I open my eyes, and close them again. Sleep holds onto me. It grips and binds me, and I cannot escape. Some piece of my mind nags at me – you are wasting your time, you are wasting away – but it’s only an echo, scarcely heard. I had forgotten how pleasant this was, this little non-existence. “Your concession,” Gunner once said, “to oblivion. Sleep is training for death.”

    I hear footsteps, but my thoughts are too languorous to make anything of the intrusion. I slip away again.

    “Love?” Comes a voice, sharp despite the softness of the word. I know this voice, but for second I can’t place it. Gunner? No, this is Erin, my wife, and Gunner died three centuries ago, long ago, far away. Now I remember.

     I open my eyes, and she is standing over me. I stare up at her.

    “How long have you been sleeping there?” She asks.

    I stir, and feel my body chafe against the tendrils of sleep. I realize just how sore I am, how cold the floor is, how terribly hard. I shake my head and try to brush the haze from my mind. “Forever,” I say. It seems like the right answer.

    She crouches beside me and takes my hand in hers. “Get up,” she says, in that flat, flat voice of hers.

    I force myself to stand and look around. This is Erin’s lab, and I’m not sure why I’m here. She turns from me. “John, bring it in here,” she demands.

    He has something huge and black on a wheeled cart. I look at it, puzzled. “What is that?”

    Erin sighs. “It’s a sky-ray, a gorge-bat, or rather its head, and if you paid any attention to my work at all, you’d know this.”

    I think this is sarcasm, but it’s always hard to tell with her.

    “I do pay attention to your work.”

    “I’m teasing you, love.” She flicks an eyebrow at me. Her eyebrows are her one part of her face that ever shows any emotion. She steps across the room and helps John with the cart.

    I’m missing something. “Where are my pills?”

    “I’m sorry, we can’t get them right now.” Erin doesn’t look up.

    “Oh.” I lean against a wall and sink into sleep again.

 

    “They do horrible things to your memory,” says Gunner. She smiles her odd smile, her lip twitched up on the left side. “But they save you time, and you’ve only got so much of that.”

    She holds her hand out to me, her fingers curled into a loose fist.  I reach for it, and she pulls away. “Ah-ah, T,” she taunts me. I fold my arms across my chest in mock scorn. “Poor baby,” she coos, and laughs. Her laugh is a three-beat staccato.

    "Please?" I ask her.

    She picks up my hand, spreads out my fingers. Her hand, the one with the pills, grazes mine. I can feel the hardness of them, slipping through the slats of her fist. My own hand twitches, and she draws hers away, smiling her crooked smile again.

    "Patience," she says, but I'm sick of this. I leap on top of her. I grab her hand and pry at her fingers. She rolls, and escapes me. I am pressed against her back, grappling. She tosses the pills into her mouth, and I see her swallow.

    I rock back, defeated, and she shrugs. I sigh, and roll my eyes at her.

    She kisses me, hard, fast, sudden. Her tongue probes my mouth, presses the chalky pills into me. I swallow them, and wrap my hands around her head. Her shaved head is soft, impossibly soft, downy, in strange stark contrast to the rest of her.

 A wave of desire rolls through me, twisting my guts so hard I cry out.

 

"Love?" Says a voice that does not belong. I find myself lying down, the white stiffness of Erin's sheets beneath me.

It hits me again, a fist in my stomach, that Gunner is dead, that Earth is lost, that this other place, this other time is Now. I shake my head. "I can't bear this," I say, and my mouth is dry as sand.