Tyler Hillis

“Really? Riding the link again?”

The voice was distant, Yalma thought. Did it belong to Freddy? Or his engineer friend Jackson? She wasn’t sure.

“Hey, get up,” the voice said, wandering in again. “Shake that shit out of your head. We need to get to work.”

Yalma finally opened her eyes. She was no longer in the snow-covered forest of ancient earth, riding inside the cab of a train and…what had happened again? Something shined. Something hit. Red everywhere. But even as she tried to remember, it dissolved into nothing.

That was the problem with links. They left you with a glimpse of life back on earth, but not with a lasting image of it. It was like waking from a dream – only one that wasn’t your own. The fleeting experiences clung to her memory, but trying to chase them only caused them to disappear more rapidly.

Yalma looked around her pod and slid the headset off her forehead. There were two slight *pops* when the diodes stuck to her temples lost their suction and slid away.

Dargin sat in a nearby chair, picking at his fingernails and shooting her frustrated scowls as she slowly stood and stretched. He disapproved, she knew, of her frequent trips to the link pods. But she found it hard to resist. The memories of earth were so wild and varied and full of experiences she would never have. If she wasn’t working or eating or sleeping, she was most likely in the pod, riding a wave of human memory like a junkie satisfying a fix.

And why shouldn’t she? Trillions of recorded memories were at her fingertips. She could fly fighter jets during the War of Orbital Control, or tend to beehives in southeast Asia, or fall in love at a drive-in theater. The link was her escape from the cruel reality of Proxima Hab 15b.

All habitants were required by colony directive to link at minimum once every ProxDec Cycle, in order to maintain their social connection with earth and the early humans. But there was no maximum limit. Yalma had been increasing her linkage steadily for the past seventeen ProxYears, finally reaching the point she was at now, spending every non-occupied waking moment wired into the past. The only issue it caused (aside from concern and annoyance from Dargin and her host-mother Fli) was that after disconnection, it left her head swirling with agonizing questions that she’d never have the answer to.

Why had they been so eager to leave? Why had they doomed her entire existence to this ball of rock four lightyears away? She knew the “Colony Mission Objective” reasons that were pounded into their psyche throughout early development, but she didn’t understand the human reason. The decisions of someone hundreds of years ago set her life into motion well before she had any say in the matter. And so she found a small bit of resistance in the link pods. They allowed her some other, more interesting life. Even if it was only a short, dissolvable moment.

“Your brain is going to mush, Yalma,” Dargin said through his teeth as he bit at a jagged fingernail on his left hand.

“And yours started as mush,” Yalma replied, tossing her pillow at his face. His hand, already up in position from his nail biting, caught the pillow and tossed it back quickly. It hit Yalma before she could react and she let out a small laugh.

“Let’s go you big ape,” Yalma said.