Greg Bear - Hull Zero Three

I’m more miserable now than I’ve been during my short existence, including the physical pain and the blind, newborn fear. It’s the freshness of my fear that convinces me, finally. Pain is forgotten, but fear builds and leaves tracks, and I don’t feel those tracks—not in my thoughts, not in my flesh. All my fears are new and short. I don’t have enough of them to help me survive. Not enough experience.

I’m an idiot not to open the book.

I pull back the front cover. The glue makes a cracking sound. I hold it up and look at the spine—wouldn’t want to damage it, after all. The glue has little bubbles, might come from something organic. Maybe it’s dried factor blood. Maybe the stains on the cover aren’t human blood but something else. I pull the book away, focus, squint.

I will literally lose my self in its pages.

First page begins with a thick black line.

I’ve been alive one hundred cycles of spin-up and spin-down. Funny, the people I meet all use those words—they’re part of the patois of survivors in the hull. You’re a teacher. You know what patois is. The book I was given—from my previous incarnation—had that word in it, but not much else. Books get lost. I’ve pulled apart this book and combined it with pages from others, adding blank pages when I can to record what happens next.

The other pages come from earlier. I mark them clearly.

Good luck.

P.S. If you’re me, you’ll figure out how to read the rest. If you’re not me… Well, we do like to trade information, and I wouldn’t want to give the others an advantage.

Someone seems to really hate me.

Hate you.

The rest of the book is written in what reads at first like gibberish—random letters, scrawled slowly and carefully, or in real haste, but always gibberish. I close the book and grip it tight. I’m not even quite sure what patois is—some sort of meat paste? Or a way of speaking. I think it’s the latter.

Maybe I’m not me—or him. Maybe something’s been lost. Certainly I don’t have all of my memories, even all of my knowledge. But of course I don’t have any memories, really… if I was made just a short while back. Pulled out of a sac. Then anything I remember from before I was made, finished, whatever, is just imprinting.

Instinct.

After a while, I’m settled in, about one good kick away from the ceiling, drifting and dozing. Best not to get caught away from shoving distance of a surface, in case something comes by—something that wants to clean me up and put me in the freezer.

One hundred cycles, the first page says.

I’m just a youngster , then.

Youngsters play games with words. I sort of see sunlight on a bedcover, a notebook, and a game. I see a row of white pickets on a fence. Switch the pickets: fence rail code. The game has to do with letters in the alphabet, exchanging one letter for another. To make this simple code harder, I convert everything I write into pig Latin before transposing the letters. Then I show it to my kids in school to see if they can read it. (I can almost smell the schoolroom: chalk, pencil shavings, steam heat from old radiators, gym socks, ham sandwiches in paper bags waiting for lunch.)

Some of the kids can unravel the code. They become my friends. Most can’t. We call them…

Losers.

That’s it, then. I’m not a loser. I know how to play the game.

I come out of my doze and open the book. After a while, I’m reading pretty quickly. I might even be able to write in code quickly, with a little practice. I’m good at that sort of thing.

PAGE 2

I’m making my way forward. My cold-burns are healing. The girl is dead. She was killed by a tooth-worm. It tore her to pieces.

I wonder if the little girl always dies, too.

Some of the things here are alive but act like machines. There aren’t any robots—though I did see a silver woman or thin figure of some sort, but only for an instant.

Let me describe the things that are here and can be dangerous.

FACTORS: Cleaners most important. Cleaners try to keep everything spick-and-span. They have three heads/faces and six legs. Most of the factors do very well without weight. They also do OK when there’s weight. They take us away when we die—and sometimes even before we die, if you can’t avoid them. Other factors: fixers and processors. Cleaners or scouts call fixers if the Ship has been damaged. They’re pretty single-minded, but they’re only dangerous if you get between them and something that needs fixing. Processors look scary and can be very dangerous, but they tend to stick around junk balls. The toothy eel is a processor. It converts dead organic material to simpler slush. Ugh.

Fixers and processors are getting rare, I hear. I’ve seen only two.

Scouts: smaller, thinner. Rare now as well.

Gardeners: They’re the only factors that have real color. The others are dark brown or dark gray or black.

Factors see heat and are generally inactive during cooldown.

And there are Killers. That’s what I call them. Knob-heads call them Xhh-Shaitan. Hard to pronounce, even if I hold my nose. It seems to mean “Maker of Pain.”

Killers.

Only a few of us have seen a Killer and survived. No one I’ve met can give a clear description. Killers destroy and leave the dead behind, but they also collect—alive. Where they take those they collect is unknown. The hull cooperates with Killers. They can go anywhere—fast. Makes me angry, like the deck is stacked against us. (Think about that and try to remember card games—their play and their rules make excellent metaphors around here.)

Sometimes, the hull helps us—why this contradiction, I don’t know.

Now—why the hull gets cool. There are three hulls. Based on Dreamtime, I think they are supposed to join at some point and become one, but that’s not clear yet. The Blue-Blacks say the hull gets cool because something wants us all to die. The little girl said it’s to save power, and she seemed to know a lot—but she wanted her mother badly, and was losing her own energy—fading rapidly.

Killers or cold or making other mistakes eventually remove us all from the scene.

And of course there are lots of versions of me, all dead. That means there’s a template. Maybe a lot of templates. For some reason, a word sticks up now—Klados. I don’t know what that means.

But hull is sick. Ship is sick. Something broke or went wrong—or something deliberately changed the rules. That’s why I’m heading forward—to answer those questions.

I rested for a while with the sluggards. The sluggards have a comfortable place and they just stay there. The boy in particular has made a cozy den. The room obeys his instructions but doesn’t cooperate with the rest of us. I wonder why. The woman is discouraged, maybe because she has to rely on the boy—and he can be irritating.

They aren’t going to go with me or help me find answers.

If they give you this, then you know about the freezers and the bodies. You know I’m dead. Take a deep breath. When you go forward—and you will—it gets worse.

Something doesn’t want us going forward. That might be Destination Guidance. I have no idea what that is—or who.

I’ve gone forward and down to the core. Here’s a little map.

Follows a sketch showing the tip of the spindle, an X marking the beginning of my (his) trip, and a dotted line zigging rather mysteriously toward the middle of the spindle and then jogging forward the merest fraction—a dot and a half, almost.