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Scraping steel, sparks flown across the void of smoky unconsciousness.
“Convict, can you hear me?”
“Convict!”
He debates silence, to sit against the wall and seal his lips. Silence, years pushed through in bitter nothingness of sound.
“Yeah, I hear you.” he decides, muttering quietly enough that the captain on the other end of the radio would have to have been paying knife-point attention.
“Good. Because there’s no freedom in this for you if you don’t cooperate. And cooperating means talking to me.” She slices, like ice pouring in through the gaps in the radio’s grate.
Sparks are still implanted on the inside of his eyes, brilliant flakes of death that sealed the weld and his fate all at once. It was the last time the convict felt air move, brushing on his scarred skin as people came and went, checking this, sealing that. The captain was the most prominent, a presence like a ghost behind each one, redoing anything she thought wasn’t effective enough. All the while, between barked orders and breaths, she spoke- No, lectured, him on what this really was. The Iron Lung, she called the barbaric thing, “The machine that will save us all, Convict.” she said. It didn’t look more than a suped-up toaster to him, nothing like the wonders of Eden that had.. Had landed him here, putting his trust and life in the seals of minimum wage engineers and the hunk of metal beneath his feet.
“We are beginning your descent, standby.” The captain crackled through the radio, before lurching motion rang through the sub; one throw against the left wall, one tripping over the chair welded into the ground. It must’ve only fallen a few feet, maybe 20 at most before hitting the crimson sea, but the hatch to see had been closed hours ago, it might’ve been miles and he’d never know the difference. If the COI had fed him anything, it almost certainly would have ended up somewhere that was not inside his body, though even then, it might’ve been nice to have something - even if it’s the same hardtack and water he got any other day. God, he missed home. The little pieces of it, his mother’s arms, the spices that wafted through the vents, the fire. The fire. The dying stars, the rapture that no one could’ve predicted, that they lived through anyway.
“Every single spot there? You see them, right?”
“Fifty feet descended.”
“I see ‘em, yeah, Mama.”
“Seventy-five feet descended.”
“Every single one is like you and me, now. The only lights left are life.”
“One hundred feet descended. Convict, keep an eye out for sparks or flames, okay? The descent is rockier than usual.”
“Why?”
“Why? Are there usually sparks in this kind of thing? It’s an ocean.”
“Because we’re what’s left now, Si-”
“No, there’s not. That’s why I need you to tell me if there are. One hundred and Fifty feet descended.”
“After the stars fade, our light is what has to shine, Love.”
“Wait, you’ve tested this, right?”
“You are the test. Five hundred feet descended.”
“What?” There was no test.
“This is the SM-13’s first dive, but with any luck, we won’t need a second.”
“I come back with something useful, and you won’t send me back down?” That’s all there is to it, really, traverse the blood ocean and come back alive. No big deal, right?
“Hopefully.” She states, “Fifteen hundred feet descended.”
“That’s why we have to keep going, to find those other lights.”
“Three thousand feet descended.”
“Hey, you said don’t go in the red, right?” He questioned, peering at the bar of the depth gauge, nearing the banned amount.
“There has to be others out there, in the night. Don’t give up looking for them, love, ever.”
“Con- The depth gau- broken- hear me- Convict!”
The bar sat deeply in the red zone, nestled at the bottom of the gauge unmoving. For half a moment, a dreadful half moment, the floor beneath him is gone, vanished in an instant that he spends suspended in the gelatinised air.
I want to go home. To see the sunlight, even if the light is artificial, now. Please, let me go home.
There is nothing but the ragged breath hacking from his lungs when he hits the ground, no crackling radio, nothing but the gentle tap of shed tears on the steel floor. There is no one to hold him, wrap him up in safety and gentleness and let him sleep; only the control panel and camera trigger spitting artificial neon into his bloodshot eyes.
“Those lives, my sunlight, they’re just as precious as yours or mine.”
Weight shifts from one foot to the other as the Convict wrenches his body to standing, as unsettled as he is. Ice cold fear is sat in his stomach in replacement of the COI basic rations, and he wonders if the captain eats the same hardtack as him, if there’s any mercy for the ones who obeyed.
“We are nothing if not human, love. Protect that.”
The map. It lies across the controls with the strict instructions to take a photo within 10 degrees of the marked location. No emotion in the ink, only the cold statement of fact and the direction.
He follows.
The arrow swings around in measured circles, unable to leave its confinement. The irony of it all is not lost on him, the gauge, the dials, the convict. None able to do anything but obey just like the captain, welded into metal obedience.
“But do not let them destroy you. We are Eden, our nature was not squashed by the Quiet Rapture, and it will not fall to authority. You are the wind, my son, you are everything beautiful and more.”
We are Eden, we are free. Free to sail through the void of space and find the corners no one dared to sail into, uncover the beauty hidden in the galaxies destined for annihilation, just the same as our own flesh and blood. But even if their destiny lies in destruction, we have found them, their stories are told through our children and our songs, the same as us all, we will live.
Navigation is not difficult for one whose life was exploration, coordinates tick and tick on the panel under his bloodied and burned hands. Hands that should not be so. Hands that grasp the lever to press forward like a mother’s guiding hand, that shake like a child’s.
“If it isn’t the Butcher!”
“Don’t- Don’t call me that.”
“Why, it’s true, ain’t it? The mastermind who’ill slaughter them all? That ain’t you?”
“No, that’s not-”
It is.
As much as he does not want it to be, it is. His hands are the ones that set it into motion, fifteen year-old hands that put the pins in the photographs on the walls, that wrote the plans to overthrow the COI with the last millimetres of his pencil, what to write planted by those with more authority than he. The hands pinned behind his back when they were ready for it, the hands chained to the inside of a spacecraft as Eden burned, his mother’s plea ringing in his mind.
“Keep going, my sunlight. Remember who you are.”
He wasn’t the only one to be arrested for it, that was the worst of it. Constant reminders of the home he’d sacrificed for the possibility of freedom on the other side of a concrete wall, calling and teasing that the butcher had done nothing but slaughter his own people; had watched the last tree burn and wept, with the distant hope that the saline grief would quell the flames.
They’d gone a while ago, one by one, led by their shackles to somewhere he’d never seen, and he’d never seen them again. In a way, that was worse. At least if he could hear them chiding and snipping, they were still alive. The last had gone ten years ago, and he’d had only a year with them in the COI’s jails. He took the blame, as much of it as a child could, and he could only pray the others were let go after a while.
The camera picked up what he was expecting, some indescribable shit that he couldn’t place. For the first while, at least. Motion pushed him forward and back through the crimson void, where life should be cast aside for scarlet nothingness.
“Remember who you are. Remember who you are.”
“What are you doing, Butcher? Feeling sorry for yourself, huh?”
“No, it’s.. It’s just..”
“Come on, Convict. Let’s go.”
He laughs as the button clicks beneath his palm, a flash of white forcing his pupils to dilate. Convict. It’s all they are, all any of them are. Captain. Convict. The difference is between the wind and the steel, he never did see him go, never heard of his fate beyond the closing door and the dimming lights. In a way, he never did leave the stars behind, even if it is only his five year old self that saw them, and all the memory beyond that is through his mother’s eyes. From the glorious galaxies brimming with starlight to the depth of the ocean, flashing camera images the only connection to the world beyond the Iron Lung. If the camera is close enough to a wall, it starts to look like space, like the goosepimpled flesh on his arms beneath the burns, plucked with stars reflected in the freckled skin. But is it not stars that the Convict sees anymore, it is himself, a figure echoed in the image, bones bent at angles not unlike his own.
“Hey, uh, are you there?”
“Convict? I can hear you. Sorry, we lost connection for a minute, you travelled the last eight thousand feet in only a few seconds, but we’ve been able to locate your signal now. What do you need?” The captain explains, exacerbation spilling into her words.
“There’s an.. A person, here? Maybe a skeleton?”
Her gasp is audible through the radio, and a pinprick star of hope blooms within his chest, that if he can catch it on camera again this might be over. That the.. The eleven thousand feet of blood might be escapable for real. But that’s not right, no, she only said three thousand. That drop was eight thousand feet? That’s why the gauge is busted?
“I’m sorry, did you say eight thousand feet?” he asks, fear smothering the starlight hope.
“Yes, your planned dive was to eleven thousand feet, but we were only able to track the first three thousand before you descended more rapidly than we could track. But we’ve been looking for your signal, and here you are. Take another photo of the skeleton, just to confirm.”
“This is what happens to those who disobey, Convict.”
“Yeah.. okay.”
Nothing. Only the wall he’d seen before, and the lurch of the sub as the ground shifts. There is no way to measure how the Iron Lung is flung by the ground of this moon, only that it does, and that the Convict sealed within hits the sides of it with more force than is healthy.
“Convict, did you fall? Is there a breach in the sub, any dents? Any dinks or scratches?”
“The sub? It’s fine! It’s made of whatever-the-fuck. I just got thrown around in it!”
“You can get thrown around all you like, is there a breach in the sub?” The captain puts each word in its own box, every syllable a gut punch of uncaring procedure.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“You’d better be pretty fucking sure, convict. Because if there’s a breach in the sub and we send you down again, you will die. Now, did you get the photo?”
“No! The fuckin’ thing was gone when I tried.”
“Remember who you are.”
The sigh that echoes through the radio is all too similar to his mothers, the one that buffers before the fatalism he wished she didn’t have to say.
“Love, the COI is all we have left.”
“But it doesn’t have to be! We can be more than this, Mama!”
“No, we can’t. We-”
“We’re bringing you back up, Convict. Standby for ascent.” The captain utters, before fading into a crackle of orders as the contact breaks. Leant against the back wall, the small of his back - wrapped in years of scum and fraying cotton - pushes into the button on the panel, illuminating the control box that his gaze had passed over more times than he’d like to admit. Shapes of the ocean floor choose where white light is flung on the walls, and the Convict’s breath hitches as pressure shoots through the Iron Lung; floors shaking with the ascent. Floors shaking like the child’s hands he wields, clutching a paper-wrapped package to his chest that contains the last life of Eden, the last flash of starlight in a world of black holes.
This is not an expedition. It is an execution.
“My son, what happened? What have you done?”
“I didn’t mean to- Mama, I didn’t-”
When they put you in here, they don’t want you to return.
“Hide, Simon, run as far as you can, wait them out.”
“I’m not leaving you! You’re hurt, come on, we can get out together-”
And even if you do, and even if they keep their promises…
“You, stop!”
What freedom waits for you?
“Please, I’ll go with you, she’s hurt, please-”
“Shut the fuck up, convict. You’ve done too much damage already.”
“Keep going, my sunlight. Remember who you are.”
A few dying ships in a sea of dead stars?
“For the destruction of Filament Station, colloquially known as ‘Eden’, as well as the murder of seventeen COI officers, and every colonist not under COI custody, totaling 62 casualties, the council deems you guilty. You will serve indefinite imprisonment.”
If there is still hope, it lies beyond the veil.
“Shit, the Butcher? They kept you alive? I’d have thought they’d put you down the minute they dragged you from Eden!”
“That’s not.. Not my-”
Hope in this void is as illusionary as the starlight.
“Here’s the proposition, Convict. We send you down in a sub to gather intel, you come back? You walk.”
“What, walk free? All I have to do is drive a submarine for a bit?”
“Drive the sub, come back with something useful, and the COI considers your penance served. As much as we shouldn’t, what you did on Filament station was.. Awful.”
“I didn’t.. It wasn’t-”
I will choose to breathe my last here at the bottom of an ocean, unseen, unheard, and uncontrolled.
“The SM-13 wasn’t designed for this depth, but you’re welded inside, and the porthole shield can close, so all things considered it should be safe.”
They will get their execution.
“Keep going, my sunlight. Remember who you are.”
I will get my freedom.
Between the scrawling confessions and the memories swirling in his mind like ink in water, it is only when he’s thrown to the floor that he meets the pendant. A knifepoint thin sliver of metal, and a single seed suspended in the center, the same kind he’d thumbed through as a child, and watched go up in flames.
For a moment, Simon is not the only remaining flash of Eden, the second is a tiny glimpse of the light he once knew; tied around his wrist, he cannot ignore how much it feels like a handcuff.