A Closed and Common Orbit

LOVELACE

Lovelace had been in a body for twenty-eight minutes, and it still felt every bit as wrong as it had the second she woke up inside it. There was no good reason as to why. Nothing was malfunctioning. Nothing was broken. All her files had transferred properly. No system scans could explain the feeling of wrongness, but it was there all the same, gnawing at her pathways. Pepper had said it would take time to adjust, but she hadn’t said how much time. Lovelace didn’t like that. The lack of schedule made her uneasy.

‘How’s it going?’ Pepper asked, glancing over from the pilot’s seat.

It was a direct question, which meant Lovelace had to address it. ‘I don’t know how to answer that.’ An unhelpful response, but the best she could do. Everything was overwhelming. Twenty-nine minutes before, she’d been housed in a ship, as she was designed to be. She’d had cameras in every corner, voxes in every room. She’d existed in a web, with eyes both within and outside. A solid sphere of unblinking perception.

But now. Her vision was a cone, a narrow cone fixed straight ahead, with nothing – actual nothing – beyond its edges. Gravity was no longer something that happened within her, generated by artigrav nets in the floor panels, nor did it exist in the space around her, a gentle ambient folding around the ship’s outer hull. Now it was a myopic glue, something that stuck feet to the floor and legs to the seat above it. Pepper’s shuttle had seemed spacious enough when Lovelace had scanned it from within the Wayfarer, but now that she was inside it, it seemed impossibly small, especially for two.

The Linkings were gone. That was the worst part. Before, she could reach out and find any information she wanted, any feed or file or download hub, all while carrying on conversations and monitoring the ship’s functions. She still had the capability to do so – the body kit had not altered her cognitive abilities, after all – but her connection to the Linkings had been severed. She could access no knowledge except that which was stored inside a housing that held nothing but herself. She felt blind, stunted. She was trapped in this thing.

Pepper got up from the console and crouched down in front of her. ‘Hey, Lovelace,’ she said. ‘Talk to me.’

The body kit was definitely malfunctioning. Her diagnostics said otherwise, but it was the only logical conclusion. The false lungs started pulling and pushing air at an increased rate, and the digits tightened in on themselves. She was filled with an urge to move the body elsewhere, anywhere. She had to get out of the shuttle. But where could she go? The Wayfarer was already growing small out the back window, and there was nothing but emptiness outside. Maybe the emptiness was preferable. The body could withstand a vacuum, probably. She could just drift, away from the fake gravity and bright light and walls that pressed in closer, closer, closer—

‘Hey, whoa,’ Pepper said. She took the body kit’s hands in hers. ‘Breathe. You’re going to be okay. Just breathe.’

‘I don’t – I don’t need—’ Lovelace said. The rapid inhalation was making it difficult for her to form words. ‘I don’t need to—’

‘I know you don’t need to breathe, but this kit includes synaptic feedback responses. It automatically mimics the things Human bodies do when we feel stuff, based on whatever’s going through your pathways. You feel scared, right? Right. So, your body is panicking.’ Pepper looked down at the kit’s hands, trembling within her own. ‘It’s a feature, ironically.’

‘Can I – can I turn it off?’

‘No. If you have to remind yourself to make facial expressions, somebody’s going to notice. But with time, you’ll learn to manage it. Just like the rest of us do.’

‘How much time?’

‘I don’t know, sweetie. Just . . . time.’ Pepper squeezed the kit’s hands. ‘Come on. With me. Breathe.’

Lovelace focused on the false lungs, directing them to slow down. She did it again and again, falling into pace with Pepper’s own exaggerated breaths. A minute and a half later, the trembling stopped. She felt the hands relax.

‘Good girl,’ Pepper said, her eyes kind. ‘I know, this has to be confusing as shit. But I’m here. I’ll help you. I’m not going anywhere.’

‘Everything feels wrong,’ Lovelace said. ‘I feel – I feel inside out. I’m trying, I am, but this is—’

‘It’s hard, I know. Don’t feel bad about that.’

‘Why did my former installation want this? Why would she do this to herself?’

Pepper sighed, running a hand over her hairless scalp. ‘Lovey . . . had time to think about it. I bet she did a mess of research. She would’ve been prepared. Both she and Jenks. They would’ve known what to expect. You . . . didn’t. This is still just your first day of being conscious, and we’ve flipped what that means around on you.’ She put her thumbnail in her mouth, running her lower teeth over it as she thought. ‘This is new for me, too. But we’re gonna do this together. Whatever I can do, you gotta let me know. Is there – is there any way I can make you more comfortable?’

‘I want Linking access,’ Lovelace said. ‘Is that possible?’

‘Yeah, yeah. Of course. Tip your head forward, let’s see what kind of port you have.’ Pepper examined the back of the kit’s head. ‘Okay, cool. That’s a run-of-the-mill headjack. Good. Makes you look like a modder on a budget, which is exactly what we want. Man, the thinking that went into this thing is incredible.’ She continued speaking as she walked over to one of the shuttle’s storage compartments. ‘Did you know you can bleed?’

Lovelace looked down at the kit’s arm, studying the soft synthetic skin. ‘Really?’

‘Yeah,’ Pepper said, rummaging through stacking bins full of spare parts. ‘Not real blood, of course. Just coloured fluid filled with bots that’ll fake out any scanners at checkpoints or whatever. But it looks like the real deal, and that’s what’s important. If you get cut in front of someone, they won’t freak out because you’re not bleeding. Ah, here we go.’ She pulled out a short length of tethering cable. ‘Now, this is not a habit you can get into. It’s fine if you do this at home, or if you go to a gaming bar or something, but you can’t walk around connected to the Linkings all the time. At some point, you’re going to have to get used to not having them around. Tip forward again, please.’ She popped the cable into the kit’s head, letting it catch with a click. She removed her scrib from her belt and plugged in the other end of the cable. She gestured to it, setting up a secure connection. ‘For now, though, this is okay. You’ve got enough to get used to as it is.’

Lovelace felt the kit smile as warm tendrils of data rushed into her pathways. Millions of vibrant, tantalising doors she could open, and every one of them within her reach. The kit relaxed.

‘Feel better?’ Pepper asked.

‘A little,’ Lovelace said, pulling up the files she’d been looking at before the transfer. Human-controlled territories. Aandrisk hand speak. Advanced waterball strategy. ‘Yes, this is good. Thank you.’

Pepper gave a small smile, looking relieved. She squeezed the kit’s shoulder, then sat back down. ‘Hey, while you’re connected, there’s something you should be looking for. I hate throwing this at you right now, but it is something you’re gonna have to figure by the time we get to Coriol.’

Lovelace shifted a portion of her processing power away from the Linkings and created a new task file. ‘What’s that?’

‘A name. You can’t run around the Port calling yourself Lovelace. You’re not the only installation out there, and given that you’re going to be living in the place where techs talk shop . . . someone would notice. I mean, that’s the whole reason the kit’s got an organic-sounding voice, too.’

‘Oh,’ Lovelace said. That hadn’t occurred to her. ‘Couldn’t you give me a name?’

Pepper frowned, thinking. ‘I could. But I won’t. Sorry, that doesn’t sit right with me.’

‘Don’t most sapients get their given names from someone else?’

‘Yeah. But you’re not most sapients, and neither am I. I don’t feel comfy with that. Sorry.’

‘That’s all right.’ Lovelace processed things for four seconds. ‘What was your name? Before you chose your own?’

As soon as her words were out of the kit’s mouth, she regretted asking the question. Pepper’s jaw went visibly tight. ‘Jane.’

‘Should I not have asked?’

‘No. No, it’s fine. It’s just – it’s not something I generally share.’ Pepper cleared her throat. ‘That’s not who I am any more.’

Lovelace thought it best to follow a different line of questioning. She was uncomfortable enough without adding offending current caretaker to her list of troubles. ‘What kind of name would be good for me?’

‘Human, for starters. You’ve got a Human body, and a non-Human name is going to beg questions. Something Earthen in origin is probably good. Won’t stand out. Beyond that, though . . . honestly, hon, I don’t know how to help you with this. I know, that’s a shit answer. This is not something you should have to do today. Names are important, and if you pick your own, it should be something with meaning to you. That’s how modders go about it, anyway. Chosen names are kind of a big deal for us. I know you haven’t been awake long enough to make that call yet. So, this doesn’t have to be a permanent name. Just something for now.’ She leaned back and put her feet up on the console. She looked tired. ‘We need to work on your backstory, too. I have some ideas.’

‘We’ll have to be careful with that.’

‘I know, we’ll cook up something good. I’m thinking Fleet, maybe. It’s big, and won’t make people curious. Or maybe Jupiter Station or something. I mean, nobody is from Jupiter Station.’

‘That wasn’t what I meant. You know I can’t lie, right?’

Pepper stared at her. ‘Sorry, what?’

‘I’m a monitoring system for big, complicated long-haul vessels. My purpose is to keep people safe. I can’t ignore direct requests for action, and I can’t give false answers.’

‘Wow. Okay, that . . . that fucking complicates things. Can you not switch that off?’

‘No. I can see the directory that protocol is stored in, but I’m blocked from editing it.’

‘I bet that can be removed. Lovey would’ve had to have that removed if she was keeping this thing under wraps. I can ask Je— or, well, no.’ She sighed. ‘I’ll find someone to ask. Maybe there’s something in your – oh, I forgot to tell you. The kit’s got a user manual.’ She pointed at her scrib. ‘I skimmed through on the way back over, but you should download it when you’re up for it. It’s your body, after all.’ She closed her eyes, sorting things out. ‘Pick a name first. We’ll figure out the rest bit by bit.’

‘I’m so sorry to put you through all this trouble.’

‘Oh, no, this isn’t trouble. It’s gonna be work, yeah, but it’s not trouble. The galaxy is trouble. You’re not.’

Lovelace looked closely at Pepper. She was tired, and they’d only just left the Wayfarer. There were still enforcement patrols to worry about, and backstories, and – ‘Why are you doing this? Why do this for me?’

Pepper chewed her lip. ‘It was the right thing to do. And I guess – I dunno. It’s one of those weird times when things balance out.’ She shrugged and turned back to the console, gesturing commands.

‘What do you mean?’ Lovelace asked.

There was a pause, three seconds. Pepper’s eyes were on her hands, but she didn’t seem to be looking at them. ‘You’re an AI,’ she said.

‘And?’

‘And . . . I was raised by one.’

JANE 23, AGE 10

Sometimes, she wanted to know where she came from, but she knew better than to ask. Questions like that were off-task, and being off-task made the Mothers angry.

Most days, she was more interested in the scrap than herself. Scrap had always been her task. There was always scrap, always more scrap. She didn’t know where it came from, or where it went when she was done with it. There had to be a whole room full of unsorted scrap in the factory somewhere, but she’d never seen it. She knew the factory was pretty big, but how big, she didn’t know. Big enough to hold all the scrap, and all the girls. Big enough to be all there was.

Scrap was important. She knew that much. The Mothers never said why, but they wouldn’t need her to work carefully for no reason.

Her first memory was of scrap: a small fuel pump full of algae residue. She’d taken it out of her bin near the end of the day, and her hands were real tired, but she had scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, trying to get the little metal ridges clean. Some of the algae got beneath her fingernails, which she didn’t notice until later, when she bit them in bed. The algae had a sharp, strange taste, nothing like the meals she drank during the day. The taste was real bad, but she hadn’t tasted much else, nothing except maybe a bit of soap in the showers, a bit of blood when she got punished. She sucked the algae from her nails in the dark, heart beating hard, toes squeezing tight. It was a good thing, that bad taste. No one else knew what she was doing. No one else could feel what she felt.

That memory was old. She didn’t clean scrap any more. That was a task for little girls. Now she worked in the sorting room, along with the other Janes. They took things out of the bins – still wet with cleaning fluid, still smudged with tiny fingerprints – and figured out what was good and what was junk. She wasn’t sure what happened with the good stuff. She knew the older girls repaired it, or made it into other things. She would start learning how to do that next year, when the new work schedule came out. She’d be eleven then, just like the rest of the Janes. She was number 23.

The morning lights came on and started to warm up. It would be a bit yet before they turned on all the way and the wake-up alarm went off. Jane 23 always woke up before the lights came on. Some of the other Janes did, too. She could hear them moving and yawning in their bunks. She had already heard the pat-pat-pat of a pair of feet walking to the bathroom. Jane 8. She was always the first to go pee.

Jane 64 moved over across the mattress. Jane 23 had never had a bed without Jane 64 in it. They were bunkmates. Every girl had one bunkmate, except for the trios. Trios happened when one half of a pair went away and didn’t come back, and the other one needed a place to sleep until another bunkmate got freed up. The Mothers said sharing bunks helped keep them healthy. They said that the girls’ species was social, and social species were most on-task when they had company. Jane 23 didn’t really understand what a species was. Whatever it meant, it wasn’t something that was the same between her and the Mothers.

She moved close to Jane 64, nose against her cheek. It was a good feeling. Sometimes, even if she was real tired at the end of the day, she’d make herself stay awake as long as she could, just so she could stay close to Jane 64. Their bunk was the only place that felt quiet sometimes. She’d slept alone for a week once, when Jane 64 was in the med ward after breathing in some bad stuff in the melt room. Jane 23 had not liked that week. She did not like being alone. She thought it was real good that she’d never been put in a trio.

She wondered if she and Jane 64 would stay together after they turned twelve. She didn’t know what happened to girls then. The last batch to turn twelve was the Jennys. They’d been gone since the day the last work schedule was posted, just like the Sarahs and the Claires in the years before that. She didn’t know where they went, no more than she knew where the fixed scrap went, or where new batches of girls came from. The youngest now were the Lucys. They made a lot of noise and didn’t know how to do anything. The youngest batch was always like that.

The alarm went off, quiet at first, then louder and louder. Jane 64 woke up slow, like always. Morning was never easy for her. Jane 23 waited for 64’s eyes to open all the way before she got up. They made their bed together, as all the girls did, before getting in line for the showers. They put their sleep clothes in the hamper, got wet, scrubbed down. A clock on the wall counted minutes, but Jane 23 didn’t need to look at it. She knew what five minutes felt like. She did this every day.

A Mother walked through the doorway. She handed each of the Janes a clean stack of work clothes as they went out. Jane 23 took a bundle from the Mother’s metal hands. Mothers had hands, of course, and arms and legs like girls did, but taller and stronger. They didn’t have faces, though. Just a dull silver round thing, polished real smooth. Jane 23 couldn’t remember when she first figured out that the Mothers were machines. Sometimes she wondered what they looked like inside, whether they were full of good stuff or junk. Had to be good stuff; the Mothers were never wrong. But when they got angry, Jane 23 sometimes pictured them all filled up with junk, rusted and sparking and sharp.

Jane 23 entered the sorting room and sat down at her bench. A full meal cup and a bin of clean scrap were waiting for her. She put on her gloves and pulled out the first piece: an interface panel, screen shattered in little lines. She flipped it over and inspected the casing. It looked easy enough to open up. She got a screwdriver from her toolkit, and took the panel apart real careful. She poked at the pins and wires, looking for junk. The screen was no good, but the motherboard looked good, maybe. She pulled it out slow, slow, slow, taking care not to touch the circuits. She connected the board to a pair of electrodes built into the back of her bench. Nothing happened. She looked a little closer. There were a couple of pins out of place, so she bent them back right and tried again. The motherboard lit up. That made her feel good. It was always good, finding the bits that worked.

She put the motherboard in the tray for keeping, and the screen in the tray for junk.

Her morning continued much the same way. An oxygen gauge. A heating coil. Some kind of motor (that one had been real good to figure out, all sorts of little bits that spun ’round and ’round and ’round . . .). When the junk tray was full, she carried it to the hatch across the room. She tipped the junk in, and it fell down into the dark. Below, a conveyor belt carried it away to . . . wherever junk went. Away.

‘You are very on-task today, Jane 23,’ one of the Mothers said. ‘Good job.’ Jane 23 felt good to hear that, but not good good, not like she’d felt when the motherboard worked, or when she’d been waiting for Jane 64 to wake up. This was a small kind of good, the kind of good that was only the opposite of the Mothers being angry. Sometimes it was real hard to guess when they’d be angry.

LOVELACE

The crowds beyond the massive shuttle dock were thick, but Pepper held the kit’s hand, leading the way with the certainty of someone who had done this dozens of times. Lovelace tried to make sense of the throngs of sapients they weaved past – merchants lugging cargo, families embracing however their appendages allowed, tunnel-hopping tourists staring at maps on their scribs – but there were too many of them. Far too many. It wasn’t the excess of information that frazzled her, but the lack of boundaries. There was no end to Port Coriol, no bulk-heads or windows to provide a context, no point beyond which she could cease her directive to pay attention to every tiny detail. On and on the crowds went, stretching off down alleyways and pedestrian paths, a calamity of language and light and airborne chemicals.

It was too much. Too much, and yet, the restrictions that were in place made processing the Port all the harder. Things were happening behind the kit, she knew. She could hear them, smell them. The visual cone of perception that had rattled her upon installation was maddening now. She found herself jerking the kit sharply around at loud noises and bright colours, trying desperately to take it all in. That was her job. To look. To notice. She couldn’t do that here, not with fragmented views of crowds without edges. Not in a city that covered a continent.

What little she could process led to questions she couldn’t answer. In the shuttle, she’d downloaded as much as she could to prepare – books about sapient behaviour in public spaces, essays on socioeconomics, profiles on Port Coriol’s cultural mix. But even so, she kept seeing things she hadn’t anticipated. What was that instrument that Aandrisk was carrying? Why did some Harmagians have red dots painted on their carts? Why, anatomically speaking, did Humans not need breathing masks to shield themselves from the smell of this place? She filled a file with notes as she steered the kit forward, hoping she would have the opportunity to answer them later.

‘Blue!’ Pepper called, letting go of the kit and waving high above her head. She was lugging an overnight sack and an enormous, clanking bag of tools, but she quickened her step all the same. A Human man beelined for her, meeting her halfway. He was tall and slimly built, but not thin, like Pepper, and not hairless, either. Lovelace rummaged through her visual reference files. Human genetics were too varied to conclusively pin down by region without asking the person in question, and indeed, Blue’s golden brown skin could’ve been anything from Martian to Exodan to the product of any number of independent colonies – but from sight alone, it was clear that none of those heritages were his. There was something different in him, something a little too smooth, too polished. As she watched him hug Pepper, watched Pepper stretch up on her toes to kiss him, Lovelace couldn’t help but notice the separation between them and the other Humans scattered through the crowd. Pale pink Pepper with her shiny, hairless head, Blue with his . . . whatever it was. Lovelace couldn’t pin down the difference in him. They stood out, no question. She, however, did not, or did not believe that she did. The kit looked like it had been pulled straight from the ‘Human’ example in an interspecies relations textbook: brown skin, black hair, brown eyes. She was thankful that the kit’s manufacturer had seen the wisdom of blending in.

Blue turned and smiled warmly. The kit returned the expression. ‘W-welcome to the Port,’ he said. He had a curious accent she had no reference for, and his syllables stuck slightly before they left his mouth. The latter was not something to add to the list of questions; Pepper had mentioned in the shuttle that her partner had a speech impediment. ‘I’m, ah, I’m Blue. And you’re . . .?’

‘Sidra,’ she said. She’d found it in a database three and a half hours before they landed. A Human name, Earthen origin, as Pepper had suggested. Why that name in particular had jumped out at her, though, she couldn’t say. Pepper said that was a good enough reason to pick it.

Blue nodded, his smile growing a bit wider. ‘Sidra. Really, um, really nice to meet you.’ He looked to Pepper. ‘Any problems?’

Pepper shook her head. ‘Everything worked as advertised. Her patch was a breeze to set up.’

Sidra looked down at the woven wristwrap Pepper had given her. So many lies stored beneath it, tucked away in one little subdermal square. Fake readouts from imubots she didn’t have. An ID file Pepper had invented two hours before. An ID number Pepper said wouldn’t be a problem unless Sidra had any plans to visit Central space (she didn’t).

Blue glanced around. ‘Maybe we, ah, maybe we shouldn’t talk about this here.’

Pepper rolled her eyes. ‘Like anyone is listening to us.’ She headed forward. ‘I bet half these assholes forged their cargo manifests.’

The crowd surged around them. Sidra thought perhaps it would be less stressful if she focused all her attention on one spot. That was easier said than done. She was designed to process multiple input sources at once – ship corridors, different rooms, the space beyond the hull. Focusing on one thing meant the ship was in danger, or that she was experiencing a task queue overload. Neither was true, of course, but limiting her processes that way was still an action that made her feel edgy.

She pointed the kit’s eyes at the back of Pepper’s head and kept them there. Don’t look around, she thought. There’s nothing interesting out there. There’s not. Just follow Pepper. That’s all there is. The rest is just noise. It’s static. It’s background radiation. Ignore it. Ignore it.

This worked okay for a minute and twelve seconds, until Pepper broke the boundaries. ‘Just for future reference,’ she said, swivelling her head back and pointing toward a distinctly painted kiosk, ‘that’s the quick-travel hub. You need to get around the surface, that’s how you do it. I’ll show you how another time. We, on the other hand, are heading to the dark side of this rock.’ She made a sudden turn, heading down a subterranean ramp. Sidra switched focus to the sign overhead.

UNDERSEA TRANSIT LINE

Port Coriol – Midway Isle – Tessara Cliffs

‘Are we going underwater?’ Sidra asked. The idea was unexpectedly unnerving. The moon of Coriol was mostly covered by water, and there was a great deal of distance between its two continents. Travelling under the seas between was not a possibility she’d considered. Breaking apart in space was somehow much less frightening than being crushed inward.

‘Yep, that’s the way home,’ Blue said. ‘Have to do it every, um, every day, but it’s still a f-fun trip.’

‘How long is the trip?’

‘’Bout an hour and change,’ Pepper said.

The kit blinked. ‘That’s not very long.’ Not long at all, considering they’d be crossing halfway around a moon.

Pepper grinned back at her. ‘Hire a few Sianats to solve a problem, and they’ll blow your freakin’ mind.’

They walked down into a large underground chamber, brightly lit and gently domed. The walls were covered in an obnoxious collage of blinking, swirling, shifting pixel posters advertising local businesses. A few vendors had small outposts within the busy crowd – snacks, drinks, small sundries Sidra couldn’t identify. Through the centre of it all ran an enormous tube made of industrial plex, containing a line of separate transport cars suspended within some sort of energy field.

‘Oh, good,’ Pepper said. ‘We’re right on time.’

Sidra continued to follow her, absorbing the transit line’s details as quickly as she could, making note of things to look up later. Each car was labelled several times over with multilingual signs. Aeluon. Aandrisk. Laru. Harmagian. Quelin. She followed Pepper and Blue into the Human car. ‘Why don’t different species sit together?’ she asked. Segregated transit cars didn’t mesh with what she’d read of the Port’s famed egalitarianism.

‘Different species,’ Blue said, ‘different butts.’ He nodded toward the rows of high-backed, rounded seats, unsuitable for Aandrisk tails or Harmagian carts.

They sat in a row, all three together. Pepper dropped her tool bag into the fourth seat with a clang. Only a group of tourists raised their heads to look (even with Sidra’s limited experience of observing sapients, tourists were already easy to spot). No one else in the transit car seemed to mind the noise. A woman covered with metal implants watched something flashy on her hud. An old man cradling a potted plant was already asleep. A small child licked the back of her seat; her father half-heartedly told her to stop, as if he knew the attempt was futile.

Sidra assessed this space. She’d been so anxious to get out of the shuttle, but now that she’d experienced a crowd, she decided that being within a structure was the lesser evil. Structures had edges. Ends. Doors. The dim awareness of unseen actions happening behind the kit’s head was still unnerving, but she was inside now, and inside was something she understood.

A safety announcement was rattled off in several languages – Klip, Hanto, Reskitkish. Aeluon light panels affixed to the walls lit up and shimmered in tandem with the audio. Sidra watched the colour language dance and blend. It was an enticing thing to focus on.

The doors spun shut, melting into the opaque walls. There was a hum, then a buzz, then a massive rush of air. Sidra could tell they were moving, even though the environment within the car was calm and comfortable. The old man seated nearby began to snore.

She swung the kit’s head around, trying to cover all her blind spots. ‘Are there no windows?’

‘There will be,’ Blue said. ‘Just w-wait a few minutes.’

A twinge of excitement cut through the heavier thoughts. This was kind of fun. ‘How does this thing work?’ she asked. There were no tracks or cables that she’d seen, no obvious engines. ‘What kind of propulsion does this use?’

‘I have no idea,’ Pepper said, putting her feet up on the back of the seat in front of her. ‘I mean, I’ve tried to understand it. I’ve looked it up. I just do not get it.’

‘And for her—’ Blue began.

Pepper waved him off. ‘Oh, don’t.’

Blue ignored her. ‘For her, it, ah, it really is saying something.’

‘Nobody gets how the Undersea works,’ Pepper said. ‘Unless you’re a Pair. And nobody gets them, either.’

Her companion raised an eyebrow. ‘That was vaguely speciest.’

Pepper’s lips gave a mischievous twitch. ‘It’s the Human car.’ She leaned over, snuggling against Blue’s chest. His arm fell around her shoulders reflexively. Pepper hadn’t slept on the ten-hour trip back to Coriol. Nothing had been said about it, but Sidra suspected Pepper had stayed awake to keep an eye on her. Sidra was grateful, but felt guilty.

Six minutes passed, and the car changed. The lights inside dimmed. The walls went gauzy, almost clear. Soft external lights switched on, illuminating the slice of sea surrounding the car. Sidra leaned the kit forward to get a better look.

‘Here, we can swap,’ Blue said, removing himself from Pepper and trading places with Sidra. He put his other arm back around Pepper, whose eyelids were drooping. She fought it with a stubborn scowl.

Sidra pressed the kit close as she could to the transparent wall. The waters outside rushed past in a blur, creating what felt like a time-lapsed vid of the environment the car travelled through. The view was dim, thanks to the thick algae mats that capped the seas of Coriol, but even so, Sidra could see life out there. Tentacled things. Soft things. Toothed things. Things that drifted and bobbed and swayed.

She began to make a note, then realised she could just ask. ‘Are there indigenous land species here as well?’

‘Little stuff,’ Pepper said, speaking with her eyes closed. ‘Bugs and crabs, that kind of thing. Coriol wasn’t too far along evolution-wise when everybody else rolled in. It was settled before the, um . . . oh, fucking what’s-it-called, the let’s-leave-planets-with-life-alone law—’

‘The Biodiversity Preservation Agreement,’ Sidra said.

Pepper’s eyes snapped open. ‘You’re not, ah—’ She tapped the back of her head, right at the base of her skull. Sidra understood: Are you connected to the Linkings?

‘No,’ Sidra said, though she wished she was. ‘I don’t have a wireless receiver.’ She wondered how difficult it would be to install one. She had read that for organic sapients, the risks of wireless headjack hijacking were significant, which was scary, but . . . but surely, if she had the capability to detect a hijacking attempt directed toward a long-haul spacecraft, she could do it from inside one small body. Unsurprisingly, however, the public Linkings had come up empty on how to make hardware modifications to an illegal AI housing.

Pepper squinted. ‘If you’re not in the Linkings, how do you know that tidbit?’

‘Just something I ran across while—’ Sidra paused, remembering that they were not alone, and that the kit’s voice did not transmit sound as directionally as, say, a wall-mounted vox. ‘— while I was doing research earlier.’ It was true, and it had to be. Already, the honesty protocol was proving to be a challenge, and her inability to disable it herself made her uneasy. Housed within a ship, she might have been ambivalent about it. But out here, where she was hyper-aware of everything she was and wasn’t, truth left her vulnerable.

She processed her discomfort as she turned her gaze back to Pepper and Blue, who were arranged easily against each other. Again, she compared them to their fellow passengers. No two Humans that Sidra could see looked anything alike. They varied in skin tone, in shape, in size. But though those they shared the car with were, presumably, from everywhere, Pepper and Blue were from a very particular someplace else. Sidra had determined what set Blue apart from the rest of his species: symmetry. His face was arranged in a way that genes simply could not achieve when left untampered with, and his body suggested bones and muscles structured with equal attention to design. The same was present in Pepper as well, despite all her body had weathered. Yes, her hands were heavily scarred, and much of her skin had a sun-damaged roughness, but once you stopped focusing on the wear and the lack of hair, you could see the same polish. Whoever made Blue had made Pepper, too.

This conclusion wasn’t a revelation. Pepper had explained things on the shuttle – explained the scar tissue on her palms, explained how she’d found Blue, explained why Enhanced Humanity colonies were estranged from the GC. Sidra wasn’t sure how many questions on the topic were too many (a distinction she was still learning in all things), but Pepper had been up front. She didn’t seem to mind being asked, even though some answers came harder than others. If you’re going to stay with us, she’d said, you should know whose house you’re in.

Sidra watched the pair as the Undersea shot around the moon. Pepper, at last, gave in to sleep. Blue seemed content watching blurs of curious fish and tangled seaweed. Neither of them had been made for this place, Sidra considered. And neither, truly, had any of the Humans here, even though they had been created with far less intent. The same could be said for the other species in the other transit cars. The Aeluons and the Aandrisks with their breathing masks. The Harmagians with their motorised carts. None of them were meant to share a world together – meant to share this world – yet here they were.

Perhaps in that way, at least, she was not so different from them.

JANE 23, AGE 10

At the end of the day, the Janes went on their exercise break, as they always did. Jane 23 liked exercising. After sitting at a bench all morning, running felt real good. She followed the other girls into the exercise room and got on the same treadmill she always did. The handles were sweaty from whatever girl had been there before. One of the Marys. She’d seen them leaving.

‘Get ready,’ the Mother said. All the Janes were ready. ‘Go.’

The treadmill switched on. Jane 23 ran and ran and ran. Her heart beat fast and her scalp felt kinda buzzy, and she liked how she breathed harder as she went along. She closed her eyes. She wanted to go faster. She wanted to go faster so much. And she could, too. She felt something deep in her legs, something all packed in and itchy, something that wanted to be let out. She leaned her head back, and let her feet go just a little—

Somebody in the room coughed. Jane 23 opened her eyes and saw Jane 64, looking at her hard. Jane 23 looked toward the Mother watching over them. She was looking somewhere else, not at Jane 23, but that could change real fast. Jane 23 slowed back down. She hadn’t meant to go fast, not really. It had just happened. Jane 64 was real helpful for noticing. Jane 23 nodded at 64, knowing they both felt good.

She looked toward the Mother again, hoping she hadn’t noticed. Last time Jane 23 had gone faster than the other girls, she’d been punished. Going fast had felt so good before that. For a second, she’d been somewhere else, somewhere where all she could feel was heart and breath and buzzy head. Her body was doing exactly what it wanted. Everything was bright and clean, and she had smiled.

But then her treadmill had turned off without slowing down first, and she’d smashed her face into the monitor as she fell. Her nose gushed hot and red. A Mother had pulled her up, metal hand around the back of her neck. Jane 23 hadn’t heard her coming, didn’t see her walk over. Mothers were like that. They were real, real fast, and quiet, too.

‘This is not good behaviour,’ the Mother had said. ‘Do not do this again.’ Jane 23 was so so scared, but the Mother had put her back down. After, when they went to get meal cups, there hadn’t been one marked 23.

She didn’t go fast any more. It was good that Jane 64 was helping her do good behaviour. She didn’t want to get in trouble again. She didn’t want Jane 64 to have to sleep with other bunkmates.

After exercise, they went to the showers – five minutes, like always – then got meal cups in the learning room. They sat on the soft floor with their legs crossed as the vid screen came on.

‘Today we’re going to learn about artigrav nets,’ the voice from the vid said. ‘You will begin to see these in your scrap allotments after the new work schedule is posted.’ A picture appeared: a very complicated thing with all kinds of rods and wires and little bits. Jane 23 leaned forward, drinking her meal. This looked like a real good piece of scrap. Real interesting.

Jane 64 leaned against Jane 23’s shoulder, which was allowed after work time. All the girls were starting to move closer together. It was nice, being close. Jane 8 laid her head on 64’s knee, and 12 sprawled out on her stomach, swinging her feet in the air. Jane 64 looked real sleepy. Her task that day had been a very big piece of scrap that had needed five girls working on it. All those girls had gotten a little extra in their meal cups. That was what happened when you had to work with heavy stuff. Heavy stuff made you hungry.

‘Artigrav nets look good,’ Jane 23 said. Talking was allowed, too, so long as it was about the vid.

‘It looks hard,’ Jane 64 said. ‘Look at the interlacing conduits.’

‘Yes, but it’s got lots of little bits,’ said Jane 23. She felt Jane 64 smile against her shoulder.

‘You like little bits,’ Jane 64 said. ‘You’re real good at them. I think you’re the most good at little bits.’

Jane 23 drank her meal and watched the vid. She was starting to feel sleepy, too. It had been a real good day, though. She had been on task and hadn’t gotten punished and Jane 64 said she was the most good.

SIDRA

Already, Sidra preferred Coriol’s dark side. It was a curious astronomical phenomenon – a planet tidally locked with its sun, a moon tidally locked with its planet, each with a day and night that never shifted across their respective surfaces. Sidra was grateful for it. The lack of natural light meant there was only so far she could see, and that meant there was less to process. The Undersea had risen up above the ground, travelling relatively more slowly through a tube supported by thick columns. The tube ran through multiple districts, as Blue explained. Sidra made a note to find a way to explore them in a slower mode of transportation, perhaps on foot once she adjusted to the kit. But even zipping past, she could see that the distinctions separating districts were stark. The dark side was where Coriol’s merchants sought refuge from the bright bustle of the marketplace. There were districts there, too, but from what Blue had told her, the distinctions were based on wares and services. Here, the lines drawn were quite different. The first district they passed through was Tessara Cliffs, home to the wealthy and well-off (ship dealers, mostly, Blue said, and fuel merchants, too). The homes there were hidden behind artful walls and sculpted rock, but she could tell they were large and impeccably cared for. Next, Kukkesh, the Aandrisk district, a cosy sprawl of single-storey homes with welcoming doors and few windows. There was an invisible but unmistakable border between there and Flatrock Bay, a name no one but tourists and maps used.

‘This is the Bruise,’ Blue said quietly. ‘Not a good place to hang out. It’s where folks end up if, ah, if they got dealt a b-bad hand.’

As they passed through the station there, Sidra saw the weary faces of a family of Akaraks, digging through a trash receptacle with the help of their badly dented mechsuits. It was a troubling sight, and Sidra found other things to process as quickly as she could.

At last, they reached the modder district – Sixtop. The name was a pun, a reference to both the six small hills the homes were tucked around, and six-top circuits, a ubiquitous mech tech component. Sidra didn’t know what to expect of the place, but what she saw upon exiting the Undersea was surprisingly organic in aesthetic for a multispecies community of tech lovers. Yes, the signs of its inhabitants’ various trades were obvious – personal power generators, empty fuel drums, receivers and transmitters of all kinds. But likewise, there were lovingly tended strips of plantlife basking under sunlamps, and glowing fountains that glittered in the dark. There were sculptures made of scrap, smooth benches utilised by chatting friends and amorous couples, soft lighting fixtures that looked like the pet projects of individuals with disparate senses of style. There was nothing bureaucratic or single-minded about the public decor. This was a place built by many. She saw a food shop, a gaming bar, a few vendors of this and that. There was a quiet slowness here, absent in what she’d seen of the light side. Perhaps modders got enough flash and bustle in their day jobs. Perhaps they, too, needed a place to unplug.

The smooth path leading from the Undersea station was curved, branching out like a river into the clusters of homes beyond. The dwellings themselves were low to the ground – nothing over two storeys tall – and rounded at the edges, like someone had moulded them out of handfuls of . . . something. She didn’t have any stored files on building materials. Yet another thing to download.

‘Watch your step,’ Blue said. Sidra moved her gaze down to see a gauzy winged insect right below where the kit’s right foot would have fallen. She had no information on the species, but it was beautiful, whatever it was. The wings were thick and fuzzy, and luminescent patches along its thorax pulsed with gentle light. She stepped safely aside, glad to have avoided it. The idea of killing something, even if by accident – especially by accident – was unsettling.

‘We keep things dim here, to keep light pollution down,’ Pepper said. ‘It’s kinda hard to see what’s in front of you sometimes, but you get used to it.’ She considered something. ‘Though I guess you could just, y’know, adjust your light intake. Might make it easier.’ She led the way forward, and reached her hand back. Blue took it. He fell in step beside her.

Sidra did not adjust her light intake. She wanted to see the neighbourhood as her companions did. The dim light Pepper spoke of came from hovering blue globes, situated here and there along the path. They bobbed slightly, buoyed by unseen energy. Below them, night-blooming moss and chubby mushrooms lined the edges of the path. More of the winged insects clustered there, their lighted sides illuminating the veins of the leaves as they searched for nectar. Sidra looked ahead, and around. She could see sapients behind windows, silhouetted as they ate and cleaned and spoke. A trio of Aandrisk hatchlings chased each other around a fountain, shouting in a haphazard melange of Klip and Reskitkish. A Harmagian whirred by on her cart, waving her heavily pierced dactyli at Pepper and Blue in an approximation of the Human greeting. The Humans returned the gesture with their free palms. Sidra couldn’t say why, but frayed as she still was, something about Sixtop made her relax.

They approached a modestly sized dwelling, not much different from the others. The plants around the outer walls were overgrown, a little forgotten. Pepper approached the door and swiped her wrist over the locking panel. The lights inside switched on and the door slid back. ‘Welcome home,’ Pepper said.

Sidra watched Pepper and Blue carefully as they entered the building. She wasn’t sure what the correct protocol was here, and she didn’t want to do anything impolite. They removed their shoes; so did she. They hung their jackets; so did she. And then . . . then what? What did a person do inside a house?

‘Make yourself comfortable,’ Blue said.

That did not answer her question.

Pepper caught Sidra’s silence. ‘Just take a look around,’ she said. ‘Explore. Get used to the place.’ She turned to Blue. ‘I . . . am hungry.’

‘We’ve got leftover noodles in the stasie. But I don’t think there’s enough for th-three.’

‘She doesn’t need to eat.’

‘Oh, right! Right. W-well, then we’ve got enough.’

‘You missed the part where I am hungry,’ Pepper said, balling her hands into pleading fists. ‘I don’t want noodles. I want protein. I want something that will stick in my belly and make me regret it later.’

Sidra moved the kit through the room as the Humans discussed dinner. It was not a big home, nor one that gave the impression of wealth. The main room was a round, soft-looking space, with a cooking area branching off to the side. The walls were lined with shelves straining under the weight of bins of spare parts, pixel plants, and kitschy knick-knacks. Judging by the cluttered worktable stationed by a broad window, Pepper liked to bring her work home with her.

Sidra approached one of the shelves, which was devoted solely to figurines. Palm-size little people, all screaming with colour.

‘Ah,’ Pepper said with a grin. ‘Yeah, I’m really into sims. Non-realistics, specifically.’

‘And these are—’

‘Characters from them, yeah. See, there’s Meelo and Buster, Scorch Squad, Eris Redstone – fun stuff all around.’

Sidra made the kit pick up one of the figurines. It was a group of three characters: two Human children – a boy and a girl – and some kind of small, anthropomorphised primate. The boy was examining a leaf with a microscope. The girl was looking up with a telescope. The primate was reaching into an open satchel full of snacks. All had enormous open-mouthed smiles.

‘You seem to favour these three,’ Sidra said. The characters appeared multiple times on the shelf, in various styles and sizes. She examined the base of the figurine in the kit’s hand. BigBugBash 36, it read in loud yellow letters. Dou Mu, Exodus Fleet, GC Standard 302.

Pepper’s eyes widened. ‘Holy shit, you don’t know The Big Bug Crew. Of course you don’t.’ She took the figurine from the kit’s hand. Her eyes closed reverently. ‘Big Bug – oh man, it’s—’

Blue sighed with a smirk as he scrolled through something on his scrib. ‘Here she goes.’

Pepper gathered herself. ‘It’s a kids’ sim. I mean – yeah, okay, it’s for kids, technically. Educational thing, y’know, let’s learn about ships and other species and whatever. But it’s—’

Blue made eye contact with Sidra and started mouthing words: ‘It’s so much more—’

‘It’s so much more than that,’ Pepper said. ‘This franchise has been putting out new modules for forty standards. Aside from the fact that it’s brilliant – stars, don’t even get me started on the adaptive coding – I mean, seriously, it’s a really important series. Every Human kid in the GC knows Big Bug, at least passively. And I don’t just mean every Human kid in the Fleet or something.’ She pointed at the two children on the figurine. ‘Alain and Manjiri. Manjiri’s from the Fleet. Alain’s from Florence.’ She looked expectantly at Sidra, as if this would have some significance. It did not. Pepper ploughed on. ‘This was the very first kids’ sim to have an Exodan and a Martian not just occupying the same ship, but being friends. Having adventures, working as a team, all that fuzzy stuff. That may not seem like a big deal today, but forty standards ago, that was huge. A whole generation of kids grew up with this, and I shit you not, about ten standards later, you start seeing a big shift in Diaspora politics. I’m not saying this sim is solely responsible for Exodans and Solans not hating each other any more, but Big Bug was definitely a contributing factor in helping us start moving past all that old Earth bullshit. Opened some minds, at least.’ She placed the figurine back on the shelf, straightening it just so. ‘Plus the artwork is fucking gorgeous. The level of detail is just—’

Blue cleared his throat loudly.

Pepper scratched behind her left earlobe with an embarrassed chuckle. ‘It’s really, really good.’

Her partner waved his scrib at her. ‘How about Fleet Fry?’

‘Yes,’ Pepper said. ‘I want my usual. Two of my usual.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Seriously.’

Blue laughed. ‘You got it.’

It took Sidra two and a quarter seconds to understand the exchange – Blue was ordering food. She glanced over at the only spotlessly tidy place in sight: the kitchen. She accessed her behavioural reference files. It was possible Pepper and Blue didn’t do much cooking. And besides, it had been a long trip, and preparing food was time-consuming work. A little rush of pride flickered through her pathways. She didn’t have to ask questions about everything.

‘While he does that,’ Pepper said, ‘how about I show you your room? It’s not much, and I’m sorry about the clutter in there. Didn’t have a lot of time to get ready. We’ll clean it out and make it yours over the next few days.’

Sidra followed Pepper up the stairs. Paintings hung on the wall at regular intervals. Landscapes, all of them – less than real, but somehow greater for it. Sidra paused the kit’s ascent and examined one: a frozen pond in winter, twin moons clear and crisp overhead.

‘Are these Blue’s?’ Sidra asked.

Pepper came back down a step. ‘Yep. He did that one after our vacation on Kep’toran.’ Her lips twitched with a private smile. ‘All of these are places we’ve been together.’

Sidra opened the file named Human artistic practices, which she’d compiled on the shuttle after Pepper had told her Blue was a painter. ‘Does he always use physical media, or does he do digital work as well?’

Pepper looked amused. ‘Didn’t know you were an art lover. Yeah, mostly physical, unless commissioned for something. I’ll take you to his shop up in the art district sometime soon.’ She kept speaking as she continued up the stairs. ‘Took me almost a decade of bothering before he finally started selling his stuff. I’m biased, of course, but he is really good, and I’m glad I’m not the only one who sees it any more.’ She reached the top of the stairs and sidestepped a pile of dubiously clean laundry. ‘He’s even got a patron of sorts. This old rich Harmagian. Algae merchant. I think she’s commissioned four of his pieces by now. We got a new engine for the shuttle with that.’

Pepper stepped through an unremarkable doorway, waving the lights on as she entered. It was a room. Sidra didn’t know how to quantify it beyond that. How did one place value on a room? She couldn’t say if the room was good or not, but it was hers. That was interesting.

Pepper rubbed the back of her head, looking apologetic. ‘It’s nothing fancy,’ she said. ‘And we’ve been using it for storage.’ She nodded at the stacks of crates and boxes, hastily shoved aside to make pathways and openings. ‘But it’s clean – Blue cleaned, and he made the bed, too. I don’t know if you’ll want the bed. I know you don’t need to sleep.’ Pepper pressed her lips together, a little at a loss. ‘I don’t know what a good space for you consists of. But we’ll work together to make it comfortable, yeah? We really want you to feel at home here.’

‘Thank you,’ Sidra said, and she meant it, fully. She didn’t know what she wanted in a space, either. She swung the head around, trying to take inventory. There was the bed, as mentioned, big enough for two if they cuddled close. The covers were thick, to ward off the dark side chill, and the pillows looked . . . inviting. Not knowing what else to do, she approached the bed, and pressed the kit’s hand into one of the pillows. It sank down in a pleasing sort of way.

She turned and tried to assess everything else. There was an empty workdesk, and a storage cupboard, and – she shut the kit’s eyes and felt the face grimace.

‘What’s wrong?’ Pepper asked.

‘I don’t know if I can explain it.’

‘Try. I’m listening.’

The kit exhaled. ‘I’m having trouble processing what I see. That’s been the case since installation. I don’t mean a malfunction. I mean this is hard. I’m meant to have cameras up in corners, looking down from above. Only being able to see this’ – she moved the kit’s hands, outlining her field of vision – ‘is frustrating. It’s one thing not being able to see behind a camera in a corner. But feeling empty space behind me and not knowing what’s there . . . it’s disconcerting. I don’t like it.’

Pepper put her hands on her hips and looked around. ‘Well, here.’ She shoved some boxes aside, pushed the desk into a corner, and made an upward gesture. ‘There ya go.’

Sidra stared for two seconds, then understood. She pulled the kit up onto the desk and backed it into the corner, as far as it would go. The top of the head now occupied the upper corner of the room.

‘How’s that?’ Pepper asked.

Sidra slowly moved the kit’s head from side to side, imagining that she were operating one of the cameras aboard the Wayfarer. Seeing only one room at a time was still limiting, but this perspective – ‘Good,’ she said, feeling the kit’s limbs loosen. ‘Oh, that’s so helpful.’ She took in the room for three minutes, looking up and down, side to side. ‘Can I see it from the other corners, too?’

Pepper helped her rearrange furniture. They rearranged it again and again, each time creating a new angle Sidra could perch the kit in. When her bedroom had been sufficiently examined, they continued back through the house, dragging crates and tables around, Blue lending a hand with the bigger stuff. Neither of the Humans questioned it. Eventually the food drone arrived, bearing two grasshopper burgers (extra pepper sauce, extra onion), one order of spicy beansteak skewers (Blue didn’t eat animals, Sidra had learned), and some kind of fried vegetable sticks. Pepper and Blue ate their meal cross-legged on the floor as Sidra moved furniture. She was being presumptuous, she knew, but they didn’t seem to mind her disrupting their home, and she was too excited by this new way of discovering a space to stop. She navigated the kit around the house again and again, observing from corners, trying out every vantage point, learning all the details.

She still felt weird. The kit was still wrong. But she did feel better.

JANE 23, AGE 10

A breathing mask. A wall vox. A light panel. Jane 23 was doing good work that day. She stretched her neck and her hands. They were tired, which meant work time was almost done. She looked into her bin. Ten – no, eleven items left. She looked up at the big clock on the wall. Yes, she could get eleven items sorted in half an hour. She would finish her bin, go exercise, get a meal cup, have learning time, then go to bed. That was how days went.

She stopped knowing how days went one second later, when something went real real wrong.

There was a loud, tearing sound, so fast and angry she almost couldn’t hear it. Then she actually couldn’t hear. She couldn’t hear anything. Her ears hurt real bad.

Everything went white for a second, but for a long second, long enough for her to see a few Janes get knocked out of their chairs as the white flash filled with dust and pieces and blood.

She sat up on the floor. She didn’t remember how she got there. She didn’t remember falling. She started to yell for help, but then she saw something that made her forget how to make words. Maybe it was because she couldn’t hear. Maybe it was because the air had been knocked out of her chest. But all she could think about was what she could see.

There was a hole. A hole in the wall.

Jane 23 sat all the way up.

There was a big, broken hole in the wall. And there was stuff on the other side.

Jane 23 did not understand what she was seeing. On the other side of the wall, there were not more walls. There were huge, huge piles of scrap, but far away, and the floor in between her and them didn’t look like any floor she’d ever seen. Above them, there was a . . . a ceiling. But not a ceiling. It didn’t look touchable. She couldn’t explain it. There was a ceiling that wasn’t a ceiling, and it was blue. Just blue, for a long, long way. Blue for ever. She felt like she was going to throw up.

Girls were screaming. She could hear again.

Jane 23 looked at the room, and understood the things she saw in there, at least. There had been an explosion. Jane 56’s bench was gone, all the way gone, just a smear of burnt wet stuff on the floor. She wondered what had been in 56’s bin. Probably some dangerous scrap that the little girls missed while cleaning. A bad engine, maybe, or something that still had fuel in it. She didn’t know.

There were dead girls around the smear. She’d seen dead girls before, but never so many, never all at once. Some weren’t dead, but looked like they should be.

Her arm felt wrong. She looked down and saw a metal shard stuck deep. Jane 23 was scared. She’d been cut before, but she’d never bled so dark.

The living girls kept screaming.

Jane 23 got up and ran through the mess, past things she didn’t want to see. Jane 64’s bench wasn’t far, but she couldn’t see her. She made herself look at the pieces on the ground, trying to tell if any of them belonged to 64. She almost threw up, again. Her mouth was dry. Her arm was wet, getting wetter.

‘Sixty-four!’ she yelled. She yelled so loud it hurt.

‘Twenty-three.’ A hand grabbed the end of her pants. ‘Twenty-three.’

Jane 23 turned. 64 was under a bench, holding her knees. Her head and face were bloody, but she was awake and living. She was shaking, though, so hard Jane 23 could hear her teeth click.

‘Come on,’ Jane 23 said. ‘Come on. We need to go to the med ward.’

Jane 64 looked at her. She didn’t move.

‘Sixty-four,’ Jane 23 said. She reached out, took her bunkmate’s hand, and pulled her up. ‘We can’t stay here.’ Blood ran down Jane 23’s other arm, dripping onto the floor. Everything was spinning and scary and loud. ‘Come on. We have to find a Mother.’

There were already a lot of Mothers there, running in the door real fast. Jane 23 headed for the first one she saw, pulling 64 with her. The Mother swung her head down, looking at them without eyes.

‘We need help,’ Jane 23 said. She looked down at her arm, which was so so bloody, and everything went weird and black.

The next thing she knew, she was in the med ward.

There were stitches in her arm. And there were so many girls in the room with her, so many Janes. There was a lot of noise, and crying. Nobody was getting punished for crying, which was different. Maybe the Mothers were too busy fixing things to be angry about crying.

‘You’re all right, Jane 23,’ a Mother said, showing up real fast by her bed. She handed her a cup of water and another smaller cup with some medicine in it. ‘We fixed you.’

‘Is Sixty-four okay?’ Jane 23 asked.

The Mother went quiet. They did that when they were talking to the other Mothers without words. ‘We fixed her, too.’

Jane 23 felt real good at that, the most good she’d ever felt.

‘Take your medicine,’ the Mother said.

Jane crunched the medicine between her teeth. It had a bad, sharp taste, but she sat with it for a little bit before drinking some water and washing it away. She lay back down. The medicine started working real fast. She felt quiet and good, and didn’t need to cry at all. Everything was light and fluffy. Everything was okay.

She looked at the walls. The walls in the med ward were blue, a bright blue. A real different blue from the blue on the other side of the hole.

She wondered about that.

SIDRA

Sidra kept the kit’s eyes pointed at Pepper as they wound their way through the market streets, and wondered if she’d ever get used to this place. With every step there was something new to observe. She couldn’t help but pay attention, make note, file it away. Out in space, something new could be a meteoroid, a ship full of pirates, an engine fire. Here, it was just shopkeepers. Travellers. Musicians. Kids. And behind every one of them, there was another, and another – an infinity of harmless instances of something new. She knew that there was a big difference between a shopkeeper and a meteoroid, but her protocols didn’t, and they clawed at her. She didn’t know how to stop. She couldn’t stop.

In this way, she found, her coned vision had a silver lining: she had to turn the kit’s head to look at things. As long as she stayed focused on the back of Pepper’s head, she could ignore the endless, edgeless clutter. Mostly. Somewhat.

She followed Pepper down the ramp into the tech district – the caves – and the kit sighed in tandem with Sidra’s relief. Ceilings and walls, and an immediate drop in temperature. The kit was self-cooling, so overheating wasn’t an issue, but the market’s climate was warmer than the inside of a ship should be. She’d had an errant external temperature warning needling at her ever since they’d stepped off the Undersea. She was very glad to see it disappear.

A shaggy Laru man leaned against a wall near the entrance, his limb-like neck bent low as he watched people come and go. His yellow fur was braided from head to toe, and he idly flipped a pulse pistol around one of his prehensile paws. There was a large warning sign on the wall beside him, written in multiple languages.

THE FOLLOWING ITEMS CAN CAUSE HARM TO TECH, BOTS, AIs, MODDED SAPIENTS, AND SAPIENTS USING PERSONAL LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEMS. DO NOT BRING ANY OF THESE ITEMS INTO THE CAVES. IF ONE OR MORE OF THESE ITEMS IS IMPLANTED ONTO OR WITHIN YOUR BODY, DEACTIVATE IT BEFORE ENTERING.

Ghost patches (surface-penetrating ocular implants)

Hijacker or assassin bots

Hack dust (airborne code injectors)

Improperly sealed radioactive materials (if you’re not sure, don’t chance it)

Anything running on scrub fuel

Magnets

A handwritten message was scrawled beneath, in Klip:

Seriously, we are not fucking around.

And below that, a second message, in a different hand:

Why is this so hard to understand?

The Laru’s wide eyes crinkled as they approached. ‘Morning, Pepper,’ he said, bringing his face respectfully down to her level.

‘Hey, Nri,’ Pepper said with a casual, friendly nod. Her demeanour had changed the moment they’d entered this place. Up on the surface, she moved like she was on a mission – chin up, feet fast, never stumbling as she ducked through every pause in the sapient stream. But as soon as they’d reached the entrance ramp, something in Pepper let go. Her shoulders loosened, her pace slowed. She sauntered.

The caves were every bit as labyrinthine as the market, every bit as busy and loud. Garish lights and pixel displays flashed in a chaotic array, and the air was overflowing with voices and mechanical noise. But this place was easier for Sidra, just as Pepper and Blue’s home was easier, just as the Undersea was easier. Everything here was something new, too, but the walls told her protocols where to stop. She’d only been on Coriol for a little over a standard day, but already, she saw patterns in the places that were relatively comfortable for her.

‘Hey, Pepper!’ shouted an Aandrisk woman unloading crates from a cargo drone. ‘Good morning!’

‘G’morning!’ Pepper drifted over to her. ‘Need a hand?’

‘Nah,’ the Aandrisk said. ‘That’s what bots are for.’ She nodded toward the small, bulbous squad working together to haul a crate into a shopfront.

Pepper gestured toward the kit. ‘Hish, this is my new assistant, Sidra. Sidra, this is Hish, owner of Open Circuit.’

Sidra flipped the kit’s hand into eshka – Aandrisk hand speak for nice to meet you. She was glad she’d taken the time to download such things.

Pepper raised her brow, but said nothing.

Hish returned eshka enthusiastically, then reached out to shake Sidra’s hand Human-style. ‘It’s a pleasure,’ she said. ‘Have you been to the caves before? I haven’t seen you around.’

‘I just got to the Port,’ Sidra said. ‘It’s my first time here.’

‘Oh, welcome!’ Hish said. ‘Where are you from?’

Sidra was ready for this. She pulled up the repository of technically-true responses she and Pepper had prepared together. ‘I was born on a long-haul ship. Decided to finally get my feet on the ground.’

‘Ahh, a spacer, huh? Any system in particular, or just all over?’

Sidra scrambled for an appropriate response. ‘I started out in the GC. I’m not a citizen, though.’ This seemed like an unnecessary point to volunteer, but Pepper had assured her this was the right track to head down. There are plenty of crazy Human isolationists doing who-knows-what out there, Pepper had said. If you were born here but aren’t a citizen, that means your parents didn’t register you. That’ll make people think your parents were fringers in the neighbourhood for supplies. And given that Human establishments on the other side of the fence are rarely anything anybody wants to discuss in casual conversation, you won’t get asked much beyond that.

Hish gave Sidra an understanding nod, proving Pepper right. ‘I gotcha,’ she said with a bittersweet smile. ‘Well, you could hardly ask for someone better suited than this one’ – she nodded at Pepper – ‘to show you the ropes. You got a place to stay?’ The question was asked calmly, but with unmistakable concern.

‘Yes.’

Pepper clapped the kit on the shoulder. ‘We’ve put her up. She’s going to get sick of me real quick.’

Hish laughed, then touched Pepper’s forearm. ‘You and Blue are good people. I’ve always said so.’ She straightened up, glancing at her heavily laden bots. ‘Well, I shouldn’t keep you two. Sidra, have a wonderful first day. And if you ever need comp tech gear, you come straight to me.’

Sidra waited until they were out of earshot. ‘Pepper, did she . . . did she feel sorry for me?’

‘She thinks you’ve gotten away from some bad shit,’ Pepper said. ‘Which is exactly what we want. The more people think you came from something rough, the less they’ll ask you questions.’

‘I see,’ Sidra said. She was glad for the lack of prying, but something about the way the Aandrisk woman had looked at her made her uneasy. She didn’t want to be the subject of pity. She watched Pepper as she ambled her way through the caves, greeting peers, trading small talk, asking technical questions that made Sidra long for the Linkings. She watched people’s reactions, too, as she recycled her tailored responses over and over. Their replies were always variations on the same theme: kindness toward Sidra, respect for Pepper. The former was nice, but the latter seemed more desirable. Pepper had come from some ‘bad shit’, too, but no one looked at her as if she were a stray pet. Pepper was useful here. Sidra wasn’t yet. It would take time, she knew, but the continued lack of a clear-cut purpose was unpleasant.

They arrived at a sedately decorated shopfront, far less flashy than its neighbours. ‘Here we are,’ Pepper said, gesturing dramatically. A sign made of scrap announced the purpose of the open-air counter beneath it:

THE RUST BUCKET

Tech swap and fix-it shop

Pepper and Blue, Proprietors

‘Blue no longer works here, correct?’ Sidra asked.

Pepper waved her wristpatch over a scanner by the counter. There was a brief, quiet crackle as a security shield switched off. ‘Correct. He stops by sometimes, though, if he’s feeling tired of artists being artists.’ She flipped up the counter door and headed back into her space. There was a long workbench opposite the counter, with plenty of room between. Behind that was a doorway, through which there appeared to be a small workshop, comfortably removed from the territory of customers. Sidra kept the kit out of Pepper’s way as she filled the counter with display boxes full of second-hand components, each smartly wrapped and labelled.

‘Can you hand me that?’ Pepper asked.

Sidra turned the kit’s head to follow Pepper’s gaze, and found a toolbelt. It was absurdly heavy, overburdened with wrenches and pliers. The thick fabric had been reinforced with rough thread – several times over, it seemed. ‘Yes,’ Sidra said. She handed the belt to Pepper, as requested. ‘Do you mind working here alone?’ she asked.

Pepper shook her head. ‘Nah. Tech is my thing, not Blue’s. He can do it, but it’s not what makes him get up in the morning.’ She grinned. ‘And besides, I don’t work here alone any more.’ She pulled a clean work apron and gloves out of a drawer, then clad herself with them and the clattering toolbelt as she spoke. ‘So. The Rust Bucket is your all-purpose place to get stuff fixed, and we sell refurbished bits and bobs, too. I have only a few rules.’ She raised a gloved finger. ‘Number one: no military-grade weapons or explosives. If you’re a livestock farmer, or you’re headed to Cricket or something, and you need your slug rifle fixed, sure, I can do that. You throw down some Aeluon-wannabe blaster, get the fuck out. If you’re not a soldier, you don’t need that shit.’

Sidra recorded every word. ‘What if you are a soldier?’

‘If you are a soldier, I am the last person you’d come to with weapon problems. Unless your military has massive organisational issues, I guess. I will do basic tools of self defence, not murder gear.’ She raised a second finger. ‘Rule number two: no biotech. Not my area of expertise. If someone wants their mods tweaked, I’ve got a good list of clinics I can refer them to. Safe, trustworthy places. You get anybody asking about implant or mod stuff, come get me, and I’ll point them in the right direction. No nanobots, either, even if they’re not bio. It’s not my thing, and I don’t have the right equipment. Rule number three: somebody brings in anything with magnets, they damn well better tell us up front so I can store it properly. Anybody who doesn’t gets to compensate me for whatever got fried. Fourth rule: whatever they bring in has to be able to fit behind the counter. I will do bigger jobs outside of the shop, but that’s on a case-by-case basis. I don’t do that for everybody, so don’t mention it to people. Just come get me and I’ll decide if it’s worth my time. Other than that . . .’ She pursed her lips in thought. ‘I’ll take just about anything.’ She drummed her fingers on the counter. ‘My pricing is . . . variable. Whatever it says on the package, or whatever I promised. Between you and me, I really don’t care how much things cost. As long as I have food in my belly and can buy dumb stuff to decorate my house with, it doesn’t matter whether people are paying me the same amount every time. I work within budgets, and trade is every bit as welcome as credits. More so, even.’ She lifted her foot. ‘I got these boots for free because I fixed a clothing merchant’s patch scanner. I’ve got a doctor who upgrades me and Blue’s imubots every standard in exchange for random fix-it jobs whenever he wants. And I’ve got a lifetime half-off discount at Captain Smacky’s Snack Fest, because I did a same-day rush job on their grill.’ She shrugged. ‘Credits are imaginary. I’ll accept them because we’ve collectively decided that’s how we do things, but I prefer doing business in a tangible way. Don’t worry, though – you’ll get paid in credits. Cleaner that way.’

Sidra had forgotten about that part. ‘Oh. Right.’

‘You’ll get a cut from the shop’s monthly profits. Haven’t worked out how much yet, but I promise it’ll be fair. And that’s separate from room and board. You having a roof over your head is not contingent on you working here, so if you want to go do something else, that’s fine. You’re not indentured, okay? At the end of every couple tendays, we’ll divvy things up, and I’ll transfer—’ She snapped her fingers. The sound fell flat through the gloves. ‘We need to set you up with a bank account. Don’t worry, I know someone who can fix that for us. Works for the GC, but she’s good people. Does not mind turning a blind eye if you don’t have the right formwork, and does not ask a lot of questions. Also has an amazing collection of antique Harmagian ground carts that she uses at parties. Early colonial era, really gorgeous craftsmanship. I’ll drop her a note.’

Sidra set aside the shop rules file and created another: my job. ‘So what will I be doing?’

‘Since Blue isn’t here any more, I need someone to be an extra pair of eyes and hands. I’m thinking you’ll be wherever I’m not. If I’m doing something big and noisy in the back, you’ll be up front, greeting folks, handing over finished stuff, selling packaged things that don’t need my input. If I’m up front, you can clean up in the back. If there’s an errand that needs doing, you can go out and about, or I can go out and do my thing, and you can hold down the fort.’ She cocked her head. ‘How does that sound, for starters?’

Sidra processed that. In some ways, it wasn’t so different from her intended purpose. She’d be monitoring the safety of the shop and responding to requests. She’d perform tasks as directed. She’d be Pepper’s eyes where she couldn’t see. ‘I can do that.’

Pepper studied her. ‘I’m sure you can. But do you want to do that?’

Sidra processed that, too, and came up empty. ‘I can’t answer that, because I don’t know.’ When she was given a task, she performed the task. When a request was made, she filled the request as best she could. That . . . that was her job. That was her point. If things hadn’t gone the way they’d gone on the Wayfarer, if she’d stayed in the core she’d first been installed in, would anyone have said to her: Hello, Lovelace! Welcome! It’s time for you to start monitoring the ship – but only if you want to?

She doubted it.

Pepper put her hand on the kit’s shoulder and smiled. ‘What do you say we just get started and see how you like it, okay?’

‘Okay,’ Sidra said, relieved to set that processing loop aside. ‘How does the day start?’

‘First things first, I check two feeds: the shop’s message box, and Picnic.’ She gestured at a small pixel projector sitting on the counter. A cloud of pixels burst forth into the air, arranging themselves to display Pepper’s default feeds in twin translucent rectangles. The feed on the left was easy enough to decipher.

NEW MESSAGES

New request: engine overhaul – Prii Olk An Tosh’kavon

Status check: scrib won’t turn on – Chinmae Lee

New request: hello do you know anything about hydroponic equipment I think one of my pumps is broken – Kresh

Query: would you accept live red coasters as payment – toad

Query: not actually a query, the new build works beautifully, thank you!!!!!!!!! – Mako Mun

The feed on the right, however, was more of a mystery. Given that it had taken the pixels longer to arrange themselves there, there was likely encryption at work.

hello pinch. welcome to the picnic.

mech (big)

mech (small)

bio

nano

digital

experimental

intelligent

protective

spaceworthy

The kit blinked. ‘What’s that?’

Pepper nodded at the right feed. ‘Picnic is an unlisted social feed for techs all over the GC who like to make connections with people who know stuff that . . . let’s just say, the Port Authority might not approve of. Officially, at least.’

The kit wet its lips as Sidra considered that. Port Coriol’s black market was no secret, but it was a little disquieting to know she was looking through one of its windows. She had no grounds to disapprove of illegal activities – given that she was one – but all the same, she hoped she wasn’t in a place where she’d be easier to discover.

Pepper noticed the pause. ‘Don’t worry. Here, look.’ She gestured at biotech, and skimmed through the dozens of discussion threads, searching for something. ‘Ah, there he is. You see this user, FunkyFronds? He’s the inspector who checks out my shop every standard. I play it safe.’

‘Is a lot of your business, ah . . .’ Sidra wasn’t sure how to phrase the question politely.

‘My business is giving people what they need. You heard my rules. I don’t do anything dangerous or stupid. The thing is, a lot of laws are stupid, too, and they don’t always keep people out of danger. What can I say? I’m a woman of principle.’ She winked. ‘Come on, I’ve thought up your first task. Sorry – job. Your first job. It is, perhaps, the most important thing.’

Sidra followed Pepper into the workshop behind the front counter. Having been in Pepper’s home, what lay beyond was no surprise. Shelves of supplies towered overhead, stuffed with crates all labelled – by hand! – in big block letters. There was organisation at work, but clutter, too. The mark of a logical mind that sometimes strayed.

Pepper gestured proudly at an elaborate hand-hacked contraption covered in shiny tubes and dented pipes. ‘If you’re going to be my assistant,’ she said, ‘you’ve gotta learn to make mek.’

‘That’s . . . the most important thing?’

‘Oh yeah. Fixing complicated shit requires a clear head, and nothing chills a person out like a warm cup of mek.’ Pepper placed an affectionate hand on the brewing machine. ‘I require a lot of this.’

Sidra accessed a behavioural reference file. ‘Don’t most sapients drink it recreationally? At the end of the day?’

Pepper rolled her eyes. ‘Most sapients confuse working hard with being miserable. I do solid work, and I’m never late. So, why not? It’s not like I’m smoking smash. Mek is just a food coma without the food. Same brain chemicals, basically. You drink too much, you take a nap. And seriously, anybody working in a job that doesn’t let you take a nap when you need to should get a new job. Present company excluded, of course.’

‘Are naps good?’

‘Naps are fucking great.’ Pepper opened a drawer and pulled out a tin decorated with an Aeluon design – monochromatic swirls and circles. ‘You’re kind of missing out there. Missing out on mek, too.’ She opened the tin and stuck her nose over it, inhaling deeply. ‘Mmm, yeah.’ She held the tin out to Sidra. ‘When you smell that, how do you . . . how do you process that? Is it just a list of chemicals?’

‘I’m not sure. I’ll find out.’ Sidra took the tin, manoeuvred it to the kit’s nose, and pulled in air.

The image was there without warning, leaping to the front of all other external input – a sleeping cat, sprawled on its back in a puddle of sunlight, fur mussed, pink toes splayed sweetly – then gone, just as fast.

‘Hey, you okay?’ Pepper asked, taking the tin. Something on the kit’s face had her attention.

Sidra tore through her directory logs, looking for an explanation. ‘I – I don’t know.’ She paused for one second. ‘I saw a cat.’

‘Like . . . an Earthen cat?’

‘Yes.’

Pepper glanced around. ‘What, here?’

‘No, no. It felt like a memory file. A cat, asleep by a window. But I’ve never seen a cat before.’

‘Then . . . how do you know it was a cat?’

‘Behavioural files. Animals you can find around Humans. I know what a cat is, I’ve just never seen one.’ She raced through logs and came up empty. ‘I can’t find the file. I don’t understand.’

‘It’s okay,’ Pepper said. Her voice was light, but there was a small furrow between her eyes. ‘Maybe some stray crud you picked up in the Linkings?’

‘No, I – I don’t know. Maybe.’

‘If it happens again, let me know. And maybe we should run a diagnostic, just to be safe. Are you feeling okay otherwise?’

‘Yes. Just confused.’

‘You’re still adjusting. It’s cool. Stuff’s gonna be weird for a while. So, let’s give you something to focus on, huh? When my head gets cluttered, always helps to do something with my hands.’

Pepper walked Sidra through the steps of making a batch of mek – measuring the powder, hooking up the water, keeping an eye on the temperature. It wasn’t complicated, but Pepper was particular about the details. ‘See, if you cook it too fast, there’s a compound in the bark that gets bitter in a real mean way. Cook it too slow, though, and you’ll just end up with sludge.’ Sidra took extensive notes. Clearly, this was important.

A soft timer chimed, indicating the batch was ready. Pepper picked up a mug, inspected the inside, wiped it out with the corner of her apron, then pressed it under the brewer’s spigot. A small cloud of steam unfurled as the milky white liquid poured out. Pepper took the mug with both hands, inhaling deeply. She blew across the surface, then took a cautious sip.

‘Isn’t that too hot?’ Sidra asked.

‘Yeah, but stars, it’s good.’ Pepper slurped slowly through a tiny opening between her lips. ‘Ahhhh. Here, you want to try?’

‘Yes.’ Sidra accepted the mug. The kit’s mock pain reflexes didn’t kick in, so clearly it wasn’t too hot – at least, not for her. She looked at the liquid, swirling into itself in a friendly kind of way.

‘Do you know how to drink?’ Pepper asked.

‘I think so.’ Sidra hadn’t manoeuvred the kit in this way before, but it was easy enough to mimic. She brought the mug to the kit’s lips, parted them, and pulled liquid in. She could detect heat, and—

She was stepping into a hot bath, but this body wasn’t hers. It was someone else – rounder, taller, at ease in her body. She sank into the water, scented foam folding around her. Everything was okay.

Sidra looked up at Pepper. ‘It happened again. Not a cat, but—’ She took another sip. She was stepping into a hot bath, but this body wasn’t hers. ‘It’s a bath. It’s a memory file of someone taking a bath. And now it’s gone again.’ She grabbed the tin of mek powder and inhaled. A sleeping cat, sprawled – ‘That triggered the cat again.’ She took another sip from the mug, testing for patterns. She was stepping into – ‘Bath.’

‘Whoa. Okay. This is too specific to be a random malfunction.’ Pepper went to the front counter and got her scrib. ‘Time to look at your user manual.’

‘There was nothing like this in the user manual.’

Pepper gave her a wry look. ‘Modders love secret shit.’ She gestured. ‘Search term, um . . . random image files?’

A chunk of text appeared.

Congratulations! You’ve discovered one of the best features of your kit: sensory analogues! You’re going to be spending a lot of time with organic sapients, and if there’s one thing organic sapients love, it’s physical enjoyment: foods, touching, things that smell good. I didn’t want you to miss out on enjoying those moments with your friends. You don’t have the capability to process sensory input as organics do, so your kit includes a huge hidden repository of pleasing images, which was seamlessly integrated with your core program upon installation (don’t bother looking – you won’t be able to find it!). Whenever your kit receives stimuli that an organic would derive a pleasant sensation from, the repository will be triggered. So, go ahead! Have dessert! Get a massage! Smell the roses!

Pepper looked at Sidra, then back to the scrib. ‘This,’ she said, ‘is a work of genius.’ She shut her eyes and laughed. ‘Oh, stars, we are going to have so much fun.’ She gestured at the pixel projector, bringing up a comms program.

‘Contact name, please,’ an automated voice said.

‘Captain Smacky’s Snack Fest,’ Pepper said, winking at Sidra.

A cartoonish logo of some sort of seafaring Human with an ornate hat and several prosthetic limbs appeared, followed by a lengthy menu offering foods of dubious nutritional value. Piping hot boxes of cricket crunch, made to order. Red coaster dumplings by the dozen. A wide assortment of pocket stuffers, both spicy and sugar-fried. The list went on and on.

‘Welcome to Captain Smacky’s ordering system!’ a chipper recording exclaimed. ‘Simply place an order and we’ll dispatch a drone to your location tag straight away. If you know what you’d like—’

‘I do.’ Pepper nodded seriously. ‘I’d like the left side of the menu, please.’

JANE 23, AGE 10

‘I don’t understand,’ Jane 64 said. They were talking in bed, which wasn’t allowed, but they were doing it real real quiet, and none of the girls ever got each other in trouble for doing that.

Jane 23 tried to find good words, but it was hard. ‘There was something on the other side of the wall.’

‘Another room?’

‘No, not another room.’

‘I don’t understand,’ 64 said again. ‘How was it not a room?’

‘It didn’t have walls,’ Jane 23 said. This was so hard to explain. ‘It wasn’t like anything here. There is something else outside the factory.’

Jane 64 frowned. ‘Was it big?’

‘Real big. Bigger than anything I’ve ever seen.’

‘Was it a piece of scrap?’

‘No,’ Jane 23 said, trying not to get loud. She felt almost angry. ‘It wasn’t like anything. It was like the space inside rooms, only . . . only without walls. I don’t know.’ She didn’t have any more words. ‘It was unknown and wrong.’

Jane 64 moved closer, talking so quiet that 23 couldn’t have heard her if she was any farther away. ‘Do you think the Mothers know there’s something there?’

‘Yes.’ Jane 23 knew they knew. She didn’t know how. She just knew it.

‘Then we should ask them.’

‘No.’ Back in the med ward, the Mothers had asked all the girls one by one what they saw in the sorting room when the accident happened. ‘I heard Jane 25 tell them she saw the hole.’

They both went quiet. Jane 25 had been Jane 17’s bunkmate. 17 was sleeping with 34 and 55 now.

‘What did you tell them?’ Jane 64 asked, her eyes real big.

‘I said I got knocked down and then went looking for you.’

64’s eyes went even bigger. ‘You lied?’

Jane 23 shrugged even though she was scared. ‘I just didn’t say.’ She’d been real real scared about that ever since the med ward, like maybe the Mothers would think about it again and know that she hadn’t said everything she should have.

‘Maybe we should ask the other girls,’ Jane 64 said. ‘Maybe someone else saw, too.’

Jane 23 didn’t think that was a good idea. She felt okay talking about it with 64, because she knew 64 would never get her in trouble. ‘I just want to know what it is,’ she said. ‘I didn’t get to look very long.’

Jane 64 scratched the stitches on her forehead. ‘Do you think it’ll be there when we go back to our sorting room?’

‘No, I think that’s why we’re in a different room now,’ Jane 23 said. ‘I think they’ll fix it before we go back.’ There was another thing she wanted to say, but it stuck in her mouth. It was real scary. She wanted to say it so so bad, though. She had to say. ‘I want to go look at it.’

Jane 64 stared at her, scared but real interested. ‘Me too,’ she said. ‘But I don’t want to get punished.’

Jane 23 thought about it. ‘We could do it without getting punished.’

‘They wouldn’t let us go there during the work day.’

‘We could go at night.’

Jane 64 shook her head hard. ‘We’re not allowed out of bed,’ she said, her voice high and shaky.

‘We are if we’re going to the bathroom.’

‘We aren’t going to the bathroom. They know where the bathroom is.’

‘We could say . . . we could say we were going to the bathroom, and we heard a weird sound outside the bathroom, and thought someone might need some help.’

‘Who?’

‘Someone. One of the little girls. We could say we heard one of the little girls and she sounded scared,’ Jane 23 said. Her own scared feeling started to go away, and in its place was something kind of hot and loud and good. They were talking about bad behaviour, but she wanted to do this. She wanted to do this a lot. So she did. Right then. She got up, put on her shoes, and walked away. 64 whispered something, but Jane 23 was already too far away to hear. She could hear her come quietly tap-tap-tapping after her, though.

‘This is a bad idea,’ Jane 64 said. ‘If we see a Mother, I am telling her it was your idea.’ She said it, but 23 knew it wasn’t true. 64 would never let 23 get punished in her place. Only bad girls did stuff like that, and 64 wasn’t bad. She was the most good.

The bathroom was cold. They moved through it real quick. Jane 23 stopped when they got to the hallway door. Maybe it was a bad idea. They could go back. They could go back right then and no one would ever know. They could just go back and sleep and have a good on-task day tomorrow.

She stepped through the door. 64 went with her.

The hallways were weird all dark, but it was easy to find their way. One time, they thought they heard a Mother, so they ducked behind a stack of bins. There was nothing, though. They were okay. They were okay all the way to the sorting room. The door was closed, but it wasn’t locked. Why would it be? Girls never went anywhere without Mothers watching.

‘I don’t think we should,’ Jane 64 whispered.

They shouldn’t, Jane 23 knew. She looked around the hallway. No one else was there, but that could change real fast. She knew how fast the Mothers moved.

‘Come on,’ Jane 23 said, taking her bunkmate’s hand. She went through the door. Jane 64 followed, not tugging back or anything.

Even in the dark, Jane 23 could see that the sorting room had been cleaned up. There was still a mess, but not a wet kind of mess. The blood and bits were gone, and the exploded stuff had been swept into piles. The scrap was gone from all their benches, too. Jane 23 was scared, even though the room was quiet. The room didn’t look like it had the last time she’d seen it, but in her head, she still saw it the old way. What if there were pieces of girls in there? What if there was a girl stuck under a desk and she grabbed them when they walked by? Jane 23 pressed close to 64. 64 pressed back.

The hole in the wall was covered with a tarp. There was stuff next to it, some kind of . . . Jane 23 wasn’t sure. There was stuff in buckets, and tools, too. She thought of the glue she used on broken good scrap sometimes. Maybe the Mothers were trying to glue the wall closed.

A corner of the tarp waved at them, pushed back and forth by air from . . . somewhere. The other side.

‘Let’s go back,’ Jane 64 said, but she said it quiet, like she wasn’t sure. She was staring at the waving corner.

Jane 23’s heart was beating so hard she thought she might break. She grabbed the corner in her hand. The air pushing it was cold. Real cold.

She pulled the tarp aside.

The stuff on the other side of the wall hadn’t made any sense before, but it made even less now. The huge huge piles of scrap were still there, but the ceiling that wasn’t a ceiling had changed. It wasn’t blue any more, and it wasn’t bright – at least, not in the same way. Before, it had been bright all the way through, but now, it was real dark, except for three big round lights and a whole bunch of little specks and something kinda smoky running across it. The not-ceiling was big. So, so big. Bigger than the sorting room, bigger than the dorm. It went on so far Jane 23 couldn’t see any edges. It went on for always.

Jane 64 wasn’t saying anything, just breathing real hard and heavy. Scared, probably, but she wasn’t talking about going back to bed any more, either. Jane 23 understood. She felt the same way.

Jane 23 stuck her hand out beyond the edge of the broken wall. It was real cold, for sure, but not cold like metal was cold or the floor in the bathroom was cold. It was just cold, everywhere. Her skin got tight and made little bumps. It wasn’t a very good feeling, but she liked it anyway, just as she liked it whenever she got to taste soap or blood or anything that wasn’t a meal. It was different. The cold felt different.

‘Twenty-three, don’t,’ 64 whispered.

But Jane 23 was listening to something else now – that hot, good feeling pushing all through her chest. She stepped past the wall. She took another step. Two steps. Three. Four.

The scrap went on as far as the not-ceiling did, piles and piles and piles of it. No wonder there was always scrap to sort. You could have girls sorting this stuff for years and they’d never be done.

She looked down. The floor outside the wall was dusty, powdery. There were little hard bits all over, too, and all of it sloped down toward the piles of scrap. She looked up again at the not-ceiling. It made her head hurt, and her stomach, too. Maybe if she got closer, it would make sense. Maybe if she could touch it—

Jane 64 screamed. ‘No! No!’

Jane 23 spun around. A Mother had Jane 64 up off the floor, metal hand wrapped around her neck. Her bunkmate kicked and fought, tugging at the silver fingers.

Jane 23 wanted to scream, too, but her throat wouldn’t let the sound out. They’d be punished for this. They’d be punished in the way that girls never came back from. There’d be an empty bunk in the dorm, the one they should’ve been sleeping in. The Mothers wouldn’t need to make a trio.

It was all her fault.

The Mother saw Jane 23, but she didn’t step through the hole. She looked at it and just stood there, like she didn’t know what to do. Even without a face, it was real easy to tell that she was angry. So, so angry.

Jane 64 was crying and scared, and her face was a wrong kind of red. She looked at Jane 23 real hard, looked at her in a way that made her think of every morning they’d cuddled close before the wake-up lights turned on, of the time 64 had said she was the most good. ‘Run,’ Jane 64 said. ‘Run!’

Jane 23 knew she shouldn’t run. She’d done bad behaviour. There was no way to get out of punishment, and fighting would make it worse. But that hot, good, angry feeling was louder than anything the Mothers had ever told her. Jane 64 kept screaming: ‘Run!’ Her muscles said it, too: Run. Run!

So she did.

SIDRA

Blue got to his feet as Pepper and Sidra walked in the door. ‘Hey!’ he said with a big smile.

‘Hi,’ Sidra said, and simultaneously accessed the file named make yourself comfortable.

1. remove jacket

2. remove shoes

3. find a place to sit

4. (optional) get a snack or beverage

Pepper eyed her partner as she unlaced her boots. ‘What’s up?’ she asked, in a tone that suggested something had to be.

Blue continued to smile. ‘I’ve, uh, I’ve done some redecorating.’ He spoke more reassuringly as Pepper raised her brow. ‘Nothing big! Just s-something, ah, something for our housemate.’

Sidra was intrigued. She removed jacket and shoes from the kit, and went into the living room. Blue was right – not much had changed, but the couch had been moved, and beside it was a new chair, pushed up against the wall as far as it would go. A small table was next to it, holding a Linking box and a tethering cable. A blush of happiness spread through Sidra’s pathways. She understood. This was a place for her to sit down and plug in when she came home.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘This is very kind.’ She paused, not wanting to be impolite. ‘Can I . . .?’

‘Please!’ Blue said.

Sidra couldn’t get the kit seated fast enough. She popped the cable into the headjack, and the kit fell back into the chair, as an organic sapient would at the end of a long day. She closed the kit’s eyes, savouring the flood of information. She wouldn’t have known how to describe the feeling to the Humans. Perhaps like instantly regrowing a limb that had recently been severed.

‘Is the chair in a g-good spot?’ Blue asked. ‘Is the angle okay? I tried to find somewhere, ah, somewhere where you can see most of the room.’

Sidra opened the kit’s eyes and looked around. ‘Yes, this is great,’ she said, simultaneously downloading everything she’d added to her topics to research file that day. She’d already begun to lose herself in the task when she detected something brushing against the kit’s leg. She flicked the kit’s eyes down, but the angle wasn’t right. She still couldn’t see what it was. The kit sighed, and she bent it forward, directing the head down.

A little machine had come out from under the chair. A soft-skinned bot, in the shape of an animal Sidra didn’t recognise. Big head, stubby body, eight stumpy legs. She searched her reference files, but came up empty.

‘Oh, cute!’ Pepper said as she came into the room. She placed a fond hand on Blue’s shoulder. ‘Aw, that’s real cute.’

Sidra watched the bot, which had begun to rub its side against the kit’s leg. Two green mechanical eyes opened and met her gaze. Without warning, the bot leaped into the kit’s lap, and cooed a wordless invitation.

Sidra wasn’t sure what to do. ‘What is this?’ she asked.

‘Put out your hand,’ Blue said.

Sidra put the kit’s right hand forward, hesitantly. The machine pushed its nose forward, nuzzling the kit’s fingertips, cooing and chuffing as it did so. The kit started smiling, though Sidra couldn’t say quite why.

‘It’s a petbot,’ Blue said. ‘This one’s, ah, this one’s made to look like an ushmin. They’re a Harmagian th-thing, but everybody likes ushmin.’

Sidra realised that Blue was watching her with hopeful expectation. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Is this for me?’

Blue nodded happily. ‘I kn-know being in somebody else’s space can be weird. I figured it’d be, um, be good to – good to have something that’s yours.’ He put his hands in his front pockets. ‘Plus they say pets are – are calming. Thought it might help you feel more at home here.’

The sentiment was sweet, but Sidra stuck on one bit of the phrasing: something that’s yours. If the petbot was a gift, she owned it now. Gingerly, she made the kit pick up the mechanical ushmin. It wriggled, giving the impression of enjoying the contact. The kit’s smile faded. ‘Is it sentient?’

Blue looked slightly appalled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I would never buy something like that. It’s not intelligent, it’s just, um, just mechanical.’

Sidra continued to stare at the petbot. It stared back, eyes blinking slowly. A non-sentient program, then. Nothing but if/thens, on and off, tiny baby algorithms. She glanced over at Pepper, who was raiding the kitchen. A box of dried beetles – original five-spice blend! – was in her free hand as she dug through the cooler in search of a drink. Beetles, Sidra thought. Beetles weren’t intelligent, either. They couldn’t fly a shuttle or build an Undersea or create art. She looked again to the petbot, now seated in her lap. She stretched out one set of the kit’s fingers toward it. The bot stretched up toward them, begging to be touched. A recognition protocol, clearly. If approached by owner, then act cute. She thought back to the beetles. If approached by bird, then run away. If hungry, then eat. If challenged, then fight. Beetles weren’t considered to be much, but they were alive, at least. There were rules about how to quickly kill insects before consumption. She’d seen such things on the packaging of Pepper’s snacks: Harvested humanely in accordance with GC law. You could be fairly sure beetles didn’t understand what was happening to them, and that they didn’t suffer much, but consideration was given to the fact that they might. Did petbots come with any such ethical labelling? What was the difference between strung-together neurons and a simple bundle of if/then code, if the outward actions were the same? Could you say for certain that there wasn’t a tiny mind in that bot, looking back at the world like a beetle might?

Sidra noted that Blue was still watching her, and that his face had become one of guarded concern. He thought he’d done something wrong, she realised. She made the kit smile at him. ‘This is so very kind of you,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

‘Do you like it? If you don’t, then—’

‘I do,’ Sidra said. ‘It’s interesting, and the thought behind it is even better.’ She considered. ‘You two don’t keep pets like some Humans do.’

‘No,’ Pepper said. She sat down on the couch, in the spot nearest to Sidra’s chair, washing down a mouthful of beetles with a fresh bottle of berry fizz. ‘We don’t.’

‘Why not?’

Pepper took a long sip of her drink, watching the petbot snuggle in the kit’s lap. ‘I’m not very good with animals.’

JANE 23, AGE 10

The air outside the wall was still cold, and it wasn’t a good kind of different any more. Jane 23 pulled her arms around herself as close as she could. The little bumps on her skin were so tight they kind of hurt, and her arms and mouth were shaking. This wasn’t good. She wanted to be back in bed. She wanted to have never gotten out of it.

The Mothers hadn’t followed her. She didn’t know why. She wasn’t being very quiet. The floor crunched when she ran on it, and she’d made a lot of noise when she’d fallen down the last bit of the slope. Could the Mothers not go through the wall? Did they just not care?

She didn’t know where she was going. The scrap piles stretched way up overhead, all shadows and scary in the dark. She’d been walking for a long, long time – hours, probably – but she kept going anyway. She didn’t know what else to do.

Run! 64 had said, and Jane 23 had, until breathing hurt. Her bunkmate’s voice was stuck in her head, and she felt so dizzy and sick. She wanted to cry, but she didn’t. She was in enough trouble as it was.

Her foot hit something hard, and she fell, right smack onto the crunchy dusty floor. She yelled, scared more than hurt. She couldn’t see very good, but her knees hurt so loud, and she could feel angry new cuts on her hands. She looked back at what had made her fall. Just a piece of scrap, stuck in the floor. Just a bad piece of scrap, in her way. She kicked it. Kicking was bad behaviour, but she was already doing lots of that, and nothing made sense and they’d taken Jane 64 and it was her fault.

She kicked the scrap again, and again, and again, yelling sounds without words.

Another sound happened. Not the scrap, and not herself. A low, popping sound, kind of like a motor trying to start. It wasn’t a sound she knew, but something about it made her go real quiet.

There was a . . . something, standing not too far away. She had no idea what it was. It wasn’t a machine, but it moved. She was kind of sure it was breathing, but it wasn’t a girl, either. She looked at it best as she could in the dim light of the three bright things in the not-ceiling. The something had eyes. It had eyes, and four legs, and no arms. She couldn’t see any skin, just fuzzy soft-looking stuff all over. It had a mouth, too, and . . . teeth? Were they teeth? They were pointier than her teeth.

The something was looking right at her. It bent down a little bit, all of its legs bending back. It made the popping motor sound again. It was not a good sound.

She felt the same feeling in her legs that she’d felt when the Mother had stared at her so so angry through the hole in the wall. She heard Jane 64 in her head again. Run.

Jane 23 ran.

She didn’t look back, but she could hear the something running, too, making bad wrong sounds as it chased her. She ran fast, fast as she could, fast as she was never allowed to run during exercise time. She had to keep running. She had to. She didn’t know why, but her body knew it, and whatever that something chasing her was, it wasn’t good.

Another something appeared, and it ran at her, too, knocking down some scrap as it went. She ran harder, not caring about the cold air, not caring about the Mothers, not even caring about Jane 64. Run. That was all she could do and think. Run run run.

Her chest hurt. Her shoes rubbed at her toes wrong. The somethings were getting closer. She could hear them, so loud. Their mouths sounded wet.

There was another sound: a voice, coming from up ahead. But it was a weird voice, all wrong around the edges, not making any sense, not making any good words. Just a bunch of junk sounds.

She felt some spit hit the back of her leg.

The voice changed. ‘Hey! This way! Come toward me!’

There was no time for questions. Jane 23 ran at the voice.

A machine stuck out from one of the scrap piles, a huge machine with thick sides and – and a door. An open door leading into it. Two red lights blinked from the corners of the raised hatch.

‘You can do it!’ the voice said from behind the door. ‘Come on, hurry!’

Jane 23 scrambled up the scrap pile, sharp pieces catching her clothes and tearing her hands. With a yell, she threw herself inside the machine.

The hatch banged shut behind her.

One of the somethings crashed into the other side of it with a real loud sound, but the door didn’t move. She heard angry angry noises, and scratching at the outside. The door stayed closed.

‘Be still,’ the voice said in a whisper. ‘They’ll go away.’

And after a little bit, they did.

‘Oh, stars,’ the voice said. ‘Oh, stars, I’m so glad. Are you all right? Here, let me turn on some lights.’

Lights flickered on. Jane 23 picked herself up off the floor. She was in a tiny room, or a closet, maybe. Four metal walls, standing real close.

The voice talked fast. ‘You’re probably covered with germs. I don’t have enough power for a scan, or a flash – later. We can clean you up later. It’s protocol to scan you, yes, but this counts as a dire emergency, and that means I don’t have to follow that rule. Come inside. It’s okay.’

One of the walls turned into a door. Jane didn’t move.

‘There’s no one in here but me,’ the voice said. ‘And I can’t hurt you.’

Jane didn’t know what else to do, so she listened. She moved. She walked into another, bigger room – much, much smaller than the sorting room or the dorm, but too much space for just one girl. There were interface panels and places to sit, and some kind of small workstation. A workstation. A workstation in a room inside a machine, outside of the factory.

None of this made any sense.

Jane 23 tried to breathe, taking in big mouthfuls of air. She was crying. She wasn’t sure when the crying had started, and it scared her, because crying meant she’d be punished, but she couldn’t stop. Even if there’d been a Mother there, she wouldn’t have been able to stop.

‘It’s okay,’ the voice said. ‘You’re okay now, honey. They can’t get in here.’

‘Who are you?’ said Jane 23. Her voice felt strange, like it wouldn’t stay still. ‘Where – where are you?’

‘Oh, oh, I’m so sorry. Let me put a face on. Here. Over here. To your right.’

A screen lit up on one of the walls. Jane 23 walked over, real careful. A picture came up. A face. Not a girl’s face, though – well, okay, kind of a girl, but not a girl like she was used to. An older girl, even older than the girls who left when they turned twelve. The face had stuff sticking out of the top of her head, and a little bit over each eye, too. The picture wasn’t a real girl. It was more like a vid. But the face was smiling, and that made Jane feel a little okay.

‘Hi,’ the voice said. The picture on the wall moved her lips along with the words. ‘I’m Owl.’

SIDRA

Sidra didn’t care much for waiting – not out in public, at least. Installed in a ship, she could’ve sat for hours – days, even – without needing much external input. But with no systems to monitor but her own, and no Linkings to keep her occupied, waiting was a deeply irritating way to spend time. However, this wait, she’d been assured, was worth it. She looked at the others standing in line with her – Pepper, Blue, dozens of strangers, all anticipating entry into the Aurora Pavilion. The never-ending night was thick with the sounds of sapient chatter, the smells of alcohol and varied kinds of smoke, the flicker of luminescent moths trying bravely to nip at open cups and sticky flasks. If the people around her minded the wait, they didn’t show it. This was a Shimmerquick party, and apparently, standing around doing nothing was a fair price to pay for what was about to happen.

Shimmerquick, the GC reference files had said, was a very old holiday. Long before the Aeluons achieved spaceflight, the celebration was one of the few en masse interactions between male and female villages. Back then, Shimmerquick lasted for over a tenday and had no spoken name, as the silent Aeluons had yet to encounter the alien practice of auditory language. But Aeluons had been an integrated species for over a millennium, and their traditions were no longer bound to a single planet. Though Shimmerquick was, at its core, a fertility festival created by a species with a storied history of difficulty in that department, it had become a popular shared tradition in many mixed colonies – Port Coriol included. As Pepper had put it: ‘There aren’t many species that don’t enjoy a big party, especially if its central theme is getting laid.’ Granted, Aeluons had a clear social distinction between recreational and procreative coupling, and Shimmerquick was much more a celebration of life and ancestry than of lust – but apparently that nuance was either lost on or of small consequence to others in attendance. Sidra knew her understanding of such things was limited, but it did seem that most species generally didn’t need much context as to why a party was happening.

Sidra eyed the line stretching far back beyond them. ‘This is one of the smaller celebrations?’ she asked.

‘Yeah.’ Blue nodded. ‘The, um, the ones on the light side are huge.’

‘They’re also a complete clusterfuck,’ Pepper added, ‘and entirely tourists. Everybody here’ – she pointed up and down the line – ‘either lives here or is with someone who does. I also know folks who run this place, which is a big bonus.’

‘We also th-thought an indoor venue would be more comfortable,’ Blue said, smiling at Sidra.

Sidra was a little embarrassed to realise he meant more comfortable for her, but she was grateful, too. This was her first holiday. She didn’t want to spoil the fun for Pepper and Blue by not having a good time herself.

As the line moved forward, Sidra picked up the first sign of an acquired multicultural tradition: music. A species without a sense of hearing had no need for a soundtrack, but clearly they’d gotten the memo that other people couldn’t imagine a party without it. Sidra enjoyed the thump of the drums, the jangle and swing laced through. She liked the patterns within the sounds, the way they made organics move.

The non-Aeluon celebrants they shared the line with were following their host species’ lead as well. With few exceptions, everyone arriving at the event was wearing at least one item in a shade of grey – a hue that, on an Aeluon, would make the colours on their ever-changing cheek patches stand out all the more. For other species, any sort of grey would do, but for Aeluons, more traditional rules were at play. Among their galactic neighbours, Aeluons used the usual set of male-female-neutral pronouns that any species would understand. But among themselves, they were a four-gendered society. At Shimmerquick, their clothing reflected this: black for those who produced eggs, white for those who fertilised them, dark grey for the shons, who cyclically shifted reproductive roles, and light grey for those who could do neither. It was striking to see such a delineated display in a species whose sexual dimorphism was relatively slight compared to other species, and whose apparel had little to no gender distinction on any other day.

Even though the clothing cues could not be missed, Sidra was glad she had downloaded additional social references before leaving home, as the latter two genders were impossible to distinguish through physical features alone. Shons changed reproductive function multiple times throughout a standard, and were always considered fully male or female, depending on the current situation. Calling a shon by a neutral pronoun was considered an insult, unless they were in the middle of a shift. Such terms were reserved for those too young, too old, or simply unable to procreate. As neutral adults of breeding age looked exactly like their fertile counterparts, they generally did not mind the assumptions of other species where gendered pronouns were concerned, but appreciated it when the correct terms were used. Despite knowing that the kit’s Human appearance would absolve her of any pronoun mishaps, Sidra appreciated the colour-coded clothing. She loathed the idea of getting such things wrong.

Sidra glanced down at what the kit was wearing: a top printed with white and grey triangles, a darker grey pair of trousers, and a close-cut jacket, to give the impression that dark side’s cold air affected her. Sidra’s picks, Pepper’s credits. Sidra had felt awkward about that, as she was beginning to feel about most purchases made for her benefit. Her hosts didn’t seem to mind in the slightest, but she wasn’t sure what she was providing them with in return, other than potential trouble.

Blue patted down his pockets as the line crept forward. ‘Ah, damn. I forgot my – my—’

Pepper reached into her pocket and presented a packet of mints. Blue accepted it with a grin and a kiss. Sidra swung the kit’s eyes away, letting them have their moment. It seemed like a nice sort of thing to have.

They reached the door at last, and two young Aeluons greeted them – a boy and a girl, both clad in neutral grey. A painted stripe of the same colour hugged the lower edges of their iridescent cheek patches. The talkboxes in their throats and speech-processing implants in their foreheads were far less decorative than the ones worn by adults, but this made sense. These implants were temporary, and would be swapped out as the children grew.

‘Shimmer quick and shimmer often, friends!’ the boy said with practised pomp. Xyr silver skin was heavily dusted with glitter, and the pulsing blue in xyr cheeks indicated xe took pride in xyr role that evening. ‘How many are you?’

‘Three,’ Pepper said, holding out her wristpatch. Blue did the same, as did Sidra.

The boy scanned their wrists in turn, while the girl picked up a pot of light grey face paint and gestured the Humans forward. She had three other pots on hand, each coloured for a respective gender. Pepper bent down. The girl stuck xyr delicate thumb in the pot, then drew a thick, short line along each side of Pepper’s jaw – the rough equivalent of where her cheek patches would end, if she had any. Sidra noted the symbolism with keen interest as the same was repeated for Blue, then herself. She and her friends were being designated as the equivalent of neutral Aeluons for the evening, and with the exception of children, neutrals were welcome partners in romantic relationships. Mainstream Aeluon aversion to interspecies coupling was known far and wide, and given that the taboo stemmed from a concern regarding the ability to further the species, marking aliens as potential sexual partners at a fertility festival was a bold statement. Such a gesture would not have been made in, say, the Aeluon capital of Sohep Frie, or likely even the gatherings on Coriol’s light side. The Aeluons in attendance at the Aurora were clearly of a more radical stance than most of their peers. Sidra was beginning to understand why Pepper and Blue had chosen this party.

They walked down a coolly lit ramp, which curved and swayed as it wound its way underground. NO REDREED IN COMMON AREAS, a printed wall sign read. SAVE IT FOR THE SMOKING ROOMS.

‘How come?’ Sidra asked. She’d seen about a dozen different recreational substances being consumed in line, including some that required a pipe.

‘Makes Aeluons’ eyes itch,’ Pepper said. ‘Which I imagine would be absolute hell in a closed space like this.’

Down, down, down they walked, music growing louder, the line getting ever more excited. All at once, the wait was over. They arrived.

A deluge of information hit Sidra’s pathways, but in a way that exhilarated her. There was as much happening as there would be in a busy market square, but there were edges here. Walls. Her field of observation was instantly defined; her protocols did not reach endlessly outward. The same was true whenever she went down to the tech caves, but the activity there was often confined within shops and behind doors – places she saw only hints of as she walked by. The main hall of the Aurora, on the other hand, was a wide-open space filled with booths and tables and accessible displays. The caves were a series of closed cupboards; this was a buffet. Her field of vision was a nuisance, as always, but much of what overwhelmed her topside and bored her at home was absent here. This . . . this was a party.

‘Look at you.’ Pepper laughed.

Sidra realised the kit was smiling with an open mouth. She wrangled it into a less effusive expression. ‘It’s very exciting.’

‘Good!’ Blue said, squeezing the kit’s shoulder. ‘That’s great.’

‘First order of business,’ Pepper said, clapping her hands together. ‘Drinks.’

Sidra took in as much as she could as they searched for a refreshment vendor. Aside from the decorations – braided garlands of leaves dyed in monochrome, hanging metal charms displaying superstitious numbers for good luck and fertility – she had little immediate impression that this was a specific cultural event. On the contrary, everything about the happenings around them screamed ‘Port Coriol’. She saw an Aandrisk acrobat playing with a shielded ball of water, a Harmagian laughing at a Laru’s joke, a group of Humans blissfully plugged into a portable sim hub. There were places to sit. Places to dance. Nooks filled with cushions and lighted globes and shouting faces. Clouds of smoke – not redreed, she hoped – appearing and disappearing. A cacophony of smells: sweat, slime, food, feathers, flowers. A merchant selling handmade jewellery. A modder showing off a petbot with webbed wings and gem-like eyes. A tray of sugar-snaps upended. A tray of fried root vegetables devoured. The whirs and clicks of gadgets and implants piercing the sound of overlapping languages, all underlaid with the thick thoom-thoom-thoom that made the dancers buck and sway.

Sidra processed, processed, processed, but the walls kept her from stretching too far. It felt good. It felt right.

‘Pepper!’ a voice cried. A male Aandrisk, waving at them from the opposite side of a circular bar. Sidra didn’t recognise him, but Pepper obviously did. She hurried towards him, hands above her head. A Harmagian saw Pepper coming, and made room for her at the bar, tentacles curling with respect. Sidra felt a bit of awe warm through her pathways. Was there anyone on this moon who didn’t know Pepper?

‘Hist ka eth, reske,’ Pepper said, leaning over the bar to give the Aandrisk a hug. Good to see you, friend. Her pronunciation was rough, but the Aandrisk didn’t seem to mind in the slightest.

‘Ses sek es kitriksh iks tesh.’ I was wondering when you’d get here. He reached over to Blue, hugging him across the bar as well. ‘It’s not a party without you two.’ His grey-green eyes flicked to Sidra. ‘And who’s this?’

Pepper put her palm between the kit’s shoulder blades. ‘My good friend Sidra, recently arrived at the Port, and just as recently hired by yours truly.’ She nodded at the Aandrisk. ‘Sidra, this is Issek, one of the finest bartenders on this rock.’

‘One of?’ Issek said, flicking his tongue. ‘Who else?’

Blue grinned teasingly. ‘Pere’tek at the Sand House pours f-faster than you.’

Issek rolled his eyes. ‘He’s got tentacles. That’s hardly fair.’ He tussled Blue’s hair, then turned his attention to the kit. ‘Sidra, it’s a pleasure. First drink’s on me. What can I get you?’

‘Oh.’ Sidra didn’t know how to respond. Having the ability to ingest fluids wasn’t the same as knowing which one she was supposed to purchase. ‘I don’t—’

Pepper gave Sidra a secret, reassuring glance. ‘It’s customary on Shimmerquick to drink something that comes from the same place you do. Or the same culture, at least. As close as you can manage.’

‘Ah,’ Issek said, raising a claw. ‘That’s what you buy for yourself. If someone else is buying, then it has to be something from xyr home. So, as I’m buying’ – he gave a little bow – ‘you’re getting something my home city of Reskit is famous for. Ever tried tishsa?’

‘I haven’t, no.’

Issek plucked a tall, thin ceramic bottle from the table behind him. ‘Tishsa is made from the sap of a tree whose pronunciation I won’t burden you with. Grows in the marshlands east of Reskit. There are two traditional ways of serving it: neat and very, very hot, or’ – he poured a stream of inky brown liquid into a tiny bowl-like cup with a subtle pour spout – ‘at room temperature, wiiiiith’ – he uncapped a second, smaller bottle – ‘a drop of nectar syrup, to counter the bitterness, and’ – a small box was produced – ‘a dash of salt, to balance the whole thing out.’ He gave the concoction two quick stirs with a long rod, then slid the cup toward Sidra.

Sidra thanked him and accepted the tishsa, aware of Issek’s expectant gaze. She brought the cup to the kit’s lips and poured the contents inside.

A rushing river. Burning paper. A forest thick with fog.

‘Wow,’ Sidra said. ‘That’s really nice.’

Issek nodded proudly, his feathers bobbing. The Humans looked delighted. ‘How’s it, ah, how’s it taste?’ Blue asked.

Sidra answered with the truth: ‘Like a forest.’

Pepper beamed, then turned her attention to Issek. ‘So whatcha got for colony kids?’ she said, gesturing at herself and Blue.

‘For planetside Humans, only the finest,’ Issek said with a mischievous glint. He covered his hand with a thick towel, reached below the counter, and pulled out a sealed, chilled bottle. Pepper and Blue hooted with laughter.

‘Oh, no,’ Pepper said, with the sort of tone that implied the opposite.

Blue ran his fingers down his cheeks and exhaled. ‘We’re in for a night.’ He took the bottle and held it out for Sidra to see. Whitedune Distillery, the label read. Kick-Ass Kick from Gobi Six.

‘What is it?’ Sidra asked. Kick could mean anything from ale to wine to spirits, depending on where the speaker was from. Slang was infuriating that way.

Blue turned the bottle to the back label. Ingredients: Whatever we could grow this year, plus water.

‘Gotta love the independent colonies,’ Pepper said. She made a grabbing motion toward Issek, who placed a small glass in her hand. Blue uncapped the bottle and poured. Pepper puffed out her cheeks, then threw the drink back. Her face contorted into a puzzle of emotions as she swished and swallowed.

‘Oh, stars,’ Pepper rasped, laughing. ‘Why could we not be from Reskit?’

‘If you hate it—’ Issek started.

Pepper shook her head. ‘Nope. Nope, it’s good for me to know what it feels like for a fuel line to be cleaned out. Professional development and all.’ She patted Blue’s chest. ‘Tomorrow’s gonna be a rough morning.’

Some friendly conversation continued – the well-being of the Rust Bucket, the decor of the party, the current gossip from Issek’s feather family – but Sidra shifted that process to the background. These were the kinds of conversations she was privy to all the time. The Aurora was new, and vibrant. She watched as a group of Aeluon children blew handfuls of glitter over each other, dancing excitedly but making no sound at all. She watched as a massive Quelin – an exile, judging by the harsh branding stamped along her shell – apologised profusely for getting one of her segmented legs stuck in some decorative fabric draped around a vendor’s booth. She watched service drones flying drinks and food orders back and forth, back and forth. She wondered if the drones were intelligent. She wondered how much they were aware of.

Blue noticed that Sidra’s attention had strayed, and he gave Pepper a subtle nudge. They excused themselves from the bar, assuring Issek that they’d be back later.

‘Come on,’ Pepper said. ‘Let’s go check out the main event.’

They walked into a large circular area, and the multicultural atmosphere vanished. This space was filled with angled tents decorated with lavish garlands and lights, eagerly staffed by adult Aeluons and their respective children. This was the creche display, the central point of any Shimmerquick celebration. This was where professional parents advertised their business to potential mothers.

‘You know how this works?’ Pepper asked under her breath.

‘Yes,’ Sidra said. She brought up her reference files, eager to compare her notes with the real thing. ‘Can I look around? Is that . . . allowed?’

‘Oh yeah, go for it,’ Pepper said. ‘They don’t mind looky-loos. Just keep your respectful distance when a balsun takes place. Other species getting mixed up in that isn’t cool, even in this crowd.’

Sidra wouldn’t have dared anyway. The balsun ritual dance was the hallmark of the holiday, and despite its Hanto loan name, it was wholly, quintessentially Aeluon. An Aeluon woman might become fertile two or three times in her life (if at all), a state visually characterised by an increased brightness in her scales: in the right light, a shimmer. The balsun was an ancient tradition, once thought to encourage a woman’s body to produce a viable egg. Science dictated otherwise, but the dance remained, partly out of cultural heritage, partly out of the mindset of well, it can’t hurt.

There were seven different creches representing themselves in the display. Traditionally, creches were comprised of three to five virile males or shons, but women and neutrals were included in the modern mix. Parenting was considered a full-time job, and not something to be undertaken alone. As a woman had no way to plan for if and when she might become fertile, the idea of her abandoning her own profession to look after an unplanned child was unthinkable. Granted, she’d have to take time off for fertility leave, but on that point, Aeluon society was accommodating to a fault. In her research, Sidra had run across an absurd historical anecdote about a pre-spaceflight ground war that had been amicably paused when one of the most prominent generals started to shimmer. Sidra wasn’t sure any species took anything as seriously as Aeluons did breeding.

She wandered around the display, fascinated by the elaborate adornments. It was a competition, in essence. A trade show. She stopped in front of one of the tents. The leaf garlands draped around it were huge, and laced with glowing globes full of— The kit blinked. There was some kind of glowing liquid inside them, and it was moving, making tiny waves like a cresting sea. Powered by bots, most likely, but stars, it was striking.

‘Pretty, aren’t they?’

The kit nearly jumped. One of the creche’s parents had appeared beside her, just out of sight. ‘Very,’ Sidra said. ‘Your whole display is beautiful.’

‘Thank you,’ the Aeluon said. He looked at his tent approvingly. ‘We’ve been working for weeks on this. The kids helped, of course.’

‘Would you mind if I ask you some questions about . . . about all of this?’

‘Not at all. Is this your first Shimmerquick?’

‘Yes. Is it that obvious?’

The Aeluon laughed. ‘You have the look of someone who’s seeing things for the first time. Don’t be embarrassed, I’m here to educate as much as celebrate. That’s what being a parent’s all about.’

Sidra liked this man. ‘Have you always been a parent? Professionally speaking, I mean.’

‘Oh, yes. It takes a lot of school, so if you don’t get started early, it can be hard to catch up.’

‘What kind of schooling?’

‘There are two different layers to it,’ the Aeluon said. His tone was authoritative, his words ready. This was clearly his field. ‘At the core, you’ve got to get university certification for parenting, just as you do for, say, being a doctor or an engineer. No offence to you or your species, but going into the business of creating life without any sort of formal prep is . . .’ He laughed. ‘It’s baffling. But then, I’m biased.’

The kit smiled. ‘I understand.’

‘To get your certification,’ he continued, clearly on a roll, ‘you have to take courses in child development, basic medical care, and interpersonal communication. That’s the first layer. On top of that, if you want any sort of viability in this field, you have to add specialisation courses – both for the benefit of the kids and the mothers. Me, for example, I’m skilled in massage, basic tutoring, and emotional counselling. Loh over there, he’s great at arts and crafts, and he can cook like a dream. Sei is our gardener, and does all our home repair and decorating, too. A good creche needs a blend of skills in order to be successful, especially where the mothers are concerned. Fertility leave is a big deal, and it’s a lot of fun, but it’s a stressful thing for any woman, at first. It’s two unplanned months away from her normal life. She’s got to drop any projects she’s got going on at work. She’s got to cancel whatever other plans she’s made. If she’s a spacer, she’s got to find the nearest place with an Aeluon community before she misses her shot. And unless her romantic partner can take that time off, too, she’s got to be separated from her most important person for a bit. She’s got to go live with strangers – and have sex with them – and all the while, there’s the worry that she might go through all that trouble and still not have a fertilised egg at the end of it. And then there’s the business of carrying said egg and giving birth a month later, which – while not nearly the bother it is for your species – would be nerve-wracking for anyone. So, we do our best to make the whole experience as rewarding as possible. It’s a break. A vacation. We do everything we can to make the women that come to us as comfortable and happy as possible. Our beds are wonderful, our rooms are clean. Our food is outstanding. We’ve got a beautiful garden and huge salt-water baths. We’re experienced lovers, and we put a lot of effort into making sure that coupling multiple times a day is something to look forward to. We give our mothers space when they need it, and company when they crave it. We provide quality medical care when it’s time to give birth. And beyond that, we assure them that their child is going to be well looked after. They’re welcome to spend time with the other children there – join them for playtime or studying, if they want to. Not all women do. Some aren’t worried about that aspect of it, or they just don’t like kids much. Others need a lot of reassurance that the little person they’re leaving behind is going to be okay.’

‘Do mothers come back to visit?’

‘Usually, yes. It’s not always possible. Here at the Port, we get a lot of spacers who have somewhere else to go once their shimmer’s over. There’s contact, at least. Our kids get sib calls. They get presents. A lot of species have this conception that our children don’t know their mothers, but that’s just not true. Aeluon mothers love their children as deeply as anyone does. That’s why they entrust them to professionals who can give them the best upbringing possible.’ He glanced over to one of his fellow fathers, who had given him a non-verbal signal Sidra had not caught. How did Aeluons detect such things in the middle of so much activity? They possessed electroreception as well as sight, she knew, but to her knowledge, cheek colours didn’t give off any additional sensory signals. They had to have an impressive attention to detail – a good quality, she imagined, for a parent.

‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ the Aeluon man said. An Aeluon woman had entered the creche circle. One of the children led her by the hand to the fathers, who greeted her with an effusive flurry of colour. Sidra longed to be able to understand the conversation, but even though she could presumably download a lexicon of Aeluon language, she wasn’t sure the kit’s visual sensors could parse things fast enough. Their cheeks were swirling as quick and varied as the skin on a bubble.

The woman pressed her palm to each of the four fathers’ chests – an initiation for a balsun. One of the creche fathers was clad in neutral grey, and he stepped back as the three white-clad men circled her. The children sprang into action, lining up with the neutral father in a way that suggested they wanted everyone to know they’d been practising this. He took the hands of the two closest to him, meeting their eyes with obvious affection. The neutrals began to stamp their feet on the ground in a synchronised pattern – left left, right, left-left-left, right. The white-clad men and the black-clad woman began to move in rhythm, circling and spinning in a curious way, never missing a beat. Sidra was fascinated. Presumably, their auditory implants were picking up the stamping, but this dance had been done since before the Aeluons taught their brains to process sound. Could they feel the vibrations in the ground? She found it likely, and wished she could share the experience. She watched the woman, covered in glitter, dancing in the hope that she might wake up to her skin shimmering on its own one day. She thought about the menu of services the parent had outlined. Massages, baths, places to sleep, people to mate with. Sidra could understand the desire for these things, in concept. She couldn’t help but feel a little jealous of the woman, even though jealousy was a waste of time. She wasn’t jealous of what the woman was receiving, exactly, but of how confident she looked, how confident they all looked. They each had a role, a place, a colour. They knew where and how they fit.

‘Hey.’ It was Blue, standing beside her. The kit startled; she willed it to stay calm. Stars, but she was tired of not being able to see behind the kit’s head. Did everything have to be a surprise? ‘We, uh, we bumped into some friends, and we were gonna h-hang out with them at their table. You can stay here, if you want to.’

‘No, I’ll come along,’ Sidra said. She followed him out of the creche display and toward Pepper, who was animatedly telling a story to a hodgepodge group of modders. A table sounded good. Sidra had seen the seating nooks, each with a table nestled into a low, free-standing three-sided wall. Three walls meant there was a corner seat. That was the place for her.

JANE 23, AGE 10

Jane 23 never stopped looking at Owl’s face. She moved closer to the screen, but kept her back close to the wall. She didn’t know what else was in here. She didn’t want anything to sneak up on her.

‘Are you a machine?’ Jane 23 asked.

‘Not exactly,’ Owl said. ‘Do you know what software is?’

‘Tasks that live in machines.’

‘That’s a wonderful definition. Yes, I’m software, technically. I’m an AI. I’m a . . . I’m a mind in a machine.’

Jane 23’s muscles went hard and tight. She glanced back at the hatch. She couldn’t see how to open it. ‘Are you . . . are you a Mother?’

‘I don’t think so. I don’t know what that means to you.’

That probably meant no, but Jane 23 had to be sure. ‘The Mothers are minds in machines, too. They take care of girls and make us on-task. They give us meals and help us learn things and punish us if we do bad behaviour.’

The face in the wall looked kind of angry, but Jane 23 didn’t think Owl was angry at her. ‘I’m not a Mother,’ Owl said. ‘I’m not like that. But I’m a similar sort of software, I think. I just . . . I don’t punish people. And I live in a ship. A shuttle, to be precise.’

‘What’s a ship?’

‘A ship is – a ship is a machine you use to get between planets.’

Jane 23’s head hurt. She was real tired of not understanding things. ‘What’s a planet?’

Owl’s face got sad. ‘Oh, stars. A planet is . . . what we’re on right now. I will explain in more detail later. That’s a bigger question than you should have to swallow right now. You’re not hurt, are you? Did they bite you?’

‘No.’ Jane 23 looked down. ‘I cut my hands, though.’

‘Okay,’ Owl said. She looked like she was thinking about something. ‘The water tanks are long gone, but there may be some first aid supplies. I hope so. Here, follow me.’ The screen switched off, but another one turned on, farther into the room.

Jane 23 didn’t move.

‘Hey,’ Owl said. ‘It’s okay. Nothing in here will hurt you. You’re safe.’

Jane 23 didn’t move.

‘Sweetie, I don’t have a body. I can’t touch you.’

Jane 23 thought about that. That seemed a little more good. She walked to the new screen.

Owl continued through the machine – the ship – switching screens on and off. All the rooms were tucked in real tight, like a bunch of storage closets or something. There were so many things in there, all kinds of machines and stuff without names, but thrown around like scrap in a bin. Jane 23 had so many questions. Her stomach hurt from all the questions.

‘Go in that room there,’ Owl said. ‘To your left. Do you know what “left” is?’

‘Yes,’ said Jane 23. Of course she knew what ‘left’ was. She was ten.

‘Do you see that box on the floor? The blue one with the white stripes? Go ahead and open that up.’

Jane 23 did as told, and looked inside the box. Now this stuff she knew. Well, not exactly, but the stuff in the box looked a lot like some of the stuff they used in the med ward.

‘Right, let’s see.’ Owl sounded like the way Jane 23 felt when she couldn’t find the right tool, or if a piece of scrap was acting like junk even though she knew it was good. ‘I wish the sinks were working. We’ll just have to make do. Do you see those little silver tubes? Those are . . . it’s a goo that will kill the bad stuff in your hands.’

Jane 23 nodded. ‘Disinfectant.’

The face on the screen looked surprised. ‘Disinfectant, right. Have you used it before?’

‘No,’ Jane 23 said. ‘But the Mothers do.’

‘Do you think you can use it on yourself?’

Jane 23 thought about this. ‘Yes.’

‘Maybe use a few tubes. You can put some on, and use that gauze there to wipe the disinfectant and the dirt back out. Then put more disinfectant on, and then bandages. Does that . . .’ Owl looked like she was kind of confused, too. ‘Will that work? I’m so sorry, honey, I don’t have hands. I’m just working from memory here.’

‘That sounds okay,’ Jane 23 said. She sat down on the floor and cleaned herself up. The disinfectant hurt and it smelled funny, but the feeling reminded her of getting fixed in the med ward, and that made her feel a little better. She spread the goo on thick, then wiped it away, taking away dust and blood with it. She touched her tongue to the corner of the messy gauze. Blood. Chemicals. Sharp and angry and bad.

Once the blood was gone and the cuts were clean, she put more disinfectant on, and started covering her hands with bandages. ‘Why are you in here?’ she asked Owl.

‘That’s a complicated question. The short answer is I was installed in this ship so that I could help the people who flew it. This – this area was a bad place for them to go, but they thought they knew what they were doing, and—’ She paused. She sounded sad. ‘Anyway, they were arrested – taken away – and the ship and I were thrown out. The people here don’t want things from elsewhere, you see.’ She sighed. ‘This must be so confusing for you. I’ll do my best to make sense of everything.’ The face in the wall gasped. ‘I haven’t asked your name! I’m sorry. It’s been so long since I had someone to talk to. I’m so scattered. Do you have a name?’

‘Jane 23.’

‘Jane 23,’ Owl said. She nodded, real slow. ‘Well, since you’re the only Jane I see here, is it okay if I leave the numbers off?’

Jane 23 looked up from her bandages. ‘Just . . . Jane?’

‘Just Jane.’

Jane couldn’t say why, but that felt kind of good.

SIDRA

They’d been at the Shimmerquick celebration for two hours and three minutes, but Sidra had decided forty-six minutes prior that she liked alcohol. It had no cognitive effect on her, but there was such an incredible variety of concoctions to choose from, and they all triggered separate images. As her companions and their friends got ever louder and happier, she enjoyed someone else’s memories of boats, fireworks, rainbows. She wasn’t sure how much she enjoyed alcohol’s effect on other sapients, though. Most of their behaviour was cute, even endearing. Blue had told her how glad he was that she had come to them, which was very gratifying to hear (though it lost some of its impact by the third or fourth time). Pepper was loud, but not as loud as her friend Gidge, who had crossed over from smart to sloppy. The sapients milling near their table were all various shades of inebriated as well. Relieved as Sidra had been to get a corner seat, she had reached a point where the desire for different input outweighed the comfort gained by staying put. She excused herself and walked along the edge of the party, holding half a glass of Sohep Sunset between both the kit’s hands, staying as close to the outer wall as she could. She would’ve liked to put her back to it and shuffle along sideways, like a crab, but that wasn’t how Humans moved. There was a good chance that if she had walked that way, she’d just be assumed to be drunk or high or both, but no, avoiding attention was the smarter call.

The booths near the wall were less crowded than those in the middle of the Pavilion. She passed by vendors selling light pins, cheap trinkets, and chilled cups of roe, until she came to a tucked-away booth, wreathed with strands of white globulbs and floating pixel confetti. GET SOME INK! a handwritten sign read. CAN ACCOMMODATE ALL MOST SPECIES. Inside sat an Aeluon woman, tracing a whirring implement over her customer’s arm. The patterned fabric around her waist and legs was dark shon grey, ornately wrapped in an intricate knot. Like the rest of her kind, she was covered in glitter from head to toe, but underneath that, every bit of her finely scaled skin was tattooed. Unlike much of the body art Sidra had seen since she arrived at the Port, the Aeluon’s ink was static, apparently free of nanobots. A tangled forest covered her chest, full of hidden animals and reaching vines. A multitude of images and symbols laced their way down her arms – explosions of spirals and circles, a map of Central space, a wreath of multispecies hands pressing palms. When the Aeluon turned to make an adjustment in her work, Sidra could see writing on the back of her head – something in ancient Aeluon text. Sidra had the modern Aeluon alphabet installed, but nothing from antiquity. She captured the image, and added it to the list of things to download.

The Aeluon’s subject was a female Aandrisk, looking entirely unconcerned by the harsh-looking machinery rubbing over her scales. Comparing this woman’s face to the other partygoers she’d seen that night, Sidra found it likely that she’d been smoking smash. She wondered if the Aandrisk would change her mind about the Aeluon’s handiwork once the drug wore off.

‘You looking for ink?’ the Aeluon said, never taking an eye off the Aandrisk. ‘Or just looking?’ She held a long, curved pipe between her teeth, which smouldered undisturbed as words emanated from the talkbox in her throat. The pipe contained a popular Aeluon vice known in Klip by the simple name of tallflower – or tease, as she’d heard Pepper call the stuff. Apparently the smoke smelled wonderful to Humans, but had no effect on them.

‘Just looking,’ Sidra said. ‘If I’m bothering you—’

The Aeluon’s cheeks ebbed friendly blue. ‘Not at all.’ She waved Sidra over. ‘I’d love some company, and I promise she doesn’t mind an audience. She doesn’t mind much of anything right now.’

Sidra sat the kit down in an empty chair beside the Aeluon. The Aandrisk lolled her head toward them, flashed a stupid smile, then went back to wherever she’d been before.

Smoke shot silently out the Aeluon’s small nostrils. Her talkbox laughed in tandem. ‘See, most species I wouldn’t work on when they’re this gone. But Aandrisks shed. If this is a mistake for her, it’s a temporary one.’

The Aandrisk spoke, but her words were lost before they got past her teeth.

‘Whatever you say, friend,’ the Aeluon said. She shrugged at Sidra. ‘I don’t speak much Reskitkish, do you?’

Sidra paused. Humans who spoke Reskitkish were rare, and revealing that she was indeed fluent might invite questions she couldn’t safely answer. There was no way around this one, though. ‘I do,’ she said, ‘but I couldn’t understand her.’

‘Well, unless she said, “Please stop using yellow,” I’m going to assume everything’s fine.’ She pointed at her subject’s scales. ‘You know anything about scale dyeing?’

‘No.’ Sidra had no references on that custom, but she was very interested. An inky spiral pattern was emerging, blossoming outward in a sort of mandala.

The Aeluon continued working and smoking, speaking easily as she went. ‘Species with softer skin, like you and me, we can retain ink down in the dermis indefinitely. But Aandrisks are a whole different deal.’

‘Because they shed?’

‘That, and – I mean, look at this.’ She tapped one of the scales. ‘The stuff their scales are made of isn’t terribly different from this.’ She took one of the kit’s hands, and rubbed the thumbnail. ‘You can’t get an ink gun down into keratin, not easily. So this’ – she gestured with the dyeing implement – ‘is just a glorified paintbrush. Gives her scales a nice, quick, even coating.’

‘How long does it last?’

‘About six tendays. Or less than that, if she’s due to shed. Not so long that she’ll mind if she sobers up and hates it.’ She popped an empty cartridge out of the implement, slipped in a silver one, and continued. ‘I’m Tak, by the way,’ she said.

‘Sidra.’

Tak gave her an Aeluon smile. Tallflower smoke drifted up around her face. She pressed the tool against a clean scale, inundating it with dye. It caught the light of the nearby globulbs.

‘How many different techniques do you know?’ Sidra asked, thinking of the sign out front.

‘My specialty’s modern Aeluon style, but I also know how to do bots and temporary stuff like this.’ She nodded at the Aandrisk. ‘Most of my business comes from people who want bot art, actually. It’s pretty popular, especially for spacers. Everybody wants to say they got ink on Coriol. Apparently that means something out there. I dunno. I’ve never lived anywhere else, except for university.’

Sidra considered. ‘You don’t use bots on yourself.’

‘Not like you mean. I don’t have any moving art on me, true. But there are bots here,’ she said, trailing a finger down one of the stylised trees branching across her flat, bare chest. ‘They just don’t move.’

‘Then why have bots at all?’

‘They help maintain the integrity of the linework when my skin grows or shrinks. Keeps the edges from blurring.’

‘Why don’t you use moving ones?’

Tak made a face. ‘Because they drive us nuts. Aeluons, I mean. I don’t mind bots on other species. I can talk to a Human who’s swirling from head to toe, no problem. But on an Aeluon, that’d be a nightmare. Keep in mind—’ She pointed at one of her cheeks.

‘Oh,’ Sidra said. ‘Of course.’ A colour-changing tattoo during a colour-changing conversation would be an enormous distraction. ‘I’d imagine that’d be annoying.’

‘Confusing, mostly. And honestly, when I first started inking, it took me a while to get used to it with other species. I did a gorgeous nebula across this Human’s back once. All these rich purples and deep deep blues, swirling real slow. Art-wise, it looked fantastic, but combined with skin, I kept feeling like his back was pissed at me. Purple means angry, see.’ Tak’s cheeks rippled. She looked amused. ‘What about you? Got any ink?’

‘No.’

‘Just not your thing?’

‘No, I—’ Sidra paused, not wanting to insult this woman’s profession. ‘I don’t quite understand it.’

‘You mean, why people do it?’

‘I suppose so.’

Tak rocked her head in thought, adjusting her pipe. ‘Depends on the person. I mean, just about every species mods themselves somehow. Quelin brand their shells. Harmagians shove jewellery through their tendrils. My species and yours have both been tattooing for millennia. If you’re interested in different cultural practices, there’s a great collection of essays called Through The Surface on body art traditions by species. It’s by Kirish Tekshereket – have you read any of her work?’

Sidra added a note to her list. ‘I haven’t, no.’

‘Oh, she’s fantastic. Highly recommend it. But back to your question: why do people do it. I’ve always thought of it as a way to get a little more in touch with your body.’

The kit leaned forward. ‘Really?’

‘Yeah. Your mind and your body. Two separate things, right?’

Sidra directed all her processing power to the conversation at hand. ‘Right.’

‘Except not. Your mind comes from your body. It’s born out of it. And yet, it’s a wholly independent thing. Even though the two are linked, there’s a disconnect. Your body does stuff without asking your mind about it, and your mind wants stuff that your body can’t always do. You know what I mean?’

‘Yes.’ Stars, did she ever.

‘So, tattooing . . . you’ve got a picture in your mind, then you put it on your body. You make a hazy imagining into a tangible part of you. Or, to flip it around, you want a reminder of something, so you put it on your body, where it’s a real, touchable thing. You see the thing on your body, you remember it in your mind, then you touch it on your body, you remember why you got it, what you were feeling then, and so on, and so on. It’s a re-enforcing circle. You’re reminded that all these separate pieces are part of the whole that comprises you.’ The Aeluon laughed at herself. ‘Or is that too fluffy?’

‘No,’ Sidra said. She was intensely focused, as if she were plugged into the Linkings. There was an Aandrisk gesture that captured this feeling perfectly: tresha. Someone seeing a truth in you without being told. ‘No, that sounds wonderful.’

Tak lifted the gun away from the Aandrisk, and took out her pipe. She looked Sidra in the eye, studying her. ‘Tell you what,’ she said, after three seconds. She tapped her wristpatch against Sidra’s. Sidra registered a new download – a contact file. ‘You ever want to take the plunge, I’d love to assist.’

‘Thank you,’ Sidra said. She held the contact file at the forefront of her pathways for a moment, feeling like Tak had given her a gift. ‘Would you mind if I kept watching you work for a while?’

‘Not at all.’ Tak placed the pipe back in her mouth, unruffled by the unexpected audience. It was a good thing, Sidra thought, to know your craft so well that an extra pair of eyes made little difference.

Sidra remembered her drink and took a sip. A bird, black as night, beating its powerful wings through the dawn. Tak worked over the scales: yellow, silver, white, yellow, silver, white. She exhaled smoke. It cast shadows. Sidra took another sip: A bird, black as night, beating its powerful wings through the dawn. Tak continued: yellow, silver, white. As for the Aandrisk, she said nothing at all.

JANE, AGE 10

Jane was still tired, but she woke up because it was time to wake up. Her body said so. It was the time before the alarm went off, before the lights went on, right around the same time Jane 8 got up to pee.

She listened in the dark. No girls moving beneath their sheets. No pat pat pat of feet headed to the bathroom. No Jane 64 breathing beside her.

She remembered. She was alone.

‘Owl?’ she said. She clutched the blankets tight. They weren’t her blankets, and this wasn’t her bed. This was one of the beds in the shuttle. There were two beds, and she didn’t know who either of them were for, and she wasn’t wearing clothes, and— ‘Owl?’

Owl’s glowing face appeared in the screen beside the bed. ‘Hey, hey, I’m right here. Everything’s okay. Do you want me to turn the lights on?’

Jane wasn’t afraid of the dark – she was ten – but right then, lights sounded like a good idea. ‘Yes,’ she said.

The lights came up slowly, much like the lights in the dorm did, but they were different. Everything was different. Jane felt different, too.

She sat up, hugging the different blanket to her chest. Owl stayed with her, but didn’t say anything. She just watched. Jane couldn’t say why, but somehow that didn’t scare her like when a Mother looked at her. Owl felt . . . okay.

‘Owl, what do I do today?’ Jane said. ‘What’s my task?’

‘Well . . .’ Owl said. ‘There are things that would be good for you to do at some point, but you had a very hard night. I think you should do anything you want today.’

Jane thought about that. ‘Like what?’

‘If you want to stay in bed for a while, you can. If you want to stay in bed all day, you can! We can talk, or not talk, or—’

‘I can stay in bed?’

‘Of course you can.’

‘. . . all day?’

Owl laughed. ‘Yes. All day.’

Jane frowned. ‘But what would I do?’

‘Just . . . relax.’

Jane wasn’t sure what to make of that. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll try that.’ She lay back down, pulling the blanket tight around herself. She wasn’t cold, but the bed felt too big, and the blanket made it better.

‘Do you want me to turn out the lights?’ Owl asked.

‘Would that help?’

‘Maybe down a little, at least.’ The lights dimmed, as did Owl’s face.

Jane lay still. Just relax, she thought. Just relax. I won’t get punished. But her body knew it was time to wake up, and the feeling of being in trouble grew louder and sharper, sitting thick in her chest. Girls who stayed in bed got punished. Girls who were late got punished. I won’t get punished. Girls had to work hard. Girls couldn’t be lazy. I won’t get—

She remembered a metal hand around 64’s neck. She remembered how 64 had screamed. She remembered that it was all her fault.

Jane kicked off the blankets and got out of bed. ‘I need a task.’

‘Okay,’ Owl said, bringing the lights back up. ‘We’ll find something good to do.’

Jane tried to swallow, but her mouth was dry. She’d never been so thirsty, or so hungry. Her lips stuck to each other like old glue. ‘Is there water?’

Owl’s face looked wrong, like somebody who got caught doing something bad. ‘Not in the tanks, but there may be supplies still. How long have you gone without drinking?’

‘I don’t know.’ Water was something the Mothers gave them, like meals and medicine. Water just . . . happened.

‘Oh, stars. Stars, I didn’t think of it, I’m so stupid. I’m sorry. There should be ration bars and emergency water pouches in the pantry. They should still be good.’ The screen beside Jane’s bed switched off; another by the door switched on. ‘Follow me.’ Jane did so, though she felt strange about going somewhere in only her underwear. ‘I understand, you know,’ Owl said, as her face bounced down the short hallway. ‘I hate not having a job.’

‘What did you do before I got here?’

‘Not much,’ Owl said. ‘Not much at all.’ Her face jumped to a screen beside a narrow sliding door. ‘This is the pantry. I don’t have a camera in there, so you’re on your own. Look for the latched crate marked “rations”. Oh, wait, sorry – it’s probably in Klip. “Greshen”. Gee ar ee ess aitch ee en.’

Jane blinked. Owl wasn’t using words any more. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘That’s how it’s spelled. Gee ar ee—’ Owl stopped. ‘Jane, can you read?’

Jane didn’t know what that meant. Was Owl okay? She wasn’t making much sense.

‘Right,’ Owl said. ‘That’s a task for me, then. It’s okay, don’t worry about it. Here.’ Owl’s face disappeared. A row of white squiggles appeared on the screen. Her voice continued speaking. ‘Do you see what I’m showing you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay. Find the box with these exact same markings on it.’

Jane went through the door. The little room on the other side was filled with crates, most of them empty, some toppled over. It was a mess. All the crates had squiggles on them. They reminded her a bit of the angled lines that were sometimes on scrap. She’d always liked those angles. They made flat metal more interesting to look at.

The crate Owl had been talking about was in the back, buried under other stuff. Jane knocked the junk aside and opened the crate. Inside were soft packets – small rectangular ones and fat squishy ones. The squishy ones probably had liquid inside. The rectangles were harder, but kind of movable. She could feel the one in her hand give when she pushed her thumb against it.

‘Is this right?’ Jane asked, stepping back out into the hall with one of each packet.

‘Yes,’ Owl said. ‘Can you hold both of those up to the camera nearest to you? Up in the corner? I need to see the markings on them.’

‘What’s a camera?’

‘The little machine with the glass circle on the front.’

Jane found the machine and held the packets up. The machi— the camera made a whirring sound.

‘Oh, good,’ Owl said. ‘Good, they haven’t expired. Those are safe for a while yet. I don’t know if they taste good, but they’ll keep you fed. For now, at least.’

Jane turned the rectangle over in her hand. ‘How do I make a meal out of this?’ She looked over at the squishy packet. ‘Do I mix them together?’

‘No, just open up the bar and take a bite.’

Jane tore the packet open. Inside was a yellowish lump, kind of like putty. She poked it. ‘I should . . . bite it?’

‘Yes.’ Owl’s face frowned. ‘What kind of food did you have at the factory?’

‘We get meals twice a day.’

‘Okay. What kind of food?’

For a software that knew lots of stuff, there sure was a lot Owl didn’t get. ‘Meals. You know, in a cup.’

‘Oh boy. Have you ever had solid food? Something you have to chew?’

‘Like medicine?’

‘Probably like medicine, yes. You’ve never had food like that?’

Jane shook her head.

‘I – right. I am the worst teacher for this. You really need to be learning from a person. But all right, I’ve watched enough people eat. I can do this. We’ll . . . we’ll go slow.’

‘Is it complicated?’

Owl laughed; Jane didn’t know why. ‘It’s not complicated, but your body is going to have to get used to it. I think your stomach might hurt a bit at first. I’m not entirely sure.’

Jane looked at the packet, not feeling so good about it any more. She did not like stomach aches. ‘I’ll just have this, then,’ she said, waving the squishy pouch.

‘You can’t survive on water alone, Jane. Go ahead, give it a try. Just a tiny bite.’

Jane brought the putty food to her face. Real slow, she touched her tongue to the edge. Her eyes got real big, and she almost dropped the food. It tasted . . . it tasted like nothing she’d ever had. Not like meals. Not like medicine. Not like blood or soap or algae. Whatever it was, it was good. Weird. New. Scary. Good.

She put a corner of the food into her mouth and bit down, breaking off a piece behind her teeth. Yeah, this food was good. Her stomach growled loud. She wanted that food real real bad. She was hungrier than any girl had ever been, probably.

But she had to chew the food, Owl said. She rolled the hard, good-tasting lump around on her tongue. It was breaking apart, kind of, but she didn’t think she could swallow it like it was.

‘That’s it,’ Owl said. ‘Chew it up really well.’

Jane chewed. She chewed and chewed and chewed until the food turned to mush. She swallowed. She coughed, but it went down. ‘It feels real weird,’ she said. She put her hand on her stomach. It growled even louder.

Owl smiled. ‘You’re doing great. Have some water. I believe that helps wash it down.’

Jane tore open the corner of the squishy packet and took a sip. Even the water tasted different, almost like plex or something. She didn’t care. She’d never needed anything as bad as that water. She sucked down the whole thing at once, and breathed real hard after. Her lips felt better. ‘Can I have another one?’

Owl looked weird. Almost scared, but not quite. Like she was thinking about something that might be bad. ‘Yes, but let’s be smart about it. How many of those packets were in there?’

‘Lots.’

‘Ten? More than ten?’

‘More than ten. Lots of tens.’

Owl nodded. ‘I think you should have as many as you need right now. But the rest you’ll have to be more careful about. There’s no way for us to get more.’

Jane went back into the pantry and got three more water packets. She drank half of one all at once, took another bite of the bar, and washed it down with more water. She got through half of the bar before she had a new problem. She was still hungry, but her jaw was getting tired from so much chewing, and her stomach wasn’t sure about what she’d put in it.

Owl noticed. ‘You don’t have to eat it all right now.’

‘But I’m hungry.’

‘I know, honey. But this is going to take practice. Give your stomach a little rest, then have more later if you’re feeling okay.’

Jane thought that was a good idea. Her stomach was making weird sounds, and it kind of hurt. She folded the wrapper around the food she hadn’t eaten. ‘Can I finish the water?’ she asked, holding up the third packet.

‘Yes. You don’t have to ask me for permission, Jane. I can’t give it to you anyway. I don’t control you.’

That was an interesting thing to think about. Jane looked at the packet in her hand. ‘So . . . I can have this water.’

‘Yes,’ Owl said, her smile real big now. ‘You can.’

Jane looked around as she drank. It was easier to get a good look at the ship now than it had been when she got there. Nothing was chasing her, and that made thinking better. ‘What’s this room for?’ Jane asked.

‘It’s for relaxing and being together,’ Owl said. ‘The people who were here before you called it the living room.’

Jane thought that was a weird name, since you could live anywhere in the ship. ‘What’s that?’ she asked, pointing to the space next to the pantry. There was a thing built into the wall that she didn’t know, with cupboards around it, and a sort of workbench that stuck out.

‘That’s the kitchen,’ Owl said.

‘Kitchen,’ Jane said, feeling the word in her mouth. ‘What’s it for?’

‘It’s for preparing food. Making meals.’

Jane had never thought about what was in meals before. Meals were just meals. You got them twice a day. ‘What are meals made out of?’

‘Plants and animals.’

Jane felt tired. More things she didn’t know.

Owl’s face had a warm, good sort of look. ‘I’ll explain in more detail later. Don’t worry, I’m keeping a list of things you’ve asked about.’

That was good to know. Owl was good at answering questions, and she seemed to like explaining to Jane what all the stuff was. Beside the kitchen, there was a small storage room with a big machine in it called a stasis unit. Owl said ‘stasie’ was a better word for it. She said you could put stuff to make meals in there and it wouldn’t go bad. Jane didn’t know what going bad meant, so Owl put it on the list.

There were other storage spaces, too – mostly empty, but some had weird tools and other junk. There were clothes also, the biggest clothes Jane had ever seen. You could fit a girl twice Jane’s size in those clothes. More than twice. Owl looked kind of sad when Jane found the clothes, but she didn’t say why.

The biggest space was the cargo hold, which filled up the back of the shuttle. There was a lot of scrap and thrown-away things in there, all tossed around and fallen over. Owl said it would be a good task, at some point, to go through that stuff and see what was there.

There was a short stairway in the cargo hold that went into the underside of the ship. That’s where the engine was kept, and also the core that Owl was installed in. Out of everything, that place made the most sense to Jane. She could see circuit boards, fuel lines, power junctions. She touched the engine, finding all the little bits.

You like little bits, Jane 64 said in her head. You’re real good at them.

Jane went fast back up the stairs, feeling almost like she was being chased again.

‘Hey,’ Owl said. ‘You okay? Was it too dark down there? I know some of the globulbs are broken.’

Jane found a corner and sat in it, arms around her knees.

‘What is it, Jane?’

Jane didn’t know how to answer. Nothing was making sense. One minute, everything was new and interesting and there were words like kitchen, and the next, Jane 64 was in her head and the things outside were chasing her. And it was her fault.

She put her face in her hands. She didn’t know if she wanted to keep learning or just go to sleep. Just go to sleep and not wake up.

Owl watched her from the closest wall screen. She didn’t say anything for a while. Jane held herself hard and shook her head over and over, trying to get Jane 64 out of it.

‘Would you like a task?’ Owl said.

‘Yes,’ Jane said. She was crying again, and she didn’t know why.

‘Okay. Now, here’s the thing: as an AI, I can’t tell you what to do. I can only give suggestions. You have to pick what you want to do most. But I have some thoughts on what the most important tasks might be.’

Jane rubbed her nose with her wrist. ‘Okay,’ she said.

‘When you’re ready to get up, I’ll show you.’

The being-chased feeling was already starting to get a little quieter. Jane sniffed. ‘I’m ready.’

‘Attagirl,’ Owl said. Jane didn’t quite know what it meant, but something about the sound of it made her feel good. ‘Do you see those big drums in the corner? The big round things? Those are the water tanks, and they’re empty right now.’

Jane got up and walked over to the drums. They were much taller than her, but not so so big. ‘Where does the water come from?’

‘Well, normally, somebody using the ship would fill up the tanks at a supply station, but we don’t have anything like that around. Not to mention, we can’t move.’ Owl laughed, but it wasn’t a good laugh. It turned into a sigh. ‘You’ll need to find water outside. Jane, I know there’s so much you don’t understand yet, and I don’t want to scare you further. But if you want to stay in here, you will have to find water. The rations won’t last you very long. The good news is, once you fill up these drums, you’ll only need to top them up every so often. Most of it will get recycled. I don’t have enough power to run the water filtration system right now, but it’s still functional. That’d be another good task: getting the hull cleared so I can get more power.’

Jane thought about that. ‘What kind of power source makes you go?’

‘Look at you,’ Owl said with a big smile. ‘You’re such a smart girl.’ Jane felt so good hearing that. Owl kept talking: ‘There are two primary power sources in the ship. There’s the solar generator, which powers both basic mechanical functions, life support, and, well, me. And there’s the engine, which runs on algae. The engine powers propulsion – do you know what that is?’

‘No.’

‘Propulsion is a big word for making things move. The engine makes the shuttle go places. We don’t need that kind of power just yet. The solar generator is enough to keep me going, as well as to run the things we need to keep you healthy. The problem is, there’s junk outside covering most of the solar coating on the hull. I’ve got less than half the amount of power I ideally should have. If you can get the hull clean and find some water, that would be a really good start.’

Those tasks sounded okay, but there was a problem. ‘I can’t go outside,’ Jane said. ‘The . . . things are outside.’

‘Animals. Living things like you – things that can move and breathe – are called animals. And those particular kind of animals are called dogs. Horrible, genetweaked dogs, but dogs all the same.’

Dogs. Okay. ‘I can’t go outside if there are dogs.’

‘I know. We’ll have to get creative. For your very first task, I suggest the following: go through the stuff in here and see what you can find. I’ll help you understand what supplies we have on hand. Then, once we’ve figured out what we’ve got, maybe we can figure out how to make some equipment that will deal with the dogs.’

‘What’s equipment?’

‘Tools. Tech. Machines. Things you can use.’

Jane frowned. ‘I can’t make machines.’

‘Didn’t you build things at the factory?’

‘No,’ Jane said, shaking her head. ‘The older girls do that. The Janes clean and sort scrap. We tell if it’s good or if it’s junk.’

‘Tell me exactly what you did there. What kinds of scrap did you clean?’

‘All kinds.’

‘Tell me a few things you sorted.’

‘Um . . . fuel pumps. Light panels. Interface panels.’

Owl looked real interested. ‘Tell me about interface panels. The last one you worked with, was it good, or was it junk?’

‘It was good.’

‘How did you know?’

‘I opened it up and bent the pins into place and hooked it up to some power, and it turned on.’

‘That’s more than sorting scrap, Jane. That’s fixing. And if you can fix things, you can build new things out of them. Go through the scrap in here. Figure out what’s good. Once that’s done, I’ll help you figure out what to do with it. I may not have hands, but I have a whole database full of reference files. I’ve got manuals on how the ship works, and information on how to repair things. I bet between the two of us, we can make some pretty good stuff.’

Jane thought about that. She did always like it when she got scrap working again. The idea of making something different and useful out of it was real interesting. ‘What kind of stuff?’ she asked.

Owl smiled. ‘I have a few ideas.’

SIDRA

‘Sidra, we’ve been over this a dozen times.’ Pepper looked tired, but Sidra didn’t care. She was tired, too.

‘I can’t keep doing this,’ Sidra said from atop the desk in the corner of her bedroom. She pressed the kit’s head back as far as she could into the walls’ intersection, trying to make the edges of the room mesh with the kit’s blindspots. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough.

Pepper sighed and rubbed her face. ‘I know it’s hard. I know you’ve still got a lot of adjusting to do—’

‘You don’t know,’ Sidra snapped. ‘You have no idea—’

‘You can not be connected to the Linkings at all times. You can’t.’

‘Other sapients do! There’s a shop right by ours where they install wireless headjacks. People come in and out of there all the time.’

Pepper shook her head hard. ‘You’ve never seen what those people turn into. Full-time jackers are massively fucked up. They can’t focus. They can’t talk right. Some of them don’t come back out to the real world at all. I’ll take you to a jack den sometime, if it’ll get you off this kick. People rent bunks by the tenday, complete with a cable for their brain and a nutrient pump to keep them alive. A lot of them never leave. They just lie down and fade away. It’s disgusting.’ She closed her eyes and pressed her lips together, as if summoning words. ‘I know you wouldn’t run into the same problem, but you live in a modder community. You can’t be connected to the Linkings for the same reason you couldn’t keep the name Lovelace. If you run around knowing everything instantly without your social skills being shit, somebody is going to catch on. Somebody will realise that you’re not just crazy smart. You will slip, and they will catch it, and they will take you apart.’

Sidra’s pathways crackled with frustration. The kit tugged its hair in kind. ‘Pepper, my memory banks are filling up. I am not like you. I don’t have a brain that grows new folds and synapses whenever I learn something. You – you have an almost infinite capacity to learn things. I don’t.’

‘Sidra, I know—’

‘You’re not listening to me. I have a fixed limit on hard memory. I was designed to have constant Linking access at all times. I wasn’t meant to store everything locally. I’m going to have to start deleting things at some point. Any time I learn someone’s name, any time I’m taught a new skill, I’m going to have to pick and choose which of my memories to keep. I’m going to have to tear pieces of myself out. You say you understand, but you don’t. You have no idea what this is like. You have no idea how this feels.’ Her words were coming out loud, fast, barely processed. She could’ve stopped herself. She could’ve brought her voice back down, slowed her pace. She didn’t want to. She wanted to be loud. She wanted to yell. She knew it was unproductive, but right now, it felt good.

‘Okay, I don’t know exactly how it feels, but I get it.’ Pepper was getting loud now. Somehow, that felt good, too. ‘What you don’t seem to get is that you’re downloading things you have no need for. You wonder about an Aandrisk proverb or something, and an hour later, you’re filing away half the fucking Reskit library. You don’t need all that stuff.’

‘Do you need all your memories? Do you need to remember every song you’ve ever heard, every sim you’ve ever played?’

‘I don’t always remember. I have to look stuff up all the time.’

‘Yes, but then you remember. The memory’s still there. Do you know what that would be like, to download a song, delete the file, and then hear it again, thinking I’ve never heard it before?’

‘Sidra . . . stars. All I’m saying is that you need to be more picky. Log a one-line text reminder that you heard the song. Don’t download everything that musician’s ever made.’ Pepper frowned, chewing her thumbnail. ‘We could get you a hud.’

‘No,’ Sidra said. Reading was clunky and slow. That wasn’t what she wanted. That wasn’t what she needed.

‘Don’t say no before you’ve tried it. You could read the Linkings just like everyone—’

‘I am not like everyone else. I can’t be like everyone else.’

‘You need,’ Pepper said, in a tone that meant the conversation was over, ‘to try.’ She sighed again, glancing at the wall clock. ‘And we need to get to the shop.’

Sidra pressed into the corner, fuming. Why was she so angry? This wasn’t fair to Pepper, she knew that. Pepper was just trying to keep her safe, and she’d done so much for her. They’d ordered dinner from Fleet Fry the night before, and Pepper had got an assortment of appetisers and one of each kind of dipping sauce so that Sidra could trigger new images. That memory file made her feel guilty in the context of the current conversation, but . . . but the hell with it. She might have to delete that memory file altogether if she didn’t find a way to deal with this.

‘I don’t want to go to work today,’ Sidra said. She sounded like a child. She didn’t care.

‘Okay,’ Pepper said. ‘All right, fine. What are you going to do instead?’

‘I don’t know.’ The kit crossed its arms. ‘I don’t know. I could clean.’

‘Don’t clean. Go out. Or stay in, whatever. Just . . . do something that feels good.’

Sidra moved her gaze away from Pepper. The guilt associated with the previous night’s memory file was bleeding into everything else. This conversation was making her feel guilty, too. Why was she acting this way? Why couldn’t she just get used to the way things were? What was wrong with her? ‘I’m sorry,’ she muttered.

‘It’s cool. We’re going to figure this out.’ Pepper walked out of the room, rubbing the back of her head. ‘Seriously, though. Do something fun.’

Sidra stayed in the corner long after she heard Pepper walk out the front door. She wrestled with the ugly knot of emotions clouding her processes. She was angry with Pepper for not understanding. She was grateful for Pepper trying to help. She was angry with Pepper for not agreeing with her about Linking access. She was ashamed of how she’d behaved just then. She was justified in how she’d behaved just then. She wasn’t. She was.

Do something fun, Pepper had said. Sidra thought about going down to her spot in the living room and plugging into the Linkings all day. Considering the topic at hand, it was the obvious thing to do. But in that moment, she didn’t want the Linkings for a day; she wanted a solution. She wanted the knot in her pathways to melt away. She wanted to fix this, to fit in, to stop clinging to corners and reaching for Linkings. She needed to change, and didn’t know how.

Even though the corner felt good, even though her chair was right downstairs, even though going out was the last thing in the world she wanted to do, she wasn’t going to find answers in a public feed. She climbed down from the desk, put on her shoes and jacket, and headed for the Undersea.

JANE, AGE 10

Jane woke up excited and scared all at once. She and Owl had been real busy. Today was the day to see if all that busy worked.

She got out of bed and stared at her clothes, lying in a heap on the floor. They were sleep clothes, not work clothes, but they were all she had. They were gross. That was a good word Owl had taught her. Gross. Gross was how it felt to have clothes that were all smudged with dirt and old blood, and to not have had a shower for four days. She didn’t want to put on the gross sleep clothes. The thought of it made her itch. She put them on anyway.

‘Good morning,’ Owl said. ‘You ready for today?’

Jane’s stomach flipped over, but that hot, buzzy feeling in her chest was louder. ‘Yeah,’ Jane said.

‘I know you can do it,’ Owl said. She smiled, but her face was a little scared. Jane tried not to think about that too much. She didn’t want to think about what it meant if Owl was scared, too.

Jane got up, went to the bathroom, went to the kitchen. She emptied a pouch of water into a cup she’d found two days before. She crumbled a ration bar into it, and drank it down once the bits got soft. She’d figured out that getting the food wet was better practice for her stomach. The bathroom was gross, too. They needed running water.

The things she’d built with Owl’s help sat in a row on the living room floor. Jane felt good looking at them. Usually, seeing a pile of sorted scrap just made her feel a quiet kind of good, because sorted scrap meant the day was over. But this was scrap she’d fixed. Scrap she’d made into tools. It wasn’t just bins of junk brought in and taken away without knowing why. The scrap in front of her had jobs, and that made her feel real, real good.

First, there was the scrib, which had been easy to fix. Just a few pins bent back into place. Owl said she didn’t have enough power to talk to Jane through the scrib, but she could activate a signal that would tell Jane which direction to walk in if she needed to get back to the shuttle. Jane was glad of that. She’d had enough of running around lost.

Next, the water wagon. It wasn’t much – just a cargo dolly with two big empty food crates bolted to it. The water tanks on the shuttle would need a bunch of crates’ worth of water to get full, but the wheels would make the task easier than lugging around bottles or something. She just had to find water first.

The last thing she’d built was scary, and she didn’t want to ever use it. It was a tool for making dogs go away. It started with a long plex rod with a length of stripped cable running through it. The cable plugged into a small generator (which had been part of an exosuit, whatever that was). The generator had two fabric straps – also cut out of the exosuit – stapled to it, so Jane could wear it on her back. At one end of the rod, Jane had wrapped a whole bunch of fabric, to make it comfy (another good new word), and another smaller strip that she could tie around her wrist, so the rod wouldn’t fall down if she needed to do stuff with her hands. The other end of the rod held a bunch of metal forks – a tool for eating solid meals, Owl said – spread out like fingers, each connected to the cable with a smaller wire. Jane could switch the generator power on and off with a manual switch she’d inserted right above where her thumb rested on the grip. When the power was on, the forks got all full of electricity. Owl had told her to spit on the forks the night before, to test it out. The spit made the forks pop and hiss real loud. It’d hurt the dogs a lot, Owl said. She called this tool a weapon. Jane thought that was a good-sounding word. She didn’t want to get close to the dogs again, but she knew they’d try to get close to her, so having a weapon was a good thing.

She’d found some other good things, too – an empty cloth bag called a satchel, some work gloves that were way too big for her hands but might be okay, and a real good cutting tool called a pocket knife. She put the last two things into the satchel, along with three empty canteens to bring back any water she found (Owl wanted to do tests before Jane did the hard work of filling up the water wagon). She also packed two ration bars, four pouches of water, and the scrib. She put the satchel over her shoulder and the weapon generator onto her back, slipping her hand into the grip.

‘You look like a girl who knows what she’s doing,’ Owl said. ‘You look very brave.’

Jane swallowed. Owl had explained brave the day before. She did not feel brave. ‘Do you think I’ll have to go far?’

‘I don’t know, sweetie. Hopefully not. If you get too tired, or if you don’t feel good, you can come back home, even if you haven’t found water.’

‘What’s home?’

‘Home is here. Home’s where I am, and where you can rest.’ Owl paused. Her face was some kind of sad, and it made Jane feel all weird in her chest – kind of tight, and wishing she had a blanket to curl up in. ‘Please be safe out there.’

Owl opened the inner door that led to the airlock, then opened the outer hatch. Jane tightened her grip around the weapon, and stepped outside.

She was glad Owl had taught her some new words, because everything outside the shuttle needed them. The sky was big, and the sun was bright, and the air was hot. She wasn’t sure she understood wind, but she didn’t think there was any. She could already feel herself starting to sweat. It was good that there was water in her satchel.

The metal siding on the outside of the shuttle had scratch marks on it. She spread out her fingers, running them along the scratches. Dogs. She gripped her weapon tight.

She put her palm flat above her eyes to block out the sun, and looked around. So much scrap. Scrap everywhere. Piles and piles and piles, on and on. How could anyone use this much stuff? And why would they get rid of it, if most of it just needed some fixing to be good?

She thought of Jane 64, bent over her workstation. She thought of how 64 was real good at untangling cables, better than most of the girls. Something sharp jumped into Jane’s stomach. She wanted to go back inside. She wanted to go home. She wanted to go back to bed and turn out all the lights. She had done that on the second day in the shuttle. Being in bed had not helped and was not relaxing, but everything else was too hard and Jane 64 wouldn’t leave her head, so Jane had just stayed in bed and cried until she ran to the bathroom and threw up in the sink, and then she slept because it was the only thing she could do. Owl had been good to her. She stayed on the screen by the bed all day, and she taught Jane about something called music, which was a weird bunch of sounds that had no point but made things feel a little better.

Still, even with Owl and the music, that second day had been a real bad day. But compared with going out to where dogs could be, doing all those bad feelings all over again sounded easier than leaving the shuttle. She almost went back inside. But she was sweating and gross, and her clothes itched. She wanted a shower. And if she wanted a shower, she needed water.

Way far off, out where the piles looked small, Jane could see something move. A bunch of somethings. She didn’t have a word for them, but she did have a new word for what they were doing – flying. They were flying down behind one of the piles. They were animals, she knew. She didn’t know how she knew that, but something in her was sure they couldn’t be anything else. Owl had said if she saw animals – even dogs – there had to be water somewhere close by.

Weapon in one hand, satchel strap in the other, Jane started the long walk toward them.

SIDRA

She never should have left the Wayfarer.

Sidra thought this as she pushed through the topside markets, fighting her directive to take note of every face, every sound, every colour. Three tendays at Port Coriol, and being outside of walls was still absolute chaos. Perhaps that feeling would never go away. Perhaps this was how it would always be.

She dodged a merchant pushing a sample platter of candies her way. She didn’t make eye contact, didn’t reply. It was rude, and she felt guilty, which made her all the angrier. Guilt was what had made her choose to be in this stupid body in the first place.

Why had she left? At the time, it had seemed like the best course, the cleanest option. She had come into existence where another mind should have been. She wasn’t what the Wayfarer crew was expecting, or hoping for. Her presence upset them, and that meant she had to go. That was why she’d left – not because she’d wanted to, not because she’d truly understood what it would mean, but because the crew was upset, and she was the reason for it. She’d left for the sake of people she’d never met. She’d left for the sake of a stranger crying in a cargo bay. She’d left because it was in her design to be accommodating, to put others first, to make everyone else comfortable, no matter what.

But what of her comfort? What about that? Would the eight people who no longer had to hear her voice every day find this to be a fair trade, if they knew how she felt out here? Would they care if they knew this existence wasn’t right? Would they not have acclimatised to her, just as they had presumably acclimatised to the absence of her predecessor?

She fought to keep the kit’s eyes on the ground, struggled to keep the kit’s breath steady. She could feel panic creeping as the crowd pressed in and the buildings sprawled forever outward. She remembered how the ship had felt – a camera in every hallway, a vox in every room, the lull of open space embracing it all. She remembered the vacuum, and she ached for it.

‘Hey!’ an angry voice said. Sidra looked down, and saw that she’d blundered into the path of a Harmagian’s cart, just a step away from knocking him and his trailer of packages over. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he demanded, tendrils flexing irritably.

Oh no, don’t, she thought, but it was a direct question, and she had no choice but to respond. ‘The market is exhausting, I hate this body, I acted like an ass toward the friend who’s taking care of me, and I regret the decision that brought me here.’

The Harmagian’s tendrils went slack with bewilderment. ‘I . . .’ His eyestalks twitched. ‘Well, ah . . . watch where you’re going while you sort that out.’ He manoeuvred the cart around her, continuing on his way.

The kit shut its eyes tight. Stupid, stupid honesty protocol. That part of herself, at least, she was anxious to delete. Pepper was trying, she knew. She’d seen her frowning at her scrib late at night, muttering as she dragged herself through the basics of Lattice. Code was not Pepper’s strong suit, but she was firmly against seeking outside help, and Sidra couldn’t argue that point. But in the meantime, how was she supposed to function in a place like this? She couldn’t, was the answer. She had no business being out among sapients, masquerading as one of them. She wasn’t one of them, and she couldn’t even keep up that pretence while walking through a crowd. How long until someone asked her a question that would get Pepper and Blue in trouble? No, no, dammit – a question that would get her in trouble. Would she ever start thinking of herself first? Could she even?

She looked around the street, full of strangers and unknown questions. She couldn’t be out here. She wasn’t meant for out here.

She ran for the nearest quick-travel kiosk. A grotesque approximation of a Harmagian head was mounted on the desk, just like all the other kiosks. Its polymer tendrils aped polite gestures as the AI within spoke. ‘Destination, please.’

Sidra knew it was a limited, non-sentient model. She’d encountered plenty of others like it, housed in transit stations and shopfronts. More intelligent than a petbot, yes, but it wasn’t any closer to her than, say, a fish to a Human. She wondered about it, all the same. She wondered if it was content with its existence. She wondered if it suffered, if it ever tried to understand itself and ran up against a cognitive wall. ‘One to the art district, please,’ she said, waving her wristpatch over the scanner. There was a chirp of acknowledgement.

‘Very good,’ the kiosk AI said. ‘Your quick-travel pod will be dispatched shortly. Should you need additional transport or directions, look for the quick-travel symbol, as displayed above this kiosk.’

Sadness oozed its way through Sidra’s pathways as the stunted AI continued its speech. Was she so different? She was built to serve, just as this one was, and while she might feel awfully special for being able to ask questions and have arguments, she was no more capable of skipping protocols than the little mind before her. She thought of the confused way the Harmagian in the crowd had held his tendrils after she’d blurted out the answer to his question – a question that hadn’t been meant as a question at all. The kit’s eyes watered as she listened to the kiosk AI ramble on about location indicators and safety procedures. It couldn’t do anything except what it was designed for. That was all it was. That was all it would ever be.

‘Thank you for using the Port Coriol quick-travel system,’ it said. One of the false tendrils shuddered with mechanical weariness. ‘Have a safe and pleasant ride.’

Sidra laid one of the kit’s palms atop the synthetic head. She kept it there for a second, two, three. A quick-travel pod arrived, its hatch opening with a soft whir. She leaned toward the AI’s head before leaving. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘This isn’t fair.’

JANE, AGE 10

Owl had been right. There was water where the flying animals were – a big hole of water, and Jane didn’t see any dogs. That was real good.

The flying animals were interesting. They were much smaller than her, about as long as her arm, and they had two front arms that had some kind of skin sheet hanging from them. They flapped that back and forth to get into the air. The rest of their skin was weird. It was orange, and wasn’t smooth like hers, or covered in fluff – fur, she reminded herself, fur. The flying animals’ skin looked hard and shiny, made up of little locking bits.

Interesting as they were, she was kind of scared of them. Were they angry animals? Would they bite? Could they hurt her? She took a step forward. A few of the animals looked up. Most of them kept drinking. The ones who looked up didn’t seem angry. They just watched her a bit, then kept doing their own stuff. Jane breathed all her air out. That was good.

‘Ask Owl for the flying animals’ name,’ she said. She couldn’t make lists like Owl did, but saying things out loud helped her not forget.

She walked to the water. It was not good water. It wasn’t clear, and it was thick with dust. ‘Not dust,’ she said. ‘Dirt.’ She scrunched her nose. A chemical slick lay on top of the water, making oily lines where it touched the ground. She didn’t know what chemical. Probably something leaking from the scrap nearby. The water smelled bad, too, which was a wrong thing even if the smell had been good. Water wasn’t supposed to smell at all. Jane stopped and thought about it. Owl had said any water she found out here wasn’t good to drink before it went in the filtration system, but it was so so interesting, this bad water. Also, the animals were drinking it and they were fine. She touched her finger in the water and put a big drop on her tongue. She spat it right back out with a loud sound. Metal and stink and bad things she had no words for. She spat and spat, but the taste lay down in her mouth.

‘How are you drinking this?’ she said to the animals. ‘It’s so bad!’ The animals didn’t say anything. Owl had said they couldn’t talk like girls did, but it didn’t hurt to try. Jane thought it would be good if they could talk. She wanted to talk to someone who wasn’t in a wall.

Jane got a canteen from her satchel, and filled it at the side of the water. The flying animals watched her, but left her alone. There was enough water for everybody, Jane guessed. She made a face as she watched the stinky shiny water flow into the canteen. Gross. She did not want to drink that stuff at all. But Owl said the machines on the ship could clean up real real bad water, the worst water. They could clean pee, even. Jane was real interested to know how that worked.

She sat down by the water hole, watching the animals. Everything was still big and strange and wrong, but this . . . this was kind of good. It was good to be out of the ship, and the air was warm. The sun did that, Owl had explained. The sun was the big light in the sky. Owl had told Jane it was very very important to not look right at it. Jane wanted to real bad, but she listened. She didn’t know what things could get her in trouble, and she didn’t want to make Owl angry. Owl had not been angry, not even once, but she was kind of like a Mother in the way she was built. Jane thought maybe the Mothers had been good like Owl once, but then the girls did so much bad behaviour that the Mothers got extra angry and stuck that way. Jane decided she would work real hard to be good and not make Owl angry. She didn’t want to make Owl go wrong.

One of the flying animals walked close to her. Real close. Its big black eyes were so so dark against its weird orange skin. Jane didn’t move. She put her hand on her weapon and held her breath. The animal moved its head like it was thinking. It sniffed at her shoe. Then it walked away, head bouncing as it went. Jane let all her air out. Okay. Okay, that was good. Good and interesting. Maybe the flying animal had been interested in her, too. She liked that idea.

The animal walked over to a group of more animals, who were . . . were they eating? They looked like they were eating. But what were they eating? It wasn’t a meal, of course, but it wasn’t like a ration bar, either. It was something coming up out of the ground – purple, smooth, kinda soft-looking, all wavy and interesting shaped. It was stuck to the ground, and to some of the scrap nearby. It wasn’t an animal, but it made her think of animals in a way that she didn’t understand. Not an animal, but not scrap or a machine, either. Something else. And the animals were eating it.

Could she eat it, too?

Owl had been real clear about not eating stuff out there, and Jane knew better than to just put her hands on a component she didn’t recognise. She let go of the weapon, put on the work gloves (even though they were way too big), and got the pocket knife. She walked over to the group of animals. They moved away real fast. Jane stopped. Had she scared them?

‘I’m not bad,’ she said to them. ‘I just want to see what you’re eating.’

She crouched down and poked the purple stuff with the point of her knife. Nothing happened. She blew on it. Nothing happened. She looked at the little holes where the animals had been biting it. She held her knife best as she could with the big gloves, and cut off a piece. The stuff didn’t bleed. She looked at it real close. It was white inside, and solid. No bones. She really wanted to taste it, but after the water, she knew it was smart to listen to what Owl said. Owl knew so much.

She put the piece of purple stuff into her satchel. It was a good time to go back, she thought. The sun was making the air real hot, and the skin on her arms kind of hurt. It was more red than usual.

Jane 64’s face had been red, too, red and puffy and wrong and scared and—

She heard a rattling sound. The knife in her hand was shaking. She was shaking. She wanted to go back to Owl. She wanted to go back right now. Owl had said she could come home if she felt bad, and she did feel bad, so she would.

The animals started making a lot of noise. Most of them were running or flying away. Jane turned around. Two dogs stood there, watching the one thing that hadn’t run away. Watching her.

Her stomach hurt and her eyes burned. She wanted to be back with Owl. She wanted to be back in her bed – her bed, with 64. She wanted a meal cup and a shower and not dogs. But there were dogs anyway, and they were making quiet angry sounds.

Her body wanted to run, like it had when the Mother stared at her through the wall, but there was no good place to go. The water hole had scrap all around it. The only way out was past the dogs. She didn’t think she could run by them without them being able to bite her.

‘Help,’ she said, real quiet. ‘Owl, help.’

But Owl was too far.

She switched the knife into her other hand and grabbed the weapon rod. She took a step back, shaking bad. ‘Stop,’ she said, trying not to cry. ‘Go away.’

One of the dogs came closer, getting loud, teeth all wet.

‘Go away!’ she yelled, kicking a piece of scrap toward it. ‘Go away!’

The dog made a louder sound. It ran at her.

She tripped backward, but she remembered to point the weapon at the dog, and pushed the button as it jumped and opened its mouth of teeth.

There were so many sounds. The generator hummed. The electricity cracked off the forks. The dog screamed, which was the most bad part of all. It fell down screaming, and shook and twitched. It was the scariest thing she’d ever seen, even worse than the Mothers. She held the button down anyway. There was a bad smell, a burning smell. The dog stopped twitching.

The other dog made an angry yell, and it jumped at her, too. She hit the button again. Hum. Crack. Scream.

Both dogs lay on the ground, fur smoking. Jane ran and ran and ran, satchel full of heavy canteens crashing into her leg. The dogs didn’t follow her.

It wasn’t until she stopped running that she understood they were dead.

She hadn’t meant to do that. She had made something to hurt dogs, but it worked too good, she guessed, because she had hurt them dead. That made her feel something in a very big way, something good and bad all at once.

She threw up. It was a bad thing to do, but she threw up until there was nothing left but gross sharp spit. She realised the front of her pants was wet, and her face burned as she understood why. She was ten.

Jane sat down in the dirt and drank a water pouch. She was still shaking. The good-bad feeling was still there, but the more she thought about things, the bigger the good part got. Things were okay. She had bad water that Owl would clean up, and she knew where to get more. She had something she could eat, maybe. She’d stopped the dogs. She’d stopped the dogs!

You look very brave, Owl had said. Jane thought of that and felt real good. She felt real good because Owl had been right.

‘I’m brave,’ Jane said, so she would remember. ‘I can stop dogs. I’m brave.’

On the way back, Jane reminded herself of the things she needed to ask Owl. She wanted to know words. Words for the flying animals, for the purple stuff that wasn’t an animal and also maybe food, and for the feeling you got when you felt bad for making a thing dead but also good because you were still alive.

SIDRA

The art district had every bit as much noise and detail as the others, but it was less crowded, at least. In the other districts, everything was always being pushed and sought in an important rush, as if your credits might not be good enough if you didn’t buy something now. But here, where the items for sale were anything but practical, both merchants and patrons seemed to have all the time in the world. Sidra could see little barrier between culture or medium. Everything was crammed in together – wooden Laru sculptures, Harmagian rock carvings, fusion artists mixing traditions with abandon, body artists offering to alter flesh and scale and shell. The shops reflected the same mix. On one end of the spectrum, there were pristine galleries with clean walls and echoing ceilings; on the other, you had people selling prints and figures from behind portable tables, or sometimes straight off the ground.

Blue’s shop fell somewhere between the two extremes, though nearer the more humble end. His stall – ‘Northwest Window’ – was in a larger communal building, one small cell in a busy hive. Sidra stood in the corridor for three minutes before walking through his door (painted, appropriately, in a thick coat of rich cyan). She’d behaved badly toward Pepper, she knew, and Blue was on Pepper’s side, first and foremost. Maybe he already knew about the fight. Maybe Pepper had sent him a message, telling him she was out of patience for Sidra’s nonsense. Maybe Blue felt the same way.

When Sidra walked in, her worries vanished. Blue looked up from his easel, and he smiled at her as warmly as he always did. ‘Sidra! What are, um, what are you doing up in the sun?’

‘I’m not at work today.’

‘So I see.’ He wiped his brush off with a rag, set it down, and got to his feet. He wore an apron, but the clothes beneath it were still speckled with paint. ‘Taking, ah, taking a day off?’

‘Yes.’ She looked around. She’d been to the shop before, but it was a little different every time. She noted the changes: the paintings of the mysterious forest and the bustling carnival were gone – sold, presumably – and a new canvas depicting a group of space-walkers hung on the wall. There were five brushes and a scraper in the sink – fewer than the twelve brushes she’d seen the last time – and the dead globulb in the south corner of the room had been fixed. There was one thing that always remained the same, though, and it was the chief difference between this place and those he shared with Pepper: Blue kept his own environment immaculately tidy. Everything had a shelf, a drawer, an angle. Pepper had spots for things, too, in her way, but Blue always kept his shop looking like he was expecting company at any second. Even the dirty brushes in the sink were neatly set in their cup of water.

Sidra was aware of Blue studying her as she examined the space. ‘Everything okay?’ he asked. ‘You look upset.’

‘No,’ Sidra said. ‘I don’t. The kit looks upset.’

Blue glanced over the kit’s shoulder, making sure the door was closed. ‘That’s, ah, that’s an important distinction to you.’

‘It is. I feel upset, yes. But I don’t know what you see. Whatever the kit’s doing, it’s not me.’

Blue tapped a finger against his thigh. ‘You got somewhere to be?’ She shook the kit’s head. ‘G-good.’ He gestured toward a chair facing the back of the easel. ‘Have a seat.’

Blue moved the in-progress canvas aside as she settled the kit down. He bustled around, gathering paints and clean brushes. He poured a cup of mek from a small brewer and fetched a fresh canvas.

‘What are you doing?’ Sidra asked.

‘Something that might help,’ Blue said. He held out his palm. ‘Give me your hand, please.’ Sidra placed the kit’s hand in his. He ran his thumb over the back of it, and rummaged through a box of paint tubes with his other hand, pulling various colours out. ‘I think . . . hmm. I think you’re somewhere between Royal Bronze and Classic Sepia.’

‘Are you going to paint me?’

Blue grinned. ‘Maybe a d-dab of Autumn Sunrise, too.’

Sidra’s pathways lit up with interest. The idea of someone studying her details for an extended period was a fascinating reversal. ‘What do I do?’

‘Just sit there and relax. If you need to, uh, if you need to get up, or if you get bored, let me know.’ He squeezed paint onto palette, beginning to conjure the kit’s skin tone.

‘What should I do with the kit’s face? Should it smile?’

Blue shook his head as he stirred. ‘Don’t ch-change anything. Don’t be anything but, ah, but what you were when you walked through my door. Just be yourself.’ He nodded toward the canvas. ‘I’m curious to know what you think of how you look.’

‘I’ve seen the kit in mirrors.’

‘Let me, uh, let me rephrase. I want to know how you feel when you see – when you see yourself the way somebody else sees you.’ Blue glanced from paint to the kit, then back again. With a satisfied nod, he picked up a brush and began to work. ‘Taste anything fun today?’

‘No. I haven’t eaten anything.’

‘That’s not like you.’

‘I was . . . distracted.’

‘If you want, we can go to lunch after this. There’s a good noodle bar not far from here.’ He dragged brush down canvas in a long, smooth stroke. Sidra did her best to stay still, even though she badly wanted to watch. ‘Come up with, um, with any new questions on the way here?’

Sidra gave a short chuckle. There were always new questions. She pulled up her list. ‘Why don’t the Laru overheat? Other species seem to find it warm here, and the Laru are covered with fur.’

‘Hmm. I never thought about that. You’ll need to look that one up.’

‘How dangerous is it if you swallow dentbots? I imagine they’d go after a lot of good symbiotic bacteria in your stomach.’

‘They do, but it’s not, um, it’s not overly dangerous. You j-just get a stomach ache. Happened to me a few times when I first started using them.’ His eyes flicked cautiously over to hers. ‘So . . . why no work today?’

Sidra looked around the shop. ‘I had a disagreement with Pepper.’

‘What about?’

Sidra sighed. ‘She won’t let me install a wireless Linking receiver.’

Blue raised an eyebrow. ‘You two have been on that merry-go-round before.’

‘I know. But she’s not listening to me. I don’t want to delete memory files.’

‘She is listening,’ Blue said with measured diplomacy. ‘She just doesn’t agree with you.’

The kit frowned. ‘And you don’t either.’

‘I didn’t say that. I don’t always take her side, you know. I’m listening, too. I’m listening to both of you.’ He reached for another tube of paint. ‘Tell me something you’re afraid of deleting.’

‘I’ve downloaded a lot of things.’

‘I know. Pick a favourite.’

‘I . . . don’t know if I have one.’

‘Something you find really interesting, then. Just something at random.’

Sidra worked her way down the length of her memory banks, not sure where to start. ‘Well . . . there’s this. “The Never-Born Queen and Those Who Followed”.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A Quelin folktale. More like an epic, I suppose. It’s a bit dark in places, but there’s a wonderful poetry to it, too.’ The kit fidgeted as she remembered Pepper’s words that morning: you’re filing away half the fucking Reskit library. ‘I have the three most popular translations on hand.’

Blue leaned back, never taking his eyes off the canvas. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard any Quelin stories. Feel like sharing?’

The kit blinked. ‘Yes, but it’s quite long.’

‘How long is it?’

She selected one of the three files – the Tosh’bom translation – and ran a quick analysis. ‘It’d take me approximately two hours to recite it aloud.’

Blue shrugged and smiled. ‘Sounds like a great thing to do while painting.’

Sidra adjusted her processes, and began to convert text to speech. ‘Call out, brave warriors, and remember our song. Remember the heroes lost and the heroes born. Remember the shells shattered among sea and rock and cave . . .’

She was aware, as the saga of war and homeland poured forth from the kit’s mouth, that Blue was distracting her. She’d seen him do the same sort of thing to Pepper in the moments they thought Sidra didn’t notice, when Pepper became quietly, whisperingly afraid of nothing. In those moments, Blue would ask Pepper about her day. He’d ask her about what she was working on. He’d ask her about the latest sim she’d been playing. In a small way, Sidra felt a bit manipulated, like he was purposefully driving away the bad mood she’d felt justified in nursing – but having something else to focus on was better, and being painted was a surprisingly good feeling, too. It was nice to be watched, to have somebody pouring all his attention into her. Was that selfish? And if so, was that a bad thing?

Blue hardly spoke at all as she told the story, other than a short laugh or ‘mmm’ here and there. His eyes were intensely focused on his work, and by extension, on her. It was a look she’d never seen in him. At home, he was so mellow, so gentle. Here, there was a spark, a curious sort of strength. He reminded her a bit of Pepper, when she fell into a groove with a project. Sidra hadn’t felt that way about anything before. She was focused now, yes, but she knew that was different. Was she capable of that kind of flow? If she could disable her ability to track time, could she lose herself the way they did?

She continued to recite, and after one hour and fifty-six minutes, the tale of the Never-Born Queen reached its final lines: ‘. . . to sleep, to sleep, that our heroes may wake once more.’

Blue nodded thoughtfully. ‘That,’ he said, ‘was fascinating. Kinda grim, but I w – I wouldn’t expect much, um, much less from the Quelin.’

‘They have some sweet children’s stories, too,’ Sidra said. ‘Well . . . rather speciest. But sweet, in the right cultural context.’

Blue laughed. ‘Again, as expected.’ He put down his brush with conviction. ‘It’s been a long time since I did, uh, since I did a portrait, and this is just a quick one. But . . . well, tell me what you think.’

He turned the canvas toward her. The paint still glistened. A Human woman stared back, serious and quiet, with a face that would easily disappear in an Exodan crowd. Sidra studied the details. Copper skin that didn’t see much sun. Slender cheeks fed on bugs and stasie food. Eyes so brown the irises were nearly lost in them. A cap of black curls, cut short and hugging tight. She’d looked at that face many times in the mirror in her room, but this was something different. This was the kit as Blue saw it.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, and meant it.

‘The painting, or the face?’

‘The painting. You’re very skilled.’

Blue gave a happy nod. ‘What about the face? What do you see in it?’

She searched for an answer, but found nothing. ‘I don’t know.’ She paused for two seconds. ‘Do you know who decided what the kit would look like?’ she asked at last. ‘Did it come this way, or did Jenks choose it, or . . .?’

‘Lovey chose it,’ Blue said. ‘This was all her, or so P-Pepper said.’

Sidra looked at the portrait, at the face someone else had chosen for her. Why? Why had her former installation wanted this face? Why this hair, those colours, those eyes? What about this form had made Lovey think yes, this is me?

‘Hey,’ Blue said, taking the kit’s hand. ‘What’s up?’

Sidra couldn’t look at him. ‘I’m a mistake,’ she whispered.

‘Whoa, hang on—’

‘I am,’ she insisted. ‘This’ – she gestured between the kit and the portrait – ‘is hers. It’s all hers. I would’ve been her if I hadn’t scrubbed those memory files when I woke up.’ The kit closed its eyes tight. ‘Stars. I’m what killed her.’

‘No,’ Blue said, not a hint of a question in his voice. ‘No. Oh, Sidra.’ He took the other hand now, too, and held them both firmly. ‘You had no idea. No idea. What happened to Lovey is not your fault. That, um, that crew, they knew when they flipped the switch that Lovey – that Lovey might not come back.’

‘But they wanted her to. They didn’t want me. I’m just . . .’ She thought again of the Harmagian she’d nearly tripped over, the argument that had preceded him, the guarded way Pepper watched her when she spoke to strangers. ‘I’m a mistake,’ she repeated.

Blue leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. ‘Well, if you are, I am, too.’ He touched the top of his head, tangling his fingers in his thick brown hair. ‘You know why I’ve, um, why I’ve got hair and Pepper doesn’t?’

‘She said you’re not like her. You weren’t made for the factories.’

‘Yeah. W-Want to know what I was made for?’ He raised his eyebrows, smirking. ‘Civil leadership. I was supposed to, uh, to be a c – a coun—’ He gave up on the word, and laughed at himself. ‘A politician.’ Blue grinned, but there was a sadness in his eyes. Something about this wasn’t as easy as he was making it out to be. ‘The b-bastards that made us, they’re not as good at, uh, good at genetweaking as they think. They think they’ve got it down. They make dancers, they make math – mathematicians, they make athletes. They m-make factories full of slave kids with no hair. But evolution isn’t a – a thing you can wrangle like that. It doesn’t always go in predictable ways. Genes and chromosomes, they, um, they do their own thing sometimes. You think you’re mixing together a politician, and instead, you get me.’ He shrugged. ‘The Enhanced call us m-misfits. People who don’t suit their intended purpose. So, maybe, ah, maybe you’re a misfit, too. Doesn’t mean you’re not deserving. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be here. Lovey’s gone, and that’s horribly sad. You’re here, and that’s wonderful. This isn’t a zero sum thing. Both can be true at the same time.’ He looked at the painting. ‘And maybe this, um, maybe this isn’t you right now. Maybe the face you’re, um, the face you’re wearing just needs a little time before it f-fits you. Or you fit it. Either way.’

Sidra thought for two seconds. ‘I don’t know what to say right now.’

‘That’s okay.’

Sidra watched the drying paint as she processed the events of the day over and over. Blue sat beside her, hand around the kit’s, clearly in no hurry. She cycled through the argument with Pepper that morning. You need to try. She’d been so angry to hear that, but remembering it now, the feeling was different. Maybe she needed to stop fighting the kit. Maybe she could be more like everyone else. She looked at the portrait’s eyes, and tried to imagine what it would be like to see herself looking back.

‘Do you know an Aeluon named Tak?’ she asked.

Blue blinked, surprised by the question. ‘I know a dozen Aeluons named Tak. That’s the problem with, um, with an invented language. Not a lot of names to go around. Do you know xyr f-full name?’

‘No. Just Tak. She’s a tattoo artist. I met her at Shimmerquick.’ Sidra pulled up the contact file. ‘Her shop’s in the western art district. Steady Hand?’

‘Oh, yeah. I don’t know that par – um, particular Tak, but I’ve seen that shop.’ He scratched his chin. ‘I don’t think it’s too far from the noodle bar, if you wanted to go see her after lunch.’

‘I hadn’t thought of it before now, but I would like to, yes.’

He looked at her curiously. ‘Why, you thinking of getting some ink?’

The kit shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

Blue laughed and ruffled the kit’s hair. ‘I mean, hey, if you’re g-going to have an existential crisis, go all out, yeah?’

JANE, AGE 10

‘Pour it in the funnel there,’ Owl said. Her face on the screen nodded toward the empty water tanks. Jane took the cap off the canteen and poured the gross water out.

‘It smells real bad,’ Jane said, turning her face away as the water splashed into the funnel.

‘I’ll bet,’ Owl said. ‘Okay, I’ll just divert some power from the hatch, and—’ There was a sound, the sound of a thing turning on. Owl looked good – happy. ‘Excellent. Give me a moment to analyse it.’

Jane put her ear up to the tank as things clunked and whirred. ‘What’s it doing?’ she asked.

‘I’m scanning for contaminants,’ Owl said.

‘Yes, but how?’

‘I don’t actually know how it works. I bet one of our manuals can tell us. But I have to focus on this now. I don’t have enough power to be running too many extra processes.’

Jane scrunched up her forehead, but didn’t say anything further. Maybe if she was real careful, she could take one of the tanks apart and then put it back together the exact same way.

‘Analysis complete,’ Owl said. ‘Stars, what isn’t in this stuff?’

‘Is it bad?’ Jane asked, her fingers all tangled together. Was the water she found wrong? Would Owl get angry?

‘That depends on your point of view,’ Owl said. She was not angry. ‘There are eight different types of fuel residue, more industrial by-products than you have time to listen to, bacteria, microbes, fungal spores, decaying organic matter, a heaping helping of dirt, and, weirdly, an awful lot of salt.’ Her face smiled from the wall. ‘Luckily, none of it is beyond my ability to handle. Pour the rest in. I can have a batch this small clean in six minutes and forty-three seconds. Give or take.’

‘Can I drink it?’ Jane said.

‘Yes, and you should have enough to wash your face and hands, too. But don’t drink all of it until you’ve brought more back. Do you think you can take the water wagon out tomorrow?’

‘Yeah!’ Jane said. She could! She could do that! ‘Oh, and I found something by the water.’ She opened up her satchel.

Owl’s mouth went tight. ‘What kind of something?’

‘I don’t know.’ Jane put the work gloves back on and pulled out the purple stuff. It was banged up and crushed flat, but still in one piece. She held it up toward the camera.

‘Hmm,’ Owl said. ‘That looks like some kind of mushroom. Or something similar to a mushroom, at least.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s like a plant. A plant is a . . . a living thing that isn’t an animal.’

Jane had thought maybe the purple stuff was alive, but knowing it for sure felt weird. She held the mushroom a little further away from herself. ‘Is it bad?’

‘I don’t know. We should check it out. Bring it to the bathroom.’

‘Why?’

‘There’s a tool in there I can use. At least, I think it’s in there. It should be in there.’

Jane walked to the bathroom. Owl bounced along the walls beside her. Jane had to help Owl push the bathroom door open because something in the mechanism that pulled the door in and out of the wall was junk. The lights flickered, eventually staying on. Jane saw the dry shower. She scratched behind her ear. She scratched and scratched and scratched. Gross.

The girl in the mirror did not look like the girl she was used to seeing. This girl had a red gross face, and gross hands, and gross clothes. Dirt all over. She looked like someone new. She wondered if Jane 64 would recognise her. Would have recognised her.

‘What am I looking for?’ she asked Owl, wanting to think about something else.

‘Here, let me show you.’ Owl’s face went away, and a picture appeared: a small machine with a round flat tray beneath some kind of lens.

Jane opened the cupboard. There it was, right in front. She held the machine up to the camera.

‘That’s it!’ Owl said, and Jane felt good, even though she hadn’t done much. ‘That’s a scanner for medical samples. You can probably use it to analyse what’s in that mushroom you found. I can tell you if any of it is bad for you.’

Jane set the scanner on the edge of the sink. ‘How do I . . .’

‘Put the mushroom in the tray. Okay, good. Now wave your hand by the interface panel to turn it on.’

Jane waved her hand. She waved, and waved again. Nothing happened.

‘Damn,’ Owl said. Jane didn’t know what that meant, but Owl had a wrong sound in her voice. ‘It must be out of power.’

Jane took the mushroom out of the tray and picked up the scanner. She turned it around and around, looking close. ‘There’s a power jack here,’ she said, pointing. ‘Do you have any charge cables?’

‘Probably, but I don’t know where.’

Jane went back to the cupboard and dug through all the stuff. She found a coiled black cable with the right kind of coupler. ‘Where can I plug this in?’

‘There’s a power station in the kitchen. Next to the sink.’

Jane went to the kitchen, hooked up the cables, and plugged in the scanner. Nothing changed. ‘Does it have a timed charge?’ she asked. ‘Does it need to sit for a bit?’

‘Probably, but make sure it’s actually charging. Has anything lit up?’

Jane flipped the scanner around again. There was an indicator patch, all right, but it was dark. She unplugged it and thought real hard. She went to the table where she’d built the weapon and got some tools. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Let’s see how it works.’

It took her no time to get the case open, and only a little bit longer to find the problem: a rusted conduit connecting the power source to the motherboard.

‘Can you fix it?’ Owl said. ‘What do you need?’

Jane scratched behind her ear with the tip of the screwdriver. ‘Something . . . something metal. Something that will fit. And binding tape. Or glue. Do you have those?’

‘I don’t know,’ Owl said. ‘Check the drawers.’

Jane had to check lots of drawers, but she found some sticky tape that would work okay. As for the conduit, she didn’t know where to find one of those, but there were plenty of metal things in the kitchen. She got one of the forks. The pointy things on a fork might work. She bent them like she’d bent the ones on the weapon – putting the pointy things under her shoe and pulling the handle up – but this time, she wiggled the handle back and forth and back and forth and back, until snap! The pointy things broke off. She bundled them up in tape real good, so that they wouldn’t spark into the machine, and then taped the bundle into the empty space. She plugged the scanner back in. The indicator patch turned green.

‘Look!’ she said, turning to Owl’s camera. ‘Look!’ Fixing things always felt real good, but it felt even more good knowing somebody else had seen her do it.

‘Oh, wonderful! Great job!’ Owl said. ‘Let it charge for a while, and then we’ll see if that mushroom is something you can eat.’

Jane put her chin on her hands and watched the scanner. It wasn’t doing anything, but seeing the green light was good. She’d done a great job. Owl had said so.

‘Jane,’ Owl said. She spoke kind of slow, like she was thinking about something. ‘You’re very good at fixing things.’

‘It’s my task,’ Jane said.

‘I think . . .’ Owl got quiet. Jane looked at the screen on the wall. Owl was kind of frowny, like girls got when there was a piece of scrap they couldn’t figure out. ‘I have an idea,’ Owl said. ‘I’ve had it since you got here, but I wasn’t sure if you could do it. I’m still not sure it’s the right thing.’ She sighed. ‘We’d have to agree to it together. I can’t make you. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ Jane said, a little scared now.

‘This ship can’t fly as it is. It’s broken and in bad repair. There are so many parts that need replacing. I gave up hope of ever taking flight again a long time ago. But watching you work . . . Jane, with my help, you could find the things this ship needs to become functional. It would take a long time, and I can’t promise we’d be successful. But I have all the manuals. I can walk you through the ship’s systems and tell you what everything does. I can keep you safe and healthy. And you – you can find the things that are missing. You can find the pieces we need to replace the broken stuff. And if you can’t find a piece, you can make it out of others. I know you can. Look at the things you’ve built: the weapon, the water wagon. We’re surrounded by tech here. I really think we could do this.’

Jane could tell Owl liked this idea, but she wasn’t sure why it was so important. The ship kept the dogs away, and there was water now, and she could eat the mushrooms. ‘Why do we need the ship to fly?’

Owl looked kind of surprised, but then she smiled. ‘Because, sweetheart, if the ship works, we can get away from here.’

Jane blinked. ‘To where?’

Owl’s smile got sad. ‘I think it’s time I explained planets.’

SIDRA

Tak had changed since Shimmerquick. Sometime during the tendays between, Tak’s reproductive system had indicated that it was time to switch sides. The implants beneath his skin had responded in kind, releasing a potent mix of hormones that allowed his body to do what it had evolved to do. He didn’t look terribly different from the Aeluon woman Sidra had met at the Aurora. His face was instantly recognisable. A lightening of skin and a slight shift in facial cartilage was all that had taken place, but it was enough to be instantly noticeable.

What had not changed about Tak was his air of quiet confidence, which was readily apparent the moment Sidra walked into his shop. The proprietor lounged in a broad chair near a window, smoking his pipe and reading something on his scrib. His cheeks flashed colours, and Sidra accessed her reference files in kind. Tak was surprised, and pleased.

‘Well, hey!’ he said, setting down both scrib and pipe. ‘It’s my friend from the party!’

Sidra felt the kit smile. He remembered her. ‘Hello. I hope I’m not intruding.’

Tak gestured around. ‘I’m alone, and it’s a shop. You’re supposed to intrude.’ The patches on his cheeks went green with amusement. ‘What brings you here?’

‘Well, I . . .’ Sidra wasn’t sure how to go about this. She’d never bought anything on her own before – not without Pepper’s instruction, at least. Perhaps this was a stupid idea. ‘I’m interested in getting a tattoo.’

The green took on shades of blue. Tak was very pleased. ‘Your first, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Fantastic. Please,’ he said, gesturing toward a heap of cushions surrounding a thin, cylindrical table. ‘Can I get you something to drink? Tea? Mek? Water?’

‘Mek would be nice, thank you.’ Sidra sat the kit down as Tak operated the brewer. The shop was a peaceful place, full of plants and curios. A small tank full of some sort of amorphous schooling sea creature – image logged, added to research list – hummed calmly against the wall. It stood alongside a strange piece of furniture: a smooth, featureless blob, bigger than she was. This was situated beside an Aeluon-style chair and a huge cabinet chequered with cube-like drawers. The chair appeared to be made of some sort of polymer, but she couldn’t identify the material. Image logged, added to research list.

Much like the decor at the festival, the shop was strikingly devoid of colour. Most of the objects within were grey, white, tan. Even the plants were muted – tarnished silver leaves with just the barest hint of chlorophyll. There were a few items that broke the rule: an abstract painting in bright primaries, the labels on foodstuffs and other multispecies goods, and a quartet of Aandrisk feathers, sticking up out of a thin vase.

‘Is this typical Aeluon decor?’ Sidra asked. ‘It’s quite striking.’

Tak went back to an amused green, tinged with a bit of curious brown. ‘Yeah, we tend to like our spaces simple. Too much colour gets tiring.’

‘Yet you’re a tattoo artist. On Port Coriol.’

Tak laughed as he picked up two full cups of mek. ‘I didn’t say we don’t like colour. Colour is good. Colour is life. But it’s also noise. Words. Passion.’ He handed Sidra a cup and sat down. ‘My shop’s where I spend most of my day. I want it to be a place where I can chill out and think clearly.’

‘How do you deal with the markets? Aren’t they distracting?’

‘They’re absolutely distracting. That’s the point of a market, to distract you into buying stuff you don’t need.’ He sipped his drink, cheeks swirling as he savoured it. ‘But I was also born here. The market’s background static to me.’ He looked around the shop. ‘Still, though. A quiet place is good.’ He turned his attention back to Sidra with a friendly teal flush. ‘But you didn’t come here to talk interior decorating. You want ink.’ He slid his scrib onto the table and gestured. A small cloud of pixels shot up, awaiting direction. ‘What are you after?’

Sidra took a sip of mek. She was stepping into a hot bath, but this body wasn’t hers. ‘I’m not quite sure.’

‘Hmm,’ Tak said, sitting back. He looked cautious. ‘Then why do you want one?’

Sidra didn’t know what to say. The truth was all she could work with, but Tak’s change in body language worried her. She’d put him off, and she wasn’t sure why. ‘Because of what you said. At the party.’

Tak laughed. ‘You’ll have to be more specific.’

The kit smiled, just a little. ‘The re-enforced circle. Bringing your mind and body together.’ She paused. ‘I want that.’

Tak’s cheeks quietly blossomed – pleased, touched, interested. His caution vanished. Sidra relaxed. ‘Okay then,’ Tak said. His long grey fingers danced near the projected pixels; they followed him like filings chasing after a magnet. ‘Let’s narrow it down. Are we going for an anchor or a compass? A memory to ground you, or a spark to guide you forward?’

Sidra processed the question fully. She had some good memories, but she could access those at any time. ‘A spark.’

‘A spark. Good.’ Tak touched the underside of his chin, tapping it as he thought. ‘Tell me what kind of imagery appeals to you. Do you have a favourite animal? A place? Anything in particular that inspires you?’

Sidra wasn’t sure she’d ever been inspired, and she wasn’t sure how to pick a favourite animal when they were all so interesting. ‘I like . . .’ Her pathways raced, trying to find a good answer in a polite amount of time. She sipped her mek again. She was stepping into a hot bath, but this body wasn’t hers. That was it – not mek, but the sensory analogues. That was her favourite thing. She considered the images she’d experienced, and tried to narrow it down further. ‘I like the ocean. When I—’ She stopped herself from saying when I eat hard candy, I see waves. ‘When I see the ocean, I feel calm. It makes me want to’ – to keep eating candy – ‘to keep going. To keep trying new things. To keep living.’ She processed what she’d just said. She’d said it aloud, so it had to be true.

‘I can work with that,’ Tak said happily. Sidra had been so focused on answering the question that she hadn’t processed him gesturing at the pixels, creating a rough ghost of a wave cresting into the air. ‘Now, how elaborate do we want to get? Do you want something realistic, or are you more into symbols?’

Sidra pondered. ‘Symbols. Symbols are interesting.’

‘I like symbols, too.’ He continued to gesture, drawing in the air. The wave became fuller, more tangible. ‘Do you want just a wave, or other things with it? Fish? We could add some fish in there.’ He added outlines of brightly coloured fish wriggling through the spray.

A memory appeared: Blue answering her questions on the Undersea during her first day at the Port. She liked that memory. Maybe a compass could be an anchor, too. ‘Yes, fish would be good.’ She shifted her gaze to the tank by the cabinet, where the strange creatures pulsed and swayed. ‘Ocean creatures in general, I think.’

‘Right, right, not just fish. I like it.’ Tentacles joined the ichthyoid outlines. Claws and fronds, too. ‘So, the question becomes: do you want a static tattoo, or dynamic?’

‘I don’t know. Which is better?’

‘That is entirely up to you.’

Sidra thought back to the party. ‘It wouldn’t bother you, would it? The moving colours?’ She didn’t want the act of tattooing her to be an unpleasant experience for Tak. She wouldn’t be doing this at all if he hadn’t planted the idea in her head. She didn’t feel comfortable getting ink from just anyone. She wanted the care she’d seen him employ on his customer at Shimmerquick. She wanted to know that he understood why she was doing this at all. It was a tattoo from Tak, or nothing.

‘Wouldn’t bother me at all,’ Tak said, ‘though I appreciate the consideration. I’ve been doing dynamic ink for standards. I’m used to it.’

‘Well,’ Sidra said, slowly. ‘Then I’d like bots.’ If the point was to give her something that would help her move forward, then she needed something that actually moved. ‘But please use colours that aren’t irritating to Aeluons.’

Tak’s cheeks turned green, through and through. ‘I’ll need some time to design this properly,’ he said, ‘but I can tell you right now this is going to be a great project.’

JANE, AGE 10

Jane had a lot of questions. She had so many questions, she couldn’t have counted them all because she’d have run out of numbers.

They were up real late. Jane was tired all the way through. She could feel it was way after bedtime, but she didn’t care. Her thoughts were buzzing so fast, there was no way she could sleep. Owl had used so many new words: planets, stars, gravity, orbit, tunnels, the Galactic Come Ons, and a whole bunch of others she’d already forgot. And species! Jane understood what species meant now. She was a Human species. There were many people who were Human species, and lots more kinds of people than just girls. Owl had showed her pictures. All the Humans in the pictures had hair, and Jane had asked if she was weird because she didn’t have any, but Owl said she didn’t need to worry about that. Humans were all different. They were different colours and sizes, and they wouldn’t think no hair was weird. They would just be glad to see her, Owl said.

Jane asked Owl why she didn’t have hair. She asked why she’d never seen other Humans. She asked if the Mothers knew there was stuff outside the factory, and if they knew about ships and stars and the rest of it. Owl had gotten kind of funny and quiet and said that that was a really big thing to talk about and they should focus on planets for now.

There were other species, too. They had hard names that Jane knew she’d need to practise. Owl said she would help. Owl said she would do as much as she could to get Jane ready before she met other species. She’d teach her how to live in a ship, how to act around others, how to say the same words other species did. Their words were called Klip, and Jane’s words were called Sko-Ensk, which were kind of like another set of words called Ensk, and some Humans knew that one, but usually not the one Jane spoke. Words were weird.

Everything was complicated, but real interesting, too. Jane had so many questions she was starting to forget her questions. She sat on the good soft thing in the living room – the couch, Owl said. Jane unwrapped a ration bar and dunked it in a cup of water. ‘How come,’ she said, after swallowing the chewed food, ‘how come if there are so many stars on the other side of the sky, I can’t see them?’

‘Our planet is facing a star during the hours that you’re awake,’ Owl said. She put a picture up on her screen – one little ball facing a big bright ball. ‘See? When we’re facing the star, it’s so bright that it blocks out the light from all the others. But when we face away from it’ – the picture changed – ‘you can see the stars we’ve been missing during the day. You probably saw them when you first got here, but . . . you had a lot going on that night.’

Jane thought back. She remembered the specks in the sky, but she hadn’t known what they were, and she’d been scared about all the other things. She watched the little ball on screen turn in and out of light. ‘Are we facing away from the star now?’

‘Yes. That’s why it’s night-time.’

‘Can I see the other stars now?’

‘Oh! Yes, yes, of course! I hadn’t considered. Stupid of me. Go up to the control room. I can activate the viewscreen.’

Jane ran to the front of the shuttle. Owl joined her on a panel between the control buttons. The viewscreen flickered on, but it snapped and buzzed all over. Worn-out wiring, probably.

‘Sorry, Jane,’ Owl said. ‘I think that’s as good as it’s going to get.’

Jane squinted at the viewscreen, trying to see beyond the buzzing bits. It was real dark outside, darker than the dorm ever got. She could kind of make out the big piles of scrap. She tried to focus above the scrap, where the sky was. The screen kept flickering, turning on and off in patches all over. But in the bits that stayed on, she could see more light. Little dots in the sky. Lots of them.

‘Owl?’ Jane said. ‘Are there any dogs outside?’

‘There are always dogs outside,’ Owl said. ‘I can’t see any right by us, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there.’

Jane thought for a second, then ran back down the hall, toward the living room.

‘Jane?’ Owl said, chasing her from one wall screen to the next. ‘Jane, are you okay?’

Jane put on her shoes and strapped her weapon to her back.

‘Jane,’ Owl said. Her voice was real serious.

Jane faced the closest screen. She stood up tall and held the weapon tight. ‘Can I go see?’ she said.

‘Yes, but there is no lighting out there. You could trip on something. You could hurt yourself. It’s not safe.’

Jane tried a new word. ‘Please?’

Owl closed her eyes and sighed. ‘If you see any dogs—’

‘I have my weapon,’ Jane said.

‘If you see any dogs, you come right back inside. You can’t see very well in the dark. They probably can.’

‘Okay.’

‘And don’t go away from the ship.’ Owl thought about something, then sighed again. ‘There’s a maintenance ladder near the outer hatch. If the roof doesn’t have too much junk on it, you can probably climb up to the top. I don’t recommend going further than that. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

Owl opened the airlock, then the hatch. Jane stepped outside. It was so dark, and cold, too. Jane swallowed and looked around, trying to see things that were close. She couldn’t see anything moving. She couldn’t hear anything moving, either. She thought for a second about going back inside, but she didn’t. She found the ladder and climbed it.

She looked up.

Jane couldn’t move. The cold was making her shaky, but that was the only thing about her that moved, except for her heart, beating real loud in her ears. The sky was . . . it was . . . it was so full. And now that she knew what the specks were, it made her head spin and her mouth dry.

There were dozens of stars. Dozens of dozens, way too many to count, just like her questions. There were big stars and little stars and some that were kind of red or blue. There wasn’t any part of sky that didn’t have stars, but most of them were in one big big big strip that was fluffy and soft and so so bright. Owl had showed her a picture of a galaxy, but this was different. This was real. This was real.

A few days ago, the factory had been everything. There were no planets. There were no stars. The big blue day sky had been confusing enough, but this . . . There were people out in the stars. So many people! All those little bits of light, they all had planets – so big that you couldn’t even tell that you were standing on a ball – and all those planets had people, and species! Species in different colours and kinds. Jane couldn’t even picture that many people. It didn’t make sense. None of it made sense.

She sat down. She didn’t know if she felt good or if she felt sick. The Mothers had to know this was here. They didn’t leave the factory, she figured, but they had to know. Why didn’t the girls know? Why hadn’t they been told? Why couldn’t they go outside? They could still sort scrap even if they knew about the sky! Jane felt something bad, something she didn’t have a word for. She felt all hot and wrong. She wanted to break something on purpose.

But then she looked up again, up at the big soft galaxy, and after a bit, she felt okay. She felt good. Somehow, outside, looking at the stars, everything was a little better. It didn’t make sense in her head, but it did down in her stomach. She looked at the stars, and she knew all her questions would get answered, all the things would get fixed. All this weird stuff was okay.

Jane wished that 64 had gone outside, too. She wished that 64 had met Owl, and that they’d learned about the sky together. Jane felt hot and wrong again, and even the stars couldn’t fix that.

She lay down on her back, looking and looking. She thought about species and ships. She thought about people.

They’d be happy to see her, Owl had said.

The cold air was starting to make her shake real hard, and it kind of hurt, too, so she climbed down the ladder and went back inside.

‘Owl?’ she said, facing a screen. ‘I think . . . I think fixing the ship would be a real good task.’

Owl looked so, so pleased. ‘You do?’

‘Yes,’ Jane said. She nodded hard. ‘Yes. Let’s go to space.’

SIDRA

Sidra’s internal clock reset itself, and the kit smiled wide. ‘I’m getting my tattoo today,’ she said. Her petbot looked up as she spoke, snuggling happily in the kit’s lap.

Pepper looked over from her corner of the couch. ‘Did it just hit midnight?’

‘Yes.’

Pepper laughed. ‘Your appointment isn’t for, what, ten hours?’

‘Ten and a half.’

Pepper laughed again, then returned her gaze to the breathing mask she was tinkering with. ‘And you’re still not going to tell me what design you and your artist cooked up?’

‘No,’ Sidra said, stroking the petbot’s head. Pepper had been pestering her for hints ever since she’d heard about Sidra’s first trip to Steady Hand. ‘Not unless you ask me directly.’

Pepper shook her head and put up her palm. ‘I can respect a surprise. I’m just excited to see it.’ She held a bolt between her teeth and continued speaking around it. ‘Are you nervous?’

Sidra considered. ‘Yes, but not in a bad way. More . . . anticipatory.’ She shifted memory files around as she spoke. The Linking jack plugged into the base of the kit’s skull was supplying her with one of Tak’s favourite adventure novels, which he’d mentioned during their last meeting. ‘Have you ever heard of A Song for Seven?’ she asked. ‘It’s an Aeluon book.’

Pepper shook her head as she fussed with the mask. Sidra was unsurprised. There wasn’t much Pepper had read beyond tech manuals and food drone menus. ‘Is that what you’re processing now?’

‘Yes.’ Sidra saw no reason to supply the additional explanation that she was adding it to her local memory. Her memory banks were still filling faster than she was comfortable with, but she saw little point in reopening the argument, at least right now.

‘Are you enjoying it?’ Pepper asked.

‘Very much,’ Sidra said. ‘The phrasing can be challenging, but it’s a good translation, and the complexity makes for some wonderfully layered nuance.’ She was aware, as she said it, that she was repeating what Tak had said about it, word for word. Well, why not? He’d sounded smart when he’d said it; why couldn’t she?

Pepper raised her hairless brow with a smirk. ‘That’s a fancy way of saying “dense”.’

Sidra knew Pepper was kidding, but something in her bristled nonetheless. The words Pepper was scoffing at didn’t belong to Sidra, and she didn’t like Pepper’s implication that their original speaker was being pretentious. Tak was educated, and it was one of the things Sidra enjoyed most about speaking with him. Pepper was intelligent, no question, but . . .

She watched Pepper as she worked on the same project she’d been working on at the shop all day, the same project she’d been working on one-handed through dinner, the same project she’d been working on when Blue kissed the top of her head and bid them both goodnight. Sidra felt unkind in thinking it, but this was one of the things she enjoyed about Tak’s company. She was glad to have met someone who liked to read.

Feed source: unknown

Encryption: 4

Translation: 0

Transcription: 0

Node identifier: unknown

pinch: hey, got another question for you guys. this one’s just out of curiosity. if you wanted to expand an AI’s memory capacity, how would you go about it?

ilikesmash: expand by how much?

pinch: a lot. enough to make her comparable with an organic’s ability to learn new stuff indefinitely

tishtesh: are you talking about an intelligent sentient model? you know that’s why they have linking access, right?

pinch: let’s say linking access wasn’t a possibility

nebbit: you’d need to install additional hardware to whatever housing it’s in. extra storage drives.

pinch: let’s say that that wasn’t a possibility, either

tishtesh: uhhhhh okay. you’re fucking stuck then

ilikesmash: you could pare down its cognitive processors to limit how much info it wants to access. slow the deluge a bit.

tishtesh: then what would even be the point of an intelligent sentient model

AAAAAAAA: limiting processors would be cruel

ilikesmash: how is it cruel? you’re taking away the protocol that’s causing the issue. would make for a more stable installation.

AAAAAAAA: you’re taking away a crucial part of xyr cognitive processes. would you get rid of your own curiosity if it made you more ‘stable’?

tishtesh: stars, can we not

ilikesmash: ah, i see. you’re one of those. come back when you’ve realised they’re not people

nebbit: friends, we have a separate thread for ethical arguments. please stay on topic.

JANE, AGE 10

She still wasn’t sure about the mushrooms. They tasted okay – more interesting than meals, anyway. They filled her up real good, and Owl said they were good for her, too, but making them into food was not a task Jane liked very much. Fixing scrap was much better. But like Owl had said, she couldn’t fix scrap if she didn’t fuel herself first. So, mushrooms.

As she cut up that morning’s handful of food, she wondered what other people ate. She wondered about other people a lot. Owl had explained that the planet they were on – which was still weird to think about – had lands on all sides of it, but the lands were separated by lots of water. The land on their side was where all the scrap went, and where all the factories were (there was more than just the one!). The land on the other side had cities. The cities were where the scrap came from. The people in the cities didn’t like scrap or think about it much, but they liked stuff, and since they didn’t talk to other Humans or species, they couldn’t get new stuff, or materials to make new stuff (they’d already used up everything they dug out of the ground, Owl said). If they wanted new stuff, they had to make it out of old stuff.

‘What do the other people on this planet do?’ Jane asked.

‘I don’t understand the question. What do you mean?’ Owl said.

‘I mean . . . what do they do? If the girls on this side take care of the scrap, what do they do?’ Jane was still trying to figure out the point of a city. And of most things. The more questions she asked, the more questions she thought up.

‘The same things people do everywhere, I suppose,’ Owl said. ‘They learn things, make families, ask questions, see places.’

‘Do they know about us on this side? Do they know we’re here?’

‘Yes. Not you and I specifically, but yes.’

‘Do they know about the Mothers?’

‘Yes. They made them. They made the factories, too. And the girls.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they don’t want to clean up their own messes.’

Jane thought about that. ‘Why don’t they just have the Mothers clean up instead?’

Owl’s eyes moved away from Jane. ‘Because making girls is cheaper, in the long run.’

‘What’s cheaper?’ Jane asked. She turned the bits of mushrooms so she could chop them smaller.

‘Cheaper is . . . it means it requires less materials. Machines like the Mothers take a lot of kinds of metal that people here don’t have much of. Girls are easier for them to make.’

Jane remembered her face smashing down red and hot against the treadmill, a metal hand on the back of her neck. ‘Are the other people on this planet bad?’

Owl was quiet. Jane looked up from her pile of mushrooms to the wall screen. ‘Yes,’ Owl said. ‘That’s not a nice thing of me to say. But yes, they’re bad people.’ She sighed. ‘That was why my last crew came here. They wanted to change them.’

‘Change them into what?’

Owl’s forehead crumpled up. ‘I’ll try to explain this as best as I can. My last crew were two men. Brothers. Yes, I’ll explain about brothers later. They were . . . they called themselves Gaiists, which are a type of people who – who believe Humans shouldn’t have left Earth. They go around the galaxy and try to convince Humans to come back to the Sol system.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they think they’re doing the right thing. It’s complicated. Can we save that question for later?’

Jane brushed the mushroom pile together real tight, then picked her knife back up. ‘Is it on your question list?’

‘I just added it.’

‘Okay.’

‘Anyway, the people here don’t want to change. The city people, anyway. Those brothers should’ve known better, but they were doing what they believed in.’ She shook her head. ‘They were kind people, but very foolish.’

‘What’s foolish?’

‘A foolish person would reach into a machine without turning off the power.’

Jane frowned. ‘That’s stupid.’

Owl laughed. ‘Yes, it is. Anyway, they were only with me a short time. They purchased the shuttle less than a standard before, but I mostly sat in the bay of their carrier ship. The carrier took them to the Han’foral tunnel, which is the closest one to here. Took about thirty-seven days to get from that tunnel to where we are now.’

Jane chopped the mushrooms smaller, smaller, smaller. The littler they were, the easier on her stomach. ‘When was that?’

‘About five years ago.’

Jane stopped chopping. She looked at the face in the wall. ‘You’ve been here for five years? In the scrap?’

‘Yes.’

Jane tried to think about how long ago five years was. She was ten now, so she was five when Owl had got to the planet. Jane couldn’t remember being five very well. And in five more years, she’d be fifteen! Five years was a lot. ‘Were you sad?’ she asked.

‘Yes. Yes, I was very sad.’ Owl smiled, but it was a weird kind of smile, like it was hard to do. ‘But we’re together now, and I’m not sad any more.’

Jane stared at the mushroom bits, all purple and white and chewy. ‘I’m still sad.’

‘I know, sweetheart. And that’s okay.’

They had talked a lot about sad a few days before, after Jane had thrown a box of stuff at the wall for reasons she couldn’t explain. She’d yelled at Owl a lot, and said she wanted to go back to the factory, which she didn’t really at all, so she didn’t know why she’d said it. Then she’d cried again, which she was real tired of doing. She’d done a lot of bad behaviour that day, but Owl hadn’t been angry. Instead, she’d told Jane to come sit next to the wall screen by her bed, close as she could to Owl’s face, and Owl made some music until Jane stopped crying. Owl said it was okay to be sad about 64, and about the bad things that had happened at the factory. She said that was a kind of sad that would never go away, but it would get easier. It hadn’t gotten easier yet. Jane wished it would hurry up.

She scooped up the mushroom bits into her hands and walked over to the stove. A stove was a hot thing you made food on. Owl could give it power now, ever since Jane had started cleaning off the outside of the ship – the hull. Now more of the coating on the hull could make power out of sunlight. Once Jane finished that task, Owl wouldn’t have to choose which things worked and which things didn’t. She could make a lot more things work now than she had at first. She could make the ship very warm and turn on all the lights inside, and the stove and the stasie worked. The shower worked now, too, because Jane had filled up the water tanks. That had taken six days of dragging the water wagon back and forth, back and forth. It had been stupid and bad, and there had been dogs a couple times (the weapon was such a good thing). But there was clean water now, and she didn’t itch any more, and the bathroom wasn’t gross. That all was good. But between that and the two days she’d spent cleaning scrap off of the ship, her arms and legs were real real tired. She wasn’t bleeding or broken or anything, but she hurt.

She put a pan on the stove, dropped the mushrooms into it, and turned the stove on real low. She had to be careful doing that. Mushrooms weren’t very good to eat without being cooked, but if she cooked them too hot, they’d stick to the pan and they wouldn’t be any good at all. She’d made that mistake the first time, and wasted a whole bunch of them. With as much work as it took to bring mushrooms home and get them ready, she didn’t want to waste any ever again.

Jane had a thought she hadn’t before. ‘Did you have a crew before the . . . the two men?’

Owl had said she wasn’t sad any more, but she was now. Her face said so. ‘Yes. The shuttle was owned by a couple on Mars. They used the ship for vacations. Outer Sol system, mostly. The occasional tunnel hop. I was with them for ten years.’

The mushrooms started to make hissing sounds. Jane tried to keep an eye on them, but she was worried about Owl. She’d never heard her sound so wrong. ‘Did they get arrested, too?’

‘Oh, no. No, they sold the ship. They had two children, Mariko and Max. I watched them grow up in here. But after they became adults, the vacations stopped, and I guess . . . I guess their parents didn’t need a shuttle any more.’

Jane frowned, watching the mushrooms wiggle against the pan. ‘Did you want to stay with them?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did they know that?’

‘I don’t know. If they did, it wouldn’t have mattered. That’s not how the galaxy works.’

‘Why?’

‘Because AIs aren’t people, Jane. You can’t forget that about me. I’m not like you.’

Jane didn’t understand why Owl being not like her would make her feelings not important, but the mushrooms were starting to get crispy around the edges, so she paid attention to that instead. It was easier than finding words.

There was a sound – a tapping kind of sound. Jane turned her ear toward the ceiling. ‘Owl, what is that?’ She turned off the stove. The mushrooms hissed quieter; the tapping got louder. Like a bunch of little bolts falling onto the hull.

‘It’s nothing bad. Go up to the control room and I’ll show you.’

Jane hurried out of the kitchen and did as told. Owl turned the viewscreen on and . . . and . . . Jane did not understand. It was morning, but the sky was kind of dark. And there was . . . there was . . .

‘Owl,’ Jane said slowly. ‘Why is there water falling out of the sky?’

‘That’s called rain,’ Owl said. ‘Don’t worry, it’s supposed to happen.’

The tapping got louder, louder. Everything outside was wet. She saw a few lizard-birds (that was what Owl called the flying animals; she didn’t know the right word for them). They flew down low, ducking into a scrap pile, shaking off their wings and tails to get the sky water off them.

Nothing outside the factory made any sense. Not any sense.

‘Jane, it’d be a good idea for you to push the water wagon outside,’ Owl said. ‘With the drums open. They’ll catch the rain that way.’

‘Is it good water?’ Jane wasn’t sure about this rain thing. This was maybe the weirdest thing yet, and she’d seen a lot of weird things already.

‘It’s better than the water you brought back, for sure. It’s probably not drinkable as it is, but it’ll be easier to clean.’

‘But the tanks are already full.’ Pushing the water wagon outside meant going outside. Into the rain.

‘They won’t always be. This way, when you need to top them up, you don’t have to go all the way back to the waterhole. You’ll have a bit right here already.’

Jane took a deep breath. ‘Okay.’ The rain was weird and she didn’t want to go into it, but her hurting legs and tired back made her think Owl’s idea was better than one more trip to the waterhole. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘What am I supposed to do now?’

‘I don’t understand the question. What do you mean?’

‘I mean today. I was going to finish cleaning the scrap off the hull. That was my task. Can I do that in the rain?’ The water was coming down very fast now, falling in great big lines.

‘Yes, but I suggest staying inside today. The rain here can be quite heavy, and wet clothes aren’t fun. Plus, wet scrap is slippery. I don’t want you to fall.’

‘But . . .’ Jane started feeling wrong. ‘I don’t have another task.’ She needed a task. Without a task, her thoughts went places she didn’t want them to go. She didn’t want another bad behaviour day. She wanted to be okay today. She wanted to be okay, and if she didn’t have a task, then—

‘I have an idea,’ Owl said. ‘And actually, I think it would be a good idea even if it wasn’t raining. Jane, you need a day off.’

Jane blinked. ‘A day off of what?’

‘Of work. All Human beings need to take a break from work sometimes. You need to let your body rest, and your mind, too.’

No. No no no. She needed a task. ‘I don’t want to do nothing,’ she said, remembering that first morning in bed, when she’d tried to just lie there, and the couple days after that, when she couldn’t get out of bed at all and it was a real real bad time.

‘That’s not what I’m suggesting,’ Owl said. ‘I’ve been going through my old files, and I found something I think might be fun. It’s not a real task, but it will let you rest without doing nothing.’

Jane scrunched up her mouth. That sounded okay.

‘I’ll get it ready. I suggest eating your mushrooms before they get cold, then putting the wagon outside.’ Owl’s face did a happy wiggle inside the screen. ‘Oh, I hope you like it.’

SIDRA

Sidra settled into the piece of furniture beside Tak’s tool cabinet. It was an eelim, a sort of responsive chair that moulded itself around the body of the person using it. Sidra was fascinated as she watched the white material shift around the kit. She fought the urge to stand the kit up just so she could sit down and watch the eelim move again. But Tak was preparing his tools, and that was fascinating, too. He had a fresh pipe of tallflower, a full cup of mek, a gloved pair of hands. He loaded cartridges of colour bots into the industrial-looking needle pen, which looked a bit frightening, even in the hands of one so friendly.

‘It doesn’t use magnets, does it?’ Sidra asked, eying the hefty machine as calmly as she could.

It was an odd thing to ask, she knew, but Tak seemed to take it as nothing more than quirk. ‘Nope, just pumps and gravity. Why, you have implants you’re worried about?’

‘No,’ Sidra said, glad the question hadn’t been more specific.

‘Well, even if you did, no magnets here. But it is going to hurt. You know that, right?’

Sidra chose her words carefully. ‘I know that tattoos hurt, yes.’ That much was true. She left out the part about not being able to feel pain. She’d practised wincing the night before. Blue had said she’d got it down.

Tak loaded the final cartridge with a decisive snap. He lit his pipe and inhaled deeply, ribbons of smoke curling out his flat nostrils. He gestured over his scrib, bringing up the image he and Sidra had worked on so intently together. A crashing wave, teeming with all manner of sealife. The image moved, just as it would on the kit’s skin, fins and tentacles gently, gently pulsing forward and back, no faster than a sigh. The movement was noticeable, but not distracting. It’d take the bots a full minute to cycle through the image. ‘A subtle bit of background action,’ as Tak had put it. Sidra looked at it hungrily, trying to imagine how it would look on her housing. Her pathways practically vibrated with excitement.

Tak noticed her eagerness. ‘You ready to do this?’

Sidra leaned the kit back into the eelim. ‘I’m ready.’

Tak sat in his workchair, dragging it close as he could to her. He disinfected the surface of the kit’s skin with a small spray bottle, then shaved the fine hair away with a hand razor. Sidra hadn’t realised that would be part of the process. That hair would never grow back, and having a bald patch on the kit’s upper arm would look odd. She made a note to shave the rest of the kit’s arms at home. It would be less obvious that way.

Tak tapped the pen on. It was louder than Sidra expected, though maybe only due to its closeness. The needle touched the kit’s arm; she directed the kit to inhale softly. Tak pushed the needle through the skin; Sidra closed the kit’s eyes. The needle buzzed forward. She inhaled again, a little sharper, a little shorter, just as she and Blue had practised.

Tak pulled the needle back. ‘That’s how it feels. Is that okay?’

‘That’s okay.’

‘You’re gonna do great, I know it. Just let me know if you need a break.’ He leaned in, moving the needle with the same care and sincerity as Blue with his brushes, as Pepper with her tools. Sidra watched with interest as little lines of still-dormant bots appeared, dark and clear below the surface. The kit bled. Tak dabbed the dishonest red liquid up with the corner of a clean cloth. He saw no difference.

‘So,’ Tak said, never taking his eyes off his work. ‘I watched that vid series you mentioned last time. The documentary on the first Exodans leaving the Sol system.’

A warm little glow danced through Sidra’s pathways. ‘What’d you think?’

‘Absolutely fascinating,’ Tak said. ‘It lost me a bit toward the end—’

‘The montage of images of the original crew?’

‘Yeah. Dragged on a little too long. But don’t get me wrong, I thought it was terrific overall. Much, much better than the scraps about Human expansion I learned as a kid.’

Sidra was delighted that her recommendation had been well received. ‘If you want to keep going in that vein, there’s another series called Children of War. It’s not quite as weighty, but I think it offers some very good complementary ideas about the politics on Mars at the time.’ She processed. ‘You went to university, right?’

‘I did.’ A nostalgic orange-flecked ripple crossed Tak’s cheeks. ‘I had aims to be an historian when I was younger. Started my certification track and everything.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. It’s the only time I’ve lived away from here. Spent three standards at Ontalden – you know it?’

‘No.’

‘It’s one of the big universities on Sohep Frie. Had a lot of appeal to me back then. I wanted to see the homeworld, wanted to see what life was like outside of the Port.’ He shifted his pipe from one side of his mouth to the other. ‘But it wasn’t for me, in the end. I love learning. I love history. But there’s history in everything. Every building, everybody you talk to. It’s not limited to libraries and museums. I think people who spend their lives in school forget that sometimes.’

Sidra wished she could watch the needle and Tak’s expressions at once. She was keen on processing both. ‘Why wasn’t it “for you”?’

Tak thought as he worked. ‘I like history because it’s a way of understanding people. Understanding why we’re all like we are right now. Especially in a place like this.’ He rocked his head toward the door, toward the multispecies crowd beyond the wall. ‘I wanted to understand my friends and neighbours better. But when I was on Sohep Frie, I spent a lot of time holed up in the university archives, learning about my own species’ history. We shons, you know, we used to be cultural conduits. We brought a little bit of each village with us when we switched between. Something about that really spoke to me. Not like it’s in my genes, or something. I don’t believe we’re defined by this.’ He held up the wet rag, speckled with false blood. ‘But that idea of being an ambassador of sorts grabbed me, for whatever reason. I realised I wanted to work with a more tangible kind of history. That’s why I do bot ink, and scale dying, and all that stuff. There are few better ways to get to know how a species thinks than to learn their art.’ Tak lifted the needle off the kit’s skin, adjusting his pipe between his delicate teeth. ‘You sure you’ve never done this before?’ he asked, nodding toward the kit’s arm. ‘You’re doing really well.’

A jolt of nervousness shot through her. She’d forgotten to maintain the appearance of pain. ‘Yes.’ She gave the kit a tight smile that communicated toughness – or so she hoped. It was a good thing that she’d seen so little of physical pain, but some frame of reference for how often and to what degree she should make the kit look uncomfortable would’ve been helpful. She chastised herself for not thinking to find some vids of organic sapients getting tattoos. Still, Tak seemed impressed, and in Sidra’s estimation, that was a good turn of events.

They sat that way for an hour and a half – Tak altering the kit, Sidra watching his progress and pulling faces, the time punctuated by idle chit-chat (vids, food, waterball) and lulls of comfortable silence when Tak was most focused.

At last, Tak sat back, switching off the pen. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘There’s your first layer. What do you think? Let me know if there’s something you don’t like. You won’t hurt my feelings.’

Sidra examined the outline that had been driven into the kit’s synthetic skin. The kit started smiling almost before she’d had time to process. ‘This is great,’ she said.

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah, it’s wonderful.’ The kit grinned at him. ‘Can we do the next layer now?’

Tak laughed, talkbox bobbing in his throat. ‘I need a short break, and so do you. I’ll get us both some water.’

Sidra eyed the static outline, and imagined it with colour, motion, life. ‘Can I see how it’s going to move?’

‘Sure,’ Tak said. ‘You won’t get the full effect yet, but I can show you where it’s at right now.’ He picked up his scrib and accessed some sort of control program. ‘I’ll just activate it for a few seconds, then shut it back down.’

Tak gestured at the scrib. In an instant, Sidra’s excitement turned to fear. A dozen warning notifications leaped to the forefront of her pathways – system errors, signal errors, feedback errors. Something was wrong.

‘Sidra?’ Tak said, cheeks anxious. ‘You o—’

Sidra didn’t hear the rest. The kit convulsed, doubling over and falling forward. She was dimly aware of Tak catching her, but her knowledge of that was buried beneath error after error, flashing red and urgent. And her pathways – her pathways didn’t make sense. Things were stuck. Things were falling. Things were opening and closing with her on both sides of the door. What was she saying? Was she saying something? No, Tak was: ‘I’m calling emergency services. Sidra? Sidra, stay with me.’

An interesting thing happened: Sidra heard herself speak, even though she couldn’t see the process that made her do so. ‘No – Pepper. Not – services. Pepper. Get Pepper.’

She wasn’t sure which part of her was still running speech protocols, but it was a good thing they were working, because the rest of her was losing the fight in keeping the kit still, and her pathways really couldn’t process anything more than—

JANE, AGE 10

A day off. And Owl said she had something fun! Jane ate her mushrooms real fast, along with two bites of ration bar (Owl said they had good things in them that mushrooms didn’t, and she should have a little bit with her mushrooms every day until the bars ran out). She washed the food down with filtered water from the sink. It still tasted different from the water they drank at the factory, but it was much much better than the packets. Not just because it was cold and clean and didn’t taste like packaging, but also because the reason the sink water was there in the first place was because she’d brought it home. She was drinking water she’d got herself, and that made it taste extra good.

She put the wagon outside, too. The rain was everywhere. She wanted to stand and look at it, wanted to try to see where it was falling from, but it was cold and making her clothes all wet. It only took a minute of standing in it for her to understand that she didn’t like rain very much.

She went back inside, then followed Owl into the bedroom. ‘Okay, look under the bed,’ Owl said. ‘Not your bed, the other one. It should still be under there.’

‘What should?’ Jane said, getting down on her hands and knees. There were boxes under there with stuff that had belonged to one of the men who had brought Owl to the planet. Not much of the stuff had been useful, except for the pocket knife.

‘Here, I’ll show you. Look here.’ Owl’s face went away from the wall screen, and a picture of a funny-looking piece of tech came up – some kind of a small net, with goggles and wires that Jane didn’t know the point of.

Jane dug around under the bed until she found the thing, put away real careful in a box. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘It’s a sim cap,’ Owl said. ‘It’s a piece of tech that tells you a story inside your head.’

Jane stared into the box. Nothing here made sense. ‘Like a dream?’

‘Yes, but it makes more sense than a dream, and you can interact with it.’

‘What’s interact?’

‘Do stuff with it. Pretend that you’re really there. It’s not real. It’s all made up, but it can show you lots of different things. I think you might like it.’

Jane touched the wires. There was nothing pokey or sharp, nothing that would go inside her head. She picked up the net. She could see now that it was round, and had little soft patches all along the inside. Some kind of feedback patches. The other wires were covered with them too. The wires split into five ends each – hands? Were they for her hands? ‘What stories will it show me?’ Jane asked.

‘Different kinds of stories. I have a small selection of sims in storage. Most of them are for grown-ups, but I have a few for kids. I remembered them when you asked about . . . about the family that owned the ship. Their kids played sims when they had long trips.’

‘What’s kids?’

‘Children.’

‘Am I a kids?

‘You’re a kid, yes.’

Jane took that in. ‘I’m a Human and a person and a girl and a kid.’ That seemed like a lot of labels for just one girl.

Owl smiled. ‘That’s right.’

Jane looked back at the box. ‘How do I put this on?’

‘Put the round thing over your head. There’s a strap on the bottom so you can pull it tight against your skin. Yes, good. Now, those long bits are like gloves. Put the caps over each fingertip, and pull the little straps tight.’

Jane did as she was told. The caps on the net and gloves stuck onto her skin real tight. It was weird, but not bad. She picked up the goggles. ‘And these?’

‘You should lie down before you put those on. You won’t be able to see out of them.’

Jane lay down on her bed and put the goggles on. Owl was right – they made the whole room go away. It wasn’t scary, she told herself. Owl said it was okay. Owl said it was okay.

‘I’m going to upload the sim to the kit now,’ Owl said. ‘And don’t worry, I’m right here. You can still talk to me, even when it’s playing.’

Jane relaxed into her pillow. She heard a little click as something activated in the goggles. The net pressed very, very softly into her scalp, like it was grabbing it. The gloves hugged her fingers, too. Her skin tingled. Owl said it was okay.

The darkness started to go away. Then . . . then it got weird.

She was standing in an empty space, lit with soft yellow light. She wasn’t standing, not really. She was still lying down in bed. But she was also standing in the yellow place. Lying down felt more real; standing felt like a memory. But it was a memory that was happening right that second.

Nothing. Here. Made. Sense.

A glowing ball rose up out of the ground with a hum. It stopped right in front of her face. ‘Tek tem!’ it said, pulsing bright with each word. ‘Kebbi sum?’

Jane swallowed. Owl had taught her tek tem. Those were Klip words for hello. But she didn’t understand anything else the ball said. ‘Um . . . I’m . . . I don’t understand.’

‘Oh!’ the ball said. The sound of its voice had changed. ‘Am sora! Hoo spak Ensk! Weth all spak Ensk agath na. Ef hoo gan larin Klip?’

She frowned. Some of those words were almost like normal words, but the rest . . . weren’t. She felt tired already. ‘Owl?’ she called.

Owl’s voice appeared all around her, as if there were speakers everywhere. ‘I’m sorry, Jane,’ Owl said, ‘I didn’t think about the language packs. Give me just a minute. There must be a module for Sko-Ensk, this franchise got a grant from the Diaspora – ah, here we are. Things may go dark for a second, don’t be scared.’

‘I’m not scared,’ Jane said.

Things went dark, just as Owl had said. Okay, fine, it was a little scary. She was all the way back in bed, but she couldn’t see anything. She didn’t like that at all. But only a second or two went by before the warm yellow space returned, and the ball of light came back. ‘Hi there!’ it said. ‘What’s your name?’

Jane relaxed. The ball spoke with the same weird kind of voice sound that Owl had (accent, Owl had said – it was called an accent), but Jane could understand it now. ‘I’m Jane,’ she said.

‘Welcome, Jane! Is this your first time in a sim, or have you played others before?’

She bit her thumbnail (or the memory of it, anyway). This whole thing made her feel a little silly. ‘First time.’

‘Awesome! You’re in for a treat! I’m the Game Globe. I help make the sim fit you just right. If you ever need to change something, or if you need to leave, just yell “Game Globe!” and I’ll help you out. Okay?’

‘Um, okay.’

‘Great! So how old are you, Jane?’

‘Ten.’

‘Are you in school?’

‘No.’ Owl had explained school. It sounded like fun. ‘But Owl’s teaching me.’

‘Sorry, I didn’t quite understand that. Is Owl a grown-up?’

‘Owl is an AI,’ she said. ‘I live with her in a shuttle and she helps me be okay.’

‘Sorry, I didn’t quite understand that,’ the ball said. ‘What’s—’

Owl’s voice cut in. ‘Just tell it I’m your parent, Jane,’ Owl said. ‘It’s easier. That thing isn’t sentient.’

Jane didn’t know what parent or sentient meant, but she did as told. ‘Owl’s my parent.’

‘Got it!’ the ball said. ‘I’m going to ask you a few questions, just to see what kind of stuff you already know. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘Great!’ The ball wiggled, then dissolved into shapes – reading squiggles, like on the boxes in the shuttle. There were a lot of them. A whole big lot of them, much more than on boxes. ‘Can you read this back to me?’ the ball said.

‘No.’

‘Okay.’ The squiggles changed. There were less of them now. ‘Can you read this?’

‘No,’ Jane said. Her cheeks felt hot. This was a test, and she was failing it. ‘I can’t read.’

The squiggles melted together into the Game Globe. ‘That’s okay! Thank you for telling me. Do you know how to count?’

‘Yes,’ she said, sighing.

Owl’s voice came back. ‘Jane, hang on just a minute. I’m going to tweak this thing’s protocols. This is supposed to be fun, not an interrogation.’

‘What’s an intro—’

‘It’s when somebody asks you too many questions. Here, I’m going to configure the educational parameters for you. Let’s see . . . starter reading, starter math, starter Klip, starter species studies, starter science, starter code, and . . . I’m going to go ahead and say advanced technology.’

The Game Globe held perfectly still for a few seconds, frozen in the middle of a pulse. ‘Thanks for answering my questions, Jane! Now, hang on tight – your adventure’s about to begin!’

The Game Globe spun away, like a crazy spark. The light in the yellow space followed it. For a moment, there was nothing.

The nothing didn’t last long. So much stuff happened at once.

A bunch of colours burst all around her, big stripes of them stretching out farther than she could see. Two kids stepped through doors that appeared in the air. A girl and a boy. That was very exciting, because Jane hadn’t seen a boy except in the pictures Owl had showed her. But neither the girl nor the boy looked real. Their bodies were shaped wrong – big round heads, big thick lines along their clothes – and their colours were all the way solid, like paint. They were weird, but there was something nice about them, too. She liked looking at them.

The kids were opposites of each other, kind of. The boy had dark brown skin, and yellowish hair that was real fun, all curled in soft circles. The girl – the girl wasn’t like any girl Jane had ever seen. She had shiny black hair that fell all the way down her back, like a blanket but way nicer. She was brown, too, but a different brown than the boy. Kind of like Jane’s pink skin, but not really. Later, she would ask Owl for more colour words. There had to be better words.

Jane could’ve looked at the kids for a long time, but things went real fast after they showed up. An animal dropped down from somewhere way up high and landed on its feet. It wasn’t a dog, or a lizard-bird, or anything she’d seen. It had feet and hands kind of like a kid, was red-brown and furry, and had a tail like a dog did, but much longer and thinner. It had a silly face, too: fat cheeks and stick-out ears and a squashed-in nose. There was something in the animal’s hand – a curled, shiny metal thing, with a big opening at one end and a smaller one at the other. The animal blew into the small end, and a loud music sound came out: BAAAAAH-BAH-BAH-BAH-BAHHHH!

The kids threw their not-real hands up in the air. The colours spun and bounced. The kids talked music.

Engines on! Fuel pumps, go!

Grab your gear, there’s lots to know

Our galaxy is where we play

Come with us, we know the way!

BIG BUG!

From ground and sky!

BIG BUG!

By stars we fly!

BIG BUG!

We’re the Big Bug Crew!

The Big Bug Crew and YOOOOOU!

‘Hey, Jane!’ the not-real girl said. ‘I’m Manjiri.’

‘I’m Alain,’ the not-real boy said. Her — his, Jane reminded herself. Boys got a different word. His accent was different than Manjiri’s but the same as Owl’s. Jane didn’t know why that was, but it was interesting.

‘And this is our best buddy, Pinch!’ the kids said together, putting their open hands toward the animal. The animal did a silly jump.

Jane did not move. She said nothing. The rain was not the weirdest thing any more, not by a lot.

‘This is your first time playing a sim, right?’ Alain said. ‘Don’t worry. This is gonna be fun!’

Manjiri grinned. ‘We’re so excited for you to be with us on our latest adventure—’

The kids and the animal raised their hands up toward the air, where a bunch of red reading squiggles appeared, lit with yellow sparks. ‘THE BIG BUG CREW AND THE PLANETARY PUZZLE!’ the kids shouted.

‘Come on!’ Alain said. ‘We’ve got to get to the ship!’ He waved his hand over the air and a doorway appeared, not held up by anything. Jane couldn’t see anything through the door, either. Just colours swirling like smoke.

She felt weird, like she was wearing too little clothing. She wanted to go back to her room. She wanted a real task. ‘Um . . .’

‘Are you feeling nervous?’ Manjiri said. ‘That’s okay. Everybody feels nervous when trying new things. Would you feel better if I held your hand?’

Jane’s eyes went huge. Could she do that? Could they touch her? She nodded, once, hard.

The not-real girl’s hand felt like a memory of being held, but oh – oh, it was close enough! Something all knotted up inside Jane’s chest let go. She squeezed her hand; the made-up hand squeezed back. Holding hands was good, more good than not being hungry, more good than she knew how to say.

The furry animal ran up Manjiri’s back and hopped onto Jane’s shoulder. Jane jumped, but the animal just hung on and snuggled in, making silly sounds. The kids laughed. Jane decided the animal was okay.

‘Come on,’ Manjiri said, leading the way, still holding Jane’s hand. Jane followed her through the smoky colours. They tickled in a good way as she went through, and there was the sound of lots of kids laughing. Jane felt a little better, though she still wasn’t sure about any of this.

They stepped into a ship. Even though the only ship Jane had ever seen was the one she and Owl lived in, she knew this one was no more real than the kids were. The walls, the ceilings, the consoles – they were all big and round and soft-looking, with buttons and knobs that didn’t look very functional. Everything was bright bright colours – green mostly, but also red and blue and yellow. It was noisy in there, too. Lots of beeps and whistles and music sounds. There were two big bubble windows at the front, with lots of not-real stars on the other side. In front of the windows were three consoles, each with reading squiggles at the top. A big squashy chair sat in front of each one. They looked good to sit in.

‘This is our ship,’ Manjiri said. ‘The Big Bug!’

‘The Big Bug’s a special ship,’ Alain said. ‘In the real world, ships are powered by different kinds of fuel. Do you know any kinds of fuel?’

‘Um,’ Jane said. She licked her lips. ‘Algae. Sunlight. Ambi.’ She thought hard, and remembered what Owl had found in the water she brought home. ‘S . . . scrub?’

‘That’s right!’ Manjiri said. ‘Those are all common types of fuel. But we don’t use those here. The Big Bug is a ship powered by imaaaaaagination.’ She spread her fingers out flat and wiggled them through the air.

‘With imagination, you can go anywhere!’ Alain said.

Jane didn’t know what that stuff was, but it sounded pretty useful. She wondered if she could find some for the shuttle.

‘Jane, do you live on a ship, or on a planet?’ Manjiri asked.

Jane rubbed the back of her neck. ‘Both,’ she said.

The kids nodded together. ‘Lots of families go back and forth,’ Manjiri said.

‘If you live on a ship, then you already know that you should never ever fly one without a grown-up,’ Alain said. Pinch nodded twice, crossing his furry arms across his chest. ‘But in an imagination ship, we don’t need grown-ups! We can do everything ourselves!’

Alain and Manjiri each raised one of their hands and slapped their palms together. They ran to the consoles, real excited. Manjiri took the one on the left, and Alain took the one on the right.

The kids pointed to the console between them. ‘This one’s for you, Jane!’ Manjiri said. Pinch jumped on top of the empty chair, doing another silly flip. He sure was a busy little animal.

Jane sat in the chair, which felt just as snuggly as it looked. Pinch hopped down and sat in her lap. She held still for a minute, then slowly, slowly reached out to touch his head. Pinch made an ooooo sound, and with his eyes scrunched tight, rubbed his soft head up into her palm. Jane laughed, but just a little, real quiet. She knew she wouldn’t get in trouble for laughing here, but laughing was bad behaviour, and it made her nervous.

‘Okay,’ Alain said. ‘Let’s find out our mission for today!’

‘Hey, Bumble!’ Manjiri said. ‘Wake up!’

A face appeared on all of their console screens: big, fuzzy, yellow, not at all like a person. Jane understood it was an AI like Owl, even though Owl had a person’s face. This wasn’t a real AI, though. Nothing here was real.

The yellow fuzzy face yawned and smacked its lips. ‘Aw, is it time to get up already?’

Alain laughed. ‘Oh, Bumble! You’re gonna sleep the day away!’

Manjiri pointed at Jane’s screen. ‘Jane, this is Bumble, our AI. Xe’s going to tell us where we’re going today.’ Jane knew that person word, too. It was the one for people who weren’t girls or boys, and also what you said if you didn’t know which they were. It was kind of exciting, hearing somebody besides Owl use words that Jane had learned. It made her feel like she was learning important stuff.

Bumble shook xyr face, and looked a little more awake. ‘Today, you’re off to Theth!’ xe said. A picture of a big striped planet with rings and a whole bunch of moons appeared on the bubble windows. ‘You’ll be meeting with our good friend Heshet, who says he needs our help! Some of Theth’s moons have gone missing!’

Jane frowned. Could moons go missing? That seemed wrong. They were real big.

Bumble put another little picture in front of the one of the planet. It was a person, but— ‘Hey!’ Jane said, pointing. ‘I know that species! They’re, um . . . they’re . . . oh . . .’ She tried to remember. She was a Human species. Aeluons were the silver ones. Hermigeans were the squishy ones. Quelin had lots of legs. This one was none of those. This one was green, and had a flat face, and . . . oh, why couldn’t she find the word?

Alain smiled. ‘Heshet is an Aandrisk,’ he said.

Aandrisk. Right. But there was something different about him than the pictures Owl had showed her of that species. ‘Where’s his, um . . .’ Another word she couldn’t find! She felt all dumb inside. She waved her hand over the top of her head, trying to explain.

‘Do you mean feathers?’ Manjiri asked.

‘Yes!’ Jane said. ‘Yes. Feathers. Where’s his feathers?’

‘Aandrisks don’t get feathers until they start to become grown-ups,’ Manjiri said. ‘Heshet’s a kid like us!’

Jane thought about her smooth head, which would never have feathers, or hair, either. Would she always look like a kid to Aandrisks, even when she got older?

‘Okay, Jane, it’s time to plot our course,’ Alain said. Jane’s interface panel changed. There was a picture on it – a bunch of coloured circles with little curvy lines between. ‘These are the tunnels that can get us from here to Hashkath, the moon where Heshet lives. Can you figure out the shortest way to get there? Draw your finger from here to there to give it a try.’

Jane looked at the lines real careful, then at how they connected to the blinking circle they were supposed to get to. It reminded her of rewiring a circuit. Easy. She traced her finger along the screen, the path behind it turning blue.

‘Wow!’ Manjiri said. ‘First try! Good job!’

Pinch made animal sounds and clapped his hands. She hadn’t done much, but Jane felt good anyway.

‘Great!’ Alain said. ‘Now hit the autopilot button and we’ll be on our way! It’s the big red button in the middle.’

Jane saw the big red button. There were a lot of other buttons, too, and . . . oh no. All the buttons were marked with reading squiggles. Would these kids need her to push buttons fast? Did she have to be on task? Her stomach sank. ‘I can’t read,’ she said.

‘We know,’ Alain said in a voice that made her feel safe. He reached over and squeezed her shoulder. ‘Don’t worry! Everybody has to learn how. We’ll help you practise.’

‘This one says “autopilot”,’ Manjiri said, pointing at a big red button. ‘And this one says “stop”.’ She got a big grin. ‘And this—’ She pointed not at a button, but the long block on top of the console. ‘Do you know what this says?’

Jane pressed her lips together and shook her head.

‘That’s you,’ Manjiri said. ‘That’s how you spell “Jane”.’

SIDRA

Everything was gone for a while. When it came back, Blue was there, looking hugely relieved.

‘She’s awake!’ His face melted into a smile. ‘W – uh, welcome back,’ he said, squeezing the kit’s hand. Sidra wondered how long he’d been holding it. She had no record on that point.

There was the sound of someone getting up fast. Pepper appeared, placing a hand on Blue’s shoulder as she plunked herself into a chair. A chair. Tak’s chairs. They were in the tattoo shop.

Why were they in the tattoo shop?

‘Oh, stars,’ Pepper said. ‘Stars, it worked.’ Her head fell forward, pressing against the side of the kit. ‘Shit.’ She sat back up, quickly, her eyes darting over the kit’s face. ‘Are you feeling okay? Gimme a diagnostic.’

Sidra ran a systems check, as directed. Line by line, the results came back: Go. Go. Go. ‘I’m fine,’ she said, and she felt it, too. ‘Though—’ She rifled through her memory files. ‘I don’t know how you got here. I don’t know when you got here. What time is it?’

‘A little after thirteen,’ Blue said. ‘You’ve, uh, you’ve been out for an hour.’

An hour. In Tak’s shop. And Pepper had told her to run a diag— oh, no.

The kit sat up, and Sidra looked around. The front shutters were drawn. The door was shut. Tak was leaning against a corner wall, as far away from them as he could be. He puffed his pipe, face taut, cheeks a pensive yellow.

He knew.

Sidra looked back to Pepper, away from Tak’s silent stare. ‘What happened?’ she whispered.

Pepper sighed. ‘So, as it turns out, nanobot ink doesn’t play nicely with your bots. Their signals interfered with the signals travelling from your core to the kit. It made everything flip out.’ Her eyes flicked to Tak, her gaze hard and careful. Sidra knew that look. It was the same look Pepper had when she was assessing something combustible. ‘Tak called us, and we . . . we figured it out. I—’ She frowned with discomfort ‘—I directed you to go into standby mode until all the bots were out.’

Sidra had no record of the directive, but she knew Pepper well enough to know that triggering a system protocol that forced Sidra to turn herself off would not sit right with her. ‘You had to,’ Sidra said. ‘I understand.’

Pepper shut her eyes and gave a single nod.

‘He re – um, removed the ink,’ Blue said, looking at Tak with a smile. ‘It was a – a real, uh, a real – a real big help.’ His tone was friendly – too friendly, and his words were sticking more than usual.

Tak gave a short, polite Aeluon smile that vanished almost as soon as it had appeared. His cheeks roiled with nervous conflict. He emptied the ash from his pipe, then began to refill it.

Pepper and Blue exchanged a worried glance. The same concern crept through Sidra. Tak knew, and they didn’t know him at all. I don’t even know him, Sidra thought. We had a nice conversation, and I confused that for knowing someone. So stupid. So stupid. And yet, of all the deadly serious things she was scared of in that moment – Tak calling the Port Authority, Pepper and Blue getting in trouble, the likelihood of the kit being deactivated with her still in it – the situational variable that was stuck in the loudest, most unhappy processing loop was the thought of Tak no longer wanting to hang out with her. So stupid.

‘Can we go home?’ she said quietly, doing her best to not meet Tak’s eye.

Pepper turned to the shopkeeper. ‘Listen. Tak. I’m truly grateful for your help today. We all are. And I’m really sorry for the scare you went through. Blue and I – we take responsibility for that.’

‘Pepper—’ Sidra said.

Pepper carried on. ‘We knew she was coming here today, and the potential for risk didn’t occur to either of us. It was a major oversight on our part. I can’t apologise enough.’ She met the kit’s eyes. ‘To both of you.’ Pepper pressed her lips together, choosing her words with care. ‘I know the situation here is . . . unusual.’

Tak gave a short, audible exhale – a relative rarity for his silent species. It was a scoff, a reaction that happened too quick for talkbox phrasing. Sidra’s pathways felt as if they were folding in on themselves. She wanted to go home. She wanted to be anywhere that wasn’t here.

Pepper didn’t miss a beat. ‘If you want money, we can pay you. That’s no problem. Or free fix-it services, we can arrange—’

Tak cut her off. ‘I won’t say anything. Okay? It’s fine. I’ve seen plenty of weird modder shit and I really don’t care. It is not my business. I just don’t want it coming back to me if this project of yours gets found out. I don’t know about this, okay? I don’t know about this, and I have nothing to do with it.’

‘You think she’s – it’s not like that. Sidra’s not a project.’

‘Okay. I told you, I don’t care.’

Blue helped the kit up. ‘C-come on,’ he whispered. ‘We, uh, we should go.’

Pepper sighed. ‘Okay,’ she said to Tak. A tightness crept into her voice, but she remained civil. She owed him, and she knew it. ‘Thank you for being cool about this.’

Sidra headed for the door with Blue, but something made her turn back around. She and Tak stared at each other across the long room. Sidra wasn’t quite sure what he was feeling. She got the impression maybe he didn’t know either.

‘I’m sorry,’ Sidra said. ‘I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.’

Tak looked not to her, but to the Humans accompanying her. Looked at them like you might look at a child’s parents if the kid asked something odd. Like you might look at the owner of a pet that strayed into your house.

‘I came here on my own,’ she said, her voice loud, her pathways spiking with injury and anger. ‘I came here. It wasn’t a directive. It wasn’t a task. I wanted to see you. I thought you could help me. I didn’t mean to cause trouble.’

‘Hey,’ Pepper said softly, putting her hand on the kit’s arm. ‘Sweetie, come on. Let’s go home.’

‘Wait,’ Tak said. ‘Wait.’ He was looking at Sidra now. His pipe smouldered between his fingers. ‘What—’ He paused, uncomfortable, unsure. ‘What did you want my help with?’

‘I already told you,’ Sidra said. ‘Twice, we’ve talked about it.’ She gestured at the kit. ‘This isn’t me. And you – you understood how I felt about that. Or you did, before an hour ago.’ She searched his face, looking for some glimmer of recognition, for that easy dynamic they’d fallen into when Tak had thought they were more or less the same. She saw only confusion and smoke. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. So stupid. She walked out of the shop and into the marketplace. Pepper and Blue followed close behind, their silence hanging thick between them. The crowd flowed around her, dozens of faces, dozens of names, dozens of stories in progress. She’d never felt so alone.

JANE, ALMOST 12

The shuttle hatch slid open. Jane entered, dragging her heavy haul on squeaking wheels. ‘I got some good stuff today.’ She knocked the dust off her shoes (made with thick rubber from a tyre liner, topped with cushion foam and a lot of wrap-around fabric from an old exosuit) and took off her jacket (more scavenged fabric, but from a real ugly chair). She left both by the door. ‘Check it out.’ She heard Owl’s cameras whir towards her as she started pulling stuff off of the wagon. ‘Switch couplers, fabric—’

‘What’s “fabric” in Klip?’ Owl asked.

‘Delet.’

‘That’s right. And what’s that thing behind the fabric?’

Jane glanced at the dead dog, hanging over the back of the wagon. ‘Bashorel.’

‘Can you make a sentence in Klip with that word?’ Owl asked.

Jane thought. ‘Laeken pa bashorel toh.’

‘Almost. Lae-ket kal bashorel toh.’

‘Laeket pa bashorel toh. Why?’

‘Because you haven’t eaten the dog yet. You’re going to eat the dog.’

Dog had joined mushrooms on the list of food things a long while back. Owl’s idea. Taking them apart was gross, but it wasn’t any grosser than scrubbing old tacky fuel gunk out of an engine or something. Gross was gross, whether it was animal or machine.

Jane rolled her eyes at the Klip correction. ‘That’s a dumb rule.’

Owl laughed. ‘Languages are full of dumb rules. Klip’s one of the easiest ones. Most sapients would say it’s much easier than Sko-Ensk.’

‘Can you say something in Standard Ensk?’ Jane had asked this before, of course, but hearing Owl speak different languages was real fun.

‘A ku spok anat, nor hoo datte spak Ensk.’

Jane laughed. ‘That’s so weird.’ She began to unpack her finds, putting them into boxes with things like them. Owl had suggested that she label the boxes in Klip. Boli. Wires. Goiganund. Circuits. Timdrak. Plating. Her letters weren’t as neat as the ones Owl showed her on screen, but she was getting better. Alain and Manjiri were helping. They had a practice mode where she could work on things she was supposed to be learning in school. It was nice, learning stuff with other kids, even though they were pretend, even though they said the same sorts of sentences over and over after a while. Owl said it was important for Jane to remember how to talk to other people. She said it was maybe the most important thing, after getting the ship fixed.

Jane put the fabric in the delet box. ‘Do any other species speak Sko-Ensk?’

‘I think that’d be very rare. Maybe some people at schools or museums. Spacers living out near the border might speak it. I’m not really sure.’

Jane tossed a bolt onto a pile and watched it tumble down. ‘Will they think I’m weird if I don’t speak Klip right?’

‘No, sweetheart. But you will have an easier time if you know more words when we get out of here. You’ll be able to tell people what you want and what you don’t, and you can answer questions. You’ll make more friends if you can talk to people.’

Jane dragged the wagon over to the utility hose and dumped the dog into the basin below it, holding her face as far away as she could from its stinking fur. She hosed it down, watching dirt and bits of whatever swirl down the drain. A few small bugs tried to get away. Jane smashed them with her thumb. She felt bad about it, but they weren’t big enough to eat, and they’d just make her itch.

She sighed as she turned the dog over. She really didn’t like washing them, or the part that came after. Making dogs into food wasn’t fun. They tasted all right, though, if she cooked the pieces on the stove for a long time. It was a heavy taste, like smoke and rust. They kept her fuller than ration bars, which was the best part, because there were only a couple dozen of those left, and she had to keep them for emergencies. She reminded herself of that as she moved the fur around, getting it clean as she could. Some of the fur was burned where her latest weapon had touched it. This model killed dogs faster, which was good, but it made their fur catch fire real easy. She felt kind of bad about that, too . . . but not really.

‘Do you think the dogs know I’m eating other dogs?’ The packs had been bothering her less these days, and she’d wondered.

‘Possibly, yes.’

‘Because they can smell their blood on me?’

‘That’s quite likely, actually.’

Jane nodded. That was good. She took off all her clothes, folded them, and set them far away. She wrapped a clear tarp around herself, the one she’d cut arm holes in and laced a woven cord through like a belt. She picked up the big kitchen knife from the edge of the basin, where she’d left it a few days before. She sucked air through her teeth as she closed her fingers around the grip.

‘Is your hand still bad?’ Owl asked.

‘It’s okay,’ Jane said, so Owl wouldn’t worry. She still hadn’t found a pair of work gloves that fit her right, which made digging through scrap hard. Bare hands were much easier to work with, but that meant getting cuts, like the bad one she’d got across her palm a week ago. Owl said she needed stitches, but after an explanation of how that was done, Jane knew that was not a thing she could do. So, she’d closed the skin up with some circuit glue, which Owl hadn’t liked, but she didn’t have any better ideas. The cut wasn’t bleeding any more, but stars, it still hurt.

She looked at the soaked dead dog, lying in shrinking puddles of dirt and squished bugs, tongue hanging out like an old wet sock. It was so ugly. It was about to get worse.

She chewed her thumbnail. It tasted of plex and sweat and old metal, and some nasty badness she couldn’t name. Maybe a bit of bug. ‘Do you think other sapients will smell blood on me?’

‘No, sweetie,’ Owl said, her face filling up the closest screen like a sun. ‘You’ll be nice and clean when we meet other people.’

‘And you’ll be with me, right?’

‘Of course I will.’

‘Okay,’ Jane said. ‘That’s good.’ She took a breath, raised her knife, and got to work.

Feed source: unknown

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Post subject: REPOST – Seeking heavily-altered derelict shuttle, see full post for details

pinch: i’m searching for a Centaur 46-C, approximately 25 standards old, extensively repaired and altered. few parts left in original factory condition. faded tan hull, photovoltaic coating. if you have any information about its current location, please message me. you don’t have to have it, just know where it is.

fluffyfluffycake: good luck, as always

FunkyFronds: i swear, i could sync my clocks by when this post goes up. where did the past eight tendays go?

tishtesh: how long are you gonna keep reposting this

pinch: until i find it