“What a good little hall monitor,” Kodiak calls. “I’ve managed to upload OS Prime. Which is why you probably haven’t heard anything from our old OS for a while.”
“Is that true, OS?” I call. No response.
I’d expected some dramatic OS death speech, how could you do this to me after my thousands of years of caring for you evil humans, that sort of thing. So much for spectacle. This is how an operating system dies: a hostile set of codegoes online, and thenfizz.
“Hey, Ambrose?” Kodiak says. “I’m getting a ‘main overflow exception 104’ message up here.”
“Shit,” I say. “Shit, shit.”
“What?”
“The file allocations are different for the two operating systems. Try to—no, that won’t work. Hold on, let me think.”
Everything I tell Kodiak to try fails. We can’t get OS Prime to set any new navigation coordinates. Whether it’s because there’s more to this wiring than we thought, or because regular OS heard us and set up safeguards to prevent us from steering the ship elsewhere, I don’t know. But I can’t find a way around it.
“At least Rover appears to be at full functioning capacity,” I say, flicking an empty food wrapper at it and watching it spark back at me. “That means this probably was a last-minute sabotage by OS. Asshole.”
“That’s the thing,” Kodiak calls. “I see very easily how I could disable the operating system entirely, including Rover. Then I could pilot the ship manually.”
“No way. No operating system, no life support.”
“Let’s think that through. Our air is sealed in here, and we can get the handlers up manually. We’d have to figure out what to do with our waste, but we’d come up with something. We know where Rover retrieves ourfood from. What has OS done for us, anyway, except slay us?”
It’s a pretty good point. “Seven times over, judging by the number of clone bodies remaining,” I add.
Rover clacks its electrical prods. I wonder what it feels like without OS, if it’s like a loyal pet whose owner hasn’t come home. If there’s some Rover version of fear and abandonment.
“Okay, do it,” I say.
“All right,” Kodiak calls. “Here goes. Three, two... one.”
Distant hums quiet. I look down the long hall of theEndeavoras lights tick off, rooms going dark, nearer and nearer, until... we’re left in blackness.
The lights. I didn’t think about that part. We’re in space in the dark.
“Kodiak?” I ask, my voice rising with fear. “Are we going to be in darkness forever?”
“Of course not. We’ll need heat, too, of course. I can start up control of those functions manually. But I just need to get my mind around the systems up here. In the meantime, it’s... cold. Could you bring me... a spacesuit?”
A spacesuit. The airlock is three rooms away. But I’ve memorized this ship, know it like I would know the route from my bed to the bathroom back at the Cusk Academy.
The route through the dark ship will take me right byRover, so I’m about to test just how incapacitated the ship’s systems are.
I step through the darkness. And... no electrocution. Awesome. I give Rover a light kick. It sighs in response.
Even the dripping water sound from deep in the ship slows to a stop. I’m really and truly hearing space now, indistinguishable from the blood in my veins. Then I’m off to theAurora.
I stop.
Especially with the ship’s lights off, the stars are dazzling. But it’s not just that.
They’re different stars.
The projections are gone, and instead the screens are windows, real windows. Milky spirals of light still wheel with the ship’s revolutions, but these swaths are entirely new. There are great towering nebulas, a nearby pair of stars, one blue and one white, background galaxies in spheres and swirls and scattered puddles. We’re still in the Milky Way, but closer to the edge.
I look for our sun, and find its rough location in the galaxy. I’m the first person to see our home from this far.
If you consider me a person.
