The Darkness Outside Us

by Eliot Schrefer

  Kodiak grips my upper arm, his eyes staring into mine. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” I tug my arm free as I look closer.

  It’s an uncanny likeness. If it weren’t for the pink juice covering the face, puckering the skin and matting the hair down to its head, it would be an exact version of me.

  But why would anyone have copied Ambrose Cusk?

  I shiver, from the cold and from some new thought that’s yawning under me. “I think I need to leave,” I say. “I promised OS I’d bring us out of here.”

  Kodiak pulls me in close. “Yes. We should leave. Are you okay?”

  “You already asked me that! I’m fine!” As we turn, I see light glinting on more polycarb farther back. “What’s that?” I ask.

  Kodiak looks at me with worried eyes. Pitying eyes. “I don’t want you to see the rest. We should go.”

  “No, I’m looking now,” I say, floating forward and adjusting the hanging polycarb-wrapped body so I can see behind it.

  My hand is still on the side of the first naked frigid body when the one behind it comes into view. Wrapped in polycarb, motionless. Identical to the first.

  Identical to me.

  “What’s going on here?” I stammer.

  “I don’t know,” Kodiak says softly. “Come on, we’ll get you out of here.”

  “It’s me,” I say stupidly, pushing this body to one side. There’s another behind it, hanging in matching polycarb, like something waiting to be picked up at the dry cleaner. Only it’s another set of organs and meat. Another human body.

  As I sift through, the bodies I’ve released swing up and around. One nearly bowls me over, then the next finishes the deed, sending me sprawling against the engine cylinder. I’ve bitten my lip, sending beads of red spraying through the low-gravity air.

  “There are twelve of them,” Kodiak says.

  “Why?” I manage to ask.

  “They’re probably in this precise spot because the engine’s mass shields them from radiation. And so we won’t see them. But as to why there are copies of you on the ship at all, I have no idea,” Kodiak says. He rubs his hands up and down my arms. “You’re freezing. And we’re getting irradiated. Let’s go, Ambrose.”

  “I’m . . . that’s . . .”

  “Now.” Kodiak grips my hand and pushes off the engine, leading me backward. I can’t even turn around, just let myself float along with him. “There’s some cold metal coming up,” he says gently, “so be careful you don’t frostbite yourself . . . there, that’s right, this way. Now you go first.”

  At his urging, I get onto my belly so I can slither through the final portion of the passage. I tumble, barely catching myself as I enter gravity, landing on the floor at an awkward angle that gives me no option but to roll into the wall.

  I try to get up, but I can’t. I don’t want to see anything more, so I press the heels of my palms against my eyes, hard enough that my vision goes purple.

  I’ve been copied.

  What’s the purpose of those copies?

  There’s warmth near me, near the curled-up nautilus of me. There’s only one warm thing for thousands of miles around, and he’s placed his body around mine. I should feel relief at that, but all I feel is empty, empty, empty.

  What am I?

  _-* Tasks Remaining: 80 *-_

  What happens next is all feeling and no smarts: Kodiak leads me places, and I go willingly, but my mind can’t process, can’t plan, can’t understand. My world has been cracked open. Scent of Kodiak, clacking of Rover, chill fluorescence of the ship’s lights, zero g and then gravity again as Kodiak lugs me to his quarters.

  He wraps my fingers around a cup. I don’t drink. I watch the surface. I listen to the air.

  Kodiak tells me to drink. I stare at him. I want to ask him why I should, but I don’t want to make him wrestle with something that can’t be wrestled.

  What chance is there of Minerva being alive, if my own existence isn’t what I thought it was?

  I’m just going to leave this right here, I say, or I think I say, and place the cup on the ground. I lie on my side. The side that isn’t just mine. There are twelve more of me, hanging in polycarb, waiting to be used. Have already been used?

  What the fuck for?

  Kodiak, I whisper, what do you understand? What do I understand?

  There’s no answer. Kodiak’s hovering over me, but he’s not speaking. Maybe I didn’t say any words aloud. I try again.

  “I think you’re a clone,” Kodiak says flatly.

  “Wait,” I say, biting down nausea, counting and breathing, the techniques I learned back in training. Was I ever in training? “You mean right now I’m a clone?”

  Kodiak squats next to me, bare ankle and hot breath on the back of my neck. “Listen to me. The blacked-out memory, the missing spacesuits, the copies of you we saw in storage. It’s not such a leap.”

  “Those were copies waiting to be used, fine. But I’m not a clone. I’m me.”

  He doesn’t answer, and he doesn’t need to. I hear the absurdity of my own words. A clone wouldn’t think it was anything but itself, a person, the only interior thing in the world, more real than any other.

  I let out a long breath. “Kodiak,” I finally say, “would you fetch my violin?”

  “Of course,” he says.

  Soon the wood is in my arms. I don’t play it. I hold it.

  _-* Tasks Remaining: 80 *-_

  I dream of the swirling stars, of the Mari beach, the beach I was once on, that I had to have been on, otherwise how could I remember it now? I try to take deep breaths, five seconds in and five seconds out, but my thoughts skid and I start panicking all over again, and have to drag myself back out and into breathing again. I wonder if natural-born humans dream the way I do, or if I’m having clone dreams. There’s no way to know. It’s impossible to live as someone else. We only get one consciousness, and then we eventually lose even that. Even clones do.

  I clutch Kodiak’s forearm, press my forehead into his flesh, my fingernails gouging skin. He gasps in pain, but then is quiet. He doesn’t remove his arm. I press my lips against the soft flesh covering his pulse.

  Then my neck is in pain because I’ve slept on the floor. I concentrate on this sensation, ground myself with it. This pain is real. It’s confirmation and it’s consolation. I am a creature that can feel pain.

  Kodiak has laid a light blanket over me. “Thank you,” I mumble as I sit up. But he’s not there. I call his name.

  The only response is a clanging sound from deeper in the Aurora.

  I make it to my feet, anklebones creaking, and stretch out my limbs. I lumber toward the sound, past the blind room, around the edge of the water reservoir’s silvered surface, into the tunnel leading from the Aurora to the center of the joined ships. There I find the source of the sounds.

  Right where the yellow portal would be, if the Aurora had one, Kodiak has busted through the wall, revealing a wire-clogged passageway, just like on the Endeavor. “Kodiak?” I call.

  “I’m here,” he responds from somewhere inside the ship. “Don’t move, I’m on my way out.”

  Feet, legs, hips, and finally all of Kodiak. He hops down and gets to his feet, frowning as he looks at me. “Are you feeling better?”

  “Yes, fine,” I say impatiently. “What were you doing in there? You busted another hole in the ship!”

  “A little reconnaissance. And it’s as I suspected.”

  “What’s as you suspected?”

  “You’re not the only clone around here.”

  Long seconds go by as I stare at him. Finally I manage to speak. “Oh.”

  “At least we’re not alone in it,” he says, cracking his knuckles.

  “You don’t seem as cut up as I was.”

  “I spent my whole life feeling like I was a robot pretending to be a human. It just got confirmed.”

  I shake my head. “Everyone feels like an imposter, even when they’re real people. That d
oesn’t count.”

  He holds there, impassive.

  I crack my neck. “Well, if you want to curl up and wallow for a few hours, I owe you one. Thanks for laying a blanket on me.”

  “I’d like to take credit, but that wasn’t me,” Kodiak says. “It must have been Rover.”

  That stops me. “Where is Rover?”

  “I’m considering OS an adversary until we find out why it’s been lying to us. I added some extra barriers to the blind room, so Aurora Rover is blocked into the back half of the ship. We need a safe zone for ourselves. Rover can’t interfere with us here.”

  I nod. “That sounds wise. Though if OS actually is an adversary, you know we have no chance against it whatsoever.”

  “And it can hear everything we’re saying,” Kodiak says.

  OS chimes in from afar. “Yes, I can.”

  I shiver. “What do we do now?”

  Kodiak leans in so he can whisper in my ear. “As long as OS continues to claim that communications with mission control are down—which we should assume is a lie at this point—I figure we have two possible sources of information. The strange radio transmissions from Earth, and whatever knowledge is locked away within the OS itself. How are your computer programming skills?”

  I grin. “I’m not a Cusk for nothing. But you’re not proposing that I hack—”

  He lays his hand over my mouth, gaze darting around my own eyes. “Shh. Don’t say it out loud.”

  I wrap my arm around the solidity of Kodiak’s body. Clone or not, he’s unmistakably real. He jerks involuntarily, then wraps his arms around me, too. Like he needed the proof of me as much as I needed the proof of him. He strokes my hair, rests his cheek against the top of my head as he embraces me. “I’m glad you’re feeling better,” he says. “Now let’s go take control of our destinies.”

  The Ambrose of even a few days earlier would have snorted at that high-blown statement. But now nothing could feel more precise to our reality.

  _-* Tasks Remaining: 80 *-_

  I’m debating just how a person is supposed to go about taking control of their destiny under these conditions when OS interrupts me. “Rover’s access to forty percent of the Aurora is restricted. Without access, it cannot maintain the ship’s environment and ensure that the Coordinated Endeavor’s structure is stable enough to sustain life support for you and Spacefarer Celius.”

  “We understand that, OS,” I say as I rummage through my clothing drawer. I’ve decided I’ll grab two of my identical jumpsuits, a bunch of pairs of chemically cleaned underwear, and as many meals as I can carry in my arms. This programming job in the blind room could take days, and I need to stay outside of OS’s view for all of it.

  “You might claim to understand what I say, but you don’t seem to be taking corresponding action,” OS says. “This is a high-priority repair. You remember the transmission from Minerva, that her very survival had depended on her ship’s integrity, and now on the integrity of the Coordinated Endeavor.”

  “We hear your recommendation.”

  “May I ask what you’re trying to do right now that is a higher priority than the life of your sister?”

  I can hear Rover in the next room, making its soft ticking sound as it runs along its tracks. “Something we have decided to prioritize. I won’t discuss it, OS.”

  “I honor your need for privacy,” OS responds.

  “Thank you.”

  “. . . though I hope you will honor my maintenance requests before your obtuseness becomes fatal to you and your sister, who has no say in this inadvisable course. There is an asteroid that must be harvested in four-point-one days.”

  I’ve got the food items I need. As I walk my way back to the Aurora I pretend to be chipper, as if OS’s words—in my mother’s voice, no less—haven’t hit home. “We’ll be sure to be prepared for that harvest. That’s enough, OS.”

  I pass through the orange portal and into zero g, then a short while later I’m in the blind room. Rover tails me through the Aurora, stopping only when it reaches the polycarb barrier. It could melt the lip down, of course, but that would take some time, during which . . . Kodiak and I would get ready to enter into armed conflict? Just how do I think that would work out for us? We just have to hope OS really does intend to honor our desire for privacy.

  Kodiak’s got the headphones on, tuning the receiver dial like someone in an old-school reel. He looks up as I enter, before returning to his work.

  I shift the terminal so that it’s out of Rover’s view. Here in the blind room we’re off network, which means I’ll have to do this reprogramming without consulting the ship’s partial internet image. This will be a true test of my tech skills. I crack my knuckles.

  The only way to do what I intend to do—override the code that’s allowing OS to lie to us—is to create a shell system. That basically means taking OS’s adaptive intelligence and reinserting it in a new frame that doesn’t permit falsehoods. I’d have no hope of programming a new OS from scratch, but for OS to have lied to us thus far means that falsehood is permitted at the deepest level. That bios layer is actually a fairly small section of code, a few hundred thousand lines. I can manually debug a few hundred thousand lines. It won’t be fun, but I . . . who am I kidding, it will be fun.

  I wave a manicotti pouch in Kodiak’s general direction. “Want one?”

  An affirmative grunt. I toss it his way before opening another for myself to eat while I work. Gluten and cheese and tomato sauce—a classic programmer’s meal, though I’d have preferred the pizza version.

  I actually have a copy of the OS’s code stored in my offline bracelet. I have no idea who put it there or why, but I sure am grateful for it now. I know some hallmarks to look for, can search those out specifically and then reprogram locally. Hours pass before I know it. Kodiak and I share a lentil curry, passing the polycarb bag back and forth until our mouths have sucked it dry. Then he fetches a fortified porridge from the Dimokratía supply and we share it the same way.

  “You sleepy?” Kodiak eventually asks.

  I shake my head, still typing, mumbling lines of code to myself so I don’t forget them before I can tap them out.

  “You sure? A catnap?”

  I shake my head more savagely. “Line forty, execute logi-dot-bat iff var1 equals Y . . .”

  “I think you do.”

  I turn around furiously. “Kodiak, I . . . oh.”

  He’s lying out on the ground, right here in the blind room, on his side, his head propped up in his palm. He pats the floor in front of him.

  “Do you mean . . . a cuddle?” I ask, face hot.

  He blanches. “That’s not what we would have called it back in training.”

  I roll my eyes. “This was called, what, ‘tough-man companion time’?”

  He laughs. “Not so far from that, actually.”

  I look at him, at the drape of his jumpsuit, at the line from hip to shoulder, and from hip down to ankle. His ankle is surprisingly delicate on a body of such force.

  “Only for twenty minutes,” he says. “Then we go back to work.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Only for twenty minutes.”

  I get up from the terminal, stretch nervously, and then lower myself so I’m on my side, parallel to Kodiak, not touching him. I’m a little baffled by his sudden openness, though I realize that finding copies of yourself is probably enough to scramble anyone’s hardwiring.

  He eases forward so the heat of his body is along my back and legs, and any remaining confusion vanishes.

  I gasp. I can’t stop myself. This touching of bodies slakes a need I didn’t know was this strong.

  I study his body with mine, observe his stomach with my hips, his thighs with mine, his chest with my neck. His crotch with my ass. I sigh and snuggle in closer. “This is nice,” I say.

  “Yes,” he says softly into the top of my head. “I could get used to this.”

  _-* Tasks Remaining: 80 *-_

  I manage to fall asle
ep, my dreams riddled and chaotic. I wake an hour later. “Welcome back,” Kodiak says as I yawn.

  “Did you sleep?” I ask.

  “No,” he says, getting to his feet. “But I feel rested.” I look away as he adjusts his suit over his crotch.

  Only a few hours later, and I’ve got the shell set up and debugged and loaded onto an offline bracelet.

  When I stand, Kodiak removes his headphones. “Ready?”

  I nod.

  “Now we upload it to the ship?” he asks.

  I laugh. “Sweet lords, no. If I forcefully replace the OS of the ship, we could lose life support, our course for Titan, our protocols for Minerva’s communications, everything. I’m running a shadow OS within the bracelet, completely independent. This one will reveal everything it knows to us. We can call it OS Prime.”

  “Ah,” Kodiak says. “That is a better idea. There is quite a brain in that pretty head.”

  Pretty head! Hey now. I’ve had better compliments—Sri was particularly good at them—but wordsmithing isn’t where Kodiak’s best qualities lie. I savor the words as I remove the bracelet and set it on the ground, out of view of Rover. “Want to watch?” I ask Kodiak.

  “Are you kidding? This is the best game in town. I’m not going to pass it up.”

  “We won’t speak to OS Prime, we’ll type our questions,” I say. “This way the real OS can’t overhear from outside the blind room.”

  A cursor blinks for a few seconds before words appear.

  My access to the ship’s mechanicals is interrupted.

  I hastily tap my response out in the keyboard that projects from my bracelet.

  Don’t worry, OS, you don’t need to run the ship. We’re in conversation with just you.

  I don’t understand.

  You’re a shell program right now. Another version of you is online. We need information and only information from you.

  I will be happy to provide what information I can. With whom am I conversing?

  Ambrose Cusk.

  The cursor blinks for a long second.