It ended up being far easier, once the science matured, to engineer our bodies instead.

We don’t change much – nothing that would make us unrecognisable, nothing that would push us beyond the realm of our humanity, nothing that changes how I think or act or perceive. Only a small number of genetic supplementations are actually possible, and none of them are permanent. You see, an adult human body is comprised of trillions of cells, and if you don’t constantly maintain the careful changes you’ve made to them, they either revert back to their original template as they naturally replace themselves, or mutate malignantly. Hence, the enzyme patch: a synthetic skin-like delivery system that gives our bodies that little bit extra we need to survive on different worlds. If I were to stop wearing patches, my body would eventually flush the supplementations out, and I’d be the same as I was before I became an astronaut (plus the years and the memories).

Somaforming is an elegant solution, but not an immediate process. If enzyme patches are still used medically, you know this already – if you’re diabetic, for example, and can’t produce insulin on your own. But if you’ve never worn a patch (or if they’re old news by now), you might imagine something more dramatic than is accurate. I once spoke to a kid at an outreach event who was very disappointed to learn that applying a patch does not result in instant transformation (complete with an animation sequence and a theme song, I’d imagine). We astronauts are not superheroes, nor shape-shifters. We’re as human as you. While our bodies are wondrously malleable things, they still need time to adjust. Life-saving organ transplants or helpful medicines can often be met with some level of physiological resistance; the same is true of somaforming. It is more preferable, by far, to be unconscious while your body sorts itself out.

Again, I’m as biased as can be, but I believe somaforming is the most ethical option when it comes to setting foot off Earth. I’m an observer, not a conqueror. I have no interest in changing other worlds to suit me. I choose the lighter touch: changing myself to suit them.

At first glance upon waking at Aecor, I did not look particularly different. The enzyme patch on my shoulder – regularly swapped out during torpor by a helpful robotic mechanism – had been supplying me with the same sort of basic astronaut survival kit that I’d maintained since my first training mission in low-Earth orbit. My blood produces its own antifreeze to survive the extreme temperatures of both space and ground. My skin passively absorbs radiation and converts it into sustenance. These additions I have had for a long time. But as my weightless body shifted in microgravity, drifting like kelp in a gentle sea, a new supplementation made itself clear.

Glitter.

I can think of at least one lab tech back home who would frown at me for calling it glitter. Technically, what I possessed was synthetic reflectin, a protein naturally found in the skin of certain species of squid. But . . . come on. It’s glitter. My skin glittered, and for a moment, I felt childlike glee, like I’d emptied a bunch of craft supplies on myself, like I’d had my face painted at a carnival, like I’d flown here in a cloud of pixie dust. But it was practical, the astroglitter. Aecor is roughly as far from its star as Uranus is from our own, which makes for a sun no bigger than a fingerprint in the sky. Night and day do not look dramatically different. Here, glitter served the same purpose for us that it does for sea-dwelling animals back home: it catches and refracts light. While we would be clothed for the majority of the work day, being able to spot your crewmates’ glittery faces on a pitch-black ice field certainly wouldn’t hurt. We also needed to limit the use of work lights on said pitch-black ice fields, because light means heat, and we didn’t want to cause melt. And indoors, reflectin means less energy spent on indoor lighting, which is great when on a world where solar panels are useless and everything runs on battery.

Besides which: I glittered. It felt like a damn shame to put my clothes on, but I managed it all the same.

Chikondi was the first person I saw that day, and his face was far more startling to me than my own. To my memory, I’d said goodbye to him about an hour prior, but there he was, scruffy-faced and sparkly-skinned . . . and noticeably older. He is the youngest of us, and that two years of ageing had a more marked effect on a face in its twenties. He was thinner, too, and so was I, but I’d spent so much time mentally preparing for how I’d be different that I hadn’t thought much about how my friends might change.

Clearly, Chikondi felt the same, because he stared at me for a moment before ending the awkwardness with a laugh. ‘Good morning,’ he said.

‘Good morning,’ I returned. ‘Sleep well?’

‘I had this weird dream. I was helping my brother reorganise a massive library, and the books were written in gibberish, and suddenly I realised they weren’t books at all but cake—’

I frowned. Nothing about his conscious mind should have been active. I began to mentally rifle through what this could mean, everything that could’ve gone wrong with the chamber, the malfunctions I’d obviously missed during inspection, the unforeseen consequences this could mean for his brain . . .

Chikondi smiled slyly at me. ‘Ariadne, I’m kidding.’ He laughed again.

I cuffed his shoulder gently, then flipped my head down, floated past the ladder, and pushed myself along the walls with my hands. ‘So you are all right, right?’

‘Fantastic,’ Chikondi said. There was a pause. ‘I hate catheters.’

I nodded in solidarity. ‘Truer words.’

We found Elena in the control room, starting a systems check. I wondered if she’d needed much time to look at herself, or if this was all old hat by now. Elena’s the oldest of our crew by a minimum of nine years, and thus, her résumé has more to boast. She was part of the Eridania 8 mission to Mars, as well as the first to set foot on Ceres. This was not her first rodeo. But whatever her feelings about her body were, her keenness to get to work could not have been more plain. I’d seen that same glint in her eyes every morning we’d done field training together, every time she’d strapped on her boots for a hike or filled a bag with sample jars. I had a feeling that to her, otherworldly skin was just a sign that things were about to get good.

‘Good morning,’ Chikondi said to her.

‘Good . . .’ She glanced at a monitor. ‘Afternoon, actually.’

‘Right,’ Chikondi said. Aecor’s day was eight of ours, but we were still keeping Earth time.

Some of us were, anyway. Jack came floating downstairs a half hour later, late as always. I’ve been on crews with Jack since my early days at OCA, and we’ve long kept close company outside of that, but in that moment, I’m not sure I’d have recognised him in a crowd. I’d never seen him with long hair, or a beard that was anything but artfully groomed.

He looked at us each in turn, and burst out laughing. ‘You all look like shit,’ he said.

‘So do you,’ Elena said, matter-of-fact.

‘Yeah.’ Jack stuck his nose into his shirt and grimaced. ‘Ugh.’ He touched the thick bun bobbing at the crown of his head. ‘This needs to get murdered. Might keep the beard, though. Chikondi? Wanna be beard buds?’

They grinned at each other from within their respective thickets. ‘Sure,’ Chikondi said. ‘But I think yours constitutes a fire hazard.’