by Lauren James
I shudder and squeeze my eyes shut, like that will get me out of this, like if I just try hard enough I can erase time and make it so that The Eternity was never launched at all.
I crawl into my bunk and pull the duvet over my head until I’m safe in my cocoon of bedding, where I can ignore the computer and nothing can hurt me.
It rings and rings and rings.
I curl a pillow around my head to try and block out the shrill wail. It vibrates through me. It seems to last for ever.
Finally, finally, it stops.
I lie back, stare at the ceiling and try to catch my breath. Before I’ve even relaxed, the ringing starts again, loud and piercing and insistent.
I start to cry. He’s not going to stop. Not until I answer. He’s never going to leave me alone.
He rings three more times.
There must be a way to turn it off. When the ringing stops, I go to the helm. I try to block the calls, but as I’m clicking he rings again and—
My click accidentally answers the call – or perhaps I just needed to know, once and for all, whether he’s good or bad or somewhere in-between – and the ringing stops.
“Romy?” a voice says. The sound drags right up against my nerve endings.
My heart stops in my chest. I hold my breath, as if that will make him go away, as if he’ll think it’s an error and the call never connected at all.
“Are you there?” he whispers in a low croon.
I choke on a gasp.
There’s barely a second of silence. The time lag has disappeared almost completely.
“You are there,” he says. “I can hear you.”
I swallow back stomach butterflies and moths and snakes, and before I can decide to end the call without saying a word, he says, “It’s just me. There’s no need to be afraid.”
His voice is deep and terrifyingly gentle, as if he thinks by keeping it mild he can coax me into his arms. The sickening thing is that a day ago, it would have worked.
“I’m not afraid,” I blurt out, without thinking.
There’s another moment of silence. This time it seems victorious.
“I didn’t think you were going to answer,” he says eventually, slightly disapproving and slightly pleased.
It’s only because I’m still not entirely convinced that he’s done what I think he’s done that I reply. “I wasn’t. I answered by accident.”
“You are scared.” His words are absolutely certain. It sends a shiver down my spine so hard that it seizes up my neck.
“I have to go,” I say quickly.
“See you so—” he says, but I end the call before he can finish talking.
I stare at the screen, panting and sweating like I’ve run four laps of the ship. I’m certain now. J isn’t good. I never want to hear that voice again.
He rings again, but only once.
I sit cross-legged on the floor and stare at my model buildings, populated by the tiny Romy and the tiny J and the tiny little children we were going to raise together – in some alternative universe, where he was good and I was normal, and we were in love for real instead of for play.
I pick up the dinner-packet model farmhouses, which tilt on their glue foundations. Tiny paper chickens fly off the sides.
I carry the fragile creation to the airlock and leave it in the outer chamber. When I open the door, the model tears itself apart, twisting and turning until my future disappears into nothing.
DAYS UNTIL THE ETERNITY CATCHES UP:
80
I spend the day pacing the ship, buried waist-deep in hopeless solutions.
Eighty days. I still have eighty days. He’s not here yet. I say it to myself over and over, trying to calm down.
Whichever way I look at it, I can’t escape. How do you get away from someone flying towards you at nearly the speed of light? How do you avoid someone who can outrun you? How do you outmanoeuvre someone who has had over two years to plan?
Today, while I was searching through J’s operating system, I found an audio file hidden in the coding. The room filled with the sound of fingernails scratching across metal when it played – just like the noises I’ve been hearing outside the ship.
The noises weren’t in my head. I haven’t been imagining things. He set up a program that played the sound at night. The monsters were real. The monsters were created by J all along.
He must have spent hours on that one small thing to hurt me. And that’s only the beginning. J’s spent so much time and energy trying to make my life miserable. From the UPR to the power cuts, he’s created the worst living conditions possible.
Is it even worth attempting to stop him? I wonder, still pacing the ship’s corridors. He’s coming, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I could just wait and hope that when he arrives things will be different. But is that possible?
There’s an abrupt silence as the sound of my echoing footsteps disappears. I realize I’ve stopped outside the sick bay without meaning to. I’m so tense that it almost makes me jump.
I stare at the half-open door.
There are so many places on the ship that I avoid because I’m afraid of facing the past. But the past is much less scary than the future. I know what’s already happened; I know how bad it was. I don’t know what’s coming, though.
I breathe in the stale air and consider whether to step inside.
I was eleven when I heard a noise in the gene bank. I needed some help from Dad with an astrophysics problem, so I’d gone looking for him. When I went inside to see if it was him, I discovered my mother instead.
She was destroying the embryos, hitting the cases with the oxygen tank from her suit. She smashed the glass, sending the contents pouring out across the floor in an icy mist of liquid nitrogen.
She turned to look at me, blood running down her wrist, fragments of glass sticking out of her fist. Stepping towards me, she ground the shattered remains of test tubes under her bare feet.
There was a blank look in her eyes, the way she always looked during a psychotic episode. “It’s no good. It’s not safe. We can’t do it.”
“Mum? What are you—” I didn’t take my eyes off her, but yelled “DAD!” as loudly as I could.
My mother had been suffering from an increasingly violent psychosis for years, but I’d never seen her like this before.
“They don’t get to choose!” she shouted.
“Who are ‘they’?” I asked. I heard the sound of footsteps. Dad was coming.
“They shouldn’t live on that broken, lonely world,” she said, turning to stroke the door of the freezer, eyes on the samples inside.
“Talia!” Dad yelled as he reached the gene bank. “What are you—” He caught sight of the broken case behind her. “Oh God, no, Talia, what have you done?”
My mother jerked her head up. “It wasn’t their decision to make!”
She raised the oxygen cylinder to the glass of the next freezer, containing hundreds more embryos.
The tank hit the metal side and fractured on impact, oxygen escaping free of the canister in a loud hiss as shards of metal flew across the room.
She just raised her arms and aimed for the glass once more.
“TALIA!” Dad leapt at her, wrapping his arms around her shoulders, grabbing her fists before she could strike.
She let out a furious, mournful wail and threw all her weight forward. “It’s too cruel. We can’t!”
They wrestled, pulling each other in opposite directions, until Dad skidded on the mess on the floor. He crashed down, my mother falling on top of him.
She jerked away, pulling free of his grasp and diving for the nearest case. He grabbed at her arm, both of them slippery with blood. She turned on him, wild with fury, and pushed him away.
Dad’s head jerked back as he fell, cracking against the sharp edge of one of the smashed freezer doors.
My mother hissed at him, “We deserve to die for what we did.”
Dad made a broken, gasping noise that sounded like “Rom
y” and “help”. I realized that he wasn’t moving; that his head was bent at an unnatural angle. Blood dripped down the curve of his neck, fresh and black and thick. I ran to him, pushing past my mother.
“Stop it! Mum, he’s hit his head!”
She just stared at me, like she couldn’t understand who I was.
A shard of glass had pierced Dad’s neck, gouging deep under the skin at the base of his skull. When I met his gaze, his pupils were blown wide; almost completely black.
“He’s stuck, help me!” I yelled at my mother, the doctor, but I couldn’t get her to move.
“They don’t deserve this hell!” She forced the words out through her tears. “We should have ended this nightmare years ago!”
I fluttered my hands over Dad’s head, trying to decide whether to pull him free of the glass. I had no idea how deeply it was lodged inside his head, but the blood flow was speeding up.
All I knew about first aid was that I had to stop the bleeding; I had to bandage him up. I was only eleven.
I carefully pulled his head away from the freezer door, trying to slide the glass out of his skin. It slid free a few centimetres, but then there was an unmistakable snapping sound. Dad turned frighteningly, sickeningly white. His pupils went blank. His chest fell flat.
My mother seemed to come back to herself then. She stopped screaming and stared down at Dad like she couldn’t understand what had happened.
I knew before she did. He was dead.
My mother turned to look at me with empty eyes. I felt certain that she was coming for me next.
I ran.
In the corridor, I climbed the ladder up to the stores, expecting her to grab hold of my legs at any moment. I climbed until I reached a gap between two shelves and dived inside, crawling as deep as I could get, squeezing myself into a space too small for anyone but an eleven year old.
I could hear noises behind me, banging and crashing. I didn’t know if she was chasing me or still smashing up the embryo freezers, but I didn’t turn to check.
Lying in the darkness, I could feel blood ooze from my kneecaps where I’d grazed them on food packets. Every time I breathed, my chest touched boxes on either side of me.
I listened.
I stayed there for two days; listening, waiting, certain that my mother was coming for me.
I hid in the utter blackness of the stores until I was too thirsty to wait any longer, until the memory of Dad’s eyes turning blank as I held him was too much to bear, alone in the dark.
When I climbed back down to ground level, the ship was completely silent. I stood in the corridor, trying to decide what to do. My mouth was parched, but my brain was telling me to find out where my mother was before I went to get a drink.
I couldn’t hear anything. After ten minutes, I slowly walked down the corridor to the habitation area, the sound of my own footsteps making me jump.
It was empty.
I checked in the cupboards, under the bunks. When I was sure I was alone, I went to the sink and drank and drank and drank. Then my fear came back in a rush.
I thought about just going back up to the stores with a bottle of water, but the ship was so silent and empty that my curiosity got the better of me. I needed to know what my mother was doing – and part of me wanted to find Dad. Because I hadn’t entirely convinced myself that he was actually dead.
I checked the entire ship. The only sounds were ones that I made.
The gene bank was empty – and it had been cleaned. There was no trace of the accident, except for the smashed cases. The others were intact, full of hundreds more embryos that hadn’t been destroyed.
If I’d looked harder, I might have found the fragment of my mother’s oxygen tank, engraved with her name, hidden in the doorframe. I was too confused to do anything but carry on wandering the ship.
I didn’t know what to think.
The last place I checked was the sick bay – some tiny, hopeful part of my brain thinking that Dad might be recovering there, with my mother tending to him.
When the door slid open, my eyes immediately found the jar of ashes waiting on the table.
Dad.
I took a tentative step into the room, forcing my eyes away from the jar, searching for my mother. I knew she must be in here. I’d looked everywhere else.
The room was empty.
“Mum?” I called, my voice breaking, barely louder than a whisper.
No reply.
I swallowed. The room was lined with the empty stasis pods: silent upright memorials to the astronauts who had died in them. There were nearly a hundred. Was my mother hiding in one of them – or waiting to creep up on me while I checked them?
I had to look. I had to find her.
I started opening the pods one by one.
Empty.
Empty.
Empty.
The tenth pod I checked wasn’t empty. Even worse, it was running. According to the monitor displaying vital signs, there was someone inside.
I was flooded with adrenalin. I braced myself and opened the door. My mother was inside. She was in stasis, like the astronauts had been before the failure.
I stared at her for long seconds. I couldn’t look away from her eyelids, frozen shut. I expected her to open them at any moment and lunge for me.
When the machine started beeping at me to shut the door before defrosting occurred, I closed it and backed away, dropping to the ground and staring at the pod.
My mother had tidied up the gene bank, cremated Dad and then checked herself into a pod and entered torpor sleep.
She knew the risks, but she had done it anyway.
I still don’t know why. Guilt? Terror? Panic? Or just madness?
I don’t know. I hope I never find out.
I stored Dad’s remains alongside the astronauts’ ashes. Touching the fine grains of his ashes was when I first realized that I was alone. For ever.
I haven’t been back to the sick bay since then. I don’t want to know if she’s still alive. I don’t want to know whether I’m sharing my ship with a murderer or a corpse.
I don’t want to know why she put herself into stasis.
I never want to see her again.
I stare at the neat lines of pods through the open door of the sick bay. I understand now why my mother wanted to destroy the embryos.
She thought that it was better to never live at all than to live in the world as she saw it – where you were forced to watch your friends die, and had to cling to tiny fragments of human communication from a planet an ever-increasing number of light years away.
She thought it was kinder to destroy the cells before they had a chance to suffer through what we had experienced – or worse. Is no life at all better than the constant fear and fight for survival I face every day?
I don’t know.
If a life of fear isn’t worth living, then why should I carry on? It’s not possible to be more afraid than I am right now. The thought of J coming for me hurts to the marrow of my bones in a deep primal dread.
Whatever happens, I can’t see a point in time when I will ever be happy. For the rest of my life, I’ll be struggling. I’m always going to be moments away from sinking completely.
So why should I live at all?
I could do what my mother did, and just … not. Check into a pod. Leave my life up to chance. Refuse to take responsibility.
It would be so easy. But it would be so pointless. Every year I’ve fought to survive would be wasted.
I realize then that I’ve made up my mind: I want to live. I want to live so much that I would tear out the throat of anyone who tried to stop me. I’m not going to give up. I’m not going to sit back and wait for J to find me and play more of his games.
I’m going to fight. I’m going to do whatever it takes to survive.
DAYS UNTIL THE ETERNITY CATCHES UP:
79
I’m hiding in the stores again. Pressed up against the ceiling, I strain my eyes for any sign
of the shadow of my mother coming for me.
I hear her quietly calling my name, and at first I think she’s far away in the distance. Then I feel a hand on my ankle and realize it was a whisper.
She tugs, fingernails digging into my skin.
“Come on, Romy. Come out and play.”
It’s not my mother at all. It’s J. He leans over me, his breath foul and rotten. He stares at me with Jayden’s face and J’s voice, laughing maniacally in short bursts.
“Hello there, Romy,” he says, and—
I wake up.
I lean over the side of my bunk and vomit, coughing up the last few lumps of food and stomach acid, then spitting onto the floor.
My heart is racing. My head hurts so badly that it’s like I’ve been stabbed in the skull.
It’s only when I’m calm that I realize I woke up because I heard a noise: an enormous, echoing bang.
I strain my eyes against the darkness, trying to work out if the sound is real or if it’s another of J’s software tricks. Everything is silent and still, except for the dull thud of blood against my eardrums. I stare at the ceiling for long, agonizing minutes, certain that his scratching creatures are back again, crawling across the outside of the ship. I’ve turned off the audio feed, but maybe it’s another subroutine.
Then there’s a slow, steady creak.
I bolt upright.
Emergency lights flicker on around me as I run to the helm. It’s glowing bright red with a warning message.
VESSEL ATTEMPTING TO CONNECT
DETERMINE STATUS
A vessel. Connecting? I don’t understand.
The computer flashes up a new message:
VESSEL IDENTIFICATION DETERMINED
ALLOW “THE ETERNITY” TO CONNECT
The Eternity.
The noise. That was The Eternity, touching my ship. It’s months too early. But somehow…
It’s here.
My brain engages all at once.
“No!” I yell at the computer, frantically typing commands. “DO NOT ENGAGE. DO NOT ALLOW ACCESS.”
CONNECTION WITH “THE ETERNITY” INITIATED
“No! No! No! DO NOT CONNECT.”
I push buttons, cancelling and denying every message that comes up, but the software is J’s software, so of course it doesn’t listen to me. I should have tried harder to get rid of it.