2013: The Aftermath

by Shane McKenzie

  “Engineering hailing. Are you seeing this, Captain? It’s another ship off the port side.”

  “It’s temporal displacement, Engineering. We were prepped about this. You’re going to be hearing and seeing things outside normal chronology. It’s a mirage. Tachyons or some shit.”

  “The fuck it is, Captain. It’s us. It’s our ship in a few minutes. It’s burning up. It’s imploding. Everyone’s dead.”

  “Stop looking at it, Engineering. Where is Miner? Someone get Miner back on the comm.”

  “Medical here. It’s nitrogen narcosis, sir. At least, that’s the closest I can come to an explanation. They used to call it the diver’s rapture. Something is altering the internal atmospheric support systems. The air has turned to gas. There’s too high a concentration of nitrogen, and it’s getting into our bloodstreams. If it doesn’t subside, we’ll all be shitfaced drunk in a minute. Or worse.”

  “Fix it right fucking now. I’m panicking. I can’t see anything. Visual sensors on SAINT are inoperative. Claustrophobic in here.”

  “Navigation hailing. You need to calm down right now and get it together, Captain. We can’t lose SAINT until this is over. You’re stressing the bio controls. We’re veering off course.”

  “Engineering again. Something’s seriously wrong. The space. It’s...it’s turning to liquid. I swear to God, it’s liquid.”

  “This is the Captain. Who the hell is hailing from Engineering? What are you talking about?”

  “Holy shit. They’re light particles, size of boulders. They’re crushing the goddamn hull.”

  “Engineering, get Miner on the comm or you’re screwed.”

  “Navigation hailing. This is Ross. With all due respect, Captain, what are you talking about?”

  “Miner. Head Engineer. You just said his comm was down. Get him back on line.”

  “I don’t know anyone named Miner. Kubler is in charge of Engineering.”

  “You’re bordering on insubordination, Ross. This is no time for your fucking jokes. Get this Kubler guy on the horn.”

  “Kubler hailing, Captain. One of our guys freaked out. My apologies. We’ve sent him to Medical.”

  “Who the hell are you? There’s no Kubler on this ship.”

  “Sir?”

  “Where’s Miner?”

  “Who?”

  “Miner, you jackass.”

  “There’s no one by that name in Engineering, Captain.”

  “Captain to Security. We have a stowaway. Find a man named Kubler and impound him. Do you hear me? I want this worthless piece of shit rotting in my brig until we reach Andererde.”

  “Security here. Kubler is the primary Engineer. We don’t understand your orders, Captain.”

  “Someone’s going to lose their ass for this, Security. Upload the fucking manifest to SAINT right now.”

  ***

  When this program was conceived last year, they were toying with light speed travel, cryogenics, and suspended animation. Things I thought we’d discounted decades ago as speculative fiction. When I went up the first time, we were embracing the absurdities of quantum superposition without ever considering the state we would collapse into once somebody noticed us. We were navigating the expanse of space using particle physics and tachyons, locating wormholes and centralizing focal points through fourth dimensional stasis. The trick is not to move at all, you see, but to anchor yourself to a single coordinate and let space wash over you like the current during a rip tide. The secret is building a box to house Schrodinger’s duplicitous cat, not a faster-than-light vehicle. I asked the physicists why they’d abandoned these techniques, why critical plots on their star charts were now unmarked. I pointed one out. The eggheads went into conniption fits working out the details. Everyone was stunned.

  I spent months in close quarters with their brightest scientific minds. For as ridiculous as I must have sounded, none of them could reckon how I’d developed such an instinctive grasp on the concepts. Soon after, they were publishing studies validating these findings. Superlight travel warps the matter of space like a screwdriver forcing its way through a handkerchief. As space contracts, the vehicle implodes. A rich man would have an easier time gaining entry to heaven than trying to pass a spaceship through the eye of Einstein’s needle. No, only navigation through time gets us to Andererde, the planet everyone believes will salvage the species.

  But it won’t. I’ve flown this mission before. I’ve memorized these charts. I’ve programmed this flight deck. There’s nothing out there worth seeing. It’s been done. Why don’t they remember the first Andererde mission? They claim that my last assignment was listed as a two-day orbit. It was only to test the feasibility of a bio-integrated control system. Why can’t they remember? Who erased the logs?

  I’ve given up looking for the answer. Maybe it never happened. Maybe that’s the consequence of gambling with time. More than a pilgrim or a frontier scout, I’ve become Rip Van Winkle. As dejected and irrelevant. As damned by longevity.

  After they finalized construction of the ship, this new iteration of The Mayflower, the scientists pressed me for the necessity of the Stage Five separation module. It was expensive and, according to their calculations, extraneous. That part was my idea, but I couldn’t explain its purpose. I just insisted they build it or I’d refuse to pilot the ship. What was I going to tell them? During the maiden voyage, the one nobody seems to recall, we used only four. If I’d had a fifth, things would have turned out differently. If we would have built that final stage, they would still be here. All of them. Only I would be gone.

  During my time in space, so many things changed. I came back to a world that had passed me by in reverse. The flight recorder clocked eight years. But when I splashed down, they told me I’d never left the atmosphere; the mission was aborted when the gyroscopic stabilizing systems returned what Mission Control reported as “inconsistent data.” They cut the boosters, jettisoned the capsule, and deployed the chutes. I hadn’t been gone eight minutes, let alone eight years. Or so they said. I was knocked unconscious, they reasoned. Temporary memory loss, the doctors suggested. The flight recorder malfunctioned, the engineers surmised.

  But I remember every day I spent wandering through that black wilderness with only a photograph of my wife and daughter to keep me going. There’s no data consistent enough to describe the agony of staring out a window at nothing for nearly a decade, with the boredom eating away at your soul, and your heart too weak for madness, too weak even to die, but living on anyway because love won’t let it go. At least in hell, you’re spared the torment of hope.

  ***

  “SAINT hailing flight deck. Incoming command message received. Stage Three commencing.”

  “Goddamnit, SAINT. Suspend automated flight controls and switch to analog.”

  “SAINT cannot comply with your request.”

  “Idle this vessel. I want a 24-hour delay on jumps. That is your original programming.”

  “SAINT cannot comply with your request.”

  “Explain.”

  “SAINT has detected widespread damage. Available options are to continue to Andererde or stall to repair damage.”

  “Exactly. Prioritize stall.”

  “Probability of civilian survival cannot be calculated if we remain in the portal or dead space. Collateral damage of 58 percent anticipated if we continue without taking new action.”

  “I can’t accept any collateral damage, SAINT. Please, give me another option. We have to get out of here.”

  “Civilian casualties are more likely if we attempt to return to Anderson Hill. Up to 80 percent.”

  “That won’t work for me, SAINT. I need more options. Tell me what else I can do.”

  “Option three is to isolate the contagion. This will increase the odds for success by preserving the integrity of The Mayflower’s compartments by 72 percent. All other options risk high loss of life and ensure that The Mayflower will not return. You will be stranded on the planet. There are
not enough resources to support you, Captain.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You will die in most scenarios.”

  “Please, I need another option. Anything. Please.”

  “Isolate the contagion. Relocate civilians into crew quarters. Jettison non-essential resources.”

  “Define non-essential resources.”

  “Security. Ship’s Medical. Science.”

  “If I do?”

  “Estimating. SAINT projects 85-percent human survival rate among all remaining wombs. SAINT projects 60-percent probability of return flight to Anderson Hill. Damage contained by acceptable measurements.”

  “Okay, SAINT. Initiate.”

  ***

  At T minus 45, I meet the crew in the briefing room. The crew is the same. Flight specialists, navigators, engineers, scientists, military. Then there are the civilians. They’re also the same. The teachers, the construction workers, the religious leaders, the cooks, the doctors, the business people, the government representatives, the artists, the breeders. All the people you’d need to start a new world. All these germs in the petri-dish coalescing into the fabric of some new virus. Children too. I’d demanded that no children be included. But it’s too late now. They’ve made their decision. I can’t override it.

  The briefing is the same one I endured eight years ago. My lips move in sync with each speaker on the panel as he or she recites instructions. I don’t realize I’m doing this until Eva shoots me a look. She’s the botanist. She’s going to tend their gardens, sow the seeds of this new Eden. I frighten her, I think. There’s something prescient about me that disturbs her logical sensibilities. My inexplicable foreknowledge of events gets under her skin. She’s mentioned this several times: “It might be amusing to people who tend toward the fantastic, but I think it’s weird and a little sick.”

  She’s right. I’m no seer. And there is some perverse pleasure I take in acting out my part in this pantomime. Like Eva, I too lend no credence to things like ESP or déjà vu. It’s just that I’ve been here before.

  At T minus 30, they load the civilians onto the ship and seal them in. The crew suits up and begins shuffling out the briefing center toward the gantry. Eva stops me after the others leave the complex.

  “Wait,” she says, placing her hand on my sleeve, “I need to talk to you.”

  “We’re running out of time.”

  “Look, I know you’re uncomfortable having me along. It wasn’t my decision to...it wasn’t my intent for things to work out this way.”

  “And what way is that, exactly?”

  “Stop with the ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’ routine, Roland. What we had wasn’t healthy. We weren’t a good fit. You knew it as well as I did. And I tried, I really tried, but you wouldn’t let me in. It’s been two years now. I’ve moved on with my life. You’ve got to move on too. I’m hoping we can be professional during the mission.”

  “I don’t remember our relationship the way you do.”

  “It was spooky. I don’t know what to call it. Too familiar. When I met you, I was intrigued at how well you could read me. Then it turned weird. You can’t make me the person you think I should be. You can’t replace your wife with me.”

  “I was never trying to replace her.”

  “I think, at least subconsciously, you were. You went and found someone who looked like her, acted like her, reminded you of her. But that’s all. I’m not her.”

  “It was a lot more complicated than that.”

  “And that’s just the problem. I don’t want to help carry your baggage around the universe. I’m happy with Kubler. This is the life I want, and I’m sorry it hurts you. Once we’re settled and you return, you’ll never have to deal with this again.”

  “That may hurt more. Did you ever stop to think about that? I’ve lost you before. This time, it might be forever.”

  “What do you even mean by that? We ended a long time ago. I’m never going to be yours, regardless of what happens. It’s just not meant to be.”

  “I could live a thousand years in the absence of your embrace just to see you on the street and know that you’re safe. It’s the absence of your presence that’s hell for me.”

  “You’re going to have to get used to that idea. I’m sorry.”

  Eva shakes her head and steps into the hall. I pull a cigarette from my duty bag to allow her a moment’s head start.

  At T minus 25, the speaker in the ceiling announces that I need to board. I put the cigarette out on the wall.

  At the end of the hallway, the main doors wait for me. This is the worst part of the walk. Beyond them, I’ll have to cross five meters of open ground before I can enter the tube connected to the lift. But there’s no turning back now.

  I step outside, into the day. But as suddenly as I emerge, I recoil back into the hall. The day has become an uncertainty for me. It promises nothing, it offers little. It illuminates all our contrived goals and all the ways in which we will fail to realize them. It describes our pain.

  Over this last year, I’ve grown increasingly nocturnal. That’s what all old people do, isn’t it? They stop sleeping. And I’ve become old. I might not look it, but eight years were robbed from me the last time I went up into that permanent night. Now I wither inside this younger man’s skin, incapable of keeping pace with his body but unable to rest. Since the day they pulled me from the capsule, I’ve lost my struggle to sleep. Maybe like children, old people believe they’ll miss something in sleep. But unlike children, we just don’t have the time to miss out on anything more.

  I’ve learned to appreciate the nocturnal, the insomniac. I’ve embraced their fear of the day, the way it exposes our imperfections. How it reveals all the ways we are not created in God’s image.

  When I brave the light again, I’m intercepted by a man named Middleton. They tell me he’s an eccentric philanthropist with a keen interest in this colonization project. He used to be a researcher at SETI before all the space programs were privatized. They claim he discovered some alien signal, but nothing came of it. The aliens never called back, so the government shuttered the agency. After that, he made a fortune writing science fiction novels. Then he began sinking his money into revitalizing the space exploration initiative.

  He’s funded this entire thing. But he never talks about colonization, at least not when I’ve been present. He doesn’t even talk about extraterrestrial life, his old bailiwick. He talks about the wormholes. About time displacement. About inter-dimensional anomalies. About all the pitfalls and their probable outcomes, echoing too accurately travails I have undergone. He disturbs me with his insight, much as I disturb Eva with mine. It’s funny. I get it, though, this joke. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the universe has a child’s sense of humor: cruel and ironic and selfish.

  “Captain,” Middleton says, shooing away his security escorts. “I won’t keep you long. I just wanted to wish you well before you embark.”

  “Thank you, sir. I know that many people owe you a debt of gratitude for this effort.”

  “Yes, yes, the colonizing. It may take quite a long time, yes? Nothing’s certain. And you’ll have many more trips ahead of you, I imagine, should we decide to populate Andererde on a greater scale.”

  “That’s the plan, as I understand it.”

  “Well, if sustaining life proves viable. Look, I’ve got a lot riding on this. More than you could possibly fathom. I’ve listened to all the talking heads in Engineering and Project Management, but it’s your opinion that matters to me. I need a healthy dose of honesty, not more optimism. So Captain, do you think, with reasonable certainty, that you will reach your destination?”

  “We’ve taken more precautions this time.”

  “This time?”

  “I meant in contrast with conventional missions. You know, moon landings, satellite repairs, that sort of thing. We should reach Andererde without incident.”

  “No doubt, no doubt
. But that’s not really your ultimate destination, is it? What happens when you leave Andererde?”

  “I don’t follow. When I return, the rest is up to the colonists and the data they send back for analysis. Then it’s a problem for the scientists. My mission will be complete.”

  “Will it?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Godspeed, Captain.” Middleton makes a show of checking his watch. “I eagerly await the day you and I meet again. Wherever that may be.”

  He stuffs an envelope into my hand and scurries away. I shove it in my duty bag.