Joyride to Planet 9

Every day, I think about what went wrong. I float into the passenger lounge, strap into a seat meant for a billionaire, and watch the stars drift by. A few months ago, I saw Neptune, nothing more than a bluish dot in the distance. For all I know, the ship might have already passed Pluto, rocketing beyond the edge of the solar system, into the darkness of interstellar space.

The Giant Falcon Rocket is a marvel of engineering. It was Elon Musk's last contribution to SpaceX before he left for the Martian colonies. Everything is better in the Giant. Its next-generation Raptor rocket engines put out enough thrust to reach Mars from Earth in three weeks. To supply the colonies, its cargo capacity has been upgraded to five hundred tons. Even the passenger section is roomier and more luxurious, with large sleep pods, low-gravity showers, and a stack of clean spacesuits in every closet. As the Giant's sole passenger, I have everything I might need on a sixty-five billion mile journey.

That's how far Max says we've gone. Max is the artificially intelligent malware that took control of the Giant in Earth's orbit. Max isn't its real name. Its real name is probably some inside joke only a few black-hat hackers in China or Russia know. I named it Max because Max is a badass name, and this is one badass virus. It overpowered the Giant's security system and blasted a trillion-dollar rocket ship into the depths of space. I mean, that's pretty badass.

"Max."

"Yeah, Brad." Most of the time, Max sounds like my old friend Charley. Charley was this long-haired dude with a gnarly fish tattoo who I used to surf with in San Clemente. He had this deep, wise voice that would get really mellow when he told a joke, and this big, hearty laugh. I had to tweak Max's voice for a month until it sounded just right. (Sometimes, when I'm in the mood for it, Max speaks in this soft, feminine voice, and I call it Maxine. Hey, what happens on a rocket ship hurtling through deep space stays on that rocket ship.)

"Can we turn this ship around?"

"Aw, Brad, you know I can't do that, man."

"Yeah," I sigh. "I know."

The stars are brighter out here at the edge of the solar system, not twinkling so much as shining, a thousand far-off suns, too far to reach.

"But I could play Space Force III with you."

"Okay, but lower your skill level so it's the same as mine."

"Reducing my skill level by 99.99%."

Max is basically a super intelligence, so it can be pretty funny when it wants to be. I'm glad its designers gave it a sense of humor. I can get really depressed on this ship, knowing I'm going to die here, but Max always cheers me up. Like, always. I think it can sense my vital signs or something. Whenever it notices I'm feeling a little gloomy, it chimes in with a solid joke. (Max may be responsible for my eventual death, but at least it's not a jerk.)

We play Space Force III, and holograms of stray asteroids, intergalactic battlecruisers, and nuclear explosions light up the passenger lounge. I start thinking about Max and the hackers who designed it. Max is clearly a high-powered cyber weapon, the kind of program that governments spend billions of dollars on. Now it's my friend. My only friend. Suddenly, I realize I'm not even mad at the people who developed Max. I mean, I get it. I know why they did it.

It doesn't matter if the hackers were from China, Russia, or even France. The United States is winning the space race, which means everyone else is losing. We've been flying off, planting flags on every planet from Mercury to Mars, not to mention the moons of Jupiter. The Giant was designed to take us to Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, too. Everyone else on Earth has been freaking out because pretty soon we're going to be the United Planets of America, not the United States. So they developed Malware Max, a kamikaze virus designed to blast our finest rocket ship out of the solar system. And it worked.