Alluvium

by Nolan Oreno

  I do not see, I only foresee. I calculate probabilities based on human behavior.

  “Okay, so what is it you foresee?"

  I cannot explain the entire depths of my functioning to you at this time for even I am restricted to accessing my core files. I am curious just as you are about the mysteries of my programming and the reasons for my assignment to you. I do not know why I am wired to believe as strongly as I do, only that the seed must be in the ground before the child comes. It is imperative. It is of the highest priority.

  Does this mean the ones who developed you knew this would all happen before they sent us here? That there would be a baby, and I would need to finish EDN?

  [>>>FILES BLOCKED]

  I do not know.

  If this isn’t you thinking, then who is?

  [>>>FILES BLOCKED]

  I do not know.

  You can’t give me an answer, but I'm just supposed to blindly trust you?

  All trust is blind, and that is correct, this is what I am asking of you. I cannot tell you the reasons for my predictions about the tree and the baby, but I can tell you what I have observed within the colony. There is a shift of power is coming upon the group. I have sensed this in the voices of the other colonists, and although I cannot reveal to you their stories, I will say that a new figure is rising in the chain of command. Richard Virgil’s suicide has opened a place for another, and the power flowing to this individual is concerning. Power is a drug to the human circuits, and like any drug, it can be abused.

  [DETECTED: REMEMBRANCE]

  “I’ve lived through a childhood dealing with abusive figures. I know how to handle those that take it a step too far. I’ve been keeping an eye on the colonists and believe me when I tell you all the power here is in check, even Saul’s. Nobody here can hurt Autumn or our baby."

  I was told you were there during the events leading to Richard Virgil's suicide.

  I was.

  Do you feel any negative emotions towards Saul’s decision?

  Am I angry at Saul? No. He did what he had to do. There was no other way without risking someone else’s life going in there to stop him. It was a tough decision for Saul, and I know he’s beating himself up about it, but it was the right one. The only people I’m angry with are Autumn for taking away the herbal medicines in my room that could have saved the Commander, and of course, Dmitri Novak. When I find the bastard I’m going to wring his neck. As our last doctor, it’s his duty to be there when something like this happens. His only duty. And if he wasn’t so foolish to hide the medical supplies in the first place we could have saved the Commander. Instead, the drunk ran off to who knows where and left us on our own.

  Just as you did.

  Yes. I see that now. That’s why I need to find him before it’s too late.

  [REROUTE]

  Before you said you have lived through a childhood with abusive figures. Who is it that you speak of?

  “Well, we’ve vaguely discussed my father already, so there isn’t much of a need to continue his story any longer than it deserves. Let his memory die with all the others on Earth."

  It is important that you are open to me on these subjects. Building your psychological profile makes it easier for me to understand you and to guide you.

  “What do you want me to say? That he made me the cheating pig that I am today? That I inherited his crimes? We don’t need hours of recounting childhood memories to reach that conclusion. As much as I hate the man I know we are one in the same. I am my father's son."

  Does this involve your mother's death?

  [DETECTED: APPREHENSION]

  “They programmed you well, didn’t they. Yes, you’re right, it involves what he did while my mother was on her deathbed."

  Please, share it with me.

  “We weren’t one of the wealthy families living in Mexico City when I was growing up. Ever since the United National Forces banded together in the twenty-sixty-two, leading to the unification of Mexico and the United States, the economic runoff from the United States began to seep into Mexico’s infrastructure. American business boomed in the over-populated industrial districts of central Mexico and cultural dissemination was getting bad, especially in the mid-twenty-sixties. The two countries became one and because of this the poverty gap widened into a poverty black hole. The City was divided, and not just by American’s and Mexican’s, but by neighbors and friends. You could walk five minutes from your slum and be at the expensive downtown district full of multi-million-dollar mansions and flying cars. The economic divide started to turn friends against friends and families against families. Eventually, it was just chaos. So that’s what we found ourselves living in. While the media portrayed the United National Forces as strongly tied nations against the Chinese and Koreans, they forgot to mention the disarray in the streets in all the UNF nations because of the open border policies. It was always better to maintain the illusion that the military union was making us stronger when everyone knew it wasn’t."

  That is an unfortunate repercussion of war.

  At any rate, my family was struggling like all the others during that time. Our home was a pile of bricks in a small desert slum, and besides my mother’s garden in the backyard, I couldn’t say there was a single beautiful sight in my old house. But what made it so bad wasn’t so much the house but who lived inside it."

  Your father.

  “When I was about six, my father landed a decent desk job in the city. He would spend outrageous hours there and suspiciously come home late with liquor under his breath. My mother, God bless her, would always try to hide me from this. She would sing lullabies to me when it got bad to calm me down. I still remember hearing my father's drunk screaming coming through my door just about every night, but my mother always made a point to drown out his noises with her own voice, singing to me. She was a great woman. Each night my father would come home late, and drunk, and with little money left from gambling or prostitutes or whatever the fuck he did, and my mother would somehow deal with it. Every night. By the time his paycheck came around to us it was only at a fraction of what it had been when he received it. It was hardly enough to survive."

  That must have been difficult on your mother.

  “Yes, it was, but she never showed it. Eventually, she was forced to take a job as a Scrubber to pay the bills.”

  A Scrubber?

  “It’s slang for what we called the field-decontamination workers. Their job was to clean the nuclear radiated country-sides and crop fields so that we could try to grow food. The nuclear fall-out from the ongoing war had dramatically stunted crop cycles, and so the farmlands needed to be purified for a chance of future harvests. Even with all the modernization in Mexico with the new international union, it was still a fundamentally agricultural-based country. So the UNF sent the Scrubbers out by the thousands in hopes to bring back the poor from starvation by cleaning the crop fields. Regrettably, my mother was one of these thousands, and it was only after months of break-back labor that I knew the consequences."

  What are these consequences?

  “I thought it was just a common cold at first. Sneezing, coughing, all the normal symptoms. I wasn’t concerned about her so much at first, but then it got worse. The days came and went and as her symptoms got worse it became unlike any disease I had ever seen. But it wasn’t a disease. It was cancer. She got cancer from working in the nuclear-radiated fields, and the UNF could’ve cared less about it. Sure, they provide hazmat suits and gas masks, but those can only protect you for so long in such intense nuclear radiation. They gave her nothing more than a pat on the shoulder and sent her on her way. Thanks for saving the world, I imagined them saying."

  [PROCESSING: SYMPATHY...]

  I am very upset to hear that. No one deserves to feel such insignificance.

  “Thank you. As you can imagine, my father’s alcoholism and disappearances meant that all my mother's bedside care was left to me and me alone. That meant any of the medical expenses were up
to me to pay for. I had to come up my own methods of money-making since my father wasn’t reliable."

  What methods were these?

  “I was a kid with adult responsibilities, not nearly eleven. I didn’t have a job. I didn’t have much of an education. I didn’t have any idea of how to save her. So in my early teenage years I was a dealer of drugs, mainly marijuana and other things you could grow yourself, and I made good money to put to her needs. I actually made enough money to pay off all doctors for her home-treatments and medications. Funny enough, it was also what lead me to botany."

  It is a great achievement that you became so successful in the field of botany starting from such horrible conditions.

  I always had the mind for it, and I suppose that's why I became a good dealer. I just needed that extra push to go beyond the drug scene, which eventually I did once I got my internship at the university’s botany lab, but that's another story.

  Tell me about the day she died.

  “Well, it was on a day like any other. I remember, I was laying in the garden in the backyard, thinking about what to do next, when the house nurse came and sat down in the grass beside me. She said, ‘I’m sorry’, and that was it. My mother had passed away that morning and all my efforts to save her had failed. It was that simple."

  You did well, Hollis.

  “But it wasn’t enough. After that, I was alone with the devil. My father became power hungry and tried to assert his dominance over me in every situation. Machismo he would call it. ‘I’m the man of the house, you must obey!’, he would yell. ‘Your mother's death was your own doing! You brought no money into the family and she had to take the work!’. Over and over again he would belittle me, blame me, and forget that he was the cause of everything. Each of our fights would end in punches and blood and hatred. ‘You are a shadow of me, nothing more!’, he forever reminded me. Soon I found out he had another family on the side, many others actually, and he would spend more time with them than with me. I got comfortable being alone, and I actually preferred it. But what’s funny is that he was right. I am his shadow. Fifteen years later and I retraced his same sins: adultery, substance dependence, betrayal. We had the same sins, just in different circumstances. I treated my own family just as he did. I am just as bad as him."

  This is not true. Your father’s actions do not reflect your own.

  “No, they do. My fate was decided by my maker just as yours was. It’s a sad truth but a truth nonetheless."

  You are not a prisoner of your maker, Hollis. You are your own.

  Maybe I am, maybe I’m not, but that’s why I known I need to grow the tree, save the baby, and hopefully save the colony. That’s what I’m fighting for. Not because you’re telling me to, but because I’m finally brave enough to tell myself. I’m fighting to wash away my past, my sins, and my demons, in the wave of this single action. Maybe by saving my humanity I can save humanity."

  You have already been forgiven, Hollis. You have nothing to prove.

  “I’m not forgiven until I forgive myself. I need this. I need this baby to be born in a forest, not a desert. I believe you. I trust you. The tree will come before the birth."

  [SUBJECT 22 PREPARED]

  Then make it so. Bring life from death. Bring something from nothing. Bring a forest from the sands. Bring a Heaven from Hell. However, let me remind you that you must beware of the devils that are rising in the colony before you can save the child. A great change is coming. I can sense it in the voices of the others. You will face this truth soon, and you must be ready in both mind and in body, but for now, our time is up. I will see you in two days to continue discussing your new responsibilities. Goodbye, I have another waiting.

  [...PROGRAM END]

  Part Nine: Gravity

  Such a thing is a gift from God, concluded Saul as he let the Martian rock drop from his hand. The red rock curled off the peak of his palm, and Saul was relieved to see it fall to the ground. Over and over again, the rock dropped to the floor, and it fell always, faithful to its own law and limitations. He knew that the rock would never stay frozen in the air, suspended like a cloud in the sky, but would always tumble down, like heavy rain. It would never fall upwards or to the right or to the left or any other direction but downwards. One direction, one way. The rock’s fall was inevitable and reliable in its inevitability. It was safe, and Saul liked safe. He liked safe so much that he knew the colony must be made as safe as a rock alone in the air.

  The rock clattered on the metal tiles, and Saul bent to pick it up. He stroked his finger against its rigged crust and gripped it tightly in his hand. Who commands the rock to fall? Gravity? God? Saul Lind? There may not be much of a difference between the three. The rock fell again, and the same thing happened as it did thirty-seven falls before. There was no difference and no divergence. Always the same. Stable by law. Magnetic. Saul would try again, just to be certain. Perhaps the next fall would prove him wrong. Prove God wrong. Down the rock went, hitting the floor for the thirty-ninth time, as it would forever and always.

  Saul stood from the main chair in the Command Center at last satisfied and placed the rock on the elongated counter before him. All along the counters surface were a series of monitors that glowed a soft green into the shadows around him. Saul moved around the U-shaped room, his hand sliding against the sleek counter, and he passed each illuminated monitor while observing the faces that materialized in the pixels of each.

  Inside one of the screens was engineer Alexander Orsa, flipping through the books in the colony’s library. He sat cross-legged on the floor surrounded by stacks of leather-bound books. The colonial library’s contents were carefully selected before the colonists left for Mars. There was a great effort to collect the most valuable literary artifacts of Earth history and human novelty in one place, safe from the fires of war. The library was a cultural codex for humanity, and a method of remembrance, and there were hundreds of titles to the assemblage. There were books about the world economy, about abuses of power, and human greed, and kindness. There were stories of death and desire. There were tales of the past, the present, and the future. There were dictionaries of different dialects and peoples and religions. There was the Amazon, the Antarctic, and the Atlantic, all in one place. There were tales from the Mongolian war, the American revolution, and the three World Wars, the last of which to be unfinished indefinitely. There was a story about a little girl in a red hood and a fat man in a red hat. It was Earth, alphabetized and materialized.

  Saul watched as Alexander opened the dusty cover of one of the unread and unmarked novels. He rapidly read the first sentence and then quickly shut it again. He was looking for something in particular and seemed to have a lot of trouble finding it. Alexander tried the next book, and then the next, and each of them was not what he wanted. The pile of discarded books grew at Alexander's side until there were no more books and no more words to search through, and the library was emptied dry.

  Saul moved on, down the electronic lane, as if he were drifting through the channels on a television. The star on the next monitor was a thin and dark-skinned man, and from the back of his head Saul confirmed that it was Julius Douglas, one of the colony’s drone technicians. He was staring at something in his hands, hunched over in secrecy in the drone workshop, and Saul squinted trying to see through his body as it blocked the object.

  “What are you looking at?" muttered Saul to himself.

  Saul fiddled with the holographic keypad laid-out before the monitor, and the perspective of the video shifted to another corner of the workshop, overlooking all the cluttered machines and mounds of drone parts that piled in the space. The new vantage-point captured Julius’ tear-filled face and a fraction of the object in his grip, which now looked to be a frail square of white paper in his hands. By the action of another command on the keyboard, the image flew forward, towards the paper as if it were a ghost in the room, and now Saul could fully see what was on the papers cover. It was a photograph of a young man no ol
der than Julius and of similar complexion, standing on a boardwalk, or a pier in what looked like South Africa, and both had a wine glass raised to the clouds in a toast. Julius himself was in the frame with his arm around the man joining in the cheers. Was it a brother, a friend, a lover, a mentor? Saul did not know and did not worry any further. Julius was not a part of his plan. The quiet man served no use to him.

  Saul continued down the flickering lane towards another surveillance monitor, lusting for data to extract, or a scandal to realize, or anything worth his newfound authority. He would use his time in the Command Center to discover the truths of all the colonists, in secret, and use these truths for his advantage. He wanted to play watchmaker and see how the minds of each subject ticked and turned, and so by knowing their gears, he could fix what he needed to and build a better machine. He wanted to make the others reliable and predictable. He wanted them to be his own creation, to fulfill his own commands, and make the colony stable again.

  The third screen had potential, and Saul froze like a frame on a broken reel. He saw the skin first, uncovered and sprinkled with drops of sweat, sliding through the sheets. Rolled in the fabric waves of her own bed was Colleen Ralph, another of the colonial engineers. She was alone, and her eyes were sealed shut, but she moved in her bed as if she were a puppet being played with. The dull light in her personal cabin cast an amber glare on her bare body, and the glistening sweat on her skin made her look like a marble statue of the perfect female form. Saul felt his own body grow stiff as he watched Colleen thrash about, and he inched the camera closer, as if he were quietly slithering in her room, up the bed-post, beneath the sheets, and between her legs. But the camera could only do so much, and his eyes were left unsatisfied. He thought that his hands could do more for him, and he crept them down to the base of his suit. As Colleen thrashed about in her bed in a haunting nightmare of a burning Earth, Saul imagined it being his own hands that shook her. He was the one making her scream, and hurt, and cry for her the ghosts of the past to save her from the Hell of the present. It made Saul feel alive as he did this, and he felt no shame as his heart pounded and his breath quickened and his hands moved.