The Edge by James Smythe

Author:James Smythe [Smythe, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-11-30T17:00:00+00:00

8

I have such ideation of death, only occasionally, but such overwhelming ideation.

I imagine myself in these scenarios, and up here it’s worse, so much worse, because the opportunity presents itself so easily.

This is not a death-wish. It’s not a suicidal urge, despite what Xavier presented to the courts in his own attempts to ruin me. It’s a clear and simple realization of visuals inside my head, repeatedly, of how I could die. Not how I should, or how I want to, but how I could, if it were to happen.

Choking, on a piece of something unappetizing.

Slipping in the shower, one of the plastimoulded fittings being just the right height and angle for me to smack my head onto, cracking my skull, blood spilling out onto my feet, pooling around my body as my heel blocks the drain, and the water and blood mingle around my body, breaking out over the edges of the shower, onto the bedroom floor; and then flowing, to the hallway, the donut, where somebody finds it, a trail of pale pink that they can’t help but follow.

Out there, in the darkness, coughing, sputtering, unable to breathe, even as I try to; and then into the Anomaly, where God knows what happens, but death is inevitable, and there is no coming back from it.

When I was a child, I would leave my house at night and walk towards the back of our garden, the edge of the perimeter; and I would stand there at the fence, and wonder what might be beyond it. Out in the darkness, because there was nothing to light the land but the moon and the stars, no ambient light, no bleed from our house when my parents were in bed; and I would stand there and wonder what could be out there, in that darkness. A killer, a wolf, something only imaginable in horror films that I stayed up to watch long after my parents thought that I was in bed …

This is not new, is what I am saying.

I’m saying that this ideation is not new to me.

When I wake, it’s to silence from the rest of the station. A dream that I once had: that I was the last person here, up here alone, and engulfed by that thing, and discovering what was inside it. A secret, an Easter egg, a prize, almost; knowledge, and truth, the reveal of something otherworldly. I get showered and dressed, and I leave my room, knowing that it’s the last time I will do these things up here, in this place. I’ve done them many times, so many that I’d lose track if it wasn’t for calendars; but this is it.

Outside, in the donut, most of the others are staring out of the window. The Anomaly has done what it always promises to do: crept forward. Not by much, but framed against the Ukonvasara, against our stage in orbit – this being the moment we’re closest to it, for this cycle – it suddenly seems so much closer.

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