StretchWave

Janus didn’t want to be here.

First of all, it was cold. It was the type of frigid, ultra-modern place that made you think of stern faces and admonishing voices. People looking down their nose at you, demanding to know why you were spoiling their precious air with your worthless exhalations.

Second of all, the chair was uncomfortable as hell. It was made of some hard, molded plastic. Except it wasn’t molded to any shape that could be called human. The seat formed a strange cup that pinched her outer thighs. The backrest was an abomination. The lower part was concave, sunken in, whereas the upper part jutted out, forcing her to sit erect but giving her lower back zero support. The cold, hard plastic made her butt numb and, if that wasn’t bad enough, there were metal rivets that shocked her every time she fidgeted, which was often.

The third reason she didn’t want to be here had nothing to do with physical comfort. It was about what was waiting for her beyond the timeless hell of this waiting room, with its ticking clock and soft breeze of dry, metallic air.

An old man had been sitting here almost as long as she had been, and he kept clearing his throat. Once in a while he would pull a piece of cloth out of his pocket and blow his nose into it. She could hear the chunks of snot and booger ejecting out of his oversized nostrils.

For some reason, the old man seemed perfectly content. Undisturbed. Whenever Janus caught his eye he just smiled and nodded at her. Either he did this all the time, to visit family or go to work, or else he was here for some completely different reason.

Other than him, there was only one other person in the room. A stoic and severe older woman behind a desk who kept herself busy at work, ignoring the fact that there was at least one, perhaps as many as two, passengers waiting anxiously for some form of guidance.

For the twelfth or maybe seventieth time since she had sat down, Janus reached into her handbag and pulled out her ticket. She scanned each detail like someone with OCD staring at a stove burner knob.

Her name: JANUS KAMMELO

Her ticket ID number: Some long and unimportant string of information.

Her station of departure: BLACKWELL EAST STATION

Her date of departure: 8/16/2082

Her time of departure: 3:30 PM

There was more information beyond that. But she didn’t want to read that far, because it would make her feel sick. It was good enough that she had verified, yet again, that she was in the right place. And, furthermore, she was here on the right day at the right time. Well, actually, she had come a bit early, because they said that was a good idea. But so far no one had…

“Janus Kammelo?” said the woman at the desk.

Janus stood up so fast her heels nearly left the floor.

“Yes, that’s me,” she said politely, gathering her things quickly and rushing toward the counter.

“ID, please?”

She laid her right arm on the counter, palm up, and let the woman wave a small device over it. There was a sharp beep and, presumably, some information popped up on the woman’s screen which she proceeded to stare at for an almost alarming length of time.

“This is your first time using StretchWave?” asked the woman, without looking away from her screen.

“Uh, yes,” said Janus with a shaky smile. “I kept making the excuse that I was waiting for it to become more affordable. Well, now it has. You really called my bluff.”

The woman didn’t seem to find this particularly funny or interesting. Well, it wasn’t meant to be. It was just the truth, really.

“Have you been briefed?” the woman asked.

“No, not yet. I was told I could get the briefing in person. That’s why I got here early.”

“Please sit down,” said the woman in a monotone. “Someone will be with you.”

Nothing seemed to change in the woman’s expression or stance. But something had indeed happened, as palpable as a door slamming shut. There would be no more questions, no more talking.

Janus took a new seat, one nearer the counter, and waited. She checked the time. It was now 3:17. Her stomach flipped over and anxiety arced through her like an electric shock. She knew logically that being perfectly on time didn’t matter very much, but she couldn’t get past the terror represented by the thought of missing a travel deadline.

3:17 became 3:18. And then, of course, as a matter of inevitability, 3:18 became 3:19. Just when Janus thought she had been forgotten and forsaken by the tyrant at the desk, a person appeared in the waiting room.

He was a small man, completely bald other than some wisps of snow-white hair around the extreme peripheries of his scalp. But his eyebrows, bushy and thick, were completely jet black. He walked with a hunch but also with great speed, approaching Janus with a smile on his face.

“You must be the lucky newcomer,” he said, gesturing to the old man still seated. “Must be. That fellow doesn’t look like much of a Janus to me, and he certainly doesn’t seem to be a twenty-nine-year-old woman.”

“No, I guess not,” said Janus, chuckling and already feeling more at ease. Surely everything would go well now, and she could stop worrying.

“Very good,” said the man, looking down at his data slate. “Well, everything seems to be in order. All that’s left is cluing you in on how things work around here, which we can do right in the very same room you’ll be departing from. If you would follow me.”

He started to walk away at the same fast pace, his feet a shuffling blur beneath him. Janus jogged to catch up, then fell into a fast walk. She felt a bit like when she was a child, trying to keep up with her mother at the grocery store.

“My name is Paolo, by the way,” said the man. “But everyone calls me Paul.”

“I can call you Paolo,” said Janus. “If you prefer it.”

He glanced back at her. “I suppose it would suit me.”

She smiled. “Good. Did anybody ever make fun of you for your name?”

Right away she wanted to stuff the words back into her mouth. She was nervous, and when she was nervous she just blurted things without thinking.

To her it seemed like Paolo took forever to acknowledge what she had said. But probably only a second had passed before she started speaking again.

“Because I got made fun of for my name,” she said.

“Really? I don’t see that Janus is very unusual,” he replied.

“Until you look at the way it’s spelled. Kids used to call me Jay-niss. Which rhymes with anus. They had plenty of fun with that.”

Paolo laughed. “Well, then you have a greater sob story than I. I just got sick of people adding more syllables to my name than it actually needs. It’s POW-lo, not PAH-oh-lo. So when my best friend started referring to me as Paul, I let it stick.”

Janus nodded to herself, and finally took a look around. The station was actually quite a gorgeous building. Right now she was walking along a ring-shaped hall that surrounded a central open-air courtyard. The wall to her right, the outside wall, was ordinary and opaque. But the inside wall was all glass, giving her a view of trees and grass and pond water. The air out in the courtyard was full of a perpetual mist. She saw a couple of workers walking around out there, letting the mist soak into their clothes. It was a pretty hot day, so it made sense.

“Here we are,” said Paolo, coming to a stop at a door set in the outside wall. It was one of many, spaced about five feet apart. They all had numbers on them. This one was number 9.

Janus looked behind her. The dreaded waiting room was now out of sight along the curve of the hall.

Paolo opened the door and said, “After you.”

She stepped into a space that felt like a wonderfully cozy black cocoon. There was white noise drifting from the wall slate, a surge of waves and wind. She could see very little, perhaps by design; everything was in vague silhouette.

Paolo shut the door and, automatically, the wall slate suffused the room with a gently bluish glow that rippled like light refracting through water. Now Janus could see slightly more. A room divider set up in the corner. A small wardrobe. And a long, oval pod that took up most of the floorspace.

“You can have a seat right over here,” said Paolo.

She followed him to a small desk. They sat down. Rather than each taking one side of the desk, they sat on the same side. Facing each other. Janus guessed that this was another subtle way they had of putting you at ease. Of making you feel more in control. Luckily, her knowledge of the trick did not make it less effective.

“First of all,” Paolo said softly, “I would like to tell you that flight has been dethroned as the safest form of transit. The new king, of course, is StretchWave.”

She nodded. “I assume it’s safer because…”

“Because when you’re on a jet or a liner to the moon, your physical body is still present and thus the level of risk can never be brought down to zero. They have got down things down to a level of near perfection, and it will take them further decades to knock a single hundredth of a percent off their current risk levels. Even now, the flight industry records approximately fourteen deaths annually. Across millions upon millions of passengers, that’s very low. Can you guess what StretchWave’s fatality rate is?”

“I dunno, zero?” said Janus.

Paolo held up a finger, smiling. “One. Eight months ago, pods were being delivered to a new station in Chisinau. There was an accident. One of the pods fell and a worker was crushed. So, we have one fatality. Of course, it had nothing to do with the technology itself.”

“Of course not,” said Janus, nodding along, as though she knew all of this. She felt suddenly like a true convert to the religion of StretchWave, which was just another sect of the larger religion called Science. This was a world where everything was right, where everything was neat and categorized, where reality could be boiled down to a vast but well-lit archive of knowledge. Everything stored away in its proper drawer, in a plainly marked file.

“Now,” said Paolo, putting his finger down. “That isn’t to say that StretchWave travel isn’t without its… peculiarities.”

“Oh?” said Janus, her heart suddenly pounding as her inner being woke up to the true reality, to the world of darkness, fear, and superstition. Yes, this was the moment. This was when all that peace would be destroyed and the demons that haunted the universe would be revealed to her.

But of course, it turned out to be more mundane than that.

“Yes,” said Paolo. “There is quite a laundry list of symptoms. You have the usual nausea, indigestion, headache, blurry vision… All temporary, of course, resolving within an hour at most. You also have your stranger symptoms. One man recently… he was an arrival, you see, rather than a departure like yourself… he claimed his teeth felt like cotton balls, and his brain had gone cold. I thought that was strange, so I made a note of it. I walked around with the man for a little while, as is my custom. By the time we made one full circuit of the hall, he was smiling and joking around with me. Right as rain.”

Janus began to wring her hands. Or perhaps she had already been doing it for some time. Either way, Paolo picked up on her nervous energy.

“Is there something specific that is bothering you?” he asked.

“No,” she said quickly. “I’m just a little nervous.”

“Yes, of course you are. That is human nature, when faced with a strange new experience. But believe me, StretchWave is fun and exciting. Just the concept of it is quite thrilling, isn’t it? Instantaneous transportation to any point in the solar system. Provided that point has a pod that is connected to the civilian network, that is.”

He chuckled, grabbing his data slate. He seemed to be herding her towards the final moment, when she would need to actually put herself into the pod.

“I heard it isn’t actually instantaneous,” she said.

He set his slate down and stared at her soberly. She could tell he had heard all of the theories, all of the fairy tales, and was hoping she wasn’t another one of those nuts.

“No, it isn’t,” he replied. “It actually takes a few seconds. Up to ten, if you’re going as far as Charon orbit. You see…”

Now he leaned forward, taking both of her hands in his, his brown eyes going warm and almost damp.

“StretchWave is like every other new scientific marvel that came before it. We mostly understand how it works, and why, but we don’t know everything. But the basic story is that it breaks our bodies down into molecules. We are then beamed through the network from one pod to another, and put back together again just as we were.”

“But doesn’t that break the laws of physics? Nothing is supposed to be able to travel faster than light, and I’m pretty sure Pluto is a lot more than twenty light seconds away.”

Paolo sat back again. “You’re a smart one. You do not come by your nerves by a lack of studying. Rather, you use knowledge to solidify your apprehension. As I said, we do not know everything about how StretchWave works.”

Even through his professional calm and his friendly smile, Janus saw something. A bit of his own apprehension, bubbling under the surface.

“I have to ask,” she said.

He immediately sighed, throwing his hands up, then crossing his arms in a sort of shield over his chest. He glanced at his slate.

“We are approaching your departure time, Ms. Kammelo.”

“I know, but…” She really starting wringing her hands now. “Some people are saying that isn’t really how StretchWave works. Even some people who work for the company.”

“It is the official explanation,” said Paolo.

“But not the only one?” she asked, narrowing her eyes and baring her teeth in a rictus of embarrassment.

He sighed again. “It would perhaps be better for you if you would simply accept the simplest explanation and go about your day, Ms. Kammelo.”

She didn’t say anything, because she had no idea what to say. She wanted to stuff the words back into her mouth again.

But Paolo took her silence for stoicism, for stubbornness. After a moment, he continued talking.

“You are right about the laws of physics,” he said. “Nothing should be able to travel faster than light. That’s where the secondary theory comes in. From our perspectives, a StretchWave journey lasts only a handful of seconds. But actually, it is a much longer journey.”

“How can that be?” asked Janus.

“Because it is happening somewhere else. This theory holds that a StretchWave pod opens a temporary portal to an alternative reality. Another dimension, another universe… it doesn’t matter. It then deposits your body into that other place. The pod on the other side of your journey creates its own portal to the same place and pulls you through.”

“That sounds like it would only take a few seconds as well,” said Janus, fidgeting, picketing at the edge of the cushion on her chair.

Paolo shrugged. “I can’t believe I’m going to give these people even this much credit, but here goes. Surely you’ve heard the stories. The rumors.”

She nodded slowly. “I think so.”

“StretchWave travelers claiming to have been stranded in some strange world for many hours, terrified and alone. Or in some cases, not alone. But it’s all nonsense, of course. The mind wishes to make sense of everything we experience. When it goes up against StretchWave, when it must endure a brief period of non-existence, it’s bound to come up with strange visions. However…”

“What?” asked Janus.

He seemed to be getting excited now, the knowledge-seeker inside him coming fully awake.

“It’s curious,” he said, “how some of these visions seem to corroborate each other. There are various experiences that really match up. Of course, it’s possible that they match up because they were designed that way. A StretchWave traveler reads someone else’s tall tale online, concocts his own follow-up, and posts it as soon as he’s gone on his own voyage. I think it’s a lot of fantasy, a collection of people looking to entertain themselves in that oldest of ways. By telling ghost stories. It’s a thriving online community, I assure you. They have developed an entire mythology surrounding StretchWave, and how it is not a creation of science but rather a cursed and haunted piece of technology. They even have a name for the other world you go to.”

“What do they call it?” asked Janus.

“They call it the Stretch,” said Paolo. “It’s fascinating. I do love a good horror yarn. I’ll admit that I spend an hour or two each week catching up on the stories. It’s human nature to seek mystery and intrigue, and it makes my job seem more exciting than it really is. Ms. Kammelo… I have personally seen over two thousand people off on their StretchWave journeys. I will reiterate the fact that it is the only form of transit that is completely safe. Furthermore, ninety-nine out of a hundred travelers come out the other side with smiles on their faces, marveling at their experience. And the one out of a hundred? Well, that person just has to take a few deep breaths and wait a moment for any symptoms to fade away.”

Janus nodded. She glanced at the time on her wrist, and saw that 3:30 had come and gone. It was now 3:32, and they were still sitting here. In the dark. Her brother was waiting for her on the other end, and they hadn’t seen each other in five years. It was time to go.

“Well,” she said, starting to stand.

Paolo beat her to it, launching to his feet and rushing toward the wardrobe, pulling open a door. “Now, we give you the option of changing into something more comfortable and relaxing. A bathrobe or gown, if you prefer.”

She looked at the room dividing screen, then at Paolo. “No, that’s OK. I’ll just keep what I have on.”

He nodded, shutting the wardrobe. “Then we’ve just about run out of preamble.”

Lifting his slate, he pressed a button. The lid of the pod suddenly lifted and swung aside in complete silence, revealing a black and cushy interior. Janus flashed back to when she was ten years old, taking her first off-planet flight to see her father at his base. There had been beds in their cabin, and they looked a lot like this.

Before she knew it, she had begun to lower herself onto the cushioned surface.

“On my back, or…?”

“However you feel most comfortable,” Paolo said with a smile.

She lay on her back, her ankles crossed and her fingers interlaced over her belly. This was not how she felt most comfortable at all. She felt full of sick energy, ready to jolt upright. Like she was in the dentist’s chair, waiting for the horrible whining sound of that little drill.

“Just take a deep breath,” Paolo said. “You’re completely safe. You are at peace, in a place of calm silence… Soon you will get to experience what nothingness is like, Janus, and when you wake on the other side I think you will feel refreshed.”

It seemed to be an odd note to strike. But perhaps it was just his way of trying to sell the experience to her. He didn’t need to, though. It was too late. This was going to happen. Technically she could still stand up, back out. But only technically. In reality, she could not.

The white noise was back to full volume, the crash of the surf. The blue light danced, like sunlight through clear, beautiful water. Janus shut her eyes.

There was no direct audio cue for when the lid shut. The white noise suddenly became muffled, and she felt a change in the air pressure. She felt her own breath wafting back against her face. She opened her eyes, and saw the lid just a few inches from the end of her nose. Fear spiked through her; she pressed her hands against the lid, putting in a half-hearted effort to shove it open.

Something changed. A fan or something started to blow, and that warm feeling of recycled breath was washed away. Soon she was surrounded by a cool current. It blew in at her head and was sucked out at her feet. Somehow, it made the pod feel less tight.

“Breathe and relax,” Paolo said, his voice coming through clearly. “What you’re feeling now is just ordinary air. In a moment, though, I will start pumping in hypophoric gas. We call it dream gas. It’s a mild form of anesthetic. It won’t put you to sleep, but it will make you feel very good. I know you’re someone who likes answers, so I will tell you that the reason we use dream gas is a simple one. In the earliest trials of StretchWave, travelers would experience an exaggerated hypnic jerk when they arrived at their destination. Like when you jump in your sleep. There were some black eyes and even a broken nose. The dream gas prevents that from happening. It is a safe compound that has a half-life of less than fifteen seconds in the body. It will not be flowing in your destination pod. By the time they lift the lid off, you will be fully lucid.”

She nodded. She had no idea if Paolo could see it. The lid was transparent, but the material was frosted glass. She perceived only vague shapes beyond it.

And then the gas came. She was worried she might not be able to tell, but it was quite obvious. One second she was trying to tell herself everything would be fine, and the next she was believing it. Soon she was fully relaxed, smiling, her head lolling from side to side. It felt like she’d just had a big glass of wine and a couple of good orgasms. Or, more simply, she felt loose and at ease.

“You are going on a wonderful journey,” said Paolo’s voice. “You are about to experience something people have been dreaming about ever since dreams existed. Essentially, you are about to experience teleportation. Give my regards to the folks on the other side.”

***

She didn’t know whether anything had happened. She still saw the frosted glass of the lid, but there was something strange about it now. The shapes on the other side were moving. And they were hovering directly over her.

It was very dark on the other side, but the inside of the pod was still filled with that soft blue glow. She fidgeted, trying to gather some kind of motivation as the dream gas dulled her senses. She thudded around. Everything sounded hollow and strange, echoing in a way that shouldn’t be possible. But that was just the gas, she decided. It had caused her ears to go funny.

“Hello?” she said, tapping her knuckles against the lid. “I see you out there. Can I come out now?”

The shapes stopped moving. Now she couldn’t see them anymore, because motion was all she had to go off of. But she knew they were still there. Watching her.

“Something went wrong,” said Paolo’s voice. “Can you still hear me? Janus, Ms. Kammelo, can you hear me?”

“Um, yes,” she said, blinking to try and clear her vision. “Paolo, I can hear you. Nothing went wrong. Everything’s fine.”

“If you can hear me, you have to come back,” Paolo said. “Ms. Kammelo, listen to me very carefully. Try to fight the gas. Pay close attention, please. I was wrong, and you’re in great danger. If you can hear me, look for a way out. Come back to me, or get to your destination pod. It doesn’t matter which. But do it now.”

“Why?” she asked, trying to sit up and slamming her head against the lid. “Paolo, what’s going on?”

He could not hear her, but he answered her question anyway.

“Something has found you, Ms. Kammelo. I don’t know what it is. And if you want to stay ignorant along with me, I suggest you move.”

“I can’t!” she said, beating her hands dully against the glass. “The lid is stuck shut! Paolo, I’m trapped in here.”

When it opened, it was just as silent as before. But this time her eyes were open. As soon as she realized the lid was swinging aside, she squeezed her eyes shut and held her breath.

She felt it again. The warm feeling of recycled air. The moist heat of breath against her face.

Her heart thudded in her ears like a war drum. Dread washed through her body, making her gasp involuntarily.

Nearby, someone laughed.

She told herself it was just the people at her destination, messing around. Or maybe it really was Paolo. Someone had gone wrong. The pod malfunctioned and she hadn’t been sent through. Now he was just messing with her.

Technically, all of that was possible.

But really, she knew it wasn’t.

She opened her eyes, and found herself staring into two empty sockets.

Janus screamed and launched herself off the pod.

She hit the floor. Everything was dark, but she could see enough to realize it was the same tile floor from the station room she had just left behind. Except it wasn’t. The tiles were cracked now, caked with grime. Smeared with old blood. She could smell it, the stench of copper.

“She fell,” a harsh voice said.

Janus felt a hovering presence. She looked up as the eyeless thing stooped to stare once more into her soul. Beyond it, though she could see nothing much, she thought she could make out another figure standing in the corner of the room. Someone very tall, someone smiling, with teeth that were far too big.

Her shoes squeaked and scuffed the floor as she exploded upward in a sprint. Immediately she slammed into the wall, rebounded, and nearly fell back into the pod. Instead, she skirted around it and made for the door.

She never expected to make it. She thought one of them would reach her before she could. But suddenly she was shoving it open and spilling into the hall.

The first thing she saw was the courtyard beyond the glass wall. It was lit by a red glow. Corpses floated in the pond, and a single naked man danced in the grass.

Janus turned left. That was the way to the waiting room. Beyond the waiting room was the exit.

She ran as fast as she could. She had always been a fast runner. Even in nightmares. Not once had she been stuck in quicksand, frozen, unable to move.

She had been in room 9. The rooms were spaced five feet apart along the outer wall. That meant she only had to go forty-five feet before she reached the waiting room. At this speed, it ought to have been a very short trip.

But the waiting room never appeared. And as she ran, she noticed the numbers on the doors were going up. She was at fifty now. Then a hundred. A hundred and fifty. The hallway stretched on forever ahead of her, and yet it all circled the same small courtyard where the naked man was dancing, smiling, laughing as the intestines of the dead coiled around his ankles.

There was no waiting room, no door out. No exit.

She was in the Stretch now. And even when they pulled her out in a little while, back into the real world, there was a part of her that would always be here. With the dancer, with the tall man with teeth like piano keys, with the eyeless thing that seemed to seek her gaze no matter where she went.

She came to a stop when she heard the music. It was coming from the courtyard. An old song, soft and crackling with age. Echoing with the perverted nostalgia of demented memories. It beckoned her to join the dancing.

***

“Just got a ping from Paolo, Earthside,” said the StretchWave tech. “He’s putting her under dream gas now. We should be receiving her in a few seconds.”

Lars Kammelo nodded, anxiously tapping his foot. Five years without his younger sister. Five years without the thing he treasured most in his life. It was enough to make you start to forget the meaning of things. The purpose behind what you were doing all the way out in the ass end of nowhere. But already he was feeling revitalized, like he had been in a stuffy room and someone finally opened a window.

Something happened beyond the frosted glass of the pod lid. Suddenly, there was someone there. Squirming around. There was no sound, no flash of light. Nothing at all. Lars was familiar with this fact, but it still struck him as an anticlimax.

However, he was the first one to the pod as the lid slid aside.

His sister stared up at him with wide eyes, sweat pooling in the hollow of her throat.

“Ah, crap,” Lars said. “Looks like she had a rough one. Can we get some water in here?”

Someone hurried out of the room.

“I just had to get to a pod,” Janus whispered. “I just had to get into one of the rooms…”

Lars leaned down to try and comfort her. She reached out, but not for him. Instead, she grabbed the nearest technician by the collar, pulling him in close.

“The dream gas isn’t enough,” she said quietly. “You need to start putting people to sleep.”

A few minutes later, she was her old self again. Mostly. Throughout the day, as they toured around and reminisced about when they visited their father at this same base, Lars occasionally caught his sister looking over her shoulder. And when she turned back, there was a darkness in her eyes that took a long moment to go away.

END