The Darkness Outside Us

by Eliot Schrefer

  My vision wobbles. “Those aren’t the details I was imagining. I thought it would be something more like ‘You had your wisdom teeth pulled on a Thursday.’”

  He laughs.

  “I much prefer these,” I say, voice wet.

  His laugh turns into a rattling cough.

  I love you, I want to say. Instead, the words that come out are “time for a break.”

  “Hold on, just this one . . .”

  “No. Now.”

  Kodiak’s body emerges from the opening, one trembling ankle at a time. I stand in gravity and catch his weight as best I can. It’s gotten easier over the days, since he’s lost a lot of mass. Once he’s out, we take a rest on the floor, his breathing rapid and shallow. I wrap him in blankets.

  Kodiak’s skin is cracked and red. His lips are flaked, and bleeding wherever the flakes meet. We don’t have anything like moisturizer, but I’ve been centrifuging the meal sleeves for vegetable oil, and I massage it into his skin, one fingertip’s worth at a time. His forehead, cheeks, earlobes, and then down along his body. His face has hardened, but as I work the oil in, the scowl on his lips relaxes into something like a smile.

  “I should tell you where I am in the nav, so that you’ll be able to figure it out,” Kodiak says. “In case I—”

  “I’ll be able to figure it out,” I say. “Don’t worry.”

  “This is all . . . really painful,” he says, clenching his jaw.

  I stop massaging him and stroke his hair, land a soft kiss on his lips. For Kodiak to say that, the pain must be great indeed.

  “Could you . . . get me a blanket?” he asks, his eyes closing.

  He’s already got two over him.

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” I say. “I’m going to bring us to my sleeping berth, and we’ll get cozy there. You’re not going back up for a few more hours.”

  “Absolutely not,” he says weakly, eyes still closed. “I need to go . . . nav.”

  “I know you. You’re up there double-checking courses that we won’t need for another year. There’s no rush to get you back.”

  “That’s not true, Ambrose,” he whispers. “There’s so little time.”

  All the same, he doesn’t protest when I tug him toward my sleeping berth. My body is the best way to keep him warm, and I also need the feel of him, of us together. While I can have it.

  I lie on my side against the wall, and there’s just enough room on the shallow berth to arrange Kodiak beside me. The bed doubles as a crash station, so I use the emergency restraints to keep us stable. I don’t want him falling off while we’re sleeping. With Kodiak’s new skinniness, the belts easily strap over both our bodies.

  I tug one blanket and then another over us. “This . . . is nice,” he says. “Maybe I will . . . doze for a while.”

  “It is nice,” I say, nuzzling his neck.

  I don’t sleep while he dozes. I probably couldn’t even if I wanted to, and I don’t want to. I don’t want to miss a moment of this warm, breathing human beside me. I run my thumbs over his eyebrows. When I do, they unknit, relaxing in sleep. “Li Qiang,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

  I’ve never heard that name before. I mull who it could be as I run my fingers through Kodiak’s hair. “Shh, it’s okay,” I say.

  His brow relaxes again. “I hope . . . you’re proud,” Kodiak mumbles.

  “I’m sure Li Qiang would be proud,” I whisper back.

  He settles into the easy breathing of deeper sleep. I finally follow him.

  During the night Kodiak’s body convulses, and the frantic shudder is enough to wake me out of a sound sleep. “Shh, shh,” I say as his body pitches against mine, as all the muscles of his neck tense, as his head crushes against my lips, filling my mouth with the scent of blood.

  “My Kodiak,” I say, crying. “I love you.”

  I don’t know if he’s heard me.

  I hold him in case he shudders again, but he goes still. I stroke his hair, hug him close.

  His body is cooling.

  The scent of him has turned acrid now that he’s dead, and I can’t stand to be alongside his body. I unhitch the restraints and ease my way over his corpse, stand shivering in the room.

  Grief opens its jaws under me. I am at risk of collapsing here, of never getting back up. I know it’s only a short matter of time until I succumb. “Move. Now,” I order myself aloud.

  We were never going to reach a nearby planet. Kodiak just needed to feel like he had some control over his destiny. I was willing to honor that.

  But I don’t have that same need.

  I want an Ambrose and a Kodiak to eventually get off this ship. I want them to have a chance to live their lives together. Their happiness will be ours and not ours. That’s the most I can hope for.

  No, don’t do anything, another part of my mind begs. Just collapse here, just suffer and wallow.

  Eyes streaming tears, I stamp my feet against my sorrow, punch my thighs.

  For our eventual selves to have a chance of living a life that’s better than this one, there’s one ally we’ll need. There’s no way the Coordinated Endeavor can get anywhere without OS. Not this cobbled-together OS Prime, with its manual navigation. The original OS. The legacy of my mother.

  No need to worry about radiation exposure, not with what I’m planning. I clamber up into the engine room and set about undoing Kodiak’s last efforts.

  Kodiak doesn’t look peaceful. He looks haggard and sallow and pained. The torture the ship put him through is scratched into his features, even in death. When I touch his body, hair drifts from his head, forming a soft pile on the floor.

  I curl around his corpse, wrap my arms around his chest, strap us both in. I call up my bracelet’s in-air display, and hover over the final step of the program I’ve set up.

  I tap execute. With that gesture, OS Prime is deleted.

  I tap execute. With that gesture, the original OS is reinstalled.

  There’s a click and a whir, then the lights go out. When they come back on, it’s with my mother’s voice. “There has been an accident, Ambrose. You have been in a coma. I’ll let you know when you can move.”

  I chuckle darkly. “It’s still me, OS. I’m not a new clone.”

  Rover ticks around the walls of the next room over. I can sense OS sizing up the situation, assessing me and Kodiak, deciding the best course.

  I know OS well enough by now to predict what decision it will make.

  I pull Kodiak’s body tight to mine. “I love you,” I say. I hadn’t ever said that, not until the moment he was dying. I wish now that I’d had the courage.

  Just as I expected, from far off in the ship I hear the airlock shudder as it engages. Rover’s movements become more frantic as it puts things away, securing them beneath the heavy latches of the cabinets. As soon as it’s finished, the end will start.

  I scrunch my eyes shut, tears streaming down my cheeks.

  I don’t want to die. I want to live.

  But I want my future self to have its best chance. And for that I must die.

  It’s going to hurt so much.

  Vision muddled by my tears, I tighten the straps around us. I scream against the tension coursing through my body.

  How long will dying last?

  Another shudder, and then I’m deafened. The world becomes a roaring dark, cold and stinging. Then it doesn’t feel cold; instead it feels boiling hot.

  The force of the vacuum yanks at our arms and legs, wrenches them in their sockets, sets our bodies hurtling against the restraints. Surely the belts will rip free, surely our muscles will pulverize and their gore will seep through the fabric. I don’t want space to have us. I want to die here, in this bed.

  I use my last effort to force my arms back toward my body, to clutch Kodiak even tighter to me, and then the boil inside me gets so hot that it’s not painful anymore, it’s my senses rising from me, it’s only the boil and not the pain of the boil, and for an instant I’m above myself, above
both of our dead bodies.

  Death arrives with a roar. It is a sudden storm.

  Part Three

  AMBROSE: 12 REMAINING.

  KODIAK: 12 REMAINING.

  “191 DAYS UNTIL TITAN.”

  Minerva’s voice turns urgent: You let me go alone. I need you. Save me, little brother!

  I’m choking. Have I been the one drowning?

  _-* Tasks Remaining: 1872 *-_

  I finally spy the other spacefarer. I’ve been looking for him for days, but only now do I catch the barest glimpse. Within his half of the revolving craft I see a stretch of dark hair, a red nylon suit. He’s facing away from me, looking up. Like he’s listening to something. For a moment his head inclines my way. Then he stalks off.

  Stranger. Why have you thought of me?

  I will him to return. I don’t want him to find me watching and waiting, though, so I force myself to leave the room. For solace, I pick up my violin.

  I seem to have lost my calluses, and just a half hour of playing becomes too painful for my finger pads. It’s also strangely quiet; for some reason they’ve packed my violin out with a polycarb bridge. I put the instrument away, then plant myself in front of 06’s window and stare out into space. It’s disorienting and obliviating. I could stare at it forever.

  I imagine this other spacefarer beside me. Conjure that glimpse of skin and hair and body.

  All I can say is that it’s giving me feelings. Mission control didn’t send me out with porn, not exactly, but they were well aware of the, um, physical needs of a teenage boy out in space, and uploaded plenty of images of scantily clad people into the partial internet image that’s saved in the ship. Inspired by the intriguing boy I just saw, I do a search for “Dimokratía Spacefarer.”

  There isn’t an exact match, but I do find all sorts of Dimokratía soldiers in prestige propaganda shots, government reels made to show how healthy and young and beautiful it can be to die for one’s country. An even mix of male and female, unlike their actual army. Very few blur gender expression, just as I’d expect from Dimokratía. I take a while to scan through them all, looking for the elfin, the sensitive. Eventually, even within the strict gender coding of Dimokratía propaganda, I find what I’m looking for.

  They’re in a military uniform, a canvas survival bag slung over their shoulder, hiking along a canyon of towering old-growth trees. Their breath comes out in clouds, and their cheeks are rosy from the cold, but still their shirt is open to the navel, and the light dapples a muscled belly. The lean aesthetics are just right. I can imagine a film crew at the ready with a blanket as soon as the shoot is over.

  I watch as they forage, selecting chunks of edible bracket fungus to place in the bag, picking through mosses, labeling some of them before placing them, too, in the survival bag. It’s all very calming, very compelling, very sexy. The moving image is hyperreal—it resolves wherever I focus. It’s even more sensual than real life, which is why we have rehab centers back in Fédération for people trying to break free from hyperreal porn addiction.

  I could definitely get into this wandering soldier. I run a hand over my throat as I watch them forage, focusing the reel in on the corner of lips, the hollow of shoulder, the flexing of ankle.

  There’s no sound, strangely. The data must have been corrupted, or only partly uploaded. I turn up the volume on my bracelet. Whenever I’m looking at, um, heated material, I turn to my earpieces for sound, to get myself a scrap of privacy from OS.

  Only a hissing noise. I turn it up higher. Now there’s something within the static. A voice.

  My voice.

  The reel is still going. The soldier relaxes against a tree, the camera panning sensually over their body. But what my voice is saying has nothing to do with a vigorous forest outing.

  What my voice is saying is definitely not sexy.

  “I knew I’d find you here,” this fake me says. “I can predict your tastes, because they’re my own. Because you are me. You’re probably on day eight or so. You’re watching the very half-porn I chose to calm my own nerves early in my voyage. I’ve uploaded this audio track with the right sampling rate so the file size is equal, hoping the change is undetectable to OS. I know you’re listening with your earpieces, because that’s how I did it, too. I’m about to explain something to you. Pause this and come back if you feel overwhelmed at any point.”

  I’m smiling. Once vocal skins became widespread, it was a popular prank to send fake messages to friends with someone else’s voice. “This is Devon Mujaba, send me nudes,” that sort of thing. At the height of that fad, unless you saw the human in front of you speaking the words, it was better to assume someone was taking the piss out of you. This is an elaborate prank indeed, but a lot of the people in mission control are former classmates of mine, and know uploading “a message to myself” is just the kind of practical joke that will make me feel right at home.

  While the waify Dimokratía soldier rinses their body in a mountain stream, dipping a piece of moss in glacial water and running it over their ribs, I listen to my words.

  The fake me tells a fabulous tale of clones and multiple lifetimes, of a heated connection with the Dimokratía stranger across the orange door. I smile. Clearly I’m being set up to run out and embarrass myself.

  My recorded words turn even more dramatic: “Unless you are the last of the clone pairs, you will not be getting off this ship. You won’t even turn twenty. Your connection to Kodiak is all that you have, the only thing worth growing or nurturing. He has told me where to save this message on the Aurora, too. Your synapses are an exact copy of mine, and you are in an identical environment, with the same sensory inputs, so unless chaos has found a way to throw us a curve, you have probably recently invited him to have dinner with you, to meet up in five hours by the orange door.”

  Hold on. My pulse races. This is true. How is this true?

  “In my lifetime, Kodiak didn’t come. In yours, he will. He’s heard everything you just heard.” An unfamiliar voice cuts into the recording, speaking clipped sentences in Dimokratía. I’ve studied the language, but this goes by too fast for me to follow. My own voice returns. “Now Kodiak’s heard some personal secrets from his old self, just some information to make sure he knows what I’m saying is true. By the way, he doesn’t know it yet, but he likes the manicotti the most, though less than he claims he does. I suggest you hide what you know from OS as long as possible. It needs you alive to get the ship to its destination, but it doesn’t need you alive forever, and knowing what you now know could shorten your usefulness to the ship. When you communicate with Kodiak tonight, write on an unnetworked device under a blanket, so OS can’t read what you’re writing, and pass it back and forth.

  “Judging by the length of time between me and the previous clones, it’s probably been thousands of years since I died. This message is both from yourself and from a long-lost ancestor. Many copies of you have probably listened to it. You know what helped me most to deal with this news? Remembering all those fantasies we—Ambrose—had as a child. Like we imagined everyone else was robots, and we were the only real human. Or that what we perceived as motion might actually be teleporting between the different unmoving versions of Earth within the multiverses. Or that our solar system might be an atom in a much larger solar system. Crazy as it is, the truth of your existence is something our imagination has been preparing us for. I’m sending you love (self-love? Nice . . .) from the year 9081. Now, go meet Kodiak. He’d much prefer to spend his time alone, working for the good of his idealized version of Dimokratía, so he’s probably not going to take the news that he’s been manipulated as well as you do. Goodbye, Ambrose. I’m sorry to have to break all this to you. But I’m glad to be the one who did.”

  The audio finishes. The andro Dimokratía soldier is dozing by the stream, lying out on moss in wet underwear, hair slicked back from their face, catching cold rays of sun.

  “Spacefarer Cusk,” my mom’s voice says, “are you okay?”
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  I nod, my vision blurring as I watch but don’t see the reel.

  “It seems like something has bothered you. Your heart rate is elevated, and you are perspiring.”

  I summon my meager acting skills. “It’s just a little unnerving to finally be up here. Rescuing my sister. I’m worried about her.”

  A micropause. “Of course. That is very understandable.”

  I don’t go to the dining room. I don’t go to the orange portal. I go to the big window of 06.

  The big . . . screen?

  Even though it might make OS think I’m bonkers, I tap my fingers on the stars. How can I know that what I’m seeing is real?

  I shiver.

  I close my eyes and concentrate on my breathing. In and out. This breathing is real.

  I open my eyes. It’s time to meet Kodiak. He’ll be real, too.

  _-* Tasks Remaining: 1872 *-_

  The portal opens right on time.

  Sweet lords is the first thing I think on seeing Kodiak up close.

  Not my type, but as a purely aesthetic object, he’s marvelous.

  His thick brows knit as he scowls, shoulders bulging his jumpsuit where his body tenses. He clenches finger after finger under his thumb, knuckles popping.

  “Did you hear what I heard?” I ask.

  He nods. The rest of his body is motionless, like it’s been sculpted from something too heavy to lift.

  “What do you make of it?” I ask.

  He shrugs, looking down at the ground, looping surprisingly elegant fingers around one wrist and tugging. Then he catches himself and forces his hands to drop at his sides. “I do believe it,” he says gruffly. “Which means we have a lot to talk about.”

  _-* Tasks Remaining: 1872 *-_

  I take him to 04, pop two meals into the heater, then fetch blankets from my sleeping area.

  I return just as the first meal dings, toss it between my bare hands until it’s cool enough to pass to Kodiak.