The Bunny's Curse (short story)

 was the second story in the anthology In Time.

Plot
After offending Officer Zhang in a lecture at the Academy, Benny is made to wear an exo-suit modified to look like a pink rabbit for a training exercise on Goethe. A recording tells her how Goethe was an Earth colony inhabited by psychic individuals until the sole continent was covered in rubble by a hypervolcano and Zhang informs Benny and her fellow cadets that their mission is to locate and retrieve their respective drones.

The cadets arrive on the wastelands of Goethe and begin their mission. Benny encounters a moving mummified corpse and is unable to run because of its telekinetic control over her suit. She tries to use her comms link, but it explodes and she screams before firing a burst of light which scares the mummy away. She runs away and gets out of her suit, going to hide in an automated museum of artefacts dug out of Goethe after the eruption. The mummy follows.

Benny finds another mummy on display near an exhibition of children's toys, including pink rabbits with six limbs. She wonders if the mummy was a mother who recognised the image of Benny's suit as that of such a toy and hands her one from the display. They walk through the wasteland together until the mummy collapses and a mummified child emerges from the ground to lie with her and the doll, after which Benny leaves a makeshift gravestone and puts her suit back on. She finds her drone and returns to the pod, wondering how many stories were lost beneath the rubble.

Characters

 * Bernice Summerfield
 * Kenan
 * Maaza
 * Officer Zhang
 * Mummy
 * Second mummy

Worldbuilding

 * Goethe was once home to psychics before a volcanic eruption covered the planet's only continent in molten rubble.
 * Zhang collects 22nd century model submarines.
 * During some academy training exercises, Benny has visited carved cliff-faces of Merritt and the glowing tube cities on Xolotl. The exercise on Xolotl was distubed by bioluminescent scavenger worms.
 * A psychic person's power can double or even quadruple when they are under extreme stress.
 * A cadet once found out he was psychic after deactivating a platoon of combat synths at the last minute of an exercise. His girlfriend Roxanne cried for weeks after he was transferred for the psychic division, on a different base.
 * While running from the mummy, Benny enters a museum. Its exhibitions were:
 * Posters advertising VR simulations
 * Clothes influenced by popular entertainers
 * Parts of vehicles
 * A glass sheet that projected though-forms for amusement of children
 * A puzzle to be solved with telekinesis
 * A cutlery set
 * The mummified remains of a hypervolcano victim
 * Toys, including those resembling pink bunnies

Continuity

 * Bernice briefly thinks of her mother before deciding she should not dwell on the past. (PROSE: Love and War)