by Matt Spire
But the truth has ruined her: she also knows this is all fake and inconsequential.
He isn't real.
Still, whenever her life in Realm began, whether any of her memories happened in or out of Realm, it doesn't matter. For now, outside of the sterile hospital and shuffle of doctors, she has an opportunity to make her strange peace.
Until then, it will stay too real inside of her.
“Come on,” she informs him, “We're going out.”
Though he's healthier now, he still protests, but she's firm.
They stroll along the beach, stopping for breakfast at one of the crummy diner-themed restaurants he likes, her father grumbling the whole way.
“No,” she interrupts as he tries to save money and order scrapple, “he'll have his lobster benedict” she tells the waitress.
“What's gotten into you?” he asks, but she ignores him.
“When I was little, you'd bring me all the way into town on the summer weekends just for cotton candy, do you remember that?”
“Of course,” he says, smiling. “You didn't even like it,” then he laughs, “It was just the colors you liked, but you'd be so happy to get it each time.”
“Then eat your lobster.”
“You couldn't pronounce it when you were little. You called it cloud candy.”
Nothing makes sense anymore, but this mutual moment of happy nostalgia makes her smile.
Watching a little girl toss bits of her waffle to a seagull, Lydia sees her plan crystallize.
Find Jericho. Get everyone real out. And let the rest have their peace.
It's a chilling resolve–a whole world, in her hands. Oblivious, automated, scripted.
Afterward, she insists on wheeling him throughout the town, recounting more bygone memories, and finally she lets him rest.
What happens when she exits Caligatha? How can he be unaware of her disappearance?
But she can't think about that now.
She leaves Eden's Vineyard and, standing outside Jericho's apartment, wonders what to say.
The strange sense that they'd always known each other–won't it still be there?
She knocks and waits for minutes, and finally she hears him leaning against the door, checking the peep hole.
There's a pause, and he opens.
He doesn't look well, only half of himself, like his face is a mask or some parasite is feeding off him.
He stares expectantly.
“Hello,” she starts, and he continues to stare, blinking.
When he doesn't respond, she repeats the plan in her head. No backing down.
“I'm Lydia,” she tells him. “Do you remember me?”
“No,” he says but doesn’t move, then, “Maybe.”
“We've met before.”
“You look familiar,” he admits.
It's like we've always done this.
“Good,” she says. “Do you know where?”
He studies her.
What to feel? She wants to shake him, scream why? a thousand times.
“I don't know,” he says, uneasy.
“Yes. You do,” she insists.
“What is this?” He slips his hand back onto the doorknob.
“Think, Jericho,” and at the mention of his name he starts to close the door.
She throws her palm against it, leans in and waits for his eyes to meet her own.
“Jericho. I'm Lydia. You run Blue Coral and you do drugs because you're miserable and blame yourself for the loss of a woman you loved. She was sick and you thought you could save her.”
His face falls, expressionless.
She puts her weight on the door, stepping one foot in, but something in him breaks and he pushes her back, slamming the door in terror.
Lydia leans against the painted brick, that familiar headache returning. Bright, white, and making her body drift.
She focuses on her breathing, trying to stay calm against the fear of disappearing again until it's passed.
***
Emma is quiet.
He can tell she's wavering on the precipice of admitting a rare defeat.
Finally she says, “I'll turn MAIA on. Go down to the greenhouse and grab me a leaf.”
He's puzzled about the leaf, but just says in sympathy, “She can't do anything you can't do.”
She gives him a vacant smile. “It's no time for pride.”
Descending to the lower level, he hears Emma activate MAIA from the bridge. Really, MAIA still makes most decisions while in sleep mode, but doesn't take directions unless awake.
MAIA–acronymically named according to its functions of systems monitoring, autopilot, and information analysis–was not particularly intelligent, at least as far as artificial intelligence goes. But that wasn't the point. Emma had developed MAIA for long flights with crews in stasis to make important flight or ecosystem control decisions. Emma hadn't played God, but as she ascribed to Jericho, she had dabbled in her own irrelevance. After everything went to hell down below, it was MAIA and not Emma–much less himself, of course–that was onboard the evacuation ship with the world's dignitaries, headed towards a confidential destiny. Most likely the Gliese System, Emma had said. It'd take a near eternity to reach, so of course they'd probably be using Realm in tandem with MAIA. The two were interdependent anyway–MAIA operated on a small percent of Realm's massive allocated resources.
Keene opens the first pressurized door, air blowing through him, decontaminating him. Then the second door depressurizes.
He pulls the handle and jumps back as overgrown foliage bursts into the vestibule, so dense he can't even see the red LED lights overhead.
It hadn't been this way–the assortment of plants had been tidy and organized in their long bins of strange soil, evenly spaced leaves and stalks, roots in little marble-like orbs. He'd only stepped into the room once before they took off for orbit, but he remembers the labels: wheat, rice, bamboo. Algae in tanks. Now it's a veritable jungle.
What the hell happened?
He snaps a leaf, mystified.
As he's about to close the doors, a quiet chittering sounds at his feet.
It's Methuselah. For whatever reason, Jericho insisted he come along. His habitat in the greenhouse must've been destroyed by the overgrown foliage.
Keene picks him up, rubs his tiny scruff.
“You're not that old, are you, friend? What's happened here?”
Methuselah sits up and twists his whiskers.
***
It's evening before Lydia decides to get out of Caligatha.
After her confrontation with Jericho she's realized the futility of her situation. No one will listen. No one will remember.
Against all her visceral judgment, she refuses to return home–she can't. She can't just accept that life continues, indifferent to her disappearance, that the hole she leaves behind is just a continuity problem. But she can't stay, either, plugging that hole and driving herself mad.
There is no unknowing.
A blood-red sun behind her on the beach of Caligatha, Lydia starts up the steps to Blue Coral.
Inside, a young woman sits at the front desk.
“Can I help you?” she asks. Her name tag says Maggie.
“Yes,” Lydia says. “I need a room. First floor.”
Maggie squints at the monitor in front of her. “I'm afraid I only have second and third available.”
Lydia looks down the hallway. She'll have to pass the front desk to reach that strange room. And she'll need a staff member's key. There's no way she can pull it off without a room on the first floor.
“Are you sure?” she asks, thinking as she speaks. “Jericho told me it would be no problem. I have a guest in a wheelchair. The stairs won't work for us.”
Maggie bites her lip.
“Could you call him, please?”
She takes the bait, picking up the phone.
“Do you have a restroom?” Lydia interjects.
Maggie points down the ha
ll, and Lydia slips behind her, looking back. Maggie's engrossed on the phone, trying to find Jericho's number.
She runs down the hall, turning left at its end, then retracing her steps and turning right. There's a housekeeping cart, but no key.
This is it.
She returns to the front as Maggie is hanging up the phone, taking note of the room, 114.
“I'm sorry,” Maggie tells her before she's returned to the end of the hall, rising again from her chair, “but I'm afraid Jericho can't be reached right now.”
There they are. Her keys are on a band on the desk.
“Could you try again?” Lydia asks. “Tell him Miss Sortanova.”
Maggie hesitates, but picks up the phone again, and Lydia runs back down the hall, tries the door. Locked.
No. There's no way around it.
The muscles in her stomach tighten. She heads back to the desk, grabs the band, and begins to run, but Maggie's grabbed the band behind her, yelling some warble of surprise.
Lydia stumbles, turning around and almost losing her balance.
Maggie's face is incredulous. “Hey!” she yells, and before she realizes what she's doing Lydia's hands are on her collar, pushing her back against the desk, but Maggie rights herself immediately, face still bewildered and half-crazed.
They're both frozen in place, both confused by her actions. Was this really the only way to go about it?
This is it.
Lydia again only sees her fist hitting the side of Maggie's face, spit ejecting from mouth. This time she lets go of the band.
Without looking back, Lydia runs down the hall, sweaty fingers fumbling to face the card’s magnetic strip out before she reaches the door.
The word hopeless screams through her head as her feet pound on the carpet.
“Please,” she begs, swiping the card. The lock grumbles, and she throws it open, stealing a look down the empty hallway as she blindly enters the room.
20
Decision
Emma folds the leaf in her hand, lost in thought, something reverent overcoming her.
“Thank you,” she whispers, staring at Methuselah.
He tells her about the overgrown foliage, and she nods.
“What do you need that for?” he asks, but she walks in silence to the lab.
He sits in the bridge, at the nearest printer, as a simple box and dish are assembled for Methuselah, soon overhearing Emma talk to MAIA.
An engineer, a literature professor. No doctors, no pilot.
There's no control, he thinks. We're at the mercy of Realm and MAIA, drifting in infinite space in a very expensive tin can.
Emma returns in a moment with the leaf, her eyes weary. She waits until Methuselah's new home is printed, and the mouse tucked inside.
“It's been a long time,” she says.
“What do you mean?” he asks.
She pulls up a chair, sits closer to him than she has since they woke up.
Rubbing the leaf between her fingers, she begins to cry.
“There's molecular sensors in the plants,” she whispers. “In case we need them to, they can sprout and flower on cue, or we can track a bad generation.”
“So?”
“So every other log tracks some sort of system activity, and is maxed out or reporting the fortieth year. This is independent.”
“I don't understand.”
“Each generation is tracked. This is a,” but she begins crying again, stops. “This is a thirty-second generation bamboo leaf.”
It can't mean what it sounds like. That's not possible.
“We've been asleep thirty-two years?”
She shakes her head. “Longer. Each generation is a little over a year. The logs are probably accurate.”
“That can't be,” he insists. “We only planned for five years. How are we still–how is the mouse...?”
“It all works,” she sobs. “It all works perfectly. Physiologically, no one onboard has aged a day. Even the mouse.”
He tries to say something, but can't. It can't be. Something is wrong.
“It all works perfectly. Just perfect. We're gods.”
***
Lydia grips her sheets, wide eyes taking in the dimly lit metal of her cabin, curling into a tight ball.
She closes her eyes.
What has she done? She's saved no one.
Exhaling, she sits up, tells her heart to settle.
The black screen stares back. No stars.
“God damn it,” she tells the wall.
There's no time for that she hears her invisible conscience say, and she wishes it would show itself, tell her exactly what she's supposed to do.
She walks to the bridge.
Keene is holding Emma while she stares into space.
“Hello, Lydia,” he says, not at all acknowledging her with his usual gentle severity.
“No luck,” she tells him, but they don't respond until she brings up a seat.
“Okay,” Emma says, sitting up and wiping her face. “Okay.”
Keene is quiet. Something is happening.
“Okay, this is it,” Emma tells everyone. “We give ourselves a day. Twenty-four hours. We decide whether to stay here or go home.”
Lydia tries to consider this, but it doesn't feel like a choice.
“I don't have a home,” she says.
“What happened in Caligatha?” Keene asks, but he doesn't look interested.
“I don't know.” That's the truth. “I...went back in time.”
“I don't understand,” Emma interrupts, and Lydia isn't sure but it sounds more like a protest, almost like she's angry.
“When I arrived...I found Jericho, and he died. I'm guessing an overdose, but...” She wraps her arms around herself, feeling cold. “And then–”
“An overdose?” Emma sneers. “An overdose? In Realm? Jericho had an overdose in Realm.”
“He'd told me before about his problems. But...then we seemed to go back in time. Everyone, everything. But he seemed to have an overdose that day, too. At least that's what someone told me.”
Emma stands, quiet but appearing to withhold an eruption, and begins walking out of the bridge.
Lydia looks to Keene, but he lowers his eyes, and they begin following Emma to the sleeping quarters.
She places her thumb on the corner of Jericho's window, next to the little name Amara, and the door makes a quiet huffing sound.
“You bastard,” Emma says, opening the door.
And there he is, just as she remembered him, chest rising and falling in deep sleep. She tries to take it in, this new reality of Jericho, but Emma's leaning over him, touches his screen.
She stands cramped in the doorway. The room is so small.
“MAIA,” Emma says after the screen over Jericho's body fades in, “Do you have a record of physical activity in this room?”
Lydia wonders who Emma's talking to. Her voice is no longer detached and observational.
A woman’s voice, “Security surveillance, Emma. Jericho has set his logs marked private.” It seems to come from everywhere at once in the room.
“Give me the last feed.”
The entire screen fills, at first an almost black gray, then becomes a mirror image of the room, except their bodies are missing.
In the screen Jericho's body sits up, dazed, and Lydia realizes it's a video. He sits still, broken by random bouts of shaking and rubbing his arms as though cold, and the silence in the room is crushing.
“Speed up,” Emma says, and Jericho begins rocking back and forth so fast it makes her feel panicked. He stands and circles the tiny room. He must be walking very slowly because it looks normal now, then he stops.
“Slow back down.”
Jericho stares back at them, his eyes dead. Lydia almost can't take it anymore, but he speaks.
“We can't,” he says, seeming to study them, then falls silent for a while.
“What did you do, you fuck?” Emma says under her breath, and
as though to answer her Jericho speaks again.
“MAIA, create a new partition in Realm.”
He sits, looking away from them.
Lydia consults his sleeping body over Emma's shoulder and shivers.
“My last back-up–copy that to a synthetic, but remove every reference to Lydia Sortanova. Don't let him remember anything. Respawn him at day one.”
He looks at the screen again. “Yes. Good.”
He rubs his temples and forehead in silence as he considers his next action.
“Pull up our passengers. Everyone.”
His eyes burn back at them, studying them again carefully, looking through them. Then he begins listing names.
“Gregory Mentz. Rowan Scanlia. Timothy Regis. Wallace Friedman.”
His voice is so hard and commanding, in stark contrast to his beaten, almost transparent presence, like a man burned by the same divine fire he's brought down from the mountaintop.
“Samantha and Max Benning. Garret Huck.”
He goes on and on for minutes, a deliberate pause between each name, but steady and determined.
Finally he stops, thinking, almost defeated, then says, “Wait. Remove the women,” even though he's said only a few women's names as far as Lydia can tell.
He stops longer now, breathing deep and long.
What is he thinking? Lydia wonders. She wants to ask Keene and Emma, but even Emma's stone cold glare has fallen, her mouth agape.
“When the partition is ready, queue them up,” he says. He's doing something huge–catastrophic–but what? “Queue them up. Then disconnect all outgoing transmission in two hours. Disconnect all of Realm.”
He stands, walks away from them, through the mirrored door, but then the video jumps forward and he's walking back in.
Studying the screen, staring through them again, he says, “Prepare to transfer that new partition to a freeform edit mode. Lock everyone. Queue me–no, queue me and–” He chokes on his words and brings up a glass, taking a long gulp of something amber. He must have left the room for the drink. “Queue me and erase all the physical wetware, do you fucking understand?”
Fiery wrath again.
That everywhere voice that responded to Emma speaks again, but this time, in the video, it's thinner and hard to hear, coming from the screen.