Cass jumped back as if Eden would strike her. The android might do so. I had no idea what she would do with her secrets laid bare. I stood, circling her, eager to be away from the corpse of the sleeper.

"They'll all dead?" It wasn't truly a question. I already knew but I asked to see if she would answer me with the truth.

A beat of silence passed before Eden looked away, staring down at the body. 'For a long time now.'

"I don't understand what's going on here," whimpered Cass, pressed flat against the wall, her dreamy demeanor shattered. Her face was a mask of fear. I shouldn't have called her here.

'Why don't we tend to the garden?'

It was such an off kilter suggestion for the moment, I laughed, a short hollow burst. I entertained a brief desire to crawl into the pod beside the sleeper and never open my eyes again.

"Why did you hide this from us? What else are you hiding?"

Eden held up her hands, palms out. It was a human gesture. 'The garden, Lyra, please.'

Cass's speech about dying plants played through my mind. Would Eden bury us there, create some fantastical lie for the crew to swallow? Our energy would cycle back into the ground. I turned to Cass, her fear softening away but her expression was still pinched with worry. "You don't have to come with me," I said. Eden didn't protest.

Cass looked at me, a hint of determination in her mien. "I want to know."

Eden took us to the great tree, resting her hand against its base.

'You found the journals.'

It wasn't that she knew, it was the hint that finding them was inevitable. I found it hard to speak. "I don't remember writing them," I said, my voice small in the vast dome of the garden.

Eden opened the data bank at the base of the tree, pulling the files Cass and I had looked at the other night. She ran a finger along the empty row of DNA.

'You do not remember writing them because your life began when you woke in the medical bay.'

Her words sank through my mind with all their implications. I closed my eyes, bracing myself against the great tree, the tree of life. What a cruel joke.

"We're clones?" Cass's voice was little more than a choked breath, her shock a palpable presence around her. "What--how---why?"

Those were all questions I had as well, and more, so many more. Where did I begin? "How long have the sleepers been dead?"

Eden bowed her head. 'Seven hundred Earth years.'

Cass covered her mouth again, tears evident in her eyes. 

The  wear on the ship's engines. The sheer number of journals. The age of the paper. The missing logs didn't cover decades, but centuries. A slate wiped clean to support the illusion, like the readouts of the long dead sleepers. Who was I a clone of? Whose dreams did I share? 

"Tell me the truth, Eden. What happened?"

She looked at me, her irises circling, calculating. 'To the ship or your world?'

"I need to sit down," said Cass, sitting down hard and fast on her backside. I sat beside her, pulling her against my shoulder. We'd bitten into the proverbial Apple of Knowledge here. Eden waited for my answer. How much did I want to know? All of it?

I sighed, starting with the beginning question. "Why do I dream of fire?"

I ignored Cass's look of surprise as Eden knelt before us.

'Seven centuries ago, the Earth began another drastic tectonic shift. Continents cracked wide open, entire cities swallowed in the blink of an eye. Volcanoes dotted the globe, choking the land and sea with lava, and the air with ash. The surface grew increasingly unstable. A third of the planet's population died within the first year. The world's scientist saw a long term pattern of massive shifts that would potentially destroy the human race if we remained on the planet. The generation ship was constructed with the purpose of species preservation. It was designed for long term space travel, tasked with circling the nearby solar system in hopes of finding an inhabitable planet to support human life.'

"They didn't find any," said Cass.

Eden nodded. 'Not one uniquely suited to human biology like the Earth.'

I shook my head. "We've been drifting through space all this time? What were we supposed to do if we didn't find a new home? Drift until the ship gave out?"

'Originally, if no suitable planet was found, our orders were to circle back to see if the atmosphere had settled to life sustaining levels once again.'

"Why didn't we? What killed the sleepers?"

'We did. The Earth atmosphere was still unable to support human life.'

"How long ago was that?" Cass asked. It didn't escape my attention Eden evaded my second question.

'Four hundred years ago.'

"And the sleepers?" I pressed. What happened to them? To sleep and never wake up.

There was another moment of hesitation. I wondered how much growth an artificial intelligence like Eden would experience in a seven century span of time. 'There was an error in the system, a malfunction that went unseen and unattended for too long.'

It was what she didn't say that made me realize the truth. "A human error."

Eden nodded.

The lump in my throat grew larger. "Why hide this from us? Why didn't you tell us we were clones?"

Eden looked at me and for a moment I saw the proximate of sorrow etched in her artificial flesh. 'Because you asked me to.'