“There won’tbean OS when they wake up,” Kodiak says. He lets out a long sigh, ending in a whimper.
I fetch an empty food wrapper, in case he needs to throw up. “If we die with the ship offline, all our clones are doomed, too,” I say. “So is the Cusk mission, whatever it is.”
“Fuck the mission. Fuck the clones. Humanity is a blight. Why should we spread it any further?”
“Kodiak, if you’re insisting on doing all the nav-ing inan unshielded portion of the ship, you won’t be the one choosing whether to bring OS back online. I’ll be making that decision alone.”
He lets out a shuddering breath.
I pull his hand tight to my chest. “The least we can do is be as honest as possible. To give each other the kind of truth our governments never offered us. That my mother never offered.”
“Maybe I should pilot us right into one of those asteroids,” Kodiak says, joining his other hand with the first so they trace a butterfly under my shirt, over my narrow chest.
“Maybe you should,” I say. But he won’t. The heart beating in the fragile ribs under his hands knows otherwise.
While Kodiak is holed up in the ship’s guts, I set up a proper camp below. I give up all pretense of professional cleanliness and shoot for full-on comfort instead, the room quickly turning into a jumble of blankets and food packets. I bring along my violin, after I fabricate a new bridge using the portaprinter. I pass the shards of the old bridge up to Kodiak to keep in his pocket, since I know how much he’s comforted by the feel of what was once a tree.
The new polycarb bridge is not as resonant as the old one, so it sounds like I have a practice mute on. But the violin will play. I do scales for a few minutes and then stop, not sure what to perform next.
“Keep going!” Kodiak calls.
The last concertos I learned—or I guess I should say, that the old me learned and were nanoteched into my memory—were the Prokofiev and Mendelssohn. With OS offline I don’t have access to new sheet music, so I play those on repeat. I’m a little pitchy. Kodiak doesn’t seem to mind.
Whenever he takes his breaks from piloting, Kodiak and I head to 06 to stare into the new field of stars. His nausea stops him from ever feeling too sexy, but all the same we can’t keep our hands off each other. Not in a hot-and-heavy sort of way, but more like an old couple who have kind of merged. My favorite position is where I’m sitting on the desk and he’s standing in front of me, so I can wrap my arms around his waist and rest my chin on his shoulder while we stare out.
“Stars are what made me dedicate my life to training,” he says. “It’s amazing to see new ones.”
I decide against leaving a physical letter. That would be too easy for OS to destroy. Instead, when Kodiak goes back to piloting, I start recording an old-fashioned audio file on my bracelet. I’ll add segments of video, too. Whatever I record I’llcopy to a hundred places all over the ship, using a variety of codecs and password locks so that OS will really have to work to delete it all. Granted, it’s got thousands of years until it wakes the next set of us, so maybe it will manage it.
Just in case I succeed in passing it along, though, I’m going to tell our story. For us.
I’m not sure I’ve even done this before. Written for myself. I wasn’t ever really the journaling type, though mission control always planned for me to keep a log of our trip. Seeing as there’s no evidence of a log by previous clones, I guess that was for my own psychological good rather than any need for posterity.
I don’t start at the beginning. I start with the most important stuff and keep on repeating it, like a siren. It’s not like OS is going to delete just bits and pieces of the log if it finds it. I guess I want to capture the blare of the thoughts in my own mind.
You are a copy.
Minerva Cusk died right after she landed on Titan. There was no distress beacon.
You are headed somewhere far from Earth, but OS is blocked from telling you where.
Unless you are the final clones, you will die on your voyage.
Kodiak Celius has been trained all his life to be unfeeling, but inside is a tender human yearning for love. Justlike you. You can provide that love to each other.
Fédération and Dimokratía are gone. Everyone you’ve ever known is gone.
OS will kill you, or space will.
Within those two laws of your existence, the life you carve out is your own.
Do not isolate yourself. Do not allow Kodiak to isolate himself.
I know it’s going to be a brutal recording to hear. Poor next clone Ambrose, with pins and needles in his body and having to eat poo administered by Rover and Earth in the rearview and then this whammy of an update piped into his ears. I thread the doc with all sorts of memories that were saved into my synapses, so that the next Ambrose will know this message came from his brain. Or at least a copy of his brain.
“Hey, scrumpkin,” I call up to Kodiak.
“‘Scrumpkin,’” he says back. “Wow. I thought you’d run out of ways to embarrass me, but then here you go.”
