Touching the Foam

by David Brookes

conclusion

She helped him to stand and, together, they made their way towards the organics laboratory. Charlotte hit the switch and the lab filled with white illumination, highlighting every edge and curve of the equipment it contained. The hexagonal tank mounted against the back wall gleamed with reflected light.

They started towards it. A rumbling vibration rolled through the ship, following by a resounding crash that knocked them both off their feet. Charlotte was slammed against the join between the floor and a computer console, landing on her twisted arm and popping something loose. The Alex-Companion tumbled against the tank. The glass shattered instantly, spilling sideways out of the tank along with gallons of the thin yellow broth. The fluid washed across the floor, underneath the Alex-Companion and Charlotte, drenching their clothes.

She stood up soggily. The Alex-Companion groaned and winced as the cuts on his shoulders rubbed against one another. The ship bucked again, this time with a scream like the sound of rending metal.

‘What was that?’ he asked shakily.

‘I’m not sure. It wasn’t a collision.’

‘How do you know?’

‘If we hit something at this speed, we’d be nothing but vapour now.’

He turned creakily to the smashed tank and looked at it with an almost tangible sadness.

‘There goes any chance of regeneration,’ he said.

She watched him testing the extent of his injuries with his eyes closed in discomfort. He was already practically falling over from his deterioration. All strength was bleeding from him.

Pieces of broken glass reflected them both. In some of the pieces she could see her face, in others the Companion’s. Some of the curved shards held both their reflections, putting them next to each other. The yellowy fluid slowly spread throughout the whole room, soaking her soft shoes.

‘Alex...’ she said.

‘Not Alex,’ he grinned. ‘Remember?’

‘You’re as good as.’

He breathed a long sigh and smiled lopsidedly. ‘Yeah...’

The ship fell into spasm. Objects began falling from the shelves and fell rattling to the ground. Cans and bottles sprayed water as they rolled. The ship was listing and the artificial gravity, supplied by the drive’s secondary function, was too slow to compensate.

She shouldn’t have turned the AI off. It could have been fixing this. Maybe even fixed it before it happened. She’d been so stupid to take revenge on Louise that way; the only result was that she’d put herself and Alex in danger. They would never get to fully test the ship. And they would now never get home.

Charlotte’s memories continued to spread, just like the water on the floor, further into the foam. She could feel its texture, its substance, in her mind and all along the surface of her skin, as though she had fallen and was lying on a vast, yielding sponge.

There were vivid recollections of a million events that had never happened to her. She remembered being born, she remembered being conceived; she remembered her first boyfriend, her first girlfriend, sisters and brothers she’d never had; she knew what it felt like for a boy to masturbate, for a man to cheat on his wife, for a person of either sex to come to terms with homosexuality. She remembered being ill and recovering; she remembered being ill and dying. She remembered everything, or at least it felt like she did. Every time she focused on a certain aspect of life or death, there were a billion memories there waiting to be accessed, drawn from minds across the whole of time.

‘It’s an odd experience,’ Alex gasped, ‘isn’t it?’

She nodded, feeling very small and stupid. She felt like a little girl that had done something naughty without thinking beforehand.

‘Turn the AI back on,’ he said, struggling to catch his breath. He was still slumped against the work surface opposite Charlotte, the tank to his left just inside his field of vision.

‘I can’t...’

‘You can,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t the AI who took me away from you. It was Louise.’

‘She was my friend...’

‘She was mine too. We were both wrong. And you were a victim of our stupidity. But I’ve been thinking,’ he said softly, ‘that it’s a kind of stupid that a lot... a lot of people have been. Can you remember how stupid all those people have been, at one time or another?’

‘Yes.’ She was crying. A thin, constant flow trickled down her cheek and she pawed at it with her sleeve wrapped around her hand. ‘Yes, I can. We can all be pretty dumb, can’t we?’

‘Got that right. You go and sort out that AI. Don’t come back in here. Have the AI seal this room shut. It’ll all get cleaned up automatically, right? This ship has little robots to clean up stuff like this, doesn’t it?’

She nodded.

‘You go and get the AI to seal it shut. By the time you’ve finished you won’t want to come back here.’

Charlotte knew it. The Companion — Alex — would be gone, and all that would be left was Charlotte, rattling around a massive ship powered by a force she didn’t understand, and totally wrapped in sheet after sheet of other people’s recollections.

‘All right... Alex, I—’

‘I know,’ he said, and smiled. ‘Do you?’

She closed her eyes and accessed the foam, felt waves like warm water wash over her thoughts, two currents bleeding into one, and yes, she knew how he felt. She said so. Alex smiled and beckoned for her to leave, and lowered himself onto the wet floor and closed his eyes.

The corridors were suddenly empty-feeling and cold, all white plastic lit with florescent bulbs. The screens that had shown the warped space outside were now displaying a twisted sort of light display, rushing white lines split into their component colours and crossing over in a flickering haze. Either something was wrong with space or something was wrong with the drive; whichever, Charlotte knew that she was in trouble.

Choking back more tears, she forced herself to move faster. The primary console for the AI was just a few corners away. She came to the broken viewscreen and almost tripped over it in her hurry. Further along was the room with the console; she fell into it as the ship juddered once more in space. It was shaking with increasing frequency and now she was afraid that it was coming apart. From every side there were strange sounds of metallic stress that sounded like screams in her ears.

She bashed at the console.

‘Come on!’

It could take anything up to half an hour. She had to reboot programs and reinstall drivers, reissue directives, compare data packets with software prerequisites and make sure the AI was resurrected correctly. Errors during installation could result in errors during resurrection. The AI might wake up murderous or stupid. It could decide to flush everything — Charlotte, her meagre possessions, the remnants of the organics lab and Alex’s body — out into space in a rush of shrieking, sucking vacuum.

‘Come on, come on!’

It took ten minutes. She skipped a lot of vital steps, but she just needed it awake. Charlotte was forced to bypass a bunch of program inhibitors and couldn’t waste the time on rebooting the console. The AI flipped into existence once again and began to shout immediately:

Shut down the drive shut down the drive shut it down shut it down shut it down—!

Charlotte ran. She hadn’t exerted herself like that since physical training, years before she’d flown her first craft. She dieted and she worked out but she didn’t work out, she did no cardio-vascular stuff and when she was planetside she smoked like a damned chimney. Out of breath and with her body threatening to purge her lunch, she ran towards the bulge in the middle of the ship that comprised almost eighty percent of the craft.

She made it to the metal walkway that encircled the drive. Her head felt like it was ready to burst; there was a pressure within the craft now, as though gravity had doubled itself. The air felt thick and cloying, pressing in on her eardrums. Every sound felt like an aircraft taking off, and the walkway itself seemed to be shaking itself to pieces.

The closer she got to the drive, the worse the sensation became.

There were cracks in the casing. The only thing capable of causing anything more than abrasions to titanium-steel that thick was an atomic bomb, but there were fissures developing all around the curved surface of the shell. Through the widest Charlotte could see swirling light filled with glowing grit. Light and a sound almost too low to hear spilled out from the cracks, filling the chamber.

It was all she could do just to hold onto the vibrating metal walkway. She was suspended about thirty feet above the rounded inner hull, and she didn’t much want to find out whether she’d walk away from a fall. The vibrations were giving off their own music now, bass warbles mixed with a high-pitched whine.

‘How do I turn it off?’ she screamed above the din, hoping that the AI would still be able to hear her.

‘The console,’ the AI screamed back with Louise Harper’s voice. ‘There’s a console on the far side, you’ve walked past it a hundred times...’

The AI was right. She’d seen it, but never thought to use it; what use would a pilot have for a computer terminal that accessed the propulsion drives when the entire ship was built around an AI that would do that for her? Now she regretted not learning more about the basics of the ship’s design — and pushing her superiors for more details about the faux-Alcubierre drive.

‘What’s happening?’ she yelled.

‘The warped space that the drive is creating has turned in on itself. The bubble’s trying to flatten out with us inside it. If you don’t shut off the drive—’

Charlotte was nearly thrown over the railing, but she caught the opposite rail and steadied herself against it. She’d had the entire upper half of her body over the edge before pulling herself back, but she had no time to rest or dwell on the matter.

‘Then the ship will be crushed and us with it. Quickly! There are eight commands, the first is the large button to the top right with the data scrolling across it...’

She fell into the console. She found the button and hit it. The AI screamed further instructions. There was a speaker built into the terminal that projected its voice:

‘Now run the sequence for the shutdown, quickly! Press “PROP”, press “ACTIV”, press “CANCEL”, press—’

The thick casing around the drive emitted a squealing sound that made Charlotte duck with the volume of it; something exploded away from the shell and spun into the upper hemisphere of the inner hull, sending debris flying down towards the walkway. A piece as big as the pilot’s seat slammed into the railing a metre to Charlotte’s right and buckled it flat, then fell down over the side. Twisted metal beams and flashing fragments of plastic veneer crashed around the computer terminal. The glow from within the drive grew brighter and it was like peering into a star that was giving birth to another star, each of a different shade of blue or green, shimmering inside one another.

‘Press “CONFIRM”, press “SHUTDOWN”, press “CONFIRM”, press “ACKNOWLEDGE”... Quickly quickly quickly quickly Charlotte—’

She finished the sequence and hit the final command. The computer terminal flashed and then seemed to switch itself off. The squealing emitted by the vibrating ship rose in pitch until Charlotte dropped to her knees, yelling with her hands clapped over her eyes, tears forming under her eyes—

And then nothing. The sounds stopped, instantly. The vibrations subsided in the space of two or three seconds, and the glow from the drive cut out completely. The light and the swirling motes within it faded and then blinked out of existence, leaving the thick titanium-steel casing empty of anything but a few glinting pieces of reinforced circuitry.

There was silence.

‘AI...?’

‘I’m here.’

Charlotte got to her feet. She wiped her face free of the water that her eyes had produced; not exactly tears, but a reaction to the intense sounds. That was what she told herself.

‘Are we... okay?’

‘The outer hull was never breached, according to the readouts. We’d know if it had. Integrity is holding, but we’ve lost a lot of speed. We’re almost stationary, by comparison. I suppose by conventional means we’re still going at a fair old rate. Within a few hours we’ll start to noticeably lose momentum.’

The AI sounded very tired. Charlotte tried not to access the foam, but she couldn’t help it. There were twin memories of Louise Harper developing. Those that came from Earth, from the Louise who was now with the real Alex Penrose — she wished them luck — and those that came from another, floating just outside the edge of the galaxy in a dead spacecraft. The latter was feeling exhausted, a very human feeling. But the AI was feeling it nonetheless.

‘So we’re dead in space?’ Charlotte asked quietly.

The AI’s response was slow to come. ‘Give it a few hours, but, yeah. We are.’

‘No conventional means of propulsion? Only the drive I just shut down?’

‘Actually,’ the AI said, ‘I gave you the commands to disable it permanently. Anything else would have left the drive functional, whether we were using it or not, and we’d have been destroyed. It was the only way.’

Charlotte slumped against one of the secure sections of railing that ran along the edge of the metal walkway. The thought of having a quick nap right there suddenly seemed appealing.

‘Okay,’ she said.

‘Want me to prepare a message to send back home? It would take a very long time to get there, but it would get there eventually.’

‘Worth a shot,’ Charlotte said sleepily.

Her limbs were heavy as lead. She could barely keep her eyes open.

Before she fell asleep, she said, ‘Wake me if anything happens, Lou.’

The AI could sense that she was already asleep, but it answered her anyway:

‘Will do,’ it replied. ‘Rest easy, Charlotte.’

to Challenge 352...