The Raft: A Novel (40 page)

“No,” I said. “Technically, you’re right, I suppose. We are a natural part of the world. That doesn’t count for much, though. Not any longer, when we’ve made such a concerted effort to destroy our own home. If we’re natural, what does that say about us, or the world, for that matter?”

“Hm. Yes. Well, perhaps then it would be better to classify you as natural
disasters.
” Father laughed at his own joke. I wondered then how many humans he had ever met. Had these ideas been programmed into him or had he somehow been able to reach his own conclusions? How much experience could he have had on the subject?

“It does seem to be the case, though, doesn’t it? Some humans treat their own intellect with such antipathy,” he went on, “as if it is an alien thing. Intellect is treated like a dirty foreign object brought into the world on the underside of your boots! They seem to think it is noble to be dumb and ambling, without self-awareness, that you should all be possums and sunflowers and three-toed sloths.” He paused and sipped again. “But never mind all that. We could go on about it all night. Most importantly, the two of you are here. And that gives me hope.”

“Hope?” Gideon asked. “Hope for what?”

“You have no idea, do you?” Father said, jingling his ice. “He said you wouldn’t.”

“Who did?” I asked. I rolled my tumbler in my hands. The rain came down harder, clattering on the windows like a thousand fingernails.

“I know you’re looking for your son,” Father continued. “I also know you are not here by chance.You’ve been led here,” he looked at me closely, “but something tells me you know that already.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I was told by a departed member of my family, who was also my best friend.”

“Shen,” I said.

“Ah, so you do know,” Father said, raising his glass.

“That’s
all
I know,” I said. “I was given a name and nothing else.”

“Well, it’s enough for me. Enough for me to tell you …”

He sat up and grabbed the bottle of whiskey, tilting the neck towards us in offering. We held out our glasses. He smiled and topped us up. “It goes down smoothly, doesn’t it?” he said. “Much more than most things these days.”

Other earth

I
take it you gentlemen have heard of Chang’e 11?

If you haven’t, it’s important to know the story starts right there. It all goes back to that fateful ship. The day it took off and the day it came back. Perhaps one day, with a bit of luck, the story will end there too. For now, however, it is crucial that I tell you everything I know about Chang’e 11 … It is a story you may choose not to believe, but I’ll leave that to you. At this juncture, what matters is I give you a chance to at least
make
that choice.

You see, no matter what anyone says, Chang’e 11 was one of a kind. It was the largest astromining vessel ever created, sent into the furthest reaches of space in the hope of extracting mineral resources from asteroids, spent comets, moons and planets. It was also the answer to a specific problem: the shortage of resources here on earth. But these kinds of answers are always the same, aren’t they? They are considered just as far as solving the problem concerned, but seldom as far as the problems that invariably follow.

After Africa—the flagship of earth’s resource supply—ran dry, the developed nations (having spent their time and money building up Africa’s infrastructure in exchange for access) were faced with a conundrum. They realised they’d put their stock in a land of holes. So Africa was promptly abandoned, creating a vacuum of promises to be filled by new generations of dictators and enraged citizens. This is what led to the rise of The Borrowed Gun, the aggressive multinational African faction. The movement was not so much a revolution as a form of lionised pillaging. I don’t imagine you remember this, but it was all over the news. The details have been lost in time with everything else.

The Borrowed Gun infiltrated several major international cities and plundered on a mass scale. Skyscrapers and airports were stripped bare. Factories were cleaned out. Department stores in popular shopping destinations were ransacked or bombed. Most attacks seemed to come from inside and there were few options to resist the sheer number of internal aggressors.

In the end, there was only one major corporation that remained immune to the onslaught of The Borrowed Gun. Conveniently, the centre for this corporation was located in the desert—out of the targeted cities—and had the foresight to anticipate the backlash of a group who’d been empowered by the very nations that had once forsaken them. It was a corporation that had long since disowned its national affiliation, knowing all too well governments were weak and disorganised bagholders, the perfect Straw Men for a misinformed, overzealous faction such as The Borrowed Gun. The name of the corporation? Huang Enterprises.

All they really had to do was do what they did best—cut a deal. So that’s what they did. The deal was that The Borrowed Gun would continue to cripple the competitors and Huang Enterprises would supply The Borrowed Gun with resources and weaponry, like feeding bloody raw meat to a vicious junkyard dog.

Now, around about this time it just so happened that Huang Enterprises announced the return of Chang’e 11.

Forty years earlier, Chang’e 11 had been built on the dark side of the moon. It was built for that very problem, the limited supply of resources on earth. It took seven years to build and although it was the size of a small town it only required a crew of nine astronauts for a nine-year mission period. The selection process was rigorous but covert. No applications were submitted. The members were scouted: nine of the finest engineering and scientific minds in the world.

Chang’e 11 remained a secret right up until a week before the launch. The world, of course, was stunned by the knowledge of its existence. They watched as it was launched into the cosmos, this titan of a ship manned by a mere handful of pilots. They watched as it made its way to 4660 Nereus, tagging its first asteroid with a self-replicating refinery. They watched as it ventured further, to the moons of Jupiter, as it made its way towards the edge of the Solar System, and then … they stopped watching altogether.

In an instant, there was nothing to watch.

Chang’e 11 was gone.

Off the radios. Out of range.

No reason could be found. There was no distress signal. No messages. No readings on the earth-based warning systems. It simply vanished, as if it had never existed at all, and with it, the nine astronauts who had been selected for the mission.

This is probably as much as you know; this is what
everyone
knows, apart from the fact that it did eventually return, even though not much was publicised. For one, the news was that one day there’d been a sudden blip on a screen and the ship had been found drifting near Saturn. The news was also that, despite numerous attempts, no radio contact could be made with the crew. Auto-piloting systems had been reinstated and Chang’e 11 brought safely back to earth. The last two pieces of news shared with the world were that the crewmembers were the same age as when they’d left and that they had no memory of where they had been. That was it. That was what people were allowed to know. But what
nobody
knew—and never did find out—was where Chang’e 11 had been for all those years.

And that, gentlemen, is where the real story lies.

It was Shen who told me all of this. He was one of the nine astronauts. An exceptional mechanical engineer and the captain of Chang’e 11. We’d often sit together in this house and he’d explain what had happened, where they had been, what it had meant … because, of the few things the world thought they knew, one supposed fact turned out to be untrue: the nine did remember where they had been. They remembered all too well. The problem, you see—the reason it was covered up—was because of
what
they remembered.

At first Shen didn’t say much about the voyage, but over time the details of his extraordinary experience were revealed. We sat in this very conservatory and he told me everything. The truth of a ship that had disappeared not only from our Solar System, but from our universe.

This had apparently happened without their knowing. Everything was going according to plan, Shen said. One moment they were on course to a mining destination and the next moment the instruments on Chang’e 11 were telling them they’d returned to the geospace of earth. They thought they had been brought back. They thought the mission was complete.

Chang’e 11 made contact with ground control and landed. Upon landing, they went through the standard decompression procedures and were welcomed by their friends and their family. For a while, he said, everything seemed normal. It was the earth they knew and remembered. They were initially quite happy to be home. However, it wasn’t long before irregularities began to surface. Shen said that, though none of them could put their finger on it, they were struck by the sense everything on “earth” was off kilter. The number of steps outside a building would be different on different days. Sometimes an object in the sun wouldn’t cast a shadow. People would say and do unusual things: strangers would often stare at them or not talk to them at all. There were only a handful of weather variations: sunny, cloudy, rainy. The astronauts recognised their homes, their wives, husbands, children and friends, but even these people did not seem themselves. They always talked about the same thing or repeated the same actions.

It was the world the astronauts had left behind, but somehow it was a world incapable of
changing
in any way. He said it was as if every day was simply replaying itself, and they were participants, actors in a contrived theatre of elaborate props.

It was his once-friend and colleague Quon who noticed it first. It was also Quon who came up with a theory. His theory was as outrageous as it was reasonable: they weren’t on earth at all. Wherever they were, their memories had been downloaded and re-uploaded to give the impression of them having arrived at home. A simulation of some kind. Quon was also the one who proposed that the only way of escaping this manufactured reality was to commit suicide. If they killed themselves, he theorised, they’d be pulled from the program, the way one wakes before falling to a death in a dream.

It was clear to Shen that Quon struggled with that pseudo-reality. Perhaps more so than himself. It was no place for a man committed to a life of logic, he said. In a world where basic math no longer functioned and physics was subjective, Quon strained to stay his normal, composed self. This led to Quon being the first to test this theory. He killed himself. Shen was there when it happened, but he did not immediately follow suit. He still had his doubts. He continued to examine the world by himself, to investigate Quon’s claim about it being a simulated world—but it was the event of Quon’s suicide that ended up providing Shen with the most striking evidence to support the theory.

After Quon took his life, there was no funeral. No one recalled him having ever having existed. More than that, any connections to Quon vanished at the same time he did. His wife was abruptly non-existent. His house. His friends and family. Any footprint he’d left was gone. And it was this incontrovertible peculiarity that led Shen to finally do as Quon had done, and take his life. He rode an elevator to the rooftop of a tall building and leaped over the edge. Upon hitting the ground, he awoke in his hyper-sleep chamber in Chang’e 11. The rest of the crew was there. Quon and the other seven. They’d been waiting for him.

On Chang’e 11, each of them had an incredible story to tell. A story of a life they thought they’d had on that earth. Each crew-member spoke of limited landscapes, two-dimensional characters, and their occasional ability to manipulate that environment by will alone. It chilled them to think they had been so easily fooled. However, one thing stayed with them from that bizarre other reality: not one of them had an idea of what had really happened, of where they had been. The only two things they could agree on were that they had certainly been
somewhere—
a place not as tangible as reality and not as shapeless as a dream—and that they had all been in the
same
place.

For a while, Chang’e 11 continued to drift through the vast darkness of space. The crew went about the normal business of running the ship. They learned that they were somewhere near Saturn. At last, a message came through to them from earth, and Chang’e 11 was escorted by remote control back home.

So they landed. For a second time.

Here.

This time, no friends and family were awaiting their arrival. After landing, Huang Enterprises had the crew separated from each other and put into quarantine. They were probed. Interrogated. Tested. The military officials, scientists and psychologists who conducted these sessions gave them no information. The crew begged to see their wives, husbands and children. Their pleas fell on deaf bureaucratic ears.

They were asked about the events of their absence. The astronauts told their interrogators about the other landing—the first landing on what they thought was earth. They retold their anecdotes. They answered all of the many questions, completed all of the tests, but they received no further information or privileges. They were treated as if they were carrying some contagious disease.

Ultimately, the truth was broken to them by a public relations officer: though they believed they had only been away for nine years, it had actually been more than forty.

The astronauts were shocked by this revelation and found the news difficult to digest. For some of them it meant that their wives and husbands were now dead. Their children had grown up and had children of their own. They had been officially declared deceased many years back and their families had held memorial services for them.

This landing was far less forgiving than the first, the people colder and less sympathetic, the truths they had been made to face harsher and no easier to process and accept—but at least it felt real. As far as Shen and most of the crew were concerned, they were home, as unwelcoming as home was.