Living Forever & Other Terrible Ideas

by Emily C. Skaftun

  The girls nearest to the baby start to move, picking her up and heading toward the long ladder. A chorus of noise spreads from them, with the letters O and K at its core. The creepy sensation that these alien teenagers give me is coming back. They remind me of a flock of birds, or a hive of bees, a colony of ants. Something not quite human.

  At that moment I think of Gordo, who is surely awake by now and wondering where I’ve gone. I feel it like a shot of pain, and I start to follow the girls to the ladder. But F-8 stops me with a tug at my sleeve. “How did this happen?” she asks. “How did that … baby … get inside F-3?”

  So I find myself giving the birds and bees talk to a group of birds and bees. They know shockingly little, despite being raised by information itself with a steady diet of movies, and despite living as naked as monkeys. And yet, they’ve obviously been experimenting. When I tell them the connection between intercourse and pregnancy, a knowing look enters F-8’s eyes. She pats her abdomen absentmindedly, and I notice the beginning of swelling there. Others look worried, frightened beyond belief. I try to reassure them that the process isn’t usually fatal, but I don’t think they believe me.

  “How do you know these things?” one asks, a tiny girl who’s sitting with her arms around her knees. “You look younger than me.”

  I start at the beginning, then realize I have to go even further back. “I’m much older than you,” I say. “I’m fifty-three years old. And on Earth, our years are a little longer than here.”

  “You’re a Fixie,” one offers.

  “Exactly,” I sigh, grateful to be momentarily off the hook. A ripple of mechanical-sounding wonder moves through the crowd, and now many of them look at me the same way they did at the baby. It’s been an illuminating day for them, and the sun’s only just risen. I’m tired and extremely hungry, so I shrug off all the questions and head toward the ladder and, hopefully, some kind of breakfast. If nothing else, our extra provisions from the Wildest Dreams are around here somewhere.

  I’m climbing onto the top rungs, twisting around to descend, when F-8 says, “So, when are you going to get un-Fixed?”

  And my foot slips.

  #

  I find Gordo in the kitchen/living room pod, which has been modified and added on to, making a huge cafeteria with tables and benches that pop up out of the floor on telescoping legs. He’s in the middle, surrounded by a lot of the naked girls. They leave a berth around him, but it’s obvious that they’re split pretty evenly between interest and fear. There are no boys in the cafeteria.

  Gordo is stuffing his face as fast as he can. He has three square plates in front of him, piled high with fruits and vegetables and bread and even what looks like fresh meat. He’s so focused on the food that he doesn’t notice me approaching, and jumps when I touch his shoulder, food juice dribbling down his chin.

  “I guess I shouldn’t have worried about you worrying about me,” I say.

  He looks up at me guiltily, and I grin. Then I slide onto the bench next to him and start eating food from his plates. It’s delicious, and not just compared to ten years of freeze-dried whatever. Whatever else “Annie” has been up to, she’s done a great job getting food production up and running. It seems like everything we need to make a go of it is already done.

  “Info spreads fast in this place,” he says. “Without words, often. Have you noticed how they use other sounds in their language?”

  #

  I nod, enjoying the hell out of something resembling bacon. For the moment I’m not concerned that I haven’t seen any pigs for it to be from. “Have you been hanging out with the ‘Ms’?” I ask, employing air quotes for punctuation.

  Gordo shakes his head. “They don’t want anything to do with me. Unless it’s to loom over me brandishing their wispy mustaches. The ‘Fs’ seem a bit skittish too, although they all really wanted to watch me take a leak.”

  I can’t help but laugh. “Well,” I say. “They learned a lot about men and women today. They probably just wanted to see which one you were.” I ruffle his hair, which looks oddly flat with a planet’s mass tugging it down.

  “Yes, well. I guess they’ve decided it’s neither. For now, anyway. Did you hear that we can un-Fix ourselves?”

  I’m not laughing now; my heart starts beating fast. “Yes,” I say carefully.

  “It was one of the last things Earth sent before it blew itself up or whatever.”

  I just nod. It’s refreshing to be around someone who understands body language. Hell, Gordo and I know each other so well after forty-some years together, we could probably communicate with only body language. So I can tell that neither of us wants to be the one to ask. It’s so awkward that I give in. “I don’t want to,” I say. Even if my thyroid wouldn’t probably kill me, I still wouldn’t want to. Once, long ago, I longed to grow up. To have boobs and hips and make steamy love with beautiful people. To have a family. But not in a long time. Our bodies may not mature, but our minds and our hearts do; they learn to long for other things.

  Now Gordo nods, relief and a touch of frown on his face. “Yeah, me neither. Let’s see how old we can get instead.”

  “That’s right,” I say. “I want to be around to see F-3’s baby’s grandchildren. As long as I don’t have to deliver them.”

  Gordo laughs, and it seems genuine now, the same little-boy smile that kept me sane across the void. “Okay,” he says. “We’ll have ‘Annie’ train some doctors.”

  It’s gotten quiet in the cafeteria, even the little beeps and whatnot noises hushed. I’m in mind of a forest when a predator nears, but I’m sure there aren’t any predators here. The little naked children wouldn’t have stood a chance.

  But the girls surrounding us all have firm grips on their cutlery, from knives to spoons, and their mouths are set in determination. Thankfully, those looks aren’t aimed at us. In terms of table manners, a decade in zero-g has left us less civilized than these kids, and therefore unarmed.

  I look where they’re looking, toward the door, and see the tallest boy entering. M-1, I presume. He almost has to duck to get in the doorway, followed by the other boys close behind.

  Things happen fast. I feel motion and Gordo’s arms around me, and I see the girls turn into a blur of anger and flesh. They spin together like a tornado, silverware flashing. I hear yelling and gnashing noises and cries of pain, and somehow under that I even hear the sickening impacts of metal into flesh. I smell blood.

  One more sound emerges from the melee: a maniacal laugh that haunts my dreams. I look around wildly, taking in the flailing arms and kicking legs, and in all the motion a still face at a window catches my eye. An impish little girl’s face, beaming with madness. She’s gone in an instant, but I know with a clarity I can’t explain that this chaos is Belka’s doing.

  And then I realize that I’m on top of the table with Gordo, and that it’s become a tall platform, lifting us above the melee. Near the door bodies slump on the floor, and I can’t tell if they’re breathing or not, only that they’re bleeding. Not again, I think. But it’s not the same: this time the bodies, at least the ones I can see, are male. The crowd starts to disperse, and I see an army of the spindly robots coming in with scrubbing attachments on their hands and feet.

  “How many boys are there in this place?” I whisper to Gordo. He is silent. “How many?” I ask again, with greater urgency.

  “I’ve only seen four,” he finally says. At which point he gets my point, and uses the control panel at the side of the table to lower it back down.

  But it’s too late. The wild girls know how to wield their cutlery, and all four boys are dead or dying from stab wounds. Gordo and I press towels into their wounds, but they still die. The robots carry them away, presumably to join F-3, maybe to become bacon. Who can say?

  In the whir of machinery only a few girls remain, tending to their sisters with bruises and cuts. I see F-8, pushing against a robot that’s trying to clean blood spatter off of her like one would with an overl
y friendly dog. “Why?” I ask her.

  She looks at me with red blood against red cheeks, but no emotion in her eyes. “One of them broke F-3. And maybe many more of us too. They needed to be taken out of service.”

  It’s so ridiculous that I can’t even think. Until now, I haven’t let myself consider the big thoughts. I haven’t thought of Earth and the billions of people presumably dead. I haven’t thought that we on CelBod might be all that’s left of humankind, charged with the task of continuing that legacy. Thinking it now makes my soul hurt.

  I cling to Gordo in the blood-spattered room, feeling young and old.

  #

  Colonizing a new planet could never be simple.

  NASA spent years, with international partners, assembling a massive ark with embryos from hundreds of thousands of animal species and thousands of human individuals and seeds from millions of plants. They sent them in “bullets” to CelBod, capsules that could rocket through the black faster than anything big enough to support human life. And most of them arrived. The pods came the same way, compressed like IKEA furniture. So did the CREATORs and Annie, though she wasn’t called that.

  All of these things had to arrive and work together to prepare the planet for the slower-moving, fragile humans (us) to arrive. Even so, we were limited by cost and space to four humans, and tiny ones at that. We’ve known since the first Mars base that Fixies make great astronauts. We’re small and we don’t eat much and we suffer less from hormonal needs and sexual tension. Oh, and we live for-goddamn-ever.

  All we can’t do is populate the bases once we get there.

  Hence the multi-stage plan that was the colonization of distant Celestial Body #8972642158. It hasn’t gone according to plan, but it can still be saved.

  After our bloody breakfast, I head to my laboratory to see about making some more humans: male ones. Populating the place was always supposed to be my job, and now that Annie’s experiment in free-range children has gone so very wrong, it’s my turn again.

  The plan is fucked.

  I expected to find a lot of the seeds and embryos gone. Obviously a number of them have become people and trees and presumably animals.

  I did not expect to find all of the human embryos missing, their little tubes empty and clean and neatly slotted into racks in an unpowered freezer. I can make elephants and raccoons, dandelions and redwoods, alligators and catfish. We have plenty of those. But I cannot make humans. I am doomed to watch our race wither to extinction.

  Gordo finds me weeping, curled under a lab table wishing I were back in space. Gravity numbs my shoulder and heavies my heart. To his credit, to his never-ending credit, Gordo doesn’t ask me what’s wrong. He looks into the freezer and gently shuts that door, then crawls onto the floor behind me, holding me until I cry myself dry.

  After a long while he sighs hugely. I know what he’s about to say, and unfairly I already hate him for thinking it. “You know,” he says, “there is one more way to make children on this planet.”

  I know, I know, that he means it for the benefit of the human race. I know that he’s not just interested in sleeping with every naked teenager on CelBod, of being the Adam in this ridiculous Eden. I know that it doesn’t mean he doesn’t love me or that he wants to leave me. He probably won’t even have intercourse with them—we have much better technology than that.

  But it breaks my heart. I turn away from him so he won’t see me cry, even though I’ve been crying for an hour. “Of course,” I say with mock lightness. “Some of the girls’ babies are sure to be male.” Which is true, of course. But even so it would mean waiting many years to breed the next generation, wasting the current Fs’ most fertile years. It’s a gamble with the entire human race for stakes, and furthermore it’s definitely not what Gordo and I are thinking about.

  His silence says, I will not let you make me say it. His words say, “Do you think Annie has introduced ice cream to CelBod?” And of course I love him again.

  Of course I always will.

  #

  There are no graves on CelBod. It’s not a custom most of the children, as I persist in calling them, understand, and with resources still slim, burial isn’t a sensible option. And anyway, I’m not sure what name I would put on a stone. John? Gordo? Or the series of whirs and beeps that the children use? I have no alphabet for it. So I hike up to the lava flow to grieve. Looking over the tops of the odd trees to the stars, I can imagine that I’m looking back toward Earth, if Earth is still out there.

  Thankfully, a few of the Fs’ original children were male, so the population of CelBod wasn’t immediately inbred. Now there’s a fifth generation brewing in some of the planet’s bellies, and so far they seem okay. It looks like the human race might make it, which means my mission is accomplished, and it’s time for me to lay down my head and rest, next to the bald, spotted head of my old true love.

  Only I can’t. I’m only about 115 years old, give or take, and the end isn’t even in sight.

  Most of the original Fs are dead now, and Gordo and I long ago programmed nonwords out of the robots’ vocabulary, but the clicks and chirps and beeps have persisted in the language of CelBod. I hear it now, coming toward me like a wave surging up through the crystal streams to this crest of red rock. I still don’t know what most of the sounds mean; it seems like birdsong to me, even after all these years. But as the voices climb toward me I hear familiar patterns that might be words, might be curses, might be prayers to the gods we thought we left back on Earth.

  One of the children, actually a child just a few years younger than I look, runs up to me ahead of the pack, whistling a tone that I often hear. Though I can barely voice it, I’ve come to think of it as my name. She hands me a leaf that she probably picked up from the forest floor. “Thank you,” I say, accepting it. It is beautiful, red and pointed like a star. She squeaks out a trill of delight, and then repeats the first sound louder, facing back toward her mother. “Momma, she’s here!” she calls.

  The crowd repeats the tune, a couple of short beeps and a long one that growls into a purr. They don’t understand the way I react to death, but they know I’m sad and I think they’ve come to comfort me. What am I to them? I wonder, not for the first time. I’m not sure. But I know who they are to me. They’re my family.

  I may never know what they see up there, but together we look up into the bright night sky.

  ***published in Buzzy Magazine, Issue 79, May 2015

  A Matter of Scale

  An Account by Dr. Riley Lovegood

  You know that thing where you become aware of something, then suddenly you see it everywhere? Like, maybe a year ago I saw cavatappi on a menu, and I had to ask the waitress what it was. The day after that, I was at the grocer and the only pasta on the shelves was cavatappi. Or anyway they had more than one brand of the curly noodles in stock, when I only just learned that they existed. It must have been there all along, right? Because the other alternative is that cavatappi was in the store because I was now aware of it, and that model of the universe is one I simply cannot live in. If that's the kind of universe we live in ... well, I'm getting ahead of myself.

  Let's assume these things have been around since the beginning.

  I want to go back to the beginning. And that is my family crest.

  Many of the older families of the Miskatonic Valley have shields with lions or gryphons or other beasts. Ours—it's sort of a symbol. It has a few sharp lines that seem familiar, like a rune or Cyrillic or Chinese character (but it's not—trust me, I've looked). It's bulbous and symmetrical and yet deeply wrong. It resembles an animal if you squint a certain way. If you ignore biology and allow for tentacles to replace most other body parts. If you accept that eyes are windows to the bottomless, meaningless, dark, soul-devouring depths of space.

  But that's only if you accept that those things on the crest are eyes.

  The symbol is like a Rorschach test, telling more about the beholder than itself. Furthermore, it's like cavata
ppi. Once you see it, you can't stop seeing it everywhere. Come to think of it, it even looks a bit like cavatappi.

  Father saw it in the ocean. He thought a beast slumbered below, trapped on an undersea island. Actually, he thought it was a god, and that it was his destiny to find and awaken the god, who would then go on a rampage and destroy the fragile sanity (and home planet) of insignificant humans. I don't know why Father thought this was a good idea.

  He sold the scheme to Miskatonic University as a scientific survey to discover what creatures live in the ocean's depths. Giant squid, perhaps. Not the Kraken, or Leviathan. Certainly not Cthulhu.

  He didn't find it there, and returned a broken man.

  It was Mother who identified the god Father sought as Cthulhu. She introduced him to a cult worshipping this and other demon gods, where his family crest was sensibly taken as proof that he was a chosen one.

  I dismissed their obsessions. If I'd believed in their apocalyptic gods, I suppose I'd have feared them—I certainly fear the other cult members, with their worship of gibbering madness.

  But I had more important things to worry about than sunken continents and mythical monsters. Rural New England escapes the scrutiny of, say, Appalachia, but a real problem of poverty surrounded us. Nutrition was an issue, as was hygiene, safe drinking water, and disease. So rather than devote my life to the search for ineffable evil, I became a doctor.

  I kept a small office at the MU teaching hospital—mostly so I'd have an excuse to "run into" Gina, in Research—but most of my work involved visiting patients in their far-flung homes, bringing basic medicine to folks who really needed it.