There were no windows in the cell, but the AI seemed to still accept my name and rank when I asked for the wall opposite the door to give me a view of the outside. The image of the limb of Kenya, dangling there with the terminator passing across the northern hemisphere, was indistinguishable from the real thing. The day side was a dappled mess of magenta, turquoise, and white cloud swirl. The night side, where there should have been a hundred clusters of city lights, was just black.
I found myself drumming my fingers on the brushed steel table, the sound mingling with the other ambient noises of the ship. From beyond the hatch footsteps approached. The wheel cranked and the door opened with a metallic yawn. A middle-aged man in dress fatigues stepped over the coaming, clutching a briefcase. He casually smoothed over his protruding gut, then waved to someone behind him and out of sight. The hatch closed behind him, locked.
The man pulled the chair opposite me, sat down, placed his hands on the table without making eye contact. His jaw twitched as he ground his teeth back and forth. As if I wasn’t watching, he chewed a fingernail and spat it out.
“Lieutenant Vinashradi,” said the man, drawing out the first syllable. “Call me Dawson. I want to make it clear how painful your situation is for me. The —” He paused, thinking of the word. “Paradox? No.” He wiggled a finger, then tapped a finger on the steel-brushed table. “Vice. The vice we’re in. You feel it turning?”
“We?”
He feigned shock. “Sorry, sorry. Aren’t you aware? They don’t want to touch you. No. They know that whoever has to deal with you is going to be shit upon — shat upon? — as much as you yourself.”
I held my expression fixed and impassive. “If it’s so much trouble, don’t bother.”
He chuckled. The single light above flickered with subtle rhythms. He licked his lips and stood, as though engaged in a second, silent conversation with himself. “What I want is to be home. I want to be home. A beer. Wine. Ouzo, for all I care. Any drink. I’d be at home, watching something. I would trade your life not to be here, Lieutenant. That option isn’t open to me.”
“Not how I pictured my professional counsel to sound,” I said.
“For the time being, I own you. I am your counsel. I am your interrogator. I am your saviour.” He leaned over the table, placing his hands firmly on the cold surface. “I am your wife and lover and fucking saint. There is no one for you. Not a hell’s hope. As for me, my career might hang, but not my neck.”
“I’m not here to make you a pariah. I just need to talk to someone. If you could —”
“Hello, paying attention? I have —” He hefted the leather briefcase onto the table, clicked open the lock, pulled out and dropped a paper file an inch thick. “I have here my summer reading material. Spoiler: you’re the star. We already know how it ends, Vinny. Can I call you Vinny?”
“No.”
“Vinny, you — a decorated war hero — deserted your post, were AWOL for months during the final stages of the evacuation, removed by way of illegal surgery your implants, boarded a vessel using forged documents, and incited mutiny on a Global Armed Forces Ship in a time of war.” He rubbed his eyes and waved his head side to side. “It isn’t my place to make moral judgments, but people were fucking depending on you. So, do I want to pass on whatever it is you have to say? Not really, no. It’s nice to see you’re calm now. I hear when they picked you up you were manic. Raving. You feeling better now? They give you something?”
“Fuck you.”
“That’s not helping.”
“Let me talk to someone.”
“You are talking to someone.”
“You need to warn them.”
“Who?”
“Everyone!”
“Try being specific. It’s a skill worth having.”
I leapt to my feet. The chair shot back with a screech. The guards were in within a second. Dawson stayed stone still, waved them off. “He’s fine, boys.” They left. He locked eyes with me. “Sit. Down.”
He resumed with, “Let’s talk about your defense.”
“You think I have one?”
Dawson nodded, his face brightening in obvious mockery. “Absolutely. Oh, if by defense you mean pleading guilty as fuck.” His expression sobered.
“And Worthing?” I asked.
“What about her?”
“If I plead guilty, will they release her? Look more favourably on her?”
Dawson shrugged. “I can ask for that. Say she was compelled, by you. Mental break down. They’ve got her down the hall right now, so. . .”
“Do that.”
“Consider it done.”
We sat in uneasy silence for a while as Dawson picked up and leafed through the papers.
He said, “Vinny, tell me. Where do I get a pair of the loaded dice you’re rolling your life with? Because I sure as hell would’ve done a better job with the luck you’ve got. I mean, Vinny, let’s get real. You knew you’d get caught. Why even try? Why do any of it at all?”
I observed Dawson as he waited my answer. The roundness of his face was obfuscated by a finely trimmed chestnut beard, his brown hair combed over to mask its recession at the peak and crown. Dawson’s suit, while standard issue navy blue dress fatigues, had the rumpled and dusty look of something hastily pulled out of a locker last minute. He fidgeted with his hands, pausing only to chew his nails and spit them.
“May I ask a question?” I replied.
His eyebrows went up. “Oh, you’re going to do the asking. Well, fuck. Fire away.”
“Have you been in combat?”
Dawson squinted. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“So, no.”
“I didn’t say that.” He snorted. “Why do you want to know?”
“Because you don’t seem very interested —”
“Oh, I’m up to my ass in this, trust me —”
“— let me finish. You seem to have already made up your mind about me.”
“Personally? I have. And 99.99% of the time, I’d never let it show. But once in a while, when the entire ediface of human civilization is crashing down around you, you tend to want to vent. And you know what? I’ll still make your case to the tribunal as best I can. Because I’m just that good.”
“So your feelings about me are entirely separate?”
“My feelings about you are entirely separate.”
“But you have feelings.”
Dawson’s face went red, lips seemed to pucker. He slammed an elbow on the table and pointed a finger. “I’m not here to be lectured. I’m here to do a job for you, one I was assigned. I didn’t volunteer to take your case on. I’m your legal aid. I can feel however I want about this without letting it affect my job.”
“You never answered my question. About being in combat.”
Dawson rolled his eyes. “Fine. Yes. Happy?”
“Down there?” I gestured to the window, where Kenya still gently rotated. A host of fleet vessels amassed at one corner of the panel, their black masses and trailing filaments visible only for the glint of sunlight at their edge.
He gave a curt little nod. “It’s where the party’s at. Why do you care?”
“I just thought you’d appreciate my situation more. If you’d been through the same.”
“Oh.” Dawson looked up to the ceiling. “You thought. . . that I would be a sympathetic ear. We’d find. . . a common connection. Is that so?”
I hesitated, then said, “There is one, even if you don’t see it. Where did you fight?”
He shook his head, as though getting ready to shut this avenue of conversation down, but then his expression softened, and he stared off at something impossibly distant in time and space. “Up in the hills, Tsingtao. Perimeter station. It was just my first week. I’m a fucking lawyer, but they were short of bodies and I had my basic rating. So off I went. Got cut up. Got a complete recon.” He tapped the front page of the dossier on the table. “Captain Akhil Vinashradi, reconned a whopping three times. Don’t envy you, being on your fourth life. What’s that like for you?”
A flashing memory: of the trilling bay, shrill cries like scraping metal, low industrial noises resolving into guttural moans of human beings. A woman’s face hovering over, obscured by harsh overhead light. Snapping fingers. Waiting for me to do something. Saying, Another one. He’s gone. No, wait —
Now Dawson snapped. “You with me?”
I forced a nod, feeling the other man’s mood soften. He withdrew a cigarette.
“You can’t smoke those in here.”
“Fuck,” he said. “After all they’ve put you through, you give a shit about that?” He passed it over, lit it for me, pulled out a second for himself. “Fucking crazy.”
“What part?”
He lit up, took a long haul and exhaled. The cloud lingered in the air above us. “These things. That they. . . survived, I guess. What a habit to keep. The Scyphons took everything else away, wiped it all clean. But this. . . ” He bounced the cigarette in his hands, weighing it like a buried memory.
I took a long draw on my own, sputtered and coughed it all back up. I jabbed the smoke out on the table.
“Not for you?” he said. It wasn’t really a question.
“The habits,” I said, regaining my composure, “come from need.”
“Ah!” He leaned forward, the cigarette between his fingers rendering him like a character from a vintage film. The light cast rough shadows under his brow. “Perfect. The needs don’t change, do they. When little old Walter Raleigh came back to England a thousand years ago, people saying ‘you want us to do what with the leaves?’ — was as good an idea then as it is now. But.” He looked suddenly green, inhaled sharply, pounded his chest. He put out his own cigarette. “Not for me either, truth be told. Like them for the clients. Conversation piece. You know?”
“We’re lucky we didn’t set the alarm off.”
Dawson waved the smoke away. He leaned in conspiratorially. “I do have one burning question.” I motioned for him to proceed. “Did you really think it’d work? Your plan, you and Worthing, trying to escape all on your own?”
I tried to imagine myself in Dawson’s life. Switching skins. He’d find himself in a younger man, a browner man for that matter. Fitter by far. A face angled and sharp. Good deal more hair. I tried imagining myself in his soft and aging body, the round stubby fingers with the nails chewed down practically to the bone, the sheen of sweat on that broad and hairless forehead. Tried to imagine myself enduring the ceaseless grind of lawschool. Imagined him, at the same time, in the slums of Kolkata — the confusion, the panic he’d feel in such an environment. Wouldn’t be much different had I been dropped into his own world. I couldn’t navigate the intellectual mazes that defined his life. Hell no. And what was it like being reconned only a single time, the maximum allowable number under official Global Armed Forces law? What would Dawson feel if we switched bodies, if he’d had to endure and relive the trilling bay not once, but three times? Had to prepare and execute his daily routines with obsessive precision to combat the creep of mental decay?
Instead of answering, I asked, “How hard was your reconning?”
He puckered his lips. “I’ve been told it was easy, as they go.”
“There’s a reason they typically limit reconstitution to a single time per patient. Does it say in there,” I leaned in and tapped his dossier, “why that is?”
“No, but I think you’re about to tell me.”
Boots stomped in the corridor and a klaxon sounded over the PA. Now hear this! Now hear this! EVA in progress. No electromagnetic discharge while EVA is in progress. That is all.
I cleared my throat. “Lot of side effects. Imperfect process. They put people through four, five rounds in the beginning. It’s a delayed reaction. Often starts with ticks, before developing into something more harmful. It doesn’t exactly add new neuroses and ticks to the roster, just magnifies the ones you have tenfold. How are your fingers doing?”
Dawson, who’d been sawing his way through the nail at the end of his left pinkie, stopped, pulled the finger out, trailing a tiny thread of saliva. He wiped his hand on his pants. “Okay,” he said. “All right. So three is bad.”
I shuffled up to the edge of my seat. “No. It is clarifying. It makes everything that much clearer.”
He seemed to consider this. At least, he didn’t immediately snort, laugh, or retort. “Well - I chew my nails. Where’s, ah -” He titled his head this way and that. “Where’re your ticks, huh?”
“Well hidden.”
Dawson remained silent. His chair creaked as he leaned back in it, folded his hands in his lap and tucked in his chin. I noticed a hand begin to make its way up to his face for subconscious grooming, but, catching my eye, he returned it to his lap. He smirked, pulled his chin in. He closed his eyes, and continued to speak with them closed. “Vinny, you puzzle me. On the one hand, you seem. . . fragile. Ready to crack. On the other, you clearly give no fucks. You are ready and set to stick it to the man.”
I sighed. “I don’t care, Dawson. Tell me you’ll do something for Worthing.”
“Like I said, consider it taken care of.”
“And try for me — please — to just pass on my message.”
He rolled his eyes. “Fine. What should I say?”
“That I. . . We saw. . .” Shit. This really does sound crazy. Shit. Had I really seen it? Had either of us? Dehydrated for days, we could’ve imagined it. Besides, I’d already burned up all my credibility, screaming like a crazed man, ranting what was obviously nonsense from a guy who’d cracked. Make him understand, or you all die. Worthing dies. Dawson looked at me expectantly. I felt sweat beading on my forehead.
“Vinny?”
“I. . .”
“Look,” he said, almost worried now. “You’ve been through a lot. This is natural. Maybe start from the beginning. Okay?”
I gave a little nod. “Will your knowing help?”
He threw his head back and gave a whooping laugh that sounded too well timed to be natural. “Almost certainly not. But it’s something to do. We’ve got. . . looks like at least twelve hours until you’re due up. No time like the present to hang traitors, as far as the navy’s concerned.” He frowned. “Sorry. I have a bad habit of telling it like it is. Let’s get started.”