“Where the Day Takes You”

Emerald touched a hand to her hair and frowned into the mirror. Something seemed off.

She stuck two pins in her hair, a ridiculous effort to hold it in place. A box of pins could not hold all of her hair where it needed to be, even though it was thinning—gone for good in a few spots, and long since turned from the shock of red Emerald had known her entire life to a flat, disappointed gray.

Her thoughts were scattered, haphazard, and stayed that way for the rest of the morning. She was well-accustomed to this sensation the morning after her trips, but the feeling still disoriented her. Otherwise, the first part of her day was ordinary: a shower, complicated with maneuverings that seemed more difficult with each passing day, then a breakfast that had become a routine forty years ago, and which had grown neither more nor less appealing for its lack of variety. She donned the clothes she had long since stopped resenting. They were never stylish or fashionable, not when she first wore them and not in the years since, but they were whole and untorn. That in itself was something.

Emerald knew she was an old lady. An “old biddy,” she chuckled to herself, a bit of teen slang floating up to her from childhood. They did that, those words and phrases, names and places: They became unmoored from the places they had been stored so long and drifted to the top of her mind for no reason at all. It seemed to be happening more these last weeks. Months. Years. Whichever. She no longer had a way to be sure.

Being this old, some parts of her were less reliable than others. Some days it was her eyes, dry and graying. Her hands were stiff and sometimes clumsy, but there was nothing she could take for relief. Today it was her knees, yet there was no other way to get up the terrace and tend to the plants than climb, which she did. This was more than a responsibility.

How marvelous all these living things were. Like her, they had persisted with the most minimal of care. Even the worms were still here in the soil—even the worms!—churning the dirt and depositing their waste, which became nutrients that fed the roots and fed the leaves that fed her and that, in turn, became her own waste, which repeated the cycle.

“I eat myself,” Emerald said to no one. “My, I can be tasty.”

There was always something to be done. While she folded her clothes, she turned on her screen—still working!—and selected an episode of “The Price Is Right,” a simple pleasure that never failed to bring her joy. It had aired on television when she was in third grade, maybe fourth. That distant version of Emerald would never have believed what she was doing now. There had been no vocabulary then for what most of her life had become. Without words, she couldn’t have conceived it, so she wouldn’t have thought of it. No sense fretting about that. She enjoyed thoughts of her past but was not nostalgic. She was logical. That had always been one of Emerald’s hallmarks. Pragmatic. Grounded. The irony of that word made her smile and shake her head at her own little silliness.

After the laundry was put away, Emerald ate what little lunch she allowed herself. She napped awhile, and when she woke up, she looked at herself again in the mirror.

She felt better. She felt more herself. She even thought she was ready for another trip.

Emerald closed her eyes, opened the door and stepped into a bright, warm sun that might as well have been ordered up just for her, special for this particular day. As if on cue, the taxi arrived. She walked around to the trunk to make sure the driver was careful with her luggage, and once in the backseat she gave her destination with some pride: She was not just headed to the airport, but to the international terminal.

On board, the plane was cold but grand, and when she asked for a blanket the flight attendant brought it to her without delay. The breakfast was curated for the destination: two croissants, one with and one without chocolate; confiture de framboises; and a luxurious coffee. She must have closed her eyes and slept, because when she looked out the window there was the Eiffel Tower, and the plane descended into Charles de Gaulle.

Every smell, every touch, every sight she took in on the streets was just how she imagined. The city always thrilled her. Her hotel room, luxurious, seemed superfluous—she could stay in these streets forever. Yet, when she was tired, the room was there, always waiting for her, no detail a disappointment.

There were imperfections. There were bound to be in any trip. When she found a dim little street she hoped to explore, she discovered it was closed to her. Something in the routes she walked felt circumscribed, and there was more than a passing familiarity to the people she saw. The woman with the six dogs, the girl with the balloon, the couple on the bench—it was as if she had seen them before. Could she have? Years ago, on another trip?

In the moment, she dismissed them as no more or less than flickerings of déjà vu, quirks of the brain. She forgot them almost as soon as they happened. Besides, this was Paris and she was in her twenties. She could live in this moment forever, if she tried. It was summer and the day was long. She used every last bit of it until, exhausted, she could not resist the hotel, the room, the bed. She kept the curtains open so she could see the lights of the city as she listened to the din of traffic, the sound of accented voices below her, noises from the street, and faint and far-off accordion music that was both a cliché of Paris and integral to the authenticity of the city. She smiled at the musette. Her eyes fluttered and sleep found her.

When she opened them again, Emerald touched a hand to her hair and frowned into the mirror. Something seemed off. She stuck two pins in her hair, a ridiculous effort to hold it in place. Perhaps she had stayed too long in Paris, but now the memory was fresh and new, and it could sustain her for days, maybe longer.

By early afternoon, she shook off the fog and completed the rest of her day, comforted by the routine, satiated—for now—by her adventure. She planned a menu for the week and prepared the ingredients, ensuring, as she had done so many times before, that she had plenty. She could not reassure herself enough, would never stop worrying about running out. By her own reckoning, what she had could last until the end of her life, but her mind would never be still about it. That night, she watched the stars and imagined them over the Seine and let herself sleep.

She didn’t travel again for a week.

When she did, every one of her quotidian troubles vanished the moment she saw the large chalet. The sight of it never disappointed her, nor, as she turned back, did the sweeping view of the Andes, and of the ridge of twin volcanoes, Planchón and Peteroa. These mountains had held an overwhelming fascination for her since before she could remember, though for most of her life she had not expected to see them herself. There had been many things Emerald did not expect in her life; Václav was among them. But as she readied herself for this trip, she knew he would be waiting inside the cabin. She knew just what book he would be reading, just what shirt he would be wearing, just how he would look at her when she opened the door. She knew, too, what he would say:

“Good day out there?” He would put down the book, push himself off the sofa with a soft grunt, and walk to the refrigerator, where he would remove a small box as she told him about what she had seen.

“I saw a fox. We both stopped at the same time and looked at each other, just stared. Neither one of us wanted to move.” Then he would give her the box. “What’s this?” she would ask, as she always did (in just the same way, for fear of missing the moment). Her voice sounded so young. She felt so young. She was so young.

“Open it?” he said, his voice rising up with his native accent. He would never quite master English, nor did he seem to want to try.

She wanted to stay here, right here, in the seconds before she opened the box, saw the ring and told him yes, of course she would marry him. She wanted this feeling not to end. She wanted to be in this moment as long as she could. She tried.

In the morning, Emerald touched a hand to her hair and frowned into the mirror. Something seemed off. She thought about Václav, still able to remember his voice, his touch, his scent with alarming clarity. He had once told her he wanted to make possible everything she believed impossible: the volcanoes, their marriage, her ambitions. His faith had motivated her. What a cruel twist that his boundless encouragement led her here. She stuck two pins in her hair in a ridiculous effort to hold it in place: a routine start to a routine day.

There was a time when Emerald—headstrong, confident, with a fierce intelligence that rivaled any of her crewmates, when they were alive—would have felt a day so predictable and repetitive was a waste. These years had made her mellow and relax enough to be able to relish such simple days. Their straightforwardness and predictability had become a virtue, one that allowed her the luxury of time, and with it the luxury of travel.

Her advancing age meant she needed more time to recuperate between trips, but within a week of her visit to Václav, she was ready to go again. This time, she left the destination to chance, and was delighted to discover a place she had all but forgotten: Mount Rushmore.

Her parents had rented a Ford Country Squire station wagon, and she spread out in the back, reading out facts about the monument, telling them what to expect, mapping their route from the airport at Denver through the empty plains, hot and dry. After a while, Emerald drowsed and felt more content than she could ever have thought possible. She hadn’t been aware of that satisfaction in the moment; the knowledge of it came to her later, once she had returned and was herself again. While traveling, she was a child, with a child’s brain. She was irritated when her mother called her “Emmy,” a name she despised and that caused her to squirm, fidget and grow restless. She was anxious to arrive.

While on the trip, whatever Emmy felt was all that Emerald could know. This was less a limitation than a quirk of the program: It could replicate the sensory experience in precise, mesmerizing—sometimes agonizing—detail, down to the emotions, but it could do no more. What had gone unseen, unknown or unexperienced at the time could never be revealed. Emerald had been unable to turn down those tantalizing Parisian streets because she had never done so herself. They were unknown to her then, they remained unknown to her now, just as, from the back of the Country Squire, she could not see her parents’ faces or know what they might be feeling. She could not change the angle or adopt a different view like a movie, she had no omniscience.

At the beginning—at the very beginning, while the original crew of ten was still training at Jovian Station—some of Emerald’s colleagues had complained about these limitations. They wanted to go places they had never been, experience moments they had missed out on before leaving Earth. They found it easy to criticize the sense chamber, but spending time inside it was still a novelty. It had not become a necessity.

“It’s uncanny to be in the moment again,” observed Decker, who had so long ago been their captain, “but if you can’t have an old experience through new eyes, I don’t quite see the point.” Emerald found that part of the sense chamber’s charm – once you were inside, you could not simultaneously be there and here. You gave yourself fully to the moment.

With the memories renewed and freshened, they could be felt and analyzed again on return. Without question, most were relived to be enjoyed, but there was often a deeper purpose to the destinations. Over the years, Emerald had found herself spending a surprising amount of time next to her mother’s death bed, as much to have more time with her as to examine the act of dying, to trace and feel the shape of death. She found comfort in it.

Jun, the physicist on board the Vathys, could explain the artificial intelligence concepts at the core of the sense chamber. Mathematician Bakman could discuss in mind-numbing detail the quantum computing power that translated memories into three dimensions. Xanthos, the neuroscientist, could detail how pathways in the brain had been tapped to unlock the sounds, tactile sensations and even smells and tastes that corresponded with each memory. In those earliest days, an hour or an afternoon in the chamber seemed much like a magic trick; everyone wanted to know how it was done. The scientists were all too eager to break it all down.

It had only begun to feel normal (if that was the word) when Emerald and seven others in the crew were placed into Long Range Sleep Mode. With the others in LRSM, the remaining pair spent six months at the helm of the Vathys. The voyage had been expected to take ten years, with five rotations for each team of two.

During these long stretches of time, the sense chamber’s true importance became apparent, allowing the pair who controlled the ship during their half-year shifts to step out of its sterile environs and into any moment they had ever lived. They could control their experiences and select a moment by doing no more than thinking about it, or they could let the sense chamber explore their brains—the process took milliseconds—and be surprised at the selection. There was some risk involved in the latter. They might be deposited into an embarrassing sexual encounter, an angry and unhappy argument, a period of depression, or a tortured day with a playground bully. Every life had worst days, but the sense chamber’s computer couldn’t or wouldn’t differentiate.

More often, whether their own selection or the chamber’s, they could find pleasure, happiness, fulfillment, unexpected depth. It was relief from mind-numbing sameness of the ship. Even the risk of spending time in a memory laced with pain was preferable to the isolation of being in deep space on a journey whose purpose and form were all too easy to forget.

The sense chamber worked by opening the brain of its inhabitant with non-invasive care and caution. As many times as the Vathys crew tried to explain it, true comprehension of how the sense chamber worked was beyond any of them, though the fundamental core of its mechanics seemed almost too simple: The human brain recorded every single image of every single moment of every single life. Every piece of information a brain took in was stored somewhere, so could be retrieved like any piece of data on a computer. If the way the sense chamber worked was difficult to fathom, its basic approach was easy to correlate with everyday life: Everybody knew the experience of visiting a place just once, then revisiting it years or even decades later and finding it familiar. The brain had made neurological and chemical records of everything. Simple nostalgia—walking the hallways of an elementary school as an adult, for instance—turned out to be based in astonishing science. The revolution of unlocking and decoding these bits of programming was part of what made long-haul interstellar travel bearable for the crew who had to endure an endless, shapeless set of days and months.

For six years, nothing had gone wrong during the long voyage of the Vathys.

Then, everything did.

Four of the crew died in a heartbeat when their LRSM pods malfunctioned.

In an alarming span of time, two of the others died of natural causes: one of a heart attack, the other a stroke. No amount of testing, conditioning, research and modeling could change the truth that not all human bodies were equipped for the realities of this kind of travel.

Then, while working during a six-month shift with Emerald, Bakman had choked during dinner. Emerald made a frantic attempt to save her, but some deaths were as mundane in intergalactic space as they would have been on Earth.

The remaining two had gone mad. There was no other word for it. During their final watch, they had somehow reached the conclusion they could return to Jupiter and then Earth by commandeering the ship’s sole escape pod. Such a feat might have been possible within the first months of their mission, but at this range meant instant death the moment the bolts detached from the hull. They had deactivated Emerald’s LRSM pod, waking her just minutes before enacting their disastrous plan. She was still shaking off the effects of deep sleep when she heard the alarms.

Their quixotic, deadly effort did no damage at all to the Vathys itself. When their tiny escape craft smacked into the hull of the enormous mothership, its force was all but immeasurable. Emerald hadn’t even felt a shudder on deck when the pod with her two remaining crewmates had disintegrated. Infinitesimal as the impact was, it had an effect. The trajectory of the Vathys shifted by less than half a meter, though even a fraction of that would have had the same effect. The ship could never reach its intended destination. In an instant, completing the mission became a mathematical impossibility.

Inside the ship, Emerald was alone.

She had panicked, of course.

She had considered every option.

The Vathys was so far out of range of both its origin and its destination, that communication with either side was out of the question. No one knew the Vathys was in trouble. No one knew Emerald was alone. No one would ever know.

For weeks, months, even longer, she thought about what to do. This was her function, her assignment: to apply logic and strategy. Yet how could she plan the next play in a game that was already over?

The Vathys was a decade or more overdue.

If anyone were even waiting for it, if anyone even knew to search for it, it was so off course that they would never find it. On Earth, shipwrecks sometimes swirled into trenches five miles deep and left no trace on the waters above. Spaceships could not sink, but they could drift into realms in which they would never, could never, be found.

She might be sixty now. Older. Bakman might once have helped her do the calculations, but such a feat seemed pointless. Knowing how old you were seemed the least useful data point when inhabiting such a ghost ship.

But—and this was the first point, one she repeated every morning—she was alive. That amounted to something. She was sure of it.

And if she were alive, that meant each day she would tire and then sleep. If she slept, she would awake. Though no longer measured by the sun or moon, the days still mattered. She would get through them. She would continue. She had to.

There was no question of power; the Vathys had a supply that was limitless and perpetual. There was no question of sustenance; the garden alone could keep her fed for a lifetime, and in addition to its bounty there were supplies of every sort intended for ten.

And there was the sense chamber.

The morning after her trip to Mount Rushmore, Emerald touched her hand to her hair and smiled into the mirror. Nothing at all seemed out of place. She knew exactly where she wanted to go, and because she knew that, she knew what a beauty the day was going to be.

It was spring, though only just. She had gotten up early, then settled into the car and placed it into manual drive. She wanted to enjoy the control of navigating her own route.

She left the windows down and drove at a speed designed to please her, not caring if it irritated the drivers behind her. All her life, she liked to drive fast. Not today. Today, she was in the mood to slow it all down. Families filled the jogging paths. She waved to them, content in the knowledge that she belonged here.

She focused her mind and looked at the trees, their leaves just beginning to uncurl. She never did learn their names. She still could, if she wanted. At a stoplight, she watched a man who was late for something and who cursed into the air as he checked his watch again and again.

Emerald drove out of the small downtown area and the road opened before her as she passed new, low-slung brick buildings, many of them laboratories and storage depots built to service the very project on which she was about to embark. There were intake centers and research offices, and between them a bookstore, a video library, an aerobics studio, some restaurants, a gas station.

Emerald didn’t know quite why she made a note of everything, saying the names of each building and business aloud as she drove by. She smiled as she did, noting the sensation that being observant might one day prove useful.

At Jerry’s, she walked up the steps and narrated the scene in her head, words only she could hear. She held the baby. No, she snuggled the baby. She touched her nose to the baby and breathed in. She looked around the house at the framed paintings she had given her son as wedding gifts, at the brick fireplace and the beautiful, sharp-featured woman her son had the good sense to marry. She took her shoes off and felt the deep carpet with her toes. Jerry brought her lemonade and she drank it down, concentrating on the way it tasted – more than its simple taste, but how it tasted here, how the scents of Jerry and Nadine’s house combined with the burst of lemon and the sweetness of the sugar. She kissed the baby after she drank, then the child licked its own lips and giggled and held its hands out and wanted more.

“I wish you didn’t have to go, Mom,” her son said. “Is that selfish of me to say?”

They stood together outside the screen door. Nadine and the baby stayed inside, watching but keeping their distance, one mother and child respecting another.

“I’ll be back before she’s out of high school,” Emerald promised.

“You don’t know that,” Jerry said, tightening his lips with resignation. “I want to believe it, but you can’t promise.”

“Even if I didn’t go, I couldn’t promise tomorrow. But you know why I’m doing this. For her. For all of you. For all of, well, us. We will get this solved, Jerry. We will. And things will be better. If it comes at the sacrifice of a handful of people in outer space—”

“Don’t say that, Mom.”

“Which do you want, then? Promises for the future, or platitudes of hope?”

How odd it seemed to her to look at another human and see herself—and, of course, Václav. She would leave him, too. She would leave them all, and the hardest truth was that she didn’t know why. All she or anyone else knew with certainty was that the mission of the Vathys, the journey that would send them so deep into space, was important because it offered a slim chance for a better future. Even pragmatist Emerald knew that the slimmest chance was better than no chance at all.

That was it, then, she realized when she woke in the morning, images of her final day on Earth still fresh in her head.

There was almost no chance she would make it now.

­But any chance …

There was almost no chance Jerry or Nadine or the baby were even alive anymore, even less of chance they would be if she were somehow, by some miracle, to make it home.

But any chance …

And there was her entire life to live. Backward, perhaps. In random order. But whose life was anything less than random, and as the physicist on the Vathys would have reminded her, what was “backwards” anyway? It was still her life, and would be until she was no longer living. Whatever came after that was no one’s to know.

She had to be rational. She had to be sensible. She would continue her routine, because as long as she was breathing there was still hope.

When she woke up each morning, she could go anywhere she wanted, do just about anything, be anytime. Even now, even here, it was as much up to chance as up to her where the day might take her.

The End

April 2025