When I finish my task, I stand and look out from the tower’s edge, studying the ice and snow and wind and, above it all, the aurora, its bright curtains of color cutting a ribbon through the darkness, obscuring much of the meteor shower that continues to fall. I linger until the cold penetrates the last of my bones, then I turn the metal wheel atop the frost-stuck hatch, descend the rickety ladder leading back into the tower.
An hour later, lying in bed, I am unable to remember the colors of the aurora, or even what exactly I went outside to fix. The events of my life increasingly exist only in the moment, too often consumed by their own bright fire, lost as the many meteorites tumbling and burning out across the already unimaginable midnight sky.
Once a week, after we’re sure the captain is asleep in his quarters, we gather in the basement of the tower, amidst the stacked palettes of canned and powdered foodstuffs, the whole rooms of spare wiring kits and computer parts and drums of fuel oil, where there is enough of everything to last another hundred years. There are six of us who meet, the only ones who still remember enough to work, who can still log into our computers. Weeks ago, we changed our passwords to password, the first thing everyone guesses, so that as we continue to dim we will still be able to log in and listen for the orders we hope we might yet receive.
In the basement, we take turns telling whatever stories we can. Tonight, Camran tells us about playing baseball in high school, about how the smell of the grass stuck to everything, to his clothes and hair and fingers, and then about the sound of the bat striking the ball, how he once hit three home runs in a single game. With his gravelly voice, Lachlann brags about all the sex he got before coming here, going on and on about the tits and ass until we beg him to stop torturing us with what we cannot have.
Earc speaks of his parents at length, a strange but touching attachment for a man his age, and then Ros tells us about his favorite dance club back home, about the heaving crush of the dancers. We look around at the meagerness of our group, and when we try to imagine hundreds of people in one place, we find that we cannot.
I talk—as I always do—about the ship and the base camp and the coast. I have forgotten everything so that I might remember this, for myself and for the rest of us. Better that I never again recall my family, my friends, my former home, if it means remembering the ship, our last hope, because if I forget, the captain will have won and none of us will escape this tower.
We go on speaking until we’ve exhausted ourselves, until we’ve shared everything we still have left to share. Every week, this takes less and less time. Once there were eleven of us, but soon there will be only five, then four, and then three and two and one., until the treason of these meetings ceases to exist altogether.
Camran is dead by the captain’s hand, shot at his station in the listening room. The force of the bullet shatters his face, spraying his monitor and lodging wet flecks of skull and teeth between the once cream-colored letters of his keyboard. The captain surveys our shocked expressions, then accuses Camran of trying to use the transmitting dish to send an unauthorized message, an act of disobedience as punishable as any other. As we watch, unable to see around the bulk of his body, the captain silently reads the sentences typed across the flickering green screen, his lips moving wordlessly as his eyes scan from left to right. When he is finished, he fires a bullet into the computer, showering the leftovers of Camran with sparks. We beg him to tell us what the message said, so he gestures to his lieutenant, Dughall, the only other who’d seen the screen.
The captain puts away his pistol, then takes a deep breath, sucking in a lung’s worth of cordite and bloodsmoke. He says, Let Dughall tell you, as he told me.
But of course Dughall has already forgotten—it has been months since he’s been to one of our meetings—and so there is no one to tell us what message might have gotten out, or if there has been any response. All we want is something to hope for, and this the captain refuses us.
We could push the captain further but there is only so much we can risk. The threat of automatic fire from his machine pistol prevents us from asking too many questions, from arguing against even his harshest orders. We all have our sidearms, but he’s the only one who still has bullets, having convinced us to surrender our own to his care some time ago, when our troubles first began.
After silencing our protests, the captain orders Dughall and some of the other dims to carry what is left of Camran down the stairs and out into the courtyard. The rest of the men go back to their work, but not me. I climb to the roof, where I watch the dims stack Camran atop the pile of our other dead, our frozen and forgotten friends.
The captain is in a foul mood today, in response to our persistent nagging about Camran, and to our continued speculation about the chances of making it to the coast if we were to try as a group. He rants at us for planning to abandon our posts without leave, then decides to make an example out of two of the long-time dim, Onchu and Ramsay, both so far gone they can barely speak. He dresses them in their furs, then hands them packs already provisioned to the point of bursting, as if the captain knew this day was coming. He pushes them both out the door, kicking at them and threatening with his pistol when they protest. He points toward the south, which I myself only know because it is the opposite of where I see the auroras over the mountains, then forces them across the courtyard, through the gate and out onto the ice. Within minutes they’re out of sight from the ground, but from the roof we watch through our night scopes as they wander against the wind and blowing snow, unable already to remember which direction they’ve come from or where they’re going.
Only a few hundred yards from the gate, Onchu sits on the ground, facing away from the tower, too far to see or hear us above the howl of the wind. We scream anyway, begging him to get up, to keep moving, to make for the coast, to save us all, only he doesn’t move. He draws his limbs in, hanging his hooded head between his knees. By morning, he will be frozen to death, and then, some time after, we will forget his name.
Later, Ramsay somehow finds his way through the dark and the blowing snow back into the courtyard, where the captain shoots him dead, as he has so many others who have refused to go into the wastes, who have returned without his leave.
Eventually, there is a meeting at which I wait alone until dawn before returning to the barracks. With no one to tell stories to, I walk the rows of bunks instead, watching my men slumber, their gray heads full of dim dreams. A week later, I find Lachlann dead by his own hand, hanging from the rafters in the supply closet. The captain cuts the body down himself, has it dragged outside and stacked with the others. He asks if anyone would like to say a few words in Lachlann’s memory, shakes his head when we cannot.
I wait until it is night again—true night, not just dark, as it always is—and then stuff my backpack with foodstuffs and bottles of water, with chemical torches and the thickest blankets I can find. I am leaving, but first I consider murdering the captain in his sleep, perhaps smothering him with one of his own battered pillows, or else choking him with my hands. I sneak easily past the sleeping, dim guards outside his quarters, then through the creaking door of his bedchamber.