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When Ezekiel awoke and wandered into the common spaces, Rae was in the kitchen cooking breakfast hash. By this he deduced they were even lower on standard food than they thought. She did add a dash of real chili pepper, and she put a bottle of his favorite Atascadero hot sauce on the table next to the plate she set before him, so life wasn’t so bad after all.
“Thanks, Mom,” he said with put-on brightness designed to appease parents. Being polite deterred getting a lecture, which he supposed was the point, a kind of social symbiosis. “Where is everyone?”
“Exploiting that Sentry,” she said as she plated some hash and then dumped the rest of it into four bowls. “Once you’re done you can take these to your brothers and sisters.”
“Yeah, okay.” He shook drops of spicy sauce onto the plate and then shoveled seasoned hash into his mouth.
Mom sat down across from him, looking at him the way mothers do. Or at least, the way mothers on TV seemed to, which was the same as his own mother. He’d never met anyone else’s mother for real. He focused on eating, hoping she wouldn’t start some kind of “conversation.”
Fortunately she seemed content to just stare at him with that funny smile she had. As soon as he could, he finished, dumping his plate and spoon into the sink and grabbing the bowls, balancing them on his hands and arms like a diner waitress. “See you!”
“Bye,” Mom replied.
In the cargo bay he expected to see a scene of science, with inexplicable tubes and biomachines and his siblings in miniature lab coats or something. Instead they all just stood next to the quiescent dolphin-like Sentry with their palms resting on it and their eyes closed.
Dad’s avatar hung out to the side and turned his head when Ezekiel came in. “They’re exploiting it.” His mouth turned up in a smile.
“Cool. What are they gonna do with it?”
“We’ll see.”
“Dad...I want to keep it. It could do all sorts of stuff. I could train it to push more asteroids around and stuff.”
“You know, son, I could make you a Sentry any time, that knows you from birth. This one is special, though, because it has some fragmentary memories it inherited from the three Meme that got away, as well as all their standard military programming. It’s too useful to just make into a pet for you. I’m sorry.”
“Aww...”
The avatar smiled. “Don’t go saying I never let you have any fun. When I was a kid I could only dream of having my own spaceship and flying around the solar system.”
“When you were a kid they didn’t even have computers!” Ezekiel retorted.
Dad just shook his head in amusement. “Besides, we might have a use for this little guy when the Destroyer shows up. I’d hate you to get too attached to him.”
“He might get killed!”
“Exactly the reason I don’t want you to become fast friends.”
Ezekiel looked around at the scene, realizing he wasn’t going to win this argument. “Okay. Well...I’m going to get back to work, then.”
“All right.” Dad lifted a hand in farewell. “Well done with this thing, son. It might make a real difference.”
“Thanks, Dad,” he said, reddening at the praise. As smart as his siblings were, such special recognition for him alone had come more rarely lately. It felt good to have done something they didn’t and couldn’t.
Still...his potential pet just got snatched away from him, turned into a lab experiment. Boo.
He called Roger back to dock, and boarded. Maybe if he found another Sentry out there he could keep that one.
