Майкл Бламлейн - Longer

It wasn’t complicated.

Nothing to clean up. No hole to dig. No ashes.

The only thing left to decide: premedicate or not?

He had pills, but didn’t want to take them. Preferred to be awake and alert, alive to every sensation, every thought. He wanted to be fully in possession of himself in order to fully appreciate the experience. His sole concern: he might panic, and screw everything up.

Panic was a killer of the here-and-now. It was death to contemplative observation. It twisted reality, made it frightening and hideous.

He wasn’t panic-prone, had only panicked once in his life, and that was after waking up from juving, a fairly common occurrence. He doubted it would be a problem, but also knew that panic didn’t care about intentions, that it had a life of its own, came when it came, suddenly, out of nowhere, without invitation. The smallest thing could set it off, and this was hardly small.

He was bringing pills, just in case. Not to sleep, but to calm the nerves, if necessary. Composure, not unconsciousness. That was the plan.

His came in the form of capsules. Each capsule contained hundreds of tiny granules that looked like poppy seeds, but pink and white, the color of cotton candy. Colors favored by Gleem, which manufactured the medicine, and had named it, imaginatively, NOCKOUT, or NOK, as it was commonly called. Not to be confused with the beer of the same name, which had the same effect, if you drank a truckload. The name was a nod to days long past, when it meant glamour, bedazzlement, wow wow wow. Just the kind of double entendre PR and marketing departments fell out of their chairs for.

The word was stamped, along with the helpful icon of a sleeping beauty, on a sleeping beauty bed, on the capsule’s protective, gelatinous shell. It was a mid-list drug—reliable, no-nonsense, and a steady seller. He’d brought enough to put down a horse.

He planned to carry four, attached to his helmet within reach of his tongue and mouth, but separated, so that he could take as many or as few as necessary. He unscrewed the top of the bottle and shook out a handful.

A bad idea. A mass of capsules spilled out and immediately dispersed, like a genie freed from captivity. He grabbed at them, but it was like grabbing at a school of fish, and he merely managed to drive them farther away. He focused on one. His hand-eye coordination was not a thing of beauty, but he finally managed to pinch it between thumb and forefinger, and pushed it back in the bottle. Then he got a second one. Thinking, this is ludicrous, like moving a sandbox grain by grain.

What if it happened outside? They came loose in his helmet, then floated around in front of his face, a total distraction and annoyance, not to mention out of reach of his mouth?

A setback.

The upside: better to know now.

What could be done?

Go without them. That was one possibility. But it felt like giving in, and also risky. Besides, he liked puzzles, even now, at this late stage of the game.

It wasn’t much of one, as it turned out. Capsules and pills were made to dissolve. Optimally, in a stomach. Less optimally, in plain water. But water worked, particularly if you heated it up.

He didn’t have to eat his medicine, he could drink it.

He tried pulling a capsule apart, with the idea of dumping the contents directly into a beaker, where they’d dissolve much quicker without their protective coating. But the halves were sticky and hard to separate, especially for old, trembling hands, and grains were no more willing to be poured than the pills themselves, and in fact much less manageable. They dispersed in a particle cloud, then hung there, like a swarm of midges. He cautioned himself not to inhale.

Subsequently, he didn’t try what he couldn’t do, and instead used the whole capsules, and a closed system. Keeping busy kept him from looking too far ahead, and second-guessing himself.

It took an hour under low heat to dissolve them, then another for the solution to cool. While he was waiting, the comm came to life.

It was Laura Gleem. He recognized her voice, which preceded her image, and the perfectly modulated cadence of her speech. He assumed that, like her image, there was software involved.

She looked the same as always. Pert, attractive, businesslike. Abruptly, the screen went blank. Moments later, someone else took her place.

At least it looked like someone.

The person was sitting up, if “sitting” was the right word, in bed. She, if it was a she, was the color of ash and nearly hairless. What hair she did have was stringy and valentine pink, as though dyed by a morbid beautician. Her body was gnomish and deformed; she looked like a gnarl of wood. She was hunched forward, as though she had no choice. No fat or muscle. Drooping, loose skin. Strikingly, there were grapefruit-size lumps on her arms, legs, and torso.

The figure was draped in a formless gown. Didn’t seem to care if it covered her or not. A network of tubes and wires were attached to her, and ran off-screen.

He kept his composure, even as his stomach churned. He wasn’t entirely sure who or what he was seeing.

Laura Gleem’s voice answered the who. “What do you think?”

His mind, uncharacteristically, was blank.

“That bad?”

“Is this you? For real?”

“In the flesh. Such as it is.”

“You juved a third time.”

“I survived,” she said defiantly. “Give me credit for that.”

“The lumps …”

“Tumors. As you’d expect.” Her mouth didn’t move when she spoke. “At present, under control.”

“How are you communicating with me?”

“With difficulty.”

“Deep brain?” He knew it had been tried. Still a few hurdles, last he’d heard.

“I wish.” With an effort—and considerable discomfort—she arched her entire back, too frozen in the neck to independently lift her head, revealing a thumb-sized appliance crabbed to her larynx.

“A plug-in,” he said.

“God bless ’em.”

“It works well.”

“Well enough. I’m due for an upgrade. And you, Doctor. How are you? You don’t mind my saying, you look like you could use an upgrade yourself. Did I interrupt your beauty sleep?”

“I’ve been working.”

“Glad to hear it. Work is better than sleep. Better than almost anything. You get old, you appreciate that.”

“It’s true.”

“I assume your work includes our new object. What can you tell me? Is it worth getting excited about?”

A moment of truth. He decided to lie. “The asteroid’s carbon. Nothing exciting in that. The object is metamorphic rock. A collision artifact.”

“It’s rock?”

“That’s right.”

“Is it valuable?”

“Possibly to a student of astrogeology. To you, no. It’s worthless.”

She didn’t reply. She could have been thinking about deep-space mining, about capital outlay, financial risk, unloading her assets, writing them off, and so on and so forth. Alternatively, she could have been thinking about calling his bluff. In her current ravaged state, she had the world’s most unreadable poker face.

He waited her out.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said at length.

“Yes. I’m sorry, too. I was hoping for something different.”

“Hope sustains us. It’s our daily bread. The only bread I can eat.” She half-grunted, half-groaned. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”

“Like what?”

“This,” she said. “Me.”

“You look …”

“Unusual?”

“Uncomfortable.”

She barked. “Don’t make me laugh. I look like crap. A crumpled-up bag of bones. Like I’ve been picked at by vultures, chewed up, spit out, then fed to a compacter.”

“You’re in pain.”