Infinite

by Jeremy Robinson

  “Seven percent,” I say. “Roughly.”

  Point made. If some people could hang out atop Mount Everest without oxygen, who’s to say that mutated frogs living beneath Earth’s surface haven’t acclimated to the reduced O2. They could leach oxygen out of the ground, the water, or just not need as much. I return my gaze to the jungle outside the lander. We’re just thirty feet above a sandy beach tracing a line between the green land and the blue ocean.

  Unlike Capria, I look out the window with an equal mix of excitement and apprehension. If giant frog-things can survive in a barren world, what are we going to find here? Images of strange and unusual animals flit through my mind. I’m not sure what they are, but they’re not a product of my imagination.

  “You’re doing it again,” Capria says and motions at my head. “The forehead thing.”

  “This feels familiar,” I say.

  “How could this—” She waves her hands at the window. “—be familiar. Even when you lived here, Earth didn’t look like this.”

  “I think it was a book, or a movie,” I say. “Maybe both.”

  Before I can dig deeper into the memory, the lander hatch unseals and opens wide. The lower ramp digs into the sand a few inches and stops.

  The air is hot, but a good fifteen degrees cooler than it had been in what was left of Florida. Being at the South Pole has its perks. The place is also scented with organic rot from generations of plant growth, sea water, and flowers. It nearly undoes me.

  I stumble down the ramp and step into the sand.

  Bird calls echo from the forest, joined by something deeper, something mammalian—but not threatening. The palm trees lining the beach sway in the wind, their large leaves merging with the crashing of waves to create a peaceful white noise.

  Without thinking, I unclasp my coveralls and peel out of them. Dressed only in boxer-briefs, I step into the sand again, and smile at the warm feel of it beneath my feet. The humid air covers my body with a sheen that makes me feel cleansed.

  This is living.

  A loud thumping, racing up behind me, fills my mind with images of new-Earth predators, but it’s just Capria. Like me, she has shed her coveralls. Dressed in her own Command-issued gray boxer-briefs and bra, she charges down the ramp, rounds the lander and runs for the glistening turquoise waters.

  A series of warnings approach the threshold of my mouth—check for an undertow, watch out for sharks, don’t step on a sharp shell—but I hold it all back and follow. She stops in just a few inches of water, looking down, wonder painted on her face.

  “F.B. coming through!” I shout and charge past, remembering my few childhood visits to the ocean, what it felt like to plow through incoming waves, what the water tasted like, how good I felt after a day in the sun. I hit the first three-foot wave head on, crashing through. Then, in waist deep water, I dive in, kicking for several feet before twirling around and rising.

  When I break the surface and wipe the water from my eyes, Capria is still rooted in place, her wonder replaced by fear.

  I stand in chest deep water, pummeled from behind by incoming waves that lift me off the ocean floor every few seconds. “What is it?” I search the area for predators. For fins. Shadows. I see nothing.

  “How are you doing that?” Capria asks.

  “Doing what?” I ask, and then I realize the problem. “You can’t swim.”

  Of course she can’t. Water on Mars was the most rare and valuable commodity. Every ounce of it was recycled, from showers, toilets, urine—even feces. Every drop was recovered and reused. There was none left over for a swimming pool or even a bath. No Martian-born human being could swim.

  I kick back to shore, practicing the strokes my father taught Steven and me, which probably made my brother overconfident when he dove into a swamp filled with debris, tangling vines, and a layer of goopy mud at the bottom. I stop in waist-deep water and hold my hands out to Capria.

  She looks unsure.

  I wave her on. “This is what you wanted when you ran out here in your underwear, right?”

  She takes a cautious step closer, and then another and another until she’s standing in front of me, rising and falling as the waves roll past or crash on my back. I take her hand and lead her a little deeper. She says nothing, but looks nervous as the water rises. I stop when we’re deep enough that the waves aren’t cresting.

  “What are we doing?” she asks.

  “Teaching you to swim.” I reach out my arms. “Hold my forearms.” She grasps my arms beneath the elbows, and I do the same to her. “Now, just lean forward, try to stay straight and kick.”

  She raises an eyebrow. “Kick?”

  “Just kick.”

  She eases forward and yelps a little as her feet come off the ocean floor. When she doesn’t plunge beneath the water, she laughs, and then kicks. The water turns white behind her thrashing feet, and I pull her along, letting her feel what it’s like to move through the water. I twirl her in slow circles, smiling as her laughter continues and grows in volume when a wave sideswipes her. We stop so she can pull her hair out of her face and wipe the water away.

  “How am I doing?” she asks.

  “You’re a natural,” I say, and she slaps my shoulder because we both know it’s a lie.

  “Let’s see how you do with your hands and feet.” I extend my arms and lower them just beneath the water. “Lay across my arms.”

  She’s dubious, but leans down onto my arms.

  Holding her buoyant weight, I’m about to explain a breast stroke to her and move her through the water while she thrashes about, when she looks up at me with a strange kind of smile. “Pretty slick move.”

  “Huh?” Something about her expression makes me feel like I’ve been caught doing something wrong, but I have no idea what it is.

  Her smile widens when she realizes that I’m ignorant to whatever it is. “Your left hand.”

  The moment my ears register the words, I feel her breast in my cupped hand, holding her up. I roll my hand forward so it’s awkwardly placed against her clavicle. “Shit. Sorry.”

  She leans back, planting her feet on the seabed. “I didn’t mind.”

  I’m at a loss for words, and then discover it doesn’t matter. It’s hard to talk when a woman’s lips are pressing against yours. A wave lifts us together, carrying us closer to shore. We touch down again at an angle, Capria stumbling back, me holding onto her. I nearly catch her, but a second wave does us in. We topple back, fall to the sand, and resume kissing.

  I recall seeing movies, and my mother’s classic romance novels, depicting this very thing: couples on the sand. The images were alluring, and promised that great things happened when men and women made love at the beach, caressed by each other and the waves. But reality chafes.

  When my knees grow raw, and sand works its way into places before Capria can get there, I pull back and say, “Lander?”

  She nods and we hurry back to the lander like sneaking teenagers.

  Gal’s drones file out of the lander, making room and forming a protective half circle around the open hatch. To her credit, Gal remains a silent observer, even when our shouts of ecstasy, which could be misconstrued as pain, drown out the jungle’s animal calls. Gal has feigned romantic interest before, and I have to admit I’ve sometimes wished she was human, but she’s also made it clear that she is without a body, or human interests, like sex. So I’m more worried that I’ll look bad in the security feed of this encounter, than I am about her being jealous.

  I’d like to say that the hard floor of the lander was a relief compared to the sand, but its hard surface is brutal on my knees, and then on my back, and on my knees again. But I don’t care. Our first time together is equal parts pain and pleasure, but when we’re done, lying sprawled in the lander’s cargo bay floor, stark naked, all I can remember is how amazing it felt.

  Still feels.

  For the first time since waking up with a screwdriver in my chest, life isn’t just horrible,
depressing, interesting, or fun; life is good.

  “Ahem,” Gals says, fifteen minutes after we’re done. “I think we can rate Antarctica as a five-star experience, but there is still the question of Mars and Kepler 452b. Shall we take a look?”

  I sit up, no longer worried about my nakedness. “We should check them out.” I say it with the enthusiasm of a student being roused for school. “But I think we’ll come back when we’re done.” Capria takes my hands. “I think we’ve found our home.”

  The drones return like a well-trained flock of sheep, and the lander doors close. An electric chime sounds. “First stop, Mars,” Gal says. “Then on to Kepler 452b, Cognata to the layman.”

  Layman. A singular and not too subtle dig at my intelligence. I don’t mind it, though. Means Cap and Gal are getting along.

  I’m not sure what we’ll find at either planet, but after our experience on Antarctica, I feel a little more hopeful about discovering something not entirely horrible.

  42

  Horrible is too mild a word for what we find.

  It’s not the first time I’ve seen Mars from orbit, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it without the colonies or Command. I had envisioned a lifeless planet—Mars always has been—but I thought the structures erected by mankind would still stand. Command, like Galahad, had an army of drones maintaining the facility, but there was nothing they could do to stave off the self-inflicted fate that erased humanity from the red planet.

  “War?” Capria asks, standing beside me on the observation deck. We’re in orbit over where Command once stood, our view zoomed in on the ten square miles that once was Mars’s first city, and is now a crater—or rather, a collection of craters. Command was destroyed by a missile barrage.

  “They must have made it a long time,” I say.

  “Long enough to develop weapons of mass destruction from the elements,” Gal says. “WMDs were eradicated before Command was formed, but if they survived on Mars for hundreds of years, uncovering resources, it’s possible that they were able to fashion new weapons. But I don’t understand why they would.”

  “Survival,” I say.

  “No one survived,” Gal says.

  I step closer to the wall, inspecting the black rings marring the ruddy surface. “It’s a misconception as old as modern man. Might makes right. Carry a big stick.”

  “Mutually assured destruction,” Capria adds.

  “To prevent destruction, they built the means to carry it out.” Gal says. It’s not a question. She’s accessed history and seen the pattern for herself. And then she offers her articulate and fairly accurate assessment of people’s potential for violence. “People are dumb.”

  “Sometimes,” I admit. “Depends on who is in charge. Brains don’t always beat brawn. A leader who believes violence is the solution can undo generations of progress. It’s how most modern wars began. So…” I motion to the destruction.

  I have no idea if that’s the scenario that played out on Mars, but I have little doubt that when Earth became uninhabitable, Mars found itself with droves of refugees and not nearly enough resources to support them. War was inevitable.

  “Well,” Capria says. “This is depressing. Can we leave?”

  I had pictured us spending a good amount of time on Mars, exploring structures, pillaging supplies, and uncovering the history of mankind’s final days, but there is absolutely nothing here for us.

  “Cognata.” I spit the word, ready to leave this place and never return. Humanity’s self-destructive nature is discouraging. Is this what we have to look forward to? A war between the last two people in the galaxy who have only just consummated a romantic relationship? Are we destined to find ourselves at odds, trying to kill each other to claim dominance of what little is left?

  Or can we alter the inevitable course history says our lives are meant to travel?

  I can’t imagine a future where Capria is trying to kill me, or vice versa. So I make a pact with myself: if such a thing happens, I will fly Galahad into a star and erase us from existence.

  If Gal will let me.

  And that’s a fight I simply can’t imagine. The conjurings of my mind’s eye are bringing tears to my real eyes. “Gal.”

  “Pretty sure you don’t want me to get the coordinates wrong,” she snips. “Reappearing in the molten core of Kepler 452b wouldn’t be pleasant.”

  After I isolated us within the code of reality, changing the coordinates for our group is something Gal can handle without me returning to the VCC, which is nice, because I now have very little desire to escape reality. Part of me wonders if that’s simply because I know life is already a simulation, but I think it’s simply because this reality is the one where Capria lives.

  “Ready,” Gal says. “I’ll put us in orbit, close to Galahad’s original destination.”

  I nearly ask why she’s bringing us to that same fateful location, but then I conclude the answer on my own. If there is any chance that the other immortals reached the surface of Cognata alive, and survived the past few thousand years, that is the most logical place to begin our search. At the same time, I can’t imagine survivors staying in one place for that much time.

  So when I say, “Let’s go,” I’m fully expecting to find dried out husks, flattened by Cognata’s gravity.

  The observation deck view shifts from Mars to Cognata without any fanfare. There’s no hum of engines, no physical sensation to register a change in location spanning 1400 light years, no visual distortion of any kind. The image simply changes, like a slide show of planets.

  But the ease of travel doesn’t diminish the severity of our reaction.

  It’s night below us. Kepler 452, the sun-like star at the center of this solar system is just starting to peek over the horizon, its bright glow still a good fifteen hours away from reaching the land below us. Days on Cognata, a planet sixty percent wider than Earth, with a slower rotation, measure in 62 hour periods. Twin moons on opposite sides of the planet, make two full revolutions around the planet every day, ensuring there is always something in the sky to look at.

  “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Capria asks, stepping closer to the wall, like that will give her a better look at what’s going on down below.

  She knows I’m seeing it, too.

  It’s impossible not to.

  Where there should be nothing but stark darkness, there is light. It’s not a lot, but the way it clumps and spider webs out to other clumps suggests a civilization has developed in the past few thousand years.

  “How’s the air?” I ask, leaping ahead to the ‘can we go down there’ stage.

  “Oxygen rich,” Gal says. “Twenty-seven percent, which is good because the added gravity means every step is going to be a workout.”

  Capria and I know this already. It’s going to feel like we’re giving someone a piggy back. It won’t be fun, but the human body can adapt. Over time, our muscles and bones would grow stronger and more dense. The thought reveals that part of me is already leaving the Antarctic oasis behind. There are people on Cognata.

  “Thermal scans reveal dense populations,” Gal says, “some in the brightly lit areas, which are cool, by the way, and some in the darkness, suggesting herds of wildlife.”

  Wildlife that did not come from Galahad. Alien creatures. Could that also mean that the civilization below is also alien? And why are the lit areas cool? Light generally indicates heat, even if it’s insignificant. These are questions that can only be answered by traveling to the surface.

  “I can see by the looks on your faces,” Gal says, “that you are both determined to travel to the surface before daybreak.”

  “You’re damn right we are,” I say. Capria smiles wide at this, excitement brewing, her hand clasping mine. Squeezing her energy into my flesh.

  “May I suggest landing on the far side of the planet first? Or an unpopulated area?” Gal is doing her due diligence. She already knows the answers.

  “You have my permission to
say ‘I told you so,’ if anything goes wrong,” I tell her. The part of my brain still in touch with the primal instincts coded to early man is prodding me to agree with Gal, but the modern human who craves socialization and community overpowers those instincts the way homo sapiens once did Neanderthals. “This is where the Galahad’s crew would have landed.” I point to the largest and brightest splotch of light. “If this world has a capital, that’s probably where we’ll find it.”

  Gal sighs. “Agreed.”

  The next hour is a whirlwind of preparation. The temperature on Cognata is currently fifty degrees. It will probably warm up once the sun rises, but since that’s a good number of hours away, we need to break out the cold weather gear. Long ago, on Earth, people wore thick layers of furs, and later on in human history, layers of synthetic material, all designed to retain body heat. Our winter clothing is a thin black layer of thermal underwear that generates its own heat. Designed to sustain the crew should we find Cognata in the grips of an ice age, the ‘Thermals’ are capable of keeping a human being toasty in minus seventy-five degree weather, which would also require a facemask, and only needs a few hours in the sun to recharge. The garment goes over our feet, torsos, arms, hands (except for the finger tips), and head. Once dressed we look like ninjas, or as Gal puts it…

  “You look ridiculous.”

  Capria looks me up and down. “We do. They’re liable to think we’re thieves.”

  I pull the tight hood off my head. “It’s only fifty degrees. We don’t need the head gear, and we can wear the coveralls over this, which I’m pretty sure is how we were meant to wear them, because ‘ridiculous’ is not how I would describe how you look.” When I look Capria up and down, there is no mistaking my point.