Chapter 5 #9
A cloud passes before the sun, momentarily shadowing my mother’s digitized face.
She looks left, where a figure approaches along the beach.
It’s Minerva, all legs and arms and swagger.
She stands next to my mom and looks at me, smiling, hand cocked on her hip, like a video game character.
“I found this old reel profile uplink Minerva created, where the whole point is to show off how good you look to your friends. Anyway, I figured you hadn’t seen it before, and might appreciate the reminder of who you’re heading to save.
Perhaps save. Lords willing. I’ll leave off here, darling, and wait for your response. I love you.”
I ask OS to start recording my answer right away, but the moment the red light is blinking, I blank.
My heart is spinning, and I’m not sure what feeling will be faceup when it lands.
Relief, resolve, wistfulness, hopelessness, helplessness, despair.
Whatever it is, I’m not ready to send my recorded-for-all-time emotions beaming across the solar system for billions of people on Earth to scrutinize.
Instead, I search through the ship’s memory for old reels of Minerva.
Once in a while, Mom had our surrogates pull her children from our automated schooling sessions to go on a trip.
We never had warning—when and where we could go depended on weather patterns and the crime map, both of which could change in a flash—but I remember one outing when my siblings and I suddenly left the walled city and headed to the mountains with an armed escort of warbots.
After so much time inside, being under an open sky felt like falling upward.
My siblings slunk back to the vehicle as soon as they could, hungry for the familiarity of their computer lessons, but I stayed on the mount with Minerva, hugging myself to her.
She pointed out the ruins of abandoned cities, the debris-clogged seashore that was once high land.
“Maybe we could have stopped this, maybe we could have held on to the species we’ve lost, maybe we could have prevented the polycarb seas. But it doesn’t matter now.”
While Minerva spoke, our warbot protector wheeled and pivoted, scanning for bandits.
It was bulletproof and heavily loaded, capable of 120 rounds a minute.
If it was restrained or captured, it would detonate, killing hundreds.
Thirty Cusk warbots on their own took back Egypt and ended the Third World War, and the Fourth World War was fought over who would control the warbots that eventually won World War Five.
Military contracts for warbots were the origin of my family’s wealth.
To this day, every warbot ships with “Cusk” printed across its murderous head.
They bear a healthy family resemblance to Rover.
Minerva pointed to the spaceport in the distance, to the Cusk walled compound. “That’s why Mom’s building the Endeavor. To bring a human crew beyond here, to exoplanets where humans might live if Earth becomes uninhabitable.”
“Exoplanets,” I said, savoring the word. “Those are far away, right?” I snaked my hand into hers and drew as close as I could. I can’t smell it in the reel, but she had a popular skin fragrance mod installed that year. Cannelle douce. Sweet cinnamon.
“Very far away. There are closer possibilities, like Saturn’s moon Titan, but the best places for people like us to live would take many thousands of years to reach.”
“That’s longer than you’d be alive.”
“And you, too,” she said. “We’re working on strategies to get around that, though.”
I didn’t say anything. Every kid knew that cryostasis was proving impossible—no one can reanimate a mammal that’s been killed, and turns out it’s impossible to be frozen without dying in the process.
The difficulties went beyond that, though.
No biosphere experiments had established that we could make a ship of any reasonable size that could host an ecosystem stable enough to grow food.
And no ship could launch with enough food for a human crew to survive on for thousands of years.
“In the meantime,” Minerva continued, “I think I might just go to Titan.”
I remember wanting to have something smart to say back to Minerva. I remember wanting her to admire me. But I was just a kid, so the best I could do was hug her. Five years later, and I’ve started thinking it’s the best any person can do in most situations.
“Actually, Ambrose, I am going to Titan. It’s going to be announced tomorrow. I wanted you to be the first to know, because you’ll be the one I’ll miss the most.”
“Minnie,” I said, hiding my tears by burying my face into her side. That was my name for her—I’d started when I was little, and was surprised she let me continue now that I was almost a teenager. “You can’t leave me.”
“I’ll be back for my little brother,” she whispered. “I promise you I’ll be back.”
“I know you will,” I murmured. “But I’ll miss you so much.”
She turned quiet, so I leaned back to see her face. I was shocked to find tears in her eyes, too. I’d never seen her sad. She held up her hand to shield me. “I’m scared, Ambrose.”
I put my hand over hers and lowered it, so I could see her tears. “You can do this. You can do anything.”
“I used to think that was true,” she said softly. “It’s nice to know you still believe it. Maybe we’ll have to think of this as my getting that moon warmed up for you to come join me in a few years.”
I’d laughed at the time, but I guess her words had something to them after all. Because here I am, halfway to Titan.
_-* Tasks Remaining: 330 *-_
Out of what’s probably some deep emotional dependency of mine that I’d rather not mull on, I play through that memory reel every few hours as the days go by.
Minerva and I have that conversation in my bedroom, and while I’m eating breakfast. I start playing with the rendering, so that we have that conversation in parkas, in bathing suits. We have it as merfolk and as vampires.
“I need you to accelerate your progress on the task list,” OS says one morning.
“Yes, yes. You don’t need to remind me,” I say. I start putting my violin away, loosening the bow and removing the shoulder rest.
“Perhaps you consider these tasks beneath you?”
That one stings. How many times in training did I hear Oh, you turning your nose up at us, Ambrose the Great? Maybe I never was Ambrose the Great. Maybe I was just Ambrose the Privileged. What can I say? I guess I’m having some sort of outer space crisis.
“Watch your tone,” I tell OS after I bite down some less diplomatic responses.
“I guess inspecting thermoregulation log lines feels like it’s not doing a thing to help Minerva, so it’s hard to work up the energy.
” I don’t add that I feel bad about that, too, and that the ensuing depression spiral always gets me mooning about and watching whatever semipornographic reels I can find in the ship’s memory.
“I appreciate your self-awareness,” OS says. “Now go take that cake of silicone wax and lubricate the med bay door instead of your genitalia.”
“Ooh, sexy,” I tell OS. “What’s next on the list? Caressing the ship’s ball bearings?”
“Cleaning and replacing the air filtration gaskets, actually,” Mom’s voice says. “Get going, Ambrose. This list isn’t getting any shorter.”
That voice skin is my peace offering to Kodiak. OS’s Devon Mujaba days are officially over.
_-* Tasks Remaining: 279 *-_
I’m not making much headway on the med bay door, and nothing else on the list is particularly appealing, either.
How did the ship’s engineers screw up this much?
There are six Rovers in total, and once I finish with the gaskets I’ll be tasked with getting the other five back online.
At the thought of my endless debugging list I find myself on my back, staring at the ceiling.
I feel like I can do nothing that will help Minerva, and “learned helplessness” is most biologists’ definition of depression.
Mother’s voice cuts into my stupor. “Ambrose, this is urgent.”
My blood suddenly surges through my veins, setting my vision winking with crystals. I stagger to my feet. “What is it?”
“Minerva. There’s a transmission from Minerva.”
_-* Tasks Remaining: 279 *-_
I stand in 06, heart pounding, while OS compiles the transmission. A little green bar, with no units on it, slowly fills in midair. Could be terabytes of data, could be megabytes. An uncharacteristically sloppy display. “Come on, come on,” I say.
The green bar fills and fills.
“Is Kodiak on his way?” I ask OS. There’s no time for an answer, though, because the green bar suddenly completes.
A grainy, half-imaged Minerva is before me.
Her jumpsuit is ragged, the arms emerging from it thin and rangy when once they were strong.
But the determined expression is definitely hers.
The image cuts out entirely, then returns.
I can see, dimly in the background, the polycarb-printed walls of the Titan habitat.
“I have only seconds until this last battery goes. Ambrose, please hurry. I need your help. I’ve rigged—” The transmission cuts out entirely.
I hang there in the darkness, staring out at the revolving stars.
Then she’s back. “—the ship, Ambrose! The wear on the ship is too great on the approach, more than mission control predicted. You must finish OS’s tasks as soon as you can.
Any defect, like . . . in the old shuttles, will lead to catastrophe.
The ship must be . . . pristine to survive the friction and heat.
My brother, I love you, there is no one better to—”
The transmission cuts out. I hang in the stillness, not daring to breathe, waiting for Minerva to return.
“There is no more incoming data to process,” OS says finally. “I will let you know the moment anything more comes in.”
“Play this transmission over,” I order, hands over my mouth, tears streaming from unblinking eyes.