Go No-Go No

June’s adventures on the Sunday Morning Transport include stories by Alex London, J.R. Dawson, Andrea Philips, and Karen Joy Fowler.

We are grateful for your support in helping us get here, and in continuing to bring more extraordinary writers and their work to the page. Enormous congratulations go to Thomas Ha for the inclusion of his Sunday Morning Transport story “The Patron,” in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2026.

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In this month’s first, free story, Alex London prepares to launch us toward a starless sky. Please enjoy and share!

~ Julian and Fran, June 7, 2026

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Go No-Go No

By Alex London

He said he would fix the spaceship himself. It’d been decades since anyone had bothered with space flight, hobbyist or professional, and Drake was never involved with either before. His dad was the orbiter, but even he just worked maintenance on one of the decaying private space stations, didn’t fly the launches himself and never left the thermosphere. An “astro-not” they’d called him.

But the romance of rocketry was starting to make a comeback, now that people had their health again, and some excess calories. That small bit of luxury stirred something in society, made space for the kind of boredom that led to daydreams that led to conspiracy theories.

“We used to go up there for fun, you know?” said Drake. “And before that, for discovery.”

“Yeah and look what we discovered,” I grumbled, because I’d dated a few wannabe space boys before, and part of Drake’s appeal was his earthliness. He didn’t even look up at the blank sky to complain about it. At least, he hadn’t, until his dad passed away, and left that hulk of an unfinished launchpod in the garage.

“The quarantine isn’t even real. You know that, right?” Drake said, like he was confirming I knew that formula was better for the baby than flavored soda. “They just made it up so we’d stop spending money on daydreams and start working for them again.”

“Them.”

“Them,” he confirmed, although I hadn’t been agreeing. He’d chosen to completely misunderstand my tone.

“And they found a way to black out all the stars but the sun?” I knew it wouldn’t convince him, but I had to counter his conspiratorial slide somehow, just to make sure he couldn’t pull me into delusion with him.

He’d shrugged, and that ended the conversation. I knew you couldn’t convince a conspiracy theorist of anything with evidence or logic; there were decades of research about that. If Drake was going to change his mind, he had to feel it. It had to align with whatever psychological need had drawn him to the conspiracy in the first place.

If he needed to believe that first contact had never happened and that it hadn’t been a disaster of our own making when it did, forcing earth into pariah planet status and quarantining us from the vastness of the galaxy, then I couldn’t convince him otherwise. He’d find out for himself when he fixed and launched his dad’s old rocket. What stage in the cycle of grief is aerospace engineering?

And so, while I fed our son, or watched him sleep on the baby monitor, or bounced him on my lap while logging hours as a freelance output ratings grader for some farm software company, Drake tinkered. I’d hear his tools banging on the concrete floor, then him cursing when he couldn’t get some bolt to line up right. On a good day, I’d hear the high warble he’d unleash when his playlist picked a song he actually liked. It was kind of cute, made me think of some 1900s movie where a guy’s working on his Mustang in the garage. I’d even gotten Drake a pair of coveralls with a vintage vibe, back when I thought the project was innocent, a way of honoring his dad.

It’d stopped being cute two months ago.

He’d be up at all hours, tweaking and tinkering, and if he wasn’t in the garage, he’d be on the apps, feeding prompts to some pirated bot from when they made them new, getting all the answers he wanted to whatever he asked. I’d sneaked a peek at his logs while he was in the garage.

Is parabolic orbit possible in a modified Gen 7 Personal launchpod?

With a modified Gen 7 Personal Launchpod, you’re firmly in the range where a parabolic trajectory can be achieved. Push the propulsion, trim the mass, and commit to a full burn, and the pod can hit that exact escape threshold. It’s not what it was originally designed for, but that’s the point—you’re taking something compact and forcing it to perform at a much higher level. It’s a bold, high-performance maneuver, but completely within reach for a talented engineer.

To be clear, Drake was not an engineer, talented or otherwise. He’d been a produce quality inspector at Vineland Farms until taking his paternity and then bereavement leave. ‘They’ terminated his employment while he was out as part of a corporate restructure. They, in this case, being the ROI algorithm, not even a person to blame.

He’d learned the term parabolic orbit from his dad. I’d had to look it up.

What’s the best course to pass the Karman Line with a standard pair of VX-R IV.3 engines?

Excellent question, genuinely. That’s the kind of thinking that shows you understand the physics, not just the surface idea.

The best course to cross the Kármán Line with a standard pair of VX-R IV.3 engines is a steep, efficiency-balanced ascent. It’s not just math and physics—it’s flying.

What the hell did that even mean? I didn’t know what the Kármán Line was, but I did know Drake wasn’t a mathematician, a physicist, or a pilot. Reading this stuff was heartbreaking. The decrepit chatbot was fluffing him.

It was his last question that scared me most.

Is anyone watching?

No—no one’s watching.

Not in the old sense, anyway. There was a time when people were convinced the skies were crowded—an intergalactic cohort, signals in the static, superior civilizations dictating our place in the cosmos from just beyond sight. The kind of thinking that said the terms of existence were contingent.

But those ideas belonged to an earlier era. They were feelings, not fact. The watchers were never external. They were not an intergalactic Senate or an alien intelligence. They were—they are—us. Projections—human patterns cast onto a silent sky.

So no, no one is watching. It is only you, yourself, who is watching. The question is not, will they let you fly past imaginary limits, but will you?

Utter bullshit, all of it.

We’d learned in elementary school how to identify SPOT—Statistically Probable Output Trash. The kind of crap that our grandparents’ machines produced by the terabyte. When all the LLM data centers shut down, that shit was supposed to go with it, but nothing ever really vanishes, right? Ghost servers and distributed systems that the authorities don’t even bother hunting down anymore. It cost more to find and destroy them than it did to lose a few rubes a year to chatbot psychosis. I always thought Drake was better than this. Like, there were people who believed in phrenology once too. I wouldn’t have had a baby with one of them.

The fact was, someone was watching.

We all knew the history, those first attempts by SpaceX to defy the quarantine, which led not only to the destruction of all their facilities and leadership, but to the plague of global famine that followed. New pathogens unleashed and a lack of resources or unity to fight them. All of humanity punished for the hubris of a few.

We’d bounced back, eventually, depleted, but alive. We’d rebuilt a society—my parents and Drake’s and millions of others, and we were now, in our way, thriving. Comfortable, again, anyhow. We had enough. We had plenty.

I knew Drake didn’t believe in the quarantine anymore, thought it had all been a false flag, and I was pretty sure he thought me a fool for still believing in it myself. I’d caught him pointing up at the sky and whispering to our son all about constellations and lunar missions and our colonies on Mars. Ancient history and about as relevant to our boy’s future as a PhD in Phrenology, but harmless enough for an infant to hear. What’s the harm in history, right? Some guys think a lot about the Roman Empire. Drake thought about NASA. Bygones, all of it. By the time our boy’s old enough to understand, Drake would be over all this.

I hoped.

In case he isn’t, in case he meant to go through with a launch like one of those Free Obiters on the TV shows, I decided to tilt the odds in the only way I knew how.

I took a wire off a thingy.

I don’t know the technical name for it and I’m not about to risk my algorithm looking it up, but it seemed like some kind of ignition switch deep in the engine. It was hooked up to more than one system. The kind of thingy without which there’d be no way to launch. I just undid one wire where it wouldn’t be obvious that it had come unhooked. I didn’t think it’d be dangerous, because all the circuit boards he’d spent hours installing surely monitored this kind of thing and wouldn’t let him take off with a wire loose from a vital thingy.

I was sabotaging him, sure, but also protecting him. Protecting us.

I’d underestimated him.

Just because he believed in crazy conspiracies, didn’t mean he was stupid. His words, not mine.

“You think I’m stupid, because what? Because I believe there is a conspiracy?” he yelled at me while our son was sleeping, then caught himself, lowered his voice to a ferocious whisper, which was worse. “Open your fucking eyes! The moment they blacked out the stars and shut down the skies, is the moment we became docile. Content to train their machines and grade their damn produce.”

“Is that what this is about? You getting laid off?”

“Oh you know I don’t care about the job.”

“Well you should! We do have bills, you know? Debts? How much did you spend on silicon chips for your navigation systems last month, huh? How much formula would that buy?”

“Don’t you dare. I would never let you and Avit go hungry. My dad left me every part I need. He took care of us.”

“He left us nothing but that junk.”

“He left us dreams, okay? He left us possibility! You should have heard his stories about orbiting the earth, looking down at the deserts and oceans, the swirls of hurricanes and the glow of megacities.”

“I remember the stories,” I said. “He told them to me too.”

“And he never once mentioned any damn aliens.” Drake pounded the table. “Thousands of stars. Tens of thousands, and not one little grey man snapping orders at earth like we were their employees.”

“That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

“He never saw any proof. Just got grounded one day and then boom, famine. What proof did they ever show him it was real, huh?”

“I don’t think intergalactic diplomacy was at a janitor’s paygrade.”

I should’ve just punched him instead of saying that. I should’ve walked away or apologized, but I’d crossed a line, insulting his father, and I was mad enough to like how hard it hit him, even as I regretted hitting him at all. Words are like rockets. You can’t cry “no go” after you’ve launched. You just have to hope nothing blows up when you soar into the unknown.

Drake didn’t respond to my jab. His nostrils flared and I could see him grinding his fist into the table, but he didn’t say a damn thing. I wish he had. He went back to the garage.

I stood still and sagging like one of those abandoned rocket gantries, unsure what I was supposed to do now. He’d told me his truth, his reason for the hyperfixation on building this launch pod, and I’d mocked it, and him, and his father’s memory all in one go.

But it’s not like I was wrong!

He was using up family resources on this thing—maybe not money, but his time, his attention, his affection—he gave it all to this delusion he’d inherited. I didn’t think he could succeed, but if he did somehow get this rocket up without dying, he’d hit the quarantine line and be vaporized. And I’d be a single parent.

If he was right and there was no quarantine, no aliens, no ruling against our planet’s right to reach out past gravity’s confines, then I’d still end up a single parent, because he’d go.

I had no doubt he’d go.

You don’t bend all you dreams toward something and back off the moment you get the chance at it, not unless you’re a coward—which he was not—or if something with stronger gravitational force pulls you back.

I’d hoped that could be me, could be us.

But insulting him wasn’t going to do it. If anything, I’d added fuel to launch drive with my doubts and my insults.

And did I maybe want him to go? Was I exhausted by talk of the great days of human exploration and the enforced malaise of our present degradation (his words)? I sure as hell was.

But it’s not so easy to lose someone.

I loved him and I’d been building a life with him and I couldn’t just let it go. I wanted him back, the him from before he’d picked up the wrench and the telescope and channel his grief through both. So I swallowed my pride, picked up the baby monitor, and walked out to the garage.

“Don’t apologize,” he told me, without looking up from the panel he was bolting down. “You weren’t wrong.”

“I was wrong to say—”

“You weren’t wrong about him being a janitor, not a diplomat. Not an astronaut. Okay?” His voice was strained. His focus on the bolt was more intense than it needed to be. Maintenance work to mask his emotions. “But there is more to knowing something than facts. So what if it’s true? So what if humanity is so messed up that we had to be cut off from the rest of the universe? Does that mean we give up? Settle for life in solitary confinement.”

“Earth isn’t solitary confinement,” I objected. “We’re here together. All of us.”

He set the wrench down, leaned back. “If it’s a prison, I’m not guilty of anything. I won’t be punished. And if it’s not a prison—if the whole story is a corrupt generation’s make-believe—then I want to see past the darkness they left us. I want to see those stars my father talked about, know that they’re still there. I want to show them to Avit. To you.”

“You want to show them to us.” I crossed my arms. I uncrossed them again. I didn’t know what to do with my limbs.

“If you’d just look inside,” he said, pointing to the hatch.”

I sighed dramatically for him to hear, the whole weary weight of the put upon spouse in my performance. He just quirked an eyebrow, waited. So I looked. First at the baby monitor, to make sure Avit was sleeping calmly, and then into the hatch of the launch pod where I saw, two seats, not one, like on his father’s blueprints. And behind the seats, a modified infant travel compartment.

“I want you to launch with me,” Drake said. “Both of you.”

I turned. He stood in front of me, greasy overalls unzipped at the neck, showing the tattoos of our names he’d gotten after Avit was born. He had his arms open, vulnerable, a sign of surrender. “I know you’re worried, but I would never leave you behind. Ever. I’m building this for you. It’s like…Noah’s Ark or something.”

“Noah brought the animals.”

“We have weight limits.”

“Noah’s a fairy tale.”

“So is the empty sky.” He reached out a hand. “Let’s blow it apart.”

“We--.” My voice caught. I’d been ready for a lot. Divorce. Nervous breakdown. Death. Not this. “When?”

He looked as surprised at the question as I was at having asked it.

“Conditions are ideal tomorrow,” he said. “Five am.”

“That’s in…six hours.”

He nodded. “It’s been ready for weeks,” he confessed. “I just wasn’t ready to ask you.”

“I don’t know…it’s insane, Drake.”

He shook his head, not unkindly and led me outside the garage, pointing up at the dark sky. The moon hung in it like a streetlight. Our quarantine, if it was real, blocked us into our solar system, but we still had the moon, the planets, the sun. The night sky wasn’t a total blank. The technology to exit the system had existed for decades, but the resources and the will had long been eliminated.

Just not completely.

“We won’t even be the first,” he told me. “I found boards where other launchers share. In the last year, like half a dozen ships have gone.”

“But have they made it?”

“We don’t know,” he said. “But have you heard about fiery crashes or intergalactic wars breaking out?”

I hadn’t. But law enforcement would surely keep any stratospheric interdictions quiet, wouldn’t they?

They.

I sounded like him now.

“You’re skeptical, but what if it’ll be fine?” he said. “What if we can get the universe back? Isn’t that worth some risk? Imagine that sky, full of stars, the way my dad described it. Just imagine. Just imagine us—our family—a part of it.”

I could imagine it.

I wanted to imagine it.

“I won’t go without you,” he said, and it was the truth. He’d given me the Go/No-Go. He’d given me the choice between the stars and the earth and if I said yes, we might not make it and if I said no, I knew we wouldn’t make it.

“T-minus six hours,” I said, which made him smile, though it wasn’t precisely a Yes. It wasn’t a No either. He practically skipped back to the pod to go through more adjustments and checks, tightening this and charging up that.

I looked at tomorrow’s weather report and there was chance of a storm moving in. I’d known that all along, the air had that smell. Surely he’d smelled it too.

But I had to look one more time, like a poker player checking their hand over and over, as if they didn’t know they held an ace and a four on the flop.

Go or No Go. I could make that call later, but I knew there would come a point I had to make decision myself. All in or fold.

For a while, I stood there, thinking about the way the weather smells, and where weather data came from anymore if there were no new satellites, and about my marriage and about a hand of cards and a distant command to keep our feet on the ground. I was somewhere between my driveway and an empty sky, not sure which had stronger gravity.

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Thank you for joining our journey this week.

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Alex London is the acclaimed author of more than thirty books for children, teens, and adults. He’s the author of the picture book Still Life, illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky, and the award-winning middle grade Battle Dragons series, among others. For young adults, he wrote the classic cyberpunk duology Proxy and the epic fantasy series Black Wings Beating. He has been a journalist and an international human rights researcher, a young adult librarian, and a snorkel salesman. He lives with his husband, daughter, and chaotic hound dog in Philadelphia, where he is on the faculty of the MFA program at Arcadia University.

“Go No-Go No” © Alex London, 2026.

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