Maria

Maria is now finally able to be bored, and she considers this a true marvel of progress.

After the battle, there is a gap in her memory. She left the sub and—already things begin to get dim—collapsed on the floor? From stress and post-decomposition fatigue alone, this would have been an understandable reaction. But she remembers something else, a kind of coldness and hunger, driving her toward states of low energy, towards repose and sleep.

And then she was found by Miranda, who, in an inscrutable mood, led her to her own quarters and presented her with a hearty bowl of noodles and pork and a large cup of Oolong. Maria had never been in Miranda’s quarters before. It was larger than her own standard dorm-like room, with a shiny and well-defined kitchen as opposed to her little kitchenette, and a stairway leading up to some sort of second floor where Miranda presumably slept. Maria, still not entirely sound of mind but accelerating in that direction with the help of food and drink, became at one point immediately aware of the size of the couch on which she had been plopped—did Miranda need a bigger couch when she, by all appearances, never invited anyone here? The TV at which she placidly gazed was bigger than hers. Did it see any use? Miranda had always smiled indulgently when Maria requested her soap operas. But what did she herself watch, if anything?

And then a new phase in her return to the world had definitely begun, as Miranda sat down on the couch—many torso-widths away from Maria, a level of distance only made possible by such a large couch, Maria had thought with a stifled laugh—and explained to Maria what had happened.

That they had been transported to a new world. That they no longer had any idea what was on the surface. That for all they knew there might be no food in this world. That they could live for another two weeks at most without supplies from the surface.

Maria had no idea what to make of this. She had instinctually rejected the mental clarity imposed upon her by carbs and caffeine, yearned to be back in the breach, in the heat of decomposition, a fractured non-I with a purpose rather than an all-too palpable I localized in a shivering little form here on her superior officer’s couch, in this glitzy, impersonal apartment.

She had collapsed and Miranda had held her, awkwardly but firmly, and muttered reassurances for fifteen minutes or so. Miranda was not very good at this, which was the only reason it was reassuring: it was obviously sincere, and the rough edges of Miranda’s performance, her inability to step into the role of caretaker without glitches, made Maria feel at home again, in a hall of broken mirrors, selves not quite completing themselves.

And then all of a sudden she was back on her feet and it was all business between them and the business was that Maria would have to scout the territory around the Sphere, to see what sort of pneumatic life this new world harbored.

There was none.

When she first turned on the pneumatic scope, she thought it might be broken. There was no burst of light, no clusters of glowing circles. There was nothing. The floor was as bereft of Pneuma Light as it was of Maxwell Light.

She had kept searching, moving in concentric circles around the Sphere of greater and greater radius. There was nothing—no life, not even the little wriggling pneumatodes. Nothing.

After an hour, the shock wore off and she was left with a cocktail of residual feelings which she decided to kill with TV. The sub’s onboard computer could tell her, after all, if any Pneuma Light ever came up on the sensors.

She had chosen to bring along a new series, just brought down for her by James on the same fateful trip that brought Kyle to the Sphere. This show, titled My Heart’s Revolution, had a premise that at least sounded amusing: a female investigative journalist, assigned to report on a growing student radical group whose rhetoric has grown increasingly violent, falls in love with a charismatic central figure in the movement. As it turns out, the show is underwhelming: the leads have little chemistry, the reporter a hackneyed strong-woman-with-vulnerabilities, the student leader an insufferably cocky young man spouting a hodgepodge of generic slogans. Maria groans every time the reporter, supposedly a tough-as-nails veteran of political journalism, is dumbstruck with awe by the scruffy student leader’s latest banal tirade.

But she’s stuck with these assholes for the long haul, and so she does her best to warm up to them, hard as it is. Somewhere in episode 5 she gets hungry, but no one expected the mission to last this long, so she hasn’t brought any food with her. To forestall hunger and retain alertness she pops one of her Go-Pills, which just makes matters re: My Heart’s Revolution worse: she is overly alert, unwilling to think about the reintegration and its consequences, and thus her thoughts are driven towards desperate, elaborate critique of each of the show’s failings, of every deficiency of set design, of every unconvincing emotional gestalt. She spends a few fevered minutes typing up an essay on the sub’s computer, attempting to explain the show’s deficiencies in entertainment value by explicit contrast with Cruel Love By Fate. But without the light and sound of the TV streaming into her senses she feels too acutely her presence in the sub, the smallness of the cockpit, the water all around eager to rush in and crush her.

And so she returns to My Heart’s Revolution, watching idly, detached, bored. Boredom is good. If she can be bored, if her soul can muster that kind of petty, low-key emotion, then maybe things aren’t as permanently screwed-up as they seem.

A tedious scene is playing out in which the two romantic leads eat lunch at a cute, upscale cafe, having met there to avoid scrutiny by rival organizations, who would never expect to see the student leader in such a bourgeois place. The meeting’s officially an interview and its de facto status as a date is the subject matter for a drawn-out series of jokes, not quite developed enough for Maria to feel that her failure to laugh reflects a failure of the show.

There is an awkward pause in the conversation, one of many. But it lasts too long. Padding to reach the designated episode length? No, this is something different. The man and woman sit, uncannily still, in their pastel-colored chairs. It must have been ten seconds by now.

The student leader turns, very slowly and deliberately, toward the camera. There is a sudden quick-zoom onto his face, of the sort that would typically appear in a show like this only for comedic reasons. The student leader’s not unhandsome face fills the frame, his face impassive. Further seconds pass.

He opens his mouth and speaks. “Maria, I’m here.”

It is a voice she has not heard for several years. Her heart pounds. The part of her that views everything since then as unreal awakens and slavers for more.

“I can only speak in this way for now. Don’t trust them. In particular,” Martin says, and pauses, puppeteering the student leader’s face into an expression of greater import and purpose, “don’t trust Miranda.”

Maria stares, transfixed.

“I’m going to go, now. Just keep in mind: we’re all lungfish.”

Maria is barely aware of the camera zooming out, the melodrama resuming as though nothing had happened. She is breaking down in peals of laughter. “We’re all lungfish” had been one of many many shared injokes, part of her and Martin’s dense tapestry of shared humor. Since she hasn’t read the Summer Diary in many months, she’d managed to forget all about that one, and it caught her by surprise.

A feeling is coming back to her that she hasn’t felt in years, a feeling of denseness, of fullness. Her relationship with Martin was a thing filled with shades of meaning and humor twined closely together, into a braid matched by nothing she’s been able to find in the world she stepped into, when she left the summer and found that it had not occurred. It is hard to put into words what you’ve lost when it’s not there, and easy to adapt to its absence—but one reminder and it all comes flooding back. How silly she was, to think that what she had in the Sphere was a thing of density and substance. How thin her relationships here were, in comparison to the solidity of Martin, the barn, the attic, the immediacy and fullness of that world.

We’re all lungfish. It’s all coming back. Why had she told herself not to read the Summer Diary for so many months? Pointless. And here’s Martin’s voice, somehow. The real world has rushed back to meet her. Her laughter has long since faded into tears, but they’re happy tears.

At some point, the barely perceived chatter of My Heart’s Revolution is unceremoniously interrupted by the sub’s automated voice:

Nontrivial Pneuma Light source detected. Would you like to switch the viewscreen to Pneuma Light view?

“Yes,” Maria says. She wonders if the onboard computer is sophisticated enough to register the sniffle in her voice.

My Heart’s Revolution abruptly disappears and in its place is a circle of light surrounded by blackness. Moving the viewscreen back and forth a bit to get the third dimension, Maria gets a clearer sense of what she’s looking at. It’s a sort of glowing chasm, a fissure in the floor of unknown depth shining too bright to make its insides visible, casting light on the flat abyssal plain around it.

“Computer, are there Boltzmen associated with this phenomenon?”

Yes. Amplitude is 1.2 kCept. Storm statistics are Gaussian. Mean Boltzman type is non-human, p < 0.01. Mean Boltzman ethical status on Metric S is Indefinable, Class 1. Boltzmen appear to be stable and not associated with an approaching heteropneum.

Maria radios Miranda.

“Miranda, take a look at this.”

“Well, that’s definitely . . . something,” Miranda says.

“Do you think it’s associated with life? Or could it be some sort of reactor? Man-made or naturally occurring?”

“I don’t know.”

The chasm glows.