The Emotional Dilemma of Depicting Io

I’m listening to my own voiceover for Io and I’m confronted with this huge dilemma: If I’m being true to life, I can’t take a listener “safely” though the atmosphere of Io, the experience would be terrifying, there's nothing serine or comforting about this moon, and a visitor would definitely not hypothetically make it without ten minutes of backstory detailing how NASA landed a rescue ship on the surface of a volcano during a radiation storm to save this person— speaking of which, why are they even there to begin with? I can put a listener on Titan and Enceladus "safely" but I feel like on Io, where things are traumatic, there has to be a reason. Without it, I (the narrator) would be aware of the doomed fate of the listener-- And while aware, choose to calmly tell them about their surroundings like Morgan Freedman's psycopathic cousin. So I came up with this story to confront the hopelessness and terror of this piece in a way that is more meaningful and intentional rather than strictly harrowing.

Without this being explicit, in my mind the listener is an astronaut who is presumed to be dead on Io after an emergency during exploratory mission. Mission control is trying to keep the listener alive long enough for rescue by directing her away from deadly missteps. This is conveyed though shouted, angry directives that would shock the astronaut into action that could save her life. Midway though the piece, Jupiter’s radiation belt cuts transmission with the listener. This is a realistically unpredictable occurrence that would make it impossible for a ship to rescue the astronaut because without transmission they have no way of knowing where she is, and even if they did they would have no navigation to get to that place. As the voiceover becomes less and less predictable, the tone of the voice darkens into a tearful sadness as it appears to realize the futility of rescue without navigation given the deadliness of Io. The woman from mission control attempts to draw the astronaut’s mind away from the descending lava storm by directing her attention to the beauty of the moon as the freezing night falls over the moonscape, collapsing the atmosphere and drawing the sound from the headphones of the listener.

The story is told in an entirely abstract way though the tone of the voiceover, there would be no literal cues as to what is going on—because mission control and the astronaut would both already know. The story is still consistent, and doesn’t shirk from the horror, but this way of telling it takes away the problematic notion that the voiceover knows the fate of the listener before its too late to do anything and chooses to just talk about geology. Here, there’s a reason she’s talking about it.

Also I’ve decided in my head they’re all women. The NASA scientists, the astronauts, the moons, the planets, and the listener characters. Not explicitly, except when I refer to the moons as “sisters” but for some reason embroidering the the work with my identity as a woman—or even just painting a giant powerful moon as a woman-- makes things feel more meaningful to me.