Creation by Greg Chase Page A

before, but who the hell was Lev?
    “Good. Lev wasn’t sure how much you’d remember. Don’t worry too much if it’s not all in that raddled brain of yours right now. It’ll come back. You’re in the agro pod of the space freighter Leviathan . You were up here working on her systems. Do you remember that?”
    Sam had that pretty clear, though after some details about entering the central computer core everything grew a bit hazy.
    “This piece of information’s a little tougher. That was six months ago.”
    Sam shook his head. That wasn’t possible. The longest anyone had stayed in one of those building tubes was—what? He couldn’t remember, but it had been days, not months.
    “Yeah, that one’s a doozy. Whatever you were doing in there worked. The computer finally powered up. But it happened too fast, and the crew couldn’t get you out before the vortex of energy—that’s what Lev called it—flooded the computer core. She was able to protect you for the most part, but the energy bonded you to the computer. Once you became one with the ship, separating you became a problem. As we moved in from the Kuiper Belt, it received more energy from the solar-transfer array. Power surged into that tube you were in. It was almost more than she could handle. But it also improved her functionality to the point where she could let you go. Getting you out through the bridge access involved too much risk of the builder pod punching a hole in the nose cone of the ship. And trying to get you out the back of Leviathan would have incinerated you in her engines. The only answer was to use this escape hatch. On my last supply run to the main living pod of the ship, Lev told me to keep an eye out for you. That’s how I knew where to find you. Do you have any recollection of any of that?”
    Sam turned his head from side to side. Six months. He tried to stretch out his arms but only managed to bend them halfway.
    “The crew thinks you’re dead. Lev says that gives you some freedom. You get to decide your future. Does that make any sense? ’Cause it doesn’t really to me.”
    Sam had to shake his head again. He had some fragment of a memory about Xavier not waiting forever for him to finish his work. But dead? At least that explained why they hadn’t tried to rescue him from the builder’s pod. A fully functional computer wasn’t something most people wanted to mess with even if it had a corpse inside.
    Doc’s smile drew wrinkles next to his eyes. “Don’t worry about it. You get to choose your own fate. As far as the rest of the solar system is concerned, if you want to stay dead, you can. If you want to go back to the life you had, Lev can make that happen. But before you decide, let me tell you a little about where you are, who we are, and why you might want to stay.”
    Sam leaned back against a thin tree trunk. Glancing up, he saw it spiraled out of sight toward the transparent wall of the agro pod.
    Doc sat down next to him. “There are one hundred forty-three of us—and one more in a few days. We left Tethys, one of the moons around Saturn, twenty years ago. Our plan was to terraform the rock known as Chariklo. We got permission, funding, all that pesky stuff. I had a source for old terraforming kits. We were doing pretty well. The first set of pods established a livable atmosphere, solar arrays to provide heat and light, and basic plant life around the planet. Then the empty pods were each cut in half and secured together to build the planet’s outpost. It looked like some old greenhouse made of eight one-mile-long half cylinders all stuck together.”
    Sam closed his eyes. The outpost would look like all the other outposts across the solar system.
    Doc continued with his history lesson. “The outpost was the commercial part of the deal. Chariklo makes for a nice stopover between the Kuiper Belt and Jupiter. We’d let the shopkeepers run the outpost, and we’d get the rest of the planetoid for our village. Of