I will be born in the explosion that kills me. My first memory is—will be—was—the blinding flash of ignition from the methane tank at my side, reflected off the ground around me.
Then, like a video in reverse, the light packs itself back into the ruptured tank. Exploded aluminum folds flat and seals along the seams. The shock wave recedes, pulling me together as it goes, leaving me in the shadow of Pavonis Mons. The full tank sits at my side.
“I don’t like the readings I’m getting on that tank.” A man’s voice comes through my headset. He sounds more concerned than I’ve ever heard him, though I’ve never heard him before. “Can you check the valve?”
I take an unsteady step back. A wrench slips out of my hand. It clips the tank, throwing off a spark—
Rewind.
“Are you sure you’re up for starting back today? You can wait if you need to,” says a woman in a NASA jumpsuit, pouring boiling water into a cup. We’re in the galley kitchen now, and I’m holding a package of rice pilaf. My hand is still outstretched, just closing the cupboard door. I jerk it back, dropping the packet, and clutch at my chest, feeling the shock wave that hasn’t happened yet.
“Myrt?” She grabs my arm as I reel. The backs of my knees hit a chair. Goosebumps race up my arms as a hundred familiar/unfamiliar sensations hit me—the temperature of the room, the smell of reheated food, the faint shift of air from the recirculator—and my brain buzzes, overstimulated.
“Who are you?” I shake her off and stagger toward the counter. “Where—where did—”
Rewind.
I’m in the engineering lab, watching the printer extrude blocks of ice onto a conveyor belt. The man on the other side leans over with thick gloves and grabs the block, placing it on a stack of others. He’s wrapped in a heavy coat. The only part of his face visible is the strip of dark skin between his hat and scarf. My breath comes in twin streams from my exposed nose. I have a scarf around my mouth as well, and a hat pulled low over my ears.
As soon as I become aware of myself, I spin around in a circle, causing the man to straighten. This room is familiar in that I know it’s the engineering lab and I know that it’s in a habitat on Mars, but the things in it are new, as if I’ve never seen them with my eyes before.
I open the door—and that process is as familiar as muscle memory as I slap the palm-sized button and wait for it to slide out of my way. The greenhouse beyond is dark and empty. Is it morning? Is it the same day? Can I stop the—
Rewind.
I’m in the medical center, shouting, a handful of startled faces staring at me—
In the recreation room, stumbling on the treadmill—
In the shower, slipping on the soapy tiles and bruising my hip—
In the propulsion lab, hands frozen over a keyboard—
Rewind.
I drag in a painful breath, my face wet, and the same woman from the dining hall is there pushing my hair out of my face. “Breathe, Myrt. It’s okay. I’ve got you.”
I choke on my own spit and start coughing, twisting my face away. I’m on the floor of a dorm room, my clothes soaked with sweat. My skin tingles with the sensation of skipping from EVA suit to thermal clothes to sleep sweats all in the span of, what … a minute?
“What happened?” I croak when I get my breath again. I wipe away tears. My hair sticks to my face. The woman helps me sit up. Her dark hair is tied back messily and she’s wearing sleep sweats. There’s another woman with a blond crew cut standing in the doorway, but other than that the room is empty. A strip of LEDs lines the edge of the ceiling, giving the room a dim blue light. It smells dusty here.
“I think that was a panic attack,” the woman says. “No, don’t try to get up. I want you to catch your breath.”
“No, what blew up?” I’m not in the medical center. I’m not injured at all, as far as I can tell. And that explosion was big; there’s no way I would have survived. Especially not outside of the habitat in a ruptured EVA suit.
“Blew up?” The two women glance at each other. “Nothing blew up.”
“There was—I was on a planetwalk …” I trail off as her expression turns gentle.
“It was a dream. You fell off the bed.”
I rub my hands over my face again and don’t answer. Bits of my brain are coming back online, but not enough of them. These women are strangers, but how can they be? I’ve lived here since … since we …
“Who are you?” I whisper, and I watch her gentle professionalism unfold into open concern.
“I’m Astrid,” she says. “Gert, could you wake up Nathan and tell him to head for the med center?”
The other woman leaves. Astrid gestures for me to hold out both my arms in front of me, gauging my reaction. “Can you tell me your name?”
“Myrtle Reeves,” I say immediately, relieved to have an answer. She nods.
“Good. Can you stand up? I want to make sure you didn’t hit your head too hard when you fell.”
She doesn’t help me up, but I don’t need it anyway. I can keep my balance and my legs feel strong. I’m hyper-aware of my body. It feels like someone rubbed my skin with sandpaper. Everything is new.
“Do you know where we are?” Astrid asks as I straighten out my clothes.
“The dorm,” I say, although I falter. I do recognize the room, but it doesn’t feel like something I’ve been in before. “I know we’re in Dawes Base on Mars. I know how to get to the medical center.” I start out of the room and Astrid follows.
Hallways are a luxury this base doesn’t have to spare. Our room leads into the recreation area, where a man is jogging on a treadmill and watching TV. Red twilight filters down from the transparent ceiling, made up of ice blocks sandwiched between Plexiglas. The whole habitat is buried under three meters of dirt to protect it from the sun’s radiation. The ice blocks serve the same purpose but give us a small, morale-boosting amount of natural light. Those facts are just there in my mind, without me having to search for them.
“You’re not slurring your words and your eyes are focused,” Astrid says. “I want to do some scans but I think this is just stress-induced amnesia. You’ve been really stressed recently so I’m not surprised.”
“Have I?” I’m barefoot and the plastic tiles of the floor feel unexpectedly gritty.
The recreation room leads to the greenhouse, warm and humid. Fat tomatoes hang from tangled green limbs while tomato tendrils reach up to the transparent ceiling, grasping at the twilight. Wheatgrass shivers under a whirring fan. It smells green.
“I didn’t realize how hard the anniversary would’ve been on you,” Astrid says quietly.
“We’ve been here a year,” I say slowly, trying not to make it a question. I can’t figure out the logic behind all these fracture lines in my memory. “Why would I be stressed about that?”
We’ve reached the medical center but Astrid doesn’t open the sliding door.
“Do you remember our arrival?” Astrid asks, her voice quiet.
I don’t remember arriving. I don’t remember assembling this base from modular parts. I don’t remember what must have been a nine-month journey here, or my time before the trip, back on Earth. Like the dorm room, I recognize that these things had to exist, but I don’t remember any of them.
Astrid’s expression is now open worry as she watches those thoughts cross my face.
“Let’s get you checked out,” is all she says. I turn toward the med bay door and—
I’m on the other side of the greenhouse, fully dressed, mid-step, when I wake up with a jerk. I stumble but catch myself against a wall. Bright morning sunlight blazes down, searing into my eyes.
“Are you okay?” Someone grabs my arm. I straighten and a man squints into my face. I recognize his dark eyes from the man in the engineering lab. He’s in uniform now, his hair cropped short against his scalp. It says CDR J. DUANE across his lapel.
“I’m … fine, Commander,” I say carefully. He nods and releases my arm.
“I was hoping to run into you,” he says. “I spoke to Prescott yesterday. Actually, I was just headed to breakfast. Care to walk with me?”
“Yes, sir,” I say, wiping sweaty palms on my pants. The feel of the fabric momentarily distracts me. I don’t remember putting these pants on.
“She said that you were uncomfortable about the ceremony,” Duane says, his voice lowering as we cross toward the dining hall.
I try to unglue my tongue from the roof of my mouth. “Is there going to be an, um … ” I trail off, the words “another ceremony” still on my lips. “Never mind.”
“This might be hard to believe, but the ceremony isn’t really about you.” Duane glances at me to gauge my reception, so I struggle to focus on his words. “Marking the occasion helps everyone deal with the stress of living in a place with very little separating us from instant death. If we make a big deal out of the time that someone averted disaster, it helps us feel a little safer, and helps the people back home think that we’re in control. I want you to consider it your duty to accept this medal.”
“Right,” I echo, my face feeling numb. “That time we averted disaster.” Duane is talking about a ceremony that hasn’t happened yet, but Astrid told me about a ceremony that happened this morning. There must be two ceremonies.
We arrive at the dining hall. Duane starts to open the door, then pauses.
“But it doesn’t matter anyway,” he says. “You’re a hero whether you feel like one or not. At some point you’re going to have to accept that.”
Astrid is in the medical center when I find it again, along with another man. “Medical center” is too strong of a word for such a small area. It’s a futuristic frontier out here. We’re slightly more advanced than having someone bite a wooden spoon while we amputate their leg, but not by much.
“Astrid?” I say, stepping into the lab. Astrid looks up from a screen. Her expression flickers from distracted to surprised to carefully neutral.
“Can I help you?” she asks.
I seek out the nametag on her uniform: A. Prescott. That answers one question. “Could you, um.” I glance at the other man. “Can we talk in private?”
Her expression flashes unease for a moment before going back to neutral. “Of course,” she says, gesturing toward an examination room. As soon as we’re alone, I can’t think of what to say. Astrid stands in silence, her gaze flicking around the room, settling on everything but my face.
“Did we, uh. Did we get around to doing those tests?” I ask finally. I don’t remember us actually making it into the medical center to take the tests, but it was late afternoon then and I just had breakfast with Commander Duane now so it’s reasonable that it happened.
A crease appears between her eyebrows. Her gaze jumps to my face. “Tests? Which ones?”
“After my panic attack,” I say. “Was that … last night?”
“You had a panic attack?”
I bite down on my lip, staring at her. She’s not joking. Why would she lie?
“Was there a ceremony yesterday?” I ask slowly.
“It’s this afternoon. Did you think you missed it?” She looks like this was definitely not how she expected the conversation to go. I swallow another surge of panic and try to keep my voice steady.
“Commander Duane told me you spoke to him.”
This time she flushes and her gaze drops. “Sorry. I didn’t think he’d say anything to you about it. I’ve been—I just—” She stops and considers her words, then continues. “I know we don’t … talk much anymore, but I could tell you’ve been anxious about the ceremony. I thought I could put in a word with him. I’m sorry if that was wrong.” The words are stilted and formal.
I feel a shaky rush of relief that this, at least, really happened. “It’s fine. I’ve just been … having memory problems, and I think it’s stress about the ceremony.” The ceremony that definitely hasn’t happened yet. “Could you check me out and rule out any physical causes?”
“Sure.” She studies me. “Are you sure you … I mean, do you want me to ask Nathan to do it?”
“No, just you,” I say. Something relaxes in her shoulders and I feel like I’ve said something with far greater meaning than I intended.
We spend the rest of the morning ruling out medical explanations. There’s no evidence of a cerebral hemorrhage or a concussion or a stroke. I don’t seem to have neurological damage, or at least not the kind that’s detectable by the limited medical supplies we have on Mars.
“Honestly?” Astrid finishes typing into her tablet. “I think you’re right that it’s stress. As soon as the ceremony is over, I think it’ll start to clear up.”
“Right,” I say, pinching the bridge of my nose. “What time is that, again?”
“It starts at four,” she says. “If you don’t think you can do it, I can tell the commander that you’re too sick to attend. I’ll give you a doctor’s note and everything.”
“No, that’s okay.” I think of Commander Duane’s words. “I think it’s important to be there.”
“Fair enough. Go get rest. Doctor’s orders.” She smiles and walks me to the door of the medical center, but her brow is pinched in the middle.
I’m the last person into the meeting room, which has been set up for a media broadcast. The table’s already filled with the other five staff members on the base. As I hurriedly take my seat, I look from face to face. There’s Astrid in her lab coat, her hair tied severely back. The next one is Gert with the blond crew cut. Nathan from the medical lab, also in a lab coat; a young woman in a jumpsuit named W. Cheng; and finally Commander Duane. Everyone is uncomfortably aware of the camera set up at the other end of the table. It’s a high-priority transmission, preempting all of our other data streams. It’ll go live on Earth in half an hour, when the data gets there.
Commander Duane moves to the front of the room as everyone gets settled. His gaze settles briefly on me and he smiles—partly in relief that I’m here, I suspect. I can’t bring myself to smile back so instead I just nod. My gaze shifts past him to the projector screen. Everything inside me goes cold.
The screen shows two pictures. The left one is of a horrific shuttle crash. The shuttle’s mutilated metal carcass is strewn across the Martian dirt. Barely any of it is intact. Was this the “arrival” Astrid had mentioned? How could we possibly have survived that crash?
I tear my gaze away from it to look at the other picture, which is an official portrait of a woman in uniform. Across the bottom of the portrait it says Doctor Myrtle Reeves. That’s me. But the woman’s face … Is that what I look like? I stop myself from reaching up to my own face, and try to remember the last time I looked in the mirror. The inside of my mouth floods with tinny saliva. My heart beats in my neck.
Duane rests his elbows on the podium. Silence falls. I try not to hyperventilate on camera.
“It’s hard to believe it’s been twelve Earth months since we first arrived here. We’ve accomplished so much since then, and yet. And yet.” The commander pauses. “We’ve lost so much as well.”
Eyes are shifting to me so I turn my gaze away from everyone. The red, white, and blue bunting hanging on the wall is made up of recycled parachute fabric. I know this in the same way that I know the orange-red streaks on the ceiling next to the air vent are from the inexorable Martian dust that gets in everything. I know that this habitat can support twelve people, but only six people live here. I splay my fingers on the molded plastic surface of the table and try to remember building this room. It’s only been a year. If I close my eyes, I can picture Pavonis Mons, but only the brief glimpse I got of it before the explosion. In my mind’s eye, I try to turn and look at the habitat from the outside, but I can’t do it. My memory can’t fill in the gaps.
“I would like to start this off with a memorial for the people we’ve lost,” the commander says. The silence in the room is palpable. “Mission Specialist Bernice Hunter. Corporal Jamil Hayes. Lieutenant Samuel Prescott.”
He keeps reciting names, but Astrid goes still next to me. She’s looking down at her hands. I wonder whether Samuel was her brother or her husband. I think about reaching out and clasping her hand, but I don’t know what sort of a relationship I have with her. She’d been uneasy around me in the medical center. Something must have happened.
Before I can second-guess myself anymore, I put a hand on Astrid’s. She lifts her head, startled, then turns her hand over and clasps mine back. The tears in her eyes spill over.
My face is going numb again. I press the fingers of my other hand into my eye sockets until I see white spots. Then the commander says my name and I come back to myself.
“Doctor Reeves acted quickly and professionally in taking control of the shuttle and bringing it in for a landing with minimal loss of life. If it weren’t for her quick action, none of us would be here today, and for that, we owe her our gratitude. Doctor, if you would?”
Duane is smiling at me, one hand outstretched. Astrid lets go of my hand. I rise from my seat, stealing a glance around the table before I join him at the podium. He clasps my hand and then pulls me in for an unexpected hug.
“As the commander of the Ares Project, I would like to confer upon you this medal of commendation for your acts of bravery,” Duane says, releasing me. He presses a medal into my hands. It has a rocket on it, with my name embossed around the bottom rim. It’s 3D-printed, and as I take it, it strikes me that it’s a colossal waste of resources for something so stupid as recognizing whatever it was that I did.
The room breaks into applause, jarring me out of my thoughts. I close my fingers around the medal and look back at everyone and, behind them, the camera. Astrid isn’t the only one with tears in her eyes. Duane clasps me on the shoulder.
“Thank you for showing up, Doctor,” he says quietly.
I nod and try to force a smile. Turning away, I—
I wake up in my EVA suit, next to the methane tank. There’s a windstorm going on, sending whorls of dust scouring the ground. My HUD reads the wind speed at two hundred miles an hour. It feels like a faint, persistent breeze. The atmosphere is so thin that even a hurricane is pleasantly calm.
“Doc, do you copy?” It’s Nathan’s voice, same as before. I freeze, feeling my palms go slick.
“Sorry,” I say. “Please repeat that?”
“Base asked if you had a status update.”
“Uh.” I step into a river of streaming dust, feeling the faintest pressure as it parts around my boot. There’s something in my hand, but it’s not the wrench. It’s a little round 3D-printed plastic ring. “I’m sorry, I … I lost my train of thought.”
I turn toward the habitat and the sight of the structure jars me. I can see the hard-packed dirt bricks, and while I knew they existed, their actual appearance hits me like an epiphany.
“Base,” I say, and then wet my lips. “Tell me today’s date.”
“We’re at three hundred and fifty-four sols post arrival, Doc.”
I make some mental calculations. A Martian sol is forty minutes longer than an Earth day, so three hundred and fifty-four sols are roughly equal to three hundred and sixty-four days.
“Our anniversary ceremony is tomorrow,” I say out loud, squeezing the plastic ring in my hand.
“Correct.”
“It hasn’t happened yet.”
” … Correct.”
“We haven’t had any ceremonies at all.”
Nathan is silent a moment before he says, “Jones, do you have line of sight on Reeves?”
I turn my head and see someone else in an EVA suit three dozen feet away, working on something under the hood of the rover. They turn back to me and I see Gert’s face inside the helmet.
“I see her,” Gert says, waving. I wave back.
“We’re aborting this EVA. Return to the airlock, doc, and I want you to go to the med bay as soon as you get in. Jones, secure everything for now and we’ll pick these projects up again in a day or two.”
“Gotcha,” says Gert easily, closing the hood.
I open my mouth to protest, but I don’t know why. I can’t do whatever job it is they want me to do. I wade through the dust stream back to the airlock. The tanks are far from the base, which is a small comfort. When they blow, the only thing they’ll destroy is me.
“How are you feeling, doc?” asks Nathan.
“Just fine,” I say, then pause as I reach the airlock. “Base, I’m … I’m having some trouble with these controls. Can you … walk me through them?”
His voice is quieter when he replies, “No problem.”
The dorm room has six fold-down desks set in the wall, despite only having four beds. Mine is currently down and scattered with the pieces of what may have once been a tank of oxygen or coolant. There’s a tablet sitting on the desk as well. I know how to turn it on, but when I do, I’m confronted with a login screen.
I press the heels of my palms into my eyes and think. What happened yesterday? I was … working? I spoke to … someone? No, there’s nothing there. There isn’t a hole where my memory should be—it’s as if it never existed, not as if it was taken away.
Okay. I need to work through this logically. The most obvious explanation is that I had a stroke, a seizure, or some sort of traumatic brain injury. My trip to the medical bay didn’t uncover anything of the sort, but it’s an easy explanation for my short-term memory loss.
The second explanation is drug toxicity. Could I have taken something that didn’t show up in Astrid’s tests? What would be available to me here? Would the effects last … however long it’s been?
The third is emotional trauma. Could the ceremony have triggered the stress-induced amnesia that Astrid suggested? Knowing that I would be singled out for special attention could have been enough to send me spiraling into a delayed breakdown.
The fourth is that I’m dying. Many people who have gone through near-death experiences have reported their lives flashing before their eyes, an instantaneous highlights reel as the brain loses oxygen. Is that what’s happening? As I think these thoughts, is my body just starting to spread like a mist across the Martian sand?
I type “mreeves” into the username field, then hesitate. I had hoped muscle memory would let me type the password without thinking. I try it again with “m_reeves,” “reeves_myrtle” and “reeves_m” but nothing works.
The fifth explanation is an impossible one. I’m literally jumping back in time from an actual explosion.
Spiraling, I think. Jumping backwards in time, then living forward for a few minutes or hours, and then jumping further back. An explosion, then a few minutes prior to the explosion; the evening after the ceremony, and then the morning before.
If this is true, I’m echoing backward through time along the same track that the original Myrtle—ur-Myrtle? Myrtle Prime?—took in her chronological life. I don’t remember what has happened in the past because it hasn’t happened yet.
“Hey.” Gert is in the doorway. I raise my head and she smiles tentatively. “How are you feeling?”
I open my mouth to say that I’m fine, but instead I say, “I don’t remember my password.”
Her mouth quirks in a sympathetic smile and she comes into the room. “Did Wen make you reset it again? I don’t know why she insists on having us change our passwords when it’s just us. I keep cycling among the same three.”
I shrug mutely. Am I the sort of person who uses her birthday and her pets’ names? Have I … have I ever owned pets? I stare at the blinking cursor. What’s my birthday?
“What happened out there?” Gert asks.
“I got dizzy,” I said. “I’ve been feeling weird.”
“Come on, doc. You can’t fall apart. You’re the only one who hasn’t yet.” Gert says it with a laugh, but her words are hollow inside.
If I’m spiraling back in time, does that mean that the explosion was real? Is it still in my chronological future? I could write an email to myself, but I don’t remember ever receiving it, so would it make a difference? It only matters if I imagine a long line of me’s traveling through time. The me ahead of me, who was, perhaps, the original Myrtle; the me behind me, who would receive the email I write. The me’s before and after those two. There could be an infinite line of them, each one influencing the actions of the one that comes after. Any one of them could come from a slightly different past or move on into a slightly different future. There is no telling what futures my actions can create.
On the other hand, there could just be one of me. This one me is someone who has completed a series of concrete actions. Whatever I tell my past/future self won’t change what I’ve already done. Whatever advice I get won’t make my own actions any different. If that’s true, nothing I do will change the explosion of the methane tank, and nothing I do will change the success of the flight.
I wake up at the 3D printer, watching it print a small plastic ring. It’s the one I was holding in my hand when I last woke up in my EVA suit. My tablet is in my lap, showing the same ring as a mesh framework. I rotate the design with a finger, staring at it.
“Such a simple fix,” says Duane next to me. My shoulders shoot up to my ears and he laughs softly. “Sorry. I didn’t realize you were distracted.”
I clear my throat. “Just a little twitchy.”
“It’s a good thing you caught it,” Duane says. “I don’t want to know what would have happened if someone left the methane tank valve open by mistake.”
I go very still. Looking down at my tablet, I page backward and find designs for the tank. My notes are all over it, detailing design tweaks. One note links directly to the valve and is highlighted in red and underlined.
>>>NO MORE OF THESE FUCKING VALVES
“Let’s install this as soon as possible,” I say. “Today. Right now.”
“I’ll put it on the duty roster as soon as I can,” Duane says, and I know he means it, but I also know he won’t do it soon enough. “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of it.”
“I’ll go out right now and do it,” I say, pushing back my chair. “We can’t risk an accident.”
“No one is going to be using the tank in the next couple days,” Duane says. “I can’t upset NASA by messing up the schedule.”
“What are they going to do? Fire us?”
“Reeves.” Duane’s mouth flattens. “Be reasonable, here.”
“I could die!” I exclaim.
“But you won’t,” Duane says. “You caught the flaw and you designed the fix. Of all of us, you’re the least likely to make that mistake.”
Let’s talk about failure.
In 1961, the Soviet Union sent a series of probes to observe Venus. Nine of them never made it off Earth. Of the ones that did, almost every one suffered a failure of some kind, but it was Venera 14 that surpassed them all. The probe had an arm that was designed to reach out and squish the dirt to test its compressibility. Unfortunately, it ejected its camera lens cap directly under the arm, and tested the compressibility of the titanium cap instead.
Or we could talk about NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter, launched in 1998. One part of the team working on it used the metric system. The other used the imperial system. Their failure to notice the difference caused the probe to smash head-on into the planet.
Or the DART spacecraft, which was intended to autonomously dock with a target satellite but lost its navigation, propellant, and collision-avoidance programming on the way up, causing it to try to dock with the satellite at high speed. After bouncing off, it abruptly expended all its fuel, retired itself, and headed for polar orbit.
Humans make mistakes, is what I’m trying to say.
The Ares Project that brought us to Mars was engineered to exacting standards. But there were mistakes. There always are. And one of those mistakes was in the design of the tank valves.
When fully closed, an arrow on the valve would point straight up in the twelve o’clock position. When fully open, the arrow would point at ten o’clock. Unfortunately, a flaw in the catch mechanism meant it didn’t always stop the valve, making it possible to open it so far that the arrow once again pointed at twelve.
To an astronaut in an EVA suit, standing out in the shadow of Pavonis Mons, it would look closed, even as it released methane into the thin atmosphere.
But Duane’s right. I knew about the flaw, and I was the only one with reason to even go near the methane tanks. Why was I the one who was killed?
Apart from my consciousness, everything moves chronologically. When I jump backwards in time, I can’t take anything with me except my own thoughts. No one remembers the conversations I’ll have with them tomorrow, but to be fair, I don’t remember the conversations I had with them yesterday.
Sometimes I get flashes of ur-Myrtle’s life when I jump backwards. I wake up in the middle of writing an email to Commander Duane, resigning my commission, as if that means anything. There’s no going back. I delete the email without sending it. Another time, I wake up in the recreation room, obsessively going over footage from the shuttle crash. I make myself go to bed. Whatever experiences shaped ur-Myrtle into the person she was aren’t present for me, so I’m a different person, for better or for worse.
If I’ve existed forward and then backward, is my current existence anything like my previous one? My forward-living persona wouldn’t have had the trouble with names and wouldn’t have acted so strangely in those final/initial few days. My actions and my relationships with my coworkers would have been drastically different. Yet I’m still rocketing backward from the same convergence point, which indicates that despite our separate actions, everything has culminated in the same devastating event. Perhaps that means that nothing can change it.
It reminds me of the old story about the intelligent puddle. The intelligent puddle, looking at the hole in which it exists, marvels that a creator must have designed it because no other hole would have fit its shape so perfectly. I can try all I want to change my own past, but if it weren’t for the explosion, I wouldn’t exist in the shape I’m in.
“—Kill him,” I’m saying hotly when I next wake up. I stumble over the last word, confused.
I’m standing in the airlock. Astrid is here too, sitting on the floor, hugging her knees. The airlock door is open into the habitat behind me, showing the shadowed interior of the engineering lab. It’s cold in here, and I’m only in my pajamas. Astrid’s face is streaked with tears.
“You don’t know that.” She wipes at her eye with the back of her wrist. “You can’t say things wouldn’t have happened differently if I’d been able to do something.” She’s shivering.
How far back in time is it? The last I remember, it was a month before the anniversary. When is it now?
“You’re right, I don’t know that,” I say slowly, focusing back on Astrid. I lower myself to the cold floor and sit cross-legged next to her, clamping my fingers over my cold toes to warm them. “None of us know how anything could be different.”
“I could have at least tried,” Astrid bursts out, covering her face with both hands. Her next words come out muffled. “All I can think about is staying strapped in my seat while my little brother burned to death.” She chokes and starts sobbing.
I reach out and carefully rest a hand on her back, unsure how to comfort her. “You panicked,” I say quietly. “It happens.”
“It doesn’t happen. They train us for years to make sure that panic doesn’t happen.” She continues to shake for a few moments, her head in her hands. I rub her back.
“Maybe we should get—” I start to say.
“You blame me,” Astrid interrupts. She’s not crying anymore, and her voice is dead. “You haven’t been able to look me in the eye since the crash.”
“Of course not,” I insist. “Why would I blame you?”
Her voice is choked with shame. “Because you told me to take the shuttle controls and I couldn’t make myself unstrap from my seat. We wouldn’t have had as many casualties if I could have just obeyed a fucking order.”
“It was a mess,” I say helplessly. “I—I barely remember any of it. It was my fault as much as it was yours. Let’s get out of this airlock.” I gently take her hand. “Please? I’m freezing. Let’s go to the dining hall. Want some hot chocolate?”
She squeezes my hand and we get to our feet. The tear streaks have dried on her face and her nose is red. She pulls her hand free of mine as soon as she’s up, folding her fingers together tightly.
“You can’t blame yourself for Sammy’s death,” she says. “None of that was on you.”
“It wasn’t on you, either. It was the fire, and that was an accident. There’s nothing we could have done to change that.”
Astrid takes a deep, shaky breath. “I guess,” she says, hugging herself. “Let’s get that hot chocolate.”
She waves me through the doorway. As soon as I step through, the airlock door slams shut. I spin around, shouting “No!”
Inside the tiny square window, Astrid is at the controls. She doesn’t look up when I knock frantically.
“Help!” I shout across the engineering lab. “Help! I need to get the airlock open!”
There’s a hiss as the airlock depressurizes. Astrid doesn’t even get the other airlock door to open before her blood starts to boil. And in the two minutes it takes to cycle the airlocks back through, I keep thinking, she doesn’t die. I know she doesn’t die. I speak with her tomorrow. She’s fine.
By the time I reach her, it’s far too late.
One month earlier, the remains of the shuttle crash appear on the horizon. It’s like a flood that unearths a coffin; that which was dead should not be unburied.
And slowly the forensic analysis unreels. I walk through the conference room and find the charred remains of a seat in the middle of the table while Nathan and Gert inspect it. Wen spends long, harried hours communicating with Earth about the ongoing investigation.
The current findings are inconclusive, but there’s a rough timeline of events. Our trip to Mars progressed normally until five minutes before landing, while the crew was storing supplies and preparing to land. A fire started, either through a faulty wire or a power surge. Bottles of coolant were stowed in the storage cupboard next to it, used for EVA suit cooling systems, and it was possible one had ruptured. The liquid was corrosive and highly flammable and could have conducted electricity easily if it made it behind the panel.
The flames spread quickly, cutting the cockpit and half the crew off from the rest. The oxygen tubes supplying the two pilots melted and the smoke overwhelmed them. At this point, the standard policy to put out the fire would be to open the airlock and vent the oxygen, but we were already barreling through Mars’s thin atmosphere and the only thing hotter than the inside of the shuttle was the outside of the shuttle.
I was in the fore of the spacecraft with the pilots, and was closest to the controls. I’d never flown an actual shuttle before, but we needed a thousand hours of flight experience in the simulator before being allowed on the mission. I managed to bring the shuttle in for an extremely rocky landing.
In all, six crew members died: four due to the fire, and two more from injuries sustained in the crash. That the other six of us survived was nothing short of miraculous.
I don’t know how to fly a shuttle. I can’t picture the inside of the cockpit, or remember the nine-month journey to Mars from Earth, or remember my thousand hours of flight simulation. The only memory I have of the crash is the photo I saw during the commemoration. If I sat down in front of the controls right now, I wouldn’t be able to do a thing.
Time pushes me backward in bigger and bigger leaps. I’m nine months out from my death now, with three months to go to the shuttle crash. The shuttle itself is a hulking wind-scoured mass a hundred feet from our base.
I need to find a way to fly it, but how? There are no flight simulators on Mars. I can request a manual from Earth but it takes a day for NASA to upload it and by then I’ve jumped back again. I pester anyone who will listen to walk me through the controls, under the guise of wanting to understand how I could have done better. I tell them to explain it to me as if I’ve never touched the controls before, and they make the attempt. It’s easier when I don’t have to face their scrutiny for long.
The crops get smaller, shrinking down to seedlings and then bare dirt. The extra rooms on the habitat are gone, and then one day the propulsion lab is too. Then the second dorm room, and our dorm is crowded with two more beds. We lose the second shower stall. Everything packs itself neatly back into the crates in which they arrived.
The funerals are the worst.
Commander Duane leads the ceremony in the meeting room, where we do everything important. Then we don EVA suits and move out to an expanse of dirt with six tiny boxes and an assortment of symbolic possessions that we collected from the wreckage. We dig a single hole.
Nathan carries the camera. Duane says that there’s an estimated one billion people tuned in to the funeral, but my mind can’t process the thought of that many people. Why do they care about such a distant tragedy?
Back in the habitat, we’re forced to sit through a speech by the President, even though I feel like if I don’t leave the room soon, my chest will collapse under the pressure. Over the last three weeks, I’ve been watching a palette of bruises unheal themselves on my flesh. By now they’re a vicious dark red-purple. My ribs ache and there’s a healed laceration on the back of my head. I focus on that instead of the words the President is saying, because if I pay too much attention, I’ll start thinking about where I’m headed next, and I’m not ready yet. I’m not ready for the crash.
When we finally sever the link with Earth, silence descends over the habitat. It’s a smaller habitat than before; the recreation room still has a dirt roof. If I look out the airlock door, I can see the wreckage. I avoid looking out the airlock door.
“Pull up a chair,” says Wen as I step into the dining hall. Astrid rests her chin on her crossed arms. Nathan slouches back in his seat, jiggling his leg.
“Hi,” I say, sitting down. Nathan nods. Astrid blinks slowly.
“I’m glad that whole thing’s over,” says Wen. “It felt so performative. I never liked the idea of everyone back home watching us grieve.”
“That’s not home,” says Nathan.
Wen and I both look at him. Astrid doesn’t move.
“It’s not,” Nathan says. “Home is a place you’re going to return to. We’re not. That’s just someplace we used to visit.”
“Home is where my family is,” Wen says. “They’re back in West Virginia.”
“By that standard, my home’s about a hundred meters north of here,” Astrid says flatly. I wince.
“Mars isn’t my home,” Wen says firmly. “This habitat is my shelter, sure. It’s my current address. But it’s not my home. You’re with me on this, right Myrt?”
I chew on my lower lip, considering my coffee. “Mars is my home,” I say finally, thinking of the cold, lifeless dirt outside. It’s not a home I want, but it’s the only one I’ve ever known.
Astrid finally looks up. “You’re quick to hang your hat,” she says. “How long have we been here? Three weeks?”
“Feels like ages,” I say. I meet her gaze, then look at Wen and Nathan—these struggling, broken people who will spend the next year trying to make sense of their empty futures. I hope that whichever Myrtle accompanies them won’t make the same mistakes I did. I won’t be there to see how it turns out.
This is soon going to be someplace I used to visit.
Outside of the dining hall, I step into a flaming crater.
Smoke billows past my visor, thick gouts of dark grey torn by the wind. I stumble in the EVA suit and my foot hooks something. I crash down to my knees and the impact jars me to my teeth. It feels like a hand is pressing down on me, trying to pin me to the red dirt. Dirt runs over my knuckles in a stream.
“—Broken the—” My headset crackles with someone’s voice, but it’s immediately gone again.
I’m a jellyfish out of water. Ur-Myrtle’s body hasn’t felt gravity in nine months. I struggle back to my feet, but walking forward is nearly impossible.
The whipping smoke parts briefly to reveal the white wall of the crumpled shuttle with a giant letter N painted on the side.
Two shaky steps bring me to the gaping maw of the wreckage. There’s no airlock. There’s nothing but twisted steel and melted plastic. I kick something and nearly trip, and when I catch myself I realize it’s someone’s detached helmet. I blanch.
Someone lurches in front of me, falling out of the opening. I reflexively grab at them and we both crash back down to the ground. They flail, battering me with an arm. I let go and they roll away.
It’s Wen, face bloody, eyes wide. She says something but the radios aren’t working.
“I can’t hear you,” I say. My voice is close and stuffy inside the helmet and I’m suddenly, uncomfortably aware that I’m inside a tiny oasis of livable atmosphere fifty-four million kilometers from home.
She points back into the wreckage. Her lips form the word “Help.”
The shuttle cracked in the middle of the passenger compartment, where all our landing couches were. The landing couch closest to the hole in the wall is gone. In the next one over, someone lies limp, still strapped in. I can’t tell who it is, and from the burns on their suit, I don’t think they survived. I keep going past them to the front of the shuttle.
The cockpit is a melted, blackened mess. A body lies on the floor behind the pilot’s couch. The co-pilot’s couch is still occupied. Astrid sits there, cradling her brother’s body in her arms.
I don’t know how long it takes to get her brother out of the cockpit. I don’t know how long it takes to get all the living members of the crew safe and accounted for. It seems interminable, and it gets worse when the sun sets, leaving us in a red, living darkness. We only have seven hours of oxygen in our tanks, and when I finally collapse on the ground, my gauge is bordering empty, but I’ve been breathing hard. It can’t have been seven hours. God, I’m running out of time. I could jump back any second.
We have no shelter and no oxygen. Our shuttle was supposed to be our shelter until we could assemble the modules, but I don’t even know where the modules are in relation to this wreckage. They could be kilometers away.
I lay flat on my back, staring up at the sky. The stars gleam between shifting curtains of dust. Can I see Earth? My brain is too fuzzy to calculate orbits. I pick a bright star and decide that it’s Earth. They all must be glued to their livestreams, waiting to hear word that any of us survived. All they know is that we lost contact at the most critical point.
I want to sleep. My blinks are coming more slowly. If I fall asleep, I’ll die. We’ll all die. And maybe I’ll wake up again, but maybe I won’t. In this timeline, we’ll never establish the base.
Did ur-Myrtle exhaust herself trying to save everyone from the shuttle, or did she spend her time doing something else? Did she go straight for the module, knowing it was our only hope at survival? She should have known that even assembling a module was beyond our capabilities right now. But if she could have accessed the rover somehow …
Wait. The rover isn’t with the module. It came on our shuttle. I struggle for a second like a turtle on its back, then roll over onto my stomach and get unsteadily to my hands and knees, wincing as rocks dig into the suit. Everyone else is arrayed around me in identical positions of exhaustion.
The rover will have backup oxygen in it, and it can get us to the module much faster. It’s at the rear of the shuttle, far from the site of the fire.
I heave myself up to my feet, trip, and fall again. Someone grabs my elbow and helps me up. I turn and can barely make out Gert’s face through her visor. She turns on her flashlight and I remember mine.
We stagger in lockstep across the rocky terrain. I’m getting chills, and I slowly realize that the atmosphere is overwhelming my suit’s thermoregulation system. Heat doesn’t radiate in space, so despite the frigid temperatures in the vacuum, the main problem with EVA suits is overheating. But here, in an atmosphere again, the wind whips the heat away from my suit faster than I can produce it. My battery stores must be getting low.
Gert’s flashlight beam plays wildly over the ground, bouncing over rocks and swirling dust. She picks up the edge of the shuttle, and then the crumpled body of someone else. They’re laying face down and missing their helmet. I avert my gaze, feeling nausea lurch in my throat. That was one of the two who died in the crash itself. They were my personal responsibility. If I had done a better job—no, don’t think about it.
The tail end of the shuttle looms ahead of us. If it had landed correctly, the door to the rear loading bay would be a dozen feet over our heads, accessible by an unfolding ramp. It’s on its side, though, with the loading bay doors kissing the ground.
It takes ages to dig through the side of the shuttle, which is built to withstand the heat of reentry and has multiple layers. I’m on my knees, taking in slow breaths, when the door finally gives and the piece comes crashing to the ground with an explosion of red dust. Inside the hold sits the rover. I weep.
In half an hour, everyone still alive is inside the rover. It’s a tight fit for six of us, but we don’t mind it if it means oxygen and warm air. Sitting in the seat, feeling the engine rumbling, I slowly become aware of my aching body. Something on the back of my head is trickling liquid. My ribs throb.
We trundle off slowly, headlights cutting through the darkness. Sheets of dust blow across the ground ahead of us. When the headlights first land on the module, it looks like a monument looming out of the darkness, half buried in dust. Gert stops the rover in front of it, leaving the headlights on, and for a long moment we just sit and stare at our salvation.
“—Will be initiating our landing procedure in T minus eight minutes and counting.”
I slam the storage container shut and turn away from it, then stop, blinking in the bright lights overhead. Bile lurches up my throat in sudden, wild terror. I’m in my EVA suit, but I’m comfortably warm and not in pain. A few feet away, Astrid is strapping into her launch couch. She gives me a thumbs-up with both gloved hands.
“I’m so excited I could barf,” she says.
“Don’t do it inside your helmet, sis,” comes a voice over the intercom. Someone else snorts. I look down the length of the room. More pairs of couches march down to the other end. Someone shuts a cabinet door and kicks off for their couch.
“Rear cabin is stowed,” Nathan says. “We’re shipshape back here.”
“Acknowledged. Mid cabin?”
“Mid cabin is stowed,” says Gert.
“Front cabin?”
Silence. After a moment, I realize he’s talking to me. My hands are curled into tight fists. I can barely force the word out. “Stowed,” I whisper.
“Then we’re good to go. T minus six minutes and counting. Are you all ready to meet our new home?”
The cheers over the intercom are deafening. I can’t bring myself to make a sound.
“Myrt, you’ve got to strap in,” Wen says. I can’t tell which couch is hers.
I stay where I am, rotating slowly in the zero g. I’m not ready. I still can’t fly this shuttle. Maybe I can get to the fire as it’s starting and get it under control earlier. It started in the lower left panel in the front cabin, which is …
I turn back around and look at the storage container that I just shut. Reaching out a shaking hand, I pop it back open.
Three coolant tanks are strapped in here. Their valves are visible from here, all three of them with their arrows pointed at noon. They look closed, but when I lean in, a faint haze of blue condenses on the faceplate of my helmet.
>>> NO MORE OF THESE FUCKING VALVES
The terror drains out of me.
The letters of condolence, the attempt to resign, the obsession with the valves; it was all one stupid, expensive, tragic mistake, and ur-Myrtle will spend the next twelve months being called a hero for it until she can’t stand it anymore.
Will she consider it justice to kill herself with the same faulty valve that had caused the deaths of half the team?
Maybe this is just a break with reality, or maybe this is my life flashing before my eyes as I die, or maybe the instant I turn this valve I’ll cease to exist because I’ll have removed the impetus for my own creation. I was never a hero, not even in an alternate timeline, and I don’t want to die, but I only exist because Myrtle did. This hole she left was not made for me, yet here I am. I can’t let her make that mistake again.
I close the valve.
| Bennett North co-edits Translunar Travelers Lounge and has previously had works published in F&SF, Escape Pod, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and others. |  |