Frank Schätzing - Limit

As he raised his head, he thought he saw a movement at the far left of the window, something flitting at the edge of his vision.

He stared out at the canyon.

Nothing there.

He hesitated, indecisive, then shrugged and left the suite. Nobody about. Why would there be? Everybody was exhausted, deep asleep. He went to the locker with the spacesuits and began to dress, wriggled into the narrow, steel-reinforced harness, put on the chestplate and backpack, held his helmet under his elbow and went down to the basement.

As he went into the corridor, he thought for a moment he was hallucinating.

An astronaut was coming towards him from the train station.

Julian blinked. The other man drew nearer fast, carried along by the conveyor. White light limned his outlines. Suddenly he had the crazy feeling that he was looking at a mirror-world, that he saw himself there at the other end of the corridor, then a familiar face came into focus, oval head with hair cropped short, strong chin, dark eyes.

‘Carl,’ he called out, astonished.

Hanna seemed no less surprised.

‘What are you doing down here?’ He stepped off the belt and walked slowly towards Julian, who lifted his eyebrows, unsettled, and peered about as though more early risers might step out of the walls.

‘I could ask you the same question.’

‘Tchh, well, to be honest—’ A furtive look showed in Hanna’s eyes, and his smile slipped, becoming foolish. ‘I—’

‘Just don’t tell me that you went outside!’

‘I didn’t.’ Hanna lifted his hands. ‘Honestly.’

‘But you wanted to.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Go on, say it.’

‘Well, yes. To take a walk. I wanted to go over to the other side of the canyon, look at Gaia from over there.’

‘On your own?’

‘Of course on my own!’ Hanna dropped the schoolboy affectations and put on a grown-up face. ‘You know me. I’m not the type for eight hours of sleep, could even be I’m not house-trained for group trips like this. At any rate, I was lying there in bed and I suddenly wondered what it would be like to be the only person on the Moon. How it would feel to walk around out there without the others. Imagine there was no one here but me.’

‘That’s a half-baked idea.’

‘Could be yours, though.’ Hanna rolled his eyes. ‘C’mon, don’t be like that. I mean, over the next few days we’re going to be wandering about in herds, aren’t we? And that’s fine, really. I like the others, I won’t go walkabout. But I just wanted to know how it would be.’

Julian ran his fingertips through his beard.

‘Well, it looks as though I don’t really have to worry,’ he grinned. ‘You’ve already got lost before you could even set foot outside.’

‘Yes, that was dumb of me, wasn’t it?’ Hanna laughed. ‘I forgot where the darned airlocks are! I know, you guys showed us, but—’

‘Here. Right up ahead.’

Hanna turned his head.

‘Well, that’s great,’ he said, downcast. ‘It says so in big fat letters.’

‘Some lone wolf you are,’ Julian said mockingly. ‘As it happens, I was about to do just the same.’

‘What, just go out on your own?’

‘No, you fool, I have a great deal of practical experience which you don’t. This isn’t just a morning jog! It’s dangerous.’

‘Sure. Life’s dangerous.’

‘Seriously.’

‘Give me a break, Julian, I know my way around a spacesuit! I had an EVA on the OSS, I had one on the flight here, all of that is more dangerous than taking a hike out here on the regolith.’

‘That’s true, but—’ But I snuck out the same way you did, thought Julian. ‘Regulations say that nobody goes out on their own. None of the tourists anyway.’

‘Fine and dandy,’ said Hanna cheerfully. ‘Now there’s two of us. Unless of course you’d rather go out alone.’

‘Nonsense.’ Julian laughed. He went to the airlock and opened the inner door. ‘You were found out, so that means you have to come along with me, like it or not.’

Hanna followed him. The airlock was built to take twenty people, so they were rather dwarfed by its dimensions as they stood there letting their suits run through diagnostics. Bemused, he worried away at the question of just how unlikely this meeting was, mathematically speaking. If it were true that a person lives in just one of countless parallel universes where every possible course of events is true somewhere: almost identical worlds, radically different worlds with intelligent dinosaurs or where Hitler had won the war, then why did he have to live in the world where Julian had turned up in the corridor at exactly the same time as him? Why not ten minutes later, giving him the chance to get back to his suite unnoticed? The only consolation was that there were other realities where things had turned out even worse, where Julian had actually seen him arrive on the Lunar Express. At least he seemed not to have noticed that at all.

He would have to be more careful, pay more attention.

He, and Ebola.

‘Interesting, that program of yours,’ said Jericho.

‘Ah!’ Tu looked pleased. ‘I was wondering when you would call. Which one did you try out?’

‘French Concession. You’re not seriously going to put that on the market, are you?’

‘We’ve drawn its sting.’ Tu grinned. ‘As I told you, that was a prototype. Strictly for internal use, so please don’t go peddling it. I thought that you would appreciate the jokes, and you also wanted to get to know Yoyo.’

‘Was that her idea? Taking swipes at the Party.’

‘The whole script is Yoyo’s. They’re test recordings, she was mostly improvising. Did you try chatting her up?’

‘I did. Chatting her up, and calling her names.’

Tu giggled. ‘It’s impressive, isn’t it?’

‘A few more responses to choose from wouldn’t hurt. Otherwise, very successful.’

‘The market-ready version runs on an artificial intelligence. It can generate any response instantly. We didn’t even need to film Yoyo to get them, any more than we needed sound recordings. The synthesiser can simulate her voice, her lip movements, gestures, everything really. Your version is very much simpler, but it means you get unadulterated Yoyo.’

‘You’ll have to explain one thing.’

‘As long as you don’t go selling it to Dao.’

Idiot, Jericho thought, but he kept it to himself.

‘You know I’d never do something like that,’ he said instead.

‘Just a joke.’ Tu dug about with a toothpick, produced a small green scrap of something and flicked it away. Jericho tried not to look. For all that, his eyes were irresistibly drawn to where the scrap, whatever it was, had landed. It was irritating mostly because Tu appeared on his new media screen not just life-size but in perfect perspectival detail, so that it looked as though Jericho’s loft apartment had grown an extra room. It wouldn’t have surprised him to spot the scrap of food lying on his floorboards somewhere. Seeing Tu in three dimensions was very much less enjoyable than looking at Naomi Liu.

Now she really did have nice legs.

‘Owen?’

Jericho blinked. ‘I noticed that the Yoyo avatar is remarkably stable in crowds. How do you do that?’

‘Trade secret,’ Tu sang happily.

‘Tell me. Otherwise I’ll have to go and visit my optician.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with your eyes.’

‘Clearly not. I mean, the specs themselves are transparent, just like a window. I’m seeing the real world. Your program can project details in, but it can’t change reality.’

‘Is that what it does?’ Tu asked, grinning.

‘You know perfectly well what it does. It makes people blink out of existence.’