The ancient myth of Pandora’s box reimagined in a haunting, post-apocalyptic future…
Novelette | 10,730 words
But my hand was made strong
by the hand of the Almighty.
We forward in this generation—
triumphantly.
There’s no more putting it off. On the exterior synchro-glass, Pandora comes into view, a pale mint green. Misty atmospheric tendrils flare out into space, some reaching as far as two hundred aerilons above the planet’s surface. Unlike a star with its fiery corona of superheated plasma, Pandora appears as if wrapped in an ever-shifting vapor. And to think there’s only one being somewhere down there wandering around in the mist and fog, one lone figure who calls Pandora home. Dio wonders how they’ll find her.
“Don’t you remember? We won’t find her,” says Sola. He flinches as Sola tightens the seal around her respir-shield. The thing is mostly transparent, her mouth and nose still visible, her lower face illumed with an eerie glow. Sola grins. “Don’t worry your pretty little head about it, bucko,” she says. “She’ll find us.”
Dio hates the way Sola does this, at times seeming to read his mind. He’s given up trying to hide the fact that although he would kill her in half a heartbeat if ever given the chance, he can’t help but find her unbearably attractive. The first time she catches him fantasizing about laying her down on an old-fashioned sleeping pad, she looks him dead in the eye and says, “Not if you were the last man in formation. What?” she adds, as his mind begins to spin, wondering how she knows what he’s thinking. “It’s easy,” she says. “You Shit Breathers are all the same.” At the time, he chalks it up to a lucky guess, resolves to hold his cards closer to his chest from then on, but it doesn’t matter. She always seems to find her way in, the more transgressive his daydreams, the more likely she is to suss them out. And worst of all, he knows she knows it drives him nuts. Now it feels like she reads him just for sport.
Yet somehow she never seems to sense his sorrow. Maybe it’s because he tries to keep it a secret even from himself. If they’re lucky, everyone he’s known for the past astral year is dead. And if they’re not lucky, then even now four days after the breach, they’re still convulsing back in the space port orbiting Vipara, each of his fellow Soil Breathers and friends dying the slow death that takes a lunar week when your exposure is secondary rather than direct.
That’s how it goes. It’s why the pay on any extraction planet where the harvesters are Geckoes is three times what it is working on any other rig. Anytime you add Geckoes into the equation, there are a million things that could go wrong, resulting in a mass exposure. If the respir-barrier springs a leak. If said barrier is poorly maintained and develops a crack. Or more sinisterly, if someone tampers with it, some lone Gecko deciding he’s had enough of being a Company man, that he’s damn mad and someone ought to pay for the world making him what he is. And once you’ve been exposed to the Geckoes, it’s either instant death if you’re exposed for longer than ten solid minutes or the slow desiccation that comes with a secondary exposure, over seven days your bones turning to dust while you’re still alive, your brain drying up like a clam that’s been dropped on the rocks, its shell broken open, the creature slowly shriveling in the air.
Only four days ago there was a mass exposure on Vipara. From the look of things, it was probably planned. Great. Just what the Universe needs. A Gecko uprising. Dio can only hope his buddy Xin is dead. Another three days of Xin’s prefrontal cortex slowly drying up is something he can’t stomach imagining.
It’s no secret. Dio knows why they’re keeping him alive. At the space port on Vipara, he was just stepping out of a panjugal chamber after a very satisfying encounter with a schatzi when someone threw a LifeSac over his head and the exposure alarms started screaming. He felt himself being muscled up a ramp and thrown in a room, his LifeSac torn off as the air filled with a sedative. Later he woke in the first mate’s chair on the bridge of his own ship, the Stella Maris, only to find the bridge entirely manned by Geckoes in respir-shields, each one with their lower face outlined in that eerie glow, their smiles rendered whiter than white, his own hands and feet bound with magnetics.
At best the respir-shields the Geckoes wear when interacting with him will buy him maybe another thirty days or so. Yeah, he’s probably got one lunar month tops until he succumbs to a rare tertiary exposure. Everyone knows just being around the buggers is enough to get you in the end, respir-shields be damned—the Geckoes are just too toxic. The question is: will a lunar month be long enough for him to pilot this cargo ship crammed with Geckoes wherever the hell it is they’re looking to go while allowing him enough time to then take himself to the nearest decon box for a long retamination? Dio can only hope. Every second is precious, as each instance in their presence, he absorbs more and more of the lipid-shattering GVP they emit, most of it spewing out in their breath. There’s very little science on the slower tertiary exposures that occur simply by being around them. One lunar month might be overly generous. There’s a possibility his prefrontal cortex is already drying out. All he can do is hope for the best.
And so here he is on Day Four of being a Soil Breather living in a Gecko world. From across the viapod Dio watches as Sola finishes punching in the coordinates that will shuttle the two of them down to Pandora. She slides on her thermapanes, the green suns that are her eyes now hidden behind four layers of trivex polycarbonate. In his own way, he’s sorry to see those eyes encased in darkness. Normally when she looks at him with those fiery green eyes, the mark of a pure-bred Gecko, Dio feels the hate rise in his gullet, then the unbearable lust that follows, his body wanting hers against his better judgment, wanting the heat of those small green suns all over his skin. He wonders if it’s purely biological, something embedded in every Gecko’s pheromone print. Before the mass exposure four days ago, he’d never even seen a Gecko much less been strapped into a viapod with one, the two of them on the verge of shuttling down to a planet from which few ever return.
“Ready?” she asks.
As if you care, he thinks.
“We’re launching in five, four—”
The viapod’s self-navigator takes over the count. “Three, two, one—” Dio feels himself slammed back in his seat. He grips his harness as the viapod shoots down the launch tube of the Stella Maris and out into space. Within minutes, the tiny vessel is no longer visible from the cargo ship’s main deck, the viapod lost among the confectionary wisps scrolling off Pandora’s surface.
Dio tries to remember the ancient legend. Something about a box and a woman. He can’t even remember what civilization the legend comes from. Zeran. Acquali. Or maybe from the hive world of Marqana 3. A woman and a box. The woman letting something loose in the world, though for the life of him he can’t remember what exactly that something is, if it’s something that will save the world or destroy absolutely everything.
Because she’s wearing thermapanes, Dio can’t tell if Sola’s awake or sleeping. Either way, she appears deeply relaxed, her long legs stretched out on the empty seat across from her. He wonders how she manages to look so calm, considering where they’re headed. At this point what do his roaming eyes matter? He lets them go where they will—to each of her collarbones like G clefs, the V of her thighs, the outlines of her nipples faintly visible thanks to the tightness of her vapo-suit.
“Drink it all in, cowboy,” she says. “We’ll be there in ten.” For a moment she pulls her thermapanes down. “Looking forward to it?” she asks with a wink.
“I told you all a thousand times—I was just a kid. I don’t remember any of it.”
Sola puts her thermapanes back in place. “No worries, hot stuff,” she says. “We know you won’t let us down.”
“How do you know that?”
“We know your type. You’re a survivor.”
It’s true. He can’t argue with that. Dio didn’t get to be an intergalactic navigator by playing nice. None of them ever do. Hell, all of them working for the Company are scoundrels in one form or another. If what happened on Vipara didn’t kill his buddy Xin, some other planet, some other woman, some other karmic event would. In their own way each Company man has a bullseye on his back and a clock on his forehead counting down to splat! What else do you expect when you do bad things for a living?
And now Dio is four days into his own personal countdown, twenty odd days from doomsday. He gazes out the window and tries to hide a shiver. Those eyes. Of all the Geckoes Dio has encountered since the mass exposure, Sola is the most striking, her radium-green eyes set in a smooth topaz face, her skin like toasted sand. True, most of the Geckoes are melanated people. Their skin tones vary from blackest space to the occasional lunar white. Regardless of skin tone, they all have the same piercing green eyes, a sign of genetic GVP poisoning. While it’s not unusual to find melanated people throughout the Universe—Dio himself is as dark as the Old-Order metal called iron—in all his travels, he has never met anyone with eyes like Sola’s, her pupils seemingly many-faceted and blinding as gems.
“And why should I keep helping you?” he says. “Each second I’m around you freaks, my GVP-per-minute keeps rising.”
“We made a promise, or did you already forget?” She re-crosses her ankles, licks a finger, and rubs a smudge off her vapo-suit. “Don’t dry out on me yet, loverboy,” she says. “Once you help us get where we’re going, we’ll cut you loose. You can jet off in a viapod and take your sorry self to the nearest decon box for a long soak. Or you can go back to one of your panjugal chambers and have the time of your remaining life.”
He imagines the two of them in such a chamber, how he’d dip a hydroberry in whipped substrate, then run it over—The viapod enters Pandora’s atmosphere, jolting him back to his senses. “You and I both know there isn’t a world with a functioning decon box within fifty light years of here,” he says, clutching his restraints as the tiny ship thrashes through the clouds.
“Then we better make this little trip quick, grasshopper. And remember,” says Sola, tapping her respir-shield. “Any monkey business down there and I will whip this puppy off so fast you’ll be dead before your head hits whatever on Pandora passes for ground.”
Through the porthole he can see the viapod’s heat shields glowing white hot, the heat in the cramped interior climbing. Suddenly it’s as if a giant hand has taken hold of the viapod and is shaking it. Sola remains in her seat, her legs still stretched out like a woman enjoying a day at the beach. He has to hand it to her. She is one tough cookie. As an intergalactic navigator, he’s seen it all, breached a thousand atmospheres, made it through the absolute worst, like the upper stratosphere on Tau B9, the way the solar winds make the metal in any craft sing at high E above middle C, high enough to make a man’s ears bleed. Dio wonders how Sola remains so non-plussed. A seasoned pro, he’s having a hard time keeping his last meal down. Yet she looks positively—He searches for the right word. Smug, maybe even post-coital. Like satisfaction is her middle name.
“In your dreams, starboy.”
Dio sighs. “I can’t believe you still doubt me,” he says.
“Are you still on that?”
As the hard entry continues, Dio finds himself hoping this particular viapod was built on Toulou 3 where the shipwrights still take pride in their work and not Luun XK where everyone knows the craftmanship is shit. “Am I still on what?” he says. “On saving all your green-eyed asses and getting the Company off our tail?”
“What do you want? A medal? You done good—don’t let it go to your head, killer.”
But that’s exactly where he’s let it go. On the second day of the Geckoes commandeering his ship, the Stella Maris picked up a signal from a Company frigate sailing full speed for them, the thing most likely charging forth to perform a repossession.
“But we left everything we harvested back on Vipara,” said Arias, the Gecko leader. To Dio, he sounded almost whiny, a child not getting his way. What did he expect? When did the Company ever play fair? It was why the Company was the number one manufacturer of arable planets in the Alliance. In truth, it was starting to act like a monopoly.
The thing Dio hated even more than Arias sitting in his captain’s chair was the way the Gecko leader would from time-to-time put a hand on Sola’s lower back. The gesture was obviously proprietary in nature, the Gecko leader signaling that no other man might touch her. Dio was surprised she even allowed it.
But that day the Company frigate was closing in. They would have to act defensively—there was no time to go on offense. “They’re coming for you,” said Dio, as he diverted more energy to the ship’s propulsion sanctum. “You all signed Facta Vitae.”
“Our ancestors signed Facta Vitae,” corrected Sola.
“A Deed of Life is good ten thousand astral years,” said Dio. “They let you get away, what kind of signal does that send to the rest of the Geckoes across the cosmos?”
“Then get us out of here,” said Arias.
“And what will you give me if I do?” He’d been waiting for a moment like this. What every survivor knows. Ask for your terms when your opponent can’t say no. The negotiation was quick. In addition to getting the magnetics removed from his hands and feet and his old captain’s chair back, they also agreed to set him up with a viapod and let him go after he brought them safely into port, though they refused to tell him where exactly they were headed.
“It’s a strictly need to know basis,” said Arias.
And so Dio did what he was good at. He lost the frigate, jumping through hyperspace in a random pattern it would take the Company countless gila-hours to figure out.
When it was all over, he sat back in his captain’s chair, his wrists and feet unfettered, for the moment his whole being feeling utterly untouchable. Eons ago as a young Lunarian he had learned in his anon family to take things one astral at a time. For the first time since the mass exposure he saw a path for himself out of this shitstorm. Then Sola approached him and wrapped a hand around his throat. Instantly, he knew she wasn’t playing around. He could see the green fires blazing in her eyes. He imagined what her breath would smell like without the respir-shield, the sheer rage pumping out with every breath, poisonous and in this case personal. “Never call us that again,” she whispered. “We’re humans, just like you. Call us Geckoes one more time and I don’t care if we need you—we’ll find another way.” She squeezed his windpipe for good measure. “Capisce?”
Now in the viapod barreling through Pandora’s atmosphere, he looks over at this woman and remembers the feel of her hand on his skin. He can’t help it. Must be something in her pheromone print. At the memory of her wrathful touch, he smiles.
The viapod has stopped shaking, his stomach settling back down. There’s one last lurch, the viapod’s landing apparatus deploying. “We’re here, shuggums,” sings Sola. She undoes her harness and stands up, stretches. The door opens. Instantly a carpet of fog enters. He can no longer see his feet. “After you,” says Sola.
Dio takes a deep breath. I don’t remember this place, I don’t remember, why would I—it was before my life on Lunari S, he silently intones, thinking, I was just a kid. The air smells surprisingly electrical, like something on the verge of burning. He feels somewhat naked as neither he nor Sola have a weapon on them, arriving clean just one of the many rules of entry. I’m a survivor, Dio thinks, then a snippet of the ancient myth floats up in his memory, something about a woman on her wedding night, yes, the first woman ever, a kind of Eve, a gift from the gods to mankind. They should have sent her back, he thinks, women are nothing but trouble. With that, he heads out onto Pandora.
From space, Pandora had appeared a pale green globe streaked with wayward clouds that periodically escaped the planet, to the eye, the whole world sheathed in peace and restfulness. Consequently, Dio imagined that once they landed, they might find endless emerald oceans, everywhere the white caps like foam, or perhaps vast veldts with small green flowers blanketing the land. What they find instead is beyond anything he was picturing.
“Should we have seen this coming?” says Sola. “Does it ring any bells?”
“How could it?” says Dio. “There’s literally nothing here.”
At first they move cautiously, wondering if what they walk on will bear their weight. The two find themselves inching along on state-of-the-art polarized crystal, the glass smooth, tractionless, easy to slip on. Stretching below their feet where one would expect earth or water is simply an endless digi-screen. There are no seams, no panels. The screen perfectly clear so that Dio can see straight down into the planet, a mass of cables and optics and logi-chips and junction receptors threaded together like ganglia. Pandora isn’t so much a planet as a giant processor, a data pool floating on the edge of a forbidden galaxy, its outer crust a computer screen. And everywhere a white mist rises off the surface, the mist some kind of coolant deployed to keep Pandora from overheating, the smell as if the whole planet is on the cusp of a meltdown.
“This is unexpected,” says Sola. “I don’t think we really need to go anywhere.”
“Agreed.”
“Maybe we just mentally request access.”
“No,” Dio says slowly. “I remember something.” He closes his eyes, tries not to force it. “I remember an actual world. Trees. The sound of birds. Someone speaking, maybe even laughing.”
“Who?” says Sola.
“Me,” says a voice. “Have I aged?”
Fast as lightning, Dio and Sola whip around. From out of the mist, a figure is walking toward them. As it approaches, Dio can see that it’s a woman. He blinks hard as if to clear his vision, then looks again. He was right the first time. The woman is completely naked.
“Where’d our ship go?” says Sola. Instinctually she has a hand on her empty holster.
“No worries, it’s safe up here,” says the figure, tapping her forehead with a finger. Sola frowns. “Relax,” says the woman. “It’s in my memory. I can download it in a snap if you need it.”
“What do you mean ‘if’?” says Sola. The naked woman sighs, snaps her fingers. Instantly an image of the viapod appears on the screen under their feet.
“You do know the rules of this place,” says the woman.
“Yeah yeah,” says Sola. “You’re like an Old-Order immigration officer. We answer some questions, get our ‘passports’ stamped, so to speak, then you let us in.” Without looking, Sola reaches out and punches Dio on the shoulder.
“Ow,” he says, rubbing his arm.
“Roll your tongue back in, Fido,” says Sola. “We’re this lady’s guest.”
The woman laughs. “Will this help?” she asks. With a wink she takes on the form of the schatzi who entertained Dio in the panjugal chamber on Vipara, though as a schatzi she is still only somewhat clothed.
“Look, this is your nest,” says Sola. “We want you to be comfortable.”
“Thank you for that,” says the woman, who takes the opportunity to transform back into herself though now she’s clothed in a loose tunic, a flower wreath in her hair, like something out of ancient times, maybe a muse or even a goddess. “Yes, she says. “Like the Sphinx of the black sands of Kemet, answer my question correctly, and gain the world; answer it incorrectly…”
“I remember trees,” says Dio. “A lake. The smell of real air—not the canned kind you get on ships, and definitely not this electrical smell,” he says, wrinkling up his nose. Suddenly the three beings find themselves standing in a grove of trees beside a crystalline lake. “Exactly!” he says. He walks over and runs a hand over the bark of an oak. On the trunk Dio notices a small brass plaque. None but ourselves can free our minds: 2107, it says. For a moment Dio thinks he hears music playing, someone strumming an Old-Order guitar, but then he realizes he has never even heard a guitar before and doesn’t even know how he knows what a guitar is.
“Thanks for the trip down memory lane,” says Sola, “but we got a B16R full of people up there waiting for us to come back with the golden ticket, so if you don’t mind.”
The woman stops smiling. “We could’ve done this the easy way,” she says. Her voice has changed. “But alas.” She closes her eyes and they’re once again back on the empty planet, she herself once again naked. The woman raises her arms, revealing a small patch of hair in each pit. “I’m Pandora,” she says, her voice now both human and synthetic, “the gateway to the Helican System.” She lowers her arms. Somehow her skin seems to shine from within, as if she herself were made of glass. She is both beautiful and terrible to behold.
“The Helican is an ancient system,” she says, “one of the oldest in any quadrant of the Universe. More than a Tasic age ago, something sacred was stolen from the Helican and sent forth through the Universe, and so the ancestors created me, Pandora, to keep watch over this system. And now, when any traveler is looking to come or go from the Helican, they must first come to me, Pandora. I am not a being, I am not even a computer, though I know that that is what I appear to be. No, I am the avatar of this system, of all 1,928,558,367,082 stars, planets, and everything in between, and as the embodiment of the Helican, I ask you in the name of what was stolen back in the realm of time out of mind to tell me a one-word story.”
“You mean like a password,” says Dio.
“You don’t think an entire story can be conveyed in a single word?” Pandora pulls a flower from her hair left over from the wreath she was wearing. “You humans are the ones who still believe an AI can’t appreciate poetry,” she says. She considers his question a second time, then says, “No, not a password. Tell me a story in the span of a single word, a story I might savor for all of time, and if your story touches my heart, I will let you into me.”
“What heart?” demands Sola. “And what happens if you don’t like the story we have to tell?”
“Then you and your people currently orbiting this world will no longer exist.”
“How?” says Sola.
“The laws of the Helican System are malleable. Alter the strength of the covalent bonds that hold all matter together, and poof!” She smiles.
“This is bullshit,” hisses Sola. “We are rebel fighters seeking asylum.”
“Some say the entire Universe was born from a dream seeded in the Helican’s cosmic dust,” muses Pandora, as she begins to sashay away back into the mist. “It’s more than a fair trade. You get access to the deepest secrets of the Universe, and all for a single word.” Suddenly Pandora stops, looks over her shoulder. “Here,” she calls, and tosses a small object to Dio. He catches it in one hand. Then she turns and is gone.
How long he and Sola have been standing on this digi-screen planet, Dio doesn’t know. He has been lost in thought. When he comes back, there is Sola, moving through her body and cracking her joints one by one. “Shit shit shit shit,” she says. “We got nothing. No weapons, no auxiliary cognition systems, nada.” With a long satisfying neck crack, Sola starts all over again with her hands as she paces back and forth, a bundle of energy with no outlet. There’s nothing to throw, nothing to kick, nothing to smash. She can only take it out on her own body. “I can think of at least one word I’d like to tell this galaxy,” she huffs. “And it only has four letters.”
Dio stands fingering what Pandora threw him. It’s a stone, smooth and white, with one tiny black spot on it. He closes his eyes, clutches the stone, wanting to be sure. The stone as if rubbed by a river for a millennium. His mind once again filled with memories, though again, he’s not sure whose memories they are.
There is a river. The sunlight sparking on the water. Someone standing knee-deep in it, skipping stones, the circles radiating out where each one kisses the surface. Then someone is holding a puppy, the dog white with a black spot on its side, the puppy licking his face. The world is beautiful, the seasons come and go, white flakes falling from the sky. Men pouring over the earth with hand shovels, faces grimy. Wonders launching into space. Buildings rising, space flight, more men combing over the earth, the men mostly Black and Brown, every one of them weary. Then everything drying up, everything dying, the river filled with sludge, trying to skip stones and watching them just sit on the thick surface, dead things bloated in the muck, water pouring from a sink and catching on fire, the puppy looking at him but no longer moving, its stomach distended, its eyes a pale irradiated green.
Dio opens his eyes. “I know a one-word story,” he whispers.
There is something in his look that scares Sola. She lets this fear move her, spur her into action. Thinking back on it later, though she will never admit it to anyone, she is sure of what she saw in his face. For the briefest of moments, his eyes burning a familiar jeweled-green. “Pandora, Pandora,” she calls. “We’re ready.”
“I’m here.” Pandora is back, naked as before, her voice slightly more human this time.
“We have a story for you,” says Sola. “Well, Captain Fantastic does.”
“Very well.” Pandora gestures for him to approach.
Dio moves as if in a dream. Pandora turns her stony face from him, offering him her ear. He closes his eyes, remembering what he saw, then breathes a single word into her ear. For a moment she looks startled as if remembering a truth long forgotten. Finally, she turns and chastely kisses him. When he opens his eyes, he’s back on the bridge of the Stella Maris in his old captain’s chair.
The Helican System is strange and primeval. It is the oldest quadrant of space, a place no one ever travels anymore, the region unexplored, forgotten, uncharted. Dio spends his days in the captain’s chair. Once they entered the System, many of Stella Maris’s instruments stopped functioning, most of them generating nonsensical data if any data at all. Consequently, he navigates as if piloting during the Old-Order, using star charts and gila-lobes. It’s a strange sensation to steer by feel. At the end of each astral period, Dio has to ascend into the Stella Maris’s cupola and scan the stars, then use manual instruments to calculate complex equations that indicate where they are in space, how much further they have to go. He remembers some of the legendary voyages the Commanders taught them at the Akedemy. Legends of Old-Order men lashing together the trunks of trees and sailing out across an ocean. Life spreading across some old-timey planet and then eventually the Universe.
Though she’s dying to know, Sola doesn’t ask what the single word is he spoke to Pandora, the word that bought them entry. True, she wants to know so bad she finds herself being temporarily nice to him, but her pride keeps her from asking outright plus she doesn’t want to jinx it. The Stella Maris is five days into its voyage through the Helican System, the travel eerily smooth despite the instrumental glitches. Soon the ship will arrive at the coordinates Arias reluctantly transmitted to Dio. Planet L2905F674. To Dio, it’s just a number in the big sky. But to Sola and all those on board, it’s a dream. Who knows what they’ll find once they land, and if it will all have been in vain or if it’s just the beginning?
“Hey.” Dio turns to his first mate, a capable young navigator named Motts who always seems to be smiling, his front left tooth chipped.
“Captain-Captain?” says Motts. Even when Dio was chained up in magnetics, Motts called him Captain-Captain. Nothing has changed now that Dio has free run of the ship.
Something about Motts feels familiar to Dio. When the LifeSac was thrown over his head back during the mass exposure on Vipara, he vaguely remembers a voice similar to Motts’s, a bass like sugar and thunder all mixed in one telling him not to fight.
“I gotta head into the BiblioBox, pull up some more charts. You got this?”
“Aye aye, Captain-Captain,” Motts says, his respir-shield giving his deep-brown skin a sickly cast. Motts presses a button and issues a command, his voice rumbling through the entire ship. “Clear H deck,” he says. “Repeat: clear H deck; a Soil Breather coming through.” Only recently has Dio figured out the strange name his first mate calls him. As a Gecko, Motts obviously never attended the Akedemy. Consequently, everything he knows about navigating must be self-taught. Somewhere he has gotten it in his head that one refers to the head of a starship as captain-captain, that for clarity, one must repeat everything of importance.
Dio stands up and stretches, giving the ship’s other inhabitants a few minutes to clear a path for him or at the very least to put on their respir-shields as he walks through. Today is Day Ten since the mass exposure on Vipara. He wonders how his brain is holding up, if he’s experienced any withering yet.
After enough time has passed, Dio heads for the BiblioBox. As he walks through the tunnels and byways, Motts’s statement rises in his consciousness. I’m a Soil Breather, he thinks. How did it all come to be this way? The poisoning of everyone on this ship has made his life possible—hell, it’s made life all over the Universe possible. Some paying the ultimate price so that others might thrive.
Once in the BiblioBox, Dio plugs himself in. “Amaya old girl,” he says, “show me star charts for coordinates 901-926-5611.” Instantly the AS Network brings up a projection of the Helican System, a many-armed spiral of stars, the system steely yet beautiful. Slowly Dio works his way through the data. “Amaya, why aren’t there any present-day navigationals?”
“Six point four arch-ages ago the Helican System was declared a non-functional galaxy,” replies the Network. “Akedemy-standardized navigationals were all purposefully destroyed in order to obstruct travel.”
“So all we have left is the Old-Order star charts?”
“Correct.” For a moment, Amaya pauses before continuing. The Network is an auxiliary system—an artificial intelligence that can act as a pure AI when needed, but that can also supplement human intelligence, magnifying a thought, a memory, building on a perception, a hunch that’s buried somewhere inside the human but only faintly. “As it’s on your mind, here is some adjacent data that might interest you.” On the projection, a series of constellations appear—a horse with wings, an archer with his bow, a scorpion scuttling across the sky, an Old-Order cup with a long handle. “These are the pictures Ancient Sapiens drew of the Milky Way.”
“The Milky Way?”
“That is what the Helican System was called before it was declared obsolete.”
“Amaya, what is Planet L2905F674?” Dio had assumed it was just some cosmic backwater, a place for the Geckoes to hide out from the Company as they regroup.
“Planet L2905F674. Terra A1.”
“A1,” murmurs Dio. He himself grew up on Lunari S, a moon that orbited Terra N9. Thanks to the Company and its farms, there were Terra all over the Universe. You couldn’t go ten feet without running into life.
“Terra AI,” repeats Amaya. “Earth.”
Instantly Dio flashes on an image of white flakes falling from the sky, of water from a faucet suddenly catching on fire. “Thanks, Amaya,” he says, and begins to unplug.
“One more thing, Captain-Captain,” jibes the Network.
“Not you too.”
“Bear with me,” says Amaya. “Written circa 1979 in the Terran A1 year of Jesu Christo. Released June 1980 on the Island/Tuff Gong label. Marley, Robert Nesta, born 1945, died 1981. ‘Redemption Song’ was written as Bob Marley was suffering from the melanoma that eventually killed him. Recorded in the key of G major for voice and Terran acoustic guitar.”
Then Dio hears it again, what he heard on Pandora as he stood considering the oak tree by the lake. The guitar’s light strumming, simple yet powerful. The man’s voice relating what happened to him. How he was stolen by pirates and thrown into a bottomless pit. How he was taken from that bottomlessness and sold straight into bondage. How he overcame his suffering by the grace of the Divine.
“Your father sang this song to you,” Amaya says in a soft voice. Dio closes his eyes and listens. Won’t you help to sing this song of freedom? Cause all I ever have—redemption songs. Strange, because Dio has no memory of either his father or his mother, but Amaya never lies.
Finally the song ends on an unresolved note. Dio hears his own voice crack but asks anyway. “Amaya, on Earth, what kind of ship would this man have been thrown in?”
“A slave ship.” The schematic of a nineteenth-century hull flashes on the projection, black bodies crammed on top of bodies. “Beings from the continent of Africa were kidnapped and sold westward,” explains Amaya, “their uncompensated labor ushering in what was then called the Industrial Revolution.”
Dio remembers hearing something about slavery, but it happened so long ago, it seems like a myth. “Slavery was a barbarian practice in which human beings were sold to other human beings under a system that thrived for hundreds of Terran years during the oldest period of the Old-Order,” says Amaya. He tries to imagine such savagery. Human beings forced to work against their will; children sold away from their parents. The Company’s Facta Vitae system was completely different, or so it claimed. Genetically suitable men and women voluntarily signed on to work for the Company, and in exchange, they and their offspring were guaranteed goods and services as well as monetary compensation for the span of the deed. It was widely known the Facta Vitae system had lifted billions out of poverty and brought life to every corner of the Universe. It was seen as a win-win. True, because of their genetic toxicity, the Geckoes were relegated to their own worlds. When moved from job to job, they were sealed off deep within a ship so that there was never any contact between the Geckoes and the Soil Breathers. Most Soil Breathers went their whole lives without ever seeing a single Gecko.
“Amaya, publish a Terran guitar for me,” says Dio.
“Aye aye,” says the network. “It’ll be waiting for you in your quarters.”
“Thanks.” Dio then calls Motts and asks his first mate to announce that he’ll be returning to the bridge via the H deck. As he waits for a path to clear, he tries to imagine being jammed inside the BiblioBox with as many people as the space will hold, perhaps as many as twenty beings crammed in this very box for months at a time. No windows, no air. Maybe only the sound of your own voice to keep you sane.
Even before Dio has a chance to knock, the portal slides open. “What’s on Earth that’s so important to you?” he says.
Sola is wearing her off-shift uniform, a long flowing robe that Dio finds even sexier than her skin-tight vapo-suit as it leaves more to the imagination. She stands in the doorway adjusting her respir-shield, obviously having just thrown it on for his sake. “Where’d you get that?” she asks, pointing to the strange object he’s carrying.
“I asked you a question first.”
Sola sighs and cracks her neck but steps aside, allowing him to enter her berth. She doesn’t ask how he knows where the Stella Maris is headed. “Earth is where we became toxic,” she simply says. Dio can see there’s something else on her mind, that she’s attempting to act casual despite their proximity. In turn, he tries to hide his incredulousness that she even let him into her space. “But everyone knows your Company schools don’t teach the truth of what happened,” she says. “There’s an old saying: history is written by the lion, not the antelope.” She turns and offers him a chair, then reclines on her suspension mat.
“To answer your question, it’s called an acoustic guitar,” says Dio. “It’s Terran.” At the word, Sola’s eyes begin to burn, a small muscle twitching along the side of her hairline. “I think I got the hang of it. Wanna hear?”
Slowly, as if against her better judgment, she nods.
Dio places his fingers along the frets. All third shift he sat in his room, running the drills Amaya published for him. For the first time in maybe never, Dio feels nervous. Somehow the act of what he is about to do feels more intimate than anything he has ever done before. This small room, this beautiful woman, her phosphorescent eyes, this Old-Order instrument in his hands, his soul about to escape his mouth. Dio takes a deep breath and does what no man has done in an arch-age. He strums the first chord. G major. Sola gasps but remains silent, utterly rapt.
Old pirates, yes, they rob I
Sold I to the merchant ships
Eventually the last note hangs in the air. Dio puts down the guitar and goes to Sola. There are tears in her eyes. With a finger he wipes one from her cheek before kissing her on her respir-shield, the barrier cool to the touch.
All I ever have, redemption songs.
“How did you know?” she asks.
“Know what?”
Another tear escapes her eyes. “That is the secret song of our people.”
Dio doesn’t answer, his mind already miles beyond the guitar. Instead he lifts her mask and kisses her directly on the lips. Her breath tastes green, like things that sprout from soil and fresh air, clean and free. After a few tender moments he puts her mask back down.
“Now you only have seven days to live, maybe less,” she whispers.
When he replies, “You’re worth it,” she lifts her robe over her head. Then she is the one who grabs him by the shoulders and hungrily throws him down on the suspension mat.
Afterward Sola traces a finger along an old Akedemy tattoo on Dio’s chest that consists of six unconnected dots. “Tell me a one-word story,” he says.
She laughs and shakes her head. “I don’t know any of those,” she says. “But I’ll tell you a story with many words that still has no ending.”
“I’m listening,” Dio says with a yawn.
Sola caresses one of the dots inked on his chest. “A long time ago in what we now consider the first days of the Old-Order, in the entire Universe there was only life on Earth and the Earth was dying,” she says. “Many didn’t believe it. They kept their heads buried in the sand. But we knew.”
“Who’s we?” Dio asks.
“We were the tired, the struggling, the hungry,” Sola says. “The oppressed always know what hardship is coming well before it arrives for everyone else.” She lifts the shield on her porthole. Everywhere the stars glitter, deep space as if strewn with salt. She tells him about the first small signs—the working poor cordoned off by concrete, landscapes with few trees, the temperature ten degrees hotter in the cities than in the suburbs, those places kept green and leafy through watering programs, then corporations building power plants in under-resourced neighborhoods, governments storing nuclear sludge on First lands, planners mapping flight routes over beleaguered communities, over and over the haves exposing the have-nots to rampant toxicity.
“If Earth had a motto, it was consume,” she says. “But how do you stop an economy based on having more? When are you only eating yourself?” Sola’s eyes burn bright at the collective wrongs, ancestral memories she still carries in her blood of droughts, of fires, in winter the polar cold creeping southward, then people fighting other people for resources, the rich attempting to decamp for Mars, billionaires spending their fortunes to try and escape what they’d created. “Do you know what synthetic yartsa gunbu is?” she asks.
Dio lies, shakes his head. “Of course you don’t, magic man,” she laughs. “Yartsa gunbu used to grow naturally. Ancient Sapiens called it Himalayan Viagra. It grew in the shadow of the highest mountains on Earth. Above fifteen thousand feet, a parasite would invade a living caterpillar, killing the creature and then turning its body into a kind of fungus. It was believed this fungus gave men—what to call it?” she wonders. “Let’s just say a supernatural prowess.” Playfully Dio growls.
“The Viridia Parasite is similar to yartsa gunbu,” Sola says. She tells him how scientists believe that billions of years before when the Earth was just a primordial soup, the Viridia Parasite infected the first anaerobic organisms, causing them to start “breathing,” thus turning the Earth into an oxygen-based atmosphere. The parasite then lay dormant in the permafrost for millions of years, but as the planet warmed, it became reanimated. In the 21st century the newly thawed parasite returned, this time using the common earthworm as its host. Like the Himalayan Viagra, the parasite killed each worm, gradually turning it into a fungus with spores that enriched the soil with oxygen, in time leading to the over-oxygenation of the planet, causing it to dry out and warm up even faster.
In the 22nd century, it was the Company who figured out that if you took the resulting fungus to other worlds and introduced it to the alien soil, within a decade you could have an arable planet, a world with air and a water-cycle just like Earth, the air primarily produced in the soil. But harvesting the fungus proved deadly to most people, the spores so small even protective equipment couldn’t keep the harvesters safe. “At first, there was a top-secret government-funded study to find out if any human beings might have immunity,” Sola says. “It didn’t take the scientists long to realize our capabilities. We had been living in toxic spaces for so long, of course the answer would be us.” Her voice trails off.
There is no need to continue. Dio knows the rest. How even to this day the Company casts itself as the savior of mankind, in time, seeding other worlds with the fungus created when the Viridia Parasite infects earthworms. The Company introducing it on Mars, then within ten years Mars becoming another Earth, and thus the East Martian Trading Company was born. Those who could afford the one-way ticket went as soon as the first ships began to leave. They called themselves Soil Breathers. Then the prices came down and the middle class were the next to go. This exodus lasted for generations.
“Finally we Harvesters were the only ones left on Earth,” says Sola. “We were told we were essential workers. The presidents of all the new planets created by our labor commended us. They sent gifts, named holidays after us. Our harvesting the fungus made it possible for humans to live on other worlds, to become Soil Breathers.
“Then when the Earth was truly dying, the Company came to us. Despite all our hard work, most of us still couldn’t afford the ticket off-world, and even if we could, we were so toxic, there was nowhere to go—the Soil Breathers didn’t want us. So the Company said if we signed our labor over to them for one hundred generations, they would provide for us, take care of us and all of our needs, pay us money even, as long as we and our children and our children’s children continued to perform this essential labor for mankind. It was our choice. We boarded the first ships on which we were consigned to forever wander the Universe as itinerant workers.”
Sola glances out the porthole. Suddenly, her face softens, the green of her eyes like a forest canopy.
“We’re home,” she whispers.
Dio wraps one of her locks around his finger. “That’s the one,” he says. “What I told Pandora, the one-word story that brought us here. ‘Home.’” He smiles sadly.
“What?”
Just outside the window is the planet they’ll soon be orbiting, the place where it all began. “I’m a survivor, remember?” he says. “That means I’m also a realist.”
“No,” Sola cries.
Gently he frees his finger from her hair. “I probably wouldn’t even make it back to Pandora in a viapod,” he says. “It’s just too damn far. This is the end of the road for me.”
“There’s gotta be something we can do.” Her voice fills with desperation.
“There is,” he says softly. Dio lifts Sola’s respir-shield and tosses it across the room. “This is how I’ve always wanted to die,” he jokes. Then he kisses her long and hard, this human woman with the sweet green breath. Ten minutes, just give me ten full minutes, he asks the Universe. For the second time that shift, she grabs him by the shoulders and throws him down.
Arias and Motts are standing on the bridge, one of them with both fists balled. The Earth shines before them, this planet that poets throughout time have described as a startling swirl of blue-green now wrapped in brown clouds, the oceans a dark ashy gray or maybe that’s the scorched land—from outer space it’s hard to tell them apart.
“How long can we sit here?” asks Arias. His agitation fills the room. Outside the ship a solid band of debris whips around the planet like an asteroid belt, everywhere pieces of defunct satellites and exploded rockets whizzing haphazardly through space. Arias slams his fist down on a console. The Stella Maris has come too far to now be destroyed by ancient trash. “Where’s that Shit Breather?” he bellows.
As if by way of answer, a soft rumbling can be heard outside the main bridge doors, the sound moving closer. In the room, the crew exchange worried looks. Finally the doors slide open. Two figures stand on the threshold, the light pouring around them as they move forward holding hands. Behind them, a crowd has formed, the people whispering, their murmurings filled with wonder.
“It’s about time,” says Arias. “We’re about to be pummeled by junk.” Calmly Dio lets go of Sola’s hand and takes his seat. Carefully he steers the ship into a high orbit above the planet but beneath the debris. It’s a tricky maneuver, but he pulls it off. Even after the ship is out of harm’s way, the crowd remains huddled in the entrance, their amazement still front and center. “What’s everyone going on about?” asks Arias, his irritation still evident even though the ship is now safely tucked away in a clean orbit.
Dio rejoins Sola. It’s only then that Arias realizes she is maskless, her lovely face radiating a joy-filled light without the manufactured glow of a respir-shield. “They’re going on about this,” Sola says, and grabs the front of Dio’s uniform, pulls him into her, and kisses him. The crowd lets out a loud cheer.
“Wowzer!” shouts Motts.
“How’s that possible?” whispers Arias. “He should be deader than dead.”
Sola ends the embrace but doesn’t stop smiling. “It’s because I love him, Father.” Now it’s Dio’s turn to look amazed. Sola simply nods.
For the next astral hour, Dio is poked and prodded, blood drawn from every region of his body. The results are all the same. He is perfectly healthy—there is no contaminate in his system, no trace of toxins. “A fine specimen,” remarks one of the doctors. “If I had to guess, I’d say he gradually built up a tolerance to us by being here so long.”
“Either way, he’s still a Shit Breather,” grumbles Arias.
Sola adjusts her vapo-suit one last time. “Daddy, don’t call him that,” she says.
“I’ll call him what I want to call him,” Arias retorts. “No daughter of mine is going to go—” But it’s too late. Sola steps into the viapod where Dio and the rest of the exploratory team are already waiting. She blows her father a kiss and seals the door closed.
The descent down to Earth is beyond smooth, the crew barely aware that they’re moving. “Wowzer,” says Motts. “This must be what it feels like when you touch down in Heaven.”
Minna, the climatologist in the group, explains that the Earth has less than five percent of its original atmosphere left. Consequently, there’s nothing to slow down the viapod as it approaches the Earth, nothing to create the punishing friction that normally heats up the outer shields. “That’s why each of our respir-breathers is equipped with six astral hours of oxygen,” she says. “No atmosphere means no O2.”
“No atmosphere also means no shooting stars,” says Dio. Suddenly he feels the eyes of everyone on the team hone in on him. “What?” he says. “Can’t a guy like shooting stars?” Playfully Motts elbows him in the ribs. Dio doesn’t tell them about the memory in the back of his mind, how as a child he spent a night with someone—who was it? his mother?—sitting out under the vault of some planet’s sky, the heavens periodically alive with bursts of color.
“No, he’s right,” says Minna. She explains that since there’s no atmosphere, even the tiniest space rock will sail right down to Earth unimpeded. “The place must be completely cratered, just like the moon,” she says.
Now, five hours later, their explorations are almost over. Everywhere they have gone, everything they have seen, speaks of the same story. Desertification. Fire. Flood. The land cratered just the way Minna said it would be. On each continent the team makes the requisite stops. At each location, they set up their equipment, take their samples, perform a sowing, snoop around, then move on.
North America is their final destination. In Mexico City, the Plaza del Zócalo is only recognizable from the coordinates displayed on the navigationals. There’s nothing left of the grandeur of the main square, the flagpole that, according to Old-Order histories, once seemed to stretch all the way up to heaven. Because Mexico City was a mile-high city, at least the location still exists. Florida, on the other hand, is just a word on an Old-Order map, a place described in the histories as a paradise people flocked to for its natural beauty and temperate weather.
The team continues to work their way around the continent. In a place called Chester, Pennsylvania, near the Old-Order city of Philadelphia where many of the first generation of Harvesters came from, they find the first sign of life, tiny footprints scrabbled in the sand. Even before landing, they had ascertained that there is still some small-form life left, the oxygen level too low to support anything mammalian, the temperatures too hot. Still, something has found a way to live on this planet, which is mostly sand and ash, fires raging that are perhaps thousands of years old. The team never finds this creature, but secretly Dio feels hopeful each time he sees its tracks.
On what was once the west coast, they discover a vast glassine plain that stretches all the way to the horizon. Sola thinks of Pandora, how that planet’s surface was made of glass. Here, the sands must have melted from the killing heat, creating what Lenis, the team geologist, now calls the Glasslands. The spot is incredibly beautiful, an infinite variety of colors melted into the vitrine layers. In the Glasslands they cannot perform a sowing as there is no soil to be treated. They simply soak in the majesty of the spot, the play of colors in the landscape before moving on.
Just outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin, they find the ruins of actual buildings, mostly silos, a few boats beached on land. The area was once called the Driftless Region, the one spot on the Earth where during the final Ice Age the glaciers never swept through and sanded down the landscape, instead leaving the surroundings hilly and wild. During the Old-Order, this was probably one of the last places on Earth to support life. The Great Lakes were nearby, the region far from the rising oceans. Ancient Sapiens might have staggered on here well into the rise of the Cosmovoyene Age.
In a place called Prairie du Chien, the team performs their final sowing. Dio falls on his knees one last time to dig a hole in the parched earth. Then Sola steps forward and closes her eyes, intones a prayer to Mother Earth. When she’s done, she opens the last of their receptacles and drops in the remaining earthworms their scientists infected with the Viridia Parasite. In time, these worms like the others they’ve buried around the globe will die, their bodies becoming hosts for the fungus that may one day return this ruined planet back into the place that was once the source of all life in the Universe, a garden filled with endless varieties.
“We’re not that far from HQ,” says Gryphon, the team’s logistics member. “We should see what’s there.”
“Agreed,” says Dio. The team piles back in the viapod to make the short trip to Madison, a college town once located between two lakes. It’s here where the Company set up its first office. This is also where the Company hunkered down in the Earth’s last days. Consequently as they arrive the team is not surprised to see one lone building rise up out of the dead prairie.
“It’s the Promethean,” says Gryphon. He explains how the Promethean was a billion-dollar building constructed to withstand absolutely anything climate-related. Dio gasps. Old-Order relics are mostly nonexistent as Ancient Sapiens generally built things to become obsolete, to be thrown away, replaced. Yet here is a building still standing through fire and flood, death and global destruction. It’s a testament to what Ancient Sapiens were capable of. Together the team approaches the entrance. Sola places a hand on the metal, and the doors slide open.
Inside the air is cool. Instantly the lights come on. Soft music plays. “Solar and geothermal power,” says Phan, the group’s resident archi-builder. “This thing’ll keep going and going until the sun explodes.”
Adda comes forward next, their digi-perator, and moves off to look for the building’s mainframe. Others disperse to various floors. Sola and Dio take the elevator all the way to the top where they let themselves wander, each silently surprised at the awe they feel. How could Old-Order man build something so colossal, so enduring, yet not take care of his own world?
“Think of the things they could’ve done if only they’d had the right priorities,” says Sola.
“You talk about them as if they died out,” says Dio. He runs a finger over the dark wood paneling decorating the walls, the wood still rich in color. “Remember, they became us,” he says.
The two of them enter an office. Judging from the sheer size of it, the room’s floor-to-ceiling windows, the magnificence of its view, it must have belonged to the Company’s commander. On the oversized desk are various devices, a coffee mug, Old-Order optics of a family, a man and a women, small children smiling beside some kind of shrub decorated with lights.
And so Dio finds the answer just by chance though the answer is on display in plain sight for anyone to see. Sola is off in another part of the suite, rummaging through some kind of cold box filled with Old-Order cans. When Dio sees the answer, his first instinct is to tear the optic from its frame, rip it in pieces, burn it, deny the truth of what it means. But he also knows the power of denial, the havoc it wreaks. Just look around. Carefully he slips the optic from its glass. What else is there to do? He can hear Sola humming to herself in the other room. After only a few bars, he recognizes the melody. It’s the song he sang for her on the Terran guitar the first time they loved each other, “Redemption Song,” a man singing his way out of slavery. Solemnly Dio approaches Sola and hands her the photo. For a moment she doesn’t understand what she’s looking at.
“There’s more,” he says, leading her to a wall beside the desk where the history of the Company is told in photos. A group of young men stand smiling in a lab, one of them holding aloft a glass beaker. In picture after picture, the evolution of the Company unfurls, everywhere people smiling, over time the lab growing more and more ornate, the Company’s success evident. Sola studies the images, not putting it all together until she does. When the truth of what she’s looking at finally hits her, she lets out a scream of such rage that even this billion-dollar building constructed of adamantine seems to shake.
On board the Stella Maris, Arias and the Elder Council sit around a table. They are in-session formulating a plan for how to proceed once the first part of the multi-targeted strategy is complete. “We’ll know within three astral years whether or not re-sowing the Earth with fungus will bring back the atmosphere,” says Arias. The other Elders nod. It is a long time—some of them may not live to see the result, but as the Old-Order saying goes: A journey of a thousand gila-miles begins with a single step. “Okay then,” Arias says, pleased that all are on board with the plan. “In the meantime—” Suddenly, the doors to the chamber slide open and the exploratory team hurries in.
“What’s this all about?” demands one of the Elders.
Sola tosses a sheaf of documents onto the table. “It’s not love,” she says. “Look for yourselves.”
“What’s not love?” someone asks.
“It’s not love keeping Dio alive,” Sola answers.
“I could have told you that,” grumbles Arias. “A scoundrel always finds a way to survive.”
Dio ignores this comment. “It’s all here,” he says. He picks up one of the photos from the Promethean. “See? In the beginning, we were friends,” he says. The Elders lean in, their bright green eyes hungry for answers.
“What exactly are we looking at?” asks one of Elders.
“This one’s labeled ‘Christmas 2097,’” says Dio “It was their seasonal party. Look who’s there, smiling into the camera. They’re everywhere.”
There’s a long moment of silence as the Elders grapple with what they’re seeing. “Harvesters,” Arias finally whispers. “There are Harvesters in among the Company Soil Breathers. Just look at their eyes.”
“And not a respir-shield in sight,” points out Sola.
“Maybe we become toxic later,” says an Elder.
“I scoured the Old-Order mainframe for data,” says Adda. “According to the Company’s own records, the eye mutation occurred naturally through the mixing of several ethnicities. As the upper and middle classes departed the Earth, the mutation spread quickly among those left behind.”
Sola is the one to speak the final terrible truth. “We’re not toxic,” she says. Her voice remains controlled through her rage is palpable. “We never were.”
“But why?” asks one of the Elders.
Dio pulls up a series of projections of Old-Order Harvesters toiling in a field. “The work of harvesting the fungus was back-breaking manual labor,” he says. “Machines couldn’t do it—the fungus was too fragile. So the Company needed a group of people willing to stay on Earth and work under terrible conditions as the planet heated up.”
From there Sola takes over the story. “The Company began to spread the lie that we were the perfect candidates to handle the fungus. Due to multi-generational exposure to environmental pollutants, they told the Universe we were already toxic and therefore immune to the parasite. No new worlds wanted us—we were effectively quarantined on Earth. And our eyes meant we were easy to identify.
“In the last days of the Earth, the Company categorized us as essential workers,” says Sola. “We were lauded as heroes.” Her eyes shine with pride and anger. “And every passing year there were fewer and fewer people left on Earth who weren’t Harvesters. Then even the Company forgot their own lie. They thought it was the truth, that we were toxic. They bought into it and shaped their policies accordingly.”
“In the early days, there were Harvesters who helped the Company build this lie,” says Dio. “Even today there might be Harvesters who know the truth but prefer to maintain separate Harvesters / Soil Breathers societies. It’s one of the oldest truths there is. Having an enemy gives you power.”
The Elders look suspiciously around the table. Slowly they begin reading through the reports, combing through the ancient photos. There is so much to unpack. This is only the beginning.
Dio finds himself standing by the three-sided bay window that looks out into space, the Earth spinning below, a dull brown orb.
Sola takes his hand. “What’s next?” she asks.
Dio looks at her, his eyes tinted with the faintest whisper of green. How many days has it been since the mass exposure on Vipara? And what really happened there? Could his buddy Xin and all his friends still be alive? He takes no joy in telling her. In some ways, it’s the end of his way of life. “What’s next?” he repeats, then answers his own question. “War,” he says. “The Company must be destroyed.”
He wraps her in his arms. Together they stand in the window and look out at this scorched world that may be their future. Suddenly he remembers the last part of the myth of Pandora, how on her wedding night, her curiosity overpowers her. Gingerly Pandora opens the box which has been gifted to her husband by the gods. At the lifting of the lid, terrible things instantly fly out to all corners of the world. Pestilence. Famine. Death. Hatred. Pandora slams the lid down. When she regains her courage, she lifts it again to see if there is anything left. Lucky for us there is. Right then and there Dio prays that his first child will be a girl. If it is, he resolves to name her Hope.
“Redemption Song” copyright © 2025 by Amy Quan Barry
Art copyright © 2025 by Jun Cen
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Redemption Song
