by Joseph Rhea
The others hadn’t gone to sleep quite so peacefully, but he had insisted in being there for each one. All except for AJ. If she had any last words before shutting her eyes, Wood wasn’t telling.
“I just want you to know,” Jake said as Wood began applying the patches to his arms, “that I appreciate what you have done for my crew. The crew that I consider you a part of.”
“Please, Captain,” he said. “I have no belief that this effort will help us in any way. I don’t believe there is some sort of lost colony out here, and I’m quite certain that I will never wake from this coma.”
“Then why?”
“Simple. While I still carry a certain amount of animosity towards you personally for bringing me out here, I hold no ill will toward your crew. They have, for the most part, treated me fairly in the past three weeks, and I felt I owed them something in return. From what I know of the human body, death by hypoxia, or lack of oxygen to the brain, is rather unpleasant. In a comatose state, the crew and I will feel nothing when our hearts stop beating. What better gift could I offer them?”
Jake shook his head then flipped the switch that activated the patches. “You also gave them hope,” he said. “And like it or not, you gave us all a chance to find my ‘lost colony,’ as you call it.” When he closed his eyes and didn’t reply, Jake added. “Goodnight, Dr. Wood, or goodbye if you prefer.”
Wood opened his eyes and looked at Jake. “If you do manage to find what you’re looking for out there, please remember to wake me. I would very much like to see it.”
As Jake walked out of the room, and the door sealed behind him, he heard the distant timer on the bridge go off, signaling that it was time for him to prepare for the next ballast reversal. As he headed towards the stairwell, he realized that it was probably a blessing that he would be so busy during the days ahead, maintaining the ship’s heading and adjusting ballast every few hours. It might help keep him from dwelling on the fact that he was now the only person awake on the ship. That he was the only conscious human this far outside of Civica Colony. He was alone as he had never been alone before.
Chapter 15
For four straight days and nights, Jake Stone sat alone on the bridge of the Rogue Wave piloting the ship all by himself. Then, at the bottom of one run, just before blowing the ballast tanks to start the next leg, he forgot to turn off one console before powering up another. Such a small thing, but it melted the thin wires that drew electricity from the hull. The ship sank the remaining few meters and settled on the muddy ocean floor.
While what little energy that was left in the capacitors slowly drained away, he was trying in vain to repair the melted wires when he heard a low, thumping sound. Thinking it was just his heart beating in the thin air and almost unbearable silence, he ignored it at first. However, its persistence made him investigate further, and he found that it was coming from Jessie’s earphones resting on her console.
When he placed them on his head, he heard the sound more clearly. There were words: Give me twenty years then twenty more. Tell me that when I die, you’ll die. Won’t you tell me that you want me too, that I’m all you need…
It was that song again, the song Captain Steele had used to try to lure him back, but how was he hearing it so far from Civica? When he saw from the console’s readout that he only had a few seconds of power left, he quickly triangulated the song’s origin. Directly ahead. The song was being broadcast by someone directly ahead.
The power failed at that moment, plunging him in total darkness. He managed to make his way down from the bridge, back to the dive locker to put on a hardsuit, the only source of oxygen left in the ship. Then he continued aft, weighted down by the bulk of the pressure suit, squeezing through several lockout doors, and finally climbed down into the shuttle. As the dash light flickered on, he silently thanked his engineer for having the foresight to keep a small amount of power in the shuttle’s batteries as a last-ditch effort. He quickly detached from the Wave and moved away. Without fresh air, he knew the only hope left for his crew was to find the source of the signal and bring back help quickly.
As he moved away from the ship at full speed, he saw something out his starboard viewport. It was an isopod, far larger than any they had spotted before, sliding through the water and heading directly for the Wave. As the monster reached his ship and engulfed it with its long arms, Jake banked hard to starboard and pushed the shuttle’s thrusters to maximum. He was determined to ram it, hoping that the action would force it to attack him instead. However, before he got close, the creature picked up the Rogue Wave as though it was a child’s toy and then moved quickly away. After a few minutes of chase, Jake slapped the console in frustration and killed the thrusters. There was no way to catch the creature and no way to stop it.
You’ll pay for that, a voice inside his head told him. It was his own subconscious talking to him, he knew, but the voice was decidedly feminine, which disturbed him. Usually it was his former captain, Marcus Cole’s voice that informed him of his shortcomings, his many failures as a captain. Was this perhaps Stacy’s voice he was hearing now? Had his dead girlfriend come back to berate him in his final hours?
“I know,” he said aloud.
You’ll pay for that! The voice repeated.
Jake found himself thrust back inside the Scimitar, but unlike all previous visits, this time he was no longer inside the interrogation room and no longer tied to a bed. He was standing unbound in a cargo bay that was easily big enough to contain his entire ship.
“You’ll pay for that,” a woman’s voice said. Jake turned and saw his jurors standing on the other side of the bay, their hoods still covering their faces.
“But I’m innocent,” he said. “Didn’t you see?”
“You abandoned them,” a male juror’s voice accused.
“I was trying to help them. Can’t you understand? I remember now.” Something began to hiss loudly, and then water came gushing out of openings on the walls. They were flooding the bay. “Wait! You can’t do this! I was trying to help them. I was…”
“You abandoned us,” the female juror said. “You abandoned us all, and you will pay for that.”
“Us?” Jake asked, trying to back away from the water. “What do you mean, us?” One by one, the jurors threw back their hoods, revealing their faces. It was his crew. Stacy was there too, as well as her father, and both of his parents.
I’ve lost it, he thought to himself. They left me in too long. My brain is corn mush.
Suddenly, the outer bay door opened, and the ocean came crashing into the bay. It knocked him over and then smashed him against the back wall. He tried to fight against it, but the ice-cold water quickly rose to the ceiling of the bay, removing any chance for escape. At the last second, he grabbed a mouthful of air and then closed his eyes and sank to the bottom. So this is it, he thought to himself.
No, Jake, Stacy’s voice said in the back of his mind. This is not it.
Then what is it? he asked silently.
It is time for you to return to us, she said. Time for you to breathe.
What?
“Breathe!” someone screamed. Jake gasped and opened his eyes and saw that it was Jane, not Stacy, staring down at him. “Breathe!” she yelled again.
“Stop yelling!” he tried to say, but the words stung his throat. His lungs burned like fire, and his chest felt as though someone was sitting on him. Then he realized that he was, in fact, breathing. He was breathing air. He was alive.
“How long?” he tried to ask.
“How long have you been here?” Jane asked, wiping sweat from her forehead. “You’ve been asleep on this cot since we found you this morning. I came in to check on you and saw that you weren’t breathing.”
“Asleep?” he repeated. The word didn’t make sense. He was on the Wave, then the shuttle, suffocating. Then he was inside the Scimitar, drowning in a flooded cargo bay, being punished by his own crew for abandoning them.
He felt himself drift
ing off, going back, but then Jane looked up and smiled. “There’s someone here to see you,” she said, waking him up again.
“The crew?” he asked, suddenly more alert. Every breath seemed to come a bit easier.
“No,” she said. “It’s not the crew.”
Panic hit him. “Are they…”
“No, Jake,” she assured him. “They’re not dead. You saved them. You saved us all.”
“Then who?”
Jane moved out of his field of vision. He tried to move his head, but then another face replaced hers. It was a face he didn’t recognize at first, an older woman with soft wrinkles around her gray eyes and nearly white hair pulled up in a tight bun. She reminded him of pictures of his grandmother. As she looked down on him, tears began to well up in her kind-looking eyes.
“Oh, my little Jacob,” she said. “I’ve missed you so much.”
Recognition hit like an electric shock. “Mom?”
“Yes, it’s me, sweetheart.”
His head began to spin. “How are you here? Am I dead?”
She smiled. “You’re not dead, and neither am I.”
He looked around and saw other people in the room. When his eyes could focus, he saw his jurors, his crew, standing in a circle around him. “Why are you doing this to me?” he yelled. “I am innocent.”
“Of course you are, Captain,” Jessie said.
“Welcome back, sir,” AJ said.
The room began to spin again, and this time he didn’t fight it. His last thought was a clear image of his mother on the last day he saw her alive. She kissed him on the forehead and said, “I’ll see you soon.”
Chapter 16
A day or so later, Jake was able to sit up by himself, although he was still too weak to walk or even stand on his own. He had slowly grown used to the idea that he was no longer in a hypoxic dream, that he really was alive, that he and his crew really had made it, against all odds, to the lost colony he had been searching for.
However, from what he had discovered in his first day there, it was nothing like he had imagined. For example, he was lying on a bed made of dry straw, covered by what seemed to be tattered, old clothing. The straw matched the walls and ceiling of the primitive hut he found himself in. This was no Capitol City apartment.
Since he hadn’t yet left his hut, he asked AJ about their new home when she stopped by to check up on him. She described it as a massive curved “tube” compared to the domed cities of Civica. She said that it contained every type of terrain imaginable, including mountains, lakes, and rivers, but no buildings whatsoever. It was also filled with animals of all kinds but no people other than his mother’s crew and the seven of them. Her description reminded Jake of the abandoned forest dome where they had found Jane, only apparently much, much larger.
His mother also stopped by several times, occasionally just sitting in a makeshift chair beside his bed and staring at him without speaking. It was probably difficult for her as well, not seeing her only child for so many years. For him, finding her alive and well after believing she was dead for half of his life, still felt like a dream.
When he asked her about his father, she turned away. When she could bring herself to talk, she told him that fifteen years earlier, after they left Civica as members of the westbound component of the Compass Expedition, their ship had also lost power at their Rubicon point. Then, just as their life support failed, an isopod came for them as well. It picked them up and carried them for several hours then placed them gently on a bare patch of sea floor. Then they all passed out and woke up there.
“There were twenty crew members aboard my ship,” she said, “but only fifteen of us woke up inside this place.” She looked directly at him. “Your father was one of the missing five, and we never saw any of them again.”
Jake had only a few memories of his father, and most of those involved him working long hours in the city’s hydroponics section. He hadn’t thought much about him over the years, but seeing his mother alive made his absence that much more real. To change the subject, he told her his own story, of how he watched an isopod pick up the Rogue Wave and carry it away and how it returned for him once his shuttle’s power was depleted.
“Like you, they left us alone while we had power,” she said, “but then rescued us when we needed them to.”
“Sounds like angels to me,” Raines said from the doorway.
“Good morning, Norman,” his mother said with a warm smile.
Raines smiled back then looked at Jake. “Feeling better?”
Jake nodded. “But, I’ll feel even better when I find out where my ship is.”
Raines nodded. “As would I, Captain, but I think it likely we’ll never see her again.”
That made him sit up in bed. “Why would you say that? She’s docked here somewhere, isn’t she? And the shuttle, too. How else did we get here?”
His mother then told him how she woke up one morning to find his crew members lying unconscious in the middle of their village. Then, several days later, Jake appeared in the exact same place. No footprints were found, and there was no sign of how they got there.
“This place has to have a dock somewhere,” he argued. “If we find it, we’ll probably find the Wave there.” Raines and his mother both exchanged glances. “What?” he asked.
“You haven’t been outside yet, dear.”
“How would seeing this place make a difference? This structure has to have a dock. We came in here through one, which means we can leave through it as well.”
His mother patted him on the arm and looked at Raines. “Most of us felt the same way when we first arrived here. There were so many who had spent their lives aboard ships, and it took awhile for some of them to accept the fact that this was our new home. That this was where we belonged.” She looked at Jake. “We are no longer ‘children of the sea,’ as the poem goes.”
Jake shook his head. “Maybe oxygen deprivation has killed too many of my brain cells, but neither of you are making any sense.”
Raines walked over to him and reached out a hand. “It’s time you see for yourself, Jake.”
It took the efforts of both Raines and his mother to help him stand and then walk awkwardly towards the door. When the thick cloth covering was drawn back, he had to shut his eyes because of the brightness. As he was led out, he felt heat on his forehead and shoulders. Then as his eyes slowly adjusted, he saw a view that could only exist in a rec room simulation.
The sky above him was blue and curved in a tubular shape just as he had been told, but the scale was beyond anything he had imagined. There were actually wispy clouds floating along the ceiling, and the sun was far too bright to look at directly, and it radiated heat so powerfully that he could feel it on the ground. To the left and right, he saw mountains rising up to meet the sides of the tube, and ahead of him was a vista that was hard to grasp. As his mother and the others had described, there were fields of crops and lakes of clear water and a river nearby with a small log bridge crossing it. And trees everywhere. Big trees, huge trees, and plants of all kinds. It was like life run amuck.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” his mother whispered.
“Overwhelming is a better word for it,” he replied.
“Does it look familiar?” Raines asked.
“Too soon,” his mother warned.
Jake looked at her. “Too soon for what?” Then he looked at Raines. “I’ve never been here. How could it look familiar?” Then it hit him. “You’re not trying to say…”
Raines smiled and then closed his eyes and faced the sun. “I’m not saying anything. I’m a scientist, and it’s not a very scientific idea.” He looked back at Jake. “But it is an interesting thought, isn’t it?”
Jake looked at the view before him, the sheer size of the place made the thought more real. A dozen domes as big as Capitol City could fit inside the tube, and it extended beyond his vision in both directions. It was possible that every man, woman, and child in Civica could fit in
side this single structure and not feel crowded.
“Do you remember the group of small flashing creatures that we passed through?” Raines asked.
Jake nodded. “We all thought they looked like stars.”
“Some of the legends of our ancestor’s journey from Earth claim that we traveled through a ‘sea of stars’ on our way to Civica.”
“Those same stories also said that Earth’s sun moved in a circle and that there was true night and day,” his mother said. She pointed to the sun, and Jake could just make out the track it ran along. “Our world is not just a tube, it’s a circle, a torus.” She made the shape with her hands. “As the sun moves along its track, it disappears around the far curve in the late afternoon, only to reappear from the other side in the morning.”
Jake felt his knees go limp, and it wasn’t just because of his body’s weakness. He had Raines help him sit down on the moss-covered ground. He reached down and pulled up some of the moss and massaged it in his hands. “So this is Earth?”
“There is no way to know for sure,” Raines said. “But I have always suspected that the Pre-Fall world we call Earth was actually another colony, located in our ocean but far from Civica. It was actually one of the reasons we launched the Compass Expedition, to search the ocean for humanity’s birthplace.” He sat down beside Jake. “However, I also felt quite certain that it was destroyed during the Fall of Man; why else would our ancestors have left it?”
“This place doesn’t look destroyed,” Jake replied, smelling the moss. “In fact, it looks like a giant garden.”
“Exactly,” his mother said as she sat down beside him. “Exactly what we thought when we first saw this place, which is why we named it Eden Colony.”
