“It was different when it happened to me,” I told Greta, when we were lying next to each other again, days later, with Suzy still in the tank. “I had all the nagging doubts she has, I think. But as soon as I saw you standing there, I forgot all about that stuff.”
Greta nodded. Her hair fell across her face in dishevelled, sleep-matted curtains. She had a strand of it between her lips.
“It helped, seeing a friendly face?”
“Took my mind off the problem, that’s for sure.”
“You’ll get there in the end,” she said. “Anyway, from Suzy’s point of view, aren’t you a friendly face as well?”
“Maybe,” I said. “But she’d been expecting me. You were the last person in the world I expected to see standing there.”
Greta touched her knuckle against the side of my face. Her smooth skin slid against stubble. “It’s getting easier for you, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You’re a strong man, Thom. I knew you’d come through this.”
“I haven’t come through it yet,” I said. I felt like a tightrope walker halfway across Niagara Falls. It was a miracle I’d made it as far as I had. But that didn’t mean I was home and dry.
Still, Greta was right. There was hope. I’d felt no crushing spasms of grief over Katerina’s death, or enforced absence, or however you wanted to put it. All I felt was a bittersweet regret, the way one might feel about a broken heirloom or long-lost pet. I felt no animosity toward Katerina, and I was sorry that I would never see her again. But I was sorry about not seeing a lot of things. Maybe it would become worse in the days ahead. Maybe I was just postponing a breakdown.
I didn’t think so.
In the meantime, I continued trying to find a way to deal with Suzy. She had become a puzzle that I couldn’t leave unsolved. I could have just woken her up and let her deal with the news as best as she could, but that seemed cruel and unsatisfactory. Greta had broken it to me gently, giving me time to settle into my new surroundings and take that necessary step away from Katerina. When she finally broke the news, as shocking as it was, it didn’t shatter me. I’d already been primed for it, the sting taken out of the surprise. Sleeping with Greta obviously helped. I couldn’t offer Suzy the same solace, but I was sure that there was a way for us to coax Suzy to the same state of near-acceptance.
Time after time we woke her and tried a different approach. Greta said there was a window of a few minutes before the events she was experiencing began to transfer into long-term memory. If we knocked her out, the buffer of memories in short-term storage was wiped before it ever crossed the hippocampus into long-term recall. Within that window, we could wake her up as many times as we liked, trying endless permutations of the revival scenario.
At least that was what Greta told me.
“We can’t keep doing this indefinitely,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Isn’t she going to remember something?”
Greta shrugged. “Maybe. But I doubt that she’ll attach any significance to those memories. Haven’t you ever had vague feelings of déjà vu coming out of the surge tank?”
“Sometimes,” I admitted.
“Then don’t sweat about it. She’ll be all right. I promise you.”
“Perhaps we should just keep her awake, after all.”
“That would be cruel.”
“It’s cruel to keep waking her up and shutting her down, like a toy doll.”
There was a catch in her voice when she answered me.
“Keep at it, Thom. I’m sure you’re close to finding a way, in the end. It’s helping you, focusing on Suzy. I always knew it would.”
I started to say something, but Greta pressed a finger to my lips.
GRETA WAS RIGHT about Suzy. The challenge helped me, taking my mind off my own predicament. I remembered what Greta had said about dealing with other crews in the same situation, before Blue Goose put in. Clearly she had learned many psychological tricks: gambits and short cuts to assist the transition to mental well-being. I felt a slight resentment at being manipulated so effectively. But at the same time I couldn’t deny that worrying about another human being had helped me with my own adjustment. When, days later, I stepped back from the immediate problem of Suzy, I realized that something was different. I didn’t feel far from home. I felt, in an odd way, privileged. I’d come further than almost anyone in history. I was still alive, and there were still people around to provide love and partnership and a web of social relations. Not just Greta, but all the other unlucky souls who had ended up at the station.
If anything, there appeared to be more of them than when I had first arrived. The corridors—sparsely populated at first—were increasingly busy, and when we ate under the dome—under the Milky Way—we were not the only diners. I studied their lamp-lit faces, comforted by their vague familiarity, wondering what kinds of stories they had to tell; where they’d come from, who they had left behind, how they had adjusted to life here. There was time enough to get to know them all. And the place would never become boring, for at any time—as Greta had intimated—we could always expect another lost ship to drop through the aperture. Tragedy for the crew, but fresh challenges, fresh faces, fresh news from home, for us.
All in all, it wasn’t really so bad.
Then it clicked.
It was the man cleaning out the fish that did it, in the lobby of the hotel. It wasn’t just the familiarity of the process, but the man himself.
I’d seen him before. Another pond full of diseased carp. Another hotel.
Then I remembered Kolding’s bad teeth, and recalled how they’d reminded me of another man I’d met long before. Except it wasn’t another man at all. Different name, different context, but everything else the same. And when I looked at the other diners, really looked at them, there was no one I couldn’t swear I hadn’t seen before. No single face that hit me with the force of utter unfamiliarity.
Which left Greta.
I said to her, over wine, under the Milky Way: “Nothing here is real, is it?”
She looked at me with infinite sadness and shook her head.
“What about Suzy?” I asked her.
“Suzy’s dead. Ray is dead. They died in their surge tanks.”
“How? Why them, and not me?”
“Something about particles of paint blocking intake filters. Not enough to make a difference over short distances, but enough to kill them on the trip out here.”
I think some part of me had always suspected. It felt less like shock than brutal disappointment.
“But Suzy seemed so real,” I said. “Even the way she had doubts about how long she’d been in the tank…even the way she remembered previous attempts to wake her.”
The glass mannequin approached our table. Greta waved him away.
“I made her convincing, the way she would have acted.”
“You made her?”
“You’re not really awake, Thom. You’re being fed data. This entire station is being simulated.”
I sipped my wine. I expected it to taste suddenly thin and synthetic, but it still tasted like pretty good wine.
“Then I’m dead as well?”
“No. You’re alive. Still in your surge tank. But I haven’t brought you to full consciousness yet.”
“All right. The truth this time. I can take it. How much is real? Does the station exist? Are we really as far out as you said?”
“Yes,” she said. “The station exists, just as I said it does. It just looks… different. And it is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and it is orbiting a brown dwarf star.”