The lights went up and Celeste saw she was in a real space after all. A room. It looked like an old-time hotel room with gold and cream patterned wallpaper and a bed and a window set in one wall with the curtains drawn. She was sitting on an ordinary wooden chair and no longer bound. Getting to her feet, she padded across the carpet to the window and tapped the control pad to make the rad-shielding cycle back.
Majesty unfolded before her – she was on the moon.
Celeste ran her fingers over the outward facing windows revealing the beautiful desolation of white-grey moonscape beyond. She could see the domes of Antara Station. The legendary sole outpost of humanity on another sphere. She couldn’t believe she was here – that she’d made it. Or, that she could’ve been here all along, dreaming a dream of a life in the Crawl below. Forty years under, lost in inner space.
Something was wrong with the station over there. Each of its domes had a hole in the top. There were dark shapes resting on the sloping exteriors. Forms sprawled awkwardly in nearby craters. Bodies. Corpses. No signs of life. So much death. His calling card.
She was alone out here, with the man in the moon.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Celeste walked out of the room into a lobby. It was immense. There was a reception desk cut from black marble, which was threaded through with veins of gold and quartz. She went up to it, reached out, and rang the bell on the desktop. The electronic chime it emitted echoed somewhere far away – but no-one came to answer it. As the echo faded, she was left with the sub-static of silence to keep her company. Every inch of this place was Real. No ersatz. No substitute. All hi-def quality. It should’ve made her feel good, surrounded by so much reality, but it didn’t. It felt like death. So empty and cold. A deep coldness on a level other than temperature.
Celeste went up to the doors of the lobby that should’ve led outside. The handles were stylised bronze dragons in a vaguely oriental style. She tried them. The doors wouldn’t open. They were airlock-sealed. On the other side of the doors, she could see an enclosed plexiglass bridge connected to Antara station. The bridge was packed with the dead. Most were piled against the closed doors of the hotel. Hands frozen in the act of groping desperately at the polished, unyielding onyx. It must’ve been an unpleasant shock for the rich of Antara to discover the truth they’d lived by had become their undoing.
We hold this truth to be self-evident that all are created equal, but some are more equal than others.
They never thought the rule would one day apply to them as they applied it to those who dwelt in the Crawl. Celeste rested her hand against the glass, matching it to the frosted palm of a young, pale woman wearing a red silk dress. She looked into the bloodshot, decompressed eyes and saw the mouth that’d tried to scream despite the lack of air. Hair that’d once been a perfect coil of platinum blonde was hanging limp over bare shoulders. It was her – the woman from the trace. The one she’d seen herself turn into momentarily. How long had she been dead up here? What’d she done to deserve this fate?
Celeste turned away from the dead. Stairs to the upper levels were positioned to the left-hand side of the reception desk. Time to climb. There was one place the man she was seeking would be – at the summit of it all. Like the old men in the old stories, who lived atop mountains, waiting for mortals to ascend and question them, except she wasn’t so sure this man was a wise creature. He was a cruel one: a bitter, preserved relic of the past. Something that should’ve died a long time ago.
All surfaces here were clean, and the air was purified in a way that made her head ache as she breathed it in. This must be what it was like before Earth’s air became a mixture of dull but endurable poisons. Her skin was itching as though alive with insects, another consequence of the antiseptic atmosphere.
No expense had been spared in the decoration of this monumental building. The walls continued to be inlaid with slabs of marble. When she reached the first floor, there was a door of ornately carved oak before her. She pushed it open to see what was on the other side. A corridor stretched off to the left and right, with more oak doors inset at regular intervals.
What could this be?
She tried the nearest – it was heavy and needed a push, but it allowed her access.
“Hello?”
The word almost froze as particulate letters in the hypothermic air. Through the dense, atmosphere, she could see a luxurious bed crusted over with white ice. The head resting on the pillows was pale to the point of being faceless, such was the build-up of crystallised preservative. The hair crowning the head was made of fragile, white wisps that Celeste reached out to touch. One of the hairs shivered on contact and shattered soundlessly, disintegrating into a fine shining dust. Withdrawing her hand, Celeste stared again at the face, and saw some movement. The eyelids were flickering open like wrinkled moth wings, revealing sightless orbs beneath. Too long deep under had made this woman blind. Those eyes would remain with Celeste as ghost and memory; dead stars in the dark that somehow burned bright. Aged bones worked slowly underneath translucent skin, and stiff fingers clutched at the bedclothes, making them crackle and crunch. Gestures of fear. Motions of resurrected paranoia. The richest and most powerful of the old world; they were up here among the stars, hoping to out-sleep eternity and this one was waking to find the dreaded poor had invaded her bedroom.
“We’re the ones you feared the most, so much so you left us behind to die on the Crawl, giving our lives that you might live.”
Celeste had counted about twenty doors spaced along the corridor outside. She guessed that about the same number would be on the next floor, and each one above that. She reached over and picked up one of the pillows from the bed, testing its weight in her hands before pressing it down over the recumbent’s face. The figure in the bed made a tight sound in its throat. The old woman didn’t put up much of a struggle. There wasn’t enough strength left in her atrophied muscles to do so. After she became still, Celeste let go of the pillow and stood upright. She breathed out, creating a small cloud that sank down and dissipated over the dead sleeper’s face, pebbling it with false tears.
Celeste left the bedroom and began to climb to the next floor.
How many more bedrooms were there in this place? How many floors?
All occupied.
It was going to be a long climb to the top.
Chapter Twenty-Six
At the top of the stairs, at the top of the tower, Celeste came to a set of gold-lacquered double doors. She knocked three times. There was a pause, a silence underscoring silence. The sound of decompression was followed by a caustic blast of oxygen, which hit her in the face as the doors swung open. Beyond was the boardroom, unpopulated but for one stiff figure that turned to face her.
“Who was she?” Celeste asked. “The woman in the red dress.”
“A volunteer. She couldn’t believe her luck.”
“I’ll bet. What did you say to her to convince her to do it?”
“What she wanted to hear. Riches. Fame. Her own twenty-four-seven channel in the Flood. We had to test you. See what you were capable of outside of simulation.”
“I know. I exceeded your expectations.”
“You did.”
“And you’re him. The man in the moon. Tate.”
“I am,” the voice was fed through countless nano-processors. There wasn’t enough left of his mouth, tongue, or vocal cords to be able to manage speech without significant assistance. “I’ve been waiting for you.”