Free Upgraded by Peter Watts, Greg Egan, Ken Liu, Robert Reed, Elizabeth Bear, Madeline Ashby, E. Lily Yu

woman named Gleem. Did you steal the sound from her?”
    The black mouth wasn’t bad at laughing, but scoffing was its specialty. “That’s a simple question to answer. Look at the records.”
    “Except I wanted to ask you,” he said. “Which is not so simple, apparently.”
    Others laughed at that.
    Gleem tightened her sneer. And then very quietly, she said, “It was my mother’s mother’s mother’s name.”
    Orleans knew that, or he didn’t. What mattered was to hear her explain a little bit about her simple, unfinished self.
    “It’s just a name,” she said.
    Orleans broke into a hard, long laugh.
    “What do you mean?” the youngster demanded. “What’s so funny, old man?”
    One of her peers called out a warning. “He’s got a lesson for us.”
    Which Orleans intended to impart on everyone, probably right away. But before his good-at-laughing mouth could offer another word, an encrypted transmission arrived. It came from a location that in eighty thousand years had never once spoken to Orleans, even by accident. He listened to the transmission. He listened, and the others watched him saying nothing, every young eye narrowed with thought. And then feeling bored, they began to chat among themselves while he continued to absorb orders and suggestions from high machine-minds that were too smart to be wrong and far too smart to appreciate what it was that they had discovered.
    That one eye used to be alive, fully and utterly alive, and the body and mind attached to the eye were healthy, possessed by the certainty that nothing would ever go seriously wrong. Yet in the middle of a routine moment, everything went wrong. Other eyes and minds were close by. Everybody was riding a fine ship, rockets opened to full throttle, pushing colonists to some world far too distant to be seen. Then there was no one else. The others were missing. What happened to them? And where did the ship go? And why was this single creature tumbling through the blackness, screaming hard with a mouth barely born?
    He was scared, far too scared to think along proper lines. And he spun wildly, and then he managed to quit weeping but couldn’t stop tumbling, stars sweeping past his lidless gaze.
    What had gone so horribly wrong?
    Life on the starship had always been busy and pleasant, free of discord and blessed with moments of small joy. Then a critical machine on the bow demanded attention. It was decided that one of the crew had to dress in a lifesuit and step into the cold black. There was a song from the bridge, a rousing plea for one brave volunteer, and nobody answered. Then the leaders examined the rosters, identifying the most deserving, least important crewmen. That was when he sang back at them. That’s when he volunteered, and it was the last time in his life that he would hear others singing about their own happiness and considerable relief.
    Inside the airlock, ten lifesuits stood at attention. Because he was small, he claimed the largest, thickest suit for himself. Feeling big was the only reason. Then he passed through the airlock and into space. The work itself was quite routine. Nothing went wrong and nothing felt wrong. One navigation system needed close attention, and there was a menu to follow, and he did the job perfectly if a little slowly. His suit and his body were tethered to the outside of the starship, nearly finished with the job, and then the ship was gone. Some huge soundless event tore him loose, gave him new momentum, and that terrific jolt turned his body into living water and scared grit.
    Modern life could endure almost any abuse, short of plasmatic fire. His bioceramic mind fell into a state deeper than sleep but far, far removed from Death. Then his water and organelles and phages found one another, and they found energy and heat, reconstituting a body that allowed him to become aware again, spinning and screaming, weeping and then not weeping.
    How much time had passed?
    He asked the suit.
    The big