Today's Reading
"Okay, I'm going to start the anesthetic in a few seconds here. You might get a little light-headed," the technician said. She was a petite redhead with a small chin and dainty little teeth. If they'd met at a bar, Roy might have tried flirting with her.
Instead, he put a hand in his pocket, reassuring himself that the little velvet box really was where he thought it would be, then nodded. "Copy that."
She shifted, put a needle into the drip feed going to his arm, and made a little sound that seemed like satisfaction. "Okay. Just count backward for me from ten to one."
"Ten, nine, eight, seven—"
Roy opened his eyes. He was alone in the landing couch, just the way he was supposed to be. He lay there for a little while, getting used to the feeling of his body. His arms and legs felt heavy, like he'd just had ten hours of hard sleep. The knot that always seemed to rest in his belly had untied itself. He felt great.
The room itself was small, spartan, engineered to have not just the least mass but the least information that the package would have to encode. It seemed silly to take a snapshot of two hundred human bodies and brains and then try to economize with simplistic shelving, but here he was. He checked his pocket. The box was still there.
"What's the word, folks?" he said.
"Scan went great, Roy," Sandor, the director of operations, said through the speakers. "No data loss, minimal overhead."
"Great. That means I can retire now?"
"Wait a few minutes to get your legs back before you start running down the street, but yeah, man. We did it."
Roy smiled. After three years of active training, it felt a little anticlimactic. He'd come into the program at thirty years old with six years as an officer in Air Command behind him, a dual master's in engineering and applied math, and he'd still barely qualified. The program had been boot camp and graduate school and team-building intensives all in one. And this was the last time he'd be looking up at the gray ceiling of the package module. The last time he'd be talking to Sandor and Chakrabarti and Foch. The last day he'd spend with most of the team.
Maybe not all of them, though. There was room to hope.
The farewell banquet was the next day at a hotel ballroom just off the base. Three hundred and fifty people, mostly women, mostly in their late twenties, around fifty tables with ceramic pumpkins for centerpieces and plates of rubbery chicken or gritty lentil tacos. An open bar. Sandor had given a tipsy speech about the nobility of the human soul and the work of becoming not just a multiplanetary but a multisystem species and started weeping. It had actually been pretty moving, in the moment. The president of the National Space Agency sent a message of congratulations and thanks that had been projected onto a blank wall behind the empty bandstand.
Now, Roy was leaning back in his chair with a whiskey sour in his hand while Zhang Bao and Emily Pupky leaned in on either side, talking across him. After three years of a strict no-alcohol policy, even the watered-down drink was hitting him hard.
"Bringing men at all was a mistake," Emily said. "No offense, Roy. But every male in the package is one less uterus. And there are what? Fifteen hundred sperm samples? We're going to kick founder effect's ass." She pointed an exuberant finger at Bao. "Kick its ass."
"Replacement is an issue, yes," Bao said. "But how many babies are we really going to need in the first stage?"
"We'll have to have some pretty fast or there won't be anyone to do the work when we get old. Populations with inverted age distribution—"
"It's going to have to be a game-day decision," Bao said. "Every situation is going to be different. And really, Emily, do you want to commit to living the rest of your life without cock?"
Emily cackled. "You're going to be a lucky man, Roy."
"Oh, not me," Roy said. "I've stood my watch. Now I'm going back to Ohio and looking for a job."
He caught sight of Anjula across the room. She was wearing a pale-yellow dress that brought out the warmth of her skin. Her hair was flowing down one shoulder, and her smile was the same wry near-smirk he'd loved and hated and loved again.
Now or never, he thought. He teetered on never, then shifted his chair back. "Doctors. You'll excuse me, I hope, from your very erudite conversation on the long-term value of cock."
...
