I blearily peer up to see that Kodiak’s shut his eyes, his jaw clenched.
“What, were you embarrassed about it?” I ask. “Even though the very same thing happened to me? Don’t you think this is information you should have shared?”
“I shared it with OS,” Kodiak says. “At the beginning of this voyage, I thought OS was the one I could trust, and that you were not. This dynamic has recently changed. In any case, I don’t think we need to agonize over what’s already happened.” His hands go limp as he says the last words, and I realize he’s performing the part of an effeminate man, showing how very weak “agonizing” would be. Sweet lords. Dimokratíans. Are. The worst.
Even though anger is rising in me, I know I have to becareful. Even if just for my own survival, I need Kodiak to keep communicating with me. I speak carefully. “We were both knocked out at the beginning of the ship’s launch. Now we’re awake and on board and healthy. No matter what the cause of the injury, it seems unlikely that any impact would knock the two of us out without leaving evidence. Broken bones or bruises.”
Kodiak pulls down the collar of his shirt to show me a red radiation lesion riding his neck muscles. “I have half a dozen of these,” he says, shame in his voice. “But yes, I am otherwise healthy.”
“I’ve got some of those, too,” I say, turning and pulling down the collar of my jumpsuit, so he can see the most vivid welt, a bright red cashew between my shoulders. “It would take a terrible wound to bend that metal and leave that much blood, but I have no memory of it, and I don’t seem to have any scars. So we have to keep exploring what is going on. Maybe the oxygen levels were off at the beginning of the voyage, and that’s why we passed out. An air leak was the emergency we both woke up to, after all.”
I hear a whir, and then Rover appears at the lip of the room, robotic arms waving like anemones. OS’s voice comes on. “This is not a fruitful line of inquiry at the moment, and there is much maintenance still to do to keep up the integrity of theCoordinated Endeavor. Minerva’s warning couldn’t have been clearer. I suggest you switch your effortsback to your list of tasks.”
Kodiak closes the door inAuroraRover’s face. “We get it. You don’t want us sharing information.”
I beckon Kodiak to kneel next to me. I’m pretty sure there’s no masking anything we say from OS, no matter how quietly we whisper. The ship uses audio to keep track of ourpulse—there’s no hiding any words. But here I go, trying anyway. “I’m going to create a blind room,” I say. “No Rover tracks, no microphones or cameras. Then we can continue this conversation. Once I do that, we’ll figure out the truth of what’s going on here. Until then, it’s safest that we perform the part of good little spacefarers.”
Kodiak nods. “If OS wants us to do maintenance, we do maintenance.”
I wink back. Though Kodiak’s eyes twinkle, the set of his mouth is grim. “OS is an adaptive, sensitive intelligence,” I continue. “Creating a blind room will be like creating a blank space within its very body. We have no idea how it will react.”
“Keeping a big foundational secret. Isn’t that precisely what OS has done with us?” Kodiak bites his lip in frustration. Its red color dims before flaring back, and I’m temporarily transfixed. To kiss that lip.
“Someonehas kept a secret from us,” I whisper back. “It could be OS. It could be mission control. It could be something else entirely. Minerva herself, I don’t know.”
“You’re being too anxious,” Kodiak says, rocking back on his heels to sit heavily on the floor. “The OS will be okay.”
“Kodiak,” I say, smiling despite myself. “If I’m not mistaken, I’d almost say that you’re showing the tiniest bit of self-doubt right now.”
He takes to rubbing his feet, sealed in paper-thin space booties. I wonder what solace it would give me—us?—to take one of those feet into my lap, to tug off the covering, to press my thumbs into a sole and watch relief and pleasure transform Kodiak’s scowl.
“What are you thinking about?” Kodiak asks.
“What we should do next.”
“I’d like to do some more in-depth analysis of the blood sample,” Kodiak whispers. “To try to independently confirm that the blood is yours, and see if I can figure out how old the sample is. Meanwhile, you should set up this blind room. I’m thinking we use this one, so we can keep any laboratory work we’re doing private. I’m sure Dimokratía mission control is more paranoid about outside influence than your Fédération leaders. You will probably find some quick shortcuts to get this room off the ship’s grid.”
“I’ll engineer us our blind room, never fear,” I say. “Now it’s time to ‘man up,’ as you’d say.” I push myself to my feet and dust my hands. “What an awful expression. Can someone ‘woman up,’ too, or is that against the law in Dimokratía?”
Kodiak snorts again. “That is funny. I am glad to see you’ve gotten over your self-pity.”
“Oh, you haven’t seen the faintest beginnings of my self-pity,” I say. “That is a well that goes very deep.”
“You are giving me much to look forward to,” Kodiak says, cracking his knuckles as he stands. The portal reopens. Rover is directly on the other side of it, arms waving. It makes me think of a spider I once put a pillow over, how it sprang into action the instant I freed it hours later.
“First thing we have to do is get independent control of these doors,” I say as I start rummaging through Kodiak’s cabinets, to see what supplies I have to work with. OS can hear what I’m saying, of course, but what other option do we have? “I think that means setting up a shell to operate within the larger computer, running systems in parallel, with the ability to shift between the native OS and the shell one, in case of a life-support crisis that the shell can’t handle.” I start digidrawing diagrams in the air, saving the renderings to a local bracelet file. “Maybe I could even make the shell physically independent, a portable unit that I wire in, so I could remove it by hand as needed, in case OS tries to destroy its own code—”
“Yes, okay,” Kodiak interrupts. “And while you’re doing that I’ll run a more comprehensive test on the dried blood. As that’s running—it will take an hour or so, with our limited offline processing power—I’ll disable Rover’s tracks inthe walls of this room. And search for cameras and lice.”
I startle, then remember from a movie reel I once saw that Dimokratíans call microphones lice. “I’m a little worried that OS will block the tests,” I whisper, bringing my lips as close as I can to Kodiak’s ear, to maximize the chance that OS can’t hear me. My cheek brushes his lobe.
“This is a mission with all sorts of possible endings once we reach the Titan base,” Kodiak says. He doesn’t withdraw, his ear still grazing my cheek. “Mission control has known from the start that we might need to make the ship perform all sorts of tasks they couldn’t predict. Giving us permission to act freely is hardwired into the operating system. I predict that OS will not start blocking us. If itdoesblock us, we’ve entered a whole new level of danger. We can’t exactly pick up and move somewhere else, can we? I honestly think we might be safer if OS knows what we’re up to, so we don’t surprise it.”
I return to the console, to my own mysterious blood match on the screen.
“The sample’s still installed, so you just trigger the more comprehensive analysis on the console,” Kodiak says.
“This menu looks very familiar,” I say as I tap away. “Did Dimokratía steal this software?”
