[OC-Series] I'm the Last Person Who Remembers the Original Timeline. I Have Four Days. | Chapter 32: Found

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The note stopped rising.

I had been listening to it climb for what my body wanted to call an hour and what my chronometer would have called something much shorter, if I still trusted my chronometer, which I did not. Then it stopped. The stopping was worse than the climb. A thing building toward something and a thing that has arrived make different sounds, and this one had arrived. The acrylic held a single high hard tone, steady, no waver in it, and I knew without a screen to tell me that the thing on the far side of the wall had stopped walking the perimeter and stopped feeling along it, because it had found the door.

I was up on the equipment rack with my head in the last good air, running the break-even pump one slow stroke at a time to hold the number where it was, and I had been telling myself for a while that holding the number where it was counted as winning. Down at the deck the sensor read into the low seventies. The clean few feet at the overhead had gotten smaller every time I climbed down to work the handle, and I had built a whole grim little economy around it, pump slow, rest, breathe off the top, let the room go bad underneath me by inches. It was a way of falling that took longer. I had made my peace with the falling because there was nothing at my end to fix, and a man can make his peace with almost anything if you take away every option first.

The note took that peace and put it down.

I came off the rack too fast and my knees folded and I got a palm on the deck to keep from going into the bad layer face first. My hand came up thick and slow, one lungful of the floor's air going into me before I could stop it, useless air, air like breathing through a wet cloth, and the white bloomed behind my eyes and I hauled myself back up into the clean band and hung there over the rail sucking at it. Then I did a stupid thing. I put my hand flat on the inner wall of the module. You put a hand on a door when someone knocks. I know the wall is not a door and there was nobody on the other side of it who could hear me, and I put my hand there anyway, and the acrylic was singing under my palm at a pitch a wall has no business making.

Six thousand eight hundred feet down. Ten thousand tons of the cleanest heavy water on the planet stood between me and the rock, and two miles of Canadian shield stood over that, and a woman in a leased warehouse a whole world sideways had reached through every meter of it and laid her hand on the exact place where I was standing. The probe had been, from the start, a hand in a dark room, feeling along a wall for a door. I had listened to it do that for days. It found the service hatch and left it. It found the thin place and pushed there. And now it had stopped moving, and a thing that has stopped moving is not looking anymore, and a thing that is not looking has found what it was looking for.

Tabarnak.

I said it to the wall, quiet, the last of me going out in one word. Then I did the only thing the whole night had left me, which was to stop saying anything, and listen.

The line was still there.

Under my breastbone, past the singing and the bad air and the shaking in my arms, Sarah's carrier held. Her heart was going too fast and her breath was short. Her fear was one long unbroken rising thing that had not come down the whole time I fought the air, and I understood now what she had been afraid of, because I was afraid of the same thing and it had finally arrived. She could feel it coming for me. She had been able to feel it coming before I could, the way you feel weather turn a minute before it turns, and she had been standing wherever she was standing and doing the only thing she could do about it, which was to be terrified at me down a wire, on and on, refusing to stop.

I want to say what I did next was a decision. I want to say I stood in the singing dark with the wall coming apart under my hand and chose, the way a man in a story chooses, to hold the line and go down fighting. That is not what happened, and I am going to be honest all the way to the end because the end is close.

What happened is that I have never once in my life been able to do the hard final thing. The clean cut. The walking away that you actually mean. I could not do it when walking away would have spared me a life with her that frightened me, and so I did the slow cowardly version instead and went down a mine for a year to be somewhere she could not reach me. I could not do it when a letter with my own name on it told me, in the plainest words the dying signal had left intact, that the correct move was to stop. And I could not do it now. The one operation my whole flawed wiring had never managed was to let go on purpose. So I did not let go, and I held the line because letting go of it was a hard final thing, and I am not built for hard final things, and I told myself, because a man has to tell himself something, that as long as the line was live there was a fight left in it.

There was no fight left in it. I know that now. I did not know it then, and the not-knowing is the entire reason I am here to write any of this down.

The number I could not see anymore had gotten worse while I stood there. I knew it the way you know it, the ache behind my eyes crept down into my jaw and my hands went thick when I tried to make a fist. The good air at the top of the room had thinned while I was busy having thoughts about myself, and my body, which had never once been interested in my thoughts, wanted air and was going to keep wanting it right up until there was some other reason to stop. So I did the stupid animal thing. I came off the wall and climbed down off the rack, down into the bad layer where the pump was, and got my hands on the handle.

I worked it. Pull, push. Down there in the part of the room that was trying to kill me, with the wall singing over my head and the last of the world I remembered starting to loosen at its corners, I stood at the bottom of a flooding module and moved air by hand, one stroke at a time, because it was the thing in front of me and I have always been able to do the thing in front of me. It is the small fight I have never lost, the only kind I have ever known how to win.

The bad air came into me while I pumped and my hands slowed on the handle and I kept working it, slower and slower, the way a wind-up toy runs down. I want it on the record that I did not stop, because stopping was a hard final thing, and I have told you what I am.

The tone did not step up again. It bent.

The high hard line of it began to bow, the pitch smearing sideways the way a held note smears when the thing making it starts to come apart, and I felt it in the wall and I felt it in my back teeth and then I felt it somewhere with no name, somewhere behind everything I was, a pressure that was not sound and was not pressure, reaching into me the way it had reached into the acrylic. This was the thing that rewrote the world at three fourteen in the morning on the day it all changed. I had spent days reading its wake, the shifted constant, the changed word in an old film, a whole planet overwritten in its sleep while I sat down here keeping the old numbers like a man guarding a house nobody lived in anymore. Now it had my address. Now it came to do to the last holdout what it had done to eight billion people who never felt it. It would reach in and write the new thing over the old, gently and without malice, the way you correct a number in a ledger and move on.

I felt it start. I felt the edges of me begin to give. The whole weight of the world I remembered, the timeline I was the last living person to carry, began to loosen at its corners like a photograph lifting off the glue, and I understood that in one more second there would be nobody left who knew, and that the man who took my place would not know he had taken anyone's place, and would stand in a kitchen in Montréal and butter his toast and never once feel the seam where I had been.

And then I caught on something.

I do not have a cleaner word for it. The giving-way reached a point and did not pass it. The overwrite came into me and found, where it should have found nothing at all to snag on, a fixed point, and hung there. I was coming apart and I stopped coming apart against a thing I could not see and had not put there and could not begin to account for. A stillness with a shape to it. Cold and even, holding at one unmoving place while everything else in me tried to dissolve, and the unraveling caught on it and could not finish the stroke.

I did not understand it. I have to say that plainly. I did not understand what I had caught on. In the part of me still able to think at all I thought the machine had faltered, that something on the far side had failed at the last instant, that I had been handed a reprieve I had done nothing to earn. I reached for the line the way I had reached for it a hundred times, out of pure animal habit, out of the need not to be alone inside the thing, and the line was there, and the steadiness I could not account for and the line were the same steadiness, the same one thing, and even then I did not understand.

The pressure that was not pressure gathered itself for another pass.

I held the line. It is the only thing I have ever truly known how to do, hold on past the point where holding on makes any sense, and for the first time in my life the worst thing about me was exactly the right size for the moment I was in, and I did not know that either.

The note bent all the way over.

The last thing, before the last thing, was not fear. I had spent all my fear on the air and the wall and had none left for this. What was left, when the wave finally closed its hand, was the steadiness I was caught on, cold and even, refusing to let go of me, and the certainty, wrong in every particular and right in the only way that has ever mattered, that as long as I did not let go of the line there was still something on the other end of it worth holding on for.

I held on. The wall stopped singing, and the pressure that was not pressure came all the way in, and I