The Echo taq-2

by James Smythe

  ‘Problem?’ Tomas asks. He has been listening in. I want to tell him to stop, but we designed the system so that he could; so that, were it me down there, I could, if I wanted to. Complete mission parity. Completely open.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘He’s lonely.’

  ‘Aren’t we all,’ Tomas says. I picture him with his baker. I do not say what I am thinking.

  I want to sleep, but I cannot. I lie there and I think about what this means, and the pressure. There is always something coming, here. I have to be at my best, and that is my worry: if I do not sleep, I will function at some percentage of my absolute ability, and I could ruin everything. I get out of bed, and nobody is looking, and I contemplate staying awake; but there is another option. In the medical cupboard, the hypos with the sedative. We have so many shots, delivered in tiny liquid capsules which are then injected into the neck before dissolving; and they are harmless, non-addictive. Before, Inna administered them, but, I reason, how hard can it be? I am not scared of needles. Needles are a necessary evil. I load one into the hypo and try to find the spot she pushed it into my neck before, where there is still a pock-mark on the skin; and I hold the injector there and push the button. When I have done the first I make a choice: to take another, straight away. Two to settle me, to ensure that I am down. I inject it into the same spot; this one stings a little more. I get back to my bed and I begin to count, and I am gone. This works. This has really worked, and I can sleep, and be safe.

  ‘Wake up, Brother,’ Tomas says. ‘We’ve found something you’re going to want to see.’ He opens the bed for me, and I’m alone in the sleeping area. ‘Come to the lab,’ he says, which means it’s something related to the anomaly. He was meant to wake me first, before anything was announced, before any decisions were made. We were both meant to be there at the start of these things.

  I have an erection, so I dress myself, pulling on the thick trousers designed to regulate our temperatures, and I desperately need to piss but that can wait, because I’ve obviously already missed something that he thinks is important. Down the corridor, all their voices coo as I float down, clinging to the bars. I think of myself as a trainee ballerina. Pointe. Demi something. Stupid. I should have been here.

  I wonder if Tomas has done this on purpose.

  One of the screens has been extended to fill the length of the wall, and they’re all peering at it. It looks like nothing at first; as if it’s been switched off. But then Inna turns to me, and smiles. She holds her hand out to usher me to the front.

  ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ she asks. I peer at it, and then I see it.

  It’s the anomaly. I can’t tell the scale, so I shift the screen to a more scientific view – and they groan as the grid pulls itself over the image, a scientific sheen over this thing of natural beauty, but then I can see how far away it is, and still how large, even at this immense distance – and then I see the edges of it. It’s like a sheet of something that sits in the middle of the nothing: a pulled, taut sheet, where the corners and edges ripple like waves. And the texture – admittedly we’re far out, and this resolution, as much as we can see, isn’t going to be entirely trustworthy – but it’s like oil, somehow. It’s black, but not like the colour of space. Space isn’t true black. When you look at it, sure, that’s what it seems. But when you examine it, it’s got colour and light bouncing around inside it. It’s lit, and the blackness you can see is just a temporary absence of light. This is a different sort of black, painted or created, but I’ve never seen anything darker. I’ve never seen anything this pure before.

  ‘This is from the bounce?’ I ask. We have a chain of satellites between us and the anomaly. Tomas and I spent a year setting them up, sending them out and getting them roughly where we wanted them to be. They bounce visual data, downscaling it at each choke-point. The bounce is how I can talk to Tomas from here; and now we are finally close enough to see this in a resolution that lets us make out details.

  ‘It is,’ Tomas says. ‘We are finally close enough.’ Any chance of this being as incredible as I know it is – because it’s never been seen on a live feed, not like this; and that fact alone essentially means it’s never been truly seen full stop, as that’s how humans work – is diminished by seeing this last. It is, to me, like being told the ending at the start of the story.

  ‘We couldn’t sit on our hands while you slept,’ Tomas replies. I wonder how this reads to the rest of the crew. How antagonistic they think he is, or I am.

  ‘No,’ I say, but I can taste the lie in my own mouth, and feel myself brimming with anger. ‘Of course not. You were right to continue.’

  ‘We woke you up as soon as we were close enough to see this thing, and when we had processed the picture properly. We had to be sure.’ Of course you were sure. Of course you waited. I call up the readings from the ping, try to compare it to the pictures we have received from the satellites. The ping is working, giving us something resembling an edge, numbers, an outline. I examine the readings concerning the scale of it, the approximations of how large it is. I check the numbers against what’s in my head, and then call up the old measurements – Dr Singer’s best guesses, the estimates that he worked on his entire life. They are wrong, and I can tell that. It’s obvious to anybody even glancing at a comparison. While it’s possible that Dr Singer was wrong, it’s unlikely. ‘The scale of this thing,’ I say. ‘Were we off?’

  ‘It’s definitely larger,’ Tomas says. ‘It’s grown.’

  ‘Or it’s closer.’

  ‘Either way it’s closer, surely? Whether it has physically grown or hasn’t.’ He is explaining the basics of physics to me. I am grateful that he cannot see me.

  ‘How far away are we?’ I ask. I can hear the shake in my own voice.

  ‘Ten days,’ Tobi says. ‘Somewhere between ten and eleven. We’ll have an exact number of hours soon.’

  ‘That close?’

  ‘That close.’

  I peer into it as much as I can. I know that Tomas will be doing the same: standing close enough to smell the holo-screen he has fitted down there, the vague waft of the chemical processes that give it capacitive abilities. He will be trying to find something else before I can. And to think: he said that he wasn’t jealous of my being up here, and him being down there.

  The crew filter off, back to their jobs. Apart from Inna: she stays in the doorway. She leans back and becomes a sudden distraction: I notice her there. She leans back as far as she can. Almost like a stretch.

  ‘It’s incredible,’ she says.

  ‘It will be,’ I say. I wonder if Tomas is still listening. ‘Soon, we might know exactly what it is that we’re looking at. Then it will be truly incredible.’

  ‘That doesn’t change the fact of seeing it, does it?’

  ‘What?’ I try and soften the question, which I know comes out far too hard. ‘It has to change it, surely?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we don’t understand it. That’s human nature, isn’t it? To understand.’

  ‘Human nature’, she says, ‘is to be there and watch as everything unravels.’ She says it so lightly and gently, as if she’s leading me to a concept that I might not otherwise understand. ‘That’s what you’re really doing, isn’t it?’ she asks, and then she pushes away from the wall and pirouettes. I don’t understand what she’s saying. I don’t.

  ‘Wait,’ I say, but she has gone down the corridor, disappeared into the living quarters. I turn back to the screen and watch the anomaly: as the edge curls and the light runs down it. I try to find the beauty in it; I try to appreciate it for what it is. To see it as nothing more, not anything that runs deeper. It is something we do not understand, and that has to be appealing. We are here, and so is the anomaly, and it is as real as anything else I have ever seen. That has to be enough, I tell myself.

  ‘Careful,’ I hear Tomas say. I decide to not ask what he is talking about, and instead I pull the picture apart with my hands, zooming in as much as I can, unti
l it’s a blurry black grain. There are specks in it: miniatures here and there. Nothing, probably: asteroids, detritus, scree. I make a note to myself to track them, to aid us plotting our course or in case they do anything interesting. I don’t say anything to Tomas about them, because then he’ll watch them as well, and that can be one more thing that he can keep from me, that he can let me sleep through. Instead they can be mine: something that I have discovered by myself.

  The rest of them work silently. Ten days, is what Tobi said.

  Ten days. When we were kids, we counted everything down in sleeps. Here, there’s not much guarantee of that meaning anything.

  5

  The first few days are incongruous, and they pass without incident, and without crisis. We do not sleep with any uniformity, but this suits me, as I do not want to. There’s no set time for bed, no set concept that we should lie down when we are told to, and shut the beds and try to shut our eyes. All we know is that at least two people have to be awake at any given time, preferably one of them a pilot. We’ve decided that there should always be somebody watching and guiding us. Another flaw of previous attempts at excursions this deep was in their attempts to take control away from the real people on the ship. Human fallibility is one thing, the failings of a computer quite another. When the Ishiguro didn’t come home, the good people at DARPA – wealthy parents sending their privately tutored child out into the world before being surprised that it could fail when forced to react to the realities of life – examined where they felt everything had gone wrong. It was in the computers, they said. We put too much faith in automated processes. They bullshitted, said that they could trace that back to programmers, clearly, and still blame humans, but it was blame through a proxy. We don’t want that. Processes may be automated on a base level, but the enacting of them is still dictated by humans. Even though there were people coming to us with their software solutions, trying to get us to take them on, to trial them even, Tomas and I knew that they were not right. We knew that real brains, real minds: they were what was needed here. The Ishiguro failed because there was a lack of trust: not in the machines, but in the people on board. They had two pilots whose job was to sit and watch the stars go by.

  So, here, Hikaru relieves Tobi or vice versa, and one gets dressed as the other sleeps. Tobi insists on doing more than she should, because she’s proving something. That her eye – which is still red and dark and hard to look at – isn’t hampering her. (Though she blinks too much, and you catch her looking at it: peering into a mirror, or anything even slightly reflective. We, the rest of us, have stopped noticing it. She will not until it is gone, and her eye is white again: normality resumed.) Her behaviour says that the panic, the eye and the fit, they have only made her stronger. This is a lie, which means that Inna spends a lot of time watching her. Inna insists on us eating together as much as possible, for the solidarity that it provides: she’s even started preparing the food, unwrapping the bars and presenting them to us as if they were somehow a proper home-cooked meal. Wallace hates that, but he puts up with it. Inna has a way with people: she can make them do whatever she wants, somehow. She has an authority here that is natural and unforced.

  After we’ve eaten we set about our jobs.

  Wallace runs diagnostics. Ninety per cent of his job is ensuring efficiency. The Ishiguro burned fuel constantly, stopping and starting in ways that should not have been possible, that were engineered to be unrealistic and false. We saw pictures of the inside, their big button to stop and start the engine like they were children. Artificial gravity generators, constantly switching on, keeping them grounded, retaining their humanity, that was the logic. Everything a waste of time and resources. We are not like that, not even slightly. We have a gravity generator, but we will never use it. It has been built into the hull for emergencies: in case an operation needed doing, in case somebody died. These are exceptional circumstances that every other failsafe, every other system is designed to prevent. So Wallace runs diagnostics, over and over. These things are his, and when we need them, we will need them to work. You need to keep an engine ticking over, he says. When he isn’t running diagnostics, he sits and speaks with Inna, and she listens to him. She puts an arm around him while he talks about his family – I can hear their names mentioned, and his face droops, and his shoulders slump – and she consoles him. I find myself jealous at this. And when that’s done, and he has stopped feeling sorry for himself, he talks to Tobi and Lennox, and he acts like a younger man. As if they – sans families, sans ties, footloose and fancy free – are like him. They are not.

  Lennox talks to me about his life while we’re working, mapping the anomaly, charting issues, and he tells me stories about who he is. He is young, still. I hear the stories, and they make me think of my life when I was his age; the conversations that I had with Tomas. Lennox sits with me for a good portion of each day as I examine the anomaly, and he’s another pair of eyes. And his eyes are less tired than mine, I would warrant. He logs everything that we discover, a manual backup of facts – one of the places that we are inefficient, failing to resort to computers, and all the better for it – and he works on direct comparisons of scale, as well as being in charge of distance-pinging anything else that we pass. One of the ways we can use this mission is to help plot parts of space we are further from. We are going to be closer to some of these stars than ever before. We might be able to get something out of this. He’s dedicated, as well, and he wants discoveries of his own. That’s a difference between him and many of the other people we saw for his position. They liked the principle but not the practicalities of this. He knows that this is learning and it’s vital. In twenty years, I tell him, he could be me. He could be discovering things, a scientist who does work for the good of mankind.

  Inna is unfaltering, it seems. She doesn’t rest. I barely see her sleep; or she sleeps at the same time as I do, lying down after me, rising before I do. She walks – I cannot get used to verbs like this, when they require modifiers based on a lack of gravity – she goes from room to room and talks to every single member of the crew about what’s happening. She asks them how they’re feeling and she tells them the best ways to deal with this situation. I hear nothing of their private conversations, but I can tell. There is sympathetic nodding, hands on shoulders. She’s a doctor, but psychiatrist by proxy. If nothing else happens, this will be all: checking that we don’t succumb to some temporary insanity, and ensuring that we are all safe around each other. That we have everything we need. (She has asked me about Wallace’s request, and whether it might not make sense to allow him, and I have denied it again. Because, as I have repeated, once the floodgates open, they never shut. They all know the rules. She has said it will be good for him. I say, We are all missing things. We cannot take these things for granted. She didn’t look angry with me; she told me that she understood. You do what you must do, she said.)

  Unless somebody is asleep, we eat our meals collectively. Lunch is protein bars that taste of sandwiches, meatballs and tuna and BLT and chicken mayo only without any of the textures of the sandwich itself. They are intricately processed. If they didn’t softly crumble in your mouth, you could swear that they were the real thing. Dinner is roast meals and hamburgers and fried chicken and fish and chips, only turned into slightly larger bars that we heat in what amounts to a complicated descendant of the microwave. When you eat, you shut your eyes and think of home. You imagine walking into a bakery and buying a fresh, warm-bread sandwich from the counter and then eating it, bite after bite. Meals are a moment, hinging on socialization, on feeling part of something. Inna insists on them: she says that the psychological effects of being together for occasions such as these can be enormous.

  In the afternoon we repeat everything: we check that everything we did in the morning is correct. Aspects are checked and double-checked. When Tomas and I worked with the engineers to design this trip, every single component of every single part of the trip was torn apart and rebuilt. We tested i
ndividual spring coils when they came in to ensure that their kinetic power loss was as low as we were comfortable using. We would rather spend the money to build custom parts, we said, than use something that was less than perfect, and thus liable to fail. Each component was built in duplicate, even the ship’s hull itself, because if you’re going to stretch to the cost of one, and something goes wrong, it’s less expensive to have a second ready and waiting to pick up the slack, ready to go on a second launch pad. Less expensive certainly than having to back to the drawing board or the designs and rebuild it all, especially where the custom parts are concerned. Two of everything, we said. Tomas and I enjoyed that synchronicity.

  For his part, he is omnipresent. He drifts in and out of conversations, and he imparts his wisdom and he tries to not miss anything. He is controlling: even just as a voice from nothingness they all listen to him. I listen to him, because I don’t want to be the cause of dissent. Once that happens, we will struggle to maintain control, and we haven’t worked as hard as we have for so long for that to happen. The lag is up to a fair few seconds now, long enough that a conversation can become irritating, and we’ve taken to shouting as trickles of static start to settle into the broadcasts. (I quite like the lag. I like knowing that I’ll get to see everything before him; that even if the scanners pick something up and we have a breakthrough, it’ll be a few seconds where I explicitly know something that he doesn’t, and if the rest of the crew aren’t there, it will be a discovery that’s mine. Solely and entirely mine, just for those few seconds it takes for the information to make its way through the ether.)

  We spend the evenings in conversation, and we never stop working. I learn details about the crew: Lennox trained to be a lawyer, in his youth. That was his father’s plan for him. He let him down, because he was more concerned with this stuff, as he calls it: with the larger, the greater. The incredible. This explains his goggle-eyed amazement and his dropped jaw. It’s worth this to him. Tobi was on a television show, a reality thing, when she was in military school. She says that there are clips of her on the net, and I threaten to pull them up from here and watch them, waste our bandwidth for the sake of a funny time, but she scowls and starts to look genuinely concerned at the prospect so I stop. Inna looks horrified when I suggest it: the boundaries that it would cross. Hikaru talks about his religion, his obsession with his food. We listen, and nod, but do not comment or judge. That is a minefield that I have no desire to enter. I know about Wallace’s children and wife already, but he talks incessantly when you get him going: about how he doesn’t spend the time with them that he should; and how he’s lonely even when he’s at home; and how he feels that he owes them all something, more of himself than he’s able to give. His words. And tonight we ask Inna questions: the last to speak, the last to tell all.