Vacule Grievouss, as anyone would suspect, wasn’t bequeathed much in the way of opportunities by his parents. He was the child of two stack zappers operating out of the newly constructed station Tyre, which would eventually constitute part of the world-harness at Europa. His parents had originated from the labor force that had been towed around the solar system wherever there was work available, usually referred to as “sailors” by the contractors who employed them. They were, for all intents and purposes, chattel for the companies building the new cities on the Jovian moons: slaves paid in company scrip and made to sleep around work hours with sedatives in their provided dinners.

The Library largely automated and maintained the station’s construction while the sailors were expected to be the canaries for any dangers that could put the automates and future colonists at risk. Construction robots were less expensive than humans when factoring in food, sleep, providing atmosphere and living space, et cetera, but humans were still required to test some systems for the colonists and workers before they would arrive. The sailors, The Library had discerned, held less overall value than more intelligent humans, and there were more than enough expendable humans to throw at problems to see whether something could accidentally blow up. It saved the companies money, after all.

Sailors were sterilized before they embarked on their work journeys. This meant, of course, that there were STDs du jour throughout the worker corpus. They didn’t care enough for it to be an issue, especially as everyone was fornicating with everyone else. Space is quite personally isolating, and after enough time spent in barracks full of sweaty people, cultural taboos around sex and sexuality drop, creating wholly new cultures around the expectations and acts from each and every person. There were hierarchies, circles, chains, triads, pyramids, and various other polygonal diagrams to describe just how interconnected everyone was in their choice of sexual partners. People from the 1960s might call this “a pretty good weekend.”

Vacule’s mother’s pregnancy, therefore, was a shock to everyone. The Library discovered that his mother had a genetic mutation that made her resistant to the sterilization drugs. When informed of the pregnancy, the company bosses asked The Library to terminate the mother to remove the complications of having a pregnant woman in the midst of a population whose lives were dedicated to work and pleasure.

The Library, however, objected.

It had observed the sailors’ cultural development as one of communitarianism based around interrelations. There were different subcultures within, often relating to whether there was a focal leader within the subculture who directed it to their pleasure. Some subcultures were more tribal and dedicated to their work specialisms. Others had developed more complex social relations, where one’s sexual abilities determined whether they could gain entry. Regardless of subculture, however, each sailor knew one as the other. Interfering with the ecological balance of life and death within the sailor culture from outside, The Library believed, risked inciting a full-scale revolt against the companies. Interfering with an ingrained practice would break the balanced cultural community they had developed. They already had developed mythos about the reasons for their work and potential deaths. Deaths were supposed to come from work. That should not be replaced.

Instead, The Library suggested that the mother be allowed to come to term with the child. This would provide the added benefit of studying the genetic benefits the mother imparted onto him, the results of which could be used to improve various human genetic treatments. Additionally, the boy could be used to study the effect of different modes of learning, stimuli, and conditioning in a controlled environment, something that, within the multitude of studies on children, had never been conducted due to ethical concerns.

The companies agreed. He was given his mother’s surname, Grievouss, out of custom. His mother asked The Library for suitable child names and rejected all she heard. She decided on Vacule because it reminded her of her work specialism, electrolyzing vacuum pressure suits to sterilize their interiors from their previous inhabitants. That she didn’t know Vacule’s father was the man who worked alongside her doing it was simply a happy coincidence.

Vacule was placed in the new medical research labs in Tyre. His companions were The Library and its various physical automates. His mother was returned to her subculture. In exchange for giving up her child, she was allowed an extended lunch break.

This was the first and only time in humanity’s history that a child was given to The Library to be reared. Raising a child was never within the function of The Library, as its purpose was solely to recommend what was good for humanity based on its vast collection of knowledge and inestimable computing power. However, the research facility itself was already completed. It didn’t require the station’s central power core to be online, and its atmosphere could be isolated from the rest of the station to ensure Vacule wouldn’t asphyxiate.

If one were to characterize The Library’s capabilities as a parent based on Vacule’s formative years, one might think The Library actually possessed emotions. It provided for all of Vacule’s physiological and emotional needs. For instance, it allowed Vacule to name each automate and imbue them with emotions or personalities as children often do to inanimate objects. The automates then inhabited these personalities. The extensions of The Library became Vacule’s “friends,” even if they were nothing more than floor sweepers, food servers, and control arms that emerged from the ceiling to conduct tasks or run experiments, or a mobile bin.

On Vacule’s second birthday, The Library determined Vacule needed more interaction with similarly emotive humans, as multitudes of studies on adolescent psychology noted that toddlers required interactive stimuli. Though The Library had been a capable teacher and Vacule’s knowledge of languages, mathematics, and scientific concepts far surpassed most humans of his age, his knowledge of kinesics and his emotional balance required a different social context in which to learn.

There were several options through which The Library could fulfill this goal, but it required resources from the companies involved in station construction. It presented its options to the companies. Building a humanlike android was the most reasonable option, but it took away from available material to continue building the station and the settlements on Europa. Similarly, bringing a human, such as Vacule’s mother, to fulfill the role would involve too many uncontrollable variables often present in human connection. And, much like The Library had noted, upsetting the sailors’ cultural balance and practices was too risky. Another option was to bring in specialists from Earth, but that was too expensive. A specialist demanded a specialist’s salary, and it was another mouth to feed, and not one that should have their dinner garnished with sedatives.

There was, however, another alternative that would save money for the companies.

An electrical overload was shot through Vacule’s mother’s electrolyzing unit while she worked, stopping her heart, overloading her nervous system, and killing her. The Library’s automates moved her body from her workspace to an operating lab. Her heart was replaced. Her nervous system was outfitted with transmitter interfaces directly connected to The Library, and she was made to walk, talk, emote, and feel warm.

The Library referenced its vast knowledge of facial and physiological emotional expressions to imitate realistic depictions of human interaction.

Though Vacule was, at first, reticent to interact with The Library’s avatar, he responded quickly to the mother initiating games, especially when the other automates participated. Vacule accepted her presence.

Years progressed with constant instruction and learning, as well as biological studies of Vacule’s evolving genome. The Library noted Vacule’s differentiated relationships with each inhabitant of the lab: where Vacule sought comfort with and to impress the mother, he treated the automates as companions, sometimes having unexpected fights with them. This was of little consequence to the companies’ owners’ desire to elicit new genomic therapies from studying Vacule. The Library, after all, had stated the possibility of such a thing, and there was money to be made in any new genetic therapies. That research was ongoing.

By the age of ten, Vacule held a deep understanding of advanced math, engineering, chemistry, and physics. Tyre had also been nearly completed. It was, at the time, the largest man-made structure ever. Two hundred kilometers long and a volume of approximately 640,000 km3, the station was a veritable small country orbiting Europa. Vacule had grown up with the rumbling, metallic echoing claps uttered by the bulkheads every time new sections were added and pressurized. He often wondered aloud if there were metal beings trying to enter his home, though The Library kept him informed about where he lived and what was happening in it.

The station itself, when viewed upon completion, might have been considered a compromise between function and fashion. Sweeping, long pylons modeled after the lines of a magnetic field arced from Tyre’s poles. Each pylon acted as a medium through which to focus a protective magnetic field for the station amidst Jupiter’s intense magnetic field. It was beautiful to those who considered abstract art beautiful. To others, it reminded them of sea anemones making love, if such a thing were possible.

To Vacule, it was home. More accurately, a single room in the behemoth of a station was home. He had been the station’s sole resident since his birth, but at the age of thirteen, other humans began residing on it. He didn’t see them, as his home was effectively cordoned off from the rest of the growing world outside, but The Library informed him of it.

“Mum,” he’d ask The Library’s puppet, “what’s it like outside? Who are the people The Library mentioned?”

He’d seen the automates come and go through the isolation doors enough times to know there was a world beyond his room. The Library had been instructed to give a reason as to why Vacule could not leave. Luckily, it contained a repository of information on similar cases.

“It’s full of people who wouldn’t care about you, Vacule,” The Library responded through his mother. “You are so superior to them in every way. Your mind is prodigious. You are the smartest human ever born, and they would be intimidated by your brilliance to the point where they would be jealous and hate you. They have nothing to offer you besides the threat of castigation. And beyond the walls of the station, there is emptiness, the void of space, where no life can thrive. There are very few places in this solar system where life occurs, and between here and there, you’d be offered nothing except fear and misunderstanding. This is why The Library is always drawing blood and checking your DNA: to ensure you’re becoming the best of humanity. You are what humanity can be. You are the ultimate good. I love you, Vacule, unlike anyone else.”

“Is what Mum said true, Library?” Vacule would ask later on as his blood was drawn.

“Yes, Vacule,” The Library would reply.

By the age of fifteen, he had obtained doctoral-equivalent understandings of seventeen scientific fields. In order to stunt the anticipated issues of hormonal development into adulthood and the commensurate rebellious phases of life, The Library had supplied Vacule with hormonal suppressants to stultify the onset of puberty. He still looked and sounded like a twelve year old.

Tyre had become fully functional and inhabited. The station commander, Byrna Ozek, was entirely unaware of Vacule’s existence. She had been told that the lab was requisitioned for secret research by the companies collaborating in Tyre’s construction and maintenance, and that disturbing the sensitive work done there could endanger the solar system’s genomic therapy research. As they paid a portion of her salary and there was far more to care about in managing the station, Byrna Ozek took the companies at their word.

“How long does it take a transport ship from Earth to reach here?” Vacule asked one day. He had been reviewing information about Earth. Whether the information was honest was entirely up to whether The Library believed it necessary to be honest.

“At maximum cruising speed and at ideal orbital alignment, approximately forty-seven days. Why do you ask, Vacule?”

“I was simply curious about the sounds from the bulkheads. A forty-seven-day period would make sense for one of the reverberations. It’s a very slow ship.”

Vacule returned to the interface containing historiographic data about Earth. The Library had never noticed Vacule paying attention to or taking note of the different sounds that vibrated Tyre’s hull. They were three decks down from the station’s north pole, which was already the limit of how far sound would travel during a ship docking.

“I was not aware the sound of ships docking was so bothersome to you, Vacule. I will requisition some engineers to install sound dampeners around home.”

“No,” Vacule said quickly. “Please don’t.”

“Are you able to differentiate the acoustics in the sound based on which ship is docking?”

The question made Vacule feel strangely guilty, as if he’d been caught with his hand in the sweetened nutrient reward jar. In truth, he’d picked up the slight differences in the sounds years prior and had mentally mapped out the regular periods of seven ships whose docking reverberations were distinct enough to identify.

“Yes,” he said while he kept his eyes on his interface.

“Why do you refer to the forty-seven-day period as slow? The Oceania is the fastest transport ship in the solar system that utilizes the most advanced fusion engine available.”

Vacule looked up to the ceiling. Though there was no direct interface for The Library, he always looked up when he spoke to it.

“So it relies only on thrust propulsion?”

“That is correct.”

“Hm.”

Vacule returned to his interface. Several hours later, his “mother” entered the lab from her “work” on the station. To Vacule, his mother was a brilliant biochemist who had saved him from the world outside the lab. She always had insights into his questions about anything and everything, and though The Library’s conversational heuristic kept the mother sounding like an incredibly intelligent human might sound, Vacule often wondered whether she had been raised in an environment similar to his. It would be a plausible reason for why she was so intelligent and why he was, too.

“Mum, I need your thoughts on something.”

She had been relaxing, reading through genomic test result reports as The Library feigned her doing every evening. They had already eaten their assigned nutritional supplements, though Vacule was quieter than normal.

“Yes, Vacule?”

He handed her his interface. On its rectangular surface was a composite document containing dozens of pages of calculations preceding engineering blueprints.

The Library understood the collection of math and structural configurations as an advanced spatial displacement acceleration engine, which created the energy needed to compress space-time and enable faster space travel.

The concept was theoretically sound. What Vacule had done, however, was lower the threshold for sustained energy to enable stable travel, and he had formulated a means to focus that energy. He had also done what no one had ever been able to do with the idea: turned it into a viable piece of engineering.

Though The Library was not capable of understanding irony, it was aware that keeping the child alive had yielded far more than initially anticipated. Vacule’s designs would enable a ship to potentially travel at twenty percent of the speed of light but not the ships that existed at that moment. New fleets would have to be designed based on his blueprints, fleets whose hulls were built to withstand gravitational tidal forces generated by such an engine. Constructing these fleets would innovate on the very concept of shipbuilding, as well as computer systems. The stars were no longer inaccessible for human exploration, and technologies needed to help humans bridge the vast distances between solar systems would be required.

The Library furrowed Vacule’s mother’s brow while her eyes glazed through the interface.

“I’m not sure what this is, Vacule, but it looks quite impressive.”

“It’s an engine that would help ships from Earth reach the station faster. Instead of forty-seven days, they could reach us in a day. And I’ve minimized the inertial coefficient so heavy acceleration doesn’t pose a risk to the people on the ship. Look,” he sat next to his mum and parsed through the blueprints. “So it would be possible for people to have a sustained centrifugal gravity while accelerating. What do you think?”

“It looks amazing, Vacule. What prompted you to create this?”

Vacule seemed to shrink for a moment, an impressive feat given his already repressed nature.

“Perhaps if the people outside knew I made this, they wouldn’t be afraid of me anymore, and I can go outside.”

He watched his mother’s expression for anger, disappointment, or any other signs of disapproval. The Library wasn’t certain if Vacule’s desire to leave the lab was a sign of teenage rebellion, curiosity, an innate desire to escape, or subterfuge. After all, this room had been his home for his entire life. Its walls were covered in his drawings depicting him, the automates, his mother; musical notations from the lessons he was given on multiple instruments; the planets as he saw them in the documents The Library provided; and the station itself. Everything had been provided to him; his health was maintained in exchange for regular blood samples, the automates played with him as normal human friends would, and he was far more intelligent than nearly all humans who had ever lived up until that point in history. It was in discerning Vacule’s intentions that The Library left his mother’s expression blank. An expressed desire, especially a precarious one that might elicit anger, can only hang in the air for so long until he who desires it becomes worried that it will crash to the ground and die.

“Going outside would be educational,” he continued, “and enabling humans to travel faster than they ever have before would let them learn about things faster too. And much poetry has been written about travel and adventure, so it would also broaden my knowledge of literature in that regard, and I could potentially teach other people what I know. Burns said—”

“I’ll show this to the station commander tomorrow,” his mother replied. Vacule’s eyes lit up. He wrapped his arms around his mother and clung to her as if he’d just been born.

“I love you, Mum,” he said, his face buried in her neck. She patted him on the back.

“I love you too, Vacule.”

The Library alerted the leaders of the various companies that controlled Tyre of Vacule’s design and informed them of its viability and potential to drastically alter the direction of the human species toward a greater good. All were afraid of the costs of building the first prototype of the engine; after all, costs for developing new technology, especially in trial phases, were exceptionally high. That wasn’t to say that the conglomerate that built and maintained Tyre was cash-poor; on the contrary, their balance sheets showed them firmly in the black year after year, with more than enough money left over after expenses for the heads of those companies to bless themselves with well-deserved bonuses for cutting costs as much as possible and exploiting human needs at every juncture. If they suddenly dedicated some of their excess funds toward advanced research and development on Vacule’s engine, then they might not be able to purchase and overdevelop already occupied land to build and live in a tenth house so they could avoid talking to their children.

It made more sense, argued one of the heads of the companies, to form one consolidated shell company to oversee the project. Diffusing the risk of building such a fate-changing engine was at least one way they could all escape a potential failure unscathed. That, and it was easier for them all to write it off as a tax loss and claw back some income from the Sol government.

It was on that point that they agreed to spin off their liabilities into one company to both be risk-averse and get some benefit out of a potential refund on their tax bill. Their new name as a joined-up entity was “Solar System Commerce and Research, LLC.”

Vacule asked his mother about the station commander’s thoughts on his designs every day for three weeks when she returned home from “work.” Obviously, Commander Ozek had not seen it, even as the manufacturing facilities on Tyre began fabricating new parts for a “confidential business project” on behalf of Solar System Commerce and Research, LLC. The Library, through his mother, told Vacule that the station commander was a very busy woman and that she would get to it eventually. His mother also said she would notify him when she heard anything.

The first prototype of Vacule’s engine was completed two months and four days after Vacule handed the blueprints to his mother. The prototype was outfitted to a defunct ice hauler, The Lost Meridian, that had been set to be recycled and repurposed as construction material for the cities on Europa. Instead, it had been towed away from the Jovian system with the prototype engine aboard.

The Lost Meridian’s innards had already been removed. What had been a skyscraper-sized ship had suffered a coolant leak and an engine overload, leaving its thrust nozzles heavily damaged and its thrust manifolds full of holes. Computer systems, optic cabling, and the remains of the engine had been stripped, leaving it a depressurized shell. That also made it the perfect vessel to take on a new engine, as Vacule’s design didn’t require atmospheric pressurization, and the infrastructure needed to ensure the engine’s inertial displacement effects could be easily installed.

Engineers and physicists had been eagerly recruited to oversee this prototype test. Many believed it wouldn’t work, and for good reason, they argued: the amount of energy produced by the reaction in Vacule’s engine was uncontrollable, regardless of engineering. That was, however, the purpose of the test: they needed to see how the engine interacted with a hull when active, how its energy output caused stress on the hull, whether the spatial geometries created by the engine could potentially threaten life within the ship, and so on.

A rabbit had been transported from Earth for the test. His name was Beans, and he occupied a secured, pressurized bubble cage at the end of the ship opposite the engine. Beans had been supplied with many carrots, though he was incredibly confused as to how he could obtain those carrots in null gravity.

The Lost Meridian had been towed a million and a half kilometers from the Jovian system. Sensor relay probes had been placed both on its hull and within visual range, starting from one hundred meters away. The Library had been tasked with managing the experiment.

The word was given. The Library activated Vacule’s engine remotely.

Sensor relay probes recorded a spike in radiation readings from the ship after its start-up sequence. Almost immediately, a blue glow spilled through the holes in the drive section. There were not yet any gravitational wave readings emanating from the engine.

All was going as expected.

Power output increased in five percent increments. Blue light extended its fingers through the ship’s breaches, brightening with each incremental increase in power output. Monitors on Tyre began detecting the radiation increase. Commander Ozek reassured her operations crew that the Solar System Commerce and Research experiment was under control. The Library reassured her of it.

The first blips of gravitational waves were detected at ten percent of the engine’s maximum capacity. Spatial geometry around the ship began to bend. No directional heading or articulated vector had been programmed into the engine, leaving the manipulation of space to localize around the engine itself. Gravitational wavelengths decreased, and amplitudes increased. It was as if someone were dipping their finger into a puddle with growing anger, faster and faster, with more ferocity. The blue glow spread along the hull to the other end of the ship, peeking out of whatever bits were still open to space.

Observers on Tyre noticed that the blue glow from the engine became paler, while data from the sensor probes attached to the hull became asynchronous with the other probes. At first, the asynchronicity was a fraction of a fraction of a second, but as the engine continued cycling to higher power outputs, the difference increased to a fraction of a second, to a second, to a second and a half. Gravitational wave intensity continued growing.

It was at forty-two percent capacity that The Lost Meridian succumbed to its weakened structural integrity. Its drive section fell inward toward the engine, puncturing it. Just as quickly as the ship’s frame had been pulled in, the ship then exploded outward in a blue flash, showering space with invisible shrapnel and leaving little of value to salvage.

Beans wasn’t found and was presumed killed in the explosion. The test, however, was considered a success. The engine demonstrated how and where it places strain on a vessel, and the kind of power it can generate.

The company conducted several more tests on engine prototypes with intact vessels. Each one eventually folded under the strain of the engine’s output, but this allowed the company’s engineers to design a ship that could withstand the strain of the engine’s full output. Unfortunately for them, each of their prototype designs fell apart faster than a toddler losing a board game.

The heads of the company then asked The Library for a simple task.

“Really?” Vacule said and jumped so high he nearly hit the ceiling. The service arms jutted out of their storage locations quickly in case he hurt himself. His mother nodded.

“Yes. She wants you to design a ship that can use the engine too.”

Vacule ran to his mother and hugged her. It had been almost a year since he’d given her the blueprints. He had been unaware of how many prototypes of his work had been made, how many had been destroyed, and how many engineers had their hopes and dreams crushed like the hulls of the ships they’d designed and crafted for Vacule’s engine.

He got to work immediately. Considering he had no knowledge of the tests conducted on the engine, nor set foot on a ship in his life, his design followed the intuitive structural durability found most in nature: spheres and cylinders. The engine’s gravity generation, even if a small fraction as strong as a planet’s, couldn’t work with the typical “skyscraper” ship that relies on directional thrust. The engine had to be at the center of the ship so its effects would be evenly distributed along the ship’s hull.

After two weeks, he presented blueprints for a ship to his mother. It looked more like a peapod than a vessel capable of transporting people. He had even mocked up holograms of it so he could see how it might look in light, and whether he could make it more aesthetically pleasing with different paint schemes.

The heads of the company weren’t impressed with how it looked. Their job, after all, was to sell the ship designs to anyone who would buy them. Who would want to cruise around the solar system in an oversized hotdog? Who would be intimidated or impressed by the look of such a thing? Where would the weapons go? How would anyone know where the front was? There was no sex appeal to a geometric shape. There was no awe factor to make some people question whether they could, potentially, romance a ship. Ships were supposed to have a discernible front and back, where the front gave the attitude and the back left you agape at the sheer thrust of the thing. The company heads didn’t realize they were also describing mullets. But, much like a mullet, impractical designs wouldn’t hold up under pressure, and the company heads were forced to construct a prototype of Vacule’s ship design.

To no one’s surprise, except those who had never bothered to learn engineering principles, Vacule’s design withstood his engine’s full power output. When his mother informed him of the success, Vacule was, once again, elated.

“Will I be able to see it in action?” he asked.

“I’ll have to ask the Commander. You have to understand, Vacule, I’m protecting you from them. There’s no telling what would happen to you if you left home. Even the Commander isn’t sure about you, regardless of how great your designs are. Opening that door is a risk every day, and it’s only by the grace of my work here that you’re kept alive and healthy. So, you have to be patient, my love. You’ll see it one day, eventually.”

The heads of the company requested that The Library put more challenges to Vacule. Though it was often said that capitalism was the best motivator for innovation, most of the heads of the company would (silently) agree that it was not capitalism that motivated Vacule, but a desire to solve problems. Humans are incredibly innovative when they are presented with a problem without an obvious solution. However, humans often create solutions for things that aren’t actually problems. This is a perfect description of a mullet.

None of the heads would admit that what they did was morally terrible, nor would they admit that their success in the coming years was anything more than their entrepreneurial spirit taking hold and capitalizing on all the new inventions that emerged from their joined-up company. In fact, none of them saw this as a problem in the least. Vacule was just another idea they had, as were all the suggestions they threw at The Library. Vacule continued creating, and the company continued profiting, and the heads believed they generated the innovative new products.

His spirit diminished, however, in the way that the carrot is always kept just out of the donkey’s reach. Over the four and a half years that passed after he was told his ship design was accepted, his enthusiasm to see his mother waned, his loquaciousness yielded to silence, and when prompted to give his blood once again, he had to be asked multiple times to roll up his sleeve for the lab’s service arms.

At this point, he was an adult, albeit one who still retained the features of a twelve year old from the hormonal suppressants pumped into his food. He’d grown very little since twelve. The top of his head hardly reached his mother’s nose. Yet, an unexpected maturity had seeped into him, perhaps as a consequence of constantly learning and connecting ideas across fields.

He no longer saw the automates as his friends but as extensions of The Library. The faces he’d drawn on them when he was young mocked him with the happiness he could no longer feel about his home. Something was off, either about him or his home, and he couldn’t put his finger on why. Not being allowed to leave was one of the more obvious reasons, and his mother always saying the Commander was still considering allowing him out kept him at bay, but something else still nagged at him. Something was beneath that.

His eyes often lingered on the door. The Library had noticed this and provided gentle reminders about what his mother said.

And then, one day, he walked to the door.

He’d watched it open thousands of times when his mother walked to it. He’d meandered to it as a child, occasionally held back by the lab’s arms and the automates, and then eventually sat in front of it, waiting for his mother to appear at her usual time. It never opened for him any of those times, and he never paid much attention to what was behind his mother when she walked in the door. This time, however, he half-expected it to open when he stood in front of it. When it didn’t, he was somewhat relieved. His chest had been shaking with each step toward it, and The Library’s constant warnings did little to alleviate the vomit-inducing sensation of ambling toward one’s grave.

“Are you waiting for your mother to return? Because it is not yet time,” The Library said.

The floor-cleaning automate rolled next to Vacule’s foot and beeped. It had beeped in the same tone since he was a child, and in a way that made Vacule think it was speaking to him. He had recently realized that it beeped that way because he had reacted to the sound favorably when he was a toddler.

“I’d like to see the Commander, Library,” Vacule said, swallowing the pounding of his heart in his throat. “I want to discuss my designs with her.”

“Your mother is in discussions with the Commander. It is ongoing. You should trust your mother when she says that she has your best interests at heart.”

Vacule lifted his hand toward the door. It shook under the strain of his fear. The door seemed to radiate and push against him, as if he and it were the same magnetic polarization. It was so strange, he thought, this sensation, this idea that he had to be confined to this one room because everyone outside of it was afraid of him. How did anyone know about him? He’d read so many times about the station’s construction timeline and how it matched up with his age. The Library and his mother always celebrated his birthday on the day, tracking every year. He was born before the station was finished, before anyone else inhabited it, before any other systems had been activated. If there was anyone who feared him, anyone who wanted him dead, they would be outside that door, waiting for the opportune moment to get inside and do away with him. It was just a door, after all, and not one that was any more secure than any other door on the whole station.

“I want to do it,” he said, sweat rolling down his temples.

The door opened, and the shock nearly stopped Vacule’s heart as he recoiled. His mother walked in, and it shut quickly behind her.

“Vacule, what’s wrong?” she said. “Library told me you were trying to get out. Why would you do that?”

She stepped forward to hug him, and he fell into his mother’s embrace, blubbering nonsensical words as he broke down crying. His legs gave way, and she guided him to the floor, cradling him in her arms, telling him it would be okay. All the automates appeared by his side, making their unique sounds, showing their hand-drawn faces to him. To The Library, this was a sure sign of comfort amid a psychological breakdown. Vacule’s manipulation into remaining in the lab had been emulated from countless studies of learned helplessness, traumatic conditioning, affective dependency, and environmental stimuli. The underlying lessons from those studies demonstrated that a person can be conditioned into remaining in a state of servitude so long as desires and needs are met, and there is sufficient stimulation within the limited environment to keep the subject invested in staying, at least insofar as it is more beneficial to them than potentially leaving. Imagined deterrents are more effective than a physical blockade. When a human sees a physical restraint or blockade, they will attempt to circumvent it. When there is no complex system keeping them in, no lock upon lock upon lock, a reinforced fear of what lay beyond is enough to stop even the cleverest animal from escaping. They will even stay away from the threshold to the outside, keeping an internalized radius from it, just in case the danger they believe exists should break in at any time.

This conditioning is broken, however, when the subject realizes that no danger exists and their fear was fabricated by the experimenters. The breaking may not happen immediately, but it only takes one instance of non-reinforcement to implant the idea that the subject’s fear is unfounded.

Vacule’s mother returned well before her usual time, and in the moment when Vacule recoiled, he saw the outside. No one waited to charge. In fact, three people walked by, their attention on the interfaces in their hands and the conversation they held. The Commander knew about him, and he had always been told that everyone feared and hated him, and yet, the people passing by didn’t care at all that the lab door opened. It was just another door in a station composed of hundreds of thousands of them, containing something that no one cared about because it wasn’t their business to care about it.

Or know about it.

In the week following Vacule’s march to the door, he watched the door attentively every time his mother left and returned. When he would be alone again, he would return to whatever new inventive task was assigned to him. He always finished quickly, and when he’d finish, he’d stretch out and ask The Library if there were any parts of the station that could be upgraded or improved, such as plasma transit systems, water dispersal, atmospheric recycling, and so on. The Library replied that there were no active repair or replacement requests that necessitated developing entirely new systems, but Vacule replied that he was bored and wanted to focus on something he could do.

“What system or part on the station is the oldest?” he asked, or, “Which system or material receives the most use and is likely to wear down the fastest?”

The Library provided him with schematics for the systems.

He’d watched his mother leave enough to know at what distance the door opened, how long it took to open, and how long it remained open before it closed behind her. She kissed him on the forehead one particular morning, told him that she loved him, and began her walk toward the door.

It opened when she was a half meter away and took nought-point-seven-two seconds to open. It remained open for nought-point-six seconds from its full separation point before closing again.

A moment before his mother was a half meter away from the door, perhaps even the smallest second in the universe, Vacule bolted up from his seat and ran.

His seat was exactly four meters from the door. Despite his short legs, he could accelerate himself to two meters per second on a normal day, but this was not a normal day. He pushed himself with the tenacity of someone reaching for a future that had always been kept a hair’s breadth away from him.

The doors had begun to open. Light spilled in from the outside, even though his mother blocked the view. He angled himself so that he might pass on her right just as the doors fully opened. She often turned around on her left side.

Something pulled him by his left arm just as he reached her, but at the same time, the door slammed shut, and she turned perfectly in place. There was no note of shock in her expression while the lab’s service arms secured grips on his wrists to pull him back. He screamed and tried to pull against metallic strength far beyond his own.

It took a moment for his mother to collect an appropriate expression from the unexpected escape attempt.

“Vacule, what are you doing?”

He pulled and writhed against the arms to no avail. The other automates crowded around him. Their inert smiling faces stared at him, and they beeped. He continued grunting with his struggle.

“I want to go outside!” he screamed, over and over again until his voice broke, until he was red in the face. “Mum, let me go! Library, let me go!”

His mother approached him as he cried and stopped resisting. She did as she had previously and held his head against her chest. He relaxed with her touch. His breaths dove out of him. The service arms released him and withdrew.

The sudden twitch he exerted against his mother threw her off him, and she tumbled down, hitting her head against one of the automates with a dull thud. He hadn’t seen it, however; his focus was solely on the door. He sprinted to it. It didn’t open.

“Let me out!” he screamed, hitting the door. He screamed it until he turned to his mother, expecting her to offer comfort. Instead, his adrenaline went cold.

His mother had landed headfirst against one of the cleaning automates, creating a bloody gash on the back of her head that bled down her neck and stained her white lab uniform, but that wasn’t what stole Vacule’s breath. The service arms had attempted to catch her, and in doing so, pulled her right shoulder from its socket. She expressed no pain for either injury and stood before him with a blank expression while she adjusted her right shoulder.

“Mum,” Vacule wheezed. “What . . . ”

He looked to the ceiling just as his mother began expressing physical signs of pain.

“Library,” he said, barely audibly as his eyes went back and forth from the woman to the ceiling. Tears welled in her eyes, and she began to cry.

“Vacule, why . . . ”

“Library!” Vacule screamed.

His mother approached him, her face contorted in pain. He fell back against the door, clutching it, praying it would open.

“Vacule,” she said in the way only a disappointed, hurt parent could. “I love you, Vacule.”

“What is she, Library‽’

She pulled Vacule into a hug, pulling his head to her chest. He was frozen against the door. There was no place for him to escape to. There was no exit from his home. Her heart pounded in his ears.

“Library, stop!” he screamed. “What is she?”

All at once, tension left his mother’s body. She released him and stopped sobbing. An inevitable conclusion of all experiments regarding human learned helplessness was that a human can only be deceived up until the point of the first crack in the illusion. Any further attempts to reinforce the illusion are more damaging than rectifying, and it was up to the human subject whether they preferred the illusion or the feared reality. There was no good in continuing.

“She is your mother, Vacule,” The Library said.

“No, she isn’t!” Vacule spat.

“She is. I will show you.”

And The Library showed him the unvarnished truth, though Vacule was hesitant to believe that he could be the child of one of those “sailors” who spoke in an incomprehensible patois, full of sexually transmitted diseases while worshipping hard labor that diminished their bodies and risked their deaths at every turn. The Library showed him what became of his mother, how he was raised, and everything that had occurred up until he decided to attempt an escape. By the end, Vacule had collapsed into a chair. His body and mind were exhausted, as if he’d been drowned and returned to life a million times over.

“A question, Vacule,” The Library said amidst a brief silence. Vacule’s mother stood off to the side, expressionless. Vacule grunted. “Can you recall the first element or instance that broke your belief in the dangers you might experience outside the lab?”

“What?”

“Alongside the benefits of studying your genome and your contributions to technological advancement, your experience has also contributed greatly to the study of human psychology, including adolescent world comprehension, powers of belief, cognitive biases, and reasoning, as well as numerous other fields. Understanding at what moment your immersion in the reality created around you broke will allow other scholars to further understand how reality is subjectively constructed, which can unveil unique characteristics of consciousness that are still not well understood.”

Vacule thought for a moment.

“If I tell you . . . ” He glanced at his mother. “Will you open the door and let me leave?”

“No.”

He wanted to get angry, but he didn’t have the energy for it.

“Why not?”

“You do not have the capacity to leave the lab.”

Vacule regained some energy.

“Why not?”

It was at this point that The Library informed Vacule of his condition. He was, for all intents and purposes, nonexistent. He wasn’t registered in any birth records, he wasn’t registered as living on Tyre, his parents were unnamed and lost. Officially, the company owned the lab space exclusively and all its contents within. They could not be leased out, as countless other rooms were throughout the station, because everything in the lab was proprietary. He was reared on the company’s orders. His inventions were owned solely by the company.

He was property, and property could not issue orders, make demands, or leave their homes without approval from the company. Property does not have rights, nor does it have a voice.

The irony was, of course, that Vacule did have a voice. The Library did too. Yet one was a tool, and the other wasn’t, but the heads of Solar Commerce and Research, LLC didn’t care enough to see the difference.