The first attack proved him right. As the sun began to soak into the ground three Diseased crossed the broken fields, making their way casually to us. We saw them coming—we awoke early to work on rebuilding the houses and reworking the fields—and I had more than enough time to prepare myself to greet them. They were, as they drew closer, a ragged trio: Alrea had eaten their skin down to their bones to the point that they looked as if they were but the remains of their former selves, given life. The first of the three wore dirty overalls and had lank, colourless hair, and it was to him that I first spoke.
“Shut up,” he said, his disdain clear. “Get me food, consider yourself owned, and tell me where Baker Thomas died.”
“That’s not how it works here,” I replied.
He laughed.
“Please, understand that I am serious.” I was aware of the others behind me and aware of the price of my failure. “You’re welcome here if you want to work, if you want to make a different life for yourself than the one you currently live, but you do not own us. No one owns anyone.”
“I could snap your neck.”
The words had barely left his mouth before Lydon’s young hands did exactly that. The leader of the three Diseased dropped to the ground without a word, his neck without any strength to it, his body twitching. Wordlessly, Lydon returned to stand beside me, his face expressionless.
I gazed at the remaining two Diseased. “Leave,” I told them. “We’re all infected here, but that does not mean I won’t have you killed.”
After the two had left, I turned to Lydon.
“I don’t know.” He was staring at the body of the man he had killed, a blank expression on his face still there. “I’ve never hurt anyone before. It was just—I knew what they wanted, I knew that they’d take us, and I knew, I
knew
what I had to do.
It was Alrea, I think. It told me—it made sure I knew that I had to kill him to stop the other two.” He turned to me, and to the six that stood behind me, each one of them human. A brief sliver of anguish passed across his features, as if he understood fully what it meant to be Diseased, but when he spoke, he said, very calmly and very quietly, “You should not call us Diseased, I think.”
Construction on the wall began the same day and over the months it grew stronger as Sid mixed concrete into the frames. At the end of the first month, after we drove out a pair of humans who wanted to militarize our small community, and who talked about connections outside the border for weapons, we had a year of steady growth and confidence in my idea and leadership. Both Alrea and human came to us, both wanting to be free, to be part of change,
to be change
.
“We have moved beyond whatever I thought possible,” I said at the dinner we held one year after Sid and myself had returned with Lydon. “We have made a place for ourselves here that I don’t think any of us would have thought possible. We are equals where a year ago we were not. We are friends. We are lovers.” The last was new to all of us. A young Alrea girl and a human boy, no older than seventeen, had escaped from a community four hours to the West and made their way to us to be together. With them, we numbered forty-five, twenty eight of them human, the rest Alrea. “We still have our fights, our disagreements, but no community does not have this. We are settled.”
Around me, people cheered. Sid rose a glass to me and the others followed.
Once the toast was over, I said, “But we are change, and there are still things to do. Our community needs to reach beyond where we are. The walls that we erected to protect us are also cutting us off from the rest of the world. That is why I will leave tomorrow morning. Don’t—don’t all shout.” I raised my hands to quiet everyone. “There’s no need to shout. It’s just change. Change to help Ulee grow, to help share our ideas and our peace.”
In the questions that rose I tried to be as reassuring as I could. Lydon would accompany me; yes, I would take a gun for my safety; no, I would not reconsider my decision. It was what needed to be done. I repeated that line a dozen times during the evening, but, two months later, in the community of Brixton, as both Lydon and I were lead out naked, and with ropes around our necks, I thought back to the night and realized what I hadn’t done was thank any of the people before me. I had not begun as someone who believed in anything, but they had given me faith. They had given me the courage to walk into small communities and talk, openly, about change; to fight in streets with authorities; to run at other times. They had given me the strength to enter Brixton, the first Alrea run town I had ever seen, with muddy streets and shops, and to speak in a secret meeting that would lead to the capture of Lydon and I.
They did not put a hood over our heads on the gallows. I had been beaten and raped and if there was pride in me, it was gone when I stood before the crowd.
It never had time to return.
“Did I forget anything?”
“Not as much, this time.” The voice was her own. “How do you feel?”
She wanted to say awful. O.—she could no longer identify herself by the name her mother had given her—felt nauseous, had a dull ache in her head, and could taste only plastic in her mouth. The pale light of the room she sat in did not help, either. The light was meant to be natural, but served only to highlight the artificiality of everything around her. The smooth walls, the lack of windows, the furniture that was part of the floor and warm to the touch—it was all a creation, an aberration of normal. Since she had awoken, O. believed that she had not yet experienced anything authentic, from the food she ate, the air she breathed, and even herself. It was the latter that was the most obvious, however, for there was no ignoring her hard white skin.
She had tried to kill herself twice. “It’s your reaction,” the woman across from her said after the last time, “to the loss of your identity.”
O. supposed she should know, since the woman claimed to be her. Her from the future. It was ridiculous, but still, she looked like her: a medium sized white woman with closely cropped hair—O.’s hair had been cut after her first suicide attempt, when she began to mutilate herself by pulling it out. It would never grow back, she had been told. Just as unsettling, however, was that she looked just like the woman who had given her a knife as a child. The woman across from her claimed that she had, in fact, done that, and whenever O. thought about
that
, she dug her regrowing fingernails into the palm of her hands and attempted to draw blood. She had, as yet, been unable to do so—even in her suicide attempts.
“Octavia,” the woman said, “how do you feel?”
“A little nauseous.”
“Would you like to go for a walk?”
She didn’t, but it was better than staying and repeating what she remembered of her life for the fourth or fifth time.
Rising, O. followed herself out of the room and into empty, unnaturally lit corridors. The warmth of the floor seeped into her feet and she could not shake the feeling that she was standing on something alive. Worse, however, were the thoughts in her fractured memories. She could see faces inside glass bowls and bulky white suits. She could hear heavy breathing.
“You’re doing well,” herself said.
“Am I?”
“Yes.”
“Do you believe that, or is this just what you said to me when you were here?” More than once O. had raised the question of how she could be both the patient and the doctor. She persisted with it now as an act of defiance, rather than an honest question. “You told me that you were here because I didn’t react well to Alrea, that it needed you to be a calming influence on me—but how is seeing myself in another body meant to do that?”
“I wondered the same thing.”
That, O. decided, was one of her more annoying habits. If it was true, if the woman beside her was her from ahead in time, then—
“What you’re thinking right now,” herself said, “is that I will be more forthcoming when it is me who stands there.” Stopping, she turned to O. “But you won’t be, because you don’t really know how it works. It’s like magic. You go back in time to see yourself because there’s no other choice. Alrea is through this door, by the way.”
There was nothing special about how it looked. “Why me?” Yet, she could not escape the vague sense of disquiet that settled over her. “Why any of this?”
“I have only theories.” Her future self made no motion towards the door. They would part here, it seemed. “Sally was right when she said that Alrea was a child in its understanding of gender. Men cut wood. Women cook. I’ve always believed that is why Alrea made a woman to be the first carer. But as to why it was you, or me, that is a more difficult question. Nothing that we did made an impact in the world: Ulee did not last long after we were killed and the ideals within it were lost. I doubt that Alrea even paid attention to us at the time, but yet, here were are, reborn imperfectly.”
Curious, O, reached out for her double, but her white hand passed through the other.
“I’m just an image,” herself said. “If you had touched me in the school, years ago, the same thing would have happened.”
“But the knife?”
“Only small things can be sent through time.” She shrugged. “I just use it when I am told.”
The last word sat unpleasantly with her. The sad smile that her future self gave reinforced the emotion. “Don’t keep it waiting,” herself said.
And then she was gone.
Alone, O. considered running . . . but to what point? She had seen no exit, and no other person than herself was in the building with her. Earth was a wasteland, destroyed by war and disease, the best of them Alrea, so there was, in theory, nowhere to go but the smooth, shell like complex around. But, again, what would be the point? The answers she wanted—the reason for her to search—the explanation of why she was there, how it had happened, and what the future held lay beyond the door in front of her.
It slid open at her touch.
The light inside was cold and brittle, but dimmed as she walked further in. Within the centre of the room was a large mass and as she drew closer, her mind drew comparisons, first suggesting a sack similar to that of a spider’s egg satchel, but many, many times larger; then she thought of a heart, dried and withered and enlarged, suspended in thick black cords from the ceiling; and lastly, she thought it a tomb, for she was able to make out in the dimly cast shadows, a figure. It was human, at least in size and form, but her earlier memories flooded back when she saw a white, full body suit suspended in the middle. Its head was encased in a pressure sealed helmet—or so it once had been for, in turning to face her, there was revealed broken glass and a torn suit.
“Finally.” Within the shattered faceplate, there was only darkness. The voice came from around the tomb, around her. “Octavia. Welcome.”
O. made no response, could not find her voice.
“I am Alrea.” A pause, then a correction: “I am what is left of Alrea.”
“You’re an astronaut?”
“No.” Inside, the helmet tilted up, then turned to the left. “No, I was inside this man when I left Earth. When
we
left Earth.”
“We?”
Above the astronaut, light ignited to reveal thousands upon thousands of miniature sacks. So bright was the light that O. could make out a tiny sliver of movement in each, the shiver of an embryo, she knew without having to be told, the beginning of a child. After a moment, the light dimmed, and the encased head of the long dead astronaut that housed Alrea slumped, as if asleep. A moment later, it rose. “These are all that remain of your people.”
“Earth.” She hesitated, stumbled on the sentence. “There’s truly nothing?”
“Yes. I—It was failure.” O. caught a glimpse of the face in the helmet as it turned to her: torn, black, but a familiar black: Baker Thomas. The last Baker Thomas. “I came by accident, and I came injured, but as I healed, I grew an affection for where I was. There was such life: in the soil, in the water, in the air, everywhere. The sickness that I saw I thought I could fix easily, but I did not understand how your kind would react, how I would react with humans, and while every day I tried anew, the decades saw that I killed all but Baker.”
“And now you want to try again?” She did not know what was more appropriate: anger, grief, or shock. “To alleviate your guilt?”
“Yes.”
It was anger. “Look what you have done to me!”
“I have remade you,” Alrea said, its voice without a hint of remorse. “You are stronger now than you ever were—”
“I’m dead!” The words were a scream, torn from the body that had been created for her. “You killed me! You can’t remake me just because you need me—I did not want to be here! You have no rights over me!”
“Do not take such a tone with me.”
Pain wracked her body, forcing her to the ground. It was worst than any pain O. had ever felt before, and it paralyzed her with its strength. Had she been flesh, made from muscle and bones, it would have caused a seizure, and parts of her would have ruptured and split. Then, feeling if she were entombed in a thick gel, she gazed down on white herself, standing patiently, an empty figure waiting to be filled.
“If not you,” Alrea said, though now it sounded as if it came from inside her, “then another. You can be returned to the parts of Earth that I keep within myself. Do you want that?”
“No.” She could not feel her voice, but could hear it. “No.”
“Good.”
Released, O. sank to the ground, a sudden weight where there had been none momentarily. There was, however, no safety in it: she knew that could be taken at any time. “You and I,” Alrea said, “are working together.”
It was a lie: O. was property, a worker.
“Do we understand each other?”
“Yes.”
“Good. We will remake humanity here, safe from the destruction I left on Earth.”
O. raised her head and met the blank stare of the astronaut. There was no intelligence, no hint of life that she could meet. She asked the room, “Where are we?”
“Mars.”
She did not let the children call her mother.
When Alrea asked her about it, she answered truthfully: “I’m not a woman anymore.” Before her, the two boys, Zu, dark skinned and dark haired, and Nicholas, pale skinned and dark haired, were writing. The three girls were away, playing under the watchful eye of Alrea, but the two boys had not done their homework and were being punished, forced to write up to a hundred in French and Japanese. “This body is just a shape, a replica of something you saw, with no uterus, nor ovaries. I have no breath. I don’t eat. I don’t drink. I don’t even age. I am nothing but a doll you made.”