329 Years Awake

by Ellie Maloney

  River positioned himself close to the pot, still wearing the headgear.

  “Man? So … you don’t know. I know it’s against protocol and all, but I tried to hint you all along.”

  “What are you talking about, bro?” I was busy trying to scoop semi-liquid goo with my finger.

  “I’m no bro to you.”

  “What? You prefer Ensign River?” I chuckled.

  “It’s not that. I’m more like a sister to you,” said River and retracted the headgear.

  I lifted my eyes from the pot, and lost my jaw. The military policy was explicit on gender parity, to the point that we never see each other on the mission without the fully equipped uniform and voice modulator. That’s why River never suspected who I was. At the end of the day, you stop wondering who is who, and think only about the mission. It is truly easier to do your job this way. But damn. I guess I was caught in stereotyping myself.

  “Ensign Ebony River, nice meeting you, Lieutenant Mazula.”

  “Nice meeting you, Ebony.” I was awe-struck. So River was a woman.

  Big deal. It was not the gender that shocked me. And not her incredible purple eyes and purple braided hair, and not even the completely surreal beauty of her face untouched by this gruelling mission. I could not imagine that I was serving with someone from the Fourth Orbital Colony.

  “I see, the eyes gave me away.” She smiled.

  “A little. Fourth Orbital! I’ll be damned!”

  Their tribe was reclusive and pacifist and would not want anything to do with the military, even if their life depended on it. And so much for the simpleton military engineer, Ensign River! About one hundred years ago, the Fourth Orbital legalized the full-force genetic editing of every expected child. Without any exaggeration, the 4th were the brainpower of humanity. I bet my boobs she knew everything there was to know about quantum physics. But why would she hide this from me? No. Can’t be. Or can…

  I remembered a huge diplomatic scandal, that broke out about two years ago, involving an eloping citizen from the Fourth. These brainiacs could never leave the orbit, this was against their law. And when this one requested asylum on the Earth Prime, the Fourth had a temper tantrum, threatening to stop providing knowledge services to the Earth Nations Confederation. Nobody took them seriously, because they had no weapons, no military, and fully depended on the rest of the colonies for supplies. What could they really do to us? Stop writing books? Well, that’s not entirely fair. The Fourth serviced all the terra-formation processes in the galaxy. Without their expertise, none of our rapid progress would have been possible. Everyone was happy about their help, and having them work from the comfort of their home didn’t bother anyone. I guess as the generations passed since they self-imposed their home arrest, we did not expect to have much in common with them socially. They probably solved Feynman diagrams before breakfast, what can you possibly talk about with a person like that?

  Anyway, long story short, the Earth Nations did not turn in the deserter, and the Fourth never stopped pouting about it, although personally I am not sure what it meant in practical terms. I know that the identity of the deserter was concealed, and that was the end of the story for the rest of us. And now I was sitting in front of the best kept diplomatic secret and watching this unicorn, Ebony River, scoffing the green alien mush.

  “Stop staring at me, Mazula. Start eating.”

  “Desiree.”

  “What?”

  “This is my name.”

  “Nice name.” A pause followed as we silently regarded our meal.

  “What’s a brainiac like you doing in a place like this?” I asked.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “And for the record, normally I wear prosthetic facial implants, and nobody can see my face. But when the attack on E. N. Obama started, I had to evac, and had no time for that sort of stuff. I dropped from the low orbit, and it is by pure luck that I was going through parachute training on the holodeck, that’s why I had a pack on my back, when the ship core burst open. Anyway, what I am trying to say, Desiree, now that you know who I am, you must keep it a secret. My life depends on it.”

  “Don’t worry, Ensign, your secret is safe with me.”

  She smiled faintly. For a few moments we were solely devoted to the green goo in the pot, and perhaps to our own thoughts. I was thinking about our identities, and how many of them are hidden, sometimes even from ourselves.

  ***

  Ten years ago, I was going to get married. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.

  We did not make it to the ceremony. She died in a flash fever.

  Sometimes I think that my continent is cursed. AIDS, Ebola, malaria. We’ve dealt with those. But no matter how clever we get, there is always something around the corner. They used to say that the flash fever was a strain of Ebola virus - a whole lot deadlier though. We didn’t know how the virus picked its victims. Some were just fine coming in contact with it, others died within hours. Their lungs burned into crisps. My baby, Desiree, was among the unfortunate.

  It was a rehearsal evening. She was wearing a shimmering dress of pale gold. It made the surface of her body look like a glittering lake. One moment she was laughing and drinking champagne, and another – she collapsed on the floor, coughing blood. Her beautiful dress was covered with red stains. It was as if my songbird was bleeding, snared in razor wire.

  Everyone ran away as if they saw the face of death itself. Maybe they did. I had no time for death. I sat beside my baby and cradled her in my arms for the longest 20 minutes in my life, looking her in the eyes, swallowing tears, and telling her how much I loved her.

  The disease did not take my body, but it did take something so big, I could not put it in words. Until three years ago. Desiree’s death finally gave me the courage to look inside and realize that I lived like an off-balanced Russian doll that could never stand upright. Something in me was off kilter. It was always there, and I could not ignore it any more.

  That was when I went to court and officially changed my name to Desiree Mazula. I took the official documents to our HR Director, requesting to adjust my file accordingly. Then I took medical leave to adjust my body as well. When I returned, some of my buddies, ever so gently, asked if I did it to keep her memory alive. I thought about it, but concluded that that was not the case. First, I fell in love with her, then we were planning to getting married, and then I was dealing with her loss, and all this time I had no opportunity to think of who I was, other than in relation to other people and institutions. A soldier. A son. A future husband. Maybe even a father. All those qualifiers didn’t tell me who I really was.

  Once the grief subsided, I found some clarity, and once I gained that, everything fell into place. As for my new name, well, Desiree is just a beautiful name. It’s that simple.

  ***

  Ebony scooped the remains of the food from the walls and sat the black box aside, looking at me. It looked like she was going to say something important, when I heard the familiar hissing sound of the purge cycle.

  “Suit up, Ensign! Brace for the impact!” I yelled, following my own command.

  The next moment, we were floating in mid-air, arms grabbing knees, like two hedgehogs in a pond. The glass cylinder capsule was lifted, and the methane-rich atmosphere restored. This time, our landing to the ground was not so smooth. I landed partly on River, causing his –her! - leg excruciating pain. She groaned, and her off-key voice, processed through the voice modulator, was truly heartbreaking.

  Another minute or two later, we heard heavy steps moving towards us from the depths of the cave. The sound of their footsteps bounced off the slippery rocky walls and vibrated, trapped under the tall ceiling, unable to find a surface to absorb it. When the footsteps approached closer, the sound became notably shallower, less resonant, and soon died out in front of
our holding cell. Three Unkari soldiers joined our guard at the gate. Curtly sharing a few vocalizations between each other, they opened the cave. The gate banged the rock wall as it was flung open by one of the newly arrived guards. I knew little about Unkari emotions and expressions, but it appeared like the guard was impatient. With their high-powered rifles targeting our every move, they commanded us to exit the cave and follow where directed.

  About one kilometre or so into the tunnel, we stopped before a foreboding dark cave. It must have been enormous because our steps created a full, resonant echo that seemed to live forever. I closed my eyes to allow them to acclimate to the darkness. When I finally opened them, to my utter horror, I found us standing at the brink of a bottomless canyon.

  The Unkari stuck their rifles in our backs, and one of them commanded: “Shoom.”

  “This is it, Desiree Mazula. I’d say it was a pleasure knowing you, if not for the circumstances. Had we met in a different place, in a different time, who knows, we could probably get along,” said Ebony wryly.

  “I cannot believe it, that shitty soufflé was our last supper. You putrid, foul, rotten, slimy piece of shit of a race! You want me to jump?” I yelled, trying to turn my head to the Unkari standing behind me, but the suit restricted my range of motion.

  “Shoooooom Umn!!!” hissed one of the Unkari, nudging me with his gun. The hard jolt to my back made me stagger towards the edge, where the rock was loose, and I slipped. I heard Ebony yelling at the Unkari words I did not realize they knew back on the Fourth, but it didn’t last long. The last thing I heard was silence.

  11

  FREEFALL

  “Umn tarted vo vat fo.”

  Enveloped in bright light, I struggled to open my eyes.

  “Umn vo at Unkar vat fo.”

  Here came the voice again. I knew I had to open my eyes. I looked up and saw a cloud hovering over me. I squinted to see past the cloud and it freaked out. I was not looking up, as I thought at first. Without any visible bonds, I was floating face down at least fifty meters above the floor. It was hard to say exactly how high, because I had nothing for a reference point, but it was high enough to know that, in case of a free fall, I’d be as good as a sack of beans scattered all over the floor. I could hear water dripping on a rock surface, like a metronome, keeping tempo to the waves of my panic. The place was dim, and the brown rock walls had a wet sheen to them. I tried accessing the B5 and pulled my wrist into my field of vision, only to meet a formidable resistance. My entire body was immobilized.

  The minute I realized how high I was above the floor, electrifying fear penetrated my body. Generally, I was not afraid of heights, this was something they tested you for in the military because soldiers routinely experienced zero gravity. However, some rational part of my brain screamed that hovering in zero G was not the same as hanging above the floor, with no apparent strongholds, when gravity clearly was pulling me down.

  As if that itself was not a reason to panic, I felt the cloud swirling around my face, leaving cool prints in spots of contact with my skin. Because of that clammy feeling on my skin, I realized that my headgear was not on, and I breathed the air from the environment. At that point, I couldn’t decide which threat I should worry about first: falling down and breaking every bone in my body, or inhaling whatever there was in that cold, milky, gaseous cloud all over my face.

  “Put me down!” I yelled, intently staring at the floor below me.

  “Umn vishhhh davn Unkar akreeee.”

  Evidently my captors had a twisted sense of humour and released my bonds, sending me on a collision course with the pavement. Blood rushed to my frontal lobe so fast, I could physically feel it. Panic prevented me from having any coherent final thoughts, except, maybe, “splat.”

  About half a meter to the floor, I felt a hard blow to my chest and stomach, as if hitting something invisible in the air. The gravity turned off, and I stopped falling, barely avoiding pancake-ification. Right when I felt a rush of relief, something went terribly wrong with the room surrounding me. My point of view shifted, and, again, I was looking fifty meters down, plastered to the thin air without any ability to move.

  “Umn vant mo davn,” hissed the same voice without a question mark at the end, but I got the message.

  “No! No more down!”

  “Hoot,” hissed the voice. “Umn mast ansa. Vo on Unkar vat fo.”

  My captors wanted to know why we had committed an act of war against them by invading their territory with our military. Reasonable question, if you ask me, but this was not something I could tell them. So I tried the next best thing: I lied.

  “We were lost. Our navigation was…”

  And before I knew it, I was falling down like a ripe papaya.

  “Splat!”

  The image of a ripe papaya hitting the pavement appeared before my eyes.

  “Splat!”

  This time, my body met the floor, and everything went blank.

  ***

  According to Article 2 of the Earth Nations Confederation (ENC) Constitution:

  “Earth Nations Confederation is a union of equal and independent human colonies in space, united in the name of security and economic prosperity for the human race.”

  Each colony has their own constitution and government, but they are not allowed to hold an independent military, only a police force and National Guard. The ENC military is stationed across all the colonies and consists of enlistees from all over space.

  The Earth Nations Confederation is governed by the Earth Nations Senate (ENS), a dual house body with combined legislative and executive authority. Its primary functions are the legislative review of the colonial legislation, unification of practices, inter-colony commerce, and defence. Both the legislative and the executive houses of the ENS have their speakers.

  Earth Prime (EP) is the capital of the Earth Nations. As the capital city, Earth Prime has a special status of an autonomous colony with its own military. The headquarters of the EP military, the Royal Moroccan Fleet, is stationed in Rabat, in the African Moroccan Democratic Kingdom (AMDK). Earth Prime also has its senate, which is modelled after the ENS. Earth Prime delegates thirty percent of the seats to the ENS, which makes it the most powerful colony in terms of decision-making. On top of that, EP also elects its own president, who has some veto authority over the EPS.

  I was going over all of this information in my head, trying to pinpoint where things with the Unkari had gone so terribly wrong. The more I thought about it, only one name stood out clearly: general August Parietti.

  General Parietti, the head of the Royal Moroccan Fleet, was the reason why the Earth had Nations panicked and sent the military vessel to the Unkari space. Parietti was a strong proponent of meeting external threats head on and in a pre-emptive fashion, whenever possible. History will show if he was on the right side of the issue, but he managed to gather enough votes in the EPS to override the Earth Prime president’s veto on pre-emptive acts against the Unkari. Considering that the issue had top security clearance, or should I say, a level of clearance that did not even officially exist - and only a handful of senators possessed it - the decision was made by a four-to-three vote in favour of sending the troops. However, the general was forced to make concessions. Instead of sending several vessels, he was allowed use of a single Galactica-class vessel, which, if you know anything about the military fleet, is just one step above the cargo barges running errands between the colonies. The goal was to leave no traces to this mission, nothing that even the most experienced watchdog activist or reporter could stick her fingers in.

  To be fair, everyone, including the general, blamed all of this Unkari mess on one event: Arecibo 1974. What were our ancestors thinking? Broadcasting a “welcome” message into space without having any planetary defence mechanisms was nuts! It’s like teasing a Rottweiler with a bloody steak, and then blaming the d
og for your missing fingers. You just don’t do that sort of thing! Makes you wonder why, 300 years later when the Unkari showed up in our solar system, everybody acted surprised.

  ***

  “Fuck Arecibo,” I thought a fraction of a second before crashing into the floor for the fourth time from fifty meters, and feeling my bones shatter like a wafer.

  ***

  “Fuck Unkari,” I thought, when I saw myself hanging above that floor some time later. It looked like lying about the purpose of our military operation was a bad idea.

  “Ok, I’ll talk! Let me see Ensign River first. What happened to her?”

  No response, only the cloud hovering around me.

  “Please…”

  Silence. I was about to relax a bit and closed my eyes, when I felt that my centre of gravity rapidly shifted to the skin on my back. Indeed, I headed towards the pavement full speed. Like in the previous loops, everything went blank.

  ***

  “Ok, ok! I’ll talk! I’ll tell you everything!” I begged. “But you must realize, I am just a soldier. I go where they send me. I don’t know any Earth secrets. I am just a…”

  “… AAAAaaaaaaaaaa…”

  Splat! Crumble. Blank…

  ***

  Next time, when I found myself hanging above the floor, I broke down. Making a person survive her death over and over again was a twisted interrogation tactic. I started talking. Certainly I am not proud of it, but I rationalized that I knew relatively few details.

  “We were sent here because… we had information that your people were testing a weapon. We wanted to know if you were preparing for war. It was common for our people throughout history to gather information about the defence capacity of other countries and consider how to fight back in case of war. It’s a preventive move. We did not start a war with your people. If we did, we’d come with a lot more ships. Please, I’ll tell you all you want to know, don’t drop me down any more.”

  The cloud swirled around me as if thinking of what kind of questions it should ask me.