The crew sat together in the dormitory common room for now, their most recent revelation leaving everyone silent. Tired. Confused. Seven stared blankly out of a window, a lost expression on her face. She was certainly younger, but the implications of her role were not lost on her.
“How can it be ‘breeder’?” Five asked incredulously from one of the couches, having finally donned a plain white t-shirt herself. It had seemed like that’s all the clothes were. White and undecorated, despite the different suites having different shapes and styles of clothes. “What does that even mean? Breed with who? There’s nobody here, we’re all girls, and why in the world would that matter!?” Five sounded angry on Seven’s behalf.
“Only One knows for sure.” Three said as she watched her own slate charge rapidly from a port they had found on the wall of the common room “We have to find out a way to read her file.”
“Fine, you stay here and look it over.” Five stood up from her seat and walked up behind Seven “Hey, Seven. look at me.” she gently turned Seven’s seat to face her, revealing the injured girl’s distant stare “Hey… look, I don’t care what that file said, you’re our sister now, and I’m not going to let anyone do anything to you, got it?” she slowly put her arms around the girl and she reciprocated, holding the larger girl tightly. “You can trust us. Nobody’s gonna touch you.”
Two also stared out of a different window, looking over the planet below them. She wondered if it was where they were from. Or where they were going to. She knew of Earth, but she couldn’t identify it if she was looking at it, so was this even their own home planet? What did all of this mean. “I’m going to check the bridge next.” Two spoke flatly, not wanting the others to mistake it as a suggestion.
Five wanted to argue that they needed to keep comforting Seven, but pragmatically, she knew that they might not have all the time they needed to ease the girl’s fears. “Well you’re not going alone.” she stepped back from hugging Seven and took her hand gently instead “Come on Seven… let’s go do some looking around. Maybe you’ll feel better after a walk with us.”
Seven nodded reluctantly “Maybe.” she sighed, slowly getting to her feet so as not to disturb her injury.
—
The three walked the large hallway together, going at a slow pace to ensure Seven could keep up, and eventually Two thought it best to make conversation “Hey Seven, I was wondering, how’d you get hurt anyway?” she asked.
Seven was surprised the others were addressing her at all now, having been more focused on each other up until that moment “Umm… one of the cables. When it disconnected, it got caught on something and whipped into me. It might have been pressurized.”
“Whoever made those things didn’t make them safe, that’s for sure.” Five muttered “But they worked. If we really are clones, then we were just born. How do you think we’re not a bunch of drooling idiots?”
Two shrugged “Maybe that’s what the data in those files is. Somehow… download information into us or something? We were apparently in there for around six years, but we look older than that. They probably tweaked a lot of things about how we grew.”
“So we age fast then?” Seven wondered “Does that mean we’re going to die of old age faster too?”
“Who knows?” Five didn’t want to think about that as they turned to face the helm. They likely still had a lot of natural lifespan ahead of them, after all. The door to the helm appeared to already be twisted open, off of its hinges. It hung awkwardly at the corner of the frame. It had already been forced open, perhaps long before they had woken up. Inside, several terminals lit up under several large screens. None of the three could identify anything that was happening in the room at a glance though “Probably Six’s job…” Five remarked, walking in to look over some of the terminals and see if she could decipher anything.
Two did the same, going to one of the screens that looked to have the most user-friendly interface and found it not unlike the slates. After poking around in the file system, she found that it too was disconnected from a central server, and only had local files related to bridge control. These, however, were far more readable than what was on the cloning chambers. “… Girls, I think this is communications. It still has some logs in a buffer.” she started looking around for some sort of controls, a distress signal, a way to call out to a planetside facility, anything, but she couldn’t make sense of most of it.
Five seemed equally frustrated at her terminal, groaning as she clicked through the interface haphazardly “Navigation here. I’m not touching that. Don’t want to knock us off course or something.”
“Does it at least say where we’re headed?” Two turned and came to look over Five’s shoulder.
She shook her head “Stable orbit around that planet. We’re not going anywhere. I’m guessing that’s Earth, but it doesn’t feel familiar.”
“Do you think rescue’s coming?” Seven asked, staying at the door because she was too uncertain she would be able to do anything to help.
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Five grimaced down at the terminal “Maybe.” she said grimly, though she wasn’t certain if help would be appreciated if they were just going to enforce their roles, disgust showing on her face as she once more reminded herself of what that could mean for Seven.
“I’ll check those logs. Shouldn’t hurt anything.” Two returned to the comms terminal and went back to look through the text logs. Some of the data was corrupted, but there was legible text. She excitedly opened the file, eager to see the first bit of coherent readable information they’d encounter since they had woken up.
—
‘Last Stand, this is […] The diversion team has failed. It’s over. Your crew will likely be […] I’m sorry that it came to this. There are no more contingencies. Perhaps we were just never meant to […] asteroid […] fire […] Maybe you can figure something out. No matter how impossible […] human spirit […] the end for us. 42 hours until impact, and then it’s all up to you. You’ll be the only ones left. I don’t blame you if that’s too tall an order. I guess I can’t even really say it’s an order anymore. A request. You have the world’s most brilliant minds in that station. You’ll think of something, I […]
—
The file was full of holes, but Two thought she could understand the gist of it. Something happened. Something terrible happened. A disaster that would leave whoever was on the ground incapacitated. Dread crept up Two’s spine as she reread the word ‘asteroid’. She looked out the helm window and down at the planet beneath them. It didn’t look like there was anything in proximity. Perhaps this disaster was yet to pass, which made her wonder how long they had until this happened. What were they supposed to do about it though?
“What’s it say?” Five asked grimly, used to seeing Two distraught by something she had read by now.
Two frantically looked over the terminal again, looking for an accurate time to compare to the timestamp on the log, but the terminal threw an error and requested access to the central database again. Pursing her lips, she sighed “I… think we’re supposed to save the world?”
“… Huh?” was all Five could muster, letting out a huff in disbelief “That’s bullshit.” she stepped up to the terminal herself, reading the communique and crossing her arms “This doesn’t sound right. We’re smart, but I wouldn’t say we’re the ‘world’s most brilliant minds’.
Seven walked closer to read as well “Maybe it’s from a show.” she suggested “You know, like for entertainment.”
“Grim entertainment.” Five scoffed as she turned around “42 hours… how long ago was this sent?”
“No idea, I think something went wrong with the clock system, it keeps asking to connect to the database for the time on the slate too.” Two pulled hers out again to look it over, and sure enough it still wasn’t finding the central computer either.
“Well where’s the database?” Five asked impatiently
Two shrugged her shoulders “Ahh… maybe one of the labs? Maybe somewhere outside the station? Maybe it’s in some administrative area we don’t have access to.” she sighed and put the slate back down “We’ll need to explore. That’s all we can do.”
“Getting real tired of this.” Five groaned, slamming one hand into an empty wall in frustration “I want to know what’s happening around here already. I want to know why we’re being birthed on some abandoned space station. I just want some answers already!”
“We’ll get them.” Seven said quietly “We’ll find it out. I know we will.” she sounded so assured of herself. It was hard to tell if it was confidence or if she was just trying to reassure Five.
“Yeah. I… think we need to get the rest of the power on.” Two said quietly, curiosity seething within her to the point where she was ready to do something drastic.
“Didn’t Three say not to do that?” Five raised an eyebrow.
Two pursed her lips, knowing she was right and this was a stupid risk “Yeah… but if we’re in a time crunch, we need that database on now. If we don’t know where it is, we can just turn on everything and see. If this place is really supposed to be so advanced, I’m sure it’ll be able to handle it, right?”
“We have to do something…” Seven murmured in tacit agreement.
Five took a deep breath and sighed “We’re gonna die. We’re all gonna die, aren’t we?” she threw her arms out “Screw it, let’s… turn on a space station. For real this time.”
—
“Three’s gonna kill us.” Five said as they stepped into the engine room once again. Two, on the other hand, wasn’t wasting any time. She walked up to the panel and began flipping switches, turning on everything from the hallway to the dormitories, to the restrooms. It had to be on one of these circuits. And as more and more of the station lit up, the engine room began to hum louder as the machines started working again.
“Three can yell at us when we’re dead.” she declared as she flipped on the very last switch, one that wasn’t even labeled like the others. And miraculously… they stayed on. A few minutes passed as they stared at the machinery, looking to see if it would explode or fall apart on them, and it didn’t. By some fluke, it seemed to be in working order.
Once Two was done gawking at her plan actually working, she pulled out her slate and began swiping her way to find connections. And after a few moments of scanning, it connected to something. “Holy… it’s working!” Two declared, immediately checking in on the clock again. But it wasn’t what she expected. It just showed another error screen that said ‘unable to parse date time.’
“No… come on, there’s gotta be something.” she started looking through the slate to find that innumerable other functions had been unlocked. Things relating to chemistry, physics, astronomy, mathematics. There were just too many options now, many related to hard sciences.
“Can you see how long since it connected last?” Seven asked, looking around her arm at the device.
Two nodded “Maybe?” she looked around the system to find if there were logs and after a few minutes of frantic scrolling, she was able to find something. System logs. “Here, yeah, time since last login.” she stopped and stared. It was such a large number… “Must be in seconds.” she muttered as she opened up a calculator on the screen “… divide by… then there’s…” she stopped saying all the words as she did the math, slowing down as she found she had to keep dividing again and again, realization slowly dawning on her as she let the slate slip down and fall limp in her arm at her side.
“… What? How long we got?” Five asked impatiently. But Two quickly began to realize that it wasn’t a matter of how long they had until the disaster happened anymore.
Two slumped back against the wall and stared blankly into the distance, a look of disbelief on her face “Last login was… T-Two… Two hundred… fifty seven… million years.”