Atlas Alone Read online

  It’s getting harder for Travis to hide his frustration. “But what about the food thing, Carl?”

  There’s the twitch, the one by Carl’s left eye, right on cue. “I . . . I don’t like printed food.”

  “You don’t like the taste?”

  He presses his lips together and shakes his head. “It isn’t that,” he finally says. He rests a hand on his stomach, drawing in long, slow breaths through flared nostrils.

  “Give it a rest, Travis,” I say sharply.

  “We can’t just keep ignoring this! Look at him!”

  “It makes me throw up,” Carl says quietly. “You know that.”

  “Yes, but why do you think that is? The printer that serves your row has been feeding dozens of people for the past six months and none of them have been ill.”

  Carl scowls at him. “Why? It’s fucking obvious, isn’t it? It’s me!”

  “Why are you angry?”

  “Because you’re being such a twat!” I snap at him. “He doesn’t want to talk about it, Travis. That’s up to him.”

  “If you don’t want to talk to us, then talk to a counselor,” Travis says, refusing to get the idea, like so many men.

  Both Carl and I bark out a bitter laugh, and we both know exactly why we did. “Yeah,” Carl says after glancing at me. “They make it all better.”

  “I mean a proper counselor. A trained professional whose job it is to make sure people on this ship don’t fall apart—for their own good, not for those money-grabbing bastards who wanted to make as much money out of you as they could.”

  So he knows Carl used to be indentured? But they must have met when Carl was still a specialist detective for the Noropean Ministry of Justice, and it was part of his contract to never tell anyone about his status as a corporate asset, just like it was in my contract. Did he break that rule before we left Earth, once we were with the Circle, those contracts paid off? Or was it confessed here on Atlas 2, when Earth and its horrors were far behind us? Regardless of when it must have happened, I never thought Carl would ever share that with anyone except me. He’s opened up to Travis far more than I thought.

  “For our own good?” Carl scoffs.

  “And for everyone else’s too. We’re all on this ship together. If someone goes Trafalgar Square on board, it’s a lot worse, right?”

  Carl frowns at the mention of that massacre. One lunatic with a dirty bomb was bad enough in a huge city; it would be so much worse in a spaceship. “Now, I’m not for a moment saying that you’re going to lose it like that man did,” Travis continues, “but . . . you are losing it. And it’s going to kill you if you don’t sort it out.”

  “They won’t let it kill me,” he says with a bitterness I understand all too well. He’s still thinking like someone classed as a corporate asset, like I was. But that debt was wiped the moment he made the deal with the Circle to bring us onto Atlas 2. Somehow he got the funds to pay off my debt too.

  It will never leave us, the memory of others having power over our bodies, over our lives, but it’s still gnawing away at him. I refuse to let it do that to me. They took enough years of my life. But I don’t think he’s in a state to see it the way I do.

  Then again, I suspect he sees very little the way I do.

  While I don’t agree with how Travis is doing this, I do agree with his appraisal. I’ve been keeping Carl together since we were classed nonpersons over twenty years ago; there’s no way I’m going to let him die now, not when we’ve finally gotten away from that shower of shit that was corporate slavery.

  “No, they won’t let it kill you,” I say, “just like anyone else on this ship. I guess they’ll fuck with your brain even more, without your permission, if it comes to it. Look, Carl, this is serious shit. Talking to someone about this food thing could make your life here so much better. We’re stuck on this ship for another, what, nineteen and a half years? Your chip has already done all it can to keep you alive. It’s not enough. Antiemetics and uppers and downers can only go so far, and they’re not a long-term solution anyway. If you don’t find help, they’re gonna have to get more invasive.” He remains silent. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

  “I could say too much.”

  “They know you’re fucked up, Carl. And whoever it is will know your background. It’s in your medical file.” I don’t say anything more, not being certain of how much he’s told Travis. We had so many learning acceleration drugs pumped into us back then, they’ll know he’s been hot-housed, even if he doesn’t disclose it. Our brains don’t look normal anymore.

  “I’m not worried about that.” His voice is quiet and his body is still. “What if . . . what if I start to open up and I just blurt it out?”

  “Blurt what out?” Travis asks, as I scream at him in my head to shut up.

  “That everyone on Earth is dead.”

  I wait for the rest, for the fact that not only are they dead, but someone on this ship must have given the order for the nukes to be fired from America into Europe. That someone else breathing the same recycled air as us right now is responsible for the deaths of billions. But he doesn’t say it, even though we’re all thinking it.

  There’s a fly on one of the cards and then I can hear them buzzing.

  What is that sound coming from the bedroom? “Daddy?”

  The buzzing gets louder. Is there something wrong with the wall?

  Pushing the door, revealing him on the bed, the buzzing louder. His eyes open, his mouth open, the flies coming out of his mouth—

  “I can’t stop thinking about it!” Carl shouts, and there are no flies here, of course there aren’t, we’re in space, thousands, if not millions, of miles away from every bug known to humankind. “Every single fucking time I try to eat I think about the food I used to cook, about the gingerbread . . .”

  “Gingerbread?” Travis asks, but Carl is crying into his hands now. Shit.

  “Look,” I say, getting up to rest a hand on his back. “Cry it out if you need to, but you have to . . . to . . .” What can I say here that won’t make me seem like a monster to him?

  He drags his hands down his cheeks, sniffling, to look at me. “How are you coping so well?”

  Oh, Carl, if only you knew.

  “We all deal with things in different ways, mate.”

  “Yes, but you’re not dealing with it, are you?” Travis says, looking at me. “You’ve closed yourself off from us, you don’t play mersives anymore and your gamer score was insane when I first met you.”

  “Been snooping into what I do in my private time, have you?” I fire at him, Carl sitting up as he wipes his eyes.

  “I’m worried about you too!” Travis says, spreading his hands, looking for all the world like a bloody middle manager trying to keep the board happy. “Why aren’t you playing anything anymore, Dee? Why aren’t you—”

  “Because what is the fucking point?” I yell at him.

  Confused, Carl twists round to frown at me. “It’s gaming, Dee. There doesn’t have to be a point.”

  And he’s right. He is completely right, and I feel like an idiot. Why did I say that? Why am I letting them see any of this after I’ve been working so hard to keep it away from them?

  JeeMuh, I swear there is a fly in here.

  “Look . . . all of us are struggling to adapt,” Travis says gently. “We just have to make the most of it.”

  “What the ever-living fuck is that supposed to mean?” Carl shouts. “Make the most of what? Of being stuck in this tin can for the next twenty-odd years while everyone we left behind is either dead or dying and whoever did it is on this fucking ship with us?”

  His voice rings off the plastic table. I am so grateful for the soundproofing on this ship. The designers wanted to make sure that people living in close quarters wouldn’t drive one another mad, with the added bonus that we’re n
ot likely to get killed thanks to Carl and his bloody anger issues.

  Travis looks away, attending to something in his visual field. Probably checking that no one else was walking past in that moment. The communal area we’re in has been booked out for our use, but still, Carl shouldn’t have put us at risk like that. “Thankfully, I know how to make sure our conversation is actually private, rather than just looking that way,” Travis mutters, adding, after a beat, “What else can we do but make the most of it?”

  “We can find out who gave the order,” I say.

  “And then what?” he asks, all the pleasantness gone from his tone.

  “And then we tell everyone else on board what they did,” Carl says. “And we . . . we make sure they’re prosecuted.”

  Travis laughs. At first it’s cold and sarcastic; then he draws in a breath and starts laughing even harder. “Seriously? According to whose laws are we going to do that? Don’t you think that whoever gave that order is going to be pretty high up on this ship? Do you really think that anyone will believe us?”

  “You didn’t keep the footage we watched?” I ask.

  “Since when has anything like that ever been used in a successful prosecution, Dee?” Carl mutters back to me. “They’ll claim it’s faked.”

  “And I didn’t save it anyway!” Travis says. “I never wanted to watch that again and I definitely didn’t want it to be found in my private space!”

  “So we just do nothing?” Carl says. “We just—”

  “Yes!” Travis says, standing up. “Yes, we just move on and be grateful that we weren’t one of those poor bastards down there when it happened!”

  “You just don’t have the guts to do something about it!” Carl yells, and Travis gives him a look that I simply don’t understand, something that speaks of betrayal and disbelief and . . .

  He walks out, leaving his playing cards on the table. The door slides shut behind him, Carl sitting back and folding his arms like a petulant child.

  “Well . . . as interventions go, that one was pretty shit,” I say, and then we both burst out laughing, feeling the release of tension.

  I lean down and wrap my arms about him. He rests his head on my arm. “What the fuck are we going to do, Dee? I miss you. Come and shoot aliens on Mars with me, like we used to. We can make the settings as ridiculous as you like. Horny scientists? I know they make you laugh. Don’t you need to have a laugh? I know I sure as fuck do.”

  I think about it. But I know what will happen. It’ll be the same as every other time I’ve immersed. I’ll end up standing there, seeing, smelling, feeling and hearing every damn thing in the mersive exactly as I should; and I’ll just stand there not caring. Or actively hating it. Killing zombies, or growing as many bloody carrots as I can in a square meter on some fantasy farm, or whatever puerile shit I’ve tried always suffers from the same problem. Me.

  Where is the joy in postapocalyptic survival horror when you’ve only just escaped it yourself? Where is the joy in any environment that reminds you of an Earth you’ve left behind, dying? Where is the fun in shooting stupid fake aliens on Mars when you know the real people in the base there are stranded and condemned to a slow death?

  But I can’t say that. I can’t tell him how I feel. I never have. All these years I’ve known him, I’ve propped him up. I’ve been the one who doesn’t let anything get to her, not even being rounded up by those corporate-sanctioned slavers and being hot-housed and sold to a gov-corp. It was all water off a neoprene suit to me. I never let it bother me, and if something had, I’d never have let Carl see it. Not the only person in the world who actually means something to me. Nothing ever did bother me though. I killed off that sentimentality a long time ago.

  And the irony is, I never even liked anyone we left behind. I never went out into nature, or loved any of the cities I lived in, or even cared that much about anything other than surviving and finding the latest game to help me escape it all. I thought I was invincible.

  Turns out that watching thermonuclear war from space in real time didn’t just run off me like water. Maybe I am human, after all.

  “Talk to me, Dee,” he says, squeezing my arm.

  “I’m fine, seriously,” I say, pulling away, marveling at how easy it is to lie to him. “I just don’t fancy it anymore, that’s all.”

  “How about we just try going to Mars? Tomorrow, maybe? No pressure. Even if we just sit there and take potshots at rocks for a while. Nothing too intense.”

  I can hear the need in his voice. “All right. Throw a time at my APA. It’s not like I have anything else going on.” I point at the cards. “What should we do with those?”

  He starts gathering them up. “I’ll take them back to Travis. Peace offering.”

  I nod. “Tell him not to do that to me again, will you?”

  Carl gets up, looks me in the eye. “I will. I got your back, Dee. Always.”

  2

  MY CABIN IS only a few meters away, and as the door slides shut behind me, I feel both the relief of solitude after Travis’s clumsy interference and the familiar faint disappointment at my living space.

  The ceiling, a creamy white printed sheet of thick plastic, stretches above me, merging seamlessly with the walls. The door to the tiny bathroom is shut, as is the one that leads out onto the corridor. Carl’s room is on the other side of the wall that my bed extends from and I can’t help but wonder if he is feeling the same relief as I am. Is he going to try to eat anything? What can I do about it?

  I lie down, there not being any space for a chair in here, and squeeze the foam of the mattress with my hands. I think about the bed I lie on, about the floor my bed rests upon, about the other cabins beneath mine and the many floors of the ship between my cabin and the engines. It helps me to ground out in my body when I feel unsettled, but it worked better when I was on Earth and lived in a normal apartment. It was far easier to feel like I was at home, in the real world, when I lived there. That building made sense and I understood it.

  There are many things I don’t understand about Atlas 2. I know that antimatter powers the engines, and that there’s some sort of clever gizmo that makes it in the quantities required to maintain our speed, but I don’t understand how either of them actually works. That means of antimatter production was one of the major technological breakthroughs the Pathfinder made all those years ago. Apparently she woke up out of a coma, knew where to go to find God and then figured out a revolutionary way to fuel interstellar travel in less than a month. Bloody overachiever.

  I know that those engines create a huge amount of heat that has to be sent somewhere; otherwise it will melt the ship. I know that a tiny fraction of that heat is used in life support and that the rest is removed by means of “droplet radiators,” which are basically two jets of superheated molten sodium that are sprayed out from the sides of the ship. The sodium is piped past the engines, taking in that waste heat, which melts it; then it gets sprayed out. The cooled droplets are caught by pipe catcher things near the base of the ship and pumped back into the system. If the little mersive I watched about the ship is to be believed, the cooling sodium fanning out from the spray jets on either side of the ship looks like giant glowing wings as we travel through space. I would love to be able to see that. Apparently, you can see a sliver of that spray from the viewing window, but my time slot hasn’t come up yet. We’re only allowed a very small amount of time looking out of the only window on the ship because of the radiation (or so we’ve been told), and there are about 10,400 people to share it with.

  I understand the principle, sort of, behind those droplet radiators, and I don’t need a greater knowledge of it than I have; there are other, far more qualified people on this ship who have got that covered. I’m happy with my rudimentary understanding of how gravity is generated by the fact that we’re accelerating at the equivalent of one g, but I did get a bit lost when the mersive e
xplained that gravity is actually falling. Again, I don’t need to be able to do the calculations there; I can just live here, walk around, run, lie down, jump and land again just like I did on Earth. At the halfway point in the journey we’ll temporarily lose gravity and have to strap ourselves to our own beds to prevent injury. It’s something to do with having to turn around and decelerate or something, so we don’t eventually hit our destination planet at just below the speed of light. Never a good look.

  No, what really bothers me is that I don’t understand how the ship is structured socially. Pretty much every organization I’ve ever interacted with, from an apartment block residents’ association to a huge gov-corp, has had a clear hierarchy of roles with easily accessible information about who is employed in them. Military vessels have command structures and everyone knows who the captain and first officer and all the other critical members of the crew are. But not Atlas 2. Someone is in charge of this ship, and I don’t have the faintest clue who that is.

  It seems absurd to me. Surely if there’s anything that thousands of years of human history has told us, it’s that people like to know where they stand in the pecking order and whom to depose if they want to climb higher. I have no idea whether the average peasant in ancient China knew who the emperor of the time was, nor whether the peasants of medieval England knew who the king or queen was, but I reckon it wouldn’t have been difficult for them to find out. Someone in their village would know, surely, because there would have to have been someone connected to the wider machine of society. Those poor bastards couldn’t have been adequately exploited without it, after all.

  Even if a person has no hope of climbing their respective social ladder, they want—no, need—to know the name of the one at the top so they have someone to blame for all the ills of the world. A name to curse while bemoaning one’s lot. Is that why this ship’s captain has kept their name secret? Because they don’t want to be seen as the one responsible for all of the bad as well as the good? Unlikely. In my experience, the sort of people who pursue roles at the top of the ladder actually want everyone else to know their name. And this is a historic trip, one that will form the foundation of the new civilization we’re going to build at our destination. The captain will want to be remembered long after we have arrived.