Cold. A smile crept over my face as I walked to one of the compartments and removed another thermo control blanket and wrapped it around my shoulders. For the first time in my life, I felt cold: a natural reaction to an environment that wasn’t perfect or controlled. Just like I had tasted hunger and thirst when The Collective held me prisoner. All of these were new experiences for me…all were things that reminded me just how real and human I was.
“Are you cold again?” Cassie asked from the bed.
“A little.”
She kicked the thermo blanket away from her legs and stood up, crossing the small room and wrapping her arms around me, reaching beneath my blanket to hold me tighter.
“I hope you’re not getting sick.”
Squeezing her back, I tried to be reassuring. “I don’t think so – I feel fine – just a little colder than normal, but I think it’s the pod. You probably don’t feel it because you’re a girl and carry more fat than I do.”
“Carry more fat...?” She repeated in a warning tone.
“Just a little,” I patted her non-existent tummy gently.
Beep-beep-beep.
The sound of the alarm interrupted whatever Cassie might have been about to say. Her eyes flew towards the console. “Is that…?”
“Yeah,” I nodded, answering the unasked question.
“Oh.”
Cassie stepped away, leaving a cold spot where her warm body had been. “There’s nothing for you to do, everything is set up.” I wanted to reassure her, and clear away the desolation that now shadowed her eyes, but I knew there was nothing I could say that would make a difference. Cassie gave no indication that she had heard me. “We’ve got thirty minutes now until – well, until – it’s time.”
“Oh,” Cassie said again. She wasn’t looking at me: she was staring at the compartment where Joel’s covered body lay.
“We have nothing to do but wait. Why don’t we have something to eat?”
It was a terrible suggestion and I knew it. I was sure Cassie felt about as hungry as I did right now, but it was the first thing that had popped into my head. Without saying anything, she took a seat at the single small table in the pod, which divided the living area from the main pod console. I bustled about in front of the pod compartments, locating two bowls and some dehydrated soup. Disappearing into the tiny bathroom – where the only sink was – I added the requisite amount of water to the package of soup, before taking it back into the main area of the pod to put into the hot box to cook.
“Why do you think The Collective even had a pod like this?” Cassie said abruptly. She might have been talking to herself, but I answered anyway.
“There was something about it in the files I found.” The hot box pinged and I turned away to remove the sachet of boiling soup. Ripping the top off I poured it haphazardly into the two bowls I’d set onto the table, struggling with just one good hand.
Cassie pulled a bowl towards her, but did not pick up her spoon. She was waiting for me.
“This is an old model pod – the manual made some references to it having been used to transport humans from elsewhere, but that the small size and lack of restraining areas made them impractical. Some of them – like this – were re-fitted as waste pods for…” I drifted from unemotional and informative, to not being able to finish my sentence.
How could I say: “disposing of humans” when we were waiting for Joel’s body to be released?
I swallowed the lump in my throat, but still couldn’t get the words out. I picked up my spoon, then put it down. Cassie placed her hand over mine and we sat in silence, as our soup went cold and time moved on.
Cassie stood beside me in front of the compartment. Joel’s body was visible through the small panel in the door, although you didn’t really see much of anything as he was covered with a white cloth. In some ways, the blank emptiness looked almost peaceful, which he deserved. Dying was hard; but death itself, by comparison, seemed easy.
Winding my fingers around one of Cassie’s shaking hands, I squeezed her gently. She reached forward and rested her palm against the clear panel of the door, as though she were reaching out to pull Joel back inside.
“There’s nothing we could have done for Joel.” I whispered, knowing that she was wondering if there was some other way things might have worked out.
When she nodded at me, I knew she was ready to say goodbye. I leaned over to the panel beside the door and manually entered the ejection code. A moment later bright white flames engulfed the shrouded figure inside the compartment. It was a few short minutes before the outer door opened and the fire and ash was pulled into space.
I turned away, expecting Cassie to follow. She didn’t.
“It was because of me, you know.” She said, staring into the empty waste compartment.
I didn’t know. “What was because of you?”
“Joel – being here – it was because of me. The system they had, The Collective needed us, but we had to fall in love to make it work…”
What she was saying didn’t make much sense. However, it was the first time Cassie had offered information unprompted, so I leapt on it.
“The Collective needed us – what for?”
“Their civilisation was failing, some disease infecting them all, killing them.”
I shrugged. “What did that have to do with us?”
“Nothing – at first. A group of them left their home, searching for planets with life on them that might hold a solution for combating the virus. They are the ones that created the space station.”
“They were from another planet – not Earth – and found us as they were searching for a cure?” I remembered Joel, laid out on a table, his body being pulled apart by those monsters. That was some cure they found.
Cassie turned then, searching my face. I don’t know what she was looking for.
“They started off peaceful – logical, really – not as bad as we found them to be. It was desperation that drove them so far.”
Desperation? I didn’t care what their rationale was – they were parasites, surviving by feeding off us. My stomach rolled as I remembered the commander – he wasn’t just a parasite, he was evil. It took me a few seconds to force the feeling away.
“Did you see what they looked like, without the body-suits?” It was hard to imagine another race of beings, and in my head I was now picturing locust-like insects.
Cassie shook her head. “Only through a link to The Collective – just flashes – nothing clear.”
“What are they?”
She stared at me, a flash of sadness creasing her features before she answered. I hoped I wasn’t pushing her too far – I just needed to know what she did.
“They were like a plant, sort of. On their own planet they lived in water – it was very similar to Earth, which was what brought them in the first place. You were right about the size of the space station; it was much bigger than we were told it was. Most of it was given over to the living space of The Collective, when they weren’t working in one of the breeding grounds.”
Breeding grounds? That’s what the Family Quarter must have been. “They bred us?” I guessed aloud.
Cassie nodded. “There were several areas they maintained – our Family Quarter was just one of them.”
“And our parents were part of The Collective too?”
“The people we knew as parents – yes. They called them Keepers. I don’t understand it completely, but being apart from the rest of The Collective made them weaker. That’s why they were so excited about the idea of us changing – it meant the end of their turn working in the breeding grounds and returning to their normal environment.”
“Our human parents are dead?” I guessed, already knowing the answer.
“They took people from Earth originally, but they were too violent and wouldn’t accept the control of The Collective. Your – I mean – our parents came from Earth, but they were the last groups: The Collective changed the process after that – it
was too difficult to manage. Now they use us to breed the next generation, before they – they ”
Unshed tears made Cassie’s eyes gleam and I knew exactly what she was unable to say. I remembered the room where I’d seen Joel die…I remembered what they had been doing to him, and all the others that lay on tables around him. Everything Cassie said tied into what I had seen: they used us to propagate and re-fill their breeding grounds, then ripped our bodies apart to harvest what they needed.
I had been wrong. They were all evil. The Collective – one entity – no one part of that could be absolved of responsibility. Not even the man that had helped us. He still allowed all the others to die.
“Consuming us – our blood, our organs – held back the progression of the disease. It wasn’t a cure, but it gave them more time to keep looking.”
I frowned. “How did that even work?”
Cassie paled. “They mixed their cells with human DNA at the embryo stage, to make it compatible.”
Compatible? Palatable more like! “They were eating us?!”
She shook her head. “I told you they were more like a plant than an animal – it would be blended into the water they lived in – they absorbed it.”
What. The. Hell. No wonder she’d been so quiet – this was a lot to get your head around.
Wait a second.
“Their DNA is in us? Those creatures are inside you and me?” My skin began to crawl, as if I could feel something poisonous moving through me.
“No. It should have been. But not you – you didn’t have it added – you were a blip in their system. An anomaly.”
I was different? A freak – that’s what the commander had called me. How long had they known? “How was that possible?”
“It was an accident. System failure.”
I swallowed. “And you?”
Cassie looked through me. “I was the same as everyone else: two-per cent Collective DNA.”
My legs wobbled beneath me. This was too much. I found a chair and without looking, dropped down. “That creature – ”
Cassie threw me a pained look – stopping me in my tracks.
I tried again. “That man told you all this?”
“Most of it. Some I saw when I was connected to The Collective when I left the Family Quarter.”
“And you believed him?”
“He was helping us to get out – why would he bother lying?”
I suppose…My mind whirled on. “You said he helped you because of your mother – your genetic mother – how did he know her?”
“We’re first generation Balik. Our parents were brought from Earth – less than twenty years ago.”
Just twenty years? They told us we’d been on the SS Hope for over a century – that we were fifth generation descendents.
“Do you know what this means? There might still be humans on Earth – we might have somewhere to aim for!”
“Human.” Cassie echoed, her voice flat.
The final piece dropped into place and I realised what she’d said earlier, but I’d not picked up on. I understood what was wrong.
“Hey,” I was on my feet, gathering Cassie into my arms. “This doesn’t change who you are – you’re not like them. You’re like me. Two per cent is nothing!”
Cassie’s head shook against my chest. “You hate them – for what they’ve done. Part of that is in me!”
“No,” I said firmly, pulling her back to look at me. “They are not in you – not the bad stuff – just a small, tiny part to make things work. It’s nothing. You are the reason we got out.”
The last part was a guess, but I thought it must be close to the truth. It would certainly explain how Cassie had heard The Collective’s silent communications.
She nodded, confirming that my speculation was close to the truth.
“He told me they look out for it in the Carriers – that’s what they called us. It’s rare, but it happens now and again: we develop their traits.”
I thought of the brain scans Cassie had triggered, and which I’d deleted from their monitoring systems. She was right. “Did he say what would happen now, when you left the space station?”
“Being away from the rest of them – The Collective – the ability should fade. From what I saw, their strength lies in being close together.”
“You’ll stop hearing people’s thoughts?” I asked.
Knowing now what had caused Cassie’s skill, I wanted it gone. I couldn’t stand the idea of taking any of that with us.
Her gaze lifted to mine and lingered, as if she was trying to look inside my head for the answer. “Yes,” she said, finally. “It will fade. It already is.”
* * *
The lights in the pod cabin were dim and Cassie was dozing in the bunk. Watching her sleep brought me a degree of peace: she looked so relaxed and normal, I could almost forget that she was still probably catching up from days where she’d barely rested…almost forget that her body had needed time to recover from the exhaustion and dehydration caused during her torturous escape from the Family Quarter…Almost forget, but not quite…
For a long time, I had lain beside Cassie, just watching her sleep. I could have stayed that way forever, but I had work to do. I had made her a promise and I intended to keep it.
So, here it was that I found myself sitting in one of the two chairs at the console of the pod, flicking through charts on the various screens. It was hard to focus, being so close to the main vision panel of the pod, which offered a perfect view of the stars and universe beyond. It was daunting how small and insignificant we seemed, beside the endlessness of space.
Earlier that day, we had put together a recording about our experiences on the SS Hope. It was Cassie’s idea and she had done most of work for it. I just helped with the filming and saved the file into as many different versions as I could. She was scared about what might happen to us – she didn’t admit it, but I knew – and this was a record for if we didn’t survive. Perhaps we could warn others and save them from the world we had been born into.
For my part, I was oddly confident. Possibly, it was naive, but I had an unshakeable sense that we were going to survive...that there was somewhere for us to go. Much of my confidence came from the facilities on the pod and my ability to understand them, for which I had only one person to thank – I probably wouldn’t be admitting that out loud any time soon though.
There was another force at work behind my confidence, that I couldn’t deny. For a long time on the SS Hope, I had wanted to escape from the Family Quarter; wanted to find out why we lived the way we did…whether we were less human than we had been on Earth. I was on the outside now and knew that we lived the way we did because our lives were built on lies…
We were less human, because we were trained to be that way by The Collective: farmed like animals, doesd up with chemicals to supress our moods and enhance the characteristics they wanted in us. When Cassie finally filled in the blanks for me, I was shocked by the extent of their systems, even though I’d been the one questioning things for years.
Part of me had always felt that the Family Quarter was a beautiful cage to keep us in. Finding out I was right had not been as satisfying as I had hoped. The truth was so horrific, it just made me wish I’d been wrong all along; while everything Cassie had told me, made me hate them even more.
Perhaps, it was my hatred for the creatures who had taken us away from our home that was driving me on with such zeal… Or maybe it was because I just couldn’t exist without some kind of problem to solve. This was certainly a new type of challenge, I smiled to myself.
Time had lost all meaning. I had no idea how long it had been since I’d last moved from the console chair and the muscles in my shoulders and back were like rocks. That wasn’t going to stop me, not when I was this close!
“Is everything OK?” Cassie appeared at my elbow, surprising but not distracting me.
What had she said? I wasn’t really listening. She sounded worried. Maybe it w
as the alarm that had woken her – I couldn’t do anything about that right now, it was tracking and so I needed the insistent beep-beep noise to let me know it was still working.
“Yeah, sure,” I muttered, hoping it would answer whatever question she had asked.
There it is!
The long-range chart I’d been using to trace the probe’s position was just about to merge onto the short-range chart. We were getting closer and a new system had just appeared on-screen, the details blossoming more fully as the data was received and manipulated in the processor.
Maybe, maybe!
It was looking better every minute now… I scanned the other screens, watching the data from the charts flow into the pod navigation system, allowing it to adjust automatically towards the point of interest I had programmed in.
“What’s that?” Cassie was pointing at the furthest screen, squinting to make out the data on chemicals, temperatures, gas levels.
“Environmental probe results,” I replied, without looking up, too busy re-adjusting the pod position in relation to the new information coming in from the short-range chart. We were out by a few degrees.
“An environmental probe?”
“I sent one out a few days ago – maybe a week – just after I got the orbital routes re-mapped.”
“And what did the probe find?”
“Hmmm…” I replied, still typing and not having heard what Cassie had asked. Did she sound frustrated? Had she asked what I found?
Oh, not much, just water, oxygen, soil, plant debris…
“Balik!”
My fingers froze for a moment when she shouted and I paused long enough to coherently answer what I guessed was her question about the probe. “It found an environment that looks viable.” I resumed work.
“Where – is it close?”
There!
I clicked on the new option that had just become available on the probe. It was some distance away and proving slow at returning the detailed image data collected. The system paused for a few seconds and I hung on desperately. The screen where the environmental results were displayed flickered and changed.
The Rainbow Maker's Tale Page 35