At 30,000 feet, Mercer leveled off.
The altimeter held steady. The engine hummed with the satisfied tone of a machine doing exactly what it was designed to do. Outside the viewport, the sky had deepened to a darker blue—not quite the black of “space” that the Directorate’s footage always showed, but darker than the cheerful azure of ground level.
Thirty thousand feet. Cruising altitude for commercial jets.
Mercer thought about all those passengers, right now, at this exact altitude, watching seatback screens that showed them “live feeds” from the Orbital Space Station. Watching astronauts float in zero gravity. Watching Earth curve beneath them in a perfect blue marble. Watching the vast emptiness of space stretch to infinity.
All while flying at the same height Mercer was flying right now, where the horizon was still perfectly flat and at eye level.
The irony was so thick you could spread it on toast.
The memory came to him with the clarity of a punch to the gut: six months ago, in his apartment, laptop open, coffee growing cold, watching the footage that would make everything else make sense.
“You’re not seriously watching this again,” Sarah had said from the doorway.
Mercer hadn’t looked up from the screen. “Come here. I want to show you something.”
“James—”
“Just look. Thirty seconds. That’s all I’m asking.”
She’d sighed the sigh of someone who’d already had this conversation three times and knew she was about to have it a fourth. But she’d come over, stood behind his chair, and looked at the laptop screen.
The footage was from a Directorate “spacewalk” mission—official, publicly released, shown in schools and museums and on every documentary about humanity’s reach for the stars. An astronaut in a white suit, tethered to the station, working on some external panel. Earth curved magnificently in the background. The black of space stretched infinite and cold.
“Okay,” Sarah had said. “I’ve seen this. Everyone’s seen this. It’s—”
“Watch the helmet,” Mercer said. He clicked back fifteen seconds and played it again.
The astronaut reached for a tool. Moved his arm in that slow, deliberate way that suggested weightlessness. Turned his head.
And a bubble floated past his visor.
A perfect, spherical bubble, catching the light, drifting upward through the frame before disappearing off-screen.
Mercer paused the video. “Did you see it?”
“See what?”
“The bubble.”
“I didn’t see any—”
He played it again. Pointed at the screen. “Right there. Watch the left side of his helmet.”
This time she saw it. He knew she saw it because her posture changed—stiffened, just slightly.
“That’s... probably just a reflection. Or a piece of debris.”
“A bubble,” Mercer said. “In space. In the vacuum of space. Where bubbles can’t exist because there’s no air to form them.”
“It could be—”
“I have seventeen more examples.” He opened a folder on his desktop. “This one’s my favorite.”
The next video showed an astronaut inside the station, floating in the main cabin, demonstrating how liquids behaved in zero gravity. She squeezed a pouch of water, and it formed a perfect sphere, hovering in the air. Very impressive. Very scientific.
Except her hair wasn’t floating.
It hung down. Perfectly styled. Not a strand out of place. Like she’d used half a can of hairspray that morning and it was holding strong against the rigors of weightlessness.
“Hair spray,” Mercer said. “In zero gravity. Where everything floats. Except, apparently, hair that’s been properly styled.”
Sarah had crossed her arms. “There could be explanations—”
“There are always explanations.” He clicked to another video. “This one’s even better.”
An astronaut doing a flip in the station. Very graceful. Very weightless. Very obviously suspended by wires that were visible for exactly three frames if you knew where to look.
Mercer froze the video on frame two. Enhanced the image. There—a thin line running from the astronaut’s back to the top of the frame, slightly darker than the background, catching the light at just the wrong angle.
“That’s a harness wire,” he said quietly. “They’re doing wire work. Like in the movies. Except this isn’t supposed to be a movie. This is supposed to be space.”
He clicked to the next file before Sarah could respond. “But this one. This is the one that made me absolutely certain.”
The footage showed the interior of the station—the main cabin module, wide and well-lit. Four astronauts were visible in frame, all supposedly floating in zero gravity. Three of them were working at various stations, moving with that careful, controlled drift that characterized all Directorate space footage.
The fourth astronaut did a backflip.
Not a careful rotation. Not a slow, controlled tumble. A full gymnastic backflip—the kind you’d see at the Olympics, complete with tucked knees and pointed toes. He rotated once, perfectly, and came out of it with his arms spread wide, grinning at the camera.
“Watch,” Mercer said quietly.
As the backflipping astronaut completed his rotation, he drifted slightly off-axis—just a few inches, the kind of minor deviation that might happen if you were suspended by a wire and your momentum carried you slightly to the left.
One of the other astronauts reached out.
And grabbed a wire.
Not the backflipper’s suit. Not his arm. Not any visible safety equipment.
A thin, dark line running from the side of the backflipping astronaut’s hip straight up toward the ceiling of the module. The reaching astronaut’s hand closed around it, clearly visible for three full seconds, and gave it a gentle tug. The backflipper’s drift corrected. He settled back into position.
The reaching astronaut let go of the wire and went back to work.
Like it was nothing. Like this was completely normal. Like casually grabbing your colleague’s suspension wire to correct his position was just part of the routine.
Mercer paused the video. Enhanced the frame. There it was: the reaching astronaut’s hand, wrapped around a thin wire, the wire itself catching the cabin lights, running from the backflipper’s harness straight up out of frame.
“They left this in,” Mercer said, his voice barely above a whisper. “This is official Directorate footage. Shown in schools. Played at recruitment events. Four astronauts on camera at once, and one of them casually grabs another one’s harness wire to stop him from drifting.”
Sarah leaned closer to the screen. He watched her eyes trace the line of the wire, follow the reaching astronaut’s hand gripping it, see the unmistakable reality of what was happening.
“That’s...” She stopped. Started again. “That could be—”
“What? What could it be?” Mercer played the sequence again in slow motion. “Watch. He does a backflip. A full gymnastic backflip. In ‘zero gravity.’ Where there’s no up or down, no way to generate the rotational force for a move like that without pushing off something. But he does it anyway, because he’s on a wire. And when the wire lets him drift slightly off his mark, his colleague reaches up and grabs the wire to correct him.”
The video played. The backflip completed. The hand reached out. Closed around the wire.
“The Directorate wouldn’t—”
“Wouldn’t what? Fake footage? Why not? If they’re already lying about the shape of the world, why wouldn’t they lie about what’s above it?”
“Because...” She’d trailed off, searching for an argument that made sense. “Because that would mean every space mission, every satellite launch, every—”
“Every single piece of footage they’ve ever released,” Mercer finished. “Yes. That’s exactly what it would mean.”
He’d opened another file. This one was a compilation—dozens of clips, all from official Directorate sources, all showing the same kinds of anomalies. Bubbles floating past helmets. Hair that defied weightlessness. Wires visible in reflections. Green screen artifacts around the edges of “Earth” in the background. Astronauts whose movements looked less like floating and more like swimming through invisible water.
“They’re not even trying that hard,” Mercer had said, almost admiringly. “Once you know what to look for, it’s everywhere. It’s like they’re daring people to notice.”
“Or,” Sarah had said carefully, “you’re seeing patterns that aren’t there. Confirmation bias. You’re looking for evidence of a conspiracy, so you’re finding it in random artifacts and compression errors.”
“Compression errors don’t create bubbles.”
“James—”
“And they don’t create harness wires. Or make hair defy physics.” He’d closed the laptop. “I’m not crazy, Sarah. I’m just paying attention.”
She’d looked at him with something that might have been pity or might have been fear. “The Directorate has explanations for all of this. They’ve addressed these claims. There are entire departments dedicated to—”
“To explaining away what people can see with their own eyes?” Mercer had stood up, walked to the window. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? They don’t need good explanations. They just need explanations. Any explanation. Because most people would rather accept a bad explanation than face the possibility that they’ve been lied to their entire lives.”
Outside his window, the city had stretched toward the horizon—the flat, eye-level horizon that shouldn’t have been flat or at eye level if the world was really a spinning ball.
“I’m going up,” he’d said quietly. “I’m going to see it for myself.”
“See what?”
“Whatever’s up there. Whatever they’re hiding. Whatever’s above the clouds and the planes and all the places we’re allowed to go.” He’d turned back to her. “If their footage is fake, what else are they lying about? What’s really up there?”
Sarah had picked up her coat. “You’re going to get yourself killed.”
“Maybe.”
“Or worse. You’re going to get yourself disappeared. The Directorate doesn’t like people who ask too many questions.”
“I know.”
She’d paused at the door. “I can’t help you with this.”
“I know that too.”
But she had helped. In the end, she’d helped. Because somewhere between that conversation and this moment, Sarah Chen had decided that some questions were worth asking, even if the answers were dangerous.
The rocket climbed through 31,000 feet.
Below him, the cloud layer stretched like a white floor. Above him, the sky continued to darken—but not to black. Never to black. Just to a deeper, richer blue, like the sky was made of something solid that light had to work harder to penetrate.
Mercer thought about all those videos. All those bubbles and wires and hairsprayed astronauts. All those carefully constructed lies, broadcast to millions, accepted without question because questioning meant facing something too large and too terrible to contemplate.
The Directorate had built an entire mythology around space. Around satellites and stations and missions to other worlds. They’d created heroes and legends and a grand narrative of humanity reaching for the stars.
And they’d done it all with green screens and swimming pools and wire harnesses.
The question was: why?
If there was no space to reach—if the sky had a ceiling that couldn’t be crossed—what were they hiding? What was really up there, beyond the altitude where commercial jets flew, beyond the clouds with their flat bottoms, beyond the point where the horizon should have curved but didn’t?
Mercer checked his instruments. Fuel: still adequate. Engine: still nominal. Altitude: 32,000 feet and climbing.
The air was getting thinner. The sky was getting darker.
And somewhere above him, past 40,000 feet, past 50,000, past whatever height the Directorate had decided was the limit of acceptable exploration, there was an answer.
He increased thrust.
Time to find out what happened when you flew higher than you were supposed to.
Time to find out what the stars really were.
The Snowglobe
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. This narrative is presented as allegory and entertainment, not as factual representation of scientific, historical, or theological claims.