Abaddon

CHAPTER 1

“Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say”.

That was the final utterance from that smarmy shithead Gabor as I opened the door of a monstrously pretentious onyx-colored G-Class that would taxi me to a tarmac the size of a small country.

I think he was trying to be funny. Or he was trying to mirror my behavior from our only other verbal exchange for which he had a basis. I’m a jocular fellow. Or glib or flippant or insouciant. It didn’t matter now.

Mitra laughs without looking at me when I relate this story and she continues looking intently through the panoramic window of my stateroom that seems both impossibly resilient and absent. I don’t laugh this time but I don’t believe I’m done laughing quite yet. Her laugh is brief and spontaneous. She is very earnest for an actor – based on my experience at least. It probably doesn’t matter now.

The occasional celestial body drifts by even though it is we who are drifting and those bodies that are far away always remain in the same place and we are all probably dead already but I am concluding that I’m alright. Mitra seems alright. I guess we’re both alright.

My name is Rhodes. My friends would call me Martin if I had any. Or Marty if I allowed it but I probably wouldn’t. Rhodes is what everyone called me in my former life but there aren’t really such things as former lives – we just tell ourselves that because we are terrified of the continuity. Occasionally you encounter sources of power so great that it turns what you thought was the arrow of time upon which your life was threaded into a concave hellscape for which there exists no sufficient response – punctures in the heavens that would make you crawl.

My name is Martin Rhodes and I am stuck in outer fucking space.

*

Addison Gabor sat at his desk and looked straight ahead into the eyes of the man opposite him. Gabor was a physically unremarkable man in a world he had orchestrated the construction of. Behind him, immense and uninterrupted windows cast a view over the Pacific Ocean and the cliffs of Big Sur extending upwards to the north. His office had the scale and sonic volume of a cathedral and the only perceptible sound was the noise of water dropping quietly into water – made by a large obsidian surface resembling a clock upon which a mercurial rivulet would make an antiphysical clockwise revolution before falling and disappearing into a basin that led nowhere. Rhodes had noticed it from where he sat during the initial silence before Gabor ultimately spoke.

“You…are…a vice president of operations.”

“I am.”

“And…you used to work within the film industry system.”

“I did.”

“Yes.”

Rhodes assumed the seated enigma wanted him to continue.

“As an assistant director. And ultimately as a line producer.”

“Yes.”

The space between them fell silent again. Gabor seemed to be in contemplation and then shifted to a vague and inscrutable amusement.

“I don’t know the full lexicon of the film industry, I’m afraid. Human resources is a strange animal indeed. I prefer to invent things.”

“Human resources would consider it a fairly natural progression.”

“Yes.”

More silence and the continuous drop of water into the fathomless basin. Rhodes was unconcerned. The need for his attention elsewhere was resoundingly undertaxed.

“I would like for you to do something for me.”

“Sure thing.”

“I need you to produce a movie for me.”

“Really? Why?”

“I imagine you learned a great deal on those Hollywood film sets.”

If Gabor was referring to Rhodes’ preternatural ability to ride the Ferris wheel of cocaine and tranquilizers and induce the disintegration of meaningful relationships, he was correct.

“Sure. But it’s been ten years. I assume things have changed.”

“We all know 3-D, I would like to shoot in 4-D.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Neither do I. At least not in a filmic context…so that’s where you come in.”

Unperturbed and resolutely uninterested Rhodes remained in his seat and occasionally would float through the windows rising behind the other man and abandon himself to the bluish and slate-colored waves breaking on the cold surface of the Pacific before returning once again to the confines of his $2000 suit.

“Okay.”

“Just hire someone who knows how it works.”

“That’s what I would do if I were me.”

“There is something else.”

“Okay.”

“Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“It is utterly devoid of any convention. Without precedent.”

“Okay.”

“I would like all aspects of production to occur beyond the reaches of Earth’s atmosphere.”

“I’m sorry?”

“In outer space.”

*

The elevator I step into at the end of a morbidly luminescent hallway of about 100 feet in length just outside of Gabor’s office has only one button and the air inside is acrid with stainless steel polish. I hit the solitary black button and the doors meet in the middle in a closing mechanical embrace. I can almost feel the recessed and overhead fluorescent light seeping under my skin and rendering it translucent as the lift descends at what seems like a rapid clip. I’ve been in elevators like this before but the journey never lasted so long. It is not until the lift stops and the doors open again in arrival that I realized I had just traversed immobile through the antechamber of something that might actually be impossible to reconnoiter.

*

Rhodes’ eyes had begun to glaze over but upon hearing this the right eye twitched involuntarily and then the left one and the violent shattering of his good humor almost ejected them from their sockets but the other man was floating upon the tidal vespers of his own egotism and did not notice.

“…the first fiction feature film of its kind.”

“Why?”

“It will be the first fiction feature film of its kind.”

“Is the world ending?”

“Oh yes. Not any time soon – but yes, the world is always heading towards its own unique terminal – everything is.”

“Is it a Sci-Fi project?”

“No.”

He had asked the question out of hope – out of jest and was not surprised by the answer. Gabor slid a small silver thumb drive across his desk towards Rhodes like it was an envelope of money for an assassination of a business rival. Rhodes didn’t even look at it.

“Here is the script.”

“What’s it about?”

“I haven’t read the script. You read it.”

“This isn’t something I can see myself doing.”

“Certainly not. It is without precedent.”

“I don’t…I mean I don’t know. I don’t think this is something I want to do.”

“Are you a happy man?”

“Sure.”

Gabor began to stare at Rhodes with a reptilian intensity.

“The human soul might not exist. If it does…it is a prodigiously effusive phenomenon. Still – there is no proof which one can apprehend.”

“Okay.”

“When one does something…the reasons are beyond us. Motivations are fugitive and alien. One does something to make oneself feel something…on a level that is molecular…on a level that one can facetiously claim to experience on the level of one’s soul.”

“But it’s just chemicals in our brain. Everything is.”

Gabor leaned back supinely in his chair and was riding his tidal plane again.

“Just chemicals in your brain…yes. But it lacks poetry – for many – poetry is not a necessity for me.”

“Poetry is okay.”

“Poetry is fine. Doing is better.”

“It’s what we’re supposed to do.”

“I will pay you fifteen million dollars per year until the project is complete.”

“That’s fine.”

“Yes.”

“So where are we shooting this movie? Mars? The Moon? A moon?”

Rhodes already knew he didn’t have a choice in the matter.

“No. Others have already shot footage on the Moon.”

“Unless it was all fabricated?”

“It wasn’t. The project will be made entirely in space.”

“How?”

“You and everyone else involved will be aboard a purpose-built spacecraft.”

“It takes a lot of real estate to shoot a feature film – lodging for the cast and crew, storage facilities, lab facilities, dining, recreation…”

“As I said – a purpose-built spacecraft. It is quite voluminous.”

*

After a short walk from the elevator, Rhodes stepped across the threshold of an automatic cloudy glass screen that silently slid open after a slight delay. He had a kindred sensation that he was entering through the side door. The floor was fabricated from semi-translucent white polymer that concealed what was underneath just enough to prevent any vertiginous reaction as it extended glacially to Rhodes’ left into an expansive mezzanine that was at least one hundred feet above the ground below. The noumenal presence of the object it was constructed to observe and the space within which it was set was so unfathomably beyond scrutiny that Rhodes had another kindred sensation of when he used to smoke angel dust with depraved talent managers and power brokers during goodwill missions into the ionized bedlam of the Las Vegas underbelly. He snatched his consciousness back into the corporeal plane and urged his flesh-wrapped bones forward. Midway to the barrier of the mezzanine separating it from the precipitous drop to the concrete floor over its edge, he was approached by a tall and slender woman dressed in a t-shirt and fashionable dark jeans and black synthetic fiber work boots with a Kevlar capped toe. He spoke first:

“Rhodes.”

“Cervantes. Chief Project Manager.”

“Good to meet you. I don’t think I’ve ever heard your name mentioned in the middle management suite.”

“I don’t officially work here. No one on this project does. Shall we?”

She was younger than him and her initial severity made him feel somewhat alien but not uncomfortable. The atmosphere in the hangar had a different temperature than the conference rooms and offices that were Rhodes’ primary habitat and which seemed infinitely far away from the place he currently occupied – impossibly large, impossibly located, seemingly filled with temperatureless sunlight – both arcane and existing in an irrefutably phenomenological state.

“Of course. This is…impressive.”

The spacecraft occupied the volumetric center of the universe-sized hangar – levitating in place above the acres of concrete floor like an upended monolith of heretofore unencountered scale – an inverse Abaddon but no less inspirational of fear and trembling. The ship was prismoid and rectilinear and stretched horizontally to such a length that the far end touched a vanishing point beyond Rhodes’ eyeline. It was wrapped in monumental and mesomorphic sinews of glass and steel running with monstrous curvature to form a hull with planes of shimmering and reflective brilliance beset upon by reptiliform columns twisting with disquiet in an impregnable and hibernal embrace.

“Yes. It’s pretty fucking wild” she replied.

*

The artificial gravity in my room started malfunctioning a few days ago. Now it disengages at random and I’ll start to drift around my spartanly luxuriant living quarters which is what I’m doing now. I secured my liquor bottles with a loop of duct tape to the bar so I can breaststroke my way to the booze and belly up like I’m in Cabo. I’ve been on this ship for six months managing the production of a film based on a script I still haven’t read. Space is possessed by a silence that is difficult to describe but these are my private spacewalks where I drift upon my back and generate shapes and forms on the insides of my eyelids. Someone knocks once on the door and I open my eyes.

*

The cabin door slid open and the room pressurized instantaneously. Rhodes dropped from a height of about five feet – his right half hit the side of the mattress before he toppled onto the floor into a position that could have passed for sitting. He slid his left hand along the dark Berber carpet and propped himself up to a minimal extent.

“Did you just fall over?”

“In a way.”

Anya Mitra was already in the room by the time he responded. She was the second lead in the movie and they had talked at length over the preceding months.

“I don’t think I’m interrupting anything – right?”

“You’re not. Interrupting anything that is.”

“That’s wonderful.”

“I’m glad you think so.”

“Why don’t you open the window shade?”

Her hand suggested towards the automatic quasi-opaque screen covering the full dimensions of the panoramic window on the starboard wall.

“Too bright outside.”

“That’s all in your head. We’re in space, you should enjoy it.”

“I will.”

“May I?” … “We’re getting close to Mars.”

“Interesting.”

She had already turned the dial for the window screen before Rhodes responded. The opacity dissolved like a synthetic fog and the darkness of the cosmos replete stars and a certain kind of light was revealed – expanding forever outwards. Mitra stood close to the window glass and the light from the sun reflecting from the surface of the red planet in the near distance through the utterly translucent barrier made her skin appear vaguely pearlescent and light amber.

“It is interesting. You’d be a little tiresome if I didn’t find that saturnine disposition of yours oddly charming.”

“Lucky me.”

“Lucky you. Get up – come stand next to me and look.”

He began to rise to his feet like a stray dog waking from a nap in the sun.

“What am I looking at?”

“You’re looking at everything. That’s Mars of course – but past that is everything else and past that is a point too distant to observe and from that point everything we know and everything we don’t know emerged.”

“You’re quite the scholar.”

“And you’re the patron saint of patronizers.”

She was jesting in a way and Rhodes knew but he still felt inclined to placate her even though it was unnecessary. He was very fond of her but his distance and being adrift made it difficult to consider. She was very similar in that way but did not lack real socialization. Rhode’s self-absorption made this impossible to notice though.

“That’s not what I meant. And I don’t think that’s a real word.”

“You’re not helping your cause Mr. Producer.”

“I wasn’t trying to be patronizing – promise. I’ve spent…a lot of time around actors. You have a certain thoughtfulness that usually takes a press pack or social media post to bring out.”

“I guess my ilk has the occasional surprise.”

“Tell me more.”

“Well…the universe is like a really intelligent sex comedy – but also without meaning – and all of the ensemble cast are impotent - do you follow me chief?”

“I think so.”

“So fourteen billion years ago all of this kicked off – just hotter, denser, and much smaller. Basic atoms start to form but the universe is completely dark – its too tightly wound – kind of like you – so photons that transmit light can’t break free and travel outwards – like a lightning storm behind an impenetrable veil.”

“How do you know all of this?”

“Occasionally I take a break from reading scripts.”

“I’m sorry. Go on. Photons…”

“Thank you for my cue. So, the universe has been expanding this whole time – it still is – so these atoms have room to stabilize. The photons can finally break free and start traveling outwards. In the grand scheme – all of this is happening very quickly – but I like to imagine light slowly spreading slowly through the universe – the universe starts to glow – orange…yellow…brilliant but…diffuse somehow. The light spreads…and starts to fade…meanwhile – about 500 million in – stars and galaxies and massive celestial bodies without names start to coalesce. The universe doesn’t know what it's doing…it just does.”

“Like a method actor.”

She tossed her head back slightly and the corner of her mouth turned up in a silent laugh as she cast him a sideways glance.

“Funny man. We should get you down to the crew club for open-mic night. Drink?”

“Please.”

She passed behind him in the direction of the bar while he imagined what life would be like in the center of a Martian dust storm. She returned and passed a glass tumbler into his hand.

“For you, Rhodes. Your bottles are taped to the bar.”

“Thank you, Mitra. And I know.”

She drank and then he drank.

*

It was at that juncture that Rhodes understood Cervantes’ initial severity and that he was mistaken. It was an aloofness that the young woman had cultivated as a reaction to the enormity of engineering that dead certainly was possessed of an orbital pull on the vital egos of those in its presence. Now he was just in awe of her composure as they continued to look outwards from the escarpment of the mezzanine.

“Why does it feel like my eyeballs are drying up? Normal or no?”

“Oh yeah. The humidity in the hangar is maintained at an extremely low level.”

“Why?”

“The space is so large that if too much moisture develops in the air…a sort of atmosphere will form and it will start raining.”

“Fucking wild indeed.”

“Yeah. I think I remember a professor telling me in grad school that a project wasn’t serious until it required a meteorologist on staff.”

“So this…goes into space.”

She seemed to sever herself from an inner rumination and glanced quickly at Rhodes.

“Was that a question?”

He also had one foot that was somewhere aside from where he was and he didn’t have time to answer before she continued.

” Either way – that’s what they tell me – I don’t know the science. I do know that the craft is 1,990 feet long, 375 feet wide and 375 feet tall and the fuselage has an empty volume of approximately 280 million cubic feet. It is propelled by a continuously cycling fission reactor – plutonium-241 according to the last SCRUM session – and it’s maneuvered using electromagnetic radiation – generated by these proprietary rings that encircle the ship. It’s very green.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“I don’t know how any of it actually works.”

“That’s okay. Do you know how much Gabor has spent?”

“No – and neither does he.”

“Fuck me – really?”

“Well…not 100 percent really. By my latest count – about one trillion.”

“Trilion with a T.”

“Yes. Was that a question?”

“No it wasn’t. How do you count to a trillion? That’s the question.”

“…very haphazardly – with reckless abandon. I can quote you a trillion – but the entire accounting department is based in the Cayman Islands so I really can’t say for sure – but it’s probably more. No way of knowing… Their office number was left out of the staff directory.”

“Well I have heard that tax-sheltered space shuttles are more reliable.”

“I think the project sponsor told me something similar.”

“I’d like to see the non-disclosure agreement for a project like this…”

“There isn’t an NDA…”

Her quippy energy evaporated quite suddenly. She looked at him intently for just a moment before returning her eyes again towards one thousand yards into the beyond.

”…because this project does not exist. Phone lines are restricted to intra-company communication – and bugged. No one here goes home until this project is complete.”

“You mean – “

“Yes. I live here.”

“What about staff member families? Do they move them down here too?”

“Do you have a family?”

“No.”

“Neither does anyone else on this project. We have everything we need. Material requests are rarely ever denied. The fake windows emit UV light and there’s a bar that opens at what I can only guess is 1800 hours with cold drinks and a gym and a spa every Sunday – or what I can only guess is Sunday – those three things probably do the most to keep us from going insane and murdering each other.”

“Can staff quit?”

She continued with her gaze still straight ahead.

“Sure. Only a couple have – we’re paid too much. For most it's too much to walk away from – and too much temptation to violate the non-disclosure agreement.”

“The one that doesn’t exist.”

“Exactly. After launch day, we all go back and do whatever it is we did in the real world – Gabor doesn’t give two shits what we say after that – write a book about it, start a podcast, whatever. But until that day…the consequences of saying anything are…grim.”

“I see.”

Rhodes did, and when she turned to him Cervantes knew as well.

“I believe you do. The billionaires of yesteryear could bury you…the trillionaires of today can make it as if you were never really here.”

*

The green space of the park was a mausoleum of cinder under the minutely convex dome that provided a view of the void above and around. It’s a shame I haven’t been in here before now I guess. About a month ago crew member passed out drunk with a lit cigarette and burned the whole fucking place down to the soil that probably cost a million dollars per cubic yard. His comrades-in-inebriation tried to run out but the gates sealed and the oxygen was purged to contain the fire. They’re all dead. I’m drunk too and the front of my shirt is covered in someone’s blood but I gave up smoking a long time ago and there's nothing else flammable in here – just a scorched reliquary of another lost kingdom.

*

In many ways the choice was made before he had stepped into this room – or in almost every way. In many ways before he knew a man like Addison Gabor existed.

“Does it have a Main Street – a city hall?”

“No. But it does contain a park…of sorts…an engineered green space. You will have the necessary length, width, and height for the project. Difficult for you to imagine – but I assure you – it is a purpose-built spacecraft.”

“You – I mean - I don’t know how to fly a spaceship.”

“Certainly not. It’s not your business department.”

“We have a department for flying –“

“Every person does a job. Yours will be yours – everything else you can remain unconcerned with.”

Rhodes knew it was not his lot or purpose to understand the things that had brought him here.

“Okay…well as the producer – how much is this film budgeted for?”

“Yes. I don’t know. How much do the movies cost these days? One billion – two?”

“Well – “

“The monetary amount is superfluous. This is an endeavor for our possibly nonexistent soul.”

“I understand. But…beyond a fairly standardized logistical framework, what keeps a film on track is the budget – the money is concrete – it has a beginning and end.”

“I don’t follow.”

“What I mean is – “

“I think what you are trying to say is mostly correct – money is an abstraction – no real meaning.”

“Sure.”

Not a single request had actually been made during Gabor’s ersatz proposition and both men knew that whatever transpired – cataclysm or providence – was inscribed and sealed. The two men had radically incongruous disparities in nature but they shared the understanding that the future was no more real than all of the other things that had never occurred.

“So.”

“Who’s in charge?

“Who is in charge of a film set?”

“It depends who you ask.”

“You’re in charge of making sure people don’t ask.”

“It can be difficult making sure people don’t ask things.”

“I don’t think that’s accurate.”

“Okay.”

“That has not been my experience.”

“Okay. I’m in charge.”

“You are the sole representative of the company. The sole representative of me.”

“I’m in charge.”

“So.”

“Fifteen million?”

“So?”

“I guess…I’ll do it.”

“Yes you will.”

“So…should I just – “

“I think it’s time for you to take the grand tour.”

*

Mitra and Rhodes spent an uncounted amount of time in rapturous silence. They had become closer to the glass and to each other and with their arms close to contact she sipped slowly from her glass and spoke from a different place than she had before. Further away but within an entirely new place with a proximity that may have been close enough to grasp.

“So. We’re at about a billion years since the Big Bang now. The Milky Way. The sun. All of that is taking on form from void.”

“Very poetic.”

“Ha. Our solar system…Earth…and then – by some stupid coincidence or synchronicity – you get life. After a much longer time, we get life. It only took the universe four billion years to accidentally create life…it took more than another ten billion to bring us here – a stupid comedy.”

“A short comedy for us.”

“Yes. The show goes on…”

“And how does all of this end?”

“I wouldn’t worry about that too much. The show goes on – we’re just not in it.”