by Aaron Bunce
What is wrong with my eyes? He reached up and rubbed them slowly.
Eyes or head? Am I stuck in a…is this a dream?
“Remember?” Emiko asked, after turning. Anna shrugged, shaking her head, but did not speak. Jacoby thought she looked sad…troubled. “We’ll see if we can’t jar something loose. Sometimes it takes just a little work.”
A warm hand pressed to his forehead, the contact eliciting an immediate reaction inside both his head and his body. He felt Emiko’s vitality, her energy and an outwardly radiating warmth–compassion. It quickly washed away his panic, a sense of calm and peace trickling in after.
“Emiko,” Jacoby whispered. There was history…no, he had history with her. One that felt significant but distant. But why couldn’t he remember it?
“Very good,” she said, smiling. “I’m glad that you’re awake, Jacoby. I wanted a chance to thank you. From what the others tell me, you tried pretty hard to sacrifice yourself to save everyone else. Lana and I first and foremost.”
“I did?”
Emiko nodded, smiling. There was that warmth radiating off her again, a barely tangible vitality that soaked in through their skin contact. He felt it working inside him, pushing away his anxiety and dispelling fear. Jacoby didn’t know why, but he felt that she was not a threat.
“What do you remember?”
He set his emotional feet and focused. Both Anna and Emiko felt so familiar. Perhaps he just had to concentrate, think hard enough, and everything would come back.
And yet, everything beyond the man-eating chair and the day with Alexandria before that, was just…black. Or maybe not black, but just gone. He struggled through the momentary realization that everything he was, everything he’d experienced, was gone forever.
How could he remember who he was, but only in the context of a single, dreamlike day? It didn’t make any sense.
“I don’t…I can’t,” he grunted and struggled with what and how to say it. How could he tell people he was supposed to know that everything that tied him to them was gone? Even the ability to articulate that point felt out of reach.
“Start small? Do you remember me, or Anna?” Emiko asked, then added, “your good friend. How about Hyde station, the place you used to work? Do you remember that?”
He studied her face as she talked. The longer he looked, the more familiar she felt–her brown eyes, smooth, pale complexion, and dark, silky hair. The emotional tie deepened, too, but still no memories surfaced. And then the almost invisible version of her tilted its head to the side and smiled, its hand reaching out to playfully pull at his cheek. Jacoby felt the contact, but distantly, as if it were another version of him operating in a separate place and time.
“Maybe, but it’s not…why do I see two…? Ugh this is maddening,” he grunted and slapped his hands over his face, struggling with how to break down what he was feeling, seeing, into words. If it didn’t make any sense in his head, how was he going to make them understand? “You feel so familiar, like I know you. But when I try to remember how…there is nothing. I feel like I was asleep and dreaming, but everything in that dream felt so real. It felt as real as this and you,” he said, tapping the bunk frame and then reaching up to touch Emiko’s hand still resting on his brown. “But now…with you two, everything feels real, too. I see you, feel you, but that’s not all. There is another version of you, one I can barely see. I feel a strong connection to that one…one that doesn’t feel tied to you here. I don’t know. Nothing makes sense. Everything is so confusing.”
“Okay, I’m not sure how to work through that one, but I’ll tell you what. Anna and I are real, so that is a good place to start. Or I hope so, at least,” Emiko chuckled, quietly. “If you feel up to it, let’s get you on your feet. Maybe a little walk will help. It is not unusual for people with head traumas to struggle getting their bearings. Let’s just take it slow and see if things straighten out.”
Anna moved forward tentatively as Emiko undid the strap around his legs–the flesh and blood woman with long, blond hair tied up in a ponytail moving first, a shorter-haired version in a green dress followed a second after. She leaned into him, her face pressed tightly against his cheek. She was warm, her smell so painfully familiar. Something clicked inside then, just as it had when Emiko laid her palm on his forehead–that distant significance, as if they shared a deep and almost unbreakable bond. It wasn’t like Emiko’s compassion, but deeper, an established trust…or at least the feeling of it.
Anna’s lips pressed hard into his cheek, but it wasn’t until she pulled away that he realized she was crying. He wanted to ask her what was wrong, but the words refused to come. Her tears, her eyes, everything about her felt so wonderfully comfortable. He wanted to hold onto her and everything she inspired inside him, and yet he couldn’t tell if that was him feeling it, or just the lingering effects of something else.
“Let’s do this together,” Anna sniffed.
Jacoby nodded.
“Okay,” Anna pulled the blanket free, which he immediately regretted. The air was cold and smelled stuffy, like a basement in bad need of ventilation. Was that it? Was he underground?
She carefully pulled his feet around and over the side. His feet touched the ground, the cold evident even through his socks.
“Yeah, sorry about that. We can only afford to run a few of the heaters now, and never more than two at a time. We alternate…so that means everywhere is always just kind of cold, instead of having some warm spots and everywhere else being ‘holy shit’ freezing. We can’t run the air scrubbers together with the heaters, or when the engine fires, so things get a little stuffy, too. But, yeah, that’s really just the tip of the iceberg.”
Engine fires? Is that bad? Heaters and air scrubbers? What does all that mean?
Jacoby slid forward off the bunk and wobbled for a moment, but Anna’s strength easily stabilized him. His sluggish mind chewed through everything she said. But none of it connected to meaning or significance.
They moved slowly out into a round room, the chaos of the space immediately threatening to overwhelm him. Anna seemed to sense his uneasiness and compensated, taking even more of his weight onto herself.
Access panels had been removed from the ceiling and floor, heaping bundles of cables crisscrossing across the space, some hanging in the air, while others covered the ground. Some cables terminated in messy clusters, while others branched up and over the galley chairs and table, disappearing into open access spaces. Somehow, he knew what those things were called, but now how or why.
Okay, that is good. Keep looking, keep trying to make the connections. He thought. It felt like when he had a kink in his back, only in his head. Jacoby just needed to move or twist just right, and pop it would snap back into place and everything would be okay.
The space was dark, albeit warmer than where he’d woken up. Only three lights glowed in the whole room, drawing the shadows over the debris strewn floor and somehow making it look older than he would have guessed. Not older, he realized, but ramshackle.
“What happened in here?” Jacoby asked, as they moved sideways to avoid the debris of a demolished cabinet.
“That happened in the accident where you hit your head. I guess it makes sense that you wouldn’t remember that. The rest of this chaos is from us trying to work around the little software problem that caused it,” Emiko said, and he felt Anna stiffen next to him in response.
Voices echoed in from a passageway ahead and to the right. Jacoby eyed the door, his gaze catching on an open ladder well leading down into the darkness.
“Listen, my head is still ringing but my ears work just fine, so if you’d please stop yelling, I would really appreciate it. Thanks!” a young man said, his face a maze of what looked like grease and dirt. He wore an insulated cap over his brown hair, the gray and blue hat pulled down over his ears.
A thin brunette followed in closely behind him and could not have provided a more startling contrast. Where the young man appeare
d tired, disheveled, and ragged, she practically glowed with health and energy. She bounced with every step, as if gravity struggled to hold her down. And just like with Anna and Emiko, a barely perceptible overlay followed them–the same and yet different.
“You’re not listening. Speed is everything. If we’re going too fast, we skip right off the atmosphere and right into deep space. If we slow down too much, that hella-thick atmosphere will catch us, and we’ll have little to no way to control our vector. If we can’t keep the Betty’s nose up at least thirty-five-degrees we’re screwed.”
Jacoby cleared his throat, shook his head, and blinked rapidly. The ghosts, as that was what they appeared to be, remained.
“I can’t take you seriously when you use the word ‘hella’. You sound like an idiot. And yes, you are yelling. By now I’m having a hard time hearing you over the bell ringing in my ears. And that’s thanks to you, too,” the young man snapped.
“I’m not yelling. Please, stop fighting me on everything. We’re losing our window and need to get our shit together. We…I mean, I just want you to listen before you make up your mind. We can’t trust that injection system for any more than one or two more burns. The couplers are shot. You took it apart yourself. The gaskets are pretty much gone. If it comes apart during an acceleration pulse, it could push ionized plasma out into the engine room and in theory, flash the ambient oxygen and breach containment. Best case scenario…the airlock holds, and we seal the engine compartment. If it does, we’ll have no engine or power, we’re dead in the water and have to cut our way in to the compartment. Worst case? The explosion breaches the airlock, or the hull and we vent our breathable oxygen off-ship and asphyxiate in minutes. Either way, we all die.”
Erik sagged forward, closing his eyes, and bracing his weight on his knees. “It’s like your only volume setting since…well, since whatever happened to you is all the way up. And no, that’s not right-right. If we recalibrate the injector computer separately and run it incredibly lean…”
“If you run it lean then the manifolds collect more heat on the back end. We don’t know what their integrity is because we’d need to be in a drydock to pull lower maintenance hatches to reach them. What if they are as bad as the injectors? What if they’re worse?”
“What if…what if…what if?”
The two stopped just above the ladder as their argument grew more intense. Several more figures appeared through the doorway. First, a well-built balding man in a jumpsuit. Shane. It startled him how easily the name popped to mind. And second, a tall woman in a grimy, torn jumpsuit. She moved through the shadows between unlit ceiling panels and settled behind the others as they argued. The nearest light caught her shoulder and neck, her auburn hair practically glowing.
“Alexandria,” Jacoby muttered and took an awkward step forward, but Emiko and Anna were holding him back more than up. The redhead looked up and noticed him then, and after failing to get the arguing people’s attention, hooked two fingers in her mouth and whistled. The shrill sound cut through the chatter, echoing loudly against the close walls. They all looked to her then, and with a head nod his way, the group turned.
“Oh, shit!”
“Finally…”
“Oh my god!”
“Hallelujah!”
The group churned his way, hands gesturing, mouths moving, and all speaking as one. They playfully poked and patted his arms, joking about long naps, days off, and slacking.
“You could not have cut this any closer, Jacoby. We are so in need of a strong voice to help some of the people on this ship see some reason. Honestly, how are you feeling? I mean, ten days! We’d kind of given up on you ever waking up,” the brunette said.
“Lana, he…” Emiko tried to cut in, but Shane was louder.
“Damn, man, I’m really glad to see you up and about. Things have not gone smoothly. We can’t seem to get on the same page about what we’re doing next. We’re down to the wire on this entry versus slingshot decision and, to be perfectly frank, I’ve really wanted to bounce some things off of you. Do you have a quick minute to talk?”
“Seriously? Hell no to the entry thing. I’m not going down there. We did things the way you wanted, we voted. You can’t back out now just because he’s awake and things might go your way this time,” the young man cut in, turning to the big man.
“My way? Erik, we talked about this. The decision only works if everyone has a say. We all share the risk. So, we each have a voice. That is how a crew works. It’s not my fault people are refusing to take a side. This is the only…”
“Crew?” Erik laughed. “We ain’t a crew. And the risk isn’t even anymore, either. Not even close. He made sure of that with whatever he did to Lana and the nurse.” Erik pointed right at Jacoby. “They were back up and around in less than two days, looking’ like a million fucking dollars–no concussions, no headaches, or memory loss. Meanwhile, I’ve puked up my guts after breakfast…still. I have headaches. My nose bleeds and by bedtime I can’t remember how many times I’ve peed that day. My brains are scrambled eggs, man. But no, it’s ‘Erik’ strip and reroute the engine ignition solenoids’ or ‘Erik flip through ten thousand lines of code and see if anything looks off in oxygen handler’s OS’. It’s bullshit. Where’s my magic cure-all? I’m falling apart and running on no sleep, and on top of that you guys want me to throw together an atmospheric entry with no navigational computer, no atmospheric data, in this beat-up tub. All to go to a Russian Federation science station no one knows anything about, that we can’t even communicate with. What do you think they’ll do if they see us coming? Do you think they’ll be happy? Roll out a cart with salty pickles and vodka and say, ‘come on in, Comrade’?”
“This isn’t the time, Erik. We don’t have the luxury of sitting around and arguing semantics…” Lana cut him off.
Erik turned, a flush of his cheeks highlighting the puffy, blackened skin around his eyes. It wasn’t just grease. His eyes were glassy, too, and reddened.
“Of course, it’s the time, Lana. We’ve got one deacceleration pulse left and then it’s shit or get off the pot time. But wait, we don’t know what we’re going to do. And what makes you think he’s going to side with you anyways, bossy-pants? And if he doesn’t, what makes you think I’d listen to a word he says, anyways? Nothing I’ve seen makes him qualified to do anything around here. So just stop arguing and admit I am right. You’ve got you, and the nurse…”
“My name is Emiko, not ‘the nurse’.”
“Whatever,” Erik grumbled. “You and Anna refuse to vote. You two are the ones making shit break down around here.”
“We don’t want to vote because it is not an option that should be voted on at this point. Why can’t you understand that?” Lana growled, her cheeks and neck turning red. “We have to try an atmospheric entry at Titan. The pulse engine won’t handle another acceleration, deacceleration cycle. If we slingshot, we’ll be stuck in a transit lane with no safe way to slow down.”
“You don’t know that. And tell me, after what we’ve seen in this ship, not to mention that creepy ass message and the havoc it caused to the primary and ancillary computer systems, you actually want to go down there? That is nuts, man. Nuts! I don’t want any part of it. You’re a freaking psychopath or an idiot if you do. End…of…story!”
Jacoby couldn’t make any sense of their argument. He didn’t know why they were fighting or where the young man didn’t want to go. What was ‘down there’?
“Did you really just call me a ‘psychopath’, Erik? Stop acting like a baby.”
Shane wove around Lana and grabbed Erik by the shoulders, pushing him back. But the young man fought and strained, jabbing a finger at the brunette. Everyone moved as one, their ghostly counterparts moving to a completely different dance. It was dizzying.
Jacoby’s brain ached. A jittery urge to move settled in his feet. And worst, his chest was already growing tight.
“Fuck yes I am. Cause I know I’m not and I don�
��t want any part of what is going down there. None of us should. You pulled the atmospheric data from the computer before we severed the connection last time. You tell me, how confident do you feel in triangulating a descent in an atmosphere with that much methane? Hmm?”
“It is less than six percent…well within safe…”
“None of this is safe!”
The fight intensified then, bodies jostling and voices rising. They bumped into Anna and she pushed back, just as Emiko hollered for quiet. Jacoby struggled with the noise, the threatened violence, the strain, and worse, only had a vague, disconnected notion of who everyone was and why they were fighting. It wasn’t his problem. All he wanted to do was take Alexandria and get out of there.
Shane wrapped an arm around Erik and used his other hand to push Lana away. Then he looked to Jacoby.
“See what I mean, Jacoby? You need to sort this shit out before things get out of hand and we miss our window. I’ve tried. They just won’t listen to me.”
How? Out of hand? What am I supposed to do?
“…because this isn’t a freaking dictatorship, man. I’m not going to listen to your nonsense, and if he says the same thing, guess what, I’m not having it from him either. If it doesn’t make sense, then it doesn’t…freaking…make…sense! I don’t know whose stupid idea it was to nominate someone on this boat as a captain. Like that’s supposed to make sense. This isn’t the damned Navy,” Erik yelled.
Navy? What is down there that scares him so much?
Jacoby almost folded as the rest of the group, save one, turned his way. They all started talking, yelling, and shouting over each other, pushing and jostling, their ghosts doing the same, only without the screaming.
He wanted to curl up into a ball and cover his ears, to block it all out. But his gaze caught on the one person not fighting. Jacoby wrenched his arms free suddenly and lurched forward. He bounced off Shane, hit Erik, and pushed off. The smaller man cried out angrily and spun, fists clenched.
