The Last Astronaut

by David Wellington

  Even if there was a way to stop the worms, it didn’t matter much. 2I was still headed on a collision course with Earth. Dead or alive, it would smash into the planet with enough force to end all life on the surface.

  But where there was life, there was hope. Right?

  There had to be.

  There had to be something they could still do.

  Well. There was one thing Jansen could think of. The most terrifying thing she could imagine.

  “Foster talked to this thing,” she said. “Somebody else could do the same.”

  Rao’s face drained of all emotion.

  “No,” she said. “No. No. No. No.”

  “Foster had days to communicate with 2I, and he couldn’t make it work,” Rao pointed out. “He read its memories, but he couldn’t make it move.”

  “No,” Jansen agreed. “But Stevens did. Stevens was gone, completely gone. But he found a way.”

  “Don’t… don’t…”

  “Come on,” Jansen said. “You’re smart, Rao. Maybe the smartest woman I’ve ever met, and I work for NASA, so that’s saying a hell of a lot. You figured out that this wasn’t a spaceship, it was an animal. You must have some idea. What did Stevens know that Foster didn’t?”

  Rao squinted and pursed her lips as if she’d just bitten into a lemon. She didn’t want to say it, but Jansen knew that there was something there. Rao had worked something out—

  “God damn it, tell me,” Jansen shouted.

  Rao’s eyes went wide. “Maybe—just maybe, OK? Maybe I have an idea, but… but… at the end you heard Stevens speak. You heard what he said.”

  Puh. Puh. Puh.

  Jansen shook her head. “I thought that was just some reflex of his throat muscles, air leaking out of lungs he wasn’t using anymore.”

  The platform shifted again, tilting a few more degrees. Rao redoubled her grip on Jansen’s arms. It hurt.

  “What Foster said, before, about how Stevens could talk to 2I when he was… when he was dying. Sunny couldn’t even form words. He could only call out for what he needed the most.”

  Rao shook her head, not getting it—or refusing to get it.

  “He was saying your name,” Jansen said. “Calling out for you.” Yes.

  “No,” Rao said. “No. No.”

  But Jansen was sure now. “He wanted to be with you. Foster said there was no barrier between minds when you connect with 2I. Its thoughts and yours become one. Stevens wanted to be close to you, so 2I moved toward Orion. You can’t reason with an animal. They don’t have conscious thoughts, they don’t use language. They just have urges. Needs. Foster wanted to make friends with 2I and learn its secrets, but Stevens—he just needed to reach out for someone, anyone who could give him some comfort.”

  “No,” Rao said again. “Shut up! No!”

  “He wanted you,” Jansen said.

  Rao was crying. She turned her face away and tried to wipe her eyes on the shoulder of her suit. “I know,” she said.

  Rao stood before the brain. The hands were writhing now. Forming new connections. It seemed the hands nearest to her—the neurons directly in front of her—were struggling the most. As if they were responding to her presence.

  Tendrils snaked between the hands. Two of them lifted into the air, their thin ends waving back and forth as if they were searching for something.

  Sunny was still in there.

  Foster had said as much—that some part of Sunny remained inside the brain. Some final, desperate part of him, the part that had reached out for her. The part that had made contact with 2I was still in there, still reaching for her.

  She could just step forward. Take off her suit and walk into that mass of searching hands. Let them hold her, as Sunny never had. The two of them could be together. Maybe she could talk to 2I, if she did that. Maybe she could convince it, somehow, to change its course again, to head away from Earth. Maybe. And at the very least, she and Sunny would be together.

  The idea was… intoxicating. She’d come all this way to understand what had happened to Sunny. Why he had to die. Now she knew. He’d died to bring her to this point. To this end.

  “I want you to know it’s been an honor, ma’am,” Rao said. “And when you get back to Earth, I hope—”

  “Rao.”

  “I hope you’ll say I did some good here. Whatever happens. I mean, if I fail and 2I crashes into Earth and there’s… there’s nobody left to…”

  “Rao. This is a lousy time to start being stupid.”

  She ground her teeth together. She knew perfectly well what Jansen was going to say next. It was the last thing she wanted to hear. It couldn’t end like this. They’d lost so much, survived so many horrors. It couldn’t just end like this. It couldn’t.

  “You’re not doing this,” Jansen said. “I am.”

  Rao turned and looked at her. “He’s in there, ma’am. Some little part of him.”

  “We have one helmet between us. One of us can still walk,” Jansen said. “Get out of here.”

  Then Jansen reached down to her belt and unclipped her helmet from its D ring, then shoved it in Rao’s direction.

  “Ma’am. I appreciate what you’re offering.”

  “We don’t have time to play this game!” Jansen shouted. She tried to grab at Rao’s legs, to hold her back. Jansen’s hands were weak, though, after all the physical trauma she’d been through. It would be easy for Rao to just pull free. Jansen couldn’t stop her.

  She turned and looked at the brain again. Sunny was waiting for her in there.

  But…

  Something in her chest broke, and she doubled over, sobbing violently. She nodded, though she couldn’t see Jansen, not through her tears.

  All she had to do was take off her suit and walk forward, into the clutching hands of the brain. Into that embrace. But…

  No.

  This place. 2I. She understood now. The darkness, the silence, the fear. The endless tension of being inside an alien environment. She’d thought it would change them, make them different people. But it hadn’t. It had just exaggerated the darkness inside them. It had made Jansen obsessed with finding the KSpace astronauts—she had already been desperate for redemption, and it took that desperation and stretched it out to extremes. Hawkins had only ever wanted to defend the Earth. It had taken that and twisted it into paranoia.

  And as for herself? It had taken her sadness over losing Sunny and distorted it into this terrible moment, this ugly, ugly choice.

  It had held up a dark mirror and let them see themselves. Their worst selves. But if Rao paused, even for a moment, if she thought about things—she knew. She knew this was wrong.

  She wouldn’t surrender herself. She would not take what the brain offered. Not for Sunny.

  She and Sunny had never been together. Not really. It had been a flirtation, a crush. It had never had a chance to become anything real. She had held on to it not because it was integral to her being but because of the way it had ended. Survivor’s guilt, she supposed.

  It was time to admit the truth. Sunny was gone. He was dead.

  The tendrils wavered before her, reaching out. Like hands reaching for hers.

  That wasn’t him. Not the man she’d cared for. Just some fading echo.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Rao took the helmet Jansen offered her. She lifted it up to her head and screwed it into place. Pure air flowed across her face, cooling her down. That was good. Her face was so hot it felt as if it were on fire.

  “Go! And don’t look back,” Jansen said.

  Rao turned and climbed up onto the brain. The hands tried to grab at her legs. Tendrils lashed out toward her suit. They were weak, and she could simply push them away before they could take root. It was horrible, horrible to even think about touching all those hands, but it was nothing, nothing at all compared to what she was doing. What she was leaving behind.

  “Go!”

  It made a kind of logical sense, really.

>   Jansen used her chin to work a lever inside her collar ring. Her suit, on its last dregs of power, asked her if she was sure she wanted to open her life-support unit. She said yes. She hit the lever again, and the back of her suit swung open on spring-loaded hinges.

  She had failed.

  She had failed to save Blaine Wilson. She had failed to save Sunny Stevens. She had failed to save any of the KSpace astronauts. She even blamed herself for Hawkins. If she’d been a better mission commander—if she had held on to her command—

  She had seen it, what the dark and the strangeness had done, warping his natural paranoia into something violent and desperate. Maybe, if she’d said something, she could have saved him, too.

  But she hadn’t.

  She had failed. She was a failure many times over. But that was the thing about failure.

  When you fell down, when you completely fucked everything up—you didn’t get to lie down and surrender. No. When Blaine Wilson died, she’d known this. You owed it to everyone—not just the people you’d failed but also the people who were still there—to make things right. She’d gotten Orion 6 back to Earth. She’d made sure Julia Obrador and Ali Dinwari got home to their families. Now she’d made sure Parminder Rao had a shot at getting home, too.

  Too bad her responsibility didn’t end there.

  Roy McAllister had picked her because he thought she could be a real astronaut. Knowing everything that entailed—knowing that when you go to space, you put yourself at risk. You accept the fact you might not come home. More than that. Even in that desperate moment, when there’s no chance of her survival, an astronaut continues to think, and to work. She salvages what she can.

  She screamed a little—she allowed herself that much—and pulled her injured leg out of the suit. It twitched, and every time it twitched, blinding pain shot through her whole body, flashed through her limbs, and landed in her brain like a bomb.

  She pushed the suit away from her.

  It wasn’t completely dark. There were status lights on the front of her suit, and they spread a tiny bit of illumination around her. Enough that she could see the hands that made up the brain. Neurons, right? They had to be some kind of giant neurons, axons and dendrites but on 2I’s massive scale.

  They still looked exactly like human hands, even knowing that.

  She saw the hands stir. She saw them move, weakly and slowly, only a few of them at first but more of them all the time. They were reaching for each other, trying to make connections. To reestablish control.

  Maybe it would help. Maybe, while the brain was still stunned, it would be easier for her to climb inside its dark space, push herself into its alien thoughts, and make herself heard.

  Maybe.

  She took a long, slow breath. Inhale. She let it back out. Exhale.

  She had no idea how Foster had convinced this thing to send its tendrils into his brain, to connect to his central nervous system.

  She reached up and grabbed a pair of the hands. 2I reached back, sending tendrils searching across her wrists, up her arms toward her face.

  “OK, you bastard,” she said, trying not to scream. “Time to talk.”

  She held her breath, as if she were diving backward into the warm ocean off the Florida coast. Closed her eyes as if she were waiting for the sudden plunge, the rush of silver bubbles, and the feeling that was almost, if never exactly, like being weightless again. Then she threw herself forward, into the sea of hands.

  Rao ran, and didn’t look back.

  She felt immense guilt and shame for not looking back. For abandoning Sunny. For not staying with Jansen through what was about to happen. She also knew that Jansen would have shouted at her in anger if she even considered turning around.

  So she ran.

  She ran, but the platform tilted under her feet. She slid three meters before catching herself, swaying from the hips to try to ride out the violent tremors.

  There was only one working light on her helmet, and that was the last light in the world. She kept it pointed forward, showing her where she was going. So she nearly tripped when the previously smooth floor cracked open, a dark fissure racing zigzag away from her, splitting the platform apart. For a moment she straddled that gap. Then she realized she had to pick one side or the other or risk falling into the darkness below.

  She made her choice and leaped to her left, even as the crack opened wide and large fragments of the platform fell away, shards as long as she was tall, tiny chips she could have sifted through her fingers. The tendrils that had been embedded in the bone lashed at the air, looking for something they could grab on to. She had to dance sideways a little to prevent one of those questing arms from grabbing her boot.

  Up ahead of her she could see the bars of the cage, rising up around her like tall, circular arches. In her light they made a bull’s-eye, a series of concentric circles that defined her trajectory. The cage tapered toward its south end, to fit inside the cone that was the mirror image of the one through which she’d entered 2I. The platform tilted upward, toward the axis. She had to be conscious of the weakening gravity, knew she couldn’t trust the ground to stay stable—

  There was a sound much louder than one of Hawkins’s gunshots, though just as sudden, and she knew one of the buttresses must have snapped under the constant attack of the worms. The entire platform groaned and then new cracks spread like lightning bolts all through the floor under her feet.

  She just had time to jump before it collapsed altogether.

  The hands grabbed Jansen’s legs, squeezed her injured knee, and she screamed. Long fingers wrapped around her arms, her throat. Tendrils crept across her skin, searching, stinging her as they dug tiny hooks into her, locking themselves in place. They were never going to let her go.

  Yet the pain didn’t overcome her. The horror of what she’d chosen was gone. As the tendrils caressed the lobes of her ears, as they dug into her and connected with her bloodstream, with her nerves—she was—she was—

  The silver bubbles burst all around her, the surface of the water when seen from underneath was a wavering mirror that faded into darkness so quickly as you sank, and she was sinking fast, all buoyancy gone, away from light. Away from the possibility of light.

  Jansen had heard a metaphor for life once, a poetic image of a bird flying through a dark winter storm. Purely by accident the bird flies in through the window of a well-lit hall, where a banquet is in progress—a room full of light and warmth and music, of rich smells and fragrant smoke—but only for an instant. Before the bird even has time to understand where it is, it flies out through another window, back into the storm, never to see the light or feel the warmth again.

  This… was the opposite of that. Jansen’s life, her fifty-six short years, were gone. Everything she’d ever seen, every laugh she’d heard from another room, every flash of a camera, every time a lover ran a fingertip down the valley of her back, every smile, every knowing, smirking look, the taste of blueberries—

  A dark wind blew them all away, a dark wind howling in a space with no walls, no limits. She was so small, so insignificant, her experiences and thoughts and highest goals were nothing, microscopic. Meaningless, just noise. Red scratches on skin that faded to white, that faded away to nothing in the space of a breath. Obscene graffiti on the padded wall of Wanderer. A flicker of light at the bottom of a coal mine that no one would ever see.

  But she was not alone.

  Someone else sat with her, someone very much larger than she. Stronger in every possible way. A mind as big as a moon. A mind of unstoppable instinct, of crushing purpose, of an unspeakable purity born from unthinkable constraints.

  She fought it. She tried to speak, to talk to 2I. To even make it aware that she was present, that she was there.

  It already knew. It just didn’t care. It had looked at everything she had to show it, all her memories and her beliefs and her fears, and it had not comprehended them at all. It rejected them as being devoid of any meaning, of any
useful data. And then it was 2I’s turn, and she experienced everything it knew, everything it was. A dark wave rolled over her, a crashing tsunami of sensations and impressions and desires, and she might as well have tried to hold back a flood by stretching out her arms.

  The platform crumbled under Rao’s feet. In normal gravity she would have stumbled and fallen a dozen times by now, but here even the slightest jump sent her flying high in the air. She raced left, then right, then—as the platform crumbled beneath her—reached out to grab one of the upright bars that curved up around her like ribs.

  She jumped in the low gravity and managed to get to a piece of the platform that was still mostly intact. It was already cracking by the time she reached it, but she could see she was getting close to the end of the cage. The platform narrowed like a sternum as the bars flashed by on her right and left. She estimated she weighed no more than ten kilos at this point—how long before she weighed nothing at all, until she was floating free at the axis? And what would she do then? Floating in midair, would she have to flap her arms like a bird to keep moving forward? Would that even work?

  As the platform rumbled underneath her, she stopped worrying about that. She looked up and saw nothing at all in front of her. She was clutching nothing but a jagged plinth of bone, sticking out into dark space.

  She’d reached the end of the cage. Beyond her there was only darkness. She took a second to catch her breath and to move her light around, looking for her next move. The light easily reached the surface of the cone beneath her, and she expected to see the worms down there, clamoring for her flesh.

  Instead she saw bare walls—stained everywhere with black slime. The same slime they’d seen in the other cone, so long ago now. The black corrosive slime that had eaten right through KSpace’s high-tech ropes.

  The stuff was thick and full of bubbles that grew enormous before they popped. Each time one of them exploded, the shower of droplets hung in the air for long seconds before falling back down. Rao knew, suddenly, what the slime was for—it was there to keep the worms away from the airlocks. To keep them from accidentally blasting themselves out into space.