The Seeds of New Earth

by Mark R. Healy

I exhaled slowly and got to my feet. “Then tomorrow it is.”

  She smiled suddenly and returned to her task, pressing and twisting at the sieve. “It’s a kind of relief, isn’t it? That we finally made it to this point?”

  “Yeah,” I said, taking one of the soy wax candles from the bench next to her as I moved into the room adjoining the kitchen. It had been repurposed from a bedroom into a kind of storage room. “There were a lot of times I thought we’d never make it.” I grimaced as she glanced back at me. “Or at least, that I’d never make it.”

  “Well, don’t underestimate what we’ve done to get here. It hasn’t been easy.”

  Carefully placing the candle on a shelf, I crouched over a rectangular box in the corner where other grey discs were enclosed in metal housing – the cell bank. It was heavily scratched and dented in places but still functioned, which was the only thing that mattered. Through strips of transparent plexiglass I could see blue LEDs flashing, indicators that several of the cell bays were active, and as I lifted the catch and opened the access bay, the room was filled with the light of the LEDs, blue intermingling with the yellow of the candlelight. I eased the cell into a spare groove, and as it slid up against the gold contacts within, another LED winked into life.

  “How’d you go today on the roof?” I called out as I manipulated the touch panel built into the cell bank. “Make any progress?”

  “A little,” Arsha said. “Some of the solar panels we’ve collected aren’t compatible with the ones we’ve already installed. Different connectors. I’m keeping them in a pile so that we can use them over at Cider.”

  As I brushed my fingers across it, the touch panel flickered, then cut out completely. With well-practised deftness I slapped the side of the screen and it promptly came back to life, but the readout only showed four active cells. The new cell had not been detected.

  “Damn,” I called out, “this thing is glitchy as hell.”

  Arsha appeared at the doorway. “What’s going on?” she said, concerned.

  I waved a finger at the cell bank. “It’s not picking up the new one. I’m gonna disconnect for a second, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  I reached around the back of the bank, where an orange power conduit snaked out of a socket and into the wall, and twisted the screw mount that secured it in place. I unplugged the conduit and, with it now effectively unlinked from the solar panels on the roof, performed a power cycle on the cell bank operating system.

  “How many more cells do we need?” Arsha said, returning to the kitchen to strain the soybean mush into a plastic container.

  “To keep the power on here non-stop? Depends on what it is you’re powering. I’d say seven or eight should run just about anything.”

  The display showed a splash screen with the M-Corp logo for a few seconds and then returned to the initial menu. I cycled through to the cell readout and was rewarded with the result I sought.

  “Ah,” I said appreciatively, “that’s better. Now we have five.”

  “Great! So it’s working?”

  “Zero percent charged, integrity check still being performed, but I’d say it’s good. They usually don’t get this far if they’ve died.”

  I closed the cell bank bay and returned to the kitchen with the candle, noticing for the first time that there was a new clay sculpture on the windowsill. I picked it up and turned it over in my hands. Squat and lumpy, it was nonetheless recognisable as a horse.

  “You do this one today?” I said.

  “Oh, yeah. Careful, it’s still drying.”

  “It’s really good, Arsha.”

  She gave an embarrassed smile. “It’s crap, but thanks for the thought.”

  “No, seriously, you’re getting better.”

  Of late I’d been encouraging Arsha to make time for pursuits outside of our endless cycle of chores. If we were going to embrace our human side, I’d reasoned, then we needed our activities to encompass more than just the endless toil of rebuilding and planting and harvesting. We needed to spend at least some time creating and expressing ourselves. She’d been difficult to persuade, and slow on the uptake, but she was getting there.

  “It was a bit of a rush job, anyway,” she said. “I could do better with more time.”

  She dabbed some of the soy milk on her tongue.

  “What are you doing?” I said curiously.

  “What does it look like? I’m tasting the soy milk.”

  I gave her a quizzical look. Synthetics couldn’t consume food or liquid, but our tongues were still designed to mimic a sense of taste. I just wasn’t used to using mine, since there didn’t seem to be a point.

  “And?”

  She fought to maintain a neutral expression, but I thought I detected a hint of repulsion in the slant of her mouth.

  “You try it,” she said by way of answer, offering the container to me. I dipped my finger into it obligingly and pressed it to my tongue, smacking my lips together awkwardly at the odd sensation.

  “It tastes… interesting,” I said. “But don’t take that to heart. I’m not an infant.”

  She drew the container back and peered into it thoughtfully. “I still have to mix some other ingredients in to increase the nutritional value. Sunflower oil and a few other things. That might make it taste better.”

  “Or worse,” I said sardonically.

  “Watch it, or I’ll make you drink the whole lot.”

  Moving around the side of the counter, I began to help her clean up, wiping at the translucent soybean skins and adding them to a bucket of organic waste by the window that would later be transferred to compost.

  “You still have a little while to work on the recipe, Arsha,” I said lightly. “We’ll make a chef out of you yet.”

  She refused to join in the banter, making a noncommittal gesture. “There’s going to be less time for everything after tomorrow.”

  I paused and looked at her thoughtfully. She seemed uncharacteristically edgy, fiddling with the hem of her black cotton blouse, the typically bright blue of her eyes now clouded with concern. She noticed my attention and in an instant the look was gone, replaced by the surety and confidence I’d come to expect as she busied herself about the kitchen.

  “We’re ready,” I said encouragingly. “I know we are.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. We’re ready,” she agreed, but her thoughts were obviously elsewhere. “Pass me over that bowl, will you? We have a lot to do tonight.”

  3

  “How long till we die?” I asked her.

  She paused, hunched over the little wooden chest she’d dragged across the carpet, swirls of dust eddying around her in the golden morning sunlight. She seemed to consider for a moment, then straightened, wiping her nose with the back of her hand and inadvertently leaving a smudge of dirt there.

  “Why are you so… obsessed with this notion of dying?” Arsha wanted to know. She seemed to notice the dust for the first time and swatted at it with her hand. It jumped and danced at her beckoning, but for all those particles displaced there were an equal number waiting to drift back in to take their place.

  “I’m not obsessed with it. I just think it’s a very real concern. We need to know how long we have left so we can plan out how we’re going to do this.”

  She lifted her backpack from the chest and slung it over her shoulder, flicking her head to free loose strands of hair from her face.

  “You could probably guess just as well as me,” she said, moving past and heading out toward the back of the house. “What do you think?”

  I finished fastening the torch batteries into the solar charger on the windowsill and followed her, securing my own backpack as I went.

  “Somewhere as high as one hundred and as low as fifty. That’s going by the theoretical lifespan of our power cores.”

  “Sounds about right.” She pulled the door open and proceeded into the back yard. Following through, I stopped beside her at a trough of mulch, scooping a hefty amount of
it up between my hands.

  “So let’s work with the lower estimate,” I said. “Let’s say twenty years from now is where it ends for you and me.”

  She carted her own load of mulch toward the nearest garden bed. There were more than a dozen of the beds in all, raised wooden rectangles of earth aligned with the kind of precision that permeated everything Arsha created. Green sprouts of all types of fruit and vegetables emerged from the soil, bathing in the refulgent yellow sunlight, and thick grass grew freely between the beds, bent over and crushed in places where we had been traipsing around the garden. I took my own handful of mulch to the garden next to hers.

  “We need rain,” she said absently, straightening from the potato plants she was tending and lifting an eye to the sky. “The tank’s running dry.”

  “I’ll take a couple of buckets to the stream this afternoon if I have time.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So,” I went on, distributing the mulch around some turnips, “twenty years. We need to have everything in place before then.”

  “Right, as long as the Marauders don’t roll in here and hack us to pieces earlier,” she said, then, looking across at me, pointed her finger with a wiggle. “Make that a little thicker over there, okay?”

  I scooped at the mulch, redistributing it as she’d suggested. “Well, let’s assume we can stay out of the Marauders’ way. What’s twenty years? One generation of people, and maybe the start of a second?”

  “Yeah, that sounds about right.” She turned, wiping her palms on her pants, squinting at me in the sunlight. “I can see where you’re heading with this.”

  “Look, I know it’s been a point of contention before, but we need to make a call on this, considering what we’re going to do today.”

  She went back for more mulch and then moved onto the next garden bed.

  “Like I’ve said before, Brant, I don’t have a figure in mind. I don’t know how large the community that we leave behind will be. It could be twenty, or it could be a thousand. I only know that it needs to be as large as we can possibly make it. The more of them there are, the greater chance they’ll have of surviving and propagating.”

  “Okay, let’s work the other way, then. Forget about that end of the spectrum, the goal. What are we going to start with?”

  She finished distributing the mulch around a tomato plant and straightened. “That’s where we have a problem, isn’t it?”

  I ploughed on. “We have forty-eight human embryos in the cryotank at the workshop. In the big scheme of things, there’s not a lot of room for error.”

  “So I say we grow six on our first try.”

  “And if they all come to term, that’s six children we have to raise.”

  “Yeah,” she said casually. “So?”

  “That’s six children to feed and raise, to clothe and keep warm, in addition to all the work we have to do with the crops and these other projects,” I said. “Do you really think we can cope with that kind of workload?”

  “Yeah, I do. In light of the cryotank data, I don’t think we have time to mess around. Within the near future those embryos could suffer irreparable damage. There are signs that they’re starting to deteriorate.”

  “I know that, but can we feed that many children?”

  She hesitated. “Yeah, we can.”

  Brushing past me, she strode over to a bucket of water by the tank and began to clean the dirt from her hands.

  “Why do I get the impression you’re not telling me something here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I joined her, dipping my own fingers in the bucket. “I mean how do you plan to feed six infants? That’s cutting it a little fine, considering our crop yield right now.”

  Wiping her hands on a cloth, she refused to look at me. “Come on, let’s get going. We’ll talk on the way.”

  With that, she headed out for the street. I scraped my hands messily on my shirt, then bounded after her.

  “Arsha!”

  She strode on quickly, and I only reached her as she stepped out onto Somerset Drive. In the distance, the tall spires of the ruined city, clad in a dirty haze, reached toward the sky like rotten brown weeds. Across the terrain I could see more and more patches of green as vegetation slowly began to reclaim the city, and here on Somerset the grass was thick, lapping at the edges of houses, where long vines climbed almost to the roofs. The change here had been nothing short of amazing, to the point where this part of the city was now redolent of meadows and forests rather than the crushed concrete and dirt of a year ago.

  “Arsha!” I said again, drawing alongside her. “Are you going to answer me? How do you expect them all to survive?”

  The corner of her mouth twisted and she stared out over the city as we walked.

  “Because I’m engineering them to.”

  I gaped at her stupidly. “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “You’re planning to bioengineer the only surviving human embryos on the planet?” I said, disbelieving.

  “What’s the problem, Brant?” she said crossly.

  “The problem is that you’re messing with biology that could have some pretty serious implications, long term. Without the proper trials we might not know until it’s too late.”

  “That’s garbage. M-Corp was using the tech for years, and now we have full access to the workshop, so why not continue it? You and I both did plenty of biotech before the Winter, as synthetics working in their lab.”

  “Well, my memories of those days aren’t the same as yours.”

  She looked at me almost apologetically. “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “And you know as well as I do that most of the biotech we worked on was for black market applications. For people who weren’t concerned about what happened in twenty or fifty years from now. People who were only concerned with what they could get out of it in the short term.”

  “It was only the legislation that kept it from being accepted and used by the wider public. You know that.”

  “And the legislation was in place to protect those people–”

  “Look, Brant,” she cut in, “you said it yourself: we don’t have a lot of room for error. We need to raise children who are going to survive. To do that they’re going to need to be strong. They’re going to need to be resilient.”

  “And the only way to achieve that is if we engineer it into them? Humans did a pretty damn good job of surviving for a few hundred thousand years before they started tinkering with their own DNA.”

  We exited Somerset and started down the slope toward the freeway, Arsha setting a pace so quick that I almost needed to jog to keep up.

  “I’m sorry if this doesn’t fit in with your vision of a perfect and pure utopia,” she said unsympathetically. “In the end, we want the same thing: healthy children who survive and grow into adults who will in turn breed more healthy children. This is the way that I think we can ensure that happens.”

  “And do you think the ones who built us, the ones who designed us to bring humans back into the world wanted this? Are you even bringing back humans, or something else?”

  “Don’t be so melodramatic,” she snapped. “This is the time for pragmatism, not sentimentality. You need to start thinking objectively.”

  “I am thinking objectively. What if you introduce cancer or a disease into these embryos, Arsha? We could be setting something in motion that doesn’t manifest itself for ten or fifteen years, and then we could lose them all.”

  “We won’t. The changes I’m introducing have been used before and I’ve examined all the data that’s contained in M-Corp’s repositories. That’s years of biotech data. There’s no danger. I wouldn’t be going down this road if there was.”

  “And what are these changes you’re introducing, anyway?” I said as we dissected a pile of rubble in the street and proceeded along a narrow path that had been cleared on one side.

  “Stronger bones, stronger skin,” she said. “More efficient m
etabolisms so they can go without food for longer. Everything they’ll need to be more resilient in this new world.” She glanced over her shoulder at me. “This world isn’t the paradise we once knew, Brant. It will be a struggle, not just for you and me as we try to raise them, but for them as well. At least in the early years, it will be a real struggle.”

  I stared at her helplessly as she strode onward. We were two unlikely world builders – a couple of synthetics with a repository of frozen human and plant embryos who had been left to bring life back into the world, life that had been snuffed out by war and by the cold and dark of Winter. After the light returned to the world a decade or more later, there had been no sign of animal or plant life at all. The human race had not only caused the extinction of itself, but of everything else as well. It was just the machines, the ones who could survive the freezing temperatures and the lack of nourishment who’d survived.

  And here we were with a chance to bring humans back, to make the earth green again, to give it voice. But no matter which way I flipped it, no matter how I tried to see her point of view, I just couldn’t bring myself to agree that bioengineering was the right course of action. Yes, there would be struggle. There would be difficulties to overcome. That didn’t mean we had to go down this road of fiddling with the most basic components of human life. Not yet. Maybe down the track if all else failed, but not yet.

  “I can’t agree to it,” I said finally, pressing my lips together resolutely.

  “Look, it’s not worth discussing further,” she replied curtly, swinging over a guardrail and starting up the slanting on-ramp to the freeway.

  “Why not?”

  She swept onward without looking back. “Because I’ve already done it.”

  4

  We stood within the dim confines of the inner lab at M-Corp. Surrounded by vinyl floors, curved grey walls, silver storage compartments and benches that disappeared into the gloom, the lab was a carbon copy of many others I had worked in before the Winter. There were no defining characteristics that marked this space as something remarkable or important. And yet, undeniably, that is what it was.