An Astronaut's Life (6 page)

‘How does it work?'

Mendel leans in and places his hand on a lever.

‘Here.'

Sean looks at Mendel in the dim light. He's not a large man. Only Sean's height,
much smaller than Sean's dad, and he's dressed in a shirt and beige pants. He looks,
Sean thinks, like someone who couldn't really belong anywhere else.

‘Maybe you should pull the lever,' Sean says.

‘It's a decision for the group. We agreed on that.'

‘But it's not. You said you can't start again. Maybe the others can. Maybe they still
have choices. You're the one who built this, why shouldn't you be one who decides?'

‘I'm not deciding today.'

‘I would.'

‘Are you so determined for revenge?'

‘It's not just revenge. I already told you; I can't start over. You want to do this
to save your wife from knowing what a failure you are. I want it because I want this
thing out of the world. It's not to protect my parents, or me—or even my sister.
It can't bring her back. I just
want a world where this photo never existed.'

Mendel nods. ‘I want that world too,' he says. ‘But you've looked at it. Your parents.
If I pull that lever, it's not just the bad guys who suffer.' He gestures to the
machine. ‘It doesn't distinguish your intentions, your interpretations, or what is
human from machine. It just identifies specific memory cells and destroys them. It
could destroy communications, much of what we know and remember about the world.
I can't predict it, Charles, I can't test it. Even though it's my machine, it will
be out of my control.'

‘Will your wife remember the thing you wrote?'

‘No. It will be as if that never existed. And everything that follows from it will
be gone, too.'

Sean shifts and knocks over a mop. It clatters against the wall and lands with a
thud.

‘Sorry.'

Mendel makes a tight smile. ‘Are you sure about it, Charles?'

Sean nods. ‘Yes. I'm more sure than not.'

Mendel pulls the lever and the sound of the machine grows to a warm hum. It's not
loud, but Sean can feel it in his chest. It builds until it's too much. ‘Can we get
out of here?' he says.

‘I'll give you a ride.'

He follows Mendel up the stairs and out into the night.

Half an hour later, Sean stands on the front lawn of a small yellow-brick house and
watches as Mendel's car disappears around a corner, the indicator blinking courteously
despite the absence of traffic. He wonders how Mendel and his wife will spend the
night. On the ride here, Mendel told him that in just a matter of hours they might
not remember any of this.

Sean makes his way along the side of the house. The gate is locked, which is new,
but he climbs it without too much trouble, probably because of the adrenalin. He
pictures a string of tiny bots spilling into the basement of the Gratton Building.
In reality, they are too small to see. They are as tiny as a virus. They are as single-minded.

‘François?' he calls, standing outside his friend's window. He says it louder.

There's no reply, but a shifting light through the curtains suggests François might
still be awake. Sean raps his knuckles against the window and after a startled clatter
from inside, it slides open.

‘What the fuck?' François can't tell who is there because of the darkness, but he
makes his voice gruff, just in case.

‘It's me,' Sean says, coming closer to show himself in the light. ‘Hi.'

‘Shit!' François fumbles to free the flyscreen from the window. ‘Are you okay?'

‘Yes, sure,' Sean says, to dispel the empathy in his friend's face. ‘I'm fine. I
just wanted to see you. I did something.'

‘Your parents will freak.'

‘They won't wake up.'

Sean climbs inside and drops onto the carpet. François extends a hand to steady him.

‘I sneak out every week,' Sean says. The pressure and comfort of François' hand makes
him confessional. ‘My parents take pills so they can sleep, they don't hear a thing.
I climb out the window.'

It's too dark to see his expression. François squeezes Sean's arm.

‘You've got to come with me,' Sean says.

‘Okay—my shoes.'

‘I'll meet you out front.'

As he waits, Sean pictures his sleeping parents. He doesn't mind that they take medicine
to sleep. He just hates the thought of them waking, that moment where it all floods
back each morning.

François looks apprehensive as he emerges from the side gate and Sean is afraid that
if he does not hurry and explain, his friend will turn him away.

‘You said you did something,' François says.

‘Have you got your phone?'

‘Yes. What is it?'

‘Let's go.' Sean steps away, towards the street.

‘Tell me.'

‘The punishment. It's happening.'

Sean sets off down the driveway and François follows. For some reason François doesn't
seem to question what Sean has said. When Sean reaches the street he looks back at
his friend and the expression on his face is so concerned, so trusting, that Sean
feels his first wave of doubt.

‘Come on,' he says, because he also feels an urgent need to escape.

He starts to run, and François runs alongside him, through the circles of road lit
by streetlamps and the darkness in between. The sounds of their breathing and
their
footfalls form a heavy rhythm. Sean is regretful and frightened and excited; he is
bursting with all of these things and he is not thinking about the picture, until
he realises that this is the first time in forever he has not thought about it. François
passes him and Sean shouts ‘Hey!' and his thoughts are overtaken by his proximity
to François. He wants to hug François again. He wants to shout. Everything is going
to change now—could that be true?

The university's horticultural gardens contain over two hundred plant species, if
you include the grasslands, but at night very few of them can be identified. You
would only care what they were if you were a particularly committed botanist because
in the darkness they are all home to spiders.

In the garden's back corner, behind the Gratton Building, there's a nameplate attached
to a rock explaining how the unassuming shrub behind it is in fact the critically
endangered
Lomatia tasmanica
, a clone that reproduces itself identically by dropping
branches that then take root.

There's a window jammed open right behind it. It's here that a series of microscopic
machines stream
out into the world. Some rest on the leaves of
Lomatia tasmanica
.
Others are swept away because they are so light. They're lighter than air, and more
determined.

Sean and François are nowhere nearby. They're kilometres away, on the second floor
of a supermarket car park in the suburbs. Sean had pictured a mountain, a bridge,
but there is nothing like that in the neighbourhood so he leads François up the concrete
ramp to the top, and they lean against the metal railings and look out across the
empty parking spaces below. He explains that the nanobots are so small they can be
inhaled or swallowed or absorbed through the mucous membranes of a human. Because
they are only robots, they can't differentiate between the electric impulses of the
brain and those of a machine.

‘Is this real?' François says.

‘I think so. You can't see them, but the machine was working.'

‘And they destroy specific types of cells?'

‘Neurons. Memories. Files.'

‘It's exactly what we dreamt of.'

‘I know,' Sean says. ‘It's perfect. Well, Mendel hopes the brain will adapt to the
changes, but there will be some problems.'

‘How long do we have?' François leans forward over the railing and lifts his feet
so he's balanced against the metal.

‘I'm not sure. Maybe hours.'

There are no cars, but there are lights around the car park's perimeter as well as
signs that are all lit up. Sean isn't sure about the extent of the threat these things
pose, given the possibility of electromagnetic radiation, but he realises he wants
more time. He doesn't want to be awake when it happens, he just wants to go to sleep
and then everything will have changed.

‘Your phone,' he remembers.

François takes it from his pocket.

‘Do I just turn it off?'

‘I'm not sure. I thought we'd smash it.'

François looks uncertain, but only for a second. He hands it over.

Sean holds the phone over the railing and when he lets go they lose sight of its
path in the shadows. The sound is an unsatisfying crack followed by the tinny echo
of falling plastic.

‘It's going to happen to us anyway,' says François.

‘I know.'

‘Fuck, you really did it. Take that!' He leans forward
to shout, ‘Take that, you
fucking cum bags.' He shouts louder, ‘Take that, fuck-faced dick faces!'

The sound settles over the car park.

‘How long now?'

They have hours. Sean's excited about the hours he has with François. He thinks about
the things he already has to fill into his chart, but by the time he gets home he
might not remember the chart at all.

From somewhere far away he hears something, a very low hum. It could just be a distant
vehicle. But no.

‘I've been thinking about something,' he says.

‘What's that?' François slumps forward against the railing.

‘I've been thinking about kissing you.'

François doesn't look over. He doesn't move.

‘I have too,' he says.

‘I was scared to do it.'

François straightens up. ‘But why?' he says. ‘What might happen?'

Sean considers this. Deep in his chest he feels the machine's hum grow stronger.
He thinks about what it would be like to kiss François and, for once, it doesn't
seem that anything too bad could happen.

THE ARCHITECT

They were eating dinner when the call came. It was the landline phone, which rarely
rang, so they exchanged a look as the architect stood up to take it.

‘Hello?'

He knew it would be one of those international call centres and he was probably going
to hang up before they could finish a sentence, but instead a serious voice asked
for him by name.

‘Yes?'

He watched his wife dip a slice of bread into the sauce of her pasta. It was his
pesto cream sauce, the one meal the architect could always make well.

‘I'm sorry?' he said into the phone.

His wife looked up.

‘I don't think I understand,' the architect said. ‘What do you want me to do?'

As the architect explained the phone call, he looked from his wife to the muted TV
where a reporter was interviewing a politician. The man on the phone was a doctor,
he said. The man said he was Leisel's doctor, but there had to be some mistake.

‘So why is she asking for you now?'

They hadn't spoken in fifteen, maybe twenty years.

‘She must be in love with you,' his wife said. ‘Or making amends? Maybe she's dying
and wants to reconnect. Or she's an addict—what if it's part of her treatment?'

The architect didn't share his wife's enthusiasm for theories, and since the doctor
hadn't made clear what Leisel's illness was, all he could offer was that the doctor
might have mentioned some kind of accident. Or had he said incident? Either way,
it might have been a euphemism.

He tried to tell his wife what he remembered about Leisel, the way they used to skip
school and hide out in the old caravan behind her mum's place. How they'd papered
the walls with drawings of the house he would
one day design. By the end of their
first year together they must have had fifty or sixty different versions of their
future home: houses on stilts, houses dug into hillsides, houses seventeen-storeys
high. How they'd lost their virginity looking up at those sketches of their future.
They'd been inseparable. And then she broke it off, without warning as far as he
could recall—but, God, that was years ago now.

It was his wife who suggested the visit. He might as well drive over later in the
week, what did he have to lose? Leisel was ill, and she'd been asking for him.

In person, the doctor wasn't so intimidating. He was sober but friendly, with narrow
shoulders that gave him a defeated appearance. The hospital wasn't what the architect
expected, either. His wife had hugged him that morning and they'd shared their misgivings.
They'd pictured barred windows and human distress, but in reality it was all automatic
doors whooshing open as he was led to a bright meeting room.

The doctor explained Leisel had forgotten a lot of things.

‘Try not to inundate her with too much information,' he said.

‘Are you sure it's a good idea for me to be here?'

‘Just don't expect her to talk too much—she'll get confused if you push her. We must
be patient.'

‘And this will help?'

The doctor led the architect down a long corridor and into a locked ward. He warned
that Leisel was still adjusting to life in hospital and to large amounts of medication—which
would probably not cure her, but might help numb her anxiety.

‘Her delusion might be permanent.'

The architect retraced the steps he'd taken since his life had diverged with Leisel's
and he tried to imagine where the reversal of all that time might have left him.
The doctor said Leisel believed she was still seventeen.

He saw her from behind. Even with her hair cut to her shoulders, he recognised her.
Leisel must have known he was coming because when he entered the TV room she smiled
without surprise.