Prose Exercise 4-18-16

Bare fangs, bare skin, bare rock, barely made it, bare necessity, bare arms (a right), barely audible.

I know there isno rush, but somehow all the melodrama of every fiction you’ve ever watched, read, played, etc. has a way of coming back to you the minute you touch down on one of these snowballs. Comets are fragile, naturally, and when they’re falling toward a star on a hyperparabolic trajectory they sometimes crumble apart as the little steam explosions overcome the cohesion of rock and organic matter in their various lumps and bumps. But Olympic Vega is half a parsec away, and this little snowball is nearly stationary, relatively speaking, so I’m not sure why I’m at all panicky. Routine research, routine exploration, routine boring. Maybe it’s Douglas. He has a way of baring his teeth in these big rictus grins when someone says something sly about him. The whole way here it was pearly whites and ‘ha ha ha’ in a false laugh and then he’d glare to the side. Do I think he’ll kill us? I’m not sure.

My last backup is about forty days ago, on Olympic Vega Three. It’s a pretty dull name for a planet, but after naming eight-hundred twenty-seven thousand, you stop caring about style and start wanting a convenient way to identify them in a database. If I die here my clone will lose about forty days, then, apart from the minimal journaling I’ve done heading out this way and the ship’s logs. Not that it’s much comfort to me, now. I mean, I’ll die and my reincarnation will be a different man, even if we’re precisely the same. This comes to me more strongly than usual as I watch Douglas do his stretches in the nude in the ship’s small hi-grav room. He is a remarkable specimen. First generation, I believe, and very well bred. I am the… I believe eighteenth clone in the line. It’s somewhat obscure, and it’s been a long time since I was in the archives looking into myself.

We land a bit hot - that’ll be Cody, our pilot, playing with the controls - on an unremarkable comet. Mostly ice and trace minerals, a small piece of bare rock jutting out where some proto planetary material fused after gravitational ejection eons ago. It feels fantastic to be out of the ship I’ve been in for weeks. Tara does the ‘One small step’ joke that is practically a religion, and I make a snark about how we’ve barely made this difficult journey and should be proud. Douglas is the last off the boat. I somehow knew he would be. Being a first gen, he is naturally testy. I don’t know for certain, but I suspect he wants to be one of the immortals. I tease him about this lightly and he grins and grimaces.

There’s not much to do here. We run the tests, gather the data, have the computer sort out the math. Hurrah, another system figured. I became jaded to the process a few clones ago. A robot could do this just as easily. We humans just want to have something to feel responsible for.

I’m fairly certain he got to Tara first. They were off looking at some cave-like feature in the cometary terrain and only he came back, saying she wanted to meditate on it. Afterward, it was only an hour or so before it was just me and him. I hadn’t brought anything other than the minimum requirements, intent on dreaming my way through the trip, for the most part, but he had brought one of those arc pistols you can tuck invisibly into a suit. I can’t say I’m surprised. Eight or nine
generations ago it was me with the homicidal urge. Still, a man doesn’t like to die. He’d done Cody carelessly, and was coming for me last, when I heard a barely audible whisper on the headset. I couldn’t make it out, but I had an inkling. I was in the middle of putting up a generator for a beacon and he was behind me. Douglas didn’t have the grin, I’m sure, but the pistol was raised and to my back. Three times I’ve let it happen, knowing it would happen. Three times, a little tired, a little glad. But that grin. I couldn’t bear it.

So they’re dead, now. Twenty to fifty days, they lost. Douglas and I are about to go for a pint if you’d like to join us.