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There are no photographs of your childhood.
If there were, they'd look like this.
==> Look for the one of a fat little baby with food all over its face. Everyone has one of those.
You don't.
You weren't a fat little baby for long. Mostly you were a thin little baby, because there wasn't much food for anyone and little enough of that was suitable for something with no teeth. The people did their best, shredding seaweed and pounding seagull meat and nervously poking the resulting paste into your mouth, but there was never so much food that you could just get it everywhere.
They always hoped you'd harden as you got older.
You never did, though, and you think they blamed themselves for not finding the right kind of silicates for you to eat.
There you are, a soft, malnourished infant, neither black nor white, surrounded by worried faces and cautious hands.
That might be a flake of dried seagull on your cheek.
==> Find the one of you as a toddler, playing on the beach.
You didn't find out what a beach was until you were twelve.
You learned to walk in the central spaces of the colony, first crawling and then tottering from white spaces to black. There was always somebody with an eye on you. At first there were at least six or seven; as time went by and disaster failed to strike, the village that raised you began to relax a little. Your firsts, your achievements, were greeted less with pride than with relief. Thank goodness, the people seemed to sigh, this child works properly after all.
They never let you wander too far. The edge of the colony was a dangerous place, and they waited until you were a competent walker before allowing you close to it. This is your earliest memory, the first time you saw the ocean: all that green-grey-blue, stretching out to meet the sky. No other colonies in sight. White hands scooped you up and pressed you gently to a warm, tough carapace; segmented fingers tousled your wispy hair.
There you are, eighteen months old, looking out over the edge of the world.
There you are again, three years old, sitting on the edge with a ragged cloak around your shoulders, grinning up at worried black and white faces as the ocean laps at your dangling feet.
==> Look, there's one of you in a silly costume.
It wasn't a silly costume. It was you trying to fit in.
There comes a point in everyone's life when they start to realise that they're different. Yours was probably earlier than most: the difference between you and people, after all, is quite dramatic. A person is black or white, and has a tough outer shell that goes tik-tik when you tap on it. You are soft and miscoloured. Your plates never grew in. You had never seen anything else with hair; the closest approximation you knew was the tiny, sticky barbs of a seagull's feathers. People were never unkind to you - if anything they were pleased by the texture of your hair, and because you are neither black nor white you were equally at home with all of them - but nevertheless, there was no one else like you in all the world.
Sitting on the edge of the world one day, you saw something pale float to the surface just out of your reach. You tapped your current caretaker's foot for attention, pointed towards the object and signed Get It For Me Please? with an urgent look.
Your caretaker regarded you fondly. Of Course I Will Do That, she signed, and reached over the edge to pick it up.
When she put it in your hands, you were startled by how light it is. There was no time to ask questions about it, though, because you both heard the deep rumble of drones in the distance (a bad sound, the worst sound of all) and had to run for cover. You were adept at running across the floating platforms by then; to you, it was perfectly normal to feel the ground shift beneath your weight.
As the two of you huddled in the shelter of the nearest hive, castled behind four stout souls who did their best to conceal their own fear, you turned the white thing over in your hands. You pushed a finger into the soft underside. You taped the firm shell. Tik-tik, it said, tik-tik, just like a person.
You suddenly realised how people get their plates.
There you are, five years old, some two months of collecting later, tying pieces of cuttlebone to your arms and legs with strips of inedible seaweed, wondering when your plates will stick well enough that they won't need the seaweed any more.
==> There has to be one of you and your parents.
Of course there is. You have more parents than anyone. The whole village raised you; you have as many parents as there are people in the world. At least ten of them huddled around to comfort you when you cried over your plates refusing to stick. By then, though, a few faces had begun to stand out of the crowd, people who often came to your side when you most needed someone to explain the world to you. The gentle white woman who'd been watching over you when you found your first cuttlebone was the one to explain what cuttlebones are, to tell you that people eat them to make their plates grow strong. The little black man who made you your first cloak out of scraps of cloth, he was the one to reassure you that you didn't need plates like his to be a real person.
He was also the one to go into the Silent House, the house where almost no one would dare to go, to bring you back the Framed Photograph: a depiction of a woman with soft skin like yours, hair like yours, eyes like yours.
This Woman Lived In The Silent House Long Ago, signed the gentle white woman as the little black man held it up. She Was A Great Hero. Do You See? She Looks Like You. She Is Your -
There she used a sign you had never seen before. The little black man put the photo frame in your hands, took a piece of chalk out of his robe and wrote six letters on the black floor:
M O T H E R
What Does "Mother" Mean? you signed to them.
Mother Means You Came From Her, signed the black man. Mother Means You Are Like She Was. Mother Means She Made You To Be Like Her, And Gave You To Us.
Mother Means, signed the white woman, a look of quiet pain in her eyes, That She Always Did What Was Best For You.
There you are, still five years old, surrounded by a dozen parents, holding the Framed Photograph close to your chest.
You never worried about not having plates again.
==> Look for one of you playing with your friends.
You were eight and a half when you found out that there were no more humans left.
Even once you'd come to terms with being different, you were still lonely - as much as anyone surrounded by friendly people can be. Not only were you the only human on the colony, you were also the only person in your age group. You were attended by largely patient adults who did their best to understand you, which is more than a lot of children get from the adults in their lives, but you didn't have other children to play with. The older you got, the more you realised that adults didn't have much time to play: keeping the colony fed and afloat was no small task, after all, and the village that raised you had their own survival to think of as well. You helped, which is to say you mimicked at first and eventually learned how to help properly. For the first time you started to see pride in their faces; for the first time they were signing Thank You of their own accord, not just teaching you to be polite about being given things.
Why Does No One Go Into The Silent House? you asked one of your parents one day, half way through learning to mend a fishing line.
The Patient Mediator gave you one of her sad, gentle looks. Because It Is Not For Us, she told you. Your Mother Left It For You.
This struck you as odd. If It Is My House, Why Don't I Live In It?
There May Be Dangerous Things Inside, signed the Patient Mediator. We Have Been Waiting Until You Were Large Enough And Strong Enough To Face Them.
You nodded your understanding, thanked her, and went back to mending the line.
On your way to the Weary Vigilkeeper's hut that night, you paused at the Silent House. Something about the place seemed to beckon to you, like a secret spelled out behind the back. When you stopped the Patient Mediator, it seemed she knew your intent.
Little One, she signed, It May Be Dangerous.
You nodded. I Know, you signed back. But It Is My House, And I Must Go Inside. If I Do Not Come Out In The Morning, You Will Know It Was Dangerous.
She let you go - but you knew then, and still know now, that she wanted to take you somewhere safer instead. Sometimes, you supposed, it was hard for a mother to know what was best for her children.
The place was dark. You crept through shadowed corridors, feeling your way along the walls, turning corners at random until you saw a sliver of light up ahead - moonlight, shining around a half-open door. It beckoned. You followed.
The room you entered was furnished like a bedroom, though like none you'd ever seen before: a huge, soft bed, a table, a chair, all so clean you knew at once it could never have been lived in. There was no dust, no scent. Not even any salt marks from years of sea-spray. Most of the odd-shaped windows were dark, as though covered with cloth; through just one, the moonlight shone in broken pieces. Something was casting a towering shadow, upward-reaching, fingered. Outside it, the wind blew a strange new breath. Hissing. Like rain, but no clatter of droplets.
As you crept inside, you noticed the shelves. On the very top one, out of your reach, was what looked like an animal trapped in a block of glass - dead, you assumed, but something about the shape of its face was endearing all the same - and a little red thing with a barrel and a handle, like a miniature of the ray rifle the Armament Refurbisher uses to shoot at high-flying seagulls. The others held books. Big, thick books. This was more interesting still; you thought you'd read every book on the colony, even the difficult grown-up ones, but apparently your mother had kept some in reserve.
In fact, it looked as though this whole room had been kept in reserve - presumably, if PM was right, for you.
You sat down on the bed. It creaked softly as it gave under your weight for reasons you didn't quite understand at the time, but later discovered was to do with springs. The pillow was smooth and plush, stuffed with more down feathers than you'd find on...more seagulls than you could count up to.
In the morning, you woke to strange birdsong. The room was uncomfortably bright. That tall thing outside the window was brown; its fingers rustled and hissed in the wind. You began to realise it wasn't like any window you'd ever known. Some day you'd persuade some of your parents to come in and look at it with you to decide what it meant.
Before leaving to reassure said parents that you were still alive, you picked up one of the books - heavy, but not too heavy for you - and the little red ray gun. Trying to open the door with both hands full, though, caused you to accidentally pull the trigger, and with a sound you could only render in your head as -IFY!, a small black furry animal appeared where the barrel was pointing, at the end of the bed. It was wearing a jacket.
"Meow?" it said.
There you are, eight years old, playing with your cat and a seagull feather.
Once you could read your mother's books, you decided to name him Frigglish.
==> Leaf through the other photographs.
Eight and a half, co-leading an expedition of half a dozen people into the laboratory behind the Silent House, PM at your side and WV bringing up the rear. A few hours later, emerging carrying heavy little green boxes with all kinds of sockets in the sides. That night, reading Complacency of the Learned by stark white lamplight, following the words with your fingertip as your nameless cat sleeps beside you.
The next night, a picture of the folding device in your bedroom, plugged into one of the green boxes, its screen lit up with unfamiliar words.
Three nights later, a crowd around your laptop, listening, for the first time, to a human voice. PM is signing something you didn't recognise at the time; looking back, it was Captions.
The next morning, still awake, staring at the screen in shock, PM behind you with a hand on your shoulder. She looks pained, but not surprised.
Two years later, ten and a half, clumsily but earnestly reading Complacency of the Learned aloud to a knot of people. They can't copy you, but they want to understand what your human noises mean.
Six months later, on your eleventh birthday, holding your first live mutated cat after a lot of failed ectobiology experiments. Frigglish sulks in the background.
Over a year later, wading through a clowder of clones and their descendants to reach a fenestrated plane.
Ten minutes later, behind a door that was locked from the inside, posing with your tiny red ray gun in one hand, signing Totally Badass with the other.
Two minutes later, pictures of a dais with a spiralling pattern on it, a screen depicting coordinates and a large, orange object you had only ever seen on the internet.
Half an hour later, surrounded by random objects, your little red ray gun plugged into a screen, a list of coordinates, a gallery of similar images, all with a vegetable in common.
Two days later, a tear in PM's eye as you offer her a pumpkin.
You like to think that if your mother - your human mother - could see these photographs, she'd be proud of you.
==> Be current Roxy. Exchange childhood photographs with your friends.
Janey has one of her as a fat little baby with food all over her face. It's cake, of course. Goddamn Batterwitch. Jake was wiry like you, in his case from activity instead of malnutrition (though you wonder about Hellmurder Island all the same).
Di-Stri doesn't have any photographs. You don't even know how he survived without parents or ancestors to take care of him. Unlike you, he's not willing to share.
Janey doesn't believe the things you tell her, not even when you say them out loud (and boy does that take all your courage, liquid and otherwise, talking to another human being for the first time, somebody who knows what you're supposed to sound like). You two fight about it sometimes, but never for long.
"It's nice to have someone to talk to," she says to you one evening after you've made it up for the umpteenth time. For a moment she stops self-consciously watching the picture of herself on her screen and focuses on her webcam. You hit Prt Scrn before the moment vanishes, the closest thing you can do to taking a photograph of your best friend. She's smiling.
One day, you think to yourself, you'll teach her to sign.