Though most of my vision is blocked by my knees, I can sense Kodiak standing close, his fingers drumming against his thighs. I figure he has no words to say in the face of my pathetic weakness, my unmanly display. Ugh. Is “man up” some Dimokratía phrase?
“You said ‘we’ are on the same side just now,” I say to the fabric over my knees, moist from my shallow breathing. “You don’t remember the launch either.”
I blearily peer up to see that Kodiak’s shut his eyes, his jaw clenched.
“What, were you embarrassed about it?” I ask. “Even though the very same thing happened to me? Don’t you think this is information you should have shared?”
“I shared it with OS,” Kodiak says. “At the beginning of this voyage, I thought OS was the one I could trust, and that you were not. This dynamic has recently changed. In any case, I don’t think we need to agonize over what’s already happened.” His hands go limp as he says the last words, and I realize he’s performing the part of an effeminate man, showing how very weak “agonizing” would be. Sweet lords. Dimokratíans. Are. The worst.
Even though anger is rising in me, I know I have to be careful. Even if just for my own survival, I need Kodiak to keep communicating with me. I speak carefully. “We were both knocked out at the beginning of the ship’s launch. Now we’re awake and on board and healthy. No matter what the cause of the injury, it seems unlikely that any impact would knock the two of us out without leaving evidence. Broken bones or bruises.”
Kodiak pulls down the collar of his shirt to show me a red radiation lesion riding his neck muscles. “I have half a dozen of these,” he says, shame in his voice. “But yes, I am otherwise healthy.”
“I’ve got some of those, too,” I say, turning and pulling down the collar of my jumpsuit, so he can see the most vivid welt, a bright red cashew between my shoulders. “It would take a terrible wound to bend that metal and leave that much blood, but I have no memory of it, and I don’t seem to have any scars. So we have to keep exploring what is going on. Maybe the oxygen levels were off at the beginning of the voyage, and that’s why we passed out. An air leak was the emergency we both woke up to, after all.”
I hear a whir, and then Rover appears at the lip of the room, robotic arms waving like anemones. OS’s voice comes on. “This is not a fruitful line of inquiry at the moment, and there is much maintenance still to do to keep up the integrity of the Coordinated Endeavor. Minerva’s warning couldn’t have been clearer. I suggest you switch your efforts back to your list of tasks.”
Kodiak closes the door in Aurora Rover’s face. “We get it. You don’t want us sharing information.”
I beckon Kodiak to kneel next to me. I’m pretty sure there’s no masking anything we say from OS, no matter how quietly we whisper. The ship uses audio to keep track of our pulse—there’s no hiding any words. But here I go, trying anyway. “I’m going to create a blind room,” I say. “No Rover tracks, no microphones or cameras. Then we can continue this conversation. Once I do that, we’ll figure out the truth of what’s going on here. Until then, it’s safest that we perform the part of good little spacefarers.”
Kodiak nods. “If OS wants us to do maintenance, we do maintenance.”
I wink back. Though Kodiak’s eyes twinkle, the set of his mouth is grim. “OS is an adaptive, sensitive intelligence,” I continue. “Creating a blind room will be like creating a blank space within its very body. We have no idea how it will react.”
“Keeping a big foundational secret. Isn’t that precisely what OS has done with us?” Kodiak bites his lip in frustration. Its red color dims before flaring back, and I’m temporarily transfixed. To kiss that lip.
“Someone has kept a secret from us,” I whisper back. “It could be OS. It could be mission control. It could be something else entirely. Minerva herself, I don’t know.”
“You’re being too anxious,” Kodiak says, rocking back on his heels to sit heavily on the floor. “The OS will be okay.”
“Kodiak,” I say, smiling despite myself. “If I’m not mistaken, I’d almost say that you’re showing the tiniest bit of self-doubt right now.”
He takes to rubbing his feet, sealed in paper-thin space booties. I wonder what solace it would give me—us?—to take one of those feet into my lap, to tug off the covering, to press my thumbs into a sole and watch relief and pleasure transform Kodiak’s scowl.
“What are you thinking about?” Kodiak asks.
“What we should do next.”
“I’d like to do some more in-depth analysis of the blood sample,” Kodiak whispers. “To try to independently confirm that the blood is yours, and see if I can figure out how old the sample is. Meanwhile, you should set up this blind room. I’m thinking we use this one, so we can keep any laboratory work we’re doing private. I’m sure Dimokratía mission control is more paranoid about outside influence than your Fédération leaders. You will probably find some quick shortcuts to get this room off the ship’s grid.”
“I’ll engineer us our blind room, never fear,” I say. “Now it’s time to ‘man up,’ as you’d say.” I push myself to my feet and dust my hands. “What an awful expression. Can someone ‘woman up,’ too, or is that against the law in Dimokratía?”
Kodiak snorts again. “That is funny. I am glad to see you’ve gotten over your self-pity.”
“Oh, you haven’t seen the faintest beginnings of my self-pity,” I say. “That is a well that goes very deep.”
“You are giving me much to look forward to,” Kodiak says, cracking his knuckles as he stands. The portal reopens. Rover is directly on the other side of it, arms waving. It makes me think of a spider I once put a pillow over, how it sprang into action the instant I freed it hours later.
“First thing we have to do is get independent control of these doors,” I say as I start rummaging through Kodiak’s cabinets, to see what supplies I have to work with. OS can hear what I’m saying, of course, but what other option do we have? “I think that means setting up a shell to operate within the larger computer, running systems in parallel, with the ability to shift between the native OS and the shell one, in case of a life-support crisis that the shell can’t handle.” I start digidrawing diagrams in the air, saving the renderings to a local bracelet file. “Maybe I could even make the shell physically independent, a portable unit that I wire in, so I could remove it by hand as needed, in case OS tries to destroy its own code—”
“Yes, okay,” Kodiak interrupts. “And while you’re doing that I’ll run a more comprehensive test on the dried blood. As that’s running—it will take an hour or so, with our limited offline processing power—I’ll disable Rover’s tracks in the walls of this room. And search for cameras and lice.”
I startle, then remember from a movie reel I once saw that Dimokratíans call microphones lice. “I’m a little worried that OS will block the tests,” I whisper, bringing my lips as close as I can to Kodiak’s ear, to maximize the chance that OS can’t hear me. My cheek brushes his lobe.
“This is a mission with all sorts of possible endings once we reach the Titan base,” Kodiak says. He doesn’t withdraw, his ear still grazing my cheek. “Mission control has known from the start that we might need to make the ship perform all sorts of tasks they couldn’t predict. Giving us permission to act freely is hardwired into the operating system. I predict that OS will not start blocking us. If it does block us, we’ve entered a whole new level of danger. We can’t exactly pick up and move somewhere else, can we? I honestly think we might be safer if OS knows what we’re up to, so we don’t surprise it.”
I return to the console, to my own mysterious blood match on the screen.
“The sample’s still installed, so you just trigger the more comprehensive analysis on the console,” Kodiak says.
“This menu looks very familiar,” I say as I tap away. “Did Dimokratía steal this software?”
“Of course we did,” Kodiak says, laughing. “We’ve been lifting code from you for dec
ades. Fédération is incredibly easy to steal from. Your encryption is cute. You might as well have gone with ‘password1234.’”
“I’ll be sure to let mission control know that once we have the comm fixed.”
Kodiak shrugs. “We’ll figure out new bypasses, I’m sure. You all should just give up now.”
“Never!” I pronounce, striking the screen with a flourish to start the test.
Rover is motionless by the portal, waving its little gripper arms at me. It’s like a crab on the beach, guarding against the people going by: small, vulnerable, powerful, invulnerable. “Rover,” I say deliberately and slowly, as if I’m dealing with a wary stray, “Kodiak is going to remove some of your tracks. You will be fine.”
It stays there at the doorway, arms whirring, rocked by waves that don’t exist. “OS, send Rover away from here,” I say.
No answer.
“Okay, Rover,” Kodiak says. “Guess I’ll be examining your tracks right in front of you.”
Kodiak gets down on his belly, face to the floor. When he shines his headlamp directly at the wall, the covering goes translucent, revealing ribbons of metal just beneath the polycarb. The thin coating leaves the surface smooth, but still allows Rover’s magnetic undercarriage to draw electricity. The tracks lattice the entire ship—there’s no ripping them out without ripping out the ship’s walls. The best we’ll be able to do is to block Rover’s access points. “Be right back,” I say to Kodiak.
I head back to the Endeavor, grab my portaprinter, and set it up to begin constructing a polycarb lip over the doorway of the blind room. Of course Rover could melt the lip away if it wanted to, but that would mean actively undoing our wishes. If Kodiak is right that OS is unwilling to take that step, then we might have privacy here.
All this activity is clearly making Rover curious. It transfers to the walls, examining the portaprinter as it applies layers of molten polycarb over its tracks. While it observes the portaprinter, Rover makes tinny little beeps. They sound like the robot versions of involuntary gasps.
Neither interferes with the other. It’s like we’ve created our own mini cold war.
I realize I’ve heard these very sounds before, on a mountainside with Minerva while she told me about her mission to Titan. “Kodiak,” I say, “do you know if the developers incorporated any warbot tech into the Rover system?”
“No idea. Warbots are a Cusk invention, and you’re our resident Cusk.” He looks up from his console and rubs his hands. “Come over here, we’re about to get your result.”
He taps the screen excitedly. “Here’s a segment of your current DNA, and here’s that same nucleotide segment from the dried blood sample.”
I eyeball the numbers. “They look mostly the same. Like we thought.”
“Yes. Mostly.” Kodiak scrolls through the data. His eyebrows knit. “That can’t be right.”
“What can’t be right?”
“Look at this—99.902 percent of the bonds in the dried sample’s DNA have broken. Breakage is normal—DNA has a half-life of around five hundred and twenty years. Measuring the amount of decay is one way to determine the age of a sample.”
“Okay, so how old does this make this blood?”
Kodiak looks at me flatly.
“What? Something weird? Before the ship even took off?”
“Weirder than that. This is around the same percentage we’d get if we sampled a mummified pharaoh from ancient Egypt.”
I chuckle. “Well, something went wrong.”
“That much is clear by now,” Kodiak says. “I’ll run the sample again. It might have been cross-contaminated. Or OS might have tinkered with the results to mess with us.”
“I would not do that,” comes my mother’s voice from the other side of the door. I lock eyes with Kodiak. His eyebrows rise.
“OS,” he says, without shifting his gaze from me, “what can you tell us about the blood sample?”
“It is dried blood. Your testing showed you what I see as well: there is a close correlation to Ambrose’s DNA.”
“Can you tell us how my blood got on the panel?” I ask.
“I cannot. I have begun printing a new panel to replace the one we lost. In seventy-nine days, we’ll pass near a second asteroid going close to our approximate speed and direction. I suggest we net it, to mine the hydrocarbons that will help support our excessive polycarb use, since you insist on using the portaprinter lavishly. We can also use the asteroid’s ice to replace the trace water vapor that has continued to escape the ship each day.”
“I thought our repairs had eliminated the leak,” I say, looking questioningly at Kodiak.
“They have helped the problem, but not eliminated it entirely.”
“It seems like you are trying to distract us from the matter at hand,” Kodiak says.
“That is correct,” OS says. “I am trying to distract you from the matter at hand.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Because it is part of my role on this ship to prevent you from unnecessarily upsetting yourselves.”
“Does it bother you that we’re building a polycarb lip at the doorway to this room?” I ask.
“I understand the human need to believe you have agency over your environment,” Mother’s voice says. “I am sorry if I have made you feel exposed or vulnerable. That was never my intention. I am in support of your doing anything that increases your comfort and productivity, so long as it doesn’t go so far as to endanger the ship or your lives or your mission.”
As if to prove the point, Rover strokes the portaprinter, like it’s a wild animal it intends to take home to live in a shoebox.
“OS is getting a little neurotic,” Kodiak says out of the side of his mouth.
“Who am I to judge?” I respond. “Apparently I’m five thousand years old.”
“Our own shipboard mummy,” Kodiak says. “We rushed the analysis, that’s probably the problem. We’ll run the numbers again.”
I hold out my arms and shamble forward. “It is not in the mummy’s eternal cold heart to believe that the world is anything but cursed.”
“We’re not in the world anymore,” Kodiak says flatly.
“Wait, do you not get the reference?”
“I don’t get the reference.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
Kodiak shrugs.
“Movie reel tonight,” I say, “and this mummy won’t take no for an answer.”
_-* Tasks Remaining: 71 *-_
I indulge in the rare luxury of a shower, or as close to one as I can get. After heating a water pouch so it’s nice and warm, I hang it over my head to sprinkle over me while I stand over the ship’s toilet. I tap some of my sacred tea tree oil stash onto my underarms and trim some order into my body hair. I shake dry shampoo through my clothes. I ask OS to project a live image of me so I can measure the effect. Wish I had some hair product, but I have to say I look pretty good, especially if you go by outer space standards.
I’m finishing my recorded spacefarer training for the day—this one on unexpected fluid motion when using the “slingshot” method to gain velocity using the gravity of a planet’s orbit—when I hear a knock on the wall. Kodiak leans against the doorway, in thin cotton shorts and gauzy top. “I figured it was a pajama night,” he says, crossing his arms around his chest, like he’s been surprised in a wet T-shirt contest.
I look down at my own official suit. “That sounds much better. Give me a second.” I duck out, quickly change into my off-duty clothes, and come back to sit on my chair, tucking my feet under me. “So. Am I still five thousand years old?”
Kodiak was sitting in a chair, but he springs to his feet, rubbing the back of his neck. “I’m afraid yes,” he says, looking at me with worried eyes. “I can’t get the sample to come out any other way.”
“Wow. You know how to make a guy feel good about himself.”
He still looks genuinely upset. I laugh. “It’s a glitch! I think it’s funny.”
<
br /> He nods. He wets his lips. He crunches his knuckles.
I cough. “Can I offer you a drink?”
“You have drinks here?” he asks hopefully.
“They didn’t ship me into space with booze, no. We Fédération types might be decadent, but we’re not that decadent,” I say. “I can offer you water or, um, water. Some of the pouches have a slightly different font, so you can choose serif hydration or sans serif hydration.”
A reward: the truffle of a smile on Kodiak’s face. “I will take some of your finest sans serif water, please. And that manicotti. I have been thinking for weeks about that manicotti. I want to marry that manicotti.”
He stands right over me while I prepare the meals, like the too-early guest at a party. Every time I need to set a dial or open a drawer, he’s in the way. I wish I did have a beer to offer so we could both take the edge off.
“So. Kodiak Celius,” I say while I hand him his water pouch. “Tell me something about your life. Something I don’t know. Which is, um, basically everything.”
“There is nothing to say.”
“That is literally the opposite of true. Start with your parents.”
“I have nothing to say about them,” he says, sleeves riding up his arms as he stretches them out awkwardly.
“What kind of name is ‘Celius,’ for starters?”
“There are three of us named ‘Celius’ in the Dimokratía space program. We are all named for the province of our orphanage. That is why I have nothing to say about my parents. I have never known them. Perhaps they still exist, or perhaps they don’t.”
“Who raised you, then?”
He presses his teeth against his lip. It again blanches, then blossoms red. I’m as transfixed as the first time I saw it. “No one. I was in institutions. I raised myself. It was fine.”
It was fine. I’ve heard enough about those Dimokratía institutions to know that’s hardly possible. I press my back against the food heater. Room 04 feels so tiny. There’s hardly space for two people to remain two separate people in here. “I believe you when you tell me you’re fine,” I say carefully. “You seem strong-willed. But someone cared for you. No child can survive solitude.”
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