by James Smythe
‘It’s not finished,’ I say.
‘Of course it is,’ she tells me.
‘We can get out of this and make it home, Inna. We just have to work together, and we will find a hole. We can get you home, I am sure of it.’ My lies. I do not know what I believe: if I think it’s possible, or if I am telling her this to keep them going until Tomas says we are done, and that they are sacrifices. And when that happens, will I be satisfied? Will I be able to go through with it?
‘We can’t go home, Mira. Don’t you see that?’ She walks closer; puts her hands out until her skin presses onto the wall. I can see her veins, in her wrists; the blood pumping around her body. ‘Why are you the only one who doesn’t see that?’
‘I’ll find a way,’ I say. ‘I will.’ I don’t let them reply. I go to the lab and I call Earth, and Simpson tells me that Tomas is asleep, and I rage at him. ‘Get him,’ I say. ‘Wake him up and tell him I want to speak to him.’ I wait. I bring up the orange ping-map and I try to think about work, but I don’t even know what that work is any more.
He comes onto the line. ‘What?’ he asks. He doesn’t sound as if he was asleep; he sounds stressed, yes, but I know our voices when we are just woken.
‘They have no faith in us, Tomas. They have none. They don’t believe we are getting home, and I have nothing to tell them.’
‘Okay,’ he says.
‘It’s not okay! What do you suggest? What the hell should I say? Do you have any ideas down there? Any plans? Anything for us to try?’
He sighs, and I know what it means. It is my sigh. It is even my mother’s sigh: when she told us that she was sick, and that she would not be getting better. ‘We have nothing,’ he says. ‘There are no plans.’
‘There must be something,’ I say. ‘We need to do something.’
‘Make your peace, Brother,’ he says. He has no faith in me, in himself, in us. No faith that we can survive this. Death is the only answer, and inevitable. ‘I’m sorry. Goodbye.’
‘What have you done?’ I ask him. ‘Tomas, did you know?’ There’s no answer. The line is silent. I message a few more times, try to instigate a video call, try to send data packets, but there’s no response. I shut my eyes. I think of the anomaly, and I wonder what will make it move; and how long I have.
In the lounge I tell the other two that I have accepted it. They tell me to cross over, towards them, and to keep walking. I say that I cannot, because I don’t know what it will mean. And they say, this will last forever. After you cross to us, you will never die, because you cannot. I wonder how I look, to them; grey and vague, through the anomaly. If they can ever truly see me from where they are.
And then I find myself sitting in the cockpit, in one of the pilot’s seats, propped up. I think that I’ve been asleep. I can’t remember if that was a conversation that actually happened or not. Inna and Hikaru sit at the table. They are eating together: as Inna once said, it is important to do things in a social way, to enhance the feeling of solidarity, to stress that you are not out here all alone. They cannot see me, but I watch them, and on this side I eat as well, as if I am with them. Hikaru isn’t eating white food. He’s eating one of the normal bars – I think it’s meatballs, from the colour, meatballs and vegetables and gravy, Swedish style, one of my requests – but he doesn’t look as if he’s enjoying it.
There’s something on the scanners. I notice it when I’m staying awake, my last couple of stims, as Hikaru and Inna both sleep again. Sleeping until death; until the batteries go, and life support ends, and this is over. The something is in the distance. Indefinable because it is so small, but coming towards us.
‘Tomas,’ I say, ‘are you watching this?’ I don’t get a reply. I don’t really expect one. Even though I know full well that he’s watching, and listening.
In the lab I bring up a screen and put a marker on the object and then I realize what it is, but it takes me a second because I’m slow with tiredness, even through the stims, and I put the marker in and it makes sense. I bring up video footage from the bounce, the long-range footage of whatever this thing is, and I plot it against the map of where we are. I go into the hard drives, to the time stamps of what we saw before, when we first met the Ishiguro, and I bring that up, extend it and enlarge it, and try to match the two. The blur looks the same from here, as tiny as it is; and I spend all day watching them, trying to see if they’re exactly the same; and they are, soaring along inside the anomaly. It makes sense, and I finally have answers to one of my questions. How did the Ishiguro survive out here for so long? Answer: it didn’t. It has been cycling, like everything else that dies inside the anomaly.
I don’t say anything to Inna and Hikaru, not yet: I sit and watch them. ‘I have déjà vu,’ I say, hoping that Tomas will correct me; tell me that this is not déjà vu, this is sitting through something again, an experience that reminds me of the first. Déjà vu is a chemical response to coincidence that causes a rush of endorphins. This – watching the two versions of the Ishiguro, one from before, one now, and yet both somehow old – makes me realize how much the anomaly is like the video players. It is not changing time; it is simply replaying that which has already happened once before.
I spend my life here watching it as it gets bigger, losing track of time. It’s following the exact same line. I tell Hikaru and Inna that I might be onto something, that there might be something happening soon. I don’t say that it’s a way out, because it isn’t. I don’t say that it’s the Ishiguro. I match the trajectories exactly, using the recorded pins as an overlay, so that I can see if anything changes. It’s safe to assume that they are like Inna was: relatively mutable, able to alter what they do each go-around, depending on circumstances. Still, they won’t have changed a thing, I shouldn’t think, because there’s nothing external to influence them. There is no me, telling them lies through a headset. Assuming that they don’t know that they’re in the cycle – because why would they? – they will do exactly what they did before. Why would you change a decision that made perfect sense the first time around?
As it gets closer and closer I can see the ship. Their path is an exact copy. Where they stop, it’s at the same time in the same place. When they start moving again, ditto. It’s almost too incredible.
‘Are you seeing this, Tomas?’ I ask, but he doesn’t answer, and of course he is.
Hikaru tells us that he wants to go for a walk. I cannot stop him, I know that. He says that he wants to see what it’s like.
‘I never had the chance when we were still on the mission,’ he says, even though the mission is not done, and we are not finished, ‘so I think I should probably do it now. Before this ends.’ He is convinced that we are over. This is Hikaru on a death clock. If Inna was doing her job properly, she should be worried about him. He’s a prime candidate, more even than Wallace was, and look how that ended. He preps an O2 tank for the helmet and gets changed outside the airlock. Inna helps him: even as she fastens his suit for him and aids him in attaching the helmet I can tell that she hates it. What it reminds her of, to look into that slightly mirrored glass of the front. I watch them through the corridor, but I can barely see the airlock from here. I change the view on the screens to track him when he’s outside – I imagine him doing something stupid, and know that I have to watch it if he does – and I strap myself to a chair and reach for my stims. The blister pack is empty. I tell myself that it’s okay. Fastened here, barely sitting, almost floating, I am gone.
I wake up to the noise and bluster of Hikaru coming back: the flurry of him working the airlocks compared to the silence of Inna sitting by herself. I don’t know what she was doing.
‘How was it?’ she asks him. She knows what her time was like; what it must be, she’s thinking, to have had a trip into that darkness that passed without incident.
‘Yeah,’ he says. He thinks, and then, ‘Pretty amazing.’ I pull myself to the corridor and peer in at them. ‘You should try it, Mira: going out into the anomaly.’
There’s no joy in his suggestion. He is the villain in the darkness beckoning me closer to his side of the ship. ‘It’s not like real space, you know? You feel so alone, and there’s nothing. Even a foot in front of your face, there’s nothing. It’s an answer in itself, I think.’
‘I’m fine,’ I say. I flick back to the Ishiguro on the cameras. It’s only a day away, maybe. I am trying to think of ways to get its attention, to let it know that we’re friendly. If we combine forces, maybe we can break this thing? Maybe then we can all get home?
I wake my crew and tell them that we need to talk. They are sluggish and wary, but I tell them that this is important. I tell them what I have discovered: that the Ishiguro is out there again, and heading back towards where we are. Hikaru nods along as if this is the most normal thing in the world. Suddenly nothing is incredible.
‘So they’re in a cycle, just as I was,’ Inna says. As you may be still, I think, but I don’t say that out loud. Wherever they are, whatever they are doing, if they die now they will begin again. Everything replays itself; all that has happened becomes new again. Inna has been in the anomaly since she died the first time. Would all her cycles before count as a single cycle now? If she and Hikaru died, would they all be a part of their joint experience? She stares at the screen I bring up, showing them it. I put it against the wall, make it large. She treats this as a window.
I am the only one out of this. Really, if I break this down, I am all that is left of my own free will; my own ability to do what it is that I want. If I were to die now, I would stay dead. I would join my other crewmates, sent out of the anomaly before they had a chance to restart their lives. I would drift; they might be able to drag me to their side but I, I assume, would remain dead. They would put me into a bed, probably Hikaru’s, to preserve my body.
I would be in that state for eternity: done.
I have never before had thoughts this dark. Once, Tomas told me that he had considered suicide. As a teenager he had wondered about it as a way of expressing himself. An experiment. He asked me what there was left to conquer – this was before we had set ourselves on our paths – and said, This is a way to explore that which can only be explored now. To really discover something about humanity. It was a child talking, the idea of a fool who talks before thinking. Maybe it was under the influence of something – he got quite into drugs as a teenager, mushrooms that our stepfather grew and approved of us trying, an experiment to open our minds (and which directly led towards him leaving our mother) – but it made sense to him for a minute. Death: a final frontier. He had those thoughts. I wish that I could speak to him, now. Ask him what he would do in my situation, even though I know the answer. He would say, Be strong. I am not as strong as him though. Not in that way.
‘Are you all right?’ Inna asks me, but I can only gulp her question – and my answer – away, and I slope off down the corridor and into the lab. She follows, down her own section of the corridor. I stay around the corner, out of sight, but I don’t close the door, and I can hear her voice calling to me: ‘Mira? Mira?’ She sounds concerned for me: as if, all of a sudden, she wants to ensure my safety again, and that I am okay. Her job, and maybe something else.
‘Go away,’ I say, but I don’t know that she can hear me, and I’m not really sure that I mean it.
I think about it all day. Here, on the one hand, the Ishiguro is getting closer and closer: and with it comes a chance to witness something truly incredible, to step outside the bounds of science as I understand it, to define a scientific theory. The reappearance of it, the seemingly immortal cycle of life inside the anomaly: it could change the world. This is what we wanted to find, even though we did not know it.
And the other hand: the reality of what is left, and how my days will end. Because Inna doesn’t remember her cycles, and I would hazard that the crew of the Ishiguro don’t either. If they could, it is likely that they would be doing something different with them. They wouldn’t be back here, revisiting old glories. They would be trying to find a way out of this. Twenty-three years of this, and they surely would have found something better than echoing themselves.
So there is a way out. I think about how I would do it. Wallace’s route worked for him, but I could not do it. We have blades, scalpels in the medical kits. And we have pills: we have enough tranquillizers in the medicine cupboard that it would be easy. They say it’s like sleeping, drifting off in a fug of something or other. A haze.
If I could find the courage, this would be my last chance.
I watch the Ishiguro get closer and closer. It is so unnatural: like a ghost, almost, coming through the nothing. It is solid, but it has exploded and been lost (I assume) so many times before. I wonder what they’re doing in there. I wonder if they know what we know, on this cycle. Maybe this time they have worked it out. It stops. It did this before, the first time. (I laugh at that thought: the first time for me, but how many times for them I wouldn’t even like to hazard a guess. Maybe I will run the numbers one day: it should be easy enough to work out.) It is close enough now that they should be able to see us. We are not chasing to catch up with them: we are ahead of them, not debris or a meteor or anything else you might see in space. We are like them. I wonder, if they see us, how we will look: the half a ship inside the anomaly, divided up. What that will look like to them? I tell Hikaru and Inna what has happened, and where it is.
‘How do we get in contact with them?’ Hikaru asks. I can hear hope in his voice. I’m not sure that he even knows it’s there, but it is. I wonder if he suddenly regrets eating his non-white food. ‘There must be some way,’ he says.
‘We tried everything before,’ I say.
‘You could try hailing them,’ Inna says.
‘We’ve already tried that as well,’ I tell her. ‘We tried different radio frequencies, and they didn’t answer. They’re too automated.’
‘So we’re in front of them. They’ll see us through the cockpit now, won’t they? They’ll want to know who the hell we are.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Of course.’ But we float and wait, and nothing comes from there. Hikaru gets nervous, and paces as much as somebody can up here; pushing himself in a small space, from wall to floor to ceiling. He bites his nails: so different from the man we brought up here. That man was calm, still. This one is a nearly a wreck.
‘I should go out there,’ Hikaru says. ‘I could get them out.’
‘No,’ Inna says. He isn’t thinking. Or he can’t remember. It seems like so long ago.
‘It would make sense,’ he says. ‘They’re close enough, right?’
‘Don’t be fucking stupid!’ she shouts. I picture them – Inna, Lennox, Tobi – out there, trying to do what we thought was best. Then the Ishiguro firing its engines and roaring forward in that way we never expected. How it didn’t flinch: all their engines, pushing it onwards along the inside line of the anomaly.
And then, realization. We are not where we were; or the anomaly is not.
I push myself to the lab. I get the maps up, where we and the Ishiguro are now, the video of where the Ishiguro was before. Something’s changed: the Ishiguro was never on this exact trajectory. It was further away, further from the Earth. It’s moved, clinging to the front-line of the anomaly, as if it was a tide, maybe, and we are on the edge of the wash; and I watch the video of what it will do now and we’re in its path, trapped halfway between the anomaly and not. On the video projection, as an overlay, the Ishiguro roars past us and explodes. It moves through where we are. It moves into us, and if we are still here, we will die, as it will break every part of us.
I do not want to die. Sometimes, the promise of that is enough to give you the answer; seeing it happen, almost, is enough to put you off the idea.
Hikaru tells me that there’s no choice but to move the ship forward. He pleads with me, that it’s something we have to do. He says, ‘We don’t want this to be our everlasting,’ which seems to me an odd way to phrase this. I wonder where the cycle wou
ld start from with this death; if there is any logic or reason there, any science. (I wonder, for a second, for a fraction of that time, if this could be down to God. This is the first time since I could breathe that I have contemplated with any seriousness the concept of a deity. I almost feel a fool.) I tell Hikaru that there must be another way. This all seems to play too slowly: as if we’re struggling for what to say and think. I wish we had Tomas’ input. He might have an opinion.
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ Hikaru says, as he seems to always say or think now. ‘There’s no other way out of this. You will die, Mira. Is that what you want?’ Preservation of the self, I think. This is what he’s displaying, even though he’s turned it onto me. Inna pushes herself towards the wall of the anomaly. She rests against it. The flats of her palms are white with the pressure she’s putting onto it.
‘Please think about this,’ she says.
‘I am,’ I say.
‘You told us that there was a way home.’ I was placating them. ‘You said, we can all get home. You cannot get us all home if you die, Mira.’ She’s terribly scared: she knows that it’s my death and mine alone. What will happen to them? Would they relive this moment for eternity? What happens to the me in their cycle, when they come back? Would that dictate their own loop: leaving them with that solitary moment of death, over and over, unending and ceaseless? When do they die? When does this begin again?
‘Put in the override code and give us control back,’ Hikaru says.
I watch the Ishiguro start its engines on the screen. It rumbles on the video, the hull shaking, and it seems to lurch – drawing backwards, like a toy car that you pull then release – and here it comes. These are the moments that define us.
