by Nolan Edrik
She opened her eyes. “That’s why I wanted to come back here so quickly.”
“G’huh,” I said, a clever new version of my trusty standby.
With my head spinning, absorbing a sudden, complete appreciation for the totality of the universe, my balance deserted me. I wobbled toward her, put my hands on her hips, and pulled her in. It felt so natural, our lips together, our faces near, our hands pulling us closer.
Inside me roiled a wordless wonder that we had found each other across the terrifying expanse of empty space. The universe could be expanding, accelerating, ready to tear itself apart at the seams, or the edge of existence could be collapsing toward us, ready to crush all that ever has been, and I wouldn’t care, could never care about anything now that I’d had this moment. Now that I’d met her.
She broke from the kiss and rested her forehead against mine, our noses touching, her eyes locked on mine. I wanted – more than I’d wanted anything in my life – to repay her a small fraction of the joy she’d given me that evening. I knew that I’d have to fight my instinctive timidity, to follow the wisdom of those bolder than myself, no matter how audacious their guidance seemed.
I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and stuck my tongue in her nose.
She shrieked and jumped back.
“Shit,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
Her hands were covering her nose. “What was that?”
“I’m so sorry. Are you mad?”
“No, I just… What was that?”
“I’m sorry.” I trembled as the bliss of a moment earlier collapsed inside me. “I’d read that Moirana like that move. Actually, a friend told me.”
“A move? You talk to your friends about moves?”
“No. I mean, kind of. I …”
She sat on her bed and stared at the wall, her cheeks flushed.
“We should call it a night,” she said.
I felt hollow, as if my organs had disappeared from my body.
“Sure. I’ll go.”
I left the room, and as the door shut behind me I searched for the nearest airlock to fire myself out of.
*
The next day started normally enough. I woke up heavy with despair, spent five minutes convincing myself to roll out of bed, reminded myself that flinging myself into the station’s recycling apparatus would burden the other vitals officers and that they’d end up hating my remains as much as I hated myself.
I pulled on my suit, the green, comfortable one, because who cares, and dragged myself to my station, where I could fester all day. On the walk over, the halls hummed more activity than usual, defense officers hustling by, speaking with their faces lowered and eyes averted. I figured the rest of humanity was moving at a normal pace compared with my sluggishness.
I arrived at my station and slumped into my chair, resolving to do as little breathing as possible.
Within five minutes, the public-announcement system chimed five times, signaling an imminent announcement from the station director.
“Kepler 42 personnel, please initiate full defense procedures. We have reason to believe that an attack by a Rexnari regiment is imminent. All efforts will be made to defend this station, but if our assailants succeed in boarding the station, remain calm, shelter in place and await further instructions. This is not a drill.”
The Rexnari had good timing. At least I wouldn’t have to live with this misery for long. Still, to occupy myself in my last few moments of existence, I pulled all the combustible gases into the deepest, safest parts of the station, per emergency protocols. As I worked, my monitor showed the external launch bays depressurizing, the station’s squadron of fighter ships taking flight. The lights dimmed, and non-essential systems went dormant as power flowed to the canons. The electricity drained from the station’s research wing. I worried about Orynna.
The remaining lights pulsed as the canons fired. I pictured the battle raging outside, the fighters swirling, ships disintegrating noiselessly in the vacuum of space, the Rexnari fleet circling in closer, the noose tightening. I saw myself alone in the darkened station, knee-deep in corpses.
A knock sounded on the door, and I jumped out of my seat.
“Cal,” came a voice through the metal door. “Cal, it’s me, Rynn.”
I sprinted over and let her in. She was panting.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I ran all the way from the research area. Can you use an extra set of hands? Anything’s better than cowering under my bed.”
“There’s not much to do. At least not yet. But I’m happy for the company. I didn’t know if you, if I…”
“Forget about it. Forget any of that happened. We can talk later. We have bigger problems.”
She sounded sincere, if still a little rattled. I guess that was to be expected. And hey, she’d come all this way, so I hadn’t totally repulsed her, despite my best efforts.
“What are you supposed to be doing?” she asked. “What do you do if we get boarded?”
I sat back down.
“If we get boarded, I’m supposed to boost the oxygen so the station defense can fight better.”
“Won’t that make any explosions worse? And help the Rexnari, too?”
“That’s what I said.”
“They’re oxygen-breathing too, and with much thinner blood, so they need more O2.”
“For them, fighting on the station right under its typical conditions would be as hard as exercising on a mountain peak. If we flood the place with oxygen, they’ll be able to function normally.”
“That’s crazy.”
“I know. So I was thinking—”
The room shook with an impact. My screen showed a rapid depressurization nearby, followed by a rapid re-pressurization in the same sector. A Rexnari ship had blown a hole through the side, latched on, and sent its troops through the breach. We had been boarded.
Orynna watched my monitors and understood the situation.
“Can you blow up the corridor they’re in?” she asked. “Fill it with hydrazine and nitrogen?”
“Too risky. All the systems here are woven together too tightly. I don’t want to detonate a trunk line and kill half the station.”
Orynna paced the room.
“I was thinking,” I said, “that I could flood a large portion of the station with—”
The PA in my room crackled to life with shouting. The defense headquarters had patched me in.
“Callahan, this is Lieutenant Zander.” Chaos sounded in the command center behind him. “Do you copy?”
“I’m here.”
“The Rexnari have boarded the station. Our officers are mounting their defense of the station. Initiate the plan we discussed.”
“The one where I crank up the oxygen? About that, I think—”
“Do it now!”
The speaker went silent.
I put my elbows on the desk and dropped my head into my hands. Was I ever going to finish a sentence for the rest of my short life?
“What’s your idea?” Orynna said from behind me.
“Does it matter?”
“You know what you’re doing better than anyone on this station. They’re stupid not to listen to you. Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“The idea was that I’d flood the station with nitrous oxide. That would thin out the air enough to put the Rexnari on their asses. They’d pass out from oxygen deprivation.”
“Where would you get all the nitrogen from?”
“I’d strip it out of the nitrogen tetroxide fuel.”
Orynna tapped her fingers on her chin. Explosions echoed outside the room.
“Do it,” she said.
“Really?”
The room’s PA went on again.
“Callahan, where’s our extra O2?”
I listened to the blasts outside and the shouting in the control room. A soldier in the background yelled that corridor 84A had been breached. That was right down the hall from us.
“This is an order,” Zander growled. “Disobey and you will be court-martialed.”
I turned toward the control console. The dashboard strobed red with malfunctions, fires, pressure leaks. The fighting grew closer, the sizzle of plasma bolts ringing through the walls. I pictured the door blowing out, the Rexnari cackling and gutting us. I glanced at Orynna. Her eyebrows furrowed, and she ground her teeth as she wrung out her brain, concocting a way to save us. She was beautiful.
I looked back at the keyboard. This type of decision was why I’d signed up for vitals instead of defense. I couldn’t handle having the lives of the whole station crew resting on my shoulders. I could barely handle having my own life on my shoulders.
That’s when I realized that even with Zander shouting at me from the ceiling, this was on my shoulders. No matter what anyone told me to do, I had to flip the switches. I had to live or die with the consequences.
I exhaled and typed in the commands. Deep in the bowels of the station, compressors whirred to life, sending invisible gases whispering out into the station. All we could do was wait.
“Do you think the defense officers can hold them off?” I asked.
A giggle, mostly of the nervous variety, escaped from Orynna’s chest.
“Doubtful. The Rexnari are vicious.”
I chuckled.
“Yeah, we’re dead.”
“Probably.” She laughed and snorted. “I have to admit, I’m pretty at peace with that all of a sudden.”
She put her back against the wall and slid to the floor. It was the least graceful move I’d ever seen a Moirana make. I backed up next to her and did the same.
Orynna grinned.
“You hit the nitrous, didn’t you?”
“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t.”
The PA switched on again. Zander’s voice came out in a husky, bewildered “huh huh huh,” kind of guffaw.
“What the hell is going on, Callahan? We’re seeing elevated levels of nitrous oxide.” He wheezed out a laugh. “Fix this.”
“Nah,” I said. Orynna snorted beside me. “I’m going to let this play out. The nitrous will make the Rexnari pass out. I’ll dial it back once they’re all on the ground.”
“This is unauthorized! Huh huh.” He couldn’t scare me while he was chuckling like a stoner. “Do the… do the thing.”
I gave the PA the finger. Manic shouting rang out behind him as the station defense radioed in their progress.
“Huh, huh. It’s working?” Zander said. I don’t think he knew he still had the mic on. “They’re dropping? Huh, huh.”
“You’re welcome,” I barked at the ceiling. “Just drop my medal off in my mailbox. No big ceremony, please.”
Orynna punched me weakly in the shoulder.
“I knew you had it in you.”
I pressed my fingers into my cheek, trying to feel my face.
“You don’t hate me?”
“No,” she said, giggling, “but next time, let’s get further along before you try splunking.”
Where We Left Off
Nora returned from her shift volunteering at the career center to find Austin sprawled face-up in their backyard, the pointed crown of their Ganesh statue driven deep into the nape of his neck. His eyes and mouth had frozen open in shock. His skin was marbled and blue.
Nora dropped her purse and sprinted into the house to grab the bot pack from the medicine cabinet. She raced back to the garden and knelt beside him, not caring about the black soil staining her dress pants. After dislodging the statue from his brainstem, she opened the pack, hit the activation button, and dumped the glistening metallic dust into the wound, all while trying not to notice the pleading stare in his clouded eyes.
She cradled his head in her lap and rocked herself. Judging by the ladder splitting the juniper bushes and the watering can floating in the koi pond, she guessed he’d been climbing to their roof garden to water the zinnias.
After five minutes with no improvement, she called an ambulance.
She could already hear the voices at his first-life memorial.
He was so young, just 106.
They’d only been married for forty years. And they didn’t even have their kid yet.
Thank goodness they could afford backups. Bet he’ll want to buy some InCase stock after this mess.
No one would know about the excruciating choice he’d stuck her with.
*
She simmered throughout the memorial service, straining to conceal her burden. The guests acted cheerful, telling stories about Austin, sharing his worst jokes, comparing which of his books they’d liked the best. They munched cucumber sandwiches and cheese wedges and slurped down glasses of wine. The event resembled a workplace goodbye party, like Austin was going on sabbatical and would return in three years.
That’s how Austin had wanted the celebration to unfold. But Nora omitted the finale he’d planned.
*
After the party, still in her dress, feet aching from three hours in heels, Nora tossed herself onto their bed. On Austin’s nightstand rested the new spy thriller he’d recently started, his own book on the Amundsen mine disaster in Antarctica, and the Naturalist Manifesto, dog-eared on every other page. Atop it all, his watch ticked slowly and ceaselessly. She took a deep breath, inhaling the remnants of sweat and aftershave on his pillow.
She swatted the books to the floor and screamed until she ran out of air.
*
The next morning she retrieved Austin’s letter from their file cabinet, poured a mug of tea, and sat at the dining room table. The document had all the required biometric proofs of identity, signature, written testimony, and video recording. She raised the sheet in front of her face and tapped the video. Austin’s image sprang to life, reading from a written statement while seated in his favorite recliner.
“I, Austin Brown, being of sound mind and body, hereby forswear any heroic measures to save my life should my body or brain become incapacitated. Should my natural life come to an end, I forbid the activation of my digitized consciousness and its subsequent implantation in a bioframe.”
Seeing him speak so formally felt strange. Even in front of stiff, seated crowds at his readings, he’d always managed to convey the intimacy of a barstool chat. His rehearsed presentations came across as spontaneous confessions.
After dispensing with the legal portion of the recording, he chucked the script onto the floor and stared into the camera.
“I know this decision will disappoint some of you, and I apologize for that. But human life is meant to have an end. Our lives have no meaning if they stretch on forever.”
His voice had regained its natural tone, and his body loosened. He gestured emphatically.
“To rob a life of its finitude is to rob it of its essence. And I could not continue with an existence that I knew would have no end. So I have tried to live with an uncommon intensity, and I hope that effort has made my life a meaningful episode in all of your lives. To me, this is better for everyone than lingering on this plane of existence interminably, without passion and without purpose.”
Nora remembered hearing all of this when he first took up Naturalist philosophy a year and a half ago. At first he mentioned how he respected the way the Naturalists viewed the world, how they refused the safeguards that were unavailable to so many people, the people he and Nora had spent their lives helping. Soon he said the Naturalists had found the secret to happiness that eluded all their rich friends. Then he dropped this boulder on her, that he wanted to erase his backup and be allowed to die.
She’d humored him, as she’d done with all of the other currents of interest he’d gotten carried away on. And really, how often did people die anyway? So she agreed to honor his wishes and play this video so he could explain himself to his loved ones.
Still, she’d demanded that he complete one more annual upload and postpone deleting his backup for a year. That way nothing was irreversible before he became certain of his decision. For s
omeone as impulsive as Austin – he’d had six tattoos erased over the course of their marriage, including one that hadn’t lasted a year – this compromise seemed fair. He’d agreed, and Nora assumed that would be the end of it. She didn’t picture him going full-blown Naturalist, living out in the woods, herding goats.
At the time, the idea of letting himself die sounded like Austin’s usual headlong idealism. That was the quality that Nora had found so attractive in him in the first place. Now, as she listened to him ramble on about needing his life to end to have meaning, it all sounded so self-centered.
Had his whole life – the books he’d written about the world’s downtrodden, the unfailing friendliness that she’d taken for sincere graciousness, the relentless accumulation of new experiences and new stories that played so well at parties – had all of that been only to enlarge himself?
Had he really loved her? Or when they met as she was building the Altiplano clinic all those decades ago, had he found the perfect accessory, a do-gooder wife that he could cart around the world and show off at awards banquets?
And now this insistence on dying. The choice would immortalize him in certain circles, maybe win him that Pulitzer he’d always wanted, but had he considered for an instant how his passing would affect her?
*
Nora arrived at the spa early, so she walked around the reflecting pond out back as she waited for Louise to show up. Braced by the crisp spring air, her mind tumbled around her justifications to continue ignoring Austin’s wishes.
Was the Austin that recorded that video nine months ago the same one that had died in their backyard? After all, they’d had some great times since then, the vacation to Greece, the tango classes, that sweaty ten minutes in the backseat after Sybil and Jim’s wedding. He might have changed his mind?
Wasn’t 106 too young to make any important life decisions anyway? And was it his choice to make? Should he be allowed to decide that the mind floating in the InCase vault will never see the sunlight?
If it’s not him, why does she care? It’s a version of him. And he had made her a promise forty years ago, to be with her “from this day forward, until ever shall we part.”
