An awkward silence fell between them. “Thank you,” Corbin said. “I… well. Thank you.”
“Yeah, well,” Sissix said. She cleared her throat. “From now on, though, I get to crank up the temperature as high as I want.”
Four days later, Corbin sat at his lab bench, spreading algae on a sample card. The last batch had come out slightly tacky, and he wasn’t sure why. He spread the algae thin, so that he would be able to see the cells clearly once he placed the card into the scanner. A normal task, but it didn’t feel that way. Nothing did, not his lab, not his bed, not his face. But that was exactly why normal tasks needed doing. He would put algae onto the card, and he’d put it into the scanner. He’d do it again and again, until it felt the way it had before.
“Excuse me, Corbin,” Lovey said through the vox.
“Yes?”
The AI paused. “There’s a sib call coming through for you. It’s from Tartarus.”
Corbin looked up from the algae and said nothing. Tartarus. A prison asteroid, out in the Kuiper Belt. There was only one person who would be calling him from there.
Lovey spoke again, her voice awkward. “I can dismiss the call if you like.”
“No,” Corbin said. He wiped the smear of green slime from the end of his sampling tool and set it aside. “Put it through down here.”
“Okay, Corbin. I hope it goes well.”
Corbin gave a curt nod. The vox clicked off. With a sigh, he turned to his desk and gestured at the pixel projector. The pixels scurried into action. A blinking red rectangle in the bottom of the projection indicated that he had a sib call waiting. He watched it blink five times before gesturing to answer it.
His father appeared. Corbin hadn’t spoken to the man in four standards. He had grown old. A little heavy, too, which was surprising. His father had always pushed Corbin to eat healthy. Corbin could see it now, the familiar curves and angles and lines in his father’s face. The features were more pronounced, worn deep with age, but they were the same as his own. It was more than just familial resemblance. Corbin would wear the same face one day.
His father spoke. “They hurt you.”
Corbin leaned back in his chair, making sure that his father could get a good look at the fading bruises on his face. This was exactly why he hadn’t let Dr. Chef fix anything but the bones. He had been hoping for this moment, the moment in which his father would see what his hubris had done. “Hello, Marcus. And yes, I came back from prison with a broken nose and three cracked ribs. One came damn close to puncturing my lung.”
“I’m sorry, Artis. I am so sorry.”
“Sorry,” said Corbin. “I get ripped out of my home, beaten to a pulp, and thrown into some Quelin hellhole, only to be told that my entire life is a lie—and you’re sorry. Well, thanks, but that doesn’t quite cut it.”
Marcus sighed. “This is why I called, you know. I figured you had some questions. If you can stop hating me for a few minutes, I’d be happy to answer them. I can’t make many calls from here. Ansible access is a rare thing.”
Corbin stared at the man in the pixels. He looked so defeated, so tired. Corbin found himself shaken by it, and it made him all the angrier. “All I want to know,” Corbin said, “is where I really came from.”
Marcus nodded and looked down at his lap. “You know all those times you asked about your mother?”
“Of course. All you ever said was that she died in a shuttle crash. You never wanted to talk about her. Which makes sense, since she never existed.”
“Oh, no,” Marcus said. “I did have a wife. She wasn’t your mother, of course, but…” His eyes went somewhere far away. “Artis, I’ve never been good with people. I’ve always preferred my lab. I like data. Data is consistent, it’s steady, it’s easy to understand. With data, you always know what the answer is. If the data doesn’t make sense, you can always puzzle it out. Unlike people.” He shook his head. “I can never puzzle out people. I’m sure you understand.”
Corbin clenched his jaw. Dammit, he thought. How much of me is actually you?
Marcus continued. “When I was a young man, I took a posting down on Overlook.” Corbin knew the place. It was one of the few labs down on the surface of Encaledus. Strictly quarantined, to prevent contamination of the microbial pools below the moon’s icy surface. Only one person manned Overlook at a time, and those who were assigned there were on their own for at least a year. It was rare that people took an Overlook assignment more than once. “I thought it was the perfect place for me. I loved working down there. No people to disturb my work or get in my way. Except for her.” He paused. “Her name was Sita. She flew the supply shuttle that brought me food and lab supplies. She couldn’t come in, of course, but I could watch her through the airlock cameras, and we spoke over the vox.” Marcus smiled, a warm, private smile. Corbin was startled. He’d never seen his father smile like that, not once. “And as you may suspect, she was beautiful. Not beautiful like they do in vids or when they’re trying to sell you something. Real beautiful. The kind of beautiful you could actually touch. And she wasn’t from the orbiter. She was from Mars.” He laughed under his breath. “I thought her accent was so damn cute.” Marcus shook his head, as if clearing it. His voice became more grounded. “I was awful to her, of course. I’d snap at her if she showed up while I was in the middle of testing, and I’ve always hated small talk, so I barely gave her the time of day. I was like that to everyone, but she… she didn’t care. She always put up with me, even when I was an ass to her. She always smiled. She made fun of me, for my bad moods, for my uncombed hair. For whatever reason, it didn’t make me mad. I liked the way she gave me a hard time. I started counting the days between supply drops. At first, I thought I was just lonely, that it was a symptom of living in isolation. It took me a while to realize just how in love with her I was.” He ran his hand back through his thin hair. “And then I got us both fired.”
“You what?”
Marcus cleared his throat. “One tenday, I spent all of my free time cleaning up the station. Made sure it looked presentable. Set the table with the nicer food that I’d been saving in the stasie.”
Corbin gaped. “You did not invite her in.”
“Oh, I did. And she accepted.”
“But,” Corbin sputtered. “Does that station even have a decontamination flash suitable for Humans?”
“Nope. I was sterilized before I went down to the station. The only flash installed there was meant for food and supplies. Having her walk through it wasn’t even an option.”
“But your samples!” His mind reeled. Throughout Corbin’s entire childhood, Marcus had drilled him with the importance of preventing contamination. One time, he’d revoked dessert privileges for a month after catching Corbin eating candy in the lab. Corbin didn’t know the person that Marcus was describing. It certainly wasn’t the father he knew.
“All ruined,” Marcus said. “She had just enough benign bacteria on her to cause a few problems. The project leader was furious when she found out. Six months of work, gone. Sita was fired, and I was given the option to either start the year over or leave the project entirely.”
“You stayed?”
“Oh, no, I left. I had just had one of the best days of my life, and it was all thanks to that beautiful woman. We hadn’t even done anything that interesting. We just ate all my food and talked about everything. She made me laugh. And for reasons I still don’t understand, I made her smile. There was no way I was going to be locked away from her down on Overlook. I spent the next five years trying to put my career back together, but it was worth it.”