Living Forever & Other Terrible Ideas

by Emily C. Skaftun

  But I also feel relieved, and I’m not the only one. “The transmitter!” Gordo practically yells in my ear. He starts to run toward it, but he’s stopped by the naked children.

  “No TV,” says a girl’s high voice, followed by a lot of giggling.

  Another girl comes toward me, reaching with slender but calloused fingers toward the arm of my jumpsuit. I stand still, thinking not to startle her, as if she were a wild animal. And so it is a moment before I notice her enormous nude belly.

  She is pregnant.

  Pregnancy has always fascinated me, because it’s something I can never do. As a Fixie, I’ll be physically twelve years old for as long as I live—which might be two hundred years. When the Wildest Dreams left Earth, the oldest living Fixie was 142 years old and still running marathons. His skin was wrinkled and a bit spotted, and he’d had cataract surgery many years before, and he’d had some trouble with his liver (which was attributed to an excess of liquor), but he was healthy as a clam otherwise. The trade-off, of course, is puberty. We don’t have it, and thus we can’t reproduce. In my case, this choice was a no-brainer. If I’d have finished puberty, the docs told me, I had a 90 percent chance of dying from a hereditary thyroid disease called Storgen-Childs. Whee.

  I twist my hand toward her belly. Her eyes—an otherworldly green—lock onto mine, gaze broken only by chunks of evenly clipped hair falling across her face. As my fingers creep toward her belly, and hers pet the thin fabric that covers me, I think I see her smile slightly.

  But then an ominous hush overtakes the crowd of children, and she draws back as if shocked.

  What now? I think. I’m getting pretty sick of first contacts already, but when a huge, spider-looking robot roves into view, I almost faint with relief. It’s a CREATOR, one of the robots Earth sent ahead. “Let. Them. Through,” it says, bleating the words out with its antiquated speakers.

  As it scuttles away, Gordo and I follow through the parting crowd of youngsters. They wait until we are past them before chirping and whirring and laughing, a cacophony like feeding time at an outer space zoo.

  #

  CREATOR leads us to one of the old pods, which is buried at the end of a curving metal staircase that goes down I’m not sure how far. CREATOR is too big to get down the steps, so it squats on top of the cellar door like a giant spider guarding its web. The walls are sheer, almost glass-like cuts of stone, and at the bottom is a cold chamber with a lot of flat-panel screens, all of which show nothing but static.

  Gordo makes a beeline for a computer terminal and starts typing away. I am momentarily overwhelmed with gratitude for him. If he’d been the one Belka sent on extended spacewalk, or if he’d been the one to succumb to space ennui and withdraw, I doubt I would have made it to CelBod with my own sanity intact. And now, watching him commune with computer systems, I’m grateful in another way. Thank the universe for my engineer, I think. My own redundancy training in computers is like a faint memory, and whatever is wrong with the dual-particle transmitter, I’m sure I could never fix it on my own.

  I’m startled when the computer starts talking. “OMG, John?” it asks in an almost human-sounding female voice. The screen Gordo’s using fills with a sideways emoticon—in other words, a smiley face. “I’ve been waiting for you for … calculating …”

  Gordo cuts it off. “Yes, it’s been a while.” He turns to me, a look of vague worry on his face. For my part, I am shocked by the computer’s use of Gordo’s legal name. I’d almost forgotten it.

  “And Jane!” the computer fairly shrieks. “Can we play games now?”

  My brow wrinkles so tight it hurts, and I force my face to relax. I’m reaching way back into my memory, back to the training days at NASA, when we and the other prospectives met the AIs. Of course, we never met the first one to leave for CelBod; that was before our time. But I do remember playing chess and other games with a version of the AI that left later. All of the software was designed to mingle and learn from disparate experiences, so a later arrival must have remembered us.

  AI theory said that if we fed them enough data (which we did—practically all of the knowledge humans had ever gleaned), gave them a purpose (which we also did, by entrusting them with the preparation of CelBod’s settlement), and left them alone (which since the transmitter died had obviously been the case), they would mature.

  As I watch the smiley face bob up and down on the screen, shifting mouths and eyes, I’m starting to think this hasn’t happened.

  Eventually I realize that I should respond. Thankfully, Gordo already has. “Computer?” I hear him asking. “Can we play games later? I’d like to get a little work done first.”

  The emoticon on the screen changes rapidly, so fast I’m not sure what characters it’s using. But the effect is a distinct eye roll. “Okay,” it says. “What can I do?”

  “I’m trying to re-establish communication with Earth through the dual-particle transmitter,” Gordo says. “Can you tell me what’s wrong with it?”

  “Oh,” the computer says, her emoticon mouth turning into an O, then returning to a smile. “It’s not broken. Can we play now? None of my children have the patience for Go.” On a nearby screen, the static turns to an even grid, a Go board.

  “What do you mean?” I blurt out, ignoring the computer’s request. I put my hand on Gordo’s shoulder for comfort.

  Gordo, with remarkable restraint, says, “Not just yet, okay? If the DPT is working, then I’d like to talk to mission control. Can you connect me?”

  “No,” it says. The smiley face shoots up off the screen, replaced by a flatlined face. “Earth is gone.”

  #

  Gordo and I spend the rest of the day underground, glued to the multiple monitors of the comm center. All of the streams coming from Earth have been recorded, up to the point at which there are no more. So we scan newscasts, because the NASA comms, which stopped almost six years ago, say nothing, nothing, nothing. “What the hell is that?” And the question is never answered.

  Between requests for games, the computer tells us that it’s just as well Earth is gone. It tells us about lying to NASA, what spoilsports they were. Its emoticon winks at me, and even Gordo’s arms around me can’t stop my shaking.

  The newscasts stopped coming in only a few months back. Leading up to the final broadcasts, there is talk of political tensions between countries. It doesn’t seem any more fervent than what I saw in my sheltered life as a NASA orphan and biotechnologist. There’s no real warning before the news blinks off, and it looks like all countries went off the air within two weeks. At first we try to establish a chronology, but soon we give up. What difference does it make?

  Earth isn’t talking. And it’s far enough away that we can’t know what’s happening, now or ever. We don’t have equipment sophisticated enough to even see the planet from here. I think the computer was exaggerating, and Earth is still there. I even think there are probably people on it. There have to be some people, right? But they’ve lost the will or the ability to communicate with us, so the spirit of its statement remains true.

  We are alone.

  Or at least we would be if it weren’t for the horde of children. They are standing at the top of the stairs when Gordo and I emerge, chittering like a flock of grounded birds. The sky is a twilight purple, though the sun has already set. Above the eerily level tree line I see a huge half moon like a yin and yang, black side clearly visible against the not-black of the night. Below it the second moon rises redly, like a harvest moon. It could almost pass for Luna, if it weren’t for the behemoth above it. A chill runs up my neck, though the air is mild: this is an alien world.

  The children have us backed up against the doorway, and it occurs to me, not for the first time, that they intend to murder us. Well, it was fun, I think bitterly. Four boys stand at the forefront of the crowd, puffing their naked chests. “You don’t belong here,” one declares. Another asks, “Are you going to tell on us?” and a squeak on tell betrays his nervousness.<
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  “We came from Earth,” Gordo says, trying to muster a deep and authoritative tone. It’s clear these teens don’t respect us; there’s no way for them to know we’re in our fifties. “And we come in peace.”

  To his credit, he says it with a straight face. The crowd of teens is divided between laughter and eye rolling and awe. “Yes,” the apparent leader says, moving menacingly close to us. “We saw that movie too. Annie loves movies.”

  “Well, it’s true,” I add meekly, arms spread placatingly.

  “Give me your lunch money,” the tallest one yells, to more laughter. He is standing right on top of us, puffing his chest out and bumping into Gordo, knocking his footing off balance.

  I look around at the crowd, noticing more and more. For one thing, all of the kids seem to be within a few years in age. They’re clearly older than ten years old, which means that the AIs started growing them before the Wildest Dreams even left Earth. I suppose that’s not surprising, given the established trees. The other thing I notice, scanning the crowd, is that the four males in front are the only ones. There are at least a couple dozen girls, maybe thirty or forty. Which also makes sense, if the goal of the AIs was to start a breeding population as quickly as possible. My eyes search for the pregnant girl I saw earlier, and I eventually recognize her by the ridiculous clarity of her green eyes.

  But not before I see several other bulging bellies.

  The other obvious thing is the two separate groups: girls in a ring behind, boys alone in front. Yet I don’t think the boys are dominant; in fact, they seem a little afraid of the girls.

  “What do you mean?” Gordo asks, looking a bit worried. We’re surrounded, and the boys are pressing closer all the time. My hand drifts to my pocket, where the syringe still waits. I don’t want to start out on the wrong foot here, but I also don’t want to be crushed in what appears to be a power struggle with savage hormonal humans who shouldn’t even be here. When the boy leans in again, looming over me like a gorilla, I hit him in the abdomen with my needle and push the plunger home.

  He drops like a bag of rocks, almost crushing me in the process. Silence ensues. Then whistling like steam from a kettle, and high-pitched sounds that I take as approving from the ring of girls.

  And then they whisk us away once again, to the living quarters where our belongings have been thoroughly rooted through and then stored neatly in cubes. There’s a bed for us in one of the cylindrical pods, which seems smaller than the ones we trained in and around on Earth. We’re apparently expected to share the bed. I think I should protest, but I don’t want to. The sight of the soft mattress makes me realize what a long, long day it’s been. The same must be true for Gordo, because as soon as the children and the spindly robots leave us alone we lie down together and fall into a dead sleep.

  But not before I realize how wonderful it feels: Gordo’s warmth and weight next to me, the evenness of his breath. We’re home, I think. I wrap my arms around him and close my eyes.

  #

  The same waxy light is filtering in through the pod’s windows when I am shaken awake, and I open my eyes to see two sets of eyes glowing whitely back at me. Two of the naked girls crouch by my bed with urgent expressions on their faces. It’s all I can do not to scream.

  “M-1 says you’re just a child, but it isn’t true, is it?”

  I look over my shoulder to Gordo, who is still sleeping with his mouth wide and his arms flung above his head. I shake my head, then notice the girls’ puzzled looks and whisper, “No, we’re not children. But how did you know?”

  The one on the left points skyward. “We saw your … arrival. It was a thing beyond our grasp. Like the machines, you must be more than you seem.”

  The logic has me stunned. I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time obsessing over Earth and had spent more learning about the facts on the ground here. I still don’t know why the AIs decided to grow people without authorization, or how they raised them, but for the moment I’m impressed.

  The girl on the right beeps a few times, very fast. “Yes, and stories. Talk later. F-3 needs us.”

  They both squeak, and I am practically pulled out of bed to a harmony of eerie whistling. I think to wake Gordo, but he looks so peaceful, and he deserves the rest. The girls and I walk under the light of two moons until we reach a ladder that spirals up into a tree so tall that it’s hard to believe it’s not native—except for its rigidly straight trunk and round branches. We climb up, way up, onto a platform that looks rough and unstable. Broken limbs of trees and scraps of metal are laid jaggedly like driftwood, wedged into nooks and tied with crude-looking rope. In other places, hammocks sag from holes in the floor, and on one end of the platform, the torso of one of the spindly robots is wired between two horizontal branches to make a chimney.

  I can see at once that this is their place, fashioned with human hands.

  Girls sleep on every available flat space, and some that aren’t so flat. Near the robot-stove, though, a group of them huddle around one figure writhing on a bed of leaves. It is the pregnant girl, the one who touched my clothes.

  One of the ones who brought me here—F-8, she tells me—leans down to whisper to me, “F-3 is … we do not know. Annie only says that she makes a new life. But she looks like the other thing.”

  “Annie?”

  “Annie,” the other one says. She is tall, almost too tall for the tree house we’re in. “The director, the mother, the intelligence.”

  “The teacher,” another says, a girl I’d thought asleep near my feet.

  “The maker.”

  “The one from before.”

  And then they are saying words too quickly for me to make them out, interspersed with the name and a lot of beeps and trills. The only dissenting sound is a wail of pain from F-3. A contraction. I go to her, stepping carefully around holes in the floor and the naked limbs of beeping girls. She looks at me with her piercing eyes wide and white all around. Her skin is clammy and cold, and she shakes all over.

  The next few hours are a blur. I am a biologist, not a doctor, and my training in creating human life was focused on the laboratory end, the vat growing that I would do to seed this planet. Our doctor went for a spacewalk somewhere between suns and never came back. Not for the first time it occurs to me how unprepared we are, despite it all. I try my best, with no equipment and no way to communicate with the AIs—Annie—and their nearly infinite store of information, telling myself that women have been doing this for millions of years.

  Of course, they’ve been dying in the process for just as long.

  F-3 gives birth in the relative dark of night, with only one half moon for ambience. It’s a girl. She wails as the other girls rush to clean her off, and I show them how to support the baby’s head. They beep and click and whir, cooing to her in the strangest baby talk I’ve ever heard. They seem interested and frightened in equal measure, and it’s the first time I really register their similarity in ages. They have no little sisters and brothers, and have probably never seen a baby. It’s another mystery: why Annie would make only one round of children and then stop, given the enormous store of genetic material Earth sent to CelBod. But I am exhausted, up to my elbows in blood and the other offal of birth, and I’m in no mood for mysteries.

  I turn back toward F-3 and am shocked by her pallor and the cloudy cast of her eyes. Maybe it’s the moonlight, I think. But it’s not. I try my best to save her, calling up old redundancy training in medicine. I look for tears and try to stop her bleeding. But the problem is inside, beyond me.

  By the time I stop trying the sun is rising, filling the thin air with light that filters through green leaves. F-3’s body is as cold as space. “What happened to her?” one of the girls asks me.

  I shake my head. “I’m sorry,” I say. “She’s dead.”

  The hush that follows is thick, broken only by the baby’s mewling. All eyes in the tree house slowly turn my way.

  “Dead?” one says, as if testing out the word. I
feel my eyes getting wet, and I can only nod.

  “Is she broken?”

  “Scrap metal?”

  “Obsolete?”

  I want to say no, she is more than that. But I just nod again, a gesture that they don’t seem to recognize. A few of the girls have come over to look at the body and prod it with their fingers, and then they seem to get it. I let out a breath, grateful that I don’t have to try to explain death. Or to understand it.

  Some of the girls start to carry F-3 away, loading her into a pulley system that goes over the side of the tree house. Others cluster around the baby, who continues to whine. I look over to see the infant’s fingers locked around one of a pregnant teen, who beams down at her. “What should we call her?” I ask, aiming for a cheery tone.

  Some of them look curiously at me, heads at an angle like the robot in the woods. Many of them seem to have Fs on their lips, looking around the group as if counting. “No, no, no,” I say, shaking my head uselessly. “A name. Let’s give her something a little more … meaningful?”

  The girls are stumped. They look wildly around them, obviously trying to pick names from the tree’s branches, like fruit. F-6, the tall one who came for me, asks, “What are you called?”

  And now I’m stumped. I almost tell them to call me Laika, the name I took on the Wildest Dreams. But those dark thoughts of abandonment seem wrong for this place, so I hesitate. My official name seems wrong too. Jane Doe. It’s as bad as no name at all.

  Eventually I shrug. “I don’t really have a name either,” I say. “I guess I need one too.”

  But that thought just hangs there among the branches, because the baby starts wailing again, loud and demanding.

  “She needs food,” I say. “Milk.” I wonder briefly if they have milk before reasoning that these people were once babies, and obviously ate something. A few of them are themselves pregnant, so I guess there’ll be milk soon, assuming I can keep some of the moms alive.