Greg Bear - Hull Zero Three

My twin and I don’t always get along, but we went through training together, and we rely on each other for solving major problems—including women. Though of late we have been suffering through competition over a particularly lovely lass named—

(And here it gets strange, because that brings up fragments of future memories, the broken bits of my history available to Hull Zero One when I was—)

Don’t be silly. That’s just part of the terrible dream. You aren’t made in deep space—you’re frozen with all of your shipmates, your future partners in the colonies, and the Golden Voyager—

Whatever. I can very clearly anticipate my partner in the staging area, boldly looking at me along the line of the first landing party, exchanging those excruciatingly meaningful glances of first adoration, then lifelong bonding. We are meant for each other—so why would my twin interfere?

But we have so much to catch up on. Mother and Father, sister, education up through secondary, physical adaptation and augmentation, getting our freezing-down organs installed after first qualification, long summer days at Camp Starfield, our first test freeze… We all come out healthy and whole, not even hungover, and now we’re ready for that installation flight out to the edges of the Oort cloud, to meet up with the chosen moonlet, on which is strapped the growing frame of our Ship. This is a journey of almost nine months, because it’s illegal to light off bosonic drives within the system.

So clear! I suppose that even in my confusion and my conflicting emotions, seeing our unborn Ship for the first time, far out in the darkness where only starlight matters, fastened like a tiny golden octopus to the long end of the moonlet—seeing all this is useful, helpful, but why does it have to come attached to so much imaginary bullshit? I’m just fine without a backstory. I know the real story.

They pump us full of this continuity for psychological reasons—but why? They don’t trust us. We’re designed to be deceived.

We find spaces within the cramped living quarters, all three hundred of us, handpicked, tested, trained, passed—superior emotionally and physically to Earth’s best and brightest, filled with that glow of knowing where we’re going and what we’re going to do, flying in the most expensive goddamned object ever devised by the hands of humanity….

And as we go into the freezers to become time travelers into the future, to awaken five or six hundred years hence, we’re filled with an overwhelming joy at our destiny, more intense than anything we’ve experienced.

I’m still worried about my brother, of course, because we can’t both have her at the end of the journey. But we’ll work that out later.

Besides, I know, I anticipate…

At the end, there will be only one of us.

One of me.

My twin must be experiencing the same conflicts of indoctrination and emotion, because we pull up from this feed simultaneously, trying to shout in anger and frustration.

All wrong. All a lie.

“Hold on,” Tomchin says. “Wrong input. That’s the story if everything on Ship goes right. Here’s what we’re really looking for—the part of the Catalog that Ship uses if something goes wrong . And we all know that something has gone badly wrong.”

What pours into our presences next is even more disturbing than our false personal history. We’re paging through Ship’s instruction manual, examining every possible contingency.

The planet is already covered with primitive life-forms, and we can’t adapt, no matter how hard we try.

We’re out of fuel, we can’t move on…. Time to explore the far reaches of the Klados, the possibilities inherent in the nastiest neighborhoods of genetic phase space.

Time to bring out the Trackers and the Wastelayers. Time to convert the factors, the biomechanical servants that tended Ship while it grew from its egg into a mighty three-hulled starship, for the first twenty years of our journey, and that lit off the bosonic drives far from Earth’s star….

Time to turn the page to a nightmare of destruction. And along with this comes my—our—new, tougher personality and a new, harsher personal history. Earth was in desperate trouble when we left—it wasn’t the social and technological paradise depicted in our previous biography. No, it was a wreck. People were dying everywhere and pumped all their resources into creating this lifeboat to the stars. We’re humankind’s last hope, and now all that stands in our way is a planet covered with indigenous slime, hardly worthy of the name of intelligent life.

All we have to do is send down our Killers and Wastelayers and muck out that slime, then deactivate our weapons… and send down, in their place…

But that’s another cluster of points in the Klados, another page in the Catalog, not as grim and more than a little hazy. What is becoming clear is that the Catalog has been damaged along with everything else in hull memory. We have no idea what the Klados is capable of delivering.

Still, the pages turn. Something wants to unburden its psyche. Something needs to confess.

We’ve encountered a primitive technological civilization, capable of rudimentary exploration of their stellar system—that is, our target system. We’re here, we’re out of fuel, nowhere else to go—and they attack. They’re advanced enough that their weapons can do real damage, blow us to bits, in fact, and they won’t listen .

They refuse to share .

We can’t bargain with them. It’s going to be a long, drawn-out fight, ending in our extinction, unless we—

Turn the page. Another page. We’ve plowed our way to the margin of the deepest, darkest corner of genetic phase space, and beyond, it seems, lies a genius-level zoo of madness and destruction.

Death’s secret menagerie.

ACCESS GIVEN TO TOTAL WARRIORS ONLY.

Unexpectedly, we’re dumped back into the main gallery. Sweetness, light, deception. We don’t have the proper training, the proper indoctrination. None of us qualifies to venture into that section of the Catalog.

Rejected.

Tomchin bravely tries to hook us up to other cables, but we’re balky, burned down to nubbins—too much shock, too much contradiction, almost worse than the first time we were squeezed from our birth sacs.

When we let go of the blue hemisphere, we bumble and thrash and cry. It must look as bad to the others as it feels to us. Nell orders Kim to pull us aside. Kim moves in and holds us in his arms while we shiver and curse out our misery.

That takes a few minutes. Tomchin seems relatively unaffected, but now that we’re out, we don’t understand what he says, and without the girls, neither does anyone else.

The control chamber gets quiet.

Nell has a report to make. She looks around. All of the adults are listening, possibly even Tsinoy, still deep in her interstellar survey.

“Ever since we were born, things have been trying to kill us,” Nell says. “Dropping the shield seems to be a last-ditch attempt to get rid of us. We should assume that someone is willing to sabotage Ship operations and even destroy the hulls. Well, we may be able to fight back. I think there’s a way to initiate hull combination—to unite the Triad. Because Destination Guidance is supposed to be gone before the Triad is united, bringing the hulls together will squash and absorb that little ball down there—and reclaim the moonlet. It may give us back complete control. I just activate this system—”

The Tracker moves too fast for us to see and is suddenly right next to us, her paw on Nell’s hands, pushing them away from the hemisphere. “ We can’t do that! ” Tsinoy roars—a terrifying sound completely impossible to ignore.