Chapter 1: The Survivor - The Shareplace

-  “The subject we’re assigning to you is named Ada. She was born eleven years ago in a Shareplace near Caliban. Do you know what that is?

- It’s an orbital station, right?

-  Yes, and with Caliban being the frontier, there’s a legal gray area around it. Antioch saw it as the perfect opportunity to conduct sociological experiments to support political projects. A Shareplace is essentially a community somewhere between anarchism and pre-stellar communism. From zero to three years old, Ada was cared for by older kids or adults—chosen at random. No moms or dads there. If she needed comfort, an adult would step in and care for her. On this orbital station, there were about a hundred adults and thirty children under fifteen, and all those adults were the kids’ parents—in an emotional sense. In a Shareplace, as you grow up, you might unknowingly form relationships with close relatives. Genetic screening manages the issue of inbreeding.

-  Antioch’s Paradise.

-  Exactly. No one owns anything. Need a tool? Want a pretty plant for your cabin? You take what’s in front of you, and no one says a word. And when someone takes it back, you don’t complain either. Even your clothes: you take them off, toss them into a big laundry bin at night, and the next day, you get clean ones that used to belong to someone else. It works fairly well. Here we are. The window is one-way, so she doesn’t know we’re watching her.

-  She looks like an ordinary girl.

-  More or less. Here are some biographical details I sent you via LE. Ada grew up, and at three, she started taking care of the plants covering every surface of the station, especially the large common zero-gravity room at the center, where plants could grow in all directions. At five, she began caring for younger kids. She takes advanced science courses—today, she’s clutching a stuffed animal, but she’s perfectly capable of solving a Diophantine equation. That’s even more impressive considering I have no idea what a Diophantine equation is. When I asked her, she hesitated as if I’d asked the color of an orange.

-  Doing math in the age of LEs...

-  She listens to stories about the heroes of the League of Antioch and watches Caliban through the station’s windows. It’s a large planet shrouded in clouds and lightning—uninhabitable, sterile, uninteresting. Not even a missile base, if you can believe it.

-  Or none visible.

-  At six, she starts doing maintenance work on the station. Her small frame and training are perfect for the job. One day, she’s punished for refusing to lend a tool to a “Brother” who needed it for his work. She needed it after her rest phase and didn’t want to waste time retrieving it. Shareplace punishments are ... unique. She was locked in an empty room with no windows, just the disputed tool and a plant providing food and water. She told me it was ten days, but it might’ve been less. Isolation quickly drives people mad—take it from a former castaway.

-  How did you get her out?

-  Shareplaces started to ruffle the HS Council’s feathers ... It was a roundabout way of colonizing the frontier, pushing it outward. Two months ago, the Stellar Fleet launched an operation. They sent a fully armed Endymion—six kilometers long.

-  I’ve served on plenty of Endymions. The Phrike, I assume?

-  Yes, the Phrike. So you can imagine the impression that monster left. The station was in its shadow. You’d think they’d give up, right? No. Negotiations failed. The fleet pretended to leave, then sent in six special forces soldiers in chameleon suits. It was incredible. The distance was so great they spent four days approaching the station in pressurized suits. They breached the airlock, killed four or five people, negotiated again, but no one wanted to surrender. Command ordered the assault, renegotiated, and faced rejection after rejection. In the end, no adults survived. We were left with twenty kids, including Ada.