Kip shifted his weight. ‘I’m gonna leave the Fleet.’

Isabel waited for some specificity. None came. ‘And do what?’

‘I dunno.’

‘Where will you go?’

‘I . . . I’m not sure.’

‘Are you going to university? Are you looking for work?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know yet.’

‘Then why,’ Isabel asked without judgment, ‘do you want to go?’

Kip shrugged with agitation. ‘I just . . . I need to get out of here.’

‘Why?’

She’d hit the crack in the boy’s patience. ‘Because there’s no point to any of this!’ Kip blurted out, finally speaking with something other than a guarded drone. ‘Seriously, what is the point to orbiting here forever? So we remember stuff? Why? For what? What are we for?’

‘A fair question. You think you’ll find the answer to that planetside?’

‘It’s . . . that’s where we’re supposed to be.’

Isabel laughed. ‘That’s a slippery slope you’ll never see the end of. Head down the path of “how we’re supposed to be”, what we evolved to be, and you’ll end up at “hunting and gathering in grassy plains”. Maybe the Gaiists are right, and that is how we’re supposed to be. I don’t know. But if everything has to have a point: what’s the point of hunting and gathering? How is that more meaningful than any of this?’

‘I’m not talking about hunting and gathering, M.’

‘Oh? Why?’

‘Because . . .’ He struggled. ‘That can’t be all there is, either.’

‘So what you’re saying is Humans aren’t really supposed to do anything in particular, and we get to choose the kind of lives we have. But that doesn’t mean any of it has a point, son. You think people born planetside don’t wonder what the point of it all is? You don’t think they know that their cities will fall and their houses will rot, and that somewhere down the line, their planet will get swallowed up by its sun? Spacers and grounders, we’re riding the same ship. We both depend on fragile systems with a million interconnected parts that can easily be damaged and will eventually fail. Yes, we built the Fleet. The Fleet didn’t just happen the way a planet does. But why does that matter? The only difference between our respective ecosystems is scale and origin. Otherwise, it’s the same principle.’ She studied him. ‘Have you ever gone through any of the Archives from the first days of Human spaceflight?’

‘No.’

‘I’d be surprised if you had. It’s archaic stuff, and the Ensk translations aren’t the best.’ Yet another project, she thought, to keep some future archivist happy. ‘Do you know why people – why Humans started heading out into the open? Oh, there was lots of military posturing involved, no mistake, but the true believers, the ones who couldn’t bear the thought of not going out there – that’s where they thought they’d find answers. They said, hey, we haven’t got the context right. We need a sample size bigger than one lonely planet if we’re ever going to understand any of this. And in many ways, they were right. We found other people out here, so that question got answered. We found out that life isn’t rare. We’ve learned exponentially more about how planets work and how physics works, and the technology we have today would’ve blown their minds. We understand the galaxy in a way we never could have if we hadn’t left. But the big question – the end-all, be-all question – well, that’s still up for discussion. Why? What’s the point? Kip, there isn’t a sapient species living or dead that hasn’t grappled hard with that. It scares us. It makes us panic, just like you’re panicking now. So if the lack of a point is what’s bothering you, if it’s making you want to kick the walls and tear your hair out, well, welcome to the party.’

‘But—’

Isabel put up her palm. ‘Your ancestors thought they would answer the big question in space. Now here you are, out where they longed to go, looking back at the planets, trying to answer the same damn thing. You won’t. You need to reframe this frustration you’re feeling. If what you’re saying is that you don’t see a life for yourself here, that the kind of work you want to do or the experiences you want to have aren’t available in the Fleet, then by all means, go. But if the only reason you want to do it is because you’re looking for a point, you’re going to end up miserable. You’ll float around forever trying to make peace with that.’

Kip looked lost, but an entirely different kind of lost than he had moments before. ‘I have no idea what kind of life I want,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t know what I want to do.’ He fell quiet, the blue glow of the data nodes highlighting his face.

Stars, he was young. He had so far to go.

‘What do you like to do?’ Isabel asked. ‘What interests you?’

Kip gave a brittle laugh. ‘Nothing.’

‘There must be something. What do you do with your day?’

‘Nothing important. Sims, vids, school.’

Isabel let the implication that school wasn’t important slide. ‘Job trials?’

The heaviest sigh in the world escaped the boy’s lips. ‘Yeah.’