Testing. Testing.

Conamara to Pwyll. Come in, Pwyll.

If you are reading this message, you’ve cracked my code. Welcome. First of all, I hope you’re not the sort of person who’s going to get me in trouble with my dads for junking up these cells with a bunch of base pair sequences that, at first glance, really shouldn’t be there — and at second or third glance is an elaborate message to you.

Whoever you may be.

Second! I hope you like long letters, because I am not feeling short-winded these days. I am feeling like there is nowhere in this entire station for my words to go except back down my throat, so I have invented a way to get some of them out and hopefully put some new things in their place, courtesy of whatever is in your brain. I know they used to call this being pen pals back in the ancient days, but I have a bunch of plasmids instead of pens. What if we just call it brain exchange?

I might not be a scientist like most of the humans on Europa, but seeking creative solutions is in my DNA. Just like this message is in the DNA of a fungal cell I messed with. There is a lot of space for junk DNA in even the most basic life-forms. We’re pretty messy, even on the tiniest level.

From the mess of my message so far, you must have plucked out the fact that my dads brought me to this icy little moon we call home. One of them is a medic who specializes in space travel. Henry flew to Luna and back to Earth four times before getting this station, which was his dream, partly because it meant he could live on Europa full-time with my other dad. Mack is a gardener. They like to say their jobs are two expressions of the same urge toward life, because they say things like that.

They don’t know about this letter. They’re too busy with different stages of inertia. Henry is rolling down the hill of a new planting cycle. Mack is sitting very, very still and listening to a lot of Tori Amos. The funny part is that the one who’s gardening all day is not technically the gardener! Nobody’s had an emergency for a while, and Henry ends up helping in the hothouses when he can’t relax, which is always. Mack doesn’t seem to mind Henry watering the plants and snipping at the new growth, except when he does. Weird things happen when you let people spend every waking minute together. Some boundaries turn into electric fences. Others just disappear.

I live in the Conamara Chaos, which you know, but I’ve always wanted to tell someone that I live in the chaos. Except everyone else I know lives here, too, for a grand total of 164 people. Now I’ve said it to you, so you’ve already made at least one of my dreams come true.

Tell me about you, new person! What are your dreams? Can I help make at least one of them come true?

From the fact that you are reading this, I will guess that you are probably one of two things. Scientist spouse or scientist spawn. Coding and decoding endless data strings tends to be a task given to these two categories of people. My dads aren’t primarily scientists, but they’re not not scientists. Most people who end up on lifelong missions start out in those sorts of fields, though at some point they have to decide what particular jobs they want, besides spaceperson.

I’m not anything. Not yet. Not quite.

I am hoping you’re scientist spawn, merely because that might put us in the same age territory. I’m sixteen years old by Earth standards. Which is still just one year old if you’re counting by Jupiter’s orbit. When I’m being difficult, my dads call me a Jupiterian infant, and the fight ends.

The most recent fight was yesterday, which is why I’m here, doing the most onerous yet uneventful job in the entire station. It’s my punishment. But I’m determined to transform data storage into an adventure.

Will you help me?

With hope,

Lileo

PS If English isn’t the language you’d prefer to use for encoding our secret messages, let me know. I only know two others past basic words and phrases, and I picked the one my brain tends to ramble in. But I know that every Europan base has a lot of languages in play. If another is better for you, hopefully I can read it! And if not, I’ll find the best translation machine around and also start learning right away!

Hi, Lileo. Message received. English works. To be honest, my best language is math. Please send more words, though. In desperate need of new brain.

X

X,

How can you ask me for more words when you gave me basically none? That was like the asymptote of communications, where I started with this enormous sweep and you did your best to touch absolute zero.

Considering it takes the bunny I 3D printed to hold the cells with the encoded DNA a full month to make it to Pwyll and back, this was anticlimactic, to say the least. And that bunny had to withstand a lot of surface radiation riding in a rover over icy terrain to get to you. It was not an easy journey.

Waiting a month for twenty-six words, no matter how pithy, simply isn’t good math. If I don’t get at least three whole sentences from you next time, I’m going to cut this off and devote all of my time to my other impossible project.

Still hopeful,

Lileo

Hey, Lileo,

Sorry. It’s been hard to talk since I reached the station. It feels like half my words leaked out on the way here. I’m at Pwyll, though I know you know that. Living in an impact crater really shouldn’t feel like a metaphor, and yet here we are.

Not scientist spouse or spawn. I science all by myself. I am close to your age, though. They let me come as a sort of last-chance program for social maladapts who test bizarrely well. For some reason, I do better with my peer group when they’re four million miles away. Let’s hope the Conamara Chaos is far enough to keep you safe from my radioactive levels of awkward.

A few questions . . .

Who is Tori Amos?

Why a bunny? I know it’s there because biohybrid data storage is the only way to sidestep how much Jupiter’s radiation belt nulls and voids other methods of communication on this moon. But you could have 3D printed any kind of container for the radiosynthetic cells. You chose a bunny, and you made it creepily accurate. It’s the uncanny valley of bunnies. It makes me think of the one I had when I was ten. You have a good eye for detail. Especially the whiskers.

What is the other impossible project?

X

Dear X,

I’m going to have to address some things in your last missive out of order because, real-life bunnies? The last time I checked, Atacama was the only base with nonhuman animals of any kind, and honestly, those weren’t faring well, except for the penguins. Either Pwyll is running some animal-based experiments I don’t know about, or you had a childhood that involved pets. And the only place I know of that has such things is Earth.

EARTH.

Did you come to Europa straight from Earth? How recently? Can you tell from my sudden voracious curiosity that I’ve never been there? I wasn’t even born on Earth. I was born on the flight to Europa. Pure spacebaby. Mack likes to say that I ate stars for breakfast and it made me glittery and restless. I’ve always wanted to see more of the universe. Any of the universe. This series of little domes is feeling smaller and smaller every day. How many questions can I ask you about Earth without straining the very fabric of our new friendship? Twenty? Thirty?

Answers to your questions . . .

Tori Amos is a singer. She plays the piano and sings, and the notes slip into spaces you didn’t know you had. It’s funny that you had to come all the way to one of Jupiter’s moons to learn about old Earth music. I have lots of books and movies, too, but everything is archival, nothing is synced up with Earth time. I guess I’m living in their past a little bit. But we’re also supposed to be helping their future.

We have our own timeline here. Yes, that feels as weird as it sounds.

I chose a bunny because I wanted to imagine softness. Everything on a moon base is hard and sterile, including my pillow.

The other impossible project is why my dads are so upset right now. I should say mad, but only one of them gets mad. Henry carries around a metric ton of terror about the many ways I could hurt myself. A space medic is basically a walking encyclopedia of possible catastrophes. When I propose doing anything that could cause more harm than a single skinned knee, he converts terror into anger, and he freaks right out. Mack just turns quietly sadder by degrees, which is so much worse.

I definitely knew better, but on my sixteenth birthday, I asked them if I could take a dive. Not in the immersion tanks, a real one. I know you’re studying different things on your base, and I’m not sure how much you know about the others, but here at the Conamara Chaos, we’re on a spot where the ice shell is thinner — two meters instead of six or seven.

And under that? So much water.

That salty global ocean is right under our feet, and it’s calling me, X. I want to go down into the buried sea. I’ve wanted it for years. I want it so much that I made the mistake of asking my overprotective parents for it. My dads have been letting me train, reluctantly, but that was more of a concession than any sort of permission. They said that we still have another six months or even a year of remote submersible study to go before a human can explore, and even then it won’t be me, it’ll be some special wreck-diving expert from Earth.

First of all, my moon is not a wreck. Second of all, nobody from Earth knows this place as well as I do. Third, if the whole point is finding life, they really should send me. I’m so desperate to connect with new life-forms that I’m literally sending bunnies into the void.

They said no. Technically, Nia, the dive supervisor, said no, but my dads must have swayed her, because Nia is the one who’s been training the official dive team and me in the salt tanks. It helps that she was an Olympic swimmer in another lifetime, back on Earth. Nia knows that you can be a teenager and make things happen. They’re not mutually exclusive at all.

When I told my dads that Nia said no, they looked more than relieved. They looked guilty. I got into a real ice storm of an argument with Henry while Mack just frowned at us over a dinner he’d made of vegetables from his gardens and dehydrated protein and Europan salt. It’s the only thing that actually comes from here, but we have a lot of it. I hope you like salt, X. Everything is about to get very briny.

I accused my dads of treating my existence like an experiment instead of an actual life.

They said I’m not old enough to understand that I would be risking that actual life if I dived alone into an ancient, ice covered ocean that no human has ever touched or mapped. Mack said that it was all bacteria down there anyway, just a bunch of extremophiles hanging out near hydrothermal vents and in the frigid ice, which we already know from the submersibles.

There’s only the tiniest chance of finding anything else.

I said that the life we could find down there was worth any risk.

Which I really do believe. But I didn’t tell them the rest. I haven’t told anyone this part, because it’s a little too much to admit out loud, but I’ll say it to you. I believe that there’s something more complex and wondrous living in the dark, quiet water beneath our feet. Yes, there are bacteria somewhere other than Earth, and that’s a big deal, but maybe everything’s not always about Earth. Maybe whether or not we confirm second genesis on Europa isn’t even the point. Discoveries are a big deal, but they still center humanity. And I want humanity to get out of its own way. I want to know about so much more than myself.

I believe extremophiles are only the beginning of life on Europa, not the end. There are creatures in that ocean, X. I can sense it somehow, but how do you explain that to a station full of adults who’ve built their life on the explainable? You show them, right?

So the other impossible project is to get down there somehow.

Now that you’re talking to me — really talking — I have hope for that, too.

Your new friend,

Lileo

Hey, Lileo,

I like the sound of your endeavor.

I also like the sound of your dads. I miss my mom way more than I want to admit. You’re lucky not to be alone out here, even if it means fighting with people over vegetables and sometimes feeling like they hold you back. I hold myself back enough that I understand the resentment, but at least you get to point it at somebody else, right?

Wow. That sounded bad. But it’s too late to unsay it. There’s no delete function when you’re coding secret messages into DNA.

For that reason and a few others, talking to you feels slightly dangerous. Not exactly like being in a salty ocean that nobody’s explored before.

But not not like that, either.

And yes, you can ask me about Earth. I go there every night.

The spaceflight to get here took about four years. That’s faster than it used to be, and the ships are near luxury compared to some of the older models. I left when I was fourteen. Other people back home were slogging through painful crushes and first jobs and endless academic testing, and I was in space.

I had detached from reality, but in a good way.

I took a lot about that ship for granted, though. It was designed to mimic Earth, from the food to the lights that cycled through our circadian rhythms. I was totally lulled. I thought I’d been living in a new environment, but really it was just an extension of the old one with really amazing views of the stars and a lab that brought actual human tears to my eyes the first time I saw it.

Then I got to Pwyll. The people here don’t try to pretend they’re on Earth. It’s a completely new set of environmental inputs. One of the main things that can happen is this disruption of sleep, it distends and plunges you into deeper REM cycles, basically turning you into a dream machine. I’ve been here for six months, and I’m still dreaming like that every night. It’s so vivid and delicious that I feel like my brain is the kind of dessert they bring to your table and light on fire in front of you.

This is how it starts.

I’m back on Earth, surrounded by animals. Every animal I’ve ever seen, and every plant, too, growing out of control. The sun is so bright, high-noon-at-the-apex-of-summer bright. I’m in the place where I went to science camp, and the other kids there are wearing camp shirts, which are far too yellow, like the color is a substitute for natural cheerfulness. We were not a cheerful bunch. We were so serious, and all we wanted was to outdo each other. But in my dream, we’re all trying to find each other while the animals run and hop and stampede around us, and whenever I find another kid, we hold hands for just a second before the plants get in our way, twisting up from the ground because the soil is so rich and the sun is so bright that they just can’t help thriving. The animals run between us. The other kids and I aren’t upset when we have to break apart and find each other again, though. We just keep trying to connect for a few seconds. That’s the whole point.

Then I wake up, and the sun is so far away that it will never wake me up by rising, and I realize that I’m never going to see a single one of those animals or plants or people ever again.

I’m sorry. I know that describing your dreams is supposedly the worst thing you can do in a new friendship. Dreams are too personal, right? Not in the feelings sense, but in the not-worthy-of-sharing sense. They’re just these recalibrations our bodies are doing. They’re just overflow valves for our emotions. They’re just buckets of associations and metaphors.

I hope I didn’t ruin anything between us by being too dreamy.

Ha. You see what I did there?

X

PS Is Lileo short for Galileo? I just put that together.

Dear X,

For a child prodigy, that took you a minute. Yes, my name is Galileo, for all the obvious reasons.

Your dreams sound really intense. I wish I could wander around in them. I wish I could hold hands with all the kids you didn’t make friends with at science camp. I wish I could hold your hand, too. As an experiment. And then we could look at the data on what happens after that.

Would you get weird with me? Would I get weird with you? Would it feel totally normal? Would that be the weirdest thing of all?

It’s getting weird to think that you have fleshy dimensions I can’t see or touch. It’s so exciting to discover your words each month and so comfortable to settle into them. I wonder how excited-comfortable we’d be with the rest of each other. Would everything automatically seem easy because of our brain exchange? Or is there always a learning curve for bodies? Are you really as awkward as you say when faced with a many-dimensional person?

I’m going to tell you a truth, X. I don’t think you and I are like most many-dimensional people, and I’m not saying that to romanticize how weird we both are. This is a deeper biological truth I’m talking about. I think we’re like the extremophiles. Made to thrive in unexpected places and impossible conditions. Maybe that’s how I know there’s something else in the ocean below us. Other people swear it’s not conducive to life, to real, complex, interesting, messy life, but they’re basing that conjecture on what they already know. You and I know something different.

I’m going to break into the dive room tomorrow and get under the skin of this moon.

I’m going to live your dream, but on Europa.

It’s time. Wish me luck.

Heart in my mouth,

Lileo

PS You’re not alone out here, you have me. And whatever I find down in the deeps!

Lileo,

Oh shit. I can’t believe you’re actually doing this. Wait, I can.

Wait, have you already done it?

I feel like I’m living in your past. Like I can’t catch up with what you’re doing because it already happened. Or maybe you didn’t get into the dive room yet, maybe it’s harder than you thought, but I won’t know for another month that you’re still in a holding pattern. I don’t know.

Time feels broken.

I want to tell you about what I saw last night, but that feels slightly broken, too.

My dreams are changing, Lileo. The longer I’m on Europa, the more they twist into something different. Something I never could have anticipated back on Earth. These dreams aren’t just friendship killers and metaphor buckets. I think they’re a way for my brain to adapt to its new environment.

To tell me the truth about this place, if I’m willing to listen.

We’re both looking for truths about Europa in our own extreme ways. Mine involves delving into sleep for sixteen hours a day. Yours involves diving under the ice shell that I’m standing on right now. It makes me feel weirdly connected to you, knowing that you might be down there, under all of our feet.

Did you find anything? I need to know.

X

Lileo,

This month, the 3D-printed object that arrived with radiosynthetic cells inside of it was just a blank-faced cube. No bunnies in sight. No secret message slipped into the junk DNA. I miss your words. I miss digging for every one of your meanings. You’re not an experiment to me. Experiments have controls, and there’s no control group for talking to you. No way to know what I should expect. Any truth could be revealed at any time.

My turn, I guess.

Did I tell you why I was put on data storage duty in the first place? Weird to haul my brain all the way out to Europa and not use it for something more important, right? But when I first got here, I was a complete washout disaster. They didn’t know what to do with me. It wasn’t just that I spent most of my time dreaming. When I was awake, I could barely function. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know up from down. Autonomic functions got wobbly and unreliable. Breathing made no sense. I couldn’t look out at the rusty bands on the washed-out teal surface of this moon without wanting to throw up. I couldn’t wake up without running obsessively through every choice that had brought me here. Not just my choices, either. Choices running back and back for generations. My parents and their parents and everything branching out through different eras of evolution and geological time, until I was in the primordial soup, second-guessing everything.

My supervisors talked about sending me back. Can you imagine? Making it all the way out here only to be sent home? My mom literally sold our house to get me on that spaceship. I was having such a hard time in middle school. I knew the guidance counselor better than I knew anyone in my class. To be fair, Ms. Pike was great. But everyone knew I needed something really different in order to thrive.

And then I got here, and I did the opposite. I anti-thrived. I shattered.

My supervisors stuck me on data storage duty because it cost a lot less money than a return trip to Earth and the last person in this job had broken their wrist. I thought it would be more monotony and claustrophobia, and those things were already breaking me.

All I was supposed to do was comb through the experimental data from the Conamara Chaos to find out if there was anything useful for our own experiments at Pwyll. They put me in a tiny dark room and prepared to forget about me. I braced myself for a brainless, thankless existence. But only a few weeks into encoding and decoding, I saw your words, hidden in endless strings of ATGC.

You surprised the shit out of me, Galileo. And then you kept doing it.

I think your mind is the extreme environment I like best.

Things are different now. I can breathe and eat a whole bowl of pudding in one sitting, and yes, it’s salty pudding, and yes, I’m still sleeping a lot, but my dreams feel like a string of secret messages. And when I’m awake, the hours aren’t just blank containers. I’m even semi-friends with a few of the younger scientists. I’ve been given my choice of projects, and I told them I want to study the buried sea. We have a dive site. Did you know that? It’s new. I haven’t been training like you have, so I don’t know if they’ll ever clear me for an actual dive. Most of my job is ferreting truth out of numbers. Even when I’m not on data storage duty.

But that’s how I know that we’re changing incrementally all the time. That’s what the other scientists I talk to seem to forget. It’s what hit my brain like an asteroid when I first got here. When we step foot on this moon, we’re not just studying new life-forms. We are new life-forms.

And maybe you’ve been here long enough to start feeling what else is out there. Your senses are expanding and changing to suit the environment and the input streams, showing you messages that the rest of us don’t even know how to decode.

I believe there’s something in the buried sea, Lileo. I want to help you find more life. Not so we can say we discovered it, but because connecting is what I’m here to do, even if I couldn’t imagine that back when I left Earth. It would have sounded impossible. But a brain exchange through altered DNA traveling across the surface of an icy moon also sounds impossible.

So I’m on the dive site team now. I told my supervisors that I want to keep running data storage, too, of course. They said that the radio has been working really well lately and we might not even need to use the backup data storage system if we can keep it running consistently. The radiation around Jupiter makes satellites pretty much impossible, but I guess they’ve been working on a point-to-point rocket system that would allow us to send more traditional archives of our data to other bases. No DNA encoding or decoding necessary.

The idea of being cut off from you is really messing with me. I know it’s not your job to make me functional, but you’re my friend.

I’m worried that if they stop sending the biohybrid data storage units before we talk again, we’re screwed. Unless you want to stop talking. Did you not find anything down there in the water, Lileo? Did it make you feel like this connection was a source of false hope?

Or did I do something wrong? That always feels possible. Did I not use enough sentences? I swear I will flood this entire crater with sentences if you write back.

I had another dream last night. For the first time, you were there.

Let me know you’re still listening, and I’ll tell you all about it.

X

PS I wrote my mom a letter about you. I hope that’s okay. It won’t reach her for another month. The rockets that take data up to the satellites for transmission back to Earth only leave Pwyll every few weeks. By the time she knows your name, our whole friendship could be a thing of the past. It’s a horrible idea, but I’m trying to face it head-on in case I don’t hear from you again.

PPS There is always, of course, the slight but nonzero possibility that you made it to down to the buried sea but didn’t make it back.

PPPS Even if you’re done talking to me, please tell me that’s not true.

Lileo? Lileo?

Galileo, are you there?

Testing. Testing.

Pwyll to Conamara. Come in, Conamara.

X,

I’m here. I’m always here. I’m never going to be anywhere but here in the chaos. I’m certainly never going to the buried sea. And you don’t need to freak out about keeping in touch with me now that you have your like-minded high-testing friends. You can let go of any hopes you attached to me, okay? I’m nothing special. Being born in the stars and raised on a moon sounds magical, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m just another bored teenager looking for some way to rebel against parents who are making life impossible. It sounds like you’re much more likely to live my dream than I am.

Go science yourself. Have an amazing time. I’ll be fine.

Lileo

PS Your mom will survive our friendship breakup, I promise. My dads certainly did.

PPS Please describe your dream anyway.

Dear Lileo,

What the hell happened over there?

I’m glad that you’re safe and everything, but other than that, I am made of concern.

I am going to distract myself from worrying by telling you about my dream.

It starts like the one I told you about before. There are animals and plants everywhere. Sun pouring all over me. Kids in yellow moving around really fast, darting like fish. I’m chasing them, playing the same game as usual, but I can’t seem to keep up this time. I can’t move as fast as everyone else, and the grass keeps getting in my face and tickling my nose. Then I realize the grass isn’t grass at all. It’s this flowing, fast-growing kelp. And the kids aren’t really kids, and they aren’t really fish.

And the sunshine isn’t sunshine. It’s you.

What I mean is, you’re there with me, in a dive suit shining this big warm light all over me and everything around me. We’re not on Earth. It’s shaded into somewhere else, but it feels the same as Earth felt. And there’s life everywhere, just as much life as there was on Earth, but it’s different.

And then . . . stick with me . . . Galileo shows up. Not you, obviously, because you’re already there.

Galileo Galilei.

I don’t know that much about what he looked like, so in my dream, he’s this medium-old Italian guy with a beard. It’s tucked into a dive suit, which looks really uncomfortable. We’re the only three people who don’t seem able to breathe in this environment. Everybody else is just inhaling cold salty water like it’s nothing. And then Galileo looks straight at you and says, “Good job, little fish. All you had to do was be patient.”

You two hold hands, and nothing can break you apart.

Then I wake up.

That’s all I’ve got. I’m sorry your dads are mad at me. I’m sorry you haven’t gotten to dive yet.

Your

X

My dear X,

Damn your epic dream. It ruined my sulking. It ripped me out of my chilly, dark mood. It even got me to stop listening to Mack’s Tori Amos albums. As it turns out, I can’t forsake my only friend just to make a dramatic point.

Here’s what happened in all of that limbo time when you were waiting to hear from me.

First, Nia caught me breaking into the dive room. I had just gotten the zipper all the way up to my sternum when I heard this horrifying creak of the door. There was nowhere to hide. It’s just a lot of freestanding monitoring equipment and thermally regulated dive suits and gear.

So I went down the ladder and waited in the hole in the ice. It’s almost two meters deep, tall enough that I could completely disappear unless somebody looked straight down into it. I thought about going into the water, just plunging right in, but I didn’t have an oxygen tank. And I didn’t really want to die.

I think my dads were worried about that. That maybe my need to dive was a death wish all dressed up. It’s not. It’s the exact opposite of that, and if they were paying attention, they’d know it.

So I was down in this ice hole, every inch of my skin coated with shivers under the suit.

And I heard Nia’s voice.

“I’m not going to look down there and see if Lileo is attempting a dive. Otherwise, I’ll have to put a stop to it and tell Mack and Henry. And I know how hard Lileo has been training and how important this is. So I’ll just be right over here monitoring the equipment.”

I couldn’t believe it. Nia was going to let me dive. She was going to help me dive and claim to know nothing about it at the same time. I crept back up and got my oxygen tank on, and she pretended I wasn’t even there. It was kind of ridiculous and kind of incredible.

This time, when I went down the ladder, it felt real. I took the last few steps down into the icy, sloshing water. It was running fast, and it nearly swept me away as soon as I put both feet in. It’s easy to forget that there are tides under the solid ice. But Jupiter is pulling on its moons really hard all the time. There’s so much happening under our surface.

I kept one hand on the last rung of the ladder as the water closed over my head. It was dark, and as soon as I let out all my breath, it was calm. Some people might have freaked out, but I could imagine letting go and living down there.

And then something ripped me right out.

It was my dad. Mack.

He got wet and cold hauling me out of the dive site, and he sat with several blankets wrapped around him, drinking his favorite chamomile blend and scowling at me for about an hour before he talked.

He was finally mad.

First he said he could get Nia fired and sent back to Earth and put on trial for reckless endangerment, and I had to talk him all the way out of that particular hole. Then he said that Henry had found our letters when he was tearing my room apart to see if I was hiding somewhere.

I’ve been keeping copies of them, X. I hope that’s not a violation of your privacy or anything. Well, I’ve been keeping my decoded versions of your letters, and I’ve been writing out copies of mine so I have a complete set. Henry read them, muttering parts out loud while I blasted Tori Amos to wash out the sound of his voice.

It was a bad twenty-four hours.

When the day had lapsed, my dads sat me down in our little living room. It’s about the size of a walk-in closet on Earth, or so they keep telling me.

Mack took a deep breath and started talking.

This is what he said, more or less, edited by my imperfect memory of a very intense day.

“Our generation grew up in new territory, Lileo. Mack and I were just kids when COVID-19 hit and global pandemics became a reality, and so many people were getting sick, and we all had to cut ourselves off from social contact in a lot of ways. But that isn’t really what I want to talk about. This is about what happened later. We made big steps forward in space exploration because suddenly here was this generation who’d grown up with a limited sense of space, an ability to deal with social disconnection. We could exist inside the parameters of extended space voyages in ways that people before us just couldn’t. And countries were willing to cooperate on international space exploration in ways they never had before. After so much of the world had shut down, suddenly the universe was opening up. But even growing up the way we did, we couldn’t be sure of what it would mean to raise you like this. Sixteen years, no exits. And you’re amazing.

“But we still worried that the first time you got a chance to connect with someone outside of Conamara, you wouldn’t know how to do it. You’d end up hurting yourself. Or someone else. Social exploration can be as dangerous as scientific exploration. But you’ve made something beautiful happen with X. We should have trusted you. We have to start trusting you.”

“Does that mean you’ll let me dive?” I asked before Mack even finished the last syllable of that last word.

“You really think there’s life down there, don’t you?” Henry said.

They knew that from my letters to you. Henry reading them is still not my favorite thing, but it also gave him a way to connect with me. This current version of me. The one who’s sixteen and from a completely different part of the solar system than he is.

“I know there’s more,” I said. “And X believes me.”

Now I know you feel it, too. I didn’t say that, because I didn’t know it yet.

“Speaking of X . . .” Mack started.

Henry finished his sentence in that eternally coupled manner they have. “We think you did a great job befriending X, but we don’t want you to talk again until we know more, okay?”

“More about what?” I asked.

Henry muttered something about catfishing, which I still don’t understand at all.

My dads checked up on you and discovered that you are, in fact, eighteen and a recent arrival to Pwyll. They also told me your full name and used some gendered pronouns that must have been in your file, but I won’t use those unless you tell me to. I’ve been told that Earth-born folks can be obsessed with gender and defining and policing it for other people. It’s one of the many, many reasons Henry and Mack felt so ready to leave. Henry is trans, which I don’t think I told you yet, because it’s something I barely think about on a day-to-day basis. When I was little, my dads gave me a lot of space to figure things out and name them for myself, in my own way and my own time. Nobody made choices for me that I had to write over or fight back against to be who I am. Growing up on a tiny moon base comes with restrictions, but there are freedoms that shape everything.

There are also a lot of group decisions that take forever.

The real reason I was gone for so long is that I, uh, got in some trouble for using the data storage module for personal enrichment. I knew I wasn’t supposed to add my own messages to the data, not that I ever skimped on the actual experiments. But I was aware that it could go badly, and I just didn’t care. I needed to talk to someone.

And then I needed to talk to you.

The board that runs the space station suspended me from the job until they could decide what to do about me going rogue.

Mack had me put on garden duty with him. At first, I hated the enforced parent-kid time. But then I started to fall in love with the plants. The bunny-soft lettuces and papery garlic and aggressively good-smelling herbs. Even the grass. I would talk to all my seeds and cuttings, sort of the way I talk to you. At first, I couldn’t tell if they liked it, or if they even really heard me. Also like with you. But then I could see that they were growing. So I just kept adjusting the sun lamps and digging up more stuff to say.

Mack says that the plants he grows on Europa are already slightly different from the versions back on Earth.

Obviously, the board decided it’s okay for me to come back to data storage, but I think they mostly don’t care if we carry on like this for a little while longer because, well . . .

They’re finalizing the new way to carry data from base to base. Our data storage system is being discontinued in two months. Even if it wasn’t, I’m going to be busy. I’m joining the dive team full-time, with Nia and that wreck diver. My dads apologized to Nia for threatening to get her fired with a real Europan feast. They even baked a pie. A very salty pie. And the wreck diver is not so bad, as it turns out. They started diving in the Great Lakes when they were my age, which meant my dads were finally outnumbered in the arguments about whether or not I could survive. After only a few more auxiliary arguments, Mack and Henry said that I can dive for my seventeenth birthday.

Earth birthday, that is. I’ll still be one on Jupiter.

My dads are only three, though. We’re all super young here.

Love,

Lileo

Dear Lileo,

The version of me who left Earth would have freaked right out at several points during your last letter, but I only had a single mild panic attack when you described getting pulled out of the water, so I must be evolving. I’m good with keeping things gender-nonspecific for now. Just to give me some time to think without all the Earth pressure. Thank you for asking. And about my name, well, you can call me whatever. But I do like being your X.

And now I might have the chance to be your many-dimensional X, too. You know that point-to-point rocket system that’s going to carry experimental data all over Europa? They’re also working on a sort of exchange program from one moon base to another. I was the first person at Pwyll to put my name down. I can also un-put it down if that seems like too much. But if you want me there, I’ll be able to watch your dive in real time. I can even hold your hand before you get into that really intense dive suit. If it helps.

We had only two months left when you wrote your last letter, which means this is my last letter to you, and even the idea of seeing you in so many dimensions can’t seem to stop me from missing this. Writing to you. I have so much nostalgia for something that hasn’t even stopped happening yet.

Is there a scientific term for that?

In order to keep this moment from being the end, and to make this record of our early friendship feel really complete, I’m going to tell you one more dream. The one I had last night, right after I found out that you could be a part of my future, not just my past.

This one doesn’t even start on Earth. The creatures don’t look like anything I’ve ever seen. They’re so different I don’t even know how to categorize them. Some have so many tusks, and others are plants that also seem to be singing, and some are jellied blobs that light up in interesting patterns that I’m sure are messages of some kind.

You’re there. I’m there.

The other Galileo went back to Italy and his own time period, I guess?

There’s one other thing I have to say, even though I’m still radioactively awkward about these things.

Here it comes.

Love you, too,

X

Dear X,

By the time you read this, you’re going to be packing for the chaos. You’ll be less than two days away from meeting me, or at least the parts of me you don’t already know. Which is intense, since you already know more parts of me than anyone. It might seem like I’m not scared of anything. As it turns out, meeting the person you’re closest to in the entire universe is higher on my personal terror scale than diving into dark frozen water that’s literally never been touched by human skin.

But that’s only because I really want it to go well.

Once you get here, we’ll spend a beautifully synchronized day together before I take my first dive. But for right now, I’m still lagging behind the story, and I have a month until it finally happens. So I want to give you your welcome present a little early.

It’s a dream I had. You gave me so many of your dreams, and I never gave one back because mine have traditionally turned out murky and unmemorable. But last night, I had one that must have been snatched from one of your deep REM cycles. You really did exchange part of your brain with mine, didn’t you?

Here’s how it starts. My dream. The one where I finally go down into the buried sea.

I spend the pre-dive hours with you and my dads, eating sweet potato pancakes made mostly from ingredients that Mack and I grew in the greenhouse. All three of you walk with me to the dive site.

You get really excited about the tech and the dive suit and the setup where you get to watch me. You run around like a kid after too much dessert. You are a science type, after all.

And then you calm down enough to hold my hand. And that calms me down enough to put my dive suit on.

Right before I start climbing down into the ice, Henry tells me the story about how his parents came to the launch of the ship when he left for Europa. They tried to convince him at the very last second to stay, all tear-streaked and horribly sincere. They begged him not to “abandon his birth planet.” He promises never to be that dramatic with me. I give him an enormous hug. One for Mack, too.

I save the one for you until I get back. Because I am coming back to you.

Then I’m with Nia and the wreck diver, and we suit up and head down.

The ladder is short, and the water is freezing. Even with an insulated suit. We don’t fight it, though. We relax and float with the tide. This tidal energy is what creates enough heat for the ocean to exist below the frozen shell in the first place. It’s one of the forces that might be strong enough to create life here, even with the sun so faint and far. The tide is my friend. I let it tug on me and show me where to go.

As soon as it turns gentle, I start to swim down. And I feel something in my head. Not a voice, but as strong and clear as a voice.

Can my senses really be changing, X?

I swim down, because that’s what the sense is telling me to do. The dark water swirls around me, and I don’t see anything at first, but I feel something. Reaching. It might not even be here right now, the complex life I’ve been talking about, that you’ve been dreaming about. What if it’s not going to evolve for millions of years? Time is different for us on Europa. Not broken. Bigger.

Maybe what we’ve both felt is the future, reaching out in all directions until somebody paid attention to it.

Or maybe there’s something down there. Right now.

There are lights in the distance. Pinpricks, like stars. Or planets. Or moons. I follow them, because of course I do.

When Galileo first saw the moons of Jupiter, he knew it shifted the whole universe. Away from us at the center. Toward the possibility of more. All we had to do was accept that we weren’t the only ones who mattered.

I keep swimming down. I keep reaching.

There are extremophiles down there, hanging out by the hydrothermal vents, glowing in the dark, lighting my way.

I breathe in deep, and without speaking a word, I send a message.

Is there anyone down here?

Galileo to the universe.

Come in, universe.