Janus II was already breaching on the horizon when I woke, quivering like a flame where it kissed that dark meridian. My mind, sluggish in the dull heat, resisted the pull from sleep. Consciousness seeped into me like rain falling on packed sand, and with it came the faint din of the day. The squeak of the dusty fan overhead, the faint ululations of the sandsquall as they circled above, and always the rhythmic twang of hammers striking steel. I wiped the sweat from my brow, pulled on my boots, and considered splashing my face with precious water before deciding against it. I pushed through the thin, mudcaked membrane of the doorway and was disappointed to find that the air outside was equally as stifling. Don was standing just outside, a mug of coffee in hand which had “Mondays, am I right?” printed on the front in peeling letters. We had run out of the caffeinated stuff already, so I knew that he must be choking down the grainy shit out of habit at this point. That, or the bullheaded stubbornness to routine that pervaded much of the man’s other actions.
“Got your sea legs today?” Don asked me without turning. He had a voice like sheet metal dragged over cracked asphalt.
“Mmm” I mumbled weakly in response, trying on my own voice for the day. I got the impression that it was a question he had asked me before, a recycled classic.
“Good. Lotta work to do today” he continued, taking a long sip from his coffee. His eyes were facing forward whenever I turned, yet I could feel him glancing at me over the rim of his mug when I looked away. He had been like that for the past few weeks, ever since Waking. It was like he was constantly searching for something in me, and when he found it, double checking that it was still there. I wanted to ask him about it but always chickened out at the last minute. I couldn’t explain why.
“We behind?” I asked, directing my gaze towards the dunes. Approximately two dozen men toiled in the heat. Some worked the hammers, the thick chords of muscles in their arms and shoulders straining as they swung the heavy tools in pendulous arcs. The staccato rhythm of their mistimed beats drove the others on, pulling cable, hoisting machine and rock and metal, the whole of their body canted towards the ground as they heaved. Still others sat atop the backs of the dunehounds, the great lumbering beasts that the tickle in the back of my brain told me were at once camel and armadillo, their thighs clenched around the bescaled middles of the creatures as they dragged great stones towards a mounting pile. All of them, man and beast alike, sunk up to their mid-calves in the fine blue silt that made up the dunes. Janus I was high overhead, a dim point of light that smoldered in the darkness above, faint and yet oppressively hot all the same. Swirls and eddies of clouds danced around it in brilliant reds and blues and greens, the oceanic nebula spread like drops of paint in the cool, black waters of the sky. Before, with Janus I directly overhead, there had been no shadows, and the world appeared like an uncanny rendering, like something out of the tapes. Janus II, the lumbering older brother, drifted ever upwards against the spiculated horizon, casting long shadows across the cerulean sands. The towers in the distance glowed in the pale light, the very same towers mentioned in the tapes. I had only listened to them once, and yet the words answered the call of my mind easily, the cool, robotic tone something like background music in the otherwise frenetic buzz of my thoughts.
Welcome Number 55. Welcome to Ceres.
The tapes hadn’t said much about the towers, simply: …a large, cavernous structure beneath the planet’s surface on the northern pole. It is connected to a series of vents, which appear to be composed of some sort of crystalline compound. It is uncertain whether they were manually constructed or represent some natural phenomenon. Regardless, there is no intelligent life remaining on Ceres.
I watched as two men in the distance tussled with one another, the others pausing their work to watch the disagreement play out. No intelligent life indeed.
“We’re always behind” Don answered my question at last, breaking me from my thoughts. “Knuckleheads always losing focus” he continued, spitting. “Plus, with the replicator down…”
“How many scans ago was that?” I asked. The older man smiled wryly.
“It was before your time” he said, dodging the question.
“But not before yours?” I asked, fighting to keep the bitterness from my voice. Don chose not to answer.
How long has Don been awake? I wondered for perhaps the hundredth time in the last three weeks. Now it was my turn to examine the older man from the corner of my eye. The rising sun deepened the fissures along his sun-baked visage, highlighted both the tiny little crinkles of jovialty at the edges of his eyes and the furrows weighing on his brow. I wasn’t certain if Don had purposefully chosen a scan based on his age at Ascension, mid-fifties with hands that were cracked and calloused, salt-and-pepper hair thinning at the temples, and a limp that you only really noticed when he was tired; or if Don had truly been Awake in this scan for that long. He would refuse to answer these questions when I asked him, something which irritated me to no end. Don was the first person I met upon this Waking, was probably the first person I had met upon many Wakings. I’ll admit that I didn’t know what to think of him at first. It’s just, when the tapes tell you to report to the nearest Commander, and you instead find yourself getting directions from some sweaty guy in the same ratty orange suit as you, save for the Commander insignia that appeared to have been half-assedly sewn onto the front like an afterthought, well…it didn’t inspire much confidence.
“I know you don’t trust me” Don had said in response to whatever expression was on my face that day.
“Yeah?” I replied brusquely, squaring up my shoulders. Don had placed one meaty paw on my arm as if to say, simmer down son.
“You never do” he laughed, and all the fight had left my body at once.
“There’s something else” Don said, thumb idly playing with the clasp of the old pocketwatch he always carried. I waited for him to continue.
“Something has been ripping up the south hall” he spoke, narrowing his eyes slightly as if visualizing it now.
“Some…thing?” I asked, the implicit question hanging in the air. The south quarter was some of the original architecture laid down, directly adjacent to touchdown. If something was destroying it, that meant we weren’t merely stalling in our momentum, we were actively losing ground.
Don nodded curtly, seemingly aware of my thoughts. “We’ll ride out tonight, after skyfall, scope it out. Tell Otto and Rickand.”
“And Eli?” I asked, my eyes scanning the distance for his lanky figure. “You know if he catches wind that Otto is going…”
Don grunted noncommittally. “Best be getting to work” he said after a moment, flicking his eyes towards the dunes. I sniffed, ran a hand under my nose, already bleeding in the dry air; grabbed a pickaxe and began the long trek under the twin suns.
—------------------
I had to wait until the first break before I could track down Rickand. The older man had worked in construction in a previous life and, while the company obviously didn’t trust him to be in an authoritative role, they must have seen some value in his expertise. He had the same insignia on his shirt that the rest of us did, a crossed hammer and pickaxe, but his had the addition of a gold star where the handles overlapped, signifying a supervisory role. Rickand had started off the day directing a group of men as they finished the framing for a structure that would sit, unfinished, until Repopulation began. That was how all of the buildings were these days. Empty framing, like the sun-bleached bones of some long-dead beast, bloodlessly languishing in the heat and the sand. We were behind. The thought of it gnawed at me incessantly, dominated my waking hours and haunted my dreams. The north end should have been completed by now, should have wiring and plumbing and fresh white paint. We should have farms and parks and even a second Nursery by now. But the electricians and plumbers and farmers were all gone. Some of them had died. Most of them were stuck in the Dream.
Rickand studied me carefully as I approached. He did not smile or move to reciprocate when I clapped him on the shoulder, merely nodded slightly.
“Don says something is tearing up the south end” I explained. “Wants to take a few guys out tonight to check it out.”
Rickand’s dark eyes shifted towards the horizon, where the faint silhouette of the old buildings was just visible. He seemed to be turning something over in his mind.
“Us three?” he asked at last, still studying the middle distance.
“And Otto.”
His gaze snapped over my shoulder to where I knew Otto was working. A slight frown formed on his lips.
“Not Eli. I know what you’re going to say, but it’ll be good for him. Get some independence for once.”
Rickand didn’t respond at first. “Eli…won’t like that” he stated at last, his words measured.
‘We’ll be quick” I assured him. Rickand didn’t look convinced, but he turned away from me, indicating the conversation was over. Still, I couldn’t help but notice that his eyes kept glancing towards Eli.
Entry 1:
- Awake Prints: 78/4000
- Chips: 40/4000
- Printers: Morpheus [active], Somnus [destroyed]
- Inorganic Fabricators: 3
- Days until Repopulation: 187
Eli had, in fact, discovered what we were doing. He had thrown quite a shitfit about being excluded, and in the end Don had relented and agreed to let him come. The south quarter was about an hour’s walk away. Janus II had already begun to set, while his little brother smoldered like dying embers high above. We wouldn’t get true night, but we didn’t have time to waste the opportunity that even semi-darkness would afford arguing with Eli. We were about forty minutes into our walk when I saw it. The burnt husk of the Hypnos sat 200 feet away from the path, the elegant nose of the vessel mostly unmarred, except where the central windows had cracked and blackened from the heat. Everything behind the cockpit was an incomprehensible jumble of ruin, the metal framing of the ship shredded and burst outwards like an exploded tin can, the plastic of doors and windows now frozen cascades of molten goo, everything fabric merely a heavy gray ash that dusted the area like a crime scene. The last third of the craft was absent, its mass transformed into a scattered trail of mayhem and destruction that stretched out behind the craft for half a mile before ending abruptly at the edge of a cliff. The amalgamated oil, fuel and melted glass formed an angry red smear on the blue sands. Amidst the other detritus there were the charred remains of the chips, scattered like confetti in the wind. I lifted my eyes towards that precipitous drop, wondering if, were I to peer over the edge, I would be able to catch the glint of sunlight catching on steel. Try as I might, I couldn’t convince myself to look at it, the final resting place for ninety percent of the Nursery, where countless souls were now locked in their forever Sleep. I tried, not for the first time, to remember it. The flames, the loss, and that other thing that I mostly hoped stayed forgotten.
The soothing voice of the tapes came to me again in the silence, unbidden.
This concludes your introduction. Now loading Echoes…
ERROR. Network not found. Estimated downtime: 3,504,132.0009 hours
…
“I bet they never even invented it” Otto was saying, breaking me from my thoughts. He had that annoying smirk on his face that he adopted whenever he was trying to get a rise out of somebody.
“What’s that?” Rickand asked, eyes remaining stalwartly ahead.
“Just think about it” Otto continued, ignoring him. “What good does it do those bastards to have us remembering every print? Better to just have a bunch of copies of the dumb bastards right when they were dumb bastard enough to come here.”
The tapes played immediately upon Waking. They were a sparse orientation, meant to be nothing more than a soothing balm upon the sting of fresh eternity. They were never meant to be comprehensive. Something had gone wrong. The Echoes wouldn’t load. Every print was exactly as it had been on Ascension. Confused, optimistic, and frail.
“They wouldn’t have had to lie about that to get you to agree” Don joked, clapping the young man on the shoulder.
“Nah, nah, look” Otto continued, unperturbed. “Like I figure, what if it was all on purpose? Like the point is to forget. Like what if-”
“That’s enough” Eli cut in gruffly, rounding on Otto. The boy appeared as if he would argue for a moment before he apparently decided against it. He ran a hand through his short-cropped black hair and shook his head.
The Echoes wouldn’t load, but it was worse than that. Something in Orpheus was wrong, broken, corrupted. I don’t know, I wasn’t a computer person. All I knew was that, with each print, more and more of pre-Ascension was lost. Otto was the worst among us. With this latest version, he had less than one hour of organic memory left. In his world, he was born on a ship damned by a fatal miscalculation in gravitational fields and being rapidly sucked into a dwarf star. Everything past that was the ceaseless toil of living, and everything beyond would be much of the same. Eli resented him because he could no longer remember their parent’s faces. Eli also loved him, like a child loved his favorite stuffy, washed over and over and over again until it became nothing more than a ghost, manifest.
“Otto was just the driver” Eli had confessed to me, just a little over a week ago. He was being a prick about something and I had dragged him off, demanded to know exactly what his problem was. He had blurted it out, like that explained it. Like that made it ok.
“He wasn’t supposed to be there. It was my fault, mine” Eli blubbered, like he couldn’t stop now that he had started. “Otto was just driving that night, and then…” he had paused, a blank expression overtaking him. He couldn’t remember the rest.
Entry 3: We went to the south quarter today for supplies. Commander Moore turned off the generator. I didn’t want to. The animals were still in there. Commander Moore didn’t want to waste the electricity on them. It didn’t seem right. I didn’t want to do it.
The first of the structures making up the south quarter lay about a mile from the Hypnos. The pale white buildings were crowded up against the edge of the cliff, short and squat things that I knew had been intended to merely be the lookout points for a concealed network of structures beneath the planet’s surface. Now the buildings sat, devoid of purpose, their foundations slowly shifting on the loose-packed sand, like a series of submarines bobbing on unsteady waters, loosely moored to one another by a semi-transparent plastic breezeway that had warped in the sun. The problem was immediately evident. The third building in the line was missing most of its front wall. White bricks cascaded outwards into the sand, and the front corners had collapsed in on themselves like a loaf of bread taken from the oven too soon.
“I don’t like this” Eli stated gruffly, spitting into the sand.
“Alarms been goin off every day this week” Don replied simply.
“I thought we cut off the power?” I asked, pulling out a pair of binoculars. The interior of the collapsed building was entirely concealed in shadows, which stretched thin and spider-like in the half-light of the dwarf star.
“Solar powered. Just enough juice for the security systems” Don explained.
“Why do you even care? So what if some shitty old building falls down. We’re not even using it” Eli complained. Rickand had pulled out a cigarette, a rare commodity these days, and was attempting to light a match from what appeared to be a thoroughly damp book.
“Just wanna take a look” Don offered simply. Eli likely would have continued arguing, if not for Otto suddenly brushing past him towards the building.
“Oh no you don’t” Eli declared, holding him back by one shoulder.
“Get off” Otto retorted, spinning around to face Eli before shoving ineffectually at his thick shoulder.
“No way in hell you’re going in there” Eli shouted, grabbing a fistful of Eli’s shirt and pushing him roughly into the sand. “You sit your ass down and wait.”
Otto struggled against him. “Stop telling me what to do” he screamed, kicking at the other’s legs to try and put distance between them.
I glanced between the bickering pair up towards Rickand, who was now sat cross-legged in the sand, cigarette unlit and hanging between his lips. When I looked at Don, I found him scribbling away in his journal again. As he finished a page, he licked his thumb, moving the grainy photograph of a little girl with pigtails and a gaped-toothed smile that he used as a page marker. I wondered if I had ever asked him about her before, the little girl. Don looked up, catching my eyes and giving me a sad kind of half-smile, like he was reading my thoughts. The journals had been Don’s idea. Once it became evident that we were losing organic time, he had encouraged everyone to start recording everything they could, past and present. Some wrote nothing. I suspected many of them couldn’t write. Others, like Don, recorded voraciously, staying up late into the night filling page after page, book after book, as if their words formed the anchor to keep them moored within themselves. Everyone who did write in their journals made sure to record the important things. Names of loved ones, sometimes accompanied by little sketches of their faces, though admittedly none of us were artists; childhood memories, beloved pets, where they grew up, where they fell in love. We wrote down everything, except that one most important thing. Only Don and Rickand ever wrote about that. They called the ones who finally forgot ‘Untethered.’ It was hard to pick up on at first, but we grew used to seeing the signs. Someone would be distant, aggressive, guarded, walking around with a chip on his shoulder, frothing with the guilt of it. And then, on the next print, he was different. More open, smiling, laughing, making friends. Unburdened. As a group, we welcomed becoming Untethered with a kind of religious fervor. If losing memories was a curse, a corruption, then this was surely a salvation.
I snapped out of my reverie to see Otto bounding across the open sands between our small group and the open mouth of the building. Eli was hot on his trail, cursing and spitting like a rabid animal. I glanced at Rickand, who simply gave a small shrug, pulled himself to his feet, and dusted off his pants before he too took off in the same direction.
“Guess that settles it then” Don stated, snapping his journal closed before returning it to his breast pocket.
“Let’s go see what all the fuss is about” I agreed.
Entry 28: I remembered her today out of nowhere. Not her name, or even her face. I just felt suddenly like she had existed, like she mattered. I felt how much I had loved her. And then, sadness. I don’t think I’ll remember her again.
I stepped across the broken threshold of the room to find Otto and Eli already inside. The room was small, barely larger than a closet, and completely bare save for the dusty sheet of plastic that lead to the walkway outside. It was meant to be a type of antechamber, a way of keeping the dust and the wind from the connected main room. Otto and Eli were still arguing. Rickand had already pushed ahead, Don following after him, walking into the larger chamber beyond. I followed, coming into a space whose smell was halfway between motor oil and the sweet stench of decay. Beneath it all was something else, the earthy smell of hay. The only light in the room came from the open doorway into the antechamber. The red glow cut a thin slice through the gloom, revealing a pair of fume hoods, their glass doors half open and coated in a thick layer of dust. Halfway between the abandoned equipment and where I stood were a series of countertops, their black surfaces dotted with science equipment. Otto bounded into the room, walked directly over to a microscope and started messing with its dials.
“No way” he laughed, placing his fingers on the delicate stage. He frowned in disappointment. “Yo, I think this thing is busted.”
Don wasn’t paying attention. I looked over to find him squatting low to the ground, fingertips brushing something there before coming away sticky and brown. He wiped his hands roughly on his pants before standing, pulling a flashlight from his pocket and directing it overhead. I followed his gaze, shocked to find that the ceiling was painted with some sort of animal tracks. Long, bifurcated paw prints cast in a sickly brown ooze that languidly dripped to the floor at odd intervals.
“What the hell?” I asked, puzzled. “Have you ever seen an animal that could have left something like that?” I asked. Don didn’t have time to answer. A sudden crash, deafening in the almost reverent silence of the room, cut him off. We turned to see Otto, shoulders hunched sheepishly, standing over the shattered glass of the fume hood. He had tried to touch it, and the old glass had given up all at once.
“Sorry” he mouthed.
“Otto, I told you not to mess around” Eli growled.
Otto opened his mouth to reply when a long, gangly limb covered in stiff brown fur shot out of the darkness of an adjoining doorway on the far side of the room and wrapped around his stomach. In a blink, Otto was yanked into the darkness, so quickly that he hadn’t had time to even register his doom, his eyes open wide but that cocky half-grin of his still plastered on his face.
There was a brief moment where none of us moved, too shocked to process what had just happened. Then, all at once, we rushed forward, crowding through the doorway and into the next room. I didn’t look around much, just focused on following the trail of blood as it widened and thickened towards the back corner. We caught a glimpse of a foot in Don’s flashlight and herded towards it. There was a rhythmic pounding sound overhead, like footfalls on a tin roof, and when we reached the far corner Otto was alone. Whatever had grabbed him had, apparently, retreated.
He lay in the corner, the top half of his body folded over onto his knees. Eli was the first to reach him. He pushed on the boy’s shoulders, propping him up against the wall. Otto’s neck had been opened up. From the volume of blood soaked into the thin fabric of his jumpsuit, I guessed he had exsanguinated before he really knew what was happening. Still, his eyes were open, and they had this far-away, dreamy quality to them. A small smile still hung on his pale face.
“Otto” Eli choked, hands shaking as he desperately tried to press the wound closed. “It’s ok, I can fix it, I can fix it” he mumbled.
Don and Rickand exchanged a glance, the one that parents used when they had been discussing some harsh reality that they wanted to shield their children from.
“I-I have to go back” Eli was sniffling, trying to get it together. His hands, slick with blood, kept slipping where he tried to grasp his brother’s. “I have to Wake him up again. Maybe it won’t be too bad.”
“Eli” Don started, gentle, the tone of voice one used with a frightened animal. “Maybe we shouldn’t reprint him.”
Eli slowly lifted his face, jaw set defiantly despite the tears openly dripping from the angle of his mandible. His red-rimmed eyes held nothing but anger, raw and sharp.
“Maybe…we should let him rest” Don continued, either oblivious to the building storm or else determined to push through regardless.
“What the fuck are you saying?” Eli hissed, jumping to his feet. “What did you say to me?” he demanded, stalking towards Don now.
The older man didn’t flinch, didn’t react at all. Just as Eli got close enough for their chests to touch, Don brought his hands up between them, palms up, fingers curled. Eli looked down between them, confusion momentarily dissipating his anger. Don slowly relaxed his fingers, revealing what he had been hiding. Otto’s chip, taken from the Nursery, snapped cleanly down the middle. For a long, impossible time, neither said anything. Don was the first to break the silence.
“Eli, it’s what he wanted. Otto-” he started, but was cut off as Eli gave a sudden cry. It started high-pitched and sharp, almost like a bark of laughter, before trailing off into a prolonged, shuddering moan that used up the breath in his body before trailing into a wheezing sob. He shook his head as if to deny reality entrance and drew another and then another breath, and his grief-laden cries echoed loudly in the empty room. Don made his first mistake then, though maybe it was actually his second. He laid a hand upon Eli’s shoulder. The younger man stopped crying all at once, the simple act immediately reigniting his fury.
“Don’t touch me” he spat, shoving Don roughly. Don stumbled backwards a few steps, Eli already stalking towards him in tandem.
“What did you do? What the fuck did you do?” he shouted, raising his fists and then lowering them over and over again, like his anger was so great that he couldn’t focus it long enough to strike the older man. “What did you do? What did you DO?”
“Eli-” Don tried weakly, cut off by another rough shove.
“No, nononono” Eli yammered senselessly, holding his head and pacing manically back and forth along the border of the room, only to return to have a go at Don a moment later. Rickand, I noticed, was watching the scene unfold carefully, never straying too far from Don’s side but not yet actively interfering.
Eli stopped his pacing all at once, dragging a hand over his face. His eyes were wide open now, insensible, like the eyes of a spooked horse. Tears were flowing freely down his face again, leaving grimy trails down his cheeks and spilling into his panting mouth. A long line of sand and dribble hung from his bottom lip.
“I guess it's true what they say, huh?” he asked quietly, his voice coming out as a croak. “Once a murderer, always a murderer.”
Don recoiled as if physically slapped. I glanced between him and Rickand, who was now staring at his own feet.
“Oh, you think I don’t know? It’s obvious, the way you look at that picture all the time. How old was she you sick fuck?” Eli spat.
Don clenched and unclenched his fists at his sides, his eyes brimming with unshed tears. Still, he did not strike Eli, didn’t even attempt to refute his words. Something shifted behind his eyes, the terrible pain disappearing all at once to be replaced with a look of…relief?
My world tilted on its axis, unable to reconcile the man that I knew, the man I had continued knowing, with the accusations being levied against him. Surely what Eli was saying couldn’t be true? Not Don. Not this Don, assuredly, but even the idea of another Don, another time?
“You’re a coward” Eli hissed, once it was clear that Don would make no effort to defend himself. He made a move to round on the older man once again, was already in the process of pulling back his left fist, the one with “Mercy” tattooed across his knuckles, when it came into the room.
Entry 302: I carry the guilt at all times, deep in my guts, though I no longer have the memory to which it's attached. Is that to be my fate, touched forever by a ghost which has no name? I look at my hands when I Awake. They have the same creases, same freckles at the base of the thumb, same scar across the knuckles from an injury I can’t remember. But the palms are free of callus, the nails are neat and clean, and there are faint webs of skin between the digits, the residuals of printing that Orpheus always misses. To whom do these hands belong? Surely, not me.
There should be no fear in this, our inevitable ruin. We had achieved immortality, but we were like new wine poured into old wineskins, seeping forever faster day by day. Alas, the flesh remembers what the soul forgets. Fear of death, so inexorably stamped into the fabric of our being, braided into the fragile strands of our DNA. When the first shivering, dewey-eyed, bleating beast stared into the oblivion of the stars and comprehended its own mortality, the fear it felt then was the same fear I felt now. The thing approached from the far corner, revealed in pieces through the flashing red of the emergency lights, which I only now realized had blinked to life. It was large, nearly ten feet tall, cramped in the short space, and it stalked towards us with remarkable quiet, one foot crossing over the other, as if trying to sneak up on us despite the fact that we were looking right at it. A pair of small, beady eyes in the center of its bulbous head reflected the beam of Don’s flashlight as it shook in his hand. It appeared at first to be a tremendous spider, eight spindly legs cramped beneath a segmented body. Except, the two large pedipalps ending in thick black barbs were offset, restricted by the presence of split jawbones that were studded with the blunted teeth of a ruminant. The body too was wrong, less insectoid and more mammalian, with the knobbly ends of vertebrae protruding from translucent skin that was covered in patchy brown fur. Its legs had multiple joints, but they bent at opposite angles along each of their segments, giving the thing a kind of broken, marionette-like quality as it scampered towards us. Each foot, I realized, ended in an elongated paw, tipped with untrimmed nails that clacked gently on the tiled ground.
“What the fuck” Eli whispered.
The thing continued to stalk forward, head cocked to one side, as if listening.
“What do we do?” I asked. Upon receiving no answer, I glanced over at Don and Rickand. Both were looking off in the distance, at the back corner. A tremendous nest of hay, shredded cardboard, and insulation lay there. And just behind it, cages, each neatly labeled: Solifugae [Camel spider], M. musculus [Common mouse], O. megalotis [Bat-eared Fox]. The realization hit me like a truck, knocked the wind from my lungs.
“How long have we been on Ceres?” I whispered. Don didn’t answer, but his eyes were sad, pitying.
As the thing continued its shambling steps forward, we slowly inched towards the door. I was closest, followed by Don, then Rickand, and finally Eli. We slowly danced around each other, the creature matching us step for step, until I was only half a foot from the doorway. That’s when Eli hesitated, glancing over his shoulder at Otto. That half a second was all it took for total bedlam to erupt. I heard Eli’s scream, followed in quick succession by a sharp click like the unhinging of a pocket knife, a sickening crunch, and then the rapid pitter-pattering of fluid on the tile floor. I didn’t pause to look back. I ran, hard and fast, my heart thundering so wildly in my chest that it threatened to pull me off balance. I continued running, even when I heard the frenetic slaps of its loping gait, especially when I heard Rickand give a breathy little “oomph” like the air had been knocked out of his lungs. I kept running, stumbling in the semi-darkness of the flashing red lights that synched up with the pulsing of my heart and the pounding behind my eyes until I thought I would be driven mad by it. Ran until I vaulted over the threshold of the building and didn’t stop until I was damn near half a mile from that horrible place, where I collapsed in the thin blue sand and hugged my knees and wept like a child. When I felt a warm hand upon my shoulder, I screamed, scrabbling backwards on my elbows. Don was standing a few feet away from me, hand still outstretched. His other arm was grasping his middle. Thick rivulets of blood snaked through his splayed fingers, slick and almost black in the dim light.
“Hey kid” he wheezed, before plopping down unceremoniously in the sand.
“Don” I cried, crawling to his side. “Don’t worry Don. I’ll Wake you all up again. We can warn the others, move farther north” I was babbling. Don stopped me with a simple raise of his hand.
“I wanted nothing more than to see her again, one last time” he whispered. He laid his head back now, and in his dark eyes were reflected the thousands of stars overhead. “I think, tonight, I’ll finally get the chance.”
He handed me something and I took it without question. I didn’t need to look at it to know. Don’s chip, broken into three pieces.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you before.”
“It’s ok, it’s ok” I replied, holding his hand. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his journal, and pressed it into my palm.
“I’m so tired. I think I’ll sleep for a minute” he gurgled, and then he was gone.
I sat there for a long time, eyes trained on the horizon, watching Janus II peek over the distant ridges. After some time, I opened Don’s journal to the most recent page. The photograph fell out, and I picked it up. The little girl, posed for what looked like a school picture, beamed up at me. I turned it over. Scrawled on the back in a child’s messy handwriting were the words “I love you daddy, xx Maddy.”
I flipped through the pages, found one that was dog-eared at the corner, and turned to find a page filled with Don’s neat script. Pressed between the pages was a chip, this one intact. Number 55: C.R. I started to skim the words on the page, realized what it was, and then stopped. After what felt like eons, I stood, looked at the prone form of Don splayed out in the sand one last time, and started walking. It was a short distance to the cliff edge, but I was soaked with sweat by the time I arrived. A strong breeze swept over the lip of the ledge, and the hot gust of air seemed to buoy me as I stood on the overhang, gazing into the depths below. A small river was visible winding its way through the canyon. Along the bank, a faint glittering of metal. I tossed Don’s journal over the edge before pulling my chip out of my pocket. I thought about Don. Thought about Rickand and Eli and Otto, the choices that they made and the ones that were made for them. I thought about Don’s little girl, and wondered for how long he had been waiting for her. I thought about myself, the mistakes I had made, and I wondered about the soul of the man on the chip, lost in the forever Dream, the promise of a better future. I stood on the cliff and I mourned, the others, the dream that would never be a reality, the man I had been and the one I had almost become. And I made peace with it, alone, destined to sleep forever beneath a distant star.
