The Homo sapiens Recovery Project

by David Barber

Part 1 appears in this issue

conclusion

“Your cells have XY chromosomes. We created a female by replacing the Y with a homozygous copy of your X.”

“You think I would inflict all this on another?” cried Eliot. “You think I could explain to her why I had been so selfish? If you’re not cruel it’s because you feel nothing!”

He stored up his resentment for her visits, and eventually she stopped coming. His life seemed to be slipping away, until one day, everything changed.

Two men were waiting in his cubicle at end of shift. Two men. Tall, with hair on their heads, and one of them was brown.

“I’m Franks,” announced the man with dark skin.

“Connors,” said the other. He offered his hand and Eliot stared at it.

Franks glanced round Eliot’s cubicle and shook his head. “The herd lied to you.”

“They lied to all of us,” murmured Connors..

All seven crew embryos had come to term. Doktor Tass had them raised under different conditions, as part of the experiment.

“What did they do to you?” Franks demanded, and Eliot had no idea what he meant.

Connors patted his shoulder. “Anything you want to pack?”

“Where are we going?”

“This is their idea of life,” said Franks. “Leave it all.”

Years ago the others had escaped, or walked out, or refused to cooperate. Eliot wondered why that had never occurred to him.

He was the last to be found. The Steady-State would not help, but it seemed the two men had found him by shouldering their way into a data centre, then boarding a Vesta-bound shuttle despite the protests of the herd.

“We took charge of our lives,” explained Connors. “Now you can, too.”

A roomful of his own kind was overwhelming. He flinched as they argued. This was not how consensus was achieved by the Steady-State. They grew heated, and Franks raised his voice, repeating that the herd was passive and conformist.

“All we have to do is push,” he insisted.

Connors shrugged. “We’re getting older. All they have to do is wait.”

Eliot spoke up for the first time, eager to contribute something to his new cohort. He recounted what Rona had said about creating human females.

Was this Rona spoiled, they wanted to know. Would she betray the herd?

Franks was loud with triumph. He would resurrect humankind and the Steady-State could not stop them.

“His skin,” Eliot whispered to Connors later. “Is he sick?”

“There is more variability in this room than all the herd. Chen there, thinks the Steady-State went through a population bottleneck after Earth, but I believe they chose to be as they are.”

* * *

The dust of sensors meant they were always watched. These humans had no idea how much the Steady-State knew.

Rona sought out Eliot when he was alone.

His beard was trimmed, and his hair tied back like the other men. She had forgotten how tall he was, though he seemed to have aged. There was something about their lives that burned faster.

“I’ll meet Franks,” she agreed, “but you must be present. You are the only one I trust.”

He smiled uncertainly as she put something in his hand. “What is it?” He had never seen an actual weapon before. Constables just carried a staff of office. “Why have you given me this?”

“Just a precaution. They became violent once before, when we tried to confine them.”

He understood about the violence. Speaking to Rona, he could distance himself from Franks and the rest, the way they overpowered any room they entered, the bulk and smell of them. Eliot realised they must seem like barbarians to Rona.

Reluctantly, he slipped the small gun into his pocket, where it bumped against his leg as he walked, a constant reminder, like a bad conscience.

* * *

“You expect us to let you breed?” Rona spoke with authority. These days she led the Homo Sapiens Recovery Project. “That was not what I offered Eliot.”

“We have rights.” Already Franks was leaning forwards, his voice sharpening.

Rona dismissed this. “Rights must be earned.”

“You chose to birth us,” murmured Connors, “so you have responsibilities.”

For a moment Rona was silenced. “But not him.” She gestured towards Franks. “Perhaps the rest of you we can work with.”

“She’s trying to divide us,” Franks warned.

Rona glanced from face to face. “The female clones of each of you are ready to be woken. All except Franks’. His, I will order flushed.”

Amidst the struggle and shouting, Eliot reeled back, caught in the face by an elbow. Rona was on her knees, blood staining her teeth.

“How can we be a threat to your billions?” said Connors. “Just give us a rock out in the Kuiper—”

“Give us the women!” shouted Franks.

Rona wiped blood from her mouth. “Why would I do that now?”

Franks shook himself free. “Because I’ll hurt you again if you don’t.”

“Rona’s coming with me,” cried Eliot. He produced the gun but Franks just laughed.

“The herd fashioned you, Eliot. You won’t use it, but she knows I will.” Franks stepped forward, grabbing for the gun, and it fired.

* * *

It was not until the arrival of the long-awaited Jirt vessel that Eliot saw Rona again.

“There will be an exchange,” she was saying. “Some Jirt staying, some people going back on their ship. Including you.”

He would never see Rona again. This was his punishment, though he knew the Steady-State did not think like that.

“They picked up radio signals from before the destruction of Earth. In time, they built a vessel capable of travel to the stars. They set out centuries ago and sent messages ahead, fragments of human broadcasts, so their arrival would not be a surprise.

“We debated whether to destroy them. To protect the Steady-State. But in the end no one could give the order.”

“Rona—”

“We are victims of our own sanity. But you would have done it, to save those you loved.”

“I always meant to apologise. When you visited, I was hurtful—”

“You were the best of them, Eliot. We almost made you in our image.”

The Steady-State had already lasted longer than any human civilization, and who knew how long it might endure. But they had overheard Franks say how vulnerable the Steady-State was. Exactly their own fear. What if the Jirt seized on that weakness?

“I’ve known you all my life—”

“You are an important message to the Jirt, Eliot. You demonstrate how far we have come, but also, if threatened, we can defend ourselves.”

“You shouldn’t have given me the gun.”

She was not allowed to explain the Project was always about domesticating wolves, to protect them from other wolves, and that final test was to see how far Eliot would go to protect her.

Instead she said: “With time dilation and cold sleep, you will see the Jirt homeworld. In some ways, I envy you.”

* * *

From the hundreds chosen to leave on the Jirt ship, a different couple would stay awake each year. Perhaps the Steady-State thought this might deter the Jirt from experimenting on helpless sleepers. After all, the consensus was edging towards using the Jirt who remained behind in that way.

After the ship set out, it wasn’t foreseen that Eliot would refuse to go into cold-sleep. The Jirt used no tricks to avoid the centuries in space, and he chose to see out his time with their short-lived generations.

The Jirt grew agitated by the notion that Eliot was the last of his nest and asked him to tell his story, to be coded into memory.

“There is someone,” he explained to the juveniles, though relativity must have claimed Rona long ago. “But it was all a foolishness. And anyway, she married others.”

Of course they understood nothing of this and misunderstood the significance of the water leaking from his eyes.

He told tales about Connors, Franks and the others being allowed females and a rock in the Kuiper Belt that became a refuge for all the spoiled. He never finished the story, because he couldn’t imagine what lives they would lead.

The Jirt refrained from pointing out his mistake, because it was impossible for him to know any of these facts. Nor did he admit to himself that the Steady-State would be so kind.

Then there was the time a caretaker couple confronted him with syringes filled with sedative, held like a talisman against ancient evil. They had given up trying to make him see sense. He must go into cold sleep else he would not outlive the voyage.

Filled with a rage so pure it was joyous, his fist spun the man backwards, scattering droplets of blood.

This was why he preferred to mix with the Jirt, who knew nothing of anger or guilt, a strange and envious thing to Eliot.

Very old, he grew forgetful and used the cognates of Jirt long dead as he whispered the secrets of the Steady-State.

“They think they’re better than us, but we do their dirty work. What does that say about them?”

The story he repeated most often was about the caretaker couple who woke other sleepers to chase him down the nest-ship’s endless tunnels, like a nightmare of the consensus. But armed with a length of Jirt material, dense as metal, he turned on them and cracked heads and bones.

The cold sleep tanks were beyond his reach, stored at space ambient, but he pounded at resuscitation gear until it failed in a shower of sparks. He spun to meet the horrified stare of a caretaker.

“Why have you done this?”

“I warned you,” said Eliot, and stabbed at bioware, its green light dying in a gush of plasma.

The man swayed in the doorway, holding the wound on his scalp, droplets of blood in the air around him. “You are a monster.”

The Jirt, to whom fiction was incomprehensible, listened to Eliot’s story and pondered the ways of this strange race.

“I am what you made me.”

* * *

Jirt stooped over him on too many legs, organs pumping and fluttering inside transparent integuments, smelling of old damp and rot. But even as they tasted him, brushing anxious palps over his face, he felt no disgust or fear. He had a powerful sense they were living creatures with their own calm souls.

He wanted to understand the death of Franks; to tell Rona what he felt for her; to play “Save the Ship” again. Had there been time, he would have told how lives are wondrous, briefly gifted, and we piss in the wind.

The caretaker couple tried to explain what humans did with their dead, but the Jirt chose to treat him like their own, and his molecules nourished the next generation.