The Superposition of the Shuttle COLUMBIA

The space shuttle broke into thousands of resplendent fragments raining a magnificent fire across the skies of the southwestern states. The still-living bodies of the astronauts approached their origin on the surface at hypersonic speeds, becoming a flaming suborbital pyre of themselves, mingling ash with incandescent airframe fragments, each one manifesting as a separate wishing star.

Meanwhile the orbiter touched down safely at the landing strip at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, 08.47 am local time. The ground-crew technicians, wheeling up stepladders, were amazed to find that the vehicle had survived re-entry. Seeing so many scorched holes on the underside they boggled their eyes like children after some zany Halloween prank.

Both events occurred in uneasy violation of the rules of what could and should happen in any acceptable reality. The space shuttle both fragmented and flew home safely.

Machine pieces stormed across the flatlands, snatched away as smouldering illegal souvenirs. And in parallel the spacecraft proceeded, a stoic migrant goose, to its nesting grounds on the Florida shore. The seven astronauts were found as remnants scattered over Texas and Arkansas and also stepped off the spacecraft to cheers and fanfares at 09.12 am local time, hugged by relieved relatives, backslapped by flabbergasted crew.

When the bifurcation of what happened became clear to those in charge, there was initially, as always, an attempt to conceal the truth. But which part of this unbalanced equation should be hidden from view? The fragments and remains were real enough, and called for some explanation. Literally thousands of videocamera clips existed showing the gleaming tracery of the ruptured vessel in that morning sky. The beauty of that lancing gleam of gold in the morning would brook no easy forgetting.

At the same time these living and breathing astronauts being debriefed, who'd been worried by the terse-lipped sense of crisis, nothing spoken but nothing unspoken either, knew something was up, a position between knowing and unknowing that can't easily be tolerated but sometimes must.

These were years nestling in the cleft of uncertainty. There were weapons of mass destruction that both did and didn't exist, there was an ongoing war that wasn't a war, at the same time a struggle for liberation and an intrusion of brute conquest. An enemy warlord lurked somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. A president who was a close ally and simultaneously a mortal enemy. A chief of desert hordes who was a terrorist monster beyond the pale, and also a man we could do business with.

There was plenty of indeterminacy to be going on with, and the small-scale conundrum of a spacecraft that both exploded and survived at the same time couldn't linger in public consciousness for long. In time that version of events in which the shuttle broke up in the dawn faded, to become an online legend bickered over endlessly in subreddits but never admitted to in any official epistemology. History collapsed back onto a singular track, just as it should.

One morning many years after that bifurcation of reality, Leon Brustwanger, last commander of the Columbia space shuttle, stood in the NASA Mortuary Annex at KSC, looking over the broken remains identified as himself, and praying for the soul of this charred double. These remains had been collected from various sites across the southwest and identified by DNA analysis. They gave off vapor trails from the deep freeze, evoking some smouldering conjunction of fragments just now extracted from a bombsite.

Every year on this anniversary Leon stood, a ridiculous jackass, in mute tribute for this shattered other without knowing precisely why. Mortuary staff sniggered at his solemnity. A signed presidential order admitted him to this place. He supposed the other astronauts had the same paper, but they never presented themselves. The remains of the others lay unmourned in their freezers.

The theological implications of praying for himself over a pull-out tray were above his pay grade. He only felt that he must do it. Paula didn't feel the same way and refused to come with him. His girls didn't even think this other ‘him’, the thing before him now, was real. They said it was part of a ‘false flag deepstate psy-op’, serving God-knows-what ends.

In those twenty-five years since events in the stratosphere had bifurcated, Leon's career had been a clear success: a nominal ascent, chairman of several defense tech and internet startup firms. He’d remained happily married to Paula and was active in his local church leadership. He was a lay deacon now, a near-preacher who could fill in at christenings and funerals if need be. He liked to specialize in animal blessings, officiating in a sort of wedding ceremony in which the pets being paired off sat panting on a pink cushions before being carried away to a discreet stud-room to produce valuable pedigree offspring.

But around a decade ago, his daughters became estranged from him, designating him a reactionary, moving to the Coast where they now lived lives he couldn't even begin to comprehend. Lives of distortion and perversion of the very language itself, tokens of deep subversion of family as provided for in the scripture. There were pronouns and new orifices in these lives of theirs, things so very vile they chilled him to deep-frozen bones where vapors of revulsion vented nebulous and blear.

He thought he saw angels but then he looked and there weren't any.

Now Leon felt he was a scorched broken cadaver on a mortuary tray, dreaming that there was this aging man standing over him. A stranger paunchy and gray, lacking of solace, a stray pet without master, without any blessing.

He looked up to the exterior window of the mortuary and seemed to witness an angel rising. It was the track of a rocket shooting straight to space. The rocket's exhaust drew an arrowshaft of fate, straight and resolute, heading in the opposite direction to that taken by this his body when it descended down to earth all those years ago.