Black Hull (31 page)

He stepped along a thin gold railing,
paused for a moment: a tiny gunwale and a thin layer of glass was all that
protected him from the vacuum of space. Utopia filled the sky: tiny grooves
travelled in intricate geometric patterns over its surface, and a glow seemed
to light its outer mantle, and translucently, throb beneath the crust. It
looked like a life current was running through the artificial planet. He moved
along.

He entered a small room with row after
row of what looked like metal closets—besides their neat appearance, he felt
like he could have been in a rundown New York City train station. Footsteps
sounded, more than one person. He raised his pistol.

“Don’t shoot!” cried a mother, two
blonde girls hugging her feet. She was thin, starving probably, and her
children looked worse than her. Grime covered their faces, as if they’d been
lost in the tiny locker room for months. “We need help. We paid—it took our
money and said we didn’t have enough. There’s no UCA replies—they’ve deserted
this place. We were dropped off, we don’t have any way to get back home.”

Mick looked around the aisle they’d come
from—storage lockers as tall and wide as an eight foot man. Some of them had
been wrenched open, bags of food and other items strewn on the floor.

“Sorry, I can’t help.”

Mick walked past. One of the children
started to cry. He eyed an open locker and saw a body hanging by a hook. The
person was connected to a pipe that ran into the ceiling.

That’s how they feed the .HUM to the
world? There’s no coming back from something like that—why the hell are you
considering this?
Mick
couldn’t formulate a reply to his own better judgment. Finally, after he
finished surveying the ransacked storage units, he moved to an empty upload
closet.
Let’s just hope they don’t fuck with my body when I’m linked in.

As he stepped inside, the chatter in the
other room increased. Someone else had come into the foyer with the girls and
their mother—a man by the sound of the voice. He shouted something angry. Mick
strained to hear, waiting to access the terminal in front of him. He looked
down at his foreign, strange hands.

“A ship, black ship,” the man’s voice
said.
They’re going to try to steal your fucking ship.

He strode out of his locker and went
back into the room. Already out on the railing went the man. He looked as
haggard as the woman and the children. All of them, together, were heading
straight for the door of his ship.

“You can’t get in,” Mick said. The man
didn’t slow down. He sped to the door and drew a small computer and a tool from
his pocket.

“God damn it,” Mick muttered. He raised
his gun.

He looked at the thin glass tube keeping
them out of raw space.
Miss here, and everyone suffocates.

“Back off I said.”

“You can’t fire that here,” the
scavenger said. “You’ll kill us all.”

“Stay away from my ship,” Mick said.

So he’ll back off, and then you’ll
disappear into Utopia, and he’ll mind his manners? Might as well kiss that ship
goodbye.

He pushed past the woman and her
children. With his left hand, Mick grabbed the frail man and lifted his chin
up, then fired into his throat. His body fell into a pile and Mick turned
toward the screaming.

“Do you want to go with him?” he said.

“Please don’t,” cried the woman as her
children wailed.

“Then—don’t—
fuck
—with my ship.”

He took the tool and small computer from
the dead man’s hands and returned to the locker. He closed the door, wrapped
the link cord around his neck as a tiny picture instructed him to do, and
pressed
yes
to the request for .HUM check.

NO PLANT-TAINT DETECTED.
CONGRATULATIONS! YOUR .HUM IS APPROVED. ENTRY TICKET AND TRANSMISSION UPON
PAYMENT IN FULL.

Mick drew out FOD’s plastic, put it next
to the screen for a moment. The screen again wrote to him:

PAYMENT RECEIVED. YOU HAVE UP TO THIRTY
MINUTES FOR STORAGE. ONCE COMPLETED, CONNECT YOUR HARNESS AND PRESS TRANSMIT.

“What about returning? What if I’m
coming back?” Mick asked the computer. No reply. “Computer, I have a question.”

“This is the UCA help desk. How can we
be of service today for your Utopia needs?”

“What if I want to return? How will I
return to my body?”

“Although leaving Utopia is extremely
rare—and with good reason—one can return at any time to their respective
storage locker location and make the necessary arrangements to leave. Please be
reminded, there will be no refunded tickets, and each ticket has a single use.
You may not return to Utopia using a previously used ticket. The UCA is not
responsible for your body while you are in Utopia.”

“Won’t be a problem.”

“Welcome to paradise, and enjoy your
immortality.”

The computer beeped off, and then the
screen appeared with a countdown time starting from twenty-nine minutes.

Mick locked the door in his upload
closet and stared at the screen.

“Show me something,” he said.

The world was filled with places Mick
recognized. There was his house, his childhood street. Beyond that, his vision
changed, and materializing before him was the NASA FRINGE academic building.
One of his professors drifted by, a smile on her face: he’d just received an A
on one of his term papers. The imagery shifted. He realized it had done so
after his own decision—his own memory. He looked down—the familiar lines of his
own hands.

Age?

As the thought popped in, his hands
firmed, lines disappeared, and he made the strong fists of his twenty-two year
self.

The flow of people, voices, smells, and
images rushed through his consciousness, forming his reality. The pull of
elation released him into a state of ecstasy.

Anything you want. As real as real.
What? You decide.

A sudden throb of fear drove through his
heart—
this is perfect—better than anything heaven could ever be. You have to
go back and turn off the G-10 black hole. Otherwise, this won’t be immortality,
just a day’s taste, and then nothingness.

A voice rose from darkness:

“It’s me, Mick.”

Mick turned, opening his eyes, though in
reality he did nothing, for he no longer occupied any physical space. FOD
appeared, and behind him the moon world laboratory he’d constructed for years
in secret, inside of which was the ignition device for the black hole.

“FOD?”

“Yes, I’m here.”

“This is—incredible.”

“That’s why it has pacified humanity.
What you are experiencing now is the great hope of each family, each
generation
of families
—to get where you are now. It funds the spread of the plague we
are responsible for—humanity.”

“I can’t—I don’t think I can leave.”

“Mick—there wouldn’t be time even if you
did try—you couldn’t get back now.”

“What do you mean?”

“Time passes differently here than
outside. What you perceive as minutes will have been hours on the outside.”

Fuck. How many hours of wiggle room to
get to the T-jump station? Two?

“I have to tell you something Mick.”

It was still FOD. Mick said nothing, he
felt the tearing of his soul—the worst indecision he’d ever known—the swelling
of some familiar memory that he felt would materialize and prevent him from
ever leaving—his family.

“There is no such thing as reverse time
travel,” FOD said. He pulled his hood up, concealing his aged face. His body
disappeared into darkness, the moon world upon which he walked fell away into a
spray of color.

“Liar—you’re a fucking
liar.
”

“It was the only way to keep you in
this, the only way to pull you along. But it was a just cause. Remember that.
And here you are, and you’re rewarded.”

“All of it?”

“Everything. I had to wait for what my
mathematics predicted thirty years ago—your appearance in my spacetime.”

“Sera, she knew it wasn’t real?”

FOD altogether vanished. In his place, a
sparkling array of stars moved, and then, a beautiful planet, a tiny ship
orbiting it—he flew, as if a phantom, through its hull walls. It was the Cozon.

He watched XJ eating, steam rising from
his electric orifices. By his side sat Sera. She looked over at their new
guest.

“It’s about time, Mick,” she said.

“You took me to Melbot’s station—you
know
reverse time travel is
real,
” he shouted.

“Mick, of course there is no such thing
as reverse time travel. That much is common knowledge,” XJ said, turning around
to see his old friend.

“I’m sorry Mick. I had to. I needed you,
because I needed FOD—so I could get here.”

“But you’re not here, you never made it
here!”

She looked confused.

“I am though. You made it, so we all
did.”

“No, you’re dead. I saw your body, saw
your uncle’s planet explode.”

“It doesn’t matter, the details. We’re
here. And we’re still flying.”

“Look at your brother and father—do they
look like what they’re supposed to to you? Does it look like the mission’s
complete?”

Mick looked from her face to the
droids—only they were not droids, and they were not on the Cozon. They were by
a lake, at night, under two bright moons. A long dock stretched into black
water, and a dim light offered light behind. Sera sat nearby, her legs
stretched out—and she no longer looked like Sera. Her hair was short, chopped,
and her smile was fuller than he’d ever seen it. Her eyes were glowing, happy,
and green.

It’s not Sera.

“It’s me, Mick,” she replied. “It’s
really me. Before the transplant.”

A boy splashed his legs in the water,
drawing close to a canoe. By his side, with an arm around him, protecting him
from falling into the water, was a young man, in the prime of his physical
power, watching vigilantly the dark stretch of dangerous water.

“We’re going in together Teddy,
alright?” the man said.

“Can we still learn to play that game
tomorrow?”

“You mean chess? Of course, but I know
you two really wanted to go in the water, so we’ll do this tonight.”

“It’s a deal.”

“Thank you Mick,” Sera said. She walked
over to him. Looking down, he saw his feet at the edge of the dock. She looked
all of eighteen years old to him, and gorgeous. She leaned in close, grabbed
his waist, kept him safely away from the water. She closed her eyes, kissed
him, and then hugged him hard. “Thanks.”

None of this is real. It’s all bullshit.
Coming from my imagination.

Sera laughed at him, as if his thoughts
had amused her. They fell into the water. Coldness enveloped him, and then she
disappeared in murkiness.

You’re wasting time here, get the fuck
out…

Get out and go where? Die out there,
alone in the cold of space? There’s no reverse time travel, you heard him. I
was his pawn. All of them. And there’s not enough time. Hours have passed. The
G-10 will annihilate this Utopia and the rest of them—the whole universe—any
second now. Enjoy it while you can.

Bullshit. That’s me talking to myself
about things I don’t know—things I can’t know.

It’s your last chance to see your
family. To go home. And you’re going to waste it?