-  “The subject we’re assigning to you is named Ada. She was born eleven years ago in a Shareplace near Caliban. Do you know what that is?

- It’s an orbital station, right?

-  Yes, and with Caliban being the frontier, there’s a legal gray area around it. Antioch saw it as the perfect opportunity to conduct sociological experiments to support political projects. A Shareplace is essentially a community somewhere between anarchism and pre-stellar communism. From zero to three years old, Ada was cared for by older kids or adults—chosen at random. No moms or dads there. If she needed comfort, an adult would step in and care for her. On this orbital station, there were about a hundred adults and thirty children under fifteen, and all those adults were the kids’ parents—in an emotional sense. In a Shareplace, as you grow up, you might unknowingly form relationships with close relatives. Genetic screening manages the issue of inbreeding.

-  Antioch’s Paradise.

-  Exactly. No one owns anything. Need a tool? Want a pretty plant for your cabin? You take what’s in front of you, and no one says a word. And when someone takes it back, you don’t complain either. Even your clothes: you take them off, toss them into a big laundry bin at night, and the next day, you get clean ones that used to belong to someone else. It works fairly well. Here we are. The window is one-way, so she doesn’t know we’re watching her.

-  She looks like an ordinary girl.

-  More or less. Here are some biographical details I sent you via LE. Ada grew up, and at three, she started taking care of the plants covering every surface of the station, especially the large common zero-gravity room at the center, where plants could grow in all directions. At five, she began caring for younger kids. She takes advanced science courses—today, she’s clutching a stuffed animal, but she’s perfectly capable of solving a Diophantine equation. That’s even more impressive considering I have no idea what a Diophantine equation is. When I asked her, she hesitated as if I’d asked the color of an orange.

-  Doing math in the age of LEs…

-  She listens to stories about the heroes of the League of Antioch and watches Caliban through the station’s windows. It’s a large planet shrouded in clouds and lightning—uninhabitable, sterile, uninteresting. Not even a missile base, if you can believe it.

-  Or none visible.

-  At six, she starts doing maintenance work on the station. Her small frame and training are perfect for the job. One day, she’s punished for refusing to lend a tool to a “Brother” who needed it for his work. She needed it after her rest phase and didn’t want to waste time retrieving it. Shareplace punishments are… unique. She was locked in an empty room with no windows, just the disputed tool and a plant providing food and water. She told me it was ten days, but it might’ve been less. Isolation quickly drives people mad—take it from a former castaway.

-  How did you get her out?

-  Shareplaces started to ruffle the HS Council’s feathers… It was a roundabout way of colonizing the frontier, pushing it outward. Two months ago, the Stellar Fleet launched an operation. They sent a fully armed Endymion—six kilometers long.

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

-  I’ve served on plenty of Endymions. The Phrike, I assume?

-  Yes, the Phrike. So you can imagine the impression that monster left. The station was in its shadow. You’d think they’d give up, right? No. Negotiations failed. The fleet pretended to leave, then sent in six special forces soldiers in chameleon suits. It was incredible. The distance was so great they spent four days approaching the station in pressurized suits. They breached the airlock, killed four or five people, negotiated again, but no one wanted to surrender. Command ordered the assault, renegotiated, and faced rejection after rejection. In the end, no adults survived. We were left with twenty kids, including Ada.

-  And the other ten?

-  The other ten what?

-  You said there were thirty children on the station. Now there are twenty.

-  Well, I’ll let you imagine their fate. Anyway, Ada was entrusted to us. We brought her to this lovely room overlooking the waterfalls of Calchas, the ramps where damned bureaucrats like us scurry about, and the ships passing in the sky. A little bed just for her—the same one every night for the first time in her life. Television, programs—and ads!—from the Human Society. Video games. Supplies for painting and reading, and revising her science lessons. A small collection of classics from the Human Society and the League of Antioch. We’re broadening her horizons, you get me? When the kids arrived at the complex, we gave them all a little blue bag with a moon on it. Inside were small items: colored pencils, a notebook, a stuffed Xeno… When we told her the stuffed Xeno was hers, my God… the intensity of her emotions! She was terrified it was a test and that she’d be locked up again for ten days. That it was a punishment. And then it hit her: it was hers, and nothing in the world could take it away. She clutches it as if it were her child. She sleeps with it. She talks to it.

-  A textbook case Antioch wouldn’t approve of.

-  Exactly. In just two days, all the principles of the Shareplace were obliterated with a toy. Property, territory—it’s visceral, deep within us. I’d even say it’s the fundamental factor that sets us apart from the Xenos. That said, some kids are more resistant to temptation. You know what? I think, deep down, the Shareplace was a pretty great project. There’s more common ground between the Antiochians and us than political speeches would have you believe, once they’re pushed far enough from Caliban.

-  Yet you sound like a politician.

-  Now that you’ve got the context, here’s your mission. You have three weeks to introduce Ada to Human Society. How we work, friendships, work, leisure. Thalers. The right to citizenship, which will give her food and shelter on our planets. You’ll need to explain what a family is in the traditional sense. In three weeks, we’re sending her to a rock called Clelia, beyond the Far Gate, where she’ll be welcomed by the Jespersens: a dad, a mom, a sister, and two brothers. It has to go well. We owe her that.

-  Are you asking me to reprogram her mind with psi techniques?

-  Uh… can you do that? Actually, no, absolutely not. It requires finesse. We’re being watched. Always have been… Don’t make her forget her Shareplace culture or Antioch’s ideology. Tell her it’s her most valuable possession. It’s her past. It belongs to her. We’re here to give, not to take or destroy even more of what made up her life.

-  Who are you afraid of? The HS president who declares daily that the Antio-dogs are our best friends?

-  I want, should a Wau—or gods forbid, you know who—come asking questions, to look those bastards in the eye and tell them we preserved Ada as much as possible and acted without ideological bias. In fact, if Ada screams and begs to return to Antioch or anywhere else in three days, we’ll take her. That said, you’re not to mention this or ask her about it, got it?

-  Why would those armored Wau bastards give you trouble? After all, you only killed ten kids for living in the wrong place. War again, isn’t it? Not that I’m complaining. I’m ambitious. Someday I’ll have my Endymion. War speeds things up.

-  Idealists say nothing justifies even a single death in the HS. I know nothing of Command’s plans, and like you, I can only guess. But you don’t need to look far. When dogs fight, it’s for their masters’ pleasure. And our masters, who can destroy worlds with a thought… I won’t speak their name or even imagine it. But you know exactly what I mean.”