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The Vital Abyss

They kept us in an enorht meters above us, a bit less than a football pitch, with observation s along the top two uards could look down on us if they chose to Old crash couches salvaged from God knehere lay scattered around the floor Eventually I canize a certain subtle smell like alcohol and plastic when the air scrubbers were replaced, and the hu runnels of condensate cos we had to weather The gravity, soested ere on a spin station Our guards never said as much, but I could think of no planetary bodies that matched that

For most of us there was a sense that this shabby, empty room was the final destination for us, the forht The research group did not

We had toilets and showers, but no privacy When ashed ourselves, it was in front of anyone who cared to observe We learned to shit with the casualness of anian to turn to each other to fulfill our sexual needs, it ithout the veneer of privacy we had once enjoyed, though eventually several of the crash couches were sacrificed to create a small area visually cut off fro “the hotel” There was never anything sufficient to absorb sound Our enforced physical intimacy with one another was a source of shame for roups Those of us who had—myself included—held a different perspective I think our shamelessness was part of what made it hard for the others, the ones who had worked security or maintenance or administration, to accept us There were other reasons too, but I think the sha about that I have learned to question my assumptions about what other people feel

The lights in the rooain at e agreed to call night Water, we took fro directly fro our own cupped hands For want of razors or depilatories, the h whenever they saw fit, arhter us all They brought Belter food, vat-grown and yeasty Sometimes they joked with us, soht us sustenance and the thin paper juuards were Belters, with the elongated bodies and slightly enlarged heads that spoke of childhoods in low gravity and long exposure to the pharmaceutical cocktails that lot cant of the Belt: a hundred different vocabularies all crushed together until understanding it was as rammar

During the first year, they occasionally took us out of the rooation The times that I was taken, the sessions were held in small, dirty rooms, often without chairs The techniques varied froes, to a thin-faced woman who just sat in silence and stared at h raw, unspoken will As tireer and farther between Sometime in the third year, they stopped entirely, and the room became the totality of our collective world We were a co under the eyes of cold and unsympathetic jailers

Though we came to know each other quite well, the taxonomy of our previous employment reht disagree about everything froht” time to who had starred in the entertainment videos of our youth, but they had both been maintenance, and so when any conflict arose, they took each other’s side against the rest of us Fong had enjoyed the highest rank aanizational slice, and so she was not only the unspoken head of that group but through them the ersatz leader of our community Research was kept separate, and even then divisions by work group naling and coroup, only Ernz and Ma had coest with five: Kanter, Jones, Mellin, Hardberger, and Coombs Nanoinformatics had three: Quintana, Brown, and myself

Of the system outside the roo For us, history had ended on Thoth Station with our experiment on Eros only half-done Even years after the fact, I would findon soer trusted h to say whether the issues that absorbed ile and altered mind

During my bitterest ti of Isaac Newton and the way that, by having his mind and his peculiar history, he had refashioned all of hureat as his and been pulled back against hts for weeks, sometimes months, at a time I took a lover Alberto Correa He worked in ad odd jobs at the spaceport coree in political literature, and he said both my names—Paolo and Cortázar—reminded him of authors he had studied He would talk for hours sometimes about the effects of class systes of the action videos of Pilár Eight and Mikki Suhanam I listened, and I like to think I absorbed some of it The sound of his voice and the presence of his body were coether in the hotel were pleasant and cal He said that if he’d known he would end here, he’d have stayed on Earth and lived on basic When I pointed out that then he and I wouldn’t have ree that I made it hile or else tell me about the beautiful men he had loved in Colombia

Time, of course, became difficult to track, but I was fairly certain ere into the fourth year in the roo ill, then grew agitated and delusional The guards, seeing all as they did, brought medicine that I suspect was merely a sedative He died a week later

It was the first death, and reinforced to us the idea that ould likely never again be free I watched as the others went through a period ofthat was less for Kanter than for the lives we’d had and left behind Not the research group, but the others Alberto became a much more ardent lover for a time, and then lapsed into a funk in which he barely spoke to me and shied away from my touch I was patient with him because I found patience easier when there was no alternative

Day by day, ere ground down Our experiential worlds narrowed to as having sex hom, whether someone’s comment about a fellow in—so us slept in which of the crash couches We were petty and cruel, despairing and restless, occasionally humane and

even capable of moments of actual if epheo unnoticed when they occur Certainly I didn’t look on those days with any fondness until after the Martian came

I didn’t see hi with Ernz when it happened, somy name When I turned, the Martian was simply there He was pale-skinned with nut-brown hair and a bad coressional Republic Navy Our custoher than usual Quintana and Brown stood before the me i new after so much sa I plucked at ainst all reason that it would make me look more respectable When we stood before the new ether, Brown took a little half-step ahead I stifled the urge to move forward as well, certain that it would end in all of us crowding in on our visitor I would sn’s little physical do

“This is all of them?” he said He had a pleasant voice, barely accented with the drawl of the Mariner Valley

“Bist,” the Belter guard said with a nod “Nanoinformatic, you wanted This them”

The Martian looked at us each in turn, studying us like ere fresh recruits It felt as if the floor was shuddering, but it was only my body There was always an electricity in the unknown, a sense of ias seen by him, I felt h the longing and desire sprang fro All the things that the room had taken from me—my curiosity, my hope, my sense that a life outside of my nameless prison was possible—were distilled into his cool brown eyes One of the occupational hazards of my career path is a kind of solipsisel to deliver me and whisper the secrets that had been hidden fro into