The Homo sapiens Recovery Project
by David Barber
part 1
The Scholar clade on Vesta, considered to be an academic backwater, made the winning bid for the ancient vessel discovered by chance adrift in the Kuiper Belt.
Steady-State archaeologists estimated this forgotten human venture had wandered for 6 kiloyears, its dead crew preserved by cold and vacuum. It offered a novel opportunity for what became known as the Homo Sapiens Recovery Project.
DNA extracted from the crew was treated according to an ancient recipe and coaxed into blastulas. Hosted by the wombs of a Mother clade, one survived to term.
The neonate, HSRP/03, was named Eliot. His first memories always involved free fall, to which his cohort was genetically adapted but Eliot was not. In time, the nausea eased, and hastily designed drugs stopped his bones’ shedding minerals but, for the moment, he had to live with the headaches and engorged features that went with fluid retention.
His cohort played “Save the Ship,” a children’s game that reinforced cooperative instincts. Eliot was already bigger and heavier than his teammates, though without their natural grace in free fall.
Upside down and out of position, he spotted the leak by chance, a barely perceptible turbulent fog. While his cohort closed in on the hissing sound, passing the patch between them as they parted round obstacles like a flock, Eliot knew he could save the ship.
Without time to explain, he grabbed the patch from startled hands and dived away to plug the leak in record time. He spun triumphantly to meet silent, hostile stares.
There was no opposition; only by working together could the ship be saved. Eliot was a bad team member and they wouldn’t play with him any more.
Not long after, in an outburst of rage and frustration, he flailed at a child until he was dragged away. He never forgot the sight of blood droplets swirling in the air. Violence was not tolerated by the Steady-State and, from then on, he was allowed to mix only with adults.
* * *
He remembered his mother was always swollen with pregnancy. Later, he would learn much of the population was hosted by the wombs of this traditional clade.
Even at five and six years, Eliot clung to his mother, as if realising her instinct was to move on to the next child.
“You won’t leave me?”
She stroked his curious hair. Normal children soon lost any fuzz they were born with. Normal children left their mothers early, seeking comfort amongst their birth-cohort instead.
“I shall stay as long as you want, Eliot.”
Let him become Homo sapiens, she had been told, whatever that might be, though the urge to pass on the truisms of the common good was strong. She cared for him, but Eliot always sensed her disappointment.
One of his teachers was young and female: Rona, the most perfect name for a girl. He dreamt about her and puzzled over his erections. He masturbated secretly, ignorant of the dust of sensors everywhere. Privacy was little valued by the Steady-State.
He tried to impress her with feats of daring, walking edges under gravity, holding a lungful longer than others, bullying the giAnts that scavenged the corridors.
She told him not to be foolish, to stop showing off. Bluntly, she informed him her kind didn’t mature sexually until later life; their untroubled adolescence the time for learning.
Under drugs, he recounted a dream:
Rona touches a finger to his lips. They have forbidden her to see him, she whispers, but somehow no whispering is quiet enough and the Steady-State finds out.
When they come for him, Eliot is bigger and faster and he destroys them with fist and foot. There is blood and weeping and Doktor Tass begs him to stop.
Now they run down endless corridors, chased by shadows. Rona will be forced to marry another, though she confesses shyly it is him she wants. Knife in hand, Eliot turns to face more agents of the Steady-State. When they grab Rona, he stabs them again and again, globules of blood wobbling away in the air.
Doktor Tass studied Rona for a moment then shrugged. “You see how violent they are.”
Afterwards, Eliot was questioned at length about his feelings for Rona, until fighting back tears, he stormed out of the Scholar’s Quarter. He was stared at by curious crowds in unfamiliar corridors until Rona was sent to find him.
Not long after this, he was offered time with a female from a Sex clade.
* * *
Eliot declared he would study the ancient history of his kind. After all, who better to understand them? He learned the people of the Steady-State were not the descendants of humanity but their own creations, remodelled by geneering of the past’s faulty flesh.
Around this time, the notion emerged that he should visit the ancient human spacecraft now in a parking orbit round Vesta. It was not clear whether it was his idea or theirs. This was how consensus was achieved in the Steady-State.
“Those are their vacuum suits,” said Rona. The bulky, non-biological outfits were festooned with gadgets and stencilled with archaic script.
“NASA was the logo of their clade,” she added, always a teacher. “These are their names: Doctor G. Connors and Captain P. Franks. Your kind was very hierarchical. Even this small group had leaders and followers.”
She touched another suit. “Mission Specialist M. Eliot. You were cloned from him.”
A thrill went through Eliot. He asked what the name meant, but Rona shook her head.
Together, they examined faded pictures of humans like himself, smiling females and children and some sort of animal. Above one bunk were pictures of unclad females, all more fleshy than Rona.
Mouth dry, he feigned interest in what the vessel had been doing in the Kuiper Belt.
Rona shrugged. “Exploring, presumably.”
Seated at an instrument panel, touching crude mechanical controls, Eliot realised why it felt so right. The chair was the size and shape built for his own kind.
* * *
All through his youth, there had been medical and psychological assessments, but now he was older, he had the impression the testing was more perfunctory.
He wondered aloud why the staff always seemed to move on before he could get to know them.
The new medic, busy touching insects to Eliot’s arm to take blood, replied absently that his own predecessor had been spoiled.
Eliot glanced up. “What do you mean, spoiled?”
“Slang. Spoiled for the Steady-State. Individuated. A mental illness where someone puts their own needs ahead of the many. Even after so long, it seems we are not immune to your kind.”
Eliot blinked in surprise.
“Some seem vulnerable to prolonged contact with you, so the staff are rotated to avoid it,” added the medic, as he fed the insects to other creatures to be analysed.
“Are you immune then?”
“I dislike you. I think that is a healthy sign.”
* * *
Most of those who had driven the HSRP forward had moved on, replaced by mediocre minds. Only Rona seemed a constant in all this.
But then Doktor Tass came back to see Eliot. She looked much the same as he remembered, a little stiffer in her movements, a little more lined, perhaps even colder now.
Without explaining, she said Eliot should visit Earth, and a craft was hired to drop them into the inner system. The crew chattered endlessly about the alien Jirt vessel, arriving soon after centuries of travel.
This was the first Eliot had heard of it, and it seemed exciting news, but Rona just shrugged. It was not something the Vesta Scholar clade was interested in.
She floated beside him at the ship’s port, looking down on the Earth. Sometimes the angry clouds parted to reveal the red glow of magma.
“Earth was destroyed by your kind,” said the Doktor, as if beginning a lecture. “Perhaps an asteroid strike, perhaps a weapon.”
Eliot wondered if this was another of their tests. Was he expected to feel guilty about the doings of dead ancestors?
“You were monsters,” declared Tass. “We geneered ourselves so we would not repeat your crimes.”
Then why had they birthed him? Eliot was embarrassed by the whine in his voice.
Tass shrugged. “We knew the history, but did not understand it. Some maintained the Earth ended by accident, but now we know what you are capable of. ”
Tass gave him an accusing stare. “It was Rona who insisted you deserved an explanation. Besides, who knows what changes these aliens will prompt? The Steady-State must free up resources. The Project is ending.”
* * *
Back on Vesta, he was escorted through unfamiliar biofac zones and shown into a shabby cubicle. “This is yours,” he was told.
Everybody had a job, sometimes two jobs, and he fitted in by working in a recycling plant, the sort of ethical employment that was commended by the Steady-State. For a while he was a sensation in the corridors, to be pointed at and whispered about.
He had neighbours and people he worked with, but they never spoke more than a greeting. Perhaps they had been warned about becoming spoiled.
He clung to the certainty that this was just another test, and they would not waste him here forever.
In the beginning, Rona visited regularly, though he felt she only came out of pity. Of course, she was older now, an important Scholar. She had matured into a sexual being, in a marriage with others. If he risked spoiling those that knew him, she showed no sign of it.
One day she mentioned a female companion. “Of course she would be sterilised,” she added. “But we are not cruel, there is no need for you to be alone.”
Perhaps she mistook his expression for puzzlement.
Copyright © 2024 by David Barber
