“How did we not notice this sooner?!” Talyn exclaimed, quickly throwing themself into the co-pilot’s seat and grabbing the controls. “There’s so many! There’s no possible way we could’ve missed this!”

    “I have no idea,” Remy shook his head and stared at the screen in front of him, trying to plot the best course to take that would take them away from the danger. He took a sip of his Starbucks (Hey, they started to donate two years worth of coffee to every space exploring crew for public relations to any crew that wanted it. There was no way Remy was going to pass up that offer.)

“We’re already so deep in that they’re surrounding us on all sides. It really should not have been possible for us not to know, or to get here without crashing in the first place!” Remy shook his head, looking down thoughtfully, “Really the only thing we can do is to turn directly around, but we could crash that way too.”

“That’s exactly what I said earlier!!!” Giovanni exclaimed, before turning to Joan, “I’m an AI programmed to tell you what to do in situations exactly like this, why won’t you listen to me??? Why do you hate me!!!”
    “To be fair, you did try to convince us that Pluto didn’t exist and it was okay to keep going straight even though we would fly right into it.”

“It was one glitch! It’s not my fault I read ‘Pluto is still not a planet’ wrong.”

“Guys not the time!” Thomas exclaimed.

“Uh, speaking of glitch…” Talyn interrupted, sharing a nervous glance with Joan, “We can’t get control of the ship either. We don’t have access.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?!” Remy shouted suddenly, turning away from the mapping screen in front of him, a panicked look covering his face.

“It means we can’t control the ship either!” Joan exclaimed, pressing a multitude of buttons and trying to override the unknown factor that was blocking them, “Giovanni, what’s going on?! I thought you didn’t have control either!”

“I don’t!” Giovanni folded his arms, staring accusingly at Joan, “Don’t you trust me!? If I knew what was going on, I would have already told you.” He turned and pointed to the front window of the ship, “Right now, we are just floating in space. No one has access to any controls at all. Something is preventing us from working anything like that on the ship.”

“Is it a virus? Were we hacked?” Talyn demanded.

Giovanni shook his head, “I cannot see any problems at all. There’s nothing showing up at all. Whatever the problem is, it’s not technological. There’s no glitch. It’s something I wasn’t programmed to check for or deal with, or even know how to recognize it.” He then turned his attention to Thomas and started yelling, “Maybe if you didn’t hate me and listened to me the second I said something was wrong, we wouldn’t be in this situation right now!!!”

“Stop arguing and focus!” Thomas shouted suddenly, his hands shaking slightly, though there was a visible effort to stay calm. He turned to Joan and Tayln, “Joan, you and Talyn keep trying to get control,” To Remy, “You go start getting the ship ready for an emergency lockdown and get everyone safe.”

“And Giovanni, you keep trying to figure out what happened!” Once Thomas had finished giving out orders, everyone went to work. Even Giovanni let his holographic form disappear as he went in search of the problem (though, he couldn’t help but roll his eyes and mutter a few more rude comments before doing so).

Thomas quietly sighed, but his relief was short lived. Though he had managed to make everyone focus on the problem at hand, the life threatening danger was still there right in front of their eyes. He faced the window, holding his breath as he watched a comet fly by their ship only a few hundred feet away. 

Before any real progress could be made, the lights above them all turned red. Alarms began to sound in their ears, and Giovanni returned. However, he was no longer his overdramatic self. The ships emergency mode had been activated, and so he was now a bright red color and was stuck repeating eight simple words over and over.

“Alert. Collision incoming. Take cover immediately; lockdown initiating.”

    Everyone looked at each other in a panic - minus Remy, he had left before the doors were locked to go help the rest of the ship’s crew - and sprinted to their seats, buckling up immediately.

    “Ha ha.. So I guess we’re crashing now…” Joan laughed nervously, still desperately trying to control the ship. Everyone knew by now that the attempts were useless, but it made them feel ever so slightly better to be trying.

    “This was not how I wanted to spend my summer….dying…” Talyn mumbled. They had given up by now on getting the controls back. Instead, their gaze remained locked straight ahead, staring out into open space. 

    “IT’S THERE!” Thomas suddenly screamed, pointing ahead. Sure enough, they now could see what the sensors had picked up before them. Hurtling through space, they all could see the asteroid rapidly growing bigger as it headed directly towards them. All of them, (Save for Giovanni, who was still stuck in emergency mode but had somehow managed to replace some of the words with ‘This happened because you didn’t trust me. Because you hate me. B*tch.”) squeezed their eyes shut as tightly as possible. None of them wanting to see their end with their own eyes.

    But the moments passed. The alarms remained on, and they could still see the flashing red lights from behind closed eyes… But no impact came. Nothing else changed.

    It was Thomas who gained the bravery to look first. He opened his eyes slowly, scared that the second he did, he’d see the asteroid hitting them. 

    Instead, he saw two halves of them, passing by on each side of the ship… 

    Split perfectly down the middle.

    Thomas quickly got out of his seat, and ran over to the front of the room, staring out in complete and utter shock at the sight in front of him. Not a single spec had managed to hit them… Which was impossible. There was no way that should have happened. He stared out, too amazed to care to look at anything else.

    But then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw it. A glimpse of purple, and a glowing face. Their eyes were perfectly white, but Thomas could tell that they were staring right back at him. A worried, yet blank expression, and a robe that blended into the universe behind them almost perfectly. But the most stunning feature was the faded halo around their head, golden yet glowing with a beautiful violet.

    But within the time Thomas took to blink, they were gone. Vanished, as though they had never existed in the first place. He shook his head, looking back at the same spot. But no one was there.

    He didn’t even notice that the alarms had ceased blaring and the lights had returned to normal until he felt a hand on his shoulder. He quickly turned to face whoever it was, and saw Joan’s relieved face.

    “We made it.”

    “What just happened??”

    “I have control of the ship again!” Everyone turned around and saw Giovanni smiling proudly, “Whatever the problem was, it’s gone. And all asteroids in our path? They’re gone.”

    “They’re just gone?” Talyn demanded, looking at Giovanni as though he were crazy, “What do you mean, they’re gone? Those don’t just disappear!”

    “Aside from the one that just almost hit us - that one is behind us - they disappeared just like how suddenly they appeared,” Giovanni explained, frowning, “The sensors seemed to have glitched, and when they came back online, they were all gone. I don’t know what happened, nothing I was programmed with has any reasoning for this at all.”

    “That makes no sense!” Joan exclaimed, before he turned to Thomas, ready to ask him what was wrong with Giovanni. But he stopped, “Dude, you okay?”

    “Huh?” Thomas snapped back into reality, looking away from the window, “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.” 

    “Um, what just happened? Why aren’t we dead?”

The four turned to look at the door, only to see Remy had returned, his sunglasses pulled down and a confused expression glued on his face.

    “I…” Thomas turned back to where he had seen the mysterious figure, before returning his gaze to Remy.

    “I really don’t know.”