Half Way Home

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.

Far more sensible, of course, is a system whereby blastocysts such as myself are launched into space with a handful of machines to raise us.

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

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

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

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.

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.