Gareth L Powell

by Gareth Powell

  nakedly—amongst them. As they filed through into the chill gloom of the vault

  beyond, he retreated barefoot to the white-tiled toilet cubicles.

  How had everything gone so wrong in his life? How had it all fallen

  away?

  Standing in front of a row of sinks, he considered himself in the mirror,

  searching the flat coins of his eyes for some sort of explanation—some trace of

  the lonely young boy who’d once pictured himself as the last scholar in a world

  of barbarians, alone in a tower of musty books.

  Could he have saved Kerri? The sudden doubt slid its way into his gut

  like a cold stiletto. Had she still been alive when he poured on the petrol?

  He gripped the sides of the sink.

  What did it matter? What was one more death compared to the

  thousands who’d died in the camps? So many that their stacked and bleached

  remains lost all trace of individuality and their skulls became piles of repeating

  motifs, like a Warhol painting rendered by Bruegel. He leant forward until his

  forehead kissed the mirror. His insides were a fist and he could taste bile at the

  back of his throat.

  His first heave brought up the remains of the black coffee that had

  served him as breakfast. When he heaved a second time, he felt a weight shift

  inside. Something small and heavy pushed its way up his oesophagus. He

  couldn’t breathe. He was chocking. In desperation, he gave a final tortured

  retch. The thing scraped his teeth and fell into the sink with a loud clank.

  Lee’s knees sagged and he had to hold onto the sides of the basin for

  support.

  “Shit,” he gasped, “shit, shit.”

  He grabbed a paper towel from the dispenser beside the sink and used

  it to wipe his eyes and mouth.

  Sitting in the plughole, surrounded by a lukewarm puddle of watery

  coffee, sat a small metal sphere about the size of a Ping-Pong ball, sticky and

  glistening with blood and mucus.

  WHEN LEE RETURNED to the changing rooms a few minutes later, they were

  deserted. The lockers were closed. All the other sleepers had gone through to

  the vault and were probably already ensconced in their caskets, if not already

  in hibernation.

  He held the metal ball in his fingers as if cradling a precious egg or an

  unstable explosive. It must have been implanted in his stomach while he was

  ‘inside’ the Reef, talking to Kerri. But what was it? If the Reef wanted to absorb

  him, it could have done so at the time. All he could think was that this heavy

  little nugget must represent some sort of seed, that the Reef was using him as

  a way of reaching into space and that, when the Widening Gyre finally reached

  48

  its destination, a rocky little world in the habitable zone of Gliese 667 C, it would flower.

  His heart rattled like a tin mug against the bars of a Louisiana jail.

  Was it possible this seed also contained Kerri’s memories? When the

  Reef had spoken to him, it had told him that her personality had become

  inextricably entwined with its own artificial consciousness. Could this little ball

  hold a record of everything she’d been, everything she’d done? He could

  almost feel the weight of her life in his palm. Aside from Lewis, it was all he

  had left of her.

  Coming to a sudden decision, he crossed to his locker, opened his

  memory box, and placed the ball inside. When he closed the lid, her memories

  and his were left to nestle together in the darkness.

  Swallowing down the sour taste in his mouth, he opened the door to the

  main vault. Now, all he had to do was adjust the controls of his hibernation

  pod, to get it to revive him halfway through the ship’s flight. As Lee Doyle was

  the owner and CEO of Lone Tower, the company responsible for outfitting this

  outlandish vessel, he knew there would be plenty of information about him

  stored in the ship’s memory—information that could potentially identify Jason

  Pembroke as a fraud. Until that information was wiped, he would never be able

  to relax. He would spend the rest of his life living like a former Nazi on the run

  in South America, always half-expecting discovery and prosecution for his

  crimes. The only way he would ever feel safe, ever have a hope of making a

  new start on the new world, would be to wake while everybody else was still

  in hibernation, and expunge the records himself.

  49

  9.

  A DECADE AFTER the Widening Gyre bade farewell to the blue marble of the

  Earth, Lee awoke in his pod. As he opened his eyes, the last of the cryogenic

  gel had already drained from the container and the lid yawned open, leaving

  him wet and naked in the cold air of the vault.

  He sat up slowly.

  For a few moments he couldn’t remember who he was. Then he recalled

  the dense metal ball he’d puked into the sink.

  A burning aircraft hangar.

  Hollow-eyed skulls heaped beside an earthen trench.

  With a small curse, he gripped the sides of the tank and pulled himself

  out. Although his head felt foggy and thick, he knew who he was now, and

  everything that entailed.

  Without pausing to look at the other sleepers, he made his way out,

  through the changing rooms, to the corridor beyond.

  “Do you need assistance?” Mi Sun, the ship’s controlling intelligence,

  spoke to him via a fly-sized drone. “Has your hibernation capsule

  malfunctioned, Mister Pembroke?”

  Lee swiped at the drone with the back of his hand.

  “Buzz off.”

  He pushed his way through a pair of double doors, into the room that

  housed the cupola.

  He couldn’t just instruct the computer to wipe sections of its own

  memory. There were safeguards preventing accidental and criminal data loss,

  and to try would leave a record of both that was deleted, and who deleted it.

  The only way to make sure he remained undiscovered would be to

  destroy all evidence—and the only way to do that was to inflict catastrophic

  damage on its main memory core.

  Of course, he knew his plan entailed a certain degree of risk. Mi Sun

  controlled everything aboard the ship, from the engines to the life support, but

  he reckoned he could trash her memories without compromising her

  functionality. Her memories were centralised on a single server, but the life

  support systems were distributed on smaller servers throughout the ship. All

  he had to do was get into the room below the cupola and find the right server

  in the ship’s smart matter core.

  He let the fly trail him down to the main hangar, where he entered one

  of the ground-to-orbit shuttles and retrieved a set of tools intended for use in

  the building of a new world.

  “What are you doing with those?”

  Lee unclipped the lid and, ignoring the hammers, saws and wrenches

  contained within, pulled out a handheld blowtorch.

  “Go away.”

  50

  Gripping the torch like a gun, he descended to the cavern housing the

  computer’s memory banks. There were locks on the door but, as they had been

  supplied by Lone Tower, his thumbprint overrode them. It was a back door

  he’d built into all the company’s tech, right
from the earliest days. Whatever

  Lone Tower produced, Lee Doyle could access.

  In the centre of the room, Mi Sun’s smart matter memory dump looked

  like a row of pyramids made of hard, black plastic. They were built of the same

  material as the Reefs—for an instant, he felt nauseous, recalling the way Kerri

  had been ripped apart and consumed in the aeroplane—but he had been

  assured that limitations had been imposed, preventing the kind of runaway

  expansion that characterized those entities.

  “You shouldn’t be in there,” Mi Sun said from the other side of the door.

  The nose of the drone tapped against the safety glass panel like a bee caught

  against a summer window.

  Lee ignored her.

  As far as he knew, Reefs were flammable. At least, he knew that in the

  past, flamethrowers and napalm had been used to sterilize them. This core was

  built from the same stuff they were. All he had to do was burn the server

  continuing the crew records. The computer would be lobotomized, but other

  servers, controlling the life support and engines, would still function. All

  records from Earth would be gone, and he would be Jason Pembroke—just one

  anonymous crewmember amongst thousands.

  He made his way along the row until he came to what he thought was

  the correct server. Holding the torch in front of him, he depressed the trigger.

  Flame roared, blue and narrow. Where it touched, the black matter flared

  orange and white. It shriveled away from the heat, throwing off acrid plastic

  fumes.

  Behind him, he heard the tiny drone banging against the door.

  “Stop it!” The computer’s voice actually sounded alarmed.

  Lee laughed. He was burning his past, imagining it all crisping and

  curling and disintegrating into ash.

  Death to it all! Death to the valleys and the attic room in Hotwells; death

  to guilt and regret; to every stupid, lazy decision that had ever led him here.

  Death to the monster Lee Doyle!

  HE PLAYED THE flame into the melting pyramid until he’d exhausted the gas

  cylinder in the handle. Overall, he’d burned a crater roughly the width of a

  manhole cover, and the depth of his forearm. At the bottom, embers

  smouldered like sunset clouds, giving the black pyramid the appearance of a

  stylised volcano.

  Had he done enough damage?

  The ship’s drone had stopped banging against the glass. When he

  opened the door, he found it lying inert. He bent down to pick it up.

  Nothing. To all intents and purposes, it was dead, which meant the

  computer had shut down its higher functions. The fact the lights were still on

  showed its automatic systems were still online and his gamble had paid off.

  51

  Now, all he had to do was get back to his pod before the system managed to

  reboot itself.

  Bare feet slapping the stone floors of the corridors, he returned the

  blowtorch to the shuttle in the hangar, and then made his way back to the vault.

  En route, he passed a large, circular window and slowed for a moment.

  He was out among the stars, on his way to a world around a star called

  Gliese 667 C, twenty-two light years from Earth. And they’d already covered a

  sizeable fraction of that distance.

  Earth, he realised, was a dot so small that, even if he knew where to look,

  he wouldn’t be able to see it. Everything he’d done back there was gone.

  Everyone he’d ever known thought he was dead. All the records on the ship

  had been expunged. Only Jason Pembroke remained: a guy in his fifties,

  standing naked before the universe.

  It felt like being reborn.

  A movement caught his eye. He glanced upward and thought he saw,

  for the merest fraction of a second, the flying saucer that had appeared to him

  on that roadside in Somerset, all those years ago, on the evening he found out

  about his father’s cancer. By the time he realised it was there, it had already

  gone, evaporating like a dream on waking, leaving only the faintest afterimage.

  He smiled at the space where it had been.

  “Goodbye, old friend.”

  AS LEE SETTLED back into his tank, he felt a surge of triumph. He’d done it. He’d

  screwed up his life, but he’d escaped. He’d covered his tracks. Now, he had a

  real chance of carving out a new existence for himself and his son, on a new

  frontier, on a planet so far from Earth that it took light two decades to cross the

  intervening distance.

  The fire in the computer room still smouldered, but he was confident the

  ship’s emergency systems would stop it from spreading. After all, he hadn’t

  done that much damage. He’d simply performed a little surgery, burning away

  all evidence of his past life, along with the records of his fourteen thousand

  shipmates.

  He smiled as liquid gel gurgled into the tank, pooling around him, and

  the breathing tube extruded from the wall, blindly questing for his face. When

  he awoke, the fire would be out, and an electrical fault would be blamed. None

  of the crew would know who he was, and he’d be free to reinvent himself any

  way he chose. He might keep the name Jason, or he might find a new one. In

  the meantime, all he had to do was close his eyes and hope the lingering guilt

  of Doyle’s life evaporated while he slept.

  No more Lee; no more Kerri.

  No more dead boy in a summer quarry.

  Only Jason.

  52

  10.

  THE MONSTER DIDN’T DREAM.

  At least, he didn’t remember dreaming.

  He wasn’t aware of time passing.

  And when he awoke, he was already drowning.

  SUBMERGED IN DARKNESS, lungs ready to burst, he thrashed around, but the

  thick, warm slime had already forced its way into his nose and throat. It burned

  as it went down. He couldn’t open his eyes. His flailing hands struck the

  smooth plastic walls of the vat and his panicked feet kicked against its base.

  A coffin!

  They were drowning him in a coffin!

  He gagged. His fingers clawed and scrabbled for purchase, but the lid

  wouldn’t move. He wanted to cry out, but he was being smothered. He

  couldn’t breathe. The water roared in his ears. The agony in his chest swelled

  until it threatened to rip its way out through his ribs.

  Let me out!

  His fists battered the lid above him.

  Why are you doing this?

  The muck tasted rank and salty in his throat, like the water from an

  unclean fish tank. He gagged again, stomach muscles convulsing as his

  diaphragm spasmed. Even though his eyes were shut, he could see sparks.

  Why was this happening?

  His limbs felt as if they were pushing through treacle. The need to

  breathe was turning him inside out, and he knew he couldn’t hold on. He knew

  he was going to die.

  Just not yet.

  He clamped his jaw so hard he feared his teeth would splinter.

  Not yet…

  His body tried to retch. His limbs thrashed. Every pulse thumped like a

  drumbeat. And then, just as he was on the verge of giving up – of surrendering

  himself to the dreadful, choking darkness – a blue light punctured the green

  murk. The fluid tremb
led to an electrical hum, and the lid above him hinged

  upwards, dripping.

  Frantic, the monster grasped the vat’s slippery lip and hauled himself

  up, spluttering, into coldness, light and sweet, sweet air.

  HE FOUND HIMSELF sitting waist-deep and naked in an open vat of goo about

  the size and shape of a large bath. Somewhere, an alarm rang but, at first, all he

  could do was cough and retch, and blow wads of gunk from one nostril then

  the other. When he could breathe again, he wiped his eyes and tried to take

  stock of his surroundings.

  53

  He was in some sort of dimly lit vault that reminded him of a cinema

  with the lights turned down low. Other vats surrounded him on all sides. Like

  his, they had been inlaid so that their lips were level with the floor. Row upon

  row, they receded into the gloom, ascending in steps like the seats in an

  auditorium. Unlike his, their lids were still all in place and covered by thin

  patinas of frost. His breath misted in front of him. Apart from the mournful

  chime of the distant alarm, the only sounds he could hear were the gentle

  whispers of the air conditioning and the noises made by the liquid around him

  as it slopped in the vat when he moved.

  Was he in hospital? He rubbed his forehead. There was a blank space

  where his memories should have been – a void, a hiss on the tape, a glitch in

  the program. He didn’t know where he was and, with mounting panic, realised

  he didn’t even know who he was. Even his name had gone.