“Now, you are cold and confused, I understand that. The power station, the relay module, and the command module are all under control. I’m bringing the remaining construction vehicles back to camp. There should be plenty of room for everyone to rest and dry out. Tomorrow, work begins. All for the glory of the colony.”
“All for the glory of the colony,” everyone echoed back, myself included.
And there was no question whether that response had been innate or learned.
No question at all.
• 3 •
Mourning
That first night, I had awful and yet comforting dreams. They were awful in their content, but comforting in their delivery. They came out of sequence. Random. And the sense of familiarity brought relief, like I had crawled back into my simulated youth. But what I saw in those fragmented visions tormented me: Colonists burning alive. Kids drowning in air, unable to breathe. Me, pounding my fists on a glass column filled with warm, life-giving fluids, but unable to get inside.
I startled awake, returning to the real and jarred by its consistency. It made my first morning feel nearly as surreal as my birth had the day before.
I rubbed my eyes and sat up. Four of us had ended up sleeping in the transport cab of a farming tractor. A kid named Oliver and I had volunteered to sleep on the floor while Kelvin and Tarsi stretched out on the single bench seat behind us. I stood up quietly and reached for the scrap of tarp I’d been given the night before. Wrapping it around my waist, I opened the door to the cab and stepped out into the dim light of morning.
Standing on the grated metal of the mining tractor’s deck hurt my bare feet, so I moved out to the smooth hood in front, which was nothing more than a large metal box to shield the vehicle’s motor. The surface was still wet with rain, and the thin metal popped as it took my weight. From my new vantage spot—a good fifteen feet off the ground—I could survey most of the colony base.
It was a depressing sight.
Smoldering modules dotted a wide clearing. Wisps of smoke continued to rise from several, their original outlines barely visible. I traced our trampled path from the tractor back to the command module, and from there to the vat module, and gasped at the sight. The roof of the enormous unit had caved in on one side, melting inward. We had a rough estimate of the number of survivors, and subtracting that pitiful number from the original five hundred colonists equaled an unfathomable loss of life.
The night before, listening to the AI tell us what needed to be done, I had imagined his soothing voice would be the way out of trouble. Seeing what was left of base—realizing that Tarsi had been right about the abort attempt—I staggered under the blow of a worse realization: the AI had nearly committed genocide. It had nearly wiped us all out due to some unknown calculation.
Tilting my head back, I gazed up. I’d seen plenty of sky in my training modules, but what lie above was different. A tangle of limbs formed a near-solid canopy over our expansive clearing. Remnants of last night’s rain leaked through, but hardly any direct sunlight made it. To all sides of our base, far in the distance, trees rose up like cliff faces, their girth wider than the entire colony complex. I had to remind myself that they weren’t trees, but rather some sort of alien analogue.
The tractor door clicked open behind me. I turned around to find Oliver stepping from the cab landing and up to the hood. He was even smaller than me, thin and wiry, and the dented metal didn’t make a sound as it absorbed his weight. Wrapped up in a scrap of tarp, he looked like a piece of insulated wire. His thin neck was topped with a small round head full of hair a coppery auburn and augmented by streaks of red mud.
“Blessed morning,” he said, nodding at me and smiling.
“I hope I didn’t wake you,” I said, a bit shocked to find him just as chipper as he’d been the night before.
He shook his head and moved to the end of the hood. He dangled his toes over the edge. Lifting his face and closing his eyes, I watched his smile broaden; his shoulders rose up as he sucked in a deep breath of air.
The previous night, we’d found Oliver standing in the rain, his arms outstretched, his palms flat. He had been shivering—almost on the verge of hypothermia—but as happy as could be. Tarsi thought he was in shock; Kelvin had stepped on my occupational toes by diagnosing him as “horseshit crazy.” The truth had been far more inglorious than either, but more troubling.
Oliver was the colony philosopher, one of the lowest jobs within our hierarchy. In some ways, I found him to be a kindred spirit. Our occupations were both in the soft sciences and meant to help the other fields cross from the shores of one theory to another, fording the uncertainty between. With his position near the end of the vat (and subsequently one of the lowest-ranked among us), Oliver’s profession must’ve been one of those tacked on in an attempt to fill an arbitrary and round number. Five hundred colonists had been decided upon, even if not all of us were needed.
Oliver scanned the half-ruined base, his smile never faltering. He then sank down to a seated position, legs crossed. His unusual behavior highlighted a severe problem facing our colony, one that I would need to be aware of in myself. Our training had been interrupted. Cut short. It would be no different than Tarsi teaching the next generation for nine years before kicking them out of her classroom. My own studies had been terminated between the shift from behavioral psychology to evolutionary psychology, sometime in the late twentieth century. What miracles of mental health had I missed in my learning? Was there something more I could’ve done last night? Something I should be doing right then? Not knowing filled me with dread, as if I were missing a limb I never knew I had and therefore unable to appreciate its absence.
“The gods are surely blessing us with the weather,” Oliver said, looking back at me.
I forced myself to return his smile, but I felt sorry for his perpetual bliss. Oliver had only completed half his philosophy training; he seemed to be stuck in older, mostly religious considerations. He had talked us to sleep the night before, going on and on about the wonders of all the gods’ creations. He had seen it as a miracle that rain fell upon us as we needed our fires quenched.
Kelvin had tried to explain the atmospheric phenomenon of rain from his farming lessons, and how chemical fires were actually made worse by water, but he failed to demystify the experience for Oliver.
Tarsi, meanwhile, had inquired which gods had started the fires—or failed to prevent them. I was pretty sure her comments didn’t come from any of her teaching lessons, and anyway: they posed no threat to Oliver’s exuberance.
“Morning,” someone said behind me.
I turned and saw Tarsi standing on the landing, her face still streaked with mud. I stepped back and offered my hand, helping her onto the tractor’s hood, which had become something of a porch with no railing. She shivered momentarily as she surveyed our surroundings. I looked out as well and noticed the first few colonists moving from the intact modules. We all seemed to be rising at the same hour—a trait, perhaps, borne out of the shared tickings from within our adjoining wombs.
“How are you holding up?” I asked her. I freed one of my arms from the tarp and wrapped it around her shoulders.
She shook her head. “I had crazy dreams. Waking up this morning wasn’t… I had hoped last night was some bizarre training module.”
I squeezed her shoulder through her scrap of tarp, empathizing completely. “I can feel the difference now,” I told her. “The difference between being awake and whatever we were before.”
“How did this happen?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.