By Lucas Yao
T-minus twenty-four hours. Bright and early, the festivities have already begun, banquets held in our honor across the world, banners in our hometowns plastered with our faces, speeches commending us for our bravery.
As we have been briefed, they start with a celebration of our past. We take our seats at the special tables reserved for us, the ones with navy blue tablecloths rimmed with gold to match the insignias on our chests. We smile and wave at the screaming crowds in the plazas and fields and stadiums in front of us. Some of the crowds we face fade off into the distance, speckled viewers in seemingly endless grassy fields capped in searing blue skies. Some end abruptly where the seating stops, walls of concert halls with grand wooden ceilings reflecting their excitement back at us.
Some of us also buzz with that excitement, some of us only with nerves. We’ve had public appearances before—interviews, parades and signings—but nothing like this. Nothing like the whole world watching. Nothing like our faces projected on screens as large as buildings in front of oceans of people. Some of us bask in the attention, hearts swelling and smiles burning our cheeks. Some of us have already sweated through our uniforms despite the cool breeze or because of the heat and are afraid to wave to the crowd lest they see the stains under our arms.
We are introduced by our figureheads, presidents and prime ministers and royalty, as though there is anyone alive who does not know who we are. They’ve known who we are longer than we have, longer than we’ve been conscious. Our purpose is described, as though there is anyone alive who does not know why we live. Most of them have known for longer than we’ve been alive. And the origin of the Message, as though there is anyone alive who does not know it, is divulged through booming speakers.
A generation ago, our figureheads tell the hushed crowd, Earth received a pod from beyond our galaxy. It crashed into the great ocean and was recovered by a group of nearby fishermen. It had been badly damaged, contents degraded nearly beyond recognition, but our historians and engineers knew what it was. Its technology, or the remains thereof, was a signature of an ancient era, a small capsule containing a short segment of base four code that could be translated to a binary directive. This technology was popular during what was thought to be the end of days, a bleak era when hope for the future was low, and longing for a world beyond the then-ruined planet was high, when some believed fleeing was the only solution. It was to be sent out if those who fled the Earth so long ago ever reached a habitable planet, if they ever successfully set up a colony.
The problem was, the speakers continue, while some aspects of the small pod’s script had been decoded, large portions that dictated where it had come from were lost, destroyed beyond salvation upon atmospheric entry, or simply due to time. So many had fled to so many fabled destinations that there was no chance of knowing its exact origins. Its trajectory was mapped beyond the edge of the galaxy, but past a certain point, mobile gravitational fields and unknown impacts and time dilations provided too many variables for accurate calculations. Based on what little of the contents had been decoded, a few hundred potential destinations were determined.
For them, a few hundred out of tens of thousands was little enough.
They celebrate the living proof of our history, and the people drink to our past.
T-minus twelve hours. As we have been briefed, the midday event celebrates our present. We are ushered to pedestals, stages, and podiums, with cameras staring and spotlights glaring.
Remember to smile, they tell us, and we smile and wave at the screaming crowds we cannot see past the blinding glow that draws sweat to our brows.
While the more outgoing of us feel the cheers like a summer sun, some of us have burned through what little energy we regained in the brief respite between events and now wither slowly under the stage lights. In our peripheries, we see the image of ourselves replaced by that of the new speakers, the scientists directly responsible for our existence. A hush falls over the crowd.
The scientists start to speak of our noble mothers, so moved by the possibility of reconnection that they offered their bodies, their children, their lives.
We all learned the tale of our creation when we were old enough to understand, the tale they now spin onstage. Some of us, when we were old enough, learned a different tale. While our mothers smile and wave, practiced tears in their eyes real enough to trigger cries from the audience, our birth mothers are not here.
Some of us do not know this; some of us still believe the women seated in the audience to be our true mothers. Those of us who know were told, when we were old enough, that our mothers were chosen for their desirable characteristics, good health, good fitness, and good history. We were told our mothers were poor, homeless, or criminal, and they’d been offered money or housing or lightened sentences in return for carrying to term a child with genetically modified DNA, with an inserted segment of code that made no protein but would instead read the Message to anyone who sequenced it and translated the base four code of our genes to a computer’s binary. We were told we were orphans, convenient for genetic modification with few objections from the masses until it was too late to protest.
Those of us that know whispered to one another behind the backs of our mothers and teachers and trainers, swapping stories after lights out and ridiculing the more unlikely tales – stories from the attention-seekers among us about kidnapped children and clones or, even better, changelings left behind so our real mothers would never even know we were missing. These stories were always met with a smack to the back of the head and a snarky, Why use a real kid if you can just make clones, stupid? and we’d continue exchanging real stories. Of all the real stories we heard, our story was always the correct one, and everyone else had misunderstood, misheard, or was flat-out wrong.
But our story doesn’t matter, only the one recounted now onstage.
Whatever the real story, however we came to be, every cell in our body contains the Message encoded using the same technology contained in the capsule we had received, a Message that would last hundreds of thousands of light years when cryogenically frozen. Even the most rebellious among us feels a twinge of pride as the crowds applaud our existence, as the speakers laud the mothers who raised us.
They celebrate the living proof of their successes, and the people drink to our present.
T-minus eight hours. There are festivities throughout the night where the people drink to our future, but we retire early to bed. We wave to the crowds as we’re ushered away, puff out our chests so the insignia over our hearts is prominently displayed, a navy blue double helix with seven connecting bars, the three in the center gleaming gold. We see the countdown clocks posted on every screen and tremble with excitement.
We all tremble, not all with excitement. Many of us had the shadows under our eyes edited out of the headshots they took last month for this final day. In the middle of the night, we hear some of us crying out for our mothers. None of us would ever admit to it, but it’s not hard to trace a cry in a silent dark.
Our mothers do not answer our cries anymore. We are old enough to understand everything they want us to understand, so they decided we have no need for mothers and released them from their daily duties. Now, when we drag ourselves awake, drenched in sweat in the dead of night, we repeat what our mothers told us when we were children. We are special. We are loved. We are hope. We are special. We are special.
To put ourselves back to sleep, we mutter to ourselves the story our mothers used to tell us at bedtime. Bear needed food for the winter, so he ate and ate until he had no more. But it wasn’t enough, and so Bear started taking from others. He took from Rabbit, and he took from Fox, and he took from Deer, and he took and took until none of them had enough, until the forest was barren.
When Rabbit and Fox and Deer came knocking on Bear’s cave, angry and hungry, Bear told them they should have stored more food like he did if they didn’t want to starve. Bear didn’t listen to their angry cries that he had taken their food.
And what of the forest? asked Rabbit.
You’ve taken all the seeds and all the fish eggs and all the roots, said Fox.
There will be nothing for any of us next winter, said Deer.
Bear laughed at them and said, Look how much I have secured for myself! There is more food now than there has been in any winter before. The forest will provide for me next year as it has this year, as it has every year before.
And he closed his cave off to the world.
Well, Rabbit and Fox and Deer didn’t know what to do. Without food, there was very little chance they would survive the winter.
Why not leave? asked Deer, Surely there is food beyond the forest!
Fox replied, But this is our home!
Rabbit added, Why should we leave our home because of Bear’s actions?
Deer looked around at the barren forest. If you stay, you will die, Deer said, and ran to the edge of the forest and beyond.
Rabbit perished in the cold. Fox, thanks to Rabbit’s contribution, just barely survived. Come spring, no fruit blossomed for there were no seeds to sprout them; no trees grew for there were no roots to anchor them; no fish swam for there were no eggs to hatch them. And Fox was left to struggle in the naked summer.
We remember hearing the story when we were children, curled up in our mothers’ arms with our blankets pulled up to our chins. We didn’t know then what we were, why we were. We didn’t know our mothers weren’t our mothers, didn’t know why they told us this story as they held us in their arms, as we kneeled at their feet, as they sat at the ends of our beds. We booed Bear when appropriate and gasped when Rabbit died. Some of us asked about the other little animals in the forest. Did they leave? Did they survive?
They told us that not everyone left for greener pastures. Not everyone was lucky enough; some of them put it. Many chose to stay, others put it. They believed the damage could be fixed.
We asked, then, why Deer didn’t stay to help regrow the forest like Fox did. They told us that not every little animal thought the forest could be saved. Many thought their only option was to find another forest in which to start anew. Some of them told us the ones who left felt lucky to fulfill their dreams of exploring the world beyond. And when they found a new forest, we were told, a lush and vibrant haven greener than any tree in their old forest had been, they would send for the animals left in the ruins to join them.
Was the forest saved? we asked. Our mothers smiled, always that same smile like they knew something we weren’t privy to, and turned off the lamps on our bedside tables, leaving only our star-shaped nightlights faintly glowing a warm yellow. In the dark, our mothers softly told us we would one day meet Deer, beyond the edges of the forest, to deliver our Message. Because we are special. Because we were chosen. Because we are hope.
And we fall asleep telling ourselves that.
T-minus sixty minutes.
All of us are prepared in the morning, and none of us are ready. Even the biggest and strongest and most self-assured wavers when we don our space suits for the last time, for the first time outside of simulation.
Our mothers accompany us as cameras follow our every move. Some of them hold our gloved hands, brush our hair back, stroke our cheeks with their thumbs, and tell us how beautiful we are, how brave we are, how grown we look, how proud they are of us. Some of them just march us soundlessly to the thick little pressurized door, not giving us time to even look behind us at the grounds and the far-off mountains, forests, and deserts. Those of us who see the wetlands and plains and thriving cities feel a heaviness in our hearts and crane our necks as far as we can to keep looking at that last glimpse of the world we grew up in.
They double-check our helmets and suits, then buckle us into our seats with our backs to the Earth. Some of them quietly ask if we are nervous, if we are scared. Some of us are. Some of us are terrified, sick to our stomachs, and sure we will throw up in our helmets. Some of us, deep down, are excited, a tremor so deep in our bones no x-ray could picture it. We shake our heads no. This is what we were trained for. This is what we were made for. We may never reach our destinations, but our DNA will, frozen for hundreds, maybe thousands of years in the cold and dark of outer space.
Above us, we see the sky, bright blue and clear for some, gray and cloudy for some, navy and still twinkling for some. We feel below us the rumble of the engines, rolling fire building to a roar as the minutes count down, then the seconds. T-minus ten. Nine. Eight. We feel our hearts shaking syncopated with the trembling cabin. Seven. Six. Five. Our eyes widen, and our breath shrinks with each inhale. Four. Three. Two.
One.
Some of us become the atoms we came from. We rain down upon the Earth, scatter the Message into the atmosphere, back to our mothers.
More of us rise into the heavens and beyond. Most of us lose consciousness from the weight of the sky pressing down into our bones. We do not see the universe growing larger, the air growing thinner, the sky receding into our memory. Few of us stay awake, feel every ounce of our planet desperately clinging to us, grasping at us as we try to break free. Those of us who do keep the Message in our minds repeat it to ourselves, a mantra to still our racing hearts: We are still here. We are still alive. We are still here. We are still alive.
We are still here.
Leave a Reply