“Noa?! Please tell me what’s going on!”
The anguish and betrayal in DJ’s voice hurt my heart, but in less than thirty seconds he wouldn’t remember it. He never remembered. He didn’t remember the movie or learning to swim or when I’d accidentally overloaded the reactor while trying to shut it down. No matter what I did, DJ would forget everything when the day reset and began anew.
“You want to know what’s going on?” I said. “I’m repeating the same day. This day. I’ve been repeating it for… I don’t know. A long time. It was fun at first, but now I’m bored, DJ, and I want it to end. I need it to end. But it never does. It never, ever ends.”
“I don’t understand, Noa. Something’s wrong with you. Let me help you. Please.”
“Maybe next time, DJ.”
FORTY-EIGHT
I WATCHED QRIOSITY DRIFT AWAY. I muted Jenny’s voice in my helmet calling me names and saying I’d lost my mind. I’d disabled the suit’s remote controls so that DJ couldn’t force me to return to the ship.
I should have died out here that first day. Maybe this time my death would stick. Maybe that’s what all of this had been about. The universe was angry that I’d escaped death before, and it was punishing me by freezing me in amber and preventing me from moving forward.
My fingers fumbled at the latches on my helmet, but I finally worked them open and pulled my helmet free.
The stars were so beautiful with nothing between us. Space wasn’t so scary after all.
FIFTY-THREE
DR. KIM POLK WAS A GRANDMOTHERLY woman who walked with a slight hunch, smelled like peppermint tea, and wore enormous glasses, hanging from a chain around her neck, that made her eyes look huge.
“That’s quite a story, Noa.” Dr. Kim had been taking notes on a fresh yellow legal pad while I’d been talking, but she’d never once broken eye contact with me. I wasn’t sure how she was interpreting what I’d told her—and I had told her everything—because the limitations of the Bell’s Cove recreation in Mind’s Eye made it so that the non-player characters often ignored anything that didn’t fit into the narrative of their reality. I hoped Dr. Kim would be different.
“It’s true,” I said. “Every word of it.”
“Then it sounds to me as if you need a physics professor rather than a psychologist.” Dr. Kim’s laugh accentuated the lines around her eyes and mouth.
I didn’t laugh because I didn’t find anything about my situation funny. I wished I had been able to laugh. I wished I’d been able to find the humor in what I was going through. It might have made my experiences slightly less painful. “What do I do?”
“I’m not sure I’m qualified to answer that.”
“Great.” I threw up my hands. “This has been a super waste of time.”
I stood, but Dr. Kim waved me back down. “My son Louis is grown with children of his own now, but when he was younger and sprouting an inch a day, it seemed, I used to wish I could freeze him the way he was, prevent him from aging one single day more. But I would have been an awful mother if I’d kept Louis from changing. We become who we are by accepting the past for what it is, letting go of it, and moving forward.” She took off her glasses and let them hang against her chest. She fixed her eyes on me and said, “You need to move forward, Noa.”
“How?” Tears threatened to well up in my eyes. I could feel the pressure building. Feel the frustration of the countless days I’d spent trapped in one unending loop growing dense inside me, threatening to collapse under its own weight like that stupid soufflé I couldn’t get right. “I’ve tried everything.”
“Have you?”
“Yes!” My voice cracked. “I’ve scoured Qriosity searching for the reason I’m stuck in this looping day. I’ve run every emergency simulation in the database at least ten times. I’ve blown up the ship; I’ve blown up myself; I even blew up the shuttle trying to learn to fly it. During one loop, I stayed awake so long that I began to hallucinate that I was being chased by a monster that had already eaten DJ and Jenny. I ended that loop screaming, trying to dig through the floor. No matter what I do, I eventually fall asleep or die, and the day starts over again.”
Dr. Kim put her glasses back on and scanned the notes she’d written on her legal pad. She tapped a line near the top with her finger. “Tell me about the first day you remember.”
That first day seemed so long ago. For everyone else, it was still just one day, but for me, weeks had passed. Maybe months. “I already told you. I talked to Jenny; I went to the garden, where DJ was waiting with his picnic; I left and went to my quarters, where I fell asleep.”
“Have you considered remaining in the garden?”
“With DJ and his surprise date?”
Dr. Kim let out a breezy laugh. “It’s a date, Noa, not a death sentence.”
I rolled my eyes. “Going on a date isn’t going to help me escape this day. I’m beginning to think nothing will.”
Dr. Kim watched me for a few moments. She wasn’t even real, yet the intensity of her gaze was unnerving. She was definitely different from the other characters I’d interacted with in Bell’s Cove. Finally, she said, “You keep insisting that you have tried everything, but you haven’t.”
“Still, I don’t—”
“What could it hurt to try?” Dr. Kim asked. “If it goes badly, the day will end, he will forget, and so will I.”
I chewed the inside of my cheek, trying to think of a reason why Dr. Kim’s suggestion was ridiculous. “What if I—”
“Noa,” she said in a firm but kind voice. “How can you expect to move forward if you never stop running away?”
FIFTY-FOUR
THE TIMER BEGAN TO BLARE, but I canceled it and set it for another five minutes.
“Smells good in there,” Jenny called from the table where she was playing with the familiar puzzle. I peeked my head around the corner while I waited for the timer to go off again.
“Soufflés never work for me,” I said. “But I’m hoping this will be the one.”
Jenny shrugged, her attention on the game.
“What is the point of that?” I asked.
“To get all the lights to turn the same color?” Jenny glanced at me and crinkled her nose. “I only found it this morning and I’m already bored. I’m terrible at these puzzles.” She held it out to me. “Wanna try?”
“Can’t,” I said. “As soon as my soufflé’s done, I’ve got to meet DJ in the garden.”
A smile crept across Jenny’s face. “Oh really?” she asked, trying to sound innocent. “Whatever for?”
“It’s a date,” I said. “He thinks that I think I’m helping him clean the air recyclers, but it’s a picnic by the pond.”
Jenny’s smile deflated slightly. “It’s supposed to be a surprise,” she said. “He’s been planning it for days, so don’t you dare ruin it.”