Kodiak gets to his feet, knotting the blanket around his waist just before it falls away. I look up at him, my own breathing quickening. I ease to my feet, hands open. “It’s okay,” I whisper.
He sways from side to side. Just like Rover.
Kodiak picks up the screwdriver, looks at it, then releases his grip. It clatters to the floor.
I place my hand on his shoulder and nod. “Why don’t you take a rest? Just rest. There’s no rush for anything. Besides, I have something to tell you. Something you’ll like to hear.”
Kodiak allows me to guide him toward my sleeping room. I can’t think of anything else to do with him; getting Kodiak to bed seems like the best cure for his strange glassiness. Maybe when he wakes up, this dark desperation will be gone.
He accepts my bed, snaking his arms under my pillow and shutting his eyes. His face softens.
“Are you ready to hear it?” I ask.
But he’s asleep.
“OS,” I say, “lights out.” OS makes it happen.
I pad my way to 06, with the largest window—screen?—that shows me the image of outer space that I think I recognize. I name familiar constellations, same as I might see on Earth. Why shouldn’t this be the honest view? If it would mean I could live my life in peace, why can’t I just choose to believe what I see and what I’ve been told and be done with it? I’m rescuing Minerva. Done. My life can have a purpose that makes sense to me. Done. I’m not building to some abstract better future that I’ll never get to enjoy. Done.
I don’t need Kodiak’s sort of clarity, not when seeing clearly also means dying.
I don’t know if believing in a planet for our future selves will be enough to convince Kodiak to accept the ruse we’re living in—if that’s what it is. Maybe the model of my own calm presence, of my own acceptance, will eventually be enough. As Minerva said in her departure speech, broadcast live to both Fédération and Dimokratía:We are meant to be extraordinary. Take hope from our example.
I tent a hand against the stars on the screen, five pads touching five points of light that have traveled eons from their various different histories to strike this window at this precise instant. Five moments in time, five places. I know that this is true, even as I know that it is untrue, that I’mtouching pixels OS has placed. Maybe my heart can be a more insightful organ than my brain.
Your heart is only good for pumping your blood,says my brain.I am the source of both what you feel and what you think.
Insanity used to be a stranger that lived on the other side of the world. Now it’s moved next door. It’s only a matter of time until it becomes shipmate, lover, self.
I trance, my focus skipping far off into the cosmos. Maybe I’ll never eat or drink again. Maybe I will be forever disembodied.
Maybe I’m fooling myself.
I stop wallowing and open up the audio file on the pinup video of the Dimokratía soldier, the one that alerted me to my supposed reality. I add a new chapter to the recording, so the next me will know more about himself—and about Kodiak. I decide that I’ll do this every day, so our lives can build even as they restart, so that each version of us will have a better chance at happiness than the one before.
There’s a rustling sound from my sleeping quarters. I imagine Kodiak rousing, finding himself in my bed, testing his painful welts where he was electrocuted. Getting to his feet. Foraging himself something to eat and something to drink.
I hear the orange portal open. I ready myself for the sound of it shutting, but it doesn’t. As a safety precaution,we’ve been keeping the passageway between the two ships closed. Has Kodiak been absentminded, or has he left it open because he wants me to follow?
Maybe he’s disoriented. Maybe he’s confused and scared. I pad quietly toward theAurora, instinct keeping my steps as quiet as possible.
He’s ahead of me in the zero g, flying forward, still wrapped in my sheet. It billows around him, making him look like a phantasm. I speed up, soaring after him.
I lose track of him once he heads into theAurora. I creep through the blind room. He’s not in his eating and sleeping rooms, either. Only a few rooms left where he could be.
I hear whistling from the airlock.
“Kodiak?”
The song is tuneful and melancholy, some Dimokratía folk ballad that I’ve never heard before. I tiptoe forward.
“Kodiak?”
He’s before the small round window, looking out at the stars, or the images of stars, or maybe the darkness between the images of stars. When he hears me enter, he turns to look at me, then returns to staring into the porthole. “Kodiak? You okay?”
He opens his stance toward me. That’s when I see there’s a wrench in his hand.
I’m about to ask him to put it down when he rears backand strikes the porthole.
