THE EDGE

Book Three of The Anomaly Quartet

James Smythe

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

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HarperCollinsPublishers

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2021

Copyright © James Smythe 2021

Cover design by Mike Topping © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

Cover images © Shutterstock.com

James Smythe asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007541867

Ebook Edition © November 2020 ISBN: 9780007541850

Version: 2020-11-30

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 0

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Part Two

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Part Three

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by James Smythe

About the Publisher

0

I walk the station, and I go to see Snipes; and he is in pain. He is in such pain, and that has been so clear from the start. A person who wasn’t made for this; who wanted to be so much more. An experimental pilot, he said the night we met, the night he came up here; a joke we made about his job. I’m an engineer. Just an engineer. His hand on my arm. Maybe we could be something; in another life, maybe.

He paces his room, frantic. He says, ‘I didn’t want you to see me like this,’ but I tell him that I don’t mind, that I just want to help.

It’s early in the morning, or late at night. The same state, really. Just different perceptions; we set the clock ourselves. And he says, a variant on the last: ‘I didn’t want to have to see you, not right now.’

‘Please,’ I say to him, but he doesn’t listen. He doesn’t, because he’s made a choice.

He leaves his room, and he climbs down the ladder to the main section of the station, and he heads around it as if he’s already late.

I chase him. I message the others, to tell them what’s happening, that I might need help. He stops, shouts at me. ‘Please, Ali,’ he says, ‘let me do this.’

Then he’s into the changing rooms, and the airlock.

‘Please help,’ I ask the others, ‘please help,’ but nobody comes in this moment, and there’s nobody coming at all; so I think, I’ll pull the alarm, but Snipes is too fast, too driven.

He’s got permissions; he can do what he likes to the systems.

We didn’t have anything between us; we nearly did, that’s all. But neither of us was in a place to begin anything—

He starts the airlock cycle. One door opening, and he steps inside.

Another door opening, and he’s gone.

His hand lingers on the internal window, for just a moment. It holds, blocking my view, as if he’s reaching for me—

Outside, I see Earth. That’s where we are in this part of our rotation. Facing away from the Anomaly.

His trajectory: home.

I feel my heart leap, or sink, or crush or be pulled apart; I watch him go. It’s so cold—

I feel myself pulled along in his wake. I would be—

The others get here, finally, and they rush and crowd, and desperately try to fix this.

Mon helps me away, ushers me to my room, where she quiets me. Shhh, she says. Hand on my head, brushing my hair back, comforting me; restraining me.

Go to sleep, she says. This’ll help you, sleep now.

A sleep. A chance to reset myself, and to feel better, and to move on.

PART ONE

It seems, as one becomes older,

That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence.

T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

1

Theo, my son, is five years old, or a little over; the exact number of days gets looser when you pass the easily definable. Until they’re two, of course, you count them by months; or even weeks, when they’re younger.

Then they cross a boundary, and suddenly: it’s thereabouts. Two and a half; nearly four; five, until they’re six.

My connection with Theo is purely digital. Screen to screen. The comms link with Earth is terrible, but usually it’s enough for a picture, even if it’s low res. To see his smile, hear his voice, that’s everything to me. That tells me that there is a reason for my doing this.

After I have asked him about his day, about his life, and told him about mine, I tell him that I love him, and he says the same to me – he isn’t yet old enough to really understand what it means, but he knows that there’s a call and response to these things, and he says it the same way, every single time, as if it’s rehearsed; even though I can tell he feels it, I can see it in his eyes – and then we say goodbye. Sometimes our conversation runs its course; sometimes it’s halted because of the connection being tenuous up here; sometimes he’s late for school, or his father has decided to take him out at the exact moment that he knows I’ll be calling. But at least we speak, and have spoken nearly every day since I came up here; even if our conversations are only brief.

I think, on those days, that I work better. I am more efficient. I am focused, and I channel my feelings into my understanding that, more than anything else in the world, I want to get off this godforsaken station.

Last night one of my only real friends up here killed himself. His name was Snipes, and I hadn’t known him for long. It feels stupid to get caught up in it, in missing him, or feeling the pain of his being gone; the burn of it. And already, his face is fading a little. As if it’s not quite been impressed hard enough. The short time that I knew him, that wasn’t enough to make it permanent.

But still, he ended it. He was sent up here to die, anyway. His death was inevitable.

He just wanted to control it, I suppose.

We buried him. Except, here it’s not a burial. It’s a send-off. So much less important-sounding, so much less gravitas.

This morning, more than any other day since I’ve been up here, I want to speak to my son. This morning, still hungover from the sadness of last night, I need Theo’s voice, his gaze. I need that moment of connection; of clarity.

I get a connection straight away. Sometimes we don’t get to speak, because the comms are out, or because our cycles don’t overlap. Sometimes I call, but there’s no answer. Those days, it’s impossible to not fear the worst. In any situation where you truly feel for somebody, it’s natural to worry when you cannot make contact with them; and when they’re your child that feeling is amplified. But today, the connection works. There’s static on the picture, and that’s fine. Better than nothing. Xavier answers, and he smiles at me. He wears a very different smile than he wore when we were actually together. It looks the same, because that’s his face, but God knows that whatever is happening in the space behind it is a very different thing.

‘Allanah,’ he says. He’s the only person who still uses my full name. I’ve been Ali for as long as I can remember. Xavier uses my full name because he thinks it gives him the upper hand, or power. This unbearably petty aggression, this absolute smugness. Arrogance that was there before this, long before the upper hand he felt he held; that he is Down There and I am not.

Because, as he reminds me, to hurt me, I left, and Xavier remained.

As soon as he sees me he hoists Theo up into the air in front of him, holding him out to the camera, pushed forward. ‘Can you see?’ he asks. Theo has one of the knots on a necklace around his neck, like a cross, at first glance; a cross mixed with an ampersand, to make this tied-off symbol, looped and knotted together. ‘He picked this one out himself,’ Xavier says.

‘No he didn’t,’ I say. ‘He doesn’t know what that even means. He’s too young.’

‘I don’t think you can ever be too young to have faith, Allanah. He’s got faith, just like I do. You wouldn’t believe what it’s like down here, now. Even in the short time you’ve been gone, it’s so different. Belief in the knot is intrinsic. You’d understand if you were here, I’m sure you would.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I say. He smiles dismissively. I wave at Theo and he waves back. My little boy; growing older every day, without me there to see it. ‘Let me talk to him, on our own.’ As I speak, my head swims. Being up here, it fucks with you. There’s a strange pressure in the station, a sense of the air not being quite right. Headaches, bone aches, cramps in your gut: they’re all part and parcel of your stay on the station. They told us that on day one. ‘Take it off him, please. If you don’t, I’ll tear it off as soon as I see him.’

‘Come on,’ Xavier says, ‘there’s no need for that.’ Xavier’s got a necklace of his own, and I see it as he shifts Theo’s weight in his arms: his is thicker, silver rope tied around itself; a tangled ball that has only a passing resemblance to a crucifix now. ‘Anyway, it’s not like I forced it on him. He wanted one.’

‘Because you wear one, and he wanted to be like you.’

‘Invoke the truth and make it a reality,’ Xavier says. It’s one of his church’s platitudes: a phrase that means nothing, torn from some quasi-life-coach little blue book and turned into a commandment. Seize the day, and make it yours. But it’s a creed that Xavier’s lived by long before the knot came along. ‘We both wanted to talk to you today, anyway.’ His smile is so weak and ineffectual. I picture it plastered to his face while he sleeps, while he dreams whatever he has been told to dream. ‘What’s it like up there?’ he asks. ‘What can you see?’

‘The same as always.’

‘But the knot, right?’

‘The Anomaly.’

‘Sure. Whatever you want to call it.’ So patronizing. ‘What’s it like, now?’

‘It’s the same as it always was.’

‘How close is it?’

‘A long way away.’

‘How long?’

‘Four years. Something like four years.’

‘Four years, my word. That’s …’ He sucks in air, like that’s attractive to him, somehow, a lecherous move, and he smiles. ‘That’s not long, is it?’ He leans towards his camera, and, by proxy, my screen. ‘Describe it more?’

‘It’s dark. Jesus, it’s like you’re getting off on this.’

‘Don’t be disgusting. I’m impressed. What colours does it have in it?’

‘There are no colours. It’s dark, like I said.’

‘It can’t just be dark. You likely can’t see the colours, that’s probably it.’

‘I can’t see them because there aren’t any,’ I say. Xavier snorts.

‘Just because you can’t see them, doesn’t mean they aren’t there,’ he tells me. ‘You aren’t attuned to the full spectrum, that’s the nature of denying your faith.’ He looks away from the camera, and he rubs at his wrist and fumbles his words ever so slightly. ‘This is so like you. To shun what’s in front of your face.’ His voice dropped to a murmur. ‘You’re so selfish, Allanah. You should want to share the joy, but you’re trapped. You should be doing everything you can to get back here faster.’ He looks at Theo. Touches my son’s neck, the string around it. ‘Our boy misses you, but you’ve chosen to be apart from him. What does that say about the kind of person you are?’

‘How dare you,’ I say, and there should be more there, but there isn’t; there are choked-back tears, instead, a lump in my throat. Xavier nods, as if understanding something, and he reaches for the screen. I try to make eye contact with Theo in that moment, as Xavier hoists him around, then severs the connection, keeping his face turned away from me; and I blurt out those three little words my son didn’t get a chance to say, hoping that the connection holds long enough to carry them down to Earth.

I love you.

I cry: about Theo, and the distance between us; and about Snipes, and the distance there, even further.

Last night. That’s all.

Some believe in life after this, but it’s hard to, when you’ve seen the evidence we have. So Snipes is nowhere.

I don’t know if it’s okay to cry about my lot, because it seems like there are bigger problems than mine. I have to keep reminding myself of that. People have come up here, and they have been brave, and they have tried to do something. Bravery is something that cannot be underestimated.

Snipes was brave.

I get back into bed. Another hour, or less, or more. Whatever I can have.

I imagine that I am out there, in the wild nothingness, before the Anomaly, and after here; and I’m spiralling, out of control. A veil, the cold, the dark, clothing me; my eyes forced shut, the pain, the nothing, overwhelming.

Lost, and my guts churn, my head pulses, tightens, a vice; my pain—

The alarm sounds, waking me from my dream, whatever my dream was, trilling through the bones of the station, piercing my skull, thumping into my headache and making it ring even louder than before.

I dream out here. We all do. To be this close to death, every dream is either a memory or a dream of what might be; there’s no ground in between.

I pull on underwear, my jumpsuit, slide my comm unit onto my wrist, and leave my room. I’m far from the viewing window, so I start to run towards it; but I know what the alarm means before I even reach it. I was on a committee that chose the sounds, that decided what we would hear in any given situation.

High-pitched, a trill rather than a thump.

That’s panic stations.

Panic, station.

The security doors are shut. The lights gone dim. The exit pathways are marked for us.

I don’t float, though, which means the centrifuge must still be churning. It can’t be operations fatal. Not a fire, not an explosion, not a hole. This is something else.

The Anomaly. When all other options are removed, there it is. There it must be.

I run down the corridor and approach the viewing window, a massive track of glass, running around a sixth or so of the outer edge of the middle ring of the station, curved and secured and reinforced with polymers that make it basically unbreakable. And as I see it, before I see whatever’s outside, I pray. I am not religious, so instead I cross my fingers and I try to picture Theo, but his face is somehow so intangible in this moment; distant, distance turning itself into the physical, even though I have just spoken with him, even though he was right there, in front of me.

I shut my eyes, briefly, running on instinct. I run these corridors, the loop – the donut, we call it – every morning. Sixty days of this station, of this repetition, and I know exactly where my feet will fall; the curve of the floor, the sound of each panel. The pleasing beat of my shoes on the metal, the exact tone of each step.

The others, bar Tomas Hyvönen, the scientist in charge of this station – so, that’s Desh, Cohen, Berry, Gibson, Sian – are standing at the window already when I get there. They’re watching something in the distance. Mon – Monica, my friend, the station’s primary medical officer – looks at me, and she looks so sad. Broken, almost. She takes my hand as I approach, as if she hasn’t seen me in the longest time, and this is a reconciliation.

She squeezes my hand. ‘Don’t freak out,’ she says.

I look out of the window in front of us, and I see it.

I lied to Xavier when I spoke to him, even though I didn’t realize it.

The Anomaly isn’t years away from us; not any more. Until this morning, it was and now it is not. Now, it’s on our doorstep. I don’t know how far; or how close.

As we rotate towards it, our orbit so fixed and yet bringing us closer, closer, it’s clear that it isn’t where it was last night. It’s not there, it’s here, it’s right here, really.

I want to scream.

I don’t. We are told to control ourselves.

‘We don’t know what happened,’ Desh says. He’s the tech guy on the station, maintaining the security systems, the appliances, the messaging, the connections. Clever and annoying in equal measure. ‘We’re on it.’

‘Ground control see?’

‘We’re asking. They’re being silent so far. Probably freaking out.’

‘Useful,’ I say. I look at it, and it makes me feel strange, unsteady. Disarmed. That will be the shock, most likely. I steady myself; and I feel Mon’s hand holding my arm, a brace, a restraint. I look to her, and she smiles at me. She doesn’t say anything. She is sad, or scared, or somewhere between.

I don’t know what to feel, and nobody is going to tell me what to feel.

‘Is there video of it?’ I ask.

Desh shakes his head. ‘Camera missed it. It just fucking … leapt. Between frames, looks like. One minute it’s there and the next it’s … well, there.’ He’s sweating a little. Jittery. He should have caught it, probably. Blame for missing such a pivotal thing will land on him, I’m sure. ‘We’re only running at twenty-four fucking frames, which I said wasn’t enough, I said that’s like a hundred fucking years out of date and I wanted one-eighty—’

‘It doesn’t matter. How close is it?’

‘We’re waiting for Hyvönen on that,’ Mon says. ‘It’s hard to tell.’

‘A few days, I reckon. Can’t be much more,’ Desh says.

‘Assuming it doesn’t leap again,’ Cohen says, his brow depressed. He and I don’t talk, not really; nor his compatriots, Berry and Gibson, who stand behind him as if they’re his chorus.

‘Has Hyvönen said anything at all?’ I ask Sian. She’s his assistant and carer both, there to support him on his good days and rescue him on his bad.

‘He’s thinking,’ she replies.

‘Is it a coincidence?’ I ask.

‘What?’ So dismissive in her tone, immediately.

‘A coincidence; that Snipes died yesterday, he went out there, and now this happens. It feels like it can’t be coincidental, is what I’m saying.’

Snipes died. I hear the words out loud.

I didn’t know him that well.

‘Everything’s a coincidence,’ she says. ‘Linear time’s a coincidence. Dominos. Don’t overthink it.’

And then we’re quiet. All of us, silent; just staring at this thing that’s changed our purpose up here drastically.

That’s changed everything.

When I arrived, there were forty people up here; forty bodies, the count used to read. A totally different place then, it was. Felt like it was bursting at the seams. Back then, you couldn’t breathe without hearing somebody else breathing first. Now, there’s the background hum of the rest of the station going about its work, the under-foot thrumming of the centrifuge from the level beneath us, but that noise all fades into the background. And when it’s faded, for the most part, it’s quiet up here.

Back then, we were forty bodies, then funding was pulled two weeks in, which took us down to twentyish; and then, more funding pulled, we were reduced again.

A skeleton crew, we were told, was all that would be needed to run the station. You’re a lighthouse, that’s all. We told ourselves that we would swell and grow once more, the number constantly fluctuating, depending on need. But until then, yes, sure, maybe it was easier to keep it lean.

Besides which: it was easier to rotate the crews if they were smaller.

Four months on, four months off.

I am sixty days through.

Time passes. We were meant to be here for so much longer.

Now, we have to leave. We have to go, because it’s so close we can’t risk it. Even I know that. All the projections, they had us cleared off with weeks to go.

If it swallows us, we do not know what will happen.

I sit with Mon in the mess hall, because we have to eat. Nothing better to do, while we wait for Hyvönen to tell us what’s next. I pick at my breakfast, an English muffin, a patty of egg and spinach and hollandaise on top, all rehydrated and each component tasting, somehow, exactly the same as the others, no distinction between them. Mon drinks coffee. We used to have better food, but the freezers have all been switched off in the stores, the storeroom itself locked off. Another in a long list of attempts to save both money and power, but one which has left us with nothing but food that’s been drained of all water and nutrients, and coffee that tastes stale the moment it hits your lips.

Over Mon’s shoulder, I can see a sliver of the window. The darkness outside.

‘They need to send us home,’ I say. ‘What happens if it moves again? I don’t want to be caught in that thing.’

‘I’m assuming they will,’ she says. ‘Not like we can do anything now. Still: you know what that means.’ She smiles, softly, sadly. She’s got a little boy not far off Theo’s age; and an ex-husband she hates almost as much as I hate Xavier. We joke that Hyvönen has a type. Like some lothario, choosing those he sees fragility in, pasts that are tethers, anchors, that he can manipulate. Mon and I bonded through situational association and empathy. Those things are stronger than something like shared tastes, I would say. Actual understanding wins every time. ‘You speak with Theo this morning?’ she asks.

‘A little.’

‘Let me guess. Good but not great?’

‘He looked well, but … his father.’ She knows what that means. ‘And that fucking church, it’s so insidious.’

‘It’s not even a church, don’t fucking dignify them.’

‘You and I know that,’ I say. ‘Try telling him.’ Shake of my head. ‘You. You go.’

‘Andre was good,’ she says. ‘I can’t complain.’

‘Just think,’ I say. She’s half-smiling. ‘Think. We’re going to get to go home.’

‘Don’t count your chickens.’ Mon keeps the smile, but she’s hesitant. Less convinced than I am. I pierce my egg: a double-yolker, yellow dripping from my fork. ‘I just don’t think they’ll give this up that easily.’ She looks at me. Her head tilts in commiseration. ‘How you doing?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Snipes, I mean. It’s hard …’

‘I was there. I know.’

‘Look: I’m bad at this stuff,’ she says, ‘I’m so fucking clumsy. Look, I’m sorry, that’s what I’m saying. You want to talk, I’m here. I love you, that’s what I’m saying, and if you need me—’

‘I know,’ I say. A smile of thanks; of feelings reciprocated.

From the other side of the mess hall, I hear Berry and Cohen and Gibson eating, talking. Cohen quiet, quieter than usual certainly; Berry and Gibson being dicks, their usual asshole selves. Not giving a shit about the noise they’re making, or how anybody else is feeling. Snipes died last night, and they don’t care.

I feel less about it than I should. Shock, I suppose; or, maybe, I just didn’t know him that well. Maybe it’s just not the sort of thing that sinks in too hard when you’re only a week – less – into knowing somebody.

Mon clocks me looking over at them, my side-glance.

‘Cohen?’

‘He hasn’t said anything. But he will, he’s a prick.’

‘That he is.’ Her hand creeps to mine. ‘He tried anything?’

‘No. No.’ I side-glance again: Berry laughing at some shitty joke Gibson’s made. Cohen quietly to one side of them, as if he’s overseeing the whole thing.

I really hate them.

The egg is disgusting. I nudge it to one side, but can’t face the rest of the meal anyway. My stomach turns. Being up here, it’s hard on every part of your body. The actual physical being here, it’s not normal. We are not meant to be here, that’s the crux. This isn’t natural, so why should our bodies accept it? ‘What’s today like for you, assuming we’re not just packing our bags? Cross fingers, let’s pray.’ My face grins, and I feel the muscles stretch. Tighten.

‘Well.’ She stretches her Ls, a cartoon drumroll. ‘Hyvönen broke his arm.’ I laugh at that, a spit of sound from my mouth, and she covers her mouth as she laughs as well. ‘No, no,’ she says, ‘he fell down, right after he saw the Anomaly, apparently. It wasn’t funny.’

‘It’s a little funny,’ I say.

‘He’s old.’

‘Too old to be up here,’ I say. ‘And he’s been up here too long.’

‘So bloody long,’ Mon says. ‘His bones are fragile as anything I’ve ever seen. Breathe on them too hard and they’ll turn to dust. So today I’ll have a fight on my hands. He’ll need injecting to seal it. Maybe nanites. He’s resistant, you know that.’

‘At least if he gets handsy you can snap him like a twig.’

‘God, twigs. Remember trees?’

‘Remember soil?’

‘Remember air?’

We laugh, both of us. A joke we make a lot. We’ve been up here together a couple of months, that’s all. Amazing how bonded you can become, in that time.

‘Are you scared?’ I ask her.

She nods. ‘I’m fucking petrified.’

‘What happens if it leaps again?’

‘It hasn’t before. Chances are it won’t again.’ She shrugs. ‘That’s a doctor’s opinion. It’s not a pattern until it happens twice.’

‘Jesus,’ I say, ‘you’re so nonchalant. How can you be this laid back?’

‘I have a relaxed disposition,’ she replies, ‘that’s what my lecturers always used to say. Makes for a good surgeon. It’ll be fine. We have to believe it. They’ll get us off this thing, take us down there.’

‘But it’s still coming,’ I say.

‘Yes,’ she replies, ‘it is.’ She stands up, her plate empty. ‘I should make a start, prep the room for Hyvönen’s op. If you need to talk, about Snipes, or anything …’ Her voice trails. I nod. I know, I know. ‘You okay if I leave you alone now?’ she asks, and I nod again, it’s fine.

But as she’s leaving, I ask her: ‘Do you think Snipes’ death had anything to do with this? With it … moving?

‘No,’ she says.

I watch her as she leaves, as she walks straight past the window, straight past the Anomaly. As it doesn’t seem to faze her; and I wish I was more like her, sometimes. Able to leave things; to move on.

I eat the muffin with my fingers because it’s impossible to cut with the ridiculous plastic knives we’re forced to use. As if there’s any need for anything sharper – anything that could be construed as a weapon – up here. If we wanted to mutiny, we’d mutiny. If we wanted to kill ourselves, we’d find a way.

I think of Snipes. I don’t not think of Snipes.

I should be more broken by it, I know, but grief is strange; and time here is stranger. It hasn’t hit me, I know. It won’t until I’m not here, probably. Until I’m somewhere else, and this is the past, and Snipes is the past as well.

He is the present, still, somehow; there, but not.

A buzz comes through, on my comm. An instruction sent to everybody, from Hyvönen; but written by Sian, his assistant. Her tone, her timbre. Clipped to the point of abrupt.

We are not to go outside any more. No suits, no walks, no unnecessary outings. Only if it’s mission critical will we be allowed. We have to seek permission.

Disappointing: because that suggests that there’s still a mission to be critical for.

Only when Hyvönen has something that he needs us all to do does he issue specific instructions.

So I leave. I stand in the hallway, and I stare at the darkness.

To think that we are suddenly so close to darkness, so close to death, to the unknowable. To chaos, and to disorder. To this thing that was so ambiguous for so very long, a something that existed millions and millions of miles away from us; and maybe for millions of years, maybe.

But now, it’s here.

We’ve seen it this close before, on fly-bys, through the drone footage that Desh and I worked out when we first got up here. I built the new drones from units meant to be flown on a tether, used for station maintenance. I had painted the fronts of them yellow, like little beaks; and so we christened them Huey, Dewey and Louie. From some old cartoon, or some old movie. Desh chose the names. He flashed their firmware with an update to their sound files, so that they quacked when they were given instructions. We got video as they approached the Anomaly, perfect clarity on its darkness.

Hyvönen was pleased, because he saw them as an opportunity. A way to send living subjects – mice, rats, a new generation’s Laika if he could lay his hands on it – into the Anomaly. Nothing had gone in and come back alive, and he wanted us to test the limits of the thing.

The mice died, of course. Hyvönen didn’t even seen disappointed. Instead, he told us to send more out there, so we did; watching them drift off into that deep, inky darkness, as matte and dull as anything you can imagine.

Before I came up here, I would lie in the garden with Theo, and we would watch the stars. He said, ‘There’s a hole in the sky,’ and I told him that it was not that simple. There was more to it than that. He asked what it was, then, and I said that it was an Anomaly. That is the only word that we have for it. Something that we cannot explain; beyond that word itself.

This was how I explained to him what it was that I did. I would say, I am helping to create something that will go into that thing, that will try to stop it. I’m writing code, like a language, to allow the ship we’re going to send in to work better.

He didn’t understand the words – oh my God, he was too young for the words, or the meanings behind them – but he liked looking at the stars with me. He liked when I drew the shapes of the constellations for him, and when I told him what they were. What they meant, if you believed in superstitions. But then there was that dark mass in the sky with nothing inside it, and nothing past it; and when he asked about it, I didn’t have answers for him.

I like explanations. I need them. I understand exactly how this place works. I understand the life support systems, the air filtration equipment, because it’s the same as the ones that I used to fit on SC3s, back on Earth. I understand the centrifuge, which we basically co-opted from the Russians. I was on the adaptation team, ensuring maximum efficiency, keeping our gravity as constant and consistent as possible. I understand how all of the station works, even if only on a theoretical level – there are parts I am not allowed to touch, aspects of the station that Desh or Cohen or Sian have control over, but I have still tried to understand them. Eventually, I am who people turn to in order to fix problems. Even if those problems are on a software level – some of the software here is cheap and nasty, hacked together, much to Desh’s chagrin – it’s easier to ask somebody to fix the hardware than the soft.

Eight of us up here; eight people who have so much resting on them.

And the pressure’s multiplied so quickly. Yesterday, we were years from the necessity of understanding it, or stopping it, or something. And now, today? Today, we’re days away, at best. The Anomaly is headed to Earth, it is coming, and we still understand so little about it.

I like to think, if the Anomaly manages to reach us, or them, however I think of it, that we will change the way that we live. We will adapt. When they can study it, maybe that’s when we work out how to counteract it, and stop it happening. I don’t know. We adapted to the heat, when it set in; to the seas, when they rose. We’ve adapted to the oxygen generators that blot the landscapes, to the ravaged ecosystems, to the cities we were forced to abandon in the wake of the microclimates we had no chance of controlling. We adapt every time some new virus gets unleashed, and we’re terrified about attacks for a few hours; and then some scientist somewhere makes an antidote and it’s released into the water supply and the air filters, the code for it copied the world over, protection immediate and widespread.

Until we know otherwise, we’re safe.

That’s what I tell myself, at least.

The donut is quiet. I don’t know what I want, really – do any of us? In a crisis, can any of us truly know what we want, need, even require? And if the Anomaly leaping towards us doesn’t constitute a crisis, what truly does? – but I don’t want silence. I want the buzz of people working. Mon is preparing for Hyvönen’s arm surgery. Desh is doing whatever coders do to pass their own concept of time. The clique are being assholes somewhere, I’m sure, passing time instead of actually doing work, even if we don’t quite know what work should look like right now.

I want a message. A joke: Hyvönen thinks of himself as a god, and I suspect that even he would admit it. Mon and I use that. Instructions like pennies from Hyvönen, a bad pun that we love, because it’s something.

But it’s so quiet. I stand alone at the window and I watch the darkness. This massive object that isn’t an object at all; a presence with no presence. The Anomaly: alien, impossible to comprehend. Something that we don’t understand, and that we never will. We never thought it could happen, that’s the insane thing. That’s the truth of every change in our lives: terror attacks and pandemics and personal tragedies, we try to keep them from ourselves until they’re relevant. If we stopped and contemplated our own ends too much, we would go insane.

Why don’t I like being out here? Part of me feels selfish, to think of the people who would murder for this opportunity. But they aren’t here, and they can’t see this. The Anomaly, looming, coming into focus; or we are, we are moving towards it. It has no orbit: it simply sits, taking up space.

Soon we’ll be past it, and it won’t be there to see any more, until we swing back around.

I put my hand to the glass, as if this is some romantic movie; a loved one on the other side of the glass, about to spiral out of control.

Snipes’ hand on the airlock window.

He wasn’t my loved one; he was barely mine at all.

The Anomaly: that is all I can see. Whatever is behind its wall, its border, that’s the loved one. The nothingness, I suppose.

The lights flicker. Cycle. Off, click, click, off one by one. The donut plunged into darkness. The thrumming of the centrifuge beneath my feet; the vibration of the station through the glass. We say that it’s still, it’s never still.

The station creaks.

Metal on metal; bolted together segments of every piece of this place, still settling.

A new house settles, they say. The floorboards settle, the roof settles, the windows settle. When Xavier and I moved, so I could be close to my training, the house was doing nothing but settling for so long.

‘Did you hear that?’ I would ask, and he would shake his head.

‘You would hear creaks in the twigs of newly built nests,’ he said.

But I heard settling: like footsteps, softly treading, feet that didn’t exist on floorboards that had been there for years; years that, for some reason, were not quite enough.

The creaking under me now, and from the windows. In the darkness, it feels as if it’s the walls closing in. Tighter, tighter; and the space is already small enough, even though I am not claustrophobic, and I am not afraid of the dark. Still: creaking, and then thumping—

And out of the window, a glance, and I see something staring at me, something—

My face. The lights flickering, and the reflection of my own face, against that dark mass. I stare at the reflection – back at the reflection – as it catches me off-guard. A moment, caught in it—

Something thumps into the glass. A hand, I think, fingers splayed, pressed to the window; not a reflection, but another me, out there, a device in a horror movie, to scare, to intimidate, to signal an ending—

But it’s not a hand, it’s detritus. Orbital debris. It’s a piece of clothing: a glove, floating out here. Accidentally flushed, or …

Or it’s Snipes’. His glove, drifting loose, free.

It sticks to the window briefly, then the sensors puff it away, as they’re designed to do. To keep the windows clean, and clear, and perfectly transparent.

I am afraid of being here, because everything now is about being afraid. The lights come on, one by one, around the donut; and I follow them, because it’s better there.

Even though it’s just as quiet, there’s somehow less silence.

2

Here is the story of humanity’s relationship with space, with the stars, with the Anomaly.

We began by staring up at the nothingness, at the twinkles in it, the light we could see, and we assumed that it was gods; that it was incomprehensible. Before we knew what the sun was, before we understood the concepts of stars and red dwarfs, we assumed deities and demons. We assumed that our mortality meant that this thing – a life giver, which aided crops, which gave us light before we could even do that for ourselves – was something more incredible than we could comprehend.

We worshipped it, and we were probably right to.

Eventually, of course, we told ourselves that we did not want to be complacent about our knowledge of what was above us. We began to fathom what it was, and how it worked. Maybe we lay there, counting stars, watching the brighter ones move around us. Trying to understand. That was before we started to destroy the sky, as well. Maybe it’s natural to wonder how clear the sky might have been, maybe; and if, with that crystal clarity, we could actually see everything. We came from millennia of not understanding this space above us, and then we charted it and plotted it and built telescopes, and suddenly we knew it all. We argued about our place in it, whether we rotated or were rotated around, depending on our arrogance; and we argued about what it would be like out in it, if we could breathe, if we could hear. We didn’t understand, and yet we told ourselves that we did.

We sent up satellites, probes, ships. We landed – first on the moon, then more recently on Mars – and we told ourselves that to do it once was a demonstration of humanity’s greatest skills: of exploring, yes; but underneath that, of course, was conquering, was might and majesty.

This is what we do. We move to where we are not.

Enter, then: the Anomaly. For so long lower case, until we didn’t have a better name for it. Something is anomalous until it isn’t; we have never defined it better. The Hyvönen Anomaly, technically, that’s how we designated it, after it started life as a number that meant nothing, a code, in research files and secret emails. But the Hyvönen Anomaly is likely how history will remember it. He tries to speak of it now with his name removed from the noun, to keep himself apart from it; as if it might sully his good name. It’s a piece of space that we cannot understand, that exists but only barely, dense and unreadable. It’s a semi-permeable membrane that, when crossed into, cannot be left.

Inside it, we know – and all we know – is death.

And it’s coming for us.

I feel a constant need to check the fixtures and fittings of the station, the smallest aspects that somehow hold it together. I spend much of the day on the windows, checking the sealant, to make sure that the creaking wasn’t important. Pressing my thumb to the edges of the glass, to feel for the cold. The way it works, the multiple layers of glass, it would get cold if there was a leak.

Colder, rather; it’s always cold.

From behind, I hear the low growl of Hyvönen’s resting voice: a constant hum, almost, from his throat, as if he is in a state of perpetual disagreement. He’s not built for being up here any more. He shuffles past me, accompanied by Sian. He doesn’t look at me; doesn’t look at the window, at the Anomaly. Arm tight in a sling. Doesn’t wait, just barges – as much as he can do such a thing – into the medical bay, one of the rooms off the donut, and the door shuts behind him.

The glass around the medical bay usually dims when there’s something going on inside it, but it hasn’t, not now, for some reason – probably Mon leaving it clear, knowing that I will want to see this. It’s evidence of his fallibility. I watch as Mon tweaks his arm, as she works with her machines to examine the fracture, to try and reset the bone. The pincers run up and around his limb, whirling, spinning, heating and cooling, fixing the bone with their gels and clays.

This version of him isn’t what they sold to us before we came up here. It’s not even close to how he’s presented to the world. The agency uses promotional photographs from thirty or so years ago, back when he still had his birthmark across his face; when that was what distinguished him from his brother. That was when the whole space programme was his, and he was a marvel. The man who brought back wonder to the masses. They kick-started a new space age, in theory: one that was less about discovery of our solar system, less about exploration, more about understanding. Exploration was how the Anomaly was found; investigation was how, in theory, we would understand it. The mission failed, the ship lost – just like every ship – but there was nobody else willing to step up. He kept his position, presenting himself as a costume-party fantasy of a bygone age’s space-race: thin-tie suit and slicked-back hair, horn-rimmed glasses and tumbler of whisky. He spoke to the world, a self-proclaimed genius, and he apologized.

This isn’t over, he said. I won’t stop until we understand what we are dealing with.

He didn’t stop, in fairness to him. Except, now, he’s his own greyed-out shadow. His hair thinned to the point of near non-existence, somehow both swept and pasted across his scalp. His bones deteriorating from age, from trip after trip up here during the construction phase, from the traumas he’s put them through; bones so damaged that his entire self is a patch-job, nanites in place of Band-Aids, tying him together. But his decay is more than just hips and ankles: dementia has set in. We all know it, even though it’s not public yet. He needs daily treatments. When we first came up here, Desh told me that there’s a MemoRain in Hyvönen’s office, that he’s on a regular regeneration cycle: his memories put back into his brain, slides inserted back into an antique projector after an accident, fingers crossed that the images are still tenable.

I have asked Mon, and she says that she can’t talk about his medical files. From the way she says it, I know that it’s true. But I get it: people are more inclined to question their leaders if they are known to be failing.

Once, Hyvönen had the keys to the kingdom, that’s the thing, and he sent up a ship, with his brother on it, and it went into the Anomaly. Of course, it never came back. That’s how these stories always end: you send something into the unknown, and it becomes the unknown itself. It was a loss that Hyvönen took ownership of; because he stayed, and his brother went.

Not that he shows his pain, of course. Nobody talks about the tragedy of the eternally lost Mirakel Hyvönen any more. It’s just not the done thing.

In the medical bay, Hyvönen – our Hyvönen, Tomas – barks at Mon as she slides the apparatus from his arm. Some part of it scratches his skin, and he snaps, in pain and rage, his ire aimed squarely at Mon. A scratch, little more, and it bleeds, yes, thick bright blood, but still; it’s only a scratch.

I watch as Sian tries to calm him. She puts her hand on his shoulder, and she apologizes on his behalf. I’m assuming it’s an apology, but it’s not like her face actually shows anything resembling emotion when she says it. She’s cold, emotionally, which I think probably makes her good at her job.

He’s a lot to deal with.

Mon unseals a large box in the corner, pulls out a canister. Nanites. I’ve seen them before, down on Earth, when one of the people in training was crushed under an old SC3 craft. It fell from its anchor at the back end, fin slamming into the guy’s leg, nearly taking it off. They put nanites onto the damage, and they sealed it, rebuilt it. Not permanent, but good enough to hold him until they could get him to a proper surgeon, until he could get a perfect reprint fitted.

Mon opens the canister, takes out a tranche of the nanites. They’re in small liquid pouches, sealed off and protected, kept in cold storage to prevent them activating. She draws some into a syringe and injects them into Hyvönen’s forearm. It’s blackened and bruised, the angle of the bone wrong; and he winces at the needle, at the pressure of the nanites entering his flesh. As soon as they hit the warmth of the body, they start to work. This would be miraculous, if miracles weren’t something we just invented ourselves, something we dreamed of and then made happen. Under his skin, the nanites slither, shimmering through like a light held beneath a bedsheet; and they find their target, and they mend it. They can fix almost anything, that’s the most astonishing thing about them. There’s a half-life, sure, before they stop being efficient, but if you need to patch a metaphorical tyre, they’re the ideal.

Hyvönen stands up. He adjusts himself, moves his arm; stiffly at first, and then with greater range of movement. The whole thing looks immediately better: the colour returning to normal, and the skin less loose, as if it’s been plucked and pulled back, stretched around his old bones. A nip and a tuck and he’s good as new; as old, rather.

He does this strange little bow, to Mon, and to the equipment, and then turns and leaves the room. He tries to stride his way out of his shuffling, leading to a juddering as if there are frames missing from my vision. Sian lets him through the door first. He carries himself as somebody twenty years older than he is. Held forward, stooped and crooked, and he glances from the corners of his wet eyes at everything and everybody. He sees me, standing by the window.

‘You,’ he says. Raises his hand; points. Confusion, as if he’s partway between recognizing me and not. This is par for the course with him. He is not all here, not all the time. Wait for the parsing. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘I shouldn’t have been staring. I heard about your arm, sir.’ We treat him like military, even though he’s definitely not. His space station, his rules. ‘I hope it’s feeling better.’

‘You shouldn’t be here; what are you doing here?’ he asks, again.

‘We should go,’ Sian says, to both him and me. She leads him down the corridor, around the donut, away from the labs; and I am, again, alone.

Saying goodbye to Theo when I came up here was the hardest thing that I have ever done. Of course it was. Xavier didn’t even want to let me bring him to the launch, but I told him that it was important to me: that Theo see me leave, and understand absolutely that I was coming back. I spoke to Xavier’s mother, because we still had a perfectly reasonable relationship – I suspect, if pushed, she even agreed that her son was a poor example of a human being – and I told her what he was doing. I said, ‘I’m trying to do something to help us all, and Xavier is being a fucking child.’

‘Yes, well: children are wont to do as they will,’ she said, wiping her hands of it; but then Xavier called me the very next day and told me that he had changed his mind. He was going to fly Theo to Florida, so that I could see him and say my goodbyes. I didn’t like that conversation, because he said it all with such an air of finality, as if he assumed that I wouldn’t be returning home at the other end. He stood there when I held Theo, not giving me any time alone with him. He waited there for the whole conversation, standing in the corner by a window, like a fucking wraith. We were in one of the beige holding rooms in the launch facility, and we ate the sandwiches that were prepared for us – tuna fish and salad, and I can still taste them, that’s how strong that memory is – and I remember thinking that it was so strange: that this would be the last real food I would eat for the next few months, probably.

I didn’t think that it would be the last time I held Theo for that time, because I could only smell those sandwiches, even as I tried to breathe in his hair. It was only afterwards that I realized that Theo had changed his shampoo; or, Xavier had changed it for him. My son’s scent, suddenly different. The memory of his smell fading almost completely in that sensory overwhelm.

I asked Xavier to let Theo stay with me that final night and he denied me. He said that I was too busy, his tone snide. Too stressed, and he said it in that pointed way he tended to say everything when he wanted to refer to my health issues. And it’s a Tuesday, he said. That’s what the custody battle was about: my job, my role in all of this, and how much attention I could – or couldn’t – give to my own son. Xavier made me out to be a bad person, somebody who would ignore their family because of their work at best, or neglect at worst; somebody with issues in their past that would intrude, even after I had them redacted from the conversation, stricken from the record. The past was the past, and I didn’t even believe it in the way that Xavier did.

Lies, between us; bitterness and lies.

But the court agreed with him. I told them that I could handle both aspects of my life, but they only looked at me with pity. Of course I couldn’t.

Poor, poor Allanah: with her history, and her mind, and her ways.

The judge said that maybe it was best, until the Anomaly was sorted out, as if it was a minor discrepancy, and until I was willing to devote time to him – telling me that I was a bad mother, if not in so many words – that my boy lived with Xavier. That’s what he told me.

When I handed Theo back in the waiting room – we hoisted him between us, as if he was still a toddler, unwilling to admit to the passing of time, the growing of his body – I told Xavier to take care of him.

‘I won’t need to,’ he said. ‘The knot will do that, in the end.’

That was the first time he used the phrase to me directly. I knew he was obsessed, I knew he was going to the meetings, to what they called the sermons, but he hadn’t told me himself. And then he tried to give me something: one of his necklaces. Homemade. A crucifix, wrapped in its own chain. Strangled, the metal twisted and gnarled, then fastened in on itself. He pushed it into my palm. ‘You have to go,’ he said, ‘but maybe you’ll see this better on the other side. Maybe, when this is all done, you’ll see that we were being provided for all along.’

Then we boarded the SC3 that brought me up here. Back then, they were coming up to the station every couple of weeks with people and supplies. And I remember lying back in my chair, strapped in like this was any other test flight or simulator, and thinking that this didn’t need to be the way that it was.

Before the door shut, I saw Theo there, or I’m sure that I saw him. I think I saw him. His little head of jet-black hair, a target to concentrate on, a dark spot in my vision. I’m sure that it was him, so I waved to him, and he waved back.

Everybody was waving.

That was a memory that we both needed to have.

Time is strange here. It can be lost. You are working on something, sitting in the quiet, the cold, and you shut your eyes, and suddenly … Bang. Time has passed, and you’ve slept, or it feels as if you have, and you’re still cold and yet nothing at all has changed. I was sitting, and then my eyes were shut, tired, my head doing the ache it does, all the way down my spine. Imagining something that won’t happen: drifting out there, lost. Spiralling away from the station, nothing to cling to, towards the Anomaly as it waits to swallow me whole. Gasping in air, and feeling my chest tighten—

Then, thump, thump, the pumping of an artificial heart that powers this entire station, suddenly intruding into the peace. And I’m back, I’m here, right where I was. My head hurts, and my mouth hurts. Xavier always used to tell me that I ground my teeth, at the back. That he could hear it while I slept. He used to say that I had an underbite when I slept, because my mouth was forcing the teeth together so much.

I must have fallen asleep. I meant to sit, for a moment, but again, that sort of thing happens. The boredom; the stasis.

The air.

Xavier would say, ‘You’re like a pug when you sleep; like one of those ugly little dogs, their faces squashed up, their breathing fucked, as if they’re on the verge of stopping at any moment.’ And my chest: the ache is real, even if the reason isn’t. The air up here is thin. Balanced, supposedly, but I’ve seen the oxygen processors – I helped install them, I help maintain them – and it’s in favour of energy preservation over health.

I rinse my mouth out. I read through the jobs I was meant to be doing this week, and I try to think about their mundanity; as I’m sure they’ll all get abandoned. Nothing like the urgency of a massive fuckknowswhatitis in space to really screw with your schedule.

I smile at that, and my wrist buzzes; and for a moment, I’m taken aback, as though somebody overheard my thoughts. Don’t laugh at the Anomaly. It’s all-powerful, all-terrible.

But I’m wrong. The buzz is a summons: Dr Hyvönen wants to see me.

His quarters are enormous. They take up what was to have been the New Europe wing of the station, before they were forced to pull out over funding issues; and before the United Nations Space Agency became a thing, took this whole operation over. This was shiniest part of the station, still waiting to be unwrapped when the UN collapsed and sold it to private investors as the Anomaly got closer. So it fell to Hyvönen to finish it himself. He made it happen.

He bought the house, he chooses which bedroom he gets.

I have never been in his quarters before, though. Pretty much none of us has, because there’s never been a reason to. Only person aside from him who spends any time here is Sian. Best I can tell, working as his assistant means standing around and staring when anybody tries to move the good doctor off-track, but if that’s how she makes her living, who am I to argue? I don’t imagine many people have security access, anyway. Desh will, most likely; and, actually, probably Mon. In case Hyvönen needs her in an emergency.

But I merely build; I assemble. Compared to them, I am persona non grata.

As I walk towards it, I cycle through the reasons he could want me. His air supply. His hyperbarics. His coffee machine. So many things could need repairing.

His Earl Grey is too hot, maybe; his bath is running too cold.

These are the things I went to six years of university for, I think. To help build a spacecraft, a space station; to ultimately fix a toaster with a dodgy element.

The doors are already open, Sian waiting in the doorway for me. ‘You took your time,’ she says. She’s twenty-something, and tiny. Terrifyingly thin, but not like she’s sick – a different kind of thin to the old man – and her hair is clipped army-tight. Everything about her feels as if it’s rejecting trappings or bullshit, and I respect that. ‘He’s been waiting.’

She doesn’t bother listening for an excuse. Instead, she turns and walks off with an almost supernatural calm. Her body barely moves. An invisible book on her head that never falls, a control I can’t quite understand; until I am in the room itself, that is. The gravity is slightly different here. It’s looser, somehow. Only a little, but enough to cause a lift in your belly. Like mild indigestion. Immediately you have to adjust, to reconfigure yourself to deal with it. Must be for his benefit; to help him with his body.

Up here, we’ve become used to feeling enclosed and capsuled. We’ve accepted everything being built into the walls, the plastic of the floor being the same as the plastic of the beds, the rooms themselves moulded and joined and fastened down. Hyvönen’s room is different, though. How long has it been since I have seen somewhere that didn’t look as if it were torn from some bullshit-futuristic science fiction movie? There is actual furniture in here, and there are real books on the shelves. I recognize some of this, some of the items; they must all be classic pieces, things that are so well known they’re almost ingrained into our cultural consciousness of furniture and knick-knacks. There is a chair and matching footstool, in this rich leather that I know is real without even having to touch it, making it either a genuine antique or illegal. There is a globe here that, I know without examining it, is a drinks cabinet. And, more than that, I know that it will hold real bottles, not the paper cartons that our scant supply of alcohol comes in. Even that makes me jealous. And I wonder: why have a globe, when the real thing is there, out of a window, on a rotation for us; visible exactly like this, but with more majesty. And sure, more yellow, less green than the representation; but still. His clothes, his belongings, all affectation. The old books, leather-bound, missing protective dust jackets; audio on old wax vinyl, lined up in shelves that fit them perfectly; and video cassettes, a format that nobody has used in nearly a century now. Tapes that degrade, that need maintenance. Flawed, but original, which I suppose is the point.

Through, past this detritus, is another room. Here sits Hyvönen, his shirt off, his skin sagging and pale. There is a device on his head, a slim crown of plastic and wires, the cable from it leading to something in the corner. A big black box that takes up much of the wall. There’s a thick whirring that comes through the air; a grinding, almost. That’s how loud it is. This, I know, is a MemoRain, even though it’s the first I’ve seen outside a museum. They were withdrawn, their use made illegal, in favour of chemical treatments – so much neater, if not quite as efficient; and there were nightmare stories before they were withdrawn, about people being left vacant by the treatments, bodies with no functioning minds. And yet, he’s got one of the very same machines: memories recorded to hard drives, backed up, restorable.

I suppose that, when you’ve got Hyvönen’s money, the legality of any possession, any medical procedure, ceases to be a problem.

It makes me wonder how bad his memory actually is; if he’s being repaired to keep himself presentable – or, even, just functioning – how often does it happen?

And the fact that I am allowed to see this, that’s a fundamental shift in everything I’ve known. Why? Why me, why now? Is it out in the open?

How often does he actually collapse?

He sees me, and he smiles. A stark contrast to his earlier confusion.

He pulls the crown from his head and he picks up his shirt from behind him. His arms into the sleeves – his broken arm back to full strength already, apparently. I wonder if his restoration makes him forget he even hurt it in the first place; if whatever backup of his mind he’s running on was made before he even broke it.

He buttons the shirt while I wait, then puts a tie on. Sian stands by, to help him if he needs it; and then she reaches for him as he starts to walk towards me, but he flicks her arm away, not looking at her.

‘Miss Becker,’ he says, and he holds out his hand, as if we haven’t met before. But we have. He interviewed me over a screen; he okayed my being here. And while we have not been close workmates, I have been here, as has he. It’s likely his treatments, I think. Maybe they leave him more vague than he would otherwise have been. I wonder how much is lost to him before it’s restored. ‘Thank you for responding so swiftly to my request.’

‘I wasn’t aware I could turn it down.’

He smiles. ‘You’re quick. I like quick, Miss Becker.’ The door closes behind him, the sound of the memory machine dying away. I notice that it’s been replaced by music in here: something from the pale end of the last century, some guitar music that I vaguely know from before, back when I was a kid.

‘Everybody calls me Ali,’ I say. ‘Allanah.’

‘Sometimes I prefer the formal. Easier to remember who I am dealing with. My name is Tomas, but I think you already know that. Would you like a drink?’ He doesn’t give me a chance to answer. ‘I don’t like to drink alone. They say that’s when you know you have a problem: when you can’t persuade somebody else to join you, and yet you drink anyway.’ He smiles, walks to the globe and opens it – I was right, the cliché, and I spy the heads of a few bottles, metal caps and off-orange corks – and pulls a bottle out. ‘Just a little one.’

‘I prefer a clear head,’ I say. We talk in English. Everybody talks in English, even though we probably don’t need to right now. I know Hyvönen lived in Germany for a while, I know he knows the language. But still, English. It’s easier, a mid-point.

‘And you think that this won’t help with clarity? Trust me, I am experienced.’ As with his summons, I wonder if I actually have a choice here. ‘The looseness afforded by alcohol, it’s like lubricant. You understand engines, pistons, so forth?’ I don’t want to be the one to tell him that the piston is long extinct, so I nod. ‘They need oil. This is oil, nothing more.’

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Just a small one.’ A placation.

‘An excellent choice,’ he says. ‘Small means that you can always have more, should you choose to.’ He carries himself so strangely. He’s been in this business for decades now, twenty years spent working towards the launch of the Lära, the first ship he sent up to space, to the Anomaly; then another thirty-five or so building up to this moment here. He pours the liquid into the two glasses – it seems slow, and it doesn’t pour properly, as if it’s threatening to lose its way as it leaves the bottle, towards the small baubles of ice that are somehow already prepared in the glasses – and then passes one to me, before chinking his glass against mine. ‘To the future,’ he says.

‘If there is one,’ I say. He smiles, tickled by that.

‘Ahh, there is always a future. That’s the nature of time, of course. Always moving forward. I suspect it’s the singular immutable thing in existence. Whether, of course, it moves towards the place we wanted, or even behaves the way that we have decreed it behave, well. Those are up for debate.’ He drinks, and I drink; warm, peppery, the hint of a burn softened by the ice. I look around at the room, absently. ‘It’s a good room, isn’t it?’ he asks.

‘It’s very nice,’ I say. ‘I like the furniture.’

‘You wouldn’t believe what it cost to bring it up here. But I argued. I said that if I was going to be here such a long time, I would need creature comforts. We aren’t animals, and how dare they try to treat us as such?’ He picks a box up from the tray beneath the globe. ‘Do you smoke?’

‘No,’ I say. Nobody does, not any more, but he has cigarettes. He opens a delicate metal case, and there they are, trapped beneath a pair of thin elastic bands. They’re quite beautiful, and so delicate. Small white tubes, crisp paper, a sweet smell that reminds me desperately of being a kid, of my uncles on my mother’s side.

He pulls one out. ‘Have you ever tried one?’ he asks.

‘No,’ I reply.

‘You should.’ He puts it between his lips and holds the box out. I shake my head, and he smiles again. ‘Not for everybody, I understand. But my lungs aren’t my own any more. They aren’t even flesh. When the replacements cannot catch cancer, it’s significantly easier to fall to baser desires.’ He lights the cigarette, and the smoke plumes around him. ‘Today is confusing, is it not?’

‘It’s not normal, certainly.’

‘No.’ He smiles. Smoke trickles out from between his teeth. Perfect teeth, regrown in a mouth far too old for such pearly whites. ‘The algorithm failed us. Mathematics, of course, is so rarely wrong, as you know yourself. And yet sometimes … Nature has a plan.’ He stands – easier for him in here than watching him doing it in the medical bay, certainly – and he walks. Not shuffles, lifts his feet. His limp is gone. ‘The Anomaly is too close, now. My hope is that we have time for one last chance, a window that we can’t afford to miss, or to waste.’ He makes an expression that I’m sure he thinks is comforting, but it’s anything but. It reads as sarcastic. There’s a minuscule part of his face that doesn’t move; the top corner of what was once his facial birthmark, before he had it removed. His twin brother, Mira, was identical to him apart from that birthmark. That must be something, I think: to have it removed, and to see a different man looking back at you all of a sudden, how strange that must be. But not a stranger, rather a man that existed; a brother that was lost.

‘So, Miss Becker, I have a question for you. What would you have us do, to try and save ourselves?’ he asks.

He means the people on Earth. We’re implied, but there’s always been this question over us, up here; this knowledge that we might be lost. We pray, and we hope, and we watch – and there’s still a lone SC3 stored here, known as the Raft, primed and ready to take us home should we need it, at a moment’s notice – but this is about Earth. It’s about future generations. Because what happens when the Anomaly reaches those we love? What happens then?

‘We’ve tried everything,’ I say, which isn’t an answer. I’m not sure he really wants one from me. This is so he can tell me about his, that’s all.

‘That is not true,’ he tells me. ‘We have shot at it, and fired missiles at it. But maybe that is not enough?’ He says it knowing that he believes he’s got an ace up his sleeve. He swipes in the air to bring up a console and types something on the keyboard. An image appears, a holo between us. A spaceship. A modified SC4, that’s obvious. It’s been tweaked and changed. Not painted, which is odd to begin with. Strange, to see the raw metal. It’s been plated many times, built up again and again. Bits and protrusions. This is the ship that Snipes was going to pilot, kept down below the station, in storage, with the Raft. I don’t remember it being so banged up when it arrived, so altered. Things always look shinier than they are. ‘I have christened this one Ukonvasara,’ Hyvönen says. ‘I don’t suppose it means anything to you.’ I look again at the ship, closely. It’s another variant on the standard. I’ve helped to build, to tweak, more of these than I care to count.

‘I don’t know the name,’ I say.

‘It’s from mythology,’ he says. ‘Norse. Ukon, stronger than thunder, God himself, carved his axe to strike lightning into the hearts of his foes. It was said that his weapon could stop even death.’ He smiles, as if there’s poetry in that idea; except it reads as smugness. ‘My Ukonvasara is humanity’s axe,’ he says.

‘We’ve tried a nuke already,’ I say.

‘We have. You think that means we shouldn’t try again?’

‘Probably, but we won’t. We’re human, that’s what we do, isn’t it? We keep trying the same thing and hope it somehow starts to stick.’

He grins, this smug glow to him. ‘I think you’re probably right,’ he says, ‘but how fast you were to assume that a weapon needed be violent. Humans are not adaptable, I would say. There’s only one thing we can do, once we have exhausted all other options: sacrifice.’

‘Still with the gods?’ I say, half-joking; but I’m thinking about the pilots who have done that very thing. ‘That’s what Snipes felt,’ I say; and there’s a moment where his name parses in Hyvönen’s brain, where his eyes dull, and I realize he has forgotten.

It was only yesterday, and he’s forgotten it. Because with his restored memory, it’s not there. The glassiness of his eyes betraying the stillness of his face.

‘It was his ship,’ I say. ‘This was his ship. He died,’ I say, the bluntest refresher. A kick-start; and Hyvönen nods, but he’s lying. He sits down on one of the couches, easing himself onto the cushion. Even that act seems to physically hurt him. He moves on; ignores the revelation. Any more would give him away, I suspect. ‘I have come to the conclusion that we will never damage the Anomaly.’ He’s the man who should know. That’s scary, to think of it; that the person who is meant to have the most faith has none at all. ‘For the longest time I have thought about this, because we have tried everything. But, what if there are answers that we cannot understand? What if there are things other than we know?’ Another smile. I imagine, at one point, he was probably quite attractive. I can imagine him as a younger man: persuasive and charming, and so driven to save the world.

‘What do you mean?’ I ask. A video begins, floating in the space between us. He shows me: Ukonvasara, leaving the New International Space Station, and entering the Anomaly. Not exploding, but carrying on, deep into the Anomaly.

It goes on and on and on. ‘What do you know?’ I ask.

‘I know many things,’ he says. ‘My brother, Mirakel, was lost inside there.’ Hyvönen’s lips dry; and he wets them in the most curiously delicate way, a finger to his tongue that he then brushes along them.

‘And so he’s dead,’ I say. It’s callous, but true; and this is a conversation that I can scarcely believe I am having. He’s been out there for decades, and he will have died. No life support, no fuel. It’s finality.

‘Of course. However, I’ve died as well. And I think we all know that death is not necessarily the end.’ He lifts his shirt, and I see what I did not when he was in the other room: a patchwork of scars that cover his torso on one side, across his heart and lungs. ‘For three minutes I had no life signs at all. And yet, here I am, and I am speaking to you.’ He brings up another window. An audio file, waiting to be played. An image next to it, spinning, of a fragment of something metal. Chunky, blocky. Not quite golden age tech, but old.

‘What is that?’

‘Listen, first,’ he says.

He presses play. A crackle of noise fills the room; the sound of the recording’s background, the ambient noise. A voice, so similar to Hyvönen’s. ‘I wish that you were here, brother!’ Exasperation. Desperation.

‘Mirakel?’ I ask, but I know the answer. The voice the same, but with its own lilts, its own trills. The recording continues:

‘You would have loved to have seen this, Tomas. You would have been amazed. All through here, it’s as black and dark as anything you can imagine, and then …’ Crackles, hisses of static; and then, ‘Slivers, brother. Of light, or something like light. There is something here more powerful than we imagined. Inside here, it’s beating, brother. A beating heart. It’s pulsing, with light. With life. I think it’s … It is, it’s alive.’ The static, and then the file ends.

‘When – how – did you get it?’ I ask.

‘It found me,’ he says. ‘Debris leaves the Anomaly. I have had ships in the past trawling the edge, recovering what they can.’

‘Gathering trash.’

‘Very much so. Almost everything that emerges is of no worth. And then, one day, this. A piece of the Lära. The black box, if you like: designed to be found, recovered, examined. This was what we managed to recover from it. We used old tech for it. We both loved the tangible, the physical.’

‘Convenient.’

‘It is.’ He grins. ‘But you mean it sarcastically.’

‘Slightly. Convenient that you sound the same. Convenient that you found it, the chances of this piece finding its way to you—’

‘A million to one. More. A trillion. But still: there’s always a chance.’ He motions towards the sofa. Shuffles, then sits, lowering himself onto the cushion. Sighing, as he does so. ‘It’s strange: you would think that the pain would abate as the broken pieces inside my body are replaced with the artificial. But, alas.’ He shakes his arm. ‘And this, of course. This one will not heal well. The skin is too thin.’

I drag him back to topic. ‘So, you believe him? You think the Anomaly is, what? Alive?’

‘It’s a possibility. Consider our egos: that we assume an alien life form might somehow be similar to ourselves. We assume a bipedal physicality, the construction of devices, of spaceships, of civilizations. We assume that any other life form might have evolved on our plane of existence, alongside us somehow. And yet, our own evolution came from something we call LUCA – the last universal common ancestor. Nothing more than a single-celled organism, really, from which all life on our planet evolved. But that’s only one path. The paths we didn’t take, that birds didn’t take, or lizards: they are infinitesimal. And that’s before you get to creatures that didn’t evolve from the same amoebae as we did. Who is to say that the Anomaly isn’t something evolved? Who’s to say it isn’t the first stage of an evolution? Who, indeed, is even to say it isn’t our own evolution’s ending.’ He nods, as if this makes sense. A theory he’s long had. ‘My brother was many things, but he was not stupid. If he believed that it was alive … Maybe there is stock to be placed in that.’

A life form.

Which would make entering it first contact. Or, something close.

He smiles. ‘There are few enough of us here that we only need the one ship to return to Earth. So Ukonvasara, eminently viable for my desired purposes, is available.’

‘They won’t miss it?’

‘Sometimes things slip through the net.’

‘Like spaceships, sure.’

Nothing shakes the smile. ‘I enjoy sarcastic women, you know. Very much enjoy them. I will share something with you now,’ he says. ‘I have been planning this for a while.’ He says the words slowly, splitting each syllable into its own mouthful. ‘I want to reroute some of our power, our batteries to it. Give it more oomph, shall we say?’

‘More oomph. Another missile. We’ve tried that so many times,’ I say, but he shakes his head.

‘Not a missile, I told you. No, no. We come in peace,’ he says. ‘I want the craft to journey further. Some tweaks, yes, sending signals. But I want to see if we can find what Mirakel found: evidence. And, in doing so, perhaps we can map it a little more, get some idea of how large it is.’

‘We know how large it is.’

‘No! Not at all. We know how large we have guessed, based on curves and algorithms and equations. But maths isn’t everything, you know? Maths is barely anything. Perception is closer to fact, sometimes. It involves less guesswork. You helped to create these wondrous inventions.’ He says it with no small amount of pride, I think; even though we barely know each other, it’s as if he’s taking ownership of this, of me. Responsibility. ‘I am going to need your help for this. We will map it; and we will try to talk with it.’ He sees my face. I don’t know what look I am pulling, but he sees it. ‘Don’t be so alarmed.’ He leans close. Conspiratorial. ‘Maybe we commune with it. Send a message. Something like the golden records on the Voyager probes. Something to afford it knowledge of us, of what we are; and maybe, even, us of it.’

‘It most likely isn’t alive,’ I say. ‘It’s most likely a spatial anomaly, some sort of black hole, or something … I don’t know.’

‘And so: we will discover,’ he says. ‘My brother believed what he saw was alive. Mirakel, rest his soul, believed. He was foolish and childish on occasion, to his detriment, perhaps; but he wasn’t prone to frippery.’ A shrug, that sees Hyvönen’s whole body commit to make it happen. ‘Who am I to deny him his discovery; his moment in the sun.’ Then, quieter: ‘He was as much a scientist as I.’ Tick, tick: his eyes flitting, left to right, right to left, before settling forward; as if he wandered from the path, and has found his way back. ‘But there are factors at play here. For a start, ground control—’ He says the words as if they’re evil, the final boss in a video game. ‘They locked the craft to a single purpose. Barely a journey at all.’ Once, I know, he was in charge. But investors and boards and chains of command mean he’s a figurehead now, really. Little more. ‘There are restraints on the craft. Manual restraints, yes?’

‘Most likely,’ I say. ‘And software, working together.’

‘So, you will help Desh remove them. I want ground control to have – ha! – no control; and yet they cannot know that, not until the last moment, not until the craft is inside the Anomaly, the station quiet, the crew returning home. And then: you will make further alterations, which I will explain as and when.’ He turns. A grandfather clock behind him: the pendulum swinging, the hypnotic brass of a cheap magic trick. ‘My parts have a clock. My body has a clock, a timer. I am dying. The effort required to keep me alive …’ He trails off, waves his hand, a circular motion. I think of Theo doing The Wheels on the Bus, round and round, round and round, and on. ‘Such is life. I am dying again, and so.’ But he doesn’t look that sad about it. Just exhausted. He lights another cigarette; I didn’t even notice him finish the first. ‘There are a few long days ahead of us. I am already tired, and I would imagine that you are as well.’ He stops looking at me. Still stares towards me, but his gaze is loose and unfocused.

My cue to leave. I stand, walk to the door, stop. A question, bugging me already. Gnawing at my brain.

The door opens, and I step out; and as I go, he speaks, one last time.

‘You know,’ he says quietly, almost so quiet that I can barely hear him over the ticking of the clock, the whirring of the old technology in his room, the ambient hum of the station itself, ‘I think that maybe we are very much alike indeed.’

The door closes, and his voice is gone.

The Anomaly’s inexorable creep – that’s the phrase that Hyvönen used to describe the movement of it to us in his initial speech – was once so completely predictable. The first time humanity saw it, it was terribly far away. Further than we’d ever gone, and we didn’t understand it, because it was an absence.

We are good – or adequate, maybe, in the scale of things – at defining that which exists. But absences, removals, losses? We have always struggled with those. Like, say, grief. How do you define it? It’s missing something that’s no longer there.

At first, we didn’t know what to think of the Anomaly. Suddenly, this area of absence appeared, and didn’t abate. Nobody knew what caused it. We discussed a big bang, the thought that maybe this might be something that the universe has seen before. Or, maybe it’s something that we – humanity – brought on ourselves, somehow. We have discussed every option, every possible avenue; but it all comes back to that inexorable creep, and the knowledge that it is coming, and that, so far, we have discovered no way of stopping it. There is no end to it; it is a piece of space that isn’t there, and never has been, and never will be.

Then, all of a sudden, it was impossible to miss, and amateur enthusiasts started talking about this thing that they could see through their telescopes and on their hacked satellite feeds; and then, one day, you could simply look up towards the night sky and see a patch where the stars were missing, as if they had been blotted out, where the constellations, as you tried to plot them, had holes bitten out of them. I remember seeing the headlines; and I remember that, on seeing them, eating breakfast in some diner with my friends, we shrugged it off. It was an anomaly, I thought. Lower-case A.

When I first began specializing during my degree course, the Anomaly was hanging over us all. Probably – likely – it was a goal, of sorts. To see it then, it was unthinkably different from only a few years before. Before, space was frippery. Or, that’s how it seemed. I moved for university, to another country, to Florida. My parents followed me; they said, We’re retiring soon, and we want to be near you. Because I think that they could see my life changing, that I wasn’t necessarily heading back to a country without a space programme of any kind. And then, straight out of college I went to work for the United Nations Space Agency. They hired the best, that’s what they told us. We’re only interested if you’re the best of the best. They headhunted me, to code their ships and stations and investigative devices, and I said yes. How could I refuse? It’s a different business than it used to be, that’s what my father said. He was a ship technician, working on the mechanisms that made them fly; as if it was a family trade, passed down from generation to generation.

These things, they always seem to repeat themselves.

We met, we fell in love, we got married. That’s how it’s meant to happen. You meet people at work, you socialize with them, make friendships, get drunk, do the dance. The most traditional of relationships. You begin a thing; you come to understand that you prefer the exclusive company of this person to other people’s company; you begin forging a life together. That life was manifest as Theo, and then Xavier changed, and I got sick – or, he said that I got sick – and that was that. I moved back in with my parents, because I needed the help with Theo. They had always wanted to be there for me, they said. And they got to spend time with Theo. My father bought shorts and a cap and took Theo to Disneyworld, and he said, I’m becoming one of those men, right? And he was, he absolutely was; except, also, he was collapsing. He was sick, dementia of some type that doesn’t have the name of the type you recognize, so you hope it’s not as bad; but, in reality, it was worse. A series of micro-strokes ripping through his brain.

Xavier used that, in court. My mother couldn’t be carer for him and Theo. And I wasn’t there. We put my father in a home to get custody, and still Xavier insisted. He waved medical files around, my medical files. Spoke about them in court.

We, my counsel and I, argued it should be inadmissible. But Xavier spoke to the judge himself. His hand on his chest, Please, you understand. Man to man. And the judge nodded, because of course, of course, I couldn’t be allowed to make that judgement for myself; maybe it should be considered.

Considered; condemned.

The court decided that Theo was mine every other weekend, and the rest of the time I trained. Nothing but training. The Anomaly – Hyvönen’s Anomaly – was coming closer to us. It was a threat, we were told, so they needed us. All hands on deck. All of a sudden they wanted us up there, to fix it. We asked them how we would do that, and they said that they didn’t know. They said, We have to get up there and look at it. We have so many tests we can do now; things that we can affect, readings we can take. I remember being in rooms with scientists who explained nothing, and Hyvönen standing at the back. He was always totally silent, but did that matter? It was him. It was all about him.

That was when we all started capitalizing it. There have been other anomalies in space, and there will be others after this, I am sure, whether we are aware of them or not; but none like this one. This one swallows life, and it is death.

I don’t know how long they managed to keep the truth about the Anomaly a secret from the public for. Years and years. The files are sealed, that period of time has never been made public. Whatever happened to the Ishiguro, whatever really happened, that was a secret. But the Anomaly was constant, moving in a way that meant we had an algorithm. We understood exactly at what point it would reach us. We had five years, nearly six. We had time.

Theo would be nearly in his teens. I understood the rules of engagement. I was up here until my time was served, then I would return home; and I would have time to apply for joint custody, to build my home, to turn everything around.

But now that has changed. The Anomaly has leapt. Days until it reaches here. Weeks until Earth, assuming it doesn’t leap again.

I don’t think it’s hit me yet, because it feels like I should be broken by the revelation. I know, I should be crippled, because it’s unnatural. I can see that, as if I’m on a vantage point. I know it’s wrong, and yet it’s passing me by.

Shock, I have to assume. Maybe that’s the only way to deal with it.

When I get back to my room, Hyvönen’s files on Ukonvasara – blueprints and mission breakdowns and mauve-protected papers full of jargon and hypotheses – are waiting for me. A physical file, left inside my room: the lock evidently nothing to him, or Sian, whoever left the files here. I flick through the papers. They all lie somewhere between insanely over-detailed and utterly insufficient. Dates and timestamps have been deleted. Not even redacted, just simply missing from the documents. As if everything’s been thrown together, approved without anybody caring. The redactions, of which there are a great many, are details: minutiae, that I try to figure out – the puzzle of missing words in otherwise nearly logical sentences, somewhere between crossword and jigsaw puzzle and shape-sorter – but I fail. Handwriting, and not just his. The axis of the letters turned to the unhinged, the frantic and manic.

Do not upload to the systems! written in bold on top of the pages. To keep it private, away from ground control, no doubt. Even though he built it, staffed it, he evidently doesn’t trust them with this. Their smart shirts, their rows of bespectacled pocket-protectored scientists, staring at a 2D screen of our mission: a golden age, recreated to the absolute degree.

A beating heart, Hyvönen said.

Mira Hyvönen, the lost brother, the dead brother.

Thanks to him, thanks to his eternally-repeating black box, I will be aiding Hyvönen in what surely must amount to mutiny.

I wonder if we will be punished when we get back home.

I lie back on my bed, and I try to sleep. Staring at the ceiling of the room, I think of Snipes, of course. Just as I did last night, when I got into bed; and I wondered what might have been. He was an experimental test pilot. If I picture his face, it’s the side of it, the angle I saw as his craft docked; the grit of his jaw as the shuttle trembled; the shutting of his eyes at the hiss of the airlock opening.

Charles-William Snipes, that was his full name, but surname was all, a military man through and through. He was different to the rest of us, because we were there for a period of time, are here for a period of time; and then we would get to go home, to our families.

But Snipes was different because he knew it was a one-way trip for him.

He was a sacrifice.

He was a good pilot. I read his file before he arrived, one of the few actual benefits of having access to the key systems. He was highly decorated, and he had once had a family, but there had been an accident, and he’d lost them. That’s what the programme liked in its pilots: those who had less to lose than others. He had a history of depression since then, and other sickness. Fatal, as it turned out; as if he was cursed, his life somehow meant to be one that didn’t happen for him. All the details redacted, of course. Ailments were secrets, because they could be abused.

That’s human nature: to take advantage, if we are allowed.

Snipes was given a room, away from the rest of us. Ours are all around the donut; his was on the floor above, near the servers. Larger than ours, slightly more plush. Art on the walls, to calm; to aid with focus. A room that felt a little more like it was part of a home.

‘The Imminent Room,’ Mon called it, under her breath.

‘What is that?’ I asked her.

‘That what some prisons call the room where convicts get taken the night before they’re executed. They’re given their last meal, a good night’s sleep, whatever. Time with their family, all that stuff. The Imminent Room, because of … well, what’s imminent, I suppose.’

I showed him to his quarters. He sat on the bed, shifted his weight. Bounced, almost, like you would in a showroom, or a hotel. I said that nobody would disturb him; somebody would come back in the morning, but to call if he needed anything. Call or find one of us, we would all be around.

I was about to leave when he asked me if I was scared of dying.

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘You got kids?’

‘One. A son.’

‘You don’t want to lose him.’

‘No. Of course not.’ I thought of Theo; and how close I had come before, already.

‘What if death is a lie?’ he asked me, then; and I didn’t know how to answer, because of course it wasn’t, or it couldn’t be.

‘How is it a lie?’

‘We dream of heaven, right? Of dying, and then coming back. And everybody we love is there.’

‘It’s a very Christian dream,’ I told him.

‘Fine. Reincarnation, if you’d rather: we come back, again and again. That’s the goal.’

‘For some,’ I said. ‘Still religious though.’

‘So, you think there’s nothing?’ He smiled, this deeply sad smile. ‘When all of this is done, either there’s something or nothing. But it’s not this any more. I don’t want to die. But I’m too afraid to keep living.’

He took his own life, rather than leave his death to the Anomaly; and that makes simply no sense to me. No glory, no attempt; just the cold of his own hand.

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