“Hey, Ambrose?” Kodiak says. “I’m getting a ‘main overflow exception 104’ message up here.”
“Shit,” I say. “Shit, shit.”
“What?”
“The file allocations are different for the two operating systems. Try to—no, that won’t work. Hold on, let me think.”
Everything I tell Kodiak to try fails. We can’t get OS Prime to set any new navigation coordinates. Whether it’s because there’s more to this wiring than we thought, or because regular OS heard us and set up safeguards to prevent us from steering the ship elsewhere, I don’t know. But I can’t find a way around it.
“At least Rover appears to be at full functioning capacity,” I say, flicking an empty food wrapper at it and watching it spark back at me. “That means this probably was a last-minute sabotage by OS. Asshole.”
“That’s the thing,” Kodiak calls. “I see very easily how I could disable the operating system entirely, including Rover. Then I could pilot the ship manually.”
“No way. No operating system, no life support.”
“Let’s think that through. Our air is sealed in here, and we can get the handlers up manually. We’d have to figure out what to do with our waste, but we’d come up with something. We know where Rover retrieves our food from. What has OS done for us, anyway, except slay us?”
It’s a pretty good point. “Seven times over, judging by the number of clone bodies remaining,” I add.
Rover clacks its electrical prods. I wonder what it feels like without OS, if it’s like a loyal pet whose owner hasn’t come home. If there’s some Rover version of fear and abandonment.
“Okay, do it,” I say.
“All right,” Kodiak calls. “Here goes. Three, two . . . one.”
Distant hums quiet. I look down the long hall of the Endeavor as lights tick off, rooms going dark, nearer and nearer, until . . . we’re left in blackness.
The lights. I didn’t think about that part. We’re in space in the dark.
“Kodiak?” I ask, my voice rising with fear. “Are we going to be in darkness forever?”
“Of course not. We’ll need heat, too, of course. I can start up control of those functions manually. But I just need to get my mind around the systems up here. In the meantime, it’s . . . cold. Could you bring me . . . a spacesuit?”
A spacesuit. The airlock is three rooms away. But I’ve memorized this ship, know it like I would know the route from my bed to the bathroom back at the Cusk Academy.
The route through the dark ship will take me right by Rover, so I’m about to test just how incapacitated the ship’s systems are.
I step through the darkness. And . . . no electrocution. Awesome. I give Rover a light kick. It sighs in response.
Even the dripping water sound from deep in the ship slows to a stop. I’m really and truly hearing space now, indistinguishable from the blood in my veins. Then I’m off to the Aurora.
I stop.
Especially with the ship’s lights off, the stars are dazzling. But it’s not just that.
They’re different stars.
The projections are gone, and instead the screens are windows, real windows. Milky spirals of light still wheel with the ship’s revolutions, but these swaths are entirely new. There are great towering nebulas, a nearby pair of stars, one blue and one white, background galaxies in spheres and swirls and scattered puddles. We’re still in the Milky Way, but closer to the edge.
I look for our sun, and find its rough location in the galaxy. I’m the first person to see our home from this far.
If you consider me a person.
The spacesuit. I hustle into the Aurora, make it through zero g in the dark, retrieve Kodiak’s suit, and return to him, conking my head only a few times in the process.
I send the suit floating through the opening. Kodiak reaches out, his hand shivering. “Thank . . . you,” he manages, then he pulls the suit up. I hear him struggling with it, then a sigh of relief, muffled by the helmet. “Okay, back to the office.”
The Coordinated Endeavor’s shielded hull provides good insulation, but even so I can feel the ship’s temperature dropping. The tips of my fingertips are turning numb. I wrap my arms around my chest while I wait in the darkness, listening to the sounds of Kodiak rearranging things in the uninhabited region.
“I’ll get my own suit,” I finally say. “Then I’ll join you.”
“Not a good idea,” Kodiak says. “I’ll explain why at dinner. Look, it’s going to be some time before I get all the life-support systems online. You should just go where it’s warmest.”
“Are you kidding me? I’m not going anywhere,” I call into the darkness. As my eyes adjust, the scant starlight turns the ship’s interiors off-black, rims everything in charcoal. I hump over to my sleeping chamber and yank my bedding from the bunk. When I return, I flump into a pile of blankets. “We should switch positions pretty soon, right?” I call up.
“Still not a good idea. I’ll explain later. Don’t worry!”
“I am the better programmer here,” I grumble. I ease my dollop of blankets over to the room’s exit, so I can see the stars. “You have to come look soon!” I say. “We’re in a whole new set of stars. I think I see some other galaxies, like Cigar and Pinwheel, and maybe that’s LMC?” There’s no answer from Kodiak. “Okay, I’ll let you concentrate now!” I call.
I watch the stars move, and while I do, my mind keeps returning to Kodiak. It’s tight quarters up there, and can only be tighter with the spacesuit on. As the ship chills further, I keep adjusting the blankets, so that they cover the seams where my skin meets fabric.
I must have dozed off, because I wake up to sudden light. My body is sweating inside my pile of blankets. I kick them free. “Kodiak!” I call. “You got life support back on!”
There’s no answer.
“Kodiak?”
I listen to the drip of the cistern, the buzz of the lights. Maybe he’s gone back to the Aurora to grab a tool. “OS, where’s Spacefarer Celius?” I ask, out of an old reflex. But of course OS is gone.
I get to my feet and pivot, biting my fingernails.
One red-suited leg and then another appears out of the opening, and finally Kodiak himself. His legs buckle as they hit the ground, the rest of him crumpling after. He cradles one leg in his hands, kneading the thigh muscle.
I help him, my hand adding its pressure over his. His body tenses, then relaxes.
“You did it,” I say while I massage the cramping muscle. “Thank you.”
He manages a tight smile. “I’ll need to go up there every few hours to make course adjustments and be sure we’re not careening into any asteroids. We’re manually nav-ing.”
“We’ll take turns.” I kiss him. His lips are cracked. “First we need to get you some water.”
Kodiak nods. “Some water would be good. And some of that manicotti.”
“I’ll whip some right up. Come on.”
Kodiak eases to his feet, wincing.
“I don’t know how you stayed cramped up in there all this time,” I say. “Everything must be aching.”
Kodiak nods fractionally. He will never not be stoic.
I twine an arm around his waist, and he accepts my support. Together we limp toward the dining area, where he eases himself into a chair.
He reaches a hand up to his hair, and when he does I see red welts on either side of the training scar on his bicep. They’re lined up neatly, like seeds. “What the hell are those?” I ask.
He presses on the back of his arm so he can see the flesh, then shrugs. “Lesions.”
He opens his hand to show me a tuft of blue-black hair. “Whose is that?” I ask crisply. But I know the answer.
Kodiak points a thumb at his chest. This guy.
“The uninhabited area—”
“—is unshielded,” he finishes. “We knew that.”
Angry tears dot my eyes. “We didn’t think we’d be manually nav-ing. OS Prime is supposed to do th
at.”
“You programmed a shell to operate within the most sophisticated piece of equipment humankind has ever created,” Kodiak says. “I think you’ve done amazingly well.”
I run my hands through Kodiak’s hair, letting the strands that come free drift to the floor. He winces. I stroke his head again, hoping to erase his shame. He closes his eyes, leans his head against my stomach.
“I failed us,” I say.
“Stop it. That’s not a productive thought.”
What’s going to happen to us?
“We’ll alternate who pilots to prevent too much radiation from accumulating in our bodies,” I say.
Kodiak shakes his head, rolling it, forehead to crown, against the muscles of my stomach. “Absolutely not. It’s a long trip. I need you healthy, to eventually take care of me. If we both get our radiation dosing at the start, then you won’t be able to look after me once I can’t nav anymore.”
Something about his words doesn’t make sense. I feel I’m being manipulated, but I’m too exhausted to come up with the reason why. My brain still aches from when Rover electrocuted me.
“Let’s not talk more about it for now. I want to eat dinner, I want to be with you, and I want to see those galaxies,” Kodiak says quietly. “Show me our solar system from the outside.”
After we eat, Kodiak lumbers to my bunk and collapses flat. He says he’s napping, but I recognize the look of someone desperately trying not to puke. I hold his hand, careful to give him space. It’s the worst to have people crowding you when you need to throw up.
I sit on the floor beside him and run my fingers along his hand, its muscles, tendons, and joints. The long thumbs, the dusting of black hair on the backs of his fingers, the lifelines of his palms. Do our clones all have the same lifelines? Maybe I should sketch a picture for our later incarnations to discover and compare.
What is this life?
There’s a kernel of something in that thought, something that looks like a solution to our predicament. I can’t think of what it is in these conditions.
Instead I kiss that palm.
Kodiak inclines his head weakly toward me, eyes still closed. “I should get back up there. I need to check our heading.”
“What you need to do is rest,” I say.
“That is true,” he admits. “But I also need not to crash us into an asteroid at thirty thousand kilometers per second.”
“Kodiak,” I say slowly, pressing my lips into his palm, “we’re not going to survive four years to get to this planet.”
“I think you’re right.”
“So why are we doing this?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” he asks. “We’re going out on our own terms.”
I tease my teeth against the tight warm skin of his palm, run my lips over the calluses at the base of each finger. “Are these really our own terms?”
Maybe they are. These are the real galaxies and stars around us, for the first time. Our previous selves wouldn’t have gotten to see them. They were murdered by an operating system before they had any idea of their real purpose. We’ll die on the way to a planet that almost certainly won’t be able to harbor us. But we’re in control of that destiny. OS and Rover aren’t active anymore. We’re not living inside a manipulation. Or we are, but it’s the manipulation we choose.
“Kodiak,” I say, my eyes searching his for any clues to how he takes what I’m saying. “I want to die at the same time as you.”
He shuts his eyes heavily. “I want you to live.”
“Some versions of us will get to live their full lives. But us? We’re not going to make it to a planet we can survive on.”
Kodiak turns away from me, I figure so I can’t see he’s lying. “I’m not going to let you nav,” he says. “There’s a chance we’ll make it to land.”
“I’m not going to fight you on this,” I say, rubbing my cheek against his hand, “because I know it’s how you want to live. But I know what I’m going to do while you’re nav-ing. I’m going to record everything we know. Offline, on an actual surface somewhere. Somewhere Rover won’t ever be able to reach, not in the thousands of years that will pass before OS wakes up our next set of clones. I’ll give our future selves information, so they can make their own choices. Even if they’re doomed never to leave this ship, at least they’ll begin with the awareness that we’ve had to fight so hard for.”
“There won’t be an OS when they wake up,” Kodiak says. He lets out a long sigh, ending in a whimper.
I fetch an empty food wrapper, in case he needs to throw up. “If we die with the ship offline, all our clones are doomed, too,” I say. “So is the Cusk mission, whatever it is.”
“Fuck the mission. Fuck the clones. Humanity is a blight. Why should we spread it any further?”
“Kodiak, if you’re insisting on doing all the nav-ing in an unshielded portion of the ship, you won’t be the one choosing whether to bring OS back online. I’ll be making that decision alone.”
He lets out a shuddering breath.
I pull his hand tight to my chest. “The least we can do is be as honest as possible. To give each other the kind of truth our governments never offered us. That my mother never offered.”
“Maybe I should pilot us right into one of those asteroids,” Kodiak says, joining his other hand with the first so they trace a butterfly under my shirt, over my narrow chest.
“Maybe you should,” I say. But he won’t. The heart beating in the fragile ribs under his hands knows otherwise.
While Kodiak is holed up in the ship’s guts, I set up a proper camp below. I give up all pretense of professional cleanliness and shoot for full-on comfort instead, the room quickly turning into a jumble of blankets and food packets. I bring along my violin, after I fabricate a new bridge using the portaprinter. I pass the shards of the old bridge up to Kodiak to keep in his pocket, since I know how much he’s comforted by the feel of what was once a tree.
The new polycarb bridge is not as resonant as the old one, so it sounds like I have a practice mute on. But the violin will play. I do scales for a few minutes and then stop, not sure what to perform next.
“Keep going!” Kodiak calls.
The last concertos I learned—or I guess I should say, that the old me learned and were nanoteched into my memory—were the Prokofiev and Mendelssohn. With OS offline I don’t have access to new sheet music, so I play those on repeat. I’m a little pitchy. Kodiak doesn’t seem to mind.
Whenever he takes his breaks from piloting, Kodiak and I head to 06 to stare into the new field of stars. His nausea stops him from ever feeling too sexy, but all the same we can’t keep our hands off each other. Not in a hot-and-heavy sort of way, but more like an old couple who have kind of merged. My favorite position is where I’m sitting on the desk and he’s standing in front of me, so I can wrap my arms around his waist and rest my chin on his shoulder while we stare out.
“Stars are what made me dedicate my life to training,” he says. “It’s amazing to see new ones.”
I decide against leaving a physical letter. That would be too easy for OS to destroy. Instead, when Kodiak goes back to piloting, I start recording an old-fashioned audio file on my bracelet. I’ll add segments of video, too. Whatever I record I’ll copy to a hundred places all over the ship, using a variety of codecs and password locks so that OS will really have to work to delete it all. Granted, it’s got thousands of years until it wakes the next set of us, so maybe it will manage it.
Just in case I succeed in passing it along, though, I’m going to tell our story. For us.
I’m not sure I’ve even done this before. Written for myself. I wasn’t ever really the journaling type, though mission control always planned for me to keep a log of our trip. Seeing as there’s no evidence of a log by previous clones, I guess that was for my own psychological good rather than any need for posterity.
I don’t start at the beginning. I start with the most important stuff and keep on repeating it, like a s
iren. It’s not like OS is going to delete just bits and pieces of the log if it finds it. I guess I want to capture the blare of the thoughts in my own mind.
You are a copy.
Minerva Cusk died right after she landed on Titan. There was no distress beacon.
You are headed somewhere far from Earth, but OS is blocked from telling you where.
Unless you are the final clones, you will die on your voyage.
Kodiak Celius has been trained all his life to be unfeeling, but inside is a tender human yearning for love. Just like you. You can provide that love to each other.
Fédération and Dimokratía are gone. Everyone you’ve ever known is gone.
OS will kill you, or space will.
Within those two laws of your existence, the life you carve out is your own.
Do not isolate yourself. Do not allow Kodiak to isolate himself.
I know it’s going to be a brutal recording to hear. Poor next clone Ambrose, with pins and needles in his body and having to eat poo administered by Rover and Earth in the rearview and then this whammy of an update piped into his ears. I thread the doc with all sorts of memories that were saved into my synapses, so that the next Ambrose will know this message came from his brain. Or at least a copy of his brain.
“Hey, scrumpkin,” I call up to Kodiak.
“‘Scrumpkin,’” he says back. “Wow. I thought you’d run out of ways to embarrass me, but then here you go.”
“Oh, I’ve got a long list of names for you, my flufferskunk. Anyway, do you want me to include some details from your memory, so the next Kodiak will know it’s really you?” He told me earlier that he wanted me to hardwire copies of my missive into the Aurora for the next Kodiak. He doesn’t trust himself to focus enough to record anything coherent.
“That’s heavy,” Kodiak calls down. “Hold on, let me chart our path through this next field, then I’ll let you know a few things. Okay. Ready. Future Kodiak: One, you don’t like manicotti as much as you tell Ambrose. It’s just your way of having something to say. Two, you don’t need to spend as much time getting ready for when you’ll see Ambrose, since he’ll only start to tease you for being so vain. Three, settle into kissing Ambrose as soon as possible. You’ll enjoy it very much, and you’ll only have time for so many kisses.”
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