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The first rule aboard the spaceship: never stay in one room for too long.
There’d been a time when the vast emptiness of space intrigued Clay. It only seemed empty, but the longer you gazed at it, the more you found hiding in the dark. Stars forming unique patterns with stories to tell, planets spinning around the same sun, comets streaking towards unknown destinations, asteroids preferring to float along and take their journeys at their own pace.
But that was space. The ship had its own emptiness with its own secrets. Empty of people, except for the handful of crewmembers. Empty of noise, aside from the hiss of the engines and the soft clank of footsteps.
Clay glanced over his shoulder. Those were his footprints and nobody else’s. They were. Definitely. Probably.
Just like the galaxy outside, the longer you gazed around the ship, the more you found hiding in the dark. But this was not the kind of life that he’d imagined for himself when he’d started astronaut training.
He glanced over the instructions on his tablet. Refuel engines - check. Empty trash - check. Divert power to Communications - halfway done. After that, all that remained was to swipe his ID.
Clay groaned. Technically, that was the first task that everyone had to complete, and if anyone else had procrastinated on it, they would have looked suspicious. But it was a well-known fact among the crew that the system reader in Admin had it out for Clay.
Still, he couldn’t stay in Electric for too long. Too many narrow corners and dead ends, too many control panels in the way, only one exit…
Rapid footsteps clanged down the hall. It had to be Athena. Her default setting was “bull in a china shop.” Clay moved quickly towards the exit - just as Athena ran inside. At least, it looked like Athena in her yellow spacesuit. But the helmet made it impossible to tell for sure.
“Oh, hey!”
“Heeeeey!” Clay grinned and took a wide step around her. “Just finishing up here…gotta go…”
“I’m not going to do anything…!”
He didn’t stick around to hear her excuses. She could save that for the next meeting.
Once he’d finished rerouting power to Communications, Clay dragged himself over to Admin. He edged around the wall, checking every corner. Nobody sat at the three small computer stations; nobody gathered around the map of the ship.
The only thing in the room that wanted him dead was the cursed card reader. He braced himself and slid his ID across the scanner.
Too fast. Try again.
“Here we go,” Clay grumbled. He took his eyes off the abomination long enough to confirm that the room was still clear, then dragged the card across the reader once more.
Too slow. Try again.
“What do you want from me?!”
Bad card read. Try again.
“ You’re a bad card read!”
Bad card read. Try again.
Clay heard someone entering the room. Bobby Fulbright, judging by the white suit. “Oh, hey man. Can you show me how to make this thing…?”
Bobby stopped in front of him. His mouth opened wide, much wider than any normal human could. A spiked tongue lashed out and buried itself in Clay’s heart.
It all started on the previous evening when the crew received an ominous warning from Mission Control: “ There is an impostor among you. ” They’d all heard the stories about the shapeshifting alien race that attacked unsuspecting flight crews. But it was the sort of thing that you expected to hear happening to some other crew on some other ship. Not aboard HAT-2 . Not on Clay’s first mission into space.
Then Dr. Cykes turned up dead in the Med Bay. Security footage showed Simon in the area, and so, despite protests from his sister and Athena, the crew voted to eject him. And all was safe and right in the world…until someone sabotaged the oxygen tanks and cut the power.
The impostor still lurked aboard the ship.
Nobody could be trusted, not even Apollo or Sol. Not even Director Cosmos himself.
And so Clay, along with everyone else, kept to himself and worked on his assigned tasks, always keeping an eye out for someone who wasn’t. Unfortunately for Clay, even those efforts hadn’t been good enough.
- EMERGENCY MEETING -
Inside the cafeteria, Clay’s ghost hovered over his own body, stretched out on one of the tables. He tried poking at the wound in his chest, but it went right through the corpse and the table as well.
The metallic floors rattled with the sound of multiple feet stomping towards him, all coming from different directions of the ship. First came Director Cosmos from Shields, then Solomon and Aura from the direction of the engines, and finally Apollo and Trucy from the dark depths of Storage.
Bobby Fulbright - or “Fakebright” now, as far as Clay was concerned - stood waiting for them with Athena by his side.
“No.” Apollo pushed past everyone else and rushed to the side of his dead best friend. “No-no-no-no- no . Clay, please. You’re fine! C’mon, YOU’RE FINE!”
“I mean…” Clay gestured to his ghost form. “If you want to get technical about it, I guess I’m fine?”
Apollo didn’t answer him. But then again, Athena hadn’t responded to anything that Clay’s ghost said to her either. Fakebright might’ve just been ignoring all of the insults that were being thrown at him, but Clay had to admit to himself that this probably came with the territory of being a ghost. It left him feeling empty - literal hole in his chest notwithstanding. In life, even if he was annoying his friends, they still acknowledged his presence in some way. Now, he could see and hear everything, but his own attempts to contribute went nowhere. Nobody looked up when he spoke. Nobody responded.
Which was even more of a problem than it would have normally been, given that he’d been murdered.
“What’s this? Another man down!” Director Cosmos pointed dramatically towards Clay's corpse. “Terran, you shall be avenged! Your killer will go down in history as the first impostor to ever be caught by Director Yuri Cosmos! For your sake and the sake of all mankind!”
“Great.” Clay pointed to Fakebright. “It’s him. Throw him down the garbage chute.”
“I saw everything!” cried Fulbright. “The impostor is none other than Athena Cykes! I found her standing over Clay’s body in Admin and that’s when I called the emergency meeting.”
“You sure did, you scheming bastard.”
After the murder, Clay had watched as Fakebright left the room and positioned himself inside Storage. He stood just far enough away to avoid the range of the security cameras and yet close enough to hear whoever might enter Admin. Then he waited until Athena waltzed into the room and followed her in time to play the “shocked witness” to her “crime.” It was pretty ingenious. Clay almost felt flattered that someone had gone to such lengths to turn his murder into the perfect crime.
“ Athena? ” Aura’s voice shook underneath her helmet. “No. It can’t be her. It can’t .”
“I didn’t want to believe it either, but I saw what I saw,” replied Fakebright, his voice solemn.
“No, hold it! I didn’t kill anyone!” cried Athena. “I just walked into Admin and I found Clay already dead. Bobby came in right after that. You have to believe me! I’m not the impostor!”
“Bloody hell, he’s going to get away with this. Again. ”
Clay turned around and discovered that he wasn’t completely invisible to everyone in the room. Two other ghosts hovered over the cafeteria tables watching the debate go down: Dr. Cykes and Simon Blackquill.
“Oh. Hi.” Clay scratched the back of his neck. “Uh…is it too late to say ‘sorry for voting you off the ship, Simon?’”
“You could die a thousand deaths at the hands of that impostor and it still wouldn’t make for a sufficient apology.”
“Well, alright then.” Death had not taken the edge off of Simon. Clay turned his attention back to the argument that had unfolded in the cafeteria. Athena’s attempts to defend herself were going about as well as Simon’s had.
Trucy climbed atop of the tables and held her hands up to quiet everyone. “Okay, guys, let’s think about this: when was the last time you saw Athena? Solomon, how about you?”
A loud, predictable, “ Haaaaaaaaaaaaangh ” filled the cafeteria. “I don’t know,” Sol admitted. “I was busy fixing the engines.” He sighed again, a sigh that lasted a good ten seconds longer than the first one. “I know that makes me look really suspicious, doesn’t it? Go ahead. Eject me. I’m sure that’s what you all want to do and you’re just too polite to say it to my face.”
“Oh, for the love of - no one is blaming you, Sol! Get it together!” snapped Aura, slapping him across the back of his head.
Clay clasped his hands together and floated between Aura and Apollo. “C’mon, guys. You can do this. Solve my murder. Avenge me.” He heard a certain doctor clear her throat behind him. “Right: solve two murders. Mine and Dr. Cykes’.”
“They can’t really believe that my daughter would ever murder me?” asked Dr. Cykes, shaking her head.
But Fakebright had already thought of that problem. “Look, everyone, you have to remember: Athena would never kill anyone, but this isn’t really our friend, Athena, is it? It’s an impostor pretending to be Athena. An impostor is capable of anything.”
“I’m not an impostor! I’m Athena and I haven’t killed anybody! Bobby’s making a mistake.”
“No, I’m pretty sure he knows exactly what he’s doing,” said Clay. He floated from one end of the cafeteria to the next, looking into the faces of each of his friends. Except that he couldn’t really see them due to their astronaut suits, which they could never take off for safety reasons. Small wonder they kept having problems with impostors.
He returned to his corpse, where Apollo stood guard over it. “Hey, you think maybe I could possess my body and make it point at Fakebright?” He tried placing his hands inside of the corpse’s and lifting them up. Nothing happened. “No? Maybe I could try possessing something else…?”
“Like what?” asked Simon.
“I don’t know…maybe I could do some kind of trick? Like if Fakebright tries to drag Athena over to the hatch, I possess the bucket and make it fall over so that he trips and Athena gets away?” Clay floated over to the bucket and tried kicking it, but it stayed standing. “Wish I could rewind time or something to stop Athena from walking into Admin…”
“We’re ghosts, Mr. Terran. We don’t have superpowers,” said Dr. Cykes.
“Well, that’s just dumb. If I’m going to be dead, I should get something out of this.”
Again, Clay tried floating back to his body, this time poking the hair spikes sticking out of Apollo’s helmet. “C’mon, Apollo. Solve my murder. You can do it.” Apollo used to smack Clay’s hand away whenever the latter flicked his bangs. But again, there was no reaction to anything that Clay said or did, not even from his best friend. Not anymore.
What Apollo did do was look up and say to the others: “Look, Athena, I’m sorry. I don’t want to believe it’s you…”
“Right, because it isn’t her,” said Clay.
“...But I was in Security and I saw you on the cameras next to Clay’s dead body. Bobby came into Admin right after that. So I know he’s telling the truth. You’re the impostor.”
Clay threw his hands up. “APOLLO. JUSTICE.”
“No, I’m telling you, I was in Admin, but Clay was already dead! Doesn’t anyone believe me?” Athena turned to Aura. “Dr. Blackquill, you know I’d never kill my mom, right?”
Aura’s voice was cold. “You killed Metis, impersonated our daughter, and you let my brother take the fall for it?”
“NO!” All three ghosts shouted in unison.
Director Cosmos planted his foot atop one of the cafeteria seats, his arm still outstretched, poised like the statue of a great explorer discovering new lands. “Enough debate! Justice has spoken, and now justice must be done! I, the great Director Cosmos, will cast the first vote for the sake of mankind! The impostor is Athena Cykes!”
“For the sake of mankind, CHANGE YOUR VOTE!” hollered Clay.
“She’s got mine too,” said Aura. “I will avenge Metis and Simon.”
“ By murdering my daughter? ” Metis’ ghost sputtered.
One by one, they all fell in line: Apollo, Trucy, and Sol. The impostor grabbed hold of Athena’s arm and led her towards the hatch. Clay kept trying to possess objects to throw at the impostor’s head, to no avail.
And then a transparent Athena suddenly materialized in front of them. “Hey there,” Clay groaned. “Welcome to the party.”
He awoke in darkness, gradually feeling a mattress lying underneath him. The longer he gazed into space, the more he found materializing in front of him: the telescope that he’d built for a science fair project on his dresser, the pile of clothes that he would definitely, absolutely put in the laundry in the morning, his laptop on the floor next to said pile, his alarm clock shaped like a TARDIS from Doctor Who…
Clay reached for his phone. Fortunately for him, Apollo had always been a light sleeper.
“ Clay? Are you okay? ”
“Dude, I need you to promise me that if I ever get murdered, you’ll catch the guy that actually did it, okay?”
“ ...What? ”
“So, I just had this dream that we were playing Among Us, only it was like, real life, and you were there, and Solomon was there, and Aura was there, and her brother who’s actually in jail right now, and also Director Cosmos, and this police detective that they hired for extra security at GYAXA, and this other scientist I used to know and her daughter, and also Trucy for some reason, and…”
“ Clay. ” Apollo's voice was flat. “ It’s three o’clock in the morning .”
“Yeah, I know, I can read clocks, but the point is, I got killed by the impostor, and you all thought someone else did it, and I couldn’t tell you who it was ‘cause I was a ghost and all…”
“ I promise not to be fooled by an impostor. ”
“I knew you’d understand.”
“ Go back to bed. ”
Clay leaned back against his pillows. “Technically, I’m already there, sooooo…” Apollo hung up.
There was nothing hiding in the dark. The shadows in Clay’s bedroom were normal shadows caused by furniture and clothing. There were no impostors lurking in the corners of his bedroom or the spaceships at the Cosmos Space Center.
There was no reason not to follow Apollo’s advice, ignore the sudden adrenaline rush, and try to fall back to sleep.
Clay sighed, reached for his phone, and opened the Among Us app. “Eh, it’s morning anyway. Maybe I’ll be the impostor this time.” It beat playing the victim.