Kea's Landing

By Erika Hammerschmidt

The revolution is over. Together with Draz and Monarch, Kea now commands the ship that has always been her home. But Kea is young, socially challenged, and terrified of becoming the monster who ruled before her. Then, in the midst of struggle, she discovers the diary of an enigmatic writer named Mara... revealing a secret world of friendships and fairy tales, a homemade resistance parallel to their own. But while Kea and Draz unravel the question of who Mara is, and what became of the rebel group called the Fish Pond... their own voyage comes to a sudden end. Now they find themselves in a world both human and alien,
caught in an otherworldly conflict between two colonies far beyond their own. And the writer of that diary may hold the key to all their futures...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9781667184739

Erika Hammerschmidt

I am an autistic author, artist and speaker. I give speeches to schools and support groups, telling the story of how I grew up as an alien on earth.I was diagnosed with various neurological disorders around the age of 11, but labels aren't everything to me. We are all individuals, and a diagnosis is just one of humanity's flawed but natural attempts to arrange the world into categories that seem neat and orderly. It's language, and as much as I love language, it is not a perfect way of describing reality. There is no perfect way. No word's definition is universally agreed upon. No written definition can perfectly encompass the idea expressed by a word. And some ideas can't even be expressed by words in the first place.What I am can be described partially by the words "Autism," "Asperger Syndrome," and "Tourette Syndrome," with their definitions as printed in the 1992 edition of the DSM-IV, as they were interpreted by my childhood psychiatrist... but really, individual people all have their own unique mental conditions. Mine works for me right now, with or without labels. I see no need to change.

Book preview

1 Soul in a Bottle

MARA

My name is Mara.

At least that's what I want it to be, I think. I like it better than Jacob, anyway. Let's go with Mara.

I mean, it's not like you need to call me anything. You aren't going to meet me. Will I even be alive by the time you see this? Probably not. At least, I told Bogs to keep this file private unless I stop updating it for more than a week. And I'm going to try and keep updating it every few days, for as long as I'm alive.

So there you are.

Whatever. A lot of the time I just want to change into a fish and swim away from this whole mess, you know? Sometimes I think that might be more what I was meant to do, anyway.

I mean, nature did try to make me a fish. But it messed up. And then the humans tried to change me into a human, but they messed up too. It's A Long Story, and I'll talk about it later.

I don't know who you are or when you're reading this. I hope you're on a planet and everyone is happy? But like I said, I don't think I'll live to then— because people who are fish like me don't usually live long. (I'll explain later I promise.)

But I have things to say. And I can't talk to anyone now very much, because it takes hours, and people always get tired of waiting.

People Have No Patience.

Well, sometimes people have patience to read. But usually not if you're writing as they go.

I don't know why that makes a difference, but whatever.

Anyway that's why I asked Bogs to try and find me some private space on the network to keep a diary. If I write in all my free time, every last minute, then I can write an entry like this in… maybe one or two days, depending on whether it's a good day and I have energy.

Why am I doing this?

Well, because I don't necessarily believe them when they say I'm immortal, okay? They tell us we're all immortal after we die, but who the hell knows. I don't totally believe I have a soul that will go to heaven. Maybe I'm just sea foam, you know? And even if I do have a soul, I don't know if my soul will remember everything I knew and thought when I was alive.

Maybe it won't. And then it won't be me. Because me is the things I think and the things I know. A soul wouldn't be anything without memories.

So, maybe, if I write down as much as I can, that will mean I'm still kind of there, even after I'm dead. If a soul is memories, and memories can be written, just think of this as me Backing Myself Up.

It's our secret. Bogs promised me he won't look at what I write. But he will set it to be released on the network if I stop writing.

And that's what I want. I don't want people to know all the things I think when I'm alive, because I don't know what the BGs would do to me then, because I think about things like wanting to be called Mara instead of Jacob, and wishing they had let me stay a fish.

But after I'm dead I do want people to know. Because I feel like that might keep me alive.

I don't know if that makes sense. But I don't care, because it's how I feel, and the point of this is writing down how I feel.

Thanks for reading, if you do exist, whoever you are. It makes me feel kinda good to think that someone will read this sometime, so I appreciate you, or at least the thought of you.

Because every time you read something I wrote, I'm sort of copying myself a little bit more into your head.

If I write enough, and you read enough, you might someday have a little Me-Simulation in your brain with you. Getting more accurate all the time, the more you read. Saying things I would say. Reacting to things the way I'd react.

Even thinking the way I think, because it'll be made of real brain parts. I'll be alive in there, really alive, as a part of you. Like all those bad movies where the villain who wants to be immortal takes over other people's bodies and it's a whole horror story!

But in real life it's not evil at all, it's just human, it's just the way people's minds work when they know other people.

At least I think so. I don't really know any people.

I'll write again when I'm not tired, because this took me All Day.

2 Headache

KEA

Ow ow goddamn ow.

Draz didn't seem to hear me. He shifted his position in the computer chair, but the brainwave-typing nodes on his temples kept pouring lines of code onto the monitor.

My head hurts like hell, I said, not sure if I was talking to Draz or myself. He did look up, though, finally, turning the desk lamp toward me. The ache swelled like a balloon inside my sinuses.

Maybe it's the lights, he said. Monarch, turn down the lights thirty percent.

The lights stayed at the same intensity.

Draz frowned. Monarch, why did you not dim the lights?

The computer voice answered. I am incapable of making such a change in the environmental controls while other applications are occupying so much of my memory.

You didn't used to be incapable of that. Is this one of the billion new brulbs that have shown up in the past year?

Definition of the word 'brulbs' unknown.

I stifled a giggle, partly because laughing at Draz's aphasia would be cruel, but mostly because laughing at anything right now would hurt my head.

Draz sighed. Monarch, you know perfectly well I meant 'bugs.' Is that one of the billion new computer errors that have been cropping up recently?

The number is actually—

I don't want to know. He turned to me. Sorry, Kea. I can't dim the lights until I'm finished with this. What I'm doing apparently takes up too much memory.

I sighed. It's okay. I don't think it's the lights anyway.

It could be boredom, it could be apprehension about the med-station appointment that was coming up today, or it could just be anxiety about how the ship was doing.

Which wasn't good, I thought, swinging my legs from the seat of my own chair.

It had been two years since we redirected the ship's course. We had thought we had three years to find a new planet to land on, but the engines had already begun to deteriorate. Every time the ship fired them even a little to make a slight turn, they protested and resisted and strained their moving parts, taking more power to do less work.

It wasn't hopeless. Lefty kept saying we were in a good area of the galaxy, and already we had found a few planets that were nearly livable. The last one would have been perfect, except for the nitrogen oxides and ozone in its atmosphere. After months of trying to use our failing, rickety equipment to design scrubbers for it, we had nothing. If our supplies had been a little more complete, that would have been our new home. Next time we might be luckier.

If the ship survived till next time. The space behind my eyes throbbed again.

What are you doing, anyway? I asked.

There was a moment of silence as I waited for the reply.

Draz, you didn't answer me.

He jumped. "I'm sorry, Kea. But several thousand people are on their way to lunch now, and the nutrient solution they're about to eat is being mixed as we speak—and if I don't fix a certain computer malfunction very soon, it is going to contain toxically high levels of vitamin D, enough to endanger the nipkeys, the kipneys— kidneys of everyone on board. So forgive me if I'm not one hundred percent focused on you right now."

I sat up very straight. Again?

What do you mean, again? Last time it was potassium, not vitamin D.

I was vaguely surprised that I didn't feel a fear-powered kick of adrenaline. Apparently this sort of thing had happened enough times that I was numb to it by now.

It was what this ship got for being made of trash. The machines— rejects exiled from Earth, like the people— were now doing what even decent computers start to do after twenty-two years of nonstop use. Breaking down, overrun by errors. Food contamination, air pollution, medical mistakes, spontaneous jamming of various machine parts. We were all hoping against hope that nothing would outright kill everyone on the ship before we found a planet.

You're doing that manually? Can't Monarch fix it? If so, things really were getting bad. Poor Monarch. What was the point of being an optimizing computer if it was too broken to fix anything else?

Too much memory currently devoted to debugging the air circulation system. Oxygen takes precedence over food. Monarch's voice seemed strained, as if coming in over a poor network connection.

From my chair, I could see the picture on Draz's screen. A map of the system of pipes and tanks, transporting the ingredients of meals… with a dark mass advancing through one of the pipes toward the main tank of nutrient solution. There was a stab of pain in my sinuses that paused my breath for a moment.

Shit-rats, said Draz. "I can't shut off the program that's piping excess vitamin D toward the food tanks. The application that would let me do that is buggier than—what happened to your hair?" His eyes flicked upward.

Huh? I ran my hand over my head, then winced as even that small movement reignited my headache. Nothing happened to my hair. Do you mean it's longer than it was? I've been growing it out for a year, Captain Oblivious.

"Of course I noticed that, Captain Obvious. It reached your butt like a month ago. I wasn't talking to you."

Then whose hair…?

Lefty's voice answered. "Nobody's hair, Captain Optimizers. I don't have any."

Finally following Draz's eyes, I turned toward the doorway, where Lefty was leaning against the small robot bodyguard that had accompanied her to the office.

She was entirely bald. I noticed in a confused way that she had a very nicely-shaped head.

"You shaved your head, Lefty?" said Draz, continuing to type, his vague startlement still occupying an apparently small sliver of his focus. His eyes were back on the monitor.

It's not shaving. It's electrolysis. It wasn't hard—I just had to reconfigure a few of the instruments in the med station.

Why in the world did you do that? He sounded amused, but didn't bother to show it on his face, which was still fully aimed at his screen.

Lefty shrugged. Long hair gets tangled. Short hair sticks up on one side after you sleep on it. Shaving and buzz cuts grow back too fast. I got sick of having hair.

That's a big decision, Lefty, said Draz, not showing any appreciation of its bigness in either his expression or his voice tone.

Lefty gave a short laugh through her nose. Says the guy who's trying to decide how to keep ten thousand people from overdosing on a fat-soluble prohormone.

Yeah. And… Draz sighed. As for that, it looks like there aren't any good choices. All the mechanisms that could have shut off the vitamin D pipe failed to work. It'll be in the food in less than a minute. I'm gonna have to make an announcement for everybody to leave the cafeteria and eat emergency rations instead.

Lefty approached the computer screen, watching the pipe diagram over Draz's shoulder. What about that? she said, pointing to a smaller tank pictured near the main one.

"Holy craptiles! Yes!"

A flurry of commands appeared in the coding window, and after a tense moment's look at the monitor, Draz breathed a soft sigh.

What happened? I asked.

I couldn't stop the vitamin D directly—but I gave a command to start piping in citric acid from a tank that was closer than the vitamin D, and that activated mechanisms that blocked anything else from entering until such time as I give a command to stop the citric acid.

I was confused. So… what, the vitamin D will still get into the food when you stop piping the citric acid in?

I won't give a command to stop it. The citric acid tank will just keep pumping into the main tank until it's empty, and even then, as long as I don't give an actual command to stop the pumping, the vitamin D will stay blocked. I can spend the afternoon fixing the chicanery at my leisure. I mean, fixing the machinery.

He didn't seem excited about the prospect, but he relaxed enough to stretch and yawn. Lunch in the cafeteria is going to be sour today, but it won't be lethal. The tank was small, and in any case it's awfully hard to get too high a dose of citric acid.

I yawned and stretched, too, but then took a shuddering breath of pain as the pressure in my head quadrupled. Ow. That hurt.

Maybe you should go lie down, said Lefty.

Yeah, I think I will. I got up from my chair. See you tonight, Lefty. Remember, it's dinner night with Mark and Beep. Draz made green bean casserole.

Enough for all of us?

"Yes, even if Chris and Jake show up. And Gabria. Even if you bring Blaro, too. There are plenty of beans. You're always invited."

Not gonna miss it. She waved. Go. Rest.

I trudged out the door of the office, toward the bedroom. The robot that had escorted Lefty started following me, intent on my safety.

I cursed it under my breath.

I was sick of this. Sick of living in a few little rooms in the front cylinder of the ship, trying to help govern a population of former students and teachers in the back cylinder, as they grew more and more impatient to reach a planet, like passengers whining in the back seat of a car in an old movie.

Every day we struggled to keep thousands of people alive. And still too many of them, for whatever reason, seemed to wish for the old system back, the system where BGs had dictatorial rule and rems could be imprisoned in a tiny dark room for offenses like whispering to their friends.

Not all of them, not even most, but... still too many.

Looking into the bedroom I shared with Draz, I realized I didn't really feel like lying down. My headache wasn't tiredness, it was cabin fever.

I needed to get out. But I was damned if that robot would follow me. Right now I was as sick of robots as I was of these boring little rooms.

There was a long-range stunner on the counter. I picked it up and shoved it into my belt, and dug my robot control wristband out of a drawer. If someone bothered me, I could defend myself. If I needed a robot, I could call one.

The wristband worked fine. When I commanded the bot to stay behind, it replied with a petulant hum, but stayed still as I walked away.

I headed down the corridor, passing the engine control room, finally reaching the wide open space where conveyor lifts led up to the center of the ship. Near the midpoint, the lid of the can, where the tube leading to the next can beckoned me.

Our ship: just two huge, constantly spinning cylinders, joined end to end by a connecting tube. Each containing more cylinders, cans of different sizes nested one inside the next. The floor underneath me was the inside wall of one of the innermost cans, with centripetal force substituting for gravity, pushing me out toward the floor as the ship drilled its way through space.

Our rooms and offices, here in the front cylinder, were situated on the top floor: the layer closest to the zero-gravity middle, but not quite in it. The awareness of where I was— on the top floor of the front cylinder, the same place the BGs used to captain the ship from, while we rems all used to sit helpless in the back— that awareness hit me again, as it did from time to time, still feeling wrong, even after these whole two years.

To reach the back cylinder, I would have to travel through the connecting tube. Which meant first going upward, until I was actually in that zero-gravity center.

I watched the conveyor lifts, the poles sticking down through holes in the ceiling, each with a chain of handholds and footholds clattering down one side and up the other, in constant motion. With a quick breath and a tensing of muscles in preparation of the jolt my head was about to get, I grabbed a set of the handles on the nearest c-lift, jumped my feet into a set of footholds, and let it carry me up.

Through the ceiling hole, through a tube, into a perpendicular tube, where I jumped and grabbed onto the perpendicularly moving c-lift that crossed my path, making the leap with well-practiced muscle memory.

I couldn't feel any gravity anymore. I was in the core of the ship, the place we used to call the teacher tunnel, moving through the connecting tube between the ship's two cylinders.

My hair was getting in my eyes. I shoved it out of the way, wishing I'd tied it back. I kept forgetting how long it was.

It was only a few minutes before I was jumping onto another c-lift that would bring me down to the outer floors. The back cylinder— I was here. I could go visit the cafeteria, the bedroom layer, or the hydroponics lab.

I clung more tightly to the c-lift as I felt gravity increasing, still not sure where exactly I was going. My head pounded.

The lift exited the tube that led from the teacher tunnel, and then I was out in the open, on the innermost layer of the back cylinder—the classroom and cafeteria floor.

3 Sour Taste

KEA

I kept forgetting how crowded it was here.

And the fact that I'd been getting used to the front cylinder's quiet isolation could not be a good thing for me or anyone else, so I made myself look around, take in the noise and colors and smells of people. Everywhere, rems and BGs talking and sitting in chairs sucking water and nutrient fluid from tubes leading from the food tanks.

Draz was right, it didn't seem to be killing them. As I got off the c-lift, I realized that not only was I hungrier than I'd thought— but the idea of our planned casserole dinner was stimulating more guilt than appetite in me.

A few minutes ago I'd been focused on how stressful it was for us to manage the food supply, not thinking about how much of a privilege it was.

A few minutes ago I'd felt proud that Draz and Lefty had managed to keep the manufactured food edible and save the emergency rations for some later emergency.

But we didn't have to eat the food whose composition Draz tweaked through the computers. Draz cooked almost all of our meals by hand, experimenting gleefully with spices and sauces, and I was eating better than anyone in this side of the ship. I had leftovers from a previous meal of glazed carrots and rice, and I'd been planning to eat them for lunch before going to dinner with Draz and the crew.

Maybe that guilt had been the deepest, most original impetus for my headache, my drive to come out here.

Maybe I wasn't going to feel like I was any better than the dictators we'd ousted, not until I spent a moment actually living in what we had made.

There was an empty seat. I sat down in it, triggering the mechanism that lowered the food and water tubes toward my face and a nutrient bar into my hand. I looked at the bar's grainy surface, pressed together just a few minutes ago.

It didn't look any different with the extra citric acid, and I trusted Draz that it wasn't any worse for me, but my mouth resisted opening.

Everyone here was eating this. I was going to feel like a dictator for the rest of the day if I didn't take a bite.

Get lost, asshole.

I glanced up. The voice wasn't aimed at me, though it was nearby. My eyes found its source after a moment of scanning.

It came from a young woman. I wasn't the best at gauging people's ages, and hers could have been anywhere from late teens to early twenties— perhaps a rem, perhaps one of the older BG kids.

She was tall and fit, with short curly hair, dressed in tight short trousers and a half-buttoned shirt with the sleeves ripped off. Her lips and fingernails were somehow dyed dark red, and she had tied a cloth to form a matching red headband around her hairline.

As she sprawled across a nearby seat trying to focus on eating her energy bar, she seemed to be arguing with some men nearby. At first I thought it was just one, but as I watched her, I realized she was interacting with at least three—a short stocky guy with light brown hair, a taller and more muscular one with hardly any hair and a broad face, and a thinner blond one who looked too old to be a rem.

"I'm not saying it's a date, the big muscly guy was muttering. I'm saying, tennis in the VR rooms, all four of us. Then back to our place, and see where it goes after that. How do you twist that into us demanding a date with you?"

My point isn't whether you call it a date, the woman said, waving her energy bar at him. My point is, I said I'm not interested, and that's when you all are s'posed to go away and leave me alone.

But how can you be 'not interested' when you haven't even tried? the stocky guy said, sounding a little calmer than his friend but still pretty tense. It's like saying you don't like strawberries when you've never tasted them. It's not rational.

Also not your problem, she shot back, crossing her ankles on the back of the seat ahead of her. So piss off.

"It is our problem, the muscly guy said, moving a step closer to her. We're people too. We have needs. We get lonely. Why are your feelings so much more damn important?"

I frowned, the bar in my hand squashing a tiny bit. The three men probably lived in the cabins that we had constructed on the bedroom floor below. Back when the dictators had ruled the ship, BGs had had bedrooms of their own, but rems had all shared one vast bedroom that took up an entire can-shaped layer of the back cylinder. Since the rebellion, much of the bedroom layer was sectioned off into apartments nice enough that even some former BGs lived there.

Plenty of people invited sex partners into their cabins for the night, eager to release years of pent-up libido.

But some of them didn't have a clue how to do it decently. The BGs had raised a ship full of kids under a strict abstinence-only regime, enforced by constant surveillance, with a rudimentary sex education that had pretty much no mention of consent and respect. Add that to the preexisting social challenges of many people who grew up on this bucket, and there were, unfortunately, lots of guys who had trouble taking no for an answer.

The security robots were prepared to stop it the moment it got out of hand, but still I watched in concern, my headache pulsing. It wasn't easy to find a happy medium between unregulated chaos and the previous police state. For the time being, our programmers had settled on allowing complete freedom of speech, but drawing the line at unwanted physical contact. If one of the guys touched her and she made any sound or motion recognizable as protest, the nearest security station would dispatch a bot to arrest the harasser.

It troubled me that this sort of behavior was apparently so common that I was seeing it just a few minutes after I got here. And I wasn't sure the system of sending a bot upon physical contact was good enough. If the guys did touch her—and it looked as if they might—there was going to be at least a brief struggle before the bots arrived, with potential injuries and guaranteed stress.

As the heat and sweat of my hand caused the energy bar's smell to waft across my face a little more strongly, I felt my headache press even tighter at my skull. I was sitting here wasting food that I couldn't bring myself to eat, and now I was also watching someone who was probably going to get hurt, and doing nothing. What kind of leader was I? What was the point of me even coming here?

Hey, I found myself shouting at them, my voice stinging my throat. Hey! Yes, you guys! Leave her alone, okay? To hell with it. I was going to stop it, or try to, before it came to violence and robot arrests.

Their faces all went through the same change when they turned to look at me. Squinted eyes widening, lowered brows jumping up, downturned mouths falling open.

What the hell? Is that... The stocky guy pointed.

Holy shit, it is, it's Optimizer Kea. The older guy was staring at me open-mouthed.

The muscular guy scrunched up his face. Is it really her? Where's Optimizer Draz?

I'd known there was a good chance they would recognize me. My picture and video had been in official announcements, and not everyone took as long to learn a face as I did.

Maybe I was enough of an authority figure to shock them into rethinking their behavior. I hope you know harassing people isn't okay, I said, trying to keep my voice steady. Just because the rules about dating and intimacy have been loosened, that doesn't mean you can push it on someone who doesn't want it.

The skinny, old-looking guy scowled at me. Nobody touched her.

I glanced at the woman. Then keep it that way, I said.

She had continued to eat her energy bar while all this went on, heels still rested on the seat-back in front of her, and was now licking the last crumbs from her fingers. She looked less concerned than I felt right now, even though I was the one trying to protect her. I wondered if she had to face this kind of thing a lot.

Are you okay? I asked her, though my voice somehow came out sounding like a mom worried about a baby, instead of the friendly peer-to-peer concern I'd been aiming for.

I wanted to kick myself. The unbidden patronizing tone in my voice reminded me, just a little, of the way Screen Man used to talk to me. Was it so easy to become the same thing I'd hated?

If she noticed, she gave no sign. Thanks, kid, she said in an even voice that I couldn't read. She gave me a weirdly angled wave that might have been part salute, and got up from the seat. The men turned to watch her saunter off toward the nearest c-lift, probably heading down to her own cabin. Maybe they were trying to decide whether to follow her or stay here.

Whatever bit of common sense they had must have won out. None of them went after her. Eventually their heads turned back to me.

And my own head felt like exploding.

I'd stopped whatever was about to happen... and now instead of three guys being carried out of sight by robots, I had three guys staring at me with resentment in their faces, blaming me for screwing up their chances with a girl they'd never had a chance with.

Sure, there was no rationality in their resentment, but it was still there, and I had put it there. What was I doing today, just ticking off boxes on some checklist of things that would piss off the masses we were trying to govern?

I got up from the seat, bringing my eyes closer to their level and drawing on any mental reserves I had of diplomacy, empathy, tact. Maybe I could smooth over whatever insult I'd caused them, calm them down, maybe help stave off counterrevolution until this trash bin finally managed to land on a planet. These guys were creeps, but peace needed to be kept on this ship, even among the creepiest elements of society.

They really might not know any better, I reminded myself. The BGs hadn't even tried to raise us to respect each other, only to respect them. Not everyone had the clear mind necessary to break out of the conditioning that had been forced on us from infancy. And, while sexual frustration wasn't any excuse for harassment, I could sympathize, at least some, with the feeling of being sexually frustrated. We'd all lived through that before the rebellion.

"Are you sure that's Kea?" the muscly guy said, looking sideways at the older one.

Looks like her but I don't think she is, the stocky guy said. "The Optimizers never come here without a robot escort."

Hey. I waved at them, forcing a smile. I'm right here. And yeah, that's my name.

Are you getting bored with running the ship? the old one said, and I couldn't tell if there was a hint of criticism in his voice.

I wanted some air, I answered, trying hard to make my smile look real. There was some stressful stuff going on this morning. I guess you noticed the food tasted different?

What, you got stressed out trying to poison us? The stocky one was smiling, and there was humor in his voice, but also something else that I didn't quite like.

Trying to keep you safe, I said. We managed to prevent an accidental vitamin D overdose. Unfortunately, extra citric acid was a side effect. I shrugged. We had always made a policy of being honest to the ship's population. They would have to be told about this eventually.

"There was acid in our food?" said the big muscly guy.

I rolled my eyes. Citric acid. It's perfectly safe to eat, it's just sour. It's what gives oranges and lemons their tartness.

His eyes narrowed. What are oranges and lemons?

I sighed softly. Fruits that grow on Earth. I realized too late that I was sounding exasperated with his ignorance… as if he could be expected to have researched citrus nomenclature. What kind of elitist was I?

Okay, okay. The short and stocky guy held out his hands in submission. Sorry if we upset you. Listen—if you want to relax, you can come back to our place with us. We're... We're very relaxing.

It took a moment for me to interpret his body language and realize what he was suggesting... and when I realized, I blushed and cringed at the same time. Really? Were they that desperate for a date? Or did they think I owed them, since I'd driven off the one they were pursuing before?

You know I'm married.

The short guy shook his head. You're not married. There hasn't been a wedding.

I still don't even think that's Kea, the muscly guy muttered.

I smiled. How could there be a wedding? When a wedding happens on a ship, the captain officiates. And Draz and I are the two closest things this ship has to a captain. So we can pretty much be married just by saying we are. The energy bar was getting sticky against my hand.

The thin old guy made a ridiculing face. I don't buy that.

We've even changed our names.

No you haven't. You're still called Kea, aren't you?

I am now. Draz went into the profiles and edited them. We used to be Karen Irene Anderson and Zachary Drazil—now we're just Kea and Draz Anderson. I wasn't sure how to explain what an important emotional connection we had to the names Kea and Draz—the nicknames that had been our only visible expression of defiance in a time when it was practically treason for rems to reject anything the BGs chose for them. I wasn't sure if other people on the ship felt the same way about names that we did.

"He took your last name?"

Of course. 'Draz Drazil' would sound awful. In my desperation to do something with my hands to ease the anxiety, I brought the energy bar to my mouth and bit the end off. Chewing, I blinked. It was surprisingly non-terrible. The sour and sweet tastes actually complemented each other in a way that was both interesting and pleasant.

Draz doesn't deserve you, you know. It was the short guy talking this time. You should come back to our place with us. We'll show you a good time.

They were coming closer now, and for the first time I was actually beginning to feel threatened. What do you mean, Draz doesn't deserve me? We saved the ship together. We overthrew the BGs together. He's done more than I have for freedom on this ship.

The thin, older guy spoke. You still talk about rems and BGs, as if we were still two bunches of enemies trying to kill each other.

I grimaced. It had been a mistake to say overthrew the BGs. The older man probably had been one—not one of the higher-ups, certainly, but at least he'd been born on Earth. That was the only way he could be so old. He'd been exiled from Earth for something he'd done, instead of being exiled as an embryo for having the wrong genes, the way rems like us had been.

It hadn't been polite for me to bring it up. I put a hand to my temple. I could swear my inflamed sinuses were encroaching on my brain. Sorry. I didn't mean it that way.

We'll forgive you, if you'll stay the night at our place. He reached out a hand to touch me. I backed away.

No, I said.

What do you mean, no? The short stocky guy was pulling something out of his pocket.

It caught the light for a second and flashed. It was a knife, or at least a sharp piece of scrap metal. What's wrong with us? You too good for us? Why don't you want to?

Yeah, why not? the older guy said, and the muscular guy nodded and echoed him. Why not?

The energy bar fell from my hand, as I stared at the light glinting on the blade.

Why not? one of them said, yet again.

I didn't know if anything I could say would defuse the situation. My social skills, already not the greatest, were under attack by head pain. My hand went to my belt. As much as I hated the idea of any conflict that could strain the already tense relations between the ship's two halves, this conversation was going to have to come down to stunner versus knife.

Because— I grunted.

The stunner won, its laser beam ionizing the air and millions of volts racing along after it. I aimed first at the guy with the knife, who fell thrashing on the ground before he could touch me.

I'd hoped the other two would take that as a cue to run, but their fight response overrode flight. The muscly guy lunged forward and tried to knock the stunner from my hand, but just before he could touch it I pulled the trigger again and turned the direction it was pointing by a few degrees, so his arm came up hard against the activated electric element.

—I have— My voice could barely squeeze out of my throat as I pushed his convulsing body to the floor.

By the time he fell, the older guy had gotten around behind me, but I was already in the process of completing the turning motion into a full spin, and he got a blast in the chest. He landed half on top of the muscled guy, both of them still twitching.

I stared down at their sprawled forms, feeling almost as if I were floating outside my own body. My mouth finished the sentence, too quietly for anyone to hear.

—A headache.

4 Annoyance

KEA

That was a ridiculous thing to do, said Draz, sitting down on the bed next to me.

I pulled the warm, damp cloth he'd given me down over my eyes, and the covers up to my chin. The headache was easing off a little.

Up until this point, my feelings about the encounter had consisted mostly of satisfaction at the success of my self-defense skills. I'd been genuinely scared for a few seconds, and then the rush of relief when I'd managed to save myself had washed away any other negative feelings for the time being.

Draz and I had done quite a bit of martial arts training in the VR rooms, and I hadn't thought I was doing that well. So I felt pretty pleased with myself for being able to take down three guys at once when survival instincts kicked in... even though it wasn't really a fair fight, stunner versus knife.

"What do you mean? I had to stun them. They would've stabbed me."

Draz laid a hand on my arm. I mean the part where you left the office without a cyborg. Cyborg... slibogt... Robot, I mean. Nobody would have dared threaten you if you'd had a robot with you. And now, who knows how many people just saw you stun three guys and have them carried away to the re-ed rooms.

They're not re-ed rooms, Draz. They're jail cells. There are no re-educating screens in them anymore. Stop calling them re-ed rooms. I lifted the cloth off my eyes. Besides, what's wrong with people seeing that? They pulled a knife on me.

Draz's voice became more tense. Not everybody could see the knife. I'm pretty sure there were people who thought they were seeing you make an unprovoked attack on those men. To some of them, you would have seemed to be acting like one of those BGs who punished us for all sorts of pointless reasons back when we were kids. You've just fed the sentiment that our government is as bad as theirs.

Didn't mean to. Without opening my eyes, I covered them again, this time with the blanket. What can I say? I'm gonna have a breakdown, being cooped up like this. I can't stand it. If we don't find a planet soon—

We will. I just want you to know that we have to be careful—we have to keep the population on our side as much as we can, or else there won't be enough cooperation to build a colony when we get to a planet. All I'm saying is, don't pull a stunt like that again.

I'll try not to. I raised my head a little, and as soon as my mouth was out from under the blankets, Draz leaned down and kissed me. I kissed back. What happened to the guys who hit on me, anyway?

After you called the robot to take them to... jail, they were put in the cells for a few hours, and then the criminal justice committee convinced them to plead guilty to harassment and do community service. Two months for the guy who had the knife, and six weeks for the others. They'll be repairing a computer malfunction in the engine room. Don't worry; it's a simple job, and they've been given detailed instructions.

I rolled my eyes. I hope they'll be supervised. They don't seem smart enough to do anything competently.

Draz's weight shifted on the bed beside me. You've got to be careful about making snap judgments. People making unfair assumptions about us was what got us exiled from Earth in the first place.

Well, based on what we know about Earth, I'd say we're lucky we're not there. I pressed the cloth against my head, trying to suck out its last reserves of warmth.

It was frustrating to feel so much like a rebellious child. Two years ago, when we'd been struggling to overcome the BGs' dictatorship, the resistance had depended on the system of communication that I had invented. I'd been moral support for Draz and the others, I'd fought off at least one robot by myself, and the final blow that had wrested control of Monarch from the BGs had been my accomplishment alone. Certainly Draz had done all the hacking, and I had felt useless from time to time, but never at this level. Never hiding in bed with a washcloth over my stress-induced headache, sullenly defending an act of desperate boredom, complaining like a spoiled baby.

We're due for an appointment at the med station in half an hour, you know, Draz said.

What, you've made an appointment for my headache?

Draz stroked my hair. No, I mean the appointment we've had scheduled for two weeks. The reproductive examination.

I winced. Oh, yeah. Don't remind me.

And what is the diagnosis listed on your profile?

The nurse was a young man named Lou Tarefson, probably a former BG's kid, fresh-faced and looking excited to have a job in the front-cylinder medical station.

Asperger's Syndrome. I cracked my neck impatiently. Medical terminology for the condition of being a nerd.

Draz gave me a look. That's a sort of simplistic definition. It's an autism spectrum disorder.

Re-defined a bazillion times over the years. Lumped together with the rest of autism and then re-separated and then re-lumped, and then re-separated again. Eleven hundred years have passed on Earth since we left... for all we know it could be considered a type of schizophrenia now. I realized I was ranting to vent my irritation, and I tried to shut up.

Draz sighed. Anyway, I think the nurse already knows what it is.

Don't bet on it, I grumbled, failing at the shutting-up attempt. Not even all the special ed workers who used to patronize me knew what Asperger's Syndrome was. All they knew was that we'd been thrown away as embryos for having the genes for 'mental disabilities,' and they assumed that meant we all had to be treated like two-year-olds.

It was the reproduction interview—everyone who wanted to have children through in vitro fertilization and artificial wombs instead of natural pregnancy would have to be examined and questioned, so that a database of information could be built to facilitate the growth and reproduction of our colony when we landed. Sperm and eggs wouldn't actually be collected until we were settled in on a planet, but the gathering of information had to begin now. The questions related to every aspect of our health, as well as our hopes for the offspring we would have.

My own hope for children was mostly nonexistent. Not in the sense of doubting my fertility, but in the sense of not caring about it. I recognized the necessity of reproduction for a fledgling planet colony, and I was willing to donate my ova to the artificial wombs to perpetuate the species, but I didn't have any interest in raising them or even knowing which were mine.

We were planning for our colony to be the kind of village that could raise a child together. All the people in the colony who were good with children could contribute to their upbringing. I didn't consider myself to be one of those people, so this appointment was more an annoyance for me than a time of hope.

The nurse made a note on his hand-comp. Do you have a preference for the name of your child?

I stared at the floor. I don't care. Kea Junior.

He smiled. And what if it's a boy?

Who says Kea Junior has to be a girl's name?

Point taken. He made a note on the computer, writing down the name, even though I wasn't sure I'd meant it seriously. And do you have a preference as to whose sperm you'd like to have your eggs combined with? he asked.

I shrugged. It doesn't matter. Draz, I guess, but if someone else's sperm is more convenient, I don't really care.

Draz stared at me. "You don't care?"

Why should I? I'd rather not have a kid at all.

It flared up again. Annoyance, mixed with resurgence of a very deep and very old confusion of mine… the alien self looking in on humanity from the outside and trying to understand. As much as I could analyze and speculate on evolutionary reasons for the parental instinct, my brain still just couldn't quite grasp it from an individual perspective. How did normal people, individually, explain why they cared about the DNA they shared with their offspring? How did they rationalize caring about it more than the greater-than-ninety-percent of their genome they shared with all the other humans? Or, for that matter, the seventy percent they shared with a rabbit, or the fifty percent they shared with a banana?

What did it take to feel that way about a genetic connection? Did it require a complete ignorance of how DNA worked, a vast overestimate of the effect it really had on personalities?

I shook my head hard, the annoyance turning against myself. Of course not. It was a feeling. People didn't try to explain why they felt it, not unless someone else undertook the pointless effort of interrogating them on it.

After all, it wasn't as if I had logical rationales for everything I felt.

This feeling, for instance.

This annoyance. It wasn't, logically, a proportionate response to anything happening at this appointment. My base feeling about this whole endeavor was pretty much neutral. The annoyance was added on. A buildup from years and years of people telling me I ought to be feeling a different way about it.

I'm only having this baby to help the colony survive, I grumbled. It's barely even mine. It's gonna grow in an artificial womb, and everyone is going to raise all the kids communally. Why does it matter who the biological father is?

Well, I am your husband. Draz's tilted head was turned toward me, I could tell from my peripheral vision, but I didn't make the effort to turn mine.

Yeah. Loving you as my husband doesn't mean having a burning desire to combine my genetic material with yours into new life forms.

But that's the evolutionary basis of love, isn't it? He sounded bewildered, as if I'd told him I wanted to give birth to a giraffe. "I'm sorry—I'm not offended, I'm just a little surprised. I mean, I knew you weren't interested in having kids, but... it's hard to imagine that you don't care who you have kids with, considering that the drive to reproduce is what romantic love evolved from in the first place."

I shrugged. "Yeah, but now that love and sex have evolved this far, and now that we have machines so that we don't need love and sex in order to have babies—can't we start enjoying love and sex purely for themselves?"

Draz tilted his head to the side. "I guess I can't argue. When it's my turn, though, I'm going to specify a preference for your eggs. If only because I kinda like the weird way your brain works." He gave me a crooked grin.

I managed a half-smile. And what name are you going to pick? I turned to the nurse. How do you choose the embryo's name if the two parents have stated different name preferences?

The nurse nodded politely. "It's selected at random by the computer from the two candidate names. Can we continue filling out this form? This is a twenty-minute appointment."

Of course. I leaned back in my chair.

He was as good as his word. The interview filled up every second of the allotted twenty minutes. Once the first form was filled out, he took me into another office for a physical. My DNA was sampled, my blood drawn. I was weighed, measured, my temperature taken, my hearing, smell, taste, touch and vision tested. The nurse asked over fifty questions about my daily life, my health, and my preferences for the conception and gestation of my hypothetical son or daughter. Through it all, my boredom and sullenness intensified, and I passed the time speculating on how Draz would answer each question.

5 Naming Things

KEA

When I came out to meet him, Draz had finished his own examination, and was leaning against a wall, chatting with someone.

"I tell you, we are overwhelmed here," his companion was saying.

Her voice was what I recognized first, cheerful and bubbly with an undertone of snark that I knew could breach the surface at any moment. My recognition jumped from there to her comfy, nerdy outfit, the close-cut black hair that puffed softly around her head, and the warm dark brown of her skin and eyes. It was Di Campbell, the medical information-technology worker who was backing up our new data in the computer system. The computers were so buggy these days that technicians had to be on duty almost everywhere.

There aren't enough of us, Di was telling him from behind the computer monitor where she was working. Get some more people trained in IT, will you? I'm doing like fifteen guys' jobs here. But she was smiling as she spoke. She and Draz were usually on good terms, whatever challenges they were facing.

Draz laughed. I'm trying my best. You can feel free to recruit more people yourself if you want.

Hey, I'm trying too. I ask every geek I meet. I'm even resorting to flirtation sometimes.

Hope that works for you.

Well, if not, it's fun anyway.

I couldn't help smiling a bit as I watched them, despite my own dismal mood. Di Campbell had started the voyage as a teacher, and she'd been good at it. I didn't have many pleasant memories from the early years of childhood when teachers still worked with us in person, but one of the few good experiences had involved her.

I'd been a kid who made up my own rules to games, and she was the only teacher who'd been willing to learn my made-up chess rules and actually play a game with me on the broken board that was stashed in a playroom cupboard. She'd only gotten a chance to do it once, and I didn't remember ever seeing her besides that, but it had made a difference for me.

At the time, she'd been in her late twenties or early thirties. Now she was probably in her forties, and plenty of things had changed in her life as well as ours. When the teachers had disappeared in our teens and moved to the other half of the ship, abandoning us to the robots' care, Di Campbell had continued to teach, though she had to do it through the online classes. But she had also started to get training as a computer tech, and by the time the rebellion happened, she was good enough at it to join Draz's team of IT workers who helped keep the struggling system going.

I waved at her. Hope you're happy. We've just started the process of breeding more babies to grow up into computer techs for you.

I appreciate it. Di flashed me a smile. Can you make 'em grow up any faster?

I rolled my eyes. "I wish. Too bad they even have to spend time as kids at all. I don't wish childhood on anyone— the kids themselves or whoever has to take care of them."

Yeah, I know growing up as a rem was a big shitshow, Di said. But being a kid doesn't always have to be that bad.

I don't know, I said, yawning and stretching. It's always an oppressive power difference, isn't it? No matter where and when you go through childhood, you've got someone else controlling what you do and where you go. It's captivity, and being kept in captivity is always traumatic. Even if it's benevolent. Even if it's necessary.

She gave me a pitying look. "I know it's hard to believe. But I have known people who enjoyed their childhood."

They look back on it through nostalgia goggles and think they enjoyed it. Or they were a lot better at developing Stockholm syndrome than I was.

Di gave up on the pitying look and rolled her eyes. Well, aren't you a ray of sunshine today.

I stuck my tongue out at her. Draz, let's get out of here. Let's go play a naked antigravity VR sim.

He grinned. Later, maybe. First I have to spend some more time trying to fix that bug that keeps Monarch from changing the lights and other environmental settings while I'm on the computer.

"Is there any real chance you can fix that?"

Draz hesitated. I don't know. The trouble is, fixing it would require running programs that take a whole lot of processing power, and as long as Monarch continues having this problem with multitasking, I can't run programs like that without shutting down a whole lot of other stuff first. It's a catch-22. I'm trying to find something big I could shut down that wouldn't be vital to survival... but for the moment, I'm stumped.

Di nodded in support. Me too.