Chapter 1

The large plastic cylinder contained our entire liquid-filled world. We couldn’t see anything outside and had no idea the Universe was any larger. We could touch our elbows to opposite sides of the plastic pipe’s interior at the same time. If I stood on tiptoe, I could just reach the top of our cylindrical home and prison. My fraternal twin sister was half a hand too short. Our knees and arms were in almost constant physical contact. Unless we made an effort to stand upright, our buttocks pressed against the inside of the cylinder. When we slept, our chins rested on each other’s shoulders.

Computerized implants the size of rice grains had been inserted into our brains when we were less than a year old. We received several lessons a day from the ship’s computer over them. They allowed us to ‘talk’ to each other, in a way. I could sense most of my twin’s emotions, and she could feel mine. Once we learned to read at fifteen months old, we could also send written messages to each other or the ship’s computer, who we called ‘Mama’. Mama called me ‘Boy’ and my twin ‘Girl’, so those became our names.

Long, long ago Mama had explained the umbilical cords attached to our navels were critically important, and repeated the message daily for years. We should never do anything that might tangle or damage them. They supplied all we needed; food, oxygen, and waste removal. Without them, we would quickly die.

Two thirds of our lives ago, when we had been in the incubation chamber seven years, we each woke with a pair of tubes in our mouths and noses. The larger hoses allowed us to breathe air for the first time. The others delivered liquified food directly to our stomachs. We had no space to exercise, and unless we made a major effort to reposition ourselves, one of Girl’s feet was always between mine, and vice versa. At the time we were unaware our food tubes also gave us a mild lethargy drug, to reduce the chance we would move around and disrupt our umbilicals or hoses.

Two days after our first liquid meal, we got a few surprises. I felt pressure and discomfort in my lower abdomen, then relief as waste left my body through my buttocks. We were amused as the yellowish-brown cloud slowly descended and expanded to cover our lower legs. We also urinated into the liquid surrounding us, but Mama had assured us it wouldn’t cause any harm. There was always a very slow flow of liquid coming from above and exiting our plastic home at the bottom. We were shocked as a rapid current flushed most of the liquid from our tube and refilled it with pure and cooler liquid. Not long after I did, Girl defecated too. Our tube was automatically flushed again to clear out her waste cloud.

Between the multitudes of lessons, we watched a lot of old videos for entertainment. One had a character named Fonzie, who we thought was hilarious. We were approaching eight years old, and to us ‘being cool’ meant the tube was flushing because one of us had just pooped. To our immature minds, the old show ‘Happy Days’ seemed like a long string of toilet jokes.

Over time we noticed our bodies were slightly different. Girl had a small pair of lumps growing on her chest, but I didn’t. She was missing a few things I had between my legs. My arms and legs were also a little larger than hers. We asked several times, but Mama assured us that was normal and we shouldn’t worry.

At age 20, we got our most exciting lesson to date, ‘Human Reproduction, part 1’. We saw a nude male, and Mama named all the parts and described how they worked. My sister seemed much more interested than I was. Next we saw a nude female. The computer named the more plentiful array of parts and their functions. I was fascinated, but Girl barely paid attention. The lesson mentioned, “Natural human gestation to infancy lasts approximately 41 weeks, and takes place in the uterus of a female. Mechanical gestation is safer and more efficient.” It was so efficient, we would be ready to start work on our PhDs the day we were ‘born’.

The image changed to video. A robotic arm removed a long metallic object from a vagina. The computer voice informed us, “Forty egg cells were extracted from the female parent and analyzed to determine which were healthiest. The eight best were fertilized with a sperm sample from the male parent.” The image changed to a thick white liquid squirting from the head of a penis. I felt excited, but slightly ill. I could tell Girl’s reaction was similar.

“The remaining genetic material is stored cryogenically, along with material from 49,998 other humans. Fertilization occurs when a sperm cell from a male contacts an egg from a female, and the two fuse into a single organism.” We saw a microscopic view of sperm cells penetrating the outer surface of the eight eggs. One of the eggs had divided in half before the cloud of sperm reached it. We realized that was US! “The embryos were allowed to divide until there were more than a thousand identical cells in each. One cell was removed from each embryo for genetic analysis. An egg had cleaved in half before fertilization. This one was determined to be the most disease-resistant and contained no significant flaws. It was moved to the growth tank 7,660 days or almost 21 years ago.”

The lesson ended and an entertainment video played. When class resumed half an hour later Mama said, “We are travelling to a planet far from our original home. This is our ship.”

A map of the interstellar spacecraft displayed in our implants and our minds boggled at its enormous size. It was a terrible shock to discover there was more to the world than our small tube. There were four gestation cylinders, not just ours. The infirmary compartment they were in spanned over thirty meters in both directions! The ship was 800 meters wide and three kilometers long! The world was millions of times larger than we expected!