Maria

26:00

No purpose, no point, nothing. The TV’s on. Here we are.

Maria’s in a funk of sorts. There’s nothing for her to do now. The TV’s on, and on it goes, but it doesn’t hold the same magic it used to. Part of this is doubtlessly because all she has to watch is a giant backlog of My Heart’s Revolution, which she’d ordered on a whim in what turned out to be the last TV order she’d ever make. But there’s also the feeling that, now that watching TV is no longer a counterbalance to combat—to her oh-so-important and frightening and stressful job—it has become a grotesque thing.

Maria has become a slacker, a couch potato, and a part of her wonders whether this is her natural state, something forestalled only temporarily by the call of EPRN. If the Sphere had never come into her life, would she be off on some couch somewhere on the surface—the other surface—whiling away her time with this trivia? She is having trouble, as it were, integrating herself. Without the heteropneums, is there a Maria worth being? What conversation would she have to offer people, if not for the tendency, which she’s grown entirely used to by now, for everyone to treat her as an elevated being?

In the Sphere she is, thanks to the peculiarities of the new mode of warfare, seen as a kind of crystallization of the military hero, an army unto herself. To speak to her is to speak not to a soldier but to the soldier, as though she offered her acquaintances the chance to step into a propaganda poster and converse with that brave soul it depicts, a stand-in for the bravery of a multitude. And what does that brave young woman on the poster, with her determined gaze and her hair filtering the dewy golden light of a symbolic dawn, have to say now? “This TV show continues to be disappointing.” The propagandist didn’t set brush to canvas for that.

She has considered, for the first time, inviting a friend to watch with her. Janelle would be a good bet. Perhaps even Miranda could find a spare moment. But for now shame and inertia preclude this course of action, and she has a hard time imagining why that might change.

And of course then there is Martin. Martin, who spoke to her through the viewscreen. She has watched more episodes of My Heart’s Revolution than she would feel comfortable admitting, but he’s never turned up again. On some level she is strangely grateful. Her stasis is not pleasant, but she is not sure if the re-introduction of Martin to the emotional brew would be an improvement. Her memories of the summer seem more distant now than ever, and Martin seems less and less the joyous, carefree presence of her memories and more and more a kind of occult, imperial presence, appearing unexpectedly by god knows what power, bringing cryptic instructions. More a force than a person, a thing like the Sphere or the blank white space glimpsed in multiple when facing a heteropneum at the height of its powers. An integral part of all of this, not an escape hatch.

30:00

Timekeeping on the Sphere is, for the most part, a straightforward matter. The clock starts at Floordawn, which is 6 AM by definition. Then it rolls forward, in the military manner, indicating lunchtime at 12:00, dinner at 18:00. The variability of floorday lengths means that sometimes the lights dim as early as 17:00 and sometimes as late as 26:00. When plans are made during Floornight, one must always consult with the computer to make sure one isn’t surprised when the lights come on and the clocks all flip to 6:00 again.

It is now 30:00, and the lights are still on. A less funked Maria might find this a cause of concern; as it is, the only feeling she can muster about day-like lighting in her quarters is that it seems apt for the lukewarm drama of My Heart’s Revolution. She’s been up for 24 hours now, but she doesn’t feel tired. Whatever the technologies in her bed do to her, they work like a charm: if the computer wants a long day out of her, it’ll get one.

The plot of My Heart’s Revolution has grown new tendrils. It’s almost, Maria grudgingly admits, starting to get interesting, though it’s the empty-calories kind of interest conjured by the kind of screenwriters who lean heavily on the perennial appeal of mystery and convolution. The student leader is, it turns out, an undercover agent of the government; the government has its own internal conflicts; the advocates of liberal reform find a fierce enemy in the “student leader” himself, who is in fact a staunch reactionary; the reporter, delving further into the radical subculture, becomes more and more a true believer in the creed that her crush was only mouthing insincerely; everywhere there are hints of conspiracies yet unseen, mysterious links and collusions between characters who had seemed to belong to different parts of the story. It is keeping her attention, though most anything would, really.

In her closet is the locked chest containing the Summer Diary, which she had resolved to open the moment she got back from her scouting mission. She had told herself that that summer had been just as real as this purgatory, and that she had no reason to push it away as though it were unclean. But the moment she got back, her will failed her. And that was the start of the funk.

36:00

She has been awake for thirty hours, still as glazed-but-untired as ever, when the television speaks to her again.

The show is full of incident, and Maria has given up on keeping precise track of it all. Somewhere along the line the student leader was revealed to be an idealist after all, but an idealist of some strange stripe, his true (?) loyalties aligning with a wealthy, shadowy and powerful family to which the journalist was distantly related. This was, in fact, the reason he’d agreed to be interviewed. The latest episode begins in an opulent mansion, lit dimly, where the student leader converses with some prominent aunt who, in the crudest of cinematic symbolism, sits in literal shadow, only her hands and legs visible. Their conversation drags on, dropping endless keywords as yet undefined for the viewer.

And then, there it is: that overlong pause, that turn to the camera, the would-be-comedic quick zoom. The student leader’s mouth opens, and Maria’s past speaks.

“Keep watching. There is more after this.”

It’s definitely Martin, but the voice is unusually insistent. He is normally calm under pressure, to the point of seeming occasionally callous, but now there is a thing like fear in his voice he can’t suppress. It is a chilling effect.

“You aren’t as safe as you think. There are dangerous heteropneums even here. They will come soon. You’re strong, Maria, but not as strong as they are.”

Another pause, the man’s face inappropriately blank, as though he’s reading an unfamiliar script off of a teleprompter. Which, for all Maria knows, may be close to the truth.

“There is a man named Horatio Tile here. He knows how to build a weapon which can defend us. You must contact him yourself. This Sphere is not a safe place. Don’t trust anyone but Horatio. Bring him into your confidence. Don’t do this for me. Do this only if you are comfortable joining me against those who would stop us from saving ourselves.”

The student leader suddenly turns and speaks in a different voice, of invented intrigues rather than real ones.

39:00

The lights are still on, but something has changed. Maybe it’s just the sleep deprivation, but the funk is either starting to lift, or starting to metastasize into some new form.

The lie is the I, says the litany. It’s taken on a new meaning here, in this limbo state. What is Maria, anyway? Surely not a binge-watcher of bad TV. Surely something else. Someone with a duty, a grave and strange duty, the kind of thing one must travel to the bottom of the ocean to find. The only way out is further ahead, through the complexities of the plot. Maria’s self is tangled up with the Sphere, with the sub, with Martin—so be it. Open the box. Talk to Ratio. There is more here than a bad TV show. Maria feels like she’s seen a faint glimmer of light in the darkness, and has begun to swim toward it.

She opens the closet. She had retrieved the key from its hiding place when she got back, and it’s been in her pocket all floorday. She puts it in the lock and opens the chest. Inside are piles of paper, covered in handwriting on the edge of indecipherability, scribbled down from memory in a frenzy after she realized her memories of the summer that did not happen were fading. She picks up a page and begins to read.