The Echo (17 page)

‘Hello,’ I say.

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

I spend the entire first time – or maybe this is the second time, I don’t know how to think of it – desperate to save her. When she replies to me, I ask her what she remembers. She remembers the
Ishiguro
powering up its engines, and she remembers things going wrong. She asks where Tobi and Lennox are, because she cannot see them. They are both on this side of the anomaly. She asks where we are, because she is scared. I try to make it better. I tell her that I am here. I tell her that we are going to save her, and I call Wallace and Hikaru into the airlock room and we fight about this, screaming at each other about what we do. They do not understand this; I do not understand this. Tomas stays quiet, conspicuous by his absence. Eventually I am forced to ask him.

‘What do you think, Brother?’ I ask, but he doesn’t reply. Inna begs for reassurance, and we tell her that it’s okay, that we’re working on something; and then she tells us that she is having trouble breathing. She says that she feels light-headed, and she starts to cough. We’re too shocked to make this work; too ruined. We dread to think of her out there, and what she is going through. When she dies, it’s like a replay. It is always the same way, too similar for comfort, or coincidence. She asks for air, sputtering. She is begging for air, as if it’s something we are depriving her of. Then she dies, just like the first time. We stand, and we shake, and we hang our heads. None of us say anything; and then she opens her eyes again, and takes her first gasp for the third time. The first time she was awake, maybe it was something else. Something that we couldn’t explain, something like that. This time, the next time, I know that it is destined to happen again, and again. It is cyclical.

‘What’s happening?’ Inna asks as she gasps herself to life again, the same way that she has the past two times.

‘What do you remember?’ I ask her. I change it by interfering, but the general routine remains the same. She wants answers, and I cannot provide her with them.

‘The ship, we were at the ship,’ she says. The parts in between: they are gone to her. But I remember, and Hikaru remembers them, and Wallace remembers them. At the end of this cycle, two hours later, she paws at the anomaly wall like every other time. Then she dies, screaming and howling, tearing her throat ragged in that sealed bubble of a helmet; and then she wakes up again, and asks the same question.

‘This is curious,’ Tomas says. I don’t know what I want to say to him, but it is so much more than that.

It is awful to watch her, because she always dies the same way. Something about that makes it worse: as if you want the chaos of death to make it seem real, somehow. You want to believe that it cannot be happening, whereas her deaths only reinforce the terrible nature of her situation. Each time she coughs and chokes on her words in the exact same way that she did before. Wallace doesn’t leave the airlock. He sits there on the floor and watches her, in the distance. Not her face on the screens: the nothing, and her in the middle of it. He says, ‘This is so fucking cruel. How can this be happening?’ but I don’t know what to say to him in reply. It feels rhetorical. When Hikaru tells us that we have to remove the artificial gravity, because the batteries are suffering, Wallace clips himself to a rail and floats there, right where he was. The four of us – I’m including Tomas in this, even though he is a minute late to every decision, every conversational note – talk about how to get Inna out of the anomaly. If we even can.

There are rules here, even though we are not wholly aware of them. We are piecing them together as we go. The anomaly is as a semi-permeable membrane. Anything can pass into it; but then they cannot come out. Detritus, scrap, corpses: only non-living matter can return to this side of the anomaly wall. (This is a logic that we have reached by observation rather than the regular scruples and tests we would apply to such a theory. We would test it, had we a rat or a dog or anything else living that we could send over there. Instead, we have Inna, our only test subject, and we can pull the rope that connects us to her, but she doesn’t move. Lennox and Tobi were like her, trapped; but they died. Now they are on our side. We spend time during Inna’s next cycle – this is almost like a video game, I think, when we used to call the ability to replay moments Lives, as if that was normal, to have multiple attempts at something with no penalties involved – trying to pull her through, to force the matter, and I ask her to press against it at the point where the tether enters and exits, which she does as she cries for us to save her, but she cannot get her hands through – there are no points of entry or exit – and then she beats the cable and the anomaly both with her hands in melodrama, or what would be melodrama if she wasn’t so slowly and gradually dying.) I wonder about the
Ishiguro
– why it was where it was, and what we saw, those two bodies floating off. How deep they might get, propelled by the explosion. Hikaru wonders if we can’t just drive the ship into the anomaly, get Inna and then leave. The ship is not living. Metal passes through it fine. I think about the
Ishiguro
and I wonder. It’s nothing. I can’t explain it to Hikaru and Wallace, but I tell them that I don’t think it’ll work.

‘It’s too much of a risk,’ I say. ‘What if we all end up stuck on the inside of that thing?’ They nod. I know more about this than them, in theory. They’re not so desperate to get her back that they would mutiny. Or, at least, Hikaru isn’t. Wallace seems lost in this. He doesn’t stop staring into the middle distance. They have a word for people with his look in their eyes. I forget it. A psychological term to describe them.

‘He’s thinking of something,’ Hikaru says, when we talk about it. Wallace is asleep: passed out, drifting in the airlock room. ‘He’s been through a lot. We all have.’ Later, Hikaru says that he thinks that I should sleep as well, and he should. We should all sleep. ‘We can’t do this if we’re falling apart,’ he says. We agree – I take another stim, but I agree to the theory, that the two of them need to rest or we won’t be functioning at 100 per cent efficiency – but one of us needs to stay awake, to watch Inna. To be here with her, as she goes through this. She is suffering, and this is the least that we can do. And what if something changes? We wake Wallace from his drifting slumber and put him into his actual bed, and I tell Hikaru that I have the ship. That I am absolutely in control. While he sleeps, I talk to her. We go through the motions. I find it hard to believe that they are already rote: but what else can they be? She doesn’t change her script, so I am the only one able to adapt; or, to pretend to adapt.

On her fifth cycle I wonder, with her dying, if I should be mourning her. Is she truly dead if she keeps coming back? Is she dead already? Is this simply a prolonging, a dragging out of her life beyond her natural time? Is this, whatever the anomaly has done to her, simply life support? She is out there, and she dies. Maybe she only comes back because we are watching her. Maybe it’s because we want her to. I cannot explain this. There is still science here, there must still be answers, but they feel so far away from us. I wonder if she would know if we backed away, slowly, silently. She cannot see us. Eventually, she would just be shouting into the darkness; crying out, and then she would die anyway. Maybe that way is peace.

I watch the camera inside Inna’s helmet. I watch as she struggles and dies; and I wait for the moment that she comes back to life, a hyper-exaggerated Lazarus. That moment, where she wakes up and breathes her first of this new burst of life: it’s the same as her smile. Maybe this is how she wakes up every morning, to greet the new day.

Over and over she falls from the ledge. She wakes up and she cries, I don’t know how to help her, she chokes, she dies, there’s a time of placidity where nothing happens and then she gasps her first new breath of air. She repeats. She doesn’t remember the times before, which is a mercy. We know this because all I can do is ask her questions. But all of this feels like a lost cause: because how do we stop this? How do we stop her?

‘We pull her out when she’s dead,’ Wallace says. ‘That seems like the right thing to do.’ He doesn’t look at her on the screen – he won’t make eye contact, even though she cannot see him – but he seems to feel some empathy with her.

‘That’s interesting,’ Tomas says.

‘She’s not dead,’ Hikaru argues.

‘She is.’

‘No. Because she has a life sign more than she doesn’t, right? Which means that the suit is malfunctioning. And we can hear her. That’s a better argument for her being alive than … something else.’ Sleep has made Hikaru unblinking. His internal logic – where we ignore the thing that’s happening that we have no way of explaining, because what we cannot explain cannot be true – is flawless. But it’s also broken: we can’t pull her out of the anomaly, and we cannot explain that. I don’t push him. But I ask Tomas’ advice, and he tells me what he thinks is happening.

‘The anomaly is keeping her alive. The other two are dead. Somehow, whatever it is, it’s bringing her back to life. As long as she’s inside it, she’s alive again, until she runs out of air. If you bring her out when you get the chance, she’ll die for good.’ He stops talking. I don’t fill in the gaps. After a while, he starts again. ‘Are you there? I think you would be killing her.’ He wants us to stay here for longer. He wants us to run tests on the anomaly again while we think of a way to save her.

‘What tests would you have me do?’ I ask him.

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I’m sure we’ll think of something.’

I sit with Wallace, clamped to one of the rails. He is terrible. There is a carton in his hand, a cardboard construct: our sole concession to a food or liquid in the crew’s private possessions, a private supply of something or other. He initially asked for scotch, that he might celebrate with a glass of it. Instead, he is drinking it now.

‘Are you okay?’ I ask. It is rhetorical. He doesn’t offer me the drink, or look at me. He carries on regardless, drinking. We are silent for too long before he speaks.

‘What do you think this means?’ he asks.

‘Inna?’

‘After we die. Do you think it means anything?’

‘For her or us?’

‘Us.’ He drinks.

‘I think it means what it always meant,’ I say. ‘I think it means that there is nothing.’

‘So Tobi and Lennox: they’re just dead?’

‘That’s right,’ I say.

‘You never believed in a heaven?’ he asks.

‘I have always had too much logic for that,’ I say. He finishes the carton and crushes it.

‘What do you think she sees, when she’s dead?’

‘I have no idea,’ I say.

‘We can never ask her, because she doesn’t remember it.’

‘No.’

‘So it might as well be nothing.’ He lets the carton fall from his hands and it drifts off. He dips his head and shuts his eyes. I do not stay sitting with him, because I do not know how to talk to him when he is like this; and I do not know how long he will stay like this for.

In the lab, I listen to Inna die again. The final stretch of desperate cries and shudders, always the same. Utterly truthful: a pained realization, that this is it, for her. I have her camera feed in front of me, but sometimes I shut my eyes and let it wash over me. That feeling of loss. I need another stim. I can feel myself wavering. It’s such a good job that these things aren’t addictive, I tell myself. I would be a wreck if there was some real dependency on them, rather than my desire to remain awake for far more practical reasons. Then Inna comes back to life again.

‘What’s happening?’ she asks. I don’t say anything at first, because I find this too hard. I wait for her to start crying and pleading. I don’t want to interact with this: I don’t want her to know that I’m watching her die again. Maybe it’s cruel, I tell myself. I am selfish, letting her go through this alone. Maybe I should be out there every time, holding her hand, telling her that this will be all right. Maybe we should just kill her, drag her through, put her to an ending. Tell Tomas that it just happened, damn the results, the tests, the answers. This is her umpteenth performance, and she is screaming her lines to the cheap seats. ‘Is anybody there? What’s happened?’

‘Inna,’ I say. ‘I’m here.’

‘Why am I out here?’ She panics. Almost hyperventilates. She always almost panics at this point, and then she drags it back. If I don’t talk to her, she
does
hyperventilate. That feels like enough of an experiment by itself. ‘We were by the other ship and the engines started. What happened? What happened?’ I am trying to treat this as something worth watching: research into whatever the anomaly is. This was Tomas’ idea. Watch her: the moment that she comes back to life, maybe there is something. A spark, a flash. The last time, we told her to undo her oxygen tank. We lied to her, because we wanted to replicate the first time around: to see how it was somehow reattached to her helmet, somehow full of oxygen again. We have videotaped this so that we can watch it back at our own leisure. As if the constant recurrence of it isn’t enough. ‘Mira, please talk to me! You’re scaring me!’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘Just wait a little while. We are working out how to come and get you. Bring you back onto the ship.’ I call for Wallace and Hikaru to come here, and I find the spot on the footage where it must have happened, but I can’t see anything. So I slow it down, play it back again. I focus on her oxygen tank: the one thing we cannot explain in any real way. It becomes reattached. That’s not science: it’s magic. On the video, in one second the hose is there, floating slightly free of her body; the next it’s attached again, and firmly. One swift movement with nothing between points A and B. I slow the video down even more. Even more. Wallace arrives first, and he sees the screens – I have forgotten to pull them down, so my obsession with her face is exposed, but that’s the least of my problems – and he screams at me.

‘What the fuck are we doing?’ he asks. He turns and leaves. I hear him hit the wall: no howl of pain, just dull thud. It’s hard to get the power up without gravity. Hikaru waits in the doorway and watches him leave, and then he shakes his head at me, as if I would go after Wallace and try to calm him down. That isn’t me. We watch the screen together.