The Darkness Outside Us

by Eliot Schrefer

  “What is this?” he asks.

  “What do you think it is?”

  He reads the package. “Manicotti. I’ve never tried it, but apparently I like it very much.”

  I laugh, then I see the dark curtain that’s dropped over his face. I place a hand on his shoulder. “We’re going to figure out what all of this means.”

  He shrugs his shoulder so my hand falls away. OS speaks at the very same time. “Is there something I can help you two with?”

  “No,” I say as I pile the blankets on the table. I turn to Kodiak. “Eat your manicotti, and then I’ll explain.”

  Kodiak looks down at the pouch, his lips tight, then shakes his head. “I’ll eat it later.”

  I shake out the blanket and loft it so it drapes over our heads. I light up my tablet and start typing.

  Maybe you heard. This is the only way we can communicate without OS knowing. Cameras and mics everywhere. It can hear everything.

  He nods in the space under the blanket. The fluorescent lights pass through the thin weave, lighting up his silhouette. He takes the tablet from my hands and types, his shoulder pressing and flexing against mine. I study the strong line of his nose.

  I want to investigate beyond the yellow portal to confirm there actually are clones.

  I take the tablet back. OK. Assuming there ARE clones, what then?

  He pauses over the tablet, fingers hovering. He has no answer. Of course not. What answer could there be? Then he’s typing. I want to know what our supposed true purpose is.

  Yes! Something about the way he’s said “supposed” makes me pause, but I let it go for now. This is exactly the course I was hoping Kodiak would settle on. Any thoughts on how we do it?

  OS obviously thinks it’s navigating us somewhere. If we knew our heading, that would help. But we have to use that information without clueing the OS in that that’s what we’re doing.

  Agreed, I answer. OS is probably on high alert right now. I say let’s give it a few weeks to calm down, then start figuring out what this journey is for. I sigh and sit back, pulling the blanket away.

  Kodiak blinks at the sudden light. It’s sort of adorable. I can get why an earlier me fell for him. Multiple earlier me’s fell for him. Will I, too?

  Kodiak clenches his fists, then unclenches them. Clenches and unclenches. I don’t know what feelings he’s fighting, but I have my suspicions. Heat rises in my cheeks.

  “I think I know what you were just thinking about,” he grumbles.

  “It’s weird, right?” I ask him. “We’ve gotten together before.” There’s no mistaking it—I’m totally aroused.

  “More than weird,” he says. “You’re not, I’m not . . . I wouldn’t have thought I’d have ever . . .”

  Now my face flushes for more reasons. “Wow. Thanks.”

  He shrugs. “In training I had the same urges that most young men do. Of course I would act on them sometimes. But it was just ryad. You know, friends joining together for a short time.”

  I’m going to fall in love with this piece of ancient history? Really? I start speaking and stop myself. My face is radiating waves of heat. I occupy myself with folding the blanket, shaking out every wrinkle as I do.

  I take a Minerva stance in my mind. You are the noble Ambrose Cusk. Desired by millions. Sired by Alexander the Great. The unavailable one.

  His fists clench and unclench, clench and unclench.

  I realize I’ve tensed all my muscles as I fold the blanket. “Do you need to be alone?”

  He shakes his head sharply, lets his chin sink to his chest.

  “Look, I know how overwhelming this is—” I begin to say.

  “I’m told I’m a very good kisser,” he interrupts.

  That stops me. I watch, openmouthed, as a grim smile spreads across his face. “Oh, come on,” I say, giving his shoulder a good shove. He tumbles over. “I find it hard to believe that there’s anyone in Dimokratía who’s a good kisser. It’s just not part of your worldview. You’re all probably just a bunch of tongue wrestlers.”

  He rolls out flat, folding his arms over his chest. “This is a strange situation we find ourselves in, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I say. “It certainly is. Now eat your manicotti. I’ve heard you like it.”

  _-* Tasks Remaining: 1801 *-_

  I’m able to go about most of my day like there was no transmission from an ancient Ambrose. Kodiak and I repair the ship’s past damages, we prep for asteroid harvesting, we feed our organismal selves, knowing that those same selves might soon be silenced by the ship that hosts us. I make up an insane little song that starts I’m just a little bacterium / living in a gut.

  As that “normal” life moves forward, so does another one, in parallel. One where I press my face right up against the ship’s windows, where I sift through OS’s code for suspicious lines, where I examine suits and blankets for old hair, skin, blood. Where I peek under the ship’s skin, waiting for it to hemorrhage out the truth.

  I come up with theories for where we’re heading. Another galaxy. Into a black hole. Out of a black hole. To Minerva, after all. Back to Earth, where she’ll be waiting for me. It’s Friday night. Of course your Minnie’s here waiting for you.

  Whenever I take one of my half-dozen daily walks through the Aurora, I find Kodiak investigating. He’ll be removing a wall panel to see what’s beneath, or picking at the film that coats the inside of the windows (or are they screens?). Rover is almost always in the same room, watching.

  Whenever I see Rover, I get the urge to punt its little whirring half-basketball body. If we prove the reels from our former selves were true, we’re disabling you first. And I’ll be the one to execute the code.

  One morning, I find Kodiak in the blind room. He’s got the blanket near, and the offline tablet. I raise an eyebrow, and he nods, patting the ground next to him. I sit beside him, thigh against thigh. He tents the blanket over us, then kneads my upper arm. It’s in a sports massage-y kind of way, but after what he said about the other guys during training, it gets my mind wandering to our future, when my hand could reach under the waistband, to smooth skin and more—

  Are you ready? Kodiak types.

  You could say that. I type, Yes. He waits for me to keep going. I write, I thought you had something to say.

  He pauses. I didn’t come up with any solutions.

  I try and fail to keep a smile off my lips. Hope of all Dimokratía, huh?

  No wisecracks, Cusk.

  Lucky for you, I was the top student in my analytic geometry class.

  He rolls his eyes at that one. Deservedly. I continue. Our best chance of figuring out where we’re headed is to find out where we are relative to Earth. Then we can continue that ray out into the universe, and see what it hits.

  Well, yes. But how do we figure that out?

  The radio!

  Kodiak taps his lips. How far from Earth I get. The signals we’re receiving through the radio transmitter mention dates. By comparing those with the ship date, we can estimate how far they’ve traveled at the speed of light, and therefore how far we’ve been journeying. But that’s just distance, not direction.

  I seize the tablet from him. Yes! We need to know our distance from two other points to get our precise location. Intersection of three spheres. And what gets us precise locations?

  Pulsars. I snap my fingers, grinning. He continues writing. Their pulses are regular, but the highest frequencies of the wave move slightly faster, and the difference in the highest and lowest frequencies can be calculated, which should allow us to find out our distance from the pulsar!

  I take over. The frequency of the pulse will let me look up which pulsar it is, and we can find its original location. Can you find us two pulsars in all that radio noise?

  I’ll try to get us some neutron stars. And this is genius. Kodiak rests the tablet in his lap and pinches my chin between his fingers, gives it a good wag while he stares into my eyes. It seems he’s started to absorb
the fact that his previous self was my lover.

  I take the tablet and type, mainly to hide the rise in my pants. Let’s get started.

  He stands, his own bulge giving him away. “Such minute calculations,” he murmurs, heading to his console and placing the headphones over his ears. “The number of significant figures this will require . . .” His voice trails off as he gets distracted.

  I’m a little distracted, too. But we have more important things to do than hook up. For now.

  So I won’t tip OS off to what I’m doing, I start scrolling through the offline tablet, looking at old-school star charts. They’re images of pages from actual books, so it takes forever to find anything. Searching through all the tables does help with the erection problem, though.

  Time wheels away from me. Kodiak is as motionless as anything else in the room, his face a mask of concentration. Then he leaps to his feet. The headphones whip off his head, and he dashes to catch them before they hit the floor. He beckons me over, his face bright with joy, and tosses me my own set.

  I lean into him as I listen. There’s the pulse of his blood against my shoulder, and then the headphones are on my ears and I hear the radio pulse of a star instead, beating at us from far off in space. It’s eerie and very regular. “So beautiful,” I whisper.

  I watch him listen, his eyes closed, tears wetting his long lashes. Then I break out of the reverie and switch my connection to the computer’s, so it can time the pulses. Once I get the readout, I return to the offline books. “It’s PSR B1257 plus 12!” I say. “Commonly known as ‘lich,’ after the undead lord. Astronomers are such nerds.”

  Kodiak slowly opens his eyes and returns his hand to the dial. “One more pulsar to go.”

  I return the headphones to my ears and listen to the noise of space flying by. Huge blank spaces, hot noise and white noise, all from giant bodies beaming out across time and distance, lonely radio waves that chanced into our ship during their journey across the universe.

  Kodiak raises a finger to draw my attention. I can make it out, too. This pulsar fires radio bursts every four or five seconds. It’s a more melancholy pace, almost a complaint.

  I watch the numbers fill the screen, figures flooding as the computer refines the period of the pulse. “Four-point-eight-two seconds,” I say, scanning through the table in the tablet. “It’s another famously strong signal pulsar, Centaurus X-3. Makes sense that those are the ones we’d detect first. We’ll let it go a few minutes, so the computer has more data points about the frequencies, then we’ll set it to calculate our coordinates.”

  Kodiak starts to say something, but then stops himself. He just nods.

  “What?” I ask.

  He shakes his head.

  “Something’s on your mind. What is it?”

  He shrugs. “I guess I’m just not sure that I want to know whatever we’re going to find out. I mean, I do, of course I do. But also I don’t.”

  I laugh, then regret it. I guess I’m surprised at the vulnerability he’s showing and don’t know what to do with it, don’t know when it’s going to be withdrawn. “Well, it’s a little late now.”

  He nods his head severely, staring into the screen, as if adding his computing power to the processor’s.

  Crisis might have brought us close, but all the same I really don’t know this boy I’m living with.

  A box blinks on the screen. The calculations are finished.

  “Do you want to reveal the answer, or should I?” I ask.

  He flicks the screen. Two points resolve. One is Earth, and the other is us. I change the frame, zooming farther and farther out, so it will start to make sense. Only it doesn’t make sense—we’re near the end of a jumble of stars in a broad swirl. “That’s—”

  “The Milky Way,” Kodiak says flatly.

  “And we’re . . .”

  “Heading to the sparse edge of it.”

  He doesn’t speak for a moment, and I look at his face. It’s grim, his skin almost gray. “We’re in a vast empty stretch of dead sea. There’s nothing around for light-years and light-years.”

  We were alone before. But now we know that we’re truly, truly alone.

  Even if we could go the speed of light—which we can’t, not by a long stretch—we’d never make it anywhere at all in our lifetimes.

  Kodiak’s leg is shaking. Otherwise he’s not moving at all. I search his face, my own mind reeling.

  “I did everything I was supposed to,” he murmurs.

  “What does that mean?” I ask.

  His words become barely audible as he sinks to his knees and stares at the floor. “Whatever they asked, I always said yes. I made myself the instrument they wanted me to be.”

  “Yeah,” I manage to say. “Me too.”

  “I destroyed the dreams of Li Qiang so that I could become the hope of Dimokratía. I’ve devoted my life to . . . what? To be cast off in, in this.” He gestures out toward the window, which, it’s increasingly clear to me, isn’t showing us anything real.

  “Li Qiang. Is that the one you broke your arm fighting in the pool bash?” My recorded self told me about him.

  He nods, hands over his eyes.

  I place my palm on top of his head, which feels awkward, so I kneel in front of him, my ass on my heels. So we’re mirror images.

  He clears his tears with the back of his forearm, lets out a shuddering breath. “I’m fine. It’s just that I made a promise to my country, a major promise, devoted my life to it. It felt like a contract.”

  “Yeah,” I say, pushing one lock of his blue-black hair away from his face. “It was. And they broke it.” Just like my family had done with me.

  His chest heaves. “I don’t know what to do without that contract.”

  “You get to decide what you become.”

  He shakes his head derisively, then his expression softens. “I guess.”

  “I’m glad we’re here together for this,” I say.

  Kodiak looks at me. “I don’t know how you can find anything positive about our situation, but I believe that you mean that.”

  I take his hands in mine, hold them in my lap.

  He closes his eyes, and when he opens them there’s a sudden gleam in them. He snatches his hands away from mine, snaps his fingers, and points to the blanket. Startled, I throw it over the tops of our heads.

  Kodiak writes on the tablet, and then passes it to me. I got it. This is a test!

  A test? What kind of test?

  In training we had many unannounced drills. Woken up in the dark / transported blindfolded / had to nav our way back from deep wilderness. This could be like that. The launch that we assumed was happening never happened. We don’t remember it. Then they put us in a mock ship and feed us some lie about “clones” to judge how we react.

  He passes the tablet back to me. I scan his expression for any sign of doubt. It’s all a little too conspiracy theorist for me to even consider. Then again, so is the supposed truth of our situation.

  I know in my heart that he’s wrong. That he’s going through denial, a textbook reaction to shock. I want him to get back to his tears, so we can mourn our situation together. But I don’t know how to write those feelings in a tablet under a blanket. Instead I type, The Minerva distress call?

  A manipulation. Maybe she’s fine, or maybe she’s dead. It’s all part of trying to see how we might break down under mid-voyage stresses. As research for future expeditions.

  Did he really just call my sister’s fate a manipulation? I look at him. His eyes are hollow in the filtered light. He’s retreated to some desolate place that I can’t reach. He’s too lost in his own suffering to realize how reckless those words are to say to me.

  Could be true. I don’t feel like I can say anything for sure anymore.

  He shifts under the blanket, so his face is out of view. I lift the fabric with one hand so I can see his expression again. He writes: Don’t confess that in front of OS. Then you’ll have failed the test. You wo
n’t be sent on the eventual mission.

  Watching his face, I gingerly take the tablet back. I don’t think Fédération works the same way as Dimokratía. My mission control wouldn’t do this to me. My mother wouldn’t do this to me.

  His tongue makes a click, which I know is a mocking sound in Dimokratía. Such an enlightened country, I forgot.

  Besides, we’re obviously in space.

  How do you know?

  Is he serious right now? The stars. The view of the other part of the ship. The hum of the floor under us. The fact that we’re not getting any signals from the outside unless the antennae is on the exterior of the ship.

  All of that can be faked. The “old” you said those stars ARE fake, remember?

  I roll my eyes, suddenly grateful that this hulk isn’t looking closely enough at me to notice. Yeah, and we might also be brains in a vat somewhere, and our whole lives have been simulations while machines milk us for our organic materials. Or we’re prisoners living their existences chained up in a cave, mistaking the shadows on the wall for the world itself.

  I laugh, but when he doesn’t, I stop.

  What if he’s right? What if we’re in a bunker and not a spaceship, and this is some kind of test? There’s no way to know for sure. Well, I can think of one way. We could open a door—but that would involve depressurizing the whole ship. If my hunch is wrong, then we’re dead. Something strikes me. I tug the tablet from his fingers and start typing. There’s no gravity at the center of the ship.

  Zero gravity can be produced artificially. We’ve both been in those simulators during training.

  You’re really convinced, aren’t you?

  Come on. Isn’t it far more likely that we’re in some psychological simulation than that we’re ancient clones woken up in the middle of a voyage across the galaxy???

  A fair point, I guess. I don’t actually agree. I think he’s desperate for a way to hold on to everything that he thought he knew. I’m feeling the very same way. I’m just also a little more realistic about my own psychological pitfalls.

  So how are we going to test this theory? he writes.