“Just get one thing from that pile behind the door and give it to me for the Masher. Mack said we were getting low in some metals, so something made of metal would be good.”

  Shit. I’ve been so distracted by the seed debacle I forgot to fiddle the communal feed’s stock report.

  “There isn’t anything I want to recycle.”

  “Just one thing, Ren, and then I’ll leave you alone.”

  We stare at each other, his hands palm up and his face open and expectant. I feel like a child given one of those utterly shit choices parents offer to trick the child into thinking it has a say in anything: “Do you want to record that thank-you vid for Aunt Jasmine now or after dinner?”

  “Just one,” he repeats.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake!” I say and twist around to slap the door sensor.

  Is there something here I can sacrifice in return for sleep and peace?

  As always, a couple of items slip down when the door opens. One is a chunk of pink crystal, the other a deformed fork.

  “What about that?” Sung-Soo points at the fork and I clench it tighter in my fist.

  “I need this.”

  “Need it? Don’t you have a fork that would actually work? No one would use that.”

  It has three prongs and they all point in different directions. The steel is scratched and dull. “I’m going to fix it.”

  “When?”

  “When I get a minute.”

  “But why fix it when you can chuck it in the Masher and print a perfect one?”

  “Because it isn’t just any old fork. This is the first one that Kay designed and printed herself. I taught her how to do it.”

  That evening was full of wine and laughter. She wanted to understand why I loved printers so much and asked for a lesson. By the time she wanted to do it by herself she was too drunk to make a good design. She ignored the software’s warning that it wasn’t viable and printed anyway. When she pulled it out and held it out to me triumphantly, we laughed so much I fell off the sofa. That was the first night we kissed.

  “When was that?”

  I shrug. “A few years ago.”

  “And all it’s done is sit there in your hallway? You couldn’t find a minute in all those years?”

  “Is there a point to this?”

  “What about that?” Now he’s pointing at the crystal chunk. “That’s not even a thing! It’s just junk!”

  “It’s not! This is a piece of history. This was one of the samples we rejected for the path.”

  Sung-Soo’s jaw drops open. “But . . . wasn’t that made, like, twenty years ago?”

  “Yes. And it’s just as well I kept it because Pasha deleted the files and I wanted to compare it to the structure we chose a couple of years ago when we were—”

  “Ren!” Sung-Soo puts his hands on his head. He looks annoyed. No . . . frustrated? I can’t tell. I just want him to go away. “It’s trash. And so is the fork.”

  “That’s not for you to judge.”

  “Give me the fork.” When I continue to hold it tight against my chest, he holds his hand out again. “If you can’t give it to me, you’ve got a problem.”

  “That’s not actually an infallible way to prove that; it’s—”

  “Give me the fork and I’ll leave you alone. I know you hate me right now, but I’m doing this for you, Ren.”

  “Like fuck you are,” I mutter. But he’s standing there, that palm open, like a gaping yaw waiting to be filled.

  I look at the fork. If I give it to him, I might forget that night. He just doesn’t understand how important it is. It’s not just metal. And it can be fixed.

  “No.”

  His hand drops to his side. “I’m going to ask you again tomorrow. And then the day after that and the day after if I have to. You have a problem, Ren. Let me help you.”

  I turn and drop down to crawl inside, wedging the hunk of crystal into a crevice partway in and instructing the door to close by voice command as I go. One of the fork prongs digs into my chest as I squeeze through at the end but I don’t care. I won.

  • • •

  I wake three hours later, hungry and stiff. The fork is the first thing I see when I open my eyes. It doesn’t make me feel triumphant now.

  I wash in the usual way, using a cup of water, flannel and powdered soap that I scrub onto my skin and wipe off. It takes too long, this brainless task, and by the time I’m clean and in newly printed clothes I’m tense and desperate to get away from myself.

  Fiddling the stock levels doesn’t take very long. I’ve been doing it for years. I doubt many people take any notice of them anyway, but with the demand created by Sung-Soo’s arrival the levels are low enough to start triggering warning notices. I can see that someone has been chucking metal down their chute in response, but it’s not enough to resolve the problem.

  I look at the things in my bedroom, most of it clothing. There are a few things made of metal containing small amounts of the materials that are critically low.

  I try to pick one thing that I could return to the communal stock, but every time I pluck something out and think of chucking it down the chute, my chest gets tight and I reconsider. Slowly, I realize that there’s nothing here I’m willing to give up. It’s all too important.

  I make my way through to the un–living room and see more objects that would be fit for purpose. I break into a sweat at the thought of there being a solution to the low levels here, in my own house, coming into direct conflict with my needs. I should recycle some of this; it would solve the problem in a more sustainable way than me having to monitor the levels every hour and certainly preferable to more costly solutions such as a mining expedition or commandeering the molecular printers from people who’d booked them weeks in advance. Using them to print gold and copper would be insanely inefficient.

  I stand in the doorway, chewing my thumbnail for what seems like a horribly long time. Unable to act, I check my in-box and the network, but all the while I know I’m merely trying to divert my attention away from this paralysis.

  Snippets of the confrontation with Sung-Soo slither in at the edges of my artificial concentration and not even the latest digest of possible matches for the artifact sent by the Atlas AI is enough to keep them out. None of them look as good as the first suggestion anyway. Even though I’m aware of the inherent bias of getting attached to the first explanation of a mystery, I can’t shake it. Just as I can’t shake the feeling that Sung-Soo is set on interfering.

  It makes sense. He’s come from a life with little leisure time. Now he has luxurious comforts, safe food and drink available with no effort twenty-six hours a day, and no fears about his own safety. Of course he needs something to fill his time. I just don’t want to be his project.

  He said he would come back. I can’t bear the thought of it. I need to reassure him there’s no problem and then give him something to do. Everyone here has a role, after all.

  I send Mack a note saying he needs to think about how Sung-Soo could contribute. There hasn’t been any contact between us since he acknowledged my safe return home. I think he’s giving me space. Or is too busy setting up the rest of the sideshow. It’s only two days until Marco comes out of isolation and takes the seed after all. My stomach clenches at the thought of it.

  A reply arrives and I open it. He’s already asked. He wants to learn how to maintain and repair the printers. Looks like you have an apprentice at last ;)

  Fuck.

  • • •

  IT takes over an hour but I finally manage to find something I’m prepared to give up in return for an end to Sung-Soo’s ultimatum. It’s an aluminum pot with a nice finish to it, banded with copper and gold. It’s dented and one of the copper bands is loose as a result. I must have found it in the Masher as I’d never have made something like it. I hate the thought of letting it go, but stocks of all three metals are low and I’m not particularly attached to it.

  That’s what I keep telling myself as I wait for Sung-Soo to come to the door. I turn the pot over and over in my hands, seeing its potential. It could hold all sorts of things and it would take only two minutes to repair.

  The door opens and my grip on the pot tightens so much that the edge of the loose copper band digs into my palm painfully.

  He smiles, but the usual warmth and delight is guarded now. I’m not the person he thought I was. I have no idea who that was supposed to be. Now he knows what I’m really like. A sour thought, if there ever was one.

  “Mack says you want to learn about printers.”

  “If you’re happy to teach me. I think I could be useful. Come in.”

  I step inside and breathe in the scent of fresh moss. It’s pristine in here, almost as if he hasn’t lived in it since I last visited.

  “What’s that?” He points at the pot and my heart races. I don’t want to give it up. I want to take it home. “Is it from your house?”

  “You said that if I didn’t give up one thing you’d come back tomorrow and hassle me, so here, that’s the thing.”

  I thrust it out at him, wanting him to take it and put it away somewhere so I don’t have to see it and think about it a moment longer. But he doesn’t.

  “I said that if you couldn’t give up just one thing you have a problem.”

  “Well, this is that thing, so no problem. Good, let’s move on.”

  He looks at me for an unbearably long moment and then points to the nearest Masher chute. “Put it in the chute and we’ll get started.”

  It feels like I’m walking through thigh-deep mud rather than on new moss. Then I remember that the Masher won’t pass it on for rendering down for at least four hours. As long as I get out of here before dinner, I can go and get it. I push the flap open, throw it in the chute and turn to him with a smile. “See? No problem.”

  He nods but doesn’t smile. “Okay. So. Where do we start?”

  • • •

  IT takes some time for me to find the right place to begin. He’s never grown up with technology in the way we have, but he was raised by people who were dependent on it. It’s clear some bits of tech lasted into Sung-Soo’s childhood, but it’s left him with a patchy and rather strange impression of how it all fits together. Some of the terminology is familiar and about three-quarters of the time it means what he thinks it does.

  He learns fast though and is the perfect student. Once I know he’s got the fundamentals, we cover a lot of ground and I actually enjoy it. There’s something nourishing about teaching. It reminds me that I’m capable and useful. Enough to keep the darker thoughts at bay while we’re engrossed.

  But it eats the day and the evening too. Making dinner turns into a lesson on how to print in the kitchen. I demonstrate how different ratios of water and oils, mixed with base proteins farmed from algae grown in the upper levels of the Dome, can create a huge variety of textures. We experiment with taste additives and create some truly awful things, but each one is illustrative.

  It’s only when Nick calls over to collect Sung-Soo for a gaming night that I realize it’s dark outside.

  I make a hurried good-bye, not wanting Nick to feel he has to extend an awkward invitation to me out of good manners. I prefer solo games anyway.

  I don’t have to look up the time to know I’ve left it too late to rescue the pot from the Masher. Furious with myself, I go and dig out the protective gear I wore to plant the seed. The thought of going back inside the city tonight on my terms, to go where I want, soothes me. I’ll find another pot, a holy one, and then I won’t miss the mundane one I accidentally trashed at all.

  26

  BACK IN THE tunnel I know best, dressed and prepped for the usual migraine-inducing light show, I pick up the rope and give it a tug to see if it’s still firm. My gloves are covered in the same slimy gunk that makes my boots squelch as I walk, but my sense of purpose outweighs any disgust.

  It’s been a year since I found a room inside one of the pods that contained more than just air. I’ve found three in total. The first time I found a small cluster of rocks. They were rough and didn’t seem to serve any purpose. I wondered if they’d somehow been caught up in the city’s growth and left, indigestible, like boulders swept up and moved by glaciers on Earth.

  It wasn’t until I found the second room that I began to suspect they had been placed there. That one was discovered at the end of a particularly arduous climb up the interior of one of the thick stalks. There were rocks in there too, but they were shaped.

  Some were crude bowls; others were rudimentary tools. That’s a theory, of course, a product of my very human brain shaped by experience on Earth. In this place they could have been made or used for anything. But it was clear to me that they had been shaped by someone wielding a tool. The one I took home has spectacularly even gouges forming the depression of the bowl.

  It was so hard not showing it to anyone. So difficult to keep the endless speculation about my find within my own ears. I’m convinced people lived here once, perhaps an underclass scraping a life at the bottom of the city. Certainly the rooms I’ve found things in are nothing compared to the beauty and craftsmanship we saw at the top of the structure. But something about that doesn’t add up for me. I saw things up there requiring technology vastly more advanced than hand-carved stone bowls. Why would there be such a wide gulf between a single city’s inhabitants?

  I’m still not even sure anyone actually lived here anyway. It’s so hard to tell when there’s no common cultural reference point. I can look around this place and think habitation is impossible because there are no windows, no signs of water or food storage, no furniture or places that are dry enough to sleep. But that’s the wrong way to look at it. Perhaps the ones who used to live here needed damp conditions and constant dark. Maybe they licked the walls to sustain themselves and knew ways to shape the rooms here according to transient needs. My gut instinct still says this wasn’t a city in the sense of a densely populated place. That’s just what we call it. The only person who might have been able to tell us is dead now.

  The third room contained things that looked like weapons to me, reminiscent of the flint arrowheads and stone axe heads I’d peered at in museums on Earth. Perhaps that’s what this place really is: a museum. I shake my head at myself. Yet another human concept I’m desperately trying to impose on my surroundings.

  Those times, I didn’t come here with the intention of taking something. I just wanted to explore, and if I stumbled across something, I’d take it home. After the first time, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hope to find something. But right now, I need to, in a way I haven’t before. I’m not leaving this place until I have something I can hold and look at and love in a way Sung-Soo will never understand. I’m never going to let him bully me into losing something ever again.

  The floor of the tunnel bucks beneath my feet and I tumble, my grip on the rope made ineffectual by the slime coating my gloves. I’m falling again, in the direction I did before, but this time my feet don’t hit a ledge. I twist away from the tunnel so my mask doesn’t get clogged, which sends me into a spinning, rougher tumble that wrenches my left arm. I hear a sickening pop from my shoulder and then there’s nothing but pain. It crowds out the panic and the desire to try to brace myself. All I can do is swear until I finally land at the bottom of the tunnel.

  The emergency icon is flashing over my vision as I try to look up and see how far I’ve fallen. There are more valve ridges than I can count and no rope in reach.

  “You have had an accident,” the MyPhys software says. “Do you require rescue or assistance?”

  “No.”

  “You are injured. Would you like your physician to be notified?”

  “No.”

  “Initial diagnosis from neural feedback suggests you will be able to walk. You are at high risk of shock. Recommended action: seek medical advice immediately.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Do you require further advice?”

  “No, go away.”

  It’s small consolation, but if I’d been knocked out, the chip would have notified Mack and Kay immediately and my excursion would be all over the colony in minutes. I realize I’ve made an error in dismissing the software.

  “Open MyPhys,” I say, puffing my breath in and out to try to manage the pain. I choose voice interface, unable to focus well enough on a visual one. Somehow keeping my eyes screwed shut is helping.

  “Welcome to MyPhys. Would you like assis—”

  “Do something about the pain. Reduce it.”

  “Are you aware that artificial reduction of pain at the neural level increases the risk of further injury?”

  “Yes.”

  “Safety parameters recommend dampening of the parieto-insular cortex for no longer than fifteen minutes. Would you like to proceed?”

  “Yes, for fuck’s sake.”

  The effect is instant. Before I was nothing more than an unbearable throbbing pain with a mind and voice. Now I feel other parts of my body. The fall less than twenty-six hours after all that climbing has left my limbs strained and aching. I start to laugh and then violent shivering begins. I need to get home. No, I need to get to Kay. I can’t move my left arm.

  I open my eyes and look around the area in which I’ve landed. The beam from my headlamp is shining from a place beside my feet. Carefully I stoop to retrieve it and notice what it’s illuminating. The floor here is carpeted with thousands of cilia, each a few centimeters long. I’ve never seen anything like it here before.

  The beam moves as one of the cilia at the edge of the area sticks to the headlamp and pulls it away from me. Before I fully realize what’s happening, several other cilia push it along too with what seems to be a reflexive movement. I swipe the headlamp away from them, pulling long strands of sticky mucus with it, and put it back on. It’s tricky to do so with only one hand.

  Once I can direct the light, its sweep across the floor and up the curved sides of the tunnel reveals that this entire portion is covered with cilia. Nervously, I cast the beam in the direction they were sweeping my lamp.