Space was quiet. It was the definition of the word. With no air there was no sound, and she drifted silently through the void, her breathing the only sound for parsecs. She closed her eyes, steading herself. Annette wasn’t an astronaut. She was a scientist, and her field made her more qualified for this mission than she wanted to be. Annette hated space. Vacuum scared her. Darkness made her nervous. EVA made her sick. But if the administration’s suspicions were correct, they needed her. So here she was, careening through darkness, bound for the station.

“Looking good, doc,” Diego reported. She smiled weakly. At least with active comms, she felt less alone. There was a brief pause; no doubt Diego was checking his readings. “I got you at…eight-point-seven mps. That’s…” he trailed off the last word, the way one did while staring at a computer screen. “…a little low,” he finished. “Let’s bump it up a little. Gimme a six-second burst from your-”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Annette interrupted, eyes wide. It felt like she was sweating. Was she sweating? “It feels like I’m already going pretty fast. Meters per second, right? That’s fast, isn’t it?” She was speaking quickly, and rambling. She always did when she was nervous. Stop it.

She heard him chuckle on the other end. “Relax, doc,” he replied. “Just a six-second burst, one-quarter thrust.”

“Six-second burst,” she repeated, softly. Annette closed her eyes, nodding her head. “One-quarter thrust,” she finished. With that, she focused her eyes on the thruster control in the upper-right of her HUD. Definitely sweating. Struggling to keep her eyes propped open, she stared at the icon for six seconds, then looked away with a sharp exhale.

There was a slight lurch, and her speed increased. Multi-tasking was the worst part of being in space. Following her preflight training, her eyes darted rapidly between her velocity, her O2 levels, fuel consumption rates, all while keeping an eye on her trajectory. Her HUD was crowded with AR inputs, including a reticle displaying her distant goal: an airlock, from her vantage point no larger than an antique coin.

“Looking good…” Diego reported, absently. No doubt he was following her progress from the safety of the Naavik. She barely heard him, her attention yanked in a dozen different directions. As she neared the station, she realized she was shooting for a moving target; the station was rotating. Power might be minimal, but its wheel kept on spinning, its momentum ensuring Earth-analog gravity forever.

“Okay, doc,” Diego began. “You’re a hundred meters out. You should be able to see the airlock. Can you see it?”

She nodded, before realizing he couldn’t see her. “Yes,” she responded, “But it looks like I’m off-course. Should I-”

“Relax, doc,” Diego interrupted, dismissively. “The wheel is still spinning. Your onboard computer isn’t taking you to where the airlock is, it’s taking you to where it’s gonna be.”

She nodded again, this time for her rather than him. Confident in her trajectory, she finally closed her eyes, taking a few deep breaths. Diego seemed to notice.

“Hey…” he began, softly, “you okay out there?”

“Yeah,” she replied.

“You sure?” he persisted. “Can’t have you getting vertigo and crapping out on me out there.”

She took one more deep breath, steeling her resolve, then opened her eyes. “I’m okay,” she replied, firmly.

There was a brief pause on the other end, as though he was trying to decide whether or not he believed her. “Okay,” he responded eventually. He paused again, probably checking his feed. “You’re getting close. When you’re about five meters out, your suit’s retro thrusters will fire to counteract your forward momentum. It’ll be gradual, just…keep your eyes open, you read me?”

“I read you.” She needed to stop nodding.

“Good,” he replied. “Once you’ve slowed, your suit will match the station’s rotational speed. Might be a little jerky, but you’ll be fine. While you’re reorienting, I need you to get a good look at that hatch. There should be a pair of gunnels on either side. You grab onto one of those, attach your tether, and it’ll keep you from floating off into space.”

She grimaced. Can’t have that. A moment later she felt her stomach shift as her thrusters fired. Faint wisps of white streamed into space in front of her. The station’s gravity wheel now dominated her view, a mammoth ring sheathed in stark-white radiation shielding. As she approached the wheel, she could see the airlock: a tiny gray circle bisected with a seam. At two meters out, she felt herself being jerked to and fro as her thrusters fired, aligning her with the ring. 

Suddenly, the airlock appeared to be stationary, right in front of her. Her thrusters cut out automatically less than a meter ahead of it. It was larger than she’d expected, about three meters wide. Sure enough, there were gunnels ringing the hatch, two of them just within her reach. She stretched out her arm carefully. Any sudden motion could send her reeling off into space. After a moment’s exertion, her probing fingers finally touched it. She slid them around it, grasping tight before pulling herself in.

She’d pulled too hard. The sudden shift in momentum thrust her toward the station, and she hit the rad shielding. It was tougher than it looked, less like hitting hollow metal than a concrete wall. Wincing at the sudden stop, she gathered herself quickly, feeling a rush of adrenaline. Keeping the gunnel secured in her right hand, she reached back to pull her tether from the base of her pack. It extended readily, and after clipping the carabiner to the gunnel and tugging to be sure it was secure, she finally released her death grip, and floated.

“You still good out there?” Diego asked. He sounded amused.

She gritted her teeth, resisting the urge to curse at him. “I’m good,” she hissed.

He chuckled, which didn’t help. “Okay, so you’re attached to the station. Step one down.”

She grimaced. A hundred or so to go.

“Now we need to get you inside. See if you can access the airlock release.”

She grasped her tether, gingerly tugging to reorient herself until she appeared to be standing over the station, looking down at the hatch beneath a starry sky. She stared at it, waiting for a control reticle to pop up on her HUD. Nothing.

“There’s no signal,” she reported. “Looks like it’s dead.”

“No surprise there,” Diego replied. “But it was worth a shot. You’ll need to trigger the manual release. Looks like you’re where you need to be for that. Look…” he paused, probably checking her feed to see how she was oriented, “…down. Like, right below your feet. Can you see a panel? Should be rectangular, say, thirty centimeters wide.”

She tugged on her tether again, rotating until she was looking down. “I see it,” she replied.

“Good. Now, you’ll need to release that panel. It’s magnetic, so use your degausser. Once it’s gone, you’ll see the lever right under it.”

Sighing, she pulled herself closer to the panel before reaching back and withdrawing her degausser. She keyed it on, then passed it over the panel until it floated free, drifting carelessly into space. “I see the lever.”

“Now pull it, as far as it’ll go.”

She clipped her degausser back to her pack, then reached out with her right hand and grasped the lever. She pulled. Nothing. She pulled harder. It barely budged. Releasing her reassuring grip on her tether, she placed both hands around the lever, bracing herself with her feet against the station, and pulled. She could feel it give. Then suddenly it flipped upward, sending her careening to the end of her tether, which halted her with a jerk.

“Shit!” She rasped.

“Language!” Diego replied. She nearly snarled. He was trying to be funny, but funny was not what she needed. She didn’t know exactly what she needed, but that was not it.

“But hey, you got it open,” he went on. “Great work. Now, in you go.”

Of course the airlock wasn’t functioning. Almost nothing on the station would be. Resealing the outer hatch took almost ten minutes. Hooking up the energy cell from her pack to the cycler took even longer. But after an eternity of waiting, at last the airlock cycled, and the inner hatch opened.

She stepped in slowly; it felt good to actually walk. The corridor appeared to slope, curving upward until it bent around. It was dark, sparse illumination coming only from flickering displays that fought for what little power was left. After checking the atmosphere, she called in to Diego.

“I have breathable atmo,” she reported.

“That’s…good…” he replied, haltingly.

“Are you sure?” she asked, eyes wide. He sounded surprised. That made her nervous. 

“Yeah,” he replied, quickly. “It’s good, just…weird. Life support is designed to be the last system to fail after a power failure. I mean, obviously. But the station’s been dead for, what, five days?” He paused, likely thinking. “Check trace gasses. Can you send me your data?”

She stopped herself from nodding this time. Her eyes flitted across HUD icons for atmospheric scan. “Sending now,” she said, staring intently on the scan log until she heard a soft tone.

“Uh-huh,” Diego replied, absently as he reviewed it. “That’s what I thought. I’m detecting traces of helium, probably from lubricant seepage.”

“What does that mean?” she demanded, fighting panic.

“It means life support is dead. Anything we can’t breathe gets filtered out. Helium is still pretty low, but it’s high enough to tell us the scrubbers have been offline for at least two days.”

“But I can still breathe in here, right?” she asked, nervously.

“Yeah,” Diego replied. His tone wasn’t as reassuring as she’d hoped. “Probably. I mean, yeah. Yeah you should be good. At least for now.”

That was all the reassurance she needed. Annette snapped off her gloves as fast as she could before triggering her helmet release, eagerly prying it from her head. Free at last, she dropped it carelessly to the floor, then took a deep breath.

Her first breath wasn’t as rewarding as she’d hoped. The air was musty and stale. It was cold, but humid, smelling faintly of mildew mixed with half a dozen acrid chemicals. She fought back a retch.

“Ugh,” she rasped, covering her mouth.

“You okay?” Diego asked through her headset.

Annette scowled. She wished he’d stop asking that. Every time he did, she felt a little less okay. “I’m fine,” she replied, lowering her hand. “It’s just…”

“It stinks,” he offered. “Yeah, you’ll have that. We humans are pretty gross. Get a bunch of us and make us live in a sealed can, and it can get kinda rank.”

Annette wrinkled her nose. She briefly considered putting her helmet back on. “At least that means the crew could still be alive, right?” she asked.

“Maybe,” Diego replied. “But the CO2 levels are a lot lower than I’d expect from three days of respiration. Barely detectable.”

For a moment, she forgot about the smell. “That’s not a good sign, is it?”

“No, it’s not,” Diego replied. “Better get moving. If anyone’s alive in there, they’re in a bad way.”

With that, she removed the rest of her EMU, detached one of her helmet lamps, and proceeded into the station.

The few space stations Annette had seen were claustrophobic, because of the people. It was hard to gauge the size of a space amid the bustle of a thousand footsteps, the idle chatter of a thousand voices. Amid the darkness, the emptiness of the station made it even more unsettling. Devoid of life, the corridors were spacious and silent as a tomb. What few noises there were — the sizzle of sparks from damaged systems, the soft trickle of leaking water ducts — seemed to jump out at her, ringing through the wheel like cymbals. A few minutes in, there was a sudden bang from somewhere on the far side. She nearly jumped out of her skin before doubling over to catch her breath, her pulse pounding.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she repeated softly. “You’re okay, you’re-”

“You know the comms are still open, right?” Diego asked. He snickered as though he could see her glaring at him. “It’s alright, doc. You’re not alone, okay? I’m here.”

No, you’re there, she remarked, privately. It was easy to be calm when everything played out on a screen. Her headset fed everything she saw to Diego’s monitors, where he sat safe aboard the Naavik. She felt like the ill-fated protagonist in a cheesy sci-fi film, the one that’s always the first to meet the tentacled aliens. The one whose death leads to the “We’ve got a problem” scene.

As she progressed slowly though a dark and empty hall, her headset scanned her surroundings, searching for any sign of life. Heat signatures, carbon dioxide, even the faint sound of a human heartbeat, would register with its sensitive instruments. But as she moved, tip-toeing unconsciously, she came up empty. With effort, she manually unsealed doors, peering into cabins that appeared to have been unoccupied for ages. In some, beds were neatly made, clothes carefully folded. In others there were piles of clothes, tabs left on desks, beds unmade. Some stank with the odor of unwashed laundry. Some had pictures on the walls: friends and family, loved ones, professional athletes, one poster of Carl Sagan. In every case, it was clear they’d been long abandoned, dust flitting through her headlamp.

It made no sense. If the station had been abandoned, there would have been a desperate flight. Items would be strewn across the floors, hatches left open, clear signs of people packing in a hurry. But everything was left exactly as it had been: a snapshot of daily life, frozen in time.

After ten minutes of scanning empty rooms, she paused to check in with Diego, hoping for some insight. “Diego, are you seeing all this?”

“Yeah,” he replied. “If anybody left, they packed light. And they weren’t in any hurry.” He paused, and she could almost hear him stroking his chin. “We already know the landers are all in place. And if they’d left in suits for some reason, we’d have found them by now.”

“So where is everybody?” Annette asked, panic clawing at the back of her mind again. “So far I haven’t even seen any bodies. No blood, no signs of struggle. Just…nothing. Where did they go?”

“I have no idea,” Diego replied, slowly. She’d desperately hoped he’d have some idea she’d missed. “I guess they could’ve gathered in one of the common spaces. The mensas, maybe. With life support failing, it’d make sense to get everybody in one place, conserve power.”

“Then they could still be…” Annette trailed off. She heard something, somewhere down the corridor. It was rhythmic, like a heavy tapping on the deck plates. Footsteps.

“Diego,” she whispered, “I think someone’s still alive in here.” She closed her eyes, focusing on the sound. It was syncopated now, a sort of shuffling.

“Are you sure?” Diego asked. “I’m not picking up any-”

“Shhh!” she hissed, waving her hand as though he could see. She listened again for a moment, but it was gone.

“It stopped,” she said, softly. A moment later, she heard it again. Scuffing, shuffling…were they limping? This time it was closer.

“Annette?” Diego asked. It was the first time she could remember hearing him say her name. 

She panned her headlamp around the empty corridor, turning slowly until she found herself face to face with another human. She was right behind her, less than a meter away. Was it a “she”? The figure was gaunt, her dark skin ashen to the point of appearing gray. She wore the same uniform Annette did, only the sky blue was filthy, streaked with black. Her hair was matted, somehow appearing wet and filthy at the same time. What had happened to her?

“Ohmygod…” Annette rasped.

“Doc? What’s going on over there?” Diego asked, sounding impatient, and worried. Why was he asking that? Couldn’t he see what she saw?

“I…” she sputtered, “…found someone. She’s…Jesus, are you okay?”

The figure had her head down, but as Annette stepped closer she raised her chin. A smile revealed rows of cracked and rotting teeth. She looked like she’d just crawled out of a grave. But before Annette could utter another word, there were hands on her neck. The figure opened its mouth, shrieking and shouting incoherently. Her eyes were bloodshot, painfully wide. Annette was paralyzed in her stare, so shocked it took a moment to notice the grip on her neck, until the figure began to squeeze. It hissed and cackled, its bony fingers tightening like a vice. 

It was too late to scream; all Annette could do was gurgle. She wrapped her hands around the figure’s skeletal forearms, prying with all her might. Her hands seemed to move, but the figure’s grip remained. The fingers were cold, the sneer terrifying. Annette’s mind grew hazy. She was seeing spots. She kept struggling, pawing fruitlessly at her attacker’s elbows. As consciousness faded, fear gave way to an almost dispassionate musing on whether or not she was about to die.

The figure was flickering. That couldn’t be real. Her brain was being starved of oxygen. She was seeing things. It happened again, then again. This wasn’t hypoxia. She began feeling the fingers release her neck, then squeeze again, as though her attacker was pulsing her grip. Except it wasn’t…its hands were dematerializing, then reappearing. Her eyes grew wide as the figure’s cackles turned to wails. Was it in pain? Angry? It kept flickering, flitting in and out of existence until suddenly it was gone.

It wasn’t until the specter had vanished that Annette realized how tightly she’d been throttled. The disappearance led her to fall forward, doubling over as she grasped her neck, heaving for air. She pried at her collar, willing to do anything to widen her throat just a few more millimeters. The rush of oxygen led to a wave of dizziness: her vision clouded over for a moment, and she laid a hand on the nearby wall to steady herself.

“…okay? Doc? Say something!” Diego was saying. The attack had pushed everything to the background.

“No, I am not okay!” she shrieked, clutching her chest. Her pulse was still pounding as her mind struggled to process her ordeal.

“What’s going on? What happened to the survivor?”

For a moment she opened her mouth, prepared to lash out, but something stopped her. Diego could see everything she could. He had access to all her sensor feeds.

“Didn’t you see what happened?” she replied.

“No,” he responded. “Your video feed cut out. Do you have the survivor? Where are they?”

She shook her head slowly. Even if he hadn’t seen what happened, there had to be a record. Her attacker must have left a trace. Carbon dioxide from her breath. Volatiles from her body. Residual heat. Something.

“I…” she began, hesitant to replay the incident in her mind. “I approached her, and she attacked me-”

“She what?” Diego interrupted. He sounded shocked. “Why would she do that?”

“I don’t know!” she wailed. “She put her hands around my neck, like she wanted to kill me! Then she just disappeared, and-”

“Disappeared?” Diego interrupted. He sounded like he didn’t believe her. “Doc…”

She took a deep breath, seething. “I know what it sounds like,” she began, trying to remain calm, “but it happened.”

Annette was a scientist. She understood the laws of physics. But she also knew the most important tools of a scientist were their senses. Eyes, ears, nose. She’d seen her attacker. She’d heard her voice. She’d felt her grip around her throat.

Diego sighed heavily over the comms. “Doc, listen to me…” Diego began, tenuously.

“No!” Annette shouted. She was quivering, and shook her hands, trying to put all her nervous energy somewhere. “Dammit, I know what I saw!”

“Alright!” Diego shouted. “Alright,” he repeated, lowering his voice. “Look, you’re there and I’m here. But you need to think this through, okay? You say you saw someone. I believe you. Your feed cut out, so I don’t know what you saw. But all your sensor feeds are clean. No change. And you say this person just disappeared. You’re a scientist. Do you know of any way that’s possible?”

“I…” Annette’s mouth began before her brain could weigh in, and it was a false start. Of course she had nothing. The laws of conservation glared at her from the back of her mind. Memories of her physics professors scolded her.

“Look,” Diego began, soothingly. “Weird stuff happens in space. I’m not saying something isn’t going on here we don’t understand. But what’s that Occam’s stuff you guys always say?”

Annette rolled her eyes. “The simplest explanation is the truth.”

“That’s the one,” he replied. “So you’re out in space for the first time. You have your first EVA. Now you’re on an abandoned station and air is at a premium. You’re cold, you’re scared…”

She glared. “If you’re about to tell me I’m crazy…”

“I’m an astronaut,” he replied, sternly, “we don’t use that word. But the fact is, humans weren’t designed for space. It does stuff to us, not just our bodies but our minds.”

Annette felt the tension ease. She knew what he was thinking: in a moment of utter panic, she’d hallucinated. But he stopped short of saying it. And somehow that made her feel better. She sighed wearily, leaning against the nearby wall. For a moment she allowed herself to relax. To forget she was standing on a dying space station, one whose crew had mysteriously vanished, where she was certain she’d nearly been strangled by a ghost.

“I know how it sounds,” she began, softly, “but I know what I saw.”

“I believe you, doc,” Diego replied. He paused for a moment, before venturing, “Could this have anything to do with the experiment?”

Annette’s eyes shot open. She turned her head slowly, gazing up the corridor apprehensively. The experiment. It was the only reason ESA had sent her, and not someone else.

“I…I don’t know…” she managed. It was an honest answer.

“Then I think that needs to be your top priority,” he replied, gravely. “If something went wrong with that thing, even if there are any survivors, there won’t be for long. And we can’t keep you on that station for long, either.”

With that, Annette stood straight, taking a few deep breaths. She was afraid to close her eyes, but taking a moment helped. As ready as she would be, she started off down the corridor.

The wheel was a standard gravity wheel, split into multiple decks. Travel between decks was facilitated by lift cars running along the spokes or climbing rungs that ran upward through maintenance tubes. The loss of power would have rendered the lifts inoperable. She found a set of rungs in the wall ten meters down the hall, and began to climb. Each deck upward brought her closer to the wheel’s barycenter, which meant as she climbed the going got easier. Because rotational force was strongest on the lower decks, those primarily housed crew quarters and mensas. The upper decks housed conference areas, storage, life support and science labs. Thus, she was forced to climb to the uppermost — or rather innermost — deck.

She stepped off the final rung carefully; landing too hard could send her bouncing into the far wall. The lab deck was just as dark as the lower levels, but here the silence was complete. No dripping from faulty ducts, no smell of mildew. The air was odorless to the point of being sterile, save faint hints of iodine and ozone. It was a sick, acrid odor. She almost missed the more human scent of unwashed laundry on the decks below.

Used only for lab space, the deck was not a priority in emergencies. Power had clearly been diverted: no emergency lights, not so much as a flicker from the display panels. Without light or sound, it felt like being in space without the stars. Her lone headlamp provided a column that peered into a nondescript world of bare walls and blank doors. Her footsteps were like mallets on a timpani, and after her experience below she was jumpy. Now and then her lamp would hit one of the transparent doors to the labs, producing a sudden glare. The first time it happened, she screamed.

“Whoa! Hey you okay over there?” Diego asked.

Annette clasped her chest, heaving. “I’m fine,” she rasped. She really wished he’d stop asking that.

With the displays dead, there was no way of knowing what each lab was responsible for. Here and there she’d shine her light into one of them, peering through the plastic doors. Her lamp would pass over dead computer interfaces, display tables sitting dark and useless. What vital research had been conducted in the labs remained a mystery to her. For all she knew, they’d been modeling new microgravity toilets.

She heard something. Footsteps again, this time from beside her. She turned quickly, preparing to defend herself. Her light panned across another woman in a sky blue uniform like hers. This one didn’t appear as deathly as the other had; her uniform seemed worn, but not overly. Her hair was dark but not as matted. She appeared to be in her late fifties, but something about her creased face seemed familiar.

Annette froze, expecting another attack. The woman stared at her for a moment, her expression somewhere between longing and regret. Had she been crying?

“Uh…” Annette managed, after what seemed like an hour of being stared at. “Do you need help? Are there any more-”

“Get out of here,” the woman hissed. Suddenly her face twisted, the crows feet beside her eyes scrunching as her brow bent in rage.

“What?” Annette whispered. She fought the urge to run.

“Get out,” the stranger repeated. “Get out. Get out. Get out!” Her voice crescendoed as she kept repeating the same two words, until she was shrill with anger.

Annette dropped her headlamp as the woman rushed towards her, arms outstretched. Not again! She raised her hands in front of her, prepared to hold back her attacker. She turned her head, closed her eyes tight. Then, there was nothing. The silence returned. She opened her eyes slowly, squinting at empty space in front of her.

“Annette!” Diego shouted in her ear. “What the hell is going on over there?”

“I don’t know!” Annette shrieked, falling to her knees. In the low gravity, it felt as though she floated. For a moment she imagined she was in a pool, somewhere warm and humid and far, far away. She couldn’t be more wrong for this. No one could. She didn’t even believe in ghosts. She didn’t know anyone who did. But all other explanations seemed insufficient. Science was her greatest ally, and it was failing her. Her hands quivered as tears slipped from her eyes. 

“Doc,” Diego began over her comms, “I’m gonna get you out of there, okay? Whatever’s going on aboard that station, I don’t think this is gonna work.” He paused, probably checking her feeds. “Can you make it back to the airlock? I know it’s a climb, but at least this time you’ll-”

“No,” she interrupted. She opened her eyes, drying her face with her sleeve.

“But-”

“I said no,” she replied, forcefully. She might be the wrong person for this. But she was here. If anyone was left alive on the station, they wouldn’t care whether she was qualified to rescue them or not. They’d only care that she did or didn’t. Only one thing separated her from all the qualified astronauts who weren’t there with her. She needed to check on the experiment.

“…you sure?” Diego asked. He sounded nervous. Not just worried about her, but nervous, as though he was afraid a failure would blow back on him. Bastard. But it didn’t matter. It wasn’t like he’d been a big help so far anyway. 

Her mind was made up. She shook her hands for a moment, then rose to her feet. “Yeah, I’m sure,” she announced at last. She took a slow, deep breath, in through her nose and out through her mouth. “Now let’s find the main lab before I lose my nerve.” Or my shit.

There were twelve sets of rungs connecting the various decks of the gravity wheel. As it turned out, she’d picked the most inconvenient of them; the main lab was on the exact opposite side of the wheel. If she’d been nervous before, now she teetered on the edge of panic. She panned her lamp nervously from one wall to the next. It was hard to see with her hand shaking. It felt like she walked for kilometers before finally arriving at an airlock: a sturdy hatch split in two, set into a circular recess in the wall. Beyond lay the very experiment mission control believed had doomed this station, and everyone on it.

Annette knew very little about the experiment. Control had been oddly tight-lipped, which did little to ease her concerns. But while they were scant on the details, they’d told her she was the most qualified person they had to assess the experiment, and if necessary shut it down. That at least told her something, but she didn’t like it. She prepared to ask Diego for instructions, but that was unnecessary: the hatch was jammed open about half a meter.

“Uh…” she stammered, gaping at the opening.

“I see it,” Diego chimed in, watching her feeds. “Looks like it’s jammed open.”

“So somebody left it like this?” Annette asked, confused.

“That’s an airlock,” Diego explained, “those things have two possible settings: open and closed. I’ll bet it was partway through the cycle when the power cut out.”

Annette scrunched her nose, thinking. “So somebody was trying to open it?” she asked.

“Or close it,” Diego replied. “At least the outer door is open.”

“What does that mean?” Annette asked.

“That if somebody was in there when they cut power, they probably managed to get out.”

Annette nodded absently. That calmed her down a little. For a moment she’d pictured finding a body inside the airlock, arm stretched toward the cycle controls, eyes wide in death. That would probably have been enough to get her off the station.

The opening wasn’t overly wide, but without her EMU she was slim, and managed to slip through easily. But once inside the airlock, she found a new mystery.

“Diego,” she began, panning her light across the inner door, “this one’s open, too.”

There was an agonizing pause. Annette didn’t like the idea of anything she found puzzling a trained astronaut. When he responded merely with “Huh,” she didn’t like that, either.

Her eyes grew wide. “Huh?” she repeated.

“Like I said, airlocks have two settings: open and closed. But obviously there are two doors. Thing is, while both doors can be closed at the same time, the way these things work only one of them can be open.” He paused again, thinking. She imagined him scratching his chin. “How are both of them open at the same time?”

“Maybe they were trying to open both of them when the power went out,” Annette ventured. “They knew when they cut the power, the airlock wouldn’t work.”

“But that makes no sense,” Diego countered. “There’s a reason that lab has an airlock. Sensitive experiments like that have dedicated modules. The idea is that if something goes wrong, the module can be jettisoned. But if the airlock is jammed open…”

“They couldn’t detach it,” she finished for him.

“If they did, it’d vent that entire quadrant,” he added.

“Then why open both doors?”

“I dunno, but I don’t like this.”

She sighed heavily. “Then I should probably get in there and see what’s going on. Maybe that will give us an idea of why they did this.”

“Maybe,” he replied.

She lowered her lamp, preparing to squeeze through the opening, but stopped when Diego spoke again.

“Hey doc,” he began, haltingly, “be careful in there.”

She nodded slowly. He sounded more concerned than she would have liked. Like he truly had no idea what she would find. With that, she shimmied through, and entered the lab.

After squeezing through, she nearly fell into a space more cavernous than she’d expected to find on a space station. In the darkness she could barely see anything, but her footsteps echoed. She spun slowly, panning her light to get her bearings. The chamber was a large dome; the module itself was a sphere bisected by the floor she stood on. It was surprisingly bare; no banks of computer terminals, no display tables, none of what she’d expect to find in an astrophysics laboratory. A single computer terminal stood atop a podium at the center. Flanking it were two shorter pillars, each topped with what appeared to be a clear plastic prism, like an aquarium tank.

For a moment, she simply stared. The scene was surreal; she would have been less perplexed if the entire chamber had been empty. Years of work as an astrophysicist, participating in and even conducting research, and she had no earthly idea what she was looking at.

“What…were they doing here?” she asked, slowly. She didn’t even realize she’d said it aloud, until Diego replied.

“I have no idea,” he whispered. He sounded as confused as she was, and her confusion melted into dread. “You’re the scientist, doc,” he continued. “Don’t you have an idea what all this stuff is for?”

It was a sensible question. But without power, with no functioning computer displays, all she had to go on was the equipment. And based on that, she was baffled.

“Well,” Diego began, realizing she had nothing to offer, “maybe if we restore power to the module, that’ll tell us something. At least you’d be able to access the computers, see what they were up to.”

Annette’s eyes grew wide. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“Maybe?” Diego replied, unhelpfully. “I mean, at least you can find out what was going on.”

She opened her mouth, aghast. “Well what if whatever they were doing here was what killed the station?” she demanded.

Annette could almost hear him shrug. “At least we’ll know what happened?”

She tried not to scream.

“Either way,” he went on, “pretty sure it’s our only option, so best get to work. All lab modules have designated battery backups. I’ll talk you through the start-up process, and you can take it from there.”

Annette didn’t like this. But like he said, they were out of options. Reluctantly, she moved to the access panel he’d highlighted on her headpiece HUD, and got to work. And it was slow, tedious work. Annette hated electronics. Her least favorite part of every general physics course she’d taken was electrical physics. Luckily, Diego was a patient instructor, and the indicators he fed into her HUD helped. Amazingly, she got through the process without experiencing any shocks.

The work would’ve likely gone faster if she’d been able to focus. Diego had mentioned in passing that the module’s battery backups should have kicked in automatically when the crew cut power. For some reason, that hadn’t happened. The batteries read nearly a full charge, despite being fueled by polonium, which decayed rapidly. The fact that the backups hadn’t been engaged didn’t seem to bother Diego, but it bothered Annette. She kept telling herself he was the professional. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that the crew had intentionally cut off the backups for a reason. And that she was doing something that shouldn’t be done.

With her work complete, she was ready to flip the master switch. Her hands were quivering, and as she knelt poised to reactivate the module, she hesitated.

“I’m still not sure this is a good idea,” she whispered.

“It’s gonna be okay, doc,” Diego replied, trying to soothe her nerves. “If anything goes wrong, you just get right back to that panel and kill the power again. Okay?”

She nodded slowly. “Okay,” she replied. Her eyes closed, and she exhaled sharply. Her hands were still shaking, and she hesitated. She took a few deep breaths, then held her breath as her finger reached out, and hit the switch.

First there was just a low hum. The sound built slowly, and at last the lights came on. The shift from darkness to light, silence to sound, was jarring, and she raised her hands to shield her eyes. But before they could adjust, they shot open as she heard a loud clang from behind her. She turned quickly, and felt a knot in her gut.

“Diego!” she shouted, “the airlock!”

“It’s okay,” he reassured her. “Remember what I said? They’re supposed to do that. Don’t worry. Once you’re done in there, with the power on you’ll be able to get back out, easy.”

She nodded slowly, forcing herself to believe him. Rising slowly to her feet, she made her way toward the lone computer interface. It was almost disorienting to be able to see where she was walking, after so long stumbling in the dark. The light and ambient sound were soothing. She felt like a child again, secure in the belief that the monsters would stay away as long as the lights were on. Amid all her pressing concerns, she allowed herself to believe that.

The computer was less than helpful. Its screens were blank, save a flashing error message that read FEED LOST. She grimaced; with main power down, the module was cut off from the central computer. But that didn’t make sense; designated lab modules like this one maintained their own data storage. Surely she’d be able to see something, unless…

“That’s weird,” she whispered, absently.

“You found something?” Diego responded.

“Not exactly,” she replied, searching what remained of the computer logs. “It looks like the local memory has been wiped.”

“What?” Diego replied, sounding shocked. “But…the only way that could’ve happened is if-”

“The crew wiped it themselves,” Annette finished for him. She could feel the dread mounting again. “From this console, before the power was cut,” she finished, lowering her voice. Something was terribly wrong. The severed backups, the dumped memory, the airlock jammed open. It meant something. What had gone wrong? What did they try to do?

“Doc…” Diego began, slowly. She barely noticed.

“Just a second,” she replied, waving her hand dismissively.

“Annette!” he shouted. 

Only then did she notice the shadows: strange lights on the wall to her left. It was strangely beautiful: a kaleidoscope of colors, swirling and skewing. Something was causing it, something behind her. She turned abruptly, and could no longer suppress a scream.

She stepped back slowly as the tank behind her seemed to pulse. The space inside it seemed to twist and warp, an anomaly gradually growing until it emerged from the tank. It was like a giant bubble, distorting the view from behind it. The scans on her HUD cycled rapidly, displaying intense gravitational waves. Her eyes flitted rapidly, scrolling through the data until she found the radiation scans, and swallowed hard.

Hawking radiation.

She was peering into a black hole.

“Doc, what the hell is going on over there?” Diego called frantically across her headset. “Your feed is going crazy!”

“It’s a black hole!” she shrieked. She had no idea what to do. Her instincts told her to run, but her knowledge of physics told her it was pointless. The singularity continued to grow, the event horizon inching toward her. She was already beyond the Point of No Return.

She froze, but only for a moment, until she felt a hand on her shoulder. She spun around, and found herself again looking at a female crew member. The uniform was identical to hers, but this time it was different. She had the same dark skin, the same long black coils of hair. The same wide eyes. It was like looking into a mirror.

It was her.

“Hey,” her doppelganger began. Annette merely gaped at her. Nothing she knew or had ever experienced told her how to respond. “Look, we don’t have much time,” the duplicate went on, patting the air for effect. “You need to…” she trailed off, seeming to finally notice the rapidly-expanding bubble.

“Oh no…” she whispered, “not again…”

With that, the other Annette flickered and vanished. The remaining Annette finally gave in to her impulse to turn and run, but it was too late. She could feel it pulling on her. Her boots slipped helplessly along the smooth floor. It felt like a giant stood behind her, taking a hold of each and every molecule of her body and dragging her into the abyss. She reached forward helplessly, screaming at the top of her lungs as the space around her swirled.

Then, there was nothing.

Black holes were fascinating, and Annette had spent countless hours reading about them, listening to casts of lectures. She’d often wondered what it would be like to pass into a black hole. If she time would slow to the point where she’d live a lifetime in the seconds it took to be torn apart. If she’d feel herself being spaghettified. If everything would just go suddenly dark.

It was, in fact, dark. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t move. On the station, there had been almost no light, almost no sound. Wherever she was now, there was nothing. It was as though she had entered a void, where absence itself was a state of being. She tried to look around, but she couldn’t. It wasn’t just that she couldn’t move; she couldn’t feel her body. Not so much as a tingle. It was as though she’d been disembodied. If such a thing as a soul existed, hers had been torn away, cast into oblivion.

Had she passed through the black hole? Was she in the anomaly at its center? Was she dead? She seemed to ponder these questions forever; time had no meaning in the void. And then, amid the complete silence, she heard something. It was a whimper, faint, feminine. She couldn’t see where it was coming from. Distance and direction had no meaning in the void. But she could hear it. The woman was scared. Annette tried to speak to her, offer comforting words. She could not speak. No speaking in the void. Then, the sound became a scream.

It was a shrill, blood-curdling scream, a tortured sound. Whoever it was, they were in extreme pain. They were terrified. The wail was joined by another: deep, masculine. Then another, feminine as well, deeper than the first. The screams grew and multiplied until it sounded like dozens. Hundreds. A chorus of agony. It penetrated her mind. It reverberated in her soul. She tried again to say something reassuring. Then she tried to beg them to stop. Still, she couldn’t speak. No words in the void. The screaming continued. It continued forever.

She had no idea how long she stayed that way, paralyzed, lost in the screaming. She tried to shut it out of her mind, to will herself to be somewhere else. Anywhere but the void. Anything but the screaming. Years passed. Millennia. Eons. And then, something changed. There was a bright flash: complete black replaced with complete white. Then, she was somewhere else.

It was dark, but not as dark as it had been. She was back on the station. For a moment she simply stood, blinking. Then she realized she could blink, and stand. She looked down, and saw her arms, her legs, her body. I’m alive! But her clothes appeared faded and worn. The skin on her hands was creased. Hesitantly, she reached up and felt along her face. There were lines, trenches etched by years into her youthful skin.

For a moment, she tried to process everything through the filter of her years in science. She tried to analyze, to formulate an explanation. It didn’t work; her thoughts were clouded by darkness, by the screaming. How she’d escaped didn’t matter. She appeared to have aged, lost decades of her life. That didn’t matter either. For a moment, she prepared to dash to the nearest airlock. Part of her wanted to just run out into space without a suit. Anything to make it all stop.

She heard footsteps nearby. Turning slowly, she watched as someone ascended the nearby access ladder. She was dark-skinned, with long black hair and bright eyes. Young, energetic, scared. Her.

This was the past. The person she’d been when she’d climbed into the lab deck would have known there was nothing she could do. Time cannot be changed. Time simply is. But that was before the void and the screaming. The science didn’t matter. All that mattered was the void and the screaming, and that she wouldn’t go back.

She balled her fists, stalking toward the other her. The younger her. As she approached, the younger Annette noticed her footsteps, and turned to face her. She looked scared, and dumb.

“Uh…” Younger Annette stammered. “Do you need help? Are there any more-”

“Get out of here,” Annette hissed. How had she been so stupid? She’d blundered into something she had no hope of understanding. For that, she’d been condemned to decades of screaming.

“What?” Younger Annette whispered. She looked so scared. She should be.

“Get out,” Annette repeated. “Get out. Get out. Get out!” Why couldn’t she just listen? Overcome with anger, she rushed toward Younger Annette, but as she did the world began to flicker, flitting between the near-darkness of the station and the total black of the screaming. She tried to scream herself, but the sound vanished into the void. In an instant she was back. The darkness, the screaming. For days. For weeks. For epochs.

As time passed without end, Annette lost her mind, her being, herself. She became the void. She was the screaming. Her existence was terror and rage. She hated herself for even going to the station. For ever getting involved with the administration. For even going into science in the first place. By the time the second flash occurred, she barely felt human. Her skin was taught and leathery, her fingers skeletal. Her uniform was tattered, teeth hurt where they’d rotted down to nothing. But none of that mattered.

She was back on the station, and she wasn’t going back to the void. No sacrifice was too great. As she turned, sure enough, there she was: her younger self. Younger Annette. Young, stupid Annette. She stood there, staring in horror at what she would become, unaware she was seeing her own future. Because she was too stupid to see it.

“Jesus, are you okay?” Stupid Annette asked her.

Annette raised her chin, letting her stupid self see what she was in for. Maybe she’d figure it out this time. Maybe she’d realize anything was better than turning out like this. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t going back to the screaming. Opening her mouth, she let out a screech of anger, her disused voice croaking and rasping like radio static. Hands reached out, grasping Stupid Annette’s wiry little neck. She’d choke the life out of her. She’d rip out her spine. She’d drag her to an airlock and space her. Stupid Annette.

With more strength than she thought was left, she squeezed, leering madly as she watched the life drain from her own eyes. Then the flickering started. No. It kept going, the scene strobing with the blackness. Her fingers began slipping, her hands vanishing and re-materializing. No. She laid back her head, screaming in rage and agony as her last hope was pried from her dying fingers. Then, the station was gone again. So was Stupid Annette. Only the void remained. And the screaming. For months. For weeks. Forever.

Annette wasn’t a spiritual person. If she had been, she might have believed she was in hell. The same myriad voices, shrieking and wailing, poisoning her mind. Throughout her life, her mind had been her greatest asset. She was a thinker. She reasoned through problems. Here, in the screaming, all she could think of was how badly she wished it would stop. Without form, doomed merely to exist, she was powerless to stop it. Despair took hold. She’d have taken her own life, ended her existence, but she couldn’t. The screaming continued, as in her mind she shrieked and tore at her nonexistent hair, imagined herself smashing glass. At first she barely noticed the next flash. Then, the pattern changed.

She was on the station again, but this time was different. The space was well-lit: she stood beneath a towering dome in an almost empty module. Looking down, she realized she’d been restored: her skin was youthful and clear, her uniform nearly spotless. She should have been thrilled: she was alive again, young and healthy again. But this was wrong. The pattern was broken. Where was she? And when?

She turned around, and there was the other Annette. Except this time, she was the Other Annette. It felt as though she was being given a second chance, and she rushed toward her other self and grabbed her shoulder. The First Annette turned rapidly, shocked. She remembered feeling shocked. How strange. But no time for that now, so she spoke quickly.

“Hey,” she began. The First Annette gaped at her, dumbfounded. Other Annette remembered feeling surprised. This was familiar. Had she been here? 

“Look, we don’t have much time,” she continued, patting the air. “You need to…” she trailed off as she noticed the space nearby warping around an expanding bubble. The black hole. She was too late. It had already happened. Everything began to flicker, the darkness clawing back.

“Oh no…” she whispered, “not again…” she tried to run, but the gravitational pull was too strong. It was familiar, but different. She felt herself being pulled, watched as the First Annette was sucked into the bubble. She was next. It consumed her. There was a flash. Then, everything changed.

She felt herself floating. Her surroundings looked like space, but it wasn’t: the stars seemed to swirl, like water slipping down a drain. She tried to follow one of them, but it just seemed to spiral endlessly. If there was a vertex to the funnel, she couldn’t see it. She could feel her body spinning. A day earlier, the entire experience would’ve been nauseating, but after an eternity of darkness and screaming, it was almost comforting, like floating in the ocean. For a moment, she allowed her muscles to go slack, content simply to float. Until she heard a voice.

“Doc?” the voice asked. Male, baritone.

“Diego?” she asked, overjoyed to hear a voice not wailing in terror.

“Annette, thank god!” he gushed. “When I lost your signal, I thought you were dead! What happened? Are you okay?”

“I’m…” she began, but something stopped her. This was wrong, too. “Wait…how am I hearing you?”

“Huh?” Diego replied. He sounded genuinely confused. “Hey, you’re the scientist. You tell me.”

“We communicate via radio signals,” she began, softly as she thought. “Radio signals can’t escape a black hole. Nothing can.” Her eyes grew wide. This was impossible. It was also new. Both of those things troubled her.

“Well,” Diego began, haltingly, “maybe the-”

“No,” she interrupted, firmly. She knew what was happening, at least partly. “You’re not Diego.”

There was a long pause, but she knew she was right. Whatever had happened to her, there was no way she suddenly had the use of her headset. Feeling around her hair, she found further evidence her hypothesis was correct: her headset was gone.

“Then who am I?” he asked from in front of her.

Annette nearly stumbled as the scene around her blinked away, replaced with something else. It was her lecture hall at MIT. She was standing behind her podium, the display table next to it active but blank.

“Wha…” Annette stammered, gazing around in shock. “How did I get here?”

“Like I said, you’re the scientist,” Diego replied, crossing his arms. “You tell me.” 

He was seated in the front row, just left of center. He was young and handsome, with dark hair and impeccable tan skin, chiseled features. It suddenly occurred to Annette that she had never actually seen him before. But he looked exactly the way she’d pictured him.

Annette shook her head, looking down. “This isn’t real…” she whispered. “None of this is. It can’t be.”

Diego merely shrugged. “What other explanation is there?”

She looked up slowly, making eye contact with him. A smile crept across her face: the one she always got when she’d figured something out. “This is in my mind. All of it. It’s all in my head.” She paused as something occurred to her. “But…then who are you?”

Diego grinned. “Well, if this is all in your head, isn’t that obvious?” He paused, sitting back and making himself comfortable. “I’m you.”

Annette couldn’t suppress a chuckle. “You’re me?”

He shrugged again. “Part of you, anyway.”

“I see,” she replied, rolling her eyes. “And why, exactly, would I dream up another person?”

“Probably because it’s easier for you to solve a problem when you have somebody to talk to,” he replied, casually. “You’ve always been like that, right? Even back in high school. That’s why you always studied with a friend. Melinda was your favorite, because she was quiet. Good person to bounce ideas off of.”

“How the hell can you know that?” She shot back at him. Despite everything, she felt uncomfortable at an apparent stranger knowing such details of her life.

He laughed. “Uh, doc, I’m you, remember? If you know it, I probably know it.”

She sighed heavily. “Okay, so I made you up. I’m stuck in my own mind. So either I imagined all of this, and I’m lying in a hospital bed drooling, or…” she trailed off.

“Or?” Diego replied.

“Or there’s a problem to solve here.”

He cocked his head, raising his eyebrows. “And what problem is that?”

She had that smile again. “What happened to me,” she replied.

Annette stepped out from behind the podium. She always paced when she thought. It helped. And as far as settings went, her subconscious couldn’t have chosen better. She wasn’t an astronaut. She was a scientist, a teacher, and this was where she felt most comfortable. She strolled absently toward the display table, thinking aloud.

“Let’s start with the facts,” she began, gesturing with both hands as she always did. “I was in the lab. An anomaly formed. Gravitational lensing, Hawking radiation. Black hole. Open and shut.”

“But…” Diego offered.

She cocked her head. “But,” she began drawing the word into three syllables, “I’m still here. I’m alive, thinking. So, either everything we thought we knew about black holes is wrong…”

“Or this isn’t a black hole,” Diego finished for her.

“Right,” she replied, snapping her fingers and pointing to him. Her hand fell slowly as she went on. “So…what is this?”

“Well,” Diego began, tilting his head, “What else could it be?”

She shook her head slowly as her mind spun through the possibilities. “Time…” she whispered. “It feels like time-” she paused, looking at Diego and raising her voice as she started over. “It feels like time is still passing.”

He furrowed his brow. “But, time does pass inside a black hole, right? Time dilation. You could live an entire lifetime falling into one.”

Annette shook her head again. “You could, but time would only pass slowly for an outside observer.”

“The twin thing!” Diego exclaimed, pointing at her. “The thing with the spaceships, right? Fly a spaceship at one-half c, and-”

Annette raised her hand to shut him up. “I got it. The point is, for somebody inside a black hole, time would slow down. It would feel like the blink of an eye. But this feels like time is still moving, it’s just…wrong. It’s all jumbled. Things are happening out of order.” She paused, staring blankly. “What would do that?”

She shook her hands in frustration, turning away from him. “I need to go back.”

“What?” Diego asked from behind her.

“Back!” she repeated, whirling back toward him. “Back to when this all started! The human mind remembers more than we realize. Everything is in there, it’s just not all accessible. But my memory is above the scale. If I can just go back…”

In an instant, she was back in the module, standing in front of the console. The tanks were on either side of her. Within the one on her right, the anomaly was visible, like a glass sphere obscuring her vision of what was behind it. It was as though time was frozen. Though she knew this was her mind working the problem, it was eerie.

“Okay,” she began, “I need to think, to focus. Any detail could be important, even if I didn’t notice it at the time.”

“Where do we start?” Diego asked. She was hearing him through her headset again, which was back where it should have been.

“Let’s start with the data,” she replied. She focused on the HUD on her headset. She could see the indicator for Hawking radiation, but everything else was blurred. No. Focus. She squinted, concentrating. Slowly, the blurred lines pulled into focus, becoming words and numbers.

“Anything?” Diego asked.

“Oh yeah,” she replied, deflated. “Ambient levels of ionizing radiation from the batteries, cosmic radiation from gaps in the station’s shielding, electromagnetics from the…” her final word fell flat on her tongue, as a line of data caught her eye. “Neutrinos,” she whispered.

“What?” Diego asked.

“There was a burst of neutrinos. They occur naturally, but these levels are a lot higher than they should be.”

“So they came from the anomaly,” Diego reasoned.

She nodded. “There’s no other suitable explanation.”

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “Not yet.”

Hesitantly, she stepped closer. At a thought, time suddenly resumed, then froze again. Now, the anomaly had tripled in size: a bubble about a meter in diameter. The tank it had grown from was nowhere to be seen.

The tank.

“I can’t see the tank,” she whispered. “It’s not transparent, it’s a lensing effect, produced by intense gravitational forces.”

“Like a black hole,” Diego replied.

“Like a black hole, yes,” she clarified. “But something’s wrong here. I can’t see the singularity itself.”

“But, I mean, you can’t actually see a black hole, right?” Diego countered. “Light can’t escape.”

“That’s right, but there’s still an absence of light. A dark void at the center.” She paused, closing her eyes amid the trauma of the screaming. Shaking her head slowly, she went on. “I’m not seeing it. I can’t see anything.”

“Then where’s the singularity?” Diego replied.

She was close. She knew it. The answer was tickling her tongue. “I can’t see it,” she began, slowly. Suddenly, her eyes shot wide open as it all came together. “Because it’s not three-dimensional,” she finished. “It’s a four-dimensional object.”

Annette stepped back slowly as the final pieces clicked into place. Gravitational lensing. A burst of energetic neutrinos. The singularity was there, but she couldn’t see it, because she could only see in three-dimensions. That meant she couldn’t see the entrance.

“An Einstein-Rosen Bridge,” she whispered in awe.

And she was back in her lecture hall, Diego seated once more in the front row. Her mind was racing, flooded by new information from the jarring revelation. She looked down, shaking her hands. She needed to think.

“Okay…” she began, breathless as she moved toward the display table. So I’m inside an Einstein-Rosen Bridge.”

“A wormhole?” Diego asked.

“In layman’s terms,” she allowed. For a moment, she searched for the controls to key on the table, before remembering all of this was in her mind. With a thought, the table glowed to life, a holographic representation rising from its surface. The wireframe image appeared as though two funnels, joined at the middle by a narrow passage.

“So an Einstein-Rosen Bridge,” she paused, turning to Diego, who’d joined her at the table. “A wormhole,” she added, leaning toward him, “is composed of two singularities, pinched together until they just barely touch. You enter on one side, pass through the bridge at the center, and emerge from the other end.”

“How do they form?” Diego asked.

She grinned, realizing she was leading herself through the obvious questions. “Not easily,” she began, “and not by accident.”

“What do you mean?” Diego replied.

“Well,” she began, stroking her chin as she studied the schematic, “as far as we can tell, a wormhole isn’t a naturally-occurring phenomenon. You don’t just find one, you have to create it.” She stopped, eyes wide in realization. 

“The tanks…” she whispered, that solution smile creeping across her face again. She turned abruptly to Diego. “That’s what they were doing!” she exclaimed. “On the station! My god, they were trying to create a wormhole!”

Diego turned away, studying the image himself. “I’d say they didn’t try anything.”

“Right,” Annette replied, nodding. “I’ve seen a theoretical model of an experiment like that. The goal is to create a stable bridge between the two tanks, to allow an object to pass from one to the other.” She stared absently at the image as thoughts surged. “The biggest impediment to wormhole research is energy. The power requirements to produce even a small one are intense.”

“They must’ve found a way around that,” Diego offered.

“I doubt it,” she replied, dismissively. “It’s obvious from the tanks that they weren’t expecting what they got. Must’ve been a power surge. Burst of cosmic radiation, solar flare, something. But this still doesn’t make sense.” 

She turned to Diego. “We have pretty good theoretical models for what happens inside a wormhole.” Pausing as she thought, she turned back to the wireframe. “So when you enter the event horizon,” she began, pointing to one end of the anomaly, “you see a flash. During the flash, theoretically you’d be able to see everything that’s happened, anywhere in the universe, up to that point.”

She stepped to her left, pointing to the pinch between the two singularities. “Eventually you reach the midpoint, here. There’s another flash, during which you’d be able to see everything that will happen anywhere from that point on.”

“So what happens between the two points?” Diego asked.

Annette shrugged. “Nothing,” she replied, simply. “The space within the singularity exists outside of our spacetime. So really, it isn’t space at all. Just…well, we don’t really know.”

Diego gaped at her. “Then how do you move through it?”

She shrugged again. “You just do. Time and distance are meaningless inside the singularity. You can’t maneuver, all you can do is watch and record. When you enter, you have no momentum, no inertia. All you get is a vector. You make it through, or you don’t.”

He appeared nervous. “So what happens if you don’t?”

Annette merely stared at him. She had no idea. No one did. Frustrated, she whirled around, clenching her fists. “Ugh…this is all still wrong!” she railed. “Movement through a wormhole is a straight line. Everything still happens in order. But this…it’s all jumbled. Things are happening before they’re supposed to, or after, or…” she trailed off, as she began to put it together.

“It’s unstable,” Diego observed. He was her, after all.

She nodded slowly. “As far as we know, travel time through a wormhole is based on two things: your entry vector, and the shape of the bridge itself. If the bridge is unstable, you could end up taking centuries to reach the other side. Or you could get there before you entered.” 

She turned back and leaned over the table, staring into the wireframe. “If it’s bad enough, conceivably it could loop back on itself. But everything changed when I entered it the second time. Since then, it’s working the way it’s supposed to.”

“So it’s stabilized,” Diego offered. He turned to gaze at the image as well, appearing to think. “Then, all you need to do is just wait until you hit the other side.”

“Yeah…” Annette replied, absently. “But there’s still something I don’t get.”

“The screaming?” Diego offered.

She nodded gravely. The screaming. Time had no meaning in a wormhole, and thankfully the memory of her shrieking hell had faded into the distant past. Far enough back that she could think about it without shaking. What had once defined her existence was now an object of fascination: a loose thread she was less hesitant to pull on.

Annette didn’t like unsolved problems. Everything had a scientific explanation; just because she didn’t know it, that didn’t mean it wasn’t there, waiting to be found. A wormhole was a gateway: a bridge between two points in space and time. There were no off-ramps, no pit-stops. It was a one-way trip. To somewhere…

“It was a place,” she whispered. “A place and time.” It was dark, completely dark. There were people there. People who were screaming. They were in agony, like they were being burned alive.

Or crushed.

“Oh my god…” Annette whispered. She turned urgently to Diego. “The station orbits Tau Ceti,” she began. “There’s a habitable planet in the system.”

“Right,” Diego confirmed, nodding. “Tau Ceti 6: Baldr. It’s habitable, but barely.”

He was saying it because it was what she remembered. Baldr was barely habitable, but why?

“Because of the gravity,” Diego finished for her. “It’s massive, way bigger than Earth. Humans can’t survive on Baldr. Not without a gel suit, or years of gene therapy.”

It all came together. The researchers had been trying to create a wormhole, and they’d succeeded. But it was bigger than they’d expected, and longer. Despite their screams, they got lucky. The exit could have been anywhere, even solid rock. Somehow, it had deposited them in a cave, where they lay in agony, slowly crushed by the immense mass of Baldr.

“I have to go back,” Annette declared. Days earlier, if such distinctions were even possible, the idea would have terrified her. But after all she’d experienced, fear was a lapsed friend, one she barely knew anymore. She’d seen things no other human could even imagine. It all had to mean something.

“But if you go back,” Diego began, sounding afraid, “you won’t have a gel suit. You’ll get crushed just like they are! What if-”

She raised a hand to silence him. Right now, he was her fear, that old friend speaking up because he still cared about her. Still wanted to protect her. But her mind was made up. She still had time. Time to plan, to figure out what she would do when she emerged again, back in the module. This time, she would be ready. She understood what was happening, and she would do what she should have done before.

She had no idea how long it took. Time was an abstract now, impossible to reckon. When she reached the end, she emerged back into the module, as she’d expected. The bridge was still there, but it was stable now, and in that state it was useless to her. She would have to begin again.

As she rushed to the access panel, she heard Diego, the real Diego, in her ear.

“Doc? Doc! Talk to me! Are you okay?”

She smiled, barely stopping herself from saying You know I am. “I’m fine,” she replied. “Look, I don’t have time to explain, but I know what happened to the crew.”

“You do?” he replied, incredulous. “How in the hell-”

“Like I said, no time,” she replied, cutting him off. “Listen, in a minute here, you’re going to lose me again. When my feed cuts out, I need you to contact the dispatchers on Baldr.” She cut the power, then restored it. Soon, the anomaly was building in one of the tanks. Bracing herself, she pried away the plate that shielded the module from the batteries. There was an immediate rush of warmth as she was bathed in ionizing radiation. She might need a few weeks of rad meds, but it was a small price to pay.

“…still don’t understand,” Diego was saying. He sounded panicked. She remembered what panic felt like. “Are you saying there’s something down there?”

“Just tell them to scan the planet for sources of ionizing radiation.”

“Ionizing radiation? What would they have down there that would put off rads like that?”

Me. “Just tell them, okay? They won’t have long. It might already be too late. But we have to try.”

He hesitated to respond as she rushed toward the center of the room, trying to stand exactly where she’d stood before. “Alright,” Diego replied at last. He still sounded unsure. That was fine. She was sure enough for both of them.

The event horizon had expanded, and now stretched well beyond the tank. She found her place, turned toward the airlock, and stretched out her hand. Before, she’d been reaching for safety. Now, she was merely playing out the scene.

“Thank you,” she replied. “And Diego?”

“Yeah, doc?” he replied. He still sounded so worried.

“I’m okay,” she finished with a grin.

There was a flash, and she was somewhere else.

The human mind is a powerful thing. One of its most incredible abilities was dissociation, and to those who lived in fear, it was a superpower. The ability to divorce one’s self from reality, to pretend what was happening wasn’t, was enough to survive almost anything. On her first trips to the void, it had probably saved Annette’s life. But this time she knew what was happening, and this time she needed to experience everything.

It was dark, just like she remembered. Only this time, she could feel her arms, her legs, her entire body, and wished she couldn’t. The weight was intense. It felt like someone had parked a lander on her chest. Her head weighed a thousand tons. The rock beneath her was hard, and unforgiving. She smelled sulfur. It made her sick, and in the crushing gravity she couldn’t roll onto her side to throw up. She could barely breathe. Her hands were made of lead. It felt like she was nailed down.

It started just as it had before: a whimper, feminine, scared. She was fairly young, probably about eleven meters off to her right. There was coughing from a man, maybe six meters to her left. Then the screaming started. They were terrified, in pain as the planet tried its best to flatten them. Annette tried to speak, to comfort them, but the words came as hollow gasps. Her lungs strained to function, and in a sealed cavern they were more likely filling with sulfur than air with each breath.

Part of her regretted her decision, but it was a small part. And as she lay gasping, losing consciousness, all she could think was that she’d at least solved one more problem. It was the last thought before everything faded to black.

When she regained consciousness, there was no screaming. In its place was a gentle, rolling sound, familiar. Comforting. The stench of sulfur had been replaced by the odor of fresh plastic and disinfectants. A hospital. Or something like it. She didn’t open her eyes at first. Everything hurt, as though she’d run a marathon. Her muscles ached from her arms and legs to her diaphragm. But she was alive and breathing, and no longer felt the press of Baldr’s gravity. The sound seemed to grow louder, more recognizable.

“I hear the ocean…” she whispered.

“Standard procedure in an infirmary,” a familiar voice replied. “It’s to keep your mind at ease to promote healing. Usually it’s music, but I remember reading you grew up in Port-au-Prince, so I thought maybe this would be better.”

She opened her eyes slowly. It felt a lot harder than she expected. Her eyes adjusted to the light slowly, and she found a young man standing over her. His skin was in fact tan, though his face was narrower than she’d imagined. He was short and wiry. And his head was shaved.

She squinted at him. “No hair,” she whispered, trying to prop herself up and failing. “Didn’t see that one coming.”

Diego snickered. “I used to have a lot of it, but it kept getting caught in my helmet,” he replied.

“Where…am I?” Annette asked. Even speaking seemed to take serious effort.

He stepped toward her. “You’re in the infirmary aboard the Naavik.”

Her eyes shot open. Forgetting everything, she attempted to sit up. “The crew!” she managed, before flopping back unceremoniously onto her bed.

“Relax, doc,” Diego said, softly. “You’ve been through a lot, and your muscles are still recovering. Your blood is like half xenobots and rad meds at this point. But you’re going to be okay.”

She nodded weakly. “But the crew…”

“They’re fine, too,” he replied. “Another couple of minutes, though, and none of you would be. They found you in a sealed cavern almost fifty meters beneath the surface. Didn’t take long for them to map out the cavern, but digging down to you was tricky. By the time they breached the chamber, you were all out.” He smiled. “Hell of an idea, dosing yourself with radiation like that. Ballsy move, and risky as hell.”

She managed a weak smile. “Well, my job was to figure out what happened to the crew.”

He nodded deeply. “And you found them. All of them. Alive, too.” He gave her a wry grin. “How’s it feel to be a hero, doc?”

Annette shifted slightly, triggering searing pain from half the muscles in her body. “Like shit,” she replied, wincing.

“Oh I’ll bet,” he replied. For a moment he remained silent, as though trying to figure out how to ask the obvious question, or whether he should. “You know,” he began, tenuously, “you never did tell me how you knew where they were, or how you got to them. What happened on that station?”

Annette stared blankly at him. She was still struggling to process everything herself. Her career had given her glimpses into the most bizarre elements of the universe and its workings. But now, she had truly experienced something no other human ever had before. No one else could possibly understand it. She still didn’t fully understand it herself.

“I stopped being afraid,” she replied, offering the best explanation she could.

He laughed. “I’m glad to hear that. You know, you impressed a lot of people with what you did. We could use someone like you. Ever thought about becoming an astronaut?”

She stared at him for a moment. “Are you kidding?” she replied. “As soon as I’m better, I’m getting the hell out of here. This is way too weird for me.”

END