“So what is it?” Paul asks when I’m dried off. My whole body hurts. This is healing. I’m at risk from so many things: infections, disease. I’m wrapped in a towel that has the name of a fancy hotel from when London was still London stamped onto it, only the threads have started pulling, so now it’s the Do-c-es-er –otel, which just isn’t the same. Paul’s taken the golden disc from me, and he’s flipping it in his hands. He turns it, over and over. I’ve seen this before; I remember it. It’s at least slightly familiar, this action. He whistles. “This is probably worth something. Must be worth something, I reckon.” He throws it into the air and it spins, and he catches it. “Is it actually gold?” He puts it between his teeth and pushes down. I don’t know what he thinks that will prove: his bite on the thing.
“What can we do with gold?” I ask. The next stage, post-blisters, is the shivers, and they have come over me. This rings like any other fever: shivers and a temperature, and then sickness and then my muscles will all ache, and it will take me a while before I even begin to feel human again. That’s why we draw straws.
He lays it down flat. “Don’t know. It was your harvest, anyway. You can work out what you do with it. You could take it to some of the groups in the towns, try and get something for it.” These are the rules: we do the harvest, we share the take with the camp. If it can’t be shared, we try and trade it with one of the other settlements we’ve found. They’re all in the same way as us, but they might have use for our junk. But I’m the one who has to do the deal; that way, I’ll be providing for the camp. We each feel ownership and good reason for going out there, going through what we do; and the camp gets money to fix itself up, to feed us all, to buy shared provisions. It’s like taxes, I’m assured. I’m told that this system used to work perfectly well.
I sleep with the disc under my pillow, and I can feel it during the night when I turn and turn, and my skin scrapes against it. It scratches me, cold against my shoulder.
I am not better when I wake up. I’ve had post-outside sickness before, so many times, but never like this. We’ve stopped asking what it’s doing to us, because that’s counterproductive. Once we went to a hospital and we tried to use their machines but we couldn’t get them to work, so it was fingers jabbing at them for hours, and when we got back we were all so much more sick than we were when we left. We lost Joe that day as well, because he was so sick before we even went. He couldn’t stand the journey, being out there for that long. You see it at its worst, then: blisters on the eyes. I never take my goggles off out there now, not after seeing that. So I have felt sick before, but never like this. I wonder if this is what it’s like when it sets in: when it gets deeper to you. I wonder if I am going to die. I have a paper bucket from a fast-food restaurant to be sick into◦– we took hundreds of them one time when we went out, reasoning that we couldn’t wash plates or whatever, so they might come in useful one day◦– and I have to use it as soon as I am awake, vomiting into it. Blood and soot, it looks like.
It’s natural to wonder if you’re going to die from it, I tell myself. I tell myself that I’ll be fine. No question. I hold the bucket and I shudder, and the bucket starts to collapse on the sides from my grip. No question at all.
Paul and the others stand in the doorway and watch me. I catch them; I wonder what they are talking about. No, I know what they are talking about. I’m that sure I know.
I tell them that I am feeling better, which is a lie, but I am worried about the farm that they could send me to. We have a shotgun, which they used to use to hunt rabbits here. I can imagine Paul pulling the trigger, so I tell them that I am feeling better. I stand up, and everything swims. My skin is on fire, and the sweat runs down it. It doesn’t soak in; it’s as if I am rejecting it. I stumble out of my tunnel. It’s colder here, and I can feel that. It’s nice. I lean against the wall and drop the sheet from my shoulders and press against the stone.
The others are standing around a table. There is a record player on it, one of the really old ones. I’ve never seen one used like that; with a long brass horn sticking out of the side. The golden disc from the harvest is on top of it. I see it, now: it’s a record. Of course it’s a record.
Paul grins. “I washed it, while you were sick. There’s little grooves all around it, see?” I can, if I squint. My eyes feel wrong, but I don’t say anything. I stay back, in the darkness, so that they can’t see how bad I really am. “So I went and got this from upstairs, what used to be the music rooms. I remembered that one of them survived.”
There are candles around the record player on the table, as if this is some sort of sacrifice. All ten of us are here, watching; Paul runs the plug on it to an extension cable, and Ella gets onto the treadmill and starts running. We wait for the lights to turn green. Usually takes five minutes; now, that seems like forever. I shut my eyes. I can see something in my eyelids: where the blood is pulsing, red and black. It makes me feel dizzy.
“And we are go,” Paul says. He picks up the arm from the player and puts the tip◦– the needle, I remember, that’s what it’s called◦– onto the disc. It spins, and there’s a crackle, and we expect noise. I shut my eyes and wait, again, but then it comes, as a wave. It steals us, and we are floating. I open my eyes: we are pressed to the walls, hoisted up. Paul is screaming but I cannot hear him. Everything is distorted. The record is spinning, going even faster than the player. The player tears itself apart, pulling and yanking and distorting itself as the record whirs. Lumps of metal and wood and plastic fly off, and the player is held on the table as if a tiny tornado is wrapped around it. It glows; it flashes white.
We are not where we were. We are pinned to these walls, but they are not here. I cannot describe who is with us, because they are like ghosts, but made of something, like sound or light, but not either of those things. It hurts to even think of them; to imagine them. They find the thing I saw in the fields, but it’s different. It’s clean. It’s so old, still, but clean. It is a spacecraft where it should not be. Printed on the side, it reads Voyager: its name.
The things that I cannot explain find it, caught in a swirl of liquids and gases, and they drag it to where they live. They crack it open and they find the record. It looks the same. They do not know what it is, and they move around and through it, and they try to decipher it. There is something inside it, an isotope that they cannot understand, and it hurts them. It mingles with them, with their atoms, because this is who they are, what they are made of, and they cannot adapt to it. They degrade. I try to scream at them, and they notice me, but this is not now. This is another time, and they keep trying with the disc. They are dying: whatever is inside this golden record is killing them. They are sick, and they are changing. One of them manages to channel the sound from the record, garbled and distorted through a sad approximation of a mouth: Hello from the children of planet Earth. They know where it came from; who sent this, to kill them. Then they stop dying: they have found a way to take this in, to make it a part of themselves. They were threatened and they survive. They make a decision. They rebuild the spacecraft. They alter it. They send it back to us.