The Echo

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 (#ud7e19d1d-40b4-5ffa-87c0-fa4253665716)

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.

‘Nothing to it,’ he says. The others line up one by one, and they all act as if it’s nothing, but I see in their hands the mild tremble of fear at the injection itself; or, maybe, at the thought of being asleep and not being in control. I never used to drink, for that loss; I never used to take painkillers, for the same. Tobi goes first, then Lennox, then Wallace, and then Inna turns to me. ‘You next,’ she says.

‘One second,’ I say, as she readies the hypo. I pull myself to the cockpit and open a connection to Tomas. ‘Can you hear me?’ I ask him.

‘What is it?’ Tomas sounds annoyed at the sound of my voice. I know how busy he must be. I speak quietly, and turn away from the rest of the crew. I don’t want anybody to see that I’m worried.

‘Is everything okay?’

‘It’s fine. Why would it be anything other than okay?’

‘I just wanted to check.’

‘You think that I would let the launch happen if everything wasn’t okay?’

‘No,’ I say.

‘I have work to do, Mira.’ And then he’s gone. I turn back to Inna, who’s waiting. ‘Let me get into the bed,’ I say. ‘Do it there.’ I am next to the central controls on one side, with Inna on the other.

‘You can’t,’ she says. ‘You have to do me after I’ve done you.’ I nod and sit on the edge of the bed, unbuttoning the top of my shirt, and I pull it down to show the part she needs. She leans in: I feel the press of the needle. Like a bore, followed by the break of the skin, and the liquid. That’s the worst part: feeling it rushing inside of you, something where it should not be, mingling. It hurts for a second, nothing more. ‘It’ll only be a couple of minutes before you feel it,’ she says, and she pulls her top to one side and exposes the tattoo again. I can see more of it: the head of a bird, blue and yellow, eyes wide, mouth open. An eagle’s beak. It seems to run lower, towards her chest itself. She puts the capsule in and then hands me the hypo, and points with her finger to where I should place the nib.

‘Ready?’ I ask.

‘Of course,’ she says. The hypo rests against the peak of the bird’s head. I press the button and she barely reacts; I pull it away. She folds her top back up. ‘Now,’ she says, ‘time for sleep.’ She swings her body round into the bed and I hear the hiss of the magnets. ‘They lower the doors for us?’ she asks.

‘They will, but you can do it yourself if you want.’ I glance over at the others, their frontages still up. ‘Sleep well, everybody,’ I say. They murmur; they’re already under. It hits you like you don’t know it’s coming, and you’re suddenly elsewhere, in total darkness. It’s brutal, how fast it is. Inna lies back.

‘See you when we wake up,’ she says. She reaches for the lid; her touch alone makes it descend, bringing it down around her. The glass darkens as it lowers. I flatten myself against the bed as well, and I fasten the magnets, and I try to stay still, because I am still not used to this; the feeling of never being flat, of never being orientated one way over the other. I rest my head on the bed, snug inside the plastic form that’s been moulded around our individual physical shapes. I wait until a click comes over the intercom, and I hear Tomas’ voice.

‘This is the first milestone on the road to the stars,’ Tomas says. ‘Beds closing in five. Four.’ He finishes the countdown and the glass slides down and seals me in. Enough air to breathe, to sustain, that’s the deal. When you sleep you naturally need less. Your body rights itself, puts itself into a state of optimum intake. It aids the depth of your sleep as well, having less air. I shut my eyes and wait for sleep to take me. I know that it cannot be long now.

I hear the engines kick in, and the rumble that they send throughout the entire ship. For that second, it feels like an explosion. I hear the joining door being retracted, and the order that it be so, and I hear Tomas’ voice over the intercom telling the ground crew to prepare for launch. I keep my eyes shut and think about the path we’re going to take, and how the launch will look. We’ve run so many simulations – and a simulation was how we knew to launch from the NISS in the first place, how the money saved on building an extension here to do it was proven to be the right choice by another simulation – and I can see them all running at the same time.

When I used to fly in airplanes I would shut my eyes for a second as we took off and picture the plane exploding, bursting into flame. They say that if a plane is going to crash, it’s statistically most likely to happen as it takes off. I figured that if I got past that I was pretty safe. I imagine this ship exploding. I imagine the pieces floating all around me in space. I imagine me floating amongst them.

Tomas does the other checks, his voice talking through every stage, and I start to wonder why I’m not asleep yet. I should be, by now. This is crucial. Sometimes people need a few minutes to really let the sedative sink in, I remind myself. Sometimes the body’s natural adrenalin, the endorphins, they need longer to be counteracted and swallowed by the sleep. But then: now I am worrying that I am not asleep. In my life I have insomnia, I suppose, of a sort: when pressure mounts and the following day carries any sort of importance, I will worry all night, worry that I am not going to achieve the required amount of sleep to function at an optimum the following day. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the worry is then the thing that conspires to keep me awake, rolling around in my head in circular patterns that never stop looping in on themselves. Only when I have given up all hope do I stand a chance of actually falling asleep: when I have managed to pass that point, to realize that there is nothing I can do now, and that the day I was so worried about is likely ruined. It is a hindrance; a horror. I sleep so badly, because almost every day carries that pressure. Tablets do not help, not really: all they do is render me more tired than I would ordinarily be when I awake. Eventually nature takes over and I sleep: but it is fitful, and it is not what I want. This injection: this is to be my salvation for this leg of the journey. After this, I will worry about it as and when.

I cannot see a clock from here. There’s nothing. That’s an oversight, and I should have thought about that. There are no microphones in the beds either, another oversight. It’s to protect the seal: the fewer holes there are, the less chance of there being a crack. The pilot on the Ishiguro died before they even woke up, probably because of a gap in the seal, something like that. So we were cautious. It’ll settle in. I’ll sleep soon, because this is medically controlled. This is something I cannot avoid. On occasions, when I have been at my most desperate for sleep, I have taken painkillers: something strong enough to dull everything else, to remove my faculties from worrying about the sleep itself. This is like a better version of them: unavoidable, inevitable.