Whatever that something was, the news bundle shed no light on it. All we got was a dizzying melange of conflicts without context, political leaders whose names we didn’t know, all-consuming dramas that would likely be forgotten a generation later. Have you ever looked at the headlines on a foreign news site, and felt completely adrift? The experience was like that, but on the scale of the entire planet. The plot escaped us entirely.

‘Stay safe out there,’ the man said with an awkward wave. ‘We’ll talk to you next month.’

And that was that.

We three sat silently for a moment, our frowns all the more pronounced.

‘Try the one before that,’ Jack said.

So we did. We watched another, and when that told us nothing, we jumped back ten months to see if chronological order would help. Chikondi joined us at last, saying little of anything, but present for the puzzle at hand. A few pieces started to fall into place. They only raised more questions.

OCA was experiencing funding problems – we’d gathered that much, even though the bundles did their best to make light of it. Nothing was said of where the shortage in finances was coming from, but the greater context of the stories relayed to us made it plain. There was war. There was famine. There were too many people in cities that already had too many when we’d left. It is difficult to give thought to the stars when the ground is swallowing you up. And if thought is difficult, it stands to reason that money is even harder. We watched as the clothes got more and more tired. The faces did, too. But in every bundle, the closing sentiment was the same: We’re proud of you. Stay safe. We’ll talk to you next month.

Until, some nebulous day before April 2162, they stopped. They simply stopped.

We sat in silence around the monitor. We’d screwed up our launch schedule by cramming the news all day, but that no longer seemed like the bigger priority.

Jack shook his head at the screen. He stood. He paced. ‘Where are they?’ he said. ‘Where did they go?’

Opera

I remained in front of the mirror for much longer than I had the two times before. The sun was large in Opera’s sky, so I did not need to shine. The gravity was on par with Earth, so I did not need to be strong. There was much about Opera that was like Earth, in fact – its size, its atmosphere, its temperature range. I needed nothing special for Opera, so I was given nothing. My previous gifts were gone, no longer maintained by the patch on my arm. The radiation and antifreeze supplementations remained, of course, but beyond that, I was just . . . me.

Looking in the mirror, I wasn’t sure I liked what that equated to. I was almost eleven years older than when I’d left Earth. That’s not so much time, but the changes of ageing had largely escaped my notice, distracted as I was by the more dramatic differences of somaforming. I didn’t mind the lines in my face, but I also didn’t remember their development. My hair hadn’t grown too much in the five years spent in torpor, but the frequent shaving meant I never saw it much longer than maybe a centimetre. Now, I saw frequent threads of wintry grey among the black tufts. My body was average, healthy, nothing out of the ordinary. That was the problem. Without the glitter, I felt dull; without the brawn, puny. To my eyes, I looked ill, and the sight made me sink.

I found my crewmates where I’d bid them goodnight, down in the control room, arranged around the comms monitor. Jack shook his head at me as I floated through the door.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘Nothing?’

He shook his head again.

‘Have you run a—’

‘Yes,’ Elena said. ‘Everything’s as it was when we left. All green lights.’

Chikondi floated in the corner, silent in thought and distant in gaze.

‘They can’t just be gone,’ I said.

‘No,’ Jack said in agreement. ‘Even if funding ran out entirely, they’d tell us. They wouldn’t just say, whoops, oh well, no more paychecks, guess we’ll fuck off. No, something’s wrong. Something’s really wrong.’

‘I’ll check the comms again,’ I said. ‘I’ll do another full hardware check.’ My gut said the problem wasn’t on our end, but with this, we couldn’t be too sure.

‘What do we do,’ asked Chikondi, ‘if we hear nothing?’

‘What we came here to do,’ Elena said. ‘We’ve received no mission updates, so that means the mission stands. We do our job here, we go to Votum, we do our job there, we go home, and we find out what happened.’

I stared at her, and the weight of what she was saying sunk in. From my internal sense of time, we hadn’t heard from OCA in seven months, which, to me, was a problem I’d discovered the day before. But of course, that wasn’t the shape of things at all, not when you factored in the transit time. We hadn’t heard from OCA in five and a half years. Chikondi wasn’t asking what we would do now, in the absence of contact. He was asking about the complete absence of contact. The absence of any contact at all.

I remember our introductory mission briefing about Opera at OCA Oceania. Sophie Thomas, one of my favourite people on the planetary science team, led the presentation that day with her usual energetic charm.

‘This one’s going to be a real kick in the tits,’ she said cheerily. ‘The surface of this planet is almost entirely ocean.’

‘Water ocean?’ Elena asked, taking notes on her tablet.

‘Yes,’ Sophie said. ‘So you don’t need to worry if your boots get wet, but you haven’t exactly got a fine choice of landing sites, either.’ A map appeared on the screen behind her. ‘There are four small islands, and your survey activity will be limited to those locations, plus however far out you can fly your drones in a given day.’

‘Four islands,’ Chikondi repeated. ‘On the whole planet.’

‘That’s right.’

‘When you say small,’ Jack said, ‘d’you mean, like, there’s room for a quaint fishing village but you won’t have many dining options, or glorified rocks?’

‘Glorified rocks,’ Sophie said. ‘You’ll be able to go for a short walk, and that’s about it.’

Elena twirled her stylus as she processed that. ‘That is a kick in the tits.’

In the control room, looking at the satmaps of the planet below us, our demeanour was far less flippant. No one was smiling. I doubt even Sophie Thomas would have smiled in the face of the two big problems conveyed by our satellites.

Problem the first: they’d only found three islands. The one we were supposed to land on first was missing.

‘Could the folks back home have made a mistake?’ I asked. I doubted it, but as a scientist, you have to consider every possibility.

‘No,’ Jack said. ‘I reviewed the landing maps with them.’

‘We all did,’ Elena said. ‘There should be something right there.’ She pointed at the screen.

‘Those maps were made over forty years ago,’ I said. ‘Something must have happened. Some kind of volcanic event, maybe?’

‘Maybe,’ Jack said, ‘or an impact event. That could do it.’

‘Could be sea level rise,’ Elena said. ‘The planet could be undergoing some kind of climate change.’