Page 76 of The Brightness Between Us

“Of course I didn’t,” he says. “But here’s what I know from my studies: it is possible to make crude changes to the development of the amygdala. It’s perfectly feasible someone could plant a virus to roam through the zygotes’ DNA while they’re dormant, making alterations that will turn them aggressive. The zygote would seem perfectly viable initially and pass inspection by mission control, but then be altered over the voyage, outside the purview of OS. A sort of timed detonation.”

I think about Ambrose’s words. This means the young colonists... could turn on their parents and siblings, might destroy the fledgling civilization they’d begun to create?

I know that idea should be harrowing. But it is so abstract... so far away and so far in the future. What are the chances that theCoordinated Endeavorwill even make it to Sagittarion Bb? This betrayal is unpleasant to consider, but it’s not really going to happen to me. Or only sort of to me. I’m confused by it. Maybe this is all part of the WakeSleep, too. I’m hating the effect of it still, but also—I can see why Ambrose would consider this drug pleasurable. Here I am, untroubled by something that I know, distantly, should be worrying me.

“Why wouldn’t Devon just make the zygotes unviable from the start?” I ask. “Instead of having them slowly turn aggressive?”

“He might have done that, too,” Ambrose says. “Thehormonal triggers could be a second-stage fail-safe. Cusk scientists would be checking and double-checking everything, but altered development of the amygdala postpuberty, by a virus so tiny it’s virtually undetectable? There’s a chance they aren’t going that deep into the DNA of every protozygote to find a few hundred thousand unusual base pairs of the virus, that they were just confirming overall viability and then washing their hands.”

“And the zygotes are behind that gray portal, as Devon said,” I say. “Nothing the OS can access en route.”

“If the war has really gotten so hot that they recalled the warbot, misson control might not even be actively supporting this mission at all anymore. The colonists might have been on their own ever since launch, and will be for tens of thousands of years.”

How awful. Still an abstract kind—it thinks awful instead of feels awful. All the same, my body is newly chilled. I creep closer to the heat stick. Ambrose does, too, bringing our knees to touch. I try to use words to work through what I’m thinking, like Ambrose would. It’s strange and a little frightening, to start a sentence that I don’t already know the end to. “What you are saying is that... somewhere in the distant future, we’ll have settled a colony and the young colonists will turn on us. And Devon will have made that happen.”

“Yes,” Ambrose says. “And he used me to do so.”

“But you were willing to ruin the whole mission,” I say. “You wanted to scrub the launch with that missive.”

Ambrose sighs. “Yes. It was fine to me if the exocolony never began, but if it did, I’d want our selves to have their best shot at a good life. I take it you refused to let Devon Mujaba record you speaking out against the colonization?”

“Yes, I refused at first,” I say. “I wanted time to think. He was going to return here to try to coax me to start. I was... less trusting of his motives than you were.”

“And for good reason, it turns out,” Ambrose says with a sardonic smile.

Seconds tick by. I struggle against the unnatural calmness of my mind.

Ambrose puts his head in his hands. When he looks back at me, there is steel in his expression. “To be honest, I get where Devon Mujaba is coming from. Now that our countries are fully at war, which could finally be the end stage of human civilization that the pundits have so long predicted, now that we’ve seen the extinction of virtually all vertebrate sea life and the misery of the animals that remain on land... compared to that, what does the suffering of a small colony on an exoplanet matter, so far in the future and so far away? Comparatively nothing. Not compared to the threat we humans represent to every other species that has been unlucky enough to encounter us. Maybe humanity is a scourge, and ought to be stopped, which meansSagittarion Bb should fail.Weshould fail.”

After everything that our countries have done in our names, I can understand Devon’s thinking, too. We can’t trust that this mission won’t wreck devastation on one world, then spread to yet another. The lives of individual humans seem small in the face of that. All the same, I’m also desperate for this sabotage not to be true. It might feel only distant and abstract, but it’s still horrible to think that our future selves might have fought hard to form a colony, only to find their fellows turning on them, one by one. “Ambrose,” I say carefully, “doyouthink humanity is a blight?”

His lips purse in the moonlight, while he looks at me. He takes my hand. I pull it away. I miss his touch as soon as it’s gone. “I did think so,” he says. “Not as fervently as Devon or my classmate Sri, but when I found out what had been done to my clones, I was ready to burn everything down. Though now... after getting to know you a little, knowing the man that I would be settling the colony with, it all began to feel more real. I don’t want to stop them, to stop us.”

His eyes gleam. “It’s all got me feeling a little emotional,” Ambrose continues.

“I can see that.”

“So what do we do?” He pauses. “Andwhydid Devon Mujaba risk everything to—”

A sound from the woods. I hold my hand up to interrupt Ambrose, cock my head.

We go quiet. “I don’t think that was anything,” I say. “Except an owl, maybe.”

In the quiet, Ambrose put his hand back on mine. It feels a thrilling kind of dangerous. I’ve always felt that my personality is missing some piece that makes people want to be with me. I’ve had plenty of ryad in my life, but they just wanted to grapple with my body for a while. They didn’t actually want to be with Kodiak Celius. This hand on mine is taking away the serenity I escaped to Old Scotland to achieve. And yet—perhaps this is the WakeSleep—I do not pull my hand away this time.

I lose myself in the sight of our hands. There was something I wanted to ask Ambrose, but I can’t remember it now. I wish he had told me that the WakeSleep would have this unexpected effect. I’m feeling things close-up that I usually keep at a far distance. When I look up from our hands, I see Ambrose staring at me. “Are you okay, Kodiak?” he asks.

“This WakeSleep is more powerful than you said,” I reply.

Ambrose chuckles. “You’re just new to it. You haven’t seen anything if you think this is intense.”

“I think I have... less tolerance than you for mind-altering substances,” I say huskily. “What do we do while we wait for the dawn?”

Ambrose looks down at the ground before looking back at me. “I guess we talk.”

It’s not the first way of spending time that comes to mind, but I don’t know him well enough yet to propose what I’m really thinking. To give up that power.

Chapter 4

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