The Faces That Returned Beneath Concordia Base

0:00The radio squeal boiling the static and pleating voices as I snap the buckles on my emergency pack. The wind outside the air look buttered the base with such violence that the bolted steel doors thumped in their frames. The isolation of Antarctica has a particular flavor of the sense that if you were to step into the storm it would simply swallow you up, leaving not even your memory behind. Night pressed on the windows though by now, two months into winter, the idea of day has become a rumor no one really believes. I checked the auto injectors gloves satchel. Sometimes my hands still tremble before a critical code a holdover from hospital nights in Lyon, Obostin. But this terror was different less clinical, more primitive. Even the bases veteran rescue team signed of rattled on the radio. Coming through six minutes out the patient's not responding repeat, not responding. The voice on comms was sergeant Javi, his finish accent clipped by adrenaline. Vigia's face reflected in the pit of steel wall looked paler than usual. I'll keep the comms open doctor. He tried for a reassuring smile and failed.

1:02Anatolies, although I was in full lockdown once you're back in, he's nervous. That got my attention. Dr. Anatolien Markov did not do nervous. The station's commando was a Gleyscher in Boots, famously unfazed even when the power grude failed for three hours in a blizzard last season. The comms officer, Renee Halpert, a man of official partner in mischief and disaster, slid a flask of spice tea into my pocket with a wink. Her brisk French was a shield for nerves too. Hey K. E. Lina, if you see anything odd, I want stories later. She tried humor, but even she sounded strained. The outer door heaved open into a wall of blackness and whirling ice. The rescue team emerged like ghosts from the squall, bundled Huddled doing their best to protect something with someone on a hastily improvised stretcher. Even through fogged goggles, I saw why Javi sounded afraid. Their patient was a man, but barely. He wore a vintage thermal-gay brown canvas, cracked leather boots, insignia faded decade to go. Beneath the peeling hood, his skin was waxen, a colour I'd only seen in old midcom monographs about the total body frostbite, a pathology more legend than reality now.

2:03Vains blue blackened to the skin, lips almost crystalline. He clung to consciousness with the desperate will of a drowning swimmer. Found him near the old upflow tunnel, Javi grunted. No traction, nothing around but heart-packing wind. I bent to check his pulse-thready, barely there. Fingers covered in scars, skin-like tampartraments. As soon as my hand touched his wrist he lunged, I snapped in line. They were startlingly pale, almost opalescent, irises ringed with frost. His voice was guttural, not quite Russian, but close, words tumbling out so quickly they bled into sense only on the edges. Don't go beneath, don't let it up turn around, turn around, dear. His nails dug into my arm. The cold remembers everything, you must not open it again. His body spasmed. A spatter of blood-street my glove, flex of frozen saliva dusted his chin as he rastped and finally slumped back, breath-rattling. I hit him with the pre-worn blood warmer, hoping, irrationally that adrenaline would somehow patch the holes of frozen night head left in his living systems. As we rushed him into the airlock, the bassist lets flicker to just a surge, nothing unusual,

3:04but time too precisely to feel coenced, enter. Outer storms were a gave way to the familiar drone of reclamers and recirculators, the barely rumble of an over-strain generator. I shivered, but not from cold. Aside, a half dozen staff clustered by the decon station, faces shadowed, all wide-eyed, breath-fisble and uncertain light. Renee usually caustic, now silent. Anatoly cleared a path with a barked order and undertove worry in his gaze. The bass mels, always present bleach, perfen, a constant, undercurrent of cheap soap seemed impossibly sharp to me. We found no footprint except his, Jarvy whispered, as a hustled our patient under the surgical lamps. And no one could survive outside for more than an hour, where did he come from? I had no answer. The man's gear was relic quality, pouches stitched with thread yellowed by age. As I peeled the jacket away, a clump of hair and skin came with it, brittle as parchment. The frost was so deep the blood in his capillaries it solidified long-strange patterns are reticulated web I'd only seen in century-old case reports from early and talk to expeditions. He was the kind of patient you only read about and hope never to see.

4:06But the real curiosity was his expression, even through delirium, relief, as if he'd accomplished a desperately important task just by reaching us. Or warning us. Isolation breeds its own madness, even among the rational. But as I settled in for the endless night, prepping for a fight with death I had little chance of winning. I wondered if the madness he had already begun to spread. Renee accompanied me down the narrow medical corridor, clancing over her shoulder as the storm battered the kitchen windows above. I think this might actually be worse than the time the Dessal Unistar had grown slime-old in 22, Shimathed, a vain attempt at levity. She nudged me for focus. How long do you think he's been out there? Based on his vital signs, he should be dead weeks, maybe, but I don't believe it. I stripped off my gloves and reached for an auto-injector, numb by the sense of unreality. There were wounds here, there old, amputated toes to see, scarred, ropey, not recent, but his face these frost lines they'd take days, not ours. A smell rose from his gear, strangely sweet, mixed with something acid and tannic. Not infection, not rot.

5:06A memory. I pressed goals to split in his lip and tried not to inhale. Anatoliy Loomed, still in command mode. He wore his habitual navy sweater, faded patch at the shoulder, and the ways he paced the sick-beapertrade underlying tension. He will not allow anyone to see him accept you, Dess, quarantine status, no word outside until we are sure this is not first intrusion in the over-records. His English had a kind of rolling gravity, unplaceable. I focused on keeping the patient's core up, wrapping him in a phase blanket. Flipper's flickered in and out as the bases internal power grids stuttered. In the end to him, Renee glared to the flickering security camera feed and saw it had muttering to herself. Vigie, two doors down, was scanning logs, his fingers dancing over keys so quickly, and out did he truly read anything. Sleep always a luxury, was now impossible. Concordia base thrives on routines, hourly checks, the slow shuttle-tune from the labs, the occasional vodka and chess. Extracted from that, time evaporates. At some point, the next day simply failed to begin. Stranger remained comatose for newly a day.

6:07When I drew his blood, it oozed in bursts rather than the usual flow, with unexpectedly large, almost slug-like platelets. Under my portable microscope, the cells were outstructures consistent with severe cold adaptation, but also with mutations I'd only seen referenced in old Soviet research on a deep cold syndrome, primarily among workers in long band and uranium mines. Riments of pathogens long-foddex dynch drifted among the red cells, puzzling anomalies that prickle the back of my neck. The sight is gurney, and a tully frown as I updated a digital chart. He will keep all records and personal drive only, I do not want this on general net. I didn't ask why. I witnessed his caution with data ever since I met you right something was fortunate last year, when aim a function erased a month of results. But a tiny, memory-in-voice inside me noted the difference, the sense that this time, the stakes were not professional, but personal. I circled back to my own bunk for a quick recharge. A corridor hump of generator noise, the flicker of motion senses dancing on battered four panels. Passing Vigie's security den, apposed as the monitor bank shut out and briefly flash static.

7:08He bickened me in. Blino, look at this. He tapped the blade back her rolling black and white feet from two hours before the search and rescue call. In the reading room, walls of snow skated past a window. Then a burst of static, and a two minute void in the digital log. When the feed returned, the rescue team was already in the hall, uniforms as cue, faces ghost-like. It's not a delete, Vigie insisted a voice-low. There are no log entries for any system errors, so the timestamp just skips forward there shouldn't be any gap, not even a pixel out of place usually. Grapbed at file. I asked, feeling an odd chill. The distair to his green, doubts diffening his jaw. This is the first time since while, since last winter, when those readings went wild, remember the argon leak in the core freezer, nothing quite fit together then either. Kind of shadow pressed at the base's edges, unspoken but thickening. The walls of the sick bay, normally bright with faux wood paneling and cheerful posters, seen suddenly in teak, faded in colors and seen but plainly fell. The calendar hanging knew my bunk was off by day, nothing major, an error I told myself.

8:09But it subtle discrepancy maintained a slow, insistent pressure, a sense that something outside time was knowing at us. The strangers hot beat jerked upwards as I entered his room, his eyelids trembling. In those brief, fever lit moments, he reached for my wrist again, tighter, cold as a corpse. He was supposed to leave last year, he hissed, his french accent nearly perfect now, but they would not release you, the voice kept leaking, you stitched the cut wrong and will you correct it now. I jerked back, I was shooting up my spine. My file, my records had been scrubbed of all detail on my delayed transfer. Only Anatali and central command should know. How could he know that? And what else? The man's lips lulled then he murmured, don't look at the mirrors below, don't write your name that listens. He fell slack, sweat beating on his temples despite the sub-zero air circulating through the bay. I sent for Anatali and explained what happened, watching his face for any flicker of recognition. Instead he became stone. We test for memory contamination, he said bluntly, from hypoxia, for miscellation, but names, details, unless someone listens when we talk, no way to know such things.

9:10I want to wake him properly, get cognitive tests, I said. No one signaling outside? His silence was answer enough. We are under Combs Blackout and scheduled traffic especially with anomalies were trigger and wanted interest. You, Doctor, will investigate. No untrust Paris, Washington or Moscow or these things. I nodded, even as dreads, bred through me like a cold infection. In a place where outside interference could be days away for never come at all truth is rationed as tightly as morphine. If reality bent there was no higher power to appeal to. A night and day such as they were blurred together as aphold, syringes and scound chromosomes. The first anomaly in his blood work had been odd, but the second became impossible. Some pathogens cold adapted bacteria belonged in museum drawers, not living tissue. His immune profile suggested exposure to viruses like polio and smallpox. Yet he bore scar at the left rest, the kind inflicted by Soviet era of vaccination needles, now banned for half a century. It glanced at his chest reveals scars for, in a cross-ach, but the right pectoral muscle. Surgical, but not like anything taught since the 1970s.

10:11Incisions closed with crude cacke, edges pebbled unworked. My scalp prickled with a sense of reading a message centuries old, cratched into the bones rather than left and righting. When acolyd into the med bay as I catalogued findings clutching her ever-present weathered tablets. The wind howled outside, moaning in the eaves. He's older than the ice, you know she quipped, nodding at the patient. Or maybe it's just the best-making us feel ancient. This darkest, erases time, I checked records in 1983, a French meteorologist went missing, right after storms like this, no remains ever fram. The blame did on her failed taxi to Dumont-Devil, but her things were found a year later. Deep in the ice caves, you know what was strange. Her diary referenced a shadow, canceling a doctor, she swore was alive, the records claimed she died decades earlier. Something inside me tightened. I turned the bedside monitor so as not to look in the patient's eyes. Ghost stories. Renée shook her head. Ghost Josseys, French army, archived it under unexplained events called war times, all secrets. Vigia joined us, looking more ragged than his usual engineers' needness. Security feeds, we lost critical hours again last night, not like a system glitch blanks

11:14based on four feeds, physical offset backups too, as if we recorded, then erased. Who had the admin rights? I asked. He hesitated. Only me, Anatoly, and the Russian core team, no one accessed my terminal. We split up, uneasy, spissions rising like rime on the windows. I descended to the sub-isman for the archives, a hannikum of steel shelving mat with Cyrillic, French and Modi disclaimers, ancient seals from German and British missions long closed. My flashlight flicked shuttles across damp, ancient folders. Operation Teal. Subject 12. Their inspiratory English and dense Russian, pages dense with cryptic diagrams and after-action reports. Experiments in human cry preservation. Multiple failures. Rewoken 28 March 1986, severe psychic disintegration, order removal. The hair on my neck pricled. A name, blood, but part readable. Dr. Len. At the bottom of the folder, a grainy photo of a group in heavy winter kit. The face of the end was just out of focus, but what I could see chilled me to the chorus

12:15blitz second recognition. My own expression, or someone uncomfortable-y liked me. Later, back in the main corridor, I opened my locker only to find it empty of medicine and touch by my hand. A quick canvas revealed missing items and four other lockers, two personal belongings vanished, old photos rearranged, some with faces blurred or scratched away with a thumbnail. Only Anatoly station log remain pristine, locked as always in his drawer. In my own small quarters, I found something new. An ivory token, hand carved, lay in my underwear drawer. A circle bisected with a strange sigil, identical to one etched into a surgical tray in the cryo-project photos I'd just seen. I looked down at my hands and for the briefest moment, so gloves stained with a red-so-old that looked black. The patient's condition worsened, his temperature dropping though he sweated through the sheets. His ravings became more cryptic, chiffing between Russian, French, and uniquely a redigerman dialect I recognized from my Bavarian grandmother's whispered prayers. He thrash feverish. Work up because you called me, always you, he rapsed. Breaks when you ask the coldest patient.

13:16Later, René found me pacing half to Lerius after Fortio's awake. Blinat sleep, you aren't helping him like this, we'll lose you too. It restivated me, replaced by Cesis' feeling of encroachment as if the very walls were pressing in. The air in the base grew sharp, metallic, two-drive for comfort. Nothing in Concordia happens without being logged, yet for three days small items kept vanishing mags, pence, old scarves, half-use medical scraps. Reappearing, then disappearing again, sometimes in other people's cubbies, sometimes not found at all. It became a joke among the staff until René privately confessed she suspected someone was retracing us, mapping our movements by disrupting our patterns. The blizzard drove us all inside, the old routines fraying as tempers wore thin. The storm intensified, shaking the window panels until they burned like animals in pain. For the first time, since I'd landed here, I felt truly afraid afraid that the base itself had turned against us. One afternoon, the wind dropped to a hush that seemed to magnify every sound. René and I were drafted into a supply convite trudging through tunnels to the old stores.

14:16The outbuildings groaned under the weight of drifted snor. As we rounded the fuel deeper, we saw almost hidden under the leave in a fractured redline attempt, half-berry, made from faded green canvas, a style decade out of date. Who's map that? René muttered scanning her pdf. It didn't appear, not even under out-of-date survey files. We approached, calling out, silence except for the creek of ropes. Inside was another time entirely, battled tin trunks, fossilized field notebooks, a carousine lamp crusted over with age. Tucked among the debris was a bundle of photos black and white, faces grunish-miling, one of them unastickably me, older by decades, in the same brand of medical smock I wore now. Is this a joke? René asked, voiced them with dread. A rifle through a leather-bound notebook, called Steph Page's Faintly Written in French. It described procedure 23 a revival attempt using in field cryonics positive at first, but trailing often to panicked grubbles subject failed to revive memory error cannot account for lost time, or lost stuff. But the handwriting it was my own. The capital else the tangled osomatch so obvious I almost fainted.

15:19We need to leave, Renee whispered. Lena, we shouldn't have found this. The patient's fever rage by the time we return. That night everyone on base dreamed the same things, been submerged in icy water, hands banned, surgical lights above, faces near faces half familiar, half strange. The next morning, three staff reported waking with nosebleeds and bruises along their ribcage as if they'd been constrained. Renee cornered Anatolii in the mess hall, her com-shattered. How long have you known she has, brandishing, a faded old group photo from the tent one marked in Cyrillic as Operation Theal Medical Staff March 1985. The furrows and man's face now seem clearly stood next to mine, his badge label wise, Anton. Anatolii watched Renee his impatient facade cracking. Finally, he unlocked a battered strongbox from his room, laying out ancient dossiers, grainy polaroids, lab diagrams. They warned us, he said softly. It never come here in the dark, this place was never meant for us. Renee's eyes roved over the papers. What is this? Anatolii's expression darkened. This station was rebuilt to top Soviet failure, underneath experiments some room sealed forever,

16:23officially, all decommissioned and officially no. Group photos bore my face, Anton's, and three others I now recognise from the medical staff of old expedition logs. The same names, different years, over and over always a doctor, a commander, a technician, a meteorologist. Each time the faces changed slightly, the names sometimes swapped. J.J. fevered, offered his own logs, the blueprints don't match the tunnels, there are sealed doors, footage lost, some nights, I hear my own voice in the computer logs, but I never made those files. A staff gallored in the mess, spissing bold over. Are you an on this, someone shouted? How do we know you're not part of the project? I tried to reason, saying, look at us, we're all here, all counted for. But I couldn't explain why my face was in a photo from 1985 or why the stranger had recited the details of my unpublished psychological evaluation. The crew divided some blaming Anatolii for a military cover-up, other suspect in the sick patient wasn't even human, but a shadow left by Soviet science. Worse, maps confirmed what I'd feared, the stations foundations capped the ruins of

17:23the original cryopressivation site. Renée traced the route on her tablet. Three stories down, blocked by concrete and steel, nothing gets in or out. Except someone, or something, had. Later at that night, I dreamed. Or perhaps I wondered. The line between the two had faded entirely since the patient's arrival. In a half-real half-light, I heard static over the int calm, a voice that sounded like mind-distorted pleading. Dr. Mercer responded, it's freezing, you have to finish the procedure, they'll forget you if you don't. Drawing by that impossible call, I found myself past the last proof stairwell, past accordion doors with faded Russian stencils. The walls echoed, concrete stained by the slow migration of time as much as water. I stopped at a yellow security door, lab deep lock, authorised medical only. My thumb print opened it, though I'd never programmed the lock. Inside, I'm older in glass case health medical files, lovingly wrapped in alcohol. The first ledger read, Dr. Lena Mercer, duty cycle 17, 1986, 87. My hands shook as I read the entries. Procedure 19, subject 12 failed to revive.

18:26Vocalizations increased post-art. Crew tension rising. Rumors. Project head insists on memory treatments, must erase results of fail again. Procedure 23, subject presence as aren't unwise. Facing confusion between my own voice and intercom. Preparing to close project. Fennel entry of this fails. At the end, a folded polaroid. Me too young to be plausible standing next to Anton, both in medical whites, both staring directly into the lens. A mirror hung on the wall above the desk. In the flickering fluorescence, my reflection fractured my own face-splitting, shifting, young girl and older, sometimes not quite my own. Impossible medical memory surfaced as sutured winds that weren't mine, comforted crew never assigned to my missions, recall smells and procedures no training had ever prepared me for. When I could breathe again, I pressed a hand against the glass. The cold was deeper than anything in this world. Behind me, footsteps a shuffle or perhaps memory. In the lowest level of concordia, the past had returned. Or perhaps it had never left. Anton's real identity was clear, a lost medic, subject 12, punished when the first experiment

19:30failed nearly 40 years ago. But so was mine a double, a repetition, a thread and a tapestry sniped and tied again and again. My base was not just haunted. We were trapped in a cycle. Its boundaries measured less by physical walls and by layers of tinnan by the names we did or refused to write. Time, I realized not distance, not isloctis here. As I sagged back toward the light, clutching the old, damning files, my own voice I could over the base and to calm, filtered by static, pleading for help. But I already knew the truth, help was never coming. And if I opened the cycle fully, I might erase myself or worse, let something out. The cold, as he said, remembers everything. I stood there, I breath rattling in the stale sub-basement air. Pulse or ragged are hithmic beat in my ears. Static dripped down the labyrinth of old cables overhead, some barely holding their patch reconciliation. From the walls, the strange geometry of pipes and shadows pressed into new, impossible angles. It felt as though I slipped the world clipped into a space outside itself, where the air itself stung differently, and I tasted copper every time I heartbeat.

20:31A slow, deliberate step behind me, a spawn, the files pressed so hard to my fist that the old paper crumpled. Nothing but the broken fluorescent reflection in the glass. No Anton, no doubling shadows. Get my own nerve ending still prickled as if I were being observed from somewhere just out of sight, for some tiny, year for a reason window. Alarms pings somewhere far above, a mechanical clatter at going through unseen shafts. For a moment I consider not going back and not climbing the corroded stairwell up out of the deep lock but then another voice cold of her head, distantly recognizable through layers of metal and time. Lena, how you down there? It was Renee, urgent and thin with static. Parsearch medical bay-tripped Lena, answer if you hear me. My feet ached, my skin felt as if it no longer fit my bones. I jammed the faded journal under my arm, made for the stairs not looking back at that shifting reflection. Even as I emerged through the pressure door, a headache thumping at my temples, I could feel the base above me in agitation. Emergency light strode and sickly read. Electrical conduit shuttered overhead. In a mess hall, a swell of movement, three stuff running between rooms, one cradling

21:32his arm in a bloody towel, shouts ricocheting from the drywall. On the security screens by Vigia's station, corridors spun in flicking pan figures crossing and doubling, sometimes pausing to stair and blinking directly into the lens. Renee appeared, cheeks flush, hair sticking up and wild static. We lost feet within the bay doors and locked for nine seconds by themselves, Jury ran in, but Lena, someone opened the airlock, the person outside in the white, just now. My mind crashed against the impossibility. Who? We don't know, it wasn't any of us. By the time I made it to the medical bay, the door hung open, drifting, pneumatic seals barely hissing. The patient's cot was empty but the sheet showed the ghost of a body one outline and something darker, a blim of half frozen blood. The room and four lines dangled snapped. The blizzard outside roared, shouting everything beyond the glass in blindness. A nod of staff crowded behind me. Anatoly glared at the chaos his hands shook, not visibly, but I could sense the tremor in the way he clenched and unclenched. He barked orders, forcing everyone to check inventory personnel, calms anything to regain an edge.

22:34Someone hissed behind me, worst doctor Mercer bin, where were you? I ignored them, pushing into the room's farthest corner, searching for what. Some sign of direction. On the floor pressed into a melted patch near the radiator, lay a scrap of canvas to corner from the man's old jacket and a single, tarnished Russian dog tag, stamp-wise, hey. I pinched it between trembling fingers. The metal radiated cold surface, I joked my hand, always swearing, it left a red and print in my palm, as if it remembered a chain of events my nose could not. In the trunk at the end of the bed, the paperwork had been disturbed to pages I'd filled in the last days, now over it, and entries terminating in erratic, looping scrolls that grew less and less like my own writing, as if someone else had taken over my script mid-sentence. I noted the bottom, not in my hand, do not follow into the ice, not this time. Panic bled through the corridor's raised voices, the sense the order was eroding. The radiator was barking into the calm, his voice snatching it in up. Atmosphoric pressures a wrong look, a sense of show drop, minus 40, but only inside the maze tunnels. He flashed a screen at Anatoly, atmospheric data graph, lines knotted and dipping in time

23:34not aligned with any outside change. And a gamma count as spiked briefly on level minus 3, it shouldn't be possible. I found myself backing away documents clutched to chess, the dog tag burning ice into my palm turning for the old North Main corridor. No one called after me. Halfway down between Main Level and the Archives, the lights flickered off pitch black, safely emergency run-os clearing red. My head spun. I pressed the dog tag to my forehead for grounding, it sent a chill for my skull, strange and clarifying. I staggered into a storm, shoulders-icking, lungs clawing for a breath that never truly satisfied. Something inside me, some stubborn, clinical resolve forced my hands to enclaunch, to pick apart the files that's damaged. On each battered dossier patterns. The same four names mixed in match from expedition after expedition spiraling back across the sheet. Verser. Voice. Albert. Markov, sometimes spelled in German or faint French. A whirlpool of barely diverging events each time, one slipped out of the record midwinter. Sometimes it was Anton.

24:34Sometimes Lena. Once sold to print was purple it was Renee. Each time the same refrain written in the margins or undisplented polaroids, memory failure, object will not remember, do not look in a reflective surfaces below. My head thruved. I forced myself to flicker my hand torch. Inside the folders pocket, old negatives kelled up like worm segments. I flipped through holding them to the faint beam. Images from the cryo lab are figured and operating table, flanked by two others, all gowned, all faces blurred by fog or film air. But the name badge on the central figure was plain, L. Mercer, ND. The patient Anton, or whoever he was stood next to me, long before the present. The expressions between us were indoctrupatient. They were colleagues. I saw myself folder, younger at the line on surf and pressing a cult glove hand to his shoulders he lay beneath the harsh operating lights. A sudden jolt boots pounding above. Someone shouted in Russian, I heard the crack of a fist against a plastic wall panel, a volley of frantic French. Renee's voice. I bolted to the stair, winded heart galloping.

25:35In the main hall, half the crew pressed to the windows, breath fogging, searching for movement in the murk. French lights cut patterns through the falling snow, white slices spinning from the retagemass. Renee grabbed me, ice on her eyelashes, fury masking her fear. Jari saw him a man in old gear, out by the service left, not possible. No one could last. We have to check the grounds before he disappears. We have to do something before dusk, before the storm thickens again. There was the briefest, bitter wash of hopelessness in her words. It drained my own hands of warmth. We dress fast, silent but for slippers in the thunk of boots. The other staff muttered their own excuses, drifting to the kitchen or the cons post. Annatolli badge the lift with his finger, the security lock beeped, grudgingly as it disengaged. Outside the wing keen, raising a thousand willing bannos of snow. The outer door opened, the storm pressed at us heaviest wall. Every step forward was a negotiation with the elements, the line between inside and outside, blurring faster than our breath for a deeper goggles. Renee and I stagger toward the lift, flanked by floodlights stuttering on emergency power.

26:35Near the ice-bomb machinery, blood and slushed march a strange, irregular trail dropped spaced wider than a limping pace, but a mistakeable. We followed it past the generator shacks, down the alley between main block and the buried comstack. Everything metal was heard with frost, humming quietly, as though the verrestructure of the base was resonating with some impossible music. A silhouette half real, so blurred by blowing snow it seemed to split at its edge's lurch past the service edge. Renee hiss, there. I crashed forward, boots lighting on the ice hand, taking with cold and urgency. As I rounded the corner, the form wavered and stopped. The man ant unturned, just for a moment, his face agasso medley of old and neutral. First bit and lips curved into a sad, knowing smile. End of cycle, end of self, he rast almost conversationally as words lost in the wind. You are always the last to forget, Lena, it's only harder the first hundred times. He pressed his palm to the glass instead of the hatch leaving a foggy, freezing outline, all they doubled. Beneath, I glimpsed and not reflected, but imprinted a shadow of my own hand, as if left in a memory I hadn't yet lived.

27:37Renee pulled at my sleeve. We should not be, come back inside, now. A fresh, howling gust, an antun vanishing, the dotting around the corner or to solve by the force of the storm, no way to know which. The evidence, such as it was, consisted only of prints and steel, new streaks of frozen blood, and overwhelming sense of having trust but somewhere forbidden. We hassle back inside, baffling doors that tried to close enough faces. The base was almost choking in its atmosphere air heavy, everything over bright as if the generator was about to blow. Staff whispered in half circles, faces drawn tight. Anatoly appeared, disheveled. He cornered me, anger spun through with a thread of terror. What are you doing, Lena? Where did you go? I need a list every way you've looked, everything you found. I gave him the files the oldest, most damning entries tucked beneath. He ruffled through them, crunching his faces and dates blood together. We should never have come, he muttered voice hollow. Each group always the same, something in the ice wants witness, but not truth. The last commander, the Jackie tried to wall up the tunnels, he burned the oldest records. He just shurred, fingers trembling, to the battered dossiers.

28:40Some things, if you need them, call themselves forth. Vijaype beside him, lets cracked, worry flaring. I check against every system lock, there are entries from before the base was commissioned to someone locked in as Vijay Rao, but in 1987, impossible, faked. But who would do that, and why so slowly? The base settled into silence for a long moment. To an open door, a glimpse the others huddled under cremaryng lights, faces pale and flickering at the edges like a photosholy being erased, all definition blurring to shatter. Rene's hand found my elbow. We cannot stay above, we have to go below, Lena, you saw him out on one sister follow, and the base wants us to unravel what's under the liars, otherwise nothing ever ends, does it? Not for any of us. I could hear, in distant Vincent pipes, the shivering sound of wind, or was it a voice? The memory of that all warning, do not look in the mirrors, do not write your name, it listens. The call to my bones now was new invasive. I nodded, once not trusting myself to speak. The routine's fracture completely. Up above, something heavy slid across the roof, screeching protests of frozen steel.

29:41All at once the lights jerked and the alarms greened a storm surge in the grid, or an intrusion signal I couldn't tell. We packed provisions lights, masks, rubbed moving fast and wordless. One atolley handed me a battered pistol, and case doors were not open. He almost laughed at himself, then thought better of it. The storm outside rage, but the storm inside of time and self-fire, far worse. At the entrance to the sublivols were Nace later hand over the reader. His curl through access codes then, inexplicably accepted my own thumb, reacting with a soft electronic chime. We descended through the dark. The air grew colder, drier, until my skin pulled hot and my breezy and shallow dry sips. The smell changed, iding, old paper ozone. At the final landing, the ice dove a deep lock spun its wheel under my grip as easily as if it had been oiled yesterday. We stepped forward together the boundaries of self of rolls and use, collapsing behind us in the dark. My identity, it realized, was no longer a single thread, but a braid of cold trembling under unbearable tension. Some were beneath the ice, answers waited, cold and ancient. And for the first time, I accepted that what I would find was not just the story of the

30:45patient or the base, but an unraveling of myself as deep and recursive as the ice itself. Renee's voice was a mirror as the door to the sublivols eased open under my displays, thumbprinted soft, rapid-pant, half whisper, half staccato prayer in French, as she entrolled at her light and followed me down. Behind her, Anatoly and Vigia hesitated at the virtual fear, a thought or wisdom. The air coming up from the lowest air was felt sharper than before, biting, under a lane by a dry static that carried the faintest ozone tan. We crossed a line and knew it. No comfort waited up above. The bases in salarity, the camaraderie of isolation, had shattered when our rolls split and tangles of the path intruded upon the present. We moved in a blurring dream state, I recognized the corridor's strange slope, the dented service cart, patches of paint-gun gray with the years or decades of palm-worry or frantic retreat. Emergency runners cast bands of Bruce Light over to Cratt-Tile. Here a doe banged losing the pulse of erotic assoculation, there a pile of boxes bore the stencil glyph from the ivory token I'd found, as if a warning or recursive mark left for myself, or for anyone else unlucky enough to reach this far.

31:46At the bottom, by the deep lock, the badge freed her flickered uncertainly between green and red. I pressed my thumb. The machine accepted me, a strange air forgery of myself, a digital echo whose authority made no sense. Renee was at my shoulder, teeth-beared, lips blue. He's down here, she said, voice trembling. I heard him someone's moving, and the light subs days they went out the moment he passed the checkpoint. We all heard it then, footfalls receding in the tunnel ahead, the faint, lowest grade of something dragged or nudged along concrete. Above us, the generator kicked twice in an atlas, desperate struggle for power, and then went silent. Every device we carried shut of my med-git-beapted internal distress signal, and the ass-seeing to compress pressure rolling up from below-like a surfacing, frozen tide. Fiji fought on a surge of panic, his focused rusting into obsession. He brought a field lopped up, clinging to it like a talisman. Back up batteries draining faster than it showed, he muttered. Environmental readings are wrong, air temp is dropping, but not incrementally spiking in pockets, gamma readings too. He waved a sensor, needle flicked, dipped spiked again. Don't trust the machines, and a toly-grout, flashing his battered flashlight across the

32:49firewall. It done here, they echo us, read out-slide, only what you touch is real. I led the way toward the first sealed security hatch. Fingers of frost-cripped along the doorjam, radiating from the brush-steel as if the cold inside yearned to burst out. I pressed the pump plate, it registered my print by the panel shimmered and displayed, Dr. Merzcleo 24 slash 3 slash 86, the date spun vertiginously in my mind. Renésque is my wrist with short, percussive bursts. You're sure about this, no rescue, no way back, maybe. We don't have a choice, I heard myself say, not recognizing my own voice. He's down here, still looping through whatever this is, and so are we. The lock-cycled, hissing open, and a wave of air-hitters sharp, brined with old disinfectant, the sweetness of rots pressed by cold. Inside, the remnants of the Crayonix labs bred before a swapp-roading table's undersheets of ancient plexiglass, racks of heavy, frost-sealed canisters, some marked specimen, others crew, others blank. Ice goes hung from the instrument trays and computer terminals, the forms walked by agents sudden melt-refree surges.

33:49Aftertops crackled over ice flows. The silence was not silence at all but a pressure, humming with afterimage's surgical flashbacks bleeding into the real. At the far end, twin figures loomed, and on the frost-pitch-man, his movement stuttered, half a lie, half on strings and another, and distinct but wearing my old uniform stand in just out of the center of the lie. Both glanced up as we entered. For a moment, I saw my own face in the shadows of her shoulder, go on to her as hollow with some lost akadamos, but not quite remember. Anton lowered his head. His voice, when it came, was perfectly clear as ominously rational as if he'd been waiting us for years. You're almost in phase Lena, it doesn't hurt so much after the first collapse, tell them, you always have to tell them, or it doesn't finish. The words pounded something loose inside me. Layers of memory threatened to spill out. Renegasped, putting up her arm to hold me back, but I stepped forward. Why us, why now? My voice, or the version of it, this cycle war. He shrugged, shoulder-strumbling as if with fever. Because you called, because you wouldn't let me sleep, because the experiment needed a closure no one was brave enough to give, I was the surgeon, he was the patient, then

34:52was swapped, and now you get to choose again. I swallowed. I tried to find medical certainty, diagnosis, or physical fix. But no pathology accounted for this, no trauma or shared hallucination. The room itself seemed to flicker, half-filled with the dream-humma of overlapping voices, the walls bleeding between ears, 2024 and 1986 layered so thinly that the past and present became insipable. A warning flicker, that Anatali's lips. We must not touch the core, if it breaches. We lose everything above, this is the trap, the knot. Fuji, knuckles white on the laptop, scan the room. Both logons are active across the systems, Lena, there's a log in bayou, timestamped every decade sometimes more than once, files written, then erased, then written again, I can't even tell which is now. Renee's voice was high, verging on panic. If we leave him if Anton stays list as a start again, do we vanish? I don't want to be a race, Lena, I don't want to become one of the faces in the photos. Anton watched us, eyes glittering with a mixture of hope, suffering, and resignation. The only real action is to finish the procedure, otherwise the ice remembers for you, it brings

35:52another Lena, another Anton, another winter, it never ends. Think that it overhead, the echoes arriving as if down a frozen well. Above us somewhere, the generators wind to life, then stutter. The environmental generator was losing the fight. If power failed if the co-ruptured nobody above could save us. And if the experiment failed again, how many iterations would we be granted? How much more would we lose of ourselves? I thought of the journal, still pressed in my chest, the pages thick with overlapping entries, the handwriting buckling, the vulving, then sharpening, cycling through my own voice, through my duplicates, Anton's perhaps even her nays. Each time the experiment tried to finish, each time something deferred. We do it now, I said my words clipped and strange. If we don't, we're back here again, none of us gets out until it closes. No one argued. I perched Anton. His fast beat and hands extended trembling, a supplication. The medical corer word behind us is let's cycle to radically, little embers in the darkness. You'll remember Lena, he murmured. You always do and tell you don't, and it, or walk away.

36:55My heart battered my ribs, my fingers numbed. I reached for the old steel scalpel left on the tray. A shadow of muscle memory trembled down my arm, some ancient routine alive in my hands. The echo standing at the room's edge, the other leanest smile, a shimmer that never quite found solidity. We only find peace when we give up our separateness, she whispered. Shoes. A storm here above, a shriek of wind, a brittle clout of structural vibration. A twilight shuttered, the air refocused, and for one crystalline moment I felt all of us snout then, between stacked light transparencies on the same slide. Anton pressed his hand to mine. It was cold as absolute zero, or as memory's final failure. We begin, doctor, he asked. His eyes held mine. Or do we wait for another leaner, another Anton? I nodded, swallowing, and pressed the scalpel to the puckered old scarlet line I knew not just by sight, but by feel a thousand times cut and healed within cycles beyond counting. As the blade sank in, the luts failed. The air contract, it then expended with a roar. The bases structure groaned, a deep size of protest. In the galloping red wash of my cranial blood flow, I could see nothing but snow, stars,

37:59and the blur faces of all the possible cells entwined with mine. A medical proof called played itself out through me. Loves. Churnic it. Thump. Assess and act. My hands were my own, but not entirely each movement waited by repetition by the ghosts of failed attempts. Blood, or something like it, well-dapped, steaming against the receding cold. Renained out shoulder to shoulder, instrument at the ready her bad racket, wild but determined. A duet now lean up, there's no more time, everyone else's. A voice fractured. I didn't look beyond Anton, or myself. The alarm above us blared, muffled and faint. A spatter of blue light rippled across the surface of the chryonic core, its eyes and conduits glowing faintly where organic tissue had knitted in over the years. A low thrum, a harmonic both inside and outside my skull. Anton gripped my wrist the pressure dire. Remember, doctor, when the barrier falls step through, don't stall, don't remember too long. His breath stopped. Or perhaps mine did. The core shivered. And for an instant, everything inverted, time flowed backward, the aflick of blue light,

39:01and I saw, mapped in a scatter of fragmentary memory every moment we'd ever failed to end this, ever failed to choose. When I wear in a settle again, we sit exactly where we always had, in the deep lab-out on silent, the operation begun, my hands shaking with purpose, the others ringed around us, each expression of study in help, horror, dread, and anticipation. The final act had begun. Above Samurai, I could hear the wind and an eight, my own voice, calling for rescue, past, present, and futurely so tightly to the notion of separation felt as arbitrary as a breath divided from the cold. A pressure grew, a crescendo, a demand, choose, acts. End what could no longer hold. René grabbed another instrument, jabbing it into my field of vision. He can't take another round, if you hesitate, lean, he'll go into shock, and then it's failed again. I clamped down, sealed the main artery, excised the tissue with an anomaly pulsed. Anton's ice flutter, rolling back. The other shifted shadows splitting into more shadows until for a moment they seemed double-tripled, an entire retinue of lens, Anton's, René's, Markov's, each flickering through the forgotten cycles.

40:02A wall of monitors on the far side of the room blinked with the overlapping archival footage teams from other years, other faces, other hands repeating the same desperate act. Anatoly hissed between his teeth. Is it working? Can you feel it? I shook half and shock, half an all. The anomaly pulsed, then surged, as if the effort to finish what we never had before was breaking the machinery of reality itself. A rush of cold, like dry ice fog, spilled from the wind and began to curl through the room, setting every instrument chattering. The ancient core of the junction between our world and whatever lay inside the basewined, answers flickering the digital face blowing before my eyes. Anton reached up finger-fumbling. Don't stop, finish, always finish, Lena. His lips cracked blue with effort. If you let me go, you can leave. The wound isn't closing, or René shouted, frantic, hunting for a sealant pack. My own hands, or hers, are thus pressed to the incision, pinched flesh, tried to anchor what could not be anchored. A double reflection shimmered through the curved plex, echoing back to his familiar foreign. The last thing I remember before the rupture wasn't pain, or the roar, but the pressure

41:04attacked to finish for real, for permanent before the base was set itself, before the ice took cold again. Ice creased Anton's hand and began to so. For a spannus time could have been seconds, or years I felt the looping weight of memory threatened to cussify my mind. With every suture, another echo fell silent, the shadows of previous cycles faded, some relieved, some warmful. The isotologic of the deep froze the false stars, compressed the failed escapes until all that remain was the bright, raw focus of choice. As the wound seal, the coarse green to subsonic howl that rattled the fillings in my teeth. The walls bulged, the light flared, the oval-lapping faces in the monitors burst like soap bubbles. For a moment everything was open, vulnerable a chasm of light and cold that might swallow us all. I tied the last knot, released the clamp. The lard, real blood pulled under my thumb. The anomaly roared and frayed then, impossibly began to abate. The deep lard stedded. The cold ancient and insistent rolled back. I rubbed my eyes suddenly and absolutely exhausted. Anton lay still not dead, not quite. The anomalies pulsed still beneath his skin, or beneath mine.

42:06Briny leaned in, weeping the sound bright and unstoppable in the silence after. It's over, she said. Well, you know, it's over, isn't it? I had no answer. My hands ached. My heart too. I not only pressed close, his hand heavy on my shoulder. You did it? I watched Anton for a moment he seemed to glow, or to recede. I wasn't certain which. Vigia closed up the laptop. Logs were stable again, time is enlubing, not that I can tell. I nodded, weeping quietly, muscles and sinews gone slack with fatigue. No one spoke. For a few hobbies or lifetimes, no one mooted all. Above us the wind dropped. Far off-light to blink back to life, pale, forgiving. The echoes began to die away. I rose from the mess of surgical wrapping, some walked to the core. The glass was hot under my hand. I pressed the ivory token into a fissure, feeling for the first time that the symbol fit that the tulip belonged there. Its lines matching grooves were not just beckoned, but by time and by layers of memory ready at last to thaw. The circuit closed. The room, the base, the past and present hole fused in the other frozen hush.

43:10I don't open to Zizl, new, both at once. For a moment all the faces in the footage blurred into his, patient, surgeon, witness. For another I felt my own zav drop away, burning out as if from magnesium, flaring, and then gone. I stood exactly where I was meant to stand and know further soden to your cycle to play out, just the clear, infinite cold. Let's flick od. Our alarms began their reset routines. Walls exhaled warmth for the first time in ages. In the deep lap, all was finally impossibly still. I stared at my bloody gloves and realized the cycle hadn't spued, swelled to its last knot, and let go its claim. I backed away from the core, from Anton, from the shadows thick and empty along the walls. Renee caught my hand, her grip oddly strong. Let's go, she murmured. I nodded, feeling the contours of my own limbs as newly as a waking child. We left the deep lap together to survivors, or one, halved and stitched hole again. The cold behind a settle, the air had cleared. In a corridor, the lights flick od, hesitated then glowed, steady and sane. I paused, turned back, and gaze once, only once, at the glass of the core.

44:13They're preserved in thin frost, two overlapping handprints, one mine, one nuntons. The base was beginning to move again. At this time, nothing followed us up the stairs. Stepping into the main hall, I let myself notice the first, true warmth I'd ever felt here a break in winter pressure, not just outside, but inside my own breath. Vigil limped in, rubbing his eyes. You're alright? I nodded in no words left to explain why had been cut open, and what had closed. Renee giggled, half mad with terror and release. We never tell this story, not a word. I smiled for the first time in memory. The lab doors peaked to catode shut, maggots singing their soft, mechanical olibies. I returned the surgical trait of the dispenser, closed out my log and breath. A world outside and within rested. I stood by the shattered, re-freezing core, and felt the gentle weight of the ivory token in my palm, cold but underretting as the lapse of the last lights blinked out one by one. Somewhere above, someone was calling my name, distant and indistinct. I listened, as drifting over the overlapping handprints frozen onto the glass of memory

45:13made tangible, a boundary now at peace. I let out a sound-apartic salation, past something else then slipped the ivory token until it sat hidden in my pocket and closed the panel. Behind me, the hum of failing machinery quieted, circus clicking off in a sequence that sounded almost gentle, even final. Renee pressed her chilt hand to my back, steering us into the service corridor where sodium bulbs flickered, then steady the colorless light lending a sudden clarity to every gouge and dent in the steel. Apart behind, Anatoly and Vigiling go to the entrance and certain assадos. No one else spoke. The only sounds were footfalls, two heavy, echoing oddly off-tile and chitra quonset, or perhaps two, impossible to separate. At the top of the stairs, I hesitated the blood and my gloves beginning to dry, itching and tight. The bases overhead alarms were set, beeping out low, sequential confirmation tones routine reasserting itself for the first time since this all began. Above us, brittle silence, as if the wind that had battered us for weeks had drawn a single frozen breath and was waiting for an answer.

46:15Renee, boys, roll, whisper, let me see. She peeled off one glove with trembling fingers. Her eyes darted to the hamperance, then to my face, searching for some thread of recognition or proof. She nodded once, as if reassured by what she saw in acceptance, a way forward. We climbed out of the sub-level in single file, and for a moment as I passed the battered badge reader, a flash green and dark. On the console display, my own name lingered for a second longer than it should have, then faded along with the rest. We emerged into the main hall. The bases routine ghosted in around us, boilers knocking, service relay cycling. Someone Vijay or his double had already reassembled the main security panel, the screen now showing on the current faces, not the old ones. Jauri and the rest of the night watch huddled by the radio repeater, voises Hush as though the air itself hung listening. I couldn't have spoken if I'd wanted to. Renee fetched a thermal blanket for my shoulders, swaddle me without asking. My fingers shook as I accepted the mug of scolding instant coffee pressed into my hands, the taste sharp and unsweetened. It told me if you remember, she said, I face searching mine, but I shook my head too tired

47:16for words, my dirt closing against everything. Anna Tully circled the table, crashed sat into a battered metal chair. He leaned forward elbows on these hands loose. No more echoes he mattered. No more tunnels shut it all. He swept up the access keys, gathered the files, and turned his gaze to me, expectant, one thin, and tinged with a hope that looked almost as frightening as resignation. Jauri and diagnostics on his battered fields laptop, each keystrived deliberate, ritualistic. Environmental readings of flat, he said, showing us the live feed and scatterplots. Gam is back at background, pressures even, everything normal, if we're still looping, the machines can't see it. But the base felt different lighter, even as exhaustion pressed in. Air moved through the ventilation in deep, rivet drafts, the heavy ache of static charge that had clung for weeks suddenly dispersed. I watched the dog half expecting Anna nor myself, some others self a brush pass, called bleeding from his steps. None did. What remained of the crew drifted back to their posts. René Carouse applies, muttering about the integrity checklist.

48:17I busied myself with the most menial tasks sterilizing orthescopes, restocking winddressings, synchronize in medication inventories anything to avoid the eyes of those who looked at me and saw not just Lena but something doubled. Hours bled into each other, urgency melting into a grind of survivors routine. This poor teeter suckled up his thing. Outside, the storm finally gave way, the long nights pressure receding pale blue lights billed down from his guy for the first time in weeks. That afternoon, a joined René unwatched by the galley window, neither of us eating, both of us sipping and breathing, watching the horizon shift as the sun cold along the edge of the world. Did you see him? I asked, voice hussed by disuse, when he? She nodded, staring past me. Two of you, I think, like reflections glued together, one stayed, one left, or melted, orth. She shuddered, looking away. It's done, we aren't forgetting this, Lena, not again. Words start between us, things neither apology nor confirmation. We leaned on the silence, hunched together in a band of week orange light, a kind up promise is not warmed or safety exactly, but that the night is not, after all, endless.

49:18Later Anatoly summoned the remaining crew to the mess for a tally and debrief. The roster, tattooed and coffee stained, showed every name except Anton's marked prison, even those marked and accounted for in days' price art, sluck hide, barely awake, as if the memory of absence had been erased. The radiolopic shuddered clean list of shift changes, signatures and old and covalent fresh ones smudged but undeniably ours. Yet there were things none of us could account for, fidget's notes, full of data that now read as blank columns, Anatoly's battered strongworks, half its contents missing, a handful of photos pinned to the noticeboard faces blurred, names scratched out, my self-appearing once in a pose I could not remember. Stillness pulled in the corridors well after at once ricocheted, as though the echo of the cycles collapsed demanded rest. The station, its equipment, its coats all responded to us if at all as if feeling out which version of self it no-hels. In private, René recounted the deep-labs final moments. You cut something gave, dear air broke like ice, he was there, so were you, and then just us, it felt like waking from being buried. For a moment her hands shook, but she smiled anyway.

50:19We didn't lose ourselves, not this time. We tell it the stores. With the winter breaking, rescue choppers would come in a matter of weeks if the weather held. I felt my daily logs with hands that felt simultaneous the ancient newborn and I'll get the mine. The medical sheet chronicle only the injuries present, not the ones dreamt or carried from before. We slept all of us for the first time in memory without shared visions, without the press of other people's dreams. My sleep was deep, formless, and if I felt the occasional pressure of a cold palm on my shoulder, I let it pass, like a distant recollection and tethered from pain. In the weeks after, the news from the outside world trickled through with the day's static. Our presence was required, our story to be filed. The official logs would show no deaths, only a prolonged absence of signal, severe weather, and minor assistant corruption offset by acts of discipline and care. Survival, in the narrative of the world, shrinks to a list of bullet points, while the reality messy, tangled, riddled with impossible holes remained hidden below the thin crust of reportable truth. We did not speak of out-hands face, nor of mine reflected in his, nor of the deep pull of the things looped beneath the station.

51:20The bases routines took over, lying to redrawn, memories receding at the edges like frost from warming glass. But sometimes, when the wind still before a new storm, or when a door shuttered in its lock a beat longer than natural, I thought I heard voices in events fragments of languages I half-accalled, phrases meant to warn or sooth, or summoned from cycles now settle to ash. On the last night before the flyover, Anatoly sat with me by the utility room eyes troubled but clear. We lose more than we know, he admitted, handing me back the old blank journal. But we gained something, too, after all the loops, something's different. You whoever's left to broke it. I wasn't sure I believed him, but I nodded tracing my thumb over the impressions of words no longer visible. Above us, the first rudder thuds of the scouting helicopter doppler through the winter air and possibly real. Renee appeared at my side as a packed-away de-remains of what Lizl I owned Bippon's kit, the old ivory token, the dog-tagnowskrib clean. She cocked her head half-marking. They'll ask what happened, what will you tell them? I paused, then shrugged. That's sometimes you wake up here, and sometimes you don't.

52:21The cold forgets nothing, that all I know for sure is that we're still us for now. She squeezed my shoulder hard. Good, that's better than most stories. A last sweep of the base found only the expected scraps of paper, a frayed uniform, a single, feed it medical order signed by a version of me that now seemed hard to real. We boarded the helicopter when it landed faces scrubbed, as exhausted, but together. As we lifted off, the battered shell of the base shrunk against the endless white. I looked down and saw no movement, no sign of the history is buried underneath just empty eyes, dazzling under a crack of pale sun. In the sea beside me, Renee closed her eyes, leaning into the possibility of sleep, or maybe just peace. For the first time in a season, I let myself believe it was over. And there, against the battered glass of the portal, just as we rose into the indifferent sky, I laid my hand down, for a brief instant, felt the warmth of another layered within, both of us released it last until whatever came next. She squeezed my shoulder hard. Good, that's better than most stories. A hush settled between us on the shore, jarring hot back towards civilization if any place on earth could be called that, after what we endured.

53:22In the tremble of the helicopter's deck, I let the vibration fuzz my mind, close my eyes, and not think of the overlapping hamperance, not yet. The battered shell of the base shrunk to a pale afterthought against the white infinity, snow blown across all trucks until nothing betrayed what had happened. Three weeks ground pass with almost a natural smoothness. The Concordia team, those who'd made it remained in each other's orbits as we were prodded tested, were tested in isolation at Jumon de'Aville, a French base on the coast. Every blood draw, every side consult, every blank face official registered only what could be measured. I spun my own medical logs with litany's of minor winds, sleep disorder, frostbite, but remained silent on the matter of entanglement under the ice. There was no field for that on the reports. When Ace stuck close even in town, she'd show up at Bentcoffier, her journal always at hand, though she confessed the last entries refused to settle on paper. It's like the words won't hold, she muttered, tap in the page. Every time I tried to describe the lap, my pen just stalls, brains don't want it, I guess. Some things filtered through. Anatoly, Sholdo's hunched, spent his quarantine poor and over blueprints as if relearning

54:23the architecture of every base he'd ever commanded. Vigid's mantel to his own old laptop, scraping at the memory chips, watching lines of code that now behave themselves, all clean and sequential. The dog tag antons, now mine remained in my pocket, lighter than I remembered, it's surfaced growb to anonymity. People left in slow pairs, some heading to Europe, two Canadians on Medevac to Christchurch, and Anatoly vanishing onto a Moscow-bound flight with only a final nod. Only Rene and Alingot longest, our debriefs running late into the season because nobody could decide what to make of our silence. When pressed, I'd describe the endless blizzard, the tremors, the patient always has an unidentified male, lost to the storm. No one filled in the blanks I left. One afternoon, held up for days by bad widowed and supplied delays, I wandered to a frost-crazy window at the edge of the medical anix. Up beyond the truck roads, a plane landed, then lumbered into a spin before halting in a storm of powder. Brief chaos, then stretcher appeared. I watched as a figure bundled and rescue orange was let down, surrounded by officials and steady, limping but alive. The others in the common room paid at no mind.

55:25I felt Rene's presence lied and beside me, her voice nearly inaudible. Second team from Innobluff found a man walking on the ice, very confused, said he was looking for his doctor, said he wanted to go home. A meaning lingered as heavy as any diagnosis. I didn't look away from the glass. In the days after, Settle Things wore to the edges, a weather report dated 1987 appeared at beside the fresh daily map, a technician's radio logged a buzzing with fragments of Russian, words I both did and did not recognize. A tray of surgical instruments misplaced, then returned, nearly cleaned. Now and again, I'd glance at Rene and Cienaud Schimmer in the reflection of double vision, almost, as if sure about to speak from 40 years ago, or had just answered. Perhaps these were just tricks of exhaustion. Perhaps not. Some memories did not allow themselves to close lowly. I woke one night to find my hands bold and to fists clutching after the feeling of scalpel and suture. Dreams circled through freeze in water, forces underwater, a blur of years war and thin as glass. Then, as if by mercy, the memories faded the thing under the ice gun quiet, the cycle

56:25run to rest. With each day, remembrance I had replaced by small lakes, brief flashes of guilt and a growing sense of deliverance. I stopped listening so intently for footsteps and empty corridors. One morning, the door to our shared room banged open, bringing with it an administrator and the dry smells of processed paperwork. He were cleared, he said. Transport leaves tomorrow for Hobart, congratulations on surviving the last. Rough winter, good luck to you both. He paused as if to say more, it then closed his folder and retreated. That evening, Rene found me unpacking, then repacking my gear for the 20th time. She picked up the ivory token from my desk. Still have this? I took it, running my thumb along its grooved, ancient pattern. Feels lighter. She snorted softly. Or maybe the week get shared around now. She slid the token back into my palm, covering my fist with hers. Ready to go home? I hesitated, a thousand icy corridors winding somewhere just beyond my senses. Yes, I said. I think this time I am. We went up for one last cigarette in the dusk, staring at the southerly stars arranging

57:28a grim constellations. The wind off the ice cap was still sharp, still held its memory of the deep, but for the first time I felt it as distant, in different force not summons, not a promise, simply cold. No goodbyes were set, there was no ceremony. As we boarded the last flight north, I made my peace with the emptiness, with everything left from resolve beneath miles of hard, unuding ice. On the plane, I pressed my hand to the small blistered window, expecting nothing. What I found instead was a fiend outline the trace of another's palm beneath mine, warm still for a moment the shape familiar, echoed, indivisible. I flew into the growing light. And that is the end. Thank you for listening, and I will see you in the next one.