The Echo

by James Smythe

  ‘I tried,’ he says, but he’s lying. As if I do not know the tells in his voice.

  ‘Am I inside it?’ I ask. He leaves the pause too long. He is fucking with me.

  ‘No,’ he finally says. ‘We’re guessing, based on the pings. Still sending them out to the sides, assuming that the aperture of the anomaly hasn’t changed.’ Everything is speculation, and I feel my guts rise. I am scared, because that is not what I want. I want to be alive. I want to do what I can. There is no guarantee that, inside there, I will not be able to get out, but we have to work within the confines of what we know. What I know is that Inna is stuck. What I know is that, for some reason, the Ishiguro never left, not until the day it exploded. The anomaly is hell. It is death.

  ‘Does Inna remember anything more?’ I ask.

  ‘No. She’s more confused, certainly.’

  ‘You haven’t let her in yet.’

  ‘Would you have?’ He’s right. I would have made the same decision. I wouldn’t have wanted to risk the ship. She is now a variable: she might be the thing that stops us pulling the ship out of the anomaly, were she inside. ‘You’ll have to talk to her,’ he says, ‘or not. It’s your decision, Brother.’ I flick the camera to show the inside of her helmet. She is desperate. We’re here, next to her, and she has woken up alone and in the dark and we could just open the door but we have not. She will be wondering why; if we are all dead, maybe. Nearly, I want to tell her. We’re getting there. ‘She’s at the end of a cycle,’ Tomas says. The variable is nearly dead. Soon she will begin again, and this will be fresh to her. I click her face away. I do not want to see her die here. I think it might be different: even more confused, even more desperate.

  ‘Where can’t I go?’ I ask, and he tells me to bring up the screen he’s sending, so I do. I look at the line of the anomaly: carved through our ship. It slices through the engines and pretty much splits the ship into two: down the central corridor, with the airlock and bathroom on one side, the lab on the other; and the beds and lounge and cockpit also divided. The line is nearly straight – the curve of the anomaly so long we barely notice it in here – but we aren’t. We were on a slight angle, so the line matches that. I have more of the lounge and cockpit than the anomaly does. Inna is not the only variable; Hikaru’s bed is firmly inside the anomaly, now.

  ‘Hikaru is still asleep?’

  ‘Until we know what to do,’ Tomas says. ‘We don’t want him to panic about this.’ How much has he been watching us? When did this happen, sneaking up on us? ‘Unless you think we should wake him.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Not yet.’ I look at the picture. ‘We need to reverse,’ I say.

  ‘So we have to wake him.’

  ‘You can do it from there, can’t you?’

  He takes longer than usual to answer. The lag hides a multitude of sins. ‘It’s safer if he does it. From here, what if, I don’t know, what if it crushes him while he’s in his bed? What if that’s how it works? He should do it. You’ll have to wake him up.’ I think he is gone, and then he speaks again. ‘It will sound better, coming from you. Less alarming.’ I try not to think about Inna, still out there. I ask myself, deep inside, if I am a bad person. And if I am, does it matter?

  The ship looks as it should from the inside. The anomaly has no colour, no smell. The air is the same: no change in temperature as you approach it, no front that suggests anything different than what we are used to. I contemplate chalk or pen: something to draw a physical line down the ship. I do not want to be caught in this. Accidents can happen. They can be so unbearably fatal, or eternal. The same. On my side of the anomaly: my bed, Inna’s bed, Wallace’s bed, even though it’s full. I have the kitchenette, and the food. In the lounge, they have most of the table, the medical cupboard, a chunk of the floor space, one of the three computers. In the cockpit, they only have half a seat. With Hikaru’s bed still sealed I can’t even hear him sleeping. I cannot reach over and open it, so I tell Tomas to do it.

  ‘I can’t get a signal,’ he says. ‘I’m pressing it, but it’s not responding.’ I think about the slight static on the connections from inside the anomaly; and I think about the remote probe suddenly becoming unresponsive as it got deeper into it. Three items of electronic interference: almost enough evidence to be definitive. I bring up a screen and try, but again, the bed doesn’t open. ‘You don’t want to reach over there and open it manually?’ he asks. He is joking, but he doesn’t laugh. I clip myself by my belt to the rail and watch the bed.

  ‘We’ll have to wait for him to wake up of his own accord,’ I say.

  ‘I suppose so,’ he says. I wait there in silence, staring at the room, trying to work out if the anomaly is going to move – or grow – any more, and if it might swallow me whole. I’m thinking about that when I hear the banging start again, which means that Inna died, and she’s back again, full of air and energy and desperation, banging on the door, begging to be let in. What was that story from when I was a kid, something about a Monkey’s Paw? I haven’t wished that she was still alive yet, but that banging is so insistent. Desperate, as it should be. ‘Tell me about what’s going on down there,’ I say to Tomas. I stare at the beds and wait to see if he will answer.

  I think about anything else, after a while. I stare at the beds and wait, and Inna’s banging is a drum inside my head. A constant, unending rhythmic reminder. In my pocket I have a pack of stims, and I take one as soon as I catch myself yawning, because I am still somehow tired. The body needs to recover. You can put it through the ringer, torture and punish it, and then you have to let it recover.

  I think about how I can come back from this. How I can ever hope to recover who I was; and I wonder, briefly, who that person even was to begin with.

  Hikaru’s bed hisses open. I have been listening to Inna’s hand become weaker, and the sound drop off inside here. The hiss comes as she falls silent, which means that this life is ending for her. Another will start. This is the new cycle. Hikaru lets himself up. He stretches. He cracks his shoulders, rolling them, rubbing them with one palm. He turns his head to look around.

  ‘What the hell?’ he asks. ‘What’s happened? Why are you so dark?’ He sees me: through the ink of the anomaly. I bring up a screen of one of the cameras, to see what he sees: myself, through a black fog, almost, the internal lights dimmed. I make them bright, but still it is hard to see every detail through this. He brings up a window, and looks out, and he sees the darkness; how there’s no fringe of stars on his side: just the blackness of the anomaly.

  ‘I’m inside it,’ he says. He rubs his face. He has most of a beard on it now, and his skin is greyer than it was. ‘And I suppose you are not, somehow.’ I don’t know how to deal with this. Likely that this has to be a plaster, rapidly torn off: a wound exposed to the air, for the benefit of healing.

  ‘The anomaly moved.’

  He nods. He’s either not taking this in or he implicitly understands. Maybe I don’t need to go through this all. He unclips himself and swings his legs out, as if there’s gravity and he’s just going to put them on the floor, but then he starts drifting. He pushes towards me with his hands out, and I watch them fold up against the dividing line in mid air: like the world’s best mime. His eyes sag even more as he feels the wall. How it’s inside the ship, how it has cut a swathe through everything: questions that I cannot answer. I wonder if we’ll ever have answers, or if I will return home to accusations. How all that mattered would be the deaths and the enigmas, spoken of as fraud and lies as we attempt to bluffingly explain the unexplainable thing that we have encountered out here.

  ‘It moved, not us.’

  ‘That’s what Tomas tells me.’

  ‘And he’s sure?’

  ‘He’s sure.’ I watch Hikaru. He looks around every part of his side of the ship. He doesn’t look at the anomaly wall, at where I should be. It’s nothingness; I don’t think that I would want to look into it either, not if I was in his shoes. This feels like hostage negotiations
, I think: he is suddenly a man on the edge. I don’t want to say the wrong thing, but I have no idea what the wrong thing is. ‘We were both asleep. Maybe it’s related to that.’

  ‘Was Tomas awake?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘And you trust him? There’s no way he would have done this. No way he would have moved the ship.’ Tomas is listening, because he must be. He is always listening. ‘Or, you know, not moved us backwards, when he saw what was happening. He’s not so fucking driven, so desperate to get answers, that would never have made him do this.’

  ‘He didn’t,’ I say. ‘And we’ll get you out of there.’

  ‘Like we have with Inna,’ he says.

  ‘That’s different,’ I reply. ‘You aren’t dead.’

  ‘Yet.’ He doesn’t look up. He looks so grey.

  ‘Listen, now that we have you on the inside, working out what this thing is will be much easier.’ He rubs his face with his hands, his whole head. Running his fingers through his hair. I’ve lost him, I think; and then the banging starts. She’s back.

  ‘What’s that?’ Hikaru asks.

  ‘It’s Inna,’ I say. I won’t lie to him.

  ‘She’s still outside.’ He turns and pushes towards the doorway, down the hall. I chase him, slower than he is. Still less able. I drag myself along the rail and I watch him, and I shout. ‘We thought it was safer, because we didn’t know what we were going to do. We didn’t know how affected you were!’ He ignores me. I get to be in the hallway and watch him bring up a terminal, so I do the same. I tap to lock the door, to enter the override code that only Tomas and I know, but the system rejects it. It’s on the other side of the anomaly; I cannot do anything. The equivalent of the static, I suspect. ‘Hikaru,’ I say, ‘I want her back just as much as you, but this could ruin the entire mission.’

  ‘You can’t leave her out there to die,’ he says. She isn’t really even dead. I don’t know if she is even really alive. I see him hammer the buttons to start the airlock cycle, almost in rhythm with Inna’s hammering on the side of the ship. He speaks to her through the comms as the door opens. ‘Inna,’ he says, ‘you should come in now.’ He’s her white knight; the one who saved her. I am the one who stood on the other side of the fence.

  ‘Hikaru,’ I say, ‘be careful what we tell her. About what’s happened. It could be distressing to her.’

  ‘I won’t lie to her,’ he says. The banging stops, and there’s a different sound. Pawing. Scraping, the noise of Inna dragging herself along the hull.

  ‘I will,’ I say. And then there she is: gasping in her helmet, even though she has enough air. Inside, then, and frantically looking around. Hikaru shuts the door behind her, and the air floods into the room, and she pulls off her helmet and presses the walls of the decompression room as the helmet floats about behind her.

  ‘You saved me,’ she says. She is weak and tired, gasping in as her lungs get used to this. He reaches for her and props her up and pulls her to the rail and helps her take hold of it. I am pathetic. She is crying so hard. ‘What’s happened?’ she asks. She pulls at the straps of her suit, tugging the zip down, and the suit peels away from her chest and shoulders. Her bird tattoo: I had forgotten. Where does it go? What does it mean? ‘Mira,’ she says. ‘Come and help me, please.’ She looks at me, but I stay where I am.

  ‘I can’t,’ I say. ‘I just can’t.’

  I explain everything to her, apart from how many times she has died. That can come later. Hikaru watches me while I talk to her, and I wonder if he will be the one to say it. He has brought her in from the cold; maybe he will tell her the truth. If he does, he can be the one to deal with that. When she was outside and I told her, I saw how it ruined her. To know, suddenly, that death means nothing inside the anomaly: it must change you. (I have thought about it myself, but I am so distant from it: I have tried to consider the implications, what it might do to the mind, but until faced with the very real possibility of what the anomaly offers, I cannot firmly contemplate how I might feel.) She will find out eventually, I know, but that doesn’t have to be now. Hikaru doesn’t say anything to her: instead, he says that he needs some quiet. He says that he needs to think. I don’t think he believes that we are ever getting home, at this point. I tell myself that I will tell her eventually, when we’re free of this and headed home. If that is possible, then so too will the truth be.

  Instead now I tell her that she passed out. I truncate time, and say that Tobi and Lennox have not long been dead. That Wallace killed himself just after that, and that Hikaru and I have been trying to get her back ever since. She doesn’t question the timescale, because she’s just happy to be back on the ship. She is wrapped in a towel, having showered, and she coughs and sips from a water bottle she keeps tethered to her wrist, nibbles at a food bar. She is ravenous, she says. As she eats, slowly, so slowly, I explain about the anomaly wall, and how she and Hikaru are stuck that side of it.

  ‘It seems safer that I stay outside it for as long as possible,’ I say. She presses a hand to the wall. She’s sitting on a chair opposite me, strapped down.

  ‘So what is this anomaly, then?’ she asks. She looks so tired. She and Hikaru both, but it shows even more on Inna. Where you can see the surgery scars, suddenly, as the skin slightly sags over their thin laser-lines; and where she tries to smile but the skin won’t allow it, because it’s been too smoothed over. She is in her tank-top, and the bird reaches for her neck, its beak only slightly parted. I’m sure that there’s a hint of a tongue in there. ‘You must know something now.’

  ‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘You know how often we can’t explain something?’ She doesn’t reply; it’s rhetorical. ‘Never,’ I say. ‘Because we make up explanations. We take whatever we’ve got and apply logic and get somewhere.’

  ‘I want to go home,’ she says.

  ‘So do I,’ I say, but I do not know if that is true. Not without answers. Because what are we without answers?

  Hikaru agrees to run the tests I ask of him, even though he questions their point. Now, I can tell that he is lost in himself. He is not the man that he once was, but he understands enough of how this has to work. He has no control, and he is like all of us: expendable. While he sends pings out from the front of the ship that is inside the anomaly, Inna examines the bodies of our dead comrades. She says that she is only making sure that they’re preserved, but I suspect that she wants to ensure that there hasn’t been any foul play. She says that she trusts me, but there will always be a doubt. I catch only a glimpse of Lennox’s charred arm before I stop watching her examination. She asks me about Wallace, about what drove him to do it. I tell her that some people can’t cope with the unknown. She doesn’t buy it. I have asked myself the same question, over and over. What piece of knowledge pushed him over the edge in the end?

  The day is quiet and strangely muted. It’s almost as if nothing happened, and we’re a crew getting on with this. I don’t know, really, how I expected this trip to go. Maybe that we would have come to the anomaly and found nothing, that would have been ideal. Not for science, but for the safety and state of the crew. Maybe it could have turned out to be the equivalent of the aurora borealis: a trick of the light, a convergence of science that gave us something strange but harmless. (Does that mean that I see the anomaly as harmful? Intrinsically, in itself? I don’t know. Every pain it has caused has been our own. It is simply the iceberg that collided with the Titanic.) The anomaly would have been something that we could shrug off, and we would learn from, and there it would lie: charted in the stars, plotted for eternity, as something that we would name – Hyvönen, maybe, the Hyvönen Anomaly – and that would always be there. People would search for it in the skies with their high-powered garden telescopes, to look for that ripple, like the haze of heat rising from tarmac, only stretched across the stars, and they would wait for the optimal conditions to see it, as they do with meteors and planets. It would be a thing that existed past us, longer than us. Our name would be un
faltering. That would have been a result: past the excitement of the trip, and the thrill of this whole endeavour, a thing that we could name and be remembered by. Science in its essence.

  I remain desperate to stay awake. I cannot keep this up forever, I know. I don’t know why I am so scared of sleeping now. I am worried, perhaps, that if I wake up I will have missed something: another death, or myself becoming swallowed by the anomaly. And I cannot take a shower, even though I desperately need one, because it is on their side. I am itching from the dirt and sweat, my scalp and pubic region needing a wash. Instead I take bottles of recyc-water, and I go to the engine rooms. I strip and spray the water at myself, all over, rub myself with a bar of soap and then try as best I can to wash it off; as the water tries to follow the lack of gravity and flee I catch what I can to smooth it across myself. I am also growing a beard. I can see it in the mirrors of the screens, but I am not able to judge what it looks like for myself. Inna says that I look distinguished, but I do not necessarily believe her. The beard itches as it comes through. Inna has offered to find and give me the shaver, but I don’t need it. I think I like this. I like the idea of, when we land, me looking completely different to Tomas. He will have the birthmark; I will have the beard. I spray the water all over me, onto my head, my face, my groin and armpits, my arse. This can’t be hygienic, having the waste float around me like this, drifting into the engines and the walls. I dress and avoid it, and then step outside the room before decompressing it. I listen as the air and water and whatever’s spewed off my body are sucked out into the vacuum. I leave it sucking everything out for far longer than I need to. There is something curiously comforting about the thought of a vacuum.

  I take another stim. I remember when you used to have to wait for headache pills to kick in. Now, they’re working as soon as you even touch the tablet, surging through from fingertips to nerves in the most fluid and driven of motions. The stims bolster me. Everything is perfectly clear for a while. I squander that clarity by myself in the lab.