by James Smythe
Hikaru doesn’t know that I’m still not sleeping; or he doesn’t care. Either way. He is still and static, and humourless. He has become a shell. If I didn’t know better, I would think that this hadn’t affected him, that’s how calm he has remained. In many ways, he is acting as if this hasn’t happened: we are still here, and still on a ship in the middle of nowhere, and still on a mission. We’ve moved much, much closer to Inna now, and to the anomaly. Hikaru has been put in charge of making sure that we don’t drift – I have no intention of crossing that line – and nothing else. I am dealing with Inna.
And Tomas: he claims that he is helping. It’s something that they cannot rehearse on Earth, but they have ideas. That second where she dies, they’re wondering if we can play with it. Use it, somehow. Maybe snatch her through as she comes back to life, or at least a part of her, and that might give us purchase. I worry that the anomaly wall is just that: that, like the slice of a guillotine, it might somehow chop off any limb that we dared pull over to the near side of the anomaly. And I worry that she is alive because she is in there, and that as soon as she leaves it will be over for her. Tomas is intent to the point of preoccupation on getting a sample of the anomaly. I tell him that it’s impossible from where we are. He tells me that we’ll find a way. He sounds convinced.
I sit in the lab and work, going over the results that we have. The knowledge that we have. We were naïve to think that we could simply come out here and find out the answers. How long has it been since humanity had to reach for something? To truly push themselves and make a discovery that changes the face of who we are and what we understand? This is one of those discoveries. Out there, in the anomaly, time means something different. Life itself means something different. If this is something we can harness, it could change everything. Every single aspect of life on Earth could be altered. And if it cannot be used by us, then it is something to explore and to divert time and energy into understanding. It is a marvel; it is the likes of which we have never seen before.
I have ideas. We have tools that Wallace brought up here: designed for taking samples from rocks. Diamond-tipped drills. If I cannot work it on my side, I can ask Inna to do it on hers. I do math, as well, working out how far the anomaly is from us right now, so that I can limit my tether when I actually go out there, to prevent me accidentally crossing the border. I am uncomfortable with this. When they were training in low-gravity situations, I was doing work. Actual work, hard grind, to ensure that we would not die on this mission. They forgot, I think, how important this was. I feel like I could say it again and again and they would never understand the enormity or importance of this. That is something that only Tomas and myself understand.
I go into the airlock room and take my clothes off, before pulling my spacesuit from the locker with my name on it. You would think that, with the layers of the suits being so thin, they would be cold to wear; and with the fabric being such a bizarre composite – metals, plastics and wools all working together, all coated in treatments that are the result of decades of work and millions of dollars of purchased patents – you would think that they would be heavy, or scratch your skin. Inside the suit you’re all but naked, but you can barely feel the suit even touching your skin. I prefer loose clothes in general. I find shirts and belts to be claustrophobic in the way that they stitch the halves of your body together. I undo the buttons on cuffs. But the suits here are smooth and warm – the perfect temperature, in fact, regulated by the readings taken from your own body – and they feel like nothing. You are free. Even between your fingers, where they could be so tight and constricting, they simply seem to fit. They’re made from a single piece of the new fabric, that’s part of the reason: no seams. They stretch for every body-type, despite being custom fitted. They’re a marvel.
I look at myself in the mirror, because they’re also – for a man like me, of my age and lack of build – mildly unflattering. Tomas is probably in better shape than I am. He is more tucked-in. In another time, another place, I would worry about how I looked. But Hikaru will not judge me, and Inna… I will not rescue her this cycle, so she will die again and forget that I was ever out here, and forget how I look in this.
I switch on the monitors, to see where she is in this cycle – because I want to be out there when she wakes up, to really make the most of the time we can have together – but she is not panicked and terrified as I thought she would be. Instead she’s almost smiling, calm and peaceful. She is talking. I hear her, saying that it will be all right. That she knows we are doing everything we can. She asks what happens if we don’t have a solution. She asks how much air she has. He answers, somehow; zero lag, Tomas, playing as me. He must have done something; I cannot work out what. He tells her that he doesn’t know how much air she has – a lie – and then he says that he won’t lie to her. He says that they are doing everything they can. He says that he can’t wait to get her back on the ship. He is speaking these words to her, acting as me. I think about interjecting, but she will forget. She will forget him, and this version of me. She is happy, even though her death is inevitable. She trusts me.
I sever Tomas’ connection to her. ‘What are you doing?’ I ask. I wait for a reply.
‘I’m trying to make this peaceful for her. She was alone. What did you expect?’
‘I can’t talk to her all the time,’ I say.
‘Of course you can’t. So I was doing it for you. I worked out a way around the lag: I know what questions she will ask, so I can predict it. We were speaking out of sync, Mira. It was really quite the thing.’
‘Don’t do that,’ I say. ‘Don’t pretend to be me.’
‘What are you doing now?’ he asks.
‘I am going out there.’
‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Good.’
In order to open the airlock door, we have to close the outer door. We cannot do that until we sever and retract the cable stitching the three of them together. As soon as Inna begins, I play melodramatic, and I tell her that it’s urgent that she unclip herself. I don’t give her a chance to ask why. She does, and I retract her tether. It snaps through the nothing, back towards the ship, and it coils itself inside the airlock. I shut the outer door, and the inner door opens in turn. Lennox and Tobi’s bodies are in front of me; I have to deal with them. I call for Hikaru to help me, but he doesn’t. He says that he has to keep the ship anchored. He’s lying, but I can’t force him. He is all I have left, really; so I move them myself. They are easy to move when there’s no gravity. You can drag them and they don’t snag on anything, and there’s no mess. Their suits are sealed, and I try to pretend that they are not even people. They are suits, nothing more. They are an experiment. It’s not like I haven’t seen a dead body before, but still. Regardless.
I seal them into their beds next to Wallace. Three of them now, lined up and ready for a crew who are not me to take them and worry about them. As if they’re sleeping. This is what they did with the captain of the Ishiguro when he died: they put him to bed for the rest of the trip. No burial in space. Instead, you journey with the corpse of the man who died. It’s practical, if not horrific. They are with us, as much as they can be. My mother used to say that ghosts stayed in the places that they died. That a quiet house was made louder by the presence of the spirits over the years: this is why old houses feel the way that they do. She really believed in that stuff. We sneered when she said it. And then she died, and we said, Maybe she’s here, in this hospital room. Maybe this is where she will stay forever. But we didn’t actually think it was true, because we didn’t believe in God or in ghosts or in anything like that. What’s it that they say? You can either be logical or fallible. There’s no halfway point.
Afterwards, I sit and wait in the airlock room. Inna tries to talk to me, to get me to tell her the rest of my brilliant plan that involved her cutting herself off from the rest of us, but I am silent. Even as she begins crying, and cursing my name. An experiment: to see if the tether cable resets as her oxygen suppl
y does. My hypothesis is that it will not. As Tobi and Lennox are outside the anomaly, and remain dead, so too will this cable no longer be a part of Inna’s cycle. She will awake and assume it was lost when the Ishiguro interrupted their jaunt. This entire process will take time, now. It will take time and sacrifice, but that has to be acceptable.
She dies; she wakes; the cable is inside the airlock. Over her next life I prepare the tools I will need, and I attach myself to the tether inside the airlock itself, and I tell Tomas that he will have to open the airlock doors for me from Earth; that Hikaru is distracted.
‘You’re comfortable with this?’ he asks.
‘No,’ I say. I have an unbalanced inner ear, and I am clumsy on my feet, let alone drifting in the ether. I am graceless, and I haven’t adjusted to the lack of gravity on the ship, because I ignored the training. Because I am not this sort of man. ‘But I have little choice,’ I say. ‘Needs must.’
‘That they do,’ he says. I put the helmet on, and I press to fasten it to the suit. I wore one once before, when we received the trial versions, to check that the visibility was acceptable. It feels tighter here, now, even though I know it’s exactly the same model. Exactly the same size. The helmet hisses as it attaches to the fabric and creates the seal, and I’m no longer breathing the Lära’s air: I am breathing my own portable, personal oxygen.
‘Open the door,’ I say, and wait.
‘Okay,’ he says. No farewell, godspeed, no stay safe. The door opens, and I am outside.
I cannot describe this; there is no need. It is singular, and fantastical. It is nature, even though it is not what we would immediately think of as such. It is, despite everything that brought us here and that protects me and that enables us to be here, and the death and the unexplainable nature of the anomaly: through that all this is nature. This is the purest I have ever been with the universe, and that is really something.
The boosters on the suits are tetchy and sharp, and they spit out in a way that I do not expect. I have not practised enough with these, which is a disadvantage. I didn’t foresee having to do this. Truthfully, I didn’t expect to ever wear my suit. Maybe to drift; to revel in the nothingness if I could. But I didn’t expect to be out here, and I didn’t expect to have to work in these conditions. I push myself forward, but I have to be tentative. There is too much chance of me getting this wrong and overshooting. I do not want to end up in there. What would happen? I would die with Inna. Over and over, perhaps, if that’s how it works. But I nudge towards her, shuffling almost, and then I am right in front of her. I can see her perfectly as she dies: close enough to touch, if I wanted to lose myself. She sees me, her final few breaths. I am close enough to comfort her, but I do not.
She dies, and she wakes, and she sees me, and her routine adapts.
‘You’re here,’ she says. ‘What happened? Why are you here?’ She reaches for me, and she touches the wall.
‘You can’t,’ I say. ‘I am outside the anomaly, and you are inside. But I have come to try and help you, to help you get out. Can you see me okay?’ I ask. She nods, but she’s unsure. ‘Make the torch on your helmet brighter. That will help.’ She does, and she sees me more. She smiles, a little. Just a little. She raises her hands and feels the anomaly wall between us. She feels it every time, but now I am here, close enough to touch. ‘I’m stuck,’ she says.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m a prisoner here?’
‘I don’t think it’s like that,’ I say.
‘But you came for me,’ she says. I should have kept a tally of how many times she has died now, for the results of whatever this is. So that, when I come to write this up, when I am delivering my paper to whoever wants to read it, there are exact numbers. Details: science is all about the details. I’m sure that Tomas will have been doing it, or that he’ll have somebody else doing it. She presses her hand, and she cranes her neck. ‘You say it isn’t a prison, but look at me.’
‘It’s the anomaly,’ I say. ‘We don’t know how it works, still.’
‘Where are Tobi and Lennox?’ she asks. ‘Are they safe?’
‘Yes,’ I say. Lying is easier. Lying moves this on. I am learning from each time, just as she is not. I grow; I evolve. A harmless lie is easier than the truth, when time is pressed and Inna is dying. ‘Tomas and Hikaru are working on how to get you back onto the ship. They’ll have an answer soon. I have to do work until then. Will you help me?’ I have to give her a use: she has responded well to tasks during previous lives. It serves to keep her mind away from her situation. It lets her know that we’re all working together towards a common goal; that we haven’t forgotten about her. She will not simply be left to die.
I pass tools through the anomaly, and she takes them at the far side. She and I move them back and forth, passing them through the wall. She rests a hand against it all the while, making sure that I keep my distance. I have to watch my drift. It’s easy to reach out and forget and suddenly your hand is through. I don’t know what would happen if I were to have a limb, or a part of me through the anomaly. Would I be able to retract it? Or would it render me stuck forever, unless I accepted the inevitable and followed it into the darkness? For a second, distracted and daydreaming, I see myself and Inna: together, in an embrace. Holding each other, dying over and over. We share oxygen. We wake. We die. We wake. Seconds together, snatched and desperate. Is that what would fill our dying moments? Is that what we would see?
I pass her a scalpel, holding the blade myself, as you are taught to pass knives, and she takes it and tries to cut into the anomaly wall – putting her hand to it, pressing hard, splaying her fingers and cutting between them – but the blade finds no purchase. There’s nothing there for her to work on, and the scalpel passes through. If I held my hand out, it would cut me. We try with the drill, to take a sample, but again there is nothing. This might as well be air. Were it not for Inna’s hands on it, and for what we have seen, and for what we cannot see inside it, I would say that there was nothing there.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says.
‘It’s not your fault,’ I tell her.
‘Are they ready to get me back onto the ship yet? It’s getting harder to breathe.’ She looks tired. I don’t tell her that.
‘I’ll head back and find out,’ I say. I wave as I go, so that she feels safe. Maybe she will just drift off to sleep this time, rather than panicking and choking. If I talk her towards her death, that might be better. I seal the doors and cut the communications, because I can’t stand to look at her as she dies in this cycle. It’s too much: seeing her up that close, and with my lie to her still hanging. I like to imagine how she dies this time; imagine the peace that I wished for her.
Something of this reminds me of these books that Tomas and I used to have as children. My mother said that they were her brother’s, from when they were young – and he had died when he was a teenager, so she kept them, as something worth keeping – and she gave them to us when we were old enough and told us to take good care of them. You read the first page and then it gave you a choice, and you picked one of two options. Each led you to another page, where you might fall down a pit or meet a monster, and you would have to keep making decisions to try and reach the end. Some ends came quickly, with death or early accidental glory; some went on for pages and pages, circling around, leading you on a chase. Tomas and I would play the same book one after each other, trying to see who could get further. We turned it into a game: which one of us had the better instincts? The better gut reaction to a situation, the better wiles to lead them through the Maze of Death or the Journey to the Ocean Sand: the brother who navigated the choices with the most skill, he would be the winner. There was no prize other than gloating, but regardless. And the winning itself was tricky to determine, as what one of us thought to be a win – so, abandoning their submersible and swimming to a desert island, but still having escaped the Kraken – was determined by the other to be a false option. The debate carried on past the book.
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br /> ‘You would die of starvation,’ the non-playing brother would say. ‘On that island, with no food source, no weapons, no means of escape, you would die. That isn’t a win; it’s delaying the inevitable.’ So the argument would go, and the winner would add the book to their own personal pile. It would be theirs then. We both treated them the same way: with some level of reverence in their physical object. As soon as the game was over, however, the text was destroyed. We broke the rules and read them beginning to end, finding secrets and routes and pathways and endings that we would never have stumbled on before. We reverse engineered them, to work out how to reach the different areas. The main character escapes the submersible, the same as countless other times, but this time he meets a beautiful Atlantean, and she kisses him, giving him the gift of water-breath, and he can survive and then the mermen rally and help him kill the Kraken. The Kraken’s head is a trophy: how do you reverse engineer such a situation? We would read these sections and be totally in awe. It made us take risks, in the next book. Because maybe those risks would pay off? They rarely did. Most times, we ended up with the same endings: death, or the island, or some tepid, muted victory of circumstance and luck rather than judgment.
Now, here, talking to Inna, it’s like that. Choices at the foot of a page, nothing more than selecting different dialogues. If I start the conversation differently, she will respond differently. There are seemingly infinite ways I could start it, or things I could tell her, and yet they all end in the same approximate way: with her crying, and begging me to save her, as if that’s a power that I somehow have but am keeping from her.