by Lee S. Hawke
I didn’t have a phone left, having drained all its battery long ago. But the house had an ancient webcam and a laptop that looked like it had been used more as a table ornament than for work. Remarkably, it still had power. I positioned the webcam at myself and put the Coder on the desk in front. Time crawled past as the webcam blinked, connecting. I felt each second brush by me, irrevocably gone. The moaning grew louder. My palms began to sweat. As soon as the light snapped on, constant, I began. “My name is Aisha Oneko,” I told the world. “Elewa, I’m sorry. I’ll see you on the other side.”
The moans reached a crescendo. I twisted the Coder sharply, fixed my eyes on the air in front of me, and hoped with all my might. Remarkable, that my capacity to hope had survived. I knew that Elewa, still running somewhere, would have probably called it insane rather than remarkable. I supposed it wouldn’t matter soon enough.
The space between my eyes began to hurt. I rubbed it, squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, and then blinked. The air seemed to ripple for a moment with dancing lights, and then it stilled. Nothing. I stared at the Coder, betrayed.
My head began to really hurt.
And then an electric arc ripped outwards from my neocortex, more agonising than the worst pain I had ever imagined. Instinctively I divorced myself from my body, watching the arc kick down each muscle, activating and shortening. Dimly, I tasted the feeling of that pain, like seasickness mixed with the bodily force of an earthquake. And the pattern of that ripple, and the way the world spun, made me realise what was happening.
The door was opening inside my mind.
There was no need to crawl through. I closed my eyes and gathered every part of me, from my fingertips to my toes, and leapt. The last sensation I had before I left was my body falling. Then, presumably, I crashed.
But in another world, this brave new dimension I had opened the gate to, I was flying.
Memories rushed past me like the wind. My love for my mother, my predilection for mixing coffee with tea, my adoration of vinyls. They dashed themselves to pieces against a cliff I couldn’t see, sinking like rain. At precisely the same time, I felt new points of awareness brush against me like questing leaves. People who had made it through. And one of them felt tantalisingly familiar.
Jada? I asked.
I… that name sounds familiar, she said. She sounded puzzled, but it was fleeting. Welcome.
It was her. Through my fading bits of memory, I recognised the rough tenor of her voice. Sadness pooled in me for a moment until it was swept away by another consciousness, wrapped around all of us, overlapping like petals. Someone who spoke a different language, one that I had never heard before on Earth. The language of Lemuria, of freedom from everything. Time. Memories. Self.
Understanding caught me by the throat. The Others fed on the annihilation of the soul. The existence of Lemuria was built on the annihilation of the Self. A distant wash of horror passed through me, but it was distant, and soon forgotten.
If this was life, I would take it. I closed my eyes and let go. And point by point, piece of data by data, they left me. The scent of the hot sun after rain. The scrape of concrete against my cheek. My mother always saving me the last piece of kashata. My father smiling.
The last thing to go was the image of Elewa’s eyes. Forever stricken, forever betrayed. It left me, and I divided, and I became free.
DIVISION
I’m doing a routine check of Engine Demeter when Fern calls me. She’s sobbing so hard down the line that I can barely hear her. I cradle my ear and mentally crank the connection down, for the sake of my throbbing eardrums. “Slow down,” I plead. “What’s happening?”
There is a pause punctuated by the sound of staggered breaths. And then Fern says, “It’s Julie. She… she collapsed in the Reel.” She breaks, swallows salt. “She’s… she’s at the medical bay. So am I. Please come.”
The world doesn’t stop. Demeter whirrs away contentedly in front of me. To the left and far above, on the other side of the ship where the medical bay is, I know that Aladdin is also performing on spec. One of the things I love about The Mary Shelley is that whoever built it wrote the names into the diagrams. No Engine A or Engine B for The Mary Shelley. No. It’s Aladdin and the Blue Fairy and Chikarataro and Demeter. It’s Eglè and Frau Trude and the Golden Goose. It always makes me feel like I’m working with something magical, and I guess I am.
“Dayani? Are you there?”
No I’m not. I’m with the ship as it hurtles through space at a speed I can’t comprehend. I’ve always loved working here, but now I realise that I’m in its heart, its guts, feeling my whole world vibrate with its power. It’s like I’m in the womb myself, and if I leave this safe place now a part of me will shatter forever.
“Sorry,” I hear myself say. And I am. “I’m doing a scan. I can’t come right now.”
Somewhere, a distant part of me realises that this is a betrayal. She knows it too. The beauty of technology means that I hear the sharpness of her indrawn breath as if she were right next to me. She doesn’t say anything else. The connection cuts off and I continue with the scan like I’ve done it a thousand times before. Maybe I have, I haven’t counted.
* * *
I continue the scan. Engine Demeter uncoils in front of me, larger than an Earth house. She’s in perfect health. When it’s done, I hand over my screen to someone. Probably Patrick. And then I walk off in the opposite direction to the medical bay. I pass people, nodding to them like an automaton. The Mary Shelley is one of the largest passenger ships in this galaxy. I could keep walking for a long time.
I do.
But eventually, I have to turn back. Rations come every simulated afternoon. I’m late already. That little failure touches off a cascade of other failures in my head, and before I can stop it I’m thinking about everything else that I’ve screwed up. About my colleagues who would’ve had to scramble to cover my shift when I walked out. About Fern standing alone in a disinfected ward with our daughter. About Julie herself. This morning I got up early, as I always do, while she slept in. I stopped kissing her forehead years ago, but I still pause by her cabin and look in and smile and remember that I used to do it.
I wish I’d gone in.
* * *
I piece it together slowly on my walk back, finally turning my connector back on. I have a slew of messages and frantic voice calls. I knead them together like yeasted dough, their content doubles in size inside my head. Julie and her friends were in the Reel. They finished a big exam last night, they were celebrating. They chose some space adventure, some stupid thing that kids do. All of her friends, even Archer, the guy she told me was the love of her life, were so caught up in virtual reality that they didn’t notice she’d passed out until it ended. I think of the preciousness of time and how it could have saved her, how she wouldn’t be brain dead now if they had only noticed, and I decide that hatred is one thing grief cannot kill. In fact, hatred kills everything else first and then squats in the centre of my face like a dragon, ready to incinerate anyone who crosses me.
* * *
The hatred buoys me until I see Fern in our cabin. It’s a small cramped hole of a place when the bed is unfolded. Which it is now. Fern sits on one side. She looks like she hasn’t moved for hours. She’s staring at the wall as if it’s a textbook. I don’t know what it’s telling her to do.
“Honey,” I say. It comes out choked and jagged for such a sweet word.
“Dayani,” she says to the wall, and even though it hurts, I think I deserve it.
When we decided to have Julie, I couldn’t carry her. We sat down and the hard numbers stared back at us. I made twice as much as Fern. We wouldn’t have been able to feed ourselves, let alone another mouth, if I’d been the one to hold her. And so we both went for the operation, and they took eggs from the two of us and made them one. And then I squeezed Fern’s hand when she went into the theatre, and when she came out again they’d put it inside her. And sheltered by her body, the o
ne cell that was us divided and became two, and then three, and then four hundred million, and then they divided into parts. Lungs, heart, brain, mouth. And finally, when she was ready, Julie divided from Fern and there were three of us.
I sit down gingerly on my side of the bed and look at my other half. Dimly, I know what I should be saying. I should be reaching for her and apologising for leaving her to face the hospital bed alone, telling her that I just didn’t know what to do and I’m sorry and I’ll never do it again. But grief is a funny thing. My arms move, but as they extend all they feel is the empty space between us, the place where we used to be three, and that jagged gaping hole that means we can’t be one again.
My hands drop to stroke the bedsheets. Fern’s shoulders drop in defeat. We both sit separately, united in our uselessness.
* * *
Fern and I, we met at the Reel.
It was an old, broken-down thing, on an old, broken-down ship. Not The Mary Shelley. I can barely remember the name, I think it might have been The Carmody. We were watching some stupid sci-fi love story - I came in for the love story, she came in for the sci-fi - and we accidentally brushed against each other. It was odd, coping with the second set of senses. For a moment, we were both jerked out of virtual reality and had to deal with our awkward teenage bodies. Ever since, whenever we walk into the same room we can feel each other, as if we’re the same body. The left side reminding itself of the right by clasping hands.
Now, I can’t stand being in the cabin when Fern is there, and I can’t stand being in the cabin when she’s not. So I go to work early and come back late. Even then, I can’t escape the grief trailing down over my shoulders and weighting my boots. Everyone is awkward at work. At least the engines can’t be awkward with me. Chikarataro becomes my favourite, distant from everything else associated with The Event. I can work on it for hours, checking each valve and piston for wear and tear. And then, since it’s mostly self-repairing and running, I can stare at the screen diagnostics and watch the flow of energy, back and forth, back and forth.
It’s like watching how everyone else grieves.
First there’s Fern, of course. When we got on, she picked up work with The Mary Shelley’s steward, so everyone knows and loves her for being the one who gets things organised with a wry smile and a warm joke that laughs at no-one. So there’s an endless parade of people to our cabin who have just the right amount of influence to pull favours. At one point, when we stop for harbour at Gygax-20, we even get flowers. They’re an otherworldly blue-orange the size of a fist, made up of thousands of individual petals, like cells. She holds them and strokes them and doesn’t cry, but her eyes get softer. I smell them afterwards on her fingers. They smell like an afternoon of whisky and sadness. She arranges them above our bed and I get hayfever. She tries to speak to me, but when I can’t say much back, she invites more and more people over and bathes in the shared grief until the only times we are alone are late at night, lying light years apart from each other on the same bed.
Then there’s Archer. He doesn’t come to our cabin, but Fern forces me to come with her. He looks like he’s been crying razors. He looks too young, a child. But Julie was even younger. A whole 9 months. When he answers the door, back bowed like he’s been broken, the hatred rears and I want to slap him. He could have noticed her go. He could have saved her. I could kill him for that alone.
I neither kill nor slap him in the end. But Fern tells me off for not saying a word to him. And then tells me off for not saying a word to her. I nod and listen and feel the words build up in abstract behind the cavern of my mouth. I watch as he speaks at the ceremony after Fern and says trite, stupid, teenage things. I watch as he picks himself up and one day, four weeks later, when we pass each other in The Mary Shelley I see that he’s smiling. I almost stop him then to tear it off his face, but I don’t.
Then there’s Carrie and Adi. Julie’s sisters-from-other-mothers. They come when Fern opens the door and cry a lot together. We tell each other stories about Julie, stories that we all know because we were all there for them. The way Julie ate Fern’s birthday cake when she was three. The way Julie tricked Carrie into meeting up with her crush. The way she would always beg Adi to brush her hair when she was sick. We tell them so many times that they become empty echoes of themselves, because we all know that there are no more stories to tell.
Then Carrie stops coming and I don’t see her again, even at the funeral. And Adi finally gets the guts to sign up to zero-G training, the way Julie always told her that she should. They were meant to do it together. But Adi’s at the age now when she only has a few more years before apprenticeships. The age that Julie will never reach. I see her occasionally when she comes back to the ship and while she might not be happy, she’s coping. They’re all coping.
And judging me for not.
But it’s my daughter. My heart. How am I meant to cope at all?
* * *
I find something that looks like coping. The viewing deck. Turns out that while windows have and always will be needless structural weaknesses, most humans find it hard to handle being locked up in a box for months or even years of their lives. So they built in a deck where visual feedback from the ship’s sensors collide together and show us the outside on a beautiful, vibrant, three hundred and sixty degree screen. I kick away the chairs and lie on the floor and look up. In space, the stars look different. So far apart. It’s easier to focus on the dark expanses between them than to search for that pinprick of distant light.
Fern hates it in here. She can’t take that darkness. She says it sucks her in, makes her feel even more alone. Small. Insignificant. But I need this sense of false perspective, this feeling that life is staring into a void where everything so immeasurably larger than a human life - the planets, moons, stars - feel like figments of my imagination.
Maybe it’s not so false.
* * *
Julie wasn’t like me. She didn’t like working with machines. She liked people, and they liked her. And I loved her, because even though she didn’t like working with machines, she’d follow me sometimes and let me point out the different parts to her.
But something happens to me, in these weeks after The Event. After they turn off her life support. I struggle with it, the anger. We humans can travel to the stars, but we still haven’t quite figured out how to fix our own brains when they fail on us.
“Hey Dayani, could you pass me the multitool?”
My own brain feels heavy, like I’m carrying around a constant, numbing thunderstorm. I catch myself wondering how she felt at the moment of The Event. I remember hearing faint echoes, a doctor telling us that it was sudden, that she probably hadn’t felt too much pain. I don’t believe her. She was dying. My baby girl died. She died alone, with the idiots around her not even realising that she’d gone, and she died afraid, and she died with me twenty minutes away.
“Hey, Dayani!”
I blink. “Yes?”
“Pass me the multitool, will you?”
I pass him the multitool. He takes it and starts talking without looking at me. “I’ve been trying to get your attention for the last bit. Are you all right?”
I snort. “No.”
The engine clicks and whirrs, almost in pleasure. He steps back, eyes still fixed away. “I’m sorry about Julie. She seemed like a lovely girl.”
He didn’t know her at all. The mix of fury and sadness in my stomach makes me feel like puking. “She was,” I say through clenched teeth.
He doesn’t notice. “Maybe they’ll let you have the licence next time,” he says. He gestures limply at the air. “Because of this.”
That’s enough to jerk me out of my funk. I become alive for the first time in a while, to cope with this new threat. My jaw drops. “What are you talking about?”
He’s gone red. He meant well. He should stop. I should stop, but I don’t. I get in his face. “What are you talking about, Pat?”
He looks down at his feet. He
mumbles at speed, the words falling out, each one self-imploding as it hits the air. “Nothing nothing nothing. It’s just that, aw, well, it’s just that I know it’s hard for you to get the motherhood licence with this job. But maybe they’ll make an exception for you now.”
He must see something in my face, because he stops. And then he pales. And then he leaves, muttering something about checking in on Eglè.
I’m left shaking, clutching the ridge of Chikarataro like it’s a lover. Julie was my daughter. I didn’t carry her, but I was her mother. And the implication that she could ever be replaced…
I don’t see the warning shimmers on my screen, or hear the automated voice or its error codes. I don’t realise that I should be doing something, flipping switches, calling an alert, letting the engine cool down, switching to the back-ups. I don’t think of anything until Patrick knocks the screen out of my hand an eternity later and grabs it, and that’s how I get two weeks’ forced leave.
* * *
I don’t know what to do with myself. And Fern doesn’t know what to do with me.
“Maybe you should go to the medical ward. See someone. Talk about it. That’s what they’re there for, after all.”
“I’m not sick.”
She’s getting ready for work, I’m still lying on the bed that marks our division. We haven’t touched each other in weeks. Maybe months. I feel like a different person from the woman who used to wrap her arms around Fern’s hips and fall asleep in the cradle of her stomach. I sense the annoyance leaking from her like tears. “Then maybe you should get up. Do something at least.” She pauses by the door and looks back at me. I look at her like I haven’t seen her for a while. Grief has aged her, I don’t remember her looking so old. Her skin is paper-thin where it gathers around the valleys of her cheeks. “And you are sick, Dayani.”
