Chapter Two
‘I was born on a soggy Tuesday.’ She said, ‘it hadn’t rained like that in years.’
Frederickson sat there, hands together, his face tilted in attention towards her. They were sat across each other in the dining table setting, except something was amiss. Charles had taken his little table and chairs and English tea and placed them high on the top of the rocks of the Grand Canyon. She’d stare out now and then to survey the crooks and the riverbeds that once were. The thousands of years of geological nonsense, all within the minescape of Charles Frederickson, now all on display all around the dining setting. He was just showing off really, she thought.
‘Go on with your tale. I’m beguiled.’
He was perhaps condescending her. She wasn’t entirely sure. The sky was an infinite blue void, as if someone had filled the above with the burst from a paint palette. A whole artistry of nature, all imagined. All running, with its cogs and fibre-optic electricity, through the mind of Charles and into the dream space they occupied. Even the rock they were sat on, the billions of atoms and the dirt and the history within it, all of this was sponged from the imagination of the nineteenth century gentleman sat opposite her.
‘They cut the umbilical cord. Stitched my mother up best they could, but she didn’t survive the night. She was the last human to die in childbirth before the event.’ She held her lip, ‘Father died eight months later of heart failure.’
‘It’s been quite extraordinary for you, hasn’t it?’ Charles said.
The tea on the table was already cold. With a thought, it’d turn hot again, but the two were focused on one another.
‘A vast journey. From those deaths and the slew of orphanages. And now here, sat in my mind. What wicked webs have been weaved for us Sydney Kim? For us to be sat here?’ He grinned like the Cheshire cat and the tea started to steam from heat again.
‘What I’m trying to understand is how I can still remember the rain. And the pitter patter on the windows. Like the devil ringing his fingernails across the glass, gazing in to peer and perverse on this intimate moment.’ Sydney blinked twice, and then stopped for seconds.
Charles leaned in.
‘Do you believe the devil stole your parents away?’
She held her eyes closed for a while.
‘I do not know. I do not know where he is. Whether he’s far away, or he’s in the bowels of the dead Earth, or if he’s just round the corner,’ she opened her sight to stare right at Charles, ‘but I can hear that rain, Charles, and it’s become readily apparently to me that it’s getting louder.’
Charles plucked a clipboard out of thin air and read over a few squiggles. She soaked in the world around them. A whole Grand Canyon, carved by thousands of years of rain and geological circumstance. The scars of planet Earth, now pale in comparison to what wounds littered that forgotten waste. She’d seen Earth a few sleep cycles ago, from the observance deck, now becoming a faint blue dot. They were way past Mars, and the big blue blur was getting harder to spot during the quieter nights. She dreamt of home and now, sat in the austere palace of Charles Osgood Frederickson, her own mind turned towards that moment of planting her palm against the window pane. She thought past the cold in her fingers and wondered that, separated by miles and miles and miles, she could be touching the ground by now. She could be in the ruins of the desert, touching the rocks, rather than holding a needle in her head to simulate the smooth touch.
‘Your psychological evaluation is excellent, Sydney. Perhaps more sound than Noah’s. He’s been shaken by a whole string of nightmares. Quite intense stuff, really. Like there’s a storm brewing in that cranium of his.’
‘I can still hear the rain, Charles.’
There was a tectonic shift across his face. A ripple of pixels and voxels, perhaps. A shake of the simulation. A cold reminder that he was a series of terabytes glued to a brain, and here he was, hearing about a young woman just a few centuries younger than he was, with the sounds of rain gushing in her ears.
‘Charles?’
‘I want you to stay completely still and don’t move a single inch. Don’t even breathe.’
‘I don’t think I’m breathing in the real world anyway,’ she thought for a moment, ‘my lungs are frozen solid with water.’
‘Then there’s common ground. We’re both simulating respiration. Don’t panic and don’t reply to this. Don’t even blink.’ She didn’t. ‘It’s funny though, right. How oxygen is reined in by the muscles, then squeezed into the bloodstream. In and out. Contraction. Expulsion. It’s one of the few biological functions that begins at the moment of birth and stops at death. Breathing, heart beating, and the brain doing its business too.’
He leaned in towards her. The Grand Canyon around them suddenly didn’t look like the orange rock she’d seen before. It was subtle at first but then the whole world started to melt. She wasn’t breathing. A pounding motion was in her chest. She could feel it roar like the rain in her brain. Charles’s words were muffled by the pitter patter.
‘Your heartbeat is currently, in reality, at the very rock bottom of numerals. It’s slow, and your brain has been through this rhythm a lot lately. The length of freezing is intensifying. We can’t keep you being an icicle for more than a decade or two now.’
Her lip began to quiver.
‘We started with six months. Then we move to five years. Then two decades.’ Charles sighed, with the rock beneath them starting to splinter apart and turn into molten rock. ‘I’m accelerating the time scales.’
And her chest was filled with fire.
Water was building in her eyes and the pain flares spit into her wrists and her blood. She felt the flames flowing.
‘I want you to hear the rain. I can tell your mind is drowning in the sounds now.’ The whole Canyon began to dissolve faster, with rivers of molten rock running into the ridges. ‘Think only of the rain and the sound of my voice. Close your eyes.’
She did. The water underneath was building steadily. She could hear the ground underneath shiver with instability.
‘Now is the time to tell you that your body is seizing up. That it’s realizing the physical reality of the situation. I’m pumping a few tranquilizers into the back of your head. There’ll be a rush of numbness down the right side of your body.’ Charles flicked her eyes open with his thumbs, peeling her eyelids backwards, and peered into her pupils.
The pain in her chest was suddenly thumping with terror. She knew what the real world was like now. A cooling process, in which a body was drawn to the exact second between life and death. And here she was, one leg dangling over the precipice with an inviting sensation of gravity. A tilting of blood down towards a deathly centre. She’d never lasted a few minutes of holding her lungs tight.
And so she tried to breath.
There was nothing.
It was as if she were in a vacuum. There was simply nothing to breathe. The numbness down her back was rippling. Her eyes shot everywhere, looking at the dissolving world shift into pitch blackness. Sat, with Frederickson’s face just a few inches from hers. He was there, staring in blissful analysis.
She tried to breathe in again. And the kicks kicked in. Cold reality. She felt the ice in her lungs. The sensation of the icy water running against her insides. She felt the weight of frozen water and the scraping of muscles against it. The sound of steel against steel, nails against black chalk. She suddenly flew out on to the floor.
The rains turned into thunderstorms. A whole array of lightning. She faded inward and outward of the dreamstate. Trapped locked in a bay of ice, eyes glued shut, trying to kick her way out with a whole mesh of frozen water in her lungs. Then back in the world of Frederickson, with the melting Grand Canyon and the locking hands, of this ancient man, around her face. She began kicking between realities, feeling the pain begin to claw at her insides.
'I stand here in the rain. With its smite upon her stone, and the grasses that have grown, over women, children, men, and their texts that life is vain,’ Charles drew out a needle from his infinite pockets, filled with yellow liquid, ‘but I hear the notes as when once she sang to me, oh the dream that thou art my Love, be it thine, and the dream that I am thy love, be it mine,’ he plunged the needle into her jugular. She felt it split open, ‘and death may come, but loving is divine.’
The Grand Canyon melted. She felt her two heartbeats collide together. One darting into the hundreds of beats, drumming like a cacophony of choruses inside her, and the other rising from a cold near nothingness. The whole world of red rock swallowed her whole with the needle buried in her neck and the sight of Charles Osgood Frederickson stood above her as she sunk into the imagined quicksand. She felt the muffling sensation of darkness again, and the same mad grab of air into her lungs. Trying again and again to breathe.
And then the darkness devoured her senses. There was the ringing in her eyes, and the croaking of thunder in her ears. And then nothing.
For a few moments. Locked inside a shelf of ice behind a metal door, with the rings of Saturn in sight, Sydney Kim lay dead.
‘The brain is weird in what it can accomplish in this time. Seven to nine minutes, it takes, until it achieves full death. It will try to make sense of the darkness, and then it will bathe itself in the chemical residues. Things will burst, memories will bleed out. Great white lights.’ Charles’s voice still fluttered in her head, as she began to feel the cold steel prick of the needle resting in the back of her cranium. Its cold touch against her spinal bones and the muscled tomb built around it. ‘And then after all this, Sydney? After you’re slowly robbed of your last bits of brain, something happens. Something magical and cold and dark and inevitable. In the rubble of your imagination, with dreamscapes fading into nothingness. The brain has its own death. It has its own kicking sensations.’
Buried in the darkest spot of the darkest corner. Removed from light and blood and the touch of life as it’s stolen, is the finality. The final frontier. Did you know I was a Christian man? I took my wife’s hand and my children’s too, led them to Church every Sunday. Wandered down the paved groves and the little stone fences. Waved to the neighbours in the cottages and bid them a happy morning. See, Sydney, I prayed and I loved and I poured my heart. All into God. All into God.’
Her brain went into freefall, with the voice of the ancient man seemingly everywhere. Her senses frazzled and bounced her into experiencing a whole rush of colour and kaleidoscopic nonsense. The whole cavalcade of chemical explosions began to occur. She was only half a minute into dying, and already pushed deeper into the great circus of non-existence.
‘And yet as an aged warrior, after life had stolen my treasures away. With wrinkles covering me like the melting Grand Canyon. With old time draining me away by the droplets of blood. Drop by drop. My chest heaving and then failing, my hand wrapped around my wife’s. I looked into her eyes and shook my thoughts into something. I told her “I love you” with the sounds of my children running into the house. See, it was raining on my last days too. And the pitter patter from mind is much like mine… like the ticking of a clock, correct?’
Her mind took her to the swimming pools. To being at on the porch of a Hawaiian house. Stars littering the midnight sky, with the friendly Moon being a lovely white light in the sky. Hovering, and just wandering. She thought herself, quite young, what the Moon’s own trail of thinking must be. To come up out of the duvet of the deadened horizon and be greeted with the darkness of infinite space. Joined by freckles of white stars millions upon millions of lightyears away. There, just hovering, just gazing itself on to the great expanse of half the Earth. Looking at this little lost girl, sat shivering on a wooden porch hoping to see the starry lights at night.
‘Oh such lovely memories, Sydney. But let’s try harder shall we? I want you to scream for me. Rage, even. Come on.’
There was a spark of heat. From somewhere, in the deep caverns of her imagination.
Three minutes into death.
A whole flush of quick memories took her under. There was a second, though, in which the whole bursting broth of chemicals seemed to not exist for a second. That she was back, away from the warmth, and into the cold ice bay. That the ice in her lungs was already sloshing into water. A great welch of heat pressed against her chest, and the needle in her head pumping liquid into her.
‘Those sounds, Sydney. Of my kids running up the stairs. Of their muffled voices. I gave in, you know, to the peace of it all. And for a while it was good. It was warm and inviting and I did die after all with a smile on my face.’
She was suddenly fizzling into existence. Torn still between places known, and drifting towards a world unknown. She was there for a brief moment. Four minutes into death. In an old wrecked house. She looked at her hands morph and change from the fingers of a child to her fingers of the present. Her height was shifting as her entire memory was being zoomed through. A whole stack of memories, a rush of liquid stuff, was brewing in the cauldron of her dying mind. And yet she was completely unfamiliar in this house. This alien house. Wooden planks, a warm little fire in the corner, and paintings with gold frames and silent women on them. She walked throughout, fading into and out of every second.
‘I want you to kick again. Do not give in to the cold spots. They may seem inviting but they’re not what you’re looking for right now. I don’t mean to alarm you, or even make humour of this. But the matter of the fact is as simple as this. You are dead. Currently.’ There was a silent laugh beneath his speech, ‘Not much to worry about I suppose.’
It was pouring rain outside. Thunder and lightning, crying and croaking in all directions. There was a flood of water now.
‘Five minutes. I’m waking up Noah to fish you out. I can’t seem to locate you, can you still hear me? I saw your brain signals drifting towards the dark spots. Do not go into the shadows. I can’t bring you back.’
Her real body took hold of the zero gravity. She felt her blood stop flowing, and start floating. Buried in a coffin lightyears away from her birthplace, she was there. Dying. And there was now a different voice from Charles.
‘Oh, Sydney. Sydney. Do you fear it like I did not? Picture this. An old man five minutes into brain death. Calmly breathing in his last memories. A whole flashbang of life and love and tragedy and exploration. See, being dead, it’s like there’s a stream of shrapnel being shoved into you. It’s a numbing, nice sensation and then you’re aware of it all. Then everything goes black. After the nice stuff. You’re just there, with everything growing cold. You’re almost thankful for it. You read your best bits and then off you pop…’
She was suddenly acutely aware of the two voices. They were both from Charles Osgood Frederickson. They were both in the house. One bouncing through the walls, and the other coming from the upstairs. She took herself slowly down the hallway, with the rains still raging. The warm rush of memories circulating too. Holding hands with a boy at school, eating a sandwich in the middle of nowhere, and seeing a shooting star for the first time. The melting sensations of tasting cold ham on her little tongue, and the stream of endorphins as she felt her lips melt into her husband’s. And then she was in his arms.
‘You can’t die for me. You can’t. Don’t. Don’t.’ He said, ‘Listen to what your mother told you.’
She buried her head into his chest. His arms wrapped around her. The warmth of it all. But then the freezing sensation.
Her wedding day. He peeled back her veil and looked her in the eyes. The grass blooming green and the chairs all empty. The taste of summer in her nose. A priest, with white noise for a voice, speaking aloud to her in a wedding dress. The fabric of it, though, slowly morphing into petals that slowly flew off into the winds. And then shifting and moving in too many directions. She felt her brain being pulled apart, a whole crashing sensation. The feeling of melting.
‘I don’t want you to die. Please don’t die.’ Her husband was crying rain.
She pulled him towards her. Wrapping her arms around him infinitely. Feeling his skin against the silk of the wedding dress and the helplessness sensation. She was kicking again, against the ice in her lungs and the hot metal tray she was trapped in. Her body was in post-mortem shock, simply cleaning up shop. Releasing the bowels and the blood.
‘Six minutes. You’re going dark now, Sydney… yes. Yes Noah! Noah I’m rushing you through. You have to get to her in time. Do not let her do this. She’s surrendering… please, Noah! I’m opening the door now. Calm! I do not want another death inside this ship. Yes, I’m still plugged into her. No I can’t-’
Then they melted. She was silently screaming at him, breaking down to her knees. Her whole husband turning into a pile of water. Drenching her. It happened too quickly to account for as she felt all of him slip away. And then she remembered the launch. Chunky seatbelts strapping her into place and looking at him through a tiny monitor. His babyface. His lovely babyface, and sweet kind eyes. He put his hand on the monitor and said ‘I love you’, and she did the same. Before the thrusters took her away. Before the sight of him burned into white static. Before Earth and everything was so far away. Before Sydney Kim would put her handprint on a window, lightyears from Earth, and wonder what it felt like to touch the Grand Canyon.
‘It’s like the tide’s coming in, right?’ Her voice came. She was on her knees in front of a metal bed, still attired in the remnants of a wedding dress.
Charles began to reply.
‘What happens next is the most terrifying thing in all of existence and it is inevitable. At some point this will all happen again for the last time. Or maybe this is the last time? Maybe they’ll save you. Who knows? You’re more than seven minutes in and, well, if you aren’t incredibly neurologically destroyed when you wake up then it’s a practical miracle.’
The rain was up to her knees now. Flooding the whole world she was in. And there she finally saw, laid on the bed, the origin of the second voice. Charles Osgood Frederickson. An old, rusted ruin. Nothing like the late aged Professor-like man she knew from the dreams, but on the verge of death.
‘In those final brief seconds there is a rush of terror and fear unlike anything else. It’s your brain running on fumes, really, as it finally realizes the reality of it all. I saw it, you know, the hand of God and the pearly white gates. And then they faded into black. So did everything. The best way to describe it is like when you sleep without dreaming. It’s nothing.’
Shivering, she looked into the dying man’s eyes and tried to speak herself. Her throat stuck still with frost.
‘Think of that, Sydney. Dwell on it. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. That is death. That is what I kicked and screamed and raged against for that final second, knowing there was an entire eternity of non-existence awaiting me. Knowing that there was simply the long hard dark.’
She was shivering now, and feeling the slow shock of organ failure. Pain was infinite and numb to her, as the tide of rain began to rise to her hips. She waded through, in panic, to stand on the bed. Choking on the ice in her throat.
‘That was my existence for centuries, Sydney. That was all I was until they dug me up again. Until my great-great-great-grandson took a shovel to my grave, heaved me out of the soil, and put me in a vat of juices to reconstitute me. Before he plugged me into a machine. Before he ran rods through my neurones and tried to shock me awake. It was an infinite, endless void of nothingness. There is nothing in death, and it is inevitable. And it is forever. There is no terror quite like that deeper sleep. Can you even begin to comprehend it? Does it scare you? No matter. It will happen and you will cease to be. A void. For eternity.’
The water was rising fast now. The bed floating upwards, carrying her and Charles upwards. Her head hitting the ceiling. She tried again to breathe in, to speak, to do something. She began to claw at her insides, trying to dig out the bits of pain. And then the darkness. And then the darkness.
She was still there. Head now pushed against the ceiling. Now the water rushing into her mouth. Now herself floating downwards. Seven, maybe eight minutes. She was going forward into the eternity of nothing.
‘I am lucky. I know what awaits us all. And yet I am cursed, Sydney. Knowing that no matter what meaning we make for ourselves in the real world, death awaits us all. It is a darkness unlike any other. It is the fate of all life. And it is terrifying and unavoidable. My death was still a blip of darkness to me, like a solid nap, before I awoke again in the womb of the Theseus. Yet you, and I, will be swallowed by death soon enough. Time goes faster as we wrinkle, no? There is nothing we can do. So surrender, Sydney. Goodnight, forever. There is no David. There is nothing. Oh my. Do show me again, one last time his face. Just for me. And you. Find comfort in that. Please? The last time you saw him.’
And then, drowning in nothingness. Feeling the void encroach, and the experience of sleep without waking come flooding in. The rain began to echo in her ears. She felt fingers running across her arms. And the numbness was fading.
‘Please, Sydney. Show me him. Show me that face he made, and what you said. I need to see it. To… help you.’
The waters reversed. The coldness returned. Real coldness. She felt the rush of water out of her system. A fist pounding against her chest, trying to kick her heart into motion. Her form and figure floating just above the sleeping bay. A wire in her neck keeping her attached. Her body was still frozen, bloodflow paused. The room grew warmer. She felt a flow warmth of breath into her mouth and lungs. Trying to restart. Trying to reboot.
‘I need this, Sydney. To complete everything! Why don’t you listen! Everything. I am coming for it. I need this. You two pesky things, running throughout my mind. You weren’t supposed to be in that house, Sydney, it’s mine. Why did you want to die there? I am taking it. I need my ending, Sydney Kim and some young girl isn’t going to stop me. I am your everything, your Earth and your heaven and your saviour. I am your beginning and ending. Your life and…’ her heart bounced on its own accord, ‘your death.’
The coughing in her throat finally lodged the ice loose. It flew from her mouth and into nothing.
‘I will survive.’ She said.
Noah pulled the needle out the back of her head. He pushed his hands again on to her naked chest, and broke her ribs trying to restart the heart. He pushed her down against the zero gravity, struggling with his muscles to save her life.
The other Fredirickson above started to speak.
‘She went to deep into sleep, Noah! I couldn’t control her biology. I’m sorry for this. Oh my. I never wanted this. I never wanted this.’
He kept trying to resuscitate her. And inside her head, a spark came to life. Small, at first.
‘Oh, Sydney. You should not have let me loose in here. I’ll burrow so far deep you’ll forget you head this. I am an agent, a parasite. And I will await what comes next. You shall see. I’ll be the dirt under your fingernails. You shall see. When you wake up I want you tell Noah a name. It’ll be an invitation, you see. Time to start the theatrics. A simple name. Do that for me, yes? And for David-‘
Sydney drew in a painful breathe. Her brain bolted into life and her heartbeat suddenly went from zero to sixty to hundred and climbing. Noah held his stoic face but the Charles through the walls was shouting overhead. And the voices were coming back. And she couldn’t feel her legs. She couldn’t feel her legs. She was numb in them and her face was contorting with pain. She felt the artificial air against her lungs and blistering heat she had been cooked in.
‘Sydney. Sydney. Sydney.’ Noah said.
He held her for a moment and that’s when she felt her broken ribs. The fire and hell of it all, and still the biochemical rush in her brain.
‘Plug me in again, Captain. Trust me.’ Charles said.
Noah slowly placed the needle back into her head with the wire floating into space.
‘Don’t put her to sleep again. Please.’ He said.
She was still assessing everything. Still breathing in, quite painfully though, with the numbness of her legs scaring her a lot. But she had gone to the precipice and back. And there, in her thoughts, she turned to the second voice of Charles Osgood Frederickson. The one dying in her final dream. The one with malice in his tone. And her wedding dress in his house. And yet she slowly let go of that. Let go of the worry. And she forgot, in the rush of adrenalin, that a piece of him was lingering in her brain. Burrowing.
A tingling nausea ran up her throat. She threw up ice and blood on to the floor. Noah still had his hands around her as if she were drifting away. And she was forgetting everything. Still trying to cling on to what she had just experienced, trying to make sure she remembered something. Something important.
Noah leaned in to her blueing face, scanning over her with his eyes.
‘You’re okay, Sydney. You’re alive. You don’t have to be afraid. Everything is fine. Everything is fine.’ He caressed her face, her heart now calming.
‘I’m not sure if you want to hear this Captain. Her brain is partially damaged. Leg control, some muscle control. Light organ failure. Blood clots litter her system. I’m going to have to flush her full of drugs. She has some cognitive damage too. Memory, as thought… but speech too perhaps. Muscle mapping. I can’t make a full assessment.’
Noah looked at her for a long time.
‘If you can say anything, Syd, please, for the love of everything please say something. Please tell me she can still talk.’
‘Still assessing, Captain.’ She could feel Charles in her head, and it was both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, ‘I’m really not sure.’
She swallowed a bit of ice stuck in her mouth and crunched her teeth. The heat went down to normal temperatures and, after a little while, she felt normalcy return to most of her body.
‘Sydney?’
She looked him dead in the eyes and pulled him by the ear to her mouth. Her nails digging into the back of his neck.
‘Clemency.’ She said with acid. ‘Clemency.’
He suddenly jumped away from her, hitting his head on a wall, and stared right at her. His face turning into a cold shiver.
‘You cannot know that name. You simply cannot know that name. How. How. How.’
Noah looked at the half-dead woman for a few minutes, both of them in shock and shivers. He looked at the wire into Sydney’s head, and the needle on the end. And then he traced his sight across all the wires throughout the room.
‘Is everything alright now, Captain? Her biology is returning to regular levels. Rhythms normalizing… Captain? Captain?’
Noah looked at Sydney now, and she was just repeating the same word.
‘Clemency.’
An impossible name. Lightyears away from it. Noah had stored it away. Only in his private of private thoughts. In the vaults of his imagination. Nothing could penetrate it. There are some things you keep well hidden. And there was only one possible perpetrator who could have pried his mind wide to glimpse at those ghosts.
Looking up, Noah saw the tiniest diode. The tiniest little lens, looking down at him. One of the hundreds of eyes aboard the Theseus. He looked right up into it and stared right into the eyes of Charles Osgood Frederickson.
The dead man. The half-dead woman. And the Captain of it all, slowly beginning to realize that his nightmares were true. That he was being swallowed, slowly, by the great big blue.