Meg Elison is a Brooklyn author and essayist. She writes science fiction and horror, as well as feminist essays and cultural criticism. She has been published in McSweeney’s, Slate, Fangoria, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Catapult, and many other places.
Her debut novel, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, won the 2014 Philip K. Dick Award. Her novelette, “The Pill,” won the 2021 Locus Award. She is a Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon Awards finalist. She has been an Otherwise Award honoree twice. Her YA debut, Find Layla, was published in fall 2020 by Skyscape. It was named one of Vanity Fair’s Best 15 Books of 2020.
The Martian day is only thirty-seven minutes longer than the Terran day, but to the designated sleeper every minute feels eternal.
In a journey of two hundred and ten Terran days, Captain Bhatti preferred to sleep no more than half his nights. They would be in transit on his birthday, and he wanted to sleep that night to feel the passage of time, watching the distant blue dot of Earth out the aft porthole window.
“Earth is the clock,” Bhatti said for the thousandth time. “The calendar. It doesn’t even make sense to keep my birthday out here on the road. But today’s the day back home. And my wife sent me my birthday message so that it would reach us on time. And I get to open my present. Who needs a clock, really?”
Mars would just be visible ahead of them at that point on the journey, discernible only from the stars in that it was brighter. Slightly pinkish, Bhatti and Commander Linden were the only repeat travelers who knew it would loom rusty-red in the weeks to come. Dr. Del Campo had been on the road for years, but this was her first run to Mars. Chen, a green junior officer, was on her very first road trip and had gotten a good one out of sheer luck.
And the miracle of miracles was Rori Breyer, the designated sleeper aboard the Koyash. Captain Bhatti would normally sleep nights of exactly seven hours. That had Breyer in her bunk a mere 700 hours of the trip, with 4,340 left for the rest of the crew to fight over.
Linden, the first officer, who had three kids at home on Earth, embarked with plans to sleep the old-fashioned way for the first several weeks. “I’m so fucking tired all the time,” they said to everyone and no one. They instinctively looked around the cockpit of the Koyash to make sure the other crew members were belted in for launch before they fastened their own harness. “If I’m not on duty, I’m in my bunk. Sweet oblivion, open your arms. I welcome the void of space after the last few months. Did I tell you Selma had the stomach flu three weeks ago? I almost didn’t get cleared!”
But Commander Linden had indeed cleared their health screen, though every school-age child is merely a neotenous incubator of disease on twitchy legs. Breyer got sleep orders from them before launch. Linden knew that the luxury of being bagged and strapped into a Velcro cradleboard in zero-G would wear off and that they’d want to be awake to read a few novels they’d brought along. Breyer accepted 500 hours of sleep for Linden, tapping the pad the night before departure without a second thought. That was, after all, Breyer’s only job on the ship.
Maria Del Campo would have taken all of Breyer’s remaining hours if she could, but she knew it would not be fair to their junior officer, Chen. With 3,840 hours left on the clock, Dr. Del Campo’s finger hovered above the slider. “Taking half would be the kindest thing to do,” she said, almost under her breath.
“Half is fine,” Chen said. She was a bright young thing, fresh out of the academy with her black-blue hair tightly buzz-cut and her eyebrow ring so recently removed that Del Campo could see the slightly obscene pinkness of the tiny hole it left behind. She tried not to stare at that.
“But if you take half and I take half, does Breyer ever get to be awake?”
Del Campo frowned. “I guess not, but why does that matter? Breyer’s not a scientist. Not a pilot, not a stellar cartographer. She has no purpose aboard this ship except to sleep. She can’t even read most of the instruments. If we want to keep her bunked up every hour of the trip, we can. That’s the deal she accepted. That’s what all her testing was for, right?”
Del Campo was surprised at herself for making that last a question instead of a statement. I don’t need some lieutenant JG to agree with me. And certainly not about this. Am I that attracted to her?
Chen ran a muscular hand and forearm over her shorn skull, turning her head to the side and setting the cords in her neck out jauntily. Dr. Del Campo had time to think sternocleidomastoid for a split second before there wasn’t enough blood in her brain to run a squirt gun, let alone a medical degree. Then she couldn’t even properly think the word shit, but it was in her soul just the same.
“I guess so, sir. It . . . it just seems awful that someone might go on this whole road trip with us and never really see anything. Does she ever get to see Mars? Does she get to see anything?”
Del Campo shrugged off both the attraction and the question. “She gets to say she’s a member of a Mars mission crew. Full medical testing and physical conditioning. There’s a TENS unit on every major muscle group so she doesn’t get soft. She’s well paid and she’s fine. People used to work down in coal mines, you know.”
Del Campo took 2,840 of the remaining hours, thinking of how glorious it would be to stay awake day after day, never having to worry that she’d miss a crew injury or illness, catching every single phenomenon or message from Earth. She’d get to spend time watching the archival TV she had brought with her. She thought she’d start with Grey’s Anatomy 2040, the doomed reboot that had shot for four seasons on Luna until their hab blew out, killing the entire cast and crew. Knowing that the end was coming gave their youth and beauty a haunted quality; a sense that nothing gold could stay. Plus, it ended on a cliffhanger.
Chen took the pad and saw the remaining 1,000 hours. She bit her lip a little. As a junior officer, she knew she had to grab every possible opportunity to stand out, take on extra work, impress someone like Maria Del Campo, the lieutenant commander who had just looked at her with the naked hunger usually reserved for a plate of pork belly for a second before thinking better of it. Chen thought she might have to fuck Del Campo at some point on this trip. Not to keep her job, just to keep things smooth. They were going to be in space for over a year. Chen was young and hot enough to believe she’d eventually fuck everyone, just out of boredom. Captain Bhatti was married and fastidious, but Chen still believed it would happen. Maybe just once.
“But not Breyer,” Chen said to herself as she tapped the pad. “Because she’s never going to be up for it.” After a moment’s hesitation, her bony finger came down on the slide at 992 hours.
“Take eight,” Chen murmured. “Do something cool with it.”
Chen was awake all that first night, relishing youth and the immediacy of their road trip to Mars.
She passed by Breyer in her tight swaddle, giving the woman a once-over. Breyer was older, but everyone was older than Chen. She had a little tattoo of forget-me-nots on her right wrist, and her face had the look of a person who had seen too much. Chen wondered what kind of life made someone want to hit snooze for a year. Breyer smiled in her slumber, one side of her mouth quirking up and relaxing. Otherwise, the sleeper was serene.
In the window, Mars grew bigger and redder, a copper penny that had seen the inside of too many pockets. Awake for days at a stretch, Captain Bhatti was relentless on telemetry, checking and rechecking, getting relay from Houston and Luna, not yet receiving from Ares Local.
“But that will happen soon,” he said, looking at his digital calendar, which was also not Earth. On his birthday, he passed out adorably in a red satin sleeping cap that he had brought in his scant personal effects.
While he slept, Del Campo gave him the necessary infusions she had tapped from Breyer’s brain and multiplied artificially in the lab. The designated sleeper process was proprietary, and the International Space Agency had paid dearly for it. A few CEOs and heads of state on Earth used it, a handful of celebrities boasted now and again that they could party for weeks and only gently baste their brains to survive. But it was the most rarefied of privileges. Astronauts were by far the biggest market.
DS required a physician to administer, but it stuck in Del Campo’s craw that she had to put up with Linden doing it for her. They were only a psychiatrist. Del Campo strapped herself in and micromanaged the entire process, never able to trust them.
“Intracerebral injection is very delicate,” Del Campo said for the five thousandth time.
“I’m aware,” Linden said, distracted. “You shouldn’t be talking. Really, you shouldn’t be conscious. But I know how you are. Now hold still.”
“You’re sure you’ve located the left lateral ventricle?” Del Campo’s upper lip was sweating. Behind them, Breyer stirred in her sleep.
Linden glanced over their shoulder, making sure that they hadn’t left any equipment where it would touch the sleeper. She looked fine. Just a momentary island of somnambulance, lost to the sea of sleep. They turned back. “You know that I’m a medical doctor, correct? I have studied some anatomy, my dear colleague. Also, I can see your entire brain, clear as crystal, on the HUD right in front of me. Relax, please.”
“You’re a glorified drug dealer and your one and only surgery rotation was over a decade ago,” Del Campo snarled, masking fear with professional disdain. “Forgive me if I’m not filled with confidence.”
For a second, Linden thought about scratching her neck with the tip of the needle, just a little nip to quiet her down. But they didn’t do it, because no matter what the irascible curly-haired ship’s surgeon said, Linden was a doctor and could do no harm. They remembered back in the fifties when the medical colleges had held a debate about whether they should adapt the oath for life off-world. There might be more reasons to do harm than had been dreamed of in the philosophy of Hippocrates. But in the end, tradition had won out. Linden’s steady hand pushed the needle home and gave Del Campo the dose of sleepjuice that would keep her brain fresh and alert for at least thirty days.
When they were done, Del Campo freed herself and did not thank Linden. Linden walked quietly to Breyer’s softly breathing form, looking her face over. “Thank you,” they said softly, barely audible above the rush and run of her CPAP machine. “Thank you from all of us.”
Rori Breyer dreamed. All designated sleepers dreamed, though the company that trademarked the process swore that the sleep was dreamless, and the DS had no sense of the passage of time. Like all professional sleepers, Breyer knew this to be bullshit. The members of her crew who received injections of her custom-made compatible brainjuice into their cerebrospinal fluid would have no dreams. Because she’d had them all. She had traveled to Mars fifteen times, logging thousands of hours on the black road between the wandering stars and placing her among the most accomplished astronauts of her generation. But she had never looked out the ship’s porthole and seen anything other than the inside of Earth’s atmosphere.
The dreaming was constant, though. The dreaming was the real job. Breyer could have told those folks at Liebestraum GmbH that the dreams she had in the deep reaches that make up the fifty-five million kilometers between Earth and Mars were nothing like the dreams she had at home, had they ever once asked. She did not dream of people she knew, or the familiar smells of the sandwich shop she loved to sit in and compose music. She did not have nightmares about running naked through her high school and she did not relive her worst breakups. When she slept in space, on the Koyash or any of the other ships she had served, she had the same dream of a subvocal signal sent over and over, loop without end. A voice that was far away and close enough that the hair on the back of her neck stood up.
Can you hear us? Are you there? We can feel you in the dream.
Breyer tried to answer, but she knew that her voice would not work for this task. She had to use something else. Something her mind showed her as an old-fashioned smartphone like her grandmother had used. A slick square of black glass, with simple touchscreen inputs and quaint features like a music player and a GPS. Breyer hated movies that used creepy antiques like that to instill fear. But she understood. She needed a different voice to speak back to them. But she could never answer. By the time she woke up on Earth, the voice would be gone.
Captain Bhatti knew that he was going to be restless when Mars was close, but it was still too early to prep for landing, so he planned to take one of his sleep days then. He sent a message to Ares Local, logging his downtime.
Linden did not look at Del Campo’s schedule, because they knew that she checked the logs to see if anyone was looking over her shoulder. The scheduling program should have warned one physician not to sleep while the other did; but the program detected that no other essential crew were awake during those hours and so manufactured no alert. Breyer was not considered essential crew.
Del Campo picked a day when she had cramps to sleep, believing that it helped better than the infusion into her CSF as her mother had believed that only fresh lettuce juice would cure a bubbling gut.
Chen didn’t have clearance to view anyone’s schedule but her own.
So it came to pass that one by one, they locked up into their space cradles and fell asleep at almost the same time. There was an overlap of perhaps two hours when Del Campo was firmly out and Chen was just drifting away, the scent of Del Campo lingering on her unwashed hands and making her smile. But everyone was unconscious when the levels dipped low and Breyer woke up.
Disoriented, Breyer unstrapped herself and removed her CPAP mask, pulled off her monitors, and quivered. She floated in the middle of the med deck. She had received zero-G training, but it had been five years since she’d felt this sensation. The cargo bay was cold and silent as she floated, bumping against the ceiling as she headed for the bridge.
“Hello? Captain Ferguson? Oh wait, no. Captain Bhatti? Dr. Del Campo? Sir? Chen?”
No answer. The sound of her own voice bouncing off the tinny walls made her a little giddy.
The bridge was deserted, all systems on autopilot. Breyer watched the lights flash, listened to the hushed beeps.
In the distance ahead, Mars was ruddy and bellicose. Looking across the reach to another world, she felt fright tear through her followed by vertigo. Breyer curled her body around one of the launch chairs, holding on, willing the nausea to pass. With a few deep breaths, so precious after the prolonged respiratory support pressure required for months of sleep, she felt better. Much better.
She pushed off the chair and propelled herself down the length of the ship, away from the point of its nose and back to the crew quarters. She looked each member of the crew in their sleep-crusted faces. Bhatti was a very handsome man, sun-kissed and shaved bald. Del Campo and Chen both had striking bone structure in their cheeks. She remembered walking to the shuttle for launch, how none of them had spoken to her. She had been silent during the preflight check; nobody needed her to confirm anything. She was asleep before the rest of them even saw the curve of the Earth.
I hear you. I am here. I can feel you in the dream. But I don’t feel you now. What do I do?
No answer came.
Breyer hadn’t checked the clock because this had never happened before. She didn’t know how much time she would have before someone woke up. She was supposed to be in her cradle before that happened; their sleep would descend on her and they’d have to position her body. They wouldn’t get her neck right, she just knew it.
Can you hear us? Are you there? We can feel you in the dream.
The image of her grandmother’s phone.
Breyer turned back toward the bridge, moving slowly. Dreamers will tell you they can never run, their every movement slow and sludgy, held captive by the trigeminal motor neurons that keep us paralyzed while we rest. For Breyer, the two states were reversed. In the dream, her heart raced and her mind wheeled. It was a noted side effect for DS in space, but Liebestraum said there was no long-term damage from it and considered the matter settled. Now, as Breyer moved physically about the ship, she felt slow. That dreamy drag was heavy on her.
There wasn’t an antique phone on the bridge, of course. She had been trained only in sending an emergency beacon, not in any other communications protocols. But there was the comms array. And didn’t it look a little like an old glass mobile? Thinner, perhaps, and flexible. But still.
Her hand hovered over it and the device woke up. The option to send a distress call appeared on the screen.
“No,” she said aloud, her voice metallic with disuse. “I’m not in distress.”
With her hand laid on the cold surface, with no idea what to do, Breyer laid her professional sleeper’s head down.
“Won’t work,” she muttered with a thick tongue. “No way.”
But she was so near sleep, so close to that deep waterway still, that the current took her the moment she touched it.
Can you hear us? Are you there? We can feel you in the dream.
For once, Breyer’s hand was not tied to her side. Her palm flexed and pressed down on the comms. Light, red and brilliant as the dawn, spread out across the bridge, coming through every opening at once.
In the dream. The dream is time. Earth is a clock. Mars is a dream.
When Captain Bhatti awoke, he had no idea what had gone wrong. Del Campo and Linden were screaming at one another. Chen was checking and rechecking the inventory. No escape pods were gone, no space suits. The logs showed conclusively that no hatch had been breached since they left Earth. But Rori Breyer was gone without a trace.
They tried to explain it to ISA, but Bhatti got the feeling that they didn’t believe a word he said. They think I airlocked her, he thought miserably. Why would I do that when I need her so?
Bhatti was the first to fall asleep, dejected and done without his infusion. He started to hear the voice in the dream. Then Del Campo, then Chen.
They argued about it as they ate their reconstituted tomato sauce and grape jelly, each compound just another piece of the calendar on Earth. Del Campo refused to believe they were dreaming the same thing.
“Comms is busted, we’re probably picking up some rogue signal. Or fucking Breyer did something to the array before she . . . ”
But even hard-nosed Del Campo couldn’t bring herself to say it.
“We have to log this,” Bhatti said, his voice hollow. Linden nodded, knowing that they would not log this. There was no way to tell this story without making their much-scrutinized journey even more inexplicable to the ISA.
“Has this ever happened before, sir?” Chen looked even younger than she was, the way that a scared child of ten will cling to her mother as she has not done since she was five years old. “Would they even tell us if it had happened before? It’s never happened to any of you before, right?”
Bhatti shook his head. “Breyer had been my DS on three other missions. She’s impeccable, fluids always within parameters.”
“But she had never been awake before,” Chen said. She knew that she was responsible for this. Looking at Del Campo, she could see that the doctor agreed.
Linden watched their interactions, baffled. They had read about group psychosis on deep-space missions, but all the documented cases came from road trips to Titan, nothing as quick as Mars and back. They logged the mental deterioration of the crew, their processing of the mysterious loss of Breyer. They did not mention the dreams. Nor did any other log.
The Koyash was refused dock at Ares Local. A drone resupplied them, but the crew did not go ashore, and they had no contact with the people of the station. Bhatti dented the wall of his quarters when the order came through.
Linden was the last to hear the voice. Linden had taken the smallest number of hours to conceal a problem with sleepwalking. They had read the journal articles about carry-over of sleep disorders to designated sleepers, and they were worried that Breyer would pick it up from them, bringing chaos to the ship. Linden strapped themselves in tight to their cradleboard, but they knew they would eventually get loose. All their life, nothing had held them back from sleepwalking. They dared not ask someone else to strap them in.
One night, on the long ride home with a court-martial awaiting them all, Linden got loose. They bashed their way to the bridge, just as free of intention and as dangerous as a bear in a campground. Their hand touched where Breyer’s hand had been.
I hear you. I feel you in the dream. I’ve been trying to reach you, but I couldn’t get free.
We’ve been waiting. Nights are so long in the dream. So much longer than on Earth.
The Koyash piloted itself all the way back home and executed its landing maneuvers flawlessly. ISA expected to find her crew unconscious or engaged in some form of protest about their coming disciplinary actions.
At 18:31 hours, on the clock that is Earth, the ghost ship swung open its doors. It waited for the very bravest to step inside.