Dead Americans (24 page)

The last hint of sarcasm was lost on Alrea. “I can give those things to you,” it said. “Though I am learning, an adult woman is not beyond me.”

O. did not doubt it. Originally, there had been eight children: four boys, four girls. A sample, Alrea argued. The first to die—a boy—had done so within days, but the second and third had been more tragic. Isa, the girl, had begun to cough blood at the age of two, and before the week was out, she had bled from her eyes and ears, bled out until there was no more blood. O. had tried to use the death—selfishly, she knew—as a way to escape her slavery. “I’ve never raised children,” she told Alrea. “I never wanted them. Just because I could give birth doesn’t make me a mother.” In response, the being that owned her told her she was wrong, and that it had been its fault. There had been a defect in Isa, and it only located the cure when, two days later, Zu began coughing blood. The cure came quick and easy, but the death of Quzong a year later reminded her of the gaps in Alrea’s knowledge. The boy died in his sleep from a clotting of blood in the brain, a defect that was removed from the other children while they slept and thin, caramel coloured tendrils rose from the floor and sank into their skulls.

They were test subjects, O. knew, samples to be watched and learned from, just as she was. “I don’t want a new body,” she said.

“It would allow for you to be, as you say, real.”

No, she wanted to tell it, I would simply be in a new creation. But she didn’t. Alrea would not understand the point.

For her own part, O. had given up trying to understand Alrea. It was neither a he, nor a she, and its concerns were not ones that she could identify with. Eventually, she decided that it was alien in all terms of the word, and the understanding—superficial, at times contradictory—that she had of the being would well be the knowledge that she kept for the entirety of her ‘life’. The point was driven into her on the day she realized that Alrea was not just the astronaut and surrounding sack she had seen, but everything around her: the walls, the air, the ground: the constantly reshaping, shifting, warm to the touch form that grew from the remains of the space shuttle that had crashed into the surface of Mars.

O. learned that the day the broken hatch appeared before her. She was drawn to it because it was out of place, an anomaly in the smooth walls and perfect doors around her. As she stepped closer to it, she told herself that it was a sign of Alrea growing lax in its defences. It was too much thought on her part, however, for when she stepped into the cold, dusty shuttle, that sense of opportunity left her. Alrea had no defences; there was nothing for it to fear. The desolate, empty surface of Mars that lay outside was proof of that.

“I am moving,” Alrea said to her, later. “It is not very fast, so there is no threat to you. I do it to create a power source—the hatch passes that part of me every two months.”

“You’ll want to be careful of that with the children.” She hid how uncomfortable it made her to know she was inside it. “They could get hurt.”

“I shall take precautions.”

Yet still, it was the boy Zu, who found the shuttle door.

“He was just doing what was natural.” O. stared at his small body, barely recognizable as the child he had once been. She did not know how to react, and felt guilty that she had not shown more emotion to Nicholas when he had come to her, crying, to tell her that the air lock door was now closed, that he had managed that much after the two of them had opened it. “Kids are curious. They find things. They push things, they play with things—it’s their nature.”

Alrea, however, while not visibly upset by the boy’s death, was obviously so. It was not just a set back, nor hindrance to its work, but a failure, and it was not until a week later that she realized just how far it would go to solve the issue.

“I can make a hole in time.” The astronaut, the final Baker Thomas, faced her. The light of the tomb he floated in had turned to amber, and his empty eyes stared at her. “It was not something that I gave much thought too, until you first appeared, after your first attempt to kill yourself. I had you sedated when your future self appeared, and told me that I had violated you
.

“I asked how it was that you were here, and you said, ‘You’ll violate time as well. You’ll poke holes in time—you’ll be H.G. Wells without the scooter.’

“I did not understand the reference until much later, and I have been running experiments, equations, theories in a part of me since that day, preparing to send you back in time.”

O. had a different question. “You want to go back in time to stop Zu?”

“Yes.” The astronaut’s lips did not move. “You have to go back in time to save yourself, twice. I have seen one, and you the other, so why not save Zu before?”

Why did she not want to? O. asked herself the question as a long, slender tube rose from the floor beside her. Inside, she could make out a complex pattern of wires, some of which she recognized as having existed on Earth, and others which were completely foreign to her. A few were florescent, while others twisted, winding themselves tightly as if they were alive before releasing; yet still others pulsed, while others looked cold, as if they had been made from stone. There was room for her, however, and when she stepped inside, unresisting, the last of the wires, those that had been cold and dead, sank into her back with a burning sensation. Wincing at the pain, she closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, the world was blurred, the lines that defined the world no longer solid.

She should step out. Instead, she said, “How does this work?”

“Only small objects can be sent back,” Alrea said, its voice was dull, as if it were speaking through thick glass. “There is feedback, of a sort, when you try to send something much larger than your hand—the other night I lost a shell like yours when I tried to push the entire thing through. An image, however, projected from the shell proves no issue, however. A tiny projector and recorder is what I send through, and it creates in the shell the environment you are projected into. It will simulate everything for you, so that you can interact within it.”

“You control it?”

“Yes.”

There was no surprise on her part, and suddenly, she found herself standing in the shuttle, the empty, desolate face of Mars and the sound of the hatch opening her only companions.

“See.” It was Zu, confident, brazen. “I told you it was here.”

Behind him came Nicholas. “What is it?”

“Dunno. But there’s another door up here—it takes you outside.”

“Outside?”

O. knew what would happen. The two would open the airlock: it would grind loudly as it did, and Zu would step through the hatch, wearing the brown pants and orange t-shirt that he wore now. He had no understanding of the difference in atmosphere outside and he would turn to face Nicholas and grin confidently because of it. The latter boy would close the hatch from the outside, and remain in the shuttle while Zu opened the hatch leading outside.

Nicholas would start screaming shortly after that.

All she had to do was call their names. They would stop the moment that she did that. They would see her projection and think that it was her and she would tell them what happened outside the airlock. But she didn’t. She stood in the shuttle, watching the two reach up for the airlock hatch and begin to play with it.

They looked so real.

But they weren’t. They were creations. They were grown from the sacks that Alrea nurtured, their bodies repaired, altered, and improved while they slept. They were creations, just like she was. Yes, the hands that pushed the buttons on the keypad had been so tiny and fragile, and they grew and aged, unlike her own hard, white hands. But the thin tendrils of Alrea altered them both in the same way, burrowing into flesh without permission. So, no matter that they aged and died, they were as real as she was, and that, as far as O. was concerned, was not real at all. That was why the sight of Zu’s body had aroused no reaction in her. Alrea could remake him, if it wanted. Life was nothing more than a puzzle, an intricate machine that was tinkered with—

In front of her, the airlock door ground open suddenly, shocking the two boys. In response, they jumped back, and Zu swore loudly. The boys burst out in laughter a moment later.

Despite herself, she smiled.

“Boys,” she said before she realized she had spoken, “you don’t want to do that.”

When she returned, Zu was still dead.

“There was no change.” The astronaut was limp inside its tomb, Alrea’s disappointment so great that it could not even animate its hideous mask to talk to her. “You talked to them both and they left the shuttle, but here there was no change. He lay on the table as he does now.”

O. did not know what to say. Her back hurt, and there was a bitter sadness in her that had not been present before. It only intensified as she gazed down at Zu’s ravaged body and tried to process what had happened, and what was happening. When Alrea’s tentacles emerged and began digging into Zu’s broken skin, however, she turned and left the room.

Her aimless walk took her to the children, who lay in their rooms, still figures in sedation. She wasn’t surprised: Alrea had done the same thing when the other children had died.

After checking on them, she went to her own room and lay on the warm bed that was part of Alrea. There, she realized that she could not cry. It was the first time she could remember giving in to her grief since, over the years, any sadness she felt had quickly given away to anger and resentment. For a moment, tearless O. almost returned to the anger—but the image of Zu, grinning when he saw her inside the shuttle, thinking that she was there to share in the fun until she explained to him what would happen, returned. The image of his body was not far behind.

The next day, she said to Alrea, “I think there should be a funeral for the boy. Also, you should think about taking us back to Earth.”

In response, the room was cold, the tomb of the astronaut dark.

“They can’t stay here. You cannot keep them in a box forever.”

“Your tone is not appreciated.”

No pain followed, and O. pressed her advantage. “I’ve not got a tone—I’m just trying to help you avoid this again.”

There was silence, and she thought that the conversation was over, and indeed, turned to leave, when Alrea said, “There’s nothing on Earth.”

“There must be something?”

This time, there was no reply, and O. left the room, feeling as if she had, at least for the moment, changed the dynamic of their relationship. She was further validated two days later when a funeral took place for Zu. Her one concern was that she did not have time to prepare for it, either for herself, or the children. She had been directed by Alrea soon after rising, the children with her, into a pale blue lit corridor that opened into a room of coloured a sombre blue. Entirely new, a room she had never seen before, a part of itself that Alrea had created for the occasion, it was empty but for the dead boy laid out in the middle. Surprisingly, his body had been fixed, for a lack of a better term—the damage done by the atmosphere of Mars no longer detectable. Zu looked as if he were sleeping and O., while thankful, thought it a strange act of kindness on Alrea’s behalf.

The ceremony was short and simple. The children placed cards on top of Zu and, at the end, Alrea took the body into itself.

Afterward, when the children had returned to their rooms in a sombre procession, it told O. she would have to go back in time. “Twice.” The astronaut’s tomb was dark, so dark that only the edge of the broken glass could be seen. “The first time will be to when you were a child, the second to when you awoke here.”

“Why?”

“A precaution.”

“I don’t see why.” She argued, in part, because she could, but also because she did not want to feel the wires sink into her back with their burning touch. “It made no difference for Zu—”

“Did you see him, today?” Alrea interrupted.

“Of course.”

“I did not change him.” When O. made no reply, it continued, “I was as shocked to see him looking as he did, so much that I changed how the ceremony would end. Initially, I had planned to burn him, but instead, I kept him, watched, studied.”

“Is he—is he alive?”

“No.”

“But—”

“I don’t know what has happened,” Alrea said, a hint of desperation in its voice. “What I do know is that it appears that Zu died for no reason. Every part of him is healthy, perfect, but I cannot stimulate the brain, or get the heart to pulse. It is beyond my understanding, and may forever be, but I take the warning as it is given: time has its own laws, and we cannot break it, nor demand it to be different just because it would make our lives easier. We have to acknowledge it.”

There was an opportunity for her. That was what O. thought as the wires sank into her back. She was not quite sure what it was yet, but the relationship between her and Alrea had changed, that she was sure of. She might be able to change it more if she warned her younger self about Dan; if she spoke about her mother’s suicide; she could even warn her about Alrea. She knew, however, that even as she thought this, she was ignoring what she had been told, that time could not be changed, or altered—but that was not entirely true. Time could be altered and changed. Zu’s body showed that and, while, yes, the change was a cosmetic one, and did not hide the facts, did it not suggest that the potential to change her conditions existed?

Before her, a long tentacle placed a sharp, ugly knife on a small tray in front of her.

Then, she was standing in her old classroom.

Out the window, O. could see the overcast sky, and the sandy brick fence that ran around the school in a sign of its prosperity. The room was smaller than she remembered, however, and the tables tiny. She doubted that she could have sat in one of the chairs comfortably, while pulling herself up to one of the desks was out of question. Unable to do either, however, her gaze drifted across the security camera in the right hand corner of the room, and to the electric board that had only recently been replaced after the monitor component fizzled out on the previous; the posters and charts that the class itself had put up around the room were her final acknowledgment and the last of them was a map of the world, marked with red.