“Would you believe me if I told you I wasn’t human?”

I laughed. She had that playful look in her eyes, the one she got when she was about to have a jab at me. I had my cup halfway to my mouth before I realised she wasn’t joking.

“Come on!” I said. “I’ve known you for over a decade. I think I’d suspect something if you weren’t human.”

“Humour me.”

Maybe she was bored or stir crazy. We had been waiting for the transporter for weeks now, and there wasn’t much to do on the station. The cup returned to the table. My lips were dry.

“Listen,” I said. “I’ve seen all kinds of weird things. I’ve seen a cave that made a melody when the wind blew in the right direction. I’ve seen skies that change colour with the weather. I even saw a dog, a real dog! But I’ve never seen an alien.”

“Do you know that there’s a station caught in the orbit of a nova star?” she asked. “Where the inhabitants have become like animals from inbreeding?”

I shrugged. “I’ve heard rumours. It’s unpleasant, but they still don’t count as aliens.”

“But they live like creatures. They even eat each other, and the station just cares for them like it was programmed to.”

I wrapped my hand around my drink like I was going to take a swig, but then I found I didn’t have the stomach.

“But their DNA comes from Earth,” I argued. “Regardless of how much it’s degenerated, they can’t be classed as alien.”

“Okay,” she went on. “What about the Ornegai?”

I frowned. “The nebula people? They genetically modified themselves to live in space. Sure, their DNA is all mixed up, but they did it to themselves. Besides, they still talk.”

“So it’s language that makes them human?” she asked.

“Well...” I said. “No, not really. The Mechaniks are all different, but they merged their bodies with machines. They don’t talk, but they still come from Earth.”

Her face lit up. “Ah! But a fish comes from Earth. Is a fish a human too?”

“Now you’re just twisting things,” I said. “You might be human if you come from Earth, and your ancestors were homo sapiens.”

“But star children have no ancestors! They were created in breeding tubes, to populate worlds we wouldn’t reach for hundreds of years. Do you say they aren’t human?”

“But their DNA is human!”

She smiled. “Now we’re back to the DNA. What is it about genes that makes somebody a human being?”

I frowned. The argument was circular, and I was getting nowhere.

“Maybe I should ask you a question,” I said. “Why do you say you’re not a human? Are you an android now? Shouldn’t the burden of evidence be on you, if you’re saying you're not human?”

“That was three questions,” she said. “No, I’m not an android. But I don’t feel like a human, either.”

I burst out laughing. “Don’t feel like a human? Mira, you can’t just decide you’re not a person!”

“Why not?”

“Because it doesn’t work that way!”

“But the Ornegai decided they wanted to live in space.”

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Yes.”

“And the Mechaniks decided they wanted to become machines.”

“Also true.”

“And star children have no parents, and therefore cannot have ancestors.”

“This is beside the point.”

She squinted at me. “How is it beside the point?”

“Because they changed themselves, or they were changed, or something happened to them that made them different. You were born on a planet – not in space – your parents are homo sapiens, and your DNA is unaltered.”

“So I have to change myself to stop being human?”

“Of course.”

“I have a neural implant,” she said. “I think faster and see patterns better than my ancestors would have.”

I frowned. “That doesn’t change your humanity.”

“People hundreds of years ago would have disagreed. People hundreds of years ago feared genetically modified crops because they thought it changed nature. Playing God, they called it. Is the corn we eat today not corn?”

“I don’t think very much of today’s universe would be familiar to those people.”

“Go even further back. Europeans considered Africans to be subhuman. People of the same genes, of the same planet, and who they shared a vast majority of their ancestry with. Those people weren’t human to them.”

“They were racists.”

“But their definition of human was different to ours. After we went out into the Universe we began to change, and so changed our definition of humanity. Now I’m a human, an Ornegai is a human, a Mechanik is still mostly human, and, according to you, mutated animal-people are also human.”

I paused with my cup half-way to my mouth. I just wasn’t having any luck drinking tonight.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll humour you. Let’s say you’re not a human. What are you?”

“Whatever I want to be,” she said.

“And what do you want to be?”

She frowned. “I want to be formless.”

“Formless?”

“Yes, formless. I don’t want to have a definition. Definitions carry expectations. A human has to live like a human: you get up in the morning, you go to work, you further the goals of your species. Humans aren’t individuals, they’re just the molecules of a species. Have you ever asked one of your molecules what it wants to do?”

“I don’t think it’d reply if it did.”

“It wouldn’t. Molecules are only parts. They form structures, and the structure thinks for them. What do you think a molecule would do if it didn’t have to hold you up, or fuel your body, or carry electrons so you could think? What would you do if you were a molecule?”

I thought about it. “I think I’d run away. But where could I go? The universe is so big when you’re a molecule.”

“The universe is so big when you’re a human, too,” she said. “I don’t even know what’s on the other side of known space. Every day we’ve been on this station, I’ve seen people, heard languages, listened to conversations from places I never even dreamed existed.”

“So where would you go, if you were a molecule?”

She frowned. “I think I’d just start off in one direction until I found somewhere I liked. Maybe I’d join another body, or live in the roots of a tree. Maybe I’d fall into the ocean and live in the water, where everything is formless, and all the molecules live together as one giant mass.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “I think I read somewhere that you should stop drinking when you start anthropomorphising atoms.”

“Are we really so different?” she asked. “Look at us; right now, you and I have been waiting for weeks to get on a transporter to Mersa. Why are we going there?”

“Because that’s where the work is.”

“But it’s a terrible place to live!”

“If you want to eat, you have to work,” I said.

Even as I said it, I wondered why it was so. Hadn’t our distant ancestors eaten food that they found? Hadn’t they lived their merry lives without ever having a cent to their name? What had changed so much that we, by definition, had to slave in mines and factories to survive?

There were even planets out there where humans could eat the food. Sometimes you needed a purifier, other times you could just pick it where it grew. But that was a thing to do in an emergency when your ship had crashed and you were waiting to be rescued. That was only something you did when you had to.

But the more I thought about it, the more I started to see those stranded souls as having escaped from the prison. They weren’t cogs in the machine anymore. They just lived their lives, for however short a span, without the burden of duty that being a human brought with it. They were free of their humanity.

“I think you’re doing my head in.”

She ignored me. “Here’s what I think. That transport comes in a few hours. It can take us to Mersa. We can find work in a crystal mine or harvesting organics for the consumable assemblers. We can be humans, or we can run away and become something else.”

“What would we do if we stopped?”

She shrugged. “I’ve only ever known how to be a human. I don’t know how to be anything else. I guess we’d have to figure it out ourselves, make our own rules.”

I looked across the platform. At any moment, there were hundreds of ships docked at the station, the people lining up at the terminals to fly to different corners of the universe, their names glowing on the signs above the airlocks. Some I recognised. Some sounded alien. Some of them were even in languages that I couldn’t read.

“You see that terminal over there?” I asked. “The one with the letters that look like little moons?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you know where it’s going?”

She shrugged. “I can’t read that language. I’ve never even seen it.”

“Me neither,” I said. “I think I’d like to learn it.”