Half Way Home

• 3 • Mourning

That first night, I had awful and yet comforting dreams. They were awful in their content, but comforting in their delivery. They came out of sequence. Random. And the sense of familiarity brought relief, like I had crawled back into my simulated youth. But what I saw in those fragmented visions tormented me: Colonists burning alive. Kids drowning in air, unable to breathe. Me, pounding my fists on a glass column filled with warm, life-giving fluids, but unable to get inside.

I startled awake, returning to the real and jarred by its consistency. It made my first morning feel nearly as surreal as my birth had the day before.

I rubbed my eyes and sat up. Four of us had ended up sleeping in the transport cab of a farming tractor. A kid named Oliver and I had volunteered to sleep on the floor while Kelvin and Tarsi stretched out on the single bench seat behind us. I stood up quietly and reached for the scrap of tarp I’d been given the night before. Wrapping it around my waist, I opened the door to the cab and stepped out into the dim light of morning.

Standing on the grated metal of the mining tractor’s deck hurt my bare feet, so I moved out to the smooth hood in front, which was nothing more than a large metal box to shield the vehicle’s motor. The surface was still wet with rain, and the thin metal popped as it took my weight. From my new vantage spot—a good fifteen feet off the ground—I could survey most of the colony base.

It was a depressing sight.

Smoldering modules dotted a wide clearing. Wisps of smoke continued to rise from several, their original outlines barely visible. I traced our trampled path from the tractor back to the command module, and from there to the vat module, and gasped at the sight. The roof of the enormous unit had caved in on one side, melting inward. We had a rough estimate of the number of survivors, and subtracting that pitiful number from the original five hundred colonists equaled an unfathomable loss of life.

The night before, listening to the AI tell us what needed to be done, I had imagined his soothing voice would be the way out of trouble. Seeing what was left of base—realizing that Tarsi had been right about the abort attempt—I staggered under the blow of a worse realization: the AI had nearly committed genocide. It had nearly wiped us all out due to some unknown calculation.

Tilting my head back, I gazed up. I’d seen plenty of sky in my training modules, but what lie above was different. A tangle of limbs formed a near-solid canopy over our expansive clearing. Remnants of last night’s rain leaked through, but hardly any direct sunlight made it. To all sides of our base, far in the distance, trees rose up like cliff faces, their girth wider than the entire colony complex. I had to remind myself that they weren’t trees, but rather some sort of alien analogue.

The tractor door clicked open behind me. I turned around to find Oliver stepping from the cab landing and up to the hood. He was even smaller than me, thin and wiry, and the dented metal didn’t make a sound as it absorbed his weight. Wrapped up in a scrap of tarp, he looked like a piece of insulated wire. His thin neck was topped with a small round head full of hair a coppery auburn and augmented by streaks of red mud.

“Blessed morning,” he said, nodding at me and smiling.

“I hope I didn’t wake you,” I said, a bit shocked to find him just as chipper as he’d been the night before.

He shook his head and moved to the end of the hood. He dangled his toes over the edge. Lifting his face and closing his eyes, I watched his smile broaden; his shoulders rose up as he sucked in a deep breath of air.

The previous night, we’d found Oliver standing in the rain, his arms outstretched, his palms flat. He had been shivering—almost on the verge of hypothermia—but as happy as could be. Tarsi thought he was in shock; Kelvin had stepped on my occupational toes by diagnosing him as “horseshit crazy.” The truth had been far more inglorious than either, but more troubling.

Oliver was the colony philosopher, one of the lowest jobs within our hierarchy. In some ways, I found him to be a kindred spirit. Our occupations were both in the soft sciences and meant to help the other fields cross from the shores of one theory to another, fording the uncertainty between. With his position near the end of the vat (and subsequently one of the lowest-ranked among us), Oliver’s profession must’ve been one of those tacked on in an attempt to fill an arbitrary and round number. Five hundred colonists had been decided upon, even if not all of us were needed.

Oliver scanned the half-ruined base, his smile never faltering. He then sank down to a seated position, legs crossed. His unusual behavior highlighted a severe problem facing our colony, one that I would need to be aware of in myself. Our training had been interrupted. Cut short. It would be no different than Tarsi teaching the next generation for nine years before kicking them out of her classroom. My own studies had been terminated between the shift from behavioral psychology to evolutionary psychology, sometime in the late twentieth century. What miracles of mental health had I missed in my learning? Was there something more I could’ve done last night? Something I should be doing right then? Not knowing filled me with dread, as if I were missing a limb I never knew I had and therefore unable to appreciate its absence.

“The gods are surely blessing us with the weather,” Oliver said, looking back at me.

I forced myself to return his smile, but I felt sorry for his perpetual bliss. Oliver had only completed half his philosophy training; he seemed to be stuck in older, mostly religious considerations. He had talked us to sleep the night before, going on and on about the wonders of all the gods’ creations. He had seen it as a miracle that rain fell upon us as we needed our fires quenched.

Kelvin had tried to explain the atmospheric phenomenon of rain from his farming lessons, and how chemical fires were actually made worse by water, but he failed to demystify the experience for Oliver.

Tarsi, meanwhile, had inquired which gods had started the fires—or failed to prevent them. I was pretty sure her comments didn’t come from any of her teaching lessons, and anyway: they posed no threat to Oliver’s exuberance.

“Morning,” someone said behind me.

I turned and saw Tarsi standing on the landing, her face still streaked with mud. I stepped back and offered my hand, helping her onto the tractor’s hood, which had become something of a porch with no railing. She shivered momentarily as she surveyed our surroundings. I looked out as well and noticed the first few colonists moving from the intact modules. We all seemed to be rising at the same hour—a trait, perhaps, borne out of the shared tickings from within our adjoining wombs.

“How are you holding up?” I asked her. I freed one of my arms from the tarp and wrapped it around her shoulders.

She shook her head. “I had crazy dreams. Waking up this morning wasn’t… I had hoped last night was some bizarre training module.”

I squeezed her shoulder through her scrap of tarp, empathizing completely. “I can feel the difference now,” I told her. “The difference between being awake and whatever we were before.”

“How did this happen?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“The gods work in mysterious ways,” Oliver said, smiling up at us.

We all met—as we had agreed to the night before—just outside the command module. The mud-caked and morose shuffled in from all directions like refugees displaced by war. The shredded tarp fashion seemed near-universal, but many of the colonists had cut slits in theirs, popping their heads through them and thereby freeing their arms. A few colonists wore zipped-up hazard suits they had pulled from intact emergency kits. They looked like aliens among us, shiny and new.

Seeing the looks these colonists got from the others—and recognizing the early signs of in-grouping and out-grouping—I wasn’t at all envious of their garb. Nor did I expect the look to last, despite the obvious advantages. The social discomfort in those things had to be worse than the physical annoyances provided by the tarps.

The four of us in our sleeping group merged with another small group from a neighboring tractor. Together, we melded with the audience that had formed around the command unit’s door. Stevens—the boy who had conversed with Colony the night before—stood just outside the module and spoke with a few other colonists. I scanned the crowd and saw several faces I recog-nized, including Hickson, the big mine security guy. I noticed the way he kept shifting from one foot to the other as he chewed on his lower lip.

“Listen up, everyone,” Stevens said, raising his hands. “If you’ll please hold still, Myra is going to get a head count. As stragglers arrive, let’s have them come to this side so we don’t miss them.”

The girl sitting in one of the computer chairs the night before came forward and jabbed the air with her finger. Her lips moved with a count of the not-dead. Stevens ran his hands through his hair, then clasped them behind his back. He looked out as us with a grim expression, his lips pressed thin.

“These are unusual circumstances,” he said, “and they are going to call for an unusual force of will, and of cooperation. The Colony has wakened us fifteen years early after briefly deciding our settlement was nonviable—”

A murmur coursed through the crowd, swelling to a grumbling. Stevens held his hands out, his elbows at his waist. “I understand,” he said. “Nobody was closer to the fire than me.” He shook his head. Even from a dozen paces away, I could see his cheeks quivering. I felt a sudden urge to run to him, but he was able to win back his stoic mask.

“If you’ve had your orientation training module, you know how this works. Colony has been teetering between viable and abort since year one. Our new home has much to offer us, but it has many risks as well. I can promise you this, we will make it work.”

“That’s not what Colony said,” Hickson blurted out. He turned toward the audience. “Colony definitely said unviable last night. I heard it.”

The grumblings returned, several of the colonists shifting about uncomfortably. I became distracted by Myra, who cursed at the movement and started jabbing her finger at our side of the crowd once again.

“People, listen to me,” Stevens said. “Hickson has half the story, and I know it’s easier to believe the worst, but we must stay strong through this. We are awake for a reason—”

“The mission package,” Hickson told the crowd. “We have a very important task, a directive from Colony itself.”

Stevens clapped his hands together loudly, but the colonists had begun talking amongst themselves, creating a dull roar of impossible-to-follow discussions. I felt Kelvin brush up against me and watched him step out between the audience and the command module.

“Listen up!” he yelled, his voice booming above the din. He had his tarp wrapped around his waist, his wide chest exposed and smeared with cakes of dirt. I found myself oddly fascinated by the large sweep of his neck down to his broad, rounded shoulders. His stomach rippled, bunched with knots of muscle as he yelled the crowd to attention. The force of it all stirred something inside me, something that likely merited my professional attention.

Tarsi moved close in his absence as the crowd stilled. I wrapped my arm around her, feeling as protective over her as a mother hen might. Kelvin nodded to Stevens and walked back over to join us, frowning at me as if disappointed by the behavior of the rest of the colonists, his eyes darting between Tarsi and myself.

“Raise your hand if you want to die in the next few days,” Stevens said. He stepped away from the command module and scanned our faces. “If any of you want to die, if you feel a mad compulsion to not live among us, please take your bickering and move on. I have not slept a wink, staying up all night to converse with Colony as I made a case for our long-term survival. If any of you want to live on half-truths and innuendo, please go elsewhere.” He locked eyes with Hickson as he said this.

“We do have an important mission, but we will also devote time to settling this world. The local star,” he pointed up, even though its rays barely filtered through the canopy overhead, “was once given a name by Terran astronomers. We will rename it. We will rename this planet, but not before we scratch a toehold in it. If you trust in me, I promise you we will overcome our challenges. Colony was halfway through the construction phase, which means no protein generators and no farms cleared.”

He held up one hand and ticked off three fingers with the other. “Food, shelter, and clothing,” he said. “Those are our survival priorities. We have enough water collected from the rains to filter and last us for at least a week or two. The rains here are supposedly frequent, so we will not want for bathing and drinking.”

Stevens nodded to Myra, who had rejoined the small leadership group by the module’s door. “What did you come to?”

“Fifty nine,” she whispered, but we all heard the count.

A moan slid through the crowd; I could feel myself contributing to it. Not that I had expected much more, but the harsh finality of the number squeezed my air out. It couldn’t be sixty, or sixty-five. Our hopes had been given mathematical limits. The fuzziness of wishes had collapsed into solid dread.

“I want all the sciences to this side,” Stevens said, pointing to our half of the crowd. I looked at Tarsi and Kelvin, wondering who amongst us qualified. I think the entire gathering became confused. We shuffled in place as we discussed our professions with strangers and debated with each other.

“That includes anyone with mechanical or electrical aptitude. All the construction personnel, including miners and farmers, please come forward. Anyone with support occupations, please go over that way.”

“I guess I’m over there,” Kelvin said, raising his arms and frowning.

Tarsi squeezed his arm and nodded. “I’m going to go over to the support side. I have a feeling we’ll be the ones cleaning up this mess.”

“I’m staying here,” I said. “I guess we’ll meet back up tonight?” They nodded, and I gave each of them a quick hug.

Oliver slid up beside me as the other two departed. We were soon joined by almost a dozen other colonists; we took turns introducing ourselves and our professions. Some—like Mica, a geologist—knew they belonged among the scientists. Others, such as an electrician named Karl, weren’t sure if they should be with us, or with the construction crew.

Several colonists were clearly fudging the semantics of their occupational labels in order to remain together. I watched Tarsi introduce herself to some people in her group and began to think of myself more as a health worker, clearly a sector of support. But before I could pull myself away, Stevens approached our group and began to address us.

“I heard we have an electrical engineer over here?”

Karl raised his hand. “More of an electrician, sir. My name’s Karl.”

“Where were you in your training?” Stevens asked.

“In the middle of integrated circuit troubleshooting. I don’t have any design training, except in basic wiring.”

“That’s fine,” Stevens said. He scanned the group. “Do we have any chemists or chemical engineers?”

“What’re we building?” I asked Stevens. “It might be better to know that, and then see what any of us have to offer.”

He smiled at me, which made chill bumps explode across my skin, my entire body shivering. I rubbed my hands up and down my arms to fake being cold, feeling anything but.

“Good thinking,” Stevens said. “What’s your name?”

“Porter,” I said, reaching out my hand. “Psychologist.”

He grasped it firmly and shook it. “That’s a science?” he asked, his eyes narrowing.

“Human behavioral science, sir. I’m an engineer of people.”

It felt ridiculous as soon as I said it.

“Hmm. I’d like to speak to you privately in a minute.” He turned to the others. “Porter’s right. Let me tell you what we’re going to build, and you let me know how you can help. Be creative. If you can offer support in any area, please let me know.”

He paused. “We’re building a rocket. Well, the construction guys are building the rocket, what I need from you is the payload. Colony is generating most of the schematics, so this will primarily be a building challenge, not a design one. I need people who can solder, who can troubleshoot kinks, and who can double-check every joint and connection in the physical creation.”

“Why a rocket?” someone asked. “What’s the payload?”

“Information,” Stevens said. He immediately raised his hands. “No, I don’t know what the information is, and we will probably not be told. Whatever it is, Colony won’t even trust the communication satellites to transmit it back to Earth. It has to be a hard copy, so you know how sensitive it must be.”

“Are you kidding?” one of our group asked.

“I’m dead serious,” Stevens said. “Colony is, anyway. Whatever it is, it has the AI riled up. I’m lucky I convinced it to divide us up three ways, so one group can work on helping us survive long-term. All the computer cares about is getting this data off the ground and heading back to Earth, which means we need to make that our top priority, or we get no help from the Colony in making this our home. Everyone understand?”

We all nodded, looking to one another to search for signs of dissent.

“Karl, I want you to check with the group by the command module to see about those wiring schematics. The rest of you, today is about scavenging for supplies and setting up our work spaces. I want you to use the power module for your work, but make it so people still have room to sleep. The supply group will tend to your clothing and food, so ignore those grumbling stomachs for a few hours and concentrate on the task at hand. If any of you have chemical training, I want you to liaison with the construction crew—propellant is going to be a major task. Colony has the mining tractors at our disposal, but we’re going to need a place for refinement, probably the fuel depot.” Stevens smiled at us. “Okay, good luck today. I’ll check in with you before dinner.”

He nodded to everyone else and pulled me aside. “So, what’s your prognosis?” he asked. “For the colonists, I mean.”

We stepped away from the scientists and stood in the small clearing that had formed between the three groups. I watched Tarsi speak with two other colonists, her head nodding. I wondered if by the end of the day, she would feel more connected with them than she felt with me.

“I’m not sure,” I said. I shook my head and tried to concentrate on the question. I looked Stevens in the eyes. “I’m not even sure how I’m doing, to be honest. I think you’re doing a great job of keeping things organized, of giving us a sense of purpose. That’s really important right now.”

“Yeah,” Stevens said, looking tired all of a sudden. He flapped back his poncho and pulled a knife out of a scabbard tied around his waist. He motioned for my tarp, and I relinquished it, trying to act comfortable with my nakedness.

“I figure people need to stay busy to keep their minds from wandering.” He inserted the blade in the middle of my tarp and made a quick gash. “Honestly, though, I wish the abort sequence went in the opposite order as the birth sequence.”

I nodded, having had the same morbid thought. The lowest-ranked colonists were wakened last, but that also meant we were the last to be aborted. That left the least qualified in charge of our half-wrecked colony.

Stevens held out the poncho he’d just made and I bowed slightly, letting him drape it over my head.

“I don’t think they ever planned on an abort sequence being terminated,” I said.

“Aborting the abortion?” he joked.

I smiled, more out of duty than any real sense of mirth. “Did Colony say what happened?” I asked.

Stevens shook his head but I saw something flash across his face. Something he was holding inside, a little twitch I had been trained to recognize.

“No,” he said, “but it must’ve happened fast. Colony changed its mind midstream.”

I looked toward the command module. “I didn’t think we’d really mastered the human brain like that.”

“I don’t know that we have,” Stevens said. “Maybe it made a discovery after the sequence had already begun, or a difficult calculation finally spat out some conflicting result. We may never know.”

He patted me on the shoulder, looking up and down my poncho. “I want you to keep me abreast of any problems you see. If you get any ideas on what to do about Hickson, I’d love to hear them.”

“You should find something for him to kill,” I said.

Stevens’s eyes widened. “Do what?”

“Some predators. Anything that threatens the group. The guy is programmed for security, and right now you’re the threat. You need to find something outside our group to unleash him on.”

Stevens nodded, his brow furrowing in thought.

“You’re right. Absolutely right. But I really hope we don’t find anything like that out there. Colony is being pretty mum on what we can expect. Very secretive.”

I clasped Stevens’s shoulder as he looked around at the other groups. “We’ll figure it out,” I told him. “On our own.”

“Yeah,” he said. He nodded, but the corners of his mouth went down instead of up. Another of those little signs I’d been schooled to note.

“All for the glory of the Colony,” he muttered.

I nodded, but felt no compulsion to answer.