Andra dug the spike in deeper. “This is a reset port. There’s a cluster of nano’bots at the base that sort of act as the center to the circulatory system. Stabbing them is like giving it a jolt of robotic adrenaline.”
Andra waited for a click. Ideally, this would be done with a reset pick, which would simultaneously reboot the ’bot while downloading any software updates it was missing. But in a pinch, any sharp object thrust into the port would at least restart it. She finally heard the click, and the ’bot hummed back to life, its hollow eyes flashing a yellowish white. The crowd behind her stirred with frenzied whispers. Andra handed the spike back to the villager, whose wide eyes remained unblinking as she took it and backed away from Andra with a terrified expression.
“Where are the Ark colonists?” she asked the ’bot again.
It hummed but didn’t respond. The holo’screen lit from its palm but remained blank. Time to be more specific.
“Where is Isla Watts?”
The ’display blinked before giving an answer.
Dead.
“What?”
The screen remained unchanged. The arid air felt suddenly chilled.
“Elaborate,” she choked out.
The colonists signed up for the generation ship Arcanum, commonly referred to as the Ark, are dead. Isla Watts is dead.
“Auric Lim.” Dad.
Dead.
“Oz Watts.” Her baby brother.
Dead.
“Acadia Watts. Cruz Alvarez. Briella Jackson. Rhin Valentino.”
Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.
They were . . . She couldn’t even think it. It didn’t make sense. How could everyone . . . And she . . .
A wave of dizziness hit her. She’d just seen them. Minutes before she was put to sleep, she’d left them in the waiting room. Her dad had mumbled something about being proud of her and patted her head like she was a child, or one of his bichons. Acadia, her older sister, didn’t spare her a second glance, too busy pinging her instructors from her holo’band, making sure her credits would transfer interplanetarily. (They would.) Oz hugged her with tears in his eyes. Mom had given her a tight smile, still angry about their fight. See you on Holymyth, she’d said. Then, You’re going to regret not shaving your head.
At the memory, Andra almost sank to her knees, but a hand caught her elbow.
Zhade cleared his throat. “Goddess?”
“Stop calling me that!” she snapped, pulling away from him. “I’m not a goddess!”
Rage shot through her, surprising in its intensity. Little realizations burst into her thoughts, faster and faster, like water coming to a boil. She was alone. There’d been an accident. She’d slept too long. No one was coming to help her. The other colonists were gone. Her mother wasn’t coming to check her vitals. Everyone she knew was dead.
She didn’t know how she knew these things, but somehow they felt real. No—they didn’t feel real at all. They felt true.
She screamed, hands clenched at her side. The sound started low in her stomach, clawing its way through her throat and bursting from her lips. It drifted into the desert, falling flat on the wind.
The crowd cowered, and Andra sucked in a breath, taking in the frightened villagers. Sand stung her eyes, and she wiped away tears.
“Sorry,” she muttered.
She had never made anyone cower before. She wasn’t exactly intimidating. She was chubby and all dimples and too many teeth. But the people looked at her like she could snuff them out of existence with a thought.
“Evens, it’s for certz you exist a goddess now,” Zhade said. He walked over to the ’bot and slung his arm around it. “You just had a full convo with an angel. If the immortality did not convince me, that did. Only goddesses and sorcers can talk to angels.”
Wherever she was, ’bots were angels and Andra was a goddess and her family was dead.
“You speak with angels. You rose from the grave. Admit it. You exist a goddess.”
She gritted her teeth. She knew he didn’t mean grave or goddess in the same way she understood it, but between that and her dead family and calling the planet the Hell-mouth—
She froze.
Hell-mouth.
Holymyth. Hell-mouth.
Maybe the people weren’t being fatalistic at all. The villagers weren’t speaking English, but maybe that was because English had changed. Words were living things. Shifting, adapting, evolving. Growing and shrinking to fill the space. Rising to meet needs, and falling away when obsolete. How long would it take for English to become unrecognizable to her?
“What year is it?” she asked.
Zhade narrowed his dark eyes. “I don’t comp. It’s this year. The year after last. The year before next, if it comes.”
“That doesn’t help.” Andra turned to the ’bot. “What year is it?”
It groaned. The interface stuttered, a quick blip of data bytes firing, muffled calculations, and the ’display blinked back to life. A date spun in the ’bot’s open palm.
3102.
“No,” she breathed. “The Gregorian calendar. What year is it?”
She waited. The ’display refreshed, but the number remained the same.
“What’s your malfunction, you piece of empty? I’m asking for the date.” She struck the info’bot. It rang out, tinny and hollow. The mechanics inside whirred as it processed the insult, lights flashing rapidly along the exposed wires under its transparent skull.
I apologize for displeasing you.
But the year is still 3102.
The ’bot was tattered and decrepit, an inch away from a mechanical death, its processing speed slower than the old data’pads in Andra’s school library, but if there was one thing a ’bot could do, it was tell time.
She was on Holymyth, the colonists were dead, and the year was 3102.
She hadn’t overslept by four years.
She’d overslept by a thousand.
THREE
belonging, n.
Etymology: Middle English belongen: to long.
Definition:
a possession.
colloq.: a feeling of acceptance in a group or society.
Andra was good with numbers, but she loved words. Numbers were black-and-white, never changing. One plus one would always equal two, from here to eternity, until the end of time, and the square root of 1,764 would never not be 42, and yes, Andra knew that off the top of her head. Words, on the other hand, were amorphous and fuzzy and fickle, and that made them infinitely more interesting. Words were alive. Numbers were tools.