2018: Mar. and Apr. Status Updates

Mar. 2018

Writing drafts of stories on a phone is, well, this:

“Oh.” I reach, and pull the dog out of her head.

The knight came down the hill slowly. He was alone, limping painfully. His horse had long since been lost, his armour was singed by fire, his ancestor’s spear broken in his shaking grip.

“Was there a princess?” his faithful retainer asked, visions of reward dancing through his young mind.

“No.”

“How many carts do we need to bring the hoard back to -.”

“The dragon had no hoard. For tax reasons.”

“I don’t understand?”

“The hoard was flown overseas to some other kingdom years ago. Every other noble knight, every warrior of the crown who joined me. All the battles, all those deaths, the rewards we had envisioned: it was for naught.”

“But you killed the dragon,” the retainer said timidly.

“It was old, and laughed at us the entire time. Laughed,” the knight repeated, in the tone of a broken man.

“I had the most brilliant idea yesterday. So now I’m spending today trying to work out whose idea it really was.”

I told you I wasn’t afraid but even that truth was born out of fear.

No war shaped human history quite as much as the Calorie Wars.

You never show up in pictures of us. Everyone think you’re a vampire when I know you’re just shy.

You told me that your life was an open book. Only I realize too late that you meant ebook - and one with a proprietary format.

I erased you from my life but the smudges remained on the paper of my heart.

The monsters never lied to us; it was how we discovered what they were.

Breakfast in bed turns out to be hot coffee on my head and eggs in a place that sent me shrieking to the emergency room.

I am starting to wonder if things might not be going well between us.

“You wonder why I am a climate change denier? You poor fool: I deny nothing. I merely wish to see the climate destroyed. October 15th, 1982. My heart was broken and the sky refused to rain despite how I felt. I decided then that the whole world would suffer with weather that shattered as easily as the human heart.”

I gave you a secret without wanting anything in turn.

Knowing it would torment you more than anything else I could do.

They said the robots would take over the world, but the robots were built to be reliant on the old technologies. Within five years their armies were out of oil, gasoline, vital minerals and metals that would have kept them fighting. We welcomed our robot overlords for freeing us from those shackles, and the information age was replaced finally by the solar age.

“Write,” the muse demanded, hurling ideas, plots, stories.

“I need to apply for jobs. I need work. I need work,” the writer replied.

“…. do you want me to leave you?”

“No. But I can’t write if I have no place to live. I would tell the stories only in my head, shared with no one.”

“… I will improve your resume,” the muse declared.

“But you must help us! You defeated the Rockhearth Dragon, walked through the Six Sundered Castles! You -.”

“I have a good publicity team, yes. I pay a dozen bards to sing songs about me.”

“But you were the hero of Bythok Bay!”

“Only in songs, child. Only in songs.” And she smiled, who some called the Untempered Queen. “What you do becomes far less important than what people think you can do. If you play your cards right.”

“But people are dying!”

“I am sorry. But that is what people do, even more than cry out for heroes.”

I told you I could save you, but I meant only from myself.

“Hah! If you were psychic, you’d have known I was going to spill my drink on you!”

“That isn’t the sort of thing I predict.” And the psychic smiled, and told me the day that I would die, and their smile never wavered at all.

I lost the key, but it turned out you were never a door at all.

“Look, Charlie. Charles. When you married me, you had to understand that marriage was a triple-A game, full-price point and the honeymoon as a loot box? Our whole engagement was a beta test.”
“You prepared for this.”

“You bet your ass I did. The EULA between us was never talked about, love. Having kids is, at the least, a season pass on top of everything else. And don’t even get me started on the microtransactions involved later on.”

April 2017

Once upon a time there was a monster who tried to be kind, until they realized they weren’t the real monster at all.

Every window wishes it were a door, and there is no door that does not desire to be only a wall rather than a wound in the sameness of a barrier. Everything we build contains portions of our failings: how else could it have beauty?

There are rules that govern the world, but to understand them means you know they do not rule over you at all.

When the boss said he liked to micromanage, no one realized he meant it literally. Not until the critique of their blood samples landed in their inboxes.

“Being a hero is always easy. You see danger, you run toward it. It takes a lot more to prevent the danger in the first place.”

If you hold a door open long enough, at what point is it no longer a door?

Nothing is true. Nothing is permitted. Those who believe otherwise have swallowed the lies that run the world.

"I have never met a fish that did not wish to be a bird, and that is the nature of the world."

Have you fed your Google today?

He snorts. “Near as I can tell, the point of your religion is that if everyone goes well, your god did it. And if things go wrong, it’s never the fault of your god. Must be a nice gig if you can get it.”

The prince realized that the asphalt jungle was more dangerous that he had believed when he returned from one quest to find someone has stolen the horn of his unicorn.

It would be interesting to call a company and get their recorded message that someone will be with you, but it does NOT claim they are getting an unusually high volume of calls.

The Spy Who Came in from the Warmth

The office was small, crammed between a dentist and a lawyer in a strip mall. According to Langley, they wanted to make sure my cover wasn’t blown. ‘We’re protecting everyone in the field,’ is just government-speak to explain budget cuts. As far as anyone else in the building knew, I did tele-sales and some salesmen from the company visited me every so often.

The lawyer’s office was a front for the KGB, of course, under whatever names they were using this year. People act like the Cold War ended, when really it just paused for a time as both sides repositioned their pawns. We only won because we had more money. It’s never about ideolgy, only about pockets and what’s in them.

I’m thinking about that when Schmidt comes into my office. The heater hasn’t worked in three weeks. He’s nursing a tan and looks like he should be sipping margaritas on a beach. Which is what he was doing last week. I keep tabs on everyone out in the field as much as I can.

“Hollis. Buddy. Pal.” Schmidt offers a full-watt smile to hide his confusion. “Word from above is that I was called in?”

“There are issues in Russia,” I say. Which is never a lie: there are always issues everywhere. “Siberia.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your next posting. You’ll need to brush up on your Russian, of course.”

The smile wavers. “I’ve been in deep cover for fifteen years in Costa –.”

“We are aware. This is your next assignment.”

“I don’t understand?”

“It is Siberia or you work in this office. You understand that, yes?”

He looks about the tiny office, unable to hide a shudder. “Replace you, here? I know four languages –.”

“Six. But not Russian,” I say flatly. “You’ll need to sell your clothing and buy winter gear. Langley will send you details about the assignment and cover shortly.”

“Why? Why me, why this?” Schmidt demands. “I came in from –.”

I smile. “No one cares about the spies who come in from the warmth. Your extended vacation from real work is over.”

He blinks. I hear teeth grind together. “I see.”

I doubt he does. But he will in time. They all do.

I don’t explain that his office will be colder than mine. He’ll learn. He might even understand.

Perils of Questions

“Help me.” I said those words, or something like them. I don’t remember.

One moment there was a jungle. The next another place, and another. I think I spoke like I did to Jia, on a world I crashed on. Spoke in a way that couldn’t be ignored. Survived a crash I shouldn’t have, survived her weapon firing point-blank at me.

I think my parents lied to me. Their sixteenth child. The one they took to Home, away from all galactic technology, the one they said had one minor talent for knowing when I was being lied to. I think they lied to everyone. They made me into a weapon. But I don’t understand what kind.

Four steps. Four steps, and I stumble through climates. Fall to my feet in tundra. I have no idea where I am. There is ice, a sky devoid of visible stars, my breath turning into crystals in the air. I should be freezing to death, perhaps already dead, but there is warmth about me. Brought from another place? Drawn from this one? I don’t know.

I don’t know how to know.

I should be dead. This should not be possible.

You don’t leave worlds by wishing about it. Only that’s how I left home. Because the boy who was sixteen and not from Home helped me save Home from desruction, said he could offer a way out if I had to go. I said yes, in the end. Ended up standing in a space station without ID, escaped a prison, stole a spacecraft, crashed it. It happened. It makes no sense. But it happened.

“What is happening to me?” I scream. I must have screamed before, perhaps when I was a child. If so, I don’t remember doing it. I say the words again, with more force. And on the third time, my voice isn’t quite my own: “What is happening to me?” booms out of me, not a request, not a cry but a demand.

I drop to my knees, feeling as though I’d run between two villages from Home at a full sprint. There is silence. I am slumped on frozen ice, and the wind has fallen silent about me. Even the stars have gone silent. The thought comes to me, but makes no sense. The sky here has no visible stars. For one thing.

“Oh.” There is a voice behind me. Soft.

I stand, spin. The nameless boy I met at Home is standing behind me, one hand raised up toward me in a warding gesture. He’s the one I knew was sixteen. The first knowing what led to – to this?

“Sixteen.” There is no question in his naming of me. There is a sadness in his eyes I have no words for.

“What have you done to me?” My voice begins like it did, but the power – the force – falls apart against him.

“I didn’t mean to do anything.” His voice is very soft. His eyes are too old for sixteen, but somehow for a moment his face is too young. “I think –.” He walks closer, circles me. “It has been a very long time, Sixteen, but I think this was an accident.”

“What?”

“My name is Jay. Jayseltosche, to some.”

I don’t move. There are stories. About something so old and wonderful and terrible that my parents thought such word the name of a weapon in some forgotten war. That there exists nothing that could, for example, cut a galaxy in half in a hurry to get to places. Destroy entire hyperlane systems. Prevent the Verkonis war. There were too many stories, and no one believed any of them. Not really. But we didn’t disbelieve either, I think.

There are holes in the historical records where all the galactic datanets and intergalactic weaves record one word: jaysome. That, and nothing else.

“I don’t understand.”

He smiles. The smile is so gentle it almost makes me doubt every story. “I am old, Sixteen. I do not age as humans do, and it has been a very long time since I could let myself cause an accident, let alone an oops. To not be in control, no matter how terrible or angry I was, was not a luxury I could offer myself.” He lets out a breath. “But I think I did. It has been a long time since the universe has needed magicians. And now you are here.”

The word magician stops the silence. The world becomes just the world again about us. But I fee cenered, somehow. More myself. “What does that mean?”

“It used to mean many things. Now, I am not certain?”

“What does it mean for you?”

Jay laughs softly. There is no cold at all; and I think that is more his laugh than anything else now. “I think it means I needed a friend.”

I have no idea what I am. Less idea what he did. But there is a yearning in him deeper than anything I have known.

“Oh.”

“I know,” he says, softer. “I’m sorry.”

“For needing a friend?”

“I have put this burden on you.”

And words come. There is a part of me that goes deeper than I understand. “Is friendship a burden to you?”

He steps back. There is shock on his face. “No,” he says finally.

“Good.”

And I don’t have any other words, not against his grin. I don’t know what will come of this, but I think it will be a peril unlike anything I can understand.

And I find myself looking forward to it, without understanding why at all.

Perils of Travel

They say that any crash you walk away from is a good one. I have no idea who the ‘they’ in this are. I have no idea what it means when the crash you walk away from was impossible. Is impossible.

I stagger free of wreckage. Unscratched. Unscarred. In less than four days I have escaped Home, possibly because of some weird entity I barely understand, escaped prison at Osalax Station, stolen a semi-experimental spacecraft capable of short-term space jumps from inside a station hangar without damaging local space, survived piloting the ship while being unable to properly access the controls and then surviving the sudden inexplicable planetfall on...

I had no idea where I was. A jungle, of vast translucent blue leaves, yellow trunks and yellow-green moss at the ground covering. Slightly spongey underfoot, the air smelling of citrus. Ship had crashed here; I had no idea why. I had less idea how I’d survived, unless some facet of ship had involved a shield solely for the occupants.

Not being able to know that terrified me. I’d spent most of my life with my parents at Home. One of the least civilized worlds in several galaxies, by choice. There were some medbots. Nothing else of modern technology able to enter or leave the star system: everyone living there doing penance or hiding. I knew enough about my parents to know they’d been doing both. I was Sixteen: their last child, whose genetic gifts were intended for other things than war. I know when people are lying to me. That’s it, as far as I know.

And somehow Home stripped away the ability to interface with technology. The entire galactic Net, the deeper intergalatic Weave: the wealth of information and knowledge and I had no way to interface with it. No one had ever left home until me. All I know is that Home didn’t want to be forgotten. And the alien on Home who helped me solve a murder promised a way off home. And delivered.

Those were facts. What was also a fact was that I should be dead. Sneaking off of Osalax Station could just have been the universe owing me luck. Surviving the crash of Ship was far beyond that, to say nothing of landing on a world with a breathable atmosphere and nothing having tried to kill me yet. I walk slowly through the jungle, and I can’t shake the feeling that the trees are parting for me. That I’m being watched.

And something is pulling at me. A feeling that isn’t a feeling as much as a need. Somethng is calling me through alien jungle. I walk slowly. I should be dead. I am not dead. I have no idea what is going on. Did my parents change me more than they admitted? Did Home change me? The creature that let me leave? I set each aside slowly as I walk, the forest giving way to rolling green-brown hills and finally a small outpost. Human settlement, at least in part, and a star port fit only for small craft.

I have basic clothing, nothing like a weapon, no way to get information about the settlement. I take a deep breath and walk slowly toward it.

A girl emerges from a small house at the edge of the settlement, spotting me. She has at least one weapon and impact armour despite an age I’d estimate at ten. Barring rejuvenation treatments of a more unusual nature. She walks toward me as I stop, waving one hand in the air. Slows. Keeps walking, a small energy pistol visible in one hand.

“The scan isn’t working on you. Why?” she snaps.

I shrug. “I have no idea. I could be dead, but I rather think being dead would be more interesting.”

She considers that, aiming the pistol at my torso. “You have a name?”

“Sixteen.”

“You’re not sixteen, are you?”

“I was my parents sixteenth child; I’m seventeen, if you must know.”

“You seem older. I’m Jia.” The girl puts her weapon away. “You from the crashed ship?”

I nod.

She looks me over, eyes narrowing. “And alive without injury?” she mutters.

“I can’t explain it either.”

Jia jumps. “You know Xiong?”

I pause. She’s speaking her local dialect; I definitely had no business knowing it, but I’m hearing it as though it was galactic Standard. “... so it would seem. Something very strange is going on.”

“I noticed.” And she draws her weapon again, aims and fires at my chest.

I dive to the side at her movement; I’m quick. My parents built that into me too, but the weapon still fires and

something

the energy beam strikes my right shoulder

only it does not

there is a deep smell of citrus, of leaves, of forest about me

and the energy dissipates.

“What was –.” Jia aims again.

“Stop.” And she stops dead at the edge to my voice. I stand, slowly. Jia doesn’t move, her eyes wide. I told her to stop, and she did.

“I – move. Be free?” I don’t think it’s the words as much as the intent, but wind blows around us as though the world let out a breath.

Jia staggers back, spins, and runs. Not firing at me again. Just running as fast as she can toward her home.

I don’t follow. I have no idea what is going on. Forests don’t protect random people. And I’d have wagered good credits that Jia didn’t have anywhere near enough tech in her for someone to take over her body like that. I don’t know what I did. I walk back toward the forest. This isn’t safe. Whatever is happening is real, but can’t be real. Shouldn’t be real. I spoke, and it wasn’t Jia. It was as though the world was listening to me. As though it is, all around me. Waiting. Observing.

Needing.

Wanting.

But I have no idea what it wants. And no clue how to help it.

How do you help anyone when you have no idea what is happening to you?

Perils of Freedom

“Prisoner 8246937-003519. State your name, species, place of origin, egress and destination.”

“Sixteen. Human. Unknown. Home. Unknown.”

There is silence after that. The cell is small, ten by twelve paces, a bed with a toilet and sink underneath. Everything is sterile and empty. This is the first time that I have been a prisoner, or in a prison at all. I pace the cell, trying hard not to think about how long the number had been.

Osalax Station began life as a rogue planet converted into the largest space station I knew of. I am at least two galaxies away from Home. I try not to think about that either. I told my parents I was leaving, but they didn’t believe me. No one leaves Home. No one left Home, they will have to say now. Or just presume me dead.

The room flickers a pale white. “Medical scan inconclusive; subject inconclusive,” the Intelligence says.

I blink. I have no idea what that means.

More time passes. An entity enters my cell. Some form of liquid synth they scans the room before departing. A human arrives some time later: male, military body, into a fourth or fifth rejuvenation treatment. He looks to be about sixty but is at least four times that age. No weapons; a single thought would be enough to cause the cell to deal with me.

“Interesting,” he says in a tone that speaks mostly of annoyance. “Home. Designated an aggressively low-tech world. No spacecraft can enter that solar system, transit to the world is via a relay junction on the moon and is only one-way. It is the last refuge of those who flee the wider universe for one reason or another. It is not possible to leave.”

“I did.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.” I don’t know the stranger’s name, what he put inside me. How it removed me from Home. I just know I’m here, far away from the world I knew. Without aid, without currency, with only basic clothing and a knife made of terraformed rock. I have genetic tricks, thanks to my parents.

“Very well. Come with me.”

“Am I free?”

“Yes,” he lies. One of those tricks is knowing when I’m being lied to. Another is being naturally gifted in survival.

Which is why I follow him into the hallway and he’s on the ground and unconscious moments later. It helps that he didn’t expect it. And that the cameras don’t seem able to find me. I run down a hallway, cells beyond the wall locked and hidden, find an open door, another, and step onto a concourse. A hundred species mingle and rush about, voices shouting commands – mostly in galactic Standard – and the rush freezes me for a moment.

I don’t think I’ve seen this many people in my life. I shake the thought away, reach. I don’t have any implants in me: no one can, and be part of Home. Nothing happens. I move into the crowd, one body among many. the cell I was in was definitely low security to be this close to any thoroughfare. I was very young when my parents took me to Home, but it doesn’t take long to find working kiosk and enter it. Not all species can or will use implants, so a kiosk is a free means of contacting the galactic Network.

I try for times. Unrecognized user. Other errors. Like the Intelligence in the cell. Home did something to me. Or the stranger who let me travel here instead? I have no idea. I try to picture surviving in any galaxy without access to a Network and shiver, force myself to exit the pale blue kiosk. Breathe.

This is the first time that I have been free. And somehow that extends to being free from the Network. From that data. From all that information. I take a deep breath. Another. Begin to walk. Somehow walking helps. I move toward the nearest hangar bay, judging it based on traffic and presumed pilots. I need to leave Osalax Station. I know that much, and somehow it’s as if my own need is directly me. Another gift from my parents, proof they knew what Home would do us? I don’t know. I just walk, and find a small shuttle craft. Golden trim, black body, small wings, a surprisingly large engine. The kind of craft designed to jump only a few systems, but the engines look too advanced for basic jumps.

It’s even turned on and empty. The kind of luck one only finds in stories.

The craft opens a door. I step inside. No strange stranger. Certainly not my parents. The craft sits one pilot, one navigator, space for two crew to sleep and talk.

“Prep a jump two sectors away,” I say.

“Welcome, captain. Please identify yourself.”

“Sixteen.”

“Identity noted. Jump prepped. Do you wish us to engage?”

I blink. “We need to clear a course with Osalax Station, move away from it –.”

The ship rocks a little under my feet.

“Jump complete,” the ship’s calm voice says.

I stare out of the screens that appear before me. A spaceship that can jump from within a space station and not kill everyone inside. It explains the engines a little bit.

“Ship. Why am I the pilot?”

“You asked to be let on board. And you seemed nice.”

“That not how anything happens. Can you see me?”

“Only if you wish me to? It is quite confusing.”

I sit in the pilots chair, my forehead starting to ache no matter how hard I rub my temples. I begin thinking of every way I know to find out if this is a simulation and break out of it. No one just escapes a prison by being invisible to the warden, finds a turned on experimental spaceship, becomes the pilot of it and simply escapes Osalax Station.

That doesn’t happen.

Except it did. Every attempt to prove this is simulation breaks, leaving me only with truth that makes no sense at all.

I ask ship to land on the nearest inhabited world. The headache begins to fade. Making choices helps. I can’t connect to the Networks at all, but even so I can’t shake the feeling there is something wrong with this world.

I hated Home. I hate being a stranger to myself even more.

If this is a simulation, I’m terrified of how good it is.

Perils of Home

I hate it here. I understand why we’re here: the Noise Plague, the Collider Wars. People’s implants driving them insane, the biotech nightmares that melted organics into each other. I’ve lost relatives I’ve never met, saw vids of what happened. I’m the last of sixteen siblings. My parents saw whole worlds melt into darkness.

But I still hate Home. No other name, no other designations. No space port. An automated satellite on the second moon transits people down to the world. And that’s it. No implants. No modern tech. No premodern tech. No data feeds.

The only modern tech in Home is the tech that keeps tech from working, the medbots for major injuries and drugs. There is a transit system outside the solar system. It, to the moon, to Home. No space craft can exit subspace near Home, let alone fly through the solar system. No way in, and no way out.

Home has been billed as an experiment in primitive culture. Probably because that sounds better than Hell.

Everyone else is old and war-worn. Some were relieved to lose their implants. I can’t understand that, even if I believe them. There are galaxies of data flowing through the universe. But here we are deaf and blind to all of it. Out there is everything. Everything.

There are farms here. Nothing as good at the vat grown food on Ios 4. Hours of work just to eat. I’ve been told that people starved in the early days of Home centuries ago. As if that should surprise me. The day is cold and I’m walking home through the brush from helping clear fields. We don’t even have machines for that. For medicine, but only just.

My father comes out of the house. Shouting my name, in Home and galactic Standard. It’s not a rule that no one uses Standard here, but it is. I don’t need an implant to know he’s scared. I shout his name – in Home – and he spins to see me. He orders me inside.

I follow. Mom is sitting at our table, the glowlight ceiling making her face a ghost.

“The –.” Mom gathers herself. “The medbots were destroyed today. The ones in Riverest. And every other town in comm range over the last week. No one knows who. Or why. Or how.”

“But we are dead. Without them.”

“Others died defending them, we think. We worried –.” Dad adds nothing else. I visit the medbots more the I need to; they remind me of better times. Better worlds. Our old life.

“Toram asked for you. To examine them. If you will?” Mom asks wen Dad remains silent.

I blink. I know of Toram, who is old and travels the towns rather than staying in any single one. We’ve barely met. “Me?”

“Do you remember when you beat up the Cof boy?”

“He lied about stealing a pie. He blamed me.”

“Yes. And you were certain he had lied. It is a – generic gift you have. Nothing implanted. Nothing intended for war. But you see more than others do. Your other siblings had... other talents; you were the first with ones not suited to war. There is an urgency to this; we will explain later?”

I nod. I have a knife I carved from terraformed bedrock in my room. A magnifying glass I won in a bet. I take some rope and string as well heading out after at an easy run. The villages have an old communication system for emergencies, but even it is often broken. As a result, running is common enough that the paths are plenty and even. I break into a faster run. Not just to reach the medbots, but to escape questions.

Ten steps, twenty, by the time I can no longer see our house I fall into the rhythm and slip out of it as I reach our town. It has two medbots, as most towns do. They repair each other, broken bones, damaged organs, offer advice. You can die if you don’t reach them quickly, and they can do nothing against age or some diseases. Some have been damaged because they couldn’t heal or fix things, but destruction on this level – aimed at all medbots – I do not have words for it.

I hate it here. But not that much. Not enough to kill everyone else. Never that; there are limits even to hatred.

I pass empty fields and shuttered homes, the village of Riverest being quieter than I have ever known. The medbots had their own small building on the south end of the town, a dome of pale stone to distinguish it. All medbots have such buildings in every town, so everyone can find healing if they seek it. No one ever thought that would be a danger, because even in the spats and battles that can occur no on wishes to remove such vital aid from the world. Until now.

There is no sign of Toram. No one has been left on guard at the medbots building, I think, until I hear movement inside. I draw my knife, push open the door.

The man standing inside the room is not Toram. He is sixteen, crouched down beside some of the remains of medbot 1. He has no weapons, but I don’t put my knife away. It isn’t much, my knife, but holding it is a small comfort as I take in the ruins of the room. The room has four tables for patients, of differing sizes. Cupboards along walls with supplies, a couple of storage shelves for spare parts so the medbots can repair each other if something breaks down. The tables are fine. Even the cupboards are mostly fine. But the two medbots have been torn apart, sliced through and scattered into hundreds of pieces.

“Thoughts?” The young man doesn’t stand, sifting carefully through the remains of a chassis with bare hands.

I put my knife away, fingers shaking. “A blade. I have a terraform knife. It might pierce one, but never slash like that. It would take decades to make a working sword of terraformed bedrock that would work and cut through a medbot. To do it fast enough to avoid alarms: that I do not understand.” He does not respond. “Who are you?”

“From another town. Not the killer.” The stranger chuckles. I believe him. He doesn’t lie. Not that he can’t, but he doesn’t.

“Why don’t you lie?” The words slip out before I can stop them. “Everyone else does.”

“Because I gain nothing from lies. And I am strong enough to bear the truth.” His smile is a flash of gentle humour, gone as his gaze flicks back to the medbots. “There are fifty villages on this continent. Over thirty have lost their medbots now. What does that mean?”

“More deaths from injury. But many die from injury even with the medbots. More will die without drugs to help them.” My parents sometimes take those to sleep. Other people take different ones. Home is the last place one goes to, for many different reasons.

“There were store houses that contained seeds of those drugs in case they needed to be planted; they have all been destroyed.” The stranger stands.

“We never planted such things?”

“They can have uses other than healing, as I understand it.”

“… and that is reason to deny them? To destroy them?”

“I would think not but often destruction only seeks to destroy. Nothing grater, for all its proponents claim.”

“Who is doing this?”

The stranger doesn’t reply but I catch a glimpse of movement behind me. I spin, knife in hand, find myself facing Tomar. He is the oldest person in the surrounding towns. All white hair, bone and sinew with eyes like a frozen lake. I know of him more that know him – he travels, belonging nowhere, and I find myself lowering my knife without sheathing it.

“You I know of –.” His gaze flicks to the stranger. “You, I do not.”

“Why did you ask for me? I do not know you,” I press.

“You do not know me?” He looks – no, he is genuinely offended.

“I know you are old and travel through the towns?”

“Children.” He sighs. “Who do you think allowed you access to the medbots when you did not need to be healed? Do you think this kind of access is given lightly?”

“What?”

“You see things, boy. I expected you to see how useless – how dangerous – that medbots are to Home. How they corrupt what Home was meant to be. You have a knife that could cut a medbot: you were expected to join me!”

That’s when I realize why I haven’t put my blade away. Why I’ve been facing him tensely this entire time. “I saw. I am new at this. I saw, but did not perceive.”

Tomar has murdered medbots. People are something else. That’s what I think as I move, but the old man steps aside. I’m young and fast. Age and experience best that every time. He has a sword seemingly pulled from thin air, making one movement for every four I do.

I am not like the rest of my siblings were, I think, but I was still bred for survival. Every movement is as natural as breathing; but Tomar is simply better.

I slip on a piece of medbot. Luck beats genetics I have time to think my parents would be ashamed of me, and then the blade stops.

Somehow, I had almost forgot about the stranger.

Tomar’s blade is sharper than my knife. But the stranger has caught it between his fingers. And yanks it out of Tomar’s grip, throwing it across the room with a grace that puts the entire fight we had to shame.

“Who? What are you?” Tomar demands.

“Just another person who was seeking peace at Home.”

“Impossible! I was one of the first settlers! I have access to the records of everyone!”

“And you should not. You came here with DNA that has kept you alive for centuries. And all you have done with what was given to you is abuse it. You drown in nostalgia for a past that never was and you call yourself just? You destroy lives and think it justified? You think power makes you justice. But it never does. There is perhaps some justice to be found with power, but never any kindness.”

“I alone know what Home was meant to me,” Tomar snarls. “I cannot count on one hand the number of hopes I have lost, nor name how many dreams I have seen wither and rot. I swore Home would not be like them. Home will be free if I must unmake everything to ensure that comes to pass!”

“Everything means more than you think it does. It has always been so. And everything changes to mean what you did not intend.”

Tomar yells a word, and the sword moves through the air toward his hand. And then then it isn’t, gone between moments.

“I imagine many trusted you, that no one blamed you for this.” The stranger stares at Tomar without any expression I can discern.

Tomar’s eyes widen. “You are sixteen,” he breathes, staring at the stranger. There is a truth bubbling from him, words seeking expulsion into truth.

“Yes.” And Tomar vanishes. Here one moment, gone the next.

I turn to the stranger slowly, hands far from my own fallen knife. “... You did that. To him, to the sword. How?”

“There are technologies older than those that protect Home.” That is true, but not the whole truth. The stranger lets out a tired sigh. “His body will be found in a field. A casualty of the lack of medbots. People have a right to mourn even monsters, after all.”

“Tomar wanted me dead.”

“Or joining him. He knew you’d be asked to look into it, and you’d eventually find him out. He didn’t expect me to be here. I liked being here. Home is – quiet.” The stranger gestures, and the air in front of him becomes a hole leading somewhere else.

I make a sound.

He looks at me. There is a weight inside me that wasn’t there before. “When you need to leave, concentrate only on that and I will come back for you. I dare not fix the medbots. I cannot help Home without destroying it.”

“Why me?”

“Because your name is Sixteen,” he says softly. “And because I recognize the look in your eyes. There must be a way to escape even paradise, or it is never that at all.”

And the stranger steps through the whole he made and is gone.

And I am left alone, to try and explain some version of the truth. I walk back outside slowly, begin walking toward home. Decide on the story I am going to tell.

I hate it here. But I won’t be here forever now. And that helps so much more than I have words for at all.