by James Smythe
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ Hikaru says, as he seems to always say or think now. ‘There’s no other way out of this. You will die, Mira. Is that what you want?’ Preservation of the self, I think. This is what he’s displaying, even though he’s turned it onto me. Inna pushes herself towards the wall of the anomaly. She rests against it. The flats of her palms are white with the pressure she’s putting onto it.
‘Please think about this,’ she says.
‘I am,’ I say.
‘You told us that there was a way home.’ I was placating them. ‘You said, we can all get home. You cannot get us all home if you die, Mira.’ She’s terribly scared: she knows that it’s my death and mine alone. What will happen to them? Would they relive this moment for eternity? What happens to the me in their cycle, when they come back? Would that dictate their own loop: leaving them with that solitary moment of death, over and over, unending and ceaseless? When do they die? When does this begin again?
‘Put in the override code and give us control back,’ Hikaru says.
I watch the Ishiguro start its engines on the screen. It rumbles on the video, the hull shaking, and it seems to lurch – drawing backwards, like a toy car that you pull then release – and here it comes. These are the moments that define us.
‘Brother,’ I say, wanting him to do it. I want him to release the controls, to save me. This is a test. How much am I a sacrifice? But there is no time to have faith in him, so I bring up a console and type the override code and release the controls. I am surprised: there is a part of me that expected Tomas to have changed the code, but it is as it always was. Hikaru is ready, and he taps buttons with a purpose I haven’t seen from him since before this happened. Our own ship rumbles, and lurches; not out of the anomaly, as when they died, but the other direction. I am not strapped in, and neither is Inna, and we suddenly have gravity. We fall, and I hit myself on the wall, surprised. This is speed like I haven’t felt, speed like the launch protocols demanded we were to be protected against. A burst, and I know we’re clear before we stop, because we have gone so far. Hikaru slows us down with the boosters, and he leans into the yoke and he grins. He looks so happy; and he looks at me, now one of them: our fate shared. I am inside it, and it feels like nothing.
There is no time to dwell.
I hit the screens, panning the cameras to show us the Ishiguro, to track it, and we watch as it carries on just past where we were – it would have killed us, no question, or me, at the very least – and it explodes. It happens just as before, only we’re closer now, and I can see it from this angle: as the ship begins to tear itself apart, spitting out the detritus and the furniture and the consoles and the beds. Most of it flies out of the anomaly, dead and gone and lost and free. But then there are those two bodies as before, one clutching the other. I can see them from here: the one in front is the journalist, instantly recognizable from his pictures. They were everywhere, for a while. Cormac something was his name. Easton. Cormac Easton. The other is harder to see, but he is bald, and thin. Dr Singer. He clings to the journalist and they move forward, towards us, deeper into the darkness, away from the rest of the ship.
There isn’t time to think. I pull a suit on, slapdash, almost, and a helmet, not even stopping to check the seal properly, because this could be something: it could be a way of saving ourselves. Having Dr Singer here with us could change everything. Together, he and I could find a way out. That’s what he and I both have been missing: a brain to play off. Another scientist.
‘What are you doing?’ Inna asks. There will be a minute, two at most before the pressure out there kills them, or they choke to death and their cycle begins anew. I can interject; I can save them. I tell Inna to be ready, that they will likely need medical aid, and I start the airlock cycle before my suit is even fully sealed, and I wait by the door and I squeeze my hands into fists and then out again to palms. Fists and then out to palms, over and over, as the door opens.
And then I am out in space. I hit the boosters, and I am clumsy still, but better than I was. Perhaps I am learning. They come towards me, and I them. For some reason Dr Singer pushes the journalist away from him, his back to me, and I go faster. I can feel the heat of the boosters through the suit, at my back; not burning me, but the suits can withstand so much I know how far I am pushing them. I ignore the journalist. He is not my target. He is nothing. He was nothing then, and he is nothing now. I aim for Dr Singer, tackling him almost, and he crumbles into me. He feels so frail and thin. I can save him. I let the journalist die out there in the darkness. He wrote, once, that he felt like an explorer. He can carry on exploring.
I turn, the boosters in the suit pushing as tight an arc as they can manage, and I head back to the airlock. I don’t know if Dr Singer’s already dead. I don’t know anything. I hope that Inna can save him. I cling to him as we go.
Inna shouts at Hikaru to get the gravity on as soon as the airlock door opens, and I drop to my knees. I am unprepared, but this is no longer about me. Dr Singer is coiled up, curled inwards, fetal. Inna rushes in and flips him to his back. I see her face first, and then I look at the body on the floor: it is barely a man. I cannot explain it. He is wrinkled and shattered and old, so much older than he should be. His skin is translucent, almost, hanging and sliding from his face, his features visible through it. His eyes are black and white and red in seemingly equal measure, and they lie open and lifeless. He isn’t breathing: we would be able to tell, as the rise and fall of his chest would still happen, even as emaciated as he is. It would be, on this frame, all we could see.
‘He’s dead,’ Inna says. She is uneasy even touching him, handling him as one does a dead cat: fingertips and hesitation. For a second, he reminds me of those old drawings of aliens, the kind we would find in our books, deciding whether to make peace with them or not: grey skin, oversized head, dark eyes. I think, for a second, almost a joke to myself, that here is the discovery we were looking for. Life, and yet it is dead. She is unsure whether to save him or not; if she should see whether this is something she can turn around.
‘Try,’ I say. I think about what I risked, and where we are now. This cannot be for naught. She slides a syringe into his suit at his neck, and holds a mask to his face to force oxygen into his body. I worry that the settings are made for a normal man, and that he will reject this: or that maybe it will split his insides. His shrivelled lungs torn at all the air. Perhaps I am wrong? Perhaps the ship has not been in the cycle? I thought. But we saw it crash twice, and Easton was so perfectly young. Nothing about this makes sense. The corpse’s chest swells with the oxygen; it almost creaks. The adrenalin should make his heart pump, a kick-start to an engine. What is this that we’re saving? She starts to manually work his chest, and I hear cracks: the sound of ribs breaking. She is in danger of making this irreparable, and then I remember that he will come back. He will die and, somewhere down the line, come back to life. We can try again. All we have to do is survive until the Ishiguro comes back, maybe, and we can be quicker, prepared. We could save them both, maybe. I move my arm to stay hers, but then it coughs. No, he coughs, and it sounds vile: a thick rigid mucus inside him, a lurch of his whole body, making his bones clatter against the floor. His spine bends and everything seems exaggerated owing to his frame, and the flesh that remains seems draped over him. His eyes don’t lose their peculiar colour; now, they dart. They’re quick, no lag, snap from face to face to face, from me to Inna to me again.
‘It’s okay,’ Inna says, but he doesn’t listen to her. He pushes backwards. He’s terrified, and he reaches the door of the airlock and forces himself against it. He looks at us still, doesn’t take his eyes off us. Everything about him is fallen. Everything about him feels wrong. I have no idea who this man is, but he is not Dr Singer.
We leave him in the airlock. We shut the door on him, because we do not know who or what he is, and we watch him as he tries to stand; as he leans his hands against the glass and seems to try to walk himself to upright. His
thin legs buckle like a foal’s, and he falls to his knees, which look as if they should shatter at the impact of the metal floor. His frailty in every part reminds me of my mother, at her end: atrophied on her bed, her body giving up. He hasn’t tried to speak to us yet, nor we to him. Or, we haven’t tried to entice him. Inna tells me that we should ask him his name.
‘Maybe he remembers something,’ she says, but I am hesitant to assume that. We open the airlock slightly and throw a meal bar in. He turns away from us and devours it, forcing it into his mouth. He tries to keep it down and fails; it doesn’t matter to him, though. He paws it back into his mouth, a monkey in a cage eating his own vomit, and then he looks back at us over his shoulder as if we owe him another. He’s not pleading with us. She gets one of Hikaru’s white bars, stripped of everything, bleached food that tastes of nothing and gives you only the proteins and vitamins you need. The man in the airlock sniffs it and then eats it. He’s feral, and it goes down in bites. He has no teeth that I can see but he gums it to pieces and swallows them. I am sure that I can see the lumps travel down his throat, passing his exaggerated Adam’s apple. Inna says, ‘For a man of his frame, he should be dead.’ She leans close to the airlock. ‘What’s your name?’ she asks. He shoots her a look of something, I don’t know what.
‘He is too gone for that,’ I say.
‘What’s your name?’ she asks again, over the intercom. She says it calmly and quietly, and she puts her hand on the glass of the airlock. She wants him to trust her.
‘I am Cormac Easton,’ he says, ‘and I am a journalist,’ although it’s slurred and drab through his mouth, and harsh on his throat. He’s the same one he was seemingly carrying as a young man, being thrown from the explosion of their ship.
He is hesitant, but we get words out of him. Inna examines him as much as he will let her. She rattles off what is wrong with him: early-onset dementia; massive bone loss and muscle deterioration; a mind-boggling list of psychological ailments; scurvy. She tells me that it’s a miracle he’s alive. I tell her that it’s not a miracle. When I have time, as she examines him, I talk to Hikaru. He seems better since I ended up on this side. He tells me that he doesn’t feel as alone any more. I think about how it’s as if we’re rebuilding our crew.
‘It is unsettling, though,’ he says. He rubs his hand with his thumb: pushing it into his palm.
‘He’s still human,’ I say. I fear how unconvincing I am, even to myself.
‘Him and Inna. They’re the same. Neither of them should be alive.’ He says it so coldly; I do not tell him that he has died once before himself. ‘Do you think he’s been looping as well?’ He doesn’t want an answer, and he doesn’t wait for one. ‘It’s not natural, is it?’
‘It is what it is,’ I say, ‘and Inna is herself. Exactly as she was before it happened to her.’ He asks what we do now, and I tell him that we have to work on calming our visitor down.
‘He’s a phantom,’ he says. ‘You see that, don’t you?’ And I do, but I don’t tell Hikaru that. I tell Hikaru that he could be necessary to our getting home. ‘We’re not getting home,’ Hikaru says. ‘We go deeper into this thing, maybe we’ll come out the other side.’ We never found out its depth. The pings meant nothing, finding nothing, returning no results. Now we have that to think about: that we could head deeper into it and never reach an end.
When I’m done with Hikaru and Inna and Easton I find myself alone. I think about where we are, and how I could have escaped this. But I am a coward, or sensible. Too sensible, maybe. I’m alive, I think. I assume. At least I have that. I’m destined to stay alive until I am no longer alive, and then I’ll come back. I contemplate Easton, and how he is here. How he was there twice, and what that must have meant. Something was wrong with his time, but maybe something different to ours. Inna died and then came back, but what if we had left her? What part did we play in her cycle? The cycles, the loops, the lives, they are seemingly random in length. There are no answers: it is as if we are being played with. I wonder when the loop began for him. They went far deeper into space than we did, because that was where the anomaly was then. When did their cycle start? Or was it only Easton’s cycle? Were the rest of them just passengers, de facto parts of it, destined to be as they were until he reached his end?
‘Tomas?’ I ask. I wonder if it even matters that there is no answer. We nurse Easton back to health and maybe we will have one. Maybe then we can get closure. Or we make a closed experiment of this: a test that can provide a definitive answer. I think about writing myself a note, scrawling it onto one of the boards in the lab about what I am going to do, and then lifting a razor to my neck and sliding it through the skin, through the arteries and veins. Feeling them pop under the weight of the blade, and watching the blood arc out. I wonder how long it would take me to start a new cycle; and when I came back, if I would still feel the pain. If the blood would remain. When I would start the cycle: in this room, with razor in hand? Partway into the slice? Or before I even contemplated it? Before I had even written the note to myself?
Before this mission even began?
The others are antsy, staying where we are, leaving gravity switched on. Hikaru looks at the battery and worries, because the charge loses every second that we sit still. He questions whether the ship’s batteries will still work the same inside the anomaly; so we might end up with this being our last. We should save it for life-support systems: on their own, what we have left could sustain the four of us for nearly a month, that’s how efficiently they run. I tell him that I want to talk to Easton before we switch it off.
He is lying on the floor, head down. He is perfectly still, and his hands are splayed, flat on the floor. His fingers are like nothing I’ve ever seen: pink silk draped over broken twigs. He can’t bend them properly, they’re too gnarled. He lies here because of the gravity. Because it’s so hard for him to lift his head. His muscles can’t cope with it, and they’re relaxing. I ask him questions and he doesn’t answer them. It feels pointless.
‘I’m letting go,’ he says as I stand up to leave, to tell Hikaru to remove gravity. He’s barely audible, so I lean in, and he repeats it.
‘Of what?’ I ask, because I feel like I should. He doesn’t answer. He shuts his eyes. ‘Are you even glad that we saved you?’ I ask, but of course there is no answer. ‘We are about to lose gravity,’ I say, and then we do. I watch him float upwards, and he hangs there in the middle of the airlock, weightless and gone, entirely limp, like a rag doll with no spine to give it structure.
I pick a blister pack of stims from the medical cupboard and pop one out. I can stop now, I tell myself. We’re swallowed, deep in the belly of the whale. Inna comes to me as I hold the pill in my hands.
‘He’s sick,’ she says.
‘I know.’
‘What do you want to do about him?’
‘Can we make him better?’ I ask.
‘I don’t think so,’ she replies. ‘If we had a hospital, maybe. Nutrient drips. Years of therapy.’ She means both kinds. ‘Here, I don’t think we can.’
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Then we make it as easy for him as possible. He probably deserves that.’ I try and sound convincing. We don’t know anything about him. He might have mutinied and killed his crew for all we know. Somehow he survived and they did not: and somehow he has aged, and they are all just a part of his cycle. We can’t explain it: I dread to think what will happen to us out here now. If one of us will become him, outliving the others, somehow going around and around at a completely different pace, in a completely different loop.
‘I’m scared,’ she says. ‘Of what might happen now.’
‘I know,’ I say. She floats up to me and puts a hand on my leg, and I see her fingernails, the chipped nail-polish on them. That she made a token effort before and I didn’t notice it. I wonder if it was done for me, before. I hope that it was. She squeezes my arm.
‘You didn’t stand up for us,’ she says. ‘And you didn’t come to me.’
> ‘I thought that it was the best thing to do,’ I tell her. It is not a lie, one way or another. ‘I wanted to make sure that we got home.’
‘We still could now. We could find a way.’
‘Yes,’ I say. I think, Lies are no foundation for the start of a relationship. That is what this feels like.
‘This doesn’t stop. We were here to find out more about the anomaly, weren’t we?’ She looks hopeful. That my answer will be the truth she’s believed.
‘Always,’ I say.
‘So that will not change now. Now we simply have a better point of view.’ She bends in towards me, and I think that this could be when it changes. For a second I am not here: I am anywhere else. I have forgotten our location, our crisis, our pains. I have forgotten the deaths we have suffered and the calamity. I have forgotten the Ishiguro and Tomas back at home and everything else. She kisses me on the cheek, on the hairs that have grown there, so close to my mouth. And she whispers, into that skin there, that she forgives me. ‘All we have left is the reality of the now,’ she says. ‘We shouldn’t sacrifice that. We shouldn’t lose it.’
I think, I have nothing to be forgiven for. But I cannot say that to her, because this, to her, is all, and she has given it to me. I let the pill drop from my hand, and I put the blister pack back. I do not need them now.