The Edge, page 19
Come on. Come the fuck on.
While I wait: I watch the video again. I watch all the videos again.
I wonder why they recorded this, I wonder what it could help achieve.
And then I think about why anybody ever documents anything: this is evidence. Except, not of a crime, perhaps; but of a discovery.
I do not need to sleep, I tell myself. My tiredness is wracking me: every bit of my body aching for just a moment of actual rest. My shoulders crying to slump; my feet sobbing for stillness, for elevation.
I think about touching down, feeling the ground beneath my feet, actual ground. My arms wrapped around my sweet boy’s back, his neck. Holding him close, and breathing him in.
Do not say a word. This is how it works, I know.
I have come so far, and there are secrets and lies and deceits and deaths, but this is so close to being over.
I was hospitalized, and I realized: do not say a word. Because everything was twisted by Xavier, turned into something else, I realized that silence was my best friend.
Do not say a word.
They want you neutered and simplified, turned into a person that you are not; so do not fall into their trap. Say the right things. Do the right things. Act the way that they want you to act, until the doctor says, You’re fine.
Do not say a word.
When the new doctor came, she was horrified. You shouldn’t be here, she said. What have they done to you? What have they done?
I know, I told her. I have been trying. I spoke the wrong way to her, the way that I had been told not to talk; and she listened. I just want to go home, I said.
And now, the same. There’s so much chaos here, so much I don’t understand. And I just want to go home.
Click click, the ruby slippers clicked together.
Do not say a word.
Do not say a word, because I simply want to go home.
A voice comes over the station’s speakers as I am sitting in my room, holding my bag, eyes shut. I was asleep, I think; passed out, while waiting. A meeting in ten minutes, in the mess. Attendance is mandatory. The voice that of the computer system, rather than Hyvönen or Sian or Desh. No joviality or celebration of the fact that we are reaching the end of this thing.
Half past seven, which means a call, most days. I turn to the computer, and I press Theo’s name; but I press it slowly, feeling it. The tactile vibrations of the screen trembling through my fingers, and I can’t tell where my tremor ends and its begins.
‘Hello?’ He is there, he is here, he speaks and I cry, because I can’t help it. He doesn’t seem to react to me doing that, so I touch the screen.
‘Are you okay?’ I ask, and he nods.
‘We need you, Mama,’ he says, and I sob, nod furiously at him.
‘I’m coming home. I’m coming home, Theo.’
‘Daddy says that you’re going to save the world.’ Desperation in his voice. I try to remember: outside of his toddler tantrums, have I ever heard him desperate before? Have I ever heard this pleading? And why would his father say that? Surely the knot – ‘Daddy says you’re going to save us all. Please save us, Mama.’
I feel sick. To my gut, to my head, to my soul.
‘Is your father there?’ I ask him, and he shakes his head, and he’s about to speak when he freezes, he freezes still, absolutely still. On the screen, not moving, the connection frazzled, this last call, this last fucking time—
Behind him, the clock moves. The clock in the room, it’s moving. The second hand still ticking, so I keep watching, waiting for Theo to move again, as if it’s a game he’s playing; as if he’s not frozen mid-blur, his movement softening the edges. The room keeps moving. A plant, behind him, a curtain, swaying in the breeze. Only Theo stock-still, rigid.
The second hand on the clock; the minute hand.
Before I left, I taught Theo to tell the time.
This is the second hand; this is the minute hand. This is how long until I will be home.
My head aches all of a sudden, a wave of it coming on, this colossal wave of pain, shooting behind my eyes, up my neck, into the base of my skull.
I look at the screen, to focus on something – remember how this works, remember to focus, Mon’s voice in my head, focus, focus; and I picture myself, somehow walking through the walls, out of the station into the cold, my body like those bodies in their mesh, their reflective fabric coffins, drifting to nothing, to the peace and release of nothing at all – and Theo disappears, but the room is there, the clock is still ticking. It unpacks, it falls apart.
Glitch, glitch, into different components.
The image on screen crashes into code. Zeroes and ones; nothing, really, at all. It’s code, not video. It’s a simulation.
Desh’s porn. Desh’s videos. Fakery, false images. Making people do things that they do not want to do, that they would never have done. Fake their faces, fake their voices.
Desh is so good at it, you can’t even see the joins.
Theo is not there, none of it is there.
But I am here. I am here.
Please assemble, a message on the comm says, and I sit in the darkness, and I let my head clear. I wait for it to clear. I pray that it will clear.
Please: just let me go home.
The others, minus Gibson, are all standing in a circle when I get to the mess, with the exception of Hyvönen, who leans against a table. He is the first to glance at me as I approach, and he talks as if there’s nothing going on behind the scenes.
‘Miss Becker,’ he says, ‘we were just talking about you.’ I don’t say anything. I survey the room: Mon, still staring down, refusing to look at me. Desh’s eyes flitting, as if he’s working, but I catch glances towards my face, trying not to be seen. Berry with his eyes shut, already in his exo. And Sian: who looks at me and nods, greeting or acceptance or affirmation of something, I can’t tell which. ‘We have only a few hours in which to finish our preparations. I trust you’re ready to aid me in our final steps.’
‘I just tried to call my son,’ I say. None of them replies. ‘It was broken.’
‘The connection is troubled since our proximity to the Anomaly became as it is,’ Hyvönen says.
‘Bullshit,’ I snap back. ‘There’s something wrong with it. I saw Theo freeze, and the rest of it, the rest of the world, it carried on. It crashed, my son crashed—’
Hyvönen shakes his head, cuts me off. ‘Miss Becker, it sounds very much as if you might have seen something impossible.’ He turns to Mon, but she’s not looking at him. He reaches out, as if he’s about to touch her; instead, he clicks his fingers. Awake. ‘Perhaps you could furnish Miss Becker with something to help her stay in herself.’
Mon looks up. At me. ‘I can administer a shot,’ she says.
‘That would be for the best, I think. Keep the mission on track,’ Hyvönen says. He shakes his head, mock sadness. ‘There is a lot of pressure up here,’ and he smiles, this fucking half-smile, ah ha, I understand the physics, I have made a joke, ‘and it’s hard for us to cope. For all of us. Sometimes we need the help, I think.’
‘Fuck you,’ I say. ‘I’m not taking anything.’
‘You have a contract,’ he replies. Again, that shaking of his head, tut tut tut. I am so disappointed in you. My head hurts, the pain so strong, so overwhelming. And I just want to go home.
‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘I’m confused, that’s all. I just … Want to go home.’
Hyvönen stares at me, blank-eyed. Finally, his lips curl upwards, just enough. ‘Then let us finish what we have already started,’ he says.
11
I am escorted, it feels, to Zvezda; to Ukonvasara. Hyvönen and Sian and Mon and Berry behind me, as I lead the way; but I am not in the lead, not in charge.
‘What’s the plan from here?’ I ask Hyvönen, and he exhales, as if he’s been holding the words in for so long he can’t even fathom holding them a minute longer. He doesn’t answer, though. Just the exhalation. ‘I need to run the diagnostics before it can go anywhere,’ I say.
I think: I should have a plan. I do not have a plan.
‘You should have done this already,’ he says.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, and I smile, and I nod. Apologize and smile and nod, that’s the rule. That’s what the doctor said to me, when Xavier was arguing that I wasn’t healthy. Smile, nod, get past this. Tell him what he wants to hear, because he will never hear different.
They will only ever try to keep you suppressed, she said. When they know that they can.
So you block them from doing it. Put things in their way. Throw them off.
I type, frantically. Running diagnostics, yes, but also: checking permissions, to make sure that I can stop the launch should I need to; that I can keep him here, until I get my answers.
In the screen’s reflection, I can see Sian standing behind me. She’s watching me.
I know from her degree that she must know her way around code, or at least know enough. I wonder if she can tell what I am doing. Because she doesn’t try to stop me.
I find the security settings. Pray that Desh isn’t watching this, that he’s got something of his own to be getting on with.
But the permissions are already changed, already altered. My name on all of them.
The ship is already registered to me. The permissions locked behind encryptions that cannot be bypassed.
Password, the system asks me.
My password is my son’s name. When I was away, I needed something I would never forget, something burned in. I have never, never worked on Ukonvasara, I have never set these passwords.
But as I type his name, fingers so fast on the keyboard, driven by muscle memory, I know that I also have been here, somehow. A premonition of sorts, that the password will work, that I will be an existing user.
Permission granted—
‘How far have you made it that we can travel?’ Hyvönen’s voice, cracked and old. Suddenly so, so old.
‘Far,’ I hear myself say.
‘How far?’
‘Depends on momentum inside there. Weeks, I would think. Maybe months, if you’re sparing with life support.’
I back out of security, back to the basic systems. I have been here. My fingerprints all over it, even if only digital.
‘Ah, we will have to breathe lightly,’ he says. ‘Launch will be in a few hours,’ he says, to nobody in particular.
Sian doesn’t leave with him, not at first. She hangs back, just a little.
‘Don’t do this,’ she says.
‘What?’
‘Please, Ali.’ I can’t think when I have heard her use my name before. ‘Don’t dig. Don’t do this to yourself. Not everything needs to be answered.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘But you do,’ she says, ‘just as I do.’
And then she’s gone, and I am alone.
I march across the donut to Mon’s bedroom. I’ve rarely been inside here, she is so private about her own space, but I don’t give a shit.
Her door is unlocked, gives under my hand. She’s sitting on the edge of her bed, staring at something in her hands; and she looks up and at me, and she blinks. Doesn’t say anything, but she’s been crying. ‘You’ve been lying to me,’ I say, and she shakes her head.
‘No, no,’ she says, ‘you don’t understand.’
‘So make me.’
‘I can’t,’ she says. ‘I’m so sorry, Ali. Trust me, please, when I say that I did this for you. I did, I swear it, I did.’ The thing in her hands: a picture of me and her, taken some time ago. Up here? The Anomaly so, so far back, so when we just arrived. We are smiling. She has a physical camera, I’d forgotten that, one of those from the last century, that prints out the picture straight away. I’d forgotten that entirely. Her wall, a mess of pictures: of her, of me, of Desh. Of crew members who have since left. Me, Snipes, Mon, Desh. I don’t remember it being taken, not really. I remember being in a room, with them—
‘You’ve changed my memory.’ I look at the picture in her hands. Swipe for it. We are laughing at something, her head rocked backwards to near-snap point, mine shocked, eyes wide. ‘I don’t remember this. I wasn’t there for this.’
‘You were.’
‘I fucking wasn’t,’ I hear myself shout. I hear the words, feel my temper buzzing behind my face.
‘Please, Ali, calm down,’ she says, but—
‘You need to calm down,’ Xavier said.
I never shouted. I never did, not once, until he started lying to me, about me.
‘Tell me what you’ve done to me,’ I say to her. I want to hit her, that’s what this is. A swelling. The pain in my head, my whole body; like a hangover caused by nothing at all. Chattering teeth, subtle under my tensed jaw. And to swing my fist, to connect it with her, an instinct I literally haven’t felt since Theo was tiny, when I came back from hospital and Xavier said that I would do nights, as he had done them in my absence – as if it was my fucking choice – and Theo wouldn’t stop crying, and he wouldn’t take to me, he wouldn’t take to me, and I could see in his eyes, this idea of who is this woman?, and I wanted to hurt myself, to hurt Xavier, to hold Theo’s arm tightly and beg, please, can’t you see, can’t you feel how much I love you, what I have gone through for you? ‘Did you kill Snipes? Did you need him dead?’
‘What?’ Her face aghast. A truth, I think; so I talk, faster. Get the words out.
‘I saw the drone, the footage of what you were doing. I saw you killing Snipes, out there. Over and over you did it.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘I watched you. I watched you, killing him, bringing him back, killing him again.’
‘Snipes killed himself,’ she says. ‘I didn’t have anything to do with his death.’
His voice, soundless, screaming, as the rush of air; and I feel the lack of it pulling on my lungs, stopping me drawing breath the way I know I can, the way I know I should.
‘Don’t lie to me.’ Am I screaming? My voice is out of my control.
‘I’m not. I told you I’m not. Honestly, Ali: all I’ve done is try to help you. You’re my friend, and you asked me to help you. So I am.’
I believe her, I think. For some reason, I believe her.
I remember Xavier sitting next to me, holding my hand. He said, ‘We’re agreed, I think, that something needs to change, Ali.’
‘We are not agreed,’ I spat at him.
‘I can’t remember that picture,’ I say, ‘and I can’t remember putting my password into the Ukonvasara’s systems. I can’t remember it.’ I can hear the desperation in my own voice as it comes to me. ‘You’ve fucked with my memories.’
As I say it, it feels like something I should have predicted, or could have predicted; a twist in my story. Too obvious, too obvious.
Mon looks down at her hands. ‘You need to talk to the old man,’ she says.
‘You tell me. Tell me about Snipes.’
‘I’ll do better,’ she says. ‘I’ll show you.’
She loads files. She goes through medical logs, files and records that are private to her, that ordinarily she wouldn’t even contemplate letting me see. I suppose that these are extraordinary times. A file all for Snipes. All his interviews, his medical records. Hundreds upon hundreds of psych evaluations, all numbers. She lingers on the file system, to let me see without actually showing me. Like she wants to prove their due diligence.
Then: a folder labelled pre, another labelled post.
Inside post, a single video file; and a document labelled autopsy.
‘Are you sure you want to see this?’ Mon asks. I nod, I feel myself nod.
Play.
Motion-triggered footage of Snipes entering the changing room. Trying the airlock, and finding himself locked out; as if, this is what they were afraid of.
Moments from death.
‘Wait,’ I say, ‘not here. Start earlier. I need to see him before.’
She shuffles off the chair. Lets me take it. ‘Why don’t you drive,’ she says.
I swipe through the folders. Everything tagged with his name since he came onto the station, everything here is accessible.
The hour before he died. Here he is, in his room. Looking through the bag on his bed. A bag of possessions, brought with him because, why? Because he knew he was going to die. Important things, and I asked him, I remember asking him—
A day earlier, and there I am, with him. My hair, the back of my neck. The angle, as I stand in the doorway, as I talk to him. I remember my words.
Are you coming to eat? A bunch of us—
Another video, from another day. I am sitting on his bed, and he is talking me through his bag. Medicine – an inhaler, meant to kick-start him, if he needs it; a photograph of his mother and father, and another of his brothers; the book he’s reading, an old paperback, tattered at the edges; his clothes, sweatpants, a t-shirt, his favourites. I remember the words, except not the words. Memories that are tightly organized and perfect.
‘Is there sound?’ I ask. Mon nods, swipes, types a password of her own.
I watch her fingers as she types it. She’s not as fast as I am at typing, and not as security-conscious. Hers is a word: Andre.
Her son’s name.
We, people, humans, are so obvious, so predictable. So alike.
Here’s my voice, cutting through a hiss of white ambience. ‘Aren’t you scared?’ I hear myself asking.
‘Of course,’ he says. ‘You’d be a monster not to be.’
‘But,’ the me on screen says, and he nods.
‘But I’m scared anyway.’ His leg jiggles. The me that’s on screen notices it. I notice it.
‘I would say don’t be,’ the me says.
‘It’s healthy,’ he says.
‘I’ll leave you,’ Mon says. ‘You should watch this by yourself.’ She stands, goes to the door. ‘If you need me,’ she says, but then she’s gone, not telling me where she’ll be.
I watch another video. He is kissing me, against the wall of his room, behind the door. I want to click back, to see how we got there. Did we stumble into the room, hands on each other? Did we keep it a secret? I can’t quite remember.
