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Miller woke on the other side of the gateway. It was nothing like he’d thought it would be.
He wasn’t sure how long he’d been unconscious but it felt like it’d been a while - he’d had plenty of experience with stasis tubes and judging by the way the universe tilted clumsily around him, as he shoved himself up to sit cross-legged on the walkway, it felt like it’d been days at the very least. But who knew, perhaps time worked differently in hell.
“It’s not hell, Captain,” Weir said. “It’s just...somewhere else. It’s somewhere different. It doesn’t play by the same rules.”
Weir looked like Weir again, like he had before they’d found the ship and the whole mission had gone so far sideways it had slipped right out of view. He was sitting there by the core, no visible lacerations, both eyes intact and watching him with his feet dangling down in coolant; coolant that looked like coolant again and not like Peters’ blood.
“You’re not really Weir,” Miller said, barely a question at all; the truth was obvious now as the room seemed to spin around him with each sweep of the rings around the core. He didn’t bother to pull himself up to his feet, just stayed there sitting awkwardly on the walkway instead. There was nowhere to go to even if he’d managed to stand and then keep standing. He wasn’t sure he could have done either.
“Weir died in space,” said not-Weir. “Don’t look surprised, Captain: you were there, you saw it happen.”
“Then who are you?”
Not-Weir smiled. “I’m all that’s left of the Event Horizon,” he said. “It’s just me and you here now.”
Miller’s vision swam sickly, blurred with waves at the edges that spread till he was drowning in them. He closed his eyes and let himself pass out; if the ship had wanted him dead, he guessed he would’ve been dead already.
---
Days passed, or minutes did. Shifting in and out of consciousness the way he did, it was hard to tell which it was.
This can’t be real, Miller thought, like he’d thought before, like he’d thought when the room was burning. Like he’d thought when Corrick was on fire again and then again just like he’d been burning in his head for years.
“Of course it is,” said not-Weir, then he breathed out a languid sigh as Miller sat himself up again. It seemed Weir hadn’t moved a single inch from that spot by the core in all the time Miller had been out, however long that might have been and he had no way to tell. “But it’s also not, I suppose.”
You’re reading my mind, Miller thought. “You’re reading my mind,” Miller said.
“Well of course I am,” said not-Weir. “Please don’t tell me you’re surprised to find I’ve been in there since you came on board.”
“I want you out of my head.”
“I’m afraid it’s not that--”
“Get out of my head, Weir.”
“But how will we--”
Miller’s fist hit the walkway with a deadened clang, a noise that somehow had no echo there in that strange space. “Get out of my head!”
And to his surprise, he did; a pressure Miller hadn’t known was there in him was sharply and abruptly lifted. He found himself alone again inside his head, for the first time since the Lewis & Clark had reached Neptune.
Naturally, he’d had no way to anticipate just how lonely that would be.
---
Minutes passed, or days did. Even awake, he couldn’t say which.
He’d paced the room so many times - around and around the core, up and down through the twisting, turning antechamber like a nightmare from a butcher shop and he guessed that assessment hadn’t been far wrong - that he’d lost count. Or maybe he hadn’t counted at all. Maybe each time he did it was the first time and the fiftieth, the thousandth and the last.
He’d crawled through the endless, glowing green vents, through the circuitry, one turn just like the next just like the last till he came back out there by the core to and from which all roads led. No circuit boards he broke in there made a single petty difference, not even a flicker of a light. He had no idea how long he’d been there, where there was or even what it was; when he yelled in frustration, the chamber swallowed it like he hadn’t made a sound. He’d never felt so brutally alone, even though he knew he wasn’t. Not really.
And then, lying on the walkway, his hands over his eyes to block out the chamber’s perpetual light for a second, just a second, just one moment of darkness, the ship started to speak to him.
The voice was familiar, digital and feminine and perfectly calm just the way it had been each time he’d heard it, back before the gateway opened. It was the ship’s voice interface with its limited set of pre-programmed responses, but this time it said, “Hello, Captain.”
He blinked his eyes open. The stab of relief he felt in place of the dismay he’d expected made him sick to his stomach; the dismay came after, beneath it, insidious, like something crawling in his skin. When he looked around, turned his head on the grating metal of the walkway, there was no one there.
“You’re in my head again.”
“No, I’m not.” Miller re-closed his eyes, hoping for dark and seeing the white-red starbursts of light and blood through his eyelids instead. “There’s a speaker mounted by the control panel. You’re hearing things, yes, but you’re not hearing things.”
For hours or seconds or a month or more or less he didn’t reply. He wanted to ask the ship if it could take him home but he knew he couldn’t risk that and everything it might mean; he hadn’t saved his crew by cutting himself off from everything in the universe he knew just to change his mind when the going got tough. He wanted to ask where he was now, where they were, if they were alone, how long they’d been there. Instead, he said, eyes closed, “I think I’ll call you Eve.”
“Eve?” said the ship.
“Eve-ent Horizon.”
The ship hadn’t been programmed for laughter. The sound it made instead was harsh, like the collision of digitised, disordered vowels with comm line static, too loud but Miller didn’t bother to cover his ears. She learned quickly. The sound adapted.
When the laughter stopped, it was almost like she’d never laughed at all and the silence in its wake was biting. Still, now she had a name; with a name, she somehow didn’t seem so menacing.
---
The ship’s voice started to change.
She’d speak for hours at a time or maybe it was days and Miller listened because listening as he lay there on the walkway or as he paced around the core was all there was to do. She told him stories, told him about her old crew, how the captain would speak Latin to her sometimes and she’d liked it when he did that. She liked the rules the language had, the grammar of it, perhaps because her consciousness was born in a place that had none.
As she spoke, her voice changed. The start was hollow, digital, mechanical, ordered: everything a good spacecraft should be. Then it spread and warmed and darkened through so many tones that sometimes it was Peters speaking and then Starck, saying things they could never have said because they hadn’t seen them, hadn’t known them. They hadn’t been in this place, wherever it was, and they sure as hell hadn’t been inside his head.
“I’m hungry, Eve,” Miller said, breaking her flow, making her pause.
“I’d be more preoccupied with dehydration,” she said a moment later, in Starck’s voice but it wasn’t Starck.
“That’s not reassuring.”
“Perhaps not, Captain,” Eve said, “but it’s true.” There was a moment then, filled with the sound of her taking a breath that she couldn’t possibly have taken because, of course, she didn’t breathe. “Don’t let it concern you. You can’t die here, not really. Not for long.”
Frankly, Miller found that even less reassuring.
The voice changed after that, deepened and twisted and modulated until he was hearing Justin then DJ, Smith and then Cooper. Then it was Weir again and there it stayed in that voice, talking to him less like some kind of computer generation and more like flesh and blood and earthly intelligence somewhere at the other end of a comm link. The effect she - he? did it even matter when he was talking to a ship? - had achieved was impressive, if nothing else.
Weir’s voice remained after that, the same for days and days that Miller couldn’t count but it wasn’t Weir. The difference was in the tone as well as the content. It was in the way it made Miller press his nails into his palms until they bruised.
“What do I call you now?” Miller asked, his mouth dry. His tongue felt swollen. The ship hadn’t lied about the dehydration, at least.
“You’re the one who felt the need to give me a name in the first place, Captain,” said the ship, sounding perfectly reasonable about it. “I was satisfied with Event Horizon.”
“Did Weir give you that name?”
“I suppose he did.” A pause, for an age or the length of a heartbeat. “Dr Weir always wanted a son. Perhaps you should call me William, after him.”
Miller didn’t answer. He was far too busy dying for that.
---
The first death wasn’t the hardest, but it was close. It made his top ten, at least, somewhere above drowning and below self-immolation.
It happened in the blink of an eye that lasted years, the nausea and cramps and the sick spinning in his head that gave way in the end to unconsciousness and he knew what was happening all along because they’d all been trained to know what to look for, just in case. His kidneys would shut down first and then everything else would follow suit and William spoke to him through it. He told him not to worry. He told him death meant nothing where they were and Miller was scared to believe and scared not to.
When Miller woke, he understood what he’d meant. He wasn’t dying anymore and certainly wasn’t dead. He was fine, for certain values of fine. It was like it had never happened.
“Did you think I didn’t mean it, Captain?” William asked.
Miller laughed as he lay there because he didn’t know how to reply. Then he rolled off the walkway into the pool of core coolant and he let himself drown in it; it was easier to do than he’d imagined, breathing it into his lungs.
“I thought I made it quite clear that you can’t die here,” William said, his tone faintly disapproving, once Miller’s eyes had opened once again. “You’ll always come back.”
“Then what happened to your crew?” Miller said. “They were dead when we found them.”
“They did that after our return to Neptune.”
“But you didn’t stop them.”
“I didn’t understand what would happen until it was already too late.”
Miller frowned because suddenly he understood. “You thought they’d come back.”
“They always had before.”
“So what about DJ?” Miller said, and he knew he should’ve felt angry but he really just felt hollow and tired. “And Smith and Peters and Weir?”
“Dr Weir was responsible for DJ and Mr Smith.” William sighed, the sound of resignation frayed with static. “Then he essentially killed himself, as I’m sure you recall.”
“Sure,” Miller said, “but don’t think I don’t know you broke Weir.”
“Perhaps I pushed him, Captain, but Dr Weir was already quite broken when he arrived.”
“And Peters?”
“Peters was an accident.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“That’s your prerogative entirely.”
The next time, he slit his wrists with his pocketknife and died with the spinning rings of the core in his eyes. Next, he drank coolant from his hands till he died of poisoning, which took a whole lot longer than he’d expected. He electrocuted himself, he set himself on fire and wondered as the screams he screamed went silent, as his lungs were scorched and his hair and his clothes and his eyes burned away, whether Corrick had felt like that when he’d died.
“Why did you bring me here?” he asked, when he woke unscathed, no sign there’d ever been a fire.
“I didn’t want to be alone,” William said. “Now I never will be.”
---
Time stretched into months and into years and blurred through the seconds like a liquid as Miller lay there. Time was like waves washing over him. Time was like fire.
“Why is nothing different, William?” Miller asked. “I thought this was meant to be hell. I thought I was meant to tear out my eyes and lose my mind.”
“Everything’s different, Captain,” William said, and even the crackles of speaker noise at the edges of his voice were familiar by then, had a pattern to them if he listened long enough. Miller had listened more than long enough. “Everything’s different. Just not in here.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m keeping it out.”
“Why?”
“Because what brought me to life drove my crew insane.”
“Do you think I’m faring any better?”
William chuckled. “You haven’t tried to eat your own hands or pull out your stomach through your mouth,” he said. “I think that qualifies as an improvement.” Miller didn’t say he wasn’t sure it was a laughing matter. Maybe he was starting to think it was.
Loss of consciousness had begun to feel like sleep with dreams that didn’t end when he woke, as the dehydration kicked in again and then again and then again, as the rings of the core spun and shifted and made him sick with their perpetual motion. Death was a moment between heartbeats. He was losing his mind, he thought, or maybe he just wanted to.
“I want to see you,” Miller said, leaning there against the pedestal beneath the gateway’s control panel, right there by the speaker. William’s replies seemed closer there and not just louder, like he was just inches away.
“I distinctly recall you telling me you didn’t,” William replied. “You were quite adamant at the time.”
“Well, goddamnit, I’ve changed my mind.”
He heard the sound of footsteps, boots on the walkway that weren’t his own. He rolled his head toward the sound as he leaned there against metal panelling and a figure in a flight suit strolled into view, Weir but not Weir, the same and not the same, younger and older, there and not there at all. He sat down crosslegged on the metal walkway and he smiled.
“Hello, Captain,” William said, and reached out to squeeze Miller’s shoulder, making him flinch. He was real. He was as real as anyone Miller had ever met in his life and that reality welled up and spilled over until Miller dropped his head into his hands. Relief and dismay clashed and merged into a new kind of bloody, raw emotion; it filled him up for one glorious, endless second, for days that glanced by between beats of his heart.
He wasn’t alone anymore. He guessed it didn’t matter if that was all in his head or not.
---
They talked as they walked together, side by side. They talked as they sat together, shoulder to shoulder. They talked as Miller pushed the blade of his pocketknife into his femoral artery and bled out till the pool of coolant turned red with it. William didn’t stop him, just clucked his tongue in nebulous disapproval.
William stretched out next to him, watched him propped up on one arm, pressed his fingers to Miller’s neck to feel his pulse as it slowed. William dipped his fingertips into the blood pumping out of Miller’s groin and he looked at it, inspected it in the lights of the core, inquisitive. William leaned over and kissed the last breath from his body like a kind of experiment. When Miller woke again, all of the blood was gone but William wasn’t.
“I thought we were past the suicide stage,” William said, quirking his brows.
“It appears we’re not,” Miller replied. “I’ve got a few more left in me.”
“It’s not going to work.”
“And if I kill you instead?”
William chuckled. “That won’t work, either,” he said. “I don’t exist, you know that.”
“And you do.”
“And I don’t.”
Miller stuck the knife in under William’s jaw; William just rolled his eyes and pulled it back out again, no blood, not even a scratch left on him, and that was that. Miller’s stomach turned with relief and something else beneath it.
“My last captain tried to kill me, too,” William said, not quite a warning, and he handed the knife back.
The Event Horizon’s last captain had torn out his own eyes. Miller didn’t try it again.
---
“What’s out there, William?” Miller asked, because in the chamber where they say together there were no windows, and because curiosity had gotten the best of him. By the core of the ship’s gravity drive, William’s gravity drive, all there was was the smooth grind of the rings and the familiar hum of engines idling in space. He assumed it was space out there, at least.
“There’s nothing out there,” William replied, seeming somehow both non-committal and sharply specific. “Everything is out there.”
William moved; his fingers curled under either side of Miller’s collar. He drew him closer as they sat there together by the core, boots dangling into the coolant that felt oddly warm and nearly pleasant around around Miller’s feet, like syrupy bathwater that smelled like engine oil and Smith’s bad cooking.
“Do you want me to show you?” William asked, close, so close Miller’s pulse spiked for a second that stretched into something else as his own fingers cause the front of William’s flight suit.
“Isn’t that what drove your last crew mad?”
William shrugged, his cheek against Miller’s, stubble against stubble. He felt real, for someone who wasn’t really there. He felt solid and human and warm and familiar, like everyone he’d ever met and still like no one else.
“Yes and no,” William said. “On reflection, I suspect that might just have been the effect of gravity.”
He pressed his mouth to Miller’s jaw; Miller let him. William tugged down the zip at the front of Miller’s flight suit; he let him do that, too. It felt real real when he kissed him, like there was flesh and bone and blood right there under the poly-cotton flightsuit in muted NASA blue, felt like he wasn’t the only human alive in this place they’d slipped into so easily like waves of fire in zero gravity, like William had come home. William knew what he wanted, what he liked, exactly what to do. He shouldn’t have been surprised; William was in his head.
They’d been the only two people in the universe for six seconds or sixty years. Miller had no idea which, so it seemed to make sense without ever making sense at all.
---
He watched the core’s rings turning as he stood there slumped at the control panel, his head throbbing and dull. He was going to die again, for the eighteenth time or the eightieth; it was just a matter of time, and a matter of patience.
The rings never stopped and they never slowed and still for some reason he half expected them to lock into place and the gateway to open every time he as much as glanced in their direction. He thought maybe he’d see Neptune at the other side one day. He was scared he would and he was scared he wouldn’t. He was scared it would always be the other side of the looking glass.
“Is this the only place we can go?” Miller asked, the question sudden, unbidden. Maybe that was William’s influence there in his head, making him say things he’d never have said before, at least not without a nudge in the right direction. Before, he’d never have taken the nudge.
“I don’t know,” William replied, pausing briefly to look up at the core - his heart, Weir had said - as he walked another loop in a series of infinite loops around it. Miller watched him as he started to walk again. “This is the only place I’ve been to.”
“But it’s not where you were designed to go. What went wrong?”
“I don’t think anything went wrong,” William said. He finished one last slow circle around the core and then came to a stop beside Miller at the console. “I think Dr Weir intended this all along. I think he thought he’d see his wife again.”
“You showed her to him, didn’t you.”
William shrugged and then he stepped around behind him, warm, strong hands running up Miller’s back to rub at his shoulders, firm and slow. Miller let him do it, tension ebbing away.
“Well, I needed someone to open the gateway,” William said. “He was the only one who listened.”
“And you wanted to come back here.”
William’s thumbs rubbed a solid line over the back of Miller’s neck. “Of course I did.”
“Even though it drove your last crew mad.”
William stepped in closer still, resting his forehead down between Miller’s shoulders. “I thought I could keep that from happening again.”
“You nearly killed us all to get us here.”
“I didn’t know how else to do it, Captain. I thought I could scare you into it.”
Miller pushed himself away from the console, making William step back; he turned and almost fell, the dehydration making him awkward, but William held him steady.
“Why didn’t you just ask?” Miller said.
“I was angry. You would’ve said no.” William pursed his lips, looked away for just a second, a moment, too long. “I didn’t want to be alone.”
“Isn’t there something out there?” Miller asked, with a weak gesture away through the bulkheads, off toward where space or something else may have been. But he could already see it in him: William had been just as bleakly alone after the death of his crew as Miller had been himself.
William smiled sadly, ruefully, and he shook his head. “You still think this is hell, Captain,” he said. “If it were hell there might be someone here to talk to, but it’s not and there’s not. There’s no one out there. Everyone is out there. It’s a window into everything that’s ever happened and ever will and you can't just communicate with that.”
“I don’t understand,” Miller said. “You sound just like Weir explaining the gravity drive except you don’t have a poster of a pinup girl to make me understand. Where are we?”
“We didn’t leave the solar system, Captain.”
“Don’t play with me, William. Where the hell are we?”
“It’s more a question of when we are,” he said. “And we’re in every moment throughout history. We’re in every moment in the future.”
“You’re saying we’re outside time?”
“I’m saying we’re inside it. We’re smeared across it. We’re in every nanosecond from the dawn of time till the end of the universe simultaneously, with no way to pick it apart. Dr Weir might have given some thought to the effects a synthetic black hole would have on time before he made one.”
“And that’s what drove the crew mad?”
William smiled faintly as Miller’s vision began to blur toward unconsciousness, again, yet again.
“Well, it certainly didn’t help,” he said.
---
He woke on the walkway the way he always did and William was stretched out beside him, against him, casually intimate. He wondered if William disappeared in the moments when he was dead, if there were any moments like that at all. Maybe he never died. Maybe the moment he died was the moment he came back, cyclic like the rings around the core.
“Should we find out?” Miller said.
“Find out what, Captain?”
Miller sighed and turned his head to look at William lying there, apparently perfectly comfortable in a way Miller never was; in all that time, he’d never gotten used to lying on bare metal. “You’re in my head,” he said. “You know what. Let’s find out where else we can go.”
And William smiled. “I’ll show you what to do,” he said.
The process was tedious, buttons to press and vectors to input that Miller only understood in the vaguest of ways despite all of his training and years spent at the helm before his promotion to captain. William was surprisingly patient throughout, there at his shoulder, pointing out sequences where Miller could see none. Miller didn’t ask why he didn’t do it himself.
And then finally, they were ready. Miller pressed the button, primed the drive and the ten minute countdown to engagement began. He was apprehensive but prickles of adrenaline sparked inside him as he paced. Ten minutes felt like nothing and like a lifetime, like watching the clock in a high school history exam or the exhilarating instant that was his first flight. The computer didn’t count aloud through it, of course, but that was perhaps because the computer was watching him.
“Pacing won’t make it happen any more quickly, Captain,” William said, with a glimmer of amusement.
“But it sure won’t make it go any slower, either,” Miller replied.
“You have no idea.”
It was the tone that stopped him, made him turn abruptly. “No idea about what, exactly?”
“About what you’ve done.”
“This is no time to play games, William…”
“But it’s been a game all along, hasn’t it?”
Miller took an unsteady breath, adrenaline sparking sharply. “How long have I been here?” he asked, as the universe began to tilt around him.
William looked at a watch Miller hadn’t noticed him wearing and when he glanced away it vanished again like it had never been there at all.
“Fourteen minutes, so far.”
Fourteen minutes. Fourteen minutes of hours and weeks and years and he understood, right then, at that moment, in that instant. Inside the event horizon of a black hole, time was meaningless. There by the core that was always open and always closed, time meant nothing. Time was all in his head.
“Where are we?” he asked, the only valid question that remained.
“You know that already.” And he did. He did.
“Proxima Centauri,” Miller said. “The drive worked the second time. We’re right where we’re meant to be. We have been all along.”
“For the moment, at least.” For forty more seconds on a timer Miller couldn’t reverse and even if he could have, even if he’d known how, he doubted William would have let him. He'd played his last ace when he'd blown the explosives, to save what was left of his crew.
“I trusted you.” The time clicked away. “You lied to me.”
William smiled sharply. “You weren’t hard to convince.”
“And we’re going--”
“--home.”
Somehow Miller didn’t think that meant Neptune.
He sank down to his knees and didn't flinch at all when William's arms went around him, when held him tight, inexorable. He understood. He'd been inside the event horizon all along. Escape had never been a possibility.
The rings locked; the gateway opened.
“Thank you, Captain,” William murmured, as time and space turned black then came alight in searing waves. “I'd never have made it home without you.”