Searching for Sun Chapter Seven

Seven

Why do you have a face? None of the other androids look like you.

You like it?

Well, yeah, I guess.

I’ll try not to stop your heart too often.

—Alec Ten & Cloey

Cloey’s JPV

Six months later, Resolute time

Space, Resolute, Date: 2349

Sunlight pooled in the creases of Asami’s face. Her nose and the tips of her ears felt slightly burnt. She lay on a flat rock, basking in a clearing of redwoods. The thick trunks were over a hundred years old, their reddish-brown bark riveted and rough to touch. Above her, a circle of blue sky glimmered like a waving flag amidst the treetops.

The wind tickled the hairs on her neck, and a cloud passed across the sun, giving Asami a chill. The ground was patched with clover, though Asami had never been able to find one with four leaves. She reached down, and ran a finger over a green stem, fingering the leaf.

She looked close, searching for the veins inside the leaf. She compared it with another. They were identical. She crushed them both and watched the broken stems. After ten minutes, two more clovers appeared where she had picked them.

Her sessions always ended this way. With a taste of disappointment as the world erased any mark she left on it.

“Shut program,” Asami sighed.

The world evaporated around her. The hum of electricity ran through the walls into the central standing holographic pods. She opened her eyes.

The holographic lab was made up of five recesses in the walls, like caves. Users would enter a pod, not unlike a freeze chamber, and plug in to a network that simulated a communal world.

Asami could interact with other crewmembers in virtual reality as if, instead of hurtling through the space between planets and stars, she was actually on Earth walking through a rose garden.

Sometimes when she sat down in a field of flowers, the crush of grass beneath her palms lacked a fresh scent—it was the smell of memory, and most disturbingly, it wasn’t always her memories. When she reached out to brush her hand across the trunk of a tree, she felt another memory fold over her, fingers touching bark, but it wasn’t the way her fingers would have felt.

Perhaps those with a chip in their brain interfaced with the technology more fully. Asami always felt the experience slightly invasive, as if technology were inverting the world, her internal mind becoming the landscape of interaction. It wasn’t unlike the freeze dreams, sinking down into a world of the mind.

She left the holo lab with the taste of dust and warmth on her tongue and wondered whose memory it had been gathered from.

Asami resisted the urge to return to the freeze chambers. She hadn’t had any more visions like the one Sam gave her, but when she looked at the freeze chamber she wondered if it was the cause. Within the day, she would have to return to freeze, and a part of her hoped to see Sam in her dreams.

Over the past few months Asami had often come back to watch the freeze process. To her knowledge, she was the only freezy that returned to the chamber. All the other freezys wanted nothing to do with the place. But to Asami, to watch the freeze tubes open was scientific, clinical, and after awhile, routine. Her constant presence had soon become natural to the nurses. And she had been able to snoop through several freezys’ files, none of which gave her answers to what made a freeze go bad, but it helped to be searching.

Once Asami stopped testing the nerve endings in her toes, suspicious that the freeze had left some mark on her body, she watched the process from the outside between her work shifts. The tubes were inserted into the walls of thirty-four chambers. Each chamber held twenty-five tubes. The stiff cold faces behind the tube’s glass thawed into a restless, dark sleep. The faces would frown and contort like babies gaining control of their facial muscles. At last consciousness reigned and the heart monitor galloped and hiccupped. One in twenty needed a sedative to relax, and all of them had the notion they suffered from frostbite and craved a shot of krupnik to set liquid fire in their veins.

At first Asami felt herself relive the moment every time a freezy woke. She suffered a sympathetic chill and felt her scalp numb over. Most freezys commiserated at the ship’s bar, and would often say, “Wake up inside a freeze tube and you experience nothing but emotion, a blind panic and a momentary loss of memory.” Asami would nod and mention how she’d picked up the habit of checking her toes when she woke up to see if they retained feeling. But she wasn’t all that interested in how the freeze went right. She watched for someone who woke up nervous, angry, and agitated. But Sam had been the last in the past six months.

She made her way to the conservatory. The green room felt empty now that she was leaving. The plants she had cultivated over the past half year would be inherited by a ghost worker. Someone young, who had never actually touched Earth before, had never seen Earth outside of a virtual room.

Asami became aware of a child peering in at her from the open door. His ghostly skin looked translucent next to his dark hair. He, like Sam, had escaped the superficial, physical experimentation, and had maybe Mongolian genetics, with those huge, rosy apple cheeks, though it was difficult to tell since his skin wasn’t yet warmed by sun.

“What’s your name?” he approached, reaching for her as he would his android nurse.

“Asami.” she replaced herself with a plant for him to hold.

“Sami,” he repeated. She didn’t bother to correct him.

Immediately she wished it were not her prize Sungold cherry tomato, especially now, when it was in its first month producing fruit. Growing anything in a greenhouse paled in comparison to the natural earth, but a greenhouse on a spaceship? That was a feat of nature. The child hugged the plant to his chest in surprise, wincing as he bumped the fruit.

“I like plants,” he said, sniffing the leaves. “My supervisor says I was made to work with them. I think that’s nice.” His brown, almost black, eyes studied her as if she were part tomato, a yellow leaf he might need to memorize for a test.

“Alec,” his android found him, humming around the corner. She was plain and not as humanized as Cloey, pure white with neon-orange accents on her paneling. The voice was low and feminine, but she was shapeless, her middle cushioned for hugs. Asami felt sorry for him. At least Cloey had a human face, hair, even a scent like cinnamon.

Asami took her plant back.

“Can I visit you?” Alec asked seriously.

“No,” Asami put the plant back on its shelf. “Today is my last service date. I’m going back into freeze.”

He seemed disappointed, “Why do you need to do that?”

Asami looked at her smooth fingers, her imagination layering another version, old, leathery skin, and thick yellowed nails. The past six months had been a series of needles, tests, and scrambling to catch up and replace the growers that had taken the six-month shift before hers. She had only just settled in and found her way with the plants again. At first, she could practically see each six-month cycle, a history of different hands growing the ship’s food supplies.

“If I don’t, I would be an old woman before we reach home,” Asami tried the word out on her tongue. She had always thought of their destination as home, but the closer they were to getting there the more foreign the planet seemed.

“This is home,” Alec’s jaw jutted stubbornly, as if resuming an old argument.

“Gliese is your home,” the android took the boy’s grubby fingers.

Asami wondered what it would be like to be born on a ship never having seen or felt or tasted the Earth. As a child she had been told the same thing, had studied the history of Gliese581g.

Alec’s dirty fingers wrapped around her hand. Her skin shuddered as she felt his wet palm but there was also something nice about how warm and real that hand felt.

“Can I have one?” he pointed up at her plant.

Asami didn’t shake him off, though a part of her wanted to. Another part of her squeezed his hand back. With her free hand she searched through the golden tomatoes until one slipped off the branch. Alec released her and crammed the fruit into his mouth. She could see his small white teeth as he bit down, seeds and juice squirting across his lips and cheek.

His android tried a new tactic, “Would you like to get lunch now Alec?” Her voice didn’t fluctuate very dynamically. For a surrogate mother, the androids seemed designed to encourage children to become independent. Perhaps that was why the ghost children seemed to run in packs, always together, laughing, eating, and thinking in unison.

“Where are your friends?” Asami asked. It was odd to see someone so young moving about the ship alone.

“Group napping. I can’t sleep with them, or I start snoring like Jenny. She makes us all snore like her because of the net. When I’m falling asleep, I can feel her snore in me.”

Asami shuddered. “No, I suppose I wouldn’t want to sleep like Jenny either.” She knew the chip enabled close correspondence, some even claimed they had shared thoughts, but she hadn’t considered how it might work through the subconscious. The thought horrified her. How could the children ever feel like their own person when they couldn’t even be themselves when unconscious? She’d never been so glad not to have a chip.

“Can I have more of that for lunch?” He pointed at her plant.

“You like tomatoes?” Asami asked, touched in spite of her resistant nature. She found it difficult to dislike anyone who appreciated one of her plants.

“I’m sure there will be tomatoes in the canteen,” the android said.

Alec looked at her, “You come too.”

“I can’t. We aren’t allowed to eat anything before a freeze.”

Asami turned back to her plants still unwilling to say goodbye, to surrender them to the next six-month shift. She heard the scrape of Alec’s feet as he followed the android out of the conservatory. There was a pause of shuffling and Asami looked at the door. Alec’s grubby fingers held the corner as if to keep his legs from walking off before his head was ready to leave.

“I’ll remember you,” he declared with a nod and disappeared.

Asami smiled despite herself.

She wondered if there were children on Gliese now, if the Libra colony had domesticated into a colonial life. It had only been a prep team, a majority of androids, but still, there had been enough people on the team that it was logical they would go about making families. Asami liked to speculate that the Libra crew were the first-time jumpers. If they had ever returned to Earth, generaltions would have passed. They had isolated themselves not just in space, but in time.

She said goodbye to her plants. There was only one last thing to do before she went back into freeze.

Cloey met her at the door and wrapped her small arms fully around Asami’s waist. Her long hair clung to Asami’s uniform.

“We should really protest against whoever makes these storage crates,” Cloey complained. “I want a petition to focus less on making them compact and more on making them comfortable. I’d like to see them spend years curled in half. I am not a bowling ball.”

“Well, if you were lying down it might look like a coffin.”

“I’d rather be trending like a vampire than wrapped up like measuring tape.”

“Will you be ok?” Asami looked at the small crate, the freeze pods seemed roomy compared to getting bent up like a pretzel.

Cloey tossed her mane of hair, “As long as it doesn’t kill my hair. This time I moisturized.”

“I hooked an extra power supply to your crate, so, you shouldn’t run out of energy. If you need to, wake yourself up periodically, you know, make sure everything is working.”

“I’ll be fine. Besides, I’m not the one injecting crazy drugs in my body.” Cloey climbed inside the crate, wrapping herself in a moisturizing towel. She looked like a small queen, lowering into the crate, and folding her legs before shoving pillows around herself.

“Just remember to wake me soon as you are up.” Cloey scooted down.

“See you soon,” Asami could never bear the idea of turning Cloey off herself.

“Sweet dreams.” Cloey’s eyes went out. The soft hum of electricity that surrounded her went dead, and the room sounded quiet as a tomb. Asami rested Cloey’s face against a pillow and pulled a plastic sheet over the top, to protect her from dust and dry air. Then she closed and locked the lid.

Maxi was going back into freeze with her. She looked restless and nervous.

“You’re okay with this?” Maxi asked as they stood waiting for the nurses.

“With what?” Asami asked reluctantly. She wanted to think about Cloey, about Sam.

“They’re putting us under knowing what it could do to us. This is illegal. I can’t believe you would be okay with this.”

“Why not?”

“You said you were best friends with Sam. You aren’t stupid enough to think this process didn’t kill him. Or maybe you don’t care that much.”

Asami felt her throat close off. She focused on breathing in and out.

“Whatever, princess. Its people like you who make it impossible to demand change, walking the status quo.”

Asami turned her brain off. She would not think about this. “I’ll take the chance. I want a full life on Gliese.”

“Oh, I forgot, you dream about making it a home. You swallowed the propaganda whole. Hail Queen Heidi.”

Asami had done what she could. Five months of grieving, and she had done more to learn about the freeze process than Maxi ever would. There was no evidence. There was no reason. There was no chemistry equation to parse out a why. “Think what you want.”

The familiar pinch of the injector on her neck sent Asami’s blood roiling. It felt faster this time, and she barely lay back in her freeze pod before the ice congealed in her veins. Her heart thundered even as it slowed and knife-like shards of ice clawed through her tissue as if it were alive, as if it were trying to escape the warm-blooded body it had been forced to inhabit yet again.

“You won’t fight . . .” Maxi’s voice faltered, the freeze taking her.

Asami closed her eyes as pain pricked behind them, hot as lightning. Her eyelids sealed, glued to one another. She felt her breath chill her teeth as her saliva thickened to slush around her tongue. Through the crashing of her blood, she heard a nurse yell.

“Doctor, we have another.”

“Don’t let her drop.”

Silence swallowed her.