"I see..."
[Referencetocomplementaryvisualmaterial—seetheAuthor'sNoteattheendofthechapter]
"Okay..." Nunes whispered, narrowing his eyes.
[Referencetocomplementaryvisualmaterial—seetheAuthor'sNoteattheendofthechapter]
"But I'm still here. It's not over yet. So, there's an eighth day. The void!"
"Like the eighth day of the Roman market, the lost day."
Nundinae.
"Is the next room the Nundinae?"
"That means there's a next room. But it won't be normal. I can't go in there."
He chuckled, muttering with his arms crossed:
"My whole life, I thought time was a straight line. That Sunday came before Monday, and the cycle restarted. But this week, I found out there's more. A day the world refuses to acknowledge."
"I woke up in it."
"It's raining blood, like in Kentucky in 1876."
"Just like on day one, in Goiânia."
"There are no birds, only vultures. And every clock stopped at 00:00."
"Oh, how dramatic... Let me see that display screen again..."
On the display...
"Fish Bubble Bubble \ Bubble Bubble \ Bubble \ Bubble Bubble Bubble \ Bubble Bubble Bubble Fish \ Bubble Bubble \ Bubble Bubble"
"Current Earth Date: October 8, 2559."
"Time elapsed on Earth: 532 years."
"Another one." He rubbed his fingers on his suit's fabric, nervous. "Okay, Ketlen died 531 times. She didn't die just now; the focus was on me, even if I've died as many times as she has."
...
"I heard the gunshot. And the Squeeek kills me. But now, without a gunshot and without a Squeeek, I'm simply here, and so is the other one."
He approached the previous hatch.
He placed his hand on the door.
On the other side, the other Nunes did the same.
But the touch... didn't come.
"I'm walking inside myself..."
"I'm passing through time like someone walking inside a knot."
"It's not a loop. It's not a spiral."
"It's false continuity."
...
"I didn't go back in time..." He narrowed his eyes, taking a deep breath. "I became part of it. Ketlen too, two condemned souls with no escape."
[Referencetocomplementaryvisualmaterial—seetheAuthor'sNoteattheendofthechapter]
"It's not me on the other side." He denied, hysterical. "Damn it, it's not me, I would never choose to die, someone chose for me."
"It wasn't Ketlen, she's trapped with me too."
"It was someone. Someone's playing with me and her, as if we're disposable in a much bigger game."
"This means..."
"Okay, I get it." He nodded, serious. "They want me to think this way, they want me to think that 532 is the end, that I need to go through one more room. There's something on the other side, and I can't go through it."
The light flickered again, went out for 1 second.
"If I'm on a Möbius strip, in a psychological concept..."
"The default choice is to continue. But continuing leads to death."
[Referencetocomplementaryvisualmaterial—seetheAuthor'sNoteattheendofthechapter]
"Death."
"Void equals death. Death equals void."
"Therefore, the right choice would be to go back, something that, theoretically, I haven't done..."
"Perhaps I can imagine it on a simple plane."
[Referencetocomplementaryvisualmaterial—seetheAuthor'sNoteattheendofthechapter]
"But that would be undoing the normal. This is a Möbius. It's inverted, but at the same time, the default option leads me to death. 529 doesn't take me back to Ketlen, not even to the outside of the ship, much less to 533."
"And I'd probably see something unpleasant if I went back to the past."
"So it's more complex."
He looked back at the ceiling. Something there didn't make sense. The ceiling wasn't flat. It was slightly curved inward, like the floor.
As if both were folded over the same strip, suspended... in something that didn't exist.
He pushed off. He jumped.
And then he heard:
A step above.
Another below.
"Holy shit..."
"It's bigger."
[Referencetocomplementaryvisualmaterial—seetheAuthor'sNoteattheendofthechapter]
"That means I'm both above and below at the same time. But over there, it's even more distorted; it's not literally me, it's a specter of what I imagine myself to be, a reverberation, a close imitation of what, in my current reality, I can call..."
"…choice."
"Free will."
"Holy crap, so it's worse."
"But what about the diagonals?"
He slowly turned, analyzing the environment. The corner of the room. The edges. The lines that followed neither horizontally nor vertically. He walked to one of them. Stopped.
He lifted his foot—and stepped firmly, right on the diagonal edge of the floor.
Thump.
Silence.
Thump... Thump.
The echo came fragmented, from above and below simultaneously—but skewed. As if something, someone, was also stepping... on the upper diagonal. And on the lower.
He repeated the step in the other corner. The same sound. Same pattern. A crossed reverberation of himself.
"Damn it..."
It wasn't just up, down, right, left. The space was stitched in eight simultaneous directions.
[Referencetocomplementaryvisualmaterial—seetheAuthor'sNoteattheendofthechapter]
"Perfect. All Elias black hole's fault..."