The End of All Things: The First Instalment

by John Scalzi

  The Rraey turned its head to look at Ocampo. So did Thao. I think she realized, like I just did, that Ocampo had called the creature by name and rank.

  “Secretary Ocampo,” Tvann said, nodding its head in salute. “Perhaps you would be so kind as to identify a pilot for me.”

  “Of course,” Ocampo said. Then he pointed into crew members, directly at me. “He’s one. Take him.”

  Two Rraey peeled off and came at me. Tellez put herself in front of me. One of the two advancing Rraey raised its weapon at her. “You son of a bitch,” Thao shouted at Ocampo, and the crew of the Chandler began to agitate.

  “Quiet,” Ocampo said. He said it in a loud voice that he was clearly proud of, the sort of speaking voice that had been polished by years of diplomatic speeches and the assumption that people would naturally listen to what he had to say.

  And it worked; even the Rraey coming to get me stopped and looked at him.

  He held up a hand to further the call for silence. The crew hushed to a low murmur.

  “You will survive this,” Ocampo said, loudly. “Let me say this again: You will survive this. But only if you listen to me right now and do as I say. So listen. Quietly.”

  The Chandler crew was dead silent now.

  “I regret the death of Lee Han,” Ocampo said. “Rraey commanders are not accustomed to having orders questioned or refused. There will be no more killings unless you resist or disobey. I also recognize that from your point of view this looks very much like both piracy and treason. I assure you that nothing could be further from the truth. I am sorry I don’t have time to explain it to you further.

  “Now. I require the Chandler and I require a pilot. I am taking the ship and I am taking Mr. Daquin here. As for the rest of you, very shortly you will be escorted to the Chandler’s lifepods. The lifepods will be launched and immediately after the Chandler has skipped away—three days from now—an emergency drone will be sent to Phoenix Station and the Colonial Union with the precise coordinates to this system and your lifepods. You know that the Colonial Union keeps ships at skip distance specifically for rescue missions of this type.

  “So you will be rescued in four days, five days at the outside. The lifepods are rated for seven days under a full load. You will be rescued with time to spare.

  “I repeat: You will survive this. But in order to do that you must now offer no resistance. You must not fight. You must not argue. If you do, the Rraey here will show no hesitation in putting you down. I want you to see your family and friends again. I want you to make it back safely to Colonial Union space. Help me help you get there. Let’s get to it.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Thao said, loudly, to Ocampo.

  “That’s fair,” Ocampo said. He nodded to Tvann.

  The Rraey shot the captain in the forehead. She collapsed, dead.

  Ocampo waited for the screams to die down. “As I said, you must not argue. Now follow the Rraey’s orders, please.” He turned away from the Chandler crew and motioned to Commander Tvann to follow him.

  The two Rraey continued toward me, and I saw Tellez tense up to fight.

  “No,” I said to her.

  “They’re going to kill you,” she said.

  “They’re going to kill you if you try to stop them,” I pointed out.

  “We’re dead anyway,” she said.

  “I’d rather you take your chances with a lifepod,” I said. I put my hand on her shoulder as the Rraey arrived. “Thank you, Chieko. I appreciate that you’re willing to fight for me. I really do.”

  “Well, you would for me, right?” Tellez asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s what I’m doing now.” I nodded to the Rraey, letting them know I was ready to go. One of them grabbed me by the shoulder, and we marched away from Tellez and the crew of the Chandler.

  I barely knew any of them.

  I was already feeling guilty that I knew I was going to survive.

  I heard Secretary Ocampo talking to Tvann as I was marched up to him. “How much damage did you do to the ship?” he asked the Rraey.

  “Very little and none that would threaten the ship structurally,” Tvann said. “We only needed to disrupt and disable certain systems.”

  “Good,” Ocampo said. “The Chandler’s chief engineer said he could get the power back on line in twenty hours. Can you do it in the same timeframe?”

  “We will take less time than that,” Tvann said. “We have experience with this, Secretary. As you know.”

  “Indeed I do.”

  “It will be good to have you with us full time now.”

  “Thank you, Commander Tvann,” Ocampo said. “I agree.”

  “What do you want to do with the rest of the crew?” Tvann said.

  “I told them we’d put them on the lifepods. Let’s do that.”

  “It will be a shame to lose the lifepods.”

  Ocampo shrugged. “They’re really not going to be needed, are they?”

  “No,” Tvann said.

  “Then no real loss. One thing, though. One of the lifepods needs to be destroyed. It has to be plausible that my body isn’t recoverable. Having a lifepod torn up will help with that.”

  “Of course,” Tvann asked. “You have an assistant, yes? Will she be going into the lifepods?”

  “Offer her the choice of the lifepods or coming with us,” Ocampo said. “How much you want to hint to her that the lifepods are a bad idea is up to you.”

  “She did not know?”

  “About this? No. This was a secret, remember?”

  “I believe I will simply order her to come with us. Less complicated that way.”

  “It’s your show,” Ocampo said, and clapped the Rraey on the shoulder, dismissing it. Tvann went to direct the herding of the Chandler crew. Then Ocampo turned his attention to me.

  “Well, Mr. Daquin,” Ocampo said. “Today is your lucky day. You will survive this day, after a fashion.”

  “There’s no emergency drone, is there?” I asked.

  “You mean, to let the Colonial Union know about the Chandler’s crew,” Ocampo said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Ocampo shook his head. “No. No, there is not.”

  “So you’re going to let everyone on the Chandler suffocate in their lifepods.”

  “That’s the most likely scenario, yes,” Ocampo said. “This isn’t a populated system. No one else is likely to come by in the next week. Or year.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why are you doing this?”

  “You’re asking why I’ve apparently become a traitor?”

  “For starters,” I said.

  “The full answer is too long for the time we have now,” Ocampo said. “So I’ll just say that the real question is where one’s loyalties should be, with the Colonial Union, or with humanity. The two are not the same thing, you know. And I’ve come to realize that my loyalties are with humanity first. The Colonial Union’s time is coming to an end, Mr. Daquin. I’m just trying to make sure that when it ends, it doesn’t take the human race with it.”

  “If your loyalty is to humanity, then prove it,” I said. I gestured back to the crew of the Chandler. “They’re humans, Secretary Ocampo. Save these people. Send a skip drone back to Phoenix Station letting them know where they are. Don’t let them die in the lifepods.”

  “It’s noble of you to try to save them,” Ocampo said. “I wish I could grant your wish, Mr. Daquin. I truly and sincerely wish I could. But for now the Colonial Union can’t know that I’ve abandoned them. They need to think I’m dead. That only happens if there’s no one to report otherwise. I’m sorry.”

  “You said you needed me as a pilot,” I said. “I won’t help you unless you save them.”

  “I think you’ll change your mind,” Ocampo said, and nodded to one of the Rraey.

  My feet were knocked out from under me and I was pushed down hard to the floor of the cargo hold.

  Something was pressed to the back of my head. It felt like a gun
.

  I felt the vibration of the gun firing at the same time I felt something hit the back of my skull.

  I don’t remember anything after that.

  PART TWO

  So now we’re at the part where I actually become a brain in a box.

  I don’t remember the first part of it at all. I was shot in the back of the head point blank with some sort of electrical stun gun; I was out. After I got zapped, I was taken to the Rraey’s ship, where a doctor of some sort (at least I hope it was a doctor) put me into a medically induced coma; the first step of the process. I was unconscious through the skip, three days later. I was unconscious when we arrived at our destination.

  I was, thankfully, unconscious for the part that came next.

  And then there was the recovery period, which is substantial, because, and I think this may be obvious when you think about it, removing someone’s brain from their head and keeping the brain alive in a box creates a considerable amount of trauma for the brain.

  All told I was out for eighteen days.

  And when I say I was out, I mean that I was out. I didn’t dream. I didn’t dream because I don’t think that technically I was sleeping. There’s a difference between sleeping and what was happening to me. Sleep is an actual thing your brain does to rest itself and tidy up after a day of stimulation. What was going on with me was something else entirely. If sleep was going for an easy swim in a calm pond, what I was doing was fighting to surface in the middle of an ocean storm, far from any land at all.

  I didn’t dream. I think it’s probably better that I didn’t.

  During all this time I surfaced only once—well, once that I remember. I remember feeling like my consciousness was being dragged hard through sludge, and thinking I can’t feel my legs.

  And then: I can’t feel my anything. And then falling back down into the sludge.

  I did feel something the next time I regained consciousness.

  I had, bluntly, the worst fucking headache I had ever had in my life.

  I’m trying to think of the best way to describe it. Try this. Imagine a migraine, on top of a hangover, while sitting in a kindergarten of thirty screaming children, who are all taking turns stabbing you in the eye with an ice pick.

  Times six.

  That was the good part of my headache.

  It was the sort of headache where the best possible course of action is to lie there motionless and quiet, eyes closed, and pray for death. Which is why I think it took me longer than it should have to figure out a few things.

  The first thing was that it was dark in the sort of way that shouldn’t be possible.

  Go ahead and close your eyes. Do it right now. Is it totally dark?

  I just realized you wouldn’t have read that last question if in fact you’d just closed your eyes when I asked you to. Look, I told you I wasn’t a writer.

  Let me try this again: Close your eyes for a minute. Then when you’ve opened them up again, ask yourself if it was totally dark when you had them closed.

  And the answer was, no, it wasn’t. If you were in a room or place that had any light in it, some of that light found its way through your eyelids. If you were in a dark room, reading this on a screen, then you had afterimages of the screen on your retina. And even if you were in a dark room, maybe listening to this being read to you, eventually the very physical fact of your eyes would eventually make something happen. If you rubbed your eyes, you’d press on your optic nerve and ghost images and colors would appear in your brain.

  The darkness is never totally and inescapably dark.

  But this darkness was.

  It wasn’t the absence of light. It was the absence of anything.

  And once I realized that about the darkness, I also realized it about the silence. There’s no such thing as perfect silence, either. There’s always some noise, even if it’s just a phantom hum from the hairs in your cochlea moving around in your head.

  There was nothing but the perfect clarity of nothing.

  Then I realized I couldn’t taste my mouth.

  Don’t look at me like that, because even though I can’t see you I know you’re looking at me like that.

  Listen. I don’t care if you ever think about the fact that you can always taste your mouth. You are always tasting your mouth. It’s where you keep your tongue. Your tongue doesn’t have an off switch. You are tasting your mouth right now, and now that I’ve brought it to your attention, you’re probably realizing that you should probably brush or chew some gum or something. Because your mouth, by default, is a kind of a little off, tastewise.

  You can taste your mouth. Even when you’re not thinking about it.

  I was thinking very hard about it. And I couldn’t taste a goddamned thing.

  And this is where I started to lose it. Because you know about blindness. It’s a thing that happens to people. They lose their sight and maybe even their eyes, and while it’s possible to regrow eyes or to create artificial ones, you still accept that blindness is real, and maybe it’s happened to you. The same with deafness.

  But who the actual fuck can’t taste their own mouth?

  So, yeah. This is where my brain well and truly started saying oh shit oh shit oh shit on a more or less infinite loop.

  Because after that everything I wasn’t sensing hit me head on: No feeling in my hands or feet or arms or legs or penis or lips. No smells coming in through my nose. No sensation of air going past my nostrils and into my nose. No sense of balance. No sense of heat or cold.

  No nervous swallow. No feeling of fear sweat in my pits and brow. No racing heart. No heartbeat.

  No anything.

  I would have positively shit myself in fear, except I had no sense of losing sphincter control, either.

  The only thing I could feel was pain, because my headache decided that this was a fantastic time to get a dozen times worse.

  And I focused on that headache like a starving dog focuses on a steak because it was the only thing in the world I could feel.

  And then I passed out. Because I think my brain decided I was feeling too much about not feeling anything.

  I can’t say that I disagreed with it.

  * * *

  When I came to again I did not freak out, and I felt a little bit proud about that. Instead, I tried to calmly and rationally figure out what was going on.

  First hypothesis: I was dead.

  Discarded because that seemed kind of stupid. If I were dead, then yes, I wouldn’t be feeling anything. But I also probably wouldn’t be aware that I wasn’t feeling anything. I just … wouldn’t be.

  Unless this was the afterlife. But I doubted it was. I’m not much of a religious person, but most afterlives that I’d heard of were something more than a blank nothingness. If God or gods existed, and this was all they put together for eternal life, I wasn’t very impressed with their user experience.

  So: probably alive.

  Which was a start!

  Second hypothesis: was in some sort of coma.

  This seemed more reasonable, although I didn’t really know anything about the medical facts of a coma. I didn’t know if people in comas could actually think about things while they were in them. From the outside they didn’t seem like they were doing much. Tabled this idea for later thought.

  Third hypothesis: not in a coma but for some reason trapped in my body without any sensation.

  This seemed like the most reasonable explanation on the surface, but two questions arose that I didn’t have answers for. One, how I got into this predicament in the first place. I was conscious and knew who I was, but otherwise my memory of recent events was shaky. I remembered falling out of my bunk and then going to the bridge, but anything after that was a blur.

  This suggested to me I had some sort of event; I knew people’s memories of accidents or injury were sometimes wiped out by the trauma of the event itself. That seemed likely here. Whatever it was, I was in a bad way.

  Well, that wasn’t news
. I was a consciousness floating around in nothing. I had gotten the “you’re not doing so well” memo.

  But that was the second thing: Even if I were in terrible shape, which I assumed I was, I should be able to feel something, or to sense something other than my own thoughts. I couldn’t.

  Hell, I didn’t even have a headache anymore.

  “You’re awake.”

  A voice, perfectly audible, indeterminate in terms of any identifying quality, coming from everywhere. I was shocked into immobility, or would have been, if I had any way to be mobile.

  “Hello?” I said, or would have, if I had been able to speak, which I wasn’t, so nothing happened. I started to go into panic mode, because I was reminded so clearly that there was something wrong with me, and because I was desperate that the voice, whoever it was, would not leave me alone again in the nothing.

  “You’re trying to talk,” the voice said, again from everywhere. “Your brain is trying to send signals to your mouth and tongue. It’s not going to work. Think the words instead.”

  Like this, I thought.

  “Yes,” the voice said, and I almost cried with relief. A jumble of thoughts and emotions rose up in a panicky need to be expressed. I had to take a minute to calm down and focus on a single coherent thought.

  What happened to me? I asked. Why can’t I speak?

  “You can’t speak because you don’t have a mouth or tongue,” the voice said.

  Why?

  “Because we took them from you.”

  I don’t understand, I thought, after a long minute.

  “We took them from you,” the voice repeated.

  Did something happen to them? Was I in an accident?

  “No, they were perfectly fine, and no, you weren’t.”

  I don’t understand, I thought again.

  “We removed your brain from your body.”

  It’s hard, looking back, to accurately convey the amount of utter incomprehension I was experiencing at this moment. I tried very hard to express my level of confusion and incredulity at the statement I just heard. What came out was:

  What

  “We removed your brain from your body,” the voice repeated.