SAM

  I pushed forward, wanting to get every single answer I could from Ree while I had her attention. “Do you know about the Resistor? How it went down? What happened to my mom and dad?”

  Her face softened, “I’ve dug as deep as anyone can, Sam, and what I don’t know tells me more about the truth than anything else.”

  I nodded, so she went on.

  “The story says the Resistor hit space debris in the asteroid fields of the Kuiper Belt on its way to Black Moon Lilith. There was an technical malfunction on the starliner that took the shield down. The ship exploded, destroying it, the passengers, and not a few asteroids in its wake. And lo and behold, this once-in-a-millennia catastrophe happened so far away from civilization that the only loss of life was those on board.”

  My anger rose listening to the story, and Ree kept going.

  “Oh boy! Aren’t we grateful that no inhabited spheres were caught in the backlash of the disaster? What a terrible tragedy, but so good for the rest of the Cosmos that we know how to fix that type of mechanical problem now. And it will never happen again. Tidy, eh?”

  “And the story checks out?” I asked. “There’s proof it was a malfunction and a crash, not a bomb?”

  “Of course there is!” she scoffed. “Despite the severity of the explosion, there was sufficient wreckage recovered to explain exactly those facts. Such a nice, clean investigation. All the pieces line up perfectly.”

  “So we’ll never know the truth,” I said, stomach sour. “The cover-up was so thorough no one can disprove it.”

  “We can know that it stinks to high heaven and guess, but proof? Unlikely.”

  “So the shields really were down?” Cora asked.

  Ree nodded, “Probably. Most likely, it wasn’t a bomb. But without shields, an accident like that is entirely plausible. It’s the timing and lack of damage to an inhabited world that have me convinced it was intentional.”

  “So, it was an inside job? Someone took the shields down on purpose at the perfect moment?” I asked voice tiny, barely wanting to know the answer.

  “Most likely,” Ree confirmed.

  “Wait—are we actually talking about kamikaze augments on board starliners?” Cora asked disbelievingly. “I mean, are people really that lost that they’d die and take down a bunch of innocents for the cyber mafia?”

  Ree shrugged, “Probably not that direct. If I had to guess, it was something more like the psychological profiling you experienced on Discord, but turned up a few notches. Everyone has something they want, and everybody has pressure points. So imagine this scenario.”

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  She held up a metal finger, “You’re a new, inexperienced augment with a ton of debt. Maybe you had a gambling problem, then you got in an accident and lost a limb. Now you need accommodations for your disability, and your work life isn’t going great. Your family’s suffering, and you’re struggling to use your new metal arm.”

  She walked her fingers along the tabletop, “Then along comes a Recruiter for a tech firm who needs an augment to test some equipment upgrades. They’ll pay you handsomely and train you to use your new cybernetics. It’s the perfect solution to all your problems. And you even get to travel! Put your new skills to work testing starliner upgrades. It’s prestigious and glorious—a life you never dreamed you could have after being an amputee.”

  I gaped at Ree in horror, realization dawning that she was likely 100% right.

  “Oh god. I'm gonna be sick,” I moaned. “The guilty party probably had no idea what they were doing. They were a victim as much as my parents.”

  Ree pointed at me, “Bingo.”

  “And anyone who questions the story will look insensitive or stupid,” Cora said, horrified. “Like they don’t care about the victim’s families.”

  “The smartest doubters like us will put together the inconsistencies and realize that making a fuss over it will get you nowhere. Because you’ll never prove anything,” Ree nodded soberly.

  I pushed aside my empty salad bowl, hands flat on the table. “But why, Ree? Why did a whole starliner full of people need to die?”

  “The most important question,” Jax nodded.

  “Once again, I can tell you the details around the event, and the rest is deduction,” Ree began. “For thirty years prior to the crash, there were Energized Electro! conventions held once every five years on Black Moon Lilith. The coordinators were a cross-galactic team, one from each of the 9 Galaxies. Interestingly, none of them were augmented. But all had either a spouse, parent, or child with a cybernetic limb.”

  My eyebrows rose as Ree’s story spilled out.

  “The convention was ostensibly for tech—gadgets, off-brand games, table-top sci-fi stuff, VR rooms. Nerds doing goofy things with graphic novels and homemade animations. Lots of fandom. It got bigger and bigger every con. And while it’s hard to say for sure who attended, every single video or photo I found had augments in it."

  She pointed to the table emphatically. "I mean every. Single. One. I sifted through millions, looking at thousands of them myself, and having programs identify the rest. I didn’t find a roster, so that tells me they were keeping it on the down low. But people posted on socials.”

  “Everything about it screams: ‘this is a place where augments can gather, and no one cares.’ What they were doing other than the con, I can’t say. Because superficially, it all looks like typical geek-dom. People nerding out over characters. Cosplay. Baking cookies that look like cartoon shows, you know the shit.”

  Actually, I didn’t, but I tried to imagine it.

  Ree went on,“It wouldn’t surprise me at all if your parents were going there to meet up with augmented hackers who got off on thumbing their noses at the Tech Guild. All under the guise of putting on a nerdy con.”

  “You know what convinces me of that? The conference was cancelled after the Resistor went down, and there’s never been a peep about re-starting it,” she finished, metal hands clenching and unclenching on the table in front of her.

  “Woah,” Cora said, turning to me. “Blowing up the Resistor solved the problem, didn’t it? Quashed the spirit right out of them.”

  “It adds up,” I agreed. “Yeah, a lot of speculation, but it does tell a story. Or, at least, questions the so-called ‘truth’ the media published. And makes a lot more sense than anything else. Especially considering the little I know of what my parents were writing about.”

  “Does that help, Sam?” Jax asked, smoothing dark hair away from their eyes.

  I had the odd feeling it wasn’t my emotional state that was on the table, so I answered accordingly.

  “I think it does,” I nodded. “Alternative histories are popular after all.”

  I was already formulating a plan for how I’d write all of this down and make sure no one ever forgot what happened to the augments who tried to get together on Black Moon Lilith.

  At that moment, our pads buzzed. Dinner was ready.