by Mel Hubahib Loja

I don’t suppose you’ll let me in? All I’m saying is, it would be a lot easier to have this conversation indoors than yelling through the intercom.

No? Well I don’t blame you. Trust is in short supply these days. Among other things.

Mind coming closer to the viewport so we can talk face to face? Thanks. Now see here? I’ve got portable solar cells, meds, ration bars, self-scrubbing air filters, you name it. We can share if you like. God knows there’s little enough to go around these days, what with the looting and the orbital blockade on top of everything else.

Everything else. Heh. Words can hardly do it justice. I mean, who could have believed that a terraforming project could go off the rails like this?

Hey, you mind if I stop here for a while? I must’ve run a mile under a minute getting away from them, and my dogs are barking.

Ahh. That’s better. Of course, they’ll still find me eventually. They’ll find you too, and then it’s just a matter of time before they figure out how to pry open your airlock. We’re all in the same boat, and lemme tell ya, it’s sinking faster than a stone.

Here’s a joke for ya. What’s the difference between a marketing exec and a bag of fertilizer? The first spouts shit while the second holds it in. Geddit? Ha ha.

Not a very good one, I know. But hey, at least I got you smiling. I just had to see your chompers, see. These days it’s the only way we can tell them apart from people. The mark of the beast, so to speak: hollows either have too many teeth or too few. One of the last remaining kinks in the printing process. Or so I’m told. 

I can still remember when Upper Management rolled them out last quarter. Said they were just a stopgap, an emergency measure meant to offset labor shortages caused by the plummeting birth rate. It was our fault, basically. That was their bottom line.

We weren’t making enough new colonists for their liking. Babies who’d grow up to become climatologists and roboticists if they were lucky, and indentured wage slaves if they scored low on the graded curve. Children who’d live in hab coffins like yours and eat reconstituted protein jellies, while dreaming of the smell of meat they could never taste. Adults who’d never live to see the fruits of their life’s labor, that vaunted day centuries from now, when this hellhole of an exoplanet becomes the paradise promised by all those cutesy advertisements.

Fuck that noise. Why would anyone sane have kids in this economy? I suppose the head honchos at Exodus Industries took exception to that sentiment, because it didn’t take them long to revive those old seedship colony programs. You know, the ones they invented back in the age of sublight travel, when it was assumed that living passengers would never survive the transit.

See, the whole idea was to replace human colonists with a library of 3D files. Because why wait decades for a child to  mature to working age when it’s possible to print out fully operational human-adjacent life forms in a matter of hours? Why spend billions on promotional materials and political lobbying when you can indoctrinate those turnkey colonists from birth? 

The backlash was immediate. Turns out people don’t like the idea of being replaced. They started out with strongly worded emails and peaceful protests, but Upper Management doubled down and sent in their rent-a-cop goons to put the boot on our collective throats. Which went about as well for ‘em as you’d expect. All of a sudden, they had a full-blown insurrection on their hands, and the whole lot of us, stranded hundreds of lightyears away from the closest point of resupply.

The Board back home was less than thrilled, and proposed a compromise. Both sides would agree to a ceasefire, and Upper Management would temporarily cede authority to a council capable of more rational decision-making: a council of engrammatic intelligences—a council of synthetics, if you prefer.

I was a systems engineer during the initial rollout, so I was present when that council first went online. It just so happened that some wit lobbed a firebomb through the window of the municipal hall, breaking the ceasefire right at the instant of the council’s inception. You can imagine the sort of first impression this made.

It took ‘em all of five seconds to reach their conclusion: the only way to meet the quotas necessary for future human habitation was to replace the human component of the process altogether.

I suppose it makes a twisted sort of sense. In a closed system nothing can cause more problems than a group of irrational actors. And mobs are nothing if not irrational. Especially when they’ve just been informed that they’re essentially redundant.

Hence all this rioting.

But I think we took it a step too far when we started ripping the unborn hollows out of their incubator sacs and smashing them to a pulp. Upper Management sure didn’t like that, lemme tell ya.

But we had the numbers on our side, and all they had were the printers. That and the council of synthetics. When we massed up at the company HQ, some desperate schmuck at HR panicked, removing all the ethical algorithms on the council. To resolve the situation with perfect impartiality, he said. 

How right he was. Upper and Middle Management were the first to go, followed by plebs like yours truly. Now the new hollows come as fast as the printers can pump them out, and each one would as soon bite out your throat as look at you. They had our complete genetic sequences on file, you know. Every employee that ever signed up with Exodus Industries was a potential template for the hollows. I don’t know when they started wearing the faces of the dead, but that’s how they fooled our sentries and slipped through the barricades.

Not that we had much luck telling them apart from people to begin with. They looked damn near perfect when they first came out of the printers, those dopey, doll-eyed, murderous bastards.

But you and me, we’re clean. There ain’t too many of us left, but if we pool together what we’ve got, maybe we can hold out long enough for the S.O.S. to reach someone out there that matters.

In the meantime, if you could just find it in your heart to cycle this airlock…Please. They’ll be here soon enough. Question is, do you want to face them alone or together?

Oh, thank you thank you thank you! You won’t regret it!

Awfully warm in here.

Snug as a bug in a rug, aren’t you. 

I’m so glad I could just about die.

What’s wrong with my smile? Why, nothing. Nothing at all.

Is it so wrong to be happy when you’re among friends?

You needn’t bother with that rail rifle. I think we both know you ran out of slugs days ago.

Hush now. Don’t cry, because it’s over. Smile because it happened…

Mel Loja is a freshman at UP Diliman. He likes reading HG Wells, Isaac Asimov, Dan Simmons, Terry Pratchett and John Steinbeck.