Mental Contact

by Beth Martin

  “But you shouldn’t. You’re just in my head.” I felt silly trying to rationalize with her, but I couldn’t trust what she said if it was just my brain making things up.

  She sighed and turned toward me and glared. “I’m not just in your head. Like right now, I’m standing here in front of you.”

  “But you’re a delusion. You’re not physically there.”

  “Look, we don’t have time for a philosophical discussion on the difference between perception and reality. We need to get down there and take the train. This line will lead us almost all the way to the dusk belt.”

  I nodded in agreement. With no water left, I would die in a few days from dehydration. There was no way I would survive on my own, so I decided to go along with whatever Lola had planned. She descended down one of the staircases, her hair and clothing fluttered behind her.

  “So how does this work?” I asked. “You said engines follow the lines in these trenches?”

  “Yes. Back when the stations were in operation, the subway trains followed a schedule, a new one coming every few minutes.”

  “And now?”

  “We’ll have to find our own.” She walked up to the edge of the platform and jumped gracefully down into the ditch. I climbed down as well and walked with her, following the tracks. “There should be one not far from here.”

  The tunnel grew darker and after a hundred or so yards I pulled out my flashlight to see farther into the blackness.

  “See where the paths fork up ahead?”

  “Yeah,” I said, following her pointing finger with my eyes.

  “That’s where the off-duty trains would get parked. Now they’re all off duty, but the point is there should be one over there.”

  “So why did these stations get shut down?”

  “You saw how many people were out there on the surface.”

  I scratched my chin. “Right. But then why were the stations constructed in the first place?”

  She flashed me a smile and crossed her arms. “Now you’re starting to ask the right questions.”

  “So, why were they?”

  “There’s one.” She pointed ahead at a boxy chunk of metal. It almost looked like a passenger ship, just without the wings or thrusters. There were windows set in a line along the side, and the only entrance was high up on the side. I had to hoist myself up to crawl through and get inside.

  “How do we make it go?” I asked once Lola had also lifted herself inside.

  “Through that door,” she said, pointing to the end of the train. I walked down the length of the passenger car and through the door. There was a dark panel and two large levers.

  “Shit,” I said. “I still can’t see holograms. There’s no way I can make this work.”

  Lola chuckled. “This is pretty old technology. You’ll be fine. Use that.” She gestured to a small switch next to the panel I hadn’t noticed.

  I flicked the switch, and lights turned on behind and around the panel as well as behind us in the main part of the car. The panel showed an arc of numbers with a line pointed to 0 and an illuminated red square with the letter P in it.

  “The left lever is the brake. Push that one forward first.” I did as she said and an awful sound of metal rubbing on metal made me shudder. “The right one is power. When you throw it forward, it makes contact with the charged rail and the engine will move.”

  “You think this thing still works?” I asked, skeptical that this old piece of junk could move without falling apart.

  “We’ll just have to find out.” She moved to the side of the small room and held onto a handle on the ceiling. I looked up and saw a similar handle above me. I went ahead and grabbed hold of it with my left hand before throwing the second switch with my right.

  The train lurched forward. The little needle shot up from 0 to 15, then kept climbing higher and higher. “Holy shit,” I gasped as I watched the sides of the tunnel whip past us through the windows. The sporadic lights lining the tunnel raced across the windows.

  Lola let out a hearty laugh. “Not used to traveling with other objects nearby?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Look at our speed.”

  I looked down at the panel: 40 miles per hour. “We’ve got to be going faster than that.” Even Paradido easily surpassed Mach speed.

  “Nope. But it is faster than you can go on your feet, so we’ll make better time this way.”

  I did the calculation in my head. If we had to travel 1500 more miles, even in the engine it would still take a day and a half to get to the dusk belt.

  “Let’s not go to the dusk belt,” Lola said, yet again reading my thoughts.

  “Where else can we go?”

  She smiled, staring through the window. “Home. I want to go home.”

  •••

  We had been traveling on the subway train for two full days. Since there was no reason to stay in the control booth, I had tried to relax in the main passenger area. I laid across three of the molded chairs, but found it impossible to get comfortable. I kept my hands over my face, trying to block out Lola and whatever she was doing.

  The only thing I had drank since getting on the engine was my own piss after putting it through the filter. Even then, it was uncomfortably warm and tasted off. Without sufficient fluids, I had a hard time getting the ration bars down. I was probably losing weight, yet somehow my body felt heavier and harder to move each day.

  Lola rushed at me and grasped my arm. The physical contact surprised me. The time she had touched me and disappeared while I was in the academy flashed through my mind. “Jake! We’re almost there.”

  I went with her into the control room, and she guided me through the steps of slowing down the engine. As I applied the brake, I saw an illuminated station in the distance. I was able to get the train car to stop at the platform. Here, the doors lined up perfectly with the edge of the platform so I was able to step out easily without climbing down the side.

  Lola exited behind me then dashed toward one of the halls. “This way,” she said as she ran, her bare feet slapping against the smooth, concrete floor. I chased after her, trying my best to keep up.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I told you,” she said. “I’m going home.”

  Weaving through the halls, we came to a vertical tunnel with a rickety ladder similar to the one that I had first used to go underground. She nimbly climbed up and I came right after her.

  Once on the surface, she kept going. With each stride, her feet kicked up another cloud of sand. I tried to keep up, but my body felt weak. I desperately needed water and real food.

  My thoughts were racing. I hadn’t seen her eat or drink a single thing while we were traveling, and she was still somehow able to keep up this breakneck pace. The only way that was possible was if she wasn’t real. Delusions didn’t need to eat or sleep.

  But delusions also didn’t have a notion of home or know about secret underground transit systems.

  My head started to ache, and flashes of white crossed my vision. “Don’t you dare,” she yelled from ahead. “Focus! We’re going to make it.”

  I tried to block out my doubts and focus on keeping up with her. I hadn’t had a chance to even pull out my flashlight—I was navigating completely by starlight.

  Something seemed strange, and I paused a moment to slow down and take notice. The sky. There were too many stars. Far too many and much too bright. I shouldn’t have been able to see this well on the dark side. I looked up and found Orion. His belt was speckled with more than just three points. His chest was adorned with extra pin points of light, and there was an extra cluster of stars at the end of his arrow.

  I stopped dead as my eyes widened. That was the definitive proof I needed. I had fallen into complete madness. There was no more hope left for me.

  “They’re supposed to be there,” she called. Her voice sounded like it was coming from far away. “They’ve always been there.”

  A profound feelin
g of deja-vu filled me. All of these constellations and clusters of light felt familiar, yet my rational brain told me that it was all wrong.

  “Jake!” she yelled, her voice vibrating through my entire brain. I looked down from the sky to where she had been running. The sand was no longer red, but a mix of every color.

  A sense of urgency filled me, and I ran faster than I’d ever run before. Even though I couldn’t see her, I knew exactly where she had gone.

  I was going too fast when I noticed the ground dropped off in a cliff ahead of me. My arms and legs flailed out, kicking up clouds of red sand as I tried to slow down. I looked around me, desperately trying to see where Lola had gone, but tiny particles stung my eyes. There was nothing to hold onto so I slid over the edge of the cliff while grasping only handfuls of sand.

  I laid on my back for a while and gazed at the black sky. It looked how it was supposed to, all of my favorite constellations twinkling above me. I was still alive. The soft sand had cushioned my fall. To my left, the sheer cliff rose high into the sky, taunting me.

  I had entertained my delusions for too long. There was no underground station. I hadn’t ridden a train to get here. My brain had filled in the gaps and made Lola and the whole subway journey feel real. If I survived long enough to reach civilization, I would go to the nearest medical center and get back on my medication. But I wouldn’t make it. My water pouches had stopped refilling and had been empty for over a day.

  When I sat up, my body cast a long shadow which danced and stretched endlessly through the sand. I turned to see the source of the light. There were two bright orbs bobbing above the ground surrounded by darkness.

  “Hey, here he is,” a voice said from behind the lights. From the uncoordinated movements of the lights, I figured there were two people holding flashlights heading toward me.

  I could have run, but instead I squinted while staring at the two approaching figures. I couldn’t see them well at all, but from their voices, I figured they were both young women.

  “Told you that pod must have had someone in it,” the second voice said.

  “At least I didn’t dismiss it as a meteorite.”

  “You all right?” the second voice said, finally addressing me.

  I rubbed my eyes, the flashlights too bright to keep trying to look at the two women. “As good as anyone stranded in the barrens, I guess.”

  “I’d say better since you’re still alive,” the first voice said. Her voice was lower and huskier than the other woman’s. “And lucky, too, since we’re here to save you.”

  “I don’t need rescuing,” I said as I got up to my feet and brushed the sand off of my coveralls.

  “Uh, yeah you do,” the second woman said. “We’re over 2000 miles away from the dusk belt. I’m surprised you’re still alive, to be honest.”

  The two women turned and started walking in the direction they had come from. I followed them, knowing I wouldn’t come across another person on the dark side of Zeta. The first woman asked, “How did you even get out here? I haven’t seen any ships come near Zeta.”

  In all that time following Lola, I had completely forgotten about Paradido. “My ship was off-course. I was the only one who escaped.”

  The second woman shined her light in my face. “Which ship? Was it that delivery ship?”

  I shook my head. If they didn’t know which ship, they wouldn’t be able to look up who I was and learn about my condition. I desperately wanted to find out what had happened to Paradido. If it got sucked into Trappist, it would burn up and I would be the sole survivor. However, if any of the other crew members escaped, they’d be able to testify to my mental condition on the ship, guaranteeing my future of being locked up in the institute for the rest of my life. I could ask these two woman what had become of my ship and crew, but didn’t want my interest to give me away, so I held my tongue.

  “We had a hell of a time finding you. This is nowhere near your pod. We flew all over the desert looking for you.”

  Had I really traveled that far? Maybe the subway was real…

  “Here we are,” the woman with the huskier voice said. They had a small passenger ship with only enough seats for six people. As they climbed into the ship’s well-lit interior, I could finally see what my rescuers looked like. The first one with the husky voice had olive skin and dark brown hair that fell in tight ringlets. She turned to face me where I had taken a seat in the back. “You better buckle up.”

  From the look of it, this shuttle couldn’t possibly go fast. My guess was that it wouldn’t even reach Mach. I buckled myself in just to make the two women happy.

  “Let’s get going,” our pilot with ringlets said. A roar of sound filled my ears as our vehicle lifted off the ground. I strained to see what the control panels looked like. The edges of the controls were just barely visible. It was more pronounced than the logo on the entertainment panel, but still not completely there like it should have been. We jolted forward with a kick, though it was nothing like lifting off on Paradido.

  The other woman who had fair skin and jet-black hair said, “It’s going to take a while to reach the other side. Get comfortable.”

  “How fast does this thing go?”

  “Three hundred miles per hour,” the pilot answered.

  I tried to convert the number in my head into something that made sense. I must have looked confused, because the fair-skinned woman laughed and said, “That’s just shy of Mach one half.”

  “Wow.” I was surprised the shuttle could stay off the ground at such a low speed. Of course, I was accustomed to interplanetary flights and didn’t spend much time traveling around a single planet.

  “You’re used to riding a spaceship,” she added. “I’m sure that goes a lot faster.”

  “I traveled in a warp ship when I was a kid. That went damn fast.”

  “Why would anyone want to travel warp?”

  “I was going to be a warp pilot.” I stared out of the little window, but there wasn’t really anything to see.

  “That’s even worse.”

  I sighed and looked down at my lap. “My father was the pilot on Spaceship Titanium. I wanted to be just like him.”

  She didn’t say anything after that.

  “Why didn’t you?” our pilot asked.

  They both looked back at me, waiting for my answer. A pilot of all people should know how difficult it is to become a warp pilot. Maybe flying vehicles this small didn’t require much instruction.

  “It’s complicated.” I looked back out the window and remained quiet for the rest of our flight.

  •••

  My rescuers landed the craft at the airfield on the bright side. I stared out the window at the landscape around me—all of the ground in Zeta was the same red sand. Even the sidewalks and roadways were paved in red. Everything here was vibrantly colored: deep green foliage lined the roadways and building fronts, and the cloudless sky had a deep blue hue.

  The three of us got off the little ship and the two women escorted me through the window-lined halls of the spaceport to a small room with a plaque on the door which said ‘Security.’

  “We found a stray,” said my pale-skinned rescuer.

  There was an older woman with frizzy white hair at a large wooden desk peering at a panel through a wearable vision enhancement set. She glanced up at me with muddy green eyes. “You care to explain how you ended up in the barrens of my planet, son?”

  I desperately wanted to snap at this woman for calling me “son.” Instead, I held my tongue. I just needed to keep a low profile and angering someone with power wouldn’t help. “The ship I work on was off course. I was able to escape in an emergency pod.”

  “That would have been the Paradido. What’s your name?” She had her hands poised over her panel, ready to look me up.

  All the blood drained from my face. I had to think fast to avoid being found out. “James Cory,” I fibbed.

  I could see her scroll through a few portraits on the p
anel. I saw my silhouette whiz past before she stopped on Officer Cory’s profile. I held my breath as she examined the picture and description. We both had dark hair and brown eyes. We weighed about the same. I hoped she wouldn’t figure out that I wasn’t the same man as the hologram in front of her.

  She gave me a sideways glance. “You look a lot older than twenty-four.”

  “I’ve been wandering around the barrens for days. I’m just happy I’m not dead.”

  She pressed her hand down onto the panel, turning off the hologram. “Touché. You may leave.”

  My rescuers led me out of the office and back to the bustling halls of the spaceport. “Good luck,” the woman with curly hair said.

  “Wait. Do you know what happened to my ship?”

  “It disappeared.” The older woman shrugged her shoulders. “It was there, and then it wasn’t.” My rescuers walked away, leaving me there in the middle of the hall, completely dumbfounded.

  I looked down at my watch. It only displayed universal time and not local Trappist time. No matter which time I referenced, it had been a while since I had gotten any sleep. I walked down the spaceport until I reached the exit, then kept walking down the road.

  Once I got to the center of town, I continued roaming until I found a cheap hotel. It made sense to have the spaceport in the middle of the light side, but this was also the hottest spot on the planet, getting constant direct light from straight above. I was starting to sweat and felt weak. I desperately needed to take a shower. Then I could get some sleep and work on a plan once I felt refreshed.

  I checked in, yet again using Officer Cory’s name. The hotel had an open design. This town didn’t get a lot of rain or wind, so exterior walls weren’t always necessary. At least the rooms themselves were enclosed. As I approached my room, the door made a clicking sound and automatically unlocked. I slipped in and manually locked the deadbolt and privacy chain.

  The room was bright and white with a large window at the far end. I walked through the room to the window and pulled down the blackout shades. I’m sure the shades were automated, as there was a panel set on the desk to control every aspect of the room, but I could only half see the panel and didn’t want to bother.