by Matt Spire
The woman with her history, her sick father.
Dead.
Her body shakes so hard she's sure she'll collapse into a pile of broken limbs.
Dead.
Through the hall, to the bridge. No one.
She runs back to the cabins, trying all the doors without thinking.
What does she even want to find? Herself?
As though she'll find the fake Lydia in these movies, still alive. Not dead, not melted into a puddle. No, not dead. No one's dead, not on Earth, not her, not her father. No one.
All one big fucking joke.
She begins touching her quivering thumb to the windows, one by one, swinging the doors open.
So many bodies, sleeping, lost in time, lost in space.
She wants to shake them all, demand everything be given back.
She stops halfway down the hall, looking back at the mess of flung open doors.
Transfer all my administration privileges to Lydia Sortanova.
Jericho.
She has to find Jericho. Not the fake, simulated Jericho. Not the breathing shell in his bed. The real one.
The one quarantined with all the others he'd damned.
The only life she remembers is some falsified feedback loop. In his miserable idea of heaven.
For answers, she has to go to hell.
No ejection points.
She makes her way to her own cabin, sits on the bed, resenting the reflection of her own face in the black screen.
21
The Descent
Emma and Keene emerge from their cabin to discover half of the hallway's doors open and Lydia asleep on her bed.
“She's going to lose it,” Emma says. “It's inevitable.”
They return to the bridge, and Keene watches her discuss the logistics of a landing with MAIA.
Since the orbital isn't designed for navigation, their best opportunity for landing near their target is only ten hours away.
“Well?” Emma says.
“What about Lydia?”
***
She feels her body, her clothes.
Green sundress. It fills her with rage, this feeling of being dressed by someone else.
A long hallway lies before her.
Cool, milky light glows from gargantuan windows stretching from the marble floor to the ceiling far, far overhead. Elegantly trimmed trees, their trunks and branches wrapped in knotted vines, line the hallway in pots so tall she could barely reach their rim.
She steps to the first window. Everything is the palest blue, clouds drifting lazily below.
Between each of the windows is a door.
According to the diagram MAIA produced, Jericho and everyone he brought with him is at the far end of this hall.
But now the skeleton whale that swallowed her in her sleep is alive, has flesh.
She's here and the tables have turned. The thing that was impossible to fathom is itself asleep with all of its denizens, unaware, just a dream floating in the sky.
Etched in the first door is the word Panacea. According to MAIA, there are four people wasting away here, two men and two women.
She pushes the door and it glides wide open, revealing a glowing panel of white. Stepping through, the panel dissipates, and behind her is now a curtain of beads in its place.
There's a spiral staircase surrounded by paper lamps leading down to another curtain of beads, and a dense and sweet fragrance hanging in the air. She pushes through the second curtain, and rather than surprise is overwhelmed by disappointment.
An elaborate opium den opens before her eyes. Ornately-patterned silk hangs from the walls. A hallway to her left is obscured by more beads.
Low-lying beds hug the corners, suspended in midair. On one next to her, two women in loose dyed skins are listlessly pleasuring one another, mouth on mouth and hands in thighs while on another bed a man and woman watch in disinterest.
The second couple immediately pull pipes from their mouths, staring at her. A lazy specter drifts from their lips in place of words.
In a far corner, a naked couple are copulating slowly, but at the sight of her the man takes his hands off her breasts and pushes her back by the stomach until she stops, resting on her arms. Without breaking his stare, he snickers and reaches to a tray, grabbing a square glass.
He sips, then laughs again, motioning her near.
The other man and woman continue to stare at her, their smoke now long floating snakes, while the two women continue, oblivious.
She had no plan, and certainly none for being so underwhelmed. She had expected desperate, trapped people. People who would rush to her rescue, people at the edge of madness with a thirst for freedom. Instead, she’s found wallowing slugs in a lethargic sandbox of carnal bliss.
She approaches.
“Drink?” the man with the square glass says, motioning to the tray.
“What is it?” she asks, not knowing where to begin.
“Laudanum. Opium tincture.”
Of course.
“Lovely.” He sets his down. “Blackberry.”
“No,” she says, stopping.
His smile grows and grows until he erupts in a screeching cackle that reminds her of a stalling engine. His eyes never leave her face. Then, without any transition, he barks, “Why are you here?”
“It's time to go.”
“Time to go,” the couple beside her echo in unison, but they've taken to watching the two women pleasuring each other again. But now the women's faces are different. They'd both had brown hair, and now one is blonde.
“So,” the man says, now fully pushing off the woman like a bedsheet. “Everything is...back to normal.”
“No.” She stares at the woman. She must not be real. “It's time to wake up.”
“Ha.” He sips the laudanum again.
“Do you know how long it's been?”
“Hummm.” The woman to Lydia's side lays back, stretching her arms. “A year,” she yawns, disinterested.
“No. No, it's been much longer than that.”
She doesn't respond, and the man beside her stares through Lydia.
“Much longer,” she appeals to the man with the laudanum.
“Things are not back to normal. As though normal–” He stops, reaches for his own pipe. He draws for a long time, and blows in her direction. “I think we'll ride out normal, if we haave a choice.”
“This isn't real,” Lydia protests, stepping forward. “This is all the same. You're–you're fucking cartoons.”
“My dear,” he says, now picking at the indolent woman's silk. “I used to have consequences. I used to squander my time on the search for meaning. I spent my days empire-building. Amassing things. People. And happiness is always, always fleeting in that world.”
He sips the laudanum, staring at Lydia. Then he begins moving his hand over the woman again. “Not because of struggle. Not because of pain. But because there's a difference between the unreal and a lie. What I realized is the world we'd lived in for so long was never real–everything that held society together, like money, is just another fabrication. But it's worse. It's a lie. You tell yourself it's real. You see?”
He leans toward the woman, grasps her face with both hands and runs his fingers across her chin and mouth, parting her lips. He settles his thumbs on her cheek bones.
“But now we don't have to believe anymore. No more anxiety. No more lying to ourselves or each other.”
He moves his thumbs to her closed eyes.
“Accept that everything is unreal. The lack of inherent truth will set you free.”
He looks at Lydia, smiles and reaches a hand to the square glass and sips again.
“Everything going to shit, and nothing being a lie, is the best thing that ever happened.”
He reaches to the woman’s face again and begins pressing his thumbs into her eyes as she lies solidly still.
Lydia surges with anger, grabs the lamp with its dangling pipe and slams it into the
wall. She steps back, watching in surprise as a tiny spark begins to glow and burn into a flame.
He grabs the bare shoulder of the woman, picks her up and shoves her to the wall. Still unflinching, she pulls the burning silk into herself, curling into a smoldering ball.
He laughs, standing now, reaching his hand to Lydia’s face.
“Look at you,” he says. “So unfulfilled. A life of frustration. You still embrace your pain. The fulcrum of your life.”
The woman moves, uncurls and rests on her side, but she's not the same. Her broad face has become narrow, her pink lips red, her shoulders more jagged, her brown eyes blue.
“I've had so many like you,” he says, fingertips digging into Lydia's neck, turning her face side to side, examining. “But real, feral thoughts in your head. How exciting.”
She smacks his arm away, and he rests again, already disinterested.
From the soft ticking and clacking of the bead-obscured hall, another woman arrives carrying a lamp, rests it beside the bed. Lydia watches her prepare the opium.
Was there something wrong with her to be so distraught by this rupture in reality?
The second woman finishes and reclines on the bed. In her eyes is nothing. There's no careful design in these people, these things. They're not at all like everyone from Caligatha. They're sloppy, designed for sensation in a haze.
“You're all dead inside,” Lydia tells them. “Dead, dead!”
The word rings out in her head again. Dead, dead. Just like her, dead. Who is she to call anyone dead?
“Dead!” she screams. No matter what her circumstance, she has her will.
“Then here we are,” the man says, and blows smoke in her direction again. He motions to the suspended cloud. “Join the danse macabre or leave. Your penchant for sadness is no good here.”
Lydia says nothing, looks to the hallway.
“Be gone,” he tells her.
She takes one last look around the room, backing through the beads. After all this time, she's not cause for alarm. She's novelty.
She continues down the dark corridor, discovering another beaded doorway. She parts them and steps through.
At once, with one step, a dense noise washes over her. An orgy of elegant booths of neon, silk, caged birds and macaques. A vibrant chaos of sight, sound, and smell. The sizzle of live shrimp in woks of leaping liquor-fed flames; pale pubescent girls, nude save their checkered boarding school tops; chopped serpent chunks writhing on platters. Those tending the open tables and booths are motionless and sullen, unspeaking. The noise is its own self-sustained black magic, like the ocean roar, everywhere and nowhere at once.
As she passes, each twitches and jerks alive, shouting its thrill, but these too are carnivalistic caricatures of real people: drain and taste the blood of this living man, little lady!–crush these baby chicks with your bare hands!–defile any of these chained women anyhow you please!–and then, after she passes, each again falls quiet.
So this is a Realm dedicated to fulfilling uninhibited desire and bloodlust. Urges pinched off in the ancient brainstem and left to rot. A romanticized, womb-like den of bliss. And steps away, violence, modeled on a shadowy interpretation of a black market's worst in Shanghai or Mumbai; or perhaps, depending on the participant, of New York or Los Angeles.
Hyperrealist decadence.
Therapy. Panacea.
More than disgust, she's struck by the lack of surprise, the lack of creativity, the insincere sameness. The wrathful parts of the mind care only about liberation from shame. All reviled passions look the same in sunlight.
She passes children in bamboo cages, tanks offering the temporary sensations of near-suicide by tigerfish, the leashed men and women implanted with absurd sexual devices full of prongs and teeth and blades for pleasure or torture. Finally, there is an open area with benches and a veranda serving as an infinite wall.
Invisible birds chirp cluelessly.
A woman sits at one of the benches, back turned, head up to the sky. Matted black hair falls in dirty tangles to her waist.
“Hello,” Lydia calls out, but she doesn't move.
She's compelled to run back to the beginning, out of this awful place, but she steps forward.
The woman is still as stone. Lydia circles around to discover one of the slaves with his face between her legs, engaged in cunnilingus.
Her eyes are glossed, her mouth agape, neck crooked. She's been drooling for so long, her clothes are plastered against her skin from chest to waist.
Dead. Dead. Dead.
The word swirls in her mind again, whipping into a tempest.
Feeling her heart pound in her fists, she forces them flat, slaps the woman's face hard.
“Wake up!” she screams.
But they won't wake up. As her hand begins to sting, she realizes there's nothing she can inflict in her wrath that they haven't already experienced.
She steps back, cradling her hand, thinking of how surprised she was to strike Maggie. But now she was seeking catharsis, enraged to feel. Now there was no surprise. She strikes out like a mad storm unable to contain her thunderous friction.
The woman reels back, settles her eyes on Lydia. Her lips mouth something silent, one or two syllables of air.
More in puzzlement than anger, the woman grabs the slave by his hair, throws him off in a string of saliva without breaking her stare into Lydia's eyes.
Lydia steps further back, stares into the slaves expressionless face, and races toward and through the market and all the reanimating vendors. Through the black rainbow whirlwind of neon and blood.
“It's not real,” she says aloud, gasping, looking back for any sign of being followed. “It's not real.”
She crashes into a large body hard. Steps from the beaded curtain, a man stares at her, unphased. He's fully nude, and in his right hand he holds a long knife. “I told them,” he mutters, plunging the twelve-inch blade into his side with a giggle.
His entire body is covered in scars and oozing sores.
He lifts the knife and Lydia screams, grabbing his wrist. But there's so little force in his arm, it swings back without tension.
“Time to go,” he breathes, hot on her face.
She screams again, grabbing the blade from his hand. She wrangles his fingers loose with too much force. It flies in her hand, slices through his mouth. His jaw dangles and flaps as he giggles again.
He steps towards her, blood gurgling from the open gash. She kicks him in the stomach and swipes the knife across his face as he doubles over, choking and laughing, and she strikes him again with the hilt until he falls to the dirt.
Her chest heaving, she plunges the blade with all her strength into his back, pinning him to the ground.
Overcome, his laughing stops. There’s only the liquid sound of blood choking his breathing.
Lydia rocks in place, staring at her bloody hands.
Her scream is not one of terror. It rises from her belly like a world splitting in half until her lungs are empty and she’s an empty vessel.
She rushes through the first and then the second set of beads, expecting scornful laughter or an ambush, but the room remains silent, undisturbed from its standstill rhythm.
Onward out of the opium den, up the spiral staircases, and then into the marble hallway.
The gentle breeze from nowhere gently licks her hot skin as she stands, catching her breath.
“It's not real,” she says again, trying to clear her mind of all those tortured people. “They're only there when I look at them. They're not real.”
The blood on her hands is gone.
Below, through the windows to nowhere, neolithic mists still twirl across a pale blue sky.
She looks at all the remaining doors.
Elysium. Harmony. Rapture.
She thinks of the student she'd judged back in Caligatha, when she was sitting at the bench waiting for her father's medicine. She'd been so quick to project ignorance and selfish indulgence. Why?
Because she had no indulgences of her own? Is this what ultimate liberty from responsibility looks like? A mad race beyond temptation, beyond pleasure? A race to the most forbidden, to the most unthinkable?
Is it possible to appreciate pleasure and pain only when the pendulum swings beyond our reach?
No one here wants to be saved. They'd rode that pendulum swing into a directionless circle.
She begins to walk to Jericho's nameless door.
***
“I don't know,” Emma says. “It may be wisest to compose a new signal. Try to communicate further.”
“Does it matter? Someone wants us to return.”
Emma nods, tells MAIA to display the coordinates. The screen splits into a sinusoidal world map and several other blocks of text.
“Assuming these are the international standards we're used to,” she says, tapping an area near Arizona, “roughly 34°N and 114°W...we can expect to land somewhere near the California-Arizona-Nevada tristate area. That would specifically be Mojave Valley.”
The screen fills with a topographic map of the region.
“But as it doesn't appear anyone will be laying out the red carpet, nothing about this landing would be specific.”
“Back to the beginning,” Keene says. Less than three hundred miles from where it all began.
***
A ground cold and damp sinks under her feet like moss, the door behind her, her only way out, sucking up dead air until it's disappeared.
Everything is dark. Only the dimmest of eclipsed-moon violet lays a razor's edge of light.
Organic tendrils, not quite trees, form wide swaths of crooked path, hanging loose from invisible walls, brittle and dying on the ground.
She forms her lips to whisper Jericho's name, but holds her breath.
The air is salt, rust, rot. Strange and alive.
Beyond is a dark clearing with scattered boulders.
She makes her way forward, feet sinking, moist soil spilling over and between her sandals and toes, until she realizes they're not boulders and gasps.
No longer moving, no longer struggling, are the torsos of the men Jericho has brought to hell with him. Only their rasping gives it away in the darkness until she squints her burning eyes.