He laughed despite himself. “Oh,” he said. “Wow.”
His core was beginning to list off imminent systems failures, thermals, filters, pressure. He shut off the display. He didn’t need to see that.
“The salamander reproductive element is an amorphous fluid,” he said. “It appears to consume resources from the planet and create eggs via an exogenic chemical process. It’s too big for me to do anything about.”
He stared at the gentle flow of soup. It didn’t even have a brain. There was no intent. No malice. They were at war with a blind string of DNA. He was glad he’d found the truth.
His head nodded; he caught himself. He had run out of air.
“Wow,” he said again.
16
[Beanfield]
THE SURVIVOR
She sat up. She was surrounded by rock. She turned her head and there was no Anders and no Jackson.
Her throat was dry. “Anders,” she croaked. There was no sound but her own breathing.
There was a low rocky overhang and she banged her helmet on it. She stopped and tried to think. Anders and Jackson had left her to go explore some kind of hole they’d spotted. She had lain down and exhaustion had fallen over her like a blanket and now this.
She hobbled along the ravine. “Anders?” she said again. She fumbled at her film but couldn’t bring him up on it, for some reason. She couldn’t find either of them. “Jackson?”
You wake up on an alien planet. There is no one and nothing. Go.
She began to climb the side of the ravine. This was a lot harder than it looked, because she had a hot mess of an ankle and the gravity was relentless, but she fought her way up it a toehold at a time. There was a lip, and more rock after that. This would make a good Talia feed, it occurred to her: There was plenty of really identifiable Feed Talia behavior right here. Those were her most popular clips, the ones with vulnerability, and she was feeling pretty vulnerable at the moment, pretty goddamn vulnerable, because no one was here. She was starting to freak out a little, which people liked, too, watching Talia losing her mind over something silly. There had been a clip where she couldn’t find her white socks and it had sparked a set of memes and references that she hadn’t completely understood, but people dug it, was the point. There were so many people who would stand beside her in this moment, if only they knew. If she ever got out of here, she would tell how it had happened for her feed, and it would be amazing, and people would love her. She focused on that. When she gained enough height to turn and scour the landscape, there was rocky plain, split and sundered, as far as she could see and nothing else.
You have been abandoned. Your home is fifty trillion miles away. Go.
It was really unfathomable that she could be alone right now.
She checked ping again. She didn’t know if she was doing something wrong or her survival core was preserving power or Anders and Jackson had decided to play a hilarious practical joke, but she was not loving this. She picked her way back down into the ravine and sat. She waited. That was what you were supposed to do when you were lost. That was what everyone said. Stay where you are and we’ll come find you. You definitely shouldn’t wander off, because you might get really lost, and never found.
Time passed. She tried to clear her mind. She wasn’t terrific when left to her own thoughts, to be honest. She was better when she had other people to bounce off. When it was just her, all alone, she would return to old fears and inflate them. Like thinking she was the only person alive on an empty world.
She tried to remember her roleplays. But she couldn’t think of one that applied to the situation, and was there any point to a roleplay if no one was watching? She might as well drop the facade. She might as well go ahead and give in to the bubbling terror that the worst thing she could imagine had