by Matt Spire
“It's been a while. And you're used to food.”
She watches him, unsure, but he seems to be watching her too, as though she were a wild animal and he were afraid she might do anything.
“What kind of food do you like?” he asks, opening a compartment in the wall to remove a cup.
She watches him fill it with water from another compartment and place it beside her, then realizes her face is hot and wet.
“I'm sorry,” she says, choking and looking away. When she looks back, there's nothing but hurt on his face. Is he genuinely bothered by her sadness?
Neither of them speak. She reaches with a trembling hand for the glass, sips until her throat feels a little less sore.
Breathing deeply, she tries to swallow all her vulnerability with the rest of the water, but can't finish it.
“I promise I won't make a mess this time,” she says.
He makes a little choking, laughing sound, seeming to hold back his own well of sadness, surprised by her words. He stands and walks away from the table.
“Really,” he says, “there's anything you could want here. Provided you don't want anything too fancy.”
Staring at the soft white finish of the table, she swallows the rest of the water. She wants to force herself to say something, think of some food, but she can't.
He turns, the smile gone, and it only makes her want to shrink away again. More than anything else she just wants the terrible loneliness to go away.
“Here,” he says, resting another glass and spoon on the table. “Your stomach needs to work its way up to solid food.”
There's a thick, shimmering puree of minerals in the glass.
“It's mostly just sugar,” he assures her.
She nods.
“Other than tired and hungry,” he asks, “how are you holding up?”
“So what are you?” she says, ignoring him. “A scientist?”
“No. Not at all. My wife is. Emma. You can meet her whenever you're ready.”
She doesn't say anything. There is no ready.
“I was a professor of literature, but now I guess you could just say I'm the luckiest man alive.”
“I'm sorry I don't remember.”
He sits next to her. “Don't be silly.” He takes his time, still careful with his words. “I know anything I say will sound demeaning or cruel, given the situation. But I mean it when I say...If there's anything I can do to make this more bearable, I will.”
She considers this. “You said the people I know–lots of them are here.”
“Yes,” he says. “Many of them.”
“I want to see them.”
“You will. We're working on that.”
“Something is wrong,” she says, thinking aloud. “I don't remember anything before...Caligatha. I don't remember you. You said–you said you don't know why I woke up?”
He explains everything to her again, how there was a big accident a while ago, how they fled, how they don't know how many survived, how they send out an SOS signal for everyone below, how he and Emma sleep for eight month periods, how the system wakes them every eight months or if it thinks the SOS got a response, how they seem to have gotten a response now.
But this time he tells her new things. How only he and Emma and Jericho are supposed to wake up, how they're supposed to wake everyone else if they can confirm the response. How something happened and they're not sure how much time has passed. How they've lost their control over Realm, can't wake everyone else up. But they're working on it.
“You're taking this very well,” he says, almost sounding proud.
“What choice is there?”
“Can I call you Lydia?” he asks gently.
She's confused by this, almost expects another wild story and to get another name, but realizes she has a last name too. He's just being polite.
“Of course.”
“Lydia, I'm...I'm astonished. Your intellect, your strength. We'll get through this.”
Intellect? She feels so worthless and overwhelmed. She studies his face, still too tired for any of this.
Picking up the spoon, she digs up a pea-sized bit of the paste, puts it in her mouth.
Blueberry. Like every other artificial blueberry flavor she's tasted for twenty-one years. Her stomach aches at the taste of sugar.
“Go slow,” he cautions her.
“My father,” she says, afraid she'll start tearing up again. “Is he here?”
Keene places his hands on the table. “No, Lydia. I'm sorry.”
She waits for the tears, but they don't come. “I was supposed to take him to the theater,” she says, listening to her flat voice and strange words. “But he died.”
“My God,” he says. “He passed a long time ago. Long before the accident.”
She listens to his words repeat in her mind, watching the paste melt on the spoon.
A long time ago. A long time ago.
“Jericho.” The name has become a mystery. “He made Caligatha of things...” She trails off.
“He wanted you to have what you enjoyed,” Keene tells her, looking away. “What made you you.”
“I need to see him. We need to fix this.”
“We're trying,” he says, still not looking at her.
“I need to. That's what I want. I have questions.”
He looks at her again, but not in the face. Just like the people at the hospital, or when she walked delirious into the theater.
“That's what will make this more bearable.”
“Lydia, in Realm...What's your...relationship with Jericho?”
She wishes he would really look at her. “You're afraid, too,” she says. “Afraid we all forgot the world outside Caligatha.”
“Truth is, Lydia, we don't know what to think yet.”
“He was an engineer,” she says. “He wouldn't talk about it, ever. It made him sad. He said he neglected her when she needed him, when she was sick. He was mad at his work. He–”
“Slow down,” he coaxes, but it makes her angry.
“No, he remembers,” she insists. “Maybe not all of it, maybe not all of–this, the accident, but–but–”
“We're hoping,” he tells her.
She stares into space again, catching up to her words. Jericho not remembering parts of his past didn't sound too different from her own apparently damaged memory. Had it all just become a big jumble of things that had really happened to them, set in a place that didn't exist?
“I'm so confused,” she says.
“I know,” he tells her. “I know.”
She forces herself to continue eating, and for a while he seems lost in thought.
“Yes, Jericho is an engineer,” he finally says. “A very brilliant one. His breakthroughs in nanotechnology changed a lot of things. First, health. He was a big contributor to the artificial immune systems we have today, though they've evolved a lot since then. Now you don't even need that food you're eating, really, and aging is mostly optional.”
Lydia stares at the spoon.
“But he stopped working in the middle of all that. His–well, the short story is...he'd fallen in love with an undergraduate at the University, deeply so. They were expecting a child. But she became sick, and he lost both of them.”
Keene stands, retrieves himself a glass of water. She can tell he's scripting his speech.
“He blamed himself for not being able to save them. That is true. He wasn't the same after.”
Lydia stops eating.
“But eventually he rose from that depression. Finished his work on the immune system. Developed Realm. He became one of the most successful pioneers alive.”
“That's not the Jericho I know,” she says. “None of this makes sense.”
“No,” Keene tells her. “None of that ever mattered to him. The money, or being the Edison, Ford, Gates of his day; whatever the fame–he avoided all of it. He was determined, but not prideful. All that mattered to him was you.”
She focuses abs
ently on the taste in her mouth. It's impossible to believe any of this.
“I can't say I ever agreed with Realm, or like the idea of biding time in a fantasy, but he has saved all of us. And–at the end of it all, you may well be the only reason he had to keep going.”
She doesn't understand where she fits into anything, but she's beginning to feel exhausted.
“I need to rest,” she says. “I can't do this.”
“You have all the time in the world.”
***
Sitting there on the ledge, the remaining half of her glass has melted into blue water.
Infinite space behind a blueberry slushy. This is what absurdity everything has come down to.
She rolls onto her back again, thinking about Jericho.
Was he looking for her? Had she vanished from Caligatha like a shadow? He must be worried sick.
She wishes she'd forced him to talk more so she'd have more clues. The Jericho she knows–how could he have made all this?
Sitting up, she wonders if she'll ever see him again, then she wonders if she'll see anyone. What if she's one of only three people left alive?
No, it can’t be. She would rather live in Caligatha. Convince herself it’s real. She’s already forgotten everything once. Surely she can do it again.
Staring at the window, she longs for the ticking clock but hears cavernous silence. So this is the end of time.
She gulps down the melted blueberry stuff, looks in the mirror.
This powerlessness, this frozen time, this non-existence–she won't have any of it.
Leaving her room again, she examines the doors. They're locked. Etched in small print in the corner of each window is a last name.
Sortanova.
And directly across from her's is Jericho's–Amara.
None of the others are familiar, but had she known many last names? Her failure to develop closer relations haunts her still.
She imagines each person she knows as she passes, living their separate life, clueless. Florence opening the Sandy Sparrow, Reuben locked out of Eden's Vineyard–what's going on there?
It doesn't matter anymore. She needs to get everyone out.
Navigating to the main hall, she looks around, follows voices up a stairwell.
Keene is sitting on a bed coming out of the wall, just like her's, but it's a much larger room encircled by unfamiliar black objects with dull lights and a window almost the whole width of the room. He's leaning forward, listening to a woman speak, her face obscured by several hanging tablets. It must be Emma.
“Lydia,” Keene says, startled.
Emma slowly moves the glowing objects away from her face, and Lydia is struck by how young and powerless she abruptly feels.
Keene and Emma must be nearing their fifties, but she hadn't noticed it until now. Keene was so soft-spoken and gentle, it gave his ethnically ambiguous features a sense of youth despite the few lines under his eyes and few gray streaks in his hair. Emma and her square but delicate face, glasses, all drenched in monitor glow, makes Lydia feel like a child again.
“How are you feeling?” he asks her.
“I'm ready,” she says.
Emma moves everything entirely from her face at this. “I hope you're not planning on getting fresh air.”
“Ready for what?” Keene asks.
***
“Are you sure you understand, Lydia?” Keene asks again. “This–this could be bad.”
“Yes.” On her back, she looks again out the window into the darkness. “But...what happens when I come back?”
“What do you mean?” Emma asks.
“How do I...disappear–from Caligatha?” She stumbles for the right words. “How–what happens to everyone I leave behind?”
“It's a simulation,” Emma tells her.
She wonders at this. “No,” she begins, but can't find the rest.
“Inconsistencies are programmed to be ignored. No one–unless they're here on board–will notice that you're missing. In other words, unless, like you, they have a room and bed on board, they do not exist until you interact with them.”
“Okay,” she says, though she doesn't entirely understand. And it doesn't answer her unasked question. What is it she's really looking for?–still the validation that everything she's cared about, a fake universe, needs her?
“There's no pulling you out of this yet,” Emma says. “There should be at least one ejection spot, probably very accessible to Jericho. I have every reason to believe they still work, but we didn't anticipate any of this. It's impossible to know where they are until we reestablish a connection. Do you understand?”
“I'll take him there. I'll come back with him.”
“He knows where they are. He designed it that way. There is likely one wherever he's living,” Emma tells her.
“Okay.”
“If you don't find it,” Emma begins, and looks to Keene.
Keene changes tone, slows down. “Lydia...there is a chance–”
“I'm doing this,” she insists.
Keene walks to the doorway, looks back at her and Emma. “If you don't come back, we'll get you out.”
“I'm going to reiterate one last time,” Emma says, looking her square in the face with furrowed brows now, “Caligatha is possibly an unstable Realm. We track vitals, and we've routinely had brainwaves coming in scrambled every six months. We've lost our incoming connection.” She turns to Keene. “I don't know what either of these facts mean, or whether they're related, only that they're highly abnormal. We'll do what we can to get you out.”
“Fine.”
“You are entering right at the beginning of another cycle of disruption. That six month period is due. I don't know what to tell you to expect. Possibly nothing.”
“Let's just do this.”
“In fact, it may be any moment. One last time, I’ll urge waiting a day or two until–”
“No. Enough. Just wire me up.”
“It doesn't work that way, dear,” Emma says, walking to the foot of Lydia's bed. “Everything you need is inside already.”
Lydia wants to ask what this means, but says, “Okay.”
Emma touches the corner of her window, and little white lines fade into place.
“It's not a window?” she asks, betrayed again by an artificial device posing as the natural world.
Emma fleetingly smirks and says nothing, tapping through menus. Lydia watches, surprised by how accessible, how nontechnical the minimalist screen is.
“Whenever you're ready–your afferent nerve pathways will be blocked. There might be a half second of disorientation, since you're not used to this. But then you'll be in.”
Lydia lies back, staring at the ceiling now. “Okay.” Somehow, the inability to glimpse dead space, no matter how cold it might be, has begun to chip at her resolve.
The hesitation in the room is claustrophobic. She digs her fingers into the bedsheets.
“Whatever you must do, I implore you to be quick,” Emma says.
Keene starts to say something very serious sounding, but she can't turn her head, goes limp.
18
Return
Lydia wakes to a faint ticking sound, dizzy.
Her hands feel around, fingers knotting the familiar sheets of her bed. She's wearing a green sundress.
Sitting up, she takes in the room, the aging wooden floors, every piece of furniture.
She twists up her leg. The scar from the whelk's shell forms a line across the heel of her foot.
She stands and touches the curtains. The mirror. Her mother's pendant stares back.
“Okay,” she says aloud. “Okay.”
She knew she didn't have a plan. She tried to ignore it and jump in with anxious instinct, but now she’s paralyzed.
Find Jericho–then what? She can't even sort out how she feels. Why should she even want to leave Caligatha again? But the illusion is ruined.
She checks her father's empty room, closing her eyes and lis
tening to the silence broken only by the clock.
Tick, tick, tick.
Seven in the evening. Jericho should be home.
Descending the stairs, an overwhelming stench of wines makes her cover her mouth. The floor is sticky under her sandals, and an entire aisle is toppled over.
She runs into the kitchen. Paper towels and shards of glass are stuffed to the brim of the trash.
Confused, she calls out Reuben's name, but then tells herself it doesn't matter. No one answers.
Walking the two blocks to Jericho's house, she avoids eye contact with passersby. Are some of them fake?
So many dreaded questions.
Her heart pounds as she knocks on Jericho’s door, looking back at the world, but it does nothing to assuage her dread. No, everything–everything scares her now. Everything in her own room, the sunshine, the people–everything is so real.
She knocks again, and hears something fall inside.
“Jericho?” she calls into the door.
Something unintelligible in Jericho's voice cries out.
She knocks harder, calls his name again, and again a slurred mutter.
“It's Lydia,” she yells louder. “Open up.”
Something scrapes against the door, and her heart races even faster.
“Jericho,” she says, cringing.
The bolt turns, and she grabs the knob, throwing the door open. His body slumps against the wall.
“Jericho!” she screams, grabbing him, but he falls back, head hitting the painted brick.
He looks up, eyes closed, dully pronounces the consonants of her name. She shakes him, saying his name again.
His eyes open, lizard’s eyes, all bright blue without pupils and gazing into another dimension.
“Come on,” she says, hoisting him up and heading to the bed, his legs moving out of rhythm.
“I'm sorry,” he mumbles.
He collapses in a pile of limbs, and she shakes him, rolling him over.
“What happened?” she cries.
“Love,” he slurs.
“What?” she screams, looking around the apartment, realizing she didn't think to grab any belongings before leaving the shop–where would they even be?–where the fuck is her phone?