A1A. That had been my designation in the Vicoss Colony on Io. We were assigned designations, not names because the Liagro didn’t want us to believe that we deserved better treatment than we received. After years of obedient service, I was assigned the role of first in our unit, taking charge of the younger children who were sent to the small dormitory where we lived.

They were usually around 8 years old, and had been educated just enough to be useful without being given the intellectual tools to cause trouble. I was in charge of administering the drugs that prevented their worst instincts from manifesting themselves. Above me was a caste of older colonists who managed us and so on until we were no longer useful. There were thousands of us and we followed orders and worked tirelessly to improve the lives of our brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, cousins and everyone else who had managed to remain on Earth.

Manual labor was mostly left to the robots. We were in charge of receiving cargo from outside of the Sol System, a sort of galactic logistics hub. While I would work for a few days in the warehouses, my main job was to wrangle the children and train them for a life of usefulness. I rarely had time to contemplate my situation and the neural inhibitors we were all forced to consume prevented deep thought about anything other than our work.

The Liagro wanted the humans on Earth to have as little to do with outside species as possible. They were seen as pets, the Liagro’s favorite experiment and a way to prove to other species that any planet could be turned into an example of the Utopian ideal, even the ones that were on the verge of complete and total self destruction.

A human doctor who lived in Proxima Centauri took an interest in me and began to ask questions about my situation when he would visit us for health checks. I explained that the Liagro were trying to help Earth and that we were lucky to be allowed to live. He had only been hired to care for us a few weeks earlier and was constantly questioning me about our conditions.

Without telling me, he began to reduce my dosage of the inhibitors and I gradually started asking questions about what was really happening. He warned me to be careful and told me that the Liagro would be displeased if I strayed too far from my set parameters.

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After a few weeks, I was having difficulty maintaining the facade that everything was normal and when I knocked down a robot that had been disciplining a child, the Liagro overseers knew something was amiss. They ran dozens of tests and discovered that the neural inhibitors were no longer working. The standard treatment for this condition was cerebral incapacitation and they locked me in a cell to await my execution, pending a few final experiments. I had never even considered my mortality before, and now, as it loomed large on the horizon, I was overcome with grief so intense that I could only lay in my bed and sob.

Fortunately, hours before I was scheduled to die, the doctor appeared at my cell and told the guards he had detected something unusual in my bloodwork. I was allowed to leave with him and he hid me in a box of goods that he was accompanying off-world. I nearly suffocated during the eight hour trip, but when we arrived on Antares Major, he pulled me out of the crate and took me to his home.

‘I shouldn’t have done it.’ He paced around his house, shaking his head. I was sitting on a chair, realizing that my world had changed completely and he knelt in front of me and began to apologize profusely. His explanations about a group of humans who were attempting to overthrow the Liagro were irrelevant to me, but I lent a sympathetic ear without fully understanding the implications of his actions.

‘You did the right thing.’ He put his head in my lap and I stroked his hair absentmindedly.

‘You need a name.’ He lifted his head and looked at me.

‘I already have a designation. A1A for leader of an education unit.’

‘My name is Koji, you need to have a name so people can identify you. A1A is a title, not a way to refer to a human.’ He stood and reached his hand out to me. ‘What about Aia?’

I nodded. It sounded fine and as I barely knew what a name was, I didn’t have any better suggestions. The drugs eventually worked their way out of my system and my deficiencies in personality began to show. I would fly into fits of rage and had a manic obsession with food. Koji and I grew closer as he tried to help my rocky adaptation and one evening after an unusually intense argument, I kissed him.

‘No Aia. This isn’t right.’ He had told before that he wanted to remain only friends, that it would be wrong for us to change the nature of our relationship.

‘But I need you.’ I had never felt this way and my body was on fire, wanting to experience what it was like to be close to someone. ‘You can help me.’ I kissed him again and this time he submitted, wanting me as much as I wanted him. I undressed him and he showed me what it felt like to be human. I left soon afterwards to join another group of outcasts in a camp on a nearby planet, eternally grateful for what he had done for me.