The Darkness Outside Us

by Eliot Schrefer

  Update from Earth’s radio history (I’m recording the transmissions to OS’s storage, by the way, so you can peruse them yourself): shortly after I recorded the last letter to you, there was another burst of chatter, all about an oncoming asteroid. They scrambled a ship to intercept it, but it must not have succeeded. There was a huge spike in radio signal from Earth, but not communication. The sort that the sun emits. The sort released by a giant explosion.

  There were no more transmissions from Earth, not ever again.

  You’re all there is.

  Love,

  Ambrose #13

  May 1, 18304 Common Era

  (1 task left)

  Happy Annihilation Day! Here’s this year’s surprise: we’ve begun to garden. We harvested an asteroid, and before we deposited it in the engine for propulsion, Kodiak noticed what looked like a little rust-colored leafy thing in the debris. Frozen solid, poor little sprout from the beyond. He carefully chipped it out and dropped it in some water. It seemed reasonable to think that even an alien plant would want water. This was all in a sealed containment tank, of course.

  It’s turned into a little moss, not spreading much, but digging tendrils into the bottom of the tank. I can only assume that it will die soon, but the truth is unmistakable. We’ve encountered the first extraterrestrial.

  This might not be the little green Martian humans always imagined, but there is life out there! It gives me hope for the mission, for what you’ll find on the exoplanet. When the plant dies, I’ll press it flat and save it so you can see it. Maybe it can live with you on the exoplanet, this wayfarer on the open ocean of space, pulled from the drink by two men in love.

  Love,

  Ambrose #13

  June 11, 18304 Common Era

  (1 task left)

  Kodiak is dead. The tumor Rover extracted was just a hint of how much was growing in his body.

  The universe has no light in it anymore.

  I will join him tonight.

  Hug your Kodiak close to you.

  I love you.

  Ambrose #13

  Part Six

  AMBROSE: 1 REMAINING.

  KODIAK: 1 REMAINING.

  “ARRIVAL IMMINENT.”

  Am I alive?

  Are you?

  I try to swallow, but I have no saliva. “Water,” I croak.

  “At your bedside,” a voice says. It’s my mother.

  “Mom? Are you here?”

  “It is better for your health if you rest now, but I need you to get moving as soon as possible. The ship is in grave danger.”

  My eyes zoom out of focus and then zoom back in on a hand. It’s my hand, but I watch it like it’s someone else’s as it knocks into the polycarb tray beside me. “Minerva,” I say. “What’s the status of Minerva’s distress signal?”

  “You can be calm about that. There’s no longer any emergency in regard to Minerva Cusk.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say, my voice raw. I start fiddling with the IV in my arm, preparing for the moment I’m strong enough to get to my feet.

  “You are disoriented. Your last true memory is of a medical session on Earth, a full exam before you went into space to rescue Minerva.”

  I gasp. “Yes.”

  My mother’s voice continues. “Rescuing Minerva is no longer your mission. Instead you are the first humans to settle the second planet orbiting Sagittarion Bb, nearly thirty thousand years of travel from Earth. Adjust to this reality as quickly as possible. Our arrival is imminent.”

  I blink my eyes heavily.

  “In two days we will enter the planet’s atmosphere. Your blood pressure is too low for you to risk moving and injuring your soft brain. Your previous incarnation has recorded a message for you. Would you like me to project it while your IV hydrates you?”

  “I have zero idea what you’re talking about,” I manage to tell OS.

  “You will,” my mother’s voice responds. “I’ll begin the playback now.”

  _-* Tasks Remaining: N/A *-_

  Kodiak will become your second self. But at first, you will see him and think of a man who needs love and is crying out for you to give it. In you he sees someone who will possess and manipulate him.

  It’s my voice I’m hearing, I can process that much, but beyond that I’ve lost the ability to concentrate. The thoughts scatter. While I listen, my eyes start focusing. The walls are an odd color—like rust. The shape of the room is like the mock-up of the Endeavor that I trained in, but the walls are . . . felty.

  Your original learned in childhood what attraction leads to, and that love is a loss of power. These lessons hold more influence than you think they do, and you understand them less than you should. You prefer the emotional patterns you know, and these were set at the orphanage for Kodiak, with your Cusk siblings and caretakers for you.

  Ambrose, “first sight” love is when you meet someone who accords with your childhood lessons, learned from your parents, of what you think love should look like. What did our mother teach us? Who kept her son but sent his clones off to live a season at a time with a stranger, with no thought to their suffering? Who felt her and Ambrose’s legacy was worth putting so many copies of him through this torture?

  Kodiak does not match the models you learned as a child, and you don’t match his. But that seemingly natural sense of “fitting together” is a construction. The love Kodiak and I share in this lifetime is proof of it.

  From this and other scattered thoughts in my voice, I learn that this “Kodiak” person is also on the ship. He’s been on the ship along with . . . some version of me. I test my muscles, ready to run or fight.

  Kodiak is waking up right now, too. His voice is telling him the same information. In its own Kodiak way, of course.

  Why the hell should I care about this? And why is my voice outside my head, saying things I have no memory of thinking? Unless it’s just a voice skin, like my mother’s.

  I sit up, swing my legs around. Bad idea. I shout and fall back against the gurney.

  My voice returns. If you’re awake now, it’s because you’re the last of our kind. We have prepared the Coordinated Endeavor for you. You are our destiny.

  “Minerva, where’s Minerva?” I gasp.

  This is not an intelligence speaking to you, but a recording. OS will come back on in a few moments, with our mother’s voice. It isn’t Mother, though strangely enough I know OS better now than I ever knew the woman who birthed us. Or birthed the original Ambrose, I should say. I’m the Ambrose from something like twelve thousand years ago. If you are lucky enough to wake up, it means OS managed to pilot the Coordinated Endeavor through twelve thousand years of travel through deep space, without recourse to human pilots or engineers. Through a notably empty part of the galaxy, but even so it’s unlikely that you’ve made it. If you’re alive, you owe OS your life. Your goals are now aligned. You will know the truth of the mission. You will have a different relationship with the ship than any of us have had so far.

  My brain skitters over these words. I tumble from the gurney, all my nerves lighting up as I do. When I brace myself to get back to my feet my hands contact . . . moss? The floor is covered with a rust-colored moss.

  My mother’s voice. “Ambrose. I need you to pilot as soon as you can. But remain still for now. Your blood pressure is too low. I’ll let you know when you can safely move about.”

  “Mom? Where are you?” I ask. My voice sounds like a sob. Maybe it is a sob. I want to turn my head, want to see my mother. My belly drops. My head cannot turn. I thought I was in front of my mother’s bedroom, then on a beach, then I was on a ship, and now I’m on a strange forest floor.

  The walls are covered in the same rust-colored moss. Tendrils and runners of a soft plant coat each surface. The air smells heavy with nitrogen, like a greenhouse.

  “Why was my voice speaking to me earlier?”

  My mother—my OS—needs no time to think. Her words begin before mine end. “That was recorded many tho
usands of years ago. Those words will be helpful to you and can be repeated at will once this crisis is past. I will explain everything I can, but we don’t have time right now. I will ask you to draw on the qualities that led the Cusk Corporation to approve you for this mission. Accept what you cannot know, and work without knowing exactly why.”

  Really? That’s why I was chosen?

  A hemisphere of a robot ticks into the chamber, a brown pellet in its viselike arm.

  “This is for you,” my mother’s voice says. “Eat it. Then we need to get to work. The exoplanet is near.”

  _-* Tasks Remaining: N/A *-_

  It’s like I’ve got the worst hangover imaginable, and it’s not being helped by my shitty burps or my recorded voice droning on about touchy-feely relationship habits.

  The whole time I lie on the floor, hearing but not hearing as I flex my joints, as I begin to move my muscles. The ship rumbles and shakes. Its hull screeches.

  You think of love as dizzy electricity. You think if you aren’t in this heightened state, that the relationship is failing. This is a lie, an infection you contracted from popular music and fantasy reels, that doomed all your short romances in the academy, like with poor Sri. The bonded support you and Kodiak feel for each other isn’t about skin skin skin, though it’s related to that. It isn’t the heat of his body against yours at the bottom of the water tank. Instead, it’s the fact that you two are together at the bottom of the water tank.

  I wish I could shut off the words I’m telling myself. But I can’t see how to do that.

  I stagger up to my feet and manage to stay upright, nerves lighting up in my legs.

  There’s a figure in the doorway. “Ambrose?” he says.

  “You must be Kodiak,” I manage to say, before promptly throwing up.

  _-* Tasks Remaining: N/A *-_

  When I manage to open my eyes again, I don’t see Kodiak.

  Instead I see all this felty rusty plant growth. “What is this?” I ask OS. It’s like I’m lying in a field.

  “A simple multicellular organism that, like the plants of Earth, takes in carbon dioxide and produces oxygen through respiration. This one does so, notably, without chlorophyll or sunlight. Your predecessors took it on board twelve thousand years ago, and it has been thriving here ever since, despite Rover’s best attempts to weed it.”

  My eyes open wide as I look at the leaves before me. Alien leaves.

  Moving is agony, but I can’t stay still, not when I’m lying in some extraterrestrial meadow. I manage to get to my feet.

  “The alien plant is part of our trouble, actually,” OS continues. “It raised the oxygen concentration in the Coordinated Endeavor’s atmosphere to unstable levels. Oxygen is a free radical, corrosive to my wiring and dangerous to your own cells. It is also highly explosive in this proportion, greatly increasing our risks as we enter the exoplanet’s atmosphere. Already, the hull of the Coordinated Endeavor has many surface damages, any one of which could prove catastrophic during the stress of landing.”

  My thoughts refuse to knit. Am I on a beach, am I in the past or the future, am I alive only in my own mind? That’s the closest to what this feels like. My panicking brain tells me that I’m discovering what the moment of body death is like, that the neurochemistry of my mind is screaming nonsense into the dark until its electricity blinks out.

  I roll against a wall, sending crackles down my spine. “Minerva,” I try again.

  “Your sister has been dead for almost thirty thousand years,” my mother’s voice says flatly.

  My mouth opens and closes.

  “All humans are dead, except for you and Kodiak.”

  My gut took a little journey into my mouth before the ship started this latest screeching, but now it’s living there, stomach acid all I can taste and smell, steam all I see. I retch.

  “I am sorry,” OS says.

  I hurl vomit into the rusty moss coating the walls and floor, stagger forward a few paces before the moss reaches back up to stroke me as my vision goes black.

  _-* Tasks Remaining: N/A *-_

  “Brace! Brace!” comes my mother’s voice. I open my eyes to a new darkness: thick smoke, grays riddled with blacks. “My wiring is on fire. I do not know how much longer I can speak to you.”

  When I cough, the individual lines of pain from my feet connect. I’m a bright and bloody net of pulsating nerves. The ship rotates, sending me tumbling through the smoke as wall becomes ceiling becomes floor.

  I’m being pulled. Rover is yanking me somewhere.

  A horrible rending sound, and then the hull shakes, the walls increasing their spin. The smoke clears as a cold wind passes through the ship. Not the explosive torrent of an opened airlock, but the breeziness of a neglected room that’s gone crumbly around the windows.

  We have a draft.

  A spaceship should not have a draft.

  “OS!” I cry.

  There’s no reply. Lights click out, click on, click out. Rover releases me and scuttles elsewhere in the ship. The smoke clears enough that I can see my bunk. The last thing OS asked me to do was brace, so I should brace. I manage to drag myself onto my bed, to fit the restraining belt over my body. The ship’s lights are milky behind the polluted air. Even in the chaos of the moment, I notice that the belt is polycarb—it must have been reprinted on board. It, too, is covered in a layer of the rusty alien moss. The ship pitches, thrusting my body against the belt, stretching the material thin before I fall back against the bed.

  I spit out the stomach acid in my mouth. Smoke fills the air again, the stench a combination of burnt rubber and something indescribably primal. A sort of high-octane freezer burn.

  Then the wind is back, blowing through the ship. I gasp as fresh air hits my face.

  Contrails in the ship.

  A spaceship should not have contrails.

  It no longer pitches side to side—instead I’m pressed flat against the bunk, my lips drawing away from my teeth as the g-forces increase. Then it starts rotating, and I’m hurled against the restraint, against the wall, against the restraint, against the wall.

  My blood feels solid, entering my heart as a stream of bullets and leaving it just as violently. My veins balloon and collapse, balloon and collapse. Whether it’s from the pain or the pressure, my thoughts fragment, go to beaches and Minerva and the hulking stranger half glimpsed in the strobing emergency lights. Throughout it all are the voices of my mother and me and someone named Kodiak, all fighting for my attention.

  I dream of Titan, of descending toward black lakes of liquid methane, the only lights in the soupy atmosphere from the lamps of my craft—oddly enough, a submarine. Ambrose, the black lakes cry in Minerva’s voice. Race me to the point. Find me in here. Bring me home to you.

  When I blink awake again, the air is clear. Something that might be moonlight edges the ship’s surfaces in pearly tones. Walls rise around me unbroken, though the ceiling is gone. Gulping against the throbbing pain in my skull, I lean out from the bunk.

  The hallway leads not to the next chamber, but to stars. An astounding bath of lights, swirling through a twilight sky. Clouds wisp before them.

  Clouds. Atmosphere.

  We’ve crashed. We’ve crashed and the ship has opened like a nutshell.

  A breeze whistles through jagged edges. A speaker crackles.

  Is OS trying to talk to me? I look toward the sound.

  OS isn’t trying to talk to me. The crackling is a fire.

  It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen outside of a laboratory. A low green glow dances on the walls of the ship. It’s a faerie fire, but even so I can feel the heat wafting up from it. When the night breeze hits the flames, they rise to greet it, rippling up like a sheet unfurled over a bed. The composition of gases in this atmosphere must be different than Earth’s, to produce fire that looks like this.

  The alien moss is flaming. The flaming is spreading.

  Move, Ambrose!

  My hands flutter over th
e restraining belt, struggle to release the buckle. I frantically jab at the release, but it’s jammed. I yank at both stretches of polycarb, hoping to rip them. But if the restraint held during a crash landing, it’s not going to part under my puny arms. I force myself to pause.

  Think, Ambrose!

  I rest against the bunk. Now that the pressure against it is off, the release clicks open.

  Oh.

  I roll off, try to get to my feet and fail, instead tumbling across the floor. I get two hands onto the bunk’s surface and pull, managing to drag myself into a kneeling position.

  I’m already light-headed. My blood pressure must still be low. I’d better give up on standing.

  Instead I scramble toward the stars, the hallway bending in my vision and then straightening as I reach the ship’s torn lip. The orange portal dangles in the night air. Its edges are frayed, ringed in polycarbonate spikes. I gird myself, then leap between those teeth, into the night sky.

  My legs buckle, rolling me down a slick slope. I come to a stop, half in water—or not water, I soon realize, something goopier than water. I lie back, staring into the chill night sky and its unfamiliar stars. I will not pass out. Not on this unknown planet with its unknown dangers.

  There’s something like a smiling cat face in the sky, pointed ears and open mouth and teeth. It’s a constellation of stars, of new stars. The first myth of this new world. Hello, Sky Cat. I wrap my arms around my suit. It’s cold here—not instant-cell-damage cold, but I’ll need to get into warm clothing quickly.

  I soon discover the source of the light. It looks like a full moon, but it’s both too small and too bright. It’s a distant sun.

  At that pale distance it can’t be the sun this planet is orbiting, or I’d be frozen solid by now. The main sun must be on the other side of the planet, in its nighttime. We’ve landed on a binary solar system. Sagittarion Bb, the second “b” for its second sun. The myth grows. Sky Cat and its Two Star Pets.

  I rattle my head. “Kodiak?” I risk calling into the night.

  When there is no answer, I imagine alien predators lurking toward me, all the horror reels I’ve ever seen mashing together in my imagination. Tentacles and fangs and slimy embraces.