All of this knowledge arrived in my consciousness with a cool surety, as if I’d always known such things. But I felt a tight thrill run down my spine while I looked down at my legs.
“Fully functional?” I asked.
“Yes,” Hastel said, with a small smile. “Were they not before?”
“No,” I said. “Paraplegic.”
“We’ve gotten a few of those,” she said. “Easily fixed.”
I dared to try to move my legs, which had been useless my entire life, and discovered I didn’t really know how. If I concentrated, though, I could feel the sensation of the air cycler’s gentle current across my thighs, such that it created tiny goose bumps.
I felt delirious with sudden joy, tears leaking from the corners of my eyes while I smiled broadly.
My mind began to burst with questions.
“All in good time, Mr. Jaworski,” said Chow. “We’re sorry we had to keep you off-line for so long. Even with advanced gen, it takes years to grow a clone body to the decanting stage. You were put into the queue as soon as possible.”
One of the other women, a younger and freckly redhead, asked the next question.
“I’m Surgeon’s Assistant Keilor. What would you like to know first?”
“Can I…” I stopped to really think about it. Then I said, “Can I get something to eat, please?”
The entire group smiled widely.
I looked around. “Is that the right answer?”
“You bet,” Keilor said, taking my hand.
Another mind jolt, directly from her.
I slid off the table and discovered I knew how to walk.
The Outbound were far more numerous and sophisticated than I’d expected them to be. While the solar system had gone about its myopic, self-centered business, the Outbound had secured great whacks of the Kuiper Belt, both for mining and colonization. Eventually they’d erected a monitoring network that had, at first, been designed to keep an eye on the rest of humanity that lived “down in the hole,” as I’d learned they called everyone who lived inside the orbit of Neptune.
It was this grid that had first detected the Others, who had apparently erected a monitoring network of their own, dating back to the twentieth century.
Things sort of snowballed from there.
Exchanging information and technology with the other sentient species of nearby star systems, the Outbound rapidly outpaced those of us “down in the hole,” so that the Outbound were able to easily mask their gradual takeover of the Kuiper.
None of the Outbound had been surprised by the outbreak of war. They’d seen it coming for many years. The wedge-shaped ship that had intercepted the observatory had been one of numerous, automated picket craft designed to intercept anything sent from the solar system, and determine if it was friendly or hostile. Had I been one of the killsats or any other hostile entity, I’d have been destroyed. But once they found my memory arrays and determined that I was benign, they pulled the arrays, sampled tissue for cloning, returned both the arrays and the sample to a safe harbor, and the rest was history.
The observatory, along with the bodies of Howard and Tabitha, was allowed to continue on its eternal journey towards the vastness of the faraway Oort.
I bided my time as just another adolescent Outbounder: lounging around in the public spaces, getting used to my new body and its revelatory mobility, and playing on the direct-connect system. Hundreds of thousands of minds, most human, a few alien, all feeding into and interconnected by a vast, peer-based sharing system that was serverless and extended as far as communications equipment could make it go. Not quite a pooled mind, since everyone kept up their privacy barriers, but there was enough crossover for us to learn and access so much information that it was like digesting an entire college semester every day of the week.
I also managed to stay in touch with the freckly redhead from the clone center. Physically, Colleen Keilor was a good bit older than I was, but age didn’t seem to matter much to Outbounders.
Col and I got along quite well.
A couple of years after I awoke among the Outbound, their Quorum announced its intention to begin reclamation of the solar system. The Quorum asked for volunteers to spearhead the effort, which would involve not only cleaning out all the killsats that still prowled between the planets, but a partial terraforming of the wasted Earth.
It would be a protracted effort—the greatest challenge of the Outbound Age.
Col and I signed up immediately.
Irenka Elaine Jaworski-Keilor was born in the midst of the Inbound flight of the First Reclamation Flotilla. Bright-eyed, and with a face and smile that seems eerily familiar, she brings my wife Col and me a great deal of joy. Once, Irenka would have seemed an impossibility. But through the years of changing diapers and teaching her to read and write and do math and use direct-connect, I gradually accepted the fact that impossibilities are routine in my new, expanded reality.
We reached Jupiter, and found the scorched remains of the old settlements. The killsats were waiting too, but we made short work of them, radioing our progress back to the Second and Third Flotillas that were launched in our wake.
There’s work aplenty for the new inhabitants of the solar system.
I hope that some day I can take Irenka down to Earth and show her a world I once called home, and which, hopefully, with a lot of fixing, might be called home again.