The Echo

13

Inna lasted nearly a day. I never found her pulse again, but she kept breathing for a while. It was too shallow. She didn’t wake up. She had no last words, not to me at least. Only what she said to Easton, and I couldn’t even remember that as I held her body.

I didn’t think about the cycles. About how often I would have to watch that scene play out.

The loop begins with Hikaru in there as Easton sleeps, attempting to do as I ended up doing: seal the airlock doors and trap him. Maybe he intended to flush him out; I cannot tell. Hikaru moves slowly and quietly. He begins to tap on the keys to close the door, but he’s not the stealthy one here. Easton has been awake the entire time. He launches himself around the corner of the airlock, faster than Hikaru can react – and since then, with the time that I have had to myself, I have contemplated his deterioration and the effect that it has had on his body, and how adept he became in that time at adapting to the weightlessness, turning it to his own advantage – and then he stabs him. I have been able to examine the blade over time: presumably torn from some part of the Ishiguro. What I thought was a single piece is not. It is the construct of hundreds of thin wires, torn and stripped from the interior systems of the ship, I would assume, wound around and around, then carved and smoothed, heated and melted together to form a new single blade. It is the product of some work, of time and effort. It is quite elegant, I suppose.

He slides the blade into Hikaru’s neck and then scutters backwards through the air, and there’s a look in his eyes: almost as if he’s shocked at himself. Self-preservation, that’s all it was. He knew what Hikaru was planning. I don’t know what happened on the Ishiguro, and I don’t suppose that I ever will, but something made him this way. He is broken and gone, a product of time and circumstance. I feel sorry for him, sometimes. When I try to think of him as a man other than this: away from this situation, from the deaths that he caused; or causes; or will cause. When Inna arrives he seems to panic further. She is another potential threat. She is only trying to help Hikaru but she’s so aggressive in how she speaks to him. He lashes out. He’s trying to keep her back. He’s just unlucky with Inna, I think. There is no malice in his murdering her. I wonder how this has worked for him: if he’s been looping but somehow ageing at the same time. How long has he been alive for? How long has he been out here? And when he dies, if he wakes up and doesn’t understand what has happened, how can he excuse what he has become?

I can see myself in him, or him in me. Especially now that I’m all alone. The last one left, really; the only one actually alive. I am, however, as much a part of this as they. It begins when I am not in the room: when I am back at my starting place, looking away from the bodies, head bowed; an actor designated a part, a starting position behind a curtain.

For a few cycles I took Inna from the room and saved her briefly, convinced that I could do something differently. I had everything prepared, so that when I looked away and the play began, I could get her and save her. I have tried every option that I can think of. After a while, when I got tired, I began leaving her there. I would watch it happen on video, because I didn’t want to be there in person. Would she think that I was betraying her? Of course she would. It would be the third time. The cock would crow, and she would never be mine again. So I leave her there. When she’s not aided by me, she dies a lot faster. She bleeds out in minutes, and she tries to save herself, flapping uselessly, coating the room in her blood. It’s hard to tell who dies first: her or Easton.

Sometimes I find myself staying with them because I can’t stand the thought of it starting again: so I stand in the doorway and watch their bodies after they’ve passed away, and I try to stay there for as long as possible. It’s a battle of wills. How long can I stare at them; how long can I wait while they die.

It’s been three weeks since they died, and I don’t know how many times I have watched it, but I am not used to it, and I don’t hate their deaths any less than I used to.

The ship has been quiet. There are no echoes in space. I should know. I talk to myself, because why would I not? I do it simply so that I can hear another voice in the void. Despite his betrayal – and I see it as that, surely and definitively – I miss Tomas fiercely. I try to talk to him, and I send him more messages, telling him what has happened, explaining how alone I now am, and yet I only hear my own voice coming back. Still: at least this voice is something we share.

Now, I have no trouble sleeping. I shut the door on the bed and in there it is silent, and it is still. When I wake up, I wonder if anything will be different, but I know the answer. Even though there was no audience, the play continued. Every day I use more of my air and get closer to having to move the ship or die. And if I die – if I choke to death, unable to breathe – all that will be guaranteed is that I will have to live that death over again.

I wonder where I would begin from.

I have done things to try and help me understand this. I have seen if I can play with the scenario. I cannot stop it: the cycle never begins until I am away from it, and I cannot reach it in time. Chaos theory was wrong: it plays itself out, always exactly the same. We are doomed to repetition. There are never variations. I have tried to tamper with the room before a cycle begins, to see if I can affect it. If I suck all the air out, for example, can I knock them all out before it begins? Drag the key players to other areas? Lock Cormac in before he can do his damage? Open the airlock as soon as the cycle begins, maybe? Nothing sticks. All my work is undone. I cannot explain any of this, and thus I have become neutered: a scientist who understands nothing of his surrounding or situation, who can prove or disprove nothing, who can never attain answers.

One time, I dragged Inna’s body from there as I did that first occasion, only faster – I am becoming more adept at the path to the table, knowing when to turn my body and hit the walls at their best, even if the collisions leave me with bruises, all to get Inna back within the shortest time possible. I cannot save her, so I try to make it easier on her. I make her comfortable. I find myself wondering what’s wrong with her; pushing aside her top, and then seeing where the scar lines the tattoo, how much of her side is the fake flesh that they used to seal her up. She never had a chance to let me see it in the light. Here, looking at it with as close to scientific eyes as I can muster, I can see that there is art in both. I wonder which came first: the desire for the bird tattoo or the scar? If she saw the line of the scar when she was healed, saw the different tone of the synthetic skin, and through some almost-pareidolic reaction she saw the bird on her chest, deciding there and then to make it somehow more real? I look up the word that the bird carries on the computer, and of course it is Cancer. She was shedding the past, looking to a future. Would that I could.

We – that is, the ship and her crew, in whatever form we might take – have drifted. I don’t know exactly where we are, or how much the anomaly might have grown – or moved – from our original position. On the maps, we are a way from it, but there’s no real way of tracking what the anomaly is doing. I repeatedly sit at the console in the cockpit and think about pressing buttons and seeing if I can fly this thing: program a new destination. I have never tried to fly this. But I would assume that it couldn’t be that difficult: we designed how it should work, and we watched them build it, watched the trials. We had simulations constructed in the early days to give us an idea of how the yoke would work, the joystick, and how the remote controls would work given the lag and so forth. I took the controls then, once. The heft and power of the real thing can’t be that much different.

Sometimes I think that there might be an exit on the other side of this thing. That I could travel through it and maybe there I would find a way out.

I go through cycles myself: where I have to leave them alone to play out as they will; or where I cannot take watching Inna die again, so I attempt to save her, despite knowing the outcome. I think of it as a duty: every few times, I want those final few moments with her. I wait until it’s started, with my back to them and my eyes closed, and then when I hear the action start I put myself in position. As I try to save Inna she seems to know what I am doing. She appreciates it. I am there with her in her final moments, and I try to give her peace.

I think about the great discoveries in our lifetime, in the lifetimes of those who came before us, and I wonder what they must have first thought: how inexplicable it was to contemplate a round Earth, to see and understand comets and meteors, to uncover evolution, electricity, the atom bomb. As we took those first tentative steps into space, inventing a means to explore that which had previously been something close to hearsay. I used to wonder how it must have felt, as somebody who had seen two wars at the start of that century, to watch that launch on the television at the time: to see where we had reached. To have watched Le Voyage dans la lune as a child, and then to see it realized. No face in the moon; no mermaids or aliens. Instead, only footsteps and flags and dust. Just as incredible, when you think of it. And now, if I return, they will know of this: that I discovered something truly inexplicable. Here is a space that makes no sense; space in the truest sense of the word. Not the void that we describe with that word in our regular lives, but something else. When the Ishiguro didn’t come home, hypothesis was everything. Now, I could tell them so much more.

Tomas still can. Even without me he has enough. I wonder if he’s told the world that I am lost yet? I wonder if he’s told them that I am dead? I tell Inna, on those times that I save her, that we will make it home. I know that, for her, it is a lie. But in those moments either she believes it, or it makes her feel better, and then she dies with more of a smile on her face. She still trusts me, even after everything.

I have lost track of how long this has taken; how long I have been here, doing this for.

It is one of the times in which I save her. I pick her body up and let the blood soak me again, into my suit which has been soaked so many times. The blood stays on me: I am out of this cycle, and my suit is darkened with Inna’s life. Each time it happens there is something so warm about it. It’s almost comforting, to feel her so alive for just a few seconds. This is Inna, and I am doing right by her. If I can get better at saving her, with practice and hard work, she might one day have more time with me. I am not trying to save her life now. I know that she is beyond that. I would need to be a surgeon to attempt more than I currently do, and while I have contemplated it, a part of me is unwilling to punish her in her dying moments with experimentations and attempts. I have done it before, when she was outside, but there was a distance there. I think, now, about the direct pain she would feel; and how I would feel her dying breath on my face as I tried. It would hurt her. But to preserve her, to ease her suffering, that is something I can do. I am injecting her with the sedatives when she leans to me and speaks to me, the first time that she has done this in any of her cycles.

‘Let me die,’ she says. Her voice is barely a whisper. Barely human, really, from the sound. I stop what I am doing and drop the hypo, and I listen in case she says anything more. But she doesn’t. That’s it. Her eyes shut and her mouth stays open. Her words smell of her blood as it gargles it in her throat.

Let me die, she said.

‘I have been,’ I tell her body when she is gone, and I’m waiting for the next cycle to begin. ‘Was that not enough?’ In her next cycle, I just watch. As she dies, as they all die, as Cormac gasps at me, choking in his cell, I tell Inna that I am doing as she asked. ‘This is what you wanted,’ I say. She doesn’t look at me. She floats on her back, with her head tilted back, and the blood floats like children’s bubbles.

‘I have to sleep,’ I tell Inna as she dies another time, and I watch her. She chokes and coughs, lying there on the table. I say goodnight to her. She dies as I sleep. I talk to her as I shut my eyes, and tell her what I have done. Not that she will remember any of it. I sleep with the lid of the bed open, because I don’t need the darkness, not really.

When I wake up it is to the alarm of Inna’s screaming as she dies again. It will have happened all night: there must have come a point where my body was more susceptible to the noise. I drag myself from my bed and to their room, and I look at them. She always ends up the same way: face down, near the ceiling, a red balloon floated off and trapped in the branches of a tree. They have reached the end of a cycle as I enter the room, and I know I need to wash. I take a shower, watching their bodies the whole time. I am unwilling to close my eyes in case the cycle starts again. It’s never happened with me in the room before, but there’s always a first time. So I wash with my eyes open, the shampoo swirling around me in the shower-pod and stinging my eyes, but still. I dry myself and then shit, not taking my eyes off them the entire time. When I am done I stay watching them, naked in that room. They are all dead. Cormac stares at me, as if, as he died, he wondered how I could be so casual about the whole thing. As if I am the murderer here. I eat a bar, never taking my eyes off them. Even when I look at myself in the mirror – at my beard, so Robinson Crusoe am I – I am keeping an eye on them. I have to be prepared.

They start again as I reach the cockpit and examine where we are. No sign of it stopping, and no way to tell when it will.

I try to save Hikaru this time, but that’s pointless, and he struggles so much, almost hitting me, that I think it is that he doesn’t even want me to. That’s how far gone he was. Maybe I should have realized the effect that this would have on us all.

I save Inna once more, and I carry her out of the room, to the table. This time I have decided to use the ship’s supply of adrenalin to get more out of her. I plug her wound, and I stabilize her, and then, when she’s on the table, strapped down, I take a hypo of adrenalin and have the intention to inject it into her heart. I want her awake, even if it shortens things. Even if the slightly fixed artery cannot take the increased blood-flow I will cause inside her.

I cut off her once-white vest, slicing it top to bottom with the thick-bladed scissors from the medical set, then discard the pieces. She is naked. There is the bird; and here, in the harsh brightness of the room, I can see every scar clearly now. Maybe I am less enthralled by the work done, because over time I have come to see the flaws. How they reflect the light, almost, and how the blue that she’s attempted to cover them with hasn’t quite set. The synthetic flesh isn’t blended properly; it’s a different shade of skin tone. She could have had it dyed, had the scars hidden and smoothed over. I wonder why she didn’t: how fresh this all was. Or maybe it was a choice, like Tomas’ birthmark. She decided that it made sense to keep it, as a reminder.

The tip of the beak, her breast and her heart. I press the hypo to her breastplate, waiting until I hear it click, and then it does the work for me: like a nail gun, shooting into her. She inhales and jolts upwards. The blood starts pumping faster, and my gauzed patch-job is insufficient. It ebbs over and through, and starts running all over her.

‘Mira,’ she says.

‘I’m here,’ I tell her. I hold her. I keep my back arched, my chest away from her and the hypo that juts from her front, but I wrap my arms around her.

‘What’s happening?’ she asks.

‘You’re dying,’ I say. She panics and tries to struggle away from me, which only makes the blood flow faster. ‘But I can make it stop,’ I say. ‘I can make it okay. Do you want me to help you?’ I ask, and she nods. She dies in my arms. I don’t know if this was the best way for her to go: how much pain she was in, whether she would rather have had something else. But it is what we have.

When she is dead, I take a scalpel from the kit, because I need to know. I slice along the line of the synthetic flesh, cutting it out as if it was a window, so that I might see inside her. At first, through the blood, it looks normal: pink and red and brown organs. But then the blood clears, and I see that they are synthetic: all transparent plastics, bags and pipes and batteries. I want to know what nearly killed her; how much of herself she lost. I cut her more, and I look inside as much as I can. This is not her, I tell myself: it’s a model. I pull aside the organs to see them all, and she is barely herself. Her insides are swapped and false. Underneath them all, her real organs. What is left of a stomach; a liver; a partial bowel. Joined and clamped together by technology, they all look normal, and then I see the part that is not: the cancer, rotting away at the stomach, the intestine. It is brown mould, brown and black, and maybe she knew about it, maybe she didn’t, but it is pervasive and deep-rooted, and it would have killed her. Through all of her attempts to save herself, it would have been an end. I think about this ship, and how I keep trying to save her, but in the end, she will die anyway. We will all die anyway. For her, maybe this is better: the shock of Easton’s blade; the blood; the table; me doing my best, or trying to.

I tell myself that I am a good man. That I have tried to be, because this seems a noble goal. I treat the bodies of those who remain in their beds as therapists, and I talk to them. I tell them that I would do anything to redeem what has happened. I cannot get them home, and so they die. But I would give anything to stop it. As long as I am in here, I know, they will do this, over and over.

I think about interjecting myself into the play: dying first, to stop them. But would that help? Could I? Can I? I think about going outside, and dying there, and maybe if I am not here the cycle changes, and everything alters, and they could live. Maybe, if I am outside, Hikaru never tries to cycle the airlock; and then I am the one in the loop, out there forever. They might find a way to save me, of course. They might work out how to give me an ending.

And then I realize it, and it’s so apparent to me; and I am an idiot, because I did not see it sooner. I can give that ending to them. I always bring Inna back into the main body of the ship, and I try to save her. But what if I push her the other way, and I let her die? What then?

It isn’t easy, that much is apparent, because there is nothing to gauge it against. When driving a car, there is the road; when flying an airplane, I would imagine, you have wind and drag and pull and an atmosphere to work against. Here, out here (or inside this thing, depending on how you want to think of the anomaly) there is nothing, so it feels like nothing. You push forward on the joystick and there is a rumble of the engines, but that doesn’t carry into the stick itself. We should have taken another tip from our days of playing video games and built force feedback into it: a rumble through the stick that worsened the more pressure you applied. Instead, the rumble comes around us in the ship itself. But it feels like sliding on ice, I suppose. There’s nothing to stop us: no brakes, not in the conventional sense. I worry about where the anomaly is, because of what we saw the Ishiguro do at its end. And I know that we cannot pass back through. I don’t want to collide with it; I don’t want to relive this without hindsight. That such a death, such a ruination, could be my end over and over? It’s unthinkable.

So I have read about how this works, and in the cockpit I have plotted a course based on the maps that we kept before. I do not know how far we have drifted: inside the anomaly there is no sense of place. The pings reach nothing, rebound from nothing, so I am in a void. I travel as slowly as it’s possible for us to go using the fuel, and I watch as the battery recharges ever so slightly, heading up towards the halfway mark, moving back towards something resembling safety.

I can hear the play in the other room, rehearsals for what I will make the final performance. I can hear their screams, but I try to concentrate on flying. In this blackness I cannot even tell if we are actually moving or not; if we are stuck in it, thick black tar tugging at our wheels. I bring up the old map, with the pin where the Ishiguro was – because that was the wall, or near as damn it – and I plot us as we head towards that, the computers doing the work for me, the distance and the speed, and telling me that we are moving. Reassuring me, even.

It isn’t long until we pass the point where we were static before: I watch it on the map, move to boosters rather than engines. This allows us to crawl forward. I am assuming that the wall will have moved, but I have no idea how much by. We inch – really, moving in tens of metres – and we’re soon past where we sat and waited the first time. I zoom the map out, and there, in the distance, is the moon, and Earth, where all this started. We keep moving.

I don’t know how I am going to do this when we get there. I have a window of opportunity, I know that, though I can try multiple times. I will send Inna through the wall, a corpse and destined to stay that way; and Hikaru with her. I am not sure how I feel about Easton yet. How feral he is. He probably didn’t even think about what he was doing. He was trying to save himself. You can’t stay alive for as long as he has, in his physical condition, without developing an innate self-preservation instinct. I wonder if that carries through cycles like an injury? Changes to your psyche, to the way that you think? Brutal, base natures? I wonder if Easton’s journey made him what he is now, in that room, stabbing Hikaru. It’s constant, every cycle. Never a flicker of doubt about what he should do or how he should react. I wonder if being as alone as he must have been made him desperate to survive.

And then I wake up when I feel the anomaly wall pressing against me, inside the ship, and I know that I have crossed the boundary, and I am scared. In that second I slam the booster into reverse, pushing us back, and I sit and shake, because that could have been worse; and because, when I look at the map, at the computer’s calculations, we are so far past it. We have moved on so very far; but that cannot be my problem now.

I lock the ship into place as I hear her scream and cry, stabilizing and anchoring it with the boosters, and then I pull my helmet on. I check the seals this time, actually bothering to take the time to ensure my own safety: I have no desire to die out there an infinite amount of times for the rest of my life.

I wait for Easton to die. I watch it happen, to make sure, and as he does I take one of the final few stims: for the clarity, to drag my eyes open, to keep my here and now. Easton dies. There are no tricks: it’s the same as every other time. His body floats, loose and yet stiff at the same time, and I open the interior airlock door and I drag it out. I tie it down to the rail at the far end, still unsure as to what I should do. He deserves peace, I tell myself. And what happens to his cycle if I remove the other players from the equation? Does he go insane and hunt me down? Is that how this ends? Either way, he is tied, and then I take Hikaru’s body and Inna’s, and I put them into the airlock space. I change my mind about Easton. I unclip him. I am not sure exactly what it is that he deserves, but this is what he’s getting. I can offer some sort of peace, and I should. I clip them all to the tether rope, and me at the end, in case I need to pull myself back to the ship, and then I seal the internal door to block off the rest of the ship. I open the external airlock door, and we’re outside. Or we are in this. We are not on the Lära any more.

I push them in front of me, all three of them, and they feel like nothing. We move through space, a train, and I talk to them as I go. I tell them that it will be all right; that I am doing this because it is all that I can do. It is my fault that they are out here, and that they have died, and that their families, their loved ones, will maybe never know. Or, I pray, maybe they will. Maybe they will be picked up, seen by something. Maybe there will be closure. Isn’t that all any of us seek? An ending?

Because I don’t want to give this a chance to reset itself, I watch them constantly, never taking my eyes off them, forcing myself to not blink, to keep focused. We move forward and forward, and nothing changes. In the distance, I know what these things are: Earth, waiting for us. I push the bodies, a pile-up, and Inna is facing me. I look at her as we go, and she is right there, held in my arms. I tell her things: that I will miss her, and that I am sorry, and then I feel it against me, and she is suddenly gone through. I did not see it coming. I had hoped, I think, that I would follow. The rules would change and I would be free, but I do not. Instead I feel it here, in front of me. They go, momentum carrying them. I wonder how far it will take them. I wonder if they will follow it on the path I have set, and, somehow, they might travel back to Earth; and then they might burn up in its atmosphere, as they head home.

I press myself to the anomaly, and I decide that the others deserve this as well. I go back to the ship, and I pull myself back to the living area and their beds. The beds are sealed, so I undo them. I try not to look as I pull their bodies out: I hold them by their sleeves. They look the same, because there’s no bacteria in their beds, no air, nothing to let the rot set in. I pull them through, one by one. Lennox, Tobi, Wallace. I think about my mother as I pull their bodies to the airlock. I think about what she looked like after she was gone, and they called us, and said, Do you want to see her? Spend some time with her? Say some words? We told them that we had already said all that we had to say; and that her body would know nothing of what we would want to say to it.

I set the cycle and open the doors, and we are outside. I repeat myself, pushing them through. There is no ceremony, and they are gone. As I am floating, I think that I could pull my helmet off: that I could choke here, and maybe I would die and drift across; and maybe I would be on the other side, and I would stay dead. I think this but there’s no way, I know, that I could ever do it. I am too afraid of death. I am too scared of that infinite nothingness.

And to think that people used to dream of an afterlife. That, for them, paradise was what happened when this was over. Somewhere that was worth dreaming of, that was worth thinking about instead of life. Instead there is nothing. I would bet my own life that there is nothing, and it is a bet that I would win; and the only reason that I would make that bet is because I am so sure that I would live after it.

I push the anomaly wall with my hands, and I set my boosters going, one more attempt, and I struggle against it. When it doesn’t move, when it doesn’t change, I turn back to the ship, and I see the stretch of the expanse around me. I am so alone here, and I have never seen anything worse than this, and how incredible and mystifying and wonderful it is, and how deep; how black; how terrible.

14

The Lära is quiet without them here. They have left their blood from their final cycle: staining the walls in seemingly improbable places. There has been no reset of that: it is indelible. I tell myself that I really should clean it off, but that it will be a task. I am better at the floating, the swimming around. Not good enough yet, maybe. (Then a voice inside me asks what I am doing it for: whom I am cleaning the ship for. It is a voice I have to ignore.) But it’s so quiet. I wasn’t really aware. It feels like a lie, that it’s more silent, and maybe I’m just noticing it more. They say that, that empty houses creak more than full ones, somehow. This house is the emptiest of all.

I sleep. I don’t dream, or if I do it’s unmemorable, and when I wake up I am still strapped to my bed, and the lights are still as they were, and the cycle hasn’t restarted or anything. I am alone, still. I sit in the lab and look at the maps, of where I am now. I think about running calculations about how far the anomaly has moved – or grown – and where it could end up. I wonder if Tomas knows what I do about it. If he’s got enough information to do research. I wonder if he changed his mind and launched our backup. They could be heading towards us, roaring through space, maybe even captained by Tomas. He could be explaining that they cannot go through the anomaly, because they won’t come back. They will be careful. They won’t dare take the risks that we did. (And even then, as I look on it, did we even take risks? Or did we just live this out as it made sense to do?)

I try and talk to him. ‘Brother?’ I say, into the ether. I hope that he’s listening, but there’s nothing. It makes sense for me to wait here, I tell myself, but of course I am wrong. Even as I think it I know that it is madness. Still: another day here, another night. However long they are.

I think that I might go back to using clocks.

I ask myself why I got into this. Why Tomas and I decided that it was something we should do. What on earth I wanted from it when I was a child, what I thought that it would be like to be a scientist. As we grew up and it became a realistic possibility, why did we not see it? That it was not about the questions or the answers, not really. It was about investors and results and returns. But what is the point of this if not to gather answers? About who we are, about our place in the universe? This is our eternal question, Tomas would say to me: man’s eternal struggle. Why us? Why did we grow out of the ooze, why did we develop hands and eyes and consciousness? Is there really a chance that it was an accident?

Don’t you want to know more? he would ask me, and I would say, Yes, of course. But he was more desperate than I. He was more inquisitive, more willing to do what we needed to do. He said, This cannot be all, and the anomaly might be part of something. It’s a discovery, Mira, and we cannot throw away a discovery without knowing everything possible about it.

I lie in bed and think about Tomas, and what he would do. He is probably at home. Maybe they have had a funeral for me, because he knows what he condemned me to. Maybe he was there, with his baker, in another of his dark suits and thin ties with his glasses on, and maybe there he was smoking one of his cigarettes, and he said something, read a passage maybe, about me. Something poignant, from literature, about space and the stars and the notions of loss and loneliness; something that would speak to me now, and mean something, and ruin me were I to hear it. He wouldn’t have cried, but his baker would have. She would have put on a show enough for both of them. And who would have been there for me? Maybe some of the researchers, or the attendants from the NISS. Maybe some of my old classmates, if they even remember me. Maybe one or more of our stepfathers might have put in an appearance, out of duty. I wonder if Tomas would stay for the wake.

At my lowest, I wonder about Easton, the journalist. What he must have seen. I wonder how he was old, and how the other version of him, the one that was jettisoned, was so young. I wonder what it means for the logic that I had assumed about the anomaly, and the effect that it has upon us. Where I had assumed that we were all in a loop, always dying, always living again, I wonder what he has been through: that the events of his life show on his body, not resetting as with Inna and Hikaru, but still there. I wonder if, in those final few days, as he died on my ship, if he felt his choking, his suffocation every time he awoke and had to play it again; if the only thing he could do was to take part in the deaths the way that they were happening, and if he knew that he was no longer alone, and now he was part of our loop, our cycle, our new way of him dying.

I am at my lowest when I think of this because it is another question that I will never have an answer to; another way in which I am just a failure, desperate and clawing for a truth.

I am wary to not stray too far from the screens, and the cockpit. We hadn’t expected that the wall would be solid. Maybe we would have compensated, built some anti-collision technology into the ship if we had known. We met with manufacturers of every type of addition we could have stuck into this thing, all the little details that some might ignore but that engineers and money-men were trying to get us to shoe-horn in. Things that belonged on cars or airplanes. We ignored most of them. We said, The ship is going to be built for use, for practicalities and work. Anything else is a bonus, but we won’t pay for those.

Sleep comes easily to me now, so I do it all the time. It lasts for hours and hours, and it is still and peaceful, and it rejuvenates. I wake up and feel rested for the first time in as long as I can remember. I don’t know why I am not stressed; probably acceptance. My body has, however, begun to ache, so I exercise when I can. We have devices to do this, but very few, so I hold onto the table and force myself into squats, into working my arms and legs. I shower and I shave, finally. I look at my face and I think about how I am essentially becoming more human now, as it matters the least. How fastidious I am still, even though there is nobody here to judge me. Regardless, I judge myself.

Eventually I snap and I try to clean the ship as well. I wash the blood off the walls in the room, where I can still almost see the ghosts of them going through their cycle. Going endlessly through their motions. I put gravity on – I can’t see how to make a bucket of water and a sponge work any other way – and I stand on the benches and try to get it all. It runs when I wet it, making wide pink stains down the white walls, and I have to try and clean them up as well. Where it has stained and smeared the cold walls it has dried, like you find on the underside of paint-can lids, and that runs as soon as you wet it. My work multiplies, but it’s the only way to get it done. I work corner to corner, hunting it out. I have no idea how Hikaru and Inna could make this much blood between them. I wonder, as I wet each individual part, if it’s Hikaru or Inna’s.

When the walls are pink and I can’t get any more away I drag the hose from the shower cubicle in the changing area and put my thumb against the end, running the water and spraying it across the room to try to get the walls as wet as I can. It only works on the nearest, but the pink runs down and it seems like the stain isn’t permanent. It gives me an idea: I wet all the other walls, soaking them, filling my bucket – actually a kidney bowl, the only thing I could find – and I throw water at them. When every wall is as wet as they can be, like the room has been hit by a localized storm, I put myself outside it in the corridor, seal the internal doors, and then set the airlock to open. Both doors, no safety measures. Suck all the liquid out of the room. I watch it on the video: it peels itself off the walls, almost. It’s not perfect, but it’s enough. When the room is nothing but space, I shut the doors and go back in. It’s so white, and so bitterly cold.

I turn gravity off again, and I clean the whole ship, top to bottom. I go through the drawers and see what we decided we would need, the stuff that we never touched. Cases of tools and replacement parts in the engine rooms; medical supplies, enough to run a full operating theatre; all this food, and so much of it Hikaru’s bland, bleached awfulness; all the measuring tools in the lab, all the instruments and methods of data collection; games, in case we got bored. What chance to use any of those things? I rifle through the drawers, where everything is vacuum-packed and magnetically held down, and I laugh at this. Tomas and I had gone through so many different possibilities, different eventualities. We had decided that we needed to prepare for them all. We were idiots. This trip was a waste, I tell myself.

We have champagne in the cupboards, in these individual cartons. They were for when we discovered what the anomaly was. One of Tomas’ suggestions, a way to celebrate our achievement. A last minute thought. I take one down and suck the sickly, fizzy liquid out of it in one go. And then another. And another. I tell myself that I’m a bad person for doing this. For even starting this trip, for initiating this stupid fucking concept in the first place. I have their blood on my hands. Five people’s blood, and their families’ hatred of me should and will be deserved. Tomas will bear the brunt of that, when we disappear. They will say that we should have prepared better. They won’t care that we were abandoned, because they will never know. It will be buried, some secret that people will never realize. All they’ll know is that the anomaly is something we didn’t expect, that we can’t account for. It can become a mystery. I drink another of the champagnes. Each is the equivalent of a glass. I can feel my head swimming more. I do not drink at home, usually. To celebrate something, birthdays or whatever, maybe a glass here and there. Drinking in space. Drinking in space! They’ll ask why we didn’t prepare for every eventuality, which is something that Tomas does not and will not have an answer to. He’ll say that we prepared for what we could, but is that even true? The eyes of the world were on us, the great scientists, meant to explain what the unexplainable is, meant to reassure, and we couldn’t even bring six people in a fucking capsule home. They’ve been doing that for years: since the middle of the last century. That’s how long we’ve been sending people up here for, and it’s something that we should have become good at. Instead we pushed ourselves and took leaps rather than working on perfecting what we knew, rather than removing risks. We took more. We said, Death found these people at this place. We should seek out death. We should try to stare it in the eyes.

I drink another of the flasks. I tell myself that I should save the rest. I should bide my time. I think about what happened, and I replay it all in my mind. I think about my last time with Inna. I think about her body, and peeling her apart, and seeing inside her. I wanted to know how bad it had been, and if I could have helped. My final stepfather once said, Put your skills to good use. Don’t fritter it away, how intelligent you boys are. How good you are when you work on something together. Fix cancer, he said, rather than fucking around in the stars and with ships and with things that will never do anybody any good. And when our mother died, he came to the funeral even though they were not together, had not been together for many years, and he said, I told you so. He stood at the funeral and he said, You stupid assholes. You stupid fucking children. See what you could have done. Tomas and I knew how irrational it was: his suggestion. It would not have helped anything. We knew that he was being insane, because it was likely that we wouldn’t have found a definitive cure.

There is nothing for me here. No way out. I look at the readings, of how long I have left, and I know that I cannot just sit here and wait for death to come to me. I can discover something myself: I can do what I came here for. I unclip myself and pull myself to the cockpit, and I turn on the engines and point the ship away from the wall of the anomaly. I plot a straight path, a straight line, deeper into the anomaly, into where – if my calculations are correct – I might find a centre, eventually. We will accelerate and then coast, and then I will see how far I can go in here. If this thing has an answer, I am going to head towards it.

The ship shakes, and so do my hands, and then I settle into the seat, and I have gravity back, and I feel, for the briefest of seconds, normal: moving forward, sitting, human.

There’s nothing in here, the deeper you go. After a day of travelling I can see nothing. It’s quite incredible, to look at it. I surround myself with screens in the lab and take the best 360-degree view that I can, and all I can see is blackness. If I turn the lights out and rely on the light from the screens, even though I know that they’re broadcasting and connected, the only light comes from our ship and engines, burning at the bottoms of the screens. In the distance, as far as I can see, there is absolutely nothing.

And I think, How can I be so alone? How can I be this absolutely alone?

I think that I should sleep again. I am not tired, but this is what I have now. The ship is still accelerating, still slowly gaining speed, and there is still weight in here. I walk to my bed and I lie down and I shut the door and I talk to myself, just to hear my voice; and in here, closed in, it reverberates. In here, it’s trapped. I think that I am talking to myself, and also that I am talking to Tomas. This is for him as much as it is for me: if he accidentally hears me, through the crackle of static inside the anomaly.

‘I am so useless,’ I say. ‘I have squandered it all. I have done what I should not, and it’s a waste. If you could see me now you would say that I am broken, a foolish man who rode some foolish dreams. And you’re just as bad as I am,’ I say, ‘because those dreams were ours. We allowed them to be here. We allowed them to be all that we were. We were distracted, and we failed.’ I need a drink, water. I am too lazy to get up, even though I am not tired, and in my throat I can feel the sick rising from the champagne. Here, it’s worse. Here, everything is worse. ‘I would tell you how my day was, but it was tantamount to nothing.’ I feel the vomit in my mouth, so I open the door of the bed and cough it out. It floats; another thing that I will have to clean up. I shut the door. ‘I am ruined,’ I say. ‘I wish that I would die, because then this would be over. It couldn’t be my choice, because I am so weak that I will always choose life: even here, where death means nothing, and life means nothing, and when I go, there will be nothing.’ I am picturing myself as an old man: dying of some horrific disease, and then waking up and dying again. Perhaps my heart gives up, or perhaps a cancer of my own. Or maybe in my sleep, just that I stop working, and then I start again, a new cycle, and I stop and start and stop. Perhaps that is already happening; because how would I know? ‘This is no way to live,’ I say. I am sobbing, and then I hear it: a voice, talking to me.

‘Brother?’ it asks, over and over. It’s Tomas’ voice, slinking through the nothing. I hear it as an echo, crackle-filled and pale from the speakers. Barely there at all, and if I wasn’t listening, maybe I would have missed it. It is as an echo, almost nonexistent. ‘Can you hear me?’

‘Yes,’ I say, but I’m not sure that it isn’t a lie. I call to him, but there’s no answer. In the darkness, with the bed shut, I say his name over and over. ‘Where are you?’ I ask.

There is no answer, and I wonder if it was just a ghost. If I was never meant to hear it in the first place.

I wake up and I say his name, first thing, in case. But there is no answer, not even the hiss of a connection. I wonder if I imagined it, last night. If I dreamed what it was that I wanted to happen. It is possible. I have never had an imagination, not really, but maybe this time. Maybe now is when I develop one. I get out of bed and discover that I am weightless again, so we must be going as fast as we can, now coasting; and I move to the cockpit and bring up the map, because I want to see where the computer thinks that we are. We have no way of knowing the centre of this thing, but if it is close to a sphere in shape, maybe we can guess. I start the program doing its work, and I lean back and shut my eyes, and then there comes a crackle from the speakers.

‘Brother?’

‘Yes!’ I say. ‘You’re there!’

‘I can’t hear you,’ he says. ‘I can only hear static.’ His voice fades in and out of the nothingness. I try and talk with him more, but there’s nothing coming back to me. It’s quiet again. It was definitely clearer than the night before, which makes me wonder if the anomaly is thinner than we thought. Maybe I’ll be reaching the far side of it soon enough? Maybe that’s where the signal is coming from. There’s no anomaly wall, nothing to stop me leaving it. The other side of the membrane, an easy slip-through for me, and back to the real world. This is the first time that I have felt hope in a while, I think. ‘Hello?’ I ask.

‘I’m here,’ his voice says, and then it’s gone again, fading into the crackle. I don’t stop the ship, or turn around: I know that I have to keep going forward. Maybe I am heading towards an exit; maybe that is how I can hear him.

There is nothing left for it now.

I talk to him, to fill the silence. I think that I could go insane here alone if I was given half a chance, so I keep talking to him. His voice flits in and out of the conversation; occasional bursts of dialogue with me that amount to answers, monosyllabic or thereabouts, but still: this is a conversation. The relief I feel at that. I am just so glad that I am not alone any more.

In the morning, the first thing I do is to look at the computer’s calculations. It has finished extrapolating where the middle of this could be, and it is so far away still. Past that, the other end of the anomaly. What might be an exit. There is no concept of being able to tell what is around me, and no way to tell if the ship’s instruments are correct. No points of reference for anything. In the olden days, a ship could plot a course by the stars, because they were unchangeable, the constancy. I am here with nothing around me, nothing at all. The distance looks as if it could be feet away, maybe, or thousands of miles. There’s no horizon. The map could be so wrong and I would never even know it.

I want to say, I am coming back to you. I want to say, I knew that you would not abandon me.

The ship is slowing down. I find it hard to tell, but it is slowing. I set the computer to track it and it does, and I do the math myself, seeing the numbers as they should be and then as they actually are. We are – I am – slowing inside here. There is drag inside the anomaly.

This should be a breakthrough. It should be a wonder: that this thing that doesn’t exist in any real way that we can tell, this anomaly in the truest sense of the word, it has a form of some kind. It is real, and must be tangible. I celebrate, by myself, that there is evidence. There must be something I can collect to prove this; maybe I just don’t have the tools yet. But still, there is work to be done.

Then I am alone, just me and my discovery. I try to tell Tomas but the line is dead, and I think about what it means as the ship slows and slows, and I realize that I will have to switch on the engines constantly, to keep us moving forward. That I will be burning fuel all the way to the edge of the anomaly. I have no choice: eventually I will run out, and the batteries will discharge over time, and then I will die.

Where will I begin from? Here? This moment of realization? I try to call Tomas again, over and over and over, and then I set the engines to burn to counteract the drag: only a small amount, to keep us coasting, top up the speed and make it seem like there’s nothing slowing us down.

Me. Nothing slowing me down. That is the easiest thing to forget, through all of this.

We would always be in touch. From the tin-can telephones we made in the garden as children – running from his bedroom upstairs to the tree house, where I would sit and attempt to communicate with him – to the telephone call he made to me the night after he met his baker. She was asleep in the bedroom that they would eventually end up sharing, and he crept to the kitchen and opened the fridge, so as to have an excuse, and he called me. He whispered.

‘She’s nice,’ he said.

‘Good,’ I told him. I was alone in my room, and I had been asleep. Or I told him that I had, I cannot remember which, accurately. ‘You can tell me about her tomorrow.’

‘I want you to meet her tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You can come with me, and we’ll have lunch.’

‘It seems very early,’ I said. ‘How do you know you won’t have forgotten about her in a week?’

‘And it would matter if I had?’ He sounded affronted. ‘I like her. You could make the effort.’ This was so soon after our mother died, and he was over-compensating. He had found a woman who made the kitchen smell like a stereotype should, and who wanted to take care of him. Who appreciated how hard he worked. ‘She wants to meet you.’

‘I’m surprised you even mentioned me.’

‘Of course I did. I told her all about what we’re working on, and how important you are.’

‘You broke the NDAs?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, they don’t count with her. She’s a baker, Mira, not a spy. She doesn’t care. She thinks it’s amazing, you know, what we’re working on.’

‘You’ve jeopardized everything,’ I said, ‘for this woman you barely know?’

‘Oh, goodnight, Brother,’ he said. He hung up the phone and ended the conversation, a conversation that was mine to end. I think that’s when it fell apart for us, because that’s when we stopped talking, apart from when we were at work. He said to me once, a few months after that, that my jealousy was ruining our relationship. That we were brothers and surely that was more important than whatever animosity I felt towards the woman that he loved.

I tell him what has happened anyway, and I tell it to him every few hours in case he hears me. I send it out there to let him know what to expect, and how to prepare. When I finally get something back from him he sounds so exhausted and resigned. I say, ‘I’m so pleased to hear from you.’

‘I know,’ he replies, but he sounds as if he doesn’t feel the same. He is tired and sad, I think, as if he knows something that I do not. It’s the static, I tell myself: it warps everything. To him, I wonder how I sound. If I sound as eager as I fear, as happy to speak to him as I expect I do.

‘Are you far away?’ I ask when I get the chance.

‘Not far,’ he says.

‘You’re here for me?’

‘Yes,’ he says, and then his voice is swallowed again. I spend the night surrounded by the screens as large as I can make them, in that blackness, and when it doesn’t feel real enough I go to the airlock and open the external door. I press my face to the plastic window of the internal one and I watch through, no sign that we’re even moving at all. I stay there for I don’t know how long, but it’s not out of pity: more a feeling that, despite how terrible it is out there, how I cannot understand what it is, we – that is, Tomas and I, working together as we should be – have beaten it.

I don’t hear from him the next day. He is silent, even though I get static, and I wonder why. It makes me worry that whatever plan he had has fallen through, and that I’m now alone again.

It doesn’t change how I spend my day. I spend it worrying: about fuel, air, Tomas. I can barely eat for the worry, so I try one of Hikaru’s white bars, one of the noodle bars. It’s so bland that I keep it down easily, and then I feel guilty. I think that this cycle is better than the one he died doing.

Tomas speaks to me the next morning, and there’s a clarity to his voice, to the transmission. He says, ‘This will all work out, you know.’ He is trying to make me feel better, and to bolster my spirits. He is my brother.

‘I know,’ I say. ‘You sound closer.’

‘I am.’

‘And I am,’ I say. It’s nice. I smile, and I’m sure that he will be doing the same. It’s something synchronous; we always liked it when that happened. People would ask us if it didn’t annoy us, as twins, that we were lumped together. We would say that it made us feel better: that there were always the two of us in a situation, and we were so close that we knew we would never feel alone in our reactions. We always thought the same, until Mother died, until the baker, until this project pushed us apart. I say, ‘I’m glad that you didn’t forget about me.’

‘How could I?’ he says.

‘I thought that you were abandoning me before.’

‘No,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t do that.’ He still sounds so sad. I wonder if he has had just as much trouble getting to me as we had getting here in the first place.

‘Do you swear? That you won’t abandon me in here?’

‘I swear,’ he says.

‘How long until I see you?’ I ask.

‘Another twelve days, by my calculations,’ he says.

‘Twelve days? That’s all the fuel I have!’

‘It’s going to be close,’ he says. ‘Very close.’

‘And you’re heading towards me as well?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘I can’t. It’s just you, Mira. It’s all on you.’ And then he’s gone, and I am alone again. Twelve days. I can do this. I have gone longer, I tell myself, when it was self-imposed.

‘Do you ever think back to when we were children?’ I ask him. I have always assumed that he never did: that he was too preoccupied with moving forward. Constantly moving forward, never dwelling on what happened before. ‘I think about it,’ I say, ‘because I wonder what made us who we were. What made us different.’

‘I think about it,’ he says. There’s such a fuzz on his voice, but so unmistakably him. ‘I think about it all the time.’

‘Because it mattered to you? I thought that we had a good childhood.’

‘We did.’

‘So what happened?’ I ask. The static is too strong, I think, because he doesn’t answer. So I lie there and try to sleep, and to forget about the gnawing inside me. Suddenly I find it difficult again. There is pressure on me now; and maybe I will miss something, something important. Maybe he will tell me something, and I will not hear it.

15

I don’t know if Tomas’ plan to rescue me involves me alone, or me and the ship. I tell myself that it would be nice to take this all back, considering who it is named after. It’s fine to have a backup, but it will have a different name. He will have named it something pompous and inglorious, I should imagine. A seemingly well-chosen word like Bravery or Temerity. Something that sounds like a ship’s name but that he feels represents a facet of himself and the trip we have made. Or that he will have made. Discovery, maybe. Maybe that’s too impressive. He’ll want some level of boastful subtlety. There is a part of me that wonders if the rescue he is conducting was part of this: that it’s a glory he will attain for himself, that I will have no part of. I wonder if he knew what would happen with the anomaly, and didn’t tell me. I suppose that it’s something I will always have to wonder.

I clean everything top to bottom again. I want the ship to be in pristine condition when he sees it: to show that, while I could not save the crew, I have saved this. The investment; our creation. I clean out the beds that my crewmates’ bodies were put into. I change into one of the spacesuits, because then I can shut myself in their beds and breathe through the oxygen tanks, and I don’t need to worry about taking in their death. Besides which, the suits are comfortable. I can wear this through, and when he sees me, I will look as though I belong out here. I am a professional.

I eat when I like. I try and talk to Tomas: this is a constant process, where I call for him and try to get him to answer. He crackles in, and he makes excuses, which is typical.

‘It’s hard to get a connection,’ he says.

‘Did you have to adapt the radios to the anomaly?’

‘Yes,’ he says.

‘How did you do it?’ I ask. I feel like I’m constantly suspicious.

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘They just told me that they got it working.’ He’s lying. There’s nothing that he won’t understand when his staff explain it to him. And, for that matter, that he won’t have asked about. They will have said it was working; he will have wanted to know how. He’s an inquisitive mind.

‘What’s keeping you so busy?’ I ask.

‘Research,’ he says. He sounds exhausted, as if he’s not sleeping. If he’s anything like me, he isn’t, not at this stage of his trip. And he is exactly like me.

Eleven days. He is more talkative today, and I ask him how he is. He says, ‘I’m fine. I’m tired.’ He doesn’t ask how I am, but I tell him.

‘You don’t know what it’s been like,’ I say. ‘Out here, all alone. And how they all died.’

‘I know,’ he says.

‘No you don’t. You haven’t even asked about Inna and Hikaru. You haven’t asked me anything about what happened.’

‘Oh,’ he says.

‘Don’t you want to talk about it? Don’t you think we should?’

‘No,’ he says, then, ‘I’ve seen some parts, from the camera footage. I assumed you wouldn’t want to go into it.’

‘I have had nobody to talk to.’ I think about how weak this connection between us is: how much data could they have really streamed? ‘Where are you?’

‘The far side of the anomaly,’ he says.

‘Why is the connection so bad?’

‘You can’t expect it to be perfect,’ he tells me. ‘Not where we are, in this situation.’ He crackles. I feel like I am in some ancient comedy movie, and the man on the phone is faking driving into a tunnel. I don’t trust Tomas. I say it aloud – ‘I don’t trust you,’ I say – but I don’t know if he’s listening, because all I get from his end is the static.

Ten days and the darkness is getting to be too much. The lights from the ship feel too artificial, and all I want from the minute that I wake up is to see something else real. I try to call Tomas but there’s no reply, so I think about what we have. I stare at the engines. I surround myself with screens of the outside, but it makes no difference. It reminds me of car drives when I was a kid, in storms. Parts of Europe where they didn’t have road-lights, and my stepfather would sometimes switch the lights off on the car to scare us. He would make a noise, and wobble the car, knowing the road so well that he knew how safe we were. Tomas and I would howl in that laughing-scared way. Fuck.

I push myself to facing the floor. I am finally becoming adept at this, mastering how my body works here. I can see how it’s an art. I ache all over, but that’s probably an effect of how little I’ve been resting. And this puts such a stress on your bones. The bone loss is minute, but it’s there. Atrophy of muscles, loss of bone, wearing down of tissue. A slackening of what holds you together. I think about Easton, and what a zombie he was: barely even human. There is so much that I wish I could have asked him about his trip. That mystery, only partly solved. I wonder how this will play out from here on. I tell myself that I have no interest in ending my life like him, stuck in some loop I cannot escape from. Instead I will escape altogether.

I can see nothing, though. There is something, I think, and then I realize it’s a reflection, the light from above making the floor shine through the projection of the screen. That makes me laugh: what here isn’t just reflection? The cycles; the darkness; so even.

It’s been such a short amount of time without company, and yet I already understand how Cormac could go insane.

Tomas will be waiting in the ship for me. It will not be the perfect trip that he envisioned, and I will be blameless in losing the crew of my trip, because the anomaly is so far beyond comprehension that it renders all blame ineffective, all concepts of understanding new. He will say, I’ve missed you. We’ll embrace. Do you know that we haven’t had an embrace since Mother’s funeral? He apologizes for what happened, for abandoning me. He explains: that it was never meant to be permanent, but that it was necessary. It was our goal, he said. (Even in my fantasies he is selfish.) He says, As soon as it happened I rerouted everything to save you, Brother. All of our resources, every single man and woman we have here working on the goal of saving you. You’ve been on the front page of every news-site, he tells me. He shows me them, the stories floating in the air on the screens. They proclaim me a Hero. I will ask about my crew, and if I am a pariah now. He says that the families understand. They gave their lives for the greater good, he says, ever the utilitarian.

On the ship I will recover. We’re going home, Tomas will tell me. We’ll sleep that part of the journey: travelling faster. I’ll have a bed, and we will climb into ours, next to each other, and he will tell me what’s been happening as we go to sleep. He’ll tell me about the rescue effort, and how he decided to personally man the ship, and how the research part of our career – of our lives, when we get down to it – is complete. We have discovered the anomaly, he tells me, and that’s enough. We know what it is.

What is it? I will ask him, and he’ll tell me. He’ll have it all worked out. All the work we did, the research. The thousands of hours. I’ll tell him that I have never felt like much of a scientist, and he’ll say, Don’t be ridiculous. You’re as much of one as I am. Look at what we have discovered, he’ll tell me. All you are now is a name in history, and whatever else you are from this point, that doesn’t matter. You can go and be quiet, if you like. You can take a life away from this. I’ll ask him what we will do, and he’ll say, Whatever you like. We’re brothers, and we’re meant to do this together.

And I will tell him about what happened to me after he left me in the anomaly. I’ll tell him about Inna and Hikaru and their cycle, and Easton, how we found him. He will tell me that it’s okay that I don’t feel guilt. That I don’t really feel anything at all. I’ll tell him about Inna’s tattoo, and that she was ill. I won’t tell him about the scar that made the bird what it was, because that’s mine. Mine and hers.

He’ll tell me to sleep then. There is something so comforting about that, being given that permission, so I will. I take his advice. He is older than I am, but not by much. And when we wake up, I can look out at the Earth coming towards us. It’ll be a marble first, and then bigger, and then we will be descending. We will come in like a plane, doing everything we can to slow our descent. This is the part I haven’t been looking forward to, I’ll tell him, and he’ll say, After what you’ve been through, this should be a breeze. I will notice that his birthmark is gone: dug out and rebuilt or recoloured or something, and that he looks exactly like I do. I’ll ask about it, and he’ll say, There was no point in either of us being more special than the other. I wanted parity. That will bring us closer together, and everything else the past however-many years will cease to matter.

When we land there will be a press conference. They will ask me how hard it has been, the trip and the deaths and being alone. I’ll say, You don’t know how hard. The hardest thing. But then they’ll celebrate, and they will stop asking about Inna, and they’ll laud us for what we’ve done. A podium finish, like racing drivers, with champagne, myself and Tomas. Applause.

At home, the baker will be there, and she will have made a cake. I can forgive her, I think. (I question my own fantasy, that she is still here. Maybe I don’t hate her as I thought.) The cake has my name on it: Mira, in stars. The next day Tomas and I go to our mother’s grave and we stand over it, and he says that he forgives me for how her life ended. He says, I am proud of you, Mira. Her grave says, Beloved Mother To Sons, and nothing else. Not our names, our full names, as he inscribed them. He’s changed it.

We work with the agencies to help them look at the anomaly. They want to know if it’s still coming towards Earth, and what it will do when it arrives. They sit me down and ask me to describe what we’ll face. I say, I cannot. I leave. I go to the wilds, and we never speak of it, because we’ll be dead before it arrives. Because we have to be. I don’t know how that will happen, or where or when. But it will be coming.

The fantasy ends quickly. I am alone and alive and in the ship, and I can see the nothingness.

‘Tomas?’ I ask.

‘I can’t talk,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry.’ There’s not even the pretence of static, or the realness of static, whichever. He just cuts the call. He sounds devastated. Like this is all coming to an end, or that he knows that it is somehow actually not at all real.

Nine days.

I am lost and lonely, and I am a man who needs to be the opposite of these things. I am a man who needs people, I have discovered; or a specific person. Tomas’ presence has lightened my mood, and my feelings. It has made me feel less as though this is inevitable. As if maybe I will get out of this alive.

I clean more, as if that is all I have to do. There is a part of the ship where the blood has crusted a seal, and I can see the line where it is. It has snuck inside the bowels of the ship herself, and I decide that I want to clean this. I cannot get the cleaning instruments into the gap enough, where the wall and the floor meet, which means I have to go inside the wall to reach it. In the engine rooms there is panel to allow the engineering team to reach the insides of the ship. All around the thing, around every room, there is at least a foot of space between the interior and the start of the hull. They could get into it, to fit everything, to make sure that the turbine – which circles every part of the ship – works properly. The panel is easily removed, and then I can see into the ship itself. It’s like a secret: seeing how something works. I think of Inna, and I climb in. A tight fit, for a few feet, and then I’m behind the wall. It’s warm and dark. The turbine is off, so I can be in here. Otherwise the ring inside the hull would rotate, like the drum of a washing machine, and I would be killed. I creep forward, knowing where to go. It’s close. They press against me, the walls, and I edge into where it is even darker. There’s no light bleed until you reach the edge of a room, and then I am tracking along the corridor. A dip as I reach the changing rooms, the airlock, and I have to enter a smaller passage, a crawl-space. It runs underneath the airlock itself, and it’s hard: hauling myself down, trying to stay under there. Pressed up against it, on my back, pulling myself along. Under here, it smells of something stale and metallic, which means I am at the right place. I feel it with my fingers: the blood. I don’t know whose it is, but I clean it as best I can. In here, it’s so dark: I only make it lighter when I get the blood out of the crack and the light from the room can poke through.

Getting the blood all gone from the ship is good. It’s better. It feels cathartic, as if maybe, for a second, I can pretend that this never happened. I go from room to room and check everything, and I finally cannot see any anywhere. The ship is clean, almost back to where it started. I am the only evidence that we have ever been anywhere. Me, and the empty drawers.

Tomas messages me as I am trying to sleep.

‘I wanted to see if you are still there,’ he says.

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘I don’t know. Sometimes I think that you are less than real. I can’t believe this.’

‘You left me for dead,’ I say. He is silent. ‘Don’t you have anything to say?’ I ask him.

‘I don’t know,’ he says.

‘You could apologize,’ I tell him.

‘No I couldn’t,’ he says. The connection severs.

I try and work out where Tomas could be. This seems like a sensible way to spend my time: exercising my brain. Putting anything I have up here to good use. This was always my flaw, I think. I could never just stop and be. Tomas was able to do everything, to multitask, to do his dating and his fucking and his work and somehow get it all right. He was hampered: he was the imperfect one, the one who was neglected when I was a miracle. He had the birthmark: I was physically perfect. But then, he excelled and I did not. I was the one whom they did tests on when we were children, who had the extra time to do his exams. He is no less intelligent, they said. He just needs more care. I was the one whom Tomas had to look after. Everything about us leads to this: him as my salvation, and still I know he is lying to me. He has always lied, because it’s easier for him. And why should I trust him, I want to know. I want to ask him, but the connection is dead, so I plot his route instead. I try to see where he could have left from and where he could be now, if I make educated assumptions concerning my own trajectory. Assuming he can see me, and it’s just me that cannot see him. Assuming that he is here to rescue me, and not luring me deeper into this thing for his precious fucking research. Nothing but assumptions. He had a thing he used to say about that, a pithy little joke that he threw out to embarrass me when I used the word. When we were researching, I used it a lot. So much of science is based on assumptions. We assumed that the anomaly would be something we could just read from, something benign and yet explainable. I can hear his pith in my mind, rolling around.

He would say, We should have researched more.

After a day of working on it, I cannot fathom where he can be. The estimations of the anomaly are huge and all-encompassing, and I put a pin into the map to represent where we could end up, based on trajectory and speed and assuming that I travel at normal parameters inside this thing. Assuming I burn fuel normally and that the drag – and therefore my speed – is constant. He can’t be there, because I can’t work out how he would reach that point. I can’t see how, from earth, in the time that he had; flying around it, riding its curvature, coming in from the rear. I imagine it as many ways as I am capable of doing and I simply cannot see it. There is something about this that all feels too inevitable.

So I try options: that maybe he left before he said, that we were talking from somewhere closer, and he was lying to me; that he is lying now, but somehow has managed to find a way to communicate with me from Earth, even though the lag is less; that I have been here for longer than I thought. The last one burns. It would mean that I have died somehow, and am part of a cycle. I wouldn’t even realize, would I? I would be stuck here, somehow in this loop, and he might have been out here for months looking for me. Maybe years. I have thought about how they work: some consideration about what makes them begin, what defines them. I touch myself, feel my body, as if that might give me a sign. Maybe I have been here for more time than I realize, and he has found a way out. Maybe we are different ages; brothers now, no longer twins. No longer even close to identical. We wear different skins entirely.

It nags at me. I cannot fathom him lying to me, not like this; though it explains so much. It explains the hesitation in his voice, the trepidation, the fear. What if I was in a loop and he has found a way to break it? What if they are trying to talk me out of the anomaly without me dying, undoing all their good work? I try to work out the fastest Tomas could get to the point he claims, if he slept the whole way, if they had somehow added fuel tanks, replaced life-support systems with backup fuel, made the ship more cramped. Maybe only brought a crew of three, say, to run it. A skeleton staff. It’s still days and days out. Maybe he’s telling me his projected time? Maybe the point at which we will coalesce?

I message him. I am determined to ask him. I message over and over, nagging him, not even saying anything but his name, calling into the darkness. Eventually he answers, after I don’t even know how long.

‘What do you want?’ he asks.

‘Where are you?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says. He barely sounds like the same man. He sounds broken, more broken than I am, even. Not like a man who is on a rescue.

‘You said that I was twelve days away from seeing you. Now it’s only seven.’

‘Yes,’ he says.

‘So how are you that far into space so quickly? How did you find the other edge of the anomaly?’

‘I didn’t,’ he says.

‘So where am I to meet you?’ I ask.

‘At the centre of this thing,’ he tells me. ‘I’m right in the middle, I think.’

‘What’s in the middle?’ I ask him, but he doesn’t answer. I think he has gone, because it’s silent apart from a hiss, but maybe that’s him sobbing in the fug, or maybe it’s laughter. I don’t know. I can’t tell.

It preoccupies me throughout the entirety of the sixth day before I will see him: whether this means I am not to be rescued after all. What it means to me to be pushing through this darkness. And it has a centre, and it’s six days away. In the lab I estimate the size of it. I draw it as a black circle, and it engulfs so much of space. It’s gargantuan. It fills the space between where I am now and the far beyond. I wonder if it’s moving or growing. I wonder if that’s making a difference. I draw the circle darker on the map, not translucent, blotting out the stars. I leave the Lära there as a pin, but it will make no difference to anything.

I wonder how he ended up in here. If he came in after me, or if it was an accident. If, somehow, his journey mirrored my own. We have that a lot, where we find that we say we would have done things differently only to discover that in reality we would do them in exactly the same way. It’s very easy to think that you’re distinct and individual when you are a twin, but actually you are nothing of the sort. It’s an accident to think the same way as another. I try and talk to him but he doesn’t answer.

I wonder if he is as trapped as I am. If he has called this a rescue, sold it to me, but really he is alone out here. I wonder if he’s adrift; if he has asked me to come to him to rescue him. The tables turned. He’d never admit that, not outright. He would thank me later. My fantasy of this is of me getting home, but maybe that’s impossible. Maybe what’s possible is getting him back. It is not getting home, but the two of us, we could work out how to free ourselves. Between us we could muster the fuel needed, the ideas. How to extricate ourselves. He has a connection that works, the ability to message me. Maybe he’s still in contact with home. We could send our data home, keep them informed, answer the question of the anomaly. Isn’t that what this has all been about, really?

I tell myself that I should make peace with it. There are five days until I see him, and he seems to be holding up worse than I am. He makes contact today, and asks me over and over where I am. I say, ‘I don’t have any reference points.’

‘Find some,’ he tells me. So I sit and I stare, and I try to see anything out of any of the screens. I drag them to their maximum possible resolution, their highest zoom, and I try to find even a speck in the darkness that I can latch onto. I tell him where I am on the map, on my old star charts. Where I should be, if the anomaly is true: the distance from home, the distance to our closest planets. I give him coordinates, but he laughs them off.

‘You think those are right?’ he asks. ‘You think that they mean anything?’

‘How can they not?’ I ask him. ‘You said I’m now five days from you. There must be constancy,’ I say, ‘or you would not have been able to predict that so ably, would you?’

‘You’re so fucking naïve,’ he says. ‘That’s your problem, it’s always been your problem. You’re too naïve, and you’re a coward, and you refuse to see this for what it is.’

‘So tell me what it is!’ I say.

‘I can’t,’ he says. ‘Not yet.’

‘Why not? Won’t it help me? Help us?’

‘You’ll see,’ he tells me. ‘You’ll see.’

On the fourth-last day, I see something on the screens. I don’t know what it is: a dot, even at the largest zoom. I strain myself getting close to it. It’s barely even a pixel, barely anything at all. It’s something in the distance, and I am headed for it. I wonder if it’s Tomas. I message him, and I talk to myself, to the quiet on the other end, that it must be.

‘I can see you, I think,’ I say. ‘Can you see me? You should be able to, as a speck.’ I give him my coordinates again, but he doesn’t answer. I spend the day attached to a bench and watching the speck grow. It’s barely visible. It grows as flecks of dust grow: it amasses until there is just even more of that very same dust.

Three days to go, and he wakes me. ‘Did you ever think that this would happen?’ he asks. He sounds ill. He sounds like there’s something terribly wrong. I can tell, because his voice is not what it should be.

‘No,’ I say. ‘We didn’t prepare for this, did we?’ I lie in my bed, strapped down. ‘We didn’t have a plan for this. No contingency.’

‘No, we didn’t.’ He is gulping a lot.

‘Are you lying down?’ I ask.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘As are you.’

‘I am.’ He coughs. ‘What’s wrong?’ I ask him, but he coughs more, and then there’s a retch. Vomit. I can hear him spitting it up on the other end of the connection. I try and talk to him, to get him to listen to me, but he doesn’t reply, and the silence floods in. It’s another five minutes before he says anything.

‘Are you scared?’ he asks.

‘Of what?’

‘Of what happens now. What’s going to happen.’

‘No,’ I say. That’s a lie. I am waiting for his reveal: as he shows me that he is as duplicitous as I fear. That he’ll stab me again, and this will be a test, and I will be his lab rat.

‘Okay,’ he says. He’s warning me. He goes then, and I can’t get him back.

The dust speck is now something else. A larger speck. A ship, I know. I can see it, in the same way as I once saw the Ishiguro. I can’t even think how long ago that was. I still worry that it was longer than it seems, that I am playing tricks on myself. But this in the distance is a ship, definitely. I can tell from the shape, the rough shape of it. It looks like the ship that I’m on: meaning that it’s the backup. I still haven’t asked Tomas about how he got out here, and why he’s here. Why he didn’t just leave me to die. I watch the ship-speck get closer and closer. Forty-eight hours and I will be next to it, and I’ll climb aboard. And whatever happens, I will be with Tomas, which is better than being in this alone.

I have another fantasy. Perhaps I shouldn’t call it that, as that suggests a desire for it to become true. But:

He and I are on our ship. We are together and we are growing older. He is dying, of something or other. Hunger. Thirst. Everything is recycled, and there is only so much of this. We are stuck inside this thing, this anomaly, and we cannot escape. He sacrificed himself for me – maybe that’s the part of this that I like? that I am attached to? – and that’s that. I watch him die, and then, as he dies, he chokes himself awake. He fits and sputters and chokes and then wakes again, and then he dies and then he wakes. I have seen the cycles when this is unnatural, when it’s forced onto people, but not when they just stop. When their bodies are done.

Will the anomaly force them back into life? Is that something that it can even do? Will they live forever?

I watch the ship get bigger and bigger. People throw déjà vu around, as something that occurs when they do something that reminds them of another time. That isn’t it. Déjà vu, real déjà vu, it’s a chemical imbalance. It’s a reaction where your brain can’t parse what’s happening and it turns it around. It ruins a moment of peaceful memory for you by adding dizziness, nausea into the mix. Watching this now all I have is a sense that I have been this impatient before. The ship starts as something small and generic, and then I see it exactly as it is. It’s this ship, exactly this ship. Even down to the lettering on the side. Lära, it says. My mother’s name; and also the name of Tomas’ baker. I said to him, Can’t you see what she is to you? What you’re doing with her? And he said, She has the same name. It’s a common name, and what is it to you? So when I suggested we name the ship after Mother, he wasn’t happy. I said, I don’t care. I look for a suffix, for a Two or a B or something else, something distinct, to see what he has done to differentiate us. I want to see if this twin has its own birthmark.

Then it is the size of the desk, on full zoom. I can see it sitting still and immovable. The boosters are not on; they’re not holding it in place, which means it’s drifting. The lights are on, though. It’s not a power loss.

‘You’re looking at me, aren’t you?’ Tomas asks, over the speakers.

‘How did you know?’ He snorts at my question. He’s silent, then, despite my prodding. I say, ‘If you won’t talk to me, listen to me. I am only a while away. Are you in trouble?’

I don’t get an answer for hours, and then he says, ‘Yes.’ But even when I ask what he means, he doesn’t say.

I can count how long it will be until we are together in hours now instead of days. I am lucky, I think, because one way or another I will be out of here, and I will no longer be alone. I could have lost all sense of who I am in this, after the crew died. And to say it, I still feel no guilt. I wonder if that’s my problem. That I should have felt more. I wonder if that makes me a bad person. Seems to me that if I had focused on it, I would have lost myself.

I look at the blackness. It’s my hope that Tomas and I can put our heads together and save ourselves from this. But if we don’t – if he’s lying to me, if he’s as stuck here as I am – then I am still okay. It’s better to not be alone as you die, I think. That’s what our mother said to me as I sat with her. She said, This tells me so much about your love for me, and I said, It should never have been in question.

I message Tomas. He is barely there: a shell of a voice, a fragment, broken and devoid. He says, ‘You’re nearly here.’

‘I am,’ I say. I try to sound excited: to lift the tone. ‘I am only hours away.’

‘You’re anticipating reconciliation.’

‘Aren’t you?’ He snorts. ‘Listen,’ I say, ‘I want to know if you knew that this would happen. All along, when you abandoned me. I need to know, Tomas. You understand that?’

‘I understand so much more than you,’ he says. He sounds like he’s a ruined man. I wonder what he had to sacrifice to come out here to me.

‘You don’t sound happy to be seeing me,’ I say.

‘How could I be?’ he asks. ‘Knowing what I know now?’ Then he severs the connection, and he’s gone. But his ship is there, right in front of me. There are so many things I want to ask him. I strap myself into the cockpit seat and watch on the screens in real-time as it gets bigger and bigger, and I get closer and closer to him.

His ship looks tired from this angle. I wonder what it’s been through to get here. I want to hear all of his stories, every single one. How he got here so quickly; how he came to be inside the anomaly; and he hasn’t mentioned a crew, so I want to know what happened to them; and why is he here? Is it for me? I hail him as I get closer, but there’s no reply. I say, ‘I need to come aboard,’ but there’s nothing.

As we get closer still, I ponder his suggestion that we are near the centre of the anomaly. How did he know that? How could he? There’s nothing here to tell me that, and nothing to allay my thought that we shall never escape it. I wonder what state I will find him in. If he’ll be as broken as his conversations with me would suggest.

I’m scared of damaging the ship – either ship – so I stop far before I reach it. Hikaru would have been able to do something better with this. Maybe drive us alongside it, allow us to almost connect the doors together. That’s why he was a pilot and I am not. I stop the ship with the boosters, and it’s harsh and hard, gravity back, thrown into the chairs, but they work. They do what we wanted them to do.

‘Where are you?’ I ask. ‘Why aren’t you answering?’ It’s so quiet on the other end of the line. ‘Tomas?’ I say, but he doesn’t answer. I check my suit, take a helmet, attach it. I have a fully replenished tank of oxygen, and I seal the airlock from the rest of the ship, leaving the door open for me. And then I’m in space, or the anomaly. The darkness. It’s so cloying out here. A foot in front of you looks like the far-off distance, looks exactly the same. There is no light in here – nothing from the sun coming through, and you cannot even see out, from in here: the darkness is too much. It’s like fog, only there’s nothing tangible here. Just nothingness, all around.

I move through it, though, towards the other Lära, and I circle her. I will miss this, just as I get better at it. I can really feel myself growing in these circumstances. Perhaps I was always destined to be out here and alone. I feel like I am beginning to discover exactly who it is that I am.

The airlock of this other Lära is open. Tomas is waiting for me, as he said he would be. I get to it and pull myself inside, and I seal the door, start the decompression. It only takes seconds, but it’s still enough to make me anxious. I look for Tomas here, waiting for me, but he’s not. He’s nowhere to be seen, not in this room. It looks exactly the same as ours, which makes sense, because we built them to be the same. Hewn from exactly the same plastics and metals and moulds.

‘Hello?’ I call as I step out. I check the changing area, the corridor, the engine rooms, the lab, the lounge, the cockpit, but he isn’t here. It is pristine, as if it has never been used. I spend time pulling myself around every room, ending in the lab. The only sign of life: my notes, my handwriting. The orange map that I made, with the anomaly on it and a pin in it showing where the ship is. ‘Hello?’ I shout, but the ship is, apart from me, empty. He’s not here, and, as I look at this exact duplicate of the ship I have just left, I realize that he has never been; or he has always been; or he will be, now.

It was as I thought: inevitable.

Somehow, now, I am more alone than I have ever been before.

16

I panic, and am terrified. I leave this ship, because it is wrong, and it has no place here. It is a lie, as all of this is a lie, and I swim through the anomaly to my Lära, my original version, untainted, truthful and honest, and I cling to the rail when I am safe inside the airlock. I start the engines, the boosters, turning the ship in the nothing. We rotate, and I look for the other Lära, the facsimile, but it is gone, and I am in its place; the same position, facing the same way, drifting and fitting into the lie in its entirety. I stop the engines and I weep, because I have no other choice. I feel sorry for myself; I feel as though I am responsible for this. From day one, I have been leading towards this.

I have made my own bed, and it is the same as it has always been, ever since we came out here. Now, I must lie in it.

I have to test this. I have to see if this is true, so I sit at the console and I open the radio and it is at the right frequency, of course it is, because it is the same frequency; and I say his name – my name – into the darkness, to see if I will answer.

‘Brother?’ There is static and nothingness. A gap, a pause, a wait in the air. ‘Can you hear me?’ I ask, knowing that he can. He replies. I can only hear myself in his voice, now. Nothing of Tomas in it at all. People always used to say that we sounded the same but I could never hear it. I can hear him asking more questions, but I don’t have answers. I don’t want to ruin him; I’m not even sure that I can if I want to. He still has hope, or he does now. I remember that feeling. I had it once, but now it is gone; or replaced, by whatever I will leave this ship for in fourteen days, and not come back to.

He is so happy to hear from me. I say his name and he bursts with joy. I don’t remember sounding like this, but then, that’s not surprising. Back then I was preoccupied with getting somewhere. Now I am stuck. I have to wait. I have to meet him before I see whatever it is that I am going to see. The connection isn’t good, so I tell him about the static. It fades out and in, and I think that I should stop talking to him. It’s easier. I can barely bear to hear his voice, because it does remind me so much of Tomas.

I wonder what Tomas is doing now. Fuck him, fuck him, fuck him.

He asks me about when we were kids. Our childhood. He doesn’t know that it was the same. He asks if I ever think about it, and I say that I do. I cannot lie to him; not any more.

‘All the time,’ I say. He’s so desperate. He thinks that it means something, that we are close. Tomas thinks about our best times. He is so pathetic, I think. I am just like this, fawning at the altar of the one who would have surrendered me to this abyss, this maw. He wants to think that Tomas thought well of him, when in fact it was nothing but abandonment. I was a sacrifice to science. I wonder if he still thinks of me. If he wishes he could do it again.

The slow-fade of my mood as I try to forgive him. I reach out to my memories of how Tomas and I were and I try to think of a reason that I shouldn’t harbour the grudge that I do, that I will, until the day that I die. Who am I kidding, I think; I am already dead. I don’t say a word to the other Mira, because I am so angry. I want to tell him not to trust Tomas – not to trust me – but I can’t. Because there’s something else. There was a version of me here, and then it was gone. When I found the new version of the ship, or the old version, or the copy, I was not here. I must have gone out there into the darkness. It’s a lure in the purest sense: the fish approaches the line with no idea what it’s getting into.

I want to placate him. I can’t remember our exact conversations, so I rely on my gut. That seems to make the most sense.

‘This will all work out, you know.’ I hope that I sound convincing. I am talking to myself as much as I am talking to him. I decide that I have a part to play: that of my brother. He wants to know that this is all right. I remember enough: that he was suffering. So I put the mask on, and I channel Tomas Hyvönen, master of all he surveyed; the brother who had something to prove, and proved it over and over, at the sacrifice of all others. Mira, the Mira coming through space with eagerness and hope, says that he thought he was abandoned, and I, a false Tomas, give him peace, for a moment at least. I tell him that I could never do that. I swear it to him. He asks how far away he is from me, and I tell him. I know exactly how far.

I don’t sleep. I can’t. I am worried about getting this right. About what it means, whether I’m in a cycle or not. I mean, I am. But at what stage, and whether I can break it. And if, therefore, I’m going to die. I’m going to die and somehow see myself.

Where do I go when I leave this ship? What happens to me? The other version of me wants to talk about Hikaru and Inna, and I cannot bear it. I don’t want to think about them. I just want to move on. I want to tell him that he gave them an ending, that he finished their journey for them. That that should have been enough. Maybe I don’t know him as well as I thought I did?

That thought alone makes me laugh. I remember that I wondered if there was something wrong, as the person I thought was Tomas signed off unnaturally. Now, I stifle my laughter as I do it. I think about how confused I am leaving myself. When he is gone I stare at the anomaly. That’s all there is to do when you are perfectly still: stare at it.

What’s left? After this, what is left?

I feel sick. I drank too much. I have finished the champagne. I have not eaten in two days, and I don’t know why. I shout at Tomas, as pointless as it is. I scream his name into the ship, and I tell him what I think of him. I call him so many words. He has put me here. He is responsible for their deaths. He is the one who should feel guilty, not me. Not for any of this.

‘Tomas?’

‘I can’t talk,’ I say. And then, ‘I’m sorry.’ Because I am apologizing to him, not Tomas. I am not the sort of man to abandon you. I will try to help you: that’s who I am, now.

I still haven’t slept. My body won’t let me. I haven’t shaved, haven’t washed. I am becoming who I will become, and it is not who I was. I cared, before. Do you remember that? Once, I gave a shit.

I question this: that maybe I am imagining it all. That I am still alone. This is me and my psyche, and we’re battling. This is a struggle, a tug of war that I am having, and losing. Winning would mean sanity. Winning might mean no longer being alone, because being alone means that there is nothing. Nothing left at all. It would make sense that I would imagine myself as Tomas, maybe. Maybe I should paint my face: the birthmark, blood-stained, covering my head.

‘I wanted to see if you are still there,’ I say to the other Mira. I want to know that he is real. He asks me why I – Tomas – left him to die. I cannot give him a satisfying answer. I can only let it hang there, and wish that I could tell him. I wish that I could tell him why our brother decided that we were not worth saving.

Still no sleep. I see things, out there, in the anomaly. I put screens everywhere I can around the ship showing the camera views of the outside. I don’t know which direction is which, other than this. And there, in the darkness, I see something. A glimmer. It’s there and then it’s gone. I pull the screens up, look at them. Try to find it. There’s nothing. I am seeing things, I tell myself. All that’s there is the black that’s always there. Why would there be anything else? How could there be anything else?

He talks to me and I reply, but I am barely present. Barely functioning. I want him here so that I can go out and see what it is.

Maybe that’s why I left? Because there’s something else out here with us?

I can’t see it. He messages me, but I ignore him. If I miss it for even a fraction of a second, I am worried that I will not know what it is.

He asks for my help, and I want to tell him that I cannot offer him anything. He pesters me, an irritant suddenly. Is this how Tomas felt about me? Am I channelling him entirely, his feelings, his moods? The other version of me is still days away, and he sounds nothing like the man that I am now. I have slept, finally, but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like I’m past something, like I’m not even meant to be here. I can’t explain it better than that.

Maybe I can. Like I’ve cheated death, maybe. I am on borrowed time, and yet time doesn’t seem to be linear, not here. Time is like anything else: language, or air, or me. Perfectly malleable.

I see it again. I don’t know if it’s real, but it pulses with colour. It is so bright against the black. It gives this all a sense of being real: that the anomaly isn’t just nothingness.

Then it’s gone, and I am alone again.

This, whatever it is, is mine. It’s mine and mine alone, and Tomas has nothing to do with it. And he will never know. He said, We are going to discover something for humanity! and I will do it. It was me who discovered how the anomaly works! I can answer that fucking question: it is a fucking demon, playing with time. It is all we do not understand, and we never can. And this thing, this light, this glimmer, I will explain that as well. Here is the question: What is it? I do not know, but I will discover the answer. Everything must have an answer.

I feel sick, and I try to eat, but I can’t keep it down. My body is rejecting everything. It feels like I am not meant to be here. I feel like my mother did. She said, once, that the cancer felt like it was eating her. I watch myself on the screens as I vomit, as I lie on the ground and it passes through me, and I think, I am meant to die.

He speaks to me, but I placate him. I am sick. I don’t want to tell him that I am sick. I have so little time to wait, now.

I tell him that I know what he’s doing. I almost tell him to turn around. But that thing, whatever’s out there: I need to know why I stepped out then. I must see it, and I think that he will have to reach me for this to complete. A loop is nothing if you cut the string.

And everything becomes obvious to me, and laid out in front of me. I can see it all: I can see how I move on from here. As I see the Lära, the other one, the original one, this one, I also see the glimmer, in the distance. It’s not too far, I don’t think. I can probably reach it.

I have two options. I stay here and I see. I break this. Or I step out and I look for what it is, for that glimmer, tempting me, a penny in a stream. He speaks to me. I am sick of him as he is. Can’t he see it himself? I ache. My chest hurts, and my head. It’s eating inside of me. I wonder, if I cut myself open, would I see the blackness that took my mother, and that threatened to take Inna once in her life? I would be too gone to be replaced; all around me would be black and rot, and I would die.

I am not meant to live past this. I am not meant to be here. He says, ‘I need to come aboard,’ so I tell him that it’s okay, and I put my helmet on and check that the oxygen is charged, step into the airlock and open the door.

I am gone.

17

Two hours is a long time. It’s time enough to get away from the Lära, and from the me that’s discovering exactly how useless he is. And from here, I am uncontrolled. I am free, perhaps for the first time. All that I know is that I was here, and I made my way out into this. I feel almost delirious with the freedom: that I can go anywhere. I have hours left, and the world – this void of a world, this space inside an anomaly that has ruined, stolen, changed my life – is my oyster.

So I move in the direction of the glimmer that I saw, because there is nothing else. I am alone, and I have always been essentially alone, and I will die utterly alone. This is not an exit or Tomas finally come to rescue me. No, he is at home, with his baker, and I hope that he is not sleeping. I hope that there is a connection between us deeper than science, and that he is seeing somehow through my eyes for my final waking minutes; that as he sleeps he will dream this dream. He will be here with me as I sleep for the last time. He’ll wake up screaming, and she will comfort him, his Lära, but he’ll know. He’ll lie to her about what he saw, because he will know what it was and what it means. I will haunt him as he presents his findings to the world. I won’t let him rest.

In the distance, the ship is nothing much any more. Like a car from an airplane. The newer version of me won’t have checked the scanners, because I did not, so he won’t know that I’m here. He’ll be getting to grips with what he must do now. He will be panicking, back on his own version of the ship, readying to leave, watching himself fall into place. I cannot remember how long that process took. Will take.

In the distance, I can’t see the glimmer, but that’s all right, because I have seen it enough to know that it’s there. A replicatable accident. If something, a situation or reaction can be replicated, that’s enough primary evidence for its existence.

It reminds me of something: when this all started, and I didn’t sleep in the bed as we launched, and I blinded myself with the light, that white glow. Sunspots. It’s almost exactly the same as that, but this time I cannot explain it. I wonder if I am being played with, some tricks and games that I barely understand. Does it matter? Does any of this?

The suit is astonishing. It’s perfect for what we needed. I can barely feel the heat of the boosters on the back of my legs, even after this long using them. They weren’t meant to be used constantly, because the battery packs in the suits were single use. They were meant to last us the whole trip. Not that that matters now.

I can’t see it, still. I shout out to it, inside my helmet. A voice inside my helmet tells me to take it off, and shout that way. Challenge the anomaly. A voice says, It’s alive, Mira. It’s playing games just as Tomas was, and I laugh that off. It’s so easy to dismiss idiocy. I know that I’m dying. I know that I’m not what I was. I think, in fact, that I have never been what I was, or what I thought I was. I have been coat-tails and clinging on, and this whole time I have been a pawn. Tomas had never really lost one of our games before this one, you know. Before it was decided that I would be coming up here. Not once. Bunk beds, Spider-Man or Batman, which side of Mother we would sit, who did the pitch, who signed the cheque. If we decided it by game, he never lost, but I kept going back because I was sure that I could outsmart him. Our mother once said, You’re the same. You look the same, you have the same interests, you think the same way about things. You’re the same, you two. Or maybe she meant it as, You too. Telling me that I am just as skilled as he is. And I wanted this. I wanted the dress up, playing at being an astronaut, the thing in space. The thing that was disposable. He wanted the control, and the power, so he gave me the win. It was easier to lose a game and let me think that I was the winner. He wanted his suit and his horn-rimmed glasses and his whisky and cigars. But more than that: I was a test. I was a sacrifice. I was part of this, and he needed to be at home to realize everything. He says goodbye. The brutal final words of a scientist to his brother; not a scientist, but a lab rat.

I shout, ‘I wish that you were here, Tomas!’ and I mean it as instead of me, but perhaps alongside me would be equally fine. I could tell him to his face. I could beg that he repented and that I forgive him. He would not, though. He would see this as what it was: his choice.

My eyes wet, I think that I see the glimmer again, so I push forward. My stomach hurts. I haven’t eaten in a while. Or had anything to drink; that was probably an oversight. I have no idea what I’m going to find here. It could be anything. I wonder if, back on Earth, they know that this is growing, or moving, or whatever. That it’s coming towards them. I wonder if Tomas knows how to deal with it. Maybe I have been useful. Maybe I will be a hero, because my being here will give them an answer. He will be the one to tell them, of course, and he’ll tell them about my sacrifice. There’s no way he’ll let my name die out. He’ll think of something appropriate, I’m sure, because he will want it to reflect well on him. He will say that I was a scientist.

How deep is this? I keep going. When you have no point of reference it feels like you are staying still, so I keep looking at the Lära. I am going further and further. Before, when I spoke to myself, I said that we were meeting in the middle. I suppose that was true. I wonder why I said it.

I have hidden the numbers of how much air I have left from the inside of the helmet, because I don’t want it to be a countdown. I only want a rough idea of how long I have before I cannot find the glimmer any more, before that hope is gone, and that will be enough. Because I know that, at that point, there will be nothing to be done about it.

When Tomas and I stopped talking for a while after our mother’s death, he said to me, You think you know best, don’t you? And I had to tell him that I didn’t. That such thoughts weren’t even close to me, nowhere near me. I said to him, She knew what she wanted, and I am only her son. I wanted what was best for my mother. I have always wanted to help those in pain. He said, There were other medicines, and I told him that he was mad. That she was suffering. Now, I wonder if this is my penance. If he thought that I was suffering, somehow. This is him making my pain cease. Does that make it better, if I think of him as that? As somehow rendering my name endless, timeless, part of history? Knowing I could never achieve as he does, and will in the future? He has given me something else. I wonder if that’s how he sleeps, after he sees the dreams of me dying. He tells himself that he did this for my benefit. He is benevolent.

I have to make my peace with him, somehow. I do not know how.

So I move on, and concentrate on other things. Inna. Hikaru. I am so glad that I was able to do right by them, and Wallace. His poor children. At least they might have a chance of knowing his absolute fate now, burying him. That matters. I wonder what he would have made of this, had he seen it. He was so much weaker than I thought, so desperately afraid of what we had found. We should have picked up on it. We should have known that he was a powder keg; and Hikaru, that he was liable to break down. That Inna was dying, or had come so close before.

But perhaps Tomas knew. Perhaps this was it: a crew of expendables, a crew that weren’t meant to live past this? Capable – no, perfectly able, at the top of their game, even – of completing the mission, but with no mind as to whether they came back. Led by me, the weakling twin. The one who did not achieve without his brother’s say. The one who stayed behind the curtain, but not because he was the one with all of the power; but because he was afraid.

I think about how they died. I watch it over and over, in my mind. Here in this darkness there is not much else to watch. I think about how much air I have left, and how it is going down whether I like it or not. I estimate an hour gone, even though I wasn’t going to do this. I could check. Everything is a countdown, whether I like it or not. Here is a timer until we lift off. Here is how long it will take to reach the anomaly. Here is how long you have got left. Twelve days to see me. Now wait twelve days until you can leave. Two hours until you die. Time moves slower, it seems, the faster the countdown. As if you give yourself more time to think.

I wonder if they will try this again? To reach the anomaly and to see what they can see? Probably not, assuming that Tomas knows everything I know, that I have worked out. Instead, he will try to work out how to stop it. He will prepare the world with tales of atmospheric interference, or say that it will herald meteor showers. He is an expert, the only expert, now. They’ll listen to him. They’ll ask him how they can ready themselves for the oncoming anomaly, and he’ll up his research budget. He will be able to write his own budget, in fact. He might sacrifice more of us, in the other ship. More expendables, thrown into the abyss to see what he can gain from it. He will claim, if anybody accuses him of anything, that it’s utilitarian. For the good of the people of planet Earth, that’s why he does it. He will tell them all that it’s no less than we deserve: a man who is willing to get things done. And I suppose they’ll thank him. They should, probably. I don’t know, maybe he was right. Maybe he knew where it was heading all along, and this was his way of… I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter any more.

What matters now is the people back there. If this reaches Earth, what happens? Does everybody cycle? Is that how this ends? In perpetual life? Do we ride it out until it passes? Will it ever pass?

How much bigger can this get?

Behind me, the Lära is tiny, now. He will be waiting, counting down the hours. Talking to himself. I am past the point where I can regret this and return. There is only forward. I am getting tired. I wonder if that’s natural. This must burn energy. The suit is designed to only take so much, and I’m only human. I think about Inna again. I always return to her. I think about her on the table that time. I wish I could think about the good things more, that my mind wandered there. But I think of her, like my mother. I think of those plastic organs.

I haven’t seen the glimmer again. I can’t see anything, now, not really. My eyes aren’t what they used to be. Now the Lära is out of sight. I think that maybe I can see the light from it, maybe, but it’s probably me fooling myself. The blackness is so thick, so encompassing, I doubt I can see past it. I turn and then realize that I have lost my bearing. Have I turned back enough? I start to panic, because there is only one reason that I am here now, and it’s that glimmer. I breathe too quickly and have to calm myself. Breathing fast makes my supply go down. It’s not a set time. Everything seems a mistake.

I never wanted to die with regrets. I move forward, because I cannot die like this. Where will I start my cycle from, assuming I start one? Where will I begin again? It would be cruel to make me go through this all over again. I think, if ever you questioned the existence of a god, here is your proof. This is cruelty; this is nothingness.

I am sobbing in my suit, and the glass is misting. I try and hold myself back, because I know that my gasps are ruining me. The air is thinning. It is becoming nothing. It’s not even time to make my peace.

I want to tell my mother that I love her. And Tomas, for all his sins. He would say that I have sinned worse than he ever could. That at least my death had purpose. He would say that I brought this on myself. So there is nothing here, and he would say that he knew that. I would tell him that I was so sure, and he would say, It was a trick of the light. It was seeing faces in clouds. You’re good at that, Mira. It’s how you’ve always been. I would argue, saying that there are no clouds here to see faces in. The glimmer must have come from somewhere. And he would stand back and look smug, because that would have been his point all along. I know so well how his mind works, exactly how he thinks.

The air is so thin, and I have to breathe twice where I previously needed one, huffing in the air that is left. I think of Inna, dying. I can still see her face. I cannot stand to think that I will die. I stop the boosters, because I would rather know where I am. I turn around. I try to find the glimmer. This cannot have been in vain. It cannot.

Nothing. Just the nothing.

My tears, and my pain. I wonder if this was destined. Pre-ordained, somehow. How I was always meant to go. I am going to choke. I am going to die. I want, more than anything, this to be an end. Only me: I am the only one who will feel this. I am singular, and distinct, but then I see him: another version of me. He is here, and he is dead; drifting. Realization. He is in the suit. I see him, and I turn around, and there is another, fighting against it, choking. He is me in a minute’s time, from the future; and behind him, me coming forward, looking for this, from the past. One is a future that I will suffer through, one that I have already done. Around this, there are other versions of me: drifting off into the nothing. Some of them have been here a long time, I think. I know: I see their faces, and they are not me. As Cormac aged, so have they. Unexplainable, but this is where everything changes. I am in a sea of myself. I struggle to keep the tears in, to stop myself hyperventilating, and I manage it.

‘You’re stronger than this,’ I say to myself, but then I try to breathe, and I cannot. That was my last. I hold it. My head aches, and my eyes feel dead inside my head. I look around, trying to count them all, and I lose track of where I am. I am not righted; I am not in any direction. I am everywhere, and everything. I think that I am dead, that I am gone.

Then: the glimmer. It has been here the whole time, above me, below me, all around me. It unfolds itself. My eyes are heavy, and I can barely keep them open, but I need to. Because here is what I was looking for this entire time. I was wrong, and Tomas was wrong, and none of us knew. We were unprepared, and we will always be unprepared.

It is a parcel, a rip, a hole and it unfolds itself into space and delicacy. Everything was so dark before. It peels backwards and inside it there is light: pure, absolute light; and I stare at it, up close, forcing myself to look. I tell myself that this isn’t real, but I want to believe it; that inside this anomaly there is something so pure that it is made so that I do not understand, and have no need to understand. Outside, rushing away from it, I can see veins, thin red and white lines, spooling off as branches and rivers, splayed and rushing. Living things have veins, and blood, and life in them. It makes sense to me that there are things we cannot understand; that there is life that we cannot conceive. Maybe things that we should not, as well; that are not for us to know. I know that this is one. I have seen things that no other man has seen. I have my answer to the question: the question of what the anomaly is. It is final, and it is my answer alone, and I think that nobody else will ever know. Perhaps that it okay. Perhaps that I have an answer is enough.

As I die, as I feel death coursing through my body, I look away from the heart of the anomaly, and down at the blackness below. It looks like I could fall: like there is nothing at all below me, and I am already falling, down and into forever.

Then it says, ‘I am here for you.’

And I say, ‘I know.’

I shut my eyes. It envelops me.