Hull Zero Three

that folds up out of sight when it’s done.

If Ship recognizes you, you get all you really need, and not one thing more—like a hamster.

After we eat, everyone is quiet, and I somehow get that they expect me to go into another room—there are several open doors down the corridor—and read my book in private. That’s the last thing I want. But it’s a ritual, apparently. It’s happened before.

Maybe I’m the only entertainment around here.

That thought almost makes me puke. I leave them to their imaginings. I’m thinking and feeling so hard that the spin-down catches me by surprise and I stumble and have to scramble back against the push, to get into my smaller, emptier room before all the weight is gone.

I float there—echoing slowly from wall to ceiling to floor, refusing to grab the cables—and pretend to lie back. Relax.

I can’t gather up the courage to open the damn thing. I am who I am. All those others… well, there’s every reason to deny them their place, their reality, because it leaves me with an insoluble problem. Identity.

What lies in my memory, waiting to be accessed, might just duplicate what’s already written in the book. Someone might have explored all of my knowledge, made all of my possible choices, run me completely out of fresh options. Someone might have lived my life all the way through.

I look closely at the book. Somehow, it feels like my book. It has little hallmarks of the character I might yet find inside my head. But I won’t believe that—not yet. I am who I am, and there’s no one else like me in the universe—right? That is a fact. It will remain a fact.

Until I open the book.

I’ve rolled it around in my hands for an hour. It’s made up of leaves of plastic, thinner than the one in my pocket. A thick brittle glue holds the leaves, the pages, between the black boards. The boards have a frayed, stained look, as if they were ripped or bent from a bigger sheet—something found in a garbage void. The stains might be blood. There are also dark marks on the page edges.

Not opening the book could be suicidal. How many times have I had access to a book like this and refused to open it—echoing through mistake after mistake, without the heavy assurance of past experience to guide me? But I know I’ve lived for years, decades, that I wasn’t just squirted into a sac and shaken into existence a couple of dozen spin-ups before. This conviction is necessary for my sanity. This conviction is going to kill me. Now of course it’s time to curse my maker, whoever that is—the hull or Ship Control or God…

The first time I’ve thought of that name, that concept. It should open so many new doors… but I don’t feel it. The word is curiously empty. I have a stronger connection to whatever Ship Control is, or even Destination Guidance.

I’m more miserable now than I’ve been during my short existence, including the physical pain and the blind, newborn fear. It’s the freshness of my fear that convinces me, finally. Pain is forgotten, but fear builds and leaves tracks, and I don’t feel those tracks—not in my thoughts, not in my flesh. All my fears are new and short. I don’t have enough of them to help me survive. Not enough experience.

I’m an idiot not to open the book.

I pull back the front cover. The glue makes a cracking sound. I hold it up and look at the spine—wouldn’t want to damage it, after all. The glue has little bubbles, might come from something organic. Maybe it’s dried factor blood. Maybe the stains on the cover aren’t human blood but something else. I pull the book away, focus, squint.

I will literally lose my self in its pages.

First page begins with a thick black line.

I’ve been alive one hundred cycles of spin-up and spin-down. Funny, the people I meet all use those words—they’re part of the patois of survivors in the hull. You’re a teacher. You know what patois is. The book I was given—from my previous incarnation—had that word in it, but not much else. Books get lost. I’ve pulled apart this book and combined it with pages from others, adding blank pages when I can to record what happens next.

The other pages come from earlier. I mark them clearly.

Good luck.

P.S. If you’re me, you’ll figure out how to read the rest. If you’re not me… Well, we do like to trade information, and I wouldn’t want to give the others an advantage.

Someone seems to really hate me.

Hate you.

The rest of the book is written in what reads at first like gibberish—random letters, scrawled slowly and carefully, or in real haste, but always gibberish. I close the book and grip it tight. I’m not even quite sure what patois is—some sort of meat paste? Or a way of speaking. I think it’s the latter.

Maybe I’m not me—or him. Maybe something’s been lost. Certainly I don’t have all of my memories, even all of my knowledge. But of course I don’t have any memories, really… if I was made just a short while back. Pulled out of a sac. Then anything I remember from before I was made, finished, whatever, is just imprinting.

Instinct.

TIME RUNS OUT QUICKLY HERE

After a while, I’m settled in, about one good kick away from the ceiling, drifting and dozing. Best not to get caught away from shoving distance of a surface, in case something comes by—something that wants to clean me up and put me in the freezer.

One hundred cycles, the first page says.

I’m just a youngster, then.

Youngsters play games with words. I sort of see sunlight on a bedcover, a notebook, and a game. I see a row of white pickets on a fence. Switch the pickets: fence rail code. The game has to do with letters in the alphabet, exchanging one letter for another. To make this simple code harder, I convert everything I write into pig Latin before transposing the letters. Then I show it to my kids in school to see if they can read it. (I can almost smell the schoolroom: chalk, pencil shavings, steam heat from old radiators, gym socks, ham sandwiches in paper bags waiting for lunch.)

Some of the kids can unravel the code. They become my friends. Most can’t. We call them…

Losers.

That’s it, then. I’m not a loser. I know how to play the game.

I come out of my doze and open the book. After a while, I’m reading pretty quickly. I might even be able to write in code quickly, with a little practice. I’m good at that sort of thing.

PAGE 2

I’m making my way forward. My cold-burns are healing. The girl is dead. She was killed by a tooth-worm. It tore her to pieces.

I wonder if the little girl always dies, too.

Some of the things here are alive but act like machines. There aren’t any robots—though I did see a silver woman or thin figure of some sort, but only for an instant.

Let me describe the things that are here and can be dangerous.

FACTORS: Cleaners most important. Cleaners try to keep everything spick-and-span. They have three heads/faces and six legs. Most of the factors do very well without weight. They also do OK when there’s weight. They take us away when we die—and sometimes even before we die, if you can’t avoid them. Other factors: fixers