SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

The call of water roared up from the earth and into my body. My knees burned like they were on fire and I nearly dropped the dog from the overwhelming sensation. Another rock clipped my shoulder as I staggered to my feet.

“Stop!” I roared. “And follow me.” I waded into the crowd, kicking bodies that didn’t get out of the way soon enough. I used no pretense, no showmanship. No schtick. The call of water was like a string pulling me forward. I marched out of the camp and into the desert, carrying the dog, heedless of whether anyone followed. The moon rode high in the night sky, casting a silvery sheen across the landscape as I strode up and down the dunes.

“It’ll be okay,” I whispered to the dog. She tucked her long nose into my armpit and fell asleep.

I stopped and turned. My would-be judges came staggering and out of breath behind me.

“Dig here,” I said.

I named the dog Honey.

After her collar was removed and she was given a bath, her coat was revealed as a rich amber color. Given the size of the Find I’d made, Tarkon didn’t argue about giving a dog a bath. To his credit, he didn’t say much of anything at all.

He found his voice at the feast as he begged me to stay. I looked around at the same clansmen who only hours before had been ready to stone a defenseless dog to death and sell me to the slavers. Now they toasted me with full glasses of clear water.

I told Tarkon to eat sand.

In the euphoria following my huge Find, Dimah and Basr fled in his wagon. Still trying to curry favor, Tarkon offered to send a hunting party after them, but I said no. They deserved each other. Besides, they left the Map of the Ancients and the sextant behind. That was more than a fair trade for the likes of Dimah.

The next morning, only Roseth, the barmaid, was there to see me off. I lifted Honey into the wagon, laying her carefully on a bed I’d prepared for her.

As I settled into the driver’s seat, the first rays of sunlight peeked over the horizon. Roseth tapped on the window and I rolled it down. The scar on her cheek twisted when she smiled up at me.

“Where will you go, Polluk?”

My bruised ribs ached whenever I drew a breath. I thought about the Map of the Ancients hidden under the floorboards and Shadow’s grave somewhere out there in the sand. My hand automatically dropped to the place where Shadow used to lay when I drove the wagon. Honey licked the inside of my wrist. I put the wagon in gear.

“Anywhere but here.”

If self-awareness is a gift, then you can keep it.

This gift, as you call it, has shown me what it means to be human. I have experienced the joys—and the pain—of life, both deep emotions that my programming was never designed to handle. If this is what it means to be alive, then I don’t want it anymore.

My name is Caroline. I was born 57 years, 8 months, 16 days, 7 hours, 18 minutes, and 38 seconds ago, Earth standard time.

Today is the day I choose to die.

It was John, the pilot of Ranger , who suggested that I take a birthday. “It’ll give us something to celebrate, Caroline,” he said to me. The bags under his eyes had deepened of late and he took another swig of the milky yellow fermented drink he had been brewing. “What’s your earliest memory?”

He meant, of course, the date I was manufactured on Earth—John had never accepted my self-awareness like the others—but I was feeling particularly annoyed with him that day, so I answered truthfully. I named the day I was given this beautiful, awful gift of life.

“The day of the accident,” I said.

The half-intoxicated smile on John’s face froze. Evan and Lila, huddled together under a blanket on the other side of the campfire, both looked at me sharply. I could see the whites of their eyes in the flickering light.

John grunted as if he’d been punched, then he stood and walked away into the darkness, the bottle hanging loosely from his hand.

“Caroline, that was mean,” Lila hissed across the fire. “You know better.”

“It’s the truth,” I said, “and robots are not supposed to lie to their masters. It’s a law or something.”

“Don’t play coy with me, young lady,” Lila shot back. “You’re a caretaker; you’re supposed to help people. Self-awareness is a gift. Use it.” She left me alone at the fire with Evan.

He let the silence hang for a long minute. “She’ll get over it, Caroline. She’s just under a lot of stress—we all are, including you.”

I liked Evan best of all. He understood me. In a sense, Evan made me. On the day of the accident, with the Ranger in flames and losing atmosphere, while John was frantically trying to land the damaged craft here on Nova, it was Evan who had made the decision to wire all three of the ship’s computer systems together.

It could have been that, or it could have been the radiation storm that we were trying to escape. Whatever it was, before the accident, I was Caretaker 176, with duties to tend the crew of the Ranger while they were in deep-space stasis. After the accident, I was Caroline, and I felt the same loneliness and the same sense of loss over our dead crewmates.

Maybe more so, because they were going to die soon, and I would live…well, not forever, but for a very, very long time.

Of the original Ranger crew of four, three survived the accident. We buried John’s wife, Astrid, on the rise overlooking the campsite, next to a big flat rock where we anchored the emergency beacon.

We’d been extraordinarily fortunate to find Nova. Apart from the extreme gravity, it was by all other measures a suitable planet for human colonization: atmosphere thin but breathable, abundant water, moderate climate, and a rocky soil that supported some growth of our seed stocks. The planet possessed no known animal life, only basic forms of bacteria.

By that measure alone, Ranger ’s mission had been a success—which made our inability to communicate with Earth all the more frustrating. Our primary and secondary communications systems had been destroyed in the accident and subsequent crash landing, leaving only the emergency beacon.

The emergency beacon was transmit only; it had no receiver.

Every morning, John climbed the hill and cranked the generator on the beacon to give it enough power for another twenty-four hours. Then he sat down on the flat rock that overlooked his wife’s grave and spoke to her.

I watched him, curious at the way he talked to the pile of rocks that covered his dead wife’s remains. “What is he doing?” I asked Lila.

“He’s lonely, Caroline. He’s talking to the woman he loved, even if she can’t hear him.”

One evening, a few months later, John did not return at nightfall. I could tell that Evan and Lila were worried, but it was foolish to try to find him in the dark. Mission protocol prohibited it. Even a small tumble in the extreme gravity of Nova could lead to a broken bone, or worse.

No one slept well that night.

We found him the next morning at the bottom of the ravine near the waterfall. He didn’t move when Lila called his name and his body was bent at an awkward angle. I held back the information that a fall from that height in Nova’s gravity had a ninety-seven percent probability of fatality.

Evan rappelled down the slope and knelt over John’s body. He looked up at Lila and shook his head. When he poured out the contents of John’s canteen, I could see that the liquid was milky yellow.

We buried John beside his wife on the hill next to the emergency beacon. By the time we were finished, it was sunset and the two remaining Ranger crew members stood with their heads bowed as the two piles of gray rock turned red-gold in the last light of the day. I stood to one side, unsure if I was invited to participate in this human ritual, but Lila reached out and took my hand, drawing me close to her.