An Astronaut's Life

by Sonja Dechian

  Sean looks at Mendel in the dim light. He’s not a large man. Only Sean’s height, much smaller than Sean’s dad, and he’s dressed in a shirt and beige pants. He looks, Sean thinks, like someone who couldn’t really belong anywhere else.

  ‘Maybe you should pull the lever,’ Sean says.

  ‘It’s a decision for the group. We agreed on that.’

  ‘But it’s not. You said you can’t start again. Maybe the others can. Maybe they still have choices. You’re the one who built this, why shouldn’t you be one who decides?’

  ‘I’m not deciding today.’

  ‘I would.’

  ‘Are you so determined for revenge?’

  ‘It’s not just revenge. I already told you; I can’t start over. You want to do this to save your wife from knowing what a failure you are. I want it because I want this thing out of the world. It’s not to protect my parents, or me—or even my sister. It can’t bring her back. I just want a world where this photo never existed.’

  Mendel nods. ‘I want that world too,’ he says. ‘But you’ve looked at it. Your parents. If I pull that lever, it’s not just the bad guys who suffer.’ He gestures to the machine. ‘It doesn’t distinguish your intentions, your interpretations, or what is human from machine. It just identifies specific memory cells and destroys them. It could destroy communications, much of what we know and remember about the world. I can’t predict it, Charles, I can’t test it. Even though it’s my machine, it will be out of my control.’

  ‘Will your wife remember the thing you wrote?’

  ‘No. It will be as if that never existed. And everything that follows from it will be gone, too.’

  Sean shifts and knocks over a mop. It clatters against the wall and lands with a thud.

  ‘Sorry.’

  Mendel makes a tight smile. ‘Are you sure about it, Charles?’

  Sean nods. ‘Yes. I’m more sure than not.’

  Mendel pulls the lever and the sound of the machine grows to a warm hum. It’s not loud, but Sean can feel it in his chest. It builds until it’s too much. ‘Can we get out of here?’ he says.

  ‘I’ll give you a ride.’

  He follows Mendel up the stairs and out into the night.

  Half an hour later, Sean stands on the front lawn of a small yellow-brick house and watches as Mendel’s car disappears around a corner, the indicator blinking courteously despite the absence of traffic. He wonders how Mendel and his wife will spend the night. On the ride here, Mendel told him that in just a matter of hours they might not remember any of this.

  Sean makes his way along the side of the house. The gate is locked, which is new, but he climbs it without too much trouble, probably because of the adrenalin. He pictures a string of tiny bots spilling into the basement of the Gratton Building. In reality, they are too small to see. They are as tiny as a virus. They are as single-minded.

  ‘François?’ he calls, standing outside his friend’s window. He says it louder.

  There’s no reply, but a shifting light through the curtains suggests François might still be awake. Sean raps his knuckles against the window and after a startled clatter from inside, it slides open.

  ‘What the fuck?’ François can’t tell who is there because of the darkness, but he makes his voice gruff, just in case.

  ‘It’s me,’ Sean says, coming closer to show himself in the light. ‘Hi.’

  ‘Shit!’ François fumbles to free the flyscreen from the window. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes, sure,’ Sean says, to dispel the empathy in his friend’s face. ‘I’m fine. I just wanted to see you. I did something.’

  ‘Your parents will freak.’

  ‘They won’t wake up.’

  Sean climbs inside and drops onto the carpet. François extends a hand to steady him.

  ‘I sneak out every week,’ Sean says. The pressure and comfort of François’ hand makes him confessional. ‘My parents take pills so they can sleep, they don’t hear a thing. I climb out the window.’

  It’s too dark to see his expression. François squeezes Sean’s arm.

  ‘You’ve got to come with me,’ Sean says.

  ‘Okay—my shoes.’

  ‘I’ll meet you out front.’

  As he waits, Sean pictures his sleeping parents. He doesn’t mind that they take medicine to sleep. He just hates the thought of them waking, that moment where it all floods back each morning.

  François looks apprehensive as he emerges from the side gate and Sean is afraid that if he does not hurry and explain, his friend will turn him away.

  ‘You said you did something,’ François says.

  ‘Have you got your phone?’

  ‘Yes. What is it?’

  ‘Let’s go.’ Sean steps away, towards the street.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘The punishment. It’s happening.’

  Sean sets off down the driveway and François follows. For some reason François doesn’t seem to question what Sean has said. When Sean reaches the street he looks back at his friend and the expression on his face is so concerned, so trusting, that Sean feels his first wave of doubt.

  ‘Come on,’ he says, because he also feels an urgent need to escape.

  He starts to run, and François runs alongside him, through the circles of road lit by streetlamps and the darkness in between. The sounds of their breathing and their footfalls form a heavy rhythm. Sean is regretful and frightened and excited; he is bursting with all of these things and he is not thinking about the picture, until he realises that this is the first time in forever he has not thought about it. François passes him and Sean shouts ‘Hey!’ and his thoughts are overtaken by his proximity to François. He wants to hug François again. He wants to shout. Everything is going to change now—could that be true?

  The university’s horticultural gardens contain over two hundred plant species, if you include the grasslands, but at night very few of them can be identified. You would only care what they were if you were a particularly committed botanist because in the darkness they are all home to spiders.

  In the garden’s back corner, behind the Gratton Building, there’s a nameplate attached to a rock explaining how the unassuming shrub behind it is in fact the critically endangered Lomatia tasmanica, a clone that reproduces itself identically by dropping branches that then take root.

  There’s a window jammed open right behind it. It’s here that a series of microscopic machines stream out into the world. Some rest on the leaves of Lomatia tasmanica. Others are swept away because they are so light. They’re lighter than air, and more determined.

  Sean and François are nowhere nearby. They’re kilometres away, on the second floor of a supermarket car park in the suburbs. Sean had pictured a mountain, a bridge, but there is nothing like that in the neighbourhood so he leads François up the concrete ramp to the top, and they lean against the metal railings and look out across the empty parking spaces below. He explains that the nanobots are so small they can be inhaled or swallowed or absorbed through the mucous membranes of a human. Because they are only robots, they can’t differentiate between
the electric impulses of the brain and those of a machine.

  ‘Is this real?’ François says.

  ‘I think so. You can’t see them, but the machine was working.’

  ‘And they destroy specific types of cells?’

  ‘Neurons. Memories. Files.’

  ‘It’s exactly what we dreamt of.’

  ‘I know,’ Sean says. ‘It’s perfect. Well, Mendel hopes the brain will adapt to the changes, but there will be some problems.’

  ‘How long do we have?’ François leans forward over the railing and lifts his feet so he’s balanced against the metal.

  ‘I’m not sure. Maybe hours.’

  There are no cars, but there are lights around the car park’s perimeter as well as signs that are all lit up. Sean isn’t sure about the extent of the threat these things pose, given the possibility of electromagnetic radiation, but he realises he wants more time. He doesn’t want to be awake when it happens, he just wants to go to sleep and then everything will have changed.

  ‘Your phone,’ he remembers.

  François takes it from his pocket.

  ‘Do I just turn it off?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I thought we’d smash it.’

  François looks uncertain, but only for a second. He hands it over.

  Sean holds the phone over the railing and when he lets go they lose sight of its path in the shadows. The sound is an unsatisfying crack followed by the tinny echo of falling plastic.

  ‘It’s going to happen to us anyway,’ says François.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Fuck, you really did it. Take that!’ He leans forward to shout, ‘Take that, you fucking cum bags.’ He shouts louder, ‘Take that, fuck-faced dick faces!’

  The sound settles over the car park.

  ‘How long now?’

  They have hours. Sean’s excited about the hours he has with François. He thinks about the things he already has to fill into his chart, but by the time he gets home he might not remember the chart at all.

  From somewhere far away he hears something, a very low hum. It could just be a distant vehicle. But no.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about something,’ he says.

  ‘What’s that?’ François slumps forward against the railing.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about kissing you.’

  François doesn’t look over. He doesn’t move.

  ‘I have too,’ he says.

  ‘I was scared to do it.’

  François straightens up. ‘But why?’ he says. ‘What might happen?’

  Sean considers this. Deep in his chest he feels the machine’s hum grow stronger. He thinks about what it would be like to kiss François and, for once, it doesn’t seem that anything too bad could happen.

  THE ARCHITECT

  They were eating dinner when the call came. It was the landline phone, which rarely rang, so they exchanged a look as the architect stood up to take it.

  ‘Hello?’

  He knew it would be one of those international call centres and he was probably going to hang up before they could finish a sentence, but instead a serious voice asked for him by name.

  ‘Yes?’

  He watched his wife dip a slice of bread into the sauce of her pasta. It was his pesto cream sauce, the one meal the architect could always make well.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ he said into the phone.

  His wife looked up.

  ‘I don’t think I understand,’ the architect said. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  As the architect explained the phone call, he looked from his wife to the muted TV where a reporter was interviewing a politician. The man on the phone was a doctor, he said. The man said he was Leisel’s doctor, but there had to be some mistake.

  ‘So why is she asking for you now?’

  They hadn’t spoken in fifteen, maybe twenty years.

  ‘She must be in love with you,’ his wife said. ‘Or making amends? Maybe she’s dying and wants to reconnect. Or she’s an addict—what if it’s part of her treatment?’

  The architect didn’t share his wife’s enthusiasm for theories, and since the doctor hadn’t made clear what Leisel’s illness was, all he could offer was that the doctor might have mentioned some kind of accident. Or had he said incident? Either way, it might have been a euphemism.

  He tried to tell his wife what he remembered about Leisel, the way they used to skip school and hide out in the old caravan behind her mum’s place. How they’d papered the walls with drawings of the house he would one day design. By the end of their first year together they must have had fifty or sixty different versions of their future home: houses on stilts, houses dug into hillsides, houses seventeen-storeys high. How they’d lost their virginity looking up at those sketches of their future. They’d been inseparable. And then she broke it off, without warning as far as he could recall—but, God, that was years ago now.

  It was his wife who suggested the visit. He might as well drive over later in the week, what did he have to lose? Leisel was ill, and she’d been asking for him.

  In person, the doctor wasn’t so intimidating. He was sober but friendly, with narrow shoulders that gave him a defeated appearance. The hospital wasn’t what the architect expected, either. His wife had hugged him that morning and they’d shared their misgivings. They’d pictured barred windows and human distress, but in reality it was all automatic doors whooshing open as he was led to a bright meeting room.

  The doctor explained Leisel had forgotten a lot of things.

  ‘Try not to inundate her with too much information,’ he said.

  ‘Are you sure it’s a good idea for me to be here?’

  ‘Just don’t expect her to talk too much—she’ll get confused if you push her. We must be patient.’

  ‘And this will help?’

  The doctor led the architect down a long corridor and into a locked ward. He warned that Leisel was still adjusting to life in hospital and to large amounts of medication—which would probably not cure her, but might help numb her anxiety.

  ‘Her delusion might be permanent.’

  The architect retraced the steps he’d taken since his life had diverged with Leisel’s and he tried to imagine where the reversal of all that time might have left him. The doctor said Leisel believed she was still seventeen.

  He saw her from behind. Even with her hair cut to her shoulders, he recognised her. Leisel must have known he was coming because when he entered the TV room she smiled without surprise.

  She was thin, perhaps thinner than she’d been sixteen years ago, and that made her cheekbones more pronounced and her face drawn. The architect was hesitant to come too close, but Leisel swivelled in her armchair and reached to hug him. The faded cotton of her red T-shirt was soft under his fingers. He could feel her shoulder blades, though when she pulled away her eyes were distant.

  Leisel motioned for him to sit.

  ‘Mum says I’ll only be here a few days,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. It’s so embarrassing.’

  The archi
tect shook his head. ‘No, it’s fine.’

  ‘Want to come for a walk?’

  He nodded and Leisel reached for his hand. She smiled and creases marked the skin near her eyes.

  The architect was glad he’d come; it wasn’t as strange as he’d expected. He imagined telling his wife, ‘I don’t know what we were so worried about.’

  Their first visit didn’t last long. Leisel was tired after a short walk around the ward, so he helped her back to her room where she curled on the bed and motioned for him to join her. The architect was careful not to come too close, but when she reached for him he wrapped his arm over her.

  After a few minutes he thought she’d fallen asleep and he started to shift away, but Leisel reached for his hand. The architect allowed her to lead his fingers to her stomach, winding them under her T-shirt. He spread his fingers, tentative. Her skin was smooth and warm—unchanged. He held his hand against her as she breathed and the shape of her small breasts shifted so close to his hand. He tried not to make the comparison, but it came: he thought of his wife, how different they were.

  The architect heard Leisel’s breathing change as she slept, but he did not move away.

  ‘It’s so sad,’ he said that night. ‘She seemed so alone in there. I might visit again, but I don’t see how it can make much difference.’

  The architect’s wife had made dinner reservations, but she cancelled when she saw how the afternoon’s events had affected him. She changed into her slippers to show she was happy to stay in. Her day had been busy too: she had her question-and-answer segment on the radio on alternate Thursdays, where people called in to ask about infectious diseases.

  He told her he’d forgotten to listen.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said.

  ‘It’s fine, don’t even worry, I’ll be on again. It was kind of you to go see her.’

  ‘Was it?’