Taban: So to speak. And back then the temps were bad—like Martian bad. And everyone was poor. We didn’t have any thermal suits or space gear. That’s why everyone left, eventually. It got to be that even birds in flight would drop to the ground, frozen through. At that point both my parents did the rite of conscription just to get us out to Mars.

HARE: Giving USER Daley the impression that you are space-born.

Taban: Yeah. But I’m not. Surprisingly, my memories from Earth are the clearest ones. Everything else is a blur. Maybe it was something in the air.

HARE: Are your memories unhappy?

Taban (surprised): Not all of them. They’re just clear. Cold, like the snow.

HARE (processors whirring): . . .

Taban: I remember this one time I was walking home from school with this girl, Harpa. I really liked her at the time, but she hated my guts. We were maybe twelve, thirteen.

HARE (processors whirring): . . .

Taban: We were walking through the woods and heard this weird sound, like a baby crying. I thought it was a kid who got lost, Harpa thought it was a ghost. We went looking for it.

HARE: What was the source of the noise?

Taban: It was a ferrox. All fucked up in a trap. You know what a ferrox is?

HARE (processing): A genetic hybrid of Earth, produced from splicing the DNA of a ferret (or Mustela putorius furo) with the DNA of an arctic fox (or Vulpes lagopus).

Taban: That’s right. Cutest little things. White as snow year-round, and trusting as hell, too. They bred them to be as docile as hamsters. Can’t survive worth a damn in the wild, which is why when some of them got out and started breeding, everyone got out their forks and knives and went to work.

HARE: I do not understand.

Taban: Not everyone lived near the canneries, back then. There were some Dryadjacks, even up in our neck of the woods—just trying to survive as best they could in the wild. They weren’t criminals, but they crashed the mode, so to speak. My mom used to not let me go through those woods because she was afraid we’d get kidnapped and . . . well, you know.

HARE: And what?

Taban: Nothing. Anyway, one of them must have set up a trap in hopes of catching a ferrox to eat. It was a mechanical metal thing, just steel teeth, hinges, and a trigger. Really barbaric. The ferrox was nearly cut in half.

HARE: I see.

Taban: But it was still alive. Harpa hated it. She wanted to leave as soon as we saw the poor dumb thing. I didn’t get why. She kept saying, ‘It’s horrible, it’s horrible!’ But I kept trying to get her to stay. I was an ass back then. She still brought it up years later.

HARE: Harpa is what designation to you?