by James Smythe
I take another stim. I remember when you used to have to wait for headache pills to kick in. Now, they’re working as soon as you even touch the tablet, surging through from fingertips to nerves in the most fluid and driven of motions. The stims bolster me. Everything is perfectly clear for a while. I squander that clarity by myself in the lab.
I watch Inna on the monitors when I am not with her. There is something about her that I want to clarify. I want to run tests on her, and I want to hold her and reassure her. The two can be attached and interchangeable, I suspect. Sometimes I catch myself thinking that she has died too many times to even be real, now.
I am forced to piss into bottles. I do this by myself, in the engine rooms. This is my private indignity. When I return, I find Inna sitting at the table, a screen pulled out in front of her. She’s watching the footage that we recorded of her dying. Playing back that moment of pure nothing over and over.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asks. Hikaru is crammed into the cockpit, asleep in his chair, leaning up against the anomaly wall. ‘How many times did it happen?’
‘So many,’ I reply. ‘Too many.’
‘And you didn’t rescue me.’
‘We couldn’t.’ I know how weak this is going to sound before I even say it; how she will resent this, because I would. Anybody would, knowing as she did that they were left to die. ‘You were on that side, and we were here,’ I say. ‘And we had to stay where we were because it seemed like the only chance we would have of getting you back.’ I don’t say: and ourselves. If we went in there to get you, we would all have been stranded.
‘You’ve got me back now,’ she says. ‘You could have come and done this straight away, couldn’t you?’ She rewinds it and zooms in: her face as she dies. That moment where it stops, where the terror and screaming give way to something like peace, but it’s an accident. And then the scratch and blank frame and she reappears, her eyes opening like it’s morning and she’s been asleep, and then she realizes the enormity of the situation.
‘We haven’t got you back,’ I say. ‘You are still in there. I am out here. We can’t go home.’
‘We haven’t tried,’ she says. ‘We haven’t even tried yet.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘We need results from inside the anomaly. We have to get them, and then we can try. I am so sorry.’
‘You aren’t sorry, Mirakel,’ Inna says. Every r, so softly rolled. She stays looking down.
‘Ask Tomas when we can leave,’ Hikaru says. He has been awake the whole time. ‘I’ve asked him, but he won’t give us an answer. Do that for us.’ He doesn’t sit up. He stays in the chair, his eyes still shut, and that’s the end of the conversation.
I float in the lab and begin talking to Tomas. ‘I want to see you,’ I tell him, and I wait.
‘What?’
‘Initiate video,’ I say, and the call goes through. I wait: the bandwidth isn’t built for this, and the resolution is terrible, and the lag almost makes this unworkable. I sit back and wait, and there he is, recognizable even when he is so pixelated: my brother. He is in that suit, just as I thought, but he’s not comfortable in it. He straightens his hair and stubs out a cigarette in the glass ashtray behind him. He smoked long before they made them harmless, and it’s a habit he’s thrilled to revel in. It’s funny: his birthmark is how I see myself, I think. That here is my point of reference for how we look, even though my face is clear. Never even a spot of acne, nothing on it but the skin – and, now, the beard, of course – but I can still tell that this is having an effect on him. That, maybe, the calm in his voice is an act. His tie is loosened; his top button undone. The image is broken and only three twenty by three twenty, maybe, but still: I can see him.
‘This is a surprise,’ he says. ‘What do you want, Mira?’ Behind him, a crowd: they peer and try to see the screen. It will be just as low-res on his screens, I know. He could have stretched it out; filled the wall, even. He puts his earpiece in, so that only he can hear me. ‘We’re just as busy as you are, you know.’
‘What do we want out of this, Tomas?’
‘What do you mean? You know what we want.’
‘We wanted to find out more about the anomaly. That was our mission. Find out if it was a danger or not. Find out how big it was; what it was. We were to get answers, right?’ I do not wait for him to reply. ‘Well, we have them. We have answers. We do not know what it is. We do not know exactly how big it is. We know nothing, and that is the best answer we can hope to have right now.’
‘I see,’ he says. He looks at my eyes: the camera being embedded in the screens means we have eye contact. It’s a look I’ve seen before: disappointment, mainly that I am not the man he is. I am not willing to go as far as he is.
‘They want to go home.’
‘Well, they can’t.’
‘You don’t know that,’ I say.
‘Then let them try.’ There is a pause, longer than the lag alone, and then he speaks again: ‘Although it looks as if they already are.’ He disconnects and I push out of the lab and into the hall. I have to be careful in being frantic, but the ship is rumbling: the engines spinning, warming up.
‘Don’t!’ I shout, but it’s too late. We move, lurching forward. Hikaru is controlling us, pushing us away. He has misjudged this. The Lära barely moves, but Hikaru and Inna do. Their bodies are slammed to the wall, crushed between the insides of the ship and the anomaly. Inna is against the table, her back broken, her spine snapped; Hikaru in the cockpit, squashed down, pressed as if in a vice. There is blood, and death, and Tomas says something over the speakers. I scream, because I did not want this, and I think about going over there, to save them, but I cannot move. I shut my eyes, only for a second, because this is too much – Inna’s shocked face, Hikaru so mangled I cannot see where he ends and the ship begins – and then they are just as they were. Inna is at the table, watching herself die; Hikaru is asleep in the cockpit.
Inna looks at the darkness as I gasp, as I know what it is that I am looking at. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asks, still searching for me. I tell myself that I should try to remember what it was that I said before, to make this play out again as if this was just the first time. But I don’t. I act like I am not there, and I stay silent, and I push away.
Tomas speaks to me when I am alone. ‘There is no uniformity,’ he says. ‘The way it works, the time it takes. Hours with Inna when she was outside. Minutes here. Twenty minutes? Maybe less. I wonder how it is chosen. I wonder if it is arbitrary.’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. I feel sick, and I try to eat, and I try to stay calm. My mother taught me breathing exercises. She taught me self-control, and so many ways to keep your head. If you let it slip away, you are likely to ruin yourself.
‘I wish I could be there to see it,’ he says. ‘To be that close. We have never seen anything like this, have we?’
‘What do you mean?’ I ask. I want to stop and think on this; to take it all in, and let it have a chance to become real. I cannot compute it, and I cannot understand it. I am not even sure, in this second, that I am meant to. But Tomas drives forward, wanting answers.
‘I mean,’ he says, ‘as humans. We have never seen time be this fluid. We have never seen it act this way. It’s fascinating.’
‘It’s not time,’ I say.
‘Oh?’
‘It can’t be. We are as we were. It’s not changing for us. Time cannot be different in two places at once.’
‘You’d think that. But the rules are different, maybe. We do not understand it, Brother, and maybe we should not try to. Not yet.’ This is not something we can test, I think. Not as he would have us do. ‘Anyway: I am locking them out of the engines. I’m bringing full control here, so that Hikaru can’t do that again. You understand?’
‘Yes,’ I say, but I want to ask for a chance to talk Hikaru down. To tell him to change his mind; to say that I know what he’s planning. I do not. Tomas is in charge here now, because I have seen
too much. I need to stay here. I need to be by myself.
When he is gone I make sure that the door is shut, and I lock it even though there’s no chance of them getting to this side of the ship and opening it and getting me, but then they start shouting, or Hikaru does. He has tried to turn the engines on and found that he can’t. He can’t do anything: his controls are completely locked out, passworded and under blankets of security that he cannot hope to bypass.
‘What the fuck have you done?’ he screams. ‘Mira! Come out here!’ He shouts, but he can’t do anything. I am safe in here. I flick through the internal cameras, and I see how disappointed they both are. Inna looks at the screen, of herself dying. She watches it over and over. I have been there myself, I think.
12
They both sleep, but I stay awake. I don’t want to risk them waking up and finding a loophole, or doing something that ruins us all. I wonder: Can they cause an explosion? Could they, if they wanted to, make the whole ship useless, cause us to explode? Wreck life support, meaning that they would come back but I, presumably, would not? They could hold me hostage. They could do anything that they wanted, then. There is a flare gun in the emergency landing pack. They could shoot me, if they wanted to. If they told Tomas to start the ship or they would kill me, he would have to listen to them.
Inna doesn’t have a bed to sleep in on that side of the ship, so she’s attached herself to a bench in the changing area. I can see her, just about: the side of her head, and her shoulder, and the tattoo. It rises and falls as she breathes. I don’t know how she can sleep; I would worry that I wouldn’t wake up again afterwards. And hasn’t she slept enough?
While they sleep, I look at numbers, and I try to imagine that I am worthwhile. That something I can do here can make some sort of difference. I do not believe that I can. I do not know what any of this is proving: these numbers, these pings, these results. Our mission was for answers, but increasingly I wonder what the questions even were. Or if we were asking the right ones. Tomas tells me that I should be using Hikaru and – now – Inna more.
‘They’re inside it,’ he says. ‘Get them to go out outside and bring in debris from the Ishiguro.’ It’s still out there, chunks of the ship, bobbing around. It’s in the distance, but nothing that we couldn’t cover with the scant amount of air the suits allow us. That’s not the point, I think.
‘What would you have them look for?’
‘That ship survived for decades. I want to know what happened to it. There was a black box, wasn’t there?’
‘There would have been hard drives.’
‘They might have survived.’
‘I’m not asking them to go and get them.’
‘Why the hell not?’
‘They will say no. They hate me, because of what you did.’
‘We had to do it, or they would have killed themselves. Do you prefer that idea?’
‘I’m not asking them,’ I say. He goes silent. ‘Do you have any more ideas how we get out of this thing?’ I ask.
‘We’re working on it,’ he says, but I know that that means nothing.
‘Worst case, you’ll have to send somebody to get us.’ He doesn’t reply. There’s another ship: a second ship still in Florida, which remained unnamed but was still constructed and tested, as everything else. It was our backup, in case the first had a problem. We made everything in duplicate during the manufacturing process. It cost a fraction of the price of the first craft: creating two of every custom part made perfect sense. Each part, in fact, has another copy, sitting waiting, unassembled, in some warehouse somewhere. It made sense to have these things: a backup ship, a backup crew, a backup of everything. ‘It could launch,’ I say, ‘and we – you – use some of the other crew who went through training. Most of them know enough to get out here fast as anything.’
‘Perhaps,’ Tomas says. ‘It’s certainly something worth discussing.’ He doesn’t say goodnight, obviously. No need. I understand the finality of that. I take another couple of stims. I need more, or I will. Only a few left. Worst case, I tell myself, I have to sleep. I shut my eyes and relax, and let the cards fall as they may.
Hikaru is locked out of the computers, so this falls to me, now. The maintenance of the ship; the care and caution of our lives. I check the numbers: how much battery we’ve got left in the charge, which means life support. It means, how long we have before we fall into darkness and start to drift as the boosters shut off, and we die, for the last time or not. We were never meant to stay still this long. Hikaru can’t have looked or he would have said something, and Inna wouldn’t know how to look, I don’t think. I send a link to a screen grab of it to Tomas, so that he can see, and then I float to my bed. I am lying down when I remember that I am not allowed to sleep; and I only took stims a while ago, but they are working less and less. I take another. I stay awake.
We can’t risk being swallowed, I tell myself.
Tomas and I did this once before, when we were children. We built our first spaceship as soon as we moved to a house with a big enough garden, after our mother married her second husband. We used cardboard boxes from when he had a brand-new sofa delivered, and we taped items to it and glued them, and spent the morning painting the whole thing with whatever he had in his shed. A thin grey for the outside; reds and yellows for the panels. He was desperate to be fatherly, so he spent the morning doing anything we asked of him, as did my mother, and they tried to be romantic about it: this is a spaceship of new familial love and pastel colours. We didn’t care about that. We were strict and told her what we wanted: we wanted science. We already owned books about spacecraft, and there had been a documentary on the television about shuttles, real things – this wouldn’t have been long after the Indian disaster – and we wanted to do what they used to do, back before. Her new husband understood: he went to the shed again and came back with a handful of wires and cables that he had torn out of the back of some ancient and ruined computer monitor, and then he gave us the circuit board from the computer itself. We glued it in; a handful of old hard drives for the systems themselves, underneath the glass window given us from the monitor also. And then controllers from a video game console, to guide us to where we were going. It was perfect.
I have photographs of the two of us sitting in it. Our problem was a lack of imagination. That you could give us the ship and we would sit in it and wonder why we could not actually take off and see the things that the adults around us were telling us we were seeing. My mother got inside the ship with us and tried. She looked to the moon, and then her new husband pretended to be an alien, but that only destroyed the illusion more. We were steadfast. The point of the game for us was to see if we could do it. We had built the ship: now the fun was in the ship itself, not the journey that we were supposed to imagine it taking.
So more of the fun: the disassembling of the ship. The laying out of the different sections flat on the lawn. Telling her new husband that this part was due to be used again in another craft, but that this part was scrap, destined for use in microwaves or refrigerators. Useless for space travel, we told him. Better off being used in the home, I think. We laid them all out and then collected them in, putting the bits we wanted to keep into a box. All we kept for the next trip were the hard drives and the joystick, nothing but memory and control. Everything else was able to go. We burned the cardboard that night and sat around the campfire it made in the garden, and they smoked and we cooked hotdogs. I remember not being able to see our mother by the end of the night – she had gone off inside – and we both asked where she was, and her new husband said, She’s gone to the stars! like he was carrying on the game, but he was joking, and he laughed at his own joke. We thought he was laughing at us, and we didn’t get it when he said that he wasn’t. Not at our age, not as excited and anxious as we actually were.
Even on a ship this small, even with the anomaly wall physically between us, Hikaru and Inna begin to ignore me. I do not say their names, and I do not try to get them
to talk to me, but they are in their own worlds, so distinct and separate from mine that I feel alienated. I feel pushed to one side. They are angry with Tomas and me, both of us. If they knew why he did what he did, maybe they would understand. You cannot feel as we do about answers unless you are the ones asking the questions. As they are awed by this, they lose their heads. Tomas cut the ship off from being able to control itself because it would save their lives, and because it would save the mission. There are three of us left, in a way, and we can be saved; and we can return with what we came out here for.
