Pitch Dark

by Courtney Alameda

  As I move into the room, my light gildes across a round door set directly into the cave wall. It must stand two and a half meters in diameter, maybe built of brass. Large patches of greenish verdigris cover its surface, the metal dull with age. It looks like nothing else I’ve seen on this ship, not in style, color, or design.

  I’m probably the first living person who’s seen this place in hundreds of years, I think, turning slowly to see if there’s anything else in the cave, any other evidence of human habitation. But there’s nothing but rock, shadows, dripping water, and the door.

  As I get closer, I notice an insignia inlaid in the metal, a dragon wrapped around the rim of planet Earth. It looks suspiciously like Pitch Dark’s logo, with a few key changes—for one, the insignia depicts a dragon, not a snake. Two, the dragon’s wings open around the Earth, as if shielding it from damage.

  I reach out to wipe the dust off the design. When my fingers connect with the door, it pulses with white light, then decompresses and rolls into the wall. Startled, I step back as if burned.

  Dappled light dances across the floor of a large room beyond the door. Warmth gushes out, as well as the rich, slightly musty smell of old libraries and even older books.

  Cautiously, I step inside. Wooden floorboards squeak underfoot. Wood? They used wood for flooring? Kneeling, I run my hand over the boards, made from lacquered light and dark woods set in a checkerboard pattern.

  The whole room is paneled in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, with alcoves for curiosities along the tops. But the claw-foot desk commands my attention more than anything.

  It’s the desk from my dreams.

  I walk into the room. Once upon a time, my father showed me images of the rain forests of Earth, hundreds and thousands of kilometers of trees extending in every direction. Millions of them. Earth had so many trees that by the time humanity was ready to abandon the planet, there were still enough to create this desk, this floor, and all these books.

  It seems like such a waste to me, born in a time when bamboo is the closest thing we have to wood, where every city had a few parks with the few scraggly trees we were able to coax from hydroponic containers. I lift a glass paperweight off the desk, smearing the dust off with one hand. Geometric shapes glimmer inside, their colors prismatic. Vibrant. I’m puzzling over how it was created when a voice says:

  “Hello, Laura Cruz.”

  Startled, I drop the paperweight. It hits the hardwood floor and shatters, pieces scattering. I whirl around, startled to find a woman standing behind me.

  No, not a woman. She’s the projection of a woman. I stand frozen in a sea of gleaming glass, looking at a woman who is both here and not here at all. She appears three-dimensional, but the room’s light and shadows don’t play across the planes of her face. She’s transparent. A digital ghost. Something about her seems familiar, but I can’t decide why. Her dark hair’s threaded full of silver and twisted into a messy pile of curls atop her head.

  “I certainly hope you didn’t treat the Declaration of Independence with such carelessness,” she says, lifting a brow.

  “Who are you?” I whisper, my shoulders inching toward my ears.

  “I’m Dr. Katherine Morgan, the designer of the USS John Muir,” she says, spreading her hands wide. “Or rather, I was Dr. Katherine Morgan. Now I’m nothing more than a scrap of consciousness left in a machine. Pretty cool, eh?” She waggles both brows.

  Cool? I squint at her, confused. “I-I’m sorry, I don’t understand—”

  “Do I look like Princess Leia on R2-D2’s message in A New Hope, or what?” she continues, gesturing to her ghostly form with one hand. “I considered recording myself saying, ‘Help me, Laura Cruz, you’re my only hope,’ but in the end I couldn’t get the files to work properly with your bioware. Sending you a map had to suffice.”

  I stare at her, openmouthed, unsure how to respond, or counter, or rebut what she’s telling me.

  “Princess Leia?” Dr. Morgan asks after an awkward pause. “Darth Vader? The Millennium Falcon? You call yourself an Exodus-era scholar and archeologist, and yet you’ve never seen Star Wars?” The lilt of her voice hooks a thought out of my memory. Or maybe it’s the mention of a midmodern movie, or my recollection of my first conversation with Tuck, when he said he was glad his mom wasn’t around to learn about the other jettisoned ships. I’d assumed she’d been the captain of the John Muir, maybe, or its navigator; I hadn’t imagined her relationship to the Exodus ships was far more personal.

  “You’re Tuck’s mother,” I whisper.

  “Or rather the digital human connectome that’s left of her,” she retorts.

  “I know you. I’ve read about you! You didn’t design just the John Muir, but the entire Exodus fleet!”

  “Well, most of them. Don’t blame me for your defunct torus colonies—I told Dr. Beck his designs would eventually fail your capacity for food production, but did he listen to me? No. Did Beck ever listen to me? No. He insisted upon designing colonies to look like that stupid video game … what was it called? Tuck used to play it with friends—”

  “Tuck thinks you’re dead,” I cry.

  “He would be correct in that analysis,” she says. “I am dead, and have been for many centuries. Rather than interring myself in hyperstasis, I remained awake in order to perform specific modifications to the ship, ones that would be necessary for her long-term survival with a maintenance crew in absentia.”

  “How long were you alone?” I ask, horrified by the thought.

  “Ten years,” she replies. “It took quite a long time to map my own mind. I didn’t want to leave anything to chance—if I stood upon the thinnest possible edge of rescue, I needed to ensure my work would continue, regardless of the state of my corporeal body.”

  I take a step back from her, shaking my head. “Tuck should be here right now … he’s your son, he’s family.”

  “Not long ago, you encountered a holographic representation of your mother while under extreme duress,” Dr. Morgan says, watching my reaction intently. “I take it the effect wasn’t comforting?”

  “No,” I reply, wondering how she knows about what happened on the Conquistador’s bridge, post-crash.

  “Exactly. Now, as much as I love digression, we don’t have much time. One of your crew members hacked the John Muir’s servers and deleted our AI, Dejah,” Dr. Morgan says, all the mirth gone from her voice. “I need you to take me to the bridge and upload my connectome as a replacement AI for the ship.”

  “Tuck told me the bridge had been overrun with mourners,” I say. “Getting there would be impossible.”

  “That may be true, for anyone who doesn’t have access to one of these.” Dr. Morgan snaps her fingers. The bookcases around us tremble and groan. Dust tumbles into the air in great swathes, swirling through Dr. Morgan’s form. Her light makes the particles sparkle like micro gems. Two of the cases automagically descend into the floor, revealing a secret alcove behind the books. Frosted glass panels retract into the walls.

  I gasp.

  A custom EVA suit stands inside the alcove on its own, with no props or support. The helmet gleams in the alcove’s light, opalescent blue as skybike shields and dragonfly wings, and shaped as elegantly as an egg. The rest of the suit’s made from matte black fibers, sleek and ribbed like exposed muscle. The material doesn’t hold still, shifting and twitching every few seconds, perhaps due to some sort of nanotech. Blue lines of illumination run from the knee to the hip, up the sides, across the waist, and under the breast. The shoulders are armored with sleek titanium guards sporting built-in, 360-degree lighting elements.

  “Wow,” I breathe.

  “Not bad, eh?” Dr. Morgan winks at me.

  I take a step forward. Honeycombed anion armor panels made of blue light appear over the suit’s chest, arms, and upper thighs. The suit looks several sizes too big, better made for a person Tuck’s size than for me.

  “The EDDA suit is one of my unfinished masterpieces,” Dr. Morg
an says, her words wistful.

  “Unfinished?” I half squeak, eyeing the suit.

  She continues as if she didn’t hear me at all: “When I set out to design a new spacesuit, I wanted something with a high armor quotient but zero bulk. The suit is intelligent enough to respond to the environment in real time, deflect attacks, heal damage to both itself and its user, and look good while doing all of it. Unfortunately, it won’t be possible to train you to use each feature properly—”

  Great wings of cerulean light extend off the EDDA’s back. I gasp.

  “—so I’ll need to be loaded directly into the EDDA suit first, so that I might control your shields, flight paths, and such. Plus, you’ll need my fingerprints to access many areas of the ship.”

  “How am I supposed to load you into this thing?” I ask, still bathed in the EDDA’s light.

  “You have two options, neither of them ideal,” Dr. Morgan says. “One, you could take the time to build a custom user interface for the EDDA, a system to bridge the gap between the suit’s heads-up display and its sensors. Without a UI, we won’t be able to communicate once you’re in the deepdowns, which means you won’t have access to maps, thermostatistics, gravity and pressure readings, damage meters, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “Bueno, I need those things to live. What’s option two?”

  “In option two, you integrate your own bioware system into the EDDA, the drawback being, of course…” She taps the hollow of her throat, indicating my subjugator. “With a custom UI, you could ignore commands given to you by someone with subjugator permissions, via the noise-canceling tech inside the EDDA’s helmet. Integrating the EDDA’s AI with your bioware will not afford you the protections of a custom build.”

  “It seems a custom build is my only option, doesn’t it?”

  Dr. Morgan holds up a finger. “It might be, if not for our lack of time. Dejah regulated several mission-critical processes within the ship’s life support systems, ones our hacker has failed to maintain. At most, the ship has one hundred twenty minutes before total system failure, but perhaps as few as eighty. Whatever time you spend building a UI for the EDDA will be time taken away from the business of saving the John Muir.”

  I draw a sharp breath. “You’re sure?”

  “I did write the user manual,” Dr. Morgan says. “I won’t make the choice for you, Laura. I only ask that you try to save this ship, my life’s work”—she glances to the side, heaving a sigh without drawing a breath—“and my son.”

  “What about the world?” I ask her softly.

  “That’s the folly of the human heart,” she says, smiling. “We make macro decisions based on micro motivations.”

  Hours ago, I know which option I would have chosen—the safe route. The smart route, in which I would spend the time to program a quick and dirty UI for the EDDA suit. Never would I undertake such an important endeavor without a well-thought-out plan. But if I’ve learned anything in the last twenty-four hours, it’s that my best-laid plans can’t possibly account for every variable. Especially the human one.

  Back then, I exchanged vast amounts of preparation for confidence. Now it lies in myself. I can do this, I tell myself. I’m a Cruz.

  “Fortuna y gloria,” I say, stepping up onto the platform with the EDDA suit. “Bioware it is.”

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, I finish merging my bioware systems with the EDDA suit, and then load Dr. Morgan’s consciousness in, too. Without her chatter, her office lies quiet as a tomb and just as eerie. I strip off Mami’s jacket, taking it to Dr. Morgan’s chair and draping it over the back. I remove my boots and pants next, everything, until all I have on is my white tank, bra, and underwear.

  As I step into the alcove, the suit emits a low hiss and unzips itself down the middle, exposing the chest cavity. The EDDA’s torso material spreads wide, like a pair of ashen black wings. The helmet lifts, suspended by the suit’s titanium spine. The entire ensemble looks like a Rorschach test designed to analyze my mental state. What do you see in this inkblot image, Laura? I imagine Dr. Morgan asking me.

  The EDDA looks like the shadow of opportunity, I think, reaching toward the feathery edge of the suit’s material. It wraps itself around my finger, velvety-soft and thicker than I’d imagined it would be. Its wings may carry me far, but also so high I might die from the fall.

  I take a deep breath, stepping one foot into the suit, then the other. As I settle my back against the EDDA’s metal spine, the suit begins to shrink.

  Here goes nothing.

  The EDDA’s tendrils close around me, sealing themselves along invisible seams. It clings to me like a second skin, applying pressure to compensate for no-or low-pressure environments. The suit’s nanites hum against my body, constantly shifting, moving, aware of my environment and feeding information in real time to my bioware.

  A trickle of sweat snakes down my spine, more from stress than from heat. The gravity of what I’m about to do rests on my shoulders, featherlight at first and growing in magnitude. My palms feel damp inside the suit. I don’t know what horrors I’ll face on the bridge, or on the trip there. And once I reach my destination, I’ll have to hack into an ancient system using what little I know of pre-Exodus tech, while fending off a hacker who’s bested me. Twice.

  The helmet lowers itself over my head. After a few seconds of whirring, the suit’s airflow kicks in. I take a deep breath of filtered air. A map appears in the lower left corner of my helmet’s visual field, showing me a way out of Dr. Morgan’s office I hadn’t been led through earlier.

  I grab my quiver and bow, then follow the map to a lift, which ascends into an aged wooden shed and clanks to a stop.

  Light slants through the cracks between the wooden boards, dust motes dancing in the light streams. The floor looks like a Jackson Pollock painting, spattered in bird excrement, leaves, and small animal carcasses. Broken furniture, rusted tools, and flattened hoses are piled against the walls. It’s a mess compared to the orderliness of Dr. Morgan’s office.

  There’s a large, bulky object covered with a tattered cloth in the middle of the shack’s dirt floor. On my helmet’s screen, the EDDA draws a bright outline around the object. Dr. Morgan must mean for me to take whatever’s underneath; she did say her interactive mapping would help me find my way to the bridge.

  Curious, I throw off the drop cloth, revealing an Exodus-era skybike. It’s bulkier than the sleek, free-energy-driven bikes we have today, and almost twice as long. It stands on four telescoping feet. Ancient, circular thrusters occupy the underside and aft of the bike. Despite the cracked leather and the rust along the edges, she’s in decent shape.

  My helmet beeps at me. The nanites on my right thumb buzz, creating tiny ridges to replace the suit’s smooth surface, whorled like a fingerprint. I press my thumb into the ignition button.

  Without a sound, the skybike lifts from the ground. Tiny, spiderlike maintenance bots leap off the bike and scatter, disappearing into the piles of refuse in the shed.

  I open the shed’s door and walk the skybike out into the park. The wind picks up, pushing me back a step. I’ve never felt wind so strong. Two deer lift their heads—at least I think they’re deer—and flick their ears at me. They’re fawn-colored, and the backs of their tails have a pure white patch of fur.

  They leap away, frightened, their tails flashing in the park’s solarshine. I’ve never seen live deer before. It occurs to me they’ve probably never seen a girl in an EDDA suit, either.

  Here, the savagery of nature and the neat protocols of technology have existed together in harmony for centuries. If the John Muir could beat the odds over four hundred years, what’s to say she won’t do it again over the next two hours?

  In the distance, a siren shrieks. Red light washes across the sky. I glance at Dr. Morgan’s map in the corner of my helmet’s heads-up display—it shows a route through the park, past the Big Valley bulkhead, out the Ingress bulkhead, and into the deepdowns. I’ll
head through the deepdowns for a few kilometers, then Dr. Morgan is rerouting me through the ship on foot. Should all go well, I’ll be at the bridge in less than an hour.

  Then I hear the screaming.

  Mourners.

  Swinging one leg over the skybike’s seat, I crank the throttle. The back of the bike spits dirt at the shed, but it gains traction. My heart tries to grab ahold of my ribs as the bike shoots forward, tearing across an open meadow and hurtling toward a path.

  Headed for the fray.

  PART THREE

  THE BRIDGE

  As we look at the long history of our species, the question we must ask ourselves is this: Is humanity worth saving? If all our destructive traits are a combination of our nature, our nurture, and culture, can we reject the worst parts of ourselves and become worthy of redemption?

  Until we find a way to answer that question, we will continue to wage war against an unknown and unnamed enemy. And perhaps that’s the most frightening part about Pitch Dark—to this day, we have no idea who ignited the movement, or what would have turned that person against her or his own people, their families, and their own history.

  FROM “HUMAN BEINGS, BEING HUMAN: COUNTERARGUMENTS TO PITCH DARK”

  LAURA MARÍA SALVATIERRA CRUZ

  COVER ARTICLE IN SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE, AGOSTO 2434

  USS JOHN MUIR NPS-3500

  AHWAHNEE HOTEL, YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK

  TUCK

  I’m halfway through the Ahwahnee’s foyer when someone calls out: “Hey, vato, wait up!”

  Looking back, I spot a guy following me out of the dining hall. He’s got skin the color of clay, a warm umber. A rubber band holds his thick black locs at the nape of his neck. He’s dressed in one of the Conquistador’s flight suits, boots, and a grin.