Shaul Malka’s no fool – he knows that he’s terminally fucked. Another rejection sends him to the floor of his apartment, squealing into a pillow so the neighbors won’t come over to complain again. He knows that there isn’t a single thing he can do or think to ease the pain. He’s trapped, cursed with a limbic system that screams at him to procreate as it watches another chance sail past, even if he fails to grasp it precisely because his brain wouldn’t give him a minute’s rest.
Shaul spends his years sailing from one devastating crush to another, usually on women who work at the same fertility clinic as him. Every time one of them shows up in his life he falls in love with her so deeply, so painfully, that he cannot think of anything else, cannot sleep, cannot enjoy anything. Yes, he knows how pathetic and desperate that sounds. His mind glorifies their image into something holy he knows in his prefrontal cortex to be impossible, yet still he is forced to believe.
His genes don’t care this is exactly that kind of stress that makes him so unappealing to women. So un-fucking-cool. And that’s the tragedy: he’s actually a pretty chill guy, and any of these women would have liked him if they’d met him in any other context. He’s not handsome, but not ugly either. Short, yeah, but he could have gotten over it if he had confidence. But no. It’s a vicious cycle that he goes through, the lack of confidence engendering further failure, each one taking away from his confidence, year after year after year.
It’s always the same thing: The girls join the clinic, he falls in love, tries to initiate small talk, fails miserably for about a year, and after they leave for something better, he sends a message, trying to hook up, with the results painfully obvious. Every rejection feels like a failed attempt to save his life – his terminal virginity is as awful as terminal cancer, as far as his genes are concerned.
Adding insult to injury, while others get to leave, Shaul is trapped in his job as a laboratory technician, making the same alterations to human DNA. The ones permitted by the government—boring stuff like cutting the defective genes that cause cystic fibrosis or Tay-Sachs out of embryos, and a little polygenetic screening on the side. Technically illegal, but practically decriminalized. When it costs so much to raise a single human being, it’s not unreasonable to grease a couple of hands to make sure that kid is above average. Nothing novel and exciting like super-intelligence or modified personality traits. The work is technical, repetitive, and there’s an added dimension of the humiliation itself: while Shaul fails to leave anything of himself behind, he is expected to help the winners make sure only the best parts of themselves are getting passed on.
The first year of the job was the easiest, the humiliation sweetened by the expectation of leaving, like the others had. But once he’d started interviewing, he realized there’s something about him that makes him suspicious to others, and that makes him anxious, and that anxiety only serves to make him act even more suspicious. Now, after years spent at a job that someone could be expected to do for a year, tops, his odds of reaching escape velocity grow smaller and smaller.
The bleaker his future gets, the greater the chunk of his free time he dedicates to his coping mechanisms – computer games, stripped to the shadow of what they’d been in Earth’s golden age, but still powerful skinner-boxes riding primal fantasies of brutal violence and triumph. And porn, that gets more toxic every year, until it becomes snuff proper. The hunt for more exciting content becomes harder, as each escalation burns off another level of sensitivity from his aging neurons.
Luckily, the same laws of game theory that had doomed him on the dating market provide a constant supply of ever-innovative entertainment. One night, as he is looking for new videos to excite his numb imagination, he comes across a whole archive of videos, seemingly from Mars, of POWs being tortured. The torturer seems to be following written instructions, but written by whom? Shaul’s curious, but his brain is too desperate for distraction to embark on anything as focus-intensive as a proper investigation. Like a rat with a lever hooked into its dopamine receptors, he knows that he’ll keep favoring the instant relief over long term gratification, and so the years pass.
His thirtieth birthday marks his failures in bold. He could have lived with having missed the excitement and adventure of youth, if he could have the privilege of fathering children. But he knows he won’t, and it’s killing him. It’s absurd, that something could evolve to kill itself, but his genes, he thinks as he rides a dick-shaped train back from work, were never supposed to face this kind of environment, this kind of oppression. He takes a bite out of a pre-wrapped cheese-flavored-fungus sandwich, grown on human waste. His brain did not evolve to deal with this shit.
Genetics are slow to evolve, and mankind had to adapt quickly in order to survive, so it created a secondary genome, coded not in DNA but in ideas, and quickly evolving. That worked for a while. The gods of the hunt were replaced by gods of harvest, and then with gods of science and justice. But at some point, the environment changed so quickly that the layer of ideas that mitigate the raw human and reality could no longer keep up. We stopped developing new traditions, new religions, but instead figured out, each for themselves, a jumble of philosophies, gathered as we went along as grownups (instead of learning them as children, as evolution planned for us). Just like a heavy dose of antibiotics could decimate your gut bacteria, leaving your digestive tract unguarded and vulnerable, so we found ourselves stripped bare, to our endemic ideas. And thus, man found himself defenseless in this alien new world.
Shaul wishes that he could have lived by his instincts, like the warriors on Mars, killing or being killed. He thinks it might have actually quenched a part of his soul, to be a hero like that. But he can’t. He’s too restricted to live, and too safe to die.
He decides to spend his money on one last birthday party. He orders stimulants from the local web, enough to kill himself with. He intends to take half of it first, then see if it gives him the courage needed to take the other half.
The customer service professional notifies Shaul that their usual policy of delivery times doesn’t apply in case of riots, so it might take the delivery as much as an hour to reach his residence.
Again? Is it about rent this time, or the rising oxygen prices? Either way, it’s always about children, in the end. Shaul’s not sure if etiquette demands that he tip the courier extra - it’s not Shaul’s fault people can’t afford to have children, or have those children breathe. He wasn’t going to have any children, and nobody cared about that. But still, being a generally good person, he multiplies the tip by one point five. Out of sympathy, if not empathy. God, how he hates that word. The drugs aren’t what gets him thrown outside, either.
Alone in his apartment, trying to keep his hand from shaking, he loads what seems like a reasonable amount of white powder onto a teaspoon and brings it up to his nose, realizes he has too much air in his lungs to snort forcefully, moves the spoon away from his face so he can exhale, emptying his lungs, then bring the spoon back under his nose, curses silently and snorts the powder as hard as he can.
The high is the best feeling Shaul has ever had. For once his default mode network is down regulated, and he finally knows what it’s like to be confident, happy, normal. The stimulants remove the shame, and as he lays on the floor, mumbling euphorically like a child, the casing of protective lies dissolves and he finally look at what’s going on inside of his mind. He sees that the porn has, even in its softer reincarnations, nothing to do with sex, but about watching someone having control over someone else. No wonder it’s so addictive - his traumatized brain seeks to believe a scenario where he is in control, and what’s a greater signifier of control than restricting someone else’s ability to breathe?
His genes always knew this—they’re tested every day, every minute. Even when a girl likes you for your personality, it’s just another test - IQ is just as dependent on your genes as your looks. They are testing your genes, and if you don’t pass, your genes die off. Can he blame his genes for wanting revenge?
But that’s naïve of him; that’s not the truth. The truth is that there is a gene inside of him, inside of every man. A gene that served so many of his ancestors that it became ubiquitous – and that gene mediates the shift in strategy that so many like him went through – when the you’re losing the game, stop playing by the rules.
The epiphany brings a great calm with it, or maybe it’s the other way around. He decides not to take the other half, to postpone his suicide for another twenty-four hours and goes to work as normal, more out of force of habit than actual necessity. When he returns home he takes the remaining stimulants, and watches a lot of Martian POW snuff, cross-referencing the time a video was made with the news from Mars itself; it takes him another night to figure out which of the Martian armies produces the videos. He does this night after night, postponing his suicide by another day, snorting more stimulants, connecting the dots, until finally he follows the trail of rat droppings all the way to the nest.
The videos were ordered by Ceresians, and for a fee, he can order one as well. No option for a live session, for reasons to do with both security and physics, but he can send his demands to the torturer, and get the results within twenty-four hours. It’s almost morning when he finally sends the request, still on, even though the stimulants should have worn off hours before, typing down one instruction after another in clear, technical language. He transfers the money to an account on Ceres, though he has no idea what a Martian army would use Ceresian Shekels for.
That’s not what gets him thrown out, either.
When the video arrives, Shaul’s life, whatever’s left of it, changes. He watches again, and again, and again. He catches every nuance: the alien looking, extreme expansion and contraction of a rib cage, the thrashing or helpless legs, knees bent inwards, the plethora of human sounds that can’t be precisely pinned down by words like ‘whimper’ or ‘sob’, but most of all he savors the expression of the torturer herself, like a child holding back tears, lower lip trembling. He keeps thinking about that, afterwards. Did the rest of the crew mock her for hesitating? Sunja Sunja, thought she was a psychopath, put some sand up a girl’s nose and now she’s traumatized. It doesn’t rhyme, but perhaps it does in whatever Hindi dialect that beat the others out of existence.
He doesn’t feel any guilt. After all, he isn’t the one causing the pain, and if he hadn’t put in the highest bid, the next bidder in the auction would have. And the Martian armies would have done it to each other even if there was no one paying, wouldn’t they? It’s not like he can save them, and even if he did, they would either fight in another Mars war, or be brought to Ceres as refugees, as if Ceres wasn’t crushed under the weight of those already. No, their lives were already rendered without value by circumstance. Why not have someone profit from it?
Shaul is free of guilt, that’s true, but he still feels shame. And that’s all right.
Shame is how your limbic system warns you not that what you’re doing is wrong, but that you should hide it from others, and Shaul heeds the advice of the older, wiser parts of his brain. Shaul has come to respect his genes. They were never the problem – it was the unnatural restrictions being imposed on him. The constant bombardment with the demand for empathy by society around him. They want you to be nicer than fucking evolution, a blind, mad god but a god still, designed you to be, so you won’t be any danger to them. Don’t try to be better, you are exactly as good as you are supposed. Your so-called weaknesses, your sadism and self-centeredness, aren’t a coincidence, they are strategies that have been utilized successfully for tens of thousands of years, and if you’re not a complete idiot you can understand why they are still useful. The world has changed, sure, but people are the same, and your genes have a lot more experience than you in how you should treat other people.
So he orders more videos. He orders women hanged and strangled, drowned in water or urine or sand, throats blocked, faces taped shut, vacuum-sealed. He stared directly at the unbearable truth of it, knowing that most people won’t even stand reading this stuff on a page, and feels purified of the comforting lies he was given. And his tastes refine, focusing less on the torture itself but of the anticipation, meticulously writing up the rules for games these women will have to play, with the reward being another twenty seconds of unobstructed airflow. It doesn’t matter what he makes them do, as long as it’s clear that they don’t want to do it.
Nothing makes you feel as in control as choosing whether or not another person breathes, and when. Nothing makes you feel as powerful as hearing them beg, and refusing them mercy (except for, perhaps, if he were to deprive someone with his own hands, which he can’t. But he does make the torturer look at the camera, pretend to be waiting for a nod from him, as if he is there instead of watching a recording of the past, and he nods each time, knowing that a part of his brain believes this simulacrum of social interaction).
This isn’t what gets him thrown out, either.
Something is altered deeply in Shaul – on the train, in the clinic, he can no longer see people as anything but machines. An almost sentient machine, computing the correct personality they should have and the best way to display it, sensing behavioral pressures and adjusting themselves unconsciously like a colony of gut bacteria tracking levels of chemical signals. He is no different, no better or worse – it is only because playing along stopped being a good strategy, that there is nothing for to gain by co-operating, that his brain allows him to witness the bare truth.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
The drug dealer’s customer service contacted him, asking in too many words why he stopped using.
According to our database, quitting at this advanced stage of a stimulant habit is 70% likely to be the result of intervention and forced withdrawal, or a financial shortage. We offer services to assist in both situations, if you are interested.
What’s the other 30%? Shaul is genuinely curious.
Falling in love. Is that the problem? We offer solutions for that as well, at affordable prices.
Shaul laughs to himself at the pragmatism of the human spirit. No, thanks. You can say that I finally found my place in the world.
Is that true? Did he really maximize the amount of control he has on others? Taking people’s lives is a pretty serious thing, but survival isn’t about the physical body–that’s just the means of achieving a human being’s real goal–leaving something of yourself after you’re gone. Taking that from people is the ultimate act of control. Shaul is surprised that he hasn’t thought of this before, considering it was in front of his eyes every single day.
Nobody in the clinic wants to take the “fertilization” shifts. The mixing of the parents’ genomes, as well as cutting out defective genes (another level of ideas humanity decided to discard), is done through a computer, but ‘printing’ the genome in actual DNA molecules and making sure it is inserted into the synthetic host cell (synthetic, in this case, means that nobody remembers who the original cells have come from). It’s tedious, boring work. Everyone’s happy when Shaul volunteers to take those depressing night shifts. They probably credit it to his antisocial tendencies, that he just prefers to spend that time alone. No one suspects what he’s actually planning. How could they? It’s outside of their little box.ַ
If you don’t know anything about gene editing, you might think that gene replacement is done with a pair of tweezers, literally cutting out the genes. Of course, in reality the entire genomes of both parents are scanned on to the computer, where they can be edited as software objects, with whole sequences cut out and replaced. That’s enough for him to compose the possible genomes of an embryo. All Shaul has to do is print out the genome of the synthetic zygote, print the sequence created from both parents, and insert that into the cell.
What he does, instead, when he receives the genetic scans of an expectant couple (so in love, so happy, the assholes) is print another genome entirely. One of the possible genomes that would have resulted from his own semen mixing with the woman’s egg cell. As is it were him to father a child with that woman. He considered making clones of himself, even female clones with a little tweaking, but there is something more fulfilling about mixing his genetic material the way nature, at some point, intended.
He wishes he could have used the stimulants to give him courage, to block out the pinch of shame that he still feels, but he can’t afford to have anyone seeing him shaking. He waits for the dead of night to start, slowly approaching the point of no return. It is the defining moment of his life, his ascension.
Uploading his own genome is easy, as is telling the computer to recombine it with the mother’s genome. But the moment he prints the genome of his own child is a hard one, a sense of intense reality comes over him, and only intensifies as he pours a million copies of said genome into the same compartment with the zygote. His heart beats slowly, heavily. One of the copies lands close to the zygote, and he directs the robotic, microscopic tweezers via the microscope screen, stopping only to wipe the sweat off his forehead on his labcoat’s sleeve. Closer now, he pushes the strand of DNA into the cell’s membrane, panting. Once, twice, many times, back and forth, until it finally breaks, and he inserts the long, thin tweezers deep inside, dumping his genetic load into the moist, soft inside of the cell.
He barely chokes down the astonished laughter, pretending to cough. His knees buckle. He watches through the microscope screen as the cell seals itself, accepting Shaul’s identity into itself.
Tomorrow morning, this woman will come here and get their child, Shaul and hers, pumped up her cervix. And she will raise him, maybe even into adulthood.
This is what winning feels like, he tells himself as he leans on the workstation, feeling a chilly, hollow horror.
The second time is easier.
By the seventy-third time, he doesn’t feel guilty at all—life is a competition, even if no one else has the balls to admit it. He knows they’ll be sore losers, and he’s right. The only surprise is how long it takes the cops to come to the clinic and arrest him.
The judge acts superior, appalled by Shaul’s obscene acts. But what does Shaul care about this man’s opinion? How many children has he fathered? Shaul has fathered hundreds.
He laughs in the faces of the judge and the two attorneys. Let them find solace in their anger, a paper-thin mask over their jealousy. Evolution has crowned him champion, an elite among the likes of Genghis Khan and King Solomon. What have they done with their life, compared to him?
Getting thrown out of the asteroid is hardly a surprise. The first thing he sees is a woman chained to a pole, forced to perform a role. There is a sense of bitter comfort in finding out that the usual rules apply on the outside as well. This could have been a place to fight, a place to finally live his life by his instincts – but he knows the game already. Whoever was out here before him has already secured power for themselves, either by technology or by grouping together, and if he goes against them, it’ll do nothing but shorten his already short lifespan. And so, he retreats to a pattern of behavior that is painfully familiar, and looks for a place where he can wait for death to come and take him.
#
Estimated oxygen time: 18:11:05
“I still feel like shit,” Shaul said after turning his comm back on. He seemed better, though, without as much tension in his muscles.
I, on the other hand, was shocked by his story. I hoped that I managed no to let my expression give away the disgust I had for him now. All of those people, all of those lives ruined, the unbelievable scope of it. A part of me thought that we shouldn’t even ally ourselves with him, that I should tell the others what kind of person is among them. But if I wanted everyone to work together, to trust each other, I had to keep this to myself. Once again, I had to admit that Pythia knew what they were doing.
“If Yossi had the power to stop people from feeling like shit,” Alex said absently, “I don’t think he’d be out here.” I turned and saw that he’d lain down in the entrance to the cave, using a rock as a pillow. Was he napping? Here? There were four metal rods laying beside him, and the useless wreckage of a rocket. He hadn’t wasted the time completely.
“I wonder if there’s a way to get high in this suit,” Shual said abruptly. “Change the ratio of gasses or something. Deprive the brain of oxygen, but not too much.” That reference to oxygen deprivation could have seemed innocent earlier, but now it inspired in me another flare of contempt. I wondered if Alex’s instinctive hostility for Shaul was in fact some insight into the man’s character.
“There is,” Alex said, quickly, as if he’d thought about it before. He pushed himself off of the rock, into a stand. “Or at least there should be.”
Shaul turned to him. “What is it?”
Alex blinked hard, unable to rub his eyes. “I’ll tell you later.”
Shaul raised his hands in frustration. “Jesus, why?”
Alex stretched his long, tree-like body. “Positive fucking reinforcement. There’s something we need to do first, and we don’t owe you anything. If anything, you owe him.” He pointed at me as he said the last word. ֱ
“I don’t care what you guys are planning: just tell me how to get fucking high before I die here,” he whined, then sighed to himself quietly. “God, fuck this place so bad.”
“You will care,” I said, and only then did the realization fall into place: not only would he not raise any objections to killing Vempress, as Alex or David had, but he’d kill her even if we told him not to, trying to squeeze another drop of pleasure from his final hours. For a moment I thought that I should warn Alex not to trust this man. I couldn’t - that would clearly transgress against Pythia’s rules. And if he did kill her, who would it hurt? Even better, it would prevent her from making any of us offers we could not refuse, if we did catch her.
“I doubt it,” Shaul answered.
“Alex,” I said, looking at my timer. “I have to go. Can you explain things to him?”
“I guess,” he said.
“But not right now,” I added.
“I know, because of the…” he said, then made a motion of tapping on his helmet, avoiding using the word aloud. Elegant. “Shaul, let’s go into the cave, and see if there’s anything useful in there.”
“Only if you tell me how to get high in this suit.”
“Deal. After you” Shaul turned to look at me, suddenly distant, as if he regretted telling me his life story.
Alex waved casually and said, “Have a nice day.”
The cliffs were growing even more familiar. Not just familiar – I was getting sick of taking the same paths back and forth. As I returned to the airlock, I started to feel a horrible sense of my hours being wasted on this work. David was right – it was harder to see the hours pass slowly, spent on the tedious and mundane, rather than on the tension of threat or chase, or the exhilaration of plotting. Having enough spare time, enough spare mind, to realize what was happening was the real curse of this place.
I tried staying focused on the plan, but instead was distracted by how both David and Alex had succeeded in calming down Rachel and Shaul. Talking to David and Alex had been so easy, and I’d let myself believe that I had some talent for it. Now I had to admit that if the order they’d arrived in had been different, things might not have worked at all. It annoyed me, and it annoyed me that I was annoyed.
#
Estimated oxygen time: 17:59:50
David was standing alone by the airlock, waiting for the newcomers. He turned slowly to me when I landed a few steps away, his face illuminated for an instant in the flashing light. He looked tired, and I could see he’d been crying. “Where’s Rachel?” I asked.
He turned and pointed east, towards Ctesibius’s cliff. “She wanted to know what’s uֱp there.”
“You didn’t go with her.” It couldn’t have been easy, being by himself with the bodies.
His voice was hoarse when he answered. “I didn’t want anyone to be alone out here, when they face all of this for the first time. We decided we’d meet in forty minutes, as counted by our oxygen timers.” He stopped for a moment. “The question now is: Do I want that time to move quickly, or slowly?”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “That’s a tough question,” I said. And after a moment of silence, I changed the subject. “I was sure the new arrival would have come by now.”
He put a hand over mine, pressing it into his shoulder, and turned up to look at me, grief in his eyes. “They did.”
“They did?”
“She did. She’s gone.”
“What happened?”
“She just...left. She didn’t want to talk. I thought I was in danger, but then she took off. Ran away.” He looked out into the distance.
“And you didn’t go after her?”
He shook his head. “She was too fast.”
I allowed myself a grunt of real, guttural frustration. “I knew I shouldn’t have stayed there so long. Fuck.”
“Trust me, Yossi: There’s nothing you could have done. Even if it had been the two of us, it wouldn’t have helped.”
And yet… My mind flashed with images of Vempress killing human beings with the ease with which I’d open a cartoon of milk, toying with Dov and Yahushua. It would be better to have six of us, instead of five. “Where did she go? I could still catch her if I used the jet—”
“Yossi,” he said, with an authority that I wouldn’t have guessed he had in him. “Leave it.”
Vempress had known, even as Diocletian, that some people wouldn’t come around, but I still thought that I could talk her out of it, if I tried.
David squeezed my hand, then lifted it off his shoulder. “You know, it’s pretty basic to give depressives something to look forward to, some future worth waiting for. I think that’s what you’re doing for yourself.”
“I think you did that for yourself too, didn’t you? When you talked to Rachel, earlier, you seemed so… engaged, knowing exactly what needs to be done. You looked like you’ve forgotten where you are.”
“Yeah, I was glad that I could be there. You should have seen the look in her eyes when she started talking about…” He paused for a moment and looked out east to Ctesibius’s cliff. “The future. Like a fire in her was lit. I think she would have gone up there even if I asked her not to.” There was a glint in his eye, and the side of his lip curled upwards.
“And yet…” I started saying, an echo of what he’d said to me. And yet you know that she’ll suffocate.
He nodded quickly, eyes squinting, as if he were swallowing something bitter. “Yeah. But it’s enough that I have something to do. I’m not asking for anything more. Anyway—I’m guessing you’re going to talk to her; You want to see who she is.”
I nodded. “I shouldn’t leave you here, though.”
“Go. I’ll be fine.”
“Are you sure?” In a flash, I remembered what it had been like to play chess with Tsur, when he was ten, or twelve. Before each game, I offer him to take out one of the pieces from my side. Not the queen, that would be too much, but a rook or a bishop. He refuses each time, saying that he wants to play fairly. And still, I keep offering. I know that he won’t accept, and still I offer. Not in order for him to change his mind, but just so that when he loses, he will have a sense of pride of having lost on his own terms, of having chosen to walk the hard path.
Someone with half a brain would see in that a tendency to be merciless towards himself. Unfortunately, he had gotten me for a father.
We looked at each other long enough for it to become weird. Long enough for it to become something that happened, an event; that time that I looked into David’s eyes and felt like he was looking through me. “I’m sure,” he said at last. “Go.”