by Kaz Morran
“Fighter jets drop all sorts of things.”
“Do you think a scramjet could get into space?”
“Heck, that’s the goal, right? Suck in enough atmosphere on the ascent to shoot out the back and push it into orbit. Big tradeoffs, though. You’re pulling a lot of gees, plus all that drag on reentry …”
“You’re talking about materials,” Taiyo said. His undergrad school, Tohoku University, was known for its materials science.
“The F22 hits twelve gees without a hitch. Structural integrity isn’t the problem. Thermal is. Air friction is going to sear your butt hotter than Hades. Thousands of degrees bearing down on your tips and nose. I don’t know if we’ve got the SPF for that.”
“And ceramics are—”
“Too brittle,” said Walter before Taiyo could.
The Shuttle had needed its ceramic tiles glued on because they’d crack if drilled. In the case of the Columbia disaster, they cracked anyway when a piece of foam broke off and hit one.
“Zirconium carbide is good,” Taiyo said and shrugged. For MONSTAR-X, he’d looked into research by a Chinese lab that made ceramics using reactive melt infusion. Low ablation. Machineable. Stress tolerant.
“Maybe that’s what DARPA was using.”
“Oh?”
“They lost a pair of H2B2s by pushing the thermals too far. NASA Ames begged them not to kill the third bird, but that’s just what Ames wound up doing. My Auntie Carol was on the team. She wanted to drop the thing back in from some ungodly altitude. A Mach-thirty-four ballistic reentry from twenty-two thousand miles up, or some gosh-darn thing like that.”
“Jesus,” Taiyo said it reflexively, and Walter let it slide. “What for?”
“Testing the thermals for something bigger. The promise was one day we’d fly commercial airliners the way we fly ICBMs.”
Taiyo was familiar with the concept. “Launch a vehicle into orbit and drop it back down on the other side of the planet.” In theory, passengers could get from Tokyo to New York in thirty minutes.
“Auntie Carol used to dream out loud that one day her and Uncle Barney and all us cousins would be sipping margaritas on a beach in Bermuda watching the thing come whipping across the sky so fast it’s in LA before you even catch the sonic boom.”
“But?”
“Auntie Carol calls it negative margins. That’s how an engineer tells you the so-crazy-it-just-might-work thing they said they could do is in fact too crazy to work.”
“Thermal analysis came up short?”
The slight rustle in Walter’s clothes indicated a nod. “Ames gave up too soon. Auntie Carol didn’t really care about getting transatlantic businessmen to their board meetings. She used to blather on about this AGA technique, but I could never wrap my head around it.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t know, bro. As I said, I couldn’t get my head around it. But I bet if she’s still alive up there at the care lodge, she’s telling the nurses and the Lord how close they’d been to doing something revolutionary.” Walter chuckled to himself. “Uncle Barney tells her to be careful about doing revolutions in aerospace, or you’ll spin yourself dizzy. Good advice, huh?”
Taiyo barely got out a polite laugh when something brushed his right ear. Slowly, knowing what it was, he tilted his head back and reached up for the object, forgetting he couldn’t see.
He ran his fingers up the length of the conic, slime-coated spike until he touched the ceiling. From there, he dragged his knuckles across the serrated contours; a tangible reminder of entropy’s indifference. He slid over to avoid being slowly skewered from above.
His arm brushed up against Nel. “Sorry,” he said. His own voice felt strange in his ears because of the air pressure.
She said it was fine.
He knew from her muffled voice, and the faint green glow of the heads-up display, that she’d already put on her diving mask.
He tilted his head and cupped his ear toward the waterfall to gauge if the torrent had weakened. In doing so, he saw a glow-worm flicker on and off above Nel’s head. He reached for it, and it fled its perch. It was the first one he’d seen fly. It was beautiful. He followed its glowing aura as it circled him and Nel, rose, skipped along the ceiling, and then plunged into the water and extinguished.
He reached over and took Nel’s hand. She wiggled closer, and they inched to the edge of the raft. There’d soon be no choice but to get in the water, but until then they curled their knees to their chests, arms around each other’s waists. He focused his thoughts on the comfort of companionship, and not the prying regret for leading a life so averse to it. Wordlessly, together, they waited. They waited until the hard plastic coating on the top of Taiyo’s helmet scraped rock.
She squeezed his hand. He didn’t know why he said it, but he thanked her.
“Goodbye,” she told him through her mask before reaching up to pull his down over his face.
He nodded, and together they slid off the edge of raft and into the water.
33
No light, only sounds, filled Taiyo’s mask—the sound of his own pulse, of the cool air cycling from the nitrox tank on his back and into his lungs, and of the raft and his helmet scraping the teeth of the ceiling as the Asylum neared capacity.
He could feel the waterline rising, now more or less across his ears as the wave crests licked the jagged ceiling like a beast tonguing for stuck food in its teeth. But he was calm. The dim green light of his heads-up display could’ve been the aurora of a distant planet as viewed from a receding spacecraft. He let the visual sedate him. Panic would only fuel an adrenaline release, which would raise blood flow and make the body demand more oxygen. It was best to submit peacefully.
Hand over hand, he edged along the submerged rope that bound the crates until he met Nel. He cupped his hand over her clenched fist and felt her trembling. When the water reached his chin, he let go of her fist and lifted his mask. He wanted to tell her it would be okay, but no words word formed when he opened his mouth, and he didn’t want to lie.
He pulled his mask back down and closed his eyes, and this time, it was Nel that placed her hand over his.
The lavacicles chipped and ground against the laminate of the crates. The vibrations hummed through the water, through Taiyo’s chest like heart murmurs.
The green display in front of his eyes counted down the nitrox in his tank:
00:21:36…00:21:35…00:21:34…
Should he not have been thinking about something important or philosophical? Something profound to fade out on. But he was tired. He’d done what he could, failed, and would soon be absolved of the ordeal. What was there to think about now, anyway? What was? What could have been? Pray? He almost laughed into his mask. The circumstances didn’t change the laws of physics, and in a way, that made him feel better. Like the glow-worm. Lights out. Back to the ground state of the universe. Back to emptiness.
Emptiness could be a beautiful thing.
At age nineteen, three and a half years after the tsunami, he’d set off solo to Vancouver for summer vacation. In his wallet: his own savings, plus 300 Canadian dollars—a gift from Dad, given on the condition Taiyo only spend it on drugs. Japanese drug laws were harsh. Up until that retreat, the most potent substance Taiyo had ingested was a can of Boss Coffee. Short of running off to pursue the life of an ascetic monk and meditating naked under an icy waterfall, Japan offered few paths to expanding one’s mind.
Not that growing up in Japan had been entirely void of illuminating experiences. One such occurrence had been when, at age nine, while waiting to use a 7-Eleven restroom, little Taiyo squeezed in among the trough of loitering businessmen at the magazine rack. It’d been the tentacles of the giant alien cyborg on the cover that had attracted his youthful eyes to the manga in his hands, and not the bawling, spread-eagle preteen tied to a stop sign with her own panties. As captivating as the ensuing pages had been, the tentacle-rape genre could never do for the mind what a ‘space muffin’ c
ould.
He wouldn’t read the hand-drawn label until later and learn the contents—twelve grams of psilocybin and an untold helping of weapons-grade hash oil—were not meant for individual consumption.
The happy dose of cosmic vertigo kicked in during a wander down the log-strewn shore of Wreck Beach. After weaving among the drum circles and makeshift shacks where elderly hippy nudists sold tie-dyed blankets and wittily named pot strains, he ventured into the world of old growth cedars and scraggly pines. There, he spent the night with the ferns and mosses in a clearing of disjointed and fading totem poles.
In that space between a dream and reality, teenage Taiyo came to terms with his place in the universe. He witnessed the dynamic of sentience and spacetime as a latticework womb woven from filaments of raw, binary data. Consciousness bled from eleven-dimensional sheets of ones and zeros; the afterbirth of a system that balanced economy and complexity in an ever-evolving drive to maximize the exchange of the fundamental constituent of the universe, information.
Each node of spidery filament was a pod of fractal spores, whose collisions and accretions put in play the physical laws that matter and energy abide by. The more complex the interaction, the less likely it was to occur—and even less likely it would endure. Consciousness—the most complex entity in the universe—could no more outlive entropy’s curse than an ember could stay adrift.
In an infinity that balances all states back to zero, the mind was a fleeting antagonism to pure … impeccable… beautiful…
Emptiness.
…00:06:11…00:06:10…00:06:09…
Taiyo took a long pull of air through the rebreather mask. In hindsight, the space muffin experience had been much more valuable than tentacle porn. That night of tripping balls in the woods had stayed with him. As much as salt was part of the sea, dissolution was an intrinsic property of every complex entity.
…00:00:03 00:0:02…00:00:01 00:00:00.
His consciousness had to be extinguished. The universe had no choice in the matter, and neither did he.
The display in his mask went from solid green to flashing red. He took in the residual air, starting with a deep breath from his lower gut. He counted twenty seconds and pictured the air filling his lungs, bottom to top, up through his sternum, and to the top of his chest where he held it.
He loosened his grip on Nel and on the rope, and let his fingers slip free; free to float under the buoyancy of the depleted air tank.
Zero-g and I feel fine.
Drifting through the depths, he looked up into the darkness and saw the faint green glow of Nel’s display turn red and begin to blink.
He counted the display lights of the others: One … two… three… four. All there, except Anton.
One by one, the lights went red.
They bobbed in a hypnotic constellation that outlined the raft. He held his breath and lifted the mask, letting water fill the helmet before he expelled a few bubbles of carbon dioxide.
One light broke free. At first, it sunk as fast as Anton had when torn from Taiyo's grip. Then in rapid succession, the glow rose, changed course, and jerked back and forth before plunging deep out of sight and disappearing for good.
Terror enveloped Taiyo’s skin like a hot, compressing wetsuit.
The other three red lights clustered and bobbed for a moment before breaking up. Each dipped and rose, and then went dim and stopped moving. The others had gone under the raft, as rehearsed, to stick their heads in an air pocket.
The burn running through his blood and lungs told Taiyo he’d better get ready to join them. He swam toward the red glow of the three remaining lights.
Only three. What happened to the light that disappeared? What he’d seen—the erratic motion of the light—replayed in his mind as the current jarred his bobbing. What had moved it so chaotically? Who did they lose?
Then Taiyo knew—because it hit him.
Something hard. Leathery. And with great mass behind its momentum. It struck the back of his head and scoured its craggy scales along the length of his body, down his neck, spine, and curled briefly around the backs of his legs.
He fought the urge to freeze. Before he could move, it struck again. His upper arm, inflicting him with stinging pain.
He tossed his shoulders left and right to escape, to aim his senses. Useless.
Something stirred. It hit him again. The same arm.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
Fight back? No. Be calm. Breathe. Fuck! Can’t breathe.
He curled into a smaller target. What about Nel? Did it get her? It got someone. Who?
Get under the raft. To the crate. Go!
His lungs now hammered in his eardrums. Air bubbles escaped him. Lava pulsed through his core. How long ago did it hit him? Several seconds. Was it done?
The other lights were in a frenzy.
One hand over the other, he translated the rope as if on the outer railings of the Space Station, as if he’d done it before. He ran his fingers over the contours of the underside of the raft, doing what he’d rehearsed, counting the gaps between the crates as he searched for his spot.
He let out more bubbles. Not many left.
Thoughts crept in and began to wander in the blackness. Undistracted by the burning, clawing despair in his oxygen-deprived body, Taiyo saw himself with Dad. He remembered when they’d gone back into the cold, dark, flooded bedroom and waded in past the bobbing nightstand. As if manipulating modules on a spacewalk, they overturned and rotated the floating pieces of furniture in search of anything that might aid survival.
With one hand, Taiyo ran his fingertips along the ceiling of the Asylum to keep from hitting his head on stalactite stubs and lavacicles; while with the other hand, he navigated along the side of the raft until he found where he’d etched his initials.
Something agitated the current right beside him. A hand grabbed him. It had him by the collar, but too briefly for him to react before it shoved him away, out to the open water. Someone—Ronin, bastard!—had taken Taiyo’s spot of refuge beneath the raft.
He drifted.
86 seconds. The magic number. The break-point. Until then, the instinct to hold his breath would mask the misery of running out of air. That’s what he’d been taught to expect, anyway. And, he believed, by the time his oxygen-starved brain at last succumbed and overrode that instinct with a spasmodic intake of water, he’d have so much carbon dioxide in his blood he’d black out without feeling a thing. Fatal drownings were usually quite peaceful.
Usually.
Not this time.
The break-point came. Violently, involuntarily, his mouth and windpipe sucked in water. But a funny, yet not uncommon, thing happened. The touch of water on his vocal cords made the larynx contract, a call by the nervous system that judged the invading water to be a greater threat than depleted oxygen. Soon enough, the reflex would overwhelm Taiyo with CO2, but for the moment it kept his lungs from flooding.
Adrenaline took over, and he began to kick and flail in a desperate last effort to find an open crate with an air pocket. Someone kicked away his grabbing hands.
The lack of oxygen in his blood stole his focus, and a bit of sanity, too. He looked up, expecting to see sunlight filtered down through the water. But when he only saw black, he let his body go limp. The will to live pervaded like no other force in the universe, but no amount of it could overpower the laws of physics.
Entropy, the bastard!
The water embraced his flaccid freefall. No pain. Only comfort.
And then … he felt his body rising. Arms and legs dangling at his sides, head back, he rose as if levitated by the tractor beam of a flying saucer. A surge of energy revived his limbs. His head clunked on the bottom of the raft, and his left arm grasped wildly until a looped end of rope hit his palm. It'd been acting as a wedge to keep the lid of the crate open and as a handle.
A mitt-like hand—Ronin’s—wrapped Taiyo’s fingers around the rope, and another hand shoved his head up inside the air pocke
t.
Taiyo jettisoned the mask. An intense bout of coughing threatened his consciousness once more, but after a few minutes, the pain actually felt good. Pain meant he wasn’t dead.
The trapped air wouldn’t last, though. Especially if he kept panting and gasping. He had to conserve it. The mental math of trying to figure out how much he had left defused the stress and calmed his breathing.
Ten minutes— twenty at the most—until his respiration converted too much of the air in the crate into CO2 for him to stay conscious. He wondered which would take him first: heart failure, asphyxiation, or drowning. Or death might come another way. He’d almost forgotten about the thing in the water.
The sound of his own breathing echoed inside the narrow confines of the crate. He inhaled the trapped, humid air as it cycled off the surface of the neck-high water, and he exhaled it up into the corners of the container.
Something rushed by below. The raft jostled in the underwater wake, and the muffled thuds of crates hitting the ceiling reverberated around Taiyo’s walled-in head like distant thunder. He scrambled to pull himself up higher, tensing every muscle, desperate to make himself small and keep hold of the crate.
It brushed Taiyo’s feet, circling, taunting him. Water shot up into the crate, making him choke and spit to regain his breath. He tucked in his knees and winced in anticipation of a strike … but none came.
Moments passed. The water calmed.
What the fuck is out there?
He had to stick his head out of the crate and check. He held his breath and went under.
A mental alarm went off upon seeing only three red blinking lights, but then he remembered that one had gone astray.
Back in his refuge, he felt around the open rim of the crate, around chest-level, and found the initials of the person whose spot he’d taken. They read like brail on a tombstone:
WT.
Walter Tate.
He took his phone off his chest and checked his vitals while it powered on. His pulse was rising. Once the screen lit up, he dipped back underwater, out of the crate, and used it to look around but found nothing. Finding nothing, he moved his thumb to power off the phone, but something stopped him. A current. He'd felt it more than seen it, but there had been a visual. Hadn’t there?
