The Echo

Then there is our doctor, but she isn’t here yet. She is arriving tonight. She has been in last-minute training sessions, because she was a replacement. Our original doctor, some prick from Los Angeles, as they so often are, he bailed at the last minute. I said to Tomas that I could see it coming. He was that sort of person. We went through uniforms, training: millions of dollars spent on him, essentially. He kept asking questions about what happened on the Ishiguro, why it didn’t come back, and we kept saying, We don’t know, it just didn’t, but we have taken every precaution, blah blah blah. We told him, categorically, that it wouldn’t happen to us, but that didn’t make any difference in the end. He disappeared. So we went to the backup: Inna Gulansky. She’s amazing, really. She’s older than Tomas and myself by some years, and she’s been a field surgeon for most of her life. Tomas found her file, and I went with his choice, so that we could sign her off as quickly as possible. I didn’t question the choice once I saw her history. She was the doctor who came up to operate on the ISS last decade, so she’s already done zero-g triage, things that the guy she’s replacing could have only dreamed of. But her final stages of training have been happening without us, tucked away in some warehouse in Moscow, and that training prevented her coming up here with the rest of us. They wanted to ensure that she was absolutely ready. I have only met her a handful of times, but I can already tell that she will be an invaluable asset. I have told her, This will be an injury-free trip, that’s my decree, and she said, Well, why am I coming then? That is a good question! I said. She is full of good questions.

Now, here, when we’re nervous, everybody wants to talk with Tobi and Hikaru. She’s bright and bubbly, and she’s got so many stories about her life that it’s almost distracting; whereas he’s a picture of perfect calm, so much that it’s almost infectious. He tells us first about meditative techniques we can use when we are nervous about situations such as this, and then she tells a story about her father taking her up in a plane, about her first crash – her first landing where the plane didn’t survive but she walked away – when she was sixteen.

‘It’s all about knowing how to meet the ground,’ she says.

‘Not a lot of that where we’re going,’ Wallace says. His quip disarms her, throws her story off. She tilts her head at him and squints. She does that, I’ve noticed, when people make a joke at her expense. It rolls off. I seize the opportunity, the gap in the conversation. Tomas told me that I should make a speech to rouse them, to make sure that we’re all on the same page. I cough for attention, and I push slightly away from the wall, into the middle of the room. They all look at me. I do not know that I am much of a leader, but I am something. I am what they’ve got.

‘Hello,’ I begin, ‘I just wanted to say a few words. There will be more tomorrow, and the press will be involved, but this is just all of us, now. We have important work to be doing out there. Very important work.’ They are all smiling. Maybe they are just humouring me, because I know that I am bad at speeches, bad at all of this stuff. I know that I am not making eye contact with them; I am looking at my hands, at the paper that I wish I had to read from. I know all of this. ‘We all remember when they did this last. We remember how it all went wrong. But they were different, because they didn’t have you people as a crew.’ I have lost their smiles. I haven’t thought this through. I ask myself how Tomas would save this, and I remember the champagne substitute. I raise my flask. ‘So, you know,’ I say, and I start clapping my hand against the flask, ‘applaud yourselves! To us!’ I raise it high, and then I say it again. ‘To us!’ They all repeat it, and we all drink, and I see them looking at each other, little glances out of the sides of their eyes. I have fucked this up, I know.

I quietly mumble at them that I have to go and do some final checks, so I fluster to the rail, leaving my food but taking my flask, and I pull myself along and back to my room. It takes too long, and when I am there I fasten myself to the chair with the magnets and I call Tomas, and I swallow the remains of my drink back in one, sucking it through the little semi-permeable straw and feeling it spark and fizz on my tongue and the back of my throat.

‘Did you inspire them?’ he asks. He was listening, I am sure. Why would he not have been listening? So this is a lie, his asking me. It’s him giving me a chance.

‘I did my best,’ I say. ‘What are you doing?’

‘We’re watching projections of what could happen if it all goes wrong.’ I don’t ask him any more about them. I’ve seen the projections myself. We are sure that we will be fine; but in case we’re not, we have to run these things. They are terrifying, because there isn’t a single one in which any of the crew manage to survive.

The reason for this mission is to examine something that we do not understand. We know it as an anomaly. We first knew about the anomaly – and, by we, I mean the world – six years after the Ishiguro went missing. The world was not told about the anomaly at the time, and so when they disappeared and didn’t come back, it was a complete disaster. Tomas and I watched it on the news: the desperate wait for any sort of news from the lost shuttle. There were so many cameras in the launch centre, with the men and their computers and the branding everywhere. Showing endless, constant VT of the various astronauts as if they were participants in a reality show. Eventually the cameras packed up, and the news cycle was reduced to a small notice at the end that simply stated how many days they had been missing for. Everybody moved on. There was a funeral when it was decided that their fuel would have run out, that their life support would have disappeared. And then, after a while, they worked out where the ship must have dropped off the radar, and then later, they announced more details. A drip-feed of updates, holding things back when they were not ready for public consumption. Records from the ship’s journey; information from the journalist, useless and garbled.

Then one day the newly named UNSA announced that they knew of something, out there in space, out where the Ishiguro had been. The UNSA was little more than a conglomerate of companies and investors and governmental bodies plucked from the remnants of NASA and other space agencies, given a ridiculous name to seem important. They disclosed that the thing first appeared a decade before. There was patch of space that nobody could see properly: as if it was nothingness. It had been designated the catalogue number 250480 – they could only give it a number because nobody knew what it was. There were hundreds of thousands of these things up there somewhere: things that we didn’t understand, but that were catalogued with their little numbers and a file on a hard drive somewhere. It had been discovered before by Dr Gerhardt Singer, and he had been on the Ishiguro to try and learn more about it. It wasn’t important, that was the party line – that Inspire the world! bullshit was the primary reason for the launch of the Ishiguro – but it was clear that it was the important thing about their trip to him. He knew that there was a differential in the readings from it, simply because you could ping it and get nothing in return. The stars that used to be forthcoming, eventually, with their locations, he got nothing back from them. The anomaly was, as best every telescope could tell, nothing. There was nothing inside it. Nothing past it. And yet, it had to be something. Even a definite nothing is always a something. Dr Singer’s readings were correct, but they were brushed to one side as something to worry about another time.

When they announced the anomaly – and I say announced, but what I’m talking about is an update on a website, not a press release – they pointed out that they had singularly failed to get readings from the thing, because the probes that they sent to it malfunctioned. That didn’t mean anything: there’s a margin of error with anything technological. Two probes they sent, over a six-year period, both ostensibly to find the wreckage of the Ishiguro, but checking out the anomaly as they went, and they returned nothing, as if the thing wasn’t there. No readings: machines could not do what humans were needed for. And that’s where Tomas and I came in. We had worked with Dr Singer before he left, when we were students, in deep admiration of his work – of his role as an explorer – and we attempted to carry on his work, when we had the time. We were fuming after they spoke publicly about the anomaly, because they were denying that it was important. Tomas and I, we knew that it had something to do with the disappearance of the Ishiguro. Nothing is coincidence. Everything that happens anywhere happens with purpose and meaning. We went to the UNSA and we showed them our results, based on Dr Singer’s research. Extrapolations and summations, but with some immutable, incontestable facts: the anomaly was either moving or growing, because the space that it occupied was different. At that distance, it was hard to gauge almost infinitesimally small movements on that scale. But it was, one way or another, closer to us – to the Earth – than it had been when Dr Singer found it, and when the Ishiguro went out to examine it. It was moving. (Or, as Tomas surmised, unfolding. He has his own theories, and I have mine. We are not that similar; or, we try and cover all bases.) We plotted exactly where it was, using readings from every telescope and satellite available to us. When you concentrate and focus, you see the things that others miss. Stars that were registering as present from one satellite at any given point might not return a ping from Jodrell Bank. We focused on the anomaly, put our careers into it, our reputations. Tomas said, It’s better to be an expert in one thing that might be important than in many things that matter only a little bit.

The UNSA panicked then. They worried. More probes were sent, and they were lost as well. Everything there was lost. One of them, one of the people who approved the funding – he was the most desperate, his hands ready to sign funds to us before we even finished our first presentation – asked us what would happen if it reached the Earth. We said, We don’t even know what it is, yet. Let us find out. We showed them a map we’d made, and expressed in real terms the actual scale of what we were dealing with. They didn’t take long to reach the decision of a green light, on one condition: one of us would need to be up there, knowing what we were looking at. The other would stay at home and guide the operation from there.

One job sounded like what we had always wanted to do, the excitingly childish dream; the other somehow more prosaic role. Drier, certainly. We played for it. We have always played for it. Whoever won was going onto the ship, up into space, to the anomaly, the prize of this thing. It was decisive, my victory: I had fought for it, and I deserved it. I never gloated, because that wasn’t our way. We just got on with it. We planned the entirety of the trip meticulously. No room for error, and no error likely. Tomas framed the plan, seventeen printed A4 sheets of times and dates, and mounted it on the wall of our lab. I asked him why he framed it, and he said, It’s not going to change, so I might as well.

Our launch time has been set for over a year now. I look at my watch and I’ve got four hours. In two hours I have to report for duty, then I have to be sedated and strapped into my bed, and I will be made to sleep.

When it is time, we will all go into that darkness out there.

Tomas was first born, by three hours and forty-one minutes. I was if not a surprise, then a miracle, because they had no idea I was stuffed in there as well. The people who delivered me, who were not real doctors, started to tell my mother to rest rather than to keep pushing, because her job was done. Her baby, Tomas, had been born, and with that they assumed she was finished. My mother was a hippie, back when such a name meant something. She was into free love or whatever, and she was eighteen and had run away from home and lived on a reservation near these marshlands in Sweden and she didn’t believe in doctors. (We would argue, as she lay dying in the hospital bed that we forced her to lie in, that at least they fucking existed in the first place, so it wasn’t something she could contest. I don’t believe in them, or anything that they do, she told us, and we said, Well they’re real! And they could have saved your life! Instead of doctors, she believed in angels and psychic energies and trees that breathed at night.) Because of this lack of faith – a denial of scans and tests performed before she slid into her birthing pool and spread her thighs – she didn’t know that I was coming. I was a miracle. Tomas was abandoned, pushed to one side as they held me aloft. We are not equal, not completely. He has a birthmark stretched across half of his face, a wine stain that truly was there from birth. As she cradled him before I appeared, she apparently reasoned his mark away. It would clear itself up, was her logic. (A doctor might have told her differently, of course, but no.) When she finally held me, three hours after I began my climb out, she proclaimed me to be a mirakel: my looks, my health, my name. Mirakel – Mira, because I would never use that horrifying name, so gauche, a name that is such a product of who my mother was rather than anything resembling sense or logic, a name that would have lost me any respect within the scientific community – Hyvönen, brother of Tomas, son of Lära and some man who never existed, for all that I know of him. One of many people in a photograph of hundreds, drunk at some festival or other. I am the product of my mother’s loose virtues, and I am a scientist.

The names were competition for us, as she didn’t change my brother’s name to something more impressive; so he had to prove himself. He was older, wiser, in theory, and he shrugged it off in what he said and how he acted. Not underneath. Underneath, as we raced each other through school – excelling in the logical subjects, with proper results reliant on knowledge and skill and being able to use your brain, and thus attain results that could be gauged, pitted against each other – then university, and doctorates, neck and neck the whole time, I was still the mirakel. I would still be there second but more perfect, and his face bore that scar the whole time. Not a scar, no, that’s unfair: in my darkest moments, as we fought, that’s what I would call it. It’s a mark. It singles him out. It allows people to tell us apart, as otherwise we would be identical, monozygotic. We are in our forties now, and tired. Both of us are tired. And this trip, this excursion, it’s our dream. When we stopped fighting, we joined forces. When we stop competing, we’re unstoppable.

I’m the second to arrive at the gateway to the Lära. It was in our contract that we could name the ship, that Tomas and I would be able to choose what we would call it by ourselves. Her name is a word that means a theory, like a scientific supposition; and it was also our mother’s name. It seemed appropriate: taken from the centuries-old tradition of naming ships after women. Gods or women, that’s how you named a ship – never mind that the Ishiguro broke those traditions, celebrating the engineer who designed the engines.

Wallace is already here. He’s leaning against the wall, and he looks weary. I can’t blame him. He looks at me and nods. He will have just said his goodbyes to his family, and I assume that he would like it to stay quiet for a while longer; I don’t have an issue with that. From the windows here, I can see the hull. I can see the panels, the bolts and fixtures holding them to each other. I know how they’re held in place, and what’s under each one. The design of this ship is entirely our own. We built this for practicality. There is a reason that spaceships look like they do. With the Ishiguro, that was just another in their colossal series of egomaniacal fuck-ups. They built a ship that looked like something from a film, that had no place being in space. It was built for its toyetic qualities, the design licensed out before they even took off; ours has been constructed to work perfectly, efficiently. To actually serve its purpose.

From here, down the tunnel, is an airlock. The other side of it leads you to a changing room, outfitted with benches and suits for exterior walks. One room off that is the bathroom, of our own design. Nobody likes shitting into a suction tube, I told Tomas, but that’s what has to happen. Might as well make it as comfortable as possible. So it’s a pod, and there’s a seat, and there’s a vacuum seal around your ass made by the seat, which is of a jelly, almost, malleable. It fits to you. There is no hose or inverted gas mask. No good for urination, though, so that’s still into a funnel, but that’s easier to deal with. The shower uses a vacuum as well, pulling through a grate at the bottom, and the water is pressure-pushed from the top. In theory, on a good day, it’s like a waterfall or a car wash, fast and hard and maybe not very pleasant, but it’ll get you clean.

Through from there is the bedroom, which has the beds set at a 40-degree angle off the floor, arranged around each other in a circle. We paid for a special darkening finish on the glass, which goes black on both sides, blocking light if you want, because it means that people can sleep while others work. No need to have lights out, or bedtime. This doubles as our sick bay as well, in case. Through from there is our living quarters, and at the neck of that room the cockpit, all built into one area. Less space than our predecessor, but theirs was extravagant. We’ve reserved more room for the essentials – fuel, food, the communications system that we had built – and taken away space for play. Tomas and I both agreed that it was unnecessary. The cockpit is state of the art. In the old Apollo spacecraft, they had open panels, hundreds of buttons. Every part of the process had to be performed under a strict regimen, an order in which things had to be done. They were suffering a basic lack of understanding of automated processes, but that is a hobby of mine. Ergo, we have tried to make this easier but still retain the functionality. We have cut down on what can go wrong, that’s all. A lot is controlled by computer – life support, air supply, fuel intake – but we can take control back if we need to. We can do it from here, and Tomas can do it from Earth. That’s thanks to the communications system, and how we’ve managed to get the signal to carry enough data, relaying it with satellites. Back in the Ishiguro’s day, such an undertaking would probably have been impossible. We haven’t had a chance to test it, not outside of satellite commands, but that’s always the way with new technologies. So much of it is theoretical until it suddenly works and you’re proven correct.

Hikaru is next to arrive, and he is grinning.

‘This is exciting,’ he says. We have a special cupboard of food especially for him, of white bars of soya and tofu and processed chicken. He’s not fussy about drink colour, apparently: just the food. Tobi and Lennox arrive together, and with them is Inna. Tobi pulls herself to the side and waves her hand out, allowing Inna past, as if this is some sort of formal greeting. Everybody smiles and greets her. They’ve all met her before, but only briefly, when she wasn’t originally a part of this team. Bonding was low on the list of our desired achievables before launch; far lower than making sure that she was ready for this challenge.

‘Hello,’ she says. She shakes our hands, reintroducing herself. None of us have forgotten her name, because she’s vital to this, and because we’ve all been talking about when she would join us.

‘Great to have you,’ Hikaru says. ‘You as excited as we are?’

‘Just about,’ she says. Her accent is curious. She’s from Georgia – Soviet, not American – but lived in England for most of her life. Her voice is very soft, only giving a hint of its origins on her Rs. She’s ten years older than Andy and myself, and in better physical shape than almost anybody else here, which is really saying something. Not sure how much of it is tinkered. ‘Can’t pretend that I’m not nervous,’ she says. She stretches the letters out, then the whole word. It sounds different, almost alien in its delivery. My own accent has been softened and lost if it was ever there in the first place; the rise and fall of my own language washed out. Hers is still there, and still prominent. Nerrrvous, she says, or it sounds.

‘You’d be crazy if you weren’t, I reckon,’ says Tobi.

I feel sick, and this feels loose. Wrong. I need to speak with Tomas one last time. I can feel the lack of gravity inside me. My guts, swollen up and churning, and like the slightest movement could upset me, could end this for me. I back away from them all, down the corridor, around the corner, and I open a connection and whisper at him that I need to hear his voice.

‘What’s wrong now?’ Tomas asks.

‘Are you sure we’ve done everything we can?’

‘Have a safe flight, Brother,’ he replies – he calls it a flight, which sounds so demeaning for what this actually is – and I hear the click of him cancelling the connection. Over the speaker system, the launch crew announce that they are opening up the airlock entrance. We’re boarding.

2

Every part of this process has been designed to ensure that nothing can go wrong. I cannot stress that enough: the level of control that we have enacted on this entire operation. Entry to the Lära is as controlled as everything else. There is no room for error. Everything must be checked, processed, run through before we are allowed on. There are exacting checklists full of bullet points that take days to tick off. It’s these things that can mean the difference between life and death. This is how the systems can be guaranteed to work when we need them to, how we can streamline them and make them user friendly while still retaining the safety: they are prepared and perfected, and instigated with absolute care and diligence.

‘Are we getting on anytime soon?’ Tobi asks. She looks at the clock on the wall. Less than half an hour until we leave. Sedation takes only a few minutes to completely set in; the paralysis less. We don’t control the boarding process from the ship: we are nothing but passengers for now.

‘Not long,’ I say. I am running through their final checks in my head, and as I reach the final one, the door opens. It slides satisfyingly and the launch crew inside the ship move backwards, grinning. They’ve got balloons and a banner, both hanging in the middle of the air. My crew laughs, almost hysterically. Bon Voyage, the banner says. From the moon to the stars, under it in smaller type. They applaud, and we applaud them. We walk through to the corridor in single file as the ground crew start pulling aside the decorations, and we all find the bed labelled with our names. (I pretend to not know which one is mine, even though I dictated where the beds lie. I arranged them, like chess pieces.)

‘I want to go last,’ I say to Inna. She nods.

‘You’re nervous?’ Nerrrvous.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I’ve been sedated before. Nothing to be scared of.’

‘Good,’ she says. ‘I always think it takes better the less wary you are.’ She preps her injections. She clicks the first one in, a bullet into the hypo’s chamber. I catch a glimpse of a mark – a tattoo, I think – on her collarbone as she moves, as the fabric of her shirt pulls away, but not enough to see what it is. I wonder what it is of. I wonder how big it is. ‘Who’s first?’ she asks the group. Hikaru raises his arm, and, in one motion, starts to roll up his sleeve. ‘Neck,’ Inna says. ‘It’s better there. It takes faster.’ He shrugs and lies back on the bed. The magnets click in, holding him in place, and she folds herself down a little to reach him. The hypo seems to fizz as it empties the contents of the pod into him. He winces, and then shudders, shaking the injection off.