Hull Zero Three

pool, to Life Design.”

Yes! Those words, those names…

“Can you follow it?” Nell asks him.

Without answering, he’s off again—physically still close, but his presence impossibly far away in an instant.

The Tracker is also with us now, apparently accessing through another board. “This hull still keeps a large share of Ship’s memory,” it says, and for the first time, I realize that Tsinoy is female— her presence is rich with identity. The Ship, the hull, knows her, trusts her, needs her. She’s an astrogation specialist. She may be the most important person among us—and because of her design, the one most likely to survive. Things begin to make a stark sort of sense. Maybe it’s the rest of us who are expendable.

Tsinoy pulls up a dense starfield, then demos how each star has a descriptor, rendered in a number of shifting symbol sets and languages. “The information has been updated continually,” she says.

“All Ship’s children got clues,” Nell says. “Let’s hope they’re enough to get us somewhere.”

The rumbling and grinding outside of our connected experience is low-key, not very distracting. We assume Kim will warn us if anything worse happens. In here, we’re exploring. Our need is painfully acute, more crucial than quenching thirst or assuaging hunger.

We might be about to find out why we are.

HULL MEMORY

Tsinoy is trying to figure out where we are headed. The first thing she discovers is that Ship is 439 light-years from Earth’s sun. There’s another measure of our distance traveled, more absolute— something to do with the crests of hyper-length cosmological gravitational waves, but it’s a bigger number, surrounded by dense mathematics, so we stick with light-years, because the memory of a year is so rich with other associations.

It seems we—my twin and I—know a great deal about our home planet, the Earth. Almost as if we had been born and raised there. Pleasant and distracting, but almost totally useless.

Tomchin returns, dragging another jeweled cable. His presence jacks the cable into ours, though Tsinoy waves him off, absorbed in her own work. (I have several definitions for the word jack, one of them involving a child’s game with little metal caltrops and a rubber ball—the other, an antiquated electrical or data connector. I assume the word refers to the connector. No reason to explore memories of playing the game as a child! Because I was never a child.)

The cable reveals to us a pull-down mare’s nest of more cables—lots more. Most appear charred and ugly. Some still glow while others have floating machine symbols like question marks. My twin and I reach through the tangle. We’re quickly becoming experts, our minds flooding with imprinted knowledge—but then, together, we clumsily grab the same cable.

Bad idea.

We’re home again.

We never left home.

It’s all been a hideous nightmare.

CORE MEMORY

Something in the hull recognizes us and tries to do us a favor by reconnecting us with what we are supposed to know and feel. There’s a little confusion because there’s two of us, but that’s okay—the system can be creative if it has to, and with a little modification, there we are, back on Earth, young twins with our whole lives ahead of us, training to embark on a journey to the newly outfitted Golden Voyager. That’s the name of this Ship, I think—we think.

We’re going to become part of the crew. The destination crew.

My twin and I don’t always get along, but we went through training together, and we rely on each other for solving major problems—including women. Though of late we have been suffering through competition over a particularly lovely lass named—

(And here it gets strange, because that brings up fragments of future memories, the broken bits of my history available to Hull Zero One when I was—)

Don’t be silly. That’s just part of the terrible dream. You aren’t made in deep space—you’re frozen with all of your shipmates, your future partners in the colonies, and the Golden Voyager—

Whatever. I can very clearly anticipate my partner in the staging area, boldly looking at me along the line of the first landing party, exchanging those excruciatingly meaningful glances of first adoration, then lifelong bonding. We are meant for each other—so why would my twin interfere?

But we have so much to catch up on. Mother and Father, sister, education up through secondary, physical adaptation and augmentation, getting our freezing-down organs installed after first qualification, long summer days at Camp Starfield, our first test freeze… We all come out healthy and whole, not even hungover, and now we’re ready for that installation flight out to the edges of the Oort cloud, to meet up with the chosen moonlet, on which is strapped the growing frame of our Ship. This is a journey of almost nine months, because it’s illegal to light off bosonic drives within the system.

So clear! I suppose that even in my confusion and my conflicting emotions, seeing our unborn Ship for the first time, far out in the darkness where only starlight matters, fastened like a tiny golden octopus to the long end of the moonlet—seeing all this is useful, helpful, but why does it have to come attached to so much imaginary bullshit? I’m just fine without a backstory. I know the real story.

They pump us full of this continuity for psychological reasons—but why? They don’t trust us. We’re designed to be deceived.

We find spaces within the cramped living quarters, all three hundred of us, handpicked, tested, trained, passed—superior emotionally and physically to Earth’s best and brightest, filled with that glow of knowing where we’re going and what we’re going to do, flying in the most expensive goddamned object ever devised by the hands of humanity….

And as we go into the freezers to become time travelers into the future, to awaken five or six hundred years hence, we’re filled with an overwhelming joy at our destiny, more intense than anything we’ve experienced.

I’m still worried about my brother, of course, because we can’t both have her at the end of the journey. But we’ll work that out later.

Besides, I know, I anticipate…

At the end, there will be only one of us.

One of me.

My twin must be experiencing the same conflicts of indoctrination and emotion, because we pull up from this feed simultaneously, trying to shout in anger and frustration.

All wrong. All a lie.

“Hold on,” Tomchin says. “Wrong input. That’s the story if everything on Ship goes right. Here’s what we’re really looking for—the part of the Catalog that Ship uses if something goes wrong. And we all know that something has gone badly wrong.”

What pours into our presences next is even more disturbing than our false personal history. We’re paging through Ship’s instruction manual, examining every possible contingency.

The planet is already covered with primitive life-forms, and we can’t adapt, no matter how hard we