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

ending.”
    Orleans realized that his voice was too excited, and so he paused. He didn’t want hopes escaping too soon.
    “That’s a biological shape,” said one boy, and another, and the oldest girl. But Gleem was first to point out, “It’s a high-grav configuration, but I’m not seeing this beast in any of our libraries . . . ”
    “How old is it?” someone asked.
    Orleans had no idea.
    But for fun, he said, “One billion years, and a day.”
    Nobody believed that. But all of the children, or even Orleans, could not stop playing with enormous numbers.
    “So how do we manage this landing?” another boy asked. “Because they want to save the artifact, right?”
    “I’m an idiot,” their teacher said. “You tell me how.”
    A debate was launched. Fifty opinions came from every mouth. Except for Gleem. She walked to the front of the skimmer, silently making calculations, answering an entirely different problem.
    And Orleans remained behind everyone, watching.
    Thirteen students devised one utterly workable scheme. The artifact was built from hyperfiber, but descending at one-third the speed of light, even the finest grade of fiber would shatter. The Great Ship refused to slow, so the target needed to find quite a lot of velocity and find it quickly. Thankfully the asteroid was a tough, useful blessing. One hundred billion tons of iron could be melted, and that melt could be vaporized in controlled bursts, banks of lasers working with surgical grace and surgical conviction, delivering just enough thrust with just enough stability to launch the artifact away from the Great Ship. And then with luck, the inevitable collision might not spoil the object’s value for engineers and historians.
    The girl took no part in the discussion. She stood apart. She was a baby barely able to control the mutations of her own flesh, dressed in a suit nearly identical to everyone else’s suit. In a cabin full of chatter and hand gestures, she ordered the skimmer’s wall to become clear. The Ship’s slick gray hull raced beneath them, and nobody else noticed. Then her hyperfiber arm lifted, bent at first and then straight, and one finger was pointed at the wrong place and then the right place. The correction was made instantly, without anyone’s help.
    One of the boys asked Gleem, “What are you doing?”
    She didn’t answer. Really, if he didn’t appreciate what her arm meant, then he was too ignorant to survive long as a Remora.
    The oldest girl said, “Oh, that’s where it’s going to crash.”
    Everyone but Gleem turned towards Orleans.
    “Of course it is,” said the baby, laughing at all of them. “Don’t you see? The old coward already has us making a nice safe spiral around the crash site!”
    The epiphany was tiny. Nothing about any recent day was better or worse, certainly not special, and the passenger couldn’t recall so much as one novel thought inside the boredom. He ate and breathed and wept and begged for death, and his dreams were ordinary or they were forgotten. And then he was awake again, hungry enough to endure the simple salted paste—the easiest food that could be made by machinery that was shepherding its energy. He ate until the immortal stomachs stopped complaining, and he drank sweetened water, and he evacuated his bowels twice before realizing that he hadn’t screamed or sobbed once, much less complained about this unyielding hell of existence.
    Why wasn’t he shrieking in agony?
    The question posed itself, and the same voice tried to give a worthy answer.
    “Because you have come to terms with your fate.”
    But no, that wasn’t the case. What he realized at last—what he should have appreciated from the first moment inside this tomb—was that he had resources beyond count. The lifesuit was tough but idiotic. But the body inside the suit was infused with phages and nanotools and genetic materials, modern as well as ancient. Every emergency pathway was a finger. The mechanisms