Half Way Home

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

All the while, the training programs you wrote teach us the things we need to know.

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.

What better way to seed the stars with the gift of humanity? Imagine the colony ships, otherwise: They’d be the size of small moons and packed to capacity with living, eating, breathing, defecating humans. Such arks would be impractical, even if those colonists could survive the ensuing insanity of interstellar travel, the hundreds of years of bore

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

Some of us would probably wonder why we were even needed.

There are a million variables, I’m sure, but by whatever confluence of events, half the planets pass muster—half of them come up viable, and our reward as little blastocysts is a chemical trigger, a simple compound that causes us to resume our cellular division as if we were in our mother’s wombs.

The growing process would normally take thirty years. Three decades spent in vats that provide perfect nourishment, our muscles electrically stimulated so they grow strong.