Chapter 6
Ver

“You’re finally home, dear girl. At 3:05 in the morning! Are you still human, or has some nocturnal animal’s DNA been annealed to your genome?”

Charles’s deep voice greets me as I step into my first-floor dorm room. It is a bare white box, but it is mine. The only decorations are products of Charles’s imagination—the best his AI brain can give. He projects rotating starry images on the wall next to my bed. They lull me to sleep most nights, but they are useless now.

“I heard about the alarm in BioLabs,” Charles goes on. “Apparently there was a gas leak. Now that I know you’re not burned or dismembered, I can delete that data from my memory.”

That means he was worried. I spend more time in this room with Charles’s incorporeal voice than outside with people. He knows all my needs and routines. One might call him my friend, but I am hesitant. Friends should have bodies.

“Cal died tonight, Charles,” I say.

I crumple onto the bed and close my eyes, which are swollen and sore from crying. But the image of Cal’s limp body is burned into my brain. Yellow hair tumbling over the floor tiles. I open my eyes again.

“Oh, no,” Charles says, his tone nuanced and humanlike. At his command, the fleecy comforter creeps up my body and embraces me. I cry into it with abandon. Charles can run it through the communal wash-dry circuit later.

“It hurts so much. Why did it have to be Cal? It feels like someone is stabbing me in the heart.”

“I wish I could empathize. I lack both a heart and the experience of being stabbed.”

Aiyo. I look up at the ceiling, to where Charles keeps his hard drive, and I envy his simple existence.

“How can I improve your emotional state?” Charles says.

I have no reply. A memory of Cal fills my mind: the night he used the lab’s audio system to play a selection of soft, jingling keyboard songs popular in his mountain hometown. During our stretch breaks, he would drag me up from my stool and we would dance. Me, doing what I could. Him, jumping and swinging his hips, waving his bionic hand in light-up mode high in the air. A human fluorophore. Extinguished now.

“Would you like me to search the Neb for entertainment?” Charles offers. The Nebula is the cloud system that contains all known information, each pocket behind varying amounts of firewalls and paywalls.

“Find me something peaceful,” I say. “And from far away.”

“I know just the thing.”

Charles projects holographic images of heavenly spheres: Pangu, our dim, burnt-orange star. The gas giant planet Gui—eleven times the size of Jupiter, back near Sol—so massive that it causes Pangu to wobble in its rotation. Gui’s three moons: sparkling One, covered in crystal formations, green plains and forest, and humanmade lakes as reflective as mirrors; green Two, with its tropical crops at the equator and its yellow corn and wheat fields in the temperate regions . . .

And Three. Yellow, dusty, un-terraformed. My home is pimpled with craters and habitat domes that contain entire cities. I pass my hand through the projection, picturing desert sand falling between my fingers.

On Three, we say we were born in Pangu’s shadow. It is not scientific; stars do not cast shadows. But to some, the saying feels true. When it comes to our future, we know little and decide nothing. Thick clouds of space dust obscure every possibility.

The police may soon have a judicial computer cluster and human jury put me on trial for murder. Although the process is meant to be unbiased, taking into account all known details about the victim’s life, the cluster rarely disagrees with the police. The human jury usually follows the cluster.

If this happens, the state could lock me up in the penal colony of G-Moon Three, the one people call the Sandbag. At the northern pole, where it is so cold that the carbon dioxide exhaust solidifies when the camps pump it into space. The guards put shocker implants in the back of prisoners’ mouths. If you are disobedient or try to escape, you are electrocuted. There is only rudimentary medical care, and specialized medications are not permitted. If they put me in a tiny cell, I will be in more pain than should be legal. Pain so intense, I will wish it would hurry up and kill me.

I felt that pain, before I started my medication. An alien land of agony. I refuse to return.

“Three is too close,” I tell Charles. “Show me someplace farther, please.”

He zooms out from the Pangu System, across the black sky to Proxima Centauri B, a red dwarf. Its single rocky planet houses a million humans who stomp around at 1.3 times Earth-gravity. They do not seem to be feeding themselves well—the Senate ships them tons of food in exchange for their valuable metal ores.

Humans settled Proxima three hundred years ago, about forty years before they reached the Gui moons. It was by chance that my ancestors woke up from their cryo-chambers here, not on that dense rock orbiting Proxima.

“Even farther,” I tell Charles. “Take me away from every place I know.”

Charles pans across the sky at light-years per second and shows me Sol, orbited by its four rocky inner planets, asteroid belt, and four outer gas giants. My muscles unclench; I rest my hands over my heart and feel my ribcage expand, then contract, over the underlying pulses.

Earth, the third planet from the sun, is barren. A steaming, swampy marble covered with gray clouds, long since abandoned by humanity. A million poor souls still live on its moon, though their infrastructure is shaky and their cities are subterranean. Our ancestors—those who could afford spacecraft passage—left Earth’s orbit centuries ago, taking with them shiploads of seeds, bacterial and archaeal samples, fungal spores, and frozen animal embryos. They survived long journeys to faraway planets and stars. To Mars’s green, lake-dotted surface and Jupiter’s icy moons. To Proxima and Alpha Centauri, to the Gui Moons.

My ancestors made it here, while so many others perished.

These are the things I tell myself when I hate the universe for gambling with every cell in my body. Ripping membranes and molecules. Putting them together again in all the wrong ways. I am lucky to be alive.

Tonight, the thought fails to comfort me. Every thump thump of my heart kills me, because Cal’s is no longer beating.