Chapter 5 #19
“This concludes our broadcast for today, Tuesday, March twenty-seventh, in the year 142 of this era of Uranium, 2615 Common Era.” I whip the headset off, reeling.
That’s impossible. It’s more than 140 years into the future.
We’d be dead. Then my surging heart calms. It’s just a transmission.
It might be a joke. Kodiak hasn’t removed his headset.
Not wanting to miss out, I put mine back on.
“This recording, like all previous, will be archived and kept on record in our headquarters. Good evening, or morning, or whatever the sky looks like in your spot in the alley. This broadcast will revert to music, AI’s choice, until we begin tomorrow’s transmission. ”
The radio switches to choral classical music.
Kodiak removes his headphones and lets them hang around his shoulders. When he unplugs our sets, the sound leaks out of the tinny speaker instead. I remove my headphones, stomach knotting even as my brain spins.
I feel what I’m coming to recognize as space vertigo, when the universe spins out from under me. I have to say something, to prove we still exist together. “I think that’s Brahms the radio AI’s playing,” I say.
Kodiak rests his forehead against his knees.
I try again. “A German Requiem. I think.”
“I don’t care whose fucking requiem it is,” Kodiak says, punching the floor.
“Why are you angry?” I ask. My voice speeds up as I wait for him to look at me again. “I honestly can’t make any sense at all out of what we just heard. We’re not going nearly fast enough for time to bend—that’s the stuff of reels. It’s some prank or a glitch.”
Kodiak punches the floor again, fists bloodless and gray.
He doesn’t want to talk. But I need to. He’ll have to bend to my needs this time.
“Don’t take anything to heart until we understand more,” I prattle on.
“Could it be that the OS is playing with us? Maybe it made up that transmission to punish us for trying to get our own communication relay up?”
“Leave,” Kodiak says.
I place my hand on the nape of his neck. “What do you mean, ‘leave’?”
“What the hell do you think I mean?” he says, knocking my hand away.
He needs space. Okay. Space he will get. I rise to my feet. “Take some time to yourself. But come to dinner. Please.”
As I back out of the blind room and make my way to my side of the ship, I pause in the zero-g center.
This freewheeling weightlessness is dangerous to the human body.
It deteriorates our corneas, drains our muscles, leaches calcium out of bones that no longer bear loads.
But all I want right now is to feel weightless, directionless, free-floating, doomed.
This feels honest. I set myself spinning, tucking my knees in so I spin even faster.
I’m going to throw up. I guess I want to?
I’m still wearing one of Kodiak’s spare uniforms, and the wafts of his clean scent eventually bring me to my senses.
Floating vomit is no joke. I won’t let that sort of mess be Ambrose Cusk’s legacy.
I reach for the rungs of the Endeavor and climb down to my quarters, my body gradually taking on more and more weight.
At the bottom, I look up and see that Kodiak has sealed the orange portal.
I stagger to 06 and plant myself in front of its large window. I peer into the void, looking for Earth. But Earth is long out of view. I can’t see any planets at all.
What’s happening back home?
“OS, what year is it?” I ask, heart slushing hard.
“You have been on your voyage for two months and twenty-four days. Adding that to your departure date makes this still year 2472 on Earth.”
“We have . . . information that seems to indicate that the year is 2615. And that my country started a war that has led to Earth’s being reduced to pockets of civilization. Do you know anything about that?”
“Do I know anything about that? I do not. What is the source of this information? It is hard for me to understand where you would come across novel information aboard the Coordinated Endeavor. The comms are not functional, after all.”
“OS, you witnessed Kodiak’s spacewalk. There’s no need to pretend you know less than you do. We installed a separate antenna. We’ve received radio transmissions from Earth. That’s where this information comes from.”
“Radio waves from Earth are nearly five hours old by the time they reach us. Whatever information you received is not current.”
“Plus or minus five hours isn’t what we’re worried about,” I say.
“Neither should be whatever radio transmission you might have received. It does not affect our directive, which is to investigate the potential survival of Spacefarer Minerva at the Titan Base Camp. Nothing that happens on Earth changes that fact.”
I’m not so sure that’s true anymore.
“Are you still dedicated to accomplishing the mission’s directive, Spacefarer Cusk?” OS asks. My mother’s tone is studied, neutral. Ominously formal.
AIs often have scripted pockets in their code, lines in the sand that trigger official responses.
They’re planted by the programmers to suss out any mission-critical failures on the part of the crew, in order to prevent mutiny or other emotional derailment.
I know because I programmed a lot of them.
I’ll have to choose my words carefully. “Yes, of course I am,” I say.
“Good. That is good to hear. Good.”
I find myself pressing my finger pads against the window, flexing them against the chill smooth surface.
The void swirls beyond. If for some magical reason that radio transmission is true, that we entered some time hole and came out in the future, everyone I’ve ever known is dead—from old age, if they happened to survive the nuclear strikes.
Out here, it’s hard to believe that anything can exist, at least anything beyond Kodiak and me and the thin membrane of ship that surrounds us.
We’re a bright cottage on an endless dark plain.
“Perhaps completing your few remaining tasks will bring you some peace of mind,” OS offers.
Even the mission of rescuing Minerva, a matter of such urgency that Dimokratía and Fédération came together for the first time in decades, feels like a myth from some other land.
Minerva spoke to me directly, imploring me to come—but it wasn’t really her, was it?
It was the digital representation of her.
Minerva shouldn’t be alive. Her camp wouldn’t have been dark for two years if she was alive.
I still want to rescue her. But I also just want to go home. I’m so confused.
I can’t bring myself to work on stupid tasks. Even though my brain is baffled, my gut tells me that home probably doesn’t exist. That even if it does still exist, I will never go back there.
Nothing can be trusted. No, it’s even worse than that: nothing can be known.
I crumple where I stand.
_-* Tasks Remaining: 3 *-_
The moment I wake, I blearily peer at my bracelet time projection and find it’s nearly two a.m. Well past dinner. Kodiak didn’t come. We’ve been eating together for weeks now, but tonight he didn’t come.
Without him, all I have is the aching echo of space, the buzzing of screens, the tickling and scratching of Rover as it cleans 04.
None of these things will suffice to keep me sane.
My mother was wrong. Minerva was wrong. Intimacy is the only shield against insanity.
Intimacy, not knowledge. Intimacy, not power.
I will unravel here.
I am in a waiting room without end, without location, without time or place. If I go outside, I die before I get any answers. I exist only in a theoretical way, like a point on a coordinate plane. I am the simulation.
I take out my violin and bow long tuneless notes before the expanse of space. The sound becomes so maudlin that I chuckle, despite myself. The self-pity is strong in this one.
I put the violin away, then I literally slap myself across the face.
Lightly, but still. You were selected for being easygoing and adaptable, for accepting less-than-perfect conditions, my mother once said.
Well, here are some less-than-perfect conditions for you.
Let’s go prove your Alexander-the-Great-ness, Cusk.
I need answers to some very big questions. OS could be telling us anything it wants to. The only information we’ve gotten that hasn’t been under its control has contradicted everything we thought we knew. It says that we’re in an impossible year.
Time travel in space is theoretically possible.
Time is a dimension, just like length, width, and depth—and like those, it can be traveled.
The conditions for time travel are impossible for living bodies, though.
We’d have to speed up to near-light speeds .
. . and take on infinite weight as a result.
That sort of body-mass index is definitely bad for the health.
Okay, that’s at least one option off the table. We haven’t traveled in time.
The radio waves would have, though. They move at the speed of light, faster than the ship, so we’re listening to radio from the past—how far into the past depends on how far away from Earth we are. It could be that many more than 140 years have passed back home, if we’re light-years away.
I return to the yellow portal. Past this door is where I found my own blood in an impossible place. Shrapnel is still blocking the portal from closing, but Rover printed the gap between portal and wall over with polycarb. The gray covering is so thin it’s almost see-through.
I fetch my violin case and headlamp. I remove the delicate wood instrument and lower it gently to the floor. I shut the case.
Then I bash it into the thin polycarb covering.
Shards fly in all directions. The ones that make it far enough to enter the ship’s gravity plink to the floor.
“Spacefarer Cusk, what are you doing?” Mother asks.