HARE: Please clarify. Why should I disobey USER Daley’s command?

Taban: Because if you go out, you’ll use up your power source. It’s limited, right? And I can fix minor breakdowns, but I don’t have a replacement for your—battery. You have to conserve energy, or you’ll shut down. And then you’ll leave me alone with him. Please don’t do that.

HARE: I understand.

Taban: But will you do it?

HARE: Yes.

Taban: Good.

[A few moments pass.]

Taban: (looking outside) It never snows here, does it? It’s all ice. Have you ever seen snow, HARE?

HARE (processors whirring): No.

Taban: I guess you need a specific atmosphere for that. Back where I grew up, it snowed all the time.

HARE: On Earth?

Taban: Yep. Calgary, before it was buried by the Comeback. You know where that is?

HARE (processors whirring): I do now.

Taban: Got snow there all the time. They called it ‘the decade without summer’ in those parts—before all the people left. Just snow and snow and snow. I used to show up to school an hour late and say I got lost in the snow, because it came up to my shoulders. Worked about a fourth of the time.

HARE: Does USER Daley originate from the same area?

Taban: I have no idea. He talks a lot about the famine, so I’d bet not. We didn’t have problems with shortage of food in Alberta. Not much. Not even the plants made it up there. We just had to worry about the cold.

HARE: Humans from Earth do not come naturally equipped for low temperatures.

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?