Alluvium (8 page)

As Autumn did this for Saul, Hollis watched from the far side of the space. He closed his own eyes as the trance-inducing hums reached his ears, and for a split-second it was his own dark and dirty hair being unknotted beneath a soothing melody swept from a beautiful woman’s pursed lips. It was his nightmare being washed away, little by little. It was her loving him. Autumn finished her song just in time to see Hollis leave the conference room, his hair still an unkempt mess and his nightmare still advancing.

Somewhere down the long maze of corridors Asnee Rao was swimming his hand against the smooth glass of a fish tank. He moved his hand as if it were a squid, fingers flickering and palm pulsating, and he was puzzled to see the fish inside the tank follow his every movement. A thought haunted him: if these fish indeed thought his hand was a squid, a predator, why were they attracted to it? There was no logical answer to his question besides the commonplace curiosity all creatures seem to have, but there was something beyond curiosity to Asnee. It seemed like the fish were intrigued by the threat the squid possessed, as if it were apart of their biological programming to seek their predators.

Perhaps all living things had an appetite for death, and it was their purpose to see themselves to their personal ends, just as the fish were doing right now before him. They were pursuing their design towards self-destruction. It was another haunting thought of Asnee’s that perhaps he too was leading himself to an end. Apart from his aggravating comment about defining the dead, he liked one thing Saul had said in the meeting just minutes before: that all of them were leaping into a pit, and only when it was too late would they realize that there would be no way out. Were they no different than the fish inside the aquarium, blinding closing in on a death that lured them?

Asnee stopped with his hand play and itched at the metallic gauze wrapped tightly around his wrists. Soon he would find a way to take the cuffs off, once the scars beneath had healed, but until then he had no choice but to wear them like a prisoner in chains. It was not by his own decision but rather it was the decision of Doctor Novak and Saul Lind who both had him placed on suicide watch directly after his explosive episode the week prior on the hill where Janya was found. The others were concerned that if he were left alone he would do harm to himself, and they were smart in thinking this, however Asnee had an intuition that there would be very few watching him after the results of today's meeting.

An apprehensive Hollis entered the Hub’s relaxation lounge to find his old friend Asnee staring listlessly into the illuminated fish tank. The blue light from the aquarium cast an inhuman glow on Asnee’s profile. The cracks in his skin took a more pronounced depth to them, and Asnee’s eyes twinkled as the water rippled against them casting back their own dark and deep waters. The lounge itself was set up in a way to calm a worried resident, featuring a fully-enclosing aquarium along the perimeter. The space was also surrounded by artificial waterfalls trickling against marble walls and it housed a set of circular couches in a lowered center. The dim lighting set the ambiance and was accompanied by aquatic synths-tones emitted from the room's sound system. It was all meant to bring peace, but Hollis saw it bringing something else entirely. He saw the sadness that dwelled there.

“Asnee. It’s me, Hollis," he said. “The corn guy."

Asnee did not respond and remained entranced by the aquatics. The image reminded Hollis of his father after his mother's death, glued to the static blue of their cheap early twenty-first-century television set. Even in their extreme poverty, his father managed to buy that horrible machine, taking him out of the reality that featured his scared and lonely son and placing him into one featuring supermodels and action adventures. It was his father's disconnect that pushed young Hollis from his home and into the decaying church where he learned what it meant to be connected to something else.

Hollis shook his mind into the moment. He rounded the room and placed his hand on Asnee’s back. The serene music swelled around them. Hollis could see that Asnee’s suit-identifier, the outline of a technician's builder drone, was flashing red. He was not well.

“Talk to me, I haven’t seen you in a while. I want to know how you’re doing." It all seemed so familiar to Hollis. He knew the moves like steps in a dance.

No reaction. Only slow moving eyes tracing fast moving fish.

Hollis continued. “I know- I know it’s been tough, for you- for all of us, but that’s common sense and you don’t want to hear that right now. I- well- I just wanted you to know that I’m here for you. Whatever’s going on, I’m here for you."

Hollis felt like the Computer during one of its sessions, only with less direction and more problems of his own. He had to try to guide Asnee as the Computer would, because as it seemed, Asnee’s own sessions with the therapist were much less fruitful than his own.

“It’s like this at first, remember what happened to me? With my family?" Hollis said. “I was much worse. I didn’t only try to harm myself, but I tried to harm others, remember? I snapped and attacked Franco because he asked me what my daughters name was. He was trying to console me, I know now, in his own stupid way. It was just-"

“Be quiet. Watch," whispered Asnee as he drifted farther from his friend and closer to the sea beyond the glass. “Watch."

Hollis watched as Asnee continued again with his hand ritual, quivering his fingers in pulsations and sentient grasps. He drew his hand in this circular motion around a section of the aquarium, luring the mindless fish in figure-eights and more complex designs, and after he was noticeably satisfied with his presentation, he returned to Hollis.

“I don’t understand," apologized Hollis.

Asnee looked disappointed. “That was, right there as you saw it, the meaning of life. The answer. The reason why we’re all here, right now."

Hollis dropped his eyes. It was not enough to lose someone in death, but to lose someone in life, that was far worse for one to bare.

“Asnee, I’m going to Janya’s grave now. I’m going there to mourn for her and to love her and to accept her as she is and was." Hollis turned for the door. “If you can meet me there, on the hill, I would like that very much." The door was sliding between the pair. “And so would she."

The fish darted at random angles at the sound of the sealing door, and Asnee peered through his own reflection trying to understand what it all meant.

The hill looked the same as it did before. Great clouds of sand blew off its peak but the shape was unchanged and remained exact. With each grain of sand taken by the winds, there was another one waiting to fall into its place. It was as if every grain of sand on the planet was linked together in a ubiquitous awareness and the desert was a single, endless entity. Hollis saw this as he climbed the hill in his exosuit. The pounding of his boots displaced the levels of the sand but before he could lift his foot, sand from the hill's peak trickled down to cover his prints below. The desert was keen on showing no signs of his existence on its surface. He would leave no tracks to follow home and the desert wanted it this way. It wanted him to get lost out in its roaming hills as he did before. It wanted him to lose his mind. It was hungry to bury his bones. But Hollis refused to give it a chance to take him again, and so he kept climbing and maintained his eyes forward to the top.

Where before he saw the shredded corpse of Janya now settled a wooden spike that swayed and rocked in the sandy gusts. The blood coated sands were replaced with their cleaner cousins, and it looked nearly too pristine that Hollis second-guessed this was the correct location.

Hollis shook his head and tried to look at the grave site in a more positive perspective. This was where his friend was now. Janya was with him. There was peace to be found on the hill-top, he realized, and he listened to the winds flutter by with good thoughts for a good friend had.

Hollis recalled his favorite memory of Janya.

It was in the cold of Russia a year before their departure and two years into their training. The clandestine colonists were assembling in a dilapidated warehouse full of unused car-parts. They were meeting in an old automotive assembly plant. Sections of the building’s tin-siding were recoiling out towards the frozen tundra outside, leaving large gaps where the cold snow rushed in, but the edifices exposed facade was a factor in its defense. Upon the rickey high-lofts perched dozens of
UNF
, or United National Forces, snipers, and they aimed their guns out of the naked walls. Beyond the warehouse was an unmapped region of the Central Siberian Plateau. It was nearly impossible to navigate through the ridged weather conditions of the area, and in a place with no roads or signs, the only way to get there was by helicopter or drop-ship, and that was precisely how the colonists had arrived.

The extra precaution of the meeting place was due to the sensitivity of the information being disclosed. Space was cleared in the warehouse’s center for a conference between the twenty-two soon-to-be colonists and the project lead, Adrian Minor. Minor, a retired American politician, looked nearly too old to be operating such a vital mission. He appeared to be on the verge of death, with hair as white as the Siberian snow and skin as frail as wet tissue paper. Most wondered how he was still walking, let alone leading mankind’s most important operation, ultimately forming the Extraterrestrial Colonial Society after years in politics. His voice was just as dreary as expected when he spoke to them. He was a ghost in a ghost house.

“Hello colonists of the new world, my name is Adrian Minor, as some of you may already know, and it is very much my pleasure to meet you all for the first time. I have been the puppeteer pulling the strings to this colonial movement, funded of course by NASA and the United Nations, and I am glad that we can finally meet one another face-to-face. I know now, looking upon all of your young and eager faces, that we have indeed picked the perfect cast to fulfill our needs. You will be the ones to build, what I have named, our backup world. The same way one makes copies of important documents in case of a data corruption, we will make another copy of our civilization. But you must ask yourselves: what is the likelihood of us losing the original?" Adrian paced back and forth on the platform, pausing for dry breaths in the cold air. “And that’s what I am here to tell you, an old man in the snow, breaking his doctor’s orders in leaving his house: to divulge to you the truth."

A nearby body-guard wrapped a thick blanket around him.

“Thank you, thank you," Adrian nodded. “I had to tell you this myself, not through others like I so often have done before. I had to tell you about Protocol Downpour and the effects it has brought upon our planet."

The colonist mumbled to themselves, and Adrian began the talk he waited decades to have.

“Thirty years ago I worked for the United States government as a higher-up in the National Security Office, as it is known to all of you I am sure. I was informed of top-secret information involving the rising conflicts centered in Southeast Asia, China, and North-Korea specifically. A war with the Chinese was inevitable, I was told, over resource and economic gain. Their population was growing too large for its borders to contain, and they would eventually be forced outwards, like the water of an overflowing bathtub, and this would be the spark to the third World War. Unfortunately for us, this risk-analysis came true some thirty years later and as such the United National Forces was constructed to hold back the suppressor from world domination. But the UNF is losing the war, and losing the war means many nations lose their sovereignty. We can’t have that. And sadly, for our sake, we refuse to have it."

Adrian took a minute to catch his breath. He had never spoken this loudly since he was first afflicted with old age. He had to fight the urge to want to lay down and admit to what he was: dying.

“Thirty years ago I was revealed a last-ditch effort. A way to end the Chinese threat once and for all if they were ever suspected to win the war. This effort was called Protocol Downpour, as I’m certain you are aware. In its initiation, the UN governments under the cover of the UNF would send packages of specially-designed ultra-nukes via stealth drones that would lay waste to massive areas of militarized space in South-East Asia. It would be Hiroshima magnified a hundred times over. It would be the solution to winning the war, but also the end to billions of lives. Some innocent, some not, I am sure."

He gave the colonists a minute to catch their breaths as he caught his own.

“Protocol Downpour has been operational for the last three years, and because of our ignorance, we did not expect the nuclear retaliation to be so great by the Chinese and their allies who had hidden their secret facilities from us with satellite-blockers. Flash forward three years and the consequences are clear today. Our over-usage of nuclear weaponry on both sides has been devastating to our planet as it is evident in our struggles with crop-growing and air-pollution. However, what is perhaps the most disturbing, and what I am here to talk to you about today, are the other after-effects of Protocol Downpour. The one’s that are being hidden from the general public."

Adrian looked around the warehouse to be sure only the ears in the room could hear what he had to say next.

“This is the will be unsettling for you to hear, but remember that this is all still based upon rough calculations. It has been an active effort of the UNF to keep this information above top-secret and out of the world press, but environmentalists are catching on to what is really happening. A council of well-regarded scientists were selected to study the implications of a continued use of Protocol Downpour, and a notable number made the conclusion that such continual high caliber strikes of atomic explosives not only radiates our soils but deteriorates the ozone layer. Large impact events of that size are too hard to calculate with far too many unknown variables, and our knowledge of nuclear radiation is minimal, but we know now that it has been unrelenting upon the thin layer of gases that protects Earth from the even more irradiated vacuum of open space. As the ozone layer weakens, as it has dramatically over the last years, there becomes a possibility of a tear like that you would find on a balloon. The inevitable
pop
would leave the Earth essentially naked to the universe, initiating a rapid rise of the global atmospheric temperature to that beyond the survivable. A hole in the ozone would flood the surface of the Earth in hours with solar fires and cosmic radiation and suck the oxygen right out of our lungs. It would be a mass extinction in less than half a day. Our mass extinction. One just as unexpected by us as it was the dinosaurs, except two important differences: they weren’t the culprits of their own demise as we are, and they didn’t have a chance to save themselves as we can."