Things are going wrong for AI nerd Imogen Hart. Her best friend takes her own life just as they prepare to set foot on planet Alameaâmankindâs new home. When the ruling elite aboard the colonial spaceship Conestoga attempt to rewrite the past, Imogen connects the dots and uncovers an age-old secret that threatens the future of a quarter of a million passengers.
Her destiny shattered, Imogen must employ every dirty trick in her arsenal and fight for the truth. But shaking things up turns out to be much more dangerous than Imogen ever imaginedâand time is running out.
Fans of Andy Weirâs Artemis, Marie Liuâs Warcross, and Veronica Rothâs Divergent will enjoy this science fiction adventure and the carefully crafted world of Conestoga.
Things are going wrong for AI nerd Imogen Hart. Her best friend takes her own life just as they prepare to set foot on planet Alameaâmankindâs new home. When the ruling elite aboard the colonial spaceship Conestoga attempt to rewrite the past, Imogen connects the dots and uncovers an age-old secret that threatens the future of a quarter of a million passengers.
Her destiny shattered, Imogen must employ every dirty trick in her arsenal and fight for the truth. But shaking things up turns out to be much more dangerous than Imogen ever imaginedâand time is running out.
Fans of Andy Weirâs Artemis, Marie Liuâs Warcross, and Veronica Rothâs Divergent will enjoy this science fiction adventure and the carefully crafted world of Conestoga.
In the morning after your reclamation ceremony, I fab my breakfast in the kitchen assembler. Call it my first mistake.
Pea, the chubby little ball-shaped hoverbot I built for a duty project, keeps me company. Strictly speaking, I was supposed to scrap her, but I couldnât bring myself to do it. Now, she bobs around the gleaming kitchen, curious, while I down a stale muffin and drink some bland tea. Everything tastes like paper since you died.
I scroll through the Feed as a distraction, or I wonât be able to eat without gagging. People are excited about the big celebrations coming up: Shoulder Day, the aerobatics tournament, and, of course, Arrival Day. Our last Arrival Day. The actual Day of Arrival. Itâs as distant to me now as it was years ago, when I first learned-but-didnât- really-learn about it.
To learn, one must first fail to understand. (Aphorisms 1:45)
Topic of the day: why the Arrival Day celebrations have not yet been made public. The Praesidium must be planning a big surprise, some say. Others think we celebrate enough and should just get on with it. Duty above pleasure, and all that. I havenât paid much attention to it, to be honest. Pioneer training and aerobatics take up most of my time. Or did, before. I steer clear of the other topic of the dayâthe topic of every day: your death.
Mother checks in on me. The house notified her when I got up. Sheâs on high alert since it happened, and here she is, loafing around the kitchen, feigning some chore until Iâm seated at the table.
âAre you okay, sweetie?â she asks. She works hard to sound casual.
I shrug. I donât know how to answer the question yet. Fine-but- not-fine?
âYou donât have to go. If itâs too much for you, you donât have to go.â
âI have to go, Mother,â I tell her. âWe arrive soon; only a couple of Convents left. And Iâm not ill. Iâm sad.â
âI know. Iâm only giving you a way out if itâs what you need.â She tinkers with something that doesnât need tinkering. Then a deep breath. âHave you talked to Joshua after... you know?â
My turn to feign casual-ness. I shake my head. âWas going to last night, but he had Praesidium duty.â
Itâs a terrible attempt to bypass a much more complicated question, but itâs what Iâve got. Fifteen days after you died, and I still havenât spoken to him. He did send me a mote last night, after the reclamation. We were both there, obviously, but I couldnât face him or anybody else. I came, I sat, and I left.
Do I feel terrible about it? Yes, but then I donât know how I could feel good about anything anymore.
Joshua asked without asking if I wanted to come over. Itâs what he does, circles around his intentions like a bird eyeing a crumb near someoneâs foot. When I didnât invite him, he eventually gave up and finally moted:
Joshua
>See you at practice tomorrow?
Imogen
>Yes
I guess heâll never know how much more there is crammed into that tiny little word: yes. The millions of things I could, and probably should say. But I donât know where to start. Itâs as though my intentions have drowned in the background noise, and let me tell youâthe background noise after your best friend kills themselves is deafening.
â
Mother loves Joshua. I think she secretly resents you and him being together. And her jealousy by proxy made her doubt you at times. Maybe now, with you out of the picture, Mother spies a chance to shape my future. Which is funny, in a way. My whole generation seems like it was born and bred to fulfill the desires of our parents.
In a way, we are, I guess. To arrive, make landfall, set up colonies, and populate a new planet. Itâs why weâre here, after all. A thousand years ago, Conestoga set sail, as it were, left a dying Earth behind, and began its journey across the stars to Alamea, the second planet out from the star we call Wakea. Mankindâs new home. Compared to that, one death seems like a trifle.
Itâs painful to think like this. I didnât use to be this... dark.
Pea zooms in on my face with an audible whir. âYou look tired,â she says.
âThanks. I made an effort.â
When Pea was younger, a couple of months ago, she would hover close to my face while I ate, peer into my mouth, and ask all sorts of questions about why I have to put things in my mouth and chew them and where they went from there. Eventually, it was easier to give her access to the Verse and let her look stuff up for herself. She also takes great interest in sleep. Anything biological excites her, and she can be very blunt about it.
It was you who named her. You considered her, still an infant then, and said: âYou should call her Pea.â
âWhy?â I asked.
âShe looks like one.â
I gazed at the patchy, beige-yellow blob and said, âMore like a
melon. Same size too. Melon would be a better name.â âI think Pea,â you said firmly.
Pea bobs up and down happily now, like sheâs nodding. She only recently started doing stuff like that. Nobody except me and my tutor, Maester Fletcher know this, but her learning algorithms donât have any restraints. Other bots have fixed limits to their learningâwhen they reach a certain level, it stops. Nobody knows what happens without a limit. I like to think of Pea as the first of her kind.
Funny how a bunch of electronics inside a bioplastic shell can develop a personality. Then again, the grey, fatty lump of organic tissue in my head can too. Humans are no less of a mystery than robots.
â
After you died, three different Welfare Officers came to our house. They studied me with a mixture of fear and sympathy written on their faces. I donât blame them. Itâs been two hundred and seventy-six years since the last suicide. I guess the Travelers have always feared a resurgence of the dark age as we inched closer to Arrival. And I understand the need for talking and figuring out and understanding. But itâs not for me. People who have lost friends will understand. Others will not. Itâs the way it is.
Thereâs been plenty of talk in the Feed. Some consider your act unforgivable. They say you donât deserve to be grieved. They call you selfish and spoiled and wonder how you got to be a Pioneer in the first place. Some call for better screening and selection. Speculative minds in the Connieverse wonder if weâre witnessing the run up to a rash of young suicides. You might have opened the floodgates.
I think you would have enjoyed all this.
And they ask if I knew. If you and I had a pact. Some even go so far as to slap a due date on me. At dinner, a tenday or so after it happened, Mother put her fork down and looked at me in the way adults sometimes do when they think they act natural. I was pushing the food around on the plate rather than eating it.
âDid you have an arrangement?â she asked.
âDonât,â Father said softly, warning.
âYouâd tell us, right?â she went on.
âOf course not.â
Mother gasped, and Father put his fork down. âWhat do you mean?â he said.
âIf we had one, Iâll say no. If not, Iâll say no, too. Either way, you wonât know until itâs too late.â
âImogen!â Mother cried.
âItâs only logical,â I said. âBut why would I wait a tenday and then kill myself?â
The shock in their faces was grimly satisfying, but then came the threats and the pleading, and I had to solemnly swear that we did not have an arrangement of any kind.
But what irks me the most isnât having to deny it. Itâs that I have no idea why you did what you did. Whenever I think of you, the same question screams inside my head, basically every minute of every day: Why did you do it? Why why why why why why why why? It drowns out everything else when I try to sleep. Itâs there when I wake in the morning. It loops in my head like the incessant notes of a catchy refrain stuck in your mind.
Thereâs lots of things I donât know. Things I will never understand. But I know I canât go on unless I know this.
I can play along. Be Imogen Hart, the Pioneer. Imogen Hart, the aerobatics champion. But all of that comes second to my most important mission: to learn why Ellinor Bowman died.
â
I finish the tea and muffin and dispose of the crumbs and tea leaves like a good Traveler. Thatâs when it happens. I glance down into the recycler sink and everything stops. More to the point, my guts go through the start/stop routine that makes me frantically grasp the edges of whatever receptacle that will soon host my barf.
Hereâs the thing.
When they sealed Conestoga and her passengers up and set it on a thousand-year voyage across interstellar space, they created a closed system. The stuff they put inside her had to last a millennium. So we recycle. Itâs one of the first things I learned. Growing up, we learn about how the system reuses everything. Breadcrumbs and egg shells and nail cuticles and sweat and poop and trash are all carefully collected. If I cut my finger on a knife, every drop of blood is gathered. Every scrap of paper, every strand of hair, every drop of liquid, every mote of dust. Every building has a recycler and a small army of miniature ant bots to take care of
every
single
little
thing.
Down the drain it goes into the molecular furnaces, and then it ends up in the resource network.
The reason for this, I learned, is entropy.
We eat, drink, defecate, walk, run, swim, fly, work, and sleep inside a gigantic cylinder hurtling through space. All those activities require energy. Now imagine thereâs a machine in my kitchen that makes my food. Every time I open the machine, thereâs a muffin for me to eat. It doesnât conjure up muffins out of nothingâI have to work for them, and for every muffin I gulp down, I have to put in a certain amount of work to earn a new one. As I work, my body converts the energy I got from the first muffin to muscle movement. In the process, my body produces heat and sweat. I canât put heat back into the machine to make new muffins, so every time I work, some of the energy I got from the first muffin is lost forever. Itâs still there, because energy canât be destroyed, it can only be transformed, but itâs useless to me and the machine.
The energy has become powerlessâits entropy has increased.
Eventually, because each new muffin means a small amount of energy is lost, the system wonât have enough high-grade energy for the machine to produce new muffins. The system has reached a higher level of entropy. Now we have to add new energy from the outside. Which we canât do.
In brief: we have to recycle everything so we donât die.
â
So. Human bodies are essentially vast collections of very valuable resources. Thereâs a whole bunch of useful stuff in our bodies, and it would be insanely wasteful to not recycle them after we die.
Which means.
Big breath.
Bodies are recycled down to the last molecule, all their various acids and proteins and compounds and whatnot finely separated, bottled up, reused, like everything else. We call it reclamation. They tried their best to phrase it in a way that didnât make people queasy. I should have prepared for it, of course. I know all this. I went to Grandmotherâs reclamation, and I know what happens to a body after death. But somehow my mind hasnât yet made the final leap, and when the truth hits, I take it right between the eyes.
Very soon after your death, before it could begin to decompose, your body was chopped up, disintegrated, spread out as atoms in a thousand-year-old circle of life. Somewhere, the molecules that belonged to you are being used for something, and my tea leaves and crumbs are right now joining them.
Maybe the muffin I ate had parts of you in it.
Okay, lesson over. Back to me, retching over the sink.
â
My legs are stuck. My hands shake and I canât breathe. Pea works herself up, because of course she does. She doesnât understand this new, strange behavior and canât identify it as anything other than interesting. Through jellied vision, I see her rotund shape floating above me, asking questions I canât hear.
âWhatâs wrong, honey?â Mother says, by my side so fast sheâs a blur. She reaches out for me and I wave her off. Sheâs too huggy. The tears burn scars in my face as they roll down my cheeks and fall onto the countertop, big and splashy.
âOh sweetie,â she says. She ignores my flailing arms, puts hers around me, pulls me close. âIâm so sorry.â She holds me until her warmth pierces through the cold armor of sadness and I stop shaking. âAre you okay?â she whispers.
I wipe some spit from my chin. âFine. Iâm fine.âÂ
I was hooked on this book from the first page when I came across the delightfully named Pea, a chubby little ball-shaped hoverbot who is Imogen Hartâs personal assistant. Imogenâs family live on the starship Conestoga which has been travelling through space for a thousand years heading for the planet Alameaâ the soon-to-be home of the descendants of the original Travellers. Imogen is a Pioneer, a Planetwalker, one of those chosen to be first on the planetâs surface when they get there. She is also an AI nerd and a brilliant athlete, head of the Cannonballs, one of the  teams in a Conestogan game played in a zero gravity arena (think Quidditch in space suits). But at the start of the book Imogen is having a melt-down as her best friend Ellie has just died, and in strange circumstances. Ellieâs brother Lex, a possible love interest (although Imogen describes him as âfull of himselfâ and having âthe too cool for school lookâ) tries to help her; but only when she receives a coded message from Ellie given to her after the girlâs death does she realise that something is seriously wrong.
The world of the gigantic Conestoga is clearly evoked by allowing us to see the way Imogen and her family function in their ordinary life, and we are borne along by the plot at the same time. Critical information is fed in at appropriate points - in case we should wonder how a quarter of a million colonists and their descendants have been provided for over the thousand years we are told about the scrupulous recycling of everything (rather gruesomely Ellieâs funeral is called a Reclamation).  There is a fair bit of strange vocabulary (meals are âfabbedâ in an âassemblerâ, the train is a 'Mag') but it is all easily comprehensible.
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The characters are three dimensional, not just stereotypes - even the Cannonballsâ coach, - and Imogen is a worthy heroine, if a bit too given to emotional outbursts and unwise fits of anger. Katniss is just the same in The Hunger Games. The romantic side of things is intriguing (will Joshua prevail?)  and the efforts of the authorities to prevent the young people finding the meaning of Ellieâs message provide plenty of heart-thumping incidents. The ending is satisfying while leaving us anxious to read more in the series. So all in all a fabulous read.
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