Memory's Exile

by Anna Gaffey

  He pressed his fingers against his temples. “I guess we’re squared away, then.”

  “I am sorry, Jake. I wasn’t sure if it would even work.” Santos released the knife hilt with some reluctance. “There seemed to be a pattern of stress that led to your, um, losses of control—”

  “Not making me feel better.”

  “I’m sorry.” She drew a circle in the halodine powder on the workbench, and then brushed it out with her arm. “But I’ve seen that type of energy before. In the legacy data scans.”

  “Chubaryan the scanning freak.”

  “Yes. But I couldn’t remember where, and we don’t have time to visually inspect every damn gem, layer, and file. I needed a baseline to search. It was a hunch, and I’m sorry.”

  Jake replayed what she’d said. “How did you know, though? I mean, I get loopy and you connect it with a fizzy energy scan you saw a few days ago? That’s a huge leap to make. How did you—”

  “I can see it on you.” Santos paused in her movements, and her hand stole over the crook of her left arm, over her port. “The same type of energy that’s on the scan.”

  He thought again of his sample’s outrageous plant growth. Was he like that? “How?”

  “Later.” She winced. “I promise. But we need to go to work now. Con and I will keep working on Heart with Kai. We can’t pull the station back into orbit without Heart.” She tapped the tablet. “While we’re doing that, you can search the legacy databases for anything like this, anything. Let’s do this.”

  “No pressure, though, right?” He took the tablet.

  Santos’ lips quirked. “Pressure? Here? Never.”

  Pressure was okay. Pressure helped Jake to think clearly, to forget the weird imaginary sensation of the station’s drift, and to ignore the guilty, noncommittal way Con couldn’t meet his eyes, even as he helped Jake order the gems. They sorted and reorganized the memory by size, by departments, by date, and Jake loaded them into the memory wells while Con rerouted hardware without prompting, his hands steady amidst the delicate connections beneath the console. How nice: they were back on the same side again, with hardly a hiccup. Jake gloomily tightened his focus to the Astro lab consoles.

  With all the memory pulled altogether, the database was huge, but still a snap for Heart, limited though she was. Unfortunately, the info dump had no unifying rhyme or reason to it.

  “Stupid backlog projects.” Jake keyed in a few algorithms. “It’s not compatible. Could take a bit.”

  It did. Santos made circuits of the floor, her feet tracking long stripes in the dust as she spoke quietly, urgently into her commbud with Kai about Heart coding, thruster connections, evac procedures, her fingers flying over the screen of her tablet. In the darkness beyond the windows, Eos peeped around the golden edge of Helias and the shadowy curve of Selas, and a wash of gold light crept across the glass. Jake worked, and tried not to think about how long it had been since he had actually slept.

  He stole a look at Con. Did he kill her? Silverman? Would Lindy’s investigations reveal something, or had they already? Would anyone tell Jake? Maybe he didn’t want to know.

  The search pinged. Jake rummaged through the mess of files, flicking through subfiles and layers until he saw something in the general station logs directory that looked promising. He surfaced it to the window viewscreens. They powered up with a low hum, and the old-time comp logs shimmered into halodine-dusty blue focus.

  The something promising turned out to be Station Activity logs. Jake delved through the file layer, but nothing seemed of the ordinary. System on. Biotags logged, and then a list of the corresponding crew names. System sleep. System on. Biotags etc. System sleep. All very rote for an old-time network system until a particular day in 2130, when the system powered on and Station Activity logged a lone biotag for one Chubaryan, Denys.

  No explanation for the missing twenty-nine crew. Just a single, lonely biotag. Jake tapped the console and delved further. Twenty-four hours prior, there was a system log for the biotags of all thirty crewmembers. They had checked into decon, donned and linked up with their pressure suits, and then had passed out of the station’s proximity for biotagging information. Most likely a trip to Selas, Jake decided. Any EVA station maintenance would’ve been close enough for the network to pick up the tags. Jake scanned the logs back to Chubaryan’s solitary biotag notation, and then beyond. Forty-eight hours later, the system had fluttered up on full power for a thin, simple message to Earth. Then the log noted the final command: total station vent and depressurization. Good night, Chubaryan.

  Santos cleared her throat, startling him. She’d halted behind Jake in her wandering conversation and system adjusting. “About you tossing me off the station—”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Yes, you’ve said that.”

  She sounded annoyed. Good. Jake continued anyway. “And I’d probably be too scared to tell you if I did, even with your bullshit scan matching plan. But it doesn’t matter.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t get pissed, I’m not finished. It doesn’t matter because of your scan just now, and because Lindy didn’t find anything wrong with my implant. It’s obviously not something we’re familiar with from a medical or a scientific standpoint. And it’s not me. You know I wouldn’t do that deliberately. Just like Mick and Mei.”

  “And like Nat.”

  Any final words? Nat’s voice ghosted through Jake’s mind. None of that for Mick and Mei. He pushed it away. He would deal with it later. With a doctor, even—not a psych. And not Nat.

  Santos folded her arms. “So?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Just because I wouldn’t normally do something, doesn’t mean I wouldn’t.”

  “Like hell it doesn’t matter.”

  “You can’t waste time worrying about that, Rachel. If that happens again, you know what you need to do, whether it’s right now or any other time and place, you have to take me the hell out. You can’t hesitate. Not like you did during the EVA. Not like Carmichael did with Mei, or me with Nat. Right?”

  Santos didn’t say anything. Jake pushed more station vidlogs up on the viewscreen. They watched a group of people in twenty-second-cent clothing doing an awkward dance-y kick line for the vid. The scene cut to a tall, dark-skinned man reading a printout. He frowned in seeming irritation, but then his frown broke into a smile, and he waved at the vid. The log cut again, this time to a pale woman with short green hair patching a connection coil with an old-time crisping iron, her eyes hidden by monstrous safety goggles. Cut again, to a fleshy red-haired white man, sitting in a shiny new version of the station’s mess hall, eating blueberry pie. He grinned broadly at the vid, and his blue-smeared teeth took up most of the screen.

  “Yes,” Santos said quietly. “I’ll take you out.”

  In her calm, pragmatic tone, it sounded almost friendly. Jake looked down at the console. “Just so we’re clear.”

  From the other side of the room Con said, “Santos? Kai’s on again. I think he’s getting close to slicing into Heart.”

  Another vidlog, this one from the Control level with the recorder pointing out the polymerine walls: a clear recording of Selas in all her mottled green glory. A ghostly reflection of the vidder superimposed over the planet in the glass. For a moment, Jake saw an afterimage, an ethereal imprint of someone standing there, between him and the dwindling dark side of Selas. It reminded him uncomfortably of the shadowy self he’d seen in the cargo bay corridor, before Nat, before Mick and Mei…

  Next came scans of personal effects. A collection of fiddle music that shifted into loud autoplay before he could mute it. Audiobooks, psychbooks, a veritable avalanche of e-texts. A collection of English folklore, storybooks, weird tales. Lines of text exploded onto the viewscreen curtains, and a rich rolling voice began to recite from where it had left off, over a century ago:

  “Suddenly, while they were sitting by the fire, they heard a sound as of something heavy being dragged along t
he ground outside, and then there was a loud and terrible knocking at the door...”

  Jake skimmed that one closed, and searched through two more directories before he got the bright idea to examine gems with files not relayed to Earth. There were several. He called up the first layers to find a collection of scans labeled Planetary.

  “Have you input the data from the tablet?” Santos asked.

  “Not yet. It was kind of unstable.” And yet he was picking it up, dropping it into a well, and digi-splicing the connections. Jake sighed and updated the database scan parameters to include the weird blobby results. The search faltered, and then several layers of results flashed onto the viewscreen, most of them from the Planetary collection. It was a tiny assortment, only a few thousand imaging scans taken by the station’s long since-reclaimed telescope. Jake surfaced the first one.

  Santos drifted back to stand behind him as he plowed through what felt like acres of scans, Eos, then Helias, then...

  “There,” Santos breathed. She leaned in to examine the coding. “They’re dated. That’s good. Can you push up any logs for corresponding dates onto the other viewscreen?”

  “Done.”

  The scans were basic in depth but exhaustive in their coverage. Vegetation readings, surface mineral deposits—fascinating how the poles had eroded… Jake shook himself out of geology-mode. High magnetic field indications, weather patterns, heat readings. Core readings—wait.

  “Look at that.” He pointed to the center of the projected core readout scan. “That can’t be right. It’s indicating solid. Solid metal even.”

  “So?” Santos shrugged.

  “So that doesn’t make any sense. Look at the more recent scans…oh, hell, we can’t. Well, in the current geological scans, Selas’ core is liquid. We’ve verified that several times.”

  “Maybe this is an old scan, then. A theoretical model, instead of data? And are you using the weird scan?”

  “Yes, already. It picked these results. Anyway, our current scans include information from the old data, the stuff in the public database. This wasn’t in there.”

  Another full-size scan of Selas into view, one of the core readings. The scan showed again the strange solid mass of the core, so different from the current scans. Then the image fluttered, the numbers and core and strata codings distorted into jumbled nonsense, and the core readout exploded with color and light. Dozens of shimmering rays spread out from the center, some reaching all the way up to and past the surface of Selas. The light undulated throughout the image.

  “There’s my weird wobbly baby,” Santos murmured. “What do you think it is?”

  Jake blinked. “I don’t know.” The shimmering rays seemed to reach out of the viewscreen in thin, wraithlike fingers, grasping toward them... “But they’re your search parameters.”

  “That image is from the legacy scans, right?”

  “Right. Chubaryan the mad scanner.” If only he could compare it to their new planetary scans, or at least search their recent images with the same baseline... “Screw it, I’m doing it.” He rerouted to force connections to the current databases and dug through them amidst Heart’s groaning protests, until he found what he was looking for: the most recent Selas surface maps he and Kai had pieced together. He transferred the scan and overlaid the image, and—“Oh. That’s curious.”

  The crumbling, so-called foundations, the rocky irregularities from his dreams. The site of his now-overgrown samples. They sat directly over the core’s largest shimmering ray.

  “That’s where we flew down last time, isn’t it?”

  Jake nodded. “I keep dreaming about them. The foundations.” He flicked back to the legacy scan layer, and expanded the scans of the planet. In some, only tiny traces of distortion and light were apparent, and in others Selas flamed brightly as a sun. It seemed to be a random phenomenon, and yet as he fished through the scans, he felt a vague foreboding. As if they were approaching the cusp of a precipice, but blindfolded, deafened, guided only by the pressure of an unknown hand on the arm.

  “Then that’s where we should go.” Santos reached down for the tablet, and the foreboding feeling ballooned.

  “Wait,” Jake said. “Don’t touch it.”

  The penultimate scan in the Planetary collection was different from the rest. The spatial coordinates and scanning resolution were identical to the previous scans, but one thing was missing. Selas itself.

  The scan showed a lovely view of space, of distant constellations and even Eos in its proper position for the logged scan time. In the corner of the scan, the data and numbers writhed and disappeared into the screen. Jake hardly noticed. The entire planet—gone, just like that. He flicked to the next scan in the sequence, the final one in the legacy files. Taken roughly a minute past the previous one, it was picturesque normalcy: Selas, serene and vividly emerald, in its proper position.

  Jake flicked back to black empty space, to green globe, to black space. In the blank scan of space, a faint mist of the strange wobbling energy remained.

  “Where is it?” Santos asked. “Did the scanner malfunction?”

  Jake shook his head. “It’s the same location as the other scans. Only no Selas.”

  “Did they remove it? Do some sort of, I don’t know, erasure?”

  “There’s no evidence of that. No tampering at all. It’s just…a scan.” Jake skimmed through the scanning output, but it all reiterated what the viewscreen showed: no planet. No Selas. Just black space, and weird anomalous energy. He noted the date/time stamp as it fizzled in and out, and it pinged at him.

  01 Nov 2130

  22:45:08

  One hundred and twelve years ago, today. Although the clock had probably rolled them from November first into November second. But the date had pinged him for another reason. He reopened the Station Activity logs and scrammed back to Chubaryan’s last day. 1 November 2130. Station vent and decompression had activated at 23:03.

  “It was a malfunction,” Santos asserted, her fingers tapping the workbench. “Had to be.”

  He wasn’t sure if she was talking about the station vent, or the peekaboo-Selas scan. Jake opened the last layer from his search results, one from the Comm data collections.

  01 Nov 2130 Comm sent successfully. Display archived version?

  “Yes,” Jake ordered. The screens futzed for a few moments as Heart dug out the data.

  “What are you looking at?” Con asked, coming up behind them. He said something else, but it was lost as the screens blared into shrieking, screaming noise and light. Jake clapped his hands over his ears, which did absolutely nothing to block the cacophony of aural apocalypse.

  “CUT AUDIO!” Santos hollered.

  “IT ISN’T ON!” Jake screeched back.

  “JUST KILL IT, THEN!” Or at least he thought she said that. He was relying on lip movement. He joggled the tablet and closed the archived comm. His ears had to be bleeding.

  The screens blanked, then settled back to their slow standby shimmer. In the deafening quiet that followed, Con muttered, “Sorry I asked.”

  Santos rubbed her ears. “What was that?”

  “That was the last comm.”

  “The last comm.” Santos shook her head. Then her eyes widened. “Chubaryan. The last comm from Selas Station. That mess, that’s what he sent to Earth?”

  “It’s the last thing that was sent out of here, according to Comm and the Station Activity logs.”

  “I don’t get it,” Con said. “Wasn’t the last comm a bunch of gibberish?”

  Jake frowned. “I thought so.” Gingerly he reopened the Comm layer.

  01 Nov 2130 Comm sent successfully. Display archived version?

  “No! Christs no.” The screen dissolved, and Jake cracked the comm item’s metadata. He braced himself as the viewscreen futzed again, but then the metadata layers opened and displayed the complicated sections of linked data. Jake fiddled through it till he found the particulars.

  Comm package sent: 01 Nov 2130<
br />
  Comm package contents: unknown

  Comm package size: EXCEEDS AVAILABLE MEMORY

  “How can it exceed available memory?” Santos asked. “We just saw it. Heard it rather.”

  “I don’t know.” The phrase was becoming an aggravating refrain. Jake gritted his teeth. “Do you have any gems and tablets to spare?”

  “A couple. Why?”

  “If we still want to go down to the surface, I should transfer as much of the legacy and current scans as possible into my portable. The shuttlepod mainframes can’t handle much processing outside of their flight and nav programs. I can take the original gems in case you want to try it, but…”

  “Do the transfer,” she agreed. Her earbud squawked audibly, and her face scrunched in consternation. “Let’s get moving.”

  They worked in silence for the next few minutes, Con and Santos feverishly so at the corner workspace, and their murmured conversation sounded increasingly anxious.

  “…right, one minute, Kai. Jake, we’re using way too much power. Ready to switch this out?” She reached for the tablet and dodged Jake’s swat.

  “What? No, I’m not done yet. This is fragile legacy data, who knows how much of it’s corrupted, how much of the uncorrupted the tablet’s actually going to interpret correctly, and many other things you obviously don’t care about if you’re willing to snatch the first—first!—tablet right out of the well.”

  “All right, all right,” Santos muttered. “Do you even know how much of an asshole you are when you think you’re top priority?”

  “Oh, so he’s always top priority?” Con said.

  “No, the rest of the time he’s just an asshole.”

  They looked at each other for a moment, and then burst into laughter.