Ghost Writers In The Sky

Everyone on the spaceship was dead. And I can't help wondering if it was my fault.

"So, Macy, I understand something funny happened to you while you were filming a scene on your latest movie, right?" The talk-show host is warmly genial and his generous smile hides the dead eyes of boredom.

"Hey, yeah! So, me and Hank were trying something new and he turns and says to me..." The starlet bursts into a well rehearsed anecdote. I know it is well rehearsed because I've been running lines with her all afternoon. The depressing truth is that nothing much of interest happens on a movie set. All those funny behind-the-scenes stories you see them telling? They're scripted. The story about the star who thought the live pig was an animatronic until it shat in his hat? I wrote that.

I wanted to be a proper writer, you know? I went to university and everything. I could write tangled essays about Molière with the best of them. I won prizes for my analysis of inter-war drama and the role of scansion in modern comedy. I was top of my class and yet fit only to be a runner on second rate TV shows. They wouldn't let me near the writers' room unless it was to get coffee. I only saw the host when he needed someone to walk his dog. I wasn't actually allowed to walk Fluffy - but I was allowed to call the woman who was.

One afternoon I was upgraded to guest star wrangler. I escorted her to the green-room and engaged in a little light chit-chat as we wandered the studio's labyrinth.

"Did you have a good journey in?"

"Fine."

"Looking forward to tonight's show?"

"Sure."

"Do you have some stories prepared?"

"What?!"

Zeus, but this girl was green. I explained that I needed to know what stories she wanted to tell so that the host could set them up.

"I... um... I don't have anything."

Between the green-room, makeup chair, toilets, and wings, I helped her invent a couple of suitably funny stories. The sort of thing that was memorable without being distinctive, and made her look much smarter than she was. Actresses are pretty good at selling a scene and she slayed it with the audience. Even the jaded host was impressed at how deftly she took to the interview. Word got around that I was the one who juiced the guest, and I was bumped up from "Junior Executive" (dogsbody) to "Sub-Associate Producer" (still a dogsbody, but with a small pay rise). Along with my coffee and dog-walking-arrangement duties, I was now writing anecdotes for dull guests. I even got a credit at the end of the show!

Celebrities are dull. They mostly sit in their trailers and run lines, do a sequence on set, and then go bang their yoga instructors. The ones which do have entertaining lives have stories which are far too spicy for TV. You can't really talk about how you scored blow for a studio exec by kidnapping his daughter's girlfriend until her narco uncle paid a ransom in product. Well, not if you want to work in this town again. So, time and again, I was asked to spin a family friendly story about how they improvised that famous line, or which extra was really their mother, or the way the cast just loved working with each other.

Over the next few years, I worked my way up the ranks. Artificial Intelligence stole most of the jobs for English Literature grads - dishwashing, bartending, telemarketing - but it still couldn't do humour. I loved working on that talk-show. Every day it was a new celebrity or a desperate politician. I'd ghost-write anecdotes for bona-fide A-Listers, up-and-coming newbies, rock-stars, and Presidents. Remember that funny story you saw the guy do in that video clip? The one which has the audience rolling in the aisles? Chances are, I wrote that. I could spin a yarn in any situation. I was a known quantity - if you wanted a safe and pleasing story, with a touch of old-fashioned humour, ask for me.

That's probably why I got the call from NASA.

I was working exclusively for a major motion picture at the time. The two co-stars hated each other with a passion that defied reason. He was an abusive alcoholic and she was a raving narcissist. Their on-screen chemistry was utterly phenomenal. Bogie and Bacall had nothing on these two. When you saw them on screen, you couldn't help believing that they were destined for each other. As soon as the director yelled "Cut!" they were at each other's throats like wildcats fighting over a scrap of tuna. The hatred they had was visceral and nasty, but they had a contractually obligated press tour to complete. A week of being interviewed by the world's media. Sat next to each other for hours at a time trying to come up with a new way to disguise their intense loathing for each other and the movie.

Actors can learn lines. That's, like, the one thing they're good for. So I wrote stories for them. He bought her flowers on their first day on set and she found them charming. She got the crew to arrange a secret birthday party for him only - chuckles - his IMDb page is wrong and it was a week early! What laughs! See how we're just like you, the viewer? We're so relatable! Let me tell you about how we both discovered we're huge fans of [insert regional food dish or local pop stars here]. Golly gee, I hope my next project is shot in the beautiful city of [interviewer's home] where I have this charming joke to tell!

The second the interviewer left the room, the co-stars leapt up and huddled in their corners like boxers preparing for another round. They furiously texted their agents about how awful this tour was. I pretended to text while I worked on my (third) abandoned novel. That's when NASA called me.

Look, I don't need to pretend that this was some sort of hard choice. I ditched those two bickering ninnies and jumped on the first flight I could. I mean, NASA! Right?

Yulia Mironova's mission to Mars had been a dismal failure by the Russians. OK, they'd landed their crew safely on a new world, but the old world didn't care to watch Mironova's taciturn expression as she barked orders at her crew. Whatever positive PR the Russians got from a successful landing and return mission, was undone by her attitude. The British tabloids called her "The Queen of the Sneer" and "Little Miss Grumpy". Sexist, but true. In a world where people craved heroes, she was a mean and unloveable presence on the TV screen. The few broadcast interviews on her return were similarly off-putting. There was no talk about the emotional legacy of her project, she never said anything flattering about her crew, and her only funny anecdote was that she considered spacing her co-pilot because he once beat her at chess.

NASA's first crewed mission to Jupiter was going to be different. They wanted the world to watch America's prowess and fall in love with their telegenic and competent crew. A multi-ethnic smörgåsbord of chisel-jawed men and not-aggressively beautiful women. They could be your (more attractive) neighbour or that kid from your class, right? They were flying faster and further than anyone else - taking humanity with them to the stars. A modern family setting their sights on colonisation! Not the bad kind of colonisation; the good kind. They were a talented bunch, with just one teeny-tiny problem. They were all as dull as dishwater.

If you want to apply to NASA's astronaut programme, you've got to be the best of the best. If you want to graduate, you've got to be the best of the best of the best. To be selected for flight, you've got to be the best of the best of the best of the best. And so it goes on. The people headed to Jupiter and beyond were as far from normal humans as it is possible to be. They memorised procedures, they could calculate impossible trajectories in their head, they were all fluent in multiple languages. They were nerds. Not the fun sort of nerd who hosts D&D parties and blogs about their cat - the sort that doesn't even go to parties and could dissect a cat.

NASA wanted me to give them personalities.

"So, we're in space, right? This ship is self contained - nothing gets in or out. So how come one of my socks is missing?!" OK, the Captain didn't have an actor's delivery, but she sold it well enough. Her bemused expression bounced around social media, trended in Jakarta, and was remixed by some influencer DJ. NASA were thrilled. I peppered their (incredibly dull but worthy) press-conferences with little stories about life aboard a billion-dollar spaceship. Each of the astronauts was assigned a personality. The Captain was stern but quirky, the Navigator loved Star Trek references, the Engineer hated Star Trek references and was always playing pranks. Each of them got a few minutes of material a week to perform. I can't say that the astronauts loved having a ghostwriter, but they were obedient little drones and did as NASA told them.

"You'll never believe this! For the last few months I've been putting on an accent whenever I speak to First Officer Daisy. Anyway, today…"

"Oh, yeah, today was mad. Here I am recalibrating the engine coolant, when a gorilla flies past me! I thought I was…"

"We've been trying to put a band together so we can write a few songs. It turns out that we have three drummers and no singers! I said to the Captain…"

It was all going brilliantly. Up until Nelson died.

Space wants you dead. It is unrelenting in its attempts to murder you. Vacuum, radiation, mechanical failures - all things that you expect to kill off your favourite astronauts. NASA took precautions against disease. Every astronaut was pumped full of vaccines, they'd all been quarantined for months prior to lift-off, and their appendices had been prophylactically removed. Nelson died anyway. It wasn't a noble or heroic death trying to save his comrades. It wasn't suicide due to the horrors of being trapped in a tin can. It wasn't his body rebelling against him. Nelson died because he was exhausted, misread the instructions on the space-toilet, and was found the next morning. I'll let your imagination fill in the rest of the details - mostly because NASA wouldn't tell me the full story. This was bad PR. Death by lavatory isn't the way a Steely-Eyed Missile Man is supposed to go. So they covered it up.

Nelson's story arc was put on hold. He wasn't a fan favourite anyway (sorry Nelson!) and we'd already banked a few dozen recordings which were due to be played back over the next 18 months. We even made a thing about him not appearing in the background of some of the crowd shots.

"Like, a lot of you have been asking where Nelson is. He's managed to get this massive zit on his forehead and refuses to be on camera. Apparently they've got a NASA doctor trying to work out what equipment we have on board to fix his skin! And I was all like…"

To lose one crew member is unfortunate. To lose two looks like sabotage.

In retrospect, the pressures on the captain were enormous. As the ship flew further and further away from Earth, bandwidth became a limiting factor. Most of the crew coped admirably with the loss of video calls to their friends, family, and fans. But the Captain seemed to take it harder than most. She'd been trained to hide her emotions and present a calm exterior. When we let her loose on camera, something shifted. I think she got addicted to the positive feedback. The more the fans clamoured for her, the more I was driven to write entertaining stories for her character. She'd done all the big talk-shows (albeit on radio delay) and seemed to love her fake personality. When we reduced her to just voice clips, that all seemed to go away. She wanted to be seen. Fame is complex like that - it nourishes you and eats you up. Officially, she accidentally became untethered during a space-walk. Unofficially, she left a note.

A captainless crew. A boat filled with memories. Workloads increased to pick up the slack. Tension mounted. The two crew members having an illicit relationship (extremely against NASA protocol) split up. The pressure of work and keeping a secret was just too much. When one of them started flirting with the Engineer, jealousy took over the spurned partner. Three fewer crew members. That left two. I kept churning out little anecdotes for them to perform over the radio. Every day they had to pretend to be happy. They had to make constant references to their fallen shipmates. All the while, they knew that there was no rescue. No sympathetic messages were beamed to them from the clueless public. How could they keep going? But they were the Right Stuff! They'd keep that ship flying right and true! The mission was everything!

The micrometeorite had different ideas.

Could the last two spacemen have sealed off a bulkhead a bit sooner? Maybe. When the alarms started blaring, did they feel relief? We'll never know. It took about an hour for the distress signal to reach Earth. At that distance, we could no longer transmit voice - so we sent text. Are you there? Are you there? Situation report? Please acknowledge? But all we got in return was silence and static. A few autonomous systems reported the state of the vessel and NASA deduced the rest.

NASA were far too deep into their deception. In the grand tradition of bureaucracies everywhere, they decided to honour their fallen heroes by continuing the lie. Every morning, I invent new amusing stories that must have happened on the fully crewed ship. Each story is perfectly calibrated to support the mission. Funny, frank, heartfelt, agog at the wonder of being the first to set eyes on a strange new world. I transmit them all the way to Jupiter. A few hours later, they're transmitted back down to Earth for a joyful public.

Floating past Jupiter is a ghost-ship which broadcasts the voices of the dead.

Thanks for reading

I'd love your feedback on this story. Did you like the style of writing? Was the plot interesting? Did you guess the twist? Please stick a note in the comments to motivate me 😃

Hungry for more? You can read:

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