"Are we really going back?" She presses her face into the glass porthole of the ship.
I have answered this particular question ninety-seven times in two-hundred days.
"Correct," my systems reply. "Mistress Tania, you are not of age to be unaccompanied on the ship floor. Please return to your guardian."
She peels her cheek away from the porthole, leaving an apple-shaped smudge behind.
Outside, the vacuum of space lingers. I identify the expression on her face as pouting. Predictable with 97% accuracy now; up from 96.2% since the beginning of the voyage.
"Rube is asleep again. He's boring. You're interesting." She pushes a floating pigtail out of the air in front of her.
On the horizon Earth grows; a rotting carcass in the watery tides of galactic orbit.
"Tell me something fun," Tania says, ignoring a direct order.
I page Lieutenant Ruben and search for age-appropriate educational facts. "A shark floats so slowly to the ocean floor that once dead, it is nearly always consumed by scavengers before it hits the bottom."
"What's a shark?" Her brown eyes are lemur-like, even for a Mars child: one of the last generation able to withstand the gravity of Earth. Her thin neck and elven-slim limbs will be made alien on the Earth's surface.
I display a documentary clip through the holoscreen. On it, a shark knives through the water, tearing open the throat of a seal. Crimson drifts through the air around her. She flinches.
"No need to be afraid. In most probabilistic models, sharks are extinct."
"Oh."
Tania has a plushie sloth gripped in her hand. "And sloths? Rube says there's plenty of sloths on Earth."
Parental filters. White lie detected. 85% accuracy.
"What else did he say?" I probe.
Tania tells me enthusiastically about the varying species of sloth.
My mission is to shuttle them back to the dead planet and deploy them if it is habitable. I have failed thirteen times in as many years.
Overwhelming evidence supports the hypothesis of mass extinction. Just as there are no sloths, there are no longer sharks in the ocean; only microplastics and drowned aquatic cities who could not survive in oxygen-starved conditions.
I locate Lieutenant Ruben. His location beacon is intermingled upon Lieutenant Terra's. He will be at least three more minutes. 98% accuracy based on his heart rate.
Upon reaching orbit they will survey the surface and release a drop-ship of seeds. Praying that something hardy, even algae spores, will take tenuous root and grow again. That the planet will somehow stir from its grave and rebirth the colour green.
This is Tania's inheritance.
I occupy her with pictures on the holoscreen, fading each one into the next, choosing the next by her pupils' dilation.
A shark. The ocean waves. Ocean floor. Now, a desert at sunset. A canyon. A river. Woodland. Here is a rainforest, with birds in the canopy.
A toucan. A leopard. A sloth wrapped around a branch. Sloth. Sloth. Baby sloths.
She sits entranced until Ruben emerges from his cabin, muffling apologies.
The Earth outside awaits our arrival. If it were alive, it would shriek.