Archive of Our Own

From the dark mechanical depths of the machine’s mind, he was looking up toward this faint blue light. At first it seemed conceivable that this was in fact death. Or this was the last of him remaining before death — the dregs that were left within the two other units of consciousness, manufactured and real, synthesized by and contained within the machine.

--

Le jaeger-duo Britanique Albarn et Coxon est mort près du Margate

La premiere kaiju du Catégorie IV attaque dans l’Atlantique

--

“Nobody thought to dial in with him.”

It was strange to look up at Justine from the wheelchair. There was an old, jagged scar under her chin he had never noticed before. In her white lab coat and sensible black heels, with the severe and well-maintained dark-brown bob, no makeup, clipboard clasped to her chest, she looked as professional and closed-off as she usually did. But there was a kind of twist in the corner of her mouth, and dark shadows under her eyes indicating she had not recently slept. 

She looked down at him, compounding the pitying effect of her gaze. Her voice was raw and tired. “His compatibility was never tested with anyone else.”

“We were recruited together. Why would it ever have been tested with anyone else?” Even the barest thought was unimaginable. Besides, he knew no one ever bothered to test the remote failsafe. “Nobody even tried.” 

“Nobody — ”

She was going to say, nobody likes him. But this was perhaps not the time.

“Nobody gets him, but you.”

“Maybe it was worth trying.”

“Maybe. We’ll never know.”

She was tapping her pen rapidly against her clipboard. She didn’t like looking at the pale, diminished person in the bed either. He wondered the extent to which she felt responsible.

“You don’t have to stay here all day with me, Justine.”

“Someone has to keep an eye on you. You’re not supposed to be out of bed.”

This was patently ridiculous. Anybody who had thought they could keep him in bed, despite the multiplicity of injuries which had been described to him in bloody detail as soon as he regained consciousness, ought to be consigned to weeks’ worth of in-service training on account of their evident misunderstanding of what this process did to one’s mind. He had woken up and slowly the layers of sedation had begun to slough off like scales of dead skin... this other mind was trying to break through them from the other side even then. Throwing itself against the door.

“I’m not leaving,” he told Justine.

“I know.”

I wish you would, he didn’t say. Besides, there was a camera in the corner at the join of the walls and ceiling. Just a little dark-black eye moving, advancing and receding. There were cameras in all the infirmary rooms to monitor the well-being of the patients at night. Or at least this was the party line. There were cameras everywhere throughout the sprawling subterranean complex.

“Will you stop that tapping at least.”

She did. Thank god. She pulled a chair up from the corner and sat beside him. He eyed her clipboard on her lap: major parietal lobe trauma —

“How long did he make it on his own?”

Quickly she lifted the clipboard toward her chest again. “I’m not supposed to — ”

“Justine, come on.”

“Nineteen minutes.”

“Did he kill it?”

“Yeah. Pretty quickly actually, after you — well, your escape pod was too damaged to eject. He brought the whole thing back to the beach.”

In the last rough calculation he'd taken before engagement they had been about ten kilometers from shore in the Thames estuary off the Kent coast. Their opponent had been the fifth such creature to attempt an attack on the city of London by these means, the twelfth such creature to attack the United Kingdom overall, and the first Category IV engaged by the Defense Corps of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Never in any of these engagements had a machine been piloted by a single individual. “Christ,” he said.

“Yes, I mean, it’s not unheard of — ”

“It is with our equipment.”

“You mean was, with our equipment, because, as I’m sure I don’t need to remind you, that’s the last of it destroyed now. Not your fault,” she added, at his look. “The junk heaps we bought off the Pacific Corps couldn’t really face up to the Category IVs.”

“It had spikes,” he remembered suddenly, “on its tail.”

“Yes, we saw the video. It’s been reported to the P.C.”

“What are we going to do when we get another one.”

“That’s being discussed presently. There are at least six in the Atlantic that we know of. We’ll likely have to call in the French.”

“Christ,” he said again.

“Yes… don’t remind me. Perhaps the Dutch or the Belgians might be amenable to an alliance.”

“Do they have machinery?”

“We think.”

“Do they know about — ”

“Yes. I mean, you saw the drones.”

He hadn’t — he never saw them. Graham said sometimes he could hear them through the machine’s aural sensors. They knew they were there, and saw them hovering and darting like hummingbirds on the footage afterward. The Atlantic nations had formed no such alliance in the face of the creatures as the Pacific nations had, and covert and overt operations to collect intelligence were commonplace.

“The French news is reporting you're both dead,” Justine went on. “Balfe pulled it up for me yesterday. They got actually pretty impressive footage of the cockpit with the skull plating busted open.”

“What’s our news reporting.”

“Uncertainty.”

“As usual.”

“Yes. When he comes to — ” She gestured toward the bed — “Balfe is going to have the PM make a statement.”

For the life of him he would never understand how someone like Balfe had such sway over the PM. “What kind of statement,” he asked.

“Whatever he’s had her say when we’ve lost equipment or crew before. Actually, he’s already written something he thinks should come from you. I told him it wasn't your voice, but I don’t know how much that matters to him…”

“Not very much,” he said. If such a missive was truly written in his voice it would scandalize all of Parliament. “Has he written one for — ”

“The assumption is that you speak for you both.”

“I don’t speak for us both.”

“Yes, and I know that, and even Balfe knows that, but as you know the general public knows… only an inkling of the actual process of neural bridging, it’s so classified, you know…”

“I know.”

“We’ve talked about this. It’s also part of norm-building and acculturation among the general public. They have to believe — ”

“Justine, I know.”

“I think he hopes you'll read it on the BBC.”

“He hopes — what!”

“He’s in talks, he says, with — wossname, the morning show woman who looks like Mrs. Thatcher.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“I told him it was unlikely.”

“It’s a bit more than bloody unlikely!”

Justine’s eyes flitted toward the bed. “Keep your voice down,” she said.

“If I could wake him up yelling he would be awake.”

“The volume of your voice was just fine until — ”

“I don’t mean speaking.”

She looked between them. People — employees of the D.C. and the general public, when they were allowed to interact with the general public — seemed to study this space frequently, as though seeking clues. There was really nothing there that was visible.

“So you can, um…” She seemed unsure of the way by which to phrase this. Most people did. “Do you, you know, feel — ”

“Yes.”

“He’s in there?”

“Yes.”

“What is he — ”

“It’s not words. Like feelings, you know. Or maybe that even is... simplified. It’s like thoughts, maybe they’re not… formed all the way…”

“What is he thinking?”

Like a crumpled up flyer shoved in his old school pack and unearthed at the end of term and unfolded, spread out on the floor with the photocopier ink peeling away from the folds, an image of the view from Primrose Hill in London. His heart twisted. He tried to remind himself he had never cried in front of Justine before and couldn’t start now.

“Just like memories.”

“What sort of memories?”

“Places. Pictures.” He swallowed. “What will happen to him?”

“We don't know. He had a few seizures. Those have stopped now. The trauma is to the lobe of the brain which processes sensory reception and language. P.C. told us to expect hemineglect, as in any case of brain damage — ”

“Brain damage.”

“Yes,” Justine said. “That is the nature of the literal beast.”

“But I can — ”

“Yes — and that is promising. And it complements the readings we have gotten, the activity on the brainscans, et cetera. Balfe will no doubt be interested. But he isn’t — like, you don't hear words — ”

“I never hear anything, especially not words.”

People who worked at the D.C. didn’t like to not understand. They thought they were all too smart to be left out of any of the precise machinations — even Justine, who was probably the least insufferable of the lot. “Maybe you could try to articulate it just this once,” she said. “So that people know what you’re feeling. And it could help the doctors.”

He didn’t want anybody to know how he was feeling. He was certain they wouldn’t understand it if he tried. As for the doctors he knew they could see the neural bridge on certain imaging implements. They applied the scanners to one’s greased forehead like the headset for electroshock. He didn’t need to tell them anything. They didn’t deserve to know anything but they did anyway. It was already unbearable how much they knew.

He must have made a face, because Justine said, airily, “Suit yourself.”

--

He dreamed. Later he realized they were Graham’s dreams. There was no speaking. Mouths were moving but nothing came out. Processing what was said came in the form of gestural inferences. He himself appeared not unprominently in the dreams as a figure at the edge of conversation. Once he was very close shouting in his own face with an expression of terrified grief. The messages telegraphed by this soundless shouting manifest in the color red. Flashes of this color like a bath of nightclubby neon intercut with the grotesque opalescent corpse-blue sheen of the creature’s blood, cutting jaggedly as lighting behind the field of crimson —

A hand at his shoulder. He sat up out of the dream, spine screaming. Time had moved. It was dark in the room and Balfe was at his quarter. “You look like shit, Damon,” he said.

“I feel — ” He had to clear his throat before he could speak. “Yes. I feel like shit.”

It seemed Balfe had wanted him to admit to his own weakness. Only after this admission did he present the little plastic cup of meds (two white and two red pills, familiar painkillers and antibiotics) and a bottle of water seemingly from thin air. “Justine was supposed to bring you back to your bed if she had to sedate you to do it,” he said as Damon downed the pills and half the water bottle.

He felt a flash of affection for Justine. And a redoubled amplification of his distaste for Balfe. If Graham was conscious it would be certain part of this was coming from him. It might have been anyway.

“Evidently she had something better to do.”

“Yes. We’ve sent her to Le Havre. The bloody frogs agreed to sell us La Meurteur.”

“I thought she was destroyed by Splinter.”

“Yes, and sunk in the Celtic Sea. They’ve dredged the parts and we’re buying whatever’s left — ”

“Jesus.”

Balfe paused, affronted to have been interrupted, for an uncomfortable period before he continued. “You two will pilot it, of course.”

He looked at Graham ensconced in the tentacular embrace of all his beeping machines. It was difficult to look at him, and anyway unnecessary, because all he needed to know he could feel. In their shared neural un-space his bruised consciousness floated weightlessly like a dead astronaut. In the big bed he looked very pale and small. Tubes of different sizes and textures were helping him breathe and supplying him with assorted translucent fluids.

“Justine said he might not be able to speak when he wakes up,” Damon told Balfe. “If he wakes up.”

“He doesn’t need to speak to co-pilot it. He only needs to communicate with you. Which he can do — which he is doing even now, through your established neural bridge.”

This immediately usurped the previously-set record of evil inherent in Balfe’s well-established strategy. “Do you hear yourself?” Damon hissed. “Are we the only friends in Britain?”

“Friends, is it?”

“Balfe, I thought I graduated from homophobic expostulation when I graduated from secondary school.”

“It’s your mind that takes it there. I only meant to remark, perhaps friendship is less than a wholly satisfactory term for your relationship, now that you can communicate inside one another’s heads. But if you want to call that friendship, then yes, you are the only friends in Britain; you have been since the Edinburgh Tragedy.”

Balfe referred to the attack, six months previous, that had leveled the city and killed the St. Andrews-based team.

“It can be done — ” Damon swallowed. He knew from experience that Balfe didn’t take kindly to this line of conversation. “We weren't born that way. You did this to us.”

“You volunteered.”

“Yes — yes.”

“You literally signed your life away to me, to this, Damon; I can bring you the paperwork if you need to refresh your memory.”

He had not looked at it since he had signed it. It had been under royally different conditions and, if he remembered correctly, was full of distant-future hypotheticals. If an attack is ever brought in the Atlantic, I agree to… At the time, they had still been living in a squat in Deptford. It was another six months before they would be evacuated by helicopter in the dead of night to this very Southend barracks when the first creature made it through Arctic waters.

“This isn't about you,” Balfe went on, his very favorite spiel; “this is about saving the world.”

“Do you think I — we don't know that? We looked into its eyes, Balfe.”

“What’s in there?”

Damon paused for a second, remembering. The great fluorescent pits looming up into the windscreen. Each and every time something about them seemed to momentarily stop his heart. Graham would know what this something was, and he would have some poetic description for it. “Conviction,” Damon said finally.

“Conviction to what.”

“Probably the same conviction we have, in another way.”

He could hear Balfe roll his eyes — “Have they done a brainscan on you since you got back?” — and ignored him.

“Maybe — the same conviction we had. I mean, as a nation. In our colonial ambitions.”

Balfe studied him. Damon knew that after departing he would go to medical and order the requisite psychological and neurological evaluations; he had done it before. “That reminds me,” he said, “I wrote a statement for you.”

“Why does it — ”

“You somehow manage to shock me every time I hear you speak. Lucky we have the best marketing team in the hemisphere.” He took a folded piece of paper from the pocket of his suit coat and tucked it into Damon’s good hand. “I need your approval,” he said.

“Do you really.”

“No — but the sooner you can start memorizing it the better. If you’re just going to sit here.”

He reached across the bed and clapped Graham’s ankle under the pale blue blankets. Damon started. If not for all the broken bones he might’ve gotten up. For a moment he almost thought he could and took one socked foot from the the pedal rest of the wheelchair and braced it against the cold tile floor. There was blood sticking in the grout between the blue-green panels. Balfe noticed when he turned and a sick expression spread slowly across his face like a drop of oil in water. His favorite thing about this two-person requirement, Damon understood, was the built-in leverage. It made all the unsavories remarkably straightforward.

There was nothing left to say. Balfe left the room and the door snicked shut. In the near-silence (pneumatics, breathing, air conditioning and electric hum) Damon could hear his own angry heartbeat in his ears. He unfolded the statement from where he’d clenched it in his working fist. It was typewritten on less than half a page of D.C. stationery.

On August 5 we engaged and killed a Category IV kaiju, since named Foulness, in the Thames estuary off the north coast of Kent. This was the first such creature engaged by the Defense Corps of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland and the first reported to attack in the Atlantic Ocean. We fought Foulness in a mecha built ten years ago in Auckland to contend with some of the first monsters that emerged from the Breach. We were nearly overpowered to the extent that some media reported our deaths and our mecha was destroyed.

Our survival should indicate our redoubled commitment to fight in defense of our country. Preparations are being made as we speak to improve our equipment. Already our scouting technology and advance-alert system is one of the best in the Atlantic. All British citizens should sleep soundly knowing that we are poised to rout any subsequent attacks.

He thought about burning it, and might have, but for the oxygen-rich environment of the infirmary rooms.

--

Leaving the room felt like he had left a limb or an entire region of his mind (he supposed at least the latter was partly true) alone someplace with no expectation he could come back and find it usable. But he was hungry and in need of something to write with. The infirmary room he’d vacated as soon as possible upon regaining consciousness had been maintained by the nurses as though his return was inevitable, and there was a tray of cold lunch on the side table. A panoply of little bowls containing assorted soft white things. He ate ravenously, mostly with his fingers, took a piss, vomited, yelled at the nurse who came to help him, profusely apologized, and begged her for some paper and a pen. She told him she would find some only if he would submit to “a few tests,” which of course turned out to incorporate at least some elements of the evaluations Balfe had no doubt ordered. “Do you feel like people are watching you,” et cetera. It was nearly impossible to answer these questions correctly — in this environment one was literally constantly being watched — and didn't matter anyway, because he could resoundingly fail them, incontrovertibly signal impending nervous breakdown, and still be required to pilot the mecha.

When this was done he rubbed the sore vein inside his arm where she’d taken blood. Eventually she came back with paper and a pen and he wheeled himself back to Graham’s room with the materials only to be intercepted by a phalanx of doctors and muscle who had evidently been placed there for this very reason. “What’s happening,” he said.

“Tests.”

He wished, desperately, not for the first time, that Justine was around to talk their way through. “What kind of tests.”

“Brainscans. Level A staff only.”

“I am bloody Level A staff!”

“Level A medical staff,” said one of the put-upon bodyguards.

He was escorted back to his room, seething. The nurse clipped the little heartbeat monitor onto his index finger and discussion amongst the technicians was general about a shot of “something to calm you down.” Damon categorically refused until Balfe’s name was dropped and silence diffused like mercury out of a dropped thermometer. He presented the abused vein inside his arm for further abasement and looked away. He hardly felt the needle break the skin before he fell asleep. At first there were no dreams, and then there were Graham’s dreams again, though he was far away. In the dream they were running together up an infinite spiral staircase made of glass.

When he woke up he was alone again. There was more food on the side table along with the notebook and pen. He ate slowly, collecting his thoughts, then wrote:

People know me and my friend Graham as students at Goldsmiths who were recruited to the D.C. before there had been a single kaiju attack in the Atlantic Ocean. In those days everyone thought it was all very hypothetical to the point that I was a student in acting. Scientists of renown were publishing articles in peer-reviewed journals expostulating that the Atlantic was ‘hostile to life’ to these giant aliens from another dimension. It is hard to imagine that we were ever so naive. We played in a really terrible band together, and one night after a gig we got in a fight with this guy who was harassing our friend, Justine. Justine worked for the D.C. as a kind of generalist in those early days. She had been tasked, among other things, with scouting for pairs of friends or amicable siblings who were short on cash and might want to take a test. She said: “It’ll never actually go anywhere, and you'll make twenty quid each.” She gave us a business card and we went to the the address on a Saturday around noon extremely hungover. The rest is history. I am sure most people thought it was altogether more heroic and selfless. The truth is that we wanted twenty quid each, which when pooled was forty quid and would buy a lot of LSD.

By the time it was no longer hypothetical, we had already signed our lives away to the cause of saving the world. Now we have fought and killed twelve of these creatures in British waters in a single ten-year-old machine, Seymour, which was destroyed last weekend in the Thames estuary with us in it. Our opponent was the first ever Category IV kaiju to attack in the Atlantic Ocean. It swiped the skull plating of our mecha clean open on the right side and in the process broke my arm in two places, three of my ribs, and my collarbone, perforating my lung along with other internal damage which has been explained to me and which I still don’t understand. The last thing I remember is seeing the sun through the roof as it peeled open. When I was unconscious, Graham killed it. I don't know how he killed it, because he is still asleep and I haven't spoken to him yet. He would have felt my bones breaking as well as the sensation of the machine’s skull tearing open as though it were his own skull. The neural load of supporting a mecha on one’s own is supposed to be nonwithstandable by the human brain.

I would like to use this opportunity to offer my thanks and apologies to my friend. Also to the Kiwis who built Seymour at the beginning of the war against monsters we now think of as Sub-Category B. Also to everyone who has ever thought of us fondly or wished us luck.

--

Later he saw the video. The French drones had captured the moment they were extracted from the busted cockpit. It was no wonder they had assumed death. Limp in the black pressure suits they were passed through legions of doctors in full anti-radiation gear against the potential busting of the interior reactor. The visor on Graham’s helmet had shattered to the extent that the blood in his nose and ears was visible when the drone’s camera zoomed in tight. His eyes weren’t quite closed and occasionally the camera caught some inhuman movement of their lens. Damon’s own helmet was entirely missing; his hair was full of blood and his neck lolled, limbs twisted wrongly, like a broken doll. He turned away. “There has to be a way to scramble the video transmission,” Balfe said to Justine at his left.

“Maybe if the reactor had actually fried…”

“We can’t shoot the drones down. That’ll start World War — however many we’ve got to now.”

“It’s the social contract of the digitally enabled era,” Justine said, “respectfully, sir.”

“The bloody world can’t see the two of them like this,” Balfe told her, as though Damon weren’t in the room. His face was fluorescent red. Damon’s ears were ringing. “It makes us look like fools.”

--

He wasn't sure how long it had been when he managed to get out of bed, fight his way into the wheelchair, and wheel himself back down the hallway to Graham’s room. The blockade had dispersed and Damon’s handprint against the scanner — though awkward from wheelchair-height — satisfied the door enough to let him through. Inside was quiet and still but for the blinking red light of the camera in the corner and the perpetual hum of all the machines. Evidently the results of the tests had shown improvement because the quantity of tubes had lessened, and the doctors had left Graham to breathe on his own. He would have looked very much like he was lying in state except for the pendulum kind of breath-movement of his chest. A nurse had crossed his hands for him artfully at his abdomen and a needle taped across the back of one of them was ushering clear fluids into the vein. The heartbeat monitor clipped to his index finger beeped reassuringly. There was deep shadowy bruising under his eyes but other than that his face was so bloodless that his hair seemed darker.

Damon pulled the wheelchair up beside the bed. He wished he’d gotten a better look at Justine’s chart. He wished he’d read any of the prevailing literature from the P.C. on the neurological effects of solo operation. He hadn’t really wanted to know. Typically, naively, he’d imagined that if either of them had to do it, it would be himself. There had been discussion at the beginning over which of them would be the right-hand pilot; it had seemed mostly complicated by Damon’s left-handedness. Otherwise he fit the bill: competitive, calculating. Thinking thirty steps ahead. “Aries,” Justine had said with maximal displeasure. In the barge en route from New Zealand, technicians had reoutfitted the machine to suit them. Stepping into it he felt like — well, to quote the Jam, to be someone must be a wonderful thing…

It — the machine — was gone now, of course, along with quite a bit of that hubris, though that had been among the first things to go. One rather could not be very proud when all was said and done. They knelt in the water, the first time, to pick up the tail, which had separated from the creature’s torso. The Pacific nations had designated clean-up crews for the mess afterward but to the D.C. this had seemed like a colossal waste of money. Through the machine’s hand Damon could feel the texture of it and that it was still warm. Oozing viscous blue gore like the inside of a lava lamp into the roiling sea. They went back to the barracks and waited in the machine while it was reviewed by the HAZMAT crews and hosed down. When this arduous task was completed the technicians shut down the software that joined their minds with the cataclysmic severity of a steel door slamming shut on one’s hand. Damon made a sound. When awareness filtered back in again through the veil of pain he saw that Graham’s eyes were bright and shocked with hurt.

In the control center Balfe and Justine had opened a bottle of expensive champagne which was uncharacteristically ignored in favor of running to the toilets to vomit. Existing contemporaneously were the terrible facts that the creature had been even more overwhelmingly horrible than they had expected and yet it had been alive and real with a heartbeat and eyes and they had killed it viciously. Graham sat back against the stall and moaned. The shape of his helmet had imprinted against his damp forehead. In those early days only glimmers came through the bridge when they weren’t connected; it was really like a wound, which sometimes picked open and bled again, stung a little with a nerve-deep sting like sticking your tongue in the place where you’d lost a tooth. Guilt and vile old terror and the blindsiding understanding it was all absolutely real, real as life, they were deep in it now, and sooner than later it would happen again. Damon heaved again but there was nothing left. “Probably we should go out there,” he said when he could manage it. He could hear the voices on the other side of the door; somebody was going to find the janitor who had the complete set of keys. Next would be the nurses and the sedatives.

“Can’t face them,” Graham said. Or, there was not much voice left, just a rawness. “Can you?”

“Ought to try.”

Graham thunked his head back against the metal. His hair was matted with sweat; in a few days he would cut it off, crookedly, by himself in his little room; Balfe would order psych evaluations, and whatever was discovered would never be pursued. He looked almost disappointed.

Damon got his feet under him and offered Graham a hand up. “You love champagne,” he said.

Graham took his hand. The wound tore a little deeper into a memory of the sight of the creature — like the cover of Ride’s Nowhere — cutting a long seam into the still water. First its horned snout emerged, and then the deep fluorescent blue eye which contained unknown worlds. He could feel Graham’s heart drop out. The ninth chord of that unique Eldritch terror which defies comprehension. And then the conviction, which Damon recalled from battle, which he had thought was his own.

“Sorry,” Graham lied, leveraging himself up against Damon’s weight. “Shall we go out there and get obliterated.”

“Yeah, let’s.”

He had enjoyed the resulting accolades. The onslaught of handshakes and embraces and manful back-pats had delighted him and had felt well-deserved, though this was also likely in part the effect of the champagne on an empty stomach. Graham had glad-handed as much as he was physically capable, which was not much, before disappearing, and Damon had found him hours later extremely drunk lying on the floor in his room in the pitch dark; having been unable to find more champagne, he had settled for lab alcohol, which they worked on together until they both passed out. Damon had been considering the wretched excess celebratory until he woke up into the cold light of his hangover. There was never champagne again, after that. They were reminded of their existential responsibility. It was easier, afterward, sometimes, depending. The technicians improved the software shutdown protocol, and eventually it didn’t matter anymore, there was no more wound, no more door, no more veil across the gateway…

In the infirmary room Damon took one of Graham’s limp hands. Upturned, the cup — and the blood under his ragged fingernails. The void space which usually shoved millions of jumbled thoughts like boiling sugar or fireworks into Damon’s mind was so still it was almost vertigo-inducing. “I know you’re there,” he blurted without thinking. It seemed very loud in the small, dark room. He remembered the camera in the corner and carefully maneuvered the bad arm to block his face so whoever was on the other end couldn’t read his lips. “Come back,” he said, not too proud to beg, as the Temptations would have said, “I know you’re there.”

--

He/they was/were dreaming about sounds, as he/they often did. Bright, sustained tones, like a foghorn or a radio broadcast test. These were no notes known to exist in the aural range of any human except in dreams. It happened relatively often and they had never been certain which of their minds it came from, because they never spoke about it upon waking. Perhaps it had happened before, though it was increasingly difficult to remember before. Sometimes he/they thought it had been similar. The sounds shifted into color: dawning tones for green, green and white on blue, like the Rothko painting, or otherwise like Eno’s “The Big Ship;” like the fields where they had grown up and the sky, the river; London, a perfection of patterning clouds, sun, spangled on the river and the buildings, the old patina-washed brick and the ghost prints of ancient cellars and foundations in the alleys and the parklands… They walked together in the old cemeteries talking about records and girls. In the flat gray light all color had extreme textural significance especially when one was royally fucking stoned. “When they were digging the Tube,” Damon said, “they had to make all the twists and turns, because they couldn’t get around all the tangled bones in the plague pits.”

“You’re full of shit.”

“Would I lie to you?”

“Yes!”

Damon ignored that, though it was true. “This whole city is built on death,” he said. He crouched at the edge of the path, knees cracking, and cleared the mulch of fallen leaves from one of the broken stones. It was still illegible with moss so he set about scraping his fingernail through the shallow weather-worn grooves.

“You’re going to get a curse put on us,” said Graham, but he knelt too, scrabbling in the thin gravel.

“Haven’t we already got a curse upon us?”

“Hmm. What’s it say.”

“I can’t tell yet.”

“I feel like it’s one of ours,” Graham said. “You didn’t feel a chill?”

“If you did, that means it’s yours.”

The sun split the cloud cover and seared across the path for a precious moment, dappling through the leaves in multidimensional humanoid light-shapes spiraling dust and pollen, and then moved on again. It was like having seen a ghost. “Dunno if I want to know what it says,” Graham said. He put a hand over his eyes. The pitchy darkness sealed things for a moment and then it moved again, signaled by another of the bright high tones. Blearily this next dream appeared; as in diametric opposition to the previous, it was a dark, terribly familiar room, with panic bleeding at the edges —

He woke up as though with an electric shock. When he dreamed about London, which was often, he woke up feeling the sledgehammer blow of nostalgia as a kind of ongoing amputation. It was cold and still in the infirmary room and the chorus of reassuring hums and beeps continued apace. It could have been moments or hours since he had fallen asleep in this place where time didn’t really exist; nothing had moved or shifted but for the slightest change to the scene, which was that Graham’s eyes were open, and the corner of his mouth moved. Damon stopped breathing. The other eye inside his mind broadcast this sunflower-yellow kind of oculus in which he could just-so see the vaseline-bleary image of himself. It felt like a very long time went by before Graham said, “Thought you were dead.”

This feeling was passed between them like a wave. A dull, exhausted relief. “How’s your head,” Damon asked him.

“It’s hell.” He pressed a thumb into his eye. “Need a cigarette.”

“Think you can walk?”

“Walk?”

“We can’t smoke in here, it’ll combust.”

Graham looked heavenward for strength. His eye caught the camera in the corner.

“Have to be quick,” Damon said. “Need help?”

Graham was already reaching carefully across himself to shut the drips from the IV bags. “What are you gonna do with one arm.”

“I don’t know. There’s rather a lot of those is all.”

“Yeah, but you need two hands.”

Damon couldn’t watch him pull the needles out of his skin. It didn't matter if he looked away because in the omnipresent broadcast screen behind his eyes he could see Graham doing it.

“D’you see a plaster somewhere?”

“On the side table. I don’t know if I could get it though, with one hand, you know…”

Graham huffed. Kind of a laugh and also a cough. They coordinated without speaking. When the purplish vein inside his arm and the clear blue one at the back of his hand were each taped over Graham sat on the edge of the bed with his toes just barely touching the floor. “Fucking hell,” he said.

In their haste the doctors and attendants had not managed to clean all the blood off him. It was unclear whether it was his own blood. Something about his bony knees at the hem of the pale blue hospital gown seemed to communicate in screaming technicolor that he was only twenty four years old.

“Alright?”

“You went sideways.”

“They said that might — like, part of your brain might not really see everything the same.”

“Wait, what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you should ask them.”

He tried one foot on the floor and then the other. Damon offered his good wrist for balance but regretted it almost immediately due to the ensuing vice grip. “Are you sure about this,” he asked.

Graham met his eyes. His were a little spinning and one was shot through with blood. “We can’t smoke in here,” he reiterated.

“But — ”

“Let me push you.”

“What?”

“Let me push the bloody chair and I’ll balance.”

He was biting his lip hard inside his mouth. He was very quiet when he was in pain and you wouldn't necessarily know he was suffering unless you were metaphysically sewn to him by the synapses. His hand slipped from Damon’s wrist to the chair’s armrest and then to the handholds at the back. The machine that had been monitoring his heartbeat by means of a sensor clipped to his index finger — now dangling empty toward the floor — set up a sustained alarm that meant the time frame in which they might escape the premises was rapidly narrowing. Damon moved the wheels and Graham took one unsteady step. “You’re heavy,” he said.

“You’ve been unconscious for days!”

Graham huffed again. He tried another step. “It can’t’ve been days,” he said.

“It has too been. And they had this — like a translucent octopus all over you, tubes and things.”

“How many days?”

“I don’t know. I’ve no idea what time it is even.”

Damon quickly reached and scanned his hand on the pad by the door. Perhaps they were lucky for once and whoever was supposed to be monitoring the cameras from the infirmary rooms had fallen asleep, because the screen flashed green and the door opened soundlessly into the gray-lit hallway.

“It’s three seventeen AM,” Graham said. He struggled to maneuver the wheelchair over the lip of the door, jostling the sharp edges of Damon’s broken ribs against each other. “Was on the scanner.”

“Did it say what day it is?”

“No. Do you know what day the fight was?”

“Sunday.”

“Are you sure?”

“Heard the church bells. Couldn’t you? You always remember the silly details…”

“Church bells ring all the time,” Graham said. “It doesn’t have to be Sunday.”

“They were the kind of Sunday wild bells where they just ring em and ring em.”

“Well it could’ve been a wedding or sommat.”

“Fine. Maybe it was Saturday. Who has a morning wedding any other day of the week? It was a weekend day.”

At the elevator Damon pressed the Up button that would bring them to the airlock out to the helipad and the seawall. Graham stayed behind him, balancing against the handlebars of the wheelchair, until he carefully maneuvered to lean against the wall by the elevator panel, closing his eyes.

“Alright?”

“Spinning…”

“Want to sit down?”

Graham cracked one baleful bloodshot eye. “Where? In your lap?”

“If you want.”

The elevator, when it finally arrived, seemed to move incredibly slowly. “Imagine getting married,” said Graham, leaning against the wall again, “in a sweet little church on the sea, and then seeing us go crashing by in that old thing with all the drones and sirens…”

“Sounds romantic.”

“If I witnessed all that on my wedding day, I would say, sorry love but I think that's a bloody sign.”

Outside the breeze was warm and heavy with mist and sea spray. In the darkness across the estuary Damon could see ship’s lights and the shadow of distant farmland against the reddish-black sky. The tide lapped against the narrow beach below the helipad where sometimes they found seaglass and washed-up plastic and, once, bones. “Where do you think it stops being Thames and starts being sea,” Graham asked him, counting stones in the seawall — six up, seventeen across — in search of the cigarettes.

“Between Shoeburyness and Sheerness.”

“Really?”

“I think. That would just make sense, really.”

Graham found the cigarettes, which he kept wrapped in a plastic bag along with a book of matches, hidden in a hollow underneath a loose stone. They were donated by some factory in Hull as a contribution to the war effort but Damon had long been certain they had only rejects to spare, as they were always stale and terrible. The tobacco tasted like grave dirt but underneath the taste he felt the nicotine cut a little wedge of light into his bloodstream. Graham’s hand shook a little and fumbled on the match but when he got his lit he literally sighed. A little smoke out his nose. The moonlight was so blue on the water it made him look particularly alien. Carefully, bracing himself against the pedal footrest of Damon's wheelchair, he sat against the seawall. “How was it then,” Damon asked him.

“How was what.”

“After the — ” He couldn’t say and gestured with a slashing movement across his own face. He thought of his last memory almost by accident and quickly he felt Graham’s memory of the same. It had nearly ceased to be disorienting to receive information in this way — through somebody else’s filter. Vision hauling up past the weak patter of the fluorescent readout smudging in the headset. Incomprehensible shouting on the tinny receiver drowned out by the horrible nails-on-chalkboard grating of steel cut through with alien cartilage. Sparks shaking from the tearing plates and — Graham would notice this — the uncanny vivid cloudless blue of the profound, unending sky, dawning in, looming in above them…

“You went away,” Graham told him. “It felt like being ripped in half. Plus the — ” He too indicated the slash through the right side of the skull and the eye. “And your fucking bones. How many?”

“There’s six breaks they said.”

“Felt like sixty.”

“Sorry.”

“You know I really thought you were dead. But then I thought, if you were dead, probably there would not — like, would there be pain, if you were dead? There would be no sensation that I would feel through you. Right?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t think there would be.”

“What did it feel like, when it all — when you had to carry it all.”

Graham paused and looked toward the sky. Stars blinking off and on amid the swiftly moving clouds. “Like a million electric shocks,” he said. “Coursing through. Zinging from the front to the back. And I felt very alive. But also like a rocket burning out. I mean, I thought you were dying, if not, you know, dead. Really it was like when you do a bunch of coke and then you feel like your heart’s going to spontaneously combust.”

“But you killed it.”

“Of course I killed it. I could have killed anything. When it was dead, I just — you were basically doubled over in your suit. Blood everywhere. I really honestly thought you were dead.”

“You keep saying that.”

“I never have felt anything more than that. That despair. I walked back to the beach. And I started to feel it fall apart — taking me apart while it fell apart. It was despairing too.”

Justine had said something like, the early interfaces are too harsh. The mecha's initial developers had been moving too quickly to develop failsafes to protect the mind in the case of single-pilot operation. At the beginning it had all been suicide anyway.

“What’s the last thing you remember,” Damon asked him.

“Falling.”

The memory played as on some hazy, pixellated film. The pressure of the staggered collapse against the machine’s hydraulic knees refracting through the neural bridge — lapping shallow water and rounded stones rushing up toward the spiderwebbing fiberglass windscreen. Some bright, pure, protracted sound. The unique pitch, like a flavor, some other (sixth, seventh?) sense, of Graham’s feeling in such memories — any of his memories from battle — which was a kind of grim determination, here tuned to its grimmest. There was a flash of hollowing certainty which Damon realized was an acceptance of the imminency of death. Then nothing.

They watched each other in the blue darkness. Graham went for another cigarette with still unsteadier hands. “If you had,” Damon managed.

“Yes. I would not wish it on you.”

“I could feel you when you were dead out. Banging on the door. Thank god.”

Graham paused for a minute, tapping his cigarette though there was no ash at the end of it. “It was like a light went out — but the light was — or like a candle, and then, just a black spot.”

He thought carefully about the memory but kept it to himself as much as he could. Damon felt just flickers — the creature’s eyes, the vivid blue blood, the endless black sea. Conviction.

“I was wanting them to see,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “I could have let it go down out there. I think it wanted to. But I wanted to make it so they couldn’t lie. They would have to pull us out like that with all the drones around.”

“A little morbid, eh?”

“I don't want them to tell some stupid story about me when I die.” He flicked the cigarette butt toward the water and the sparks snapped and roiled in the darkness. “Blah blah heroism and nonsense.”

“But you are — ”

“Nobody dies like Admiral Nelson, Damon, come on.”

“Shot in the back, being kissed by Captain Hardy…”

“I’m being serious,” said Graham. “It’s going to kill one of us, you know.” Cigarette finished, he was trying to prise the dried blood out from under his fingernails in lieu of looking in Damon’s direction. “One day.”

It was shocking to hear, if not surprising. “I don’t know that.”

“I wish you did.” He pressed his thumb into his eye. “I wish you did.”

“Why? I don’t need to. It’s not true.”

Dimly he was aware he sounded hysterical. Graham studied him with something approaching pity.

“It’ll be easier when it happens,” Graham said.

“So you think it’ll be you.”

“I don’t know. It could be you.”

“It’s not the bloody lottery!”

“Isn’t it? Who knows where its tail goes. Who knows what kind of death trap they give us to fight in now.”

“It won’t happen,” Damon said. His voice echoed off the wet stone and returned to the ear distorted. “I refuse to discuss this any more.”

“You think it’ll all wind down to the end of the war and no more of them will come out of the breach and Balfe and Parliament and all of the D.C. will say good on you boys, go on and retire in the country…”

“I said I didn’t want to talk about it any more,” said Damon, who spent much of his time fantasizing about exactly that improbable possibility, in which he was married to some capable woman and they lived on the moors with their intelligent healthy children and sometimes he spoke to Graham on the phone late at night by the fire, sipping a fine scotch, or otherwise Graham lived down the road, they went walking in the fields in duckboots in the fine rain; they spoke about the old days obtusely, like their veteran grandfathers, reflecting on the camaraderie and the moments of startling beauty — the liquid sunrise on the dark water, the view back north over the fields and hills in striking paintbox colors. Sometimes, before they saw the creature, he felt like one of the pilgrims from the ancient stories, whose reward for the strife and the endless road was a lifted veil: life never being quite so beautiful as when it might imminently be taken from you.

“Fine,” said Graham, who had felt all that, fantasy, memory, but there was nothing left to say.

“You had better not leave me here.”

That surprised him. His eyebrows moved and something of no-color like an exclamation point leapt out of the bridge. “Why — how would I?” He touched his temple. “I can’t.”

“Would you if you could.”

“I would leave this if I could.”

“But — ”

“You won’t leave, will you?”

“I won’t.”

“Balfe’s got to you, has he.”

“It’s true what he — ”

Graham imitated the nasally voice and the bluster. “This is about saving the world!” The bandage at the back of his hand where he’d taped over the little wound from the IV needle was sodden with black-in-the-moonlight blood.

“It is!”

“Then why does it have to be us? Only us?”

Damon settled his forehead in his palm, elbow propped against the armrest of the wheelchair. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Maybe it’s worth asking.”

“I’ve tried. How about you try?”

“He treats me like… a child in a Victorian orphanage with congenital syphilis.”

So help him Damon laughed. It was easiest to pretend, they both understood from experience, that laughter meant things were finished and solved and settled, so Graham laughed too, though it wasn’t really all that funny, neither what he’d said, which was true, nor the message behind it, which was more true, nor the entire substance of the conversation, which they each thought about often but never broached with one another in words. The laughter was almost regretful and grieved. Did not move to the eyes. The shared well-space of consciousness flickered with strikes of poisonous radioactive color: old wounds.

“How’s your head,” Damon asked him. Hating it, trying to let Graham know he hated it.

“Hell still.”

“And the spinning?”

“Well, sitting it’s fine. I guess we’ll see.”

“I’ll catch you if you fall.”

Graham looked at him with maximal pity. “How?”

It about killed him. He couldn’t speak. Graham counted up and over the stones in the wall to hide the cigarettes again. For a moment they shared some evil guilty feeling but would not apologize.

“Do you think anybody’s noticed,” Damon asked him.

“Oh, god, probably.” The clouds and the night fog moved on the long flat water against the colorless tidal flats and sandbars sloping toward the ship channel and the sea. Graham collected the cigarette butts and crouched shakily, bracing himself against the ground, to tuck them in the sand at the base of the seawall where they wouldn’t be found. “What’ll we tell them?”

“That we’ve been inside for — who knows how long and we needed some fresh air.” It had worked before, to some extent; as much as anything else they did to assert their humanity. “Will you push me again?”

Pockets of the approaching dawn had broken in the summer sky. They went back inside again together through the airlock.

--

The test, as he remembered it, had been very simple. Part had been multiple choice questions and another part had been written answers mostly about human nature considered on an existential scale. He had taken the test in one tiny windowless room and Graham had taken it in another of the same. They had handed the test in around the same time and then sat together in the waiting room. The administrator at the desk had offered them tea or coffee and Damon had asked for ginger ale to settle his hangover but this was unforthcoming. Beside him Graham had pressed the heels of his hands deeply into the sockets of his eyes in a posture that had communicated maximal suffering since even before.

After a seemingly interminable time the two lead doctors came back in. “You boys want another twenty quid,” he said.

Graham mumbled something incomprehensible. “Sure,” said Damon, who was thinking that perhaps this would allow them to buy some amphetamines.

This time they were kept together. Technicians brought these kind of sensory hairnets that went over each of their skulls. Graham was slouched deeply in his chair and his eyebrows had hiked halfway to his hairline. A much-more-attractive woman technician than Damon’s was affixing it to his forehead and behind his ears very gently. You’ve got to be kidding me, Damon thought.

Men and women with lab coats and glasses thicker than Graham’s — the attractive woman technician had tenderly removed them from his face (which had turned scarlet) and set them on a side table — were futzing about at some Manhattan Project-looking computer in the corner. Other technicians were affixing wires and muttering to one another and Justine eventually arrived to stand in the corner with her arms crossed tightly over her chest careful to look anywhere in the room except at either of them. Damon began to understand, rather belatedly, that perhaps this would hurt.

“Ready, you two?” said the technician with the most pens in his pocket.

“Uh — ”

“Neural handshake commencing in five.”

It was the first he had even heard the phrase. Of course he hadn’t read the paperwork. When he did, later, he realized he and Graham had signed away their rights to pursue retribution in the event of severe mental or bodily harm or death.

“Four. Three. Two — ”

It started like the sun blowing up in his face. Incredible sound like the end of a My Bloody Valentine concert amplified by orders of magnitude. He was not even certain it was real sound but it had the dissembling shatter-pattern of sound and it shook apart some of the strictures which heretofore had governed reality. Chiefly, of course, perhaps the most important wall known to exist, as elemental as the skins of atoms: the wall which isolated one’s independent consciousness.

When it was over — the chlorate-powder flash having faded with the ringing in his ears — he discovered there was another eye inside his mind which moved searchingly and rendered the room-world in starker lines. If it was difficult to describe when he knew what it was it was like some kind of terrible Eldritch thing then at the exact beginning. It was layered on top of his own perception but separate — ahead, forward. Heterophonic mirroring. Quickly this other eye showed a shocked-looking himself with equal parts empathy and consternation. Affection and fear that bowled him over. He turned to Graham and the face in the other eye pivoted and layered and he saw the self and the other collapsing as in some double-exposed nightmare film. As such he realized they were all Graham's thoughts and that the other eye was Graham’s eye and that inside Graham’s head was his own eye. Suddenly he felt faint.

He remembered, for some reason, being on acid in the V&A and understanding incontrovertibly that they had known each other before… in the ships at Mylae, as Eliot would’ve said. This other person ever just ahead of him in the maze of rooms and at last sitting on the floor to stare at a single painting until the museum closed and they were ushered out by aggrieved docents — refusing to speak on the street and eventually crying in M&S over pickle sandwiches whilst Damon cackled and people stared. His first words in two hours being “Fuck off!” Then he too started laughing and they found themselves eventually in such hysterics that they were booted from M&S and never given friendly looks in that establishment again. Out on the street it was cold and the wet night smearing shreds of synapse-firing light across the black glass and concrete. Graham’s eyes were kind of bright and liquid. There was only one cigarette left between them — there was only ever one cigarette left between them — and they shared it on the walk to the tube. Damon thought he really had come down because nothing was wiggling around the edges anymore but then it circled back around blindsiding him with its mighty psychedelic vengeance. Like a truck hit him way into the beginning of history before time. I know you from before mind existed, he almost said. Then the train came and midway home he was obliged to run between the cars to vomit.

Someone said his name. His eyes followed someone’s moving finger and someone else took the pulse in his wrist with a gloved hand. He felt the same movement and the same touch near-equivalently through the hole in his head.

In the crucible of all terror he understood not all of it belonged to him. He reached through the door into Graham’s memory which he passed desperately almost hand-over-hand like an escape rope of tied bedsheets until they held it together between them — the view from the top of Primrose Hill in London, Darklands on cassette, tinny in headphones, when his/your/my lungs burned from running and laughing and the color was the first of spring the skyline very like teeth the always-the-last cigarette in his/your/my fingers and at last the sun split the heavy gray cotton clouds like the eye the eye the eye the eye of god.