I’m waiting for Kodiak in his workshop, wearing—deliciously enough—one of his jumpsuits. The sleeves hang to the middle of my fingers. We have only dry clothes shampoo on the ship, so this shirt smells perfectly clean and also like months of built-up Kodiak scent, of engines and sweat and lemongrass and bleach. I’m draped in the deepest and freshest version of him.
I run Kodiak’s soft shirt collar over my cheek while I wait for him in the blind room, then drop it as I hear him approach.
“Are you ready for this?” he asks, powering up the receiver.
My heart surges for reasons beyond radio transmissions, but before I can figure out just what I’m feeling, what I discovered about my feelings for him as I watched him spacewalk, he’s sitting cross-legged on the floor again, knees against mine, in his matching Dimokratía jumpsuit. I puton my headphones while Kodiak works the makeshift dial.
While he tours the static, I lay myself down, feet flat on the floor, staring at the pinpoints of old light swirling outside the window. I tug at Kodiak so he’ll come beside me, but he bats my hand away, focused on the dial.
Static in and static out. He hovers over the knob.
A clear signal.
Kodiak darts his hand away, like the knob has burned him.
“—to our retro radio hour, where the holos are down and the screens are black. Pull out your old Amérique du Nord chair, split a coconut, and swirl some milk into your yerba mate. I’m your host, Ibu Putu. Remember, our intelligence might be low, but at least it’s not artificial.”
Over the sounds of banjo, the host goes on to describe where they’re broadcasting from—something they call the Isotope-Free Zone, which is no name I’ve ever heard before. Their accent is unusual, too. It sounds like some distant form of Portuguese that I’ve never encountered in any reel.
I kind of like the music and start bopping my head. Kodiak shakes his chin severely, though he’s smiling in his eyes.
“Up next, news relayed across Isotope Alley to our international headquarters in Ubud.”
Kodiak and I lean in while the transmission turns to static. It cuts back in. “—has been at the forefront of thearchiving movement, and before the most recent conflict was accumulating empirical evidence of strikes to someday bring against Fédération in war crime proceedings, for launching the volley that many consider to be the trigger for Disassemblement, the Isotope Alleys, and our eventual fracture. How has that work been going?”
Another voice laughs. “Not so well, Ibu, as you can imagine. That work was begun under the assumption that Fédération would somehow reassemble and could therefore be held accountable. But the capitals and the thousands of miles around them were worst hit and are right in the middle of Isotope Alley. It’s hard to throw a punch at a ghost.”
“Well said and thank you, Anuk. Stay rad-free.”
“Stay rad-free, Ibu. Thank you for having me on.”
“This concludes our broadcast for today, Tuesday, March twenty-seventh, in the year 142 of this era of Uranium, 2615 Common Era.” I whip the headset off, reeling. That’s impossible. It’s more than 140 years into the future. We’d be dead. Then my surging heart calms. It’s just a transmission. It might be a joke. Kodiak hasn’t removed his headset. Not wanting to miss out, I put mine back on. “This recording, like all previous, will be archived and kept on record in our headquarters. Good evening, or morning, or whatever the sky looks like in your spot in the alley. This broadcast will revert to music, AI’s choice, until we begin tomorrow’s transmission.”
The radio switches to choral classical music.
Kodiak removes his headphones and lets them hang around his shoulders. When he unplugs our sets, the sound leaks out of the tinny speaker instead. I remove my headphones, stomach knotting even as my brain spins.
I feel what I’m coming to recognize as space vertigo, when the universe spins out from under me. I have to say something, to prove we still exist together. “I think that’s Brahms the radio AI’s playing,” I say.
Kodiak rests his forehead against his knees.
I try again. “A German Requiem. I think.”
“I don’t care whose fucking requiem it is,” Kodiak says, punching the floor.
“Why are you angry?” I ask. My voice speeds up as I wait for him to look at me again. “I honestly can’t make any sense at all out of what we just heard. We’re not going nearly fast enough for time to bend—that’s the stuff of reels. It’s some prank or a glitch.”
Kodiak punches the floor again, fists bloodless and gray. He doesn’t want to talk. But I need to. He’ll have to bend to my needs this time. “Don’t take anything to heart until we understand more,” I prattle on. “Could it be that the OS is playing with us? Maybe it made up that transmission to punish us for trying to get our own communication relay up?”
“Leave,” Kodiak says.
I place my hand on the nape of his neck. “What do you mean, ‘leave’?”
“What the hell do youthinkI mean?” he says, knocking my hand away.
He needs space. Okay. Space he will get. I rise to my feet. “Take some time to yourself. But come to dinner. Please.”
As I back out of the blind room and make my way to my side of the ship, I pause in the zero-g center. This freewheeling weightlessness is dangerous to the human body. It deteriorates our corneas, drains our muscles, leaches calcium out of bones that no longer bear loads. But all I want right now is to feel weightless, directionless, free-floating, doomed. This feels honest. I set myself spinning, tucking my knees in so I spin even faster.
