by James Welsh
The pack of miners walked out across the floor of the bridge, and Nash followed. They stopped in front of the massive, three-dimensional sonar map that was planted in the center of the room. Courtesy of the sonar buoys scattered across the star system, every inch of space around them was mapped down to the stray rock. Coil was explaining something to the others, but Nash wasn’t paying attention. Instead, he watched as a blip on the screen moved away from a miniature version of Harbor. Nash realized that they were watching the fused launch heading towards the drop point, to unload the new quantum drill into its orbit. The technology was stunning, and it should have impressed Nash. But a part of him wanted nothing more than to commandeer a launch and make a run for freedom. And as long as that star system was mapped out, he could never hide – everywhere was a prison. He sighed as he thought of this.
“David, did you hear what I said?” Stratos asked, his words finally breaching the thick door into Nash’s skull.
Nash turned quickly and saw Stratos and the miners at the sonar map staring at him. At first, he thought about lying, but then he remembered how terrible of a liar he was. “No,” he admitted.
Stratos shook his head. “Now don’t make me regret choosing you.”
“Choosing me for what?” Nash asked. “What am I doing?”
“Well, when the pilots drop off the drill in a few minutes, you’ll be the one taking it for a spin – literally, I guess.”
“You think I’m ready for that?” Nash asked. It was obvious by looking at the other miners that they questioned it too.
“Oh, I can trust you,” Stratos said brightly, slapping Nash on the shoulder. “Unless, of course, you don’t feel up to the challenge…”
“I’m ready,” Nash said quickly, hoping that they wouldn’t catch his lie. Nothing terrified him more than to operate such expensive machinery, especially with so little training. But one thing he had learned in his short years alive was that you never turned down an order from a charter official. Why Stratos chose him, of all people, didn’t matter.
“Good! Show these men how they need to do their job,” Stratos said, gesturing towards the waiting desk.
Shakily, Nash took a seat in front of the computer. Although there was a soft hum coming from the machine, it was like a snowstorm of white noise, and Nash tried to get lost in the sound. But then Stratos’ voice found him through the blizzard: “They just dropped the drill.” Before Nash could even respond, Stratos persisted. “Well, what are you waiting for? It’s time to put that training of yours to use.”
His broken education was coming back to him in pieces like a jigsaw puzzle. He vaguely remembered what needed to be done. He first had to activate the drill, but how? There were a few nervous seconds as he tried to imagine the hand gesture. Then, the memory came to him, and in his excitement he dipped his hands into the water panels in front of him to control the computer. Nash heard the miners behind him groan, and he realized that he forgot to put on the magnetized gloves. Sheepishly, Nash put on a pair of gloves sitting on the desk and dove into the water panel again.
He twisted his hand in the water as if he was trying to turn a stubborn doorknob. He repeated this until the screen in front of him began glowing, meaning that the drill was waking up for the first time. The miners crowded around gave a sigh of relief, none louder than Nash. But the activation was just the easy part of their work. Now he had to synchronize the drill’s spin with the star’s solar activity. The balance between the two had to be perfect in all of the ways that Nash could never be – a few degrees’ difference could result in the drill burning up or a blackout back on Earth.
As Nash sweated out his first day of work, he thought that he would have at least a comforting shadow standing over him, keeping him cool. But the other miners, satisfied that the drill was operational, returned to their desks, leaving Nash very much alone. They had been working for so many years, that they had forgotten how nerve-wracking their duties truly were.
It was about ten minutes when something happened. Nash was so new, that he didn’t even realized that he was doing anything wrong. All he knew was that one minute the screen was glowing blue, and the next minute it was blaring with an alarm red. His computer began screeching, startling Nash even more. The supervisor on the deck at that moment, a woman with short, brown hair and eyes as cold as deep water, ran up. She pushed Nash to the side and looked at the screen, her eyes frantically reading for the problem.
She looked wildly at Nash and grabbed him by the collar. “What did you do?” She demanded.
Nash stuttered, trying to find the words but not knowing where to begin. The lady didn’t bother waiting for a response – instead, she pushed Nash out of the chair and took the controls. She already had a pair of the gloves on, and she sank her hands into the water panels with a splash. As Nash recovered, he watched her hands swim in the water. While Nash had been drowning, this woman was a seal. He looked on as her hands drew out what looked like waves, followed by an upwards swoop, as if she was painting a sailboat crossing rough waters. As she did this, the fire in the screen was extinguished, as the red glow transformed back into blue.
It was only when the screen returned to normal that the woman sighed, and Nash realized that she hadn’t taken a breath since she had sat down. She then glared at him. “Do you know what you did wrong?” She demanded.
“No,” Nash said quietly.
“You were spinning the drill too fast!” She snarled. “If I didn’t stop you, you would have broken the drill into a thousand pieces! How were you gesturing? Show me!”
Meekly, Nash drew out in the air the instructions he had been giving to the computer: the gesture was two swipes, first with a downwards glide of the hand followed by a climb back up. The woman rolled her eyes and grabbed Nash’s hand. Then, she forced his hand to gesture what she had been drawing, the image of a sailboat in a storm. “That’s what you need to do if the drill is absorbing too many electrons! Otherwise you overheat the drill – did you learn anything?”
“I guess not.”
“You guess not,” she scoffed. “Of course – what’s the point of bringing on new help if you have to do their work?”
“Sorry.”
The woman clicked on an icon at the bottom of the screen and dragged it up to the center. The icon enlarged to reveal the surveillance cameras on board the drill, used to check for any physical damage to the machines. She rewound the tape to a minute beforehand, just prior to the alarm sounding. Nash watched in silence as the levels on the drill were spinning fast, too fast. The drill was even glowing a dull red, although it was impossible to tell if it was from overheating or from the drill’s polished metal reflecting the sunshine.
Nash jumped a little as the drill suddenly blasted a laser beam through its exhaust. The laser shot straight into the heart of the star, draining the drill of its excess electrons. Nash could have sworn he saw a tiny piece of debris rain down with the laser as well. His suspicion was confirmed when the woman yelled, “You better hope that wasn’t an important piece! Otherwise, you’re jumping into the star after it!”
She threw her hands up in frustration and stormed off, leaving Nash standing there, feeling like an idiot. He then realized that he was floating in a sea of silence and looked around him. All of the miners had taken a moment to look down at him, some of them shaking their heads, others chuckling a little, and even others still drawing out instructions on their computers even with their heads turned. Humiliated, Nash sat down at his seat, his face mercury, his eyes watering. That moment was nothing more than a tiny part of his long parade of failures, and there was no end.
And that was when Nash felt a drumbeat on his shoulder. He spun, flinching, expecting the madwoman to be back. Instead, he saw a lean man with messy hair and the weedy beginnings of a beard. He said with a reassuring smile, “Don’t mind Sonya – she’s just mad because someone, somewhere in the Universe, is happy.” The man suddenly extended his hand. “I’m Dmitry Puzzle, by the way.”
Nash was about to shake Puzzle’s hand, but then he realized that he already had his hands back in the water panels. Puzzle realized this too, and he laughed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt. You can go back to messing things up.”
Then, Puzzle leaned in closer and whispered into Nash’s ear, “Don’t tell anyone this, but the first time I ever handled a transmission in Morse code, I thought the other party was sending out a distress signal when really they were just signing off. I sent out rescue ships out into the asteroid belt looking for a transport that didn’t need saving. We all make mistakes.”
Before Nash could say anything, or even look back, Puzzle had slipped away. Nash didn’t know it then, but he had just spoken with one of the most gifted radioman in the entire galaxy, who was on Harbor that day to fix the station’s malfunctioning radio transmitter. All Nash knew at that moment was that he was alone again.
A short time later, a call rippled out through the bridge for volunteers. One of the drills on the other side of the star Carina was radioing back error messages. They had attempted to hail the drill wirelessly, but their efforts failed – it appeared that the machine’s receiver was broken. It was something that had happened before, twice actually, when a stray meteoroid had rattled the drill.
“You need me to tag along?” Puzzle asked, having heard what was going on and eager to put on a spacesuit.
“No, we’re just going to do a spacewalk and replace the transmitter,” said Ysabel Winter, the chocolate-haired pilot assigned to the mission. “You still have to repair the radio here.”
Puzzle scowled – he’d never get the chance to go on a spacewalk like he always wanted.
Soon, a team had been chosen: the mischievous Turtle Bach, the compulsive liar Grant Orange, and the paranoid Alaois Dart. As the bitter Pilot Winter herded the miners into a waiting launch, the change in atmosphere on the bridge was noticeable. The mood brightened and a chatter spontaneously sprung up from the miners. Nash could hear one of the workers say, “Is that all it takes to make Turtle go away?”
“I know, right?” Another miner laughed. “I can’t wait until the next drill breaks.”
The miners were glad to see the dirt leave, not knowing yet that they were going to regret it. Because they were going to find out soon enough that one of them was not going to come back at all. Only then would they realize just how much that soul would be missed.
INTERMISSION B
2198AD
As Nash stood on the balcony, he realized that perhaps the only door out was to jump.
In the two years since his handshake with Drake Storia, Nash had tried his best to rub feeling back into the cold veins of humanity. He had done everything from opening up art galleries to soup kitchens, from bookstores to health clinics, anything to remind people of what they had forgotten. But after all of the grand openings, he realized that the people didn’t forget their past as much as they didn’t want to remember. Almost as quickly as one business venture opened, he wound up having to close it due to a drought of customers.
And then there was the charter’s vice around the heart of his business. The last venture he had attempted, a for-profit museum of Dauphin’s history, back to when the city was New York City. Nash went through all of the trouble of finding artifacts from the city’s past and navigating the charter’s laws and licenses. The charter inspector waited until the day the museum was opened to issue a ruling: the exhibits were charter property and subject to seizure. Nash stood on the cracked sidewalk and watched as every item was wheeled out of the museum.
And then there was the fact that his flailing empire had a heart to begin with. The charter had succeeded because it was ruthless – during the charter wars a century before, the Phoenix Charter had broken down every one of its rivals in the Americas. The lucky charters were shot in the streets and put out of their misery, while the unlucky ones were absorbed into the amoeba that was Phoenix. But where the charter destroyed, Nash tried to create, all in a world that was still burning down.
Whatever the reason, it didn’t matter now to Nash. All he knew was that he couldn’t look anyone in the eye, not after his failure. Now, the only place he could look was down. From six stories above the night, the ground below looked like open jaws. Even the sharp lights from the convoys on the reborn highways looked like a fence of fangs. This only made him want to jump more, to be inhaled and forgotten.
Behind him, Nash could hear the familiar creak of the apartment door, swinging on its hinges like a hangman. He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. He was too late. He had to be strong – that was the only way he could be a hero in their world. And being strong meant turning around and walking back into the apartment.
As he walked back into the apartment, the curtains from the door rippling across him like a cloak in the wind, he knew she was there. He didn’t even have to turn the light on – he could feel her eyes through the darkness of the room. Nash took comfort in this – if he couldn’t see her, then she couldn’t see him. Already, he could feel the tears running his cheeks.
As he sat down on a chair with a soft sigh, his love asked, “What were you doing out on the balcony, David?”
Zara spoke in a whisper so soft, Nash could almost hear her short, charcoal hair tumbling as she turned her head. Nash cleared his throat. “I was looking at the stars.”
“It’s too cloudy to see them.”
“You don’t need to look up at the sky to see the stars,” Nash said, waving his hand to the world beyond the wall. “I see them in the city and the people.”
“This romance you have with the world was charming when we were younger. Now, I’m just waiting for you to grow out of it.”
It took a few moments for Nash to talk – when he did, his voice was any icy pond crunching under boots. “I guess we’ll just have to not grow up together.”
As Nash spoke, he spat an inkblot of venom. Even in the pitch of the room, Zara could see the stain of his words and interpreted them. And what she saw was the baby crib in the other room, drenched in a blanket of dust. And just a few feet away sat a rocking chair that was never used. Nash had tried to give them away to people who needed them, but Zara had always refused.
Nash could hear her hair shake even harder. As Zara looked at the chair, she said in a voice wrung of tears, “You were such a monster – you didn’t even feel anything when she died.”
“You’re wrong – I felt as sick as you did. For months, I wondered if there was a point to living. But, after all of that, where you saw an end, I saw another beginning,” Nash said, with the courage of an architect whose building burned down but still finds the urge to keep creating. “And that’s where we stopped beating with the same heart. And just in time too – I think I may have had a heart attack today.”
Zara’s laugh was lemon. “What, when you looked at your bank account and saw that you have no credit left? That you’ve woken up from your dreams of a renaissance? I’ve been telling you that your experiment in culture wasn’t going to work, that no one wants to relive the past. History’s done nothing but ruin people, and now it’s ruined you.”
“Who told you about the money?” Nash asked, already knowing the answer.
“You mean the lack of money? Who do you think? My father saw that you didn’t make a payment towards your loans, and so he went to the bank. Imagine his shock when he saw you don’t have a penny to your name.”
“I’m surprised he was surprised.”
“Why are you taking this so well? You’re bankrupt – you have nothing left,” Zara demanded. For the first time, Nash realized that all of her accusations were singling him out. If she was making those accusations a few years before, she would have included herself. Instead of them being bankrupt, it was just him that was bankrupt.
“If we were given a second chance after the world ended, I’m sure this isn’t the end of me,” Nash said stubbornly.
“That’s what you think. Father’s going to get his money – one
way or another. He’s putting out a bounty for you – that’s the only reason why I came back here, to tell you that. He’ll put you in chains, like all of his other servants.”
“So you came back to warn me? So you still love me then?”
“That’s the last of my love for you. Starting now, I don’t care what happens to you. I’m not going to learn how to swim just to save you from drowning. You’re not worth it.”
Nash heard Zara standing up, the floorboards creaking beneath her feet. She didn’t say another word as she walked to the door and left, slamming the door behind her. The door didn’t close properly, the frame having been warped long before – he had been meaning to fix that. The door swayed open just enough to let a trickle of light in from the hallway. The sword of light cut through the room and cracked Nash open. It was only then that the arrow of pain hit him.
He flew into a rage that was a strange to him. He stormed through the room of darkness, flipping over the coffee table that he had found in an alleyway, a piece of furniture that he spent months restoring. He made his way into the bedroom, crunching his shoulder against the door way as he passed through. Ignoring the burning pain in his arm, Nash felt around until his hand hooked around the baby crib. He dragged it across the floor, leaving behind him the footsteps of dull scraping against the hardwood. He reached the balcony and lifted the wasted crib over his head. He launched it into the air and watched as it plummeted the six stories to the ground below. In just a few moments, he heard the shatter of wood against concrete as the crib exploded across the pavement. As the sound died away, Nash realized that he wasn’t as satisfied as he thought he would be.