The Raft: A Novel

by Fred Strydom

  The Borrowed Gun infiltrated several major international cities and plundered on a mass scale. Skyscrapers and airports were stripped bare. Factories were cleaned out. Department stores in popular shopping destinations were ransacked or bombed. Most attacks seemed to come from inside and there were few options to resist the sheer number of internal aggressors.

  In the end, there was only one major corporation that remained immune to the onslaught of The Borrowed Gun. Conveniently, the centre for this corporation was located in the desert—out of the targeted cities—and had the foresight to anticipate the backlash of a group who’d been empowered by the very nations that had once forsaken them. It was a corporation that had long since disowned its national affiliation, knowing all too well governments were weak and disorganised bagholders, the perfect Straw Men for a misinformed, overzealous faction such as The Borrowed Gun. The name of the corporation? Huang Enterprises.

  All they really had to do was do what they did best—cut a deal. So that’s what they did. The deal was that The Borrowed Gun would continue to cripple the competitors and Huang Enterprises would supply The Borrowed Gun with resources and weaponry, like feeding bloody raw meat to a vicious junkyard dog.

  Now, around about this time it just so happened that Huang Enterprises announced the return of Chang’e 11.

  Forty years earlier, Chang’e 11 had been built on the dark side of the moon. It was built for that very problem, the limited supply of resources on earth. It took seven years to build and although it was the size of a small town it only required a crew of nine astronauts for a nine-year mission period. The selection process was rigorous but covert. No applications were submitted. The members were scouted: nine of the finest engineering and scientific minds in the world.

  Chang’e 11 remained a secret right up until a week before the launch. The world, of course, was stunned by the knowledge of its existence. They watched as it was launched into the cosmos, this titan of a ship manned by a mere handful of pilots. They watched as it made its way to 4660 Nereus, tagging its first asteroid with a self-replicating refinery. They watched as it ventured further, to the moons of Jupiter, as it made its way towards the edge of the Solar System, and then … they stopped watching altogether.

  In an instant, there was nothing to watch.

  Chang’e 11 was gone.

  Off the radios. Out of range.

  No reason could be found. There was no distress signal. No messages. No readings on the earth-based warning systems. It simply vanished, as if it had never existed at all, and with it, the nine astronauts who had been selected for the mission.

  This is probably as much as you know; this is what everyone knows, apart from the fact that it did eventually return, even though not much was publicised. For one, the news was that one day there’d been a sudden blip on a screen and the ship had been found drifting near Saturn. The news was also that, despite numerous attempts, no radio contact could be made with the crew. Auto-piloting systems had been reinstated and Chang’e 11 brought safely back to earth. The last two pieces of news shared with the world were that the crewmembers were the same age as when they’d left and that they had no memory of where they had been. That was it. That was what people were allowed to know. But what nobody knew—and never did find out—was where Chang’e 11 had been for all those years.

  And that, gentlemen, is where the real story lies.

  It was Shen who told me all of this. He was one of the nine astronauts. An exceptional mechanical engineer and the captain of Chang’e 11. We’d often sit together in this house and he’d explain what had happened, where they had been, what it had meant … because, of the few things the world thought they knew, one supposed fact turned out to be untrue: the nine did remember where they had been. They remembered all too well. The problem, you see—the reason it was covered up—was because of what they remembered.

  At first Shen didn’t say much about the voyage, but over time the details of his extraordinary experience were revealed. We sat in this very conservatory and he told me everything. The truth of a ship that had disappeared not only from our Solar System, but from our universe.

  This had apparently happened without their knowing. Everything was going according to plan, Shen said. One moment they were on course to a mining destination and the next moment the instruments on Chang’e 11 were telling them they’d returned to the geospace of earth. They thought they had been brought back. They thought the mission was complete.

  Chang’e 11 made contact with ground control and landed. Upon landing, they went through the standard decompression procedures and were welcomed by their friends and their family. For a while, he said, everything seemed normal. It was the earth they knew and remembered. They were initially quite happy to be home. However, it wasn’t long before irregularities began to surface. Shen said that, though none of them could put their finger on it, they were struck by the sense everything on “earth” was off kilter. The number of steps outside a building would be different on different days. Sometimes an object in the sun wouldn’t cast a shadow. People would say and do unusual things: strangers would often stare at them or not talk to them at all. There were only a handful of weather variations: sunny, cloudy, rainy. The astronauts recognised their homes, their wives, husbands, children and friends, but even these people did not seem themselves. They always talked about the same thing or repeated the same actions.

  It was the world the astronauts had left behind, but somehow it was a world incapable of changing in any way. He said it was as if every day was simply replaying itself, and they were participants, actors in a contrived theatre of elaborate props.

  It was his once-friend and colleague Quon who noticed it first. It was also Quon who came up with a theory. His theory was as outrageous as it was reasonable: they weren’t on earth at all. Wherever they were, their memories had been downloaded and re-uploaded to give the impression of them having arrived at home. A simulation of some kind. Quon was also the one who proposed that the only way of escaping this manufactured reality was to commit suicide. If they killed themselves, he theorised, they’d be pulled from the program, the way one wakes before falling to a death in a dream.

  It was clear to Shen that Quon struggled with that pseudo-reality. Perhaps more so than himself. It was no place for a man committed to a life of logic, he said. In a world where basic math no longer functioned and physics was subjective, Quon strained to stay his normal, composed self. This led to Quon being the first to test this theory. He killed himself. Shen was there when it happened, but he did not immediately follow suit. He still had his doubts. He continued to examine the world by himself, to investigate Quon’s claim about it being a simulated world—but it was the event of Quon’s suicide that ended up providing Shen with the most striking evidence to support the theory.

  After Quon took his life, there was no funeral. No one recalled him having ever having existed. More than that, any connections to Quon vanished at the same time he did. His wife was abruptly non-existent. His house. His friends and family. Any footprint he’d left was gone. And it was this incontrovertible peculiarity that led Shen to finally do as Quon had done, and take his life. He rode an elevator to the rooftop of a tall building and leaped over the edge. Upon hitting the ground, he awoke in his hyper-sleep chamber in Chang’e 11. The rest of the crew was there. Quon and the other seven. They’d been waiting for him.

  On Chang’e 11, each of them had an incredible story to tell. A story of a life they thought they’d had on that earth. Each crew-member spoke of limited landscapes, two-dimensional characters, and their occasional ability to manipulate that environment by will alone. It chilled them to think they had been so easily fooled. However, one thing stayed with them from that bizarre other reality: not one of them had an idea of what had really happened, of where they had been. The only two things they could agree on were that they had certainly been somewhere—a place not as tangible as reality and not as shapeless as a dream—and that they had all been
in the same place.

  For a while, Chang’e 11 continued to drift through the vast darkness of space. The crew went about the normal business of running the ship. They learned that they were somewhere near Saturn. At last, a message came through to them from earth, and Chang’e 11 was escorted by remote control back home.

  So they landed. For a second time.

  Here.

  This time, no friends and family were awaiting their arrival. After landing, Huang Enterprises had the crew separated from each other and put into quarantine. They were probed. Interrogated. Tested. The military officials, scientists and psychologists who conducted these sessions gave them no information. The crew begged to see their wives, husbands and children. Their pleas fell on deaf bureaucratic ears.

  They were asked about the events of their absence. The astronauts told their interrogators about the other landing—the first landing on what they thought was earth. They retold their anecdotes. They answered all of the many questions, completed all of the tests, but they received no further information or privileges. They were treated as if they were carrying some contagious disease.

  Ultimately, the truth was broken to them by a public relations officer: though they believed they had only been away for nine years, it had actually been more than forty.

  The astronauts were shocked by this revelation and found the news difficult to digest. For some of them it meant that their wives and husbands were now dead. Their children had grown up and had children of their own. They had been officially declared deceased many years back and their families had held memorial services for them.

  This landing was far less forgiving than the first, the people colder and less sympathetic, the truths they had been made to face harsher and no easier to process and accept—but at least it felt real. As far as Shen and most of the crew were concerned, they were home, as unwelcoming as home was.

  The only person who struggled to accept what had happened was Quon. He became increasingly detached. Erratic, even. Initially he was convinced they were still in a simulation. He said he had evidence to prove that this was so.

  For some reason, who knows how or why, Quon could now hear what people were thinking. He could read minds. Shen disbelieved this claim at first, of course, until he discovered that he too had the ability. Possibly, they deduced, the result of a new capacity to manipulate quantum entanglement. They knew what the officials and scientists had planned for them. They could hear every conversation, not only when they were in the same room as others, but behind every closed door too. At first, Shen said, it was difficult to control their listening—whisper would stack upon whisper—but in the end they became better at it. They could select the mind they wished to read. They could even read each other’s minds. And that was how they learned what was in store for them. They would never be released from the compound. Huang Enterprises had no intention of allowing them back into the world. They would never have normal lives. They would continue to be tested, probed and dissected, until—as with anything stripped of its worth—they were ultimately discarded.

  Their nights in confinement were long and sleepless. Their days were filled with endless examinations, though they mentioned nothing to the scientists of their new abilities. The astronauts had occasional contact with each other, but soon that too was taken from them. They’d once imagined returning to earth as heroes, pioneers, idols; instead they were kept in solitary confinement like prisoners, or specimens trapped under glass.

  One night, Shen was lying on his bed in his small room, thinking about his wife, when a voice slipped into his head. It was Quon, communicating telepathically with him from the room next door. Quon said something had come to him in a dream. He’d figured out the purpose of their arrival back at earth. He said that somehow there were new ideas being channelled into his mind from somewhere far away, and that everything was now clear to him.

  They were destined for something greater, Quon said. They were part of a plan. It didn’t take much for Shen to understand what Quon meant, because he too had begun to feel the same way: they were part of something bigger than themselves, something impossibly grand. They had to fulfil this plan, but in order to do so they had to find a way out of their holding cells. Break out.

  There was something else they had learned in snippets of thought gleaned from the scientists’ minds. At some point Chang’e 11 hadn’t been lost within this universe, but had passed through a wormhole into another universe. A universe very similar to our own. This universe had topographical familiarities, planetary systems and constellations, but earth in this second universe was very different. It was precisely like our earth, except, they figured out, at an advanced stage of its own evolution. This second reality had once been the same as our own, but over time, life there had evolved to a point of collective consciousness. A noosphere. Simply put, the earth had evolved to become a single, sentient thing. Floating on its orbit around the sun but operating as one massive brain.

  This sentient earth had extraordinary abilities, Shen explained. It had thoughts and a will of its own. As Chang’e 11 had passed through the event horizon—that point of no return—and into the universe of this sentient planet, the planet became aware of its existence. It drew Chang’e 11 towards it. This second sentient earth had created the simulation, to lure Chang’e 11 and the crew. It wanted to know what they were, to learn from them. It learned they had come from another earth in another universe—a less developed earth, but earth none the less. Despite everything this advanced planet was capable of now doing—manipulating matter as well as its own trajectory, downloading memories and playing them back—it had never encountered life from a parallel universe. It was fascinated by the astronauts’ arrival, intrigued by their existence.

  And that was why their host decided to send them back—to this primitive and divided earth. It had a task for them. It sent them back with a package which was to be delivered to mankind, a package of enormous importance. The package, buried within the minds of the astronauts, consisted of nothing but a single, powerful thought. A thought that could be passed from person to person like a virus.

  Shen deduced that their new ability to read peoples’ minds was the delivery system of this viral thought. The plan, it turned out, was for the astronauts to arrive here, spread the thought into the minds of men, women and children—every conscious soul on the planet, really—and by so doing accelerate human evolution.

  This might be a lot for you to take in.

  It was for me. Perhaps we should have another whiskey. I’m not even human and I can understand the gravity of such an idea. This is what Shen knew—what Quon and the other members knew. But of course it’s not how things turned out.

  Shen and Quon

  The robot father took a moment to ease himself into the next part of the story. He drank his whiskey and looked out into the dark wet night.

  “Quon,” he said finally. “Quon was the one who realised he could steal people’s memories. Not only that, but he could claim those memories for himself. He could use someone’s own memory against him. The first time he tried this was on a guard who came into his holding cell. Quon took the guard’s thoughts, memories—his entire identity, really—and walked right out while the man stood there in a zombified stupor. Quon did this to everyone he saw—anyone who attempted to approach him. He sucked their minds dry. Then he went to the rest of the astronauts, unlocked their doors, and set them free. Shen left the cell with Quon and the rest of the crew and escaped the compound. A clean and simple getaway. Not a single soul was able to stop them. Quon manipulated a man into driving them away from the site, and they got as far they could.”

  The robot sat forward in his seat. Gideon and I leaned forward too, entranced by the tale we were being told. As he spoke, all my unanswered questions played through my mind. The glowing ball in the sky—the one in our dreams—had that been that second earth, trying to make contact with us?

  “They tried to find their way to their homes,” Fathe
r continued, “but they had no homes. Their families had either died or moved on. Earth was a relic, forty years out of time, the museum of a place they used to know. Upsetting, as you can well imagine. Some of them handled it better than others, but Quon was entirely indifferent to the news of his dead wife. He felt nothing, Shen said. Quon no longer entertained what he called ‘infantile emotions’. Instead, he became obsessed with taking memories, saying that they empowered him. He acquired an incredible wealth of new knowledge because of his ability. New ideas. Feelings. Dreams. Secrets. The complex identities of total strangers became his to do with what he wished. Though the rest of the crew could do the same thing, they knew how inherently dangerous it was to indulge in such parasitism. They tried to talk him out of taking any more memories, but Quon wouldn’t listen. He didn’t see it that way. To him, this was no longer the world he’d once cared about. Everyone had moved on without him, so why should he care?”

  There was a rap on the conservatory door. Mother was standing there, smiling, holding a tray.

  “Sorry to disturb you gentlemen,” she said. “I’m shutting down for the day, and I thought I’d bring some tea to flush out all that awful whiskey before bed.”

  Father smiled warmly at Mother as she put the tray on the table between us.

  “Tea’s the horrible stuff,” Father said. “It’ll rust your insides.”

  Mother kissed him on the cheek, wished him goodnight, and turned to us.

  “There are clothes on the beds in the spare room. They used to belong to Shen. I don’t know if they’ll fit, but see what you can do. Good night, Gideon. Goodnight, Kayle.”

  We thanked her, wished her goodnight, and she left the room. Father sighed as he watched her go, then settled back in his chair.