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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 woman named Gleem. Did you steal the sound from her?”

The black mouth wasn’t bad at laughing, but scoffing was its specialty. “That’s a simple question to answer. Look at the records.”

“Except I wanted to ask you,” he said. “Which is not so simple, apparently.”

Others laughed at that.

Gleem tightened her sneer. And then very quietly, she said, “It was my mother’s mother’s mother’s name.”

Orleans knew that, or he didn’t. What mattered was to hear her explain a little bit about her simple, unfinished self.

“It’s just a name,” she said.

Orleans broke into a hard, long laugh.

“What do you mean?” the youngster demanded. “What’s so funny, old man?”

One of her peers called out a warning. “He’s got a lesson for us.”

Which Orleans intended to impart on everyone, probably right away. But before his good-at-laughing mouth could offer another word, an encrypted transmission arrived. It came from a location that in eighty thousand years had never once spoken to Orleans, even by accident. He listened to the transmission. He listened, and the others watched him saying nothing, every young eye narrowed with thought. And then feeling bored, they began to chat among themselves while he continued to absorb orders and suggestions from high machine-minds that were too smart to be wrong and far too smart to appreciate what it was that they had discovered.

That one eye used to be alive, fully and utterly alive, and the body and mind attached to the eye were healthy, possessed by the certainty that nothing would ever go seriously wrong. Yet in the middle of a routine moment, everything went wrong. Other eyes and minds were close by. Everybody was riding a fine ship, rockets opened to full throttle, pushing colonists to some world far too distant to be seen. Then there was no one else. The others were missing. What happened to them? And where did the ship go? And why was this single creature tumbling through the blackness, screaming hard with a mouth barely born?

He was scared, far too scared to think along proper lines. And he spun wildly, and then he managed to quit weeping but couldn’t stop tumbling, stars sweeping past his lidless gaze.

What had gone so horribly wrong?

Life on the starship had always been busy and pleasant, free of discord and blessed with moments of small joy. Then a critical machine on the bow demanded attention. It was decided that one of the crew had to dress in a lifesuit and step into the cold black. There was a song from the bridge, a rousing plea for one brave volunteer, and nobody answered. Then the leaders examined the rosters, identifying the most deserving, least important crewmen. That was when he sang back at them. That’s when he volunteered, and it was the last time in his life that he would hear others singing about their own happiness and considerable relief.

Inside the airlock, ten lifesuits stood at attention. Because he was small, he claimed the largest, thickest suit for himself. Feeling big was the only reason. Then he passed through the airlock and into space. The work itself was quite routine. Nothing went wrong and nothing felt wrong. One navigation system needed close attention, and there was a menu to follow, and he did the job perfectly if a little slowly. His suit and his body were tethered to the outside of the starship, nearly finished with the job, and then the ship was gone. Some huge soundless event tore him loose, gave him new momentum, and that terrific jolt turned his body into living water and scared grit.

Modern life could endure almost any abuse, short of plasmatic fire. His bioceramic mind fell into a state deeper than sleep but far, far removed from Death. Then his water and organelles and phages found one another, and they found energy and heat, reconstituting a body that allowed him to become aware again, spinning and screaming, weeping and then not weeping.

How much time had passed?

He asked the suit.

The big lifesuit had counted five days.

But what happened to the ship and colonists and the rest of the crew?

It was a critical matter, but the suit had no opinion. And no interest. It was a minimally conscious machine, somewhat damaged by the abrupt fury. Maybe the ship’s engines exploded. Or a black comet gutted its body. Speculation was pointless. Circumstances were critical. But the suit was still able to hear a close strong radio signal, and there were no signals. The vacuum was silent. Nobody was calling to the suit or to its ungrateful passenger.

The passenger wailed until exhausted.

Detecting hunger, the suit fed him and infused his fluids with fresh oxygen.

The simplest lifesuit could purify water and air, and it could synthesize food, and when necessary, generate pleasant sounds and odors. This particular lifesuit also possessed two fully-fueled reactors and several banks of unfinished machinery. Unfinished machines could be organized in any direction necessary. The suit had been designed to serve this starship and another fifty ships in the future. And to the limits of its cognitive powers, this suit could help its passenger survive.

The starship was no more. There would be no rescue or even a sorrowful greeting from the black of space. An undeserving life had been delivered to this one creature, and it came for no good reason, and now his suffering would stretch into an eternity.

That passenger proved to be an obsessive, half-mad beast. Each conscious moment was suffused with thoughts about those last moments of normal life. In excruciating detail, he replayed routine events where nothing went wrong, where he did what was expected of him, and every memory left him aching with guilt. Perhaps the engines failed. But if he hadn’t been brave enough or pliable enough to march out onto the hull, he would have remained inside, and maybe he would have seen the malfunction and saved the ship. Or an impact killed everyone. But if he had volunteered with the first call, and if he had worn a smaller, less massive suit, the vagaries of those tiny motions and masses would have shifted the ship’s trajectory a cell’s width. In another ten million kilometers, that faint change would have shifted the ship hundreds of meters, and everybody would have been saved, and he would have been the unknown hero.

Enticing stories want to be told. But of all the possibilities, what was most likely, and what was most wonderful, was any variation killed him along with everybody else, leaving him beyond doubt and every misery.

“Kill me,” he told the suit.

Not understanding, the suit continued its important work.

So the passenger tried to murder himself. But the lifesuit was designed to care for almost any level of damage. There were multiple ways to force its passenger to breathe and find nutrition as well as adequate energy to repair what pathetic little damages that the creature could inflict on a body that couldn’t be touched.

Ages passed.

Immortal beings can bear horrible things, and misery found its natural, bearable state. But with the ages and small measures of cleverness, the suit did manage one small decency: Wasted heat had to be bled off the reactors, and the suit did so in an uneven fashion, the wild spinning body slowing and then stopping entirely.

Eventually the passenger went through space with his one eye forward.

Still screaming, still weeping, but never quite as much as before.

Orleans offered telemetry and images, and then he let the fourteen children weave their own conclusions.

“The object, the artifact, is eight meters long, two wide,” he told them, opening the full files for examination. “Hyperfiber on the outside, and that’s all we know. This is the AIs’ best guess of its shape, its density, and this is its velocity right now, and this is how much the prize needs to slow to survive its impact with the Ship. Which is coming in just a little while. There’s no way around that ending.”

Orleans realized that his voice was too excited, and so he paused. He didn’t want hopes escaping too soon.

“That’s a biological shape,” said one boy, and another, and the oldest girl. But Gleem was first to point out, “It’s a high-grav configuration, but I’m not seeing this beast in any of our libraries . . . ”

“How old is it?” someone asked.

Orleans had no idea.

But for fun, he said, “One billion years, and a day.”

Nobody believed that. But all of the children, or even Orleans, could not stop playing with enormous numbers.

“So how do we manage this landing?” another boy asked. “Because they want to save the artifact, right?”

“I’m an idiot,” their teacher said. “You tell me how.”

A debate was launched. Fifty opinions came from every mouth. Except for Gleem. She walked to the front of the skimmer, silently making calculations, answering an entirely different problem.

And Orleans remained behind everyone, watching.

Thirteen students devised one utterly workable scheme. The artifact was built from hyperfiber, but descending at one-third the speed of light, even the finest grade of fiber would shatter. The Great Ship refused to slow, so the target needed to find quite a lot of velocity and find it quickly. Thankfully the asteroid was a tough, useful blessing. One hundred billion tons of iron could be melted, and that melt could be vaporized in controlled bursts, banks of lasers working with surgical grace and surgical conviction, delivering just enough thrust with just enough stability to launch the artifact away from the Great Ship. And then with luck, the inevitable collision might not spoil the object’s value for engineers and historians.

The girl took no part in the discussion. She stood apart. She was a baby barely able to control the mutations of her own flesh, dressed in a suit nearly identical to everyone else’s suit. In a cabin full of chatter and hand gestures, she ordered the skimmer’s wall to become clear. The Ship’s slick gray hull raced beneath them, and nobody else noticed. Then her hyperfiber arm lifted, bent at first and then straight, and one finger was pointed at the wrong place and then the right place. The correction was made instantly, without anyone’s help.

One of the boys asked Gleem, “What are you doing?”

She didn’t answer. Really, if he didn’t appreciate what her arm meant, then he was too ignorant to survive long as a Remora.

The oldest girl said, “Oh, that’s where it’s going to crash.”

Everyone but Gleem turned towards Orleans.

“Of course it is,” said the baby, laughing at all of them. “Don’t you see? The old coward already has us making a nice safe spiral around the crash site!”

The epiphany was tiny. Nothing about any recent day was better or worse, certainly not special, and the passenger couldn’t recall so much as one novel thought inside the boredom. He ate and breathed and wept and begged for death, and his dreams were ordinary or they were forgotten. And then he was awake again, hungry enough to endure the simple salted paste—the easiest food that could be made by machinery that was shepherding its energy. He ate until the immortal stomachs stopped complaining, and he drank sweetened water, and he evacuated his bowels twice before realizing that he hadn’t screamed or sobbed once, much less complained about this unyielding hell of existence.

Why wasn’t he shrieking in agony?

The question posed itself, and the same voice tried to give a worthy answer.

“Because you have come to terms with your fate.”

But no, that wasn’t the case. What he realized at last—what he should have appreciated from the first moment inside this tomb—was that he had resources beyond count. The lifesuit was tough but idiotic. But the body inside the suit was infused with phages and nanotools and genetic materials, modern as well as ancient. Every emergency pathway was a finger. The mechanisms that could rebuild a body might be fooled by that same body. Apply willpower to these armies of cells and their modern scaffolding, and quite a lot might be accomplished.

The day passed quietly.

And the next twenty days too.

Then another question was posed. This time the suit spoke, with a voice that could never sound concerned or particularly curious.

“What are doing now?” asked the lifesuit.

“I am doing nothing,” the passenger said.

“But you are,” it maintained. “You have slowed your circulation, and the acidity in your blood is a mistake.”