Read Online Upgraded by Peter Watts, Greg Egan, Ken Liu, Robert Reed, Elizabeth Bear, Madeline Ashby, E. Lily Yu - Free Book Online Page B

seemed to defy all calculation.
    There were times when the people worshipped Orleans for his good fortune as well as his wealth of practical knowledge, and they would repeat every good story about the long odds that their friend had defeated or tricked or at least endured.
    But this was not one of those times.
    Youngsters in this generation had suffered horrible losses. More comets than usual had slipped past defense systems, impacting on brave smart and very unlucky Remoras. Worse still, early this year an alien reactor detonated unexpectedly, and the blast was in the hundred megaton range. Thousands of their peers had been vaporized. That’s why these fourteen youngsters felt abused by the Creation. They were entitled. And that is why they had embraced some very narrow, exceptionally rigid beliefs, including one simple, well-polished belief was that the oldest Remora was a coward in his heart. How else could Orleans have survived for so long? And with that faith in hand, they were free to look at him as if he were nothing but a contemptible piece of worn-out man.
    The youngsters liked to glare at Orleans, snarling on private channels.
    As if he couldn’t read their baby faces.
    And Orleans rather enjoyed these harsh thoughts. It made him a better teacher by making more determined students, each one of these half-born children hungry to prove the old man’s flaws in front of her peers.
    “I know where you’re taking us,” one child began.
    Gleem was her name.
    Orleans looked at the ugly, almost-human face. “You know where, do you?”
    “Yes. And I’m warning you. I know the trick.”
    Gleem had a bright gray human face and two white eyes, a crooked nose that couldn’t decide where to grow, and a shiny black-lipped mouth full of black teeth. Being three hundred years and few months old, she was the babies’ baby. According to a calendar full of arbitrary timemarks, she was also the last of her generation, and as sometimes happened with the lastborn, she was something of a prodigy—an expert with machines of every species and every useful job.
    The girl had a two-and-a-half meter tall lifesuit for a shell.
    For a skin.
    Every Remora lived inside a lifesuit. Each lifesuit was built at the instant of conception, and that suit was theirs until a final moment of existence, usually on the leading edge of plasmatic fire.
    “I know exactly what you’re planning,” she said.
    Orleans laughed at his student.
    The black-lipped mouth sneered.
    And he laughed louder, on the public channel. Very little that was human showed in Orleans current face. He had six eyes evenly spread around the edges, and down low was a complicated nose full of delicately folded skin, looking like a flower blossom decorating the region where a chin might be set. The skull inside the helmet had been reassembled in novel ways, while his current mouth was in the middle of his inspired face—a large and wet and very good mouth designed for laughing.
    Every mouth Orleans grew could enjoy a good joke.
    “So you know,” he said. “And I thought I had such a fine surprise waiting.”
    “It’s the Rudger fissure, that’s where the patch is. And you built that patch when you were our age.”
    “A full crew built it, and I happened to be there, yeah, except others were in charge of the operation. But you’re right, I did some of the work.”
    “You made mistakes,” she said.
    “We all did that,” he agreed.
    “But we won’t fix the mistakes, because you never let us.”
    “I don’t let anyone do anything. Haven’t you heard?”
    The other youngsters were listening. But like people anywhere, they felt obliged to look elsewhere, pretending indifference.
    “You’ll take us to some corner of that patch, and we’ll have to mark each little blunder,” she said.
    Orleans let everybody consider his silence. Then with a sturdy, careful voice, he said, “Your name. Gleem.”
    “What about it?”
    “I’ve been meaning to ask. I knew another