Archive of Our Own

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Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.
Ovid
    Brad Colbert no longer woke up sticky and cold with sweat. Not like he did in the beginning. There was no undercurrent of anxiety so primal it might overflow any moment, like the sea pulling away from the shore: pulling, and pulling, and pulling, until it came crashing back, inevitably coming, coming, coming. He didn’t wake up soaked in terror anymore. Yet there was something unsettling still about it; something incongruous, out of time.Like a memory, a false recollection. A recurring dream.It put things in perspective. Brad had spent weeks upon months upon years on unfamiliar planets at the very cusp of the Wastelands’s borders. He’d spent endless time fighting an enemy with everything to lose, and what put the fear in him, what made him quake in his jungle-rot boots, was his dreams. Not his reality.He’d believed, since age six, that the Alliance Marine Corps would be for life. When the armistice between the Alliance and Insurgents was finally put in place, Brad retired from the AMC. He was twenty-nine. Two decades thinking he knew exactly what he was doing, where he was going…Soon after word of his retirement sifted into public channels, he was offered a position as Chief of Security on a privately owned, non-profit research facility on Mars.Brad accepted the offer. He squared away his life on Earth within a week, and went off to Mars. On his third night there, safely tucked away in his new apartment, the dream returned.For the dream would come and go, like a scheduled intermission over a bad connection. It’d disappear for months, only to return every night for weeks. By the time he retired from the AMC, he hadn’t had the dream for more than a year. Not once.By now, at age thirty-one, Brad was able to recount every single detail of his recurring dream.It was a glimpse, an arbitrary piece of a much larger story. It could effortlessly weave itself into his other dreams, like it belonged there; the way dreams flit from one setting to the next without seeming disjointed. That is, until he woke up.

. . .

Brad lay on his back with an arm above his head, the other across his chest. There was no other light on in the apartment apart from the thin strip of luminescence at the bottom of the door. He could still see it, barely, despite the arm. He’d been lying like this for several minutes now, waiting for his alarm to go off. Softly at first, then louder, louder, louder still until he silenced it. He’d wondered, once or twice, what would happen if it wasn’t silenced. If it’d continue until his eardrums burst.With his right hand, Brad reached up to the small inset shelf above his bed. His hand splayed over the faux leather-bound book stowed away there the night before. The old-fashioned ink pen had fallen down sometime in the night; he’d woken up to it stabbing him in the armpit, and had subsequently thrown the pen somewhere toward the bathroom. Brad let his hand fall back on his chest. There was nothing he needed to add, anyway.The alarm still hadn’t gone off. Rubbing his eyes with his index-finger and thumb, Brad let out a long exhale through his nose before bringing the smartband up to his face. It glared at him. He squinted at the small screen on his wrist: only fifteen seconds until 0700. It was going to be a long day.The new CSA was arriving a little before nine. A man by the name Nathaniel ‘Nate’ Fick.As far as Brad was concerned, it was long overdue. A sentiment doubly reinforced when the shower spray turned ice-cold just as he was halfway through soaping up. It was almost cold enough to feel searing hot. It made the puckered scar high on his shoulder angry. Brad yelled at Nyx to check her fucking temperatures, which awarded him lukewarm water, leaking out in a single, concentrated jet. It felt like being drizzled with piss. Not a great start to his morning.He didn’t bother with breakfast either. Just a quick fix of caffeine from the sad, temperamental coffeemaker his sister, Sarah, had loaded off on him just before he left Earth; a sort of going-away present. The symbolism hadn’t exactly been lost on him. It made decent enough coffee, though.It still felt like there was a slick layer of lather on his skin as he put on his uniform. The black cargo pants, and long-sleeved steel-gray button up as usual, along with the black boots. None of the security personnel wore the full uniform most days, but today Brad put on the black tie and sweater as well. Although there was, technically, a dress code in place, Brad enforced it selectively; so long as the security officers wore the pants, boots, and shirt, he couldn’t give less of a shit. He’d had enough of the ‘grooming standard’ to last a lifetime.The sweater was light gray, with a discreet Oneiroi: Biogenetic and Neuroscientific Research Facility logo on it. Brad was tall and lean, with blond hair and blue eyes, a strong jaw and high cheekbones. He looked the part: Chief of Security.He rolled up the sleeves of his shirt and sweater, and left his apartment.

. . .

The facility was shaped like a domed octagon, with the Courtyard as its epicenter. From orbit, the facility resembled a living entity; its branches stretching in different directions, like a geometrically challenged spider. An elevator was set in the middle of one half of the octagon. It had only two options: the basement where the labs, the mainframe control room, and gym were; or the second floor, where the library, a few classrooms, a cafeteria, and the staff apartments were housed. Beyond that were the Gardens, the Observatory, and other miscellany. Only the security personnel had their apartments on the main floor.The Courtyard itself resembled a small island garden. Being only a single floor, its ceiling was two floors high, and curving toward the center. The Courtyard was otherwise made up mainly of greenery, as well as a few strategically placed patches of flowers the facility’s phytologists had crossbred and nurtured in their free time. The layout was vaguely inspired by ancient Japanese gardens, replete with a small bridge crossing a pond with a modified koi habitat. There were even benches to sit on throughout the garden, and along the walls, too.Seeing as the majority of the staff were Earthborn, the domed ceiling usually had a real-time holographic display of the sky as it was somewhere or other on Earth. Although, sometimes, it would reflect the true Martian sky outside the facility.In many ways, the facility was—especially the Courtyard—the pictorial equivalent of a beautiful hotel lobby. It was well-kept despite getting on with the years, and when you first arrived you’d feel a little out of place, a little simple. But the longer you stayed, the more you would start noticing the hidden flaws and secrets, what hid behind the many doors, under the floors, inside the walls.A few kids sitting on the benches along the outer side of the Courtyard quieted as Brad walked past them. It was recess. He recognized them both: Mari and Johanna, eight and ten years old, both born on Mars. A third joined them. Thea, the least reserved of the three.Normally the kids wouldn’t take much notice of Brad, or any of the other security officers walking about the facility. They weren’t shy around them, either, though they’d get chastised often enough if their parents caught them talking to any of the officers on duty.Today, though, all three girls whispered among themselves. Their curious eyes followed Brad intently. He had almost reached the other side of the Courtyard—about to enter a much narrower corridor—when he heard running footsteps behind him. It wasn’t much of a surprise when Thea caught up with him, nearly skidding to a halt to match his pace. She remained quiet until they were halfway down the corridor.“Why are you wearing that?” She asked. She had to crane her neck to look up at Brad as they walked. Enough for her thick, dark braid to reach all the way to her waist. She was all of nine years and seven months old, so her stature wasn’t much to brag about next to a giant like Brad. He slowed his pace a little for her sake, though not enough she’d notice. She wouldn’t have liked that. He wasn’t in a hurry, anyway.“You don’t like it?” He glanced down at her. She was looking forward again, swinging her arms rigidly at her side.She scrunched up her nose by way of reply. Brad mirrored her.When they were only a few steps away from the door leading to the docking bay and docking control room, Brad stopped short and turned to face Thea. Utilizing the entirety of her petite frame, she sighed loudly and turned on her heel to walk back to the Courtyard. Brad stood watching her; he knew from experience she would try to hide anywhere she could in hopes of catching a glimpse of whatever exciting events may be unfolding behind the many sealed doors of the facility. Eventually, Brad tapped the in the passcode and waited for the biometric scan’s approval.“Heard anything yet?” Brad asked. He expected to see Cortez or Wiley occupying one of the disproportionately large swivel chairs by the control boards. Instead he found Ray Person attempting to unstick a piece of biodegradable plastic from a lollipop. Never mind he could just eat the damn plastic.“What kind of half-assed attempt at getting dressed did you go through this morning?” Brad said once Ray came into full view.Ray was on the low end of average height, wiry but not skinny, with dark hair and brown, deep-set eyes. Like Brad, Ray was wearing the black cargo pants and the steel-gray shirt with half the buttons undone and the other half done wrong, leaving the shirt lopsided. He was only wearing one boot as well, the other replaced by a rainbow colored flip-flop. “Why do you only have one boot?”“We can’t all be steeped in Eugenic perfection, Brad,” Ray said, turning the chair slightly on its pivot. “As for our new and esteemed colleague, I—we—” Ray amended when Cortez returned with a manual screwdriver and a pair of wire-clippers in hand. Cortez briefly acknowledged Brad before getting down on his knees behind the chair Ray was occupying.“—We lost contact with the ship not too long after they left Earth’s orbit, but there’s a pretty heavy storm building up around the comm towers. Which is probably fucking shit up, and our shit’s already pretty fucked up, so, you know. You do the math. Cortez is trying.” Ray waved his lollipop at Cortez’s back. Cortez grunted.“So who is this dude, anyway?” Ray asked.“Do you actively not listen during briefings, or have the consanguineous relations on your colony caused irreparable damage to your frontal lobe?”“Whoa, big words, big man! Unless it’s really interesting, I usually just zone out and ask Walt about it later,” Ray said. He planted his feet on the floor again, and started rotating the seat from side to side.“Of course you do.”From the raised dais of the control boards, and through the large window above them, Brad could see the handful of technicians roaming around on the main floor, waiting for the supply ship to arrive.Cortez swore under his breath. He nudged Ray’s chair hard enough to make it slide a few inches. “Check the storms. Left screen.”“So what do you know about the new guy?” Ray asked Brad again before checking the storm and saying to Cortez, “It’s gaining speed.”“Twenty-eight, served in the AMC, decorated war hero, Lieutenant during the war. Promoted to Captain, retired shortly thereafter. Degrees in software and computer engineering, specialized in info-sec. His name is Nate Fick.”Like he had during the briefing, Brad skipped the part about how some of the AMC’s higher ups hadn’t liked Nate Fick very much; how they’d had certain feelings and opinions on how Nate had handled his men. Some said he was getting pussy-whipped, others said he was pushing his men too hard.“You know what I’m gonna do when I retire?” Ray said, shifting around the lollipop in his mouth so it was trapped between molars and cheek.“I can make an educated guess.”“—I’m gonna buy an island, right? And populate it with nothing but swimsuit models, and then I’m gonna spend the rest of my days knee-deep in pussy. Drowning in pussy. Literally. Drowning.”“The best you’d get is some inbred pageant queen scraped off the floor of your local shit joint.”“Stop projecting, Brad.”“If I were the one retiring, there’d be no you, no swimsuit models, nobody of the Homo genus other than myself. There’d be nothing but a surfboard and some peace and fucking quiet.”Ray snorted, leaning forward in his chair. He pointed the glistening lollipop at Brad. “Get that fucking ‘holier than thou’ stick out of your ass before it pokes a hole in your brain. One week in, you’d be shooting sea creatures. Two weeks, you’d be building your own fucking raft out of some indigenous leafy greens or some shit like the Viking motherfucker you are. Then you’d brave the great unknown waters, and get back on the front lines shooting people before anybody could say, ‘Moby’s Dick’. And then all’d be right with the universe once again.”“Astute.”Ray tipped the lollipop and his chin in unison, damn right.The radar finally lit up, followed by a docking request on one of the righthand screens. Ray was about to approve the request when Cortez grabbed Ray’s chair by the back, and pushed him away from the control board. “They’ll be docking in about ten, fifteen minutes, sir,” Cortez said to Brad before relaying the same message to the crew on the floor. Approval was thus given to the small cargo ship carrying their new CSA.“It’s gotta make you wonder, tho’,” Ray drawled.“No.” Brad pushed off from his relaxed stance.“Dude, c’mon! Mat’s barely fucking cold, and they’ve already got some new guy lined up, and I’m just gonna say it: maybe this Fick guy’s a plant, you know? Maybe they wanna make sure we’re all sane here, or whatever. I mean, Mat… I spent more time with him than anybody else—” Ray trailed off. He crunched down on the hard candy. “I’m just saying.”“How is it you pass the psych evals?”Ray rolled himself closer to Brad. He removed the chewed-up lollipop stick from his mouth, and said, “Mat passed his a month ago with flying colors.”When Brad finally responded to this, it was only to say, “At least button your damn shirt right if you’re gonna wear it.”

. . .

Nate Fick exited through the ship’s open cargo door. The docking bay was surprisingly large for being non-commercial. Floor crew were milling about, none of them taking much notice of him, or if they did, not caring about his presence so long as he didn’t get in their way.The facility worked on a skeleton crew, Nate knew. In the past, Oneiroi had almost been the size of a small city, but as the years went by, and the facility lost commissions to newer and larger facilities under the Haagen corporation's domain, there wasn’t much need for a large staff anymore. The scandal some decades ago hadn’t helped, either. A strategic move on the Haagen corporation's part, turning it into a non-profit in wake of it.Brad covered the distance between the entrance to the docking bay and Nate with long, swift strides. He proffered a hand once they were within reach of each other. Nate looked civilian. He wore jeans, a t-shirt, and a hooded jacket with a faded AMC logo along the left arm. He was shorter than Brad by half a head, and had dark blond hair at a length where it was just beginning to curl. Not only did he look civilian; he barely looked twenty at a glance.But he held himself like a soldier.

. . .

“I didn’t expect there to be so many kids here,” Nate said once they’d rounded back to the Courtyard after a quick tour of the mainframe room, the gym, the cafeteria, and a waved gesture toward the library and classrooms upstairs. The medical office and security office had been last on the list.“They belong to the scientists and support staff,” Brad replied, noticing Thea in his periphery. She was sitting cross-legged on a bench with a tablet in her lap, paying more attention to Brad and Nate than whatever game she was playing. “There’s not much of a distinction.”A handful of the youngest kids were playing tag, hiding among the tall but hardly camouflaging trees. Nate watched them, slowing down his pace a little. He sped up again when he realized Brad was already several steps ahead, waiting.“Your apartment is four doors down,” Brad said, pointing to one of the identical doors lining the corridor, each spaced evenly apart and numbered. “Standard lock code is 1234#. Everything’s set up inside. There’s a stationary screen with full access, both to the intra- and extranet. There should also be a smartband on the desk. Wear it 24/7. Remember to activate your private terminal, and sync it up to the smartband. Any questions?”“No, sounds standard enough.”“If you’ve got questions, you know where to find me. Once you’re settled in, head back to the DCR and Person’ll show you to the OCC, and introduce you to the assisting techs. Welcome,” Brad said, and they shook hands a second time before Brad left Nate to settle in.

. . .

The tour had taken less than forty minutes. Although not by design—Nate already seemed familiar enough with the layout—it was fortuitous, since Brad needed to speak with the pilot before the cargo ship took its leave.“Reyes!” Brad said, grinning. They grabbed each other by the hand and came in for a half-hug. “I thought you were doing colony rounds?”“Nah, brother.” Reyes shook his head with a chuckle. “Half the pilots’ve got the runs, so Pappy and I’ve got to step up and do Sol rounds for a few more weeks.”“Not contagious, are you?”“Brother, I treat my body like a temple.”They both turned when Legs, one of the technicians, waved for their attention. Legs gave Reyes the thumbs up. Pappy was squatting in the ship’s open cargo door, twiddling a toothpick between his fingers. Reyes gave a subtle nod to the ship, and started walking toward it. Brad followed a few steps behind. Pappy and Brad exchanged a nod, then the former disappeared behind the cockpit door.The back of the ship created a blindspot, obscuring them from the CCTV. There was no audio recorded on the floor. Even when it was relatively quiet, there was enough ambient noise to turn audio staticky and therefore pointless.“I was surprised when Ray said you’d be the one doing the pick-up,” Reyes said, handing Brad four slim black-out tubes. The allys rattled slightly when Brad tucked them away in a sealed pocket at his knee.“So was Ray. I didn’t realize you’re the one who’s been smuggling for him,” Brad said.“I owe him.”“Must be a big debt.”Reyes said, “Remind Ray this is the last time.”Brad nodded and gave Reyes’s tricep a slap. “Take care out there.”“You, too, brother.”The roar of the engines was fully silenced when the door to the floor closed behind Brad. He lingered for a moment. He chose to take the long way around instead of taking the shortcut through the control room.

. . .

Brad had been aware of Ray’s dependence on stimulants for nearly a year now, but he’d never actually seen them, let alone carried them on his person. He didn’t like admitting it, but ‘out of sight, out of mind’ played a significant role.Allys were black market derivates of a performance-enhancing drug specifically commissioned by the Alliance’s Ministry of Defense. A commission that’d gone to this very facility, ironically enough. The drug was meant to temporarily increase concentration, memory retention, and reduce need for sleep. It was even meant to suppress the body and mind’s natural fear responses to some degree.They got all the way to a human trial before the project was shut down. The drug was never approved for use within—and certainly not without— the Alliance military. It’d been quite the scandal, at the time. The allys hit the black market not too long after the project was decommissioned. Brad was only ten at the time. It wasn’t until he’d been at the Alliance Military Academy for a few years, he’d started to hear about the allys in earnest. It always started with horror stories.They’d make your brain melt, and every orifice would start pouring out blood. That was the urban legend, the things parents said to keep their kids from trying them out. Not exactly how the parents put it, but close enough, regurgitated by thirteen-year-olds.In truth, the allys were fairly harmless, as far as any performance-enhancing drugs on the black market went. The pills themselves had a faux crest on them, reminiscent of the Alliance’s own insignia; it was a bit of a joke, and a bit of an insult, all rolled up in one. ‘Remember where you came from’ and ‘fuck you’. Hence the name: allys.Despite being fairly harmless, the effects of prolonged use and withdrawal were no joke. It was difficult to make a good quality knock-off when the original wasn’t too good to start with.Brad walked through the Courtyard at a leisurely pace. The sky above was bright blue with cotton-white clouds drifting lazily by. It wasn’t even noon yet, and Brad was already waiting for the day to be over. He imagined, not for the first time, what it would look like if one or several of the panels malfunctioned. Like black holes in the sky.

. . .

The medical office was one of the few spaces within the facility where the primary color wasn’t some variation on steel gray. Instead, it was blindingly white panels with lines of gray where paneling wasn’t functional.Brad entered the office. He gave the wall a knock. When there was no response, he took a few more steps and leaned against the wall.Doctor Timothy Robert Bryan—better known to all as Doc Bryan—was the resident physician on the facility. He was tall and fit with a neatly trimmed mustache and short, brown hair. With his dark, deep-set eyes and defined bone-structure, he more often than not carried on him an expression indefinitely toeing the line between stoicism and disapprobation. He’d been a Corpsman 2nd Class during the war. Brad and he had crossed paths briefly during a tour. Brad didn’t remember it.Brad got shot by an Insurgent. Funnily enough, he was pretty lucky. The shot was in the shoulder area; it managed to avoid his heart, major arteries, and once Brad started to heal there was only some minor, temporary nerve damage.But what wasn’t so lucky at the time, was how his platoon was in the middle of fucking nowhere, with no medic, and then Brad went about contracting a bacterial infection in the wound. When they finally managed to get him med-evaced, he was more or less on the brink of death. In the hospital, during his surgery, he was clinically dead for almost three minutes. He couldn’t remember this, either.By the time he was healed and cleared for duty, he was offered a position in a special black-ops task force. Or that’s how they phrased it at the time, anyway. Because the task force didn’t have a name, and it wasn’t black-ops. It didn’t exist at all. So for a while, Brad didn’t exist, either.“Doc,” Brad said, finally.Bryan looked up from his tablet with a disgruntled expression. “What?”“You wanted me to come in for some more blood work, and the inoc-shot.”Bryan made a face, like he was considering whether Brad was telling the truth or not, then gestured toward the examination table in his office. Brad settled down on it. He made his hand into a fist for the nurse, unfurling his fingers again once the band was secured around his bicep. It wasn’t often blood got taken this way anymore, though Brad’s continued problems made quantity a mere practicality. The first time he’d had it drawn like this—that he was conscious for, that is—was the day he had arrived.“Has the fatigue continued?”Brad scratched his left eyebrow, hesitating for a beat before answering. “Not so much since the shot you gave me.”“What about sleep?”“About the same as usual. Three—four hours a night.”The nurse wiped down the minuscule puncture wound and coated it with a clear gel that quickly became part of the skin itself.“Is it affecting your everyday life in any way?” Bryan looked up when Brad didn’t answer. “I’m contractually obligated to ask.”“I passed the psych evals last month. I’m fine.”Bryan made a noncommittal noise. He unpacked the one-time injector for the inoculation shot.The first time Bryan met Brad—because he did remember it—Bryan had been the medic who indirectly saved Brad’s life by giving him just a little bit more time to live.

. . .

Settling in didn’t entail much more for Nate than dropping his duffel bag on one of the two chairs in the small apartment. He’d essentially grown up a nomad, so by the time he entered the Corps, it was old shoe for him. The place looked about the same as he’d imagined while memorizing the facility’s layout before leaving Earth.The apartment itself was square with a small, walled-off bathroom in one corner, and a bed to the right with an inset shelf above it. Across the bed was a desk with a simple swivel chair, and two somewhat more comfortable chairs around a compact, circular table by the door. Otherwise the room was the same dark-brushed steel as everything else. Impersonal, but not inherently unappealing.It wasn’t the former analyst’s apartment, something Nate was quietly thankful for. Technically, all staff except the security personnel had apartments on the second floor, but after the incident with Matvey, the protocol for living arrangements was changed.The call Nate received at the crack of dawn ten days ago, offering him a job as Chief Systems Analyst (“It’s a catch-all title, really; it’s a small operation up there”) at the Oneiroi facility had been as unexpected as if the sun were to suddenly burn out. It was slightly less unexpected and much more morbid when, the very same night, the ‘breaking story’ about Matvey Nikolayevich Vitsin flooded all the major news outlets. Nate hadn’t accepted the job offer immediately, said he had to think about it. They agreed to give him a few days, let the dust settle.The media were sparse on the details. Nate was, quite frankly, surprised they had been offered much by way of detail at all. The Haagen corporation weren’t known for being forthcoming; they would slip through whatever loophole they could find, wherever they could find them.Nate had never worked for the Haagen corporation specifically, but the cybersecurity firm he’d been employed at for the last year had taken on a few commissions for one of the Haagen corporation's many companies.When people weren’t afforded the information they wanted, even when they knew only that there was information to be had, regardless of whether or not it was valuable, made it valuable. Information brokering was a wealthy, if not dangerous business.According to the news outlets, Matvey murdered two scientists before committing suicide. Nate considered, when he couldn’t sleep the night before he was leaving for Mars, trying to dig up any classified internal reports on the matter. The irony of not trusting information when it was freely given by someone usually so reticent. He hadn’t, in the end. It felt ghoulish, almost. Besides, it was best not to tempt fate.Nate booted the apartment’s stationary screen and entered the private terminal created for him. He let the smartband sync up while going through the messages he’d already received. One was a generic ‘welcome!’ message (there was always something vaguely creepy about those, like they were trying to indoctrinate you somehow), another was an information packet about the facility and its daily goings-on.The newest message was a request for Nate’s presence at Bryan’s office as soon as manageable. Nate had yet to meet Bryan, as the medical office had been empty save for a nurse when Brad had given Nate the tour.

. . .

“From here on out, any and all future assessments of your physical health while you reside here will be compared to the state of your physical health upon arrival. You’ve been briefed about this already, I’m sure, but bi-yearly physical and psychological assessments are mandatory. It’s still five months till the next psych evals, so your mental health will be compared to the psych eval you went through before leaving Earth,” Bryan rattled off, giving Nate a moment to take it all in before asking, “Any questions? No? Good. I need some blood.”Nate watched as the blood filled the plastic tube at his elbow. He’d only had his blood taken in this manner once before, when he was much younger, during a time with substantial concerns about a viral endemic. Though Earthborn, he’d lived on several different colony planets throughout his childhood. If nothing else, it’d exposed him to quite a few things, both pathogenic and otherwise.The nurse Bryan had been conversing with when Nate arrived removed the tube and needle. He sealed the puncture wound, and left the room for the inner medical wing. Bryan picked up a tablet, flicking through tabs until he found Nate’s entire medical history from birth, by the looks of it. “It says you’ve got no allergies to any foods or medicines. Correct?”“Yeah, no allergies.”“Then you’re free to go,” Bryan stepped aside to let Nate remove himself from the examination table. “Welcome to Oneiroi,” Bryan added as Nate was about to slip through the open doors.

. . .

Across the hall and a few paces down from the medical office was the considerably smaller security office. Generally speaking, the facility had no jail nor place of temporary custody. If needed, the offending party would be cordoned off in their apartment, or strapped to a bed in the patient wing if they were deemed a threat to themselves or others. Then it was just a matter of playing the waiting game until they could be picked up by the authorities, if needed.Brad sat at his desk, trudging through the extra sludge of paperwork Nate’s arrival had landed him with. At times like these, he felt more like a glorified administrative assistant than anything else.It was almost midnight when Brad finally got out of his chair, stretching until he yawned. He could feel the vials shift inside his pocket, imagined he could hear the faint tinkling of the pills as they hit the sides. He put the vials on his desk, watched them roll in either direction until a stylus, a tablet, or a cup stopped them.“Ray, drop by my office when your shift’s over.”Ray was good at hiding it. It probably helped he was a little high-strung regardless of whether or not he was on stims. But mostly it just came down to how good Ray was at hiding his addiction. It was impressive, as much as it was angering, saddening. Brad had let Ray sweat, though, when he first sussed it out. An inevitable fact.Brad had gone to Bryan—who without doubt knew about Ray’s addiction—but all Bryan did was give Brad the ‘doctor-patient confidentiality’ line. “You’re not a fucking priest!” Bryan had agreed he wasn’t, and that was pretty much the end of it.Ray didn’t get fired. So far, he’d never missed work without good reason, he took up the slack when needed, and being a mechanical engineer by trade he’d often help out the engineers on the docking bay floor. Last, but not least, Brad had grown—if not begrudgingly—fond of Ray. He had warned Ray, though. “I see so much as a blip on the radar, and you’re out.” Ray had saluted him in response.Brad preferred it when things were black and white, which they rarely were, and Brad knew this. So when they weren’t, he had to make up his mind, put his foot down on this side or that, make it black-and-white. On the one hand, it wasn’t his business. It wasn’t for him to say. On the other hand, as Ray’s superior, as Ray’s friend…It was only a few minutes past twelve when Ray entered the office. He came to a relaxed halt a few steps away from Brad’s desk. Somehow it still looked forced. The four vials were now stacked next to each other in a neat line on the desktop. Ray looked at them, but didn’t move.The atmosphere was world’s apart from what it’d been that morning, in the DCR. They’d both known their day would end here, end with this exchange. Out of sight, out of mind.“Reyes says this is the last time.”Ray’s response was a flat, “Yeah,” as he closed the distance between himself and the desk with a few even steps. Brad didn’t have to look to know Ray had both his boots on. Ray slipped the vials into a side-pocket. He was still holding onto one of them, his fist bulging inside the dark material.Bracing his fingertips on the desktop, Brad said, “I know it’s been a fucked up two weeks, you were close to Matvey, but if you can’t handle your job, if this—” He made a vague gesture with his hand. “—If this is starting to affect your performance—”“This is my last batch, then I’m done.”“Yeah, ‘cause you quitting cold turkey after how many years is definitely not likely to fuck up your job performance.”“How’d you think I got a job here in the first place, man?” Ray said.Ray had started using over-the-counter stimulants during his Alliance Military Academy days, and continued with it into his time with the Corps—it was always legal stuff. He hadn’t slip-slid into the allys until the over-the-counter stimulants stopped working. Brad had never asked, so Ray had never said anything. He didn’t say anything, now, either. Just worked his jaw.“Don’t do me any favors,” Brad said. “This isn’t a threat. But if you start slipping, if you can’t keep this under wraps—people suspecting you is one thing; people getting their hands on evidence… You won’t be giving me much of a choice. Take a couple of days off, think about it, talk to Doc.”“Yeah,” Ray said, already starting to pivot on his heel. “Am I dismissed?”“You’re dismissed.”Brad sat down on the uncomfortable couch across from his desk, and rubbed his face raw with the callouses of his palms. He mourned the fact he probably wouldn’t be able to fall asleep until four in the morning this night, either.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

It took all of three days and one shift in the OCC with Nate for Ray to come to the conclusion he didn’t like their new systems analyst. Ray wasn’t inclined to offer up much of an explanation as to why this was, though.“He’s too—squeaky,” Ray said at length. He glanced up at Brad. The cafeteria was mostly empty, save for a few tables. The docking bay’s floor crew were playing cards while eating their dinner; no doubt losing their hard-earned credits to Legs, yet again. Some people just never learn.Ray returned to scrutinizing the red, body-shaped jello candy held between his index-finger and thumb. He bit off the head. “It’s the quiet ones. Or the really well-adjusted ones. They’re the ones you gotta look out for.”“You have no choice but to accept that Fick is our new CSA,” Brad replied, attempting to keep his tone neutral. To say Matvey’s death—his entire existence—didn’t hang over them like a foreboding shitstorm about to rain havoc at any moment, would be a lie.Brad flicked through the colored candies until he found the ever-elusive yellow one; on a lucky day, you could find three in a single bag. Usually the surplus was greens and reds. “If you’d like some perspective, I can hand over a long ass list of people you didn’t like when they first arrived,” Brad said.Brad’s predecessor had actually made a list of people Ray didn’t like, and it wasn’t only people he’d expressed dislike toward upon their initial arrival, either. Some names even had tiny notes next to them, detailing why Ray didn’t like them. The shortest one was: breathes too loud. There wasn’t much left over from Brad’s predecessor, but what’d been left behind—it did raise some questions. Maybe the reason behind their resignation was solely motivated by the desire to retain what tiny sliver of sanity they had left.Whatever the reason, Ray didn’t know any of this.“I nurture a healthy ratio of dislike and mistrust toward everyone,” Ray said matter-of-factly. He swatted at Brad’s hand when he started picking through the candy again, hoping to find another yellow jello-man. “Likable people make me wanna hurl, Brad. That’s why you’re my favorite,” Ray said, glancing up as Walt walked into the cafeteria. Ray waved an arm to bring him over.“Walt’s your favorite. And everyone loves Walt,” Brad said. Walt lowered himself into a seat next to Ray with a bemused expression.“Walt doesn’t count. He’s the exception that proves the rule. He defies the laws of the universe, including mine.” Ray put an arm around Walt, who had yet to speak, and now looked both bemused and sheepish.“Well, Walt’s got a twelve-hour shift in the OCC tonight. That’s quite a few hours spent with our likable and well-adjusted CSA,” Brad said, grabbing the last yellow jello-man before Ray could stop him. “Remember your inoc-shot, kids. Before the week’s out,” Brad added, giving both a mock-stern look before leaving.Ray chomped off the head of three jello-men simultaneously. He offered one of the headless men to Walt, who gracefully declined. 
. . .
 With the lights turned off, and standing just so, where the desk didn’t obscure the view, it almost felt real. The seams between each of the holopanels stretching the entirety of the concave wall were indiscernible.It was a nighttime forest illuminated only by two intersecting cones of light, like the headlights of an old-fashioned car. The rest was dark; thick conifers, so tall the stars littering the sky above them touched their summits, obscuring the night sky. The trees swayed. An infinite loop. An endlessly recurring moment in time.In these rare, indulgent moments, Brad would move the couch along the wall opposite, and proceed to stare for hours at the view. Like meditating. He could almost hear the wind in the trees; rushing, bustling, a little like waves at sea.Sometimes, when he’d sat there long enough, he started to anticipate a break in the loop; a moment where a pair of eyes reflected the light like a tapestry of green-lit silver. Eyes appearing among the tree trunks, moving quickly, some apex predator sensing him out, honing in.Brad didn’t intend to—he never did—but at some point he fell asleep. Half-sitting, knees bent and feet far apart, his hands on his stomach and chin resting on his chest.Sleeping in the office had yet to prove a good idea. Brad wasn’t likely to learn from this repeated mistake anytime soon. At least not until the crick in his neck took on a more permanent quality. When he woke, only a few hours had passed, yet his legs were tingling with pins and needles, and his neck was very much unhappy.“Lights,” he grumbled, shuffling into the bathroom to splash some water on his face. He wasn’t due for work for another hour and a half, but he might as well get started, since he was already in his office.He fetched a cup of piping hot coffee from one of the machines in the Courtyard. It was better quality than the one he brewed with the old and temperamental coffeemaker in his apartment, but it still didn’t taste any better. The moment he sat down at his desk again, a message from Sigrid arrived at his work terminal. If he didn’t know better, he’d think she had some sort of preternatural ability that allowed her knowledge of when—down to the millisecond—Brad did, or did not have a moment to spare. >>TO: BC >>FROM: Siggy >>SUB: lesevake >>I need to change the dates for the children’s ‘lesevake’ but Dr Bryan is scheduled for the library on the fifteenth of sixth. First aid classes. - Sigrid>>TO: Sigrid Johannessen >>FROM: Brad Colbert >>SUB: RE: lesevake >>Bring it up with Bryan. - BC>>TO: BC >>FROM: Siggy >>SUB: RE: lesevake >>Don’t make me argue this with him. I never win. Please? - Sigrid>>TO: Sigrid Johannessen >>FROM: Brad Colbert >>SUB: RE: lesevake >>Not your personal assistant. - BC>>TO: BC >>FROM: Siggy >>SUB: RE: lesevake >>Do you want to disappoint the children, Bradley?>>TO: Sigrid Johannessen >>FROM: Brad Colbert >>SUB: yes >>yes - BC>>TO: Doc Bryan >>FROM: BC >>SUB: first aid class >>Moving the first aid class from the 15th to the 18th. - BC>>TO: Colbert >>FROM: Dr. Bryan >>SUB: RE: first aid class >>OK. Brad was on his second cup of coffee when the daily messages started trickling in. Right on time.One of the facility’s engineers, Gabrahn—the resident jack-of-all-trades—was requesting a short run outside to get a hands-on look at the communications tower that’d been acting up for the last two weeks. The storm from three days ago hadn’t helped. Brad approved the request, assigning Espera and Ray to tag along with Gabrahn, including a long-range rover.A request for a routine check on the solar panels. They powered a variety of non-vital machinery and appliances on the facility, and supplied power to the emergency energy reserves as well. Though the panels were self-maintaining, there were times when they got so covered with dust and sand it had to be removed manually. Or they would get damaged during storms, to the point remote repair couldn’t do the job. Brad approved this request, too, assigning yet another pair of security officers to join the engineers.The third message wasn’t a request so much as a long, angry tirade from Legs about how, “they want us to go thru theri fuckin suppl i ers but ther suppliers ve got shit fer fuckin brains. the y totally fuckd me over ANd—”They had four rovers in total: two short-range, powered entirely by solar energy, and two long-range ones for longer trips. One of the latter had been causing trouble for the last few months. It was entirely fixable, but bureaucracy was, as usual, getting in the way of things. Brad set up a reminder to head down to the docking bay floor; maybe he’d get something out of Legs that wasn’t long strings of expletives peppered with Afrikaans this way.It’d been less than a week since he’d dropped by last, only to find Legs holding a small welding gun in their hand, long legs akimbo, and looking like they were about to smash in the rover's windshield.“Not what it looks like,” Legs said, shifting the welding tool from one hand to the other, bracing a foot on the steering wheel.“I’m sure,” Brad replied dryly. Legs only grinned.Brad was at the tail-end of a message to an acquaintance on Earth—if they couldn’t get the parts through the proper channels, they’d get them through the backdoor—when Kocher entered the security office.“Busy?”Brad gestured him inside without looking up from his message. Kocher sat down in the chair across from Brad’s desk, and stretched out his long legs, getting comfortable as he waited.They’d both attended the Alliance Military Academy as teens, landing in many of the same classes along the way. During their last year, they’d lived in the same dorm. Somehow they’d managed to stay friends after graduating. A small feat, considering they were never deployed together, and thus maintained their friendship through sporadic messages, and meeting up once every blue moon. They did fall out of touch when Brad disappeared into black-ops non-existence. It made existing outside of it difficult, too.So it’d been a welcome surprise when Brad saw Kocher’s name coming across his desk shortly after he’d started working at Oneiroi.When Brad finally hit ‘send’ on his message, Kocher didn’t miss a beat, saying, “So you’re seriously considering re-upping?”“Not here for a status report regarding your ‘family emergency’ leave?” Brad deflected.Kocher shrugged with an arch little smile on his face. “Sure.”“It’ll come through tonight. You only get three days, and you’ll have to catch a flight from the Backer base at 0300, local time.”“Great. So you’re re-upping?” Kocher repeated. He’d twined his fingers together, looking so relaxed it made Brad tense up.“What’s got you thinking that?”“A little birdie mentioned it.”“Wouldn’t be Korean, this feathered tattletale?”“Hard to say, I’m no ornithologist.”Brad leaned into his chair, settling his arms on the rests. “It might be under consideration.”Kocher scrutinized Brad’s impassive expression. Kocher was the one who knew the most about Brad, good and bad. Kocher came second as the one who knew Brad best.Sarah would always be the one to crack Brad open with nothing but a sideways glance and a purse of her lips. He used to hate his sister for this, and he used to hate Kocher for it, too, those rare times he succeeded. Now, Brad was just grateful there were people in his life he never had to explain things to when he simply couldn’t.“Liar,” Kocher said at length, the humor in his voice gone.“Absolutely,” Brad agreed.Kocher got to his feet. As he was leaving the office, he turned on his heel and said, “I take it this isn’t something I should be talking about?”“Give birdie my best,” was Brad’s reply. Kocher gave him the finger. 
. . .
   
 
The elevator moved slowly. Not actually, but it felt like it was going at a snail’s pace as Brad stood half-leaned against the back wall, waiting for it to reach the first floor. It was barely past midday, and he was feeling tired, like his body was a sack of bones he was forced to lug around. The new normal. He hadn’t had lunch yet, though. He could hear Bryan at the back of his mind, “Caffeine is not a fucking food group!”Aside from the labs in the basement, the Operating Control Center—OCC for short—was the most heavily secured part of the facility. A certain level of clearance was required to get past the initial passcoded retinal scans, much like the DCR. From there was a narrow hallway, leading to a guarded door. When there was no-one inside the OCC, both guards remained outside the door.Brad hadn’t seen much of Nate—or had reason to seek him out—since his arrival. It was probably a good thing. They’d bumped into each other once in the middle of the night, in the cafeteria, both sleuthing for sustenance while sleep escaped them.Brad arched an eyebrow at Walt when he reached the entrance to the OCC. Walt nodded, “Sir”. He was barely succeeding at biting down on a grin. Brad wondered what Ray might have bribed Walt with.Inside the OCC, just beyond the entrance, Trombley stood guard by the wall, just shy of leaning on it. Trombley’s arms were resting across his chest, eyes closed with what might be considered a concentrated frown on his face. Trombley was only twenty-one; as a soldier, he’d mostly been part of the clean-up leading to the armistice, and now he planned on working at the facility for about a year. It was quick money, and he had a baby on the way with his fiancée, and a wedding to pay for, too.Standing sentinel in front of Trombley, mirroring the crossed arms, Brad waited a good fifteen seconds before Trombley startled himself awake by pivoting slightly, and bumping against the wall.“Sir,” Trombley said. At least he had the decency to show some modicum of chagrin at having fallen asleep on duty.Brad checked the time, then looked up at Trombley again. “You’ve got thirty-five minutes left of your shift, Trombley. How many of the past eleven hours and twenty-five minutes have you spent awake?”“More than ten of them, sir,” Trombley replied.Brad narrowed his eyes, and tilted his head back slightly before saying, “You’re dismissed.”Trombley appeared dumbfounded for a moment, not entirely clear on what he was being dismissed from. He took it as his cue to leave, either way, when Brad turned his back on him and walked up the short ramp to the control panels and screens. The ramp turned into a small walkway that dipped down again on either side, leading further into OCC, where the assisting techs were whiling away in front of their own screens.Instrumental electronica was playing at low volume, sifting across the room to where Nate sat with his socked feet propped up on a slab of empty space. He was reading an old, surprisingly well-maintained paperback he’d found in the library.Brad caught the title from the spine a second before Nate noticed him and lowered the book. The Illiad by Homer. Judging from where Nate’s finger remained between the pages, he was already halfway through.“You do look like you’d know Ancient Greek,” Brad said in lieu of a greeting. He sat down on the metal railing of the walkway, bracing his hands on either side of his hips.Nate snorted a laugh, somewhere between indignant and amused. “It’s translated.” He tilted the book slightly as he said it.“You’ll find it doesn’t alter the sentiment,” Brad said. “So, how’s your first week going? Any grievances you’d like to report?”“Things are roughly how I expected them to be. More red tape than I’m used to these days, though. My predecessor must’ve been very good at his job, because undoing some of the things he’s left lying around is taking a lot more time and effort than I initially thought it would. It should all be cleared out by the end of the week, though. Nothing that affects any of the vital systems to any greater extent,” Nate clarified, picking up a small, empty bag of gummy bears to use as a bookmark. He put the book where his feet had been a moment before, and turned his chair so he effectively had both screens and Brad within his line of vision. “I’ve also looked into the smartbands’ inconsistency with tracking, both location and biometric feedback, and as far as I can tell, it’s a hardware issue, not software.”“Well, that’s fucking annoying,” Brad grumbled. Whenever any of the security personnel dropped off the grid, or biometric feedback ceased, Brad would receive a notification. It was meant to function as a way to keep track of everyone, both where they were at any given time as well as to ensure they’d get swift medical attention if needed. The smartbands the non-security staff carried, which were considerably newer, rarely experienced these drop-offs.“In short, there’s nothing to worry about. A lot of programmers leave a little something behind, for their successor,” Nate said, turning his back on his screens to face Brad fully. “Usually in the form of some code that’s unnecessarily convoluted, making it nearly impossible to figure out what they were thinking when they made it. It doesn’t make any difference to how the program runs, it’s not meant to be malicious, it’s there solely to—” Nate cast about for a word. “To aggravate, really. But some of it… it’s incredibly elegant.”“I wouldn’t know, but according to Ray, Vitsin was some kind of genius,” Brad said to his boots, grimacing. He was starting to get a headache. Caffeine really was not a food group. The stiffness still lingering in his neck, and the unnatural light from Nate’s screens didn’t make matters better.“I don’t think Ray likes me much,” Nate said, sounding amused.Brad snorted a laugh. He kept his head bowed, only moving his gaze to look at Nate. “Ray’s pretty indiscriminate in his dislike. He’ll come around. Just don’t get too close to Walt.” Brad didn’t mention how Ray hadn’t liked Matvey at first, either. It probably wouldn’t be very comforting, considering.“I’ll keep that in mind. Are you feeling alright? You look a little—” Nate gestured vaguely toward his own face, pale and freckled, carrying a small frown.“I’m fine. Speaking of; have you had your inoc-shot done?”“I got it before I came here—you really don’t look too good.”Brad swore under his breath, squeezing his eyes shut. Fucking typical. “What time is it?”Nate had moved to the edge of his chair like he was ready to leap out of it at any moment. “Five minutes to twelve,” he said.When he pushed away from the railing, Brad wasn’t expecting the spell of vertigo that came rushing through him; everything faded into white-noise. He couldn’t say when Nate had actually gotten out of his chair and walked over, but Brad could feel Nate’s strong grip on his fore- and upper-arm as acutely as the nausea roiling up in his stomach. “I’m fine,” Brad said brusquely, jerking his arm out of Nate’s hold. “It’s fine.”On his way out of the OCC, Brad accidentally shouldered into Kocher hard enough he almost keeled over himself. He waved Kocher’s concern off. Brad needed to get to his office, now. 
. . .
 A thin, chilling coat of sweat was starting to break out all over Brad’s body. By the time he reached the Courtyard, he’d stepped up to an outright jog that, quite frankly, wasn’t getting him anywhere faster than walking would; it only jostled him more. His head ached, and his bones, too. It wasn’t even that much distance from the OCC to the security office. But for all his body seemed capable of just then, he might as well be trekking through the Martian desert, with neither oxygen nor protective gear. Thankfully, his pathetic attempt at a jog wasn’t witnessed by anyone. The Courtyard was empty.The bathroom connected to the security office was little else than a tiny square, not even an arm’s length in any direction. Brad barely managed to grip the toilet bowl before throwing up, one of his legs stretched beyond the still open door.It took three goes before his stomach finally came up empty, and he was dry-heaving. He could feel the strain on his blood vessels. If he didn’t pop one in his brain, he’d surely walk away with a bloodshot eye for his efforts. The toilet flushed with his forehead still kissing the rim, a fine mist of water hitting his nose and chin.The sickening feeling accompanied by the cold sweat was starting to abate; now he was just cold and sweaty. And his knees hurt, he realized, from hitting the hard floor with all 195 pounds of him.He didn’t want to move a single inch—despite how the outer rim of the bowl was starting to dig into his collarbone—but he didn’t have much of a choice.Brad braced himself against the sink on weak legs. He let the water run for a bit before splashing some on his face. It didn’t make him feel any better. The cold water prompted a full-body shiver to run through him. “Nyx—tell Doc Bryan to come to my office as soon as he’s free.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Though not a medical doctor by trade these days, Dr Heloïse Durand functioned as the tertiary physician on the facility. A back-up, essentially, should things ever get so mind-blowingly fucked.

Professionally, Bryan had nothing against her for the most part. Personally, he didn’t know her well enough to pass any judgement, nor had he any desire to amend this fact. Her most recent message to him had Bryan closing his eyes, and mentally collecting himself. If he didn’t, he might go down to the basement and do something very unprofessional. Her official position was that of lead scientist in the labs, yet she acted like she was Bryan’s superior whenever the opportunity arose.

Bryan went through the rest of his unread messages, flagged a few of the appointment notifications in his terminal, then opened up a reply to Dr Durand. In the five years Bryan had been the head physician on this red fucking rock, he had made one mistake during his first year; a fairly innocent one regarding the inoculation protocols, the result of a mislabeling outside of his immediate responsibility. It was the one and only time he’d required Dr Durand to share his workload due to a subsequent increase in patients in need of care. He had yet to live it down. That is, she was the only one who still harped on about it.

“Doctor Bryan,” Nyx said. “Colbert requests your presence in the security office when you are available.”

Bryan typed up a quick and mostly passive-aggressive reply to Dr Durand’s mostly pointless and as equally passive-aggressive inquiry, before heading over to the security office.

. . .

Brad sat hunched over on the single couch crammed up against the wall across from his desk. His head was in his hands; even from afar, Bryan could see the sheen of sweat and water drying on Brad’s face. The sweat had been profuse enough to soak through the back of Brad’s shirt, between the shoulder blades. Brad made no sign of noticing Bryan’s entrance, though Bryan doubted he hadn’t, even in his sorry state.

Bryan crouched down in front of Brad, balancing his elbows on his knees. “What’re your symptoms?”

“Nausea, headache, cold sweats, beginnings of a sore throat—probably a fever,” Brad listed, lifting his head so Bryan could see his face properly. The usually clear-blue eyes were dull, red-rimmed, and glassy from vomiting. One of the tiny vessels in Brad’s left eye had ruptured.

Bryan pressed the back of his ungloved hand against Brad’s forehead. He doubted this was anything contagious; he’d already seen a few of the kids reacting similarly to the biannual inoculation shot. It wasn’t uncommon, even in this day and age. It didn’t happen as often with adults, but it was neither unheard of nor worrying.

“Feels like a low fever,” Bryan said, removing his hand and straightening up. “Sounds like a reaction to the inoc-shot. Sleep, fluids, and rest for the next twenty-four hours, and you’ll be fine.”

Brad leaned back into the couch, resting the back of his head against it so he could look up at Bryan with minimal effort. “Is this a suggestion, or doctor’s orders?” Brad asked. He wasn’t relishing the idea of remaining inert for the next day and night, no matter how much his body might welcome it. His psyche did not.

“You wanna go on passing out everywhere, and throwing up on yourself, be my guest. If you don’t start improving in a few days, we’ll run some tests but I doubt it’ll be necessary. Get some sleep.”

“Fine.” Brad sat up again, grimacing. Bryan left without further ado.

Brad pinched the bridge of his nose, squinting at the table. The muscle aches had started to set in; it felt like his bones were gnashing against each other, irritating his joints. He gave himself a few more minutes before getting in touch with Stafford, then Espera.

“White man sleeping on the job,” Espera said when he came through to the office some twenty minutes later. “You look like shit, dawg.”

“Fucking feel like it, too.” Brad rubbed his eyelids raw before opening them. The office lit up like somebody had detonated a flash-bang right in front of him. He didn’t feel too steady, either, when he got to his feet. “I need you to cover for me the next twenty-four hours. Stafford’ll take your shift tonight.”

Assuming this place could go twenty-four hours without some sort of meltdown. It didn’t feel like it, lately.

. . .

The chill of the fever had shifted gears by the time Brad crawled into bed. The synthetic linen stuck to his skin. As much as he wanted to kick it off and let the air cool him off, he knew it’d do more harm than good in the long run. So he just lay there, on his back, uncomfortable in every way. He stared up at the ceiling, catching, at the corner of his eye, the dim luminescence lining the bottom of the door.

This was how most of his nights went, unless he’d stayed at the office for so long he fell asleep at his desk or on the couch. Wanting—needing—desperately to sleep and not being able to, was maddening. He’d tried sleeping pills once; he’d rather meet Death by way of sleep deprivation than try that again. Nightmares were one thing; nightmares you couldn’t wake from no matter how much you tried, no matter how intellectually aware you were of it being just a dream; that was a completely different kind of hell.

He couldn’t remember what it was like to just put his head on a pillow, and fall dead asleep in the blink of an eye.

. . .

In the living-room there’s a woven carpet. It has square dents in it from a heavy, second-hand teak table. The carpet is not second-hand; it is new, as much as you doubt that, and was gifted to the two of you when you moved into this apartment six years ago. The carpet doesn’t look new. Imagine a rainbow throwing up on your hardwood floor in the shape of a perfect circle; then imagine someone letting it float in the Hudson for about a year, followed by a half-hearted attempt at cleaning it before gifting it to you.

You have never given the carpet this much thought before, other than the cursory, ‘that is a fucking atrocity’ but you are giving it some serious thought, now. You’ve been standing in the middle of the apartment for the last few minutes, staring at this carpet.

The TVs on to your right. The volume is on low; neither of you are watching the TV, just keeping it on for ambiance, for distraction. Your eyes sting a little, sore and dry; you blink and find yourself facing the wall behind the couch, your shins almost touching the living-room table, your toes pressing against the woven carpet. The wall is rough with bricks. Red bricks. There’s an illustration hanging on the wall. Black frame, off-white paper. It says, in stylized lettering: TODAY IS A GOOD DAY.

There’s a scent in the air, like meat gone off, fruit decomposing. The culprit is the swollen bag of trash sitting against the kitchen bench. You must have forgotten to take it out earlier in the morning before work, while taking the dog for a walk. You’ll do it later.

You do clear away the tissues littering the living-room table, though. You’ve been coughing since last night. He has been, too. Longer. There’s a nasty cold going around the office. You throw the tissues in the trash, stick them in through the little opening where the plastic handles have been tied together. You just need to sit for a moment, then you’ll throw it out. You just need a glass of water.

The dog’s claws click against the floor as they enter the kitchen with you. There’s a name that starts with a V. It’s on the tip of your tongue, always. You fill the water bowl and get yourself a glass of water from the carafe in the fridge before returning to the living-room.

The news is on. You glance at the time and find it too early for news. You pick up the day-old newspaper from the living-room table, throwing it onto the chair and gingerly sit down on the table itself. It creaks, its screws gone a little loose with time. You take a few sips of water, noticing the ‘LIVE’ up in the corner of the screen. You turn up the volume.

The reporter’s words sift through you, but your mind doesn’t parse the words. You’re looking down at your feet, at the carpet again. You’re wearing socks with penguins on them; you must’ve slipped over to his side of the sock drawer again. V barks. V rarely barks inside. You want to call out for quiet, but you don’t.

He’s in the apartment, too. V continues to bark. It’s coming from the bathroom room, you realize. Your gaze shifts back to the TV, questions starting to flit about inside your head, like a ricocheting bullet on a path of destruction. A siren wails somewhere far away, then startlingly close. The distance is breached in the blink of an eye.

You cough into your hand, dark-tanned and long-fingered. You cough again. Short, painful coughs. V is still barking. The sirens are still howling, close and far away simultaneously—ambulance, police, fire department? You can’t quite focus. Something clatters to the floor like a set of dominoes in the bathroom. You turn your head, snap-quick. You don’t look at your hand before you wipe it on your jeans, you don’t register the tangy, metallic taste of blood in your mouth, you don’t have time to. A disconnect.

You scramble to your feet.

. . .

Rather than assaulting himself with the light from his smartband, Brad asked Nyx what time it was.

“It is exactly 0400, local time. Is there anything I might assist you with?”

Brad grumbled a ‘no’. It was the dream again.

The one night he hadn’t had the foresight to move the journal from the passcoded lockbox beside his bed to the shelf above it, was the one night he actually needed it. His efforts to avoid bright lights were for naught, too, as the surprisingly potent illumination of the passcode pad lit up like a beacon at sea.

Having removed both the journal and pen, Brad slumped back down on the bed, using his thigh to steady the notebook as he wrote. The words came out crooked, borderline illegible. The last entry was made more than three months ago. Even after eight years, Brad still had no idea who the other man in the apartment was, or what he looked like. But one thing had changed.

Brad had been able to read something in the dream he hadn’t before: the first half of a headline printed on a folded up newspaper.

1,579 MERS F—????

. . .

Scratching only the surface, applying some pop psychology, it could be said Nate’s motivation for joining the Alliance Marine Corps was a combination of wanting to belong somewhere, and wanting to do something for the greater good. All in all, it wouldn’t be wrong.

There had been no single defining moment that’d lead Nate on the path to becoming a Marine; no more than there’d been a single defining moment that had him retiring. But his oldest brother joining the Insurgents when Nate was just shy of fifteen—it’d had a lasting impact on him, and his choices from thereon.

William Fick: barely twenty, dropped out of university to join the enemy. For years, Nate hadn’t known what’d happened to him, if William was even alive still. They all remained clueless: Nate, his sister, his parents.

There was an ambush on a group of Insurgents stowed away in the jungle of Caiphas. The ambush itself hadn’t been anything out of the ordinary. But ten miles out, in the middle of the jungle thickets, a mass-grave was discovered. A total of 24 individuals were found, 18 of which remained unidentified. They were all between the ages of 18 and 40, reasonably healthy. Executed with a single shot to the head, point blank, while facing their executioner. All of them were naked. The clothes had most likely been incinerated along with any form of ID. Not nearly enough time could have passed for it to have deteriorated naturally.

The Insurgents were a lot of things, but they weren’t known for executing their own.

It was dumb luck Nate needed to access the extensive database of deceased and unidentified Insurgents in an attempt to find someone else entirely. A prominent leader grown to become a legend. They needed evidence of her death, in hopes of quelling the building mythos surrounding her. Instead, Nate found a sparse autopsy file including the report from the initial discovery of the mass-grave—‘possible paramilitary ambush’—and photos of his brother. Eyes closed, face expressionless. A cleaned-up, circular wound square in the middle of his forehead. William’s date of death was estimated to six years prior, when Nate had been only nineteen.

There was no body to bury. It’d been incinerated, and the ashes disposed of when no-one had been able to identify the man after a year. Standard protocol. William Fick, the first and oldest child, the one who’d joined the wrong side of the fight and remained loved despite it. Nate was the one who had to break it to his parents, to his sister.

William had died one year before Nate himself joined the Marines. Nate stayed on for five years. For the remaining two, he hadn’t existed.

His last mission before retiring was a clean-up effort. That’s what they called it; like they were still trying to put a good spin on it—this public relations mindset—even when no-one would ever know it’d happened in the first place. This mission was something else entirely from the humanitarian clean-up efforts started around that time, when the armistice was slowly coming into its own.

Nate was the leader of a small, five-man team. The moment they’d landed on the colony, they’d known something wasn’t right. But orders were orders, and they were ghosts. It didn’t matter if it was right or wrong; there was only one way home, and it was through. He and Tomas got separated from the rest of the team. All things considered, it hadn’t even made the top five worst missions Nate had been part of, off the radar or otherwise. It still continued to be the one he dreamt about, sometimes.Upon joining the Marines, Nate lost most of the friends he’d gained during his teens. When he’d announced his desire to retire from the Corps, they'd tried to keep him on by promoting him to Captain. An incentive to stay; an obligation; a guilt-trip? Nate couldn't tell, even if he wanted to. So when he left, he lost a fair share of the friends he’d gained in the Corps, too. Different animals though they were, both had Nate’s betrayal to bond over, if not ideals.

He skimmed the summary of an article about the ongoing peace talk between the Alliance government and the Insurgents. The armistice was nearly 3 years old, now; the anniversary was coming up soon. Peace between the Alliance and the Insurgents would mean the Wastelands ceased to exist. The colonies would once again fall under the Alliance, under their governance as well as their protection. Many of the Alliance loyalists were worried about what a reunification would mean.

It wasn’t as though Nate wanted the war to rage on; he had no love for the Insurgents, but he knew their civilians, like all civilians, were just that. Regardless of what they believed in, they were still human beings, innocents caught in the crossfire of war, of ideology. Civilians were always the ones who experienced the ceaseless grief of war, no matter which side of it they belonged to, no matter which side ultimately won.

He still had that voice, even if it was buried somewhere deeper now; the voice that carried a near indestructible faith there was always hope, however small. By now, at twenty-eight and counting, Nate was fairly sure this hope had shriveled up. Not died, perhaps, but too much of a husk to muster anything for the future of humanity.

On bad days, Nate was a walking-talking contradiction.

Nate closed all the news tabs. He needed to get on with his day. There were messages to answer; subtle reminders he still had friends and family. He sighed, leaning back into his chair, staring at the unread messages. Most of them were from friends or family. Those were the messages he’d been neglecting since leaving Earth. His mom, likely asking about how he was settling in. Mike Wynn’s message was tagged ‘bad ideas’ which could mean anything. Minah Park’s message was tagged, ‘CORPORATE SELLOUT???!!!’ which seemed fairly self-explanatory.

The right corner of Nate’s lips twitched. He opened the message from Minah.

. . .

Bryan frowned up at Brad, and said, “You want to talk about your nightmares?”

They’d had a few conversations about Brad’s nightmares before, but it’d never gone into any greater detail. Mostly it’d been begrudging, noncommittal conversations that began and ended with ‘nightmares’. It was part of the psychological evaluations, after all, and Brad admitting he had nightmares—even the recurring kind—wasn’t of any greater concern. He showed no signs of PTSD or any other mental illness. Nightmares were—in a sort of ‘what can you do?’ kind of way—expected, accepted, and then brushed aside.

Other than the incident involving Matvey earlier that month, there had never been any noteworthy problems with disorderliness or the like among the staff. And the incident with Matvey had been on the extreme end of the spectrum; no-one had seen it coming, despite all the preventative efforts put in place.

Mars was, on a whole, little more than research facilities, scattered far and few between. The planet had never undergone terraforming, not after the first, early attempts when mankind first started colonizing their solar systems. At worst, Bryan would sometimes encounter cases resembling ‘cabin fever’ as the facility itself was quite secluded, and getting off-planet leave was more hassle than it was worth most of the time. But other than this, Oneiroi was peaceful enough.

“Here.” Brad unceremoniously dropped his journal on Bryan’s desk. Bryan’s gaze went from Brad’s face to the notebook. He didn’t pick it up, just let it sit there on the table between them. Instead, Bryan gestured for Brad to sit down.

“Why the change of heart?” Bryan asked.

“You’re bound by doctor-patient confidentiality, right?” Brad said by way of response.

“As long as you don’t give the impression of being a danger to yourself or others, in which case I’m contractually obligated to report it. Otherwise, anything you say to me, here, is in confidence.”

“Like a priest,” Brad said. Bryan didn’t rise to the bait. Brad leaned forward. “I trust you.”

“You can’t manipulate me into not reporting you if it turns out to be needed.”

“Give me some credit.” Brad rubbed a hand over his short hair, returning to a more comfortable position. “I’m too fucking tired to even entertain the idea.”

“You’re still having difficulties sleeping? What about the inoc-shot side-effects?”

“The fever’s gone. Mild headache. It’s fine, getting better,” Brad said, dismissing it. “And I’ve been sleeping, but I don’t feel any less tired when I wake up, same as it’s been for the last eight months. Although I seem to be sleeping deeper, now. At least according to the log,” Brad said, looking down at his hands, absently touching the smartband. His nails were painfully short. He’d been biting them lately.

Brad twined his fingers together so the nails were out of sight, and squared his shoulders. He breathed in, and said, “I’ve been having these dreams…. I don’t remember them most of the time, but there’s this one specific dream that keeps on repeating.”

“Does this bother you?”

Brad grimaced, but the expression disappeared almost as quickly as it arrived. His expression was neutral when his gaze settled on the notebook. He nodded at it. “ For years now, I’ve been having this one particular dream… It started when I was maybe twenty-three, twenty-four. It’s the same one, down to a T, every time.”

“Does the dream prevent you from falling asleep? Staying asleep?” Bryan asked. He picked up the notebook. The edges were frayed. There was a processed feel to the faux-suede leather, a bushy thread marking a spot past the middle. “And what is this?”

“A log. Details.”

“A dream journal,” Bryan said, cracking it open at the middle. The ink was cheap but durable, the kind of ink pens they kept in stock for emergencies. Brad’s handwriting was familiar, if slightly less uniform from the digital signatures Bryan was accustomed to seeing. As he flipped through the pages, Bryan noticed the slight changes in the ink’s color between entires, noting the different dates in the corners. Some of the dates were far apart, others close together. “Why is this so important to you? What do you hope to achieve?”

The clinical tone to Bryan’s questions felt wrong, grating. Brad would rather have incredulity, ridicule. He unfurled his fingers so they rested atop his thighs. The nails were bitten down to the point he could practically see the nerve-endings. He met Bryan’s gaze, clenched his jaw, and said, “I don’t know.”

It was more terrifying than the dreams themselves: Brad had always known what he wanted.

Except when he found himself leaving the Marines altogether. Ten days he’d spent in his mostly empty house, in the middle of seaside nowhere, before jumping on the offer to become the new Chief of Security at Oneiroi. Like that had ever been something he’d wanted in life.

“Mom’s crying,” Sarah said. The hammock-like bench stirred and gave an irritable groan when she sat down next to Brad, both of them facing their childhood home. It was two days until he was leaving. It was all he ever did, according to Sarah. “She thought you were back for good this time.”

“I never said that.” Brad accepted the mangled half of cinnamon roll Sarah was offering. He didn’t want any, but took a small bite anyway. A peace offering. Sarah tucked a leg under herself, and picked off a piece of pastry. She ate it slowly. The sun was starting to set behind the houses. Brad leaned his shoulder against Sarah’s, and she put her head to rest on his. “It’s not war,” Brad said.

Sarah huffed a humorless laugh, throwing her dark brown braids behind her back. “That probably just makes it worse. In mom’s eyes, anyway.”

Brad remembered being six-years-old and missing two front teeth, wearing a summer tan that never seemed to fade, when he proclaimed his intention to join the Alliance Marines the moment he was old enough. Their parents hadn’t said much about it this way or that, but nine-year-old Sarah? She had something to say about it. By the time Brad was eleven, he joined the Alliance Military Academy, fresh out of primary school. Sarah refused to talk to him for three whole months.

“Are you going to sell the house?” Sarah asked. Brad felt her head move against his shoulder, and when he looked down at her, sure enough, she was looking right back at him.

“No,” Brad said. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Still sticking it to Cait?”

“You really think I’d hold a grudge that long?”

“I’ve never been able to figure out if you’re the kind of person who holds grudges until the end of time, or just don’t hold grudges at all,” Sarah said and removed her head from Brad’s shoulder, settling her bare feet in the grass.

“If it was the former, we’d have ceased being on speaking terms way before I ever joined the Academy.”

Sarah made a face, like she had no choice but to concede to this. She got to her feet and kissed Brad’s forehead, close to the hairline. She rubbed his cheek like their mom used to do when they were kids, like Sarah did with her own kids, these days. “Put some more effort into keeping in touch with us this time around, okay?”

Brad spent his last day on Earth surfing, eating twice reheated take-out, and finishing off the few beers left in his otherwise emptied fridge.

“Brad,” Bryan repeated.

Brad looked at him, frowning.

“You didn’t answer earlier. About the dream. Does it prevent you from falling asleep, or staying asleep?”

“No.”

Bryan leveled him with a searching look, then said, “I see no reason to report this, but—” He leaned forward, pointing the edge of the notebook at Brad. “I’d like to do some imaging tests. And I’d like to read through this. We’ll take it from there. Agreed?”

All Brad wanted at this point was for someone to tell him he was going crazy. That his suspicions of a past life unfolding in his dreams were ludicrous. After eight years, though, he wasn’t so sure he’d be able to believe it, anymore. To believe his dreams were anything but the truth.

“Agreed,” Brad replied.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

You still haven’t gotten around to retiling the bathroom. During the viewing six years ago, the real estate agent did her best to show you everything else first, so when you walked into the bathroom, with spring sunshine streaming through the tiny slats passing for windows, you had this bizarre, unplaced association with an underground river of bubblegum-pink ectoplasm.All three of the small windows are ajar, allowing a distorted ambiance of city life to echo off the bathroom walls. Aren’t bathrooms supposed to have the best acoustics? It doesn’t sound right; the wind, the traffic, the chattering of conversations. Twisted, like passing through a poor radio connection.You forget why you came in here in the first place. You were supposed to do something. You cough, and it hurts between your shoulder blades at this point. You’ve almost reached the open frame leading into the living-room when you remember what you’re supposed to be doing. You pause for a moment, irritated. You close your eyes, center. You can hear him in the kitchen, the water running, V’s bowl clacking against the floor as it gets put down.Your fingers trail against the bureau as you pass it on your way back to the bathroom. He hates that bureau. Every time he walks past it from the living-room, he walks straight into the sharp edge. It’s too big for the narrow hallway, but it’s spacious. Its drawers hold spent pens and notepads; cables neither of you know what belongs to, old electronics that might come in handy someday, but likely won’t, and ought to be recycled; scarves, gloves, and hats for winter. A bowl of keys and garage openers; a couple of mismatched frames with photos in them; a fake, green ball of tiny, clover-shaped leaves perched on a plant pot. The dimness of the hallway; no windows, no lights on during the day, because you had to save the planet, save the bills, one thing at a time.Bubblegum pink. Bubblegum pink. Bubblegum pink.V follows you into the bathroom, her claws clickity-clacking louder on the tiles. She’s still shedding her white winter coat, the laundry a batch of black, and it’s probably counterintuitive, but you let her stay, anyway. You appreciate the company. You don’t want to be alone. It’s too quiet.The clothes from the washer-drier aren’t that heavy, but they feel like pounds piled upon pounds when you move them into the basket by your feet. You have to pause midway, close your eyes again, center. You’re actually out of breath. Your fingers tingle, lungs rattle; death knell, water, Legos in a ventilator. V noses at your hand, and you hold onto her scruff for a moment. She’s sat down next to you, neatly on top of your left foot. She exudes so much heat. Soft. Bony.By the time you finish transferring the load of fresh laundry, V is back on all fours. She’s whining. You’re lightheaded. This must be what a helium balloon feels like, slipping out of some kid’s sticky fingers, floating up into the stratosphere with a wail trailing behind. You’re waiting for the pop and drop.There’s sirens outside, and V is barking. You try to grab onto the washer-drier, hold onto the edge, but your hands fix on something soft and scratchy. Bottles crash to the floors seconds before you do. V is barking, frantic, licking your face. You can’t feel your face. The bubblegum-pink starts to wash out, fade, a waterfall surges through your ears, through your skull. It’s like the sirens are right next to you, inside you, swarming, distorted.There’s a mad scramble. A cacophony of feet and claws. Arms around your chest, two-day stubble grating against the sensitive skin of your neck. It’s pop and drop. The sirens burst your eardrums from inside and your eyesight follows suit. Bubblegum-pink implosion.

. . .
 Nate dreamt, too.

. . .
 The Alliance groomed Brad to become a soldier in their army. From age eleven, he’d attended one of the most prestigious Alliance Military Academies the galaxy had to offer. He graduated with good marks in most of his classes, only one or two remaining below-average. Between ages eighteen and twenty-three, Brad did six tours. Almost everything he’d done after age twenty-three remained sealed, or remained entirely undocumented.They all had to go through a mandatory background check before becoming part of the Oneiroi staff; only a matter of security due to the labs. There wasn’t much to Brad's file, other than his medical history and some spotted parts of his service history. The more Bryan went through the file, the more it felt like bare-bones.Bryan spent the last few weeks parsing through Brad’s dream journal. It did read more like a log: extensively detailed, and to the point. Much of it were simple keywords, not much by way of exposition. At the very back of the book, turned upside down, there were several pages of nothing but details added through the years. Like a list of adjectives; a dictionary without definitions.Bryan couldn’t make sense of it. As logs—in the most basic sense—sure. What he couldn’t make sense of was the why. Why was this dream recurring? Why did Brad seem so obsessed with it? Was this obsession fueling the dream itself, making it recur more frequently? Like a self-fulfilling prophecy?Furthermore, he couldn’t understand what Brad expected him to do about it. Bryan was an M.D, not a psychologist, or better yet, a neurologist. And dream interpretation was certainly not his forte, nor anything he put much stock in, for that matter.The fact Brad Colbert only had this one recurring dream bothering him was beyond Bryan’s understanding.Bryan shuffled through the pages of the journal for what felt like the millionth time. There was no chronology to the entries, so he’d found himself writing his own notes while reading. Trying to create a timeline, perhaps. Anything to create some order in the chaos.With his notes and Brad’s notebook sitting side-by-side on his office desk, Bryan asked Nyx to find a definition for MERS.“Give me a moment to search all available databases… I have found several million mentions of ‘MERS’. The most relevant results refer to a fatal respiratory virus. It was mistakenly thought to be similar to SARS upon discovery. Both were active within the first quarter of the 21st century on Earth.”“Was there any notable outbreaks of either one?” Bryan asked. Brad had only written ‘respiratory virus, 2012’ in his notes.“SARS was on the verge of pandemic between year 2002/2003, followed by a few inconsequential outbreaks in the next sixty years. The 2002/2003 outbreak had its beginnings in South China. MERS was first reported in November 2012, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It proved low-risk for the next eight years, until 2020, when it became pandemic. It is estimated to have caused 4.3 million deaths globally. There have been no significant outbreaks of either virus since 2042. Aside from belonging to the same family, SARS and MERS are distinct from each other. Would you like a more in-depth analysis of the data?”“Thanks, Nyx, that’ll be all for now.” Bryan leafed back to the beginning of Brad’s journal.What do you look for, when you have no idea what you’re looking for in the first place?

. . .
 The cafeteria served breakfast from 0500 to 1200. Lunch was all the way until 1700, and dinner until 2400, at which time they closed up shop for the day. A month and a half having already passed, these times were firmly committed to Nate’s memory. Not so much because he made it a priority to observe them; more so because he always seemed to be five minutes late.At the end of the night, before service was shut down, the kitchen crew would make a batch of sandwiches and leave them in the cooled, self-serve displays. You only had to pay a single credit for them. Whatever wasn’t finished off throughout the night, was free the next day. There were also fruits, and a small assortment of desserts available throughout morning and night, and all food prepared and consumed on the facility was free of animal produce.So this had become Nate’s nighttime routine. He would sit down at the table to the far right, pushing his chair back until it tapped against the wall, and make himself comfortable while he ate a sandwich, or something sweet if he wasn’t hungry, only sleep-deprived and restless. He had a good view of the entire cafeteria, empty though it was.He flicked through various tabs on the tablet perched in front of him. It was connected to the OCC. and thanks to biometrics it only responded to him. He couldn’t do anything heavy-duty with it, but it did allow him to move around the facility more freely.He had a game of Scrabble open somewhere in the midst of all the tabs. Minah was on the other side of the board. Nate could imagine her tapping the tiles against the floor. They’d only ever played it with an actual, physical board once before, when they’d first met while consulting together aboard the experimental Alliance ship, Aether.The letters at Nate’s disposal on the digital board didn’t immediately jump out at him with a word scoring high enough for him to maybe have a chance at winning this round. Both he and Minah were too stubborn to look up words when they got stuck. A single game could go on for weeks and weeks like this, sometimes months even.He continued to frown at the letters, rummaging through his vocabulary, chewing his sandwich slowly. As his fingers remained inactive, the tablet’s screen turned opaque, going into sleep-mode. He collapsed its supports and pushed it aside so he could finish his sandwich.He’d thought he might run into Brad. They both seemed to gravitate here when they couldn’t sleep. No such luck tonight, though. Nate gathered the sandwich’s biodegradable casing, and swept the crumbs off the table.

. . .
 Brad never actually ran out of work to do. Instead, he ran out of patience with which to do it. Sometimes he’d end up patrolling—roaming, really— various sectors at night when neither sleep nor administrative work could sway him.His favorite spot was the Observatory. He had to pass the cafeteria to get there, so lately he’d found himself not getting to the Observatory at all. But not tonight.It was only a rectangle of a room, about ten long strides across. Taking those ten long strides would have you standing in front of an opening in the metal, from floor-to-ceiling, from one wall to the other, where you could watch the scenery unencumbered. The concave window was automatically covered during storms, and the room would seal off in the unlikely event of a breach. Brad had been there, once, at the beginning of a storm. He’d wondered, idly, what it might be like, standing outside in the whirlwinds, the open night sky, knowing it’d be the last time.There was a moveable bench located in the middle of the room. A round table and some chairs were in one corner, similar to the ones in the security personnel apartments. Most of the staff didn’t spend time here much. You’d seen it once, twice, a handful of times, and the novelty wore off. It didn’t help it was so far removed from the heart of the facility.Brad stood watching the Martian night. There wasn’t much to see, other than desert and mountainous ranges off in the distance. There were no other facilities close to Oneiroi, and the communication towers were too far off to the left to be seen from here.Not for the first time, Brad’s body felt too light, his hands unoccupied and restless. Like he ought to be heavier, exhausted, on watch duty with his weapon firmly latched to him. The sand looked cold, a dark blue; the stars in the sky bright and twinkling. He’d seen far greater starscapes; from ships, or planets mostly uninhabited, no light pollution to wage battle with their insignificant victories.When the door slid open behind him with a soft whooshing noise, Brad only turned his head to the side, arms still across his chest. He saw Nate out of the corner of his eye. He wasn’t surprised to see him, which was a little surprising in itself.“Hey,” Nate said, coming to a halt. “You mind?”Brad made a gesture like by all means, and turned back to the landscape.Nate was soundless as he walked over. The stealth hadn’t left him, even so many years out of the Marines. Brad also knew Nate wasn’t wearing shoes. He never was, when they bumped into each other in the night. An unexpected quirk.“You roam around a lot more than Matvey did,” Brad said at length.“Do you consider it a security issue?”“No, just an observation. It’d be more cause for worry if you holed up in the OCC 24/7, probably.”“If I don’t change up the scenery every once in a while, I start forgetting about—well, everything. Sleep, food…”That kind of hyper-focus at the detriment of all else was only ever effective when it was absolutely necessary. Not so different from how it’d been while in the field, really. Constantly sleep-deprived, borderline malnourished, hanging onto whatever sanity and humanity they had left with routine, and quick-fire bursts of adrenaline. Nate didn’t say any of this, but Brad’s quiet nod made him think he heard it, anyway.“So, no sleep tonight?” Brad asked, glancing at Nate.“Maybe, probably not.”The color outside had started to change. Brad wasn’t sure how long he’d been standing there by himself before Nate arrived, but he hadn’t thought it was as long as the coming sunrise suggested. Nate took a step closer to the window, almost touching it. Brad watched him. His shoulders relaxed a little.“You’ve been here over a month, and you haven’t see the sun rise yet?” Brad asked.“It hadn’t crossed my mind,” Nate replied.The sky went pinkish-red by increments, a purplish-blue halo around the sun. There was nothing unusually remarkable about Martian sunrises, or even this particular sunrise, but it felt valuable, somehow.It wasn’t uncommon for those who traveled outside the solar system, to do just that. They didn’t set their eyes on planets like Mars or any of its colonized moons—neither of which had much to offer for the average individual. They were too close to Earth for these restless hearts, whether it was wanderlust or escape, running away from something, or running toward it.Nate had never quite decided with himself what he was doing, when he joined the Alliance Marines. He’d been running away from something, and toward it, too, but it wasn’t just that.“You know what I miss about Earth?” Brad said. “The breeze passing through trees.”
“You’re Earthborn?” Nate asked.“Mmm. You?”“Technically. We jumped colonies a lot. Eventually I ended up with my uncle on Katara,” Nate said, sitting down in one of the chairs in the corner. Brad turned his back to the scenery, leaning against the window instead.“I’ve spent more than half of my life on Earth. Been a couple of years now, though,” Brad said.“Do you miss it? Aside from the breeze.”“I miss the sea.”The dark, soft Earthen soil. His family, on bad days. Especially Sarah. Every once in a while, Brad missed his house. Too spacious, and probably too empty by normal standards, but so close to the ocean you could step off the veranda and right onto the beach. It was worth the grime and wear the salt did to everything. It was worth finding sand every-fucking-where, too. It was worth the rare reminder of Caitlin. But Brad knew, deep down, the next time he went back to Earth—whether permanently or temporarily—he’d finally be putting the house up for sale. It’d never really been his. “I miss surfing,” he said.Nate could easily imagine Brad getting up before the crack of dawn, donning a wet-suit tied up around his waist, with suntan skin flaking in places from overexposure. Sun-bleached hair, bobbing on a board in the middle of vast, open waters, the horizon gray with morning mist.“What about you? Missing Earth?” Brad asked.“Practically just left. It’s just another planet to me, I guess. Nothing tying me to it. My parents finally settled down some years ago, on Vale’s Hope. My younger sister lives there, too.”“Vale’s Hope, huh?” Brad said, smiling slightly. It was a colony known for being inhabited mostly by academics, colloquially known as ‘the Egghead Planet’. “So that begs the question: How’d you end up joining the Marines?”“I honestly don’t know,” Nate said.His entire school experience—aside from university—had been private classes on the extranet. It’d allowed him to graduate high school at sixteen, with honors, and by the time he joined the Alliance Marines at twenty, he was already halfway into his second degree. Maybe he had just wanted to belong somewhere. Maybe because he was the middle child, and his brother, the oldest one, had dropped out of university to join the Insurgents. Pride, honor… Maybe because he was only twenty at the time, Nate still believed in the ham-fisted ideology of Good versus Evil, Us versus Them. Likely, it was all of them combined.“Misguided youth?” Nate suggested, eventually.Brad’s responding chuckle was unguarded in a way it hadn’t been before. Nate liked it. Moreover, he liked being the one who made it happen.

. . .
 When Walt entered Ray’s apartment, he was no more surprised by Ray’s complete lack of acknowledgement than Ray was by Walt letting himself in without asking permission. They were over at each other’s apartments often enough, it’d been easier to just exchange passcodes, even though they weren’t supposed to. Who expected privacy in this day and age, anyway? Ray continued rifling through his t-shirts, water dripping from his short hair onto his shoulders.Walt sat down on Ray’s bed, unloading a small stash of vending machine goodies he’d acquired on his way over. Walt’s bones felt like they were going to turn into jello the moment he relaxed, his posture visibly worsening. But he also knew somebody needed to feed Ray.When Ray finally turned around, Walt’s focus immediately went to the t-shirt Ray had picked out. It was maroon with the words ‘LEG RESTS’ printed across the chest in glittering white, with an arrow pointing at each shoulder. Walt snorted.The lewd t-shirts didn’t bother Brad. They’d annoyed him when he first started working here, but now it was more of a game where Ray found the most ridiculous ones he could, liberally disregarding the dress code in the process. He had yet to find a shirt so out of bounds Brad reprimanded him for it. One day. Ray was not giving up the good fight.“Which shift are you on?” Walt asked as Ray sat down in front of his personal—and therefore unauthorized for use on the facility—laptop. Ray woke the holoscreen from its sleep. A terminal was open, busily running through word combinations.“Babysitting,” Ray replied. He moved the terminal tab aside in favor of trashy news sites on the extranet.“I thought you were out of rotation for the next couple of weeks?”“Yeah, man, but I’m awake anyway so why the fuck not. More money, too.” Ray rubbed his fingers together. The four dark-tinted cylinders lined up on Ray’s desk hadn’t slipped Walt’s notice. They almost disappeared among the wires and circuit boards, but not quite. Walt wouldn’t be surprised if Ray had already gone through half a cylinder. So much for rationing.Ray’s gaze followed Walt’s. He twitched slightly, like he wanted to hide the allys, for whatever good it would do. Ray’s expression turned annoyed. He rubbed a hand over his face. Walt noticed a few burn marks on Ray’s fingers, tiny and uniform, likely from a soldering tool. He didn’t comment on it.“When’s the last time you slept?” Walt asked instead, yawning just thinking about it.“Yesterday morning? Couple of days ago?” Ray waved a hand when Walt yawned again. “I’m gonna crash soon, I just gotta—I can feel it, okay? I’m this close. Something’s gonna happen soon.” Ray leaned over his chair at the waist, bracing his wiry, vibrating arms against the edge of the desk. His eyes were staring at a fixed point, even though the random combinations of letters, numbers and symbols were rushing past much too fast. Tirelessly trying to find the right combination.Walt rubbed a hand over his face, stifling a third yawn. He leaned back on his elbows, shifting his feet slightly. “Still not worried they’re gonna find out about it?”“You gonna tell them?” Ray said, not looking away from the screen.“No. ‘Course not.”“Then it’s not a problem. Mat wants me to figure it out,” Ray said, more a reminder than a revelation. They’d had this conversation a few times already. For the most part, it devolved into Walt getting pissed at Ray for absconding with Matvey’s very personal external hard-drive before the investigators could find it after his death. The moment the situation was under control, Ray had fucked off, and inadvertently made himself accessory to murder.Now Ray just had to figure out the password so he could access the damn thing. He only had one chance. If he got the password wrong, everything would get wiped. Matvey had said as much. Ray hadn’t thought anything of it, at the time. A small chill went through him.“Isn’t Nyx gonna figure it out eventually, though?” Walt asked.“Give me some credit, Hass-face. It’s not like I synced it up to her; give me some credit. I might not be Mr Squeaky in the OCC, but I do know something about this stuff.”“You sure about that?”“I’m God’s favorite son, Walt. He wouldn’t let anything happen to me.”“Did he demote Jesus?”“I’m gonna outlive you all.”“Somehow, I don’t actually doubt that,” Walt agreed. He yawned again. If he didn’t get to his own apartment within the next ninety seconds, he’d pass out wherever he found himself standing. He threw a bag of gummy bears at Ray, clipping his head so it landed in Ray’s lap. “Eat and sleep,” Walt said, and left.“Only if you sing me to sleep!” Ray shouted at the closing door.

. . .
 Ray ate all the gummy bears, drank the water, finished off the chips. His shift didn’t start for another five hours. He paced the apartment, wiggling his fingers, clacking his teeth together. He threw himself on the bed, letting the decryption software run in the background.He lay like a plank, lacing his fingers across his chest, and closed his eyes. He’d talked to his mom a few days ago; the farming equipment was in dire need of some repairs, but she told Ray not to worry about it. They always figured a way through.It wasn’t something they talked about, but a small portion of Ray’s monthly paycheck automatically went into his parents’ joint savings account. He just set it up one day, and his parents had never mentioned it since. They were kind of proud people, and Ray didn’t like confrontations. People never believed him when he said that. In any case, his parents weren’t bad off, generally speaking, but the Persons were a big family, tight-knit. A bunch of kids, a bunch of grandkids.Really, they were the archetypical family you’d find in the outer reaching colonies, right before you hit the Wastelands. Their colony was a farming colony; a small one, all things considered. Most of the planet had quite a hostile environment despite being terraformed. They relied mainly on export of rare, overly expensive fruits and vegetables.The colonies in the outer reaches weren’t usually big—their numbers grew slowly as the young people left more often than they stayed. Ray’s parents had both been born and raised on Eos. They’d never seen much reason to leave, nor felt any kind of wanderlust. They’d remained neutral during the worst of the Insurgent war. But push come to shove, Ray suspected they would’ve sided with the Insurgents.Since he wasn’t sleeping anyway, Ray figured he might as well put a little more of his paycheck into their account this month. He missed his home colony, sometimes. Other times he was glad to be so far away from it. Right now, being in a physical body was too much of a commitment. He opened his eyes. He checked his watch. Only five minutes.“Yo, Nyx! Anybody in the gym?”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

The last year, maybe a little less, Brad had found himself in Bryan’s office more and more often. It was disconcerting. Brad had always been a very healthy individual, both mentally and physically. It was like his body had flipped a switch.Bryan had a true litany of questions he wanted to get through. He would ask something, and proceed writing notes as Brad answered. Some were simple, sensible questions. Others were… annoying, and difficult, and Brad would rather do anything but answer them.How did the dream make him feel? How did it make him feel while he was in it? Did he think about it during the day, during the week? What did Brad think the dream might mean? What might it relate to? Did he think there was some hidden meaning to it? Was there any history of mental illness or degenerative cognitive disease in his family? Had he ever engaged in drug use, legal or illegal? Had his family, or anyone close to him during his childhood, ever owned a dog? What about—The very first time Brad had taken the halos, it was like the universe uncoiled itself. The harsh glories and colors surrounding everything; living, dead, inanimate, it didn’t matter. For the first few seconds, it surged the nervous system, like a supernova. Everything so incandescent it obscured his very sense of self. Then, for the next twenty minutes, the harsh glories and colors slowly faded into nothing. It sounded beautiful, but it wasn’t. Harrowing, terrifying; the only words able to describe even a fraction of it.Bryan was in the middle of another question, one Brad hadn’t heard the beginning of, when Brad said, “Yes.”“Yes?”“Yes, I’ve done drugs.” Brad straightened up in his chair. He met Bryan’s gaze. He held it. A split-second decision. “Stims. E.532. What the allys were supposed to be.”A long pause.Bryan drew a decisive line in his old-school notebook. He asked Brad, “When was the first time?”“April. About 8 years ago.”“For how long? Continuous use? Intermittent?”“Intermittent. Maybe sixteen months combined. Two to three months off at the most, a couple of days off, at the least.”“When was the last time?” Bryan asked. He’d stopped writing.“Two years, four months. Give or take,” Brad said. His face was carefully neutral.“You do realize what you’re implying?” Bryan asked.“Nothing that’ll hold up to scrutiny,” Brad replied. He had no proof of ever having used halos. He couldn’t even prove the halos existed. The last time he’d been weaned off the stuff was almost two and a half years ago, after all. Nothing left to carry residue.But it was true. The Alliance decommissioned Oneiroi, laid the project to rest after the first human trial went wrong, after the scandal. They did all this, on paper. Oneiroi became a non-profit. The perfect ruse, if there ever was one. The project lived on, undead. It sounded too much like every conspiracy theorists’s wet dream: every spy novel since the dawn of man. Stranger than fiction.They were ghosts. Brad’s team, other teams, too, but no crossover. You knew yours, and that was it. Take the pills, do your job. There was none of the glitz and glamour of the fictional spy. No unique gadgets, no casual sex, or worse, falling in love. No romance, no romanticism of any kind. Just the mission. No red tape. Get in, get out. You die? You’d be listed as AWOL. Dishonorable discharge in absentia. No body for your loved ones to bury.You live? Then you’d get to live with the knowledge that you knew nothing about the mission, other than your directive.Did you do the right thing? The wrong thing? Did you change the course of history? And did you do it for better, or worse? You ignore all of these questions. Every night when they come knocking into your conscious, you ignore them. When they attempt to pry your eyelids open, you ignore them.“Somebody’s got to do it,” they’d say.There was nothing honorable in that.Putting his pen down, Bryan leaned back in his chair. He stared Brad down. “Do you happen to know anything about the side-effects?” Bryan asked, eventually. “Similar side-effects to the allys? Worse, better?”“Yes and no. Worse, for the most part.”“Well… This is fucked.”“Beautiful bedside manner,” Brad said.“Fuck you,” Bryan replied, more dry than heated. “Can you tell me anything about the possible side-effects?”Brad shrugged. “What’s true for the allys is true for the halos. Anxiety, depression, withdrawal. Just take the extremes of the allys, what might happen but usually doesn’t, and assume it happens a lot more often with the halos. Psychosis, severe mood disorders, hallucinations, suicidal ideation—all that good stuff. I can’t tell you, exactly; it’s not like the docs and psychs told us how everyone else was doing. It’s just a matter of… filling in the blanks.”Bryan said, “I want to help you.” He could side-step his own disbelief for now. Besides, he couldn’t think of any reasons why Brad would lie. He handed the journal back to Brad. “Your last entry—you mention a respiratory virus, MERS. Any idea why?”Brad shook his head. He’d looked it up the next morning. It hadn’t rung any bells.“I want to help you,” Bryan said again, and stood up. “I could confer with Dr Durand—only generalities—she might have some insight, being a neurologist—”“No,” Brad said.“No?” Bryan repeated. Brad didn’t elaborate. Bryan sighed.“Do you believe me?” Brad asked.“Do you trust me?” Bryan asked in return.Brad clenched his jaw, said, “Should I?”“I took that damn Hippocratic Oath so my hands are tied, whether I believe you or not,” Bryan said. “I won’t confer with Dr Durand, at least for the time being. Doctor-patient confidentiality.”Brad looked at Bryan, then down at the journal in his hands. The spine rested against his palm. It was growing clammy. “There’s no point keeping track of the nightmares,” Brad said, an answer to a question long since asked. “I know what they are, and I know why they’re there.”“You’ve got to appreciate the irony of you ending up here,” Bryan said as Brad was about to leave.“It’s not lost on me,” Brad agreed. He hefted the journal and left.

. . .

Brad stood at the top of the small lecture hall. The light was as dim as it could get before going out entirely. The handful of rows were empty, save for one seat in the middle. Off to the side, Kocher sat. From where he stood, Brad couldn’t see what he was looking at, but the light from tablet’s holoscreen lit up Kocher’s face from below.Kocher didn’t notice Brad walking down to the row he sat in. Brad was only a few steps away when he could finally discern what Kocher was looking at: a sonogram. It played on a loop; heartbeats, tiny, twitching movements. Brad slowed down.Kocher started when Brad sat down in the chair one over from him.“You getting a little too comfortable on this rock?” Brad asked. He gestured at the tablet, the room at large. The holoscreen went opaque.“Didn’t expect anybody to sneak up on me in here, at two in the morning,” Kocher replied.“You can never be too careful,” Brad said. He stretched out his legs, sinking further into his seat. “So now I know what you were doing on leave. Hell of a family emergency.”Kocher scoffed a laugh. He put the tablet on the chair next to himself. “We got married,” he said.Brad moved his head to the side, ear pressed against the rest. He raised an eyebrow.“Not legally, but… In the eyes of God, and all that.”“One day, Ray’s gonna figure it out, you know.”“The other day he said he’d seen the error of his ways.”Brad laughed. It wasn’t difficult to imagine Ray saying it. It was much more difficult imagining Ray say it with any kind of conviction.It was none of Brad’s business, and he knew Kocher more than well enough to know he was being trusted with what little he did know. But it was still a mystery to Brad: all this secrecy they insisted on. He could understand Minah’s desire to keep it under Alliance radar, at least to some extent, but Kocher and Minah’s relationship had always felt like an open secret: everyone knowing, or at the very least suspecting it. It didn’t get more serious than marriage and babies. How they were going to wing this was beyond Brad.“Apparently, she’s way out of my league,” Kocher said. “According to Ray.”“No accounting for taste. So how far along is she?”“Eight weeks as of yesterday. I’ve been listening to the heartbeat for the last twenty minutes. Just… looping it,” Kocher said. He slid further into his seat as well, putting his elbows on the rests. Staring at the opaque screen, he said, “I’m gonna be a dad. I’m fucking terrified.”“As you should be. Though, according to my sister, it’s a lot harder to fuck up your kids than you worry it’s gonna be. Apparently.”“Good to know,” Kocher said. He put his chin to his chest with a small smile. “Speaking of questionable intel—what’s up with you and our new CSA?”“Well…” Brad shrugged, closed his eyes. “He’s got a pretty mouth.”“Fucking asshole,” Kocher said under his breath. There was laughter in his voice.The rumor mill was always churning.Kocher had heard some tittering about Brad and Nate sighted sparring at odd hours in the gym; sharing meals in the cafeteria in the middle of the night. Or just falling into step with each other, easy as pie, conversing as they walked from one place to another, then falling out of step with the same kind of effortlessness.The rumor mill would never stop churning.“You ever have that feeling like something’s about to happen, but you’ve got no idea what, or if it’s going to be something bad, or something good—you just know something’s waiting for you?” Kocher said.Brad’s eyes were still closed, facing the ceiling. Lucent shapes flitted behind his lids. He thought about the dream. About the halos. About Nate. “Yeah,” Brad said, eventually. “I do.”

. . .

It wasn’t that Brad needed time alone—be it at the gym or otherwise. Throughout his days, he spent plenty of minutes—disjointedly accumulating into hours—alone in his office, or his apartment. But between the insomnia and his administrative duties, he ended up at the gym during the dead hours, anyway.There was this pocket of time where it seemed like no-one was awake on the facility. Everything eerily quiet and calm. Like you were the only one left: on Mars, in the solar system—the entire galaxy. Like you were the last shred of humanity. A peaceful kind of calm shot through with the vague disquiet of being utterly alone in the universe. Like you could touch its extremities with your fingertips; physically sensing the entropy all around you.Existential dread, in other words. Brad liked it there.Even though Nate had barely been there for two months, Brad and Nate had developed a routine that found them sparring together in the gym a few times a week. Hand-to-hand combat, drawing on the varied—and sometimes completely different—training they’d received during their time with the AMC. If they didn’t bump into each other in the cafeteria, they were likely to bump into each other in here. Rarely planned, yet they always seemed to know when the other would be present.There was an undercurrent of energy flowing between them when they sparred. Like tendrils reaching out, finding each other, connecting, sparring along with their physical bodies. At first, it had only been about the sparring itself, the exertion and the challenge, the pure fun of it; but then the layers built, rapid, with each movement, with each strategic shift, with every huffed and held breath.Tonight it ended with Nate pinning Brad to the mats. Brad’s legs locked, hips seized, even his arms halfway pinned by his own body weight and one of Nate’s hands. Nate used his free hand to brace himself next to Brad’s head, leaning over him.“You gonna tap out?” Nate asked, when Brad neither spoke nor resisted after a few seconds.“You gonna make me?” Brad replied, strained.Nate leaned in closer, said, “You want me to?”Nate’s eyes were green and unblinking. His breath was coming more even already, lips still parted. There was a slight sheen of sweat covering his upper lip, and Brad wanted to lick it, taste the saltiness on his tongue. His eyes flitted down, dart-quick, and just like that Nate licked his own lower lip.“Playing dirty makes a dirty winner,” Brad said, his gaze back to Nate’s.“Fine.” Nate sat up. “I forfeit.”Brad almost grabbed Nate’s wrist as soon as he was free, but Nate was too fast, already off him, already holding out a hand to Brad, with a massive shit-eating grin on his face. Their fingers lingered, attached to each other as they headed to the showers, slipping apart but still somehow touching.The few scars Nate had on his ribs were still visible, meaning they’d likely been acquired in combat, or else they would’ve been cosmetically removed during whatever after-care he must have received. They weren’t fatal wounds, as far as Brad could judge, but bad enough to need sealing back up, at least. Nate had quite an impressive scar on his knee, too. It was old; old enough to be completely translucent, but clearly deep enough to have stood the test of time. A scar from his childhood, his early teens.Maybe Nate hadn’t wanted to remove the scars. It was a thing, for some; keeping scars. Not because they held a lot of meaning, necessarily, but because they reminded them they were living, breathing creatures. That their bodies were not something life-like. It reminded them they were alive, and they were going to die, someday.They were still looking for that, the scientists: the key to immortality.When Nate leaned forward, stretching his arm downward to place his tablet on the bench, Brad once again caught an infuriating glimpse of a pointillistic mess of ink: a homemade tattoo.Brad ceased toweling his hair to flick his fingers against the sensitive skin high on the left side of Nate’s ribcage, where the tattoo was, a few inches below his armpit. “What the fuck is that, anyway?” Brad asked. He threw his towel on the bench, halfway turning his back to Nate to grab his shirt from the floor.“Asks the guy with that piece of fine art on his back,” Nate replied. “Ray said it was—”“—‘A horned viking babe with a sword, riding a polar bear’. Yes, I’m familiar.”“It would’ve been better. I’m just saying.” Nate pulled on his own shirt, exposing the entirety of his tattoo for a split second.Brad shifted on the bench, leaning his shoulders against the wall behind him. His hair left a damp spot: a barely-there halo of mist. “So, what’s the story behind that thing you’re so coy about showing me?”“It’s literally just some ink I got when I was seventeen.” Nate sat down next to Brad, his head tilted slightly forward to hide his grin. He did a poor job of it. “See?” Nate said and pulled up his shirt, angling his upper body so Brad got a good look.A myriad of tiny dots. The ink had bled quite a bit, though not as much as Brad would have expected with such an old-school method of tattooing. Six of the dots were considerably larger than the rest. Brad realized they created a shape, easily recognizable as Delphinus. There was a smattering of much tinier dots all around it, arbitrary, like freckles.Nate dropped his shirt and shook his hand out. Brad looked up at him and said, “You’ve really got a thing for those Ancient Greeks, huh?”“In this particular case,” Nate said, eyebrows raised. “It was more of a ‘really had a thing for girl’ kind of situation. She had some India ink, and some needles; I was seventeen and head-over-heels crazy about her. Of course I wasn’t gonna say no,” Nate said, laughing.It’d been sunny outside, the light filtering through thin sheets of fabric hung in lieu of curtains. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed in an oversized t-shirt and no underwear. They were in her apartment. She was nineteen, and Nate had snuck out, lied a little to his uncle, so he could stay over for a couple of nights without worrying about repercussions.That, and his uncle was fairly lenient. Partly a personality trait, but mostly owed to the fact Nate always did what he was supposed to do, always helped out when needed, and his uncle trusted him. What Nate did that he wasn’t supposed to do—well, his uncle didn’t have the mind to consider that, so they were both safe in their assumptions.With her thighs as support, she’d used a cracked tablet as a table, the India ink balancing on it with a few different needles next to the bottle. One of the needles rolled off when she shifted her knee, and she’d spent the next fifteen minutes looking for it, hoping it hadn’t gone into the mattress, only to surface in the middle of the night to poke her in the kidney. And Nate, he was lying on his side, alternating between keeping his head up with his hand, and resting it on his arm.He could still remember the tingly feeling of his arm falling asleep, the pricking of the needle, the sensitivity across his ribs. Her red hair, the day wearing on, becoming cloudy, the midday light. The overall grainy nostalgia of memories.“It took a couple of weeks before she decided it was finished. Then she broke up with me two months later,” Nate said, tilting his head to the side as if he were considering it. “So, what’s the story behind yours?”Brad shrugged. The only person Brad had ever loved enough to willingly do something so colossally stupid for, was Caitlin. And she’d never really asked him to. After Caitlin, he hadn’t had time to pursue anything like that—even if he had, he wouldn’t have wanted to. He’d been stupid in lust a few times, but that was it.“No story. I’m surprised yours doesn’t have some deep, meaningful bull attached to it. I somehow didn’t expect ‘because of a girl.’”“Disappointed?” Nate asked.“Always,” Brad said, tilting his head further back. A small smile curved his lips as he closed his eyes.Nate didn’t move other than to grab his tablet. Their shoulders brushed against each other as Nate swiped through tabs. Brad felt himself drift, not quite falling asleep, but relaxing more than he had in a while.Several minutes had already passed when a message pinged on the tablet, and Nate said, “Duty calls.”Brad could feel, rather than see, Nate lift the tablet for emphasis. He could feel Nate briefly squeezing his thigh too, just above the knee, as he got up from the bench. Brad gave Nate a mock salute. He fully intended to hold onto this relaxed state for at least another ten minutes, his mind and body willing.

. . .

Entering the OCC, Nate bypassed his own holoscreens and headed down to the lower level where the assisting techs were situated. The message he’d received down in the gym hadn’t been alarming, so much as puzzling.“Maybe I’ve just been staring at the screens for too long, but,” Thuy started saying the moment Nate arrived at her station. She pulled up the CPU tab, toggling it to fullscreen. “I noticed the spike, like… twenty minutes ago, maybe? I figured it was just a normal fluctuation, but I’ve been keeping an eye on it, and it’s still going strong. I ran diagnostics, and none of the usuals are acting up; they’re all within the normal range. But look here,” she said, scrolling down the long list until she reached ‘maintenance’.Considering its vitality, maintenance was perhaps the one thing to run smoothest above all else. It was also the one with the most naturally occurring fluctuations. Nate leaned on her desk, as though coming closer to the screen would make more sense of the mountains rippling by. Usually, if something was pulling more juice than it ought to, it was because of a bug, or faulty sequencing; almost like a gene pool getting too narrow.“I’m not just seeing things?” Thuy prompted a moment later, sounding uncertain.“No,” Nate said. He was already on his way back to his own screens. “You’re not just seeing things. Continue keeping an eye on it.”He glanced at Espera, whose dark, alert eyes were following Nate’s movements from where he stood guard at the door.If you wanted to hide something, some latent code or malware, you’d hide it inside maintenance. Nate had gone through everything those first few weeks, he was sure of it. And no-one could hack this system without getting noticed. No-one from the outside, no-one from the inside, either, unless—Unless they were standing right here, where Nate was standing now.“Nyx, what is your highest priority tasks, currently?”“Listing highest priority tasks,” Nyx said. “Preparing to vent emergency oxygen reserves. Preparing facility-wide lockdown. Preparing depressurization.”“Did I just fucking hear that right?” Espera asked, suddenly standing only a few steps away from Nate.Nate ignored him, asking Nyx, “What’s the timeframe? How long until the lockdown? Who authorized this?”He couldn’t override it. She was already shutting him and everybody else out of everything, like dominoes; like she’d been triggered to.“All tasks set to complete in fourteen minutes and twenty-three seconds. Commencing lockdown in six minutes, thirty-two seconds. You are not authorized to access this information.”

. . .

Brad was almost asleep when Espera’s disembodied voice pierced through the thin veil of his doze. He cleared his throat, gave a gravelly, “Yeah, what’s up?”“We’ve got a fucking situation on our hands,” Espera said over the security personnel’s open channel. “According to Fick, Nyx is about to put the entire facility on lockdown so she can depressurize it, and get some wholesale fucking slaughter done.”“Yo, what the fuck?” Trombley cut in.“Ray—Fick wants you in here right the fuck now,” Espera added, ignoring Trombley.Brad was already halfway to his office, boots in hand, only one arm through his shirt, when he said, “I want every one of you spread out. Suit up, and get the fuck moving. The labs are priority.” He switched to a private channel, and said to Espera, “I want you in the library. Fuck protocol.”Nyx’s booming voice cut off whatever response Espera might have had. She was coming through on the public speakers.“This is not a drill. All residents are urged to return to their living-quarters within the next five minutes. If not possible, please remain where you are. Do not remain in open areas. This is not a drill.”“I’m on my way to the OCC,” Ray informed Brad.Across the open channel, Brad said, “We follow basic emergency protocols. Everybody knows where they’re going and what they’re doing. If you don’t know where you need to be, or what you need to do, you might as well walk straight into the fucking desert for all the fucking good you’re doing.”Brad stood behind his desk. The trees swaying in the breeze dissolved into a light gray with three simple words across the middle: cannot access network. No point trying to alert anyone outside. Brad gave it a try, anyway. Cannot access network. Extranet disabled.Brad grabbed an oxygen mask, bypassed the protective gear. He was flaunting half the protocols. When it came down to it, the inability to be flexible about rules and regulations was what got people killed half the time, anyway.

. . .

“Fucking crazy ass rogue VI bitch motherfucker,” Ray panted as he ran. His boots were barely on his feet, threatening to bowl him over with every thundering step. The remaining allys were rattling along in his side-pocket. He’d popped two the moment Nyx started spewing doom over the public speakers.Ray was barely inside the OCC when Nate came up close, right up in Ray’s face, asking, “How well did you know the last CSA?”“Pretty fucking well,” Ray said, immediately on the defensive.The door behind him closed with a barely audible whoosh. It sounded ominous. Like pyramids, like mummies, like petrification. Sealed inside.“Do you think it’s at all possible—do you think it’s likely for him to have left a ticking time-bomb in the system to kill everyone?” Nate got even closer, his questions rapid-fire; like he was trying to solve a riddle as he was saying it. “Why did he take those scientists hostage? Why did he kill them, and then himself? Why would he want to kill everyone in this facility? Are the two events tied together?”Nate’s expression was determined. It might have been a little terrifying, even, if Ray weren’t hopped up on stimulants and the adrenaline rush of a lifetime. Ray opened his mouth to say something, but Nate cut him off.“I don’t have time to be fucking sensitive about this right now, Ray. Why did he kill them?”“I don’t know—I don’t know! That fucking bullshit they dished out—he didn’t give a fuck about people trying to, like, marry extraterrestrial genetics with human genetics or whatever kinda fucking bullshit that whole thing was,” Ray said, gesturing expansively at their surroundings. “Of all the shit they coulda gone with, they go with this fucking outdated conspiracy—”Nate walked over to the holoscreens. The letters he was typing into the terminal were lagging behind compared to how fast his fingers were moving. “She’s shutting me out. I can’t override her. Nothing I’m doing is having any fucking effect—” Nate hit one of the holoscreens with the palm of his hand. It bled into rainbows for a moment. He took a step back, hands behind his head.“How did he think he’d get away with this?” Nate said, not expecting any kind of answer. “How the fuck did he manage to override all of it?”“What exactly do you mean when you say, ‘override all of it’? I mean, I get that depressurization is bad, and all, but it could be, like, a lot worse, right?” Ray said.“Nyx isn’t just depressurizing the facility. She’s about to equalize our atmosphere with Mars’s the easiest way she can: open all the doors. The lockdown is set to cease the moment the breach happens.” Nate looked to the side as Ray came to stand next to him, staring at the holoscreens with his lips parted. “There’s failsafes for this kind of thing—safety measures—but they’ve all been sidelined. I don’t understand how, it’s not supposed to be possible…”“We’re gonna fucking die,” Ray said. The tone of his voice was bordering on awe.“Three minutes until lockdown.”Nate grabbed the OCC tablet from the table. There was a compartment filled with loose ends—wires, cables, old-school tech, tools, bits and pieces of who knew what. Nate grabbed what he needed.“What the fuck are you doing?” Ray asked, from awe to panic in a heartbeat.Nate was practically through the door, calling behind himself, “I’m gonna reboot the mainframe!”

. . .

Nate was already waiting outside the elevator when Ray’s disembodied voice said, “You’re fucking crazy.”There’s one kind of failsafe that can’t be overridden or worked around. If the mainframe got cut off from the system—like during a reboot—then all doors facility-wide would enter a kind of sealed circuit that was no longer connected to the mainframe itself. This way, whatever override Matvey had set in place, also got thwarted.There were literal seconds left when Nate stepped into the mainframe room, and the door shut behind him. Nyx declared over the speakers, “Lockdown is now in effect.” Communications had already been down for over a minute.The room’s temperature was high enough it didn’t immediately feel cold, but it was still considerably lower than Nate’s body temperature. It wouldn’t take long before his teeth started chattering, for the adrenaline to start seeping out of him. He was stuck here, either way.

. . .

Death by a matter of minutes was perhaps a blessing, as opposed to death by slow, long hours of asphyxiation. Ray had told Brad, right before communications went dark, the reality of the situation.There wasn’t much Brad could do, now. Other than hope whatever plan Nate was attempting to execute would save them all. It wouldn’t kill them any faster, or slower, at least. Whatever Nate did, it couldn’t make it any worse than it already was.Brad walked into the Courtyard, his oxygen mask hanging from the tips of his fingers. He was almost at the bridge overlooking the koi pond when Nyx declared the lockdown as in effect. There was no going back now.Despite being his de facto successor, Brad had sent Espera to the library. It wasn’t in line with the emergency protocols, but then the library wasn’t usually filled with kids at night, either. The labs, and those within it, were to be protected above all else.“Only God can save you now,” Brad said to himself, slowing down. A laugh bubbled up in his throat. The bubble burst. He imagined pink flesh and blood smeared everywhere. He let out a croak. A laugh, a cough, a pink little glob of guts, stuck.It wasn’t the worst place to die. In a beautiful garden, underneath Earth’s sky. If only Nyx’s play-by-play wasn’t still droning on in the background, it might have even been peaceful. Brad looked up, noticing a few of the panels had gone light gray, much like the forest in his office. They blinked out, haphazardly, like pixels dying on a screen. Brad almost laughed again. It felt very on the nose, in that moment.Brad had already died once before. On a foreign, wild planet, fighting other humans, because some things just don’t change. Nearly three whole minutes, he ceased to exist. He couldn’t remember anything from it. Couldn’t say if there was a bright light, or simply darkness, or if there was nothing. How would you know, if it were the latter? How would you know, any more than you sense the before of your birth? One day you don’t exist, and the next you do. One day you exist, the next you don’t.The dream—it didn’t feel like a dream. But a life lived at some other point in time, maybe some other universe. Or maybe they were the same thing, somehow. The man in the dream, whom Brad never saw the face of, but knew with the same matter-of-fact certainty the Earth revolved the Sun, so too did Brad revolve him. That this man mattered more than anything. He, and their dog, and the life they’d carved out for themselves.There was a glittering of glories dancing before Brad’s eyes, faint and fading; his skull briefly like a massive nerve of excruciating pain. A nail being driven through it from top to bottom, piercing through to the underside of his jaw. The halos went out with a wink, taking the pain with them.“Five minutes until depressurization,” Nyx said.Brad put his oxygen mask on a bench. It didn’t matter if he wore it or not. The scrubber would last for only a few hours at best, enough to optimize his presence for his own death, should it come. What was the point of that?He was about to straighten up when he heard it: a kid, crying. Breathless, like a body attempting to cry and have a panic attack simultaneously.Suddenly, it felt as if he were in a jungle, like he was back in that jungle, dying—there weren’t even that many trees in the Courtyard, nor the grass tall, yet he couldn’t find his bearings. He checked his smartband; three minutes and forty-seven seconds left.“Can you hear me?” Brad said, loudly. He tried to locate the source of the sound. It had to be close, if he could hear it over everything else. No-one answered, nothing but faint dry-heaves and aborted sobs.When he was a kid, when they played hide-and-seek, when he was scared—where did he hide? Where would he hide if he were scared enough, if he didn’t know what else to do? Somewhere closed off. A closet, a cupboard, underneath a bed…Brad couldn’t say if he spotted her just as he thought of it, or the other way around. To the left, underneath one of the benches fastened to the wall, Thea was curled up. He wouldn’t have noticed her if it weren’t for her bright red sweater.He grabbed her by the forearms—they were crossed at her chest like vices—and pulled her out. Her eyes were squeezed shut, swollen, her face bright and wet with tears. She wrapped her legs and arms around him, just as tight as she’d wrapped them around herself.“I’m here, I’m here,” Brad said against her ear, the mess of her dark hair crawling over his face. She was breathing too fast and shallow. He moved toward the bench he’d put the oxygen mask on. “Thea—Thea, I need you to listen to me, ok? You have to put this on. If something happens, if something happens to me, I want you to run upstairs as fast as you can, and go straight to the library, ok?” She didn’t respond, but she let Brad thread the mask on her, so it covered her mouth and nose. He fastened it as much as it would allow.It felt like he was signing her death sentence. She didn’t have any protective gear. Brad’s office was already sealed due to the lockdown. He couldn’t get his own, drown her in it, give her a fighting chance. Even if he could have—would time have allowed it? She was going to die, and it was his fault, this time, because he’d flaunted the protocols, hadn’t suited up. If he had, he would’ve—“It’s ok, it’s ok, I’m here,” Brad said, helplessly.“One minute until depressurization,” Nyx said.Brad rocked from side to side, saying, “It’s going to be ok, just breathe, breathe with me, you’re going to be ok.”The splintering pain in his skull returned, the halos stronger, threatening to white-out everything, incandescent; terrifying, harrowing, how was it even possible—He thought about the man in his dream. He thought about the life they might have lead. He didn’t know, anymore, where the daydreams began, where the dream started; where, in-between it all, reality existed. Brad thought of Nate: slipping him into that vacant spot, next to the white dog, next to V; sleeping together on a couch, in a bed, walking together in a park, a forest, running by the sea…No-one had ever felt right, those few times Brad had tried to superimpose them on this man in his dream. Not even Caitlin, whom Brad had always thought, deep down, was the one that got away.Nyx was a few seconds away from counting down single digits.“It’s going to be ok,” Brad said quietly against Thea’s ear. He didn’t know if she could hear him. He stared ahead at the dark-brushed, steel wall.The sudden quiet was deafening. And then everything went dark.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Once more, before he died, Brad wanted to go surfing in the early morning mist. Instead, Brad got to deal with chaos. Absolute and utter fucking chaos. It was closing in on thirty-six hours of non-stop damage control. A laundry list of grievances kept trickling into Brad’s terminal. Most of them were not from the facility’s staff, but the Haagen corporation’s higher ups. They were collectively shitting themselves, judging by their messages. Brad had lost count, within the first five minutes, of how many times he’d heard or read the words ‘NDA’. Although rebooting the mainframe had saved their lives, it didn’t come without its own unique set of issues. Nate had made sure to cordon off everything but the absolute necessities to sustain baseline functioning of the facility. There were plenty of bugs nevertheless; harmless in and of themselves, but incredibly irritating. This was what happened when rebooting a system that was never in the need of rebooting under normal circumstances. The communications dropped in and out often enough it felt like living a fucking game of Telephone. At least the connection to the extranet was more or less stable. By the thirty-sixth hour, Brad finally had a moment of peace and quiet before his next round of video conferences. “Fick’s out cold in the patient wing,” Bryan said, striding into Brad’s office, tablet in hand. “He’ll be fine, but he needs rest. According to Ray,” Bryan said, looking pointedly at Brad, “Fick finished debugging the primary systems, leaving the assisting techs and Ray to hold down the fort for the time being. Fick should be awake in about eight, ten hours.” Brad stared at Bryan. He heard the words, but it was taking his mind a moment to process them. He hadn’t slept in almost three days now. “Why am I getting this information from you?” Brad finally asked. “I’m no mind-reader, but I imagine Fick would have relayed this information himself, had he not passed out. Ray, on the other hand, I imagine plain forgot in all the hubbub,” Bryan said, dryly. “Like herding fucking cats,” Brad grumbled. “Wait, Nate passed out? Is he ok?” “Overexertion, sleep deprivation, food deprivation, excessive caffeine consumption, and a very mild case of hypothermia from his extended stay in the mainframe room—but he’ll be fine. How long since you slept or ate?” “Sleep: about two and a half days ago, give or take. Food: a protein bar about six—seven hours ago.” “I’d suggest you get some food, then some sleep, but I know you’d flaunt both of those suggestions so I’m just gonna leave you to it,” Bryan said. He picked up his tablet from Brad’s desk, and went back to his own office. Brad got another protein bar from the vending machine in the Courtyard. At the end of his next video conference, a demand to speak to ‘Mister Nathaniel Fick’ was made, to which Brad responded, “He’s currently unconscious, sir.” When that didn’t go over—imagine an adult man in a suit throwing a temper tantrum worthy of a six-year-old denied cookies—Brad was so fed up with the bureaucracy and red tape, with this entire fucking week, and it was only Tuesday, he just— “I could go down to the patient wing and shove my hand up his ass, give ventriloquism a try. Barring that, I’m afraid he won’t be available for conferencing at this time, sir. And neither will I. Duty calls. Good day, sir,” Brad said. He cut the connection. If he lost his job over this, it’d still be worth it. Besides, it’d give him a few extra months to live a completely civilian life for the first time ever.
. . .
Nate woke in the apartment. The hard, cool tile pressed up against his damp cheek. An equally cool, wet snout poked along his other cheek. How had he ended up here? The thought quickly dissolved when he noticed the walls. Pure white and sleek, with gray metal pipes breaking up the uniformity; no bubblegum-pink, no aging porcelain, looking like cracked eggshells. His muscles ached. For one jagged moment, Nate was convinced he’d landed himself in some sort of purgatory. This strange and sterile place. Shifting his gaze behind half-lidded eyes, he caught the blurry outline of Bryan advancing. Nate fell unconscious again.
. . .
The second time Nate woke, Brad was sitting on the edge of the bed next to his own. Brad’s head was bowed, hands loosely clasped between his thighs. His shoulders were hunched forward, nearly in line with the boots planted far apart on the floor. He looked asleep. The dark bruises under his eyes were made all the more obvious under the fluorescent lights. How unguarded he was. How exhausted he looked. Brad yawned, letting out a small huff at the end. Nate’s mind conjured up the image of a cartoon bear, inside a cave, hibernating. Something half-remembered from his childhood. He snorted, and regretted it instantly. His head was pounding. “How’re you feelin’?” Brad asked. Nate cleared his throat, said, “It feels like somebody threw me into a steel wall at the speed of light.” Brad nodded. “You’re pretty much on course, then.” The corners of Nate’s lips twitched up at the ceiling. He only closed his eyes for a few seconds, listening to Brad move. When Nate opened them again, several minutes had somehow passed anyway. Brad was still sat on the edge of the bed, except his shoulders were pushed back, and his spine straighter. Like a veil hiding reality. Nate cleared his throat again. “I’m pretty sure I dreamt about a hoard of cats coming at my throat at one point,” he said. “Did you have some horrendously traumatic experience involving felines as a child?” “Are you psychoanalyzing me?” “Wouldn’t dream of it,” Brad replied. “The only F word that’ll be uttered under my roof is ‘Fuck’ with a capital F, as it deserves.” “That’s a shitty joke,” Nate said, smiling. “Maybe I’m just more of a dog-person.” “Maybe,” Brad agreed. “How long have I been out, anyway?” Nate asked. “About twelve hours, give or take. You’ll need to report to the Board when you get out of here. They’re just reassigning the source of their own fucking incompetence down the corporate ladder.” Brad made a dismissive hand gesture. “I was the one who didn’t notice it in the first place,” Nate said. He cleared his throat again. The hoarseness wouldn’t leave. “An oversight that almost got everyone killed.” “In any event,” Brad said, his expression was neutral as he held Nate’s gaze. “Ray’s holding down the fort with the techs.” Brad turned to look over his shoulder as Bryan made his way into the small patient wing. As he was only checking Nate’s vitals, he let Brad stay. “When I was a kid,” Nate said, “I was convinced, for a while, we’d actually owned a dog. It didn’t make any sense, because we hopped colonies all the time, but I could have sworn we’d a dog, somewhere along the line.” The first time Nate had the dream, he was twenty-four. They’d been briefed about the side-effects of the halos. Among the most common were strange dreams. That’s what the doctors referred to them as; ‘strange dreams’. For most, it meant night terrors. But this particular dream of Nate’s didn’t feel like that. And it occurred so sporadically, with no other notable side-effects, that telling his handler seemed unnecessary. It’d only cause Nate grief. Not long after, Tomas started getting ill, and Nate decided he’d made the right decision in not telling. Nate wasn’t that. He was fine. But a year or so later, when the dream still occurred, randomly, he asked his mom if they’d ever had a dog. Maybe that one time, when they’d stayed in the same place for nearly a whole year. Of course they hadn’t. Her response didn’t come as a surprise, but Nate still asked her if maybe there’d been neighbors who’d had a dog, white or otherwise. He’d asked his uncle, too. There hadn’t been any dogs on Katara, either. It made sense, since it was one of the hotter and drier colonies. A big, thick-furred dog would be miserable there. Brad’s expression had gone neutral again. But the way he looked at Nate… “It was more fur than dog,” Nate said, clearing his throat. He remembered finding bunches of fur everywhere during the shedding season. Or any season, really. “Big, white, kind of like a polar bear. Pointy ears, dark eyes… and a curly tail, like a squirrel.” Nate yawned, not noticing the momentary flick of Bryan’s eyes from Nate’s chart to Nate’s face. Brad did. “Sounds like a cryptid,” Brad said, his voice deceptively even, a touch sardonic. “Like a yeti.” “Probably,” Nate agreed, already drifting off again. Bryan stepped away and gestured for Brad to follow him out to the office. Nate was asleep.
. . .
“What exactly is your relationship with Fick?” Bryan asked. He gestured for Brad to sit down in one of the chairs. “What does my relationship with Nate, no matter its nature, have to do with anything?” Brad responded. He remained standing. “Did you tell him about your dreams?” “Are you jealous?” “Stop acting like a fucking twelve-year-old,” Bryan said. “No, I didn’t fucking tell him about my dreams. I’ve never mentioned any of my dreams. Not even the one where I shove Ray into an airlock and hit ‘eject,’” Brad said. He’d actually had a dream like this once: except Brad was the one shoved into the airlock, and Ray hadn’t been the one to hit ‘eject’. “Nobody wants to hear about other people’s dreams. What the fuck does it matter?” “So it’s entirely coincidental he described a dog exactly like the one in your dreams?” “It’s a fucking dog. It could be anything. What the fuck else would it be, other than a coincidence?” Brad said. Somewhere in Brad’s mind was nothing but blaring sirens, and bright lights, and ceaseless panic. Convinced he was moments away from dying, had a veil been lifted? The man in his dreams, the man in a bed only a few handful of steps away from him—a man he didn’t know, not really. Yet the more they talked, the more it felt like the continuation of a long-standing conversation; like they were circling each other across time, slowly narrowing, until they were at the very periphery of each other… What the fuck else could it be? Bryan looked nonplussed for a split second, like he’d heard the sirens, too. “Do I need to put you through a new psych eval?” Bryan asked. “Of course not. Fuck, of course not. I just don’t understand why the fuck we’re having this pointless fucking conversation about a goddamned imaginary dog. I’ve still got actual shit to do, like run this fucking Satan’s incubator—” somewhere Ray was transcending his physical body to fist-pump the air, “—so unless you wanna exsanguinate me, or lobotomize me—” “I’ve been pretty fucking patient with you, Brad, but I’ve about fucking had it. We both know I’ve got your entire career in my hands. If I set you up for an extended psych eval, and you don’t pass that shit with flying colors, you can kiss this job goodbye. And you sure as hell can forget about re-upping.” “Are you threatening me right now?” “No, I’m not fucking threatening you,” Bryan growled. “But you are under my care. You, as much as anyone else in this hellhole, are my responsibility.” “And, like I said, I’m practically the one running this fucking hellhole, so…” Brad left Bryan standing with his fists clenched and white against the desktop.
. . .
A message from Minah pinged in as Ray was walking back to his apartment. He couldn’t remember if he’d actually slept or not in the last twenty-four hours. He’d taken the last of the allys during the clean-up; to say he was starting to feel like shit squared was an understatement. During his second year with the Alliance Military Academy, Ray had been an exchange student in Seoul, UROK, for a semester. This was how he met Minah. They hadn’t met through their own volition; they’d begrudgingly endured each other’s presence at first (more so Minah than Ray). With time, they’d decided it was destiny. Ray still remembered Minah saying it, her voice loaded with sarcasm and endless love. They weren’t teenagers anymore, they knew how to hold their own against the world, but it didn’t change anything between them. They were still partners-in-crime, bonded for life. >>TO: Ray Person >>FROM: Minah MASTER COMMANDER Park >>SUB: incestuous relations >>I give you Headline of the Week (we’re starting off strong): ‘DRUGS, BROTHERS, AND GARBAGE BINS DO NOT HAPPY BEDFELLOWS MAKE’ >>On the off-chance you don’t actually read the article, and fail to extrapolate from the subject line: two brothers got high and fucked in a public garbage bin, then beat each other up. >>TO: Minah Park >>FROM: Ray Ray >>SUB: RE: incestuous relations >>im curr ntly dyin g and u r ma e me la ugh fu c k u P a rk Ray hit send, almost dropping the tablet in the process. Fuck today, too. He would’ve gone straight to bed—cue toe-curling nightmares and endless chills—but the screen to his stationary screen was awake. He stood staring at it for a moment. He hadn’t been in his apartment since before the near-death debacle. For the screen to be awake, someone else had to have been. “Nyx, has anybody accessed my apartment? Like, uh, Walt?” Ray asked as he typed in his code and hit ‘enter’ on the screen. “No-one has accessed your apartment in the last 68 hours.” The code was rejected. Ray shook out his fingers—they were starting to stiffen, like temporary arthritis—and typed the code in again. On his desktop, in plain sight, there was a file. A video file. He stared at it. “Are you sure nobody’s accessed my apartment? Has anybody tried to log into my stationary remotely, or anything like that?” Ray asked Nyx, starting up a search for malware. It shouldn’t be possible for anyone to log into anyone else’s stationary, or their tablets. Especially not remotely. “Yes, I am sure no-one has accessed your apartment, or attempted to log into your stationary.” The file came up clean. No malware. Ray wasn’t stupid, though. He moved the file to his laptop, wiping the file clean from his stationary. He hit play [link].
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.The evil that men do lives after them;The good is oft interréd with their bones;So let it be with Caesar. The noble BrutusHath told you Caesar was ambitious:If it were so, it was a grievous fault,And grievously hath Caesar answer'd it.Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest—For Brutus is an honorable man;So are they all, all honorable men—Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral.He was my friend, faithful and just to me:But Brutus says he was ambitious;And Brutus is an honorable man.He hath brought many captives home to RomeWhose ransoms did the general coffers fill:Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;And Brutus is an honorable man.You all did see that on the LupercalI thrice presented him a kingly crown,Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;And, sure, he is an honorable man.I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,But here I am to speak what I do know.You all did love him once, not without cause:What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,And I must pause till it come back to me.— Julius Cæsar, Act III, sc. ii
Ray sat staring at the screen long after the clip ended. He breathed in, then said under his breath, “What… the actual fuck.” He played it again. It didn’t help. He got Nyx to sample the audio by playing the clip a third time, and she could tell him it was Shakespeare. More specifically, it was a long-dead actor—one Marlon Brando—performing Mark Antony’s speech from the play Julius Cæsar, which didn’t help much, either. He was too brain-fried for this. “I’m too brain-fried for this,” Ray said. He should sleep. If he was lucky—in a truly relative capacity—he’d pass out and stay passed out for the next twelve hours. He should go get a bag of chips, something salty, and a bar of chocolate, a bottle of water; get all that down, then pass the fuck out. He needed sleep. His entire body felt like a steel wire constantly snapping back on itself. He was crashing, and he needed to sleep. “So I’m gonna make a list,” he mumbled to himself, opening an empty document on his laptop. “When in doubt, you make a list. A motherfucking list. Okay, so what do we know?” The video file hadn’t been there last time he was in his apartment. And the last time he’d been in his apartment was before the most recent doomsday event. No-one had—presumably—accessed his apartment and put the file there manually. To get the file onto his desktop, rather than into his message center, whoever would’ve had to hack into his stationary, and only the assisting techs—or Nate himself—could do that. Or Matvey. Ray lay down on his bed, keeping the laptop on his stomach. He closed his eyes. He couldn’t relax. Matvey used to do crosswords to pass the time. In both English and Russian, without a translator. He had a knack for numbers, obviously, but also an affinity for words, riddles, anagrams. He’d spent a lot of his free time teaching Ray how to code, just for fun, for something to do—as a challenge, maybe. Ray already knew quite a bit about computers, being a mechanical engineer, but not like Matvey. Matvey would create these tests, these trials, increasing in difficulty little by little, playing on Ray’s curiosity and competitive streak. His sponge-like mind, always thirsty for more knowledge. “Fucking fuck you, Mat, you fucking fuck,” Ray said. The reboot must have triggered something on Ray’s stationary, allowing the file to become accessible. It wasn’t even that far-fetched. Or maybe it was, maybe it was far beyond the Wastelands kind of far-fetched. Ray opened his eyes again, and did something very simple. He checked the file’s size. It was roughly two times too large for such a short clip, even taking into account its high resolution. Once Ray had extracted the message hidden within the video file, he almost felt like laughing. He was 99.999998% sure he was a looking at the password to unlock Matvey’s hard-drive. It was a ‘forest for the trees’ kind of situation. Several hundred-thousands of lines with random words and symbols, but Ray knew what he was looking for, now.
==80?yourself?CRY?course?20== %%53|nine|HAVOC|meat|35%% ||40;prepared;AND;system;79|| ??57%entered%LET%hunting%66?? ??39$minutes$SLIP$group$06?? ..87?must?THE?gain?98.. ..92:simple:DOGS:told:57.. ||37.shirt.OF.suffix.51|| %%80bringWARwith80%% ::90|within|END|october|20::
Ray scrambled to get the hard-drive from its hiding place, and input the password. A folder appeared on his desktop, and within it there was a text file, and another folder. The text file was titled only ‘ray’. The folder itself was slowly filling up with more files than Ray could readily comprehend. His entire body was shivering.

You’re the end of the line. Make it count.— M

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There is no great genius without a mixture of madness. Aristotle
    The dream hadn’t changed. It felt like it ought to have, but it hadn’t. Brad still couldn’t see the man he was running for, running toward, with his heart in his throat; but it was Nate. Brad knew it was Nate. Just like he knew the DVD player, relegated to the last shelf of the TV stand, hadn’t been used in over a year ‘because who plays DVDs anymore’. Or how he knew they’d once taken V to the veterinarian because V had gotten a little too curious about a bee. Bees. Bees hadn’t been doing so well at the time. He remembered this, too. Brad had to trust his instincts. He had always trusted his instincts, and very few were the times they had steered him wrong. He had to trust his instincts, even though his rational mind considered all of this completely ludicrous. The only reason you suddenly believe it’s Nate, is because you want it to be Nate. In the dream, Brad had looked at the newspaper, at the headline, and he hadn’t felt any different about it. Even though he now looked at it knowing what it meant—what MERS actually was, and what it did. But it didn’t feel any different. It was just a headline. Then V was barking and Brad was scrambling. Over, and over, and over again. “Brad!” Walt shouted. He jogged down the hall to catch up. “Do you have a moment?” “Is it important?” Brad asked. Walt made a face, like it could go either way. “It’s about Ray?” That explained the face. “Okay—what about Ray?” “Off the record?” Walt asked. “Off the record.” “He’s been acting… His mood’s getting a little… weird?” “‘Weird’ as an adjective in connection to anything describing Ray is moot,” Brad said. “Get to the point.” “Ray’s mood’s getting weird. I mean, more than usual. More than you’d expect, considering the…” Walt gestured vaguely with his hand, and scrunched up his face as if he were in pain. “If the rest of that sentence ends on a rising inflection—” “He’s detoxing, and I’m kinda worried, because it seems like it’s hitting harder than the other times, and he won’t go to Doc Bryan, so…” “I’ll handle it,” Brad said. “Thanks.”

. . .

Ray was used to Brad.Ray was used to Brad’s uncanny ability of knowing the exact when, where, and how of everything that went on. Often enough, he’d know the why, too, without ever having asked anyone. Like he was some sort of seer. He’d been the ‘Iceman’ with the Marines. Ray had never had the honor of serving with Brad, but he’d heard about him, anyway. Like some sort of legend, in the proper, traditional sense.This? This was something different.For one, Brad was seated behind his desk, almost slouching; an elbow resting on the chair’s arm, his hand supporting his hanging head. His fingers were twitching against his forehead; it was barely noticeable, yet it was somehow so unsettling Ray slowed down.Brad looked like shit. Not the kind of shit you look like after skipping a couple of hours of sleep, a couple of meals, maybe a shower or two. Brad looked like the kind of strung-out, half-alive shit of those thoroughly drained; those who were, somewhere in their mind, starting to give up on whatever fight they were waging.Ray could relate.Brad had yet to look up, yet to acknowledge Ray. He wasn’t in some shallow slumber—even then he would’ve noticed Ray by now through some sixth Iceman-sense—but his eyes remained unfocused and unblinking, caught on the edge of the desk.“You summoned?” Ray said. It was the subtle stiffening of his body that let Ray know he’d caught Brad off-guard.Now there was dread, slow and creeping. The same kind of dread Ray used to feel whenever he was called to the principal’s office as a teenager, before he entered the Academy. Not the instinctive dread, by virtue of being called in; but the dread of knowing he’d already done so many things, and not knowing which one was about to rain hell down on him. Whatever transgression he’d thought he’d gotten away with—realizing it might not have slipped under the radar after all. The dread spread through Ray’s chest like fiery bugs skittering over his skin.Brad moved his hand to his lap, turned his attention to Ray, and said, “Concerns have been raised about your… well-being, which naturally concerns me, as well, being the head of security. Did I not make it very clear you’d be facing consequences if the allys start affecting your ability to do your job?”“What the… did fucking Doc put you up to this? Is this some kinda half-assed intervention or something?”“No. Should he have?” Brad asked.“Fuck no,” Ray said, a bit of spit flying. “Excuse me if I’m acting a little off, a little concerning, but in-between yet another very recent near-death experience, fucking detoxing, and losing a real good friend of mine—which I know isn’t something you can wrap your lone wolf, warrior spirit bullshit brain around, Brad—but let me fucking tell you something—” Ray moved closer and closer to the desk as he spoke. The only thing separating him from Brad’s slouching, impassive existence was the desk Ray’s thighs were about to hit.“—Realizing your best bud, your fucking pal, is a fucking terrorist hellbent on killing this whole fucking facility because of some half-chewed lie of a justification made up by whoever the fuck is up on high around here—‘the aliens fucking made me do it’—He was my fucking friend, and he killed two people, right here, right in this fucking Satan’s incubator. He’d probably been planning it for months, right in front of me, right under my nose—this guy I saw, and talked to, and shared my fucking meals with every fucking day for months, and I didn’t guess fucking shit, and so he goes off and kills two fucking innocent people because, what? Why? Who the fuck even knows? And if they know, they won’t fucking tell us anyway. One of my closest fucking friends stabbed a fucking stylus pen into his own fucking brain, after killing to innocent people, so yeah—that’s gonna make me a little concerning for a fucking while, and it’s got fuckall to do with stims, allys or otherwise.”Ray was so fucking fed up with this unfounded persecution.Brad remained in the exact same position, expressionless, as he said, “I sympathize with you, Ray, but as things are—”“Fuck you, Brad. Seriously. Fuck you.”Ray was almost at the exit when Brad grabbed him by the bicep. He managed to turn Ray halfway around before Ray outmaneuvered his hold. They stood only a few steps apart.“I get it,” Brad said, voice low and hard. “But I’ve got to keep this shithole together. It’s not just my job on the line if you get caught doped up on fucking class A drugs—that’s the least of my fucking concerns. Reyes and Doc Bryan, on the other hand? Even if Reyes didn’t fucking buy the drugs, he still distributed them. Doc Bryan’s been keeping your use off the books—which is pretty fucking illegal in and of itself—but that doesn’t just affect his contract with this facility; it affects his entire fucking career. I let all this fucking slide. That’s on me.” Brad pointed to his own chest so hard it gave a hollow sound.“I get that you were close to Mat, and I sympathize with that—but you gotta get your fucking head out of your ass, Ray, because this isn’t about you.”“When the fuck did I ever said this is about me?!”“You’re fucking whining about a fucking terrorist who was ready to wipe this entire facility! Scientists, civilians—fucking kids. You spent so much fucking time with him, and you didn’t fucking notice, and you know why, Ray? You know why you didn’t notice anything? Because you idolized the fuck out of the guy. You imprint on people like a lost fucking duckling. You did it with Mat, you did it with me—”Ray snorted so loud it hurt. A cruel laugh bubbled up in his throat. “Idolized him? You? It’s called caring about people, Brad. I cared about Mat; I still fucking care about Mat, even though he was a fucking terrorist, even though he’s dead, and I’m fucking miserable about it. I care about Walt, too, and Minah, and fucking Poke, and for some truly unknowable fucking reason, I care about you, too. But you don’t understand that, you don’t understand the concept of caring about people. Which makes sense, right? It’s not that fucking weird, is it? Your birth parents rejected you. Cait dropped your emotionally constipated, boot-fucked existence after how many years? Five? And went off with your best fucking friend. How fucking hilarious is that? Do you even have friends, Brad? Do you even want people in your life? When’s the last time you talked to your sis, huh? People stop fucking trying.”“That’s rich, coming from a degenerate fucking junkie.”The room went quiet.Brad’s breath rattled in his chest.“You know what?” Ray’s expression was ice-cold. “Fuck you.”“Report to Bryan by the end of the day, or I report you,” Brad said.

. . .

Brad didn’t clear his throat until the door closed behind Ray’s back.>>TO: Doc Bryan >>FROM: BC >>SUB: ray person >>If Ray doesn’t show up at your office within the next 24, tell me. - BC

. . .

Ray dragged his finger along the clusters of information he’d created. This would have been so much easier to decipher—to visualize—if he could project it, walk through it. He couldn’t hook his laptop up to Nyx, though. It was outdated, for one, but more importantly, if he did, she’d be able to—Moot. So fucking moot.“This is insane,” Ray said, not really referring to any one part specifically. “This is insane. I’m insane. I’m going fucking crazy. Walt!”When Ray had stomped into his apartment earlier that day—neatly bypassing Bryan’s office for the time being—he’d found Walt asleep on his bed. Considering the huge fucking blow-out he’d just had with Brad, Ray hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone. Not even Walt. But he appreciated Walt being there, anyway, and he knew for a fact Walt could sleep through anything when he didn’t need to be on high alert. So Ray let him sleep, for once.That was almost five hours ago, though.“Walt!” Ray repeated.Walt snorted awake. He pressed an uncoordinated hand to his face. He almost took his own eye out.“Walt, seriously, man. I don’t need you to babysit me.”“I’m not. I wasn’t. I’m sleeping. I was sleeping.”“Go sleep in your own hidey-hole.”“I’m fine here, thanks. Your bed’s more comfortable, anyway.”“That’s certified organic bullshit,” Ray said. He swiveled around to face the aforementioned bed.Walt had already turned his back to Ray.“They’re the exact same beds, asshole,” Ray added.“Yours ain’t been used as much. For sleeping, I mean,” Walt said.Walt was smiling the way he did when he got a good one in. Ray couldn’t see Walt smiling, but he knew. He could glean it through the back of Walt’s guileless, blond head.Ray’s bed was used more for its storage space than literally anything else, sleeping and fucking included. Unfortunately.Ray rested his socked toes against the frame of the bed until he lost his grip and his foot fell to the floor with a dull thump. Ray did this over and over again until, finally, he said, “You talked to Brad, didn’t you?”Walt didn’t respond. He hadn’t fallen asleep again. Ray could wait.“I didn’t talk to Brad, I just…” Walt hedged as he turned onto his back, facing the ceiling. “I’m worried about you. I mean, I’ve seen you go through some pretty harrowing shit before, Ray, and you always come out okay, but this time—all the shit that’s happened. Brad knows about the allys, you told me yourself, and you won’t see Doc about it, so I figured if anybody’s gonna get through to you, it’d be Brad.”Walt turned to look at Ray.“Yeah, well. Brad’s a fucking asshole.” Ray swiveled the chair back and forth a few times, then added, “You’re an asshole, too, by the way.”“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t’ve done it, but I didn’t know what else to do.”Walt’s eyebrows were furrowed and tilting upwards. He looked so earnest and remorseful. Ray half-groaned, half-grunted.“I’d be pissed at you, except I’m too tired, and too pissed at Brad already, and you’re Walt, and that’s like—I don’t know. Sacrilege, or something.”Walt hesitated before asking, “What’d Brad do, anyway? Are you in trouble?”“Dude, you make it sound like we’re, like, in fucking middle school or something. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I just gotta talk to Doc Bryan or, you know, ‘face the consequences.’”Ray stood up from his chair. “You go back to sleep. I shall return.”

. . .

Brad strode across the docking bay floor and dropped down next to Legs under one of the rovers. Espera and Cortez immediately ceased griping at each other, watching through the big window in the DCR.Espera gave a low, descending whistle.“Somebody’s got the Iceman’s panties in a twist,” Espera said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Wanna make it interesting? Ten credits it’s Trombley.”“How about I pay you ten credits to be the bearer of bad news?” Cortez said. He pointed to one of his screens; a docking request, and a ship’s manifest.“Not taking up your slack, homes,” Espera replied.“Colbert,” Cortez said over the comms. “The supply ship’s ETA is about fifteen minutes out. Their passenger manifest doesn’t match up with the one we got sent before they left: an Alliance Flight Lieutenant by the name Minah Park’s been added. The ship’s also got a fucked coupling, so they’re requesting some help with that.”Cortez glanced over at Espera as they waited for Brad to respond. Espera raised an eyebrow.“I’ll deal with it on the floor,” Brad said.

. . .

Minah stood with her back to the cafeteria’s entrance, talking to the crew from the supply ship and a few idling security officers. Her flight suit was tied off around her waist, and her hair pulled into a sleek ponytail. The generic Alliance Military Academy logo on the back of her t-shirt practically glared at Nate. It had a smaller logo beneath it, signifying its affiliation with the United Republic of Korea’s AMA in Seoul. From the look of it, the shirt was threadbare enough to have been one she’d worn when she was a student there herself.She looked over her shoulder, black hair shimmering sea-foam green with the movement, and her laughter turned a fraction softer when she caught sight of Nate. She gestured her head toward one of the many empty tables in the cafeteria. For most of the staff, lunch had already come and gone a few hours ago.“I would’ve sent you a message,” Minah said, adjusting in her seat. “But I hitched a ride last minute.”“Is this where you tell me you’ve finally turned space pirate extraordinaire?”“That is clearly the title I deserve; alas, it is not one I currently possess. Nah, I’m just heading to Pa’val, to that decommissioned flight base they’ve got there—I’m gonna be scrounging for parts. Sometimes, as you well know, the Alliance can be a little stingy.”Nate chuckled.“What about you, though?” Minah said. She stretched over the table and gave Nate’s cheek a rub with the palm of her hand. “You look dead on your feet. Aren’t they treating you right around here?”Nate shrugged, smiling lopsided. She knew it meant there was nothing to talk about. Or rather, that he couldn’t really talk about it, and they ought to leave it at that. Instead, they talked about the boring little details of their lives. Minah mostly complained about how the Alliance was making her job a lot harder than it needed to be, and Nate mostly just listened. He’d hit that part of the day where anything but basic functions were out of the question. He knew Minah was assessing him, even if her tone and conversation didn’t indicate it.It wasn’t long before he realized he needed to get back to the OCC. Minah remained seated as he gave her a hug, but her arms were wrapped tight around his neck. A small part of him wondered if he’d fallen asleep at some point— if his consciousness had just stepped clean out of his body. It looked like she was about to say something to him when he let go, but then she broke into a big grin instead.He was almost out of the cafeteria when Minah said, “Hey, Nate?” He walked back up to her. “Could you do me a favor? I was hoping I’d run into Ray, but apparently he’s dead to the world at the moment, so…” She trailed off as she got up from her seat, digging for something in a side-pocket in her flight suit. What she pulled out were three old-fashioned flash-drives. The novelty kind made to look like tiny animals. This particular technology had gone extinct long before either of them was born, much like the animals they’d been modeled after.“Ray likes to tinker,” Minah said by way of explanation, her grin returning to her face. She handed the flash-drives to Nate. “Tell him I’m sorry I didn’t get to see him, ok? And tell him—” She paused, glancing over Nate’s shoulder. Kocher and one of the flight crew were standing at the entrance, gesturing for her come along. “Tell him—‘I’ll see you around.’” She squeezed Nate’s forearm, and left.

. . .

Just before the stroke of midnight, Nate pulled the bench in the Observatory to the middle of the room, and sat down with his legs to either side of it. Between his knees he put a bottle, faded blue-purple, and two small shot glasses. He’d sent already sent a message to Brad, saying nothing other than to meet Nate in the Observatory at midnight.So when Brad arrived, he sat down across from Nate, picked up one of the still empty glasses, and said, “Pushing your luck, huh?”“Do you guys even have a drunk tank?” Nate asked, looking up at him with a guileless expression as he poured them each their shot.By now, Nate was sitting on the floor, using the bench as a back-rest. Brad was lying on the bench with his legs on either side of it, his head close to Nate’s. Brad was balancing the shot glass on his breastplate.Only four days had passed since the mainframe reboot. Nate suspected he’d be better off not drinking any alcohol but he felt like he’d earned it. Just a few hours of mindless respite. Then he’d seen Brad stalk off to the docking bay earlier that day, and decided they both needed it.Nate turned his head slightly, catching the curve of Brad’s jaw, the shot glass moving up and down as he breathed. “So what’s the stupidest thing to have happened while you’ve been working here?” Nate asked after a while, pouring himself another shot.“Thought you didn’t wanna talk about work,” Brad said. He handed his own glass to Nate, putting it back on his breastplate once it was full. It balanced precariously under Brad’s gaze. He’d already had three full shots. Maybe four. He wasn’t counting. He should probably be counting.“Humor me,” Nate said. He downed his shot. He still felt a little giddy, relaxed, despite slowly becoming his own dead weight. Still, he felt… pleasantly empty.“Stupid dumb, or stupid dangerous?”“Stupid dumb,” Nate said. “Better not tempt fate.”Brad nodded, downing his own shot. He put the glass down on the floor. “Probably the time Legs got stuck in one of the many vents around here. That, in and of itself, wasn’t necessarily so stupid, but considering it didn’t happen during repairs or other scheduled work, then yeah; stupid dumb. The vent system around here is a fucking maze, too.“It took us almost a whole day, trying to figure out how to un-stick Legs. Ray suggested dismemberment. Tempting, but no. In the end there were no injuries or damages incurred, so I didn’t have to report it, but…” Brad shifted on the bench. He put his hands on his chest, turning his head, facing Nate’s profile. “Still don’t know why Legs was in the vents to begin with, but I strongly suspect Siggy had something to do with it.”“Siggy…” Nate repeated, pouring himself another shot. “That’s Sigrid, right? The one who believes in ghosts.”Brad snorted, said, “That’d be the one.”“I was trying to explain to her, a couple of weeks ago, how ghosts don’t really make sense from a physics point of view. She called me narrow-minded.” Nate chuckled. “In my defense, she was the one who asked in the first place, and I told her physics isn’t really my area of expertise, but…”“It doesn’t matter what angle you’re coming from with her. She’ll tell you science is still in its infancy, and therefore incapable of determining whether ghosts are real or not, and since it hasn’t been disproved ‘without an inkling of a doubt’, she maintains they are, in matter of fact, real and so by extension, are souls,” Brad said. He didn’t have enough fingers on his hands to count the times he’d ended up having this conversation with Sigrid. He knew her counterpoints by heart at this point.Nate leaned his head back, using Brad’s bicep as a makeshift pillow as he looked out the window. He tried to remember what the stars looked like on Earth. It sobered him up a little.“You know,” Nate said, pulling his knees up so he could rest his arms on them. “There was this… this psychologist—an actual psychologist with a PhD and everything, living around the end of the 20th century, who genuinely believed souls exist, and that he could prove it.“He wrote a bunch of books on it. I read a few of them when I was in uni—they were in the library’s database… Anyway—he postulated that, the reason some people we meet, whom we’ve never met before, but instantly feel close to, and like we’ve known for decades, is because we belong to the same soul cluster. Like a family of souls.“So every time we die, and we’re incarnated, or start a new life cycle—when we meet someone from our cluster, it will feel like we’ve always known them, because we kinda always have,” Nate said. He turned his head, meeting Brad’s cool blue gaze.“Did people take him seriously?” Brad asked.Nate huffed a laugh, said, “No.”All of the psychologist’s evidence had been anecdotal. Nate still remembered the stories. Of people finding each other across space and time. Of soulmates.For a drawn out moment, they held only each other’s gaze.Brad broke the spell by very quietly asking, “What time is it?”Nate checked his watch. “Close 02:50.”“Almost the Devil’s Hour,” Brad said, his lips curving into a small, impish smile. It was more in his eyes, than his lips.Nate put his hand on Brad’s neck, along his jaw, careful. Nate’s thumb rested on Brad’s lower lip, drawing it down slightly, the wetness of Brad’s saliva coating Nate’s thumbprint as his hand slowly slid away from Brad’s neck. They kept staring at each other, caught in the spell again. Hazel-green, and cool blue.A moment. Something meaningful; a moment waiting for something.It was on the tip of Nate’s tongue. Almost, almost.Nate’s head dropped, his gaze following suit, unfocused on the dark, blurry floor. Brad’s warm breath ghosted along Nate’s neck for several breaths. Then the warmth disappeared, and Brad was staring up at the ceiling.Presque vu.

. . .

As they had the day off, Walt moseyed on over to Ray’s apartment. He knew Ray wouldn’t come over to his; whatever crazy bullshit Ray had inherited from Matvey, it was eating up all of his free time. It was not unusual for the security officers to switch their shifts around; usually as favors to later be cashed in. Brad didn’t care so long as they logged it and it made it into the records.Walt and Ray both had nightshifts today, but it was neither Walt nor Ray’s doing. How their shifts kept lining up so frequently over the last week was a bit of a mystery. Or, Walt suspected it was Brad’s doing, hoping Walt would implicitly keep an eye on Ray. Maybe Bryan was in on it, too.Walt felt kind of guilty. He wasn’t hanging out with Ray to keep an eye on him; most of Walt’s motivation had less to do with that, and more to do with just enjoying Ray’s company. A tiny fraction of it was so he could make sure Ray didn’t lose life or limb some way or other, to be fair.They were both lying on the bed. Ray was on his back to one side, his legs up against the wall, all three pillows under his head. Walt was slumped against the wall, using the duvet as a makeshift pillow, and trying in vain not to bang his head against the shelf above him every time he moved.Walt was already halfway through the library book he’d checked out before heading to Ray’s apartment when Ray said, “Ok, so, like, I think I’ve figured it out.” Ray held the banged-up tablet against his forehead.“Already?” Walt asked, turning a page in his book. It was still such a novelty, reading actual books with paper pages. “Thought you said it was ‘thousands, and thousands, and thousands of files and shit, Walt.’”“Well, excuse me. I didn’t say I had it all figured out. Think of it, like, as a… rough outline.”Walt put the book spine up on his chest. Ray was still holding the tablet to his forehead. “What’re you doing?”“Activating my third eye,” Ray said, using the tablet to point at Walt instead. “There’s a couple of documents in here that claim over half of humanity’s got, like, this alien bug in their brain that controls everything, but it’s mostly dormant except when it makes people do stupid shit—notably politicians—that fuck over all the other humans. And that’s what the Insurgents are really fighting. The alien bugs, that is.”“Maybe that’s what Mat had,” Walt said. Ray deadpanned him.“There’s also, like… a considerable amount of actual Alliance documents talking about genetically altering bees to pollinate with poisonous shit that would make the plants deadly, but without them dying, so it wouldn’t be suspicious. I’m talking actual time, and effort, and fucking Alliance-sanctioned research went into trying to create genetically altered poison-bees.”“That’s… stupid?” Walt said.“Well, yeah. What do you expect. But this isn’t even remotely close to the real fucked up shit,” Ray said. He put the tablet down on his stomach. “I found info on the allys. I mean, the black-market stims. The ones I’ve been using.”“That’s not so strange? I mean, that falls under some facet of Alliance jurisdiction.”“Yeah, no, but… You know that urban legend about the allys, right? How they hit the black market and whatnot. Just humor me,” Ray added when Walt raised his eyebrows, scrunching them upward at the middle. “That big fucking scandal, like thirty years ago, with the—the performance enhancing drugs and whatnot. How the Haagen corp got commissioned by the Alliance Military, or the Ministry of Defense, or whatever. They got commissioned by the Alliance to make the allys, the original ones, I mean.”“Sure,” Walt said, eyebrows still raised. “Some people died during the trials, so they didn’t get the approval and the whole thing got shut down. And then, as urban legend would have it, the allys hit the black market not long after because somebody in Haagen leaked it or something. Then Haagen turned this place into a non-profit, to remove the heat they were getting from the public and the Alliance.”“Yeah, but there was never any incontrovertible proof that Haagen themselves released the stims to the black market, right?” Ray said.“Right. Kind of why it’s called an ‘urban legend,’” Walt said.“Don’t get sassy with me, bucko, ‘cause I’ve got proof right here.” Ray tapped the tablet on his stomach with his fingertips. “They did leak a small amount of the stims on the black market. Except they switched up the recipe. The stuff they really used—no chemist on the street, low- or high-end, would be able to match that shit. Even if they could get a hold if it somehow, it’d be the exact opposite of profitable. And we both know it’s all about profit.”“But Haagen wouldn’t profit from this, either,” Walt said.“You’re absolutely right. And so they half-denied, half put the blame on some supposed disgruntled scientist or whatever—you know, somebody who’d worked on the original project and got laid off when the project got shut down. Because this place did downsize their entire operation when they went non-profit, and it put a lot of scientists and general personnel out of work. Haagen just utilized all their truths, and half-truths, and outright lies, and they created the urban legend about the allys we all know and love.“Because Haagen didn’t need profit—they needed data. So they got this… down-graded, and by comparison pretty harmless version of the original stims they’d cooked up, and they got it into the public circulation. I mean, where stims are concerned, black market or no—these watered-down military-grade stims are pretty damn potent, so there was no problem for the allys to gain traction, and for the illegal reproductions to start up.“The contract—the commission, whatever—between the Alliance and Haagen came to a natural end. They couldn’t produce what the Alliance needed, and the whole project got put to rest. No more funding, no more research.“They’d determined that, you know, the kind of strides these scientists and whatnot were trying to make with these performance enhancers—it just wasn’t realistic. Not yet. It’d be way, way more years into the future before they could even get close to anything like human trials again. That they’d grossly fucked up in doing a human trial in the first place.“But here’s the kicker: the funding didn’t stop. Unofficially—I’m talking way, way up the ladder, here—the Alliance continued to fund the research using slush funds. At this point, Oneiroi had been turned into a non-profit research facility, right? This place we’re in right now, this very facility, where we live, and breathe, and work.“So the Alliance made it easy for the scientists and whatnot to collect data from the public. All kinds of data. Nothing’s fucking sacred in a surveillance society. Shit like what socioeconomic groups were more likely to use the allys, the rate of ODs, rate and severity of addiction, physical and psychological health of users—first-time users, occasional users, long-term, short-term, whatever. You name it, they got it.“So these scientists started over. A new lead was brought in: Doctor Ardit Durand. Yeah,” Ray said, eyes practically sparkling with manic energy. “Dr Durand as in Heloïse Durand, as in our current Dr Durand. She’s Ardit Durand’s daughter.“So Dr Durand Senior didn’t manage to lower the mortality rate all that much, with the real stims, the ones the allys are cousins thrice-removed from or whatever. Anyway.” Ray waved the air in front of him, like it would clear his mind, too. “He didn’t manage to do much about the mortality rate, but he managed to do something else. This new recipe, they exceeded expectations in almost all categories. He was so close to making this perfect drug for the Alliance Military, and this was just in the nick of fucking time, too.“And this is where it starts getting really fucked up—like, this is where you start questioning everything you’ve ever been told—”“It’s already sounding really fucked up,” Walt interrupted. He shifted, tucking his shoulder in slightly.“You’ve just got to listen, dude,” Ray said. “I’ll answer whatever questions you’ve got, after. Hell, I’ll even make you a copy of all this shit and let you read it yourself.”“Fine, fine. I’ll listen,” Walt said.“Ok. Good.” Ray gave a little nod, cleared his throat. “So, as I was saying—Durand Senior was this close to perfecting the super drugs, and the Alliance Military were desperate, because the Insurgents were getting a little too effective, so the Alliance basically tried to coerce Durand Senior to start production without a controlled human trial. But instead, he made his daughter, Durand Junior, a part of the project, and she ended up being the one who perfected the drugs. She made the E.532 compound, or halos. I don’t know why they’re called that… halos. Anyway. She made the end product happen.“She’d also figured out a pretty important, and in my opinion, a pretty obvious detail. The higher the physical and psychological scores of those who were administered these halos, the less likely they were to experience long-term side-effects. Some of which were, by the way, major depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, psychosis, suicide, and the list goes on.“So, you know, the higher-ups ain’t fucking stupid. They round up the best people they’ve got, most of them Marines. They create these elite fucking black-ops teams. And when I say black-ops, I’m talking pitch fucking black. So far I’ve barely found any real documentation on any of it in this pretty extensive care-package I’ve had bestowed upon me. There’s nothing on any of the teams, or who was part of them, unless you count some blood work, and a couple of psych evals, all of which have got nothing but patient numbers on them that correspond to, well, nothing.“So yeah, the Alliance—Military, MoD, or whoever—feed these black-ops teams the halos, and then send them on their merry way to fuck up some Insurgents. Or assassinate world leaders across solar systems, stage coups—who the fuck knows. That’s it. That’s all I’ve got for now.”Ray stopped talking. Walt watched him for a long moment before saying, “I mean—I’m totally cool with humoring you and whatnot—whenever you’ve got some new conspiracy theory going, it’s usually pretty entertaining, even interesting, but this is taking it a little too far, Ray. How’d you even manage to go through this much information in such a short time? Especially without Nyx? And you got all this stuff from Mat, which, you know… doesn’t exactly instill a lot of conviction or faith.“This shit’s too crazy, even for you. How would the Alliance even get away with all this? I mean, you actually believe in all this? You think these are actual, legitimate documents taken from the Alliance, and the Haagen corp, and everything in-between?”“Either that, or somebody spent a lot—and I do mean a lot—of time creating several fucktons of forgeries. Not just written documents, but imagery, too. I haven’t really gone through all that yet, but. Who’d bother going to this much trouble to fuck over the Alliance and the Haagen corp? No, wait, yeah, stupid question. But still. I’d be willing to bet both my legs and my dick on this being authentic, actual paradigm shifting shit.”“That raises some questions, though,” Walt said.“Only some?”“Let’s say this is real. Where is Durand Senior? I’ve never heard anybody in this place talk about him before, at least not that I can remember, which I probably would’ve if he was the lead scientist. Secondly, it’s pretty damn convenient how there’s no documents on the black-ops teams, or the members. If they actually exist, or existed, and died as a result of the halos to begin with—nobody’d know because their missions don’t exist, and so by extension, they don’t exist. ‘No man gets left behind’ doesn’t exactly apply in that kind of set-up. I mean… the scope of this thing would be insane. And you’re saying you’re not even done with all of it yet?”“I know, it sounds fucking batshit insane and then some, but I seriously think this shit might be 110 percent the real shit. Mat literally made me his plan B. Or C, or whatever. His last message to me said, ‘You’re the end of the line. Make it count’. Like, I know what he did, and I’m still kinda trying to piece that shit together, but… I trust him, as batshit insane as that sounds, too. And I know what happened to Durand Senior. I double-checked with Nyx, even.“A couple of years after Durand Junior started working here, he was diagnosed with this incurable degenerative brain disease. Which is kinda ironic. He died, like, five years ago. I’ve got about a hundred or so pages here, his journal or something, but it’s all in French and Nyx can’t help, so. There’s also a fuckton of medical and science-y stuff that I don’t understand squat shit of,” Ray said.“So,” Walt said, ignoring the latter. “So what you’re saying is—Heloïse Durand, the daughter of Durand Senior, she got promoted to his job. She took over, and she’s still in that position. Which means—”“Which means she’s definitely in on it,” Ray finished.Walt’s brain was overloading. Circuits would start frying any minute now. There were so many questions. He didn’t even want to believe any of this—it was too fucking outlandish—but he could feel himself already dipping his toes into it, following Ray straight down into that maelstrom.“I’m supposed to be your voice of reason,” Walt said.Ray made an offended face at him, and shoved his big toe into one of Walt’s thighs. He made sure his uncut nail hit just right. Walt yanked Ray by the ankle in retaliation, almost toppling Ray and the tablet onto the floor, face-first.Guess we’ll just drown, Walt thought.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Already, three weeks had passed since Matvey’s parting gift had almost wiped the facility clean. It might as well have been three years, or three hours, for all Brad could reckon. When you don’t sleep, time is a wave that keeps on coming, never making landfall.Brad sipped his kombucha. The entire cafeteria—aside from the kitchen to his right—was in perfect view. He could even see beyond the entrance: the large walkway leading around in a circle, looking down on the Courtyard, narrow stairs hugging the walls on either side.The lights beyond the cafeteria were dimmed. Only the pinpricks along the floors grew slightly brighter when someone walked by. Like fireflies guarding you through the night, making sure you didn’t trip over thin air, and break your neck. Or accidentally swan-dive over the tall barriers and straight into the Courtyard below.Walt walked past the cafeteria, his pace casual as he did his rounds. He spotted Brad, acknowledging him with a small nod before continuing on. Brad shifted his legs on the table, sipped some more of the kombucha. It tasted like fermented ass with a hint of raspberry. It was worse than Nate’s illicitly obtained moonshine.The barriers were quite tall. They reached just below Brad’s waist, if he stood leaned against them. It’d take more than gravity to pull you over. Many years ago, when the facility was still in its infancy, a young man had fallen over the barrier and cracked his head open on the Courtyard floor below. It was ruled an accident.It was one of those things you wouldn’t know about, if it weren’t for the fact someone saw fit to make it into a lesson. ‘This is why we don’t climb the barriers, children’. Brad wondered how a kid would go about climbing them, smooth and flat as the barriers were. Kids wouldn’t have enough upper-body strength to pull themselves up, and they were too short to hike a leg up for help…The dim lights along the floors outside the cafeteria grew brighter again.Nate’s surprised expression at finding Brad in the cafeteria left as quietly as it arrived. He exchanged it for a much more amused expression, like he was thinking of an inside joke.“We meet again,” Nate said. Brad still sat with his legs on the table, the backside of his knees pressing against the edge, his ankles crossed. He looked at ease.Brad’s asscheeks had fallen asleep twenty minutes ago, and his tailbone had gone a painful kind of numb, but the idea of moving was too much. How could anyone ever be this exhausted yet incapable of sleep? This wasn’t a new experience, but outside the context of active duty, with no adrenaline to keep you awake—it seemed improbable.Nate sat down on the chair opposite Brad’s. His back was turned to the expanse of the cafeteria, leaving him in a complete blindspot.Like he could read Brad’s mind, Nate said, “Are we the only ones who can’t sleep around here?”Brad glanced over Nate’s shoulder, saying, “Ray’s probably got some ideas about why that is… mass-hypnosis or something. Sleep-deprivation experiments, and we’re the unwitting subjects.” Brad returned his gaze to Nate’s.“Maybe Ray’s got all the answers and the rest of us are just fumbling in the dark,” Nate agreed.“How’s that going, anyway? Ray and his indiscriminate dislike, that is. You sound like you’re ready to convert to the Gospel of Ray Person,” Brad said.“I think the whole… rebooting the mainframe stunt won him over,” Nate said, relaxing more into his chair. He smiled a little at the tabletop. “He also figured out I was the one who unshackled the AI on—at the time, experimental—Alliance ship Aether.”Nate met Brad’s gaze again.“That was you?” Brad asked, straightening up slightly.“Yeah, yeah… that was me. One of the techs fucked up while trying to improve the AI, and it basically turned homicidal instead. It’s all about the self-preservation protocols. So I cut off its ability to interface with the ship itself, and left the pilot to pilot a ship that was not meant to be piloted manually, and somehow she managed to make landfall, and the worst injury to the ship’s crew was a single broken leg.”“And that’s how you met Minah Park,” Brad said, nodding to himself. That was how Brad knew the story—and Ray, too. A time when Minah had told them all about how this ‘brilliantly fucking bonkers techie who shall remain nameless’ had saved them all from getting catapulted into space sans protective gear.“And that’s how I met Minah Park,” Nate agreed, chuckling. “The hero of the story, to be sure.”“Yeah, I can see how that’d win Ray over,” Brad said.Nate’s gaze landed on the tabletop again, becoming unfocused as his mind wandered. He’d fallen asleep at his desk in the OCC earlier. According to his stats, it’d only been for fifty-three minutes, and he’d gone straight into REM sleep.The dream remained the same. Nate woke feeling like his brain and muscles had atrophied to nearly nothing. Like waking up from a fever dream. After trying and failing to fall back asleep in his actual bed, he began roaming the facility. He’d meant to go to the Observatory, but somehow ended up in the cafeteria instead.It was starting to eat at him: the insidious way insomnia had of making everything seem so much more difficult to overcome. Every obstacle and inconvenience a small death. His short-term memory was terrible; he would think something, and then five seconds later, he’d have forgotten what he was thinking about already, and it kept going in a loop, endlessly.“What are your thoughts on déjà vu, Nate?” Brad asked. “Since we’ve already covered ghosts and soulmates.”“Well,” Nate said, buying time as he drew himself back to the present. It felt like trekking through molasses, coming free in fits and bursts. “Well,” he repeated, shifting in his seat. “Scientifically? I think it’s the mind playing tricks on itself. Taking something vaguely familiar, and attributing it to some half-remembered place, or person, or event. Kinda like a game of Telephone, maybe. Why?”“I keep having this recurring dream,” Brad said. “—Of this blinding white giant—I’m talking incendiary brightness—that consumes everything, city after city.”“Unless I’ve missed some very recent developments in the news, I don’t see how that has anything to do with déjà vu.”“No, the media’s staying consistent in its reporting on the rapidly unraveling peace talks,” Brad said.“Maybe you’re a modern-day Pythia,” Nate said.“Pythia, huh.” A corner of Brad’s lip quirked up at Nate. “An interesting hypothesis; an alarming one, considering the only likely explanation in that event would be nuclear holocaust. Humanity’s long overdue for blowing each other to shit, I guess,” Brad said, side-eyeing Nate.Nate huffed a laugh, said, “I honestly can’t tell if you’re being serious or not.”“I did actually have that dream as a kid. More than once, too. Granted, it was between ages six and seven—” Brad made a hand gesture, like what can you do? “And once or twice when I was eleven, right after I joined the Academy… My sister, Sarah, she got pretty pissed when I joined. She was fourteen. She didn’t talk to me for three whole months. Which was a pretty big deal, ‘cause she never hesitated to express exactly what, or how, she felt about something. But she did the whole silent treatment. Or silent protest, I guess.”Nate picked up the kombucha’s bottle cap, and turned it around a few times between his fingers. “Are you still thinking about re-upping?” He asked.“How do you even know about that?”Brad had told him, when they were drinking. A throwaway comment… something about a last hurrah. A thick, heavy feeling had settled in Nate’s stomach; not because of what Brad had said, but how he’d said. Nate didn’t think Brad remembered it.“Ray mentioned it,” Nate said. Because he had, a few days ago, and Nate had acted like he didn’t already know.Brad rubbed a hand over his face, said, “Yeah, well,” and nothing more.Maybe Ray was right. People stopped trying. Brad had never given anyone much of a reason to keep trying. He hadn’t talked to his sister in—he didn’t even know how long. Months. He hadn’t talked to Ray, either. Not really. Brad hadn’t apologized. He hadn’t even tried. He kept meaning to, and then he didn’t. He didn’t reach out, and just fucking apologized.Brad gingerly moved his legs from off of the table, planting them far apart on the floor. He was still sitting in a slouch. His asscheeks and tailbone would just have to deal. “What about you?” He said. “You mentioned something, way back, about your parents jumping colonies, growing up with your uncle…”Nate hummed, nodding.“We used to jump colonies, as a family,” the bottle cap took another few turns between his fingers, “and I loved it as a kid. It didn’t really bother me, starting new schools all the time, making new friends. It was never that hard on me. It was harder for my brother, Will. My sister, Katherine, she was the youngest of us, but she was too stubborn to let it get to her.“By the time I was fifteen, Will ran away and joined the Insurgents. I didn’t want to jump colonies anymore after that, so I moved in with my uncle on Katara, finished high school. Went on to university and got a bachelor in software engineering, started a bachelor in computer engineering but then I ended up going into the Marines before finishing. After I retired I went back and finished. I was about to start my master, but then I ended up freelancing instead.”“So your parents are still jumping colonies?”“No, no, they stopped after my sister ran way. Around two and a half years after I moved?“Katherine just… ran off. She was gone for almost three months before they finally found her. She was fine, considering. She’d been living on the streets with some people she’d gotten to know—she’s never talked about it much. She was barely sixteen.” Nate looked up at Brad, then back to the bottle cap. He spun it listlessly on the tabletop. “So Katherine put a stop to the colony jumping with that. Made mom and dad settle down.”When they were kids, their mom used to refer to them as ‘the twins’. Although Nate and Katherine were three years apart, Nate had always looked a little younger than he was. When all three of the siblings stood together—Will, and Katherine, and Nate—Katherine and Nate were like twins. Will, on the other hand, barely resembled them at all.Nate had always thought it was his parents’ way of dealing after Will took off to join the Insurgents: the way they just kept on going like nothing had happened. They had no way of knowing where he was, if he was alive, why he’d done it. They were one step short of acting like Will was just—at university, like planned, just busy being a student on some far-off colony. It was exhausting. It’d made Nate so angry. And scared, and even more broken-hearted.“My mom actually ran way from my dad, on their wedding day,” Nate said. He smiled when Brad raised his eyebrows, just a fraction. “When we were kids, mom’d tell us this elaborate fairytale about a runaway bride. It wasn’t until I was, like… twenty, twenty-two, maybe? I realized she’d been telling us the very true story of how she’d stood up our dad at the altar.”“Does this mean you’re a bastard child?” Brad asked, a gleam in his eyes.“They married a few months later, so no. But we are a family of runaways, apparently. Runaway blood.”“It makes perfect sense, when you think about it,” Brad said.“Are you saying I’m a flight risk?”Brad see-sawed his hand, and said with a small, inside-joke smile, “You do like to wander.”The silence of these dead hours settled over them again. Nate slid further into his chair, and with his arms crossed over his chest, he closed his eyes. He didn’t sleep, but at least he felt calmer than he had in days, if only for a little bit.Brad proceeded to watch Nate without qualms.When the dreams first started, Brad had chalked it up to the halos. It wasn’t a comforting idea, considering what a portent of misery it might be, but it made sense, at least. He knew one of the many side-effects were night terrors. And the dream was a terror.That continuous, building anxiety turning into blind panic.So when it started, he thought the recurring dream was a side-effect. Nothing else. Run of the mill.But it didn’t stop. And the longer it kept going, the more real it started to feel. He knew, rationally, that the mind could easily fabricate feelings of reality in a dream. The feel of a dog’s fur under his hand, of cold water slithering down his throat, the putrefying smell of garbage; the heavy exhaustion and aching muscles.Then the dreams stopped, for the first time, two weeks after Caitlin left him.Brad thought it was over with, then. But of course it wasn’t. It was just a temporary break in the transmission.Because he remembered things he’d never experienced.The feel of stubble against his neck, a too-soft pillow under his head, freshly washed linens, and morning breath, the rain hitting a windowpane. Falling off of a ladder while cleaning someone’s gutters, breaking his wrist, and being forced to wear a bulky, unwieldy cast for what felt like ten years. A ginger cat named Toulouse. A laugh so unselfconscious it almost made him feel resentful. He remembered, so effortlessly. The happiness, the pain, the ordinariness of it all.And looking at Nate, now…For just a second, Brad considered asking Nate about it, about that goddamned dog. But how could he? It wasn’t just an innocent question about a boy and his imaginary companion. If Brad asked, then Brad would have to acknowledge—accept—that this was all real. He was dreaming about a past life. A past life where he was Nate’s. And the imaginary dog was not imaginary at all; it was theirs.Instead, Brad talked about déjà vu. About a recurring dream he had as a kid. Instead, Brad asked Nate about his family, hoping he might glean something, some slip, some memory of the past not belonging in this present.And what if Brad asked? It wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t change how Brad felt, or the choices he made. Since the moment he first saw Nate, Brad had been attracted to him. It hadn’t taken long to realize it was mutual. But Brad had deliberately chosen not to pursue it long before he’d realized just how significant Nate was.But what if Brad chose to pursue it? Would he be doing it of his own free will? Was choosing not to, the only real choice? Did it all just come down to fear? Was Ray right?Brad was re-enlisting. His contract with Oneiroi was running out in less than five months. He was re-enlisting. If the halos had brought him here, if this was his slow descent into madness, he might as well make it worthwhile. He’d become a ghost, one last time. Take your pill, do your job. One last disappearing act.Nate finally opened his eyes, not the least surprised to find Brad’s already on him. Nate turned the bottle cap between his fingers. One, two, three. He put it on the tabletop, his hand lingering for a moment. Instead of reaching out with his restless hands, and grabbing Brad—any part of him within Nate’s reach—Nate said, “Do you ever feel like it’s always somewhere between two in the morning and four in the afternoon around here? Like no matter what time of day it actually is, it feels like two in the morning, or four in the afternoon.”Brad raised his eyebrows a fraction and shrugged. “Like a hamster on a wheel,” he agreed.

. . .

Ray carried a tablet under his arm. It was the same make and model as the banged-up one he kept hidden in the lockbox beside his bed. In the loosest sense of the word, Ray had borrowed them. They were severely outdated, which made them perfect. They could take a beating; they weren’t as affected by sand or pressure drops as the newer models. They were clunkier, but more versatile.Sure, they were also glitchier, and would sometimes reboot for no reason and without warning; but the pros outweighed the cons. So they kept a couple handfuls of them on the facility. Mostly they were used by the techs and engineers, when the solar panels needed manual resetting, or when the communication towers had their clockwork tantrums. Ray wondered when they were gonna realize their stash was dwindling.Walt had put this whole sure-to-fail idea into motion a few days ago when he asked Ray, “Who do you trust?”It was a short list. Incidentally, it started with Walt. Minah, but she wasn’t part of this hellhole. Ray didn’t even get a chance to talk to her when she dropped by. She’d handed over three prehistoric flash-drives to Nate, who’d diligently turned them over to Ray the next day. Ray had messaged her a handful of times since, but she hadn’t answered any of his messages.“What about Brad?” Walt asked.“Let’s not talk about Brad. What’re you getting at, anyway?”Walt shrugged. “I just… Ok, if you think all that shit’s the real deal, then you need people you trust, right? And if you can’t interface with Nyx, then you need people you can trust from the inside. And I don’t think I’m gonna be able to do much, other than help you read through all that stuff, which I’m willing to do, even if I’m not exactly… sold on all this. But that’s not the point. All that medical, science-y stuff—Doc Bryan could help with that.”“Doc Bryan?” Ray said. “Doc Bryan? You’re fucking with me, right? He’d send me off to some forced psych hospitalization or something. Or rehab. Or both… like, rolled up in some hellish burrito of ‘we’re here to make you feel better, Ray-Ray,’ and then I never see sunlight ever again. Nah, I’m already on pretty thin fucking ice with the good dottore. Besides, how do we know he’s not in on this shit, too? I mean, he’s been here as long as Durand Junior’s been in charge.”Walt snorted, said, “Can you really see Doc Bryan being into all that shit? I mean, I’m pretty sure he takes the Hippocratic Oath pretty damn seriously, and I don’t think he’s much of a government type of guy. If you’re really willing to bet both your legs on this—”“And my dick.”“—Then make him a deal. You give him the science stuff, all of Durand Senior’s notes and everything, and if he still thinks you need help after reading through all that, then you’ll go quietly.”“You’ve never read that poem about not going gentle and all that, have you.”“Ray. If this shit’s real…? Then you’ve gotta trust somebody.”Ray had wiped the tablet, and disconnected it from Nyx’s systems. Then he’d spent all of yesterday trying to figure out what, and how much of it, he was willing to trust Bryan with. And how, exactly, he was going to persuade Bryan to even take look at any of this, let alone take it seriously.Standing outside the sliding door to the medical office, Ray considered just… turning on his heel and fucking off. Getting the fuck off of the planet, somehow. Fake some emergency. Figure out some way to smuggle all this information with him. Nobody knew he possessed it; they’d have no reason to stall him. Then again, when had Ray ever walked away from a fight, even the ones he couldn’t win.

. . .

“Fuck me!”Bryan only glanced up before saying, “Not without an appointment.”“Fuck that. Also: fuck you.”“What do you want, Ray?”Ray sat down opposite Bryan’s desk. The tablet rested on his lap. Ray gripped the armrests, looked straight at Bryan, and said, “You know French, right?”“Yes?”“You wouldn’t happen to be proficient in Russian as well, would you?”“No.”Ray waved a dismissive hand. “I guess we can’t all be perfect. How long have you been working here?”“Over five years. Either cut to the chase, or get out.”“You’ve got shitty bedside manner for a doctor.”“I don’t appreciate having my time wasted. What do you want, Ray?”Ray put his elbow on the armrest. The weight of the tablet made his wrist bend, the tablet looking in danger of falling to the floor. “Did you ever meet Dr Durand Senior?”Bryan raised an eyebrow. “No, he was on his deathbed by the time I started working here.”“Did you know,” Ray said, resting a corner of the tablet against his temple, “—after making this hellhole a non-profit organization, the Haagen corp hired Dr Durdand Senior so he could keep working on the stims? As in, the stims behind that shitshow scandal thirty years ago. Or, better yet! Did you know your paycheck’s probably doled out by Alliance slush funds? If I told you the Alliance has been funding this place for some way under the table research—”“I appreciate the intricacy of your delusions—”“No, I don’t think you do, Doc. ‘Cause I’m pretty sure I’ve got solid proof.” Ray gave the tablet a little wiggle, then put it down on the desk between them. His fingers lingered on the scratched frame for a moment. “I don’t understand a lot of the shit on there. It’s all science-y medical stuff, a fuckton of notes in French… and an even bigger fuckton in Russian, which might as well be bits and pieces of War and Peace for all I know. It probably doesn’t matter, either way. Right now, I don’t give a shit if you believe me or not, Doc. I’m not gonna say anything about where I got all this from, ‘cause I don’t trust you enough for that, and it doesn’t really matter right now. But I can tell you there’s way more where that—came from. I’ve been going through it for like three and a half weeks already, and I’m barely halfway through. So, I’m here to make you a deal.”“A deal? I swear to Jesus fucking Christ, Ray: I am this close to having you forcibly removed from this facility. If you’re intent on going down this road, I can’t keep protecting you. I made this very clear last time we talked. Colbert did, too. And I’m not a fucking idiot, Ray. It doesn’t take a great cognitive leap to realize where you got this from. I was Vitsin’s physician; don’t you think I got vetted inside-fucking-out when they came to pack up his shit? You’ve literally made yourself an accessory to murder, and to make things worse, you’re following Vitsin’s orders from beyond the fucking grave.”“You can fucking ship me into deep fucking space for all I care, but it won’t change the fact this isn’t about me acting all batshitty because I’m detoxing, or because of Mat. This isn’t a symptom, or some psychotic break, or whatever. I’ve got evidence. And now you’ve got some of it, too. Right there. You can go running to fucking Brad if it makes you feel better. But before you do any of that, check it out. If you still think I need to be put in some psych ward or whatever, then fine. I’ll go ‘gentle into that good night’. I’ll sign the form, voluntarily have myself committed. But read it first. I’m trusting you with this.”“You better fucking trust me. I’ve put my job on the line for you more times than I’m willing to admit,” Bryan said. He held Ray’s gaze for a long, long moment. Bryan picked up the tablet. “Fine. I’ll read it. Just remember: a deal’s a deal.”“Oh, and before I forget: stop telling Walt to babysit me.”“I haven’t told Walt to babysit you.”“Okay, then tell Brad to stop telling Walt to babysit me.”“I’m sure your motormouth on legs can walk five feet to Brad’s office and tell him yourself. You’re wasting my time. And your own. Your days are numbered, Ray.”“Fuck that,” Ray said. He pressed his middle-finger to the tablet’s dark screen. “Don’t try hooking it up to Nyx. It won’t work, and everything’ll get wiped. Don’t try hooking it up to your screens. Don’t talk about it to yourself, or to Nyx, or anybody else. If you gotta write notes, do it on this tablet. ‘Cause this is it. This right here. Nothing else. I’ll graciously await your verdict.”Ray gave a mock bow and left.

. . .

The fact Bryan’s day had started with Ray striding into his office, was enough to make it feel twice as long by the time it reached its end.Handwritten notes were scattered across his desk. His wrist ached from writing. He pressed the nib of the pen too hard when he wrote. An old-fashioned ink-pen wasn’t quite the same as a stylus; with or without the life-like pressure sensitivity. It was all mimicry, when it came down to it. But certain notes—certain thoughts—were best made with ink on pieces of paper, and nowhere else.Pieces of paper couldn’t be hacked. They didn’t leave traces of their contents when discarded. They didn’t live on after incineration. They could be physically absconded with, sure. Yet they felt safer than any digital facsimile, no matter how well-guarded by encryption and whatever else they might be.Bryan linked his fingers together behind his head, and pushed his elbows inward so they touched each other. He carried the well-being of each and every individual on this facility. This Satan’s incubator, as Ray so fondly referred to it. Some days Bryan truly did carry all of them on his shoulders.He fulfilled so many roles, half of which weren’t even his to fill. It was a running theme around here. And his obligation—if not his loyalty—resided with the corporation that had hired him, and continued to pay for his services. He did his job, and he did it well. He took each and every one of his patients seriously, and he acted professionally. When necessary—when he deemed it necessary—he reported whatever problems were brought to his attention.It was the lesser of two evils. If it wasn’t Bryan doing the job, it’d be someone else, and they might not care about anything other than the revenue, the smattering of perks. Bryan let his elbows fan out again. All he wanted, at this moment, was to write Ray’s conspiracy du jour off as nonsense, and go to bed. He never wanted to think of it again.The tablet had been sitting in a locked desk compartment, and Bryan had been acutely aware of it the entire time.Bryan, unlike Ray, had no evidence. He only had his gut feeling: from day fucking one. The Haagen corporation claimed complete transparency when it came to the Oneiroi facility. Accessing any and all information was a hop-and-a-skip away. The conversation Bryan had had with Brad, however many weeks ago, now… about the dreams, about the halos—the fact the halos even existed at all.The only reason Bryan had accepted the job offer in the first place, almost six years ago now, was because of his debt. Signing up for medical school just as the Insurgent war was winding down had perhaps not been the best idea, financially, but Bryan had seen it as the only way forward.Ray claimed to have evidence.Bryan unlocked the desk compartment.On the tablet’s desktop were three folders, aptly named: french shit, med shit, possibly tolstoy.Bryan breathed through his nose, and opened the first folder.Journal d’Ardit Durand.

. . .

Brad wasn’t doing night rounds, so much as wandering aimlessly under the guise of doing rounds—as had become his habit—when he found Sigrid sitting in the empty cafeteria. Her light brown hair was out of its usual ponytail; a frizzy mess of corkscrew curls reaching her shoulders. She was shuffling a worn tarot deck, her eyes unfocused as she watched the cards merge together over and over.“What’re you doing here?” Brad asked as he reached her table in the middle of the large room.“Were you expecting someone else?” Sigrid asked.“Not exactly.” Brad pulled out a chair across from her. “Diddling with some liberal arts necromancy, are we?”“Are you afraid I’ll influence the children with my wicked ways?”“Do think of the children,” Brad said. She smiled, still shuffling her deck, her hazel eyes lingering on him a moment longer.Sigrid ran a finger over her eyebrow and spread the large cards out on the table. “Pick a card, any card,” she said.“Seriously?”“Don’t be a spoilsport.”“It goes against my faith.”“I thought you a self-proclaimed atheist,” Sigrid said.“Don’t tell my mother.”Sigrid pulled out one of the cards from the spread, and held it up for Brad without looking at it. “What is it?”Brad leaned closer, hands still in the pockets of his hooded jacket. The writing was faded. “‘Wheel of Fortune’. Finances?”“Destiny.” Sigrid wiggled the fingers of her free hand before slipping the card back into the deck. She swooped the deck up and started shuffling again. “I can’t wait to get out of this place. My contract is finally reaching its end. I really, really cannot wait,” she said.“A trending topic of late,” Brad agreed, dryly.“Mmm… I’ve been hearing rumors about your plans to re-enlist,” Sigrid said. She glanced up.“Nothing’s sacred around here.”“It’s not like there’s hundreds of thousands of people living here. Word gets around.”“How’re the kids doing?” Brad asked, deliberately sidestepping the question he knew Sigrid wanted to ask. He wasn’t in the mood to talk about it. He didn’t even want to think about it in the sanctity of his own mind.“Generally? Or in relation to the murders, the suicide, and/or the recent near-death experience? All of which we’ve been subjected to in the last six months, I might add.” At least she let him get away with changing the subject.“None, all of the above, whichever you want.”“Your feigned indifference doesn’t work on me, Bradley.”“How’re the kids?” Brad asked again.Sigrid sighed.“Many of the younger ones don’t really understand what’s been going on. Some of the more impressionable ones seem to be picking up on the unease of the adults surrounding them. According to Aryan, none of the older kids, our few teenagers, have been exhibiting any greater degree of anxiety, or other adverse reactions to what has been happening lately. But then they don’t know much, either, even if they might understand more, intellectually.” Sigrid sighed again. “I’m no child psychologist. Nor is Doctor Bryan. There’s not much to say about it, this way or that.”“Your resignation hasn’t crossed my desk, yet,” Brad said.“If I’m absolutely honest… I didn’t actually decide until a few days ago. I’ll send it tomorrow. Make it official.”“How long is it you’ve been working here, anyway?” Brad picked a card at random when Sigrid fanned them out for him. “You’re before my time.”“Almost four years, now. Not about to embark on a spiritual journey, are you?” She held his ‘Eight of Cups’ upright before slipping it back into the deck, shuffling it away.“I doubt it,” Brad replied.“The only reason I took this job was because it’d look good on my resumé. And then I got a little bit more attached to the children than I thought I would. It was only supposed to be for a year. It’s different when you have such small classes, when you live in a little village, and see each other every day. My childhood and early twenties were almost as sheltered as the children who grow up here, in this… tin can. Until recently, anyway. The third time’s the charm, you know. The third thing to happen—whatever it is, I don’t want to be here when it does.”She pulled three cards from the deck, putting them face up in front of herself. She gave a tired laugh. “I’ve never been any good at actually reading these spreads.”The only card Brad could name was the middle position, aptly titled ‘The Star’. It bore a faded painting of a woman kneeling by a pond, pouring jugs of water. It was the right side up for Brad, making it reversed for Sigrid.After a half-hearted attempt at deciphering their meaning, she gathered all the cards and put them back in the deck.“How’s Thea doing?” Brad asked.“Putting on a brave face.” Sigrid’s shuffling slowed, but it didn’t stop. “She’s stubborn, as always, but she’s highly sensitive, too. Her participation in class has been fluctuating a bit, comparatively, but… It’s difficult to say. She told me you visited her while she was being kept for observation.”“I swung by, briefly,” Brad said. The moment the smoke had cleared, Brad had had more to deal with than he could immediately process. As much as he’d wanted to, he hadn’t been able to be the one to take her to the medical office; he’d had to let Walt do it. Thea had held onto Brad so tight, his neck and shirt wet with her tears. He hadn’t had the time to spare, but he’d stopped by the patient wing a handful of hours later to look in on her, anywaySigrid smiled. It was oddly fond. “I think it’s safe to say you’re likely to have made a lasting impression on her. To be fair, you were already kind of her hero. She looks up to you.”“It’s because she’s barely 4”8.”“Is that why you’re taller than everyone, save maybe Legs?”“Ha ha.”“You’re not so bad,” Sigrid said, giving him a look.“Maybe not, but idolizing people rarely leads to anything productive.”“If you say so,” Sigrid agreed noncommittally. “I’m not going to miss this place. Not even for a second. I will miss the children. And Aryan, and Legs. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep in touch with them, but you never know with Legs… I’ll miss you, too, but I know you’re terrible at keeping in touch with people, so I’m not even going to try. Don’t worry.”The corners of Brad’s lips curled up in a small smile. “I’ll set a yearly reminder, for today, at this very hour, to send you a message. All it’ll say is, ‘keeping in touch’.”Sigrid snorted a laugh. “No need to flatter me with empty promises, Bradley.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

JOURNAL D’ARDIT DURAND—EXCERPTS >>>SORT: oldest to newest >>NEW ENTRY […] had it not been for the Division project, I would have accepted the position when it was first offered to me: Had I been here from the beginning, perhaps we would now be much farther along. No matter. We will start from the bottom. [—] will serve as an inspiration. The only thing I find regretful about this situation, is that I cannot publish any of my findings. But, surely, one day the project will see light again, and I can finally confer, and contribute.No breakthrough is without its casualties. >>NEW ENTRY Over the last few weeks, I’ve found myself devouring Heloïse’s case notes from the time she spent on the colony of Eupraxia. It makes for a fascinating read, though I question how helpful it’ll be. We have all of us returned to the project with renewed vigor.As for Heloïse’s case notes… The human trial on Eupraxia ran perpendicular with the official human trial conducted here, within Oneiroi’s own facilities. But then the project was decommissioned, and Heloïse was urged to go elsewhere; to ‘lay low’ as she writes. She also expresses a desperate desire to join my team, a matter I’ve already tried to explain to her, the sensitivity of it… In due time.She laments not being able to continue observing those who survived the trial on Eupraxia. The group was quite small, with only twelve subjects, all of them children. Six were between ages six and twelve, the other six were between ages thirteen and nineteen. One of the girls was in her third week of pregnancy when the trial began. Heloïse mentions nothing about whether or not this was known at the time. Both the girl and her fetus died at week eighteen. The girl was fifteen years of age. Cause of death was unexplained cardiac arrest. She was otherwise healthy.A seventeen-year-old boy, and two nineteen-year-old girls survived the trial. Of the younger children, only a seven-year-old boy survived. There is no knowing what long-term effects they may have encountered, after the cessation of the trial.One symptom was especially prevalent with the children while the trial was ongoing. It affected primarily the younger children, but not exclusively. Excessive parasomnia. Especially night terrors are highlighted. A few cases of this were also seen during the official trial. >>NEW ENTRY Why parasomnia? Why night terrors?One might argue it’s stilly to ask this, when the patients in question are soldiers of war. Many of them have only nightmares to be sure. But this doesn’t interest me. It’s the night terrors. When I spoke with some of these soldiers, the ones who survived the trial… I honestly don’t know how to explain it. There is something other about the way they describe these terrors, the way they frame them, how it affects them. Once again, one might argue this is because of the temporary or permanent side-effects they’ve otherwise incurred, but… I can’t prove it by any stretch of the imagination, but there’s something there. >>NEW ENTRY It is official: my mind will leave before my body. Perhaps this is retribution. A sort of cosmic rebalancing. Why not delve into philosophy? It’s quite a thing to ruminate over: how, in the 20th century, they were just finding penicillin, and by the beginning of the 21st, they were imagining what we might find. What we might cure, or have already cured by now. Instead, we have yet more questions and even less by way of answers. >>NEW ENTRY My sweet daughter, [ma petite puce]. She has done what I could not. >>NEW ENTRY [T]hey wouldn’t listen. I did not expect them to, but I am… disheartened? I have tried to impart on them, time and time again, how dangerous the continued use of the E.532 compound might be without further research. Or surely already is. Even Heloïse will not listen. I have suddenly become her demented father, and nothing else. My mind has not left me yet.They claim the collateral damage is worth it. Furthermore, I cannot prove the truth of my fears. Finally they have gained advantage in this war, they said. I cannot see it. But then I am no strategist, no soldier […] When I was a young man, I used to think, ‘this is not my war’. I used to say I was neutral in these matters. There is no neutrality in war. Certainly not this one. >>NEW ENTRY They will not listen. I’ve tried again and again to impart on them the enormity of our potential discovery, and the potential dangers sure to follow it. We know nothing about what it might be doing to these soldiers. They simply will not listen. I suppose, just as I have no mind for strategy, they have no mind for science, and scientific inquiry […] I have been re-reading Heloïse’s case notes from her time on Eupraxia obsessively. I feel the more I read, the more removed the answers become. More questions, always more questions. […] She claims to have no answers beyond what she has written. This is what she says, when I ask. Some days I do not believe her. She says I am becoming obsessive; paranoid, even. Perhaps. It is the signs of deterioration, is it not? >>NEW ENTRY My downfall is my lack of proof. I have none. I have a myriad of hypotheses. A theory […] lists of symptoms, easily explained away by this, that, or the other. Data compiled through other means, ridiculous, all of it, to think it would tell us anything of value, as if they are the same […] Of course they will not listen to me. The raving scientist, the madman […] I fear what may happen. I fear what may happen to me, as well, if there is such a thing as an afterlife. >>NEW ENTRY The question of sacrificing the few to save the many. But is that even the question, here? Who are we saving, and who are we sacrificing? >>NEW ENTRY Beware the dreamers.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eyes.
H. Jackson Brown, Jr
    “How have you been sleeping?” Bryan asked the moment Nate sat down in the medical office.Almost a full hour before Nate’s alarm was scheduled to go off that morning, he’d been woken by the incessant vibration of his smartband. A request from Bryan to come in for a check-up later in the day. Nate had accepted the appointment, and tried to fall back asleep to no avail.“It’s getting worse, the insomnia,” Nate said.“How is it affecting you? Is it disturbing your daily activities?” Bryan asked.“It’s not ideal, but I’m doing okay,” Nate said. When Bryan didn’t say anything further, only kept looking at him, Nate sat up a little straighter in the chair. “My concentration isn’t great. Some fatigue. When I sleep, it’s been on the cot in the OCC for the most part.”“How about your appetite?” Bryan asked. “Increased, decreased?”Nate couldn’t tell anymore, if his days were bleeding together in a way that was expected, or if they had become so undefined they might not be days at all. There was no real need for him to keep track of time, here. Days came and went, and much the same happened within them. He performed his duties: system checks, fixing glitches, updating software. Occasionally, he’d tinker with the code that determined Nyx’s personality (or lack thereof). When there wasn’t much for him to do but sit around—which was also a part of his job—he read books.He liked the feel of real books. Yellowed pages and old-fashioned covers, with faded colors and a certain kind of grainy quality; it made him nostalgic for something he’d never truly been part of. The physical books the Oneiroi library kept—stacked haphazardly on a few modest shelves—were almost all of them paperbacks.Paperbacks weren’t known to last for generations, but someone somewhere had considered them important enough to preserve. Or maybe they’d simply put them away somewhere, for safekeeping, for storage, and then forgotten about them altogether. Something for someone else to find, however many decades later. Enough time having passed to make them inexpensive novelties, if not collectables. The pages still held onto that strange, almost vanilla-like scent.Nate thought about lunch, only an hour ago. Ray was trying to convince Walt and Nate the Oneiroi logo was, “—a fucked up mix between Jesus on the Cross and the Virtue Man—”“Vitruvian Man.”“Whatever, you know what I mean—”Nate honestly didn’t know what Ray meant. He couldn’t remember what Ray’s conclusion was, or if there’d even been one. All Nate could remember was thinking Ray could probably cook up a decent conspiracy about just about anything in the universe. Given enough leeway, he could probably amass a considerable cult following to boot.“Nate?” Bryan said.“Hm?” Nate shifted his gaze to Bryan. Everything was a blur. He blinked a few times.“Your appetite?”“Uh… a bit decreased, maybe. I had breakfast, lunch…” Nate trailed off. He hadn’t finished either of the meals.Bryan leaned forward on the desk. “Nyx has been logging some fluctuations in your body temperature throughout the last week. Fluctuations are normal, and the smartbands aren’t reliable, but it seems like you’ve had a low-grade fever for most of the week. This could explain your lethargy. Your not getting enough sleep naturally affects your body’s ability to regenerate. It’s—”Bryan continued talking. Nate kept looking at him as he did, but Nate wasn’t there. It was like part of his mind simply checked out. His smartband vibrated against his wrist. For a second he thought it might be Minah, finally replying to the message he’d sent days ago, but judging by the subject title it had to be spam. Nate looked up at Bryan again. Bryan had stopped talking. Nate closed his eyes, took a deep breath through his nose. “I’m sorry, it’s just… yeah.”With a huff, Bryan said, “Nurse Anwar will take some blood samples, and check your temperature. If you get worse, don’t hesitate to tell me. Keep an eye on your temperature.” Bryan paused, then added, “Go get some fucking sleep, Nate. Even if it’s just an hour on that damn cot.”

. . .
 It was rain. It wasn’t rain.It was the same forest Brad had been staring at for the last two years. Not once had he changed the holographic background in his office, except allowing it to mimic the day-night cycle of Mars. Not once had it rained in that endless, perfect loop.The branches of the fir trees would occasionally shiver, or the tree tops would sway with the breeze; small details to make it seem as true to life as possible. He could make it snow, if he wanted. He could make it a perfect sunshine day; he could make it windy, drizzling, a downpour. But he kept it like this: overcast but still somehow clear, the trees tall, and healthy, and so alive.Maybe he was just lazy.Brad stared at the forest. He kept thinking it was raining, even though it clearly wasn’t. Twilight was creeping in. He hadn’t had a chance to actually sit still since he’d woken up somewhere in the middle of the night. He’d barely eaten anything today. His muscles hurt. His brain hurt, honestly.The day started off with a message from Bryan, calling Brad in for a check-up later in the day. Shortly after this, Cortez got through to Brad about an Alliance Army vessel with a docking request. The vessel carried two Alliance Army Criminal Investigation Division agents. That was a fucking mouthful to start the day off with. It didn’t bode well, in and of itself, but even less so considering it was a surprise visit. The Board had to know about it, which meant the Board wanted it to be surprise, too.“We’re here to talk about Flight Lieutenant Minah Park,” Agent Telad said. “We believe her to be a security threat to the Alliance ministration and its citizens. We would like to talk to anyone who was in contact with her while she was here, though we are especially interested in Eric Kocher, Nathaniel Fick, and Ray Person.”They made it clear they weren’t there to interrogate anyone; they only wanted to ask a few questions. They had no court order, and the interviews were conducted quite informally. They stayed true to their words, only staying for a few hours. A relief and an omen. Brad didn’t know Minah very well, and couldn’t give the agents much by way of answers. And what answers he did have that might be of interest to them, he gracefully omitted from his responses.He was lying to the Alliance. He didn’t know what Minah had done. But he was keeping her safe, at least for now, out of allegiance to Kocher, to his friend.Brad lied to the Alliance.The moment the agents left Mars’s orbit, Brad went over to Kocher’s apartment, knowing his shift wasn’t starting for another hour.“Did you know?” Brad asked.“I didn’t know. Not before she showed up here.” Kocher pulled on a t-shirt, his wet skin staining it dark in patches. “I didn’t know, honestly. Minah hasn’t exactly… She only said I needed to trust her. I don’t even know where she is. The CID agents? They say she’s being charged with committing treason against the Alliance. That’s why they’re looking for her.”“Treason?” Brad repeated. “On what grounds?”“Insurgency,” Kocher said.“She’s a fucking Insurgent?” Brad sat down on the small table in the corner by the door. “I guess that makes you two the star-crossed lovers.”“I haven’t been Alliance for years,” Kocher said. “Neither have you.”Brad raised an eyebrow. “We might not be Marines anymore, but neither of us is out there actively committing treason against the Alliance,” Brad said.“Did you tell them about us? About Minah and me—being married, about the pregnancy…” Kocher asked.“No. I didn’t.”Brad had left it at that.Brad picked up the tablet next to him. It was nearly out of reach, forcing him to actually move. The trees swayed in the breeze in front of him. He wished he could hear it, too. Feel it. He set the tablet on the table in front of the couch. He still had his appointment with Bryan in a few hours. Were the days ever going to stop feeling so fucking long?“You look like death,” Sarah said, her face filling the tablet’s screen.“I feel fantastic,” Brad replied. He gave a flat flourish of his hand. “How’re you doing? How’re the kids?”“I’m fine. Tom’s fine, the kids are fine, too. Emma won a prize the other day, for one of her paintings. Her school had a proper gallery opening and everything, and she came second.” Sarah sent a looping photo of Emma grinning with a ‘2nd place!’ ribbon tacked to her shirt, standing next to her painting. It looked like a close-up of a foaming wave: midnight blue and frothing white with leaves of gold scattered about.“Huh,” Brad said. He couldn’t quite speak around the sudden lump in his throat. He rumbled.“Also,” Sarah said, her gaze briefly sliding off to the side. “Zach turned eight two weeks ago.”The lump in Brad’s throat dropped to the pit of his stomach. Over the years, he hadn’t had many occasions to spend time with his niece and nephew, but he’d spent just enough time with them to make an impression. Aside from his mother’s, theirs were the only birthdays he always made a point to remember.“I guess the kids are in bed already?” Brad said. He cleared his throat. “I forgot. I’m sorry. Things have been—hectic around here, the last couple of months.”“It’s not like I would know,” Sarah said. “And I’m not the one you need to apologize to.”“I know. I’ll make it up to him. To you, too. I promise.”“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Brad.” Sarah sighed. “You do look really terrible. I hope you’re taking care of yourself? I miss you. We miss you.”Brad coughed. He suppressed the next one. The lump had migrated back up to his throat. “I miss you, too,” he said.He wanted to tell Sarah he wasn’t renewing his contract with Oneiroi. He wanted to tell her… about Nate. About the dreams. About all those black-op missions he’d done, about the halos, about how his life was spiraling out of control, and he didn’t know if he was even a person anymore. If he was taking care of himself, if he was sick. He wanted to tell her he wasn’t re-enlisting, either. There was no final disappearing act, anymore. This was it.He wanted to tell her he didn’t know what the fuck he was going to do next—and how mind-numbingly terrifying that was—but he’d be back on Earth while he tried to figure it out. He’d be with her, and his niece, and his nephew, and—He wanted to tell her. He should tell her.Brad got her talking about Zach’s birthday party, instead. About Emma’s painting. About anything, and everything else.

. . .
 The Observatory was left dark, save for the starlight coming from outside. Nate was sat on the floor, next to the concave, floor-to-ceiling window, his back against the wall. He didn’t turn his head from the slanted view of the desert outside; he let Brad linger in the doorway.Eventually, Brad settled down next to Nate, stretching out his long legs. His joints were stiff, and the hoodie he’d grabbed earlier wasn’t helping much in warming him up.“Bryan called me in for a check-up,” Nate said. “I’d say, ‘fit as a fiddle’ but it feels a little too on the nose.”Brad gave a noncommittal hum in response. According to the good doctor, Brad had been sporting a low-grade fever for the last two weeks. “It feels like I’m dying in slow motion,” Brad said when Bryan asked him if he’d been feeling more lethargic than usual. As if Brad had any concept of ‘usual,’ anymore.“Bryan called me in, too,” Brad said.Nate looked at him, his profile. Brad didn’t meet his gaze. Something was waiting, off in the distance. Nate turned back to the scenery. “Did I ever tell you about Tomas?”Once or twice, Nate had mentioned his name, briefly, by the by.Brad, staring at the stars, thinking about rain, oceans, waves, said, “Tell me about Tomas.”“It was a miscommunication, human error, whatever—imagine trying to coordinate a operation around another that doesn’t even exist,” Nate began. “My team nearly got hit with ordnance meant to wipe out whatever remained after we’d completed our retrieval, when we were supposed to be halfway back to the rendezvous. Tomas and I got separated from the rest of the team…”It was a simple mission. Get in, collect the caches, and get out.If he closed his eyes and focused on the memory, Nate could still hear the high-pitched whine, and the mechanical system’s voice of his biosuit alerting him to the damages inflicted upon it. Oxygen leak, radiation absorption, bleeding below his collarbone and the middle of his shin. He could hear Tomas’s voice over the intercom, but not what he was saying. But Nate could see well enough.Tomas was filling in the wounds—it was a quick-fix solution to keep Nate from getting an infection, or bleeding out. The wounds weren’t all that deep, and nothing too serious had been hit. It hurt, but Nate would live. Tomas sealed up the holes in Nate’s suit, too. The system’s voice gave a running commentary as all levels began evening out again. It wasn’t a permanent fix by any means, but it should hold until they got back to the rendezvous.Tomas gave Nate the thumbs up. Nate returned it.They were in the side-room of a hallway. The windows were shielded. There were a few portable safety boxes stacked up against the wall, a handful of others scattered on the floor, opened. As they searched through the building, it became obvious it was still under construction.The top floor was bare bones, the rooms completely devoid of interior. They were high above ground, giving them a good view of the rest of the town. If they needed to leave fast, they could climb out through the window facing east, drop down onto the roof of the building next to theirs, and further down into a small maze of alleyways. This way they could make their way into the mountains shielding the town from the elements.“Two hours and 23 minutes ’til dark,” Tomas said. He was standing next to a window, looking out at the ghost town below. It was smoldering in places. He could spot bodies, more than what they’d seen on their way in.It didn’t make sense. Even if they’d had no warning, they would have still had emergency protocols. This many people shouldn’t have died. Even a small town like this, even in the Wastelands, they didn’t just hope for the best. The atmosphere was live-able, aside from the radiation. It didn’t make sense.It was two hours and twenty-three minutes until dark fell. It was less than five hours until they needed to reach the rendezvous point for pick-up. They could risk it while it was still light. The sweeper drones had only picked up on a few active, moving signals; it didn’t necessarily mean they were Insurgents. But Nate and Tomas—as well as the rest of Nate’s team—were in enemy territory, completely cut off from everything except each other. If they came head to head with Insurgents, it was kill or be killed. It was risk assessment; if you’re not sure you can dispatch them all, you dispatch yourself.“We figured it shouldn’t take us more than three hours to get to the rendezvous point. Two if everything went according to plan,” Nate said. His eyes weren’t focused on anything. Brad glanced at him, shifted his legs so the left was now over the right. He didn’t speak.Tomas had just turned twenty-nine, the week before. Nate and Tomas went out, got fantastically drunk, and very gracefully passed out at the table of a take-out place. They got breakfast on the house when they woke up several hours later. There was this drinking game… Nate wasn’t going to pretend he remembered it, but it was a tradition from around where Tomas grew up; whenever it was someone’s birthday, this elaborate succession of drinks—mostly different kinds of shots—had to be consumed.Every whole number was different from all the other ones. Like wedding anniversaries. Every decade had something special. And as with every other hangover Nate had ever had—although this one was the worst by far—he said, “I’m never gonna drink again” and Tomas had just laughed, and said, “wait ’til next year—big three O.”Nate shook his head, smiling absently to himself. He sat up a little straighter, his leg touching the length of Brad’s. Nate continued telling the story of Tomas.“There was a girl—she was a girl; probably no more than sixteen, maybe seventeen. Tomas was in the room off to my right, taking a piss. I had one eye on the street below, and one eye on where we’d entered the floor. Somehow, I didn’t—notice when she entered. She was just standing there, suddenly.”The moment Nate spotted her, he had his rifle trained on her.She was carrying a small, semi-automatic weapon. It was covered in dirt and grime, but this didn’t mean it wasn’t serviceable. She wasn’t wearing any protective gear, not even the meagre kind of biosuit they’d sometimes find around Insurgent colonies, the kind of biosuits meant for civilians, non-combatants.Her arms hung loose by her sides. She wasn’t gripping the gun, but her gnarled fingers weren’t in any danger of dropping it to the floor anytime soon, either. The braid keeping her hair back had long since failed its job; tufts and tendrils were gathered around her face. There were stains down the front of her dark shirt, dried and crusted, white in places. She had bruises on her skin. Her stare made time stop.Tomas re-entered the room, his rifle already trained on the girl.She didn’t do anything. She didn’t raise her weapon, she didn’t drop it, she didn’t hoist a proverbial white flag, or beg them not to shoot her. She just stood there, a living-dead. Her gaze slid slowly over Tomas. Her lips twitched. Tomas lowered the rifle by a fraction. She didn’t take her eyes off of him. Not even when she raised the weapon in her hand. It was like her arrival: so sudden and indisputable. Tomas and Nate both saw the movement, the minor foretelling of it, and their instincts had plenty of time to kick in, and shoot her before she shot either of them.“That was a great moment to question the humanity of all this. She could’ve dropped either one of us; she could’ve been a spy, she could’ve compromised the rest of my team. She could’ve radioed somebody. We could’ve been killed, or worse, caught. We both had our weapons trained on her, but neither one of us pulled the trigger.”The girl still didn’t take her eyes off of Tomas when she put the gun under her chin and pulled the trigger.“It wasn’t likely anybody’d hear the shot. It wasn’t likely anybody was around to hear the shot, but we didn’t want to risk it. It seemed like less of a risk to be in the open than staying in that town. Considering the radiation, anyone on the plains…” Nate trailed off. He cleared his throat before he continued. “We got to the rendezvous, got off planet—it was done.”The whole flight home, Tomas hadn’t said a single word. He sat with his helmet beside him, staring into the middle-distance with his brows furrowed.“About six months later, that’s when he started talking about her. How he remembered her. At the time, I thought he meant he remembered her from that day. I still did, I still thought about her. But no, he kept stressing how he remembered her, from before; but whenever I asked him what he meant, he’d clam up and tell me to forget about it. It didn’t take long before he got diagnosed with a fucking grab-bag of disorders. They started treating him. The same doctors and psychologists who were monitoring us, feeding us the halos,” Nate turned to Brad as he said this, holding Brad’s gaze. “You know what they were like. Completely singular, one-track purpose.“Tomas just got worse. Night-terrors, auditory hallucinations, anxiety that got more and more extreme, to the point they had to sedate him on more than one occasion. And he kept talking about this girl, but none of it made any sense. He was bordering on psychosis, and the rumor mill—as limited as it was—said it was the halos, the side-effects we got warned about, in that diffuse way they had where it seemed reasonable, divorced from possibility. He committed suicide, eventually.”Nate looked at Brad, who had been listening quietly this entire time.If Brad weren’t sat here right now, right next to him, Nate would still be able to find him. It wasn’t anything spectacular; he couldn’t close his eyes, and somehow be able to see Brad. Instead, it was a game of ‘hot and cold’. The closer you got, the warmer it got. Nate didn’t know when, or how, he’d realized it… he just knew it to be true.Even if there were lightyears between them, Nate was certain he could find Brad. Not easily, not like a set of coordinates; but from dot to dot, one connecting the other until he had the whole picture.Nate was certain he could find Brad anywhere, even in death.“I remember those,” Brad said, slowly, like he was picking over the words in his mind. “The rumors.”It was the fear. One of the reasons they took the halos in the first place: to suppress their natural fear response. To make them more calculated, more deadly, less afraid of death. It wasn’t just the fear of death, though; it was the manner of death.Losing yourself, bit by bit, until your body and mind ceased being able to hold you together. Or until you ended it yourself, before it got that far. Those rumors would come and go like the tide, and every time they came, someone would be there to reassure them they were safe. There was no-one to contend it.“All Tomas talked about toward the end was his dreams,” Nate said. “I used to believe whatever the psychs and doctors told him more than whatever he told me. They still let me see him—not often but—I don’t know why they did that. I figured they wouldn’t have, if they thought I believed him.“There were all these things about his sister, and their childhood on Earth, and this civil war that’d broken out, and killed them both. She a few weeks before him. It was so easy to find a pattern there. I mean, Tomas didn’t leave his planet until he became a Marine. He was twenty-two the first time he went to Earth. Before that, he’d spent his entire life on one of the colonies at the cusp of the Wastelands, brought up an only child by his aunt and her wife. I didn’t have any reason to believe him, and I didn’t. Not until three years later, after he’d died, and I started having this one specific dream, over and over again.”Brad’s voice was deceptively even when he asked, “Are you dying in it?”Nate let his jaw come to rest on his own shoulder. He took in Brad’s profile. “Are you?” Nate asked.It felt like butterflies took flight inside Brad’s lungs. He heaved a breathless chuckle, and said, “Was this your very convoluted way of trying to figure out if we’re having the same dream?”“It’s a difficult subject to broach,” Nate said. He tried to keep his voice even, like the universe hadn’t just somersaulted, turned itself inside-out.“Either we’re both fucking delusional, in which case we can comfort ourselves in knowing we’re not alone, or…” Brad trailed off. “When did you start suspecting it?”“Why did you think I was getting drunk three weeks ago?” Nate said, jokingly. He steadied himself. “Somewhere around then, and that conversation, in the cafeteria, when you were talking about déjà vu. There wasn’t anything particular about it, I just…”“You just knew,” Brad said. “I know the feeling. I can’t explain it to save my fucking life, but I just know it’s you.”“Like you always know where I am,” Nate said.Brad picked up Nate’s right wrist, the one with the smartband circling it. His expression was deadpan.“You know what I mean,” Nate persisted.“Always? No. Sometimes, somehow—yeah,” Brad said. Nate’s wrist was still circled, loosely, by his fingers. He looked at the tendon, barely visible, the thick, creeping veins. Brad said, to Nate’s wrist, “The way the world catches fire, right after you take the halos… Has it ever happened to you—without taking them—a long time after you stopped taking them?”“Once,” Nate said. “On Aether… when I thought I was going to die.”Brad nodded, running his thumb along the tendon of Nate’s wrist. He traversed the smartband, mapping out a path all the way to the crook of Nate’s arm, where his shirt-sleeve was bunched up. Brad frowned, saying, “It happened to me, too, when I was in the Courtyard, with Thea… I thought we were going to die.” He looked at Nate’s face, his thumb still lingering at the crook of Nate’s arm, the rest of his fingers dry and warm against Nate’s forearm.“Are we too calm about this?” Nate asked.“When in doubt…” Brad said, trailing off. He couldn’t remember what came after, if there was anything following it…He reached his other hand up to Nate’s face, thumb pulling slightly at the corner of his lips. Nate didn’t blink as he held Brad’s gaze. Nate’s skin was warm, fevered. Brad’s eyes naturally gravitated down to Nate’s lips, telegraphing his intentions by leagues.The moment their lips touched, Brad pressed his entire self into Nate despite the awkward angle. Nate followed, their bodies moving against each other like a wave.It was the unexpected rainfall following months of drought; the electricity in the air before a thunderstorm. Their bodies surging, and melting simultaneously. An electric surge so great it set everything on fire, building even as the rain fell. Like each their soul was finally touching something it’d been missing for decades, for half a century, more. Like, oh, there you are.Nate easily maneuvered himself into Brad’s lap, noses and teeth knocking against each other, quiet laughter against lips. He straddled Brad’s thighs, pushing Brad’s upper body into the wall as their kisses went deeper. It left Nate’s right arm jammed uncomfortably between the back of Brad’s neck and the wall, but Nate’s left hand remained free to grip into Brad’s shoulder; fingertips and butted nails digging into the fabric of his shirt, the hoodie, pulling at the neck.Brad’s hands were suddenly greedy. Ravenous for the feel of Nate’s flesh, the subtle shifts in muscle, bones, tendons as Nate shifted in his lap. Brad had practically pushed Nate’s shirt all the way up to his armpits when he remembered where they were.In-between kisses, Brad managed to express this, Nate agreeing they needed to go somewhere else, even as they continued to kiss, chasing each other’s lips whenever the other attempted to move away. Brad dug his hands into Nate’s waist, grounding them both for a moment. He rested his forehead against Nate’s shoulder before he finally let Nate stand up. Nate held out his hand.The amount of anticipation running through them didn’t make the walk from the Observatory to their apartments any shorter. They kept a comfortable distance between themselves. It wasn’t a matter of secrecy—the rumor mill would keep on churning no matter what they did—but a matter of privacy. The fact Brad was, essentially, the topmost authority figure on the facility by way of his position also factored in.It didn’t stop Brad from glancing over at Nate as they walked, gracing him with a wicked smirk, a brief flick of fingers against Nate’s ribs. Just below his star-speckled tattoo. Nate noticed how Brad’s shoulders squared instinctively when they passed Trombley on rounds, how he returned the nod of acknowledgement, the perfunctory ‘sir’.The door to Brad’s apartment was barely closed before they started stripping off clothes, pulling and yanking at fabrics; their own, each other’s.Nate touching Brad’s face, running his hands down Brad’s neck. Palm resting against Brad’s sternum for a second. The back of Nate’s hand traveling down in an uneven line. From Brad’s navel to the side of his hip, fingertips ghosting, then pushing down on the way up, dragging along Brad’s hairline to between his legs.Brad pulled off Nate’s jeans and underwear, half-lifting and half-pushing Nate further up the bed so Brad could settle between Nate’s legs. Nate quickly started unbuttoning Brad’s pants, watching him intently as Brad got back into standing to kick them off. Everything removed; feverish and naked, skin pressed against skin.Their hips rolled against each other; lips and tongues moving, becoming momentarily inert, forgotten, with a thrust. Their bodies met in synchronous waves, breaths gusting against each other’s faces, necks, shoulders.Nate ran his hands down Brad’s back, hooking his ankles at Brad’s knees. He grabbed Brad’s ass, pushing against him, and Brad’s forehead came to rest against Nate’s shoulder. Brad could practically feel Nate’s grin against his ear, against his neck as Nate kissed him, bit into his shoulder, his collarbone.Brad wheedled his hand between them, grabbing Nate’s dick. He gave it a squeeze, followed by a stroke. The angle was awkward, not particularly conducive to anything where they were still pressed against each other, still moving even if there was no rhyme or reason to it anymore, other than craving the sensations.Nate flipped them over with ease, earning him an indolent little smirk. They’d wrestled enough for Nate to know how to use Brad’s height and weight to his own advantage; what Brad’s strengths and weaknesses were. Even if Nate had lost some of the muscle he’d maintained as a soldier—where Brad hadn’t—their matches were still even. Nate was too competitive, deep down, to let Brad win just for the sake of it.And this wasn’t meant to last.Nate braced his arms on either side of Brad’s ribcage, Brad’s hands grabbing and pulling at Nate’s short hair as their foreheads came to press against each other. Bone against bone, hard, eyes staring into each other. Sloppy kisses, long kisses; pauses where neither of them moved except to kiss each other, slow and deep. Brad touching Nate’s chest, digging his hand into Nate’s ribcage, fingers splaying just so over his silly homemade tattoo; Delphinus, covered, hidden. He bit into Nate’s collarbone, licked his nipple.Nate hid his face in the crook of Brad’s neck as Brad grabbed his ass, digging his fingers into his thighs, leaving white little marks that faded and became red. Brad pulling Nate’s arms over his head, Nate digging his fingers into Brad’s hip.It was finding water after days of searching; they wanted it inside them, all around them, all at once. Even with the fatigue starting to settle deeper into their muscles, into their bones, their hearts, they couldn’t cease until they were gasping for air.It wasn’t meant to last, this time.

. . .
 Nate slept on his stomach. Brad preferred to sleep on his back. Although he’d never given any thought to how Nate slept, it still surprised him. It felt like something he needed to know. Something he should have known, after all this time. Like it couldn’t have possibly changed, in-between.Brad was on his side, tangled up in the duvet. His feet and legs were sticking out, part of the duvet having bunched up behind his neck, the rest pulled down almost to his hipbones. He was lying on his side, watching Nate sleep on his stomach. One of Nate’s hands was tucked awkwardly against his jaw; his wrist bent, fingers curling like a conch. He’d wake sometime in the night, no doubt, having to move his hand, shake out the pins and needles.Nate’s other hand was lodged between the curve of his hipbone and the mattress. His duvet was tangled much like Brad’s.Brad traced the line of Nate’s back, his shoulders, his near-buried nose, his chin, his jaw, his lips in the dim light. Brad was thinking about rain again. It’d kept falling into his mind, all day. The sound of rain on rooftops, or sand, or in the ocean itself.There was this sudden, subdued sense of grief. These simple things, like the sound of rain, or the smell of dirt, or the feel of a wave swelling underneath him; he hadn’t missed them, not truly longed for them, until he came to work here.Following the curve of Nate’s brows, Brad imagined Nate on the deserted beach by Brad’s house. Overcast weather, but not quite raining, not yet. Great waves in the distance. It felt… unexpected.“It’s long since been established that staring at people while they sleep is creepy,” Nate said, his voice scratchy and quiet. His eyes remained closed.Brad hummed, shifting lazily so he could use his bent arm as a pillow. “I’m not staring. I’m contemplating.”“Contemplating, then,” Nate said. A few beats passed. Brad ran his palm slowly up and down Nate’s spine. Nate took a deep breath and opened his eyes. He checked his smartband.“How long?” Brad asked. He continued to run his palm along Nate’s spine. He could feel the vertebras.“About an hour and thirteen minutes. Mostly REM,” Nate replied. He put his hand flat on the space between their heads, closed his eyes again.“Did we choose this?” Nate asked, eventually. His voice was still quiet.“Do we have free will,” Brad said. It was neither a question, nor a statement. If anything, it was a summary of a long list of arguments Brad had already chewed to pieces in his own mind.“I guess that’s what it comes down to,” Nate agreed.They were both lying on their sides, memorizing each other.“Does it matter?” Brad asked. “Does it change anything?”There was a visible scar bisecting Brad’s eyebrow. Nate would have never noticed it if he weren’t so close. Brad’s eyes were intent. Like he was keeping a door open, and standing sentry all the while.“Does it feel like something you don’t want? Is there a part of you that—feels like this is being forced on you?” Brad asked.The moment Nate had stepped off that ship, four months ago, he’d felt there was something about Brad. But it hadn’t been a unique feeling. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t felt before. It was attraction. Nate had been attracted to Brad long before he realized the man scrambling for him in his dream, was the same man lying next to him in bed, now.Maybe every road led here. Maybe it was determined. Maybe it didn’t matter.“It doesn’t matter to me, anymore. How we got here,” Brad said. “I thought it did. I thought the only choice I had, was to make no choice at all.”He kept looking at Nate, still intent, still guarded.“It doesn’t change anything,” Nate said, moving into Brad. “It doesn’t matter why it happened, or how.”For hours, they lay in silence, and in conversation. They recounted their dreams, easily fitting them together at the seams. They lay silent. They didn’t sleep.It mattered not how the love manifested, only that it did. That was the only inevitability. Love.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Bryan woke early. He ran ten miles on the treadmill, showered, got dressed. Then he sat, for nearly an hour, with his eyes closed and his hands entwined on his stomach, facing the blank wall opposite his desk. This was as good as it was going to get for today.The day’s first appointment was one of the phytologists working in the Garden. The look of pure joy on her face when he confirmed her suspicions of pregnancy… She would be growing a living human being in the next nine to ten months. A human being forced to grow up in this unknowable time and place.How the fuck was that not terrifying? How was she not terrified for this kid? This fucked up universe where nobody was clean.Bryan drew himself closed, quick. He’d always been good a that. But then he’d always been good at not letting things get to him, too. Not in a way he couldn’t control, or a way he wouldn’t want to express. A sudden burst of despairing melodrama.He congratulated the phytologist, and set up an appointment with the OBGYN on the Backer base. The moment she left, Bryan took several deep breaths through his nose; deep into his stomach, hold, and out through his mouth.He sent a message to Ray.

. . .
 “So are you ready to have a serious conversation about this shit, or should I just pack my bags now so you can cart me off?” Ray threw himself into the chair opposite Bryan’s desk, slouching to the point he was about to slide off it altogether. “‘Cause I ain’t got time for that shit, Doc.”“You don’t expect me to believe all of this without question? All that documentation could have been forged, some elaborate ploy to…” Bryan made a gesture, like dealer’s choice. He wanted to believe it was a ploy.“I’ve got something else for you,” Ray said, picking up the banged-up tablet he’d put down by his feet. His fingers skittered across the screen. He handed the tablet to Bryan.It was a satellite image. Completely benign, close enough you wouldn’t be able to tell where it was unless you were familiar with it. Bryan wasn’t. Several of the screen’s pixels were dead, too, which could very well be omitting landmarks. “What am I supposed to glean from this?”“It’s a satellite image of Eupraxia. An old one. Ish. It was one of the first things I found: a folder full of satellite images. Only some of them were of Eupraxia, most were of other planets in the outer reaches, or in the Wastelands. There were even some solar system maps—didn’t really give me anything, and the files looked pretty straight up so I didn’t prioritize it much at first. But then—then I started thinking about how Mat hid all this shit in the first place. Inside a vid file.”Bryan looked up from the tablet. The screen had gone dark. “Get to the point.”“You have, like, no appreciation for dramatic flair. Exit the satellite photo and check the rest. I made a folder, all nice, just for you.”The first photo was barely discernible. It looked like it might be the entrance to a small home; the kind of home more common in the outer reaches. The photo had a greenish tint with plenty of grain. The next photo was of a group of kids—some very small, some older, their mid-teens perhaps. They were all smiling, like it was picture day. Colony kids, outer reaches, definitely. But they looked well-fed, healthy. Bryan had an unpleasant sensation of familiarity despite never having seen any of them before now.Several high-resolution photos of abandoned homes in a desert-like climate. There was some degree of vegetation, mostly short in stature. The light was a strange bluish-pink.Bryan was about to ask, yet again, what the point of this was when he came to a photo that made him stop cold. It was a vast canyon—a mine—filled with people. Each and every road, like steps descending, had people on them. Some of the photos were close-ups. Laborers wearing worn-down, outdated biosuits. Many of the suits appeared too big, which was a chilling prospect considering biosuits were quite tight by design. If you looked thin in a biosuit, you’d have to be practically skeletal outside of it. Judging by stature, many of the laborers had to be kids.One photo showed a small group of guards with rifles slung across their chests, and high-tech biosuits without insignias or logos of any kind. They were standing together in a half-circle.There was a body at their feet. The faceplate was half-hidden by the stirred up ground, the other half facing away. Another photo showed an individual whose faceplate was broken beyond repair. They’d likely died shortly after. Whatever had smashed in the faceplate had smashed their face to a bloody mess as well.“They’re slave labor mines,” Ray said, his voice quiet. “This is why the Insurgents ‘came out of nowhere’. It wasn’t about the Alliance having too much control of the Wasteland colonies—or it wasn’t just about that, anyway. The Alliance must’ve been dealing with the dissension for years before the actual war started. I mean—we learned about this in school.”The way Ray remembered it from high school History lessons, the New Worlds Initiative was created by the Alliance, offering homes and work to people who were willing to move, and start building colonies in the Wastelands. One of the great things about this was quite an expansive need for manual labor, so everyone had a shot, no matter their socioeconomic standing. The pursuit of Happiness, and all that.The New Worlds Initiative failed because the Wasteland colonies became greedy, and started threatening the Alliance, demanding they be allowed to self-govern: demanding they no longer be under Alliance authority. The Alliance had too much power, and the Wastelands were far from the heart of it all.What Ray hadn’t learnt in school, was how the Alliance had to make the Wasteland colonies seem like the villains from the very beginning. The moment the colonies started making noise, started kicking up a fuss, the Alliance flipped it and made them into the monsters. It wasn’t so difficult, this gradual dehumanization. Spreading fear across the ether.How travel outside the Wastelands was becoming dangerous, even along the periphery. The people—those closer to the heart of the Alliance—asked for border controls, which they got. The Alliance duped its citizens across systems, effectively making it impossible for people to find out what really went on in the colonies.What had started out as once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a dream, became something truly horrid for most of the colonists, and no-one knew. Or if they did, they didn’t speak up, or they were silenced.“These people were recruited as fucking slave labor,” Ray said. “They didn’t stand a fucking chance. Even if it was all good and above board to start with. The Wastelands might as well have been a completely different dimension, for how inaccessible it turned out, even before the borders went up.”A photo of two kids lying practically on top of each other, sleeping. They were nothing but skin and bone. Bryan couldn’t even hazard a guess at their ages; they could be ten years younger or older than he guessed, if these conditions were the only conditions they had ever lived in.Bryan went back to the photo of the smiling kids. “Where did you say this photo was from?”“Eupraxia. Why?”Bryan shook his head, putting the tablet on his desk. “How do you know these aren’t doctored? Or outright fabricated?”“Who the fuck would be stupid enough to try and frame the Alliance for crimes against humanity? They’ve literally got more power than God. The only thing that regulates the Alliance, is the Alliance. Who knows where the corruption begins and ends,” Ray said.“What you’re implying—”“I’m implying fuckall. I’m saying, outright, that the Alliance is fucking evil incarnate and they’re the reason we’re at war. Not the Insurgents. Why are you refusing to believe this?”“Because it’s unbelievable,” Bryan said. Before Ray could go on another tirade, Bryan continued. “However—unbelievable isn’t synonymous with untrue. I’m not saying I’m sold on all this, but the documents you gave me last time—there might be a more immediate concern at hand.”“What,” Ray said. It was an exhale: how could there possibly be more things going wrong.Bryan had been reading Dr Ardit Durand’s journal entries over and over. Certain parts he knew by heart, certain sentences kept repeating at the back of his mind, like it was continuously working through it, trying to solve this damn puzzle. Beware the dreamers.“I’m under doctor-patient confidentiality—even so, I’m choosing to divulge some information with you, because at this point, I don’t know who the fuck else I’d confer with. Can I trust you not to repeat this information in any way, manner, or form?”“Who’d I tell?” Ray said. Bryan deadpanned him. “I mean, even if you couldn’t trust me, you could just black-mail the shit out of me with the very illegal drug abuse, blah blah blah, get me blacklisted, maybe even get me thrown into one of those arctic penitentiaries. That’d be great. Maybe they’d just assassinate me for knowing too much—”“—both Brad and Nate are suffering from what I am starting to believe is some form of psychosomatically induced illness. And the reason this is happening, I believe, is because they were both under a very specific drug regiment dictated by the military during their service,” Bryan said, talking over Ray. “Do you understand?”Ray’s lips parted. Bryan took it as acknowledgement.“Did you give me all the ‘science-y’ files, or are there more?”“That was all of them,” Ray said. He frowned slightly. “Is it—I mean… is it bad? Are they really sick? Are they gonna be okay? Do they know?”“No, they don’t know,” Bryan said. It was such a grossly unprofessional decision on his part; not just the act of telling Ray before Brad and Nate, but telling him at all.Frankly? Bryan didn’t know how to tell Brad and Nate. Or what to tell them, exactly. Nate hadn’t even said—in so many words—that he too had used halos at some point in his life. But Bryan could extrapolate.The similarities in Brad and Nate’s service records, despite Brad’s being more extensively redacted. Nate exhibiting nearly the exact same symptoms as Brad. No pathogens of any kind: all of Nate’s blood work was perfect. Brad’s, too. They were both in peak physical health. Every goddamned test Bryan had thought to run, had come back clear. It was too much of a coincidence.Yet Bryan felt like he was only able to see half of the whole.He had never observed what would happen when the side-effects of the halos didn’t end, when the severity of the symptoms was a downward spiral. From what he’d read… He knew neither how nor what to tell Brad and Nate. Maybe they already suspected it themselves. Maybe they already knew more than he could ever hope to.“I don’t know what’s going to happen to them. If I can’t figure out what it is, how to stall it, or reverse it…” Bryan trailed off. “Are you sure there are no other documents? Nothing?”Ray’s heart dropped. He thought of the last thing Brad had said to him. You degenerate fucking junkie. He thought about the last thing he’d said to Brad, too. Ray still meant it: his whole spiel about caring about people, even those who had hurt him. Maybe that was a flaw. Maybe it was a strength.“I’m sure. I’m positive. I gave you all of it.”

. . .
 Walt’s apartment smelled different from Ray’s: just a subtle difference. Nothing to do with cleanliness; it was tidier than Ray’s apartment, but overall the level of cleanliness was the same. It’d been a while since Ray had been in Walt’s apartment. He was lucky Walt didn’t have work today. Or maybe it was fate at this point, needling away.They were lying side-by-side on the bed, head to feet. Ray was staring up at the ceiling while Walt read quietly.Ray felt like he was swimming. Floating. But not in a pleasant way. Like he’d been cast to sea, and he was just waiting for his body to give up. To sink, or succumb to hypothermia. He was nauseous. A buoy taking in salt-water. The ship had capsized. How had so many things gone so wrong in less than a year?“I’ve been thinking about something,” Ray said after a while. He shifted his legs, knocking against one of Walt’s knees as he did. “About why Mat did what he did. What his plan was. I mean, Mat never did anything without a reason, you know?”Walt hummed, more acknowledgement than agreement. He’d never been close to Mat. Quite frankly, no-one but Ray seemed to have been. To Walt, Mat had always been… opaque. He’d been perfectly capable of small-talk, even beyond polite inquiry, but the moment you tried to actually know him, it was as though everything shut off. As if he ceased existing as an individual.Ray fiddled with one of the novelty ships Walt kept on the shelf above his bed. Ray wasn’t sure, but he thought it might be the Alliance’s Aether vessel. They were all modeled after Alliance vessels, after all. “I did figure out what those flash-drives were,” Ray said, changing the subject. “The ones Minah gave me.”“Yeah? What are they?”“Flash-drives,” Ray said. His lips quirked into a smirk. Walt rolled his eyes. “They really are, though. Outdated as fuck, but fully functional and all that. With a little tinkering, anyway. Especially after you remove the tiny military-grade memory chips tucked inside two of them.” Ray let the ship sail gracelessly through the air so it landed nose down on Walt’s stomach. “I mean, you gotta appreciate the irony. Memory inside memory. Obsolete versus contemporary. Actually beyond contemporary, to be honest, but that’s neither here nor there. Something useless nobody would look at twice, hiding something priceless. I could literally go on like this for hours.”“Wait, do you think that’s why those CID agents were here? The ones that said Minah was a security threat? Is it connected to that?” Walt shifted on the bed so he was more upright. He put the book down, completely forgetting to mark his place. The ship slid slightly to the side.“She’s wanted for treason,” Ray said. He hadn’t told Walt, after the CID agents’ visit.Nate had asked Ray, the very same day, if he believed it. Ray’s reply had been a solitary, “Yes”. Yes, he believed she was wanted for treason. Yes, he believed she was an Insurgent. Nate had scrutinized him for a beat, then nodded.The agents had clearly been selective about who they’d used the T-word with.“I don’t think the agents knew why she was here. I’m not sure why she was here, either, aside from dropping off the flash-drives. Probably to see Kocher, now that I think about it. I don’t know why she keeps saying they’re not a thing, when they’ve been a thing for like three years—like she can trick me into believing that’s not the truth. Can’t trick a trickster, dude,” Ray said. He stretched for the ship on Walt’s stomach, flopping back down on his back. He pointed the ship’s nose at his own, eyes following the tip of the ship as he brought it closer and closer to his face until he went crosseyed.“Anyway, she was probably here to say goodbye to Kocher. And me, and Nate, I guess. I don’t know what she wants me to do with these memory chips. I’ve got some ideas but… I think she and Mat were on the same team. I think Mat was an Insurgent—I mean, I’ve been thinking that for a while now, to be honest—but I think Minah’s one, too. Which is so fucked up, calling them that, especially now that I know what actually made this clusterfuck of a war happen in the first place.”“But how’s she connected to Mat? Just because they’re both playing on the same field—”“I don’t know,” Ray said, chewing the inside of his cheek. He put the ship down on his chest. “It’s not like I can ask hem.”Ray wasn’t lying when he said he’d been thinking about it, trying to figure it out. Why Matvey had done what he had, Insurgent or not. There’d been moments where it all seemed like Ray was just trying to redeem Matvey, somehow. To excuse him from the inexcusable. Somewhere along the line, Ray started tugging at the right thread in his mind.

. . .
 The plan was to escape the facility.Nyx’s engineered collapse was meant as a distraction. The depressurization of the facility was, at its core, meant to allow Matvey a way out. He hadn’t wanted innocent people to die, but it was a matter of sacrificing the few to save the many. He knew the scientists were replaceable in the eyes of the Haagen corporation. They were assets: important but not invaluable. If nothing else, he could slow them down, he could slow Haagen down, the Alliance, just a little bit.Matvey was supposed to suit up, wait for Nyx to start collapsing, then sneak his way out without security noticing. It wouldn’t be all that difficult. He would commandeer one of the long-range rovers, and drive to a predetermined coordinate, far enough away from Oneiroi and any other base or facility, to be picked up unseen. They would fly under the radar into the Wastelands.The resupply ship meant for Oneiroi was delayed. By two and a half weeks. Logistically, for the facility and its inhabitants, it was just a minor nuisance. For Matvey, it was a disaster.It meant the agent supplying him with the memory chips would be two and a half weeks delayed. It meant he had to push everything back. In theory, this was only a nuisance, too. But in practice? In practice, someone somewhere was starting to suspect.Matvey didn’t believe they knew what, exactly, he was doing. They only knew he was doing something untoward. They’d increased monitoring his personal correspondence. They knew he would notice. How could he not? It was his job to notice. We’re watching you, they said.It couldn’t wait. Either he had to flee the facility without all this information he’d amassed, or—there was no option B. The longer he stayed, the more scrutiny he would fall under. It’d cause a domino effect: the scrutiny he was put under would spread outward, like virus. If they figured it out, everything Matvey had found would be wiped from existence.He spent three whole days trying to find a way out.That was the funny thing about Oneiroi. Getting in was hard, sure, but getting out? As close to impossible as it could get. They didn’t care so much about what you might smuggle in, as long as it wasn’t weapons, or explosives, or anything else that could harm the facility or its inhabitants on a large scale. But they cared very much about what you might try to smuggle out.Matvey had renewed his contract for another twelve months. A strategic move, obviously, since he had no plans on staying. He could request a three-day leave of absence, cite some family emergency. It wouldn’t work, though. He hadn’t been in touch with his family for more than a decade. For all he knew, they might all be dead and gone. Whoever was keeping tabs on him would have no difficulties finding out the truth, this way or that. At best, Matvey’s request would be denied. Even if it wasn’t, he still wouldn’t be able to smuggle the information out. Not without those memory chips.Every scenario led to the same outcome.He had only one way out. But the information… contingencies, contingencies, contingencies. Matvey had to risk it.He didn’t remove the collapse from Nyx’s systems. He tweaked it, left it dormant, added a trigger. He knew there was a chance his successor would be smart enough to figure it out ahead of time. And if they didn’t, a reboot was the only way to go. If his successor couldn’t figure it out, well… it’d leave Matvey’s associates a small window to extract the information in the ensuing chaos and clean-up. Or cover-up. They knew his plan. The rest was up to them to figure out.Matvey spent his last night on Oneiroi in its observatory.He’d never appreciated it much. The scenery of Mars, or lack thereof. To be fair, he hadn’t ever appreciated the scenery on any of the other planets he’d lived, either. He thought, standing there, knowing he had only a dozen or so hours left to live, he’d develop some acute sense of appreciation for the sheer beauty and complexity of existence.He didn’t. He was… mournful. He didn’t want to die. But he accepted it. He didn’t think they would buy his performance, necessarily, but it was better than nothing. Make it seem like he’d gone off the deep end. Take a leaf out of Ray’s book. The extreme ends of a ridiculous conspiracy theory.It hadn’t been part of the initial plan; Matvey taking to Ray.It wasn’t that Matvey didn’t believe in social connections. He was human; he needed other humans in his orbit, just like anyone else. But it wasn’t a concession he could make these days. He didn’t have family, or friends. Only associates.But then Ray came waltzing into this place; this young kid who talked too much, and too fast, with his carefully concealed ally addiction, and a brain made for much bigger, better things. So Matvey started conditioning Ray, surreptitiously. Just in case. Another contingency.If Matvey’s successor managed to reboot Nyx’s system, it would act as a trigger, allowing Ray to find the hint Matvey had so heavy-handedly left behind. It relied on Ray knowing Matvey as well as Matvey knew Ray. Maybe it was too sentimental, but what could he say; he knew Ray.Ray, who cared about people boundlessly, who was loyal to a fault, with a mind that couldn’t leave any riddle or puzzle unsolved. Matvey didn’t have friends anymore, but Ray was close enough.Matvey knew Ray would copy his personal hard-drive. It was the only reason Ray knew about the hard-drive in the first place. Ray was curious enough, and enough of a rule-breaker to do it. Most importantly, with his ridiculous conspiracy theories, Matvey knew Ray would believe what he found—everything in those files—and he would not remain idle. Ray would find a way.Matvey got up from the bench in the Observatory, and walked up to the concave window. He put his hands in his pockets, and watched the horizon lighten just a fraction as the seconds and minutes ticked by. He stood there for a long time before he said, “Nyx, where is Ray Person?”“He is currently in his apartment, asleep. Would you like me to wake him?”Matvey kept from responding long enough for Nyx to repeat her question.“No. Thank you, Nyx.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

When he was just shy of eighteen, Ray went to Earth for the first time. It was a small honor, being accepted into the Alliance Military Academy’s exchange program. Eight months in a completely different environment, learning a new language, a different culture, new people. Although the purpose of the program was quite broadly defined, one of the top requirements was intensive language learning classes. Translator devices were commonplace, but it was all about preserving languages, especially those outside the Alliance’s primary languages. Many colonies—including Ray’s—had pidgin languages, but those weren’t prioritized by the Alliance’s preservation programs.So Ray spent eight months on Earth, in the United Republic of Korea, learning Korean on top of his other Advanced Level classes. It wasn’t like he’d never been to big cities—the true megapolises—but they weren’t quite like the ones you’d find on long-established planets like Earth.Ray was from a big planet with a small number of inhabitants, and he attended the only branch of the Alliance Military Academy habituated on a space station. It was close to the Wastelands, almost as close as his home planet.Certain people—conspiracy theorists, not including himself—believed the Alliance had chosen a space station rather than one of the terraformed planets, only because a space station would be much easier and faster to liquidate, should the Insurgents decide to rush them. Considering the space station was practically toeing the Wastelands’s borders.Ray didn’t really care either way. He was just happy to have secured himself a spot straight out of junior high school, and a full scholarship to boot. His parents were happy so long as they didn’t have to pay anything. They didn’t care it was Alliance; they harbored no allegiance to either side of the war. All they cared about, at the end of the day, was that Ray was happy, and got the education he wanted, and needed, to continue on with his life.Minah was the cadet tasked with babysitting him. Those were her words, said with the kind of begrudging tone implying she was neither happy about it nor doing it willingly. It was punishment for something she’d done to another cadet. Minah never told Ray what, exactly, it was she’d done, and he hadn’t managed to wheedle it out of her, either. All she’d said, was, “I’m not the one deserving punishment,” and left it at that.A few months later, Ray didn’t doubt her for a second.It wasn’t any different, now. He didn’t doubt Minah. He didn’t doubt what had been left to him. He doubted… himself, maybe? How the fuck was he supposed to do this? He didn’t even know who they were, not really; all these people who suddenly relied on him, who expected some great, mind-defying feat of him. Without intending to, he’d somehow hitched his wagon to the Insurgents. If he went through with this—if he figured out a way to go through with this—he would be an enemy of the Alliance. If caught, he would be tried for treason.It was great, how the only two people he could talk to in any meaningful way, were either dead or on the run.Ray shuffled his feet, resisting the temptation to rest against the wall behind him. He was on lab duty, which essentially meant standing very still, doing nothing, for hours on end. Another great thing.He’d spent the last three hours trying to figure out how to approach Nate and Brad. At first, he’d considered approaching Nate, solely to use him as a buffer against Brad while Ray regaled them with the insanity that was… well, everything. But that would be childish. He needed to face this head on, personal feelings aside. He’d also entertained the idea of just going in, guns blazing, with, “So I heard you gentlemen might be dying, and so I figure you guys do the entire literal universe a solid, and smuggle some truly interstellar-shattering info out of this hellhole under your literal fucking skin.”Ray decided against this, too. Mostly because he didn’t think Brad nor Nate would be especially partial to believing anything that came after it. He needed to find that fine line between expediency and a thorough explanation to get them both onboard. Bryan hadn’t exactly clarified it much beyond what he’d told Ray, but from the sparse summaries Bryan compiled from the leagues of documentation he’d gone through—Ray had managed to piece it together. At least the important bits.“Nyx, where’re Colbert and Fick right now?”“Colbert is in his office. Fick is in the cafeteria. Would you like to conference?”Ray tilted his head back. He squinted up at the ceiling. Do or die. Literally.“Tell them I wanna meet them in, uh—in Brad’s apartment. Now. It’s urgent.” 
. . .
 Brad sat on his bed, elbows on his knees, chin resting on his knuckles. Nate stood leaning against the small table in the corner, between the two chairs. His arms were crossed over his chest.Ray shifted his shoulders back. This would not be an easy crowd to win over. Not that he’d expected it to be, but somehow, standing there, under two sets of very discerning eyes, he felt incredibly small. Like a kid, about to be chastised. Actually, it made him feel like he was back to being lorded over by every fucking asshole who outranked him at the Academy.“What the fuck, Ray?” Brad said, eventually, when Ray still hadn’t spoken.“I know what’s going on with you two,” Ray blurted.Brad looked like he was about to astral project to a different plane, and had to forcibly keep himself in his corporeal body to say, “Are we in fucking middle school?”“What’s going on, Ray? Why are we here? Nyx said it was urgent,” Nate added. He sounded as tired as he looked.“My dudes, I don’t give a shit about you guys fucking, that’s not what this is about. I just need you to trust me, okay? Can you just trust me, for two secs?” Ray turned to Brad as he spoke. “You know, like you used to? Trust me, that is.”Brad’s impassive expression briefly slipped. He said, “What is it?”“I don’t know. Before you implode or whatever—I don’t know exactly what’s going on, I just know it’s bad. And as a side-note, because I feel it’s worth mentioning: I’m still pissed at you. Like, I can’t even begin to put the words in, like, a coherent line of, of words. But I’m willing to put that aside, for now, ‘cause you’re like my best friend, probably, which is kinda sad, and probably says something about my self-worth, or whatever—”“Ray—”“No, just, just listen, okay? I’m willing to put all that aside, ‘cause I don’t want you to die, or something, and I don’t want you to die, either,” Ray added, turning toward Nate, gesturing at him.“What are you talking about?” Nate said. His arms loosened across his chest.“It’s a long, elaborate, wild fucking ride of a story, man, and I’ll tell you all about it some time, but first: I think you guys need to, like, get the fuck out of this place. And then get the fuck off this planet.”Nate and Brad barely glanced at each other. They returned their collective gaze to Ray, part expectant, part incredulous. They didn’t say anything.“So, I realize you need, like, a carrot? Or whatever, like a reward, or a, a—what the fuck is that word—”“Incentive,” Nate said.“—Right, an incentive. I don’t really have one of those, aside from, you know, you’re probably gonna die here and I don’t think Oneiroi, or more specifically, the Haagen corp—or even the Alliance, really—is gonna leave you in peace, so to speak. In a sort of, you’re gonna disappear and your families will never know what the fuck happened to you, and then your corpses are probably gonna be desecrated, for, like, eternity. Oh, and I kinda need you to, like, smuggle some shit out of here. In your bodies. It’s not drugs, I swear!” Ray added when both Nate and Brad’s faces twisted into nothing but incredulity.“What the fuck, Ray?”It took a lot longer than expected to explain everything. And then convince them of it. Or, ‘convince’ was probably too strong a word, but. Ray had asked Walt to cover his station for an hour, two tops; Walt probably realized how unrealistic the timeframe was the moment Ray opened his mouth, because Walt ended up finishing Ray’s shift. On a sick-day, no less. Walt was too good, honestly. He put up with too much of Ray’s shit.Both Brad and Nate wanted to see all the documentation Ray was touting as his new religion. He’d expected as much, and had prepared a third tablet with a selection of it. He could hardly fit all of it on a single tablet, and he wasn’t about to remote storage any of it. But Ray made sure all the photos were on the tablet. None of the medical documents, none of Dr Ardit Durand’s personal notes. Not even the abbreviated version Bryan had typed up for Ray. Even though Ray had no idea what the original said, he knew intuitively that Bryan had taken ‘abbreviated’ to mean ‘make as vague as possible without being too vague’.Ray tried to explain as much as he could. Tried to answer as many of Brad and Nate’s questions he could. Wrote down some of the ones he couldn’t; they raised concerns he hadn’t thought of before. He told them about how Bryan had divulged some information with him, about them; both Brad and Nate looked well and truly pissed about that, but they didn’t verbalize it.How Minah had smuggled in military-grade memory chips and simply handed them over to Ray. This was what surprised Brad and Nate the least. Nate almost looked as if he’d had a small, private epiphany when Ray told them.This segued Ray, finally, to his idea. Which wasn’t really an idea, so much as a three-legged Hail Mary, where one leg was Ray’s own deductions and hypotheses, the other leg whatever Bryan was telling neither Ray nor Brad and Nate, and the third leg… well. Ray didn’t really know what the third leg was. Maybe a phantom-leg; his gut instinct and nothing else.“It won’t work,” Brad said. He was sitting on the bed proper, back against the wall, body slouched, one knee bent over the edge. Ray and Nate were sitting on the chairs by the table. “Unless it’s in a body bag, there’s no way we’ll get out of this place, assuming you’re right and they don’t want us to get out of this place. Our contracts are ironclad. If we send requests for temporary leave, they can cook up some bureaucratic bullshit that justifies rejection. If they want to keep us here, dead or alive, there’s no way we’re getting out.”“If we get the memory chips implanted,” Nate said, “and we die here, they will be found. And that’s literally the antithesis to what you want to happen. And even if we disregard all of that, you’re asking us to commit treason against the Alliance. To help the Insurgents.”“It doesn’t matter if that happens, if they find it. Mat, he—he left this to me. And I don’t know what that means, I really don’t, it’s too big, and I’m not gonna sit here and lie to your faces, and say I’m, I’m 100% sure this is all true, and right, and good, and whatnot. But my gut instinct says, it says the important parts are. And if I believe that? Then I can’t just sit here with my thumbs up my ass.” Ray paused. He looked at his feet, chewing the inside of his cheek.“I could take all that intel, put it in those chips, and put them in me, and I could fuck off. I could figure out some way to get the fuck off this, this, this—I don’t even know what the fuck to call it, anymore.” Ray looked up at Nate, then Brad. “But I think you guys need to leave. And as much as I wanna leave, I don’t need to. Besides, somebody’s gotta be here when shit hits the fan, once again. I don’t know what the fuck is going on with you guys. I think Bryan knows more than he’s telling, but honestly? I don’t think he actually knows either, and I don’t know if there’s anybody out there, on either side of this situation, who knows, or who knows and can do something about it. Fix it, cure it, whatever. But I’m pretty sure you guys staying here? It’s like signing yourself over to the mad scientists down in the basement. For, like, ever.”Nate and Brad looked at each other. No words were spoken, but it felt like they were having a very real conversation, anyway. One Ray wasn’t privy to. He could still spot the resolve as it settled between them.Now all they had to do was persuade Bryan to implant the memory chips. 
. . .
 Nate put the tablet Ray had given them on the floor next to Brad’s bed. Nate had been trying to find answers to questions that kept multiplying at a rate he couldn’t follow. It’d only been a few days, but it felt like years. Everything kept getting turned inside-out.What they’d been taught—in school, through mass-media, by unquestioning parents, and peers: the colonizers of the Wastelands had been given great opportunities, which they had squandered away, and taken for granted. They were greedy. They thought they were something special. That they deserved more.How could the colonizers in the Wastelands be so greedy? They weren’t the only terraforming colonies. They weren’t the only colonies struggling to get everything working. They were not the only ones fighting their climate, their environments, the internal politics of their own states. The Wasteland colonies were given the same opportunities as the other start-up colonies; better, even, because they were the ones to take on the Wastelands.They were offered a place to live for free, they had job security. A large part of their daily nutritional needs were met free of charge. They had health care and dental care. They were allowed, even encouraged, to bring family with them—so long as it didn’t expand beyond spouses and kids, at least not to begin with. And the kids brought to these colonies—the kids born to these new colonies—they were given good quality Alliance education.How could they demand so much, when the Alliance had already given them everything it possibly could?Once the dissension started spreading among the colonized planets in the Wastelands, the Alliance and the heads of state of each colony agreed to enter talks to find a compromise they could all live with. It just didn’t happen fast enough. The colonies took out any and all individuals partial to the idea they remain self-governing states under Alliance authority.Nate had been taught this throughout the years as part of his education, as part of his socialization into big society. Some places, some planets, were less outspoken, others were overzealous. But what it came down to, was how they all believed this to be the truth. It was the truth. The Alliance didn’t lie. The New Worlds Initiative had failed because of ingratitude, and greed, and power mongering.But then… was this really how it had happened? Nate had been going through documents, looking at the photos, skimming, non-stop for two days. It was difficult to put it together—through the exhaustion, the endless fog in his mind—but what it was positing was none of what he’d been taught as truth. It wasn’t how it had happened.Some of what he’d learnt was indeed accurate, but the reality of it was, within those first few decades—if that, even—most of the colonizers in the Wastelands had not been colonizers: They were slave laborers. Many of those who had applied to be part of these new colonies, they were poorer, marginalized people. It sounded like a deal made in heaven. Security in every aspect of your life, and the lives of your family.The colonies were self-governing, with their own democratically held governments, but they were very much under the authority of the Alliance. It was smoke and mirrors. It didn’t help they were democratic states, when their heads of state were the few who benefited from the terraforming of these planets, the few who lived under good—and always bettering—conditions.So when the dissension started rippling through the colonies, it wasn’t difficult for the Alliance to turn it on its head. Turn those on the outside against those on the inside of the.It was one new regulation enforced after the other. It started small, much of it seemed harmless at first, or inconvenient at worst. It increased, slowly. The regulations became bans. The rights of the colonizers were slowly but surely shrinking away from them. It became harder, and harder to get anything out. Until, one day, the extranet was no longer available to them. There was no-one to see, or hear, or read about what was happening, far, far away from the heart of the Alliance.The Alliance noticed the dissension early on. They knew. They were aware. And like with everything else they did, they did it slowly. They started spreading half-truths about the Wastelands to the public via the extranet. Sometimes complete truths, even. They spread outright lies. Whatever came through the Wastelands itself—before and after the extranet was disabled—was quickly spoken over, demonized; by the zealous, by the neighbor, by the ignorant, and by the knowledgeable. The social scientists, the historians. The echochambers. The fear-mongering, the slow build of paranoia, the ‘what would happen if I disagreed’.By the time the coup happened, the majority of those outside the Wastelands, safely within their stable, long-established colonies, were very wary and suspicious of what was happening within the Wastelands. Some had been wary and suspicious from the start: because they believed the majority of those who lived and worked in the Wastelands were lesser than themselves, one way or another.And so the Insurgent War began, 26 years ago. It had its anniversary in a month. People hoped the Alliance and the Insurgents would celebrate it by ending the armistice, and putting peace in its place. An end to the war, finally.“Do you believe it?” Nate asked, as Brad came out of the bathroom, newly showered.“Do I believe it?” Brad repeated. He pulled on a pair of sweats, a t-shirt. He shivered. His room was warm, but he still felt cold. “I don’t know. My ability to suspend my disbelief at this point is… I don’t know what to believe. If it’s even remotely true, then everything I’ve ever believed in, is a lie. My entire life, is a lie.”Brad thought of all the missions he’d been part of as a Marine; especially the nameless ones. He’d been raised by the Alliance. He’d been steeped in it. Fucking indoctrinated, homes, came Ray’s voice at the back of his mind. Some long-forgotten conversation, in the gym, in the cafeteria, during rounds… who knew. Nate lifted his head so Brad could put his arm under it. Nate was wearing sweats and a hoodie, already curled up under the duvet. He was only a little less cold than Brad. The lights dimmed in the apartment.“Just for the sake of my sanity, I want it to not be true. I want to not believe it,” Brad said.“I guess there’s only one way for this to go,” Nate said to the ceiling.“I think we sealed our fates with that very first hit.” They’d willingly gone down that rabbit hole. They’d made the choice to take the halos.“Acta non verba,” Nate said. The motto of the Alliance Marine Corps.Brad kept staring at the ceiling as Nate’s breathing became quieter, and deeper. Every once in a while, there was a barely discernible rattle as Nate breathed in. Brad shifted his head to the side, pressed his lips to Nate’s temple.Half an hour had passed when Nate said, into the dimness, “I was there. On Eupraxia.”Brad didn’t say anything. He kept breathing against Nate’s curling hair, by his ear, his temple.“Remember when I told you, about how we almost got left behind because the ops that got fucked… Tomas, the girl, all that. It was on Eupraxia,” Nate said. “All we saw was desert. The only colony we saw flying in—the colony we sought refuge in—it was small, like an administrative outpost, maybe. They said the Insurgents had done it, disabled the radiation shields. We went there to retrieve caches from the main facilities—to get to it before the Insurgents could. There were no humanitarian efforts. There was no point to it. We were told everything was blown to shit, at best. We didn’t question it, none of it, because it wasn’t our place to.”When the Alliance vessels dropped the ordnance on the facilities, they’d been told it was to prevent the Insurgents from coming back; from rebuilding, reorganizing.Nate sat up on his elbows. He turned to Brad. “We were part of that. I was. You were. It doesn’t matter if we knew or not: we were part of it.”Brad stared up at the ceiling. He could feel the weight of his own chest grow heavier, like his diaphragm refused to do its job properly. ‘The diaphragm, like any muscle, needs to be utilized fully to work at max capacity’. A physical therapist had told him this, once. She’d suggested deep breathing exercises, and stretching properly after vigorous physical activity. Brad took a deep breath through his nose, and held it at the pit of his stomach. He breathed out through his mouth.He said, “Maybe this is poetic justice.”Nate looked at him for a long moment, then. In the end, Nate lay back down next to Brad. They were meeting Bryan and Ray in the morning.Eventually, they fell asleep, if only for a few hours. 
. . .
 “What I’m having difficulty understanding,” Nate said, facing Ray, “—is how any facet of the Alliance could get away with this? That many colonies—the Wastelands had four and a half colonized planets when the war finally broke out, with anything from three to fifteen settlements on each of those planets—how could the Alliance get away with that? With so many people?”“They kinda didn’t, though,” Ray said. “I mean—the Alliance has been at war with the Wastelanders for, like, twenty-six years now.”Brad, sitting with his arms crossed over his chest, tilted his head up at Bryan. “So you’re in on this? You agree with this? Totally re-educated?”“Does it matter? What Matvey left for Ray—whether all of it is true, or only some of it—” Bryan gestured at Ray to shut up, sensing he was about interrupt. “The more I look at it, the more convinced I am. Maybe we’re all under some mass-fucking delusion at this point, but…”“Seriously, your bedside manner is abysmal,” Brad said.Bryan continued, ignoring Brad, “The symptoms you two have been experiencing are more worrisome than I initially thought. Since neither of you exhibit any actual, physical manifestation of your symptoms aside from the symptoms themselves—that is, no viral or bacterial infections—and your lungs, heart, and all other organs are in perfect working order, I don’t know how to explain it. But there are concerns I’ve come across, and continue to uncover, that implies your bodies are convinced they’re ill, even though there is no illness. There’s no pathology. And whatever illness your body thinks it has, it’s eventually going to kill you. Your minds are essentially shutting down your bodies, and inevitably itself by extension.”“So we’re going to die,” Brad said.“For no feasible reason?” Nate asked.“It’s connected to the E.532 compound. The halos. You’ve both mentioned similar side-effects, and it matches what I’ve managed to find in the files Ray handed over. Other than that… I can’t make heads or tails of it. One of the original project leaders—his journal—it contained some clues, but even knowing the context it makes little sense. It talked of echoes in the mind, memories, psychosomatic death… It seemed almost more literary than scientific,” Bryan said. “As for your symptoms—they’re vague, at best. I considered MERS—” Bryan glanced at Brad when he said this, “—But it doesn’t line up. Since it is—outdated, but simply put—psychosomatic, it could be mimicking anything.”“But your prognosis is we’re likely gonna die, because of some subconsciously imagined condition,” Brad summarized.Nate looked over at Brad, and said, “The dreams are connected to this.”“Yeah… Guess that goes without saying at this point,” Brad agreed.“So you have told him about your dreams?” Bryan asked, eyebrows raised.“Funny story,” Brad said. “Nate’s dream kinda picks up where mine leaves off.”“You’re having… the same dream.” Bryan’s voice was flat. The Yeti dog… Nate’s imagined childhood pet.Brad see-sawed his hand. Nate lifted a shoulder. Ray stood looking nonplussed.Bryan rubbed his eyes with his forefinger and thumb for what felt like a very long time, but somehow not long enough, because he couldn’t manage to rub all the knowledge out of his mind through his eye-sockets. He just wanted to scramble his brain a little, so he wouldn’t have to deal with this circus of endless horrors; so he wouldn’t have to pick a side, take a stand. How was this possible? Any of it?He thought back to Dr Ardit Durand’s journal. That one line, at the end. Beware the dreamers.“You do realize your chances of getting off this facility are close to nil? Alive or dead? The Alliance isn’t just going to let you walk,” Bryan said.“So you’ll do it?” Nate asked.“I don’t see that I’ve got much of a fucking choice at this point.” 
. . .
 Nate checked the incision beside his hipbone; it’d already healed completely. The remaining scar was faint. That, too, would fade sooner than later. Four days had passed since Bryan had implanted the chip. One in Nate, one in Brad. Without one, the other couldn’t be accessed. Separately, they were useless.The bio-film protection on the chips should last up to three weeks, effectively making them invisible to scanners. It made it appear as if the chips were not foreign objects, but part of the flesh surrounding it. The chip would still be fine once the film degraded, and the regular tissue surrounding it should be, too, but the chip would no longer be hidden from scanners, except maybe the shoddiest ones.All that information stored in such a tiny, fragile little thing, hidden inside an even more fragile figure.Nate had felt a bit better these last few days. Brad had, too. Maybe it was a kind of placebo effect. Maybe they were in remission. Remission from whatever was slowly and inexplicably taking their bodies apart. Ye of little faith, right?Nate didn’t actually believe this. He didn’t believe it as a he video chatted his mom, carefully brushing off her concerns about his looking ‘under the weather,’ as she put it.“Oh, you know, things are puttering along as usual,” she was saying. “The university might offer me tenure in a few months’ time. Your father and some of his colleagues have finally managed to crossbreed an Earthen orchid with a native plant that apparently has quite a similar make-up—in any case, the result is quite hideous and behaves quite strangely. It has your dad very, very pleased, as you might expect. What else… Oh! Kathie dropped by briefly, a week ago, she mentioned she’d spoken to you quite recently, too— she brought her partner with her. Such a lovely woman! A child psychologist, surprisingly. You wouldn’t expect your little sister to end up with somebody like that, would you—”Nate continued to listen as his mom talked about everything and nothing, regaling him with tales both short and tall. How much they enjoyed living on Vale’s Hope—never mind they’d been living there for almost six years now—and occasionally diverging, saying how much they would have loved it, too, when they were kids—Kathie, and Will, and Nate—but, well, life never quite turns out how you’d expect. His dad dropped in on the conversation, too, briefly filling the frame, asking about how Mars was treating Nate, if it was as dreadfully sandy and boring as it looked from afar.Nate missed them so much. He missed his parents, his sister, his brother. He missed Minah, and Mike, too.“How’d the recruits deal with the nine circles of Hell?” Nate asked Mike once the perfunctoriness had been done away with.“Well,” Mike said, pausing to take a slow sip of his coffee. “One of them drank from a native stream and nearly died. Another almost died from hyperthermia. That’s a new one, in an arctic environment. Other than that, the usual,” Mike said with a lopsided shrug. Nate laughed.As Nate’s apartment filled with silence, all conversations ended, he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. His neck hurt. His throat was sore. He was starting to get tired again.There was still one thing left he needed to do.  
. . .
 “Nyx, where’s my body temperature at?” Brad asked, relaxing into his chair. He rubbed his temples.“Your body temperature is approximately 39.2 Celsius.”“Great. Am I dying yet?”“Your fever is 1.5 degrees higher than it was 34 hours ago. It is still within the acceptable limits as set by Doctor Bryan,” Nyx said.Brad made a face at the wall opposite his desk. “Great. Where’s Espera?”“He will be walking past your office in approximately two minutes.”Brad went into the hallway, and started slowly walking toward the Courtyard. Sure enough, Espera’s boots hit the floor in a quick, certain rhythm only a few handfuls of seconds later.“I trust you to get Siggy to the Backer base safely. No getting lost in the desert,” Brad said, turning his head to the side as Espera fell in step with him.“Who am I, Trombley? Only the White Man gets lost in the desert, dawg,” Espera said.“Is he ever gonna live that down?”“Not as long as I’m still breathing,” Espera said, flashing Brad a shit-eating grin before picking up his pace again.There was something strange about everything, right then. Like reality existed on two visible planes simultaneously. Like an overlay, out of order. Old-fashioned 3D imaging. When had Brad ever experienced that? Some movie, in a cramped movie theatre, and stupid glasses that didn’t fit over his own stupid glasses that he had to wear when he watched movies, or when he was reading, or driving.Sigrid was standing at the other end of the Courtyard, close to the long, narrow corridor leading to the docking bay. Her hair seemed bigger than usual; like a corkscrew-halo of frizz. Espera was standing by the door at the end of the corridor, looking off into the middle-distance. As Brad got closer, he saw that Sigrid was hugging Thea, saying something into her sleek, dark hair.Brad had never given his friendship with Sigrid much thought, other than to categorize it as a friendship. It wasn’t something either of them had sought out; frankly, they probably wouldn’t have given each other a second thought had they not been stranded on the facility with a finite amount of places and people to spend their time with. They’d bumped into each other during the odd hours when neither of them could sleep; or, more likely, in the odd hours when Brad couldn’t sleep and Sigrid had already started her day, before anyone else.She was an early riser by nature. She was also allergic to soy, and strawberries. She still ate the strawberries, even though Bryan kept telling her not to because one day her body was going to say, ‘enough is enough’ and give her more than an itchy mouth. She really did believe in the supernatural, the paranormal, whatever you wanted to call it. “It’s just a part of scientific reality science hasn’t figured out yet.”Brad almost felt like he had to tell her—now, before she left—that she might actually be onto something.Thea was leaving by the time Brad reached them.She gave Brad a nod of acknowledgement. He almost wanted to laugh, it was so out of place, such an adult mannerism; but he nodded just as gravely in return, straightening his back slightly as he would if he were acknowledging a superior.“She’s even more set on joining the Marines, now,” Sigrid said, watching Thea leave.“Hopefully she’ll’ve changed her mind by the time she’s old enough to make that decision,” Brad said.Sigrid turned her focus on Brad. Her expression was surprised. And maybe a little suspicious. “So I take it you’re not re-enlisting, then?”“I’m gonna miss you,” Brad said, without missing a beat.“Wow, anything to not answer questions about yourself, hm?” Sigrid said. Her lips curled then fell quickly into contrition. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. Or I did, a little bit, only because you never—well, never mind that. I don’t handle goodbyes well, to be honest. I tend to cry. I’m a crier. And I’ve already cried once today, so I’d rather not cry a second time,” Sigrid said, and laughed instead. “Besides, most people don’t really know what to do when somebody cries. Aryan sure didn’t. But then he started crying, too, so it kind of evened itself out.” She laughed again. “I’m going to miss you, too.”Brad hugged her. Like the bear-hugs his dad used to give him and his sister when they were little—and not so little—almost picking them up off their feet even when they’d grown as tall or taller than him. Brad held her tight. Sigrid squeezed back, digging the pads of her palms into his shoulders.When she pulled back, letting go, her eyes were glistening a little. She smiled.“Stay safe,” Brad said.“You, too,” Sigrid replied.Brad watched her as she walked away, down the long corridor, toward Espera. Just as she was about to reach him, she turned around, and said, in her carrying teacher’s voice, “I expect annual updates as promised!”Brad smiled his crooked smile and saluted her. 
. . .
 “I’ll be the first to admit enjoying clandestine meetings in my own bathroom, but I’m still kinda weirded out by it right now?” Ray said as the door to the bathroom slid closed behind him. Nate was practically standing inside the shower. This would have been so much funnier if Nate didn’t look like he had some wasting disease, and the entire galaxy wasn’t getting closer, and closer to what seemed like an inevitable paradigm-shifting implosion.“Here,” Nate said, handing Ray a small remote, cloud-storing device. “If shit goes the way it’s looking like it will, you need to get into the OCC, and access the system. The cloud is already paired with the system, all you have to do is accept the request. There’s a file named Pythia. Open it, and get out of the OCC. The virus will wipe out as much of the local and remote storage from the last six months as it can before anyone’s able to isolate it.”“Fuck,” Ray said. He looked at the tiny, sleek circle in his hand. Nate had definitely absconded with this the same way Ray had with those old tablets. “How’d you come up with this? How’d you even do this?”“Took a leaf out of Matvey’s book. Most people don’t know it, but I was a hacker before I was anything else. And judging by the look on your face right now, you’re finding it hard to believe, too,” Nate said, a small quirk to his lips.“See, I knew you were fucking crazy, man,” Ray said. There was nothing but admiration in his voice. 
. . .
 The cafeteria was buzzing with activity. Lunch had just started. Brad wasn’t used to so many people being in the cafeteria. This probably said more about his routines than theirs. He’d been picking at the dal tadka for the last half hour, taking small bites here and there, mostly just pushing the rice and lentil stew around on the plate. Somewhere along the last twenty-four hours, he’d started to lose his sense of taste. His appetite was already lacking; not being able to taste what he was forcing himself to eat didn’t help.Nate sat down across from him, carrying a solitary banana muffin. “How’re you feeling?”Brad tilted his head back, eyes closed, and said, “Like I’m dying. I also can’t taste anything.”Nate put his banana muffin aside. Some of the grease from the casing smudged the tablet’s opaque holoscreen. His sense of taste had been gradually disappearing since morning, too.“I just wanna sleep,” Brad said, opening his eyes again. He cleared his throat, coughed, cleared his throat again. “I got Espera to take over for me. I’m just trying to build up the motivation to walk back to my apartment at this point.”“C’mon,” Nate said, getting back on his feet. He picked up his tablet. “I’ll get the techs to cover for me.”Brad fell asleep the moment his head hit the pillow. Nate crawled into bed next to him, shifting around for a bit before he fell asleep, too. 
. . .
 Nate woke in the middle of the night. For a moment, he was in another apartment; the apartment. His body floating, sinking; the white noise, V barking, the sirens, Brad running, pulling, carrying—everything a discordant hellscape.Then he was in this apartment; Brad’s apartment. Nyx’s voice loud and uniform, Brad’s smartband frantically sounding off, Bryan, and nurses suddenly rushing into the room, as if appearing out of nowhere, communicating rapidly, employing abbreviations Nate could barely cobble together. His head was swimming, his body ached, he was still half-asleep, or half-dead—like he couldn’t drag himself out of the dream, or dreamlessness he’d been inhabiting seconds earlier.They talked over him, everyone. Ushered him out of the way. Getting Brad, Brad whose eyes were closed, Brad whose breath was coming in short gasps, Brad whose body was twisting like he couldn’t get enough air; like something was pulling him tauter, and tauter, and tauter still. They strapped him to a gurney, got an oxygen mask on him, and wheeled him away.Nate scrambled out of bed. He ran along the hallway, wearing a pair of Brad’s sweatpants, the sheer force of his strides the only thing keeping him from sliding sockless on the cuffs. The coolness of the floor on his skin. By the time he reached the medical office, there was no-one to stop him from entering. He stood only a few feet away, his own breathing almost as shallow as Brad’s.It was over as quickly as it started.“We had to intubate him,” Bryan said.Nate nodded by way of answering. He breathed, suppressed a cough, breathed deeper.Bryan watched him. “He’s conscious, but I’ve administered a pain-killing agent, as well as an anti-inflammatory agent. He’s lucid, but unable to communicate verbally.”Nate nodded again, unable to suppress the cough this time. One, three, five times into the crook of his arm. He could taste it—he could feel it against his bare skin—before he saw it. He could see it in Bryan’s expression, too, before he looked at the crook of his arm. Blood. 
. . .
 
Тот, кто любит, должен разделять участь того, кого он любит
— But what can be done, the one who loves must share the fate of the one he loves.
- Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master & Margarita

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Do not be afraid.
Fredrick Buechner
    Bryan made an executive decision. He’d made this decision the moment he agreed to implant the chips inside Brad and Nate.

There were certain protocols in place; the kind of protocols Bryan was legally obliged to follow, as per the contract he’d signed upon taking this job. Protocols set in place by the Haagen corporation to protect the Haagen corporation. Were the protocols themselves legal? A gray area, at best. Closer to illegal than legal on a good day, but the Haagen corporation were lacking in neither lawyers nor scruples.

Bryan knew, like Brad knew, and Nate knew—and Ray, even, despite how fucking obstinate he was—there was no way of getting Brad and Nate out the facility, alive or dead. Even before Bryan had so much as an inkling of an idea what was in store, he’d tried to keep Brad’s condition off radar. Nate’s as well, as things progressed. But Bryan didn’t doubt there were still people who knew bits and pieces, enough to become suspicious. How could they be this fucking omniscient and not know what was happening right under their own goddamned roof?

They were stranded on an island no-one wanted to save them from, let alone let them escape from. Bryan was no martyr, he was no hero. He just knew his own life mattered very little in the grand scheme of things.

“The Interplanetary Epidemic Intelligence Service will be here in an hour, maximum,” Bryan said to nurses Anwar and Koharu. “You can choose to stay, or you can leave this room right now. If you choose to stay, I can’t tell you what’s happening. Your choice will have consequences, possibly severe ones, deniability or no. If you choose to leave, I understand and respect that.”

Both Anwar and Koharu chose to stay. Bryan nodded, once.

“Okay. Then we need to set up a quarantine, a lockdown of the patient wing. Remember the fucking passcode. Once this is done, Nyx will immediately alert the rest of the facility, and put it on lockdown as well. She’ll also alert the Board. Last chance to leave.”

. . .

With Nyx’s automated message about the quarantine droning on over the loudspeakers, Ray ran down the hallway. Not toward the OCC, as he’d promised, but away from it.“Walt!” Ray yelled, slowing down. Walt was coming out of his apartment, hastily doing up his pants.Walt turned, asked, “Do you know what’s going on?”“Yeah, but never mind that—I need you to do me a favor. Like, a big one. A big, bad, ‘it’s probably gonna end horribly, might see us both dead and buried, or at the very least out of a job,’ kind of favor.”Walt raised his eyebrows.“I need to get into the OCC, so I can access the system, and I’ll need about five minutes of no interruptions, and do you see what I’m getting at here?”“We’re not on OCC duty. Unless Espera or Colbert gives the thumbs up, we can’t get in there—”“Exactly, so we need to, like, incapacitate Q-Tip and Trombley, and also the worker bees in the OCC so they don’t try to stop me—” Ray stopped talking. He looked at Walt. “You gotta trust me. I mean, I’m gonna do it anyway, do or die, man, but it’d be at least a little easier with your help. I have to do this. I promised—I promised Nate I’d do it.”

. . .

“The IEIS will be here in less than an hour. It’s outside these walls, now. Hopefully, it’ll keep Haagen and the Alliance out of the way just long enough for you to—” Bryan paused, looking at Brad lying in bed, at Nate sitting a few feet away. Bryan squeezed Brad’s bicep. Long enough for you to die somewhere that isn’t here.There was a memory, swimming around in Brad’s mind. He honestly wouldn’t be able to defend it as real, if put on the spot. No, this could very well be an amalgamation of impressions, of imaginings, of imagery he’d come across during his search for an answer—when the far-fetched had started to seem more reasonable than anything else. But it felt real. So it was real.Nate slouched in a car, leaning into a well-worn seat, his eyes closed. Relaxed, tired, sure; but not bone-deep, not dying. Trees passing by, almost in a blur, possibly pines. Probably pines. The open road, and sunlight hitting Nate’s face, making him stir. Brad neither saw nor heard her, but he knew V was sleeping in the backseat, all tuckered out after a long day. It was like this, endlessly, a loop in Brad’s mind.It was similar to this moment, right now; Nate sitting slouched, with his head against the wall behind him, his eyes closed. It took so much effort to exist at this point.Bryan listened to Nate’s lungs.“How’s the breathing? Worse?” Bryan asked. He’d done new imaging tests before he’d implanted the chips. Their lungs were still fine, five days ago.“About the same,” Nate said. His voice a little quieter than usual. There was one silver lining: the blood he was coughing up, wasn’t from his lungs; it was only an irritation in his throat from the increasing coughing fits he’d been experiencing.Nate turned to Brad, across the room, who was unable to breathe without help. Brad stared back.

. . .

There was no separate room for quarantining on the facility. Protocol stated, if quarantine was necessary for any reason, it would be handled internally. In theory, this meant the patient or patients would enter temporary quarantine in the patient wing, and be evacuated by the Haagen corporation’s own agencies. These agencies would take it from there, as far as involving the Alliance went, including the involvement of the IEIS.Bryan had sectioned off the small patient wing. He’d also alerted Espera the moment they’d gotten Brad stable, informed him of the impending quarantine and facility-wide lockdown, and the need to keep all personnel and residents safe and calm while the quarantine was in effect. Even if he had no way of truly knowing, Bryan told Espera whatever ailed Brad and Nate, it was likely not airborne, or even contagious, so there was little need for worry. This was just standard procedure. A precaution.They were lucky it was nighttime.25 minutes had already passed. Brad remained stable, but Nate was getting worse by the minute. At least he was still able to breathe on his own.When Ray came into the medical office, Bryan simply handed him a mouth barrier even though they both knew there was no pathogen. He coded Ray into the patient wing, removing himself to the office. Anwar and Koharu were already inside the wing, keeping tabs.Ray gave Nate a thumbs up and a nod as he walked past him on his way to Brad’s bed. Nate nodded back. With Walt’s help, Ray had managed to do as he’d promised.It felt almost… sacrilegious. That Brad ‘the Iceman’ Colbert should be so beyond help. That something so incongruous would be the thing to take him. No death in battle, no Valhalla for the honorary Viking. Instead Brad was lying in this bed, unmoving, pale, his cool blue eyes the only thing left of him holding onto life.“So,” Ray said, shoving his hands into the front pocket of his hoodie. “Now that you’re basically rendered mute and motionless: let me present you with my newest conspiracy theory—” Ray held up his hands like he was brandishing a sign. His voice almost cracked when he spoke. “—‘The Alliance is Totally Fucking Evil Incarnate and Ray was Right All Along’. Which, you know, I really wish wasn’t so fucked up so I could feel more awesome about being better than all yous.”Ray knew the deliberately slow closing of Brad’s eyes before they opened again was an eye-roll. Ray knew this, because Ray knew Brad. Maybe, at least for a little while longer, he knew Brad better than Nate, too. Than Sarah, and Kocher.Several heartbeats passed as they looked at each other, neither of them saying anything. Brad closed his eyes again. Ray breathed in deep, and exhaled long, and quiet. He sat down on the edge of Brad’s bed.“I don’t want you to go,” Ray said, quietly. He picked at a stray end of the bedsheet. He felt like a little kid again. He sounded like a little kid. He couldn’t say the words: I don’t want you to die. “You’re my best friend. You haven’t forgotten that, right? You’re a fucking asshole, sometimes, but you’re still one of my best friends. I mean, it’s Walt, and it’s you, so… pretty fucking exclusive.” Ray paused, looking away from Brad’s face and down at Brad’s hand, resting on the bed.Ray could pick out the veins, easy, under the bright lights. Green-blue and thick, still pumping blood through Brad’s body. There were very fine, blond hairs on the first joint of his fingers, from the knuckles up. Slightly more coarse hairs—but no less blond—curling in a receding pattern from Brad’s wrist to the back of his hand. Ray’s gaze remained intent on Brad’s hand as he began to speak again.“I shouldn’t have said what I said, about people not wanting to be around you, or whatever. That they give up on you. You shouldn’t have called me a fucking junkie either, even if you didn’t mean it. Or even if you did. Fuck. I’ve been so fucking pissed at you for the last month. And you didn’t say anything, and I didn’t say anything, and then it just kept on being all—pissy. And now it’s, like… can’t get that fucking month back, can we?”Ray covered the back of Brad’s hand with his own sweat-slick palm, his fingertips pressing into Brad’s dry skin. He squeezed Brad’s hand, hard. Brad squeezed back. Ray rubbed the heel of his free hand into his eyes, quick and forceful, like the kid he was. He wasn’t ashamed of the tears threatening to fill his eyes, but he couldn’t cry now. He couldn’t let go, yet. He had to hold on.

. . .

Eventually, Ray had to let go of Brad’s hand.

. . .

It had only taken Dr Durand five minutes and a handful of seconds to find out Bryan had bypassed protocols by calling it in to the IEIS. That was how little time it took for someone to get wind of it, and pass it down, pass it down, pass it down until it got to Dr Durand, and for her surprisingly resonant voice to penetrate the quiet of Bryan’s office.She’d been storming down the hallway, already in the middle of a rant discrediting Bryan’s entire career; hell, his entire right to exist by the time she was standing in front of him.“How can you be this fantastically stupid? Do you not understand why we have procedures? Why there are protocols? Did the military not teach you this? Medical school? If nothing else, might the legally binding contract you signed help jog your memory? Or do you simply not understand a single fucking thing?!”He’d stoically listened to her tirade. When she demanded access to the patient wing, he denied her. He didn’t even try to come up with a defendable reason as to why she couldn’t access it; he simply denied her. She hadn’t been happy about it. She’d been even less happy when an extra security officer was posted to the medical office, specifically to ensure she didn’t attempt to access the patient wing. She could no doubt override the passcode, somehow.“You’re free to stay in my office, if that’s what you want,” Bryan said, returning to the patient wing and locking it behind himself. By the time Ray arrived, Dr Durand was no longer in the office. Bryan fully expected her to be back before all this was done with.

. . .

The IEIS had yet to arrive. They’d said an hour, tops. They were deploying from Eir; it shouldn’t be taking them this long.“It’s only eight minutes past,” nurse Anwar said quietly.It didn’t matter if it was ‘only’ eight minutes. Bryan would have preferred they’d been here yesterday. Not knowing what might happen at any given moment? Not knowing if this was just a minor inconvenience, if it was the Alliance interfering already, or the Haagen corporation, or both, or—or countless other scenarios. Bryan knew time wasn’t on their side, either way. If the IEIS didn’t arrive sooner than later, whatever grace period Bryan had afforded Brad and Nate would no longer matter. Bryan already suspected neither Brad nor Nate had much time left to live.Brad was no longer conscious. His vitals were getting weaker, but not exponentially so. Slow and steady till the end.Nate was getting weaker, too. He was coughing more than he was breathing. The oxygen mask was helping less and less. Bryan said they’d have to intubate soon, if it got worse—when it got worse.“We’re coming full circle,” Nate mumbled. “Red tape’s gonna kill us after all.” It was a joke. Or he thought it was a joke. Some past conversation… His head felt like wet sawdust. Wet cement. Not officers, not the higher-ups, not the inexplicable fuck-ups, not the prestige getting them killed. Nate got no response from Brad. But Brad’s chest continued to rise and fall.Nate ran the pad of his thumb along the soft spot beneath Brad’s eye.They were lying on their backs, although Nate had managed to angle his body just enough so his arm could rest against Brad’s chest, heavy and immoveable. He was determined to just… touch Brad. Nate just wanted to touch his face.The skin under Brad’s eye was damp. The high fevers, the constant ache in their bones, their flesh, the difficulty breathing. Slowly, slowly drowning.Bryan had let Nate move into Brad’s bed when Brad started getting worse.“Who the fuck am I to say you can’t,” had been Bryan’s only response.No-one wants to die alone.It didn’t take long after this for Nate’s breathing to get so labored they’d had to move him back to his own bed, and have him intubated, too.

. . .

Death was not something Bryan was immune to, any more than it was something that scared him. He did not fear Death. He had witnessed people die, in countless ways, for countless reasons. He knew he would one day die, sooner or later, and it didn’t scare him. But as Brad’s heart rate continued to slow, Nate’s following suit with a minute’s delay, Bryan wanted desperately to do something. To halt Death, somehow. To stall it. But he didn’t dare to. He might inadvertently kill either of them if he did. Death was not merciful in these matters. Bryan was helpless, which scared him more than Death ever could.The IEIS arrived, finally, after one hour and twenty-three minutes. They arrived in hazmats, with portable, sealable gurneys. They no doubt questioned why the fuck none of the people in the room—aside from Ray—wore, at the very least, protective mouth-nose barriers. They didn’t ask; it mattered very little at that moment.By the time Brad and Nate were evacuated to the IEIS’s Eir medical station, more of their hazmat-suited kind would flood the facility. To assess possible contagion, whether or not others might be sick or infected, and a plethora of other tedious, pointless procedures that would leave the facility on lockdown for at least a few weeks.Unless the Haagen corporation managed to finagle the responsibility onto their own plate, and effectively keep the IEIS from finding anything the Haagen corporation didn’t want found. Just because they had the Alliance on their side, it didn’t mean the Alliance would risk it if they saw no gain. They would be the first to throw the Haagen corporation to the wolves, if they became more liability than asset.Dr Durand had returned. She stood a few steps apart from Ray and Bryan, from Anwar and Koharu. Her expression was impassive, her arms crossed loosely below her breasts. They all stood watching as Brad and Nate were rushed away on sealed gurneys.The doors slid shut behind the last of the hazmat suits. Dr Durand looked sideways at Bryan. The tip of her nose pointed into the air. “This isn’t over,” she said.As if on cue, Ray’s smartband emitted Espera’s voice, “We’ve got company from on high. Everybody get their collective shit together for Mom and Dad.”It wasn’t as if on cue; it was on cue. The Haagen corporation could have arrived much faster, had they wanted to, had it served them. Arriving just as Brad and Nate left; it allowed them to sow the seeds of whatever future narrative they wished to create. They were sacrificing their pawns. At worst, they were sacrificing a rook.“I hope Hell or something like it exists,” Ray said, turning to point at Dr Durand. “And I hope you fucking burn in it, forever.”Ray left.Dr Durand’s expression hardly changed, but somehow she emanated a kind of smugness, a kind of triumph. A very proper and collected sense of, I told you so.“How long have you known about them? From the beginning? Before? Before they even started working here?” Bryan asked, invading her impassiveness, her smugness. She didn’t respond. Her gaze was still resting on the sliding doors. “How much do you know?” Bryan asked. He wanted one simple answer out of her. Out of all of this.She tilted her head a fraction to the side, looked at him, then left, too.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

They met in college.Specifically, a lecture by the name History of Epidemics. Nate was actually a history student, and thus belonged there, whereas Brad was studying civil engineering, and ended up there on a whim.Life is funny like that.Brad mentioned having read Biohazard by Ken Alibek over the summer, which had prompted him to drop in on the lecture. Nate proceeded to inform Brad that Biohazard by Ken Alibek was ‘oversentionalized tripe’ to which Brad replied, “‘Oversentionalized’ is not a word,” and “What do you recommend I read, then?”This is how they met, ten years ago.

. . .

Brad and Nate walked the slope up to their car slowly. The pleasant breeze from earlier in the evening had started to grow more insistent, colder. Brad tugged Nate’s hand, letting him go. Nate jogged to catch up with him, took Brad’s wrist and pulled him sideways to give him a kiss, before jogging past him, folded blanket bobbing along. They were on their way home from a nighttime screening of Casablanca. Brad deliberately slowed down again; he was the one with the car keys.He grinned, finding Nate leaning on his shoulder, the rolled up blanket sagging off the rooftop of the car. Brad caged Nate in for a few satisfying moments.“I really don’t like that movie,” Nate said as they hit the main road. He shifted in his seat, getting comfortable. It was only a twenty minute drive back to their apartment, but there was something about nighttime driving that was… especially relaxing.“Then why’d you suggest we go see it?” Brad asked.“It’s a classic. It feels like the kind of thing you ought to at least watch once in your lifetime. And I figured the atmosphere might help,” Nate said. When Brad only snorted in response, Nate smiled to himself. He was looking down the bridge of his nose, absently following the streets with his eyes.The commercial on the radio faded into This Kiss by Faith Hill. Nate made a face, but didn’t bother changing channels. He expected Brad to, as he reached out, but instead Brad turned the volume up. When the refrain started in earnest, Brad sang along half-garbled, half-sincere.
This kiss, this kiss / Unstoppable / This kiss, this kiss—
“What the hell are you doing?”Brad kept on singing, suspiciously accurate in both lyrics and beats, despite trying to make it seem as though he wasn’t. Like he was doing this solely to annoy Nate. He admitted to nothing when Nate pointed this out. Brad only shrugged, turning the volume down a few notches, continuing to hum along.“It’s country,” Nate said, as the song finally faded into something different.“So?”“I distinctly remember you once banning all country and country adjacent music from all our shared living spaces even before we moved in together.”“It’s called personal growth,” Brad said. “Besides, it’s a classic.” He glanced over, grinning. A long-standing joke.

. . .

Nate got a cold. It started kicking in a few days after the screening. He blamed the breeze, not bringing a jacket, just in case. He could practically hear his mom, somewhere at the back of his mind, asking why he hadn’t brought a jacket. Or better yet, retroactively telling him to. Time-traveling for the sole purpose of telling him to put on a goddamned jacket.“Should’ve brought a jacket,” Brad said, and kissed Nate’s forehead before practically jogging out of the apartment to take Vicky for a quick walk before work.Another couple of days passed before Brad developed a cold, too. By then, Nate was already feeling a bit better.“Are you going to work?” Nate asked.“It’s just a cold,” Brad said. He downed a second glass of orange juice. He knew, intellectually, it wouldn’t do shit, but like everyone else, he’d grown up with this illogical advice. You’ve got a cold? Get as much vitamin C into your body as humanly possible. Never mind it’s a water-soluble vitamin. As in, you pee out the surplus pretty damn fast.It took them six days before they realized they’d probably gotten the flu. By then, Nate no longer felt on the mend, and was lying on the couch, covered in both a duvet and a wool blanket, despite it being the middle of summer. Even the A/C was turned off. He had a hand resting on the back of Vicky’s neck. She lay on the floor next to him, her head on her paws. She watched as Brad came closer, crouching beside her with a thermometer for Nate.“You sure you’re gonna be okay?” Brad asked.“M’fine,” Nate said around the thermometer.Brad rubbed Vicky’s head as they waited for the thermometer to beep. 102.4 Fahrenheit. It could be worse.“Are you sure you should be heading to work?” Nate asked, handing the thermometer back.“Can’t trust my coworkers not to make some egregious mistake that has an entire building falling apart because of a tiny earthquake,” Brad said. It was meant as a joke, to somehow reassure Nate, but it ended up just being a mouthful. “I’ll be fine. I’ve barely got a fever. I’ll call you during lunch.”

. . .

It wasn’t just stubbornness that had Brad heading in to work (although that was part of it); he had an important meeting that day, about a job they were hoping to land. It would be one of the biggest his firm had landed in the last five years; if they could just get the negotiations and formalities nailed down.About halfway into the meeting, Brad was ready to pass out. How could his bones hurt this much? How could his skin hurt this much? He struggled through the second half of the meeting, ignoring the mixed bag of concerned and annoyed looks from a few colleagues. The moment the meeting was over, Brad headed straight for the bathrooms.There were beads of sweat collecting along his hairline. He was pale.On the drive home, he had to take a breather on the side of the road, just for a moment, until the dizziness passed, and he could see straight again. It was a miracle he didn’t total the car.

. . .

Nate was still on the couch, looking worse for wear. At one point, boredom had gotten the better of him; he’d sat up, the drone of the sitcom going faint in his ears. He’d considered picking up the rumpled paper tissues littering the table. Instead, he’d ended up just sitting there on the couch for the next twenty-five minutes. It seemed, arbitrarily, more important to throw a batch of laundry into the washer-drier instead.It only took him another twenty minutes to succeed in doing so. He’d promptly fallen into an uneasy sleep on the couch after, not waking until he heard the door open and close in the hallway. Vicky trotted off in response.Nate checked the time on the TV. “You’re home early,” he said, trying to look around the armrest of the couch. Brad only hummed in reply, throwing himself into the chair by Nate’s head.“How’re you feeling?” Brad asked. He leaned forward to feel Nate’s forehead. He realized it was pointless, as he seemed to be as warm as Nate.“Like I’ve got the plague,” Nate murmured. He turned so he could actually see Brad. “How ‘bout you? You look worse than this morning.”“Plague,” Brad agreed. He leaned back into the chair again. His chest felt a little tight. Like he couldn’t breathe as deep as he wanted to. Vicky came and put her head in his lap, looking up at him with those big, dark eyes. He put his hand on the scruff of her neck, and didn’t get much farther than that. Just left it there. She didn’t mind.A few minutes passed, only the drone of the TV and their collective breaths breaking the silence. The washer-drier beeped. Nate groaned.“Want me to get it?” Brad asked, already halfway out of the chair.“It’s fine.” Nate made a small, dismissive wave with his hand. He’d been the one lying on the couch all day, after all. He wandered off a little unsteadily.

. . .

They still hadn’t gotten around to doing anything about the bathroom. During the viewing six years ago, the real estate agent did her best to show them everything else first, so when they walked into the bathroom, with spring sunshine streaming through the tiny slats passing for windows, Nate had this bizarre, unplaced association with an underground river of bubblegum-pink ectoplasm.It wasn’t until Christmas rolled around, and he and Brad were having their annual Christmas movie marathon, he realized what the tiles reminded him of. One of the movies on their ever-growing list was Ghostbusters 2. There was no rhyme or reason to this, other than they’d watched it one Christmas while they were still in college, and the nostalgia of childhood, mixed with the inherent nostalgia of Christmas, had made it an obligatory Christmas movie for them. And there it was, the bubblegum-pink ectoplasm river, floating by underneath New York City.All three of the small windows in the bathroom were ajar, allowing the distorted ambiance of city-life to echo off the walls. Bathrooms were supposed to have the best acoustics, but it didn’t sound right; the wind, the traffic, the chattering of conversations. Twisted, like they were all passing through a poor radio connection.They kept meaning to retile the bathroom: mostly because of the pink ectoplasm association, but also because they wanted to put in a shower cabinet rather than shower straight on the tiles. The last thing they needed was water damage. Water damage was a considerably larger bill to foot than new tiles, and a shower cabinet.Nate had already forgotten why he’d come into the bathroom. There was something he was supposed to do, he knew that much. He coughed, and it hurt between his shoulder blades, now. He’d almost gone all the way back to the living-room when he remembered what he was supposed to do. He paused, irritated. He closed his eyes, centered. He could hear Brad in the kitchen, the water running, Vicky’s bowl clanking against the floor as it was set down.Nate’s fingers trailed the bureau as he passed it on his way back to the bathroom. Brad hated that bureau. Every time he walked past it from the living-room, he walked straight into its sharp edge.It was too big for the narrow hallway, but the bureau itself was spacious. Its drawers held pens, and notepads; cables neither of them knew what belonged to, old electronics that might come in handy someday, but likely wouldn’t, and ought to be recycled; scarves, gloves, and hats for winter. A bowl for keys, and garage openers; a couple of mismatched frames with photos in them; a fake, green ball of tiny, clover-shaped leaves perched on a plant pot. The dimness of the hallway: no windows, no lights on during the day, because they had to save the planet, save the bills, one thing at a time.“We could always childproof it?” Nate had suggested a few years back, when Brad woke up one morning with a hangover, and a spectacular bruise on his hip. Brad’s response had been a solitary, “Asshole.”Vicky came trotting down the hallway, following Nate into the bathroom, her claws louder on the tiles. She was still shedding her white winter coat. The laundry was a batch of black, and it was probably counterintuitive to let her stay, but Nate did, anyway. He appreciated the company. He didn’t want to be alone. It was too quiet, somehow.The clothes from the washer-drier weren’t that heavy, but they felt like pounds piled on pounds when Nate moved them to the basket by his feet. He had to pause midway, close his eyes again, center. He was actually out of breath. His fingers tingled, lungs rattled; death knell, water, Legos in a ventilator. Vicky nosed at his hand, and he held onto her scruff for a moment. She sat down next to him, nearly on top of his left foot. She exuded so much heat. Soft. Bony.By the time Nate finished transferring the fresh load of laundry, Vicky was back on all fours. She was whining. Nate felt lightheaded. This must be what a helium balloon feels like, he thought. Slipping out of some kid’s sticky fingers, floating up into the stratosphere with a wail trailing behind. Nate was waiting for the pop and drop.There were sirens outside, and Vicky was barking. Nate tried to grab onto the washer-drier, hold onto the edge, but his hands were fixed on something soft and scratchy. Bottles crashed to the floor seconds before he did. Vicky was barking, frantic, licking his face. He couldn’t feel his face. The bubblegum-pink started to wash out, fade; a waterfall surged through his ears, through his skull. It was like the sirens were right next to him, inside him, swarming, disoriented.There was a mad scramble. A cacophony of feet and claws. Arms around Nate’s chest, two-day stubble grating against the sensitive skin of his neck. It felt like fire. It was ‘pop and drop’. The sirens burst his eardrums from inside, and his eyesight followed suit. Bubblegum-pink implosion.

. . .

In the living-room there was a woven carpet. It had square dents in it from a heavy, second-hand teak table. The carpet was not second-hand; it was new, as much as Brad doubted that, and had been gifted to the two of them when they’d moved into the apartment six years ago. The carpet didn’t look new. Imagine a rainbow throwing up on your hardwood floor in the shape of a perfect circle; then imagine someone letting it float in the Hudson for about a year, followed by a half-hearted attempt at cleaning it before gifting it to you.Brad had never given the carpet this much thought before, other than the cursory, ‘that is a fucking atrocity’. But he was giving it some thought, now. He’d been standing in the middle of the apartment for the last few minutes, just staring at this carpet.The TV was still on, to Brad’s left. The volume was low; neither he nor Nate had been watching the TV, just kept it on for ambiance, for distraction. Brad’s eyes stung a little, sore and dry. He blinked and found himself facing the wall behind the couch, his shins almost touching the living-room table, his toes pressing against the woven carpet. The wall was rough with bricks. Red bricks. There was an illustration hanging there, another gift. Black frame, off-white paper. It said, in stylized writing: TODAY IS A GOOD DAY.There was a scent on the air, like meat gone off, fruit decomposing. The culprit a swollen bag of trash sitting against the kitchen bench. Brad must have forgotten to take it out with him before work that morning, when he’d taken Vicky out for a walk. He’d do it later.For now, he cleared away the tissues littering the living-room table. They were the soft kind with balsam on them. He wondered if it was just a sales gimmick, or if it actually worked. If your nose did come away from the ordeal of a cold less red, less sore from the constant chafing of tissue paper.A few of the tissues dropped on the floor, and Brad almost lost his balance when he straightened from picking them up. He stood utterly still, the dizziness slowly abating.It was early July, and he was freezing. On the drive home, he’d been overheating. He coughed into the already sullied tissues in his hand. He’d started coughing last night. Nate, too, the day before that. There was a nasty cold going around the office, or more likely flu. Or maybe he’d just gotten lucky; a cold to weaken the immune system, a flu to finish it off.Brad threw the tissues in the trash, stuck them through the little openings where the plastic handles had been tied together. He just needed to sit for a moment, then he’d go downstairs and throw the trash out. He just needed a glass of water.Vicky’s claws clicked against the floor as she entered the kitchen. Brad filled her water bowl and got himself a glass of water from the carafe in the fridge before he returned to the living-room.The news was on. He couldn’t remember changing channels. He glanced at the time, and found it too early for news. He picked up the day-old newspaper from the living-room table.The headline of the newspaper read: ‘MERS ON THE RISE? 1,570 MERS RELATED FATALITIES IN THE U.S. OVER THE LAST 5 YEARS. READ MORE—PAGES 12-15.’ He’d read the article a few days earlier. Blatant fear-mongering, extenuating circumstances, little to no spread across states, many cases happening because of poor early recognition and response, leading to more hospital infections than anything else.Brad tossed the paper on the chair he’d been sitting in, and sat down on the table instead. It creaked, its screws having gone a loose with time. He took a few sips of his water. He noticed the ‘LIVE’ up in the corner of the TV and turned up the volume.The reporter’s words sifted through him, but his mind wasn’t quite able to parse them, not immediately. He was looking down at his feet, at the carpet again. He was wearing socks with penguins on them: he must’ve slipped over to Nate’s side of the drawer again. Something gifted to him by one of his sisters, no doubt.Vicky barked. Vicky rarely barked inside. Brad wanted to call out to her, quiet her down, but he didn’t. Vicky continued to bark. It was coming from the bathroom, Brad realized. His gaze shifted back to the TV. Questions started to flit about inside his head, like a ricocheting bullet on a path of destruction. A siren wailed somewhere far away, then startlingly close. The distance breached in the blink of an eye.“—attended the screening of Casablanca in Central Park last week, and is experiencing any of the following flu-like symptoms—” the screen cut to a bullet point list.> moderate to high fever
> shortness of breath
> cough
> fatigue
> chills
> chest pains
> shock“—are to call the following number immediately—”Brad coughed into his hand, dark-tanned and long-fingered. He coughed again. Short, painful coughs. Vicky was still barking. The sirens were still howling, close and far away simultaneously—ambulance, police, fire department? Brad couldn’t focus. Something clattered to the floor like a set of dominoes in the bathroom. Brad turned his head, snap-quick. His bones ached.He didn’t look at his hand before wiping it on his jeans. He didn’t register the tangy, metallic taste in his mouth. He didn’t have time to. A disconnect.He scrambled to his feet.

. . .

Nate succumbed almost two whole days before Brad. Brad did not get to say goodbye.The last conscious thoughts Brad had, were of Vicky.Vicky, adopted when she was four years old, bought off of a family who realized too late she was too big for them. She needed too much: too much maintenance, too much affection. More than what the family could give. It’d always pissed Brad off, how they’d come out so nonchalantly with it; like they couldn’t have fucking figured this out before they went to a breeder, put such an atrocious amount of money into it, only to realize they couldn’t take care of her, didn’t really want to.Nate reasoned it was better they were honest about it, rather than having her euthanized for something that was in no way her fault or responsibility. And besides, this way she got to live a full, long life with people who could—who wanted—to take care of her, and love her, exactly as much as she needed, maybe more, even. It still pissed Brad off, but he knew Nate was right.Who would take care of Vicky now?Brad died alone.

. . .

“—confirmed outbreak in Central Park was, in fact, an act of bioterrorism according to—”“—claim the motivation behind this act of domestic terrorism was motivated by hostility toward the current government, and more specifically, its refusal to further fund and bolster the fight against, the prevention of, and the immediate ability to care for those affected by, and I quote, ‘[t]he exponentially rising risk of bioterrorism, both domestic and foreign—’”“—others believe this act to have been a demonstration to entice buyers on the foreign black market, ‘such as enemies of the United States’, although the DoD considers this unlikely—”“—the two self-proclaimed activists—”“—the two scientists—”“—the two terrorists—”“Fresh reports from the CDC put the number of casualties at 95, and say the numbers are likely to continue rising. There are still dozens of quarantined who remain under intensive care, although the number of new cases is in steady decline. According to the CDC, this particular strain of weaponized anthrax is proving unusually aggressive and resistant to conventional treatment—”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

The first time Brad woke up, he vomited next to his bed. He dry heaved a few times after, then lay back down, staring up at the blindingly white ceiling. It was too white to be the patient wing on Oneiroi. With a bit of effort, Brad managed to look over to his left.Everything had a strange light around it, not so unlike the light he’d gotten used to experiencing after a dose of halos. It would have terrified him, had he been more awake, had he thought this was why he was seeing it now; that somehow, for some dreadful reason, he’d been given a dose of halos. But as his eyes landed on one thing after another, the light moving seamlessly with him, he found it didn’t scare him at all.It was softer. More tangible, somehow: were he to reach out and touch it, he would be able to feel his fingers sink through these coronas of light. Not resistance, not warmth or coolness… but what he imagined stardust to feel like.Brad turned to the right, already knowing Nate was there, in a bed identical to Brad’s, sleeping.Nate had his hand on his chest, a monitor ticking away above him. Nate’s hand rose and fell. He was breathing, he was asleep. He, too, was enveloped by stardust; nebulous and dynamic in a way Brad couldn’t even begin to explain. Like motes of dust in a ray of sunlight; halted in mid-motion; constantly moving; looping endlessly. Brad wanted to watch Nate some more, but his body protested, wanted much more for Brad to be horizontal. He fell asleep again in the blink of an eye.The second time Brad woke up, it wasn’t nearly so eventful. The ceiling was still blindingly white, and he was definitely not in the patient wing on Oneiroi. He lay there for a few minutes, just breathing, trying to remember who he was, and why he was here, wherever here was. The stardust was gone.When he finally turned over to the right, Nate was halfway to sitting, eating lime-green jello from a small, see-through container. He ate slowly, and looked like he was still mostly asleep.A nurse came in. She was wearing cornflower blue scrubs and went straight to Brad, carrying a container of reddish jello in one hand. Brad suspected it to be fortified with something. Or maybe they just needed the sugar. Probably both.“Mr Colbert,” the nurse greeted him. There was a logo on the pocket of her shirt. IEIS: Eir. She put the cup of jello on the small, collapsable table, and helped Brad into something resembling a sitting position. Out of the corner of his eye, Brad noticed Nate turning his head over to look at him. “Do you know where you are?” The nurse asked, taking out a small flashlight to check Brad’s pupillary response.It felt like a star exploded inside his head for a second.He shook his head weakly. Speaking didn’t seem feasible at the moment. If he weren’t concentrating so hard on staying awake, maybe it would’ve been easier.“You’re on the Eir station,” the nurse said, looking over at Nate as well. He’d already been informed of all this when he woke up little more than half an hour ago. “We didn’t want to take you back to Earth before we knew you were stable; out of the woods, so to speak. The doctor will be here in a few minutes to explain everything. Here,” the nurse added, handing Brad the jello cup. A malleable, reusable spoon stuck out of it, ominously erect.It tasted ominously artificial, too. Brad scrunched up his face, and Nate made a small sound. When Brad looked over, he saw Nate smiling crookedly, his own cup of jello abandoned for now, half-eaten.The doctor dismissed the nurses milling about when he arrived. He watched them leave, all the way until the doors closed behind them. Brad and Nate glanced at each other.The doctor didn’t say anything as he walked up to the space between their beds. Out of a pocket, he revealed a scrambler. He was deliberate in allowing them both to see it, to understand what it was, and what it would do. He turned it on, and set it down on the table between their beds.“We have about fifteen minutes. And you needn’t worry, I’ve already removed them,” the doctor said, patting his hip. “Your friend told us where to find them. Still leaves the question of where you two will end up, though. You’re free to take your chances and let the good people of this station take you to Earth, where you’ll be lawfully detained by some branch or other of the Alliance.”He leveled Brad and Nate with a long look in turn. When neither of them said anything, remaining expressionless, the doctor breathed out heavily. He glanced off to the side, shifted his feet, put his hands in his pockets. Time’s a-wasting.“You’re both fine. We lost you for a few moments, but you survived, obviously. I’m not in any position to explain what has happened, or what will happen. But give it a few days, a week tops, and you’ll be back in peak condition,” the doctor said. He squared his shoulders slightly. “Now, we can protect you from Haagen, from the Alliance. We have people who can explain this to you, explain everything. Help you adjust to… well. To help you adjust. But you have to make the choice to trust us.”“Who is ‘we’?” Nate asked. He regretted it immediately. It felt like someone had gone to town on his throat with a grater.“We, the Insurgents with a capital I,” the doctor said. “We, the Resistance.”“With a capital R?” Brad said, also regretting it. It was worth it just for the look of thinly veiled indignation on the young doctor’s face, though.“You can remain loyal to the Alliance, though I doubt they’ll remain loyal to you.”A sudden burst of stardust covered everything in the room. Nate glanced at Brad. Brad picked up his jello again, ducking his head slightly to hide his smirk; like he’d heard something funny. He didn’t need to look at Nate. He didn’t need to speak to him to know.The door wasn’t ajar anymore: It was wide open.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

EPILOGUE

The scientists working within the Oneiroi facility, were not unique. They were intelligent, competent, hard-working individuals; but they were not unique. They were valuable, which is to say, they were not invaluable.Doctor Heloïse Durand is dead. The official, transparent documentation says so. The same does the non-official, non-transparent documentation. Every little memo making the rounds of its own exclusive little circle says so. Doctor Heloïse Durand had not been unique. She had been valuable.Ewa Nowak is alive.She’s a few years older than Heloïse, with a somewhat pointier jaw, more prominent cheekbones, higher eyebrows, more crooked nose, a slightly lower hairline, and blue-green eyes. If you were to put a photo of Ewa and Heloïse next to each other, you wouldn’t think they were the same person. If anything, it’d be like those uncanny doppelgängers everyone is said to have. Similar, but not the same.Ewa’s dirt-blonde hair is pulled into ponytail that bounces as she makes her way through the hospital hallways. She smiles, perfunctorily, as she passes the nurses’ station. A nurse says something; Ewa chuckles and responds in the same vein. The nurse waves, and carries on.Having passed the elevators, Ewa slows to check her tablet. There’s nothing on it needing her attention, but the loose wisps of hair tickling the back of her neck send chills down her spine. This is what she tells herself, every time she feels… unbalanced. Like someone’s made her misstep, unseen. She knows it’s paranoia. She knows the way sounds—even small sounds—make her cease all movement for minutes on end, is a kind of hyper-vigilance. It lingers on.There’s little traffic in the hallway, so when she continues scrolling through her tablet, leaning her shoulder on the wall, she isn’t impeding anyone. She tries to keep her body-language casual, her expression one of concentration. Another minute passes, and she glances over her shoulder, toward the end of the hall, the nurses’ station, and further down, to admissions. She can discern a nurse entering one room, a doctor leaving another. Otherwise, there’s no-one but her. She’s the conspicuous one.She wishes her shift would end, already.

. . .

Getting out of Oneiroi before the whole place went up in smoke—literally—had not been difficult, in so far as it hadn’t been impossible.All this absolutism. The Haagen corporation, the Alliance—they are fond of their absolutes, so long as they can use them to justify what is only different shades of gray. She’d learnt to say a lot without saying much at all. To muddle the issue. To convolute it, so people ceased listening, even as she continued to explain. And then they would nod, and say, right you are.The Haagen corporation were clever, staging it to look like an act of terrorism, rather than an accident. The act of terrorism Matvey Nikolayevich Vitsin had cooked up, the on Nate Fick had thwarted. The one that never made it into public channels. Ewa suspected this was how they’d gotten the idea.Take an unknown truth, and twist it to your own purposes. This was how Nate Fick, Brad Colbert, and Ray Person—all of whom had disappeared off of every radar in the interim—were not only wanted by the Alliance, but wanted for high treason.Of course Haagen pinned it on them. A stroke of genius. Haagen wanted them back, now that it was already too late.Ewa suspected Ray Person must have felt terrible when he realized he’d aided in her escape as well, when he himself fled Oneiroi. It was one of many errors the Haagen corporation and Alliance had both made, she believed: not underestimating the people they hired, but overestimating the scope of their own omniscience.The Haagen corporation had taught her how to hide. That it should come back and bite them in the ass so thoroughly was nothing short of poetic justice. Perhaps she wasn’t unique, or invaluable, but she was clever. Or duplicitous, if you were set on being unfavorable. She’d saved the Haagen corporation and the Alliance more than once. She’d done it on Eupraxia. She’d done it on other nameless, deserted shitholes.This time, she had done it by removing her father’s influence. She’d done it in a way so her father’s name, and his accomplishments, had not been sullied. Removing him, by necessity, from his own creation before he could destroy it.It’d been cruel, she knew, to slowly take his mind away from him, force him to witness his own decline. She wasn’t proud of it. She hadn’t enjoyed it. She’d never hated her father, certainly not as a child, but with the passing of time his presence become more, and more remote. She’d taken no pleasure in her choice. By the time she infected him with the bacteria, she had already grieved his illness, his slow decline, and his inevitable demise.Doctor Ardit Durand had been a humanitarian, above all else. Or so he liked to believe.When he realized what, exactly, might be hidden in their creation, he hadn’t wanted it monopolized by the Alliance. Yet he had no say in it. He knew they were going ahead, despite the lack of approval, despite how administration of the E.532 compound on any human was, in his opinion, nothing short of inhumane. He believed they’d found a door in the human psyche. A door they had somehow managed to pry ajar. But those few who managed to go through it, they were never able to find their way back. A fancy way of saying their deaths were inevitable.So Heloïse took over her father’s legacy. Or his progress, if not his beliefs. She had taken the recipe and bettered it. Over, and over, and over again. She’d witnessed its effects with each iteration, up until the last one her father ever made, which had been the one showing the most promise, on Eupraxia. She had almost witnessed the loop close. The theoretical truth of what the E.532 compound was capable of—would be capable of in the right hands. It had almost become a reality on Eupraxia.On Mars, within Oneiroi, she was convinced, in her last moments, that Brad and Nate had been the ones to finally close the loop.So how fucking furious was she when Brad Colbert and Nate Fick got away. She’d tried to impress upon her superiors how fucking important these two subjects were. But all the Board had to say was, ‘Without concrete evidence, you have nothing’.She was, truly, her father’s daughter.She’d had to abandon Eupraxia—the most promising of the four projects running at the time—with only her thoughts and her samples. Samples that were not indecipherable so much as what could be deciphered, made no coherent sense to the bigger picture, because the bigger picture was still too small. It was riddle, after riddle, after riddle.She’d only given them more puzzle pieces, rather than piecing together what they already had. And then the Alliance lost Brad and Nate, let them slip through their fingers like water through a sieve. Heloïse knew, then, she had to die.Ewa doesn’t have any of Bryan’s notes, any of the samples he’d taken from Brad and Nate during their time on Oneiroi. None of it. The moment they left with the IEIS, Bryan disposed of all his stupid, handwritten notes, and all his samples; shoved everything into the biohazard disposals, reduced it to nothing but ashes. She’d managed to abscond with her own files, at least. Her father’s files. Brad and Nate’s personnel files; whatever was still accessible to her, whatever hadn’t already been eaten up by Nate’s parting gift.Ewa had managed to pry all of this out of Heloïse’s cold, dead hands. Now it was Ewa’s destiny to pour over them, hours on end, trying to find the threads, the pieces, whatever it would take to reach that eureka! moment.Her death would not be for nought.

. . .

Ewa’s days are long. Her days have always been long, since the moment she decided she wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps. He never pressured her into it. But he pushed her, cheered her on in his own way. Swept her up in his arms, and kissed her forehead, and called her, as always, ma petite puce when her four-year-old self told him, I want to be just like you, daddy. She wonders, some days, if he’d known his disease was something other than bad luck. He’d never mentioned it in his writings. Did he know she was the one who’d sentenced him to death?She wonders, too, if they’re looking for her. Brad and Nate. If they know Heloïse might be dead, but Ewa is alive. If they’re coming to demand answers she doesn’t have, to make her pay for what she’s done, what she made them go through, however inadvertently. All of the above.It doesn’t scare her as much as the thought of the Alliance finding her, or Haagen. Brad and Nate are not what makes her stop, some early mornings during her commute to the hospital, to catch another connection, or the wrong connection, because she’s sure someone is there, watching her, waiting for her at the other end.Her days are long, but different from her time on Mars. On Oneiroi she was a scientist, first and foremost. She rarely had to dip into her medical practice. Here, she spends her time treating broken bones, scrapes and bruises. This particular colony isn’t very big, but the size of the planet itself is. The environment is harsh and dangerous. The most common cause of death is hypothermia. Those who get lost in the snow storms; the sudden appearance of whirlwinds, like howling death, banshees fashioned from ice.She hears it now, sitting curled up on her couch with a stupidly large mug of tea in hand. She’d never been a tea-drinker, in the past. She doesn’t know if it’s this place that’s made her one, or if it’s Ewa’s own little idiosyncrasy.She grabs her tablet from the table, activates the wall screen. She stares at the diagrams, the blood-work, the autopsies, the case notes, the photos. Her father’s diary. Her own diary. She stares, and she moves, and she writes, and she stares, and she moves, and her tea grows steadily colder, steadily lesser, and the hours pass, and the wind howls a little louder, and her eyes burn with tiredness, and the wind howls a little less, and she gives up. Turns off all the lights. Lingers, for a moment, as wisps of hair at the back of her neck send a chill down her spine. She goes to bed.Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat.

. . .

It’s almost two and a half years, now, since Heloïse Durand died, and Ewa Nowak was born.She stands, waiting for her connection, bundled up in enough clothes to hide her from plain sight. There are no wisps of hair to tickle the nape of her neck yet a chill goes down her spine. She looks off to the side, tries to remain subtle. The other side. Ignores her desire to look behind, to do a complete three-sixty. She gets on the wrong connection. She just has to switch a few times. It’s fine.She walks through the halls of the hospital and the chills keep coming. She checks her temperature during lunch: no fever. She’s fine. She sets a broken arm, a young boy. Treats a mild case of frostbite; work-related, she sees a lot of those. “There’s a reason you’re supposed to wear those, not just drag them around.” “They get in the way.” “If this gets worse, we might have to amputate.” “It’s fine, it’ll heal soon enough, you’ve fixed worse.” “If you develop gangrene—” “It’s fine, doc, it’s fine. I’ll be more careful.”The wisps tickle the back of her neck in the bathroom. She does a three-sixty for the sole reason she can: no-one will see her, no-one is there. It’s counterintuitive but it makes her feel better. See? No-one there.She gets home, showers, makes dinner. She drops the same knife twice, almost hits her foot the second time. She presses the heels of her hands into the workbench, closes her eyes, and takes a deep breath. When she finally lets it out, she swears she feels someone’s breath on her neck, the wisps moving. She undoes her bouncy ponytail. Strands of hair come loose with it, falling to the floor. Is it menopause or stress-related? She laughs.She doesn’t hear the door open on her exhale; close on her laughter. She doesn’t hear the footsteps echoing hers. No shoes allowed inside the house. She doesn’t drop her plate of food, when she enters the living-room; the mug of tea from yesterday sitting on the table, Brad Colbert sitting on the couch, elbows on knees, hands clasped, looking at her like he’s… disappointed?She stands utterly still. Plate in one hand, wineglass in the other. The hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. The hair on her arms follow suit. Fingers brush the hair away from her neck, gently placing it over one shoulder. She can see the very faint outline of Nate’s reflection in the window behind the couch. She doesn’t want to turn around anymore. Brad’s gaze doesn’t leave hers.You can’t outrun yourself. You can’t outrun the reborn.Surprise.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

POST-SCRIPT

>>TO: N/B
>>FROM: limp bizkitz
>>ENCRYPTION: 4
>>SUB: (no subject)
>>ATTACHMENT: 1[PHOTO: The endless purple-pinkish field of vegetation reaches Minah to her hips. It sways in the looping breeze. Her hair is buzzcut short. She stands shielding her eyes against the planet’s star, squinting up at the many moons. Ray is squatting at the forefront where the vegetation meets dry dirt and sand. Erica is sitting on his knee. She falls back into his chest, laughing, following the same loop as the breeze. She wears brightly colored, berry-shaped sunglasses, her hair a mass of tiny knots bunched up with colorful bands. Ray is grinning, his hands doing fingerguns before Erica falls back into him. He wears a pair of old, gold-rimmed pilot’s sunglasses.]>>We pimpin’ homes.