventeen-year career in the Army. So, he picked things up pretty quickly and his crew was accommodating, motivating and were pretty good teachers…maybe a little impatient from time to time, but that was understandable. They had trained their whole lives to become astronauts and he just happened to buy the right pack of lightbulbs from Amazon one day.