The Echo

by James Smythe

  ‘For her or us?’

  ‘Us.’ He drinks.

  ‘I think it means what it always meant,’ I say. ‘I think it means that there is nothing.’

  ‘So Tobi and Lennox: they’re just dead?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I say.

  ‘You never believed in a heaven?’ he asks.

  ‘I have always had too much logic for that,’ I say. He finishes the carton and crushes it.

  ‘What do you think she sees, when she’s dead?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ I say.

  ‘We can never ask her, because she doesn’t remember it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So it might as well be nothing.’ He lets the carton fall from his hands and it drifts off. He dips his head and shuts his eyes. I do not stay sitting with him, because I do not know how to talk to him when he is like this; and I do not know how long he will stay like this for.

  In the lab, I listen to Inna die again. The final stretch of desperate cries and shudders, always the same. Utterly truthful: a pained realization, that this is it, for her. I have her camera feed in front of me, but sometimes I shut my eyes and let it wash over me. That feeling of loss. I need another stim. I can feel myself wavering. It’s such a good job that these things aren’t addictive, I tell myself. I would be a wreck if there was some real dependency on them, rather than my desire to remain awake for far more practical reasons. Then Inna comes back to life again.

  ‘What’s happening?’ she asks. I don’t say anything at first, because I find this too hard. I wait for her to start crying and pleading. I don’t want to interact with this: I don’t want her to know that I’m watching her die again. Maybe it’s cruel, I tell myself. I am selfish, letting her go through this alone. Maybe I should be out there every time, holding her hand, telling her that this will be all right. Maybe we should just kill her, drag her through, put her to an ending. Tell Tomas that it just happened, damn the results, the tests, the answers. This is her umpteenth performance, and she is screaming her lines to the cheap seats. ‘Is anybody there? What’s happened?’

  ‘Inna,’ I say. ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Why am I out here?’ She panics. Almost hyperventilates. She always almost panics at this point, and then she drags it back. If I don’t talk to her, she does hyperventilate. That feels like enough of an experiment by itself. ‘We were by the other ship and the engines started. What happened? What happened?’ I am trying to treat this as something worth watching: research into whatever the anomaly is. This was Tomas’ idea. Watch her: the moment that she comes back to life, maybe there is something. A spark, a flash. The last time, we told her to undo her oxygen tank. We lied to her, because we wanted to replicate the first time around: to see how it was somehow reattached to her helmet, somehow full of oxygen again. We have videotaped this so that we can watch it back at our own leisure. As if the constant recurrence of it isn’t enough. ‘Mira, please talk to me! You’re scaring me!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘Just wait a little while. We are working out how to come and get you. Bring you back onto the ship.’ I call for Wallace and Hikaru to come here, and I find the spot on the footage where it must have happened, but I can’t see anything. So I slow it down, play it back again. I focus on her oxygen tank: the one thing we cannot explain in any real way. It becomes reattached. That’s not science: it’s magic. On the video, in one second the hose is there, floating slightly free of her body; the next it’s attached again, and firmly. One swift movement with nothing between points A and B. I slow the video down even more. Even more. Wallace arrives first, and he sees the screens – I have forgotten to pull them down, so my obsession with her face is exposed, but that’s the least of my problems – and he screams at me.

  ‘What the fuck are we doing?’ he asks. He turns and leaves. I hear him hit the wall: no howl of pain, just dull thud. It’s hard to get the power up without gravity. Hikaru waits in the doorway and watches him leave, and then he shakes his head at me, as if I would go after Wallace and try to calm him down. That isn’t me. We watch the screen together.

  ‘When are you going to save me?’ Inna asks.

  ‘Soon,’ I tell her. ‘We’re coming.’ I slow the footage to a crawl, to see single frames; and I find the exact frames in the footage where the changeover happens. There’s nothing in it. No Inna, no oxygen tank. The frame before, she’s dead, and the frame after, she’s alive, almost exactly as she was hours and hours before. In the space between, it is blank. ‘Do you see this?’ I ask Hikaru. He nods. I wheel it back to the exact frame, and we concentrate on it. There’s nothing there: not even the stars, because the anomaly has had those too.

  Wallace comes to me when I am alone. I thought he was asleep but he isn’t. I am not, because I am watching her. I have turned the sound off: now she screams silently. He speaks quietly from the doorway, as if he doesn’t want to disturb me. He doesn’t make eye contact.

  ‘I asked you this before,’ he says, ‘but this time I’m really serious. Please: I want to call my family now.’

  ‘We might be going home soon,’ I say to him. I don’t know why I am trying to put him off, but I am. I want him to save it; in case he really needs it. ‘You can tell them we are coming home when we know it for sure.’

  ‘I don’t care.’ He looks at me. His eyes are red and dark. ‘Let me call them now. Please.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say. He doesn’t leave.

  ‘Can I have the lab?’ he asks. ‘There’s privacy. I just want to be alone with them a while.’ I unclip myself and pull myself past him. In the corridor I turn, to offer my help to him: to tell him how I hope he feels better after this. He has already shut the door, and I message Tomas, before he makes his own connection.

  ‘Wallace is calling home,’ I say. ‘Let him. It’s fine. I think he needs it.’ Tomas doesn’t reply, which is good. He would question it, maybe. Let him. I have made a choice.

  In the main living area I bring up Inna on the screens. I talk to her and make it better, because this is what I feel like I should do sometimes. I lie to her that we’ll be saving her soon. She asks me what we are going to do, how we are going to get her back. She asks what the plan is.

  ‘We have to work out what the anomaly is first,’ I say. ‘We are closing in on that.’

  ‘How did you get Tobi and Lennox back?’ She doesn’t know that they’re dead, this cycle. I haven’t told her.

  ‘In the blast,’ I say. ‘When the engines started, they were thrown out. I’m sorry that you are there, still. We are doing everything we can.’ I haven’t told her the strangest part of her story, in any of her lives: that she’s died before, over and over and over. I talk and I talk, and she asks questions, and we relax into this. She trusts me. Why would she not? I am in charge of this. I understand it all. I have been here since the beginning: planning this, working it out. We talk, and then she says that she is tired, that it’s getting hard to breathe. I have lost track of time. Wallace is missing, still; still talking. I imagine the cost of that. The bandwidth being used. How angry people will be. I flick through the screens, opening the outward signal. I can see into his conversation. He is terrible and sad, so sad. His face is red with tears.

  ‘I love you,’ he says. He touches the screen, because they must be doing it as well. I cannot see them, but I imagine them crying at his words, his gentle manner. He is finishing this. ‘Look after your mother. I love you all so much. I’m sorry.’ He severs the connection. That is wrong. Something is wrong. Why would he apologize?

  ‘Wait there,’ I say to Inna, even though she has so little time left, and she will be gone, dying alone; and I unclip myself and push towards the office, but the door is locked. I cannot remember the code, so I call for Hikaru, but he cannot remember it either – why would we lock the doors? – so Tomas steps in, and he unlocks the doors from their end, and we wait and wait.

  By the time I get to him he is dead.

  Tomas tells me that it isn’t my fault. ‘He wou
ld have done it whatever. He was that personality type.’ I was the one to cut the cable that Wallace had tied to the floor; that had tightened itself naturally as he pushed away from it; that had choked him, and that he could not get back from, even if he wanted to. ‘Some people see things and they cannot cope,’ Tomas says. Hikaru sits with Wallace’s body. He put it to bed, and he says something. A prayer, even though Wallace didn’t believe whatever it is that Hikaru does. I don’t stop him. Hikaru has stayed calm, somehow. Maybe it works. Maybe whatever it is that he believes is somehow a leveller. I would worry that he would take the same route as Wallace, were he not so scared of death. His religion – some obscure thing borne out of the riots in the American Mid-west at the start of the last decade – says that death is the end; it is something to be feared. There is nothing afterwards, so seize the day. The white foods are to prolong life. White is the colour of light; of health; of life itself. I think about the irony of the anomaly out there: absolute blackness, and yet, how it is prolonging Inna’s life, and preventing her death.

  We are now a skeleton crew. Tomas says that it will be all right. He reminds me that they can offer assistance from their end; like when he unlocked the doors. That was the point of what we designed: if he needs to, he can get us home. Inna goes through cycles by herself: she died while we tried to save Wallace, and she lived again, and then died once more. She isn’t even a sacrifice any more. She’s a curio we can return to when we have dealt with our current crisis. When Hikaru has prayed as much as he is going to, we seal Wallace’s bed. He can do whatever decaying he likes in there and we won’t be able to tell. Let the people back on Earth deal with it. The trip is a tragedy. We’ve already ruined this. The Ishiguro had the mystery to sustain it in history: we will have only the massacre.

  Tomas tells me that he’s getting the press in the next day. That he’s prepared a breakdown of everything for the various heads of the UNSA, along with the assorted conglomerates and governments who have put money into this mission. This is the point at which they deserve to know everything. It’s a dangerous game he’s playing, I know, because he’s assuming that they will tell him to deliver results. He wants them to say, Stay. Work it out. After this much tragedy, we cannot return with this being in vain. And what does it say of the anomaly? I ask him how much he’s going to tell them about it.

  ‘Nothing yet,’ he says. ‘I’ll say that we’re doing tests into it. That it’s during those tests we’ve had accidents. That we are getting results. That this is worth it.’ He’s playing the game. He knows what he’s doing better than even I. He’s had the media experience I missed out on as I watched him from backstage. ‘You do think it’s worth it, don’t you, Brother?’

  I deal with Inna by myself, sitting with her – or, rather, sitting in the airlock. I watch the screen of her face. She is desperate, and I do not want to lie to her. Not this time.

  ‘Are you coming to get me?’ she asks. She has fifteen minutes of this cycle left. Less, if she starts breathing too heavily. I should tell her to be light with her breathing, to calm down. That would be the sensible thing to do.

  ‘I don’t think we can,’ I say instead.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The anomaly you’re in. We can’t pass into it to get you out.’ She’s silent. I can see her eyes: they’re darting. I cannot be the one that has betrayed her. She trusted me. I would be her captain. ‘There are ways we could try to keep you alive for longer.’

  ‘Until you have a plan,’ she says. She sounds so Russian in that moment.

  ‘I don’t have a plan,’ I say. ‘I don’t. I think that you are going to die.’ Her face doesn’t change. But she looks so disappointed in me.

  Tomas sends me the press release that he’s put out. It is not for me to check; he’s already broadcast it to the wider world. This is just for my information. It’s frank and nearly officious in its use of language. It says that we have reached the anomaly, and that we are conducting tests. It has not been without its tragedies as a trip, however: and he lists the names of Lennox and Tobi as our dead. No mention of Wallace; no mention of Inna. Our suicide and our mystery will be left for another day, or until we get home, even. He’s playing this. He knows that too much death and we’ll be recalled. The equipment – the true cost of this expedition – must be returned. It’s vital. The press release ends by saying that we are making great strides. That we are realizing our research into the anomaly, research that has lasted over three decades in total. The crew of the Lära are still achieving all that they set out to achieve, he promises, and that there will be answers to some of humanity’s deepest questions upon their return.

  I open a line to him. ‘Seems optimistic,’ I tell him. I wait for the lag to reach him, and then minutes after it, but I think he must not be there. He is somewhere else.

  10

  I look at the outputs of the software that we wrote to track the outline of the anomaly. I have almost forgotten this, the part that we thought was the most important. Fly to the middle of the wherever, find this thing, explain it. This is what science is.

  The orange shape is whole; or, at least, what we can see is. It is drawn in solidly, a line around. It is enormous. I cannot tell the sides, especially now that we are so close, but it stretches off so far in every direction. Up and down and left and right, we are surrounded.

  ‘Have you seen this?’ I ask Tomas.

  ‘What do you think we’ve been doing down here?’ he eventually replies.

  I ask Hikaru to edge the ship closer, as close to the line of the anomaly as we can get. I use Inna to help us plot the thing. During one of her cycles I tell her, in a desperate, panicked voice, that she has to find an exit or else she will die, and I instruct her to move her hands across the surface of this thing. She confirms what the pings say. I let her use every part of her oxygen, reiterating to her how urgent it was, knowing that she would die; and then I witness her snapping back to her starting point as I blink my eyes shut. Then I start again, only this time I tell her to head in the other direction. When I am satisfied that the results are correct, we start work on gathering samples from the anomaly. I ask her to try and break a chunk from the wall, using the leash she is attached to, wrapping it around her fist to attack it, just to see if it makes a difference. It does not, and she manages to hurt herself; she wonders, as she lurches towards death, if she has fractured it. The next time around, when she wakes up, she feels no pain in her hand, and there is not even a bruise. Death means very little to her, now. Or, maybe, her death means little to me. This is like a game. It is something to be pushed and explored. It’s almost crippling as a distraction: to see how far I can push these limits. I could tell her to take off her helmet, and she would: simply because she believed me. She looks at me with implicit trust every cycle, every time I tell her that I can help her. She stares at the camera sometimes, even though she doesn’t know she is making eye contact with me.

  I am not sleeping any more, because of the stims. They are like replacement batteries, and they are ideal for my situation, as I have no desire to miss any of this. And I do not want the worry, the stress of what would happen if I tried to sleep. The stims are astonishing, really. I have never used them before. Tomas routinely used them – or an early version of them, when they were still loaded with addictive properties – during his finals. He started revision later than I did, and missed a few more classes on some of the lesser modules. He claimed that he was more naturally adept, which might have been true if he had also coupled that with the work that I did. I remember him taking the stims every evening for a two-week period. Perfect clarity, they promised, and that’s what he had. Talking to him as he was riding off the immediate rush of one was almost inspiring. Seeing how his mind connected with itself, and how it maintained those connections. He slept for two or three hours every few days, as if he were simply recharging himself. He called those periods of sleep ‘nights’ – as in, I haven’t used a stim tonight – but they fell where they fell,
whatever time of day, and there was no routine to them or his life. After a while, they began to lose potency. He would wake, get a good four or five hours before his body began to shut down, and then turn back to the pills. But they pushed him through the exams. They weren’t illegal, because they weren’t performance-enhancing. The knowledge had to be remembered regardless; the thoughts and concepts entirely your own, no matter how awake you were, how clear your thoughts. He would take one half an hour before the start of an exam and I would be the one who bore the brunt; alphabetical order dictating that I ended up sitting in front of him in the exam halls, able to hear his furious typing right behind my shoulders. He typed faster than anybody else at the best of times. He’d taken a course in touch-typing where the rest of us all used three or four fingers, and he hammered the pad so hard I wondered how it didn’t crack. When the exams were done, he struggled to stay off the pills. He slept for days. He called it a hangover, but I knew the truth: the shivers, the headaches, the fever, like the old symptoms of influenza. Almost indistinguishable.

  Hikaru doesn’t know that I’m still not sleeping; or he doesn’t care. Either way. He is still and static, and humourless. He has become a shell. If I didn’t know better, I would think that this hadn’t affected him, that’s how calm he has remained. In many ways, he is acting as if this hasn’t happened: we are still here, and still on a ship in the middle of nowhere, and still on a mission. We’ve moved much, much closer to Inna now, and to the anomaly. Hikaru has been put in charge of making sure that we don’t drift – I have no intention of crossing that line – and nothing else. I am dealing with Inna.

  And Tomas: he claims that he is helping. It’s something that they cannot rehearse on Earth, but they have ideas. That second where she dies, they’re wondering if we can play with it. Use it, somehow. Maybe snatch her through as she comes back to life, or at least a part of her, and that might give us purchase. I worry that the anomaly wall is just that: that, like the slice of a guillotine, it might somehow chop off any limb that we dared pull over to the near side of the anomaly. And I worry that she is alive because she is in there, and that as soon as she leaves it will be over for her. Tomas is intent to the point of preoccupation on getting a sample of the anomaly. I tell him that it’s impossible from where we are. He tells me that we’ll find a way. He sounds convinced.