N O M I N A L

Siren 1 lifted off successfully on a sunlit June morning.

The gawping crowds at the Cape craned to watch it plume like an angel as it rose into Heaven itself.

All systems were nominal and the critical things that had to happen happened.

The three astronauts were healthy, effective and very much in control of this gargantuan rocket hurtling into all our tomorrows.

It was perfection in a tin.

The excess parts fell away, boosters thrusted, apogee was reached and the sextant was set for Ceres the strange planetoid between the planets.

It was a monumental mission, exactly one hundred years after the inspiratinal Apollo Moon landing and that one small step in the dust.

In that time the lunar surface had been colonized with villages, Mars had it's first cathedral and Ceres was to give up it's own cosmic mysteries as Mankind crawled further and further over the barren sands of the solar system.

It was Christmas Day when they landed on Ceres like Santa Claus and planted a small holographic fir tree decorated with fairy lights for the whole world to wonder at.

"We even left some reindeer food!" laughed the flight commander. 

It was a global holiday triumph and the three-person crew alighted the dwarf planet without a hitch and set the compass for a glorious return home.

All the sensors back at Control were beeping soundly. Breathing, heartbeat, brain pattern. The trio were healthy and bright.

So after a textbook splashdown in the Pacific there was inconceivable and unbearable worldwide shock when the re-entry capsule was found to be completely empty.

There was simply no sign of the three astronauts yet the sensors said they were still on board.

They were still breathing somewhere, just not here.

It didn't make any sense.

Where the hell were they?

They had vanished into thin air.

After a month of widening oceanic searches for their bodies, NASA asset recovery and intense forensic research of the spacecraft, there was nothing.

Yet the life support sensors kept on beeping. 

After another year and ignoring the sensors, the three astronauts were pronounced dead.

The capsule was decommissioned and trucked along an empty freeway to the Smithsonian as a monument to their courage in the vast Hanger of Heroes.

Crowds flocked to the sad exhibit, eager to touch it's cold titanium shell and somehow in so doing solve the mystery of the occupants' eerie disappearance.

Due to the popularity of the Siren it was decided, sometime later, to install the sensor array as well, which was still functioning, cruelly displaying the health of the crew as completely normal.

A seemingly pitiless decision, to allow the public to see that the three were really still alive, proved incredibly popular and over the years vast queues slowly trudged to stare at the morbid monitors for the briefest of moments and contemplate the unknowable.

It was only the very keenest of sensibilities visiting, perhaps just one in a million, who got the merest if inklings that someone was still on board the Siren's capsule, but the feeling was usually so slight that they ignored it.

If they had persisted and properly divined the dreadful aura within, they would had seen the pitiful crew screaming and frantically banging on the port-holes, trapped as invisible phantoms forever in a cosmic temporal shift triggered by Ceres and imprisoned as spirits in the capsule for all eternity, their insane cry reaching a fever-pitch:

"For Gods sake, we are still inside!"