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.