Just ahead of him, another man seemed to be looking around for it just as intently. Shrugging it off, he walked toward his office. The other guy seemed to also give up and headed toward him at the same time.

As the man neared, Jonathan felt goose pimples forming along his arms. He thought about those people who said everyone has an exact double somewhere in the world – a doppelganger. Jonathan only gave so much credence to that, but the man that approached him more than resembled him. The man looked to be a perfect replica of him. “Hey, what is this, a joke?” he said.

The man spoke at the same time, but Jonathan couldn’t understand what he said.

Jonathan tried wrapping his mind around it. This can’t be! Yet, the man he faced looked just like him, even, he surmised, to the look of bewilderment spreading across the other’s face. Jonathan went to step around, but the other man copied his movements exactly, and the almost collided with him. He felt his anger rise, felt he was being made fun of, but could not see how. This other him tracked each movement like clockwork. He seemed to do it without hesitation or thought. Jonathan couldn’t shake the feeling that this doppelganger didn’t struggle with the same thoughts.

He noticed that even the clothing matched. His twin wore the same style of new chocolate colored Rockports and Geoffrey Beene suit. Everything matched, right down to the patterned, olive and black colored tie. Recalling something, he looked to the shoes and felt disconcerted when the other him mimicked the movement exactly.

That morning, he scuffed the Rockport on his right foot on the cement steps leading to his house after letting his dog out. Not having time to buff it out, he just wiped it with a damp paper towel to remove what he could of the cement dust until later. The scratches, on the other Jonathan’s shoe matched perfectly.

Oh my God! This is not possible.

Looking back up, and again flustered that his actions were copied exactly, he studied the other’s face. As completely identical as they looked, Jonathan sensed a wrongness that he should be able to pick up on. He stared at the rosacea on the other’s nose, knowing it looked just like his, but felt an answer drifting along there, just out of his reach.

“What’s your name,” Jonathan asked.

The other spoke at the same time again, also appearing to ask a question. Again, he did not understand.

Ants crawled along Jonathan’s spine. He wanted to ask where this other him came from, but felt certain that this other would speak in that unintelligible language at exactly the same time. They started and stopped at the same time, but the words didn’t match.

Then Jonathan thought about the odd way the air shimmered. Thinking back, he didn’t recall seeing this other him before stepping through it. He didn’t feel anything, but it did seem weird how it simply went away after passing through it. Did the universe make a mistake? Physicists viewed it as a large equation, solvable with enough variables to plug into the right places. If so, maybe the equation is not without glitches. The question Jonathan pondered, though, was how would the universe resolve the glitch? So, whatever happened, whatever doorway opened, this other Jonathan stepped through at a time both made their way back to the office.

Or did he? He said he saw a shimmering in the air, but what does that mean? Maybe he stepped through into this other Jonathan’s reality. Maybe he was the one who needed to get back. The entire thing gave Jonathan a headache, and he couldn’t shake the thought that this other him struggled with the exact same thoughts. He just wanted to step aside, move on, and allow the universe to resolve itself. He feared, though, that they were stuck inside some kind of loop where he and this other Jonathan would just stand there and mirror each other’s thoughts and movements.

Mirror!

Then it hit him. Jonathan, and the other, each stared harder at the rosacea. He realized that the imperfection, though exactly the same, was opposite his – a perfect mirror image. He looked to the shoes and realized the scuff lay on the opposite foot. He opened the Geoffrey Beene jacket to the writing inside. The other did as well. The words written on the other’s looked just like writing viewed in a reflection. “Hey, I know what’s different now.”

As expected, the other spoke at exactly the same time. It occurred to Jonathan that it sounded similar now to a recording played backward.

They reached out, more perfectly timed than synchronized swimmers, to point out their findings. Jonathan’s right index finger lightly brushed Jonathan’s left. Pain ripped through their bodies as atoms met and annihilated each other. A miniscule singularity formed between them that pulled their bodies together. Both Jonathan’s opened their mouths in a silent scream.

Blinding light and a sudden shockwave from the explosion knocked passerby’s off their feet. A woman who witnessed the event screamed, pointing to the now empty spot.

I read all I could at the beginning, tried to comprehend what was happening, but I only got so far, immersed in all that medical jargon. What I did understand were the bacteria. Cartilage and flesh and bone. They were hungry little buggers. You shake your head, read on, know deep inside that it can never happen to you. That’s the other thing about the media; it puts things right there in front of your face, but keeps them at a distance. For all of the reportage, it’s like watching a movie, always at an acceptable distance, that extra step removed. It could never happen to us. Nothing could ever happen to us. Nothing like that.

That first night, a heavy sticky evening, not a breath of air, I was standing out on the porch watching the bug light, as we used to call it, fanning myself with an old hat, feeling the sweat trickles crawling down between my shoulder blades. A hazy white corona encircled the porch light, small insects and moths darting in and out, fading into darkness and back again. I remember the smell of damp earth and vegetation filling the surrounding atmosphere with extra weight. At one end of the porch sat a pile of stacked chairs, covered with an old blanket. From time to time, we’d pull them out and sit around at the back of the house, sharing drinks or simply reading, but the rest of the time, they were stacked there out of the way of our comings or goings. Our cat had decided that was in ideal spot to curl up and sleep in comfort. Most of the time, he seemed to do little else. As I stood there, I was tempted to go over and disturb his feline reveries. What right did he have to sleep while we stood around and sweltered? Good luck to him that he actually could. I turned away to watch the insect dance for a while, still fanning myself before heading back inside, my hopes for a little relief in the evening air already faded. At least we had a fan in there.

Just as I was about to reach for the back door, a movement in the corner of my eye caught my attention. At first, I thought it was merely Angus, turning and stretching on his accustomed perch, and I was tempted to go over and give him a scratch anyway, but it was something else. Nuzzling up against him, licking at his exposed pale belly fur was Cashew, the neighbour’s cat, a friendly, stocky, black and white, easily recognisable by her burglar-mask facial markings. I crouched down to call her over. She was fond of bumping up against your legs and sliding in an out.

“Hey, Cashew,” I called. “Here puss.”

She halted her ministrations and jumped down from the stack of chairs, quickly padding across to my outstretched hand with a faint miaow. There was something funny about the sound, something different, but I didn’t register it immediately. I was still looking up at Angus when Cashew butted against my leg and miaowed again. At that point, I looked down, preparing to scratch the top of her head.

“Shit,” I said and scuttled backwards. There was something wrong with her face. The burglar mask was still in place, but all around it and below, the fur was gone. No, not only the fur. It was just hollow, missing. Where there should have been white fur, where there should have been flesh and more, there was nothing. Just deep incised hollows, and at the bottom of them, it looked like bone. It was hard to tell in the shadowed light, but it was enough. I shot to my feet, scrabbled with my free hand at the back door behind me and stumbled back into the house. I stood panting there, like that, for a couple of seconds, shaking my head, something cold working inside me. Then, I headed further back into the house to find Anna.

“Christ,” I said to her, standing in the doorway to the lounge. “I don’t know what’s happened to the neighbour’s cat, but it’s dreadful.”

She looked up from her place on the couch, lifting her gaze from the magazine she was reading and gave me a frown. “What do you mean?”

“Cashew. The neighbour’s cat. You know.” I proceeded to describe what I’d just seen.

“Oh God,” she said. “Really?”

“Yeah. It didn’t seem to be bothering it though.”

“I wonder what happened. Maybe it got hit by a car or something.”

“No,” I said. “It didn’t look like that. It was something different. Oh shit, I touched it.” I dropped the hat and quickly strode over to the kitchen sink and started scrubbing my hands. “I touched it,” I said.

“John, you don’t know. It didn’t sound as if it was something like that,” said Anna from the lounge.

“No, I don’t know,” I snapped back, but by then, it was probably too late anyway.

We weren’t aware of the growing tide then.

Angus was the first to get it, our Blue Burmese with his beautiful face, his silky sealskin fur. The first sign was that he started to look patchy around his eyes, like mange, but it was too even for that, too regular. Thin lines of bare skin appeared beneath his eyes and down the sides of his nose. Apart from the missing hair, he seemed completely unaffected. We took him to the vet, who gave as some ointment to apply and told us about this new mutant strain of streptococcus. He’d seen more than a few cases recently and there was very little he could do about it. What was peculiar about it was that it was so targeted, so specific about the regions that it attacked. He told us to expect further degeneration in the affected areas. As he said, there was very little he could do about it until they understood more. Angus grew steadily worse. The skin along the affected areas just seemed to withdraw, the flesh beneath drawing back and collapsing into itself till it revealed bare bone beneath, and then it kept going.

We were worried of course, but he didn’t seem to be experiencing any real discomfort. He was still hungry, affectionate, his usual cat-like self.

“But it’s so ugly,” said Anna.

“I know,” I told her. “There’s nothing I can do about that. He’s still Angus. Perhaps it will grow back.”

The first human cases appeared a couple of days after we had taken Angus to the vet. It wasn’t until it broke the press in full force that the words ‘flesh-eating bacteria’ appeared. Anna and I were already nervous. That first experience with the neighbour’s cat had been enough, but after the press got hold of it, we didn’t know what we were going to do. By then, there was nothing we actually could do. It was far too late. And anyway, perhaps we’d be okay. It’s funny how you always live with that vain hope.

I was the first to exhibit the symptoms. Deep lines appeared below my eyes like grooves in the skin. There was no real discomfort, more a sort of numbness. At first I didn’t believe it. I poked and prodded at my face, but they didn’t go away. I tried smoothing them with my fingers, but that did nothing other than making the numbness around the area more apparent. For a while, I simply ignored the fact that they were there, but I could see them in Anna’s expression when she looked at me. The lines started to grow deeper, and two days later, they appeared on Anna’s face as well. We raced to the emergency room, but the hospitals were already overflowing, the panic was on the streets. Even the medical staff looked at us askance, apparently reluctant to approach too close. Pills and ointments and salves, they provided in abundance, but the truth was that they didn’t really know what to do at all. They didn’t understand it, and that soon became painfully apparent. I shouted at them. I yelled and I ranted. There had to be something they could do. What sort of medical facility was it anyway? Did we live in the Dark Ages?

By the time Anna started exhibiting the full-blown symptoms, we knew, it was firmly on its path. We didn’t bother calling the doctor. We didn’t bother heading back to the hospital. We stayed locked behind our front door, hidden, drawing back from our own images in the hall mirror, from the unfamiliar ruined faces, from the hollows where our noses had gradually dissolved away, from the deep grooves across the tops of our cheeks. I couldn’t look at myself. I couldn’t look at Anna without turning away despite myself. We weren’t sick. We didn’t feel sick, but the thing continued regardless and dragged us down with it. I even considered drastic action for a while, but my mother used to say to me that that was the coward’s way out. Those words had stuck with me for some reason.

One day, it simply stopped. Angus was Angus, and he continued on with his cat life as if nothing had ever happened. Anna and I didn’t believe it, looking, waiting, hoping that there would not be any more, but it had really stopped. The gradual deterioration slowed, then crawled to a halt and went away as if it had never been there, leaving us with nothing but our ruined images and our…shame…yes, that was the best way to describe it. We felt ashamed. We were embarrassed about our own faces. We could not look at ourselves, let alone each other. How could we carry on like that?

Each day, we peered at Angus, hopefully, praying that there’d be some sort of improvement, that he’d regain some of the parts that had simply shrunk away to expose the ugliness, but there was nothing. We saw Cashew a few times too, but it was the same, and she had had it longer.

We had to venture out eventually, from sheer necessity. We had to eat, we had other things to attend to, and we weren’t really sick, were we? We decided on hats and scarves, despite the weather. At least it would do something to conceal a part of our humiliation and if we didn’t look at people directly, if we kept our exposure to the outside world to a minimum…. We simply had to hide what we had become, that was clear. Work, social interaction, other things, we could deal with those in due course, but in the meantime, we had to live. We still had to live. All around us, the plague continued, passing from cat to human to country to country, across oceans and mountains, around the globe, as more and more became afflicted, but to us, that no longer mattered. We were too busy dealing with our own little microcosm to pay any real attention. It was still hard to look at each other, to look at ourselves, but we were learning to cope. Outside, and we had started to think of it as that, the outside, things were more difficult. I know that look. We’ve all done it. You look at something or someone, register, and then your gaze simply slides away pretending that you hadn’t seen. The maimed, the disfigured, the unusual, I’d done it myself. You don’t want to be caught staring, do you? It was strange being on the receiving end instead.

“There might be options, things we could do…” I said to Anna a few days later.

“Like what?” she said. There was still resentment in her voice. I couldn’t work out whether it was directed at me or at the circumstance. We were learning to accept how the disease had left us, but it was not enough.

“I don’t know. Surgery? Prosthetics? I’m sure there’s something they can do.”

“And where are we going to find the money for that?”

“What about masks? We can get those medical masks. You know, like the ones they always seem to wear in Asia. I’m sure they’re easy enough to get.”

Anna narrowed her eyes at me, processing the image, but at least she was considering.

“Maybe,” she said, resignedly and turned away.

My shoulders slumped and I let out an involuntary sigh. I was trying. Why couldn’t she see that?

For a while, we were so bound up in dealing with our affliction that we hadn’t really been paying attention to what was really going on outside in the big bad world. It consumed us, just as the bacteria had consumed our cartilage and flesh. Every time we thought about the future, a cold hollowness grew inside. The road ahead was bleak, but gradually, some sort of acceptance had started to come with it. I don’t know whether it was displacement or simple resignation, but after a few more days locked in our self-imposed social quarantine, we turned back to the television. It was another reminder, but we felt there was nothing more we could see that could make us feel any the worse about our condition. There was the vague hope, perhaps, that we might even see something about some potential cure. It was not to be. The Eater, as they called it now, continued its spread. Some seemed to be immune, but mostly, it was indiscriminate. At least they’d passed beyond the cat culling that had taken place in the early stages.

The funny thing was that I hadn’t been too far off the mark with my suggestions. Things had moved on in other ways whilst we’d been locked away. Masks are all the rage now. Even the newsreaders are wearing them. And the weather girl. It won’t be long before they’re appearing on the sitcoms too. The designer labels have started with their own lines of specialist fashion masks and, of course, they cost and arm and a leg, well beyond our reach. The aesthetic of what is desirable has always been defined by its context. The culture, the social media, the fashions of the age, all of them delineate the boundaries of what is attractive or acceptable. It doesn’t matter if it’s the dimensions of the Rubinesque or the frame of Heroin Chic, the use of labrets in the Amazon and Africa, the stretching of the necks. I understand that better now, or think I do and Anna too. We have discussed it at length. Together though, finally, we have come to a decision. In the end, perhaps, we won’t be too alone. But then again, perhaps it’s just our way of coping.

We built a fire in the back yard last night and burned our masks. We stood there, hand in hand, watching the sparks float up into the night sky, a symbol of our transformation. Tomorrow, we plan to venture in to town, together, our heads held high. We don’t need the masks any more. Nobody really needs them any more. After all, why would we? We’re beautiful.

“Is that thing broken?” she asks.

I shrug, and look inside the food box. All we’ve really got is turkey cold cuts and bread. A half empty jar of pickles.

“Well?” she says.

“It’s all we’ve got,” I say. “Turkey and bread. It’s not broken, we just need to go grocery shopping.”

She grunts, and moves to the food processor to pour our protein shakes into glasses.

“Jennie,” I start.

She looks over at me.

“Why did we buy those robots this morning?”

Dancin’ Doug Robots are what most people would file under the category: Useless Crap. They are about two feet tall, composite plastics, some fiberglass, with metal joints. They have a very primitive form of robotic programming—just enough to respond to a limited number of voice commands. All of these commands are related to forms of dance that Dancin’ Doug has been programmed to know. A Dancin’ Doug Robot is priced to sell at $4,000.

“Because they’re fun, Don,” Jennie replies. As if it’s obvious. Of course we’d buy them.

“Right, but they are sitting, still-packaged, in our spare room while we eat turkey sandwiches for the eighth time this week. We spent $8,000 on toys, instead of buying food. That would’ve bought us three weeks of groceries—the good stuff, too, not the synth kind.”

“I don’t mind the synth stuff,” she says.

“That’s not the point,” I say.

“Then what is the point?”

I shrug. We are late on our rent, we’re not buying groceries. I’m working over-time at the Yin Cheng call center over in Seattle (a 90 minute commute by hover-rail in each direction), trying to use my best stunted Mandarin to explain to angry people in China why: their computer is broken, their car is no longer under warranty, their robot gardener is watching them in their sleep. I hate this job. I also hate my other job, here in Spokane, cleaning out video-phone booths. I am not working 60 hours a week at shitty jobs so we can eat turkey sandwiches and accumulate crap that we don’t even want.

“What’s the point, Don?”

“We don’t even want Dancin’ Doug Robots,” I say. “Or the AbMaster8000s that we bought two days ago, or the self-heating pillows we bought the week before. Do you even remember buying those pillows?”

She shrugs. “I wanted that stuff. It’s epic,” she says.

We’re 30 years old. We’re supposed to be past caring about what the latest epic thing is. Something new is epic every week. Five years ago, sure, okay, I cared a little about what was epic. Ten years ago, absolutely. Everything that was epic: I wanted it. Now, I’m more concerned with groceries, and bills, and over-time, and vacation time, and whether Jennie’s parents are going to ask me how night school is going. I don’t want to tell them that it isn’t going anymore, because they already think I’m a deadbeat.

That’s when I tell her our dreams are getting hacked. “You didn’t really want that stuff,” I say. “Neither of us did. But we always both seem to end up buying the same amount of the same thing.”

“Come on, baby, you saw the stuff about that website on the news vids—there was an independent study,” she says. “It was just some wacky conspiracy theory.”

A few weeks ago, I found this website. It had already been debunked by an independent investigation sponsored by the Federal government. But I read it anyway. It talked about how couples that shared dreams were getting their dreams hacked by spam companies. It talked about how those companies would insert products into dreams, and a sense of over-whelming emotional desire. Those couples would then wake up with an irresistible urge to buy the spam company’s product. My wife and I had been buying outrageous shit for two years, always after we woke up.

“Honey, sweety,” I say. “Look in the food box. Then, go back into the spare room and look—I mean really look—at all the stuff we have. All of it still packaged.”

To my surprise, she does. She looks in the food box, closes it, and walks past me into the living room, presumably on her way to the spare room.

I trail behind her, splitting off and into our bedroom while Jennie looks at all our junk in the spare room. At the head of our bed is the shared-dreaming terminal. A small computer and all sorts of electrodes. I’m used to this old thing, a wedding gift from her parents. We hook in and dream the same dreams together. It’s very intimate. That’s what her parents said when we opened it, and what she said to me later, on our honeymoon, when she was convincing me to try it. I don’t really remember many of my dreams. But I still attach the electrodes before I go to sleep anyway. For Jennie.

I feel Jennie behind me before she puts her arms around my waist, and rests her head on my back. “You’re right,” she says. “It’s a lot of stuff. Maybe we should cut down, save some money for awhile.”

She does this a lot. Tells me I’m right, when really she means I’m wrong.

“So,” I say. “You don’t think our dreams are being hacked?”

She says “no” so quietly that I barely hear her. I ask her if she remembers last night, how we were dreaming about Jamaica, our honeymoon, when suddenly there was Dancin’ Doug on the beach. She shakes her head—I can feel it against my back.

“Well, that’s how it happened.” I’m not sure that’s how it happened. I don’t remember last night’s dream, per se. But that’s probably about how it went down, so it seems like an okay kind of lie.

She pulls away from me instead of responding. When I turn around, she’s gone. I follow her into the kitchen, where she sits, eats her turkey sandwich, drinks her protein shake. I sit across from her at the table.

“$143,000 in two years,” I say. “That’s how much money we’ve spent on stuff that’s currently sitting in our spare room. I did the math, the other day.”

“We’ll cut back,” she says.

“We’re getting programmed in our dreams. We can’t disconnect the shared-dream computer from the internet because it doesn’t function without regular software updates. So we just have to stop shared-dreaming.” I know this will not go over well, but not how bad it will be.

“Can’t you just drop it?”

“We have to pull the plug,” I say.

“You don’t love me, do you?” she says.

So, that’s how bad it will be, I think, searching for words, and finding none.

I say something hollow sounding about how of course I love her, and I get my own turkey sandwich, sit down beside her. She gets up, leaves her sandwich half-eaten, and goes into the spare room. I hear the door close, the lock engage. The turkey tastes stale when I bite into it. I’m not even really hungry. But still, I take another bite, and another.

I used to love her. When we were sitting on the beach in Jamaica, just married, drinking tropical drinks, I loved her more than anything in the world. At night when we’d have sex and then sit in bed and watch Holo-Vids until four a.m., the ocean’s crash faint in the background, the sweet smell of it wafting in through the open porch door, I loved her madly. There was nothing I loved more than the thin curve of her body, her dark brown hair, bordering on black, the tentative way she smiled, like whatever it was that made her happy might suddenly become unreal if she acknowledged it.

I tried to love her for a long time after that, and succeeded for a while. I ignored pretty waitresses, even when she wasn’t around. I tried to fantasize about her when we were apart—when she was visiting her parents, or I was visiting old friends in Vancouver. I did the shared-dreaming thing with her whenever we were both home. I signed up for online classes at night and promised her I’d make something more of myself, move us into a nicer place.

But eventually I realized that what I’d fallen in love with was her physical presence, or maybe to be more accurate, the idea of her. I fell in love with the fantastic beauty of her smile—maybe because it was so cliché to be captivated by a smile, but also so true. I fell in love with her hair, which I really did love to run my hand through. I fell in love with the way she carried herself, something I always called quiet strength. All of this stuff that I fell in love with: cliché. Ultimately, this was the problem. I fell in love with a normal idea of what love should be, not with her. She wasn’t a bad person. In fact she was a good person. She was nice, sometimes funny. But there was a certain something missing, and it took me a long time to realize and accept that. I stopped not flirting with attractive waitresses. I let my eyes linger on pretty girls walking by on the street. I still shared my dreams with Jennie, never told her how I felt. It’d be a lie to say I never contemplated divorce, but it’s the truth that I never really considered actually doing it. I still wanted—still want—to be married to her. I guess that’s a form of love, of devotion. It’s something, anyway.

This is why it all came out like it did when I brought up the shared dreaming.

She’s never locked herself in a room like this before, but somehow I know what will happen if I knock on the door, call her “honey,” ask her to come out and talk to me. She’ll ignore me, or get even more upset. So what I do is I leave a note. It says I love her and I went to lunch and I’ll be back soon. And then I get my sweatshirt and go to my favorite café.

A five minute drive later, and Alice is bringing water to my table, smiling at me, asking me if I’ll have the regular. Honestly, the food at this place is only decent. A hundred bucks for decent food, including tip. It’s pretty reasonable, but not super cheap, or super good. The real reason I come here, I suppose, is for Alice. It’s harmless, really. Harmless flirting—she’s probably just trying to get a good tip. Still, it’s nice. Especially at times like this.

I smile extra wide today, when I say yes, please, the regular, and hand her my menu. Her fingers brush against mine as she takes it—this is new, and it raises my heart rate a little. After she puts my order in, she comes back and sits down across from me. She does this sometimes, when it’s a slow day. Today is a slow day. Usually we just talk about nothing—sports, or weather, or if something funny happens in the government, like a senator gets elbowed playing basketball or something.

Today she just looks at me, smiling.

“What do you think of shared-dreaming?” I ask her.

She shrugs. “I had a boyfriend who wanted to try it. I thought it was weird. I’m used to telling someone about a strange dream that I had, you know? But not talking about a strange dream that we both had. It was too weird.”

“Did you break up with him?”

She nods. “But not because of that. He cheated on me.”

I tell her I’m sorry and she shrugs, says it’s water under the bridge. “Water under the bridge,” she says, smiling, and asks me why I ask.

I tell her it’s nothing, just a little fight with my wife over whether to keep shared dreaming or not. I tell her how I think our dreams are being hacked, and how she won’t believe me.

“I heard about that,” she says. “My brother says you can just reset the connection on your shared dream computer. Takes about five minutes, and the spam company can’t get through. Like changing your password on MyTweetFace or on your email.”

Reset the connection. I nod and thank her for the tip. She smiles and gets up: Back to work. I google “My dreams have been hacked” with my hand computer, and scroll through results. Aside from one or two results from the government study, it seems that everyone on the internet is operating under the assumption that the dream hacking is real, that the government study was either paid off or incompetent. I find a likely looking result and click it. I start reading, when the screen is obstructed by a large picture of Jennie, and a notification that she’s calling me. In this picture she’s smiling that tentative smile, that I don’t see much of these days. I hit the “Ignore” button and go back to reading.

I put the hand-comp down when Alice brings my food, while it finishes loading the latest result. I take my first bites while I read. It seems that Alice’s brother is correct. There’s a fairly complex explanation of how it works, but basically all I have to do is hold a button for five seconds, and wait five minutes for the shared-dream computer to reset itself. And this will solve all of my problems. Our dreams won’t be hacked, I can go back to sharing them with Jennie. Everybody wins.

I eat, and when Alice brings my check our fingers touch again as she takes my credit card. The nerves in that part of my finger seem to retain some kind of sensation for at least fifteen seconds after she has walked away.

When she brings the card back she offers it to me instead of just setting it down on the table, and this time when I grab it out of her hands I run my fingers down the soft protrusion of finger bones on the back of her hand. Looking at her smile, I know I need to sign this receipt and immediately go home to my wife, if I want to go home.

“You know,” she says while I sign, “I get off in an hour.”

Some distant part of me has a semi-conscious reaction to this whole moment when it realizes that this is an important fork in the road that is my life. The thing I say to this woman next will determine which direction I take on that road. I will tell her I’ll wait around, and then go home with her, with Alice, who I often fantasize about while having sex with Jennie, and I’ll cheat on my wife for the first time. Or I’ll tell her something apologetic and make a hasty exit back to Jennie. I seem to be in slow motion while I sign my name, Alice looming in my peripheral vision.

“Well,” I say, “I’m going to go see what Jennie is up to. Have fun with whatever you do when you get off.” I’m careful to give her twice the normal tip.

She’s good about this. I imagine that she very rarely comes on to married men like this. Maybe I’m her first. I don’t know why she picked me. Could be she’s having a shitty day, too, and sensed in me a kindred spirit. It doesn’t matter, because I can’t. And to her credit, she’s good about my answer. She forces a smile and nods, takes the receipt back, and says to have a good day.

When I get back Jennie is sitting at the table, reading a book. She looks up as soon as I close the door behind me. She says she’s sorry she got so mad, knows I was just concerned about money. I smile at her and say it’s okay and walk over and rub her shoulder for a second. Then I go into our bedroom to look at the shared dreaming computer. I turn it over and find the button on the back of the computer, the reset button. It’s very small, blends in with the case. All I have to do is press it for five seconds and all of my problems go away. The DreamCorp slogan is imprinted just beneath the button: “The couple that dreams together, stays together.”

Behind me, I feel Jennie’s presence before she speaks. “What’re you doing?” she asks.

I don’t know why I don’t press the button. But I don’t. I don’t press the button, and then I put the computer back on the ledge behind our bed, how it’s always been since we moved in here. “Nothing,” I say to Jennie. “Just looking at it.”

“I don’t want to give it up because of some crazy conspiracy theory,” she says.

I nod.

“Say something,” she says.

I don’t have anything to say, so I shrug and walk past her, into the spare room. The first thing I do is open up all of our self-heating pillows. I bring them into our bedroom and place them on top of our regular pillows. Jennie just watches me. I don’t know what I’m doing or why, but the next thing I do is open up both of our Dancin’ Doug Robots and my AbMaster 8000. I set up the AbMaster 8000, and start using it—doing these weird sort of supported crunches, the AbMaster 8000 whirring along beside me, vibrating my muscles. After I get the hang of it I look over at the Dancin’ Doug twins and say, “the robot.” Nothing happens, so I say it a little louder. One of the Dancin’ Dougs starts doing the robot, arms gyrating stiltedly, torso twisting occasionally. It plays a poor quality, tinny kind of electronic dance music that doesn’t quite seem to go along with the dance. I say it even louder, until I am shouting, but the other one simply sits there, defective.

Jennie says something to me, but I ignore it, don’t even hear it really, just keep doing crunches until my stomach burns. Then, still doing crunches, I say loudly, “salsa.” The one robot starts doing something that could be vaguely construed as a salsa dance, playing some salsa music. The robot kind of shimmies a little bit, and bumps into the defective one, knocking it over. Once that one’s knocked over, it starts doing the robot. On its side, the dance is even more bizarre, and the robot is really just wriggling, and here I think to myself that this one, the defective one wriggling on the ground, out of tune and one step behind, must be mine. Jennie is saying something else, and maybe starting to cry, and the tinny salsa music is mixing with the sort of electronic robot dance music, and my abs are really burning now. “Electric Shuffle,” I say. “Square dance,” I say. “Tap dance,” I say. Ballet, Moon Shuffle, Mexican Hat Dance (it doesn’t know this one), pole dance (it doesn’t know this one either), Samba, Flamenco.

Just as I am running out of dances, something seems to snap inside of Jennie, and she rushes over to the two Dougs, and starts kicking them. She kicks over the good one first, then stomps on both of them until they are both silent, both still. She looks at me, eyes red and wet, and asks me what the hell is wrong with me. Tells me if I want to say something to her, I should just say it. “If you want to say something, just say it,” she says.

But I don’t want to say anything. I don’t know what I want to do, but I know what I should do. I know what the husband is supposed to do when the wife is crying, and I fall back on this. What I do is get up. My abs are killing me. She lets me walk over to her, and reach for her, and envelope her with my arms, and hold her for a long time. She gradually stops crying, and we eventually leave the spare room, return to the living room. I apologize, she apologizes. We kiss some, and watch Holo-Vids for the rest of the evening. We take a break for dinner, but it’s still turkey sandwiches with pickles. We make a promise to each other to grocery shop together tomorrow, when I get off work. We watch Holo-Vids some more, until we both decide we want to go to bed early.

We have make-up sex, and it’s very good. I don’t fantasize that I’m with Alice, not even once. When it’s done, she looks at me, and her lower lip begins to tremble, and I remember why I loved her, even if I don’t anymore. I don’t say anything about it, but I begin attaching the electrodes from the shared dreaming computer to my head—temples, forehead, back of the neck. She smiles, attaches her own, and kisses me. I turn out the lights and lay there for a while, until her regular breathing subsides to sleep-breathing, deep and slow.

It occurs to me, with how fast she falls asleep and the peaceful look on her face, that for her everything is back to normal. And I detach the electrodes from my head, one at a time. We have shared dreams every night since I visited friends in Vancouver without her four years ago.

It is when I begin removing the electrodes that I think of Alice again, touching her fingers to mine.

When the last one is removed, I close my eyes and prepare for sleep. Perhaps Jennie will wake up before me in the morning, see what I have done, and leave me. Perhaps even now she is aware, dimly, of my withdrawal from her dreams, aware of some absence in her dream world that she hasn’t felt for a long time. With each removed electrode, I feel more disconnected. More like whatever happens tomorrow will not happen to me, but to somebody else. For now I am just tired. I relish the feeling as my body settles back, and each muscle relaxes, and at last I feel some kind of relief from the day. I have not felt this good for a long time, and I give myself to the encroaching darkness of sleep. I give myself to dreams—to my own, for the first time in a long time.

Greg Leunig has a BA from UC Denver, and an MFA from Eastern Washington U., both in creative writing. His poetry has appeared in Strange Horizons, and his fiction is forthcoming at 10Flash and The Colored Lens. He’s lived in every continental U.S. timezone, his principal claim to fame, and really really likes cookies. To learn what kind of toothbrush he uses, follow him (@GregIsDangerous) on Twitter.

“I know, Dad,” Gregory said,”you’ve told me enough times.”

Edgar noticed his son’s gaze never flickered from the menu board above them. “I also remember when you used to give a rat’s ass about the things I said.”
Gregory’s shoulders tightened but he didn’t turn around. Edgar watched the movement under his son’s lightweight jacket. He knew Greg always scrunched up when he was upset and trying to hide it.

“Hey, look, Son!” Edgar shouted. “Your mother wants to take your order. See her behind the glass partition working the computer? Look, she’s waving at us.”

Greg spun around. “What did you say?”

“I said stop acting like an old fart and lighten up. I just want to reminisce a little and all you can do is think, Uh oh—definitely time for the home!” Edgar looked his son in the eyes and spat on the floor.

Greg flinched, opened his mouth, but only sputtered. Both men stared at the glistening glob on the spotless floor. An alarm went off behind the glass partition and a spider-like thing scurried out from a slot under the counter. It squatted down on jointed metal appendages and sucked up the wet spot.

Edgar snorted, “I can remember when they used to have people to clean—hey, I even remember when it was considered disgusting to spit on the floor in public. Why, I even remember when ‘in public’ meant other people around and music playing over the loudspeakers. Even if it was only crap elevator muzak.”

He glanced around the room, saw only two plastic booths occupied by other travelers. “Hell, those alarms didn’t even faze sleeping beauty back there manning these mechanical nightmares.” He pointed to the only employee at the rest stop, the one sleeping behind the food dispensing machines. “I….”

“Dad, please!” Gregory whispered. “Come on, Dad. Please order. After all, this trip was your idea. You wanted to take a drive to the cemetery.”

“Yep, Greg, it’s so good of you to humor the old man like this, kind of eases the guilt before you send me to the home. Hey, I understand, Boy. Peg didn’t grow up around old people. She just doesn’t understand an old geezer around her house. She thinks I’ll be happy stuck in a disguised prison filled with senile fools, drooling mental black holes, and all those nice shiny nurses and cameras to watch over me.”

“Dad!” Greg shouted, finally red in the face. “Please!”

“So, Son, you can do more than just get embarrassed. What are you feeling, shame or anger?”

“Anger, Dad. Anger!” Greg said lowering his voice as the other people in the room turned to stare at them. “I’m sick of you trying to make me feel guilty. Well, I’m not feeling bad! I’m not in the least. You are always putting me down, always comparing me to some absurd standard from your pathetic excuse of a past. Peg isn’t just uncomfortable with you around, she hates you! You are making our lives a terrible strain.”

Edgar laughed. “So Greg, you do have a little spine, don’t you? You actually came out and said ‘hate,’ and in public too! Good thing the Polite Police didn’t hear you, huh. And gee, I’m a ‘terrible strain,’ mighty harsh words, mighty tough talk for now-a-days.”

Greg sighed, his shoulders slumped and he turned back to the menu. He touched the pictures of what he wanted to order, then touched them again for Edgar, who refused to communicate with machines.
“Ah, Greg. I just want you to see that you and the rest of the sheep are condemning yourselves to an existence of empty, polite crap. Everybody’s nice to each other, nobody has to ever get their hands dirty, but nobody’s happy either.”

Edgar watched his son walk away from him with the tray of food following on wheels. He sighed with frustration. The world was never meant to be like this, he thought. Nobody allowed to complain, nobody allowed to get angry, everyone so considerate of everyone at the cost of everything.

When did we stray so far from reality? he wondered. He struggled to let go of the anger he seemed to feel all the time and followed his son to a booth. I think I miss the music the most. All there is today is silence, nothing piping through to upset anyone. I can’t stand the idea of having a speaker embedded in your head or else you gotta live with this infuriating silence…
Greg sat and began to silently eat.

Edger shook his head. He was sorry that Greg thought him a foolish, wasted, old man, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t! He was just tired of living in a society based on lies. “Look son, I’m sorry I’ve embarrassed you. I just miss the old days.”

Greg picked up his sandwich and took another bite. He chewed, swallowed, and said, “I think I understand, Dad. But anger is so counterproductive. We live in the best of all worlds. Just look around. Everything is clean, sanitary, peaceful. There is no need for anger any more.”

He took another bite and added. “I just wish you could learn to enjoy life. The village you are moving to is so perfect. You’re not going into a home like your dad had to. This is just the way it should be, everyone living with their proper group, the elders together in the villages, and the family units together in their complexes. No more of that forced intermingling of cultures, no more ethnic or socioeconomic slurs, no more fighting, no more anger! A good world.”

“You really believe that?” Edgar asked, then started to eat his bland sandwich. He wasn’t even sure what it was. Pseudomeat or processed non-dairy cheese. “I’d like a hamburger, dripping grease and covered with mayo, pickles, and fresh outdoor grown onions.”

Greg shuddered.”Ugh…sounds kind of disgusting. Dead flesh, muscles and fatty tissues ground together, fried in its own carcinogenic excretions, then covered with a vegetable grown in insecticide-polluted soil. Thanks, I’ll stick to today’s food.”

Edgar caught a movement off to the side. He turned his head, but whatever he thought he saw disappeared. “Guess I’m just stuck with my yesterdays, or at least wishing for them,” he said to Greg and began to hum a song from his past.

The movement caught his attention again. This time he didn’t turn his head. Instead he waited and it moved into focus a little, just inside the line of his peripheral vision. It was a waitress, dyed red hair tousled and falling out of a ponytail, short-skirted uniform bouncing over long pantyhose-clad legs. He could have sworn he’d seen her a thousand times in a thousand places when he’d been young.

But her type was gone, just like the restaurants, the hangouts and the life he had known. And yet, she persisted in playing on his vision.
Maybe the boy and that bitch wife are right, maybe I am ready for the old folks home. Edgar chuckled softly. They may have cleaned those old age centers up, taken away the stench of piss and shit, and made the residents look presentable and functional. It was amazing what they could do with implants and chips—but when the mind gives up the fight, the only thing left is a senile old fool, too dumb to know when to die.

He closed his eyes, then opened them. The waitress was gone, but he could sense more than see shadows moving all over the room. He squinted and the shadows deepened into misty people milling around an old-fashioned turnpike rest stop complete with food stands, canopied shops, vending machines, video games, and huge smelly rest rooms. Edgar sighed and closed his eyes again. He ate that way, eyes closed shutting out his silent, sullen son, and a vague world he longed to see again.
Finally he heard, “Ready, Dad?”

He nodded and got up, opening his eyes. The shadows were still there and he swore he could hear noises, people talking, shouting, laughing, sneezing, coughing, and even the crying of a baby.

He rushed to the glass automatic doors that went out into the almost empty parking lot. He was going to leave as quickly as possible. Then he heard her, “Come back now, real soon.”

He jerked to a stop, Greg crashing into him. He turned back and there she was, the waitress, waving good-bye. “Real soon, Honey, we’ll be waiting.”

“Dad, what’s the matter?” Greg asked stepping back from his father. “Dad, are you all right?”

Edgar went out the door, then asked, “See anything interesting in there?”

Greg’s expression turned to concern, “No… Did you? Dad?”

“Of course not, what do you think I am, crazy?” Edgar snapped and walked toward the car.
Greg drove the solar powered car on the almost deserted superhighway. “It’s funny, what with public transportation so good, you’d think they’d close those rest stops and tear up the roads.”

“Some of us still like to drive, and, as for the reststop, well, as clean as they’ve made us humans, they still haven’t figured out how to make us give up food and voiding.” Greg sighed and fell silent.

Edgar looked out the window at the bleak landscape covered with landfills, high-rise cites and cemeteries. He sighed and thought about how the future had become the present, how man didn’t need the land anymore, what with submersible living, and superstructures reaching to heaven like successful towers of Babel. The earth was only good for storing the trash and the dead. Edgar thought about ending up in one of the endless graveyards tended by machines, never visited except by fools like himself. He wondered if Greg would ever visit him after he died. Would Greg visit Peg the way he visited Janet?

He had had hopes for that boy. He remembered how like himself Greg had once been, before Peg, success, and children turned him into a modern day automaton.

“Greg?”

“Yes, Dad?”

“You ever think about your mother?”

Greg turned from the road. “Of course!”

“Ever miss her?”

Greg smiled a little, “Not like you do.”

“Are you going to miss me?”

“Hey Dad, I’m sorry I blew up back there. You’ll only be a few minutes away from us by metrotube.”

“No, son, I mean when I’m really gone. Will you ever come out here to visit?”

“Of course, Dad.” Greg’s cheek twitched and Edgar knew he was lying, just like when he was a kid.

“Perhaps you will,” Edgar said and returned to studying the road.

They stopped at the cemetery for just a few minutes when Greg said he wanted to return to the rented car.

“Wait, Son,” Edgar said reaching into his jacket pocket. “I’ve been saving this for you ever since I found it in a container last year.”
Greg’s eyes lit up. “Why, its my old smartphone!”

He grabbed the small portable unit from his dad’s outstretched hand. He opened a compartment and took out the cordless buds and slipped them in his ears. “Hey do I look as cool as I did when I was eight?”

Edgar nodded, “You sure do, Son. Cool.”

“Too bad batteries are outlawed. I wonder if I can find an energy source to make it work. I had tons of music and movies stored on it.” Greg smiled. “Boy, I sure would like to hear those songs.”

Edgar fished out a holographic photo and handed it over. “You find all sorts of stuff when you clean out a lifetime.”

Greg’s expression softened even more and he got a faraway look in his eyes. “Wow, me and my first car.The old shitmobile.”

Edgar laughed, “Yeah, those manure driven babies weren’t around all that long, thank the Lord. But they were efficient little stinkbombs.”

Greg put the picture in his pocket. “You know Dad, sometimes the past does look good, probably better than it really was. But this world is a good place.”

Edgar nodded and rested against Janet’s gravestone. “That’s because it is your world. My world is in that picture and all around us right now. When you don’t fit in anymore you have to move on.”

Greg looked sad. “I wish you could see that you are wrong. This planet is big enough to be everybody’s world.”

They walked back to the car, neither breaking the silence that had formed. On the drive back, Edgar found himself thinking very little of his late wife and a lot about the reststop.

“I’d like a coffee,” he announced.

Greg sighed. “Dad, we have to get back.”

“Come on, Son. Humor an old man with a weak bladder.”He watched Greg grind his teeth.

They turned off the road and back into the reststop parking lot. Except for two cars which had obviously left, the same few cars were still there. Edgar wondered, if he walked up to them, would they be covered in dust?

They went inside and the shadows were gone. Edgar fought off the feeling of disappointment. What had he expected anyway, a welcome wagon?

Greg walked up to the counter to punch in two coffees. “Want any dessert, Dad?”

Edgar thought for a moment then said, “I’d like an apple pie a la mode.”

He sat at a booth and waited, not sure for what, when he suddenly saw her, plain as day.

“Hiya, Honey,” she said. “Glad you could make it back. So few do any more, but it’s a slow time. In a couple of more decades we’ll be swamped, just you wait and see.”

Edgar sat there mesmerized. As he stared at her he realized he was hearing music, music decades old, from the turn of the century when he was young, it was “Boulevard Of Broken Dreams.” It all started to sink in.

The waitress was standing in front of him, pad and pen in hand. “Well, doll,” she said, “what will it be? Processed pie with sonny-boy over there, or the real thing forever?”

“Am I dead?” Edgar asked.

She laughed. “Hell no, Sweetcheeks.”

“Then, am I dying, is that why I have a choice?”

She shook her head and few strands of her rich, red curls tumbled from the scrunchie.

“Well then, what’s going on?”

She shrugged. “Hey I’m just a waitress, came here about thirty-five years ago and took the job. All I know is, if you can see the past, you can get there.”

“This is the past?”

“Well, it’s a rest stop on the way to the future.”

Edgar looked over at Greg who was still at the counter. He smiled. His dour middle-aged son, who was always in such a rush, could never make up his mind when it came to desserts. He’d be there another ten minutes without Peg nagging him to hurry.

“How do I join you?”

She smiled, a sweet crooked grin. “Just order what your heart desires.”
Edgar thought for a moment then said, “A stop from reality, with a juicy, rare burger smothered in pickles and fresh onions.”

She wrote furiously and asked, “Mayo?”

“Nah,” he said. “Hold the mayo…this time.”

The room suddenly filled with a crowd of people, souls just like himself, who had tired of humanity’s desperate, futile race to assimilate as well as segregate. The music tempo changed. The

Beatles sang “Twist and Shout” as several of the people around him got up and began to dance.

Edgar ignored the dancers and watched Greg turn and look for him. He felt a pang at leaving the only living soul who mattered to him.

The waitress put her arm around him and said in a soft voice, “Don’t you worry. His kind always come back when they’re ready. After all, he’s a chip off the old block.”

Edgar nodded and walked up to his son. “Greg, I know the most you can see is a shadow that you won’t accept as real, but I’ll be here waiting when you finally decide return someday. And, Greg, I’ll make sure the desserts are fresh for you.”

He wiped at his eyes and turned away from his son, who was obviously searching the huge empty room for him.

Then Edgar walked back to his table and ate the first real burger he’d had in forty years.

I can’t forget to reset the watch. I can’t sleep for more than an hour here or there. If I sleep too long, I might not hear the alarm and, resultantly, might forget to take my break, come back and reset the damn thing. Then I’ll be all disoriented and not know how much time has passed and will inevitably have to see Hektor float by the window again. The only thing worse than seeing the dead body of your best friend floating by in space is seeing the dead body of your best friend floating in front of the dead body of your home planet. I think I’m the only person who’s ever been able to say that. I’m not proud of that fact, and I don’t want to be able to say it again.
I’m absolutely sure about that, too. There is nothing worse.

#

I wake to Hektor shaking me and I’m covered in sweat. My chest feels like there’s a twenty pound weight on it and I think, It’s happened, the airlock’s opened, atmosphere’s running out, this is it.

Hektor pinches me below my jawline and it hurts like hell. I struggle, pulling my hand out of my sleeping bag then putting my palm to my neck, where his nails left a small welt. I glare at him.

“What’d you do that for?” I ask.

“You were screaming,” he says.

I sober up a little and look around my cubicle. There are the blinking green lights and the netted straps that hold everything in place, so nothing floats around and bumps into equipment that doesn’t need to be bumped into.

Hektor is rubbing his face. He doesn’t look so good. What used to be bags under his eyes have turned to luggage, and his cheeks are starting to show the imprints of his gumline. I remember very distinctly what he used to look like, it wasn’t that long ago that the change took place. Back home, Hektor and I trained together for months before taking off. We were friends before the mission, but that time brought us even closer. And it showed, on his face, the face of his wife when she cooked for us. I was like family to them, which was fun and new, considering I have no family of my own. Hektor looks lost now, though. His hands have a perpetual tremble, and I want to grab them and hold them so they’ll stop.

I look ahead of me, into the mirror across from my sleeping bag. I don’t look so hot myself. We’ve had to ration the food. Hektor suggested it. Personally, I don’t see the point. We’re just prolonging the inevitable. I didn’t say this to Hektor, though. Partly because he already knows, partly because words have a way of sticking around up here, as if the pressurized atmosphere of The Box traps everything within, leaving it all to float around with us in zero-gravity, crashing into our minds and driving us even further towards insanity. And besides, who the hell wants to hear something like that?

#

I had my earphones in when the beeping started, so I don’t know how long Hektor knew about everything before I did. I just know that everything kind of erupted while I was on my break. Breaks aren’t very long up here. There’s always one of two work components to focus on in the ISS, one being the research (which consists mostly of waiting for lab results) and the other being bureaucratic bullshit (which seems to be in endless supply). So, I was a little pissed off when Hektor took my concentration away from the game of Spades I was playing on my laptop, Nirvana’s “Aneurysm” blasting in my ears, trying very hard to drown out the constant hums and clicks and whams of the various machinery keeping the space station running. I had just put in a ten- hour shift gathering the final statistical evidence for the fourth leg of my DECLIC-HTI experiment, a study of water near its critical point (when it transitions from liquid to vapor). This is extremely interesting to study up here where there is no gravity and no atmosphere outside of this artificial one.

If Hektor had come to me with something pertaining to my studies, I would have been pleased, grateful even. But I’d finished up the report before I came over to my cubicle, so I knew it had nothing to do with that. I valued my free time greatly, as did most other astronauts during their six month stint in the ISS. It’s a known thing—an unwritten code between us all—that when a cadet is off-duty, save for only the most critical emergencies, they should be left the fuck alone.

So, when Hektor tapped me on the shoulder, I gave him one of the most aggressive looks I could conjure. I mean, I was knee deep in a dime bid that was going very successfully. I pulled both Jokers from the deck on the deal, plus both high ranking deuce’s and the Ace of Spades. That’s five guaranteed books, not to mention the aces I had from the other suits. And from what my A.I. partner was bidding, I could tell they were holding too. I had this round in the bag, and with Kurt Cobain screaming in my ear about the cruelty of life, women, and heroin, So, with a win in my near future and good music blasting in my ears, I felt balanced enough to actually be relaxed up here for once. You see, The Box (that’s what I took to calling the ISS when I got up here) had an effect on me almost immediately when I got in it.

The moment that air lock snapped shut and the pressure hit me, my perspective shifted. At first, it wasn’t a very good shift. I mean, I training at NASA headquarters, fine. Five years to be exact, no problem. Five years to prepare for six months, sounds like overkill doesn’t it? No. No amount of training could prepare anybody for being up here. Nothing could prepare me for being resigned to what basically amounts to an air bubble sitting in the middle of a vacuum, for the ever-present threat of that air bubble bursting and releasing me to the vast emptiness of a space that nobody understands. Sure, we hypothesize. We study. We gather samples. But nobody really knows what’s out there, the details within the void. It’s a shit deal, and I spent my entire life aspiring towards it.

Up here, you rely solely on all this machinery to keep you alive, nothing but two feet of arm space no matter where you go. Without my free time, my laptop and my music, I don’t think I could do it. These things clear my mind, keep things in perspective, remind me why I pushed to get this far in the first place. Remind me of where I came from.
Earth.

So, I turned on Hektor when he bothered me, opened my mouth to scream at him and make it a point that this was not acceptable. Not really even recognizing or caring that it was Hektor. Then I saw his face and all that anger drained away. Hektor’s a stocky guy, about six feet tall, pure Russian heritage. American-born but he’s got the look, which basically meant he looked like a jock but wasn’t. Not in a stereotypical way, at least. Hektor was one of those guys who played football in college and got straight A’s and actually earned them. Did his Marine training in California at Camp Pendleton, then hit UCLA, where he got his Bachelor’s in Aeronautical engineering while breaking his own school rushing record three years in a row. Took a break to go to Iraq and kill a few hundred people then came back and got his Master’s. Hektor wasn’t the type of guy to scare easily. I swear, on our way up here, we were sitting on two SRB’s with upwards of Mach 23 capability, 37 million horsepower, which was essentially equivalent to having twenty nukes strapped to our backs. And Hektor laughed. The whole way up, he cackled and wailed like a fraternity guy at a keg party. A real hardcore thrill artist.

So when I saw the look of terror on his face, I couldn’t help feeling instant terror, myself. Hektor and I were up there by ourselves, a ship having carried off two of our teammates a few days earlier. We weren’t scheduled to be replaced for another two days, a ship with three astronauts shooting off from Kennedy at 0800 EST Friday morning. I thought the lack of bodies up here would have been a welcome respite, more space to move around. Judging by Hektor’s face though, this wasn’t the case.

“What is it?” I asked, removing my headphones and hearing the beeping for the first time. Two faint tones, close together, barely audible over the cacophony of machinery.

“You might want to see this,” Hektor said.

I opened my mouth to respond but Hektor had already floated a 180 and made his way back to the control panel. So, I unstrapped myself from the wall, secured my laptop and iPod in storage and followed him.

When I got in, the first thing I noticed were the blips on the radar screen, the source of the faint beeping. The screen showed a map of Earth overlaid with a red-light detection system that scanned the planetary surface for irregularities in anything from heat signature to abnormal cloud structures. Hektor came to a stop in front of the screen and I stared at it. There were a couple dozen little points of blinking light, four floating above the United States. I got a little closer and saw the exact positions of the U.S. blips: L.A., New York, D.C., Chicago. The rest were scattered across various areas on the planet, Japan, England, Russia, Korea.

“What’s the readout?” I asked.

“There is none,” Hektor said.

I glanced at him.

“There has to be a readout,” I said.

“There isn’t.”

“Ok,” I said, nodding, though I didn’t know why. “Ok. Get Control on the li-”

“There’s more,” he said. The way he said it gave my stomach a jerk, like a lump of ice had just been dropped in my small intestine.

“What?” I asked.

Instead of answering, he floated past me towards the window at the other end of the control panel which looked out onto the planet we called home. We were positioned right over the Americas, the U.S. blazing up at us. Blazing. Literally. As in on fire. Staring through the small porthole window, I watched what looked to be a cloud of flames spreading slowly across the eastern and western coasts. Everything on both sides, New York, the Carolinas, California, Utah, all gone. Florida and Kennedy Space Center engulfed. In the center of the country, a blooming cloud spread across the state of Illinois, down towards Texas, more specifically the city of Houston, Johnson Space Center. Control.

I turned to Hektor, and I guess my face mirrored his, because all he did was look back at me and nod.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

#

There’s no atmosphere out here, therefore no wind. No conditions to change velocity or fluctuate body mass depending on its proximity to gravitational fields. That’s why Hektor’s peek-a-boos into the control panel are so regular, every four hours, give or take a few seconds. That’s why I can set my watch for every three hours and fifty-five minutes and get away from the window in time to avoid his eyes. His eyes are the reason I have to leave every time. He died with them open, and the first time I saw him cross the plain of the control panel window, it seemed he was accusing me. As if this was all my fault.

Part of me wants to cut the rope that keeps Hektor tethered to the station, so I don’t have to follow this routine anymore. I see the rope now. It’s a constant presence in front of the window. I can hear it rubbing against the outside of the ISS, making this long scree-ing sound, like nails on a chalkboard. I’ve gotten used to it now, but at first it was unnerving.

I want to cut the rope and push Hektor towards the sun. Make him the first human to be cremated in such a manner. I want to do it out of spite, because I know that’s not what he wanted. It was pretty clear to me what Hektor wanted, even before he did what he did. He wanted to go back home. He wanted his body laid to rest there, in the ashes of our planet. He did not want his body floating aimlessly through space. He wouldn’t have tied himself to the ship if that were the case, he would have just jumped. He wanted me to figure out a way to get his body back down there. I haven’t. I don’t want to. I want to take that away from him; like I said, out of spite. But if he stays attached to the space station, eventually he and it and I will stop orbiting and get sucked into Earth’s gravitational field anyways. Then Hektor will get his wish.

I don’t want him to, but I can’t get rid of him. I need the routine.

Three hours and fifty five minutes. Ten minute break. Reset.

I don’t have the energy to cut him loose anyways. It isn’t just a weariness thing either, though I am extremely tired. Weary from staring at what used to be Earth, the gray clouds covering the barren land, glimpses of burning red storms every few hours. It’s also an actual lack of energy. Resources are running low. I think Hektor knew that. I think it’s part of the reason why he did what he did. For himself and for me. Release himself, give me more time to figure out what I want to do. Both honorable and cowardly if you ask me. And for that, I have spite. But not enough. Not enough.

#

I can’t find Hektor, which adds to the stifling feeling of this place. There’s not much to the space station. It’s just a big network of tunnels basically, with us free-floating through them. Nowhere to hide, really. So, Hektor has to be around somewhere. I turn a corner and there he is, staring at the boarding/disembarking airlock chamber. He’s floating there with his legs crossed and his hands lying flat in his lap, looking like a Zen master or something. I want to approach him but I’m afraid to suddenly. So I just say his name. He looks back and his face is more haggard than ever.

“There’s nothing down there anymore, is there?” he asks.

I try to pretend I don’t know what he’s talking about, but I can’t. His eyes are haunted, tearless. He looks worse than sad. He looks like a man that used to be sad, but now he’s just given up.

“We don’t know what happened,” I offer. “There could be…something could be in the works.”

He nods and turns back to the airlock, resuming his Zen pose. I stare at him and rack my brain for something else to say.

“Right,” he says, the word hanging in the air, oppressive. “We don’t know.”

#

I sat in my cubicle with my earphones on, trying to drown out a lot more than just the machinery now. I couldn’t listen to Hektor anymore. He was like a wild animal in the control room, raging, gnashing at the microphone as if it were a taunting hand poking through his cage. He wouldn’t put it down. I’d stopped trying to take it from him. His voice mimicked the machineries grinding monotony, every thirty seconds bursting out in a spat of frenzy:

“Control?” A deep breath and then, “Control, are you there?”

Almost twenty four hours since the first beeps had pierced the artificial air—since the first blips sprang up on the radar screen and exploded across the map like measles—and Hektor hadn’t slowed. He hadn’t even slept, as far as I knew. I knew I hadn’t. I didn’t know if I ever would again. I didn’t know much of anything actually, which was the worst part of it all.

Hektor popped his head around the corner, holding himself steady against the wall. He’d pushed himself out of the control panel too quickly and almost floated right into a wall. His eyes were wide, his mouth set in a strained expression, something between a smile and a grimace, his teeth glistening. It was painful to see his face like that, and I averted my eyes as I removed my headphones.

“I think I got Control,” he said, breathing hard.

My heart broke into a race and I unstrapped myself, pushing towards the control panel. Hektor pressed a few buttons and spoke into the microphone.

“Control?” he said. “Control, you still there?”

A burst of static came through the speakers and I leaned in closer, straining my ears. Faintly, in between waves of hissing, there was a voice. I put my ear right up to the speaker and listened with intense concentration to the message that came through, words cut off as bursts of static chopped them up.

“Things a—…political tur—…cadets somebo—…abort mission fo—…”

Hektor and I glanced at each other and Hektor quickly grabbed the mic.

“Control, I’m not getting you clearly,” he yelled. “Abort what?”

There was nothing for a minute and the tension in the control panel was thick, stifling. Then there was another burst of static, followed by one word that made me wish Hektor hadn’t tried to contact Control in the first place.

“…Help.”

Then the line broke, and there was no more.

#

I wake up to the alarm on my watch beeping. I turn it off and my heart jumps into my throat. I look up slowly and Hektor is staring at me, his eyes ice blue, his mouth gaping. His hand is frozen in a claw, as if he scratched his way out of this life. The metal rope is tied around his waist, triple-knotted next to his left hip. I haven’t seen him in two days. I wish I hadn’t fallen asleep.

I look away and close my eyes at the same time, and realize I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t. I turn and float back into the corridor, head to my cubicle, and look at my stuff. My laptop, my iPod, my headphones. A second of contemplation and I make a decision. I grab my iPod, leave my computer behind, and make my way past the control panel. I can’t help it; I glance in and see Hektor as he’s moving out of sight. His eyes are the last thing I see before I float past the opening and head towards the airlock.

#

I’m sitting in the control panel when the alarm goes off, louder than the tiny blip of the radar screen. This one wails through The Box, jolting me from my reverie. I would jump if I could, but as it is I just float painfully into the machinery behind me as I turn to look at the control board. The “breach” sensor is blinking and the speaker above my head is screaming, shoving a needle of pain deep into my forehead. I turn to the computer screen, enter the alarm code, and push “DISENGAGE”. The sound cuts off, but the sensor is still blinking. I pull up a map of the ISS on the computer screen and it tells me that the airlock disengage controls have been activated. My blood thickens, my skin prickling and I shiver, grabbing the sides of the opening into the hallway next to me and shoving myself towards the opposite side of the station.

I turn the corner and the shield door is down, already locked tightly into place. There’s a small window near the top and I peer in at Hektor, without a suit on, holding a length of metal wire in his hand. He’s tying one end of it to a metal bar next to the airlock control panel. I bang on the door and Hektor looks up tiredly.

“Hektor!,” I yell, then chuckle, make sure he can see me smiling. “Buddy, what are you doing?”

He keeps staring at me, silent, eyes droopy. My chuckle turns to a full-blown laugh, a cackle actually, and I try unsuccessfully to remove the insane tinge to it.

“Come on, man,” I say. “This isn’t funny. Not even a little funny, man.”

Instead of answering, he returns to securing the wire around the metal bar. I bang on the door some more, look around for a way to open it. The only way, though, is to head back to the control panel and do a manual override of the security system. But I don’t want to leave Hektor alone over here. And, I think with dismay, if he opens the airlock before I get to the control panel and then I open the shield door, the entire space station will be depressurized in under 15 seconds. I’d be dead in a minute, if I was lucky. So I float there and watch helplessly as Hektor finishes securing the wire then turns a little to look at me through the window.

“Hektor,” I say, and at this point I sound more like I’m sputtering than laughing.. My vision gets blurry, then damn near incoherent and I swipe at my eyes. “Come on buddy. You don’t have to do this.”

“Do me a favor,” he mouths at me, and I reach over and flick on the radio transmitter, his voice filling the speakers of the space station. It’s so faint beneath the whirring and clacking of machinery that I have to move closer to the speaker above my head, near the shield door where I can still see his face. When I do, I hear Hektor perfectly, watching his mouth form the words half a second before they reach my ears. “Make sure I make it back,” he says, then pauses and adds “Good luck, friend.”

I push back a little, my eyes wide as Hektor turns away and ties the rope around his waist, a triple knot. I slam my hands on the glass, scream, yell, curse. I grab at the door handles and jerk my body around, breaking into a light sweat with the strain of trying to pry the thing open. Hektor keeps his back turned to me, and I watch fearfully as he turns and presses a few buttons on the airlock controls. Then I turn away, grabbing the walls and rushing towards the control panel again, determined to override the shield door before Hektor opens the airlock. He won’t open it if I get the shield door open. He wouldn’t kill us both.

I reach the control panel and the computer screen. The map of the ISS has a bright red blinking spot where the airlock is and I stare at it until I hear the first scree against the outside of the station. When I look over, Hektor’s floating there, hands already frozen in the clawing grip, mouth already gaping. Eyes already an accusing, icy blue.

#

We floated in the control panel waiting for Control to contact us again. But we’d both stopped pressing the buttons, and Hektor had long ago lost his voice from screaming into the microphone. Now we just floated there watching the planet consume itself. Glimpses of the ocean were still visible occasionally. They were no longer blue, though, but a muddy gray. Hektor was closer to the window than I was and I heard him sniffle every few seconds. It unnerved me to hear that sniffle, mostly because I hadn’t shed a tear myself. Not for the planet I’d lost or the few people I’d known. The childhood friends, my estranged parents, my ex-girlfriends, my future girlfriends I’d never meet. They were all in my head but my face was like stone, emotionless and cold. I wanted to give Hektor something but I had nothing. I knew the faces he saw in his head were much closer than mine, his wife, his daughter, his dad with the bad hip and obsessive love of golf. So I just floated there and watched him watch what remained of earth.

#

I don one of the EMU space suits that are next to the shield door, glancing through the window at the open airlock, the taut wire tied to the metal bar, the other end tied to Hektor’s waist. I put my iPod earphones in, turn on a random playlist and shove the contraption in the suit with me. U2’s “One” blasts into my ears as I grab the oxygen tank next to the suits and put the mask over my face and turn the valve, feeling the coolness of pure oxygen pouring into my lungs, flushing the nitrogen from my blood so I can put on the rest of the suit and not get the bends. It’s kind of like scuba diving in that way; the atmosphere in the space station (a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen) versus the pure oxygen environment of an EMU are too different to just jump from one to the other. My chest rises and falls until my head is light and I feel a bit giddy, then I hold a deep breath, take off the oxygen mask and throw on the EMU helmet, locking it in place. The controls for the EMU are in the arm of the suit and I press the bright red button near my wrist and there’s another cool burst against my cheeks, my ears popping as the suit pressurizes and the iPod switches tracks to Radiohead’s “Creep”. I turn around and shove myself and the bulky outfit down the hall to the control panel.

Grabbing hold of the handle above the panel to secure myself, I bring up the atmosphere controls, override the safety protocols and backup security and shut off the ventilation and recycling systems. Then I pull up the airlock chamber controls and type in the disengage code and the alarm goes off above my head. I flinch when it starts wailing but keep pressing buttons anyway. I, grab onto a handle and hold myself steady as a loud whoosh blasts its way into the control panel and the shield door creaks open, exposing the open airlock and releasing the station’s artificial atmosphere into space. There’s a long minute when I think I won’t be able to hold onto the handle for long, when it feels as if my helmet is going to fly off and take my head with it, when it feels like the disorientation of rapid depressurization is going to make me let go of the handrail and shoot into space. Then, in an instant, everything settles, and my iPod switches tracks again. Alice in Chains “Man in the Box.” Fitting. I let go of the handle and make my way towards the airlock.

In the chamber, I fumble with the wire that keeps Hektor tethered to the space station, finally get it untied, brace myself against a wall and pull Hektor in, foot by foot, grabbing the wire with each hand and grunting as I bring him closer to me. I avoid looking at his face when he appears and, as he gets within grabbing distance, I hold him around his waist and move carefully towards the airlock opening, peeking out into the deep beyond. The darkness behind me is complete, in front of me the burning earth too bright to look at directly. The airlock is facing the planet, which makes it a lot easier.

I spread my feet apart and shove them into the little cubby holes on either side of the airlock doorway. Turning Hektor so his face is towards earth, I let out a wail of exertion and despair, using every last ounce of strength I can muster to push Hektor towards our home planet as my iPod switches tracks one final time, Oasis’ “Wonderwall.” My feet slip as he floats away, the image of his lifeless body and carcass of the Earth behind him filling my vision as I relax my body. The space station is visible in my peripheral, and I glance at it, lights blinking, floating there and waiting to fall back to earth. I move in the opposite direction, though, away from earth, towards the unknown, keeping an eye on Hektor as he gets smaller and smaller then bursts into a small bit of flame, becoming once again a part of the place we both called home.