[OC-Series] I'm the Last Person Who Remembers the Original Timeline. I Have Four Days. | Chapter 31: Still Air

Index -- Previous Chapter -- First Chapter 

The fan had been the sound under everything for seven months, and now it was gone. I kept listening for it the way you listen for a clock you have just noticed has stopped. The bearing had seized in the last hour, welded itself solid with its own heat, and I had nothing left to unstick it. The graphite had gone into the last repair, the solder with it, and whatever grease the bearing had once held had cooked off a long time ago and not been replaced. It was a paperweight now, bolted into the ductwork, and it was going to kill me on a schedule I could almost read.

Air does not sit still on its own down here. It never had. The fan pushed it in a slow loop, floor to scrubber to ceiling and back, all day and all night, and I had stopped hearing it the way you stop hearing your own furnace. With the fan dead the loop was dead. And carbon dioxide is heavier than the air it rides in. Without something to stir the room, it does what water does. It finds the low places and pools there, and then it climbs.

The sensor told me the story in one number. Seventy-eight. It had been seventy-nine for what felt like a long time and was probably not, and now it was seventy-eight and going the wrong way, and I knew from an old back-of-the-envelope estimate that I had somewhere between eight and ten hours before the number and I stopped being on speaking terms.

I did the thing I do. I went and found the part of the problem that was not broken, because that is usually where the answer hides.

The scrubber was fine. That was the part that should have been funny. The canister was good, the chemistry had plenty of life left in it, the intake was clear. When I held my hand to the grille I could feel the faintest cool breath of scrubbed air still leaking out of it, clean, exactly as designed. The machine that was supposed to keep me alive was in perfect working order. It just could not reach me. It sat there cleaning the small volume of air that happened to drift across it and doing nothing at all for the rest of the room, and the rest of the room was where I lived.

I needed to move air through it by hand. That was the whole problem, reduced. Take the dead air off the floor, run it through the good scrubber, put the clean air back where I could breathe it. The fan had done that without being asked for seven months. Now I was the fan.

There is a story every engineer knows, about three men in a crippled spacecraft and a carbon dioxide problem they were never supposed to have, and a scrubber built for the wrong module, and a fix cobbled together on the ground from the spare parts they had and read up to the crew line by line while the air went bad around them. I had thought about that story a lot, over the years, in the abstract admiring way you think about other people's disasters. I was not admiring it now. I was about to live the amateur version of it, alone, with worse supplies, and no one on a headset telling me which part went where.

I inventoried what I had. The dry suit from the tunnel dive, still stiff with dried heavy water. Lengths of flexible conduit I had pulled off dead runs weeks ago and kept because you keep things. The manual transfer pump I had used to fight the flooding, a dumb reliable cylinder with a handle. A roll of aluminum tape that had survived when everything else ran out.

I built a lung. That is the only word for what it was. I ran a length of conduit down to the lowest corner of the module, where the sensor read worst, and taped the joints until they stopped hissing. I mated the top of it to the scrubber intake, which took three tries and most of the tape, because the fittings were never designed to meet and did not want to. Then I put the pump in line. Pull the handle and it dragged a lungful of the heavy dead air off the floor, up the conduit, and forced it across the scrubber bed. Push the handle and the clean air came out the far side, into the middle of the room, where I was going to be breathing it. One stroke, one breath of the room cleaned. It was crude and it leaked, and against all odds it was a machine that worked.

I moved the sensor up to head height, where it mattered, and I started to pump.

The number moved. Slowly, grudgingly, but it moved, seventy-eight holding, then a hair better, then something you could almost call seventy-nine again if you were generous and tired. I settled into a rhythm. Pull, push. Pull, push. It was the most boring emergency I had ever been in and it was going to save my life, and for about ten minutes I let myself believe that.

Then the line changed.

I had been keeping half of myself on it the whole time, the way you keep a hand on a sleeping person in the dark so you know they are still breathing. Sarah's carrier, low and even, her body ticking along at the bottom of its own cold somewhere I could not see. I had gotten good at holding my own noise off it. The pump was making that hard. Every pull of the handle spiked my heart and shoved a jolt of effort down a line that carried effort as cleanly as it carried anything, and I had to sit on it, breathe around it, keep the man on my end of the wire looking like a man who was fine. It was work stacked on work. Pump the air. Hide the pumping.

Then her signal climbed.

Not the small drift I had felt from her all night. This was fear, and it did not spike and settle the way fear does. It came up and it stayed up, a long steady rise with no top to it, her heart running and running and not coming back down. I had felt her frightened before. I had never felt her frightened like this, for this long, with no floor under it.

I read it the only way I had to read it. She was afraid of losing me. She could feel what I could not hide, the edges of the pump-strain leaking past my guard, the number I was fighting, the fact of my situation bleeding through in whatever narrow band got past me, and she had done the math on her end and understood I was running out of air. Of course she was afraid. She had reached into a silence a few hours ago and found nothing where I should have been, and now she could feel me struggling, and she was standing wherever she was standing with nothing to do about it but be afraid.

So I did the only thing I could do for her. I steadied. I put down as much calm as I had left, which was not much, and I shaped it and sent it, hold on, I am here, the same lie I had been telling her all night in the language of a nervous system. I made my breathing even on purpose so the line would carry even breathing. I kept pumping with one part of my body and kept the rest of it smooth for her, and it cost me, because a man cannot do hard labor and broadcast serenity at the same time without one of them being false, and the false one was eating me.

She did not settle. That was the thing I could not fix from my end. I sent steady and she stayed terrified, and I told myself it was because she could feel me and could not be talked out of what she felt.

I went back to the pump with both hands, because the number had stopped climbing. It had not just stopped. I watched it for a while to be sure, and then I stopped being sure of anything comfortable. Seventy-nine had been a story I told myself. The real number was drifting back down under the pump, slowly, while I pumped, which was not supposed to be possible.

I sat with it and did the arithmetic, plain, the way you do when the answer matters more than your feelings about it.

The pump cleared the room at some rate. Call it a fixed amount of bad air moved per stroke. Fine. But pumping was work, and work is muscle, and muscle burns oxygen and makes carbon dioxide, and it makes a lot of it, fast, right there at head height where I was breathing. Every stroke of the handle cleared a measure of the room and dumped a smaller measure of fresh carbon dioxide straight back into it, out of me, because of the effort of the stroke. When I pumped slow and easy, I came out a little ahead. When I pumped hard enough to actually gain ground on eight to ten hours of accumulated dead air, I was breathing hard enough to lose most of it back. The harder I worked the machine, the more the machine's operator undid the work.

There was a speed that broke even. I found it by feel, backing off until the number held flat. At that speed the pump exactly cancelled me and did nothing else. I could run it forever and stay precisely where I was, seventy-eight, and seventy-eight was already the wrong side of where I wanted to be, and my arms were not going to run it forever anyway.

Câlice.

I had built the right thing. I had looked at a broken system, found the one part that still worked, and bent my whole body into making it reach me, and it reached me, and it was not enough, and the reason it was not enough was arithmetic that did not care how clever the fix had been. The smartest move in the room, and it netted me a flat line at a number that was already too low.

So I stopped fighting the whole room and started giving ground.

If I could not clean all the air, I could at least not breathe the worst of it. The bad layer was on the floor and climbing, and the cleanest air in the module was up at the overhead, where the scrubbed air collected before it sank. I moved up. There is not much up in a module like this, a few feet of height between the deck and the equipment racks I could get myself onto, but a few feet was the difference between the number at my chest and a worse one at my knees. I got up off the floor, wedged myself onto the racks with my head near the overhead, and breathed the best air in a shrinking room.

The dead layer kept climbing. I could map it now without the sensor, by the ache that started behind my eyes when I let my head drop too low, so I moved the sensor down to the deck and left it there to watch the tide come in. The floor read into the low seventies and falling. The bad air was a thing with a surface now, a level rising through the module an inch at a time, and I was sitting on top of it like a man on a roof in a flood, watching the water find the second step.

Then the pump seized.

Not the fan. The transfer pump, the dumb reliable cylinder, the one thing I had left that moved. It caught at the bottom of a stroke and would not push, and the conduit I had taped to it was down on the deck, in the bad layer, in the rising dark part of the room I had just spent the last of my good sense climbing out of.

I did not want to go down there. I want to be honest about that, because it is the part I keep coming back to. Every animal thing in me knew the floor was where the bad air was and screamed at me to stay up in the good few feet I had left. And the pump was down there, and if the pump was truly dead I was out of options, and I had to know.

I took three breaths of the best air I had, held the last one, and went down.

The floor was another country. I got my hands on the pump and felt the catch, a length of the conduit collapsed and folded on itself where it had kinked under the tape, and I started working it open with fingers that were already going clumsy. The held breath ran out faster than it should have. I let a little air in without meaning to, one shallow pull of the floor's air, and it was like breathing through a pillow, thick and useless, my chest working and getting nothing back. The ache behind my eyes bloomed into something white. My hands slowed down. I remember watching them slow down from somewhere slightly behind myself, the way you watch a video buffer, and thinking with great calm that I should probably go back up now, and not being entirely sure my arms had heard me.

I got the kink open. I do not remember deciding to. I remember my hands finishing the job my head had stopped supervising, and then I remember the rack under my palms and hauling, dragging myself up out of the low country by feel, getting my head into the thin good air at the top and pulling it in, whooping, ugly, nothing serene about it at all.

The line lit up under my breastbone while I did it. There was no hiding this one. Everything I had been holding off Sarah's carrier all night tore loose in that minute on the floor and crossed the wire raw, my terror and my failing hands and the white behind my eyes, all of it going down the line while I clawed back up into the air. I felt her get the whole of it. I felt her feel me nearly go. And I felt her answer, hard, a pressure coming back down the line with more force than she had any business having left, holding on, holding on, do not, the wordless grip of a person refusing to let the other one sink.

I took it. I did not have the pride left to do anything else. I lay on the rack with my head in the good air and let her hold me up, and I understood, in a dim way I did not have the oxygen to examine, that she was not going to let me go under no matter what I did, and that this was the second time tonight I had learned that and the first time I had stopped arguing with it.

When my hands worked again I fixed the conduit properly, re-taped the kink, and I made a bargain with the machine and with myself. I could not run the pump hard. Hard lost. I could run it slow, at the break-even speed, and hold the number where it was for as long as my arms lasted, and I could rest up on the rack in the good air the rest of the time and let the room go bad slowly underneath me. It was a way of falling that took longer, and that was all it was. Every time I climbed down to work the pump, the ceiling of good air was a little lower than the time before, because I was still making carbon dioxide every minute I breathed and the break-even pump only broke even. The tide was still coming in. I had just learned to tread water in it, and treading water is a thing you can do for a while and not forever.

I did the honest arithmetic one more time and then I stopped doing it, because the answer was hours and I already knew the answer was hours.

I would have stayed in that grim little rhythm until my arms gave out. The boundary had other ideas.

I had been reading the boundary by ear for a long time now, since the day I fed the last sensor into the antenna, and what it gave me was a tone, the acrylic singing under the pressure of a thing pressed up against the far side of it. For the last stretch that tone had been a flat hard line climbing slowly, the sound of the machine settled into some faster, patient phase of whatever it was doing. I knew that sound. I had learned to work under it the way I had learned to work under the fan.

It changed. Up in the good air, half-conscious, I felt it before I heard it, and then I heard it. The flat climbing line broke into something with structure. It was not the pulsing I had caught once before and lost. It was a rising, a pitch bending upward and gathering, the acrylic beginning to sing a note it had not sung.

I did not have a sensor to point at it and I did not need one to know it was new, and hers, and building toward something. I was right that it was new. I was right that it was the machine, and that the machine was Moreau's, and that the changing note meant the far side had stopped waiting and started doing. I was wrong about what the doing was for. I had been wrong about that all night, and I did not know I was wrong, and I did not have the one piece that would have told me, and I did not even know there was a piece missing to look for.

The fan was dead and the pump could only break even, and out past the acrylic the boundary had started to climb toward a note I could not read. Somewhere past it, a few miles up and a whole world sideways, Sarah was afraid and would not stop being afraid, and I was breathing borrowed air off the top of a flooding room and telling her I was fine. Two people at the bottoms of two separate falls, each one certain the other was the one in danger, each one lying with everything they had left to keep the other from letting go.

The note kept climbing.

I stayed on the line. It was the only thing left that I could do, and I had finally, far too late to matter, learned that it was the entire job.