Hull Zero Three

Hull Zero Three

(by Greg Bear, excerpt)

Core Memory

Something in the hull recognises us and tries to do us a favour by reconnecting us with what we are supposed to know and feel. There’s a little confusion because there’s two of us, but that’s okay - the system can be creative if it has to, and with a little modification, there we are, back on Earth, young twins with our whole lives ahead of us, training to embark on a journey to the newly outfitted Golden Voyager. That’s the name of this Ship, I think - we think.

We’re going to become part of the crew. The destination crew.

My twin and I don’t always get along, but we went through gaining together, and we rely on each other for solving major problems - including women. Though of late we have been suffering through competition over a particularly lovely lass named -

(And here it gets strange, because that brings up fragments of future memories, the broken bits of my history available to Hull Zero One when I was - )

Don’t be silly. That’s just part of the terrible dream. You aren’t made in deep space - you’re frozen with al of your shipmates, your future partners in the colonies, and the Golden Voyager - 

Whatever. I can very clearly anticipate my parter in the staging area, boldly looking at me along the line of the first landing party, exchanging those excruciatingly meaningful glances of first adoration, then lifelong bonding. We are meant for each other - so why would my twin interfere?

But we have so much to catch up on. Mother and Father,, sister, education up through secondary, physical adaptation and augmentation, getting our freezing-down organs installed after first qualifications, long summer days at Camp Starfield, our first test freeze… We all come out healthy and whole, not even hungover, and now we’re ready for that installation flight out to the edges of the Oort cloud, to meet up with the chose moonlet, on which is trapped the growing frame of our Ship. This is a journey of almost nine months, because it’s illegal to light off bosonic drives within the system.

So clear. I suppose that even in my confusion and my conflicting emotions, seeing our unborn Ship for the first time, far out in the darkness where only starlight matters, fastened like a tiny golden octopus to the long end of the moonlet - seeing all this is useful, helpful, but why does it have to come attached to so much imaginer bullshit? I’m just fine without a backstory. I know the real story.

They pump us full of this continuity for psychological reasons – but why? They don't trust us. We're designed to be deceived.

We find spaces within the cramped living quarters, all three hundred of us, handpicked, tested, trained, passed – superior emotionally and physically to Earth's best and brightest, filled with that glow of knowing where we're going what we're going to do, flying in the most expensive goddamned object ever devised by the hands of humanity...

And as we go into the freezers to become time travelers into the future, to awaken five or six hundred years hence, we're filled with an overwhelming joy at our destiny, more intense than anything we've experienced.

Spaceships. Illustration by Elena.