The Echo

by James Smythe

  Tomas messages me as I am trying to sleep.

  ‘I wanted to see if you are still there,’ he says.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

  ‘I don’t know. Sometimes I think that you are less than real. I can’t believe this.’

  ‘You left me for dead,’ I say. He is silent. ‘Don’t you have anything to say?’ I ask him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says.

  ‘You could apologize,’ I tell him.

  ‘No I couldn’t,’ he says. The connection severs.

  I try and work out where Tomas could be. This seems like a sensible way to spend my time: exercising my brain. Putting anything I have up here to good use. This was always my flaw, I think. I could never just stop and be. Tomas was able to do everything, to multitask, to do his dating and his fucking and his work and somehow get it all right. He was hampered: he was the imperfect one, the one who was neglected when I was a miracle. He had the birthmark: I was physically perfect. But then, he excelled and I did not. I was the one whom they did tests on when we were children, who had the extra time to do his exams. He is no less intelligent, they said. He just needs more care. I was the one whom Tomas had to look after. Everything about us leads to this: him as my salvation, and still I know he is lying to me. He has always lied, because it’s easier for him. And why should I trust him, I want to know. I want to ask him, but the connection is dead, so I plot his route instead. I try to see where he could have left from and where he could be now, if I make educated assumptions concerning my own trajectory. Assuming he can see me, and it’s just me that cannot see him. Assuming that he is here to rescue me, and not luring me deeper into this thing for his precious fucking research. Nothing but assumptions. He had a thing he used to say about that, a pithy little joke that he threw out to embarrass me when I used the word. When we were researching, I used it a lot. So much of science is based on assumptions. We assumed that the anomaly would be something we could just read from, something benign and yet explainable. I can hear his pith in my mind, rolling around.

  He would say, We should have researched more.

  After a day of working on it, I cannot fathom where he can be. The estimations of the anomaly are huge and all-encompassing, and I put a pin into the map to represent where we could end up, based on trajectory and speed and assuming that I travel at normal parameters inside this thing. Assuming I burn fuel normally and that the drag – and therefore my speed – is constant. He can’t be there, because I can’t work out how he would reach that point. I can’t see how, from earth, in the time that he had; flying around it, riding its curvature, coming in from the rear. I imagine it as many ways as I am capable of doing and I simply cannot see it. There is something about this that all feels too inevitable.

  So I try options: that maybe he left before he said, that we were talking from somewhere closer, and he was lying to me; that he is lying now, but somehow has managed to find a way to communicate with me from Earth, even though the lag is less; that I have been here for longer than I thought. The last one burns. It would mean that I have died somehow, and am part of a cycle. I wouldn’t even realize, would I? I would be stuck here, somehow in this loop, and he might have been out here for months looking for me. Maybe years. I have thought about how they work: some consideration about what makes them begin, what defines them. I touch myself, feel my body, as if that might give me a sign. Maybe I have been here for more time than I realize, and he has found a way out. Maybe we are different ages; brothers now, no longer twins. No longer even close to identical. We wear different skins entirely.

  It nags at me. I cannot fathom him lying to me, not like this; though it explains so much. It explains the hesitation in his voice, the trepidation, the fear. What if I was in a loop and he has found a way to break it? What if they are trying to talk me out of the anomaly without me dying, undoing all their good work? I try to work out the fastest Tomas could get to the point he claims, if he slept the whole way, if they had somehow added fuel tanks, replaced life-support systems with backup fuel, made the ship more cramped. Maybe only brought a crew of three, say, to run it. A skeleton staff. It’s still days and days out. Maybe he’s telling me his projected time? Maybe the point at which we will coalesce?

  I message him. I am determined to ask him. I message over and over, nagging him, not even saying anything but his name, calling into the darkness. Eventually he answers, after I don’t even know how long.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asks.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. He barely sounds like the same man. He sounds broken, more broken than I am, even. Not like a man who is on a rescue.

  ‘You said that I was twelve days away from seeing you. Now it’s only seven.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says.

  ‘So how are you that far into space so quickly? How did you find the other edge of the anomaly?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ he says.

  ‘So where am I to meet you?’ I ask.

  ‘At the centre of this thing,’ he tells me. ‘I’m right in the middle, I think.’

  ‘What’s in the middle?’ I ask him, but he doesn’t answer. I think he has gone, because it’s silent apart from a hiss, but maybe that’s him sobbing in the fug, or maybe it’s laughter. I don’t know. I can’t tell.

  It preoccupies me throughout the entirety of the sixth day before I will see him: whether this means I am not to be rescued after all. What it means to me to be pushing through this darkness. And it has a centre, and it’s six days away. In the lab I estimate the size of it. I draw it as a black circle, and it engulfs so much of space. It’s gargantuan. It fills the space between where I am now and the far beyond. I wonder if it’s moving or growing. I wonder if that’s making a difference. I draw the circle darker on the map, not translucent, blotting out the stars. I leave the Lära there as a pin, but it will make no difference to anything.

  I wonder how he ended up in here. If he came in after me, or if it was an accident. If, somehow, his journey mirrored my own. We have that a lot, where we find that we say we would have done things differently only to discover that in reality we would do them in exactly the same way. It’s very easy to think that you’re distinct and individual when you are a twin, but actually you are nothing of the sort. It’s an accident to think the same way as another. I try and talk to him but he doesn’t answer.

  I wonder if he is as trapped as I am. If he has called this a rescue, sold it to me, but really he is alone out here. I wonder if he’s adrift; if he has asked me to come to him to rescue him. The tables turned. He’d never admit that, not outright. He would thank me later. My fantasy of this is of me getting home, but maybe that’s impossible. Maybe what’s possible is getting him back. It is not getting home, but the two of us, we could work out how to free ourselves. Between us we could muster the fuel needed, the ideas. How to extricate ourselves. He has a connection that works, the ability to message me. Maybe he’s still in contact with home. We could send our data home, keep them informed, answer the question of the anomaly. Isn’t that what this has all been about, really?

  I tell myself that I should make peace with it. There are five days until I see him, and he seems to be holding up worse than I am. He makes contact today, and asks me over and over where I am. I say, ‘I don’t have any reference points.’

  ‘Find some,’ he tells me. So I sit and I stare, and I try to see anything out of any of the screens. I drag them to their maximum possible resolution, their highest zoom, and I try to find even a speck in the darkness that I can latch onto. I tell him where I am on the map, on my old star charts. Where I should be, if the anomaly is true: the distance from home, the distance to our closest planets. I give him coordinates, but he laughs them off.

  ‘You think those are right?’ he asks. ‘You think that they mean anything?’

  ‘How can they not?’ I ask him. ‘You said I’m now five days from you. There must be constancy,’ I say, ‘or you would not have bee
n able to predict that so ably, would you?’

  ‘You’re so fucking naïve,’ he says. ‘That’s your problem, it’s always been your problem. You’re too naïve, and you’re a coward, and you refuse to see this for what it is.’

  ‘So tell me what it is!’ I say.

  ‘I can’t,’ he says. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Why not? Won’t it help me? Help us?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ he tells me. ‘You’ll see.’

  On the fourth-last day, I see something on the screens. I don’t know what it is: a dot, even at the largest zoom. I strain myself getting close to it. It’s barely even a pixel, barely anything at all. It’s something in the distance, and I am headed for it. I wonder if it’s Tomas. I message him, and I talk to myself, to the quiet on the other end, that it must be.

  ‘I can see you, I think,’ I say. ‘Can you see me? You should be able to, as a speck.’ I give him my coordinates again, but he doesn’t answer. I spend the day attached to a bench and watching the speck grow. It’s barely visible. It grows as flecks of dust grow: it amasses until there is just even more of that very same dust.

  Three days to go, and he wakes me. ‘Did you ever think that this would happen?’ he asks. He sounds ill. He sounds like there’s something terribly wrong. I can tell, because his voice is not what it should be.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘We didn’t prepare for this, did we?’ I lie in my bed, strapped down. ‘We didn’t have a plan for this. No contingency.’

  ‘No, we didn’t.’ He is gulping a lot.

  ‘Are you lying down?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘As are you.’

  ‘I am.’ He coughs. ‘What’s wrong?’ I ask him, but he coughs more, and then there’s a retch. Vomit. I can hear him spitting it up on the other end of the connection. I try and talk to him, to get him to listen to me, but he doesn’t reply, and the silence floods in. It’s another five minutes before he says anything.

  ‘Are you scared?’ he asks.

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of what happens now. What’s going to happen.’

  ‘No,’ I say. That’s a lie. I am waiting for his reveal: as he shows me that he is as duplicitous as I fear. That he’ll stab me again, and this will be a test, and I will be his lab rat.

  ‘Okay,’ he says. He’s warning me. He goes then, and I can’t get him back.

  The dust speck is now something else. A larger speck. A ship, I know. I can see it, in the same way as I once saw the Ishiguro. I can’t even think how long ago that was. I still worry that it was longer than it seems, that I am playing tricks on myself. But this in the distance is a ship, definitely. I can tell from the shape, the rough shape of it. It looks like the ship that I’m on: meaning that it’s the backup. I still haven’t asked Tomas about how he got out here, and why he’s here. Why he didn’t just leave me to die. I watch the ship-speck get closer and closer. Forty-eight hours and I will be next to it, and I’ll climb aboard. And whatever happens, I will be with Tomas, which is better than being in this alone.

  I have another fantasy. Perhaps I shouldn’t call it that, as that suggests a desire for it to become true. But:

  He and I are on our ship. We are together and we are growing older. He is dying, of something or other. Hunger. Thirst. Everything is recycled, and there is only so much of this. We are stuck inside this thing, this anomaly, and we cannot escape. He sacrificed himself for me – maybe that’s the part of this that I like? that I am attached to? – and that’s that. I watch him die, and then, as he dies, he chokes himself awake. He fits and sputters and chokes and then wakes again, and then he dies and then he wakes. I have seen the cycles when this is unnatural, when it’s forced onto people, but not when they just stop. When their bodies are done.

  Will the anomaly force them back into life? Is that something that it can even do? Will they live forever?

  I watch the ship get bigger and bigger. People throw déjà vu around, as something that occurs when they do something that reminds them of another time. That isn’t it. Déjà vu, real déjà vu, it’s a chemical imbalance. It’s a reaction where your brain can’t parse what’s happening and it turns it around. It ruins a moment of peaceful memory for you by adding dizziness, nausea into the mix. Watching this now all I have is a sense that I have been this impatient before. The ship starts as something small and generic, and then I see it exactly as it is. It’s this ship, exactly this ship. Even down to the lettering on the side. Lära, it says. My mother’s name; and also the name of Tomas’ baker. I said to him, Can’t you see what she is to you? What you’re doing with her? And he said, She has the same name. It’s a common name, and what is it to you? So when I suggested we name the ship after Mother, he wasn’t happy. I said, I don’t care. I look for a suffix, for a Two or a B or something else, something distinct, to see what he has done to differentiate us. I want to see if this twin has its own birthmark.

  Then it is the size of the desk, on full zoom. I can see it sitting still and immovable. The boosters are not on; they’re not holding it in place, which means it’s drifting. The lights are on, though. It’s not a power loss.

  ‘You’re looking at me, aren’t you?’ Tomas asks, over the speakers.

  ‘How did you know?’ He snorts at my question. He’s silent, then, despite my prodding. I say, ‘If you won’t talk to me, listen to me. I am only a while away. Are you in trouble?’

  I don’t get an answer for hours, and then he says, ‘Yes.’ But even when I ask what he means, he doesn’t say.

  I can count how long it will be until we are together in hours now instead of days. I am lucky, I think, because one way or another I will be out of here, and I will no longer be alone. I could have lost all sense of who I am in this, after the crew died. And to say it, I still feel no guilt. I wonder if that’s my problem. That I should have felt more. I wonder if that makes me a bad person. Seems to me that if I had focused on it, I would have lost myself.

  I look at the blackness. It’s my hope that Tomas and I can put our heads together and save ourselves from this. But if we don’t – if he’s lying to me, if he’s as stuck here as I am – then I am still okay. It’s better to not be alone as you die, I think. That’s what our mother said to me as I sat with her. She said, This tells me so much about your love for me, and I said, It should never have been in question.

  I message Tomas. He is barely there: a shell of a voice, a fragment, broken and devoid. He says, ‘You’re nearly here.’

  ‘I am,’ I say. I try to sound excited: to lift the tone. ‘I am only hours away.’

  ‘You’re anticipating reconciliation.’

  ‘Aren’t you?’ He snorts. ‘Listen,’ I say, ‘I want to know if you knew that this would happen. All along, when you abandoned me. I need to know, Tomas. You understand that?’

  ‘I understand so much more than you,’ he says. He sounds like he’s a ruined man. I wonder what he had to sacrifice to come out here to me.

  ‘You don’t sound happy to be seeing me,’ I say.

  ‘How could I be?’ he asks. ‘Knowing what I know now?’ Then he severs the connection, and he’s gone. But his ship is there, right in front of me. There are so many things I want to ask him. I strap myself into the cockpit seat and watch on the screens in real-time as it gets bigger and bigger, and I get closer and closer to him.

  His ship looks tired from this angle. I wonder what it’s been through to get here. I want to hear all of his stories, every single one. How he got here so quickly; how he came to be inside the anomaly; and he hasn’t mentioned a crew, so I want to know what happened to them; and why is he here? Is it for me? I hail him as I get closer, but there’s no reply. I say, ‘I need to come aboard,’ but there’s nothing.

  As we get closer still, I ponder his suggestion that we are near the centre of the anomaly. How did he know that? How could he? There’s nothing here to tell me that, and nothing to allay my thought that we shall never escape it. I wonder what state I will find him in. If he’ll b
e as broken as his conversations with me would suggest.

  I’m scared of damaging the ship – either ship – so I stop far before I reach it. Hikaru would have been able to do something better with this. Maybe drive us alongside it, allow us to almost connect the doors together. That’s why he was a pilot and I am not. I stop the ship with the boosters, and it’s harsh and hard, gravity back, thrown into the chairs, but they work. They do what we wanted them to do.

  ‘Where are you?’ I ask. ‘Why aren’t you answering?’ It’s so quiet on the other end of the line. ‘Tomas?’ I say, but he doesn’t answer. I check my suit, take a helmet, attach it. I have a fully replenished tank of oxygen, and I seal the airlock from the rest of the ship, leaving the door open for me. And then I’m in space, or the anomaly. The darkness. It’s so cloying out here. A foot in front of you looks like the far-off distance, looks exactly the same. There is no light in here – nothing from the sun coming through, and you cannot even see out, from in here: the darkness is too much. It’s like fog, only there’s nothing tangible here. Just nothingness, all around.

  I move through it, though, towards the other Lära, and I circle her. I will miss this, just as I get better at it. I can really feel myself growing in these circumstances. Perhaps I was always destined to be out here and alone. I feel like I am beginning to discover exactly who it is that I am.

  The airlock of this other Lära is open. Tomas is waiting for me, as he said he would be. I get to it and pull myself inside, and I seal the door, start the decompression. It only takes seconds, but it’s still enough to make me anxious. I look for Tomas here, waiting for me, but he’s not. He’s nowhere to be seen, not in this room. It looks exactly the same as ours, which makes sense, because we built them to be the same. Hewn from exactly the same plastics and metals and moulds.