“Heia, you okay?” Celeste asked.
The girl looked up, startled, showing pupils dilated enough to almost obliterate colour from the corneas. She was drinking dim-water, dulling her emotions to cope. She must really hate this party, Celeste thought, though not enough to absent herself altogether. Strange, why would someone stay somewhere they hated so much? She thought about how she felt about the Crawl, the Compound, and deleted the question from her mind. She knew the answer as well as this girl did.
When there’s nowhere else to go, you stay where you are. The core of the trace was an equation to be solved, and Celeste came to the answer as she watched the girl swaying and nodding to herself. This was a bad memory of a party where nothing happened, so she needed to make something happen. She had to change the narrative in order to defuse the trace. She sat down and put her hand on the girl’s knee. The girl flinched away, looking at her with eyes that said, What’re you doing?
“What’s your name?”
“Grace.”
Celeste paused.
Can’t be, not the same girl from the dropped module.
“You want to go somewhere, Grace?”
The hazy girl nodded, either in consent or from too much dim-water. Celeste didn’t have time to worry about which was the correct answer. This was a trace. Nothing and no-one was real. She could do no harm here.
Celeste took Grace by the hand and led her through the crowd away from the party. It took a small mental shove of the trace’s architecture to create a room. This was delicate work – she didn’t want to signal to the trace that it had been infiltrated. The girl appeared fragile. Celeste was handling something that could go off in her face at any moment.
In the room, she began to undress, trying not to look for too long at the handsome male body she was inhabiting. The way the muscles moved, the stirrings of sexual excitement were a distraction she could become lost in. How it felt for a man. She had to keep her distance, preserve the emotional disconnect. How much of the body’s behaviour was her doing, and how much the trace? There was no way to tell.
Tread light, tread careful. That’s all I have to do.
The subconscious moves in mysterious ways, especially when disturbed.
Celeste’s thoughts were clinical and cold as she let her fingers move over the girl’s body, helping her to disrobe, too. The girl’s fearful rigidity loosened as the minutes went by. It had been a while since she’d used sex to get to the core of a trace, but some things had to be done.
They were lying on a comp-couch larger than Celeste’s module. The girl moved slowly, reciprocating Celeste’s advances tentatively, shyly. Naked, they crawled over each other’s skin, using mouths and fingers to explore one another inside and out. The couch reacted to them. Recognising their activity, it moved in time with their bodies, reducing friction and softening textures. The warmth of the couch increased, heightening the mood. She’d read somewhere that some couches could exude pheromones, further intensifying the action.
Careful, careful, don’t get lost. Remember who you are.
… the wheels on the bus go round and round… all day long…
Celeste took a mental breath and caught herself. The couch was no more a reality than the girl was. This was a trace, a memory – a fantasy that shaped according to its core. She’d almost lost herself, taken too much to be real. Bad, very bad.
Her sense reasserted, Celeste noticed the girl’s earlier coolness and rigidity returning. She knew something was wrong. There was a clearness in the girl’s eyes. I let myself get in too deep. First-time mistake, and I’ve been doing this shit for long years.
“This didn’t happen last time.” Grace’s eyes met Celeste’s. “This didn’t happen at all.”
The girl moved away, climbing off the bed. “What’re you here for? Why’re you doing this to me?”
This was it: the moment the trace defused, or began to rebuild itself around Celeste instead.
Grace understood. This wasn’t real.
This was life or death time.
And, with realisation… came the defusing.
Celeste felt it in the same way she felt her module’s airlock lose pressure. She should’ve felt relieved, that was how it usually was, but she felt sad. The girl’s eyes were open wounds, and she had been the architect of the pain resting there.
This trace had a lot of hurt in it – did she feel the pain before it happened? Was that possible?
… round and round… all day long…
Far too deep. I’m caring. Feeling. Losing distance. I should be able to touch and not to feel. The art of defusing. She could see the trace degrading around her. The sounds of people outside evaporated, and the room she’d created lost definition. Grace remained. She held the girl’s gaze but didn’t respond to her. She couldn’t. The degradation would be interrupted if she did, and the trace would rebuild itself, establishing a new pocket-reality around Celeste, locking her into its fabric permanently. It was a human thing to do – to respond, to reach out, to try to make a connection – but in here, it could be the end of you.
“Say something! Doesn’t this mean anything to you? Am I nothing? Don’t I exist?” the girl demanded. “Fuck you! Fucking fuck you! Say something to me, you heartless cunt!”
“You are nothing to me.”
The words were the final trigger. She might as well have put a bullet through the girl’s forehead. The trace collapsed, fragmenting into nothingness. Grace’s tear-lined face was the last thing to go. For a moment, it looked like the face she’d seen staring out at her from the module drop earlier that day. Distraught. Despairing. Preserved. Lost. Alone.
Gone.
Chapter Six
The man in the moon felt something.
It had been a long time since he’d last felt something. Pain was a ghost to him. Love, pride, hate, and fear were more distant still. This was different, a connection registered in his neural relay. A trace element from the Flood had gotten through. As the moon was separated from the Earth by the void, so Antara station – and himself – were separated from the mass of humanity by conceptual acres of sub-space ice. It might have been possible for a master-navigator to bypass the multipartite failsafe grids and polymorphic drones but this was not that because he could feel something, an emotion, which had slipped past every line of defence.
Grief; a sure, fine and thinly-woven thread, piercing him from all the way down there. He might have wept from its sudden, unexpected sting except his tear ducts had been surgically removed at his own request. How could this be? He must know.
The man in the moon does not weep.
He closed the mollusc shells that were his eyelids, reached out, and cast his consciousness across the space between worlds. The colours and sounds of humanity’s existence battered at his senses, so used to the unchanging white-grey whispers of the moon was he. The collective consciousness of his species was an unwieldy mass bearing down on him; a gargantuan weight of kaleidoscopic filigrees threatening to shred his mind into micro-pieces. And then, as always, it passed. They could not overcome, or undo him. He was master and creator here. The Flood was his realm – and it paused at his behest.
He was at the party, at the point when the trace was disintegrating. He walked through the frozen crowd of young people; finding them of interest only in the same fashion a collector admires an insect specimen before he kills and mounts it with a pin. The thread of grief originated here. He could still feel it keenly, as a piece of icy glass lodged inside his chest. The source of it drew him on until, thanks to a data-glitch, he walked through a wall and found himself in the same room as Celeste and Grace; both naked and raw from one another.