Sam grunted.
I held out my hand. “Give me your bracelet.”
“Why?” he asked. “You’re not going to puke onto it, are you?”
I held up Rosita’s bracelet. “Andthat’swhat Rosita said. Just give it to me.”
He unhooked it and handed it over. His hand was shaking. I placed it around the bevel in the repair bay. I placed Rosita’s in the second bevel next to it. I hopped into the chair and slid over to the control center and pulled up the bracelets’ diagnostics. I moved to the network screen and proceeded to transfer the connection to the other net.
“We don’t have a lot of bandwidth, and if we add too many, they’ll probably notice, so don’t just go telling anybody we can do this, but you’ll be able to talk to me and Lulu and anyone else who’s using the feed routed through theForlorn. You’ll have anonymous access to the interplanetary feed.”
My friend shook his head and adjusted his cap. The ancient faded hat was a relic from Earth for some sports team called the Seattle Supersonics. It’d been his great-great-grandfather’s.
“How is it,” he asked, “that you know absolutely nothing about what’s going on in the world and you can’t figure out the software for the cistern distributors, yet you can do shit like this? You’re literally using two-hundred-year-old technology to hack a modern communication system. You and your sister both.”
“It’s Roger,” I said, watching the screen, waiting for each bracelet to complete the handshake. It would take a few minutes. “He quizzes me on this stuff every damn day. And the bracelet system is not modern. They have to use old technology if they want to communicate with all the colonies. Earthers have implants, you know? They don’t even need bracelets.”
Sam made apfftnoise. “And they’re the ones complaining about us being altered.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I still don’t understand what’s happening.”
“I’ve been telling you this whole time,” Sam said. “It’s the same stuff that made our great-great-grandparents leave in the first place. It’s the corporations, man. They’re all owned by that one-world-order stuff my grandpa used to talk about. I think they’ve found this planet is more fertile than they thought, and they want us off it so they can plant their corporate farms.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “There’re not that many of us. And if they settle the planet, the same thing will happen to them that happened to our parents, unless they alter their genes in the womb, and if they do that, then what’s the point of kicking us out? We’re already here and we know how to farm the land.”
I didn’t add that our great-great-grandparents didn’t leave because of “one-world-order stuff.” This was an old argument, and it had originated with Sam’s grandfather who used to also believe that the Becerra farm was infested with lizard aliens.
The original crews of the generation ships were mixed. Half werevolunteers, and the other half were prisoners. They had been chosen by AI. By the now decommissioned ships themselves, who were intelligent AI systems like Roger but even smarter. They’d had their pick of people in prisons, and that was how at least half of each ship had been crewed.
If anyone ever brought this up around Sam, he would get weirdly angry about the whole thing. He didn’t believe most of the stuff his late grandfather had spewed, but he was always adamant about this one. They were prisoners, yes, but they’d been political prisoners.
That wasn’t true. We’d seen the records in school. My great-great-grandmother Constance had robbed a bank and stabbed a drug dealer.
Sam shrugged. “Maybe they want to strip-mine the planet.”
“But why are they using kids to do it?”
“Man, don’t you ever watch the feed? They usually use AI-controlled mechs to fight against terrorists, but this is new.Operation Bounce Houseis run by Apex Industries. They’re mercenaries, but the guy who runs the program used to be in charge of that game company Victus Wonderworks—the same one that made that hippopotamus-versus-ferrets zombie game you liked.”
“That game is, like, two hundred fifty years old,” I said.
“Yeah, and it sucks, too. But the company is still around, or they were until Apex bought them, and the former CEO guy is now the head of the mercenaries. Eli Opel is his name. He’s using a pay-to-play model to fund all of this. So instead of the AI mechs, they’re controlled by assholes on Earth who are treating it like a game. Apex is getting paid by the Republic to fight their wars. People are paying a ton of money to design these war machines and control them. So money is pouring in from both sides. Think about it. Imagine a war where all the soldiers are actually paying money for the chance to fight in it. It’s brilliant. They’ve been talking about it on the news for months, but everybody thought they were going to some other planet. You know, one with real terrorists. I don’t know why they’re here.”
“Shit,” I said.
Sam’s bracelet beeped a few times. I pulled it off the bevel and tossed it to him. He caught it and placed it on his wrist. I pocketed Rosita’s bracelet.
“Thanks. Do you think you can set up Harriet’s bracelet, too?”
“Sure,” I said. “But don’t tell anyone else.”
We just sat there for a minute, not moving or saying anything.
“Do you remember that time?” Sam suddenly said. “We were both like eight, and you were at my house. Your grandma was there, and so was Roger. You knocked over the vase, and it broke into, like, a million pieces. We tried to blame Snickers, but Roger ratted you out.”
I laughed. “I remember your grandmother cried. She told us not to tell your mom.”
“Yeah,” Sam said, suddenly serious. “That was a couple of days before my mom died. I forgot that part. She was already in the coma by then.” He paused. “She loved that stupid vase.”
