43. Questions that need to be asked

Eating familiar food after four months of foraging made whole away team tear up.

Noodles. Potatoes. Tofu. Properly spiced, fried, steamed, baked! That is a taste of home.

"Some roasted meat would go well with this," Blaze said as he inhaled full bowl of pasta.

Home team watched them eat, concluding that outside is a barren wasteland that will make their survival harder than expected. They watched with somber faces and passed more previously prepared food.

Geb felt that serving such cold and unpalatable food was a black mark on his records, yet seeing everything served disappear made him glad that they prepared it in advance.

"Cooking without lights and electricity will be rough," he said to Hama who was helping him.

"It's not that bad," Echo overheard him while taking another bowl of mashed potatoes from Hama "its just that I had no proper spices on hand."

"Roasted meat is actually best thing ever," Floreo added while sharing a plate of pastries with Cid.

Wuo who came into the throne room after drinking his tea and regaining self-control, sat with Dagda perched on his lap, and watched his twin brothers eat as starved wolves. Thinking that if they keep up with that, they will look like Hama soon, made him smile and nuzzle Dagda's neck.

When he first woke up and saw Floreo and Echo, sudden burst of possessive madness overtook him, but now he calmed down. He knew he was jealous over Dagda's fatherly love for his two youngest brothers, yet he could not entirely understand why did it bring him to the edge of losing his mind.

His head was buzzing and there were overlapping voices trying to convince him that he should just end his own existence to escape the loneliness that haunted him. But. He was not alone, never since his birth. Where did that irrational fear came from? And what his feelings for Dagda had to do with it at all?

Luckily, Dagda liked him enough to stick with him. At least for now.

He closed his eyes. Jone should know more about this whole mental mess. Still, Wuo did not want to talk with him about all that now, when everyone was here. Later. There will be time to ask him about it after this whole mess with Protocol is solved.

As they finally had their fill, Yax wiped his mouth "It should be dawn now, lets go up to the terrace to talk."

Xul observed his adopted son, appreciating changes that his mission brought out in him.

"Sure," he agreed "sunrise seems appropriate time to start anew."

***

Mani felt disjointed again.

He silently sat there, beside Yax, listening everyone reporting snippets of events that happened within the pyramid while they were out on the mission.

By now he already understood, after observing his teammates for these past few months, through his relationship with Yak, that his previous notion of what 'replicants' are and how they function is far cry from reality.

When he arrived to this station, he secluded himself partly because he just could not handle other people approaching him. But partly, because he expected them to be dispassionate, machine like, inhuman. He was taught to think of them as lesser beings, able to act only in correlation to manuals they were trained to follow and obey.

He did not think he could pass as one of them, even after a decade of Blaise trying to chat him up. Yet now, he felt choked by the raw realism of the way their described their everyday life and relationships.

How did they find the way to accept their existence so naturally? Was it due the time since they were manufactured and sent down here? Did accumulation of experience changed them? Was it beyond original drafts, or was it expected by those who started the production of artificial human personnel?

Well, if he really thinks about it, what was that made them 'artificial'? Mechanical womb tube was a technology that was used even before apocalypse, as infertility rates soared with pollution rising.

Natural pregnancy was deemed too dangerous since moving into orbit, so every new human after that came straight out of it. Should all so-called gods be treated as artificial humans then as well?

Well, these people down here were cloned from a batch of carefully selected tissue samples, and additionally genetically manipulated. Then more or less shaped with hormones and surgeries to be tools for various specialized tasks.

Things done to them were experimental, tested on them and later applied to proper humans if deemed beneficial. Making those humans be called 'gods'.

But being with them for so long, he was now painfully aware that they were not 'artificial' at all. They were humans, as he was.

Test subjects who survived and lived to become tools, then lived long enough to claim their own person-hood. When comparing, Mani felt like his own problems were nothing. His parents did not see him as a person. So what? These people were not considered as proper persons by anyone.

Mani leaned on Yak and felt lucky again. Lucky that he had unsupervised access to his fathers personal logs and files. Lucky that he realized in time what fate was waiting for him as his parents 'pet child'. Lucky that he found courage to fake his own death in transport accident and then launch himself in one-way-delivery pod to this exact half abandoned station.

And most of all, he felt lucky that because of him being a 'pet', he actually inherited quite a good set of genes from his two 'fathers'. His genes were not tampered with beyond now standard cell self-repair proteins and consequent immortality, and no one looked deeper into them, making his abilities unknown. They were not thinking of him as someone worth much, thus giving him a lot of freedoms he would not have if they knew what he was capable of.

His brain was his own, with almost photographic memory and ability to do calculations with variables that most computers on board still had difficulties to handle. After all, his granddad was the one who made the AI on board the orbital station. He read his original publications, and understood them.

He even had an Aunt, who led the rebellion and took all the women who survived the apocalypse on a long voyage to some distant star. When he found that snippet of family history, he thought it to be a fiction. He never even knew there was a gender called 'female'.

And now, he needed to find a way to broach that subject and explain his own existence to this new family he had. He had father-in-laws now. He glanced at Xul and Ah Kin. Should he wait a little bit, until whole situation stabilizes a bit? Everyone now was tense and his own status as non-replicant was really not all that important, right?

He knew procrastination is not the best course of action, yet, the whole matter was irrelevant to their current problems. 'Once we settle properly.' Mani promised to himself.

***

"Why do we always end up as delivery guys?" Ler asked Kane as they pushed yet another load of Very Important Supplies down the ramp.

"Because we know where things are." Kane replied with a slight smile.

Ler always had things to complain about, no matter what they do.

"And its not like you are only one doing delivery this time," Soma and Rudra were pushing another trolley behind them.

"Exactly!" Wuo and Hama were behind them, pushing carts full of dried and pickled food.

They had limited supply of lamps, so they moved things in groups. And honestly, it would be really uncomfortable climbing up and down alone. After cycles of living in this station, now when it was out of power it was alien to them. Darkness and silence and emptiness.

Jone made a ban on solo tasks, requiring them to always move into pyramid in groups and stay together during retrieval of materials. He also made a schedule that balanced their inside and outside time. To just step out in the open world was risky, so he examined them at start and end of each shift, making them drink his tea in proper time intervals.

They carried things outside, then they switched tasks with other group, that helped build temporary accommodations in new camp by the lake, on the hillside north of pyramid. No one wanted to sleep in that silent pyramid any more. It was like a graveyard now that the power got cut off.

Veles and Notos were in that group, together with Olaf and three young ones. One turn retrieving supplies from the pyramid, one turn in construction. That was their schedule. Blaze and Cid were teaching them how to do woodwork and construct basic shelters, while Tzol and Geb joined Echo and Floreo in exploring food options.

It was autumn, according to Ivory, so planting crops outside was not advisable, yet they decided to plant some winter vegetables, like cabbage, leek and kale. The food reserve in the storage they had up in the pyramid should be enough until spring, and by then they can plan proper fields for growing fresh food.

Rest of the crew was planning to go into that new underground base that was supposedly somewhere in northern hills. To check that mobile habitat left there, and see if there is anything that could be used to replace their geothermal energy source.

Life was going on, and they faced this change one step at the time.

No choice really, it was either to adapt, or to die.