Kodiak looks at me darkly. Weird tack.
He’s not wrong. “Put my mother on,” I say.
Kodiak rolls his eyes. We wait the long minutes for mission control’s response.
“She is not present. She did record a personal reel for you in the event we came back into contact. It is currently uploading to your ship. Unfortunately, we have no new information from the Titan base.”
Not for the first time, I imagine Minerva frozen in a methane lake, Minerva poisoned by bad air and clutching the sky, Minerva driven insane and slitting her veins. I steel myself. “Understood.”
“No one’s meant to live forever,” Kodiak says huskily.
I glare at him.
“Spacefarer Celius, you have numerous Dimokratía transmissions recorded and encrypted using your memorized prime number. The Coordinated Endeavor’s operating system will transfer them to your secure data centers. There are no personal messages.”
“Okay,” Kodiak says quickly. “Mission control, please also upload the news since our departure.”
There’s only static in return.
“OS,” I ask. “Have we lost signal with mission control?”
“Yes. There was an unexpected flare from the sun.”
“All flares are unexpected,” Kodiak grumbles.
“Do you expect to get signal back soon?” I ask.
“That is hard to calculate.”
I lock eyes with Kodiak, measuring his doubt while I speak to OS. “Will you repeat Kodiak’s request for news in the meantime?”
“I will,” the ship responds. “However, it is against the Cusk Corporation’s policy for me to update you personally on Earth’s political situation.”
Kodiak nods. “They want to tell us any updates themselves, in case it’s bad news.”
Our conversation with mission control feels like it was deliberately cut short. My reasoning brain tells me I’m just experiencing isolation paranoia, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to trip OS up.
“OS,” I say, “as soon as connection is restored, request that mission control send me updates on what my mother has done with the porcelain pig, rosin cake, and tapestry fragments I gave her. Also, please tell me what Professor Calderon’s response was to my final essay in his queerness and nation-building seminar.”
“I will transmit these unusual requests,” OS says after a micropause.
I pull my chair close to Kodiak, so our knees are almost touching. He smells like bleach and sweat. “I want to check—”
He puts his hand up sharply to stop me. Don’t say anything else in front of OS.
“I’m off to listen to my uploads,” he says.
“Meet me again afterward,” I tell him.
The only response is the padding of his bare feet against the floor as he returns to his half of the ship.
_-* Tasks Remaining: 336 *-_
I set the downloaded reel to play in my bedroom, sitting on the bunk and clutching my pillow while the three-dimensional representation of my mother appears.
There’s a reason she was the initial voice of the ship’s AI—she’s the one who funded this all. During the twenty-first century, space innovation moved from state-sponsored to private ventures, and the trend continued into the present era, when suborbital quinceañeras have become a thing. Once corporations got involved, there was moon travel, weekend sightseeing orbits, and space station vacations. Cusk has been leading the astrotech industry for generations. I’ve always been well aware we were rich, that we were among the few people who could afford high land, that our wealth let me grow up in a walled compound safe from the massive migrations of the starving, from the plagues and superstorms, from droughts and floods and epidemics and radioactive winds.
Once my mother’s reel has loaded, sound projects from the corners of the room, and suddenly I’m back on Earth, outside Mari. There’s a yellow luster to the air, seagulls wheeling in a sky that looks real enough to make me worry about getting pooped on. The temperature in the room doesn’t change—the holotech isn’t that realistic—but the light makes me unzip the top of my suit and fold it down, expose my skin to imaginary sunshine.
I run my fingers through nonexistent sand, hang my head and bask. Eventually, I look up and see her—Mother. She’s walking along the beach, dressed incongruously enough in her usual avatar clothing, a business suit and sandals. I watch her approach, her smile frozen until she reaches me. Then the avatar breaks into recorded motion as the reel begins.
“Darling. My darling Ambrose,” she says.
My breathing hitches, coming out in a sort of hiccuping gasp.
“I know you haven’t been gone so long,” she continues, “but it feels like forever. I was so sorry to hear about the solar storms. They won’t be going away anytime soon. But I’ll continue to send messages like this, updating you on what we know. I hope you send me messages back. I know you will, darling.
“We’ve continued to run through simulations of what might have happened to your sister. One thing hasn’t changed: in the majority of all outcomes, she’s no longer alive. If only the Titan camp hadn’t gone dark so soon after she arrived, then we’d know that she at least had life support set up. Of course, you and I both know that if anyone could figure out how to survive on a frozen moon with a minimal atmosphere, it’s our Minerva. My heart is with her, and with you, every day. You two are my crowning joy.”
Her words might be over the top, but I believe them. Mother is cold, but also totally devoted. She loves Minerva and me as much as she loves anyone. She’s also incredibly ambitious, and her love for us merges with her love for the family dynasty. It’s weirdly reassuring: when adoration is selfish, it’s not going anywhere.
Back when I was in the process of ghosting on Sri, they told me that I was a scientist about the heart. It wasn’t a compliment.
“Mom,” I say, even though she can’t hear me. “I miss you.” I say it quietly, because it’s not exactly a world-class spacefarer thing to say.
The reel pauses while I speak, Mom’s lip caught quirking in mid-syllable. Once I shut up, the reel continues. “I need you to be strong, darling, stronger than any person should ever be expected to be. That’s why you were chosen. You’re expertly trained in the procedures of space travel, of course, but you also have a high awareness of your feelings. You’ve examined your own life more than most people your age have. I assume you’re working alongside the Dimokratía spacefarer. Pause this if he’s in the room.”
Now it’s getting interesting. My skin pricks with tension as I wait a few beats of silence. From somewhere back in time, recorded-Mother scans through her notifications on her bracelet, then continues. “We know very little about him, unfortunately. We had to work hard even to get his name. Both countries’ space agencies examined the ship together, and there are no hidden weapons on board. He might not be the special friend I’d choose for you, but that doesn’t mean he won’t be a strong ally all the same. Your goals are aligned, after all—investigate Titan, rescue Minerva if you can, report back. He’s motivated more by bringing prestige to Dimokratía and keeping up with Fédération, but that shouldn’t affect his performance.”
A cloud passes before the sun, momentarily shadowing my mother’s digitized face. She looks left, where a figure approaches along the beach. It’s Minerva, all legs and arms and swagger. She stands next to my mom and looks at me, smiling, hand cocked on her hip, like a video game character. “I found this old reel profile uplink Minerva created, where the whole point is to show off how good you look to your friends. Anyway, I figured you hadn’t seen it before, and might appreciate the reminder of who you’re heading to save. Perhaps save. Lords willing. I’ll leave off here, darling, and wait for your response. I love you.”
I ask OS to start recording my answer right away, but the moment the red light is blinking, I blank. My heart is spinning, and I’m not sure what feeling will be faceup when it lands. Relief, resolve, wistfulness, hopelessness, helplessness, de
spair. Whatever it is, I’m not ready to send my recorded-for-all-time emotions beaming across the solar system for billions of people on Earth to scrutinize.
Instead, I search through the ship’s memory for old reels of Minerva.
Once in a while, Mom had our surrogates pull her children from our automated schooling sessions to go on a trip. We never had warning—when and where we could go depended on weather patterns and the crime map, both of which could change in a flash—but I remember one outing when my siblings and I suddenly left the walled city and headed to the mountains with an armed escort of warbots. After so much time inside, being under an open sky felt like falling upward.
My siblings slunk back to the vehicle as soon as they could, hungry for the familiarity of their computer lessons, but I stayed on the mount with Minerva, hugging myself to her. She pointed out the ruins of abandoned cities, the debris-clogged seashore that was once high land. “Maybe we could have stopped this, maybe we could have held on to the species we’ve lost, maybe we could have prevented the polycarb seas. But it doesn’t matter now.”
While Minerva spoke, our warbot protector wheeled and pivoted, scanning for bandits. It was bulletproof and heavily loaded, capable of 120 rounds a minute. If it was restrained or captured, it would detonate, killing hundreds. Thirty Cusk warbots on their own took back Egypt and ended the Third World War, and the Fourth World War was fought over who would control the warbots that eventually won World War Five. Military contracts for warbots were the origin of my family’s wealth. To this day, every warbot ships with “Cusk” printed across its murderous head.
They bear a healthy family resemblance to Rover.
Minerva pointed to the spaceport in the distance, to the Cusk walled compound. “That’s why Mom’s building the Endeavor. To bring a human crew beyond here, to exoplanets where humans might live if Earth becomes uninhabitable.”
“Exoplanets,” I said, savoring the word. “Those are far away, right?” I snaked my hand into hers and drew as close as I could. I can’t smell it in the reel, but she had a popular skin fragrance mod installed that year. Cannelle douce. Sweet cinnamon.
“Very far away. There are closer possibilities, like Saturn’s moon Titan, but the best places for people like us to live would take many thousands of years to reach.”
“That’s longer than you’d be alive.”
“And you, too,” she said. “We’re working on strategies to get around that, though.”
I didn’t say anything. Every kid knew that cryostasis was proving impossible—no one can reanimate a mammal that’s been killed, and turns out it’s impossible to be frozen without dying in the process. The difficulties went beyond that, though. No biosphere experiments had established that we could make a ship of any reasonable size that could host an ecosystem stable enough to grow food. And no ship could launch with enough food for a human crew to survive on for thousands of years.
“In the meantime,” Minerva continued, “I think I might just go to Titan.”
I remember wanting to have something smart to say back to Minerva. I remember wanting her to admire me. But I was just a kid, so the best I could do was hug her. Five years later, and I’ve started thinking it’s the best any person can do in most situations.
“Actually, Ambrose, I am going to Titan. It’s going to be announced tomorrow. I wanted you to be the first to know, because you’ll be the one I’ll miss the most.”
“Minnie,” I said, hiding my tears by burying my face into her side. That was my name for her—I’d started when I was little, and was surprised she let me continue now that I was almost a teenager. “You can’t leave me.”
“I’ll be back for my little brother,” she whispered. “I promise you I’ll be back.”
“I know you will,” I murmured. “But I’ll miss you so much.”
She turned quiet, so I leaned back to see her face. I was shocked to find tears in her eyes, too. I’d never seen her sad. She held up her hand to shield me. “I’m scared, Ambrose.”
I put my hand over hers and lowered it, so I could see her tears. “You can do this. You can do anything.”
“I used to think that was true,” she said softly. “It’s nice to know you still believe it. Maybe we’ll have to think of this as my getting that moon warmed up for you to come join me in a few years.”
I’d laughed at the time, but I guess her words had something to them after all. Because here I am, halfway to Titan.
_-* Tasks Remaining: 330 *-_
Out of what’s probably some deep emotional dependency of mine that I’d rather not mull on, I play through that memory reel every few hours as the days go by. Minerva and I have that conversation in my bedroom, and while I’m eating breakfast. I start playing with the rendering, so that we have that conversation in parkas, in bathing suits. We have it as merfolk and as vampires.
“I need you to accelerate your progress on the task list,” OS says one morning.
“Yes, yes. You don’t need to remind me,” I say. I start putting my violin away, loosening the bow and removing the shoulder rest.
“Perhaps you consider these tasks beneath you?”
That one stings. How many times in training did I hear Oh, you turning your nose up at us, Ambrose the Great? Maybe I never was Ambrose the Great. Maybe I was just Ambrose the Privileged. What can I say? I guess I’m having some sort of outer space crisis.
“Watch your tone,” I tell OS after I bite down some less diplomatic responses. “I guess inspecting thermoregulation log lines feels like it’s not doing a thing to help Minerva, so it’s hard to work up the energy.” I don’t add that I feel bad about that, too, and that the ensuing depression spiral always gets me mooning about and watching whatever semipornographic reels I can find in the ship’s memory.
“I appreciate your self-awareness,” OS says. “Now go take that cake of silicone wax and lubricate the med bay door instead of your genitalia.”
“Ooh, sexy,” I tell OS. “What’s next on the list? Caressing the ship’s ball bearings?”
“Cleaning and replacing the air filtration gaskets, actually,” Mom’s voice says. “Get going, Ambrose. This list isn’t getting any shorter.”
That voice skin is my peace offering to Kodiak. OS’s Devon Mujaba days are officially over.
_-* Tasks Remaining: 279 *-_
I’m not making much headway on the med bay door, and nothing else on the list is particularly appealing, either. How did the ship’s engineers screw up this much? There are six Rovers in total, and once I finish with the gaskets I’ll be tasked with getting the other five back online. At the thought of my endless debugging list I find myself on my back, staring at the ceiling. I feel like I can do nothing that will help Minerva, and “learned helplessness” is most biologists’ definition of depression.
Mother’s voice cuts into my stupor. “Ambrose, this is urgent.”
My blood suddenly surges through my veins, setting my vision winking with crystals. I stagger to my feet. “What is it?”
“Minerva. There’s a transmission from Minerva.”
_-* Tasks Remaining: 279 *-_
I stand in 06, heart pounding, while OS compiles the transmission. A little green bar, with no units on it, slowly fills in midair. Could be terabytes of data, could be megabytes. An uncharacteristically sloppy display. “Come on, come on,” I say.
The green bar fills and fills.
“Is Kodiak on his way?” I ask OS. There’s no time for an answer, though, because the green bar suddenly completes.
A grainy, half-imaged Minerva is before me. Her jumpsuit is ragged, the arms emerging from it thin and rangy when once they were strong. But the determined expression is definitely hers. The image cuts out entirely, then returns. I can see, dimly in the background, the polycarb-printed walls of the Titan habitat. “I have only seconds until this last battery goes. Ambrose, please hurry. I need your help. I’ve rigged—” The transmission cuts out entirely.
I hang there in
the darkness, staring out at the revolving stars.
Then she’s back. “—the ship, Ambrose! The wear on the ship is too great on the approach, more than mission control predicted. You must finish OS’s tasks as soon as you can. Any defect, like . . . in the old shuttles, will lead to catastrophe. The ship must be . . . pristine to survive the friction and heat. My brother, I love you, there is no one better to—”
The transmission cuts out. I hang in the stillness, not daring to breathe, waiting for Minerva to return.
“There is no more incoming data to process,” OS says finally. “I will let you know the moment anything more comes in.”
“Play this transmission over,” I order, hands over my mouth, tears streaming from unblinking eyes.
I study everything about it. Minerva is lit by emergency lighting and some other source, strobing her face in red and white. Her right elbow is bandaged, blood seeping through to create a raspberry-sized stain in the center. At first her face looks scarred, but the last few seconds of the reel are higher resolution, and I realize that the lines on her skin were artifacts of the reel’s compression.
Minerva, come back.
I shake my head in amazement. Two years of isolation in a far-flung spot of the solar system, improbable survival in the face of starvation and deprivation, and does she send out a moody whining session, like I probably would? No, she’s giving instructions on how we can survive our own voyage long enough to save her. It’s just so Minerva. And her message was clear: we need to get the Coordinated Endeavor in perfect shape.
“Send the transmission along to Kodiak, if you haven’t already,” I call to OS as I dash to my feet. “I’m recording a message for you to send on repeat back to Minerva, and then I’m off to lubricate that fucking med bay door.”
_-* Tasks Remaining: 180 *-_
“Minerva,” I sing to myself as I work all afternoon. “Minnie! Minerva!”
It takes full-fledged hunger pangs for me to realize how long it’s been since I’ve eaten. I send a message to Kodiak as I pick out my dinner. “It’s Friday night, and my sister is alive. Come over. We’re celebrating. I won’t take no for an answer.”
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