She is not Laika. Laika was before. Laika was well into adulthood when they took her off the streets, Laika they had to beat and needle and bribe to train. She knows because she saw it. Laika bit sometimes but still had her photograph taken with her doggy grin and her compression vest, surrounded by her shiny grey capsule; the picture was pinned up in the cognitive testing lab, not in praise, but as a reminder of their failure. Laika was famous for going up, and the reason they had acquired her as a puppy was because Laika wasn’t coming back down. They’d never taken her photograph, but it didn’t matter because they told her she would be the first to return, that they were very proud of her. They would take her picture when she came back.
It took months of slowly introducing one task on top of another. Even when she wanted more, when she knew she could do it, they held back. When she tried to advance on her own—anticipating what came next in the procedure to acquire food, transmit data, record her heart rate—they made her skip a day of training. That was the worst, when she was left in her room, surviving off scraps of passing voices outside and the sight of a hand pushing food through a locking panel. No contact. They cleaned her room so thoroughly she couldn’t even smell her handler’s mix of soap, human, lab.
But finally her days accumulated complete routines and the most exhilarating moment of her life was when she performed every procedure accurately in one go: the entire team whooped and cheered and slapped hands and backs and her handler had knelt down and tugged her ears affectionately and butted his head against hers. He looked her right in the eye and they smiled together. Her doggy grin and his white teeth that were crooked on the bottom row. This victory was the best because it felt like she was the conduit that had let them all succeed as a single unit. It made up for every isolation, every quarantine.
She had practiced isolation, and quarantine, practiced it so much it was maybe what she was best at. Once she understood there would always be another test, another operation, another free day with her handler, she could live through any number of days alone. It hurt and she whined, straining her throat in a pitch too high to be heard by the monitors. It hurt, but she could do it. There was no point in her being here if she couldn’t do it.
When the day came that she was loaded into the capsule on the launchpad instead of the training grounds, she was the one most surprised by her reaction. Her handler led her to the ramp, they paused for five seconds, her handler’s fingers unclipped the leash from her harness and she did exactly what she was supposed to do: trot calmly into the capsule, use her teeth to fix the grommets of her harness straps over the eye-hooks attached to the back capsule wall, and wait for her handler to check the connection. He tugged her ears with both hands, kneeling in the hatchway in front of her, and she smiled her doggy grin but he didn’t smile back. He did something strange that he had never done before: he leaned forward and pressed his mouth against her forehead. He breathed her name into the short fur between her ears. She was stunned. Then he was gone. The ramp clanked as it reeled in. A man pushed the heavy door closed and she was alone in the capsule with a dim grey overhead light. This had happened before.
She waited patiently, listening. The small window used for visual cues was covered and latched. She could usually hear the team outside, saying and repeating numbers, walking around. But this time she couldn’t hear them. She cocked her head at this new procedure. This was not right. She could not hear them. This was not right. A deep rumble began. They should be there. She could not hear them so they must not be there when they should be there but they are not there this is not isolation this is not quarantine this is this is this is—she howled. Her heart beat so fast it hummed. The capsule shook and she howled at this not-isolation, this not-quarantine, this other that terrified her into behaving like a wild animal caught in a snare; a wild animal calling its pack. She had never made a sound like that before, never made a sound that loud, that echoed around her like the capsule was filled with twenty dogs howling instead of just one. She couldn’t stop howling and the capsule shook violently and the roar of launch overtook her howl and pressed her hard against the wall and then she was gone, up and away.
◌
The first time she wakes after her ascent she is glad for the silence. The shaking has stopped. The launch and her howl are forgotten as she basks in the quiet, half asleep. It had been so loud for so long even her unconsciousness had been deafening. Now, her own gentle panting is soundless; her hearing completely lost in the launch. She fully wakes after a few minutes and by then some of her fear returns. Something is holding her fear back, though, which is the strange sensation on her skin, or under her skin, she can’t quite tell. She recognizes it: they did float experiments in the water tank so she would link sensation of suspension with release cord with reward. This feeling is just like that feeling but without any pressure on her body. This feeling is different, but similar. It is okay. It is understood. It is good. She is in orbital free-fall.
She has a procedure, now, so the panic ebbs away. She needs to pull the cord that will release all of the eye-hooks and let her move freely in the cramped space. Moving is hard because, when she doesn’t focus, her arms and legs float of their own accord. She bites at the release cord by her neck. As soon as she pulls it she looks around for a treat but there is none. This is confusing and starts to break down the link in her mind between what she does and what she is supposed to receive—there isn’t a reward and there isn’t a punishment. But she is strong and trusting, even after the launch. The treat might not come now. It might come later. Later didn’t matter when because it was always ahead and so would always happen.
It feels good to be out of the straps, floating. She is tired. The silence and cold of the capsule make her fall asleep. Her muzzle twitches, anxious, as she slips into a dream-memory of the first time she ever entered the capsule. There had been enough buttons and lights on the console to disorient her. She hadn’t liked when the smooth glass bumps suddenly started blinking or when she was given an unfamiliar cue and pressed down on the wrong shape. It had taken four days for her to learn them all. In her dream, she speeds through that time, the memory jumping forward to the moment when her handler had let a man hit her sharply, efficiently, the morning of the fourth day. She had been too slow completing a procedure. His fingers had been thick and smelled of disinfectant. Her handler had looked down with pride when she didn’t snap back or cower. Don’t get lost in the Forest, he had teased, patiently giving her the cues again. In reality it had only taken two more tries to successfully complete the procedure, but in the dream her final attempt stretches out, ebbs and flows with her orbit around Earth. Again and again: he says, Don’t get lost in the Forest like the tide rushing in, and she chases the cues like the tide pulling out. She struggles to break from this loop of always beginning and never completing.
In the dream, there is an end to the procedure she is not following. She knows what the end is. It is the big black button that is perfectly circular with a slight swell to it, shiny and slick. She had always seen it more clearly than any of the yellow, green, greyscale buttons, but she can’t summon it in her dream. Her handler had named the button the Mother. The Mother ended one cycle and began the next, re-starting each set of procedures.
She is not pressing the Mother in her dream. Her handler had always told her that if she remembered nothing else, if she could reach no other shape or switch or see any blinking light, if she were dead, she was not to forget the Mother. They had her lick it to see if the pressure of her tongue was enough in case her body broke on the way up. It was, though she had to push hard against the button’s wired resistance. Even when they stopped smearing flavored gel onto it, it had still tasted like pumpkin, her favorite reward. In her dream she is distracted by the taste instead of the obsidian swell, ignoring the sequence of buttons she is supposed to press and then there, there it is, her handler says, Don’t get lost in the Forest one last time and just as she reaches to press the Mother, she wakes up.
The console flashes sluggishly but this is normal. It reminds her that all of this is normal, this is her training, all she needs to do is wait for the next set of procedures. Situation does not matter. Location does not matter. There are buttons so there are procedures. There are procedures so there are routines. There are routines so there is purpose. This is enough. She curls up as best she can while floating in the small space to watch the tiny glass nub that will flash when she is supposed to press the Mother. Her training is still in place but had been split by her howl during launch. She watches fiercely, refusing to sleep again, refusing her dream of the unfinished routine.
◌◌
A few days later between the one hundred and twenty-first and one hundred and twenty-second cycle, she is thrown against the side of the capsule. She yelps in pain and surprise but before she can swim-float herself to the loose restraining straps, she is knocked again into the wall, then the ceiling, the floor. Every surface she hits bounces her in a different direction and she can’t seem to twist the right way to clamp down on the straps. A row of lights in the Forest is blinking, each light at a different rate. Storm in the Forest. Her handler said this might happen; they ran simulations together. After smacking against the front wall, she is propelled forward enough to latch onto the straps with her teeth. She holds on as hard as she can until the capsule stops rocking. The lights are off. Storm in the Forest is over.
She releases the strap. Though her jaw and teeth ache, she immediately starts licking her lower abdomen right above her hips. She has to tug the compression vest up slightly. A ring of blackish-grey bruises bloom around her midsection. As she tries to lick each one it inches to a new spot. After a few attempts she gives up and instead floats on her back observing her stomach. The bruises drift like clouds on her, slowly threading into one another then fraying loosely apart. She is very calm. She had seen clouds like these with her handler on their off days. She tried to discern animal shapes the way her handler did, pointing and saying their names, but she wasn’t able to follow what he saw.
After any injury she would usually be placed in a crate and taken to the medical room for treatment. She doesn’t know what to do next. Just as there was no reward for pulling the release cord that clipped her to the eye-hooks, there is no medical room, no crate. The link between training and response weakens further. The hairline fracture, triggered by launch, chipped by her dream, widens. She makes the choice to ignore the upcoming routine to instead watch and lick her belly again. It is not a Mother routine this time. She can make it up next cycle.
As she chases the bruises with her tongue she fills with anticipation that has no outlet. Slowly she understands that there is no one here to correct her. There is no forthcoming punishment to relieve the anticipation, and there is no liberation in this realization. There is only a yawning expanse of dark unknown. Panic slams into her and instead of howling, she chokes on it—she freezes; this is what it means to be alone. She stands on the crumbling lip of a gulf filled with infinite decisions and no guide. To deviate from training is to be swallowed by this geology. Without a fixed procedure there will be no fixed outcome. This separation, this severance, is chaos.
She is petrified for several seconds when a bruise she can’t see passes over an upper rib. She flinches. Her attention is redirected. She has to stop licking immediately and fulfill the procedure. It is the only thing she can do to stymie this mass that threatens to overwhelm her. She licks one more time. She stops. The bruises are less like clouds than the shadows clouds made on the ground and water.
◌◌◌
She does well strictly following procedures after the solar storm until the two hundred and first cycle. Between routines she either floated complacently, her mind blank, or slept equally complacently without dreams. She ignored any stimulus—her bruises changing color, lights altering their patterns—that might cause her to trip toward the black expanse. The widened crack was now a fissure, but her memory of the vague notion of chaos was dimmed. She did not feel the old joy in following her routine, nor did she feel fear at the potential of deviation. She felt empty, blessedly empty. She had entered a stability that bordered on stasis, a stupor so lulling she hardly noticed the plinking against the hull of the capsule.
She has just executed the two hundredth cycle and is waiting for the next when the plinks catch her attention. They have been going for some time. Deaf from the launch, she perceives the plinks as tinny vibrations when part of her body brushes the wall. She had been so good about ignoring them. For seventy-eight cycles she had followed her training. Her bruises had started to yellow. But curiosity had always been her weak point. There was plenty of time until the next cycle. It would not be a deviation if she had a quick look outside as long as she didn’t skip the next press of the Mother. This was not a violation of training. But it was unmoored from any cue, trigger, command, procedure, or routine. She was not trained to open the small covering over the thick, flat window, but she had been in the capsule with her trainer a few times when he opened and closed it to receive visual commands from the team. She fumbles through unlatching and sliding back the casing with her teeth and paws. She pants, unused to straining herself in this place.
Outside she sees nothing but velvety black, a murky glow from below, a pale silver glow from her right. Bits of dust breeze by, or rather she is breezing by bits of dust. Very far away she thinks she can see another capsule, lit up for a second in a blinding slice by the sun. She doesn’t feel too surprised since she knew others were being trained to go up after her, and that others have gone before. These others are not the ones she cares about anyway. They aren’t her handler or her team, the other capsule is not her lab or facility.
She feels the plink again and since her eyes do not see anything she sniffs tentatively. The capsule has developed a new scent that is a non-scent. An empty scent. She can’t even smell herself. They had taught her to be aware of her breathing rate because the capsule could only carry so much air. She needed to recognize what it felt like to be without breath so she would know the follow-up procedure. They had dragged her into the depleted capsule again and again until she could perform the correct sequence to trigger the emergency oxygen reserve.
When she bumps her nose on the cold window glass she smells, suddenly, an image and a taste at the same time: raspberry. A single raspberry snuck to her by her handler, bright grey with a hum of slate-violet, still not really a color, wet and like no other treat. The taste was sour, though she had no comparison. Sweet she could categorize, but that wasn’t quite right. She had cocked her head at the identification test but her handler had said no. There was no test that time. It had made her happy and agitated.
She is about to sniff again when an object zooms by. There is no plink to accompany it but she is smart enough to put them together. She watches until three, then four more, pass. When the fifth hits the capsule she sees it as a tiny explosion of sediment. A sixth hurtles in front of the window, a brownish-grey rock. A seventh nearly hits the glass so she ducks away and closes the covering. She can feel herself teetering on the edge of divergence. She clings to the taste-memory of the raspberry the way she would a log in a river: nails dug into the wood, water splashing into her mouth and ears. What would happen if she let go? If she let herself be swept down the river, no log, no sense-memory, no handler, no order?
◌◌◌◌
She checks on the other capsule many times, the one that had looked so far away the day she flew through meteor dust. By the two hundred and fiftieth cycle it becomes part of her routine. The other capsule isn’t shaped like hers but seems to be the same material. Each day it moves a little closer. She sleeps poorly and makes mistakes in the sequence of procedures. Fear slowly fills the seams of her capsule, overflowing onto the floors and walls. She snaps and growls at it but only the lights from the console keep the reaching dark, the threat of chaos, at bay. She chews at her paws. She misses the texture of the slick lab floors and pebbled concrete paths she walked with her handler.
◌◌◌◌◌
During the two hundred and eightieth cycle she has a dream in which she opens the capsule door to see a man’s head spinning slowly on its vertical axis a few meters in front of her. It is the head of the man who had hit her once. She feels the veins in her ears contract from the cold. The head is smiling, and from the way the never-setting sun glints off his cheeks, hair, eyes, he looks frozen. He mouths, “What claim did you make to the Forest?” She doesn’t understand him, but the word-shape Forest compels her to slink back into the capsule, chastised, tail tucked low. She goes back inside to the array of switches, presses the Mother, that big obsidian button she couldn’t stop touching every hour, even if she wanted to, even if she were dead. There is no other procedure in her dream. One cycle immediately begets the next so she is pushing the Mother over and over in a frenzy. When she wakes up she holds tight to the straps against the back wall, pressed as far away from the console as she can. She only goes near to push the Mother, skipping all other procedures, dreading the approach of every cycle.
◌◌◌◌◌◌
On the two hundred and ninety-second cycle, the other capsule is close enough that she can see the rivets and bolts are identical to her own. At cycle two hundred and ninety-five the capsule has turned slightly so she can barely see it has a large window, much bigger than the small rectangular glass of her capsule’s, as dark as the Mother, gently rounded just the same.
The two hundred and ninety-seventh cycle brings the other capsule so close to hers that if she opened the door she could press a paw against its hull. She stares, mesmerized, at the beating blue curve that flares on the diamond-ground glass; the dim haze rises off it like cobalt steam to light up the entire window.
She has never seen color like this. The glow of Earth’s atmosphere, reflected from below. Her mind rapidly tries to categorize the color as taste, smell, texture, sound. Loop loop loop. None of it. She cannot look away and she cannot breathe. She knows the curve better than her body, the color better than her handler’s voice. It is more internal than the aching pain of her upper rib, erasing or maybe uniting any separation between her mind and body. It is the depleted air in the capsule, a loosening of the valve of darkness outside and a dispersion of the shadows that seeped out of the bottomless gulf created by her fear. It is a bath in which she drinks. She is surrounded by it, lifted by it, compressed, enveloped in a way that swallows her long-ago howl and negates any possibility of chaos should she abandon her training, her routine, her handler, her team, her room, her lab, her capsule, her purpose.
To deviate from training was to separate from its threadbare remnant of companionship. But with the blue she would not be alone. The blue does not need to be pressed. The blue offers itself without condition. The blue offers union with itself, with every single thing it encircles on Earth below and the space it touches above. The blue is a word she has been longing to hear: We. She had watched her handler open the door many times; she knew how to depress the lever and could grip the sliding lock with her teeth, brace her body against the control panel. She moves towards the other capsule and sees a reflection caught for a moment against its window. A face, her own or another’s just like her, glazed in blue. The Mother waits.