But there was no need, for your body had every intention of taking care of things itself. As I rotated you by 90 degrees, you made a deep, guttural belch and vomited again, this time an entire stomach-full, which flew six feet across the room in an astonishing arc that collided with the western wall.
‘Oh,’ I said, holding you as far from me as possible. ‘Oh.’
These were useless words and, I realised, the first I had spoken since Haralia’s visit.
For a moment we remained in that position, me frozen to the bed and you drooling remnant milk as I bore you aloft. Eventually I stood and wiped you down.
Once cleaned, I lay you on the bed, whereupon you began to cry. This was a new sound, more tremulous than any other you had made, and even more jarring. I concluded that you must be in a state of shock after your surprise vomitus. In addition, the milk which you had moments before requested was no longer inside of you, and therefore your hunger had not been satisfied. Your equation was unbalanced.
This was irksome. But no matter. I would simply reintroduce more milk.
But as I reached for the bottle, you soiled yourself. I determined this not just from the noise your anus made—astounding as it was in both length and amplitude—but in the instant, wretched smell that hit my nostrils. I reeled, holding a hand to my nose.
‘Goodness,’ I proclaimed, another useless word heard by nobody but myself.
The sound had surprised you too, and your new cry momentarily ceased as you looked up at the ceiling. Then you started up again, this time with everything you had, and the resulting cry peaked at 123 decibels.
I cupped my ears to protect them. My nose now unprotected, I was reminded of the primary objective, and I hurried to fetch a fresh blanket, but halfway across the room I slipped in the mess of milk you had sprayed upon the floor. My left leg flew upwards and I fell backwards, my skull hitting timber with a thump.
You continued to cry as I lay there, stunned, with my right hand beneath my back. I twitched the muscles in my wrist, noting that I had strained its dorsal radiocarpal ligament. I winced at the pain. Though I knew it would be brief (my body was already repairing the frayed tendon) it was pain nonetheless.
We erta are careful creatures. The last time I had felt pain had been when a bee stung my leg, sixteen years ago.
I pushed myself up and got to my feet, flexing my swiftly-healing hand and inspecting my dress, the rear of which was now stained with milk.
I continued my journey across the room, slower this time, avoiding the smear.
Clear the mess.
Change the blanket.
Restart the feeding process.
Perhaps I had failed to order these priorities correctly.
I found a cloth and wiped the hem of my dress, but the milk had already soaked into its fabric, so I removed it. Now in my undergarments, I got down on my knees and went to work upon the floor.
Still you cried.
I scrubbed the mess, but it left a dark and irritating stain which would not shift. I stood and stared at it, cloth in hand.
Still you cried.
The stain could wait. Change the blanket.
Dropping the cloth in the sink, I reached for a blanket from the pile. But there was no pile; they were all drying outside. So I stepped out onto the porch. The wind had picked up, quite chilly, and was in fact coming from the northwest, not the west as I had previously thought. I checked the row of blankets hanging from the line. They still contained moisture, but one was less damp than the others so I took this down. As I turned I noticed Magda by the well. I raised a hand, but she frowned at me, one hand upon her ample hip. I wondered what her expression could mean, but then the chill wind reminded me that I was largely naked. I went inside.
The room was now overrun with the stench of your faeces and vomit, and the cacophony of your cries. You had also escaped from your blanket, which now lay open, exposing its monstrous contents to the air.
I admit that, by this point, I was nettled. The unfamiliar racket, the smell of your faeces, the lingering shock of pain and my unexpected nudity—all these new variables had complicated your equation beyond my expectations.
But this was just another equation to solve. An equation within an equation, I told myself.
I watched you. Your head turned from side to side, your arms waved, your feet kicked—kicked, in fact, through your own mess, covering you with sticky, wet slime and sending your soiled blanket to the floor, where it landed, face down, with a slap.
This disgruntled you supremely, which, under the circumstances, I considered unfair.
Avoiding the stain and the now fresh mess that lurked beneath your dirty blanket, I approached the bed, but realised I had left the cloth at the sink. I placed the damp but clean blanket next to you and returned to retrieve it. There was a crash from behind and I turned to see that you had kicked Haralia’s bottle from the bed. It now lay shattered upon the floor.
‘Oh,’ I said, rushing to pick it up, but the pieces were too small and numerous to repair. ‘Oh dear. Oh no.’
Holding two fragments, I glared down at your wriggling, squealing body. You were now naked, cold and covered in your own filth.
After an entire week of existence—the time it takes for the planet to turn seven times, for its oceans to surge back and forth, for forests to bud or die—this pitiful display of filth was the extent of your abilities. Against your animal cousins, you were an embarrassment. Lambs stand within seconds of birth. Tigers run and pretend to hunt meat. Birds take flight. Insects could live many lifetimes.
You—you kick and scream and shit yourself.
Hopeless, I thought. Without hope.
Nonetheless, I still had an equation to solve. I began by cleaning you rigorously, then wrapped you in the new blanket, making it tighter than usual to contain your wayward limbs, cleaned the mess and swept away the broken bottle.
This placated you somewhat, but you were still hungry. I looked down at the broken pieces. ‘Haralia,’ I said. But Haralia was not there.
I went outside, where Magda was still standing in the same spot as before, head cocked to one side, mouth open. There were others in the square now too, looking at me in similar fashions. A shiver ran through me. I was still half naked, though now I did not care.
‘Do you have a bottle, Magda?’ I said, above the renewed screams that resounded from within the house. ‘Anything with a teat?’
She shook her head, with something resembling disgust.
‘Anyone?’ I turned to the square, fighting to keep my voice steady. ‘Does anyone have a bottle?’
They shook their heads too.
The breeze rippled through my undergarments, and I returned inside to find you waiting for me, grunting and pulling at the air with your lips. I no longer had a vessel upon which you could suckle. However, as I looked down upon my still bare breasts, I did, I realised, have a teat.
I took the bowl of milk to the bed and soaked the trailing hem of your blanket in it. You had already sensed my plan, I think, from the eagerness with which you clamoured towards my left nipple. I barely needed to move at all, just a mere downward tilt of my shoulder and you latched upon me. Pain yet again, sharp and surprising. I rested the milk-soaked fabric against my breast and squeezed, allowing a white rivulet to run down my skin and find its way into your mouth. In this way I fed you, drip by drip, some of it spilling upon my lap, and the bed and floor. I knew I would have to clean it afterwards, or it would sour. But it did not matter. You were quiet, clean and feeding.
I had solved the equation, at least for now.
ONE MONTH
— EIGHT —
PERMIT ME TO tell you about erta in a little more detail.
By definition, I was not alive when my eleven ancestors—my parents and their eight fellow council members and Oonagh, who lives in the mountains—were created. However, I know enough through gestational updates and informative conversations with my mother to have gleaned a clear understanding
of our history.
In 2054, when it was clear that Earth’s situation had reached dire proportions, a distress call went out. You had the remains of something called the internet, a crude but optimistic attempt at organising yourselves and the information you had gathered about the universe into one cohesive system. The internet was, like everything else, dying. Its nodes had been compromised; its infrastructure hijacked by the now megalithic corporations who had taken the role of humanity’s leaders. I had heard that your species once bowed to pharaohs, empresses, Caesars and queens. You left the earth bowing to chief executive officers.
I digress.
Despite its ruinous state, a handful of persistent system administrators around the world fought to keep the internet alive, enabling it to remain sufficiently functional to propagate a simple encrypted message. This particular message originated in a place called Paris which had been under siege for some years, and was sent by another archaic system, also in ruins, called the United Nations—which is somewhat of an oxymoron, if you want my opinion.
The message was thus, in these exact words:
This is a message from the last remaining states of the United Nations. We issue a challenge, a call of hope, to any individual or group still operating in fields of research. To academies, libraries, laboratories and home enthusiasts alike: come forward with your ideas. Anything you have, no matter how outlandish or unfeasible, will be considered. We implore you—share with us your idea and tell us how to stop this destruction. Tell us how to save our souls.
There is no record of how many people heard this message, or how many responded. But we do know that it reached Dr Elise Nyström’s laboratory in the mountains of northern Sweden.
Dr Nyström was an expert (in human terms) in many fields, including neuroscience, bio-engineering, intelligence and nanorobotics. She was also a transhumanist, which meant that she believed human development could be guided into perfection by means of cybernetic enhancement and genetic engineering.
She was quite correct.
Quite simply, Dr Nyström’s life’s ambition had been to create a better version of a human, and the timing of her success and her interception of the United Nations’ message could not have been more serendipitous; just three months before, Oonagh had stepped, dripping, from Nyström’s gestation tank.
Nyström asked Oonagh: what should be done?
Oonagh’s answer was simple: create more of me.
This they did, and the council were born.
Physically, erta are larger, stronger, faster and more robust than humans. They live far longer and heal with ease, thanks to immune systems enhanced by swarms of self-replicating nano-mites trained to hunt and destroy anything which does not belong within the body. Tumour, virus, disease, toxin—nothing that dares enter our blood stream with malicious intent will last longer than a minute.
We eat the same, although our diets are less varied and consist primarily of herring, vegetables and broth from the sanitation tanks. We drink the same, and although we have not developed a taste for alcohol or any other such drugs, I am told it affects us in similar ways.
Although our gestational requirements prohibit procreation in the traditional sense, we do still have sexual organs which can, in the rare case of couples such as Haralia and Jakob (so she says, and as I say I am highly sceptical), be used for idle pleasure.
We urinate and defecate in the same manner and from the same orifices, the texture and colour of what is issued being consistent and predictable with what was issued before.
But when Dr Nyström designed Oonagh, her genius (when compared with other humans) was not in what she added to the blueprint, but in what she left out. Rather than merely focussing on what could move you forwards, she spent just as much time on identifying what already held you back.
Desire. Fear. Greed. Anger. She muted it all, and in doing so created a far more peaceful space in which to think. The erta do not get distracted so easily. They do not think about themselves over others. They can see how things fit together without thinking about how they would prefer them to fit together. They do not fear the unknown, they do not want what they do not have. They do not fight to be heard above the next, because we recognise, implicitly, the value in a different perspective. Logic rules our thought, purely because there is nothing else to take its place.
You can understand now why that council meeting was so perplexing.
Of course, an erta’s mental capacity is also far superior to that of a human. We can remember every event as clearly as when we first experienced it, think in parallel, many times over, and at thousands of times the speed. We can analyse our sensory data in greater resolution and with far greater accuracy but in the fraction of the time. All these things we do without effort. The hard work goes on deep within our minds.
Which explains the final similarity between erta and humans: sleep. Erta require regular, consistent sleep, probably to a greater degree than humans and, possibly than almost any other form of life upon the planet. It is when our minds perform their deepest levels of processing, and if it is lacking, then so are we.
The erta need their sleep.
I need my sleep.
You, it seems, do not.
YOU WAKE UP at night, many times over. There is no pattern. Or if there is, then I cannot find it.
Prior to the day you vomited, you had been sleeping soundly through the night, as every other diurnal life form upon this planet, including me, should and does. But that night you woke before midnight, bringing me with you, unwillingly, into consciousness. I rose and sat upon the bed. My house was illuminated only by weak starlight, the moon a waning crescent obscured by the southern cliffs. The tide was high, and I heard the waves washing the beach. It was a peaceful sound, whereas your cry, as ever, was not.
I applied the feeding routine, attaching you to my breast as I had done during the day and dribbling milk from a cloth down my flesh. You took it hungrily for six minutes, then removed yourself, gurgled and immediately slept. My own passage back into unconsciousness was not so swift; I had rarely in my life woken before my body and mind had enjoyed sufficient sleep, and it was strange to be awake during the night. I lay there listening to the shuffling of the palms against my roof, and the quick, light steps of rodents over the porch. A night owl screeched. It was nine minutes before I fell asleep, and two hours, thirty nine minutes and fifty seven seconds before I was awake again.
My brain usually assembles sensory data so expeditiously that I can, for example, know everything about a forest clearing the moment I step into it—the species of grub crawling through tree bark, the network of roots beneath the ground, the ambient temperature, humidity, the frequencies of bird call above and so forth. But this time my brain did something which it rarely does. It faltered, and for a brief moment I found myself lacking data. I did not know why I was awake, or where I was, or—I was somewhat chilled to note—who.
It is extremely unnerving to lose an identity which has stood firm for five centuries.
But this was a momentary glitch, and I sat up and repeated the same procedure, as before.
You woke twice more that night.
The next day was not a good day.
— NINE —
MY MOOD WAS already troubled by your four night-time disturbances, and from the fact that, after the last, you did not return to sleep. You had decided that the day began before dawn, which it clearly does not. There are a variety of matutinal animals, a clique of beasts such as birds and certain species of flying insect which raise themselves before the sun, but erta do not belong to them, and neither do sapiens. I am certain, in fact, that no ape rises before it has to. Haralia told me this once.
My sister. I felt a pang when I thought of her. I had not seen her for over thirty days.
So I started the day bothered and in the dark. I did not expect to have to deal with Magda as well.
It was mid-morning and you were feeding when she knocked upon my door. I had not yet had
a chance to breakfast, and a bowl of broth and raw sweet potato sat half-eaten upon the table. I opened the door with you firmly attached to my breast, the sodden flannel dribbling as ever. Magda’s eyes and lower jaw dropped in unison, a manoeuvre of such perfection that I actually felt somewhat cheered.
‘Hello, Magda,’ I said. ‘What do you want?’
Magda paused. She is a third generation erta with expertise in agriculture, which largely involved the dismantlement of artificial ecosystems (biofarms, palm plantations and such), the gradual phasing out of man-made crops, and their replacement with more naturally growing cereals. Like Caige, Magda grew a fondness for eating wheat and carries evidence of this in her figure. Although no erta would ever drop too far above or below their optimum weight, there are some fluctuations in build. Magda is one such fluctuation.
She paused, watching you suckle.
‘Magda?’
Her eyes and jaw swiftly returned to their original positions.
‘Ima. I had heard rumours of your…’ She glanced at you again. ‘…enterprise.’
As a third generation, Magda is not involved in any first-hand discussions within the council. Though you are not a secret—erta do not keep secrets—neither have you been announced in any formal way. As with all things, information is best allowed to spread freely and naturally as required. All erta, for example, are aware of transcendence and its implications for them, but an individual would not typically seek to learn the specifics of any activity, unless they had a part to play in it. We neither learn, create, nor move unless there is purpose.
Magda, however, is a terrible gossip.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Do you wish to contribute? Assist?’
I was disturbed at the velocity of my words, and at the slope of their upward inflection. Hurried hope.
Magda’s attention returned to the situation at my chest.
‘Not in the slightest,’ she said.
The Human Son Page 5