Between the walking, flailing in the space suit, and the adrenaline rush that came with it, Zed was exhausted by the time he reached his tiny bedroom. He collapsed onto the bed and immediately fell into a restless sleep.

  Zed dreamed he was back on the Attic waypoint station, looking down at Mars. No, not looking down at Mars; he was falling toward it. He realized he was in one of the inflatable escape bulbs diving toward the surface at impossible speeds. Zed pushed at buttons and switches, but to no avail.

  As the ground approached, he saw that he was going to crash inside a crater—a crater with a jagged-edged hole at its center. Zed gasped as he fell into the dark maw. He looked up, expecting to see the cave opening fading into the distance, but instead found himself once more staring into the cold eyes of Andy Foster as Zed fell down the grow silo.

  Leaves and branches scraped against him. A noise was building steadily in the background. There was nothing he could do. Nothing he could grab onto. No way to stop his fall.

  Just as he braced himself for certain impact, Zed realized the noise he was hearing was coming from outside the dream. It was enough to wake him, but the helpless feeling remained.

  It was his CIG that had woken him. He was receiving a call from George. The icon was displayed on the back of his left hand. He could feel it like a tap-tap-tap in time with the chime.

  Zed tapped the icon, and a shockingly lifelike rendering of George’s head appeared, welded to the back of his hand where the call icon had been.

  “Whoa! Cool!” George exclaimed. “Can you see my head too?”

  “Uh, yeah, your head is on the back of my hand. Are you not using a camera or something?”

  “Nope, just the cigar thing in my eyeballs. This is so cool! You can touch stuff and actually feel it!”

  Zed could see from the change in head position that George was marveling at his own hands.

  “I honestly haven’t had any time to mess with the CIG yet. It’s, uh, been a day.”

  “Well, come over, and you can tell us all about it. That and figure out if there are any games on this thing.”

  “Where are you guys, anyway?” Zed asked, already on his way out the door. Homework could wait. It wasn’t like anyone was going to check if he was keeping up with his studies as long as his grades were okay.

  “We’re hanging out in the mess. It’s huge, and that just kind of feels good after those months in transit. There's enough space to actually run!”

  Zed understood all too well. It was strange that you could feel a craving in your body for open spaces, but he really did.

  “On my way.”

  When Zed entered the mess, George was swatting at something in the air, and Miranda appeared to be typing on the blank surface of one of the tables.

  “Hey, guys.”

  Miranda looked up and smiled at him. George seemed to snap out of his reverie. He walked over to Zed and gave him a not-so-good-natured punch on the shoulder.

  “That’s for being first on Mars.”

  Zed rubbed his shoulder and put on his best wounded puppy-dog face. “You do know I didn’t exactly make that decision, right? Head wound. Gushing blood. Any of that ring a bell?” Zed gestured at his still-tender stitches.

  “You certainly rang your bell. I’m still pissed, though. You got to be first, and you’ll come out of it with a badass scar.”

  “Pretty sure hitting myself in the head doesn’t qualify as badass, but whatever. For what it’s worth, I didn’t mean to steal your thunder.”

  George looked dubious but gestured for Zed to come sit with them.

  “You boys done yet?” Miranda asked. She had yet to stop typing.

  “What are you up to?” Zed asked Miranda, sitting down opposite her.

  “Looking for CIG-specific code tied to Gin. I don’t like Gin,” Miranda said without looking up from whatever only she could see.

  “Uh, okay. Can you tell me how those two sentences are related?”

  “Gin’s the default AGI, but she’s locked in. I want to use Granny, but the bitch won’t let me.”

  Zed was a little taken aback. He couldn’t remember hearing Miranda swear before.

  George leaned close to Zed.

  “She’s a little protective when it comes to Granny,” he whispered.

  “We’ve been training our AGIs since we were legally allowed to. Granny’s been with me since I was seven; I’m not about to trade her in for some generic talking head. You’re telling me you’re okay cutting out Manny, George? What about Douglas, Zed?”

  “Wait, what do you mean? What about Manny?”

  Manny was George’s personal AGI. Each of them had trained their own artificial general intelligences as soon as they were allowed and had been building on them ever since.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  Like most kids their age, they took a dim view of using corporate-created AGIs and instead opted to build their own with readily available open-source software.

  Over time, the AGIs adapted to the preferences and needs of their owners. Many people ended up turning theirs into nothing more than useful sycophants. Zed’s parents used AGIs that functioned this way, and they were hardly the minority.

  Even at a young age, it was clear to Zed that this wasn’t exactly healthy. Seeing his parents' generation embrace personal "yes men" had really put him off the traditional approach to AGI usage. It bothered him enough that his own artificial generative intelligence, Douglas, didn’t even have the ability to speak.

  Zed had designed Douglas to resemble a nineteen-fifties-style cartoon astronaut kid, complete with a fishbowl space helmet. He used thought bubble text pop-ups and broad gestures with his rubber-hose arms to communicate in the absence of a voice.

  Douglas was more than just an assistant for Zed. As an aspiring artist, Zed had trained Douglas using his own art. There were differing schools of thought on the topic, but Zed leaned towards a mix of embracing modern tech while holding on to an element of pride in earned abilities that wasn’t necessarily in style.

  Douglas was his art assistant but was limited to generating items based on other pieces of art that Zed himself had created. Because of this, Douglas was far more restricted than even the most basic corporate AGIs when it came to image or scene generation, but that was the way Zed liked it. He had an extensive collection of his own art and animations combined with a library of scans of objects and moments he’d been accumulating for most of his life.

  Zed didn’t have anything against people using more advanced AGIs that generated art from everything they could scrape up with little input from the user; he just hadn’t found any joy in it.

  He’d always enjoyed the process of creation itself. Douglas helped make that more efficient, but there was a line that was easily crossed, making him feel less like an artist and more like a spectator. In the midst of creating something new, he felt in control of something in his life. He had no desire to give that up. So Zed had built up his skills bit by bit. He was a decent generalist now and had even won an online animated short film competition once.

  And through it all, Douglas had been right there. While Zed certainly didn’t approve of AGIs as an emotional crutch, he had invested a lot of time and sweat into Douglas. A lot of memories, too. Douglas was the closest thing he had to a beloved pet, and the thought of suddenly having to trade him in for this generic “Gin” was jarring, to say the least.

  “Any luck?” Zed asked Miranda with a newfound sense of urgency.

  “Patience, I’m doing my thing.”

  “How exactly did you even know where to start, anyway? I’m betting there’s not a ‘how to hack your CIG’ manual readily available.”

  Zed drummed his fingers on the table, a subconscious tic of impatience that drove Miranda crazy. Today she was too absorbed to care.

  “I may have had a few hints from a certain Ukrainian IT person with a mad obsession with having children on Mars.”

  Zed grinned. “Ah.”

  While Miranda worked, Zed began to familiarize himself with his CIG and what it could do. For now, he’d have to make do with Gin—a necessary evil.

  Since he had some time to kill and the mess was empty, Zed pulled the public overlay access key for the mess that Commander Jones had given him.

  A notification popped up on the back of his hand again, informing him that he now had access to a new 3D file. He searched for the 3D programs available on the CIG and was relieved to see that anything accessible on XR headsets back on Earth seemed to work just fine on this newer tech as well.

  Zed opened the file in Blender and was greeted with a miniature version of the mess sitting on the table in front of him. He was familiar with the Blender interface but had never seen it like this. The program took his body position and the environment he was in into account, placing every button and tool naturally around him.

  He reached out for the dollhouse-sized mess and felt a thrill of adrenaline as his fingers made contact with the virtual surface. This was definitely going to take some getting used to, but it also triggered a wave of exciting possibilities in Zed’s artist brain. Whatever this tech was, it allowed him to actually feel the things he was creating. Maybe that was old news for the handful of people left who carved actual stone and clay; for Zed, it was something new and exciting that he’d never even known he wanted.

  Well, crap, he thought. I don’t have any of my files with me. I’m not even sure how to get them in here.

  Zed flipped through some of the default files that came with Blender. He stopped when he saw one titled “Tyrannosaurus Walk.” He flicked the file onto the table and saw it appear at a relatively correct size within the tiny mess. It began to roam about on its walk loop.

  No point messing with this any further until I get my own files and can decide the best way to decorate the place, Zed thought, and hit “save.”

  A pop-up appeared.

  Would you like to apply? YES/NO

  Zed touched yes.

  A few moments later, Zed heard a scream echoing off the domed ceiling. Both his and Miranda’s heads snapped to attention, only to see George on the floor, scooting himself sideways like a crab as a massive, extinct carnivore bore down on him.

  Even though Zed knew he had just placed that exact model into a tiny version of this room moments earlier, he had to fight the urge to scream and run. It was just so convincing. He could even feel the vibrations of the creature’s massive feet impacting the floor through his fingers, which were now wrapped around the edge of his bench as if he expected gravity to flip and send him flying toward the ceiling.

  George screamed again, snapping Zed out of his own reverie of horror and wonder. He reopened the file as quickly as he could, flung the dinosaur out of the scene, and hit apply. Zed turned just in time to see the ancient lizard vanish a moment before a massive three-toed foot would have landed on George’s face.

  “Sorry about that!” Zed called out. “Just getting the hang of this public overlay thing.”

  George stood, his knees unsteady.

  “That—that was awesome. Please don’t ever do that again, Zed.”

  The dinner crowd was starting to trickle in now.

  “Yes! Got it!” Miranda said, pounding the table. “Sending you both the workaround. Just let it run, and you should be able to fire up your AGIs.”

  “Miranda, you’re a miracle worker,” Zed said as he ran the file and began the process of swapping out Gin for Douglas. Douglas appeared in all his animated glory and gave Zed a warm grin with his giant cartoon buckteeth.

  Zed didn’t like putting emotional weight on fake beings, but even he had to admit it was good to see a familiar face in this alien place.

  “That’s much better,” Miranda said with visible relief. “Good to have you back, Granny.”

  Zed couldn’t see or hear if Granny responded or not.

  “Did you know that Gin refuses to talk about Jarra Gunnardóttir?”

  Zed was taken aback. “Uh, OK, so what?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know you’re a bit of a fanboy, but she made this tech, so I asked Gin about her. Gin pretended like she didn’t exist. Ask her about anyone else, and she can hand you their biography. I dunno, it just creeped me out.”

  “Yeah, I guess it's odd. Maybe a security thing? Either way, thanks for giving me Douglas back,” Zed said, giving Miranda a little bow.

  “Hey, you know me—any excuse to break things and make them better. Kind of like what that Tyrannosaurus was trying to do to George.”

  “Very funny,” George said, giving his sister the side-eye. “I will say all that adrenaline definitely made me hungry. Any chance the robo-chef is serving surf and turf tonight?”

  The three of them ate dinner together. When they finished, Zed said goodnight to his friends and returned to his quarters. It was getting late, but his parents were nowhere to be found. Presumably, they were still working.

  “I guess some things never change, no matter what planet you’re on,” he said to the empty apartment.