Estimated oxygen time: 19:40:49
And there it was. The truth that I had risked everything to find out. A madman’s death wish. Was that it?
“You’re right,” I said, my words falling flat and echoless in the darkness. “That is hard to believe.”
He laughed again. “True, but I’m glad I got a chance to send it back to the inside.” He looked at the side of his visor and his expression tensed. “And you have something to do now. Nobody knows my story yet, and they should. So, you can’t die here.” He reached and squeezed my hand. “I don’t think the PM crossed me. I think the Shadow Man cleans up after him, keen to keep this information from coming out. I’m counting on you to fuck it up for them. The confession is over.”
He opened the door, exposing a patch of starry sky through the opening and filling my helmet with the background radio noise of open space. “But there’s one more thing I’d like to ask of you.”
I followed him outside. Pythia’s Second was looking at the stars; the moment she saw us, she jumped to his side, unhooding her helmet while floating, and took his hand in one of hers. She held a knife in the other, just like the one Anaxagoras had used. “Diocletian aren’t coming,” she said. “I’ll have to do it myself.”
“Let him do it,” First said, and she looked at me, her eyes darkening.
I didn’t understand, and then I did. “I wouldn’t… I don’t…” I choked on the words.
She came close to me and practically shoved the knife into my hand. I closed my grip around it, angry at myself for not having more resolve.
“You’ve seen it done, haven’t you?” First asked. Second watched me, the hard lines of her face seeming even harder.
I nodded.
“I want you to do it,” he said.
“Why?”
“For one, it will hurt horribly if you don’t.”
“You,” I said, looking at Second. “You should do it. You want to.”
She shook her head in a short, fierce motion. I held the knife in my right hand, limp. “I can’t.”
He stepped forward and grabbed my free, left hand. “Please,” he said. “Time’s up.” The violet numbers within his visor turned blinking red.
“You do it!” I yelled at the dying man. “Why me? Why am I even a part of this?”
Second placed a hand over mine in a firm grip. With the other, she held First’s. I didn’t look at her face. She didn’t so much guide my hand as reassure it, but there was something easier about not being the sole culprit.
Arik’s face was beginning to turn red, and he was taking quick, shallow breaths, but he still stood, not like Anaxagoras in her final moments. We put the knife against the bag at his chest. He held my hand so tight I thought my fingers would sprain. “Do it, you coward.” Spittle sprayed the inside of his visor. His face was turning purple, the veins bulging on his forehead and neck. There was surprise in his expression, as if the experience was not as he’d imagined it. “Do. It.”
Was it me or Second who started moving the blade against the bag? It didn’t matter; once we started, we carried on, flaying the suit open. In horror I looked at his face and saw the expression of someone grasping, as if he was holding on to something—to what?—even as blood burst through his clenched teeth and the eyes dried and wrinkled, still he held, until his skin inflated and hardened and after long seconds the process of his dying finally ended.
Second and I stood, still holding our hands together in one knife grip.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Arik. “I am sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He probably wouldn’t have accepted my apology, but that was all I had to offer. The corpse’ hand was still clenched around mine, as if still he did not let go.
I found the courage to look at Second’s face. Her eyes were wet, and her lip trembled, but she made no sound. There was no softness in her expression as she met my eyes. She let go of my hand, leaving me with the knife, and took his body in both hands as my fingers squirmed out of the dead grip. She braced him and jumped; floating over to the top of the shuttle, holding him in her arms like a child who had fallen asleep on the way home. Once she landed she sat with her feet over the edge and placed his now rigid corpse on her knees.
She tipped her head back to look again at the stars. “Was it enough?” I heard her whisper. “I thought I’d get to do more.” She sighed, her voice breaking. “I am now First.”
#
Estimated oxygen time: 19:35:19
I had so many questions, but I didn’t know how much time she would need. I didn’t know how much time I would, neither. Diocletian would arrive at some point, and all I had to do was wait. If they still wanted to send me back, they would. If they wanted to kill me… Well, there were worse alternatives.
I crouched beside the shuttle, looking at the history of the lines. Four long rows of letters, scratched into the shuttle’s side. Some letters were large, carved with great force and perhaps distress; others were small, made in gentle, straight lines. Hundreds of initials, packed tightly together. Every dozen or so names there was a blank, a single line signifying an absence. For those who escaped, perhaps, or blown up by the airlock.
“You should sign it,” First said from above.
I looked up at her, confused.
“You came here,” she said. “You took part in our rituals.”
“Where? I’m not a part of a line.”
“The top row is Diocletian; Ctesibius is below them; Pythia’s at the bottom. It’s customary for visitors to add their names near Pythia, but we don’t remember why.”
I traced the bottom row. Every hundred names or so, another name appeared, just below the lowest row. Who were these people? O.R..; O.S.; B.K.. They’d seen everything I saw, but I never heard of them. Did they manage to return inside?
I reached the end of Pythia’s line. … A.R., V.S., T.G., S.B. “Under the last name?”
She nodded, and I used the knife to scratch a crooked Yud and Bet. It was comforting, in a way, to let someone know that I had indeed been here, whether or not I made it back.
“Don’t try to memorize the poem,” she said. “It’s enough that you listen to it, fully, only once, but with your whole being. Be completely present.”
I nodded. “I’ll try.”
She took a deep breath, and recited:
I have seen people go mad, clutching their sanity with manic fingers, slick with lunacy,
I have seen children, confused but tenacious, sacrificing their lives, not their deaths, which is harder, for something, anything,
I have become—in ancient, cold death, in twinkling void, in insanity—a person, in a way the oxygen-sucking monarch that I was could not have hoped to fathom.
Gazing, slack-jawed, I saw the waterfall of humanity crash down into the past—and in the flow, thoughts swimming upstream just to stay in place, struggling upwards, and I was blessed to pass those thoughts myself, mouth to ear, one at a time,
And I had you there to show me,
And I had you there to teach me,
And I had you there to hold my hand.
Goodbye, glorious fool; your blood will run through many hearts before it runs dry.
She looked up, and in the asteroid-light her face shone. “You know, everyone has the same confession, coming here. Sure, their prior lives are different, but their experience within the Town is virtually the same. For the first couple of hours they think everything we do here is insane. What’s the point, if they’re already going to die at the end of their twenty-four hours? Who the fuck is Pythia, they want to scream, I am a human being, and I have a name, and I’m dying. But they go along with the motions, mostly out of fear of what would happen if they wouldn’t, trying very hard to understand if this is for real, if we really mean it. Then their First dies. And the first time you watch your first die, you realize that even if they were pretending to care, they believed it was important enough to keep pretending even when there was nothing to threaten them with. And you realize that they, like you, had to watch their First in order to understand. Then you go to the airlock to pick up a new third, and they look up at you, their eyes full of the question whether this is for real, and you find yourself doing anything in your power to prove to them that it is. You feel like a part of this long chain of trust, and everyone along the chain trusted you to carry it along, and you’re unwilling to disappoint them. Not like you have anything better to do, right? Feels weird, telling you this, but I guess it wouldn’t matter, the way things are going.”
The camera was still recording. I wondered if her words would carry the same weight when played from a speaker. “If none of this matters, will you tell me who you are? Your name, your story?” I asked.
She opened her mouth, and then closed it again. “No, it still feels wrong. I’m Pythia, as far as you are concerned. But you could make out the initials of my former name, if you wanted to.” She smiled, as if hinting at something.
I looked at the letters again. A.R., V.S., T.G., S.B. She was Pythia’s second when I got here, and no newcomer came into the line since then, which meant that she was T.G.. That was all that I was going to get to know about her, all she could tell me if she wanted to hold on the line’s persona. I traced the initials of Arik Rosen, “I only met him once, but I think I understand what kind of man he was-” I started saying, and stopped when I realized that I had, in fact, never met him at all. Whoever just told me that story, wasn’t Arik. What an idiot. What an absolute idiot.
“Who did I just talk to?” I asked her, my voice surprisingly choked.
“What do you mean?” she said, and I knew that she knew. There was no malice in her smile, no gloating.
“The initials!” I pointed at the letters. A.R., V.S., T.G., S.B.. You and Second are T.G. and S.B., which means that the person you referred to as First, the person I was just in confession chamber with, was V.S., and Arik Rosen fucking died before I even got here. Whose story did I listen to, then?”
She looked at me from above, still sitting on the shuttle with the body in her lap, holding one hand in her, and laughed—with relief, this time, not amusement. “One last joke, huh?” she asked him.
“Did you hear it too?” I asked. “The story about the meeting with the prime minister? Did Arik tell it to you or did V.S. just make it up?”
“What’s said in the shuttle, stays in the shuttle,” she said sagely. “But I will tell you this: I haven’t seen Pythia do a single thing that wasn’t out of kindness and love. Made up or not, if he chose to give you this memory, he thought it would help you.”
“How is a false memory going to help me?”
“No such thing, false memory. The world may agree with some of your memories, discredit others, but they are all real just the same.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“You’ll figure it out.” She shrugged, and even as she grieved her last friends, and herself, there was disappointment in her over not being understood.
I looked around for an anchor, trying to stabilize myself, and my eyes found the statue. The simulacrum of a human being, meant to bring comfort. How had they built it? Not just how did they bring themselves to do it, but how did they, physically, weld the beams together? It was, just by standing there, a proof that there existed a dedication that was greater than one person’s interests and ego. Kindness and love, she said. I let that image, that story that the statue told just by standing there, strengthen my resolve, empty my mind.
“What will you do, if Diocletian come?” I asked, after a while.
“I’ll talk to them. I’ll offer whatever comfort I can; tell them what they need to hear.”
“What if they hurt you?”
“Then I’ll be hurt.”
“Aren’t you afraid?”
She raised her chin at me. “What does that have to do with anything?”
#
Estimated oxygen time: 18:59:22
It had been a very long thirty-six minutes. Pythia and I had sat in silence and watched our timers count down. The only interruption was a flash from deep within the crater, where the airlock should have been. “A newcomer,” First said quietly. “They never got to become Pythia.” There was nothing more to say.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Finally, something came in low over the horizon, straight for us. I’d have thought it was an asteroid if it hadn’t been for the shine of black metal, the accurateness of its trajectory. Not an asteroid, but a skipper: a rental like mine.
No, I slowly realized. Not like mine. It was mine. Ctesibius hadn’t blown up my skipper; they’d stolen it.
It stopped above us, then came straight down, close enough that I felt the landing jets scattering against the uneven terrain and pressing against my suit. Eventually the skipper touched ground, resting crooked on a bulging rock.
I stared at it. First may have stared at it too—I didn’t dare turn away to look at her.
The skipper’s interior was dark, and the reflection of the sky against the glass made it difficult to see inside. After a moment I made out a small figure in a gray space suit, trying unsuccessfully to open the skipper’s door. The entire craft shuddered as the figure tried kicking it open, once, twice. After a moment the inside filled with blazing, painful light, as the figure must have used a welding torch against the lower edge of the door, farthest from the hinge. The light died, and the figure kicked again. This time the door hinged upwards wildly.
The bright light of the torch had left a pink stain in the middle of my field of vision, and now, even without the pane between us, I couldn’t see clearly enough in the starlight to understand if I was looking at Ctesibius or Diocletian. Slowly, I fell into a deep crouch, ready to move.
The small figure exited the vehicle, one slow step at a time. Something must have moved above us because all at once it became brighter, the shadows’ edges sharper. The helmet crossed that precipice of light, and in it I saw her smile. I also saw the streaks of black against the gray of the suit—one large blotch across the chest, but many more that had joined it since. Loops of tape had been added to her suit, one around her shin, another around her forearm.
She stayed low as she moved, holding the handle of the blade, still clasped to her side, with one hand, protecting the fragile metal from the rock. She held the torch in the other.
Pythia had let go of the body’s hand and placed him stiffly beside her. She looked at Diocletian for only an instant, as if she were nothing but a passing asteroid, then returned to looking at the sky.
“Are you here to kill me?” I asked, my voice thin, like the sound of pressurized air escaping.
Diocletian’s eyes were unfocused and distant, and her breathing was ragged. Something primal had curled her spine, her fingers. “Why would I kill you?”
“You tried cutting me, before.”
She rolled her eyes. “I tried nicking your suit, dropping the inside pressure. It wouldn’t have killed you, if you’d let me patch you up in time.”
I looked at the tape on her suit. Had it been cut, and she just taped it down? “What happened to Ctesibius’s Second?”
She looked at me, then, and recited:
Why, she that cuts off twenty hours of life,
Cuts off so many hours of fearing death.
Her voice was a low, satisfied purr. Pythia turned to look at her then, perhaps in recognition.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
Pythia replied, “It means they’re dead, and she considers she has done them a favor, even.”
Diocletian had killed all of them, then. But that wasn’t the part that was horrific, was it? They were going to die anyway. It’s that she killed their legacy, crushed the flame they were trying to keep alive.
Diocletian’s eyes glinted, as if she were drunk. Her gaze darted to mine, and it terrified me more deeply than any oxygen-count display or blade. “Ctesibius weren’t afraid,” I managed to say. A laconic epitaph, not only for First, Second, and Third, but for a custom, a way of being that was now gone. “And they lived for more than twenty hours.”
“You actually care about that? About Line Ctesibius?” She asked, fascinated.
“They worked for so long to keep it going. It meant so much to them. More than that: it gave people something to care about in their last hours.” Look at Yossi, finally finding his spine.
“Well, nobody cares about it now.” Her expression was dismissive, as if she didn’t understand why I’d even expect her to take my opinion seriously. “Fly home,” she commanded, still crouching by a rock protrusion. “Appeal.” She tossed the skipper’s remote control to me and I stretched to grab it with both hands, almost losing my balance.
“Are you sure it wasn’t damaged in the explosion?” I said.
“It wasn’t around when the bomb went off,” she said. “Ctesibius wrapped it in a faraday cage and carried it away.” I didn’t want to ask how she’d gotten that information.
“But what if they sabotaged it?”
“Then improvise something out of the parts, like we’ve been doing all of this time. I’ll wait one week to hear from you—if I don’t get any signal that you’ve started the legal process, I’ll walk over to the airlock and give them just enough information to track you down. They’ll find something to stick you with.”
“One week,” I repeated. A very short time for a legal process.
“I told you I’ll make it,” she assured me, misunderstanding again. “Focus on your end. And in return, I’ll reestablish Lines Ctesibius and Anaxagoras, as I see that it matters to you so much. It shouldn’t be too hard, especially with Pythia here to help me. You have nothing to worry about.” Even an idiot could see that for the lie it was. “Line Ctesibius will be exactly the same, except that they won’t remember exactly what happened here. Poetic, considering that’s what they planned for the other lines.” She said, as if I knew what she was talking about.
“It won’t matter for the Ctesibius you killed, though,” I said.
Diocletian shrugged and turned to Pythia and the body. “What do you say, Pythia?”
“Diocletian.” Pythia turned to Diocletian as if she’d just noticed her presence, her tone distant and strangely calm. “You’re late. I’ve been waiting for you to pick up the body for a while, and now we’re going to be late for recitation.”
“Is that how you choose to spend the last of your oxygen? Lecturing me on civic duty?”
“It held this place in one piece, didn’t it?”
“That’s up for debate, I’m afraid,” Diocletian said. “Tell me, Pythia: Did you know what was going on?”
She nodded. “The moment you stopped showing up for confessions.”
“I never liked those. Never made sense to me. And you know what else never made sense?” She put a hand to her chin, a movement that almost seemed natural until her hand found a rest against the glass of her visor. “The names. I understand that Anaxagoras was an exile who liked stargazing, and Diocletian was a cavalryman-turned-emperor that retired to tend to cabbages. More than anything else it just sounds so cool: Dai-uh-klee-shn. Ctesibius discovered the basis for modern pneumatics. But why would the line tasked with hearing confessions be named after an oracle? This might be your last opportunity to let the world know.” There was pleasure in her tone.
Pythia considered for a moment. “Why don’t I predict your future, then?”
“Sure, why not.”
“There will come a time when you will regret this. All of it: every time you killed to live a little longer. You will die without seeing the inside again, and by the time you do, you will have left behind nothing but chaos and suffering. You will realize you would have been better off accepting death, and the comfort that comes with dying alongside allies.”
“Chaos?” she protested. “Did you not just hear me say that I was going to rebuild the lines?”
Pythia shook her head. “Don’t cling to your lies. Do you expect me to beg, Diocletian?” She raised her hands, and her voice then changed to a dramatic, high-pitched impersonation of herself. “Oh, Diocletian: Please don’t kill Line Pythia! We carry so many memories, the history of this place, and if we die these memories will be lost forever!”
Diocletian laughed, and Pythia laughed with her, the way a desperate victim laughs along with their torturer.
“You won’t beg, even for the entire line?” Diocletian asked.
“Fuck you, Diocletian.” For the first time, her composure wavered. “We both know you won’t keep Pythia alive, no matter what I say. We know too much.”
“If you knew, why didn’t you fight? Why, when you knew that everything you worked for was about to be taken?” There wasn’t just curiosity in Diocletian’s voice, there was anger.
“If we fought against you, we wouldn’t be Pythia anymore. We hoped that Ctesibius will calm you down, or in the worst case that you’d kill each other, and we were almost right, but-”
“You could have tried,” Diocletian cut in, and her anger flared, as if Pythia had taken something from her by not fighting back. “You should have tried to survive.”
Pythia shrugged, and for a moment said nothing more. When she finally spoke, her voice was a low lament. “It’s almost time, isn’t it?”
Diocletian’s tone softened too. “I almost forgot about it. Yeah, it actually is.”
“Once more, Diocletian, for old time’s sake?”
Both of them looked behind me. I turned to follow their gazes, and saw the orbiter rising over the southern horizon—first the black, slick body of the massive spacecraft, then the net dragging behind it, carrying colossal chunks of metal shining refracted sunlight on Last Day Town in colors gold and ferrous and all shades of silver and chrome, creating patterns I’d never seen there before.
I looked back at the two women, as the sky showered them with light. They recited, and as they did, I could see the people putting those words together, in those ancient times of three weeks ago, as if they were standing there now:
Here lies King of Hellhole,
We see him as he dies,
We hear his O2 whistling,
As the light leaves his eyes.
We broke his bones and power,
We took away his tools,
We made him curse the hour,
He made us into fools.
We were kept proud and knightly,
By the words Pythia strung
And Ctesibius crafted rightly,
Blades Diocletian swung.
Anaxagoras ventured,
To silence, frightful, dark
To discover around us,
The bounty of an ark.
Be warned then you, if you might think,
To spend your day time-stealing,
For Vampire law, that we now forge,
Compels to kill those killing.
The light shone down on them from above, brighter than ever, and for the first time I could see their faces clearly. They looked impossibly tired.
“This has been the fifty-first Recitation,” said Diocletian.
“Fifty-second,” Pythia corrected.
“Yeah, whatever.” She turned to me. “Why are you still here? You got your story. Now go—day’s not getting any longer.”
I didn’t want to leave them alone together, knowing what Diocletian might do. Would do. Pythia was still sitting on the shuttle, and put the hood back over her helmet. Her head was tilted upward; she must have been gazing at the orbiter as it drifted into the shadow of Ceres, the light dying. Even without seeing her face, it was obvious from her body language how aware of us she was, and how Diocletian frightened her. She turned to me as if she’d noticed I was looking at her. “Just go,” she said from the shadow of her hood. “I’ll handle this.”
Pythia was going to die anyway, but leaving her alone with Diocletian felt wrong. I could have bargained or distracted, urged Diocletian to spare this woman her last hours, but my body moved on its own. It lurched into the safety of the skipper, pulled the door closed, pressed against the back of the chair, grabbed for the controls.
I took off.
#
This is Last Day Town’s last day, and Pythia’s dying along with it. It is their final trial.
“Is there any reason I shouldn’t kill you right here?” Diocletian, what’s left of them, ask. “Anything you could give me?”
Pythia remembers how much Diocletian suffered, even if they don’t. Always feared, always hated, their burden corrupted them. Unlike Pythia, they were never given the privilege of providing comfort. The bliss of having made people’s lives better, even just fractions of it. At best, all that Diocletian got is to cut someone out of a suit, a brutal duty that taints the soul. And yet, for so long Diocletian held, as a line. How hard it must have been for them.
Pythia look at the blade in Diocletian’s hand, and find that they have given up all hatred. They have nothing in their heart now but love, even for this killer. They were tried, and found worthy.
“How would you like,” one weary woman asks another, “to hear a story?”
#
Estimated oxygen time: 18:47:22
When you fly a little rocket, hugging it with your legs and being thrown about without any protection but an airtight bag, you aren’t going through space: you are in it, exposed, alive, a tiny celestial body in its own orbit. When you fly in a spaceship, even a small one, you feel as if you are sitting in a room and space is whipping past you, the danger kept safely away.
It was a long time before I reached the airlock. Flying through dead space, watching Ceres’s craters and mountains, passing asteroids and ice haulers and cruise ships, I felt numb. I’m going to live, I told myself. I should be relieved. But there was no relief.
I chose an airlock on the skipper’s console, trusting it to fly on its own. Not the same one I’d exited through—even though I wasn’t even down to half of the amount of oxygen I started with, I didn’t want to see it come anywhere near finished. Or maybe it wasn’t that rational. Maybe I just wanted to be back in the interior as soon as safely possible, even if it meant taking a longer time on the trains, back on the inside.
The rental company would probably contact me in a couple of hours to ask about the damage to the door, and they’d sue me for probably three times what it would actually take to fix it. They’d sue me for the jetpack, and ask some questions, and that would be costly, too. Renting a jetpack and trashing it was a horrible way to buy a jetpack. But I’d survive. I survived, and the video survived. Everything else is commentary.
A metal sliding door that blended into the shape of the rock, large enough to let in a ship ten times larger than my skipper, slid aside to reveal a hangar with rows of spacecraft on each side, placed neatly on shelves dug into the rock to serve as parking spots. I piloted it slowly into one of the empty spots.
Why did I feel only grief, rather than triumph? And grief for whom? Persons? Lines? I recalled Arik’s insinuation that I’d come there to die. Wait, that wasn’t even Arik’s words, were they? Or maybe they were, his thoughts passed down to someone else. None of it made sense.
There was the matter of those I’d left behind in Last Day Town—those I’d done nothing to save, who would die there still. Had I done everything I could to save them? Had I done anything?
I will, I thought, once I upload the video. If Arik was right, if the prime minister was right, if any of that was real, uploading that video might actually make a big change. After I edited it for my own safety, of course.
The skipper informed me that I couldn’t exit because of my suit’s low oxygen. I had an oxygen reserve in the skipper, and the complex wrench needed for the piping used in spacesuits. I could have given it to someone in Last Day Town, but I’d chosen to leave it so I could open my door. I opened the skipper’s storage, to find that both the balloon and the wrench weren’t there anymore. Not a big surprise, with both Ctesibius and Diocletian having more than enough time to pick through it for anything useful. If anything, it should have surprised me that they didn’t take more. It was a good thing that Diocletian burned the door open, otherwise I’d be stuck here now, waiting for a rescue team to come get me. I pushed the door open, and it gave way easily.
Large arrows directed me towards the airlock itself, and I pressed the button with a flat palm; a door slid open without protest. The airlock was a small chamber, like a broom closet, with painted rock for walls. Inside were a console for authentication and a little window of space-proof glass.
I looked at the airlock overseer: a bored teenage girl, sitting in front of a screen of her own, sucking something from a tube. The airlock couldn’t be spun, so the overseer’s hair floated around her in the micro-G. I lifted a palm in a gesture of peace, but she didn’t lift her eyes from her screen.
I turned to the console that stood by the inner door. It presented a symbol indicating that it was communicating with my suit, demanding authentication in some silent machine language. After that, it scanned my retinas, and finally demanded that I put my thumb to the socket. Fucking vampires, I cursed, as the needle pierced my thumb.
But then again, I thought, if it weren’t for all of this, Diocletian would not have let me return. I blinked, and saw in a flash how the first thing that Diocletian thought, the first time that she saw me, was how difficult it would have been to cut out my eyes and put them against the front of the visor while wearing my suit. Maybe the blood taking was unnecessary, but I wasn’t angry at the founders of Ceres for designing one extra precaution.
A logo appeared on the screen, letting me know that the computer was processing my genetic data, making perfectly sure that I was one of the people who were allowed to occupy this part of space.
The overseer spat out the green juice she had been sucking on from the tube, her expression surprised in a cloud of green droplets. The gate behind me shut suddenly, with surprising force, the impact visible in the shaking of the little screen that had changed from its usual display to glaring, red letters. “Wanted criminal detected. Arrest in progress,” it read.
What an idiot. What an absolute idiot.