by E A Carter
He continues to work at the box with the lever, prising at a narrow opening with infinite patience. I can't help but wonder at his apathy to another human being after being alone for so long.
'Because I wanted to open this box,' he says without taking his eyes from his work, 'and it's taken a long time to find a way to do it.'
'Was it your box?' I want to find out how he ended up here, what he knows of this place, and if he ever saw Ryan—or what was left of him.
'No,' he answers with another grunt. 'I found it.'
'So you have no idea what's inside?'
He doesn't answer, just keeps working at the box, methodical and determined.
'What if it's nothing?'
'It won't be nothing,' he says, terse.
I give up and leave him to his task. It's clear he isn't in the mood for a chat, at least not until he opens his damn box.
I sink onto my knees and wait. A hundred questions speed through my mind in stark contrast to the slowness of his work. I hope whatever is inside will be worth it.
My gaze returns to the sky. The stars continue their procession along their stoic paths, communicating a language I never learned. All I can do is watch and admire them, ignorant of their eternal secrets.
A quiet creak comes from the box, followed by a slow exhalation of a breathe held for years. With something approaching reverence Amadi reaches inside and pulls out a severely cracked clear container, and examines it from every angle. Inside, locked in place by the clear material is a dark metal sphere outlined with indentations and lines. Whatever it is, it's impossible to guess what its purpose is, especially without any light. I begin to curse the darkness when the shadows ease just a touch. A moment later, the shadows lessen again. Thinking it's a trick of my mind, I glance at the horizon. A smear of pale blue tinged with streaks of orange heralds something I thought I would never see again.
I catch Amadi watching me. 'If you thought the dark was bad,' he says, unsmiling, 'just wait for the light.'
And so my first dawn arrives, and one by one, the stars die.
With the sun comes humid warmth, sudden, heavy and brewing with insect life. We sit in the shade of the strut as a multitude of bugs awaken from wherever they've spent their long, silent night.
Amadi picks up a black-shelled beetle the size of his thumb. 'I missed these. Tons of protein.' He pops it into his mouth and the crunch of its shell makes me gag. He plucks another from the depths of the vines and holds it out to me. 'Want one?'
I shake my head and look away.
'I know it's a cliché, but they really do taste like chicken.'
I get up and submerge myself in the broiling heat of the sun so I don't have to hear the crunching. I don't bother to tell him he probably doesn't even know what real chicken tastes like, at least not like I do. One of the perks of my last months in Alpha VII. He's a loud eater, so I still hear it. I hope when I turn around there won't be bug guts on his beard.
'So, Cassandra,' he says when the crunching at last ends. I turn. No bug guts, thank god. He leans back against the vine-covered strut, and crosses his legs at his ankles. 'What's your story?'
'My story?' My attention swings to a weird kind of bee with a thin beak like a hummingbird flitting past into the basin of the city. 'Same as yours. I was put into a pod to sleep for a thousand years. Woke up ten thousand years later. Walked here in the dark. Heard you scream. The end.'
He smiles under that rat's nest of his beard. I get the feeling he was handsome once. Probably also had a lot of power if he was already in a pod several days before the event. But I have no intention of letting him know I know hardly anyone else was frozen, or who I was, or who was supposed to be waiting for me—and wasn't. Amadi has the easy confidence of someone who's used to being admired, but all I see is a man who looks like he's been dragged backwards through seven levels of hell. But, as shit as his company is turning out to be, at least I'm not alone anymore. And it's not dark. Or cold. It's enough to take the edge off wanting to hang myself, for now.
'OK,' he says, quiet. 'I get it. You need time to get used to me.'
'It's been two years for you here—'
'Almost two years,' he cuts in, sharper than seems necessary, 'no need to make it longer than it is.'
'Whatever,' I say, 'I don't understand how you are so calm about meeting another person after all this. Shouldn't you be relieved or full of questions or, I don't know, something?'
He looks back down at his worn trousers. A shrug. 'I didn't know there was a protocol for behaviour in this situation.' He glances up at me. 'I had just fallen from up there.'
He picks up the clear container with its dark sphere inside. In the daylight it's much easier to see its markings. Whatever it is, it's high tech, which means it will be totally useless here. But it's impossible to tell what it is or what its purpose is when it's packed up like it is.
Amadi prises apart the biggest fracture in the case until it splits with a sharp crack. It's tough, whatever it's made of, even after all this time, but my new companion is strong. I am impressed by his ability to work out the container's weakest places and exploit them. Piece by piece, he pulls the casing apart until the metal sphere slips out of its ten thousand year imprisonment and drops onto the carpet of vines with an unceremonious thump.
He picks it up and examines it, his thumbs pressing against small indentations as if searching for some way to activate it.
'I doubt it will work now,' I say. 'I mean, after all this time it's got to be dead.'
He cuts me a thin look I can't decipher and returns to his work, as if trying to solve a puzzle he once knew the answer to but has since forgot.
Eventually he tires of his task and sets the sphere aside. He lets out a heavy sigh and for a beat I feel sorry for him.
'You carried that around for how long?' I ask, crouching down to get a better look at the thing.
'More than a year.'
'Can I have a look at it?'
He shrugs as if he doesn't care, but disappointment leaks from him. Whatever he was hoping for, hasn't happened. Then again, if you carry something around for a year, you probably don't expect a cold, meaningless piece of tech. Whatever it is, it's dead weight, anachronistic, and pointless here.
I reach out for it. It's heavier than it looks and I need to hold it in both hands. Patterned with numerous indentations and lines in a complex layout, it speaks of high technology—even for Alpha VII—but it is a closed thing to us, nothing more than a mysterious sphere.
One of the indentations slips under my thumb. I press my thumb pad against it. I hold it up for Amadi to see.
'A perfect fit,' I smile. 'What are the odds?' I put it back down. 'I wonder what it was.'
'It doesn't matter anymore,' he says. He pushes himself to his feet with a groan. 'I was working my way south when I got sidetracked and ended up back here.'
'What's south?'
'Probably nothing,' he answers with a sniff. 'But it doesn't hurt to try to get further down this island and reach the coast. I mean, you never know, with all the changes that have happened, maybe there's an island chain that leads back to the continent.'
'That's an ambitious hope.'
'What else is there to do but hope?' He prods the sphere with the worn toe of his boot. It lays there, an inert, dead thing. A relic of a lost world. I wonder if he's going to keep carrying it around or leave it behind.
'So,' he says, and falls silent.
I wait while he continues to nudge the sphere. It feels like he's deciding whether he will take me with him or leave me behind, and the longer he deliberates the shittier I feel. I realise I want him to take me, because I don't want to be alone again in this place.
'Did you have anyone,' he asks, right out of nowhere. He jerks his head towards the ruined basin of the city. 'Back then?'
'Did you?' I counter.
A heavy veil of sadness falls over him. He nods. 'Adiana.'
'She didn't come with you?'
He shakes his h
ead and blinks back a haze of tears. 'She's dead.'
'I'm sorry.'
There is no reaction. He waits. The message is clear. It's my turn.
'Yes, there was someone,' I meet his look. 'But he died. Before.'
He takes a minute to absorb that, then: 'What was his name?'
'Ryan,' I whisper.
Amadi eyes me in the strange, unreadable way I am learning is part of who he is here. I expect the usual platitudes, but they don't come.
'Was he a good man?' he asks at last.
'So good,' I breathe and blink back the tears that belong to the endless ache inside that is Ryan. 'He saved my life. Twice.'
'Adiana was too good for me,' he says, blindsiding Ryan's heroics. 'I was lucky she even looked at me.'
I don't know what to say to that, so I say nothing.
Silence stretches between us, broken only by the hum of insects and the thump of a loose vine against the strut, caught in a sudden breeze.
'So there's just us, then.' He sighs. He gestures to the south. 'Think you can tolerate my company?'
'As long as I don't have to listen to you eat beetles.' I toss a wan smile at him, but my heart isn't in it. This is it. This is the part where we survive, where we are together whether we like it or not. One day, when we get lonely enough, we'll fuck. It's over. For both of us. And now it's this. Whatever this is. Adam and Eve, I guess. And I don't like it one bit.
ELEVEN | RYAN MADDOX
* * *
This time I kick the door as hard as I can. If I can move a pod that weighs a tonne, I can kick a goddamned metal door in. Even with everything I've got, all I leave behind is a deep indentation. I pull back to kick it again when the dent ripples and smoothes itself out until the damage I have done is gone, as if it never happened. I let out a slow exhalation. It's just like me, but it's a door. And now more than anything I want to know what's on the other side.
If this is de Pommier's vault, I have the key, I just need to find where it goes. I eye the door, but there's nowhere a key could be used. It's a plain metal door. All around its frame, there is nothing either. No panel, no indentation, no keypad or smartscreen. I run my fingers around the doorframe, thinking to release a hidden catch where an opening might accept the key. Nothing.
I take a step back and widen my search to the walls on either side, the ceiling, and finally the floor. There's nothing that stands out, if—
A faint green glint flares in my low res vision. I swing back to it, hungry. It's gone but I know where I saw it, set into the corner of the floor, tucked right up against the edge of the doorframe. My fingers become my eyes, and I feel my way around the spot, and then, I find it, a tiny sliver of metal embedded in the floor. A careful search reveals a small notch I can press with my fingernail. The sliver of metal slides back. Underneath, a slot. As I pull the key from my pocket to line it up, the slot bleats a faint blink of green, the same green I caught before—which means it still has a power source, whatever that is. The key slides into the slot. A perfect fit. Another flare of green ignites, this time from the key. With a soft hiss, the door eases open and the green light dies.
I collect the key and step over the threshold. Along a concrete corridor, strip lighting along the wall flickers on. Even though the lights are dim, for a beat I'm blinded until the echolocation switches off and my vision returns. Ahead, there's another door made of the same metal as the first one, which sits ajar, waiting for my arrival.
I push the door open. Lights snap on. I stop. Stunned. I don't know what I expected to find in de Pommier's vault, but in a million guesses it would never have been this.
Her.
'Hello,' she says as she turns from panels of tech far more advanced than anything I have seen before, and smiles at me. 'It's been a while.'
'What the fuck,' I breathe. 'How are you—'
'Still alive?' she finishes for me.
'Yes.'
'Because,' she answers in her French accented English. 'I am not technically alive, at least, not any more than you are.'
And then I see it. She looks exactly the same as her avatar. But she can't be here in Alpha VI, everything burned minutes after I met her in the lab at Alpha VII—when she gave me the key, to this.
She eyes my confusion, and a look of mild amusement fleets across her features. 'You are trying to put the pieces together, no?'
I don't answer. Instead I take my gaze off her and give the room a once over, to get my bearings. The first thing I notice is it's big. And the floor is clear. I can see straight down through about three more levels packed with sleek tech, and at the bottom . . .
'Is that a fucking space shuttle?'
'You could call it that.' She walks over to me, and graces me with her infuriating smile. 'Although it is a little more advanced than what your kind consider a space shuttle.'
'Our kind?'
'I find I miss real coffee,' she says, apropos of nothing. 'Out of all the planets I have been to coffee beans have only existed here, on Earth. And now,' she sighs, 'well, it is what it is.'
'It was goats,' I say. If she wants to play this game, I can, too.
'Hmm?'
'Goats discovered coffee. The goatherd noticed they got excited after they ate the berries and the rest is history.'
'Yes,' she nods, her faint smile lingering, 'in Ethiopia.'
'How did you get here so fast after you met me in the lab?' Fuck coffee. I want answers.
'I didn't,' she says. 'That was a copy of me I had built to my specifications. It burned.'
'And is this,' I gesture at her, looking exactly as I remember her, 'also a copy of you?'
'No,' she says, 'this is me, for now.'
For now. I lift a brow and wait.
She returns to the panel. On a glass surface embedded with thin threads of gold she taps in a sequence. The floor before me erupts in light. A second later, the sphere of a blue planet similar to Earth with a swirl of white clouds flickers into view. It's big enough I need to walk around it to see it all. Unlike Earth, there is very little land, and it looks like it is almost completely covered in water.
'This is from when I was on Kirula, what I named Mars's moon,' she says.
'Mars has two moons,' I say.
She flicks me a sidewise look. 'It does now.'
That shuts me up.
'Wait for it,' she breathes.
It happens so fast I almost miss it. In a blink, it goes from a blue jewel to the dead planet I recognise, a red-hued husk of dust.
'I'll slow that down for you, shall I?' she taps the surface again and the watery planet returns. 'Three billion years ago, a gamma ray burst hit Mars, and shredded its atmosphere into ribbons. Radiation from Sol's cosmic rays eradicated what life struggled to remain. I was sorry to see it go.'
The planet vanishes. Story time is over. I take the bait.
'Three billion years ago,' I repeat. 'Does that mean you are—'
'I'm much older than that,' she says. Another soft smile.
This is me. For now.
'You didn't look the same as you do now back when you were on Kirula three billion years ago, did you?'
She shakes her head. 'Of course not, I had another form. I chose to be a mountain, it is different, no?'
I digest the absolute weirdness of that and decide not to go there.
'Then what is your natural state?' I nod at the spot where Mars just hovered. 'Show me.'
She smiles again. 'I'm afraid I shall have to disappoint you. It is impossible. I have no natural state. I am immanent.'
'Excuse me?'
'I just am. I am consciousness without form.'
It's too much. I can't process it. 'I need to sit down.'
She gestures towards a seat behind me I didn't see before. I wonder if she just 'manifested' it. I ease myself onto it gingerly, half expecting it to vanish. It holds.
'So,' I broach, feeling awkward as hell, 'are you God?'
She laughs, and it's quite beautiful. There is no moc
kery, only delight, which I assume was bought at the cost of my ignorance.
'There is no god,' she says at last. 'I am an anomaly, a piece of the universe that lost its way at the beginning of time and so I am here, between places. Just this, nothing more, nothing less.' She shrugs, elegant, and infuriatingly French. 'It is my fate, no?'
'How can you do it?' I ask, thinking of my own fate, of going on indefinitely and wanting it to end. 'How do you not go mad after all that time?'
'I am not like you,' she answers, 'I am enmeshed with the quantum field, time does not have the same meaning to me. Everything exists at once for me.'
'Jesus Christ.' I hold up my hand to make it stop. 'Just, please. No more.'
'Bien sûr,' she smiles, soft. 'So you have found me, at last.'
I pluck the key out of my pocket and hold it out to her. She takes it and sets it onto the glass surface where it glistens for a beat, turns to light, slips through the glass like liquid and slides away into the threads of gold until it fades. I decide not to ask about that either.
'Why didn't you stop the cataclysm?'
'You saw what happened to Mars,' she says. 'I could not stop that.'
'Probably because you were a mountain,' I mutter.
She laughs again. 'Oui, but even so, I cannot stop what is meant to be. Nor can I see into the minds of others. I can only experience what is.'
'You did manage to protect what's above you though,' I roll my eyes up to the ceiling. 'Everything is still intact up there for a good few blocks.'
'Ah,' she scoffs, 'that is not me, but a little technology I picked up while I was in the outer spiral of Andromeda. I have learned a few tricks along the way.'
'Like hiding here and living out there as an avatar?'
'Exactamente.'
'How do you not age?'
She gives me an unreadable look laden with the weight of eternity. 'As I said, time does not apply to me.'
I think of Andromeda, two and half million light years away. 'Or distance, obviously.'
'Obviously,' she says. She lets out a little sigh. 'But enough chit chat, let us speak of what matters, no?
I brace myself for the worst. If she calls this chit chat, god only knows what matters to her.
