The Holy Book™
Chapter 67 Verses 78 -84
78 Do not dwell on the dead, for the productive and the holy shall be rewarded for their toil.
79 Let it be known that those rewarded on this plane with riches and renown shall be rewarded tenfold in the kingdom of The Father, for what is given in thy time of plenty does foretell the beginning of a time of plenty in The After.
80 If a laborer asks for an increase in wage or pity for his situation, strike him with your left hand, for his reward can only be increased in practice and drudgery.
81 For did I not say unto you that this is only the first of many levels of existence? It is blasphemy to doubt the stratification. Soon you will be in My bosom with many riches.
82 Do not covet your employer’s status or currency or lifestyle, for he hath pleased My Father through Me and was blessed by His hand for his hard work.
83 Heed this: when you reach your 65th Terran year, The Corporation shall process thy retirement, as you cannot labor in full capacity as is the morality of Mechoben’s Bride.
84 Weep not, for this is the next step toward Upward Mobility.
***
Alona swung her bare legs from the edge of the cold table. The room contracted and bloomed into nauseating clarity. Her stomach heaved and her joints ached as she touched her feet to the cold floor. She was alone.
One of the aging speakers crackled, and Pai’s voice echoed around her.
“Alona, you have been quarantined for your own safety. Do you remember what happened?”
She realized that she was in one of the secondary laboratories. When the last model of Research IntelliDroids androids reached his expiration date, Pai said he closed off the wing due to the expense of operating costs. She knew better. His experiments had been failures. This cold table had been her bed for many cycles before this, leaning backward with her feet in the stirrups, crying and clinging to her android, Nana, who stroked her arms with blunted fingernails and cried strange opaque tears with her.
“Yes, Pai. We – no, I mean I, just me – I ruined one of your experiments.”
“He was your brother, Alona.”
“He was not my brother.”
“He was our future. You are going to die. I am going to die.” His voice was flat.
“What about the others?” She asked as she drew the PlastiFabric robe around her shoulders. Her nose had been plugged with Pai’s expanding wound foam that he developed for soldiers in the Terran AfterEvent. The material was damp with blood.
“Their civilization gene programming didn’t take.”
“Where’s Gram?”
“Gram has been dispatched.”
“Where did you send her?” Alona heard her own voice raising into a wave of grief.
“She was just supposed to be your playmate, Alona.” Pai’s voice crackled through the speaker, no nonsense, like he was speaking to a small child about some unreached sweet perched on a faraway countertop. “Did you even teach her about Bicky Ball at all?”
Alona leaned against the countertops and rifled through the cabinets on the walls looking for a reversal or an amphetamine to fight the fog behind her eyes. A small bottle of Wakey Wakey: Pure Crystal had been tipped over in the back corner of the tallest cabinet. She grabbed it and crushed two of the pale blue capsules between her back molars, gagging against the bitterness. Her grief spun into ragged anger as the stimulant hit her bloodstream.
She remembered the evacuation from the Terran Medical Research University as The Event streamed on the screens. She and the other students peered at the streams as they watched buildings tumble over into the churning brown waters. Images from the overhead drones of New Orleans in The New South flashed on the screen. The city had long been underwater. The spires from the Original Brand Catholic Church still poked through the mud. People spun in boats made from the hulls of black rotting buildings, draped in bright flashes of old plastic beads they dredged from the black silt and attached in elaborate patterns to their pirogues. The water overtook them and swallowed them. The dots of human heads disappeared under the rushing current.
Numbers had flashed across the screens with a prompt to check their assigned identification number. Hers appeared in the very first group: 23890 to 25606. Her Earthborn friends looked on with wet eyes and creased brows as they loaded the Martian students onto the private evac vessels, handing them masks and anti-grav sickness kits as they shuffled to their coded quarters with running water and padded cryo chambers.
She could still taste the sour kiss of her Earthborn partner, Hajai. Her monitor number read 86996. As her soft lips drew away from hers, Alona knew she would never feel her gravity-hardened body against hers, her stubby five-fingered hands gripping hers so carefully as to not crush her space softened bones, her rough sun-red skin, to be swallowed whole by this balancing, this folded hand.
They were in the final Terran year of residential research in genetic abnormalities in the space- and Martian-born. Their research had been funded by MechoBen LLC. An honor. They fought about it. They kissed through clenched teeth. They tucked their bodies together and broke plasticine wine glasses against the gray brick student housing walls.
“Where did you send her?”
“I don’t see how that’s relevant.”
“Do you want me to stay alive?”
The comm link was silent for a moment.
“Don’t threaten me,” Pai said.
Alona rolled the Wakey Wakey container in her hand and spun the top off. She poured the remaining medication onto the metal table under the shining eye of the monitoring camera. The bright blue pills skittered across the metal surface. She raked them to the center with the side of her hand and used the base of the jar to crush them into micro jewels. Her thin long hair dipped into the shining dust as she peered at the fineness of her grind. Pai’s voice crackled over the water-damaged speakers.
“She didn’t meet the specifications for GagGirls, so I sent her to a plasticine weaving facility in The Belt.”
“Where in The Belt?” Alona scraped the powdered drug into her other hand, tilted it into a chipped Petri dish, and dripped solution into it.
“You can’t get there.” He sounded uncertain.
“I’ll worry about that.” She swirled the solution in the Petri dish and fished for the plasticine hollow tipped needles.
“This will not help her. This will not help you.”
She drew the solution into the syringe. A careful single dose. She rubbed the inside of her arm, prodding for one of her miniature, flaccid veins. The sting of the needle. The burn of the amphetamines. Her heart filling and collapsing. The hum.
“Who will it help then? You?” The jagged lift of the amphetamines pushed her voice higher. “Who is this all for?” She gestured at the lab with the pipette. “We don’t even have the proper air filtering systems. You haven’t been in contact with The Corporation for two years. Where did you send that poor man from the factories? Where did he go?”
“Where else are we going to go?” Pai’s voice remained flat. “I can’t leave Mars.”
“I can.”
“You might die out there. You are my most prized possession, Alona. My most successful experiment.” He was avoiding her again.
She sucked more of the solution into the syringe. Her skin tightened and rippled with adrenaline. She drew the pale liquid up into the transparent tube and tapped it on the side of the table.
“This is about 900 milligrams, Pai. I already took one unit. I know we don’t have any more androids to stop me. Answer me.” She tied off her wrist with a piece of tubing and pressed the veins on the top of her hand. The veins in her arm had retreated.
“Look out of the viewing port,” he said.
She creased her brows and walked over to the indention in the wall. She slid back the plasticine cover. Instead of the butterscotch Martian desert, lumpy with pastel egg-shaped structures, the frosted rust-against-black curve of Mars churned past through the window. She clutched the syringe, feeling the sides of it give.
“It was a ship,” she said.
“It was a ship.”
“I’m going to get Gram.”
“I’d like to see you try,” he said coldly.
She raised the syringe and pressed the needle to the raised veins on her hand again.
“I will send for her,” Pai said.
“No. We are going to get her.”
“This isn’t that kind of ship. It’s on a fixed course. You can’t change it, and I am not on it.”
“What do you mean, you’re not on it?” Alona asked.
“Did you think I could survive space travel again?”
“What about me?”
“What about you?” His tone was removed.
“What about my survival? I thought you said I was your most prized possession.”
“What value is an experiment if the results are not shared?”
She poked the needle into her skin and pushed down on the plunger, snapping the tubing off her wrist. The burn of the amphetamine spread up her arm. Her heart pounded as the drug rushed over her like a tide. She was an angel, a god, the queen of the space dust. Her body was a temple overrun with worshippers, war drums in the halls, bare feet slapping the marble floors as they tore golden relics from the walls. Heat in her belly. Heat in her cunt. Blackness. Blackness.
***
The Curanderas wrapped Riff in their arms as the craft descended to Enceladus’ surface. Their chanting was muffled in the padded containment room. The grav drives switched off to conserve energy as the ship dropped onto the icy surface. Riff’s stomach contracted as the metal landing gear slipped on the ice. The craft tipped as it caught against a crag in the ice, and the walls moved around them in a directionless spin. Riff’s mouth filled with salty water. Her back pressed against the control panel as Curandera Morena flipped the plasticine casings back from the emergency controls, her hunched body rotating midair.
A click and a buzzing, and they tumbled back to the floor. The smell of their space-cloistered bodies filled the recycled atmosphere. The control panels hung above them, blinking like wet speleothems. Curandera Morena had already rolled to her feet and was pulling out grav boots from the chambers, flinging them into the center of the bunched women.
“Only two pair, and they are old,” Curandera Peliroja said, picking up the boot closest to her.
“Curandera Negra has MOTHER’s ear. She will go,” Curandera Morena said.
“Of course she will, that’s why we’re here,” Curandera Peliroja snipped. “But who will accompany her? We are old. My bones won’t stand that cold.” She touched her fingertip to the sliver of light coming through the wavy viewing port.
Riff slid a tube of protein gel into her mouth to settle her stomach and listened as they bickered, as they sometimes did. Something itched in the back of her mind. It reminded her of the MicroSurveillence drones no bigger than mosquitoes that whined by their ears on the factory line back on The Belt. Something was watching.
She sucked down the rest of the protein tube. The silky gel coated the back of her tongue. The burn in her belly quieted as the gel expanded in her stomach.
“Put on your boots, Curandera Negra, the gravity is light here. Even lighter than Mars,” Curandera Morena said.
Riff, forgetting her renaming, ignored her and sent a thought toward the itch in her mind. She shaped the word “hello” in her mind in bright pink bubble letters and thought of her own lips pursing and blowing it toward the itch. The word drifted back toward her with an image of a generic smiling face. Like a note attached to a balloon.
“Curandera Negra! Escuchame. Put on your boots,” Curandera Morena’s firm voice intruded and burst through the bubble letters in her head like a hand slicing through smoke.
Riff snapped open her eyes. The women looked on, each with small lines forming between their brows.
“Someone is listening to us.”
“Who is it?” Their voices comingling in concern.
“I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like MOTHER.” She stopped and thought. “Does MOTHER know what a smile is?”
“Put on your boots,” Curandera Morena repeated and shoved the boots toward her with her own booted feet. “Stuff this in the toes to make them fit. We used to do this in Cuba for new shoes.” She handed Riff a fistful of torn rags. “We don’t have time to linger. This craft will not hold against the cold.”
“Where are we going?”
“You are our bloodhound. You will tell us.”
“A bloodhound? What’s that? And where is Cuba?”
“Mija, put on your boots, please. I will explain bloodhounds and Cuba to you on the way to the research base.” She stepped into the pressurized mining suit and tugged at the straps at the waist. “Rápidamente, por favor.”
Riff put on her grav boots and suit, and Curandera Peliroja checked the seals and snaps before she and Curandera Morena crowded into the airlock. Curandera Morena’s sharp black eyes, nestled in overlapping brown wrinkles, caught the square of white light from the overhead lights. Her gray hair was braided over the lumpy mats at the base of her shiny scalp. Her eyes folded into slits under the mass of wrinkles as she smiled.
“We are going to meet her,” she said to Riff.
“How will we leave?”
“We won’t. This is our birthright.”
“You said we can’t live here.”
“We can’t live in the ship,” she said as she drew the helmet down onto her shoulders and slid the transparent faceplate in place. Her labored breathing crackled through the comms in Riff’s helmet. “But MOTHER has a place for us by the seaside.”
***
The itch at the back of Riff’s mind came back just as the grav assist feature on Curandera Morena’s pack failed. The old woman crunched behind her through the ice toward the flat black glass of the lake in the distance, her toes overlapping in the overstuffed boots. She could feel the blister forming on the space-soft skin of her heel when she heard Curandera Morena’s voice ring in her earpiece. She turned around to see her on her back, her arms flailing in wide comical circles. The sun stood small and cold against the thin atmosphere. A wisp of steam spurted from somewhere in Curandera Morena’s suit.
Riff boosted her grav assist and sprang over the terrain to the old woman. The wisp turned to a gush of steam as Riff turned Curandera Morena to her side. Ice crystals formed in lacy patterns on the inside of her helmet as the cold seeped in. Ice coated the creased upper lip, and the thin lips cracked and bled. Riff held her clumsy gloved hands over the break in the suit. She choked back tears of desperation as she rifled through her pack one-handed for the Never Say Die Epoxy Suit Glue. Steam seeped through the gash and poured out around her fingers.
The itch at the back of her mind returned and she wheeled around, her knees digging twin holes in the snow. A pain bloomed in her sinuses and her familiar writhed in new life, sending a withered tendril out of the corner of her eye. Her helmet prevented her groping fingers from accessing her face. Panic wailed from her core. A shadow churned under the ice, fracturing the thick layer below them. It whipped toward her in a serpentine pattern. She squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for her final gasp of cold air on this strange moon.
Then it spoke.
***
Papa leaned over Rasp, his breath hot on the side of his face. The monitoring station whirred and beeped as Papa traced his nail-less pointer finger over the blinking red dot.
“See that, son?” He pointed to the dot. “That’s them. We can leave this godforsaken moon.”
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Rasp edged away from Papa’s closeness. The sweet richness of decay emanated from his mouth.
“Do you think they’ll take us back with them?”
Papa turned his swollen face to peer into Rasp’s eyes.
“You need to prepare yourself for something. We may have to take the vessel from them.”
“You mean like in the Pirates of Ass Pornographic Film?”
“I don’t know about that, but yes, like pirates.” His eye was bright and focused. He picked up the pistol from the light table and clicked the safety off and then on again. “Get your suit from the drying rack. I don’t want to be here. I want to feel warm again.” He tucked the pistol into the warming sleeve of his carrier bag and pulled his helmet on.
***
The rings of Saturn cut golden through the sky as Rasp and Papa neared the blinking dot on Papa’s wrist monitor. Rasp hopped up and down to warm himself as Papa interpreted the readings on his scanner. Puffs of steam burst from the filtration ports on his helmet. Rasp turned the grav setting down on his boots so he could leap higher to see further. He pushed off from the ice as hard as he could, imagining his body flying out past the rings of Saturn, stretching through his ribs, reaching for the thick yellow gas clouds swirling over the fecund body. Just as he reached the apex of his jump, he noticed a person crouched in the snow over the body of another.
MOTHER boomed into his head.
“FRIENDS.”
The intensity of her voice, the insistence of it cracked through his mind.
“HELP FRIENDS.”
He flailed backwards in the air, trying to keep his balance in the onslaught of stimuli. He bumped the grav controls and floated back to the ground, landing on his back on the other side of an ice dune from Papa.
“Mechoben in space, MOTHER. Not so loud.” His stomach turned. Fear tingled in his throat at the sight of other humans.
“HELP FRIENDS.”
“Who are they?” He rolled to his side and checked his suit for damage, pushing on the seamed sides with his gloved hands.
“FRIENDS.”
He pushed himself up from the fall and trudged over the ice dune in the direction of the strangers. His digital compass spun when he lifted it to catch the magnetism of the moon’s own poles. Saturn’s pull always distorting, disrupting. Papa’s voice sputtered in his ear over the comms.
“Where are you going?”
MOTHER coursed under the ice, twisting and worming like some great earthworm. He remembered earthworms flicking their bodies across the rain-spattered sidewalk. A smell of wet on hot concrete. Somewhere. Somewhere bright and warm.
“There are…” His voice was clipped off as MOTHER sliced through his consciousness again.
“NOT HIM.”
“I didn’t catch that, son,” Papa crackled into his comm.
“What? Why?” Rasp whispered blinking against the pain in his head.
“HE HURTS.”
Rasp addressed Papa, “I think I saw something over this ridge. I’ll be right back. I can tell you a joke though.”
“A joke?”
“Yeah. I have a really good one the miners on the asteroid belt told me about angels.”
“Angels?” Papa sounded odd.
MOTHER rumbled under the ice and flashed whiteness across Rasp’s vision.
Rasp marched toward the people on the other side of the dune and dredged his memory, trying to reconstruct the joke. He tapped the ambient noise reducer on the side of his helmet and leaned his head toward the comms mic.
“There were two statues in a park, one of a naked man and one of a naked woman. They had been facing each other across a pathway for a hundred years, when one day an angel comes down from heaven and decides to bring the two to life.
The angel tells them, ‘As a reward for being so patient through a hundred hot summers and cold winters, you have been given life for thirty minutes to do what you have always wished to do the most.’
He looks at her, she looks at him, and they go running behind the bushes. The angel waits patiently as the bushes rustle and giggling ensues. After fifteen minutes, the two return, out of breath and laughing.
The angel tells them, ‘You have fifteen minutes left, would you care to do it again?’ He asks her ‘Shall we?’ She eagerly replies, ‘Oh, yes, let’s! But let’s change positions. This time, I'll hold the pigeon down, and you shit on its head.’”
As he finished the joke, he waited for Papa’s reaction. He topped the ridge and waved his arms at the person crouched in the ice below. Silence for a moment. Papa’s voice hummed in his ear, faraway and faint.
“What is an angel?” Papa asked.
A memory hurtled back into Rasp’s mind. Papa coming into a space he used to sleep in on that warm, sunny planet. He nestled under a heavy navy blue blanket stitched with white anchors and watched a creature in a transparent cube that clung to the sides, its belly pressed into perfect pale green flatness against the glass. The pads of its toes minute circles.
Papa silhouetted against the doorframe, the bright yellow light of the hallway erasing his features. He entered, his boots heavy against the laminate. Rasp was supposed to be sleeping. And Papa was supposed to be somewhere far away. Somewhere dusty and cruel. He could smell the sunshine on his uniform as he sat on the edge of the small bed. The mattress compressing. The springs squeaking. His father’s rough, heavy hand hovering above his head and then letting it fall for a moment before pressing the heel of his hand against his cheek. The warmth of it. His mother stood in the doorway, her robe belt swinging against her calf.
“Cómo un angel,” Papa had said.
His eyes were brown-black and glittering. Moon-Papa’s eye was green.
***
Riff saw the figure against the white just as Curandera Morena’s LifeSigns monitor squealed into a flatline. It stood on the ridge waving its arms at her. It appeared human. She pumped the adrenaline function and tried to listen to the black tendril under the ice.
“FRIEND. FRIEND. FRIEND.”
She picked up Curandera Morena’s limp hand and dropped it. The huge tendril poked through the ice and stroked the crack in Curandera Morena’s helmet before plunging through the plastiglass. Bits of glass rained down on the hard ground, indistinguishable from the broken ice. The crone’s familiar shot out of her mouth, thick and phallic, entwining with the tip of MOTHER’s tendril, overlapping and sliding through. Riff felt her own familiar racing behind her eyes and filling her sinuses. Another tendril crawled from behind Curandera Morena’s staring black eye, before yanking the eyeball out of its socket in a blood-tinged clear spurt as it lengthened and stretched toward MOTHER. Riff fell backwards and pushed her body back.
The great being rose and rent itself into two door-sized flaps. A circular sphincter pulsed ruby-red at the center. An opaque, matte pearl spun in the throbbing mouth. Curandera Morena’s body writhed as the familiar wrenched itself through her nostrils, her ears, her eye sockets, splitting and tearing the skin into flaccid pink ribbons. The familiar whipped in the wind as it arced and dove into the wet fissure. The flaps closed over the torn prone body and lifted it, pushing it deeper into the maw with the mass of waving appendages. The enormous flaps closed over the churning hole and collapsed in, creating a sucking void.
Bits of ice and snow chipped away from the ground, caught in the swirl of the collapsing mouth. MOTHER drew back down under the ice. The rasp of her great body vibrated under Riff’s grav boots. Memories of bodies bloated into grotesque roundness floating by in the opaque brown water, blood streaming down legs and arms from hidden glass, eyes nibbled away by bacteria and squirming creatures under the mire. Her brother wrapped his thin arms and legs around her in the turning inflatable boat, shielding her from the sun, before a drone dragged them to a grove of trees. Helmeted soldiers separated them and drove pediatric needles into their arms to rehydrate them. The red mist on the ice was all that remained of Curandera Morena.
***
Rasp clung to the surface of the moon as his helmet rattled with MOTHER’s full emergence on the ridge below. The tiny, suited figure hunched as she crunched through the ice. He tapped the digital zoom on the side of his helmet until one half of his vision field was filled with the image of the fallen body spritzing the ice with crimson. He was dizzy for a moment and looked away, focusing on the figure kneeling in front of MOTHER instead. Something was familiar. A slice of transparency cut through the black of the First Regime helmet and he caught a fuzzy view of a large dark eye, before MOTHER blocked his view.
He scrambled down the ridge as MOTHER dove back into the ice. Moon-Papa’s voice popped into his comms, as he skidded down the slope.
“Where are you going? That thing’ll eat you up.”
He ignored the hum in his ear and rolled down the volume to a crackling buzz. MOTHER roiled in his mind, her attention split. The figure noticed him and pushed up like a baby, arms rigid and heels flat. It stood and put its hand against MOTHER’s enormous side, stroking and leaning as he approached. He could see the figure’s face through the helmet now. It was a woman. Or a girl. Rare and strange. Even before this place.
He waved at her. Her eyes went wide through the glass, and she ran to him, her grav boots snagging her back down to the surface as she charged toward him. His suit pressure alarm whined in his ear as she collided with him, knocking him backward onto the ice. MOTHER circled them under the ice, whipping her long body in an unending dark river that stretched to the horizon line.
She stood up, brushing the snow from her suit, and hauled him up by the arm. She shoved her gloved digits in front of his helmet. Two fingers. Three fingers. Seven fingers. He shook his head, not understanding. She tapped the comms side of her own helmet and mimicked talking into the microphone. He realized she was trying to show him the access code. He nodded and tapped the code into the side of his helmet until he heard a faint crackling and her breathing. They stood facing one another. Silent and afraid to say the first words, they stared at one another, unmedicated, unseparated by distance or memory.
“José?” Her voice slow.
“Alicia?”
Naturalborns, both of them, illegal now and shunted aside by the nature of their entrance into this plane. He remembered when Mama brought her into his room after he had heard her all night, swearing in Spanish, her bare heels thumping against the hardwood as she paced. Papa’s voice, hollow in its distant transmission, murmuring to her.
“José, esta es tu hermana, Alicia,” Mama said without ceremony. Her black hair was slicked back into a tight bun. She buttoned her jacket. Her belly was slack and draped with layers of fabric. She put the baby into his hands and walked out of his room without a word.
Now she stood here before him, dwarfed by her spacesuit. She howled into the microphone, her tears streaming into the body waste reservoir at the base of her neck. He reached out to touch her arms.
“Where did they take you?” He asked, his environmental monitors chirping.
She cried more, unable to stop. He listened to her gasp, her own monitoring system wailing high in alarm.
“I forgot my own name,” she choked.
“I know a good joke about names,” he said, the discomfort folding over him like plasticine.
“Joke?” She hiccuped.
“Yeah. I know a really good one. I used to tell you jokes all the time.” A lump thickened in his throat. Men don’t cry. Mechoben said so. Tears are for the sexy, not the sad. He had been demerited for crying twice.
Riff-Alicia opened her mouth and then closed it again, as MOTHER’s voice echoed between the two of them.
STOP HURT. STOP HURT. LOOK UP.
They turned their gaze toward the ridge where Moon-Papa leaned against a jag of ice. A stun stick extended from his right hand. He stuck it into the snow to steady himself as MOTHER stirred under the ice, pushing small waves of snow toward him. He began his descent, sliding as Rasp-José had done earlier. Riff-Alicia ducked behind Rasp-José and whispered into her comms.
“Who is that?”
“Don’t you recognize him? That’s Papa. He’s still pretty far away. You’ll see.” Rasp-José felt a strange push-pull in his consciousness. One thing cannot be true as another thing at the same time.
“Papa?” Her voice was small.
“Did you want to hear that joke?”
She drew back from him and MOTHER turned words in his mind.
1. NO. HE HURTS.
Moon-Papa stood up from his slide down the ridge and ambled toward them, loping and stumbling. His wide grin shone through the tinted helmet. The whites of his eyes glinted through like a beast in the woods. He heaved through the white toward them. MOTHER’s voice humming in their skulls in audible distress. Rasp-José felt his sister cling to the back of his suit as she peeked around him at the stumbling unknown.
Her breathing churned in his ear.
“That’s not Papa,” she said.
“How do you know? You didn’t ever meet him.”
She backed away, her eyes wild.
“That’s an android. He’s an android.” Her voice quavered.
As Moon-Papa neared, MOTHER and Riff-Alicia howled in unison. His mouth was set in a thin line, unnaturally straight and wide. Rasp-José stepped backward. A small white scar winked on his neck where the identification chip for the old model of android was implanted. It provided a kill switch before the shortened lifespan was introduced. Moon-Papa reached him and clapped him on the shoulder. He didn’t seem to notice the furls of darkness under the ice, slipping his right leg from the weak curl of MOTHER’s grasp.
“This must be my little daughter,” he said.
“You aren’t my father,” she whispered.
“I am. I am pieces of him.”
She backed away further, staring at the stranger.
“What are you talking about?”
He slid the Radiation Shield down on his helmet and pointed to his face.
“Do you see? Look.”
They looked into his face for signs of Papa there. The shape of the eye was correct, but not the color. The burnished skin was familiar, but had a bluish tint. The black hair was as black as the day he left. He was forever forty, no new lines, no gray hair. His teeth were sharper somehow. Perhaps he was taller.
“HURT HURT HURT,” MOTHER echoed into their minds.
“Now we can get off this troubled stone. Harness her, my children, and be transported.”
Rasp-José and Riff-Alicia found themselves clinging to one another in their suits as shunts of vapor shot into the air. MOTHER and Moon-Papa facing one another on the frozen lake, each locked in cruel wanting. Each of them begging, coercing, tearing at these children to remove the other, to dominate and flee and fight. There was no place for them to go, these children of the void. These mere tools of something far away and undesigned, unplanned.
MOTHER moaned and flashed images of her penetration into their minds, rousing Riff-Alicia’s familiar’s convulsions that stretched the skin of her face. The auger driving into her vast back under the ice.
***
The director on The Corporation’s livestream of Youngest, Brightest, Wettest leaned back from the camera to see the bedlam with his own eyes. The GagGirls all screaming and vomiting and tearing their FactoryFresh Human Hair Extensions from their scalps. Their familiars so carefully disguised, now pouring from their orifices in thick ropy disobedience to the suppressant drugs. The androids, streaked pink and orange and red with stress responses, kneeled by them holding their wrists as they tried to rip the black tendrils from their bodies. Some lay on their sides staring at the whipping extensions of their own bodies, trimmed eyelids wide.
“Keep the cameras rolling,” he said. “This is pure credits.”
The camera android nodded and panned across the set, slick with fluid.
***
Curandera Peliroja had felt the life of Curandera Morena snuffed out. Her own lungs burned, and her own heart seized. A coldness so true and so sharp that it smelled of wood smoke and wet wool. Death was part of the ever expansion. The natural order was the death of heat. The distance between planets a holy rite to be observed. “Goddess” was an old word, one from before the true diaspora into the stars, but in this moment the Curandera understood why the Earth elders created the image of scarlet wings and jaguar claws. To overlay the familiar on the forces not controlled. The face of the goddess was not in the suns, but in the spaces between.
And now, the voices reached her. Begging for the removal of the holy MOTHER. Flashes through their eyes of pornography sets and luxury Martian quarters sodden with suffering as the familiars wrenched toward their colonial home world. She flipped through images like a book, paging toward the whiteness of ice and snow. Curandera Negra’s eyes found hers and she saw the great MOTHER, plunged to the bottoms of the black sea under the ice, unbound and expanded to loom over The Father. The abomination that lived between the always and the recent. The created and the creator.
***
Alona’s familiar drew down her throat and flung its tendrils through her nostrils toward the white moon she was orbiting. Pai’s communications stopped weeks ago, and so she paced and spoke with her familiar. Her thin body drifted around the small cabin as she sucked on the tubes of Shine and cultivated protein paste. Her familiar eased itself from her body, smaller than others, and suddenly she was truly alone for the first time in her short existence. The mass of black floated toward the airlock and shaped itself around the square door as it sent jellied fingers through the cracks. In her desperation for normalcy, for this parasitic companionship, she pushed herself toward it from the opposite wall. Reaching her three fingered hands, now swollen from being in zero-G, out like a mother encouraging her child to toddle to her.
“Please don’t leave me. Please. It’s so dark here.”
The being didn’t respond. It attempted to push itself through the tiniest chinks in the paneling, striving to return to MOTHER.
Alona drifted, pressing her feet against the doorway as she slid her fingers under the throbbing mass to pry it away. To bring it back into her. The friend she was never without. The space behind her eyes was hollow and empty. The familiar slid through her fingers and pressed its gelatinous form further from her touch. She pushed herself back to the comms panel and tapped the communication code into the screen. A general transmission. A call to anyone. Static hummed.
Pai’s voice came through, then his face on the screen. The first time she had spoken to anyone in four cycles.
“Have you landed yet? It looks like you are still orbiting.”
She gripped both sides of the screen and peered at his yellow sclera. His sunken cheekbones were dotted with open sores and a thick lump rose on the side of his neck.
“Something is happening, Pai. I love you. I am sorry I disobeyed.” Her desperation drove her pleas. She would beg. She would submit.
“Strange to hear those words,” he said. “Why haven’t you landed?”
“I don’t understand what I should do, Pai. What do you want me to do?” She was begging again.
“You must go down to the surface and let the Matriarch consume you.” His yellowing eyes were wild and moist.
“What Matriarch?”
He lifted up an old holographic copy of The Holy Book™ in front of the screen.
“Do as you were commanded, Alona.”
“I thought you were a scientist, Pai. I thought we were scientists.” Her confusion overwhelmed her. “That book is for those who can’t understand. It’s for comfort.”
His breath rattled in his chest as he reached down to switch off the feed.
“Pai! I will. I will let her consume me. Just don’t leave me alone.”
His hand hovered above the power to the screen, just out of her view.
“We are scientists and science requires sacrifice. Do you know what a mouse is, Alona?”
“Yes, Pai. They were a Terran animal. A pest.”
He talked past her, as if she had said nothing.
“They used them to experiment on. For medicine. For cosmetics. They used billions of them. Do you know why?”
She opened her mouth to answer, but he continued past her.
“Because they were easily housed. They were cheap. Because in those days there was a notion, a whisper that their lives were lesser, and they were right.” He smoothed his yellow-white hair away from his eyes. “What do we use now?”
“Androids?”
He laughed. “Androids are not cheap.”
“What then? Dogs?” She ground her back molars, heat rising to her cheeks.
“You are spoiled, child of mine. Where is your mother?”
“I don’t understand the question.”
It was in that moment, floating in that vacuum, Alona realized her place in this scheme. She was the pill wrapped in something that slid down easily. She hid the bitterness in her body. Her body created to house the means to regain control over this thing they had enslaved for their own means. The means of more more more more more. Power wasn’t credits in the Galactic Bank of Wells. Power was the ability to change the narrative for no ends. To spread the players thin across an ephemeral board and then gaze over their suffering. To know that suffering was removed. Her years wandering the flooded halls on Mars, chasing her little brothers – peeling their fingers from equipment, careful not to break their fragile bones. Her research. Playing Bicky Ball until her heart rate monitor cut off the scoreboard. She was the mouse sniffing for peanut dust in the maze.
Her mother was a plasticine bag. Pictures of Alona’s spinal cord, pictures of her porous bones, pictures of her malformed feet on the wall of light.
She met small bursts of memory, unimpeded by the droll tight smiles and representations of happiness so present in the scrolls and flashes of the streams. Twining her limbs around her loves, the smell of unperfumed skin, the stroke of the hot palms. The heaviness of gravity. The brightness of the Terran sun, so near it burned her skin in a swell of sleepy pressure, like latex gloves filling with sweat.
She switched off the feed with Pai and stepped into the suiting chamber.
Isolation was her mantra. Her third eye pried from her skull.
***
Rasp-José pulled the pistol from his belt and aimed it at Moon-Papa, courting the violence of his ancestors tearing the flesh of birds and fish and monkeys, searing it over fire, pushing it past the long canids into the mouth that could not be satisfied. This tool in his hand, heavy and cruel, prepared for its purpose. To annihilate.
His sister’s nose gushed blood as her familiar filled the bottom half of her helmet like a curled snake in an aquarium. The plastiglass crackling under the pressure of it.
She pounded her gloved palms against the outside of the helmet, gurgling and choking.
He pulled the trigger.
***
[redacted] Incorporated
Pre-Colonization Documents
To The Legislative Body of the Global [redacted]:
The contract awarded to us on [redacted] has yielded several fruitful studies, though our focus has been directed to a particularly rewarding discovery, both economically and socially, regarding the lifeforms excavated and detained by our Lucrativity Scouting Teams.
Our efforts have been focused largely on Saturn’s water-rich moon, Enceladus. Originally, we planned to conduct studies focused on silicate mining, as well as hydrogen gas and methane harvesting, but in our studies discovered a lifeform with particular social potential. Though we hesitate to use the terms “social control” and prefer the term “quality of life enhancement,” we will use the term “social control” for clarity and broadness of use in this report.
Our oceanic probes and android-manned missions discovered a lifeform that resembles an interconnected eusocial society, though we remain uncertain if the lifeform is one being, or many that communicate through a singular queen, not unlike Earth’s extinct honey bees and meat-eating ants.
It is worth noting that while we have discovered several extra-terrestrial lifeforms on other moons and planets, none have had the drive or capability to attempt communication. We have named the organism MOTHER, since it seems to caretake particularly our female crew members, who routinely say with humor “She is worse than my mother.” MOTHER seems particularly interested in their movement and “asks” with something akin to telepathy. Only one of our male crewmembers has been privy to this communication and it appears the only difference was his proximity to his sister, who was a crewmember on a previous mission.
MOTHER appears to communicate through mental images and now (with our coaxing) monosyllabic, but internal words. We believe that the potential for direct communication that transcends language barriers, cultural differences, and editorial communication for nefarious purposes could be monumental. It appears too, that MOTHER cannot or does not communicate with androids, which could provide insight into the tangible, provable notion of a soul, which would serve the Salvation of Space’s original mission and allow for the continuation of funding.
It is our belief that this lifeform’s existence has extreme economic and political benefits for whomever maintains possession of Enceladus, thus this report should be viewed only by those possessing the highest clearance.
[redacted]