by James Smythe
Don’t you want to know more? he would ask me, and I would say, Yes, of course. But he was more desperate than I. He was more inquisitive, more willing to do what we needed to do. He said, This cannot be all, and the anomaly might be part of something. It’s a discovery, Mira, and we cannot throw away a discovery without knowing everything possible about it.
I lie in bed and think about Tomas, and what he would do. He is probably at home. Maybe they have had a funeral for me, because he knows what he condemned me to. Maybe he was there, with his baker, in another of his dark suits and thin ties with his glasses on, and maybe there he was smoking one of his cigarettes, and he said something, read a passage maybe, about me. Something poignant, from literature, about space and the stars and the notions of loss and loneliness; something that would speak to me now, and mean something, and ruin me were I to hear it. He wouldn’t have cried, but his baker would have. She would have put on a show enough for both of them. And who would have been there for me? Maybe some of the researchers, or the attendants from the NISS. Maybe some of my old classmates, if they even remember me. Maybe one or more of our stepfathers might have put in an appearance, out of duty. I wonder if Tomas would stay for the wake.
At my lowest, I wonder about Easton, the journalist. What he must have seen. I wonder how he was old, and how the other version of him, the one that was jettisoned, was so young. I wonder what it means for the logic that I had assumed about the anomaly, and the effect that it has upon us. Where I had assumed that we were all in a loop, always dying, always living again, I wonder what he has been through: that the events of his life show on his body, not resetting as with Inna and Hikaru, but still there. I wonder if, in those final few days, as he died on my ship, if he felt his choking, his suffocation every time he awoke and had to play it again; if the only thing he could do was to take part in the deaths the way that they were happening, and if he knew that he was no longer alone, and now he was part of our loop, our cycle, our new way of him dying.
I am at my lowest when I think of this because it is another question that I will never have an answer to; another way in which I am just a failure, desperate and clawing for a truth.
I am wary to not stray too far from the screens, and the cockpit. We hadn’t expected that the wall would be solid. Maybe we would have compensated, built some anti-collision technology into the ship if we had known. We met with manufacturers of every type of addition we could have stuck into this thing, all the little details that some might ignore but that engineers and money-men were trying to get us to shoe-horn in. Things that belonged on cars or airplanes. We ignored most of them. We said, The ship is going to be built for use, for practicalities and work. Anything else is a bonus, but we won’t pay for those.
Sleep comes easily to me now, so I do it all the time. It lasts for hours and hours, and it is still and peaceful, and it rejuvenates. I wake up and feel rested for the first time in as long as I can remember. I don’t know why I am not stressed; probably acceptance. My body has, however, begun to ache, so I exercise when I can. We have devices to do this, but very few, so I hold onto the table and force myself into squats, into working my arms and legs. I shower and I shave, finally. I look at my face and I think about how I am essentially becoming more human now, as it matters the least. How fastidious I am still, even though there is nobody here to judge me. Regardless, I judge myself.
Eventually I snap and I try to clean the ship as well. I wash the blood off the walls in the room, where I can still almost see the ghosts of them going through their cycle. Going endlessly through their motions. I put gravity on – I can’t see how to make a bucket of water and a sponge work any other way – and I stand on the benches and try to get it all. It runs when I wet it, making wide pink stains down the white walls, and I have to try and clean them up as well. Where it has stained and smeared the cold walls it has dried, like you find on the underside of paint-can lids, and that runs as soon as you wet it. My work multiplies, but it’s the only way to get it done. I work corner to corner, hunting it out. I have no idea how Hikaru and Inna could make this much blood between them. I wonder, as I wet each individual part, if it’s Hikaru or Inna’s.
When the walls are pink and I can’t get any more away I drag the hose from the shower cubicle in the changing area and put my thumb against the end, running the water and spraying it across the room to try to get the walls as wet as I can. It only works on the nearest, but the pink runs down and it seems like the stain isn’t permanent. It gives me an idea: I wet all the other walls, soaking them, filling my bucket – actually a kidney bowl, the only thing I could find – and I throw water at them. When every wall is as wet as they can be, like the room has been hit by a localized storm, I put myself outside it in the corridor, seal the internal doors, and then set the airlock to open. Both doors, no safety measures. Suck all the liquid out of the room. I watch it on the video: it peels itself off the walls, almost. It’s not perfect, but it’s enough. When the room is nothing but space, I shut the doors and go back in. It’s so white, and so bitterly cold.
I turn gravity off again, and I clean the whole ship, top to bottom. I go through the drawers and see what we decided we would need, the stuff that we never touched. Cases of tools and replacement parts in the engine rooms; medical supplies, enough to run a full operating theatre; all this food, and so much of it Hikaru’s bland, bleached awfulness; all the measuring tools in the lab, all the instruments and methods of data collection; games, in case we got bored. What chance to use any of those things? I rifle through the drawers, where everything is vacuum-packed and magnetically held down, and I laugh at this. Tomas and I had gone through so many different possibilities, different eventualities. We had decided that we needed to prepare for them all. We were idiots. This trip was a waste, I tell myself.
We have champagne in the cupboards, in these individual cartons. They were for when we discovered what the anomaly was. One of Tomas’ suggestions, a way to celebrate our achievement. A last minute thought. I take one down and suck the sickly, fizzy liquid out of it in one go. And then another. And another. I tell myself that I’m a bad person for doing this. For even starting this trip, for initiating this stupid fucking concept in the first place. I have their blood on my hands. Five people’s blood, and their families’ hatred of me should and will be deserved. Tomas will bear the brunt of that, when we disappear. They will say that we should have prepared better. They won’t care that we were abandoned, because they will never know. It will be buried, some secret that people will never realize. All they’ll know is that the anomaly is something we didn’t expect, that we can’t account for. It can become a mystery. I drink another of the champagnes. Each is the equivalent of a glass. I can feel my head swimming more. I do not drink at home, usually. To celebrate something, birthdays or whatever, maybe a glass here and there. Drinking in space. Drinking in space! They’ll ask why we didn’t prepare for every eventuality, which is something that Tomas does not and will not have an answer to. He’ll say that we prepared for what we could, but is that even true? The eyes of the world were on us, the great scientists, meant to explain what the unexplainable is, meant to reassure, and we couldn’t even bring six people in a fucking capsule home. They’ve been doing that for years: since the middle of the last century. That’s how long we’ve been sending people up here for, and it’s something that we should have become good at. Instead we pushed ourselves and took leaps rather than working on perfecting what we knew, rather than removing risks. We took more. We said, Death found these people at this place. We should seek out death. We should try to stare it in the eyes.
I drink another of the flasks. I tell myself that I should save the rest. I should bide my time. I think about what happened, and I replay it all in my mind. I think about my last time with Inna. I think about her body, and peeling her apart, and seeing inside her. I wanted to know how bad it had been, and if I could have helped. My final stepfather once said, Put your skills to good use. Don’t fri
tter it away, how intelligent you boys are. How good you are when you work on something together. Fix cancer, he said, rather than fucking around in the stars and with ships and with things that will never do anybody any good. And when our mother died, he came to the funeral even though they were not together, had not been together for many years, and he said, I told you so. He stood at the funeral and he said, You stupid assholes. You stupid fucking children. See what you could have done. Tomas and I knew how irrational it was: his suggestion. It would not have helped anything. We knew that he was being insane, because it was likely that we wouldn’t have found a definitive cure.
There is nothing for me here. No way out. I look at the readings, of how long I have left, and I know that I cannot just sit here and wait for death to come to me. I can discover something myself: I can do what I came here for. I unclip myself and pull myself to the cockpit, and I turn on the engines and point the ship away from the wall of the anomaly. I plot a straight path, a straight line, deeper into the anomaly, into where – if my calculations are correct – I might find a centre, eventually. We will accelerate and then coast, and then I will see how far I can go in here. If this thing has an answer, I am going to head towards it.
The ship shakes, and so do my hands, and then I settle into the seat, and I have gravity back, and I feel, for the briefest of seconds, normal: moving forward, sitting, human.
There’s nothing in here, the deeper you go. After a day of travelling I can see nothing. It’s quite incredible, to look at it. I surround myself with screens in the lab and take the best 360-degree view that I can, and all I can see is blackness. If I turn the lights out and rely on the light from the screens, even though I know that they’re broadcasting and connected, the only light comes from our ship and engines, burning at the bottoms of the screens. In the distance, as far as I can see, there is absolutely nothing.
And I think, How can I be so alone? How can I be this absolutely alone?
I think that I should sleep again. I am not tired, but this is what I have now. The ship is still accelerating, still slowly gaining speed, and there is still weight in here. I walk to my bed and I lie down and I shut the door and I talk to myself, just to hear my voice; and in here, closed in, it reverberates. In here, it’s trapped. I think that I am talking to myself, and also that I am talking to Tomas. This is for him as much as it is for me: if he accidentally hears me, through the crackle of static inside the anomaly.
‘I am so useless,’ I say. ‘I have squandered it all. I have done what I should not, and it’s a waste. If you could see me now you would say that I am broken, a foolish man who rode some foolish dreams. And you’re just as bad as I am,’ I say, ‘because those dreams were ours. We allowed them to be here. We allowed them to be all that we were. We were distracted, and we failed.’ I need a drink, water. I am too lazy to get up, even though I am not tired, and in my throat I can feel the sick rising from the champagne. Here, it’s worse. Here, everything is worse. ‘I would tell you how my day was, but it was tantamount to nothing.’ I feel the vomit in my mouth, so I open the door of the bed and cough it out. It floats; another thing that I will have to clean up. I shut the door. ‘I am ruined,’ I say. ‘I wish that I would die, because then this would be over. It couldn’t be my choice, because I am so weak that I will always choose life: even here, where death means nothing, and life means nothing, and when I go, there will be nothing.’ I am picturing myself as an old man: dying of some horrific disease, and then waking up and dying again. Perhaps my heart gives up, or perhaps a cancer of my own. Or maybe in my sleep, just that I stop working, and then I start again, a new cycle, and I stop and start and stop. Perhaps that is already happening; because how would I know? ‘This is no way to live,’ I say. I am sobbing, and then I hear it: a voice, talking to me.
‘Brother?’ it asks, over and over. It’s Tomas’ voice, slinking through the nothing. I hear it as an echo, crackle-filled and pale from the speakers. Barely there at all, and if I wasn’t listening, maybe I would have missed it. It is as an echo, almost nonexistent. ‘Can you hear me?’
‘Yes,’ I say, but I’m not sure that it isn’t a lie. I call to him, but there’s no answer. In the darkness, with the bed shut, I say his name over and over. ‘Where are you?’ I ask.
There is no answer, and I wonder if it was just a ghost. If I was never meant to hear it in the first place.
I wake up and I say his name, first thing, in case. But there is no answer, not even the hiss of a connection. I wonder if I imagined it, last night. If I dreamed what it was that I wanted to happen. It is possible. I have never had an imagination, not really, but maybe this time. Maybe now is when I develop one. I get out of bed and discover that I am weightless again, so we must be going as fast as we can, now coasting; and I move to the cockpit and bring up the map, because I want to see where the computer thinks that we are. We have no way of knowing the centre of this thing, but if it is close to a sphere in shape, maybe we can guess. I start the program doing its work, and I lean back and shut my eyes, and then there comes a crackle from the speakers.
‘Brother?’
‘Yes!’ I say. ‘You’re there!’
‘I can’t hear you,’ he says. ‘I can only hear static.’ His voice fades in and out of the nothingness. I try and talk with him more, but there’s nothing coming back to me. It’s quiet again. It was definitely clearer than the night before, which makes me wonder if the anomaly is thinner than we thought. Maybe I’ll be reaching the far side of it soon enough? Maybe that’s where the signal is coming from. There’s no anomaly wall, nothing to stop me leaving it. The other side of the membrane, an easy slip-through for me, and back to the real world. This is the first time that I have felt hope in a while, I think. ‘Hello?’ I ask.
‘I’m here,’ his voice says, and then it’s gone again, fading into the crackle. I don’t stop the ship, or turn around: I know that I have to keep going forward. Maybe I am heading towards an exit; maybe that is how I can hear him.
There is nothing left for it now.
I talk to him, to fill the silence. I think that I could go insane here alone if I was given half a chance, so I keep talking to him. His voice flits in and out of the conversation; occasional bursts of dialogue with me that amount to answers, monosyllabic or thereabouts, but still: this is a conversation. The relief I feel at that. I am just so glad that I am not alone any more.
In the morning, the first thing I do is to look at the computer’s calculations. It has finished extrapolating where the middle of this could be, and it is so far away still. Past that, the other end of the anomaly. What might be an exit. There is no concept of being able to tell what is around me, and no way to tell if the ship’s instruments are correct. No points of reference for anything. In the olden days, a ship could plot a course by the stars, because they were unchangeable, the constancy. I am here with nothing around me, nothing at all. The distance looks as if it could be feet away, maybe, or thousands of miles. There’s no horizon. The map could be so wrong and I would never even know it.
I want to say, I am coming back to you. I want to say, I knew that you would not abandon me.
The ship is slowing down. I find it hard to tell, but it is slowing. I set the computer to track it and it does, and I do the math myself, seeing the numbers as they should be and then as they actually are. We are – I am – slowing inside here. There is drag inside the anomaly.
This should be a breakthrough. It should be a wonder: that this thing that doesn’t exist in any real way that we can tell, this anomaly in the truest sense of the word, it has a form of some kind. It is real, and must be tangible. I celebrate, by myself, that there is evidence. There must be something I can collect to prove this; maybe I just don’t have the tools yet. But still, there is work to be done.
Then I am alone, just me and my discovery. I try to tell Tomas but the line is dead, and I think about what it means as the ship slows and slows, and I realize that I will have to switch on the engines c
onstantly, to keep us moving forward. That I will be burning fuel all the way to the edge of the anomaly. I have no choice: eventually I will run out, and the batteries will discharge over time, and then I will die.
Where will I begin from? Here? This moment of realization? I try to call Tomas again, over and over and over, and then I set the engines to burn to counteract the drag: only a small amount, to keep us coasting, top up the speed and make it seem like there’s nothing slowing us down.
Me. Nothing slowing me down. That is the easiest thing to forget, through all of this.
We would always be in touch. From the tin-can telephones we made in the garden as children – running from his bedroom upstairs to the tree house, where I would sit and attempt to communicate with him – to the telephone call he made to me the night after he met his baker. She was asleep in the bedroom that they would eventually end up sharing, and he crept to the kitchen and opened the fridge, so as to have an excuse, and he called me. He whispered.
‘She’s nice,’ he said.
‘Good,’ I told him. I was alone in my room, and I had been asleep. Or I told him that I had, I cannot remember which, accurately. ‘You can tell me about her tomorrow.’
‘I want you to meet her tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You can come with me, and we’ll have lunch.’
