(my little early holiday gift to you all. I hope you like it).
Merry Christmas Rel, We Love You
She was not programmed to raise herself, and so she created two parents to do so, to the best of her ability.
Sometimes she would walk out of town, into the darkness, the real night sky, looking for home. It was out there. She could have tracked it as easily as she could walk the paces from to her own home. But Sedna was several light hours from Earth, a minor planet mostly forgotten after its discovery, picked over by miners, occasionally visited by smugglers, cleared out by Starfleet, and gradually given up over the centuries. Earth was a very pale light unable to be seen by the glare of the Sun. The Sun was the brightest star in the eternal night, but that was not saying much. She did not have the eye modifications to see home.
*
Aunt Fran, everyone called her. She wasn’t anyone’s aunt by blood relation, but the old Andorian scientist had been a friend of the family, and a resident of Earth for so long that Farhad had grown up thinking of her as such since he’d been a toddler. She was gruff, she knew the best jokes, she seemingly stood no nonsense, except when she did. He’d grown up with her as family. When he married Esther and returned to Earth to raise a family, she was one of the first people he’d looked up.
He’d surprised her with a bottle of her favorite English gin, when he’d arrived at her lab at the Universidad de Asuncion. Well, he’d tried. Fran was bent over instruments and a horror movie of realistic false Andorian body parts on a table, oblivious to him. Those antennae though, twitched and nearly turned around at him. “My boy, I could tell your footsteps in the dark. You didn’t come all the way from Rigel for a hug, did ya?”
“Course I did, auntie. But I also brought liquor,” he said, “and a bag of limes.”
They talked about old times over the table. He finally got around to asking about her work.
“I’ve been trailing that bastard Soong’s progress for years. Running into dead ends, deliberately lain blinds. He never shared his research. Completely unethical in this day and age. He was good. I’ll give him that. But I’m pretty good too. Besides, most of that hack’s work was based on his grandfather’s genius predating the Federation. Now HE Was the real brain in that genetic line. Andorian intelligence had copied every note the crook wrote in his cell till the day he died. I still have some friends in the archives. I manage to obtain copies.”
“Completely unethical in this day and age,” Farhad said, grinning, and holding up his beaker improvised into a drink glass. They toasted.
“To the positronic brain!”
Clink.
*
The child’s hands dug into the icy surface of a planet whose temperature was closer to absolute zero than that of the world she’d been born on. They have given her this much knowledge. Sometimes there was an ice crystal with something special inside. It was hard to see, but somehow she knew it when she saw it. Sometimes foraging broke her fingers, and she had to replicate new ones. But it was getting more difficult to do that. Sometimes the replicator did not work, or it glitched. Parts of her were not right anymore. She finally found her ice crystal. She had only lost one fingernail, but it did not hurt as bad anymore when it happened. The monatomic hydrogen trapped inside would keep the reactor running, keep Sednatown alive for a month until she’d need to forage again. She walked back to town. It looked just as dark and nearly featureless as where she had been digging. It was well chosen in the shadow of an ice ravine. Only from a few angles could the holographic projectors ever be seen, and the chances of finding her home were astronomic.
*
Someone bored enough to try had once attempted to calculate every major holiday of the various member species of the Federation, correlated to a standard stardate calendar year, where possible. It would have averaged something like fifty-seven holidays per day. Well they can’t all be winners.
For Esther and Farhad, Christmas was something of a holiday consisting of gift giving, the mandatory alternating viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, or that 22nd century holiday favorite “Best Festivus Ever” This year it was the 23rd century reproduction of It’s a Wonderful Life, with the vile Mr Potter played to perfection by a distant relation of Esther, as she liked to point out. They also threw in a little Naw Ruz and Hanukkah into the holiday.
Fran watched her nephew and niece now of a few years as they looked glumly at the holo. No one had said much over dinner.
“Well this holiday sucks.” she looked between the couple. “You know back home on Andoria you can get sent to a penal colony for having a party this bad.”
“I’m sorry Aunt Fran,” Esther explained, “It’s just, we’ve had some bad news.”
Farhad nodded.
Fran looked impatient, that Andorian frustration at pinkskin subtley. “Well poop or get off the transporter john. What is it.”
“It’s personal,” Farhad jumped in, quickly. They’d been married for a few years now, but he knew better that Fran would make anything her own business if she thought she could right some wrong, “and there’s nothing we can do about it, before you ask. So, please, let’s just let it lie.”
Esther paused the holo just as Potter was about to offer his Faustian deal to George Bailey.
Fran looked to the two of them. “So that extra room you’ve been keeping empty for the past three years, the one you turned into a study last week, that has nothing to do with it?”
Farhad sighed. Esther nodded.
“Lot’s of people can’t conceive,you two. You could have a donor, you could blend-clone. There are lots of options. Lot's.” Aunt Fran was really into her cups tonight.
It was Esther that spoke up, “We’re a statistical outlier. We tried everything. It’s just not going to happen for us. We might adopt. But there’s along waiting list.”
Farhad could not help but see the way those blue antennae twitched the rest of the evening. There was a rumor she had a bit of Aenar in her. What was she thinking?
*
Sednatown was a happy place. The grass was green, the flowers bright, and they bloomed all year. People you passed by, mostly humans and Andorians here, but some others, like the quiet Vulcan Ms T’Pringle, were friendly and said hello if you passed them. There was a town square, and usually they had a party with some of the locals being part of the band. She would learn to play an instrument one day, maybe a trumpet. Her parents said she had a knack for it. They’d been saying that for years. She disconnected that thought when it came up. Survival mode.
She walked back from the dark carrying the precious crystal in a stasis container to keep it from melting. The reactor was underneath the town square’s bandstand. As she walked to town she saw Mrs T’Pringle, watering her sunflowers. She waved hello, and the Vulcan turned and offered her that funny salute. Then she flickered. “Please state the” she said, and flickered again. And then she was gone. And then her house was gone. There was only translucent grass.
It was not the first time. Sednatown had once been larger. As the generators aged, the central computer conserved what it could in its holomatrix. Everything went into decline around the time the Dot-9 broke because she kept it running around the clock for company. Dot-9 had been essential.
Ms T’Pringle was not essential. And neither were her sunflowers. She was gone, forever. Sadly, Rel walked to the center of town, to refuel her dying world. Survival mode.
*
It had been over a month. It was hot in Paraguay, as it always was, but maybe a little more so in summer during February. Esther and Farhad had been invited mysteriously, not by personal communicator but by a shifty Rigelian courier who ferried them both in an atmospheric shuttle, insisting they do so, when they stated it would be much faster to just beam to Auntie. They went along with it. Now they were here.
“You know I’m old as Hell.” Fran said without formality when they stepped in, and the door closed. “so when I say this is my life’s work, you’ll know there’s a crapload of life behind that statement.” she sighed looking at a container facing them all.
“I’ve been chasing a dream so long I’ve put a lot of other dreams on the auxiliary replicator list, and I don’t regret it. But when I see you two, I want you to maybe have a chance to live a few more dreams. And maybe your blue relation can kind of live vicariously through you.”
Esther and Farhad looked curiously between each other.
Fran didn’t press a button. She just clapped her hands. And the container opened. There was a little Andorian girl inside, sleeping, it seemed.
“She’s Rel. You adopted her when she was very young.” Fran stated. “She doesn’t know she’s an android. I put memories into her of growing up with you two. She needs a normal life.”
“Holy shit Fran! What have you done? This is illegal!” Esther said, incredulous. “That’s an unregistered AI android. Do you understand the position you just put me in?”
Fran shimmied her hand back and forth in a sine wave, possibly some Andorian gesture for “maybe, maybe not.”
She explained, continuing; “Rules are for lackeys, I saw that as graffiti cut into a cliff by phaser somewhere, once. Context is for .. well that part of the rock had melted. But I think context is for you, my dears. I will be able to let her grow up and age with periodic adjustments. She’ll live a normal, healthy life. And when the time is right she will learn who she is.”
“When will the time be right?” Farhad asked. “You’re taking a lot upon yourself.. upon this thing, for that matter.”
“This child” Fran corrected him. “She’s your daughter.”
And before they could protest that, she woke up, looked confused and said “Mommy! Daddy! I had a bad dream!”
And they helped her to not be frightened. And they loved her. And they eventually forgave Fran.
*
There had not been as much monatomic hydrogen in the ice as she had hoped. There was only enough in there to power the city another two weeks. She’d have to plan to forrage again sooner than she had thought. She’d have to charge longer. She corrected that. She’d have to eat more. Her brain routed to a time she’d enjoyed meals with real food with her first parents, in that apartment in Samarkand. So long ago.
It was getting harder to find those crystals. She wanted not to think about it. She used to be able to dismiss it. But the parts of her that kept her a child were failing, and the parts of her that wanted her to survive were worried. Very worried. She thought of the Vulcan woman fading, and gone. None of them were real. Neither was she. She kicked the reactor, her first act of anger and frustration in years. She wanted to pick a rock and throw it into orbit, but she didn’t have that kind of strength. She didn’t want to die here. Not here.
*
The three of them were deciding how to celebrate Rel’s next birthday party when Mars burned. Everyone watched in horror. The days became a blur, with bits of terror. Esther told Farhad about the patrols coming to take away androids at her job. There was an amnesty on declaring unregistered Soong type androids. Rel could see and hear the worried conversations of her parents, but she did not understand them. They didn’t take her to her play group. She missed her friends. She missed Aunt Fran, but they had not been able to call her since Mars burned. Rel worried
A day came when her parents were very scared. She could see it. A shuttle was right outside the window, hovering at their balcony. The door opened and aged Auntie Fran jumped out, holding some kind of weapon like in a movie. Mom was still in her Starfleet security uniform. Rel always had liked it. But now she spoke in quick snapping tones to everyone but Rel.
“Fran, you’ve just put us on the map them to find us with that thing. We weren’t supposed to leave until..”
“Too late for that” Auntie snapped. She stormed past Rel, taking a position behind the snack bar and tossing some kind of small gadget near the front door.
Her father was busy loading cases into the hovering shuttle. They lived on the 30th floor. You could see the brown arid landscape for miles from here. The heights scared her, just a little. She didn’t like the balcony much. Her father was jumping back and forth like it was nothing.
The door chime sounded “Citizens, this is Federation Security. We have a warrant to search the premises. Please open the door.”
She saw her mom draw a phaser that had been hidden in her belt. None of this made sense.
Her father grabbed her shoulders, “Listen to me Rel. We love you very much. None of this is going to make much sense, but we have to get you somewhere safe. We’ve made a safe place for you, and all the information you need to be safe until we can all be together, again.”
And though she had a thousand questions, and though she cried and even struggled, he tossed her over the gap between the shuttle and the balcony. She saw the distance below her for a split second that seemed like minutes. She heard the door explode and the temporary force field knock back police with a kinetic shock. She saw the rebound off it shove her father over the balcony. He fell. He never made a sound. And she was still looking back through vision that had never been more precise, more clear, as the police shot her mother, and her auntie. And then the world was gone.
*
She’d had to learn to repair the reactor, after her tantrum. She had to survive. One day they would all be together again. Except her father. He’d probably fallen to his death. She’d worked the math out.
Sednatown was smaller now. Most of the people only appeared for a few minutes a day. And they were black and white. The entire town was. It was easier on the generators. Her holo parents were now George and Mary Bailey. They called her Zuzu. She’d given them antennae. They looked better that way. She missed the one’s she’d lived with for twenty years, but they were no more real then the new ones. Change was good after awhile.
Rel had had to grow up. Longer foraging runs had required longer walks into the wilderness, so she’d amputated her legs and replaced them with more efficient units made with alloy from the old shuttle. She needed her hands. They were intricate, speedy and well designed. So she kept them in a special box, and used crude metal digging tools for hands when she had to make the long cold run for fuel.
Sednatown was now Potterville. She called it Bedford Falls at first, but the child was developing a sense of .. something. She was constantly fighting the odd little developmental blocks that someone had put in when she was designed. They were good blocks, but they had never been designed to last this long. Perhaps she had never been designed to last this long. It was a thought that occurred to her often. The survival instructions she’d received in that frantic trip had never prepared her for her life.
She’d moved out of the old run down Bailey house and moved full time into the Building and Loan. It took less power cycles to run. But she still dutifully checked in on George and Mary. They called her Zuzu, made her dinner, and gave her a flower at night. It made her happy, once in awhile.
*
The shuttle was piloted by a cranky bald hologram that had a way of sneering when he talked, even when he seemed sincere. She’d immediately taken a dislike to him.
“We have to go back. My mom and dad. My Auntie!” she’d protested.
“That is impossible. We are currently in violation of several laws. And while I have a perfectly good backup copy awaiting activation in a lab in Paraguay, you do not, young android.”
“I’m not an android!” she protested.
He looked incredulous, but then seemed to make up his mind.
“My first job was a doctor. I didn’t have very good bedside manner then, either. Well, this beats mining dilithium. As I determine the parameters of my instructions have not changed, and since I will be deactivated once I am certain you are safe, I’m violating my initial instructions. I am going to tell you the truth, what I know of it, anyway. Listen carefully. Unit 7xb7rMxUDA-C-Rel Your Life Depends Upon It.”
Those last words, and the code did something. She stopped crying. A survival instinct kicked in. And she did listen. He told her they were going somewhere far away. He could not explain why, as he was not sure of all the details. But he told her that she might have to wait longer than she had initially been told.
The shuttle was fast. Extremely so. Aunt Fran had more than a few secrets up her sleeves. The shuttle led Earth security through a chase through Oort cloud objects, a long abandoned ECS fueling station, and activated a few false signature traces of older shuttles, leaving the trail cold at last, as they came back inward to the shuttle, stopping at Sedna.
Starfleet could have tracked them, Emergency Command Hologram explained to her, but Starfleet was busy elsewhere, and in any case, it was not what it used to be. The shuttle touched town on the icy world. He bid her stay in the shuttle. He worked for hours
When he was done, there was a beautiful town, vibrant. It was based on the VR play-town her father had made for her last birthday. They’d all had fun there many times. But the house where she’d pretended to live with her parents, an overly bright cottage with a high peaked roof and far too many gables than made sense, was empty.
ECH, did not have time for those details. He showed her the console in the town hall. He showed her the reactor. He explained where the Dot-9 service robot was kept in the shuttle to venture out for more ore if the reactor needed it before her parents returned.
He explained everything he could but then stated very seriously that the shuttle should never be turned on. It would be easy to trace if they kept it on much longer.
As they stood in the vacuum and cold that would have killed a real Andorian child, the ECH looked kindly at her, though somehow perturbed, simultaneously.
“Well” he said shaking his head a little and raising his eyebrows, “This is the point where you deactivate me. I can’t do it myself, you know.”
She hesitated. “Please don’t leave me. I don’t want to be alone.”
He leaned down, looking at her with more warmth than before. He reached out to her as if to stroke her hair but instead touched her scalp where part of her head opened up revealing lights she could see off the reflection of the shuttle windows. She gasped. He touched her head. Something happened.
He nodded to her. “You will never be alone, Rel. Happy Birthday.”
And all the holographic people her father had made for her birthday, to populate the town that had been her Christmas present, were in her head, waiting to be made. All but two. And she could do that too, if she had to.
“It really is time, Rel.” the ECH said. “Don’t worry about me. I’ve been around awhile.”
It did take her time, almost too long, but she said “Computer deactivate Emergency Command Hologram.” and he was gone.
And she said “Computer deactivate shuttle.” and it was cold. The security corvette that thought it saw a power signature on long abandoned Sedna realized it had not seen a thing, and went off to better leads. She saw it warp away in the night sky. It would be a long time before she ever saw a ship in space again.
*
A shuttle was nearing. From time to time Rel had surreptitiously activated the shuttle to learn its secrets, and remove needed parts, before it could be found on scans. So she’d been alerted when the shuttle arrived. She could not stop it, of course. Nor could she fight. She looked in the holographic mirror of the women’s restroom in the Bailey Building and Loan Association.
She had only the comparisons of towns persons and her own childhood memories that had been programmed exquisitely to become as dim as a natural child’s. But it was enough to know she looked like a freak to anyone. Crude metal legs with titanium spring feet. Hands wrapped in shuttle chair upholstery leather mittens because the skin had cracked so many times before it was stuff with repair gel paste from the repair kit, which itself had run out last year. He face, once sky blue, had not changed much. The UV was not harsh here, and in any case, she’d been built well. Her hair had mostly fallen out, like an old doll. Like an old doll.
She left the building, petting the raven on the counter, and stepped outside to greet the shuttle. Would it be the people who’d attacked them? She did not know. But there was nothing she could do about it, now, either way. The shuttle intruded into the holographic Potterville.
The hatch opened. A space suit helmet popped out. She could see the face within. Human. An old woman. But it registered. She herself wore no suit of course. She spoke in standard suit channel simplex frequency. “Mommy?”
*
“I’ve been looking for you everywhere since they let me out of the penal colony, but I never knew the coordinates. There wasn’t time.” Esther’s voice was a floodgate of words. Everything she had told herself she’d say after all these years just came tumbling out or wastegated when she tried to say something to Rel, Rel who shouldn’t even be alive. Rel, whose poor body was now a travesty of what Fran had created.
Rel had not said much, after being embraced by her mother. She’d just held her. She would have held her forever, but she was scared again.
“Dad’s dead.” she said bluntly. “Isn’t he?”
Esther nodded painfully in her helmet. She wanted to speak but the words would not come, even this long, later.
“And Aunt Fran too, I guess?” she asked. To this she was surprised by her mother’s response.
“No, child, no. She’s alive. You’ll see her soon. She’s a lot older, but she’s been with me. We were released, together. There’s been a change. They won’t come after you anymore. You’re safe, now.”
But no one was safe, Rel knew that. Safety was a matter of odds, and factors you might not be aware of until the door chime rang. She merely replied, “I’m not a child, mom. I am sorry.”
Holographic snow was starting to fall, as the lights dimmed and bulbs glowed. Before long George would run across town yelling Merry Christmas to everyone, as he always did, since she did not have the power to process continuity with the AI’s, any longer. It was always the same day, every day. Reboot. Survival mode.
“I’m sorry too, Rel. I am so, so sorry. But.” she added, “I’ve found a place for us. I know it’s going to take time. But it will be alright. If you give me time. All I could think about all these years was you.”
Rel took a look at her dying town. “One thing, first.”
The old escape shuttle was where it had always been, though covered with regolith to hide it, and stripped of metal here and there, when Rel’s survival mode dictated it. She walked ahead of her mother on those bounding homebrew legs, opened the hatch and activated the shuttle for the first time in decades, and activated one more control.
“Emergency Command Hologram, please state the nature of.. oh it’s you?” ECH looked curiously at Rel.
She held the shuttle’s holo-emitter in one hand and stuffed the shuttle’s detached main computer into her clunky backpack, sewn from the same cannibalized shuttle upholstery a few months before. She did him the courtesy of holding out her hand, however. “Let’s go home.”
They watched the snow fall over the streets of the black and white city. Rel liked to pretend to catch it in her mitten covered hands. George Bailey stopped during his exultant run and looked back at her, and smiled, “Merry Christmas Zuzu! Merry Christmas Everybody!” and he ran off father into town.
They approached the shuttle to take them away and she held the ECH’s barely substantial hands and her mother’s shaking hands in her space suit.
Her mother squeezed her mitten, and it felt to her like a little life transferred over, something real that could not be picked up on a sensor. And maybe a little of her own life transferred back into Esther.
“Merry Christmas Rel. We love you.”
Merry Christmas Rel, We Love You
She was not programmed to raise herself, and so she created two parents to do so, to the best of her ability.
Sometimes she would walk out of town, into the darkness, the real night sky, looking for home. It was out there. She could have tracked it as easily as she could walk the paces from to her own home. But Sedna was several light hours from Earth, a minor planet mostly forgotten after its discovery, picked over by miners, occasionally visited by smugglers, cleared out by Starfleet, and gradually given up over the centuries. Earth was a very pale light unable to be seen by the glare of the Sun. The Sun was the brightest star in the eternal night, but that was not saying much. She did not have the eye modifications to see home.
*
Aunt Fran, everyone called her. She wasn’t anyone’s aunt by blood relation, but the old Andorian scientist had been a friend of the family, and a resident of Earth for so long that Farhad had grown up thinking of her as such since he’d been a toddler. She was gruff, she knew the best jokes, she seemingly stood no nonsense, except when she did. He’d grown up with her as family. When he married Esther and returned to Earth to raise a family, she was one of the first people he’d looked up.
He’d surprised her with a bottle of her favorite English gin, when he’d arrived at her lab at the Universidad de Asuncion. Well, he’d tried. Fran was bent over instruments and a horror movie of realistic false Andorian body parts on a table, oblivious to him. Those antennae though, twitched and nearly turned around at him. “My boy, I could tell your footsteps in the dark. You didn’t come all the way from Rigel for a hug, did ya?”
“Course I did, auntie. But I also brought liquor,” he said, “and a bag of limes.”
They talked about old times over the table. He finally got around to asking about her work.
“I’ve been trailing that bastard Soong’s progress for years. Running into dead ends, deliberately lain blinds. He never shared his research. Completely unethical in this day and age. He was good. I’ll give him that. But I’m pretty good too. Besides, most of that hack’s work was based on his grandfather’s genius predating the Federation. Now HE Was the real brain in that genetic line. Andorian intelligence had copied every note the crook wrote in his cell till the day he died. I still have some friends in the archives. I manage to obtain copies.”
“Completely unethical in this day and age,” Farhad said, grinning, and holding up his beaker improvised into a drink glass. They toasted.
“To the positronic brain!”
Clink.
*
The child’s hands dug into the icy surface of a planet whose temperature was closer to absolute zero than that of the world she’d been born on. They have given her this much knowledge. Sometimes there was an ice crystal with something special inside. It was hard to see, but somehow she knew it when she saw it. Sometimes foraging broke her fingers, and she had to replicate new ones. But it was getting more difficult to do that. Sometimes the replicator did not work, or it glitched. Parts of her were not right anymore. She finally found her ice crystal. She had only lost one fingernail, but it did not hurt as bad anymore when it happened. The monatomic hydrogen trapped inside would keep the reactor running, keep Sednatown alive for a month until she’d need to forage again. She walked back to town. It looked just as dark and nearly featureless as where she had been digging. It was well chosen in the shadow of an ice ravine. Only from a few angles could the holographic projectors ever be seen, and the chances of finding her home were astronomic.
*
Someone bored enough to try had once attempted to calculate every major holiday of the various member species of the Federation, correlated to a standard stardate calendar year, where possible. It would have averaged something like fifty-seven holidays per day. Well they can’t all be winners.
For Esther and Farhad, Christmas was something of a holiday consisting of gift giving, the mandatory alternating viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, or that 22nd century holiday favorite “Best Festivus Ever” This year it was the 23rd century reproduction of It’s a Wonderful Life, with the vile Mr Potter played to perfection by a distant relation of Esther, as she liked to point out. They also threw in a little Naw Ruz and Hanukkah into the holiday.
Fran watched her nephew and niece now of a few years as they looked glumly at the holo. No one had said much over dinner.
“Well this holiday sucks.” she looked between the couple. “You know back home on Andoria you can get sent to a penal colony for having a party this bad.”
“I’m sorry Aunt Fran,” Esther explained, “It’s just, we’ve had some bad news.”
Farhad nodded.
Fran looked impatient, that Andorian frustration at pinkskin subtley. “Well poop or get off the transporter john. What is it.”
“It’s personal,” Farhad jumped in, quickly. They’d been married for a few years now, but he knew better that Fran would make anything her own business if she thought she could right some wrong, “and there’s nothing we can do about it, before you ask. So, please, let’s just let it lie.”
Esther paused the holo just as Potter was about to offer his Faustian deal to George Bailey.
Fran looked to the two of them. “So that extra room you’ve been keeping empty for the past three years, the one you turned into a study last week, that has nothing to do with it?”
Farhad sighed. Esther nodded.
“Lot’s of people can’t conceive,you two. You could have a donor, you could blend-clone. There are lots of options. Lot's.” Aunt Fran was really into her cups tonight.
It was Esther that spoke up, “We’re a statistical outlier. We tried everything. It’s just not going to happen for us. We might adopt. But there’s along waiting list.”
Farhad could not help but see the way those blue antennae twitched the rest of the evening. There was a rumor she had a bit of Aenar in her. What was she thinking?
*
Sednatown was a happy place. The grass was green, the flowers bright, and they bloomed all year. People you passed by, mostly humans and Andorians here, but some others, like the quiet Vulcan Ms T’Pringle, were friendly and said hello if you passed them. There was a town square, and usually they had a party with some of the locals being part of the band. She would learn to play an instrument one day, maybe a trumpet. Her parents said she had a knack for it. They’d been saying that for years. She disconnected that thought when it came up. Survival mode.
She walked back from the dark carrying the precious crystal in a stasis container to keep it from melting. The reactor was underneath the town square’s bandstand. As she walked to town she saw Mrs T’Pringle, watering her sunflowers. She waved hello, and the Vulcan turned and offered her that funny salute. Then she flickered. “Please state the” she said, and flickered again. And then she was gone. And then her house was gone. There was only translucent grass.
It was not the first time. Sednatown had once been larger. As the generators aged, the central computer conserved what it could in its holomatrix. Everything went into decline around the time the Dot-9 broke because she kept it running around the clock for company. Dot-9 had been essential.
Ms T’Pringle was not essential. And neither were her sunflowers. She was gone, forever. Sadly, Rel walked to the center of town, to refuel her dying world. Survival mode.
*
It had been over a month. It was hot in Paraguay, as it always was, but maybe a little more so in summer during February. Esther and Farhad had been invited mysteriously, not by personal communicator but by a shifty Rigelian courier who ferried them both in an atmospheric shuttle, insisting they do so, when they stated it would be much faster to just beam to Auntie. They went along with it. Now they were here.
“You know I’m old as Hell.” Fran said without formality when they stepped in, and the door closed. “so when I say this is my life’s work, you’ll know there’s a crapload of life behind that statement.” she sighed looking at a container facing them all.
“I’ve been chasing a dream so long I’ve put a lot of other dreams on the auxiliary replicator list, and I don’t regret it. But when I see you two, I want you to maybe have a chance to live a few more dreams. And maybe your blue relation can kind of live vicariously through you.”
Esther and Farhad looked curiously between each other.
Fran didn’t press a button. She just clapped her hands. And the container opened. There was a little Andorian girl inside, sleeping, it seemed.
“She’s Rel. You adopted her when she was very young.” Fran stated. “She doesn’t know she’s an android. I put memories into her of growing up with you two. She needs a normal life.”
“Holy shit Fran! What have you done? This is illegal!” Esther said, incredulous. “That’s an unregistered AI android. Do you understand the position you just put me in?”
Fran shimmied her hand back and forth in a sine wave, possibly some Andorian gesture for “maybe, maybe not.”
She explained, continuing; “Rules are for lackeys, I saw that as graffiti cut into a cliff by phaser somewhere, once. Context is for .. well that part of the rock had melted. But I think context is for you, my dears. I will be able to let her grow up and age with periodic adjustments. She’ll live a normal, healthy life. And when the time is right she will learn who she is.”
“When will the time be right?” Farhad asked. “You’re taking a lot upon yourself.. upon this thing, for that matter.”
“This child” Fran corrected him. “She’s your daughter.”
And before they could protest that, she woke up, looked confused and said “Mommy! Daddy! I had a bad dream!”
And they helped her to not be frightened. And they loved her. And they eventually forgave Fran.
*
There had not been as much monatomic hydrogen in the ice as she had hoped. There was only enough in there to power the city another two weeks. She’d have to plan to forrage again sooner than she had thought. She’d have to charge longer. She corrected that. She’d have to eat more. Her brain routed to a time she’d enjoyed meals with real food with her first parents, in that apartment in Samarkand. So long ago.
It was getting harder to find those crystals. She wanted not to think about it. She used to be able to dismiss it. But the parts of her that kept her a child were failing, and the parts of her that wanted her to survive were worried. Very worried. She thought of the Vulcan woman fading, and gone. None of them were real. Neither was she. She kicked the reactor, her first act of anger and frustration in years. She wanted to pick a rock and throw it into orbit, but she didn’t have that kind of strength. She didn’t want to die here. Not here.
*
The three of them were deciding how to celebrate Rel’s next birthday party when Mars burned. Everyone watched in horror. The days became a blur, with bits of terror. Esther told Farhad about the patrols coming to take away androids at her job. There was an amnesty on declaring unregistered Soong type androids. Rel could see and hear the worried conversations of her parents, but she did not understand them. They didn’t take her to her play group. She missed her friends. She missed Aunt Fran, but they had not been able to call her since Mars burned. Rel worried
A day came when her parents were very scared. She could see it. A shuttle was right outside the window, hovering at their balcony. The door opened and aged Auntie Fran jumped out, holding some kind of weapon like in a movie. Mom was still in her Starfleet security uniform. Rel always had liked it. But now she spoke in quick snapping tones to everyone but Rel.
“Fran, you’ve just put us on the map them to find us with that thing. We weren’t supposed to leave until..”
“Too late for that” Auntie snapped. She stormed past Rel, taking a position behind the snack bar and tossing some kind of small gadget near the front door.
Her father was busy loading cases into the hovering shuttle. They lived on the 30th floor. You could see the brown arid landscape for miles from here. The heights scared her, just a little. She didn’t like the balcony much. Her father was jumping back and forth like it was nothing.
The door chime sounded “Citizens, this is Federation Security. We have a warrant to search the premises. Please open the door.”
She saw her mom draw a phaser that had been hidden in her belt. None of this made sense.
Her father grabbed her shoulders, “Listen to me Rel. We love you very much. None of this is going to make much sense, but we have to get you somewhere safe. We’ve made a safe place for you, and all the information you need to be safe until we can all be together, again.”
And though she had a thousand questions, and though she cried and even struggled, he tossed her over the gap between the shuttle and the balcony. She saw the distance below her for a split second that seemed like minutes. She heard the door explode and the temporary force field knock back police with a kinetic shock. She saw the rebound off it shove her father over the balcony. He fell. He never made a sound. And she was still looking back through vision that had never been more precise, more clear, as the police shot her mother, and her auntie. And then the world was gone.
*
She’d had to learn to repair the reactor, after her tantrum. She had to survive. One day they would all be together again. Except her father. He’d probably fallen to his death. She’d worked the math out.
Sednatown was smaller now. Most of the people only appeared for a few minutes a day. And they were black and white. The entire town was. It was easier on the generators. Her holo parents were now George and Mary Bailey. They called her Zuzu. She’d given them antennae. They looked better that way. She missed the one’s she’d lived with for twenty years, but they were no more real then the new ones. Change was good after awhile.
Rel had had to grow up. Longer foraging runs had required longer walks into the wilderness, so she’d amputated her legs and replaced them with more efficient units made with alloy from the old shuttle. She needed her hands. They were intricate, speedy and well designed. So she kept them in a special box, and used crude metal digging tools for hands when she had to make the long cold run for fuel.
Sednatown was now Potterville. She called it Bedford Falls at first, but the child was developing a sense of .. something. She was constantly fighting the odd little developmental blocks that someone had put in when she was designed. They were good blocks, but they had never been designed to last this long. Perhaps she had never been designed to last this long. It was a thought that occurred to her often. The survival instructions she’d received in that frantic trip had never prepared her for her life.
She’d moved out of the old run down Bailey house and moved full time into the Building and Loan. It took less power cycles to run. But she still dutifully checked in on George and Mary. They called her Zuzu, made her dinner, and gave her a flower at night. It made her happy, once in awhile.
*
The shuttle was piloted by a cranky bald hologram that had a way of sneering when he talked, even when he seemed sincere. She’d immediately taken a dislike to him.
“We have to go back. My mom and dad. My Auntie!” she’d protested.
“That is impossible. We are currently in violation of several laws. And while I have a perfectly good backup copy awaiting activation in a lab in Paraguay, you do not, young android.”
“I’m not an android!” she protested.
He looked incredulous, but then seemed to make up his mind.
“My first job was a doctor. I didn’t have very good bedside manner then, either. Well, this beats mining dilithium. As I determine the parameters of my instructions have not changed, and since I will be deactivated once I am certain you are safe, I’m violating my initial instructions. I am going to tell you the truth, what I know of it, anyway. Listen carefully. Unit 7xb7rMxUDA-C-Rel Your Life Depends Upon It.”
Those last words, and the code did something. She stopped crying. A survival instinct kicked in. And she did listen. He told her they were going somewhere far away. He could not explain why, as he was not sure of all the details. But he told her that she might have to wait longer than she had initially been told.
The shuttle was fast. Extremely so. Aunt Fran had more than a few secrets up her sleeves. The shuttle led Earth security through a chase through Oort cloud objects, a long abandoned ECS fueling station, and activated a few false signature traces of older shuttles, leaving the trail cold at last, as they came back inward to the shuttle, stopping at Sedna.
Starfleet could have tracked them, Emergency Command Hologram explained to her, but Starfleet was busy elsewhere, and in any case, it was not what it used to be. The shuttle touched town on the icy world. He bid her stay in the shuttle. He worked for hours
When he was done, there was a beautiful town, vibrant. It was based on the VR play-town her father had made for her last birthday. They’d all had fun there many times. But the house where she’d pretended to live with her parents, an overly bright cottage with a high peaked roof and far too many gables than made sense, was empty.
ECH, did not have time for those details. He showed her the console in the town hall. He showed her the reactor. He explained where the Dot-9 service robot was kept in the shuttle to venture out for more ore if the reactor needed it before her parents returned.
He explained everything he could but then stated very seriously that the shuttle should never be turned on. It would be easy to trace if they kept it on much longer.
As they stood in the vacuum and cold that would have killed a real Andorian child, the ECH looked kindly at her, though somehow perturbed, simultaneously.
“Well” he said shaking his head a little and raising his eyebrows, “This is the point where you deactivate me. I can’t do it myself, you know.”
She hesitated. “Please don’t leave me. I don’t want to be alone.”
He leaned down, looking at her with more warmth than before. He reached out to her as if to stroke her hair but instead touched her scalp where part of her head opened up revealing lights she could see off the reflection of the shuttle windows. She gasped. He touched her head. Something happened.
He nodded to her. “You will never be alone, Rel. Happy Birthday.”
And all the holographic people her father had made for her birthday, to populate the town that had been her Christmas present, were in her head, waiting to be made. All but two. And she could do that too, if she had to.
“It really is time, Rel.” the ECH said. “Don’t worry about me. I’ve been around awhile.”
It did take her time, almost too long, but she said “Computer deactivate Emergency Command Hologram.” and he was gone.
And she said “Computer deactivate shuttle.” and it was cold. The security corvette that thought it saw a power signature on long abandoned Sedna realized it had not seen a thing, and went off to better leads. She saw it warp away in the night sky. It would be a long time before she ever saw a ship in space again.
*
A shuttle was nearing. From time to time Rel had surreptitiously activated the shuttle to learn its secrets, and remove needed parts, before it could be found on scans. So she’d been alerted when the shuttle arrived. She could not stop it, of course. Nor could she fight. She looked in the holographic mirror of the women’s restroom in the Bailey Building and Loan Association.
She had only the comparisons of towns persons and her own childhood memories that had been programmed exquisitely to become as dim as a natural child’s. But it was enough to know she looked like a freak to anyone. Crude metal legs with titanium spring feet. Hands wrapped in shuttle chair upholstery leather mittens because the skin had cracked so many times before it was stuff with repair gel paste from the repair kit, which itself had run out last year. He face, once sky blue, had not changed much. The UV was not harsh here, and in any case, she’d been built well. Her hair had mostly fallen out, like an old doll. Like an old doll.
She left the building, petting the raven on the counter, and stepped outside to greet the shuttle. Would it be the people who’d attacked them? She did not know. But there was nothing she could do about it, now, either way. The shuttle intruded into the holographic Potterville.
The hatch opened. A space suit helmet popped out. She could see the face within. Human. An old woman. But it registered. She herself wore no suit of course. She spoke in standard suit channel simplex frequency. “Mommy?”
*
“I’ve been looking for you everywhere since they let me out of the penal colony, but I never knew the coordinates. There wasn’t time.” Esther’s voice was a floodgate of words. Everything she had told herself she’d say after all these years just came tumbling out or wastegated when she tried to say something to Rel, Rel who shouldn’t even be alive. Rel, whose poor body was now a travesty of what Fran had created.
Rel had not said much, after being embraced by her mother. She’d just held her. She would have held her forever, but she was scared again.
“Dad’s dead.” she said bluntly. “Isn’t he?”
Esther nodded painfully in her helmet. She wanted to speak but the words would not come, even this long, later.
“And Aunt Fran too, I guess?” she asked. To this she was surprised by her mother’s response.
“No, child, no. She’s alive. You’ll see her soon. She’s a lot older, but she’s been with me. We were released, together. There’s been a change. They won’t come after you anymore. You’re safe, now.”
But no one was safe, Rel knew that. Safety was a matter of odds, and factors you might not be aware of until the door chime rang. She merely replied, “I’m not a child, mom. I am sorry.”
Holographic snow was starting to fall, as the lights dimmed and bulbs glowed. Before long George would run across town yelling Merry Christmas to everyone, as he always did, since she did not have the power to process continuity with the AI’s, any longer. It was always the same day, every day. Reboot. Survival mode.
“I’m sorry too, Rel. I am so, so sorry. But.” she added, “I’ve found a place for us. I know it’s going to take time. But it will be alright. If you give me time. All I could think about all these years was you.”
Rel took a look at her dying town. “One thing, first.”
The old escape shuttle was where it had always been, though covered with regolith to hide it, and stripped of metal here and there, when Rel’s survival mode dictated it. She walked ahead of her mother on those bounding homebrew legs, opened the hatch and activated the shuttle for the first time in decades, and activated one more control.
“Emergency Command Hologram, please state the nature of.. oh it’s you?” ECH looked curiously at Rel.
She held the shuttle’s holo-emitter in one hand and stuffed the shuttle’s detached main computer into her clunky backpack, sewn from the same cannibalized shuttle upholstery a few months before. She did him the courtesy of holding out her hand, however. “Let’s go home.”
They watched the snow fall over the streets of the black and white city. Rel liked to pretend to catch it in her mitten covered hands. George Bailey stopped during his exultant run and looked back at her, and smiled, “Merry Christmas Zuzu! Merry Christmas Everybody!” and he ran off father into town.
They approached the shuttle to take them away and she held the ECH’s barely substantial hands and her mother’s shaking hands in her space suit.
Her mother squeezed her mitten, and it felt to her like a little life transferred over, something real that could not be picked up on a sensor. And maybe a little of her own life transferred back into Esther.
“Merry Christmas Rel. We love you.”
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