But when I try to turn on the lights this morning, they don’t work. The UPR’s new lighting schedule is automatic. It must not have an option that lets me override it.
I reach over to the side of my bed, fingers searching for the shaft of my torch. When I turn it on, it glows a dull yellow for a few seconds and then switches off. Out of charge. There have been so many power cuts recently that I’ve been using it almost every day, and I must have forgotten to recharge it last night.
I’m stuck in bed until the lights come on, then. My tablet is in the living area, so I can’t even use that as a torch. The ambient light routine has been deactivated completely, so there isn’t the usual dim pink light of simulated dawn. It’s pitch-black, completely and utterly. I’ll have to lie and wait.
My bladder complains insistently that it’s achingly full. I cross my legs, shifting onto my back and trying to focus on anything other than my desperation to wee. I don’t know how much longer it will be until the lights come on, until I can finally get out of bed. It might be an hour or more. I’m not sure I can make it.
I pin my fists to the bed and squeeze my eyes shut, pretending I’m still asleep, I’m still dreaming and I’m not ready to get up yet anyway.
My breath is shallow and quick. I’m asleep, I am, I am, I am.
I count to two hundred, then four hundred. I can’t wait much longer.
I let out a frustrated sob. Every time I breathe in, I’m certain that I’m about to wet myself.
I have to go to the bathroom.
Carefully standing up, I curl my toes against the floor. I take a hesitant step with one hand reached out in front of me. I’m overcome with a desperate certainty that if I move now, I’ll end up walking right into some rotting creature, or trip into a bottomless hole in the floor that wasn’t there before.
I picture the layout of the furniture, hoping that I know my own bedroom well enough not to trip over anything. The five metres across the room feels like miles.
I catch my foot on the edge of a cabinet, and the impact ricochets up the bones of my calf. Ignoring the pain, I carry on walking, but my fingers touch a wall somewhere I didn’t expect a wall to be. I think I lost my sense of direction when I crashed into the cabinet. I can’t think, can’t reorientate myself.
In my blindness, I start imagining hands curling up over my shoulders; the moist breath of something standing just in front of me, motionless and waiting; the tickle of fingertips gliding only micrometres from my face.
Suddenly I can’t breathe. I’m desperate for the lights to come on, to show me that the monster I’ve invented isn’t real.
I stagger along the wall, hoping that somehow I’ll find the entrance to the bathroom without falling into the pit of the living area, but I can’t think about anything except slimy fingernails and rotten breath.
My knees give out beneath me and I collapse against the wall, gasping and straining my eyes in the darkness. I hope desperately that the lights are seconds away from turning on, but nothing happens.
I curl up on the floor, my nightmares creeping towards me in this blackness. Frozen astronauts touch me, coming for me with eyes bulging from their sockets. Sobs rack my chest, tears spilling from my eyes. Before I can stop myself, or crawl any further towards the bathroom, my bladder lets out.
When I feel warm liquid flood over my legs, I’m so ashamed that my crying increases. Urine stings the inside of my thighs, smelling sharp in my nose. I can’t handle even a few hours in the dark.
I try to ignore the pins and needles trailing across my skin. It feels like fingers are stroking me; like the astronauts have finally come for me. I don’t have the strength to stop them. I close my eyes and let them take me.
The astronauts.
They had only been in stasis for seven years when the torpor technology started failing. The problem might have been something to do with the space radiation interacting with the oxygen-rich liquid that filled their lungs, or the artificial gravity microclimate, or something else completely. My parents never found out. It just happened.
Without any warning, without any way to stop it, the astronauts started dying in their sleep. One by one. Lights flicked off, as lives passed silently into the night.
I was only four, but I can remember it. My parents tried desperately to hide their worry, but I knew something was wrong.
I remember Dad patting me absently on the head and telling me to stay in the living quarters when I asked if we could play hide and seek in the stores. It was obvious his mind was full of other things.
I followed him and watched from the doorway of the sick bay as they tried to wake up the astronauts, one after another. Most died before ever regaining consciousness. Later, I found out that the men and women who did survive the stasis were brain-dead. Humanity’s cleverest minds had been wiped away.
There was nothing that could be done.
The only thing that survived was the embryos. The undeveloped cells were only ever supposed to be a way of ensuring genetic diversity on the new planet. Now they are Earth’s only hope.
My parents didn’t stop trying to save the astronauts, not until they’d woken up every single one of them and run MRI scans, searching in vain for brain activity.
I left when my mother started injecting the brain-dead. I crawled under my duvet and waited, eyes closed, listening as hundreds of souls left their bodies. It was the loudest silence I have ever heard.
My mother gave a euthanasia injection to every astronaut who survived torpor sleep. She killed almost the entire crew of The Infinity and she didn’t cry, not once, the entire time. I couldn’t understand why, back then. Now, I know that there are just some things so terrible you can’t cry about them, because if you start, you will never stop.
After the astronauts died, the three of us were alone. The ship was empty.
Before, it had been the best place in the entire world: filled with music and coloured lights, and secret hiding places that were perfect for a little child to curl into, giggling as her parents searched for her.
After they died, it was dark and full of shadows, and so, so quiet.
When the astronauts left, so did the light from my mother’s eyes. Dad told me that she just couldn’t handle the trauma – not on top of the pressure, the isolation and the confinement of being in space. My mother watched all their closest friends die one by one. She put them to sleep, unable to save them.
She developed an adjustment disorder – her mind rejected her reality.
I didn’t understand that, not then. Not really now, either. How can a child understand that their mother has left them when she is right there in front of them? I used to cry and beg and plead for her to see me, to just look at me instead of at the astronauts she saw in her mind. But I could never bring her back to us. I wasn’t good enough.
Dad tried to help, but there was nothing he could do. She was beyond help.
He tried.