Dalton tried to relax. He even laid down in his cube, eyes shielded from the halogen lights by the partial shadow his presswood desk provided. They were undoubtedly in a code-freeze—that die had been cast—but corporate code security would have questions; post-landing operations and all. And he dreaded anyone coming towards his area.

Maybe a crash would point out some flaw in the design rather than the software. Perhaps a spectacular failure would bring world peace, as the news media would run stories non-stop about who’s fault it was and how the Trillionaire was a fool for thinking he could land on Europa. Yes, bad news might diffuse the zeitgeist for war with Communist China.

Good news (a successful landing) might last for a day, but pinning failure on someone would make news for months. Now he was almost praying for failure.

Please God, do something. This was far outside his norm, but the weight of the world was still in his head, though he could do no more within his power. He thought back to the winning number on the last night, the spin he wanted to lose. Since he had good luck, then he was due for a spell of bad luck now, right? But he knew Chance didn’t work like that.

World War could erupt, and everyone a target. But if; if they found life—multicellular, or even intelligent aliens in our solar system, perhaps World Peace would bloom. Humanity might unite once we establish life, if common. It would be a pattern interrupt slamming into all minds at once. A world-wide synchronicity.

He could do nothing but wait and sit on the charcoal and tan polypropylene carpet tile that provided minimum comfort but maximum utility to the property management company (probably owned by the Trillionaire).

The countdown showed red digits on a black rectangle thrown up on the wallscreen.

L minus 50… His restlessness got the better of him. He left and spoke to someone in the control room. They were all present. Dalton gave a good-luck and thumbs up to the boss but otherwise paced the first floor and waited for the stream like millions of others. It was almost 7 PM east-coast, but 4 PM here, 8 AM the next day in Beijing. Regardless of location, it felt like a minute till midnight on the Doomsday Clock.

In fact, the probe may have already landed on Europa, and reality on another other world took at least forty minutes to hit here.

Dalton went to the break room to get water. While there, he saw they had chamomile tea and got that instead, hoping it would steady his nerves. He took some sips from it and laid back down under his desk. It was sometimes customary to sleep in the office when landings were at a bizarre time. Really, he just wanted to get somewhere with a semblance of safety. He read the news feed and tried to gauge whether the landing was making news, whether maybe some diplomatic solution might be achieved after the strike on the carrier.

He put his phone up above on his desk and sat in silence and sipped. Chamomile’s supposed to reduce anxiety, but sipping herbal tea won’t solve world problems, Dalton thought. God, what are you doing? If you exist, why do you run the world on such narrow margins?

His heart continued to beat too fast for doing nothing. He sipped and breathed and thought and even prayed more. He tried everything to rid himself of this anxiety.

He reached above him blindly for the phone and checked the time. L minus 42. Really? Does time always move this slowly just sitting and worrying? So he did the only thing he knew to do when bored, to calculate the odds. So he worked through the chances of peace if they confirmed life in the next 24 hours. Then the chances of peace if multicellular life. He smirked and thought about the radio broadcast earlier. Yes, what were the chances of world peace if intelligent life were discovered?

And then there’s Mars. There’s always the possibility that there’s only so much attention to go around. The percentage of news stories that will ever be devoted to space exploration might be as low as five percent on landing day. Our share of the news might only supplant Martian share. Maybe the population isn’t interested in space exploration; the Mars landing last year had captured that ten percent of people’s attention at once. Would our discovery make a dent in the news cycle?

Dalton dozed for a minute. He nodded his head once or twice and was in a peaceful state between sleep and wakefulness.

He jumped at the noise in the cube next to him. The Spaniard came back to his computer.

Dalton stirred and coughed loudly, to not surprise Marco. “Hey, are you as nerve-wracked as me?” He said whilst getting up from under his desk.

“Amigo, didn’t know you were there.” Marco said. He was one of the principal data architects and was in high spirits.

“Hey, I looked at one of the other sets of synth training data. I made some changes, but I think we should include it after the landing.”

“What?” Dalton asked. With the looming landing, he hadn’t even looked at his notifications, which were accumulating like barnacles on screen. “That was a bad push, remember?”

“Relax! We’ll use it locally for a purposely bad-data baseline.”

“So you’re going to use my automated RPG?”

“Yes. The boss wanted something in case we found weird life.” Marco said with a smile. “So I pushed the code after I made some changes. Relax, it’s only an option, it might not even get uploaded. Even then, we don’t have to use it, but the AI can include it as if it finds that data less unreasonable.” Marco said. He could see Dalton was flushed and breathing weirdly. “You okay?”

“No. It’s the stress of the landing… and the news… and you scared me for a moment. And now you pushed my funny code.”

Marco now felt pity for the anxiety he put on his co-worker. “I’m sorry, man. I thought it was good stuff. To test how well the AI decides against fantasy creatures.”

“Oh, got it, a baseline. Yes, it could be used for that.” Dalton said and slumped down into his chair. He took a sip of his cooled chamomile tea. Warm, but it wouldn’t scald his throat. He chugged it down, hoping to slow his startled heartbeat.

“I’ll be right back. Need anything from the break-room?”

“Nah, I’m going to watch from my computer if you can join.” Macro said, trying to be friendly and soothe his jittery co-worker.

Another few laps.L-24 minutes the red numbered countdown showed.

Dalton crawled back under his desk. He could not watch the screen, or the clock, or even look at the faces of those who were. Anxiety was bolting through any point of contact with the probe. He drank more of his tea and sat in the half darkness.

Eventually, he had to visit the restroom, and he expected it to be as good as any hiding place. With the countdown, no one would be in either room.

As he returned, he walked within earshot of the operations room. “Touchdown, braking net deployed.” Someone said, but there were no cheers, just silence as the operators still held their breath. They still needed to slow the heavy craft down.

Dalton turned the sharp corner into the breakroom with the white and gray checkered floor. Again. no one was there. Everyone in the building was glued to the landing like a barnacle on a rock.

He got another cup of tea and wiggled the tea-bag string furiously. Numbers were being counted down at big intervals.

“Velocity Halted!” Someone said. Then Dalton heard huge shouts erupted from the operations room. Cheers and congratulations, surely hugs and happy tears.

Dalton was alone in the break room and celebrated in his own way. Here’s a toast to the crazy. He sipped his tea. Who would have thought you could cancel out 1400 km/s velocity with a few retrorockets, a drag chain, and fabulous wheels and brakes?

He raised his tea into the air for no one to see.

Unbelievable. He took a deep breath. We did it—and the Madman Trillionaire paid for it.

The Europa Lander inadvertently came to a halt close to a curious-looking area with odd distortions on the otherwise slate-flat ice. Like ice had covered over crumpled metal. It was solid white, but would be the first of many oddities the craft would detect. The AI busied itself executing on scripted tasks and was not programmed to inspect the surface. The few tests run were self-diagnostics, communications with the Europa Clipper, and pictures of the landing site. As quickly as possible, the probe would blow the landing apparatus off and the pill-shaped probe would melt down into the ice, before the intense radiation of Jupiter fried the electronics.