Tessa shook her head. ‘It’s like family means nothing.’ She paused. ‘He’s on this kick lately – “all fixed”. He says it constantly. Any idea where he got it?’

George stroked his thick beard. ‘I dunno.’ He squinted at the ceiling. ‘Isn’t that a Big Bug thing?’

Tessa had never been into The Big Bug Crew as a kid, and she hadn’t played any of the new ones with her daughter. ‘Is it?’

‘Maybe I’m remembering it wrong, but I swear it’s Big Bug. Whenever something on the ship breaks down and you repair it, there’s this, like . . . fanfare and confetti, and the kids yell, “All fixed!”’

‘But he hasn’t—’ Tessa stopped. Ky wasn’t old enough to be playing sims yet, not by a long shot. Anybody who’d only figured out his knees a standard ago didn’t yet have the mental chops to distinguish between virtual reality and reality reality. She knew this. Aya knew this. Aya had been told this. And yet, Aya had also recently been deemed responsible enough to look after her brother unsupervised for a few hours. There’d been a few of those afternoons where Tessa had come home to find Ky wound up like she’d never seen. She’d chalked it up to his sister’s overly liberal forays into the cookie box, or him just being excited about time spent playing with the coolest person in his little world. But Tessa put herself back in her childhood big sister shoes. She remembered the times her parents left her alone with Ashby. She remembered how annoying he’d been sometimes, how impossible to please. She remembered trying to find something, anything that would keep him occupied for more than ten minutes. She wondered, if they’d had a sim hub at home then, if she might’ve stuck a slap patch on his head, leaned him into a corner of the couch, and pumped sims into his brain while she did whatever she fancied. Watched forbidden Martian vids, maybe.

‘Uh oh,’ George said again.

‘What?’

‘Your face.’ He made a circular hand motion around his own. ‘It went super scary.’

She glared at him. ‘I don’t have a scary face.’

‘You do. You do, sometimes, have a scary face.’

‘If I have a scary face, it’s because your daughter—’

‘Ohhhh, boy.’

‘—is in big trouble.’ And stars, was she ever. Tessa had half a mind to wake her up right then. She would’ve, too, if getting her to sleep hadn’t been such an odyssey.

‘Sounds like everybody’s in trouble. Am I in trouble? I swear to you, Tess, I didn’t have anything to do with the toilet thing.’

She rubbed one of her temples and gave half a laugh. ‘I still have to review the evidence on that. You’re not out of the open yet.’

‘Shit,’ George said, with a sad shake of his head. ‘Maybe it’d be best if I didn’t come home early.’

Tessa looked at him – his broad chest, his big beard, his perpetually sleepy eyes. He was greyer than he’d been once, and fuller, too. He was a kind-looking man. A normal-looking man. George wasn’t the sort of guy she’d once dreamed about. George was just George, and George never changed.

She knew that wasn’t true. Nothing was permanent, especially out in the open. But when she was with George, even just on opposite ends of a sib call, it was nice to pretend, for a little bit, that this one thing would never end. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t perfect, or wasn’t always exciting. It was hers. There was one thing in this universe that was wholly, truly hers, and always would be.

It was the cosiest lie she knew, and she saw no reason to stop telling it.

Part 2

We Have Wandered

Feed source: Reskit Institute of Interstellar Migration (Public News Feed)

Item name: The Modern Exodus – Entry #4

Author: Ghuh’loloan Mok Chutp

Encryption: 0

Translation path: [Hanto:Kliptorigan]

Transcription: 0

Node identifier: 2310-483-38, Isabel Itoh

[System message: The feed you have selected has been translated from written Hanto. As you may be aware, written Hanto includes gestural notations that do not have analogous symbols in any other GC language. Therefore, your scrib’s on-board translation software has not translated the following material directly. The content here is a modified translation, intended to be accessible to the average Kliptorigan reader.]

*

At the heart of every district is a four-story cylindrical complex, stretching through the layered decks like a dowel stuck into a disc. The complex is made of metal, like everything else, and has no windows. The exterior is covered in muted murals of varying age, the details often obscured by the climbing vines growing from planters that encircle the base of the building. There are two entry-points at the neighbourhood level – an unobtrusive door used by the people who work there, and a larger archway used by those going through the most difficult days of their lives.

The complex is, in function, a corpse composting facility. Exodans do not call it that. They call it, simply, the Centre.

I admit I felt trepidation as I passed through the archway. This is an area of Exodan custom I was unschooled in, and I was unsure what I would find. I braced myself for the sight of rotting flesh, the air of decay. I found neither. The Centre does not feel like a place of death. The lights are kind. There are planters everywhere, but they are tame and controlled, just as the entire process within this place is. The air surprised me the most: a slight hint of agreeable humidity, coupled with an utterly pleasant warmth (in truth, it was the most comfortable environment I’ve been in since arriving in the Fleet). There’s a strange feel to it, yes, but it is inoffensive, reminiscent of a forest after a rain. I wondered if Humans – with their notoriously poor olfactory sense – could detect it at all.