“Perhaps completing your few remaining tasks will bring you some peace of mind,” OS offers.
Even the mission of rescuing Minerva, a matter of such urgency that Dimokratía and Fédération came together for the first time in decades, feels like a myth from some other land. Minerva spoke to me directly, imploring me to come—but it wasn’t really her, was it? It was the digital representation of her. Minerva shouldn’t be alive. Her camp wouldn’t have been dark for two years if she was alive.
I still want to rescue her. But I also just want to go home. I’m so confused.
I can’t bring myself to work on stupid tasks. Even though my brain is baffled, my gut tells me that home probably doesn’t exist. That even if it does still exist, I will never go back there.
Nothing can be trusted. No, it’s even worse than that: nothing can be known.
I crumple where I stand.
_-* Tasks Remaining: 3 *-_
The moment I wake, I blearily peer at my bracelet time projection and find it’s nearly two a.m. Well past dinner. Kodiak didn’t come. We’ve been eating together for weeks now, but tonight he didn’t come.
Without him, all I have is the aching echo of space, the buzzing of screens, the tickling and scratching of Rover as it cleans 04. None of these things will suffice to keep me sane. My mother was wrong. Minerva was wrong. Intimacy is the only shield against insanity. Intimacy, not knowledge. Intimacy, not power.
I will unravel here.
I am in a waiting room without end, without location, without time or place. If I go outside, I die before I get any answers. I exist only in a theoretical way, like a point on a coordinate plane. I am the simulation.
I take out my violin and bow long tuneless notes before the expanse of space. The sound becomes so maudlin that I chuckle, despite myself. The self-pity is strong in this one.
I put the violin away, then I literally slap myself across the face. Lightly, but still. You were selected for being easygoing and adaptable, for accepting less-than-perfect conditions, my mother once said. Well, here are some less-than-perfect conditions for you. Let’s go prove your Alexander-the-Great-ness, Cusk.
I need answers to some very big questions. OS could be telling us anything it wants to. The only information we’ve gotten that hasn’t been under its control has contradicted everything we thought we knew. It says that we’re in an impossible year.
Time travel in space is theoretically possible. Time is a dimension, just like length, width, and depth—and like those, it can be traveled. The conditions for time travel are impossible for living bodies, though. We’d have to speed up to near-light speeds . . . and take on infinite weight as a result. That sort of body-mass index is definitely bad for the health.
Okay, that’s at least one option off the table. We haven’t traveled in time.
The radio waves would have, though. They move at the speed of light, faster than the ship, so we’re listening to radio from the past—how far into the past depends on how far away from Earth we are. It could be that many more than 140 years have passed back home, if we’re light-years away.
I return to the yellow portal. Past this door is where I found my own blood in an impossible place. Shrapnel is still blocking the portal from closing, but Rover printed the gap between portal and wall over with polycarb. The gray covering is so thin it’s almost see-through.
I fetch my violin case and headlamp. I remove the delicate wood instrument and lower it gently to the floor. I shut the case.
Then I bash it into the thin polycarb covering.
Shards fly in all directions. The ones that make it far enough to enter the ship’s gravity plink to the floor.
“Spacefarer Cusk, what are you doing?” Mother asks.
“None of your business, OS,” I say. I leap into zero g and soar to the edge of the yellow portal, gritting my teeth as the polycarb edges cut my fingers. I fly into the darkness beyond.
The last few shards of polycarb float to either side. They’re thin, and actually a little soft. Rover’s printing doesn’t produce anything as hard as the ship’s original polycarbonate.
I slither in, moving shoulder by shoulder and hip by hip, arms down at my side, the red nylon of Kodiak’s jumpsuit catching on broken polycarb as I go. It’s cold and musty, and my head and shoulders keep banging against pipes and outcroppings. At one point I nearly wedge tight, neck wrenching against a bundle of wires.
I could be trapped forever in here, or at least long enough to starve, with no microphones nearby to alert OS, and Kodiak sealed off in his own quarters. Keep it together, Ambrose, comes Minerva’s voice in my mind. If I didn’t die on Titan, you’re not going to die here.
I free myself of the wires, and by sheer force of will manage to continue floating forward instead of backing out. I’m not sure what’s come over me, this reckless push, except that for now, answers mean more to me than my own life. I’ll risk annihilation if it means finding out whether everything I’ve ever known has been annihilated.
As I press toward the engine room, the rumble of the ship’s machinery gets louder and the air gets colder, so that my breath creates clouds that glow in the field of my headlamp. The surfaces begin to sear the flesh on my fingers and wrists. I try looking back, to see how far I’ve come, but can’t angle the light over my own body.
Whenever I pause in the open air, the chill draws down around me. It’s like I’m in a morgue, like I could die. Like I am dead. My heart asks: Would that be so bad? My teeth chatter while I consider what dying would mean, when everyone I’ve ever known might have died long ago.
Except for Kodiak.
Minerva comes to me again, imperious on a beach. Swim to me, Ambrose.
I push off the cold wall, stroking through zero gravity. The passageway opens into a chamber. My shaking headlamp shows a broad cylinder in the center, trembling with contained power. The ship’s engine.
Around the edges of the room are full food pouches. Rover tracks are embedded in the walls, so the robot can supply the ship’s habitable areas.
I listen for Rover’s sound, but can’t hear much over the booming engines. At least I have a break from OS communication; there must not be any speakers in this uninhabited region of the ship.
As I float closer to the engine, I train my headlamp on its smooth surfaces. Deep in the center of the cylinder, shielded by its thick metal, is what looks almost like an old-fashioned dry cleaner’s rack, a circular rail with polycarb-wrapped bags draped along it. Each is filled with something bulbous and weighty. I ease closer.
My feet scuff against some object in the zero gravity. As it floats up into my view, I see it’s a stretch of heavy polycarb. I take it in hand. It’s a different sort of material than I’m used to feeling in the ship, and my mind conjures up old memories of chicken breast, sealed and juiceless from the freezer, plastic adhered to plastic to keep meat fresh, only with a gray film to it, like it’s been shielded from radiation. I’m surrounded by small globes of an oily fluid that has beaded in the zero gravity. I work my way forward cautiously, careful not to directly contact the humming metal of the ship’s engines.
The rack comes into view. The polycarb is luminous in my headlamp, my light catching air bubbles within the fluid. I maneuver so I can see the first bag.
A face.
A face and a body, wrapped in the shielding polycarb sheet, sealed in its juices, mouth open and eyes sunken and closed. Before the creature can get me I’m kicking against the side of the engine and scrambling backward. I swear I can feel shriveled arms grabbing my ankles, teeth piercing my calf. Space itself joins the enemy, the darkness outside ripping open the fragile membrane of the ship, just like this creature could part my skin with its teeth and claws.
My desperate scramble snags me in cables and cords, sears my cheek against the frozen exterior wall of the ship, yanks my finger backward when it unexpectedly hits a metal spur, the sound of bone breaking or ligament tearing, I don’t know and can’t know because al
l I can do is continue forward, shoulder against beam and pipe, struggling for freedom from cables that ensnare, that pull me back each time I manage to leave.
There is no sound of the creature behind me, a creature that I am coming to realize was no creature at all. I saw a lifeless body.
A sliver of light appears in front of me, beyond it the familiar far wall. Finally I emerge into the open light, my body tumbling forward and out, falling to the floor as it enters gravity, knocking my violin and sending it clattering. A delicate wishbone pop as the balsa-wood bridge snaps.
Pain lights up my body. The fresh agony in my shoulder fades to reveal my finger’s pain throbbing beneath, the digit probably broken, already blueing. That pain is joined by the sear of my cheek, where the frozen metal of the exterior wall did its worst damage.
Despite the hurt, I’m on my feet as soon as I can, sudden momentum almost pitching me to the floor before I’m back up. It’s like I’m drunk on PepsiRum again, hands pushing against the walls when I stagger too near, my desperate movements bringing me to the orange portal.
I pound against it, busted finger lancing anew as I bang my wrists against the metal. “A body! Kodiak, I found a body!”
“What are you saying you found?” my mother’s voice asks. “Can I help?”
I don’t answer. OS is definitely not the one I want to talk to right now.
“You need medical attention,” OS continues. “The injury on your finger appears severe, and your pulse is spiking. The ship’s systems are as normal. If you believe you have seen something unusual, it could simply be a trick of your mind’s eye. We both know that humans are more than capable of hallucination in stressful circumstances.”
“Kodiak, speak to me!” I cry.
“Kodiak is not answering,” OS says. “You must come to the infirmary. Your finger might be broken. Your pulse is dangerously elevated.”
“What was that back there?” I gasp.
“It was nothing.”
“You didn’t even ask me what I saw.”
“What did you see?”
I bang on the portal again. “Kodiak!”
The doorway opens.
I scramble to all fours and look up to see Kodiak standing over me. His handsome face is tear-struck, his shoulders slumped. “What is it?” he asks.
“The uninhabited areas. I went in, to figure out what I could, but I . . . I came across . . .”
“Spit it out. What? You came across what?”
“A body! A dead body, hanging from a rack. Like grocery meat.”
Kodiak snorts. “That’s ridiculous.”
“I know it’s ridiculous!” I say. “But that doesn’t change the fact that I saw it, right there, like a dead body or a zombie or I don’t know what, Kodiak. But something impossible is going on in here, and we have to figure out what it is.”
“Impossible sounds about the word for it,” Kodiak says, arms crossing.
“Ambrose is hurt,” OS says. “He entered the engine room, which is not intended for human occupants, and damaged his physical form in the process. Help me get him to the infirmary.”
Kodiak scowls at the ceiling, but when he looks back at me his expression is softer. I’m the enemy of his enemy. He lifts my chin, so he can look at the wound on my cheek. “You really beat yourself up. What happened to you?”
I hide my hand behind my back. “It’s nothing. I’m not going to the infirmary, Kodiak. I don’t trust the ship.”
“Of course we should trust the ship,” Kodiak says. “Don’t be crazy.” His eyes have a gleam in them. The gleam says: don’t talk like that here.
He gestures toward his quarters. “Come on, let me take a look at your finger.”
“I know what I saw,” I say as I step past him.
“Hold on,” he says, grabbing my elbow. The rough pad of his thumb strokes my cheek. “Seriously. What happened?”
“My face touched the exterior wall,” I say. “It was cold.”
“More than cold. You’ve gotten frostbite,” Kodiak says. “Ambrose, you have to be careful.”
“It’s fine,” I say, shrugging him off.
His hand lingers on my shoulder, then drops away. “Back to the blind room,” he says. “Come on.”
“You must go to the infirmary, where Rover can properly help you,” OS says. We ignore it.
My limbs feel even heavier than the increasing gravity can account for. I wonder, and not for the first time, whether this could all be fake, whether we might be in an underground bunker still on Earth, or deep in some simulation, our brains floating in a vat. What can I do to prove otherwise? My exhausted mind protests: Kodiak did a spacewalk. You’ve felt zero gravity. You’re not in an underground bunker. But in my state it doesn’t matter what I tell myself. The truth, the physical reality of this world, still feels flimsy.
“You don’t look good at all. Here, sit,” Kodiak offers as we step over the polycarb lip into the blind room.
He removes a tube of some Dimokratía balm out of a medical kit. It’s yellow and lettered in an antique style. “Hold still,” he says, then starts dabbing at my wounded face with the pad of one pinkie, like a makeup artist.
“My face is ruined forever, isn’t it?” I sniff. “What will I do without my beautiful face?”
“Please. Your face will be fine,” Kodiak says. He moves on to my hand, laying it flat in his lap, straightening the good fingers. The busted one cocks out to one side. “Can you move that?”
I try. My joint explodes into infinite fire.
“It’s not broken. The tip moved,” Kodiak says. “We’ll still have to splint it.”
He starts to rig up a splint, using a depressor and fabric bandages. More fire.
I guess I make little gasps and shrieks while Kodiak’s working, because he says, “Don’t be so dramatic. You’ll be okay. In the meantime, tell me one more time exactly what you saw.”
I know he’s only trying to distract me, and that’s just fine. I could use a little distraction about now. “I don’t think it was alive, I’m not trying to claim that,” I say. “But there was a dead body, no doubt about it. Wrapped up like meat. I don’t know how else to phrase it. Ow.”
“Why do you think that would be?” Kodiak asks as he kneads the center of my palm.
“Neither you nor I have any memory of the beginning of the voyage, right?” I say. “What if there were three spacefarers on board originally? What if one died, and instead of telling us about it, OS hid the body?”
“Why?”
“Because whatever killed the third spacefarer is still putting us at risk, and OS doesn’t want us to panic. Because it was, I don’t know, some crazy alien attack, and OS is worried that we’ll mutiny instead of continuing forward.”
“You said there might have been more bags and more bodies? So would that mean there are many dead spacefarers? All wrapped up and tidied away?”
“I don’t know. It’s all so confusing. The radio you rigged up is telling us that it’s the future now, too.”
“And that your country destroyed mine.”
“I honestly don’t know what to do with that particular piece of info,” I say. My good hand lies limp on the table. Helpless as the rest of me.
“I know,” Kodiak says grimly. “I don’t, either.”
He’s avoiding my eyes.
“What?” I ask. “There’s more?”
He still doesn’t look at me. “I’ve uncovered something about the distress signal that’s . . . unusual, too.”
“What do you mean? Has Minerva contacted us again?”
“I’ll show you in a moment. For now, you just keep talking to distract yourself. Any words that come to mind. The most painful part is coming up.”
“What do you mean, the most—GAH!”
“There, the worst is over,” Kodiak says. He begins wrapping the finger against the splint.
“Gah, gah, gah! You lied!” Each jostle sets off new eddies of fire. I decide to take Kodiak’s advice
and blabber through the pain. “I’m sorry my country destroyed yours, if that even happened, which I can’t really think it did, I can’t really think that anything happened, have I told you that I think maybe we’re still on Earth, underground somewhere, can you, ow, I mean all I know is this ship and those stupid meals and what OS tells us about the distress beacon and I wonder if I’ll ever be the fearsome scientist warrior Minerva was and I’m not nearly the star that you and the rest of the whole fucking Earth expect I am and you’d probably be so turned on if it was her here instead of me, Minerva here instead of me, Minerva serving you manicotti, and don’t kick me out of your life again okay, because we’re all we have, holy shit this hurts.”
“All done,” Kodiak says. He keeps his gaze studiously trained on the bandaged finger, and for a moment I can let myself hope that maybe he was concentrating too hard to hear anything I said. Then his mouth spreads into a grin. A spot in the middle of his chin stubble dimples.
Much as he tries, Kodiak can’t hide that he’s laughing at me. Laughing at me. “Kodiak, tell me you are not doing what I think you’re doing right now.”
Now the laughs come out full force. He pounds the table. Tears stream down his face, enough to drip down that dimple. He swipes his cheeks with his palms, takes long exaggerated breaths.
“Are you quite done?” I ask.
“It’s just that your voice got so small and scratchy toward the end.”
“Screw you, Kodiak Celius.”
“It was adorable. And you’re right. We’re all we have.”
“I am right. I don’t need you to tell me that!”
“I know. This is what it looks like when I agree with you.”
“Apparently I’ve never witnessed that before!”
The Darkness Outside Us Page 11