How did I start all this falling? I can’t even remember anymore. It would seem that I’ve been dropping through blackness for a couple of months now. But that would be impossible. How could I have survived that long?

I stopped screaming a long time ago. Except for the odd gust of warmish wind now and then I can almost imagine that I’m merely suspended in the centre of nothingness. Floating in the black void I strain through the fog of my mind. Was I pushed from a precipice? Clipped from a cliff? Mayhap a cyclone sucked me from a Sikorsky. That’s odd. I don’t recall ever having ridden in a Russian rotary powered aircraft.

My mind is starting to wander off and play practical jokes on me. I keep seeing things in the dark.

One day for instance I was falling along through the black like I usually do when I swear a dead body flew by. It was as though it was falling as well but I was falling much faster, so it quickly flew up past me and out of sight, its loose clothes flapping in the wind. THAT made my fuckin’ skin crawl!

But now I am seeing mushrooms, thousands upon thousands of brightly colored mushrooms are all around me. I know with my heart that I am still in blackness, yet my eyes tell me that I am now falling down an endless well with funky fungi covering nearly every square inch of its curved walls. My god the mushrooms are dancing!

Day two-hundred and something I think, maybe. Now the well is lined with long probing lizard tongues. The slimy forked tongues try to reach me as I plummet past. Once in a while one brushes against my arm and I let out a yelp or a whimper.

Day three or four or five-hundred perhaps, who gives a shit? My imagination is so worked up into a lather now that I no longer see the blackness. My mind puts on brilliant displays of color and light. Sometimes I am surrounded by waterfalls, sometimes by tumbling kitty cats. I can even eat whenever I want and have whatever I want. Turkey pot pie anyone? Coming right up! It even tastes real.

Today I am sipping a martini and watching reruns of Hee Haw as I fall through eternity and it occurs to me. Why must I continue to fall? I mean, I can do and have anything I want now thanks to my super developed imagination. Endless months of sensory deprivation have made me into a master at creating my own surroundings. I toss the martini over my shoulder and allow the glass to break upon bricks which are not there. Well that is that. I am no longer falling. Wow, I’m actually walking down Main Street! It feels great to put weight on my legs again. Why didn’t I think to think of this sooner?

But I still have a problem. I still know in my own mind that none of it is real, and that I continue to fall into the pit of eternity. Well, say then, all I have to do is imagine that I forget that I am falling into the pit of eternity and then I will truly be free to live my life once more. Now that’s what I’m talking about!

About what? What was I just thinking?

It was June when Mark and Alicia kissed each other one last time before strapping in for the long sleep to Caltrani. “I love you”, Mark had said as the canopies had closed. “Elephant shoes”, she mouthed back, and giggled behind the glass that separated their two capsules.

Neither knew it would be their very last kiss, her capsule bleeding out in flight. When they came to wake her she was dried nearly to dust.

They would have no family. He was left alone.

Back home he knew his friends and family would have long passed on. Maybe there were nieces and nephews, or great to some incomprehensible exponent – great nieces and nephews, but they were as lost to him as his love.

Home would have to be where his heart was, where she was planted in the foreign ground.

He worked first as a labourer, helping build the colony up, then as a soldier defending it against those that would see it fail. He’d seen wars before, and was trained for them, but this was a profession he had looked to the stars to escape. Starting anew the cycle of getting close to people with a uniform in common only to see them die would prove too much to bear.

Mark became a nomad, losing himself in the rough jungle of this planet he’d been so keen to make peace with, a planet that had proved so vicious in return.

On a clear night, from the hilltops overlooking Panteran Gorge, he watched the landing lights at Keff, marveled as ships arced out into space, and others descended to take their place on the ground. The horizon was alight with evidence of prosperity. Brightly lit buildings, flying craft, the multicoloured aura of the cities and towns.

“Their prosperity,” he scolded the night, “not mine. Not Alicia’s.”

Slowly he made his way to the edge of the cliff, peeling off his clothing and equipment and leaving it in a trail behind him. Above him Gentle filled the sky, the low moon giant and grey, lighting the jungle and the water below. Beneath it Skittish streaked across the blackness in fast orbit. Less massive and straining against Caltrani’s gravity, it would pass many times before the sun breached the horizon again, desperately trying to break free of the planet’s grasp to fly away into space.

“It’s hopeless Skittish,” Mark spoke out-loud to the sky, “she’ll never let you go.”

Mark dropped from the cliff, barely feeling the water strike his feet, breaking the surface to sink like a stone into the icy depths. Above him the water rushed to fill in the space he left behind, on the surface barely a ripple to show where he’d been.

As he sank, he thought of Alicia, saw her through the water mouthing ‘Elephant shoes’, and giggling as she swam away. He thought of the children they’d never have, of how he’d been right there as she grew old and died, and how he’d been robbed of his chance to share that with her.

“Nothing left to live for”, he thought, as the moon faded out over his head. He kicked out violently at the water. “Nothing left to live for.” His heart pounding as he broke the surface and filled his lungs, “but I’ll be damned if I let that kill me.”

The meeting was in a small stale office of the Pentagon, the two crisp suits shifted in their seats as I came in. I was tall clean shaved in a comfortable cream jacket, silk shirt, tie and custom leather shoes worth more than minimum wage makes in a year. They looked at me with uncertainty, no doubt I defied their expectations.

I opened with confidence, catching my interviewers on the back foot “Good afternoon, I am Mr Ross, you would be Agent Adrian Cole and Agent Maria Fernandez, shall we begin?”.

Adrian was hesitant but to her credit Maria took me in her stride, she must have been a few years older than her partner, clearly the more experienced of the two.

“Of course Mr Ross, now I just want to make certain you know what’s involved here. Your duties will include…” I cut her off with a wave of my hand, damn I love freaking out these Yale types.

“Agent Fernandez, I am perfectly aware of what is involved, the documents on the project were quite comprehensive. You are already aware of my previous employers, so let me cut to the chase. Finding highly trained government agents with high level access is easy. You can throw a brick in DC and hit a dozen. I have Graceful level clearance, two grades above your own. I am certified to know national secrets that would start wars if they got into the wrong hands and I have 20 years with a flawless record for my tact not to mention intensive torture resistance training with the US Marines and the British SBS, I am a rare commodity.”

I slid a crisp white sheet of paper across the table with a 6 digit number on it and relished the looks on their faces.

“Finding janitorial staff with the same clearance is significantly harder, hence my fee. Trust me Ma’am none of those suits will be willing to clean up alien substances off the laboratory floor or unclog the toilet that the Head of Project 12 was using yesterday and your average cleaning staff won’t be able to keep sufficiently quiet about the work involved or be able to spot a class 1 bio-hazard leak. I think you will find my services and record for discretion are well worth my fee.”

Agent Cole scowled in silence, but Fernandez simply nodded.

After a long pause staring at the number she met my gaze “Your fee will not be a problem, It will be a pleasure to work with you Mr Ross.”

Newton left us a gift. Tesla wrapped it up and Hawking put a bow on top. It was the brilliance of Dr. Panaura that opened it for the whole human race.

Dr. Panaura had found a way to trap energy and shape it. Using accelerator kilns, she’d bind the light with the electricity. By using a series of ceramics and mirrors, she’d weave the energy into a tight overlapping grid. The waves would move in a pattern that generated their own power through recursive timestreams.

Physical relationships warp at higher velocities. Anything with appreciable mass cannot be accelerated to lightspeeds.

In effect, she’d made plates of invisible energy that borrowed energy from past versions of themselves. She knitted light into primitive jointed garments.

The armour tapped into the missing seventeen per cent of the universe. It was a marriage of Newtonian physics and the unified field fueled by funneled electricity.

It worked on a universal scale. It stole kinetic energy but weighed nothing. It was bulletproof in the same way that a planet was. Any force applied to it was absorbed.

It could be worn as an invisible suit of armour that nothing could penetrate.

She would be hailed as a savior later. Any industry that needed a hard surface would benefit immediately. Impossible architectural masterpieces would blossom. The military would gain invincibility. Hard materials would become possible with no natural matter being used.

She never lived to see any of it.

That first suit of armour that she tried out on herself didn’t have any airholes and the generator pack was on her belt, trapped inside the form-fitting field with her. The fields surrounding her hands couldn’t penetrate the shield around her waist to press the deactivate button.

No one knows what she was thinking trying it out on herself like that. It’s hard to believe what a simple, stupid mistake that was considering her brilliance. Conspiracy theories abound that the military complex got to her and killed her so that she wouldn’t stand in the way of her invention being used as weaponry. No one knows. She suffocated there. Her assistants found her in the morning.

Since the energy supplies are theoretically infinite, she is still encased in that field, resting peacefully in her coffin.

He calls her beautiful but he doesn’t mean it. He is in love with someone else.

He feels his hand stroke his wife’s back, hears himself whisper I love you, you know that, go back to sleep. He rolls over on his side towards the window. Through the half-opened blinds he can see the moon, full and round and orange, in the night sky.

He thinks of her, the woman in his dreams, waiting at the station, eyeing the watch he gave her as a birthday present. He imagines her there, waiting for the shuttle that will take her to Tranquility. She will be going on holiday to visit her mother. She has talked of almost nothing else for several weeks. The gray lunar mountains are just visible through the opaque shielding behind her, and the Earth, if she can see it at all, will hardly register: just another gray speck in the sky. No one lives there anymore where she comes from.

He feels himself fall asleep then, and when he wakes he does not tell his wife about the dreams. He does not tell her about the Earth, dead for centuries, or about the woman he is meeting at the station on the surface of the moon. He does not tell his wife how beautiful this other woman is, or how this world has become more and more like a dream. She would laugh, and then he would have to smile and say, you’re right, of course, I was only joking, what’s for breakfast? He would have to say, you know you’re the only one. He would have to say he loves her.

And he is growing tired of the lie.

While they made love, the world ended. Bombs dropped. The earth shook and split open. Tornadoes flung nations to pieces, and then tsunamis swept the land clean. By the time they were finished, everyone else was dead.

They lay there for a while without saying anything. She rested her head on his chest. He picked pieces of plaster out of her hair. The apocalypse had opened a small hole in the roof. Clouds of black smoke rolled by, occasionally revealing a patch of deep red sky.

She turned to look at him, her chin fast to his ribcage. “What do you want to do now?” she asked.

“Just lay here with you,” he said.

Somewhere in the distance something rumbled. Thunder, maybe, or more bombs. It was all the same now. She put her ear to his chest and listened to the smaller, more comforting rhythms of his heart. The earth shook once more and she dozed off as it rocked her to sleep.

She dreamed that the world hadn’t ended. She dreamed of plants growing in time-lapse, seasons changing. Children being born. The people of the world laughed and held hands and sang. She saw her family standing in a field, waving to her. The sun rose and set and everything was green and beautiful and alive.

She skipped through this world with the sun warm on her face, looking for him. But she could not find him. She stopped skipping and began to run. She ran through the green fields, over the cold rivers, faster and faster, always searching. Her feet left the ground and she flew through the clean blue sky, over the people, over the families, and she screamed his name but he did not answer. She could not find him. He wasn’t there.

She woke to the sensation of rain on her cheek. He pulled them aside wiped the water from her face with his thumb. It was gray from the smoke and the ash.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said. She pressed her body closer to his, out of the rain. “I was just having a nightmare.”

“Captain’s log, 6022.55. We’ve separated from the Command Ship and are descending toward the surface of Piscis Austrini C. The weather over the primary landing site is clear, so we’ll set up the blind as planned on an old lava field, approximately 1000 meters from the migration bottleneck. Per the mission objectives, we’ll observe the mandria herd for two days as they return from the birthing plains. Reconnaissance data from the drones indicate that this herd contains at least one million bison size creatures. We plan to capture a few live specimens to obtain statistical and biological data, including blood and DNA samples, assuming they have them. With a little luck, we should collect enough data on this trip to keep Earth’s Xenobiologists busy for decades.”

“Approaching the landing site,” announced the helmsman. “Touchdown in ten seconds.”

Three massive landing pads extended from the underbelly of the shuttle and locked into position. As they touched the surface, the ship skidded sideways before jarring to an abrupt stop.

“Captain, the penetrometer indicates that we landed on mud, not lava-rock. We’re at Zee minus one meter.”

“Move us to hardpan, Mr. Shikoku,” ordered the captain. “We don’t want to be mucking around in waist deep mud for the next two days.”

After several aborted liftoffs, the helmsman reported, “Sorry, Captain, she won’t budge.”

The captain unbuckled his harness. “Okay,” he said, “let’s pop the hatch and have a look.”

Crewmen Alpeton climbed down the ladder and prodded the ground with his foot. “It’s solid, sir,” he announced as he jumped onto the rocky surface. As he walked around the stub-wing toward the nose of the ship, he suddenly sank into the mud up to his knees. The mud instantly turned solid, trapping his legs. “What the hell! What is this stuff, some kink of cosmic fly paper?”

The ground began to tremble. In the distance, a nearby hill began to undulate. It started to move perceptibly closer. “A spider web would be a more accurate analogy” remarked the science officer. “If I’m interpreting the circumstances correctly, that approaching hill is the silicon-based equivalent of a gigantic Earth-spider. It must be capable of controlling the viscosity of this mud-like substance to trap prey. I estimate that it will reach our position in approximately two minutes.”

“Options?” demanded the captain.

“Our phasers will be ineffective against rock,” replied the science officer. “I recommend that we free the ship by melting through the aluminum landing gear struts. Unfortunately, we’ll have to amputate Mr. Alpeton’s legs above the knees.”

“Unacceptable,” snapped the captain. He quickly set his phaser to self-destruct and threw it as far as he could toward the approaching mound. The moving hill shifted its path and engulfed the whining phaser. Moments later, the size of the mound tripled as the antimatter power-pack detonated. The expanding hill then burst like a water-balloon, showering the area with fist size clumps of mud. The ship shifted slightly as the rock encapsulating the landing gear suddenly returned to the consistency of mud. Freed, Alpeton scrambled up the ladder and through the hatch.

“Preparing to return to the Command Ship,” announced the helmsman as he began manipulating the controls.

“Belay that,” ordered the captain. “We didn’t come to the cosmos to run and hide every time an alien creature says ‘boo.’ In fact, this planet has piqued my curiosity. After we complete this mission, we can spend a few extra days studying this amazing new predator.”

I found them. Nobody else wanted to believe it, but I found them. It’s my truth.

Well, maybe not mine. But not theirs either!

After the Act was signed and the last of the satellites went live, the corporations assured us the link would be continual. But I started twitching. I never twitched before. I’d have these little blackouts. I told people it had to be the satellites, but they said I was wrong.

So I parsed the stream. They let you see it if you want, but nobody really looks. And that’s how I found the gaps. They’re small, much smaller than the human mind can register, so small our technology can barely detect them.

That’s right. Our technology. Not theirs.

I started talking to the technicians who worked on the upload, and they all denied it, until I got angry and used the battery. One finally broke their vow of silence. He told me that they knew about the gap, but insisted it was for calibration.

This I knew to be a lie.

The human brain can handle the link, everyone’s seen the science that proves it. It’s like humming a tune you don’t even hear, they said. You don’t even know you’re doing it.

“So why are there still gaps?” I asked, but he couldn’t answer. I showed him the pictures I extracted from the blackness in the gap. When you look at it long enough, you can see the eyes, the places where the black gets darker than the rest. They’re slitted, the eyes. Like a cat’s.

He had tears running down his cheeks as he looked at the picture. That’s a sign of guilt. There are all kinds of signs of guilt, if you know what to look for. I’ve always been very attentive.

Those eyes kept me up at nights for weeks. I hate cats, always have, but I never knew why until I saw those pictures. Like they were an advance force, or something. Maybe I’m psychic. You see a lot more articles about psychic ability since the link went active. One says that we’re using parts of the brain that have never been touched before. Why shouldn’t psychic ability be hidden there? It has to be somewhere.

That’s when I realized what the gaps had to be. We’d spent all these years beaming messages out into space, and now our satellites are picking up their replies. We’ve got more satellites in orbit than any other time in history, and they’re more sensitive too. We’re finally hearing them.

But they’re being subtle. Tricky. Communicating through negative space, testing our link, seeing what they can insert without our noticing. So far, just their eyes. Understand? It’s like a joke. They’re watching us, so they put in their eyes. They want to see if we’re paying attention.

Nobody is. Nobody but me.

It took weeks and another technician, but I finally figured out how to make gaps of my own. So tonight I’m going to talk back. I’m going to insert my gaps into the link and show them we’ve noticed. And they will spread. The companies clean the link for carriers, but not for anything this size. I’m as clever as they are.

My gaps won’t just watch with black on black eyes, either. No. I’m putting images in my gaps, sounds, and they will be plugged right into the feed. Wars. Disasters. Primates howling. Metal grinding metal. They’ll see what we’ve survived. They’ll know we won’t go out without a fight. They. Will. Respect. Us.

Because I own the gaps.

Not them.

Me.

Dr Siward’s Journal, 18th April

Another interview with Mr Renfield. I wonder whether he shall ever recover from the psychosis- his fantasy world seems so complete. One cannot help pitying the man. He is such a gentle soul, particularly compared with some of the others under my care. If I were to meet him outside the asylum, I imagine I should think him perfectly sane. But despite my best efforts to persuade him, he refuses the treatment. He is still a threat to the public.

I feel that we are at an impasse. Unless he becomes violent, I cannot force him to accept the therapy, and without it, he cannot be released to rejoin his family. He presents his ideas so rationally that I cannot help but be drawn into arguments, for all their insanity.

It began as usual- “You still want me to have that thing transplanted, don’t you, Doctor?” he announced.

“The genetic therapy would be for the best, Mr Renfield. Everyone else in your family has had it. Haven’t you seen how contented they are?”

“That’s because they’re slaves. You’re all slaves. You don’t know what you’ve done.”

“How can it be slavery when we choose to submit to the operation freely?”

“What about those of us who don’t accept it? Do we all end up in places like this?”

“It’s for your own good. You might endanger other people. You’re not sane. Some of you have tried to forcibly remove the implants- do that, and you end two lives! Don’t you respect the unborn child?”

“And when that…that thing reaches maturity? Do you know what happens then?”

“It’s not a thing, Mr Renfield. We’ve discussed this. It’s a child. It has a right to life.”

“Well, I have a right to choose. And I choose not to let those things use my body as a breeding tube. I don’t believe all that rubbish about us being under threat, anyway.”

“We’ve been through this, Mr Renfield. I’ve shown you the footage they send us. Our protectors are constantly battling threats from all kinds of terrorist beings. By allowing them to use our spinal fluid to grow their offspring, we help them continue to keep our great nation-planet safe. Don’t you care about national security, Mr Renfield?”

“I care about our freedom. I care about our future! Haven’t you ever asked yourself what happens once your implant reaches full maturity? Have you ever seen what happens? I have. Where are your friends, Doctor? What about the Doctor who came before you?

He got very agitated at this point. We had to restrain him again. But my Guest tells me all will be well. I must be vigilant, and not let the emotions of this body cloud Our judgement. Imagine! If it wasn’t for my Guest’s good sense, I would release him- I would even agree with him. Foolishness! Renfield must not be allowed to corrupt anyone else. We were lucky that his family discovered his experiments in time. He was close to perfecting an operation to remove the implant without harming the host. He planned to force his wife and children to be test subjects- and they were so close to being fully grown.

Right foot.

Tom Jenson remembered his uncle once told him “the hardest thing to do most days is to put one foot in front of the other.”

Left foot.

Of course, the topic was depression…and his uncle did kill himself, eventually. Tom shook his head and cleared away that last thought. He was starting to drift again. Time to lower the pain meds for a while.

Right foot.

The enviro-suit protested; but in this, he had some capacity to override its commands. He brought up the time remaining, just as the pain started tickling his feet. 3 days, 15 hours, 21 minutes 12 seconds. That’s how long until the AI controlling his ship The Far Reach calculated it could hold orbit and still have fuel for the trip home.

Left foot.

The pain leveled off at a tolerable level for a moment. Tom wondered what shape his feet were in. He understood now what his uncle meant – every fiber of his being screamed “lay down…let it stop…just stop”. He had been walking non-stop for 1 week. Or rather, the suit had been walking for 1 week. He gave up controlling his body 3 days into the march.

Right foot.

The trick was balance – not just the walking, but the time in the suit. He could have programmed the suit to run to the drop zone. It would have taken 5 days, but he’d be dead, beyond anything the suit could revive.

Every few hours he wished he was dead.

Left foot.

He had locked the commands into the suit itself after consulting with the on-board AI. He understood now why it recommended this action, when at least twice daily he screamed at the suit to let him lay down and rest. That’s usually when it pumped up the meds. Quite the achievement – in theory the suit could provide him with everything he needed from the existing resources on this planet.

Right foot.

Except he’d have wear the suit until the next time a survey ship is sent out this way – which could be months or years. Assuming he didn’t go mad from the loneliness, with only the primitive lichen on this rock to keep him company. I may go insane even before I reach the drop zone, Tom wondered. The repetitive movement was grinding away at bones, skin and muscles.

Left foot.

The suit kept his damage at a minimal level, only slowing to fix and repair flesh and bones. He’d reach the drop zone with about 23 hours to spare. That was better than the original estimate of a 3 hour window, but as every second dragged by, the hours ahead of him were like an endless ocean of time.

Right foot.

“The hardest thing for you to do most days is to put one foot in front of the other.” Tom Jenson remembered his uncle telling him when he was only 12 years old. His uncle thus described his depression, hoping to illustrate the depth of his sadness.

Left foot.

Tom didn’t understand at the time what his uncle said – how the everyday activities wore a depressed person down, how it took a colossal effort to perform these activities.

Right foot.

He understood now, but knew unlike his uncle, Tom had no avenue of escape. He felt the scream bubbling up in his mind and his body just as the suit increased the medications, and his consciousness washed away.

Left foot.

Right foot.

Left foot.

Right foot.