by Kurt Johnson
What could have him so freaked?
Rampaging, fire-breathing monsters?
I spared a parting glance toward the sound of the rustling leaves and caught a pair of silver eyes glowing at me through the foliage. I froze, blinked, and they were gone.
“Dad,” I said, “Can we go?”
He reached up a hand, patted my back, and started tromping back home. Dad hadn’t seen what I’d seen. I swayed on his shoulders, staring hard into the darkness of the ’natch.
2
A billion intrusions into my social life later, the ”Human specialists” had yet to figure out why I felt like my head was being crushed whenever Nem’s planetary Storm Walls scraped the land flat.
The Storm Walls, and my headaches, were a mystery. We knew some of how the tempests were created, but it was like explaining a god’s anger through chemical reactions. The Mesa Range was one magnetic pole, and its twin sat on the exact opposite side of the planet. These mountain ranges changed the electrical charge of the air.
The intense ionization of particles made the atmosphere go insane. As in—giant, dark walls of angry clouds and bellies gorged with lightning, rumbling from one pole to another, roughly every six weeks. Unshielded galactic structures were spectacularly transformed into twisted, melted slag, which meant that a significant part of the energy output on Nem’ was dedicated to micro shielding. This might seem like a huge task, but Galactic tech—specifically, Galactic nanotech—was integrated into almost every manufactured item, and thus provided mostly sufficient shielding on a nano level.
The Storm Wall was kilometers thick and was really storms within storms—tornadoes, hail, scraping winds, ground-searing lightning. It was the stuff of gas giants, not Goldilocks worlds. And somehow, the ’natch thrived. Nem’ was one giant, hairy ’natch ball.
Attempts had been made to dig into the plateaus, but machines and electronics simply stopped working when they got too close to the Mesas. I couldn’t imagine why the Convergence had even built cities on this planet given how well Nem’ resisted colonization. Or at least, the Galactics’ attempts at colonization.
Nearly two millennia ago, Nem’ was home to billions of citizens of the Terran Republic. It was different then. Right? I mean, why would the ancients want to live through this maelstrom every six weeks?
Most believed the Mesas were Human constructs and the Storm Walls a result of a Terra-forming project gone wrong. But there was little about Nem’s history in the Recorders’ archives. All I knew was that since I’d turned ten, whenever the storms came, the headaches followed.
We were roughly ten days away from the Storm Wall and its energy was reaching toward the sky in giant, angry, lightning-filled clouds. The week before the Storm Wall was the best time for me, actually—I buzzed with energy, feeling more alive and alert than usual. But when the wall of clouds rose from the bulk of the Mesas into Nem’s stratosphere, the fun stopped. If I was outside, blinding headaches would curl me into a shivering ball of kid.
Energy was building all right, but it felt different this time, more urgent. And…I don’t know. Different.
I winced, gently rubbing my temples, as I remembered the last Storm Wall. I’d been walking into the house from our farm’s central yard. AI had been yelling at me to hurry. Thunder cracked overhead. My vision changed, as if I’d put on silver sunshades, and objects and people seemed to shimmer. Then the pain hit.
Just like now.
OK, well, right now there was no pain. Just a SEARING LIGHT SHINING DIRECTLY ONTO MY BRAIN THROUGH MY EYEBALLS. I crushed a pillow over my face. What time was it? Aren’t there laws against light at this hour?
“RAYSTAR! DESTINY AWAITS! Breakfast!” Dad thundered, leaning in from the doorway.
Destiny, my butt. “Ten more minutes?” I groaned. Destiny was NOT awake at this hour.
“Of course.” He rumbled. I didn’t have time to peek at him from under my pillow. He grabbed my comforter, tugged it over my feet, and dropped it at my knees. Crisp morning air surrounded my exposed legs and….
“Unnngh!” I flopped about, trying to toss the comforter down around my feet.
“Breakfast in five, we leave in thirty.” His deep chuckle faded as he walked downstairs. I lifted my head from the bed and the pillow from my face, and watched my door as it slid shut. AI flashed 4:15 A.M. to me.
Questions from last night came to me as I glared at the purple comforter, now warming only one of my feet. I squinted into my ceiling lights. Why would meteors have Dad so alarmed? And what the great-gravity-well was the rush to fix this controller? I dropped my head back on the bed and the pillow back over my face. AI chimed, “4:17 A.M.”
Yeah, yeah. I thought to him.
Don’t hate the player, Ray, AI thought back, strobing brightly enough so flashes of green shone through the pillow I’d wrapped around my face.
I rolled my eyes. Don’t hate the…. That didn’t even make sense.
When you live with someone long enough that a pattern becomes common, it takes only a nudge of contrast to remind you that just because you’re used to something doesn’t mean it’s normal. AI was peculiar. Often. I wondered briefly how he’d acted with my biological parents. I guess it didn’t matter, at least now, at 4:18 in the flipping morning.
Pulling and pushing myself out my tangle of blankets, I uncurled in a spinning stretch that turned me toward the window. My bangs fell over my eyes, and I poofed them out of the way.
My room had two of the farmhouse’s eight outside walls on the second floor, but only one wall had a window. My view framed the flat-topped mountains. The Mesas blocked the sky, but in the orange of morning light, I could just see the source of my second-biggest question. Ancient Human Ruins crisscrossed their base, like a charcoal sketch of my history.
What exactly HAD happened to us? Now, 1,800 years later, Galactics still hadn’t figured out our technology. The War had been so traumatic that my kind was talked about in hushed words of anger and fear. If I was any sort of representative of my kind, I found it hard to believe we could be a threat. I’d never met other Humans, and Mom and Dad were at best evasive when questioned about maybe, I dunno, getting offworld and meeting some more of my kind? We couldn’t be all bad. Or still be bad? Or whatever.
I wasn’t bad. I was a kid, pretty much like a lot of other kids at school. Smaller maybe.
The fact was…today, Humans were weeds growing on the edge of a well-kept garden. We were nothing at all like the billions and billions who had made up the Terran Republic.
For all I knew, I was the lone weed.
I finished my stretch and snapped my mouth shut, lest I yawn myself back into bed.
And what the great gravity well did Dad want to talk to me about last night?
My feet didn’t leave my room’s thick, white carpeting. Static electricity snapped and nibbled at my toes as I dragged myself toward the bathroom, and I winced with each crackle and bite. My room was a rectangle, with my bed on one end and my bathroom on the other. One wall was graced with a floor-to-ceiling 3-D slow-motion animation of a Glean Dreadnought destroying a Lethian attack formation.
The holo vid was AI’s present to me on my fifth birthday. AI didn’t have any arms (or any appendages, for that matter). But he had amazing abilities to manipulate computers and electronics. He’d hacked the house attendant and reprogrammed my room’s display, effectively mounting it on my wall. After a quick “Happy Birthday to You!” in some ancient Terran tune, the vid showed me gorgeous views of streaking missiles and plasma-cannon broadsides from a gargantuan Glean Dreadnought that transformed a squadron of Lethian cruisers into gold-grey puffs against the hungry darkness of space.
Because it was mounted on the wall, I couldn’t watch any other videos. That was OK. I never tired of that scene.
AI had said it was my birthright. I remember Mom hating it immediately and commanding our house’s attendant to take it down. But when the house synth couldn’t recognize that the holo was even there, Mo
m went nova on AI. Dad separated the two, which is weird when you think about a fist-sized pendant needing to be separated from a multi-hundred-kilogram mother.
That was the first time I remember my parents yelling at each other. Imagine, five-year-old me, barely up to my parents’ knees, cowering, while the gods thundered. That memory is fuzzy with images and emotions, but Dad’s final words are as clear as if spoken a second ago, “War. Sathra. It is all she has of her people.”
To AI’s glee, and Mom’s displeasure, I’d set the holo on repeat.
Opposite the battle scene floated a wall-sized image of pre-war Terra: blue, white, green. Planet Earth had sure been pretty. “Homeworld” was framed against the black backdrop of space, and arching red letters flickered, “Live Free or Die!” Even lost as I was in my morning fog, that was grim. I squinted at my feet, shuffled through the staticky, sparkly carpet, and considered that I’d never asked my parents where they got that poster.
My shuffle brought me past my lounge chair and alongside my desk, which held my collection of things from the Mesa Ruins. Fused lumps of metal and elements of shattered devices that looked oddly new, each with their own hidden history, felt like a connection to my past. To be clear, I’d never gone IN the Ruins. That was craxy dangerous. But I’d been close.
There was a wide swath of scrabble between the skeletal Terran structures and our ’natch fields. It was a tossed salad of concrete, weeds, twisted metal beams, and bits of, well, stuff. I’d never gathered enough courage to cross that chaotic, jagged distance to the Ruins, nor to even go half-way. Between AI flipping out about how dangerous the jagged, hollow-skulled buildings were, and my own imagination, thinking that each dark crevasse I passed or jumped over was a lair for some predatory drooling denizen of the fallen city, I limited my collecting forays to the shelter of our ’natch fields. And I was pretty sure there was something in there.
Cri made fun of my metal collection. Mostly, I didn’t care. My kind had once used, or at least touched, that stuff. Probably. Or not. Either way, I imagined they had, and subsequently, I fiercely protected my collection with socks and T-shirts to keep, uh, dust and unwanted eyes off it. Whatever. It’s way too early to justify myself.
Besides, my room was nowhere as messy as Cri’s. My sister used her drawers to store air and kept her floor warm with discarded clothes. I blew a strand of hair out of my eyes and plodded on. Where was my dumb bathroom? Had someone moved it?
Lights buzzed on. A full-sized 3-D image of me, with frizzy purple hair and oversized pajamas, flickered twice before stabilizing. We stared at each other. I stuck my lower lip out and puffed the same strand of hair out of my eye once again, and my image did the same. If you were a critic, you’d say my bathroom was messier than my room. Combs, brushes, my favorite flower sock, and a green boot were scattered across the floor and counter. The boot, of course, was supposed to be on the counter. There was order here.
“Heya,” I waved. My image copied me down to the wisp of hair as it fell back into my face. My reflection was the closest thing to another Human around here, so we might as well be friends. I was tan. I had a dimple when I laughed, and a few more when I really laughed. My eyes were brown. Usually.
It was my hair that Mom and Dad said made me different. From what? There were so many races. What was I different from? How would anyone know if purple hair was normal to Humans? And Mom said I was going through a growth spurt, but seriously, how would she know? As far back as I could remember, I’d always been able to eat seconds and thirds. Yawning, I programmed my clean clothes, tossed my nightclothes on the floor, and hopped in the shower.
“RAYSTAR. USE HASTE,” my dad boomed, his voice thundering around me. Our house communicator probably did a fine job of transmitting to whomever was up at this hour, listening, my startled shriek and the “thunk” that transpired as I slid in the soap onto my butt. I glowered as water streamed into my eyes. Nova and gravity wells, a little volume control, AI?
My friends had all sorts of cute names for their AIs.
“Okay, Dad, on my way,” I replied into the air. AI better give him the message. I rinsed off, stepped out of the shower, and grabbed a drying cloth. A blower lowered and whooshed hot air at me from all directions. I pulled programmed clothes off a rack that extended from the wall. Upright spiky hair, grey coveralls, purple t-shirt to match my hair, and stompy boots, yeah. How had I not been discovered by a video production company was beyond me. My holo and I winked at each other in near real-time. I brushed my teeth and spat in the sink.
And watched in horror as blood made a lazy spiral on its way down the drain.
“AI?” I whispered, tasting the metal in my blood. Yellow scan-beams washed over me, flashing from the pendant I’d hung on my bedpost.
Alpha-wave readings are irregular. Blood sugar and iron are low. And—OW!
“What? What?” I turned to face him, ready for help.
Your HAIR! It BURNS my virtual eyes!
Rolling my actual eyes, I rubbed my tongue against my gums, sucked hard, and spat again. The water was clear.
C’mon, Ray. You gotta tell your parents.
“You worried about me?” I put a finger in my mouth and lifted my lips, searching for blood along my gums.
This is how the headaches start.
I grabbed him from my bed. Pausing at my doorway, I considered his smooth, steel-grey surface resting in my hand. “Am I way off my norms?”
You know your chemistry isn’t the whole picture. There are storms in today’s forecast.
Ugh. Blood sugar, iron. Was I in denial, thinking I just needed breakfast? Probably. It wasn’t even a question that there was something peculiar about my headaches. But…I’d rather be fixing an irrigation controller than going to the doctor.
Lethian doctors.
“I’ll get food, and then we’ll see. For now, AI, it’s our secret.” With a shiver, I settled him around my neck. He didn’t emit any colors, but he’d turned ice-cold in frustration. Increasingly skeptical about the notion of the Universe leaving my last two days of summer vacation alone, I headed downstairs.
3
Oh, yeah. You have not eaten until you’ve had a farm breakfast on Nem’. Eggs, fried gratcher steak, and hot toasted bread. Breakfast’s salty, savory aroma greeted me as I stumbled down our Glean-sized stairs into the utilitarian kitchen, and it made my stomach rumble in anticipation.
Gratchers evolved from Terran pigs. We raised them, along with endlessly forsaken amounts of ’natch. I’d seen vids of pigs. Gratchers were nothing like their porcine ancestors. For starters, their mottled brown skin failed to camouflage their saber-like teeth. Small gratchers were easily 800 kg; herd leaders weighed in at 5,000 kg and left craters where they stomped. Mom and Dad called our big guy “Chunks.” Alas, for most Galactics, large creatures weren’t a problem. No way was I going near one of those things without a stunner. Pretty much everything in the Convergence was bigger, faster, stronger, or something-er than I.
My parents had “Human-sized” our house with furniture and access to everything that was suited to a being that was NOT three or so meters tall (that would be me). It helped that Cri was “relatively” my size too, for sure. I sat on my high chair—a barstool with a back. Three other Glean-sized chairs ringed the large round metal table. The chairs were arranged in a half-circle facing a flat wall. That wall served as our primary video viewer, but also an interface to the house synth; from there, we could control all of the farm compound’s functions.
Mom had the news on, and an uncharacteristically balding Glean in a plaid suit peered, seemingly at me, as he attempted to make a report about ’natch harvests more interesting, with each frown and gesture synchronized to his words.
Ugh. ’Natch.
But wow. I ran a strip of steak through my eggs, slopped it on my bread, shoved it in my mouth, and squinted in ecstasy. Just. Wow! My tongue almost convinced me to forget about the meteors, my blood in the sink, and why I was up at this ridiculou
s hour without Cri.
“How about chewing?” Mom said, her golden eyes widening, as I shoved another forkful in my mouth. She touched me gently between my shoulder blades. Seriously, would anyone die if I slouched?
Straightening, I looked up from my plate and, for her benefit, moved my jaw in vaguely chewy-esque motions. Mom’s dark-red skin, jet-black hair, and golden eyes were typical Glean. How they showed up on her was a surprise that made you want to look at her again and again, just to be sure. My sister had inherited that, too, and nearly all the remotely male Galactics my age thought they were nova. Pfft. I didn’t need a bunch of boys getting goofy around me.
Unlike my dad, Nent, my mom, Sathra, was “only” less than three meters tall. Her deep-space-black hair flowed past her shoulders and curtained left and right as she moved. Mom’s eyes were rounder than mine, and her lashes were so thick and long I imagined I could feel the breeze when she blinked. Beyond that, and their size, Human and Glean faces were similar.
Except for her scar, Mom’s features were perfectly symmetrical. The scar cut through her symmetry, streaking from her right eyebrow to her jaw. It could be mistaken for runny make-up, or a tear.
“Raystar,” she’d say to me, softly, touching the healed ridge across her cheek, like the memory was RIGHT THERE. It was all I got when I asked her about it. Cri got angry with me when Mom cried. Like it was MY fault Mom had a scar. When the scar came up, Mom would cry, Cri would glare, and I’d grit my teeth and leave the room.
There was a hard history in my parents that they tried to keep from us. But I noticed. I watched Mom from the corner of my eye, flowing about our kitchen in her bedrobe, not unlike royalty. Whatever had happened to her was still fresh….