Wish

I feel pretty bad for Niah. She's been in a funk for factors now and I kind of regret telling her what Bellamy did. She has this strange kinship with the dead man. It's like she carries his guilt on her shoulders. Still, there's nothing much I can do about that.

Hart is being his usual stubborn, inconsiderate self. Niah grows more insistent. "We're not sleepers any more, Hart. Can't we stay in the crew quarters now that we're awake? We're almost back to Nar after all."

The droid tilts his head at Niah as if considering her words but then straightens. His twin orb eyes blink in place and I wonder if the bolt trap even has a clue what we're saying.

"Come on, Hart. Stop being such a downer. We just want to bunk in comfy quarters for the night. Those sleeper pods aren't exactly the height of luxury. They feel like morgue slabs."

Hart turns his dead stare on me. "You are sleepers. Those are your quarters."

Niah puts a hand on his shoulder and his head swivels to her. "But surely at some point we inherit the quarters of our predecessors."

Hart seems to consider this a moment then shakes his head. "Your duty does not require an adjustment in your sleeping quarters."

He leads us down the corridor toward Niah's room. I glance behind us. The room I woke up in is all the way at the other end of the ship, beyond the lift. I bite my lip. "Can we at least be together?"

Hart turns to me again. "Sleeper quarters are only equipped with a single pod."

"I know that! That's why we thought we could move to the crew quarters. I saw some rooms had twin share." That annoying eyebrow quirk above one of his orbs lifts and I sigh. "Come on, Hart. Lighten up will you? We've been alone and asleep for narcycles. Can't you understand that we don't want to be alone anymore?"

His eyebrow disappears and his orbs blink. An odd rumble hisses from his chassis. "Your emotional response is not computable."

"I know, it doesn't make sense–" I gear up to rant at him but Niah puts a hand on my shoulder so I turn to her. She keeps her focus on the droid.

"Hart, you haven't really explained about our mission. What more do you know of it?"

He looks as if the question startles him. I wonder if he's trying to formulate a lie. Do droids lie?

He turns away to continue leading us down the hall so I grab his arm, pulling him to a stop. He spins to face me. "Why don't you tell us anything?" I demand, leaning close. He splutters. "You can't just use us like this! We're people, you know?" Niah puts her hand on my arm again but I shake her off and turn to her. "How can you be so calm about all this baull-scat? He's just using you. Don't you see that?"

Hart blusters, "But, your mission."

"It was never OUR mission, Hart! It was Captain Bellamy's mission and he's dead. He and his whole crew threw away their lives on some pipe dream. That doesn't mean Niah and I have to do the same."

"But, you must return to Nar. You must save it!"

"Why?"

He blinks and I want to throw my fist through the stupid screen of his face. Those features seem to communicate so much but it's all just a program. Like everything else on this ship, Hart's just a fabrication of someone's greater plan for our lives.

"You must return to Nar with the cure."

"What is the cure, Hart? Do you know? Do you even know what's happened on the planet? It's been more than two hundred narcycles. Maybe there's nothing to go back to!"

I hate the pit of guilt in my stomach as the soft pink of his hover jets fade to a pale blue-green. His head dips and he turns away. "We must complete the mission."

"You don't even know what we're going back to, do you?"

"The Captain–"

"Eagrim's beak, Hart! Niah's the closest thing we have to a captain. You said so yourself. But you won't even let her, let either of us, sleep on a real bed. Are we just machines to you?"

"Wish," Niah whispers. She rubs her head and I feel instantly ashamed. She's worked so hard, for so long. She must be exhausted and all I can do is rant and rave about how unfair all this is. It's most unfair to her. She turns to Hart. "Can we at least be in the sleeper bays beside each other?"

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

He huffs, as if disgruntled, and I wonder how he manages to snort without a nose. He's so self-important. I grind my teeth but keep my mouth shut. He pauses at the door to the cell beside Niah's and makes a noise as if clearing his throat.

Niah turns to me. "Please, Wish. Remember the plan." She pauses, meaningfully, and it takes me a moment to remember what she's talking about. Then it clicks. We aren't planning to stay in our cells tonight. We have other things to do.

"Oh!" I nod. "I remember."

***

Niah

Although we aren't able to convince Hart to lighten up about our accommodations, he does let Wish use the room directly beside mine rather than the one at the other end of the ship where she'd first awoken.

"You're right, I'm tired." Wish feigns a yawn.

Hart hums. "Yes, you must sleep. Your frail Narian forms were not designed to sustain long periods of activity. You have been awake thirty-six factors. You need rest."

Hart stands back after shepherding Wish into her room and closes the door. She leans up against the glass window and calls, "You'll wake me up, right?"

I nod. Even I can see how wiped out she looks. The dark shadows under her eyes make her pale skin more pronounced. I imagine I must look the same, but every time Hart mentions sleep, my heart pounds and I want to scream and run. Instead, I swallow the anxiety and clench my hands, drawing a sharp breath.

Hart leads me to the next door and I step inside. We can't really argue with the droid. Although I'm not sure what he could do to us, I wouldn't be surprised if he'd consider giving us an electric jolt to knock us out, and I'd rather keep my wits about me. Besides, we're not actually planning to stay confined to quarters tonight. I turn and watch the door close behind me. It clicks with a resolute lock and I frown.

"Did he just lock us in?" Wish's voice asks through the tablet still clipped to my hip. I lift the screen and see her face looking at me through the glass. "Oh, video." She winks. "Cool tech, huh? So, can you get us out of here?"

"Let's give Hart some time to wind down, but yeah, I can probably get us out of here."

We both settle back. Wish lies down on the sleeping pod but I can't bring myself to go near mine. Instead, I sit with my back to the wall beside the door and listen to the gentle sway of Wish's breath as she falls asleep. I tinker with my tablet, browsing through the archives we set up for remote access earlier in the circuit.

There are video logs and journal entries from Elixr's crew. My heart aches as I browse them. Some of the faces feel familiar. I sense deep friendships, long camaraderies, companions among these strangers' faces. There's a clear sense of community, of love, between these people who worked together for so long.

From the logs, it's clear they grew up together. They grew old together. When one grew nearer death, a new self, a perfect clone, was created to live that life again until the mission could be completed. They lived entire lifetimes on a ship destined to save the world. Each lifetime a perfect replica of their last. No mistakes, no genetic flaws like mine.

I swallow, feeling the weight of it all resting on my shoulders. I don't even know these people, but Wish and I, Hart and Elixr, we are all that's left of a centuries old mission. We are the only ones who can bring back the cure to save what remains of our people. If anything remains at all.

A few factors pass as Wish naps and I browse through the records. One in particular causes an ache deep in my heart. I linger on it, watching the eerily familiar face.

He looks like Wish, but he isn't. His soft smile doesn't reach the sad shadows in his eyes. The video snippet is a fragment. It looks like it once belonged to a longer log but I can't find a way to restore the rest of the entry. Instead, all I catch are a handful of words.

Deep in my gut, I sense a good man. A kind, caring, fun-loving man. "Good luck, brother," the man says. His voice is thick with true admiration, real brotherly love. Then he casts his eyes down as if wounded and in pain. When he looks up again, gazing directly at me through the screen, his eyes are laced in haunted shadows of regret. "I'm sorry," he whispers.

I know his heart is breaking. Mine is, too. I feel Bellamy's pain all over again. Torn away from a brother he truly loved. "Oli," I whisper, feeling the name on the edges of memories I can't quite grasp.

"Niah?" Wish asks and I startle because I hadn't realised she'd woken up.

"Yeah?" I swallow to clear my throat.

"Are we ready?"

I glance around at the empty room around me. I nod even though I don't have the video mode turned on so she can't actually see me. "Yeah, let's do this." I hook my tablet into the door controls and override the lock within ticks. Child's play. The door slides open and I let Wish out of her cell. "Now, we must be quiet while we deal with Hart. I don't want him to wake up."

She nods and we make our way down the corridor to his charging station. Hart is jacked in with his controls set to "powered down" mode. I carefully hook my tablet to his charging station. I lower the parameters on his alert statuses and, just to be safe, add a subcommand that will prevent him from waking up until I reset his system.

"Right, all set." I say. Hart remains inert.

Wish releases a breath. "Come on then."

We jog through the ship to Bellamy's quarters. The room looks exactly as we left it. I nudge open the closet again and set to work on the electronic lock securing the wall safe inside. It's complex, but I can't help but feel Bellamy could have hacked this himself. Why did he resort to trying to open it by force? Was his mind so far gone in his final hours?

The door pings as it finally releases and opens. Wish cheers, "Yes! You got it." I reach forward and pick up the small clear disk of glass that rests on the base of the safe. "Do you think that's it?" Wish asks.

"I imagine so." I glance around the room, wondering how to read the disk. Instinctively, my gaze is drawn to a panel on the wall beside another large screen display, currently dark. I cross the room and slip the disk into the small groove. The screen flickers to life with a series of blueprint designs. I examine them closely, piecing together the machine's function.

"What is it?"

"Some kind of dispersal unit. It's designed to cause Elixr's warp shield to emit a unique pulse seeded with some kind of liquid particles that are stored in the ship. They constructed this device but the fabrication drive lacks the orkrane needed to make the plasma it requires." I tap my tablet and run a search, then sigh in relief. "It's a mineral that's found on Nar. So I guess they always intended to finish the machine after they got home."

I flip through the file archive on the drive via the interface on the wall. Along with the plans for the cure, I find the programming structure of Hart and Elixr's final commands from Bellamy. I scan through them. Elixr's are relatively straightforward. She's programmed to run in defensive evasive mode with a self-correcting home course that will guide the ship home should no telemetry unit be available to navigate. Hart's program is much more detailed. I gasp.

"What is it?" Wish asks.

"Apparently, Hart is programmed with a series of commands and a full historical knowledge of the original fleet, their crew, their mission, and the way to administer the cure when they return."

"Why hasn't he told us any of this then?"

I shake my head. "I saw Hart's internals earlier when I scrambled his alert signals. None of this is in the main directories for access. Something must have scrambled his memory drivers."

"Is that why he spaces out?"

"Probably. If he attempts to access data that should be stored in those pockets he might be hitting erase points and getting no data. Like walking through a doorway and forgetting what you went into the room to do."

"I hate when that happens. So, is there a way to unscramble Hart's brains?"

I shut down the screen and eject the disk, tucking it into the sleeve of my suit, then turn to Wish. "I don't know, but let's say we go try." She grins at me as if it's all a fascinating adventure. I feel a similar tingle of anticipation. With every breath we're getting closer to Nar. I know it. And I can't help feeling like maybe our lives are just about to begin.