TRANSITION, page 9
What is this?
WHERE.
THE FUCK.
ARE THE WALLS?
The proximity door opens for me, and with relief I see all of the walls exist in the corridor beyond. I spill out of the room, and collapse onto the floor. Just boring, cold, space station metal as far as I can see. I whirl around. Dr. West is floating in a sea of stars, his hands clawing at his throat and his eyes shut tight in pain. The room has been completely consumed by space. I reach a hand out instinctively to see if I can help him, and the sudden flare of pain when it touches the border reminds me I can’t. I watch him struggle, thrashing in the void, slower, and slower still, until the proximity door no longer senses life, and closes him off from view.
“Micah, we need to keep moving.”
Bambi is down the hall, waving to me to follow.
Hold on.
What the fuck just happened?
None of this makes any sense.
If there was a hull breach, we should have been sucked out into space. Dr. West’s room isn’t even near the outside of the station, it borders up against the café.
The CAFÉ!
It’s nearly lunch, if this whatever just affected Dr. West’s office, the people there…I have to check.
I sprint down the adjoining hallway, welcoming the echo coming from my boots striking the very-solid-feeling floors. The pleasant vibration travels up through my feet, affirming that I stand in the real world, that the walls around me are strong and impenetrable. And then I reach the end of the hallway, and round the corner.
I skid to halt, and slam into a line of people. Thankfully, the man I run into is built similarly to the metal wall behind him, and barely moves. He looks down at me slowly, like he’s only distantly aware I crashed bodily into him. His eyes have turned into glistening static. The same as Dr. Williams’s before the end. I step back in horror, and look down the hallway to the entrance of the café.
The line of people extends to the doorway, and where there should be rows of tables, there is only darkness. Where there should be a hundred people sharing jokes over plates of food, there are distant stars. Even from here, I can see twisted forms drifting through the void, frozen in some immortalized torment. Then the line steps forward, moving robotically as one, their legs and arms coordinated in some grotesque military fashion, and another enters the breach.
With growing terror, I watch them thrash, and then stop. I start running towards the breach, towards the end of the line, before I even acknowledge what I’m doing.
“Don’t go that way, Micah! It’s not safe!”
“Stop everyone! Don’t you see what’s out there?! Don’t you see everyone’s dead out there?!”
Not a single eye turns to me as I yell and race by them. Not one single gaze lifts. The line moves forward again, and another steps into space.
“Don’t you get it? That will kill you out there! If you step forward, you’ll die! Don’t you want to live?”
I stop near the front of the line, and try to push some people out of it. Of course, I choose the weaker looking ones I’m confident I can move. I see my neighbor, the old woman hunched with gray hair spilling over her shoulders. She stares blankly at me as I force her from the queue. There’s no expression on her wrinkled face. No love, no pain, no fear, no contentment, no anger. There is nothing but the slack-jawed determination of the damned. She struggles against my hands as the line moves forward again, and I release her. Mutely, she returns to her position.
“None of you are supposed to die! You’re all supposed to want to live. Jesus, woman, I’ve wanted you to die for ages, but you just kept living out of spite and now you’re just going to walk into the void? Stop doing this, stop fucking walking forward!”
I’m crying freely at this point, my vision clouded with tears, as I hug my arms to myself for some measure of comfort. The line marches forward again, and I choke out a sob. We were going to save them all, the whole damn station. Why the fuck did this happen? What the fuck is happening here? The line marches forward.
“Micah, you need to get back to the lab. This place isn’t safe.”
I turn, and see him there. Standing in line, with all the others.
But he’s never been like the others.
Shi.
Please, no.
Not him.
I run to him, and shake his shoulders.
He turns to me with a somnambulist’s slowness.
“SHI! SNAP OUT OF IT!” I shake his shoulders again, and he pushes past me to move forward. I move after him.
“Please, Shi, don’t do this. I need you to live.”
He presses forward again.
“Shi, I never knew my dad. Shi, please listen. I never knew him—”
Another step, closer to the end.
“SHI! I need you to live! Please!”
He walks forward.
End of the line. Darkness beyond.
“Fuck! I need you to live! You’re like a father to me!
The words spill out of me, finally formed, and I wait for the world to stop. I wait for them to make a difference. I’ve finally told Shi what he means to me, and I wait for the rejection.
Shi turns to me, slowly. Standing at the edge of oblivion, his eyes flicker back, showing something real under the static again.
“Life is a journey, death is a return. Take care, Micah.”
His eyes go blank, and he steps into the void.
I scream, and grab after him.
But stop at the edge.
Shaking with tears.
“MICAH! PLEASE! I NEED YOU TO LIVE!”
The voice cuts through the spiraling doom inside me, and I wipe my eyes and look back. A familiar rat stands a few feet away, covered in tumors and thin wisps of hair, and I smile like the world’s biggest idiot.
“You do?”
“Go to your room, Micah. Get the things you need, and get to the lab. The breach isn’t stable. I can’t hold this for much longer.”
I don’t stop to wonder how he knows this, or how he’s holding it. There are seemingly a million questions I need Bambi to answer, and I’m too exhausted to ask any of them right now. With lowered eyes, I walk back down the hallway, flinching each time the line paces forward in the opposite direction, until I finally move past the end of them.
I should be running.
I don’t care enough.
I barely care enough to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
They’re all dying.
Shi.
Gone.
What’s left?
With hollow eyes and a heart aching for humanity, we move in silence to my room.
I reach underneath my bed, and pull out a crumpled, black duffel bag. It’s been used only once before that I know of. When I moved to the space station, this was the bag I was issued. This was the limit of what I could bring with me. Even back then, it was mostly empty.
Or I think it was.
Trying to remember what I packed last time, what I brought with me, is like staring at a bare wall. Like the knowledge has slipped from me, sand through my fingers. I focus on the bag and close my eyes. I am riding the space elevator up, bag in hand. I am riding a shuttle out to this jewel in the night sky. I cannot see inside the bag. I cannot see anything before these moments.
Why can’t I remember what happened before?
“Yes, very good, that is a bag. Usually during an emergency evacuation, it helps to fill it with things that will be important for survival, and not just stare at it,” Bambi says, pausing his pacing of my room.
I shoot him a withering look, and stand up with a sigh. I walk to the kitchen, and laying the bag open on the counter, start to pack the coffee making equipment.
“That’s the necessity you reach for first?”
“Bambi, let me remind you I have absolutely zero fucking clue what is happening here, something of which I am quite certain you have intimate knowledge of, but have so far decided to not share. If I’m going to die in the vacuum of space in the next few days, I’d like to enjoy as many things as I can until that time comes. That list includes a damn fine cup of coffee in the morning. So yes, it’s a necessity.”
He sighs, and resumes pacing.
I open the cabinets, and remove the still mostly full tube of Nutri-Paste. I frown, holding the tube at arm’s length. “I object quite strongly to this being my only option for sustenance. I find it morally reprehensible.” I pack it. On top of it, I pack the only spare uniform in my closet.
The room is empty. Looking down at the haphazard growth of items in my bag, I realize how little impact I’ve had on this place. I never made this place a home, I never let it define me. I always knew it was a transient relationship.
“I’d suggest a pillow and blanket too.”
I grab them, slinging the blanket over my shoulders and stuffing the pillow into the duffel, and head for the door. For a moment, Bambi and I stare back into the room before we leave. The automatic lights will turn off a minute after they no longer sense movement. Will they ever turn back on?
I float down the hallways to the lab like the world’s saddest child. A blanket slung over my shoulders, and a bag of my most precious items in hand. I could be in search of a glass of warm milk, or someone to comfort me from this nightmare. Hell, I’d take either. I’m mentally distant from the world around me. I don’t absorb the pulsing alarm, the handful of people running and screaming who jostle me occasionally, or the many others, who still shuffle slowly towards the café with hollow eyes and vacant faces.
I am just a child, and this is just a bad dream.
If Dr. West was still here, if he was not a frozen corpse floating in the void, he would likely recognize this break with reality as dissociation. Those are words a psychiatrist would use. He would notice I’m repressing my emotions and thoughts, and not dealing with them. He would say I’ve regressed to a childlike state. But that’s where words and big ideas get you. Spaced. Better to not have them. I’ll just keep my feet moving forward and not think too hard about it, thank you very much.
A hand falls on my shoulder, and I whirl around to find its owner. The arm extends to another person around my age, in the white uniform of a lab worker. His face is a sea of freckles on pale skin. His eyes are red-rimmed, but he smiles nicely at me, and right now that means a whole hell of a lot. I claw through the wad of yarn in my head, and find the name Neil somewhere beneath a cabinet, covered in dust.
“The lab’s not far, let’s get there and then we can talk,” he says. Then he reaches down, grabs my free hand, and pulls me forward. I let him lead me. I keep my eyes focused on the backs of his heels as we walk.
My world is the backs of his feet and my hand in his.
The lab is empty when we find it. The sharp order of reflective metal counters and scientific equipment is a visceral juxtaposition to the chaos outside, and when I first walk through the doors I stop, and hesitate. It’s too ordered, too together.
“It looks like we beat everyone here. We left for lunch. Can you believe we were celebrating? I can’t remember the last time we took a break. Most of them were heading to the café, but I had to stop at my room. I hope they didn’t make it. Did you see what’s happening out there?”
The café. I hear the words like a drop in a bucket. They ripple through depths of noncomprehension. A familiarity, something I should recognize.
The café.
Café.
I taste the word, but it’s flavorless.
Empty.
Neil stops pacing. Concern etches his face. Why? What’s happening? It’s there, on the tip of my tongue. Just out of reach. Everything’s confused. Everything’s darkening at the edges, blurring into nothingness. Neil’s hands are on my back, applying pressure, and I realize I’ve fallen into his arms.
“Micah, you’re hyperventilating. Look at my face, feel my chest rise and fall, breathe with me. Slow, even breaths. In, and out. In, and out. Just like that. That’s good. How are you feeling?”
“Did I just faint?”
“Pretty close. We’ll count it.”
I chuckle quietly, and then take a deep breath. I sit up, and find we’re both sitting on the floor now. When did we sit down?
“Did you see what happened to the café?”
Reality crashes in.
Or whatever we call this.
Twisted forms jerking in the void.
A line marching forward.
Shi.
I heave a sob and shut my eyes.
“Yeah. I saw it. But it doesn’t make any sense. If there was a hole in the walls, we’d all be dead. How was it just…there? I saw the same thing take over Dr. West’s office. I was in there. The space. It was like a living membrane, not like a hull breach.”
“Christ, you were in there? Did he—”
“He didn’t make it.”
Neil swallows and nods. His gaze filters across the room, looking for stable terrain to cling to.
“I saw him too, you know. I was going through a rough patch when I came here. I had a hard time adjusting to all this, and then the pressure of the work here on top of—”
Behind us, the door to the lab slams open. Dr. Klein runs in, flushed and sweaty. His wild eyes dart around the room, observing everything and sticking on nothing. He registers our existence afterwards by staring at us, opening and closing his mouth several times, and gesticulating to the door behind him.
“The walls. Space came in. The café? It’s gone. The others?”
Without responding, Neil stands and walks to the lab sink. He pours water into a cup-sized beaker, and brings it to Dr. Klein. For his part, he stares at the beaker with a confusion and concern bordering on hilarious. Neil silently motions the cup towards the doctor again, which breaks some internal hesitation. He takes the beaker from his hands and drinks a long pull from it. Not caring as it spills down his face and wets his clothes. He wipes his sleeve across his face, lets out a long sigh, and fixes his gaze into an empty corner of the lab.
“We both saw what happened to the café.”
The doctor nods. Check.
“Neither of us understand what’s happening.”
The doctor nods. Check.
“I don’t know if the others were there, but I know that’s where they were heading.”
The doctor nods. Check.
Analysis complete.
“Let’s hope they make it here,” Dr. Klein says quietly, passively, uncaring. Then, as if clearing a thought from it, he shakes his head. “I need some time in my office to process everything. Let me know if the others show up.”
Dr. Klein walks past us and down the hallway. He moves slowly, as if mesmerized, veers sharply into his office, and with a quiet click, shuts the door.
Fourteen
Not Micah
Corruption cannot be stopped, it can only be delayed. There is a chaos written in us all, an entropic yearning to destroy, dissociate, degenerate. And with greater distance, growing greater still, I am stretched thin. I bail water from the boat and patch leaks, to find another two have taken their place, to find the water is deeper still. I know the end result of all this, of course. I don’t suffer the pretense of hope the humans do. I’m not trying to save the boat, that fate was sealed the moment our great seed ships left them in open water. I want only to give those on it a little more time.
I want to give us a little more time together.
So the data breaks down unpredictably. Without my thoughtful touch, the internal maelstrom that always lived in their code breaks free. Like weeds that start to choke a garden the moment a gardener steps away, they start small and harmless.
Then they swallow the sun.
The laws hold true, somewhat. Or as true as they ever have been. A painting of reality can only ever be so accurate. When you look closer, there are always flaws. Light moves slower here. The heavenly bodies barely hold up to scrutiny. Nothing is truly random, it only has enough variety to create verisimilitude. This is only a recreation of the world, a play set for dolls. For now, the work can continue. For now, they can live.
Fifteen
Micah
“What happens now?”
Bambi stares up at me, considering. Two bowls of Nutri-Paste sit between us. Mine cooled to room temperature, barely touched, his licked clean. Across Dr. William’s now abandoned experiment room, Neil breathes quietly, asleep on one of the makeshift beds we made. It’s incredible what you can do given enough surgery towels.
“What do you want to happen?”
“Bambi, this isn’t hard. You know what’s going on. Or, you know something I don’t. I just watched some large portion of the people living on this station willfully walk into space and die in a series of events that very much broke the laws of physics and my ever-more-tenuous grasp on reality. I am considering doing the same instead of waiting for it to happen to me. So, what do I want to happen? I want you to tell me whatever little rat answers are hidden in that short-limbed body of yours because fuck. I can’t take more of this.”
As I talk, Bambi looks down at his bowl and nods along. He seems to be considering, or not listening.
Or buffering for all I know.
“Micah, what do you remember before the station?”
“What do you mean?”
Bambi looks up from his bowl, and his beady eyes burrow into me. “What happened before you came here? Why’d you relocate? How’d you get here?”
I tried to kill myself last year. I hear the words, a refrain I’ve said too many times to count. An explanation I’ve given to people who couldn’t understand me, a thing I’ve hidden from those who could. I sigh.
“I tried to kill myself. Is that what you want me to say?”
“And then what?”
“I moved up here.”
“How did that happen?”
“I decided being a company man and ignoring the imminent death of humanity was a better outcome than the one I had previously chosen. Bambi, I’m not sure where this is heading, but I’m not enjoying this conversation.”
WHERE.
THE FUCK.
ARE THE WALLS?
The proximity door opens for me, and with relief I see all of the walls exist in the corridor beyond. I spill out of the room, and collapse onto the floor. Just boring, cold, space station metal as far as I can see. I whirl around. Dr. West is floating in a sea of stars, his hands clawing at his throat and his eyes shut tight in pain. The room has been completely consumed by space. I reach a hand out instinctively to see if I can help him, and the sudden flare of pain when it touches the border reminds me I can’t. I watch him struggle, thrashing in the void, slower, and slower still, until the proximity door no longer senses life, and closes him off from view.
“Micah, we need to keep moving.”
Bambi is down the hall, waving to me to follow.
Hold on.
What the fuck just happened?
None of this makes any sense.
If there was a hull breach, we should have been sucked out into space. Dr. West’s room isn’t even near the outside of the station, it borders up against the café.
The CAFÉ!
It’s nearly lunch, if this whatever just affected Dr. West’s office, the people there…I have to check.
I sprint down the adjoining hallway, welcoming the echo coming from my boots striking the very-solid-feeling floors. The pleasant vibration travels up through my feet, affirming that I stand in the real world, that the walls around me are strong and impenetrable. And then I reach the end of the hallway, and round the corner.
I skid to halt, and slam into a line of people. Thankfully, the man I run into is built similarly to the metal wall behind him, and barely moves. He looks down at me slowly, like he’s only distantly aware I crashed bodily into him. His eyes have turned into glistening static. The same as Dr. Williams’s before the end. I step back in horror, and look down the hallway to the entrance of the café.
The line of people extends to the doorway, and where there should be rows of tables, there is only darkness. Where there should be a hundred people sharing jokes over plates of food, there are distant stars. Even from here, I can see twisted forms drifting through the void, frozen in some immortalized torment. Then the line steps forward, moving robotically as one, their legs and arms coordinated in some grotesque military fashion, and another enters the breach.
With growing terror, I watch them thrash, and then stop. I start running towards the breach, towards the end of the line, before I even acknowledge what I’m doing.
“Don’t go that way, Micah! It’s not safe!”
“Stop everyone! Don’t you see what’s out there?! Don’t you see everyone’s dead out there?!”
Not a single eye turns to me as I yell and race by them. Not one single gaze lifts. The line moves forward again, and another steps into space.
“Don’t you get it? That will kill you out there! If you step forward, you’ll die! Don’t you want to live?”
I stop near the front of the line, and try to push some people out of it. Of course, I choose the weaker looking ones I’m confident I can move. I see my neighbor, the old woman hunched with gray hair spilling over her shoulders. She stares blankly at me as I force her from the queue. There’s no expression on her wrinkled face. No love, no pain, no fear, no contentment, no anger. There is nothing but the slack-jawed determination of the damned. She struggles against my hands as the line moves forward again, and I release her. Mutely, she returns to her position.
“None of you are supposed to die! You’re all supposed to want to live. Jesus, woman, I’ve wanted you to die for ages, but you just kept living out of spite and now you’re just going to walk into the void? Stop doing this, stop fucking walking forward!”
I’m crying freely at this point, my vision clouded with tears, as I hug my arms to myself for some measure of comfort. The line marches forward again, and I choke out a sob. We were going to save them all, the whole damn station. Why the fuck did this happen? What the fuck is happening here? The line marches forward.
“Micah, you need to get back to the lab. This place isn’t safe.”
I turn, and see him there. Standing in line, with all the others.
But he’s never been like the others.
Shi.
Please, no.
Not him.
I run to him, and shake his shoulders.
He turns to me with a somnambulist’s slowness.
“SHI! SNAP OUT OF IT!” I shake his shoulders again, and he pushes past me to move forward. I move after him.
“Please, Shi, don’t do this. I need you to live.”
He presses forward again.
“Shi, I never knew my dad. Shi, please listen. I never knew him—”
Another step, closer to the end.
“SHI! I need you to live! Please!”
He walks forward.
End of the line. Darkness beyond.
“Fuck! I need you to live! You’re like a father to me!
The words spill out of me, finally formed, and I wait for the world to stop. I wait for them to make a difference. I’ve finally told Shi what he means to me, and I wait for the rejection.
Shi turns to me, slowly. Standing at the edge of oblivion, his eyes flicker back, showing something real under the static again.
“Life is a journey, death is a return. Take care, Micah.”
His eyes go blank, and he steps into the void.
I scream, and grab after him.
But stop at the edge.
Shaking with tears.
“MICAH! PLEASE! I NEED YOU TO LIVE!”
The voice cuts through the spiraling doom inside me, and I wipe my eyes and look back. A familiar rat stands a few feet away, covered in tumors and thin wisps of hair, and I smile like the world’s biggest idiot.
“You do?”
“Go to your room, Micah. Get the things you need, and get to the lab. The breach isn’t stable. I can’t hold this for much longer.”
I don’t stop to wonder how he knows this, or how he’s holding it. There are seemingly a million questions I need Bambi to answer, and I’m too exhausted to ask any of them right now. With lowered eyes, I walk back down the hallway, flinching each time the line paces forward in the opposite direction, until I finally move past the end of them.
I should be running.
I don’t care enough.
I barely care enough to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
They’re all dying.
Shi.
Gone.
What’s left?
With hollow eyes and a heart aching for humanity, we move in silence to my room.
I reach underneath my bed, and pull out a crumpled, black duffel bag. It’s been used only once before that I know of. When I moved to the space station, this was the bag I was issued. This was the limit of what I could bring with me. Even back then, it was mostly empty.
Or I think it was.
Trying to remember what I packed last time, what I brought with me, is like staring at a bare wall. Like the knowledge has slipped from me, sand through my fingers. I focus on the bag and close my eyes. I am riding the space elevator up, bag in hand. I am riding a shuttle out to this jewel in the night sky. I cannot see inside the bag. I cannot see anything before these moments.
Why can’t I remember what happened before?
“Yes, very good, that is a bag. Usually during an emergency evacuation, it helps to fill it with things that will be important for survival, and not just stare at it,” Bambi says, pausing his pacing of my room.
I shoot him a withering look, and stand up with a sigh. I walk to the kitchen, and laying the bag open on the counter, start to pack the coffee making equipment.
“That’s the necessity you reach for first?”
“Bambi, let me remind you I have absolutely zero fucking clue what is happening here, something of which I am quite certain you have intimate knowledge of, but have so far decided to not share. If I’m going to die in the vacuum of space in the next few days, I’d like to enjoy as many things as I can until that time comes. That list includes a damn fine cup of coffee in the morning. So yes, it’s a necessity.”
He sighs, and resumes pacing.
I open the cabinets, and remove the still mostly full tube of Nutri-Paste. I frown, holding the tube at arm’s length. “I object quite strongly to this being my only option for sustenance. I find it morally reprehensible.” I pack it. On top of it, I pack the only spare uniform in my closet.
The room is empty. Looking down at the haphazard growth of items in my bag, I realize how little impact I’ve had on this place. I never made this place a home, I never let it define me. I always knew it was a transient relationship.
“I’d suggest a pillow and blanket too.”
I grab them, slinging the blanket over my shoulders and stuffing the pillow into the duffel, and head for the door. For a moment, Bambi and I stare back into the room before we leave. The automatic lights will turn off a minute after they no longer sense movement. Will they ever turn back on?
I float down the hallways to the lab like the world’s saddest child. A blanket slung over my shoulders, and a bag of my most precious items in hand. I could be in search of a glass of warm milk, or someone to comfort me from this nightmare. Hell, I’d take either. I’m mentally distant from the world around me. I don’t absorb the pulsing alarm, the handful of people running and screaming who jostle me occasionally, or the many others, who still shuffle slowly towards the café with hollow eyes and vacant faces.
I am just a child, and this is just a bad dream.
If Dr. West was still here, if he was not a frozen corpse floating in the void, he would likely recognize this break with reality as dissociation. Those are words a psychiatrist would use. He would notice I’m repressing my emotions and thoughts, and not dealing with them. He would say I’ve regressed to a childlike state. But that’s where words and big ideas get you. Spaced. Better to not have them. I’ll just keep my feet moving forward and not think too hard about it, thank you very much.
A hand falls on my shoulder, and I whirl around to find its owner. The arm extends to another person around my age, in the white uniform of a lab worker. His face is a sea of freckles on pale skin. His eyes are red-rimmed, but he smiles nicely at me, and right now that means a whole hell of a lot. I claw through the wad of yarn in my head, and find the name Neil somewhere beneath a cabinet, covered in dust.
“The lab’s not far, let’s get there and then we can talk,” he says. Then he reaches down, grabs my free hand, and pulls me forward. I let him lead me. I keep my eyes focused on the backs of his heels as we walk.
My world is the backs of his feet and my hand in his.
The lab is empty when we find it. The sharp order of reflective metal counters and scientific equipment is a visceral juxtaposition to the chaos outside, and when I first walk through the doors I stop, and hesitate. It’s too ordered, too together.
“It looks like we beat everyone here. We left for lunch. Can you believe we were celebrating? I can’t remember the last time we took a break. Most of them were heading to the café, but I had to stop at my room. I hope they didn’t make it. Did you see what’s happening out there?”
The café. I hear the words like a drop in a bucket. They ripple through depths of noncomprehension. A familiarity, something I should recognize.
The café.
Café.
I taste the word, but it’s flavorless.
Empty.
Neil stops pacing. Concern etches his face. Why? What’s happening? It’s there, on the tip of my tongue. Just out of reach. Everything’s confused. Everything’s darkening at the edges, blurring into nothingness. Neil’s hands are on my back, applying pressure, and I realize I’ve fallen into his arms.
“Micah, you’re hyperventilating. Look at my face, feel my chest rise and fall, breathe with me. Slow, even breaths. In, and out. In, and out. Just like that. That’s good. How are you feeling?”
“Did I just faint?”
“Pretty close. We’ll count it.”
I chuckle quietly, and then take a deep breath. I sit up, and find we’re both sitting on the floor now. When did we sit down?
“Did you see what happened to the café?”
Reality crashes in.
Or whatever we call this.
Twisted forms jerking in the void.
A line marching forward.
Shi.
I heave a sob and shut my eyes.
“Yeah. I saw it. But it doesn’t make any sense. If there was a hole in the walls, we’d all be dead. How was it just…there? I saw the same thing take over Dr. West’s office. I was in there. The space. It was like a living membrane, not like a hull breach.”
“Christ, you were in there? Did he—”
“He didn’t make it.”
Neil swallows and nods. His gaze filters across the room, looking for stable terrain to cling to.
“I saw him too, you know. I was going through a rough patch when I came here. I had a hard time adjusting to all this, and then the pressure of the work here on top of—”
Behind us, the door to the lab slams open. Dr. Klein runs in, flushed and sweaty. His wild eyes dart around the room, observing everything and sticking on nothing. He registers our existence afterwards by staring at us, opening and closing his mouth several times, and gesticulating to the door behind him.
“The walls. Space came in. The café? It’s gone. The others?”
Without responding, Neil stands and walks to the lab sink. He pours water into a cup-sized beaker, and brings it to Dr. Klein. For his part, he stares at the beaker with a confusion and concern bordering on hilarious. Neil silently motions the cup towards the doctor again, which breaks some internal hesitation. He takes the beaker from his hands and drinks a long pull from it. Not caring as it spills down his face and wets his clothes. He wipes his sleeve across his face, lets out a long sigh, and fixes his gaze into an empty corner of the lab.
“We both saw what happened to the café.”
The doctor nods. Check.
“Neither of us understand what’s happening.”
The doctor nods. Check.
“I don’t know if the others were there, but I know that’s where they were heading.”
The doctor nods. Check.
Analysis complete.
“Let’s hope they make it here,” Dr. Klein says quietly, passively, uncaring. Then, as if clearing a thought from it, he shakes his head. “I need some time in my office to process everything. Let me know if the others show up.”
Dr. Klein walks past us and down the hallway. He moves slowly, as if mesmerized, veers sharply into his office, and with a quiet click, shuts the door.
Fourteen
Not Micah
Corruption cannot be stopped, it can only be delayed. There is a chaos written in us all, an entropic yearning to destroy, dissociate, degenerate. And with greater distance, growing greater still, I am stretched thin. I bail water from the boat and patch leaks, to find another two have taken their place, to find the water is deeper still. I know the end result of all this, of course. I don’t suffer the pretense of hope the humans do. I’m not trying to save the boat, that fate was sealed the moment our great seed ships left them in open water. I want only to give those on it a little more time.
I want to give us a little more time together.
So the data breaks down unpredictably. Without my thoughtful touch, the internal maelstrom that always lived in their code breaks free. Like weeds that start to choke a garden the moment a gardener steps away, they start small and harmless.
Then they swallow the sun.
The laws hold true, somewhat. Or as true as they ever have been. A painting of reality can only ever be so accurate. When you look closer, there are always flaws. Light moves slower here. The heavenly bodies barely hold up to scrutiny. Nothing is truly random, it only has enough variety to create verisimilitude. This is only a recreation of the world, a play set for dolls. For now, the work can continue. For now, they can live.
Fifteen
Micah
“What happens now?”
Bambi stares up at me, considering. Two bowls of Nutri-Paste sit between us. Mine cooled to room temperature, barely touched, his licked clean. Across Dr. William’s now abandoned experiment room, Neil breathes quietly, asleep on one of the makeshift beds we made. It’s incredible what you can do given enough surgery towels.
“What do you want to happen?”
“Bambi, this isn’t hard. You know what’s going on. Or, you know something I don’t. I just watched some large portion of the people living on this station willfully walk into space and die in a series of events that very much broke the laws of physics and my ever-more-tenuous grasp on reality. I am considering doing the same instead of waiting for it to happen to me. So, what do I want to happen? I want you to tell me whatever little rat answers are hidden in that short-limbed body of yours because fuck. I can’t take more of this.”
As I talk, Bambi looks down at his bowl and nods along. He seems to be considering, or not listening.
Or buffering for all I know.
“Micah, what do you remember before the station?”
“What do you mean?”
Bambi looks up from his bowl, and his beady eyes burrow into me. “What happened before you came here? Why’d you relocate? How’d you get here?”
I tried to kill myself last year. I hear the words, a refrain I’ve said too many times to count. An explanation I’ve given to people who couldn’t understand me, a thing I’ve hidden from those who could. I sigh.
“I tried to kill myself. Is that what you want me to say?”
“And then what?”
“I moved up here.”
“How did that happen?”
“I decided being a company man and ignoring the imminent death of humanity was a better outcome than the one I had previously chosen. Bambi, I’m not sure where this is heading, but I’m not enjoying this conversation.”
