Chapter Text
Thirty meters below the surface of the Pacific, the world has no color, only densities of blue.
For Kath, water had never been an alien element. Since the age of 6, when her father first threw her into an Olympic pool in San Diego, swimming and diving had been her native language.
While other children learned to run, Kath learned to measure her lung capacity in heart rhythms. At 22, she was the great promise of the high jump and free diving: an athlete sculpted by discipline, with broad shoulders, an enviable thoracic capacity and a chill mind.
That Tuesday in late autumn, however, there were no medals at stake. It was a routine open water workout to gauge her endurance ahead of the national qualifiers.
The plan was simple: descend to the platform at thirty-five meters, remain stationary for three minutes, and ascend in a controlled manner respecting the decompression stops.
Monitor your times, Kath, her trainer had told her from the boat, adjusting the strap of her fins. We don't want any surprises with the tide.
Kath had only smiled, adjusting her visor. After so many years, the water is predictable, she thought as she slumped backwards off the boat.
The descent was impeccable. The sunlight turned golden, shrinking over her head into a faint glow. The sound of the boat's engine dissolved, replaced by the deep, rhythmic symphony of its regulator.
At 30 meters, the water temperature dropped suddenly.
She stepped onto the platform and marked her time on the wrist stopwatch. Her heart rate dropped to 40 beats per minute.
When she tried to start the ascent, a slight pull on her right ankle stopped her in her tracks. A frayed end of the marking net had become tangled. Kath bent her knee and tried to grab her dive knife fixed to her thigh.
The plastic sheath where the knife was had a hole. As she pulled the handle, the knife slipped from her fingers, turned on itself in the water's density, and sank.
Shit.
She looked at her dive computer. The air reserve in her tank was dangerously low. She tried to untangle the knot blindly, but the rope was tied even tighter. The pressure began to weigh on her lungs. The air in the tank became dense, difficult to suck in.
She inhaled twice, but the tank was empty. Panic set in.
Kath spat out the regulator instinctively. She dug her fingers into the rope, digging her nails against the synthetic fiber. Her lungs were burning, begging for a breath of oxygen until she began to convulse.
She looked up instinctively.
Her mouth opened involuntarily. Salt water invaded her throat. Her eyes widened under the mask. The light began to go out. Her body convulsed one last time, and then gravity claimed her.
The stopwatch on her wrist kept ticking.
400 kilometers above the Earth's atmosphere, in the low orbit of the Moon, silence is an absolute presence.
Lin had never wanted to be on Earth. While her schoolmates in Bangkok dreamed of traditional careers or world travel, Lin spent her nights on the roof of her house, adjusting a telescope her father had bought her.
She graduated with honors in Aerospace Engineering in Tokyo before being recruited by the international lunar exploration program.
At 26, Lin was one of the youngest mission specialists to set foot on the Selene II Lunar Research Module. She was intelligent, reserved, analytical to the point of obsession. For Lin, feelings were unpredictable variables. The equations of orbital physics, on the other hand, never lied.
That same afternoon, while Kath was battling the current in the Pacific, Lin was performing an extravehicular maintenance (EVM) spacewalk outside the lunar orbiting station.
Selene II, this is Lin. I'm positioned on solar panel three. The nitride connectors show slight degradation. I will proceed to replace them, she reported by the intercom.
Copied, Lin answered the voice of mission control from the station, with the characteristic signal delay of half a second. You have a 40-minute window before entering the orbital shadow. Keep your lifeline secured.
Got it.
Floating on the lunar limbo was an experience that defied any human scale. Below it, the Moon's desolate, gray craters stretched out in eternal relief. Beyond, the black abyss of space was covered with motionless stars that did not twinkle. Unlike divers, Lin didn't have the weight of water on her shoulders, but the lightness of emptiness.
She was adjusting the last bolt on the panel when her suit's proximity sensor began to beep sharply and urgently.
Lin, detritus alert! The mission operator's voice lost all its composure. We detected an uncatalogued micro-swarm. Probable remnants of a satellite disintegrated at high speed. Return to the airlock immediately!
Lin didn't waste a second. She spun on her axis, propelling herself through the handrail of the ship's hull.
A particle of just three millimeters, traveling at more than 7 kilometers per second, impacted the structure of the module a few meters from it. The explosion produced no sound in the vacuum, but the shock wave projected shrapnel of metal fragments and rock.
One of the fragments had cleanly cut through the steel cable that kept Lin attached to the craft.
The impact pushed her backwards. The universe spun violently in front of her lens: the Moon, the Earth, the stars, the ship, everything became a disorienting merry-go-round.
I've unhooked! Lifeline severed! Lin shouted, trying to activate the emergency thrusters on her SAFER backpack.
She pressed the control knob. A muffled snap echoed through her earbuds. The impact of the shrapnel had pierced the nitrogen tank of the maneuvering system. A jet of icy gas escaped into space, spinning her body uncontrollably as she moved away from the station.
Lin! Try to hold on to the robotic arm! The voice on the radio began to distort from the distance.
I can't... I'm entering gyroscope... losing c-control...
The space around her became an infinite prison. The Selene II station became a tiny model, then a bright spot, and finally nothing. She drifted in the immensity, alone in the eternal night of the cosmos.
Then, the pressure gauge on her helmet flashed red. A hole in the right shoulder.
The pressurized air in her suit began to hiss, escaping into the absolute emptiness. Within seconds, the pressure inside the suit dropped to critical levels. The lack of atmospheric pressure caused the gases dissolved in her blood to try to expand. Lin felt a brutal pressure in her chest.
She tried to breathe, but there were no oxygen molecules to inhale. Her throat went dry instantly. Her lungs emptied completely.
The space ceased to be a dazzling sight. The stars were erased. An absolute, mental chill began to wash over her from the extremities. Her brain, deprived of oxygen, began to turn off its secondary functions to protect the nucleus.
Lin closed her eyes as she floated adrift.
At 14:22:05 UTC, Kath's heart stopped beating, as did Lin's measurable brain activity, dropping to nearly undetectable levels.
Thousands of miles away, the two girls simultaneously entered what is considered a clinical death.
The human brain requires 20% of the body's oxygen to maintain consciousness, memory, and identity.
Neurological medicine manuals say that after 60 seconds without oxygen, brain cells begin to die en masse. Within 3 to 5 minutes, irreversible brain damage, destruction of the cerebral cortex, and permanent loss of cognitive functions occur. After 10 minutes, brain death is inevitable and definitive.
For exactly 3 minutes and 52.4 seconds, Kath and Lin's minds inhabited the same threshold. Neither of them had a pulse or was breathing. Their consciousness became empty vessels.
In that exact interval, quantum physics and biology did something unusual. In the total lack of conventional electrical activity, a link was created, an invisible bridge.
At 232.5 seconds, the boat's rescue team managed to lift Kath's inert body to the surface. The trainer began CPR desperately, blowing air into her collapsed lungs.
At 232.5 seconds, the automated rescue arm of a support ship reached Lin's drifting suit, sealing the module and pressurizing the emergency chamber just as her heart was giving its last hesitant beat.
Doctors in California called Kath's recovery an "unexplained medical miracle." Neurological tests showed no memory loss, no paralysis, and no cognitive impairment.
Scientists at the space agency in Houston checked Lin's telemetry dozens of times, unable to comprehend how she had survived nearly four minutes of severe anoxia without a single effect in her central nervous system.
Neither of them had aftereffects. Or so the doctors believed.