Whitehead sat in silence and watched as Kaminski and Hunter slowly filled with anxiety. Kaminski slouched in his chair with arms wrapped crossed in front of him. Hunter bounced his leg relentlessly under the table. The tension in the room was palpable. Whitehead could guess why; they had been called to an unscheduled, highly classified meeting. Throughout the past few years of training, every meeting was scheduled; unscheduled meetings meant that something has gone wrong. Considering the fact that they were launching within a few months, Whitehead, Kaminski, and Hunter were all concerned. 

An administrator, one of Whitehead’s bosses, walked into the conference room, shut the door behind him, and locked it shut. He slid past the central table and stood next to the projector at the front of the room. Whitehead, who had undergone this meeting procedure tens if not hundreds of times, knew that something was off. He had spent the last few years of his life training with a team of five people, yet only three of his team members were present: Kaminski, Hunter, and himself. 

“Now gentlemen, I would like to start off by explicitly stating that everything discussed in this room stays confidential. It is not to be discussed with anyone outside of this room. Understand?”

Kaminski and Hunter nodded. Whitehead looked up at the administrator, “Why aren’t Poole and Bowman here?”

“They needed to be excluded for reasons I’ll explain later.”

“So they aren’t allowed to know any of this?”

“Correct.”

Now Whitehead was curious. Every mission, briefing, training, lesson, and exercise had been more or less team oriented. No man was ever left behind. 

The administrator continued, “Now, I’m afraid that we haven’t been honest about what your true mission objective is.”

Hunter composed himself the best he could, but deep down, he was ecstatic. To his left, Whitehead and Kaminski watched with piqued interest, but they may as well have been invisible. Nothing could draw Hunter’s attention away from the picture on-screen; a black monolith at the bottom of a crater of Earth’s moon. The sun beat down on its surface, and the monolith absorbed all the light that touched it. It absorbed Hunter too.

When he had been offered the initial job, he could hardly contain himself. He dreamed about being a sailor aboard humans’ maiden voyage out to Saturn. He could see the headlines in his mind: First Humans to Reach Saturn!. People he hardly knew would brag about how they knew the Dr. Hunter. His picture would be printed in the papers, plastered on the TV, and shown in schools for decades to come. All those decades of hard work, study, and training would finally pay off. 

Today, Dr. Hunter realized that the payload was even larger than expected. He would be present for the first human contact with extraterrestrials. He would be a human ambassador representing the entirety of the world. His name would be remembered along the likes of Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Megellan. He would be more than a man; he would live on as a legend.

When the administrator asked, “Do you all have any questions?”, Hunter had just one. 

“When do we launch?”

Kaminski leaned against the wall and stared at his soon-to-be coffin. Well, temporary coffin. The scientists back at headquarters had explained the whole procedure; they put you in the box, they freeze your body, you sleep for however long the computer says to, and then you wake up like it was any regular day. Kaminski wasn’t new to this; he already lost a week to this procedure during training. Out of all the physically, mentally, and emotionally straining tasks required for the mission, that was easily the worst. And now he’d have to do it again, except instead of losing a week, it would be years.

Kaminski looked at the rest of the team. Hunter kept tapping his fingers against the glass of his hibernation station. Whitehead stood silently next to his station with his arms behind his back. Poole and Bowman stood by the door and watched the scene from afar.

A voice projected from the ship’s internal speakers, “Please enter into your hibernation stations.”

Kaminski, Hunter, and Whitehead opened their stations’ lids and climbed inside. Through the glass, Kaminski could see Poole and Bowman stepping closer. He ignored them, instead focusing on setting all the equipment like he had been trained to do. 

Kaminski waited, and waited, and waited some more. The silence felt oppressive. Anxiously, he reminisced about his time on Earth and all that he was leaving behind; his overpriced apartment, his mind-numbing 9-to-5, his ex-girlfriend, his mother and brother (neither of whom he had talked to in the last 10 years), etc. When the agency approached him with the job, Kaminski convinced himself to join the program because he had nowhere left to go. No one, not even his friends and family, would miss him, seeing as how they never missed him when he was firmly planted on Earth. 

Kaminski felt the cold prick of a needle sliding into his arm. A robot voice whispered in his ear and encouraged him to relax. The temperature dipped and the lighting dimmed. Kaminski started to drift off into sleep. 

He hoped the world he returned to would be better than the one he left behind.