by Kathy Kachelries | Dec 23, 2005 | Story
The picture made the cover of the Tzarin colony newsletter: a petite, blond-haired girl kneeling in the center of a flock of hibernating escravo, her arms wrapped around her skinny stomach and her face contorted by sobs. It was a powerful image, this preteen runaway surrounded by the sprawled and angular bodies of the plantation’s livestock, and it was made even more powerful by the subsequent photographs of her tearful reunion with her family. Adolescent psychologists were quick to speculate about the long-term effects of 18 months spent living with animals, but after a rocky readjustment period, Elena was deemed healthy enough to re-enter the colony’s schooling system.
“I thought they were dead,” she said in a televised interview. “I didn’t know about the photo…photo…(“synthesis,” her mother finished). All I knew was that it started to get dark, and everyone I lived with fell down.”
“Everything,” her psychologist prodded.
“Everything.”
Elena was no longer permitted to play in the fields with the escravo, but during a press conference, the governor presented her with an authentic Earth puppy that breathed and barked and did several other tricks that the mouthless, photosynthetic plantation beasts couldn’t compete with. After two nightfalls, the incident was completely forgotten.
At the height of the third sun-season, the Finnegan’s storage tank ignited.
It was an unfortunate but not uncommon setback. Glass-ceilinged working spaces were necessary to permit the escravo to live indoors, and in the hottest sun-cycle temperatures inside the storage tank often reached over 150 degrees. The financial loss was great but no one was hurt, and a veterinarian was called in to determine how many of the damaged livestock could be saved.
The plantation owners borrowed some beasts from their neighbors to haul the bodies, living and dead, into a nearby field so that they could be sorted. The veterinarian made his way slowly among the rows of blue-green bodies, dividing the responsive from the nonresponsive and the nonresponsive from the dead. He preferred working with the colony’s livestock; unlike Earth animals, the escravo had no mouths and were incapable of producing screams. In fact, science had speculated that the native Tzarin animals had more in common with vegetation than Terran creatures, so it was likely that they could feel nothing at all.
The veterinarian paused beside a young colt which rested in a crumpled heap, its front tendrils drawn up around its torso like arms and its eyelids firmly locked shut. The waxy skin across its back and stomach was badly damaged, blistering and peeling away to reveal the milky whiteness of dead photosynthetic cells. The animal’s eyes opened slowly when the veterinarian sprinkled water across its body to test the rate of absorption, but it made no other movement. Dire case. He labeled it unlikely and moved on.
Two thin, bony vines wrapped around his leg and he stopped.
The creature was motionless aside from the tendrils, which retained their vicelike grasp. The veterinarian unpeeled them but the animal grabbed again, and he reached into his medical back to get his scalpel. The vine quickly withdrew and dropped to the ground. The veterinarian watched the green shape scrape at the soil, and he had almost turned away before he read:
help.
The creature was treated at the university medical facility, which used high-powered solar lamps to feed sunlight into the undamaged cells. It continued to trace words onto the walls and floor: help, stop, hurt, bad. A press statement was released saying that an escravo had developed language ability, then, at the command of the council, another was released saying that it had been a prank. The council scientists took the escravo to a research facility once it had healed enough for transportation, and there, it was put through dozens of tests.
“It has a vocabulary of over 500 words,” the technician said, “but we’re certain that it must be parroting. The escravo brain doesn’t have the capacity for communication. No evidence of language, through text or gesture, has ever been observed in the wild.”
Elena, the escravo stroked into the wall.
“Parroting,” the technician repeated. “No further study is required.”
“What do you suggest be done with it?” the colony administrator asked.
“Well, our society was founded on efficiency. We can’t have people wasting time training their livestock to be circus animals.”
“So it should remain in captivity.”
“We have an underground holding chamber used to contain those awaiting trial,” the researcher suggested. “It’s not inhumane at all. Rather peaceful and secluded.”
“And dark,” the administrator pointed out.
“And dark.”
by B. York | Dec 15, 2005 | Story |
It’s not easy, you know. I’ve had to sit here until they needed me, just like all the rest, but they tell me I’m special. The scientists told me that I would be different than the others, that they pulled me from the plant and opened me up with the cutting edge of science. It’s an honor, of course. I understand this.
I have a beginning. Everything begins somewhere. Humans, machines, war. Unlike the others, though, I have a timer. A half-life. I feel like I’m vibrating and I know it’s because I’m on my way out.
I’ve never seen our enemy. They’re far off and foreign, barbaric and bestial, and dangerously close to building a being like me. The scientists never say that, of course, but I hear the words beneath their voices as they speak over the gears of my body. If it weren’t true, the project wouldn’t exist. I wouldn’t be ticking. Thinking. Living.
Today is my day. I should be proud, but I feel sick, and I can’t tell if that sickness if nerves or the glowing matter buried inside of my stomach.
They are putting me on transport and the circuits of the plane beam with excitement at the chance for company. It’s a long flight and we talk about politics and discuss the issues of the day. We both agree that humans are funny. They gave us radio voices to hear their commands and the best technology available, but it never occurred to them that the artificial intelligence used to self-correct our faults might have introduced the greatest fault of all. They meant to build bombs, mindless explosives. They created kamikazes with a fear of death.
People are moving around me now. They are getting out of the way. Good luck, the transport whispers. It’s not luck, I tell him. It’s the glowing stuff inside of me that will be the end of this.
I’m in the chamber. I’m waiting. They’ll drop me out of transport and into the thoughtless embrace of gravity. Falling fast, I’ll feel my circuits flicker like a heart inside of me as I move towards the stopping point of time.
They started a war, but none of them fight it. They interpret our words as bugs in the programming. We are the silent soldiers, the weapons, and only once will our voices be heard. When the distance between the city and my body collapses into nothingness, I’ll scream my name and they’ll understand.
Boom.
by Kathy Kachelries | Dec 14, 2005 | Story |
I think I was about eight years old when I decided I was going to be a scientist.
When you’re eight, this sounds like the perfect career. I could see myself in a starched white lab coat surrounded by petri dishes and beakers as I looked into an antique microscope all day, and then, at night, charting the courses of stars. One wall of my laboratory would be made up of test tubes and jars, elements carefully isolated and waiting to be combined to dazzling effect. Another would be made of large cages, where impossibly white guinea-rats ran through complicated mazes as their brains sparked with the static of miniature electrodes. The third wall would be for very thick and very heavy books. Actual books, made out of paper and whatever the covers of books were made out of. I had read them a hundred times each. I had even memorized a few. Then, the last wall, my favorite because it had won me three Nobel prizes, was nothing but a green chalkboard covered with equations so complicated that I was the only one who could ever understand them.
This is what a great scientist I was when I was eight: the lab had four walls, and I hadn’t bothered to leave room for the door. Hopefully, one of those Nobel prizes was for a teleporter.
My father encouraged this insanity, and gave me this purple holographic projector that hung the same edufeed over my room every night, over and over. “Sally Stardust’s Cosmic Celebration,” it was called, and Sally Stardust was this bouncy cartoon girl who talked you through the feed with outdated slang and jokes about shopping. Fortunately, there was an option to do away with Sally, so I deleted her, junked the “stellar jewelry kit!!” and stuck her bioluminescent star stickers above my brother’s crib. Without Sally, the air beneath my ceiling flickered with suns and planets, and the facts were read in a hypnotic monotone by some lonely old man.
So I suppose the whole thing was that guy’s fault. Or maybe Hasbro’s fault, for hiring him to do the voice-over on what was really an ill-conceived toy to begin with, but either way, without that grape-colored contraption and its apathetic barrage of facts I might have never realized, on my ninth birthday, that my ninth birthday couldn’t possibly exist.
Here’s how it works: the Earth is revolving around the Sun, and our year is based on where we are in that orbit. So people have this idea that if you stand in a certain spot at a certain time on a certain day for two years in a row, you’re cosmically standing in the same place both times. This is wrong. Really, the sun’s moving around something too, and that something is moving around something and everything is rushing outwards, faster than cars, faster than airplanes, faster than rockets. I was millions of miles away from the place I was born in, but my mother apparently hadn’t heard Sally Stardust’s opinion on the matter, and after a relatively pointless screaming match I ran into my room and slammed my door shut. I wrote a bunch of random letters and pluses and minuses signs on a sheet of paper and pretended that I had worked out the secret of the universe, but after an hour or so I got tired of that. I gave the paper to my mother and told her that I had discovered a new equation that proved her right.
I think I was ten when I figured out that you have to be good at math to do science. After that, I painted Sally Stardust’s Cosmic Celebration a dark shade of blue and gave it to my brother. He was about four, I think. Age doesn’t mean much once you realize that you’re counting an imaginary thing.
by B. York | Dec 5, 2005 | Story |
“This planet needs a Messiah so you and I have to fuck.†Sydec said. He didn’t mean for it to come out that way but the tests were absolutely fail-proof, and he needed to express the urgency of the matter to Vsha. That’s aside from the fact that he wasn’t always too keen on delivering. When science finally broke the genetic code, religion took a look at it and had an idea. Sydec had an idea earlier that week, and so he went to the clinic to see if the stars and the scientists agreed.
“Well that’s a bit crude, isn’t it!?†Vsha snapped. She stormed from the room and grabbed her atmospheric suit to go out for a walk on the soil. Vsha had talked about this with him thousands and thousands of times. No sex before marriage, period. No post-script, no addendum, just no sex.
Sydec was already leaping after her in a bout of apologies for the words that dared cross his lips. “Vsha, please! I had the tests run and you know how solid they are. Look, all I’m saying is that this is one in every million successful pregnancies. You can’t give up a chance at destiny, can you?â€
The reluctant girlfriend stopped at the airlock, her suit half zipped up and her shoulders slumped in a defeated motion. “Can’t it be someone else? I mean, he’s going to get martyred or get captured or just disappear. You know how these things happen, Sydec.†Her voice was distraught.
“Sweetie, darling… “ the man began as he placed his hands over her shoulders. Rubbing his palms against her muscles gently he resumed, “This is not about sex, it’s about the future of the planet. Of existence! The genes are right, everything is right. The clinic says that if we conceive in the next month or so there’s an 85% chance that it will be a true Messiah.â€
She turned slowly. Her smile was weak and so was her conviction. Her gorgeous green eyes stared up at him, looking for a hint of compassion. Vsha saw something to hope for on the surface of her boyfriend’s face. She needed him to agree. It was the only way he could feel comfortable. When the heavens put pressure on you, it was far worse than a bad boyfriend. “So… it’s really not about the sex?†she asked.
It was. “No, of course not!†he exclaimed as he shook his head in a desperate attempt to persuade her that he meant it. She leaned into his arms and Sydec knew that he’d made the right move. “Let’s just sit down and think about this, honey.â€
They both turned towards the kitchen and he graciously pulled the chair out for her. “I’ll get the wine.â€
by B. York | Nov 18, 2005 | Story |
They are marching on the block today. Mama and Papa tell me it will all be over soon, and that whatever might happen, this won’t be my fault. My brother Mika refused to chose his words carefully, and now the others don’t want to either.
I’m scared for myself, and I am scared for my other brother Nema who has not returned from school for some days now. The army is marching on the block and I can hear them screaming uniformity. I was not raised to be as smart as everyone else…my friends looked down upon me because of my grades and they did not come to my birthday when I failed my exams.
Whoever may read this, know that I am afraid only because I was not born to be as smart as you. I was not born to take the SAT, I was not bred to be better in science. I know that we are created equal in our diversity, but you won’t hear those words once they’ve burned this diary. You might even burn it yourself.
I wrote a story once and I showed it to my tutor. She told me to correct myself and she scolded me for not putting the words in the right order. Mama and Papa loved the story when I brought it home, but the teacher told me it was unacceptable. I wrote a story once, and it was about people being better than I am. She told me to stop fantasizing, and that I would always be just as good as the others. There would be no favorites, and there would be no exiles.
That rumbling outside right now is their way of telling us to let go. When genetics failed them and cloning has become unethical, the only way they could be immortal was to be completely equal. They made Mika equal with the dead and now they probably made Nema to think the same mind as all the other artists. They want us to let go of the idea that it’s okay to think we are greater than other people… or lesser.
They told me to be an individual, but they never told me I wasn’t supposed to be different. We cannot all be as pretty as everyone else. Perhaps they thought we could all think the same thoughts, but we’re no psychics. No, we are not the gods of equality. Everyone has a little bit of murderer in their minds so that they can predict what we might do when the worlds around us collapse. So that we can all be okay.
Must hurry. I can hear them downstairs asking politely for anyone who has been acting erratically.
I know that, in the morning, I’ll be led to believe that I’m just as good as everyone else. I also know this: I won’t be. I won’t be better and I won’t be sitting side by side with the other teenagers as they hope for a better future. I knew today that I was not as smart as them, and I knew that I could never be as good. My God, how comforting it is to know I’m not perfect. Remember this. Please, remember this.
