A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers #2)(51)

They sat that way for an hour and a half – Tak altering the kit, Sidra watching his progress and pulling faces, the time punctuated by idle chit-chat (vids, food, waterball) and lulls of comfortable silence when Tak was most focused.

At last, Tak sat back, switching off the pen. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘There’s your first layer. What do you think? Let me know if there’s something you don’t like. You won’t hurt my feelings.’

Sidra examined the outline that had been driven into the kit’s synthetic skin. The kit started smiling almost before she’d had time to process. ‘This is great,’ she said.

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah, it’s wonderful.’ The kit grinned at him. ‘Can we do the next layer now?’

Tak laughed, talkbox bobbing in his throat. ‘I need a short break, and so do you. I’ll get us both some water.’

Sidra eyed the static outline, and imagined it with colour, motion, life. ‘Can I see how it’s going to move?’

‘Sure,’ Tak said. ‘You won’t get the full effect yet, but I can show you where it’s at right now.’ He picked up his scrib and accessed some sort of control program. ‘I’ll just activate it for a few seconds, then shut it back down.’

Tak gestured at the scrib. In an instant, Sidra’s excitement turned to fear. A dozen warning notifications leaped to the forefront of her pathways – system errors, signal errors, feedback errors. Something was wrong.

‘Sidra?’ Tak said, cheeks anxious. ‘You o—’

Sidra didn’t hear the rest. The kit convulsed, doubling over and falling forward. She was dimly aware of Tak catching her, but her knowledge of that was buried beneath error after error, flashing red and urgent. And her pathways – her pathways didn’t make sense. Things were stuck. Things were falling. Things were opening and closing with her on both sides of the door. What was she saying? Was she saying something? No, Tak was: ‘I’m calling emergency services. Sidra? Sidra, stay with me.’

An interesting thing happened: Sidra heard herself speak, even though she couldn’t see the process that made her do so. ‘No – Pepper. Not – services. Pepper. Get Pepper.’

She wasn’t sure which part of her was still running speech protocols, but it was a good thing they were working, because the rest of her was losing the fight in keeping the kit still, and her pathways really couldn’t process anything more than—





JANE, AGE 10


A day off. And Owl said she had something fun! Jane ate her mushrooms real fast, along with two bites of ration bar (Owl said they had good things in them that mushrooms didn’t, and she should have a little bit with her mushrooms every day until the bars ran out). She washed the food down with filtered water from the sink. It still tasted different from the water they drank at the factory, but it was much much better than the packets. Not just because it was cold and clean and didn’t taste like packaging, but also because the reason the sink water was there in the first place was because she’d brought it home. She was drinking water she’d got herself, and that made it taste extra good.

She put the wagon outside, too. The rain was everywhere. She wanted to stand and look at it, wanted to try to see where it was falling from, but it was cold and making her clothes all wet. It only took a minute of standing in it for her to understand that she didn’t like rain very much.

She went back inside, then followed Owl into the bedroom. ‘Okay, look under the bed,’ Owl said. ‘Not your bed, the other one. It should still be under there.’

‘What should?’ Jane said, getting down on her hands and knees. There were boxes under there with stuff that had belonged to one of the men who had brought Owl to the planet. Not much of the stuff had been useful, except for the pocket knife.

‘Here, I’ll show you. Look here.’ Owl’s face went away from the wall screen, and a picture of a funny-looking piece of tech came up – some kind of a small net, with goggles and wires that Jane didn’t know the point of.

Jane dug around under the bed until she found the thing, put away real careful in a box. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘It’s a sim cap,’ Owl said. ‘It’s a piece of tech that tells you a story inside your head.’

Jane stared into the box. Nothing here made sense. ‘Like a dream?’

‘Yes, but it makes more sense than a dream, and you can interact with it.’

‘What’s interact?’

‘Do stuff with it. Pretend that you’re really there. It’s not real. It’s all made up, but it can show you lots of different things. I think you might like it.’

Jane touched the wires. There was nothing pokey or sharp, nothing that would go inside her head. She picked up the net. She could see now that it was round, and had little soft patches all along the inside. Some kind of feedback patches. The other wires were covered with them too. The wires split into five ends each – hands? Were they for her hands? ‘What stories will it show me?’ Jane asked.

‘Different kinds of stories. I have a small selection of sims in storage. Most of them are for grown-ups, but I have a few for kids. I remembered them when you asked about . . . about the family that owned the ship. Their kids played sims when they had long trips.’