(Content Warnings: psychological abuse/isolation and confinement of a minor, animal death)
1. Why Bea is so angry at me all the time.
2. What exactly is in the vault in Node 2 of the ship, a room that technically only Ava as team lead should have access to.
3. How much trouble exactly does Bea think I will get into if I go look—just look! at what is in the vault.
4. How much trouble does she think she will get into for resetting my access permissions behind Mother’s back.
5. How resetting said access permissions does not really feel like a birthday gift to me, in that:
a. Unlike my gifts to her and Ava, Bea’s present required minimal effort. The ship’s computer systems, interface, and programming protocols fall under her assigned field duties anyway.
b. I hand made Bea a card with the special blue1 glitterglue pen I had been saving since the last transport arrived from Mother.
6. How it was my idea to make our “birthday cake” by mashing a bunch of dessert packs together: tiramisu, egg custard tarts, three red bean bungeoppang on the top—one for each of us, Ava (18), Bea (13), and me (8 now!)
7. How I had to beg and beg Ava for the amber tape she keeps in reserve, so I could put some over the glass of our flashlights and the three of us could pretend we had real birthday candles for once.
8. That these are all things that display initiative and exhibit measured, careful forethought, and involved me doing things I did not really want to do like moving silent as a ghost in the dark when I woke up (so the two of them could sleep in as long as possible) and asking Ava over and over again to please let me use the tape just this once.
9. What happens after mission completion. What it will be like to go home, our real home on Earth, for the first time. The list of things I’m going to do there2 .
10. What Mother might be like when we meet in person. Her smell, the feel of her hand in mine, the sound of her voice in the same room instead of filtered through the comm. How different or alike her face might look from Ava’s face, Bea’s face, my face. Since really, it is the same face, only creased and sun-freckled and much, much older.
11. How the last time Bea broke the rules, Ava had to put her in involuntary quarantine for two weeks, and she has never really been the same since.
12. That living with her feels like living with a hurricane in a bell jar. Any moment, I might accidentally say or do something that sets it free, and the terror that is Bea will explode. She will tear through the ship spitting shards of glass, smashing lab instruments and lights, ripping apart any and every soft, breakable thing, and all Ava and I will be able to do is shelter under the aluminum shell of the galley table and hold our hands over our ears.
13. How Ava used to tell us both all the time, “You’re the best things that ever happened to me. The best things!” whenever one of us was upset. How lonely it was for Ava as the oldest, by herself on board, with nobody to put love into, before it was the three of us together, complete.
14. How Bea refuses to call Mother “Mother” except during video comms, like today, when we sang Happy Birthday! with her and the base team on Earth. Bea calls her “Haneul”3 behind her back the rest of the time (when only Ava and I are around to hear it—of course!).
15. How a parent clone is still a kind of parent. How I am still a kind of sister to her.
16. How she needs to remember that we are each priceless and exceptionally bright and integral to the mission and to Mother’s recovery. How the ship has been built expressly for three—optimized for the three of us, and the system starts to fall apart when just the one doesn’t pull her fair share of the weight.
17. How Ava and I can always tell when Bea has not actually brushed her teeth, only wetted the toothbrush a bit and swirled the bristles around her mouth for a few seconds.
18. Also, the booger wall she thinks we don’t know about.
19. Just how much it hurts me every time she says, “You’re just a copy, C. Nothing but a copy.”
scowl-scowl-scowl
You’re just a copy. You’re just a copy. You’re just a copy.
I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.
20. That scowl-scowl-scowl look on her face that means if I don’t shut up quick or stop whatever it is I’m doing that is annoying her I will regret it, because she will do something mean like:
a. Shove me so hard I bang my nose or bite the inside of my cheek, and my mouth fills with the taste of blood.
b. Tie all the bungee cords on my sleep station extra tight while I’m inside, so when I wake up, my whole body is pins and needles, my fingers so clumsy that it delays the start time of my first task by 8.402 minutes.
c. Poison all my mice in the microgravity research module and leave the cages open, so the next time I check on them, their soft, lifeless bodies are floating all over the lab.
It was horrible. My favourite and not-so-favourite mice gone all at once like that. And Mother (who plans for everything) had to coordinate an expensive rush transport just to replace them, and still it pushed back the project timeline4 .
21. That I have decided I am going to look at what is in the vault in Node 2 after all, while Ava goes on mandated health rest today.
22. Because Bea is wrong. I am not a baby. And I am not Mother’s favourite toy. And as much as I hate breaking rules, I am not afraid of getting in trouble.
23. Maybe, if we are caught, Ava will put us in involuntary quarantine together, and Bea would be less lonely this time at least.
24. How Bea hates the visualization method—or really anything—suggested in the productivity handbook:
a. Visualize the outcome and rewards associated with accomplishing the task.
(I think of Mother’s face beaming with pride on the video comm channel. The sound of her voice when she tells me I’ve done it. You’ve done it! We’ve done it, Cordelia! The exact right course of treatment—the cure, all your hard work. You’ve succeeded just like I knew you would! I think of how Ava, Bea, and I will be allowed to go home to Mother because we have done such a wonderful thing for her and humanity. I think about what it will be like to set foot on Earth for the first time.)
b. Focus on the feelings that will arise having achieved the goal or task.
(I feel loved. I feel special. I feel safe. I feel happy.)
c. Break down the task into manageable, intermediate, action steps.
(Follow the instructions from Mother and the pathology team, extract and study samples, measure/document pattern of protein crystallization in the microgravity lab, read latest electrophoresis gels, upload data, move to next set of trials, etc.)
d. Keep a checklist and reward yourself for achieving incremental goals.
(Check!)
25. How creepy the truss is between our quarters and Node 2. How I always trip over myself those first few steps in artificial gravity. And how even though I know it is perfectly safe, I make sure to walk extra fast when passing the door to the airlock, try not to think of all that empty space just beyond.
26. Whether I am or am not Mother’s favourite.
27. But also, how maybe if Bea put in a little more effort, talked back a little less, worked on reducing her project completion time averages, then her performance reviews would be better. Then Mother would send things like glitterglue pens and stickers up to her too.
28. How Ava and I are not judging her, but we can always tell when she is about to do something stupid or reckless that will get her in trouble.
29. How this shift in Bea’s mood comes like a change in atmospheric pressure. Like the air in the ship is somehow heavier than usual, cold with that prickly sort of quiet you know never lasts for long. And because you are not used to it, it makes you a little giddy and nervous each time, and there is a small, secret part of you that feels relieved when it breaks.
30. Why Bea stopped playing HomePlanet!5 with us even though she was the one who made it up and was the best at it by far.
31. How I open the vault while Ava is on scheduled health rest:
a. I do it without thinking because I don’t want to chicken out at the last minute. I don’t stop to take a breath. I don’t jump in place at the end of the corridor or count myself down from ten.
b. Instead, I imagine only how it will feel to be on the other side of the door.
(Satisfied! Appeased! Calm! Joyful!)
And then I run.
I don’t think about what will happen if Ava or Mother finds out.
c. All I think about are my feet striking the floor and carrying me closer to my goal, the sound of me moving like a tiny drum down the corridor, thump-thump-thump-thump-thump, faster and faster, until I slap my badge against the reader.
32. How there is just enough of a delay to make me worry it is not going to open after all, and that it is just another one of Bea’s pranks.
But then, whoosh! the door slides open inches from my face.
33. In that moment, while my eyes adjust to the low light, I want to ask Bea what she expected to see the first time she broke into the vault. If it was worth those two weeks of isolation.
34. That I don’t know what I was expecting to see on the other side of the door. But whatever I had imagined, it was not myself times three, in a neat row of stasis tanks.
Three identical Cordelias with their eyes closed, so calm and peacefully asleep. Suspended in blue fluid, their hair floats in clouds around their heads like seaweed.
Three identical, doll-like me’s patiently awaiting the moment they might be called upon to awake.
35. How I only noticed Ava was behind me when I felt her hand on my shoulder. How she made me turn around, put her hands gently on the sides of my face to keep me from looking back into the vault. “I’m sorry, Cordelia,” she said. “C, I’m so, so sorry. You were never supposed to find out like this. Mother and I… You have to understand that she only wants what’s best. Doesn’t want you to worry—for it to distract you from your work.”
36. How when I asked if Ava was mad at me, told her it was all my fault, told her how sorry I was and that I wouldn’t do it again and please not to tell Mother, she kneeled down instead of answering yes or no.
37. How Ava rubbed her eyes like she was still trying to wake up and said, “You and Bea were never supposed to find out for another five years or so. Not until I deteriorate further and it’s time to train a replacement. You have to understand that I wanted to give you just a few more years.”
38. How I said No like it was the only word I knew. No. No. No. No.
39. And when you repeat a word over and over like that too many times, it starts not to mean anything anymore.
40. When Ava held onto me just then, I realized I had never heard her apologize for anything before in my life.
41. I want to tell Bea that Mother really has planned for everything after all. That even by base team’s most generous estimates, neither Ava, Bea, or me are supposed to last more than twenty-four years after genesis.
42. That the truth can feel like a sudden change in pressure, or a storm, or a rapid expansion of air, like gravity crushing you with your own weight.
43. Bea has been right this whole time.
We are just Mother’s project.
I am just a copy.
44. We are never getting off this ship.
45. The three perfect girls in their pretty blue containers are the proof.
One, two, three. Each perfectly accounted for.
Ava :: Bea :: me. Interchangeable.
46. What will their names be, these next girls? Did Bea ever think to ask?
Who names you?
47. And at the exact moment I knew it could never be true, I saw the small, hidden part of myself that had wanted, deep down, to be Mother’s favourite after all.
48. All those times Mother said I would be the one to develop the treatment that would cure her, fix everything, I had believed Mother really did have faith in me—the me who is writing this sentence in messy ballpoint pen this very second, the me who Ava sometimes still has to tuck into the sleep station, the me who loves Ava’s stupid see-through ponies on Equineox318 and impossible Beatriceurn even though I know it’s all, all of it, completely made up.
49. How I understand Bea now, better than she thinks.
50. How it might make things a bit more bearable if she could hate me just a little less.
51. How, if she would give me a chance, maybe we could still try, just try and pretend to be like real sisters for once.
_________________________________
1. her favorite colour
2. Top 3: 1) Learn to swim. 2) Paint all my nails different colours. 3) Eat a real hotdog.
3. Mother’s real name = Haneul M. Kim
4. Ava reprimanded Bea with five days in quarantine for it. Mother was not happy.
5. The way you play HomePlanet! is this. Let’s say you are performing a boring, repetitive task (like disinfecting cages in the lab, vacuum packing dead mice and labeling them for sendoff and processing, cataloguing the new batch of live mice from the latest transport, or sorting and organizing the MREs by expiration date). Ava will say something like “Today, on Equineox318, the marsh tackies, whose coats are a semi-translucent, swirling white and blue, have begun their annual migration from the northern hemisphere to the southern.” Then, she will look at you with her eyes all wide, and that means it’s your turn to say something about your HomePlanet!
It is not the kind of game that anybody wins, but Beatriceurn was my favourite. On Beatriceurn the atmosphere smells faintly like reheated scrambled eggs, and there are four moons and one tiny sun. The dominant life form, the Beatricettes, are a species of bird-bat-dolphin who live in iridescent mineral caves and use echolocation to navigate their surroundings. They live mainly off fruit but will make an exception for the flesh of any animals or humans who cross them or their young.
