Pai remembered flowers. He dreamed about them, sometimes waking in the middle of the Martian night drenched in sweat. His grow rooms bunkered and shuttered below his tattered bed in the vast underground labyrinth. Red dust coated his labs. The wind-powered ultraviolet lights long dead.
He had been working with several governments before Alona was grown. He was once a plant geneticist and neurobiologist specializing in hallucinogenic cacti before The Corporation consolidated the research power for the Enhanced Colonization Effort just after The Event. They bought his research and sent him to Mars to work on plant-based extracts that “worked to soothe the minds of the labor” while conserving the scant Martian resources.
He had stood alone in a cold white room with cameras on him as he described his latest ventures in crossing Papaver somniferum with globular cacti. The executive board had sent back messages telling him that this was not what they were looking for and didn’t he work with “mind-altering plants?” He dictated message after message explaining compounds and complications. He paced and looked out of the tiny radiation filtering windows at the butterscotch landscape, sheared and deadened with wind and cold. Monitoring and feeding, trimming and swirling solutions under the hard blue lights.
He dreamed about the mountains of his childhood. The white mists pearling on the cactus spines like small suns in the morning as the fog dragged over the crystalline white tops. Sparkling and humming with the living. Llamas standing like gashes in the snow. Condors, rare and enormous, wheeling against the painful blue. Brown as the earth and tied to it. He hoed potatoes and trickled snow down the backs of his brothers’ shirts and went hungry. When the water was privatized, he hauled buckets and buckets of snow down from the peaks. The wells dried up. His urine became brown slashes in the snow, the ammonia burning his nostrils as his bladder spasmed.
Soon the government enrolled him in a specialized STEM program because he could read Spanish and English. His mother kissed his cheeks and held him close to her thin chest the night before he got on the bus to Quito. She had pink plastic rose barrettes holding her hair from her face. She wound him in red thread, touching the top of his head with every rotation. For luck. His father, with dirt-creased hands, gave him a small white fabric sack. When he tried to open it to peer inside, his father held his hands and shook his head.
“It is not to be seen, my son.”
He opened it on the bus. It was filled with glittering stones and dried flowers. A bone carving of a llama rubbed smooth weighed in his palm as the bus careened around the mountain curves. His stomach burned into his throat. He had a different name then. It changed somewhere along the line. He couldn’t place when he stopped remembering his Nom de Terra.
He submitted proposal after proposal detailing his research to The Corporation. Mass Food Production in Ailing Climates, Cultivation of Responsible Non-Earth Agricultural Practices, Martian Soil Abatement for Succulent Crossbreeding, Genetically Modified Pain Reduction Plants for Adverse Conditions. Mescaline Compounds and Their Benefits on Space Travel-Induced PTSD. When he explained, the executives rolled their eyes and sighed in their offices, washed in sunlight.
His manager called him on voice chat from Earth one day and informed him of his impending termination unless he could produce research that The Corporation could use. He would be immediately returned to Earth. This is your last chance. Give us something we can use. He dug through his old files and dragged out a theoretical study he did for pre-Event NASA and submitted it.
Practical Applications of Scopolamine for Easing Inhibition and Motion Sickness in Interplanetary Shuttling.
The golden ticket. The keys to the kingdom.
***
Gram peered over Alona’s shoulder into Pai’s underground labs. The carpeting surged under their feet again as they descended into the dim room. Martian dust spun in the recycled air as Alona waved a single light on. A tendril slipped through the hatch and lifted the back of Alona’s hair, grazing her neck with the cold tip.
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“What is it?” Gram reared back from the black appendage as it drifted toward her face.
“It’s supposed to save us,” Alona said, pulling a covering from a terminal. Her voice was numb.
She placed her three fingers into slots on the side of the terminal and turned a mechanism. It hummed for a moment and faded as Alona cranked it again. The screen blipped on and went black again. Another black appendage slithered across the floor and trailed over Gram’s bare feet. She jerked her foot away.
“Did you get it? Can I call her?” Gram edged closer to the screen.
“The equipment is old.” A bit of clear mucus ran from Alona’s nose. “I just need a little more time. Bring that light over here.”
As Gram pushed the hovering light orb toward the screen, something caught her eye. The walls were breathing. Huge shiny hunks of black tissue pulsed in the light. The tendril that had been following Gram veered into the darkness.
“Alona? What is this?” Gram pressed the orb closer to the walls.
“Bring that light back or I can’t do it.”
Gram heard dripping in the hallways and tightening like straps being wrenched. Her body was light and alive with fear. She backed away from the walls. The walls were singing in an impossible language. Purple light smoldered in a great tangle of movement from the corners of the room. Her skin puckered and tingled.
“What is this?”
“Ok, I got it,” Alona said.
A long rope of emergency lights came on, illuminating the heaving coils that lay over the workstations. A small whining sound emanated from the speakers in the hallway above them. They froze. Pai’s voice echoed in the labyrinthian chamber, bouncing off of the dusty glassware. The tendril unlooped and rose in arches and waves, heaving toward the sound.
“Alona. My jewel. What are you doing?” The speaker crackled.
Alona sat down on one of the bent stools in front of the terminal and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. Gram shook her head at her.
“Come back upstairs. You’re not supposed to be down there.”
“Pai, we can’t do this anymore.”
“Come on upstairs and bring your new playmate with you.”
“I want this to be over.”
The tendril wrapped around Gram’s foot and held her. The tip grazed her ankle and patted her knee. She tried to pull away, but it stayed coiled cool and firm around her foot.
“Of course you do. I know what happened to your brother.”
“It was an accident,” Alona said. Her voice quiet.
“I can protect you, but you have to come back upstairs. I can’t go down to retrieve you. You know that.”
Alona cut her eyes to Gram who was pushing at the coils around her leg.
“It’s called MOTHER.”
“What?”
“The being. The being under the compound.”
“Alona. You need to stop talking.” Pai’s voice was serious. “You will get your new friend hurt.”
“That thing wasn’t my brother.”
The walls slid against one another, unfurling and falling to the floor like snakes coiling and twisting. The tendrils whirled and twisted around the glassware, popping them. Bits of glass flew across the room, raining down onto the floor. The being twirled around the speaker and ripped it from the wall, the wires stretching like ligaments from torn meat.
The screen in front of Alona burst into a white light.
“What do we do?” Gram pulled herself toward Alona, shouting above the sound of lab tables screeching across the floor as the being tightened itself into a central knot.
“There’s nothing we can do.“ Alona sank down onto the floor from the stool. “MOTHER is angry.”
Water flowed down from the steps above. Water. Gram had never seen so much water. She was an unapproved belt baby born before The Great Separation; water was recycled in her world. She had cannibalized herself thousands and thousands of times. Her sweat, her feces, her breath, her urine, her menstrual blood – all collected and reprocessed. She drank the others, and the others drank her. A bluish white gas oozed from cracks in the ventilation system. A buzzing alarm pulsed on her wrist monitor.
Alona curled on her side and wept.
***
Information Packet [redacted]
[redacted]
Martian Date [redacted]
Subject: Research
Dear [redacted],
We have some follow up questions to the study you sent as well as some requests. You mention “Devil’s Breath.” We would now ask that you not refer to scopolamine by its colloquial name any longer to discourage misconceptions about the safety and efficacy of the use of this substance. We are interested in its raw form, as complications with the Terran government continue to arise as the crisis continues to unfold.
Our questions are as follows:
* How easily can this compound be synthesized?
* Can it be used in an aerosol?
* How involved is the manufacture of this drug?
Thank you for your participation in this study. We have rescinded your termination notice with the caveat that you will continue your work solely on this project. Your pay has been reduced to reflect the decrease in workload.
Please sign the attached paperwork with your DNA sequencing number included. Please use Terran dates in the future.
Sincerely,
[redacted]