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Death by Water

by Grace Chan

I spread you out on the medical bed. Frayed suit, splintered body, frosted eyes.
“I can’t see anything.”
“Lie still. I’ll see what we can salvage.”
“Please, Peiyi.” You twitch, frantic. The odour of wet rot rises into my nostrils. “Just tell me what’s happened to my body. I can handle it.”
I approve the highest dose of sedative and start the scan. “You know I’m not Peiyi.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I know.”

---

The mountains collapse into swirls of liquid black.

I blink. It’s just an optical illusion. There’s no running water here on Orpheus—impossible at minus sixty degrees Celsius. I’m surrounded by knots of ice and stone, as I’ve been since I arrived yesterday.

The remnants of their base hadn’t been difficult to find. After dropping my lander at the spot marked on the historical expedition plans, I trekked around the edge of a vast basin that the original expeditioners had named Mare Lucidum, the Shining Sea. Eventually I discovered a visibility marker—almost completely buried in ice, only its reflective red tip peeking out. From there, I tracked broken markers to the habitation dome. Behind the dome, cradled in the shadow of a cliff, were the crumbled remains of the Dandelion IX.

A large crack had split the dome’s outer door, and a tumble of frozen pebbles spilled into the airlock. When I tried the inner door, I found that the mechanism was jammed. Only when I leaned my full weight against it, spinning the pinions in my knees at full power, did the seal creak ajar.

Before beginning this trip, I’d combed the archives on Terra III. There’d been only limited information about the Orphean expedition. The crew had beamed back a few reports during their first couple of months here—data about the terrain and climate; difficulties in establishing reliable food sources. Then, abruptly, silence.

I spent a night in their ruined base, carefully taking photographs and salvaging data banks. Amongst the locally-stored files, I discovered several never-sent reports.

The greenhouse crops are failing again. Nothing’s working—not the organic fertiliser, not the added humidity. We’re thinking about trying Cassius’s valley. It’s a thin hope, but we’re at that stage. It’s only four kilometres east of here. He swears he saw bits of edible algae trapped in the ice…

The journey out here was tougher than I’d expected. Even with the traction cleats extruded from my feet, I slipped many times on the treacherous ice. Geysers spouted toxic fumes at unpredictable intervals. I checked my radar regularly and doubled back a few times to avoid the most dangerous areas. Brief exposure to the fumes would not trouble me; little would seep through my scale-suit. But corrosive microdroplets might cling to my equipment and wriggle into my joints when I removed my outer skin.

Now, I find myself staring down into Cassius’s valley. A misnomer. It’s not really a valley at all, but a maze-like warren twisting deep into the planet’s bowels. The rock formations have shed their jagged edges and sharp outcroppings. Instead, massaged by long-gone rivers, they flow like ink: viscous black under lacy ice shrouds.
Did all four expeditioners come on this scouting venture? If so, why? It was out of character for me—for Peiyi, I mean—to be so foolish. The sensible thing would’ve been to leave at least one at base.

I close my eyes. Peiyi’s memories are always there: a languid tide lapping around my waist. I let my resistance weaken. It’s like exhaling a long-held breath. I sink to the neck, bumping up against ocean debris.

I see my hands—bare olive skin, unblemished by enhancements or implants—flicking objects nimbly around a holographic display. Schematics of the Dandelion IX. Incomplete maps of the Orphean terrain. Blueprints of the habitation dome, the greenhouse. Projected timelines.

I glance around the room at the others. Jun, standing at her own workstation, scrutinising the inventory list. Nitya and Cassius over by the door, arguing about something to do with suit design. Just as I look at them, Cassius lifts his head. His eyes meet mine. Soften, crinkle. I feel a rush of affection for him, which spreads to encompass my whole crew.

What would I have done? What had Peiyi done? She’d always been fiercely protective, level-headed, anticipating all outcomes. What had gone wrong?

The memory drifts away. A more recent one engulfs me. My body is a web of earth and air. I’m buoyant in a treacly haze. A stone in my chest—cold, then warm, then roaring hot with a two-step rhythm. Blood screams into my fingers and toes. The taste of metal saturates my mouth, my stomach. My skull rings like a bell.

I force myself to resurface. I’ve combed through these fragments too many times, trying to unravel the old from the new. The answers aren’t there. They’re ahead of me, somewhere in this underground labyrinth.

Cold seeps beneath my skin. I check my retinal display. Ambient temperature: -43 degrees Celsius. Atmospheric pressure: 1.54 atm. Warning: high levels of acidic gases. My internal readings are stable: Scale-suit intact. Energy reserves at 7%. Enhancements running at 150%. Recommend dialling back to 120%: Accept? Y/N.

I choose N. My body feels tired, but I have a full stash of energy banks with me. I swap my depleted bank for a fresh one, and put a spare in my shoulder pouch. Juice pours into my veins, soaking me with giddy awareness and an old, screaming heat.

I lift my gaze to the horizon. Above a grey rim of mountains, a pallid pink sun rises into a sky washed in yellows and browns. Then I turn toward the maze’s slick throat. The darkness stares back at me, breathes a cold exhale. Whispers curl around my neck as I descend.

---

“What happened after the Dandelion was lost?”
I don’t pause from removing the shattered pieces of your suit. It’s difficult work. My lenses are zoomed into hyper-focus, my fine motor control dialled to maximum precision. “What do you mean?”

“To this planet.”

“You mean, did anything come of it?” I ease my tweezers beneath a fragment and lift it delicately. Even so, a ragged portion of skin and flesh comes with it. Your face remains serene. The analgesics must have thoroughly kicked in. “Nothing. Your team sent some data back before you vanished. It helped us decide that this place wasn’t a good candidate for human life.”

“So… no one else has come here?”

I plonk the fragment into the tray, on top of a foul-smelling heap. “Not until now.”

“How many years did you say it’s been?”

“Two hundred and sixty-four.”

A shuddering sigh. “Two hundred and sixty-four.”

---

I cast my headlamps over the walls, drawing ghosts from oily shadows. I dig my traction cleats in. Each step threatens to dislodge me, to send me slipping into one of dozens of narrow mouths. The ceiling descends, bulbous with outcroppings. Soon, I’m walking with shoulders hunched, neck crooked. Déjà vu slides through me, but I shake it off. A trick of the mind. There’s no way I could remember being here. The last memory synchronised from Peiyi was four hours before Dandelion IX’s departure.

I splash into ankle-deep liquid and point my scanner to get a composition reading. Melted ice slush, more or less. Slightly acidic. Trace levels of minerals. Ambient temperature: -18 degrees Celsius. It’s much warmer down here than on the surface.

When I run a sonar sweep, a configuration of tunnels in a roughly 800 metre radius assembles in my mind, blurrier in the sections further from my current location. I’m in the largest tunnel, moving along a pearl necklace of linked caverns. Many of the smaller branches writhe tortuously before terminating in dead ends.

I wade on. The water rises quickly to my knees, to my waist. When I glance down, my headlamps bounce off the inky surface, scorching my dilated pupils. I lower myself into the water. Duck-dive into its silent embrace, its cold membrane closing over my head. Kick my legs, paddle onward. I do not breathe; I was never designed to.

Crimson fingers flutter in the corner of my eye. I swim across. A piece of algae is clinging to a tiny crack between two rocks. With a pocketknife, I uproot it and tuck it into a sample bag. I keep my eyes peeled as I swim along the tunnel, but I don’t see any other algae growth.

Ephemeral ribbons of light dance across indigo pools. Shadows move faster than my eye can decipher, briefly holding the shapes of ghosts, and then dissolving like salt in water. There’s Cassius’s face, spectral and angular, as I’d last seen it in the iridescent lowlights of the downtown bar, the night before we departed. His mouth moving, tugged by a tentative smile. There’s Jun and Nitya, both vivid and remarkable. There’s my own face.

They’re all youthful at first, and then rapidly greying with age and rot. Skin sagging from bone, ragged holes yawning in the cheeks, flesh and eyes dripping away from mandible and socket. Creaking in unison, their jaws move—desperate, tongueless warnings. My ears churn with whispers.

I blink to dispel the hallucination. Pull yourself together. I know that the mind, lacking sensory input, invents wild things. I let the water buoy me upward. My head breaks the surface but immediately bumps against rock. My headlamps ricochet off too many surfaces, blinding me. There’s only about six inches of air between water and ceiling. How did the water level rise so fast? Geothermal forces, heating the ground from below?

Something thuds against my ankle. Fighting a sudden surge of dread, I bend at the waist, stretching and flexing to turn upside down in the water. I extend both arms. My gloved hands scrabble against rocky floor, and then close around something firm.

In the wavering light, the body looks unreal. Despite some obvious signs of damage, the suit’s remarkably well-preserved. I can even read the name stamped across the chest: Takeuchi. The pale blob within the helmet looks nothing like Jun, though.

I can see another body, partially trapped in icy wall. It’ll need to be dug out, and I can’t carry two at once. I hook my hands under Jun’s armpits and swim back to the dry section of tunnel. I drag the limp body along the slick ground until we’re a good twenty metres from the waterline, and lay it out without looking at the face.

It takes me over an hour to retrieve the other. I extend a rotating saw from my wrist and gradually work away the ice. The name emerges from clouded layers. Prakash. It’s Nitya. I hack and hack. I slide my arms around Nitya’s waist, trying to hold the broken parts together, and tug until the body comes free in a sudden release. A leg is left behind, detached at the hip. I make a strange, gasping sound.

In the dry section of tunnel, I gaze down at the two bodies. Bits of faces, swollen and disjointed, press against their visors. An ear, out of context. An eyeball, distorted and opaque. Mouths, bloated with long-ago burst veins. Nitya is completely unrecognisable; Jun is less decayed. Nitya’s suit must have failed first.

Half-heartedly, I transfer their suits’ data files to my scale-suit’s system. Nitya’s files are corrupted, but to my surprise, Jun’s are intact. The last file is an audio recording. Jun’s mellifluous voice, edged with an unusual tension, spills across my mind.

“…maybe we should’ve waited until the cold season passed. I think the tunnels are changing. The temperature’s plunged. Water’s turning into ice. I found Nitya, but we can’t find the tunnel that Peiyi and Cass took. And we can’t find our way back out.”

A long pause. Sounds of water shifting, ice scraping, gasping breaths. Jun and Nitya, muttering to each other. Jun again, but she sounds different. “Temp’s dropping. Too fast. Suit’s playing up. No time. We’re fucked. Activating cryo.”

Static, crackling.

I rock back onto my heels. My body feels cleanly hollow, like someone has rifled through my insides with a scalpel. The expeditioners’ antiquated suits had a cryopreservation function, but it was rudimentary. A last resort. A die roll—one that had not favoured Nitya or Jun. Their suits had broken under the forces of water and time.

I straighten up. I can’t afford to be distracted by sentiments that aren’t even my own. I shoot a copy of Jun’s files back to my lander, hoping it’s in range. I take routine photographs of the decayed corpses. Then I return to the water.

About a hundred metres further along from where I found Jun and Nitya, I discover the third body. Before I even read the name, I know.

It’s mine.

---

Your eyes follow my movements as I check the regenerator.

“Good,” I say at last. My fingers flutter over the scrolling parameters on the translucent display. “Your body’s responding well to the proliferative infusion. Nothing else to do now but rest and wait. Soon you’ll have new toes, new lungs, new eyes.”

“Mm. Just what I’ve always dreamed of.” You shift against the cloud-like pillows alleviating pressure from your regenerating flesh. “Where will we go now?”

“Back to Terra III.”

“How many are there?”

“Five that have been fully adapted for human life—with some augmentation, of course. A dozen more in progress.”
“Is that where you’re from?” A thread of uncertainty trembles your voice. “Terra III?”

I hold your dark gaze. Something strange and warm stirs in my throat. “It’s where I came into being, yes. Now, quiet. Rest and wait.”

---

As I haul the body through frigid water, I imagine their voyage here on the ancient, lumbering Dandelion IX. I imagine jolting awake in my sleep capsule and rolling out of the webbed restraints. I would find the other three already in the mess area, heating up a giant pot of oatmeal. After breakfast, I would’ve planted myself at a workstation to review the unmanned scouting missions to Orpheus, or tweak the greenhouse designs, or read the operating manual for the air purifiers. Before lunch, I would’ve spent an hour on the exercise machine, pulling resistance bands and pushing weights to keep my bones from thinning.

As I spread the body out next to the other two, I remember my own journey here, in my much smaller speeder. Four months in those cramped, soundless quarters. Turning circles in my own gravity, carefully servicing my organs at the recommended intervals. I was lucky I didn’t tend to feel lonely.

As I check for signs of life—rotten-pudding flesh collapsing under my fingers—I think about my own coming into being. Consciousness like skin being ripped from sinew. Needles on every inch of me, protruding into my skull. A too-sharp, too-bright propulsion into a life already fully formed. To be a whole person from the instant of conception felt like a violence, a violation. Later, it mellowed into an unnameable otherness: a displacement I’d never fully been able to shake.

As I take photographs of the smashed-up suit—Hsu, across the chest—and the waterlogged body, I don’t think too much at all. I’m perhaps relieved to find that the data logs are empty. The only available information: cryopreservation failed eighty-seven years ago.

A system alert beeps in my mind. My energy bank has 20% remaining. I’m weary in a way that another bank won’t replenish. I’d mentally prepared myself for the eventuality of discovering Peiyi’s corpse, but I’d not expected this—this frigid, motionless feeling, as though someone has driven an icicle through my chest. No matter how much I remind myself, I can’t believe that I am not her.

I could head back to the lander now. I’ve gathered enough evidence to surmise what happened to the crew of the Dandelion IX. Plenty of data to compile a thorough report for my superiors, to be approved and coded and filed in the archaeological archives. I should go back.

They would’ve ventured into the valley, laced with banter, trying to sustain hope in the face of recurrent setbacks. Peiyi and Cass first. When they didn’t return, Nitya would’ve gone after them, and then Jun. Maybe they’d felt the temperature shift before they knew it. Maybe it had started with an ache in their bones, a tightening in the chest. A feeling of dread, easily dismissed.

By the time they realised they were being slowly drowned in ice and water, it would’ve been too late.

---

Most nights, I hear you crying. You try to stifle it, but you don’t know that the med bay’s continuous monitoring links directly to my cerebral cortex. It’s very difficult to focus on ship maintenance or report writing when you’re crying.

Once or twice, I come into the bay and sit next to you. I know my visage calms you. I hold your hand. You grip mine in a cold, desperate vice, as though you’re a drowning man.

“Why did you come back?” you weep.

“As archaeologists, we strive for completeness and accuracy of records.”

“No,” you say. “No, why did you save me?”

I try to say something soothing, but I’m not good at it. I ask you if you’re in pain, if your new limbs hurt, if your senses are playing up. No, no, no, you weep. I’m fine. I’m fine.

But later, when you think you’re alone, I see you scratching cruelly at your foreign flesh, as though you wish to tear meat from bone. The next day, I come and tend to the wounds in silence.

---

I try to leave the caves, but I find I can’t.

I leave the three bodies in the dry section of tunnel. Taking photographs and records is ceremony enough; there’d be no meaning to a burial. When the cold season arrives, the water will turn to ice, expanding and crawling up the network, freezing over the bodies, drawing them back down into shadowy caverns. This place will be their tomb.

I start back along the main tunnel, but I’ve only gone a dozen steps when my legs buckle. I drop to all fours, knees slamming on stone. My guts feel as though they’re strung up around my ears.

“What’s the matter with you?” I growl.

I try to get up, but my body’s not listening. My face feels like putty, as bloated and ruined as the faces of the lost expeditioners. Something has wrapped barbed talons around my heart and is squeezing until it might burst like a bloody balloon.

You’ll look after me when we’re there, won’t you?

His voice, haunting and ghostly, drifts into my ears. I don’t want it. I don’t want any of him. He’s never been mine. Why must memory encoding be inseparable from emotional circuits? I want to cut off this ridiculous attachment to him as one would snip off a fingernail.

I find myself crawling back toward the water and slipping into its pitch-black embrace. I teeter for a minute, torn between two opposing forces. Frustration roars through me. I thought I didn’t want to go back. But I don’t really know who I am. My shell looks mortal, but it is not. My soul is artificial, but it feels human. Who knows what I was made to want, and why I was made so?

I swap my old energy bank for the fresh one and dive under the surface.

Within a few minutes, I’ve already swum past the spots where I found the other bodies. Slowly, the pressure in my chest eases and strength returns to my wobbly limbs. I run two more sonar sweeps, separated by a brief gap. The configuration appears stable. I make my way down the main tunnel. After half an hour of swimming, the tunnel has narrowed to less than two metres in diameter. Further along, the sonar shows that it branches into three smaller tunnels.

I choose the leftmost tunnel first. The shadows close in around me. It takes me almost two hours to explore all its branches systematically, sweeping headlamps across floors and walls in a zigzagging pattern. Nothing.

I retrace my course and attempt the next tunnel. The energy bank’s at 32% now, and it’s my last one. I might have to go back for the banks I stashed at the start of the maze. But if I leave, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to come back—partly because the tunnels might have changed, and partly because the feelings I cannot discard might rip me in two.

The second tunnel has fewer branches, and it’s only an hour before I’ve determined that there’s nothing in here either. No algae, no life forms. No body. I grasp at outcroppings as I swim back to the fork point. My arms tremble; maybe I’m more exhausted than I realised. I dial my enhancements up to 180%, ignoring the warning that flashes across my vision: Prolonged functioning at >100% will cause oxidative stress and metabolic toxicity.

The surge in processing power shudders through my body. The third tunnel plunges downwards at a steep angle. I use the ceiling to haul myself along. As I descend, I can feel the increased pressure on every inch of my scale-suit. The suit is like a second skin, synthetic layered over synthetic. Unlike the soft humans, I’m doubly impermeable to water and pressure.

After about fifty metres, the tunnel curves under a ridge like giant teeth. As I swim into the maw beyond, whispers roar around my ears.

A dark shape bumps against the back of the teeth. His body is mangled. An entire arm is missing, the suit sealed at the shoulder joint. Behind the visor, his eyes are pearly white.

To my amazement, the suit display shows signs of metabolism and a weak flicker of brain activity. The cryopreservation sacrificed the peripheral parts of him, to preserve the central.

I wrap my arms around what’s left of Cassius’s body, willing life into him, feeling life surge of its own accord into my body—stitching together the seams I hadn’t known were shredded, weaving me into something whole. I pull him under the ridge and along the slanting tunnel, kicking and paddling and straining with every fibre of my being. The swim back seems interminable.

When I finally reach the edge of the water, I sling him clumsily over my shoulders and run, doubled-over and stumbling, to the mouth of the caves. My joints scream. My skull pounds. I burst out beneath a sky murky and sprinkled with unknown constellations. The mountains are a gleaming ring of sabre’s teeth. I cast off my spent energy bank and replace it with a new one. I abandon the stash. It’ll only weigh me down.

I glance at his face, hanging inches from mine. Sightless eyes, lank hair, ravaged flesh. In half-death, he looks monstrous. My lander is still a few hours away by foot. He can’t leave me now. I won’t allow it. I dial my enhancements up to 200%, the highest they can go, and run on with fire in my veins.

---

“Why were you so far from the others?” I ask, near the end of our journey.

You look at me. “I lost you.”

I tilt my head, open my mouth.

“I was looking for you,” you say, and this time I decide not to correct you. I rest my arms on the bed between us, reminding you of the differences: the pinions and cogs, the synthetic skin. But you only hold my wrist, feeling the twitch of tendons and the pulse of black blood beneath.

“You have so much of her,” you say.

My words stick in my throat.

“You’re different, too, I know. But you sound just like her, move like her. Why do they do that?”

“I don’t know,” I reply, sombrely. “I used to think it made for a more successful mission. But now I’m not so sure. Maybe everyone wants to live on in some small way.”

As the ship enters the atmosphere of Terra III, I remember the three bodies left behind. Ice shifts will shatter what’s left of their suits. Their bones will be picked clean by water and whispers.

I’ve decided to stop picking apart the old from the new, to stop dividing my memories and myself. They made me this way for a reason, and so I will stop wrestling with it. Perhaps I’m not merely a simulacrum. Perhaps there is a portion of Peiyi, reborn within me.

You must have seen a shadow move across my face. You reach your renewed hand, brown and immaculate, toward my cheek. In your touch, there is gratitude. This time, I don’t retreat.

---

Host Commentary

Grace has this to say about the story: “This story was written for an anthology inspired by TS Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land.

“I was especially struck by the haunting imagery and evocative language in the poem’s fourth section, titled “Death By Water”. A dead man who’d forgotten the cry of gulls; the swell of water, picking his bones in whispers. Eliot seemed to be invoking the transitory nature of life and death, gain and loss, youth and age.

“I started thinking about the ways life might be suspended indefinitely, and then restarted anew, or how a person might live on in a new way, transformed and regenerated. I thought about how people grapple with the aftermath of great changes, both internal and external. It can be challenging to resolve the old and the new, and to find peace with conflicting selves, with parts of you that feel like they don’t belong. I thought about how love might be a bridge to survival and healing. And then, of course, I wanted to write a story that was a lovely blend of horror and science fiction.”

This story, and Grace’s comments about it, remind me of the Tarot deck. Most people say the death card just means change. But I’ve heard the Tower card, infamously the worst card in the deck, also just means change, although moreso in a “tear it all down and build it back up” kind of way. Looking at this story, one might think it dark, but I feel like it’s like the Tower. It’s about change, just a more drastic one than most stories. Taking the consciousness and allowing it to live on is a well-known trope in SF, but handling your own or your friends’ deaths is a different lens all together.

And our closing quotation this week is from the band The Garages, who said
of course, you think you can just come back home
bring your bags, packed like they were when you left
and in two days, i bet you’ll be freakin out
and wherever you go you know you’ll bring your storm with you

This story lands on the end of 2023, which has been a tumultuous year for many people. If you’re listening to this, I want to say congrats, you made it. Whatever cuts and bruises you’ve brought with you to the end of the year, you still made it. I hope for health and happiness to you and your loved ones, and hope the new year is kind to you. Thanks for joining us, and stay safe, stay kind, and have fun.