The Echo

by James Smythe

  She sighs and looks away, and she protests but only a little.

  ‘Tell us about yourself!’ Tobi says. She’s on duty, sitting in the cockpit, but turned around enough to see us all. Finally, and through her fringe, which covers so much of her eyes, Inna tells us. She lists the information, pulling her fingers back as she does, as if she is counting how much she is willing to tell us all about herself.

  She’s older than she looks, she says. (I know how old she is, thanks to the files, and she is not wrong.) The others ask her age exactly, and she bats away their questions.

  She’s more selfish than she would like. ‘Single-minded,’ she says. ‘When I want something …’

  She has been married four times. ‘Each time’, she says, ‘worse than the last. In my profession, you’d think I would learn. You’d think that I would be able to smell them a mile away. But they were all the same sort of man. All brilliant. All failures, even though they didn’t know it.’

  She talks about the village that she grew up in as a place that’s torn out of time: where they concern themselves with the Cold War of the 1980s as if it’s something that they should still be concerned with, rather than something that only affected them as children, or when their parents were children; where they wouldn’t have let her do the job that she became trained to do. She explains that this is why she left.

  We sleep: or they do, all in their beds. I try to stay up later than the others, but we have broken all semblance of a cycle, of sleeping together; and because I do not want to sleep, because I cannot, for the worry of the following day, I spend time in the lab. I watch the pings drawing the trace outline. I watch the anomaly get bigger still, or seem to, as we draw closer to it. I try to see more of what it is, as the picture becomes more focused, as the resolution improves and the image suffers from fewer artifacts; but that feels like a folly, as I see the nothingness there, the expanse of emptiness, and I try to give it form in my mind. I try to make it something, so that I discover what it is. Each day it grows bigger. Each day the pings disappear into it, or fly past it. I see the edge of it, on the picture: because this is where the anomaly ends and space begins. The folds of it become clearer along the fringes. They’re like the pages of a book, peeling back to show the page underneath. Giving away all the secrets. And then there are the whatever-they-ares inside the anomaly itself. They get closer, and they’re no longer specks. Now they’re lumps. I worry, constantly, that I will sleep through their discovery. I have started to imagine that they might be important in and of themselves: that maybe, in this quest for answers – what is science if not that – I will miss something important because I am too tired, and because I am lazy. I think of solutions. One is to not sleep. Another is to sleep as little as possible. A third is to rely on Tomas to wake me up, but he has proven himself the most unreliable option of the three.

  During my own definition of night, when I lie in my bed to rest my body, I talk to Tomas.

  ‘It’s like sifting for gold,’ he says. ‘You know in movies, when they bring the pan out of the water?’

  ‘I know what you’re talking about,’ I say.

  ‘Right. It’s like that: seeing the glinting specks on the bottom of the stream.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say. The pause is close to ten seconds now. Conversations start to feel the lag, and they’re like treacle. You can monologue and stop him getting a word in edgewise; but I don’t. ‘How are you?’ I ask him.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he says.

  ‘Good. Good. It should be even clearer to look at tomorrow,’ I say.

  ‘It has been every day so far,’ he replies.

  I wonder if Tomas has the same trouble sleeping as I have. His patterns are impossible to track, because he is seemingly always awake and yet somehow managing his life at the same time. I haven’t mentioned to him how improbable I find it all: the way that he can balance his relationship and his work. I reason that one must be suffering, and I pray that it is not our mission. I can tell, in myself, which I would choose: this is everything to us. This was what we always wanted, what we dreamed of. It was a future that made perfect sense to us, and we never wanted to jeopardize it. Back then, we knew our priorities.

  The body only needs three hours of sleep a night. Famous leaders throughout history have survived – thrived – on less, but theirs is a story twisted by myth. Three is enough to, in theory, enter and complete a REM cycle: solid, deep sleep for that amount of time is easily sustainable with no loss of faculties. It brings about a state with its own set of challenges. One, how to ensure that the sleep happens during the allotted time and doesn’t either overspill or intrude into the rest of the day. Two, how to ensure that one works at maximum when awake. I do not want anybody to suggest that I take more sleep, or start to question my abilities. Three, to ensure that it doesn’t affect me in any real way over a long term. I read about sleep deprivation when the others aren’t looking: attached to my chair in the lab, the anomaly drawing itself in behind me, and here I am, reading about the chemicals that the body produces, and ways to stimulate and replace them. Nowadays, in theory, we could stop sleeping. We have the supplements and drugs to replace the sleep itself with minimal damage caused. I am worried that Tomas will know, because we linked the keypresses from up here with the ground, but I can’t imagine Tomas trawling through the logs to see what I have been reading about when I am alone. I ask myself if I would, were our places reversed, but I cannot tell: the situation is so different. We have diverged, maybe.

  Everything points me to the pills we have. Drugs are incredible: those aspects that once hindered us using them with anything resembling real regularity ironed out. Non-addictive, non-intrusive, working instantly. Everything that they used to be rendered so archaic. As we get closer to the anomaly, I need to be here all the time. Discoveries are made in seconds, and my name – our names, Tomas and myself, Tomas and Mira Hyvönen – will be the ones underneath the discovery in the history books. There is a cupboard full of pills, and I find what I need, and I take them. I stocked this ship. To some extent they are mine anyway.

  So: I stop even attempting to sleep, and I become powered by pills.

  Hikaru is on his shift, and the rest of them have been down for how long I cannot say, because they wake when they wake, and that is how we run it in these early days. Hikaru and I are in different rooms, but he calls me through and asks me to sit with him in the cockpit. I do, because I have no reason to not. My work here is watching something happen, increasingly. There will be more to it, when we reach the anomaly, but here and now the technology is doing this for me. Tomas and I designed it this way: I am a creator, watching my creations work. Any problems with the software, Tomas and the ground team tweak it.

  Hikaru doesn’t want to talk, not really: it simply feels so lonely on the ship when everybody else is asleep.

  ‘You not sleeping?’ he asks.

  ‘I am too excited for sleep,’ I say. He nods.

  ‘I hear you. This is your life’s work, I guess. It’s a really big deal.’ He has a stash of his nougat bars up here with him, and he unwraps and eats one. It’s pure whiteness in a chewy bar, and I watch him pulling it apart with his equally white teeth. The teeth look as if they have been grown: an absolutely perfect bite, better than implants even. I don’t like to ask: I run my tongue over my own, which are less than perfect, slightly crooked even in places. Tomas and I have forgone any genetic tinkerings or after-surgeries. Even Tomas’ birthmark, which they could have taken away so easily from him: he decided that it was distinctive. Tomas always said, Something like this can be defining, and you have to own it. At least they will always be able to tell us apart. Hikaru passes me a bar, and I eat one; it’s tasteless and bland, but I wonder if some of that is psychological. It looks thus; thus it must be. ‘What do you think it is?’ Hikaru asks me. He sighs mid-sentence, as if the very act of gasping the words out is somehow difficult for him. I am chewing, the nougat stuck to my teeth, and I make him wait as I struggle
to swallow.

  ‘The anomaly?’ I finally say.

  ‘Yeah. Somebody said that it could be a wormhole.’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘I forget. Tobi, maybe.’

  ‘It’s not a wormhole,’ I say.

  ‘Right.’ He leaves space in the sentence; he wants an answer.

  ‘I have a few theories,’ I tell him. The theories are, in actuality, mine and Tomas’. They are shared, the product of both minds working together. I look at the clock and know that Tomas will be asleep. I picture him, for a brief flash: with his baker, curled up and naked. Almost as if he’s taunting me. ‘I don’t want to jump the gun and make a guess that turns out to be wrong.’

  ‘Something we haven’t seen before?’

  ‘It has to be.’

  ‘Why’s it getting closer?’

  ‘Who knows?’ I say. ‘Maybe it’s just drifting. Or maybe it’s like a wave.’

  ‘Strange, finding something new. You always wonder what it means.’

  ‘Remember dark matter? That question? This might be the new equivalent,’ I say. ‘Maybe we won’t know what it is we find. But we can know more about it, certainly.’ I sit back, because it feels like a cap to the conversation. He doesn’t ask anything else, and after a while I excuse myself. He thinks I’m going to bed, but I don’t. I go to the lab. I sit and watch the anomaly being drawn, and then I bring up the visual image from the bounce, match the two up again. I make it full-wall. I stretch it out. I turn it 3D, projecting it with an approximation of depth. I stand inside it and I spin it around me. I make it swell into every inch of the room, until it covers the table and the shelving units and the walls. I get as close to it as I can. In this resolution the colours on the edge are somehow duller – this close they look like a flatter version, when they’re not so nudged up against each other. Like the aurora borealis, that’s what they remind me of: that sense of colours dancing and brushing up against each other.

  I pull it right apart, until the resolution is breaking at the seams. And then I see it: one of the smaller glints in the space, one of the things that I have been tracking, is moving. I drop a virtual pin onto it to note where it is now, and there it goes, sure enough. It tracks slightly, moving away from the pin with an almost crippling, crawling slowness; but it is moving nonetheless.

  I stay there, as still as I can in this infernal lack of gravity, and I watch it. It creeps forward. I think about waking up Tomas, but then I do not: I do not call him, or the ground. I keep this for myself. When I feel myself lagging, I go to the medical cupboards. In there, we have packets of stims, designed to help you stay awake, to perform to the best of your ability even when at your most tired. I do not even check them; I pop them from the blister pack and swallow them down. I have always dry swallowed. On the packet there is a promise of upwards of sixteen extra hours of ‘pure thought clarity’ after the user takes the pill. The stims make everything seem faster for the first few seconds, as they kick in – they make every frame of vision twice as clear, as if I’m seeing in a far more extreme frame-rate than usual – but the thing on the screen is still crawling. It passes every pin I drop, constantly going forward in a straight line. It is headed towards the same point of the anomaly that we are, curiously. It’s much slower than us, however. We can catch it, whatever it is.

  I wipe the pins from the memory in case Tomas wakes up and looks to see what I have been doing, and I set the resolution back to almost nothing, in case he’s set his display to show what I’m seeing. When the announcement is made that this is something we should pay attention to, I want it to be clear that I found it.

  This is mine.

  When I am ready, when I know that Tomas is awake and the crew are all readying themselves for a day, before Hikaru goes to bed, I assemble them all together. All day I have watched it, with my naked eyes: a speck of dust making almost imperceptible movements. I tell the crew that it’s important: that this might be crucial to our mission.

  ‘What’s this all about, Mira?’ Tomas asks. I imagine him down there, desperately trying to preempt me. Wanting to find this before I can announce it. He hates being second; playing any sort of catch-up. I am up here, though; and he is always behind the lag, now.

  ‘You’ll see,’ I say. I lead them all through to the lab and tell them to crowd in. They float and watch, most of them in their underwear, all bleary-eyed still. I am not like them. The effects of the stims are still there, not even threatening to wear off yet. ‘So,’ I say, and I explain it all as they listen. I pull the screen large again, to demonstrate, and I pop a pin in and let them all see it. They lean in, some of them, as close as they can, pulling the speck out until it’s the size of a low-resolution beetle, a silvery shimmer of boxy pixels.

  ‘Jesus,’ Wallace says. ‘Huh.’

  ‘Good find,’ Tomas says.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Lennox says. He gets closer, almost past me. It’s infectious, his enthusiasm. Makes me feel justified in my own excitement, such as it is. I like him more and more, when he is like this.

  ‘What do you think it is?’ Tobi asks.

  ‘I have no idea,’ Tomas says, before I can. ‘Mira?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ I say.

  ‘A comet or something,’ Tobi says.

  ‘Inside the anomaly!’ Lennox says. He is working this out. ‘What the hell can it be?’

  ‘It has to be something,’ I say.

  ‘It’s definitely not nothing.’ Tomas sounds weary. Like he knew that this was coming. ‘But we should be loath to declare it a something yet.’

  ‘Tomas,’ I say, ‘it’s moving. It’s got velocity, and a trajectory that seems to almost match ours. We can assume that this is not a coincidence.’

  ‘And yet space is made up of the things,’ Tomas says. I can hear him shrug. And he speaks with his mouth full of something or other: ‘Being out there, you’re just one in a chain of them. Let’s wait until you’re closer and we can make out what it is.’ I picture him there in the safety and comfort of his stupid fucking launch control room, in that suit of his that he persists in wearing, his pressed black suit trousers and his white shirt and his slicked-back hair, like he’s there in 1969, recreating that schtick, that feeling; and whatever he’s eating, it’s no doubt a gift from his baker, some doughy hand-made pastry. Everything about him is superiority: not just over everybody else, but over me, even though I am his equal in every single way. I know it, and because I know it he must also know it. ‘Let’s come back in twenty-four hours and look at it again,’ he says, and that is that. I know that he won’t take his eyes off it until then; I know that he’ll examine it as closely as I will. For the good of mankind we discover; and yet.

  They listen to him. He dampens the crew’s enthusiasm, even though this is something so important. They leave, back into the main body of the ship and their jobs or their sleep, and Inna squeezes my arm, as if to congratulate me for a job well done, and then she watches me from the doorway for a second as I hover in the centre of the room and I stretch the thing out like it was when I was alone. I know that Tomas will be doing the same: strutting around his room, ordering the people desperate to please him to get him coffee, to help him analyse what it is that I have found. He can say that it’s unimportant all he likes: I do not believe him. I have found this. I have. I put a pin in the object. I fold a chair down from the wall and clip myself to it, and I watch the pin, and the whatever it is move away from it. After an hour I move the pin, tracking it, plotting it. I want to be here when the resolution finally clears up enough that we can see what this thing is.

  We eat lunch, and I sigh when Inna tells me that I must join them, because it means taking my eyes off the image. Tobi thought that it would be entertaining to eat Hikaru’s food for a meal. She is more herself again: there is a spark in her. It’s the sort of thing that is attractive to people, and she has it. It’s behind her eyes, so we give her this. Her eye is still red, but we have stopped noticing. She has stopped looking
at it as well. We are all moving onwards.

  ‘White lunch,’ she says as she puts the protein bars into our hands. They taste as they look, and we each tear into them knowing that we need the nutrients.

  ‘Jesus wept,’ Wallace says. ‘This is what you eat?’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe how good it is for you, for your guts. Your digestive system. So good for your insides.’ Hikaru relishes this. His bar is half gone even as the rest of us are only single bites down.

  ‘It would have to be, tasting like this.’ He eats it regardless. We don’t talk about the anomaly, but I know that they’re thinking about it, and me. I don’t say a word over lunch, and they keep looking at me. As if I’m about to announce something. As soon as we’ve eaten I unclip myself.

  ‘I’m going back to the lab,’ I say.

  ‘Okay,’ Inna says, as if she is giving me permission to leave the table. I push myself back to the corridor and then down to the lab, still clinging to the walls, hopelessly behind the rest of them in my aerial acrobatics – they can spin and twirl and somersault as part of their movement, and still somehow end up where they want to be – and then, in the lab itself, I cling to the console desk and it takes me a few seconds to notice, but the pin that I laid before lunch is still exactly where the thing is: sitting right on top of it. The object hasn’t moved. Whatever it is, it has totally stopped; not even a tiny bit of drift away from the last point it was set at.

  ‘Refresh the image,’ I say, which the computer does, and it’s still there. I wait, on the highest resolution, to see if it moves again. It doesn’t. I call Tomas, and he answers, tired and lazy-sounding. He is not here: and he is fifteen, thirty seconds behind me in seeing what exactly it is that I am looking at.

  ‘It’s a ship,’ I say. ‘Inside the anomaly, Tomas. It’s another ship.’

  We all watch it. Not one of us takes their eyes off it. In the cockpit, even, the image is stretched across the front windows, and we are all awake. In the living areas, it’s stretched across the screen that we use to show the expanse below: suddenly more impressive than the vastness of space itself. I stay in the lab, because here I can see it all, and I pull up multiple screens showing every aspect. Lennox is working on trying to ping the ship – I call it that, still partially guessing, but this is how we must work – and trying to see if we can get an idea of how deep in the anomaly it actually is.