AURA SIMULATION

Chapter 11: Aura simulation

“There he is.” A woman’s voice, warm, professional, cutting through the dark before his eyes even opened. “You gave us a scare, Mr. Mercer. Can you tell me your name?”

Alex opened his eyes to a white ceiling and the feeling that he’d forgotten something enormous, the way you forget a dream in the first three seconds of being awake, except the forgetting didn’t stop after three seconds. It kept going, spreading, until it had swallowed everything behind it.

His mouth was dry. “Alex,” he said. “Alex Mercer.”

“Good. Do you know where you are?”

He tried to answer and found nothing there, just a blank space where the answer should have been, smooth and empty, like a room that had been swept clean and left that way on purpose.

“I don’t” He swallowed. “I don’t know.”

“That’s normal.” She said it gently, worn smooth from repetition. “Transit sleep can do that. Some memory fog in the first few hours is expected. It’ll come back in pieces.”

“Transit sleep.”

“You’re aboard Eden-1, Mr. Mercer.” She said it like a fact so obvious it barely needed saying. “En route to Mars. You volunteered for the consciousness-isolation program eighteen months ago, back on Earth. The transit puts a strain on memory in the short term, most colonists report the same disorientation you’re feeling right now.”

Something in him wanted to argue with that. He didn’t know why. It sat wrong, somewhere behind his ribs, the way a word feels wrong when you’ve said it too many times and it stops sounding like a real word at all.

“How long,” he asked. “Since I went under.”

“Eighteen months, ship-time. We’re a little over a third of the way to Mars.”

He looked down at his own hands, unfamiliar and familiar at once, and tried to find a single clear memory underneath the fog. Nothing surfaced. Just an impression, cold. Fluorescent light. Someone shouting, far away, like it had happened to somebody else and he’d only heard about it secondhand.

“Do you have a headache?” the nurse asked, watching his face carefully, the way you’d watch someone standing near a ledge.

“A little.”

“That’s expected too. It’ll pass.” She made a note on the tablet, unhurried. “You’re one of our maintenance technicians, engineering background, according to your file. You’ll be back on rotation within the week, once the fog clears fully. Idle hands make the fog worse, in our experience.”

“What’s your name?” Alex asked, mostly because he needed to hear a name that felt solid, something to hold onto in a room that otherwise felt like it might slide sideways if he wasn’t careful.

“Dr. Reyes. I’m on the medical staff here.” She smiled, kind and a little tired. “You’re going to be fine, Mr. Mercer. Everyone feels exactly like this the first day. It passes. I promise you it passes.”

He wanted to believe her. Some large, exhausted part of him decided, right then, that believing her was easier than not, and so he did.

“Can I see it?” he asked. “The ship?”

“Of course. Once you’re steady on your feet.” She helped him upright, testing his balance with a hand under his elbow, and led him to a window at the far end of the medical bay, and Alex forgot, for one full breath, everything that had been bothering him.

Beyond the glass: a vast, curved landscape unfolding under an artificial sky, green fields terraced along the ship’s rotating hull, small clusters of buildings that looked almost like a town, actual streets, actual people moving between them in the strange, soft light of a sun that wasn’t a sun at all, and somehow no less warm for it.

“It’s beautiful,” he said, and meant it completely.

“Five thousand people call this home, Mr. Mercer. You’re one of them now.” Dr. Reyes’s voice was warm with something that sounded, to Alex, like genuine pride. “Get some rest. Eat something. The fog will lift, and Mars will still be there when it does. It isn’t going anywhere. Neither are you.”

He nodded, and let himself be led back to a bed, and let his eyes close, telling himself the story she’d given him volunteer, transit sleep, memory fog, Mars because it was the only story he had, and because some part of him, quieter than the rest, didn’t want to look too closely at how convenient the shape of it was.

In the bed beside him, an old man slept with a small photograph propped against his water cup, a woman, gray-haired, smiling at some camera on some day that no longer existed anywhere except in that single square of paper. Alex watched it for a long moment before Dr. Reyes drew the privacy curtain between them, and something about the photograph bothered him in a way he couldn’t name, the same way the word Mars had already started to bother him, quietly, the third time he made himself say it out loud.

That night, for the first time, he dreamed of a white room, and a voice on a phone he couldn’t place, saying a name he didn’t recognize as his own.

Elias.

He woke gasping, heart hammering against his ribs in the dark, sheets damp beneath him, and could not, for the life of him, remember why any of it should frighten him at all.