I, Cassandra

by E A Carter

  It's a shit job, crossing the distance to it. Whatever the fuck is growing here is tenacious, tangled and tipped with sharp barbs. My temper flares, and I take it out on whatever gets in my way, uncaring of the strips of flesh I am tearing out of my hands. I hate everything. This place. de Pommier. Me. The world. Fucking everything. The god damned sky with its wrong stars. Bitterness eats me alive and by the time I am near enough to the blinking light I am ready to tear the throat out of anything that moves. Through my haze of rage I'm hoping to find an alien so I can kick the shit out of it.

  My hopes are short lived. Because all there is, is the faint blinking of the light, the rest subsumed by dense layers of vines. It's impossible to tell what the light belongs to there is so much growth around it. I get to work, staving off the hope it might be a pod. I don't want to be disappointed. I don't want to feel the loss of her again. No. I won't feel the loss of her again. It's over. Finished. Done. This is nothing more than a distraction, something to satisfy my curiosity before I go back into hibernation—until I figure out how to eradicate myself from existence. The vines falls away under my grip, layer upon layer of them until it becomes impossible for me to deny what I am uncovering.

  A pod. One that somehow, impossibly still beats with life, its window over the face of its occupant frosted over. But the code on the side when I finally excavate it, isn't Blue's. It's another's. A life carried over the millennia, a life I immediately hate. I can't help myself. I punch the fuck out of it. Its shell is tough as hell. I don't even leave a mark.

  Back on my feet, I pace, infuriated, driven by a sense of injustice I cannot contain. A string of expletives erupt from me and fill the air, filthy with vulgarity in this pristine world. It doesn't help. I kick the pod. Not even a dent. I kick it harder. Nothing. Fuck this shit.

  Why couldn't this have been Blue's pod? Why does everything have to be so hard? Enraged, my fury boils over, overwhelming me with the total bullshit that is my destiny. Of Blue's. Everything is pointless. All of it. That is, except for G-II-0782, whoever the fuck they are tucked up like a baby in their eternal, untouched sleep.

  Eternal sleep. Wait. I am surprised how long it take me to connect the dots. Ashamed, even.

  Blue. Hope hits me with the force of a tidal wave. If this bastard managed to survive, maybe Blue has, too. I can't believe I wasted the last four and half thousand years in hibernation when I could have been searching for Blue. But there's no time for regret. I have wasted enough time.

  I force my anger into a cold, harsh point of focus. If this pod wasn't here four and half thousand years ago, then something must have happened while I was hibernating, either the ground pushed up what was buried beneath, or an earthquake hit, or shit was happening I can't begin to understand, either way, to find this here is better than anything I could have expected. If this one has surfaced, there will be others. And one of them might belong to Blue. The thought is enough. I lunge after it like a starving animal. I have twelve weeks of darkness before me. I never felt happier in my existence.

  'Hold on Blue,' I shout into the weird trees, startling the water bears who haven't been shot into space for ten thousand years and are probably pretty happy about it, 'I'm coming for you. It's not over yet.'

  And in my heart I hear it: 'I'm waiting. I'm here. Dreaming of you.'

  It might be bullshit I have made up in my head after being alone for so long, but I don't care. It's Blue's voice I hear and it's all I need to go on. To keep searching, and not give up. To never give up. No more fucking hibernating.

  There are other pods. In the days that follow I find them everywhere, dozens of them, most are empty. Each time I pick out the outline of one buried under the vegetation, something ignites inside me, a spark, so hot with incandescence I can taste it. Hope. I can taste hope. And every single time, I get my hopes battered to hell.

  Some of the pods are in pieces, torn apart by the power of the Earth regurgitating them from wherever they ended up in the cataclysm of 2087. But no others turn up with their light still beating—carrying the single precious cargo my entire existence hinges on. As the days and weeks pass, I widen my search towards the crater rim, long since eroded to a low mound and prickly with the strange trees. Out here there are fewer pods.

  So far, I've uncovered sixty-seven more, either empty or wrecked. Not since the night I came out of hibernation have I seen another active pod. Sometimes I go back just to look at it, to reassure myself I didn't imagine it. And I always find it, sitting there, a silent sentinel to a time long lost, its light beating on and on, quiet, and purposeful. And inside. A human being. Life.

  Of course it pisses me off it isn't Blue's but then again whoever is in there survived all this, so I allow it must mean something, what exactly, I don't know. Just something. So I don't kick it anymore. I could revive them if I wanted with the protocols I downloaded the day I put Blue under. But I am in no hurry. I want Blue, not whoever this is. Anyway what if I can't stand them and they won't go away? I'd have to kill them. I don't even know what kind of -cide it is when you kill the last human left alive. I push my way through the trees whose thin trunks bend with a flexibility I still haven't adapted to, and tell the water bears it would be suicide if they were the last human, but because I'm here, we'd need a new word for it. I ask the water bears what the word should be while I scan for a light in the darkness, or the telltale sign of a pod's straight lines, like a perfectly carved ashlar under a twisted blanket of vines.

  Of course the water bears don't answer. But I like the irony of them getting to name it after all the shit we did to them.

  The thought of water bears naming shit soon ceases to entertain me and my ruminations gravitate to darker places as I consider how many passengers could have used the pods that day. Fifteen, maybe twenty at the most—there was only ever a skeleton staff in G-II. Twenty-one lives, max. And I found the wrong one.

  As I shove my way deeper into the trees and up the side of what's left of the crater, I can't stop myself from thinking it: out of one thousand pods, I found one of the rare ones that was occupied and still active and it wasn't Blue's. I never believed in religion, an afterlife or gods, but right now, I think maybe there is one, a horrible, sadistic fucker who would be the poster child for kids who enjoy pulling the wings off bees and torturing puppies.

  After twenty-three days of methodical searching, I'm well aware of how fucking lows the odds are of even finding a pod; how much lower finding one with a passenger is, and of the utter improbability of finding Blue. One of out a thousand.

  Even though it calls to me like a siren song, I won't give in to my growing despair. I'm going to find her. No matter what. I divert my thoughts with a deep scan of the landscape beyond the crater, saturated with its weird vegetation, lost in the blue light of a full moon, determined to prove myself wrong. The mantra I have begun to repeat each time I search for a new pod flares up inside me as I push my way out of the trees and onto a plain, studded with low bushes. From my vantage point clear of the trees I can see far, very far. The mound of rocks I piled up all those millennia ago are of course, long gone. I ignore the feeling of loneliness that claws for my attention, of the erasure of my once-existence in that time and place. To stave it off, I repeat the mantra.

  The next one will be her. The next one will be her. The next one—

  'Oh my god,' a voice cuts through the silence, flat and incredulous all at once. 'I'm not alone. Oh my god.'

  I turn, thinking at last I have gone mad and have begun to hear the water bears talking to me. But no. Not one hundred metres away is a man, clothed in rags and covered in filth, his face shrouded by a dense beard and his hair matted into what might be called dreads. And tucked under his arm, a box misshapen and dented to hell. I scan it, wary, as always. It rebuilds itself in my vision to its former glory—

  'Miro,' I breathe. And then, I am running.

  He starts, and looks around wildly for somewhere to go. Finding nothing, he drops to his knees and hunches ov
er the safe, protective, as if it were his only child.

  'Who are you?' I ask as I come to halt and scan him for weapons.

  He looks up, the whites of his eyes stark in the pale light of the moon. 'I am—was—Amadi.'

  'Was?'

  'What's the point of names here?' he answers, bitterness gilding every word. His hand moves over the top of the safe containing Miro, and I swear to fuck he caresses it. 'All I have is this, and I can't open it. It's all there is that's left from before.'

  'I can open it,' I say.

  'No,' he says, mournful. 'I have tried everything, if anything I have made it worse. It's never going to open, but I can't leave it behind.'

  'It's a cat,' I say.

  His eyes slam into mine. 'What?'

  'It's not a real cat,' I clarify when I clock his horror, as he snatches his hand away from the safe and rubs it on his stained trousers. 'It's a special kind of cat. Meant for someone to take to Mars.'

  He looks at me like he's losing the last grip he has on his sanity.

  'You're saying for the last year I've been carrying around a safe that has a cat inside that was meant to go to Mars?'

  'Yes.' I answer. Then it registers: 'A year?'

  He fumbles at his waist and pulls free what looks like a rope but I realise is a vine stem stripped of its leaves whose length has been tied into hundreds of knots.

  'More or less,' he says. 'It's hard to keep track when it's dark all the time, I have to backtrack when the light comes back to make sure the knots are right.' He lifts it up for me to see, but I couldn't care less.

  'Where did you find the safe?' I ask instead.

  He tilts his head towards the north. 'A good way from here.'

  'Have you found any other pods,' I ask, careful. I don't want to spook him.

  Another shrug as he tucks his timekeeping vine back into the depths of wherever it came from. 'Not many and the ones I found were mostly empty, those I found with passengers were already dead, turned to dust. Only one pod was still active because its window was still frosted over.'

  Hope corrals me into a corner. 'One?'

  Another shrug. 'I couldn't tell if its passenger was still alive or not. I waited a long time for them to wake up on their own, but they never did. I thought if there was one, there might be others, so I went looking for more, but until now there was only the one. I meant to go back, but it's a long way, and there's a marsh—'

  'Was there a light blinking on the side of it?'

  He considers. 'It was lying on its side. I honestly can't remember. Everything just blurs together here.'

  It's Blue. I'm one hundred percent certain of it. I just hope she's still sleeping and not wandering around alone like this poor fucker with his primitive time piece.

  'Can you take me back to where you found it?'

  'You got any food?' he asks eyeing my healthy physique, assuming things.

  'I don't eat.'

  'Shit.' Disappointment laces his tone. 'You're one of them, aren't you?'

  'Them?'

  'Upgraded soldiers turned into machines that can rebuild themselves. Of all the ones I could have found—'

  'I'm better than them,' I interrupt his lament, holding out my hand to help him to his feet. 'Because I have purpose.'

  'Which is?' he asks as he takes my hand, his grip solid, and honest. I feel a vague recollection of this man, as if we have met once before, but I have no idea when or where.

  I haul him to his feet. 'First: To find someone.'

  'What? Here?' He cuts a look at me like I am unhinged.

  I nod. 'And I think you know where they are.'

  'Let me guess,' he says, bleak. 'The pod I left a year and half ago?'

  'Lead on,' I say.

  And to his credit he starts walking, the safe still tucked under his arm.

  FIVE | RYAN MADDOX

  * * *

  He tells me things, this dread-locked, filth-encrusted, emaciated man who calls himself Amadi. He's an interesting guy, and with each day of darkness we pass together I find myself liking him more. His backstory unfolds in fragments, as if he would rather not speak of his life in Alpha VII but it trickles out, inevitable, like a dirty secret, or perhaps a confession, in between his unappetising meals of grubs harvested beneath the roots of the vines.

  I don't press him for details, partly because my only desire is to find Blue, and partly because Amadi appears to carry a burden far heavier than any man should. Knowing what GC was like I can only imagine what was asked of him. He tells me who he was before: the son a of a high government official, elevated to Colonel for 'an act of heroism' although the way he says the words, heavy with bitterness, I know there was nothing heroic about it. We have the time to figure out he was already in deep freeze two days before the shit hit the fan. I tell him about the end, of the people who didn't get into G-II because of me and how we're now in the year twelve thousand one hundred eighty seven. He digests this information then says he's glad he missed it all because it sounds depressing.

  Which makes us laugh so hard we have to stop walking.

  An engineer, he got targeted as an asset for the future, made the Prime Minister's 'insurance policy'. The pointlessness of his preservation stands out, stark as the spindly silhouettes of the thin trees against the reverse smear of the Milky Way.

  Despite all the shit we face we manage to laugh, mostly at the irony of everything, but sometimes, shit's just funny because we're wandering around in a world where we don't belong and things fuck up all the time. In the tussocks of strange stiff grass beside the black waters of a vast lake, Amadi found a nest filled with eggs. He stole them all and cracked them open to eat them raw. But they weren't like the eggs we remember, they were filled with a strange slimy jelly and what looked like a cross between a brain, a fish and a goddamn alien. Amadi puked his guts out. But after, we laughed. Probably because we're fucked. But mostly because it was disgusting. And in this place of darkness, muggy warmth, and weird plants, even disgust is welcome entertainment.

  The sound of my voice making fun of him is something I never thought I would hear myself do again. Not with Blue gone. I really thought I would never laugh again. But Amadi puts me at ease. He's different, genuine, honest, and filled with interesting facts about the world we lost. He's a man I can respect and I find myself grateful he's my companion. For someone who has wandered alone in an unknown world for almost two years eating nothing more than grubs, he's very together.

  I still don't know if this is how he is, or this is who he has become, a dry, self-deprecating man resigned to spending half his waking life in darkness and eating grubs in a world ten thousand years removed from the one he fell asleep in.

  It doesn't take long to learn we share a common ground. He too hated Global Command and the elite bastards who ran the show. I can tell he's lost something or someone important to him because of them, but he never talks about it. Neither of us say it out loud, but it's there: Our gratification that those who fucked up the world didn't make it out, when we did, even if it's shit. Somehow, it's easier now there's two of us. All I know is I am glad he's someone I can easily spend time with. For once, the odds are with me.

  He learns my story. And he's impressed, wants to know as much as possible about what it was like, how it feels, what's different. Anyone else asking me those questions would have gotten a punch in the mouth, but not him. He's just insatiably curious, and telling him about it helps me come to terms with who I am. I don't tell him about Blue, or anything about Miro. He still clings to the safe, like it's a lifeline, or a friend, it's hard to tell, but I can't bear to take whatever it represents away from him. At least, not yet.

  It's clear he's keeping secrets from me, just like I am keeping my history with Blue—and who she really is—from him. But I get it. Why he's not telling me all, even here where it really doesn't matter anymore. It's about pride. And control. That need to feel you have some power in your life when you know you've got none—to avoid admitting you
are nothing more than a speck of dust caught in the glare of a moonbeam—or you're just a piece in a vast, uncaring universe where time crushes all.

  But right now, it's just us. And here we are. Still doing it. Keeping secrets. Hedging our bets under stars ten thousand years removed from our own and making our way through bizarre trees that can endure six months of dark. And it would all be bullshit if it weren't for my hope the pod belongs to Blue. I can't help myself but I know I am reading too much into this scenario, finding meaning in it where there's probably none. But I don't care. Like the way Amadi needs that safe. I need to believe the pod he found is hers. It has to be hers.

  After a month of walking, Amadi stops at the edge of a ravine. It slopes away into a marsh that stretches far into the distance. He points to the northeast.

  'It was there,' he says gesturing at an indistinct clump of shadows that perch on the bank of a winding stream, its fast-running water sparkling in the moonlight. 'I'm sure of it.'

  I scan for signs of the pod's heartbeat. Nothing. Disappointment slices through me like a hot knife.

  'That's where I found this,' he pats the safe. 'And, here we are. Again.'

  Relief washes through me. I wait. It feels like he needs a moment. Like he's reliving the memory of finding the safe, and it means something to him. After a lengthy silence, he lets out a deep exhalation.

  'It seems like it was only yesterday when I found this,' he says, touching the side of Miro's mangled safe. 'But it wasn't. I've been carrying this for thirteen months now.' He turns his gaze up to the sky, its strange constellations muted by the moon's light. 'This summer will mark two years. . . Time just loses all meaning in this place, doesn't it?'

  I nod, and think of the five years I spent excavating the area where I believed Blue's pod would be, at the madness of my hope, the pure, blind stupidity of it. Amadi doesn't see me acknowledge his words, his gaze unseeing, still wandering the paths of his past. I prefer it this way, the silent companionship of our lonely experiences. Two refugees lost to world that feels like a dream. We stand for a while longer, and just be, under stars scrambled by time, and a world reborn without us, and remember.