by Susan May
The Clean Air Organization funded by the late Sir Richard Branson’s “Change” Charity Fund, commenced a last ditch effort to artificially convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. The Oxygen Conversion Plants (OCPs) with their limited range required an enormous reorganization of the population into restrictive radii. Major cities outside the range required the piping of excess oxygen. Eventually, though, it proved uneconomical to oxygenate cities or towns populated with less than fifteen million.
In Australia, cities like Perth and Darwin, and all country areas, were closed. London, Manchester, Glasgow, and Belfast were all that remained in the United Kingdom. Across Europe, the U.S., and the world, the story repeated. The entire populations of territories and cities—at least the ones prepared to leave—moved into the outskirts of OCP fed cities, creating refugee camps on a magnitude unseen in history.
Inhabitants who refused to leave closed towns struggled with decreasing oxygen levels. Eventually they grew sicker and weaker. The majority chose suicide. For the first time in the history of man’s domination of planet Earth, the population entered a rapid decline.
Those lucky inhabitants already residing in cities with OCPs found their lives relatively unchanged. Not for long, though. The Public Sharing Act passed first in Australia, then the United Kingdom, followed rapidly by the U.S., Japan, the Americas, then the world, saw to that.
Under the much-debated law, all living abodes, hotels, motels, and even offices were capacity-assessed. After this, they were then ordered to admit refugees to maximize their occupancy. A ballot assigned living quarters to the incoming. Initially, those enjoying their comfortable homes fought—legally, then physically—to maintain their property rights. Eventually, after threatened with eviction and corporal punishment, they relinquished their dearly prized lifestyle.
Man’s home was no longer his castle.
Earth was in survival mode.
Grim as life became, there was hope.
Scientists speculated as the population dwindled, and with more oxygen plants coming online, and a new breed of genetically modified tree beginning to thrive, the planet’s balance might reset.
Hope crept into the heart of the population.
It was short-lived.
All the changes, sacrifices, and tough political decisions could not alter man’s fate, once they arrived.
Nobody factored them into the equation. Even when the first wave made contact—their manner so diplomatic, and their appearance so like us except for their luminous white skin—the alarm bells never rang. How naive of humanity, but how true to form: we mostly judged books, and now aliens, by their covers.
The governments already preoccupied with the fight against the carbon disaster, initially welcomed the visitors to our world. Vocal groups cried invasion! These visitors, the Ariesles, at the time, seemed to pose little threat to our life.
The fact they were content to live in the oxygen-depleted, vacated cities should have been a warning. A religious furor grew around them fueled by the belief they had come to save us with their advanced technology and greater wisdom.
They hadn’t.
A decade passed before we realized they had come for our world. They didn’t need to fight us. They didn’t need to adapt to, or modify our world. We had done all the terra-forming necessary. Hollywood blockbusters and fictional tales of aliens who invaded for our water or natural resources could not be more wrong. They, instead, came for the one thing we considered waste: our carbon emissions. The oxygen to their metabolism.
Keriss sat by her son’s bed staring out through the curtained window at a dull, gray sky that hinted the coming of rain. The previous months washed through her tired mind, and she wondered if she would have the strength to follow through on her decision.
When the commercials first appeared on television, she’d dismissed them, just like everyone else. It seemed preposterous. A propaganda exercise. When the news footage began to appear of patients in the newly created clinics, the truth of the rumors was obvious. The tiny little bodies hooked up via tubes to the intravenous drips spoke a thousand frightening words.
The conversions had become the only alternative.
Keriss had argued with her husband for months before this final step brought her here today. He’d left her with their Harry, his words flung back at her as he stormed out the door.
“No child of mine will submit, no matter how desperate we’ve become. If we all die, so be it. At least we die as God’s creatures.”
She knew then she needed to plan in secret. Harry must live, must continue on, and she would do anything to give him that chance.
The oxygen levels in the past few months had grown uncomfortably low. Now there remained only two choices—certain death. Or this. YouTube videos from the Vac-dists pitifully portrayed the fate of the stalwart occupants who’d stubbornly chosen to remain. Sad figures lay propped against walls or collapsed in rubbish-strewn streets, chests inflating, stretching, as their mouths opened and closed in slow, agonizing gulps. A cruel death. Even crueler would be to watch your child suffer the same fate.
Keriss couldn’t do that.
Four weeks ago, in an outstretched hand, her sister had offered her two Tic-Tac-like yellow pills. She’d hugged Keriss tight and whispered, “For you and Harry. You’ll just fall asleep.”
Pulling away, Keriss stared at her disheveled younger sister Casey, who had once epitomized style and elegance. Now she was a dark shadow with pale, sallow skin. Her stringy hair was always pushed carelessly behind her ears.
Keriss shook her head, mouthing “no.” Casey nodded in argument still proffering the pills as though she were merely offering a headache cure. How could she kill her own son? How could her sister even suggest such a thing?
Keriss turned from Casey and the yellow horrors. She refused to even look at her.
The sound of receding footsteps and a door closing were the last she ever heard of her sister. Now she was truly alone. Her sister, gone. Her husband, gone. The world of her childhood, gone.
No goodbyes anymore. Nobody called it dying. People just went. Her husband wanted the same for their family. She couldn’t. First, she must save Harry.
The clinic was clean, white, and comforting. Comforting, if you didn’t think too hard about what they did inside them. Outside, at the entrance, picket lines of banner-toting protestors shouted insults as they entered.
“Traitor!”
“Turncoat!”
“Alien sympathizer!”
It was a wonder they had the energy. Oxygen was down to forty percent, even in the oxygenated cities. The OCPs were winding down. Closed by them.
They were just words. She wasn’t a traitor. She was a survivor.
Harry would be a survivor.
The children could survive.
They had offered.
They would accept only one per family.
She had only one.
The process began at 1:17 pm.
All Harry understood was after the procedure he would be stronger. He was only ten. He should have only understood football, backyard baseball, and summers at the pool. As the bag drip-fed pink liquid via a tube in his nose, Keriss hoped he would understand she loved him.
Keriss hadn’t left his bedside. She sat there, constantly stroking Harry’s forehead. A nurse came by and, after adjusting the electronic feed speed, she smiled at Keriss as though it was all so normal.
“It will take about six hours. Two more bags after this. Eight hours, and we’ll know if it takes. Cup of tea?”
Keriss frowned. “If it takes?”
“Oh, don’t you worry. It’s rare for it not to take.”
Pulling a gray, molded cardboard bowl from a shelf, the nurse handed it to Keriss.
“He’ll probably feel sick in the next hour. Should he vomit, please bring the bowl to reception so we can measure it.”
Keriss stared at receptacle. It reminded her of a bowler hat.
“Doesn’t take,” she repeated, but the nurse
had already turned and disappeared into the hall. Hurrying off to another child, no doubt.
It had to take.
Even as she wished the opposite.
If it took in three days, Harry wouldn’t recognize her. She would no longer be his mother. That was the dearest price. He would go on. Grow up. Have children. He wouldn’t remember her or his life before the change.
The taking of their memories was emotionally safer for the children, they had said.
She held Harry’s hand tightly as the liquid dripped into the tube driven by the little whirring motor, which reminded Keriss of a waterwheel.
Whoomp. Whoomp. Whoomp.
Harry eyed her listlessly. Perhaps he now realized her deception. She prayed the anguish in his face would soon pass. After only the first bag, his skin appeared paler. His eyes seemed tinged with yellow.
Was it working? Taking?
When the nurse came by again, she assured Keriss: “It’s all very normal.”
Keriss choked back laughter. Normal. Nothing was normal. Harry would not be normal.
Or would he be the new normal? That was good, wasn’t it? She’d made the right decision.
Death or hybrid. Survival, of sorts. That’s how she thought of it. Survival.
Some of the human DNA survived the transformation, so the human race would go on in this new form, the alien-improved form that could breathe carbon dioxide.
They needed workers.
The Ariesles would rebuild Earth to suit their needs. Only children’s growing, more adaptive bodies could manage the change. Their circulatory system, heart, and lungs could transform into carbon-breathing versions able to survive in the new environment.
In her mind, Keriss heard her husband’s voice. “It’s an invasion, Keriss, pure and simple. You’re too naïve. Maybe they even created the environmental catastrophe, initially, to throw us off our game.”
“We did that,” she argued. “They’re just taking advantage. We broke the toy. They simply picked it up.”
He’d shaken his head and tapped his forehead.
“Think, Keriss. Think. Earth isn’t a toy we discarded. We might have repaired it. Now there may be nobody left to do anything. Not even our children. The government’s in on it, that’s what I think. Now you’re giving up, joining them. You’ve always made your own choices. You don’t need me. Good luck with your freedom, now you’re going along with them.”
A tear rolled slowly down Keriss’s cheek. Some freedom. Some choice.
Harry suddenly vomited, coughing up brown, bloodied liquid. Splashes of the wretched-smelling stuff clung to the front of his shirt. As he leaned forward over the bowler hat bucket, she noticed the back of his blue hospital pajamas were wet with sweat. Keriss wondered if silkworms suffered this way, as they became moths.
The nurse’s voice came from behind: “This is good. Won’t be long now.”
Harry placed his head back on the pillow and looked up at her. His mouth moved in little twitches and odd sounds came out. She imagined he whispered, “I love you.” She couldn’t be sure, though. The words were mashed together, his language center already altered.
“It’ll be over soon, my sweet, little boy,” she soothed, gently rubbing his chest.
Already he didn’t respond. Normally, he would melt into her, entwining his arm through hers. Now he was stiff, unmoving, as though her touch was sandpaper.
“Soon you’ll be safe, my darling.”
A lone tear ran down her cheek, the only outward sign of her breaking heart.
Safe wasn’t the right word, but it was the best she could find. Her mother had often said: When facing two terrible doors, pick one. Don’t stay in the same room. Move into a new room—face new doors. Keep making choices until you find the safe room.
Keriss kissed the top of Harry’s head and whispered, “Here’s your next room. You find your next door, and you open it.”
Turning away quickly, Keriss walked toward a water fountain in the corridor. In her hand, she clutched a little yellow pill.
© 2011 Susan May
From the Imagination Vault
In 2011, my youngest son Harry (nine at the time) ended up in hospital for five days. The poor darling suffered with acute constipation. No, we didn’t feed him takeaway food from birth to cause it. He’d suffered with this condition since he was a few months old.
Initially, the doctors thought they could “loosen things up” by feeding this horrible liquid into him via a nasal tube. This went on for four days, before they decided they needed to operate. Of course, we were beside his bed, twenty-four hours a day. My husband and I soon wore the haggard look of all parents who sleep beside their sick child’s bed.
Around the third day, as I sat reading a book, the little machine hung above him pumping the liquid into him, caught my attention. The sound it made was quite unique.
Several thoughts occurred to me: What if the liquid was actually changing him? What if I was a mother sitting by my child’s bed having been forced to make a terrible life and death decision. It wasn’t a pleasant situation, but my writer’s mind was away on the what if travels.
Over the next day, I sat with my laptop in the most uncomfortable chair in the world, with weary and bloodshot eyes, writing To Be or Not to Be. Coincidentally, I finished the first draft just as Harry came out of his successful operation.
To Be or Not to Be went on to place second in the 2011 Australian Stringy Bark Speculative Fiction Awards and second in the UK January 2012 Five Stop Short Story Competition.
Due to the circumstances in which I wrote this story, it is rather grim. My stories are not usually like this, but it is a memoir of sorts of how I felt at the time sitting by my son’s bedside feeling inadequate and sorry for his suffering.
Even though To Be or Not to Be is my most successful story as far as publications go, it’s the one I enjoy the least. It encapsulates the most terrifying thoughts a person endures once they become a parent—the thought of losing a child. Sometimes fiction is too close to home. For me, this is it. I pray my only experience of the life-and-death choice faced by Keriss will be this story.
Things That Will Kill You
In Australia
American tourist and blogger R.P. Kraul is on the trip of a lifetime in the Australian outback. These Australians seem very cavalier about the dangers posed by the native wildlife. So R.P. has come prepared for any thing: man-eating sharks to poisonous spiders, he’s ready. But, perhaps, he needed a little more preparation.
“Hope you’ll be cumfordubel, Mr. Kroil,” the woman said. “We love Uh-meric’ns.”
He looked at her, the word cumfordubel rolling around in his brain. Then in a flash he had it. Comfortable. She was saying “comfortable.” She even made his surname sound as if it weren’t his, when she pronounced Kraul as “Kroil.”
Still, it was an improvement on what they’d called him back in school, after Ross Reynolds had gotten ahold of his middle name—“Percy”—from a nametag his mother had placed on his lunchbox. From then on, it was “Putrid Percy.” It had been five long years before he’d finally walked into his adult life and left “Putrid Robert Percy” behind.
He was “R.P. Kraul, Writer” now. Well—not totally a writer. A blogger. A travel blogger, actually. At last count he had 33,324 Twitter followers, and they hung on his every word. All one hundred and forty characters. Here he was in Australia—in the Aussie outback no less—on a holiday that was sure to make for a great blog series.
R.P. glanced around the small white room and turned to the frazzled-haired female Aussie standing with her hands on her hips. She seemed to be waiting for his reply. He thought she’d called herself Marlene, Maxine, something like that. The small, apple-shaped woman—no, that was the wrong fruit—pear-shaped woman stood at the door, a smile hanging on her lips. She clasped her hands tightly before her as if offering up a prayer.
“Yes, it’s great. Ah… just what I wanted.”
R.P. noticed several
flies buzzing around the window, triple the size of the ones at home, and he thought, We could lose the flies. If they are actually flies, and not small birds.
She must have seen him looking at the flies because she said, “Cripes, you leave the bloody door open for a second, and they’re in like Flynn. Don’t you worry, Mr. Kroil. I’ll getcha some spray. They’re the native wildlife of Ostrayl-ya—you just gotta live with the buggers.”
He dug in his pocket, pulling out a purple piece of paper. Holding it up, he peered at it. It was a five-dollar bill. He moved toward her and held out the cash.
“No, no,” the woman said, waving her hand like a magician performing a trick. “We don’t take tips in Ostrayl-ya.”
Then she was gone and R.P. was alone with his suitcase—and the flies with amplifiers strapped to their wings. He wondered if mere spray would kill them. Perhaps a blowtorch would be required.
The brochure had said, “Experience the true Australian bush.” The advertisement had certainly kept its word. R.P. peered out the dust-streaked window at the tall trees with their peeling white bark and thick loads of gum leaves, their trunks crowded by thick green-gray bushes. The colors of the leaves and the trees marked this forest as foreign, alien, unlike any forests he had visited at home.
High up in one tree, a dozen black birds—he thought they might be native cockatoos—madly squawked. They chewed big, flowery gum-nuts, then hurled them to the ground. There were other dark shapes hanging in a couple of the tallest trees, but they were too high up for him to make out whether they were birds or animals. Maybe they were koala bears. Imagine that—koala bears just outside his window. It was an exotic vista.
As R.P. watched, the daylight faded behind the trees and the dark swelled up from the ground, engulfing the colors of the bush and turning it to gray.
The flies interrupted his reverie.
