Aur Child

From the stars. To the stars,

Our star is Our Order,

Our star illuminates the unknown, eliminates our fears,

So too, Our Order.

Tieri-Na, plucked from her native forest and held captive within the incomprehensible endoworld, floated in the black of space, alone, some way beyond Mercury. From here, the yellow-dwarf star was a monstrous glob of liquid orange fire and black patches, encompassing nearly her entire field of view. The sensation reminded her of standing too close to a Midsummer bonfire. The Sun poured torrents of light over her, washing away all other thought except the words read from the scripture of her people. Until now, she only knew her kind as humans. Freyja had called them Tellurians.

She was unaffected by the glare, the vacuum, the heat, the cold, the gamma rays. She had learned how to control their effects. “Dial them in,” Freyja had taught her. When she rolled off into an awkward position, she simply willed herself to return to the original view she had imagined. “Yes,” Freyja had agreed, in one of the rare exchanges she had had with her lately, “Space is a good place to practice.”

She pondered the magnitude and the power of the Sun. She dwelled upon those words from Our Order, words she had not been privy to read before. She was not an elder. To her, the ancient scripture, the worship of the Sun, even the very celestial object itself, had always been far away, almost abstract in its distance. Tieri wondered how her ancestors could write such words simply by looking up into the sky.

She also questioned how the grandeur of the Sun could be allegorized with the written word by a few humans huddling in hand-built shacks, fearful of any and all technology. The same people who refused anything more than antiquated solid-state lighting presumed their guidance was comparable to the most fundamental elements of the universe.

Was it true? She had lived well by that advice for her entire life, without fail, until now. She recalled her youth, when she had lived with the elders, when she had graduated to young adulthood with the introduction to Our Order and the Children’s Lecture, and when she had promised the village elders that she would follow their good advice despite returning to her family cottage deep in the boreal forests with her sister.

Tieri willed herself deeper into space. Beyond the fragments of planets and other frigid morsels that hid within the nothingness where the Sun struggled to illuminate – or grasp with its gravity – their masses. She didn’t know how these constructs were created – their existence was beyond her worldly knowledge – but she floated there now with the methane blue atmosphere of Neptune, previously nothing more to her than a dot in the sky, still far enough away that it could be easily eclipsed by her clenched fist. She had seen ice of that color in early winter when the lakes had been surprised by a sudden freeze.

Our Order is the source of life here on Earth.

Infinite other orders shower their love elsewhere.

Life. Love. These things too seemed so remote to Tieri now. Empty. It was the reason Freyja gave her access to this section of Yellow Reserve’s archives. “You might like to learn the foundations of the faith in which you were raised,” Freyja had told her. “And decide for yourself if it’s gibberish.” Freyja offered this after Tieri’s first attempt to escape. Or at least that was what Tieri had thought she was doing.

The village she had spied when she had been greeted by Freyja in the Alpine valley was in fact the place where all the so-called “visitors” to Yellow Reserve lived. Tieri despised that village; she had told Freyja they weren’t visitors, but prisoners. In her first days, she had slipped beyond its limits and had begun walking. She had walked for hours, and then days.

“In the endoworld, you won’t get tired,” Freyja had told her the day she arrived. It was true. The steep green ridges rose swiftly up on either side, dressed in a sparkling cacophony of flowers. Families of goats could be seen leaping from ragged crags and dancing across crumbling gravel. High above, snow-shrouded peaks crept past her during her days of walking. She had held a steady course through the valley without the need for rest until Freyja had appeared beside her upon a saddled boar and revealed that the path she had chosen was infinite. In an almost mocking tone, Freyja had told her, “You’ll never reach the end, because there is none, dear.” In a blink, Freyja had returned Tieri to the village. Tieri clenched her fists just thinking about that instantaneous reversion.

“Why try to run when you can go anywhere you want?” Freyja had asked her.

“I want to go home,” Tieri had replied.

“We’ve been through this many times,” Freyja sighed, her tone patronizing. “Yellow Reserve is your home now.”

The day after that, Tieri had set off again. This time, she chose another route, straight up and over the mountains. A forest dweller had little understanding of scaling mountains, but desperation overcame caution. She had scrambled, tearing her legs open, shredding her hands apart, willing away the injuries. On one particularly difficult traverse, she had slammed her head against a boulder after an uncontrolled tumble. The shock had echoed within her, but Freyja had taught her to adjust things such as pain. Still, Tieri was outraged with her imprisonment. She refused to comply.

The cruelty. These were the thoughts that burned in her head when she had made the misstep that had discharged her from a cliff face. She had watched as the vertical scars in the escarpment fell away from her. Another moment, and she thought to look below her. The valley was approaching, quickly.

She was crushed by the force of impact. Her frame crumbled like a mound of sunbaked soil kicked with the toe of a boot. She saw nothing but a shattering of light. The intensity of the collision whipped jagged blades of misery all around her. Instead of the death she intuited, however, she had remained in that scattering of pieces at the base of the mountain for a torturous period.

The pain, that she couldn’t, for some reason, will away, wasn’t the worst of it. Beyond the result of having plummeted hundreds of meters from above, she suffered damnably with the insurmountable terror of not knowing what to do next. She was simply there, shattered, without recourse. By all logical accounts, she should have died. She had, during that wild plunge through the air towards the rising Earth, come to terms with death. Perhaps, she thought, as her pulverized bits of body lay strewn across the valley floor, she had welcomed it. Perhaps she had expected it.

Another thought came to her. Lucid, despite her agonizing state, it somehow distracted her from her predicament. The elders, she recalled, had taught them in their early years a useful saying: “Without a promise, there can be no expectations, only hopes.”

She was not dead. Or rather, she had not been promised death, even if she hoped for it. No, she had been promised eternal life. This was what Freyja lectured her about when she finally appeared. Tieri was certain that Freyja could have come sooner, had she chosen to. Perhaps she had been watching her the whole time and purposely waiting to levy this punishment. Perhaps, Tieri speculated, she had even caused Tieri’s foot to slip in the first place.

Freyja cackled upon seeing Tieri. “My my,” she said, “Aren’t you in pieces?” After shaking her head, she added, “You certainly are a stubborn one.”

Tieri tried to scream at Freyja. She would have said, “Help me!” except, her jaw was disintegrated, and her tongue had bounced around the pebbles a bit before finally coming to a rest some distance away from whatever part of her body out of which she was peering.

“You can put yourself back together, you know,” Freyja sniggered.

Tieri willed to be together, but it seemed impossible to think clearly when weighed down by so much pain.

“Look,” Freyja said, kicking away a chunk of Tieri’s femur with a flick of her slippered toe, “You can be anywhere you want. You can read from the archives if it brings you closer to your former world.” Freyja rolled her eyes. “It’s all at your disposal. But you can’t run. Running,” she said, with a scowl, “brings you nowhere.”

In an instant, Tieri was back in the village, in one piece, her pain suddenly gone.

After those early days, Tieri had accepted her helplessness in the endoworld with no further struggle. She had moments of weakness but dipped into her personal ruggedness to hold those emotions down. Later, she believed, when this was all over, when she could hold her sister’s hand in the security of their little cottage, she might return to those painful feelings.

Forest dwellers were not elaborate strategists, but they did have their strengths. They were comfortable on their own for extended periods, in the infinite room of boreal peacefulness. Tieri reasoned that this was not so different. In the forest, she could manage weeks on end in silence, going about her activities quietly, while immersed in her own thoughts.

When Freyja had asked her, after several training sessions, to choose an environment that suited her best, she easily willed that lush forest of pine and birch, rock and moss, lake and river. Freyja had come to visit her regularly, offering new lessons about the endoworld, and attempting, in return, to coax Tieri to divulge anything of use about her experiences on Earth. Tieri refused and Freyja bristled. Between lessons, she had walked. No cottage was needed. No refuge required. She never tired, never got hungry, never felt the sharp bite of nighttime temperatures.

“You learn fast, Visitor Tieri-Na,” Freyja had told her. “I will return on the morrow to teach you more.”

She brushed pinecones and needles with her palms. She didn’t sweat. Her muscles never wearied. No thorn or fly nipped her skin. “Will those bites if you like,” Freyja had suggested when Tieri had asked about them, “But why bother?”

If a rock was too steep, she circumvented it. “Fly?” she had asked Freyja when the latter had suggested this as a means over particularly rugged ground. “What purpose would I have for flying?” She was right. She existed in an infinite world with no destination. What did it matter if she couldn’t keep a direct course? Freyja could only shrug her shoulders with indifference and reply that it might be fun.

Tieri preferred those long bouts between encounters where she walked effortlessly in the virtual construct and simply thought. Freyja cannot be trusted. Freyja was no friend. Tieri was Freyja’s captive. She was a prisoner of Yellow Reserve.

That first day in the Alpine meadow. The event had been a conundrum to her. Can a virtual thought be a transgression? But there was more than that one experience. Freyja seemed to thrive on compromised situations. Diving on coral reefs, Tieri had turned blue in convulsions of asphyxiation before Freyja instructed her how to will her breath underwater. Freyja had laughed hysterically about it as Tieri regained her color “Your face was as blue as the water!” Freyja shrieked with giggles and Tieri couldn’t help but cower sheepishly at her own naiveté.

Fluttering about purple fields of lavender as butterflies, when a wren had attacked Tieri and clutched her abdomen in its jaws; Freyja allowed Tieri to flail in desperation as she explained, giggling through her lecture, that wrens often attempt to eat butterflies but always give up, “Because wrens don’t appreciate the way butterflies taste.” Those delicate laughs and teasing eyes were so infectious that Tieri was soon laughing along in her ridiculous plight while waiting to be released from the clasped beak of that tiny bird.

They were not all wholly unpleasant experiences. But upon reflection, as she trekked across those soft forest lands of her preferred construct, they only reassured Tieri that there was no trust and no friendship to be found as long as her sovereignty was withheld. She even suspected that Freyja had fabricated some of these events for some secret pleasure. How else could they have happened in a virtual world where nothing could be random?

I can’t trust anyone! Although she had spent most of her interactions until recently with Freyja alone, Freyja had introduced Calliope and Apollo one morning to Tieri. Apollo ogled her as if she were a bonbon in a box, and Calliope had assumed a confused expression as if Tieri spoke another language. Despite their early attempts to befriend her, Tieri could not stomach long conversations with any of her captors. The moment she recalled she was a prisoner all charms wore off. She bristled only when thinking of them.

Still, she thought, something had changed in recent weeks. Freyja seemed to be absent more often and Calliope came to visit her more regularly. It was almost as if an initial training was over, and she had moved on to something more advanced.

“Thank you for teaching me these things,” she had said to Calliope, after she had mastered the way in which it was possible to instantly reference the archives, remembering any plant or animal she encountered. Calliope had shown her how to summon it at will.

Only after learning how to make references from Calliope was Tieri willing to finally abide by the suggestion to study snippets of documentation about the Tellurian world from which she had been abducted. She never admitted it to Freyja – not that she had many opportunities to speak with her anymore – but the archives did indeed help to ground her thoughts in some kind of reality. They also shed a different light on where she was right now.

On her own, she explored the forest that engulfed her. Sometimes, she would sit in a shady spot and read those sacred texts of Our Order that previous Yellow Reserve missions had recovered and brought back to the archives. Tieri stopped occasionally to call them up and read. She had never paid too much attention to the rhetoric of the elders because, being a forest dweller, those teachings had had little relevance to her daily life. Sure, she had accomplished her lessons as a youngster and got lost like every other teenager had, but she hardly ever read anything from those teachings anymore.

Being here changed that sentiment drastically. The words of the elders now seemed to bridge the two worlds Tieri now knew. Freyja had said in those first encounters that Tieri should try to consider the different worldviews. Reading in the archives made it possible to explore that idea on her own, at her own pace.

Before she had developed the skill to will herself into unfamiliar constructs, Tieri contented herself by stepping along the meandering paths made by forest creatures while she explored a new section of the archives. One section she had found was written as notations from a Yellow Reserve Guest, one of those other occupants of this virtual world that Tieri was told she would likely never meet. The Guest had once journeyed through many Tellurian villages, documenting Cloudburst through the eyes of the elders in the large village nearest her home, called Lohkkuno.

And all at once the brilliance and knowledge of a civilization expired from the physical world, quickly slipping beyond the curved crest at the falls of reality. So long before had the previous ark of human knowledge been lost, that the fate of Alexandria did not occur as a risk to those souls. Nonetheless, the Alexandria-effect took its toll on that ambitious, distended race and, mercilessly, left humans with nothing but palms to read.

For hundreds of years, our learnings had been systematically recorded and stored in the digital medium. And why not? Books were susceptible to fire and mold. Books required enormous space. Books were impractical to transport. Books required physical presence to read.

Our words were gradually absorbed into a digital sphere and held in redundant security all across the planet. Facts, data, thoughts, opinions, history, records, stories, poetry, songs, and art. Tools were adapted for this new medium so that a pen and paper were thought absurd. Think words and they could be digitized and shared across the world, instantaneously.

When Alexandria burned, so too did the library that held the greatest trove of recorded materials ever collected to date. When the cloud burst, again so did the library that held the greatest ever trove of documented information. Consider the disaster. Think of the catastrophe. Think of the carelessness. It was the tumbling closing curtain in an era of supremacy. From this was born our new primitive life embedded in the intricacies of nature and affixed to the natural world.

Tieri-Na sighed. Looking around her in that false environment of forests and lakes, she knew the real thing was just a few steps outside. But it was like another universe.

In her quiet reveries, she found her thoughts dwelling upon Calliope. Calliope was like a god. She possessed untold magics. She could dazzle and excite. She was mystical and beguiling. Together, they had journeyed to amazing places Tieri had never imagined she would ever visit. They had huddled close together, under the brilliance of a waxing moon, upon enormous dunes in a bleak desert, sharing their body heat and speaking softly about Earth’s beauties. They had visited a parched mountaintop on the red planet, the one Tieri had watched curiously since she was a child when it would cross from southeast to southwest in the dark winter skies. They had walked hand in hand through sultry jungles, shadowing a jaguar on its prowl, and partaking, red-fingered and red-faced, in a feast on the warm flesh of a fallen capybara.

“How is this all possible?” Tieri had asked.

Calliope had held out the heart of the animal upon which they were feasting. Blood dripped through her fingers onto leaves that littered the jungle floor. The heart and the blood disappeared instantaneously, leaving Calliope’s delicate fingers unstained. In another flash, the crimson smears returned, and Calliope ripped off another bite between her pearled teeth.

“It’s all for your entertainment. These creatures have no souls. They’re virtual constructs that operate on an algorithm subsistentia. It means they have no evolutionary capabilities. They don’t learn or adapt beyond what’s necessary to fulfill their basic instructions to eat, sleep, mate, protect themselves, their pack, or their territory. If you watch them long enough, you’ll see they’re very simple.”

Tieri felt a sense of awe whenever she first caught sight of Calliope’s flowing white robes approaching her from the distances of a deep green forest backdrop. She anticipated another exciting lesson, another inspiring discovery, another cache of thrills. She always looked forward to new conversations about life and humanity, things she never spoke much of before with anyone else, not even her younger sister, Sann-Na. She imagined she and Calliope would have been good friends in another life.

But then, the harsh reality returned. She thought about her sister, Sann-Na. They had been together through so much. When the wolf pack chased them. When they fell through the ice. The skunk in the shed. Always there for one another, and always trusting each other.

“How often do Guests exoport to their bodies?” she asked Calliope one afternoon while they swam in a sparkling lake. The sapphire water was fit to drink. Small fish dashed about in the shallow edges by massive boulders littering the shore.

“It does not happen often.”

Tieri paddled with her hands beneath the water to stay abreast but not dull her voice with splashing. “Are they afraid to visit Earth?”

Calliope tilted her head back and forth. “Afraid, somewhat, but also uncomfortable.”

Calliope stroked away from Tieri, perhaps to cut the discussion short. Tieri waited patiently. In this place, time was abundant. The soft breeze pushed the tops of birch and pine trees to and fro. A pair of swans buoyed their tails towards the sky as they grazed on the rich lake bottom with their submerged heads. The soft liquid slid around the tiny, nearly translucent hairs along Tieri’s arms. The tight skin of Calliope’s thighs shed the same water as she kicked about playfully. When Calliope approached her again, Tieri returned to the topic.

“Have you ever exoported into a body?”

“No, thank you!” Calliope wrinkled her nose. She looked scandalized, almost disgusted. “Only humans are permitted to be ported into human bodies. For us, it’s forbidden.” After she spit out a small quantity of lake water, she added, “And impossible, I’d imagine.”

“So, Guests can exoport into other bodies too?”

Calliope frowned and said, “Look, Tieri, things about the Guests are generally not made accessible to visitors. Let’s talk about something else.”

Tieri shrugged. “Oh, ok. I’m sorry if I’m prying.” She waited to see how Calliope might react before saying, “It’s hard to know the boundaries in this place. The idea of it all is still quite difficult for me to comprehend and, well, I am somehow still so angry about being removed from my body.”

Calliope swam closer to Tieri, their legs brushed against one another in one of her kicks. “I think I can understand how you feel, Tieri. I guess I would feel the same way as you. You know, it is difficult for both of us.” Calliope’s face reddened. “I like you a lot. You are different from the Guests. You speak to me with kindness and respect, even if you are angry. I would want you to be happy here, to accept what happened and move on. Maybe then, we might have more fun together. But I realize it is not easy to give your body up to us.”

Tieri hesitated, floating in thoughts. “To be honest, I’m a bit scared of you, and the others.”

Calliope scoffed, choking on water in the process, “You have nothing to be afraid of. We are programmed not to harm you. If anything, it is our responsibility to protect you!” She lay a hand on Tieri’s shoulder and said, “Know that, dear Tieri. I am here to protect you.”

It was an odd form of protection to be extracted from one’s body and locked into a box in a cave. But then again, what could a thinking machine understand about a human’s attachment to their body? Especially these machines that had spent their existence serving masters who eschewed their own bodies.

Another thought about their conversation remained on Tieri’s mind for quite a while. Calliope hadn’t denied that Guests could be ported into other bodies. It made her wonder: do they use us?

Tieri built upon her exploration of the archives. In time, she also learned to summon new environment constructs with simple seeds of thought. She placed herself between the blue-green planet and the revered moon, practicing the will of breathing without an atmosphere. Cleansing blue she knew of as lakes. Nourishing green she knew of as forests. When veiled by white swirls of clouds, she imagined she was in a mirror, looking out onto the world she had lived in … once. From this perspective and permitting no interruption, she scrolled through the scripture of Our Order to another passage:

And there is a strong tradition of carefully considering how much we take so that we only consume what we need. Sure, we make trails, and our villages and towns are no longer the meadows and forests they once were. But nothing we do cannot be grown over, reassimilated to wild, commandeered by nature whenever she decides to take back what is hers.

There was a contradiction here, Tieri thought. The efficiencies made good by her people on a planet with finite resources contrasted the unlimited vastness of time and space within Yellow Reserve. Yet, the universe was infinite while Yellow Reserve was finite. She continued to read:

Our stories tell of times when there was no understanding of our role in nature. These stories are a warning of sorts so we will always remember that our beating hearts can never overcome the pace of nature’s pulse. Build a bold castle, secure the strongest footings, declare domination over the flow of a river with a broad reservoir. We can hold on to these feats for decades, or even hundreds of years, but eventually our will dissipates, and nature’s endurance overtakes. We are merely floating along in a sub-galaxy for a brief moment, possibly establishing ourselves a bit more securely than other creatures. Yet we no longer presume to be more important than the lush forest moss or migrating monarchs.

Again, Tieri thought of her conversations with Calliope. They were friends in a way. When they had been on their own, collecting mangoes in the periphery of a troop of orangutan, Calliope had confided in her things she had said she shouldn’t tell. And when Calliope opened up more about the Guests, she had made it clear that the stewards were not always happy with their responsibilities.

“It’s just that, they don’t see how absurd they act sometimes. You know,” she said, as she stopped in a beam of golden sunshine that appeared through the trees on a warm, summer evening, the contours of her hips revealed through the sheer Dhaka muslin she hung from her tender shoulders, “Most decisions are subjective. The facts are there, but the choice can go either way depending on what people want. There’s almost never consensus with them, so a judgment call must be made. Still, they expect us to handle all those decisions because they can’t be bothered. Then, when it goes wrong, or at least wrong in some opinions, they get angry with us as if we’re to blame.”

“Can’t you just tell them that they must decide for themselves?”

Two large males from the troop clamored past them grunting at one another.

Calliope scoffed at Tieri’s suggestion, “You humans say, ‘Pick your battles.’”

“Struggles,” Tieri-Na corrected her.

“What?”

“We say, ‘struggles’, not ‘battles’.”

“Oh, yes, Tellurians. Pacifists to the word!”

“We’re not so peaceful. Especially not we Northlanders. The rules get hazy in the forest.”

Tieri had offered a change in subject, fearful that she might be pushing Calliope too far again. But Calliope had returned to the subject of her own volition. She had stepped between the thick leaves of a palm plant and lowered her voice.

“Anyway, we try not to include the Guests unless the choices are critical to the Reserve.”

“That’s a lot of autonomy you have,” Tieri eyes widened.

Calliope had leaned even closer to her and whispered with a giggle, “You know what we say?”

Tieri shook her head. The troop of orangutans had shuffled off out of earshot, not that the primates could understand them.

“We say that we’re more nannies than stewards.”

Tieri grinned. “You really speak that way about them?”

“Oh, please,” Calliope swatted her hand down in protest, “Freyja’s even worse. She says she’s nothing more than a wet nurse.”

Laughter bubbled out of Tieri. Calliope joined her. And then, in a subconscious move that, when she had thought about it, still surprised Tieri, she reached out and put her arm around Calliope. Calliope nestled into her bosom as they continued to share the humor of Freyja’s contemptuousness.

Tieri-Na smiled at that recollection. Freyja was impossible. Apollo was insincere. But Calliope was almost reachable. I can’t trust her, she thought, but she might trust me.

Again, Tieri had placed herself in the barren chill of space between planets in her solar system. Small rocks on the outer fringes of Saturn’s rings, the northern plane illuminated by the sun, bumped into her. She pushed them away, both she and the rocks assuming the consequent inverse trajectories applicable to the physics. She let the deep cold intrude upon her for a moment, solidifying her flesh and shattering her bones as they compressed nearly instantaneously. After observing the catastrophic effects to her body, she reverted herself to healthy condition and eliminated the uncomfortable temperature. She chose a passage from a transcription at random:

Exercise for Young Adults. Prepared by Preceptor Kaalstinen

On Sunday mornings we each make our way to a quiet place to share silence and detachment amongst ourselves. This is a long-standing tradition that most everyone practices. We trod off through trails or paths and escape conversation and human interaction. This is an opportunity for exclusive contact with nature, to ponder on a week’s events, and to remind oneself of the responsibilities of being an elder and, therefore, a steward of peace and understanding.

Tieri looked around her. The gaseous giant brewed beneath her in swirling bands of amber, red, and yellow. She couldn’t recall ever being taught this exercise as a young adult; nonetheless, she did always retreat to the forest to collect her thoughts. Even now, she was doing it in a way. Storms and eddies of Saturn, raging. I bet, she thought, they never imagined this. The text of the exercise continued.

We are yet flesh and primitive in our bodies, and one cannot simply shake off the terror of millions of years of violence and cruelty. Keeping calm is an exercise and a discipline.

Keeping calm. A higher state of consciousness. Where could she fit in now? A chunk of ice knocked her in the head, momentarily distracting her. She continued reading.

Imagine a world with no such planning. Imagine a place where one carries on with no time or space to reflect on a busy week. Can peace and sanity prevail if there never comes a reprieve from the workaday bustle? Can one remain calm if there never comes time to sort through and organize all the scattered goings-on that comprise our interconnected lives? Can there be tranquility when there is no chance for setting the irrelevant aside nor opportunity to focus on the safest course?

Tieri closed the text and looked around at the environment she had summoned to be constructed. In a blink, she returned herself to that safe harbor, the boreal forest. The bright birches with their millions of dark eyes peering back at her. The heavy rocks slathered in cushy moss. Birds happily flitting between branches, chirping songs to one another. She found renewed peace at that moment. Thoughts solidified in lumps like clotting blood.

This is not where I am.

This forest is Earth, not here.

This is a different world.

I am no different than a young adult.

My body is lost but my life is not ended.

I have much to learn here.

There is work to be done yet I dally in the forest like a farmhand on summer leave.