At first Yoshi thought it was a prank of some kind. Sergei said, “The odor and bacterial filters need to be repositioned,” and since this was not a sentence that made sense, it seemed that Sergei was pulling them all into the Lav under obvious false pretenses. Yoshi had been a little impatient because it was their first recreation hour since launching from Mars and he wanted to enjoy the views.
It was difficult to fit all three of them into the Red Dawn Lav, which was even smaller than the Lav on Primitus. It had no shower—sponge baths only for almost nine months—and the three of them crammed together were required to stand nearly nose to nose, with Sergei straddling the commode, Helen jammed against the lockers and cleansing towel dispensers, and Yoshi wedged in between fan separators and Chute nozzles.
Sergei had brought in a whiteboard and handed out markers. Then he wrote:
LOST SIM DURING DUST DEVIL ON SOL 23
TOTAL SIM FAILURE
SAW REAL LOCATION
Yoshi’s impulse had been to stop him immediately. It wasn’t that the part of his brain that endlessly reverse engineered Prime special effects had gone quiet. He enjoyed imagining how Prime had managed to accomplish this or that, and assumed they all did. They are engineers; it was their poetry to understand these things. But Yoshi was also comfortable with the artificial. Perhaps because of this, he had lost his bearings once or twice, and forgotten the differences between things. The balance was delicate, and needed to be maintained.
And then Sergei had added the sentence:
WAS NOT UTAH—WE WERE NOT IN UTAH
While Sergei continued writing, Yoshi had deliberately avoided looking at Helen. Even a single exchanged glance was too much to risk until they knew exactly what they were dealing with. Yoshi thought about Sergei’s increased conservatism regarding safety protocols during their last sols on Mars, his lack of chatter, the bouts of staring. Helen would have noticed too, though Yoshi was not aware of any countermeasure she had taken. He’d thought that Sergei might be getting a mild case of what they called, in Antarctica, the “bug eye.” Yoshi had felt guilty. He’d been too taken up with his own private ruminations; he should have been more attentive to other people’s subcurrents. And Helen had become too happy. This was why joy was not a particularly desirable emotion on a mission. Joy made you notice less. Or do less with what you did notice.
As did desire.
NO LANDMARKS OF UTAH SITE < NO INDICATIONS OF AN OFFICIAL SITE < NO CAMERAS < WE WERE ALONE
DIFFERENCES IN COLORS < PERSPECTIVES
NO WARP TO VIEW OF SELF OR HELEN
PHOBOS IN ANNULAR ECLIPSE
PHOBOS
The fluid nature of their leadership roles often made being the commander more titular than anything else, but Yoshi did feel—in the Lav—that this was a situation where he must lead. One good technique was to perform a verbal repetition of something that was said to you, and in this way you could communicate both your desire to understand precisely what was being said, give your crewmate an opportunity to correct or refine his point, and—if necessary—allow him to hear for himself how whatever he just said was ridiculous. Some caution needed to be exercised in employing this method. It was not helpful to be mocking or sarcastic. Yoshi must respond with caution. He also needed to write his response, and since Yoshi was left-handed and prohibited from repositioning himself due to the fan separators between himself and Sergei, he had to scrawl.
Sergei had been in the Lav for forty-five minutes that morning. Yoshi had assumed diarrhea, but now realized Sergei was probably checking the wedge for cameras. Prime was contractually obligated not to put cameras in the Lav, but Sergei would not have trusted that. He would have checked for audio, but audio was easier to conceal. Sergei’s use of the whiteboard meant he was taking no chances. They would have to come up with some explanation for Prime about this secret, silent meeting. They could brazen it out, but that was a risk.
Yoshi had taken Sergei through a summary of what Sergei had seen, and then Yoshi erased it and wrote POSSIBLE EXPLANATIONS on the whiteboard. Then he’d gotten tangled up in a micro-g-condition urinal funnel that became detached from the wall, so Helen took over.
WAS NOT TOTAL SIM FAILURE, she’d written. YOUR SCREEN HAD GLITCH. LOADED ALTERNATE MARS SITE.
Yoshi, having freed himself, tapped her explanation with his marker in agreement and added:
PRIME DUST DEVIL SIM V. COMPLICATED, NOT SURPRISED AT GLITCH
And then, after making a fresh bullet point:
SIM SWITCHING CAUSE OF VISUAL DISORIENTATION, V. NATURAL
Sergei had written:
ALSO POSS THAT PRIME WANTS TO MAKE ME BELIEVE > THIS IS TEST > WILL I TELL YOU > BUT I HAVE
Sergei had not finished the thought. He scrubbed the whiteboard clean and ended the meeting by exiting the Lav. Yoshi had received one look from Helen, which he’d been unable to decipher. He thought his lexicon for Helen’s expressions was complete, but he had been wrong.
A blip, a glitch, a momentary lapse of reason.
At some point, for an unspecified amount of time, Sergei thought they’d actually gone to Mars. At the very least, Sergei might now be spending quite a bit of time trying to convince himself that this was not in the realm of absurdity, that he was not insane to entertain the notion.
It was not helpful—for Sergei—that Prime has them following the mission architecture for what a return after thirty days would really be. They had always planned to train this way, but Sergei could easily fold this into his paranoia.
Yoshi has accepted the possibility that Sergei wasn’t disoriented, that he’d really seen what he claimed to have seen, but believes that this was something Prime had deliberately done, like the tampering with Sergei’s equipment, like eppur si muove on Primitus. Prime wanted real data. Not astronauts pretending, astronauts believing. Dangerous, this, but understandable.
Yoshi badly wanted to talk with Helen. Only he was rather afraid that instead of talking about Sergei, something else might come out of his mouth.