Chapter 4

ARCHIVED: Providence Intracrew Messaging System Conversation — Capt. Wilhelmina Lucas and Mission Specialist Elijah Lucas, June 30, 2041

Wilhelmina Lucas

Hey, Jar Jar

Elijah Lucas

Thought we were addressing each other professionally on our work comms, Captain!!

Wilhelmina Lucas

You're hilarious

But if you can contain your glee at my hubris for the next 45 seconds, this is important

Elijah Lucas

OK shoot

Wilhelmina Lucas

Alright

so

[... ]

Elijah Lucas

Any time now, Bilbo

Wilhelmina Lucas

Shut up

Whatever okay so you're going to find a jacket with Kris's name on it with your stuff tomorrow

The jacket might feel stiffer and a little heavier than yours, maybe

But it is extremely important that you wear Kris's jacket instead

Elijah Lucas

Um

That's weird. Why

Wilhelmina Lucas

Listen

Please

I literally cannot tell you anything else but I need you to PROMISE me that you will put that jacket on before they activate the engine and you will NOT take it off

Elijah Lucas

Oh

Yeah sure I promise

Is everything OK, Bill?

Wilhelmina Lucas

[... ]

Elijah Lucas

Baby brother classified. Got it

Wilhelmina Lucas

Hey

You know I love you, right

Elijah Lucas

Yeah

Love you too, Captain

***

Cleo was elbow-deep in Billie's source code, so to speak, trying to ignore the woman herself, pacing behind her and gnawing loudly on her glasses (the detail! the realism!) while Kaleisha fiddled with the radio and ignored them, when the elevator dingedand a voice rang out across the flight deck.

"Billie!"

Cleo turned away from the console to see Ros storming out of the elevator, Abe close behind them. They had a blue jacket in their hand, for some reason, and were brandishing it in Billie's shocked face before Cleo could form any thought besides: Ros is angry, and that means there's been a war crime.

"What did you know?" Ros snarled.

"I don't know what you're talking about, Wheeler, I—"

"I'm talking about this." Ros peeled back the lining from the cuff of the sleeve, and Cleo saw something flash matte silver inside. "I can't say for certain, Billie, but this sure looks like Dr. Halvorsen's special radiation-resistant jacket that someone stole and gave to her brother and no one else. Did you know the engine was dangerous in some way? Did you care at allabout the lives of everyone else on your crew?"

Cleo knew that Ros and Billie couldn't hurt each other if they tried, but the ready-to-pounce bent of their bodies had her rushing into the space between them anyway, thinking of her parents, thinking of screaming matches in the kitchen and fragile things thrown as warning shots, thinking of raging galaxies threatening to collide, and she held a hand out in front of each of them, uselessly.

"Fuck you," Billie hissed at Ros over her head, and Cleo flinched at the furious shell that had once again snapped closed around Billie, even after Cleo had just seen something of her soft insides. "Fuck you for even suggesting—"

"Hey," Kaleisha said, taking Ros's wrist and pulling them away. "You don't get to talk to them like that. Do you know what Halvorsen's jacket was doing with Elijah's stuff or not?"

"I don't—" Billie stared at the jacket, her voice almost shaking. "I'm not—fuck."

She hit herself in the forehead with the heel of her hand, and Cleo was reaching out—to do what? Pull Billie's hand away, to shake her by the shoulders? What?!—before she knew what she was doing. "Hey, hey—"

"Whose side are you on, Cleo?" Ros said through gritted teeth. They looked even paler than usual, their freckles standing out starkly in the dusty-gold light of the flight deck.

"Since when are there sides?" Cleo cried. "She's having trouble accessing all her memories right now. They're coming back slowly, though, so just give it a goddamn minute."

Ros crossed their arms. "I'll believe it when I see it."

"Okay, look," Cleo said, hopping back over to the pilot console to scroll through Billie's code. "Captain Lucas's whole life and personality and everything are encoded here. I don't know enough about AI at this level to tell specific memories apart, and maybe I couldn't even if I was an expert, because this is, like, just an ungodly amount of data. And Billie has had to sort through an entire lifetime of memories in just a couple of hours, but she's doing it. It's basically the sexiest programming I've ever seen."

Billie went inexplicably pink in the face. "I, uh—"

"So what have you already remembered?" Kaleisha asked.

"Um." Billie blinked hard. "Kris lied to me—and by extension, the world—about how the dark matter engine works. And about whether it was safe."

Kaleisha, Ros, and Abe all broke out into a clamor of questions.

"Why the ever-loving—"

"Does that mean he knew, like, what was going to—"

"Why would he do that? What was he hiding—"

"I don't know," Billie shouted, hands at her temples. "I'm trying, but I don't—I don't remember."

"Do you think," Abe said slowly, nodding his head like he always did when he was thinking through a problem, "that maybe, if you did find out why Halvorsen lied, it would be a more recent memory? Closer to Launch Day, I mean."

"A newer memory would have had less time to form neural pathways to the rest of the brain," Ros added begrudgingly. They were sweating now, weirdly enough. Clammy-looking. Cleo wondered if they were already motion sick, even though the ship hadn't jumped to near-lightspeed yet. "Which would make it harder for Billie to access right away."

"Right." Billie dragged her hands down her face, her eyes flicking around haphazardly. "A newer memory—"

"You said you'd accessed Halvorsen's classified files after he let his plans to use the engine for energy slip," Cleo said. Billie nodded distantly. "Maybe there was something in his notes. Something you didn't find until just a couple days before the launch."

"Something—"

"Something about the engine? About what it did to those engineers?"

"I—" Billie looked almost close to tears again, her eyes buzzing faster than ever. "I feel close, I feel—"

"Hey," Cleo said quietly. "You can do this, remember?"

Billie's eyes went still, and for a split second Cleo almost thought Billie was looking at her softly, like her frantic mind had stilled just for her. But then Billie gasped, and she clamped her hand over her mouth.

"I knew," she whispered.

Cleo stopped breathing. "What."

"Knew what?" Ros said, voice going hoarse.

"I knew that it was radiation from the engine that made those engineers sick, that Kris—" Billie fisted her hands through her hair, knocking her ponytail off-kilter and leaving loose tufts hanging by her ears. "Oh God, the engine was generating energy somehow, dangerous amounts of it, and I found out, and I didn't know why he was covering it up, but I knew it wasn't going to be good if everything went ahead as planned—"

"So why didn't you tellanybody?" Abe cried.

"There was no time," Billie said. "I only found those last notes a couple days before the launch."

"You were the captain, you couldn't have pulled some strings?" Kaleisha looked shocked more than anything.

"The board wouldn't have listened." Billie's eyes were wet again, bloodshot again. "You can't understand how much pressure we were all under, to get the engine working and the mission underway. Everythingwas riding on it—the fucking future of humanity, yes, but also Erebus's bottom line, and presumably whatever other incredibly lucrative applications of dark energy they were planning with Kris. The board would never have canceled the flight, not for my hunch, not if they put those engineers on leave instead of doing anything about it."

"So you didn't even try?" Cleo said, scaring herself with how small she sounded.

Billie looked at Cleo like something was slipping out of her hands. "Maybe I could have," she said. "I should have. I don't know why I didn't."

They were all quiet for an inhale, for an exhale, trying to grasp the enormity of what had happened as Neptune, just a bluish prick of light, slid out of view.

"Billie—" Cleo said, not sure what would come next. But then Billie's eyes widened, and she never found out.

"Brace yourselves," Billie said.

And then the fabric of space bent around them.

Cleo felt it heavy in her cells, the acceleration to some horrible, impossible speed. She was a car speeding off a cliff, a plane getting swept up in a hurricane.

Motion. Sick. All the way down to her soul, like Billie had said.

Nothing moved around her, but the stars outside the flight deck window started sliding by faster and faster, as everything in front of the ship blurred into hazy white. Cleo stumbled like she'd been punched in the throat. She grabbed at her knees, trying to remember how to think. She was underwater, entire nebulae sparking at her peripheral vision, and she was only mostly sure her guts hadn't been blown out from between her shoulder blades.

"Breathe through it, McQueary," she heard, as if from a universe away. She blinked, trying to get the lightspeed fuzz out from the space between her ears. There was a pair of glasses, she thought, possibly attached to a worried face and a body in a black sweater, crouching in front of her—

"Ros!"

Abe's scream cut bluntly through the fog. Cleo turned away from Billie and managed to focus her eyes, at last, on the cardigan-clad heap on the floor that was supposed to be her friend.

"Med bay. Now." Cleo reached with all her scrambled molecules for the sound of Billie's voice, and she remembered how to move.

***

The thing about dark matter is that nobody knows very much about it. The universe is chock-full of it, we know that. Nothing else could exist without it—it was the framework that the first stars built themselves on, it keeps galaxies spinning long after they should have stopped, and the web that it forms between every object in existence is the closest thing anyone has to empirical evidence that everything is, as the hippies say, connected. The scientific community is also marginally sure that dark matter is made up of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles—or WIMPs, if you want to be cute about it—and that these can pass through matter, maybe spacetime, and possibly even dimensions without doing anything. Except, of course, when they want to, like when they hold galaxies together with their gravity. Or when people force them to, like they did with the dark matter engine.

But that's the most anyone can say with any degree of certainty. Even the Providence scientists—the ones who, if you'll recall, staked 203 lives and the continued survival of human civilization on their applied knowledge of dark matter—couldn't have said for sure how the engine worked. They invented it the way Alexander Fleming invented penicillin, or Ruth Wakefield invented the chocolate chip cookie: accidentally. In retrospect, a lot of those guys were morons. One time, one of the physics team leaders put a sweet potato wrapped in two layers of tin foil in the office microwave. That's the kind of talent they had working on the most ambitious space program in human history.

But that's not the point.

The point is that, instead of ruining everything, the scientists stumbled into a replicable reaction. Dark matter in, face-melting amounts of energy out. They ran all their tests, they peer-reviewed the shit out of it, and the engine worked the same every time. They didn't need to know how it worked, they figured, to trust that it would deliver the crew of the Providence to Proxima Centauri B, make Erebus Industries truckloads of cash, and maybe even save the world. Good enough, they all collectively shrugged, and went back to work.

But the thing about trusting in something you don't fully understand is that you can't. Not when it comes to science, not when it comes to people's lives, and definitely not when it comes to the darker parts of the universe. Halvorsen understood this, for better or for worse. (Those engineers that got put on medical leave understood it too, very much for worse.)

So Halvorsen started running his own after-hours tests, with the board's blessing, to answer all the countless questions he still had. Where was all that energy coming from? Was it scalable for a world desperate for a way to both halt the climate crisis and maintain the relentless pace of capitalism? And what was happening—off the record, of course—when that energy came in contact with a human body?

Halvorsen got some answers. First, he learned that the energy was coming from Somewhere. Second, he found out that this Somewhere was not going to keep giving up its energy indefinitely. And third, if you want to talk about things that science wasn't yet capable of understanding, this place was on a whole new level.

This is one more reason why he had to lie to Lucas. He knew her. He knew that the minor risks (of hurting some people, of dabbling in horrors beyond human comprehension) would overshadow, in her mind, the globally redemptive benefits.

But Lucas, who (for better or worse) knew Halvorsen right back, caught on to him. Halvorsen was too obsessed with his work not to let something slip. He was just single-minded enough to brush aside safety concerns if he thought he was on the verge of a breakthrough. And Lucas, never one to let something like an all-the-way-to-the-top security clearance stop her, knew that he would never stop taking notes, no matter what questionable shit he was getting up to.

So. Let's recap what we know so far. In more or less chronological order, so the whole class can follow along:

In the months leading up to the launch, several engineers get sick. Nobody talks about it. Halvorsen implies to Lucas that there's more to the engine than he's let on.

Lucas spends the month before the launch growing suspicious and uploading her suspicions into a hologram that will be able to figure out what happened if, by some astronomical chance, Lucas wasn't there to do it herself. She hacks into Halvorsen's notes; she discovers the radiation-resistant lining he's sewn into his Providence jacket. And at the last minute, she finds out exactly what Halvorsen knows.

Just before launch, Lucas steals the jacket and gives it to her brother, who doesn't fucking wear it like she told him to.

Launch Day is—well. It's Launch Day. You don't need it spelled out for you again.

Twenty years later, McQueary touches the engine and a wave of energy knocks her and her friends off their feet.

Now, Wheeler is comatose.

Have you figured it out yet? Shout it out when you do.

***

Ros's curly red hair puddled around their head when Abe placed them on the hospital bed. That's what Cleo's lightspeed-addled brain chose to focus on, had to focus on, because the alternative was looking at Ros's slack, washed-out face, and that just wasn't an option.

Hope there's some curl cream on this ship for us both, bud, she thought fuzzily. She let Kaleisha squeeze the blood out of her arm once, twice, before Billie's voice made it to them through the haze.

"Reid," she said, her voice crackling tensely, "I think we need epinephrine. Do you remember where it is, from before?"

"I think so."

"Great. Please get me a dose."

"Is there, uh." Abe swallowed thickly. "Is there anything I can do to help? Scan their vitals, maybe?"

"The bed does it itself." Billie's eyes immediately started flicking through whatever data the bed was feeding to her. "Body temp is 109, pulse is 190, blood pressure is 210 over 160—"

"That doesn't sound right," Abe said, hugging his arms around himself. "They would be dead, right? Or dying? Because that sounds like a massive fever and maybe heart failure?"

"Well, they're not dead."

"Can you check again?"

Billie's right eye twitched. "The numbers are plugged straight into my head, Yang, I don't know what more you want—"

Cleo swayed on her feet as her vision went misty. Her head pounded with every heartbeat, and her nose felt oddly stuffy. Kaleisha's hand on her back as she arrived with the epinephrine was the only thing Cleo could feel with any clarity. Again, she wished that she was unconscious instead of Ros. Ros would probably tell her that this was a normal physical effect of near-lightspeed. Surely they would assure her that she wasn't, like, having a stroke.

Kaleisha pulled Ros's pants down by a few inches and carefully slid the needle of the syringe into their thigh. "God, they are burning up," she said, voice trembling even as her hands stayed steady. "Are the numbers going down, at least?"

"No," Billie said. "They're rising."

"What?"

"You heard me. Maybe I should do an EEG, the bed does that too—"

"Is there a defibrillator?" Abe asked, frantically opening cabinets. "If their heart stops—"

"Yang."

Billie's voice was suddenly quiet, full of alarm and awe. Abe removed his head from the cabinet he'd been rummaging through and froze. Cleo realized she was going to have to look away from the spot on the wall she'd been fixating on and look at Ros.

When she managed it, she thought she was seeing stars again. Except no, everything around Ros was clear. It was just her friend's eyes were open, and glowing gold.

What.

Kaleisha dropped the empty needle, and by the time it landed with a clatter she was already reaching for Ros's face. She winced, though, and froze, like the air around Ros had sizzled at her fingers.

"They're cold," she stammered. "Like, freezing. Billie, what the ever-loving hell is—"

And then Ros sat up, with a rattling gasp. Their blank, golden eyes stared past all of them. Cleo realized that their hands, clenched in the bedsheets, were crusted over with frost.

"Ros—" Abe cried, reaching out to them.

And then Ros screamed, and they were all knocked backward by a burst of icy air.

Cleo scrambled to her feet first. Ros's eyes were blue again, but bloodshot and petrified like a caged animal's, and they were struggling for breath, unable to look away from the icy mist pouring from their hands.

"Ros." Cleo stepped forward, shivering almost as badly as Ros was. If their positions were reversed, Ros would be helping, examining, saying soothing words, something.

"Cleo, no," Ros gasped, every word sounding like it had to be ripped out of them. "Don't—you shouldn't—"

But Cleo didn't listen, because her friend was in pain, and something had to be done. So she reached out, ignoring the halo of biting cold that surrounded Ros's body, and closed her hand around their wrist—

Everything went black. And then blacker than black.

And then Cleo was somewhere else. Somewhere wavering and dark gold and slow, where time felt different, or maybe where time didn't exist at all. A cavernous room she'd never been in, with snow (snow?) drifting languidly past her eyes. And there, standing in front of her in the low light, was Ros.

Except their eyes were gold again. Glowing gold, and angry. And as they raised their hand in the air, bits of ice and snow latched onto their hand, forming an icy projectile that they reared back, and threw—

Cleo gasped and fell backward, right on her ass. The world was right again, fluorescent white instead of honey-thick, but nothing felt okay. Her body ached like it had been ripped apart and put back together proton by proton. She was pretty sure her nose was bleeding, but she didn't have the energy to wipe it away. It was all she could do to heave herself up onto one elbow and swallow the bile threatening to rise up in her throat—

And then Ros was screaming again. And the air was bending again, like rubber, like lightspeed, and the med bay was impossibly, kaleidoscopically folding over on itself in a way that made Cleo's eyes hurt. For a split second, beds and walls and floors were bending up and over Cleo's head; some instinct told her to look toward Kaleisha, who was staring at the phenomenon with a wild, wide-eyed interest. She stepped forward and into the fold—and with a deafening crack like thunder, everything unfolded, and Kaleisha vanished from the side of Ros's bed and reappeared across the room.

"What—"

It was too much. Cleo squeezed her eyes shut. She heard frantic sounds and delayed fear spilling incoherently out of Kaleisha's mouth, heard Abe stumble toward her, heard them both stumble toward Ros. And then she heard something else.

"What happened, McQueary?"

She opened her eyes. Billie was crouching beside her, her breathing heavy and her eyes blown wide.

Cleo blinked. She watched distractedly as Abe helped Ros pull their hands out of the frozen bedsheets. "I saw something."

"Saw what?"

"Um." Cleo shut her eyes again. She was sure she was imagining the sound of electrons humming all around her, minuscule waves of energy coursing through everything. Everything except Billie, who was just empty space and the faintest buzz of photons. "Ros. With the golden eyes. Looking very angry. It was snowing."

Billie's fingers twitched, like she was dying to write it all down, make the connections, solve the equation. "So it wasn't here."

Cleo shook her head and swallowed around her leaden tongue. "I don't think it was now either," she said. She glanced again at Ros and the unformed ice falling from their fingers. She knew in her bones that the skilled, furious Ros she had seen was a vision of—well. "I think it was—"

"The future."

Cleo nodded silently. Billie's green eyes swept over her face, searching.

"There's one piece left," Billie said. "One more memory that will explain this. It's on the tip of my tongue. Help me remember."

Cleo finally sat all the way up. She squared her shoulders so her voice wouldn't come out as shaky as she felt.

"Why did I just see the future?" she asked.

Billie sucked in a shaking breath. Her irises went blurry, then still.

"The dark matter engine," she whispered. "This is what it does to people. Gives them... abilities." Billie fell back on her heels, gripping her hair with a white-knuckled hand like she could get her skull out of her head if she pulled hard enough. "This is what it did to those engineers. Kris knew. And so did I, at the end."

***

Well, they figured it out.

I wish there could have been a better way.

***

ARCHIVED: TheNew York Times, July 9, 2042, "Providence Chief Engineer Presumed Dead in Apparent Suicide"

ST. AUGUSTINE - To most of the world, Dr. Kristoff Halvorsen was the face of the Providence Idisaster. If that blinding flash of light is the first thing anyone remembers from Launch Day, the second is the now-infamous video of Dr. Halvorsen, who had been tasked with the countdown, watching first in shock, then horror, then anguish as it became clear that the entire crew was gone. His lack of composure in those first terrible moments was deeply relatable to viewers around the world; his honesty and stoicism in the following months would prove indispensable to a grieving people.

Halvorsen, 52, was reported missing from his St. Augustine home on July 1, a year to the day after the Providencedisaster. On July 9, following eight days of searching, state and federal officials declared the renowned scientist dead in absentia.

"We have found no evidence whatsoever of foul play," said St. Johns County Chief of Police Wilson Connolly at a press conference Wednesday morning. "All evidence suggests that Dr. Halvorsen took his own life. We found a note suggesting as much in his home, alongside several items of recovered tech from the Providence."

"I cannot begin to speculate what he was trying to do with the tech, no," Connolly continued. "That's way above my pay grade. Our experts have confirmed that it seems to have been modified, but to what end remains unknown."

"Dr. Halvorsen will be remembered for his quiet charisma and endlessly giving disposition as much as for his contributions to the Providencemission and to the fields of mechanical engineering and quantum physics," said Professor Jillian Darbandi, Halvorsen's former colleague at Stanford University. "He wanted nothing more than to make the world—make the whole universe, actually—a better place."