22: The Flaw in the Plan

First — Prev— Archive — Next

“What do you mean by that?” I asked, narrowing my eyes.

“What? Nothing.”

“Don’t lie to me. Don’t treat me like a little kid. What do you know about my grandma?”

He looked surprised. Maybe he didn’t know anything. Maybe I’d read his expression wrong. “Nothing. I’m sure she’s a lovely woman.”

“But you think she doesn’t want to be useful?”

“I’m sure she does. Most people do. But also, it’s not just what’s inside us that builds our identities. It’s what the world tells us to be, too. Most adults seeking to join the treegrave would say that they’re doing it to be useful, and most of them probably believe it, and most of those ones are right; they are joining in order to lend their brainpower to the treegrave and help the ship as much as they can. But some might say that, because it’s what they’re supposed to say, because it’s what they believe because they’ve been told they want such things their whole lives, only to link in and be given time and space to think by themselves and realise that what they actually wanted was a retirement from their retirement. What somebody wants is as many-layered and riddled with errors and back-rationalisations as what somebody perceives. So what your grandmother told you doesn’t really indicate one way or the other whether she’s resisting fully merging on purpose or not.”

“She wouldn’t resist, though. She’s a nice person.”

“I’m sure she is.”

“And she’d want to see me again. And to talk to me again.”

“I’m sure she can see you. Camera access is one of the first things that most new minds develop. The whole reason they’re blinded is to free up their visual processing from visual data and let them learn to use the cameras faster and more efficiently. You might say that she can see you much clearer now than if she could talk to you, because she won’t be able to do that until she’s a part of a larger mind.”

“She promised she’d come back to me,” I mumbled. “In the treegrave.”

“And I’m sure you’ll hear her in it eventually. But she knew exactly what she was getting into when she applied for the procedure. Part of the vetting process is making certain that people understand what they’re signing up for.”

“But she will merge eventually?”

“Everybody merges eventually,” he said. He didn’t say ‘unless they die first, because most of them are very old.’ He didn’t want to upset me, I supposed.

“Okay. Thanks.” I got up. “Are you going to tell my parents that I came to see you?”

“And get yelled at again? I’d rather not.” He also stood up. “I’ll see you when you’re eleven.”

“You told my parents that waiting that long was a waste of time.”

“Perhaps I was mistaken.”

“I don’t think you think that.”

“Does it matter? We are delayed by four years, regardless. Crossing your parents on this is more costly than the wait. Go forth, Taya, and waste four years. My advice to you is to learn as much as you possibly can and gather as many experiences as present themselves to you; if you take my apprenticeship, they’ll come in handy.”

I watched him go, and didn’t head back to the trolley until he was out of sight. I was still going to work in Rubbish & Recycling, obviously, but I might take the apprenticeship first. No harm in learning more about the ship.

So I got to wasting time. Laisor went away to another ship and came back, and Rose and Ivy started their jaunts, and I tried new types of jobs and learned new things.

Hitan finally did his Farming jaunt, and I could hardly wait until it was over before I cornered him to ask about the sheep. Had he seen the sheep? What did he think of the sheep? The sheep was ‘weird’ and ‘cool’, apparently, and yes he’d gone back to see it again but no he hadn’t tasted the ‘gross’ meat. He didn’t understand any more than Arai had. Maybe you had to eat the meat to understand.

“It’s like us,” I told him insistently. “Made of meat and bone and nerves. Ship organics.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s weird to think that we’re made of the same stuff as what’s in the biotanks, right? None of the bone chunks in the pit are shaped like human bones.”

He knew, but he didn’t understand. He didn’t feel it.

“They’re body parts of the ship,” I pointed out. “What’s in the biotanks is the ship’s body parts, to feed its other body parts, like us and the sheep. Or to heal its walls and engines and stuff. We’re the same.”

“Uh, yeah,” he said. “I guess you do need humans to heal a ship. Robots can do a lot, but they can’t do everything.”

I gave up.

When I went to sleep that night, I dreamed of being in a view port on the Courageous, but with all of the walls transparent. Except that I wasn’t really there. A piece of me was, a girl called Taya, and moving through my rings were more people, pieces of me moving other pieces around or heading to locations to fix other pieces or use them properly, or just looking after themselves so that they could be content and healthy enough to do that later on. They were parts of my body and my mind, making their own little decisions that affected what I did, just like all the little programs that controlled my environmental systems and my engines and my biotank regulators were parts of my body and mind, but the main part of my mind was the limbless, eyeless people and the computer systems that they were hooked into. Some of the parts of me, mostly the people moving round, had difficulties and pains and ongoing squabbles with other people that were parts of me, but they were irrelevant unless they created a danger; the difficulties all evened out.

My body could take care of itself. I was swimming through space with a school of my children, other ships of the fleet, with their own bodies and minds like mine, though most of them had very different shapes and were good at very different things. We were nearing our destination.

When I, meaning the tiny little human Taya, was learning about mammals, I learned about ones that don’t look much like humans, too. On Earth there was a really, really big one called a ‘whale’. We have it in the genebanks but there’s no records of us making them for any of the space colonies because there’s no space colonies that they’re suited for. Whales used to swim around Earth’s big oceans. The deep oceans didn’t have much food on the bottom, but when a whale died and sank down, it would be a huge feast for all the little animals that lived down there, letting them eat and breed and go on living. A whalefall.

That was us, the fleet, swimming through space. Little creatures in a huge, mostly empty ocean, swimming towards a whalefall. And when we got there, when we made it to the Dragoneye’s asteroid belt, we would feast, and heal ourselves with its metals and fill up on oxygen and nitrogen and all the other things that we use up as we swim through space, and then we’d lay our eggs in the whalefall and move on, leaving our babies to feed and grow and to live –

To live –

Bur something was wrong. There was a problem in the plan. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew that that wouldn’t work. I must know, the Courageous must know, but little Taya who was still a kid didn’t now enough yet. She knew enough that she could tell that there was some kind of problem in the First Crew’s plan to seed life throughout the galaxy, but she didn’t know enough yet to know exactly what the problem was. It was there, though.

They would be doomed. The Dragonseye colony – all of the colonies left behind – were doomed.

Remembering that I was just a girl called Taya pulled me back into my dream body in the view port, and I turned to look behind us and I saw it, something following us, something we had to outrun or we’d die. It was racing through the void behind us, chasing us towards the edge of the galaxy. It must have eaten all the colonies left behind so far, all of the fleet’s careful work, all of humanity that wasn’t in this little group of ships. It would eat those we abandoned at Dragonseye, too. And if we couldn’t outrun it, it would eat us.

I couldn’t see it clearly, any better than I could see the other ships in the fleet that I didn’t know. I didn’t understand what the thing behind us was, I didn’t know what it looked like. But I knew it was there. It was like when you do a math problem and you look at the answer and you know it’s wrong even before you figure out where you made the mistake, you just know that the number is way too big or way too small. I must know what the problem is to be having this dream, but I don’t know enough about what I know to know what it is that I know.

Maybe it was like what Yamin was talking about. A left arm pointing at a card, and a mouth that can’t explain why. Part of me saw the danger. It couldn’t tell the rest of me.

I woke up.

I stared up at the ceiling. My heart rattled in my chest like a trolley. I wasn’t sure why I couldn’t see the stars any more, and when I realised, my room felt unsafe. That had never happened before. My room was always safe. But through the wall was another room, and past that room was the hull, and if something broke through the hull and that wall then I’d die, we’d all die. Whatever was chasing us could do that. It could chew through the ship and kill us all, no problem.

I had to find out what it was.

First — Prev— Archive — Next