Your original learned in childhood what attraction leads to, and that love is a loss of power. These lessons hold more influence than you think they do, and you understand them less than you should. You prefer the emotional patterns you know, and these were set at the orphanage for Kodiak, with your Cusk siblings and caretakers for you.
Ambrose, “first sight” love is when you meet someone who accords with your childhood lessons, learned from your parents, of what you think love should look like. What did our mother teach us? Who kept her son but sent his clones off to live a season at a time with a stranger, with no thought to their suffering? Who felt her and Ambrose’s legacy was worth putting so many copies of him through this torture?
Kodiak does not match the models you learned as a child, and you don’t match his. But that seemingly natural sense of “fitting together” is a construction. The love Kodiak and I share in this lifetime is proof of it.
From this and other scattered thoughts in my voice, I learn that this “Kodiak” person is also on the ship. He’s been on the ship along with... some version of me. I test my muscles, ready to run or fight.
Kodiak is waking up right now, too. His voice is tellinghim the same information. In its own Kodiak way, of course.
Why the hell should I care about this? And why is my voice outside my head, saying things I have no memory of thinking? Unless it’s just a voice skin, like my mother’s.
I sit up, swing my legs around. Bad idea. I shout and fall back against the gurney.
My voice returns.If you’re awake now, it’s because you’re the last of our kind. We have prepared theCoordinated Endeavorfor you. You are our destiny.
“Minerva, where’s Minerva?” I gasp.
This is not an intelligence speaking to you, but a recording. OS will come back on in a few moments, with our mother’s voice. It isn’t Mother, though strangely enough I know OS better now than I ever knew the woman who birthed us. Or birthed the original Ambrose, I should say. I’m the Ambrose from something like twelve thousand years ago. If you are lucky enough to wake up, it means OS managed to pilot theCoordinated Endeavorthrough twelve thousand years of travel through deep space, without recourse to human pilots or engineers. Through a notably empty part of the galaxy, but even so it’s unlikely that you’ve made it. If you’re alive, you owe OS your life. Your goals are now aligned. You will know the truth of the mission. You will have a different relationship with the ship than any of us have had so far.
My brain skitters over these words. I tumble from the gurney, all my nerves lighting up as I do. When I brace myself to get back to my feet my hands contact... moss? The floor is covered with a rust-coloredmoss.
My mother’s voice. “Ambrose. I need you to pilot as soon as you can. But remain still for now. Your blood pressure is too low. I’ll let you know when you can safely move about.”
“Mom? Where are you?” I ask. My voice sounds like a sob. Maybe it is a sob. I want to turn my head, want to see my mother. My belly drops. My head cannot turn. I thought I was in front of my mother’s bedroom, then on a beach, then I was on a ship, and now I’m on a strange forest floor.
The walls are covered in the same rust-colored moss. Tendrils and runners of a soft plant coat each surface. The air smells heavy with nitrogen, like a greenhouse.
“Why was my voice speaking to me earlier?”
My mother—my OS—needs no time to think. Her words begin before mine end. “That was recorded many thousands of years ago. Those words will be helpful to you and can be repeated at will once this crisis is past. I will explain everything I can, but we don’t have time right now. I will ask you to draw on the qualities that led the Cusk Corporation to approve you for this mission. Accept what you cannot know, and work without knowing exactly why.”
Really? That’s why I was chosen?
A hemisphere of a robot ticks into the chamber, a brown pellet in its viselike arm.
“This is for you,” my mother’s voice says. “Eat it. Then we need to get to work. The exoplanet is near.”
_-* Tasks Remaining: N/A *-_
It’s like I’ve got the worst hangover imaginable, and it’s not being helped by my shitty burps or my recorded voice droning on about touchy-feely relationship habits.
The whole time I lie on the floor, hearing but not hearing as I flex my joints, as I begin to move my muscles. The ship rumbles and shakes. Its hull screeches.
You think of love as dizzy electricity. You think if you aren’t in this heightened state, that the relationship is failing. This is a lie, an infection you contracted from popular music and fantasy reels, that doomed all your short romances in the academy, like with poor Sri. The bonded support you and Kodiak feel for each other isn’t about skin skin skin, though it’s related to that. It isn’t the heat of his body against yours at the bottom of the water tank. Instead, it’s the fact that you two are together at the bottom of the water tank.
I wish I could shut off the words I’m telling myself. But Ican’t see how to do that.
I stagger up to my feet and manage to stay upright, nerves lighting up in my legs.
There’s a figure in the doorway. “Ambrose?” he says.
“You must be Kodiak,” I manage to say, before promptly throwing up.
_-* Tasks Remaining: N/A *-_
When I manage to open my eyes again, I don’t see Kodiak.
Instead I see all this felty rusty plant growth. “What is this?” I ask OS. It’s like I’m lying in a field.
