– Are you making this up to get me into your room? – Natalie really didn't believe that Taylor would be willing to break the law so severely, even if it gave him something to actually be interested

in. He might be obsessed with the idea of fucking her, but not to the point where he'd risk being trapped for years in Tosca, where he'd have another desire, now just to get back to normal.

– No, no… I'll tell you… Anyway, there are different planets out there. And it's not just people like us. It's not just humans. There's also protos and zerg. Protos are like us, only with blue blood and oblong shapes. They seem to have technology that's cooler than ours. And the Zerg are like cockroaches, only bigger. And they can breathe without a spacesuit…

– And what are they all doing?

– They're fighting. They're fighting over resources. There's crystals and green gas. It's strange, of course. We don't mine that kind of stuff here.

– Maybe you wouldn't have taken such a risk then, and just given this game to the right people to study?

– Yes? And once again we'll be given back an empty stump with one story, as they tell us? Or even with fiction, which can't be?

– From what you're telling me, it's already fantastic as it can't be… So you'll apparently get it back the same, and everyone on the station will just end up getting a new game.

Taylor was a little offended. He didn't seem to be fully telling what he knew, and he hadn't decided if he should. On the one hand, it showed that he wasn't lying about the game. On the other hand, there was nothing interesting about it.

– That's not all I found on this flash drive....

– A flash drive?! – so he didn't just find one program in a hidden folder on his computer, he found a whole media with something new, and now he's sitting there on his own, digging through it. You might not come back from Tosca at all.

– Quiet, you… Yes, a flash drive… There are more movies.      I haven't seen them yet. But it

looks interesting… I was going to suggest that we go together.      Will you go?

It seems that the concern has blown his mind, and he wants her to keep him company in Tosca, too. It was an interesting plan, though – he'd have no competition there, and she might forget what those she liked looked like. It looked like he'd thought about how he was going to spend the next thirty years.

– Taylor, I have no desire to spend the rest of my life watching you in a jail cell      And it looks

like that's where it might end up. Give that flash drive to the elders, and then you can tell me what you get back. – Natalie got up from the table and took the tray with the leftovers and moved towards the exit.

***

It was not the first time she had heard of similar finds. People had found flash drives, memory cards, and even whole laptops in completely different places. Of course, most of them had been found in the first year, when everyone woke up, but they still found bits and pieces. And, as it usually turned out, they were tidbits that only fueled the intrigue for such things, despite the threat of prison. And there was something about it      We had an official history of our planet and

everything around it, and there was no good reason to suggest that it wasn't. Except for the very beginning of our present life.

We are officially on the third planet from the Sun, called Earth. It is the smallest in the solar system and therefore has no satellites, unlike most other planets. And a few thousand years ago, it was of a completely different kind than it is now: with beautiful seas and oceans, evergreen forests and lots of wildlife in it. Back then it was still possible to walk freely on the surface and live without a spacesuit. But for a long time everything was polluted to such an extent that the cataclysms that occurred led to what we have now – a gray lifeless desert with no air. At one point we agreed to immerse ourselves in a centuries-old cryosleep to wait for better times. But waking up after the dream, we realized that we had lost our memory in the process, and now we are recovering it bit by

bit. And to keep the truth from weighing us down, all information must first go to the elders, who understand the importance of dosing information. That was the story we were taught from birth in school. But it was not readily believed by everyone.

After all, there were a number of contradictions. Some said that it was safe to walk on the station, because special engines were working there, forming a stronger attraction. While outside it – you can easily jump without much difficulty for a dozen meters.

Others have found a contradiction in the fact that textbook maps have many mountains and other kinds of high altitude landscapes that are not even close to being on our planet. Okay, that everything died out, vaporized, and became impossible to breathe, but why did the topography change so much. Of course, only a few people were allowed to walk everywhere, and even more so to ride far away on overcars, and they kept silent in front of everyone else, but from any window one could see the complete absence of any mountainous systems on all sides of Appollo-24.

Others went even further and began to study the movies that we got on various kinds of media and that we were allowed to watch. And the biggest question that came to mind was why the technologies we see in the movies are not very different from ours, but the surrounding reality is completely different. They can breathe fresh air, they have seas and forests, and the same technology. If it came out that we've screwed up our own planet, it couldn't have happened overnight. Which means the movies we've seen are far from catastrophic. But it can't be, because technology certainly doesn't stand still – how much we've managed to invent in our twenty-four....

There were no answers to all these questions – only doubts. Some people had tried to dig into them, but it had been 14 years since they had been forbidden to discuss them publicly. The new found materials began to be turned in after the incident when Oscar Midnight, an engineer of the energy block, was put in Tosca's cell for concealing a hard disk he had found. No one even knows what he saw there, or if he saw it at all, but when he was taken away he shouted that everyone was being lied to, that the place we were on was called the moon, not Earth, and on that word he was hit in the back of the head. Fourteen years have passed since then, and no one has ever seen him again, and everyone began to share their thoughts only in whispers.

It was very strange to look at. Could just renaming his planet to something else be such a threat? The fact that he called the Earth Moon wouldn't change it, even if it did. It will still be the third planet from the Sun, even if it has a different name. Everything will be just as bleak as it is now, and just as hopeless. The best we can do now is to adapt to the conditions we have and still live our lives. And let them call this planet whatever they want, but she, Natalie, is thirty-two years old now, and she still gets so underdressed she wants to climb the wall.

It wasn't hard for her to admit it to herself, but she didn't like the men who were always chasing her. She had short romances, but even if in bed, some of them were okay, there was nothing to talk about with them. And they clearly valued her breasts and ass, not her intelligence. She didn't even doubt that, just as she didn't think she could get very far with that.

And that was important, after all. She had been preparing herself since birth to use her own brains for the common good, and now she was proud to say that she had succeeded. She was now the lead researcher in the science department, and it was her job to study primarily the matter around them for any benefit. And her recent discovery, the extraction of helium-3 from soil, was truly a breakthrough.