Alluvium (9 page)

The audience mumbled and stirred.

“My friends in high places have told me that the beginning stages of a possible tear has been detected above the north Atlantic Ocean. Now, it seems highly unlikely knowing this information that Protocol Downpour wouldn’t be shelved for good, but don’t give the UNF more credit than they deserve. Keep in mind that this was the minority of the council's result after analysis and the majority of the others deemed it safe for continual use. The UNF will do anything to win this war and are foolish enough to continue striking nukes to do so. We can’t assume that they won’t stop sending the nukes China’s way if it means our sovereignty for a little longer. Upon hearing this top-secret covenant that may destroy the world thirty years ago, I knew that something had to be done, as anyone with a right mind naturally would. But I couldn’t save our planet, not as one man against a dozen armies. Instead, I decided to create another. Protocol Downpour is the reason I founded the Martian colony project and the Extraterrestrial Colonial Society. Eventually, after the UN nations became aware of their mistake, they began funding my project as well. I convinced them the need for a Martian colony where, three years after the initial touchdown of twenty-two highly qualified colonists, and after construction and terraformation, we will begin to traffick in refugees from Earth. And as you all are aware, your families will be the first to come."

Adrian almost regretted telling them everything in that instant. They looked scared. Too scared. Would they turn back? Would they stand up and leave? Leave to where? He could not lose any of them, not after all the work that was done in the selection process. Each one was as vital and the next, but some, like Saul Lind and Hollis Reyes, were in-expendable.

“I know this is hard to hear, but this is the truth of it. I don’t want to frighten you but fuel you. Give you a reason to build faster and better. Keep your families safe-”

Adrian’s breath ran away from him, and he left the colonists in an eerie stillness. A guard came up behind Adrian and whispered into his ear.

“I- I must be leaving now. I am a tired, old man, but I hope you have a new appreciation for the mission. For the colony. For each other. And remember, the seed of civilization is yours to grow."

He waved off the crowd, too sad to look them in the eye’s. He was a father sending his kids off to war. He felt responsible for them, for Earth’s fate, but their destinies were on Mars now. It was out of his hands. So he let them go. He had to say goodbye.

Hollis remembered shivering in the masses in the Siberian warehouse. He remembered holding his gloves between his trembling legs and heaving plumes of cold steam from his lungs. He had thought about turning back. About standing up and leaving. If the tear in the atmosphere was real he wanted to be with his daughter and his wife for its opening. He could not leave her alone for three years while he was planting trees in a far away desert. It made no sense. He held his convulsing knees steady as he lifted himself from his seat, and before he realized what had happened, he was standing up. He was the only one standing in the trembling crowd and all of their terrified eyes were upon him, waiting to see what he would do next. He knew that if he left now, with all of them watching, most would follow. So he just stood, for a few seconds, perhaps minutes, thinking about Rosa, Elena, and Earth.

It was seconds before he decided to run that a small and young Asian girl in a white parka beside him took his glove in hers. She held his hand tight, and Hollis looked down at her rounded and honest face to see a girl who he would come to know as Janya. She spoke almost as quietly as the old man and with just as much love.

“Stay just a bit longer," she nearly begged. “
Please
."

And Hollis did. He scanned the shaken onlookers who scanned him back, let out a great puff of his breath, and he settled back in his seat. He would wait until the meeting had finished, he thought. At the very least out of courtesy.

“Thank you," he whispered to the girl at his right.

That was what Hollis remembered best about Janya as he smiled at the wooden spike that shivered in the desert just as he once did long ago in the snow. He remembered her reassuring words more than any other spoken that night, and there were plenty of other powerful sentences to win his favor. Janya's words had more impact than any one of Adrian Minor’s or the other mission counselors. She always had the ability to sense a situation and figure out the perfect thing to say. She saw what no other could and knew when to stay or when to leave. But if that were true, what then of the current situation the colonists of Mars found themselves in? She was the one who stood up and left them. Was she right to leave? Was he right to stay? If only Janya had someone to tell her what she told him so many years ago.
Stay just a bit longer
. It may have worked, mulled Hollis.

It may have worked.

Hollis turned to leave when he saw another figure climbing up the hill after him. They struggling not to fall against the shifting incline of the sand. Hollis thought to help but thought it better to let the figure make the climb themselves. To rise, to fall, to get up again and fight against the running sands. Hollis waited until the driven figure made it to the top of the hill before he took him in an embrace.

“Stay just a bit longer," muffled Hollis into Asnee’s shoulder.

The two cried on top of the hill until they felt satisfied their sins were washed away.

The water was not warm enough. The man reached forward and cranked the lever a few more inches to the left and looked up again into the forceful stream, blinking as the liquid beads rolled into the corners of his eyes. Not warm enough. He tried the knob again and realized it was at its furthermost direction. Sighing in acceptance under the cold current, he began to lather his long and tangled blonde hair with a dollop of organic hair gel. The curls slowly straightened and the desert’s dirt was taken with the rushing water into the drain beneath his toes. This had been his first shower in weeks. He had been too busy surveying the ruins of the Refugee Settlement, hopeful to continue construction and rebuild what was lost, and he would be going back again today.

The Refugee Settlement had been frozen-in-time since the colony discovered the fate of Earth, months ago. For the two years prior, Saul worked daily in the design and construction of the twelve high-rise towers that made up the desert city. With the partnership of head engineer Maven Atoll and the other eleven engineers, as well as the drone technicians who used their robots to do the heavy lifting, Saul had already developed much of the foundation for the towers. Each tower had the capacity of housing 1,500 citizens of Earth in accommodating, albeit minimalistic, conditions. The towering complexes were similar to metropolitan apartments, however, containing far less space and only the basic amenities: water, generator-run electricity, and a robust air-conditioning system that separated out the Martian air. Anything beyond these features was nonexistent, and the only means of entertainment was an old-age emergency radio system built into each apartment. In their early forms, the towers were meant to keep the Earth-fleeing families alive and not much beyond that. The future, however, might allow for a more evolved cityscape with bustling sidewalks, sprawling parks, and commercial shopping. For now, Saul could only focus on convincing the others in the colony to join him in the settlements reconstruction, and this would be as difficult task considering there were no Mars-bound refugees coming from their old planet anytime soon. But it was not for Earth anymore, it was for Mars. For their future. Saul alone recognized this.

From the steam of the scalding shower Saul emerged. The frigid open air sent tremors through his muscles. He immediately sheltered his exposed self in the wrapping of a nearby bath towel. He drew the moisture from his skin into the cotton cloth and waddled to the misty mirror once adequately dry. He wiped away a dewy-blur in the glass with his pruned palm and watched his features come into focus before him. He looked different than he remembered. Light stubble scattered across his depressed cheeks and his thin brows were frowning above his blue eyes. He looked intense and unkempt, like an animal taken directly from the wild and brought to a more civilized place. He wondered how the others had not taken notice of his wild appearance considering he normally kept himself clean-cut, however, they themselves did not look so different. To an outsider looking in, the colony must have looked like a zoo teeming with untamed beasts. Then again, there are no outsiders looking in, only insider’s looking out.

At any rate, Saul did not like looking like a homeless man, even if he was precisely that. He moved his fingers in a particular fashion across the mirror’s surface, and the glass sparkled with light and electronics. On the mirror’s digital interface, a selection of commands appeared in text:
Make-up
,
Trim
,
Shave
, and
Exfoliate
. He selected the shaving icon with another particular hand motion, and in that moment hundreds of tiny green dots materialized on his reflected face, localized on the stubbled area.

Shaving, please hold still,
spoke the glass in a human-like speech.

Saul felt a layer of heat rest on his cheeks and chin and suddenly the stubble vanished with the blink of an eye.

“This is what a hundred-billion-dollar project buys you," joked Saul while patting his cheeks. He splashed his face with tap-water and drifted into the men’s locker room feeling a bit more presentable to the world beyond the bathroom.

In front of another mirror, in a different part of the Hub, water from the same pipeline dripped from another man’s face. Something did not feel right to this man. He splashed himself with water again to be sure, but he was not sure. Where was he? What was he looking at? Which side of the glass was he on? He confused himself with questions, and in this confusion everything began to vibrate and twist like a world reflected in a whirled-pool. The mirror cracked beneath his knuckles, and his background was lost. Who was he? Who was this man he was looking at? Richard Virgil: the Commander. The Commander. He is the Commander of the Martian colony. Richard Virgil. The last leader of the last colony. Is that right? Richard- Richard- He is Richard. Richie, that was what the children on the schoolyard had called him when he was just a boy.
Itchy
Richie, because of the one afternoon that a dare brought him standing before the treeline at the edge of his elementary’s playing field. Exploring the arbor was strictly prohibited by all students and was strongly enforced by his teachers, but Richie wanted to show his classmates that rule’s did not frighten him. That he was his own rule-maker. So, being the social forerunner that he was, Richie took the dare, and stood at the borderline of the forbidden forest, glancing back only to see vacant swing-sets in the distance. His peers were gathering at the meadow’s border a hundred feet away, putting their precious recess on hold to see if Richie had the courage to break the barrier between the known and the unknown. Richie knew that the teachers would notice the congregation of students soon enough, so he would need to make a move. He picked up a stick from the tall grass at his feet and used it as a tool to penetrate the mysterious woodland.

Richie would finally find out what kinds of things were on the other side of the treeline. After all the fables and myths whispered by his schoolmates, he would at last discover which ones were fact and which ones were fiction. It was the group consensus that if one of them were to go into the woods alone they would inevitably get lost and become mutated by the radiation of the surrounding area. They were convinced that there were horrific beasts of the forest who were mutated boys who had drifted too far into the radiation zones. In his new home, the lost boy would be forced to sleep under the cold moon and use the branches of trees as a bed. As the days would pass, the boy would get scarier and hungrier. He could only drink water from a flowing woodland stream and catch animals for dinner with newly grown claws to survive. He would miss his mother at first, and his friends, but soon forget he ever had any in the first place. He would become a lone wolf, a reject from society, and finally, when at long last he found their way back to the playground, he would be unrecognizable to all he left behind. He would be just another monster emerging from the forest. And the children in the playground would be frightened and throw rocks at the mutant boy to cast it back into the woods where it came. Where it belonged. They would continue keeping both worlds separate.

Richie fiddled with this fate as the trees surrounded him and the other children in the schoolyard disappeared behind the trunks. He held the stick in front like a jouster riding towards his opponent and brushed the overgrown foliage out of his path. The further in he went, the thicker the forest grew, and before he knew it he was being grasped by the fingers of a hundred leaves. Astonishingly to him, the patch of skin where every leaf brushed against turned red and irritated. Was he mutating already? Had he walked far enough for the transformation to begin? Was he surrounded by the radiation all the adults warned about? Richie stopped and came to the realization that he liked being human. He liked being a child and being cared for by his loving family. He liked his home. So he dropped his stick and turned back towards the school. He did not move so delicately through the woods on his return and trampled through the greenery as it turned him even redder than before. He burst into the field in a frenzy of itching and scratching, barreling towards the grouping of kids who stood exactly where he left them, at the playgrounds edge. They were terrified of his sight and ran to their teachers from the hungry monster, screaming “It’s true! It’s true! Richie’s a mutant! It’s true!"

Richie heard their chanting and stopped his running and fell to his knees crying. ‘I want to be human again’, he cried. ‘I don’t want to be a monster’. He could see the teachers rushing towards him as his classmates ran away. 'You're not a monster, Richie', the teachers assured him. 'Everything will be okay'. The other children quickly found out later that Richie was not a mutant boy but had accidentally stumbled into a hotbed of poison ivy. They happily named him Itchy Richie from then on to further the day’s alienation. From then on, the children all decided to never tread into the forest again, not because they were frightened of turning into radioactive beasts, but because none of them wanted their own nicknames.

Richard was no longer Richie. He was no longer in the forest. He was in the desert, in front of a cracked mirror that ran red with his blood. He felt wetness under his nails and held them up to see more red. He’d been inching his arms wildly during the remembrance of his childhood and had been peeling back his skin and digging into the sensitive flesh beneath. The bathroom was violently vibrating now, and the cracked mirror reflected his mad eyes back at him. What was going on? Was he drugged, hallucinating as Hollis Reyes had? Or was he just losing his mind?

The smart-suit latched itself to Saul, and he adjusted the suits mesh for a better fit. The architects hammer-logo illuminated in a golden radiance on his left breast, and he knew then that the suit was synced with his body. Its symbiotic threads were designed to regulate its host’s internal body temperature and be aware of any instance of dropping heart-rate, failing organs, and or inefficient oxygen levels. The advanced colonial suits had, many times in the past, saved the colonists, always without them realizing it. The suit’s heroics were always hidden and could easily be missed. Technician Julius Douglas was not informed of the night that an alien virus had entered his system, bringing him severe hot sweats and dizziness, and was unaware that it was his suit that kept him alive to its end. Without the suits ventilation, his brain would have overheated, and he would have gone into a coma for the remainder of his life on Mars. In another unseen instance of near-death, during the early construction of the Hub, Engineer Alexander Orsa’s suit filtered extra oxygen into the pores of his skin, warding off the dangerously undetectable levels of carbon dioxide in particular unfinished rooms. Engineer Elisa Perry was also ignorant to the fact that her suit had deflected a spark from her skin at an electrical console in one of the outlying stations, preventing her from catching fire. There were many possibilities of unforeseen deaths, and in all of these cases, the suit was a savior. And yet, to the majority of the colonists, its purpose was merely a fashionable formality.

Saul brushed the uniform clean and closed his locker. It was time to return to his workstation and draw up more plans on the settlement. He could not let the others hopelessness infect him too, and whether or not they were with him, he would continue construction no matter the cost. He was running out of time. As Saul turned to leave the lockers and exit the bathroom, he found himself facing a man with blood on his hands and a lost look on his face.

“Richard-?" asked a stunned Saul. He examined him up and down. The Commander’s suit-icon was that of a star, and it was flashing a heavy red alerting to a health hazard. Beyond that, rivers of blood seeped from his torn arms and dotted the floor.

“Richard, is everything alright? Why is there blood on your hands, and your arms- my God."

Before Saul could recognize the situation he was in the Commander was on him like a rabid dog. The two flew back and slammed into the lockers, crumbling the tin with the sides of their propelled bodies. They rolled along the lockers as both tried to pin the other against it, and eventually the Commander had his hands around Saul’s neck.

“St- Sto- Stop-" choked Saul.

Saul watched as the lights in the locker room slowly dissolved as he grappled at the fingers straining his throat. When he saw his own icon turn red he knew he had to do something and quick. He was nearly emptied of oxygen. With a free arm, he flung open a nearby locker into his assailants back, knocking the two apart for a brief moment of oxygen gulping, and then they were back on each other. Saul tackled the berserk Commander to the tiles before he had the advantage and threw a solid punch in an attempt of knocking him out. It failed, and Saul was kicked into the air landing on his back a few feet away. The Commander was on top of him again and beating his head into the hard tiled floor. The first impact nearly sent Saul unconscious, but he was awake just long enough to watch the Commander raise a claw and scratch him across his cleanly shaven face. Saul braced for the second, and most-likely final impact when just before it was to happen the crook of another’s elbow locked around the Commander’s neck and yanked him away. Saul laid there composing himself and bearing the throbbing pain the lingered, listening to the scuffling of two bodies a few feet away. He flinched at the sound of a booming blow and heard a body collapse to the tiles. Pessimistically, Saul opened one eye, but to his relief saw another colonist shaking his hurt hand over the fallen Commander who laid crumpled and unconscious.

“What’s going on here?" panted Franco Anton, the United Nations liaison of the colony.