I NEVER WOULD have thought that being hot-housed would turn out to be an advantage. When it became apparent that between us, Dee and I could rapidly acquire the skills and knowledge that Theo would have brought to the team, people stopped shouting and started planning. We had ten days to prepare for launch, and without our experience of drug-assisted assimilation of vast amounts of knowledge, it wouldn’t have been viable.
It wasn’t just factual knowledge we needed to acquire, but also muscle memory. Learning how to move in zero g, albeit only temporarily, was part of the training, along with memorizing the layout of the pod in which we’d leave Earth to dock with Atlas 2, already in orbit.
When she arrived, Dee asked me who’d been bumped out of the program to make room for the two of us, but there was no way to find out and neither of us really wanted to. There wasn’t time to think about the wider implications. Just like when we first met, getting through the intense training program meant our survival, and we spent our energy on that alone. Cocooned in the underground facility built beneath the old farmhouse, for us the outside world ceased to exist days before we left the planet. Gabor, the capsule, the Noropean MoJ and the questions that were no doubt being asked about my phone call to Naal Delaney—all were deliciously irrelevant. Training, sleeping, eating were all that mattered.
Dee is grinning at me. She hasn’t stopped since we climbed into the pod in Texas and strapped in next to each other. “It’s like being in a mersive,” she whispered to me once we’d broken Earth’s gravitational pull. “Only so much scarier!”
As the start of new lives go, this one could have been better. My ribs ache from the vomiting caused by going from too much g to no g and then readjusting to being back in almost one g again. The pod that I had traveled in with Dee, my dad, Travis and a few others from the Circle docked with the main hub. Apparently we’re a lot less likely to die now. I remain unconvinced.
Dee’s sitting on my bed in a cabin, which is exactly the same as the room at the Circle where I read Alejandro’s suicide note. Her cabin is next door but she hasn’t been in it yet, having offered to stay with me until I feel better. Travis’s is on the other side and my dad’s cabin is opposite. The last time I lived in such close proximity to people was during hot-housing. At least the rooms are nicer here and we’re free to leave them whenever we want.
That’s what I keep trying to tell myself but I can’t shake the feeling I’ve taken a step backward. I’m free of Gabor and of any sort of contract—and the relief made me weep—but now I’m trapped in a glorified tin can with thousands of people. One that I can’t leave for twenty years.
“You’re not going to throw up again, are you?” Dee asks. “’Cos I reckon there isn’t anything left inside you.”
I shake my head.
“Want to try eating something?”
The only food is printed. That’s all I’ll eat now. Forever.
I’m retching into the toilet bowl again. Dee comes in and rubs my back. “JeeMuh, Carl. Maybe we should call for a doctor.”
“It’ll pass,” I say, trying to convince myself as much as her. “Just . . . just talk to me about something that isn’t food.”
“I wanted to ask you something, actually.”
“Okay,” I say, leaning against the sink to look in the mirror. I look like I’m going to die.
“Why me?”
“Oh, that’s easy.” I smile. “I needed a gaming buddy.” I don’t tell her that it was because she’s my only friend. I don’t mention the fact that she got me through one of the hardest times in my life; she knows that already. “Don’t look at me like that. It wasn’t a marriage proposal or anything. It’s just, you know, interstellar travel. Adventure. Freedom.”
She smirks. “Seriously though, Carl. Thanks. I don’t know how you swung it, but I’m glad you did.”
She’s standing in the doorway, twisting the security bangle that’s exactly the same as the one I still wear from my visit to the Circle. The bathroom is too small for the two of us to stand in when I’m not hunched over the toilet. The light from the cabin’s screen on the wall behind her filters through her hair, giving her a golden halo. I want to confide my fears to her. I want to ask her if she is just as terrified as I am and if she wonders whether she made the right decision as much as I do.
Instead I reach for the toothbrush and paste that were already in the bathroom, wrapped in bioplastic, and start brushing my teeth. She watches for a moment then goes back to sitting on the bed.
“We need to be careful here,” she says when I’m done, still looking at the bangle. “There’s a network on the ship—your dad told me that practically the sum of human knowledge is being taken with us—but we’re cut off from it. I’m not convinced they’re going to take these off us. New game. New rules.” She looks at me. “I’ve still got your back.”
I sit next to her. “And I’ve got yours. Travis is okay, I think. He’s not what he pretends to be. You should give him a chance.”
“He’s not one of us though. You’re the only one I trust.”
I almost tell her he gave me the money to pay off her contract, making it easier for the US gov-corp to bring her over straightaway, but I don’t want her to feel beholden to him. Persuading the Americans to bring her over was easy when they saw her skill set. I, on the other hand, am seen as an unknown quantity. I know they’ll need my skills soon enough. There are more than 10,400 people on this ship. Someone is bound to lose it and kill someone at some point.
Dee smiles, as if worried she’s been too serious. “If they ever do take these damn things off us, we’ll go back to Mars and see how sexy those scientists can be.”
I take her hand. “You don’t owe me anything, okay? You don’t have to be here for me because I got you the place. No debts here. It’s a fresh start for both of us.”
She nods, the grin gone. She knows exactly what I mean. “No debts.”
There’s a knock on the door and we let go of each other’s hands. “Come in,” I call, and Travis enters.
“Want to see something beautiful? Oh, hi, Dee.”
“I’ll go.”
“No, stay,” I say, making room for Travis on the bed. There isn’t anything else to sit on. I pat the space between Dee and me and he sits down.
“I hacked into a satellite array in Earth’s orbit,” he says. “I thought you might like a last glimpse of the mother planet before we go out of range.”
He taps a space in the air in front of him, presumably an icon in his vision alone, and the far wall of the cabin shifts from a view of the sea that Dee chose earlier to several live-cam feeds looking down on Europe, Russia and the Americas.
“It looks like a mersive cut scene,” I say, and he agrees. He smells freshly showered.
“Can anyone else see this?” Dee asks.
“Theoretically, but no one else is watching as far as I can tell.”
“I’ll be right back,” Dee says, and goes into the bathroom. The door locks with a satisfying clunk.
“I like Dee,” he says. “She’s fun.”
“Thanks for lending me that money.”
“I didn’t lend it. I gifted it. And besides, it wasn’t mine. It was that fuck’s money that I tucked away for when I needed it.”
He looks at the bathroom door and I find myself worrying he’s got the wrong idea. “Dee’s not my girlfriend.”
“I know. I asked her. She said you went through some tough stuff together way back.”
“Hot-housing. She got me through it. Travis, I wasn’t working for the MoJ when I met you at the hotel. I was owned by them.”
He twists round, shocked. “I had no idea.”
I shrug. “Assets aren’t permitted to discuss their status with real people. Look, there’s something I didn’t tell you when I came back to the Circle for the funeral.” I pause. Why do I want to tell him this? Is it part of cleaning the slate, ready for the next phase of my life? Or is it because I’m starting to appreciate that I care about how he sees me? I don’t want him to find out some other way. “Your husband bought my contract illegally. He sent me to the Circle to bring you back to him. Whether you liked it or not.”
Travis pales, even now; not even on the same planet as that man, he looks frightened. “But you didn’t.”
“No.”
He leans over and kisses my cheek. “Thank you.”
My face flushes with heat. I need to check the environmental controls. It’s obviously too warm in here. “What did you give the Yanks to get into the Circle?”
“A full update on where Stefan’s project was. He was at least a year behind—it was harder to keep it quiet without the US religious-protection laws to keep things hidden without questions, so his operation moved slower. And I told them where it was based. They wanted to know everything. I was all too happy to oblige.”
We sit in companionable silence, watching the last live images of Earth. The toilet flushes and Dee joins us again. It’s less than two hours since we left orbit but it feels like we left days ago. I feel light-headed, hollow in my stomach and my chest aches, but sitting here, Travis on one side, Dee on the other, I find I’m able to start thinking about being here without wanting to throw up. It’s not just a tin can. There’s meters and meters of shielding between us and space—there has to be; otherwise the radiation will kill us before we reach our destination. That, or we’ll be destroyed by grains of dust at the speed we’ll reach. As for the food . . . my stomach lurches again and I swallow rapidly. I’ll just have to cope.
“Somewhere down there,” Travis says, pointing to the cam over Europe, “my ex-husband is losing his shit on an epic scale. Fuck, that is just the best thought.”
“They’ll have opened that capsule by now,” Dee says. “Shit, now I’ll never know what was in it.”
A tiny smirk tugs at the corner of Travis’s mouth but he doesn’t say anything.
“Weird to think I’ve been scheduling coverage of that for months and now I’m in the middle of the only news item that might crowd it out.”
I look at the clouds over the Atlantic, the jagged edges of the European coast, the odd little speck of the British Isles. I wonder what Milsom is doing and if she ever tried to find me after I was bought by Gabor. Probably not. The MoJ will carry on as if I were never there. She’ll get someone in to replace me and the business of death will go on. I think of Linda and her sparkling red boots. I liked her. I wonder what she made of Rapture.
I try to imagine all those lives and find it just as difficult as imagining the ship I’m traveling in right now. Every truth I try to grasp has an immediate counter, keeping me off balance. We’re spinning around a central hub but it doesn’t feel like it. I’m free yet more confined than I’ve been for years. I’m finally following my mother to her destination, with no idea if she even made it there. Did she feel as frightened? Or did her religious conviction insulate her against such fears?
I’m watching the planet I’ve lived on all my life on a screen as I travel away from it, never to return. I stare at it, trying to hold that thought in my mind, but it’s too big, too fundamental, too frightening. I want to go to Mars and shoot fake aliens inside robots. It feels like the only sane thing to do right now.
“What’s that?” Travis says, pointing at a flash of bright light over Spain. The clouds around it race away in a perfect circle as a new one grows.
“Can you zoom?” Dee asks.
Europe fills the screen and the top of a mushroom cloud over a small town in southern Andalusia blooms into its terrifying fullness as a second bright flash bursts into being near Madrid.
“Oh Jesus! Oh fuck!” Travis yells, leaping to his feet. “Those are his factories and the silos where he has the— Oh God, no!”
He stabs at invisible icons in the air before him. Another cam feed fills the screen, showing North America with a time stamp of seconds before, zoomed in to show the missiles leaving for Europe.
I watch it in total silence as Travis wails at the images, dropping the tablet and sinking to his knees. Dee’s hand wraps around mine and we squeeze so tight it hurts.
“Is this real?” she asks, but I can’t reply. “Of course it is,” she says, moments later. “They didn’t want anyone to follow us. They didn’t want anyone to beat us to the Pathfinder.” She crawls over to sit behind me, wrapping her arms around my shoulders, pressing her cheek against my ear. She’s shivering and then I realize I am too.
More pinpricks of light pepper the screen, one in England, two in France, more in Russia, then America, as the retaliation begins. We watch the deaths of millions in seconds, divorced from the carnage by distance and the screen. At first, shock and the old training keep me from falling apart as some ridiculous part of my brain thinks it must be a cut scene.
Then I remember the gingerbread biscuits in that tub and the story Linda wrote for me. The way she slurped her tea and grinned at the copper who’d brought it to her. I think of my ex looking up at a mushroom cloud on the horizon and feeling the blast of the shock wave. Then image upon image of trees being flattened, of Alejandro’s farmhouse being scattered to the wind, of the grave where Bear is buried being scoured by the raging destruction, and I’m crying, my whole body shaking with each sob as Dee’s arms tighten around me. I hold on to her, as if she can keep some part of me anchored, as I imagine the man with the grandson who gave me the vegetables being burned alive, his kindness obliterated.
And yet I cannot tear my eyes from the screen. The destruction of all we left behind surely cannot look so beautiful, cannot look so serene, as that perfect green and blue orb is decorated with hundreds of its own tiny stars before the cams cut out.
My mind tumbles back to that hallway at the Circle, at the moment I decided it was better to leave than be left behind, only now understanding how monumental that was for us. As Travis weeps on his knees I clutch Dee, needing her more than I ever have before. I know she feels the same, as she crushes me to her just as tightly. It’s us and them. It’s us, trapped inside this ship with them, with those capable of such an unimaginably cruel act. How can we be safe with people so ready to kill those who are not like them?
Are we the only ones who know about this other than those who gave the order?
“We can’t tell anyone,” I say, my voice hoarse, alien. “And we have to make sure the ones at the top don’t know we’ve seen this.”
Travis nods eventually, as does Dee. We are left staring at the black screen as if staring into our own deaths, flying away from murder on a mass corporate scale toward a future created for and owned by this elite, godly few. No one will follow us now, with their rival claims and alien religions and cultural dissonance.
There is nothing to come from Earth after Atlas.