It's siesta; the midday period of rest. Lunch wasn't too long ago. I can't remember what it was, and it doesn't matter terribly much.

I'm curled up on my side, thinking about a ship that sunk more than ninety years ago. She was the RMS Titanic, and she left from Southampton on what I imagine to have been a sunny April morning. She sank in the middle of the night. Of course you've heard of her.

I'm thinking about Collapsibles A and B. They were, as their name indicates, collapsible lifeboats, and they were stored above the officer's quarters if memory serves. As the ship went down, efforts were made to flip them right-side up... but one of them never made it, and floated overturned until its occupants were rescued. The other swamped with more than forty occupants.

There's not much of a reason for me to be thinking about a ship that sank years before my production group was even a glimmer in the eye of a German scientist. We all learned about it when we were children; it's one of the ephemera that rise most clearly to memory from my brief education, so often interrupted by my being called off to missions.

I realize that I didn't exactly have a normal childhood; years of schooling are normal, but not when they're interspersed with pseudo-military training. And when your schooling focuses on the missions you're sent on.

We were developed mostly as infiltrators. We're stronger, better than those we're meant to fool. But you can't pretend to be a teenager unless you know how to be one. So our schooling consisted a lot of learning how to be whatever we were pretending to be. I don't know how the lady Titanic fits into that. Somehow she does.

This is the longest mission I've ever been sent on; three years maximum length. Of course, one year was just training. But then there are two years set aside for me to do what I was born to do. And no matter what the clever little girl said, I wasn't born to kill Max. That duty falls to someone else. My duty is... well, my duty is to play Judas. I get them to trust me. Then I betray them.

Three years of my life. And I'm spending them as a female.

I don't know why this is even disturbing. In my adult career, I'll serve on longer missions, perhaps even posing as a woman then -- more likely, a teenage girl. This is not the worst deception I'll ever engage in.

It's still not the most appealing thought I've ever had. My name now is Miranda. Most of my physical characteristics remain the same, excluding the length of my hair, long enough now to be a bit of a bother. My personality is a different one -- more feminine, adoring of Fang. And I will live as Miranda for perhaps two more years. Just over seven hundred days, twenty-one hundred meals. Didn't Maximum write that I'm a mathematical prodigy? It's lies (mostly). I worked out the answer beforehand. It came out handy that I lived in the same facility as the Director, and that she told me the problem in advance. Shifting the odds in her favor, yes.

That makes me think about home. Not my pleasant childhood memories. The worst memories I have of it.

Oh, I'm not going to tell you any horror stories involving needles. I'm going to tell you a story about any homeowner's ultimate nightmare: the invasion of hostile pests.

Once upon a time, there was a boy named Omega, because he was the last of his production group. Were this a real fairy tale, he would be the runt of the "family", and the one who got made fun of the most. But this isn't, and he wasn't, because he was separated from his next-older siblings by just two months. All of the kids were two months apart, in fact.

Now, this boy had been raised a Good Boy, and he always did what his mother said for him to do, because that was what Good Boys did. And once upon a time a girl came to the castle where the Good Boy lived, and his mother decided to prove that the Good Boy was better than this girl. This was all well and good, being that it was in the pursuit of science.

But the girl had played an evil trick on the boy and his mother. She called on her brother to witch up an army of other children to attack the castle. And so the children came to the castle...

The boy, meanwhile, did as his mother told him. He was, after all, a Good Boy.

Then the children came, and everything he thought he knew was turned upside-down. He ran for a place he thought was safe, but it wasn't safe any more. So he ran and he ran and he kept running until finally it was night and he lay down to rest. And in the morning some of his mother's friends found him and took him back to his house, but he was never the same again.

You could say it made me bitter or misanthropic, but those might be consequences of my style. I don't communicate very well; my body language is a tad suppressed in public, and I never learned to write expressively other than mission reports.

I don't know what's going to come up in the fourth pulp book about Maximum, but I hope I'm not cast as horribly bitter. Because anyone normal would be bitter after an encounter of that sort with her: She mocks you and calls in a force of children who attempt to destroy your home. It would be a terrible cut to self-esteem, I imagine.

But the Collapsibles. Like I said. They weren't solid-sided lifeboats, and the people in them were subject to some terrifying things on that April morning. I imagine there's a clever metaphor for my life somewhere in there.