Unknown Horizons

by CJ Birch

  “Just do it already,” I say through my teeth. My hands have already gripped the edge of the bed in anticipation.

  He huffs out a long breath. “Don’t move.” And without any more hesitation, he slices into my hip.

  The scalpel bites into my skin. It’s excruciating. My chest heaves and I clamp my teeth together, grinding against the pain. Chloe swabs the cut and passes Dr. Prashad a jaw-like device, which he slips into the opening on my hip and thrusts open.

  Holy fuck! My vision blurs. I let out a sound very much like a whimper.

  The captain pries my hand from the edge of the bed and clasps it tight. Her fingers wrap around mine. I squeeze hard. I’m breathing fast and shallow now. There’s talking, but I only make out part of what they’re saying. Dr. Prashad says something about hyperventilating, and I feel rather than see the captain put her hand on my chest. Everything slows.

  “Just focus on me,” she says.

  A coolness radiates throughout my chest, beginning from her palm. The pressure of it has a soothing, almost hypnotic effect. I turn all my attention to her ocean blue eyes, and there’s something behind them, something I never noticed before. It makes me feel as if I am being tethered to a ship. And I want to believe it’s a connection that she feels, too. Even if I know it’s stupid to hope. But more than that, I know it’s stupid to want.

  “Okay. I’m inserting the diagnostic cube into your hip, then I will sew you up.”

  I feel the sting of it slipping in, and then a strange sensation as it travels toward the base of my spine.

  The captain’s eyes dart to something in the doctor’s hand. They widen, and I turn to see. He’s holding a large curved suture needle threaded with thick, dark thread.

  She pulls my hand to her chest. “Look at me.” She steps closer to the table, leans in, and says, “It’s almost over. Just this last bit.”

  I breathe in hoping for her scent, apricots and soap, but Dr. Prashad makes his first stitch and all my senses realign to the stabbing pain in my hip. I scrunch my eyes shut and breathe, sucking in through my nose deep enough that the air hits the back of my throat. I focus on this and only this. One breath. One stitch. The captain lifts her hand from my chest, and I feel the absence like a physical ache.

  There’s a tug on my side as Dr. Prashad ties off the last stitch.

  And then I scream.

  I can only focus on the pain rampaging through every millimeter of my body. There’s nothing to brace against, grit against, rage against. I’m at its mercy. I don’t know how long it lasts, but when it clears, my muscles ache from clenching for so long. Rivers of sweat cascade between my breasts, down my arms, from my armpits. I start to shiver. Convulsions pulse through me.

  “What’s happening to her?” asks the captain.

  “I told you this was painful.” He takes a thermal blanket from Chloe’s outstretched arms and wraps it tight around my body, tucking the edges. “To get to the brain stem, the cube has to climb up her spine, which shelters the spinal nerves. This is the resulting shock of having every nerve along your spine yanked back like the reins on a horse.”

  Chloe drops a tray with a loud clang. “Oh, my God.” Her hand shoots to her mouth. “She’s one of them.”

  I turn to the monitor to see what’s happening. “One of who?” I croak. My throat feels raspy and sore, like I’ve swallowed a pine cone. I can’t make any sense of what I’m seeing. The screen is dark except for a small nodule drifting within a nerve clump, like a small ship floating in a nebula. It’s beautiful.

  Chloe backs away from the bed toward the door. “She’s a Burr. They’ve come.” She shakes her head, almost in tears. “They’ve come, and they’re going to destroy us.”

  Dr. Prashad turns to the monitor and enlarges part of the screen, focusing on the nodule. It takes me a moment to put it all together, that we are viewing the inside of my body, and that the nodule on the screen is floating inside me. Even with the thermal blanket cocooned around me, I shudder. Two questions immediately form in my mind: How did it get there? And how the hell do I get it out?

  “Calm down, Chloe. She can’t be a Burr. She’s too young, for one.” The captain steers her back toward the dropped tray. “Here, let me help you pick this up.”

  “Well, Captain. I’m impressed. It looks like you were right,” says Dr. Prashad.

  “Right about what?” I struggle to get untangled and sit upright on the bed. “What is that thing?”

  “This right here,” he taps the screen, “is an antique. Quite a beautiful piece of tech, too. They really knew how to design back then.” He squints up at the nodule, which is slowly rotating inside me somewhere.

  “It’s called a mind knot, and it was designed a couple of centuries ago by the military as a way to control soldiers’ minds. They had this notion of one army, one goal, one mind. The last time it was used was during the resource wars on Earth.” His excitement at seeing the mind knot is immediately dimmed the second he looks over at me. It hits home that the knot is inside me, and he averts his eyes and begins transferring notes to a small tablet in his hand.

  The mind knot turns to the left, and I see a glowing red ball, like an eye staring out at me, on one side.

  “Would you look at that?” Dr. Prashad’s voice takes on a soothing effect like he’s slipped into another world, and we’re not in it. “They’ve modified the original design.”

  I finally break free of the blanket and sit up, but it’s too quick. My vision rotates, and I feel like I’m going to throw up. I steady myself for a moment before jumping off the bed. My left hip jolts as my feet hit the floor. I hobble over to the monitor to get a closer look at what has Dr. Prashad so fascinated.

  “This thing controls minds? It’s controlling my mind?” I find that hard to believe. How can something be controlling me when I can’t even feel it? I guess that’s the point.

  “In a way, yes. Its main design feature was to relay orders to soldiers while they were in a state of unconsciousness.”

  The captain walks over to the monitor and swipes her hand down the length of the screen. A new image comes up, showing the underside of the mind knot. Four orangey-red cords snake out from underneath, stretching like feelers looking for something to grab. “They’re meant to take over when the subject shows any pushback.”

  How does she know so much about them? She zooms out, following the strands. All four are twisted into my brain stem, like parasites leeching off my memories.

  I grope the back of my neck as if I might be able to feel the mind knot working away and be able to claw it out. “How do we remove this thing?”

  They both turn and stare at me as if I’ve just suggested we strip naked and run through the corridors with streamers.

  Dr. Prashad heaves a sigh as if he’s about to tell me humans never actually lived on Earth, and it’s only a bedtime story parents tell their children so they won’t be afraid of the dark. “It can’t be removed. These fibers you see here,” he points to the four long strands clamping around my brain stem, “they’re bio-synthetic. And once they connect with your brain stem, they mold to your DNA. If I were to try to remove them, it would be like severing your spinal column from your brain stem. You would die instantly.”

  As he says the word instantly, my whole body chills. There has to be some other way.

  “Can’t you just turn it off?” I don’t want to walk around with someone else’s toy inside me for the rest of my life. But worse would be having it still running. I would rather die than be a puppet. I can’t live with the fear of never knowing when they could take over my body or use me as a power tool.

  “It doesn’t work like that. It’s acting as an intermediary between your brain and the rest of your nervous system. It would be like turning off your heart. All blood flow would cease, and you would no longer be able to function.”

  So, that’s a no.

  “What I don’t understand is how they implanted it into your system without it being noticed. The
re would be a large scar and traces of recent surgery,” he says.

  I lift up my undershirt and feel around the right side of my back. My fingers gloss over the raised skin of my scar from the attack. I turn and show him. “Would this be large enough?”

  He bends to inspect my scar. “This is from Europa Station?” His hand glides over the incision, but he doesn’t touch it, as if he’s afraid of what the mark represents. There’s a mixture of awe and fear in his voice. The scientist in him is fascinated, but the human is anxious about the outcome.

  I nod. I’ve never gotten a good look at it myself, but I know it’s at least five centimeters long. “When the first ship arrived, they found me unconscious in the med center. I must have made my way down there and patched myself up.” But maybe I didn’t. That’s all part of the black hole now.

  “It’s a good possibility that when the Burrs attacked the station, they implanted the mind knot. Your injury would have masked any trace,” he says, fidgeting with one of the syringe holders on his tray.

  The captain is just as nervous. She hasn’t taken her eyes off me the entire time, as if she’s afraid I’ll go on a rampage.

  I sit back down on the bed, suddenly feeling woozy. “Why would the Burrs choose me? What is it about me that would make me controllable?” I want to scream out, but if there’s one thing my father drilled into me from the time I could listen, it’s that life isn’t fair. His philosophy was pretty much life doesn’t give handouts, so you need to take what you want. And it didn’t matter who it hurt.

  “I’m guessing it has something to do with Hartley. You did attack him, after all.”

  “But you said he was okay. I didn’t hurt him.” Why would the Burrs want Hartley dead? If they’re trying to stop the mission, it’s not like he’s the only engineer on board who understands the Posterus’s new engine.

  “Doctor, you said the mind knot had been modified. What did you mean by that?” The captain still has her face up to the screen, studying the revolving nodule.

  “It has a transmitter. The original only had receivers. This was designed to send messages back.”

  Chapter Nine

  There’s a wrongness skulking deep inside me, hiding since I was a child listening to my cousin Edward’s stories. Stories that no child should know, let alone share. Stories that make you grow up too fast, a wickedness that keeps the dark dreams company.

  At the time, I believed Edward. I believed some monsters took advantage of us, leeched off us, slaughtered us in the deepness of our nightmares. I believed in them because they were true. I’d seen them. But they weren’t monsters. They were us. They were human. When I cringe at the name Burr, share an awful story, when I speak of them like animals, I am every ignorant crew member on this ship, every closed-minded MP in the Commons. I am my father. I am a bigot.

  The panic consumes me, tapping at my walls of denial.

  I now have the knowledge to go with my fears. I have been violated. Part of me has been lost forever. I am one of the monsters who haunt our nighttime. One of the butchers who attack our way of life. I am now connected to the people who murdered my mother.

  I sit in the middle of my bed, hugging my knees. I’ve been in this position for the past three hours, and I don’t plan on moving for another two. I’ve been confined to my cabin for the previous two days, waiting as the doctor examines the rest of the data he pulled from the diagnostic cube—which I’m told is currently dissolving and working its way through my digestive system. That’s a nice thought.

  There’s a knock at my door. I don’t bother to move. I know it will be the corporal with a tray of food to leave with the growing pile next to my door. I stare between my knees and wait for him to leave.

  “Lieutenant.” It’s her.

  My stomach floats to the surface. I don’t want it to. I want to stay in my funk.

  “What is this?” The captain points to the scattered uneaten trays blocking my door. “A hunger strike?”

  I shrug, but otherwise, don’t move. I’m moping, feeling sorry for myself, and I hate this attitude in other people, but self-pity is a perpetual motion machine. Once it’s started, it will keep going and going without any outside effort.

  “You have to eat.”

  I probably would have, I’m starving. But apparently, I’d rather die than eat that dick’s spit.

  I hear a scraping sound and look up. She’s placed a tray of food on my desk. It’s not lentils or soybeans either. There’s a heaping pile of pasta and meatloaf. She picks up a canister of liquid and offers it to me. That’s when I notice the chocolate pudding. She’s brought me dessert. I think I could kiss her just for that.

  “I’m reinstating you to active duty, Ash. Although no more spacewalks, and you will pick one shift, not three.”

  My heart soars. Finally. I need to get out of this room the same way Hartley needs to get laid, desperately and immediately.

  “So you’re not sending me back?” I open the canister and take a sip and almost retch. It’s a close approximation to pear juice. I’ve never had an aversion to pears before, but for some reason, this turns my stomach. As thirsty as I am, I can’t make myself drink. It must have something to do with the artificial flavors they use.

  “Why would you think that?” She drops a tablet on the bed next to me.

  Her uniform is crisp. I can even see pressed seams down the arms of her tunic. She looks better than when I saw her last. Her hair is back in a French twist, and her face is slightly flushed as if she’s been working out. I envy her freedom.

  “Because I have a stowaway that at any moment could go supernova,” I say and swipe the tablet. It flicks to life. It’s a data dump from the doctor. I scroll through. He was thorough. There are over one hundred pages of data, all about the intruder lurking in my brain stem.

  She pulls my chair out and pushes the tray of food closer. I get the point: Eat while we’re talking.

  “Dr. Prashad isn’t worried and so neither am I. Based on what’s happened so far, your body has a pushback mechanism. Both times you’ve shut down before anything serious happened. Besides, it has a limited range. They’ve probably hacked into communications buoys to get the signal this far. But once we set out on the Posterus, they won’t be able to connect to it.”

  Maybe it’s paranoia, but I’m not convinced. They didn’t go to all this trouble to be defeated by distance.

  I take a seat and unwrap my utensils. It even smells good today.

  She circles my cabin, fondling objects. I don’t own much, especially after that last trip to recycling. She stops at my duffel and fishes out a picture of Edward and me. It was taken right before I shipped off to basic training. “Who is this?”

  “My cousin, Edward.”

  “You have a cousin?” Not many people do. But then, not many people have siblings on account of the one-child law. He’s like a brother, only a year older than me. When we were growing up, everything was a competition: who got better grades in school, who was better in sports. We even had an unofficial contest to see who would lose their virginity first. He claimed Trisha Blake took his on his seventeenth birthday on his living room couch when his mom was at work. But this was never confirmed by Trisha, who I had fifth-period science with. It’s possible she was lying to protect her nonexistent reputation. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d lost it a year earlier, also with Trisha. But that was the thing about Edward. It never mattered if you won, he’d find a way to beat you in the end, by either one-upping you or coming up with something else to compete for.

  “My mom was a twin.” It’s one of two ways around the law. The other is to buy an unwanted. Each family gets a birth card. If for some reason the family decides they don’t want to bear children, they may sell their birth card. When you sell your card, they sterilize you.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “What for?” I hoist a fork full of pasta into my mouth. I know it’s only my imagination, but this tastes like the best whatever kind of
pasta this is I’ve ever had.

  She places the picture back in my duffel. It’s the only picture I have left of him. “You said ‘was.’ I just assumed…”

  There aren’t any pictures of my mom and me. I have one of myself with my aunt. Sometimes I pretend it’s my mom, that she lived to see me graduate and join the Union fleet. I don’t think she would’ve been as proud as my dad. But I can pretend. “It was a long time ago.”

  I shovel tofu loaf into my mouth. It doesn’t taste as good as the pasta. “What else did he find?” I ask.

  The captain stops at the window. We’ve passed most of the inner planets now, only a few of the outer giants to go until we reach Pluto and the Posterus. She looks lost and lonely staring out into space, with one side of her face dark and the other lit by the lights in my cabin.

  “Dr. Prashad thinks it was implanted for one particular purpose. We’re not sure what that is yet, but I think it has something to do with Hartley. Also, he thinks it’s…helped by sleep. Since you haven’t been sleeping properly in the last few weeks, it hasn’t been able to take control.”

  “What about the memory gaps? What does he think those are?”

  She shrugs and leans against the shelf facing me. “You’re going to have to ask him that.”

  “So if I don’t sleep, it won’t be able to control me?”

  Her hands grip the edge of my shelf, and she sighs. “Ash, that’s not what we’re saying. You can’t not sleep for the rest of your life.”

  “I can try.”

  She smirks. “Don’t make me assign you a night guard. The way things are going now, I can’t guarantee your safety.” She pauses, like she’s going to say something else, and I wish for a second she’d volunteer. I turn back to my food before she can see my blush.

  When her silence continues, I turn back.

  “Listen, Ash. I think there’s something we need to address.” She sighs and looks away from me. “I know you think I’m being hard on you. Maybe harder than I am on other crew. But I’m just trying to keep you safe.” Her hands slide along the edge of my shelves, alternatively gripping and releasing. The nervous movement belies what she’s not saying: She wants to keep everyone else safe.