Generations by Tim Lebbon

Author:Tim Lebbon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785658327
Publisher: Titan Books Limited
Published: 2020-10-14T23:00:00+00:00

We are woken by someone pressing the buzzer on the door comm. That is unusual. It wakes us before our normal time, and we sit up and look around, confused and groggy from our disrupted rest. Our room’s dimensions seem slightly altered, the colors and shapes out of sync with reality. We feel sleep flittering away from our senses as reality settles around us, and we fold back the blankets and stand on the cold floor.

The buzzer sounds again. One of us shouts a response and goes to the door. Whoever is sounding the buzzer would never enter without our permission, and we keep our door carefully closed and triple-locked from the inside. It’s not possible to sense nervousness through the impersonal electronic buzz, but still it is there, as if the sound is a troubled exhalation or the meaningless rattle of unspoken, unwished-for words.

We open the door. There is an ensign standing there, a small man in Alliance uniform. He takes a step back when the door opens, even though he has seen and served us many times before. His name is Stannard.

We do not like being awoken before our usual time. It disrupts rhythm, and rhythm runs our lives. We wake, we eat, we wait, we sleep, and so it has been for many years. Sometimes we have tasks that disrupt us from the ordinary, and for a while we breathe different air, or experience different locations. But we are not wired to be concerned with boredom. Our main reason for being always persists—to be here, ready, in case the unthinkable happens.

The waiting is sometimes tiresome, but far better than the alternative.

Stannard looks more nervous than he should, we think, and even as his eyes flicker down to our blue-gloved hands and up again to our faces, we see that it is more than our presence disturbing him. Stannard has come to tell us some troubling news.

“Has he risen?” we ask. It is the first thing we think about. Always the first.

“No,” Stannard says, frowning. “At least, we don’t think so.”

“Think? It’s we who are here to do the thinking. You and your like do the doing. Why have you woken us?”

“The ship has come online. A signal has been sent. A security breach, but that doesn’t mean—”

“Of all the things it could be, he is the most likely,” we say. We take a deep breath, our first beyond the knowledge that something terrible might have happened. “Haven’t we told you that before?”

“No… no you haven’t.” Stannard is sweating. Thin, slight, he is wiry and strong, but in front of us he is like a child.

“We shouldn’t need to,” we say. “The ship holds him. Whatever goes wrong with the ship is because of him. Any other possibility is meaningless.”

“There’s no indication—”

“You did well to wake us,” we say. “We’ll need to open up our lab. You can take us there. Wait, while we dress.”

The ensign waits just outside the open door. He averts his eyes, but we

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