The room was dark. Before I could turn on my computer light, the ground beneath me turned. The walls grumbled. The ground stopped, facing a set of steps lit from below by a dull green light. The stairs led up to a workstation surrounded by screens, with a metal table in the middle.
As I approached, an image came on the screen. It was another person. “You must be here for our data,” he said. “If you’ve made it this far, you’re the real thing. Take everything, and then destroy it.”
I attached my computer and began extracting the files. Kat was wrong. There was nothing dangerous about any of this.
I selected one of the files on the large screen and opened it. It showed three people talking in a room. One said, “We’ve finalized the key genetic codes. All our test subjects will have them, so they won’t reject the adjustments.”
“They’re not all clones, though,” another said. “We still want a reasonable amount of diversity in the results.”
“Are the adjustments themselves ready?”
“We just finished growing the last batch yesterday.”
“Then let’s begin.”
I didn’t understand it, but that didn’t matter. I knew enough to see it wasn’t dangerous to me.
Before I could close the file, another video began. It showed the table in this workstation, with a baby person lying on it. Two other people stood on either side of the table. One said, “Surgery practice one. Subject deceased.”
My stomach turned as they began cutting into the baby and putting new parts in. When the video ended, it moved to another, similar one. This time, the baby was tied down. Someone said, “Subject TI001. First modification, the filter.”
They began to cut the little person’s jaw out.
They were inserting something into the empty space, when someone said, “The genius is that this is all organic, so it grows along with the subject.”
“No, the real genius is what we’re going to tell them about themselves.”
He was interrupted by a rapid beeping. He swore. “She’s waking up!”
“How the hell?”
“Get her back under!”
They scrambled for something. The alarm blared louder and faster. The child’s body shook. Its eyes came open. More swearing. The alarm screamed, then turned into a steady drone.
The rest of the videos blurred together. Each one ended with the word FAILURE.
I reached the last video, and came to the end. The people finished their work and slipped the baby person inside a glass container. Its eyes opened, and it breathed gently through the snout on its face where the mouth had been.
There was cheering. They congratulated each other. I reached a up hand and brushed the front of my face. Surely this wasn’t what it looked like. Surely it didn’t mean what I thought.
The screen filled up with words. “Success: Subject TI330.”
I pulled the hand away from my face and picked up my computer. TI330. TIBBO. Me.
Something surged up through my chest, trying to escape. I couldn’t let it out. I tried with all I had. I fell down and twisted on the ground to release it. I thought I would die. I wanted to.
I don’t know how long I stayed there. When I couldn’t lie there anymore, I set my computer for the previous set of coordinates and ru’soed.
I came out in the tunnel to the town. Red light glowed at the end. It mingled with blue light, and Kat appeared. “Tibbo?”
I turned away and moved to the other end. The blue light grew behind me as she got nearer.
“Tibbo,” she said.
I jerked my hand behind my back. “Go away.”
She said my name again. I turned and looked at her face. I thought she would look happy, now that she had proved her point. She was right.
But her face was twisted up, the way that I felt everything in me twisted. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
I sank to my knees. She knelt down beside me and reached out a hand. Though I knew she was only a projection, I could swear I felt her touch. I tried again to release the swelling in my chest, and water filled my eyes. It streamed from her eyes too.
When it ended, I stared ahead at the dust on the ground. “I’m a tool.”
She sighed. “Maybe you were. But you’ve always been a person.”
I turned toward her. “Why did you warn me?”
She sniffed and stared at me. “I don’t know. It didn’t do any good.”
“No. But thank you anyway.”
She smiled, and I wish I could have too. She turned toward me and opened her mouth. Then her image fizzled and blinked.
“Oh no.”
“What?”
“My computer must be damaged,” she said. “It’s breaking down. I’m having trouble seeing you.” Her image sputtered. “I thought I fixed it.”
“Can you fix it now?”
She peered closer, dissolving into static. “Tibbo? Can you hear me?”
“Kat?”
“I’m going to try to fix it. If it works, I’ll be back.”
“Please come back!”
“I’ll do my best.”
Her image blurred, and she was gone.
*
It’s been weeks and she hasn’t come back. I keep searching through the town. She’s nowhere.
Was she unable to fix her computer? Could it not be fixed? Or did she leave me? Did she forget?
I don’t know what to do now. It’s been longer than I thought it would be. Do I keep waiting? What if it takes years?
I can finish my mission. I still have some information in my computer, and the rest of it is in the vault. I can send it back to the people I worked for. They’ll give me coordinates to return. I’ll go back to praise and rest. And then more work. I’ll have a purpose again.
No.
I don’t want to go back there. I won’t. I can’t.
I’m staying here to work in the town. When Kat gets back, I want it to be ready.
*
2. Kat
Tibbo’s life started with orders. Mine started with his story. My dad read it to me when I was a little girl, so many times he must have gotten sick of it. I saw myself in the story, myself and my dad. I was the fearless child running forward into danger in spite of my dad’s warnings, and he was the one who always stayed with me, even when I made an awful mistake.
We lived together in the town on Tibbo’s planet alone. We farmed our food underground and played with technology in our free time. Dad used to have a reputation in the wider galaxy for his skill combining old and new technology. I used to like calling him “the Wizard.”
I was nineteen when he started coughing up blood. Something was tearing up his throat and taking away his ability to speak. We learned universal sign language to talk without talking. I tried to convince him to contact a doctor from the outside world, but he wouldn’t listen. Now I think he knew that it was already too late. He was agitated, unsettled, and sometimes it seemed like there was something he was trying to tell me. He did say he loved me more than usual. A few months later, I woke up, and found him–
It’s still hard to write about. I’d only ever seen plants die. And now the most important person in my life was gone, finally and forever. I was alone.
I came back to the story on one of those murky gray days that blurred together while I grieved. I saw myself in it again. But this time, I was Kat and Dad was Tibbo, refusing to listen while I did my best to try helping him. Except he and I didn’t get to talk after it was all over.
Reading it again, I noticed the idea of using ru’so to look through time. Dad taught me about ru’so, but never used it for anything but an occasional projection to an uninhabited world. If it worked to connect two different points in space, it stood to reason that it would do the same thing for different points in time. One dismal evening, I decided to try it.
I assured myself that it wouldn’t actually work. It was just a distraction to keep my mind off loss and loneliness. When it did work, I didn’t think it would be just like the story. When I first saw someone, I was sure it couldn’t really be Tibbo.
But it was.
Once again, I came back to the story, this time with the mind-bending realization that I might actually be that Kat.
I didn’t want to be. I had already gone through a futile attempt to help someone I loved. I didn’t want to endure it again, especially since I knew what would happen. But I couldn’t forget the image I had, now realer than ever, of Tibbo in the vault watching himself being made, a mouthless being trying to scream. I couldn’t ignore that and let him go in unaware.
I went back to warn him. I failed. And we cried there together in the Core.
I was glad the story ended ambiguously. It didn’t dictate whether or not I made it back, so I had initiative to try. I tried over and over again, always thinking I had fixed everything, but I never made it through. A few times at first I caught a glimpse of the planet, but it only lasted a few seconds. After a few years, I started to think that it wasn’t my computer that was the problem.
One thing ru’so coordinates describe is the points of entry and exit. One tells you where you enter ru’so, and the other tells where you leave it, like a set of double doors on an airlock. If those two coordinates don’t match up, nothing gets through.
We don’t move in space significantly enough to affect those coordinates, but we move through time constantly. That movement might mean that the end point coordinates require consistent recalibration. I’m the only one I know who’s done this, and I don’t know how to begin recalculating those coordinates without endless trial and error.
It’s hard knowing that I’ll never see Tibbo again. It’s even harder to think that he died hoping to see me. I’ve noticed something. The planet is different now than when he walked through it. There’s furniture in the houses, and stairs carved into the canyon wall. The tunnel is cleared out and connects to the cave entrance. There’s even a fountain of carbon dioxide in the middle of town. Tibbo did all this, making the planet ready for when I came back.
I’m trying to hope that he’ll be–or that he was–OK, that it’s better, somehow, this way.
This is the last thing I can do for Tibbo. His story spoke to me, and it can speak to other people too. Though all his life he was forced into silence, now, at last, he has a voice.