by Stephen King
I went back to my “home” the morning after finding Barb, and I spent hours just staring at the walls. At some point I’d have to find a place to live outside of the facilities connected to the quarantine area. Barb and I would have a home together.
I’m still not sure how I feel about that.
I neuro-synched with Elli and told her Barb was still alive and that I would be going back with her.
There was a lot of crying on both sides of the conversation. I knew I could flip on the textile switch and touch a synthetic version of Elli’s face, but the holograph was about all I could manage to do without falling to pieces. I felt like a coward, but Elli was as understanding as possible. That helped. A little.
When we ended the chat, I felt more lonely than when I’d first set foot on the starship. This time, it felt more personal, more real somehow.
I felt like crap, but I was determined to make this work. Barb had given too much to me, and I had to find a way for us both to be happy.
Over the next few weeks, Barb and I spent a lot of time together, me trying to re-find the love lost a hundred years ago.
And it worked. I started to fall in love with her again as if it was the first time we’d met. She still had her playfulness, her laugh, and those amazing eyes.
I tried to ignore the nagging guilt and aching desire for Elli.
It wasn’t long, though, that I noticed something unexplained. There were crow’s feet pulling out from Barb’s eyes. I’d spent a lot of time looking into those eyes. This was new, almost overnight, which was a ridiculous thing to think, but it was true. She hadn’t had them earlier.
Looking more closely, I saw small liver spot on her face, and wrinkles that stretched along her neck. I could see her chin sagging, which was also definitely recent. I don’t think she noticed, but some strands of her hair were turning gray.
“Barb?”
“Yes, sweetie?”
“You never told me about the side effects of stasis.”
She pulled back from me. We were sitting in her kitchen, drinking coffee.
“It’s nothing.”
“You’re aging,” I said. “Incredibly fast.”
There it was, out in the open. Somehow, I must have noticed it subconsciously, but I needed those crow’s feet to knock me into realizing it consciously.
She looked down at her coffee.
“Tell me what’s going on.” I knew I’d raised my voice, but whatever was happening was too important. I should have just researched the early history of stasis myself, but I hadn’t thought to do that.
She shook her head. “I just can’t …”
“Tell me!”
I found myself grabbing her wrist.
“You’re hurting me!”
I let go. I stared at her and said slowly, “Tell me what is going on. I can see it on your face, so you’ve got to stop lying to me!”
She started to sob, and a tear fell down her face. She wiped it with a napkin.
“I just wanted to have as much time as I could with you,” she said. “The early trials didn’t perfect the process. That’s what guinea pigs are for, I guess. Most of the early stasis attempts stopped people for only a short time. I was the first one to go long-term. Not long after I was stopped, they found a problem.”
“You’d be aging when you were re-started.”
“Yes. I’d only have a short period while my body adjusted, and I wanted to have that time with you.”
“But now?”
“Now, my body is going to catch up very quickly to the age I should have been.”
“How fast?”
“I’ll be ancient within a month. My chronological age will have caught up with me by then. I was hoping to have longer, but it’s starting already. There’s no way to stop it.”
I leaned back and stared at her, not knowing if I wanted to hug her or yell at her.
Then I remembered Elli.
“You made me give up the woman I loved just so you could have one last fling?”
“That’s cruel. I love you.”
“You knew this was going to happen.”
Another tear fell as she nodded.
“I can’t believe you deceived me that way.”
“I need you. I love you.”
I stood up and stared at the woman who once meant the world to me. Now, all I felt was disgust.
“I never want to see you again,” I said. “I can’t believe anybody would be that selfish.”
And then I left.
Elli didn’t answer my attempts to connect with her for a week. I couldn’t blame her. Although she finally agreed to have coffee with me, her face was stone. She hated me, and I totally understood. When I left her, she never talked to me again.
Barb:
Every part of my body hurts. My face looks like it’s been through a shredder, with wrinkles crawling all over it. Much of my hair has fallen out, and the parts that remain are brittle and white. I’m just so tired all the time. I can barely walk.
Even the pain-killing wands can’t take all the problems away from me for more than a short while. I waved it over myself one last time, though, and caught a taxi to the shore.
I still love the ocean. It was my first love, and Darrell was my second. I might not have him, but I still have the water.
I walked out, not bothering to change into a swimsuit. Who wants to see an old hag in a bathing suit, anyhow? Jeans and my old dolphin shirt suit me just fine, thank you very much.
Nobody is walking on the beach today. It’s sunny, warm, and I see nobody for miles around.
That’s good, too.
I don’t know how long I have before the wand wears off. An hour or less, most likely.
I walk out to let the waves splash my body, and I look out to the great sea.
Punky isn’t around, of course, and in fact, I’m too close to shore to have any dolphins at all join me for a swim, but that wasn’t going to stop me from hoping.
The water is rough and splashes against my body as I walk out deeper. Already, the muscles in my arms are complaining, but I don’t care.
I’m only forty years old and the whole rest of my life has been sacrificed to be with the only man I ever loved.
As I dove into the water, I remember the wonderful kisses we shared when he loved me just as much. The memories calmed me as I swam away from shore. I smiled.
THE JUPITER DROP
JOsH MALERMAN
Steve Ringwald woke from dark dreams of swirling storms, bruise-purple gases threatening to choke him if he opened his mouth, and a surface with no support; his boots kept slipping through the ground and as dreams go, he had no real idea what held him up at all.
He was sweating, yes, and he was alone, yes, and his apartment felt too cold then too hot and oh fuck he’d had a bad dream. Big deal. And to make it an even lesser deal, Steve knew just what had caused the dream in the first place.
It wasn’t a nightmare necessarily, had nothing to do with his family or the accident at all. And the true root of it lay on his chest, visible by the light of the lamp he hadn’t turned off before falling asleep.
An advertisement, card stock, wedged into the first third of the paperback that had put him to sleep. The book was a good one, if not a little slow-going, but the ad had interrupted it cold.
THE JUPITER DROP!
Certainly they were outdoing themselves with this one. Whoever “they” were who moneyed experiences like this, the funds behind these insane interstellar joyrides; the people who were turning the solar system into a carnival. Steve hadn’t even been to Mars yet and here they were advertising a free-fall trip through Jupiter, the stormiest, most violent of all Earth’s neighbors.
Free-fall.
Steve let this idea sit a minute. Truth be told, it chilled him, and not just a little bit. He got up out of bed and went to the bathroom, but when he got there he realized he didn’t have to go. What he did need to do was move. A little bit. Get the blood flowing. Get going.
Standing impossibly on the gaseous surface of Jupiter wasn’t so far-fetched a thing seeing as he had the means to do it. He had the money. Many people did.
Steve didn’t bother looking at himself in the mirror. He didn’t think of his family either, his wife and two kids who had more than less vanished from his life in the haze of a particularly anxious period of his life. Amy was cold that way. In cold, out cold, and the only way that she wasn’t cold was the fact that at one time she thought he was funny and Steve (like most men) guessed wrongly that humor was enough to base forever upon. What would Amy say if she knew he was considering a year-long flight to Jupiter just to be dropped through the planet like a pebble?
Was he? Was he considering that?
Steve turned on the overhead light and put on his socks. The clock told him it was only five-forty in the morning, a fine time to get up, get out of the apartment, and get some coffee. Wake up. Begin the day. Possibly even get some work done.
But his thoughts of Amy and the kids, Jupiter and the solar system, followed him outside the same way vague anger follows a bad morning person. It would fade, Steve knew. The idea. The option.
The Jupiter Drop.
But beside his breakfast plate at the diner was a newspaper and on page three of the newspaper was another ad. The same purple block letters telling men like Steve Ringwald they could have the time of their lives if they had twenty-six months to kill.
Did Steve? Did Steve have twenty-six months to kill?
He read the ad. This time all the way through.
THE JUPITER DROP!
A TWO-YEAR FLIGHT ON DISNEY AIRLINES, A TWO-MONTH STAY INSIDE JUPITER!
A FULLY FURNISHED LUXURY APARTMENT.
STATE OF THE ART VIRTUAL PARTNERS.
COMPLETE WITH A VIRTUAL MOM.
EAT, SLEEP, READ, EXERCISE, RELAX, DANCE, AND LOOK!
FOUR TRANSPARENT WALLS, TRANSPARENT CEILING AND FLOOR!
FALL, COMFORTABLY FOR TWO MONTHS!
FALL BY …
THE JUPITER DROP!
(THE DOWNEY CO.)
“More coffee?”
The morning waitress. Pretty girl. Somewhat. But Steve always figured himself somewhat as well. Maybe they could find some chemistry between them.
“Look at this,” he said, mouth half full. He pointed at the ad with his fork. “What do you think this means? You literally just … drop? ”
The waitress leaned over his table for a better look. She smiled and shook her head.
“Yeah. They drop you from this huge crane connected to a space station. You’re in an apartment and you get to—”
“Wait. You know about this? Does everybody know about this?”
She shrugged.
“Sure. Or I do anyway. I know someone who went.”
Steve wiped his mouth with his napkin.
“For real? And so … what did they think?”
She shrugged again.
“He’s not back yet.”
Steve didn’t watch her walk away. He reread the ad. The phone number at the bottom looked too easy, like all he had to do was call, pack his bags, and he’d be traveling to Jupiter.
To then be dropped through the planet.
In a glass apartment.
He laughed, couldn’t help it, and turned the page. The waitress returned.
“You gonna do it?”
She was smiling. It was a smile Steve knew very well. The kind of smile from a girl that implied, if you answered in the affirmative, she’d see you in a way you always wish you saw yourself.
Fearless.
Funny.
Fun.
Steve smiled.
“You know what,” he said, looking to the newspaper as if he could see through to the flipped page. “I might. I really just might.”
In training for motion sickness, sitting on the edge of the bed in the simulated apartment, Steve read the pamphlet Downey had issued, the rules and regulations of the ride. What to expect, what not to; there being much more of the former than the latter.
Turns out it wasn’t quite a free-fall after all. And it was a tank of an apartment. The pressure, as you sink into Jupiter, is thousands of times the pressure of the Earth’s oceans and … and Steve perused these facts with the same half-interested mind and intrinsic sense of trust people once adopted when strapping in to ride a roller coaster that went upside down. You trusted the people who built it. Downey wouldn’t send anybody through a planet if they didn’t know what they were doing and that was (more more than less) enough for him. Besides, the apartment was equipped with jets that propelled it through the denser levels of Jupiter as well as steering it far wide of the planet’s solid core. The pamphlet went on to detail the sun-level heat of Jupiter’s core and to assure people (like Steve) that the apartment was built especially to withstand such conditions, being made almost entirely of Glasgow, the (thus far) indestructible and transparent material that revolutionized the theme park industry as well as other, perhaps more practical, walks of life. Steve read through all this quickly. If they were going to send him into a scalding furnace of Hell, so be it, he’d decided to go, and was indeed already upon year-long shuttle out.
It was the storms he was interested in, the diminishing Great Red Spot; to be surrounded by such cuckoo chaos, the natural angst and fervor, submerged wholly into the virulent landscape, Mother Nature Madness … that was interesting … this was something a man would remember, possibly even think about on his deathbed. As friends and family came to say goodbye, he just might see the violence of Jupiter repeated in their eyes.
It was just the sort of thing that could bring a man to accept his insignificance, even his death.
Or the death of others.
Steve wiped sweat from his hairline as the simulated apartment began to rock, experiencing faux turbulence, the worst (they said) he would meet out there.
The death of others.
“Ah, come on,” Steve said.
The agent Rob responded and his voice sounded tinny through the small silver speakers.
“All good, Steve?”
Steve waved a half-dismissive hand. Yes, all good. But no, not all good. And perhaps nothing had been all good since the silly accident; the day Steve had killed a man named Dennis Coleman. Coleman, a neighbor, had been raking his leaves by the curb in front of his house, back when Steve had neighbors, a house, a family.
“I barely touched him,” Steve said, shaking his head in beat with the turbulence. He felt a little sick from the motion and the sudden recollection of Dennis and all the shitty things that had fallen like dominos since that day.
But were any thoughts of Dennis sudden?
“All good, Steve?”
“All good. I barely touched him. Slammed on the brakes, nicked him, just touched his knee. But then he … he fell back. Jesus, man, he was smiling when he fell. We both were! Smiling because we both realized how close we were to something much worse. But still, he fell, see? He stumbled back and nicked his head on the tree and … God damn it, man, that was all it took.”
The apartment came to a standstill, though never quite completely still, like being at sea. Rob had turned the turbulence off.
“Take a nap, Steve.”
“All good,” Steve said.
He recalled the one item in the Downey Preparation Pamphlet that he considered the most curious statement of all, the singular directive that interested Steve more than the reasons why the apartment wouldn’t be crushed by pressure or go up in flames:
THERE IS NO LIFE ON JUPITER. IF YOU THINK YOU SEE LIFE ON JUPITER, YOU ARE MISTAKEN!
No, there is no life on Jupiter and there is no life for Dennis Coleman anymore, either. From a simple nick. A nick to the knee.
Then a nick upon a tree.
“Take a nap, Steve?”
Steve looked up to the transparent wall, could see Rob sitting behind a big white desk, surrounded by wires and loops and blinking yellow lights. Rob wore the white jacket and slacks, another of the Downey
/Disney “mood” effects, one that particularly worked, whether you knew it was for show or not.
Steve stood up.
“You’re doing just fine,” Rob said. “And you’re going to be fine. These feelings pass.”
Downey-speak. Disney-talk. Steve had been warned about things like depression, cabin fever, and hallucinations. Would the two month Drop be more intense than the year-long shuttle out?
Steve tried to laugh, but couldn’t quite shake the idea of Dennis Coleman raking leaves, smiling as he fell, as if he was the one taking the Drop.
“Interested in a virtual partner?” Rob asked.
Steve raised a hand to say no, then paused.
“Sure. Send one in?”
“No problem.”
Nope. No problem at all; except Steve was still eight months from the Drop and two more from the bottom of Jupiter and another year home, and here Dennis was already smiling, looking him in the eye through the windshield, saying without saying, that was a close one, ha!
Steve blinked and by the time his eyes were open again there was a brunette, athletic, tan, sitting at the white kitchen table in the simulated apartment. She was smiling warmly, though Steve understood that things like this could never quite be perfected, and an artificial woman will always have a bit of artifice to her smile.
Steve joined her at the table.
Outside the glass walls were digital renderings of sweeping colors, fervent electricity, and easily harnessed storms.
Rob vanished like powder into the winds of a false Jupiter.
“Steve,” the woman said, and the flesh surrounding her lips crinkled in a rubbery way, or maybe it was just because Steve knew she was made of rubber.
“Yes?”
“Are you interested in a nap?”
Steve shook his head no.
“Do you want to lay down anyway?”
Steve looked to the walls, to where Rob just sat; now only orange and black clouds.
“Sure,” Steve said.
Steve blinked and the woman was now wearing cloth shorts and a tank-top. She was standing beside him, looking down into his eyes, smiling.