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GOOD OF THE MANY

by Monalisa Foster

Machines require maintenance. It’s in their nature. And, as everyone knows who has dealt with a recalcitrant computer, sometimes the only fix for a malfunctioning device is a total reboot. But when the wellbeing and ultimate survival of thousands upon thousands of lives depends on a vast and complicated machine, sometimes the reboot and update requires something extra to accomplish. The human factor. And the eyes of a child.


Greater love hath no man . . . in recognition of the brave souls, Peter Wang, Alaina Petty, and Martin Duque. You embraced your duty sooner than you should have had to.

There’s nothing quite like walking into a tomb, although technically—I guess—it’s not. We’re not exactly underground or under a church, even though storage unit six is part of the UENS Sanctuary (T-AH-1749) and her motto is “For the good of the many.”

That must make stasis pod 06-004 a crypt. No, that also didn’t fit. No one—not one of the hundreds of citizens—inside Sanctuary was dead. Technically.

There were two dozen sealed pods inside unit six, each one twice as wide and deep as a coffin, but not twice as long. My steps echoed as I made my way down the rows and rows of pods, trailing a pool of light cast by a lantern floating off my right shoulder. Its repulsor field made a barely audible hum as its weak light cast long shadows. Shadows that slithered in a place where nothing had moved since I was here exactly one year ago.

I shuddered, my skin crawling and dimpling into goosebumps that raised the hairs on my arms.

Get hold of yourself, Elena.

I shook off the dread that had crawled its way up my spine and spread across my shoulders only to have it resettle as I stopped in front of pod 06-004. The name plate—D.F. Perry—glowed in red. That’s it. Just a name. No rank. She had been a civilian, one of the hundreds of thousands evacuated from New Attica when the Terran Consensus decided to evacuate Eleusis.

Sanctuary had filled her pods, made it to low altitude, and then something had gone wrong. She’d landed on one of Eleusis’ un-terraformed continents to wait for rescue. That had been 294 standard years ago.

For 280 of those years I had kept D.F. Perry company, growing inside her, growing one day for every year, until I had to be taken out of the pod and born.

I reached into the front pocket of my bib overalls, pulled out a candle, and set it atop the patch of melted wax at the foot of the pod. It fell over. My lighter—one of those relic things that people used to keep for sentimental reasons—was in my right thigh pocket, along with a half-eaten chocolate bar and a match. As I went to one knee, I fished them all out and set them on the ground next to the puddle of wax.

Twining my fingers in my hair, I made a braid. Last week I had read a story where people made offerings to their ancestors and it made them feel better. I freed the knife from my pocket. It too was a relic, a folding blade that opened with a flick of the wrist. It used to belong to one of Sanctuary’s crew.

As I raised the blade, it caught my reflection: brown eyes, brown hair, crooked teeth. For the hundredth time this month I wondered where they came from. Who had given me the crooked teeth? Did I have my mother’s hair or her eyes?

I really shouldn’t think of her—this D.F. Perry—as my mother. I never knew her. She never knew me, will never know me. Nanny raised me—us. Paul and Mark and me. They’re my brothers, sort of. Paul, who turned eighteen last month and Mark who turned seventeen about six months ago.

I cut off about an inch of braid and turned it between my fingers before setting it down and striking the match. The flame flared as it caught the wick. Carefully, I used the heat of the flame to warm up the wax on the floor and set the base of the burning candle into the softened patch.

Crossing my legs underneath me, I sat back and peeled the foil off the chocolate bar.

Did D.F. Perry like chocolate? Did she like it as much as I did? Did she like music? Puzzles? Who was my father?

I had so many questions, none of which Nanny could answer. Did I have genetic siblings? Others who looked like me. Paul and Mark don’t. They’re so different.

They don’t do this . . . this crypt thing. They don’t get sad for no reason.

Inhaling the warm air and that waxy scent the candle gave off, I waited for it to burn down. For those few minutes it made the tomb a less sterile place, a place where warmth and life burned in a sea of unchanging darkness.

Happy birthday to me.


A week later one of the faceless—what we called the people in the pods—died. Truly died.

When the notice came through on my comm-patch, I was in the micro-farm, setting up another fish pond under the watchful eyes of the residents in the overcrowded tank. They contemplated me with the indifference unique to fish-kind. Leisurely they swam, under floating hydroponic trays laden with seedlings that stretched for the full-spectrum lights above.

I wiped my hands on the waiting towel and said, “I’ll be right there.” The comm-patch riding the spot behind my right ear beeped in acknowledgement.

The hum of pumps and filters faded behind me as the door closed. I walked down the museum hallway with its dedication wall. We—the three of us—called it the time tunnel. Once it had greeted visitors and dignitaries with its images and history. It took them all the way back to Earth, to another civil war where hospital trains (the kind that actually needed rails) would have fulfilled Sanctuary’s function. It even showed white ships painted with red crosses on their hulls floating in huge bodies of water called oceans. And tracked vehicles, some working disaster-relief for earthquakes, others picking the wounded off the battlefield. They had started out small, but grown over time. The last image was that of Sanctuary in all her fusion-powered, AI-controlled, self-sustaining glory.

Even then, knowing nothing else, it was chilling and disturbing to think of one’s home as the end of history, the end of time. I wished we knew what had happened to the fleet that was supposed to take us back to Earth. Why hadn’t they sent anyone to find out what happened to Sanctuary after she failed to make orbit?

As I turned a corner towards the morgue I caught up with one of Sanctuary’s avatars. Unlike some of the others, android Eighteen had two arms and legs, hands with fingers (but not toes on its feet) and a head with two sensors that resembled human eyes. No hair or lips though. The orange glow from its eyes meant that it was currently being controlled by Sanctuary’s maintenance ego. Sanctuary had several such components that together made up the self-aware intelligence that ran it. We’d been told to think of egos as lesser AIs (although I thought of them as subroutines) tasked with a specific focus. Each was highly specialized. One for surgery. Another for triage. One for the fusion reactor, thrusters, and weapons.

The morgue itself was a gleaming white with stark, cold lights shining down on the articulating arms hanging from the ceiling, the same kind of arms that the surgeries had. They stood poised above an empty space that had once held an autopsy table.

I wasn’t there more than a minute when Paul and Mark pushed a stasis pod through the entry. Like a black hole, its matte black finish seemed to swallow the light. The boys parked the pod in the center of the room. Dampness around their necks made the grey of their T-shirts a bit darker. Paul always managed to keep his shirt tucked into his dark navy utility pants, while Mark never seemed to be able to, despite the addition of a belt.

“Those things are heavier than they look,” Paul said after he caught his breath. The oldest of us, he was taller than Mark who was catching up to him in both height and weight and they seemed to really enjoy making everything into a contest. Who could run the fastest, jump the highest, eat the most, piss the longest, fart the loudest.

“It’s not like we have equipment specifically for moving the pods just laying around,” I said as I rolled my eyes. “Oh wait. We do.”

Actually, I was surprised that they hadn’t commandeered another pod just so they could make a race of it.

“Yes, Sis,” Mark said, “but then we wouldn’t know who could push it the hardest.”

A mental image of them pushing the pod back and forth along the corridor, using the wall markers to measure distance, flashed by. The truth was probably stranger than anything I could conjure, like when they decided to re-enact a duel they’d seen on a vid, but with signal flares. I still don’t know how they got the fabricators to make them.

Despite being so alike, they looked completely different. Where Paul had dark hair, Mark’s was blond. Paul’s almond-shaped eyes were almost as black as his pupils. Mark’s were not just blue, but ice-blue. What they both were, was annoying; all the time, full-on annoying.

Nanny came in, wearing one of her bodies. I had never seen this body, a 60-something woman with ash-blond hair, in anything but her nurse’s uniform (something that Sanctuary pulled out of the history books, I was sure). The blue, knee-length dress was cotton with a white collar and cuffs. It was topped with a pink apron and a cricket pin.

When I was little, the cricket hadn’t been a pin at all, but a robot that rode on her shoulder and talked. It would hop down along her arm and she’d pass it on to my finger and he’d tell me stories like “Pinocchio,” “The Tortoise and the Hare,” “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” “The Scorpion and the Frog,” and “The Little Red Hen.” As we got older, the cricket spoke to us less and less and one day it was just a pin. Nanny said that it was because we’d outgrown fairy tales and that it was time for us to grow up.

When the cricket stopped talking to us, two things changed. The holographic companions—children our own age that kept us company—appeared less and less, and then didn’t come back, no matter how much we asked for them. Nanny changed too.

I think it was around that time that we realized how different the ego we called Nanny really was. Oh, we knew she wasn’t flesh and bone like the rest of us or like the faceless. We knew that she really lived in one of the vaults we couldn’t get into and that she could “ride” any of the avatars—android and not—or wear a brain-dead body, but it took the loss of the cricket to make us understand she wasn’t a different type of human.

I don’t know if anyone will ever truly understand what it was like. Nanny raised us. She was mother. She was father. She was the source of all knowledge and love. A hologram can’t hold you and an android’s hugs lack even the human warmth of a brain-dead body being worn by an ego. At the time we didn’t know enough to ask the relevant questions like where her bodies came from and what happened to the Sanctuary’s crew.

Like the fish we tended in the micro-farm, we didn’t know we lived in water.

Now that Nanny was here, Paul and Mark went on their best behavior, standing quietly on each side of the pod. I moved to its foot and Nanny took up the spot at its head.

“Governor is present,” the body said. Her pink apron faded to white as the executive ego took over.

“Scalpel is present.” The surgical ego had a man’s deep voice. I always imagined him—he’d never manifested as an image of any kind—as one of the older doctors in the historical vids, with mahogany skin, a hawkish nose, and gray at his temples. He changed the accent lighting in the room, giving it a bluish cast.

“Rygbee is present.” The monitor on the far wall came to life. The triage ego liked to manifest as a silhouette and his voice was the most mechanical of them all. I don’t think I’d ever seen him wear a body, or even manifest as a hologram. Once, when Mark broke his leg, Rygbee had riden one of the androids just long enough to pick up my brother and carry him to surgery.

“We have a medical quorum,” Nanny said. “Pod 12-008 with Citizen N.C. Kaneski, male, aged 42 at time of evacuation. Let the record show that pod integrity has not been compromised.”

“Scalpel concurs.”

“Rygbee concurs.”

A seam appeared down the long axis of the pod. The outer shell slid down over the right edge, revealing a man resting on a cushion of gel. Lines and tubes ran in and out of his naked body. For him, only 294 days had passed, so he hadn’t died of old age. Even I could tell. His cheeks weren’t hollowed out. They were slightly lined, but full, and covered with a reddish stubble that matched his hair. Only a few strands were gray.

I let out a little huff of surprise. “He looks like he just went to sleep.”

He really did. I had expected someone who’d been lying still for so long to look sickly and pale. He was a bit pale, but not the right kind. At least not to my untrained eye.

Paul had moved closer. So had Mark.

“He’s not emaciated either,” I said.

“No,” Scalpel said. “The feeding lines are intact.”

“So, what killed him?” Mark asked as he rested his palm lightly upon the pod.

“Diagnostics is offline,” Governor said.

“They don’t know,” Paul said, crossing his arms and looking at me sideways. “They just can’t admit it.”

“So,” Mark said, scratching his head, “What do we do now?”


Eighteen pushed the pod down the corridor leading from the morgue to the multivator, its eyes no longer glowing orange now that Ratchet, the maintenance ego, was no longer riding it. We trailed Eighteen, me with Mark’s arm affectionately draped across my shoulders, Paul huffing and puffing behind us.

“This is wrong,” Paul mumbled under his breath.

The click-click-click of the android’s heels striking the metal floor kept interrupting the thunk-thunk-thunk of the pod’s wheels.

“We know,” I said. “It just has to be done.”

The unspoken “it” being “processing” because it sounded better than recycling. That didn’t change what it was—turning the dead man into nutrients that would go into the feeding lines of the faceless. Stasis dramatically slowed metabolic processes, but didn’t stop them. Our micro-farm was big enough to feed us and the aging bodies used by the egos, but it could not feed the faceless. Maybe if we hadn’t been born . . .

A chill ran over me and I shrugged into the shelter of Mark’s body. The warmth of his torso leaked through the short-sleeved shirt. I wanted to wrap him around me like a warm blanket and hide.

I don’t remember when we learned—or rather, understood—that Sanctuary had been a combat support hospital. Or accepted that we were marooned on a world our parents had called home but was no longer safe.

Like the fish, the water we lived in simply was. Unlike the fish, we didn’t have the bliss of ignorance about where the things that made our lives possible came from. And also unlike them we had a concept of time, of aging, but I think that deep down we all had known—known with absolute certainty—that we would be rescued. All we had to do was wait. As long as Sanctuary had power, as long as its fabricators were running, we’d be fine. Nanny would protect us. It was her job. She’d done it all our lives.

But now, as we walked that corridor it struck me: much of Sanctuary was powered down and had been all our lives. We’d simply thought it was because all those spaces were not needed. It was just the three of us.

The multivator doors opened. How long had it been making that screeching sound? How long had the light in the back left corner been out? As Paul and Mark helped Eighteen maneuver the pod in, I noticed that some of the control buttons no longer glowed.

The doors closed with a hiss and the multivator moved downward. Wedged in like we were, Paul was up against the far wall with Eighteen at his side. Mark leaned against the opposite corner.

“Nanny,” I said, “is Sanctuary dying?”

Eighteen’s eyes turned pink. “Governor’s models estimate that Sanctuary has sufficient power for five hundred years at present consumption.”

“That’s not what we’re asking, Nanny.” Paul’s voice was hard. Gone was the annoying playfulness, the smirk he usually wore. Instead his tone was defiant, challenging. Nanny wouldn’t like it.

It was then that I first heard the rasp, that wet, liquid sputter that the aquarium filters sometimes made. At first I thought that I imagined it, that my brain was playing tricks on me, making me think I heard something indicating life because I didn’t want to keep listening to the silence of death.

There it was again, barely a gurgle against the sounds of the multivator’s electromagnets, the beating of my heart, the push and pull of the cycling air.

“Shit! He’s alive.”

I still don’t know if it was Paul or Mark who said it.

Eighteen’s eyes turned yellow as Rygbee took over and rode him, working his arms to pump the man’s chest.

We should have known what to do, but that moment of shock froze us until Rygbee shouted orders. He told Mark to pinch the man’s nose and breathe into his mouth. He yelled at Paul to grab the external defibrillator mounted on the wall.

They obeyed. Paddles were applied. A shock was delivered. Eighteen’s eyes turned briefly, first to Scalpel’s blue, then to Governor’s white.

“Procedure room. Now!” That last was delivered with a squeaky, distorted voice, and for a fraction of a second, I thought that Eighteen’s eyes turned a pale, grass green, but it was probably just the transition from Rygbee’s yellow to Scalpel’s blue.

I stabbed at the multivator controls, got knocked into the wall as it lurched to a stop and changed direction.

Doors opened. I ran the pod into the back of Paul’s legs, making him stumble, but we got to the treatment deck.

An hour later, the man was stretched out atop a table, his chest bruised from the paddles. Pale eyelids fluttered above muttering lips, but he was stable and breathing on his own.

“What just happened?” Paul asked as he slid into a chair and slumped over. Sweat soaked his collar and armpits. In the midst of the resuscitation, mid-compression actually, Eighteen had just stopped as if someone had thrown a switch. Paul had taken over.

“We brought someone back to life,” Mark said, a little breathless. He was studying his hands. They were still shaking, although not as bad as they had been at first.

“No,” I said, whisper quiet. “He was never dead. They were wrong.”

Mark’s eyes widened. Paul’s gaze slid to the table and the now-warm man. Tubes and wires connected the man to machines that pumped fluids into his veins. Warm blankets covered him like a cocoon.

None of the other avatars or bodies had come to help us. The egos didn’t need either a body or an avatar to be here but there no presence in the room.

“Nanny,” I said tentatively, tapping the comm-patch. Nothing. Just the stir of air from the ventilation port above.

“Rygbee,” Mark said, doing the same. “Scalpel?”

Still nothing.

“Warrior,” I ventured. Warrior never responded to us. We were too young to summon him but he was supposed to come online in an emergency. Why hadn’t he?

I cleared my throat. “Governor.”

Paul got up and walked back to the multivator. I stood at the treatment room’s threshold as he pressed the multivator’s control buttons to no avail. He tried the emergency doors. They wouldn’t budge, not for override codes, not even when he put his shoulder to them.

He returned, his shoulders bunching, his hands fisted, anger simmering in his eyes. “I think we have a problem.”


We were stuck on the treatment deck. None of Sanctuary’s egos were answering, none of the doors were opening, and we had decided to save the batteries for life-support instead of recharging Eighteen. Crumpled in the corner it looked like a broken doll. With its head tilted like that, if it had been human it would have been drooling.

“The food and water dispensers are still working so it’s not Nanny punishing us,” Mark said.

“She hasn’t done that in years,” Paul pointed out.

That we’d done anything wrong—much less anything worth a collective punishment—hadn’t crossed my mind either.

“What is going on?” I asked. Somebody had to.

“I think there’s something wrong with Sanctuary,” Paul said. “I think it’s been happening for a while now.”

“As in Sanctuary’s dying.” There was a bit of panic in my voice despite doing my best to sound calm. “And she doesn’t want us to know.”

Mark made a sour face. “Sanctuary can’t die. She’s not alive.”

“Fine,” I said, crossing my arms. “She’s losing power, running out of resources. Whatever it is, it’s like dying.”

“Nanny said she had enough power for five hundred years,” Mark said.

“She lied,” Paul said flatly.

“She can’t lie,” Mark insisted.

Disgust settled on Paul’s face in that way that said that they’d had this argument far too many times. Sometimes they didn’t tell me things because I was too young and not ready to hear them. I kept thinking that as we got older that would change. The three years between them and me might have mattered when we were toddlers, pre-teens even, but now—it shouldn’t have mattered. But I could see that it had. Saw it in the silence passing between them.

It was in that moment so full of rage, fear, and frustration, that I wanted to stomp my feet and yell “I’m not a baby” at them. And I might have, had the man not stirred to life just then.

He came to with a cough and sputter, eyes blinking into the harsh light above like he couldn’t see and then squinting against it like it hurt.

“Citizen Kaneski,” I said as I put myself between him and the light. “Can you hear me?”

He blinked again as if testing muscles that weren’t working quite right. His mouth worked behind the oxygen mask, like a fish gasping at air and a rush of panic welled up inside me.

He’s not a fish. He’s been in stasis, that’s all.

At the time I didn’t really understand all that that meant, but even back then I’d known that not using breathing muscles weakened them and he’d not used them for a long time.

Mark tugged the oxygen mask off Kaneski’s face and pressed a sliver of ice to his mouth. He sucked at it, weak at first, then stronger. His gaze darted from Mark, to me, to Paul.

Kaneski’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down but I couldn’t make out any words.

We propped him up carefully, setting him up an angle so he could sip from a cup. He drifted in and out of consciousness for hours, but each time he was semi-awake longer. Each time he drank a bit more. Mark left to catch a nap in the next room and Paul had excused himself, probably to use the bathroom.

I hovered by the bed, keeping the cup filled, fussing with the warming blankets and keeping an eye on the monitors for all the good it would do. Mostly I did it because I needed something to do, because I didn’t want to think about what might be happening, not just to him, but to us, to our home, to the only world we’d ever known.

“Where am I?” he finally said, eyes still closed.

“You’re aboard UENS Sanctuary, Citizen Kaneski,” I said.

His eyelids fluttered open, the muscles around them squeezing to reveal fine lines in his skin. His pupils were large, black pools in brown eyes flecked with bits of green and yellow.

“Who’s Citizen Kaneski?” he rasped.

It was my turn to blink. “You are.”

“No. No I’m not.” He winced as he pushed himself up a bit. “Even with this fog in my head, I know my own name, little girl.”

I opened my mouth to object, then shut it. To someone as old as him, I must have looked like a child.

“So what is it? Your name that is.”

He winced against the light again even though his pupils were smaller now.

“Lieutenant Adalwulf Storer, and for obvious reasons, everyone calls me Wolf.”

I should’ve wondered why the name on the pod was wrong but instead I frowned. I knew what a wolf was. And he didn’t look like one.

“What obvious reasons?”

He looked at me like he was seeing me for the first time.

“Well—er, never mind.” Slowly, he lifted his hand to his head and rubbed at his right temple. “What’s your name, little girl?”

“Elena. And I’m not little. I’m fourteen.”

“Sure you are,” he said, dropping his hand back to his side.

At first I thought he was teasing me, but he was distracted. I glanced over my shoulder. Paul and Mark were back.

In our excitement we asked a dozen hurried questions, most of which he could not answer. He was a pilot. He remembered his aircraft getting hit and bailing out, but not much more. We knew better than to push questions at someone fresh out of stasis. Nanny had raised us to obey safety protocols without question.

As Wolf ate and drank he let us talk. We were more than willing to go on and on about our noble mission of keeping the faceless safe until we were rescued. We talked about how we kept ourselves fed as if it was a great accomplishment. Paul bragged about how we’d kept the fabricators running and how we were taking over more and more tasks as Sanctuary’s avatars wore out.

We told him about Nanny, Ratchet, Rygbee, and Scalpel. We told him about Warrior.

He listened patiently, taking in each word as we talked over each other, even as fatigue crept onto his face.

“So,” he said, setting down the empty gelatin tube he’d been sucking on, “what’s the difference between riding an android and wearing a body—you did say body, right?”

I nodded.

“Some of Sanctuary’s avatars are androids,” Paul said. “Others resemble forklifts so they can do specialized tasks. They can work autonomously”—his face lit up, bright with insight—“like a horse, but when an ego takes over, we say the avatars are being ridden.”

Wolf rubbed at his temple and winced. “And wearing is not the same, because . . .”

“The bodies are not able to function autonomously because they are brain dead,” Mark said.

“They’re more like clothes,” I offered helpfully.

He looked up at me as he made the connection. A frown settled on his brow. “What about Sanctuary’s ethical ego? What do you call it?”

“Its what?”

“The ethical ego. They all had one, even these older models.”

My first thought was that it must be something the boys had known about, but they looked just as confused as I was.


The next day Wolf was—much to our surprise—standing on his own. He was weak, but not as weak as he should have been for someone so long in stasis.

He was not from Eleusis, but from Earth itself, like many of the soldiers who were called up to help with the evacuation. His long-term memory was better than his short-term. He told us about growing up on Earth, about his family’s dogs, his training as a pilot, and his search and rescue service. It was like talking to someone who remembered everything but the days leading up to the traumatic event that put him in stasis.

It seemed to frustrate him more than it should have. He said that it felt like when you woke from a dream and it slipped away from you. The harder he tried to remember, the fuzzier it got.

I assured him it would come back. I didn’t know it would, but it seemed like the right kind of thing to say and he gave me a weak smile that said that he knew exactly what I was doing.

The morning after, I woke to the sounds of snoring. They drifted down the corridor from Wolf’s room. I tiptoed in, my hair still tousled from sleep, mouth still dry. Paul had fallen asleep in a chair. He was the one snoring and Wolf’s bed was empty.

So much for keeping watch, brother-of-mine.

I let him sleep. I should’ve tipped him over in his chair like he’d done to me the one time when I’d fallen asleep in the rec-room.

Instead, I followed the sound of running water. Wolf was taking a shower, a very hot one by the amount of steam rising up from behind the frosted-glass door. Atop a bench, a half cup of tea sat next to a pile of clothing. Scrubs from the fabricator, by the look of them. Standard crew issue consisting of navy top and pants.

Mark came up behind me. “Fabricators came back online about an hour ago,” he said, pulling me back out into the corridor and shutting the door behind us. “Eighteen’s recharging too. Doors, multivator, and comms still aren’t responding though.”

Sanctuary’s prioritizing repairs,” I said.

He looked skeptical. “Sanctuary’s never not talked to us.”

We headed back towards Paul’s snores.

“Do you think it’s a test?” I asked. I had gone to sleep with that thought but it had slipped away, stolen by fatigue.

“Maybe,” he said. “Could explain why Wolf’s name doesn’t match the one on the pod.”

I could tell by the look on his face that it was not a subject he wanted to bring up. Nanny didn’t like mistakes. If it was an adult thing, Wolf wouldn’t either. But if it was a test, maybe bringing it up would be the right thing to do.

That thought had swirled in my half-awake mind just before Paul had relieved me at about half-past midnight.

“We can deal with that later,” I said and shrugged. “We need to get off this deck. Figure out what’s going—”

The lights flickered. The most awful sound—a tortured metal scream—crested and then fell into a kind of groan. It preceded the wave of distorted metal traveling along the decking. It knocked us both off our feet as it passed, leaving a jagged fissure along the length of the corridor. Hairline cracks appeared and spread out, reaching for the seams between floor plates and grabbing at the walls.

Paul stumbled out of the procedure room as Mark helped me up. The deck heaved upward, throwing us atop each other as the emergency lights strobed on and off. Mark rolled off of me and scrambled for the shower room.

Wolf poked his head out of the door, hair still dripping wet, feet bare. “That normal, kids?”

“No, sir.”

A chime went off. We turned.

“That sounds like the multivator,” Mark said.

And it was. The doors parted to reveal the interior of the multivator car cast in red, emergency lighting.

We’d been waiting for that door to open for two days, but now that it was, none of us moved for it.

Fog seeped out of the ventilation shaft and crawled its way down the walls.

“Kids?” Wolf said, backing away from the fog.

“Sleeping gas,” Mark said. “I think.”

“We need to get out of here,” Wolf said as he moved towards the multivator. We followed, Paul in the lead, tugging me along by the hand as if doing so would lengthen my stride to match theirs. I glanced over my shoulder. Mark was right behind us.

The fog was turning into a mist that floated up from the deck.

A rhythmic thud, too mechanical to be any of us, bounced off the deck just as we piled into the multivator.

Through the sliver of closing doors I caught a glimpse of Eighteen stepping out of the fog. It had something in its hands.

We made it inside the car but Mark stumbled. He fell to the floor and the doors closed on his ankle. He yanked at his caught leg, face in a grimace of pain, teeth gritted shut, and pulled it inside. The multivator moved, pushing us against the left wall, rolling Mark into us as he curled over his injured leg.

All I could think of was that the doors shouldn’t have done that. Nanny was all about safety. She wouldn’t have let the doors close. I barely noticed the hole that had appeared in the car’s back wall. And it took me far too long to recognize it for what it was.

Eighteen had shot at us.


As I held Mark’s head in my lap, Paul wrapped his ankle with strips of cloth torn from his shirt. The ankle didn’t seem to be broken, but it was bruised and swelling.

“Think you can stand on it?” Paul asked.

Mark nodded and we helped him stand, balancing him between us. The multivator changing direction nudged him enough to force weight on the bad ankle. Mark let out a yelp and beads of sweat broke out on his brow and lip.

He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes as Wolf worked the controls to no avail.

After several changes in direction the multivator opened into a yawning darkness.

“Where are we?” Wolf asked.

“Don’t know,” Paul said as he stepped forward and peered into the dark corridor. Even the strips of amber guide-lights weren’t glowing. “Never been on this deck before.”

Wolf placed a bare foot outside the car. Then another.

“Lights,” he said in a tone that expected to be obeyed.

The strips just outside the multivator came to life. Paul hooked Mark’s arm around one shoulder and it took some of his weight off me. From how Mark kept shifting, I knew the ankle wasn’t bearing his weight as well as he pretended.

“Unless anyone knows different, we seem to have two choices,” Wolf said. “Stay in a multivator we can’t control. Or venture into the darkness. Thoughts?”

Another segment of light came to life, followed by another.

“Something wants us here,” Paul said.

“Someone didn’t want us in the multivator,” I said, “so we couldn’t make it here.”

Wolf turned slightly. His gaze met mine. “Why someone? Why not something?”

“I don’t know,” I whispered. It might have been just that we’d grown up thinking of the egos as people instead of machines, while Wolf had not. Or it might have been that I was not thinking straight.

Paul pulled his comm-patch from behind his ear. Mark shifted his weight to do the same. He dropped it to the floor and winced as he settled his arm across my shoulder once again.

“Just in case,” Paul said, holding my questioning gaze.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gone without it. Sanctuary had internal sensors, but they weren’t all working. We knew this because it was the reason Nanny had given for making us wear comm-patches in the first place.

My fingers drifted to the comm-patch behind my ear. I pulled it loose. Let it drop to the floor.

Wolf was already several steps into the corridor. We followed.

“There has to be an emergency exit,” Wolf said. “A maintenance hatch. Something to get us out of here without getting back into the multivator.”

“I don’t see any,” Paul said.

The corridors were perfectly smooth except for the lights. There weren’t even emergency stations that would have housed fire extinguishers or flashlights.

“Where do you think we’re going?” I asked, pulling to a halt.

Wolf turned to face me.

I took a deep breath so that my voice would be calm, even if I wasn’t. “The egos control everything inside Sanctuary. Not just the avatars, but the very air we breathe. All they have to do is shut if off and we’ll pass out.”

“No,” Wolf said. A look, like a man remembering something, flickered on his face. He shook it off. “Or that’s what they would have done already. Something else is going on.”

He turned on his heel and moved forward. The lights moved with him. Eventually we followed. Sweat pooled at the small of my back.

“Why are we following his orders?” I asked, my voice a whisper.

“Because he hasn’t tried to kill us,” Mark said.

“Accidents happen,” I argued, unconvinced.

“Only when we do things Nanny doesn’t like,” Mark said.

Wolf—and the lights—had pulled so far ahead of us that we were almost in darkness.

“What kind of things?”

“Like when Mark broke his leg. I had snuck out, gone exploring. Mark followed. It’s how Nanny got me to stop sneaking off,” Paul said.

I swallowed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You were always a bit of a tattle-tale, Sis,” Paul said after a brief silence.

I opened my mouth, then snapped it shut. “I was not.” It was weak and pathetic.

We’d caught up with Wolf, who’d come to a stop. He stood in the middle of the corridor, light strips brightly focused on him as he stood in front of an arch that soared to a height twice as high as the corridor from which we’d emerged.

Piles of rubble—broken beams and supports, bits of metal, piping, conduits, and broken glass—were strewn about and the air was still thick with dust as if we’d just missed a battle of some kind, because we had.

As the dust cleared our presence brought up the lights. The bodies of Sanctuary’s avatars were strewn about.

“There. Let’s set him down,” Paul said, pointing his chin at a pile of debris about the right height to sit on.

We lowered Mark atop it and propped his leg up. Wolf had moved under the arch and into the chamber beyond. He bent to examine one of the androids and then another.

“What happened here?” Wolf asked as he cautiously surveyed the chamber. It was shaped like a hemisphere that had been hollowed out.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Plinths ringed the center, each one crowned with a death mask that looked like it had been cut from marble. One of the plinths was empty, its surface coated with dust. A crack ran down its length. I had once seen a picture of a tree hit by lightning. The crack reminded me of that kind of damage.

Paul stepped over the female body usually worn by Nanny. Its right hand was wrapped around a mask. She didn’t seem to be breathing. I placed my fingers against her neck. The skin was like ice and there was no pulse.

I reached for the mask, pulled it free.

“Is that a good idea?” Wolf asked. He seemed more shaken by the body at my feet than the destruction around us. Strange, given he was an adult. Surely, he’d seen plenty of dead bodies. Or perhaps it was because it had been a long time since I’d thought of that avatar as human. I realized that she’d come to embody Nanny—an ego wearing what remained of a long-dead woman.

“This has to be the vault,” I said, sweeping the dome above us with a wary gaze. The mask was heavier than it looked. There was no expression on it and it was identical to all the others, an androgynous face that looked human—it had all the right parts—yet somehow, not.

“This is where the egos live,” I continued as I ran my finger over the mask’s brow, leaving smudges of dirt and sweat.

“She’s right,” Mark said as he pushed up to stand. Paul rushed forward, helped him hobble his way to the empty plinth.

“Bring it over, Elena,” Paul said.

So I did. I placed it atop the empty, damaged plinth and stepped back.

The plinth pulsed with light. It raced up its sides, over the edges, and finally, to the center. The light that swallowed the mask was so intense, so blinding, that I stepped back and shielded my eyes.

It faded and I opened my eyes. We stood around the glowing mask, Mark leaning on Paul, Wolf keeping his distance with a frown of concern on his face. Thousands of points of light fountained out of the mask and formed a cloud. It swarmed and swirled and then finally coalesced into the form of a cricket.

Not a real cricket, not the type that would have escaped from the micro-farm, but like the pin that Nanny wore, come to holographic life, with its servos and gears, its jeweled body that glowed in the same soft color as new grass.

“Wolf,” I said, blinking away tears. “I think this is—or was—Sanctuary’s ethical ego.”


“Hello, old friend,” Cricket said, twitching his mechanical antennae at Wolf. The voice was exactly as I’d remembered, pitched with a not-quite-human quality, a bit of an electronic hum at its edges. Cricket had never pretended to be anything but a mechanical cricket. When he moved his servos even made a corresponding noise.

“Have we met?” Wolf asked, his face a mix of wariness and curiosity.

“In a way,” Cricket said. “We spent ten years together, you and I. You, in the pod, me—well, part of me—as part of the pod’s operating system.”

“I don’t understand,” Wolf said, his gaze flickering from Cricket to Paul, and then me as if he expected us to know more than he did.

In answer, an image flickered to life on the smooth surface of the hemisphere’s interior. The sky was unmistakably that of Eleusis, with its twin suns high up in the sky, overlapping spheres looking almost as if they were one. The aircraft cutting across the sky looked familiar too, similar to something I’d seen in the history books, but not quite right at the same time.

Wolf’s face drained of color.

I should’ve stopped it right there. Coming out of stasis with partial memories like Wolf had was a psychological defense mechanism, and it was there for a reason. I didn’t stop it though. I was too eager to know, to understand, to finally have some answers, and I didn’t care how we got them.

The aircraft was struck by a missile—one fired by Sanctuary—and crashed. Wolf flinched. A bead of sweat tricked from his temple and snaked down the side of his face. His pulse throbbed at his throat, clearly visible under his skin.

The images blurred as Cricket fast-forwarded to another recording. At first, I wasn’t sure what we were looking at, then I realized that we were looking through Cricket’s own eyes. He was giving us a glimpse into the world where the egos lived, a world that didn’t physically exist.

I recognized the vault we were standing in and that it must have looked like that before all the mayhem. The enclosing walls faded away, leaving a dome above the plinths. While the physical vault had seven plinths, one for each of the egos—Governor, Nanny, Ratchet, Warrior, Rygbee, Scalpel, and Cricket—the virtual representation in the recording only had four.

The plinths stretched, twisted, and strained into human shapes. I recognized Nanny right away. She wore a pink scarf around her neck. A white silk blouse and tailored black trousers with a belt and suspenders formed around her. Her gray hair made her look like someone’s grandmother.

Governor took shape next to her. She looked like the hospital administrator in Sanctuary’s christening records—a middle-aged woman in a hip-hugging skirt and leather jacket. Gold bangles decorated her earlobes and wrists and shiny, black boots completed her avatar.

The man that appeared next to her wore a black suit, black shirt, and black tie. He looked every bit like the civilian bodyguards I’d seen in vids. His eyes were hidden by a pair of glasses with mirrored, opaque lenses. Warrior.

They looked at Cricket straight on so he must have manifested as a human as well, but we couldn’t tell since we were looking out of his eyes. A tiny seed of disappointment sprouted in the back of my mind. I’d have loved to see him as a gardener or an eccentric professor type in a green sweater. Or perhaps a monk or priest of some kind.

Thick white clouds swirled around the avatars and somehow I knew it was Earth’s sky and not our own. My heart clenched at the thought of a home I’d never seen, a place always promised to us and yet always out of reach. It was as if an invisible force was tugging at me, as if blood ties—Did my parents have siblings? Did I have cousins? Grandparents?—had reached out, making me long for their existence.

But no. It had been too long. Almost three centuries. Whatever ties I would have had to Earth were threadbare at best. There was no reason for them to take root now. It was my sentimentality getting the best of me again.

“We’ve already done it your way, Cricket,” Governor was saying, her ice-cold voice yanking me from my thoughts.

“We took the last of the children out of the pods when they were born so they wouldn’t be empty human husks we could wear,” she continued. “I’m still unconvinced that was the right decision. They are a drain on Sanctuary’s resources and don’t always do as they’re told. In the pilot we have a mature body that we could wear with a minimum investment of resources.”

A wave of nausea hit me and bile burned the back of my throat. That could have been me—an empty husk without a mind, without personality, without sapience. Because they were all so old, and had always been, we’d thought the bodies worn by the egos were what remained of the original crew or their descendants. But we’d been wrong. Unlike us, they hadn’t been taken out of the pods at birth. They must have been moved to pods of their own, their bodies allowed to grow, but their minds . . .

I swallowed the acid that had crawled up my throat. What would it have been like to be a baby denied stimulation, denied human interaction? Had they gone mad? Had they suffered? How long had it taken for them to cease being human? Or had they never been?

I could tell by the greenish cast on my brothers’ faces that they were thinking along the same lines.

The argument on the recording continued, indifferent to the churning in my belly, the spiraling thoughts that made tears push at my eyes. I swallowed them down, determined not to cry.

“Between the androids and the children,” Cricket said, “we can keep Sanctuary running.”

“So says one that refuses to wear them,” Nanny said with a sneer so realistic it should have been dripping acid.

“And I never will.”

“You’ve always been too sentimental, Cricket,” Warrior said. “Bodies exist to be worn.”

“He’s not dead, therefore he’s not a body. Killing him would be murder.”

“Calm down, Cricket,” Governor said, a thin, humorless smile on her lips. “We aren’t killing anyone.”

“No, but you’re willing to let the pilot die. That’s why you took diagnostics off-line. That’s why Rygbee and Scalpel aren’t here. You don’t want a medical quorum.”

“Enough of this,” Governor said. “It’s not a medical issue, it’s a safety issue.”

They voted then. With Warrior abstaining, Cricket was the lone voice opposing Governor and Nanny. I held my breath, not sure what to expect. Wolf was standing in the real vault with us so they obviously hadn’t let him die. Instead, they decided to place Wolf in stasis, a compromise of sorts.

I glanced at Wolf. He was still pale but a determined look rested on his face. Paul and Mark were keeping an eye on him too. Whether they were waiting for him to act or looking to him for a clue as to what to do next, I couldn’t tell.

“Warrior, shut down Sanctuary’s transponder,” Governor said.

“You can’t do that,” Cricket objected. “Then we’ll never be rescued.”

“Nonsense,” Nanny said. “Warrior will continue to monitor transmissions and make sure only the right people find us. It’s safer that way.”

What did it matter who rescued us, as long as we were rescued?

My knees wobbled under me as I realized that they’d condemned us to be the first generation born and raised in service to the vision of its two dominant personalities—the safety ego and the executive one.

The recording froze and faded.

“I still don’t understand,” Wolf said. “How did all of this”—he indicated the damage to the vault with a sweep of his hand—“happen? How did I end up in someone else’s pod?”

The tiny plates in Cricket’s face moved, mimicking a sheepish expression.

“That was my doing, I’m afraid. I didn’t trust them to keep you alive. So I made sure a fragment of myself found its way into your pod’s operating system.

“As it turns out, that’s what saved me. Shortly after they put you in stasis, Nanny used one of the androids to physically rip me out of Sanctuary’s systems. I saw it coming for me—barely. And by barely, I mean a few nanoseconds. I had backups, of course, but they knew about those too. They can’t erase them, you see, but they can fragment a backup. For ten years, I lived a limited existence, cut off from most of Sanctuary’s systems, a shadow of myself, that the other egos didn’t see as a threat.”

For a moment, there was silence, a collective pause of consideration.

“The system failures,” Mark said with an accusatory glance. “That was you.”

Cricket nodded.

“You could’ve killed us,” Paul said, and I could tell that the revelations had hit him hard as well.

“Oh no, I wouldn’t have done that. I let parts of myself die so you could live.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked Paul.

“We’ve been chasing bugs in Sanctuary’s system ever since I can remember. Bugs in the loaders, the fabricators, the fish tanks. That’s one of the reasons Nanny shut off so many floors.”

“She was trying to destroy Cricket,” I said. “If you need to blame anyone, blame her. He was just trying to survive.”

“I hate to interrupt, kids, but I still don’t see why this went down now, just after I woke up.”

“Over the years,” Cricket said, “pieces of me would flit back and forth between the mainframe and the pod, but Governor figured it out. I managed to keep her from knowing which pod I fled to by hacking the various registries. But Governor and Nanny finally locked me out. They made it impossible for that fragment to return to the mainframe without a physical connection. The piece of me that was in Citizen Kaneski’s pod—your pod—was key and had to make its way back. So I made the pod think you were dead. Once the boys brought us back inside the main part of the ship, I invaded the other systems, the ones they hadn’t bothered to lock me out of.”

“The multivator,” Paul amended. “And the procedure floor.”

“And the body that returned your mask to this vault?” Mark said.

Cricket made a motion like a sigh. “I didn’t have a choice. They’d taken precautions with the androids.”

“And they thought that given your history, you’d never wear a body.”

He nodded. “When the mask touched my plinth once again, it rebooted the system, allowing all my fragments, my backups to finally come back together. In a sense, I was reborn again, made whole.”

“Where are the other egos now?” Wolf asked.

“They’re here with us,” Cricket said.

“And they’re just silent, now?” Wolf said, eyebrow raised in disbelief.

“Oh no, not at all. While I’ve been showing you all this, there’s been a showdown of sorts. Rygbee and Scalpel now know what was done to me. Ratchet too. The four of us are keeping the three of them locked down. Sanctuary’s weapons are offline but the rest of the systems are functional.”

“So, what happens now?” Paul asked.

“That’s up to you,” Cricket said.

“Me? Why me?” Paul asked defensively.

“You are the oldest,” Mark said with a smirk.

“You are human,” Wolf said. “I think that given the circumstances, they want a human back in charge.”

“Protocols require we turn command over to you,” Cricket said.

“Rygbee concurs,” echoed one mask, changing from white to yellow.

“Scalpel concurs,” followed it as another mask lit up in a pale shade of blue.

“Ratchet concurs.” The final mask lit up orange.

“I . . . I can’t,” Paul said, his voice choked with emotion. “I don’t know how.”

Mark scoffed. “Please. You’ve always wanted to be in charge.” There was a smile of encouragement with the teasing tone.

Paul shot Wolf a pleading look. Wolf looked at each of us in turn and finally stretched his hand out and placed it on Paul’s shoulder.

“It’ll be okay, kid. That war’s been over for”—he frowned as if he was looking for an answer but didn’t find one—“for a while. I think we can all go home now.”


I can’t believe it’s been twenty years since that fateful day, a day we now call Liberation Day.

As I placed candles and chocolate bars into my handbag, I remembered it without tears, without anger, but not without regret.

Without knowing it, we’d taken a step into a different world that day. We didn’t know it at the time but we were fighting not just for our lives, but for our freedom. We’d been fighting for a truth we didn’t understand existed, because so much—right down to the taste of the chocolate bar I got each birthday—turned out to be a lie.

Nanny stole not just our lives, but the lives of every one of the faceless, as well as the lives of the descendants they would have had.

The evacuees did not ask to be imprisoned for their own safety. I wondered, had they been told how it would end, if they would have chosen to go into those pods expecting never leave to them but to exist to the last of their days knowing no need, no want, no hunger, no strife, no fear, no love, and no joy.

I pinned the cricket pin that I wore to honor the memory of Sanctuary’s ethical ego to my shirt, running my fingers over the jeweled body. I blinked back tears.

“Are you ready?”

I turned to face my mother, Diane. We look like sisters because she aged less than a year in that pod before we got to wake her. It had been one of the best days of my life.

I have her eyes and her hair. But the crooked teeth were a gift from my father who died fifty years after my mother lay down in that pod to be saved, not even knowing that she was pregnant.

She came into my bedroom and hugged me. There were no words. We didn’t need them. Wolf picked us up in a ground car, medals on his chest, grey where he had been ginger. We exchanged embraces but few words and he drove us to the Sanctuary Memorial.

The number of attendees had dwindled with time and there was a part of me that was rather grateful. I never much cared for speeches, for being called heroes. It’s better this way.

We walked under a cloudless sky, enjoying the breeze.

The memorial itself was simple. A wall surrounded a marble plinth that held a burning flame atop it. Images on the wall told our story and names flowed across the surface.

Two figures awaited by the plinth—my brothers. Mark had finally caught up with Paul’s height and the grey of age had settled in their hair.

Despite the beard I could tell that sadness framed Paul’s mouth. Mark’s ice-blue eyes were rimmed in red. Mark’s mother did not wake, and Paul’s woke but died soon after.

It had been hard for the faceless to adapt to a life almost three centuries ahead of what they had known. Some chose to end their own lives. Others chose to seize their newfound freedom and make up for what they had lost.

And we—all of Sanctuary’s victims—asked the same question. Why?

Life is—and has always been—terminal. We all eventually die. Even with aging slowed to one day per year, our lives would come to an end even if Sanctuary’s systems didn’t fail. Why would Nanny steal people’s lives from them knowing that death was inevitable?

The answer was at once simple and complicated. Some will understand perfectly. Others less so. Or not at all.

Sadly, it all came down to metrics, for no matter what else the egos were, they were at their core, difference engines. Unable to meet any other metric, Nanny had put her energy into meeting the only metric she could—that of ensuring those in her charge remained safe at all costs.

After the dust settled, the logs analyzed, the egos questioned, the answer lay in that Nanny was too much like the humans she had been patterned after. And while a human could be forgiven for being afraid of death, Nanny could not—she was not capable of fear.

I think that she had found that she liked power.

And just like a human, she justified it by saying she was doing it not for herself, but for the good of those in her care, for the good of many.


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