The Echo

by James Smythe

  ‘Hello?’ I call as I step out. I check the changing area, the corridor, the engine rooms, the lab, the lounge, the cockpit, but he isn’t here. It is pristine, as if it has never been used. I spend time pulling myself around every room, ending in the lab. The only sign of life: my notes, my handwriting. The orange map that I made, with the anomaly on it and a pin in it showing where the ship is. ‘Hello?’ I shout, but the ship is, apart from me, empty. He’s not here, and, as I look at this exact duplicate of the ship I have just left, I realize that he has never been; or he has always been; or he will be, now.

  It was as I thought: inevitable.

  Somehow, now, I am more alone than I have ever been before.

  16

  I panic, and am terrified. I leave this ship, because it is wrong, and it has no place here. It is a lie, as all of this is a lie, and I swim through the anomaly to my Lära, my original version, untainted, truthful and honest, and I cling to the rail when I am safe inside the airlock. I start the engines, the boosters, turning the ship in the nothing. We rotate, and I look for the other Lära, the facsimile, but it is gone, and I am in its place; the same position, facing the same way, drifting and fitting into the lie in its entirety. I stop the engines and I weep, because I have no other choice. I feel sorry for myself; I feel as though I am responsible for this. From day one, I have been leading towards this.

  I have made my own bed, and it is the same as it has always been, ever since we came out here. Now, I must lie in it.

  I have to test this. I have to see if this is true, so I sit at the console and I open the radio and it is at the right frequency, of course it is, because it is the same frequency; and I say his name – my name – into the darkness, to see if I will answer.

  ‘Brother?’ There is static and nothingness. A gap, a pause, a wait in the air. ‘Can you hear me?’ I ask, knowing that he can. He replies. I can only hear myself in his voice, now. Nothing of Tomas in it at all. People always used to say that we sounded the same but I could never hear it. I can hear him asking more questions, but I don’t have answers. I don’t want to ruin him; I’m not even sure that I can if I want to. He still has hope, or he does now. I remember that feeling. I had it once, but now it is gone; or replaced, by whatever I will leave this ship for in fourteen days, and not come back to.

  He is so happy to hear from me. I say his name and he bursts with joy. I don’t remember sounding like this, but then, that’s not surprising. Back then I was preoccupied with getting somewhere. Now I am stuck. I have to wait. I have to meet him before I see whatever it is that I am going to see. The connection isn’t good, so I tell him about the static. It fades out and in, and I think that I should stop talking to him. It’s easier. I can barely bear to hear his voice, because it does remind me so much of Tomas.

  I wonder what Tomas is doing now. Fuck him, fuck him, fuck him.

  He asks me about when we were kids. Our childhood. He doesn’t know that it was the same. He asks if I ever think about it, and I say that I do. I cannot lie to him; not any more.

  ‘All the time,’ I say. He’s so desperate. He thinks that it means something, that we are close. Tomas thinks about our best times. He is so pathetic, I think. I am just like this, fawning at the altar of the one who would have surrendered me to this abyss, this maw. He wants to think that Tomas thought well of him, when in fact it was nothing but abandonment. I was a sacrifice to science. I wonder if he still thinks of me. If he wishes he could do it again.

  The slow-fade of my mood as I try to forgive him. I reach out to my memories of how Tomas and I were and I try to think of a reason that I shouldn’t harbour the grudge that I do, that I will, until the day that I die. Who am I kidding, I think; I am already dead. I don’t say a word to the other Mira, because I am so angry. I want to tell him not to trust Tomas – not to trust me – but I can’t. Because there’s something else. There was a version of me here, and then it was gone. When I found the new version of the ship, or the old version, or the copy, I was not here. I must have gone out there into the darkness. It’s a lure in the purest sense: the fish approaches the line with no idea what it’s getting into.

  I want to placate him. I can’t remember our exact conversations, so I rely on my gut. That seems to make the most sense.

  ‘This will all work out, you know.’ I hope that I sound convincing. I am talking to myself as much as I am talking to him. I decide that I have a part to play: that of my brother. He wants to know that this is all right. I remember enough: that he was suffering. So I put the mask on, and I channel Tomas Hyvönen, master of all he surveyed; the brother who had something to prove, and proved it over and over, at the sacrifice of all others. Mira, the Mira coming through space with eagerness and hope, says that he thought he was abandoned, and I, a false Tomas, give him peace, for a moment at least. I tell him that I could never do that. I swear it to him. He asks how far away he is from me, and I tell him. I know exactly how far.

  I don’t sleep. I can’t. I am worried about getting this right. About what it means, whether I’m in a cycle or not. I mean, I am. But at what stage, and whether I can break it. And if, therefore, I’m going to die. I’m going to die and somehow see myself.

  Where do I go when I leave this ship? What happens to me? The other version of me wants to talk about Hikaru and Inna, and I cannot bear it. I don’t want to think about them. I just want to move on. I want to tell him that he gave them an ending, that he finished their journey for them. That that should have been enough. Maybe I don’t know him as well as I thought I did?

  That thought alone makes me laugh. I remember that I wondered if there was something wrong, as the person I thought was Tomas signed off unnaturally. Now, I stifle my laughter as I do it. I think about how confused I am leaving myself. When he is gone I stare at the anomaly. That’s all there is to do when you are perfectly still: stare at it.

  What’s left? After this, what is left?

  I feel sick. I drank too much. I have finished the champagne. I have not eaten in two days, and I don’t know why. I shout at Tomas, as pointless as it is. I scream his name into the ship, and I tell him what I think of him. I call him so many words. He has put me here. He is responsible for their deaths. He is the one who should feel guilty, not me. Not for any of this.

  ‘Tomas?’

  ‘I can’t talk,’ I say. And then, ‘I’m sorry.’ Because I am apologizing to him, not Tomas. I am not the sort of man to abandon you. I will try to help you: that’s who I am, now.

  I still haven’t slept. My body won’t let me. I haven’t shaved, haven’t washed. I am becoming who I will become, and it is not who I was. I cared, before. Do you remember that? Once, I gave a shit.

  I question this: that maybe I am imagining it all. That I am still alone. This is me and my psyche, and we’re battling. This is a struggle, a tug of war that I am having, and losing. Winning would mean sanity. Winning might mean no longer being alone, because being alone means that there is nothing. Nothing left at all. It would make sense that I would imagine myself as Tomas, maybe. Maybe I should paint my face: the birthmark, blood-stained, covering my head.

  ‘I wanted to see if you are still there,’ I say to the other Mira. I want to know that he is real. He asks me why I – Tomas – left him to die. I cannot give him a satisfying answer. I can only let it hang there, and wish that I could tell him. I wish that I could tell him why our brother decided that we were not worth saving.

  Still no sleep. I see things, out there, in the anomaly. I put screens everywhere I can around the ship showing the camera views of the outside. I don’t know which direction is which, other than this. And there, in the darkness, I see something. A glimmer. It’s there and then it’s gone. I pull the screens up, look at them. Try to find it. There’s nothing. I am seeing things, I tell myself. All that’s there is the black that’s always there. Why would there be anything else? How could there be anything else?

  He talks to me and I reply, but I am barely present. Barely
functioning. I want him here so that I can go out and see what it is.

  Maybe that’s why I left? Because there’s something else out here with us?

  I can’t see it. He messages me, but I ignore him. If I miss it for even a fraction of a second, I am worried that I will not know what it is.

  He asks for my help, and I want to tell him that I cannot offer him anything. He pesters me, an irritant suddenly. Is this how Tomas felt about me? Am I channelling him entirely, his feelings, his moods? The other version of me is still days away, and he sounds nothing like the man that I am now. I have slept, finally, but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like I’m past something, like I’m not even meant to be here. I can’t explain it better than that.

  Maybe I can. Like I’ve cheated death, maybe. I am on borrowed time, and yet time doesn’t seem to be linear, not here. Time is like anything else: language, or air, or me. Perfectly malleable.

  I see it again. I don’t know if it’s real, but it pulses with colour. It is so bright against the black. It gives this all a sense of being real: that the anomaly isn’t just nothingness.

  Then it’s gone, and I am alone again.

  This, whatever it is, is mine. It’s mine and mine alone, and Tomas has nothing to do with it. And he will never know. He said, We are going to discover something for humanity! and I will do it. It was me who discovered how the anomaly works! I can answer that fucking question: it is a fucking demon, playing with time. It is all we do not understand, and we never can. And this thing, this light, this glimmer, I will explain that as well. Here is the question: What is it? I do not know, but I will discover the answer. Everything must have an answer.

  I feel sick, and I try to eat, but I can’t keep it down. My body is rejecting everything. It feels like I am not meant to be here. I feel like my mother did. She said, once, that the cancer felt like it was eating her. I watch myself on the screens as I vomit, as I lie on the ground and it passes through me, and I think, I am meant to die.

  He speaks to me, but I placate him. I am sick. I don’t want to tell him that I am sick. I have so little time to wait, now.

  I tell him that I know what he’s doing. I almost tell him to turn around. But that thing, whatever’s out there: I need to know why I stepped out then. I must see it, and I think that he will have to reach me for this to complete. A loop is nothing if you cut the string.

  And everything becomes obvious to me, and laid out in front of me. I can see it all: I can see how I move on from here. As I see the Lära, the other one, the original one, this one, I also see the glimmer, in the distance. It’s not too far, I don’t think. I can probably reach it.

  I have two options. I stay here and I see. I break this. Or I step out and I look for what it is, for that glimmer, tempting me, a penny in a stream. He speaks to me. I am sick of him as he is. Can’t he see it himself? I ache. My chest hurts, and my head. It’s eating inside of me. I wonder, if I cut myself open, would I see the blackness that took my mother, and that threatened to take Inna once in her life? I would be too gone to be replaced; all around me would be black and rot, and I would die.

  I am not meant to live past this. I am not meant to be here. He says, ‘I need to come aboard,’ so I tell him that it’s okay, and I put my helmet on and check that the oxygen is charged, step into the airlock and open the door.

  I am gone.

  17

  Two hours is a long time. It’s time enough to get away from the Lära, and from the me that’s discovering exactly how useless he is. And from here, I am uncontrolled. I am free, perhaps for the first time. All that I know is that I was here, and I made my way out into this. I feel almost delirious with the freedom: that I can go anywhere. I have hours left, and the world – this void of a world, this space inside an anomaly that has ruined, stolen, changed my life – is my oyster.

  So I move in the direction of the glimmer that I saw, because there is nothing else. I am alone, and I have always been essentially alone, and I will die utterly alone. This is not an exit or Tomas finally come to rescue me. No, he is at home, with his baker, and I hope that he is not sleeping. I hope that there is a connection between us deeper than science, and that he is seeing somehow through my eyes for my final waking minutes; that as he sleeps he will dream this dream. He will be here with me as I sleep for the last time. He’ll wake up screaming, and she will comfort him, his Lära, but he’ll know. He’ll lie to her about what he saw, because he will know what it was and what it means. I will haunt him as he presents his findings to the world. I won’t let him rest.

  In the distance, the ship is nothing much any more. Like a car from an airplane. The newer version of me won’t have checked the scanners, because I did not, so he won’t know that I’m here. He’ll be getting to grips with what he must do now. He will be panicking, back on his own version of the ship, readying to leave, watching himself fall into place. I cannot remember how long that process took. Will take.

  In the distance, I can’t see the glimmer, but that’s all right, because I have seen it enough to know that it’s there. A replicatable accident. If something, a situation or reaction can be replicated, that’s enough primary evidence for its existence.

  It reminds me of something: when this all started, and I didn’t sleep in the bed as we launched, and I blinded myself with the light, that white glow. Sunspots. It’s almost exactly the same as that, but this time I cannot explain it. I wonder if I am being played with, some tricks and games that I barely understand. Does it matter? Does any of this?

  The suit is astonishing. It’s perfect for what we needed. I can barely feel the heat of the boosters on the back of my legs, even after this long using them. They weren’t meant to be used constantly, because the battery packs in the suits were single use. They were meant to last us the whole trip. Not that that matters now.

  I can’t see it, still. I shout out to it, inside my helmet. A voice inside my helmet tells me to take it off, and shout that way. Challenge the anomaly. A voice says, It’s alive, Mira. It’s playing games just as Tomas was, and I laugh that off. It’s so easy to dismiss idiocy. I know that I’m dying. I know that I’m not what I was. I think, in fact, that I have never been what I was, or what I thought I was. I have been coat-tails and clinging on, and this whole time I have been a pawn. Tomas had never really lost one of our games before this one, you know. Before it was decided that I would be coming up here. Not once. Bunk beds, Spider-Man or Batman, which side of Mother we would sit, who did the pitch, who signed the cheque. If we decided it by game, he never lost, but I kept going back because I was sure that I could outsmart him. Our mother once said, You’re the same. You look the same, you have the same interests, you think the same way about things. You’re the same, you two. Or maybe she meant it as, You too. Telling me that I am just as skilled as he is. And I wanted this. I wanted the dress up, playing at being an astronaut, the thing in space. The thing that was disposable. He wanted the control, and the power, so he gave me the win. It was easier to lose a game and let me think that I was the winner. He wanted his suit and his horn-rimmed glasses and his whisky and cigars. But more than that: I was a test. I was a sacrifice. I was part of this, and he needed to be at home to realize everything. He says goodbye. The brutal final words of a scientist to his brother; not a scientist, but a lab rat.

  I shout, ‘I wish that you were here, Tomas!’ and I mean it as instead of me, but perhaps alongside me would be equally fine. I could tell him to his face. I could beg that he repented and that I forgive him. He would not, though. He would see this as what it was: his choice.

  My eyes wet, I think that I see the glimmer again, so I push forward. My stomach hurts. I haven’t eaten in a while. Or had anything to drink; that was probably an oversight. I have no idea what I’m going to find here. It could be anything. I wonder if, back on Earth, they know that this is growing, or moving, or whatever. That it’s coming towards them. I wonder if Tomas knows how to deal with it. Maybe I have been useful. Maybe I wil
l be a hero, because my being here will give them an answer. He will be the one to tell them, of course, and he’ll tell them about my sacrifice. There’s no way he’ll let my name die out. He’ll think of something appropriate, I’m sure, because he will want it to reflect well on him. He will say that I was a scientist.

  How deep is this? I keep going. When you have no point of reference it feels like you are staying still, so I keep looking at the Lära. I am going further and further. Before, when I spoke to myself, I said that we were meeting in the middle. I suppose that was true. I wonder why I said it.

  I have hidden the numbers of how much air I have left from the inside of the helmet, because I don’t want it to be a countdown. I only want a rough idea of how long I have before I cannot find the glimmer any more, before that hope is gone, and that will be enough. Because I know that, at that point, there will be nothing to be done about it.

  When Tomas and I stopped talking for a while after our mother’s death, he said to me, You think you know best, don’t you? And I had to tell him that I didn’t. That such thoughts weren’t even close to me, nowhere near me. I said to him, She knew what she wanted, and I am only her son. I wanted what was best for my mother. I have always wanted to help those in pain. He said, There were other medicines, and I told him that he was mad. That she was suffering. Now, I wonder if this is my penance. If he thought that I was suffering, somehow. This is him making my pain cease. Does that make it better, if I think of him as that? As somehow rendering my name endless, timeless, part of history? Knowing I could never achieve as he does, and will in the future? He has given me something else. I wonder if that’s how he sleeps, after he sees the dreams of me dying. He tells himself that he did this for my benefit. He is benevolent.

  I have to make my peace with him, somehow. I do not know how.