They start with rats. Rats are easy to find; there’s a swarm of them convulsing on the dumpster outside the lab, so they draw straws every day to see whose job it will be to trap the next batch. Predictably, the dumpster-dwelling rats are writhing with parasites, and this initially causes a fight between Rowan and Hodge (everything causes a fight between Rowan and Hodge). Hodge argues that testing a rat with fleas is not the same thing as testing a rat; they need to isolate the variables if they want the experiment to produce any results of value. Rowan argues that Hodge is probably full of fleas too, so he should be glad that they’re taking that variable into account. They compromise by washing the rats first.
After Rowan traps the day’s rats and power-washes them in the old shower stall, she dries one off with a discoloured towel found who knows where. The rat is giving its life for her, even if it doesn’t really know it, so she tries to treat it with a little bit of respect. She dries it off gently, like when she used to dry off her golden retriever after baths, before it lost all its fur and started to bleed from every orifice and she shot it and buried it in her backyard. Once the rat is dry, she splays it out on the examination table, clamps down its wiggling body, and positions the machine above the rat as it squirms and shrieks under the bright lights. “Me, too, buddy,” she tells the rat.
Hodge checks the power levels and Mariana gives the go-ahead and Rowan shoots the rat. Not with a bullet, like Lucky, but with the tachyonic isolator they’ve spent the last two years building, refining, and arguing over. Not perfecting, though; Mariana would say, not yet. Today, all the machine does is make the rat explode. Blood blooms like a rose on the white exam table; a ragged bit of grey fur is stuck with blood to one of the clamps.
“Well, that didn’t work,” Hodge comments.
Rowan tells him that she wishes his mouth didn’t work and goes to fetch the next rat.
After they’ve exhausted the day’s supply of rats, Mariana prints out the readings and comes down from the observation deck. Everyone converges around the exam table, which is still covered in the last rat’s entrails, to report their findings and their failures. Rowan applies her last Tide pen to the splotch of blood on her right sleeve.
• • •
After the last ship left Earth, Rowan had already shot her dog, and she considered shooting herself next. But she didn’t. Instead, she returned to what used to be a research lab operated by the government of Canada and was now an escape effort operated by Mariana. The jackass who used to run the lab was on the last ship, and the other scientists either killed themselves or, like Rowan, stayed to follow Mariana. Mariana said, “The ships might be gone, but we don’t have to lie down and take this. There’s another way out.”
For Rowan, the way out was Mariana, but many of the others found something quicker. Rowan can still picture the row of research scientists, clasping each other’s hands and jumping off the roof as one. They wore their lab coats to the end, white fabric fluttering through the air like doves’ wings as gravity dragged down the bodies inside them. Then they were nothing but a ragged white line on the dark pavement. Rowan’s first job under Mariana’s leadership was to take away the bodies. She’d dragged them down the street by the scruffs of their dirtied lab coats to stuff them in someone else’s dumpster.
Those first terrifying days, Rowan often looked up at the sky, as if the ships were on a test-drive around the block and they’d be back for her if she just looked hard enough. She sometimes imagined she was Lucky, looking faithfully up at the barrel of the hunting rifle through bleeding eyes as Rowan squeezed the trigger.
Mariana made the lab her own—consolidating all the necessary technology on the lab’s first floor, rewiring the emergency generator, going through the jackass’s files for all the necessary passwords. Rowan put her rifle in the bottom drawer of her dresser and slept at the lab when she was tempted to take it out again. She was Mariana’s dog now, and Mariana told her to stay, so she stayed.
The idea was this: faster-than-light travel. Under the jackass’s direction, it had been the lab’s purpose to figure it out. In the end, they didn’t; or, Mariana would correct them, he didn’t, before he fled the planet like a coward and left the rest of them to fend for themselves. He gave up on faster-than-light travel; he compromised on travel, any travel, any way to flee to anywhere that wasn’t here. Mariana believed she could do better. The idea was this: mass. Or, the lack of it. Nothing with mass can go the speed of light. Mariana believed that she could isolate … something. Something that could exist—that could escape—without mass to slow it down. The idea was confusing. Without mass, what would they be? Protons, travelling at the speed of light? Tachyons, exceeding it? The idea was this: Hypothetically, Mariana could shoot a human being with her tachyonic isolator and they wouldn’t be human anymore. They wouldn’t have a body anymore, a dying body; without it, they could escape this dying world. This is where Rowan was most confused: Would they be leaving this world, as in this planet, to follow the ships out into space? Or would they be leaving this world, and every world reachable from it, to follow Lucky?
Rowan had only been a junior data analyst at the lab before, and hadn’t fully understood the faster-than-light testing before the ships left; she definitely didn’t understand Mariana’s idea. But Mariana did.
In the end, Rowan didn’t care what they were doing. None of them cared, really. They just needed something to look up at and believe in.
• • •
But then the rat disappears.
Rowan traps the day’s rats, swearing all the while that one of the filthy things bit her, and then regrets her anger. She washes and dries the rats and thinks, again, of Lucky, head tilted to one side as blood dribbled from both ears. She splays the first rat out on the exam table, and clamps it down. Hodge checks the power levels and Mariana gives the go-ahead and Rowan shoots the rat, and the rat disappears.
It doesn’t explode. They almost always explode. The last one the day prior hadn’t technically exploded, but it had bloated and then popped like a fleshy balloon, which still peppered Rowan with blood, so she considered it the same thing. But this rat doesn’t get blood anywhere. It simply isn’t there anymore.
Hodge says, “Holy fuck. Did it work?”
Mariana prints out the readings, and Hodge gets the readings from yesterday’s tests, and everyone converges around the exam table, which is, for once, not covered in deconstructed rat. Although apparently they have deconstructed this rat. And the tachyonic isolator seems to be doing exactly what they’ve been trying, for seven years, to convince it to do.
“The rat’s still here,” Mariana says. “Matter can’t just disappear. It’s just that light can’t reflect off it anymore.”
“So we made an invisible rat?” Hodge says.
“It’s more than that,” Mariana says. “It’s a massless rat. A nonphysical rat. Don’t you understand? We did it.”
“Great,” Hodge says. His face says otherwise. “This rat can escape Planet Earth.”
“And we will, too,” Mariana says. “It’s time to start human trials.”
This declaration causes a fight between Rowan and Hodge (everything causes a fight between Rowan and Hodge). Hodge argues that that’s ridiculous. Can’t they test it on a monkey or something? Who’s going to consent to being blasted with this thing just because they made an invisible rat? Rowan argues that Hodge is ridiculous. Where in this godforsaken city are they supposed to find a monkey? They can’t even find a good cup of coffee since Hodge used the last Keurig pod. On the other hand, desperate people are everywhere. Hell, everyone in this lab is desperate; Rowan would volunteer herself to be blasted. Of course Hodge wouldn’t, though; he’s never believed in what they’re doing here. Everyone hears what she’s really saying: he’s never believed in Mariana.
“If I didn’t believe in what we were doing here, I’d have jumped with the rest of them,” Hodge says. “Do you really think I’d have lasted this long without something to believe in?”
Rowan is about to tell him that he’d better start to show it, but Mariana raises a hand for silence.
“That’s enough,” she says. “There’s no need to put you on the exam table, Rowan. You’re right. There are desperate people everywhere.”
• • •
It’s remarkably similar to finding rats. They draw straws every day to see whose job it will be to walk the streets. It’s oddly easy to find people; it helps that they always wear their lab coats. Rowan didn’t used to have a lab coat—before the ships left, her job was to organize data, not conduct actual experiments—but she found an extra one in a locker that previously belonged to one of the research scientists now rotting in the dumpster down the street. It also helps that everyone in the lab—like everyone on the streets, like everyone left on the planet—speaks the language of desperation.
Rowan draws the short straw on their fifth day of human trials. She sticks to the sidewalks by habit rather than by necessity, and walks north until the street falters to a stop against the lakefront park. The old tent city has been abandoned, half of the tents empty and the other half gone either to repurpose or to a dumpster, but a clump of people stand in the field of weeds beyond it and throw rocks at the muddy lakebed. A middle-aged woman turns as Rowan approaches them.
“You’re one of them,” she says, nodding to Rowan’s secondhand lab coat. She palms a large, speckled rock.
“Looking for a way out?” Rowan says.
“I always said I would donate my body to science,” the woman replies. She hurls the rock far enough that it makes a small splash in the muddy centre of the lake.
Rowan brings a group of five people into the lab and shows them to the shower. They wash and dry themselves. The woman from the lake, who introduced herself as Candace, is the first to dry off. Rowan leads her to the exam table. She lies down, and her naked flesh looks gray against the white table, scrubbed clean from yesterday’s test subjects. Her hair is still wet from the shower. Rowan doesn’t clamp the people down; it feels rude. They’re giving their lives for her, and though they surely hope against hope that it’ll work—that they’ll survive and escape—they surely also know the truth. They’re sacrificing themselves.
Candace told Rowan as they walked back to the lab that she had a teenage daughter who disappeared. She doesn’t know if her daughter managed to get onto one of the ships, or if she’s dead. Rowan thinks, Either way, the tachyonic isolator has a good chance of bringing you back to her again.
Lying on the table, Candace doesn’t squirm, but she asks, “Will it hurt very much?”
Truthfully, Rowan says, “I have no idea.”
Candace nods and closes her eyes. Rowan can see the veins in her thin eyelids under the lab’s white lights. Hodge checks the power levels and Mariana gives the go-ahead and Rowan shoots Candace. Candace explodes. Her pale flesh swells up like a pot boiling over, and then she’s not Candace anymore.
Candace is not a red rose blooming on the exam table; she is a crime scene. Still, Rowan tries to see patterns in the gore, imagining this last mark as the funerary bouquet placed on the white table of her gravestone. Then, Rowan gets the bucket and rag and goes to clean the exam table.
As Mariana gave the go-ahead, Candace seemed to mouth something; Rowan wonders if it was her daughter’s name. She didn’t think to ask what it was.
• • •
They set up a plastic shield after the first time; they hadn’t anticipated how much more there was to explode in a human body. So Rowan isn’t soaked in blood and guts every time, just the once. Still, every time she shivers and imagines the cold wet splatter hit her face again, tastes the iron in her mouth. It ruined her pilfered lab coat—luckily she was able to pilfer a second, and to find a couple boxes of thin plastic gloves and nonmedical face masks in a storage locker. The first night of human trials, while scrubbing the last of the blood from the creases of her ears, Rowan had recalled the clumps of blood that had matted the fur around Lucky’s ears and trickled into watery puddles on the kitchen floor.
• • •
Rowan has a nosebleed.
Maybe it was the rat that bit her. Maybe it was from Lucky, the illness biding its time as it shredded her insides, liquefying her organs into the red gunk dribbling from her nose. Maybe it was one of the test subjects—who knows what’s going around the streets. In any case, Rowan knows she’s dying when the blood starts to ooze from her ears and eyes.
She doesn’t cry or panic. She’s tired of this place. She’s tired of searching the sky for something that isn’t there, and she’s tired of the planet dying under her feet, and she’s tired of seeing people explode in front of her every day. She can’t help but feel that her body is finally catching up with what’s going on around her. Maybe she was supposed to shoot herself after the ships left after all.
But at least she was able to give some of her life to Mariana, and she wants to give her death to Mariana too.
The night before Rowan’s nosebleed, Rowan slept at the lab, but Mariana went home with Hodge. When the two arrive that morning, Mariana drops Hodge’s hand and runs to Rowan, cradling Rowan’s face with the pads of her fingers. Rowan smiles despite the blood leaking out of her mouth.
“Put me on the exam table,” Rowan says.
Mariana nods.
This causes a fight between Rowan and Hodge (everything causes a fight between Rowan and Hodge). Hodge argues that Rowan’s not thinking straight. Her brain’s definitely addled now if it wasn’t already. She’s been begging for a chance to martyr herself, but she won’t help anything by exploding on the table like every other dying sack of blood they drag in here. They should use all this godforsaken technology (here he gestures wildly to the lab equipment around them, which is not designed for medical interventions) to try to cure her, not to ensure her death. Rowan argues that she doesn’t want a cure, and she’s already sure of her death.
“This is how my dog died,” Rowan says. Actually, Lucky died because Rowan shot her. And Rowan wants to die because Mariana shoots her.
While everyone else arrives and Mariana goes to disinfect her hands, Rowan takes a shower and dries herself off. It’s hardly worth it, because blood is leaking from her pores now, a sticky pudding that she can only manage to spread further over her skin. She drops the stained towel to the floor. Her vision is gooey and red at the edges from the blood leaking out around her eyeballs. Hodge helps her to the exam table. She’s far enough gone by then that she wants to ask if she can hold his hand, but she doesn’t. She does, however, shyly ask Mariana to be the one to shoot her. She is glad that Hodge is facing away when she says it. He’s back at his post, fixated on his screen, producing an angry click of buttons that swims into Rowan’s ears and hurts her head. The left side of his lab coat is a smudgy scarlet.
Lying on her back, naked and splayed open under Mariana’s gaze, Rowan feels like nothing so much as a rat clamped down on the table. She’s cold, and feeling the blood ooze out onto her skin makes her shiver. She wonders if it’ll hurt. She wonders if she’ll explode. Even if she does, at least she won’t be here anymore.
Hodge checks the power levels and Mariana gives the go-ahead. Rowan looks faithfully up at the tachyonic isolator through bleeding eyes. She sees Mariana, glowing red. Rowan saw the last ship take off, angling up into the sky and away from her forever. The fire of the engine looked just like Mariana does now. A red light, brilliant, wavering, and then, gone.
• • •
