The security detail having proven pointless, my mother decided instead to install a tracker in the one thing I would always, always have with me—Aspect. But my mother failed to consider two things: One, Aspect would happily let me tinker with that newly installed tracker. And two, I would inevitably find a way to hack it. That tracker is now spoofed with semi-randomized, totally believable routines that can override my actual location as needed. Like when I need to make unrequested stops in the Morpheus Market. (Or if I don’t particularly care for my mother to know how long a bad serving of rations kept me confined to my quarters one morning. Curse you, artificial chicken!)
My mother never really sees fit to enterCharon.If she needs me, she sends a message to my comms tablet or, if shereallywants to grind my gears, sends another person to retrieve me under her orders. But she can’t really be bothered to trek all the way from her luxury quarters to the private hangar where I dockCharonin the settlement. She has the ship periodically inspected to ensure my safety, but I don’t think she’s ever actually been in it. And that makes it feel more like home than anywhere else.
Charondescends from orbit, its silhouette primarily an X with two additional vertical bars reinforcing the shape near the center on either side. In the center sits a long horizontal space where its occupants actually enter. While I may callCharonhomey, that doesn’t mean it offers extensive room.
The boarding ramp drops from its center and brings me and Aspect through a closet-sized decontamination chamber, where we’re blasted with a chilly surge of dense white smoke and rapid scan of neon-green laser sensors, confirming the outside radiation has in fact been purged from us before we move to the inside.
It’s a single space that I collectively call the cockpit, even though the pilot’s chair, passenger chair, and assorted controls occupy only about the front quarter of the area. The rest of the room is a cramped dome, with assorted storage units on basically every wall to make the most of it. There’s a rectangular table and accompanying bench (both a little rickety but still securely attached to the floor) where I’ve eaten meals, done homework, or simply tinkered with Aspect. Since we’re in the Passage, basically the entire viewport dome above us is transparent, allowing the sun to naturally illuminate the cockpit. In the Daylands, where the sun rapidly becomes too much, I can close an outer shell and switch to the same harsh, fake white light as the Morpheus Market’s secret halls.
Now that we’ve been through the decontamination chamber, it’s finally safe to collapse the various segments of my armor. Aspect absently whistles to themself while they wait. My helmet peels back like a cocoon from my face, the rush of fresh oxygen intoxicating.
The bunched, stretchy compression rings around my gloves and boots loosen, no longer needing to protect every joint from potential radiation poisoning, and allow the armor plates to roll back to my shoulders and hips respectively. I’m wearing a full standard outfit beneath, but at least now it isn’t clinging to my body.
Ripping off my gloves for a better grip on the controls, I collapse intoCharon’s pilot seat. “One memory delivery, coming up.”
Aspect pokes one finger into the small of my back. “Memory—for Aspect?”
“Not this time. I just picked up some more info about how your memory core works, so I might be able to do a more intensive installation next time.”
“Extensive—how?” I can hear an eyebrow raise in Aspect’s voice, even though they don’t have any eyebrows.
My shoulders slump. “I … don’t know.” There’s no template for any of this. I’m hoping that a deeper understanding of mechs’ deepest mechanisms will enable me to install a memory that takes … a deeper hold, I suppose? Has a more potent, noticeable impact on Aspect’s potential ability to self-determine, inspired and empowered by directly understanding how humans do it every day? But I don’t actually know if the memory I just acquired will accomplish any of that, or anything at all. “But I can promise you we’ll come back for more memories, Aspect. For you next time.”
Aspect doesn’t have facial expressions. They have bright-to-dim optical processors, a visibly obscured vocalization box, and a crudely carved mouth that I scraped into existence with a spare screwdriver. Aspect is perpetually attempting a smile regardless of the circumstances. But I swear to the stars, right now, they look sincerely … disappointed. I would feel bad if I weren’t currently in a panic about making this delivery to my mother ASAP.
I pullCharoninto takeoff, hard. We launch with such force that I won’t be surprised if my shoulders bruise from jamming back into thepilot’s chair. Aspect staggers, sliding on their heels. The earliest mech designs for mining the newly hostile Daylands had wheels, but it became quickly apparent that as the world turned to sand, wheels would only get stuck and wear down far faster than artificial feet, which are what Aspect has. They’re a prime example of (modified) Mech Model V5.30, per settlement records.
Aspect’s feet squeak across the cockpit floor, and I sigh to myself. “Literally why are you not strapped into the copilot’s chair right now?”
Aspect half shrugs as they rise from the floor. “Surprise—for Kori.”
“Is the surprise you losing a limb? Because this is going to be a bumpy ride. Strap in, now.” I sigh, hating the Chloe-like edge to my voice. “Please?”
Aspect rapidly shakes their head. “SURPRISE—FOR KORI.”
“Aspect, this is not the time,” I fire back, tapping away atCharon’s controls. Normally I’d use the autopilot to get back to the settlement’s singular aboveground entrance, butCharonlikes to beep at me when it judges my flying as too high, too low, too fast, or too close to me having any measure of fun. So, instead, I engageCharon’s secondary thrusters (without disabling the primary) via a small lever on the side of the square steering wheel.
I need all the firepower I can get if we’re going to reach home while Chloe is still awake. The woman barely rests. She’s too busy running the entire settlement (and micromanaging my entire life). We have precious little time to make it back within her sleep cycle. Having changed Aspect’s tracker to feed fake location info won’t do me any good if my mother expects me at a specific location personally.
A harsh buffet of wind and sand hits the side of my ship.Charonlurches, threatening a nosedive. I pull it back into a smooth flight path, simultaneously reaching for an overhead switch to activate its full shell. We’re getting closer to the Daylands—something that the onboard positioning system indicates, but the increased sunlight makes very obvious regardless. The intensity is rapidly becoming difficult to bearwithout my helmet to reduce it. Segmented armor plates slide into place aroundCharon, cylinders of artificial light activating all around me. An additional layer of glare protection descends over the remaining transparent viewport.
Out of the corner of my eye, I notice Aspect remains on the move, banging and bouncing their way to the tiny storage closet. My knuckles go white around the steering lever as I spin in my chair to face the mech. “Aspect, what are you—?”
That’s when the dessert platter slides up the floor, catapulted by my metal friend. It comes to a stop right beside my pilot’s chair, wetly squelching. I blink once, twice.
Back when Pagonians used the old ways of tracking time, we held gatherings called birthdays to mark a child’s age, but I’ve never wondered how many times a set number of “days” and “nights” have passed since I entered the world. Now all we have is the massive hourglass in the settlement’s center, ever flipping to indicate approximately when it’s a good idea to take a sleep cycle and start anew. The hourglass is also digitally linked to a universal application on dayfolk comms tablets, so anyone can check how close the hourglass is to emptying at any time. By this measure, I’m older than a child, but not quite an adult. We simply accept life as it comes, cycle by cycle.
But I must’ve programmed one of those historical remnant memories of a proper birthday into Aspect and then forgotten, because I don’t know how else to explain the goopy nightmare concoction resting on my floor, crudely labeledCAKEin swirly purple icing. A single wax candle sticks crookedly out of the center.
How long has it been since I cleanedCharon’s cabinets? How long has Aspect’s monstrosity been festering and melting together in there?
Why does it smell like gasoline and old shoes?
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to pivot my attention between my navigation and diagnostic stats at my fingertips, and the slow-motion culinary disaster happening behind me. My neck is already crampingfrom the rapid swinging back and forth. Nothing prepared me for this when I decided to turn a robot into a friend. Probably because, by any logical law of nature, I’m not supposed to be turning a robot into a friend.
“Your watch shows—it has been—5,840—hourglass cycles—since you first began—sleeping and waking—Kori,” Aspect announces. They toddle back up to the front ofCharon, lean one arm on their copilot’s seat (while still refusing to strap in), and elaborate upon the specifics of how long I’ve been alive.
Of all the things for Aspect to seize upon and obsess over in an installed memory … Apparently, 365 “days” was a “year” which was a “birthday,” so by that logic, my watch—which has been tracking sleep cycles since my birth—does mathematically indicate that this sleep cycle is my existence anniversary. When Aspect checked that digital total, I have no idea. Were they looming over me while I slept, ever-so-gingerly tapping my watch to check when a long-abandoned method of time tracking dictated that they take up baking immediately (and badly)?
