Lost in Space--Infinity's Edge

by Kevin Emerson

  I reached out and grasped her gloved hand in mine, and we shook, like two totally solid and not imaginary beings.

  “So, what do you think?” She motioned to the driftwood and the moss. “I thought our fort could use some spiffying up.”

  Our fort. That made me smile. “I like it. Where did you find this?” I said, running my hand over the smooth driftwood. “We haven’t seen anything like it.”

  “There are new tide pools over here. Come on, I’ll show you.” She stepped around to the opposite side of the rocks, where up until that morning there had been only water. I followed and saw that there was a new area of sandbar that was just peeking out from the waves, dotted with tide pools surrounded by low black rocks.

  “Hold on,” I said. “How are you here? Like, all the way? What’s been happening on your ship? Do you have time to be, you know, decorating?”

  “Oh.” Clare paused and a shadow crossed her face. “I was trying not to think about that.… It’s not good. The rift—that’s what my parents are officially calling it—totally overloaded our ship’s systems. We’re dead in the water. Everyone’s asleep now, or at least, trying to get some sleep. So, I just came back here.”

  “An overload?” I said. “Was it like a power surge?”

  “I think so. Why?”

  “Something like that happened on our ship, too. But not as serious.”

  “Well, I hope the exact same thing doesn’t happen to you,” Clare said, bending down at the nearest of the new tide pools. “Nearly all our systems are offline.” She pointed to a little piece of kelp rolling back and forth at the edge of the pool. “We’re basically like that, and the more we drift, the closer we get to the edge of the rift. Which is maybe why my presence here is stronger? But I don’t know what’s going to happen if the ship hits it.”

  “How much time do you have?” I asked, kneeling beside her.

  “If we can’t get the ship back online, then we only have as long as our suit batteries can last, so… a couple of days? We’ve been sending distress signals, but since everyone on our planet is focused on evacuating before the supernova, there’s not exactly time to worry about our little family.”

  “And how’d you get back here, like, all the way?”

  “Remember how I was telling you that the rift seemed to be strongest in our engine room? After the power surge, Dad said it was off-limits, but I snuck back down when everyone was asleep. There’s this weird light glowing all around the engine’s vacuum core, and when I got near it, it sort of washed over me and—zip!—I was here, just like the first time, only solid, like the effect of the rift has gotten stronger. I guess because we’re closer to it. I wasn’t ready for that, so when I showed up here, I started gasping and choking and had to jump back through the rift before I suffocated. But then I came back prepared.” She motioned to her suit.

  “Jump back through,” I said, looking around and seeing no sign of any kind of rift nearby. “How?”

  “I can see it.” Clare looked over her shoulder. “The rift is right there, behind me, but not really here. It’s almost like it’s in the back of my head.… It’s hard to describe.”

  “Okay, wow. Can any of your family members travel like this?”

  Clare shrugged. “They haven’t tried. They’ve been so busy trying to fix the ship, but also, to be honest, I haven’t told them about this. Or you.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I’m going to. But we still don’t really know what this is, and I guess I like having something of my own for once. When you’re the youngest it’s like everything is already taken, especially when you’re cramped up on a small spaceship.”

  “I get that,” I said.

  “Also…” Clare bit her lip.

  “What?”

  “Something’s been weird,” she said, a shadow crossing her face. “On the ship. I can’t really explain it.…” She trailed off, then pointed into the tide pool. “Look in there.”

  I peered into the water, but the reflection of the gray sky made it almost impossible to see beneath the surface. “What are we looking for?”

  Clare bent until her head was just above the water. “It’s tricky with the glare.”

  I did the same and caught a glimpse into the deep pool. There were more of those sticks down in the crevices. Clare reached into the water and tugged, but her hand came out empty. “Ah, I can’t get it. And I can’t have my suit submerged for too long. I was thinking we could put one more piece over the top of the fort. Your arms are a little longer. Want to try?”

  “Sure.” I flexed my fingers. I would definitely have to be quick. Just then, a burning sensation ignited in my hands, like I’d felt in my neck. I rubbed my gloves together, wishing I could pull them off to scratch.

  “You all right?” Clare asked.

  “Yeah, sorry.” I didn’t really want to admit I had some kind of rash, or whatever it was that was making me itch so much. Clare would think that was gross or weird or both. Just ignore it, I told myself, and plunged my hand down into the water. I fished around for a moment until my knuckles bumped into a large stick. I tried to pull it out, but it was heavy and seemed to be stuck on something. “This is a big one, I think.”

  “Here, I’ll help.” Clare crouched beside me and reached in as well. Together, we hauled up the piece, which turned out to be a few meters long.

  I laid the log on the rocks and then looked out across the horizon. “I guess this means that somewhere on this planet, there are actually some trees.”

  “Or at least there used to be.” Clare moved her hand over the log and I saw that she was scanning it with sensors on her palm. “This material has petrified with metallic compounds. It’s really more fossil than tree at this point. Oh, we need one more of these, too.” She turned back to the tide pool, reached in, and plucked out one of those larger snaillike creatures she’d used to hang the kelp. “It’s like a suction-y sea creature-y thing. Rawr!” She held it out toward me, and its fleshy green underside smeared against my helmet, leaving a smudge there.

  “Stop.” I pushed the creature away but smiled. “It’s called a snail.” I rubbed at the smear with my sleeve. “I don’t know if that’s going to come off.”

  “Sorry.” Clare grinned back. “Their gross stickiness is very good for hanging lights in the fort. Ooh, speaking of which.” She got to her feet and moved to the other side of the rock, where the next tide pool began. “The glowing stuff loves this spot.” She picked up a couple of dripping strands of the bioluminescent kelp, then bent and grabbed one end of the log. “Can you help?”

  “Sure.” I took the other end and we balanced it over our shoulders and returned to the fort, where we hoisted the log up onto the top, crisscrossing the others. Clare stuck the shell creature to the third triangle rock, then draped one piece of glowing kelp over it. She threw the other over the new log. “There,” she said, putting her hands on her hips. “That’s probably about as good as we can do for today. Come on.”

  She motioned to me and climbed down into the space between the rocks. I joined her, and because it was deeper now, it felt more like a hideout. The rocks widened from their tips, so the space between them was narrower and barely big enough to fit us. Our feet were touching, but if we pressed against the sides we could have our own space and still be mostly protected from the wind. I leaned into one of the gaps between the tall rocks and dug into the little sand wall between them, carving out a curved seat.

  “Ooh, good idea.” Clare did the same, and then we were sitting across from each other, though we still had to alternate our knees to have room for our legs.

  It wasn’t exactly dark in here, but the rock walls and the driftwood on top did filter out some of the light, so you could at least tell that the kelp was glowing.

  “This is pretty neat,” I said. “It’s like a hideout.”

  Clare smiled. “Yeah.”

  “Now what?” My voice sounded louder with the closeness of the rock
s.

  “I don’t know,” said Clare. “Tell me your story. How did you end up here?”

  “Okay, um…” I started with our evacuation from the Resolute and told Clare about crashing on the other planet and how I found the Robot, lost him, and found him again, and how we eventually made it off that planet, only for me to lose him a second time just before we arrived here.

  “Man, it must have been nice having someone like him around,” said Clare. “Whenever I’m with my brother, I only feel like he’s half listening, and he never wants to have adventures like I do.”

  “I know,” I said. “Even here, it’s not like these little islands are that interesting, but Penny’s only come out with me like two times in six months, and Judy never does.”

  “Well, they don’t know what they’re missing,” said Clare.

  “Actually, when I tried to tell them about you, they thought you were imaginary.”

  Clare rolled her eyes. “I wish this was all imaginary—I mean, except for meeting you.” She smiled at me.

  “Same,” I said. We sort of stared at each other for a second and I had this awkward thought, like, Why aren’t we saying anything? And that thought was followed immediately by: What should we be saying?

  But then Clare looked over her shoulder again, her face clouding with worry.

  “Do you need to, um, check in with your ship?” I asked.

  “No—I mean, yes, I probably should, but…” She looked around our fort and made a satisfied sigh. “I’ve always wanted something like this. I’ve read all these stories about life back home, how kids my age would get to roam the crystal forests and find secret caves and all. Can’t do much of that when you’re cooped up on a salvage ship most of your life.”

  “It wasn’t really safe to explore outside back when I was on Earth,” I said. “Although it’s not exactly safer here.”

  “Yeah, I guess safe is relative,” Clare said. “How old are you?”

  “Twelve,” I said. “What about you?”

  “I just had my half-hundredth birthday.”

  “Like half of a hundredth of a year?” I said. “But I guess a year is different on every planet.”

  “Ours is four thousand days… although our days probably aren’t the same, either.”

  “Good point,” I said. “This is tricky.”

  “Maybe not.” Clare tapped her index finger and thumb together rapidly, three times. “Hold out your hand.” I did, and she took it, interlocking her fingers with mine and holding our hands up so that our wrists were touching. I felt a little burst of energy, and a hot feeling like maybe I was blushing, but that was probably just my weird allergic thing, so I took a deep breath and told myself to calm down.

  Waves of green light appeared in bands on the outside of Clare’s suit along her wrist, shining against mine.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m running an MRI scan to compare our wrist bones.”

  “That’s going to tell you how our ages match up?”

  “In a way. It can measure the degree to which the distal bones in our wrists have fused, which is something that happens as you grow.”

  “Whoa, cool. How did you know about that?”

  Clare smiled. “Well, don’t tell anyone else around here, but I’m kind of a nerd.”

  “Your secret’s safe with me,” I said, smiling, too.

  The light winked out and Clare released my hand. “Alina,” she said, “compare fusion of distal bones.” She squinted like she was reading results. “Mine are just slightly more fused than yours, which means we’re nearly the same age, but I’m a little bit older. If you’re an Earth twelve, then maybe I’m a thirteen.” She sounded satisfied.

  “Same school, different grades,” I said. Then I remembered that I’d wanted to take a picture of Clare—but she turned suddenly and looked over her shoulder, like she’d been distracted by something. “What is it?”

  Her voice got tight with worry. “I thought I heard something on my ship.”

  I looked behind her, but all I saw were waves and clouds.

  She saw my confused expression. “I guess it’s kind of like I’m in two places at once. It actually hurts. I have this stretching feeling behind my eyes, sort of all the time, and—”

  Her head whipped around again. She bit her lip. “I need to go back and see what’s up. Sorry.”

  “I wonder if…,” I started. “Never mind.”

  “What?”

  “I was just thinking that Don and I—that’s our mechanic—we figured out a way to hopefully stop the power surge on our ship, if it happens again. I guess that would be too late in your case, but…”

  “Maybe not,” said Clare. “I mean, we might find a way to get our systems back online, only for another surge to knock them out all over again. Maybe you could show us your fix?”

  “How am I going to do that?”

  Clare nodded to herself. “I think I could take you. I mean, not actually take you. Even if I could somehow, like, pull you through the rift with me, it would be too dangerous, in case you got trapped on the other side.”

  “Yeah, I was kind of thinking that might be a bad idea.”

  “But I might be able to virtually bring you.” Clare took my hand and turned it over. “Does your communicator system have a port?”

  “Yeah.” I bent my wrist to reveal the small data port on the side, covered with a little rubber cap. “But what are you going to do with that?”

  “Watch.” Clare plucked open the rubber top, then aimed her index finger at it. I could see that the pad of her gloved fingertip had a matrix of little glowing dots on it. Green light illuminated from it and scanned back and forth over my communicator port.

  “Our symbiotic nanotech is incredibly adaptive,” Clare said. “It can do almost anything I ask it to, and right now, I’m asking it to port into your suit system. Ooh—” Clare winced for a second, like she’d been pinched, and then she nodded sharply. “There we go.”

  She held her finger closer to my wrist and the faintest little black dots appeared, as if out of thin air, making a line between her finger and my port, thickening and solidifying until, a few seconds later, a data cable had woven itself into existence between us.

  “My systems are all backward compatible,” she said, “although the twenty-first century is definitely a long way backward.”

  “So… you just told your nanotech to make a data cable with your mind?”

  “Cable… is that what it’s called? But basically, yeah.”

  Suddenly, my communicator began to flash. Symbols appeared on the screen that I’d never seen before.

  “What’s it doing?” I asked. “Or I mean, what are you doing?”

  “It’s not me, it’s the nanotech. It’s learning,” said Clare, “and running bypasses so it can use your helmet as a virtual simulator screen.”

  “My helmet doesn’t have a screen system,” I said.

  “It doesn’t have one yet,” said Clare. She blinked, reading. “Okay. I’m going to initiate the link, and then we’ll go. This might be a little disorienting.”

  All at once, the inside of my visor clouded over, almost like an extreme version of when it tinted in bright sunlight, except as it happened I could see thin, curly motions like wisps of smoke slithering over the inside surface. They thickened and grew darker, and soon my whole helmet had essentially blacked out around me.

  “I can’t really see,” I said. But then my view began to brighten in shimmering energy waves, and I saw—

  Myself. Well, me with a blacked-out helmet visor.

  “Is that working?” Clare asked.

  “Um…” I was looking at myself, sitting there in the fort. “Is this your view? I’m seeing what you see?”

  “Uh-huh. I’m just setting up a wireless connection. There it goes. Okay, I’ve removed the cable. Now I’m going to turn my head. Just be ready; sometimes people get motion sick in the virtual view.”

  My view swung around
and out of the fort, looking across the water. “It’s working,” I reported, not adding that she was right; the motions did make my stomach swim.

  “Okay,” said Clare. “Now for the tricky part. I’m going to pull back and cross the rift to my ship. I have no idea what this will look like, or if the connection will even hold, but…”

  I breathed deep. “I’m ready. Good luck.”

  “Thanks. Here we go.”

  My view started to swim and blur. The rocks faded, the gray daylight replaced by dark red light, and there was a sudden rush like everything was moving fast and I felt like I was falling into nothingness. A sound like hurricane winds—

  “Almost there!” Clare called distantly.

  And then everything rushed to a stop. My body jolted, as if I really had been moving, except I could still feel the rock against my back and the sand beneath my feet. And yet what I saw in front of me was like nowhere I’d ever been before.

  CHAPTER

  Welcome to the Derelict,” Clare said.

  The red light was all around us. We stood (or I should say, Clare stood, and I was seeing what she was seeing) in a room with curving walls. The floor was made of metal grating. Other than a low, crackling hum, it was eerily quiet.

  There was a circular railing beside Clare, and beyond it was a light source. I had to squint to see a set of what appeared to be massive metal coils, glowing an incredibly bright white.

  “Is that the engine core?” I asked.

  “Yeah. It doesn’t normally glow like that. Alina?” Clare glanced toward the ceiling, which made my view move upward, too. “What’s the ship’s current status?”

  A pleasant female voice spoke: “The power surge has overwhelmed almost eighty percent of ship functions. I am unable to slow our velocity toward the quantum rift or power life support systems.”

  As we watched, the light from those engine cores flared brighter, and for a moment, my vision blurred, and it was like I was seeing two things at once: this engine room, but also our fort back on the water planet. It faded almost immediately but left me feeling dizzy.