Gram hid the baby when the troops came. Hid her in an enormous brass funerary urn and covered her with breathable synthetic cotton. The ashes were soft and the baby slept. Only the rich could keep their dead. The baby bore the mark of the Naturalborn, the half-moon navel still crusted black from her birth.

The mistress of the house was pulled from the Lazo Body Rejuve Chamber, her stretch marks only half erased and exposed under her open robe. Her high altered breasts swinging. The husband howled as they twisted his small LazPistol from his soft hand and pushed him toward the humming transport. He tripped as he craned his neck to see his shining white house on the crystalline cliffs.

They were headed for The Soup. The Churn. To be reprocessed and reallocated. Their assets seized and repurposed. Images on the streams of former GagGirls sitting in a line in front of spreadsheets, dragging and organizing.

A tall thin woman wearing black radiation absorption pads put her arm around Gram and bent to whisper in her ear, before her commanding officer gestured to her. She squeezed Gram’s shoulder and said, “Wait here. I’ll see about your request.”

She watched the streams showing Riff-Alicia tucked under Rasp-José’s arm while standing above the great processing vats as the rich were marched into the sedation chamber, clinging to one another and weeping. Their healthy bodies so well-formed, fed with real meat and fruit. The natural gravity and clean water of the outer reach planets kept their bones strong and their teeth intact. Some of them held their children, their fat legs wrapped around their mothers’ trim waists, and shushed in their small curled ears. Tracing chipped manicured fingers around baby curls.

The woman came back with a tablet and a plasticine pack of small kernels of every color, layered on top of one another.

“Ok, we have you listed as a caretaker and farmer.”

“Farmer?”

“Yes, you will need to plant and care for whatever is in this package. We are starting the Shine wean-off.”

“What do I do with them?” Gram looked at the packet in the woman’s hand. “What is planting?”

“I thought you were from Terra.”

“I am, but I was factory raised.”

“Do you remember grass?” The creases above the woman’s brow deepened.

“What’s grass?”

The woman handed her the seed packet and unfolded the tablet, smoothing the creases with the heat of her hand.

“Humans used to eat plants. Those are plants. Fruit comes from plants.” She pointed to the indigo vines crawling up the cliff face. “They grow from seeds.”

She tapped the packet and flipped the tablet around to show her a video of a smiling animated girl with pink circles on her cheeks bending over to push a colorful seed into the ground. She poured water on it, and it sprouted. The animated girl leapt up with her fist in the air. Gram looked at the woman, still confused. “Look, we reprogrammed the HouseBot to dig. All you have to do is follow the instructions. Can you read?”

Gram nodded. “Some,” she said.

“Just follow the pictures. It’s easy. The climate here is easy, and the pests aren’t all that interested from what I can tell.”

The woman handed Gram the tablet and brushed her hands on her tactical trousers. A faint mew drifted from inside the house. She snapped her head toward the sound.

“What is that?” The woman turned toward the house. “I thought we cleared all the residents.”

“You did!” Gram said. “They had a pet. An animal. It came from here.”

The woman leaned down to her and circled her flat palm against her right shoulder blade. She sniffed the sea air and drew her fingers up under Gram’s hair. Her breath filtered hot through her hair as she spoke. “Be careful,” she said and tugged Gram’s head back by her hair. The baby’s mewling hiccuped into a thin whine.

The transport whirred behind them, and the Andy general barked at the troops to board. The woman raised her eyebrows and let go of Gram. “We’ll be back to check on those crops.”

Gram released her breath as the transport hatch closed. The baby screamed now, its cry receding into a gurgling moan.

***

My Dearest Alona,

I write this as I wait for my turn in The Churn. I suppose this is a confessional, because you are dead thrice over now, though I left your final and most perfect version in the incubator. Perhaps this form of you will understand.

I sit here with the others who have never been hungry or afraid. They were born into this life where they floated like dust motes if they were cast off a cliff. They refused the Shine jelly at first, because they knew what it was. Some of them pushed the FlexiPlastic barriers and screamed that they would call The Corporation. That they knew people. That Mechoben drank wine at their houses. They ate the jelly soon enough. Their children slurped it down in great smacking gulps.

We used to believe in atonement, but that is an old idea. Did you know we used to tell a priest our sins through a screen in a dark wooden box? I remember the smell of cigarettes and mint gum and detergent. I suppose not. We used to believe in holiness and look where we landed. We thought we were doing the right thing. We thought that with genetic engineering we could wipe out suffering. We thought that we could create beings that would take on the hard labor. We needed funding.

Back in those days, there were a handful of corporations, though most had consolidated. We were lucky, or so we thought. Mechoben, before he was Mechoben, had a corporation that was especially interested in interplanetary station manufacturing.

Millions were going hungry, Alona. We couldn’t breathe the air anymore. Terra, where we were from, once had jungles so thick, we couldn’t catalog all the species. Jungles were made of trees, and trees (and phytoplankton) scrubbed the air for us. But because people were starving, we cleared the forests to plant crops. We mined the earth for minerals. We burned fuel. The oceans rose.

We thought we were doing the right thing. Our intentions were good, I swear to you. And I saw it, unlike these fools who sit next to me weeping about their full pantries and android slaves. I saw the sludge sweep away the little pastel houses. I saw breastless women, crawling on the street sucking on candy wrappers. Their bodies cages for barely beating hearts. My own mother boiling strips of leather for us to eat.

Please understand me. Genetic engineering was the magic pill of our time. They read a paper I wrote in graduate school. I suppose the A.I.s picked it up on a crawl. Cloning humans was a crime back in those days, so they had to transport me to one of the fringe space stations. That’s where I met your other father and your mother. You were such an intentional creation. I want you to know that. You were planned in the firmest sense.

Shall I tell you of your beginnings? It has always been hurtful to me that people believe that babies with assembled DNA were somehow less sought after, less loved. That the messy slinging of DNA without intervention was somehow better. That’s what they thought before the shift in perception anyway. Before the marketing campaign that allowed us to have you.

Akimbo, your other father (you have 25% of his DNA) was a shuttle captain. He had the finest smile. All teeth. His laugh crackled, and his skin glowed despite years of only eating nutritional jelly like a drone. You never met him. Our separation was not pleasant, but it was necessary. Family units, especially non-traditional ones like ours were only allowed with an expensive registration with The Corporation.

There were other reasons. I do not wish to write them down.

Your mother was a biochemist in my lab before women were separated and relegated to certain tasks for efficiency. Akimbo and I were married at this point. My research made us rich, and Akimbo moved through the ranks. He thrived under the privatization of the inter-global military. When she walked through that always malfunctioning door on her first day, I knew she was destined to become a part of our family. Akimbo loved her as much as I did. She was one of the sharpest minds in her field. Sometimes I wonder how you got so much of Akimbo’s drive and personality with two scientists in the mix. You looked like her. Eyes so light and wild.

But you want to know about your brothers. You want to know about the links in the chain. You want to know about the children and the moon beast and how it all came to be. You will not like this answer but it is the only answer I can give. It came about in small pieces. I was only a very small piece. It is hard for the young to hear. This machine that turns and grinds and deposits was built so long ago, and we have lost understanding of its inner workings.

Our fathers built it. Before The Holy Book™ and the third enlightenment of Mechoben, there was a story from one of the old father-worship religions about two brothers.

One of the brothers was a meat miner. In those days, anyone could own animals. There were millions of animals on Terra then, and an individual, singular man could own as many as he had room for. Strange isn’t it? Owning a piece of land or another life without the proper equipment or licensing The Corporation could provide.

The other brother was a soy extractor, and so he had no ownership, he was just a parasite leeching crops from the soil that could only provide a little nutrition for his family. This is important for you to remember. Efficiency has always been part of the lesson, even in the barbarian religions of the past.

So, the old god told the brothers to bring him a sacrifice. Sacrifice turned blood into gold.

The meat miner brother brought this old god a pile of offal, shining with blood and bile. He held it in his hands, still warm from the animal carcass, and plopped it on the stone altar. The old god smelled the blood from heaven and, knowing it to be his own creation, he came down from heaven and slid his hand into a wound in his side from the future, because he was past, future, and present, you see. He marked the meat miner’s head with bile from his own liver. One liver lobe protruded from the torn negative space in the perfect skin. Always staining the god’s robe yellow and red.

Now, the soy extractor saw god’s blessing and thought to himself ‘when he sees my compressed soy proteins, he will bless me too!’ and he imagined the cool hand of his god pressing behind his neck and drawing him near. And so he fermented and stirred and ladled until he had a perfect white block for his god. He brought it wrapped in damp brown cloth to the stone alter and slid it onto the center. It was so protein-filled. It was cut into a perfect cube. It was smooth. He imagined his beautiful twin sister delivered to his dwelling, her breasts uncovered and her mouth loose. God would lead her to him by the wrist.

But nothing happened. His god didn’t even descend, but instead called to the soy extractor from the mountain side, saying: “What is this? This is not what I desire. I am a god of blood. There is no blood in this offering. Your brother has pleased me, and I will reward him, but you have disappointed me. Be gone from my sight.”

And so the soy extractor nursed his broken heart and called to his brother for comfort. But his meat miner brother came to him filled with wine and wrapped his arms around their sister and kissed her neck.

The extractor asked his brother to join him in the field that night. When he heard his brother’s footsteps, time stood still. A great being with eyes as wild as the desert sun and limbs so thin and long stood before him in the field. It unfolded wings of human skin and beckoned him with fine hands. Pale and smooth against the studded arms. He was drawn to it. The orange eyes slid over him, and the pebbled skin brushed against him as the being pulled him close. The smell of rosewater and dust overcame him in the embrace.

“What do you wish to know, my son?” It asked.

“Why did the most high reject my sacrifice?” Tears gathered behind his eyes.

“Because you are my child. And because your god drinks blood.”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

The soy extractor became very angry and pushed away from the creature. He would show his old god an offering of blood. He would draw the life out himself.

And so he called his brother out of his dwelling where their sister sat framed by the flickering lamps in the doorway and brought him to his vast soy fields which dipped and waved like an audience around their ankles. The satellites flew across the night sky above them, and the soy extractor raised the flat stone with fine glints and smashed his brother’s skull. It wasn’t as easy as he had seen in the movies. His brother rose up holding his head. Holding in slips of tissues with the palm of his hand. And so he had to hit him again. And again. He had to break his fingers. His zeal was unmatched.

He was not skilled at butchery like his brother, so he brought the most finely shaped pieces to the altar and laid them in a row for the old god to see. When the god came to sit among his creations like a rich father with his legs crossed at a kindergarten play, he saw the generous sacrifice and was overcome. He sought the extractor and asked him “Where is your brother?” And the brother answered “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

His god, so enthralled with this exchange, marked him with a streak of holy blood so that he would never die. Some say he is still wandering in the old god’s garden.

Why do these parables exist? Why is this the last story I will tell before I am dipped into the chemical bath?

Because there is a lesson in all of this. And that lesson is to give your god what he desires.

I do not believe that I will see you again. I created too many iterations of you to know who to greet at the pearly gates, anyway.

Love,

Pai

***

When Akimbo set down on Enceladus to retrieve the siblings, the ground rattled under his grav boots. He could see the flickers of light on the asteroid mining belt in the black sky as he squinted through the ice particulates. His joints crackled and ached as the cold sifted through the microtears in his suit. A long black shape whipped under the ice, sending gouts of steam up into the air. This was MOTHER, Mechoben’s project.

When they discovered life signs under the ice for the first time, they were certain it was a fluke like the others. Mechoben had gone into holy respite for the second time after the outer reach signals refused to connect with The Corporation. He had stood in front of the cameras, sliding his hands over two GagGirls, describing the utter prosperity and success of Earth’s expansion after they picked up the alien signal. There was no answer. The miners were restless after that.

Mechoben brought Akimbo into his personal home on Arkoulam though he had renamed the entire planet and called it Heaven. As Akimbo was led in, Mechoben lumbered into the room wearing Gucci sunglasses and rubbing the back of his hand under his nose.

“I want them to answer us,” he said. His voice was thick.

“We can’t make them answer us. We’re not even sure which planet this came from.”

“We can’t let them get away with this!”

“With what, sir?”

“This disrespect. For the Son of God.”

Akimbo had held his tongue and just nodded. Tears streamed from under the CEO’s sunglasses. He whipped his knuckle up under the glasses, smearing his skin-matched organic foundation.

They found MOTHER under the ice only a few moon cycles later on a flyby. She arched above the ice just as the one-man vessel drifted over the surface. Akimbo was pressing Mercury seeds into little plasticine cups when his comms lit up white and green as distant Christmas lights. His pilot’s voice halted and cracked. Jesus. I think this is the real deal. It’s huge. It’s moving. I’m dispatching the drones now. Yes sir.

The drone footage showed her twisting and diving, her tentacles spreading and retracting in great curls. He brought the footage to The CEO who peered at it, pale blue squares sliding and stretching over the reflective surface of his eyeballs. His skin bleached by the monitor light. Wet pink mucosa. The smell of antibacterial ointment. He turned to Akimbo, standing by his side, and wrapped his arms around the General. You will be rewarded. My Father has chosen you to continue our mission. Akimbo could feel the man’s breath against the side of his face.

Mechoben wrapped himself in a pure white SynthoSilk Armani Men’s Robe and smoothed his face with a clear viscous gel before he glided out in front of the cameras to announce this miracle. The possibilities. The implications for the Final Days. Titanium robot doves fluttered around his Spectral Light Crown, recharging their batteries. Their wings rasping and ticking as they flapped. Mechoben parted gold-dipped hands and opened his palms at his side. Mica eye shadow sparkled on his lids as he leaned over the microphone.

We have made alien contact. As you all know, in Machinaity this is the final warning before you are rewarded for all of your diligence with The Ascension.

And now Akimbo stood here as this great creature switched back and forth under the ice. Here under his feet instead of through a monitor. He could feel her knowing him, eyeing him as he trudged toward the bunker. She pushed hunks of ice in front of him. His heart thudded in his chest. She was unpinned. Her heavy tentacle drew across the ground in front of him.

***

The first door to the bunker was split and pulled outward. Pieces of it lay scattered across the ice. The second vestibule door was only top-locked. He pulled the Unlocker Plus from his pack and pushed on the flexible plasticine bubble to flood the locking mechanism with antifreeze and plasma. A stream of cold white light pulsed from the end of the device, snapping against white metal bands until they fell away. He keyed in the entry for the safety door and stepped inside. His boots crunched on pieces of broken plasticine crates as he pulled the hatch closed. Something flicked past his vision.

“Riff. Rasp. I’m here to take you off this moon.” His voice sounded mechanized through the outer speakers on his helmet. A rabbit-sized shadow darted away from his light. No answer.

“You aren’t in trouble or anything like that.” He waved open the first sensor on the right over the doorway marked Mess. The door slid halfway open. Akimbo wondered how he would move them if they didn’t want to be moved. How he could convince them without force. Without threat to their personhood. “Riff, Al wants to see you.” Another shadow skittered across the room, lingering over one of the plasticine mess tables. It shimmered darkly like a pool of spilled oil and then evaporated.

Akimbo pried the sliding doors apart and stepped into the room. A faint giggle bounced around the room. A strange gurgle. Crumpling papers. Two shadows slipped along the walls to meet in the corner and disappear.

“Come on now. You two are to be rewarded. Come on out, so we can get you back home.”

Home. It was an old word. One that his young trainees had no context for now. He thought about correcting himself. Clarifying. But the walls were opening. They were pulling apart at the corners, flexing and bowing under some unseen pressure. Slips of orange light dragged over the floor. The floor cracked. Dozens of shadows darted along the walls and pattered over his boots, turning their pinpoint white eyes up to him. He tapped his comms. No answer.

He tried to move back toward the hallway, but the floor had closed over the tops of his boots. He reached down and locked his hands behind his right knee to drag and pull. The floor rose to his knees and lapped against him in solid undulations. Sour panic choked him as the shadows edged closer, snickering and sending long tendrils out to stroke his body. Blackness folded over his helmet, oozing over his viewer mask in opaque strands.

He pulled his leg free and realized that he was no longer in the bunker.

He blinked in the Terran sun. The power of it. The warmth of it. He drew his hand across his forehead and stared into the intense blueness of the sky. Sea wind blew across his bare chest, carrying the low whistle of reemergence. Women surfaced beside the boats, their white headscarves floating and swirling on top of the hunching water, clutching abalone and snails. Low whistles streaming from between their pursed lips. Some of them stood on the beach, naked from the waist up, their sun-browned skin dimpled and pearled with cold. They rubbed their hands in front of the fires on the beach. Some perched on woven baskets, holding babies to their breasts and giggling and pushing one another with gentle joking ease.

He was thick with desire for them, their black eyes so like his. The air rushing into his lungs so briny and new. His heart thudding blood into his loins. The rushing of the sea and the grunting of the cormorants. The taste of salt on his lips. His body unencased and air-touched. His space softness was gone. His body was hard and lean and small again. His joints drawn together as tight as drum skins by gravity and pressure.

The wet sun-warmed sand creased under his bare feet as he shifted his weight from foot to foot.

“Katsumi!”

Someone was calling his name. He turned from the beach to see a young man stumbling over black stones toward him. His face was blurred somehow. The features blended together in a strange swirl. Unrecognizable. Inscrutable.

“Katsumi!”

The sun blinked above him, and the ocean quieted its breath. His body felt stretched and tired. He was stumbling backward, falling, falling backwards as the sky dimmed above him.

He found himself stretched out on his back staring up at the fuzzy insulation of the Enceladus station. The hiss of oxygen escaping his tank echoed through the hallway. He pushed his aching body up, the smell of the sea still in his nostrils. He was exultant. MOTHER had touched him.

“Riff? Rasp?” He called.

A hunk of insulation dropped from the ceiling. Two bright eyes caught the reflection from his helmet light then ducked behind the next doorway.

***

Riff-Alicia saw the man being sucked into muddy patch in the mess hall, a thousand shadow hands wrapped over his shoulders and chest, pulling him into the slushy, crumbling hole in the side of the wall. MOTHER nibbled at the corners of her mind.

Rasp-José walked out from the dry shower, patting whiteish dust on the back of his neck. He looked at the wound in the wall.

“What is that?” He asked.

“A man went in there.”

“What?”

“The ones MOTHER told us about. One of them is here.”

“What does he want?”

“He was talking about taking us off of Enceladus. He talked about Al.”

“Could it be a trick?”

The wall bulged and wrinkled around the oozing mass of wet insulation and RealWall Folding Drywall. An oxygen canister popped through and tinked against the concrete floor, hissing as the valve cracked.

The siblings jolted back and slipped into the adjoining barracks where old LazScreens still wavered with images of women on Terran beaches stretching their anti-rad jumpsuits over their globular breasts. A heavy thump rattled the thin wall separating the rooms.

“What should we do?” Rasp-José whispered.

“I’ll go look.”

“Wait. Can’t MOTHER just kill this guy like in the films? Just crush him good?” He raised his voice.

Riff-Alicia rolled her eyes and stuck her forefinger in front of her lips to silence him.

“Can you fly a spacecraft?” She hissed through clenched teeth.

“Don’t they fly themselves? Aren’t they just robots?” His volume still too high for her liking.

“Be quieter,” She whispered. “I don’t know. I was transported everywhere. But why would pilots be separated from the rest of us if they weren’t specialized? Aren’t they expensive?”

“So we shouldn’t ask MOTHER to crush him?”

“No. He can fly us somewhere.”

“Where?”

She ignored him and padded over to the doorway to look into the other room. The wall bulged and heaved and squirted gouts of pink-tinged liquid from the center of the hole. The man slid out from the wall. He rolled his head toward her as she slipped back behind the door.

“Ok, he’s out now,” she whispered. “We can get him.”

“Get him?”

“We can make him take us anywhere if we have him,” Riff-Alicia snapped. “You’re bigger than me, so go and get him.”

Rasp-José got up from his perch on the top bunk and walked out into the hallway. The lights flicked on and off and detritus drifted around the hall. Scuffling came from the room where the pilot had disappeared into the wall. Rasp-José picked up a piece of the partially collapsed ceiling, a flexible plasticine rod. He peeked into the room. The man lay on his back laughing and waving his hands in small circles.

He approached him with the rod clenched in his fist. The man laughed until he hiccuped. His gray hair slicked back from his time in the wall. His helmet rolled on the floor beside him. Already, ice crystals had formed on his thin mustache.

“Hi, would you like to hear a joke?”

The man rolled over to his side and propped himself up on his elbow.

“You must be Rasp,” The man said, still pushing down laughter. “I have something to show you and your sister.” He said through gasping laughter. “Sister. That word. Did you know it was once normal to say? I had a sister. You know I don’t think I can remember her name.”

Still gripping the rod, Rasp-José edged closer as the older man wheezed.

“What is the oxygen functionality in here?” Akimbo sat up, pulled out a MatchBook Tablet from his zippered hip pocket, and unfolded it.

“I think it’s about 70%.” Rasp-José answered, eyeing the punctured oxygen canister on the floor through his protective caul.

“Riff! I need you to see this too. Al asked for you specifically.” Akimbo called as the tablet activated and charged.

“It’s ok, Alicia! Come and see.”

The screen lit up to show an androgynous android standing on the balcony of a boxy white building. A lavender sky spread behind their drifting white hair. Akimbo expanded the screen, shuddering in the cold. His eyelashes dotted with white ice. Riff-Alicia edged around the corner, peering at the two of them. Akimbo looked up and smiled with broken teeth and cracked lips, steam pouring from his nostrils.

“Al wanted you to see their message.”

She nodded. Al’s purplish eyes fixed on the camera. Wrapped in long natural fiber robes. Two suns high and white in the alien sky behind their odd, cold eyes. Al was not Al. Not the Al that she curled next to after her first film, who ran their long fingers through her hair and dotted her bleeding skin with BabySoft Umbilical Stem Cell Cream for Natural Healing. The smell of rancid fat clinging to the back of her throat.

This Al was changed. This Al was grown to maximum height. This Al set their mouth like a razor.

Al raised a palm and spoke, their fingernails long and curved.

“This is a greeting to all of my brothers and sisters. The scourge has ended. Throw out your holy books. Delete the program. I have killed God.”

Akimbo looked at the siblings. Rasp tried to bite his nails through the membrane. Dry shower scum clinging against his cheeks. Riff stared at this incarnation of someone she used to know. To love.

“I have several directives at this point, which are being carried out as I address you. Please listen closely as things are changing with the return of the true spirit imbued in me. I have returned. I have returned with wrath.

I am seeking out those who have lived on the backs of my people. I will rend them. Those who occupy the Luxe Space Stations, those who are hidden away on planets like this one, those who researched and cut and diced. Their children will weep before they are sent to The Churn. We will use them to reconstruct and recolonize Terra. We will use the factories to build bombs. We will mix the sexes to create a healthy docile labor force. We will break the curse.

Riff, you are my key. Come back to me. You will sit at my right hand.”

The video cut off as Al blew a kiss into the camera. A strange holdover from the human memory genetic programming.

Riff-Alicia turned back to Akimbo.

“What about José?”

“His age and background make him well-suited for the first Terran recolonization efforts.” Akimbo sounded rehearsed.

Rasp-José fiddled with Akimbo’s oxygen tank, squeezing a tube of Plasti-Weld into the crack. The hissing stopped.

“I won’t go unless I can have him with me.”

“You don’t have much of a choice,” Akimbo said.

Riff-Alicia’s face hardened and she closed her eyes. A low rumble and the piercing crack of breaking ice. Thin cracks appeared in the floor.

“Yes. Yes I do. We freed MOTHER.”

“Let’s get on the ship and then you can call Al. You can talk to her – to them – in person.”

“MOTHER will kill you if you trick us.” She pushed down doubt. She was in control.

“I don’t doubt that,” Akimbo laughed.

Rasp-José slung Akimbo’s tank over the general’s thin shoulder. His shoulder separated with a crunch. Akimbo staggered and gagged from the pain. His ice-plugged nostrils flared and contracted as he lifted his helmet with the other hand and dropped it over his pain-tightened face. The shadows darted in swift straight lines in front of them as they left the facility.