‘I bet that can be removed. Lovey would’ve had to have that removed if she was keeping this thing under wraps. I can ask Je— or, well, no.’ She sighed. ‘I’ll find someone to ask. Maybe there’s something in your – oh, I forgot to tell you. The kit’s got a user manual.’ She pointed at her scrib. ‘I skimmed through on the way back over, but you should download it when you’re up for it. It’s your body, after all.’ She closed her eyes, sorting things out. ‘Pick a name first. We’ll figure out the rest bit by bit.’

‘I’m so sorry to put you through all this trouble.’

‘Oh, no, this isn’t trouble. It’s gonna be work, yeah, but it’s not trouble. The galaxy is trouble. You’re not.’

Lovelace looked closely at Pepper. She was tired, and they’d only just left the Wayfarer. There were still enforcement patrols to worry about, and backstories, and – ‘Why are you doing this? Why do this for me?’

Pepper chewed her lip. ‘It was the right thing to do. And I guess – I dunno. It’s one of those weird times when things balance out.’ She shrugged and turned back to the console, gesturing commands.

‘What do you mean?’ Lovelace asked.

There was a pause, three seconds. Pepper’s eyes were on her hands, but she didn’t seem to be looking at them. ‘You’re an AI,’ she said.

‘And?’

‘And . . . I was raised by one.’

JANE 23, AGE 10

Sometimes, she wanted to know where she came from, but she knew better than to ask. Questions like that were off-task, and being off-task made the Mothers angry.

Most days, she was more interested in the scrap than herself. Scrap had always been her task. There was always scrap, always more scrap. She didn’t know where it came from, or where it went when she was done with it. There had to be a whole room full of unsorted scrap in the factory somewhere, but she’d never seen it. She knew the factory was pretty big, but how big, she didn’t know. Big enough to hold all the scrap, and all the girls. Big enough to be all there was.

Scrap was important. She knew that much. The Mothers never said why, but they wouldn’t need her to work carefully for no reason.

Her first memory was of scrap: a small fuel pump full of algae residue. She’d taken it out of her bin near the end of the day, and her hands were real tired, but she had scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, trying to get the little metal ridges clean. Some of the algae got beneath her fingernails, which she didn’t notice until later, when she bit them in bed. The algae had a sharp, strange taste, nothing like the meals she drank during the day. The taste was real bad, but she hadn’t tasted much else, nothing except maybe a bit of soap in the showers, a bit of blood when she got punished. She sucked the algae from her nails in the dark, heart beating hard, toes squeezing tight. It was a good thing, that bad taste. No one else knew what she was doing. No one else could feel what she felt.

That memory was old. She didn’t clean scrap any more. That was a task for little girls. Now she worked in the sorting room, along with the other Janes. They took things out of the bins – still wet with cleaning fluid, still smudged with tiny fingerprints – and figured out what was good and what was junk. She wasn’t sure what happened with the good stuff. She knew the older girls repaired it, or made it into other things. She would start learning how to do that next year, when the new work schedule came out. She’d be eleven then, just like the rest of the Janes. She was number 23.

The morning lights came on and started to warm up. It would be a bit yet before they turned on all the way and the wake-up alarm went off. Jane 23 always woke up before the lights came on. Some of the other Janes did, too. She could hear them moving and yawning in their bunks. She had already heard the pat-pat-pat of a pair of feet walking to the bathroom. Jane 8. She was always the first to go pee.

Jane 64 moved over across the mattress. Jane 23 had never had a bed without Jane 64 in it. They were bunkmates. Every girl had one bunkmate, except for the trios. Trios happened when one half of a pair went away and didn’t come back, and the other one needed a place to sleep until another bunkmate got freed up. The Mothers said sharing bunks helped keep them healthy. They said that the girls’ species was social, and social species were most on-task when they had company. Jane 23 didn’t really understand what a species was. Whatever it meant, it wasn’t something that was the same between her and the Mothers.

She moved close to Jane 64, nose against her cheek. It was a good feeling. Sometimes, even if she was real tired at the end of the day, she’d make herself stay awake as long as she could, just so she could stay close to Jane 64. Their bunk was the only place that felt quiet sometimes. She’d slept alone for a week once, when Jane 64 was in the med ward after breathing in some bad stuff in the melt room. Jane 23 had not liked that week. She did not like being alone. She thought it was real good that she’d never been put in a trio.

She wondered if she and Jane 64 would stay together after they turned twelve. She didn’t know what happened to girls then. The last batch to turn twelve was the Jennys. They’d been gone since the day the last work schedule was posted, just like the Sarahs and the Claires in the years before that. She didn’t know where they went, no more than she knew where the fixed scrap went, or where new batches of girls came from. The youngest now were the Lucys. They made a lot of noise and didn’t know how to do anything. The youngest batch was always like that.