These Lifeless Things

by Premee Mohamed

  We didn’t know about Them then, he said. We didn’t know what They were, what They wanted.

  We still don’t know that.

  What do They want, do you think? he said. I’ve thought about it. Why us, why here, why now? Why Earth?

  Maybe They’ll tell us one day, I said. He seemed satisfied with that, and we got a good, big pile of wood to take back. Wonderful dry stuff from normal trees, thank God. Of course it’ll need to season.

  But I don’t think They ever will tell us. I get the sense... sometimes, in my dreams, nothing I’d ever tell him... that They’re so old that we’re not even like insects to Them, which are a long and noble lineage to us, much longer than our own, silly apes as we are. We’re barely noticeable. We’re so far below Their notice that we’re more like... bacteria or something, I don’t know. Germs growing more or less invisibly in their canned jam, in the house into which they’ve moved with its nicely-stocked pantry, and they will only take action against a can if it starts to bulge or froth.

  This is a terrible analogy. M. would have laughed at me.

  Can you tell I’m craving sugar? So badly. I’m on the verge of sneaking out of the city to go eat a raw sugar beet. I even wish sometimes for a stray beehive, or colony I mean, I would risk the stings for a few bites of honeycomb, like a chimpanzee. But I haven’t seen bees for a long time. I wonder if they pose too much of a threat to Them. You kill your enemies at once when they are most like you, of course. History shows us that.

  A hive, a hive mind. I wonder.

  Chocolate. Jam. Cream pastry. Nougat. Baklava.

  Maybe we will find a jar of honey somewhere in this godforsaken city that someone hasn’t looted.

  Now just a minute though: Have we been forsaken by the gods?

  Maybe They’re the ones who showed up, calling ‘New gods for old!’ like in the fairytales. Well then, I wish They’d forsake us. Or tell us what They want. But at the same time, maybe we don’t want to know. Maybe that’s not something for our minds, the minds of the undivine.

  Absolute compliance still results in death. It’s not obedience They want. It’s not (I think) food. They kill you, maul your corpse, but They don’t eat you. Half the time They lose interest halfway through and flicker out of existence, leering with Their tangled teeth. Genocide is happening; is that Their goal? Or is it something else?

  And where is everybody?

  EVA, HER NAME is Eva. I’m weirdly struck by this, and how long it took me to get to it. Of course you don’t use your own name when you write to yourself. I suppose I’m lucky to learn it at all.

  It’s chilly in the morning, but no one wants to eat inside the pod, adding the smell of food to the smells of feet and sweat and ink and electronics. We wrap up and eat outside, ready to set aside our scarves and gloves in an hour or so when it warms up, when the sun glints off the golden domes and focuses on us like a parabolic mirror. No one can identify what the breakfast pack is. Certainly, there are potatoes.

  “Is this one of those... military meals?” Victor says cautiously.

  “I think so,” Winnie says. “It was a condition on the funding. Darian ordered it. We had to carry the highest calorie to weight ratio for the least cost.”

  “That should be impossible.”

  “Well, that’s why we’re eating this stuff.”

  “Two days down, ten to go.”

  “I’d rather eat the canned stuff at this point.”

  “Winnie, that stuff is fifty years old.”

  “Well, it’s in a can, isn’t it? If the seals held—”

  I tune out their bickering, and clean off my spoon. We’re all doing so much digging and walking and climbing, everywhere the boards can’t go, and we’re already hungry all the time, even in our sleep. I can’t imagine having to survive in this city, constantly harried and hunted, alone and terrified. And waiting for a rescue that would never come...

  “The SOS sign at the botanical gardens,” I tell them, trying to stir up interest again. “I found a journal written by the people who made it.”

  “No shit?” Victor says, interested at last. “Hey, look at that. Primary source corroboration. I don’t suppose they saved any seeds in that journal, did they?”

  “Victor.”

  “Sorry, sorry. I live in hope.”

  The drone paths showed us intact statues, evidence of bombing, signal fires, SOS signs—many on rooftops, and one, just one, in what had once been pretty white gravel, surrounded by warm-temperature plants.

  We picked this city because it’s a good research city. And I may have found the most important document in the entire thing. But who cares, right? There’s Darian out there, getting photomicroscopy images of the busted buildings to see if they were bombed, looted, attacked by Them; there’s Victor, carefully dissecting seedlings and mice; there’s Winnie with her portable lab, her little stable of human remains detection sniffer rats and crawlerbots. And me. Who reads diaries.

  Sometimes I look around, wearily, and ask myself: Why aren’t more people studying the Setback? Why isn’t everyone studying it, why did we bother starting universities again, why did we rebuild them if not to figure out what happened? It knocked the entire world back to the stone age and everything had to be recreated from scratch. It was the greatest extinction event of a single species (us) in the history of the Earth, more than the K-T Event. We are the descendants of that zero-point-five percent of people who made it through those three years. Yet I personally know more people studying the Hundred Years War. Half of my friends are Renaissance scholars. Instead of the microscope of the world being trained on the Setback, everyone looked away.

  I look at our research team and I wonder what the writer would have thought of us. Darian is the oldest, at twenty-seven, but all of us were born years and years after everything was over. We can’t know what it was like. We can read about it, we can dream about it, but we can’t know. This book is the closest I’ll ever come to knowing.

  I sit in the remnants of the botanical garden and go through the scans of the first entries, under what’s left of the dome. They built it well; the iron bones jut bravely in their precise, original formations, exposed without their flesh of glass. The air is warm and damp, smelling of the sunflower fields outside the town. Before now, if you had told me that sunflowers had a smell, I wouldn’t have believed you.

  About the statues... I mean, no one seriously believes the statues were ‘coming alive,’ but neither are the specifics quite clear either. There is minimal literature coming from the survivors even now, they don’t seem to want to talk about it and cannot be begged, coaxed, bribed, cajoled, nagged, bullied, or threatened into it (believe me), but they are adamant about the statues. And they all say, in their various languages, leaning forward into various microphones, meeting my eyes: Coming alive. But we don’t know how.

  And there is a significant struggle to identify the enemy, period, who left nothing but these statues, which we made, and their traces, like tracks in mud, that we have to analyze as if they were fossils. There is the unspoken assumption that since no recordings survived on the tech of the time, at least some of the facts were made up or exaggerated. Well. Unspoken for most of us. Darian says it all the time. That’s why he’s more comfortable with his X-rays, his instruments, his lasers, his busted buildings and crater measurements, his numbers.

  I helped him last summer, against his will (Dr. Aaron, unaware, lent me out to his supervisor’s lab), with a database on the purported earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, rifts, sinkholes, and so on, that supposedly happened during the Setback. “Look at this stuff,” he sneered. “Like some ancient book whimpering about the Great Flood. That’s how credible half this stuff is. Telling stories around a campfire, screwing it up with each re-telling.”

  “You’d have a lifetime worth of work proving it though,” I said, strained, trying to be polite. “At least the evidence is recent. Not thousands of years old.”

  “I suppose so,” he sai
d grudgingly. “And at least for most of them there should be evidence.”

  “But there’s—” I began, and stopped; we both knew I was going to say ‘first-person accounts,’ which he mistrusts and, I now think, with the experience of that summer behind me, hates.

  Now, he walks past me and says, reminding me, “You’re obsessed with that thing. Find anything else useful?”

  Heavy in his smug voice is the reminder that plays in my head all day and even at night, in my dreams: We only have ten more days here. Make it count. And don’t waste other people’s time.

  But I have to; I force myself to ask the others to help me recon the buildings, looking for clues from the journal.

  “This will be the only time,” I say, and try to keep the wheedling out of my voice. “Please. It’ll only take a few hours, and maybe we’ll find... we’ll... find things for your projects too.”

  “All right,” Victor says. “I walk around all the time anyway.”

  Darian looks at me stonily; his eyes are almost the same colour as the concrete, in his darkly tanned face. “So you’re looking for... what, exactly? Based on this diary?”

  “Signs of marks on the doorways or walls. Showing which houses they looted. They said they had a bucket and a paintbrush. And, and, and”—I remember, and stumble over my words in my eagerness—”a bomb crater that was fresh at the time, two years post-Invasion. On Shoemaker Street. With a piece of shrapnel in it.”

  “They were still being bombed two years later?” he says, interested at last. “That’s what they said? A fresh crater?”

  “Yes! Brand new. The casing not even rusted, they said.”

  “Oh, all right.”

  All afternoon we scramble up and down the broken streets, tripping on cobbles, riding where we can, carrying the boards on our backpacks where we cannot. And we find nothing on any doorways or walls. “What colour paint did they use? Gray?” Darian grouses. I keep silent; there’s no way to jolly him when he’s in a mood like that, and you’re better off not even trying.

  We pause briefly at what is obviously the shrapnel, still, after all these years, embedded in the house, and he says, “There’s no crater.” I don’t defend the journal, but nod; I should be yelling “Told you so!” because I am half-right even if it looks like I am half-wrong too, but I hang my head instead. Still, he point-marks the site and puts it in his notepad, and we keep walking, and he doesn’t leave us.

  Victor is less vocally disappointed and I find myself hanging back so we can talk; outside of my first-year biology class I don’t really understand most of what he’s talking about. Every now and then a familiar word bobs up like an iceberg in the ocean of his excited monologue.

  I cut him off, tugging on his jacket. “This idea that Eva had,” I said. “About there being a cannibalism... like a gene for it...”

  “That’s not the case,” he says primly, but his face lights up. “All the same, you should ask Winnie about whether she’s found any evidence of cannibalism in the bone fragments she’s finding.”

  “I’ll do that, thanks.”

  In fact I do it on my phone while he’s still talking, waving his hands around at the lacy wrecks of the buildings around us, his bright yellow gloves the only colour for blocks around. No response from Winnie. I refresh the screen a few times, and shrug.

  “Epigenetics,” says Victor. “The research is just starting back up again. You know how it is. We had all the written research in the world, but all the experimental lines and organisms were long, long dead.”

  “Yeah. But it’s not really—”

  “No, no. What I meant to say was there’s no cannibalism gene in humans. We’ve never found any evidence of that. But if you’re thinking that a good number of epigenetic traits related to survival in general were activated in descendants, then yes, that’s very likely. Metabolic management, things related to homeostasis in general. Body temperature management. Calcium cycling. Adipose storage. There’s even evidence that the microbiome is different. There’s likely to be phenotypic plasticity that’s—”

  “What?”

  “Ah! You see it in some species. Let’s say frogs. When tadpoles get overcrowded and food is scarce, some of them get a developmental leg up by eating their conspecifics. These ones, they get stronger jaws, sharp little nubs that look like teeth. The victims, I mean the food, the prey, don’t. Visually, if you pick up a handful and sort through them, you can easily see which ones are cannibals and which ones aren’t. That’s how much they change. Their DNA doesn’t change. But they all carry the genes needed to turn.”

  “Horror movie,” Darian says, without turning around.

  Victor jumps, nearly walks into a fire hydrant, and lowers his voice. “It’s... it’s a well-studied adaptation response to difficult environmental conditions. Traits that help digest meat and bone, too. Their digestive systems can’t really handle it before the changes.”

  Idly, I think of the old ladies the writer refers to, and whether we would see, in their skulls, evidence that they were doing what they were supposedly doing. The teeth and jaws of monsters. But I don’t think that happens in humans.

  “These are our ancestors,” I say slowly. “We inherited all that.”

  “Yes.”

  “And if there were... these epigenetic changes...”

  “Well, certainly I would think so,” Victor says. I find myself curiously interested in his teeth, white and uneven, and Darian’s, large and sharp. He didn’t even let me finish my sentence, but I suppose he knew what I meant.

  But I’m bothered by it, and I corner Victor after dinner, in the starry dark, as we quietly work at our separate stations before bed. I apologize profusely for interrupting him, but he’s running some kind of comparative DNA analysis on tree trunks and the fresh seedlings we’ve seen, and his computer is clearly busy, a progress bar taking up an inconvenient amount of the screen. He swivels on his sproingy chair and regards me brightly in the light of the LED lanterns. “Emerson! Pull up a... a concrete block.”

  “The writer thinks mostly old women survived,” I say quietly. “But that’s not how it would be in nature. Is it?”

  “Oh, no. No, often not. Where the old survive, of course, it’s because they’re exhibiting traits that we would call human-like: culture, memory, problem-solving, even sociopathy. In general if there’s that kind of... of... of winnowing in a survival situation, you’ll find the young and strong surviving.”

  “Smaller chicks being pushed out of the nest if the parents don’t feed both chicks properly. That kind of thing.”

  “Or the smaller chick being killed and eaten by the larger. It’s just calories, you know.”

  “Victor.”

  “I mean, in nature,” he says hurriedly.

  “But people don’t do that,” I say. “Even in survival situations. We’ve found no evidence of... of that kind of thing during the Setback. Even in old material from concentration camps. People protect and shelter the weak, they don’t kill them to survive.”

  “No? Airplane crash survivor demographics.”

  “What?”

  He holds up a hand, and tilts it unhelpfully in the air. “When you look at the numbers of people who die in airplane crashes, people always want to think that it’s whether you’re in the nose or the tail or over the wings. Or whether you had just eaten, or were wearing your seatbelt, or... things like that. But when you run the real statistics on who makes it out alive, if anyone does, you’ll find that for some reason it’s males, aged 15-60, sitting anywhere on the plane. Way over the rates of women of any age, children of any age. What does that tell you?”

  “I... I don’t know. Maybe the weight, the distribution of muscle mass...”

  “Nope. Try again.”

  But try as I might I cannot make myself say that it’s clear, as Victor thinks it is, it’s clear that that’s because men are shoving people aside to get to the exits. None of this ‘Women and children first!’ like in the old movies.

/>   Victor is a year younger than me, he’s thin and looks flimsy, but he’s a foot taller than me and I find myself wondering whether he’d push me aside if our plane was crashing. If he’d want to survive so badly that he’d do that. He smiles uncertainly at me, perhaps seeing my thoughts written on my face.

  “You should sleep,” he says.

  “I’ve still got work to do.”

  “Oh?” He tries to take back his surprise, but it’s too late. I’m not offended, really. I know what they think about my research, even if he’s more polite about it than the others.

  “Goodnight, Victor,” I tell him, and stalk back to my station, and put up the paneling, and cry a little bit before I keep reading. Because of the colour schemes of their preferred software, the others glow all different colours in the darkness—Winnie is a soft violet, Darian’s a gray-blue, Victor is pink and red. Mine would be gold, from the greeny-gold colour of the text reader, diligently transcribing my anonymous author’s crabbed scrawl into a tight and readable text. I bet it would look pretty from above. Maybe tomorrow night I’ll try to get a photo.

  June 24

  Horror yesterday. When we think we have seen more than our fill.

  And shock, when we think we can no longer be shocked.

  Just at dusk, a statue darted across the street in front of us, startling, like a stray cat—though of course much bigger, as big as a horse, but still the likeness was unmistakeable. And catlike it hesitated when it saw us, one paw up, spiked and clubbed like the bloated claw of a scorpion. The grotesque face remained in profile. And then we saw something in its muzzle, ragged and red. Another corpse, I thought wearily, but it writhed just as I thought this, and screamed, and I involuntarily lunged for it.