Half Way Home (3 page)

“In
question
?” someone asked. “Fifteen years, and our viability is in
question
?”

The boy in the chair raised his hand, palm out, but nodded to the speaker. With his brow furrowed and his lips pursed, he wore a mask of complete empathy. I immediately fell for the guy, willing to follow him anywhere, completely trusting in his leadership. Or maybe I was still just being a scared little boy, or a young hatchling looking for something to keep me safe.

He turned to the console and lowered his voice, which brought the whispering in the back of the module to a halt as kids strained to hear. “Colony, what happened? I’ve got—I don’t know—sixty survivors out here? None of us are more than halfway through our training programs. Modules are burning—”

“Ask Colony if he tried to abort us,” one of the seated kids said.

The boy waved again, more impatiently this time. “Modules are burning to the ground, and you’re asking me to ready a rocket? We need more information than that. We need help sorting the base out—”

“Sorting
ourselves
out,” someone in the back said.

The boy in the seat sighed, shaking his head. “What do you mean about our viability? What is—?”

“Enough!”

Our heads spun as one and peered down the module toward the source of the outburst. A large male—bigger than Kelvin—pushed his way through the crease of shivering teens. He had short, dark hair and even darker eyes. Around his waist he’d tied some electrical wiring. A broken piece of paneling hung from it, covering his groin.

“Out of the chair,” he told the speaker, jerking his thumb.

The seated boy rose but did not step away. He stood, fully naked, exuding confidence. I should have risen as well, urging calm between the two boys, but I was just as paralyzed as the others. All of us watched the scene unfold like spectators in glass cages.

“I’m Stevens,” the smaller boy said, holding out his hand. “Mechanical foreman, third group. I’m colonist four-four-two—”

“Don’t pull rank with me,” the bigger kid said. He moved forward, standing right in front of the three of us. Caked mud fell off his enormous thighs and landed near my feet. I reached over and groped for Tarsi’s hand, interlocking it with my own. I noticed Kelvin had done the same with her other one.

“I’m Hickson,” the large colonist said. He did so quite loudly, as if he meant to address us all. “Third-shift mine security,” he continued. “Until a higher ranking officer comes forward, I’m in charge.”

“Colony is in charge,” Tarsi said.

Her voice, so close by and assertive, startled me. I felt a tinge of anger for drawing attention to ourselves, then shame for feeling that.

Hickson swung a large hand down and pointed a finger at each of us, as if we’d all spoken up. “That’s right,” he said, “Colony is in charge. And my job is to make sure we stay on point.” He turned and aimed his finger at Stevens. “It sounds to me like you want to question everything—”

“That’s enough,”
Colony said.
“Hickson, you know how the chain of command works. As Four-Four-Seven, you are outranked, but I do appreciate your enthusiasm. Each of you will play vital roles in the weeks ahead. As unusual as the circumstances are, no colony is settled without its unique challenges. I assure you all, your services will be most appreciated, and this colony will be highly touted in future training modules. I’m sure of it.

“Now, you are cold and confused, I understand that. The power station, the relay module, and the command module are all under control. I’m bringing the remaining construction vehicles back to camp. There should be plenty of room for everyone to rest and dry out. Tomorrow, work begins. All for the glory of the colony.”

“All for the glory of the colony,” everyone echoed back, myself included.

And there was no question whether
that
response had been innate or learned.

No question at all.

That first night, I had awful and yet comforting dreams. They were awful in their content, but comforting in their delivery. They came out of sequence. Random. And the sense of familiarity brought relief, like I had crawled back into my simulated youth. But what I saw in those fragmented visions tormented me: Colonists burning alive. Kids drowning in air, unable to breathe. Me, pounding my fists on a glass column filled with warm, life-giving fluids, but unable to get inside.

I startled awake, returning to the real and jarred by its consistency. It made my first morning feel nearly as surreal as my birth had the day before.

I rubbed my eyes and sat up. Four of us had ended up sleeping in the transport cab of a farming tractor. A kid named Oliver and I had volunteered to sleep on the floor while Kelvin and Tarsi stretched out on the single bench seat behind us. I stood up quietly and reached for the scrap of tarp I’d been given the night before. Wrapping it around my waist, I opened the door to the cab and stepped out into the dim light of morning.

Standing on the grated metal of the mining tractor’s deck hurt my bare feet, so I moved out to the smooth hood in front, which was nothing more than a large metal box to shield the vehicle’s motor. The surface was still wet with rain, and the thin metal popped as it took my weight. From my new vantage spot—a good fifteen feet off the ground—I could survey most of the colony base.

It was a depressing sight.

Smoldering modules dotted a wide clearing. Wisps of smoke continued to rise from several, their original outlines barely visible. I traced our trampled path from the tractor back to the command module, and from there to the vat module, and gasped at the sight. The roof of the enormous unit had caved in on one side, melting inward. We had a rough estimate of the number of survivors, and subtracting that pitiful number from the original five hundred colonists equaled an unfathomable loss of life.

The night before, listening to the AI tell us what needed to be done, I had imagined his soothing voice would be the way out of trouble. Seeing what was left of base—realizing that Tarsi had been right about the abort attempt—I staggered under the blow of a worse realization: the AI had nearly committed genocide. It had nearly wiped us all out due to some unknown calculation.

Tilting my head back, I gazed up. I’d seen plenty of sky in my training modules, but what lie above was different. A tangle of limbs formed a near-solid canopy over our expansive clearing. Remnants of last night’s rain leaked through, but hardly any direct sunlight made it. To all sides of our base, far in the distance, trees rose up like cliff faces, their girth wider than the entire colony complex. I had to remind myself that they weren’t trees, but rather some sort of alien analogue.

The tractor door clicked open behind me. I turned around to find Oliver stepping from the cab landing and up to the hood. He was even smaller than me, thin and wiry, and the dented metal didn’t make a sound as it absorbed his weight. Wrapped up in a scrap of tarp, he looked like a piece of insulated wire. His thin neck was topped with a small round head full of hair a coppery auburn and augmented by streaks of red mud.

“Blessed morning,” he said, nodding at me and smiling.

“I hope I didn’t wake you,” I said, a bit shocked to find him just as chipper as he’d been the night before.

He shook his head and moved to the end of the hood. He dangled his toes over the edge. Lifting his face and closing his eyes, I watched his smile broaden; his shoulders rose up as he sucked in a deep breath of air.

The previous night, we’d found Oliver standing in the rain, his arms outstretched, his palms flat. He had been shivering—almost on the verge of hypothermia—but as happy as could be. Tarsi thought he was in shock; Kelvin had stepped on my occupational toes by diagnosing him as “horseshit crazy.” The truth had been far more inglorious than either, but more troubling.

Oliver was the colony philosopher, one of the lowest jobs within our hierarchy. In some ways, I found him to be a kindred spirit. Our occupations were both in the soft sciences and meant to help the other fields cross from the shores of one theory to another, fording the uncertainty between. With his position near the end of the vat (and subsequently one of the lowest-ranked among us), Oliver’s profession must’ve been one of those tacked on in an attempt to fill an arbitrary and round number. Five hundred colonists had been decided upon, even if not all of us were needed.

Oliver scanned the half-ruined base, his smile never faltering. He then sank down to a seated position, legs crossed. His unusual behavior highlighted a severe problem facing our colony, one that I would need to be aware of in myself. Our training had been interrupted. Cut short. It would be no different than Tarsi teaching the next generation for nine years before kicking them out of her classroom. My own studies had been terminated between the shift from behavioral psychology to evolutionary psychology, sometime in the late twentieth century. What miracles of mental health had I missed in my learning? Was there something more I could’ve done last night? Something I should be doing right then? Not knowing filled me with dread, as if I were missing a limb I never knew I had and therefore unable to appreciate its absence.

“The gods are surely blessing us with the weather,” Oliver said, looking back at me.

I forced myself to return his smile, but I felt sorry for his perpetual bliss. Oliver had only completed half his philosophy training; he seemed to be stuck in older, mostly religious considerations. He had talked us to sleep the night before, going on and on about the wonders of all the gods’ creations. He had seen it as a miracle that rain fell upon us as we needed our fires quenched.

Kelvin had tried to explain the atmospheric phenomenon of rain from his farming lessons, and how chemical fires were actually made worse by water, but he failed to demystify the experience for Oliver.

Tarsi, meanwhile, had inquired which gods had started the fires—or failed to prevent them. I was pretty sure her comments didn’t come from any of her teaching lessons, and anyway: they posed no threat to Oliver’s exuberance.

“Morning,” someone said behind me.

I turned and saw Tarsi standing on the landing, her face still streaked with mud. I stepped back and offered my hand, helping her onto the tractor’s hood, which had become something of a porch with no railing. She shivered momentarily as she surveyed our surroundings. I looked out as well and noticed the first few colonists moving from the intact modules. We all seemed to be rising at the same hour—a trait, perhaps, borne out of the shared tickings from within our adjoining wombs.

“How are you holding up?” I asked her. I freed one of my arms from the tarp and wrapped it around her shoulders.

She shook her head. “I had crazy dreams. Waking up this morning wasn’t . . . I had hoped last night was some bizarre training module.”

I squeezed her shoulder through her scrap of tarp, empathizing completely. “I can feel the difference now,” I told her. “The difference between being awake and whatever we were before.”

“How did this happen?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“The gods work in mysterious ways,” Oliver said, smiling up at us.

We all met—as we had agreed to the night before—just outside the command module. The mud-caked and morose shuffled in from all directions like refugees displaced by war. The shredded tarp fashion seemed near-universal, but many of the colonists had cut slits in theirs, popping their heads through them and thereby freeing their arms. A few colonists wore zipped-up hazard suits they had pulled from intact emergency kits. They looked like aliens among us, shiny and new.

Seeing the looks these colonists got from the others—and recognizing the early signs of in-grouping and out-grouping—I wasn’t at all envious of their garb. Nor did I expect the look to last, despite the obvious advantages. The social discomfort in those things had to be worse than the physical annoyances provided by the tarps.

The four of us in our sleeping group merged with another small group from a neighboring tractor. Together, we melded with the audience that had formed around the command unit’s door. Stevens—the boy who had conversed with Colony the night before—stood just outside the module and spoke with a few other colonists. I scanned the crowd and saw several faces I recognized, including Hickson, the big mine security guy. I noticed the way he kept shifting from one foot to the other as he chewed on his lower lip.

“Listen up, everyone,” Stevens said, raising his hands. “If you’ll please hold still, Myra is going to get a head count. As stragglers arrive, let’s have them come to this side so we don’t miss them.”

The girl sitting in one of the computer chairs the night before came forward and jabbed the air with her finger. Her lips moved with a count of the not-dead. Stevens ran his hands through his hair, then clasped them behind his back. He looked out as us with a grim expression, his lips pressed thin.

“These are unusual circumstances,” he said, “and they are going to call for an unusual force of will, and of cooperation. The Colony has wakened us fifteen years early after briefly deciding our settlement was nonviable—”

A murmur coursed through the crowd, swelling to a grumbling. Stevens held his hands out, his elbows at his waist. “I understand,” he said. “Nobody was closer to the fire than me.” He shook his head. Even from a dozen paces away, I could see his cheeks quivering. I felt a sudden urge to run to him, but he was able to win back his stoic mask.

“If you’ve had your orientation training module, you know how this works. Colony has been teetering between viable and abort since year one. Our new home has much to offer us, but it has many risks as well. I can promise you this, we
will
make it work.”

“That’s not what Colony said,” Hickson blurted out. He turned toward the audience. “Colony definitely said unviable last night. I heard it.”

The grumblings returned, several of the colonists shifting about uncomfortably. I became distracted by Myra, who cursed at the movement and started jabbing her finger at our side of the crowd once again.