Memory's Exile

by Anna Gaffey

  A soft laugh rang through his head.

  Rebecca?

  Overreacting as usual, she whispered. He imagined a soothing touch on his shoulder, and shook himself until it faded. Was he caught in some sort of…memory feedback loop?

  Without a backward glance, Con tramped down the stairs and up the corridor.

  For a second, Jake wanted to follow him, like breadcrumbs, at least back to the sickbay. He could curl up in a cot, close off his brain to any memory, and hope Lindy wouldn’t expire of shock that he’d come voluntarily through the doors.

  “Jake?” Santos. She stood in the hatchway. “Let’s begin.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “…proceed as directed. In the wake of the catastrophic planetary collapse of 1H-24HM (colloquially known as Selas), the comprehensive destruction of both Selas Station and the Leah Harmon, resulting in the tragic loss of all souls, it is imperative that we as the UWC Governance Board continue to project and represent courage, confidence, and strength in the face of adversity. For the greater good, we must preserve humanity and soldier on. Close further examination of the transmissions from Marathon and the planetary surface is crucial to this goal.”

  Excerpt: streaming commtext, priority immediate

  04 November 2242

  Roselle Osakwe

  Director, Science Division

  United Worlds Commonwealth Governance Board

  Earth, Sol System

  2 November 2242 AEC

  14:02

  The ob deck did not light up immediately as they entered. A chill of misgiving ran up Jake’s arms. But it was okay, he told himself. It was standard energy-efficient protocol, nothing sinister. The space was as crowded as the req hold had been: haphazard stacks of boxes, crates, tanks, and bins stacked against the walls and between support struts.

  Otherwise, the deck looked fairly standard. A large polymerine viewscreen stretched before him, its transparent viewcurtains unimpeded and unfurled to their full lengths astern. Stars twinkled faintly in the overwhelming inky blackness.

  “It’s cramped, I know,” Santos said. She threaded her way through the piles in a screwy meandering path to a crooked sort of cubby among the crates. On one crate sat a small pile of tablets, an open, empty flat black metal case, and a black egg-shaped recorder with an active, glowing memory gem affixed to the port. The memory gem was clear and new, four hours’ worth of recording time.

  Santos perched on a second crate, crossed-legged and casual, and Jake sat down in her shadow, hoisting his right leg to rest beside the tablets. He had an unhampered view of the screen and the faint glimmer of stars, constellations, and space beyond, with Eos ablaze exactly where it should’ve been. Eos seemed brighter than normal, which was a funny thought. A difference in viewscreen molding? Or perhaps they’d drifted closer in the wake of the explosion, or implosion, or whatever the hell had happened to the planet.

  Santos picked up the top tablet and swiped at it with her thumb. A spherical image spun up and rotated just above the screen. A planet in full color, with clouds and too-blue oceans, patchy greens and reds, and the pale ochre of land. A red star—Beda—winked in the background. Marathon.

  The image shrank. Santos pressed a tiny button on the recorder, and it emitted a tinny beep. “This is the official briefing for Dr. Jake Jeong, November second (adjusted time), by Quartermaster Rachel Santos. This will be the final briefing for our crew. Dr. Jeong? Please state your name and United Worlds census number for the record.”

  He did, and she passed him the tablet. “Read.”

  The rotating image of Marathon had been supplanted by a commtext, official Gov Board encryption unlocked: sent on 3 Aug 2242 and again on 28 Oct 2242 to Pilot Connor Griffin and the crew of the Leah Harmon via Petel’s Waystation 4. Pending the findings of the Gunaji, the United Planetary Governance Board thereby recalled and reassigned of five pathologists, with the addition of any running crew able to be spared. Contracts increased by three percent. Priority level ten. Security clearance level ten.

  “The official marching orders?”

  Santos nodded. “Hard to narrow down where they’re from, though. Both Defense and Science seem to be involved. There’re three prominent Science team signatures on the order. They were getting some kind of signal from Marathon. But before we get into that, I want you to see Kai’s last report.” She reached into her pocket and withdrew a sapphire memory gem, half-darkened with data. “He said this was yours.”

  “Yes.” It was the gem Con had given him ages ago, or so it seemed now. Santos dropped it into a fresh tablet and raised the ob deck’s display and scan sensors.

  The viewscreen lit with a tired glow. A message tag loaded and unfurled over the length of the room, a vidlog layer surfaced, and Kai Murakami’s wan, frightened face swam into view. “Hi, there.”

  Judging by the lack of light and the old-time shabbiness of the surroundings, he had recorded the vid somewhere aboard the station. The vidlog date/time stamp was November 1st.

  “This message is for anyone left. My final report, which I hope to deliver in person, but—”

  The vid shook, and Kai gasped and slid out of focus. Then it cut back, and he was calm again. This time Jake saw something hazy flickering around Kai’s temples. “Can you increase the sharpness?”

  Santos gave him a strange look. “Sharpness is not the issue.” The colorless haze writhed, increasing in mass. Jake went cold. He was seeing it with new eyes, captured on vid. Leech. How could they see it as it existed in the past? Would they see it on every vid of every human?

  “Sorry. No time for niceties.” Kai pursed his lips. “We’re abandoning ship, or rather station, that is. But all that will go on another report, so I see no need to relate the specifics here. I’ve already gutted most of the database for transport and transfer to the Harmon, so this gem will be the only repository for any last-minute data. If you’re getting this and you don’t know who I am, I’m Dr. Kai Murakami, and this is a moment-to-moment update on the readings we’re getting through the station’s sensors. That tremor just now? It came from the planet.”

  He smiled at the camera, but his face was greasy and pale, his eyes darting. The hazy mist around his head seemed to swell.

  “I’ve done a quick compare on the report from Lieutenant Santos. She scanned an energy emanation from Dr. Jeong and compared it with similar energy scans found in the station legacy data. When we extended the station scanners to include that field, we found a similar energy field emanating from the planet, or maybe generated by the planet. Intermittent pulses of it, anyway.” Kai frowned and tapped something in the lower corner of the screen. A comparison chart sprang up, covering Kai’s mobile face with a near-translucent outline of Selas, and the wild energy readings. The planetary cloud squiggled in erratic lines over his brows.

  “But, of course, there’s something funny there.”

  “Of course there is.” Jake realized he was fiddling with the edges of his rolled trouser, and laid his hand flat over the metal cuff. The constructed knee joint had bent so easily he hadn’t even noticed. Adaptability was startling.

  “The energy isn’t static,” Kai continued. “Even our legacy readings of it. Fixed reports are showing signs of variability! They change in response to whatever the fuck is going on with Selas. Right now, for example—”

  The camera bucked wildly. The vid stuttered, and Kai disappeared. Then the resolution wavered back toward clarity, and Kai’s face appeared again, this time peering up from the very corner of the screen. He cleared his throat and stood up. Jake choked on a laugh that felt more like a sob.

  “That was close. We’ll be evacuating soon, I’m sure. I’m supposed to finish here and wait for Santos. She’s not here yet.” His breath came huffy and uncertain through the tablet speakers. “I’m reading temporal fluctuations in the Selas energy. It’s one explanation, the explanation I like, anyway, that makes sense with regards to the effect on our fixed readings. I’m not growing any younger o
r anything silly like that. But there’s some kind of temporal disturbance going on there. The way my readings are changing—it’s not like any phenomena I’ve studied. It’s way out of my bounds, like, like Selas is a patch over a black hole.” He frowned. “Or a seal, or something. But a seal that’s shrinking, or a seal over a gap that’s widening. There are leakages of this energy. And with the leaking stuff, whatever it is, there’s a distortion in, well, time.”

  Kai leaned in. His bloodshot eyes filled the screen. “The readings are crazy fantastic, and I’ve got to keep up with them so we can really thoroughly study them later. We won’t have the same equipment aboard the Harmon so I’ve got to make the most of this—”

  He stopped, and swallowed. Jake watched helplessly as the cloud of Leech expanded until it had overrun the entire screen. Through the haze, he could just make out Kai clutching at something out of the screen, the twisting horror on his face. Then something crashed in the background. The camera quaked to a shot of the ceiling, and into blackness. The video ended. The layer furled closed.

  Temporality. Temporal fluctuations. Dimensional rips. Time travel. Jake had hoped he could leave the events on Selas, in the engine, for discussion at a later date. “Theoretical temporal physics was never my strong suit, Rachel.” Hell, it hadn’t ever been on his sensors. Nor had he presumed Kai held an interest, but he hadn’t known—didn’t know everything about Kai. Of course, the pernicious bastard had the temerity to be flat on his back in a coma right when they needed him most. Unknown stellar or spatial phenomena could theoretically cause all manner of physical complaints. “Did you scan?”

  Holding it close so that he could see, Santos tapped a widespread ‘cast into the tablet. The roiling Selas energy from Kai’s charts filled the little screen, and, as the tablet bleated at the onslaught, Santos superimposed the energy scans over the wide stretch of star-speckled black. Jake gasped.

  Selas was gone, but the damned stuff was everywhere. Small clouds of varying color and light roiled in haphazard globules as far as Jake could see, in all different directions. One churned nauseatingly close, just off the Harmon’s starboard quarter. As Jake watched, Santos focused a tendril of the scan ’cast to the nearest cloud.

  The tablet sighed and then returned a wobbling result of nonsense numbers and timestamp.

  “Temporal anomalies, check,” Jake muttered. “It was worse down there, it was like Selas—the engine, was like Kai said, a seal over the rift. And I couldn’t really see it, only sense it. It was this giant storm of light and noise. How do we scan something like that? Even backwash of something like that?”

  “The Harmon sensors don’t have the chops,” Santos agreed.

  “You could bounce off the nearest comm buoys, triangulate and boost the power. Negligible loss of signal.”

  “Go ahead.” She handed him the tablet.

  She was being awfully acquiescent. Jake shrugged and narrowed the scanning signal to its tightest, then sent it to midway stations 20A and B.

  With a ping, the wide viewscreen lit into huge letters.

  Error. No such recipient.

  Jake reentered the path code and added his personal access code. The screen lit again.

  Error.

  No such recipient.

  Attempt fourteen.

  Do you need help Y/N?

  “No, you piece of—” Jake blew out a breath and dropped the scanning signal. He dug through the Harmon network until he found the pathetically limited hailing frequencies, nailed out a simple pingback, and sent it to the buoys.

  Error.

  No such recipient.

  Attempt fifteen.

  Do you need help Y/N?

  The grey-gold intensity of Eos was beginning to make his temples throb again. The buoys were irrevocably hung, then? “You tried this already.”

  “How do I know?” Santos gave him a sly smile. “Maybe our first thirteen attempts were flukes.”

  “Maybe if I wrote a wake-up ’cast…” Jake compiled the wake-up broadcast and extended it outward, including the auto-refueling satellites this time. Meanwhile, the original scan was slowly fading, but he could still sense the pockets of roiling temporal disarray, particularly the one off starboard. It was like a blood clot on the viewscreen glass.

  After a few moments, the wake-up signal withdrew.

  No known response.

  Do you need help Y/N?

  Jake pressed his fists against his chin. No known response to a general search and wake-up ’cast meant there was nothing physically located at the buoy position to send back the requisite OIS reading. In short, the buoys were not merely malfunctioning; they weren’t there at all.

  At least Con’s mulishness about req limits finally made sense.

  “We’re all alone out here, aren’t we? No connection to Earth whatsoever.”

  “Yes,” Santos said quietly. “I already tried boosting the signal to the next buoys in the chain. At first, I thought it was related to Mick’s comm system fritzes aboard the station. But destroy the buoys completely? He couldn’t have done that. So we started looking for other explanations. Ones that included this temporal dissonance.”

  She picked up another tablet and stroked its screen. Flung out before them, large and overwhelming across the polymerine, the scans showed a glittering dissonance: stars, constellations, planetoids, the faint golden outline of Helias and, beyond that, their sun Eos.

  Except that nothing matched up properly. Helias and Eos appeared in a blur of three different positions, and none of the constellations shared the same space.

  “What a mess.”

  “Impatient, aren’t we?” Santos separated two of the scans and surfaced their date and time stamps, with the metadata roiling beneath. The first scan was a Chubaryan legacy file dated 31 October 2130. The second, from Mei’s files via the Astrometrics lab, dated 31 October 2242, two days ago. Jake tried to make sense of the disorder: variance in constellation position, rate of aging in Eos—all normal for a hundred years’ gap between scans.

  So why were the two viewscreen images so off from the actual space beyond their digitally generated veil? In comparison with the scan from two days ago, the most prominent stars were light years away from their normal positions, and Eos was far closer than it should’ve been. It was inescapable.

  Then he felt silly. They were in the wrong physical position, of course. The view aboard the Harmon had to be attuned to the station’s former perspective, or every scan would skew wrong. Simple, really; it was a mistake a child would make. Santos should’ve known better. “Why didn’t you adjust the view to match the scans?”

  “It is adjusted.”

  “Give me that.” Jake took the new tablet from her unresisting hands and adjusted the angle to originate from the last known coordinates of Selas Station. The space scans shimmered, then remained the same.

  Jake tried removing the confusing legacy data. The disparity remained. He scrolled through the metadata point by point, and the disparity remained. The 2242 scan refused to match the star field outside the ob window. He slapped the tablet. In response, it shrank the general space scan and surfaced the next piece of Santos’ layers, three combined close-range scans of Eos itself with two date and time stamps: 2130 and 2242. The third scan was undated.

  Readings alongside 2130 and 2242 confirmed what they already knew about Eos: the star was a slow burner, about halfway through its hydrogen life. A small discrepancy between the two scans, logical for the time span between them. The undated third, however, showed an Eos with readings that spiked off the charts, with a surplus of hydrogen to burn. Much more than when they had arrived. More than in 2130, even, a huge amount more. Had Santos created a projection of hypothetical Eos from the past?

  He went on to the next layer. The scans from 2130 and 2242 disappeared, and the monster Eos shifted into alignment with the real Eos out beyond the viewscreen. The constellations shifted into place with their counterparts, lining back up with each other until they glowed a
s one silent star. Jake opened subsequent layers until a flood of data readings for the undated scan streamed over the screen.

  The undated scan was supposedly of the present, today.

  “Impossible.” Eos was too big. Far too big. Jake stared at the blaze in the viewscreen. Then he dropped all the scans, cracked the scanning capabilities open, and sent a particle pulse directly to Eos.

  The tablet screen wavered. Fresh readings spilled over the old ones on the screen. Unfortunately, they were exactly the same. The stellar diameter had increased, because Eos had somehow gained a few hundred billion tons of hydrogen. In short, she was about three percent larger than normal.

  It was impossible. Stars couldn’t just…remake or recharge themselves.

  “She didn’t recharge, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Santos said. She sat motionless, her dark hair alight with borrowed incandescence from the screen.

  “I wasn’t thinking that. Not exactly. Not ultimately.”

  “Of course not.” Santos said sweetly.

  “How do you explain it?”

  “You should’ve finished the briefing.” Santos took the tablet back and tapped through the layers. Images whizzed over the viewscreen in a blurring jumble. “How much do you remember?”

  “From Selas? Everything, unfortunately. More than everything. I’m getting some dizziness, some weird wobbly spells, but overall my memory’s better than ever. Con, on the other hand…”

  “Con’s memory isn’t completely broken,” Santos said absently. “He’s in the green on all settings.”

  “You and Lindy are in the green. Are we all robots now?”