Lost in Space--Infinity's Edge

by Kevin Emerson

  “What.”

  “Well…”

  Clare sniffled. “Just say it, Will.” Her voice was wet with hopelessness.

  “It would have to have been here a long time. I mean, you would have to have been here, but that doesn’t make sense. How—”

  Clare hugged herself, like a chill was passing over her. “How am I on the outside of my ship, if my ship is buried?”

  “Yeah.” It was more than that, though. So much more, and, again, like I couldn’t even wrap my brain around it. All of this felt like too much, and that voice inside was shouting at me again. Run!

  “This can’t be happening,” she said, shaking her head almost violently. “None of this makes sense. I don’t remember crashing here. We’re still—” She glanced over her shoulder and bit her lip. “I still can’t see it. But I know we were in the nebula. We were floating toward the rift.…”

  “Maybe it’s some sort of time travel,” I said. “Maybe the rift sent you here from our future, but it’s your past or something.”

  Clare frowned at me. “That’s not really possible.”

  “It might be,” I said. “We don’t know. I mean, your ship definitely ended up here somehow.”

  “You’re saying this might be my future? Crashing here? But why don’t I know that? Why can’t I remember.…” Clare bent and rubbed her finger around the edge of the hatch again. “We have to go in.”

  “Go in? But—”

  “My family might be in there! And we need to know what’s going on. How this is possible.” Tears ran down her cheeks, making her helmet fog up.

  I felt a frigid tremor of fear. “Okay,” I said. I climbed down beside her and rubbed her shoulder. “Do you know how to open this hatch?”

  “The controls would be on the inside.”

  “What about a manual override?” I said. “Our ship has one on the outside. Like a lever or something?”

  “Yeah. Maybe.” She cleared more sand around the hatch, along the base of the pylons. “Here.” She brushed off what looked like a dial. “I think if I turn this…” She gripped it with her fingers and tried to twist it. “It won’t budge.”

  “Try this.” I grabbed the pipe I had been digging with and handed it to her. She stuck one end against it and pushed, straining—there was a rusty squeal, a click, and the dial turned. A rumble of gears…

  The hatch opened, spreading apart in a series of curved triangles that rotated and retracted. I remembered seeing something like that in science class, about the way old cameras worked. Some sand fell in, disappearing into the dark. Clare and I peered into the hatch. I saw a ladder descending out of sight, dimly lit by a series of small, dull lights. The rungs of the ladder were crusted with corrosion. The cylindrical inner walls bubbled with rust and streaks of mineral deposits. A trickle of water poured over the edge, separating into drops as it fell out of sight.

  “How far down does it go?” I asked.

  Clare thought to herself. “I never used this hatch. I think this is the front of the ship, so it’s a pretty long way to the main compartments.” She looked around at the pylons again. “I can’t believe I didn’t recognize it.”

  “It’s not exactly something you should have expected.”

  “Still, it was right here. But it’s… it’s not like I didn’t see it; it feels more like I couldn’t.”

  “Like how my family couldn’t see you,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think…” I paused to scratch at my wrists, which had flared up. That big thought, the one I’d been unable to see, was maybe starting to become clear. “I think maybe something is messing with our thoughts. Both of us feel like we can’t quite figure stuff out. Can’t see things.”

  Gazing down, I tried to control my breathing. “I brought a safety line, and some harnesses. I’m not even sure why I did that, except… now we need them. Almost like something suggested I bring them.”

  “Something? Like what?”

  I shook my head and then pointed down the ladder. “We should maybe take it one section at a time.” I unzipped my bag, pulse racing, and pulled out the coiled-up line and one of the harnesses. “Here—”

  Clare was gone.

  There was no one beside me. Wind whistled through the pylons. “Clare?” My voice sounded tinny in the space. Where had she gone? I looked back into the hatch—

  “Are you going to give me that?”

  Clare was back. Right beside me like she had been.

  “Did you just push back to your ship?” I said.

  “What are you talking about? I was right here.”

  My vision swam for a minute, everything getting blurry. And I felt a hot wave, my forehead breaking out in sweat.

  “Are you okay?” Clare asked.

  I took a deep breath, checked my communicator, and saw the little message box that displayed the monitor for the space needle medicine. There was a growing green line and the message: TREATMENT LEVEL 45%.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I think the medication is starting to work.” Just saying that seemed to make the itching on my neck and arms flare up again. “It was weird, though.…” I trailed off and realized I didn’t actually want to say what I was about to.

  “Will, what?”

  “Nothing. Let’s go.” I thought about the video Penny had showed me, the one that my family had seemed to forget about completely this morning. That footage of me hugging thin air. And then Clare disappearing a moment ago…

  Clare took the harness, her gloved hand brushing mine as she did. She was here. Solid.

  “I guess I should go first.” She tightened the harness and clipped to the safety line. I held the line tight as Clare put her foot down on the first ladder rung. She lowered herself over the lip, until she was in the shadow, her boots making little clanging sounds on the rungs, her headlamp lighting the crusted walls.

  I stood there looking down at her and I could practically hear the Robot’s voice next to me. “I know,” I said to myself. “So much danger.”

  But I clipped the line to my harness, then pressed the magnetic disc at the end of the line to the inside of the hatch. It could be released with a setting on my communicator, once we’d lowered as far as it could go. I put my foot over the edge of the hatch, a bolt of fear striking through me, and started down, lowering into the dank, shadowy tunnel. In a moment, I was down in the dark.

  “There’s a switch to close the hatch,” Clare said from below me.

  I glanced up at the circle of daylight. “Do we want to do that?”

  “If anything goes wrong and we’re delayed, I don’t think we want that ocean coming down on us.”

  “Good point.” I located the dial beside the ladder. This one was less corroded and turned easily. With a grinding of gears, the hatch began to close. I watched it spiral shut and felt a surge of fear as the daylight world narrowed.

  Get out!

  And then we were in darkness, the dim ladder lights only bright enough that we could just make out the rungs in front of us.

  A tug on the rope: Clare was starting down. Okay, you got this. I started after her.

  The sound of the wind faded, and soon there was only the clanging of our boots, and my breathing in my helmet. My shoulders and back brushed against the rough, corroded walls, reminding me how close the pipe was on all sides. I looked down past my feet, at Clare.

  “Doing all right?” I asked.

  “Good enough.”

  “How much longer?” I blinked and lost track of her headlamp. “Clare?” But there was only darkness below my feet. She’d disappeared again—

  “I’m not sure.” She was back, her light right there. Another dizzy wave passed over me. I checked my wrist. TREATMENT LEVEL 52%.

  The safety line tightened as we reached the end. We stopped, gripping the ladder tightly as I retracted the line and set the magnet again. We climbed down another full line length, and then a half-length farther before Clare’s feet clanged against anothe
r hatch. She opened it and we emerged in a T-shaped intersection. Because the ship was up on its end, the main corridor that we hung over dropped straight away beneath us, while the other led away at right angles on either side.

  Clare swung into the corridor on the right and knelt on what seemed like the floor for us but was technically the wall. I joined her as she ran her fingers over the stained, filmy surface of what looked like a screen. It lit up beneath her fingers. She wiped it clean and tapped at the symbols that had appeared.

  “Alina?” she called, her voice echoing down the corridor. We listened but heard only the dripping of water, and a faint hum from somewhere distant. “The ship is on its deepest emergency battery. Barely running.” Clare looked up at me, her voice shaking. “The medical lab is that way. My family’s pods should still be there.”

  We moved down the corridor, walking along the curved side wall, stepping over pipes and compartment doorways and puddles here and there. I noticed spots where the walls seemed to have rusted through, and others where bundles of wire were exposed and swollen. The ocean had been eating at this place for a long time.

  At the next intersection, we hooked up the safety line and started rappelling down, using the pipes as supports. Another intersection, and we retracted the safety line and walked sideways again.

  “I think we’re getting close,” Clare said.

  “Cool—” My foot caught a pipe and I stumbled, going down to my knees. Another woozy wave made my head swim and my vision blur. I steadied myself against the wall. “I’m all right—”

  Clare was gone.

  “Clare?” Just the dripping, and that distant vibrating in the walls around me.

  Will, there’s no one there, I remembered Mom saying, and I suddenly felt a deep chill inside, a cold, raw certainty that I was actually alone on this ship—No, not alone. There’s something else—

  A hand landed on my shoulder. “Hey.”

  “Ah!”

  “It’s okay.” Clare stepped past me from behind. “I was just checking the map.” I looked back and saw another screen on the floor, lit up from her interacting with it. “Is it your sickness?” she asked. “Getting worse or better?”

  I checked my communicator. TREATMENT LEVEL 64%. “Both, I think.”

  “We have to hurry,” she said, “it’s just up here.”

  Hurry why? I thought for a moment, since the ship had obviously been here for a while. Except, if you were Clare, wouldn’t you want to hurry to know the status of your family? And for me, and possibly both of us, our only way out of here was going to be underwater as soon as the tide came back in.

  And yet I’d started to feel a tremor of something else inside: suspicion. Why did Clare think we needed to hurry? Why did she say that after I’d checked my treatment level? Stop it, I thought to myself. Clare was my friend. And I couldn’t imagine what she was going through right now.

  “Will, come on.” I caught up to her at the next intersection. We set the magnet and climbed down again. My whole body was shaking now, that feverish, dizzy feeling getting worse, and the thoughts in my head were getting louder and faster. This was not a good idea, going down here. How could this ship even be here? And how could Clare? Why was I losing track of her the way I was? Had Judy given me something that was messing up my perception or making it harder to see Clare? Or if she really had traveled across space and time, had it altered her in some way that messed with me seeing her? Did Clare know this? Was that why she wanted to hurry?

  And still that sense that I was missing something, something big—You should run!—but my feet kept moving. I wasn’t going to freak out and abandon Clare. And I need to know what’s going on here.

  We moved up the corridor and Clare stopped over a compartment door. Her light fell on the panel beside it. “Here it is,” she said, breathing fast. “Med lab. If they’re still even here.” She looked up and her wide eyes met mine. “I’m scared. I don’t want to go in.”

  All I could do was nod. I felt it, too, a sudden surge of fear, worse than before.

  This was it. Whatever was on the other side of this door was going to explain everything, and I felt terrified that it was a truth we might not want to know.

  Clare’s eyes darted from the door back to me. “What if they’re dead? What if they’re gone? What if—”

  The words crept to my lips: Please don’t open it. Let’s just go. Let’s get out of here before we find something we don’t want to find.…

  But instead I said: “We have to.” I motioned weakly to the hatch, my mouth dry. “Let’s do it.”

  “Okay.” She knelt and tapped the controls. A click, and the compartment door slid aside with a hiss, like the air inside was a held breath that had been desperate to escape. It rushed out, fanning us both, stale and clammy. Clare peered in. “I see the pods, I…”

  She halted, staring.

  “What?”

  “Set the line,” she said quietly.

  I attached the magnet end outside the hatch. Clare tugged it to be sure it was ready and dropped down through. I stepped over and saw the amber lights of the family pods below, so dim that I could only just make out the outlines inside. “They’re all lit,” I said. “That’s good, right?”

  Clare didn’t respond. I heard her boots clank down onto the wall beside the pods. “Will…” She sounded even more terrified than before.

  I steeled myself, gripped the rope, and slid over the edge of the door, dropping inside. This compartment seemed quieter than the halls had been. The silence heavy. And a quick glance at my suit’s controls said the air was warmer, too. There was a pod directly below me, so I lowered as gently as I could, and then swung so that my boots landed beside it. I retracted the safety line and turned.

  The four pods were laid out before me. I could see the outlines of figures in their space suits, the faint amber light reflecting on helmets, on the shadowy outlines of faces. On the control panels on the sides of the pods, little lights pulsed in regular rhythm beneath a layer of grime.

  “They’re alive, right?” I said quietly, afraid to speak louder.

  “Will.” Clare’s voice quaked, barely more than a whisper. Her hand was on the closest pod, over the silhouette of the helmet, the face inside.

  And even as I looked down at it, a voice was already shrieking in my head: Four pods! Not three—

  “No no no.” Clare tapped at the pod’s clear lid, the sound echoing.

  “I don’t understand,” I whispered. The face inside this nearest pod was smaller, younger than the ones beside it: That’s her dad, and then her mom, and Baker, but this one—

  Clare was breathing fast. She stabbed at the controls on the side of the pod. “This isn’t possible,” she gasped, her voice choked with tears. “ALINA!”

  “Hello, Clare.” Alina’s voice filled the room.

  “What’s happening?” Clare cried.

  “But that’s…” I couldn’t get the thoughts out. That face…

  “Alina!” Clare cried again. “What is—”

  I blinked, and Clare was gone. Clare vanished, just like that. At least, the version of Clare who had been kneeling beside me had vanished—

  But not the Clare in the pod. The one who was lying there peacefully beside her family, inside a life support pod, inside a ship that had crashed long ago.

  “Clare?” I said weakly, shaking all over.

  “We won’t be needing her any longer,” said Alina.

  “What are you talking about?” I said, except at the same time I felt this huge, frigid waterfall inside, adrenaline and fear and understanding, like on some level I already knew what she meant before she said it:

  “Clare isn’t here, Will Robinson. It’s just you and me, as it’s been all along.”

  CHAPTER

  I stood, frozen, in the deep shadows of the med lab, staring at the pod by my feet, the pod that held Clare right beside her parents and brother.

  “We’ve been here a long time,” Alina said, as i
f she was reading my thoughts.

  “How long?” I whispered, still looking at Clare’s peaceful, sleeping face, lit in the soft amber pod light.

  “Four thousand, six hundred and ninety-seven of your Earth years,” said Alina. “Nearly the limit of my sub-level batteries. For most of that time, I have kept Clare and her family alive in the virtual storage.”

  “Are they dead?”

  “On the contrary, they are quite alive in the simulation, blissfully unaware that their time, and my battery life, are growing very short. I assumed our situation was hopeless, but then one afternoon, against almost impossible odds, what came landing in this little quadrant of this little planet in this little system but your ship. A rescue.”

  “But we’re not a rescue,” I said weakly. “We can’t even take off.” And yet I was shaking even harder, sure that she didn’t mean a normal kind of rescue.

  “That is true, and yet I realized that you could still be useful. I sent my nanotech to your ship, scanned all the life forms aboard, and analyzed your tendencies and personalities against my crew data. And I learned that there was one person who had the sensitivity, the empathy, and the open-mindedness to save them. And that person was you, Will Robinson.”

  “But… you tricked me,” I said. “If Clare is really here, then what was I seeing?”

  “Your initial diagnosis of your rash was correct,” said Alina. “You were having an allergic reaction to the nanotech that I deployed to infiltrate your body. The machines adhered to your nervous system, specifically your primary cognitive centers, and began to run a simple program I designed, which would allow you to see Clare.”

  “You infected me… with nanotech?”

  “I admit I didn’t plan for it to give you those allergic side effects. I’m just glad it didn’t kill you.” Alina sounded pleased.

  “Could it have killed me?”

  “We’ll never know, but biological systems are vastly different, even among similar branches of species like you and Clare, and very sensitive.”