“Why would they do it on purpose?!” said Liam, squealing like a pig.
The engineer looked at him incredulously. “Are you an idiot? Look around yourself!” he shouted, the annoying nature of Liam overcoming his patience once again. The fat man quailed under the verbal assault, shuffling his feet on the floor to push himself back into the corner. The engineer felt remorse for attacking such a vulnerable target but his emotions were running so high that he couldn't stop himself. “If this infection was released onto another station, or worse started to spread planet-side, can you imagine the death toll?”
“If any of this bullshit is true then why are you trying to get us to the escape pods? Is there any point? You can bet the station told the lifeboats why it was taking such drastic measures... no one will be there to pick us up,” said Kulvinder, his arms crossed across his chest once again.
“The lifeboats have a profile of the virus and have instigated a twenty four hour quarantine. If we show no symptoms by then, they’ll take us in,” replied the engineer, adjusting his collar as he tried to calm himself down. What's wrong with me? Why this time? It's all fallen apart.
“Have you been in contact with them?” asked Cathy, scrutinising his face. He could only imagine what he looked like – scarred, bruised and bleeding. A beast.
“Just once... a long time ago, for me.”
Their faces were blank and he knew that he needed to tell them more.
“All of this has happened before, hundreds... thousands of times. I stopped counting after a year. Three hundred and sixty five days. It seemed like an end, dropping off the edge of a cliff. I placed a value on it. It's the same value that all people place on the calendar, a made up set of rules imposed on an uncaring universe. All of this, space... planets... asteroids... dust... it doesn’t give two shits whether you think it’s January the first or May the third or September the seventeenth.”
Still blank, still unable to understand. He couldn’t blame them. How many days had it taken for him to finally come to some sort of understanding and finally end his cycle of alternating highs and lows, revelling in the freedom of a reckless day without true consequences and on the flip side losing all power to influence his future, or even have a future.
“This station can’t escape the black hole, light can’t escape the black hole, and time can’t escape the black hole. I have no idea if it’s the angle of our diminishing orbit or the speed at which we’re heading for the centre but time is twisting. We’re arriving before we started. We’re duplicating endlessly, and I’m the only one who has any memory of it.”
“Why you?” asked Johan. The others were silent, either through disbelief or not wanting to believe.
“I have no idea,” said the engineer, closing his eyes. “Blessed or cursed, take your pick.”
Silence started to fill the elevator, though the distant boom of explosions and the razor’s edge trill of screams ran as a sickening undercurrent.
“Do we all make it?” asked Imogen. She was holding Johan by the shoulders so tightly that her knuckles were going white. She believes me.
“You’ll all live,” he said to them, putting as much emphasis on the words as he could to drive them home, only saying the final word of the sentence in his own head. Again.
Just One Day Page 6