There must be a way to turn it off. When the ringing stops, I go to the helm. I try to block the calls, but as I’m clicking he rings again and—
My click accidentally answers the call – or perhaps I just needed to know, once and for all, whether he’s good or bad or somewhere in-between – and the ringing stops.
“Romy?” a voice says. The sound drags right up against my nerve endings.
My heart stops in my chest. I hold my breath, as if that will make him go away, as if he’ll think it’s an error and the call never connected at all.
“Are you there?” he whispers in a low croon.
I choke on a gasp.
There’s barely a second of silence. The time lag has disappeared almost completely.
“You are there,” he says. “I can hear you.”
I swallow back stomach butterflies and moths and snakes, and before I can decide to end the call without saying a word, he says, “It’s just me. There’s no need to be afraid.”
His voice is deep and terrifyingly gentle, as if he thinks by keeping it mild he can coax me into his arms. The sickening thing is that a day ago, it would have worked.
“I’m not afraid,” I blurt out, without thinking.
There’s another moment of silence. This time it seems victorious.
“I didn’t think you were going to answer,” he says eventually, slightly disapproving and slightly pleased.
It’s only because I’m still not entirely convinced that he’s done what I think he’s done that I reply. “I wasn’t. I answered by accident.”
“You are scared.” His words are absolutely certain. It sends a shiver down my spine so hard that it seizes up my neck.
“I have to go,” I say quickly.
“See you so—” he says, but I end the call before he can finish talking.
I stare at the screen, panting and sweating like I’ve run four laps of the ship. I’m certain now. J isn’t good. I never want to hear that voice again.
He rings again, but only once.
I sit cross-legged on the floor and stare at my model buildings, populated by the tiny Romy and the tiny J and the tiny little children we were going to raise together – in some alternative universe, where he was good and I was normal, and we were in love for real instead of for play.
I pick up the dinner-packet model farmhouses, which tilt on their glue foundations. Tiny paper chickens fly off the sides.
I carry the fragile creation to the airlock and leave it in the outer chamber. When I open the door, the model tears itself apart, twisting and turning until my future disappears into nothing.
DAYS UNTIL THE ETERNITY CATCHES UP:
80
I spend the day pacing the ship, buried waist-deep in hopeless solutions.
Eighty days. I still have eighty days. He’s not here yet. I say it to myself over and over, trying to calm down.
Whichever way I look at it, I can’t escape. How do you get away from someone flying towards you at nearly the speed of light? How do you avoid someone who can outrun you? How do you outmanoeuvre someone who has had over two years to plan?
Today, while I was searching through J’s operating system, I found an audio file hidden in the coding. The room filled with the sound of fingernails scratching across metal when it played – just like the noises I’ve been hearing outside the ship.
The noises weren’t in my head. I haven’t been imagining things. He set up a program that played the sound at night. The monsters were real. The monsters were created by J all along.
He must have spent hours on that one small thing to hurt me. And that’s only the beginning. J’s spent so much time and energy trying to make my life miserable. From the UPR to the power cuts, he’s created the worst living conditions possible.
Is it even worth attempting to stop him? I wonder, still pacing the ship’s corridors. He’s coming, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I could just wait and hope that when he arrives things will be different. But is that possible?
There’s an abrupt silence as the sound of my echoing footsteps disappears. I realize I’ve stopped outside the sick bay without meaning to. I’m so tense that it almost makes me jump.
I stare at the half-open door.
There are so many places on the ship that I avoid because I’m afraid of facing the past. But the past is much less scary than the future. I know what’s already happened; I know how bad it was. I don’t know what’s coming, though.
I breathe in the stale air and consider whether to step inside.
I was eleven when I heard a noise in the gene bank. I needed some help from Dad with an astrophysics problem, so I’d gone looking for him. When I went inside to see if it was him, I discovered my mother instead.
She was destroying the embryos, hitting the cases with the oxygen tank from her suit. She smashed the glass, sending the contents pouring out across the floor in an icy mist of liquid nitrogen.
She turned to look at me, blood running down her wrist, fragments of glass sticking out of her fist. Stepping towards me, she ground the shattered remains of test tubes under her bare feet.
There was a blank look in her eyes, the way she always looked during a psychotic episode. “It’s no good. It’s not safe. We can’t do it.”
“Mum? What are you—” I didn’t take my eyes off her, but yelled “DAD!” as loudly as I could.
My mother had been suffering from an increasingly violent psychosis for years, but I’d never seen her like this before.
“They don’t get to choose!” she shouted.
“Who are ‘they’?” I asked. I heard the sound of footsteps. Dad was coming.
“They shouldn’t live on that broken, lonely world,” she said, turning to stroke the door of the freezer, eyes on the samples inside.
“Talia!” Dad yelled as he reached the gene bank. “What are you—” He caught sight of the broken case behind her. “Oh God, no, Talia, what have you done?”
My mother jerked her head up. “It wasn’t their decision to make!”
She raised the oxygen cylinder to the glass of the next freezer, containing hundreds more embryos.
The tank hit the metal side and fractured on impact, oxygen escaping free of the canister in a loud hiss as shards of metal flew across the room.
She just raised her arms and aimed for the glass once more.
“TALIA!” Dad leapt at her, wrapping his arms around her shoulders, grabbing her fists before she could strike.
She let out a furious, mournful wail and threw all her weight forward. “It’s too cruel. We can’t!”
They wrestled, pulling each other in opposite directions, until Dad skidded on the mess on the floor. He crashed down, my mother falling on top of him.
She jerked away, pulling free of his grasp and diving for the nearest case. He grabbed at her arm, both of them slippery with blood. She turned on him, wild with fury, and pushed him away.
Dad’s head jerked back as he fell, cracking against the sharp edge of one of the smashed freezer doors.
My mother hissed at him, “We deserve to die for what we did.”