Only Human

by Sylvain Neuvel

[Ma’am! I’m going to have to ask you to leave!]

  —Thank you for your visit, Dr. Franklin. You should go now. My friend Keith and I are about to have a little chat.

  PART THREE

  ROAD TO DAMASCUS

  FILE NO. 2155

  MISSION LOG—CAPT. BODIE HOUGH AND LT. BARBARA BALL, U.S. MARINE CORPS, MECHA DIVISION

  Location: Aboard Lapetus, Muskö Naval Base. Near Stockholm, Sweden

  —Hey! Why are we beaming there? We could walk to the Merry Ham.

  —It’s Mariehamn, with an “n” at the end, you moron. And it’s about a hundred miles. We don’t have that kind of time, and they’d see us coming, well, a hundred miles away.

  —Are you sure? It looked real close! On the map. You saw it!

  —There’s a thing at the bottom of the map. Tells you the scale.

  [Lapetus, we don’t have all day. You have the coordinates. You are go for launch.]

  —Roger that, Central. Punching it in…now. We’re…here.

  —To the left, Bodie.

  —OK, I see it. Central, we’re about a mile from the pier. We can see the ferry.

  [Roger that. You are looking for a girl, nineteen years of age.]

  I don’t see her. I can’t tell if—

  —Central, this is Lieutenant Ball. We’re getting closer, but there are quite a few people here. Can you tell us what she’s wearing? They’re all very tiny from where we’re standing.

  [Stand by. We’re asking our source.]

  You’re talking to him now? Is your source here?

  [Lapetus, she is wearing a black tee shirt. She should be exiting the ferry building now.]

  …

  [Lapetus, do you have contact?]

  There!

  —Central, we have eyes on. She saw us too. She’s running towards us.

  [Roger that. Just keep her company. We’re sending a helo to pick her up. ETA three minutes.]

  —Bodie, look. The ferry building.

  —Got it. Central, there are five, no, six people in olive uniforms exiting the building. I repeat, six people, possibly hostiles, coming our way.

  [Where’s the girl?]

  Still running. Maybe eight hundred feet from us. Wait. Central, I see flashes of light. Are they shooting at us?

  —They’re not shooting at us, they’re shooting at her!

  [Lapetus, protect the girl at all cost. I repeat, you must protect the girl.]

  —Arming weapon now.

  —No, Bodie. They’re too close. We’ll kill the girl too. Just kneel. I’ll pick her up.

  —What?

  —You heard me. Just kneel!

  —All right!

  —Come on, girl. Just like King Kong. Climb…

  I’ve got her! Get up! Get up! Get up!

  —And up we go. I hope she’s not afraid of heights. Central, we have her in our hand, but I see trucks on the main road. There’s a helo coming from the east. I’m guessing that’s not ours.

  [Negative, Lapetus. ETA, two minutes.]

  Central, I don’t think they’ll feel very welcome. I have a feeling this whole place is about to get very unfriendly. Lieutenant, what do you say we walk her out of here?

  —Go! Head south towards the small islands.

  —South? But Sweden’s that way!

  —We can’t cross here, Bodie. We need to head south.

  —All right. If you say so. Heading south. Central, that helicopter is coming at us real fast. It’s…firing at us. Incoming! Brace for impact!

  —Turn around! Turn around!

  —Damn! We’re hit! We’re hit. They hit us in the back.

  [Lapetus, this is Central. Is the girl alive?]

  —Affirmative, Central. I’ve got her against our chest. She’s holding on to my thumb for dear life. Keep heading south, Bodie.

  —I am!

  —No, that’s southwest. We don’t want to go there yet.

  —Well, it’s away from that helicopter. Central, how about some help? We’re fine in here, but the girl won’t make it if we get hit from the front. I’m running as fast as we can, but I can’t outrun a chopper, and we can’t fire with a kid in our hands. Can we get some air support?

  [Negative, Lapetus. Our bird is rescue only. F7 is the closest Swedish airbase. We’ll have griffins in the air in two minutes. We’re looking at another five before they get to you.]

  Central, that’s not good enough. The girl will be toast long before they get here.

  [Checking with Swedish Navy. The…Härnösand is the closest ship to your location. She might get there faster.]

  Can she blow that chopper out of the sky?

  [She’s a corvette—57 mm guns on top. Be advised, Swedish forces will fire warning shots, but they will not engage unless fired upon.]

  Fired upon! What the hell do you think we’ve been doing out here? He’s coming at us again. Incoming!

  —Captain!

  —Dammit!

  —Turn us around, Bodie!

  —My leg won’t move. We’re stuck in mud or something. Turn the body away.

  —That’s as far as I can—AAARGH! That one hurt.

  [Lapetus, is—]

  We got hit in the shoulder. The girl is…She’s OK! She’s OK! I see her moving.

  —Must be one hell of a ride.

  —She won’t take much more of this. We need to move.

  —My leg’s free. We’re moving again. Lieutenant, can you see the helo? I’ve lost it.

  —I don’t see it either. Maybe it’s gone.

  —I doubt that. It seemed very motivated a second ago.

  Got him. He’s hiding in the sun. Coming straight at us. Oh, you think you’re clever, don’t you?

  —He’s coming fast!

  —I’m taking us across.

  —No! I don’t think we’ve cleared the—

  —He’s firing again. I’m turning.

  —Ugh. Same shoulder.

  —Screw this! I’m heading west.

  —Captain! No! You need to clear the trench! Oh, shit.

  —…

  —Back us up! Back us up!

  —I’m trying! We’re too heavy. The ground keeps giving under our feet.

  —Back us up, Captain. Now!

  —I can’t! It’s too steep.

  —Keep trying, Bodie!

  —I can’t do it! We’re sinking.

  —Central, we walked right into the trench at South Kvarken. We’re going down.

  —How deep is this thing?

  —Ten thousand feet at the deepest.

  [Roger that, Lapetus. What about the girl?]

  I can’t keep her above water anymore. Central, we’ll lose comms soon. I have to let her go. Dammit! She’s still holding on. Come on, girl! Let go!

  All right, Central, she’s all alone in freezing water. You better get someone here fast. It’s a rough sea.

  FILE NO. 2157

  DEBRIEFING—COLONEL SMITH, US ARMY, AND CAPTAIN LUCAS NILSSON, SVENSKA MARINEN

  Location: Muskö Naval Base. Near Stockholm, Sweden

  —You are the captain of the HSwMS Härnösand, is that correct?

  —Yes. Is Rear Admiral Björkman going to join us?

  —No. It’s just us.

  —What is this? Is this an official inquiry?

  —Call it what you want. We just want to know what happened.

  —With all due respect—Colonel, is it?

  —Yes.

  —With all due respect, Colonel. You are an officer in the US Army. I am a captain of the Swedish Navy. I understand that our governments are…cooperating, but—

  —Captain, with all due respect, I am not asking. Let’s not waste any more time pretending you have a choice. You w
on’t like how this ends. Believe me, I have all the authority that I need.

  —What do you want to know?

  —I want to know why we have a nineteen-year-old in a coma.

  —I believe her heart stopped, and she had to be revived.

  —The Härnösand was less than five minutes away when she went in the water. She should be having cocoa right now, not lying unconscious in a hospital bed. What took you so long?

  —I strongly believe I should be having this conversation with Rear Admiral Björkman.

  —Capt—

  —He should at least be in the room.

  —He was unavailable. Don’t make me ask again, Captain.

  —Ask what? You said we were less than five minutes away. That’s how long it took us to get there: less than five minutes. We didn’t stop for snacks. It took us another five or six minutes to find the girl.

  —Why?

  —Why? You didn’t lose an aircraft carrier, you lost a tiny human in a really big sea.

  —We didn’t lose anything.

  —Well, your people had her, then they didn’t. You can draw your own conclusions. The waves were much bigger than she is. We were almost on top of her when we spotted her waving.

  —That’s what? Ten minutes in the water.

  —Freezing water. Water temperature was three degrees Celsius.

  —Three degrees Celsius, that’s…

  —More than two. Less than four.

  —I would lose the attitude if I were you. You said she was waving at you. I take it she was still conscious.

  —She was. We threw her a life buoy.

  —You didn’t bring her on board?

  —The Härnösand is a stealth corvette, not a dive boat. You can’t just hop on and off. We had to get a lifeboat down. Problem is, a Finnish attack helicopter showed up. They fired machine guns across our bows, right between us and the girl. She was almost hit. We assumed they’d rather kill her than let us have her, so we backed away. They moved closer. The helicopter was in a better position to extract her than we were. We asked for permission to engage. We were denied. We fired our guns fifty meters from the helicopter. They stopped moving towards the girl, but they stayed to make sure we didn’t either.

  —There were jets under way.

  —Two griffins, but they weren’t even in the air yet.

  —Why weren’t they?

  —You’ll have to ask them. All I know is there was a problem at the base. The first help we got was a rescue helicopter. One of yours if I’m not mistaken though it didn’t have any markings. The Finns fired in the water again when they tried to approach the girl. Your helo moved towards the Finnish helicopter, dangerously close to it. They were in between the Finns’ guns and the girl for a few seconds. We grabbed her with the lifeboat before they found a new vantage point. By then, she’d been in the water for a good thirty minutes. She was unconscious. Her heart had stopped. That’s why she’s in a coma.

  —…

  —Will that be all, sir?

  FILE NO. EE254—PERSONAL FILE FROM ESAT EKT

  Personal Journal Entry—Dr. Rose Franklin

  Location: Assigned residence, Etyakt region

  Eugene passed away last night.

  I wasn’t there.

  Vincent and Eva stayed with him until the end. I didn’t. I just lay in bed here.

  There’s this tiny spot on my bedroom wall, top right corner, it lets a little bit of light in all the time. It doesn’t matter if I make the wall opaque or not, the outside is always showing through that spot. Last night, there was a star in the middle of it. I couldn’t stop staring at it. I kept waiting for it to move past the hole and fade into the wall, but it didn’t. It stayed right there, perfectly centered. When planets form, the gas they condense out of always has a small amount of angular momentum, and so they spin on themselves. The sky is always moving. I must have been looking at a ship or a satellite. It’s gone now. Someone turned it off two hours ago. I kept on staring, waiting for my star to come back, willing it to come back. Now the sun’s up and that spot on my wall is too bright to look at.

  I spent two days arguing with regional officials about Eugene’s case, asking, begging them to save him. I didn’t get the reaction I was expecting. They didn’t brush me off. They walked with me all the way to the hospital. They introduced me to doctors. They showed me the medicine. I don’t know why. It seems obvious it would just make things worse, but they felt like they had to. There was no cruelty involved. They just wanted to prove that they could save him, as if somehow that showed their good intentions. It was touching in some way. They weren’t going to do anything—they truly believed it would have been wrong to do so—but they wanted to show me that vial. They had such warmth in their eyes when they handed it to me. “Hey, look! We know your pain is real. You can hold it in your hands.”

  Yesterday, I went back and asked them if we could bury him somewhere. They don’t bury their dead. I could tell they were puzzled, probably a bit disgusted with the idea, but they wanted to make a gesture. They gave us a spot in fallow lands, somewhere. They said the land wouldn’t be used for years, but that they would need to get rid of the bones when it was time to plant again. It was hours away, even in a ship. They wouldn’t allow a decomposing body anywhere close to where people lived. It didn’t matter. I felt like I had accomplished something. I had found a way to honor my friend. Things made sense again. Yesterday, I found out Eugene had prepared a will, if you can call it that. Vincent took me outside and showed it to me. “I don’t want to be buried. I don’t want my ashes kept. I don’t want any piece of me left on this hellhole. If you ever make it back, tell my family I love them and that I thought of them in the end.” I started crying, shaking. I hit Vincent in the face. I went crazy, batshit, body-out-of-control crazy. I threw rocks at people passing by. I screamed and swung at things that didn’t exist until my whole body seized up and I could do nothing but curl up in a ball on the street. Vincent asked for help from passersby, and they carried me back home.

  Eugene passed away last night.

  I wasn’t there.

  Did I want them to let him die? Eva was right. I worshipped these people, what they’d accomplished, the world they built for themselves. I was in awe of their principles and their absolute determination to live by them, no matter what. I drank ipipyot until the wee hours with Enatast, talking about the nature of right and wrong. They refused to help a planet struck with some disease they had conquered long ago—exactly like what happened to Eugene, only it happened to everyone—and I listened to him with delight as he told stories of distant planets whose names I can’t pronounce, of animals that went extinct and made room for new ones to evolve. What if saving that planet denied a whole new species its existence? What if that new life is what the universe needed? I argued with Eva and Vincent about it as if it were philosophy—would you kill Hitler if you could go back in time?—and I ran back to Enatast for comfort when they disagreed with me, like a child who can’t remember if the Earth circles the Sun or it’s the other way around and goes to her father to set her straight. I saw the death of ten billion people I never met as a form of moral victory. The same thing happened with Eugene, I asked for their help in saving him because I loved that man with every fiber in my being, but I know now there’s a part of me that hoped they would say no, that didn’t want to see their integrity sullied because of one man, because of me.

  I’m a scientist. I find beauty in absolutes. I love the clarity of math, its unwavering dependability. Math will never say one thing and do another one. It will never harm you on purpose because its only purpose is truth. On Esat Ekt, I found that same clarity, that perspicuity, that is so lacking in people on Earth. I found it not because it was there but because I was searching for it. I saw faces in the clouds. I found what I was looking for here because I brought it with me. I know
that now. I also know I’m a hypocrite. I marveled at their idealism, applauded them for not wanting to share knowledge with us, but I lied to them to get them to teach me. I lied to them to try to save Eugene. I admired their principles so long as they didn’t apply to me.

  Eugene passed away last night, and when he did, there was nothing gained, nothing achieved. He just died. In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t mean anything. The universe will go on without him as it would have with him. The Ekt will see his death as nature following its course. They won’t rejoice. They won’t pat themselves on the back for letting him die. There is no malice in them. They watched Eugene die with humility and respect, like we watch the leaves turn to red in the fall. They choose to see the world in a way that gives their life meaning. They choose. It is a choice.

  What do I choose?

  There was a church across from my apartment in Chicago. In the summer, I would watch through the window while grooms greeted their guests at the door. I watched newlyweds leave while everyone cheered. Some left me indifferent and lost my interest before they made it down the steps. Some didn’t. The way they smiled or looked at each other. That ignorant bliss, or the moment of doubt when they thought no one was watching. I wondered what their life would be like, and I wished with all my heart it would be a good one. It felt…intimate somehow, sharing these precious moments with complete strangers. But it wasn’t. I watched through the window. It never occurred to me to get out of my apartment and wish them luck in person. It would have been presumptuous. It was their wedding. I wasn’t invited, and I didn’t want to be.

  That is the way of the Ekt. I only now truly understand it. They watch other worlds through a window. Eugene’s death was unfortunate—the bride falling down the stairs—but it wasn’t their place to save him. It would have been presumptuous. I can’t bring myself to hate them. There is a certain nobility to the way they look at things. Only this time, I was there. I was invited. I couldn’t watch my friend die because there was no window to watch it through, and I couldn’t bear the reality of it. I lost my friend. I hurt, and that hurt is as real as anything I’ve seen or touched. There is no objectivity. Everything is perspective.