SOMA (LGBT-scifi-romance)

Chapter Twenty: Family

Sector 00: Cita Ciel

Jan. 26, 462 AC

Zhao En and his sister Ying were dish babies.

They were more than twins, were grown from the same cluster of germ cells and on the same tepid solutions. They stretched together, filling the span of their Wessinton dish, and curling closely together in their incubator. When they were eight months old, the orderlies opened their container and cut through the flesh fusing their hands and feet. At the end, when the doctors dug them out of their gel, their father waited outside in his best uniform, with a thick towel draped over his lap. As they were delivered into their father's arms, he'd touched their small hands and feet gingerly, and cried.

Now, eighteen years later, their taciturn father, with his even tempers and his unshakable calm, was commander of the Man of Means' military, and possibly the most powerful human in the colonies outside of sector owners. En watched his father, resentfully admiring.

His father's soldiers were efficient and well-trained. They removed the glass cells and syns from En's cargo. They took En's statement and observations from other ship passengers. The incident was resolved with little fanfare, but En could still feel the weight of the syn beneath his hands. After they installed a new syn at the gate and line of ships flowed again, Commander Zhao turned to En. "Go clean up."

En knew better than to object. He clattered into the lavatory of his father's ship and changed out of his bloody clothes. He couldn't completely clean the scabs of iron from beneath his fingernails. His heart still pounded.

En didn't consider himself weak-willed. Given his father's occupation, he'd seen more violence than most in the inner ring. He had fought ferals and handled wild sky fish the sizes of buildings. He worked with Lady, whose perfumes and silks hid a shrewd, poisonous core. But a body dying beneath his hands, looking into his eyes... that was a first.

As it had done with alarming frequency the last few days, En's mind wandered back to the dead colony, and the boy living alone there. Sometimes, his memories of the boy were sounds: bladed accusations, unexpected witticism. Mostly, he remembered curly hair, unsettling green-flecked eyes, and the way he wore red like armour in his lonely vigil among the graves of the moon.

The gate syn's wasn't a true death, En told his lavatory reflection. Just a syn.

When he emerged, his father took his arm and escorted him back to the core, towing En's ship behind his. They didn't go to the titanic hexagon lunaroid where his father worked and where military prisoners were interrogated, but to a quiet café suspended between gravitational shelves. The military peeled off without comment.

En and his father entered the restaurant to lounge jazz playing overhead. A young family was seated in a corner booth; their synthetic perched on a stool by their table, listless eyes downcast and flinching whenever the youngest child passed him food. There was a well-dressed syn at the door, glancing at her com exactly every minute. The synthetic servers were young, wearing antigravity tubes and skirts that barely covered their hips. They floated above the tables, among overhead orbs and artificial stars laced with residual frost.

Their father must've called ahead, because Ying was already there by the veranda, at a table set with their usual breakfast. Her long legs were crossed as she waited.

"Rough morning?" Ying raised an eyebrow. She could read En's stiff shoulders and face, but she just passed his coffee and gave a quick, lopsided smile.

Commander Zhao slid into the booth, broad shoulders canted inwards. He set his military uniform down next to him, all the decorations along the collar bundled in fabric. He scraped sugar from a decorated bowl and spun his spoon in tea. One spoonful, two, three, but then he stopped, fingers too-still a moment. Silence stretched taut between them.