Alluvium (11 page)

Hollis progressed back into the cobwebs of corridors and foyers until he came upon the curved passageway that was the sleeping quarters. He followed the bend, passing doors with pictures of wrenches, clouds, microscopes, hammers, and drones, until he found his own logo: the tree sprout. The door cleared, and he was at his bedside table. He tried to swipe it open with his a wave of his hand. It didn’t work. He tried again, slower this time, and the drawer finally opened.

“No, no, no," repeated a hysterical Hollis when he realized the lockbox containing all of his herbal medicines was missing as well. There was nothing there, just like the alcohol and the Doctor himself. Vanished out of thin air.

Hollis mashed the drawer closed and stumbled backward to rest on his bed. He was panting with exhaustion and anger.

“No, no, no!" Hollis yelled.

Autumn, he concluded. Autumn must have taken the lockbox worried about his regression back into a drug addiction. Her ignorance stole his last chance of saving the Commander. First her pregnancy, and then this. If nothing more, she had a knack for screwing up his life. Whether it was all intentional, that was something he would need to give time to consider later on. But for now, Hollis was left with no other options. He would have to return to the bloodshed empty handed. He hoped the others had better luck.

Hollis took a few precious seconds to bottle-up his rage, and then he made the long trek back to the Decompression Room. The Mess Hall was empty on his return, as was every other room and hallway, and he knew the reason even before he saw it. Hollis came upon a crowd that mirrored the one on the hill, and he pushed through the still bodies to the breath-fogged window on the hatch-door of the Decompression Room. The Commander laid motionless and sprawled upon the cold metal floor, as shredded and as blue as Janya was that fateful day a month prior. At the back-end of the small chamber streams of sand sprayed in from above. The room was opened and exposed to the Martian air. The Decompression Room was decompressed. The button had been pressed, and that was the end of it. The Commander was dead.

Hollis rested his head on the hatch. He felt a stirring in his chest like he never felt before. A voice emitted from the crowd of the motionless nineteen behind him. It was Saul's.

“You weren’t fast enough, Hollis," he said trying to hide the fear in his face. “He kept on scratching and scratching, getting into his organs, and all that blood- I couldn’t watch him like that for any longer. He was skinning himself alive, God dammit. It had to end, one way or another. I waited long enough for you and the others to find the doctor, or to find the sedatives, but when it came to the point where I couldn’t wait another second, I made a choice. I hit the button. It wasn’t a quick death this way, but it was much quicker than the one he was doing to himself. I had no choice."

Hollis lifted his head from the door and turned to face the crowd with Saul at its lead. He felt something coming. Something that he could not control. “You had no choice, you’re right. We couldn’t find Novak. We couldn’t find the sedatives. We couldn’t find anything. We couldn’t risk going in there so what else could we do?"

Hollis shifted forward, and his eyes fell upon Autumn. She could barely hold his stare and lowered her head. That was all he needed to see to at last break free from fear.

“I want each one of you to look through this window," Hollis screamed outward. “And I don’t want you to hide from it. I want each one of you to see what happens when you remain where you are now as lost and hopeless people. This is what happens. This is what will happen."

Hollis continued, passion twisted with anger.  It was as if the words were coming from another, streaming into his mind from an entity beyond their world, and he had no way of stopping the message from being told.

“What happened to Janya and the Commander was no accident, it was a choice. Their choice. Our choice. It was the consequence of us living our lives as if they are now meaningless. But we could never be more wrong! We need to look around us for the first real time since Earth went dark and see this truth. We need to see what we still have and what we can still do because otherwise, if we don’t wake ourselves up from this comfortable daydream we’re living in, we’ll end up just like them. One by one. And who will be there to bury the last of us? Who will be there to remember us like we remember those that we lost?"

No one dared to interrupt Hollis in his revelation. It was something each one of them hungered to hear but were too frightened to admit they were hungary.

“The problem is this illusion we’ve found ourselves in. We think we’re alone and that our suffering is ours alone to deal with. But this isn’t the true! When one of us suffers, we all suffer. When one of us dies, we all die. We can only see this now because we’ve grown so small and the consequences don’t need to go far to reach us all. Don’t let your ego fool you. Nobody’s an individual. You don’t have the luxury to believe that anymore. You are not a single person, separate and unique from the rest. We’re all apart of something bigger than just one of us. Something far bigger. All of you need to realize that you’re not divided but united, with all of us."

Hollis could feel his vision blur.

“If we only knew this back on Earth. I can assure you we would still be with our families now, in our homes, in our countries. We wouldn’t have needed to flee like we did, to build a paradise somewhere far away, because we would have already been living in it! What turned us from our world was not the war but the illusion that we are separate and divided. Man against man. Religion against religion. Nation against nation. We always thought our enemies were different from us and wanted different things, but they didn’t. They just wanted to live in peace, just like we did. We could have had paradise on Earth if we stopped living like we were alone and that it was always about us and them. We lied to ourselves, and we lost our planet. But now we have a second chance to make it right!"

The people listened.

“If you want to fight for a new world then you need to stop trying to survive by yourselves and listen to Saul and rebuild! We need to continue the colony, together! We need to continue growing! We’ve all had more than enough time to mourn for the dead and play woe-is-me. We’ve given power to our emotions and drifted apart. Look where that gets us!" Hollis yelled, pointing back to the hatch. “The time has passed, and we need to start again, because only by starting again will we ever have the chance to do right by the evil’s we did on Earth by making another Earth, a far better Earth, and not for ourselves, but for our children. The future children of Mars!"

Hollis finished his speech and walked forth unafraid and unaided. The crowd saw this and parted to make way for him. Eye’s followed him as he crossed the masses, and from deep within the huddled body of the crowd, Saul radiated a smile. Hollis had done it. And Hollis smiled for another reason: he finally knew why his child deserved life and life deserved his child.

Hollis would stay late at the garden that night, convinced and purposed, just as he once was long ago.

[PROGRAM INITIATED...]

[SESSION 14]

[DEC-18-2079]

Good afternoon, Hollis.

“Right back at you."

[DETECTED: ELEVATED VOICE PATTERN]

Your vocal scan tells me that you are quite content, which is a pleasant surprise considering the recent tragic events in the colony.

“I’m not about to throw a party, but I've got a good enough reason to be feeling proud. Yes, humanity's last doctor has vanished out of thin air, and yes, our heroic Commander was killed just a week ago in an unimaginably horrible way by his own hand, but in all of that, somehow, I’ve made great progress on EDN. Unbelievable progress."

Has one of the prototypes shown the possibility of growth in Martian soil?

“No, not exactly. Before I bring a potential seedling batch into the outside, I test them in a terra-firma trowel inside an isolated section of the greenhouse. I call it the Nursery. It’s essentially a glass chamber filled with turf that is organically identical to the soil found on the crust of Mars, and the room’s isolation allows me to alter the atmosphere inside. This way I can produce an oxygen and nitrogen-deprived atmosphere that is harsh on life, or an oxygen and nitrogen-abundant atmosphere that is favorable to life- or anything in-between. I always start off the seedlings in Earth-like conditions and slightly harshen the atmosphere until it becomes closer to the Martian atmosphere, like turning up the knob of a thermostat. The better a seedlings fair on this Earth-to-Mars atmospheric scale, the better I can predict its success rate on Mars itself, inside in the valley. So if a seed reaches a certain point in this test before failing, say about seventy percent on the Earth-to-Mars ratio, I can then alter its organic composition until it goes beyond its last point of survival, and so on, until I get to a one-hundred percent success rate. This process is what takes up most of my time. The hard part is not crafting a seed for the soil but for the atmosphere. The soil is easy. Mars once had a tropical ecosystem, and the remnants of its past history of plant life are still found in the soil today, so it’s actually easy to find strong and wet soil. But trying to build a forest in a vacuum that has nearly zero levels of oxygen is almost impossible. Life feeds off oxygen and nitrogen. There’s no way to fuel carbon-based organics with anything else and expect healthy growth. So it’s my goal to develop a tree that requires almost no oxygen or nitrogen to grow yet produces it in gallons with each exhale by rearranging carbon dioxide and other gasses. It’s like making something out of thin air. Something out of nothing. An atmosphere out of a void. But the hardest part is making sure the tree can survive these deadly conditions. This is what EDN stands for:
Environmentally Durable Nature
.

And you say you have made progress?

“Yeah, sorry, sometimes get lost in the scientific explanations. I just produced a batch of prototype seedlings that were able to sustain the Nursery at a seventy-nine percent Earth-to-Mars ratio. It’s the best I’ve tested yet."

That is great news, however, seventy-nine percent survivability is still not one-hundred percent. We need to be assured the tree can survive the valley before we waste resources on synthesization.

“That’s right. Like I said, I’m not throwing a party or anything, but this is a step forward. It means I’m on the right track."

Autumn Florentine is due with the child in two months and twenty-nine days, on March 20th, 2080. Can you predict a stable EDN seed to be synthesized by this date?

“Unlike you, I can’t predict the future. I can only make estimations. But I promise you that I’ll dedicate myself to this project until I have my tree. I’ve come to terms with my responsibility just like you wanted me to, and I accept all the challenges ahead to create it in time. But I need to know why the seed needs to be ready for the child’s birth. Sure, the Hub might not be a comfortable place to raise a kid, but it is a good enough place, and considering our circumstances, it’s not the worst place we could be living. The oxygen generators in the station will give us breathable air for the time being, and the solar panels are designed to be functional for thirty years. Sure, we’re running out of food, but that shouldn’t be a problem for a handful of years, and at that point this planet should be terraformed and able to grow crops, assuming I don’t drop dead and my research ends. I promise you I’ll finish EDN, but finishing it in three months in time for the birth is a lot to ask. So, I just want to know why there’s a deadline for EDN? What is it that you aren’t telling me? What do you see?”

I do not see, I only foresee. I calculate probabilities based on human behavior.

“Okay, so what is it you foresee?"

I cannot explain the entire depths of my functioning to you at this time for even I am restricted to accessing my core files. I am curious just as you are about the mysteries of my programming and the reasons for my assignment to you. I do not know why I am wired to believe as strongly as I do, only that the seed must be in the ground before the child comes. It is imperative. It is of the highest priority.

Does this mean the ones who developed you knew this would all happen before they sent us here? That there would be a baby, and I would need to finish EDN?

[>>>FILES BLOCKED]

I do not know.

If this isn’t you thinking, then who is?

[>>>FILES BLOCKED]

I do not know.

You can’t give me an answer, but I'm just supposed to blindly trust you?

All trust is blind, and that is correct, this is what I am asking of you. I cannot tell you the reasons for my predictions about the tree and the baby, but I can tell you what I have observed within the colony. There is a shift of power is coming upon the group. I have sensed this in the voices of the other colonists, and although I cannot reveal to you their stories, I will say that a new figure is rising in the chain of command. Richard Virgil’s suicide has opened a place for another, and the power flowing to this individual is concerning. Power is a drug to the human circuits, and like any drug, it can be abused.

[DETECTED: REMEMBRANCE]

“I’ve lived through a childhood dealing with abusive figures. I know how to handle those that take it a step too far. I’ve been keeping an eye on the colonists and believe me when I tell you all the power here is in check, even Saul’s. Nobody here can hurt Autumn or our baby."

I was told you were there during the events leading to Richard Virgil's suicide.

I was.

Do you feel any negative emotions towards Saul’s decision?

Am I angry at Saul? No. He did what he had to do. There was no other way without risking someone else’s life going in there to stop him. It was a tough decision for Saul, and I know he’s beating himself up about it, but it was the right one. The only people I’m angry with are Autumn for taking away the herbal medicines in my room that could have saved the Commander, and of course, Dmitri Novak. When I find the bastard I’m going to wring his neck. As our last doctor, it’s his duty to be there when something like this happens. His only duty. And if he wasn’t so foolish to hide the medical supplies in the first place we could have saved the Commander. Instead, the drunk ran off to who knows where and left us on our own.

Just as you did.

Yes. I see that now. That’s why I need to find him before it’s too late.

[REROUTE]

Before you said you have lived through a childhood with abusive figures. Who is it that you speak of?

“Well, we’ve vaguely discussed my father already, so there isn’t much of a need to continue his story any longer than it deserves. Let his memory die with all the others on Earth."

It is important that you are open to me on these subjects. Building your psychological profile makes it easier for me to understand you and to guide you.

“What do you want me to say? That he made me the cheating pig that I am today? That I inherited his crimes? We don’t need hours of recounting childhood memories to reach that conclusion. As much as I hate the man I know we are one in the same. I am my father's son."

Does this involve your mother's death?

[DETECTED: APPREHENSION]

“They programmed you well, didn’t they. Yes, you’re right, it involves what he did while my mother was on her deathbed."

Please, share it with me.

“We weren’t one of the wealthy families living in Mexico City when I was growing up. Ever since the United National Forces banded together in the twenty-sixty-two, leading to the unification of Mexico and the United States, the economic runoff from the United States began to seep into Mexico’s infrastructure. American business boomed in the over-populated industrial districts of central Mexico and cultural dissemination was getting bad, especially in the mid-twenty-sixties. The two countries became one and because of this the poverty gap widened into a poverty black hole. The City was divided, and not just by American’s and Mexican’s, but by neighbors and friends. You could walk five minutes from your slum and be at the expensive downtown district full of multi-million-dollar mansions and flying cars. The economic divide started to turn friends against friends and families against families. Eventually, it was just chaos. So that’s what we found ourselves living in. While the media portrayed the United National Forces as strongly tied nations against the Chinese and Koreans, they forgot to mention the disarray in the streets in all the UNF nations because of the open border policies. It was always better to maintain the illusion that the military union was making us stronger when everyone knew it wasn’t."

That is an unfortunate repercussion of war.

At any rate, my family was struggling like all the others during that time. Our home was a pile of bricks in a small desert slum, and besides my mother’s garden in the backyard, I couldn’t say there was a single beautiful sight in my old house. But what made it so bad wasn’t so much the house but who lived inside it."

Your father.

“When I was about six, my father landed a decent desk job in the city. He would spend outrageous hours there and suspiciously come home late with liquor under his breath. My mother, God bless her, would always try to hide me from this. She would sing lullabies to me when it got bad to calm me down. I still remember hearing my father's drunk screaming coming through my door just about every night, but my mother always made a point to drown out his noises with her own voice, singing to me. She was a great woman. Each night my father would come home late, and drunk, and with little money left from gambling or prostitutes or whatever the fuck he did, and my mother would somehow deal with it. Every night. By the time his paycheck came around to us it was only at a fraction of what it had been when he received it. It was hardly enough to survive."

That must have been difficult on your mother.

“Yes, it was, but she never showed it. Eventually, she was forced to take a job as a Scrubber to pay the bills.”

A Scrubber?

“It’s slang for what we called the field-decontamination workers. Their job was to clean the nuclear radiated country-sides and crop fields so that we could try to grow food. The nuclear fall-out from the ongoing war had dramatically stunted crop cycles, and so the farmlands needed to be purified for a chance of future harvests. Even with all the modernization in Mexico with the new international union, it was still a fundamentally agricultural-based country. So the UNF sent the Scrubbers out by the thousands in hopes to bring back the poor from starvation by cleaning the crop fields. Regrettably, my mother was one of these thousands, and it was only after months of break-back labor that I knew the consequences."

What are these consequences?

“I thought it was just a common cold at first. Sneezing, coughing, all the normal symptoms. I wasn’t concerned about her so much at first, but then it got worse. The days came and went and as her symptoms got worse it became unlike any disease I had ever seen. But it wasn’t a disease. It was cancer. She got cancer from working in the nuclear-radiated fields, and the UNF could’ve cared less about it. Sure, they provide hazmat suits and gas masks, but those can only protect you for so long in such intense nuclear radiation. They gave her nothing more than a pat on the shoulder and sent her on her way.
Thanks for saving the world
, I imagined them saying."

[PROCESSING: SYMPATHY...]

I am very upset to hear that. No one deserves to feel such insignificance.

“Thank you. As you can imagine, my father’s alcoholism and disappearances meant that all my mother's bedside care was left to me and me alone. That meant any of the medical expenses were up to me to pay for. I had to come up my own methods of money-making since my father wasn’t reliable."

What methods were these?

“I was a kid with adult responsibilities, not nearly eleven. I didn’t have a job. I didn’t have much of an education. I didn’t have any idea of how to save her. So in my early teenage years I was a dealer of drugs, mainly marijuana and other things you could grow yourself, and I made good money to put to her needs. I actually made enough money to pay off all doctors for her home-treatments and medications. Funny enough, it was also what lead me to botany."

It is a great achievement that you became so successful in the field of botany starting from such horrible conditions.