Dead Astronauts

Chen had been beholden to Moss’s kindness, in ways Grayson would never understand. You had to be there. You couldn’t conceive. Empathy wasn’t enough. Imagination wasn’t enough.

By contrast, Grayson was a single circle from which radiated calculations like the sun’s rays and a latticework of numbers between each ray. She liked to be as direct as a fist to the face. She had survived that way out in space for so many years that there was no other solution for her. She knew the stakes of their mission because she’d had so few choices before Chen, before Moss. Chen tried not to diagram her or turn her into poetry, even though it was in his nature. Did not want to solve her, for fear she’d tumble like Moss’s zeros, but, not used to it, shudder apart, disintegrate. No matter the grim set of her jaw.

Chen, Moss, Grayson. They each only used one name now. Had been winnowed down, become too familiar, had not the need nor the want for the territory of two names. When encamped, they lay heedless and seamless huddled all three together. Hard to pry apart for the comfort of it, the touch of another. They needed no fire, for the fire burned within, warmed them even in the deepest cold. And the source was Moss.

“Good night, Moss.”

“Good night, Chen, Grayson.”

Just a mutter from Grayson, but they knew she loved them.

Each had had the experience of self-annihilation. Chen had killed Chen. Moss had absorbed Moss. Grayson had killed them both. Moss had killed Chen, Chen Moss. Thus their intimacy had become exponential, along with their sadness and their regret. And it was cocooned within that, that they lay together, so close, to treasure the Chen, the Moss, the Grayson, that still lived.

While all three could feel the duck with the broken wing watching over them from afar. For better or worse.

The dark bird.

iii.

the way his face yet reflected

nothing of terrible experience

The City and the Company went by many different names in the Splinters, as Chen put it. In the Mains, it was just City and Company, as the Company preferred, the edges rounded off; no purchase. In the Mains, the risks were greater, but so were the rewards. Splinters could sting, distract, and that was all.

But versions of the City weren’t the only variable that Chen calculated, that Moss embodied. Time was a second variable, and time was not inexorable. Some Times it seemed as if they sped forward into their own future, and those were the worst moments.

The City glittering upon the plain inviolate—and terrible for it, the Company building grown so fat and thick and all tributaries leading into it, with no wastelands or outliers. Smell of blood. Just the Company and no City at all. These maze-versions they turned their backs on in haste, turned their backs on their own mortality and uselessness. For nothing could be gained, only lost.

The City, smoldering upon the plain violate—and terrible for it, the Company building dead husk and the tributaries dried up, all wasteland and outliers. Just the City and no Company at all. While shape-shifting creatures with camouflage like cuttlefish and chameleons expressed as enormous wildflowers transformed whatever raised its head from refuge. The smell of death as a rich, velvety sigh.

These versions they turned their backs on slowly, after days in their contamination suits, careful not to breathe the air. You could regroup in such a place, but you would find no sanctuary, nor an adversary. You could be lulled, or culled, and a lull was like death in the end. Woken from a dream of blossoms into a swaying disintegration.

For that was what bodies wanted: To come to rest. To know no more.

This City was like all the Cities: the observatory to the northwest, the factories to the northeast, against the polluted sludge path that was the river; the vast complex of pockmarked half-derelict apartments to the south of the factories, where the Company housed the workers; and to the southwest the white smudge of the Company building.

What varied most was the expanse between factories and Company, across the diagonal, the ancient seabed. Sometimes this was an utter ruin. Sometimes an estuary rich with holding ponds that led to the encircling river. Sometimes it served as satellite to the Company and, at least at first, industrious if not prosperous. People in numbers, making a sort of living, perhaps even selling food they’d grown to those who came out from the Company.

Grayson in particular distrusted those visions. Everything the Company did destroyed someone, killed someone, even if it helped someone else. All the rest was subterfuge, and no suit to protect against it.

“That wasn’t there in mine.”

“Was in mine.”

“In mine there were only mines. There.”

And there and there and there.

Not mines that could blow you up. Mines that could destroy your mind, change your body. Make even the thought of you never exist.

A dark joke. An old joke. Useful to remember, until you could no longer remember … anything.

Other times, they moved backward and the Company appeared in stages of construction, with such activity and so many guards that they could not even comprehend the depth of the danger and challenge before them. In that false promise you could lose your self, could be convinced the futures were glorious … if you hadn’t already seen the futures. Everything that promised glory become gory, spreading death underneath, death preferring to dive before erupting back up at the end of days.

Thus Moss, who used Chen’s equations to hone her internal compass, so that her foldings in on herself spared the three the impossible ones and chose only those Cities where the bitter possibility of collapse, the cusp of the possible, provided them with a corridor, a moment.

While Chen, bound by Moss, would calculate rates of decay and acceler-deceleration. Would add in relative unknowns like the cataclysm/catechism of the duck, other Chens, the likelihood of one day meeting a hostile Moss, or meeting another Grayson at all.

What it would mean to meet up with a Charlie X who had not become deranged, expunged his memory. What it would mean for Chen not to hate Charlie X or to remember the feeling of Charlie X’s gaze upon him. Moving backward to a point where Charlie X would be young and almost featureless in his innocence, the way his face reflected nothing yet of terrible experience.

What Chen never added to the equation.

What Charlie X, in rags, had told him, as something clicked into place behind his eyes. Would click off again, for in those days and those versions Charlie X could never hold on to his self for long.

That one time. In that one place. With Moss and Grayson preoccupied and Chen a fortress-sentinel.

“I remember you. I remember you. I remember you. You were just a dream I had. A dream I made. That’s all you are.”

Chen had trembled, tamped down the urge to dissolve and in that dissolution take Charlie X into the dark with him.

For that would be surrender.

Moss had put forth the rules to govern Chen’s more useful equations. Moss’s “tidal pool rules,” which included: Stay still, be small, bring the right camouflage, know good hiding places, become a symbiote or parasite, be poisonous or venomous, be able to regenerate body parts.

If you wanted to survive, reduce all motion to zero over long stretches of time. Trust the current. The current. The current. The species already there. How at high tide the water rippled across all of the tidal pools, even those that had been inviolate, their own tiny kingdoms, before.

If this were the purest City. The one that most rippled through all the others and the Source. If this was the one, then the effect would be greatest here.

But: Be tiny, be motionless. Take your time. Perhaps it would not be the first wave or even the thousandth. Because direct was defended. You contaminated the wall of globes inside the Company, then went to the Source. The portal wall, the magic mirror that led back to where the Company came from. You let it trickle in, like a slow-acting poison that was actually:

Life, again.

She could feel herself, sometimes, using the tidal pool rules to do the things she wasn’t doing here. Phantom sensations. Of standing in the ravine. Of watching her doppelgänger set off, with Chen by her side.

Memory of Grayson turning to her and saying one of these three things:

“This time. This time. I feel it.”

“Someday. We’ll go back to your tidal pools.”

“How many times has it been now?”

Say a number that felt low. That felt hollow.

Like one of Chen’s equations was screaming to get out. Like one of Chen’s creatures, trapped in the wall of globes.

iv.

for you cannot give us

what we already have

In this City, as in all Cities, the three knew they would find the foxes. Moss loved the foxes, while Grayson suspected them—thought them already too clever, believed, perhaps, the foxes had led to their failures, as much as the insidious nature of the Company had.

Chen had no opinion, for in his calculation the foxes must always be part of the plan. So he wasted no emotion on them one way or the other.

On a cracked dead bridge splayed in segments across a riverbed of rocks and weeds, the fox met them. They had been clambering across the gully, headed southeast, toward the Balcony Cliffs apartment complex. They wore now their camouflage, so that they appeared only as a glimmer against whatever backdrop they moved across. Faery mode, Moss liked to call it.

In a sense, the fox had ambushed them by taking the high ground of the bridge. This startled them. It had never happened so soon, or in this place.

The blue fox stood perfect-still, regarding them. It was as large as a wolf and Grayson felt the threat of its regard. Could see with her eye the peculiarities of its brain. Just could not tell if the fox had been born that way or tinkered with.

“You are a long way from home,” the blue fox said.

“This is our home,” Moss replied.

“Not all of you. Not this City. Our City.”

“The Company’s City.”

“Not forever.”

Moss was their receiver, and it was through Moss that Chen and Grayson heard her parlay with the blue fox.

“Will you accept a gift from us?” Moss asked.

“I accept no gifts from strangers.”

“But we aren’t strangers. You know us.”

Moss was letting the blue fox into her mind. The farther into that labyrinth the fox explored, the more of the gift the fox would receive. For it would understand their mission, gain more understanding of the Company, and also see how the foxes had helped them across so many Cities. That was the hope.

(What bled through, into the head? Where did they travel all unknowing? This in Moss’s mind as disturbance, registering in Chen as a possibility: v.2.1 = 2.2 + 2.3 + 3.0 + the things that could pull a mind apart if examined close up.)

“Neither shall I set foot on strange paths without a map,” the fox said or thought, and in real time it was neither but an image the fox showed Moss—of the fox come to a halt at the entrance to a dark green maze of vines, and the maze was Moss and the fox would not enter the maze. And Moss put this image into words for Grayson, for Chen.

Words ripped smooth by repetition. What Moss had said many times before: “The Company will kill you without our help.”

“The Company already kills us, and yet we are here.”

All around, from every hiding place, peered the sandy-colored small foxes that were the blue fox’s comrades.

“We can make it easier, faster, for you.”

The fox considered that, looking out over the City as if the fox would rule the City one day.

“I will give you this much: There is no Moss in this City. No Moss at all. You should consider that before all else.” Moss by then was a conduit as well as a person, and even as a person she was an accumulation of Mosses, all of whom lived inside her. Every time Moss encountered another Moss, across timelines, they merged, and she had become more powerful because of it.

Then the fox trotted off the bridge, out of sight, and his followers melted away as if they had never been there.

“That has never happened before,” Chen said. He had noticed how the fox looked covetous at Moss, as if she were a tasty morsel. That had not happened before, either.

“Give it time,” Moss said, even though Time was a joke. Even though they had less of it with no Moss in the City. No new partner, no new joining.

“How much time do we have?” Grayson asked.

(What came back to Chen was how 7 became both lucky and finite, not a door but a wall. Without an anchor at 6.999999999999. But the fox was the master of it and thus in a way Chen could not see in the numbers … their master, too.)

As they met the fox ever earlier, so too would the Company be drawn to them that much faster. This they knew. And Moss knew one thing more the other two did not: that she would see the fox again, soon.

I think you are beautiful, Moss thought hard, at the space the fox had disappeared into. I think you have always known the future. I think this time I might trust you.

But she always had done that in the past, too. Because she meant it.

Where had the blue fox come from? The vexing question, the one they had stopped trying to answer. Moss said that the blue fox had not been born in the Company or borne by the Company, or they had so forgotten it that there was no residue. A rogue lab, Chen guessed. Or some spontaneous mutation. Neither probable.

Moss believed: The blue fox was aware of its brethren across all the paths. Moss believed: The blue fox often knew them before first encounter.

Once, Grayson, after analyzing the blue fox and finding only … fox … pressed the creature.

The fox replied, “I came from where you come from, Grayson. I come from up there.”

The sky. The stars. The leap of startled recognition in Grayson before she realized the fox was joking. That the fox was telling her she had been read, down to her core.

“How do you know?” Grayson had asked. Could not help that reveal.

“You stink of space,” the fox said. “You stink of stale air and the burn and countdowns to false zeros, and places not of Earth.”

But Grayson thought the fox lied and there was some other reason.

Chen said: Any theory at this point made as much sense, since no theory made sense. That the fox could be inhabited by an alien intelligence. Or it could be a particularly devious AI wormholing back under the power of a self-made destiny. If the paths were open, porous, then other sorts of doors could open as well. Even though Grayson, the only astronaut among them, said aliens had never been encountered by humankind out in the universe. That human beings never mastered AI.

Grayson, uneasy every time, instinct telling her she knew the blue fox from somewhere. Always on the cusp, never able to recall. Distrusting the emotion behind it, careful to keep the fox at arm’s length.

The probability was that they would never know. The way most never knew half of anything and had to be content.

“Catch me if you can,” the blue fox sometimes said to Moss in joyous reverie. “Catch me if you can.”

But they never could.

v.

the first glimpse

was always the most fatal

Only Chen had ever worked for the Company. Some version of it he had left far behind on the map. And so, the first glimpse of the Company building each time was always the most fatal for him. The trauma of it had been known to pull him apart at the seams, it left to Moss to hold him together, for he had the power to dissolve into the sky almost against his will, leave Grayson and Moss on their own, nothing ever his problem again.

Before the tidal pool rules, the three had smashed in the front door of the Company. They had laid siege. They had attacked from afar, through proxies. They had lured Company lackeys into sabotage. They had led uprisings of biotech. They had done this and they had done that. They had been wounded and changed and poisoned and defeated too many times, only got out because of Moss. All the Mosses. Could only regroup because of her.

Had to wait. Try more circuitous ways. Come back much later. After the damage had mostly been done. Irredeemable. Irreparable. Yet they still meant to repair it.

Each time: What next? What now?

Each time, the obstacle seemed more insurmountable.

Chen: “Couldn’t you find a future that’s a paradise, where we could live out our days together?”

But that was a joke. Because Chen knew none of those timelines contained a Moss, a Chen, a Grayson. Because those timelines did not exist. The Company had tick-engorged itself across all timelines.

This was the problem. You could try to live out your days and years in some remote corner, but even that place would be blighted by the Company, by what happened in the City. They would find you, in time. You would be reminded of your own unwillingness to fight against your fate. The three would become one and one and one, and then none.

Grayson: “There will be a next time.”

Moss never replied. She would be thinking of what she had received from Grayson because she loved her, too much. How without Grayson she would not have known to resist. Because Moss had been too close in, too close to Charlie X and, by extension, the dark bird. How Grayson had been like original sin, how Moss was now more fully herself than before.

That they might next succeed. That failure might no longer be about a semblance of the future. That, in the end, they were three, not an army.

The Company always looked basically the same: whether an enormous white egg or a vast gray triangle or a ziggurat or a series of spires, like a fractured cathedral. Holding ponds for biotech rejects always hunched up against the side, a convenient hell or purgatory, full of dying life, and then lines of invisible defenses across the wasteland beyond. Sometimes things flew through the air that should not have been able to fly, molecules of iridescent blue and green that scintillated and changed shape, ever vigilant.

This version retained the white-egg structure but had curved lines running through the architecture so that it resembled a giant egg slicer with a metal egg sliced within it. A lazy riddle interrogating itself about some other, unrelated question.

This version had propagated the holding ponds across the entire expanse of what was normally desert, and still was, in a sense.

“How did It escape?” Grayson would ask as they stared at the Company.

“We never escaped; It was always there.”

“Can It be put to the good?” Grayson would ask.

“No, It cannot. It must be burned to the ground.”

“But could we persuade It?”

“Only if you could find a human heart to persuade.”

“Only if you could find something other than a human heart.”

“What will replace It if we succeed?”

“Anything is better.”

But without the Company, they could not have fought the Company.

But this made them at times suspicious of their own three selves.

But they had no choice now but to go on.

In this version, birdsong filled the City, but it was just an echo of nanites created to give the illusion of bird life through ghost calls.

“What will you miss?” Grayson would ask, already knew the answer.

I’ll miss you.

vi.

no one should feel responsible

for the whole world

Grayson’s past lay very far from home, always sending data and signals without knowing if they made it back. Just one of three vessels forging ahead. Two destroyed by asteroid strike. Her crew dead from all the ways space could murder you: lack of resources, bad decisions, disease, freak injury, the cosmic scale, sun flares, infighting.

Reaching the outermost point, or at least the farthest Grayson could bear. In a suit, looking at rock, rock underfoot. Caressed the outline with one thick glove. Unsure if the formation was the fossil of some alien intelligence, the suggestion of a helmet, of a face. Or just a coincidence, an outline she wanted to see. Would never know.

Feeling in an irrational way that she was looking at her fate if she continued outward bound. Weary. Sick of no grass, no trees. No horizon other than the dark or artificial light. Paltry samples. Paltry evidence.

Knowing that humanity was alone. That even a sea of water could not produce advanced life-forms unless the exact conditions were right. That she didn’t in the end care for the microscopic depiction of life. That bacteria warring with bacteria could not evoke in her any kind of awe, that she should stop taking samples of water traces.

She tried to feel for a tremor or warmth in the stone beneath her glove, but the fabric was too thick for anything but the pulse of her own breathing.

Time to return.

Only to then spend a century finding her way home, through all the strange wormholes in the universe. Come to think of it as a useless mission. Come to think of herself as a ghost during that time, lost among the stars and star matter, haunting herself, haunting dead space, haunted by her many selves. Left behind: the dead crew, buried beside the fossil that might be in her head.

Did she deserve to live after the death of her crew? She had no answer, had decided for no good reason that the atoms of which she was made were not yet ready to disperse to form someone or something else.

Thus, Grayson wandered alone and in her own thoughts, at times in danger and at times held in thrall to such cosmic places full of wary (cold) wonder that she could not find the words, and so words fell away from her for a time … because they were useless.

Fell away along with so much else that by the time she found the moon base, she would not have recognized rescuers as fellow human beings.

If there had been anyone living on the moon base.

If it wasn’t clear all the astronauts were dead.

If she hadn’t known home still lay below her.

Grayson returned to a version of the City that held no life. The blackened, flame-eaten forms of people and animals were strewn everywhere. Caught in mid-flight or huddled in corners. The runneling of flesh that forced some flush against the ground, as if returning to the earth might save them.

Fire and chemicals formed a kind of haze over the bodies, an unholy mist. Hiding and revealing and hiding again as it lingered over the dead. As if the Company had sent the mist to hide its crimes.

Roamed that landscape in shock, unaware of just how much time had passed since she had gone into space. Roamed the City as an astronaut might, still in her suit, in constant contact with the life pod.

Grayson had had perhaps a decade of solitude and air left at the base to look down on Earth’s ravaged face and try to convince herself that all would one day be better. But instead she’d returned to Earth, burning enough of the pod’s remaining fuel on reentry that she could never go back. Her reasons were sound enough: She felt too alone, more alone than just being one person. Too much carnage in memoriam there.

Eye reporting data dispassionate, she had sorted through the City’s wreckage much as a parent might go through a child’s messy room. A child missing or passed away. What was valuable. What had been cast aside. What overused. But unable to put it back in order.

In space, discipline meant life or death. Here, there had been no penalty for freedom until the end.