Kodiak looks at me darkly.Weird tack.
He’s not wrong. “Put my mother on,” I say.
Kodiak rolls his eyes. We wait the long minutes for mission control’s response.
“She is not present. She did record a personal reel for you in the event we came back into contact. It is currently uploading to your ship. Unfortunately, we have no new information from the Titan base.”
Not for the first time, I imagine Minerva frozen in a methane lake, Minerva poisoned by bad air and clutching the sky, Minerva driven insane and slitting her veins. I steel myself. “Understood.”
“No one’s meant to live forever,” Kodiak says huskily.
I glare at him.
“Spacefarer Celius, you have numerous Dimokratía transmissions recorded and encrypted using your memorized prime number. TheCoordinated Endeavor’s operatingsystem will transfer them to your secure data centers. There are no personal messages.”
“Okay,” Kodiak says quickly. “Mission control, please also upload the news since our departure.”
There’s only static in return.
“OS,” I ask. “Have we lost signal with mission control?”
“Yes. There was an unexpected flare from the sun.”
“Allflares are unexpected,” Kodiak grumbles.
“Do you expect to get signal back soon?” I ask.
“That is hard to calculate.”
I lock eyes with Kodiak, measuring his doubt while I speak to OS. “Will you repeat Kodiak’s request for news in the meantime?”
“I will,” the ship responds. “However, it is against the Cusk Corporation’s policy for me to update you personally on Earth’s political situation.”
Kodiak nods. “They want to tell us any updates themselves, in case it’s bad news.”
Our conversation with mission control feels like it was deliberately cut short. My reasoning brain tells me I’m just experiencing isolation paranoia, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to trip OS up.
“OS,” I say, “as soon as connection is restored, request that mission control send me updates on what my mother has done with the porcelain pig, rosin cake, and tapestry fragments I gave her. Also, please tell me what ProfessorCalderon’s response was to my final essay in his queerness and nation-building seminar.”
“I will transmit these unusual requests,” OS says after a micropause.
I pull my chair close to Kodiak, so our knees are almost touching. He smells like bleach and sweat. “I want to check—”
He puts his hand up sharply to stop me.Don’t say anything else in front of OS.
“I’m off to listen to my uploads,” he says.
“Meet me again afterward,” I tell him.
The only response is the padding of his bare feet against the floor as he returns to his half of the ship.
_-* Tasks Remaining: 336 *-_
I set the downloaded reel to play in my bedroom, sitting on the bunk and clutching my pillow while the three-dimensional representation of my mother appears.
There’s a reason she was the initial voice of the ship’s AI—she’s the one who funded this all. During the twenty-first century, space innovation moved from state-sponsored to private ventures, and the trend continued into the present era, when suborbital quinceañeras have become a thing.Once corporations got involved, there was moon travel, weekend sightseeing orbits, and space station vacations. Cusk has been leading the astrotech industry for generations. I’ve always been well aware we were rich, that we were among the few people who could afford high land, that our wealth let me grow up in a walled compound safe from the massive migrations of the starving, from the plagues and superstorms, from droughts and floods and epidemics and radioactive winds.
Once my mother’s reel has loaded, sound projects from the corners of the room, and suddenly I’m back on Earth, outside Mari. There’s a yellow luster to the air, seagulls wheeling in a sky that looks real enough to make me worry about getting pooped on. The temperature in the room doesn’t change—the holotech isn’tthatrealistic—but the light makes me unzip the top of my suit and fold it down, expose my skin to imaginary sunshine.
