Blood Red
“The human brain sees patterns, and sometimes it feels things that are not there.”
I was arriving at Samala in the Betas on an unexpected emergency, a first for me in my thirteen years as the head of neurology at University Medical Kappa-Nira. A fellow professor—and close friend of mine—Menia K’Fani had messaged me urgently three days prior, in the middle of the night with a bizarre story about one of his former students suffering some form of psychotic break. Her name was Celise Endrys, and when Menia mentioned it to me, she sounded familiar.
“That’s because you’ve met her, Larron. Two years ago during the Halo.”
I knew who he was talking about immediately, because Menia held that dinner annually the week Nira passed through the Halo meteor shower, and he almost never invited students to that small gathering of friends.
“She was from Aynor, right?”
“Yes. That’s the one.”
A local girl relative to most of Menia’s students, who came from everywhere in the Battery, even some from beyond. His students weren’t exactly the demographic I’d have tapped for a psychotic break, much less his prized students—one of the few he’d hired personally as a postdoctoral researcher through the department and considered a friend.
“Any signs of anything like this before,” I’d asked him.
“I’m shocked,” he replied. “Just shocked. She’s as steady as Athos, Larron; Celise has been from the moment I met her.”
He forwarded me the message that had come in from Beta-Samala. They had a common Andrew, a few housebots with basic medical skills onboard, as well as a handful of human nurses who staffed the clinic when called in. A small outpost with limited medical resources—certainly no neurological specialist.
I told Menia that I’d get out there as soon as I could.
“I can’t go myself unfortunately,” he said. “There’s a symposium on. But I’m flying you out, and Furba’s going to go with you. I’m not sure what’s going on in Samala, but I’d feel better if you were in my ship, Larron.”
“Who’s Furba?”
“Furba Luonne. A colleague of Celise’s in my lab. I’d like to see if we can recover any of her data from the station there. You’ll like him. Very smart. Very genial. Gets along well with Celise.”
He’d been right about all of that. I found Furba to be an excellent companion on the flight out. I’d also brought an embodied Miliner from the medical center to help in Celise’s case, as it seemed to present in a strange, if not unprecedented manner, as far as I could tell. And, having an AI clone with the breadth of knowledge as a Miliner was never a terrible idea when traveling about the Lettered Systems.
Like most people in the Letters, I’d never heard of Samala. To say it was one of the lesser-known Beta systems would be underselling how small the outpost was. As rushed as our middle-of-the-night departure from Nira had been, I didn’t have time to look into the system itself. I’d thrown a few personal items in a bag and had a bot from the medical center meet us at the departure gate at the top of the space tower with a few critical mobile gear cases. Then, as soon as the Miliner and Furba had arrived, we’d pushed off. What I knew of Beta-Samala was just what Miliner shared from his memory—that it was a single diamond-domed outpost of around ten-thousand settlers with no major industrial aspirations. The settlers were beginning a long terraforming process to thicken and refine the planet’s un-breathable atmosphere.
Furba knew quite a bit more about Samala, but mostly that was from what he’d been following through Celise’s research there. He explained far more than I could fully comprehend about the properties of the star and what Dr. Endrys had been monitoring before her unfortunate psychiatric episode—something about the star’s magnetic field and how it interacted with the planet’s. To be honest, though, I tuned most of it out as it seemed abstruse and entirely unrelated.
What mattered to me, though, was the story of the onset of Celise Endrys’ symptoms, which apparently had begun aboard the monitoring station that was sitting at an outer Lagrange point. Her small stellar research station had suffered a serious malfunction and gone dark while Dr. Endrys was aboard. After she’d failed to respond to the planetary outpost’s control hub for nearly two days, someone from Samala shuttled up to the research station and found her aboard, largely incoherent and seeing lights, apparently. Predictably, the Andrew on the outpost had little of value to offer beyond basic medicals on her. Useful in surgery, useless in psychiatry.
Furba wanted to stop at the monitoring station on our way in to the outpost on Samala. The best possible lens I could place on that idea was how passionate Menia’s people were about their work. As I was taking a deep breath to keep from overreacting about how callous it would’ve been to check on the monitoring station’s status before his colleague’s well-being, Miliner made the point to him much more delicately than I would have.
“Of course,” Furba replied to the AI, shaking his head. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Just, you know, we pass it on the way in, I guess. Let’s see about Celise first, though. Yes.”
“I think we’ll see about Celise,” I told Furba. “You can see about her research after we’ve unloaded everything at the clinic.”
That was the plan, of course. Miliner and I would go down and evaluate the patient and get a full history from the Andrew. But like so many other things on Beta-Samala, what unfolded was entirely unexpected.
We arrived in the middle of the night on Samala. The outpost was dark and quiet—so much so, that it took nearly two minutes to get a return on our ping from the city’s control hub. It was the security officer on duty, who made certain we understood they didn’t have a nanosheet to extend, so we would have to don belts and a personal sheet of our own or a suit “if we wanted to continue breathing.”
The joys of a small, small airfield.
The only other ship out on the flat plain beside that bubble-city was the municipal shuttle, and, once we stepped inside the clear dome’s outer airlock, the officer explained that there were a few other local mining crews within a few weeks travel. That made for a handful of ships total in the entire system.
He showed us to the clinic where Dr. Endrys had been since they’d brought her down.
“Should be just her and the Andrew in there at this hour,” he told us. “I could have Daeson come down if you like, doctor.”
“Who is Daeson?”
“Celise’s boyfriend. Well, I mean ...”
“You mean what?” I asked.
“I’m not so sure it’s official, but I understand they’ve been seeing each other a few months.”
“Do they cohabitate?”
“Do they what?”
“Live together? Or do they sleep in separate houses?”
“I get you,” he replied. “Yeah sure. I guess when she’s down, she stays with Daeson. Beats the dorm room the university lets to her.”
“Fine. Please wake up Daeson if you think he’d be willing to come down.”
As it turned out, before the officer even pinged Daeson, we arrived on foot to the clinic to find the young man sleeping on a cot in one of the empty medical bays. And just across from him, was the Andrew, keeping watch over Celise, who was lying inside the closed room, wide awake, peacefully mumbling to herself.
Furba was alongside Miliner and I, as he’d offered to help wheel in some of my gear from the ship. The sound of our entrance roused Daeson as we stepped into the treatment area with the security officer. The two of them seemed to know each other quite well.
“Are you the neurologist?” Daeson asked Furba, who entered first, looking a bit flustered as he was trying to figure out where to deposit the large case he was wheeling behind him.
“Me? Oh, no. I’m Furba.”
“Furba?”
“One of Celise’s colleagues from Kappa-Nira.”
“I’m the neurologist,” I said, reaching out toward the young man. “Dr. Larron Hand.”
“Dr. ... Hand? Like ...?”
“Yes,” I replied as we exchanged a handshake at the appropriate moment. “Exactly like it sounds.”
“Well, it’s good you’re here. She hasn’t been the same person since she came down.”
“Can you elaborate any? I’ll get a report from the Andrew, but I’m more asking about personal things? Something only you might have noticed.”
Daeson shook his head. “I don’t know. I finally managed to get her to put a bra on. We’ll see how long that lasts.”
I gazed back at Daeson and observed that he was looking over at Furba sharply, as Celise’s young colleague’s head had turned around curiously, presumably looking for Celise’s room. I snapped my fingers at Furba, and he shook his head back at me, seemingly to shake out the thoughtlessness that was swiftly showing itself to be a pattern. I pointed him toward Miliner, who was setting up the gear.
“Yeah, uhm, she’s been taking her clothes off,” Daeson continued.
“Any explanation for that?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “She just doesn’t want to wear anything, but that’s the least of it. I don’t know whether the Andrew would say much about it, but it’s strange and I thought you might not think anything of it in the middle of the night. But Celise has tried to walk out of here nude every time they’ve turned their backs on her in the past four days.”
“How out-of-character would a behavior like that be for Celise, would you say?”
He looked back at me like I had three heads.
“So, very much so, I gather from your look,” I told him, as he nodded. “I had to ask.”
“And also, she’s still wearing her flight cap from the station. I can’t get her to take that off her head for anything, but it’s been a three-day battle to get her to put on underwear. Other than that, all the crazy things she’s saying? Andrew will let you know, I’m sure.”
“Did you see any signs of changes leading up to it?”
“Before she went up to the station, you mean? No. She was her normal self, and now she’s just ...” he shook his head sadly.
“How long was she up there for ... before there were any signs of anything?”
“Two weeks? I want to say maybe sixteen days. I can check my calendar, but it wasn’t a long stretch by any means if that’s what you’re getting at. Nothing out of the ordinary for Celise. And she was fine. I talked to her every other day or so, and then we were out of contact for a couple days before the hub realized they weren’t getting any return signal back from her. Then Cap took the shuttle up. Whole station was dead. Found her inside shivering, mumbling a bunch of nonsense.”
“Have you been able to connect with her in any way? I understand from the preliminary reports that she’s quite disoriented, but to what degree is she aware of her surroundings?”
“She’ll talk to you somewhat,” Daeson stated. “But the Celise I knew is totally gone. She’s a completely different person.”
“Okay,” I replied. “Thank you, Daeson. I’ll let you know if I have any questions.”
When I turned around, I heard a noise I hadn’t expected, and she was standing there. I was glad Daeson had prepared me, so that I was able to avoid overreacting. She walked into the main treatment area in her underwear, just as he’d said, with her flight cap still fastened under her chin.
“Babe,” Daeson said, attempting to grab her attention.
“Who are these people?” she replied, before scowling back at him. “You’re not Daeson.”
I tried to greet her. “Hi. I’m Dr. Hand. Do you remember me?”
She shook her head and turned toward the large end of the treatment area where Miliner and Furba were unpacking my gear.
“He looks like ...” Celise began to drift over that way, looking at Furba very carefully.
For his part, Furba turned around and reacted the way I was trying not to—wide eyes and surprise, in an outsized and unnatural manner. As she approached Furba, I came up behind her, gesturing for Daeson to remain where he was. The Andrew approached from the side room, and I grew concerned that she might feel surrounded.
Celise, though, seemed unconcerned, examining Furba’s face skeptically before declaring: “You’re not Furba either. Where are all these imposters coming from?”
“Hello, Celise,” Furba replied, taking great care to look at her directly, making sure his gaze didn’t drift from her face. “It is me. It’s Furba. Professor K’Fani sent me to help you with your data.”
She continued to glare at him suspiciously. “You sound just like him.” And then she brushed her hand down in front of his face dismissively. “Not quite, though. You’re not going to trick me.”
“Hello, Celise,” I said as she turned away from Furba. “I’m Dr. Hand. I met you at Professor K’Fani’s house a while back, at Menia’s dinner for the Halo meteor shower.”
She looked at me very carefully. “I don’t remember meeting you. You’re not an imposter, are you?”
“No. I assure you I’m just who I claim to be. I’m a neurologist. Menia sent me from Kappa-Nira to help you.”
“Oh, a neurologist. That’s good. My head’s not right. Maybe you can explain some of this.”
She looked over my shoulder toward Daeson, who was standing just at the edge of the stretcher he’d been sleeping on.
“That’s not Daeson either,” she declared. “They’ve replaced almost everyone here.”
The Andrew stepped toward her, apparently picking up on a tell in her posture I wasn’t quite familiar with yet. When she looked at him side-eyed, he informed me.
“She’s going to bolt, Dr. Hand.”
And she nearly did. I reached out gently, gesturing to her that I wanted to talk, or at least I hoped she might interpret my body language that way. She just looked back at me inquisitively.
“Can you tell me, Celise, is Andrew here an imposter as well?”
She laughed. “Andrew? Andrew is an android, doctor. They come off an assembly line.”
“That’s true. What about Miliner behind you over there? You must have met a Miliner clone before at the university?”
She nodded. “Of course. An AI in an android shell. He looks like all the rest of them.”
“And me? I’m not an imposter?”
“How would I know? I don’t know you at all.”
“I understand some strange things have been happening for you lately, Celise?”
She grinned skeptically. “That’s an understatement.”
“Do you think we could talk for a little while?” I asked her.
“It’s cold out here,” she replied. “I want to go back.”
I gestured toward the room where she’d been lying down when we arrived.
“Andrew can come with us if that makes you more comfortable.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, stepping toward the room. “Hmmmmmm. One sixty-four point eight. Sunny Samala’s singing again.”
“Samala’s singing? The star, you mean?”
As she approached the door, Miliner piped up from the other side of the room, very uncharacteristically.
“Dr. Endrys,” he addressed her directly, “I’m sorry, but are you a musician?”
She turned around and shook her head back at him.
“Do you know if you have perfect pitch? You’ve never studied music, have you?”
“No. Never.”
“You say the star is singing?” Miliner asked walking across the room toward Celise Endrys. “Samala is singing that note? The one you’re humming?”
Celise nodded. “Uh huh. You can’t hear it?”
Miliner shook his head.
“Just a tone, or is it a song?” I asked her, trying to gauge the extent and nature of the hallucination. “Are there any lyrics?”
“Only one,” she replied, tilting her head as though she was struggling to hear it, and then she sang the word at that same pitch. “Doooooooooommmmmmm.”
Then she casually stepped inside the room.
Miliner looked at me, presenting the emotional expression of shock and puzzlement before stating the answer to the question he knew I was about to ask.
“The note she sang, E3, Dr. Hand, is exactly one hundred sixty-four point eight Hertz. Just as she said.”
As I was speaking with Dr. Endrys, Miliner entered informing me that he’d unloaded and set up all the equipment with Furba Luonne’s help. With that complete, Furba was anxious to get whatever information he could on the state of Celise’s research, and I very much wanted to have a sense of what might have happened up on that monitoring station as well. So I told Furba to get up there and to contact us as soon as he had any information about the conditions Dr. Endrys had endured aboard that station. She’d been in such a state when they found her that the shuttle pilot didn’t stick around long to investigate. All we knew was that the station had lost power for some time. It was cold and dark when they’d rescued Celise, and try as I may, no matter how I asked the questions, if she didn’t want to talk about something, she deflected, ignored me, or simply babbled incoherently—phrases that often seemed like nonsense to me.
That incident with Miliner, though, had given me pause. That had seemed like incoherent nonsense as well, but Miliner, with that keen artificial mind and embedded stereo microphones far more sensitive than a human ear, had been able to make surprising sense of Dr. Endrys. It was a bizarre enough circumstance to make one wonder whether she wasn’t actually hearing the star somehow.
The more I talked to her, though, the less oriented to reality she seemed. She swore that we weren’t on Samala. She continued to assert that the people here had all been replaced by imposters. When I asked her to explain what had happened up on the station, she started repeating the same phrase, over and over again: “When she goes red, we’ll all be dead. When she goes red, we’ll all be dead.”
I asked her if I could look at the flight cap she had buckled under her chin, just to see if I could get it off her head peacefully. I wasn’t going to be able to get a proper scan with her wearing it. That was the first time she genuinely grew agitated, a low-grade terror at the thought of removing the head covering. I let that point be for the moment, running through a thorough psychiatric evaluation as best I could.
What was happening to her mind didn’t fit neatly into any paradigm of neurological or psychiatric affliction I’d ever encountered.
I was beginning to sweat profusely. The Andrew had indulged Celise by turning up the heat in the room. She didn’t like wearing even the minimal clothing she had on, fidgeting with it almost every time there was a lull in our conversation.
“When was the last time she slept?” I asked the Andrew, something I presumed he should’ve told me in his initial report.
And then I realized our arrival had been so awkward he hadn’t had the chance to give me a report yet.
“She hasn’t slept since she came down from the station, Dr. Hand,” the Andrew answered.
“Substantively, or at all? Surely, she’s dozed off here or there?”
“No, doctor. Not once.”
“In over three days?”
“Nearly four now.”
“It’s too bright in here to sleep,” Celise said. “Even when I close my eyes. There’s always light.”
To the contrary, the room itself and the entire clinic was operating on dim, nighttime lighting.
“All right,” I said, looking over my shoulder toward Miliner. “She needs sleep.”
“Something stronger than the herbal, Dr. Hand?”
I nodded to Miliner and turned back toward Celise.
“We’re going to give you something to help you sleep,” I told her. “Your brain needs to rest.”
“Don’t you think it’s funny?” she asked looking at the area around the bed and then up to the ceiling.
“I’m not sure. What’s funny, Celise?”
“This room is backwards. This whole place is backwards.”
“I’m sorry. I hadn’t noticed. Everything looks normal to me.”
Celise Endrys laughed. “You’re in for a surprise, friend. You and all these imposters.”
I had Miliner put Celise Endrys on a powerful chemical soporific that I’d ordinarily have avoided except in extreme cases of insomnia. Her mind must have been exhausted, yet as we talked, she seemed so alert I was surprised there was no sense of mania in her bearing.
At first, the drug didn’t seem to take. I instructed the Andrew to turn down the temperature of the room and get Celise a blanket, as a cooler room was more conducive to melatonin production and a restful sleep state. She did not like this. Celise immediately kicked off the blanket and grew borderline combative with the Andrew. Ultimately, we relented, and Miliner and I agreed that we would wait for the drug to kick in before lowering the temperature in that hot room. And then a funny thing happened.
Celise finally succumbed to the drug, shutting her eyes and falling asleep for the first time in days. Then we lowered the room temperature, and, because she was all but nude, I made certain Andrew covered her with several blankets. Miliner and I then retreated to the other room and prepared a sequence of scans we planned to take while Celise was asleep. And, because of the potency of the drug, I presumed we’d be able to remove the flight cap for the scans without waking her—an additional reason I opted for such a potent pharmaceutical sleep inducer. We set up our portable scanners and were running through each of the tests I needed—a full battery of neurological imaging that I wanted to go quietly and smoothly. So we took extra time in prep to minimize the chance of disturbing our sleeping patient.
“Doctor,” Andrew interrupted, about a half hour after we’d begun our prep work.
He gestured to Celise through her room’s window. And there she was, asleep, on the bed, the blankets on the floor, and she was beginning to shiver. So I directed the Andrew to go in there and put the blankets on her again, somewhat frustrated by the interruption for a problem so small.
No sooner had he returned to the main treatment area after covering up Celise than he reported that she’d already kicked off the blankets again. I told him to place the blankets again, and once more, by the time he’d returned to his watch at the outer window, she’d thrown off the blankets—still fast asleep. That I found curious, so I came over to the window to watch for myself, Miliner tagging along with me. Sure enough, Andrew wasn’t even out of the room this time before Celise had pulled the blankets off her shoulders and rolled forward, throwing all of the covers entirely off the bed.
“I would suggest that we simply leave her as is, doctor, and raise the temperature of the room as before,” Andrew said.
Something about it wasn’t adding up for me, though. Because of Celise’s strange manner, the nudity had seemed like a behavioral oddity brought on by the break. It seemed like this aspect of her behavior wasn’t that different from an obstinate two-year-old refusing to put on clothing. But in a state of sleep that deep, I realized it couldn’t be behavioral.
“Don’t do anything,” I told the Andrew. “Give it a few minutes. Let me know if she starts to shiver again.”
Miliner and I went back to prep the scans, and not long after, Andrew reported that Celise was indeed shivering. I had a hunch.
I went into the room with a warm towel, draping it over her lower legs and feet—normally a welcome sensation in a cold room for a shivering person. She kicked it off almost immediately, never even threatening to awaken. I draped it over her shoulder. Same result.
When I came out, I instructed Andrew to raise the room temperature and told Miliner that we would adjust our preparations to scan Celise in the hot room.
“Doctor, if I may ask,” the Andrew said. “What exactly did you discern from that rather crude test?”
“Hyperesthesia,” I replied. “Her skin, for some reason has become hypersensitive to touch. The nudity isn’t a behavioral issue, Andrew. It’s a percept. Something in her brain is telling her that clothing feels uncomfortable against her skin. We’ll see if we can figure out why when we scan her.”
“How odd,” the Andrew answered. “Could that be a hallucination as well?”
“Doubtful,” I replied, thinking through the question as I was responding. “It is most definitely a genuine percept. I don’t think it’s psychological.”
We let Celise sleep after we’d set up the scanners. Then Miliner and I dove into Celise’s medical history and took Andrew’s full report on her current affliction. Miliner and I were talking through her case from a neurological and psychological standpoint. We hadn’t settled on a theory, but our discussion did produce several neurological areas of focus before we took our scans. We were adjusting our imaging algorithms when Furba interrupted. He was already pinging us from Celise’s monitoring station.
I checked the time, and Miliner noticed.
“Menia K’Fani’s Solar Weather department has an excellent fleet,” he noted.
I realized Furba must have engaged the FTL to jump out and then back in to the station to get there so fast. I’d been expecting his flight out there to take at least six hours.
“The station is dead, Larron,” Furba stated, his breath heavy in the background of the audio. “All of the data is cooked, and so are the instruments.”
I had to wait a second or two for the delay before I could respond to Furba.
“We don’t care about Celise’s research, Furba,” I told him in a lull when he was catching his breath. “What is the condition of the station? Are you wearing a suit in there?”
“Yes. So, hold on,” he said, clearly bumbling around a bit in the dark, enclosed, zero-G environment.
“Not much of a spacefarer for a stellar specialist,” I mused to Miliner, who was observing the screen in the main treatment area where I’d put up the stream from Furba.
“It’s too cold in here for long exposure in a nanosheet,” Furba explained. “I had to put on a suit. Like I said, everything is fried in here, so I can’t breathe the air. This is ... you’re looking for everything relevant to Celise, so the station ... hang on ... you’re going to want to see this.”
He went quiet for a few seconds.
“That’s right, Furba. We’d like to know what she went through up there if it could be relevant to her mental state.”
“Right,” he replied. “I was thinking about that on the way up. So ... I think the short answer is hell, Larron. She went through hell up here. I’m going to try and show you ....”
He was so clumsy I was getting disoriented looking at the screen. I had to shake my head at Miliner, who of course had no such issue with the images coming in.
“It’s a university pod, this station. I’m not sure if you know, Larron, but Professor K’Fani has a very nice budget. It includes funds to deploy monitoring stations all over the Lettered Systems—a big ship drops them off near the stars we’re watching.”
“Yes, I get it, Furba. Please get to the point.”
The audio got a bit confusing for a few seconds because of my interruption. I took a deep breath and reminded myself to be a bit more patient with the young man.
“The point is that it’s a hardened unit. So it must have gotten whacked by a significant blast from Samala to end up like this, probably a CME. Have a look ... I’ll try to hold still.”
He was steadying his body against the bulkhead, but even so, his head seemed to be bobbing around a bit, and the light from his headlamp was moving so much it was hard to make out what he was focusing on.
“I think the energetic outburst must have hit at night while the planet was turned; otherwise, I’m sure they’d have had a significant blackout, even with the planet’s magnetic field protecting the city.”
“What are you trying to show us, Furba?” I interrupted again. “I can’t see what you’re looking at.”
“Perhaps you should get closer please, Dr. Luonne,” Miliner instructed him.
A few seconds later, he floated up close to the far wall he was trying to illuminate and video for us. To my eyes it looked like a discoloration on the bulkhead, an inconsistent dark gray that was dull but seemed unremarkable to me.
“Can you see that?”
“We see a discoloration,” I answered him after a few seconds.
“Yes. That’s it, Larron. Those are electrical burn marks. The pod is insulated, but there’s still metal inside. That’s from electromagnetic energy arcing through the station. So ... I’m trying to think how to explain ... It’s like ... Have you ever seen those glass orbs with the lightning in them. They’re called plasma lamps. You’ve probably seen them in a science class.”
“I’m familiar,” I answered.
“So basically electromagnetic energy from the star turned the interior of Celise’s station into one of those lightning balls for the duration of the storm. I’ll have to check with the hub down there when I get back to pull her last data transfer to begin to calculate when it started and maybe how long it might have lasted, but something this big probably wasn’t any shorter than eight or ten hours. More likely, it was even a couple days. I can’t fathom how she didn’t get cooked alive in here. But she didn’t have any burns on her? Electrical burns?”
“No, Furba. We’d have all seen it if she had,” I said.
“Yes. Of course,” he replied breathing heavily. “But, I mean, if you’re looking for reasons she might have ... I don’t know how you say it medically ... snapped or whatever ... how well do you think you’d be doing after spending two days in a lightning ball, doctor? That’s my point.”
“All right, Furba. Thank you, we get it. Good work.”
“Oh, and I’m going to bring you some air samples, I think. Would that be helpful?”
“Air samples?”
“I don’t know. I just think ... I’m wearing a suit so I can’t smell the air in here, but I imagine it smells like burnt metal, and look ...” Furba focused on a panel that seemed entirely melted out. “All of the wires in the panels cooked their casings. The plastics melted where the electricity arced. She must have been breathing all of those fumes in. That could be significant medically, no?”
“Yes, Furba. That’s an excellent point. Some air samples may be helpful.”
“I’ll do what I can to figure out how to do that, and then I’ll get back down as soon as I can.”
“Very good, Furba. Thank you.”
“And, Larron, it may be another couple hours. I would like to gather some current data on Samala real quick. I may take a loop around the star. There’s been a three-day gap at least on any stellar observations. But this star ... just my eyeballs tell me, Larron, she is seriously misbehaving if she could do this to one of our stations this far out. What happened to Celise was an X class event. A high X.”
Miliner was skeptical. He didn’t think a solar blast of that magnitude could be so focused, taking out the station like that and leaving the city relatively unscathed. He did check with the operating system at the hub, which confirmed several minor outages and disruptions during the hours Celise Endrys was out of contact up at the station. Between the planet’s magnetic field, though, offering its protection, as well as the possibility that the planet itself had a fifty percent chance of being turned away from the star at the point of highest impact, I thought Furba’s concerns should at least be a consideration. The pictures and the events we knew had unfolded were facts that couldn’t be ignored. Celise had been up there in that station while all that energy was pulsing through it.
Hell, as Furba had described it, probably only began to describe what young Ms. Endrys had endured. I was pondering it, looking through the window into that hot room where she was sleeping. And she looked so peaceful. She was a little older than my oldest daughter—a few years—but as a father it was impossible for me not to see her through those eyes. And it was impossible for me to not think—or dare to dream perhaps would be a better way to put it—that the peaceful, sleeping girl before me, with no outward signs of damage to her person, might just wake up again, rub the sleep out of her eyes, and wonder what had happened, as though no damage to her psyche had been done at all. A father’s foolish hopes for the daughters of the galaxy. My mind was drifting. It was time to scan her.
Miliner and I wheeled in the table and the gear, and even though we didn’t think it would be physiologically possible for her to wake up with the amount of drug in her system, we still crept around like the slightest noise might disturb her.
Preparation, as always, was worth the effort, as Celise hardly stirred for the duration, only rousing slightly after we moved her back over to the bed, where she grimaced for a moment before falling back under again.
A few minutes later, after we’d removed all my gear from her room, Miliner held up Celise’s flight cap, as though to ask whether he should put it back on her. I told him to hold off on that for the time being, operating under the assumption that she was using it as a security blanket of sorts, which made more sense after Furba’s report. The protective layer in that cap may very well have saved what was left of her brain while she was immersed over all those hours in that electromagnetic cauldron. In her shoes, I don’t suppose I’d have wanted to take it off either. And now that I was thinking more about it, I was just beginning to reconsider when she woke up suddenly, screaming.
“Make it stop!” she shouted, covering her ears, her eyes squinting shut forcefully as she held her head. “It’s deafening! The light!”
Then she touched her hair, and in half a second, I realized what she was just realizing herself—that her hair being exposed like that meant that her head was no longer covered.
She cried out in pain, lurching around and feeling for her missing security blanket.
I took the flight cap out of Miliner’s hand and stepped toward her bed.
“Celise. I’m going to put this back on you,” I stated, holding out the cap.
Her eyes were completely shut, and she turned her head toward me, snatching the flight cap out of my hand as though she could see it with perfect vision. And she brushed back her hair with one hand while putting on the head covering with the other and then buckling it under her chin, breathing heavily as she did.
“Ow,” she whimpered, her legs dangling off the edge of the bed as she sat there in a tripod position.
I knelt before her, concerned that she might fall onto the floor and hit her face.
Then she exhaled and opened her eyes, looking right at me.
“It’s getting louder.”
“What’s getting louder, Celise?”
“The star is singing. I’ll never get back to sleep again.”
We talked for some time after that, but quite honestly, I wasn’t sure how long the conversation had been going before eventually trying to get through to Celise proved to be all but impossible. When everything out of a patient’s mouth sounds like a riddle, you can easily trick yourself into believing there are patterns there that mean something, when the reality is much more likely that they simply aren’t thinking coherently. In this case, I was afraid that was the most reasonable explanation. And it would be no small wonder given the trauma we knew she’d endured up on that monitoring station.
I had a long conversation with Miliner, again running through case after rare case, stretching every last detail for possible connections to Celise’s presentation, looking for some thread to pull, some sort of clue.
We returned to the scans. To say her brain function looked normal would’ve been overstating it, but nothing glaring jumped out at either of us. There was nothing abnormal in any of the usual areas that might have explained the unusual dissociation, the auditory hallucinations, the failure to recognize familiar people, nor the sensitivity to touch. But there was the obvious problem that we’d scanned her while she was asleep and drugged, and given the way she’d reacted to waking up without that flight cap on, I thought it was unlikely she’d allow us to take it off to scan her again.
“If I had it to do over again,” I told Miliner, “I’d have fixed a web of nodes to the inside of that flight cap while she was asleep.”
“Not a bad idea,” he replied. “The trick would be getting it off her long enough to do it.”
Drugging her again wasn’t advisable. Not so soon after.
I kept thinking about the touch sensitivity. If she was truly feeling that percept, then I figured it was likely she was experiencing the same regarding the noise and the light she was claiming to perceive.
“What are you thinking, Dr. Hand?” Miliner asked me after nearly a minute of silence.
“You don’t have a funny bone, do you?” I asked him. “Do you know what it is?”
He tilted his head, searching his memory for a reference. “I believe you’re referring to the ulnar nerve, specifically along the cubital tunnel at the elbow.
“Correct.”
“No. I do not have a funny bone in this android shell, Dr. Hand. Nor an equivalent.”
“I mention it because I just thought of a patient I had a few years back.”
“A funny bone patient?” he asked me, skeptically.
“Yes, actually. Sort of. He’d gone to see an orthopedist first. This was about six months after he’d reported really giving his elbow a good accidental whack on a doorframe. And he was complaining, because even six months later, he’d had a dull ache radiating down all the way to his pinky and it didn’t seem to be going away, so he thought he might have broken something. So I humored him and examined his elbow and scanned the nerve and then explained to him that nerve pain is like that sometimes. I guess this is the hopeful part of me speaking. I told him that eventually, it would take time, but it would go away on its own.”
“And it did?’
“As far as I know. Nerves are not precise equipment all the time, Miliner. Sometimes a potent provocation pops up that really gets them howling and it takes a good long time for things to settle down.”
“You’re referring to the experience Dr. Endrys had in the monitoring station?”
“It’s possible. Maybe. All that electromagnetic energy? The brain is a giant collection of electrochemical signaling devices. It wouldn’t be too far a leap to think that whatever happened on the station got a fair amount of those synapses howling. Perhaps the best treatment may be time and a quiet environment to allow the signals in her brain to settle down.”
Miliner looked back at me doubtfully. “Well, Dr. Hand,” he replied. “It’s a theory.”
I glared back at him. It was about as rude an answer as I’d ever heard from an AI clone. “You have a better idea?”
“No,” he stated. “Only questions. For instance, how would that theory square with the notion that suddenly Dr. Endrys seems to have perfect pitch. What connections would be howling that, exactly?”
“You tell me, Miliner.”
“Would that I could, doctor,” he replied.
Just then, breathless, Furba came bounding into the clinic.
“Okay,” he said. “Where to begin?”
“The beginning,” Miliner responded.
“Right. The beginning?” Furba turned to me, gathering his thoughts. “Some very impossible things are happening here, doctor.”
“You mean with Celise?”
“Well, that’s just miraculous, how she’s alive. I can’t account for that, but I was talking about the star, about Samala.”
“Please articulate your concerns,” Miliner said, trying to focus Furba.
“Bear in mind that Professor K’Fani’s ship is from our fleet, designed for stellar observation, and he’s meticulous about calibration for every one of the department’s instruments. Because my first thought was that there must be some kind of mistake. Faulty instrumentation.”
The door to Celise’s room was open, and though I doubted she’d overheard the conversation between myself and Miliner, she couldn’t have missed Furba’s entrance or the urgency in his voice as he was talking. I looked over his shoulder to see her leaning against the wall, listening. He hadn’t noticed her there, as Furba had his back to Celise.
“What mistake?” Miliner asked him.
“I took readings on both sides of the star to get a current baseline so I could compare it against the data from the monitoring station up to the moment it went down. And I noticed that Celise had been monitoring some very serious anomalies in the star in the preceding weeks. A radio burst that was constant for nearly a month, for one, which would be notable, but not exactly concerning on its own, a star of that class will do such things ... rarely, every couple centuries or so, but not outside the realm of—”
“Furba, the point,” I stated.
“Celise had captured a drop in luminosity of nearly point-zero-two percent in the week leading up to the CME that blasted the station, which doesn’t sound like much, but over the life of a star, it’s actually significant. And she began marking the accumulation of dust ...” He was shaking his head, trying to find an explanation a non-expert could understand. “The issue is cosmic particles—plasma. You could think of it like the star needing to blow off heat at a constant rate, but it also has a tremendous gravitational pull. And it pulls in all this dust, which traps heat like a blanket, and eventually it’s like a bomb. Can be. I don’t know personally. I’d need to talk to our professor about the timeline.”
“Point-zero-two percent?” I said. “That’s the urgency? Can’t you track the luminosity back in the data and see how fast it’s happening?”
“It’s a nonlinear process, Larron. And I didn’t tell you—” he looked around, and he noticed Celise standing behind him at the door, listening.
“Hello, Celise.”
“Hello, fake Furba. Please keep talking. I like your voice.”
“Right. Okay,” he continued, much more quietly. “Professor K’Fani has all of his ships programmed to take nominal readings of all the proximal stars whenever a ship drops out in a new system. Just to take a baseline. He likes data.”
“Like any good scientist,” I said.
“Right,” Furba continued. “From the time we arrived here—I mean you and me and Miliner, Dr. Hand—Samala’s luminosity has dropped nearly two percent.”
“Excuse me, what?” I replied. “What exactly does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” Furba answered. “It’s not something I’ve ever seen before. I need to take some more readings before anybody panics. But I don’t think it would be unexpected to see more solar events that might disrupt anything electrical here on the outpost.”
“And the ship?” I asked. “If you go up there?”
“It’s hardened. Very well protected.”
“Wasn’t Celise’s observatory hardened as well?”
He shrugged, conceding the point before responding. “Whatever’s coming, I’ll be able to see it in advance. And the observatory didn’t have a starship engine, Larron.”
Celise came over behind him. She attempted to remove the flight cap she still had buckled under her chin.
“You’ll need—” she said, growing frustrated, as she struggled to free the clasp, grimacing as she did.
“Hey, Celise,” Furba said, smiling as she approached. “You want me to have it?”
“Protect your brain, fake Furba. You have a good one.”
“Thank you, Celise. You too. I have a whole flight suit in the ship. I’ll put on a cap if it makes you feel better. Even a helmet. You can keep yours on yourself, please.”
He put his hand up to hers, ever so gently, and they found each other standing there, smiling, shaking hands.
“Good deal,” she replied. “Hmmmmmmmm.”
Miliner looked over at Furba, expressing urgency. “Dr. Luonne, you said something about a radio burst, didn’t you?”
“Yes. I’ve uploaded all of Celise’s data from the comms hub here to the ship. I could share it—”
“Any chance you remember the predominant frequency off the top of your head?”
“It varies somewhat, of course. It’s a natural phenomenon. But it kept coming up at twenty-one point zero-one kilohertz, I think. Oddly steady for long stretches.”
Miliner shook his head at me.
“What?” I said.
“That’s up eight octaves from the E3, Dr. Hand, and too high for the human ear to hear, certainly, but it’s the same note—an E, E11. Almost exactly.”
“Hmmmmmmm.” Celise repeated.
“I’m going with him,” Miliner declared. “He’ll need a mind like mine to parse through the patterns in the data in real time.”
Then Furba, who’d vacillated between equal parts congenial and flustered for the duration of the trip, locked eyes with me, laser focused, and stated, “Don’t tell anyone, Larron. We don’t know anything for sure yet. There’s no reason to incite a panic.”
And then, the two of them walked out of there at a clip, leaving me and Celise exchanging a look awkwardly.
Needless to say, Furba’s manner and clear alarm at the state of the star shocked me. What had happened to Celise struck me as an unlikely but not altogether unthinkable peril of stellar science. A normal risk of being in the star watching business. And Furba’s behavior up till that point had reinforced as much. This new circumstance with the star drastically shifting in luminosity over a matter of hours—that concerned me. Miliner going off with Furba like that only reinforced my building apprehension that we might be in genuine danger on Beta-Samala.
Celise, though, seemed to be improving, at least as far as her mood was concerned. She returned to her room briefly after they left, but soon after, she came back out to engage me in conversation. She complained about feeling cooped up in that room. And just as I was starting to think she might be coming back to reality a bit, she expressed the desire to go back to Beta-Samala. It was the same complaint she’d disclosed to me in our initial evaluation. Much like fake Furba or her imposter boyfriend, her brain was interpreting the outpost as a false reality—close to the real thing but not real.
And then she returned to her room again, I realized this time, not to get away from me, but because she was cold out in the main room.
I was getting antsy myself sitting in that medical clinic like that, especially with no update from Furba or Miliner yet.
When he returned with lunch for myself and Celise, I asked the Andrew to keep an eye on her. I realized that since we’d arrived in the middle of the night, I hadn’t stepped foot outside once. It was just past midday and it felt like the middle of an interminable night. I wanted to have a look at this problematic star with my own eyes.
As I was passing her doorway, Celise shouted out to me. “Did you know I was a gymnast before I was an astronomer, doctor?” she asked me. “I bet you didn’t know that about me.”
She was smiling. I think the sleep had really done her mental state a lot of good, even if she was still not oriented to reality. It was a tick in the box for my theory. I began to hope those howling neurons of hers might just slowly settle over time.
“I didn’t know that, Celise,” I answered. “You look like you stay fit for space flight, though. Mission fit.”
“It’s a good idea. You don’t mind if I do some calisthenics?”
“No. Please do. Healthy body, healthy mind.”
I smiled back at her before I stepped out into the small sitting area and then through the outer doorway to that clinic.
I guess part of me was expecting for some visible sign of trouble from the sun. But looking up at it, I couldn’t see any sign that there was anything amiss at all. It was bright in the sky, albeit a little orange, but I’d never seen how the sun normally looked on Beta-Samala anyway, and I’d been on a dozen or so outposts where the suns all had a slightly different character to their light. Plus, I also had no idea how the transparent diamond dome affected the normal radiance of Samala the star.
Looking around gave me no cause for alarm. People seemed to be going about their day entirely unconcerned. I took a deep breath, figuring for the moment that Furba may have blown the readings out of proportion, and I guessed that Miliner would shortly be setting him right. And I’d hardly had a chance to exhale before I heard a commotion inside. My patient herself was howling now, I could hear, not just her neurons.
When I entered, she was still in her room, on the floor though, her face down, apoplectic for some reason I couldn’t immediately discern. Andrew had no explanation except that one moment she was exercising and the next she was on the floor crying out in agony, mumbling.
“It’s here. It’s here.”
“What’s here, Celise?” I asked her.
“Beta-Samala. It’s here. It’s really here.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I don’t feel it.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t understand, Celise.”
She was sitting up now, looking at me.
“It went away.”
“What went away?”
“The real Samala. This place isn’t real.”
By that time, I was thinking about percepts, how hers might be getting crossed-up somehow by all the neurological noise the electromagnetic exposure might have caused her. I had a theory.
“Celise, you said you were a gymnast. What were you doing before you felt the real Samala—I think that’s how you said it?”
“I was just doing my normal calisthenics.”
“Can you show me?”
She nodded and stood up, starting with a few normal exercises like toe-touches and squats in place.
“What did you do just before?” I asked her.
“I did a handspring. Do you want to see?”
“Sure. Is there enough room? Let me back out of the way for you. Hang on.”
I stepped out of the room so there was enough space for her to spring forward, and she did, cleanly and elegantly enough that I could see gymnastics hadn’t merely been a hobby for her as a child. That handspring was as natural to her as walking. And before she’d even stuck the landing on the other side, she gasped. And standing upright as she was, just in front of me, I nearly needed to hold her up, because she was ready to collapse from the shock of a near complete disorientation I could almost witness unfolding in her eyes.
“I went back,” she said, her eyes wide with disbelief.
“You went back to Samala?” I asked her.
“Just for a second. And now I’m here again.”
Percepts. Crossed signals. Another thought.
“Celise, can you do a handstand for me, please? I’d very much like to see that.”
“I think so,” she replied.
I signaled for Andrew to come close, figuring that if my theory was correct, Celise may react suddenly to the sensation. And no sooner was she balancing vertically on her hands than she became very rapidly unsteady, at which point, I and Andrew caught her legs so she didn’t fall. Instead, she looked up at me, her eyes surveying in utter disbelief.
“It’s okay, Celise. We have you. Can you tell me what you’re feeling?”
“Scared. I’m feeling scared.”
“Why are you scared?”
“I’m really on Samala, aren’t I? I can feel it. My flat is that way, where I live with Daeson.”
She did her best to gesture with her head, as her hands were still holding her up.
“Yes, we’re on Samala. We have been the entire time.”
“Oh my God, is Furba really here with you?”
“Yes. He and Miliner are out on the ship at the moment.”
“I thought it was a dream. This isn’t a dream, though.”
“No it is not.”
“Okay. Okay,” she said, exhaling, trying to regain what composure she could, standing upside-down like that. “Doctor, this is very important. You need to tell Furba exactly what I say.”
“Andrew will remember it verbatim if I don’t.”
“He needs to look at the density of the plasma sheet. That’s the key.”
“All right. We’ll relay that. Anything else?”
“Tell them to come back soon. And where is Daeson?”
“I’ll have Andrew get him for you.”
“I can’t explain how strange this feels, like stepping into a portal to a different reality,” she replied. “Okay, I’m ready. Please put me down now.”
Then, as we let her down, once her feet were on the ground and she was upright again, Celise’s eyes completely changed character. She smiled at me, grinning as though I might be playing a joke on her, and it was evident without a single word that she was gone again, back into that strange deceptive dream.
In systems as complex as stellar physics and neurology, one should always be prepared for the unexpected to happen. Yet as much as you can understand that reality, it doesn’t mean you’ll be ready to cope with the unexpected. With Celise, I found myself twisting every understanding I thought I had about cognition.
She was experiencing an alternate reality alongside us. She was failing to recognize old friends. She was in another place that looked almost exactly like the place she was supposed to be. And all we had to do to flip those misapprehensions around was to quite literally flip her upside down. I started thinking about the related cognitive pathways. Surely, there was some involvement with the hippocampus throwing off her sense of orientation. But the cross-wiring with the feeling of being upside-down? That had to involve the vestibular system and the inner ear, somewhere along the 8th cranial nerve. And could the constant E note humming on that same nerve have something to do with her disorientation? And what about the sensation that the people around her were imposters? It was a puzzle with more pieces than I could fit together under the circumstances.
When Daeson arrived, I told Andrew that I would let him in. I wanted to prepare the young man for a rather unorthodox test I was planning to run when he came in. And as I stepped outside, I couldn’t help but think that the sun was looking redder and redder. I didn’t want to give anything away or unduly alarm him, so I didn’t ask Daeson directly.
“What do you make of that?” I said, gesturing with my head to the bright red orb over his shoulder.
“Yeah, the sun’s really red today,” he replied. “Too bad we don’t know a stellar physicist who could explain something like that.”
I smiled at the joke and said nothing more about the matter, but it served to confirm my suspicion that the light had changed since just a short while earlier.
On the way inside, I explained to Daeson our small breakthrough with Celise, and I told him of my intention to repeat the test with him present—to see if she would recognize him as the authentic Daeson once we flipped her upside-down again.
“You’re serious?” he asked.
“The brain can be a funny thing,” I replied.
“You’re the neurologist, I guess. I’ll help however I can, doctor.”
It didn’t work. He was amazed that she suddenly became far more lucid, but Celise’s response was puzzling.
“Where’s Furba?” she asked me.
“Still out with Miliner,” I told her. “We haven’t heard from them yet.”
“Okay, well, you should ping them,” she declared with a sense of urgency clear in her tone.
“What about him? Do you recognize this fellow?” I asked, referring to Daeson.
“He looks like Daeson, but he’s not,” she replied. “An imposter, only upside-down. How did he get here anyway?”
Another genuine neurological mystery.
I was puzzling over that problem while about half of my mind was on the dimming star. Whatever Furba and Miliner were doing, I figured they didn’t need to be interrupted, and it was possible the delay might have made it impractical to ping them, depending on where Furba had flown to take readings.
Then the solution popped into my head. Not upside-down, but flipped.
“I have it,” I declared.
Daeson followed me over to the workstation I had set up in the general treatment area. I pulled out a pair of glasses and began to program them to reverse the image. And because Daeson followed me, so too did Celise, curious about the activity more so than my specific declaration. She still wasn’t quite able to follow a line of thought like that—not right-side-up anyway. And as I was working, a ping came in from Furba.
I realized that Andrew had been fetching lunch while Miliner and Furba and I had been talking about the star. I also realized that he might have protocols regarding reporting any potential hazards to the authorities. So I sent him to fetch an early dinner for myself and Celise and Daeson before answering the ping. I didn’t fully know why I did that in the moment. An example of the subconscious knowing, perhaps.
“Larron,” Furba stated calmly but definitively when I opened the channel. “I want you to be prepared to meet us by the airlock within the hour, no questions asked.”
“All right,” I replied. “I should relay that we’ve had a breakthrough with Celise. She’s coming around a bit.”
“That’s excellent news. I’m happy to hear that.”
“She had a message for you.”
“She did?”
“She said that you need to look at the density of the plasma sheet. That’s the key. Does that make any sense to you? I’m afraid it doesn’t mean that much to me.”
“She’s correct, Larron. I have the message. Be ready to meet us on the flat.”
“Dark star,” Celise sang in that same tone, the E3.
He closed the channel, and as he did, I attempted to explain to Celise that we were going to go for a ride with Furba. I suspected it might be a challenge to get her to put on a belt so that she’d have a nanosheet to walk out to the ship. I asked Daeson if he might be able to help persuade her.
“A belt? What about the rest of her, doctor?” he asked, not grasping the urgency of the situation. “You want her to walk out of here in her underwear? Through town?”
“We can’t stay here, Daeson. Furba is concerned that there’s an ongoing electromagnetic event with the star. We think that may be affecting Celise’s mental state. We’re going to take her back to Kappa-Nira. The sooner the better.”
It wasn’t a total lie. He looked back at me skeptically, though.
“Dark star ...” Celise sang. “Hmmmmmmmm.”
“I’ll do what I can to help,” he said.
I tried to explain to Celise again that we were going to go for a trip.
“With Furba?”
“Yes. With Furba.”
“And him?” she said, referring to Daeson.
“And Daeson as well. Sure. Daeson can come along too.”
“I’m not going anywhere with these imposters,” Celise declared. “No. I don’t want to fly.”
“Give me a moment, please,” I said, asking Daeson to keep an eye on Celise while I stepped outside.
I had to consider the options, and I figured it might be easier to do it alone. When I stepped outside, I was stunned.
The star was a dark, dull red. Blood red. Whatever was happening was happening fast. That was the urgent tone I’d noted in Furba. And just as tellingly, he’d said nothing meaningful about the star itself over the open channel. The one coherent stellar physicist in the system. He knew, and he knew more than just the condition of the star. Furba knew there was exactly one FTL ship in the entire system, and he also knew if everyone knew what he knew, there’d be a riot to board her.
I’d medicate her to unconsciousness if I had to. Daeson and I could carry Celise out there. That was my last resort, though. I still had one more trick to play on her crossed-up brain. There was just enough time.
When Andrew returned, he clearly showed signs of curiosity. He mentioned that the luminosity of the star was abnormal for that time of the afternoon.
“I know of no stellar phenomenon that matches that pattern for a star as stable and young as Samala.”
“Very interesting,” I replied. “Are the people noticing the same?”
“Yes. They’re very curious.”
“Nervous?”
“Interested would be a better descriptor.”
“That’s good, Andrew,” I replied. “We have another task for you. Daeson and I are going to take Celise out to the ship so we can return her to Kappa-Nira for further treatment. I have my belt here so we can go outside the dome, but we need you to go to Daeson’s house and pick up his belt, and I believe he said he has a spare for Celise as well. I’d like you to pick them up and meet us at the airlock to the landing area.”
“Of course, Dr. Hand. I’ll see to it right away.”
“Daeson will direct you on where to find the gear in his flat,” I told him.
The two of them walked out toward the front, and Celise sat down beside me.
“You are being deceptive, doctor,” she said to me.
“We’ll see how that goes,” I replied. “Hopefully, I can trick that mischievous brain of yours into coming along with us.”
“That would be a good trick,” she replied, grinning and looking at the screen as I connected to the glasses and began to reprogram the optics.
Daeson returned and stood behind us, curious as to what I was up to on the screen.
“This is more serious than you’re letting on, isn’t it?” he asked me casually.
“Do you have family here on the outpost?” I asked him.
“Celise is the closest thing to it,” he replied. “Friends, though.”
“Family,” was all I said back.
“What are you doing up there, doctor?”
“Right. So you’re going to have to be the leader here if this works the way I hope it’s going to work, Daeson. She’ll follow you if she recognizes it’s you, right?”
“Yes. She would. I might even be able to get her to put some pants on.”
“If we can get her out the door, pants or no pants, I’ll be thrilled, Daeson,” I replied. “I have a theory.”
“Okay.”
“Human faces aren’t symmetrical. I think the part of her brain that processes faces is flipping them in her mind—the left side of your face where the right side of your face should be, and vice versa. So you look like you, but to Celise right now, you’re a slightly different version of you. Same thing with Furba. That’s why she thinks you’re imposters. I’m programming these glasses to flip it back.”
“That’s some theory.”
“We’ll see fast if it’s right or wrong. If it’s right, she’s going to recognize you, but she’s also going to see everything else backwards—like flipped around. And I suspect that I will suddenly seem like an imposter to her because she recognizes my face as is now.”
“I think I get it.”
“What I need you to do is take her hand and lead her when it’s time to go. Make sure she doesn’t walk into anything, as it’ll be very disorienting for her. You’re going to need to tell her what to do as well, because she’ll probably think I’m an imposter and she won’t trust me.”
“I can do that.”
I exhaled, finishing the recalibration.
The glasses set was an opaque lens, more like a VR set than an optical device. So we wouldn’t be able to see her eyes to see how she reacted. I turned her chair toward Daeson and put the glasses on her.
“Babe?” she said immediately. “Oh, my God, is that you?”
“Yeah, it’s me, Celise. It’s been me the whole time.”
She looked at me. “Where did the other doctor go? This one looks just like him.”
“Great,” I said. “Keep her in that chair, and keep her calm. I’ll see about our ride.”
There wasn’t much time left according to Furba when he pinged my earset from the ship on a private channel. I understood the urgency, but until he explained to me exactly what was happening on that call, I still didn’t fully understand myself.
“ETA is seven minutes,” he replied. “We’re touching down and I expect to be off the ground again in the time it takes three people to step through the rear hatch.”
“We’ll be ready,” I told him. “We’re leaving now.”
I’d packed a small go-bag of the essentials for treating Celise on the trip back to Kappa-Nira, and, in my other hand, I had the bag Andrew had brought back our dinner in. To my surprise, when I stepped to the front of Celise’s room to let them know it was time, I found that Daeson had managed to get a gown on her, and she looked positively ridiculous with those opaque glasses, her flight cap, and a bright green hospital gown on her, along with the flight boots she’d come in wearing. But she was smiling.
“What’s in the bags, doctor?” Daeson asked.
“Dinner,” I answered. “Ready?”
Daeson nodded and tugged on Celise’s hand.
By the time we stepped out of the clinic, the sun was just past three-quarters in the sky, and it was dark, like dusk, the outline of Samala seemed a shadow star. People had come outside to gaze up at it, sensing something—wonder, fear, bemusement, curiosity. But it worked to our advantage. Very few of the colonists even turned to look at us, the three people in that diamond bubble on the Beta-Samala outpost who seemed to be moving with purpose. Celise’s strange attire hardly garnered a second glance from anyone, not with a black star in the sky drawing the attention of every last eye.
We weren’t followed. There was a solitary figure at the outer airlock—the Andrew, dutifully waiting, a belt in each hand.
I think when he saw us, he understood.
He handed over the gear and helped Celise clip her belt-buckle, activating the nanosheet for her.
“I’ll operate the lock,” he announced.
We were at T-minus forty seconds for the ship.
“Thank you, Andrew,” Celise said. “You’ve been kind. You can come with us if you like.”
“Dr. Endrys, you’ve been equally kind during this difficult time. I wish you the best of luck in your recovery. I may yet have duties at the medical station. Godspeed.”
Once we stepped out the main airlock, it was almost impossible to see the ship, because Furba had cut the lights, coming in dark in a dark sky. I heard it before I saw the ship. I realized Miliner must have been flying, such was the mastery of that seamless touchdown, the back hatch already opening practically a step from Celise’s boots.
We were on the ground for all of five seconds before we were airborne again, the three of us hanging tight to the rails, holding on in that airlock annex until we were in space, weightless, with Miliner directing us to strap in for FTL.
“What about Beta-Coronado?” I shouted, though I didn’t need to shout, as Furba and Miliner could hear me through the ship’s audio system. “They must have a freighter or enough cargo carriers that can land on the deck back there.”
“There’s no time, Larron,” I heard Furba’s voice respond.
Daeson was struggling a bit getting Celise through the back corridor to the travel seats along the port midship. I got there first, and Furba was there, strapped in already, operating a workstation he’d set up on the floatscreen. He was looking at the star.
Daeson and I helped to get Celise strapped in first. And then we rushed to get ourselves secure.
“Clear for FTL,” Furba announced to Miliner.
“What’s going to happen now?” Daeson asked. “I don’t understand.”
“Samala is going to go nova soon. Any time now, actually. We can’t predict exactly when.”
“Then ...?” he paused for several seconds, as though he didn’t even want to say the words. “Everybody down there is going to die, aren’t they?”
“Not necessarily,” Furba answered. “Hopefully, if Samala holds off for a few more hours and it happens at night—close to midnight would be luckiest—then maybe ... maybe the dome can hold. We’ll know in a couple days.”
Epilogue:
Four weeks following the first recorded stellar micro-nova in the Battery Systems during the era of human occupation, rescuers were finally able to brave the chaotic cosmic environment to reach Beta-Samala. Stellar physicists had already calculated, based on the timing of the blast, that the burst had struck the planet while the city was obscured at seventy-four degrees past the terminator, several hours before midnight local time. The diamond exterior of the dome, somehow, held true that night.
On top of that miracle, despite every last electrical component suffering catastrophic overload from the electromagnetic storm, the clever engineers in the city managed to rig a small fleet of air scrubbers, with the air flow provided by the few pieces of exercise equipment that survived the storm of arcing metal that injured dozens of settlers over the course of that fateful night. And with such a large reservoir of atmosphere in the dome, a willing team of volunteer peddlers and runners, and an enduring spirit characteristic of deep-space settlers all over the Battery, the final death toll at Beta-Samala, miraculously, stood at seven.
Due to the debris flung out into the system by the star herself, and the certainty of a near-future filled with high-impact asteroid strikes, the colony had to be abandoned.
Dr. Celise Endrys, over the course of several months, slowly recovered to something resembling her normal neurological function. Though she reported feeling certain impulses she insisted were connected to cosmic electromagnetism, I could never confirm as much in any scientific sense. Even back on Kappa-Nira, a planet with a strong magnetic shield, she reported that she suffered a clear, definite, and perceptible anxiety at the onset of any notable solar activity from our own gentle star. She even kept a journal that seemed to demonstrate as much.
Beyond the obvious neurological complications Celise had to struggle to overcome, Dr. Endrys carried significant psychological trauma with her following the ordeal. I only asked her after I was certain she was comfortable sharing details from those interminable hours she was stuck aboard the monitoring station. I asked her how she’d managed to survive. Celise told me that she was well acquainted with the pods, having volunteered for a committee within the department that helped to decide how to award resources to new projects. In order to quickly assemble space stations of varying sizes, the department’s pods were prefabricated, with specific panels that were designed to readily attach to compatible tunnels, lock doors, or other pods of the same make. Celise’s station had one such panel, which she knew was made of a nonconductive nano-polymer and had a deep enough recess for Dr. Endrys to tuck her body into for the duration. She spent what she guessed was close to thirty hours crunched inside it, mere centimeters from arcing blasts of electricity, praying that the frame around the panel never heated to the polymer’s melting point for fear that the entire station might decompress. In short, Celise informed me that one should never underestimate the value of a good hiding spot.
For understandable reasons, she never resumed any similar fieldwork following the micro-nova at Beta-Samala, but she continued to teach Stellar Physics and Space Weather at the university, even writing several articles concerning Samala itself. And, last I heard, she and Daeson were still happily together.
For my part, I spent several years wrestling with the actions we took during that short window of time on that outpost. As much as the rational mind can replay the events and see, logically, step-by-step, that what we did was sensible given the circumstances that existed in the moment, I couldn’t ever fully shake the guilt that came with being sensible. No matter how much Furba Luonne and even Miliner insisted that we could have done no better than to escape and ensure the timeliest possible rescue, part of me will always feel different. The ship had a maximum capacity of twelve. We flew out of there with four people and an AI clone. Seven empty seats.
The human brain sees patterns, and sometimes it feels things that are not there.
I sometimes wake at night wondering about that Andrew, a simple android, its simple patterns of thought. What did it think about us in the hours between our departure and the moment its processors were fried forever in that impossibly bright cosmic blast?
Like so much else, it is a question that has no answer. No resolution. Still we can’t stop the neurons from firing the signals that ask such questions, even if they do our minds no good. Nor can we escape the forces of the cosmos. Eighty-six billion neurons at our disposal, and it is still impossible for us to comprehend just how small we are.