The Echo

9

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.

‘When are you going to save me?’ Inna asks.

‘Soon,’ I tell her. ‘We’re coming.’ I slow the footage to a crawl, to see single frames; and I find the exact frames in the footage where the changeover happens. There’s nothing in it. No Inna, no oxygen tank. The frame before, she’s dead, and the frame after, she’s alive, almost exactly as she was hours and hours before. In the space between, it is blank. ‘Do you see this?’ I ask Hikaru. He nods. I wheel it back to the exact frame, and we concentrate on it. There’s nothing there: not even the stars, because the anomaly has had those too.

Wallace comes to me when I am alone. I thought he was asleep but he isn’t. I am not, because I am watching her. I have turned the sound off: now she screams silently. He speaks quietly from the doorway, as if he doesn’t want to disturb me. He doesn’t make eye contact.

‘I asked you this before,’ he says, ‘but this time I’m really serious. Please: I want to call my family now.’

‘We might be going home soon,’ I say to him. I don’t know why I am trying to put him off, but I am. I want him to save it; in case he really needs it. ‘You can tell them we are coming home when we know it for sure.’

‘I don’t care.’ He looks at me. His eyes are red and dark. ‘Let me call them now. Please.’

‘Okay,’ I say. He doesn’t leave.

‘Can I have the lab?’ he asks. ‘There’s privacy. I just want to be alone with them a while.’ I unclip myself and pull myself past him. In the corridor I turn, to offer my help to him: to tell him how I hope he feels better after this. He has already shut the door, and I message Tomas, before he makes his own connection.

‘Wallace is calling home,’ I say. ‘Let him. It’s fine. I think he needs it.’ Tomas doesn’t reply, which is good. He would question it, maybe. Let him. I have made a choice.

In the main living area I bring up Inna on the screens. I talk to her and make it better, because this is what I feel like I should do sometimes. I lie to her that we’ll be saving her soon. She asks me what we are going to do, how we are going to get her back. She asks what the plan is.

‘We have to work out what the anomaly is first,’ I say. ‘We are closing in on that.’

‘How did you get Tobi and Lennox back?’ She doesn’t know that they’re dead, this cycle. I haven’t told her.

‘In the blast,’ I say. ‘When the engines started, they were thrown out. I’m sorry that you are there, still. We are doing everything we can.’ I haven’t told her the strangest part of her story, in any of her lives: that she’s died before, over and over and over. I talk and I talk, and she asks questions, and we relax into this. She trusts me. Why would she not? I am in charge of this. I understand it all. I have been here since the beginning: planning this, working it out. We talk, and then she says that she is tired, that it’s getting hard to breathe. I have lost track of time. Wallace is missing, still; still talking. I imagine the cost of that. The bandwidth being used. How angry people will be. I flick through the screens, opening the outward signal. I can see into his conversation. He is terrible and sad, so sad. His face is red with tears.

‘I love you,’ he says. He touches the screen, because they must be doing it as well. I cannot see them, but I imagine them crying at his words, his gentle manner. He is finishing this. ‘Look after your mother. I love you all so much. I’m sorry.’ He severs the connection. That is wrong. Something is wrong. Why would he apologize?

‘Wait there,’ I say to Inna, even though she has so little time left, and she will be gone, dying alone; and I unclip myself and push towards the office, but the door is locked. I cannot remember the code, so I call for Hikaru, but he cannot remember it either – why would we lock the doors? – so Tomas steps in, and he unlocks the doors from their end, and we wait and wait.

By the time I get to him he is dead.

Tomas tells me that it isn’t my fault. ‘He would have done it whatever. He was that personality type.’ I was the one to cut the cable that Wallace had tied to the floor; that had tightened itself naturally as he pushed away from it; that had choked him, and that he could not get back from, even if he wanted to. ‘Some people see things and they cannot cope,’ Tomas says. Hikaru sits with Wallace’s body. He put it to bed, and he says something. A prayer, even though Wallace didn’t believe whatever it is that Hikaru does. I don’t stop him. Hikaru has stayed calm, somehow. Maybe it works. Maybe whatever it is that he believes is somehow a leveller. I would worry that he would take the same route as Wallace, were he not so scared of death. His religion – some obscure thing borne out of the riots in the American Mid-west at the start of the last decade – says that death is the end; it is something to be feared. There is nothing afterwards, so seize the day. The white foods are to prolong life. White is the colour of light; of health; of life itself. I think about the irony of the anomaly out there: absolute blackness, and yet, how it is prolonging Inna’s life, and preventing her death.

We are now a skeleton crew. Tomas says that it will be all right. He reminds me that they can offer assistance from their end; like when he unlocked the doors. That was the point of what we designed: if he needs to, he can get us home. Inna goes through cycles by herself: she died while we tried to save Wallace, and she lived again, and then died once more. She isn’t even a sacrifice any more. She’s a curio we can return to when we have dealt with our current crisis. When Hikaru has prayed as much as he is going to, we seal Wallace’s bed. He can do whatever decaying he likes in there and we won’t be able to tell. Let the people back on Earth deal with it. The trip is a tragedy. We’ve already ruined this. The Ishiguro had the mystery to sustain it in history: we will have only the massacre.

Tomas tells me that he’s getting the press in the next day. That he’s prepared a breakdown of everything for the various heads of the UNSA, along with the assorted conglomerates and governments who have put money into this mission. This is the point at which they deserve to know everything. It’s a dangerous game he’s playing, I know, because he’s assuming that they will tell him to deliver results. He wants them to say, Stay. Work it out. After this much tragedy, we cannot return with this being in vain. And what does it say of the anomaly? I ask him how much he’s going to tell them about it.

‘Nothing yet,’ he says. ‘I’ll say that we’re doing tests into it. That it’s during those tests we’ve had accidents. That we are getting results. That this is worth it.’ He’s playing the game. He knows what he’s doing better than even I. He’s had the media experience I missed out on as I watched him from backstage. ‘You do think it’s worth it, don’t you, Brother?’

I deal with Inna by myself, sitting with her – or, rather, sitting in the airlock. I watch the screen of her face. She is desperate, and I do not want to lie to her. Not this time.

‘Are you coming to get me?’ she asks. She has fifteen minutes of this cycle left. Less, if she starts breathing too heavily. I should tell her to be light with her breathing, to calm down. That would be the sensible thing to do.

‘I don’t think we can,’ I say instead.

‘What?’

‘The anomaly you’re in. We can’t pass into it to get you out.’ She’s silent. I can see her eyes: they’re darting. I cannot be the one that has betrayed her. She trusted me. I would be her captain. ‘There are ways we could try to keep you alive for longer.’

‘Until you have a plan,’ she says. She sounds so Russian in that moment.

‘I don’t have a plan,’ I say. ‘I don’t. I think that you are going to die.’ Her face doesn’t change. But she looks so disappointed in me.

Tomas sends me the press release that he’s put out. It is not for me to check; he’s already broadcast it to the wider world. This is just for my information. It’s frank and nearly officious in its use of language. It says that we have reached the anomaly, and that we are conducting tests. It has not been without its tragedies as a trip, however: and he lists the names of Lennox and Tobi as our dead. No mention of Wallace; no mention of Inna. Our suicide and our mystery will be left for another day, or until we get home, even. He’s playing this. He knows that too much death and we’ll be recalled. The equipment – the true cost of this expedition – must be returned. It’s vital. The press release ends by saying that we are making great strides. That we are realizing our research into the anomaly, research that has lasted over three decades in total. The crew of the Lära are still achieving all that they set out to achieve, he promises, and that there will be answers to some of humanity’s deepest questions upon their return.

I open a line to him. ‘Seems optimistic,’ I tell him. I wait for the lag to reach him, and then minutes after it, but I think he must not be there. He is somewhere else.

10

I look at the outputs of the software that we wrote to track the outline of the anomaly. I have almost forgotten this, the part that we thought was the most important. Fly to the middle of the wherever, find this thing, explain it. This is what science is.

The orange shape is whole; or, at least, what we can see is. It is drawn in solidly, a line around. It is enormous. I cannot tell the sides, especially now that we are so close, but it stretches off so far in every direction. Up and down and left and right, we are surrounded.

‘Have you seen this?’ I ask Tomas.

‘What do you think we’ve been doing down here?’ he eventually replies.

I ask Hikaru to edge the ship closer, as close to the line of the anomaly as we can get. I use Inna to help us plot the thing. During one of her cycles I tell her, in a desperate, panicked voice, that she has to find an exit or else she will die, and I instruct her to move her hands across the surface of this thing. She confirms what the pings say. I let her use every part of her oxygen, reiterating to her how urgent it was, knowing that she would die; and then I witness her snapping back to her starting point as I blink my eyes shut. Then I start again, only this time I tell her to head in the other direction. When I am satisfied that the results are correct, we start work on gathering samples from the anomaly. I ask her to try and break a chunk from the wall, using the leash she is attached to, wrapping it around her fist to attack it, just to see if it makes a difference. It does not, and she manages to hurt herself; she wonders, as she lurches towards death, if she has fractured it. The next time around, when she wakes up, she feels no pain in her hand, and there is not even a bruise. Death means very little to her, now. Or, maybe, her death means little to me. This is like a game. It is something to be pushed and explored. It’s almost crippling as a distraction: to see how far I can push these limits. I could tell her to take off her helmet, and she would: simply because she believed me. She looks at me with implicit trust every cycle, every time I tell her that I can help her. She stares at the camera sometimes, even though she doesn’t know she is making eye contact with me.

I am not sleeping any more, because of the stims. They are like replacement batteries, and they are ideal for my situation, as I have no desire to miss any of this. And I do not want the worry, the stress of what would happen if I tried to sleep. The stims are astonishing, really. I have never used them before. Tomas routinely used them – or an early version of them, when they were still loaded with addictive properties – during his finals. He started revision later than I did, and missed a few more classes on some of the lesser modules. He claimed that he was more naturally adept, which might have been true if he had also coupled that with the work that I did. I remember him taking the stims every evening for a two-week period. Perfect clarity, they promised, and that’s what he had. Talking to him as he was riding off the immediate rush of one was almost inspiring. Seeing how his mind connected with itself, and how it maintained those connections. He slept for two or three hours every few days, as if he were simply recharging himself. He called those periods of sleep ‘nights’ – as in, I haven’t used a stim tonight – but they fell where they fell, whatever time of day, and there was no routine to them or his life. After a while, they began to lose potency. He would wake, get a good four or five hours before his body began to shut down, and then turn back to the pills. But they pushed him through the exams. They weren’t illegal, because they weren’t performance-enhancing. The knowledge had to be remembered regardless; the thoughts and concepts entirely your own, no matter how awake you were, how clear your thoughts. He would take one half an hour before the start of an exam and I would be the one who bore the brunt; alphabetical order dictating that I ended up sitting in front of him in the exam halls, able to hear his furious typing right behind my shoulders. He typed faster than anybody else at the best of times. He’d taken a course in touch-typing where the rest of us all used three or four fingers, and he hammered the pad so hard I wondered how it didn’t crack. When the exams were done, he struggled to stay off the pills. He slept for days. He called it a hangover, but I knew the truth: the shivers, the headaches, the fever, like the old symptoms of influenza. Almost indistinguishable.

Hikaru doesn’t know that I’m still not sleeping; or he doesn’t care. Either way. He is still and static, and humourless. He has become a shell. If I didn’t know better, I would think that this hadn’t affected him, that’s how calm he has remained. In many ways, he is acting as if this hasn’t happened: we are still here, and still on a ship in the middle of nowhere, and still on a mission. We’ve moved much, much closer to Inna now, and to the anomaly. Hikaru has been put in charge of making sure that we don’t drift – I have no intention of crossing that line – and nothing else. I am dealing with Inna.

And Tomas: he claims that he is helping. It’s something that they cannot rehearse on Earth, but they have ideas. That second where she dies, they’re wondering if we can play with it. Use it, somehow. Maybe snatch her through as she comes back to life, or at least a part of her, and that might give us purchase. I worry that the anomaly wall is just that: that, like the slice of a guillotine, it might somehow chop off any limb that we dared pull over to the near side of the anomaly. And I worry that she is alive because she is in there, and that as soon as she leaves it will be over for her. Tomas is intent to the point of preoccupation on getting a sample of the anomaly. I tell him that it’s impossible from where we are. He tells me that we’ll find a way. He sounds convinced.

I sit in the lab and work, going over the results that we have. The knowledge that we have. We were naïve to think that we could simply come out here and find out the answers. How long has it been since humanity had to reach for something? To truly push themselves and make a discovery that changes the face of who we are and what we understand? This is one of those discoveries. Out there, in the anomaly, time means something different. Life itself means something different. If this is something we can harness, it could change everything. Every single aspect of life on Earth could be altered. And if it cannot be used by us, then it is something to explore and to divert time and energy into understanding. It is a marvel; it is the likes of which we have never seen before.

I have ideas. We have tools that Wallace brought up here: designed for taking samples from rocks. Diamond-tipped drills. If I cannot work it on my side, I can ask Inna to do it on hers. I do math, as well, working out how far the anomaly is from us right now, so that I can limit my tether when I actually go out there, to prevent me accidentally crossing the border. I am uncomfortable with this. When they were training in low-gravity situations, I was doing work. Actual work, hard grind, to ensure that we would not die on this mission. They forgot, I think, how important this was. I feel like I could say it again and again and they would never understand the enormity or importance of this. That is something that only Tomas and myself understand.

I go into the airlock room and take my clothes off, before pulling my spacesuit from the locker with my name on it. You would think that, with the layers of the suits being so thin, they would be cold to wear; and with the fabric being such a bizarre composite – metals, plastics and wools all working together, all coated in treatments that are the result of decades of work and millions of dollars of purchased patents – you would think that they would be heavy, or scratch your skin. Inside the suit you’re all but naked, but you can barely feel the suit even touching your skin. I prefer loose clothes in general. I find shirts and belts to be claustrophobic in the way that they stitch the halves of your body together. I undo the buttons on cuffs. But the suits here are smooth and warm – the perfect temperature, in fact, regulated by the readings taken from your own body – and they feel like nothing. You are free. Even between your fingers, where they could be so tight and constricting, they simply seem to fit. They’re made from a single piece of the new fabric, that’s part of the reason: no seams. They stretch for every body-type, despite being custom fitted. They’re a marvel.

I look at myself in the mirror, because they’re also – for a man like me, of my age and lack of build – mildly unflattering. Tomas is probably in better shape than I am. He is more tucked-in. In another time, another place, I would worry about how I looked. But Hikaru will not judge me, and Inna… I will not rescue her this cycle, so she will die again and forget that I was ever out here, and forget how I look in this.

I switch on the monitors, to see where she is in this cycle – because I want to be out there when she wakes up, to really make the most of the time we can have together – but she is not panicked and terrified as I thought she would be. Instead she’s almost smiling, calm and peaceful. She is talking. I hear her, saying that it will be all right. That she knows we are doing everything we can. She asks what happens if we don’t have a solution. She asks how much air she has. He answers, somehow; zero lag, Tomas, playing as me. He must have done something; I cannot work out what. He tells her that he doesn’t know how much air she has – a lie – and then he says that he won’t lie to her. He says that they are doing everything they can. He says that he can’t wait to get her back on the ship. He is speaking these words to her, acting as me. I think about interjecting, but she will forget. She will forget him, and this version of me. She is happy, even though her death is inevitable. She trusts me.

I sever Tomas’ connection to her. ‘What are you doing?’ I ask. I wait for a reply.

‘I’m trying to make this peaceful for her. She was alone. What did you expect?’

‘I can’t talk to her all the time,’ I say.

‘Of course you can’t. So I was doing it for you. I worked out a way around the lag: I know what questions she will ask, so I can predict it. We were speaking out of sync, Mira. It was really quite the thing.’

‘Don’t do that,’ I say. ‘Don’t pretend to be me.’

‘What are you doing now?’ he asks.

‘I am going out there.’

‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Good.’

In order to open the airlock door, we have to close the outer door. We cannot do that until we sever and retract the cable stitching the three of them together. As soon as Inna begins, I play melodramatic, and I tell her that it’s urgent that she unclip herself. I don’t give her a chance to ask why. She does, and I retract her tether. It snaps through the nothing, back towards the ship, and it coils itself inside the airlock. I shut the outer door, and the inner door opens in turn. Lennox and Tobi’s bodies are in front of me; I have to deal with them. I call for Hikaru to help me, but he doesn’t. He says that he has to keep the ship anchored. He’s lying, but I can’t force him. He is all I have left, really; so I move them myself. They are easy to move when there’s no gravity. You can drag them and they don’t snag on anything, and there’s no mess. Their suits are sealed, and I try to pretend that they are not even people. They are suits, nothing more. They are an experiment. It’s not like I haven’t seen a dead body before, but still. Regardless.

I seal them into their beds next to Wallace. Three of them now, lined up and ready for a crew who are not me to take them and worry about them. As if they’re sleeping. This is what they did with the captain of the Ishiguro when he died: they put him to bed for the rest of the trip. No burial in space. Instead, you journey with the corpse of the man who died. It’s practical, if not horrific. They are with us, as much as they can be. My mother used to say that ghosts stayed in the places that they died. That a quiet house was made louder by the presence of the spirits over the years: this is why old houses feel the way that they do. She really believed in that stuff. We sneered when she said it. And then she died, and we said, Maybe she’s here, in this hospital room. Maybe this is where she will stay forever. But we didn’t actually think it was true, because we didn’t believe in God or in ghosts or in anything like that. What’s it that they say? You can either be logical or fallible. There’s no halfway point.

Afterwards, I sit and wait in the airlock room. Inna tries to talk to me, to get me to tell her the rest of my brilliant plan that involved her cutting herself off from the rest of us, but I am silent. Even as she begins crying, and cursing my name. An experiment: to see if the tether cable resets as her oxygen supply does. My hypothesis is that it will not. As Tobi and Lennox are outside the anomaly, and remain dead, so too will this cable no longer be a part of Inna’s cycle. She will awake and assume it was lost when the Ishiguro interrupted their jaunt. This entire process will take time, now. It will take time and sacrifice, but that has to be acceptable.

She dies; she wakes; the cable is inside the airlock. Over her next life I prepare the tools I will need, and I attach myself to the tether inside the airlock itself, and I tell Tomas that he will have to open the airlock doors for me from Earth; that Hikaru is distracted.

‘You’re comfortable with this?’ he asks.

‘No,’ I say. I have an unbalanced inner ear, and I am clumsy on my feet, let alone drifting in the ether. I am graceless, and I haven’t adjusted to the lack of gravity on the ship, because I ignored the training. Because I am not this sort of man. ‘But I have little choice,’ I say. ‘Needs must.’

‘That they do,’ he says. I put the helmet on, and I press to fasten it to the suit. I wore one once before, when we received the trial versions, to check that the visibility was acceptable. It feels tighter here, now, even though I know it’s exactly the same model. Exactly the same size. The helmet hisses as it attaches to the fabric and creates the seal, and I’m no longer breathing the Lära’s air: I am breathing my own portable, personal oxygen.

‘Open the door,’ I say, and wait.

‘Okay,’ he says. No farewell, godspeed, no stay safe. The door opens, and I am outside.

I cannot describe this; there is no need. It is singular, and fantastical. It is nature, even though it is not what we would immediately think of as such. It is, despite everything that brought us here and that protects me and that enables us to be here, and the death and the unexplainable nature of the anomaly: through that all this is nature. This is the purest I have ever been with the universe, and that is really something.

The boosters on the suits are tetchy and sharp, and they spit out in a way that I do not expect. I have not practised enough with these, which is a disadvantage. I didn’t foresee having to do this. Truthfully, I didn’t expect to ever wear my suit. Maybe to drift; to revel in the nothingness if I could. But I didn’t expect to be out here, and I didn’t expect to have to work in these conditions. I push myself forward, but I have to be tentative. There is too much chance of me getting this wrong and overshooting. I do not want to end up in there. What would happen? I would die with Inna. Over and over, perhaps, if that’s how it works. But I nudge towards her, shuffling almost, and then I am right in front of her. I can see her perfectly as she dies: close enough to touch, if I wanted to lose myself. She sees me, her final few breaths. I am close enough to comfort her, but I do not.

She dies, and she wakes, and she sees me, and her routine adapts.

‘You’re here,’ she says. ‘What happened? Why are you here?’ She reaches for me, and she touches the wall.

‘You can’t,’ I say. ‘I am outside the anomaly, and you are inside. But I have come to try and help you, to help you get out. Can you see me okay?’ I ask. She nods, but she’s unsure. ‘Make the torch on your helmet brighter. That will help.’ She does, and she sees me more. She smiles, a little. Just a little. She raises her hands and feels the anomaly wall between us. She feels it every time, but now I am here, close enough to touch. ‘I’m stuck,’ she says.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m a prisoner here?’

‘I don’t think it’s like that,’ I say.

‘But you came for me,’ she says. I should have kept a tally of how many times she has died now, for the results of whatever this is. So that, when I come to write this up, when I am delivering my paper to whoever wants to read it, there are exact numbers. Details: science is all about the details. I’m sure that Tomas will have been doing it, or that he’ll have somebody else doing it. She presses her hand, and she cranes her neck. ‘You say it isn’t a prison, but look at me.’

‘It’s the anomaly,’ I say. ‘We don’t know how it works, still.’

‘Where are Tobi and Lennox?’ she asks. ‘Are they safe?’

‘Yes,’ I say. Lying is easier. Lying moves this on. I am learning from each time, just as she is not. I grow; I evolve. A harmless lie is easier than the truth, when time is pressed and Inna is dying. ‘Tomas and Hikaru are working on how to get you back onto the ship. They’ll have an answer soon. I have to do work until then. Will you help me?’ I have to give her a use: she has responded well to tasks during previous lives. It serves to keep her mind away from her situation. It lets her know that we’re all working together towards a common goal; that we haven’t forgotten about her. She will not simply be left to die.

I pass tools through the anomaly, and she takes them at the far side. She and I move them back and forth, passing them through the wall. She rests a hand against it all the while, making sure that I keep my distance. I have to watch my drift. It’s easy to reach out and forget and suddenly your hand is through. I don’t know what would happen if I were to have a limb, or a part of me through the anomaly. Would I be able to retract it? Or would it render me stuck forever, unless I accepted the inevitable and followed it into the darkness? For a second, distracted and daydreaming, I see myself and Inna: together, in an embrace. Holding each other, dying over and over. We share oxygen. We wake. We die. We wake. Seconds together, snatched and desperate. Is that what would fill our dying moments? Is that what we would see?

I pass her a scalpel, holding the blade myself, as you are taught to pass knives, and she takes it and tries to cut into the anomaly wall – putting her hand to it, pressing hard, splaying her fingers and cutting between them – but the blade finds no purchase. There’s nothing there for her to work on, and the scalpel passes through. If I held my hand out, it would cut me. We try with the drill, to take a sample, but again there is nothing. This might as well be air. Were it not for Inna’s hands on it, and for what we have seen, and for what we cannot see inside it, I would say that there was nothing there.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

‘It’s not your fault,’ I tell her.

‘Are they ready to get me back onto the ship yet? It’s getting harder to breathe.’ She looks tired. I don’t tell her that.

‘I’ll head back and find out,’ I say. I wave as I go, so that she feels safe. Maybe she will just drift off to sleep this time, rather than panicking and choking. If I talk her towards her death, that might be better. I seal the doors and cut the communications, because I can’t stand to look at her as she dies in this cycle. It’s too much: seeing her up that close, and with my lie to her still hanging. I like to imagine how she dies this time; imagine the peace that I wished for her.

Something of this reminds me of these books that Tomas and I used to have as children. My mother said that they were her brother’s, from when they were young – and he had died when he was a teenager, so she kept them, as something worth keeping – and she gave them to us when we were old enough and told us to take good care of them. You read the first page and then it gave you a choice, and you picked one of two options. Each led you to another page, where you might fall down a pit or meet a monster, and you would have to keep making decisions to try and reach the end. Some ends came quickly, with death or early accidental glory; some went on for pages and pages, circling around, leading you on a chase. Tomas and I would play the same book one after each other, trying to see who could get further. We turned it into a game: which one of us had the better instincts? The better gut reaction to a situation, the better wiles to lead them through the Maze of Death or the Journey to the Ocean Sand: the brother who navigated the choices with the most skill, he would be the winner. There was no prize other than gloating, but regardless. And the winning itself was tricky to determine, as what one of us thought to be a win – so, abandoning their submersible and swimming to a desert island, but still having escaped the Kraken – was determined by the other to be a false option. The debate carried on past the book.

‘You would die of starvation,’ the non-playing brother would say. ‘On that island, with no food source, no weapons, no means of escape, you would die. That isn’t a win; it’s delaying the inevitable.’ So the argument would go, and the winner would add the book to their own personal pile. It would be theirs then. We both treated them the same way: with some level of reverence in their physical object. As soon as the game was over, however, the text was destroyed. We broke the rules and read them beginning to end, finding secrets and routes and pathways and endings that we would never have stumbled on before. We reverse engineered them, to work out how to reach the different areas. The main character escapes the submersible, the same as countless other times, but this time he meets a beautiful Atlantean, and she kisses him, giving him the gift of water-breath, and he can survive and then the mermen rally and help him kill the Kraken. The Kraken’s head is a trophy: how do you reverse engineer such a situation? We would read these sections and be totally in awe. It made us take risks, in the next book. Because maybe those risks would pay off? They rarely did. Most times, we ended up with the same endings: death, or the island, or some tepid, muted victory of circumstance and luck rather than judgment.

Now, here, talking to Inna, it’s like that. Choices at the foot of a page, nothing more than selecting different dialogues. If I start the conversation differently, she will respond differently. There are seemingly infinite ways I could start it, or things I could tell her, and yet they all end in the same approximate way: with her crying, and begging me to save her, as if that’s a power that I somehow have but am keeping from her.

I send Tomas a message, direct to his console. I do not bother trying to speak to him, because I want to be certain that he will receive this. ‘I think we have to come home now,’ I say. I will try to forget about Inna. I will try.

According to Hikaru, we’re on about 50 per cent of our life support – a number that would be much lower if we were supporting a fully live crew, rather than one that is all but deceased – so we can’t stay here much longer. Stolen from the Ishiguro, we need the rumble of our engines to recharge us: a sense of moving forward to sustain us. There are limits, and protections, and cut-off points that we do not want to reach. I am contemplating, always contemplating telling Hikaru to start the engines; I cannot predict how he would react now, if I suggested abandoning Inna. Tomas will turn us around if everything falls apart. We agreed, when designing the systems, that the overrides from ground control would be final. You never know what can happen up here, but there they would always be in control.

Hikaru is speaking to Inna this time. He said that he wanted to talk to her, to try and ease her through this. I told him to be my guest. I do not watch them, because nothing about this can surprise me any more. Instead, I go to a cupboard and count the stims we have left. I take another. We are fine. We have so many on board it is as if I knew that I would need them, when I was checking the inventories. I try to reach Tomas on the comm as I am still in that tablet’s rush. By the time I get his reply it has passed, and I feel normal again.

‘Brother,’ he says.

‘Where have you been?’

‘I’ve been in conferences. We have been trying to decide what to do.’

‘Oh,’ I say.

‘I got your message. We all took it into consideration, that’s for sure.’ He gulps something. I picture him, his stubby glass, his single malt. We both know what it means before he says the rest. ‘You have to get some results, Mirakel. Then you can come back.’

‘For fuck’s sake, Tomas.’

‘The board reminded me of the cost of this. The spend. And it’s the best we can hope. We know that this thing isn’t normal, as well.’ The pauses are unnatural and elongated. I cannot parse them in the patter of normal speech. ‘Didn’t you want to leave your mark?’

‘We have left it. We have three bodies on our hands.’

‘But their blood isn’t. They signed the waivers, just as you and I did.’

‘And you’re in such a risky position, there, with your fucking drink and your fucking baker.’ I laugh at how ridiculous this argument is. That I won’t even call her by her name. He goes silent. There is always silence between us, and it is always me that it falls upon to break it. ‘What do you want us to do?’

‘That’s harder,’ he says. I hear the click of him lighting a cigarette. ‘They want readings taken from inside the anomaly.’

‘We are not taking the ship in there.’

‘It doesn’t have to be the ship. Send a tablet over: get pings from that. See how deep it is. Use Inna: give her the equipment on her side. She needs to send signals inside it, see if we can read them from Earth. Just to see.’

‘She’ll want to know why I’m not coming in to take the readings myself.’

‘So you tell her a lie,’ he says. I can hear it in his voice; in the drag of the smoke, the exhale with the impatience. ‘You’ve done it before.’

‘There are two of us left, that’s all. You think that this is going to end well?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you really think that we’re coming home?’ I realize that I am shouting. I wonder if Hikaru can hear me. I hope he can, because maybe then he will react, and I will not have to. ‘The longer we stay here, the more likely it is that we will die here.’

‘They want readings. We all want readings. And we want for you to rescue Inna, as well. Or maybe you’re just happy to leave her there to die, again and again and again, for the rest of all time?’

‘Don’t,’ I say. ‘Fuck you.’

‘I don’t care what you say to me,’ he replies. ‘Take the ship closer, and take the readings.’ Then he’s quiet. The argument, driven by the lag, makes me wonder if there’s more coming. It’s too tense: the silence between the words. ‘I’ll talk to Inna for her next cycle. Give you some time to relax.’ Then he’s gone.

I stay in the lab. Bring up the map of the anomaly that we have been making: the spinning orange, still being made from the dots, still having gaps filled in. I calculate: estimating the size of the thing if this is essentially an orb, as deep and tall as it is wide, using the trajectory of the curve to estimate where it is heading. I move my finger into it, breaking the line of the anomaly, and I move it back and forth. I put a pin into the image where Inna is, another where we – the ship, myself and Hikaru and all our bodies – are, and I move the ship closer to see how close we can be before this all becomes truly dangerous, and I chicken out and turn the ship around myself.

I wonder what would happen if we managed to get the ship back to Earth. If I found a way to supersede the instructions that Tomas would desperately send to prevent us. The mission wasn’t military, so I couldn’t be court-martialled. It wasn’t governmental, so there’s no way I would be committing some law-break that might earn me jail time. It’s private: business and investors and some degree of public faith. They would lambast me, and they would attempt to sue, I would think. They would claim that we – and I suspect that Tomas would be thrown under the bus as well, unless he sacrificed me – had squandered their money. That, in our weak-willed frippery, we had travelled this far, spending billions of dollars, and that we had returned empty-handed, with four deaths under our belts. (In the scenario where I flee, I tell them that Inna has died. It is true, at least a part of the time.) The anomaly, they would say, is still out there. It is still a potential threat. Do we understand it any more than we did before these two ran their hands over our space program? We do not, they would say. We are, in fact, more in the dark. Because how do you lose so many crew members? How does a crew of six go up, and only two come back down?

I wouldn’t have an answer for them. I call Hikaru into the lab and tell him what it is that we’re going to have to do in order to appease them. I show him, on the map, how close we need to get. He nods, and he chews a bar made of re-formed bleached chicken, and I can tell that he has no faith at all in our ability to survive this, but he will never say that. He will not let me know.

11

Persuading the crew to come out here was easy. This was always to be a trip that would be remembered, and the probability – we told them – of a tragedy such as that which occurred with the Ishiguro happening twice were next to inconsequential. Tomas used to say: The chances of one ship going missing in space are pretty slim. The chances of two going missing in the same place? So close to nil as to be almost impossible. We will, Tomas and I wrote to each of them in our letter of persuasion, guarantee your safe return. They needed that persuasion, because they were happy before we found them; or at least comfortable. They had families and jobs and lives. We wrote personalized letters to those candidates we most desired for the roles that we had to fill. Paper letters, hand-written, mostly by me, as Tomas’ handwriting left a lot to be desired. He preferred the speed of a quick draft where I favoured the dedication of precision and care. But they were our words: a joint effort. A month after the letters went out we fielded visits from a few of them: that was when we found Hikaru and Tobi. Both in our first round of choices. Both so strong and capable. They were interested, because how could they not be? What a chance this was, for all of us. We told them about the training that they would need to undertake and the work we would be doing. We told them about the risks involved. We told them that they would have to take out their own insurance policies, knowing that they would not be able to. Everything about this is a risk, we told them; but without risk there can be no true reward.

‘What is the reward, exactly?’ Hikaru had asked.

‘Answers,’ Tomas had told him. ‘Science is a pursuit. Answers are there, and we seek them. We need answers to a question, because humans are made to question. Now we have a question that nobody can answer, but we might somehow be able to. Think about that. Wouldn’t you like to play a part in getting an answer to what might be the biggest question of all?’ They didn’t ask what the question was. That’s the thing: they never even wanted to know, not really.

It’s amazing: standing in the airlock and leaving the external door open, and being able to see right across to Inna. This is how adjacent we are: she opens her eyes when we have stopped moving, when the thrusters are only there to maintain our position. We’re like lovers, greeting each other on a dock: she cannot see me through the fog, but I am there. She only has half an hour left, and she will die. So it goes.

Hikaru and I prepare the tablet to give to Inna. We designed the computers to be detachable in part, so that we could work outside if we needed to. They were tested for pressure, designed to have special haptic interfaces that would work with the suits: we were prepared for this. This is forethought. They have attachments, and we configure one to be able to send a ping out: only to judge distances, but it’s something. We haven’t been able to see deep into the anomaly before. We don’t even know how deep it is. Maybe, I think, it could go on forever. It is a tunnel. It is a hole. This thing looks like any other tablet computer, so we agree to ask Inna to take it, hold it while we remotely control it, and then pass it back for the results to be uploaded. Should be simple: easy to use, nothing she won’t be used to in her life of medical instruments and tricorders. We need her in control, so Tomas suggests that we wait until this cycle has ended. I couldn’t agree with him more, but I’m glad that I don’t have to say it. I wonder if Hikaru is starting to hate me for the ease with which I let her die. He can maybe see how I would be with him. I would be the same, I know. Maybe more callous. I feel something for Inna, I think. I have a desire for her that I do not share for him. I wouldn’t blame him if he hated me. I don’t know what that says about me. I think that, when we get home, I should maybe speak to somebody. I wonder about myself. I see something inside me, or maybe I do not see it. Maybe there is simply something that is not there.

I see the toll that it is taking on Hikaru as well. With him, it seems deeper (but then, I suppose that the afflicted would always say that). I thought that he was tuned into his religion, his powerful self-beliefs driving his action. The more time I spend with him, however, it simply seems as if he is broken. I have offered him the chance to speak to his family, but he has turned it down. Perhaps he knows that it was the last thing that Wallace did before he ended it, and perhaps that carries a significance for him. It’s his own business. In my reports, I will write that I believe he is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. I will recommend treatments, but I am sure that he will refuse them.

I pull on my suit and am ready to go. I am a heavy breather, and I tell myself that I must be light to preserve my air. I have to pace myself. I stand in the airlock and we listen to her die, because we have to know as soon as she is alive again. She gasps and screams and asks what is happening, and I speak to her. I tell her exactly what we need.

‘Quickly,’ I say, ‘we don’t have much time.’ I explain to her that there’s been an accident, and Hikaru starts the airlock cycle. She asks me why she can’t see me properly, and I explain that I am there. I am with her, I say, but the anomaly blocks her from looking out. I say, ‘You have to help me. You’re stuck there until we can find out how to get you free, and you are running out of air. We have to be quick, and then we can get home. The device I want you to use, it’ll help us.’

‘Why can’t I come back now?’ She requires a delicate balance when being dealt with. It must be scary, to be out there, alone and on a countdown. I know that it is scary. It has scared her countless times before this.

‘You’re trapped’, I say, ‘in the anomaly. Do you not remember?’ Treat her as if this is her mistake. As if she should know more than this. Assert myself.

‘Of course I remember,’ she says. She’s so hurried and frantic that she lies to me, because she knows that it’s easier.

‘We need to find out how to get you free.’

‘And this will do it?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘This is how we begin to get you out.’ I pass her the tablet. ‘It turns on at the top,’ I say. She presses the button; there’re a few hours or so of battery on it. More than enough for what we need to do, and for her to pass it back before she dies and it gets lost, or drifts off, or whatever. ‘It’s all controlled on the screen. Do you see the apps you need to run?’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Do you want me to open them?’

‘Work left to right,’ I say. ‘Open them one by one, and set them going.’ She concentrates on the buttons. She presses them as if she has never worked one before, but I know that’s just nerves.

‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘Take your time.’ She seems her age, here and now. As if this has revealed it all to her: everything that she has done and been, all of it, suddenly rushing back into her face. Undoing whatever care she’s taken of herself, or work that she’s had done. She looks scared and old and tired.

‘They’re running,’ she says. ‘What do I do now?’

‘This is the easy part,’ I say. Now you just hold the device out. You point it all around you, turning it every minute or so. Turn it just a fraction of a degree. We need readings of this whole anomaly, to help us understand it. It will find a hole in the anomaly that we can use.’

‘You couldn’t come over here and do this yourself?’ she asks then, out of the blue. She holds the tablet out, though, and then she moves it slightly. More than I would like for the desired results – I want exact angles, ideally – but I cannot labour the point now. I am picturing the signal blaring out in every direction, waiting for a response. I am picturing her handing me the device when she is done, giving me the results, and then us leaving. I do not answer her question, and I take too long, and she realizes that there’s no way out of there. I wouldn’t risk it; she is being used.

‘Look,’ I say, but she doesn’t care. She knows.

‘What was the plan? Were you ever going to tell me the truth?’ Her mouth is pinched. Her cheeks are red. ‘Or were you going to string me along until the very end? Would we just play that I was going to be saved at the end of this?’

‘It isn’t like that,’ I say. ‘This is important.’ I do not think she will understand that. ‘It could help us rescue you,’ I say, ‘but we do not know until we try.’

‘Oh, good. If there’s a chance,’ she spits. ‘What is this? How does this help me?’ She holds the tablet down, losing one of the results. She knows that there’s far more wrong here than she first thought. I want to reach for the device, in case she breaks it or throws it. I think of Tomas, and how those results are a ticket home.

Am I this selfish? Am I really this man?

‘Please hand the device back,’ I say. And she does. She cannot see me, but she looks forward and into my eyes. She is crying. Not hysterical, not begging. Just so desperately sad.

‘What has happened to me?’ she asks.

‘It’s the anomaly,’ I say. ‘It won’t let you die. You were out here days and days ago, and you ran out of air, and you died, but then you came back. You keep coming back, and we don’t know how to stop it yet.’ She nods – I see her helmet bob with an almost tidal smoothness – and then reaches behind her, and I see her hand find the nozzle for the air and unscrew it. ‘Don’t!’ I shout, but even then I wonder why I’m begging her not to, because it’s inevitable. I could reach over there and stop it – my hand on hers, to stay it before she does this to herself – but I have no idea if I could bring it back or not, or if I would be stuck, destined to die slightly after her, destined to come back again back to life just like her, in this perpetual loop.

So instead I am forced to sit here and watch her dying from behind, and it isn’t until I turn and start back towards the ship that she wakes up, desperate, having learned nothing. I get back onto the ship and shut the door behind me.

I plug the device back into the computer and start uploading the information. I need to analyse it. There’s nothing there, though. Nothing of any use to us and our research. I take another stim, dry swallowing it. I am a master of it now.

‘Successful trip?’ Tomas asks.

‘No,’ I say. I leave it at that, for the time being. I don’t tell him the rest, but he might have been listening, for all I know.

Hikaru asks me if I mind him going to sleep. He looks ill. His cheeks sallow; his hair greasy. His eyes are so tired. I tell him that he should rest.

‘We’re heading home soon,’ I say to him. ‘And you’re our only pilot. You’ll need your sleep.’ He nods. He doesn’t believe me. This is what he’s doing: he’s accepting his fate. Has he made peace with it? Is it possible to make peace with something that might not happen? ‘Goodnight,’ I say to him, and he lies down in his bed and fastens the magnets. He is lying in between Tobi and Wallace, but he doesn’t seem to notice that, or care. He shuts the door behind him, and the glass goes dark.

Then the ship is quiet. Inna is out there alone, but I try to pretend that she isn’t. I wonder if I shouldn’t sleep as well. I can feel my eyelids shake and tremble in the way that they do when the pills wear off, but I do not know how to sleep. I think that I have probably forgotten. That was the problem all along. I inject the sedatives. I feel it on the third, the fourth. There is nothing to miss, now. I lie down at the end of the horseshoe of beds; and next to me is Inna’s empty bed. I shut the lid as well, because maybe then I can pretend.

Even though I am sure that I am asleep, I can hear a noise that I did not make, that reverberates around the ship, coming through it all. It wakes me, but it’s so dark and I do not open my eyes, and then I cannot hear it again. It’s as if it was never there. Then, when I am sure that I am nearly asleep again, I hear it in the distance. It is, I think, similar to the noise of somebody banging on a door.

‘Tomas?’ I hear myself ask, mostly asleep.

There is no answer from him, and I drift. I dream of darkness, and of home.

‘Wake up,’ Tomas says, ‘and be careful. Seriously, Brother. You need to be careful now.’ He opens my bed for me, and I unclip myself. I’m startled and worried, and in that moment between awake and asleep, when everything feels half-lost. I am here but not. I clutch on.

‘What’s happened?’ I ask.

‘You need to bring up a screen of the exterior,’ he says. ‘Do it from there. Stay where you are.’ So I do. I raise the screen, and I flick through the cameras, and look at where we were focused before, but Inna isn’t there. I wonder if this has closed: if she is done. Then I flick to the next camera and she is outside the ship: pressed to the side, clinging to the metal. She looks weak; her hand feebly tapping the exterior airlock door.

‘How?’ I ask. ‘She’s free?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘She’s moved.’ On the screen she splays her fingers and starts slapping the metal. ‘Or the anomaly has moved. But she is still dying. She has died once, out there.’

‘You didn’t wake me?’

‘I tried,’ he says, but he’s lying. As if I do not know the tells in his voice.

‘Am I inside it?’ I ask. He leaves the pause too long. He is fucking with me.

‘No,’ he finally says. ‘We’re guessing, based on the pings. Still sending them out to the sides, assuming that the aperture of the anomaly hasn’t changed.’ Everything is speculation, and I feel my guts rise. I am scared, because that is not what I want. I want to be alive. I want to do what I can. There is no guarantee that, inside there, I will not be able to get out, but we have to work within the confines of what we know. What I know is that Inna is stuck. What I know is that, for some reason, the Ishiguro never left, not until the day it exploded. The anomaly is hell. It is death.

‘Does Inna remember anything more?’ I ask.

‘No. She’s more confused, certainly.’

‘You haven’t let her in yet.’

‘Would you have?’ He’s right. I would have made the same decision. I wouldn’t have wanted to risk the ship. She is now a variable: she might be the thing that stops us pulling the ship out of the anomaly, were she inside. ‘You’ll have to talk to her,’ he says, ‘or not. It’s your decision, Brother.’ I flick the camera to show the inside of her helmet. She is desperate. We’re here, next to her, and she has woken up alone and in the dark and we could just open the door but we have not. She will be wondering why; if we are all dead, maybe. Nearly, I want to tell her. We’re getting there. ‘She’s at the end of a cycle,’ Tomas says. The variable is nearly dead. Soon she will begin again, and this will be fresh to her. I click her face away. I do not want to see her die here. I think it might be different: even more confused, even more desperate.

‘Where can’t I go?’ I ask, and he tells me to bring up the screen he’s sending, so I do. I look at the line of the anomaly: carved through our ship. It slices through the engines and pretty much splits the ship into two: down the central corridor, with the airlock and bathroom on one side, the lab on the other; and the beds and lounge and cockpit also divided. The line is nearly straight – the curve of the anomaly so long we barely notice it in here – but we aren’t. We were on a slight angle, so the line matches that. I have more of the lounge and cockpit than the anomaly does. Inna is not the only variable; Hikaru’s bed is firmly inside the anomaly, now.

‘Hikaru is still asleep?’

‘Until we know what to do,’ Tomas says. ‘We don’t want him to panic about this.’ How much has he been watching us? When did this happen, sneaking up on us? ‘Unless you think we should wake him.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘Not yet.’ I look at the picture. ‘We need to reverse,’ I say.

‘So we have to wake him.’

‘You can do it from there, can’t you?’

He takes longer than usual to answer. The lag hides a multitude of sins. ‘It’s safer if he does it. From here, what if, I don’t know, what if it crushes him while he’s in his bed? What if that’s how it works? He should do it. You’ll have to wake him up.’ I think he is gone, and then he speaks again. ‘It will sound better, coming from you. Less alarming.’ I try not to think about Inna, still out there. I ask myself, deep inside, if I am a bad person. And if I am, does it matter?

The ship looks as it should from the inside. The anomaly has no colour, no smell. The air is the same: no change in temperature as you approach it, no front that suggests anything different than what we are used to. I contemplate chalk or pen: something to draw a physical line down the ship. I do not want to be caught in this. Accidents can happen. They can be so unbearably fatal, or eternal. The same. On my side of the anomaly: my bed, Inna’s bed, Wallace’s bed, even though it’s full. I have the kitchenette, and the food. In the lounge, they have most of the table, the medical cupboard, a chunk of the floor space, one of the three computers. In the cockpit, they only have half a seat. With Hikaru’s bed still sealed I can’t even hear him sleeping. I cannot reach over and open it, so I tell Tomas to do it.

‘I can’t get a signal,’ he says. ‘I’m pressing it, but it’s not responding.’ I think about the slight static on the connections from inside the anomaly; and I think about the remote probe suddenly becoming unresponsive as it got deeper into it. Three items of electronic interference: almost enough evidence to be definitive. I bring up a screen and try, but again, the bed doesn’t open. ‘You don’t want to reach over there and open it manually?’ he asks. He is joking, but he doesn’t laugh. I clip myself by my belt to the rail and watch the bed.

‘We’ll have to wait for him to wake up of his own accord,’ I say.

‘I suppose so,’ he says. I wait there in silence, staring at the room, trying to work out if the anomaly is going to move – or grow – any more, and if it might swallow me whole. I’m thinking about that when I hear the banging start again, which means that Inna died, and she’s back again, full of air and energy and desperation, banging on the door, begging to be let in. What was that story from when I was a kid, something about a Monkey’s Paw? I haven’t wished that she was still alive yet, but that banging is so insistent. Desperate, as it should be. ‘Tell me about what’s going on down there,’ I say to Tomas. I stare at the beds and wait to see if he will answer.

I think about anything else, after a while. I stare at the beds and wait, and Inna’s banging is a drum inside my head. A constant, unending rhythmic reminder. In my pocket I have a pack of stims, and I take one as soon as I catch myself yawning, because I am still somehow tired. The body needs to recover. You can put it through the ringer, torture and punish it, and then you have to let it recover.

I think about how I can come back from this. How I can ever hope to recover who I was; and I wonder, briefly, who that person even was to begin with.

Hikaru’s bed hisses open. I have been listening to Inna’s hand become weaker, and the sound drop off inside here. The hiss comes as she falls silent, which means that this life is ending for her. Another will start. This is the new cycle. Hikaru lets himself up. He stretches. He cracks his shoulders, rolling them, rubbing them with one palm. He turns his head to look around.

‘What the hell?’ he asks. ‘What’s happened? Why are you so dark?’ He sees me: through the ink of the anomaly. I bring up a screen of one of the cameras, to see what he sees: myself, through a black fog, almost, the internal lights dimmed. I make them bright, but still it is hard to see every detail through this. He brings up a window, and looks out, and he sees the darkness; how there’s no fringe of stars on his side: just the blackness of the anomaly.

‘I’m inside it,’ he says. He rubs his face. He has most of a beard on it now, and his skin is greyer than it was. ‘And I suppose you are not, somehow.’ I don’t know how to deal with this. Likely that this has to be a plaster, rapidly torn off: a wound exposed to the air, for the benefit of healing.

‘The anomaly moved.’

He nods. He’s either not taking this in or he implicitly understands. Maybe I don’t need to go through this all. He unclips himself and swings his legs out, as if there’s gravity and he’s just going to put them on the floor, but then he starts drifting. He pushes towards me with his hands out, and I watch them fold up against the dividing line in mid air: like the world’s best mime. His eyes sag even more as he feels the wall. How it’s inside the ship, how it has cut a swathe through everything: questions that I cannot answer. I wonder if we’ll ever have answers, or if I will return home to accusations. How all that mattered would be the deaths and the enigmas, spoken of as fraud and lies as we attempt to bluffingly explain the unexplainable thing that we have encountered out here.

‘It moved, not us.’

‘That’s what Tomas tells me.’

‘And he’s sure?’

‘He’s sure.’ I watch Hikaru. He looks around every part of his side of the ship. He doesn’t look at the anomaly wall, at where I should be. It’s nothingness; I don’t think that I would want to look into it either, not if I was in his shoes. This feels like hostage negotiations, I think: he is suddenly a man on the edge. I don’t want to say the wrong thing, but I have no idea what the wrong thing is. ‘We were both asleep. Maybe it’s related to that.’

‘Was Tomas awake?’

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘And you trust him? There’s no way he would have done this. No way he would have moved the ship.’ Tomas is listening, because he must be. He is always listening. ‘Or, you know, not moved us backwards, when he saw what was happening. He’s not so fucking driven, so desperate to get answers, that would never have made him do this.’

‘He didn’t,’ I say. ‘And we’ll get you out of there.’

‘Like we have with Inna,’ he says.

‘That’s different,’ I reply. ‘You aren’t dead.’

‘Yet.’ He doesn’t look up. He looks so grey.

‘Listen, now that we have you on the inside, working out what this thing is will be much easier.’ He rubs his face with his hands, his whole head. Running his fingers through his hair. I’ve lost him, I think; and then the banging starts. She’s back.

‘What’s that?’ Hikaru asks.

‘It’s Inna,’ I say. I won’t lie to him.

‘She’s still outside.’ He turns and pushes towards the doorway, down the hall. I chase him, slower than he is. Still less able. I drag myself along the rail and I watch him, and I shout. ‘We thought it was safer, because we didn’t know what we were going to do. We didn’t know how affected you were!’ He ignores me. I get to be in the hallway and watch him bring up a terminal, so I do the same. I tap to lock the door, to enter the override code that only Tomas and I know, but the system rejects it. It’s on the other side of the anomaly; I cannot do anything. The equivalent of the static, I suspect. ‘Hikaru,’ I say, ‘I want her back just as much as you, but this could ruin the entire mission.’

‘You can’t leave her out there to die,’ he says. She isn’t really even dead. I don’t know if she is even really alive. I see him hammer the buttons to start the airlock cycle, almost in rhythm with Inna’s hammering on the side of the ship. He speaks to her through the comms as the door opens. ‘Inna,’ he says, ‘you should come in now.’ He’s her white knight; the one who saved her. I am the one who stood on the other side of the fence.

‘Hikaru,’ I say, ‘be careful what we tell her. About what’s happened. It could be distressing to her.’

‘I won’t lie to her,’ he says. The banging stops, and there’s a different sound. Pawing. Scraping, the noise of Inna dragging herself along the hull.

‘I will,’ I say. And then there she is: gasping in her helmet, even though she has enough air. Inside, then, and frantically looking around. Hikaru shuts the door behind her, and the air floods into the room, and she pulls off her helmet and presses the walls of the decompression room as the helmet floats about behind her.

‘You saved me,’ she says. She is weak and tired, gasping in as her lungs get used to this. He reaches for her and props her up and pulls her to the rail and helps her take hold of it. I am pathetic. She is crying so hard. ‘What’s happened?’ she asks. She pulls at the straps of her suit, tugging the zip down, and the suit peels away from her chest and shoulders. Her bird tattoo: I had forgotten. Where does it go? What does it mean? ‘Mira,’ she says. ‘Come and help me, please.’ She looks at me, but I stay where I am.

‘I can’t,’ I say. ‘I just can’t.’

I explain everything to her, apart from how many times she has died. That can come later. Hikaru watches me while I talk to her, and I wonder if he will be the one to say it. He has brought her in from the cold; maybe he will tell her the truth. If he does, he can be the one to deal with that. When she was outside and I told her, I saw how it ruined her. To know, suddenly, that death means nothing inside the anomaly: it must change you. (I have thought about it myself, but I am so distant from it: I have tried to consider the implications, what it might do to the mind, but until faced with the very real possibility of what the anomaly offers, I cannot firmly contemplate how I might feel.) She will find out eventually, I know, but that doesn’t have to be now. Hikaru doesn’t say anything to her: instead, he says that he needs some quiet. He says that he needs to think. I don’t think he believes that we are ever getting home, at this point. I tell myself that I will tell her eventually, when we’re free of this and headed home. If that is possible, then so too will the truth be.

Instead now I tell her that she passed out. I truncate time, and say that Tobi and Lennox have not long been dead. That Wallace killed himself just after that, and that Hikaru and I have been trying to get her back ever since. She doesn’t question the timescale, because she’s just happy to be back on the ship. She is wrapped in a towel, having showered, and she coughs and sips from a water bottle she keeps tethered to her wrist, nibbles at a food bar. She is ravenous, she says. As she eats, slowly, so slowly, I explain about the anomaly wall, and how she and Hikaru are stuck that side of it.

‘It seems safer that I stay outside it for as long as possible,’ I say. She presses a hand to the wall. She’s sitting on a chair opposite me, strapped down.

‘So what is this anomaly, then?’ she asks. She looks so tired. She and Hikaru both, but it shows even more on Inna. Where you can see the surgery scars, suddenly, as the skin slightly sags over their thin laser-lines; and where she tries to smile but the skin won’t allow it, because it’s been too smoothed over. She is in her tank-top, and the bird reaches for her neck, its beak only slightly parted. I’m sure that there’s a hint of a tongue in there. ‘You must know something now.’

‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘You know how often we can’t explain something?’ She doesn’t reply; it’s rhetorical. ‘Never,’ I say. ‘Because we make up explanations. We take whatever we’ve got and apply logic and get somewhere.’

‘I want to go home,’ she says.

‘So do I,’ I say, but I do not know if that is true. Not without answers. Because what are we without answers?

Hikaru agrees to run the tests I ask of him, even though he questions their point. Now, I can tell that he is lost in himself. He is not the man that he once was, but he understands enough of how this has to work. He has no control, and he is like all of us: expendable. While he sends pings out from the front of the ship that is inside the anomaly, Inna examines the bodies of our dead comrades. She says that she is only making sure that they’re preserved, but I suspect that she wants to ensure that there hasn’t been any foul play. She says that she trusts me, but there will always be a doubt. I catch only a glimpse of Lennox’s charred arm before I stop watching her examination. She asks me about Wallace, about what drove him to do it. I tell her that some people can’t cope with the unknown. She doesn’t buy it. I have asked myself the same question, over and over. What piece of knowledge pushed him over the edge in the end?

The day is quiet and strangely muted. It’s almost as if nothing happened, and we’re a crew getting on with this. I don’t know, really, how I expected this trip to go. Maybe that we would have come to the anomaly and found nothing, that would have been ideal. Not for science, but for the safety and state of the crew. Maybe it could have turned out to be the equivalent of the aurora borealis: a trick of the light, a convergence of science that gave us something strange but harmless. (Does that mean that I see the anomaly as harmful? Intrinsically, in itself? I don’t know. Every pain it has caused has been our own. It is simply the iceberg that collided with the Titanic.) The anomaly would have been something that we could shrug off, and we would learn from, and there it would lie: charted in the stars, plotted for eternity, as something that we would name – Hyvönen, maybe, the Hyvönen Anomaly – and that would always be there. People would search for it in the skies with their high-powered garden telescopes, to look for that ripple, like the haze of heat rising from tarmac, only stretched across the stars, and they would wait for the optimal conditions to see it, as they do with meteors and planets. It would be a thing that existed past us, longer than us. Our name would be unfaltering. That would have been a result: past the excitement of the trip, and the thrill of this whole endeavour, a thing that we could name and be remembered by. Science in its essence.

I remain desperate to stay awake. I cannot keep this up forever, I know. I don’t know why I am so scared of sleeping now. I am worried, perhaps, that if I wake up I will have missed something: another death, or myself becoming swallowed by the anomaly. And I cannot take a shower, even though I desperately need one, because it is on their side. I am itching from the dirt and sweat, my scalp and pubic region needing a wash. Instead I take bottles of recyc-water, and I go to the engine rooms. I strip and spray the water at myself, all over, rub myself with a bar of soap and then try as best I can to wash it off; as the water tries to follow the lack of gravity and flee I catch what I can to smooth it across myself. I am also growing a beard. I can see it in the mirrors of the screens, but I am not able to judge what it looks like for myself. Inna says that I look distinguished, but I do not necessarily believe her. The beard itches as it comes through. Inna has offered to find and give me the shaver, but I don’t need it. I think I like this. I like the idea of, when we land, me looking completely different to Tomas. He will have the birthmark; I will have the beard. I spray the water all over me, onto my head, my face, my groin and armpits, my arse. This can’t be hygienic, having the waste float around me like this, drifting into the engines and the walls. I dress and avoid it, and then step outside the room before decompressing it. I listen as the air and water and whatever’s spewed off my body are sucked out into the vacuum. I leave it sucking everything out for far longer than I need to. There is something curiously comforting about the thought of a vacuum.

I take another stim. I remember when you used to have to wait for headache pills to kick in. Now, they’re working as soon as you even touch the tablet, surging through from fingertips to nerves in the most fluid and driven of motions. The stims bolster me. Everything is perfectly clear for a while. I squander that clarity by myself in the lab.

I watch Inna on the monitors when I am not with her. There is something about her that I want to clarify. I want to run tests on her, and I want to hold her and reassure her. The two can be attached and interchangeable, I suspect. Sometimes I catch myself thinking that she has died too many times to even be real, now.

I am forced to piss into bottles. I do this by myself, in the engine rooms. This is my private indignity. When I return, I find Inna sitting at the table, a screen pulled out in front of her. She’s watching the footage that we recorded of her dying. Playing back that moment of pure nothing over and over.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asks. Hikaru is crammed into the cockpit, asleep in his chair, leaning up against the anomaly wall. ‘How many times did it happen?’

‘So many,’ I reply. ‘Too many.’

‘And you didn’t rescue me.’

‘We couldn’t.’ I know how weak this is going to sound before I even say it; how she will resent this, because I would. Anybody would, knowing as she did that they were left to die. ‘You were on that side, and we were here,’ I say. ‘And we had to stay where we were because it seemed like the only chance we would have of getting you back.’ I don’t say: and ourselves. If we went in there to get you, we would all have been stranded.

‘You’ve got me back now,’ she says. ‘You could have come and done this straight away, couldn’t you?’ She rewinds it and zooms in: her face as she dies. That moment where it stops, where the terror and screaming give way to something like peace, but it’s an accident. And then the scratch and blank frame and she reappears, her eyes opening like it’s morning and she’s been asleep, and then she realizes the enormity of the situation.

‘We haven’t got you back,’ I say. ‘You are still in there. I am out here. We can’t go home.’

‘We haven’t tried,’ she says. ‘We haven’t even tried yet.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘We need results from inside the anomaly. We have to get them, and then we can try. I am so sorry.’

‘You aren’t sorry, Mirakel,’ Inna says. Every r, so softly rolled. She stays looking down.

‘Ask Tomas when we can leave,’ Hikaru says. He has been awake the whole time. ‘I’ve asked him, but he won’t give us an answer. Do that for us.’ He doesn’t sit up. He stays in the chair, his eyes still shut, and that’s the end of the conversation.

I float in the lab and begin talking to Tomas. ‘I want to see you,’ I tell him, and I wait.

‘What?’

‘Initiate video,’ I say, and the call goes through. I wait: the bandwidth isn’t built for this, and the resolution is terrible, and the lag almost makes this unworkable. I sit back and wait, and there he is, recognizable even when he is so pixelated: my brother. He is in that suit, just as I thought, but he’s not comfortable in it. He straightens his hair and stubs out a cigarette in the glass ashtray behind him. He smoked long before they made them harmless, and it’s a habit he’s thrilled to revel in. It’s funny: his birthmark is how I see myself, I think. That here is my point of reference for how we look, even though my face is clear. Never even a spot of acne, nothing on it but the skin – and, now, the beard, of course – but I can still tell that this is having an effect on him. That, maybe, the calm in his voice is an act. His tie is loosened; his top button undone. The image is broken and only three twenty by three twenty, maybe, but still: I can see him.

‘This is a surprise,’ he says. ‘What do you want, Mira?’ Behind him, a crowd: they peer and try to see the screen. It will be just as low-res on his screens, I know. He could have stretched it out; filled the wall, even. He puts his earpiece in, so that only he can hear me. ‘We’re just as busy as you are, you know.’

‘What do we want out of this, Tomas?’

‘What do you mean? You know what we want.’

‘We wanted to find out more about the anomaly. That was our mission. Find out if it was a danger or not. Find out how big it was; what it was. We were to get answers, right?’ I do not wait for him to reply. ‘Well, we have them. We have answers. We do not know what it is. We do not know exactly how big it is. We know nothing, and that is the best answer we can hope to have right now.’

‘I see,’ he says. He looks at my eyes: the camera being embedded in the screens means we have eye contact. It’s a look I’ve seen before: disappointment, mainly that I am not the man he is. I am not willing to go as far as he is.

‘They want to go home.’

‘Well, they can’t.’

‘You don’t know that,’ I say.

‘Then let them try.’ There is a pause, longer than the lag alone, and then he speaks again: ‘Although it looks as if they already are.’ He disconnects and I push out of the lab and into the hall. I have to be careful in being frantic, but the ship is rumbling: the engines spinning, warming up.

‘Don’t!’ I shout, but it’s too late. We move, lurching forward. Hikaru is controlling us, pushing us away. He has misjudged this. The Lära barely moves, but Hikaru and Inna do. Their bodies are slammed to the wall, crushed between the insides of the ship and the anomaly. Inna is against the table, her back broken, her spine snapped; Hikaru in the cockpit, squashed down, pressed as if in a vice. There is blood, and death, and Tomas says something over the speakers. I scream, because I did not want this, and I think about going over there, to save them, but I cannot move. I shut my eyes, only for a second, because this is too much – Inna’s shocked face, Hikaru so mangled I cannot see where he ends and the ship begins – and then they are just as they were. Inna is at the table, watching herself die; Hikaru is asleep in the cockpit.

Inna looks at the darkness as I gasp, as I know what it is that I am looking at. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asks, still searching for me. I tell myself that I should try to remember what it was that I said before, to make this play out again as if this was just the first time. But I don’t. I act like I am not there, and I stay silent, and I push away.

Tomas speaks to me when I am alone. ‘There is no uniformity,’ he says. ‘The way it works, the time it takes. Hours with Inna when she was outside. Minutes here. Twenty minutes? Maybe less. I wonder how it is chosen. I wonder if it is arbitrary.’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. I feel sick, and I try to eat, and I try to stay calm. My mother taught me breathing exercises. She taught me self-control, and so many ways to keep your head. If you let it slip away, you are likely to ruin yourself.

‘I wish I could be there to see it,’ he says. ‘To be that close. We have never seen anything like this, have we?’

‘What do you mean?’ I ask. I want to stop and think on this; to take it all in, and let it have a chance to become real. I cannot compute it, and I cannot understand it. I am not even sure, in this second, that I am meant to. But Tomas drives forward, wanting answers.

‘I mean,’ he says, ‘as humans. We have never seen time be this fluid. We have never seen it act this way. It’s fascinating.’

‘It’s not time,’ I say.

‘Oh?’

‘It can’t be. We are as we were. It’s not changing for us. Time cannot be different in two places at once.’

‘You’d think that. But the rules are different, maybe. We do not understand it, Brother, and maybe we should not try to. Not yet.’ This is not something we can test, I think. Not as he would have us do. ‘Anyway: I am locking them out of the engines. I’m bringing full control here, so that Hikaru can’t do that again. You understand?’

‘Yes,’ I say, but I want to ask for a chance to talk Hikaru down. To tell him to change his mind; to say that I know what he’s planning. I do not. Tomas is in charge here now, because I have seen too much. I need to stay here. I need to be by myself.

When he is gone I make sure that the door is shut, and I lock it even though there’s no chance of them getting to this side of the ship and opening it and getting me, but then they start shouting, or Hikaru does. He has tried to turn the engines on and found that he can’t. He can’t do anything: his controls are completely locked out, passworded and under blankets of security that he cannot hope to bypass.

‘What the fuck have you done?’ he screams. ‘Mira! Come out here!’ He shouts, but he can’t do anything. I am safe in here. I flick through the internal cameras, and I see how disappointed they both are. Inna looks at the screen, of herself dying. She watches it over and over. I have been there myself, I think.

12

They both sleep, but I stay awake. I don’t want to risk them waking up and finding a loophole, or doing something that ruins us all. I wonder: Can they cause an explosion? Could they, if they wanted to, make the whole ship useless, cause us to explode? Wreck life support, meaning that they would come back but I, presumably, would not? They could hold me hostage. They could do anything that they wanted, then. There is a flare gun in the emergency landing pack. They could shoot me, if they wanted to. If they told Tomas to start the ship or they would kill me, he would have to listen to them.

Inna doesn’t have a bed to sleep in on that side of the ship, so she’s attached herself to a bench in the changing area. I can see her, just about: the side of her head, and her shoulder, and the tattoo. It rises and falls as she breathes. I don’t know how she can sleep; I would worry that I wouldn’t wake up again afterwards. And hasn’t she slept enough?

While they sleep, I look at numbers, and I try to imagine that I am worthwhile. That something I can do here can make some sort of difference. I do not believe that I can. I do not know what any of this is proving: these numbers, these pings, these results. Our mission was for answers, but increasingly I wonder what the questions even were. Or if we were asking the right ones. Tomas tells me that I should be using Hikaru and – now – Inna more.

‘They’re inside it,’ he says. ‘Get them to go out outside and bring in debris from the Ishiguro.’ It’s still out there, chunks of the ship, bobbing around. It’s in the distance, but nothing that we couldn’t cover with the scant amount of air the suits allow us. That’s not the point, I think.

‘What would you have them look for?’

‘That ship survived for decades. I want to know what happened to it. There was a black box, wasn’t there?’

‘There would have been hard drives.’

‘They might have survived.’

‘I’m not asking them to go and get them.’

‘Why the hell not?’

‘They will say no. They hate me, because of what you did.’

‘We had to do it, or they would have killed themselves. Do you prefer that idea?’

‘I’m not asking them,’ I say. He goes silent. ‘Do you have any more ideas how we get out of this thing?’ I ask.

‘We’re working on it,’ he says, but I know that that means nothing.

‘Worst case, you’ll have to send somebody to get us.’ He doesn’t reply. There’s another ship: a second ship still in Florida, which remained unnamed but was still constructed and tested, as everything else. It was our backup, in case the first had a problem. We made everything in duplicate during the manufacturing process. It cost a fraction of the price of the first craft: creating two of every custom part made perfect sense. Each part, in fact, has another copy, sitting waiting, unassembled, in some warehouse somewhere. It made sense to have these things: a backup ship, a backup crew, a backup of everything. ‘It could launch,’ I say, ‘and we – you – use some of the other crew who went through training. Most of them know enough to get out here fast as anything.’

‘Perhaps,’ Tomas says. ‘It’s certainly something worth discussing.’ He doesn’t say goodnight, obviously. No need. I understand the finality of that. I take another couple of stims. I need more, or I will. Only a few left. Worst case, I tell myself, I have to sleep. I shut my eyes and relax, and let the cards fall as they may.

Hikaru is locked out of the computers, so this falls to me, now. The maintenance of the ship; the care and caution of our lives. I check the numbers: how much battery we’ve got left in the charge, which means life support. It means, how long we have before we fall into darkness and start to drift as the boosters shut off, and we die, for the last time or not. We were never meant to stay still this long. Hikaru can’t have looked or he would have said something, and Inna wouldn’t know how to look, I don’t think. I send a link to a screen grab of it to Tomas, so that he can see, and then I float to my bed. I am lying down when I remember that I am not allowed to sleep; and I only took stims a while ago, but they are working less and less. I take another. I stay awake.

We can’t risk being swallowed, I tell myself.

Tomas and I did this once before, when we were children. We built our first spaceship as soon as we moved to a house with a big enough garden, after our mother married her second husband. We used cardboard boxes from when he had a brand-new sofa delivered, and we taped items to it and glued them, and spent the morning painting the whole thing with whatever he had in his shed. A thin grey for the outside; reds and yellows for the panels. He was desperate to be fatherly, so he spent the morning doing anything we asked of him, as did my mother, and they tried to be romantic about it: this is a spaceship of new familial love and pastel colours. We didn’t care about that. We were strict and told her what we wanted: we wanted science. We already owned books about spacecraft, and there had been a documentary on the television about shuttles, real things – this wouldn’t have been long after the Indian disaster – and we wanted to do what they used to do, back before. Her new husband understood: he went to the shed again and came back with a handful of wires and cables that he had torn out of the back of some ancient and ruined computer monitor, and then he gave us the circuit board from the computer itself. We glued it in; a handful of old hard drives for the systems themselves, underneath the glass window given us from the monitor also. And then controllers from a video game console, to guide us to where we were going. It was perfect.

I have photographs of the two of us sitting in it. Our problem was a lack of imagination. That you could give us the ship and we would sit in it and wonder why we could not actually take off and see the things that the adults around us were telling us we were seeing. My mother got inside the ship with us and tried. She looked to the moon, and then her new husband pretended to be an alien, but that only destroyed the illusion more. We were steadfast. The point of the game for us was to see if we could do it. We had built the ship: now the fun was in the ship itself, not the journey that we were supposed to imagine it taking.

So more of the fun: the disassembling of the ship. The laying out of the different sections flat on the lawn. Telling her new husband that this part was due to be used again in another craft, but that this part was scrap, destined for use in microwaves or refrigerators. Useless for space travel, we told him. Better off being used in the home, I think. We laid them all out and then collected them in, putting the bits we wanted to keep into a box. All we kept for the next trip were the hard drives and the joystick, nothing but memory and control. Everything else was able to go. We burned the cardboard that night and sat around the campfire it made in the garden, and they smoked and we cooked hotdogs. I remember not being able to see our mother by the end of the night – she had gone off inside – and we both asked where she was, and her new husband said, She’s gone to the stars! like he was carrying on the game, but he was joking, and he laughed at his own joke. We thought he was laughing at us, and we didn’t get it when he said that he wasn’t. Not at our age, not as excited and anxious as we actually were.

Even on a ship this small, even with the anomaly wall physically between us, Hikaru and Inna begin to ignore me. I do not say their names, and I do not try to get them to talk to me, but they are in their own worlds, so distinct and separate from mine that I feel alienated. I feel pushed to one side. They are angry with Tomas and me, both of us. If they knew why he did what he did, maybe they would understand. You cannot feel as we do about answers unless you are the ones asking the questions. As they are awed by this, they lose their heads. Tomas cut the ship off from being able to control itself because it would save their lives, and because it would save the mission. There are three of us left, in a way, and we can be saved; and we can return with what we came out here for.

Eventually I strap myself to a chair and sit opposite them, watching them. They are both still and silent, both staring at nothing; Hikaru stares at the screens in the cockpit, Inna at screens of the anomaly itself. I wonder what she sees in it. If there is something that she wonders, based on when she was out there, floating so free and loose inside it.

‘Tomas was only worried about the anomaly,’ I say, and they ignore me at first. ‘You know how long we have worried about it for. You know that. It’s not like it’s a shock to you, that he would do this.’ But it is. ‘We need answers, you know that.’

‘Why did you cut us off?’ Hikaru asks.

‘Tomas did it,’ I say, which sounds defensive. I do not want them to hate me. They can hate him: he is safe and sound, warm and cosy.

‘Okay,’ Hikaru says. It’s so dismissive.

‘We need to find out what the anomaly is,’ I say. ‘How it does what it does.’

‘And what exactly is it that it does?’ He slams his hand, flat-palmed, on the anomaly wall. ‘It’s nothing.’

‘You know,’ I say. ‘You saw what happened to Inna.’ My voice is apologetic. Inna cocks her head to her name, my invocation.

‘Why did we get cut off, Mira?’ Hikaru asks. He knows, I’m sure, or he suspects. ‘How did you know I was going to start the engines? How did you know that was going to happen?’

‘We need to get you out of there,’ I say. ‘That’s all I know.’ Tomas would have told them, I think. He would have been cold and delivered it as a fact. You died. You came back. Once is enough. But he is not on the comm right now, which means he misses this. The decisions made now are my own.

‘We aren’t getting out, though,’ Inna says. She doesn’t change where she’s looking. She doesn’t even try to find me. ‘We aren’t leaving here, and we aren’t going home. We are going to die, and we have to make our peace with it. Hikaru and I are starting to. Now it’s just you, Mira. This is finished.’ She looks so calm. I would like to look that calm, I think.

‘It’s not finished,’ I say.

‘Of course it is,’ she tells me.

‘We can get out of this and make it home, Inna. We just have to work together, and we will find a hole. We can get you home, I am sure of it.’ My lies. I do not know what I believe: if I think it’s possible, or if I am telling her this to keep them going until Tomas says we are done, and that they are sacrifices. And when that happens, will I be satisfied? Will I be able to go through with it?

‘We can’t go home, Mira. Don’t you see that?’ She walks closer; puts her hands out until her skin presses onto the wall. I can see her veins, in her wrists; the blood pumping around her body. ‘Why are you the only one who doesn’t see that?’

‘I’ll find a way,’ I say. ‘I will.’ I don’t let them reply. I go to the lab and I call Earth, and Simpson tells me that Tomas is asleep, and I rage at him. ‘Get him,’ I say. ‘Wake him up and tell him I want to speak to him.’ I wait. I bring up the orange ping-map and I try to think about work, but I don’t even know what that work is any more.

He comes onto the line. ‘What?’ he asks. He doesn’t sound as if he was asleep; he sounds stressed, yes, but I know our voices when we are just woken.

‘They have no faith in us, Tomas. They have none. They don’t believe we are getting home, and I have nothing to tell them.’

‘Okay,’ he says.

‘It’s not okay! What do you suggest? What the hell should I say? Do you have any ideas down there? Any plans? Anything for us to try?’

He sighs, and I know what it means. It is my sigh. It is even my mother’s sigh: when she told us that she was sick, and that she would not be getting better. ‘We have nothing,’ he says. ‘There are no plans.’

‘There must be something,’ I say. ‘We need to do something.’

‘Make your peace, Brother,’ he says. He has no faith in me, in himself, in us. No faith that we can survive this. Death is the only answer, and inevitable. ‘I’m sorry. Goodbye.’

‘What have you done?’ I ask him. ‘Tomas, did you know?’ There’s no answer. The line is silent. I message a few more times, try to instigate a video call, try to send data packets, but there’s no response. I shut my eyes. I think of the anomaly, and I wonder what will make it move; and how long I have.

In the lounge I tell the other two that I have accepted it. They tell me to cross over, towards them, and to keep walking. I say that I cannot, because I don’t know what it will mean. And they say, this will last forever. After you cross to us, you will never die, because you cannot. I wonder how I look, to them; grey and vague, through the anomaly. If they can ever truly see me from where they are.

And then I find myself sitting in the cockpit, in one of the pilot’s seats, propped up. I think that I’ve been asleep. I can’t remember if that was a conversation that actually happened or not. Inna and Hikaru sit at the table. They are eating together: as Inna once said, it is important to do things in a social way, to enhance the feeling of solidarity, to stress that you are not out here all alone. They cannot see me, but I watch them, and on this side I eat as well, as if I am with them. Hikaru isn’t eating white food. He’s eating one of the normal bars – I think it’s meatballs, from the colour, meatballs and vegetables and gravy, Swedish style, one of my requests – but he doesn’t look as if he’s enjoying it.

There’s something on the scanners. I notice it when I’m staying awake, my last couple of stims, as Hikaru and Inna both sleep again. Sleeping until death; until the batteries go, and life support ends, and this is over. The something is in the distance. Indefinable because it is so small, but coming towards us.

‘Tomas,’ I say, ‘are you watching this?’ I don’t get a reply. I don’t really expect one. Even though I know full well that he’s watching, and listening.

In the lab I bring up a screen and put a marker on the object and then I realize what it is, but it takes me a second because I’m slow with tiredness, even through the stims, and I put the marker in and it makes sense. I bring up video footage from the bounce, the long-range footage of whatever this thing is, and I plot it against the map of where we are. I go into the hard drives, to the time stamps of what we saw before, when we first met the Ishiguro, and I bring that up, extend it and enlarge it, and try to match the two. The blur looks the same from here, as tiny as it is; and I spend all day watching them, trying to see if they’re exactly the same; and they are, soaring along inside the anomaly. It makes sense, and I finally have answers to one of my questions. How did the Ishiguro survive out here for so long? Answer: it didn’t. It has been cycling, like everything else that dies inside the anomaly.

I don’t say anything to Inna and Hikaru, not yet: I sit and watch them. ‘I have déjà vu,’ I say, hoping that Tomas will correct me; tell me that this is not déjà vu, this is sitting through something again, an experience that reminds me of the first. Déjà vu is a chemical response to coincidence that causes a rush of endorphins. This – watching the two versions of the Ishiguro, one from before, one now, and yet both somehow old – makes me realize how much the anomaly is like the video players. It is not changing time; it is simply replaying that which has already happened once before.

I spend my life here watching it as it gets bigger, losing track of time. It’s following the exact same line. I tell Hikaru and Inna that I might be onto something, that there might be something happening soon. I don’t say that it’s a way out, because it isn’t. I don’t say that it’s the Ishiguro. I match the trajectories exactly, using the recorded pins as an overlay, so that I can see if anything changes. It’s safe to assume that they are like Inna was: relatively mutable, able to alter what they do each go-around, depending on circumstances. Still, they won’t have changed a thing, I shouldn’t think, because there’s nothing external to influence them. There is no me, telling them lies through a headset. Assuming that they don’t know that they’re in the cycle – because why would they? – they will do exactly what they did before. Why would you change a decision that made perfect sense the first time around?

As it gets closer and closer I can see the ship. Their path is an exact copy. Where they stop, it’s at the same time in the same place. When they start moving again, ditto. It’s almost too incredible.

‘Are you seeing this, Tomas?’ I ask, but he doesn’t answer, and of course he is.

Hikaru tells us that he wants to go for a walk. I cannot stop him, I know that. He says that he wants to see what it’s like.

‘I never had the chance when we were still on the mission,’ he says, even though the mission is not done, and we are not finished, ‘so I think I should probably do it now. Before this ends.’ He is convinced that we are over. This is Hikaru on a death clock. If Inna was doing her job properly, she should be worried about him. He’s a prime candidate, more even than Wallace was, and look how that ended. He preps an O₂ tank for the helmet and gets changed outside the airlock. Inna helps him: even as she fastens his suit for him and aids him in attaching the helmet I can tell that she hates it. What it reminds her of, to look into that slightly mirrored glass of the front. I watch them through the corridor, but I can barely see the airlock from here. I change the view on the screens to track him when he’s outside – I imagine him doing something stupid, and know that I have to watch it if he does – and I strap myself to a chair and reach for my stims. The blister pack is empty. I tell myself that it’s okay. Fastened here, barely sitting, almost floating, I am gone.

I wake up to the noise and bluster of Hikaru coming back: the flurry of him working the airlocks compared to the silence of Inna sitting by herself. I don’t know what she was doing.

‘How was it?’ she asks him. She knows what her time was like; what it must be, she’s thinking, to have had a trip into that darkness that passed without incident.

‘Yeah,’ he says. He thinks, and then, ‘Pretty amazing.’ I pull myself to the corridor and peer in at them. ‘You should try it, Mira: going out into the anomaly.’ There’s no joy in his suggestion. He is the villain in the darkness beckoning me closer to his side of the ship. ‘It’s not like real space, you know? You feel so alone, and there’s nothing. Even a foot in front of your face, there’s nothing. It’s an answer in itself, I think.’

‘I’m fine,’ I say. I flick back to the Ishiguro on the cameras. It’s only a day away, maybe. I am trying to think of ways to get its attention, to let it know that we’re friendly. If we combine forces, maybe we can break this thing? Maybe then we can all get home?

I wake my crew and tell them that we need to talk. They are sluggish and wary, but I tell them that this is important. I tell them what I have discovered: that the Ishiguro is out there again, and heading back towards where we are. Hikaru nods along as if this is the most normal thing in the world. Suddenly nothing is incredible.

‘So they’re in a cycle, just as I was,’ Inna says. As you may be still, I think, but I don’t say that out loud. Wherever they are, whatever they are doing, if they die now they will begin again. Everything replays itself; all that has happened becomes new again. Inna has been in the anomaly since she died the first time. Would all her cycles before count as a single cycle now? If she and Hikaru died, would they all be a part of their joint experience? She stares at the screen I bring up, showing them it. I put it against the wall, make it large. She treats this as a window.

I am the only one out of this. Really, if I break this down, I am all that is left of my own free will; my own ability to do what it is that I want. If I were to die now, I would stay dead. I would join my other crewmates, sent out of the anomaly before they had a chance to restart their lives. I would drift; they might be able to drag me to their side but I, I assume, would remain dead. They would put me into a bed, probably Hikaru’s, to preserve my body.

I would be in that state for eternity: done.

I have never before had thoughts this dark. Once, Tomas told me that he had considered suicide. As a teenager he had wondered about it as a way of expressing himself. An experiment. He asked me what there was left to conquer – this was before we had set ourselves on our paths – and said, This is a way to explore that which can only be explored now. To really discover something about humanity. It was a child talking, the idea of a fool who talks before thinking. Maybe it was under the influence of something – he got quite into drugs as a teenager, mushrooms that our stepfather grew and approved of us trying, an experiment to open our minds (and which directly led towards him leaving our mother) – but it made sense to him for a minute. Death: a final frontier. He had those thoughts. I wish that I could speak to him, now. Ask him what he would do in my situation, even though I know the answer. He would say, Be strong. I am not as strong as him though. Not in that way.

‘Are you all right?’ Inna asks me, but I can only gulp her question – and my answer – away, and I slope off down the corridor and into the lab. She follows, down her own section of the corridor. I stay around the corner, out of sight, but I don’t close the door, and I can hear her voice calling to me: ‘Mira? Mira?’ She sounds concerned for me: as if, all of a sudden, she wants to ensure my safety again, and that I am okay. Her job, and maybe something else.

‘Go away,’ I say, but I don’t know that she can hear me, and I’m not really sure that I mean it.

I think about it all day. Here, on the one hand, the Ishiguro is getting closer and closer: and with it comes a chance to witness something truly incredible, to step outside the bounds of science as I understand it, to define a scientific theory. The reappearance of it, the seemingly immortal cycle of life inside the anomaly: it could change the world. This is what we wanted to find, even though we did not know it.

And the other hand: the reality of what is left, and how my days will end. Because Inna doesn’t remember her cycles, and I would hazard that the crew of the Ishiguro don’t either. If they could, it is likely that they would be doing something different with them. They wouldn’t be back here, revisiting old glories. They would be trying to find a way out of this. Twenty-three years of this, and they surely would have found something better than echoing themselves.

So there is a way out. I think about how I would do it. Wallace’s route worked for him, but I could not do it. We have blades, scalpels in the medical kits. And we have pills: we have enough tranquillizers in the medicine cupboard that it would be easy. They say it’s like sleeping, drifting off in a fug of something or other. A haze.

If I could find the courage, this would be my last chance.

I watch the Ishiguro get closer and closer. It is so unnatural: like a ghost, almost, coming through the nothing. It is solid, but it has exploded and been lost (I assume) so many times before. I wonder what they’re doing in there. I wonder if they know what we know, on this cycle. Maybe this time they have worked it out. It stops. It did this before, the first time. (I laugh at that thought: the first time for me, but how many times for them I wouldn’t even like to hazard a guess. Maybe I will run the numbers one day: it should be easy enough to work out.) It is close enough now that they should be able to see us. We are not chasing to catch up with them: we are ahead of them, not debris or a meteor or anything else you might see in space. We are like them. I wonder, if they see us, how we will look: the half a ship inside the anomaly, divided up. What that will look like to them? I tell Hikaru and Inna what has happened, and where it is.

‘How do we get in contact with them?’ Hikaru asks. I can hear hope in his voice. I’m not sure that he even knows it’s there, but it is. I wonder if he suddenly regrets eating his non-white food. ‘There must be some way,’ he says.

‘We tried everything before,’ I say.

‘You could try hailing them,’ Inna says.

‘We’ve already tried that as well,’ I tell her. ‘We tried different radio frequencies, and they didn’t answer. They’re too automated.’

‘So we’re in front of them. They’ll see us through the cockpit now, won’t they? They’ll want to know who the hell we are.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Of course.’ But we float and wait, and nothing comes from there. Hikaru gets nervous, and paces as much as somebody can up here; pushing himself in a small space, from wall to floor to ceiling. He bites his nails: so different from the man we brought up here. That man was calm, still. This one is a nearly a wreck.

‘I should go out there,’ Hikaru says. ‘I could get them out.’

‘No,’ Inna says. He isn’t thinking. Or he can’t remember. It seems like so long ago.

‘It would make sense,’ he says. ‘They’re close enough, right?’

‘Don’t be fucking stupid!’ she shouts. I picture them – Inna, Lennox, Tobi – out there, trying to do what we thought was best. Then the Ishiguro firing its engines and roaring forward in that way we never expected. How it didn’t flinch: all their engines, pushing it onwards along the inside line of the anomaly.

And then, realization. We are not where we were; or the anomaly is not.

I push myself to the lab. I get the maps up, where we and the Ishiguro are now, the video of where the Ishiguro was before. Something’s changed: the Ishiguro was never on this exact trajectory. It was further away, further from the Earth. It’s moved, clinging to the front-line of the anomaly, as if it was a tide, maybe, and we are on the edge of the wash; and I watch the video of what it will do now and we’re in its path, trapped halfway between the anomaly and not. On the video projection, as an overlay, the Ishiguro roars past us and explodes. It moves through where we are. It moves into us, and if we are still here, we will die, as it will break every part of us.

I do not want to die. Sometimes, the promise of that is enough to give you the answer; seeing it happen, almost, is enough to put you off the idea.

Hikaru tells me that there’s no choice but to move the ship forward. He pleads with me, that it’s something we have to do. He says, ‘We don’t want this to be our everlasting,’ which seems to me an odd way to phrase this. I wonder where the cycle would start from with this death; if there is any logic or reason there, any science. (I wonder, for a second, for a fraction of that time, if this could be down to God. This is the first time since I could breathe that I have contemplated with any seriousness the concept of a deity. I almost feel a fool.) I tell Hikaru that there must be another way. This all seems to play too slowly: as if we’re struggling for what to say and think. I wish we had Tomas’ input. He might have an opinion.

‘Don’t be an idiot,’ Hikaru says, as he seems to always say or think now. ‘There’s no other way out of this. You will die, Mira. Is that what you want?’ Preservation of the self, I think. This is what he’s displaying, even though he’s turned it onto me. Inna pushes herself towards the wall of the anomaly. She rests against it. The flats of her palms are white with the pressure she’s putting onto it.

‘Please think about this,’ she says.

‘I am,’ I say.

‘You told us that there was a way home.’ I was placating them. ‘You said, we can all get home. You cannot get us all home if you die, Mira.’ She’s terribly scared: she knows that it’s my death and mine alone. What will happen to them? Would they relive this moment for eternity? What happens to the me in their cycle, when they come back? Would that dictate their own loop: leaving them with that solitary moment of death, over and over, unending and ceaseless? When do they die? When does this begin again?

‘Put in the override code and give us control back,’ Hikaru says.

I watch the Ishiguro start its engines on the screen. It rumbles on the video, the hull shaking, and it seems to lurch – drawing backwards, like a toy car that you pull then release – and here it comes. These are the moments that define us.

‘Brother,’ I say, wanting him to do it. I want him to release the controls, to save me. This is a test. How much am I a sacrifice? But there is no time to have faith in him, so I bring up a console and type the override code and release the controls. I am surprised: there is a part of me that expected Tomas to have changed the code, but it is as it always was. Hikaru is ready, and he taps buttons with a purpose I haven’t seen from him since before this happened. Our own ship rumbles, and lurches; not out of the anomaly, as when they died, but the other direction. I am not strapped in, and neither is Inna, and we suddenly have gravity. We fall, and I hit myself on the wall, surprised. This is speed like I haven’t felt, speed like the launch protocols demanded we were to be protected against. A burst, and I know we’re clear before we stop, because we have gone so far. Hikaru slows us down with the boosters, and he leans into the yoke and he grins. He looks so happy; and he looks at me, now one of them: our fate shared. I am inside it, and it feels like nothing.

There is no time to dwell.

I hit the screens, panning the cameras to show us the Ishiguro, to track it, and we watch as it carries on just past where we were – it would have killed us, no question, or me, at the very least – and it explodes. It happens just as before, only we’re closer now, and I can see it from this angle: as the ship begins to tear itself apart, spitting out the detritus and the furniture and the consoles and the beds. Most of it flies out of the anomaly, dead and gone and lost and free. But then there are those two bodies as before, one clutching the other. I can see them from here: the one in front is the journalist, instantly recognizable from his pictures. They were everywhere, for a while. Cormac something was his name. Easton. Cormac Easton. The other is harder to see, but he is bald, and thin. Dr Singer. He clings to the journalist and they move forward, towards us, deeper into the darkness, away from the rest of the ship.

There isn’t time to think. I pull a suit on, slapdash, almost, and a helmet, not even stopping to check the seal properly, because this could be something: it could be a way of saving ourselves. Having Dr Singer here with us could change everything. Together, he and I could find a way out. That’s what he and I both have been missing: a brain to play off. Another scientist.

‘What are you doing?’ Inna asks. There will be a minute, two at most before the pressure out there kills them, or they choke to death and their cycle begins anew. I can interject; I can save them. I tell Inna to be ready, that they will likely need medical aid, and I start the airlock cycle before my suit is even fully sealed, and I wait by the door and I squeeze my hands into fists and then out again to palms. Fists and then out to palms, over and over, as the door opens.

And then I am out in space. I hit the boosters, and I am clumsy still, but better than I was. Perhaps I am learning. They come towards me, and I them. For some reason Dr Singer pushes the journalist away from him, his back to me, and I go faster. I can feel the heat of the boosters through the suit, at my back; not burning me, but the suits can withstand so much I know how far I am pushing them. I ignore the journalist. He is not my target. He is nothing. He was nothing then, and he is nothing now. I aim for Dr Singer, tackling him almost, and he crumbles into me. He feels so frail and thin. I can save him. I let the journalist die out there in the darkness. He wrote, once, that he felt like an explorer. He can carry on exploring.

I turn, the boosters in the suit pushing as tight an arc as they can manage, and I head back to the airlock. I don’t know if Dr Singer’s already dead. I don’t know anything. I hope that Inna can save him. I cling to him as we go.

Inna shouts at Hikaru to get the gravity on as soon as the airlock door opens, and I drop to my knees. I am unprepared, but this is no longer about me. Dr Singer is coiled up, curled inwards, fetal. Inna rushes in and flips him to his back. I see her face first, and then I look at the body on the floor: it is barely a man. I cannot explain it. He is wrinkled and shattered and old, so much older than he should be. His skin is translucent, almost, hanging and sliding from his face, his features visible through it. His eyes are black and white and red in seemingly equal measure, and they lie open and lifeless. He isn’t breathing: we would be able to tell, as the rise and fall of his chest would still happen, even as emaciated as he is. It would be, on this frame, all we could see.

‘He’s dead,’ Inna says. She is uneasy even touching him, handling him as one does a dead cat: fingertips and hesitation. For a second, he reminds me of those old drawings of aliens, the kind we would find in our books, deciding whether to make peace with them or not: grey skin, oversized head, dark eyes. I think, for a second, almost a joke to myself, that here is the discovery we were looking for. Life, and yet it is dead. She is unsure whether to save him or not; if she should see whether this is something she can turn around.

‘Try,’ I say. I think about what I risked, and where we are now. This cannot be for naught. She slides a syringe into his suit at his neck, and holds a mask to his face to force oxygen into his body. I worry that the settings are made for a normal man, and that he will reject this: or that maybe it will split his insides. His shrivelled lungs torn at all the air. Perhaps I am wrong? Perhaps the ship has not been in the cycle? I thought. But we saw it crash twice, and Easton was so perfectly young. Nothing about this makes sense. The corpse’s chest swells with the oxygen; it almost creaks. The adrenalin should make his heart pump, a kick-start to an engine. What is this that we’re saving? She starts to manually work his chest, and I hear cracks: the sound of ribs breaking. She is in danger of making this irreparable, and then I remember that he will come back. He will die and, somewhere down the line, come back to life. We can try again. All we have to do is survive until the Ishiguro comes back, maybe, and we can be quicker, prepared. We could save them both, maybe. I move my arm to stay hers, but then it coughs. No, he coughs, and it sounds vile: a thick rigid mucus inside him, a lurch of his whole body, making his bones clatter against the floor. His spine bends and everything seems exaggerated owing to his frame, and the flesh that remains seems draped over him. His eyes don’t lose their peculiar colour; now, they dart. They’re quick, no lag, snap from face to face to face, from me to Inna to me again.

‘It’s okay,’ Inna says, but he doesn’t listen to her. He pushes backwards. He’s terrified, and he reaches the door of the airlock and forces himself against it. He looks at us still, doesn’t take his eyes off us. Everything about him is fallen. Everything about him feels wrong. I have no idea who this man is, but he is not Dr Singer.

We leave him in the airlock. We shut the door on him, because we do not know who or what he is, and we watch him as he tries to stand; as he leans his hands against the glass and seems to try to walk himself to upright. His thin legs buckle like a foal’s, and he falls to his knees, which look as if they should shatter at the impact of the metal floor. His frailty in every part reminds me of my mother, at her end: atrophied on her bed, her body giving up. He hasn’t tried to speak to us yet, nor we to him. Or, we haven’t tried to entice him. Inna tells me that we should ask him his name.

‘Maybe he remembers something,’ she says, but I am hesitant to assume that. We open the airlock slightly and throw a meal bar in. He turns away from us and devours it, forcing it into his mouth. He tries to keep it down and fails; it doesn’t matter to him, though. He paws it back into his mouth, a monkey in a cage eating his own vomit, and then he looks back at us over his shoulder as if we owe him another. He’s not pleading with us. She gets one of Hikaru’s white bars, stripped of everything, bleached food that tastes of nothing and gives you only the proteins and vitamins you need. The man in the airlock sniffs it and then eats it. He’s feral, and it goes down in bites. He has no teeth that I can see but he gums it to pieces and swallows them. I am sure that I can see the lumps travel down his throat, passing his exaggerated Adam’s apple. Inna says, ‘For a man of his frame, he should be dead.’ She leans close to the airlock. ‘What’s your name?’ she asks. He shoots her a look of something, I don’t know what.

‘He is too gone for that,’ I say.

‘What’s your name?’ she asks again, over the intercom. She says it calmly and quietly, and she puts her hand on the glass of the airlock. She wants him to trust her.

‘I am Cormac Easton,’ he says, ‘and I am a journalist,’ although it’s slurred and drab through his mouth, and harsh on his throat. He’s the same one he was seemingly carrying as a young man, being thrown from the explosion of their ship.

He is hesitant, but we get words out of him. Inna examines him as much as he will let her. She rattles off what is wrong with him: early-onset dementia; massive bone loss and muscle deterioration; a mind-boggling list of psychological ailments; scurvy. She tells me that it’s a miracle he’s alive. I tell her that it’s not a miracle. When I have time, as she examines him, I talk to Hikaru. He seems better since I ended up on this side. He tells me that he doesn’t feel as alone any more. I think about how it’s as if we’re rebuilding our crew.

‘It is unsettling, though,’ he says. He rubs his hand with his thumb: pushing it into his palm.

‘He’s still human,’ I say. I fear how unconvincing I am, even to myself.

‘Him and Inna. They’re the same. Neither of them should be alive.’ He says it so coldly; I do not tell him that he has died once before himself. ‘Do you think he’s been looping as well?’ He doesn’t want an answer, and he doesn’t wait for one. ‘It’s not natural, is it?’

‘It is what it is,’ I say, ‘and Inna is herself. Exactly as she was before it happened to her.’ He asks what we do now, and I tell him that we have to work on calming our visitor down.

‘He’s a phantom,’ he says. ‘You see that, don’t you?’ And I do, but I don’t tell Hikaru that. I tell Hikaru that he could be necessary to our getting home. ‘We’re not getting home,’ Hikaru says. ‘We go deeper into this thing, maybe we’ll come out the other side.’ We never found out its depth. The pings meant nothing, finding nothing, returning no results. Now we have that to think about: that we could head deeper into it and never reach an end.

When I’m done with Hikaru and Inna and Easton I find myself alone. I think about where we are, and how I could have escaped this. But I am a coward, or sensible. Too sensible, maybe. I’m alive, I think. I assume. At least I have that. I’m destined to stay alive until I am no longer alive, and then I’ll come back. I contemplate Easton, and how he is here. How he was there twice, and what that must have meant. Something was wrong with his time, but maybe something different to ours. Inna died and then came back, but what if we had left her? What part did we play in her cycle? The cycles, the loops, the lives, they are seemingly random in length. There are no answers: it is as if we are being played with. I wonder when the loop began for him. They went far deeper into space than we did, because that was where the anomaly was then. When did their cycle start? Or was it only Easton’s cycle? Were the rest of them just passengers, de facto parts of it, destined to be as they were until he reached his end?

‘Tomas?’ I ask. I wonder if it even matters that there is no answer. We nurse Easton back to health and maybe we will have one. Maybe then we can get closure. Or we make a closed experiment of this: a test that can provide a definitive answer. I think about writing myself a note, scrawling it onto one of the boards in the lab about what I am going to do, and then lifting a razor to my neck and sliding it through the skin, through the arteries and veins. Feeling them pop under the weight of the blade, and watching the blood arc out. I wonder how long it would take me to start a new cycle; and when I came back, if I would still feel the pain. If the blood would remain. When I would start the cycle: in this room, with razor in hand? Partway into the slice? Or before I even contemplated it? Before I had even written the note to myself?

Before this mission even began?

The others are antsy, staying where we are, leaving gravity switched on. Hikaru looks at the battery and worries, because the charge loses every second that we sit still. He questions whether the ship’s batteries will still work the same inside the anomaly; so we might end up with this being our last. We should save it for life-support systems: on their own, what we have left could sustain the four of us for nearly a month, that’s how efficiently they run. I tell him that I want to talk to Easton before we switch it off.

He is lying on the floor, head down. He is perfectly still, and his hands are splayed, flat on the floor. His fingers are like nothing I’ve ever seen: pink silk draped over broken twigs. He can’t bend them properly, they’re too gnarled. He lies here because of the gravity. Because it’s so hard for him to lift his head. His muscles can’t cope with it, and they’re relaxing. I ask him questions and he doesn’t answer them. It feels pointless.

‘I’m letting go,’ he says as I stand up to leave, to tell Hikaru to remove gravity. He’s barely audible, so I lean in, and he repeats it.

‘Of what?’ I ask, because I feel like I should. He doesn’t answer. He shuts his eyes. ‘Are you even glad that we saved you?’ I ask, but of course there is no answer. ‘We are about to lose gravity,’ I say, and then we do. I watch him float upwards, and he hangs there in the middle of the airlock, weightless and gone, entirely limp, like a rag doll with no spine to give it structure.

I pick a blister pack of stims from the medical cupboard and pop one out. I can stop now, I tell myself. We’re swallowed, deep in the belly of the whale. Inna comes to me as I hold the pill in my hands.

‘He’s sick,’ she says.

‘I know.’

‘What do you want to do about him?’

‘Can we make him better?’ I ask.

‘I don’t think so,’ she replies. ‘If we had a hospital, maybe. Nutrient drips. Years of therapy.’ She means both kinds. ‘Here, I don’t think we can.’

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Then we make it as easy for him as possible. He probably deserves that.’ I try and sound convincing. We don’t know anything about him. He might have mutinied and killed his crew for all we know. Somehow he survived and they did not: and somehow he has aged, and they are all just a part of his cycle. We can’t explain it: I dread to think what will happen to us out here now. If one of us will become him, outliving the others, somehow going around and around at a completely different pace, in a completely different loop.

‘I’m scared,’ she says. ‘Of what might happen now.’

‘I know,’ I say. She floats up to me and puts a hand on my leg, and I see her fingernails, the chipped nail-polish on them. That she made a token effort before and I didn’t notice it. I wonder if it was done for me, before. I hope that it was. She squeezes my arm.

‘You didn’t stand up for us,’ she says. ‘And you didn’t come to me.’

‘I thought that it was the best thing to do,’ I tell her. It is not a lie, one way or another. ‘I wanted to make sure that we got home.’

‘We still could now. We could find a way.’

‘Yes,’ I say. I think, Lies are no foundation for the start of a relationship. That is what this feels like.

‘This doesn’t stop. We were here to find out more about the anomaly, weren’t we?’ She looks hopeful. That my answer will be the truth she’s believed.

‘Always,’ I say.

‘So that will not change now. Now we simply have a better point of view.’ She bends in towards me, and I think that this could be when it changes. For a second I am not here: I am anywhere else. I have forgotten our location, our crisis, our pains. I have forgotten the deaths we have suffered and the calamity. I have forgotten the Ishiguro and Tomas back at home and everything else. She kisses me on the cheek, on the hairs that have grown there, so close to my mouth. And she whispers, into that skin there, that she forgives me. ‘All we have left is the reality of the now,’ she says. ‘We shouldn’t sacrifice that. We shouldn’t lose it.’

I think, I have nothing to be forgiven for. But I cannot say that to her, because this, to her, is all, and she has given it to me. I let the pill drop from my hand, and I put the blister pack back. I do not need them now.

My mother, before she died, was in a hospital. I visited her with Tomas one Saturday when we were close to the final stages of our pitch for the UNSA contract. We were busy and tired and lost, and, to us, this was another blip. She had been in and out of the hospital for years, a seemingly perpetual cycle of treatment and recovery, and each time was given what amounted to an all-clear. Then, two months later, something would be found. It was always a step ahead of her, and of us. (Her then partner told us that if we had put half the effort into curing her that we put into our adventures – his word – we could have saved her. He said, Think of the good you could have done. He spat on Tomas’ shoes, and we said, Well, you left her, just as she was sick. We were all guilty, even though Tomas said that he was not.) This time, she was taken in as an emergency. We flew across from the US, where we were preparing for a meeting with important men who could add funding to the proposal. Part of the process was showing the UNSA that you could play the game, and it was crucial. Going in without some base funding would have been fatal to us.

So we flew over on the Saturday morning, working on the flight, and we sat with her all day. She did look sick, we told her. Not that we thought what she had was hyperchondriacal, but that she often put a brave face on for us. We asked her what the doctors had said. She said that they didn’t know what they were talking about, and we said, Okay, but what did they say? They had said that it was in her spleen, now, and her stomach, and her bowel. They would have to tear most of her out, and what would they be leaving? (I distinctly remember picturing her as one of those dissected mannequins that they used in biology class, with the pregnant baby in: you take the baby out and there are all the organs, removable one by one, carefully stacked so that they don’t just tumble out and leave the woman hollow.) So we sat with her, and we queued up movies on the television that we knew she loved, and we just sat and watched them.

She asked us how it was going with the project (which is what she called the mission, as if we were still in school). It’s going well, we said. We’re doing our best. That’s all you can ask, she told us. She said, I’m in a lot of pain. So we upped her morphine, just that second, because we wanted to help. She said, You could name something after me, couldn’t you? Of course we could, I told her. Tomas said, We could name a star, but I didn’t want that. You can buy that from the internet, I said. Anybody can be named after a star. We’ll pick something else, I told her, and for a second I was best child, again.

She said, Give me more morphine. So we did, because she was in pain, and who could bear to see that? We worried about if she would die when we left, when we were in another country entirely, and couldn’t make it back to see her. But it was immaterial. She asked us to up her morphine and we did, and again. She died in the night, that night, and I said to Tomas, Well, we name the ship after her. That’s the thing that will be remembered in the history books. Remembered, preserved in a museum: the story of us and our mother, alive for eternity, having been to the stars and back.

I tell Hikaru and Inna and Easton that I am going to sleep. I climb into my bed, resisting the urge to stay awake; to find the stims and take them. They are not addictive, but maybe that feeling is, I reason: the feeling of being awake, of having yourself fully there. I undress as much as I feel comfortable, knowing that Inna and Hikaru are there. Especially Inna. I wonder if I have let myself go more: if the thinness in my body makes me even less physically appealing. They say that they’re staying awake to watch over Easton, so I don’t need to worry about it. I shut my eyes, in the darkness of that bed, and I talk to myself. I tell myself all that has happened to me, and I think of Tomas, and I think of Inna. I think that I sleep, but I can feel myself as if I am awake. I wonder if the stims have damaged me. I wonder if it’s possible to ruin the part of you that sleeps, and rests, and recovers.

When I wake up, they are all asleep. I am alone. I look at Easton, curled up, floating in the middle of the airlock; and then the other beds, their screens all dimmed. I clip myself to a rail and watch them, and I ask for my brother, over the intercom, but there’s no answer. I do not know if this is because he can’t hear me at all, now. There’s nothing when I click through to Earth. I send a message for him, telling him what happened, in case he doesn’t know. Maybe he will want to save me. I beg him to: I say, I cannot be alone up here without you. Have I ever needed him like this before?

I notice that Inna’s bed is open, and she is watching me. She has seen I don’t know how much of me talking to Tomas, snivelling and crying. She doesn’t judge; instead, she pushes out of her bed and towards me, and she opens her arms wide and envelops me. She is comforting: her skin is warm against mine.

‘It’s okay,’ she says. ‘This is okay, you know.’

‘I do not know who I am,’ I say. ‘Without him, I don’t even know what I can be.’ Her hands rub my back, and they find their way to my hair, and I cry onto her vest, soaking her shoulder. The tears peel away, and I notice them, and I think, I have seen that before. Everything has a part to play in my memory of this.

‘We only have ourselves,’ Inna says. She moves back, and she raises her shirt, only above her belly, to show me more of the tattoo. She exposes the bottom half of the bird that starts at her shoulder. In its claws it carries a word, as if it were a dead mouse. Pak, it says. It is so dark, but now I can see surgery scars with my thumbs, and the tattoo following them: the lines of the bird, loose and fluid, along the flat, crease-free skin that shows where her body once failed her. I can see all of her written out in the tattoo. She has had the darkness inside her, destroying her organs, just as my mother did. I wonder how much of her has been taken. Life has a way of making this happen. Some would call it fate. ‘We are all we are left with,’ she says. She covers herself again, and she holds me once again. For a brief moment I do not know which of us needs this more; but that moment passes.

We hear the scream as we’re asleep: standing with each other, magnetized to the rail, in some comforting embrace. When I wake up, it’s to look into her face, and there’s a second before I hear the scream again. We detach and push towards it. She is faster than me, through the doorway first and into the corridor. It is Hikaru’s voice, the scream: wet and pained and like a full-stop. He is on the floor, only a few inches above the ground, his body in the pose of a kneel, of praying, a genuflection; and there is a jagged shard of plastic in his neck, blood thudding out in baubles of thick red, dabbing the walls in dragged-out smears. He pulls the shard out and immediately lets go of it, and it looks as though he is doing it in slow motion. It floats in front of his eyes, taunting him. Inside the airlock, the journalist Cormac Easton: his hands red with Hikaru’s blood. The computer panel outside the door has been activated: somebody was trying to do something with it. I wait at the back, shocked and scared and so ineffectual. Inna rushes to Hikaru’s drifting body and screams at the phantom inside the airlock.

‘You monster,’ she says. ‘Why would you do this? What did he ever do to you?’ She’s angry, and it’s a gut reaction: she reaches for the button to lock the airlock, to trap Easton in. I am in the doorway, and I am slow to react. He is faster. Easton is used to this: he is somehow at one with the lack of gravity, a fish thrown back into the water. He shoots forward, his arm out, and he takes the shard, and he kicks off the floor. He lashes out with it again. Not a stab, this time, but a swipe. The tip scratches across her neck. It is a scratch at first, and I am glad that he missed, that he was ineffective; and then her neck opens up, a second mouth lower down, lipless and slowly gaping as she gags. Her blood joins Hikaru’s as her hand hits the panel, the right button by some fluke of chance, to close the airlock and seal it. It hisses shut, driven into Cormac’s frail body, and I hear the cracks of his bones as he is knocked backwards. He is trapped inside, no longer a threat, and I can move now: my faculties back, freed from self-imposed rigidity. I rush to Inna to see what I can do to help. Hikaru is already too far gone. It’s pointless, thinking that I might save him. But Inna: her injury is fresher. I pick her up in my arms, draping her arms over my shoulders, and I try to walk-swim back towards the living area with her. Her blood soaks into my clothes, which is good, because this way it isn’t flooding out, soaking the rest of the ship; and I finally reach the table that we ate from, or sat at while we ate, and I lie her on it. I open the medical supplies cupboard, no real idea what I am doing, and I take gauze and sealant. I know to make injections with the sealant, to stem the flow of blood, and when I have done them I try to stop the blood by pressing the gauze down. He neck feels loose under my hands: as if it is slipping as I press on it. I apply pressure regardless. I remember that being something that I should do.

She keeps breathing. I can hear it. I can see her chest. I am afraid to leave her, but I need more than this. Inna passes out, but she is still alive. The sealant appears to have worked, and she is still breathing, but I cannot feel a pulse. When she is settled, still weakly breathing, I think that I should check in the other room: to see that Hikaru is dead, and what has happened to Easton. As soon as I leave her and get into the corridor I shake until I have to stay perfectly still, and I feel – I see – myself vomit. It’s a reaction that I can’t control.

I see Easton inside the airlock. He’s having trouble breathing: his chest is bloody. Ribs puncturing lungs, I’d imagine. He is suffocating, dying, pawing at the floor. He looks at me, and his eyes are so big in his drawn face that they’re almost comical.

I’m dying, he seems to be saying, though his maw of a mouth. He mouths it: open and close, open and close.

I’m dying, he says.

‘Good,’ I reply.