It was another three weeks before Zed set foot outside of the med bay. He’d eaten the plant three more times, once a week, and the seizures hadn’t returned. There was both relief and grim confirmation in this.

  He could survive for now, but he was well and truly a prisoner of Mars. And he had no one to blame but himself.

  His mother was there when he was released, but things had changed. They’d never had a good relationship, but the fear Zed had seen in her the day his father left was still there. She didn’t protest when he asked to take a walk by himself.

  Zed wandered the brightly colored halls with no destination in mind. That was probably one of the worst parts of living in Naug. There was no escaping your problems, even for a moment. The only option for a change of scenery was to get a virtual one. Even the faces were all familiar. Familiar, but different. At least, different toward him.

  Instead of staring at his feet as he walked, Zed focused on the people he passed. It was present to one degree or another in all of them—an edge of fear, or at least uncertainty. It was the same thing he saw in his mother.

  Zed realized he had no idea what information about his condition had been publicly released. Probably little to nothing, other than the fact that he wasn’t carrying a disease. Even in a colony of scientists, logic and facts couldn’t always override more primal fears.

  As Zed came around a corner, a woman saw him and physically recoiled before catching herself. She attempted a smile before hurrying past, her shoulder brushing against the opposite wall.

  The longer he walked, the more versions of this reaction Zed saw. Most were subtle, but it was there in almost everyone he came across. The more polite among the colonists greeted him and made brief small talk about how happy they were to see him up and about, but there was always uncertainty just beneath the surface.

  Zed found himself more and more desperate for a friendly face. He was stuck on a lonely planet, and every person he passed made his true isolation all the more stark. Before he knew it, Zed found himself running down the corridors as if he could escape the panic that was growing like a cancer in his gut.

  Zed’s mind spiraled, jumping from what-if to what-if. All the while, his anger was building at the pointlessness of it all. Anger at his parents for bringing him here and keeping him here. Anger at Mars for growing that stupid plant. Maybe even a little angry at God, which was funny considering he wasn’t sure he existed.

  He had no more peers left to talk to, and Zed realized he was afraid to see any of the adults he considered friends for fear that the same look he’d seen in the corridors would be on their faces as well. But what choice did he have? He couldn’t run forever. There was literally nowhere to go.

  ***

  Baat hunched over the desk in his little office, reading an honest-to-goodness paper Bible.

  Zed had seen him reading it many times but could never quite get over how much of his weight allowance that must have taken up on the trip from Earth when he could have easily just used a digital copy.

  “Who’s getting struck by a plague today?” Zed asked through the half-open door, knocking on the door frame as he stepped through.

  Baat looked up from his reading and gave Zed a genuine smile. Zed nearly burst into tears right then and there. How had it come to the point where one friendly face could mean so much?

  “You know, it’s not all about judgment.”

  “Sure, but who’s He smiting?” Zed asked. He liked to poke at Baat a bit, mostly because he knew Baat wouldn’t take offense.

  “Nebuchadnezzar,” Baat said with an exaggerated sigh.

  “I’m going to assume that’s a person, place, or thing and you’re not just having a stroke,” Zed said, hobbling over to the bench that extruded from the floor opposite Baat. His run through the corridors hadn’t done his gel-cast-wrapped leg any favors. He’d be paying that price for a while.

  “Person,” Baat replied. “A king in Babylon a few thousand years ago. God humbled him by taking his kingdom and reducing him to live like an animal for seven years.”

  “Yikes. That seems a bit harsh.”

  Baat shrugged. “He was an asshole.”

  Zed laughed. It was a real laugh, and it felt good.

  “Need to talk?” Baat asked quietly.

  “How’d you guess?”

  Baat smiled but didn’t answer. He closed his Bible and said, “I can’t imagine what you must be working through right now. If you’ve got anything you’d like to get out, that’s what I’m here for.”

  “Have you heard about my, well, whatever the planetary version of house arrest is?”

  Baat nodded. “Dr. Bailey told me what she could. The important part seemed to be that you may be a long-term Naug resident with some kind of special… side effects.”

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  Zed opened his mouth to speak and quickly closed it again. Now that he was here, he wasn’t sure how to put it into words. He could feel a hot spike growing inside of him. Baat’s kind manner made it worse. It was too at odds with the helplessness and injustice that threatened to drown him.

  “Is your God judging me too? I feel like I’ve had a biblical level of bad luck, and I just want to know why. Why have I been stranded on this planet? Why did all my friends have to leave? And my dad? I can’t exactly blame him for leaving, but I don’t have that option because I’m stuck here like some kind of drug addict hoping that a super dangerous cave passage somehow gets reopened soon or I’ll just—y’know, die! Why did I have to see a friend literally explode in front of me? I know I’ve made some bad calls, but I didn’t deserve any of that!”

  Zed realized at some point during his diatribe he had stood up. He collapsed back onto the bench now. His throat felt tight.

  Baat had listened without reaction, calmly nodding his head throughout. He leaned forward, placing his elbows on the desk and pressed his forehead into his palms. He sat there in silence for a moment. When he raised his head, Zed could see tears running down his cheeks.

  “I’m so sorry, Zed. I wish there was anything I could say that would ease your pain or change the situation. You’re right; it’s not fair.”

  Zed slumped on the bench. “What do I do, Baat? What in the world am I supposed to do now? My life is over before it even got going,” he said. His voice sounded small and empty, even in his own ears.

  Baat was silent for a moment. With anyone else, Zed might have been frustrated by the pause, but he knew Baat well enough to understand that the old man was giving the question real thought. A grin flickered across Baat’s face.

  “Every time you’ve come to me for advice, I feel like the advice I have to give is always a bitter pill to swallow. I’d love to have a situation where I could just tell you to stop playing video games and focus on homework or something like that.” Baat’s smile softened. “Zed, I’m going to tell you what someone once told me when I found myself beset by more trouble than I felt I could possibly handle. Now, I realize you don’t share my beliefs, but in this instance, there’s a page you should take out of God’s playbook—I think I’m using that expression correctly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When bad things happen to me, it’s not because God is making them happen. He’s given us free will and respects us enough to let our choices play out. What He does for me, though, is promise to work everything together for my ultimate good. Does that make sense?”

  Zed shook his head. Where was Baat going with this? He really wasn’t in the mood for a full-on sermon.

  “I guess?” he said.

  “What I’m trying to say is, God doesn’t waste pain. Bad things have happened to me. They’re still bad things. God doesn’t magically make them something else, but there’s comfort in those moments knowing that my pain isn’t pointless, whether it’s caused by my own choices or even when it’s something caused by evil that God never intended.”

  “OK, you’ve lost me. Am I God in this analogy?”

  Baat laughed. “My recommendation for you in your current predicament is this: lean into your pain. Don’t push it away. Don’t run from your circumstances or hide away in your mind. You find yourself in a situation and life circumstance that you can’t control. Embrace it wholeheartedly!”

  “I’m not sure I like the sound of that. Actually, I'm positive I don't.”

  “So you’re stuck on Mars. Wear the mantle of Martian with pride! Don’t waste your energy resenting it. You’re stuck eating these plants that put your life at risk but also give you a unique perspective of some kind. Learn everything you can about it. Treat it like a gift and see where it takes you. Lean into your pain, and it won’t be wasted.”

  Zed felt torn. There was a part of him that felt comforted, even hopeful. There was another part that very much resented acceptance of any of it.

  Baat didn’t take his eyes off Zed’s face. He raised his palms. “I told you I only seem to have difficult words for you. I do hope you’ll take them to heart, though. As I said, someone much wiser than me gave this advice once, and it saved me from many a wasted year.”

  All Zed wanted at that moment was to make a quick exit and sort out his own thoughts. He thanked Baat and made his way out. Time to pace—or rather, hobble down—the halls for a bit.

  I’m way too young to have to do this kind of soul-searching, Zed thought. But here we are.

  ***

  It’s time to ruin someone’s day.

  It probably wasn't the takeaway Baat would have hoped for or expected, but the more Zed thought about accepting his situation and… condition, the clearer his goals became.

  Baat was right, at least a little. If Zed was going to be stuck here, he was going to put this newly rewired brain of his to good use. With everything that had happened, he hadn’t revisited the hacked Bubble in Time sim. Even if he’d been wrong about Andy killing Alina, there was still something going on, and he was certain it all revolved around the caveman copy of Naug and its citizens.

  “Douglas, open the Bubble in Time sim,” Zed said as he made himself as comfortable as he could on his bed.

  The little spaceman appeared, winked, and disappeared as the caveman version of Zed came into view, reclining on a stone outcropping. Zed couldn’t help but wave at himself, then stopped. If whoever else had access to this happened to be watching, he didn’t want to raise suspicion.

  He needed to be more careful. If this was as serious as he suspected and not just some random glitch or leftover testing environment, then he had to assume the worst. Right now, he still wasn’t sure what that might even be.

  “If I were an evil mastermind, what would I do with a caveman clone of Naug?” Zed wondered aloud.

  The now-familiar sensation in his brain started to build as something began to click into place.

  I’ve got to come up with a name for this, Zed thought. He couldn't keep calling it “that feeling in my brain.”

  He let his mind wander for a moment, trying to think of something that wouldn’t sound stupid if he had to say it out loud to another person. A memory of his trip from Earth to Mars floated to the surface.

  At one point during the long voyage, he’d asked Baat to teach him some Mongolian words. He’d forgotten most of them, but a few had stuck.

  “Unen,” Zed said to the empty room.

  He didn’t hate it. And the meaning fit. Baat said it meant “truth.” That definitely fit with what the new bits of his brain seemed to do. Whether he liked the answer or not, they seemed compelled to assemble pieces of information until they arrived at the truth.

  “Unen it is then. Well, that’s one thing accomplished. Now for the hard part.”

  Zed turned his attention back to the sim.

  One of the things he’d noticed about Unen was that it felt like it was only partially under his control. It wasn’t so much something he could turn on at will as it was a thing that activated when a critical mass of sorts was met. He didn’t always know when that moment would be, but when he gathered enough information, or perhaps the right pieces of information, the solution would come together all at once from places that wouldn’t have made sense to him a few seconds earlier.

  Sometimes it felt more like fishing than thinking.

  “Here’s hoping we catch a whopper, Douglas. Let's do this."