by J. N. Chaney
Since I was still a mess from the hunt and didn’t mind getting my hands dirty, I joined her. Working with the others was fun and I always made a point to talk to as many as I could throughout the day.
My father said this was something that real leaders did, but I just liked to be social. Taking over as figurehead for the colonists seemed like a long way off. At seventeen, many of the adults still considered me a child.
He’d taken part in his own Selection ceremony around my age, then trained to take over when he was forty and the Director retired.
Karin smiled and waved when she saw me coming, and I grinned back.
We were close to the same age and had grown to be good friends over the years.
“Looks like you had an eventful hunt,” she said, gesturing at the Boneclaw pelt with a hint of jealousy in her tone. “Was it exciting?”
I nodded grimly. “Yeah, but not in a good way. It took down the frost horn calf we were tracking then almost killed Father.”
Her eyes went big at the news. “Is he okay?” she squeaked.
I nodded again, then began to recount the last few hours. “I threw a spear at it, which gave Nero time to chop its arm off and cut off the head.”
At that, Karin arched an eyebrow. “Wait, you mean he did something besides stand there and look pretty?”
“Haha. You know he’s a talented hunter, despite his other, many faults.”
“They are legion,” she agreed, then jerked her chin in his direction. “Look at him over there, preening. No doubt bragging about his kill, just loud enough for Maria to hear.”
The young hunter in question leaned casually against one of the walls, talking to his father, Mario, my father’s best friend.
He was handsome, but Nero knew it and used it to his advantage whenever he could. Extra rations, first pick of new clothes, and special gifts from his many admirers.
I disliked this immensely because he accepted it all without any promise of returning their affections. This resulted in fights between friends and hurt feelings. Enough that my father had to step in and say something.
“No doubt,” I said, turning back to the work.
Karin groaned. “He’ll be even worse once he starts leading hunts.”
“What if he becomes the next Director?” I pointed out. “Then we’ll all have to do his bidding.
“Unless you two get married.” Her lips curled up into a smirk, then she winked. “I heard he has quite the thing for the current Director’s daughter.”
At this, I rolled my eyes. “I haven’t even completed training yet. Besides, I don’t want to get married anytime soon. It would just be a distraction at our age.”
I meant it too. Not that I had anything against marriage or kids, it just didn’t sound like anything I wanted to do now.
Before Karin could come up with a response, a young engineer named Josef Braid walked up to the table.
“Hello, ladies. How is the deconstruction going?” he asked pleasantly.
Josef had clearly been doing some deconstruction of his own, because his leather apron was splattered with flecks of blood and chunks of something I didn’t want to identify. His sleeves were rolled up, revealing pale forearms covered in more of the same. Partially obscured by gross matter were his blue markings. We all had them, in varying designs, and they allowed us to interact with the facilities.
“Great, we’re having a blast,” Karin responded, making a face as her fingers slipped in some of the juices.
“Hi, Josef. Making anything interesting?” I asked.
He was always tinkering with something in his little lab, working on new ways to use the fusion cores. I’d gone to him a few times for help on the weapon I was putting together for my upcoming scavenge and made a lot of progress.
“Not really,” he replied, frowning. “The fusion cores are getting harder to find and none of the collecting parties have come back with any information on the missing tritium core. Some still haven’t returned, and it’s been months.”
Several areas across all the facilities had suffered breakdowns and collapses over the years, and the third tritium core from the fauna facility was missing. After almost two thousand years of carrying the brunt of the systems, ours was depleting.
Janus estimated it would only last for another hundred or so years, a few more than that if we were lucky. This had hastened us to send groups out in search of the replacement.
Everyone came back empty handed except for tales of their trip. They told of an overgrown compound, ripe with danger. In recent months, some of the groups didn’t come back at all. No one knew if they had been killed, attacked by the wolves or Boneclaws, or if they had simply run off.
The latter seemed unlikely. Outside, the elements could kill quicker than the animals, and unpredictable storm cells could take visibility down to nothing in a matter of seconds.
I offered him a comforting smile and would have patted his shoulder, but I didn’t think he would appreciate the blood on my hands getting all over him.
“Don’t worry, Josef. We’re marking off sections as they’re cleared. Sooner or later, someone will find it,” I assured him.
“I hope you’re right, Miss Visaro.”
I’d told him to call me Lucia, but he always said Miss Visaro. Truth be told, I kind of liked it, though I would never admit it.
The power in the hangar flickered, then came back on.
“Hate when it does that,” murmured Karin.
She wasn’t alone. The power going out was something we all feared. With no natural lighting to speak of in the caves, it got awfully dark when the power glitched. It was uncomfortable going from seeing in one instant to blindness in the next.
That was another reason we’d begun collecting oil from the frost horns. We used it to make lamps, learning the technique from Janus’ records of ancient Earth. If the power was off for more than a few minutes, we had them as back-up.
“It’s happening more often,” said Josef, looking worried. “If this keeps up, we’re going to have to start rationing power and look at ways to reduce consumption.”
I looked up in alarm. “It’s that bad? Does my father know?”
He nodded. “Yes. It’s not dire yet, and Janus’ calculations appear to be correct, but I don’t like it. Anyway, stop by later. I think I have an idea for your staff.”
“Alright, I will.”
When he was gone, Karin wiggled her eyebrows at his back, then elbowed me in the side. “I think Mr. Braid has a thing for Cyril Visaro’s daughter too.”
“You just can’t help yourself, can you?” I teased. “Reading too many of those old romance texts.”
“I’m telling you, Luce, you should try them. Very stimulating.”
I had to laugh. She’d roped me into reading one before and it had been too boring to finish.
“No thank you,” I said, shaking my head. “Give me hunting and scavenging any day.”
“Hey, I like that stuff too,” she said, a little on the defensive side. “I just enjoy a little romance on the side. One day, I do want to get married and have a couple white-haired angels running around.”
Finished with work, I chuckled, then grabbed a towel to get the worst of the muck off my hands. “Let’s go get cleaned up. We’re starting to smell.”
Later, when I had time to be alone and think, I found myself in one of the viewing rooms, digging through the archives.
For the rest of the day, people had been coming up to me with words of congratulations on my successful hunt. They’d all looked almost gleeful. I’d been asked to recount the story more than a few times, and by curfew, I was ready to pull my hair out.
I’d smiled and nodded, as had been expected, but for the first time since Selection training began, my heart wasn’t in it. The image of the mourning animals continued to plague my thoughts until I’d finally given up on sleep and come here.
It was a place I had come to often as a child, sneaking out of my room at night to lo
ok at holo images of ancient Earth. My Nana would tell me stories of the planet, though she had never been there. They were passed down from our ancestors, like so many others.
They told of deep blue water that sparkled from the rays of a sun that actually warmed the skin. Grass that wasn’t buried under a meter of snow. Weather that didn’t kill you if you stayed out for hours. She said people went outside for fun, to play and work and enjoy nature.
I didn’t see what was so special about going outside to do something. Some of the kids liked to play a game called tag ball.
The rules of the game were simple. Janus would randomly choose one of the players to start it off. That person got the ball first. Their goal was to throw the ball at any of the other players and tag them. If they hit someone, that was a point. If the person caught the ball, they lost a point. No points were added or subtracted if the ball missed. If that happened, anyone could claim the ball.
Sometimes, if there weren’t too many adults around, we changed the rules. Like the point system. Extra for the face, if someone fell, or if the ball was slapped back at the thrower for a tag.
The concept of enjoying nature was foreign to me. All I knew was ice, dark, and perpetual danger. Still, as my mother reminded me on certain occasions, we were alive. Many couldn’t say the same. And we had fun. Hunting was fun, learning to shoot was fun.
As I’d grown older, the stories lost their appeal and I’d stopped coming.
Now I was back.
Questions burned in my mind. Were the Boneclaws intelligent? Could they be reasoned with? All this time we had been hunting them, but maybe it didn’t have to be that way.
I brought up all of the files we had, dating back to the Eternals’ first experiments. Janus had educated each of us on the subject before, of course, but I hadn’t paid a lot of attention. As a kid, it had been completely boring and unimportant, having never seen one before.
The Eternals that had brought the fearsome beasts to life were long gone, and history lessons had never caught my attention. We were all that remained, the ones left to deal with their mess.
Not that they hadn’t paid the price for their meddling.
Many from those first days of the collapse had perished. Fear and unrest had gripped the survivors, and paired with the elements of an unforgiving ice planet, the colony’s numbers had dropped significantly.
Self-preservation kicked in at some point and the colonists managed to make it through the first year following the collapse, though they could never repopulate to their earlier numbers.
Now, as I scanned the reports and pictures, I couldn’t help but feel some awe for their achievements. It was hard to imagine living in the compound while it ran at full potential.
None of the people in the footage wore furs or scrap metal armor. Their clothes consisted of clean, crisp jumpsuits, lab coats, and new boots. We had similar garments, but they were all worn and patched. Every so often, a scavenger team would come across a container of new clothes in the cave that were undamaged and bring them back. The contents were quickly redistributed amongst those who needed them most.
I opened a report at random and began to read in earnest. It detailed the first real success of the program and spoke of solutions to the aging problem they had been sent here to fix.
Eternals had thought themselves immortal, and for a long time they had achieved something close, even succeeding at accelerated healing. I did remember the lesson where all of their gene manipulation had resulted in the appearance that we still bore today.
Pale skin, white hair, and blue eyes. We’d kept the looks, but none of the other aspects. Our average lifespan was just about 150 years, although our eldest could live as long as 200, and we certainly still took time to heal. As a child, I broke my leg. It had taken a week to recover, even with the compounding brace that held everything together while still allowing for almost normal movement. Janus had said that we were better off than our ancient ancestors—the people before the Eternals—who took even longer to recover and whose lives were even shorter, so I tried to be thankful for what few blessings I could count.
He also told us of the transmissions between the scientists here and the Eternals back on Earth, which had long since ended.
At first, they had only sought to fix the degradation issue, but with each breakthrough, more problems arose that needed to be solved.
Enamored with their own superiority, the scientists had continued to manipulate the Eternal genetic code. Through all of their work, never had they stopped to consider whether their methods might yield catastrophic results. Never had they slowed to weigh the value of any alternate paths. Only the goal had mattered to them, and they pursued it through all available channels.
That thinking had cost them dearly. They were dead now, long since killed by their own horrible creations.
Moving on, I discovered a file dated around the time of the disaster. Curious, I opened it and found footage from one of the experiments, as well as research notes from the session.
Subject: BN009
Lead: Dr. Emanuel Curtis
Day: 379
BN009 shows no sign of degradation despite reaching maturity 299 days ago. Strength tests (previously documented) exceeded all expectations. Eyes remain vestigial. Hearing 50% more efficient than current Eternal physiology. As previously noted, the genetic sequencing of the new specimen demands attention. Dr. Tresbin believes it may hold the key to solving the degeneration problem, but more time is needed to analyze and test the subject’s genetic susceptibility to the degeneration sequence.
Today will mark another attempt to further assess healing and regeneration abilities.
An ominous feeling began to build in my belly, but I opened the holo file anyway.
The view room’s light dimmed, and one wall played the holo feed. A large lab appeared on screen. Two scientists wearing standard lab coats and holding pads stood in front of a heavily fortified enclosure with a Boneclaw inside. They were Eternals, though they looked like any of my people.
The animal sat listlessly in the far-right corner of the bare cell. Its eyes were open, but they stared unseeing at nothing in particular. This was an early form of the Boneclaws I knew. It had eyes, although they were unmoving. Perhaps it was blind, too, despite holding onto its useless organ.
“Commence trial 380a,” the scientist on the left said.
The Boneclaw’s ears perked up, showing that it had heard the man speak, but it didn’t otherwise react. The second man nodded and worked from his pad, tapping in commands.
A panel inside the enclosure opened and a mechanical arm slid out. There was a slight hiss of pressure being released, then the animal jerked, and something bounced off its coat and rolled across the floor.
“Up the pressure by ten percent.”
The scientist worked the pad again and repeated the process. It only took another two tries before the projectile embedded in the Boneclaw, causing it to screech in pain and scrape at its arm.
I felt a gnawing at my conscience watching the video. It continued like that, the scientists trying various tests meant to determine the poor animal’s limits.
“Moving on to audiometric data,” said the first scientist. He seemed utterly unmoved by the suffering he was inflicting on his test subject.
Both men donned earpieces before a shrill tone filled the room. It increased in decibels every ten seconds until the Boneclaw’s ears began to twitch. It swiveled its head as if trying to figure out where the offending sound was coming from.
As the pitch continued to rise, Subject BN009 began to exhibit more signs of discomfort. It tried to cover its ears, but the awkward length of its arms and clawed hands offered no relief. It finally began to stomp around the cage, banging its fists on anything it could reach, roaring as it went until it finally collapsed on the floor, writhing in agony.
I shut the recording off, unable to stomach the rest. I left the view room to try and get some rest, but it took a long time to
finally sleep, and when I did, the animal’s tortured screams followed me into my dreams.
3
When my alarm went off the next morning, I woke feeling more at ease than I expected, given the subject of my midnight studies. The Boneclaw and its plight seemed far away now, and I pushed it from my mind.
Or tried to.
The footage of the tortured creature was over two thousand years old. Even if they had been more human-like back then, they were killers now.
In my mind’s eye, I pulled up the picture of the Boneclaw’s razor-sharp talon racing toward my father. It had come so close to killing him. If not for Nero, he’d likely be dead.
I ignored the little voice in my head that said we’d attacked first. It was survival of the fittest on this frozen world. If we hadn’t killed the Boneclaw, it would have gladly ripped us to shreds and gobbled up the pieces.
This wasn’t news, so why couldn’t I get their sad mourning song out of my head? My father, as usual, had been right. Thinking of them as anything but monsters was a sure way to second guess myself and get killed.
My datapad beeped again, telling me it was time to get moving. I sat up and gave my space a cursory glance. The room was small, just over two and a half square meters. Not that any of us did much more than sleep in them anyway.
Each of the three facilities in the sprawling cave network had been built to house more than three times our current number. Even after the collapse, when some of the living quarters had been destroyed, they still outnumbered the bodies available to fill them.
Despite that fact, many colonists still chose to sleep in communal areas. On some level, I could see the appeal. At times, the underground compound had a claustrophobic effect and the shared areas were more open.
I preferred to have somewhere of my own to go, at least to sleep.
To conserve energy, the lights were set to ten percent and cast a dim glow in the small space, not enough to do more than get dressed and stumble out into the slightly brighter hallway, but that was fine with me.
