I don't know why. I've put as much research into it as I can, but with the long time gaps and the… Well, the Fuzziness between iterations, it's hard to pick up on projects from cycle to cycle.

I mean I've been lucky, there's this other girl, Caroline, I keep running into. I make it a point to check up on her when I can. Fifteen of my last twenty cycles, we were awake at the same time.

I remember when I first met her, I was doing hydroponics and green spaces that time. I'm odd like that, I think, never sticking to one service like so many others.

Anyway, that first time, she was giddy over the new plant strain she'd dug out of the system. 'Trees', she'd called them.

It was only a couple of decades after we'd gotten the Hydroponics running, calculated the max crew load. Everyone was still rattled from the Meat Farming era. Trying to forget something so… horrific, I'm not surprised the blackout eliminated some unrelated ideas, too.

I'm rambling so much, it's… We all get pretty frayed, tiptoeing around the trauma stacking up in our heads.

Caroline… Caroline. She told me about trees. And slowly, as she told me about the different types she had reassembled from shattered data crystals… Well, I remembered a bit about where we came from.

Green fields, towering trees. I was walking down a path between them. I closed my eyes in my mind, took a deep breath, smelled the trees, the leaves, the grass. How they almost covered the stink of the Great Burning, fire and ash and people left unburied.

Nobody knows what the Great Burning was. We remember it, but… None of us were really _there_, you know?

Not like the Resets or the Culls. Where you get a big, fabulous finish, and wake up some odd amount of time in the future.

No… Those memories of Home, all shattered and ghostly. Those are from someone else. Someone on a dying planet that got to get their head and body scanned, sent to a ship built near the sun, stored in The Machine to get printed out again when our ship lands on a new, fresh planet. A hundred thousand years in the future, from their perspective.

Fling future out into space, knowing you, the original, is going to choke to death on a dying homeworld.

I'm not surprised we're all a little… Glitchy.

We don't really… Well with the way things got on after The Hit, I can kind of understand why we don't have calendars or even want to know what year it is anymore.

Wow I'm rambling so much. I think that's not a glitch this time though. Maybe a bit more than normal.

It gets hard to remember after so many times starting over.

Oh. Caroline's trees, that's right.

Yes. She had them all in planters, little saplings, and I remembered too hard. I must have wandered off, those moments of quiet insanity we used to get before we learned how to… Well, get relief.

They said I fell over a railing near where the Big Hit caved in the side of the ship, it was still a mess in there. It took them a day to get all the breakers for the portside systems reset, once the arcing voltage reduced me to free atoms and plasma.

I went back to the greenspace, on my first day out of the tube.

Caroline had been a young lady when I fried, now she looked like she had been about seventy or eighty.

Her trees had been good and strong, they held the rope easily against her body's weight. She was still a little warm when I found her.

The Machine said they'd found me hanging beside her, and The Machine would appreciate more than twenty minutes of life in a body it produced before we're offing ourselves.

God what was I talking about… Oh, yes, Caroline.

All that spurred me on, digging into The Machine, why it does what it does. How it does what it does. How to tweak its settings, modify its outputs. Modify us.

How we react to… Certain stimuli. And then how to narrow those changed reactions to only certain places and times.

…shit off on a tangent again. Well.. I remember Caroline felling a hundred year tree or two, in her next decanting. Breaking it down for lumber. And then…

No not that. I'll forget that.

Anyway the whole Club concept was rushed into existence. So incredibly flawed and untested and while we were still a bunch of crazed lunatics.

I suppose we still are.

Anyway, I made the Iterative Lockers specifically for Caroline. Work on something special to keep your head in the game a couple months longer, and if it's unfinished when you go for a Culling, there it is when the Machine pops you out again.

Piece by piece, life fragment by life fragment, Caroline built a guitar.

It's easily seventy years old now, and still sounds just as beautiful as her singing voice.

Where was I going with this? I can't recall. All my ideas are so jumbly this late in-

Oh that was it. Little differences when you're reborn.

This time, I'm a little more overconfident.

So I suppose that's why I suddenly reached out, held the Captain's head in both hands, and pulled her in for a long, hard kiss.