At 100,000 feet, the world became something else entirely.
The atmosphere wasn’t thin anymore—it was practically theoretical. The reaction thrusters had given up trying to find purchase in air that had stopped being air and started being the memory of air. The rocket climbed on main engine thrust alone, a column of fire pushing against nothing, held to its trajectory by momentum and mathematics and sheer stubborn refusal to acknowledge that this was insane.
Through the viewport, the sky above had gone from purple-black to just black. Not the black of night—the black of absence. The stars were painfully bright now, no atmosphere left to soften them, and they didn’t twinkle. They burned with steady, fixed intensity, like LED lights on a ceiling that was much, much closer than anyone wanted to admit.
Below, the Earth curved away in a way that looked almost right, almost like the photos, except Mercer could see too much of it. The horizon was too high, the curve too gentle, like looking at the inside of a bowl rather than the outside of a ball. The cognitive dissonance was making his head hurt.
Or maybe that was the g-forces. Hard to tell.
The altimeter read 103,000 feet. Nineteen and a half miles up. The edge of what anyone called “space,” though Mercer was increasingly convinced that “space” was a lie told to people who’d never been this high.
The rocket shuddered. Something in the fuel system made a sound that probably wasn’t supposed to be made. Mercer’s training said he should be concerned about that.
His training also said the Earth was spinning at a thousand miles per hour and he should be able to feel it.
His training was batting about .500 today.
Then the radiation monitor started beeping.
Mercer stared at it.
The beeping continued, insistent and electronic and completely, utterly wrong.
He checked the display. Radiation levels: elevated. Not dangerous yet, but climbing. The kind of radiation signature you’d expect from—
“No,” Mercer said aloud to the empty capsule. “No, that’s not right.”
He pulled up the mission parameters on his secondary display, scrolling through the data with fingers that were suddenly clumsy in their gloves. The Van Allen Belts—the radiation belts that supposedly surrounded Earth in a protective cocoon of deadly particles—those didn’t start until 620 miles up. Minimum. The inner belt began at 620 miles and extended to 3,700 miles. The outer belt went from 7,500 to 36,000 miles.
Mercer was at nineteen miles.
The radiation monitor beeped again, more insistently.
“It’s not supposed to start for another six hundred miles,” Mercer said to the display, to the monitor, to the universe that was apparently rewriting its own rules. “You’re six hundred miles too early.”
The monitor didn’t care about his objections. The radiation levels kept climbing.
And suddenly Mercer was back in Sarah’s apartment, three months ago, laptop open between them, watching a video that shouldn’t have existed.
“I need you to watch something,” Mercer had said, setting his laptop on Sarah’s coffee table. She’d drawn the curtains at his request—not because anyone was watching, but because he’d learned that talking about this stuff made you paranoid, made you feel like the walls had ears and the ears had opinions.
“James, I really don’t—”
“Just watch.” He pulled up a video. “This is Dr. Marcus Bennett. FASE astronaut. Official interview from 2017.”
On the screen, the engineer sat in what looked like an official interview. Professional lighting. FASE logo in the background. The kind of video that was meant to inspire confidence in American space exploration.
“We destroyed the technology,” Bennett said, matter-of-fact, like he was discussing last week’s cafeteria menu. “We don’t have it anymore. We’d have to build it again from scratch.”
Mercer paused it. “He’s talking about why we can’t go back to the moon.”
Sarah frowned. “Okay, so the Saturn V was expensive to maintain, and—”
“We destroyed the technology,” Mercer repeated slowly. “The technology that supposedly took us to the moon six times in three years, fifty years ago, with computers less powerful than a modern calculator.”
“And we destroyed it.”
“All of it.”
“Every blueprint, every schematic, every piece of institutional knowledge that would let us recreate the most significant achievement in human history.”
Sarah was quiet for a moment. “That does sound... odd.”
“That’s not how technology works,” Mercer said. “That’s not how anything works. You don’t just lose the ability to do something you’ve done six times. We didn’t forget how to build the Saturn V. We didn’t accidentally delete all the files. We didn’t—”
“Unless you never did it in the first place,” Sarah said quietly.
Mercer looked at her. Really looked at her. Dr. Sarah Chen, who had three degrees and a security clearance and a career built on believing what the Directorate told her to believe.
“There’s more,” he said.
He pulled up another video. Different FASE official, different interview, same impossible admission.
“The Van Allen Belts are a significant challenge,” the official said. “We need to solve the radiation problem before we can send humans beyond low Earth orbit.”
“When was this recorded?” Sarah asked.
“2014.”
“Forty-five years after Ares 11.”
“Yes.”
Sarah leaned forward. “So in 1969, with 1960s technology, they solved the radiation problem well enough to send twelve men through the Van Allen Belts, to the moon and back, with no shielding issues.”
“That’s what they claim.”
“But in 2014, with modern technology, they still haven’t solved the radiation problem.”
“That’s what they’re saying.”
“That’s not possible,” Sarah said slowly. “Both things can’t be true.”
“I know.”
“Either Ares went through the belts and proved it was survivable, or the belts are too dangerous and Ares never went. It can’t be both.”
Mercer pulled up a document—one of the Ares mission reports. “The official story is that they went through the thinnest part of the belts, very quickly, and the capsule provided adequate shielding.”
“What kind of shielding?”
“Aluminum. The capsule was aluminum.”
“Aluminum,” Sarah repeated. “Against radiation that modern FASE says we can’t safely pass through even with current technology.”
“Aluminum,” Mercer confirmed.
He pulled up another video. This one showed an engineer discussing the Odyssey spacecraft—FASE’s modern vehicle for deep space exploration.
“We’re designing Odyssey to handle the radiation environment beyond low Earth orbit,” the engineer explained. “The Van Allen Belts are a significant challenge. We’re testing shielding materials and trajectory options to minimize exposure.”
“Minimize exposure,” Sarah said. “Not ‘use the same techniques that worked perfectly in 1969.’ Minimize exposure. Like it’s a new problem they’ve never solved before.”
“Because it is,” Mercer said quietly. “Because they never solved it. Because Ares never went through the belts.”
“Then where did Ares go?”
Mercer looked at her, and in her eyes he saw the same thing he’d been feeling for months—the terrible, creeping realization that everything was wrong, that the lies went deeper than anyone wanted to believe, that the truth was stranger and more frightening than any conspiracy theory.
“Maybe nowhere,” Mercer said. “Maybe they just went up, hit something they couldn’t pass through, and came back down. And then they spent fifty years telling us they’d gone to the moon, showing us photos they’d composited, playing us footage they’d filmed in studios, all to hide the fact that there’s a ceiling. A boundary. Something we can’t pass through.”
Sarah was quiet for a long moment, staring at the paused video on the screen.
“The Van Allen Belts aren’t belts,” she said finally, working it out. “They’re not radiation zones in space. They’re detection of something else. Something closer. Something that’s actually there.”
“A firmament,” Mercer said. “That’s what the old texts call it. A solid barrier. A dome.”
They sat in the darkness of her apartment, the laptop screen casting blue light on their faces, and contemplated the impossible.
“If you’re right,” Sarah said slowly, “if there really is something up there, some kind of barrier—the radiation readings would spike when you got close to it. Not at 620 miles. Much sooner. The ‘Van Allen Belts’ would just be us detecting the electromagnetic field of the firmament itself.”
“How much sooner?”
She pulled out her phone, did quick math. “I don’t know. But if it’s at the Karman Line like you think, like the old texts suggest—” She looked up at him. “You’d start detecting it around 100,000 feet. Maybe sooner.”
“One hundred thousand feet,” Mercer repeated. “Nineteen miles up.”
“If the radiation monitor goes off at nineteen miles,” Sarah said, “then we know. We know the belts aren’t where they claim. We know Ares couldn’t have gone through them. We know there’s something up there, something close, something real.”
“Something they’ve been lying about for fifty years.”
“And they’ve built an entire world on top of it.”
She closed the laptop. Looked at him in the dim light.
“You’re really going to do this, aren’t you? Build the rocket. Go up there yourself.”
“Yes.”
“And you need my help.”
“Yes.”
Sarah was quiet for a long time. Then she nodded once, decisive.
“Okay,” she said. “Show me the designs.”
The radiation monitor beeped again, pulling Mercer back to the present.
One hundred and four thousand feet. Nineteen point seven miles up.
The radiation levels were still climbing.
Not dangerous yet—the capsule’s basic shielding was handling it fine. But it was there. Measurable. Real. Exactly where Sarah had predicted it would be if the Van Allen Belts weren’t belts at all, but detection of something much closer.
Something solid.
Something that had an electromagnetic field strong enough to register on instruments designed to detect radiation in the vacuum of space.
Mercer stared at the monitor, watching the numbers climb. Ares astronauts supposedly passed through these belts with nothing but aluminum between them and deadly radiation—a claim that had always felt like a story told to children. Modern FASE still hadn’t solved the radiation problem, they said. Still couldn’t get past it. And yet Dr. Marcus Bennett had claimed they’d destroyed the technology, as if you could accidentally lose the ability to do something you’d done six times.
The old texts Sarah had shown him whispered a different answer. Forbidden books that spoke of a firmament, a solid barrier between the waters above and the waters below, a boundary set by a Creator who’d made the world with intention and purpose and love. Not a zone of trapped particles. Not a magnetic field. A ceiling.
“You’re not belts,” Mercer said to the radiation readings. “You’re not zones of trapped particles in a magnetic field. You’re something else. Something closer. Something real.”
The monitor beeped its agreement.
Outside the viewport, the stars burned with steady, unblinking intensity. The sky was black as void. The Earth curved below with that wrong, too-gentle arc that made his trained pilot’s eye itch with wrongness.
And somewhere above him, maybe forty miles away, maybe less, something was generating an electromagnetic field strong enough to register on his instruments.
Something the rockets always curved away from.
Something Ares had claimed to pass through but couldn’t have.
Something that had been there all along, hiding in plain sight, protected by lies and misdirection and the simple fact that nobody ever went straight up to check.
Mercer increased thrust.
The rocket climbed toward the source of the radiation, toward the boundary that wasn’t supposed to exist, toward the ceiling of the world.
The monitor kept beeping.
And Mercer kept climbing.
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.