The Rainbow Maker's Tale by Melanie Cusick-Jones

  * * *

  The lights in the pod cabin were dim and Cassie was dozing in the bunk. Watching her sleep brought me a degree of peace: she looked so relaxed and normal, I could almost forget that she was still probably catching up from days where she’d barely rested…almost forget that her body had needed time to recover from the exhaustion and dehydration caused during her torturous escape from the Family Quarter…Almost forget, but not quite…

  For a long time, I had lain beside Cassie, just watching her sleep. I could have stayed that way forever, but I had work to do. I had made her a promise and I intended to keep it.

  So, here it was that I found myself sitting in one of the two chairs at the console of the pod, flicking through charts on the various screens. It was hard to focus, being so close to the main vision panel of the pod, which offered a perfect view of the stars and universe beyond. It was daunting how small and insignificant we seemed, beside the endlessness of space.

  Earlier that day, we had put together a recording about our experiences on the SS Hope. It was Cassie’s idea and she had done most of work for it. I just helped with the filming and saved the file into as many different versions as I could. She was scared about what might happen to us – she didn’t admit it, but I knew – and this was a record for if we didn’t survive. Perhaps we could warn others and save them from the world we had been born into.

  For my part, I was oddly confident. Possibly, it was naive, but I had an unshakeable sense that we were going to survive...that there was somewhere for us to go. Much of my confidence came from the facilities on the pod and my ability to understand them, for which I had only one person to thank – I probably wouldn’t be admitting that out loud any time soon though.

  There was another force at work behind my confidence, that I couldn’t deny. For a long time on the SS Hope, I had wanted to escape from the Family Quarter; wanted to find out why we lived the way we did…whether we were less human than we had been on Earth. I was on the outside now and knew that we lived the way we did because our lives were built on lies…

  We were less human, because we were trained to be that way by The Collective: farmed like animals, doesd up with chemicals to supress our moods and enhance the characteristics they wanted in us. When Cassie finally filled in the blanks for me, I was shocked by the extent of their systems, even though I’d been the one questioning things for years.