Obscura

by Joe Hart

  Downing a bunch of hydros over a short period of time and not recalling it, that’s how messed up you were, sister.

  It was the only explanation for everything. At some point she must have lost track of time and binged on more pills than she ever had before. Probably spilled the rest down the sink without realizing it.

  And the withdrawals had been the fallout.

  God. She didn’t even want to think about it right now. It had been only a day since she’d last thrown up, and the weakness was still a constant companion. But as bad as the physical suffering had been, it was nothing compared to the mental side of things.

  The hallucinations had been so real.

  Gillian recalled the fear and sense of clarity of the visions, but the actual memories were shrouded outlines of a fever dream. None of it made sense now or coalesced into anything resembling reality.

  Carrie opening the airlock and being pulled out.

  The space suit coming to life, Kent’s putrid face filling its visor.

  The intermittent thumps and bangs accompanied by phantom footsteps.

  Her mind had manufactured all of it.

  But now she was free.

  She left the bathroom and surveyed the rest of the berth. The floor was littered with half a dozen food-pack casings and two water bottles. Soiled clothes filled up one corner, and the blankets of her bed were a tangled and stained mess. She recalled leaving the room in a terrified scramble at one point, sick but starving, and raiding the lounge before hurrying back here. She’d thought she’d seen something then. Someone in the hall. Just another flicker of her struggling psyche. Afterward, the withdrawals had started loosening their grip. More and more rationality returned with each day. Enough so that she’d quit sleeping in the bathroom behind the locked door and returned to her bed.

  Taking a deep breath, she set about getting dressed in the last clean jumpsuit she had, wincing as she gripped the zipper to draw it closed. There was a shallow cut across the meat of her palm she had no recollection of receiving. Just another span of missing time like so many others over the past two weeks. But, of course, it wasn’t only the last two weeks. How much time had she given away to the addiction over the years? Too much.

  Gillian sighed. It was the truth, but all she could do now was go forward. She’d been given another chance by having survived quitting cold turkey, and her thoughts felt clearer than they had in a long time.

  Slowly she began picking up the trash strewn about the room. She nearly gagged at the smell of her clothes and, not knowing what else to do, shoved them onto the floor of the closet. Next she stripped the bed and deposited the sheets and blanket with her clothes. It was actually beginning to look like a normal person’s room. She bent to retrieve a water bottle that had rolled beneath the bed and paused.

  The pry bar was gone.

  For a moment she frowned, wrestling with her memories. She had dropped it here while fleeing a phantasm of her mind, had watched it roll under the bed, and she didn’t recall ever retrieving it, not even when she’d left to gather food. But that didn’t necessarily mean she hadn’t. There were more than enough explanations about where it might have ended up, and she didn’t have the energy left to parse all the drug-addled decisions she’d made.

  Straightening up the rest of the room, she took account of everything. It wasn’t perfect, but if someone were to glance inside, the first emotion they’d feel wouldn’t be alarm or disgust. The smell might be another story, but for now it was the best she could do.

  Gillian grabbed the lanyard attached to her key card and looped it over her head, then braced one hand against the wall as a bout of vertigo came and went. She wasn’t completely out of the withdrawal woods yet.

  She left the berth, taking her time as she moved down the hallways. The corridors and quiet solitude of the rooms no longer had the same effect on her as they had before her descent. Now they were just hallways, empty rooms. Nothing frightening or menacing beyond what her mind had created.

  As she scanned in to control, trepidation settled over her. Going by the date Leo had written in his notes, the crew would be waking today. Gillian glanced in the direction of medical, picturing the damaged panel she’d tried to pry open. She’d cleaned up the station as well as she could, but there would be a lot of explaining to do. On the bright side, she had the breakthrough with the neural mapping to show for her time spent awake, and that intrinsic value was undeniable.

  Gillian settled into one of the seats before a pedestal screen. She hadn’t been inside stasis since the day she’d tried to pry open Leo’s locker to retrieve his key card. Maybe she should go in and try cleaning up the damage she’d caused. She stood from the seat but made no move toward the next room. Because, really, there was no way she could make the destruction unnoticeable. She would have to own up to it like every other choice she’d made; there was no alternative. At least she hadn’t done anything worse than scratch some paint and mar up a panel.

  She registered a flare of excitement as she settled back into the chair. Once everyone was out of stasis and she’d explained what had happened, perhaps she could convince Carson to get a message to Carrie and Katrina. He owed her that much at the very least.

  She held on to the idea of actually being able to see Carrie’s face for the next half hour while she waited, lost in the fantasy of hearing her voice and being able to tell her how much she loved her.

  Just as she was considering a trip to the lounge for some water and a snack, she heard the first sounds coming from stasis. Gillian rose from the chair and approached the other room’s door. Yes, she could hear the distinctive hiss of the pods opening.

  Bracing herself, she scanned her key card, and the door opened.

  Inside, the units yawned like giant mouths. She spotted Birk’s at once, the man himself stirring within, and a surge of emotion nearly overcame her. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed him. The sensation increased with seeing the others emerging from the pods, their movements sluggish, like houseflies in midwinter. The isolation and fear she’d endured over the last couple of months fled, and despite the lingering anger at seeing him, she found herself tearing up as Carson moved toward her down the center of the room.

  Gillian took a step forward, a greeting on the tip of her tongue, but stopped.

  There was a look of alarm on his face that she didn’t understand until she followed his gaze.

  Tinsel’s unit was still closed, and it took her several seconds to see why.

  Two of the heavy tether straps she’d seen in the maintenance closet were wrapped tightly around the entire pod, preventing the lid from rising more than an inch. But her gaze held on the strange sight only for a moment before it was drawn to something long and shiny on the floor beside the unit.

  She took two steps to the right, the area behind the pod coming into view.

  The pry bar lay beside a jumble of supply tubes and wires running from the room’s wall into the rear of the stasis unit. Halfway down their length, they’d been severed roughly, jagged exposed copper and bent aluminum shining in the light.

  Gillian stared, shifting her eyes from the sealed unit to the broken tubes, to the pry bar lying on the floor, and back again before she was shoved aside.

  Carson pushed past her and fell to his knees at the base of the pod. His hands worked at the tether straps, shoulders and back flexing with effort beneath his suit. All the while voices began asking questions throughout the room, and more of the crew crowded in around them. Gillian felt a fluttering in the back of her skull: the scene before her wasn’t computing.

  Didn’t make sense.

  Her eyes fell from where Carson worked to the pry bar, and she tried to swallow the dryness that was consuming her mouth and throat.

  There were dark-red smears on the bar’s handle, dried almost black, and more of the stains beneath the separated supply lines.

  Blood.

  Slowly her gaze slid down to the healing gash on her right hand.r />
  Everything took on the surreal quality of a dream, and she wondered if she was still in the grip of withdrawal, if this was just another heinous delusion.

  There was a guttural grunt and a quiet clack of metal releasing. Carson stood, yanking the two tethers free before grasping the unit’s lid and lifting it.

  The smell was instantaneous, spurring unbidden images in her mind’s eye.

  Putrefied meat left in the sun.

  Crawling maggots.

  Death.

  Someone gagged and spun away as Gillian made herself step forward.

  Tinsel’s eyes were open and swollen in their sockets, his jaw gaping wide, something blackened inside it that might’ve once been a tongue. There were bloody furrows in the skin of his face as if he had scratched himself, and when she was able to tear her eyes away from his features, she saw that his fingers were curled into crimson claws, blunted with the effort of trying to escape the locked confines of his unit.

  For a drawn second, it seemed as if they were all in stasis again, transfixed by the horror contained within the pod.

  Carson broke free of the moment’s grip and reached into the pod to press his fingers below Tinsel’s hanging jaw.

  He stood that way for a beat, the miniscule hope within Gillian extinguishing as he turned away from what was now a coffin.

  His eyes flitted across the rest of them, burning with intensity as they landed on her and held.

  “My God, Gillian. What have you done?”

  CLASSIFIED

  Audio file transcript: Recorded transmission by Dr. Gillian Ryan to unnamed UN official.

  August 6, 2028—eleven days prior to rendezvous with UNSS. Fifteen days before Discovery VI disaster.

  Dr. Ryan: Can you hear me?

  UN: Gillian. I didn’t expect you to call again.

  Dr. Ryan: There’s someone here. On the ship.

  UN: There’s several people on the ship. They’re called the crew. Gillian, are you okay?

  Dr. Ryan: They’re all supposed to be sleeping. One of them is awake. I know it. Carson lied. Tinsel lied. They’re still lying. I can hear them whispering.

  UN: [Long pause.] Are you all right, Gillian?

  Dr. Ryan: [Inaudible.] The floors are bleeding. There’s blood everywhere. It creeps under my door. [Inaudible. Laughing.]

  UN: You should probably lie down before you hurt yourself. There’s a lot at stake here. Remember what we talked about before?

  Dr. Ryan: Yes. You wouldn’t let me talk to her. Carrie.

  UN: Gillian, I think you—

  Dr. Ryan: You took her away from me.

  UN: Gillian, your daughter’s fine.

  Dr. Ryan: I’ll kill you. I’ll kill all of you.

  [End of transmission.]

  TWENTY-FIVE

  She had thought the insomnia was bad coming out from under the hydrocodone shadow.

  This was worse.

  Her mind wouldn’t stop running. It was a set of gears, sometimes meshing to form cohesive lines of thought, then disengaging, freewheeling, churning up disjointed memories.

  Kent’s breath hot on her neck while they slept inches apart.

  Carrie’s second birthday when she’d found her cake early in the refrigerator and pushed her entire face into it, taking half a dozen bites from it before Gillian could stop her. She’d had to sit down from laughing so hard, the sight of Carrie’s tiny features covered in blue frosting too much to handle.

  The rat’s neurons firing in wave upon wave, its hippocampus lighting up like condensed fireworks.

  Tinsel’s dead body, bloated and staring out at her from inside the stasis unit. Eyes accusing, cursing her.

  Gillian sat up on the bed and swung her feet to the floor. She breathed in through her nose, out through her mouth, all the while trying to shake the last image. But it wouldn’t leave her. It was like an afterimage from staring at something overly bright, except there was no merciful dulling in her mind’s eye.

  She saw everything. Remembered everything.

  With the stasis unit severed from the wall, the chemical compound keeping Tinsel in suspension had stopped. That meant he had woken up in the dark without food, without water, trapped by the tethers as if buried alive, and after an unknown number of days clawing his fingers to bloodied stumps, he’d died of dehydration.

  She couldn’t imagine a worse death.

  Her stomach roiled at the thought of what the man had gone through, what she had done.

  No. She hadn’t. There was no way she could’ve done something like that. No way—

  Gillian noticed the thumb of her left hand worrying the healing cut in her right palm and closed both hands into fists. She wasn’t a murderer. An addict, yes, but that was a far cry from having the capacity to kill another human being. But even as she tried assuring herself, the memory of striking Tinsel’s pod with the pry bar came back to her with utter clarity. In that moment she could’ve killed him; there was no lying to herself about that.

  Had she done it? She put aside the automatic self-defenses of her mind and let the notion in, let it take full form. Yes, she’d hated Tinsel, hadn’t liked him from the first time they’d met, but to inflict that kind of suffering on another person? Murder him like that?

  Everyone saw you punch him right before he went into stasis. You looked like an absolute psychopath. And now they know how fucked up you were on the pills. You could have done anything and not realized it.

  She tried clearing her mind, imagining the familiar tempest within slowly calming before retracing every memory she could recall over the last several weeks, looking for an instance she could pin down as reality. Mostly it was blurred images, sickness, and lightning strikes of fear that still brought goose bumps to her skin.

  Gillian walked past the bed, turned at the desk, and took the four steps before having to about-face at the bathroom door. It had been three days. Three days locked inside the room. Carson had led her here after opening Tinsel’s unit, Easton following quietly behind them as she pled with them both. Carson had been beyond stony, unwilling to speak or acknowledge her. Even the grip on her arm had been like a rock: cold, strong, unmoving. The last thing she’d seen were his eyes as the door slid closed, and there had been no hint of the emotion that was there before he’d gone into stasis, when he’d been trying to tell her . . . tell her . . .

  Gillian stopped pacing, listening for the sound she thought she’d heard in the hall. Maybe it was Leo bringing her meals again. The physician had been the only one she’d seen since being incarcerated. Initially he’d simply checked her over, taken a blood sample, asked several questions about her addiction, if she was suffering from any other ailments. When she’d broached the subject of Tinsel’s death, he’d stiffened and left the room, abandoning her to her churning thoughts, and the doubt.

  “I would remember it,” she said, beginning to pace again. But the truth was, she had no idea if she would remember it or not.

  And at that moment, alone and terrified of herself—of what she might have done—she’d never missed Carrie or their life as much.

  The sound of someone approaching her door slowed her movement, and she waited, watching as it slid open.

  Birk stood there, completely filling up the doorway.

  “May I come in, Doctor?”

  Her held breath whooshed out, and she embraced him as he stepped inside. He patted her back in his usual way. When he released her, she noticed he wasn’t alone. Leo entered the room as well, nodding quickly at her.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t come sooner. It was . . . forbidden,” Birk said.

  “Carson needed some time before—” Leo began, gesturing once with his hand before dropping it to his side.

  Time to decide what to do with me.

  Gillian lowered herself to the bed while Birk perched on the desk. Awkwardness filled the air before Birk cleared his throat and said, “I had no idea, Doctor.”

  She glanced at the floor. This was why she’d gotten
clean before completely on her own. The shame had been too much. “No one did,” she managed. “Maybe some people wondered, but no one knew.”

  “How long?”

  “For a year and a half after Kent died. Then I quit until Carrie was diagnosed, and I fell off the wagon.” She held her palms up and dropped them back to her lap—and here we are.

  “You’re not on the pills now?” Birk asked, shifting his eyes from her to Leo.

  “No. I . . . I was done with them weeks ago. Still weak and shaky, but they’re gone.” When no one spoke or moved, she pushed forward. “I didn’t kill him.”

  Birk licked his lips. “Doctor, they showed me the damage in the medical bay and on the locker.”

  “I know, I know. I did that, I remember doing it. But . . .” But what? “The cameras,” she said, the ray of hope flaring inside her again. “Leo, there’s surveillance on the ship, right?”

  The physician met her gaze but quickly looked at his feet. “Yes.” And in the way he said that one word, her hope was extinguished. “The internal cameras’ archives were disabled shortly after we went into stasis. Nothing was recorded.”

  “What? No, that’s not possible. I didn’t touch any of the controls. I didn’t.” Her entire body felt as if it had been injected with novocaine. This wasn’t happening. “It had to be someone else. I don’t even know how to work the cameras.” Neither Leo nor Birk would look at her. “Goddammit! I didn’t touch the controls!” Her voice rang off the walls, and the desperation in it made it sound alien. Gillian swallowed, trying to keep her voice even. “I saw someone, someone else on the ship. Someone was awake. One of the others, they had to be. I thought I was hallucinating, but now I realize they must have been real. They turned the recordings off, they killed Tinsel.”

  “Gillian. Who? We were all in stasis,” Leo said.

  “I don’t know. But it’s possible, right? What if someone were awake? They could climb in and out of their pod and it would look like they were asleep.”