James Smythe - The Echo

I watch the ship get bigger and bigger. People throw déjà vu around, as something that occurs when they do something that reminds them of another time. That isn’t it. Déjà vu, real déjà vu, it’s a chemical imbalance. It’s a reaction where your brain can’t parse what’s happening and it turns it around. It ruins a moment of peaceful memory for you by adding dizziness, nausea into the mix. Watching this now all I have is a sense that I have been this impatient before. The ship starts as something small and generic, and then I see it exactly as it is. It’s this ship, exactly this ship. Even down to the lettering on the side. Lära , it says. My mother’s name; and also the name of Tomas’ baker. I said to him, Can’t you see what she is to you? What you’re doing with her? And he said, She has the same name. It’s a common name, and what is it to you? So when I suggested we name the ship after Mother, he wasn’t happy. I said, I don’t care. I look for a suffix, for a Two or a B or something else, something distinct, to see what he has done to differentiate us. I want to see if this twin has its own birthmark.

Then it is the size of the desk, on full zoom. I can see it sitting still and immovable. The boosters are not on; they’re not holding it in place, which means it’s drifting. The lights are on, though. It’s not a power loss.

‘You’re looking at me, aren’t you?’ Tomas asks, over the speakers.

‘How did you know?’ He snorts at my question. He’s silent, then, despite my prodding. I say, ‘If you won’t talk to me, listen to me. I am only a while away. Are you in trouble?’

I don’t get an answer for hours, and then he says, ‘Yes.’ But even when I ask what he means, he doesn’t say.

I can count how long it will be until we are together in hours now instead of days. I am lucky, I think, because one way or another I will be out of here, and I will no longer be alone. I could have lost all sense of who I am in this, after the crew died. And to say it, I still feel no guilt. I wonder if that’s my problem. That I should have felt more. I wonder if that makes me a bad person. Seems to me that if I had focused on it, I would have lost myself.

I look at the blackness. It’s my hope that Tomas and I can put our heads together and save ourselves from this. But if we don’t – if he’s lying to me, if he’s as stuck here as I am – then I am still okay. It’s better to not be alone as you die, I think. That’s what our mother said to me as I sat with her. She said, This tells me so much about your love for me, and I said, It should never have been in question.

I message Tomas. He is barely there: a shell of a voice, a fragment, broken and devoid. He says, ‘You’re nearly here.’

‘I am,’ I say. I try to sound excited: to lift the tone. ‘I am only hours away.’

‘You’re anticipating reconciliation.’

‘Aren’t you?’ He snorts. ‘Listen,’ I say, ‘I want to know if you knew that this would happen. All along, when you abandoned me. I need to know, Tomas. You understand that?’

‘I understand so much more than you,’ he says. He sounds like he’s a ruined man. I wonder what he had to sacrifice to come out here to me.

‘You don’t sound happy to be seeing me,’ I say.

‘How could I be?’ he asks. ‘Knowing what I know now?’ Then he severs the connection, and he’s gone. But his ship is there, right in front of me. There are so many things I want to ask him. I strap myself into the cockpit seat and watch on the screens in real-time as it gets bigger and bigger, and I get closer and closer to him.

His ship looks tired from this angle. I wonder what it’s been through to get here. I want to hear all of his stories, every single one. How he got here so quickly; how he came to be inside the anomaly; and he hasn’t mentioned a crew, so I want to know what happened to them; and why is he here? Is it for me? I hail him as I get closer, but there’s no reply. I say, ‘I need to come aboard,’ but there’s nothing.

As we get closer still, I ponder his suggestion that we are near the centre of the anomaly. How did he know that? How could he? There’s nothing here to tell me that, and nothing to allay my thought that we shall never escape it. I wonder what state I will find him in. If he’ll be as broken as his conversations with me would suggest.

I’m scared of damaging the ship – either ship – so I stop far before I reach it. Hikaru would have been able to do something better with this. Maybe drive us alongside it, allow us to almost connect the doors together. That’s why he was a pilot and I am not. I stop the ship with the boosters, and it’s harsh and hard, gravity back, thrown into the chairs, but they work. They do what we wanted them to do.

‘Where are you?’ I ask. ‘Why aren’t you answering?’ It’s so quiet on the other end of the line. ‘Tomas?’ I say, but he doesn’t answer. I check my suit, take a helmet, attach it. I have a fully replenished tank of oxygen, and I seal the airlock from the rest of the ship, leaving the door open for me. And then I’m in space, or the anomaly. The darkness. It’s so cloying out here. A foot in front of you looks like the far-off distance, looks exactly the same. There is no light in here – nothing from the sun coming through, and you cannot even see out, from in here: the darkness is too much. It’s like fog, only there’s nothing tangible here. Just nothingness, all around.

I move through it, though, towards the other Lära , and I circle her. I will miss this, just as I get better at it. I can really feel myself growing in these circumstances. Perhaps I was always destined to be out here and alone. I feel like I am beginning to discover exactly who it is that I am.

The airlock of this other Lära is open. Tomas is waiting for me, as he said he would be. I get to it and pull myself inside, and I seal the door, start the decompression. It only takes seconds, but it’s still enough to make me anxious. I look for Tomas here, waiting for me, but he’s not. He’s nowhere to be seen, not in this room. It looks exactly the same as ours, which makes sense, because we built them to be the same. Hewn from exactly the same plastics and metals and moulds.

‘Hello?’ I call as I step out. I check the changing area, the corridor, the engine rooms, the lab, the lounge, the cockpit, but he isn’t here. It is pristine, as if it has never been used. I spend time pulling myself around every room, ending in the lab. The only sign of life: my notes, my handwriting. The orange map that I made, with the anomaly on it and a pin in it showing where the ship is. ‘Hello?’ I shout, but the ship is, apart from me, empty. He’s not here, and, as I look at this exact duplicate of the ship I have just left, I realize that he has never been; or he has always been; or he will be, now.

It was as I thought: inevitable.

Somehow, now, I am more alone than I have ever been before.

I panic, and am terrified. I leave this ship, because it is wrong, and it has no place here. It is a lie, as all of this is a lie, and I swim through the anomaly to my Lära , my original version, untainted, truthful and honest, and I cling to the rail when I am safe inside the airlock. I start the engines, the boosters, turning the ship in the nothing. We rotate, and I look for the other Lära , the facsimile, but it is gone, and I am in its place; the same position, facing the same way, drifting and fitting into the lie in its entirety. I stop the engines and I weep, because I have no other choice. I feel sorry for myself; I feel as though I am responsible for this. From day one, I have been leading towards this.

I have made my own bed, and it is the same as it has always been, ever since we came out here. Now, I must lie in it.