A number of years ago, I was contacted by Bill Orkney at NASA, who wanted to know if I would be interested in being the agency’s semi-official chronicler of the weird phenomenon/prodigy/debacle known as the “Robot Alien Prophet.” (Hereinafter, “the R.A.P.”) Of course I knew who that was — like many people, I had avidly followed the remarkable story of the child who had not only stowed away on, but inadvertently launched, a NASA spacecraft, and then spent five formative years in space. I was given access to primary materials and allowed to archive them for posterity and, where possible, to satisfy the public curiosity.

Of course, there are many things as to which the public curiosity will have to wait. No doubt NASA has long since patched the security holes that enabled a 10-year-old child to disappear into space, but they are not taking any chances. And the R.A.P., having been catapulted into a strange kind of worldwide celebrity, whose moves and moods were as religiously cataloged as those of a zoo’s marquee panda, is quite uninterested in more personal details of that difficult journey escaping into the ether.

But as we talked over many months, a story did emerge that the R.A.P. was willing to share — or at least tolerate me sharing. It was the story of the R.A.P.’s father, Steven M., a NASA engineer and hobbyist musician who wrote songs to comfort his weightless child in space.

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The records show that Mission Control, after a frantic forty minutes of figuring out what had happened and how the Daedalus had launched, called Steven and the R.A.P.’s mother Lucy at home and dragged them, confused and still half-sunk in predawn slumber, into a patched-through conversation, first with the mission commander in Houston, and then with their terrified child, who was crushed into a too-large couch and rocketing out of the atmosphere at 8 miles per second:

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Steven M.: Baby? Baby, can you hear me? Tony, what’s —

M.C.: There’s probably a short delay, hang on —

[redacted] : Dad! Dad!

Steven M.: Hey Panda Bear, Dad’s here, kiddo, what’s —[sotto voce] Jesus, what the f….

[redacted] : Dad! Mom! I’m sorry. It was a mistake — I’m sorry — I want to come home! I’m sorry!

Lucy M.: Sweetie, we’re, they’re working on it —

[redacted] : I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I was mad about the [unintelligible], but now I’m [unintelligible] —

[heavy radio static]

Steven M.: Hey kiddo, are you there? Tony, for f***’s sake….

M.C.: Hang on, Steve, we’re getting some interference, it’s —

[redacted]: —om! Dad! I’m —

Lucy M.: We’re here, honey —

Steven M.: Hey Panda, listen up, okay? We’re with you. There are gonna be times when you can’t hear us, but even during those times, we’re always with you, okay? We’re always here. We’ll get you home soon.

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Shortly thereafter, the transcript ends; the Daedalus’s communications went silent for an hour or so due to unusual radiation from aberrant sunspot patterns. Steven, with nothing else to do but go crazy, grabbed a laptop and a ukulele and a child’s accordion and dashed off a short song to his child, a lullaby, reminding him that “I’m with you always, even when you’re far from home.” Later, he sent a typed message to “remember what we talked about,” accompanied by a short recording of the R.A.P. and Steven looking at an oscilloscope and talking about the transformation of sound waves into electrical signals. The digital recordings winged their way slowly to the Daedalus, downloading as radiation permitted, but eventually making it through.

R.A.P. told me a little about that first night and day, mostly out of contact with Earth, listening to Steven’s messages over and over again, eventually drifting in and out of sleep, the lullaby doing as much work as possible under the circumstances. The Daedalus sailed quietly through the dark. Eventually acceleration was reduced, the straps on the restraining couch were released, and the R.A.P. was able to move around the cabin.

There were no immediate survival concerns; indeed, the Daedalus was heavily over-provisioned, as the stores and energy supplies were intended for seven astronauts. After several weeks of excruciating boredom, fear, and sadness, the R.A.P. (already something of an electronics hobbyist, even at 10) began scavenging electronic components from the ship to make a crude synthesizer. (I have not been able to confirm whether Steven sent the R.A.P. a schematic, or whether the R.A.P. went methodically through the ship’s manuals to find the right parts.)

Of course, the Daedalus was a profoundly complex machine with redundancies upon the redundancies, so a few nicked components wasn’t really a problem. Nonetheless, the ship’s computer reported the missing parts to Mission Control (as it was programmed to do), and it emerged that the R.A.P. was making music of a kind on the ship — or, at least, a skronking, squalling set of pulses and beeps that could charitably be called music (and might have been welcome in the ‘80s avant-garde scene in New York).

After that it was off to the races. During the day the R.A.P. was getting a certain kind of unconventional but rigorous science education, with the original mission crew (and other NASA scientists and engineers) acting as tutors and guiding the R.A.P. through most of the experiments that were supposed to be carried out in the first few years of the Daedalus’ journey. (If you are wondering whether they experienced anger and jealousy, whether they struggled with the task of teaching a child who had robbed them of what was, for most, the greatest opportunity for glory and novel experience most of them would ever be presented with… all I can tell you is that each did what they were called to do, and uniformly they told me in interviews that they considered both the mission and the task of caring for the R.A.P. to be more important than themselves. Whatever else that noble sentiment was alloyed with, they kept it to themselves, or perhaps shared it with their spouses, late at night. But not with me.)

At night, Steven and the R.A.P. exchanged music. Steven taught the R.A.P. basic music theory and programming, and NASA engineers, after some initial resistance, were persuaded to sacrifice one of the ship’s ruggedized laptops to an upload of some basic music production software. The R.A.P. cannibalized the mission crew’s carefully curated music library for samples and, in lieu of singing, developed a primitive voice synthesizer program (that, over time, grew a great deal less primitive).

Of course, meanwhile, NASA officials were working to turn the ship around as fast as possible. But this was not a simple task. By default, the Daedalus was programmed for a twelve-year mission out to the outer planets and back. And in any event, plotting a safe turnaround course was no simple matter. Any risk to the R.A.P. was considered politically unacceptable, and engineers and officials debated course corrections for nearly three months, at which point the delay in, and interference to, signals between Earth and the ship rendered remote piloting potentially risky. Of course the R.A.P. was obviously not a pilot, and top officials were adamant that a young child not be given direct control of the ship.

The team in charge ultimately settled on having the ship pilot itself automatically, with a reprogrammed route. But even that was not simple. The vast majority of the Daedalus’s fuel was used getting her off the planet, and the rest of the trip was carefully programmed to minimize fuel use and take advantage of (a) solar sail technology and (b) the gravity of orbiting bodies to do a lot of the heavy lifting. The easiest course would have been to intercept with Mars and use the planet’s gravity to turn the Daedalus around, but the mission had not been planned with such a move in mind, and Mars was on the other side of the sun as the RAP approached its orbit. Of course, it was at least theoretically possible to just U-turn the ship by burning off fuel, but there was some concern that if the calculations were off, there would not be enough fuel left for corrections. Somewhat paradoxically, it was eventually decided, the Daedalus would have to go further into space in order to be economically and safely turned around. The ship would be carefully threaded through the close side of the asteroid belt and then turned in order to meet up again with Mars, which would slingshot it home to Earth. Overall, the trip would take more than five years.

The voyage was necessarily an alienating one — the R.A.P. would say in the literal sense of turning someone into an alien. This is not far from the truth. As the ship got farther and farther from Earth, communications became more sporadic and difficult. The R.A.P. spent long, lonely hours on the ship with no communication with others at all. The toll that isolation takes on, for example, adult prisoners, is well-known and well-studied, to the point that solitary confinement is now considered by some to be a form of cruelty. We can only imagine the changes wrought on a child in the formative years between 10 and 15.

Moreover, the R.A.P. become an overnight celebrity, and NASA experimented with providing the R.A.P. access to social media accounts to communicate with other children and other curious onlookers — an experiment that was, in hindsight, determined to be a mistake. The communications from the public ranged from strange cultlike devotion to inappropriate sexual content to obvious attempts to leverage the R.A.P. for political points to sheer viciousness — all the usual suspects of online communication, but with practically none of the ordinary warmth of offline human interaction to balance it out. It was the online experiment turned up to eleven.

And, of course, there was the physical environment. On the one hand, out the Daedalus’s portholes the R.A.P. saw new things human eyes had never before looked on directly. On the other hand, except for stargazing, the R.A.P.’s vision was for the most part confined to a distance of perhaps a dozen meters, from one end of a living compartment to another.

The R.A.P. would also like me to point out that one of the known risks of the Daedalus mission was that the astronauts would be exposed to years-long doses of deep-space radiation. While the ship was designed with this problem in mind and heavily shielded, it was not designed with a developing child’s DNA in mind. The R.A.P. has received multiple clean bills of health since returning to Earth; nonetheless, as the R.A.P. puts it, “there is at least some possibility that my foundational roadmap as an organism has been rewritten; I am mutated; I am no longer fully human. We have to at least consider that possibility.” We’ve had some contentious discussions about this (among other things, I question whether, for example, children born near Chernobyl or Fukushima would consent to being called “no longer fully human” just because radiation has introduced errors into their biological code), but as a chronicler I present you the R.A.P.’s position.

One of the few lifelines to sanity and ongoing human contact available were the constant messages from Steven and Lucy. Relevant to this project, Steven and the R.A.P. exchanged dozens of songs over the years. This musical back and forth covered not only a wide amount of musical ground (with the R.A.P. tending toward more electronic, synthesized sounds, and Steven tending toward more acoustic — and highly imperfect — sounds), but a broad range of philosophical topics. One of Steven’s traits as a parent (for better and, possibly, for worse) was to always speak to the R.A.P. as, if not an adult, then a fully-realized human being who could grapple with difficult and paradoxical ideas. These ideas were presented in Steven’s own idiosyncratic voice (both in the sense of his peculiar lyrical mind and his rather non-professional vocal presentation). The R.A.P., faced with a barrage of adult ideas, often took refuge in irony, puckish joking, and “sang” in a wide variety of synthesized voices that frankly seem intended to make it hard to pin down where, if anywhere, the real R.A.P. was.

The songs presented here are all in the form of call-and-response pairs — a song by Steven that prompted a response from the R.A.P., or vice versa — a curation choice that attempts to reflect their complex relationship and the difference in communication styles. “The Robot Does Not Want to Brush His Teeth,” for example, is the R.A.P.’s childish boundary-pushing around the fact that literally no one could enforce tooth brushing, bedtime, study, or anything else. “Anarchy (But Parenting),” Steven’s response, is at once an explanation of why parents enforce rules with their children, a discourse on 20th century anarchist thought, and perhaps a wry acknowledgement that he only has the power to enforce rules that the R.A.P. grants (which is, itself, a further discourse on anarchism).

Other pairs similarly reflect Steven’s valiant but largely helpless attempts to aid the R.A.P.’s fumbling (and highly mediated) approaches toward adulthood and understanding a world that, more so even than for most teenagers, seemed distant and confusing. “Butterfly Weird” and “I Hope You’re a Bum” deal with the desire to be liked and conform to social norms; “What I Want to Know Is” and “Don’t Ask Me (About Sex)” candidly reflect the inability of a parent to pass on any kind of sexual wisdom or morality to an adolescent child. “There’s Nothing to Have” and “Lift Ev’ry Vox and Sing” arose out of a series of contentious chats between father and child about the Black Lives Matter movement; the former demonstrates Steven’s adult cynicism (if not despair) about the possibility of coming to moral conclusions; in response, the R.A.P. recorded a robot-voiced, science fictional, but respectful rendition of a venerable civil rights anthem. NASA logs indicate they didn’t exchange messages for eight days after that. Some chasms are hard for love to pass.

After that, the philosophy largely drains away from their musical messages to one another, which are mostly instrumental. The messages also became sparser; during the final year of the R.A.P.’s voyage, Steven was diagnosed with throat and lung cancer. It quickly became clear that the R.A.P. would not return to Earth in time to see Steven alive again. “Migrating Stars,” Steven’s final musical message, contains no words at all. By that time perhaps there was not much to say, and Steven, in any event, could no longer physically say it. The R.A.P.’s last two songs, one (“Sun-Faced Buddha, Moon-Faced Buddha”) sent to Steven before his death, and the other (“Whalesong Between the Galactic Clusters”) written after receiving the final news of Steven’s death, are similarly wordless tone poem of mourning.

Ultimately, these long-distance love letters between parent and child are frustrating and incomplete, as they must be. When the two musicians are simply playing for each other, they seem to represent a clear, pure signal of affection and respect that carries across the vast emptiness between people. When they try to communicate in words in ideas, the transmissions seem staticky, poorly-received, incompatible. Perhaps the lesson is that shared ideas are the least and weakest of human bonds, the slimmest connections. I don’t know. I’m a parent myself now, and I often seem to be screaming through a plexiglass wall to my children — they can barely hear me, but I can clearly see their disdain. They have to find their own way. As Bowie once said, “They’re immune to your consultations.”

The R.A.P. has, of course, long since returned to Earth. The readjustment has been rocky (the very best therapeutic care notwithstanding), and the R.A.P. is a difficult person to deal with — as the full name predicts, both alien in perspective and subject to the occasional Jeremiac whirlwind of indignation. We are, nonetheless, friends, and I am very proud to present several of the R.A.P.’s other works on this website. I am, of course, extremely grateful to NASA and the R.A.P. for allowing me the opportunity to present, for the first time, this selection of the R.A.P.’s early work, a window into, to say the least, a strange and wonderful childhood.