The Janus Expedition

Jeremiah . . . Jeremiah . . . JEREMIAH . . . JEREMIAH!!!

My eyes snapped open. The foreign voice had brought me out of a strange dream. In it, I’d been floating on the Dead Sea, a place I’ve never been but would love to visit one day. This wasn’t the oddity of the dream, however. While floating, I had been doing . . . nothing. Sitting, bobbing, looking off into the distance but picking up nothing of detail; it had been like I was—

“JEREMIAH! ARE YOU WITH ME?”

The voice penetrated my skull, reverberating through my brain. I cried out and my hands shot up to cover my ears, but I found the two could not connect. At this moment, I became aware.

In front of me was curved glass. Beyond it was thick metal, bolts along a ridge in it. My peripheral was blocked by the white edges of the curved glass, but I was already turning away from the metal.

“Jeremiah . . .? Can you hear me . . .?”

I could, but not for long. As I turned, the voice faded into the background. Everything did.

What stared back out at me was nothing. Blackness. Infinity.

I screamed. And screamed and screamed and screamed. For how long I do not know, but long enough to run me hoarse. The voice in my helmet tried to soothe me, but the attempts were fruitless. I struggled to recall where I’d been when I fell asleep, and while I didn’t know exactly, I knew the places it could’ve been: at home in bed, on the couch, in Petey’s room; at the office, in the airport, at our summer campsite. More importantly, I knew the place it couldn’t have been: In outer-fucking-space.

When I stopped screaming, the voice tried again. “Jeremiah, are you okay?” It was soothing now, the type of voice you use to convince a stray cat to come over and let you pet it. “Let’s bring you in. Are you ready to come back in?” For the first time, I registered its femininity.

Through a combination of following my tether and following the voice’s instructions, I made it back into the air lock where I was sprayed with some kind of fog on all sides, and then let through the second set of doors and onto the safety of the ship. I saw now that it was quite large. Both myself and the woman that had been waiting for me on the other side of the doors stood straight upright with a couple feet of clearance above. The hallway I stepped into could likely fit three people walking alongside comfortably. It bent a little way down to keep its end out of sight, but even from just what I could see, there were at least four rooms and offshoots that grew from it.

The woman rushed forward, “Jer!” She embraced me. My arms hung limp at my sides as I continued trying to wake myself from this nightmare. She stepped back with her hands gripping my shoulders and her eyes scrutinizing me, “Are you okay? What happened out there? . . . Jeremiah?”

“Why do you keep calling me that?” I snapped.

She stepped back, “Wh-what?”

“My name is Wes. I’m not supposed to be here. I don’t know how I got here. I have a wife and a little boy at home in Seymour, Tennessee probably wondering where the hell I’ve been. I play tennis on Saturdays and billiards on Tuesdays at O’Flannigan’s. I coach Little League and I am a biologist, and I have sure as hell never been to space!” Just then, from one of the offshoots of the hallway, a girl of about ten giggled her way through and disappeared into another offshoot across the way. Just as she disappeared, a boy that’s a year or two her junior followed her path with giggles of his own. Something about them set the whole situation into reality. The thin hope I’d had of this being a dream or some kind of joke broke. “Oh god, oh dear god, oh dear, dear god . . .” My back fell against the now closed doors to the airlock, and I slid down it until I was on my ass, knees tucked into my chest. “No . . . no, no, no . . .” I felt like I was going to be sick.

The woman crouched down in front of me, the concern plain across her face. She rubbed my arm to soothe me, “Hey, it’s okay. Something must’ve happened out there.” She began to examine me, “Did you hit your head? Does anything hurt?”

I brushed her hand away, “Who are you?”

Her head snapped back, and her face took on a look of offense, “What? Jer, are you being serious?”

“I told you to stop calling me that!” I struggled up from my fetal pose, “I need to get back to my family!”

“We’re your family!” the woman insisted. I started past her, but she grabbed my wrist and spun me to her. Our eyes locked; her murky browns searched for something in mine. “I am your wife, Josephine. We live here with our two children. You know this. Please.”

I could see her desperation, and I wanted to sympathize with her. But she was a liar. She had to be. I knew who I was, I knew that I had not ever known this woman and certainly had not fathered children with her. She was a liar, and for the first time I was considering what that meant. Liars lie for a reason, and no matter how Oscar worthy her delivery of desperation I was, I needed to be wary of her motives—and needed her not to know how wary I was.

She continued, “We’ve been living on the ship for over a decade. One of the first objectives of our mission was to conceive the two children. Their births were the happiest days of our lives—remember the champagne? How Jessie came out screaming like a banshee, but Jack arrived quiet as a mouse? How we laughed and cried and laughed again? Jer . . .” She reached for me again, but I backed away.

Her eyes filled with hurt and worry, but I reminded myself not to be sucked in by them. I was thinking of my own family, not this imposter one, and doing everything I could to reject the creeping doubts that I would ever see them again.

“Over a decade . . .” I parroted.

“Yes. We were one of twenty-five units sent out with the same objectives.”

“Sent out where?”

She scrutinized me again, as if I was the liar here. “Come with me.” I let her take my arm and lead me down the hallway.

In all, the ship was approximately twice as large as the home I knew back in suburbia—a three bed, two bath with a wrap-around porch that couldn’t have been more perfect. Emotions rose again but I quelled them as we exited the residential half of the ship and stepped into the operational.

The woman—Josephine—sat in a chair and rolled herself over to a desk that held all sorts of machinery and buttons and screens I couldn’t make heads or tails of. She pulled a keyboard in front of her, typed furiously, and then tilted the screen toward me. “Here’s Earth,” she pointed at a large dot on the screen. For some reason, this made me think I was going to be sick again. “Here we are.” We’re a blinking triangle, apparently. My nausea grew.

I didn’t want to know the answer to my next question, but I had to ask, “What are these other dots? The smaller ones?”

She gave me another look like she was the one being punked. “Galaxies. Technically, the bigger one isn’t just Earth, it’s the Milky Way, but—”

It’s good I’d been preemptively searching the room for a trash bin because I needed to lunge for one then and empty my guts into it. I heaved chunks and bile once, twice, a third time, and on the fourth all that came was a bit of saliva as my stomach tried hurling itself up through my throat.

“Oh dear, oh dear.” Josephine was tending to me again, a cloth pulled from somewhere dabbing at my mouth as a hand rubbed circles around my back. “Are you okay, Jer? I just don’t know what has gotten into you . . .”

I staggered back to my feet, snatched the cloth from her and wiped at my mouth, then spit once more into the trash can. “How do we turn this thing around? We need to go home.”

She cocked an eyebrow at me, “We can’t turn around, you know that. Each vessel was only loaded with one-and-a-half times the amount of fuel needed to reach its destination. Besides, even if we had the fuel to get back . . .”

I could tell she was expecting me to know how to fill in the blank, but I didn’t have the answers to this test. “What?” I prodded, “Even if we had the fuel to get back, what?”

She sighed, “There’s almost certainly nothing to get back to, Jer.”

“What do you mean?” But something about that had knocked another memory loose from my brain. Critical levels and scientist warnings and natural disasters and death tolls that rose and rose and rose. Earth had been impacted. Devastatingly and irreparably impacted. By what? I couldn’t quite get to that memory. My knees felt weak again.

She reached forward and grasped my hands in hers, forced my eyes to hers, “But we made it out. We were selected to start our wonderful family together and give our species hope. Our mission. Together.”

Together. Another memory came loose. I was standing in front of a hangar, and emblazoned across the top were the words “A better future. A better humanity. Together.” To my left and right was a rigid line of men, like me, all searching for a way to save the ones they love. The nervous energy was palpable and only self-fulfilling as the tense air made it feel like any of the men might snap and do something dangerous. Thankfully, before anyone could, a broad man in military uniform strode from the hangar and addressed us.

“Jer . . .? Hello?” Josephine was waving a hand in front of my eyes.

I blinked and came back to her. “My name is Wes,” I mumbled.

“What?”

“N-Nothing. Where is our destination then?”

She stroked the keyboard again so that the dots on the screen and our blinking triangle all shifted to the right. This generated a new set of dots on the left side, one of which was the size of the Milky Way’s dot. She pointed to it, “Galaxy G2891XC, where PH072 is.” She looked over her shoulder and smiled softly at me, “Home.”

Another memory flashed before me. This time, I was in a room that looked like a classroom for germophobes. Plain white walls, metal desks bolted to the floor, recessed lighting with bulbs of pure white. And an older man at the front, lecturing to myself and twenty or so others. “PH072, for example,” the man said, “was selected for its rich diversity in flora, and the current patterns we’ve observed in its oceans. No destination is a one-hundred-percent match for Earth, but we see this not as an obstacle, but an opportunity!”

Something was off about this memory. The last one too, I realized. Neither seemed like mine. It was more like I had been implanted in another person’s body to live their memory instead of one of mine. I shuddered and shook away both the memory and the feeling.

“I don’t understand,” I muttered more to myself than Josephine.

She opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, the little girl from earlier ran in. “Daddy! Daddy! Look!” Her little arms shot out from her chest, lifting the pot for me to see. It was the most curious thing: A tiny little tree, with its almost scaly bark rising up into a set of palm fronds. One of the fronds was weighed down by a curved little green thing which, upon closer inspection, I recognized as a not-yet-ripe banana. I estimated that it would grow to a normal size, which would make it just about as tall as the tree it grows on. I’d never known a banana could grow independent of a bunch, let alone have an entire tree dedicated to just it.

“You’re disappointed,” the little girl hung her head.

“No, no, of course not, honey,” Josephine stepped in, “Daddy’s just having a lot of thoughts right now, but I’m sure he’s very proud of you.” Her eyes bore into me, “Isn’t that right?”

“Yes. Yes, of course . . . honey. It’s quite impressive, indeed.”

The girl beamed up at me and as she ran out of the room she yelled back to us, “I’ll tell you when it gets big!”

Another flash: “This is big, gentlemen. The greatest undertaking in human history, likely the crux of human history as we know it. We need to be absolutely certain that you are ready, that you are unencumbered, that you are focused on this mission and this mission alone.” This was the same broad man who had exited from the hangar, which we now stood inside. Though in this memory there were far less men than there had been outside the hangar—perhaps forty or fifty. I was able to recollect a thought I’d had during the memory: Unencumbered. I’ll get around that later. The man continued, “You will be paired with another member of the program to complete the mission together. Compatibility will be tested to ensure the highest possibility of success. Before we begin, are there any questions? Is there anybody who would like to make our jobs easier and bow out now?”

This memory version of me looked to his left and his right, but no one stepped forward. Then, he raised his hand.

The broad man’s eyebrows raised, “Yes, recruit? Quitting already?”

“No . . . sir, I was just, ah, wondering . . . if we had a partner already in mind for the mission, would we be able to select them or be paired together or . . . something?”

“That’s a negative, recruit . . .” There was more, but I snapped out of it.

“Jeremiah.” Josephine was standing right in front of me, “You’re scaring me. Seriously, are you okay?”

“I’m . . . I’m fine. I just . . . I need a moment.”

I turned from her, and felt her hands drop from me as I strode to the exit. I was thankful to not hear footsteps following me as I turned into the hallway. Walking down it, bits and pieces of memories filtered back in at an exponential rate. A moment of glee that had occurred in this room, a night of panic in that one.

Panic is exactly what rattled through my bones on this walk, and it brought me back to the memory that pieced everything together.

I was in front of a door, closed but split down the middle by a seam. It was as white and shiny as everything in the classroom had been. Then it opened at the seam, and a hand rested on my shoulder, guiding me in. Another germophobe’s dream of a room, this one with no bolted desks but instead a singular chair, the kind you might see at a dentist’s office. The hand lightly guided me to the chair, in which I sat willingly.

“Just a quick pinch,” the doctor said, as they flicked the syringe and double-checked a monitor.

“What is it?”

“No need to worry about it. You may lose consciousness for a moment, but I promise when you wake, you’ll be right as rain. Among other things, it’ll help with any pain you might be having, any stress too. You’ll feel like a whole new person.” They flicked the vial once more, swabbed my bicep, and plunged the needle into my skin.

In the present, I walked through the hallway of the ship, a nervous sweat forming under my arms and at my brow. The memories were coming in clearer now, and from the moment I woke up in that dentist-like chair, each of them was the perspective of Jeremiah. A whole new person.

I arrived at the helm of the ship, understanding now. This woman who calls herself Josephine is not a liar; she simply doesn’t know better. They took ourselves from us so that we would be theirs. Engineered around the former person to create them anew. We are not connected to the old world, to our old selves. We only know the future, the selves which they created for us.

Except something went wrong. My old self was returned to me, and now it competes with the new one. Memories jostle in my mind for supremacy, each assuring me that they can reveal to me who I am, and that the other is a lie to be tossed aside.

I stare out the panoramic window at the black nothingness of space and it stares back at me. It excites half of me and brings existential dread to the other half. I am two people, and because of this I am no one.

“Daddy!” A little girl’s voice calls from behind me. “Jer!” Calls another. Somewhere, far more distant, someone calls out “Wes!” and a boy joins her, “Dad!”

The pain in my head started as a low throbbing, but it’s grown into a screaming pulsation. I grasp at my head and scream with it.