Biome

by Ryan Galloway

  Shuffling, I work my way around the dome, only just managing to keep my balance. It feels as if my legs and arms are fifty meters long. I find an airlock. Fumble for the keypad. But I don’t know the code. I try to conjure a guess, anything, but my mind is blank. My mind is blank. My mind is blank.

  I collapse against the door. Eyes so heavy… I can barely keep them open. I just sit there gasping, idly focusing on the way my chest rises and falls so quickly. Funny how important air has become recently. It seems as if I’m always just catching my breath when something else tries to squeeze it out of me.

  Will these breaths be my last? I suddenly wonder if this is how my mother and father felt. If they survived long enough to be among the last. If they died gasping too.

  If they were together, or alone.

  Like I am now.

  I slide down onto my side, helmet in the dirt. I know that this is the end. My lashes flutter. I’ve just closed my eyes when light hits them, a subtle crimson at the corners of my lids.

  Light? Where is it coming from? I squint, groggy, barely able to tilt my head up. I see an open airlock. A figure silhouetted against it. He or she is stooping over me, tugging at my arm, dragging me inside.

  Some part of me feels as if I might want to resist. But I can’t bring myself to do it. The light changes places as I blink at an oil stain on the floor. Is it oil? Or dirt?

  Again I look up, and now find myself gazing into an entirely new dome. One I’ve never seen before, filled with all kinds of plants. Familiar plants. Plants that produce a great deal of oxygen, such as sansevieria, and…

  Oxygen!

  Suddenly the alarm in my helmet arrests my attention. With the last of my willpower, I reach up and disengage the seal.

  There’s a pop, and warm, heady air floods in like a rush of healing water. I simply lie there gasping and coughing, trying to get a grip, but I can’t. It’s as if my lungs have been soaked in an oppressive wax. I close my eyes, just trying to find a normal pace.

  Eventually, the heaving stops. Though I truthfully feel like I could fall asleep right here in the airlock, I coerce my bone-weary body into a sitting position and more thoroughly take in my surroundings.

  It’s a lot like the Helix. In the center of the dome, a giant cylindrical terrarium—this one much larger than its twin at the colony—holds an Eden of vegetation, the monstrous vines and leaves and needles pushing so thickly against the glass that it seems almost ready to crack.

  Moss and algae have spread creeping blankets over every surface, leaving a Rorschach test of woolly patterns. To the left of the cylinder I see stairs leading up to an elevated room; to the right, the path snakes out of view behind a patch of furry lichen.

  And standing directly in front of me is a figure. He’s wearing a lab coat rolled tightly at the sleeves, a bolo knife in one hand, bandages on his forearms stained with brown blotches. Numbly, I realize I know his face.

  “Lizzy?” Atkinson asks.

  Somehow it’s him. It doesn’t make any sense, but it’s him.

  After everything that’s happened, for some reason it’s the sight of this doctor, this man returned from the dead who still remembers my name, that pushes me over the edge.

  I begin to tremble. Shock takes what’s left of my strength—and perhaps my sanity—as I sink back against the bay door. Then he’s kneeling beside me, checking me over with concern.

  “What happened? Are you hurt?” Atkinson leans closer. “Did he send you?”

  Without asking, I know who he means. I try to shake my head, but even that proves too much for me. The weariness from my journey, compounded by near-asphyxiation twice in the span of a few hours, has left me hollow.

  He leaves, then returns with a water bottle. With his help I’m able to sit up enough to drink, alternating between gulps of liquid and gasps of air. I realize we’ve done this before.

  Only he was in my shoes, and I was in his.

  “Better?” he asks.

  A few more seconds pass before I can answer.

  “Yes, thank you,” I say.

  “Good.” He seems jittery, glancing over his shoulder and bobbing on his heels. “How… how did you get here?”

  “I ran.”

  “Ran?” He leans back, eyes widening. “You came through the valley? Over the pits?”

  “Didn’t you?” I ask uncertainly.

  “N-no.”

  I wait for him to elaborate, but he doesn’t. Then I hear the hail begin again, just as before—a single strike on the roof, followed belatedly by another, and another, then a sudden, urgent downpour. He stands and pulls a lever. At my back, I hear the bay door’s manual lock thunk into place.

  “I was just preparing for dinner. Are you hungry? I’ll… I’ll make us some food.”

  Before I can object, he hurries off to the right.

  For some time I don’t even try to move, reveling in the fact that I’m still alive—and so is Atkinson. I listen to the clank of carbon utensils, the beep of a 3D printer, the murmur of throaty air as it pours through the vent beside me, nuzzling my cheeks. The blank sensations slowly begin to take shape as questions.

  How did he get out here?

  Why hasn’t Dosset sent someone after him?

  At length, the questions outweigh my exhaustion. I compel myself to stand, groaning, my jumpsuit sticking to my skin along my shoulder and back, as tacky as undried paint. As I come fully upright, darkness squeezes my vision and I’m forced to lean into the wall for support.

  I must’ve bled more than I realized.

  Once the dizziness passes, I uncouple the halves of my spacesuit and dump them into the corner. Feeling blessedly insubstantial without my weighted boots, I limp-hop after my host.

  On the other side of the cylinder is a kitchen. Empty bottles of protein and fiber filament are scattered along the counter, flecks of sucrose like tiny coins. Atkinson is cueing up a dish from one of two 3D printers. It occurs to me that for a kitchen to be out here, there must be someone to use it.

  Someone like Mercer.

  But if Mercer was here, he must have given up his post after shutting down Aster. No chance he would have simply let Atkinson inside.

  The printer comes to life, clicking and spinning as Atkinson lays out a pair of plates. Food begins to appear in complex layers—chicken patties out of protein, followed by chopped carrots and blobs of mashed potatoes. He selects a bottle of gravy, pouring a generous dollop over both plates without saying a word.

  While he finishes, I sink onto one of the stools at the counter.

  “Eat quick,” he says as he slides a plate in front of me. “We can’t stay long.”

  I stare at the food.

  “Atkinson,” I begin. “How did—”

  “Marcus.”

  “Okay. Marcus. How did you get out here? And why hasn’t Dosset come after you?”

  “I imagine he’s had other things on his mind,” Atkinson says evasively, picking up a fork and digging into his chicken. He chews loudly. “What about you? How did you get away? Did Dosset send you?”

  “No,” I say. “I came on my own.”

  He considers this for a moment and then chuckles. I notice his eyes still have a glassy quality to them. Like they did just before he fled the colony.

  “Excellent,” he says. “This is excellent. Just the twist we needed, to flip things around on him. You’ll help me, won’t you?”

  “Help you what?” I ask warily.

  “Get back at him,” says Atkinson. “Free the others.”

  My fork wavers above the mashed potatoes.

  “I think it might be too late for that. When you left, we tried to stop him. It just blew up in our faces. He saw it all coming.”

  “Yes,” he says. “But you didn’t know what I know.”

  “What do you mean?” He stuffs his mouth with more food, and I realize how frustrated I feel. At how casual he’s being, at how nothing is making any sense. “What is this? Why hasn’t Dosset sent anyone
after you, Marcus?”

  “As I said, I’m certain he’s had more pressing things on his mind. Also, he probably assumes that I’m dead. It isn’t easy to get here without a rover, as you must have noticed.”

  “I noticed,” I say. “So you took a rover?”

  “No. I took a detour to avoid the crags, following a pair of tread marks through a ravine. Along the way, a rover passed me. When I arrived here, the dome was empty.”

  “Right,” I mutter. I should’ve had the sense to pay more attention to the path. If I had, I might have avoided my own perilous journey.

  “Well, I’m glad you made it,” says Atkinson. “Those pits are volatile.”

  I grunt in assent. “I’m not sure what Aster was doing to the planet, but it seems like she made a pretty big mess of it.”

  He glances at me sharply and then he laughs—high, sudden, and startling.

  “Mess? This is no mess. It’s life, Lizzy. This is what life is, in its purest form. Chaotic, untamed. Everything doing what it must in order to survive.”

  “So this is what we expected?” I ask in disbelief. Despite nearly a week of poor eating, I find that my appetite is gone. “The smoke and the hailstorms… you’re saying that’s normal?”

  “Those aren’t even the worst of it,” he says almost proudly. “But no, this isn’t what we expected. Creating life, you can’t know what to expect. It’s always different. And things have moved at an incredible pace. So much faster than Dosset, or anyone, could have predicted.”

  Above us, the drum of hail grows stronger.

  “Until Dosset shut it down,” I say, unnerved. “He stopped the terraforming. Unless…” A suspicion takes shape. “Unless you started it up again.”

  But he’s already shaking his head.

  “Lizzy, you don’t understand. I have no reason to put Aster back online. Her job is already finished.” He looks me dead in the eyes. “The planet has been habitable for weeks. From this point, we just need to let nature do her work.”

  I grip the edge of the counter, as if by holding onto something physical I can force it all to make sense. Finished? How can it be finished? No one could live out there.

  Atkinson sets down his fork and pushes back his empty plate, standing.

  “Come along, Lizzy. I will show you.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Atkinson leads me out of the kitchen, past the exterior airlock, beneath the stairs, and around the perimeter of the glass cylinder. We reach a door with rubber seals and he tugs it open, ushering me into the hive of plants. Cold air swirls against my body, chilling me to the bone, rippling my sticky jumpsuit, whipping stray hairs around my head.

  The door has hardly closed before my chest grows tight. I try to catch my breath, but again I can’t. No matter how deep I suck the air, it still feels shallow and quick.

  My heart begins to race.

  “It’s just low air pressure,” Atkinson tells me, seeing my struggle. “Like being at high altitude. There isn’t enough oxygen in the air. Your lungs are just trying to keep up with the levels your body is accustomed to.”

  Rather than waste my breath on a reply, I nod.

  There’s no clear path, so we just walk right into the underbrush, feathery plants slapping at our arms and faces. When we reach the center, it’s like the eye of a storm: Mesh trellises loop in an exaggerated circle, forming a tower of empty space from the ceiling to the floor.

  And right at the center is a device throbbing softly like a sleeping animal.

  It’s about the size of an automobile—round and squat, with a thousand tiny vents that remind me of gills on a fish, the panels idly fluctuating. The whole sphere is choked with moss, standing upon four convex legs, like a hunched beetle. Even though the indicator light is set to “Dormant,” I still feel warmth radiating off of it in a ghost of dry heat.

  Looking up, I see that the normal thermoplastic roof has been replaced with the same tight mesh, likely working as a shield against the persistent hail. Inky clouds roll swiftly along. But for now, the hail has stopped again.

  Understanding funnels through me.

  “Is this…?”

  “Aster,” confirms Atkinson. He leans against a carbon railing, the final barrier between us and the terraformer. Still short of breath, I lean against it too. “You may not know this, but every doctor who came to Mars had dual specialties, in case anyone got hurt. Mine were psychology and engineering.” He stretches his hands over the waves of heat. “Seeing Aster in person is… truly inspiring. She really is a technological wonder.”

  Following his gaze, I’m again struck by the feeling that the machine didn’t just produce life—the engine itself is living. Like the heart of the dome, beating even as it sleeps.

  “I was very surprised, and a little disappointed, to find she had indeed been put to rest,” he murmurs. “But then I saw the readouts and knew why.”

  “There was no use in keeping her online,” I say, again recalling Dosset’s words. “Her job was already finished.”

  “Well, yes,” says Atkinson, fidgeting. “It was.”

  He lapses into silence, staring wistfully at the machine. I fold my arms. Maybe it’s my difficulty breathing, but I’m growing impatient again.

  “So you spent nearly a day getting here. What was next? You were going to steal some food and then live off the fertile new land?”

  He stops flexing his hands.

  “I… I don’t know,” he says. “I was still forming a plan when you arrived. But your arrival changes everything.”

  “Does it,” I mutter. “And how does it do that, exactly?”

  “You… you are the key to getting back at Dosset for what he did to me. For what he did to you!” He runs a hand through his filthy hair, lank with the dust of Mars. “If not for him, the rest of the doctors would know that Mars is habitable. They could leave the domes. They could be free to inhabit a new world! But his obsession with control has led him to push us into these positions. That’s why you’re such a fortunate asset. You can change things. Can’t you? You know what everyone is thinking. You have the same tools he has.”

  His words are like gasoline poured on the fire of my anger. Because this all feels too familiar, reminding me of the exact way Dosset thinks about me. I’m not about to be used for someone else’s purposes. Not anymore.

  “I don’t think so,” I say hotly.

  He blinks at me.

  “W-what?”

  “I’m not an asset. I’m a person. And even if we were able to work out a plan to bring Dosset down—which I’m not convinced we are—I want some answers before we even think about going back there.”

  “Oh.” He stands a little straighter. “Um, of course. What do you want to know?”

  “First, I’m not following this whole ‘Aster is finished’ idea. That”—I jab a finger at the sky—“is not habitable. At least not by my standards.”

  “It is by ours,” he says simply. “According to science, I mean. For example, think of the deciduous forests in the biomes. They must be weeded and watered often in their infancy. But after a time they become self-sustaining. When leaves are shed, they simply become part of the fertilizing ecosystem of the forest floor and help the plants to grow further. So it is with Aster. Her job was to get the planet started, beginning here.” He gestures at a snarl of vines held back by the mesh. “Now that Mars has reached a certain maturity, her own weather will carry bacteria and moisture around the globe.”

  “But the plants in the biomes—”

  “Will preserve the species of Earth,” says Atkinson. “But new species will grow too, be it from seeds and bacteria hidden beneath the crust or simply because of evolution.”

  It’s hard to wrap my head around. The idea that we could live out here is appalling—and revolutionary to our strategy against Dosset. All we’d have to do is find a way to free the cadets, and we could start a new life out here. Just as Atkinson said.

  But as he also pointed out, the plane
t is chaotic. How would we grow crops in this new soil, or raise a forest in this valley of smoke and hail? Even with all of my memories and all of the ideas and solutions that come with them, it seems like an impossible task.

  Again I have an inkling that this was why Dosset wasn’t in a hurry to leave the domes. Which makes me even angrier as I realize that, yet again, I might agree with him.

  “Let’s back up,” I say, massaging my forehead, “to why I’m an asset.”

  “Well, you have the Memory Bank.”

  “Yes. Tell me why.”

  “Why?”

  “What made you pick me?” I ask. “Even better, what made you steal the Memory Bank in the first place?”

  “I… I already told you, I don’t remember why I picked you,” he murmurs, reaching for his bandages again. But I grab his wrist, stopping him.

  “You said you don’t remember that night because of the amnesia from the Verced,” I say sternly. “But people don’t just up and do things like that. There’s a pattern. Something motivated you. So let’s back up to the part where you decided you had a reason to steal the Memory Bank and go from there.”

  He half-shrugs, the gesture oddly reminiscent of a guilty child.

  “It was during a therapy session. One of my cadets, Romesh, asked me a question in regard to Earth. About something he couldn’t remember. It made me question the Revisions, as I do from time to time. Whether or not we should be doing them.”

  I release his hand.

  “And?”

  “And when I thought about how we began this format, this weekly memory alteration, I realized I couldn’t recall. I think there was a vote at one time. But when I think about it, all the memories are warped. It’s not like when he stole my… my family.” His expression becomes tight. “These memories aren’t missing. They’re skewed. And I began to wonder if Dosset had changed the minds of the doctors as well. Maybe not just changed them by simply altering memories, but maybe he… he…”

  “He what?” I press.

  “Maybe he created them,” Atkinson finishes.

  In my mind, everything Romie told us about memories and suggestion comes floating back. How easy would it be for Dosset to not only erase our memories but create entirely new ones? In a way, isn’t that precisely what Atkinson did when he gave me the Memory Bank? He created new memories in my mind—even if they were real, once.