by Joe Hart
This was the first day in almost a month that she wasn’t high before noon. Caffeine swam through her system, and her nerves hummed like electric wires. Her head felt like a blacksmith’s anvil, and her muscles were languid and waterlogged.
She felt like shit.
The last three weeks were a blur from the pills. Too many. She didn’t know how much she’d taken on certain days. Her earlier weaning had given way to excess when she hadn’t been able to make headway on the research.
And now she didn’t know if she’d be able to make it to the space station before full-on withdrawals hit. Forty-eight days.
“Gonna be rough,” she said to the empty lounge. She no longer felt self-conscious speaking aloud. It was second nature now. At times it felt like the only tether she had to reality, the sound of her voice and what she was saying. In the back of her mind, she knew she was actually managing the isolation fairly well, even with leaning harder on the drugs. She’d read enough psychological studies to know people could snap in much less time than she’d spent alone.
“Who says you haven’t snapped already?” She shivered, noticing the familiar sensation of weight on her back and shoulders.
The feeling of being watched.
She knew it was the drugs or the paranoia that accompanied them, but that made it no less palpable. Even the sounds she heard could be chalked up to heightened imagination and the hydros wreaking havoc on her senses.
But what about the door closing by itself? What about the smell in medical?
Gillian raised the cup again, unwilling to think about those questions anymore, and realized it was empty. Maybe a little more coffee and she’d get to work. No. She needed to eat something. She’d lost weight in the last two months; her jumpsuit hung like a limp rag.
She left the table she’d been eating and drinking at alone for the last sixty-two days and went to the kitchenette. All of the crew’s meals were separated on shelves into neat rows, the corresponding member’s name below each stack. She’d thought it was strange at first that the prepackaged meals were segregated, but then it made sense. If an individual were consuming more than their fair share, it would be noticeable almost at once. Her own supply had barely dwindled.
One of the muscle tremors that had plagued her since decreasing the hydrocodone ran through her arm, and her hand bumped into the stack beside her own.
It toppled outward, spilling a dozen or more packs onto the floor. As she tried to catch them, she bumped a pile of her meals, and they fell too, bouncing off her feet and spinning away across the room.
“Damn it!” she cursed, the pack she’d grasped initially slipping free to fall amongst the others.
She stood there for a moment, on the verge of tears, her throat tightening before she looked at how many of the meals had escaped the storage unit. They were everywhere.
She broke into laughter.
The tears came then, forced out by the mirth that doubled her over in silent gales. It was laughter of the insane, cackling of the crazy, but it felt too good to stop.
“Oh fuck, look how many there are,” she managed between breaths, which kick-started another round until her belly began to cramp. Slowly she knelt and started retrieving the meals, the thudding of her headache killing any more laughter. After collecting several handfuls, she went to place them back on the racks and realized the meals she’d spilled had been Birk’s, and there was no way to tell her own from his. She read a few labels to confirm the packs were the same before placing them inside. She knew Birk hadn’t eaten a lot before he’d gone into stasis, so she distributed them accordingly. Besides, what did it really matter? She’d been the only one consuming anything for the past two months.
Gillian eyed Carson’s meals, imagining a number of creative experiments she could try on them. Then she saw Tinsel’s.
“Could use them to soak up rat piss,” she murmured, which tugged a giggle from her before she dismissed the idea. She finished cleaning up the rest of the packs and selected one, opening and warming it before settling down to eat.
She couldn’t really complain about the food. Of the many things wrong with her situation, the food wasn’t one of them. When she finished, she left Quad Three and headed for the lab but gradually slowed, running out of steam before turning the corner of the hall.
What was she going to do today that she hadn’t done in all the days before? What was different now? The answer was simple.
Nothing.
Even with all the narco-glowing she’d been doing, there had been no epiphany, no breakthrough moment, no eureka! Science was the slow grind of facts and theories gradually milled down through tests and trials. And if you were talented and very, very lucky, you’d sift through everything to make a discovery. But even then it was normally a small step in the marathon of innovation.
Gillian sagged and leaned against a wall. Her hand went out, and she was surprised when it landed on the rung of one of the access ladders leading to the center of the ship. She considered its narrow length for a second before beginning to climb.
The weakness was even more pronounced with the extra effort of hoisting herself up the rungs. Her breathing became heavier, and her heart picked up its thudding rhythm in her eardrums.
At the top of the ladder was a simple port she scanned through, and pulled herself into a small rounded room that held a more typical doorway along one side. She scanned her key card again as the port near her feet closed slowly and locked.
There was a quiet clunk, and the entire room rotated counterclockwise before the door slid open.
An immense conical space opened up before her. It stretched away in an array of support girders, access panels, bundled wiring of every color, and ducts twisting and sprouting from one another like the roots of a massive tree. And even as she registered it all, she began to float.
Her feet left the floor, and she had to reach out and grasp the doorway to keep from bumping into the ceiling. She laughed, unable to help herself, and launched out into the open space of the ship.
Gillian glided past the cluttered walls, soaring fifty feet above what she’d call the floor of the craft. A crippling sense of vertigo came and went, the image of gravity suddenly returning and plummeting her to the solid girders below so vivid she sucked in a panicked breath.
But she didn’t fall. She flew.
How many people had ever felt this? The utter freedom of true weightlessness was nearly overwhelming. This was how a young bird felt, leaving the nest and discovering it wasn’t bound to gravity as it thought it had been.
It was how she’d felt being wheeled out of the obstetric wing, the new smell of Carrie’s skin moments after her birth, the sharpness of colors and pain. The medical bed beneath her had glided down the hallway of the hospital, just as she was gliding now.
Carrie was a warm bundle in her arms, fast asleep. There had been a wrapping of painkillers as well as fatigue around her, but not in an unpleasant way. She felt as a soldier might who’s made it through a skirmish alive along with the rest of their company.
Triumphant. Victorious. Satisfied.
The nurses had wheeled them through the halls and taken an elevator down to another room, and she still recalled exactly how she’d felt as they pushed them through the doorway.
Kent had been waiting there in a wheelchair, thick restraints across his legs and waist so he wouldn’t get up and wander away. His gaze had lit on them both as they’d entered the room but just as quickly slid away, not recognizing her. Not registering his newborn child.
Her doctor had warned her this wasn’t a good idea, but she’d insisted, dead set on introducing their daughter to Kent, whether he realized what was happening or not.
Her heart double-timed as the attendants wheeled him closer.
Their eyes met, and a flicker of recognition bloomed in his, the clouded confusion clearing away.
He’d reached for her. Out of instinct or something else, she never knew. And she’d grasped his hand. He
ld it, tears already forming, blurring her vision.
Gillian? What are you doing in bed, honey? What’s wrong? He’d asked her the questions as if he’d seen her only minutes ago instead of almost a week. She couldn’t answer, couldn’t make herself form the words. In their place, she tilted Carrie up so he could fully see her through the swaddling of blankets.
He’d frozen, and for an instant she’d thought her doctor had been right. This was a mistake. Kent would recede now, the man she loved curling in on himself, leaving only anger behind. The rage would expand, and he would be dragged away from them again. A stranger furious at all around him, furious because nothing was familiar.
But that didn’t happen.
Kent had reached out, stretching as far as he could while bound to the wheelchair, and brushed his fingertips across Carrie’s cheek.
Gently. So gently.
He began to cry then, looking from her to the baby and back again.
I remember. I remember now. I remember.
Everything was in his voice. All the lost time between them since the accident and even before. He was there, fully and truly her husband. He was seeing his daughter for the first time.
And they were a family, if only for a moment.
She remembered everything.
Her eyes flew open, flinging the tears she was crying away in droplets like wobbling jewels.
That’s it.
The revelation was a row of dominoes in her mind, one thought crashing into the next, the succession leading to a surety she felt in her bones.
Gillian twisted in midair, grasping the nearest support strut. She spun herself around and sprung from it, gliding in a straight line to the entrance.
Then she was inside, swiping her key to close the doors.
The room rotated, gravity returning so quickly she hit the floor and stumbled sideways. She was back in the centrifugal rotation. The hatch at her feet opened, and she clambered down the ladder, a righteous joy of discovery coursing through her.
“It’s gotta be. It’s the only answer,” she said as she leaped from the ladder and sprinted down the hall toward Quad Four. She scanned in to the lab, barely pausing to put on the coverall before opening the closest rat’s cage. The animal uttered a short squeak as she drew it free. The small fitting in its skull glinted in the harsh light, but it barely struggled as she brought it to the table.
“It’s going to be okay. This won’t hurt at all,” she whispered, securing it with the small harness to the test tray. After withdrawing a fresh vial of luciferin compound from the nearby cooler, she injected it into the rat’s cranial port. While the absorption took place, she turned on the recording equipment, attached the injection tube to the rat’s port, and measured out the luciferase before loading in the injector capsule. This was second nature after all the other trials, but now there was a thrumming energy beneath her motions. There was true potential.
“You know, luciferin is named for Lucifer. It means ‘light bringer.’ Ironic, isn’t it?” she said to the rat as she reset the trial program on the nearest touchscreen. “Maybe you can be a light bringer that lives up to the name.” Gillian rechecked all the connections before going to the rat’s cage and pulling its food pan free along with a handful of pellets from the dispenser. She noted the time and took a deep breath, pausing before reaching out to touch the screen. This was trial 188. Almost two hundred attempts, all of them failures. Doubt ate away at the confidence she’d felt only minutes before. Why would no anesthesia make a difference? Why would being awake and alert with an external stimulus present be the key?
Her jaw tightened even as the reservations tried to consume her. “Because we all remember,” she said, and touched the screen’s button.
The injector clicked, and the luciferase flowed through the tube into the rat’s port.
Immediately its synapses began firing.
Thousands.
Millions.
She watched as the enzyme flowed across and into the rat’s brain, igniting the neurons in a firestorm of action. The activity drew closer and closer to the hippocampus, and when it was seconds away from reaching it, Gillian moved to the rat, set its bowl in front of its nose, and sprinkled the pellets into it.
The distinctive tinkling sound filled the room, and the rat’s ears perked. It squeaked once, straining against the harness to try to get to the food.
Gillian rushed back to the screen.
Her eyes widened, a hand coming to cover her open mouth.
The hippocampus lit up in waves, the neurons firing in succession, first the pyramidal then the inhibiting.
The entire portion of the brain was awash in the flaring bioluminescence. She watched, not daring to breathe, not daring to move, afraid anything she did would interrupt what was happening.
The luciferase continued through the last of the hippocampus and flowed away to other areas of the brain.
She’d done it.
She’d actually done it.
“It worked,” she whispered, taking her hand from her mouth. “It worked.” She wasn’t doing it justice. “It worked!” she yelled as loudly as she could, her voice ricocheting off the lab walls. Exuberance beyond any chemical high she’d ever felt coursed through her. This was it, the moment she’d dreamed of. Not just a step forward like all the other progress.
A leap. A catapult.
The implications were too great to absorb all at once, but the realization she had when watching the neurons firing was like a pillar in her mind.
I can see what’s wrong now with Carrie. I can find it.
And soon we’ll be able to fix it.
She wanted to dance. Instead, she unhooked the rat from its harness and port. It immediately leaned over its dish and began eating.
“You deserve all that and more, you did amazing,” she said, stroking the rat’s fur. “You can have as much food as you want. You’re going to be fat and famous, Lucifer.” She laughed. “Might have to give the press a different name, but to me you’ll always be the light bringer.”
Gillian stood back and let him eat, turning to the screen and the data once again. It was all there, the key to mapping any irregularity in the brain, and it had been unlocked by memory itself. The hippocampus had always been a mystery: how it stored spatial memory, how its conversion of short-term to long-term memories worked, and what role emotion played amid it all. Who you were was shaped by your experiences and how you reacted to them as well as the emotions associated with those reactions.
But memories, they were what opened the door to what was stored inside. That’s where the external stimuli came in. How many times had seeing something or smelling a scent brought back an experience from the past? For her, every time she walked through their home was an assault from before, when Kent had been alive and healthy and their life was something protected and filled with potential for the future. The memories were what had allowed the neural pathways to open like a gate for the bioluminescent imaging to work. In this case, it was the sound of the rat’s food falling into its bowl, spurring pleasant memories of eating. The difference had been allowing the subject to be awake and aware.
All along the answer had been right in front of her.
A sense of accomplishment settled over her unlike any she’d felt before in her career. But with it came weakness and a tinge of nausea. Probably normal with all the excitement. Also, she hadn’t had any hydro yet today.
“Just one,” she said, forcing herself to turn away from the screen.
Gillian moved to the bottle of pills she’d begun keeping in the lab. She reached out but stopped her hand an inch from the small container.
The cap was loose.
It sat askew, one side higher than the other.
Had she forgotten to close it last night? No. She always snapped it down tight; hearing the childproofing click was ingrained.
She picked the bottle up and stopped breathing as the cap tipped off and fell to the floor.
Before she
brought her shaking hand closer, before she shook the container, before she even picked it up, she knew.
The bottle was empty.
TWENTY
Gillian searched the entire ship.
She moved systematically from the airlock where the shuttle was docked through all the quads. One by one she went to each of the rooms and covered the areas she was most accustomed to before admitting to what she was doing.
Looking for someone.
She had to be honest with herself: this wasn’t normal behavior.
It was textbook paranoia.
There was no one else on the ship besides the crew, who were all still in their stasis units (it was the very first of the four quads she had checked).
Gillian placed her back against the wall, feeling the silent hum that vibrated throughout the ship. What exactly was she doing? Hoping to flush out a secret passenger?
The thought was jarring. What if there was someone else on the crew that she hadn’t been aware of? Someone who had come up to the ship on the prior trip with Leo and Easton? No, Leo would have mentioned them.
But what if he wasn’t aware of them either?
She brushed the notion aside. She wasn’t pulling herself out of the nosedive of conspiracy; she was angling into it. Where would it stop if she gave in to every possibility? It wouldn’t. Every idea would seem reasonable, every outlandish thought holding a sliver of merit.
Maybe in your addled state you imagined how many pills there were. Maybe you did spill them, and the part of you that depends on them blocked it out, wasn’t able to deal with the fact that you doomed yourself to hell. Because that’s what withdrawal is going to be without tapering off or any type of treatment.
“Stop it,” she said. Her voice sounded sick and flat in the hallway. She hadn’t spilled them or taken all of them without knowing. It was impossible.
She pushed off from the wall and continued down the hallway, scanning in through every door she came to and briefly searching the room inside. The empty beds, tidy and unused; small bathrooms, a faint disinfectant scent hanging about them; and worst of all, the closets. Even though a person would be hard-pressed to fit inside them, there was room. She left them for last, drawing each open quickly while stepping back, a part of her expecting a hand to shoot out to grab her every time.
