Page 50 of The Brightness Between Us

I shove back from my seat, heart thumping. “Thank you, thank you! Coming, Rover?”

Rover whirs into motion, turning a neat somersault beside the table. “Rover needs to help with dinner at the moment,” OS says. “But I will come find you in a few minutes to start the projections.”

“See you soon!” I say, whooping with glee as I skip across the settlement.

Owl and the dads laugh. It must be a relief to see me excited about something.

I’m relieved, too. I haven’t thought about them dead for at least an hour.

My favorite place to watch projections is on the far side of the infirmary. I can lean against the inflatable wall while OS displays reels in front of me, or just listen to audio while I stare out at the Minervan sky. It’s where Owl and I have watched a lot ofPink Lagoon.

I settle in against the wall. A few minutes later, Rover arrives, whirring to a stop in front of me. “Okay, I’m ready,” I tell OS.

OS jumps right in. “After years of short outbreaks of violence, the countries of Earth resorted to treaties that tied more and more of them together in mutual defense, resulting in the remaining two geographically patchworked countries, Dimokratía and Fédération. I start here because I believe this is the most important piece of information, though you already know it. We will delve into the reasons for this twenty-fifth-century state, including the shift of warfare from human-labor-based to principally aerospace, cybernetic, and economic mechanisms.”

“OS,” I interrupt. “I don’t want to know all this. I mean, I do, but not now. There’s something else I want to know now.”

“If it’s about the beacon, I don’t have any additional information, no classified partitions that will help us understand it.”

“Not that,” I say, craning my neck to check that the dads and Owl are still at the table, out of earshot. “I want to see the messages the original Dad and Father left for their future selves.”

“I see,” OS says. “I’m not sure they would want me to show you those.”

“Isn’t it part of the information you store? And didn’tthey grant me access to all that?”

“They did.”

“Let’s see, then.”

It doesn’t take OS any time to deliberate. The reel starts playing.

It’s hard even to recognize this as Dad at first. He’s wearing a cloth that shimmers; decorations on his skin glitter like chromium. He looks shiftily at the camera. His voice is just like Dad’s, though he intones his words strangely. The way he speaks has clearly drifted over the last eighteen years. “I’m Ambrose Cusk,” he says. “You know that. Because you’re Ambrose Cusk, too.” He whistles awkwardly. “I’m the original. We split after I had that medical screening. They recorded my, our, brain there. A couple of months ago. 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 whileIstill believed, too.”

This Dad continues to tell a story I know, a story so extreme that it would be unbelievable if I didn’t already know it to be true. Of someone sold a lie so that his copies would think that lie to be the truth. Horrors. The reel finishes, leaving me with the view of Big Sister as she sets. “Okay, now show me Father’s,” I say.

“Even Kodiak didn’t want to see Kodiak’s,” OS says.

“I know. Show me anyway.”

The projection comes up of a hulking, even broodier Father, before a wall of dark tiles. He’s in his cosmology academy reds, seated on a chair and staring into the camera. He looks shell-shocked. There’s some scrap of fabric in his hands. Wool, maybe? “I am Kodiak Celius,” he says, his voice low and barely controlled. “I am relaying to you, clone, information I have just discovered for myself. That I am not going into space as I planned. That there is no rescue mission to be launched. But you, clone, are going to space. You are going to another planet. I hope you will be strong.”

He pauses, to steady himself. Unlike Ambrose’s recording, Kodiak’s doesn’t have high production values. There’s no special costume. There’s no soft lighting. Just a man in shadow, facing a camera, barely keeping it together.

Until he isn’t.

Father goes from collected to sobbing. There is no moment of transition. Racking, body-shaking sobs. His big hands cover his face, but I can see the force of his convulsions, hear the cracking of his chair as his body wrenches against it.

“Stop the reel!” he screams.

“Stop playing the reel,” I tell OS, my voice overlapping with Father’s.

It’s just the quiet of the Minerva evening now. Big Sister glows.

I can barely process what I just saw from Father. This loss of control from someone who usually has so much of it. He wasn’t angry, he was grieving. Losing his mission was a pure and intense sorrow. It feels sacredly private, and I feel like I’ve betrayed him by seeing what I just saw.

“I’m sorry, Father,” I mumble. I sit back, numb.

“What would you like to see next?” OS asks.

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