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Twiceborn

Page 3

by C. L. Kagmi


  The hardest job on Orún is staying cool. Core overload is the nightmare no one speaks of. It’s an appropriate metaphor: a community threatened by the excess of its own power and ambition. This is not a place for the cautious. Orún is for those willing to give all to craft a new future.

  It isn’t easy to hide a small star in space. Even among Belt colonies, Orún is huge. And as far as the law is concerned, it isn’t supposed to exist.

  That’s why Chinwe is here.

  She bares her teeth at her reflection in the silvered polymer mirror of her bathroom. The “bathroom” is open to the artificial breezes of the residential shell, like every structure on this level. The shell’s surface area of several kilometers combines with the random number generator that runs the ventilation system to make it feel almost like the open air of Earth.

  Almost. Chinwe still aches for the original, with its blue sky and fluffy clouds, an unimaginable amount of unused air and water. Yet she has adjusted quickly, the familiarity of Earth flooded out by the riot of intense newness that is Orún.

  Has it been weeks since her arrival, not decades?

  Here they have breezes, at least, and there is grass sprouting from the cracks strategically designed to look random in the floor and walls.

  Her reflection is as green as the grass, but darker—a dense onyx-emerald. The engineers offered to inhibit her melanin production so that her chloroplasts would get more light, but Chinwe declined. And they had understood. Blackness was one of the few traits they respected.

  Even her teeth are black, now—carbon steel implants which she grudgingly admits she doesn’t mind. They will never rot. When she first saw the photographs of people with these teeth, she had thought they looked awful—like cosmetics done in terrible taste. But now she appreciates the fact that, were she back home, she could take out an armed suspect with them.

  Chinwe pauses, flexes a black-green arm under the bright glowing lights. She isn’t bulletproof. Not yet. The Skychildren are still working on that.

  And she is still working on stopping them.

  Walking in the centrifugal gravity is easy for her, now.

  For the first few weeks she’d been like a newborn calf. The slight difference in centrifugal force between her head and her feet had made her sick when she wasn’t on a constant anti-nausea regimen, and sent her careening into countless walls and pieces of furniture even when she was. But by now, she has adapted.

  So have the four of her compatriots who survived the first round of injections.

  Not “compatriots.” Not “friends.” Chinwe chides herself. She was trained exhaustively to look, act, speak like one of them—but she is not one of them. None of them know who she truly is. They accept her as one of their own. Accept that she, like them, seeks meaning.

  Chinwe must admit that this place has its charms. There are no drug dealers, no loan sharks, and no need for either; there is no money, full employment, no outsiders. Everyone has a place. If a resident of Orún does not fit into an existing niche, one is created for them. No talent or predisposition is wasted.

  Four of the youth who accompanied her are alive and happy here. The fifth died screaming, arteries slashed open by his own carbon steel claws.

  There is a price for everything.

  A price for paradise. A price to drift in the space between worlds, powered by your own private sun. A price to please the necessary investors to finance such a massive illegal operation. To impress the rich folks who also get to feel part of something, who get to believe that they too are shaping humanity’s destiny of freedom from the restrictions of the habitable worlds.

  Adele “Mama” Nwosu is very good at attracting investors. Chinwe still remembers the PR vid that her recruit showed her in the basement of a tattoo parlor. A slender green girl with a cloud of hair about her head, leaping to pluck fruit from an intensely bioengineered tree. The five teenagers in her “class” had been attracted by the same vid. Attracted to invest their lives in creating a new world.

  The sisters had come from a town in the northwest. Afraid of strangers, they’d clung to each other like shadows. The brothers had come from a local slum, two already with extensive histories of survival crimes and the third in danger of the same. His brothers had sought out the Skychildren more for his sake than for their own.

  The one who had clawed his arteries open had been the oldest, charged with murder back on Earth after throwing someone down a flight of stairs. He’d pled self-defense, but had served time anyway. His brothers were told that it was suicide, that the “empathy genes” they’d been testing were to blame.

  Chinwe doesn’t know how she feels about empathy genes. Her teacher has explained to her the genetic variance in oxytocin receptors, which affect the mirror neurons that allow a person to feel another’s experiences as though they were their own. Her teacher has shown her all the data about the strength of the correlation between this gene variant and pro-social, compassionate behavior. Lots of hard data, lots of hard facts.

  But she finds she doesn’t believe it. The human mind is a funny thing.

  Her teacher is coming now—Ariel is emerald green and naked in the warm pumped air but for strings of ornamental beads around her waist and neck. Residents of Orún lose their love for clothing over time, surrounded by the constant heat and no judgement except for that of wasted effort.

  Ariel says that it has been four years for her, since she jumped ship on Earth in a bout of teenage angst. She doesn’t regret it. Chinwe wonders what happens to people who do regret it, after they have learned too much.

  She tries not to think about that. She now knows too much.

  Like all the residents of Orún except for Mama Nwosu’s handpicked cadre of experts, Ariel is younger than Chinwe. In adults, the promotional materials explain, stem cells and tissues lose their flexibility. Chinwe was picked for this assignment in part because she’s been mistaken for a pre-teen all her life. In reality she’s twenty-seven, an enforcer with five years’ experience under her belt.

  Ariel walks with a spring in her step. Chinwe finds that she does now, too. It might be the lower gravity. It might be a cult member’s pathology of joy, of having found something better than the outside world.

  Memories of poor dead Akeem do alarmingly little to stop the flow of Chinwe’s thoughts about this place. What would Ariel be doing back on Earth? High school, perhaps? Whining at her parents about the woes of a privileged life, as Bridget Van Aalst had done before her disappearance? Isn’t this, in a real way, better?

  Stop that. Chinwe cringes at herself. A twenty percent risk of death before the age of twenty is not “better” than anything.

  Chinwe smiles a little too easily, baring teeth at Ariel as she approaches. “New recruits?” she asks, slowing her pace to meet the other.

  Ariel shakes her head, grins showing glinting carbon-fiber in return. “Going to the core. Teachers’ retreat with the Adaptives starts today.”

  Chinwe nods, curiosity suddenly burning like a fusion fire in her belly. The ‘Adaptives’ are one of four branches of something like clergy. Their full-time employment is to meditate on the founding principles of Orún, with the authority to restructure its operations as they see fit. It is not unheard of for an Adaptive or an Intentional or some other overseer to arrive at a laboratory or residence and entirely rearrange things. This core of thinkers is allowed to controvert any rule or routine they see fit, thus saving Orún from the risks of dogma and stasis.

  The Adaptives are revered almost as angelic beings, venerated second only to Nwosu herself. Chinwe has never spoken with one, never seen them except for the occasional speeches and flashes of brightly colored fabric at a distance.

  And soon these people might be gone forever from their natural habitat.

  “Can I come with you?” she asks Ariel, her own words surprising her.

  Ariel looks at Chinwe, seeming much wiser than her nineteen years. Slowly, she nods. “The retreat is meant for teachers. But
perhaps that is the path you’re meant for.”

  “I have flex time this week,” Chinwe assures her.

  Ariel reaches for her hand. Holding hands—that’s another inhibition one loses on Orún.

  As they walk beneath lab-created lianas, passing the grass-sprouting mounds of private quarters, Chinwe remembers the end of her life on Earth.

  ‘A once in a lifetime opportunity,’ her commissioner had told her from across the metal table of the briefing room.

  ‘You could help take down one of the largest human trafficking rings in the world. The risk would be great.’ The commissioner knew that Chinwe had never shied from risks.

  At some level, Chinwe knew what this was. The docket she’d been handed had listed the rich girls who disappeared, whose parents quietly made gifts to the Department out of their own pockets. It did not list not the countless hundreds who quietly went missing from the slums. But anything that would stop the people who were taking both was the right thing to do. Wasn’t it?

  She had never yet regretted her decision. Questioned it, yes. But never regretted it. Especially not after listening to an informant weep as he recounted the death of a girl he’d loved like a daughter.

  ‘They didn’t mean to kill her,’ he’d said. ‘But she wanted out. Sometimes the memory blocks they use do that. They know it. Eighty-percent survival rate, they say. Eighty percent if you defect. Eighty percent if you stay. It’s not enough. It’s not enough.’

  That had closed Chinwe’s decision. Officially, she was assigned to recover Bridget Van Aalst and the children of other privileged families. But the Skychildren took far more children of the poor than of the rich—and killed far more, by extension.

  Walking beneath the lianas, Chinwe shudders. The image of the Adaptives she is going to see, of the green woman holding her hand, twist in her mind. One moment Ariel is a teacher, preternaturally wise; the next she is a child who has been deceived into slavery. One moment the Adaptives are angelic beings, more conscious of true reality than any earthly clergy; the next they are twisted children who only think that they serve God.

  The Adaptives’ color is red. The red of fire and blood, her Needs teachers have told her. The red of danger and of vital life; the red of animals, hunters and hunted, subject to natural selection.

  That is why the Adaptives wear red sashes. It’s a stark and jarring contrast to the blues, greens, and whites that are ubiquitous throughout Orún.

  Anything on the asteroid that can be alive and green is, on the inner levels—everywhere green and white, growing lights and grass and hanging lianas. And the outermost shell is blue—a sea in space, combination water tank, aquaculture, and radiation shield. The Orún sea is lit from above and below by growing lights, and thick with kelp and other sea life, and all residents visit for at least a few days each month to assist with the harvest. These are the places Chinwe has known in the weeks since her arrival.

  Being ushered into the Adaptive’s inner sanctum is almost a physical shock. Everything is red here.

  Ruby-bright LEDs lace every inch of the ceiling in elaborate patterns. The adaptives’ sashes, red in daylight, appear white here as they reflect all available wavelengths—all red. The green skin of the supplicants appears uniformly jet black, absorbing all available light. Chinwe observes with fascination that her skin and Ariel’s turn the same color, here.

  The air is warm—warmer even than Orún normal, warm like the heat of Nigeria at noon, warm like the train compartment on the ride she took through its great national forests. She wonders if the warmth is intentional, or unavoidable—because the inner sanctum of the clergy is on the level closest to the fusion reactor, Orún’s true Holiest of Holies.

  This is both symbolic and pragmatic, her Needs curriculum explains. The Adaptives, Intentionals, Creatives, and Living represent the highest form of human thought, that which can be devoted purely to imagination, data analysis, invention, and celebration of life. As such, they fly closest to the Sun.

  However, the functions of the Adaptives and their kin are also the least necessary to the short-term survival of a society. If Orún’s reactor blows, it is the Exalted Ones who will go first, who will have the least chance to escape. The common laborers, the harvesters, will have the greatest chance to survive, for they have the best chance of rebuilding their society.

  As a side effect of their proximity to the core—and perhaps also as an intentional choice—there is almost no gravity in the Adaptives’ inner sanctum. Chinwe feels as though she might blow away in any passing breeze, finds herself straining, uncomfortably, to keep her feet on the ground.

  Toes and soles barely touch the floor. It’s so easy to accidentally push off and take ten or twenty seconds to drift back down. The Adaptive’s red/white sashes billow angelically in the slight air currents. Their wearers seem to simply fly as they spring and perch from the floor to a network of thin wires, invisible in the dim light.

  Before coming to Orún such a hot, red space would have carried associations with Hell. Now it’s just so disorientingly different that the connotations of divinity are easy to see. Orún has taught her to associate the different, not the comfortable, with the divine.

  An Adaptive drops down to meet the tour group consisting of Chinwe, Ariel, and a dozen other students. Chinwe barely manages to stay silent as the shock of recognition rattles through her body.

  The Adaptive is Bridget Van Aalst. The missing girl from the pictures.

  Chinwe didn’t recognize the young woman while she was up on the wires. But now the sharp nose and cheekbones are unmistakable. And the mischievous grin. The hint of rebelliousness at the corners of the mouth.

  Van Aalst had vanished from her father’s mansion along with $600,000 drained from his bank account five years earlier. She’d been described as a “troubled” seventeen year-old with several known substance addictions who had once been sent to a boot camp in the wilderness after wiring large amounts of her father’s money to an online boyfriend.

  Upon her return, things had seemed normal for a few months—but then she’d disappeared. An exhaustive inventory of her electronic communications had revealed conversations with a faceless screenname called “Adam”—the same screenname she’d wired the money to a year earlier.

  The Adam screenname had been untraceable, bouncing off of multiple satellites before reaching Van Aalst’s terminal—and all leads in the case of her disappearance had gone cold until a man from Nigeria contacted the FBI four years later, claiming to have helped arrange her illegal passage into orbit out of a Texas spaceport.

  ‘Look at me now, Daddy,’ Chinwe thinks as Van Aalst descends angelic to the floor. Her hair billows about her head, lit up like a halo in the red light, and her sashes glow dazzling scarlet-white against the darkness of her skin.

  Van Aalst seems to look directly at Chinwe as she smiles, and Chinwe can do nothing about the sense of growing panic clawing at her gut.

  There is no way Van Aalst can know that Chinwe is looking for her. Just because Chinwe stared at her picture throughout her last months on Earth, until she felt she knew the troubled teen intimately, does not mean that Van Aalst has any way to recognize her.

  Yet Van Aalst’s appearance has changed the very air in the room. This is no longer a pleasant dream. It is something like a nightmare.

  She hopes her sweat can be explained away by the heat, that her staring can be explained as awe.

  “I am—Chinwe. Six weeks’ new. A student.”

  By the time they get to her in the introductions, Chinwe’s body has gone into crisis mode. Her years of experience in appearing fierce is returning. This is just like a combat situation.

  Except that she’s roughly one hundred million miles from Earth, alone in an asteroid full of cultists, and her nearest backup is four days away at top speed. She can’t even hail them unless she can get back to the upload port in her quarters.

  Still. Her adrenaline levels have stabilized now, and this is beginning to
become fun.

  Everyone else in the tour group turns out to be of teacher rank—Chinwe, a student not yet out of her first semester at Orún, must explain herself.

  “I—met Ariel on her way here, today. Asked where she was going. I had flex time, wanted to come, so I came.”

  Chinwe lowers her face, unable to meet Van Aalst’s sharp-toothed smile, as much to stay in character as because of genuine discomfort.

  “We don’t normally take first semester students,” the Adaptive chastises gently. “This is a place for deep thought. You barely have the underpinnings.”

  “I studied in the States,” Chinwe blurts. “Biology. Early admit to college. Accelerated program.”

  This is true enough—she’d considered medical school before realizing that she hated formal education and opting for the academy instead. The “early admit” and “accelerated” parts are lies, but the only way to explain her first admission without blowing her cover.

  “Ahh.” Van Aalst sits back, pleasure and surprise painting her features. “That is something. Not many of us here brought that level of education from Earth. You will learn at least as much in your courses here, and more organically. But what an interesting perspective. What did they teach you, Chinwe, about evolution?”

  “That it functions through natural selection,” she recites, verbatim, from her Basic Needs of Organisms class—Orún-based, but similar enough to what she learned at Emory. “Or, at least, it did—before the advent of genetic engineering.” Chinwe pauses, looking to Van Aalst to see her verdict.

  “Oh, it still functions through natural selection,” Van Aalst agrees. “But now we can give it help. Dumb organisms must rely on mutation to create new traits at random. Most of them are harmful. We—we can design our own new traits. Consciously.”

  Chinwe nods dutifully.

  Beneath the exterior of rapt student, her two personas are wrestling—the fictional Chinwe-Niece-of-Javier still awed by Van Aalst’s poise and title, Chinwe-L.A.P.D. poised to go on the offensive.

 

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