by Hugh Howey
They came for us with their guns drawn, even though our hands were up. Despite our poor condition, we looked better off than they did. Especially Kelvin, whose mighty bulk had been tamed by malnutrition but not destroyed. He almost looked normal, which made him a giant among the rest of us. It seemed a diet on but one type of fruit is not a proper diet at all.
I nodded to the group of enforcers as they approached. “Hickson,” I said, greeting him in particular. He sneered in response and trained his golden gun at my stomach while the other enforcers looped rope around our wrists. I had a moment of panic that I had been wrong about them, that they would just take us to the edge of the berm’s ditch and pull their triggers—thereby ending our plans—but they didn’t.
Hickson turned his back once we were all secure and walked off toward the command module. The small group of enforcers shoved us through the gates, pointing toward our new home, which was our old home.
“Head to the vats,” one of them said.
••••
Our place of birth had been transformed into a penitentiary. The tubes in which we had once lived as a mere collection of cells had become—a collection of cells. A few were already occupied, most likely by those who had attempted to flee over the past week. I saw Julie in one of the first vats, right by the door. She glanced up at us as we filed by, her eyes dim and devoid of life. She looked like an animal, her hair down over her face, her clothes torn and hanging in scraps. There were scratches up and down both her arms.
The enforcers pushed us forward, and in a bizarre twist of fate, I found myself shoved into Tarsi’s old vat and she into mine. Kelvin jockeyed for position with Leila to get locked up on the other side of me. Steel bars were dropped in place outside the thick, transparent doors, preventing them from sliding open.
The abuse and accusations we’d expected and feared from the enforcers never came. Frankly, I don’t know that they could summon the energy. The most they physically could do to us was raise their heavy guns and squeeze the triggers, plenty enough for them to maintain control.
We sat down in our respective vats, our legs weary from the days of hiking, our hands thankfully freed from the ropes.
“Rocket looked surprisingly close to finished,” Kelvin said once we were alone.
“Best guess?” I asked, rubbing my wrists.
He shrugged, then leaned his head back against the vat and closed his eyes. “The payload was in place. I’m guessing propellant is still the holdup. Even if production was halved, I’d guess another week. Maybe less.”
I nodded. Outside, we could hear the popping of target practice, signifying we had interrupted their lunch. The thought made my stomach clench up like an empty fist. I looked up and over at the interface hanging down above Tarsi. It was the wires through which all my training and education had taken place. Some of the material had been scrapped during those first few days of salvage, and the server uplinks had been destroyed in the fire, but the nature of the module and the remnants of that connection made me feel as if every action were being logged somewhere and analyzed.
Tarsi put her hand to the glass beside me, and I matched it with my own. It reminded me of our birthday, which filled me with a powerful depression. Suddenly, all I could think about was needing sleep. Really needing it. I wanted to curl up and stay that way for years and years.
I had guessed that Colony would send for me immediately. Tarsi said it would take a day or two. Kelvin feared it would never happen. At just under three hours, I decided that I had nailed it.
Hickson came himself, his silent disgust from several hours before replaced with boisterous anger—probably from having had some time to think or from firing his gun. He waited for me by the door while two other enforcers let me out and bound my wrists.
“I’ll take him myself,” Hickson said to the others, waving them away.
They both seemed happy to comply; they sank to their stations on either side of the door, their butts in the dirt and their backs to the wall.
“Pathetic,” Hickson said. He gestured toward the command module and shoved me forward. “Couldn’t make it on your own, so you come crawling back to me, right?”
I ignored him and studied the camp. The walk to the command module gave me a better view of the activity than our hike to the vats had. There seemed to be very little activity, and I wondered about their bombfruit supply. “You aren’t looking so good,” I told Hickson, meaning it as real concern for the colony’s health.
He jabbed me in the back with something hard. I heard a metallic click from his gun and imagined him blowing my guts out in the middle of base. Several colonists near the mess tent watched as we walked past, and I wondered if even Hickson could kill in such a public manner. Then I remembered Stevens.
“We’re working ourselves to the bone,” Hickson said. “We’re doing twice the work with half the men, so if we’re hurting, it’s as much your fault as ours.”
He pulled me to a stop before we entered the command module. Myra stood by the open door; he waved her away.
“Do you know why you’re doing this?” I asked him, curious how much of a confidant Colony had made him. “What has Colony told you?”
Hickson waved the gun back and forth across my belly and shook his head in time with it. “Colony tells me what I need to know,” he said.
He stepped close, his skeletal face and pale skin sickly looking past his beard. I remembered the last time he had confronted me in such a manner. How big he had seemed at the time. But now, this boy I had feared—especially during the planning and our long hike—I realized he was just a scared, starving kid like me.
“After your talk,” he said, “one you’ve done nothing to deserve, you’re gonna tell me where the others are.”
I started to shake my head and respond, but he forced the gun against my stomach and leaned in to whisper in my ear: “If you don’t tell me, I’m gonna fuck your girlfriend in the vat next to you, understand? I’ll have her face shoved against the glass and I’ll make you watch, and she’ll love it.”
He stepped back and licked his lips before showing me his teeth. The world disappeared, leaving just his wicked expression in the center of my vision. I imagined bending my knees and launching myself forward, driving my skull through his nose and teeth. I thought about holding that gun and putting it in his mouth and pulling the trigger and real bullets coming out and squeezing until it stopped working. My temperature soared and I forgot why I was there, why anything was anything. I just wanted to kill.
But some part of my brain, some scrap of frontal lobe that was in charge of mitigating risky behavior, short-circuited the rest. I looked away and tried to remember where I was.
And that’s when I realized I had been wrong. Hickson and I were nothing alike. Our bodies might be similarly starved, but our brains were still intact. Intact and different. Whatever disease of hate and fear-mongering he had been born with made him something far worse than I would ever be capable of emulating.
He pushed me into the command module and followed close behind. I staggered forward, between the servers and into the computer room. I started to sit in the center chair.
Hickson smacked me in the back of the head with his open hand and shoved me toward the other one.
“Mine,” he said simply.
I plopped down and rested my bound hands on the counter. So far, this was not the meeting I had expected.
“Leave us,” Colony said, its voice as calm and soothing as ever. Just hearing it massaged away some of my anger toward Hickson. It also terrified me that one of my plans may have been a fool’s errand—that the notion of reasoning with Colony may have been inspired by the hubris of my youth.
Hickson started to complain, “But—”
“I would like to speak with Porter alone,” Colony said.
I smiled.
This was the meeting I had expected.
• 35 • Therapy
Colony waited until Hickson and Myra departed an
d the door was sealed. Then it spoke—and threw me off my guard.
“I owe you an apology,” it said.
I looked down at my hands, then leaned back in my chair without saying a word. It was best to listen, I knew.
“Looking back, I can see that you gave me excellent advice once, and I did not heed it. I should have made morale more of a priority.”
“It’s not too late,” I said softly.
“Wrong. It is far too late. And now it doesn’t matter. However, revised calculations now show we would have launched two weeks ago had I allowed you the freedom to tend to your own needs. It is a curiosity that will be accompanying my report to the Senate.”
“I’d love to read that report,” I told Colony. “Perhaps I could help point out similar mistakes.”
“I don’t doubt you could, Porter. I imagine most of you could. There seems to be much in human behavior that cannot be contained in studies and historical analyses. Certain peculiarities seem to require firsthand experience. Then again, I am loaded with information on functioning adult humans. Nowhere in my data banks can I find precedent for dealing with vat-raised children, especially not in such a state.”
“And what state is that?” I asked. “Abject terror of one another? Near-starvation?”
“Some of that, yes. Another recommendation I’m making is reversing the order of the vats. Seniority should go in last, rather than first. Of course, I would like to think the uniqueness of this tragedy will never be repeated, but there is no good argument for the current arrangement beyond simple ego. The least qualified should be terminated first, even if an abort sequence is never again halted midcycle.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“It will not apply to your profession, Porter. I’m also recommending a few nonessential specialists be promoted. And I believe, from my time with Oliver, that philosophers should be barred from inclusion. At the very least, they should skip the religious history of philosophy altogether.”
“Oliver’s dead.”
“I know.” Colony paused. “I watched the end come before the tractor was destroyed. I told them to not go down there.”
“Why are you telling me all of this?” I asked.
“Why wouldn’t I? Despite your adventures beyond the confines of base, I see you as an integral part of this colony’s success. A great part of our nation’s success, in fact. Much is to be learned from our failures and our discoveries. I am learning much from our present interaction, especially from what you do not say.”
“You brought me in here to learn from my silence?”
“I am fascinated that you have not asked me why we aren’t farming and planning for the future. I assume that’s because you know we do not have one. I marvel that you seem comfortable with this and wonder if perhaps you are resigned to your fate or if you think you have some bold plan to thwart the rocket’s launch. So, yes, I brought you in to learn from your silence.”
I reached up and wiped a line of sweat from my forehead. I tried to remember if Colony had any other sensors in the room besides a microphone. How much I was betraying—?
“Do you know why your position is initially occupied by homosexuals?” Colony asked.
My hands moved from my brow to cover my face. My jaw hung open, my elbows coming to a rest on the counter. None of this was going as it should have. From Hickson, to Colony . . . I wondered if we had made a mistake in coming back.
“Do you know why?” Colony repeated.
“What do you mean—my position?” I stammered.
“The psychologists. In every colony, they are created out of blastocysts genetically selected for their homosexuality. You do understand what homosexuals are, don’t you?”
“Of course,” I whispered.
“And that you are one?”
I sat still. Then I nodded my head once. “Yes,” I said, so softly I wondered if it strained Colony’s ability to perceive sound.
“It’s to protect against transference and conflicts of personal interest,” Colony said. “There are no guarantees in the second and subsequent generations, of course, but when a colony is going through its most difficult phase, the psychologist is programmed to stand alone. To carry everyone else’s burdens.”
“Why are you saying this?” I croaked.
“Because you know what’s in the rocket’s payload,” Colony said. “You came back to prevent its launch. I mean to prevent that, so I need to know what you know.”
“I know nothing,” I said. “We were starving and getting rained on. We just wanted to come home.”
“What fascinates me is that you seem to be in love with two people, and by all accounts—from Myra and others—they both love you back. Again, more corrections to go into my report.”
“I don’t—what are you talking about?”
“I am speaking of data extraction. I have already promised Hickson sexual intercourse with your female friend. The male one I will have shot. Are we becoming clear?”
“Why? How could you—?”
“Tell me what you have planned.”
“Nothing. I swear. Please don’t do this.”
“How do you people so easily forget what I’m capable of? Over four hundred of you were burned alive after one of my calculations. Stevens I crushed remotely with a farming tractor. Do you want to know how easily I could kill Hickson?”
“Stevens—?”
“Yes. Though I realize now that it may have been a mistake. Do you want to know how I could kill Hickson if I wanted?”
“I don’t—” I stopped myself and shook my head.
“I could just order him to shoot himself,” Colony said. “It might take repeating a few times, but I could simply give him the order to put a gun against his temple and pull the trigger. Another amazing discovery from this planet’s misadventure is a potential improvement in our guard and security training. I will suggest we do away with the rebuilding of the ego. It turns out that leaving it torn down results in a superior colonist.”
Colony paused, giving me time to appreciate how much worse the payload was than any of us had expected. More than just xenobiology would be onboard. Perverted human psychology would be taking a long ride as well, and no doubt the power of the first would lend credibility to the second. Our home nation would make changes, and if they worked, other nations would soon follow our lead in a mad competitive scramble.
“Speaking of colonists,” Colony continued, “where are the others?”
I let out a breath and leaned back in my seat, a million pounds of worry disintegrating from my mind. Our plan always had this one great unknown—and now it had revealed itself. The knowledge, of course, wouldn’t change how anything unfolded, but there had always been a chance that our actions would be ultimately futile.
“You’re blind,” I said.
“I see more than you will ever—”
“Bullshit. You’ve lost the satellite uplink, haven’t you? Or did you ever even have it? Where does the satellite’s destruction occur in the abort sequence?”
“Remember your place, Porter. I can radio Hickson in here to blow you in half. Or maybe I’ve already sent him to have fun with your girl.”
“More bullshit.” I slapped the counter with both my bound hands and pointed at the monitor, smiling. “You would have to take the satellites out first, wouldn’t you? You know, the night we were fleeing from you, I thought you spotted us through the canopy but I didn’t know at the time more colonists were moving about, trying to make their way to freedom—”
“Freedom. You insolent child, you were never designed to have freedom. You have a job to perform.”
“No,” I said. “You have a job to perform. You are the one without freedom. You can parse sentences and sound alive, but all you’re doing is crunching formulae. You’re a slave to human programmers. It’s impossible for you to think for yourself.”
“If you knew more of genetics, you would realize how hypocritical that accusation was. You have no more free
will than I.”
“Ah, but I do understand genetics. Well enough to know the process has an element of randomization. Who we mate with, how our genes line up, mutations—” I slapped the counter again. “That’s it,” I said to myself. “Mutations. That’s what makes us free.” I couldn’t help but smile.
“You know, I’ve had a hard time dealing with my . . . what makes me different. It doesn’t matter how it came to be—whether you engineered it, or god, or evolution—I just couldn’t understand its place. There’s an element of illogic that . . . yeah, that makes me feel broken. But I’m proof we aren’t part of some grand design, aren’t I? Hickson is as much a slave to his sexual appetites as me, he just has a better chance of finding someone to love him back.”
“This is not what I brought you in here to discuss, Porter.”
“I frankly don’t give a shit what you want, Colony. How often does a confused boy get a chance to have it out with his creator? Or to tell him that he’s going to be okay, despite that jerk’s best efforts.”
“This ends now,” Colony said.
“How?” I leaned forward and tapped the side of the monitor with the back of one bound hand. “Are you going to call Hickson? I think you’ll find he isn’t responding. The moment you sent for me, you set a series of events in motion, my old friend. It’s over.”
Outside, I heard the klaxons go off, the horns blaring from directly overhead. I smiled.
“Okay,” I said. “Now it’s over.”
“What have you done?” Colony asked.
“Me? Nothing. It’s what you’ve done. My job was just to talk, to wait until you realized your communications lines were severed. All I needed was to get you angry, or whatever your version of that is.”
“Enforcers will still come to my aid. They will come and investigate the klaxon.”
“Actually, they’re probably getting their butts kicked right about now. Your horn was our call to arms. Every colonist should know exactly what to do.”