James Smythe - The Echo

I see it again. I don’t know if it’s real, but it pulses with colour. It is so bright against the black. It gives this all a sense of being real: that the anomaly isn’t just nothingness.

Then it’s gone, and I am alone again.

This, whatever it is, is mine. It’s mine and mine alone, and Tomas has nothing to do with it. And he will never know. He said, We are going to discover something for humanity! and I will do it. It was me who discovered how the anomaly works! I can answer that fucking question: it is a fucking demon, playing with time. It is all we do not understand, and we never can. And this thing, this light, this glimmer, I will explain that as well. Here is the question: What is it? I do not know, but I will discover the answer. Everything must have an answer.

I feel sick, and I try to eat, but I can’t keep it down. My body is rejecting everything. It feels like I am not meant to be here. I feel like my mother did. She said, once, that the cancer felt like it was eating her. I watch myself on the screens as I vomit, as I lie on the ground and it passes through me, and I think, I am meant to die.

He speaks to me, but I placate him. I am sick. I don’t want to tell him that I am sick. I have so little time to wait, now.

I tell him that I know what he’s doing. I almost tell him to turn around. But that thing, whatever’s out there: I need to know why I stepped out then. I must see it, and I think that he will have to reach me for this to complete. A loop is nothing if you cut the string.

And everything becomes obvious to me, and laid out in front of me. I can see it all: I can see how I move on from here. As I see the Lära , the other one, the original one, this one, I also see the glimmer, in the distance. It’s not too far, I don’t think. I can probably reach it.

I have two options. I stay here and I see. I break this. Or I step out and I look for what it is, for that glimmer, tempting me, a penny in a stream. He speaks to me. I am sick of him as he is. Can’t he see it himself? I ache. My chest hurts, and my head. It’s eating inside of me. I wonder, if I cut myself open, would I see the blackness that took my mother, and that threatened to take Inna once in her life? I would be too gone to be replaced; all around me would be black and rot, and I would die.

I am not meant to live past this. I am not meant to be here. He says, ‘I need to come aboard,’ so I tell him that it’s okay, and I put my helmet on and check that the oxygen is charged, step into the airlock and open the door.

I am gone.

Two hours is a long time. It’s time enough to get away from the Lära , and from the me that’s discovering exactly how useless he is. And from here, I am uncontrolled. I am free, perhaps for the first time. All that I know is that I was here, and I made my way out into this. I feel almost delirious with the freedom: that I can go anywhere. I have hours left, and the world – this void of a world, this space inside an anomaly that has ruined, stolen, changed my life – is my oyster.

So I move in the direction of the glimmer that I saw, because there is nothing else. I am alone, and I have always been essentially alone, and I will die utterly alone. This is not an exit or Tomas finally come to rescue me. No, he is at home, with his baker, and I hope that he is not sleeping. I hope that there is a connection between us deeper than science, and that he is seeing somehow through my eyes for my final waking minutes; that as he sleeps he will dream this dream. He will be here with me as I sleep for the last time. He’ll wake up screaming, and she will comfort him, his Lära, but he’ll know. He’ll lie to her about what he saw, because he will know what it was and what it means. I will haunt him as he presents his findings to the world. I won’t let him rest.

In the distance, the ship is nothing much any more. Like a car from an airplane. The newer version of me won’t have checked the scanners, because I did not, so he won’t know that I’m here. He’ll be getting to grips with what he must do now. He will be panicking, back on his own version of the ship, readying to leave, watching himself fall into place. I cannot remember how long that process took. Will take.

In the distance, I can’t see the glimmer, but that’s all right, because I have seen it enough to know that it’s there. A replicatable accident. If something, a situation or reaction can be replicated, that’s enough primary evidence for its existence.

It reminds me of something: when this all started, and I didn’t sleep in the bed as we launched, and I blinded myself with the light, that white glow. Sunspots. It’s almost exactly the same as that, but this time I cannot explain it. I wonder if I am being played with, some tricks and games that I barely understand. Does it matter? Does any of this?

The suit is astonishing. It’s perfect for what we needed. I can barely feel the heat of the boosters on the back of my legs, even after this long using them. They weren’t meant to be used constantly, because the battery packs in the suits were single use. They were meant to last us the whole trip. Not that that matters now.

I can’t see it, still. I shout out to it, inside my helmet. A voice inside my helmet tells me to take it off, and shout that way. Challenge the anomaly. A voice says, It’s alive, Mira. It’s playing games just as Tomas was, and I laugh that off. It’s so easy to dismiss idiocy. I know that I’m dying. I know that I’m not what I was. I think, in fact, that I have never been what I was, or what I thought I was. I have been coat-tails and clinging on, and this whole time I have been a pawn. Tomas had never really lost one of our games before this one, you know. Before it was decided that I would be coming up here. Not once. Bunk beds, Spider-Man or Batman, which side of Mother we would sit, who did the pitch, who signed the cheque. If we decided it by game, he never lost, but I kept going back because I was sure that I could outsmart him. Our mother once said, You’re the same. You look the same, you have the same interests, you think the same way about things. You’re the same, you two. Or maybe she meant it as, You too. Telling me that I am just as skilled as he is. And I wanted this. I wanted the dress up, playing at being an astronaut, the thing in space. The thing that was disposable. He wanted the control, and the power, so he gave me the win. It was easier to lose a game and let me think that I was the winner. He wanted his suit and his horn-rimmed glasses and his whisky and cigars. But more than that: I was a test. I was a sacrifice. I was part of this, and he needed to be at home to realize everything. He says goodbye. The brutal final words of a scientist to his brother; not a scientist, but a lab rat.

I shout, ‘I wish that you were here, Tomas!’ and I mean it as instead of me, but perhaps alongside me would be equally fine. I could tell him to his face. I could beg that he repented and that I forgive him. He would not, though. He would see this as what it was: his choice.

My eyes wet, I think that I see the glimmer again, so I push forward. My stomach hurts. I haven’t eaten in a while. Or had anything to drink; that was probably an oversight. I have no idea what I’m going to find here. It could be anything. I wonder if, back on Earth, they know that this is growing, or moving, or whatever. That it’s coming towards them. I wonder if Tomas knows how to deal with it. Maybe I have been useful. Maybe I will be a hero, because my being here will give them an answer. He will be the one to tell them, of course, and he’ll tell them about my sacrifice. There’s no way he’ll let my name die out. He’ll think of something appropriate, I’m sure, because he will want it to reflect well on him. He will say that I was a scientist.