Dead Americans

by Ben Peek

  In the questions that rose I tried to be as reassuring as I could. Lydon would accompany me; yes, I would take a gun for my safety; no, I would not reconsider my decision. It was what needed to be done. I repeated that line a dozen times during the evening, but, two months later, in the community of Brixton, as both Lydon and I were lead out naked, and with ropes around our necks, I thought back to the night and realized what I hadn’t done was thank any of the people before me. I had not begun as someone who believed in anything, but they had given me faith. They had given me the courage to walk into small communities and talk, openly, about change; to fight in streets with authorities; to run at other times. They had given me the strength to enter Brixton, the first Alrea run town I had ever seen, with muddy streets and shops, and to speak in a secret meeting that would lead to the capture of Lydon and I.

  They did not put a hood over our heads on the gallows. I had been beaten and raped and if there was pride in me, it was gone when I stood before the crowd.

  It never had time to return.

  9.

  “Did I forget anything?”

  “Not as much, this time.” The voice was her own. “How do you feel?”

  She wanted to say awful. O.—she could no longer identify herself by the name her mother had given her—felt nauseous, had a dull ache in her head, and could taste only plastic in her mouth. The pale light of the room she sat in did not help, either. The light was meant to be natural, but served only to highlight the artificiality of everything around her. The smooth walls, the lack of windows, the furniture that was part of the floor and warm to the touch—it was all a creation, an aberration of normal. Since she had awoken, O. believed that she had not yet experienced anything authentic, from the food she ate, the air she breathed, and even herself. It was the latter that was the most obvious, however, for there was no ignoring her hard white skin.

  She had tried to kill herself twice. “It’s your reaction,” the woman across from her said after the last time, “to the loss of your identity.”

  O. supposed she should know, since the woman claimed to be her. Her from the future. It was ridiculous, but still, she looked like her: a medium sized white woman with closely cropped hair—O.’s hair had been cut after her first suicide attempt, when she began to mutilate herself by pulling it out. It would never grow back, she had been told. Just as unsettling, however, was that she looked just like the woman who had given her a knife as a child. The woman across from her claimed that she had, in fact, done that, and whenever O. thought about that, she dug her regrowing fingernails into the palm of her hands and attempted to draw blood. She had, as yet, been unable to do so—even in her suicide attempts.

  “Octavia,” the woman said, “how do you feel?”

  “A little nauseous.”

  “Would you like to go for a walk?”

  She didn’t, but it was better than staying and repeating what she remembered of her life for the fourth or fifth time.

  Rising, O. followed herself out of the room and into empty, unnaturally lit corridors. The warmth of the floor seeped into her feet and she could not shake the feeling that she was standing on something alive. Worse, however, were the thoughts in her fractured memories. She could see faces inside glass bowls and bulky white suits. She could hear heavy breathing.

  “You’re doing well,” herself said.

  “Am I?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you believe that, or is this just what you said to me when you were here?” More than once O. had raised the question of how she could be both the patient and the doctor. She persisted with it now as an act of defiance, rather than an honest question. “You told me that you were here because I didn’t react well to Alrea, that it needed you to be a calming influence on me—but how is seeing myself in another body meant to do that?”

  “I wondered the same thing.”

  That, O. decided, was one of her more annoying habits. If it was true, if the woman beside her was her from ahead in time, then—

  “What you’re thinking right now,” herself said, “is that I will be more forthcoming when it is me who stands there.” Stopping, she turned to O. “But you won’t be, because you don’t really know how it works. It’s like magic. You go back in time to see yourself because there’s no other choice. Alrea is through this door, by the way.”

  There was nothing special about how it looked. “Why me?” Yet, she could not escape the vague sense of disquiet that settled over her. “Why any of this?”

  “I have only theories.” Her future self made no motion towards the door. They would part here, it seemed. “Sally was right when she said that Alrea was a child in its understanding of gender. Men cut wood. Women cook. I’ve always believed that is why Alrea made a woman to be the first carer. But as to why it was you, or me, that is a more difficult question. Nothing that we did made an impact in the world: Ulee did not last long after we were killed and the ideals within it were lost. I doubt that Alrea even paid attention to us at the time, but yet, here were are, reborn imperfectly.”

  Curious, O, reached out for her double, but her white hand passed through the other.

  “I’m just an image,” herself said. “If you had touched me in the school, years ago, the same thing would have happened.”

  “But the knife?”

  “Only small things can be sent through time.” She shrugged. “I just use it when I am told.”

  The last word sat unpleasantly with her. The sad smile that her future self gave reinforced the emotion. “Don’t keep it waiting,” herself said.

  And then she was gone.

  Alone, O. considered running . . . but to what point? She had seen no exit, and no other person than herself was in the building with her. Earth was a wasteland, destroyed by war and disease, the best of them Alrea, so there was, in theory, nowhere to go but the smooth, shell like complex around. But, again, what would be the point? The answers she wanted—the reason for her to search—the explanation of why she was there, how it had happened, and what the future held lay beyond the door in front of her.

  It slid open at her touch.

  The light inside was cold and brittle, but dimmed as she walked further in. Within the centre of the room was a large mass and as she drew closer, her mind drew comparisons, first suggesting a sack similar to that of a spider’s egg satchel, but many, many times larger; then she thought of a heart, dried and withered and enlarged, suspended in thick black cords from the ceiling; and lastly, she thought it a tomb, for she was able to make out in the dimly cast shadows, a figure. It was human, at least in size and form, but her earlier memories flooded back when she saw a white, full body suit suspended in the middle. Its head was encased in a pressure sealed helmet—or so it once had been for, in turning to face her, there was revealed broken glass and a torn suit.

  “Finally.” Within the shattered faceplate, there was only darkness. The voice came from around the tomb, around her. “Octavia. Welcome.”

  O. made no response, could not find her voice.

  “I am Alrea.” A pause, then a correction: “I am what is left of Alrea.”

  “You’re an astronaut?”

  “No.” Inside, the helmet tilted up, then turned to the left. “No, I was inside this man when I left Earth. When we left Earth.”

  “We?”

  Above the astronaut, light ignited to reveal thousands upon thousands of miniature sacks. So bright was the light that O. could make out a tiny sliver of movement in each, the shiver of an embryo, she knew without having to be told, the beginning of a child. After a moment, the light dimmed, and the encased head of the long dead astronaut that housed Alrea slumped, as if asleep. A moment later, it rose. “These are all that remain of your people.”

  “Earth.” She hesitated, stumbled on the sentence. “There’s truly nothing?”

  “Yes. I—It was failure.” O. caught a glimpse of the face in the hel
met as it turned to her: torn, black, but a familiar black: Baker Thomas. The last Baker Thomas. “I came by accident, and I came injured, but as I healed, I grew an affection for where I was. There was such life: in the soil, in the water, in the air, everywhere. The sickness that I saw I thought I could fix easily, but I did not understand how your kind would react, how I would react with humans, and while every day I tried anew, the decades saw that I killed all but Baker.”

  “And now you want to try again?” She did not know what was more appropriate: anger, grief, or shock. “To alleviate your guilt?”

  “Yes.”

  It was anger. “Look what you have done to me!”

  “I have remade you,” Alrea said, its voice without a hint of remorse. “You are stronger now than you ever were—”

  “I’m dead!” The words were a scream, torn from the body that had been created for her. “You killed me! You can’t remake me just because you need me—I did not want to be here! You have no rights over me!”

  “Do not take such a tone with me.”

  Pain wracked her body, forcing her to the ground. It was worst than any pain O. had ever felt before, and it paralyzed her with its strength. Had she been flesh, made from muscle and bones, it would have caused a seizure, and parts of her would have ruptured and split. Then, feeling if she were entombed in a thick gel, she gazed down on white herself, standing patiently, an empty figure waiting to be filled.

  “If not you,” Alrea said, though now it sounded as if it came from inside her, “then another. You can be returned to the parts of Earth that I keep within myself. Do you want that?”

  “No.” She could not feel her voice, but could hear it. “No.”

  “Good.”

  Released, O. sank to the ground, a sudden weight where there had been none momentarily. There was, however, no safety in it: she knew that could be taken at any time. “You and I,” Alrea said, “are working together.”

  It was a lie: O. was property, a worker.

  “Do we understand each other?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. We will remake humanity here, safe from the destruction I left on Earth.”

  O. raised her head and met the blank stare of the astronaut. There was no intelligence, no hint of life that she could meet. She asked the room, “Where are we?”

  “Mars.”

  10.

  She did not let the children call her mother.

  When Alrea asked her about it, she answered truthfully: “I’m not a woman anymore.” Before her, the two boys, Zu, dark skinned and dark haired, and Nicholas, pale skinned and dark haired, were writing. The three girls were away, playing under the watchful eye of Alrea, but the two boys had not done their homework and were being punished, forced to write up to a hundred in French and Japanese. “This body is just a shape, a replica of something you saw, with no uterus, nor ovaries. I have no breath. I don’t eat. I don’t drink. I don’t even age. I am nothing but a doll you made.”

  The last hint of sarcasm was lost on Alrea. “I can give those things to you,” it said. “Though I am learning, an adult woman is not beyond me.”

  O. did not doubt it. Originally, there had been eight children: four boys, four girls. A sample, Alrea argued. The first to die—a boy—had done so within days, but the second and third had been more tragic. Isa, the girl, had begun to cough blood at the age of two, and before the week was out, she had bled from her eyes and ears, bled out until there was no more blood. O. had tried to use the death—selfishly, she knew—as a way to escape her slavery. “I’ve never raised children,” she told Alrea. “I never wanted them. Just because I could give birth doesn’t make me a mother.” In response, the being that owned her told her she was wrong, and that it had been its fault. There had been a defect in Isa, and it only located the cure when, two days later, Zu began coughing blood. The cure came quick and easy, but the death of Quzong a year later reminded her of the gaps in Alrea’s knowledge. The boy died in his sleep from a clotting of blood in the brain, a defect that was removed from the other children while they slept and thin, caramel coloured tendrils rose from the floor and sank into their skulls.

  They were test subjects, O. knew, samples to be watched and learned from, just as she was. “I don’t want a new body,” she said.

  “It would allow for you to be, as you say, real.”

  No, she wanted to tell it, I would simply be in a new creation. But she didn’t. Alrea would not understand the point.

  For her own part, O. had given up trying to understand Alrea. It was neither a he, nor a she, and its concerns were not ones that she could identify with. Eventually, she decided that it was alien in all terms of the word, and the understanding—superficial, at times contradictory—that she had of the being would well be the knowledge that she kept for the entirety of her ‘life’. The point was driven into her on the day she realized that Alrea was not just the astronaut and surrounding sack she had seen, but everything around her: the walls, the air, the ground: the constantly reshaping, shifting, warm to the touch form that grew from the remains of the space shuttle that had crashed into the surface of Mars.

  O. learned that the day the broken hatch appeared before her. She was drawn to it because it was out of place, an anomaly in the smooth walls and perfect doors around her. As she stepped closer to it, she told herself that it was a sign of Alrea growing lax in its defences. It was too much thought on her part, however, for when she stepped into the cold, dusty shuttle, that sense of opportunity left her. Alrea had no defences; there was nothing for it to fear. The desolate, empty surface of Mars that lay outside was proof of that.

  “I am moving,” Alrea said to her, later. “It is not very fast, so there is no threat to you. I do it to create a power source—the hatch passes that part of me every two months.”

  “You’ll want to be careful of that with the children.” She hid how uncomfortable it made her to know she was inside it. “They could get hurt.”

  “I shall take precautions.”

  Yet still, it was the boy Zu, who found the shuttle door.

  “He was just doing what was natural.” O. stared at his small body, barely recognizable as the child he had once been. She did not know how to react, and felt guilty that she had not shown more emotion to Nicholas when he had come to her, crying, to tell her that the air lock door was now closed, that he had managed that much after the two of them had opened it. “Kids are curious. They find things. They push things, they play with things—it’s their nature.”

  Alrea, however, while not visibly upset by the boy’s death, was obviously so. It was not just a set back, nor hindrance to its work, but a failure, and it was not until a week later that she realized just how far it would go to solve the issue.

  “I can make a hole in time.” The astronaut, the final Baker Thomas, faced her. The light of the tomb he floated in had turned to amber, and his empty eyes stared at her. “It was not something that I gave much thought too, until you first appeared, after your first attempt to kill yourself. I had you sedated when your future self appeared, and told me that I had violated you.

  “I asked how it was that you were here, and you said, ‘You’ll violate time as well. You’ll poke holes in time—you’ll be H.G. Wells without the scooter.’

  “I did not understand the reference until much later, and I have been running experiments, equations, theories in a part of me since that day, preparing to send you back in time.”

  O. had a different question. “You want to go back in time to stop Zu?”

  “Yes.” The astronaut’s lips did not move. “You have to go back in time to save yourself, twice. I have seen one, and you the other, so why not save Zu before?”

  Why did she not want to? O. asked herself the question as a long, slender tube rose from the floor beside her. Inside, she could make out a complex pattern of wires, some of which she recognized as having existed on Earth, an
d others which were completely foreign to her. A few were florescent, while others twisted, winding themselves tightly as if they were alive before releasing; yet still others pulsed, while others looked cold, as if they had been made from stone. There was room for her, however, and when she stepped inside, unresisting, the last of the wires, those that had been cold and dead, sank into her back with a burning sensation. Wincing at the pain, she closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, the world was blurred, the lines that defined the world no longer solid.

  She should step out. Instead, she said, “How does this work?”

  “Only small objects can be sent back,” Alrea said, its voice was dull, as if it were speaking through thick glass. “There is feedback, of a sort, when you try to send something much larger than your hand—the other night I lost a shell like yours when I tried to push the entire thing through. An image, however, projected from the shell proves no issue, however. A tiny projector and recorder is what I send through, and it creates in the shell the environment you are projected into. It will simulate everything for you, so that you can interact within it.”

  “You control it?”

  “Yes.”

  There was no surprise on her part, and suddenly, she found herself standing in the shuttle, the empty, desolate face of Mars and the sound of the hatch opening her only companions.

  “See.” It was Zu, confident, brazen. “I told you it was here.”

  Behind him came Nicholas. “What is it?”

  “Dunno. But there’s another door up here—it takes you outside.”

  “Outside?”

  O. knew what would happen. The two would open the airlock: it would grind loudly as it did, and Zu would step through the hatch, wearing the brown pants and orange t-shirt that he wore now. He had no understanding of the difference in atmosphere outside and he would turn to face Nicholas and grin confidently because of it. The latter boy would close the hatch from the outside, and remain in the shuttle while Zu opened the hatch leading outside.