I mean, they say everything’s better now, but I just don’t know. I don’t have a problem with the U.S, implementing the Military Service Act and making it mandatory for everyone graduating high school to do two years in the military; every country should have a strong military. But I would have liked to have a little choice in what I did after so many years of obligation.

            Whatever you might feel about the president, though, at least the guy did more for Truth than anyone else in the White House. With his whole campaign against Fake News and all the lies the Left likes to spew, he really helped open up the conversation by giving alternative facts their chance in the sun. The Left is always going on about how history was written by old dead white dudes, and how there’s a much fuller picture to be had, yet they won’t admit to even the faintest possibility of alternative facts if those facts don’t happen to align with their agenda. Take the whole Flat Earth movement, for example. You mention to any of them that the Earth might be flat, and they treat you like you’re dumber than dirt. Bunch of hypocrites, all of them.

            I don’t want to get into it too much with you, but my family and I have something of a different view about things up there, and that’s allowed. I know a bunch of guys have told me they went into space, and the G-L-O-B-E is beautiful and space is infinite and all that, but people say a lot of stuff. Not too long ago, everyone was saying free speech was the most important thing in the world, but it doesn’t look to me like it’s doing too well. Take, for instance, the Flat Earthers. You come out as a Flat Earther, start a blog with some ideas or diagrams or whatever, and by the end of the week, you’ve got people telling you to kill yourself and trying to get your page taken off the internet. Not out of a local newspaper with a leftist bias, mind you, but off the whole internet--erased from the world, essentially. Used to be you could say whatever you wanted, and you could find others who felt the same way you did. Now, you’re lucky if you can jot your ideas down on a bathroom stall without getting run out of town by a torch-carrying mob.

            Anyways, like I was saying, with the president’s Space Force going hand in hand with the conscription laws, the odds were pretty good I was going to get drafted into the Force. That said, when I graduated last month, I felt certain that with my leanings--I mean, you can’t come right out and say much of anything, but people still know--and my build, (I’m 6’2” and very buff), they’d have me up on the Canadian border keeping the peace. But then my letter came and holy shit, they wanted me to head off to basic training for the space program. You can imagine Dad had some things to say, but you know those government agencies; it’s impossible to get through to a living human, and when you finally do, they’re nothing more than some paper-pushing clerk who says they’ll pass your message along to someone in charge. But you know they never will.

            Naturally, nobody ever got back to us, and I was shipped off to space camp before the end of the month. Dad was furious, but Mom was actually a little curious. I could tell she didn’t want to be, she wanted to yell and curse the heavens along with Dad, but before I left, she asked me to take some pictures of things up there, if I ever got the chance.

            “Just, you know, all the textbooks and things we have are filled with those crappy, altered photos that make the Earth look like a sphere, and I would love an authentic flat Earth shot for the family files. Just so I know I have at least one they can’t get to.”

            “You got it, Ma,” I said, kissing her on her head. I tried to think of something profound to say before I left, so she’d have something wonderful to think back on when I was floating around, looking down at the Antarctic ring and all that, but the bus came a moment later and off I was on my way to camp.

            They threw us in tents with people we wouldn’t have grown up with, so that in case your platoon was killed or your shuttle went down or whatever, you wouldn’t leave a whole town without any young people. It sounded like a bit of an outdated fear to me, I mean what were we really going to be encountering up there in space? But I went along with it. By the end of the program, there’d be way more shit than just tent assignments that I’d have to go along with, so I decided I might as well get started.

            The first day we were there, they brought us into this massive room with a picture of the Earth projected onto the wall (the spherical model, of course), and they told us that there was a meteor fifty times the size of the one that killed the dinosaurs heading straight for Earth. They said that we were humanity’s (not Mankind’s) best shot at survival.

            There was this deafening silence in the room. Some people were actually crying. Some of them men. I felt like I was the only sane person in the room. But then, I probably was. Every one of them believed we were going to jump off a spherical world and into an infinite universe to combat a meteor that was coming at us from who knows how far away just to wipe us out. As if Mankind could be done away by a rock.

            I kept my mouth shut and didn’t say anything then—it being a full room and all, and the first day, and everyone so emotional and sloppy—but I kept a mental log of who was the most upset. I’d have to do something about reeducating them if they were gonna have my back and I was gonna have theirs.

            “Our plan,” the man at the front said, “is to shuttle several enterprising young men and women to the moon, where an offensive will be launched to combat this intruder before it can get too close.”

            The slide behind the man changed from the spherical Earth to an image of space—supposedly from the surface of the moon, although you couldn’t see that many stars. Looked like cheap CGI to me, but no one else seemed to notice.

            “The laser, invented by our very own Dr. Roth,” he said, gesturing at a man seated at the far right side of the room, “is strong enough to destroy the meteor, if properly aimed, and should help us to avert this disaster without issue.”

            This crazy applause exploded in the room with everyone beating their hands together as hard as they could, as if clapping hard enough might make the meteor disappear without anyone having to fire a shot.

            “We have selected you, the next generation, to deal with this, because it is your world that will be saved and your futures that will be preserved.” More applause. “Over the next few months, we will train you to master your mental and physical selves, to survive in a moon base, and, for some of you, to fire the laser, should you be required to do so.

            A gasp rippled through the assembly. The man on stage nodded in this annoying way that seemed to say, “Yes, yes, we trust you that much.”

            “Now, off you go to your first stations,” he said. “If you get lost, just ask. We have a very helpful crew on staff here. Any one of them would be happy to help.”

            More applause. Thunderous. The kind usually reserved for the great speechmakers of the past. It was pretty ridiculous, to tell you the truth.

            The first few weeks passed quickly. I got some of the highest scores and best times for boot camp, and my aptitude tests all landed me in officer training. Officially, the officers were the ones that were most likely to have to fire the laser, but unofficially, there were only five or six guys and girls that were likely to do it, and I wasn’t one of them. Don’t think for a second that I cared, though. Mankind got along just fine without me protecting it all this time, and it’ll continue to get along just fine long after I’m dead.

            I still caught snippets of the plan, though. People talk no matter where you are. The plan, as I understood it, was to bring the laser around to the dark side of the moon, and to fire out into space at the meteor. Believe me, I tried a couple of times—not to interject, per se—but to warm them up a little to my idea that if we fired from the dark side, we’d just hit the ceiling of space and blow ourselves up. But I never really saw an opportunity. It was torture, though, I tell ya, listening to educated men and women jabber on about the distances they actually thought that space could contain. Crazy numbers, insane numbers that could never exist in this plane of existence. But what are ya gonna do? This is the world we live in, now.

            Anyways, the launch was scheduled for next week, and for some reason, we all had to go. Even the people who weren’t firing the laser. They said it was valuable for all of us “enlisted” to have experience off-planet. That was the word they used: enlisted. Like we weren’t all conscripted for the sake of the good old U.S of A.

            I almost didn’t make it, though. I swear to god. One night, this skinny little dude in my tent named Rupert was going off one night about Flat Earthers and how stupid you have to be to believe something that can so easily be disproven. I seriously wasn’t gonna say anything, but I couldn’t help myself.

            “I mean, there’s evidence for both sides,” I said, lying there in my bunk.

            The little dipshit actually laughed at me.

            “Like what?” he asked. “What evidence is there that the Earth is flat?”

            “I’m not saying I think it is, but I’ve heard some things.”

            “What things, Walter? ’Cause all I’ve heard are the raving, rambling conspiracies of ignorant, right-wing fanatics.”

            “Flat Earth isn’t partisan,” I said. “Anyone can believe in it.”

            “You can’t believe in something scientific; it just is, whether you believe it or not.”

            “You know, a lot of people say the same thing about Christianity.”

            “Yeah, Christians. People who believe it’s the only way to be. Of course they’re gonna treat it as a universal fact. The only problem is, there’s nothing backing it up. Just like Flat Earth.”

            I shook my head, my crew cut scraping against my starched, white pillow.

            “Nah, man, facts can be interpreted different ways, like the history textbooks. Flat Earth can be argued by the way the moon looks to people in different hemispheres.”

            I saw him push himself up onto his elbow.

            “What do you mean?”

            “Well, imagine the moon’s a decal on your ceiling. If you stand at one end of the room, it looks like the ‘top’ of the moon is in one place, while if you stand at the other end, it looks like the top is on the other end.”

            Rupert laughed this stupid, braying laugh.

            “That just means the moon’s visible in different angles from different places. It’s still a sphere rotating around another sphere. You’re kidding me with this shit, right?”

            I didn’t answer, but only because I didn’t want to get thrown in the brig for fighting. But man, I was mad.

            The week passed with about a thousand times more workouts and emergency drills for when we were up in space, and then suddenly it was the day of the launch.

            I took my seat in the shuttle without letting anyone know how excited I was to prove them all wrong. Let them figure it out when we were up there. It wasn’t important that they understand that I’d known all along how things really are. What was important was that they figure it out.

            The Gs were unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. Nothing in training even comes close. I couldn’t describe it to you in any way that would make you understand. I guess for some things you just have to be there.

            We took off, and I looked out the window at the Earth below us as we went along. I’m not gonna lie; I can see why some people might think it’s a sphere. For the first while it definitely looked just as flat as ever, but as we got higher...I don’t know. Might have just been the curve of the window or something—you know how airplane windows can distort things sometimes—but I dunno. It looked kinda curved. I mean, the ancient Greeks thought it was flat, and they gave us politics and art and architecture, and all those things have survived till now so how could they be so wrong about the shape of the Earth when they were right about all that other stuff?

            It was a pretty long ride to the moon. Honestly, I kinda slept through a lot of it.

            When I woke up, the shuttle had turned a bit, and the Earth was behind us, so I couldn’t really see it anymore. I couldn’t see the moon either, because it was right out front where the nose of the shuttle is, so it was mostly dark. They had the heat on pretty high in the shuttle, and I could tell that it was because it was freezing outside. The stars looked pretty bright, but everything around them was so damn black and cold looking. We must have been close to the top of the dome, because I felt like we were as far from home as anyone had ever been. Something in my bones said we were right at the edge of all things.

            I heard some people talking about the meteor to my right, and to be honest, I’d kinda forgotten all about it. I was just so focused on proving everyone wrong, I forgot the reason we were going to the moon in the first place. Besides, I wouldn’t even be firing the laser. Why would I care about some stupid rock bouncing around the space dome? If it was there, it’d always been there.

            I didn’t see the moon till I was on it. There was this big fanfare around the people selected to fire the laser, and they were whisked off to this private conference area where there were reporters and whatnot all trying to get their attention.

            Mankind hadn’t completely destroyed the moon yet with construction and commercialism, but they were certainly making a go of it. The whole complex was built like a mall. Neon lights and voices and muzak playing over a central sound system. All of it was exactly like home, except for the messed-up gravity.

            While the most important people were being interviewed, the rest of us got shepherded into the room with the actual laser. It was this massive thing pointing outwards into space. You could see where it was facing, because there was this massive wall of windows that let you look out at the stars.

            We were at the “top” of the “dark side” facing “out,” and even with the tinted glass in the windows, there were so many stars, it was kinda crazy to look at. They were all just little pinpricks of light, but I assumed, if you got close enough, they’d be spheres—gassy ones, but still spheres. Only the Earth was flat. It was special that way.

            Looking out at the moon, though, I gotta admit, it looked flat, too. The moon, like the stars and the other planets, is a sphere. That much we know. But yeah, I dunno. It looked flat to me. Must have just been the way the complex was positioned, or something, but I could see why some people might make the argument that the way the Earth looks flat when you’re standing on it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s flat.

            I had to sit down, though, after I saw how flat the moon looked. I honestly kinda felt like I was going to throw up. I loosened the collar of my shirt and tried to focus on something else. Anything to take my mind off of what I’d seen.

            The woman who’d brought us into the laser room was pointing out to some of the other cadets where the meteor was supposedly coming from. “Just over there, about twenty degrees to the right,” I heard her say. “We’ll have to wait for the moon to rotate a few degrees further before we can fire successfully, of course, but it will be into this quadrant here,” she said.

            I got up to walk around a bit and clear my head. I headed down this short hallway that led into this smaller room with a bunch of TVs showing a spherical Earth. The TVs all had the seconds racing by in a bar along the bottom, which told me it was live footage from security cameras. Wouldn’t you know it? The Earth on the TVs looked round to me. I don’t know how else to say it. The cameras could have been distorting things, of course, but it looked round. No giant Antarctica ice wall around the whole thing. No dome. Just this gigantic, spherical Earth staring back at me.

            I felt kinda dizzy, suddenly. Like I wasn’t getting enough air. I loosened my tie a little more, but it didn’t help. I could feel this half-formed idea bouncing around in my head, but I couldn’t really get ahold of it. Something to do with the direction they were going to fire the laser. I knew they thought that firing it out into space made sense, but they were a bunch of people who didn’t understand the physics of the whole thing. The meteor couldn’t be coming from outer space, because outer space didn’t exist the way they thought it did. It wasn’t deep and infinite the way they all thought it was. If the meteor was coming for Earth, it had already been bouncing around above the Earth for a long, long time. If they were detecting it that close to Earth, the likeliest place to find it wouldn’t be from the far side of the moon, it would be from somewhere much closer to Earth.

            I headed back into the first room with the laser. The other cadets who weren’t going to be firing it had moved on, along with the tour guide. I could hear them chatting away down the hall, getting farther away.

            I wandered over to the laser. It was this huge thing with part of it inside and part of it poking through the glass, aiming out into the stars. The part inside had a seat and a steering wheel and a bunch of levers and knobs. It was totally unguarded, but then, I guess, they figure if you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably not a terrorist.

            I sat down in the seat. I don’t think I really had any intentions of doing anything. I just wanted to see how it felt.

            I don’t know why, but I flipped this big, green switch, and the whole thing lit up with a sound like a bunch of fans coming to life inside of it. I flipped another switch, and a voice said “Laser armed.” I fiddled with one of the levers a bit and the part that was outside started moving to the right.

            “What are you doing?”

            I turned to see Rupert standing in the entrance to the hall. I told him to leave me alone.

            “Whatever you’ve done, you should undo it before you fire that thing and blow up the whole goddamn planet,” he said. He took a step towards me with his hands out in front of him, the way you’d walk towards a wild dog.

            “You think they know what they’re doing?” I heard myself ask. “Like, you think they’re a hundred percent confident they know how to save the planet?”

            “I’d say they have a helluva lot better of an idea than you do,” he said, taking another couple steps.

            “But what if they’re wrong?” I asked, eyeing up a large red button with the word “launch” printed on it. “What if they’ve got it all backwards where the meteor’s coming from? I mean, can anyone actually see it?” I looked out to the blank spaces between the stars. The idea in my head was starting to become clear.

            “Can they see it...” he repeated. “What the hell do you think they’ve been doing this whole time? How the hell do you think they discovered it in the first place?”

            “I know they’ve got sensors and everything, but has anyone actually seen it? I mean, you stand on the surface of the Earth, and it looks flat. I’m just saying, looks can be—”

            “Wrong?” he was almost shouting. “Yeah, looks can be deceiving; that’s why we have technology to detect what we can’t.”

            “But technology can fail,” I said, running a thumb over the launch button. “It fails all the time. What if the meteor’s right over there, bouncing around behind the Earth, and we just can’t see it ’cause we’ve blinded ourselves with all this technology?”

            “Help!” he turned suddenly and shouted over his shoulder. “I need help here! There’s a crazy guy and he’s gotten hold of the laser! Somebody!”

            “What if they’re all wrong, and they’re gonna get us killed because they refuse to see reason?” I asked, ignoring his shouts.

            I could hear running footsteps now, raised voices. If I was going to do something, I’d have to do it fast.

            “Just, come down from there, and we can bring your ideas up with whoever’s in charge,” Rupert said.

            “Yeah, yeah, I’ll bet they’ll listen to me, the idiot Flat Earther,” I said, glancing into Rupert’s eyes.

            He frowned.

            “I don’t think you’re an idiot,” he said, taking another slow step towards me. “I’m sorry I said that. I didn’t mean it.”

            “Sure you did,” I said, still touching the button. “Sure you did.”

            “Look, could we just—”

            The sound of the laser exploding from the tip of the device was deafening inside the room. We both watched as it burst out of the end of the gun and raced towards the Earth, leaving a fiery red tail behind it.

            “What the fuck did you just do?” Rupert screamed. “You’re gonna blow up the whole goddamn planet!”

            “Relax,” I said, hopping down. “I aimed well past it. Nothing’s gonna happen. It’ll bounce around up here for a while, and eventually it’ll hit the meteor.”

            Rupert’s eyes bulged.

            “Bounce around where? What the fuck are you talking about?”

            “Here, in the dome,” I said, waving an arm grandly towards the windows. “Everything in your stupid universe is just bouncing around out there,” I said, “and eventually, the laser and the meteor will bounce into each other. There’s no other option. All it’ll take is time.”

            Rupert’s mouth moved, but no sound came out.

            “The ancient Greeks knew the Earth was flat. And look at everything they gave us.”

            “The ancient Greeks knew the Earth was round you fucking moron!” Rupert shrieked. “They’re famous for it!”

            I frowned.

            “Nah, you’re wrong. You’re just mad and you’re trying to screw with me.”

            “I am not just mad—you fired a fucking missile at the Earth because of your goddamn delusions, and now we’re all gonna die! And you can see it’s round! You’re on the moon right now because of the same goddamn physics that prove it’s round, and you still think it’s flat!”

            “It is, though, just look at it!” I said, pointing out at the Earth. I admit, it did look a little round, but less so by the minute. It was all just a matter of perspective. Just like the flaming trail of the laser making its way steadily towards the bright, blue planet. You could argue as it entered the atmosphere, as it was starting to, that the bright trail of it was horrifying to look at. Or, you could say it was beautiful. Both were just as true.

            I said as much to Rupert, but he just stood there with his arms frozen beside him and his jaw hanging open. He looked like a slack-jawed yokel, to be honest. But that’s the thing with these government programs. They’ll let just about anyone in. Long as you can follow orders, it doesn’t matter how dumb you are. They’ll let you in and hand you a weapon. It’s insane, really, but that’s the world we live in.

Brianna Ferguson is a poet, short story writer and music journalist from British Columbia. Her writing has appeared in various publications across North America and the U.K. including Minola Review, Leaping Clear, and Outlook Springs.