Half Way Home

Just as with my vision, I had been “hearing” for fifteen years, but only by having the auditory centers in my brain directly stimulated.

Then, I woke up. I saw the real world, solid and unyielding, and it made far less sense.

This jostling of my consciousness feels absolutely normal, for it’s all I’ve ever known.

It was often just me and the colony AI in his several guises, maybe a few virtual students to serve as examples or to keep me from going crazy. One minute, I’d be walking through the woods, listening to Colony lecture. The next, I’m in a counseling session, pretending to do therapy with two virtual colonists who can’t get along.

I was fifteen years old before I opened my eyes for the first time. Fifteen. Not quite an adult—halfway between boy and man. Before that moment, I had learned everything from visions directly implanted into my brain. I had been stuffed with virtual lessons and life experiences as my body grew inside a vat.

Send out thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of colony ships—each another spinning coin—and eventually one of them will surprise you.

You didn’t foresee a third possibility, one as unplanned for as it was unimaginable to you.

The problem, however, is that the choice isn’t really dichotomous.

Unviable. That’s what the AI would compute. And instead of a molecular trigger setting off my cell division, the machines would deliver a chemical bullet to liquefy me and my fellow colonists.