Identification: Bhattacharya, Jaswinder

Position: Minor Child

Location: Auxiliary craft TIGER ME-3

Time of signal loss: 12:53:04 01.03.393

Cause of signal loss: Unknown

When my mother turned to leave her workshop, she looked up at the surveillance camera—a steady long look, her eyes fiery with anger. She said something, lips moving briefly, silently. It might have been I’m sorry.

She left her sanctum on Level 12 and vanished.

There was no visual record of her after that. The ship’s computer was severely compromised by then—the crew had done it themselves, in fits of hysteria—and the surveillance system was badly malfunctioning. A great deal of information was never recorded, and only a fraction of what was recorded had ever been transmitted to Earth. My mother’s heart beat steadily for another hour or so, but she did not appear in the spotty surveillance data. If there were any data at all about where she had gone or what she had done after she sent me away, it was all locked aboard House of Wisdom, forever out of reach.

I shut off the screens and sat in the dark for a while. A large beetle had found its way through the insect screens around the house. It was tapping and prodding along the frame of the open door. The fog outside was heavier now; I could not see the lake.

After the massacre, I had nightmares for years about red clouds surrounding me, mist becoming drowning liquid, dancing in the air and light. The shrill, shipwide shriek of the alarm system. Shouting, screaming. Scalpels clutched in hands. Wild eyes filled with panic, going calm, then empty. When a person dies there are seconds when the heart still squeezes, not yet knowing it is time to stop. Human bodies are messy, imperfect things, a tangle of crossed signals and incomplete messages. Blood pumped into microgravity behaves oddly, like a living thing, unbound and restless, drifting, cooling. Never falling.

The beetle changed its mind about coming inside. Turned from the door, scuttled across the patio, vanished into the darkness. The insect screen would catch it on the way out. A snapping silent death: quick.

I had never tried to count how many people I had seen die that day. Their faces blurred into one in my mind, their screams into a single voice. I went to the sink to throw up again, though there was nothing in my stomach but acid.

Then I wrote a message to Baqir. I forgot we were fighting. I forgot that I was certain he would never speak to me again. I didn’t have anybody else.

My aunt gave me all the data from the ship.

The response was immediate: INCOMING CALL. My hands were moving without my permission. The buzzing in my head had settled to a muffled numbness.

I answered Baqir’s call, and his face appeared on the screen, and he said, “What the fucking fuck did she do that for?”