The Echo taq-2

by James Smythe

  I think about the great discoveries in our lifetime, in the lifetimes of those who came before us, and I wonder what they must have first thought: how inexplicable it was to contemplate a round Earth, to see and understand comets and meteors, to uncover evolution, electricity, the atom bomb. As we took those first tentative steps into space, inventing a means to explore that which had previously been something close to hearsay. I used to wonder how it must have felt, as somebody who had seen two wars at the start of that century, to watch that launch on the television at the time: to see where we had reached. To have watched Le Voyage dans la lune as a child, and then to see it realized. No face in the moon; no mermaids or aliens. Instead, only footsteps and flags and dust. Just as incredible, when you think of it. And now, if I return, they will know of this: that I discovered something truly inexplicable. Here is a space that makes no sense; space in the truest sense of the word. Not the void that we describe with that word in our regular lives, but something else. When the Ishiguro didn’t come home, hypothesis was everything. Now, I could tell them so much more.

  Tomas still can. Even without me he has enough. I wonder if he’s told the world that I am lost yet? I wonder if he’s told them that I am dead? I tell Inna, on those times that I save her, that we will make it home. I know that, for her, it is a lie. But in those moments either she believes it, or it makes her feel better, and then she dies with more of a smile on her face. She still trusts me, even after everything.

  I have lost track of how long this has taken; how long I have been here, doing this for.

  It is one of the times in which I save her. I pick her body up and let the blood soak me again, into my suit which has been soaked so many times. The blood stays on me: I am out of this cycle, and my suit is darkened with Inna’s life. Each time it happens there is something so warm about it. It’s almost comforting, to feel her so alive for just a few seconds. This is Inna, and I am doing right by her. If I can get better at saving her, with practice and hard work, she might one day have more time with me. I am not trying to save her life now. I know that she is beyond that. I would need to be a surgeon to attempt more than I currently do, and while I have contemplated it, a part of me is unwilling to punish her in her dying moments with experimentations and attempts. I have done it before, when she was outside, but there was a distance there. I think, now, about the direct pain she would feel; and how I would feel her dying breath on my face as I tried. It would hurt her. But to preserve her, to ease her suffering, that is something I can do. I am injecting her with the sedatives when she leans to me and speaks to me, the first time that she has done this in any of her cycles.

  ‘Let me die,’ she says. Her voice is barely a whisper. Barely human, really, from the sound. I stop what I am doing and drop the hypo, and I listen in case she says anything more. But she doesn’t. That’s it. Her eyes shut and her mouth stays open. Her words smell of her blood as it gargles it in her throat.

  Let me die, she said.

  ‘I have been,’ I tell her body when she is gone, and I’m waiting for the next cycle to begin. ‘Was that not enough?’ In her next cycle, I just watch. As she dies, as they all die, as Cormac gasps at me, choking in his cell, I tell Inna that I am doing as she asked. ‘This is what you wanted,’ I say. She doesn’t look at me. She floats on her back, with her head tilted back, and the blood floats like children’s bubbles.

  ‘I have to sleep,’ I tell Inna as she dies another time, and I watch her. She chokes and coughs, lying there on the table. I say goodnight to her. She dies as I sleep. I talk to her as I shut my eyes, and tell her what I have done. Not that she will remember any of it. I sleep with the lid of the bed open, because I don’t need the darkness, not really.

  When I wake up it is to the alarm of Inna’s screaming as she dies again. It will have happened all night: there must have come a point where my body was more susceptible to the noise. I drag myself from my bed and to their room, and I look at them. She always ends up the same way: face down, near the ceiling, a red balloon floated off and trapped in the branches of a tree. They have reached the end of a cycle as I enter the room, and I know I need to wash. I take a shower, watching their bodies the whole time. I am unwilling to close my eyes in case the cycle starts again. It’s never happened with me in the room before, but there’s always a first time. So I wash with my eyes open, the shampoo swirling around me in the shower-pod and stinging my eyes, but still. I dry myself and then shit, not taking my eyes off them the entire time. When I am done I stay watching them, naked in that room. They are all dead. Cormac stares at me, as if, as he died, he wondered how I could be so casual about the whole thing. As if I am the murderer here. I eat a bar, never taking my eyes off them. Even when I look at myself in the mirror – at my beard, so Robinson Crusoe am I – I am keeping an eye on them. I have to be prepared.

  They start again as I reach the cockpit and examine where we are. No sign of it stopping, and no way to tell when it will.

  I try to save Hikaru this time, but that’s pointless, and he struggles so much, almost hitting me, that I think it is that he doesn’t even want me to. That’s how far gone he was. Maybe I should have realized the effect that this would have on us all.

  I save Inna once more, and I carry her out of the room, to the table. This time I have decided to use the ship’s supply of adrenalin to get more out of her. I plug her wound, and I stabilize her, and then, when she’s on the table, strapped down, I take a hypo of adrenalin and have the intention to inject it into her heart. I want her awake, even if it shortens things. Even if the slightly fixed artery cannot take the increased blood-flow I will cause inside her.

  I cut off her once-white vest, slicing it top to bottom with the thick-bladed scissors from the medical set, then discard the pieces. She is naked. There is the bird; and here, in the harsh brightness of the room, I can see every scar clearly now. Maybe I am less enthralled by the work done, because over time I have come to see the flaws. How they reflect the light, almost, and how the blue that she’s attempted to cover them with hasn’t quite set. The synthetic flesh isn’t blended properly; it’s a different shade of skin tone. She could have had it dyed, had the scars hidden and smoothed over. I wonder why she didn’t: how fresh this all was. Or maybe it was a choice, like Tomas’ birthmark. She decided that it made sense to keep it, as a reminder.

  The tip of the beak, her breast and her heart. I press the hypo to her breastplate, waiting until I hear it click, and then it does the work for me: like a nail gun, shooting into her. She inhales and jolts upwards. The blood starts pumping faster, and my gauzed patch-job is insufficient. It ebbs over and through, and starts running all over her.

  ‘Mira,’ she says.

  ‘I’m here,’ I tell her. I hold her. I keep my back arched, my chest away from her and the hypo that juts from her front, but I wrap my arms around her.

  ‘What’s happening?’ she asks.

  ‘You’re dying,’ I say. She panics and tries to struggle away from me, which only makes the blood flow faster. ‘But I can make it stop,’ I say. ‘I can make it okay. Do you want me to help you?’ I ask, and she nods. She dies in my arms. I don’t know if this was the best way for her to go: how much pain she was in, whether she would rather have had something else. But it is what we have.

  When she is dead, I take a scalpel from the kit, because I need to know. I slice along the line of the synthetic flesh, cutting it out as if it was a window, so that I might see inside her. At first, through the blood, it looks normal: pink and red and brown organs. But then the blood clears, and I see that they are synthetic: all transparent plastics, bags and pipes and batteries. I want to know what nearly killed her; how much of herself she lost. I cut her more, and I look inside as much as I can. This is not her, I tell myself: it’s a model. I pull aside the organs to see them all, and she is barely herself. Her insides are swapped and false. Underneath them all, her real organs. What is left of a stomach; a liver; a partial bowel. Joined and clamped toget
her by technology, they all look normal, and then I see the part that is not: the cancer, rotting away at the stomach, the intestine. It is brown mould, brown and black, and maybe she knew about it, maybe she didn’t, but it is pervasive and deep-rooted, and it would have killed her. Through all of her attempts to save herself, it would have been an end. I think about this ship, and how I keep trying to save her, but in the end, she will die anyway. We will all die anyway. For her, maybe this is better: the shock of Easton’s blade; the blood; the table; me doing my best, or trying to.

  I tell myself that I am a good man. That I have tried to be, because this seems a noble goal. I treat the bodies of those who remain in their beds as therapists, and I talk to them. I tell them that I would do anything to redeem what has happened. I cannot get them home, and so they die. But I would give anything to stop it. As long as I am in here, I know, they will do this, over and over.

  I think about interjecting myself into the play: dying first, to stop them. But would that help? Could I? Can I? I think about going outside, and dying there, and maybe if I am not here the cycle changes, and everything alters, and they could live. Maybe, if I am outside, Hikaru never tries to cycle the airlock; and then I am the one in the loop, out there forever. They might find a way to save me, of course. They might work out how to give me an ending.

  And then I realize it, and it’s so apparent to me; and I am an idiot, because I did not see it sooner. I can give that ending to them. I always bring Inna back into the main body of the ship, and I try to save her. But what if I push her the other way, and I let her die? What then?

  It isn’t easy, that much is apparent, because there is nothing to gauge it against. When driving a car, there is the road; when flying an airplane, I would imagine, you have wind and drag and pull and an atmosphere to work against. Here, out here (or inside this thing, depending on how you want to think of the anomaly) there is nothing, so it feels like nothing. You push forward on the joystick and there is a rumble of the engines, but that doesn’t carry into the stick itself. We should have taken another tip from our days of playing video games and built force feedback into it: a rumble through the stick that worsened the more pressure you applied. Instead, the rumble comes around us in the ship itself. But it feels like sliding on ice, I suppose. There’s nothing to stop us: no brakes, not in the conventional sense. I worry about where the anomaly is, because of what we saw the Ishiguro do at its end. And I know that we cannot pass back through. I don’t want to collide with it; I don’t want to relive this without hindsight. That such a death, such a ruination, could be my end over and over? It’s unthinkable.

  So I have read about how this works, and in the cockpit I have plotted a course based on the maps that we kept before. I do not know how far we have drifted: inside the anomaly there is no sense of place. The pings reach nothing, rebound from nothing, so I am in a void. I travel as slowly as it’s possible for us to go using the fuel, and I watch as the battery recharges ever so slightly, heading up towards the halfway mark, moving back towards something resembling safety.

  I can hear the play in the other room, rehearsals for what I will make the final performance. I can hear their screams, but I try to concentrate on flying. In this blackness I cannot even tell if we are actually moving or not; if we are stuck in it, thick black tar tugging at our wheels. I bring up the old map, with the pin where the Ishiguro was – because that was the wall, or near as damn it – and I plot us as we head towards that, the computers doing the work for me, the distance and the speed, and telling me that we are moving. Reassuring me, even.

  It isn’t long until we pass the point where we were static before: I watch it on the map, move to boosters rather than engines. This allows us to crawl forward. I am assuming that the wall will have moved, but I have no idea how much by. We inch – really, moving in tens of metres – and we’re soon past where we sat and waited the first time. I zoom the map out, and there, in the distance, is the moon, and Earth, where all this started. We keep moving.

  I don’t know how I am going to do this when we get there. I have a window of opportunity, I know that, though I can try multiple times. I will send Inna through the wall, a corpse and destined to stay that way; and Hikaru with her. I am not sure how I feel about Easton yet. How feral he is. He probably didn’t even think about what he was doing. He was trying to save himself. You can’t stay alive for as long as he has, in his physical condition, without developing an innate self-preservation instinct. I wonder if that carries through cycles like an injury? Changes to your psyche, to the way that you think? Brutal, base natures? I wonder if Easton’s journey made him what he is now, in that room, stabbing Hikaru. It’s constant, every cycle. Never a flicker of doubt about what he should do or how he should react. I wonder if being as alone as he must have been made him desperate to survive.

  And then I wake up when I feel the anomaly wall pressing against me, inside the ship, and I know that I have crossed the boundary, and I am scared. In that second I slam the booster into reverse, pushing us back, and I sit and shake, because that could have been worse; and because, when I look at the map, at the computer’s calculations, we are so far past it. We have moved on so very far; but that cannot be my problem now.

  I lock the ship into place as I hear her scream and cry, stabilizing and anchoring it with the boosters, and then I pull my helmet on. I check the seals this time, actually bothering to take the time to ensure my own safety: I have no desire to die out there an infinite amount of times for the rest of my life.

  I wait for Easton to die. I watch it happen, to make sure, and as he does I take one of the final few stims: for the clarity, to drag my eyes open, to keep my here and now. Easton dies. There are no tricks: it’s the same as every other time. His body floats, loose and yet stiff at the same time, and I open the interior airlock door and I drag it out. I tie it down to the rail at the far end, still unsure as to what I should do. He deserves peace, I tell myself. And what happens to his cycle if I remove the other players from the equation? Does he go insane and hunt me down? Is that how this ends? Either way, he is tied, and then I take Hikaru’s body and Inna’s, and I put them into the airlock space. I change my mind about Easton. I unclip him. I am not sure exactly what it is that he deserves, but this is what he’s getting. I can offer some sort of peace, and I should. I clip them all to the tether rope, and me at the end, in case I need to pull myself back to the ship, and then I seal the internal door to block off the rest of the ship. I open the external airlock door, and we’re outside. Or we are in this. We are not on the Lära any more.

  I push them in front of me, all three of them, and they feel like nothing. We move through space, a train, and I talk to them as I go. I tell them that it will be all right; that I am doing this because it is all that I can do. It is my fault that they are out here, and that they have died, and that their families, their loved ones, will maybe never know. Or, I pray, maybe they will. Maybe they will be picked up, seen by something. Maybe there will be closure. Isn’t that all any of us seek? An ending?

  Because I don’t want to give this a chance to reset itself, I watch them constantly, never taking my eyes off them, forcing myself to not blink, to keep focused. We move forward and forward, and nothing changes. In the distance, I know what these things are: Earth, waiting for us. I push the bodies, a pile-up, and Inna is facing me. I look at her as we go, and she is right there, held in my arms. I tell her things: that I will miss her, and that I am sorry, and then I feel it against me, and she is suddenly gone through. I did not see it coming. I had hoped, I think, that I would follow. The rules would change and I would be free, but I do not. Instead I feel it here, in front of me. They go, momentum carrying them. I wonder how far it will take them. I wonder if they will follow it on the path I have set, and, somehow, they might travel back to Earth; and then they might burn up in its atmosphere, as they head home.

  I press myself to the anomaly, and I decide that the others deserve this as well. I go back to
the ship, and I pull myself back to the living area and their beds. The beds are sealed, so I undo them. I try not to look as I pull their bodies out: I hold them by their sleeves. They look the same, because there’s no bacteria in their beds, no air, nothing to let the rot set in. I pull them through, one by one. Lennox, Tobi, Wallace. I think about my mother as I pull their bodies to the airlock. I think about what she looked like after she was gone, and they called us, and said, Do you want to see her? Spend some time with her? Say some words? We told them that we had already said all that we had to say; and that her body would know nothing of what we would want to say to it.

  I set the cycle and open the doors, and we are outside. I repeat myself, pushing them through. There is no ceremony, and they are gone. As I am floating, I think that I could pull my helmet off: that I could choke here, and maybe I would die and drift across; and maybe I would be on the other side, and I would stay dead. I think this but there’s no way, I know, that I could ever do it. I am too afraid of death. I am too scared of that infinite nothingness.

  And to think that people used to dream of an afterlife. That, for them, paradise was what happened when this was over. Somewhere that was worth dreaming of, that was worth thinking about instead of life. Instead there is nothing. I would bet my own life that there is nothing, and it is a bet that I would win; and the only reason that I would make that bet is because I am so sure that I would live after it.

  I push the anomaly wall with my hands, and I set my boosters going, one more attempt, and I struggle against it. When it doesn’t move, when it doesn’t change, I turn back to the ship, and I see the stretch of the expanse around me. I am so alone here, and I have never seen anything worse than this, and how incredible and mystifying and wonderful it is, and how deep; how black; how terrible.