James Smythe - The Echo

I message him. I am determined to ask him. I message over and over, nagging him, not even saying anything but his name, calling into the darkness. Eventually he answers, after I don’t even know how long.

‘What do you want?’ he asks.

‘Where are you?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says. He barely sounds like the same man. He sounds broken, more broken than I am, even. Not like a man who is on a rescue.

‘You said that I was twelve days away from seeing you. Now it’s only seven.’

‘Yes,’ he says.

‘So how are you that far into space so quickly? How did you find the other edge of the anomaly?’

‘I didn’t,’ he says.

‘So where am I to meet you?’ I ask.

‘At the centre of this thing,’ he tells me. ‘I’m right in the middle, I think.’

‘What’s in the middle?’ I ask him, but he doesn’t answer. I think he has gone, because it’s silent apart from a hiss, but maybe that’s him sobbing in the fug, or maybe it’s laughter. I don’t know. I can’t tell.

It preoccupies me throughout the entirety of the sixth day before I will see him: whether this means I am not to be rescued after all. What it means to me to be pushing through this darkness. And it has a centre, and it’s six days away. In the lab I estimate the size of it. I draw it as a black circle, and it engulfs so much of space. It’s gargantuan. It fills the space between where I am now and the far beyond. I wonder if it’s moving or growing. I wonder if that’s making a difference. I draw the circle darker on the map, not translucent, blotting out the stars. I leave the Lära there as a pin, but it will make no difference to anything.

I wonder how he ended up in here. If he came in after me, or if it was an accident. If, somehow, his journey mirrored my own. We have that a lot, where we find that we say we would have done things differently only to discover that in reality we would do them in exactly the same way. It’s very easy to think that you’re distinct and individual when you are a twin, but actually you are nothing of the sort. It’s an accident to think the same way as another. I try and talk to him but he doesn’t answer.

I wonder if he is as trapped as I am. If he has called this a rescue, sold it to me, but really he is alone out here. I wonder if he’s adrift; if he has asked me to come to him to rescue him . The tables turned. He’d never admit that, not outright. He would thank me later. My fantasy of this is of me getting home, but maybe that’s impossible. Maybe what’s possible is getting him back. It is not getting home, but the two of us, we could work out how to free ourselves. Between us we could muster the fuel needed, the ideas. How to extricate ourselves. He has a connection that works, the ability to message me. Maybe he’s still in contact with home. We could send our data home, keep them informed, answer the question of the anomaly. Isn’t that what this has all been about, really?

I tell myself that I should make peace with it. There are five days until I see him, and he seems to be holding up worse than I am. He makes contact today, and asks me over and over where I am. I say, ‘I don’t have any reference points.’

‘Find some,’ he tells me. So I sit and I stare, and I try to see anything out of any of the screens. I drag them to their maximum possible resolution, their highest zoom, and I try to find even a speck in the darkness that I can latch onto. I tell him where I am on the map, on my old star charts. Where I should be, if the anomaly is true: the distance from home, the distance to our closest planets. I give him coordinates, but he laughs them off.

‘You think those are right?’ he asks. ‘You think that they mean anything?’

‘How can they not?’ I ask him. ‘You said I’m now five days from you. There must be constancy,’ I say, ‘or you would not have been able to predict that so ably, would you?’

‘You’re so fucking naïve,’ he says. ‘That’s your problem, it’s always been your problem. You’re too naïve, and you’re a coward, and you refuse to see this for what it is.’

‘So tell me what it is!’ I say.

‘I can’t,’ he says. ‘Not yet.’

‘Why not? Won’t it help me? Help us?’

‘You’ll see,’ he tells me. ‘You’ll see.’

On the fourth-last day, I see something on the screens. I don’t know what it is: a dot, even at the largest zoom. I strain myself getting close to it. It’s barely even a pixel, barely anything at all. It’s something in the distance, and I am headed for it. I wonder if it’s Tomas. I message him, and I talk to myself, to the quiet on the other end, that it must be.

‘I can see you, I think,’ I say. ‘Can you see me? You should be able to, as a speck.’ I give him my coordinates again, but he doesn’t answer. I spend the day attached to a bench and watching the speck grow. It’s barely visible. It grows as flecks of dust grow: it amasses until there is just even more of that very same dust.

Three days to go, and he wakes me. ‘Did you ever think that this would happen?’ he asks. He sounds ill. He sounds like there’s something terribly wrong. I can tell, because his voice is not what it should be.

‘No,’ I say. ‘We didn’t prepare for this, did we?’ I lie in my bed, strapped down. ‘We didn’t have a plan for this. No contingency.’

‘No, we didn’t.’ He is gulping a lot.

‘Are you lying down?’ I ask.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘As are you.’

‘I am.’ He coughs. ‘What’s wrong?’ I ask him, but he coughs more, and then there’s a retch. Vomit. I can hear him spitting it up on the other end of the connection. I try and talk to him, to get him to listen to me, but he doesn’t reply, and the silence floods in. It’s another five minutes before he says anything.

‘Are you scared?’ he asks.

‘Of what?’

‘Of what happens now. What’s going to happen.’

‘No,’ I say. That’s a lie. I am waiting for his reveal: as he shows me that he is as duplicitous as I fear. That he’ll stab me again, and this will be a test, and I will be his lab rat.

‘Okay,’ he says. He’s warning me. He goes then, and I can’t get him back.

The dust speck is now something else. A larger speck. A ship, I know. I can see it, in the same way as I once saw the Ishiguro . I can’t even think how long ago that was. I still worry that it was longer than it seems, that I am playing tricks on myself. But this in the distance is a ship, definitely. I can tell from the shape, the rough shape of it. It looks like the ship that I’m on: meaning that it’s the backup. I still haven’t asked Tomas about how he got out here, and why he’s here. Why he didn’t just leave me to die. I watch the ship-speck get closer and closer. Forty-eight hours and I will be next to it, and I’ll climb aboard. And whatever happens, I will be with Tomas, which is better than being in this alone.

I have another fantasy. Perhaps I shouldn’t call it that, as that suggests a desire for it to become true. But:

He and I are on our ship. We are together and we are growing older. He is dying, of something or other. Hunger. Thirst. Everything is recycled, and there is only so much of this. We are stuck inside this thing, this anomaly, and we cannot escape. He sacrificed himself for me – maybe that’s the part of this that I like? that I am attached to? – and that’s that. I watch him die, and then, as he dies, he chokes himself awake. He fits and sputters and chokes and then wakes again, and then he dies and then he wakes. I have seen the cycles when this is unnatural, when it’s forced onto people, but not when they just stop. When their bodies are done.

Will the anomaly force them back into life? Is that something that it can even do? Will they live forever?