by Matt Spire
“And what do you believe?”
“Some believed they were headed for Gliese...a very far away planet. The only inhabitable one we know of. But that would take a very long time. It's twenty light years away.”
“Twenty years? But we've been–”
“No, no. That's a measure of distance. Emma says it would take half a million years. So it doesn't seem very likely. But then again–our orbiter is based on many of their concepts, and, though I suppose you could call it a devastating success, we're here, and we're the only ones doing this.”
“Well, what made everyone here so special?”
“Money,” Keene says without hesitation. “That's all.”
“But what about you? Didn't you say you were a literature professor?”
“I told you I was lucky. Emma worked on MAIA with Jericho, and after Realm brought Jericho his money he had a lot of friends with money. Friends that apparently did not make the cut with everyone else. This is all their funding. Get enough billionaires together, you can do just about anything.”
It's taken a moment for it all to sink in, but now the realization hits her: this isn't the remnants of human survival. It's an escape vessel full of cowards.
“I'd worked with Jericho before, and Emma was integral of course. We–Emma and I–happened in that last year. It might seem obvious for us to be here...but Emma belonged on the first ship out. I'll forever be indebted to Jericho for saving the both of us.”
She's confused–why would some nanotechnology engineer collaborate with a literature professor? But it doesn't matter; she’s too betrayed by this new idea of escape.
“So you copied their plans and ran away?”
“I'm sorry...there wasn't much to run away from. By the end of our time secluded on an island off Scotland, we'd lost all ability to communicate with the outside world. We survived the only way we could. The entire operation is built around the hope that others did as well, in their way–better, hopefully.”
She turns back to Earth. “That makes me feel like a coward, but I don't remember.”
“You're far from the guiltiest person on board.”
At this she turns again. “Why? Why was Jericho so upset at those people? All those names?”
“Like I said, money. There was only room for those with money to help fund this orbiter.”
“So?”
“With limited room, and the price of...admission...some on board made...certain choices in regards to their children and families.”
“What?” Unbelievable–her skin pricks with rage. “They let them die?”
“You can rest assured Jericho felt the same way. Anyway, they are the minority. And many here, like me, are lucky and indebted, one way or another. No matter what you think of the rest, remember that.”
“How many?”
“There are seventy-four passengers all together. And Jericho listed, what, twenty?”
“They deserve whatever he–wherever he sent them.”
“Maybe. I'd rather not think of it yet. One consequence at a time.” Keene looks away. “But I'm glad to see you angry.”
“Why? It's a horrible thing.”
“We need more than sadness. We need reasons.”
She can't think of anything to say, hopes the bastards never wake up.
But then she can't help it. “Did you have children?”
Keene looks back, but not at her. At Earth.
“No,” he says, unflinching. “We can't.”
“Oh.” She wants to apologize, but she's still under the adrenaline rush of anger.
“Well, you're not alone,” he says. “It struck a very personal chord with him.”
“Over his loss? That's not the same. That wasn't a choice, losing his wife and child.”
“But you'd never convince him of that.”
“I don't understand. How, if he'd been so permanently affected, had he been able to fall so in love with me? What happened to her?”
“Just as I'd said. She was sick, and he didn't finish his work in time.”
“What was her name?”
He smiles sadly. “If you really must know, it was tragic.”
“I think I need to.”
He sighs, thinking for a moment.
“The only work he'd shared with the University was theoretical. We didn't know his team was performing animal tests on the artificial immune system off-site. But, as it turns out, they had gone smoothly for quite some time. He administered her. It was certainly a risk, but one they were both willing to take. However, the artificial immune system could not discern that there were two unique patient DNA sets–mother and child. I don't quite understand what happened on a technical level, but...it assumed one of them to be a cancer.”
“She died.”
“Yes, from that. In a more horrifying way than any of us would care to know.”
He'd killed her, trying to save her.
“Whatever existential crises he hadn't already faced, he met head on at trial.”
“At trial?”
“He hadn't been cleared for human testing. It was an act of desperation. He was found innocent of murder, in part due to technicalities and mishandlings and in part due to a sympathetic jury. It also helped there was a wealth of video documentation of her enthusiasm for the procedure. But...” Keene trails off.
“But what?”
“As I said, it was tragic.”
She shivers. “Thank you for explaining,” she says, sounding more like she’s apologizing.
Turning, she watches his face, his absent eyes, and regrets becoming so angry.
“Whenever he was down on himself, really down, he'd watch it again...as though to reaffirm his guilt. I told him so many times to destroy it, but even that wouldn't have helped. It was all over the Internet, being as ghastly as people–” He stops, looks up at her, seeming to hold back tears. “Lydia...” He pauses, shakes his head. “I apologize.”
She’s as shapeless as her envisioned Earth below of wind, water, and dust. “No. I need to know. What happened, who I was.”
“You are who you are. Don't let that weigh you down.”
“But that scares me the most–not knowing if I'll ever remember who I am.”
“You'll become what you're meant to become.”
“But–these are different rules. You said so yourself. Death is–dead. And Jericho...”
“Life and love persist. So does death. Rules don't break, no matter how much humans may bend them.”
“I don't feel human anymore.”
Keene studies her in remorse, then pulls a little piece of green out of his pocket. A little leaf.
“Here,” he says, handing it to her.
“What is this?”
“We have a greenhouse on the lower level. They gave it rules on how to grow, but it's a bit...impatient. It's been waiting for you a long time. To decide whether to bring it back home.”
She runs her fingers over the leaf’s veins and looks back at the world below. “What happened to the Vesper girl?”
He sighs. “Vesper White was kidnapped by a fundamentalist cult which refused to believe the only glimmer of light left in the world was a…former pornographic actress.”
“Oh.”
“If her body had been found, perhaps we would know more. In matters of life and death, ideas are more dangerous than disease.”
“I see.” The world below might really be empty.
“I'll leave you,” he says. “You have much to think about.”
She listens to his footsteps.
“Keene?” she calls out, and the steps stop. “I didn't realize...I thought you and Emma had been together forever.”
“We have now.”
She turns, but doesn't know what to say. “I'm sorry,” she says, disappointed.
He smiles. “Life and love persist.” But at this his smile drops, and he nods in a moment of silence before leaving her alone on the bridge.
Do they persist?
Water, wind, and dust.
The muscles in her stomach and jaw begin to clench in anticipation as she makes her way back to Jericho's cabin.
***
Emma meets him in the bridge after a little while.
“MAIA says if we begin our descent in sixteen hours, we'll have the best chance of settling near our target.”
“I don't want to talk about that just yet,” he tells her, taking her hand. “I have something to show you.”
They retire to their unused sleeping cabin amongst the others. In his room, he instructs her to lay down.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“MAIA,” he tells the screen, settling beside her, “I believe we're ready for Echo Park.”
“What?” she says, turning, but there's that cutoff feeling of an involuntary yawn.
Then the sensation of moving air. Crisp, alive.
Elysian Park Drive, that familiar stretch of gravel and dust overlooking the steep Echo Park. Timeless and verdant, not so much sunken as hidden in broad daylight, an ancient sanctuary of foliage whose crater still chokes any encroaching neon.
“You hate Realm,” Emma says, her eyes still closed.
Really, just on the other side is Dodger Stadium, and they're only a couple blocks from the bustling traffic of Sunset Boulevard. All meticulously replicated in its peacefully industrious hum.
But this spot is their own. Something about the topsy-turvy Los Angeles topography had formed a barrier, leaving the rows of duplexes in tranquility.
“Everything has its place,” Keene says.
Hand-in-hand, they watch the gentle breeze rustle the palms.
It's sundown. In the distance, a pair of joggers unsettle little clouds of dust underfoot, while a terrier sprints in wide circles around a young lady.
“Strange,” Emma says. “All this time has felt so brief...a few days. Yet, it does seem like eternity since we've been here.”
She means the real Echo Park, of course, where they'd had a little loft on Lucretia Avenue.
An eternity, but it was also such a brief pass through the corridors of time.
“I was hoping to make up for a missed anniversary,” he says, and she places her head on his shoulder.
A few days awake in space without the shape of her hand or the scent of her hair.
“I would have been fine with the soy egg protein. Thank you.”
He gently turns her face to look at his.
“I'm not scared with you,” she whispers, losing her stoicism. “Not of death. Not of our uncertain immortality.”
They kiss, embracing against the smells and chill and hush of nightfall.
“To know you is to transform love into eternity's grave, to lose you is to remove its headstone and lay within.”
Emma considers this in silence, then smiles. “Who are you quoting?”
“Just some old, retired hack.”
“Come on,” she says, squeezing his hand. In her eyes twinkle not the solid edges of overhead LED’s or the wash of anemic screens, but the diffused glow of the moon. Everything has it's place. “Let's do this.”
***
She watches the details at first, observing the strange motions of her body, every forgotten word from her mouth. Then, unable to accept the mystery of this stranger with her skin and mannerisms, skips from scene to scene, rushing through endless snippets of candlelit dinners, afternoons on the beach, days lounging in the sunbathed flat.
She remembers nothing of this past life.
Then Jericho has the camera, focused straight on her abdomen.
“This is week number eight,” he says. “Day fifty-something.”
She listens to herself laugh. “Oh no,” she says, “Am I going to go through this every day?”
“Only a little over two-hundred more times. We'll figure it out, exactly.”
It can't be.
The camera pans to her face. That look of playful scorn, unable to hide her smile. She knows it well.
“I'm sure Autumn will appreciate the documentary,” she says.
At this she skips again. It’s not possible. There has to be something, jumping scene to scene, that will explain it all away.
The seasons morph as shirts become sweaters at night, but there's a more subtle change.
Less laughter. Less outdoors.
By the time her belly has grown to what must be the second trimester, half of the videos are in bed.
She still smiles. Sometimes it’s genuine.
Most of her smiles now are the sort she's used to giving her father, brandished for courage.
“No,” she says aloud, her double on the screen stroking her bloated belly. “It can't be. It can't.”
Her heart pounds until blood rushes through every vein, pushing at the tips of her fingers, roaring like a hot river in her ears.
And there it is. It's a different camera this time–something about the colors and quality is not right. It’s a lab camera. And the room–it’s empty. No warm, buttery bedroom with green drapes and oil paintings. No encouraging smile.
She's laying on a table. Jericho strokes her hair, tense, trying to soothe.
Her double looks away, and Jericho chokes up, stifling what might be tears with an arm across his face.
“Yes,” he tells her. “Just a prick and it’ll all be better.”
Syringe.
“Nothing to fear.”
It enters her arm, slowly and more gently than any shot she can ever remember.
“One night here,” he says.
“And home in time for breakfast,” she finishes for him.
The Lydia on the screen lies still, but here and now she's itching, waves rolling in her stomach.
Jericho's talking, but she can't pay attention, holds herself and looks away from the screen.
His voice goes on and on, alternating between a drone and reassuring pets of comfort.
In this dark, cramped little room it's just her, Jericho's motionless body, and his disembodied voice.
She sobs, biting her lip until it beats harder than her heart.
Jericho's voice changes. Wavering. Still trying to soothe but louder, alarmed.
She looks up at the screen with eyes behind fanned fingers.
“Stop!” she yells, but she can't enunciate it right, it comes out mangled in her sobs. “Stop!”
It doesn't.
She watches herself writhe, Jericho screaming and knocking the counters clean, falling to his knees as she collapses from the table.
Lydia on the screen seizes, eyes only corneas, all white and open impossibly wide as they roll to the back of her skull. She gurgles up salival foam as blood pours from her nose and ears. Jericho grabs her, her arms flailing and bending at impossible angles. Her skin sticks to his coat, his face, the floor. It pulls off in loose clumps. Her torso falls apart in a shower of pulsing segments into Jericho's arms.
What’s left of her settles into collapsing pools.
She dissolves.
***
It was only their bedroom he'd crafted differently from the template, down to the wispy curtains revealing their overgrown flower garden. Matching everything from memory.
But it's not perfect. No replication of the real world in Realm ever is.
Anytime they make love and drift asleep in Realm, Keene dreams.
Elysian Park again, more vivid and imperfect and real in his dream than any Realm template.
He knows this moment as soon as the brisk frost settles on his face. It's an early December day, the first morning they spent walking about the world beyond their flat together.
Emma is in his arms, their hands clasped in her peacoat, watching a Japanese family make their rounds. To the other side, tourists with folded paper directions, two adventurous children running far ahead of the rest.
“Keene,” Emma says, watching the children, and her fingers grow clammy. She doesn't say another word.
She was so soft back then, so desperate to believe the things h
e'd promised, but she had these moments of freezing up and swallowing some invisible, poisonous thought.
Back then, he'd worried Emma doubted their legitimacy, felt forced to share her life with him. Children playing dress up in a world falling apart, with nothing else to do with their shrinking freedom.
He couldn't think of anything to say at the time, had fallen too silent for the rest of the walk, but time skips ahead in his dream.
Now they're in bed an hour later in this dream, slipping into a generic template of a bedroom that isn't their own.
They make love, and Emma begins to cry.
“It isn't the same,” he says.
“You don't know what the same is,” she tells him.
He wakes up here, as he often does from this dream-within-a-dream, wishing it were really that moment, and he could say something less apologetic, less neutered.
Emma is beside him, but she's not crying. She's asleep.
Gradually, she'd adjusted to the fact that they could only make love in Realm, that they could never have children. What else was there to do?
Always at the end of this dream, lying awake, he hears Jericho's voice from a different time and place. One of their meetings in Aurore.
They were almost finished, and Emma must have been reflecting on being left behind by Blackthorne Aeronautics.
“Why us?” Emma had asked. “I know little, if anything, that you don't know.”
“I need more than people with money,” he said, and for once he seemed to care about what he was selling. “I need people to provide for the future.”
They all wallowed in his ambiguity for a long while. Maybe, with all of these impassioned contradictions, Jericho never had a plan.
“You know,” Emma said firmly. “You know we can't have children. There's no reason for us to go.”
“Yes, I do. I know,” Jericho said, in yet another mystery left unsolved.
***
She's dead. Dead. Dead.
The woman in Jericho's home movies, the woman of so many stories, the woman with her face and voice.
She's dead.