by Kaz Morran
“Maybe we should go back and at least offer to pay for half.”
“Don’t you want to know what happened to me in Russia?”
“I’m more worried about those girls calling the police.”
“They’re not girls. They’re women. Have some respect.”
In the taxi, Aro said he’d once stolen a Russian nuclear submarine and crashed it into the Port of Vladivostok, and then rallied and trained an army of two hundred Siberian farmers into conducting a violent uprising on the Kremlin. “It’s not as dramatic as it sounds.”
“I see.”
“But do you really? Halfway through a fun night out on the town, and there’s still no passion in your eyes.”
Aro directed the driver to turn right, down a road lined with variously themed love hotels.
“Which one?” the driver said.
“Just up ahead.” Aro pointed at one up ahead that looked like a compact Disney castle.
“The Hide and Seek?” The driver wouldn’t have been able to see where Aro pointed.
“Not that. It’s called Legend of the Ignorance-Feigning Beaver. Right there.”
Sumida hid his face as they checked in. Aro had made a reservation but under the name Neil Armstrong. This whole night was turning into some kind of fugitive nightmare. Sumida understood the need to keep their dealings secret, but …
“Sex is not one of my demands,” Aro said, closing the door to the pink, fuzzy-walled room. “But if we get caught meeting each other, it’ll just look like we’re gay lovers, and your professional reputation will be spared.”
Aro sat on the edge of the bed, which had the shape and decorative duvet of a giant Hello Kitty face. “Look at me,” he said. He kept his volume down, but the intensity in his voice billowed forth unrestrained. “Look in these eyes.” Aro pointed at himself. “Do you see this glow?”
Behind the bed, on the wall, hung a collection of pink and black S&M gear.
“I’m really not comfortable—”
“This MONSTAR-X project is a legit monster. It lives with me now.” Aro’s eyes bugged, and he stared off to his right as if watching the past race at him from the wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling mirror. “It’s evolved with me. It was there through all the secret prisons and labor camps.” He took a long pause, still unblinking. “All the beatings and tortures. All the times I saw people killed.” He pursed his lips and nodded to himself. “Or when I saw people kill themselves. … And the times I had to fight. And all the years of running and moving, village to village. All that time alone.” Aro’s jaw jittered as if he were cold, and one eye began to twitch. He massaged the top of his head with his fingertips, slowly and softly. “And …” He had to stop to keep the tears in. He bent forward, putting his elbows on his knees and tightening his fingers on his skull.
He continued, but his words came out in spurts, broken and jittery, and seemingly not of his own volition. “Always leaving before—Leaving before they can learn my name. Before someone calls someone.” He pressed his palms to the sides of his head. “Waiting. Knowing. Because the monster inside the hunter of men feeds until it’s full. Then winter. And at last, it goes to sleep. The land goes quiet under the weight of the snow. But it never sleeps long.”
Suddenly, Aro stood up. He snatched a long, pink, penis-shaped cushion off the headboard and rubbed his eyes with it. “Man, fuck this.” He smacked the penis cushion on the bed. “I was done crying about this.” He whacked Hello Kitty in the eye, then the mouth, yelling, “A long fucking time ago.” He hit her with it again.
“It’s fine,” said Sumida. He stepped toward the bed and almost reached out for Aro’s arm, but resisted. “It’s good to cry sometimes. Come on. Sit back down and let it out.”
Aro clenched the cushion to his chest. “Nah, I’m done.” He sat down and wiped his face on the penis once more.
Sumida brought him the box of tissue from the headboard. He said nothing while Aro wiped his the sweat from his hands. Finally, Aro lay on his back, stretched out over Hello Kitty’s face, the penis cushion under his head and hands folded on his stomach, ready to continue. “I’ve never hurt anyone, you know? Not really,” he said.
Sumida stayed seated on the edge of the bed. He only nodded. Aro’s claim was a bit hard to believe, but he sympathized just the same.
Voice still trembling, Aro said, “I stopped that monster from killing me. And now I can’t let it die. I have to evolve it.” He sniffled, and turned his head toward Sumida, but only for a second before returning his gaze to the mirrored ceiling. “You know, in all that time of moving one foot ahead of the next, of telling myself to keep my head in the game and to keep looking up.” He scratched and picked at the backs of his hands. “I always looked up. I saw what was up there.” He spread his arms. “So vast, yet the stars and planets feel so close. Right there above our heads. All the possibilities in the universe are sprawled out like a buffet. So beautiful.” He started to get choked up again.
“But they also taunt you. Each point of light is a cluster of worlds.” Ronin gritted his teeth and jabbed the air two, three, four times. “They mock you. They whisper in your ear, ‘Look up. We see you, but you are a little human who hasn’t grown up enough to reach this high.’” He wiped his mouth with his scrunched up tissue and smiled a manic smile and then he reached into his pants and pulled out a thumb drive. He sat up on one elbow and held out the thumb drive for Sumida to see. “But with this, we all grow into giants.”
Sumida smiled. For the first time that evening he thought meeting Ronin Aro might not have been a mistake. Sumida unzipped the business bag he’d been hauling, slid out his laptop, and set it on the bed between him and Aro. “I’d like to see the data,” he said and held out his hand for the thumb drive.
Aro sat up and crossed his legs. “So, do we have a deal?” he wagged the thumb drive in front of Sumida.
“How do I know the data is worth anything if you don’t let me see it first?”
“No new physics. No leaps in technology. Something that changes everything.” He held the thumb drive by one end, between his thumb and forefinger, dangling it back and forth. “Do you want it, or not?”
“You haven’t even told me what invention is on it. I’ll have to see it first.”
“It’s not an invention. It’s a discovery. A concept. A new way of coming at the problem.” Aro smiled, much less maniacally this time. “The specifics aren’t what matters. A glance at it will tell you it’s legit. That’s all you need to know to agree.”
“Show me.”
“Do we have a deal?”
Sumida looked into those fiery eyes of Ronin Aro’s. He knew he had a duty to verify the data before accepting anything, but he also knew how long that would take, and how many eyes that would involve. Besides, he’d already done something horribly wrong by meeting Aro to … To do what? To swap favorable employment for secret Chinese intelligence? That’s not what JAXA did. That’s not what Sumida did. And yet, here he was, in a love hotel on a Hello Kitty bed next to a psychotic man with a ponytail and a penis pillow.
“How about it?” said Aro. “Are you going to let me help you change history?”
Sumida stared at the dangling thumb drive. “Yes,” he said.
“Say it.”
“We have a deal.”
“What deal? Say it.”
“I’ll get you into the astronaut selection program.”
“And?”
“And the rights to every MONSTAR-X patent and database with your name on it.”
Ronin dropped the thumb drive into Sumida’s open hand.
25
An intelligent enemy is better than a stupid friend.
—Senegalese proverb
Kristen often imagined her basement study was the Cupola module of the International Space Station. She’d daydream of floating weightlessly, free from worldly constraints, as she looked out the window down upon that glorious, precious orb, the cradle of all known life in the universe. As the
continents rolled by, she’d wait for California to appear, wait for the spec of Earth containing her house to come into view. And when it did, she’d bring her hand to the glass and give Greg the finger.
***
Kristen and Ronin stood over the charred remains of their robot creation.
“Smells like someone sabotaged a top-secret Chinese rocket,” Ronin said.
Kristen laughed and the light beam of headlamp jiggled. Ronin's humor was so oddly specific.
She handed him the half-gallon bottle as beckoned for and watched him take a swig then pour the rest over the smoldering mess of metal and plastic. The bits of wire and circuitry flushed along a fold in the igneous bedrock and out of sight.
Excess water would become a theme that day, as it had been when Kristen left Greg and the boys at home in Berkeley for Australia.
The briefing sent by T3 to Nel’s phone had the AsCans pair up and use the contents of one of the crates—which when dumped out looked like Ayden’s closet of toys had exploded—to build, test, and demonstrate a robot to aid in the exploration of the north end of the Asylum.
Anton and Walter had made a bot that could return dust samples, Taiyo and Nel’s measured air composition, and Kristen and Ronin made one that fell over and caught fire. High-fives abound, each pair declared their bot a resounding success and the contest was called a draw.
Ronin pulled himself from his and Kristen’s dead robot. He looked up at the ceiling, sighed, and announced, “I need to poop.”
How tactful, thought Kristen. A lot like Leo, her oldest. “Don’t forget to wipe,” she told Ronin and slapped his arm.
Ronin looked down at her and raised a flirtatious eyebrow. “I’d wipe you if we had the facilities.”
She smacked him again. “Stop doing that,” she told him between giggles. “You can’t just say random stuff and expect people to know what you mean.”
“You knew what I meant.”
“Yeah, but … Actually, no, I didn’t.”
“Perfect,” he said and walked away leaving her shaking her head and smiling.
“The facilities are that way,” she yelled after him. “Far that way.”
By facilities, she meant the unit Walter had dubbed THRONE: The Hygienic Receptacle for Odorous Number-2 Emissions. As ambassadors of the human race, astronauts came from civilization’s best ranks—scientists, engineers, surgeons, test pilots—but in space and in Project Daintree, they also cleaned the toilet. And before lunch, it was Kristen’s turn.
She scanned the designated area (the “THRONE Room”) for filled bags to corral into a single, larger deodorizing bag. With each bag she plucked from the rocky ground, she gagged and prayed the supplier had cleared the handles and sealed the deposit. In doing so, it occurred to her that although the inconveniences of defecating in space were such that astronauts often abstained for days or even weeks, ground-based crews were not so conservative.
Get over it, she told herself. How many dog doos have you cleaned up? How many diapers have you changed in your life? But this was different. These were not dog doos or diapers; they were bags of adult human shit. She couldn’t keep it in anymore. The next gag triggered a more powerful reflex, and she threw up in her hands. Why into your hands, Krissy? Why not the ground? Or into a bag? Come on, girl. She almost told herself to get her shit together, and the thought of such a comically Freudian slip lightened the strain enough for her to finish the job, though just barely.
She returned to camp and found the others with a selection of bagels, bagged shrimp cocktail, yakisoba, and rehydrated ice cream spread over a crate, and she almost threw up again. After lunch, they exercised with stretchy bands, and then Anton and Walter analyzed the dust samples from their bot while Taiyo and Nel tried to make sense of their own data.
Kristen ran inventory checks, filled out her logbook, and then picked up her phone from the charging dock at the generator. She rounded out the day doing public outreach from her hammock—answering emails and recording sound bites for elementary schools, which would be relayed through T3.
Exhausted, and desperate for sleep, she typed out short messages for T3 to pass along to Ayden and Leo. After, she hovered her fingers over the screen of her phone, eyes burning tired, while she considered whether to send Greg something, too. In the end, she did. But she only wrote:
Hope the basement is dry. Hi to the boys. See you next week.
She would’ve chosen her words differently had she known that, in fact, she would not be seeing Greg or the boys next week.
26
Feet up on the crate, he left his boots on—not out of laziness, but to be ready at all times. To his own surprise, a long, audible sigh escaped his lungs. Between long gazes into the dark, he scrolled through some of the papers he’d been meaning to read, but he couldn’t focus; someone would cough or scratch, or a hammock would creak, and his eyes would pull away from the screen.
“Hey, Tai. Whatcha reading?” said Walter.
“Just something to wind down before bed.”
“Oh?”
“A research paper.”
A lot of his ideas for MONSTAR-X had come from cobbling a bit from one field with a piece of another. If he read enough, he might figure out how to fix the propulsion problem.
“What’s it about?”
“Computational plasma physics codes and how to determine the turbulent transport rate of particles, momentum, and energy in order to solve the 5-D gyrokinetic Maxwell equations.”
“Oh.”
“You?”
“Yeah. Same.”
Taiyo shut off the screen, stuck his phone to the velcro on his chest, and lifted his tired legs off the crate and into his hammock. He drifted in and out of sleep, aware that he kept jerking awake to his own twitches of discomfort and to the voices of the others.
“Anyone half-sane can play nice for a week,” Ronin was telling Anton. Yes, sir, thought Taiyo. Ronin was right about that. “A weeklong isolation is only meant to weed out the crazies. Qualified people don’t break until at least ten days in.”
Oh, the irony.
“And what day are we at now?” said Nel from close to Taiyo. Her hammock frame creaked as she shifted, and she apologized for the noise.
“Day five,” Taiyo answered between the noises of his frame scraping bedrock as he sat up. He apologized, too. Japanese and Canadians were alike in that way: always saying sorry, trying not to bother people. Except for Ronin, of course. He was his own phylum.
“I don’t know,” said Anton, “I worked with a guy in the Darfur camp who went batshit after only three days.”
“Is that the medical term?” Ronin asked.
Anton said, “I suppose PTSD is a more respectful term.”
“How’d you get through it without cracking?” Taiyo said.
“Not sure I did.” Anton laughed at himself.
“But you made it here. That says something, right?”
“Yeah. It beats being stuck in some desert tent taking shrapnel out of kids.”
“Jesus.”
“It’s not as bad as it sounds.”
“Honestly?”
After a long moment of quiet, Kristen’s voice came from somewhere in the dark: “Didn’t you guys feel weird signing a non-disclosure? I mean, making people sign an NDA pretty much screams low-integrity. Don’t you guys think? It’s like demanding a prenup.” Maybe since she’d already messed up by flipping out at Ronin, after the rafting and crocodile incident, she didn’t care what the body cams picked up, but Taiyo didn’t think T3 would appreciate her slandering them.
Ronin tried messing with Kristen, saying she was the only one sworn to secrecy. “In fact, this whole project is a big setup to lure you underground so we can—”
“Ronin.” Nel cut him off before he could take the joke any further.
That reminded Taiyo of an isolation sim incident sometime in the eighties or nineties. Cross-cultural education wasn’t really a thing then, so not everyone in the internat
ional mock-mission understood the mindset of men raised and trained within the ranks of the Soviet military. These men saw vodka as a dietary supplement, fistfights as a brotherly way to resolve differences, and a shoulder rub by a female crew member as an invitation to reciprocate with sexual assault. The lone Japanese participant walked out halfway, convinced the rest of them were savages, and in the aftermath, the Canadian broke the non-disclosure agreement and went public with her complaints.
Either, in all the decades before and since, across all the world’s human space programs, that sim had experienced the one and only case of interpersonal turmoil, or, participants tended to stick to the terms of their NDAs.
Taiyo put his head back down and wondered what it would take for him, or any of his fellow candidates, to break the NDA. More importantly, how bad would an incident have to get for one of them to push the help button each had on his or her phone. What if the problem was internal? How motivated would Taiyo be to report his own psychological decline? Not very. Not if he ever hoped to get to space.
The agencies had just as much incentive to suppress unflattering incidents as crew and candidates did. That was the reason for the non-disclosures. The media could narrate any little mishap into the foretelling of a real mission. The press was willfully ignorant that the purpose of a simulation was to learn and refine so actual failure could be prevented.
Of course, that made the AsCans as much guinea pigs as recruits, and the Asylum a laboratory as much as a school.
***
“I discovered something last night,” Anton told Taiyo, who’d been drawn, like a zombie to brains, out of the hammock by the sizzle and smell of frying eggs.
Taiyo scratched his scalp and grunted something approximating, “Yeah, me too.” Maybe it was the shifting pressure in the cave, or maybe the bugs in his hair, or maybe the lack of sleep, but forcing his tired muscles to hoist his body onto a crate opened a dull pulsing behind his right eye.
