Infinite

by Jeremy Robinson

  But not all of them are dead.

  When I stop in front of the cryo-bed labeled: Capria Dixon, I realize my subconscious had planned a side-trip. I place my hands on the glass, holding them against the cold sting until beads of water roll away. The face behind the hand-shaped window is placid. She’s not smiling, but she looks happy. At peace.

  I smile at her. “You are so beautiful.”

  When she doesn’t flinch at the words, I continue. “I couldn’t tell you that before. You know why. And I’m not just saying it now because I haven’t seen a human face in a year. I’ve been thinking it for the past thirteen years.”

  Everyone on this mission was recruited as a teenager. I was fourteen. That’s when I moved from Earth to Mars. They didn’t use cryo for that trip, in part because it was relatively short, even without FTL travel, and they wanted to see how we handled spaceflight.

  Capria is Martian, born and raised, but thanks to the gravity boost inside the colony domes, she has the strength and endurance of an Earthling. And then some. While her eyes have always been on the stars, and her mind on work, she also managed to outperform the rest of us physically. Tom once told me she had the physique of a twenty-first century tennis player named Serena Williams. I didn’t know who that was, but after some VCC research, I had to agree, though I never told him that. Revealing my feelings for Capria would have erased my chances of joining the Cognata mission, and my future chances with Cap.

  Now, I think my odds are pretty good.

  If I end her cryo-sleep.

  “I want to wake you up,” I tell her. “Really. But you don’t know what it’s like right now. We are nowhere. Literally. I need to get in Gal. Need to figure out what happened, and how to get us back. Cognata is more than seven quadrillion miles behind us. It’s depressing, and I don’t know if...if you’re like me.” I motion to the other cryo-beds, full of the slumbering dead. “Or if you’re like them. Not dead. I mean, normal. Not what I am. Immortal, I guess.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know what you’d want. Waking you up now would be less about you and more about me. However long it takes me to turn us around and get us home, I’m going to be fine. But you...I don’t know.”

  Depression would be nearly unavoidable. The mission is basically over. Maybe the human race, too. Her friends are dead. And she’d be stuck with me for who knows how long. As well as I hid my feelings for Capria from Command, I’m pretty sure I failed to hide them from her. Our eyes met and lingered one too many times for her not to have figured it out. But she never told anyone. That always gave me hope, but it doesn’t mean she felt the same.

  “You need to stay here,” I say. “I don’t want you to see. I don’t want you to know me the way I have to be now. It’s...” I nibble at the inside of my mouth. “Would you mind if I came and talked to you again? This feels good.

  “Of course you don’t mind. You’re asleep.” I kiss my hand and place it on the glass, thinking of Sleeping Beauty. I’m far from Prince Charming, but someday, I’ll wake her up.

  What comes next should undo me, but the still-fresh memories of being murdered awake are like a mountain compared to the small hill that is Tom’s frigid corpse. As his cryo-bed opens, I step back, half expecting him to attack, and totally expecting him to smell.

  Neither is true, yet.

  Tom’s dead weight is familiar, as is my anger with him. When I pull him from the bed and he starts to fall, I let him. His teeth and nose crunch against the floor. My imagination predicts blood, but there is none. His insides are chilled gelatin. He chipped a tooth, though, and for a moment I feel sorry about it. Then I grab his wrists and pull.

  For a few minutes, progress is smooth. Each step brings me closer to what I’m sure is the solution to my security problem. But then Tom conspires against me again.

  It starts as an occasional jolting squeak. His butt cheeks are sticking to the smooth floor. I try lifting him higher so only his heels are dragging, but I don’t have the strength to hold his ragdoll body that high, and I really don’t want to wrap my arms around his torso.

  So I endure our stop-and-go journey.

  Tom decides to cooperate a few minutes later, but I wish he didn’t. His insides are warming up, leaking from below, lubricating his backside. A rainbow streak of white, clear and brown fluids marks our path through the hallways, filling the Galahad once more with the stink of death.

  I stop outside the secondary VCC. This is Tom’s domain, and his fitted virtual skin is hanging beside his staging area locker. But there’s something off about it. Instead of its normal, clear flesh tone, pocked with tiny blue nodules, it has an almost yellow hue.

  As long as it works, I think, and I pull the suit down. My grimace deepens when I feel the suit’s tacky interior and get a whiff of its poignant armpit stench. Somehow, Tom’s old body odor is worse than his death reek.

  I knew he had used the VCC before the others woke up to be murdered, but I’m still not sure for how long. Like the crew’s plain gray garments, the VISAs are automatically replaced or washed when returned to their lockers. Only Tom hadn’t left his suit in the locker. He’d left it outside.

  “Why were you naked?” I ask his corpse. I look down at my body, still squeezed into my virtual skin. The answer comes to me as a question. “Why am I clothed?” With no one around, and perfectly regulated temperatures throughout the ship, I don’t need to wear clothes, but I have dutifully changed from VISA to flightsuit every day since that first shower.

  Before I can come up with a good answer, I notice Tom’s legs. They’re yellowed, with purple streaks, but that’s not the problem. They’re swelling as Tom’s decomposing insides fill his lower legs like balloons.

  “Shit.” I crouch with his fetid virtual skin and dress him like a man-sized baby, squeezing his loose, dead body into the skin, which compresses and redistributes his flaccid guts. Tom will not be coming out of his VISA.

  ‘Bury me in my body-condom.’ I’ve heard more than a few tech-jocks say the words, including Tom. I never understood the sentiment. Death was visceral. It affected real people who, hopefully, loved the dead, and probably never saw him or her in a virtual skin. Being sent to the afterlife in a VISA always struck me as an offense to the living, like life inside the VCC was more real. Granted, sometimes it could feel that way, but nothing in the virtual made me feel the way a glance from Capria did.

  “Looks like you’re getting your wish, buddy.” I slide my arms under Tom’s armpits and lift him up. His head bobbles onto my shoulder, forcing my chin and nose away and up, like I’m a high-society undertaker. I drag him to the VCC door and say, “Open.”

  The door obeys, exposing me to the room’s contents.

  A surprised, high-pitched bark pops from somewhere deep in my chest, as I’m knocked back and sprawl to the floor with Tom atop me.

  9

  “Oh!” I scream, voice cracking like I’m in the throes of puberty once more. “Oh, God!”

  My feet kick and push, but Tom’s dead weight, lying across my waist, reduces my progress to just a few inches.

  From the moment of my waking, I have endured sights and smells far more revolting than I would have guessed possible. What could be worse than gallons of blood or the necrotic juices flowing from a corpse?

  The answer lies before me.

  Tom didn’t just use the VCC, he lived in it.

  Trays of rotting food line one corner. Mounds of soiled clothing and virtual skins, stained yellow from sweat, and brown from something else. The biggest difference between the way Tom and I use a VCC is that he has no shame. He’ll stay in for the full eight hours, and if he has to take a shit... A mountain of used adult diapers rises up the back wall, a patchwork of light blue, white, and brown smears. The top of the pile is packed down, like a volcano’s caldera. When I see the pillow and blanket, I realize what it actually is: a nest.

  I gag, heaving back, trying to escape while clutched in the jaws of mindless panic. A dry heave wracks my b
ody. I haven’t eaten in months, so there’s nothing to retch. Tears streak over the sides of my face, tickling my ears. I hold my breath, and in that moment of stenchlessness, the very simple solution makes itself known. With the last shit-flavored air in my lungs, I shout, “Close!”

  And when the anguished sharpness of my voice keeps Gal from recognizing the voice command, I clench my eyes shut, and say, as calm as I can manage, “Close.”

  The VCC door slides shut.

  The smell remains.

  But I’m free from the jaws.

  Rolling Tom off me takes another ten seconds. I try to hold my breath, but my muscles need oxygen to work, and I can’t help but suck in another thick breath. Once he’s off, I scramble for the staging area door and run. My feet thump against the floor, a desperate metronome that slows after three hundred beats.

  I run down the nearly featureless corridor, pursued by the monster named Stench, wondering how its existence came to be. Messes like that aren’t supposed to happen on Galahad. The drones clean everything...except the VCCs, I realize, where nothing aside from a VISA-wearing user is supposed to be. Something about the cache of filth shifts Tom to another level of crazy. Murder has been part of human society since the beginning. But making a nest out of shit? Even our ape-like predecessors wouldn’t have stooped so low.

  Far enough, I think, and I slow to catch my breath, hands on knees, head lowered. In through the nose, out through the—

  Oh, God, I can still smell it.

  I look down at my virtual skin-clothed self. The VISA is almost fleshy to the touch, soft and smooth, easy for microscopic scent particles to cling to. I lift an arm and sniff. My back thuds against the wall as I wince.

  Breath held again, I start to peel the high-tech garment from my shoulder, but then stop. I smell like literal shit. So does Tom. And since I’m not about to shower him, or take him out of his VISA, I either need to do this now, or never, and since never means remaining Tom’s prisoner on a spaceship to nowhere...

  “Damnit.”

  I take a step back toward the VCC and falter almost instantly. I rub my head, pace, and punch the walls for a full five minutes. Then I break into a sprint and nearly fall to the floor as I stop by Tom’s side, bend to lift him under the armpits and then run backward. I’m not exactly athletic, and my reverse charge is far from graceful. Tom’s loose head bobbles around, smacking against my chest, reeking of his own noxious filth.

  I stop at the entrance to the primary VCC, which I know is as spotless as it’s supposed to be. I feel like a traitor to tech-jocks everywhere—if there are any others left—when I say, “open” and drag Tom’s fetid corpse inside. The air inside is cool and pristine.

  “We’re going to do this quick,” I tell dead Tom.

  But that’s a lie.

  It doesn’t take me long to see this isn’t just going to take time, it’s also going to be nearly impossible. Tom needs to be upright, which I can manage by holding him around his torso. His virtual skin is synced to the VCC, but for that to do any good, his hands and arms need to move, and I’m not much of a puppet master whilst my fingers are interlocked over Tom’s sternum. And I need to do all this while wearing a headset, making me blind to the real world.

  My solution is to relocate a large supply case containing spare headsets to the center of the VCC and then prop up Tom like he’s a little kid about to go for a horsey ride on his uncle’s knee. Once he’s up, his head hanging back on my shoulder, dead weight compressing my leg, I get my hands around his and enter the virtual.

  Using my hands to manipulate his, I repeat the gestures to access the security check. It takes four tries, as Tom’s loose limbs fail to make the correct grouping of movements, but then it works. The system begins its check, starting with DNA. I let go of Tom’s arms, and reach up for the helmet. He slides off my knees and plummets to the floor.

  None of that matters. Once the security check is instigated, you could be dancing a jig and it would continue. I shove the headset onto Tom’s face, his dead, open eyes staring at the high ceiling. They’ve faded some, but the cryo-bed did a decent job of preserving him. Hopefully there’s enough left of his identifying features to pass the security check.

  A small voice, singing like an old school heavy metal band, crackles from the earphones that are not quite on Tom’s ears. “Welcome back, you badass motherfucker!”

  I pull the headset from Tom’s face and put it against mine.

  An unfamiliar welcome display fills my vision. The flashing, ‘Welcome’ is backlit by fireworks and framed by two women spinning around stripper poles.

  What did he do to you, Gal?

  I want to take Tom out. Want to wash the stink off me, and get my virtual skin synced to the system. But I can’t risk being locked out again. I sit on the floor and lift Tom up so he’s seated between my legs. Manipulating his hands, I pull up the security system and I’m relieved to find I’m still able to change settings. Tom altered a lot, but not everything. Rather than revert the security measures, or try to change them in any way, I simply shut the system down. There’s no one to secure the system against.

  I take a deep breath of Tom’s greasy hair, and then restart the system. An endless sea of nothing envelops me for five seconds, and then I find myself back inside my game room. I teleport to the red door with the pregnant woman and slide into the Womb. All the way in. No security.

  A year. A God damn year to solve this one problem.

  I lie back on the VCC floor, and my view inside the Womb shifts, too. Spiraling strings of code that only make sense to tech-jocks dance in my vision. Tom’s dead weight feels like a blanket. For a moment, I feel peace. And I nearly sleep. Then I take a real breath, which is always part of reality, and I smell Tom anew.

  Before shutting down the system, I schedule a cleaning of the secondary VCC. I don’t envy the drones, but then again, they don’t have feelings. Or nostrils.

  I shut down the system, pull myself free, and hoist Tom back up.

  On our way back to the cryo-chambers, the drones pass by. It’s strange, but this is the first time I’ve actually seen them since waking up. They hum, held aloft by tiny repulse discs. There are twenty small drones with a variety of functions. Some will saturate soiled areas with cleansing spray. Others will scrub. More will dry and buff. And the soon-to-be-busiest of them all will gather up the refuse.

  I step to the side as BIN hovers past. It’s a six-foot-long, four-foot-wide behemoth. The front half contains supplies and power stations for the smaller units. The back half is a trash compacter, though nothing will actually be discarded. Gal will somehow find a use for everything Tom left behind.

  The drones have round sensor packs atop their disc-like bodies, each with two small red lights mounted on the front. They serve no function other than to let the crew know which direction the drone is headed, but I’ll be damned if the drones don’t turn toward me as they pass, like they’re looking at me.

  I stop to watch them pass, each one turning toward me for a moment and then carrying on. BIN is the only one of them that doesn’t seem to notice me, bumping into my hip as it hovers down the hallway.

  I’ve never seen drones do that before, but it would be easy enough to program. I make a mental note to run a system check after putting Tom to bed. He didn’t screw with Gal’s core systems, that much is obvious. The ship is still functioning the way it’s supposed to, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t change a lot.

  The other-than-me-lifeless ship makes me shiver. There’s something not right about the lack of living things. I hum a happy tune as I drag Tom back to his cryo-bed. By the time we get there, his torso looks half the size, his legs are fat sausages inside the virtual skin casing, and something foul is slurping up his back.

  I lay him in the bed, seal it, and put him back in a deep freeze.

  “This is goodbye for the last time,” I tell him. If I ever take him out again, it will be to bury him. His legacy of death is all people will remember,
if there are people to remember, but he was my friend once. He still deserves a burial.

  I strip out of my virtual skin, peeling it to the floor like I’m emerging from a chrysalis. I smell my arm. It’s free of stink. The good news is that the VISA kept me mostly clean. The bad news is that my head reeks of sewage, sweat, and death.

  Before leaving the cryo-chambers again, I visit Capria. I’m stark naked, virtual skin pinched between two fingers. The cryo-bed glass is still clear from my last visit.

  “So that was horrible,” I tell her. “But I handled it. I, uh, I have to run a system check. Make sure everything is running right. Tom really fucked things up.”

  Her closed eyes put a chink in my armor. “I wish I could wake you up.”

  I run my hand over the glass. “But there is a lot to do, and I don’t know how long it will take to fix things. Or to get back.”

  A dark, sinking sadness pulls my head down. My forehead leans against the chilled glass. I’m oblivious to the sting. “If you can hear me, I’m going to save you. If I don’t have that... If I let you out and something happens to you... I won’t... Would be better to fly into a star and be done with it all.”

  I open my eyes and stare into her lids, imagining the deep brown circles of her irises. “That’s why you have to stay here. I hope you’ll understand. And someday, forgive me.”

  My humming fills the room as I lean back, and step away.

  Her eyes don’t open.

  And I won’t see her again for another seven months.

  10

  Viewing the past-made-virtual in the VCC, I stand in cryo-chamber four, immaterial like a ghost, present, but not. One of the ten cryo-beds hisses and opens. The name inscribed on it reads: Thomas Holden.