Before Holmes Met Watson (FEATURED)

Day Twenty-three: Stargazing

John couldn't sleep. When he'd rung off with Salman, he'd been shaking, and he could feel the anxiety inside him growing and rising, making him twitchy. That had been three days ago, and he'd been wide awake ever since – still perpetually exhausted but unable to find any respite. His mind wasn't racing. He remembered that feeling well from when he'd been revising for exams and couldn't get his brain to stop turning the information over. This was different. There was fear at the heart of his wakefulness, fear he couldn't face, fear he tried to ignore. Trying not to think of it had him executing increasingly elaborate evasive mental manoeuvres to keep himself safe from it.

He didn't want to dream. He didn't have enough control in the wilderness of his subconscious. And it was a proper wilderness down there: full of the smell of cordite and burning flesh, full of chunks of meat that used to be people, full of death. He kept getting shot in his dreams. Over and over again he was shot. And everyone thought he'd died. He kept trying to tell Salman and his colleagues that he was there, that he was alive. In some of the dreams, they shut him in a coffin and buried him alive. The only people who ever spoke to him in his dreams were his parents. They always told him that they loved him and were glad he'd come to join them.

"You're not my Mum and Dad," John would always protest.

"Of course we are, Johnny," his Mum would always say, chidingly. Then she'd remind him of something that had happened when he was a boy. Like the way he'd staged a stubborn, wailing protest when they hadn't allowed him to take his pillow with him on the first day of school. "We had to give in," his Mum said, laughing. "Now, how would we know that if we weren't your parents?"

They were lying. They were impostors. They knew what he knew because they were inside his head. His real Mum and Dad would have wanted him to live. They would have chased him out of that place and fought with all their might against anything that thought to try and keep him there.

Had he died?

John began to wonder if he'd been killed in Maiwand and this was some sort of disappointing, beige afterlife. That would explain it all, wouldn't it? How far away everyone felt even when they were standing right next to him. The way their voices seemed to either be too far away to hear or ringing inside his head. The way he could hear clearly the sound of a chair squeaking in another room, or the brush of a hand on fabric but couldn't make out the words people were saying. The way the sounds were jumbled into nonsense. The way he sometimes had to read their lips.

Him being dead and in another dimension would explain it all.

The laws of physics were different here.

There was more gravity for one. Even though he'd lost a significant amount of body mass, his skeleton felt overburdened, like it was straining to support his slight weight. His head was always bowed, and his back ached all the time. He wondered if he was developing a hump. There not being enough oxygen in the atmosphere might explain why he was always so tired, why his muscles were constantly fatigued.

John was no longer sure if anything that was happening to him was real. Wasn't that a sign of insanity?

He couldn't sleep, so he'd begun sneaking out of the ward at night to sit outside. It was cold, and his thin dressing gown didn't offer much protection, but the bracing cold reminded him that he was alive. He hadn't died. The chill on his skin was real. He was real.

At night, he watched the stars. He'd never studied astronomy, but he was familiar with some of the more well-known constellations. Their usefulness for navigation had been supplanted by technology, but the basics were still taught in survival training. Locate Polaris. That was where you started, with the North Star. John could remember nothing else. But each night, he crept outside and watched the sky.

There, he'd think. And some of the tightness in his chest would ease. There's Polaris, and I know it's real. I'm real.

#

A rather large communications satellite had been struck by debris in space and was forced out of its orbit. It was hurtling back towards Earth and would burn up on re-entry. Experts had plotted its trajectory and predicted that its fiery remains would land worryingly close to Łódź, Poland. There was a vigil of sorts happening. Thousands of Poles had set up live feeds, pointing cameras at the sky to try to capture the moment the flash of light appeared in the sky and the pieces of the satellite began to rain down on them. Real-life disaster flicks shot and broadcast in real-time – they'd become a bit of a cottage industry.

Sherlock had erased everything he knew about heavenly bodies to make room for a detailed study of how popular bondage techniques affected lividity. He vaguely recalled Newton's law of universal gravitation. It allowed one to calculate the attractive force between bodies. Everything that had mass was being pulled towards everything else that had mass. He was being pulled towards the door, towards his cup of tea, towards his syringe. And they were being pulled towards him. He was being pulled towards Sussex, to Mark. The pieces of that satellite were being pulled towards Łódź and towards him. Everything was being pulled towards everything else. It spoke to the ordered chaos that was life.

There was something about how important size was in gravitational calculations that had put Sherlock off. Unless one of the masses in question was the size of a planet, the forces being exerted were too faint to have any real effect. The pull of the earth, it holding them down, was the only thing that mattered. So, Sherlock had erased the rest of it.

How small and ephemeral we are, thought Sherlock. Compared to the earth, to the sun, to the stars, to the vastness of space. The universe was thoroughly amoral. That didn't mean there weren't rules; it meant those rules operated without care and offered no succour. There was an unrelenting ruthlessness about it that Sherlock admired. You knew where you stood with a hurtling meteoroid. There was no prevarication in an exploding star.

None of it affected him, though. It was all far too macroscopic. People and the choices they made – their motivations – were what really mattered. But others looked to the heavens and saw opportunity, didn't they? Humankind was such a hubristic species. There were always a few brave souls who said, "That deathscape out there – let's take a trip and go explore it."

A race who only a few hundred years ago had thought disease could be explained by temperamental humours and demonic possession had created and arranged an intricate network of communication satellites that orbited the planet! It was quite impressive when you considered it, Sherlock thought begrudgingly. They were all connected, linked together, the forces pulling them together and therefore apart had been strengthened immeasurably.

It had been meant to be democratising, hadn't it? All that information being beamed across the world, all the knowledge at people's fingertips, the freedom of access. But human beings always find a way to dirty up the truth with mendacity. All those voices shouting to be heard, everyone listening, so few with the ability or the time to parse out reality. Of course everyone had sighed in relief when The Archive had been created, when its simple, unobtrusive efficiency quieted all the noise and made everything run smoother.

But it all meant Sherlock was a man out of time. All the kinks that had been straightened out used to be where people like him made themselves useful. The new world destroyed the old.

Obsolescence. I suppose that's the destiny of every profession, except the artist, Sherlock thought. Put in that light, going back to The Copper Beeches and embracing the creativity of perfumery seemed even more desirable. But he wouldn't. He'd always been prepared to meet a bitter end.

Sherlock stayed up and watched the night sky over Poland. The satellite debris missed Łódź and ended up scattered in the countryside. A barn was burned and a cow killed. How anticlimactic, he thought.

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