The Lowest Heaven

THE GRAND TOUR ^{JAMES SMYTHE}

“There’s a harvest,” Paul says, so we draw straws and I am the unlucky one. We call everything new that’s outside a harvest, if it’s anomalous. There’s always something to salvage.

It is a ten-minute process at this point: actually trying to get myself dressed to go out there. The things we have to consider◦– rads, rays, whatever you call them◦– we haven’t got anything to guard against fully, so we’ve been forced to adapt. We have fragments: old suits from the nuclear plant nearby that we’ve pulled apart and repurposed. Better that ten of us can share the wealth than one. My headpiece was originally another suit’s thigh. I have attached goggles to it, sealing them; split the end so that it stretches over my entire head, my shoulders, even. You try to make sure that there are no gaps of skin showing through. I’m sure that a doctor would tell me that what I was attempting was pointless: that if something out there was going to get to me, it was worming its way in whatever I did. But we don’t have a doctor, so.

We’ve made our own airlock into the basement. There are three doors between us and the outside; two that are meant to be here, another that we brought down and fastened to the walls. We have soldered the gaps where we can, and we’ve run carpet along the inside of the door seams. Anything extra that we can do. It’s a heave: open one door, close it; open the next, close it; then the last, and you are outside, in the sunlight and the glare and the haze. We call it an airlock, but we don’t know how tight it is. We’ve stayed mostly healthy so far.

There’s a harvest. That’s all I’ve been told. Could mean anything.

Whatever they’ve found is three miles away from base camp, so that means I have to cycle. I pick one of the old BMXs, because I’m heading towards roughage, and I need the rugged stuff. There are jumps out there, and rocks. Sometimes you’re told to just get on the motorway, head down towards Junction 10 or 9, and then you can take a road cycle, one with thin tires and curved handlebars. But in the roughage, the tyres would be wrecked in seconds, and we’re running out of repair kits. No sense in playing games now.

This used to be proper fields; that’s what we remember. It gets fuzzier, week by week, so we tell stories about what it used to be like, but they change. You can hear it happen if you pay attention: a yellow becomes a burned golden colour when we tell the stories. We always try and embellish our own stories, because that makes the now worse. We should be trying to make this better but we don’t really have an interest in that. We like dwelling on the past. Now, everything is dismal. But remember when all of this was green? Remember when the fields grew corn and wheat and whatever that beautiful burned golden stuff was? Wasn’t that time amazing?

The bike whines under my weight, but that’s fine. I am not built for this sort of machine, which I accept. I look lumbering on top of it: hunched over, clenching the rubber-grip handlebars, my back arched, my legs pumping. My knees hit my elbows if I am cycling even slightly up-hill. We used to have a mountain bike, but that went missing. Wasn’t a problem: it was too heavy to carry back if something broke. The frame on this one is light, and you can hear echoes through it when stones hit the metal. They make the GPS voice shiver. We were amazed when we discovered that GPS still worked. The satellites are still up there, that’s why, we reckon: still spinning, in orbit of us. As long as we charge the VDUs on the solar racks down here, we get a few hours use out of them. Of course, they refer to roads that no longer exist; whole towns and cities, in fact. You are now entering London, it might say. No I’m not, I might reply. Maybe I would have been once upon a whenever.

Prepare to turn left, the voice says. I have set it to be the voice of a woman called Jane. She has a hint of an Irish accent, or somewhere from the north: Liverpool, Manchester. I’ve never been up that far north, so I can’t tell which. I don’t even know if they still talk like that up there. Also, she’s pretending that she’s posh. It’s something that actors used to do, I’m told. I talk back to her, imitating her voice a little. It’s playful teasing.

“There is no left,” I say to her. “There’s only an over. I can veer, though.” Through the makeshift helmet, my voice is muffled. I miss the road turning that she wanted me to take because it doesn’t exist, and she tries to readjust, finding me in a no-man’s land of space on her screen. Recalculating, she says, and then, just when she thinks she might have found it, Recalculating, again. Where I am now, there were houses once. I can see the lines in the ground, the foundations; the lines of walls and doors and entire lives.

I keep going. There are the fragments of roads, but I avoid them, because here they’re too broken up; and the occasional jut of a power cable or telephone mast, sticking out of the ground as if this is a pincushion.

I pedal harder. Doesn’t matter how much I sweat. Go left on the roundabout, Jane says, but that’s when you can hear her accent most: rind-a-bite, she says.

I pass a supermarket that I haven’t seen before. It’s shelled, mostly, but there is a section with a roof, and most of the walls are here, and the doors. We never hold out hope, because there’s a chance that anything left is either contaminated or just useless, but we always check. I park next to it and creep inside, and I hear their voices echoing down the aisles before I see them, which is lucky. We are not always so lucky. I back out: I have no wish to fuck my day up like that. No way, no how.

The bike groans again when I get onto it, and Jane threatens to ruin everything when she tells me that she is Recalculating, but they don’t hear her, I don’t think; and I am long gone by the time that they might be coming out to see what that noise was.

The bike’s front wheel snags on a rock, and I come off. On the dust, the gravel, I clutch at my knee and I check the suit. That would be a worry, if I had ripped it and cut myself; if there was an open wound for infection to set in. But there isn’t. It’s dusty and dirty but that’s all.

Used to be grazed knees and whatever. Get up, carry on. Other concerns, now. Back onto the bike, and I have lost a few minutes, and my knee hurts, so I pedal slower for a while. They say, don’t stay out more than two hours. I can’t see me being back in time. I wonder what will happen to me.

The harvest is metal, whatever it is. I can see that from here. And it’s on fire, which doesn’t bode well. We can’t put it out, so we leave it to burn off and then pick through what’s left. Some of the people at camp, they think that fire has started to burn hotter than it used to. They blame whatever’s in the air now for that: makes it harder to put out, makes it nastier. It’ll melt through anything, like white phosphorous. I haven’t seen that happening, but I’ve seen the evidence: the puddles of dull silver that used to be household appliances, now smelted to the ground. When I was a kid, we stuck a coin to the floor in the shopping centre with superglue and watched people try to pick it up. Funniest day. That’s what they remind me of.

As I get closer I see the satellite dish, like we’ve got fastened to the sides of houses, but much larger. It’s on a base, cylindrical, covered in these gold reflective panels, glinting the sun back at me, even through the smoke; and there are these giant things sticking out of it, like spider’s legs, so long, cracked and bent and twisted on the ground. The whole thing is damaged and battered. It must have fallen from the sky; only explanation. The heat from it comes surging at me in waves. There’s a hatch swinging open through the flames, but I cannot see inside it. What if this is a person? What if there’s somebody in there? Maybe they were up in space before, and this is their return.

Ten feet away and I jump off the bike, and I rush towards the fallen harvest. I throw myself at it, hoping to salvage something. I’ve come this far. I look away from the flames and get close enough that I can feel them, and I reach into the hatch. I am breaking, and I realise how unsecure my suit is: the smoke, whatever’s burning here coming into the mask. I breathe it into my lungs, and it covers my skin. Still, I am here now. I fumble, feeling wires and wires and a box, which I grab and tug out. It’s black, and hot, and melting. I take it and back off, but it’s too hot so I throw it ahead of me. The gloves are on fire, so I peel them off as well. My hands are going to fry, I know, but it’s that or burn. We can’t deal with fire burns properly, and an infection would kill me. I risk it and drop them behind me, and they are swallowed by their own flames.

The box has broken in front of me. There, in the heat, I pick up the bits from inside it and see what they’re worth. Nothing: photographs; bits of paper so charred I can’t make them out; and a golden disc as wide as my forearm. It catches the sun and the fire both, and it’s somehow cold. Not freezing, but cold. It gives me a shock when I touch it, static; as if it were a pin, and I have pricked myself on it. I tuck it inside my suit, opening the zip to slide it in and make it safe. There’s nothing else. In the distance, whatever the satellite-thing was, it is engulfed: the flames rushing out like thick red fingers clawing at the dirt.

Paul went to school here; that’s how we knew to find it. The school had tunnels underneath, running all the way through. Emergency tunnels, escape tunnels. He said that they used them during the wars before, when they needed to. That’s how old the school is. It was perfect. But there are things we could moan about: how dark it is; how damp; how tight the tunnels are. I am always close to somebody, even though they are so long. You hear things as well: echoes. It’s scarier than it need be. Almost all of us are young. We were quickest getting down here, to start. We were lucky. Maybe, because we’re younger, we fight off whatever’s out there better. Or maybe this is just how it’s meant to be: the young outlive the old, that’s nature’s law.

We’re so casual about when we die, now. We have to be. I remember when we first came down here there were twenty-five of us, all from around here. Paul knew about it, and we knew that we had to move quickly. London was gone, and we lived in a commuter town. No chance of our parents coming back, for most of us. Ella’s mum came, but she died pretty fast, because she went to look for her son, who in turn had been to look for his father. Ella stayed firm, like the rest of us. We spent a year waiting to see if anybody else came, but nobody did. When that year was done, we opened the doors and started going out. Twenty-five down to ten in only two and a bit years. Those aren’t good odds.

The others have already turned the showers on for me when I get back. I strip under them, and I let the suit and the golden disc lie on the floor at the side. The water is so hot that I am the only one in here. Even the steam’ll threaten to strip your skin. Mine is, I can see as I look down, pink and blistering. I was outside for too long. I knew it. The water makes some of the bubbles under my skin burst, and then the skin goes soft and flat and rippled. I touch them, because you have to. This is part of how you heal. You get the badness out, before it can become a part of you. When it gets into you properly, that’s when you get truly sick; and that’s when they put you out to pasture. What’s it that Paul says? When they send you to live on the farm. That’s a good way of putting it. I have blisters all over me, more than I have ever had before. It takes so long to burst them all or to pull the top-skin of them off; and to let the water go all over me, into them and through them, and taking the badness out and down the plughole. I use soap when I am done, disinfectant bleach soap, and it stings every part of me. I howl, but, I tell myself, this is better than the alternative. Oh my god is it better than the alternative.

“So what is it?” Paul asks when I’m dried off. My whole body hurts. This is healing. I’m at risk from so many things: infections, disease. I’m wrapped in a towel that has the name of a fancy hotel from when London was still London stamped onto it, only the threads have started pulling, so now it’s the Do-c-es-er –otel, which just isn’t the same. Paul’s taken the golden disc from me, and he’s flipping it in his hands. He turns it, over and over. I’ve seen this before; I remember it. It’s at least slightly familiar, this action. He whistles. “This is probably worth something. Must be worth something, I reckon.” He throws it into the air and it spins, and he catches it. “Is it actually gold?” He puts it between his teeth and pushes down. I don’t know what he thinks that will prove: his bite on the thing.

“What can we do with gold?” I ask. The next stage, post-blisters, is the shivers, and they have come over me. This rings like any other fever: shivers and a temperature, and then sickness and then my muscles will all ache, and it will take me a while before I even begin to feel human again. That’s why we draw straws.

He lays it down flat. “Don’t know. It was your harvest, anyway. You can work out what you do with it. You could take it to some of the groups in the towns, try and get something for it.” These are the rules: we do the harvest, we share the take with the camp. If it can’t be shared, we try and trade it with one of the other settlements we’ve found. They’re all in the same way as us, but they might have use for our junk. But I’m the one who has to do the deal; that way, I’ll be providing for the camp. We each feel ownership and good reason for going out there, going through what we do; and the camp gets money to fix itself up, to feed us all, to buy shared provisions. It’s like taxes, I’m assured. I’m told that this system used to work perfectly well.

I sleep with the disc under my pillow, and I can feel it during the night when I turn and turn, and my skin scrapes against it. It scratches me, cold against my shoulder.

I am not better when I wake up. I’ve had post-outside sickness before, so many times, but never like this. We’ve stopped asking what it’s doing to us, because that’s counterproductive. Once we went to a hospital and we tried to use their machines but we couldn’t get them to work, so it was fingers jabbing at them for hours, and when we got back we were all so much more sick than we were when we left. We lost Joe that day as well, because he was so sick before we even went. He couldn’t stand the journey, being out there for that long. You see it at its worst, then: blisters on the eyes. I never take my goggles off out there now, not after seeing that. So I have felt sick before, but never like this. I wonder if this is what it’s like when it sets in: when it gets deeper to you. I wonder if I am going to die. I have a paper bucket from a fast-food restaurant to be sick into◦– we took hundreds of them one time when we went out, reasoning that we couldn’t wash plates or whatever, so they might come in useful one day◦– and I have to use it as soon as I am awake, vomiting into it. Blood and soot, it looks like.

It’s natural to wonder if you’re going to die from it, I tell myself. I tell myself that I’ll be fine. No question. I hold the bucket and I shudder, and the bucket starts to collapse on the sides from my grip. No question at all.

Paul and the others stand in the doorway and watch me. I catch them; I wonder what they are talking about. No, I know what they are talking about. I’m that sure I know.

I tell them that I am feeling better, which is a lie, but I am worried about the farm that they could send me to. We have a shotgun, which they used to use to hunt rabbits here. I can imagine Paul pulling the trigger, so I tell them that I am feeling better. I stand up, and everything swims. My skin is on fire, and the sweat runs down it. It doesn’t soak in; it’s as if I am rejecting it. I stumble out of my tunnel. It’s colder here, and I can feel that. It’s nice. I lean against the wall and drop the sheet from my shoulders and press against the stone.

The others are standing around a table. There is a record player on it, one of the really old ones. I’ve never seen one used like that; with a long brass horn sticking out of the side. The golden disc from the harvest is on top of it. I see it, now: it’s a record. Of course it’s a record.

Paul grins. “I washed it, while you were sick. There’s little grooves all around it, see?” I can, if I squint. My eyes feel wrong, but I don’t say anything. I stay back, in the darkness, so that they can’t see how bad I really am. “So I went and got this from upstairs, what used to be the music rooms. I remembered that one of them survived.”

There are candles around the record player on the table, as if this is some sort of sacrifice. All ten of us are here, watching; Paul runs the plug on it to an extension cable, and Ella gets onto the treadmill and starts running. We wait for the lights to turn green. Usually takes five minutes; now, that seems like forever. I shut my eyes. I can see something in my eyelids: where the blood is pulsing, red and black. It makes me feel dizzy.

“And we are go,” Paul says. He picks up the arm from the player and puts the tip◦– the needle, I remember, that’s what it’s called◦– onto the disc. It spins, and there’s a crackle, and we expect noise. I shut my eyes and wait, again, but then it comes, as a wave. It steals us, and we are floating. I open my eyes: we are pressed to the walls, hoisted up. Paul is screaming but I cannot hear him. Everything is distorted. The record is spinning, going even faster than the player. The player tears itself apart, pulling and yanking and distorting itself as the record whirs. Lumps of metal and wood and plastic fly off, and the player is held on the table as if a tiny tornado is wrapped around it. It glows; it flashes white.

We are not where we were. We are pinned to these walls, but they are not here. I cannot describe who is with us, because they are like ghosts, but made of something, like sound or light, but not either of those things. It hurts to even think of them; to imagine them. They find the thing I saw in the fields, but it’s different. It’s clean. It’s so old, still, but clean. It is a spacecraft where it should not be. Printed on the side, it reads Voyager: its name.

The things that I cannot explain find it, caught in a swirl of liquids and gases, and they drag it to where they live. They crack it open and they find the record. It looks the same. They do not know what it is, and they move around and through it, and they try to decipher it. There is something inside it, an isotope that they cannot understand, and it hurts them. It mingles with them, with their atoms, because this is who they are, what they are made of, and they cannot adapt to it. They degrade. I try to scream at them, and they notice me, but this is not now. This is another time, and they keep trying with the disc. They are dying: whatever is inside this golden record is killing them. They are sick, and they are changing. One of them manages to channel the sound from the record, garbled and distorted through a sad approximation of a mouth: Hello from the children of planet Earth. They know where it came from; who sent this, to kill them. Then they stop dying: they have found a way to take this in, to make it a part of themselves. They were threatened and they survive. They make a decision. They rebuild the spacecraft. They alter it. They send it back to us.

I hear Paul screaming. “The fuck was that?” he yells. “Seriously, now, what the fuck happened there?” I open my eyes, and we are all on the floor. Something is wrong with me: I can barely move. I watch Paul pushing himself to his feet. I want to tell him to stop, but I know what he’s going to do. The record is on the table, and he picks it up and holds it between his hands, and bends it until it snaps. “Oh my god what was that?” he says. Ella and Lars and Rickey and the others are still on the floor as well, but they pick themselves up, and they ask each other if they are okay. They check, to see. They can move. They come to me eventually, and they feel my forehead. I am burning up. They can see how sick I am.

I am worse than I thought I was. I must have been out there for far, far too long. I must have been.

The others drag me to my bed, and they lay me down. Paul can’t get over what we saw, saying over and over how he doesn’t believe it, how it can’t be real, and it’s only this that keeps me grounded: that all of us were in there. Otherwise I might have thought that it was a hallucination, or a vision, or a dream.

They all remark that they have never seen anybody as sick as I am. I think it’s only the distraction of the record’s vision that stops them putting me out of my misery, I really do.

If I had to guess, I would swear that I am about to die. I wake up, and I feel on the cusp of it; and I breathe, sure that it will be my last, because it’s as if I can see it in front of me: the haze of my life, leaving my body.

Or maybe it is just me getting used to this: somehow taking the sickness in. Eventually, that’s how we overcome anything, I suppose. I breathe, and gasp, and it as if air isn’t what I need, so I choke; but then it’s back. Oxygen saves me, and I take it in, and sleep once more.

When I wake up I don’t know how long I have been asleep for. I climb out my bed find the bottles of water, and I drink it, three bottles, but it all makes me sick. It all makes me feel worse, for some reason, and I cannot keep it in. I cannot even bear it touching me. I get on the floor and lurch, and push it all back out, soaking the floor and myself. I sob, because I am so thirsty.

My foot touches a part of the record: still golden, still cold to the touch, even through my fever. I pick it up, and I press it to my chest. It’s like water over a fire: I am sure that I can hear it sizzling.

I sleep with it held there: comforting to me, and making me feel better. Dragging me back towards who I am.

In the morning, I feel good: the fever broken, my body no longer clammy, my head no longer swimming. I look at myself in the mirrors. All scars of the blisters and pustules have gone. It’s a miracle. It’s when they set in that you’re lost. An early warning system. Paul stands and watches while I turn the showers on, and I ask him if he’s thought any more about what we saw. They run cold, because that’s better. I can’t take the heat now.

“I don’t care what it is,” he says. “I don’t care.”

“But it was important,” I tell him. “I think we sent it up there. We hurt them.”

“There’s no Them,” Paul tells me. “We had a◦– I don’t know◦– a mass hallucination. That sort of thing happens when you’re exposed too long.”

“It was real,” I say. “Don’t you want to know what we saw?” I switch the showers off, and he throws me a towel. I put it to one side.

“No,” he says. “I don’t want to know a thing. We’re okay, right?”

“Right.”

“So, that’s fine. You need anything? We’re doing a run.”

“It’s not your turn,” I say. “The record didn’t get us anything, so I still have to contribute. Besides, I saw a Tesco we haven’t tapped. I can find it again. I’ll go tomorrow morning.”

“Fine,” he says. “Your funeral.” Strange phrase, now, because we don’t even bury our dead. We leave the bodies outside. They’re decayed within a few hours. Paul walks off, and I finish getting dressed. My skin is totally dry as I pull on my trousers and my shirt, and I find myself wondering how that happened, because my towel is still on the side, as I haven’t used it yet.

As I’m getting dressed I notice that there is something in my eye. I get close, and lean in, and I stare, and the headache hits me, a shiv in my head. It looks, for a second, as if my eye has dissolved; passed into nothingness. The black part, the white part, the colour: all a mess, swirled together. It looks like a galaxy or something. I blink and it’s gone, and the pain with it.

I stare again, willing it to happen once more.

The others are all still asleep as I watch the sun come up through the outer door. As soon as it’s light enough I put my suit back on, and my helmet, and I take a water bottle from the stash, and I get my bike. Jane asks where we’re going, and I use my last destination. It’s easiest that way: the supermarket was on that road, and Jane is nothing if not predictable. She never changes her routes. I pedal. I am not sweating, not even at all, because I feel cold. In myself, if I touch my skin, it feels cold. Like metal, almost. There is a wind, it feels like, but I can’t see it. Everything else is so still.

Prepare to turn left, Jane says, but I ignore her. I stay forward, like I did before, over the rubble and the remains and the solid ground that looks like it must have done years ago when somebody last bothered to plough it, nothing here to upset it or move it or anything, not even any animals to dig in. There are some somewhere, that’s the rumour. Some of them went underground; maybe others are ruling the cities somewhere. Taking this back for themselves.

I see the supermarket up ahead. I know I have to go there to pillage it, and I have to face whatever’s inside; but I don’t, not yet. I keep pedaling. I haven’t far to go, and I have never ridden so fast in my life.

It is in the field where I left it. It’s not burning any more, which is a relief. I pass the black box and leave the bike there. It’s how it looked in what the record played for us; I can see that now. The same shape, mostly.

It’s nearly my height, lying on its side. I put my hand on it. It courses through me: that feeling of a rising illness, of a sway. I have been out here for too long, I tell myself, but then I know that this is a different feeling. My hand feels numb where it rests on the hull, dead with pins and needles. I peel my glove off and look at it, trying to steady myself, and it dissipates. As I watch it, it seems to pick itself apart. I can see into it; through it, even. I can see millions of tiny parts, glimmering fragments. It’s like staring at a screen up close and being able to see the pixels. It is like mist, or fog, or smoke. My hand passes into the ship. It passes back. I gasp, and I scream, because there is something very wrong with me.

I scramble backwards, to the floor, to the grit and stones, and I stare as my hand pulses: from this vague approximation to something resembling normality. I turn and run, and I grab the bike. The hand still works. When I want it to, it is still my hand. Nothing more, nothing less. Turn around when possible, Jane says, but I ignore her, and I leap onto it, and I start pedaling. I am going, furiously, but then something goes wrong, and it feels as if my suit has caught on the gears; but when I look down, the bottom half of my leg is not there. It is gone, and the fabric dangles, and my shoe has fallen off behind us. We fall, the bike and I, and I push away from the frame and wheels, so I can see myself completely. I pull my trousers off, and it feels as if my leg is still there. They say this, in amputees; and they call it a phantom limb. When my bottom half is out of the trousers, I see my leg, or what remains. Molecules, something, move around the space. They swirl. This is my leg, now: innumerable tiny pieces, every part that makes up my being. I stare at my leg and it comes back. It comes back to me, and it looks as it always did.

There, lying in the road, I form and reform; and I change. I watch this spread up my leg, a rash that’s inside me, that makes me who I am.

I feel so, so vague.

I take my clothes off. I don’t need them, or I can’t use them. I look the same as I always did: the same colour of skin, the same body hair, the same everything. I smell the same. I walk, then, and it’s the same. The same logic to make these parts move.

And then I stop, and I do not concentrate, and I am not my body any more. I am something else. I am everything.

Turn around when possible, Jane says.

I do not know how I got here, to the supermarket, but I am outside it. I feel my body reconstitute itself, pulling itself back into its form.

I think about magnets: about holding them near each other, and feeling that tug as they want to be back together.

I need supplies. I had a shopping list. I cling to this. I walk through the doors, not needing to open them. My body gusts through and then reforms itself. I look to see if there are any water bottles, but there are none. I walk to medicines. There’s a noise from the other end: the people that I heard here before. Ravagers or scavengers or whatever they call themselves. They’ve lived out here too long, and they get sick and diseased, and they wait for death, and then they get used to it, some of them. They have nothing to lose in trying.

One of them runs at me. He passes through me, and he falls to the floor. He howls at me, and I see that even his tongue is pustules and mess. I reach out and touch him, and he begins to burn up. He sweats, and the pustules burst, and he lies there. He’s not dead, I don’t think, because his eyes are open, and they are swirling, miniature galaxies.

The countryside looks like another planet entirely: as if we could roll out the camera crews and start filming, and we could pretend it was Pluto or Jupiter or wherever, somewhere else that we’ve never been, that we never even dreamed we could go. I have a name on the tip of my tongue, but I cannot say it. I cannot say the word, because it’s not in my language. I rearrange myself◦– my throat, my mouth, the words◦– and I speak it. It sounds like nothing else. It is indescribable.

I don’t need to open the airlock. We are not as secure as we thought; and I feel the molecules of the doors as they pass through me. It’s as if I am learning from them. Inside, I feel thirsty. I drink water from a bottle, and I let it sink into me. Yesterday◦– and I can feel it now◦– I was rejecting it. I couldn’t assimilate it. Now, I can. Now, the liquid can be a part of me, and the walls and the wind. I pour the rest of the water over my head. It feel it sink in, and I am already dry. I go to the mirror, and when I look, it is as if I am not even there. I come back. I leave. I can be any part of this room. I come back, and I examine myself. It’s curious: how alien this body feels already.

Paul comes in and stares at me. “When did you get back?” he asks. “Jesus, put some clothes on.” He picks up the towel that I had left there and throws it at me again, only this time it passes through me. I feel myself come apart and then reform. I know what the towel is made up of, now: its fibers, its molecular structure. Paul doesn’t say anything else, then. He stares, and he clutches at his head, because to look at me causes him such pain when I am like this, and he turns and he runs. He makes this noise, like I’ve never heard. I wonder if now, somehow, my ears are different? If I hear noise in a different way?

I chase him, and I hold him. I tell him it will be alright. This is not like with the ones in the supermarket: this is different. I want this to be gentle for him: a coalescence. I pass into him. My self finds the holes in his skin and I pass into them. I take him; I make him a part of me, or of us. His clothes fall to the floor, and his body; or what it is now.

Is it still a body if there is no form? If it is just a part of everything?

The others do not hear me, but they fall the same. I touch Ella first, and she joins with me. She doesn’t even seem that surprised. They try to talk, but I am too quick for them, and I am learning how to make them turn faster and faster. I tell them, when they are with me, that I am saving them. That what I have done, it’s for the best of us all. We needed to find a way to survive this. The odds were too slim.

This is a gift, not a weapon. It is not a retaliation.

The remains of the disc are here. I take it into me, or me into it. I can feel the others in here: all of their component parts. They set themselves in here. We set ourselves. I spin it inside what I now am. Hello from the children of planet Earth. I remember that happening, once. I remember everything, now: where we were. How we were. How we dredged the craft from the atmosphere and saved it. How excited we had been; the thought of what it could mean. We prayed that it was another race, come from the stars: first contact. But it ruined us; we were forced to adapt.

I spit them out, the others: my parts fragmenting, my being divided. So many millions of pieces. They stand around me, and it doesn’t hurt any more to look at them. I remember being me, still. I remember it all. What happened.

I step outside and I let myself be taken on the wind. I dissipate.

I wonder how far I will be carried; how far I can go.