The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (best romance novels of all time TXT) 📗

emitted no sound. Death was so quiet, a scheming black cat forever inching closer.

Every breath seared my lungs. Each stride pushed my muscles to their limits. I soon forgot the pace, the pain, the death. The running became numb, mechanical. The only way to achieve a miracle, of course, is to shed one’s human weakness. This is also perhaps our only human strength.

The pipe was thicker than I had imagined. It looked like a coral tube growing from the stone wall of the opposite hemisphere.

My feet grew lighter, so light in fact they were almost floating. I realized then that I had foolishly overlooked a key indicator: power consumption.

Electricity was needed to maintain body temperature, data calculation, external environment monitoring and – I now remembered – my magnetic boots. Now that power had dropped to five percent, my life support system had first shut down the boots. A reasonable decision under normal circumstances, but now my efforts were for naught.

I continued forward from inertia, but the friction between the sole of my boots and the wall was diminishing. I would soon lose all control of my body and float aimlessly, never reaching the pipe.

There was only one way out with, as I calculated it, an extremely small chance of success. I had no other choice.

I took a deep breath. I drew my legs together and threw my body forward. I somersaulted. When the axis of my body rotated to a certain angle, I pushed out my legs towards the ground and made a leap of faith with all my strength.

Black dust plumed around my feet like a miniature atom bomb. I straightened my body like an arrow just flung from the bow, plummeted toward my silver target.

The helmet’s oxygen meter began its final-minute countdown, red numbers flashing to remind me that even if I reached the pipe, it would only be to die.

In that endless moment, Einstein was right.

I kept tweaking my posture in the air. For a second, it looked like I would miss the pipe and disappear into the endless starry sea. In the end though I hit the target and hit it hard. I probably broke a few ribs. An ominous crack appeared on my helmet. But at least I had reached my destination.

Fortunately, the impact point was not far from the airlock. I had exhausted the oxygen in my spacesuit but somehow reached the airlock with the last gasps of my will. I prepared to crack the code to the airlock.

But there was no need to crack the code. Those who had banished me hadn’t yet removed me from the system.

That was perhaps their greatest error.

*

I collapsed to the floor, gasped like an amphibian emerging on land.

There was scarce oxygen in the pipe, likely related to the gap in the resources consumption data. At the center of the dim passage were thick cables and supply pipes of various colors. On either side, sensors flashed green every few meters, like on a runway at night, stretching into dark depths at both ends.

I inferred that one direction extended to the rotating cabin that housed the crew, but what about the other? Maybe some miniature nuclear fusion reactor buried in the rock? In addition to solar and hydrogen–oxygen propellant, that was our primary source of energy.

Then I remembered the joke Magpie had shared before she died, and I decided to follow those green lights leading away from the crew cabin.

Now, I was already a dead man. At least in the system, my suit was dead, no electricity, no oxygen, no helmet. I manually shut down the positioning module to prevent my colleagues from being frightened by my walking corpse. If I wanted to get back to the cabin though, I’d need a new outfit.

As my expedition progressed, odd fragments of memory flickered as if I had seen this place before. It were as though some sharp discomfort prevented me from returning to my homeland and I had become a ghost whose sole mission was to blow a chill breath down your neck from time to time.

As I proceeded through several more airlocks, things became increasingly interesting. One of the cabins was equipped with a high-precision 3D printer, which could print and modularize most lightweight space supplies from digital renderings – spacesuit shells, mining tools, even weapons. All I needed to do was transfer the integration module from my old spacesuit into the new one.

The ghost in the new spacesuit came online.

This new bounty did little to cheer me up, however. It mostly just raised more questions. Why was such a cabin set up here? Who had access to such equipment? What did they use it for?

Maybe the answer was hidden in some dark corner of my memory, blockchain encryption still denying my access.

Perhaps I just didn’t want to know the answer.

Finally, I was standing in front of the last cabin door. Through the porthole, I glimpsed a hellish scene. No monsters, corpses or blood. Everything was pristine, radiating the holy light of life. Yet this was far more hopeless than any nightmare.

The cabin door slid silently open. I entered.

My fingers trembled across the transparent casing that held the suspended bodies. Some were fully formed, others still growing. Some were young, others elderly. Faces, familiar and unfamiliar, waiting to be awakened by the demons in their dreams. I saw Baldy, Hairbeast, Long-Legs… Their bodies, fresh and strong, spasmed from time to time in their artificial amniotic fluid. They were ripe fruit ready to drop, lacking only that last ingredient – the infusion of their souls.

Maybe that was what we had mortgaged to the devil – our souls, our genetic debt, our blockchain memories… No matter what you called it, the fact remained.

They had lied to us.

I wondered if waking one of these bodies might signal the death of someone else in the cabin. Just who controlled the growth rate of each clone? Could it be that the life expectancy of every miner had been so thoroughly calculated? All for