Chapter 5

Chapter 5

On my way back to the Earth’s surface, I sit on the edge of the bench seat of the elevator car, Cusk goons on either side. One of my mother’s assistants perches across from me. He probably thinks he’s keeping his face impassive, but I can tell from all the smaller details—his knuckles are white with tension, for starters—that he’s brimming with fury. My regular assistant has probably been fired by now, and all it would take is one misstep for this one to follow.

“Perhaps you’d like an update on what’s been going on in your absence,” the new one says primly, calling up the latest news to project in the air of the elevator car.

Over footage of the emptying hall, the anchor reads a statement from the Cusk press secretary: the Cusk Corporation was saddened to report the end of the distress signal, and made the reluctant decision to cancel the mission to Titan. Unfortunately, the news about the scrapped mission hit Ambrose Cusk especially hard, and they were asking everyone to honor his—my—need for privacy to mourn.

There’s no mention of Devon Mujaba, and the reports don’t cut to any footage of me on Disponar—I guess none of that has leaked yet, or this assistant really earned their paycheck, rushing the tech department to scrub all footage and mentions of me before they made it out of the satellite’s digital space. I guess I’ve done my mother a favor by going on my bender in a sealed location. Everyone in the world is imagining me sobbing prettily in a lonely tower, lit by a single ray of divine light as I suffer the renewed loss of my sister.

“Well, that’s not so terrible,” I say, volleying my words to the assistant through the news projection in the air between us. I’m glad it obscures my view of him, because those white knuckles were making me tense. “It’s perfectly reasonable I’d appear distraught over my sister being dead. I am distraught over my sister being dead.”

The projection blinks out as the assistant nods, hands denting the box of papers at his waist. He doesn’t really have any options. Even if he’d love nothing more than for me to take a long walk off the satellite’s short launch bay, he knows I am my mother’s son. The life of Ambrose Cusk is full of unfairnesses, and most of them benefit me.

The elevator slows to a stop, switches over to the magnetic handlers that ease it into the Earthside landing bay. We’ll have ten minutes to deboard, and for attendants to clean and restock the onyx elevator car before it fills with new wealthy customers to fling into low orbit.

Automated voices instruct us to keep track of the developing conflict and to have a nice day. I stop a few feet out of the craft, and the goons stop on either side of me. “Are you all permanently attached to me now?”

“Just until I get you where you’re going this morning,” the assistant says. He guides me to the edge of the bay, away from the curious eyes of the waiting travelers. “Your mother needs you to make a recording.”

“Trying again to get me to perform the good son, mourning my dear sister in front of millions?” I ask. “I was hoping I wasn’t going to have to go through that performance after all. To be honest, I’m not sure how convincing I could be at the moment.” I emit a wild ginger burp for emphasis.

“No, this recording is private.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Now I’m intrigued.”

“Follow me,” he says, heels clipping down the hallway that leads deeper into corporate headquarters.

When I follow, the landkeepers hang back and start to chitchat, becoming slightly less goon-ish as they do. We leave the public areas and scan ourselves into the corporate sanctum. Cusk employees shoot surreptitious looks at us as the new assistant and I pass through the central atrium. Real koi and projections of frogs swim through the marble-bottomed fountain at the center. Before we scan into the management tower, I stop. “What’s going to happen to...”

“Your famous bedmate?” the new assistant asks crisply.

“Yes.”

“He’s been invited to remain in the Cusk Suite for a few hours. We’ll administer him some electrolytes to help with the hangover, like we did you, and then he will return to his life. He has a second concert to play on Disponar tonight. He has done nothing wrong. There is no crisis there.”

I’m relieved. All the same I remember the information Devon Mujaba told me about Dimokratía’s plans, about the other spacefarer. Things my mother was very careful to keep from me. His suggestion that I could throw a wrench into the gears of our world. How appealing that still feels.

But what to do about it?

The assistant leads me to the most restricted corporate elevator, both of us getting our clearances scanned and double-scanned before we can board. The receptionist who glances at us while the doors close is so perfectly beautiful that I can’t tell if they’re a real human. Within seconds we’ve shot into the sky and arrived back at my mother’s floor, leaving the landkeepers behind. Apparently they aren’t coming with us, not this time.

As the doors open I expect my mother—or at least her assistants—to be waiting. But the upper-level corporate lobby is empty. And strangely quiet. Where has everyone gone?

I follow the assistant down the hallway until we’re outside the plain door from yesterday, the one that leads to the signal-jammed room where my mother told me I wouldn’t be rescuing my sister. What will I be finding out today? The assistant gestures me in alone, then closes the door behind me.

My mother is waiting inside, arms behind her back.

I collapse into one of the antique desk chairs. “What’s today’s big revelation? Am I actually a sentient rock? Or maybe I’m a piece of Camembert.”

“What?”

That was probably the first time I’ve ever even tried to joke with my mother. For good reason, it turns out.

She looks at me flatly, then her eyes widen. “Ambrose, what have you done to yourself?”

I pluck the soft cream robe away from my body, adjust the gold circlet on my head. “Do you like my new look?”

“No, the—are those skinprints ? You well know those aren’t allowed in the academy. Those aren’t allowed on spacefarers. And what is that written on your chest— ‘ Violence’ ?”

“It’s ‘Labels are the Root of Violence,’ actually. But my shirt has to be off to read the whole thing. And Mother. Tell me you’re not serious right now. You’re upset that I’ve broken the student code of conduct? After you cloned me without my permission so you can launch twenty of me into space to suffer?”

“We’ll get those removed. The prints. It will be painful, but that can’t be helped. Nothing to be done about it yet; you’ll just have skinprints for your recording.” She gestures to the plain table before me, which I now see has a reelcorder set up on it.

I sit before I know what I’m doing. Even after her deep betrayal, I guess I’m still that ten-year-old, terrified of moving down in the rankings of my dozens of siblings. Maybe I’m ten years old for good. I shift my seat so I can look into the cam. A man with a fuzzy gray beard stares back at me from the interface. I vaguely remember him. “Hello there, Ambrose,” he says. “It’s nice to see you again. I’m the director of the reels arm of the Sagittarion Bb project. You knew me as the Titan mission recordings director, though.”

“Super,” I say. “I didn’t know you were into fiction.”

He blinks. “Right. Funny. So. I know Chairperson Cusk is there with you, because she just finished recording her session. Hello there, Chairperson Cusk. Can you say your full name and confirm that there is no one else in the room with you? I don’t have access to any digital signatures in that jammed room, so I’ll need a verbal confirmation from both of you.”

“Cassandra Cusk. And yes,” my mother says.

“It’s just us,” I say, my skin tingling, and only half because of my hangover. There’s only one other time that it’s been just my mother and me alone anywhere, and that was when I found out I’d been cloned.

“Okay, great,” the man says. “This will be recorded onto physical media, with no networking aside from the gatekept link I’m using right now, so Chairperson Cusk, I’ll have to ask you to have it hand-delivered into orbit. The recording is already underway, so you don’t need to say when you’re ready or not; we’ll edit it so that the reel is smooth. Cassandra, have you told Ambrose what this is for yet?”

My mother glances over her shoulder. She’s been staring into the sky, and she’s not one to daydream; I wonder if she’s watching for signs of military aircraft. Or mushroom clouds. “No. You handle that.”

The guy blanches. “Sure, sure, no problem. Let me give it a shot. So, Ambrose, buddy, here’s what’s going on. You know about the real mission of the Endeavor by now. At some point, thousands of years from now, if all goes well, another version of you will arrive at an exoplanet of Sagittarion Bb, which will by then be known as its new name, Cusk. He’s going to need practical advice and instructions. That part we’ll take care of. But that version of you will also be overwhelmed, beside himself, lonely. We want him to feel like he’s seen and loved. We hoped you’d give him some emotional support.”

My legs are shaking. How dare you. And I also know he’s right. That new version of me will be barely holding on by a thread. He’s me . I know for a fact that he didn’t ask for this.

I watch the director try to read my face. “We’ll give you an opportunity now to say whatever you’d like to the clone of you. Whatever you think he’d want to know. Do you want to take some time to think about it?”

“I don’t. I’m ready. ‘Fuck you.’ That’s what I’d like to say. ‘Fuck you.’”

The director closes his mouth so tight that his upper lip puckers, evident even under his bristly mustache.

“Not you , Ambrose,” I say, overenunciating into the reelcorder. “That was for this director man and for my mother.”

My mother slams her hand on the table, hard enough that her earrings rattle and one of her hieroglyph braids falls loose. “I understand you’re angry. That my son is angry at his mother. It breaks my heart, and I know I deserve it. But let’s both put those feelings to one side for the moment. You’re not just my son. You’re also a spacefarer performing his professional duty. You can’t change what’s happened. This childish mood you’re in will matter nothing to the Ambrose who’s out there on an unfamiliar world, who exists tens of thousands of years from now and is desperate to hear words of consolation as he assumes his role as the hope of all humanity. So put your emotional tantrum to one side, be the spacefarer this corporation has selected, and give yourself something.”

I bite back a few responses, each more colorful than the “fuck you” I started with. Just yesterday she was trying to convince me that my clones weren’t really me. Now she says I’m talking to my dear sorry self. But this version of me, the one who’s paying the real price for the dicking-over that my mom’s done, will need whatever solace I can offer. I arrange my cream-colored robe, fingering the silver hem. Just a few hours ago, this robe was on the floor of the Cusk Suite as Devon Mujaba and I writhed on black silk sheets. I still smell like him.

“Fine,” I say.

“Go ahead,” the director replies. There’s no irritation in his voice. I have to sort of like a guy who’s so patient with the person who just told him to fuck off. Then again, the woman who holds his career in her hands is also in the room.

The grand window is behind me, a dry plain with the Euphrates snaking in the distance, the sun blazing above it all. This morning’s rain is a distant memory. This will be one of the future-me’s opportunities to see what Earth looks like. I shiver. “Well, this is weird,” I say. I flick my eyes to the projection of the director. “Can you cut that line?”

“It’s human. I’d like to keep it,” he says. “Because this is weird. Ambrose will know that.”

Ambrose will know that. My outrage brought me temporary vigor, but now it’s draining out of my system, leaving me queasy and sad. I shift my focus back to the camera. “I’m Ambrose Cusk. You know that. Because you’re Ambrose Cusk, too.” I whistle. Weird doesn’t even get halfway to the truth of this. “I’m the original. We split after I had that medical screening. They recorded my, our, brain there. Just yesterday. Now I know the truth. That Minerva’s distress beacon never triggered, that mission control lied to me. You needed to believe that, though, to have the will to survive each time you were woken up, so that’s why they mapped my neurons while I still believed, too.”

The director interrupts. “That was beautiful. I loved it. He will, too. Do you think you could maybe not say it was just yesterday, though? It makes it all seem very rushed, and we don’t want to shake his confidence.”

“It was yesterday.”

My mother moves so she’s behind the camera. I have a second director. Great. “It’s fine, we have a complete voiceprint for Ambrose, and can alter whatever we need to digitally in postproduction, as long as we have enough original footage to latch to.”

I drop my head into my hands. “I hate this.”

“What, that we’d deepfake whatever we need to give the future you his best chance?” my mother asks. “I’m not apologizing for that. Those stakes are far higher than whatever you’re feeling right now. This is about the future of us, long after these physical bodies are gone.”

I straighten in my seat. “I want my violin on board the Endeavor .”

“Your violin?”

“Yes. I can buy another one to play on Earth. But...” I don’t know how to refer to them. The other versions of me? I grit my teeth and just go ahead with naming them, despite my brain’s protests. “Those Ambrose clones are going to be surrounded by polycarb—”

The director interrupts. “—we’re calling them ‘human-originated hydrocarbons’ in the ship’s technical specifications. We want to have the technical language on Cusk evolve past the words of today.”

“Too late, you already nanoteched my mind yesterday, and I’ll be thinking of it as ‘polycarb,’ no matter what you tell me to think it is. Anyway, I’ll be wanting the feeling of something organic on that ship. I’ll be desperate for it. Put it on board.”

The director’s projection casts its gaze in my mother’s direction. I’m stepping into some complicated ongoing conversation. “A violin is something the ship can’t print anew,” my mother finally tells me. “Which means that we could be introducing discrepancies in the repeating timeline, if and when it degrades or is damaged. Even if the violin is kept in ideal conditions between lifetimes, it’s hard to imagine soft spruce wood surviving these thousands of years.”

“So some Ambroses at the end might not have a violin, and some will. What’s the big deal?” I ask.

The director casts my mother another glance: See? I seem to have inadvertently taken his side of the debate.

Mother has entered debugging mode; her mind is spinning fast, but it’s all on logistics. This zeal for process makes her a great chairperson for the Cusk Corporation. Parent, less so.

I don’t know what I’m gunning for, exactly. But Devon Mujaba’s—and Sri’s—call to action is resonating in me. I want to do something. I don’t know what it is yet. The key for now is getting access. The specifics can come later.

“I’m putting the violin on the ship,” I say. “Despite what you’ve done to me—both this me, the me me, and the ones you’ve created—I haven’t gone blabbing to reporters. All I ask in return is that you allow me on, to see where twenty of me will spend their sorry short lives. I’ll drop my violin off in person. You’ve captured my conversation in this room from every angle you need, my mouth shaping every syllable it takes to make me say whatever you like. You’ll have me say whatever you want to future Ambrose, I’m sure of it. You can pretend the violin was your idea the whole time.”

Mother shakes her head. “The Endeavor has been scanned and sealed. No one is going on board again before it launches.”

I check my bracelet. It’s a pointless gesture, though, since—like last time—its signal has been jammed in this room. “We have the rescheduled press announcement in four hours. Do you want me to be there?”

Her eyes narrow. Are you extorting me?

I nod. Why yes, I am extorting you.

“Fine,” she says. “This actually gives us a nice cover for placing you up in low orbit rather than down on the Earth’s surface.”

“And why would you want to have me in orbit?”

“You’ve seen the news,” Mother says. “Dimokratía’s secretary of defense has been killed. Brasilia is in open conflict, and it’s led to uprisings in Montreal and Minsk. The saga of the new mission to colonize a planet won’t have the pacifying power it had even yesterday. If the war spreads global, the safest place will be in orbit. I want me and my family safely in the Cusk secure satellite until things calm down. Your siblings are being transferred there as we speak.”

Fine. I’ll watch from low-orbit luxury as the planet blows itself up, if that’s what she wants. “I’m bringing someone with me, then,” I say.

She sighs, undoubtedly disappointed that I’m letting my emotions carry such weight in my decision-making. “Berths in orbit are restricted today. Everyone with any Cusk influence is trying to get a spot. I’m afraid that I can’t—”

“Do you want me at that press announcement or not?”

Unfortunately for her, she knows it’s no idle threat that I’ll go missing. And I know she can’t spare the precious minutes it would take to try to talk me out of it. She sighs. “Fine. Name them.”

An hour later. Express elevator ride to the ground floor. Sharp steps through the Cusk lobby, landkeeper goons keeping pace with me as I stalk past the real koi and the projected frogs.

I bracelet-message Sri, and they’re waiting for me outside the Cusk academy hangar, a hastily packed duffel across their shoulder and my violin case in their hand.

“Thanks for the Devon Mujaba present,” I say as I embrace them.

“Thought you’d enjoy it,” Sri says.

Seeing the landkeepers flanking me, Sri doesn’t say anything more. They just look at the space elevator, eyebrows rising.

“Now let’s get the fuck out of here,” I say.