Searching for Sun

By Elizabeth Kaida and Garrett Kaida

Genetically altered to be the perfect botanist, Asami and her diva android desperately want to make planet Gliese their new home-and escape from the overburdened and industrialized Earth. But it's been over eighty years since the first settlers began terraforming; and before she's even landed, the paradise of the Gliese colony slowly reveals sha

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elizabeth Kaida
• Release date: Sep 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985889710

Elizabeth Kaida

Elizabeth has been a bookstore loiterer, musician, poetry archivist, and architecture administrative assistant.She is inspired by the weird-decayed railroad tracks running into and at the bottom of lakes-music and strangers on public transportation-and by what she reads. Copious amounts of tea graduated Elizabeth from San Francisco State University with her MA and MFA in Creative Writing. Her poetry has been published in The Bohemian at NDNU and her first novel in progress won runner-up for the Clark-Gross Novel award. She currently resides and writes in LA California drinking tea and typing words.

Book preview

BOOK ONE

searching for sun

One

Willy the Whale will whistle and this whale’s will, shall will it all away. Now stop asking me for rhymes.

—Asami (Hadano) Five

Recorded by Cloey in the Joke Phrase Volume

Moon, Date: 2316

The Space Whale Museum looked like a white, ribbed mountain with a craterous hole in it. Overnight, sappers had triggered and disintegrated the wall. The Growth Project children gathered around the front entrance of the museum to view the charring remnants of a neighboring chip factory, minders herding them, so no one wandered off into the rubble.

Heretics did this. Ms. Clamps warned the children, her eyebrows scandalized up towards the widow’s peak of her hairline. Her thick, dramatic arm pointed at what remained of the once towering chip factory, now cremated to a dusty shell. Terrorists! Insurgents wanting to eradicate the progress of the past three hundred years. They’ve been known to purposefully corrupt artificial intelligence so that machines kill innocent workers, just to prove the point that technology is vulnerable, unable to comprehend that machines only do as they are programmed. It’s not the tool you must blame; it is the person behind that tool.

Asami stifled a snicker as Sam mouthed the words rolling his eyes. She wanted to laugh, but Erika stood next to her, attention rapt, cloudy, black hair nodding along with every word Ms. Clamps uttered. It was one of Ms. Clamps favorite mantras, Don’t blame the sugar bowl for your fat fingers or the simulators for your bad test scores, responsibility lay within the human will, the person behind the tool. Until it didn’t, Asami always added in her head, because it seemed she could do everything in her will to be good, and people still didn’t approve of her.

This chip factory— Ms. Clamps continued on, isn’t the first act of violence, and if these terrorists had their way, they would even do away with the Growth Project! This last sentiment made all the G.P. children shift about on their feet uncomfortably.

How could a group of people be against them? Yet the thought was hurtful, like a sour candy burning her stomach, the thought that someone feared her enough to want to undo her. She looked back once more at the crumbling grace of the moon’s whale museum. It couldn’t have done anything wrong to deserve that, could it?

She didn’t understand what the terrorists’ agenda had to do with a museum, but maybe to blow up the chip factory they couldn’t avoid the museum. She’d been looking forward to visiting it since Sam had gone to the moon for his sixth birthday. Now it was her turn. Her sixth birthday had come and gone, and the trip was two years late, not for her birthday, and not to see the whale museum; but she planned to get her fill of sightseeing anyways.

As she looked over the wreckage, she hoped the museum had just been built in the wrong place, too close to the chip factory they’d come to tour, and which Ms. Clamps seemed intent on their still viewing, though all that was left was a charred and smoking bubble like a piece of chewed up, spat out black gum.

The factory had been toasted just that morning and an unpleasant burnt tinge still clung to the air, of chemicals and scorched hair. Security guards corded off all the buildings, and a troop of shiny android guards patrolled the street. Along with four adult minders, a security guard from the Space Lobby stood watching the G.P. tour, his big hands playing with a tiny, tinsel-colored wrapper that one of the kids handed him.

Looking at the man, Asami wondered why he looked so bored. It had to be different living on the moon, more exciting with so many attractions, yet the security guard didn’t seem to enjoy it. She would have liked it, living up on the moon with the sky so full of the big gray earth. It was so much larger than the moon was in the earth’s sky—a super moon. Plus, other than large factories, the moon was almost fifty percent theme park. Heidi said they were going somewhere farther away from Earth than the moon. When Asami was grown, they would travel towards the Libra constellation, 120 trillion miles away and join the first colony, someplace where they didn’t even have museums yet.

The children rustled in a forcefully polite semicircle on the perimeter of the factory wreckage as Ms. Clamps continued gesticulating, her hooked finger slashing through the dusty air as if conducting the factory back into existence through sheer energy. The children watched with dewing boredom, chewing on crater cavities, gravity taffy, mooncakes, and sourstars, which they had acquired in the Space Lobby while Heidi consulted with Declan—her chief of security—about the terrorist attack.

Asami liked the mooncakes best because the wrapper had a big yellow moon with a smiling face on it and the cakes were enclosed in a marshmallow skin patterned with gray craters. Had the moon been so perfectly gray before the colonies?

Sam gave a slight tug on her long yellow hair. She often wished her hair darker, like Sam’s, to match her Chinese features and darker skin, but Heidi said her design was one of the geneticists’ favorites and that they had pulled out an ancient blonde gene from her genetic ancestry that had nothing to do with the white genetic Y chromosome that was used to give her blue eyes. Asami had been born in a phase when geneticists were manipulating physical traits and seeing how far they could bully them, resulting in some rare combinations. Sam was older and escaped this phase with his light skin, Irish features, and floppy dark curls as he hunkered down beside a large placard advertising whale riding prices.

Ms. Clamps turned her back and extended her arms as if to hug the wreckage. Asami sidled away from Erika. She was a good friend, but anytime Sam wanted to do something fun, Erika would turn big, brown puppy eyes on Asami and tell her Heidi wouldn’t like it. Erika possessed the sort of stare that seraphs must use to inspire repentance. Asami slipped behind several taller children until she stood beside Sam. She didn’t know what he was up to, but she had learned to follow his lead if she wanted in on the fun.

His wrist flicked and a loud bang and a sizzling twirl of fire exploded to the left. Asami recognized it as a firecracker Sam had been eyeing in the tricks and treats shop. Screams filled the air and Asami ducked backwards with Sam, scampering through a low hole in the side of the whale museum. They crouched together pressing their backs to the wall. Sam sniggered loudly, peeking through the hole as Ms. Clamps clutched a child before her considerable bulk like a thin shield. Their minders, recovering, tried to restore order.

Looking at the way the wall had crumbled in on itself she thought it must have been sappers. Sam had been telling her terrorists liked to use them. They were a new energy bomb, sapping up all the materials it could, sucking them dry of energy and then outputting that energy all at once, creating an explosion. From the way the ruble dusted under her feet, she knew, and shot Sam a meaningful look.

He shared a mischievous grin and mouthed, sappers.

As her eyes adjusted to the dim light in the museum’s hall, she smelled salt. The center sea aquarium had shattered and left a water stain and a thick crust on the floor with glow-in-the-dark purple rocks. Holographic tropical fish still swam in the air where the tank had stood, looping acrobatically in the air. Asami stood in the littered remnants of structural debris made of pieces of ceiling and wall. It was a crumbling pile but still had sharp bits that poked up like shredded tree branches. Dust plumed about her feet in the artificial gravity, bouncing up around her white shoes like miniature atomic bombs.

A case on display showed white and blue t-shirts with swimming whales on the chest, and beneath lay stuffed toys, small, motorized swimming whales for the bathtub, and plushy ones as big as she was. Sam grabbed a bright white shirt three times too large, pulling it on over his sweatshirt. It reached his knees and lit him up.

At the end of the hall, beyond the sparkling wall fixtures and posters, was a decorative dome with the initials S.W.M. Asami grinned at Sam; the museum was empty, and it was all theirs.

The ceiling sloped up like a card house, the walls bending into a point. A replica of Earth hung from the ceiling, a gray-white and orange orb with dots of light signifying the great sky countries. These dots illuminated the oceans like fiery glitter. Beside it, the moon circled gray and dotted with green. Asami found the green spot where they were. Life-sized whales suspended in midair above her head floated past, casting shadows about the room with their tails still swimming in holographic motion. Asami could almost imagine herself beneath the sea, except Sam rummaged through cupboards behind her.

Sam stuffed several robotic bathtub whales in his pockets and opened a packet of plankton bombs. He threw his head back and emptied the contents, letting the candy fizzle in his mouth till he had green foam around his lips.

Stealing already? a snobby brunette stumbled down the rubble towards them.

Asami turned back to the display cases hoping that ignoring Maxi would make her less annoying. Maxi was only one growth group earlier than Asami, but she liked to act like she was ten cycles older. Secretly, Asami wondered if someone had put some Arabian horse genetic material in Maxi. She had learned in class that the horses were known to be hot-tempered, intelligent, and difficult to control. Just like Maxi. She even tossed her hair like a horse swishing its tail.

You really shouldn’t hang out with the freak, Sam. She’s giving you bad habits. Maxi peered into the candy drawer next to Sam.

Asami rolled her eyes again. Maxi didn’t care about thieving, and no one could sell these goods now, not after the explosion.

Just eat something, Sam said loftily, leaning back against the counter like a king. What will it be for the lady? No, not plankton bombs, far too messy, he wiped at his green foaming mouth, a crater cavity?

Maxi smirked and grabbed two handfuls of asteroid bars.

Asami opened a low cupboard in search of a plush version of Willy the Space Whale so she wouldn’t have to break the glass display case. The smell hit her first, hot and rusty. Then she saw a gray dusted boot.

A man with crusty red in his hair and a gap in his forehead looked back at her. Someone had wedged the man inside the shelves amongst the plush toys. His leg was missing. The floor of the white cupboard stained in glossy, black cherry beneath him. Squished under his bloodied hands and in place of his missing leg, the plush whale tumbled over him and seemed to dance around him in a circle of purple tails and happy, laughing eyes. Attached to his shirt by a metal wire was a holographic image of Willy the Whale, big and purple, slapping his tail side to side. Asami reached inside and took the holographic button from the crusty red shirt.

The man’s brown eyes seemed to watch her, glazed with dust, but at the pupil, the reflected movement of his holographic tag. Willy the Whale was dancing inside the man.

Sam let out a high scream in Asami’s ear, spraying green spittle in her hair. She hadn't heard him approach, but she supposed that was a normal reaction. Her voice was lost down her throat. She felt her insides rush with some emotion, but didn’t know what it was, something sharp, her senses all on alert. She wasn’t scared, and she wasn’t sad.

Maxi and Sam were running. Their feet kicked up dust as they scampered out of the hole they had just entered. Asami thought that was kind of funny. Even if he wasn’t a good man, he couldn’t hurt them now. But it felt wrong to leave him alone.

She sat down opposite the one-legged man and picked up a purple plushy, noticing spots on his nose like red freckles as she hugged it. She wondered if the man still felt pain. Did it hurt to die? If one could no longer live inside the body, where did they go? She had learned in science that nothing truly disappeared, it just became something new, like with the sappers. Perhaps death was like a flower, big, brilliant, and noticeable, but afterwards it left many more seeds behind it.

Two

Rule numero one: eye contact. Keep it connected, smooth, suggestive, but not too suggestive. You’re inviting, you know? Nothing creepy. You see? . . . we will work on that.

—Sam (Rundle) Four

Cloey’s JPV

Sixteen years later

Earth, Resolute, Date: 2332

The familiar scrape of a rock three times on glass in the dark of night. It might have frightened her if it hadn’t been their signal since forever. Cloey’s power cell glowed and faded like a slow heartbeat illuminating and dowsing her room into darkness. She had blinked, poking bits of sleep from her eyes, and turned drowsily towards the noise at her window.

A dark, familiar shape of an upside-down head beckoned her. She grinned, just as she had as a twelve-year-old when she could afford to be out half the night. She raised herself from the bed silently, well-practiced in the art of leaving without it creaking or waking Cloey, who nestled in her own small bed against the opposite wall.

Asami tugged her old sweatshirt back on, scooping it from the floor. Sliding the hinge up with several glances back at the sleeping Cloey, she lifted her arms out the window to be grasped.

His hands were so familiar she didn’t need to see his face. There were calluses on the pads of his fingertips and between his middle and pointer from writing. She slid her hands up his palms to grip his wrists and then forearms, thin but somehow hard and strong—he had to be, to lift her with just his arms while lying on his stomach. Then he stole her out the window.

She laughed as her too-long legs banged against the wall, so much for escaping without Cloey knowing—not that she would tattle—scraping as Sam pulled her with stronger, but less practiced, grace up on the roof beside him. She gave a breathless grin.

We used to be better at this.

You used to weigh less. Sam helped haul her half up, his grip bruising her upper arms a bit.

She got her feet onto the windowsill, trying breathlessly not to think about what might happen if the wind knocked her off the ledge, and pulled herself the rest of the way onto the roof, the concrete sidewalk a dizzying distance down. She fought the woozy spin, the weakness it lent her muscles as she crawled all the way onto the flat solar panel slats. Sam, upside down, had his feet wedged between two to help keep him from slipping off.

They lay on their backs surrounded by cloud fog. The solar panels were wet beneath them, soaking into Asami's flannel pajamas and making them stick to her skin. The mist frizzed Sam’s hair, where it only seemed to flatten her own.

You do know getting down will be harder than climbing up here? Asami lifted her hands above her face, playing with the mists.

Mmm, Sam mused in his distracted way.

What? Asami narrowed her eyes at him.

You still wear ugly pajamas, Sam surprised her, his eyes not on the sky. She felt the wet panel on her cheek like a watery seashell as she turned towards him. His eyes were scrutinizing her.

She scowled at him, hugging the threadbare floppy Willy the Whale sweatshirt around her. I like my pajamas.

Sam flicked a smile at her, the kind that always made her brain stutter. Hard to imagine kissing you in that though, isn’t it?

Asami gaped.

He chuckled, rolling onto his back once more, one arm cushioning his head. You’re too easy.

Asami couldn’t even give it back to him, he looked . . . annoyingly nice. He had thought about the way he would look, in soft black sweatpants and a thin white shirt that stuck to him where it was wet. He always looked good, and he knew it.

Aren’t you cold? She prodded his arm just to touch him.

He scoffed but she could see gooseflesh prickling over his exposed skin.

The cold did feel nice against the back of her neck. She ran hot, but she liked the feel of being bundled.

He seemed distant again somehow. The teasing spark gone. His frown made his skin look like carved marble in the darkness, shadows pooling in the creases, his mind floating out of reach. She slid her bare feet on the wet solar panels and studied the sensation as a chill seeped through her layers, tingling numbly over her shoulders.

Will you do it? Sam asked, his voice too deep to remind her of the twelve-year-old who used to lay here with her, night after night, pointing out the constellations, and wondering how they would change when they reached the new planet.

Do what? Asami glanced at him from the corner of her eye to gauge if he was teasing her again. His face looked sad somehow. Hard and sad.

Freeze, Sam breathed the word, mist leaving his lips in a cloud.

It’s never really been a choice, has it? Asami asked, lifting a hand to frame the Libra constellation. Even at a distance, the stars glowed back at her making the shape of a home, an entryway with a steeped roof and walls, a triangle with legs.

If you did have the choice. Would you still go? Sam asked.

Asami squinted at the stars. She’d never really thought about it as an option.

Wouldn’t be much here for me if I stayed . . . She glanced at him again, No friends, no you, no job. She sighed again. Besides, I get the feeling Earth isn’t anxious to keep me.

She remembered all those visits by men in fine linen suits with patent-shined shoes and uniform haircuts. Their gazes that took in all the children but always seemed to linger most on her face with a faint strain. It had gotten worse after her trip to the moon, after the dead man.

That had been the first night Sam crept into her room, his teeth still cracking on candy rocks that turned his teeth green and purple, like he couldn’t stop eating them. She woke when he inched the door open but pretended to sleep until he rocked the bed almost sitting on her head. She tugged her long blonde hair out from under his butt and resolved she would chop it off as his knee almost took her eye out. He didn’t seem to notice, shoving her covers out of the way to scoot in next to her, his cold, gritty feet finding the warm underside of her knees in the dark.

You’re freezing, Asami griped, dropping Willy the Whale to wrap her arms around him. He was hot even if his feet were chilled, and the warmth made up for his bony frame.

Cloey’s open stomach monitor blinked a large clock at her. It was only two in the morning. She’d been lying awake for the past four hours, trying to forget all the stern faces that had questioned her that long day. Trying to forget the images they had shown her, not just of her man in the cupboard, but of others, killed in less quiet ways. The pictures somehow so much worse than the real thing. It was as though those awful deaths were now immortalized, kept still, unable to fade.

They questioned you for hoooours, Sam blew sour sweet candy breath in her face as he plopped his curly head on her pillow. She made room, grudging him her warm spot.

They questioned you too.

Yeah, but all they asked me is why I was in the building, didn’t I think about how I could have been hurt, and did the girl make you go inside? He wuffled a laugh. They seemed to really think you were the bad guy. But I bet they were just pitting us against one another, to catch us in a lie, I bet they asked you the same about me.

No. Asami rolled onto her back, blinking dark splotches from the shadowy ceiling. That wasn’t at all what they had asked her. They wanted to know what she was doing on the moon. When had she known the school trip would take place? Had anyone talked to her? Had she known there would be an explosion? Had someone asked her to come here? But that didn’t really surprise her. Adults seemed to expect that she was up to no good. She wasn’t frightened by their questions, though they seemed hard men, old, balding. After the first hour, she’d stopped really paying attention, studying instead the men’s balding spots, reminiscent dirt spots in grass, surrounded and flat.

Looking at the shapes the shadows played on the ceiling as Sam began to snore softly into her neck, she fell asleep to the wind of candy blowing her hair across her neck.

Sam had always been the easy sleeper, but now it seemed, there was something keeping him awake.

Sixteen years later, she still felt comforted by his touch, which could make her forget the mist dewing on her face and hair, the coldness of the roof.

Sam leaned closer to her, his curls tickling her throat. She had to hold her breath to keep from shivering at the touch, to keep him close.

How will the scales balance us? Sam mused, looking through her hands, his fingers tracing the stars between her palms.

The freeze serum shimmered glacier blue. Hydrogen crystals frosted the glass vials nested in foam-padded medical cases. The liquid flashed up at Asami like a living thing, speaking to her in winks of light. She wanted to touch it, to gather the water on the vials’ exterior between her fingers. To brush its frosty surface clear so that the shimmer inside would deepen into sapphire. Perhaps if she touched it, she would be less nervous. Her body hummed with excitement. It was finally time.

Pretty, isn’t it? The nurse held a vial up to the phosphorescent light, his large fingers capable of crushing it like a pill. Asami imagined that the liquid looked back at her, conscious, viscous, and alien.

Everything poisonous usually is, she said wryly.

The nurse spared her the briefest of smiles and busied himself with prepping the shot.

Asami glanced away, her fingers twisted together. She thought of moonseed. Shiny blue moon-shaped berries, that’s what she was taking, a berry that would carry her past the moon. Her stomach was empty, a snarling coil of acid that bit at her innards. The nurse said any sort of food traces left inside the stomach or intestine might cause problems after the de-freeze. This would not be the deep, warm sleep of hibernation. But then, she was too anxious to swallow even if she’d been allowed to eat.

She had been told she would remember nothing of the freeze sleep. But dreams, she knew, could feel long and terrible. And those were only for a night. This sleep would last years. She couldn’t help but wonder, what if the freeze didn’t work on her? What if she woke up an old woman, her life having passed immobile and unthinking? What if she never woke?

She watched her blue vial as the nurse inserted it into an injector. It would be worth it if it worked, if it got her to her new planet with the rest of her life to explore. She didn’t want to waste her youth, isolated from nature on a ship awake for years, but Sam and many others didn’t trust the freeze process either. Some said they were all as good as guinea pigs. It was worth the risk, it had to be.

She shifted on the metal grate in front of her freeze pod, her living embalmment. The freeze chamber was sterile. The floor before the tubes were sliced into grates and benches lined the center aisles. Yellow paint outlined each tube’s territory. The tubes themselves were seven feet tall with an opened glass front. The frosty interior waited to embrace her warm body and hold her until she grew stiff as ice. Even the bodysuit, designed to protect and monitor her life signs, refused to warm against her skin.

She felt someone looking at her—a quick, laughing look. Sam. He hadn’t noticed her when they filed into the freeze chamber. Tall, dark-haired, and somehow, infectiously exciting.

He winked. He had such long eyelashes. He was mouthing something.

Are you ready?

She felt warmed from the inside out, as if she’d just swallowed hot tea and it was glowing in her. The memory of last night made him feel closer, like a conspirator. Even separated by ten people, Sam’s nearness made her feel nervous in a different way.

She wasn’t ready at all.

No, she mouthed back down the line.

The nurse cleared his throat and reached for her neck.

This won’t hurt a bit, just lean your head to the side for me, there you go, just like that.

For all she knew of chemistry, he could be injecting bubble tea into her veins. But trust was what the G.P. thrived on. Everyone had a place. Everyone had an expertise. She looked up at the ceiling, studying the sweating pipes and felt a prick and then numbness that slowly began to ache.

The nurse moved on. She looked back down the row, but Sam’s face had lost its merriment. His eyes scrutinizing—watching, she realized, to see how the freeze took her.

No going back now. Asami stepped up into her tube, as much to hide from Sam’s scrutiny as to prepare herself. She closed her eyes, but the darkness reminded her of what awaited her.

The tube was lined with thick foam, and she felt herself slowly sink back. She was being absorbed, she thought, digested into the foam. It molded around her neck and ears, turning into a gel that stuck to her skin. She found that she couldn’t turn her head and wished her last view wasn’t of a shadowy metal wall. Across her face, a breeze, a swirling wind circled her head. She almost expected to see snowflakes on her pale lashes.

The numb sensation grew from her neck outwards. She shuddered, wondered if her skin was turning blue as the sensation swept along her spine, up and down, threads inserting themselves over her scalp and up her jaw towards her mouth. She felt herself continue to sink; the foam encased both her legs. Two nurses stared at her, poking at their data pads. One lowered the glass over her face. Her stomach was being squeezed. The glass frosted over, feathering in blue and white leaves.

Her heartbeat slowed. She thought that was the oddest part. That her heart could detach from her brain, from her emotions. It should be speeding forward, faster, harder, but it lagged. One beat a second longer each time. Her eyes strained to take in one last sight, but she looked through glass as ice formed in the liquid on her corneas. Snowflakes shaped like clock hands.

Don’t believe everything you see. She thought that would be her last thought. But no one ever remembers the last thing on their minds when sleep comes, because it steals over you like fading light.

In freeze, Asami dreamed.

Heidi’s office door stood open. Inside, warm, yellow light, filtered through the Fall leaves that rustled in the window. Orange and yellow maple leaves.

Yes? Heidi asked.

Asami had always loved Heidi’s creamy complexion, the sprinkling of orange and brown freckles on her cheek bones, and the color of autumn in her hair, brown, orange, yellow, red.

It’s me, Asami.

Heidi frowned and scrolled through her data pad. No, I don’t see you here.

I don’t have an appointment. Asami smiled nervously. Why had she come here?

Who are you? Heidi asked, not unkindly.

Asami floundered. Heidi had always known her. Heidi had created her. I wanted to talk.

I’m sorry, dear. Maybe I can call someone for you. Heidi reached for her. Asami noticed the older woman’s skin still glistened with lotion. She extended her arm to take Heidi’s warm fingers, perhaps Heidi would remember her if they touched. Asami looked down at her hand, withered like a dried-up leaf. Old women’s arthritic knuckles, with shadowy creases. She recoiled from herself, from the reality—a burst of leaves, a flurry. Panic.

Why so nervous, Little Bird? All things grow.

Dreams of nothing.

Dreams of metal. Her skeleton was iron, she felt it, unbendable. They used to put rods in people, to correct spines, to strengthen broken bones. Sutured together, she was only skin on the outside, underneath she was wires. Her voice box had gone to static, some wire had cracked, the metal beneath the plastic exposed and splintering. Her joints were solid balls and sockets, rotating gears, and washers. In her head, the processing board was being dripped on, one drip away from electrical failure.

Those faded.

She had the sense she’d forgotten.

Long stretches of black.

In some dreams, hallways opened and closed through her body. Bad smells, ripe, overpowering, she had to spit—

People passed her in a flickering hallway. Their speech muffled, as if they spoke through water, yet she knew what they were thinking. They knew someone watched her.

She turned.

Sam was tracing the hair on her neck with his gaze, she felt it, as if his fingers were playing along the nap of her neck. A look that made her feel strange in her skin, her insides fluttering loose. He stood in an open doorway; lean muscled arms crossed. His tan lips an ironic smirk, his eyes challenging.

She stepped forward. Was this what she wanted?

Of course it is, Little Bird.

Then why was she so uncomfortable?

Growth always is.

She wandered a long time, exploring one room at a time. One with a table, one with nothing but a chair. She sat in the chair, it was plastic and the legs buckled, or maybe it was wooden after all, solid, well-oiled, and smooth.

Sometimes she dissolved through the maze entirely into open meadows with crunchy grass and damp places to sit. In the rich soil she found bugs, soft worms with red insides, ants that trekked over her mountainous legs, pincher bugs with their scissored ends tripping across dirt and grass blades.

She was a long way down.

Something soft encircled her head, walked around, and pressed its small feet into her shoulders. Its fur brushed her skin, entered her ears like bristles, slid up her nose like dusty wings. She expelled air through her nose. A moth came out, fluttering wildly. She breathed in, the fur entered her, coating her arteries and organs. She tasted it through sealed lips. It was like fluttering dust. Would love taste like that?

She floated in a vast, quiet cavern. The water hugged her in a delicious, snug, warm way. Tight as if it were a second skin, wax dipped, it slipped in her pores and soaked into her. It covered her eyelids, so they felt heavy. It coated each eyelash, across her mouth, between the corners of her lips, it was glutinous. It slid over her ears, massaging her neck. She was deaf, mute, blind, at peace. She was nothing. There was space to fill.

Expanses of nothing, floating, a rush of stars, mostly nothing.

She was a long way down.

Time swam in this space. It looked upon her with its many eyes, lidless, round, and moist. They were all different colors: black, blue, green, hazel, golden, and all different shades in between. From all its angles and perspectives, it peered at her, and each eye thought something new about her.

Three

Memory is just an illusion to your kind Cloey. It is whatever you retain, or whatever we give you to remember.

—Heidi Mist

Cloey’s JPV

Eight years later, Resolute time

Space, Resolute, Date: 2348

Status? Heidi asked the nurses. It would be another four years and eight rounds of de-freeze before the children being grown onboard the ship were old enough to begin running it themselves. Until then, the original batches of Growth children cycled in and out of freeze.

Final stages of de-freeze, ma’am.

Heidi looked down at the list of names on her board. Eight years ago, these had been her very first children, back when they had begun with small numbers, small batches. The names circled through her mind, calling back her first triumphs. Ace Gerry, she had engineered his profile herself. Focus-oriented and good with math, a born pilot. Sam Rundle, a promising engineer. Kelsey Hackinson . . . Asami Hadano—she frowned, the name jumping from the text like an unpleasant memory.

It had been so long; she’d begun to relax. In some ways, Asami was . . . well, not a masterpiece, but less trouble than she had anticipated, and each year between Earth and the Resolute made the girl more normal by the count and less Heidi’s concern. She relaxed her tense shoulders. Asami was just another G.P. kid now.

Heidi paused on the name Maxi Lisk. The girl had been engineered as a leader—smart, competent, organized, and direct. She was driven, competitive, and had joined the crew under protest, stating the project was immoral; Heidi wouldn’t punish her for that, she needed Maxi to feel these things. Maxi’s anger was Heidi’s greatest achievement. Creating a human’s psyche was bound to be an imperfect process in the beginning trials. Maxi could be seen as a bit of a misfire, but not unsalvageable. Very few knew how carefully Heidi had crafted that friction, the disdain for authority—but not too much, and not too soon.

She sighed heavily.

Something about the names bothered her. Surnames were no longer given. A reminder of when each child born felt like another miracle. There had been so many children now they had begun to go through naming books alphabetically. She felt a small throb of guilt as she allowed herself to empathize with the sleepers. She’d known each well, but now it felt like looking back through a fog. They would remember her, younger, milder, more personable.

She didn’t allow her mind to go further. Her fingers made a quick decision on the tablet as she erased their surnames. The group would now be numbered by relation to which batch they had been born out of, as all the batches since had been. She would have her assistant rename the rest of the Earth batches.

As a psychologist, she knew this would cause distress, but in the long term, it might prevent division in the class systems of the Growth kids. She tried to tell herself it wasn’t for her own sake that she did this; her eye unable to avoid one name in particular—a name that she was ready to bury after all these years. It really was for the best. She had to say goodbye to the ghost of Hadano.

She stayed to watch the first freeze patient breathe again. Steam from his breath melted the ice from his lips and nose.

Send them up when they’re ready. Heidi thought she had about twenty minutes before the first wakened knocked on her door.

Soft thuds woke Asami, the steps of her heartbeat returning to use. It was a slow organ now, struggling to beat and pump the ice from her veins. Her ears began to fill with the hum of a generator and warm heat fell across her face, melting gel and ice. White gloves picked gel from Asami’s ears and neck. Her face felt wet, but her arms weren’t free to wipe away the condensation. Her eyes struggled to focus without the orientation of sound. She stood in a world of vapor.

Asami? a nurse asked.

She looked down. Bright, coffee-colored eyes in a paled, deep-brown face looked up at her. She felt very far away.

You’re coming out of freeze, the nurse said.

Asami didn’t want to wake. The world was heavy, consciousness a burden. She wavered, aware that her hands were free now, but she didn’t immediately know what to do with arms. They were cumbersome when it came to sleep.

Hands kept peeling the warm gel from her neck and ears. Noises stabbed at her, a sharp beep that echoed the softer thud of her heart, her own heavy breath rasping, and the crunch of ice beneath a boot. The light was worse. Fingers pushed at her eyelids, flashing light inside her brain.

She stepped from the tube at the nurse’s insistence, her legs watery. The texture of the grate imprinted onto her numb feet. She stood, clasped the side of her freeze tube, and waited to acclimate as her ears cleared. The sound of her heart lost now in the echo of voices bouncing off metal pipes. A blanket wrapped around her shoulders, and she drank something amber that burned down her throat into her belly. But the heat in her stomach only made her more aware of the prickling numbness of her back and feet.

Her legs were coated in strings of gel. She stared at her feet as the nurse left her to help the next freeze patient from the tube. It looked as though she’d stepped in three inches of blue gelatin.

You’re doing fine. Try to remember why you’re here. You’re on the Resolute, a spaceship. We’ve come eight years across space.

Asami had done the math before freeze, and the numbers swam back to her fuzzily. With the factor of time dilution, it had been eight years for those aboard the ship but sixteen for anyone’s friends or family on Earth. If they had traveled just over half the speed of light, time had warped around them. It had been explained to her, but she’d never really grasped the concept. Time had always seemed inescapable. Nor did it seem that motion should slow time down. But the math said what her human mind could not feel to be true. She’d thought, perhaps, once she experienced time slowing, she could understand it better, but it seemed time moved the same inside the bubble.

Asami watched with interest as the nurse scrubbed gel from her legs, beads of her dead skin rolled up her calves and feet. Her hair and nails were also longer, though not remarkably, but enough that the nurse clipped half an inch from her fingers. She hadn’t been cared for so completely since she was a child, back when her caretaking android, Cloey, only existed to clean and watch her. Asami looked down at the debris that was her. Hair clumps, nails, skin, dust.

She saw two other freeze patients walk back and forth as a nurse directed them. She stared at one. His thin posture curved forward like a taut bowstring. He argued with his nurse, his black hair wet and sticking to his neck. He’d never let it grow past his ears, but it suited his face.

Sam? Asami’s voice came out hoarse and muted; she felt a tickle in her esophagus. She lifted a hand to her throat and coughed. A spider crawled up towards her tongue. Or maybe just cobwebs—dust and webs. She half expected to see particles as she breathed out. She coughed the webbing out, spitting into her palm. A chunk of white throat lining quivered in a pool of her thick saliva. Lovely.

Sam glanced her way and she tried to smile, but her eyes were watering. Adorable, she moaned to herself. Not like he was falling all over himself to reach her anyways. She shook the blob discreetly into the pile of her other debris.

Sam’s sunken eyes sparked at her, gold washers in his irises, but his look was glazed and distant. Was he sick?

The world snapped back into focus.

The noise, which had been muffled, became a roar. Asami covered her ears. Sam was yelling at his nurse. Asami had never seen him yell. His face mean, the tendons down his arm tightening. The nurse’s lips flattened into brownish red strips. If Sam was trying to convince her of something, it wasn’t working.

Asami’s ears adjusted until the roar became words echoing from different conversations around the room.

She approached him and wondered if her own face looked as haggard and thin. Sam had always been trim, but she’d never noticed his cheeks being so hollow. His movements were twitches, his gaze a waver.

Sit down Samuel, not another word, his nurse glowered and waited until Sam sat.

It’s just Sam, he glowered at her, and I want to see Heidi.

Why is everyone so dusted thick? he rasped to Asami.

The nurse turned a sharp black eye on him, sucking her tongue across her teeth.

Asami wished now that she hadn’t approached him. He was in a mood to rip off heads and tear out throats. He wouldn’t even look at her, his gaze roamed. But the nurse definitely looked at her, lumping them together. Trouble.

You go nowhere, hear me? The nurse gave Sam another long look before walking a few steps away to talk with the doctor whose gaze wandered from Sam to the nurse again.

Prickly much? Asami asked lightly. Sam always walked a thin line with the elders. He’d actually coined the phrase elders for the adults. They’d told the children to call them by their names, but Sam’s term named the difference between their makers and watchers and those born through the Growth Project.

Sam didn’t acknowledge her.

The warmth of that night on the roof felt very distant—vaporized even—as if it had never been. It was stupid to let herself believe in that distance; they’d been friends since she could walk after him, and maybe something more on and off, more so in the past month since he’d been dusted hard by his last crush. The freeze had left her brain sluggish and witty felt beyond her. With Sam preoccupied, she took stock of her own physical adjustments. Asami stretched her legs out. Tight all over.

Don’t get the chip, Sam said under his breath.

What? Now he wants to talk?

Sam didn’t glance her way. He’d helped her decide to wait on getting a chip until she knew she really wanted one. He’d decided against it, though he never told her his reasons. She’d refused one, frightened that the chip would erode the little of herself she felt was truly her own. It would computerize her brain. On Earth, at least three-fourths of the population didn’t have a chip, some couldn’t afford it, some thought it an abomination, an invasion of their privacy, some were waiting to see the side effects, whether those with chips died or if their brains rotted in twenty years. But within the Growth Project, only a few didn’t get the chip. Heidi had gotten a free supply from the government and offered a free implantation. Those chips had run out and Asami sometimes wondered if she’d been a fool to reject the expensive procedure.

Are you okay? Asami asked. What she really wanted to say shelved with some other colorful and un-useful expletives.

Sam ripped at his overgrown thumbnail. The nurse should have clipped it for him.

Sam? she reached out to touch him, are you sick?

Aster dust! He pulled away.

His face was pale and thinned, his eyes overly bright. Something was wrong. He trembled slightly as if in pain. Though he’d been released from freeze before her, his body clean of gel, he seemed to be recovering less quickly.

He didn’t look at her again, his eyes intensely focused on some point in the ground.

Sorry, he dragged both hands down his face.

It’s ok. My brain’s still de-thawing. She felt her joke flow off him and wanted to sink through the floor with it.

Just, don’t let them chip you, okay?

Why? she pressed. She hated when he gave her vague dismissals, as though she were too thick to grasp the why—even if he was asking something of her.

He grabbed her hand from the bench between them and squeezed it, looking at her fingers instead of meeting her eyes. Please. He closed his eyes.

Please Asami, Sam’s voice said in her mind.

Asami startled. Sam’s mouth hadn’t moved. Her brain must still be frosty.

Please? he asked, looking at her this time. She squirmed a little at the intensity of his look, those green eyes that made her think of cool ponds with rich moss, and bright, soft lichen on towering trees.

Yeah. Asami looked away, squeezing his hand back. Whatever was happening, she would always be on his side. She cleared her throat looking around uncomfortably.

The freeze chamber had been so orderly when they had arrived, a marching line put away into tubes. Now the room looked chaotic. Freeze patients milled about, nurses darting back and forth putting out emotional fires that erupted with each pod that popped open.

Don’t mind me, you two, Asami’s nurse began to massage her legs, rubbing lavender-scented hot oil onto her calves. Asami hadn’t noticed that they were aching until the nurse’s massage released the pain. Sam dropped her hand and stood.

I need to talk to Heidi. He turned away from her and scratched at his arms.

Asami was surprised to see his nurse leave the room, sending him a final, deadeye glare. Sam made his way towards the stairs, following her.

Asami itched to chase him but waited until her nurse looked busy with the head doctor before slipping out of the room. The nurses wanted them to mingle and remember who they were. There were enough milling bodies to disappear, at least for a moment.

There wasn’t far to go. The Resolute grew more polished as she left the freeze chambers further behind but there were few doors. She had gotten a tour of the ship before they stored her in freeze. It was a tiered vessel: a viewing deck at the top, then the living quarters, a mass room in the center surrounded by cantinas and bars, and then, as the ship expanded even larger, the levels progressed and tapered downwards. A floor for the hospital, the holo rooms, the herbarium, offices, and under it all, the freeze rooms. Asami knew one floor up was where Heidi would be.

She came to an elevator but took the stairs. She’d have better luck sneaking around by the stairwell. Plus, the elevator was shaped almost like a freeze pod. She didn’t want to be in a capsule anymore. Though her legs felt unsteady, she wanted to use them.

Asami acclimated to the feeling of walking, the grinding of bones and ligaments, the texture of the cold, glassy floor. Her feet left smudges on the white surface of the smooth stair, but they faded, like hot breath on glass. She used the rails for extra support in case her muscles forgot how to coordinate with her brain.

Her ears were still plugged, but she thought she heard a crash overhead. Shouts sounded in the hall above. Someone cried out, a gasping breath that filled the whole hall, echoing into the stairwell. Asami strained to listen, alarmed as footfalls thudded past.

Listen, please, Sam’s voice choked, we have to go back.

Asami stumbled out onto the landing in time to see two security officers in black vests barrel past, a blur of light brown and orange hair. Another crash. A woman’s screech. She followed into the hall, peering around the corner of a flung open door.

Heidi’s desk skewed at an off angle, her coffee mug splattered across the white floor. Heidi’s back hunched within arm’s distance, Asami could almost reach out, touch her, but the security guards stood between them, their backs tall and wide. Sam’s nurse wiped at her white uniform.

Huddled against the desk, Sam shuddered, his eyes looking through Asami. She stepped forward but he shook his head, glaring at her. She clenched her fists angrily. What was he doing?

I told you he was unstable, doctor, Sam’s nurse complained. He’s burned me, I’m sure.

Millicent, he’s sick, Heidi said to the nurse. Get him to the hospital, I’ll talk with him later, she motioned to the guards tiredly.

Sam shook his head, his words running into one another, No, no we are all in danger if we don’t turn around!

An officer shot him with a sleep gun. The tranquilizer jerked his shoulders back into the desk with a thud. His head shook before it lolled down against his chest.

Asami flinched, clutching at her shoulder, and darted back out of sight. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears. Sam had been weak enough to manage, the force was excessive. The Growth kids had always been discouraged from physical altercations unless strictly observed in a class. Though Sam was a prankster, he’d never been violent.

Asami hadn’t been born with as much control. At age eight, other girls had scrapped their android caretakers for taller, more sophisticated friend models. Asami had used all her credits to upgrade her original model, something her android, Cloey, wasn’t designed for. Maxi had made fun of Cloey’s childish appearance and Asami knocked her to the floor. The elder in charge, Ms. Clamps, made Asami scrub toilets for a week, an android's job. Still, it had been worth it.

Asami backed down the hall into the stairwell. She wanted to walk out and make Sam tell her what he was thinking, what he was hiding from her. What could he even be hiding? He’d been in freeze with her the past eight years! But he knew something or thought he did, and that doubt had reduced her to hiding in a stairwell from Heidi as if she was all of twelve years old and they were out after curfew stealing from the kitchen. Heidi wouldn’t hurt him though, would she?

Asami almost pinched herself for paranoia, but the image of Sam shaking his head at her, of his shoulder jerking into the desk, kept replaying in her mind. It would be ok, she told herself, Heidi would fix him, and then he would explain it all. She tried to stamp out the sliver of doubt remaining.

Her spiking adrenaline had pumped out any lethargy left in her system as she retreated out of sight, around the curve in the stairwell, but her legs still felt weak. The heavy thud of her heartbeat pulsed in the palms of her hands and each finger. She growled to herself, moon-addled Sam, she was going to beat him senseless when he was better.

Get the stretcher.

The officer’s voice sounded close. Asami held her breath and backed down another step, grateful for her silent bare feet until she slipped. Her foot caught the step awkwardly as she walked backwards, as if her legs forgot how to move, and she half fell into the wall twisting her ankle and bashing her elbow against the metal rail, which let out a hollow bong.

She froze, not even breathing, listening for a pause in the conversation above.

Think I’d throw the coffee if she was my nurse too, one of the guards chuckled. Voice like a raven, he cawed.

Shut it.

Down the hall, Millicent rasped, Something has to be done about that boy, I won’t treat him without help.

I’ll be taking over his treatments, Heidi said, and there was a click that might have been her door closing.

Treat him for what? If she emerged from the elevator maybe Heidi wouldn’t question what she’d seen. Asami turned and let her feet slap down the stairs, ignoring the sting in her ankle as she looked for the elevator door. She whacked at the elevator button, praying Sam wasn’t gone by the time it carried her up.

Her ears strained for sounds, but once in the elevator, she was encapsulated in stagnant silence. It lifted gently, paused, and opened to the sound of watery breathing. Sam’s limp body was laid out on the stretcher, face waxy with sweat, his eyes rolled up.

Asami stepped past the guard, flinching as the man gripped her shoulder with a hairy red hand. She was startled by the heat of his grip. He was so large he made Sam look like a child. She’d never seen these men in the G.P. before.

Where’s your nurse?

What’s wrong with him? Asami held tight to Sam’s shirt. His hand was flushed on the inside of his thumb. He smelled like coffee.

He’s crazy, Millicent snapped, stomping down the hall towards them. Asami saw a coffee stain had spread over the woman’s rounded abdomen, but it was still no larger than a handprint.

You need to step back, the guard insisted.

Asami, Heidi’s quick clicking heals approached from behind, come with me.

Asami’s brain stuttered. It needed to stop doing that to her. She struggled to reconcile the two images of Heidi in her mind. The elapse of time had altered the youthful woman. Heidi’s reddish-brown hair still had a crackle in it and her blue eyes still sparkled, but she’d aged. Eight more years of frowns and smiles had formed creases down her mouth and webs around her eyes. While Asami had slept, preserved in a cupboard, Heidi had spent the trip awake to raise batches of children aboard the Resolute.

The guards pulled Sam into the elevator, and Asami was too stunned to stop them.

Four

Fact: one tablespoon of soil contains over seven billion organisms.

Ok . . . eww.

I could literally eat seven billion organisms in one swallow.

Why do you think of these things, sweetie?

Is this for that dumb joke volume again?

No . . .

—Asami (Hadano) Five & Cloey

Cloey’s JPV

What happened to him? Asami asked, relaxing slightly.

She knew Heidi, and trusted the older woman to help Sam. When Asami was ten, she’d been caught trying to grow fat zebra tomatoes in an incubator. Heidi had called off the angry nurses and explained that medical equipment was too expensive to be used for potted plants. Her voice had been stern, but her mouth had twitched up at a corner, and she had let Asami keep the tomato plant. It seemed, almost, as if she had been proud of Asami’s single-minded interest in the plant. Asami didn’t understand why, since she had been genetically designed to be interested in plants, but Heidi’s pride made her happy, and she couldn’t help being a little proud herself for causing that warmth in the older woman. Since then, when she spoke to Asami, Heidi’s eyes had always retained an intimate twinkle, as if she were telling a secret.

Sit, please, Heidi said crisply, a new formality in her voice.

Asami stood, the absence of that warmth in Heidi forming a nauseous ball inside her stomach. What had changed? Why did the people closest to her have to change on her like this, why on this day?

Heidi looked up and smiled expectantly. The personal twinkle was back but it seemed almost like an afterthought, a technique, a charm used to put patients at ease. She gestured again towards the chair, a gesture Asami remembered Heidi using on adult guests from the government—polite, impersonal, professional.

It was the awkwardness of strangers between them. It had been eight years for Heidi, but only a day for Asami. Had she been forgotten? Asami couldn’t imagine what she was to Heidi, one more child out of . . . there would be hundreds of them now if everything had gone accordingly. The familiar eyes and features of the older woman endeared Heidi to her, provoking her to please and obey. She wanted Heidi to love her.

Sam had complications after the freeze, Heidi continued as if Asami had taken the offered seat instead of standing rigid and fixed behind the chair. The desk had been put back to rights, its empty, black surface shining. The coffee cup and spill had been wiped away as well.

Heidi sat behind the desk.

Is he going to be alright?

Possibly a bad freeze serum, but we’ll do the best we can for him. I don’t want to worry anyone or make them feel the freeze process is unsafe. We don’t know that yet. I’ll make an official report about it today.

Is it unsafe? Asami asked.

No, what happened to Sam should never happen again. Heidi leaned forward and squeezed Asami’s hand in reassurance. Heidi’s grip, once strong and smooth, felt stiff, her skin softer and wrinkled.

Asami caught the word choice. She turned the sentence over in her mind. Was Sam the first? Did Heidi know what was wrong with him?

Should never, because it was a scientific error they had put right?

Should never, because bad things can’t be explained, they just shouldn’t have happened?

Should never, because it might happen again?

Now, how about you Asami? Do you remember why you’re here? Heidi asked.

Asami felt the shift in conversation like a closed door. Heidi was done talking with her about Sam. Asami sat. She looked at the foot of the desk where Sam had fallen. For some reason, she wished there was a trace of him left behind, a hair on the floor, a drop of coffee. The quick erasure felt personal as if they had erased a piece of Sam himself.

Can I see him later? Asami asked. She wanted to hear what he had been trying to say. Why he thought they needed to go back to Earth.

He may not be fit to see anyone.

He’s my best friend, Heidi.

I know. Now, the sooner you answer these questions, the sooner you can rest. What do you remember?

Asami stifled her frustration by squeezing her hands together till they ached. She would see Sam, even if it meant sneaking past Heidi. She had already shown too much interest, now Heidi would be keeping an eye on her. Asami found herself answering in a colder tone than she had meant to: I’m here to analyze the plant life the Libras started, and to introduce more plants to Gliese’s environment.

Do you remember how old you are?

I was twenty-four. Asami glanced at the three thin lines like smile ripples by the corners of Heidi’s mouth. I would have been thirty-two this year.

Forty, if you had stayed on Earth. Heidi smiled and the lines deepened into crevices. Can you recall your last day on Earth before the cryo tube?

Asami studied her crooked cuticles, her hands that should now be aged. Were her cells aged? Her mind filtered backwards. She had gone running the day of the freeze, wanting to be in motion before she was paralyzed for what could be forever. As she pumped her legs, carrying herself further than she had ever run before, she had memorized the burn in her muscles. When she finally