by Rachael Wade
The seven of us glanced at one another. Did we have questions? Um … yeah, a boatload of them. “You say you erased our memories?” I asked, my voice dry. “I remember Kale.” I pointed to him. “I remember how I got here, where I came from … everything.”
“Memories of your past life were not erased. You will remember places, people, things. Only feelings for those with whom you formed a special bond will be forgotten. Anything that hinders your ability to think rationally, due to an emotional connection, has been eliminated. You might recognize faces and the memories associated with them, but you will not recognize what you felt for those faces. Your emotional attachment to their memories will be nonexistent. Has that clarified your question?”
Kale’s voice came next. “Skylla and I were friends.” He shrugged, his eyes flicking to mine. “I remember what I felt for her.” His glance felt too intimate, so I looked away.
“That is an exception. You are both Shepherds. You are permitted to remember one another.”
“Permitted?” One of the women Shepherds huffed at my side. “What, we need permission to feel something for someone? You didn’t have our permission to erase anything. What if we don’t want this? What if we refuse to fulfill this … role of ours?”
“Then you are free to leave.”
“Just like that?”
“Affirmative.”
“Wait,” I said. “What is this final task, and why can’t you choose seven others? Others who actually want to serve you?”
“You do not wish to serve us?”
“We want answers,” Kale said, taking a step forward, placing himself next to me. “Skylla and I chose to reimplant ourselves. Our chips were removed, but we chose to implant and report to you. We ask that you respect our honesty, spare us, and consider ending the destruction on Earth. Our kind and yours can peacefully coexist, or at least come to an agreement. If you reconsider, I’m sure Skylla and I aren’t the only ones who would be willing to forgive your attack.”
“What?” I hissed through my teeth, my head snapping toward him. “I never said I’d forgive and forget.”
Kale ignored me, keeping his eyes on the creature that called itself Elara. “Please, tell us about this task you have planned for us. Tell us why you created us, why you created Earth. What is this all for, if you chose to attack our planet anyway? Why create seven different Earths?”
“Too many questions,” Elara replied simply. “You are not entitled to so many answers.”
“The hell we aren’t,” the woman to my left replied. Her green eyes were hard and angry, her voice giving away the same frustration that Kale and I obviously shared. Where was this instantaneous loyalty I’d heard we were to inherit upon service? Those with chips were supposed to willingly surrender, weren’t they? So far, all I’d felt in this room was rebellion. All I’d heard was suspicion. Was I missing something?
“Wait a minute,” Kale mumbled, stepping in front of me. “Where are our friends?”
Elara stopped pacing and turned to square herself with Kale. “Friends?”
“Yeah,” Kale said, his expression confused. “We had … we brought friends with us. Here, to Lucenta. I remember. Where are they?”
“You are mistaken.”
“No. No, I’m not.”
“Negative. You are mistaken. It is natural for your memories to be unclear or disorderly upon activation.”
Kale turned to me, taking my shoulders in his hands. “Skylla, tell me you remember. You remember, don’t you? The two people we brought with us? Another guy … our age, and a little girl? God, I can’t remember their names. But I can see their faces.”
I searched my scrambled thoughts for signs of whatever he was talking about, but still came up short. Central Control in San Francisco, Kale and me standing near the operating panel, the seven glowing globes, the Capsules …
“No,” I said, pressing the bridge of my nose again at the memory block. “Sorry, I can’t see it.… I don’t remember.”
“The guy was shooting at the Invaders,” Kale muttered, his voice trailing off as he became lost in thought. “I swear I’m not imagining this. He gave us a little girl to take with us and then …”
“Then what?”
“She traveled to Lucenta with me, and you traveled with him.” Kale spun around to glare at Elara, his gaze bouncing between her and the open Capsules on the ground. “Where are they? What did you do with them? They came here with us, in those vehicles.” He pointed to the empty machines.
“Kale,” I said, looking nervously between the two of them. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” he shot back. “The guy … you were close to him. You came with him to California to help him find the little girl. He kissed you in a hallway, in a Black Hole. You two were—”
“Yes,” I choked out. The memories were fuzzy and broken, but became clearer as the fragments rose to the surface and peeked above the distortion. Beauty like fire, a voice echoed somewhere in the blackness in the back of my skull, and a heart like rain. “Hera,” I whispered. “Her name was Hera. And his was—”
“Phoenix,” Kale finished, remembering. “Jet Phoenix.”
Elara was right. Any emotion I’d felt for these people must have been erased, because I didn’t feel anything when I thought of them. But I did register their memory, and if I remembered them and made the effort to travel all the way to California with them, and then bring them here, to Grand Central Enemy Territory, I must’ve felt something at one point in time, right?
“It’s true,” I turned to Elara. “They came here with us. In those Capsules. What happened to them?”
Elara’s blank expression deepened the swirling unease in my gut. I wasn’t sure what I was bothered by more: her indifference, or that Elara wasn’t really a her at all, but instead an Invader masquerading as a woman. “I will repeat myself,” she/it said. “You are mistaken. You arrived alone.”
“Hey,” the woman to my left piped up again, breaking our staredown. “None of this is relevant. Why don’t you answer Kale’s questions and tell us what we’re here for? Tell us about this task.”
Elara’s lip twitched. “There is strong resistance in this room. The Maker will not accept this. It will take time for your loyalty to evolve. You must yield to it.”
“I thought once you flip the switch, we instantly bow down and kiss your feet,” Kale said, eyes narrowed.
“Negative. Again, you are the exception. Shepherds have a degree of free will that others in service do not. They also have free will, but when they enter service, they are prohibited from leaving once they are implanted. If they resist or try to escape, they are punished. Unlike them, you all have the option to walk away, with no retaliation on our behalf. This is why you are given a choice to report upon activation. Activation stimulates an inherent sense of loyalty and belonging, but it is your free will that is responsible for the final step of surrender. We want you to desire to serve. The others in service are simply necessary pawns to execute our mission. Their freedom is limited.”
“Brilliant,” the woman at my side snapped. “Oh lucky us, we don’t get the shaft like the others. In that case, my name is Lorie and you can consider my free will as declaring a big, fat hell no to this whole thing. I don’t want any part of this. Where’s the door?”
“You have not heard everything. I suggest you stay.”
“I suggest you show me the damn exit. Right now.”
“If you do not wish to stay after I have spoken, then I will show you the exit. This is not negotiable.”
Lorie shot the rest of us a look, but didn’t comment further.
Elara resumed her pacing. “It is important to understand why activation stimulates a sense of loyalty in the first place. It is because you do in fact belong here, with us. Every human being belongs with us, because the Maker designed it that way. The desire you feel to belong is natural, because it was ingrained in each and every one of you, to know and seek your purpose. The identity blueprint
that was assigned to you is your answer to finding that fulfillment.”
“You have got to be kidding me,” Lorie muttered, crossing her arms. “See, everything you just spouted about free will a few seconds ago means nothing, if what you’re saying right now is true. So … we only find fulfillment if we submit to your identity-blueprint crap? What does that even mean?”
“There is a difference between happiness and fulfillment. Happiness is temporal and can be changed by circumstance. Fulfillment cannot. It is internal, and eternal.”
It was I who groaned at all this mumbo jumbo now. “Okay, Elara. You’re losing us. I know you’re trying to speak human and all, but you kind of suck at it. Can you please speak plainly?”
“Is this not plain enough for you?”
“No, it’s not. What are you getting at? Point blank, just tell us. Why should we submit to this master plan of yours? It’s essential we know the mechanics, know the why behind all of it, because your species just landed on our planet—and yes, it is still our planet, even though you created it—and wiped out half of our population. That doesn’t exactly scream peace and warm, fuzzy fulfillment. It certainly doesn’t scream free will. None of this does. You forced the Preselected Keeper Agents to be what they are. You forced the Collectors to do what they do. And what about the labs? All the experiments? The prison camps?” I shuddered, recalling my introduction to their world. “Everything you’re saying is contradictory, do you understand that?”
Elara stopped pacing, her lashes blinking rapidly. “Stand by.” As she said this, that damn blue hourglass popped up again in the right-hand corner of my vision, blinking as rapidly as Elara’s faint black lashes. Seconds passed while we all darted glances at one another, thrown by the situation in which we found ourselves.
Elara’s chin jutted out awkwardly and there was a jolt in her speech as her voice revved back into motion. “You are to submit because it is your duty. You are to submit because your presence is crucial to the building of Foundation Zero—the true, flawless, permanent Planet Earth. Foundation Zero is being built based on our findings of the seven prototype models, and you are the chosen Seven Shepherds to help extract the very best human recruits from each model planet and relocate them to this new home. Think of your planet as an experimental model used to create one flawless model. We wish to create a single, habitable planet and coexist.”
“What’s in it for us?” Lorie asked.
Elara cocked her head. “A truly human question.”
“Well? Do you have an answer?”
“That would depend on what you consider valuable. In exchange for surrendering to your role as Shepherd, you are provided with safety, security, and a chance to contribute to the preservation of the human race. You will not only be solely responsible for recruiting and transferring those human recruits to a new, permanent home on Foundation Zero, but you will enjoy that new home yourselves as well. There, we will all coexist peacefully, and the destruction you have come to know on your planet will cease. We will take no further assertive action against your species here, or on the other prototypes. We have had no choice thus far, other than to force our agenda on you. When we arrived, you attacked first, as expected. Each prototype has attacked first upon invasion. We simply defended ourselves.”
“Yeah,” Lorie drawled, “defended yourself, and then touched down and took the hell over. You didn’t come to us in peace, you came to force our hand.”
“It was for your own good.”
“And you expect us to just accept that?” I asked, dumbfounded. Surely they had a better explanation for wreaking havoc on our planet than that. This wasn’t their first rodeo. They had to know by now, after invading six other Planet Earths, that our kind didn’t respond well to attack and takeover. “Then you don’t know much about human beings at all,” I said. “We question everything. We’re inquisitive, thirsty for knowledge. Even the most open-minded, spiritual thinkers need a dose of reason, to rationalize their decision to accept something as grand as that.”
My mind was spinning, reeling from the fact that I was here, buried somewhere under the Pacific Ocean, and now these creatures wanted me to buy all this? My brain might have been scrambled at the moment, still adjusting to the activation process, but it wasn’t difficult to remember what Earth—my Earth—had looked like before I came here, to Lucenta. It wasn’t hard to recall the faces of the homeless, those hunkered down in those Black Holes, and the scared, starved people we’d come across out on the open road.
Or my parents.
Out there, above this ocean and around the globe, was a bleak, desolate wasteland, with nothing but loss. Loss of hope, loss of life. That was what these creatures had brought to our planet, not peace. And model planet or not, it was still the only home we knew.
So why did I still feel I was meant to be here? Why was there this part of me that genuinely wanted to consider this role as Shepherd? Was that desire truly natural, as Elara had said? Or was it fabricated, a byproduct of the activation process? These things had killed my parents. Kidnapped me and tossed me into a prison camp. Where did my loyalty lie?
“Yes, we expect you to accept it,” Elara said. “At the very least, to consider it. All seven of you have been specifically chosen. Your selection was exact. Deliberate. You all offer invaluable traits, and are priceless assets to our mission of building Foundation Zero. We cannot simply replace you with seven other random human beings. If you choose to walk away from your role as Shepherd, we are undeniably at your mercy. However, by walking away from your roles, you are hurting your fellow man, your entire race. We hold the key to Foundation Zero. We alone have the power to create a brand new, habitable planet for your kind, and to restore what you have destroyed yourself.”
“Excuse me?” Lorie scoffed, tossing us all a glance. “Is this chick for real? That we destroyed?”
“Your species began destroying your prototype long before we arrived. You have wasted your resources, sucked them dry. You have destroyed your land, driven by greed and excess consumption. Your water, soil, and air are polluted. Your nations are overpopulated and ridden with disease. Much of this is preventable. Shall I continue?”
“I think I’ve heard enough.”
“Please,” Elara held up a hand, “let me finish.” Turning on her heel, she pivoted around and flitted her fingers in the air, and a luminescent keypad appeared, floating just above her head. She punched in a code and a translucent projector screen materialized at her side. Images began to flash on the screen. She waved her hand and pointed as the images changed. “Lucenta is located here, on the Seventh Prototype, because we have found that your model of Earth has the most potential. It is why only you Seven were summoned here, to Lucenta. The Shepherds from the other planets were deactivated. We no longer require their assistance. The other six prototypes have also destroyed themselves before our invasions. Prototype Two chose global, nuclear war instead of peace. Prototype Five chose isolation and self-interest over community and serving others. Just recently, Prototype One chose technology over personal interaction and in turn, became insensitive and closed off to real, genuine connection with their people and nature. They lost their humanity.”
“Doesn’t that all apply to our prototype, too?” Kale asked. “I mean, we’re all guilty of those things.”
“Affirmative,” Elara replied, pressing a button on the keypad to pause at an image of our planet. The number seven was plastered across it, in huge, white text. “However, your prototype seems prone to all of this and more, whereas the other prototypes have fallen into singular, specific patterns.”
I released a deep breath, my gaze scanning the projector screen. “So we’re the major screw-ups, is that what you’re saying? I thought you said our prototype holds the most potential.”
“It does,” Elara confirmed. “Despite this flaw, yours is the first model Earth to show signs of true progressive behavior. Your planet’s race exhibits an abundance of forward thinking. Although you’ve
taken your resources and humanity for granted, you have come to recognize your errors and have begun to make efforts to restore what you have destroyed—steps toward conservation, preservation, and maintaining connection with each other and your environment. You were just too late. It was time for us to intervene. We are confident we have gathered a group of humans from your prototype that will lead Foundation Zero to a bright, fruitful future. We leave it up to you to approve our recruits and pick and choose as you please. We want your race to be as involved as possible in the new colonization process.”
Kale bristled next to me, chewing his lip as he shifted from left to right. One look at the other Shepherds, and I knew their cogs were turning just as fast as Kale’s and mine. “You went through so much trouble to create these prototypes,” I said, drawing Elara’s lifeless gaze to mine. “To create our species. Why do you care? What would motivate you to create Foundation Zero … to create a new home for us, when you see we’ve been doing nothing but destroying the experimental planets you’ve already created?”
Elara opened her mouth to respond, but that same delay bumped her speech. “Stand by.” She blinked and her gaze froze, a strange motor sound buzzing from her throat before she spoke again. “Our kind possesses something yours lacks in excess: compassion. We created you. We love you. We want to give you another chance.”
“That’s it,” Lorie charged forward, bringing herself inches from Elara’s blank expression. “I’ve listened to you speak, and my mind is made up. I want out of this underwater hellhole, do you hear me, Robo Sally? You love us? Seriously? You murdered our people! By the hundreds, by the thousands! You’ve ripped them apart in your labs, tortured them and held them prisoner. All for the sake of our own good? No. I won’t accept that, and I certainly won’t accept this crap idea that you’re allowing us to be Shepherds by our own free will. Did you guys not hear her?”
