Alluvium (28 page)

“Who are you?" Autumn let out in a panicked voice.

The suited figure took some steps towards her. Autumn backed off, growing warier of the mysterious presence. She gave it another handful of seconds for a response or any sign of goodwill, and then she decided to run. She spun around, and to her shock, a hovering Builder blocked her path of escape. Its metallic shell nearly took up the entirety of the narrow corridor and let out a series of digital chimes as it looked upon her as if it had found its prey. Autumn’s moment of hesitation was enough for the mysterious suited figure to sneak closer to her. She turned her head just in time to see the figure grab at her from behind. She let out a terrified yell and threw herself backward, knocking the figure down the open hall. The suited attacker fell onto their back, and in a quick coordinated effort, Autumn managed to maintain her stance by pushing through their falling torso. A moment after impacting the ground, the attacker reached for her ankle as she began her second escape, but it was too late to gain any real grasp.

Autumn bounded down the flickering hallway, and she rounded into the stairwell just in time to hear the bloodcurdling yell of a man thirsting for a kill.

“Autumn!" Saul screamed from the floor. “I’ll fucking rip your baby right out of you, you fucking whore! I’ll murder you both!"

Autumn could pay no heed to his words. She focused on her steps as she retreated down the abyss of a stairwell that curled before her. Down and down she went, panting through her O2 reserves and throwing her shoulders into the walls to slow herself when rounding a bend. She could hear the voices of Maven and Franco echoing from the lobby far below and slowed her pace. They had the building surrounded. She should not have fallen asleep. There was no escape. She would not get lucky twice.

When Autumn was about four floors down she rested on the platform and could hear the beeping of the pursuing Builder drone as it entered the stairwell from above. It was hunting her, another slave on Saul’s leash. It descended the shaft much quicker than she could, bypassing the platforms by shooting down the open middle. What it would do once it caught her, Autumn did not know, but she was certain it would be the same as if the two downstairs had encountered her. So she quickly exited the stairwell and entered another floor of the complex, floor seven. She remained a moment just outside the doorframe and listened as the machine roared past her, continuing down the stairwell after her ghost, soon to meet with Maven and Franco at its bottom.

The floor she had leaped into was vastly unfinished compared to those on the higher sections of the building. The majority of the walls were no more than rows of steel support beams, leaving few places to hide behind them, and some of the outer walling was simply a sheet of plastic to do no more than prevent dust from entering the building from the outside. It was clear to Autumn that this was not the place to find her much needed oxygen, let alone her escape, but this was not a time she could be picky.

Autumn quickly made due with what she had and pushed herself into the construction site, stepping aside crates and under plastic overhangs. A weapon. She needed a weapon. She flipped over tool containers and rummaged through piles of rusty and blunt objects. Just as she found her weapon of choice, she heard heavy footfalls enter the unbuilt floor. 

“I know you’re here!" Saul screamed into the maze of bent steel. His balled fists shook at his sides, and he moved into the shadows.

“You won’t make it out of here," he said, moving between the beams after her. “Not you or your bastard of a child, unless you do exactly as I say."

The wind from the outside howled through the cracks in the structure.

“Do you think you can do that for once?" he screamed.

A sound. Saul jerked his head towards it just in time to see plastic sheeting flapping from a passerby. He began to stride in that direction.

“You think I’m a bad man for what I did, and you hate me, but you loved me once. You trusted me once."

Saul pushed aside boxes. “You trusted my plan.”

He ducked under the frame of a would-be doorway.

“Trust me now," he said, moving onwards, between a collage of tool crates.

“If you come out of hiding, I’ll let your baby live."

A stirring came around another corner, a few steps away. Saul moved to it, like a rat in a maze searching for his prize.

“That’s something I’m willing to give you. I’ll let your baby live, it that’s what it takes."

He found nothing there but a torn plastic window screen. The wind flapped through it, and beyond its blurry film, he could see the silhouette of his great city rising from the desert.

“Don’t let an innocent suffer from your crimes," he spoke out the trembling window. “Give yourself to me, and you have my word, your baby will live."

“No!" a voice shouted from behind him. “My baby won’t live without a mother."

Saul turned just in time to see a massive hammer tear across his glass visor, breaking into the side of his face. Glass shards daggered their way into his eye and cheek, and the toxic air of the outside was sucked into the now broken seal in his suit. He screamed, but still stood tall, refusing to give up the fight.

“You’re dead!" he screamed and charged at her, but Autumn also refused to give up so easily. She struck him with the hammer again, breaking even more glass into his blood-red face, and he faltered back, holding at his engorged and leaking eyes. She used his split-second of weakness to use all the force she had within her and threw herself at him, forcing him back even more, until he stumbled to the edge of the plastic window.

“Stop hurting us!" Autumn cried over and over again as she beat even more into his crumbling face with the hammer.

Again and again, the hammer hooked into his face and tore up more bone and muscle into the air. His face became less recognizable by the second and became nothing more than a red canvas of destruction. Eventually, Autumn stopped the beating, and Saul wavered in his standing, blood rolling from his concave face. He tried to say something, but only a gurgling noise came forth. Autumn attempted to comprehend his last sentence, and to her ears, all she heard was:
let it fall
. He then leaned backward, tumbling through the tear in the plastic screen and over the side of the tower. Gravity took Saul Lind the rest of the way, down seven stories to the sand and knotted steel below, breaking his back, neck, and body the moment he remet the earth.

Autumn stared down at the disfigured body at the buildings basin in an emotionless daze, and she watched, stunned, as two other distant figures ran towards it. She fell to her knees, letting the blood-soaked hammer fall from her hand, and for the first time in a long time, tears poured from her eyes. She mourned not for Saul’s death, Hollis’ death, or even for her survival throughout it all, but for something else entirely. She mourned because her water had broken during the struggle, and she began to feel a rising tension coming from deep within her stomach.

She was in labor.

Fearfully, she looked at her O2 readout:
89
minutes remaining. The air thickened and became hard to inhale, and she curled her body in a fetal position to slow her breath. What now? What could possibly save her now? There was no going back to the Hub, not after what she just did, and Maven and Franco would be waiting for her at the towers bottom. Beyond that, her oxygen was nearly empty, and even more of a problem, her exosuit could not allow her to give birth if she kept it on. She was stuck, even more so than before, and with nowhere left to go. Maybe this was the most humane way to die, with her child and by her own choice, even if it was the only choice she had. At least she had ridden the world of one less evil man before she went.

Her two hearts slowed their beating as she closed her eyes. The wind rattled through the exposed side of the tower and encircled her in a soft blanket. Everything slowed down, and in the quiet, Autumn found herself doing something she never had before. She tried speaking to something, anything that would care to listen. She prayed for her child's survival, her species survival. She begged for just one single act of concern for anything that happened to the life that lived in the universe.

And to her surprise, something spoke back.

Because the rain is warm
.

Her eyes shot open, and at that moment, something tapped on her visors surface. A tiny, almost insignificant, bead of water was rolling down the outside of its glass, leaving a trail of its past placement as it scurried along. It rolled to the bottom of her visor then disappeared as it slid off the crest.

“Is that-?" she asked as she slowly sat herself up.

Another drop hit her helmet's visor in that instant, then another, and then another, all originating from the outside, soaring through the large opening in the plastic screen. Not before long there were hundreds of them, cascading evenly from the cobalt sky and wetting the dry ground below. They were so tiny they might have gone unnoticed if Autumn had not been searching the stars for one last miracle.

“What happens now?" the two men asked themselves, hovering above the broken body of the third, buried halfway in the sand.

There came a change in the air, and something began tapping at the tops of their helmets, but they chose not to notice it. They pushed at the dead body with the soles of their boots and again nothing happened. The wind stirred the sand around them.

“We start over," a woman said from the doorway.

They turned to her. Autumn Florentine was stepping onto the sand from the concrete embankment of Tower One, clutching at her belly. She shuffled towards them with little energy left.

“What did you do?" Maven asked neutrally, eyes returning to Saul in his grave then back to her. “You murdered him. He’s dead."

Autumn rested herself against a steel column along the sandy path and grimaced in pain. She made an effort to control her panicked breathing, and then she continued closer toward them.

“I protected my baby. He was going to murder the both of us. I chose to save two lives instead of one, and I know I made the right choice."

Maven turned towards Franco and cocked his head. Franco spoke up.

“It wasn’t supposed to go like this. None of this was- No one was supposed to die," Franco said in a daze.

Autumn stopped about ten paces from them leaving an empty space between the conversation. The two men now noticed her legs were trembling and wet.

“He’s dead," Maven repeated again, and thought on this truth for a moment, weighing the consequences. “Gone."

“He was going to kill the baby," Franco said out loud to nobody. “Why would he do that? We wanted to stop him. He wouldn’t listen to us."

Autumn braced through a few seconds of a birthing tremor that rattled her body.

“Because-" she winced. "None of this was about survival or holding us back from extinction. It was about him. It was always about him- not you, not the colony, not humanity. It was about his desire for power and control over people, and the pleasure he got out of it. You must see this now. He didn’t care-" She fought back a wave of pain. “-didn’t care what happened to us, he never did, or else why would he try and kill our only hope of a future?" She looked down.

It was clear Maven and Franco were deliberating on what to do next. In this spare time, Autumn looked around until she found what she was really looking for. Her Crawler, parked aside a nearby building, directly behind Maven and Franco.

“You need to let me go," Autumn said carefully, taking a step forward. “The baby is coming now. I need to get someplace safe, for the both of us."

Maven held up his glove. “I can’t let you do that," he enforced.

Autumn stopped, mind racing for a way out of the situation. “Yes, yes you can, Maven. Please, I’m nearly out of oxygen. I’ll die here if you don’t let me go. I know you don’t want that."

His voice shook as he spoke across the gulf. “No, you can’t go back to them. You’ll tell them what I did to Janya, and what I let Saul do to you. They’ll hate me for it, even more than I already hate myself. They won’t let me live. They’ll exile me into the desert just like they did to Hollis, and I’ll die alone."

“No, listen to me, there won’t be anymore more exiling, or killing, or hate," Autumn assured. “I promise you, everything will change from here on out. They can forgive you because everything will change."

“How could I believe you?" Maven shouted, and he pointed to Saul’s corpse. “That’s just what he promised me! A lie!"

“Look up," Autumn replied matter-of-factly. “Just look up, Maven, and you’ll see."

After letting out a nervous chuckle, Maven took to her advice and tilted his helmet upwards. “There’s nothing-"

Tap. Tap.

Beads of water began collecting on his visor. One, then two, then three. They were separate at first, roughly five of them spaced apart, and then they began merging together with their neighbor. The congregation of water grew large enough to partially obstruct his view, transforming the dotted starscape above him into a messy watercolor painting of light. He dropped his head back down, letting the water fall from the glass shielding over his wide-eyes.

“Rain?" he belted.

By the time he leveled out his gaze, he found that Autumn was long gone. He looked to Franco in astonishment who too was staring into the storm. Both of them let out a cry of joy and confusion. It was raining on Mars. Rain, on Mars. A weaker rain than one would predict on Earth, closer to the consistency of a light mist, but nevertheless rain. Water. Natural water.

Everything will change.

A Crawler’s engine revved behind them. It choked through the sand at first, when eventually it picked up enough traction too quickly burst from the confines of the city and enter the open desert with great speed.

“The Hub is the other direction. Where is she going?" Franco asked, returning his head to the clouds.

“The forest," Maven said smiling. 

The sand became denser and denser the further Autumn drove. The rain, heavier. All the while Autumn laughed. She knew laughter would drain her oxygen tank at a quicker rate, but she also knew it did not matter. She refused to look at the amount of time she had left to breathe, because whatever the number read, it would be enough to get her to where she needed to go. As if she were on her way to a future that was already written for her, Autumn had no fear she would end up anyplace that could harm her. Some would call this faith, but she believed it to be something much more tangible and based in science. The universe, it seems to her, in all its perceived randomness and chaos, sometimes might work for a certain outcome. Whether or not this outcome was always for the good or for the bad, or for the now or a millennium from now, Autumn could not be certain. In this case, however, Autumn and the universe had the same desire for the same end, and it just so happened that it was to give humanity of second chance. 

The sandy plain turned to clay, clawed into by streaks of falling rain. This made it more difficult for the Crawler to maintain its speed and control. The vehicle glided across the twilight swampland, tearing deeper into the soil. A couple of times, it nearly slid into the arms of a daunting dune, but Autumn maneuvered it the other direction, keeping herself on the right path. She showed no fear. She was on the right path.

Even further into the desert, the wet clay turned to mud. The Crawler coughed and choked as it continued through it. The tires, not designed to drive on swampy landscapes, caught themselves in pockets in the mud, rattling the cabin of the vehicle. Muck was flung along the shielding of the Crawler, turning its tan coloring black. Eventually, the tires found a trap they could not escape, and the vehicle shook to a halt. Still, Autumn showed no fear.

She exited the hatch of the Crawler to find herself directly at the base of the Valles Marineris, just as would be expected, and she began the climb through the sludge to the overlook. Her boots dug into the muck, leaving an imprint that lasted long after she left, and it proved to be an easy climb to the top. Outlook Station Seven passed by on her right. The incline began to level out, and the overhang to the valley approached her.

There, behind a misty curtain of rain, at the edge of the valleys drop-off, was what looked to Autumn like a ghostly figure. It loomed there, wide arms outstretched, facing away from her and towards something far more beautiful. She quietly inched forward. It was looking down into the gulf, paying no attention to anything else. Nothing arose Autumn’s suspicions that the Creature's presence was something to fear, so she got even closer, trying to make sense of its form. Her gloved hand was reaching for its luminescent body when suddenly it leaped off the rocky platform and opened its massive white wings. It joined the falling rain and drifted to the valleys basin, disappearing before Autumns eyes into the fog.

Autumn gasped in amazement, but not only at the Creature. She was now at a position where she could examine what the valley held inside.

“It’s real," she whispered.

The expanse of the once a barren gorge was now covered by an immense forest. The parade of trees crawled through the valley and filled the farthest distance Autumn could see. Smaller groupings of the trees clung to the lower walling of the canyon system, attempting to break onto the greater desert plain above by advancing up the incline. The inner region was far denser than the rest where it was even closer to the original site where she had planted the seedlings. The trees hid whatever ground stretched beneath their thick plumes of crystal white leaves. It all looked like a garden of cauliflower from the height Autumn was observing them, aligned without order or containment, and without an end. She wanted to be down there, surrounded by Hollis’ creations, and feel his life in theirs. She wanted to follow the Creature. She wanted to make sense of it all.

The descent was without incident. The closer she got to the forest, the more she realized how massive it really was. The pathway lead her along the valleys side and directly into the heart of the shining silver arbor, and once within, she quickly became lost in its vastness. In every direction was a tree, firmly rooted in a mossy bed of white grasses and fungus that linked every nearby tree. Each of the tree’s gray-tinted trunks was as wide as the drum of a water tower and taller than that of any tree Autumn had seen in even the most exotic places on Earth. Their branches reached high above her, building a dense canopy of snow white leaves that trembled by the weight of the light rain. Water droplets glided between the cracks in the roof of pedals and found its way inside to the grasses beneath.

The light from the stars also found its way through the leaves and into to the woodland. It lit a path for Autumn to follow, directing her along a narrow causeway bordered by the twisting roots of the countless trees. Connected to this intricate root system was every stem of life that erected within the forest. It occurred to Autumn that as a result of this connectivity, the forest was one massive organism, rather than the hundreds upon hundreds of separate entities it appeared to be. She made her way through the tangled web of roots, in awe of the grandeur of the entity she was exploring, and if she listened closely she could swear she heard it breathing.

Autumn followed the root system to a clearing in the forest. She could see here that the roots from every tree were sourced into a single tree that laid in the center of the clearing. This tree was particularly more visually striking than the rest. It had a soft white glow emanate from its bark, and its structure seemed to mount itself more strongly in the soil. Aside its trunk, Autumn could make out a little green flag lopsided in the dirt. It was her marker from the original planting site of the EDN’s. She had stumbled upon the core of the forest, where the first seedling sprouted and pioneered the future landscape of Mars. Before her was the tree of life.

As Autumn trekked nearer to the distant tree a warning signal shrilled from her helmets display panel:
Suit is emptied of O2 reserves. Immediately refill tank or return to oxygen enriched environment.

Autumn was so entranced by the beauty of the grove that she failed to realize how hard it had been for her to breathe. Luckily, she now found herself in an oxygen enriched environment. She loosened the outer bolt on her neck-harness, unhooked the safety latch, and began twisting her helmet upwards against the rain. Only for a split second did she pause, allowing herself time to appreciate the awaiting world that had been granted to her and the man who was behind it all. If Hollis’ science and calculations were correct, then everything would be okay. Everything, just as he always promised.

She looked at her suit’s environmental readout. Radiation levels were normal, and the atmosphere was a perfect 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen. Filled with an unbreakable trust, Autumn lifted the encasement from her sweat-caked face and took a full and deep breath, dragging as much of the surrounding air into her body as possible.

Clean and pure. The dissipating warmth from inner circulatory systems of the trees heated the surrounding environment to a comfortable tropical climate. The moisture produced by the leaves, which was harvested from water deep within the crust of Mars by the roots, coated Autumn’s skin in a thin shield of water. The air was cool and minty, and it dampened her expanding lungs. There were notes of a sweetness in the air too, soft and subtle enough to warrant another deep breath to reinvigorate the addictive taste and texture. It was a transcendent experience for Autumn to fuel her hurting body with the life force of the forest, and she accepted the trees charity with gratitude.

The warm rain trickled down Autumn’s cheeks and blended with her tears. She turned her head upwards and spun about in circles, capturing as much of the water as possible in the valleys of her dry skin. Her mouth remained wide open, drinking and laughing all at once. Never had the rain felt so good to her. She wondered why she never noticed it before, on Earth, when the rain fell so often. Why, she asked herself, did she remain indoors or under an umbrella, hiding from the sky, when all along the rain felt so warm.

Autumn dropped her head and readjusted herself to the encircling forest. She parted her wet hair from her shining eyes, still laughing in boundless joy. She quickly composed herself upon noticing a shadowed body not far away. Standing beneath the forest's first tree, further into the clearing, she once again saw her mysterious visitor. Hidden behind its translucent wings, it’s hands of four fingers were touching the gray bark of the tree, inspecting the machine that it was. Its fingers moving along its maze of markings as if to ascertain if it was real or not. Autumn started to silently move through the rain-soaked mossy glade to make the very same judgment of the figure. It was the very same visitor that had haunted Hollis since the beginning, and where she once questioned its existence, it now showed itself to her without barriers in between them. A reunion was long overdue.