Читать книгу The Echo - James Smythe, James Smythe - Страница 8

Every part of this process has been designed to ensure that nothing can go wrong. I cannot stress that enough: the level of control that we have enacted on this entire operation. Entry to the Lära is as controlled as everything else. There is no room for error. Everything must be checked, processed, run through before we are allowed on. There are exacting checklists full of bullet points that take days to tick off. It’s these things that can mean the difference between life and death. This is how the systems can be guaranteed to work when we need them to, how we can streamline them and make them user friendly while still retaining the safety: they are prepared and perfected, and instigated with absolute care and diligence.

‘Are we getting on anytime soon?’ Tobi asks. She looks at the clock on the wall. Less than half an hour until we leave. Sedation takes only a few minutes to completely set in; the paralysis less. We don’t control the boarding process from the ship: we are nothing but passengers for now.

‘Not long,’ I say. I am running through their final checks in my head, and as I reach the final one, the door opens. It slides satisfyingly and the launch crew inside the ship move backwards, grinning. They’ve got balloons and a banner, both hanging in the middle of the air. My crew laughs, almost hysterically. Bon Voyage, the banner says. From the moon to the stars, under it in smaller type. They applaud, and we applaud them. We walk through to the corridor in single file as the ground crew start pulling aside the decorations, and we all find the bed labelled with our names. (I pretend to not know which one is mine, even though I dictated where the beds lie. I arranged them, like chess pieces.)

‘I want to go last,’ I say to Inna. She nods.

‘You’re nervous?’ Nerrrvous.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I’ve been sedated before. Nothing to be scared of.’

‘Good,’ she says. ‘I always think it takes better the less wary you are.’ She preps her injections. She clicks the first one in, a bullet into the hypo’s chamber. I catch a glimpse of a mark – a tattoo, I think – on her collarbone as she moves, as the fabric of her shirt pulls away, but not enough to see what it is. I wonder what it is of. I wonder how big it is. ‘Who’s first?’ she asks the group. Hikaru raises his arm, and, in one motion, starts to roll up his sleeve. ‘Neck,’ Inna says. ‘It’s better there. It takes faster.’ He shrugs and lies back on the bed. The magnets click in, holding him in place, and she folds herself down a little to reach him. The hypo seems to fizz as it empties the contents of the pod into him. He winces, and then shudders, shaking the injection off.

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

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

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

‘Is everything okay?’

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

‘I just wanted to check.’

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

‘No,’ I say.

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

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

‘Ready?’ I ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Launch crew prepare,’ I hear through the ship. You can’t open the beds from the inside once they’ve been sealed. If you could, you could accidentally do it, and there’s nothing worse than that thought. The speeds that the ship will reach as it pushes off from the NISS – free of the trappings of any real gravitational pull, free of the resistance offered by an atmosphere – are so ridiculously powerful that they could – or would – damage the human body. Our bones, our bodies, they are not strong enough. The beds are pressure sealed to provide an environment that the body can cope with. They create their own pressure level inside them; protect the crew from the g forces. It’s another of mine and Tomas’ innovations. Another way that we are making this expedition work. If any of the crew were to be out of their beds – and the controlled environment created therein – they would likely die. Their body would be found pulverized, as if it had been beaten to death. But I am not loose. I am in here, awake. I don’t know if this is dangerous. I cannot think about how dangerous this is. I shout.

‘Help,’ I shout, ‘I am not asleep yet!’ I call Inna’s name, hoping that I’ll see her descend and open my bed, and inject me again, triple-strength, able to level me to slumber while this flight happens. I was always scared of flying as well: of seeing the Earth get smaller underneath me. Not like I will see it from space, that doesn’t faze me, because you can see everything in one go: more the sensation of suddenly glimpsing people as specks, and cars as ants, and then everything smaller and smaller, houses like dust, and then whole towns. But Inna doesn’t come, and everything is dark, soundtracked by the rumble of the engines proper: through everything, right through the hull. Everything underneath me feels like vibration, nothing else. I feel my bones rattle, and my teeth in my jaw. ‘I should be asleep!’ I shout, but my voice dulls itself against the inside of my bed, and against the growling of the ship, and against the paralytic. My words slurred.

The engines fire for launch in three phases. First phase is a warm-up, bringing the temperature of the engines up to the necessary point. The second phase – the phase that I feel kick in through the rumble, like a foot on a gas pedal while the handbrake remains pulled on – adds the injectant and coolant into the burner, readying to add it to the engines themselves. ‘Please,’ I hear myself say – an echo through the rumble – and then the third phase.

‘Countdown time,’ Tomas says. He goes through the numbers, twenty to one. I brace myself. I don’t know what will happen. Why did we have to be asleep for this part of the launch? Because it made sense. Because we were liable to panic. Because the vibrations of the ship would be so violent that we weren’t to struggle against them. I have always hated sleep. Not been afraid of it, that’s wrong, but felt it a waste. Tomas slept less than I did, and he would play pranks on me as I overslept, as I lazed about; but it’s more than that. He would have achieved so much by the time that I woke up. He would have done things. Found things. Now, he’s meant to be awake and guiding me, and I’m meant to be asleep, and letting him, but I’m not. I want to be. I don’t want to die, here. I don’t want to be shaken apart. I tell myself not to struggle. I have the self-control to do this, I tell myself. I say it aloud; or I think that I do.

The engines accelerate to a point where we break a faster speed than any man-made machine before. In the glory days of space travel, when we were still trying, the shuttles hit speeds of nearly twenty thousand miles per hour, when they were in orbit. We’re doubling that; more, even, when we reach maximum acceleration. Tripling it. And then we will coast, using that momentum, slowing to maintain that speed only, holding it as long and as far as we can. That’s the rumble. Every part of this ship is made from materials built to withstand that pressure, joists and fixtures made with composite materials that didn’t even exist a decade ago. The metal of the hull is our own: we bought the man who designed it, all of his patents, all of his designs. I think of this, of the blueprints now: flashing through my mind. His metal shakes like everything else, though. No amount of stress testing can prevent it feeling as if it is falling apart. We didn’t tell the crew that. We told them that every possibility had been accounted for. We lied, because how else do you get people to agree to something like this?

‘One,’ Tomas says, or I think it’s Tomas. Maybe I’ve been counting down with him, speaking at the same time, my voice along with his. The launch happens, and the craft shakes and lurches, and I hit my head, over and over, on the hard plastic part of the bed that is moulded to me instead of being a pillow, practicality not comfort, and I think that that’s yet another oversight. We should have had a pillow; then, maybe my head wouldn’t hit this so hard.

Everything gives way to darkness. This isn’t sleep: this is my body giving up.

Man wasn’t meant to see this. Man was meant to stay on the ground. My mother said that she believed in angels, and maybe she was right. What are the implications of travelling as fast as we’re suggesting? That’s what I asked Tomas. I said, Really, the actual implications. Do we know? We put carcasses in the centrifuge, reaching g forces equivalent to this, and we watched them quiver and be pulverized. So I said, Are we sure that this is the right thing? What are the implications? He said, The implications are that you’ll have travelled faster than anybody before you. You know what I mean. He sighed. It could break you. You’ll feel it, whatever happens. It’ll pull every part of you. So we make them sleep, I suggested, because then they’ll not know. They’ll wake up feeling like they’ve been in a fight, and not knowing who hit them. Oh, they’ll know, he said.

I open my eyes, like instinct, but it hurts. Everything’s glowing white, I would swear: even though the lights are off and my glass is dimmed, it glows.

White, white, white. Almost painful, it’s so bright.

I try and open them again, to see, and it feels like they’re being pressed on, forced and pushed down, and everything’s white when it should be black. My body can’t move, I discover. I wish I was like the others, safe and asleep. They don’t know what their bodies are going through. I can feel the bones in my face – the very essence of my skull, everything, underneath the skin, underneath all of me, every little part – and it feels as if it is being pulled apart.

I am in hell.