The Echo

by James Smythe

  ‘The air in the other suit, that’s going to help you breathe for longer,’ he says. ‘So you have to move this one to your suit.’

  ‘How long do I have?’ she asks.

  ‘Long enough. We’ll do this, okay? I’ll talk you through it.’

  ‘What happens then? When I can breathe again?’

  He looks at me, and he lies. ‘Then we come and get you,’ he says. ‘We have to sort this first. We’re close to working out how to get you out of there.’ I want to ask her what the anomaly feels like, really feels like: to take off her glove and touch it. I want to ask her to get a sample of it, to carve or dig at it, to see what she can do. I want her to help us, because we might not get another chance if she dies. Who will willingly send another person behind that wall? To test it, to see what they can find? I wonder if I am a bad person for thinking of science now, rather than Inna. Tomas would have an answer to that question, I’m sure.

  ‘You only have one shot at this,’ Wallace says. ‘We want to get your camera working first. Can you reach up? I want to see if it’s broken, or just fazed. There’s a button on the front of the helmet, like a depression. Press it.’ She does: on one of the little screens, her face appears, crackling through static. ‘Excellent,’ Wallace says. ‘We’ve got you.’ She smiles a little. Like she feels that this is putting her back towards normality. ‘Now, on Tobi’s body.’ He pauses; then continues. ‘You need to get the oxygen tank, find the cable that runs through to the back of the helmet. You know which cable it is?’ he asks, and we watch her pawing at the suit ineffectually. She stumbles on the cable by luck rather than judgment. ‘That’s the one. You need to find the catch on the end of it. Unscrew it. It’ll be tight.’

  ‘Won’t this let the oxygen out?’

  ‘It’s a membrane,’ he says. ‘Can’t come out unless connected to the suit. Stops leakages.’ She unscrews it. We can see Tobi’s dead face for a few moments, with its eyes rolled back and its cheeks blue. We try to concentrate on what Inna is doing. ‘Excellent. You’ll need to pull the oxygen tank off now, and then hold onto it. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ Inna says. She sounds more with it, now. More like herself. Survival instinct has kicked in. Everything else fades into the unimportant. Inna manages to do it, to free the tank, and she brings it close, coddles it. She steadies herself with one hand against the anomaly, and I want to ask her what it feels like: to do my research, even here and now.

  Is it like treacle? Is it like tar?

  Wallace continues. ‘Now this is the tough part, Inna. You with me?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says.

  ‘You need to unscrew your oxygen and screw this one in. You’ll still be sealed into the suit, but you won’t have oxygen for a while. And you have to screw this new one completely on, or it won’t give you oxygen. You understand what I’m saying?’

  ‘I understand,’ she says. She is shaking. Her eyes are so wide. I watch as she reaches behind her. It’s an awkward angle.

  ‘Don’t do this rashly,’ Wallace says, ‘take your time. Feel the connection first, and work out how you’re going to do this.’ She’s only got ten minutes left. Not more than that, certainly. She can’t take too long, but I don’t say that. Nothing worse than extra pressure in a situation like this. ‘So you unscrew it, then lift the other canister into place, then screw that nozzle on. The same place you unscrew the old one, that’s the place you put the new one. Remember that.’

  ‘Okay,’ Inna says. She fingers the connection a few times and then takes a breath, a deep one, and she unscrews it.

  ‘Good luck,’ I say, but I don’t know if it’s loud enough for her to hear me. She unscrews the old capsule fully and then lets it hang loose, and – her face the perfect picture of composure – lifts the other hose to her back, to the same spot. We all watch as she tries to find the hole but misses, so Andy tells her to take her time, find the hole with her finger and then attach it, but she misses again, and that’s all it takes. She’s flustered. Her eyes panic. Her mouth opens, and she breathes again and again, gasping in the last air from the helmet, and then there’s nothing left. She jabs the hose down over and over, trying to find purchase, and then by pure luck she gets it onto the hole – she can tell something’s right, because the panic turns to relief for a second – but then she tries to turn it the wrong way, and then the right way, but it won’t catch. It won’t hold. It doesn’t work. Her fingers twitch as she turns it weakly, and then they twitch again, and she stops turning the attachment altogether. ‘You’re nearly there,’ I say, but I don’t have the enthusiasm, because I know that she is gone, even before I see her face go still, and before I see her eyes turn dead.

  None of us say anything because there’s nothing to say. We took a chance and it didn’t work. I leave the airlock and I sit in the lab and I start writing something for me to read to ground control, maybe something more public. Some sort of apology. We dabbled in that which we did not understand. We took risks. They did not pay off. Wallace slumps and sobs on the floor. He is lost. I tell him to wheel the bodies in, but he ignores me, and I stand there, ineffectual. It is as if no part of me works any more. Hikaru has started plotting a course home, I can see: but we must wait for official confirmation. What else is there to be done? I bring up Inna’s face on a screen, the monitor inside her helmet. It’s curious: how quickly one can look dead. How quickly the blood drains, and how grey the skin can become. I wonder if that has really happened, or it is simply how I perceive it to be.

  This mission has been a failure. I say this to Tomas, and I tell him that he needs to talk to the UNSA. I wonder what they already know: how much he has shared. I don’t worry about the lag. This isn’t intended to be a back-and-forth conversation.

  ‘Okay,’ is all that he says.

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘What else is there to be said? What if we tell you not to come home? Can you stay there, now?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘When are you leaving?’ Tomas asks.

  ‘Soon,’ I say.

  ‘Will you take more samples at least, before you leave? More readings? It seems a shame for you to be there and us to still have no idea what the anomaly is.’ He is right. I do not say it, but he is right. I question what is inside me, because I want to mourn, but there is more to this. ‘And the Ishiguro. That you should see it, here and now! The chances of that, Mira. They’re incredible.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Infinitesimal, almost.’

  ‘I know.’ He knows that they are not, because it has happened. He’s trying to get a rise. ‘We’ll try and take some readings,’ I say, ‘before we go. I think it makes sense.’ I don’t know what they would be, but he’s right. We’ve come this far. Time, and money, and space. We are only as good as the work we do; as the results we uncover.

  I go back to the airlock, to pull Inna back in. Wallace is nowhere to be seen, and the room is dark and cold. I am about to press the button and wind her towards us, away from where she has been drifting, loose inside the anomaly, when I hear a noise: a rush, an inhalation, a shock, a scream.

  On the screen, Inna opens her eyes.

  ‘What’s happening?’ she asks. ‘Please god, what’s happening?’ I don’t say anything: she has been dead too long to suddenly come back with no intervention. I do not say anything. She panics, and says some words in Russian that I don’t understand: her rolling tongue. And then she asks for me. ‘Mira? Why aren’t you answering me? What’s happened?’ She begins crying. I know that this is impossible: and yet, here she is. She gasps. ‘Where are you?’ she asks again. I look at her face on the screen: the colour back in her cheeks, and how alive she is, all of a sudden. She puts a hand out to the anomaly. ‘Hello?’ she asks.

  ‘Hello,’ I say.

  PART TWO

  Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.

  – Ludwig Wittgenstein

  9

  I spend the entire first time – or
maybe this is the second time, I don’t know how to think of it – desperate to save her. When she replies to me, I ask her what she remembers. She remembers the Ishiguro powering up its engines, and she remembers things going wrong. She asks where Tobi and Lennox are, because she cannot see them. They are both on this side of the anomaly. She asks where we are, because she is scared. I try to make it better. I tell her that I am here. I tell her that we are going to save her, and I call Wallace and Hikaru into the airlock room and we fight about this, screaming at each other about what we do. They do not understand this; I do not understand this. Tomas stays quiet, conspicuous by his absence. Eventually I am forced to ask him.

  ‘What do you think, Brother?’ I ask, but he doesn’t reply. Inna begs for reassurance, and we tell her that it’s okay, that we’re working on something; and then she tells us that she is having trouble breathing. She says that she feels light-headed, and she starts to cough. We’re too shocked to make this work; too ruined. We dread to think of her out there, and what she is going through. When she dies, it’s like a replay. It is always the same way, too similar for comfort, or coincidence. She asks for air, sputtering. She is begging for air, as if it’s something we are depriving her of. Then she dies, just like the first time. We stand, and we shake, and we hang our heads. None of us say anything; and then she opens her eyes again, and takes her first gasp for the third time. The first time she was awake, maybe it was something else. Something that we couldn’t explain, something like that. This time, the next time, I know that it is destined to happen again, and again. It is cyclical.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Inna asks as she gasps herself to life again, the same way that she has the past two times.

  ‘What do you remember?’ I ask her. I change it by interfering, but the general routine remains the same. She wants answers, and I cannot provide her with them.

  ‘The ship, we were at the ship,’ she says. The parts in between: they are gone to her. But I remember, and Hikaru remembers them, and Wallace remembers them. At the end of this cycle, two hours later, she paws at the anomaly wall like every other time. Then she dies, screaming and howling, tearing her throat ragged in that sealed bubble of a helmet; and then she wakes up again, and asks the same question.

  ‘This is curious,’ Tomas says. I don’t know what I want to say to him, but it is so much more than that.

  It is awful to watch her, because she always dies the same way. Something about that makes it worse: as if you want the chaos of death to make it seem real, somehow. You want to believe that it cannot be happening, whereas her deaths only reinforce the terrible nature of her situation. Each time she coughs and chokes on her words in the exact same way that she did before. Wallace doesn’t leave the airlock. He sits there on the floor and watches her, in the distance. Not her face on the screens: the nothing, and her in the middle of it. He says, ‘This is so fucking cruel. How can this be happening?’ but I don’t know what to say to him in reply. It feels rhetorical. When Hikaru tells us that we have to remove the artificial gravity, because the batteries are suffering, Wallace clips himself to a rail and floats there, right where he was. The four of us – I’m including Tomas in this, even though he is a minute late to every decision, every conversational note – talk about how to get Inna out of the anomaly. If we even can.

  There are rules here, even though we are not wholly aware of them. We are piecing them together as we go. The anomaly is as a semi-permeable membrane. Anything can pass into it; but then they cannot come out. Detritus, scrap, corpses: only non-living matter can return to this side of the anomaly wall. (This is a logic that we have reached by observation rather than the regular scruples and tests we would apply to such a theory. We would test it, had we a rat or a dog or anything else living that we could send over there. Instead, we have Inna, our only test subject, and we can pull the rope that connects us to her, but she doesn’t move. Lennox and Tobi were like her, trapped; but they died. Now they are on our side. We spend time during Inna’s next cycle – this is almost like a video game, I think, when we used to call the ability to replay moments Lives, as if that was normal, to have multiple attempts at something with no penalties involved – trying to pull her through, to force the matter, and I ask her to press against it at the point where the tether enters and exits, which she does as she cries for us to save her, but she cannot get her hands through – there are no points of entry or exit – and then she beats the cable and the anomaly both with her hands in melodrama, or what would be melodrama if she wasn’t so slowly and gradually dying.) I wonder about the Ishiguro – why it was where it was, and what we saw, those two bodies floating off. How deep they might get, propelled by the explosion. Hikaru wonders if we can’t just drive the ship into the anomaly, get Inna and then leave. The ship is not living. Metal passes through it fine. I think about the Ishiguro and I wonder. It’s nothing. I can’t explain it to Hikaru and Wallace, but I tell them that I don’t think it’ll work.

  ‘It’s too much of a risk,’ I say. ‘What if we all end up stuck on the inside of that thing?’ They nod. I know more about this than them, in theory. They’re not so desperate to get her back that they would mutiny. Or, at least, Hikaru isn’t. Wallace seems lost in this. He doesn’t stop staring into the middle distance. They have a word for people with his look in their eyes. I forget it. A psychological term to describe them.

  ‘He’s thinking of something,’ Hikaru says, when we talk about it. Wallace is asleep: passed out, drifting in the airlock room. ‘He’s been through a lot. We all have.’ Later, Hikaru says that he thinks that I should sleep as well, and he should. We should all sleep. ‘We can’t do this if we’re falling apart,’ he says. We agree – I take another stim, but I agree to the theory, that the two of them need to rest or we won’t be functioning at 100 per cent efficiency – but one of us needs to stay awake, to watch Inna. To be here with her, as she goes through this. She is suffering, and this is the least that we can do. And what if something changes? We wake Wallace from his drifting slumber and put him into his actual bed, and I tell Hikaru that I have the ship. That I am absolutely in control. While he sleeps, I talk to her. We go through the motions. I find it hard to believe that they are already rote: but what else can they be? She doesn’t change her script, so I am the only one able to adapt; or, to pretend to adapt.

  On her fifth cycle I wonder, with her dying, if I should be mourning her. Is she truly dead if she keeps coming back? Is she dead already? Is this simply a prolonging, a dragging out of her life beyond her natural time? Is this, whatever the anomaly has done to her, simply life support? She is out there, and she dies. Maybe she only comes back because we are watching her. Maybe it’s because we want her to. I cannot explain this. There is still science here, there must still be answers, but they feel so far away from us. I wonder if she would know if we backed away, slowly, silently. She cannot see us. Eventually, she would just be shouting into the darkness; crying out, and then she would die anyway. Maybe that way is peace.

  I watch the camera inside Inna’s helmet. I watch as she struggles and dies; and I wait for the moment that she comes back to life, a hyper-exaggerated Lazarus. That moment, where she wakes up and breathes her first of this new burst of life: it’s the same as her smile. Maybe this is how she wakes up every morning, to greet the new day.

  Over and over she falls from the ledge. She wakes up and she cries, I don’t know how to help her, she chokes, she dies, there’s a time of placidity where nothing happens and then she gasps her first new breath of air. She repeats. She doesn’t remember the times before, which is a mercy. We know this because all I can do is ask her questions. But all of this feels like a lost cause: because how do we stop this? How do we stop her?

  ‘We pull her out when she’s dead,’ Wallace says. ‘That seems like the right thing to do.’ He doesn’t look at her on the screen – he won’t make eye contact, even though she cannot see him – but he seems to feel some empathy with her.

  ‘That’
s interesting,’ Tomas says.

  ‘She’s not dead,’ Hikaru argues.

  ‘She is.’

  ‘No. Because she has a life sign more than she doesn’t, right? Which means that the suit is malfunctioning. And we can hear her. That’s a better argument for her being alive than … something else.’ Sleep has made Hikaru unblinking. His internal logic – where we ignore the thing that’s happening that we have no way of explaining, because what we cannot explain cannot be true – is flawless. But it’s also broken: we can’t pull her out of the anomaly, and we cannot explain that. I don’t push him. But I ask Tomas’ advice, and he tells me what he thinks is happening.

  ‘The anomaly is keeping her alive. The other two are dead. Somehow, whatever it is, it’s bringing her back to life. As long as she’s inside it, she’s alive again, until she runs out of air. If you bring her out when you get the chance, she’ll die for good.’ He stops talking. I don’t fill in the gaps. After a while, he starts again. ‘Are you there? I think you would be killing her.’ He wants us to stay here for longer. He wants us to run tests on the anomaly again while we think of a way to save her.

  ‘What tests would you have me do?’ I ask him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I’m sure we’ll think of something.’

  I sit with Wallace, clamped to one of the rails. He is terrible. There is a carton in his hand, a cardboard construct: our sole concession to a food or liquid in the crew’s private possessions, a private supply of something or other. He initially asked for scotch, that he might celebrate with a glass of it. Instead, he is drinking it now.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I ask. It is rhetorical. He doesn’t offer me the drink, or look at me. He carries on regardless, drinking. We are silent for too long before he speaks.

  ‘What do you think this means?’ he asks.

  ‘Inna?’

  ‘After we die. Do you think it means anything?’