Redshirts

by John Scalzi

  “And then took a couple of years off farting around before starting law school,” you said.

  “I founded a start-up,” Sandra said. “Dad was very proud of me.”

  You said nothing, smiling.

  “All right, fine, I founded a start-up with angel investing from my dad and his friends, and then proclaimed myself ‘spokesperson’ while others did all the real work,” Sandra said. “I hope you’re happy now.”

  “I am,” you said.

  “But it was still something,” Sandra said. “And I’m doing something now. Drifting through grad school hasn’t done you any favors. Just because you’ll never have to do anything with your life doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do anything with your life. We both know people like that. It’s not pretty.”

  “True,” you agreed.

  “Do you know what you want to do with your life now?” Sandra asked.

  “The first thing I want to do is figure out what’s happening to me right now,” you said. “Until I do, it doesn’t feel like I have my life back. It doesn’t even feel like it’s really my life.”

  * * *

  You stood in front of your mirror, naked, not because you are a narcissist but because you are freaking out. On your iPad are the medical records Sandra’s guy acquired for you, including the records from your car crash. The records include pictures of you, in the hospital, as you were being prepped for the surgery, and the pictures they took of your brain after they stabilized you.

  The list of things that were broken, punctured or torn in your body reads like a high school anatomy test. The pictures of your body look like the mannequins your father’s effects crews would strew across the ground in the cheapo horror films he used to produce when you were a kid. There is no way, given the way in which you almost died and what they had to do to keep you alive, that your body should, right now, be anything less than a patchwork of scars and bruises and scabs parked in a bed with tubes and/or catheters in every possible orifice.

  You stood in front of your mirror, naked, and there was not a scratch on you.

  Oh, there are a few things. There’s the scar on the back of your left hand, commemorating the moment when you were thirteen that you went over your handlebars. There’s the small, almost unnoticeable burn mark below your lower lip from when you were sixteen and you leaned over to kiss Jenna Fischmann at the exact moment she was raising a cigarette to her mouth. There’s the tiny incision mark from the laparoscopic appendectomy you had eighteen months ago; you have to bend over and part your pubic hair to see it. Every small record of the relatively minimal damage you’ve inflicted on your body prior to the accident is there for you to note and mark.

  There’s nothing relating to the accident at all.

  The abrasions that scraped the skin off much of your right arm: gone. The scar that would mark where your tibia tore through to the surface of your left leg: missing. The bruises up and down your abdomen where your ribs popped and snapped and shredded muscle and blood vessels inside of you: not a hint they ever existed.

  You spent most of an hour in front of the mirror, glancing at your medical records for specific incidents of trauma and then looking back into the glass for the evidence of what’s written there. There isn’t any. You are in the sort of unblemished health that only someone in their early twenties can be. It’s like the accident never happened, or at the very least, never happened to you.

  You picked up your iPad and turned it off, making a special effort not to pull up the images of your latest MRI, complete with the MRI technician’s handwritten notation of, “Seriously, WTF?” because the disconnect between what the previous set of MRIs said about your brain and what the new ones said is like the disconnect between the shores of Spain and the eastern seaboard of the United States. The previous MRI indicated that your future would be best spent as an organ donor. The current MRI showed a perfectly healthy brain in a perfectly healthy body.

  There’s a word for such a thing.

  “Impossible.” You said it to yourself, looking at yourself in the mirror, because you doubted that at this point anyone else would say it to you. “Just fucking impossible.”

  You looked around your room, trying to see it like a stranger. It’s larger than most people’s first apartments and is strewn with the memorabilia of the last few years of your life and the various course corrections you’ve made, trying to figure out what it was you were supposed to be doing with yourself. On the desk, your laptop, bought to write screenplays but used primarily to read Facebook updates from your far-flung friends. On the bookshelves, a stack of anthropology texts that stand testament to a degree that you knew you would never use even as you were getting it; a delaying tactic to avoid facing the fact you didn’t know what the hell you were doing.

  On the bedside table is the Nikon DSLR your mother gave you as a gift when you said you were giving some thought to photography; you used it for about a week and then put it on the shelf and didn’t use it again. Next to it, the script from The Chronicles of the Intrepid, evidence of your latest thing, dipping your toe into the world of acting to see if it might be for you.

  Like the screenwriting and anthropology and photography, it’s not; you already know it. As with everything else, though, there’d be the period between when you discovered the fact and when you could exit gracefully from the field. With anthropology, it was when you received the degree. With the screenwriting, it was a desultory meeting with an agent who was giving you twenty minutes as a favor to your father. With acting, it will be doing this episode of the show and then bowing out, and then returning to this room to figure out what the next thing will be.

  You turned back to the mirror and looked at yourself one more time, naked, unblemished, and wondered if you would have been more useful to the world as an organ donor than you are right now: perfectly healthy, perfectly comfortable and perfectly useless.

  * * *

  You lay on your stretcher on the set of The Chronicles of the Intrepid, waiting for the crew to move around to get another shot and becoming increasingly uncomfortable. Part of that was your makeup, which was designed to make you look pallid and sweaty and bruised, requiring constant application of a glycerin substance that made you feel as if you were being periodically coated in personal lubricant. Part of it was that two of the other actors were spending all their time staring at you.

  One of them was an extra like you, a guy named Brian Abnett, and you mostly ignored him because you knew it was common knowledge on the set that you’re the son of the show’s producer, and you knew that there was a certain type of low-achieving actor who would love to become chummy with you on the idea that it would advance their own status, a sort of work-through-entourage thing. You knew what he’s about and it’s not anything you wanted to deal with.

  The other, though, was Marc Corey, who was one of the stars of the show. He was already in perfectly well with your father, so he didn’t need you to advance his career, and what you knew of him from Gawker, TMZ and the occasional comment from your father suggested that he’s not the sort of person who would be wasting any of his precious, precious time with you. So the fact he couldn’t really keep his eyes off of you is disconcerting.

  You spent several hours acting like a coma patient while Corey and a cast of extras hovered over your stretcher during a simulated shuttle attack, ran with it down various hallway sets, and swung it into the medical bay set, where another set of extras, in medical staff costumes, pretend to jab you with space needles and waved fake gizmos over you like they were trying to diagnose your condition. Every now and again you cracked open an eye to see if Abnett or Corey was still gawking at you. One or the other usually was. Your one scene of actual acting had you opening your eyes as if you were coming out of a bout of unconsciousness. This time they were both staring at you. They were supposed to be doing that in the script. You still wondered if either or both of them were thinking of hitting on you after the show wraps for the day.

  Eventua
lly the day was done, and you scraped off the KY and bruise makeup, formally ending your acting career forever. On your way out, you saw Abnett and Corey talking to each other. For a reason you couldn’t entirely explain to yourself, you changed your course and walked right up to the both of them.

  “Matt,” Marc said to you as you walked up.

  “What’s going on?” you asked, in a tone that made it clear that the phrase was not a casual greeting but an actual interrogative.

  “What do you mean?” Marc said.

  “The two of you have been staring at me all day,” you said.

  “Well, yes,” Brian Abnett said. “You’ve been playing a character in a coma. We’ve been carting you around on a stretcher all day. That requires us to look at you.”

  “Spare me,” you said to Abnett. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  Marc opened his mouth to say something, then closed it and turned to Abnett. “I still have to work here after today,” he said.

  Abnett smiled wryly. “So I get to be the redshirt on this one,” he said to Marc.

  “It’s not like that,” Marc said. “But he needs to know.”

  “No, I agree,” Abnett said. He slapped Marc on the shoulder. “I’ll take care of this, Marc.”

  “Thanks,” Marc said, and then turned to you. “It’s good to see you, Matt. It really is.” He walked off quickly.

  “I have no idea what that was about,” you said to Abnett, after Marc walked off. “Before today I’m pretty sure he never gave me a thought whatsoever.”

  “How are you feeling, Matt?” Abnett said, not directly answering you.

  “What do you mean?” you asked.

  “I think you know what I mean,” Abnett said. “You feeling good? Healthy? Like a new man?”

  You felt a little cold at that last comment. “You know,” you said.

  “I do,” Abnett said. “And now I know that you know, too. Or at least, that you know something.”

  “I don’t think I know as much as you do,” you said.

  Abnett looked at you. “No, you probably don’t. In which case, I think you and I need to get out of here and go somewhere we can get a drink. Maybe several.”

  * * *

  You returned to your room late in the evening and stood in the middle of it, searching for something. Searching for the message that had been left for you.

  “Hester left you a message,” Abnett had told you, after he explained everything else that had happened, every other absolutely impossible thing. “I don’t know where it is because he didn’t tell me. He told Kerensky, who told Marc, who told me. Marc says it’s somewhere in your room, somewhere you might find it but no one else would look—and someplace you wouldn’t look, unless you went looking for it.”

  “Why would he do it that way?” you had asked Abnett.

  “I don’t know,” Abnett had said. “Maybe he figured there was a chance you wouldn’t actually figure it out. And if you didn’t figure it out, what would be the point in telling you? You probably wouldn’t believe it anyway. I barely believe it, and I met my guy. That was some weirdness, I’ll tell you. You never met yours. You could very easily doubt it.”

  You didn’t doubt it. You had the physical evidence of it. You had you.

  You went first to your computer and looked through the folders, looking for documents that had titles you didn’t remember giving any. When you didn’t find any, you rearranged the folders so you could look for files that were created since you had your accident. There were none. You checked your e-mail queue to see if there were any e-mails from yourself. None. Your Facebook page was jammed with messages from friends from high school, college and grad school, who heard you were back from your accident. Nothing from yourself, no new pictures posted into your albums. No trace of you leaving a message for you.

  You stood up from your desk and turned around, scanning the room. You went to your bookshelves. There you took down the blank journals that you had bought around the time you decided to be a screenwriter, so you could write down your thoughts and use them later for your masterworks. You thumbed through them. They were as blank as they had been before. You placed them back on the shelf and then ran your eyes over to your high school yearbooks. You pulled them down, disturbing the dust on the bookshelf, and opened them, looking for a new inscription among the ones that were already there. There were none. You returned them to the shelf, and as you did so you noticed another place on the bookshelf where the dust had been disturbed, but not in the shape of a book.

  You looked at the shape of the disturbance for a minute, and then you turned around, walked to your bed table and picked up your camera. You slid open the slot for the memory card, popped it out, took it to your computer and opened up the pictures folder, arranging it so you could see the picture files by date.

  There were three new files made since your accident. One photo and two video files.

  The picture file was of someone’s legs and shoes. You smiled at this. The first video file consisted of someone panning across the room with the camera, swinging it back and forth as if they were trying to figure out how the thing worked.

  The third video was of you. In it, your face appeared, followed by some wild thrashing as you set down the camera and propped it up so you would stay in the frame. You were sitting. The autofocus buzzed back and forth for a second and then settled, framing you sharply.

  “Hi, Matthew,” you said. “I’m Jasper Hester. I’m you. Sort of. I’ve spent a couple of days with your family now, talking to them about you, and they tell me you haven’t touched this camera in a year, which I figure means it’s the perfect place to leave you a message. If you wake up and just go on with your life, then you’ll never find it and there’s no harm done. But if you do find this, I figure it’s because you’re looking for it.

  “If you are looking for it, then I figure either one of two things have happened. Either you’ve figured out something’s weird and no one will tell you anything about it, or you’ve been told about it and you don’t believe it. If it’s the first of these, then no, you’re not crazy or had some sort of weird psychotic break with your life. You haven’t had a stroke. You did have a massive brain injury, but not with the body you’re in now. So don’t worry about that. Also, you don’t have amnesia. You don’t have any memory of this because it’s not you doing it. I guess that’s pretty simple.

  “If you’ve been told what happened and you don’t believe it, hopefully this will convince you. And if it doesn’t, well, I don’t know what to tell you, then. Believe what you want. But in the meantime indulge me for a minute.”

  In the video Hester who is not you but also is ran his fingers through his hair and looked away, trying to figure what to say next.

  “Okay, here’s what I want to say. I think I exist because you exist. Somehow, in a way I really couldn’t ever try to explain in any way that makes any sense, I believe that the day you asked your dad if you could try acting in his show, on that day something happened. Something happened that meant that in the universe I live in, events twisted and turned and did whatever they do so that I was born and I lived a life that you could be part of, as me, as a fictional character, in your world. I don’t know how it works or why, but it does. It just does.

  “Our lives are twisted together, because we’re sort of the same person, just one universe and a few centuries apart. And because of that, I think I can ask you this next question.

  “Honestly, Matthew, what the fuck are we doing with our lives?

  “I’ve been talking to your family about you, you know. They love you. They all do. They love you and when you had your accident it was like someone came along and stabbed them in the heart. It’s amazing how much love they have for you. But, and again, I can tell you this because you’re me, I can tell they think you need to get your ass in gear. They talk about how you have so many interests, and how you’re waiting for that one thing that will help you achieve your potential, and what I hear is what the
y won’t say: You need to grow up.

  “I know it because I’m the same way. Of course I’m the same way, I’m you. I’ve been drifting along for years, Matthew. I joined the Universal Union navy not because I was driven but because I didn’t know what to do with myself. And I figured as long as I didn’t know what I wanted to do with myself I might as well see the universe, right? But even then I’ve always just done the bare minimum of what I had to do. There wasn’t much point to doing more.

  “It wasn’t bad. To be honest I thought I was pretty clever. I was getting away with something in my own way. But then I get here and saw you, brain-dead and with tubes coming out of every part of your body. And I realized I wasn’t getting away with anything. Just like you didn’t get away with anything. You were just born, fucked around for a while, got hit by a car and died, and that’s your whole life story right there. You don’t win by getting through all your life not having done anything.

  “Matthew, if you’re looking at this now it’s because one of us finally did something useful with his life. It’s me. I decided to save your life. I swapped bodies with you because I think the way it works means that I’ll survive in my world in your messed-up body, and you’ll survive in mine. If I’m wrong and we both die, or you survive and I die, then I’ll have died trying to save you. And yes, that sucks for me, but my life expectancy because of your dad’s show wasn’t all that great to begin with. And all things considered, it was one of the best ways I could have died.

  “But I’m going to let you in on a secret. I think this is going to work. Don’t ask me why—hell, don’t ask me why about any of this situation—I just think it will. If it does, I have only one thing I want from you. That you do something. Stop drifting. Stop trying things until you get bored with them. Stop waiting for that one thing. It’s stupid. You’re wasting time. You almost wasted all of your time. You were lucky I was around, but I get a feeling this isn’t something we’ll get to do twice.

  “I’m going to do the same thing. I’m done drifting, Matthew. Our lives are arbitrary and weird, but if I pull this off—if me and all my friends from the Intrepid pull this off—then we get something that everyone else in our universe doesn’t get: a chance to make our own fate. I’m going to take it. I don’t know how yet. But I’m not going to blow it.