I stared at the little computer in dismay. `Why are you asking me this? What happened?'

Maria didn't reply.

I sighed and laid on the floor, impatiently staring at the device.

`Is Rebecca okay?' I tapped, not bothering to pretend like I were praying.

`Yes, but there have been other deaths. Socmavaj hatched and laid eggs. They attacked people at the processing station. I've already seen a few babies.'

It kept getting worse. `Are you healthy?'

`Yes.'

`Have you been harmed?'

`No.'

A long pause followed.

`Let's play chess,' she said.

I still had possession of the board and pieces from our last game, so we played like we used to, she calling out the moves while I physically shuffled the pieces.

`Erin's a grouch,' Maria said as we made our opening moves. `She doesn't know what she's doing.'

I made a little advancing barrier with my pawns. Maria, in the meantime, moved her knight and other pieces into strategic positions.

`I can't believe they made you eat dog food. That isn't nice.'

`It is sufficient for my needs. Our Lord teaches us to be content with what we have.'

Maria moved again. `I noticed you played Gardenialand.'

I shrugged. `I grew tired of it.'

`You might become more interested when you see how I modified it with this update.'

Not comprehending her comment, I just pointed to the black pointy piece. `Why did they name a robot after this piece?'

`Computers are famous for playing chess.'

I captured Maria's bishop. `Your turn.'

She captured my bishop with a rook. `Did you know that terrorists used to make secret meetings in multi-user games?'

`No.' I advanced on her knight with a pawn.

`It's clever because nobody takes video games seriously.' She dropped her queen down, taking my rook. `We're not terrorists, but we can use a similar trick if our scientists get nosy.'

`I don't think they will,' I tapped, then captured a pawn. `They're not interested in me at all. It's very lonely.'

She moved her horse closer. `Well if they start to notice, open Gardenialand, take the Winnie down to New Owlings, and look in the graveyard. Space Kitty is me.'

The game concluded with my king in check.

As we started afresh on a new game, the device finished updating. We abandoned the board.

My device, once limited in its range of software, now hosted a wide variety of strange new programs. Even the layout had been updated to something more visually interesting.

A little arrow moved across the screen, clicking an icon labeled RLF2F. A moment later, Maria's face appeared. Live video.

She sat inside a bedroom with a Star Wars poster and a woven wall hanging depicting E.T. It appeared to be a compartment of one of those trailer modules, judging by the cramped angular design. "Your computer has a built in camera and microphone, but we never got to use it before."

I gazed lovingly at my new sister. "Please tell me this isn't a trick. Are you really alive?"

I waited for jarring video errors indicating a deception, but found none. "It's no trick, Sh'kassk'dwuissueblik. Hissandra said she isn't like you. She doesn't kill family. She, uh, took me hunting around the base."

"You killed humans?" I cried in horror.

Maria shook her head. "I just rode on her back as she showed me how to kill them." She shrugged. "That's why I asked if it were okay to eat them, being as they are already dead and everything."

I didn't know what to say to that. "This...is a temptation I constantly struggle against. I have sworn to never devour human flesh, for fear of returning to my sinful ways, to respect the memory of those who have died."

As if reading my mind, she quoted, "Therefore if food is a cause of my brother's falling, I will never eat meat, lest I cause my brother to fall."

I nodded.

"I think you are the brother, Sh'kassk'dwuissueblik. So I must abstain from human meat, for your sake."

I felt humbled, but grateful. "Thank you."

She isn't like you. She doesn't kill family. Those words came back to me like a stinging slap to the face...well, like what I imagine a stinging slap to the face to feel like. "You know Hissandra is wrong, don't you? I may kill my own kind, but it's only to protect my friends. You understand this, don't you, Maria?"

"Yes, yes. The humans have an expression. I believe it is `You are preaching to the choir.'"

This made me smile a little.

"Sh'kassk'dwuissueblik, Hissandra gave me a Ss'sik'chtokiwij name. She thought it would honor mother's memory if she gave me something in our language. What do you think of Ssusjmori? It means `Last child of the second great mother.'"

I understood the intention of the chosen words. Mother couldn't be called `the great mother' due to it being disharmonious to her relationship with Grandma. The lesser name would be healthy to her sense of individual identity as a Ss'sik'chtokiwij.

I guess she thought me dismayed at taking a name chosen by an enemy. "It's just a name. A name isn't good or evil, it's the person wearing it that makes it so."

I nodded. "Agreed. It is a beautiful name."

Although I may have detested a great many things she did, I respected Hissandra a lot for doing this. She was still my sister, and this simple act of naming, and naming well, meant a lot. "Where are you?"

"Roger's bedroom. I don't think anyone knows I'm here. He left the door closed, and I climbed through the vent. He has a lot of neat things."

I sighed. "How many more have died?"

Maria frowned. "I saw five technicians being carried to the medical bays with socmavaj stuck to their faces, three men and two women. Ss'sik'chtokiwij larva killed three others. I think those were all guys. They've closed off the exits of the processor, but I don't think it'll help. Hissandra killed five people in the last few days, and there's that other larva running around loose, which I think has killed another two. There might be more."

I guessed about twenty three of Grandmother's eggs hadn't hatched, if more hadn't been laid since our last encounter.

Maria paused, looking thoughtful. "Why would two men get married to each other? I thought marriage was an arrangement for the production and rearing of human offspring. Why would two men require such a pact of commitment when they cannot produce anything? Couldn't they just live together? I don't understand."

A Ss'sik'chtokiwij does not perform the reproductive act for mere personal enjoyment. "I...do not know."

"They told me about it in Rosedale Square, but I couldn't get an explanation that made sense. Every time I asked for clarification, I got sent to etiquette school. One time they even sent me to the Young Briton School of Modern Tact, which was even worse."

"I have no answer for you. But sometimes a married male and female will mutually decide to produce no offspring whatsoever."

"This I do not understand either."

I frowned. "What about your body? Is it safe?"

Maria sighed. "People complained about smells in the air conditioner, so they sent a repairman. Hissandra killed him. Hissandra and I had to move my body so it would be safe. That's why I was asking about eating already dead people. Hissandra was surprisingly nice. She let me keep it. My body, not the...man with the ring...The guy had weird pictures in his pocket. I do not understand this. It serves no purpose."

"At least you and your body are okay."

"Yeah."

"Maria, is there some way you can unlock my cell and get me out of here?"

Instead of answering my question, she blurted, "Uh-oh. Abernasty's coming. Play a game."

Suddenly the monitor displayed one of those games where you carry around a gun and shoot things. I had the screen name Erni, of course.

A digital gun pointed at a stretch of ruined dusty buildings in some desert country. A yellow tank stood nearby.

`Abernasty' stopped in front of my cell door, challenging me to remember fifteen items on a list. I did so successfully, and she went away, muttering something about how she wished she could have memory that good.

I moved the gun on the computer, shot holes in a wall, blew up an oil barrel. "I find this game tedious."

A bald, tough looking digital soldier with an eyepatch and an Uzi stepped in front of me, answering me in an unfamiliar little boy's voice. "It's like hide and seek. Except with guns."

"I don't like violence."

"Duh! Why are you even playing?"

Maria's character: A slender woman in combat fatigues. "She's bored and lonely. She's imprisoned in the science lab."

"Why's he in here?"

Even in the virtual world, it seemed, people could not immediately interpret my voice as female.

Maria's character shifted her hips. "She's an alien."

The boy laughed. "You're silly."

"My name is Sh'kassk'dwuissueblik," I told him. "What is your name?"

"David Barnett. Seriously, where do you live on the base?"

Maria knew more than me. "Unit 120."

"No. Seriously."

"We are serious."

"I just talked to the Siegler kid, and you don't sound anything like him."

"If you looked in the cages in room 120, you'd understand."

The digital army man leaned against a shattered wall, turning gray. A box on the screen said, "User Ninjavampire has signed off."

"This is great!" said Maria. "Craig and Roger would have never let us interact with kids on the base."

"Barnett...Wasn't that Kurt's last name?"

Maria sighed. "I...think so."

"So he has no father now."

"I'm not even sure he has a mother."

A soldier with a mohawk and body armor walked up to us, speaking in a man's voice. A whiny high pitched sounding voice, but a man's, nonetheless. "Kurt died in a lab accident. They said it was some kind of accident involving chemicals. His wife Ann, I heard, she died in the geothermal plant explosion, along with that guy she'd been seeing."

The couple that had been kissing in the power plant. That woman had been Kurt's wife. The thought made me sad. "So who's taking care of him?"

"He's with Rosa Hernandez. Sometimes you can hear her singing in the background when David's playing. Her daughter Araceli gets on here sometimes, too."

"Is Rosa related to Boger?"

"Yeah. A real shame. I liked Boger." He paused. "Are you really in Unit 210? You don't sound like Nick."

"I'm not Nick. I'm an alien."

He went quiet for a moment. "You mean like those facehugger things I saw in the med lab?"

I stared at the digital soldier, trying to formulate an appropriate response. "Those are just the egg layers of my species. I am the mature version."

A longer silence followed. I didn't hear the guy speak again.

"Leatherface won't let me in the lab," David said. "They told me it's a biohazard or something."

"They're afraid of me."

I asked Maria to help me out of me cage, but she said it was unsafe with so many people listening in.

Call marched into my cell, confiscating my computer.

Lonely again.

At least I knew Maria was okay. That's what mattered.

With my next meal, I got a math challenge. The android had taught me a few things about this, so I knew basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

Abernathy used my tablet computer to show the equations they expected me to solve. Whenever I answered a question, she'd move to the next one without ever telling me if I were right or wrong. Even when I asked, she didn't give me an answer.

I couldn't find out on my own with the computer either. I resorted to scratching things in the wall.

The following day, they allowed me a sheet of something called Talcboard, an odd sort of mineral that naturally fills in its own scratches when you rub sand into it, without losing thickness. Abernathy said I could scratch it up all I wanted.

They used these things in lieu of hard to replace markers, chalkboards and computers. Humans wrote with a metal stick, but I had my claws, just as good.

I spent an entire week bereft of company, live or digital, save for the perfunctory interactions I had with Ms. Abernathy once or twice a day.

Logic puzzles.

A reading from a beginners Algebra textbook, followed by a test.

The Cat in the Hat.

An earth geography quiz.

They gave me models of molecules and Legos, asked to build something with them. At other times they gave me brain teasers, like the triangle of wood you have to clear of all but one peg, or interlocking pieces of metal that had to be pulled apart in a certain way.

At one point, they showed me a series of satellite maps and asked to invent names for all the craters.

Besides that, they left me alone with my thoughts and meager possessions.

While the bible is my treasure, solace and strength...no substitute for companionship, as God's speech about lonely Adam in Genesis 2:18 attests.

Thankfully, after two weeks of isolation, they at last allowed me a computer once more...minus several modifications, of course.

Or so I thought.

On the surface, the interface allowed only the basics that had been programmed in. Music, TV shows, drawing, a calculator, solitaire, chess, a limited sort of encyclopedia, but then I started noticing strange things hiding in the desktop. Easter eggs, if you will.

My desktop video background: Salmon swimming in a bubbling brook, with a miniature waterfall. The fish always swam the same way every time, but it was lovely. Roger had installed it after I selected the video from a list of other options, such as a view from the Thames and some pagoda place with a bridge in Asia, both equally beautiful.

After gazing at this idyllic scene for a moment, something popped up in the bottom left corner:

A message written in Ss'sik'chtokiwij, spelling out the words: Secret of the Selenites.

I puzzled over it for a few minutes before checking in the music and video libraries.

I thought I'd be watching a cartoon about the Baron Munchausen, as described in the synopsis, but when I opened the file, I found a series of unrelated one second video clips from NCIS spliced together to form this hidden message: "Open. Administrator. Panel. Klick. Override. Type in. Letters. Bravo. Alpha. Romeo. Sierra. Oscar. Oscar. Mike. Nineteen. Seven. Seven. Klick. Icon. North by Northwest. Unlock. User. Ernie. Good luck."

The video deleted itself once I reached its conclusion.

I have an excellent memory, and Captain Cryptic taught me the army alphabet codes for radio. I opened the administrator panel, typing the letters from the video into the box that presented itself. I'm sure they had some significance, though the meaning eluded me.

The screen now read "Welcome, Roger Shattuck."

The `North by Northwest' section of the administrator panel (i.e. the upper left) displayed a list of users with padlock icons next to each one:

0) E. Abernathy

0) J. Cobb

0) R. Shattuck

0) C. Siegler

0) D. Siegler

0) Ernie

0) Sarah 175 (Possibly her designation as a clone)

Although tempted to lock up every other name but mine and Sarah's, I didn't think it wise, so I just unlocked mine, and instantly some programs came back.

The video chat and shooting game had been erased, but I still possessed Gardenialand, which, I guessed, still contained some method of electronic communication.

To briefly describe the game: A quest adventure. Everything on the screen reminded me of the Wind and the Willows, little furry dolls that move around in jerky stop motion animation.

I had to go through a series of magic battles and such to get to the area of the game Maria specified, a little New Orleans style town populated with owls and cats ("New Owlings").

As I wandered the digital balconies, making various characters talk, Ms. Abernathy walked up to my door, scowling like she suspected something, but didn't speak on it. Instead, she read me poems by Allen Ginsberg and made me fill out a crossword puzzle.

Once that was done (actually semi-done. I couldn't figure out all the crossword answers, even with the computer), she left me alone to play the game.

I sent my canine character down a street, arriving in a small graveyard.

Space Kitty, a green tabby with antennas and a space helmet, hid behind a mausoleum.

`Hi, Ernie,' she said in a text balloon. `I'm glad to see you followed my instructions.'

`I hope you are not eating human flesh,' I typed.

`I've been eating every part of my body. And when I was human, I ate rats and bugs and food from the trash recycler. I can try to find other food, but if it runs out, or if the humans try to capture me...'

I sighed, not knowing what to tell her. She knew not to kill humans for food, but if one was already dead...

`Wait. You ate rats and bugs, but you thought your liver was yucky?'

`What do I know? I'm just a dumb kid.' The digital cat hopped up on a tombstone. `I have more bad news. An additional number of socmavaj have hatched. I think, once they leave their hosts, we will have about fifteen Ss'sik'chtokiwij running around the base, feeding, if nothing is done. So far, it looks like something close to ten people have died from larva attacks, and that's not counting what Hissandra is doing.

`I'm surprised the power is staying on. There's no one to run the machinery except Barbara.'

`I wish there was something I could do, but I'm trapped in this cell.'

`I'm not sure there's anything you can do. There's Ss'sik'chtokiwij in the air ducts and new eggs hatching all the time. People aren't believing the lies anymore. They know about Ss'sik'chtokiwij.'

Again I asked if she knew a way to release me.

`The doors have special locks. They're independent of the power and computer systems, so I actually have to go in the room to get them...and that's not easy. They've put guards outside the door, and, like I've said before, they've fixed the vent cover.'

It seemed the scientists had begun to figure things out, for I heard Jeanette asking, "What's it doing? I thought we erased all those programs from the system."

The scientists stood at the entrance of the prison, watching me.

"I thought we did too," Erin agreed.

For a minute, they stared at me in silence.

"What's it playing?"

"It's just that stupid game my daughter's always got her head stuck into. I don't think we need to worry about it. It's not like it can plug in something and talk to other computers like the other one."

Jeanette shook her head. "Action Commando. I just don't get why that shit is so popular. It's like everyone on the damn base is playing it."

"We're millions of light years from earth. I think people are just using it to connect. Like a chat room or something. That's what's so dangerous about letting him in there."

"So you think that other game is harmless?"

Ms. Abernathy shrugged. "You can't talk to anyone real. Just ask my daughter. It's just a bunch of animated Care Bears hitting goblins with water balloons."

"Can we record these gaming sessions?"

"I suppose. But I hope you're not expecting me to watch the damn thing. I watch Sissy play hers for five minutes and I feel like my brains are going to melt and come pouring out my ears."

"That's what the fast forward button is for."

"You actually want me to review that footage?"

`Leatherface' gave her an indifferent sort of nod.

Ms. Abernathy groaned and uttered curses under her breath. "How about we just take his computer away? He obviously seems to have some skill at disabling his user restrictions..."

About ten minutes later, Call took my device away.

Well. So much for that.

The hours passed. Night fell.

As I rested on the floor, staring into Sarah's empty cell, thinking about the good times I had with her, I heard something slithering.

Puzzled, I waited a few moments, glancing back and forth at the door, the cell, and the hallway.

A humanoid shape waddled into Sarah's chamber on its hands. Having no legs, it rocked back and forth on its palms, trailing plastic intestines and white coolant as it went. "Hello, daughter."

The Mara unit Grandma dismembered at the processing station. My Mara. Ironic to see her like this again, after having taken pains to restore her body to its former glory. "Oh honey! I'm glad you're safe!"

"Hi Mara," I replied, unsure about what to make of this greeting.

"Have you found Sarah yet?"

I sighed. "Yes. Sarah's dead."

The expression on her face looked convincingly sorrowful. "I'm so sorry."

"It's okay. She's in a better place." I winced at the unintended irony.

Mara nodded. "How are your new friends treating you?"

Intellectually, I knew her to be only a machine programmed to care about me, but at the moment, she was my only companion, my only advocate in this lonely prison. "Not well. They feed me dog food and only speak to me once a day."

"You poor thing." She pressed her palm to the glass. "But don't you worry. Mama's here now."

"You're not my mother," I protested.

"I know, I know. I'm just the teddy bear that says I love you. But, dammit, I've lost two daughters and you're the only child I can claim as my own. We had a connection. We bonded as mother and daughter. I need you to see me as more than just a robot."

I stared in utter shock. This synthetic human, this machine, had never spoken thus to me before. "What!"