“And I can pick out anything I want?” As Ruth pages through the look book with her extensors, a squeal rises from whatever remains of her flesh mouth. With a start, Jerome Parker realizes he hasn’t seen one organic part of his daughter in years.
“Happy birthday, sweetie.” Privately, he’s steered the salesman toward budget options. Business at the mine isn’t what it used to be. They’ll have to stay within the government stipend for a first-time Skyn. Hell, Jerome still wears his first one, though he pays to age it up every few years.
On the salesman’s tablet, Ruth skims through the collection of models. With growing irritation, Jerome watches her reject Skyn after Skyn. She lingers for a half-second on a picture of a pretty ebony-colored girl with bright red hair, then flips all the way to the back of the catalog. The expensive part.
Jerome tries not to groan.
The salesman kneels next to Ruth. “For a very small fee, we can customize your selection. Do you see anything you like?”
“Let her take her time,” snaps Jerome. Though he can’t quite fault the man’s impatience. Ruth has been taking a while to decide.
Ruth closes the tablet. “None of these bodies are me.”
“Oh, honey.” If it was at all possible, Jerome would have taken her into his arms. He makes do with a gentle pat on Ruth’s soon-to-be-vacated exosuit.
Titan is poison to humans, from its frequent methane rains to its utter lack of arability. Colonists on this inhospitable yet mineral-rich moon start dying the moment they land or are born, and it’s not a merciful death. They suffocate.
This sad biological fact had kept Titan from colonization for centuries. Then, a breakthrough: the whole-body prosthesis known as a Skyn. Brains could be liquidated, their personalities compressed onto a thin Titan-mined silicon chip which contained the true essence of a Titanian for the rest of his or her very unnatural life. The chips were slotted into a virtually indestructible Skyn. It feels like being inside a real human body (mostly). It resembles a real human body (to an extent). Even reproduction was possible (after a fashion).
Adult arrivals to Titan, those who had staked their claim and poured their entire life savings into a one-way ticket here, have the procedure done the moment they land. Jerome and his wife Clara did it twenty years ago, and his weak digitized memory recalls it as a pain-free, near-seamless event. But for second-generation colonists like his daughter, the process is a little different.
Before a brain can be pulverized and its consciousness encoded onto a metal wafer, it needs to undergo puberty. Which means fourteen years of protecting the original human body as much as possible. Enter the exosuit: a protective shield for Titanian children. Resembling a black trash bag with skeleton-like extensors, the exosuit manages to hide the fact that at this point in her life Ruth is little more than a rotting skull containing a precious human brain. Nothing Jerome could have done would have stopped this process, short of abandoning Titan.
But he still feels like crap about it.
Ruth hands the tablet to him. “I know what I want, Daddy. It’s in our budget and I really think it’s gonna work for me.”
Jerome tilts the tablet up, eager to see his daughter’s first Skyn.
It’s a giant banana-yellow slug with bright pink feelers and a glaze of white mucus over the entire surface of its hideous body.
“Holy shit,” Jerome says. “It’s a slug monster.”
“Yeah, isn’t it great?!” The computerized voice issuing from Ruth’s talkbox is beyond giddy.
“Ruthie, be realistic. Here, let’s find you a real one.” But before Jerome can swipe back to the more sensible faces in the earlier part of the catalog, the salesman is at his elbow.
“Ah yes, the AZK-42 in canary. The, shall we say, ‘exotic’ models are very chic this cycle.”
Jerome whirls on their unwanted helper. “Don’t encourage this. Why is this even in the catalog? Who would make a Skyn of a giant slug?”
“The non-standard designs,” the unruffled salesman says, “are mostly submitted by colonists. It’s an open-source catalog.”
“You’re not gonna be a slug monster, Ruth. Go back to the front and try again.”
“But this is the one I want,” Ruth says, her voice stopping just short of a whine. “Haven’t my grades been good? Haven’t I behaved at home?”
Jerome sighs. “You realize you’re going to be a slug monster until you can afford another Skyn on your own, right? You could be stuck in this thing for decades. There aren’t even hands.”
“It has pseudopods,” she says. “I’ve thought this through, Dad.”
“I guess you don’t want to be like your boring old parents.” Most colonists chose a human-looking Skyn as their permanent prosthesis, though there were always a few oddballs who spiced it up with green hair or an extra arm. Even those people tended to have their add-ons removed after they became tired of them. A Skyn was supposed to be a replacement for a body, not some sort of costume.
A huff issues from both the talkbox and whatever’s left of Ruth’s mouth. “This isn’t about you, Daddy. This is about me being my own person.”
“This thing isn’t a person, Ruth. For God’s sake, it doesn’t even have eyes. You’ll be blind!”
“There are optical sensors,” says the salesman, indicating a row of black beads on the monstrosity’s flank. “She’ll have a normal hi-res visual array, same as any other human on Titan. In practice, it’s not too different from your prosthetic.”
Yeah, I didn’t ask for your input, Jerome thinks. He focuses his ire on a poster opposite him showing a freshly Skynned boy and girl sitting side-by-side in a bright red transport vehicle, their smiles radiant. That was supposed to be Ruth’s future, not this abomination. Jerome steels his jaw and forces himself to look away, back at the hidden remains of his daughter in her puffy black suit. “This is something you have to be certain about, Ruthie. One hundred percent sure. Because once they put you in this body, we can’t return it.”
“I won’t want to return it,” Ruth says. Jerome can see the flashing of her organic eyes within the small viewport of the suit. There isn’t much left of them, but within the shriveled, milky eyeball he sees a sliver of the green-gray irises he remembers from her infancy, before the technicians sealed her within the exosuit. “I want to wear it, and have it carry my mind around, and live inside it always.”
Before he can talk himself out of it, Jerome nods at the hovering salesman. “I guess we’ll take it.”
And this is how Ruth Parker, on the day in every young Titanian’s life when they flee the disintegrating body of their youth and spend the rest of their life smeared over a silicon chip deep within the works of a lifelike inorganic Skyn, became a boneless, bright yellow, six-foot-tall slug monster.
As Jerome expected, Clara loses it when he and Ruth come walking and slithering in.
“She looks ridiculous,” Clara says. “How could you let her pick out that awful thing?”
“I like it,” Ruth says. She’d sweet-talked Jerome into a vocal implant to transform her voice into a low rumble, like something you’d expect to hear bubbling up from a swamp.
“Oh, Ruthie, you don’t know what you like.” Clara whirls on Jerome, the rubber of her face reddening as her Skyn registers fury. “She can’t go to school like this! She’ll be bullied, and it’ll be your fault.”
Jerome contemplates Ruth’s beefy pseudopodia. They look like they could snap a silicon stalagmite from the surface of Titan with no effort at all. “I think maybe Ruth is the one who’ll be doing the bullying now.”
“I’m not going to bully anyone,” Ruth says in her new voice. “Why can’t you just accept this is what I want to be?”
Clara glares at Jerome. “Maybe we can put a little hat on it.”
Ruth belts out an unnerving, swampy bellow. “I’ll be in my room,” she says, gliding up the stairs with an undulous motion. The framed family photographs on the walls rattle when the door slams shut.
“I can’t believe she did this. I can’t believe you let her do this.” Clara gives Jerome a withering expression, then stalks to their bedroom. This time, the frames crash to the floor.
It was her decision, Jerome thinks, though he’s been a dad long enough to know kids don’t always know what’s best for themselves. Even ones as level-headed as Ruth is, or at least was.
No two ways about it, Titan is hell. Methane gas bubbles to the surface of the lakes covering over eighty percent of the moon’s surface. The air hurts to breathe, at least until your lungs die. But thanks to the Homesteader Act of 2084, if you want to reserve mineral rights to the plethora of Titanian riches, then you and your family have to live there.
Jerome and Clara had been born on Earth, only a few decades after the construction of the great orbitals slung between Saturn and Uranus. Growing up, they’d both watched the orbital reality feeds centering on the glamorous lives of the orbitals’ multi-billionaire residents. For two dirt-poor kids from Wyoming, it was a window into an alien world of opulence and vapidity, and they loved every minute of it. They were determined, first as friends and then as lovers, to break free of Earth and find their place in the stars.
Until Jerome found out a year’s rent on the least glamorous orbital penciled out to more than his parents’ ranch had made in its entire lifetime.
Of course, there was Titan, the brand-new mining colony supplying necessary materials to both the resource-free orbitals and the stripped-bare Earth. Free land, if you got there before it was all claimed. A free starter Skyn, though maintenance fees ate up around twenty-five percent of a family mine’s take. It wasn’t the off-world life they’d dreamed of, but Jerome and Clara banked their gametes, said goodbye to their flesh, and left for their journey to Titan.
And that journey had ended here, in a house a good deal smaller than they could have had on Earth, on a moon even less hospitable to life than Earth itself is now. But at least they’re able to see the orbitals sometimes with a telescope. Maybe someday they can even afford a vacation there, though it doesn’t seem too likely.
“Ruthie?” he asks, knocking at her door as weak sun filters through the skylights. “It’s time for school, sweetie.”
The six-foot-tall slug monster that is also somehow his fourteen-year-old daughter swings the door open. “Mom won’t let me go. Not unless I wear clothes.” With one pseudopod she gestures toward a nest of ripped pants, dresses, and blouses scattered on the quilt on her bed. Ruth’s maternal grandmother paid to have it printed as a birthday present for Ruth last year, based on her own design. Jerome, Clara, and Ruth even went down to the printer’s dome as a family to receive the handmade quilt that had never, and would never, be touched by a single organic human.
Plucking at his Skyn, Jerome thinks that maybe a whole-body prosthetic isn’t that authentic, after all.
“Then put the clothes on,” he says.
“None of them fit anymore! Besides, would you really have me cover this up?” She lets a portion of her back half shimmy. Jerome knows he should feel scandalized and punish his daughter, but instead he’s just confused.
“I guess? Here, Ruthie, sit down.” They sit on the bed at the same time, and Jerome’s phantom stomach lurches a little when he hears the sloshing sound her grotesque body makes. “Ruth, if you want to switch Skynz we’ll find a way to pay for another one. We’ll take out another mortgage if we have to.”
The slug monster’s bead-like optical sensors blink. “But you said it wasn’t returnable.”
“It’s not, but that’s okay. You made a mistake. Why, when I picked out my first body—“
Ruth’s voice burbles like an undersea demon in some ancient monster flick. “I’m not you. I like this body. There isn’t another body I want to have, and you’re both going to have to get used to it. This is me now.”
Jerome nods, relieved. They couldn’t have afforded a new Skyn even if Ruth wanted to change it out, but if she’d asked, he would have found a way. “I’ll try to work on your mother. School can wait.”
“I like school too,” Ruth adds, but Jerome’s already gone all the way down the stairs of their modest two-story Titanian dome home. He calls the school, tells them she’s sick. Somehow he has the feeling that when Ruth does return to class, she won’t be wearing clothes.
Like all Titanian homesteaders, Jerome spends most of the waking cycle at his claim, watching over the robot crew that excavates his land. Over the next week, he’s there even more than usual.
“So, Parker,” says his neighbor Darletta, “heard your kid’s going through a rebellious phase.”
Is that what this is? Jerome wonders. Rebellion? “It can’t be easy,” Jerome says, “being a teen on this world. Having your body disintegrate before you even get a chance to know what it’s like to be alive. Organically alive.”
Darletta shrugs. “Eh, I don’t notice that much of a difference.”
With a dawning horror, Jerome realizes that he can’t quite recall what it felt like to be inside a human body. Only that it’s superior to Skynned life in some way he can’t put a synthetic finger on.
“Why did we come here, Letta?”
“Wasn’t much left for us on Earth,” she says. She spits a bit of leaky fluid onto the silver soil. “At least not for me.”
“Me neither,” Jerome says, gazing out at the flat, barren Titanian landscape with its scattering of bustling work robots. They remind him of the elderly collies that had guarded the family ranch. His father’s ranch hadn’t broken even for ten years, and was in the process of being repossessed when Jerome left. As meager as his future is on Titan, at least he’s able to keep his head above water most of the time.
“Give her time,” Darletta says. “I messed up my first Skyn too, went for a seven-footer. Thought it would help me access the ammonia deposits on that cliff at the edge of my property, so I wouldn’t have to buy a climbing robot.”
Jerome looks his friend up and down. She’s no bigger than five-two. “Well, did it?”
“It did! But it wasn’t me, you know? So I had the old girl sawed down when I could get the robot.” She pats a hand against her stomach. “Maybe this Skyn won’t be Ruth, either.”
Yeah, but your mistake was a lot easier to fix, Jerome thinks. “I hope not,” he says.
Darletta points. “Twister.” A silver funnel dances in the distance, stirring up clouds of silicate and frozen poison. Jerome knows the storm can’t hurt his Skyn, but he still feels the urge to bury himself in a tornado cellar. And maybe stay there for a few hundred years.
On the way back from Darletta’s place, Jerome stops over at Ruth’s school. He tells himself that she’ll appreciate some company on the walk back home, but deep down he can admit that he just wants to see her interact with the other kids.
And see if she’s telling the truth about not caring about fitting in.
A sickening jolt of déjà vu hits Jerome when he steps onto the quad. It’s not exactly the same as the one he’d spent his own lunch breaks in as a teenager, but it’s damn close enough. Twin tetherball stands sit at the end of a long stretch of faux clay—isn’t everything faux here? Jerome thinks—while the students are huddled around a group of long benches. The screen hanging above their heads simulates a perfect blue sky.
In actuality, Skynned brains don’t need to eat. The whole-body prosthetic runs off excess power from the electrical grid, and the organic component itself requires only one nutrient pack a week to stay alive. But the first colonists had engineered a sense of taste and a feeling of hunger to the apparatus. Whenever Jerome eats Clara’s roasted like-okra or her chicken-fried kinda-steak, he’s glad they did. But based on how few of the students are eating, he’s not sure if it’s as important to the second generation.
Jerome walks over to one of the girls gossiping near the tetherball poles, and nearly faints dead away when she turns around.
“Shit! I mean ... have you seen Ruth Parker? She’s my daughter.”
“Ruth’s my friend,” the girl says. “She’s just running a little late.”
So this is the kind of friend Ruth has now, Jerome thinks. While the girl is humanoid in shape, nobody would ever confuse her for a normal Earth-born person. Her Skyn is stained the silvery-brown color of Titan itself, and the hues on her face, bald head, and the backs of her hands ripple like the skin of the chameleons he’d caught at the ranch as a boy. The palms of her hands appear to be magnetic, which would explain the long chains of forks and spoons hanging from them. The teenager catches his stare, and jangles the utensils with a little smirk.
“Daddy?” calls a by-now-familiar voice from the edge of the quad.
With gratitude, Jerome diverts his attention away from the chameleon girl. “Ruthie! Decided to call it an early night. Wanna get some ice cream?”
The chameleon girl’s face folds up. If she’d had a nose, it would have wrinkled. “Only losers eat food.” She spits the word like it was poison, from a mouth just a bit wider than it should be.
“Leave my dad alone, Zoey,” Ruth burbles, not unkindly.
The girl flicks her wrist, making the string of forks clink against one another, and saunters off.
“Is she one of your friends?” Jerome asks once Zoey is out of earshot.
Ruth sighs. “She’s really nice, Daddy.”
Jerome shakes his head. “If you say so,” he mutters.
“Zoey designed that Skyn herself. Isn’t it neat?”
He gapes at his daughter, and for the first time in weeks he’s not gaping on her account. “No, it’s not! It’s all wrong!”
A few of the students peek their heads up from their lunches and textbooks. Most of them present like normal human teenagers, but there are a few with appendages or coloration far outside the norm. But there’s nobody here quite like his Ruth.
“Let’s go home,” Ruth says, threading a pseudopod around Jerome’s arm.
Jerome takes in the quad one final time. With minor differences, it could have come straight out of his own past. Until he remembers that everything here is fake, and that the blue sky above is a screen thinner than the side of his prosthetic hand. He gropes for something profound to say, but can only come up with “Does anyone here use that tetherball court?”
“Not really, Daddy.”
“They didn’t in my day, either.”
So they walk and slither away. Something sharp crunches beneath Jerome’s rubber-and-alloy feet. It’s raining silicate again.
When Ruth picked that monstrous body, Jerome assumed that she’d chosen to put romance on hold for the next few years. That doesn’t bother him any, but it bothers Clara a lot.
“Dating’s a normal part of the teenage experience,” she says, as she sloshes a carton of almost-eggs into a skillet. “She’s going to miss out on years of interpersonal development, all because you thought she was mature enough to make this kind of decision.”
Jerome sets down his tablet. “Ruth’s more mature than you think she is, Clara.”
“Then there’s that friend of hers you told me about, Zoey.” Jerome watches a ripple of disgust travel down Clara’s spine. “Designing your own body seems so ... perverted.”
“Good morning to you too, Mother,” Ruth says. She undulates herself over to the breakfast table and squats on the linoleum. Ruth doesn’t use chairs anymore.
“Oh, honey, she didn’t mean anything by that.” Jerome picks the tablet back up, clicks on the tab for orbital news. Another high-profile celebrity divorce, another gala event raising money for novel space-borne diseases. None of it relevant to his life here.
“The hell I didn’t,” mutters Clara under her breath as she slaps a few strips of quasi-bacon next to the sizzling eggs.
“For your information, I have a boyfriend. We’ve been going steady for a week, since he was Skynned. He’s escorting me to school today.”
A flicker of optimism breaks through Clara’s angry exterior. “When can we meet this nice young man?”
Beneath one of Ruth’s many lemon-yellow skin folds chimes the sound of a tablet. “Right now!” She takes a polite bite of food—Jerome guesses not eating must be the other fad of the day, along with novelty bodies—and ripples down the hallway. Clara follows close behind.
There’s the unlatching of the front door, and then Clara screams even louder than she did when she’d first seen Ruth’s new Skyn.
Jerome throws down his napkin and bolts from his chair. He arrives at the wood-paneled foyer just in time to see Ruth leave home pseudopod-in-claw with a flying creature the approximate size and shape of an adult man’s head, bristling with small translucent wings. The two teenagers slither and float down the neat cobblestone that leads from the house to the street, past the printed rustic mailbox and white picket fence, before they’re obscured by layers upon layers of silvery dust.
A few weeks later, Jerome gets a call from Ruth’s school.
Please don’t let it be anything bad, he thinks as he sprints down the hallway. The caller hadn’t told Jerome what the trouble was, said he’d have to come see it for himself in the infirmary.
Like the quad with its tetherball courts and artificial blue sky, the inside of the school reminds him of his own on Earth not all that long ago. His boots even squeak when he turns a corner. Jerome asks directions from a passing student—an everyday normal human-type one—and makes his way there.
Ruth, in all her slug monster glory, sits near but not on a high-backed chair in the cramped infirmary. A teacher flanks her on each side, though the one on the left seems buried in the feedreader on his tablet. On a gurney in the middle of the room is a hyperventilating Skynned boy covered in a layer of purple slime. Neon-bright posters educating students about the importance of regular maintenance checks on their new prosthetics plaster the walls. When Jerome was a teenager, those kinds of posters had been about condoms.
“Ruth, what’s going on?” asks Jerome.
The boy points at Ruth. “She puked on me! She tried to kill me!”
“Naw,” Jerome says, “she can’t do that.”
“I’m afraid it’s true,” says one of the teachers, a short woman with a Skyn stained in permanent heavy makeup. She steps over to the gurney. “It was caught on tape.”
Jerome gawks at his daughter, more astonished than angry. “Ruth, you did this? But how, the Skyn doesn’t—“
“Zoey modified it, Dad. I told you she was smart.”
The boy whines and rolls around. “It burns.”
“No, it doesn’t,” snaps the other teacher before returning to his feed.
Jerome attempts to tower over Ruth, show her who’s boss, but it’s no use. She’s taller than he is now, and will be until one of them pays for a new Skyn. “I am so disappointed in you, Ruthie.”
“He threatened to rip Steve’s wings off, so I slimed him. I was just defending my boyfriend.”
For some reason, the fact that the wing-covered sphere that is also somehow his daughter’s boyfriend is named “Steve” just makes this situation even stranger. “You can’t modify a Skyn, honey. It’s against the law.”
“Whose law? Earth’s law? Daddy, we’re not on Earth anymore.”
No, we’re not, Jerome thinks, because on Earth you wouldn’t be turned into this thing you are. You would have kept your body, not had it worn away in this inhuman atmosphere. Twin jolts of guilt and anger war in his mind, with just a little pinch of fear. “They can jail you for this. You’re a minor, so they won’t—“
“I’ll sue!” yells the boy on the gurney.
“Don’t you ever think about why they don’t want us to modify our Skynz?” Ruth asks. “Why almost everyone here looks so human?” Ruth scoots across the floor as she carries on, and it’s clear the teachers have given up guarding her. “Because they know we could be so much more.”
Jerome addresses the fold of skin that houses his daughter’s optical sensors. “You’re human, Ruthie. You were human when you were born, and you’re human now, no matter what you look like.”
“No, I’m Titanian.”
The woman teacher passes a rag to the nurse, who’d just come in. The nurse cleans the slime off the complaining boy, then clears the gurney for a still-organic student inside a baggy rubber exosuit. He reaches into the suit with a handful of salve and lowers in a feeding tube. Jerome supposes the presence of exosuited organics is most of the reason why the school maintains an infirmary. Skynned colonists go somewhere more like a service center when they break down.
“She’s suspended for two weeks,” the other teacher says. “And I’d get those modifications out of there quick before someone complains to the governor.”
“The governor,” Ruth says, her words filtered through scummy pond water, “lives on Earth. She’s never even been to Titan. How can someone like that know what’s best for us?”
Jerome grabs his daughter by a pseudopod. “Enough, Ruth. We’re leaving.” He averts eye contact with the teachers and nurse on the way out. He doesn’t think he’s been more embarrassed in his life.
After a short trip to a service center to remove the slime organ and a few other illegal modifications—what the hell, Ruth? —Clara banishes Ruth to the house for the next two weeks. She reverses the sentence the following day and sends her off to the claim with Jerome.
“You take her,” Clara says as she presses Jerome’s galvanized-steel lunch pail into his hands. “She’s creeping me out.”
“She can hear you,” Jerome says. Ruth is by the front door, her Skyn scrubbed until it almost gleams.
Clara gives him a look that tells him she knows and heads back into the kitchen.
Jerome sighs. “Well, let’s go.”
It’s not raining methane today, at least, and the silicate clouds aren’t as thick as usual. Jerome almost thinks he can see the glimmer of his own boyhood home in Wyoming in this place of rocky barrenness, but that’s spoiled when he catches a glimpse of the silver sky.
“Nice day for a walk,” he says, but Ruth doesn’t respond. “Listen, you know that what you did was bad, okay? Even if you don’t think it was. We could lose our claim over this if Earth found out.”
“Daddy, why did you and Mom come to Titan?”
Jerome pauses. It’s such a non-sequitur of a question that he’s thrown off his guard. “There wasn’t any future on Earth,” he says, recalling Darletta’s words from a while back.
“But didn’t you want to start a new life? Why did you come to another world if you were just gonna do the same things you did on Earth?”
He catches himself nodding and forces himself to stop. “We wanted to live on the orbitals, but we couldn’t afford it, so this was the next-best thing. Maybe someday if you work very hard, you’ll be able to live there.”
“The orbitals suck, Daddy.” Jerome tries to read defiance in her expression, but he can’t. Her face always seems to wear the same blank giant-slug-monster appearance. Maybe he’s just too boring and normal to see it. “They’re so uncool. Almost as uncool as Earth.”
“They weren’t so uncool when your mother and me were kids.”
He imagines her optical sensors rolling in their arrays. “That’s because you’re uncool.”
Synthetic heat travels up into Jerome’s synthetic head and stays there until he says the thing he’s wanted to say since the fiasco at the school infirmary. “Listen, Ruth, you may like this body now, but someday you’re going to want to look like us, too. Because this is what humans look like. And this is a colony, not a world. Most of us don’t want to experiment that much with our Skynz or the way we live. We liked the way things were on Earth, we just wanted to be away from it.”
“Most of you do, but most of us don’t.” She takes a long, dramatic pause. “My generation, I mean. The ones who were born here.”
Jerome halts his steady march. He’s at the corner of Darletta’s claim. Mining bots tinted bright orange for visibility gouge lines into the soil. He can see his own claim far beyond, the land scored with zig-zags where the mining robots have already made their mark.
“Why are you a slug monster, Ruthie?” he asks.
“Because I want to be a slug monster,” she burbles.
“No, I don’t mean it that way,” Jerome says. “Why are you a slug monster instead of a zebra or a tree or a toaster or something? Why is your boyfriend a flying sphere?”
Ruth draws herself up to her maximum height, and a slight shiver runs down Jerome’s back. He’s ashamed to admit he’s still frightened of his daughter’s new form. “We’re Titanians,” she says, “and this is what the native species of Titan look like.”
“There are no native species of Titan, sweetie. Nothing can evolve here. You know that.”
“There wasn’t before,” she says, “but there are now. Us. My generation, I mean. We grow up hearing about Earth this and orbitals that, but you never taught us about this place. But it’s this place that’s our home. Our real home. Not Earth, and not an orbital.”
We never taught you about Titan because this place is terrible, Jerome thinks. It killed our bodies and it emptied our bank accounts, and if we choose to have children it’ll murder them from the moment they’re born. Like you were murdered, Ruth. “You haven’t answered my question,” Jerome says.
“The seas here are rough, right? So a creature who lived on them would have to have a very large surface area so it wouldn’t drown. It would have evolved a way to shoot poison at its enemies. It would have small eyes because of the potential radiation damage. A creature that evolved in these oceans would have to look a lot like me.”
“Hmm.”
“Think about Zoey. I’ve seen her scale one of those metal cliffs in twenty minutes flat with those magnets in her palms. Her coat pattern shifts to help her blend into her surroundings. There definitely would have been people like Zoey on Titan.”
They walk and slither in silence until they reach a surveying post with “Parker” scrawled in all capital letters. Jerome unlocks the service shed and kicks one of the orange mining robots awake with his boot. It tunnels into the ground like a blind mole rat. “And Steve?”
“His species would have been the pollinators. Flitting from stalagmite to stalactite, helping to carry lichen seeds from place to place.”
“There is no lichen on Titan.”
“Zoey’s working on making some,” Ruth says. “She’s so smart.”
“As you keep telling me,” Jerome says. “Did she design your body? Steve’s body?”
“I’ll never tell,” says Ruth. There’s a smile in her unearthly voice.
Jerome sets his lunch pail atop a surveying post. It had been printed here on Titan at moderate expense, a perfect replica of his father’s. Jerome had often watched the original item swing from his old man’s hand as the gruff rancher had walked his own slice of Wyoming. He’d even instructed the printer to copy the deep dent on the pail’s side. He prizes this object, but at heart it’s as fake as the whole-body prosthetics that keep his family alive.
“So what’s your goal, Ruth? What’s the point of all this, other than freaking out the normal humans?” Like your own mother, he thinks.
“We don’t have one yet,” she says. “We just know that it’s better to live this way. It’s more authentic.”
“Yeah,” Jerome says, “it’s real authentic to be a human brain inside an artificial Skyn on a poisoned moon a billion miles from Earth.”
Ruth snaps back, “You’re one to talk,” and they both erupt in laughter.
“But, Ruth,” he says, “what happens if you want to go back to Earth someday? You say you’re a Titanian, but this isn’t a world. It’s a colony. Earth could evict us at any time, and then where would you be, stuck in that body?”
“The same place you’d be, Dad.” Ruth pauses, picks up a handful of crystals and scatters it over the ground, making the land sparkle. “Trapped in an artificial body. But at least now I’m living the way I’m meant to, for as long as they let us stay.” There’s a small hitch in her underwater voice on the last few words, and from it, Jerome knows the children haven’t been kept innocent of Titan’s precarious political status.
He tosses a rag at Ruth and she catches it in a pseudopod. “Clean up some of those robots, the ones in the shed. Your mother made me promise I’d put you to work the next two weeks, and I aim to do it.”
Ruth squeezes her slug-monster bulk through the shed door. Jerome studies the dead silver horizon. Even after two decades here, so many things about Titan are still bizarre to him. But Titan isn’t bizarre to Ruth, Steve, Zoey, or any of those other kids, even the ones who resemble humans.
Zoey’s gonna have a lot more customers on her hands someday, Jerome thinks.
Then he goes to the catchments to harvest that day’s flakefall, for immediate transport to an alien planet called Earth.
