“Good Morning, Kyle.”

Kyle groaned softly and forced himself to roll off his bunk and stand up. He stretched, his hands rubbing against the ceiling and walls as he did so. The room was a perfect cube, seven feet tall, seven feet wide and seven feet long. Of course it seemed somewhat smaller. His bunk, the footlocker it sat on top of, and the cabinet overhead collectively took up two fifths of the space. Kyle had heard a lot of people complain about the size of their apartments, but it didn’t bother him any. True, the room where he’d grown up had been larger, a ten foot cube, but he had shared that with his parents, so while he had technically moved into a smaller domicile, his current residence provided him with more personal space. Besides, it wasn’t like he actually spent that much of his time here.

“Remember, your health and safety depend on your diligence.” It was the same voice with the same warning that Kyle had heard every morning of his life.

He opened his cabinet. While his footlocker contained some personal items, the cabinet and its contents were entirely Company property. Everything he took from the cabinet each day had to be returned by the time he went to sleep that night, when it would be removed, processed, and replaced. Kyle pulled out the razor first and proceeded to shave. One of the health advisors had confided to Kyle that since the air processing ducts had been renovated it probably wasn’t necessary to remove all of his hair daily anymore, but the company never got around to revising the mandate that required the daily shave. Besides, it was habit as much as anything, and Kyle rather enjoyed the opportunity for reflection provided by his morning regimen.

When he had finished he placed the razor in the appropriate receptacle, pulled out his daily ration of body wipes and meticulously cleaned himself. He was allotted four body wipes a day, so it was important to use them efficiently.

Kyle pulled out and opened the bulky silver bag containing his clothes for the day, grimacing in annoyance at the bright green suit inside. The color of the suit identified which job he had been assigned, and in turn, what kind of day he was likely to have.

Most of the residents of The Hill only knew how to do one or two jobs. They were assigned a position based on their skills when they arrived and spent the rest of their lives learning the intricacies of that particular occupation. Kyle had grown up in The Hill and had, over the years, learned a dozen different jobs, which meant that he was regularly reassigned. The only problem was that understaffing on a penal colony was generally the result of job-related fatalities. The more dangerous a particular profession was, the more likely they were to need an extra hand. Today he was assigned to one of his least favorite jobs: farming.

“Only by working together can we save ourselves.” The disembodied voice interjected, triggered, no doubt, by his negative body language.

Kyle’s irritation faded as he took a moment to contemplate the truth of the words. He shook his head, disappointed in his own behavior, and pulled out the last item in the box. Some of the prisoners had managed to bring books with them from their homeworld; others, like Kyle’s parents, had not been allowed that luxury. He’d been taught to read using the daily pamphlets. Today’s was a classic, Where Would I Be Without the Company? Kyle had read it over a dozen times, but he still had a few minutes before breakfast and nothing better to do.

***

“As I am given air to breathe, so I give back with each breath. As I am guarded by the walls around me, so I guard those who built them. As The Company gives me life, so I give my life to The Company.” The mandatory recitation ended and the workers sat down as one.

“So I’m back to farming today.”

Siosa growled something unintelligible.

Seven years earlier, at the age of twelve, Kyle had petitioned the warden for adult status. The warden had agreed and Kyle had moved out of his parents’ domicile and into his own. Two months later Siosa had arrived and been assigned a room on the same floor as Kyle. Being on the same floor, they worked the same shifts, ate together, and took their half hour rec times together. They got along pretty well, though Siosa seemed to get annoyed at such trivial things. He was always like this at the beginning of meals. Kyle could never figure out exactly why.

The best thing to do was keep talking. Sometimes he could find a topic to cheer his friend up. “Of course, we should be getting a ship in today.”

Siosa blinked. “Really? Today? How do you always know?”

Kyle shrugged. “Well, it’s pretty regular, isn’t it? One every six months.”

“Yeah, every six standard months. But we don’t have standard months. Hell, we don’t have calendars. How the hell do you always know.”

“Well, I’ve been here a little longer than you.”

Siosa nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, I guess nineteen years is long enough to develop a pretty good internal clock.”

Kyle smiled in agreement as he dug into his meal.

“I hope there’s someone from Sonnacca.”

News agencies generally only catered to those who could pay, and penal colonies on non-terraformed worlds tended to invest their money in things like food, water, and oxygen instead, so most convicts only got news from home from new convicts.

Sonnacca was a small continent on a distant planet, and the last arrival from there had been two years ago, a prisoner on the losing side of a three-year civil war. That was the first Siosa had heard of that particular war.

Ironically, the political party that took power during that conflict was the one that Siosa had been a part of when he had been captured and shipped to The Hill.

“I hope so too.” Kyle ran his finger around the inside of his bowl. With food rationed the way it was, it was important to get everything they gave you.

Siosa turned and looked at Kyle, an expression somewhere between pity and envy. “You know, you should be furious. You should be outraged.”

“Oh, right, this again.” Kyle smiled conspiratorially. “What should I be outraged about, Si?”

“You live in a prison! There are a lot of people here who have every reason to be upset, the politically inconvenient who got shipped here just for being in the way, the falsely convicted, guys like me who were on the winning side a few years too late. But you… you didn’t do anything. You were born here, born into slavery.”

“Right, the slavery thing again.”

“It is slavery!” Siosa slammed his fist on the table. The prisoners on either side scooted slightly away. “You have no control over your life, you work as hard as you can so that somebody else can get rich. What is that if not slavery?”

“Necessity. Look, if The Company didn’t offer its services, where do you think you’d be? Helping run Sonnacca? You’d be dead. You were captured, remember? What do you think they would have done to you if The Company hadn’t paid to keep you alive?”

Siosa snorted. “Yeah, so kind of The Company, to take us off the hands of our captors and use us to terraform a whole new world. Terraform it, and mine it. We do the work, they get the money. Downright sweet of them.”

“You’re upset that they’re being efficient? It’s a business, it exists to make money, the fact that they found a way to save some lives in the process…”

“Save lives? They aren’t saving our lives, they’re killing us in the slowest way possible.”

Kyle rolled his eyes. They’d been having this argument for years now. “Killing you? By feeding you, protecting you from toxins on the surface, keeping out the radiation. That’s how they’re killing you?”

“No, that’s how they’re making it last.” Siosa shook his head. “Look, if they were so nice, so kind, so caring, wouldn’t they have given you the opportunity to get off this rock? I mean, you’re not one of us, you weren’t convicted of anything. They don’t have a contract on you, if they wanted to, they could take you anywhere you wanted to go.”

“This is my home, where would I go? Besides, taking me anywhere would require fuel and there’s no reason they should just give that to me. How am I going to earn enough to afford passage?”

“Earn enough? You told me you’ve been working one way or another for as long as you can remember, and you’ve been doing ten hour shifts since you were twelve.”

“Of course I have, the work we do is important. The work we do is necessary.”

Siosa winced in pain. “How many times do I have to tell you? Stop reading those damned propaganda pamphlets! Do you have any idea how much money you make for these people? I mean, let’s ignore the fact that in a century or two, when this place is completely terraformed, that The Company will effectively own it, because really, how can we calculate how much you’ve personally contributed to that? So let’s just go with the mine, right? You spend at least two standard months a year down there, right?”

“Sure.”

“And you get an average of, let’s say a hundred pounds of ore a day?”

“At least.”

“A hundred pounds of raw ore, once processed, is maybe fifty ounces of drive-fuel.”

“Sure, but all I do is extract it.”

“Fine, let’s say that your personal effort is only worth one-hundredth of the final value of the fuel.”

“One hundredth? I doubt it’s worth that much.”

Siosa rolled his eyes. “Fine, one five-hundredth.”

Kyle considered for a moment before shrugging concession.

“Right. So, seven years, call it two months a year, we have thirty-five days in a standard month. That’s four hundred and ninety days at fifty ounces a day, which comes to 24,500 ounces. You get one five hundredth of that which amounts to…” Siosa gnawed his lip for a moment. “Forty-nine ounces of pure fuel. Do you know how much that’s worth?”

“No idea.”

“Kyle, drive fuel is mixed with air just before it’s burned. Less than one part per hundred thousand. Fifty ounces of the stuff is enough to land a warship on the surface of the planet, load two hundred prisoners on it, and take it all the way to my homeworld.”

Kyle raised an eyebrow. “Really? Then why do they have to process it? Why can’t they just use it like it is?”

“No idea. I think it has to do with the toxicity of the exhaust. The point is, they owe you.”

Kyle snorted. “That completely ignores the expenses they’ve incurred just keeping me alive for the past nineteen years.”

Siosa sighed.

***

After breakfast Kyle and Siosa led the way from their dining room to the lowest floor of the building where the prisoners fell into formation by job block. Kyle glanced longingly at the machinist block. Green eyes turned briefly to watch him pass. He had enjoyed the last two weeks: it had been nice to have a relatively safe job, and working with his father had been a bonus. Kyle waved and continued on over to the farming block, taking position near the end of it. Demanding a position near the front, where he technically belonged, just would have made things complicated.

The man next to him squinted over at Kyle with filmy eyes. His face was red and peeling, a sure sign that he’d been slow to raise his shield visor a few times. If he was more careful from here on out he should survive. His face would heal up soon enough, though his eyes would never be quite the same. If he screwed up much more, though, the damage would quickly become irreparable. He’d lose his eyesight and most of the skin on his face, and then he’d die.

Kyle returned the man’s gaze.

“You’re not one of the regulars. Who did you piss off to get transferred into this fresh hell?”

Kyle shook his head. “Didn’t piss anyone off. I requested it. Wanted to get outside, feel the breeze, see some clouds.”

“You poor deluded bastard.”

Kyle chuckled. He had no idea what a breeze was, or what clouds were supposed to look like, but he got tired of explaining himself to the newbies every time he got transferred.

“Your attention.”

The monitor at the front of the room flickered and the warden appeared in front of them. Nobody in The Hill had ever actually seen the warden in person, and there were several running wagers on whether or not he was actually in the Hill or if he ran the penal colony from somewhere else, possibly off planet, or if he was even real.

“Three orders of business. First, Cleimah Ohoj Rho, step forward.”

There was a moment of nervous silence. Finally a small, wiry looking man from the food processing block slipped between his still and silent compatriots and stood in front of the monitor looking terrified.

“Cleimah Ohoj Rho, you stand accused of stealing food. How do you plead?”

The man blinked in surprise and looked around, as though he might find help somewhere. “Not guilty?”

Kyle sighed and shook his head sadly. The warden did not accuse without having firm proof. Rho must, Kyle reasoned, be new.

The face of the warden disappeared, replaced by a video image of the accused man in a kitchen, glancing furtively around before tucking several hard rations into his shirt. It was as much food as most of the men in the room received in three days.

The warden’s face appeared again on the monitor. “Stealing food is stealing life. Your actions were those of basest greed. For the good of the colony you are sentenced to death.”

There was a moment of stunned silence before the man began to scream. “You pompous bastard! You hypocrite! Look at yourself! You eat more in a meal than you feed to us in a day and yet you sit in judgment?”

“Take him away!” The warden’s voice filled the room, deafening, terrifying.

Kyle winced from the sound, and watched, perturbed, as the condemned man was dragged from the room. He looked back to the screen, thoughtfully. Rho had a point. The warden wasn’t especially overweight, but his jowls did seem a little thick, and his stomach a bit heavy. He looked like a new arrival, not like a man who had spent the last decade and change licking his plate and cleaning the bottom of his soup bowl out with his finger.

But then, The Company had to have someone they could trust in charge of a place like this, and running a penal colony couldn’t be an easy sell. It made sense that he’d get extra rations.

“Second, it is becoming apparent that there are some of you who do not seem to appreciate the generosity offered to you by The Company. Some discussions over the last few mealtimes have proved divisive, derisive, and inappropriate.”

Kyle resisted the urge to look across the room at Siosa.

“I believe that you should all take some time to reflect on where you would be without The Company, and in order to give you time for those meditations, for the next two weeks all meals are to be taken silently. Violations will result in reduced meal portions.”

There was a collective groan. Meals were one of the few opportunities for socializing outside of your work block.

“Third.” The warden spoke over the wordless protests. “A ship is arriving in three hours. All personnel trained in prisoner processing are to report to their appropriate station for the first half of the workday.”

The screen flickered and the image disappeared. The warden was not a chatty man.

Kyle nodded politely at his few farming acquaintances and headed toward the prisoner processing wing. He’d have to spend the second half of his day out in the fields, but at least he’d be inside for the first few hours.

***

“But I’m innocent!”

Kyle nodded politely. One of the frustrating things about processing was dealing with people in denial. “It doesn’t really matter at this point.”

“How can it not matter? I didn’t do anything wrong! I’m here because someone made a mistake!”

Kyle shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter.”

“You don’t believe me!”

“I neither believe nor disbelieve. I don’t have to choose a side because, as I just stated, it doesn’t actually matter whether or not you did whatever you were convicted of.” Kyle cleared his throat and leaned forward. “The Company is not a government. The Company is a company. It provides a service to governments: the service of imprisoning convicts. Not criminals, convicts. Your government decided that you were guilty of… well, whatever. They decided to remove you, permanently, from their society. Now, normally that would mean killing you, but The Company offered an alternative. Instead of execution, they found a new society for you. One where you would have the opportunity to live out the rest of your life in relative safety.”

“But I’m innocent!”

“What do you want us to do? Put you back on the ship and transport you back home so you can be put to death?”

“I want you to let me go!”

Kyle was silent for a moment. “You can go any time you want. You can go back to the ship and ask for passage, in which case they’ll ask you if you can afford it, which you can’t because your government confiscated anything valuable you had before you left. You can simply leave the compound, but since you don’t own your own suit you’ll be dead before you can take ten steps. And you’ll die a very unpleasant death. Or, if you so choose, you can stay in the compound. Of course, the air you’re breathing had to be brought onto the planet, and recycled through very expensive machines, and the food and water were also brought and/or produced at no small cost, so if you would like to stay we are going to have to insist that you do some work to earn your keep.”

The woman stared at Kyle with an expression of despair and terror. He had been accused of being harsh, but the simple truth was that people who didn’t come to terms with their situation didn’t tend to last long.

“You just don’t care?”

Kyle considered for a moment before shrugging. “Not really. Nothing personal, it just doesn’t have any bearing on anything here. There are over two thousand people in this facility. Some of them did horrible things, and some of them were accused of horrible things that they didn’t do. Some are here for supporting the wrong political party, some were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. At the end of the day, though, they’re all here. And none of them are leaving any time soon. We can sit around talking about how we got here and whether or not we deserve it, but what good will that do? We are where we are, and we only have two choices: live, or die. It isn’t a choice anyone can make for you.”

The woman sniffled softly, thoughtfully, almost. “Why are you here?”

Kyle smiled kindly. “Because I chose to live.”

The woman wiped away a few tears and seemed to shrink into her chair.

Kyle flipped the file in front of him open. “Now, according to your file you’ve spent the last decade in machine maintenance and repair. We have plenty of machines around here that could use some repair and maintenance. So, which would you prefer: air recyclers, farm equipment, generators, or water recycling?”

The woman bit her lip and thought. Kyle waited patiently. Whatever her choice, chances were good that she’d spend the rest of her life at it. It would be, he thought, inappropriate to rush that kind of decision.

***

“As I am given air to breathe, so I give back with each breath. As I am guarded by the walls around me, so I guard those who built them. As The Company gives me life, so I give my life to The Company.”

The slightly fuller room sat down as one. The newbies, warned to silence, hunched over their bowls and shoveled their food into their mouths, as though afraid that someone somewhere was whispering, and, even now, guards were approaching, prepared to take their food away.

Kyle looked around the room, amused, and gave Siosa a look that said, ‘Newbies, always amusing.’

Siosa growled wordlessly.

Someone at a nearby table gave Siosa a dirty look. Most of the residents of The Hill had been political dissidents or petty criminals. Siosa, however, had been an honest soldier, an actual killer in a den of refugees. He returned the dirty look with interest and the man flushed and turned away.

Breakfast had been a nutrient-rich gruel. Lunch was hard rations, along with a special treat: Carrots. The garden, an indoor greenhouse tucked away somewhere on the ground floor, had originally been the primary source of food for the occupants of The Hill, but that had been nearly a century before, back when there were only a hundred or so residents. As the years had gone by and the facility had expanded, the monthly shipments of food concentrate had become more and more a part of the daily meals. Now one was lucky to get a fresh fruit or vegetable once every two or three weeks.

Kyle bit happily into the crunchy treat. The processed rations nourished the body, but they didn’t offer much in the way of taste. The strange, almost exotic flavor filled his mouth as he chewed. It wasn’t as strong as the beets they had gotten last month, but he wasn’t sure that was a bad thing. The beets had been hard to finish.

Siosa tapped the table to get his attention and pointed. One of the recent arrivals was clutching the table and shaking. Breakdowns weren’t uncommon, of course, and during meals was certainly better than when you were supposed to be working, but the man hadn’t finished eating yet. Kyle shook his head in sad disapproval and watched as the veterans around the quivering prisoner quietly divided what remained of his meal amongst themselves.

The man had enough body fat to make up for the lost food, thankfully. Still, it was a poorly timed breakdown.

Kyle finished his meal and carefully cleaned his teeth and tongue with the provided brush.

The bell sounded announcing the end of mealtime, and the room was filled with quiet murmurs as friends attempted to rush entire conversations into a few brief moments.

Kyle slapped Siosa on the back and headed down to the airlocks.

He paused in the hallway long enough to say hello to a few old friends before headed into airlock A. The rest of the veterans went through airlock B, suited up, and headed out into the fields. Most of them were working by the time the last of the new recruits had arrived.

Kyle scanned the room, making sure that everyone was wearing the appropriate uniform. It didn’t happen very often, but occasionally someone would follow the wrong group and have to be given directions. Kyle cleared his throat for their attention.

“All right, first, welcome to The Hill. I’m Kyle and I’m here to walk you through your duties.”

“Are you a guard?”

Kyle turned towards the man who had asked the question. “No. The only guards in the Hill work at the docks.”

“Then why should we listen to you?”

There was one with every ship. “Because if you don’t you’ll either do something stupid that will kill you, or you’ll become a burden on The Hill, in which case you’ll be killed.”

“Killed by who?” The man moved forward menacingly. He was solidly built, probably a soldier, maybe just a thug.

“I don’t know specifically.” There was no trace of fear or concern in Kyle’s voice. “One of the other prisoners. We live on a wire out here. If you don’t pull your own weight, if you aren’t worth keeping alive, then you will be killed, processed, and used for fertilizer.”

The man stared at Kyle for a moment, the look of challenge that had been on his face slowly melting away. He had, no doubt, been expecting anger or an answering challenge, but Kyle wasn’t interested in confrontations or proving his place. He had answered simply and honestly, and the brutality of it was more frightening than any tirade he could have offered.

“All right, farming is one of two jobs that does not directly contribute to the well-being of The Hill, but that’s because it’s one of the two reasons The Hill exists. What you will be doing is planting, caring for, and nurturing terraform fauna. These trees and bushes are genetically engineered to assist in slowly converting the atmosphere of this planet into something that can support human life. For the most part you’ll be doing a lot of repetitive, tedious work, but the work is necessary. What you do here is part of what makes it economically viable for The Company to continue supplying air, food, and water to us, so take it seriously.”

Kyle opened the locker next to him and pulled out the bulky suit inside. “You’ll each find a locker matching your identification number. Inside your locker you’ll find your suit. Please take it out, but do not put it on yet.”

He looked his suit over carefully as the arrivals found their appropriate lockers.

“You’ll notice that your suits are all worn, patched, scarred, et cetera. The outside is a rough place. These suits protect you from most of the hazards, but in the process they get pretty banged up. From time to time you’ll come across a suit that isn’t up to par, and believe me, you’ll want to realize it at the beginning of the day. Figuring out that you have a leak when you’re half a mile from base is a very, very bad thing. So, the first thing we do is check for damage. There are five areas you’ll want to pay special attention to.”

He was on autopilot at this point. He’d been instructing newbies when he was still living with his parents.

He reviewed the basics of the suits, explained what to do in case of a sandstorm, told them that The Hill was, in fact, slowly creeping across the face of the planet, and that in the course of a workday it could travel as far as three miles, depending on the terrain. He explained how the terraform crops were hazards in and of themselves, how they had been engineered into hard, sharp things, so that they could survive in a hard, sharp world.

“And finally, the visor.” At this point everyone’s suit was secured, locking out all noises but those that came from the microphones in each of the headpieces. He’d instructed everyone to keep their microphones off for the time being, so he was in something of a soundless void. Even as he watched, one of the larger men lost his balance and crashed with comical silence into a locker. Kyle couldn’t help but smile. It was one of the few fun parts of farming.

“If you’ll all raise your visor for a moment.” He indicated a switch on his chest and watched as they fumbled and searched, and, one by one, the visors fell into place.

“In here, raising your visor all but blinds you. Unfortunately they are occasionally necessary. Normally the glass in your faceplate shields you from the sun’s rays, but every once in a while we get flares. You can tell when it’s about to flare because it gets just a tad dark for a moment just before the sky lights up. Sort of like a cloud passing overhead. When it gets dark for a moment you’ll want to trigger your visor as fast as you can. Okay, we’re going to practice, everyone ready? Hands at your sides… Visors up!”

Everyone reached quickly for the switch on their vests, most of them jostling their neighbors in the process. Several people were knocked over. Kyle bit his lip to keep from laughing.

“Why don’t they just program the visors to drop if the light dims?”

Kyle checked his board to find who had turned on their microphone, and turned to face the man. “What do you mean?”

“They’ve got suits that you can program for things like that. It’s pretty easy to do.”

“Why would The Company spend money on new suits and programs when all you have to do is flip a switch?”

“But… but they’re not expensive suits, and these are old anyhow.”

“Sure, they’re old, but they’re serviceable. It’ll take some getting used to, but for the first couple of days just keep your comm lines open, when you hear me say ‘visors up,’ put your visors up and you’ll be fine.”

“Right, but if we aren’t fast enough we’ll go blind, right? Maybe even die.”

“Depends on how bad the flare is. Your first mistake or two probably won’t be that bad.”

“Oh, so best case scenario is that we don’t quite get maimed? That’s horrible!”

“Which is why it’s important to be fast on that switch.” Kyle was starting to get annoyed.

“New suits wouldn’t be that big of an investment, and they’d save lives…”

“Why would they want to save our lives?” This was from a short woman sitting on a bench. “You don’t really get how this works, do you? When we die they process our bodies for water and nutrients and dump whatever is left over outside with the rest of the compost. It’s part of the terraforming process. They want people to die. If we weren’t dying they’d have to ship in dirt, and it costs more to buy good dirt than to pick up prisoners…”

“Hey!” Kyle glowered at them, though there was no way they’d be able to see his expression through the tinted glass. “What the hell is it with you people? Why is it always about how bad your life has gotten. You’re here because your homeworld didn’t want you anymore. I’m always hearing about how miserable it is here, but is it really that different? You work to survive, you find small pleasures. You live. You endure. Your world abandoned you and the first thing you do is complain about the place that took you in?”

The microphones remained on but the room was silent. If it hadn’t been for the helmets, Kyle suspected there would have been a few significant looks. People never really saw things the way he did. For some reason The Company was always an evil thing, from where they stood. For some reason they couldn’t see beyond their own personal discomfort.

Kyle sighed and headed towards the airlock. “After today you’ll be using airlock B which only lets two people at a time out. For today, however, we’ll all be working closely together. Please keep in mind, the range on these radios is fifty yards, so try not to wander too far.”

“I have an itch.”

“You’ll get used to it.” Kyle stalked irritably across the room and led his small brood of workers out onto the planet’s surface.

The first few years of farming amounted to long hours of mind-breaking boredom punctuated by moments of abject terror. It was simultaneously one of the most tedious jobs, and one of the most dangerous. Of course, if you did manage to last long enough you’d eventually find yourself the most senior field worker when one of the operators died of an ulcer or had one of their inevitable accidents, at which point the hours of tedium disappeared and you found yourself with a ten hour shift of what amounted to continuous near death experiences.

The suits, while well worn and notoriously likely to kill you, had the advantage of having a distinct shelf life. After twenty or so years they would simply have to be replaced. The mechanized equipment, however, was expected to be used until it turned to dust. The equipment was so old that the corporation which had originally built it had been merged out of existence over a century before. Few of the machines had any of their original parts left beyond their frame and perhaps a few nuts and bolts; everything had been cannibalized from another vehicle or fabricated. The result was that every single one of the machines was unreliable, untrustworthy and would, at best, break down regularly when used, and at worst try to kill you on a daily basis.

The most notorious piece of equipment had been dubbed Vicious Bastard, a digging machine well known for throwing bone-pulverizing rocks in the general direction of its operator eight or nine times a day. Five people had died in three months before someone had welded a metal shield to the handles.

Kyle pointed out each of the dozens of machines, explaining the dangers, and telling stories of the people he’d known who had died using them. Then he led them to a patch of terraform plants and explained what needed to be done. How to tell which ones needed watering and which ones needed the soil around them turned. How to harvest the seeds. How to plant them. The instructions were simple enough, and it was a matter of minutes before they were all working.

Kyle talked as he worked, mostly a list of the things to look out for, why you should avoid working near the machines, and how to keep from puncturing your suit. An endless list of ways to die and how to avoid them, punctuated by the occasional ‘visors up.’

The day slipped by with surprising speed and before he knew it, the transport ships from the mines began grinding past the farmers, signaling the end of the work day. Kyle counted the suits that passed him; surprisingly, none had become lost or injured. The group began their hike back towards their slowly moving home.

The Hill had traveled about a mile since they had come out, but Kyle had made a point of having them find a spot in the general direction it had been moving, so they didn’t have too far to go. As usual the new workers were stumbling wearily. The suits were heavy and the gravity was slightly higher than on the worlds that most had come from. They’d adjust, though. Well, some of them would adjust. The rest would die.

“As I am given air to breathe, so I give back with each breath. As I am guarded by the walls around me, so I guard those who built them. As The Company gives me life, so I give my life to The Company.”

The troubles of the day weighed on the voices, and many people did not so much sit down as collapse into their chairs. Kyle broke a piece off his hard rations and dipped it into his gruel, thinking wistfully of the carrot he had so recently consumed, and wishing he had saved a bite or two.

Siosa hadn’t shown up. Kyle was hoping he was only late, though it didn’t seem particularly likely. The only reasons for missing a meal were because you were incapacitated, dead, or transferred. He might simply be in the infirmary, or his room. Kyle hoped he was, but there was nobody to ask. Nobody on this floor worked with him; in fact the only person Kyle knew who might be able to tell him was Ilya, an elderly political dissident who worked with Kyle on arrival days, and Siosa the rest of the time. It would be six months, though, until Kyle would have the chance to talk to Ilya.

If Siosa didn’t show up in the next few days, it didn’t actually matter what had happened to him; whatever it was he was effectively removed from Kyle’s world.

One of the new farmers had apparently been assigned to this floor and, as Kyle was the only familiar face in the room, the man had taken Siosa’s seat. Kyle’s first instinct had been to ask him to move, but silence was still mandated, and honestly, if Siosa didn’t return, Kyle would want someone to talk to. Maybe it was for the best. It was like the pamphlets said: people come and go, your only lasting friend is The Company.

---

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About the Author

A lifelong fan of the written word, Ross Willard has been telling stories for as long as he can remember. Currently a resident of Colorado, he is the vice president of the Penpointers, a local peer review group.