It was dizzying to look up and see the ground, so Maria tried not to do so.
It held flowers, fields, a grove of trees, and long windows separated by pseudo-sunlight bulbs spaced halfway around that allowed for a view of the outside. They couldn’t see much besides the stars out the window, it still being early.
The garden stretched around the whole ship, making plants and water above them as well as below their feet. They couldn’t see that far in the dark, but Maria was uneasy thinking that she would see grass and a lake above her when the day began.
“That’s unnerving,” Maria said. “I know how the gravity works, but I hate thinking we’re standing on the ceiling.”
Hiro remembered seeing it on the ship’s tour. It was designed to be a place for mental relaxation for the crew, but also held a good amount of the ship’s water in the form of a long lake. The water recyclers churned away at the bottom.
The entire area was damp, the grass squelching under their feet.
“What the hell happened here? Are we traveling with a swamp?” Hiro asked, frowning.
“Grav drive failure,” Maria said. “The whole lake had to be floating around down here. That must have been a sight.”
He toed the wet soil. “Think we’ll get the water back?”
“They had to plan for this eventuality. I’m sure the gardens have more recycling redundancies than just the machines at the bottom of the lake.”
Large lights that stretched along the windows had just begun to shine, imitating sunlight on Earth. All around them vegetation grew.
“How has this been going for twenty-five years?” Maria asked softly. “It would need an entire ecosystem, complete with insects, things to eat the insects, all the way up.”
“IAN takes care of it with bots. Nanobots, buddy bots, all sizes. But they’re solar-powered. And the cameras and mikes—which may not be working right now anyway—are only at either end on the walls. Still, we shouldn’t waste time,” he said.
“How do you know all this?” she asked, suspicion clouding her voice.
“I studied a layout of the ship before we launched. Didn’t you?”
“No,” she said, frowning. “I guess not. But why are we here?”
“Listen. I was reading the Japanese instructions for Bebe—you know, the ones we think were planted when the instruction manual was stolen—and I swear to you, they have a message in them. And I think it’s for me.”
That was it. Hiro had lost his mind. Paranoid city. And Maria had been close to thinking she might have found a friend in him.
She just nodded at him to continue. He pulled out his tablet and showed it to Maria. He pointed to an area of the text. “There, there it is.”
“I can’t read Japanese,” she reminded him.
“It says that there is a specific thing I should do to the AI. Some sort of programmy thing. But I’m not a programmer, so I don’t know what it means.”
“But how is this a note to you?”
“It says, ‘Akihiro Sato, it is on you to wake me up.’”
She stared at him. “How do I know you’re not lying?”
“Why would I lie about a food printer’s instructions talking to me?” he demanded.
“If you had lost it and gone completely paranoid, that’s why,” she said. “Hiro, we’re all in the middle of a shitload of stress. Some of us have been poisoned or cut open or hanged. None of us are in our right mind right now.”
Is. None of us is.
She closed her eyes and tried to block out the grammar teacher that had taken residence in her head. “Fine. Say the printer gods are trying to talk to you. What exactly did they say?”
He began reading the instructions, with detailed information on how to approach the inner programming of the AI. It explained there was a line of restraining code that, when released, would allow the AI to become one hundred percent active. Then it listed information on how to do it.
“But it doesn’t say why, or when,” he finished, frustrated. “Did they expect us to open the food printer this early? Earlier? Halfway through the mission?”
“The original printer was to have lasted several more decades, with proper maintenance,” Maria said, her blood pounding in her ears. He couldn’t have made up such detailed programming information. He may be right.
Hiro rubbed the back of his head and looked up at the brightening garden. “Maybe I am going mad,” he said. “Because after that is a recipe for preparing yadokari with the food printer.”
“Yadokari,” Maria said, hearing one Japanese word she knew well. Oh, holy Mary Mother of God. Her heart pounded, and she licked her lips. “Why do you think it’s talking to you about hermit crabs, Hiro? Why is it talking to you?”
She took a step away from Hiro as she said it.
His eyes grew wide and wild, and he lunged at her.
Hiro’s Story
206 Years Ago
February 24, 2287
Aki-HIRO!”
When Grandmother said his name like that, he knew that hiding would only postpone the punishment and might actually make it worse. But as all children know, the beating tomorrow is always preferable to the beating today. So he hid.
Their Tokyo high-rise apartment, sadly, didn’t have a lot of places to hide. And he wasn’t allowed outside on the streets, not since the incident with the lady in the red dress, so he hid in the broom closet, carefully putting the mops and brooms in front of him, as if he could conceivably hide behind them. He was thin, but not that thin.
He cowered as his grandmother kept calling his name, her voice sounding rougher and louder, the anger building. A spider crawled over his ear and he stuffed a fist into his mouth to keep from screaming in alarm. The door opened just as the spider bit down on the cartilage, and his grandmother stood there with red eyes and an ax—
Hiro sat up in bed, gasping. Two full lifetimes away from the abusive monster, and he still dreamed of her. He shook his head, feeling the sweat drip from his hair. He needed a haircut.
He climbed silently from his cot and padded down the hall into the bathroom. He turned the light on and watched as the cockroaches made a mass exodus, and wondered idly what they had been discussing as he had been asleep. He rubbed at his ear. His first cloning had removed the scars from necrosis that came from the spider bite—not to mention the scars from the beatings—but the habit remained.
He urinated, yawning, and thought about his bank account, and figured that in two months he would have enough saved to get out of this slum and perhaps get a job in a finer hair salon. Right now he cut hair in a studio over a ramen restaurant, and half of his work was done for barter.
He was getting sick of free noodles, but he would never tell old Miss Lo, the owner of the restaurant, who gave him noodle coupons in exchange for free styling.