Chapter 5 #20
“None of your business, OS,” I say. I leap into zero g and soar to the edge of the yellow portal, gritting my teeth as the polycarb edges cut my fingers. I fly into the darkness beyond.
The last few shards of polycarb float to either side. They’re thin, and actually a little soft. Rover’s printing doesn’t produce anything as hard as the ship’s original polycarbonate.
I slither in, moving shoulder by shoulder and hip by hip, arms down at my side, the red nylon of Kodiak’s jumpsuit catching on broken polycarb as I go.
It’s cold and musty, and my head and shoulders keep banging against pipes and outcroppings.
At one point I nearly wedge tight, neck wrenching against a bundle of wires.
I could be trapped forever in here, or at least long enough to starve, with no microphones nearby to alert OS, and Kodiak sealed off in his own quarters. Keep it together, Ambrose, comes Minerva’s voice in my mind. If I didn’t die on Titan, you’re not going to die here.
I free myself of the wires, and by sheer force of will manage to continue floating forward instead of backing out.
I’m not sure what’s come over me, this reckless push, except that for now, answers mean more to me than my own life.
I’ll risk annihilation if it means finding out whether everything I’ve ever known has been annihilated.
As I press toward the engine room, the rumble of the ship’s machinery gets louder and the air gets colder, so that my breath creates clouds that glow in the field of my headlamp.
The surfaces begin to sear the flesh on my fingers and wrists.
I try looking back, to see how far I’ve come, but can’t angle the light over my own body.
Whenever I pause in the open air, the chill draws down around me. It’s like I’m in a morgue, like I could die. Like I am dead. My heart asks: Would that be so bad? My teeth chatter while I consider what dying would mean, when everyone I’ve ever known might have died long ago.
Except for Kodiak.
Minerva comes to me again, imperious on a beach. Swim to me, Ambrose.
I push off the cold wall, stroking through zero gravity. The passageway opens into a chamber. My shaking headlamp shows a broad cylinder in the center, trembling with contained power. The ship’s engine.
Around the edges of the room are full food pouches. Rover tracks are embedded in the walls, so the robot can supply the ship’s habitable areas.
I listen for Rover’s sound, but can’t hear much over the booming engines. At least I have a break from OS communication; there must not be any speakers in this uninhabited region of the ship.
As I float closer to the engine, I train my headlamp on its smooth surfaces.
Deep in the center of the cylinder, shielded by its thick metal, is what looks almost like an old-fashioned dry cleaner’s rack, a circular rail with polycarb-wrapped bags draped along it.
Each is filled with something bulbous and weighty. I ease closer.
My feet scuff against some object in the zero gravity.
As it floats up into my view, I see it’s a stretch of heavy polycarb.
I take it in hand. It’s a different sort of material than I’m used to feeling in the ship, and my mind conjures up old memories of chicken breast, sealed and juiceless from the freezer, plastic adhered to plastic to keep meat fresh, only with a gray film to it, like it’s been shielded from radiation.
I’m surrounded by small globes of an oily fluid that has beaded in the zero gravity.
I work my way forward cautiously, careful not to directly contact the humming metal of the ship’s engines.
The rack comes into view. The polycarb is luminous in my headlamp, my light catching air bubbles within the fluid. I maneuver so I can see the first bag.
A face.
A face and a body, wrapped in the shielding polycarb sheet, sealed in its juices, mouth open and eyes sunken and closed.
Before the creature can get me I’m kicking against the side of the engine and scrambling backward.
I swear I can feel shriveled arms grabbing my ankles, teeth piercing my calf.
Space itself joins the enemy, the darkness outside ripping open the fragile membrane of the ship, just like this creature could part my skin with its teeth and claws.
My desperate scramble snags me in cables and cords, sears my cheek against the frozen exterior wall of the ship, yanks my finger backward when it unexpectedly hits a metal spur, the sound of bone breaking or ligament tearing, I don’t know and can’t know because all I can do is continue forward, shoulder against beam and pipe, struggling for freedom from cables that ensnare, that pull me back each time I manage to leave.
There is no sound of the creature behind me, a creature that I am coming to realize was no creature at all. I saw a lifeless body.
A sliver of light appears in front of me, beyond it the familiar far wall. Finally I emerge into the open light, my body tumbling forward and out, falling to the floor as it enters gravity, knocking my violin and sending it clattering. A delicate wishbone pop as the balsa-wood bridge snaps.
Pain lights up my body. The fresh agony in my shoulder fades to reveal my finger’s pain throbbing beneath, the digit probably broken, already blueing. That pain is joined by the sear of my cheek, where the frozen metal of the exterior wall did its worst damage.
Despite the hurt, I’m on my feet as soon as I can, sudden momentum almost pitching me to the floor before I’m back up. It’s like I’m drunk on PepsiRum again, hands pushing against the walls when I stagger too near, my desperate movements bringing me to the orange portal.
I pound against it, busted finger lancing anew as I bang my wrists against the metal. “A body! Kodiak, I found a body!”
“What are you saying you found?” my mother’s voice asks. “Can I help?”
I don’t answer. OS is definitely not the one I want to talk to right now.
“You need medical attention,” OS continues.
“The injury on your finger appears severe, and your pulse is spiking. The ship’s systems are as normal.
If you believe you have seen something unusual, it could simply be a trick of your mind’s eye.
We both know that humans are more than capable of hallucination in stressful circumstances. ”
“Kodiak, speak to me!” I cry.
“Kodiak is not answering,” OS says. “You must come to the infirmary. Your finger might be broken. Your pulse is dangerously elevated.”
“What was that back there?” I gasp.
“It was nothing.”
“You didn’t even ask me what I saw.”
“What did you see?”
I bang on the portal again. “Kodiak!”
The doorway opens.
I scramble to all fours and look up to see Kodiak standing over me. His handsome face is tear-struck, his shoulders slumped. “What is it?” he asks.
“The uninhabited areas. I went in, to figure out what I could, but I . . . I came across . . .”
“Spit it out. What? You came across what?”
“A body! A dead body, hanging from a rack. Like grocery meat.”
Kodiak snorts. “That’s ridiculous.”
“I know it’s ridiculous!” I say. “But that doesn’t change the fact that I saw it, right there, like a dead body or a zombie or I don’t know what, Kodiak. But something impossible is going on in here, and we have to figure out what it is.”
“Impossible sounds about the word for it,” Kodiak says, arms crossing.
“Ambrose is hurt,” OS says. “He entered the engine room, which is not intended for human occupants, and damaged his physical form in the process. Help me get him to the infirmary.”
Kodiak scowls at the ceiling, but when he looks back at me his expression is softer. I’m the enemy of his enemy. He lifts my chin, so he can look at the wound on my cheek. “You really beat yourself up. What happened to you?”
I hide my hand behind my back. “It’s nothing. I’m not going to the infirmary, Kodiak. I don’t trust the ship.”
“Of course we should trust the ship,” Kodiak says. “Don’t be crazy.” His eyes have a gleam in them. The gleam says: don’t talk like that here.
He gestures toward his quarters. “Come on, let me take a look at your finger.”
“I know what I saw,” I say as I step past him.
“Hold on,” he says, grabbing my elbow. The rough pad of his thumb strokes my cheek. “Seriously. What happened?”
“My face touched the exterior wall,” I say. “It was cold.”
“More than cold. You’ve gotten frostbite,” Kodiak says. “Ambrose, you have to be careful.”
“It’s fine,” I say, shrugging him off.
His hand lingers on my shoulder, then drops away. “Back to the blind room,” he says. “Come on.”
“You must go to the infirmary, where Rover can properly help you,” OS says. We ignore it.
My limbs feel even heavier than the increasing gravity can account for.
I wonder, and not for the first time, whether this could all be fake, whether we might be in an underground bunker still on Earth, or deep in some simulation, our brains floating in a vat.
What can I do to prove otherwise? My exhausted mind protests: Kodiak did a spacewalk.
You’ve felt zero gravity. You’re not in an underground bunker.
But in my state it doesn’t matter what I tell myself.
The truth, the physical reality of this world, still feels flimsy.
“You don’t look good at all. Here, sit,” Kodiak offers as we step over the polycarb lip into the blind room.
He removes a tube of some Dimokratía balm out of a medical kit. It’s yellow and lettered in an antique style. “Hold still,” he says, then starts dabbing at my wounded face with the pad of one pinkie, like a makeup artist.
“My face is ruined forever, isn’t it?” I sniff. “What will I do without my beautiful face?”
“Please. Your face will be fine,” Kodiak says. He moves on to my hand, laying it flat in his lap, straightening the good fingers. The busted one cocks out to one side. “Can you move that?”
I try. My joint explodes into infinite fire.
“It’s not broken. The tip moved,” Kodiak says. “We’ll still have to splint it.”