Aur Child

Tieri-Na, prisoner at Yellow Reserve, had been growing suspicious about the other visitors in the mountain village. She faced one now. “But how can I be sure you’re really from the real world?”

After giving up the forest, she consented to spending more time at the village and getting to know the other visitors. There were at most twenty of them. It wouldn’t hurt to know people other than the overlords who had put her here. But she noticed something was odd about the way the villagers spoke about Earth. Or rather, how they didn’t speak about it.

“Ah, the very same question all new visitors ask when they first arrive,” the villager replied. “We are no different than you, Visitor-Na. Spend enough time with us and you’ll come to see we’re all the same.”

But Tieri-Na didn’t feel the same. She remembered her life in the physical world. When she asked the others, they acknowledged Earth, but spoke nothing of their individual lives there.

“Oh yes, I’ve seen it,” they might say, as if it were just another construct they’d willed at one time or another for entertainment. “Fairly dull, if I recall.”

“But what village are you from? What was your clan? Have you ever heard of Kärssäsammut?” They couldn’t tell her, and she didn’t believe them. Perhaps, she supposed, they were just part of the construct as well.

It also struck Tieri as odd that the other villagers were content to refer to themselves as “visitors” even though they insisted they’d always lived here. To her, it was a signal that they had accepted their position of impermanence, of jeopardy, without resistance. Or perhaps something of their memory had been removed.

Rather than make friends, conversations with the villagers frustrated her. She bristled at the way they had surrendered their own sense of purpose and adopted the agenda of the stewards. It was if she, a forest courier, would instead speak categorically about the tools of her trade as merchandise only because that was how the merchant who dealt in those things described them. She refused to abandon her own identity in that way.

Of course, living in the village was Freyja’s suggestion, which gave Tieri more reason not to trust her. To her, the villagers became nothing more than puppets that fed Tieri information biased towards acquiescence. She sensed a more forthcoming answer from Calliope. When Tieri had asked Calliope’s opinion about the village, she was nonplussed. “That place is no fun,” she had said. Calliope had preferred to meet and explore fantastical creations of the virtual world rather than the static characters of the mountain village. But Tieri sought information from every source. She needed to learn as much as possible if she was going to escape, and she needed to know more about the endoworld than what Calliope would tell her. While the villagers were ignorant of their former lives on Earth, they knew a lot about life as a visitor in the virtual world. For information about Earth, she continued to befriend Calliope.

“But I thought we lost all records from before Cloudburst.” Tieri had complained, after challenging Calliope’s opinions about the endosouls’ original reasons for “living in boxes”, as she called it. Tieri had learned she could squeeze information this way; Calliope was susceptible to such challenges because she seemed eager to be friends. They were floating at the time within the tetrahedral unit cell of a quartz crystal, a suggestion of Calliope’s. Calliope had calculated the ideal scale for their bodies to fit inside the unit yet still enabled them to see far beyond. The shared vertices connected in patterns indefinitely all around them.

“Not all!” replied Calliope. “There is always some record, and of course artificial intelligence entities such as myself, and the other stewards here at Yellow Reserve, maintain some data relevant to our operational mandates. We have cobbled things together. But these data may not be so helpful to your questions. They may even confuse the issue.”

“Oh, how so?”

“Well, take the way you speak of endosouls.”

“Ok.”

“They hide from humans and refuse to change.”

Tieri shrugged her shoulders, “They’re just pretending.”

“Pretending, Tieri!” Calliope chuckled affectionately. She eased over to take Tieri’s fingers in her hand, caressing their soft tops gently with her thumb. Calliope spoke more softly and looked directly into Tieri’s eyes. Tieri thought that this might actually be the kindest thing that had happened to her since she arrived at Yellow Reserve. For a fleeting moment, she wondered if Calliope could be blushing, but Calliope quickly recovered her default complexion and returned to her point.

“You also say they leave Tellurians to suffer in the harsh environment of Earth; to struggle, to adapt, to improve their condition. I might summarize your opinion of endosouls as a conservative people, while you Tellurians are more adaptive with your thinking, willing to build new communities, embrace other peoples, and share ideas from village to village.”

Tieri nodded. To her, this all sounded exactly how she might describe the two peoples. “Take our merchant ships,” she offered. “They travel around the world, carrying communications and goods that benefit and improve our lives. We’re not a hive of buzzing ground wasps like the endosouls.”

Calliope leaned in and let their foreheads brush ever so slightly against one another; Tieri could feel the tiny hairs entangle and release. She could smell Calliope’s breath, sweet like a young wine. “Entirely false, of course,” Calliope said laughing and pushing herself away so that she floated backwards and bumped up against the valence electrons in the outer shell of a silicon atom.

Tieri smiled, somewhat confused. “What’s false?” she asked.

“Your presumptions of the endosouls,” and then she disappeared.

Tieri looked around. She stared down the endless tridymite corridors. Nothing but off-white.

Then, a tug at her shoulder, and Tieri closed her eyes. She knew this technique. Let go and she could be taken to another place. She found herself in a tumult of human bodies. Smoke burned in her nose. Women were screaming in anger. Men held their clenched fists. All were facing a line of people clad in black outfits and helmets. They gripped transparent shields and large bludgeons or other unfamiliar devices; the racket weighed down upon Tieri. She felt herself shaking inexplicably. Calliope was by her side, dressed in scarlet waves of silk, fringes of gold threads caught up in the hot breezes.

“Where are we?” Tieri asked, her voice trembling.

“A protest. About four hundred years ago.”

“Protest of what?”

“These people,” Calliope nodded towards the civilians around them, “disagree with their leaders.” She nodded towards the stiff line across the narrow patch of asphalt.

“I’ve never seen such anger,” Tieri said.

“Worse than Tellurian toddlers.”

“Are those the village elders then?”

“No, Tieri, they are peacekeepers.”

Tieri scoffed at these words. “Keepers? How often is the peace lost?”

“Constantly,” Calliope replied. She turned her back towards the line of officers to face the crowd of protesters. “In a few moments, these two groups will come together. Fury will be set free on both sides. They will strike one another. Blood will be shed. Many will be permanently injured. Many others will be killed.”

“Killed?” Tieri gasped in shock. “By peacekeepers?”

“This,” Calliope said, “is what endosouls escaped.” She turned around with her hands in the air. For the first time, Tieri noticed the massive dwellings with rows of rectangular windows climbing up into the sky. Many were broken. She felt squashed in that hard space between the towers. Some people hung out of windows high above. They hurled insults and threw things down upon the peacekeepers. “Everything was falling apart,” Calliope continued, “Governments collapsed. The technology to escape this world came just in time.”

“For the endoworld?”

“Yes, there can be no violence in the endoworld. No pain. No death. People were relieved to be numb. Earthsense, you know, was for a long time considered a bad thing. Tieri,” Calliope was again close beside her now, “Earth is a struggle.” The crowd raged in front of them. A dark can flew over Tieri’s shoulder, trailing an acrid smoke, and crashed into the ear of a protester who began to scream in agony.

“The endoworld was an innovation. Your people, Tieri, rejected it for this. When Cloudburst came, all those who had thought they found a peaceful existence were shocked to learn they had only temporarily circumvented the horrors of humanity.”

Tieri held her hands up to her mouth. In the newly formed layer above the whites of her eyes, gray dust was pushed out past her tear ducts, trickling down the sides of her face and disappearing in the gap between her hands and her cheeks.

She tugged at Calliope’s shiny gown. “Let’s go,” she whispered.

They blinked. The clamor had turned to a fast beating, nearly a hum. Around her, before a tapestry of black speckled with distant stars, Tieri saw several large orbs spinning ferociously, spitting out blasts of light at a frequency too high to count.

Calliope grabbed one of the melon-sized orbs. It snapped and sparkled in her hands. Calliope’s alabaster face and clothing flashed blue in the pulsed reflections of the ball. She raised the object high over her head and hurled it towards a swirling cone of blackness a short sprint ahead of them. The ball spit out blasts of light in all directions – light that seemed to collide with Tieri’s chest as it passed by her – as tumbled towards that dimensionless pit. It bounced and jostled, assumed a decreasing spiral orbit, and then was suddenly snapped up into the depths of the dark center.

“What is this?” Tieri asked.

Calliope grabbed another orb. Pointing to it, she said, “Pulsars.” Pointing to the black hole in front of them, she said, “Black hole.”

Tieri shook her head. She had no idea what these were, but she grabbed a pulsar and attempted to throw it towards the black hole.

“What’s inside there?” Tieri asked.

“In the real world, no one knows. Here, it is a very private place.”

Tieri moved nearer to the floating darkness.

“Careful!” Calliope said. “Don’t get too close. If you fall in there, it’s very difficult to get out.”

Tieri retreated. “Private?” she asked, turning towards Calliope.

“Yes, the system fails to handle the physics, so it makes it impossible to be seen or heard when you’re in there,” and in a soft whisper she said, “I call it the Hundred Acre Wood.”

Tieri wrinkled her nose, “Woods? In space? I don’t get it.”

“Never mind,” Calliope said, “Try to throw it fast enough so that it enters with a spiral.”

Calliope demonstrated the phenomenon. As Tieri attempted it, she recalled the thought she had meant to share with Calliope.

“But,” she said, “We Tellurians” – she still used this title awkwardly – “are also a peaceful people. More peaceful, I’d argue, than endosouls.” She pointed her fingers toward her chest and said, “We don’t keep prisoners, for example.”

“That is true.” Calliope nodded. “Perhaps it could have been different. Your ancestors, eleven generations ago, rejected what they called an abandonment of the body. They argued that the soul within a body was the essence of life. Instead of embracing these changes which appeared revolting and inhuman, they turned away from this technology - from most technology anyway – and began their return to nature, the product of which you lived within until you came to visit Yellow Reserve.”

“Came to visit?” Tieri huffed in a belligerent tone. “You stole me from that world. It was an – an abduction!”

Calliope maintained a patient expression. “We are speaking of worldviews, Tieri-Na. The endosouls here would not say you were abducted; they would say you were rescued. Perhaps you can see the difference even if you do not agree with it?”

Tieri grumbled. She could not reject it.

“From the outside,” Calliope continued, “it seems they hide. But Yellow Reserve is not the only data shelter on Earth, you know. There are many more, even if we don’t know where they are. They all hide. They refuse to communicate. For fear that even one radio transmission might lead back to their secret encampments. They covet their power sources and worry about their vulnerabilities. Just imagine what a single clan could do to Yellow Reserve if it were to be discovered.”

“So, they’re afraid of us?”

“Wary,” Calliope said, “that you might renege on your agreement.”

“What agreement?”

Now they stood at the peak of a bald mountain, the highest in a range that continued to their left and right into the horizons. Before them, Tieri could just distinguish the tips of four wind towers of her Earth, yet the blinking patterns were unfamiliar. Not Lohkkuno, she thought.

“This agreement,” Calliope said. “Your people keep to the coastlines. The endosouls in their encampments keep to the hinterlands. Neither can ever be in sight of the other. The towers,” Calliope pointed toward the distant shore, “define the extents.”

“Never beyond the towers,” Tieri said, reciting the regular warning given by elders.

“Yes,” Calliope said, “very clever of them,” and then, kicking a stone off the edge, “But, this has grown dull too. Shall we try something of your devising?”

Tieri looped her arm around Calliope’s. They found themselves in the warm, shallow waters of a forest lake. Armless. They each only had a wobbly tail to manage, yet they could not keep still. All around, hundreds of other newly hatched tadpoles were spinning and squirming in pointless arcs. Calliope was laughing in hysterics, further preventing any control of her movements. Tieri joined in, giggling spasmodically as she attempted to make any sense of her bearings. Without mouths, Tieri realized, they couldn’t speak, unless in descant.

“I can’t catch my breath,” Tieri said to Calliope.

“Are we even breathing?” Calliope replied between gasps of laughter, and then, “How did you come up with this?”

“They’ll come soon, so be ready!”

“Ready for who?” Calliope asked.

“Not who. What.”

But Calliope did not need to ask anything more. Their flagellations had attracted a school of fish. Tiny lake bream in fact, but in proportion, they were monsters.

“What are we to do now?” Calliope asked, somewhat distressed at the speed with which fish were approaching.

Tieri was trying to rotate herself to face the oncoming school. “What can we do?” she said, “Let them eat us.”

“Let them eat us?” Calliope stared at Tieri.

“And why not?”

Calliope was gobbled up before she could react. A moment later, Tieri found herself similarly ingested, in the dark gut of another fish. She noticed the hushed swish of water around her, but she had lost the freedom of movement she previously had.

“Calliope,” she continued in their descant, “About the agreement. We are told nothing of this in our education.”

“How could you be?” Calliope answered. “You are told nothing of the endosouls.”

“Why do the elders keep them a secret?”

“I can’t say. I am not a wise elder. Tellurians prefer to ignore much of which makes it possible for them to live as they do.”

“If you mean the towers, we celebrate their gifts every month.”

“I mean the origins of the towers. They were not built by Tellurians. You celebrate the sun. Yet you ignore the intermediary.”

“The technology, you mean.”

“Yes, that. One of many comforts afforded to your people by technology.”

“What other comforts are there?”

“Well,” continued Calliope, “Another example is your body itself.”

“Our bodies are natural. They are real.”

Tieri wasn’t sure if she had grown impatient with the wet cocoon they were in, or the criticisms Calliope was making. She returned herself and Calliope to the mountain village. They found themselves sitting on a grassy knoll in the warmth of a summer afternoon.

Calliope placed her hand under Tieri’s chin. She said, “Real, but by the time of Cloudburst, nearly every human born on Earth had benefited from technology to ensure they could live longer and healthier lives than ever before. They were freed from nearly all viruses, diseases, and conditions that would previously lead to premature death. The average life expectancy of a human six hundred years ago was about fifty years. Three hundred years ago, it had improved to 150 years. How long do you expect to live, Tieri?”

Her mouth was open in amazement.

“We grow no older than our ancestors,” she said.

“You’ve stopped growing older than your ancestors ever since you rejected their technology.” But Calliope was not done. “So much of your purported natural lives is but a byproduct of your ancestors: hyper-responsiveness to herbal remedies, the salt combinations in your power cells, the impregnable belts that propel your bicycles, the near-frictionless pulley wheels you employ, the tiny light bulbs and their durable circuits that never tire, the plastics and metal alloys you repeatedly melt down and remold without fatigue, the scriptleafs from which you study the very texts of your faith. Do you think any of these are gifts from your beloved Earth? Or do you think some cave dweller concocted these around a fire? It is a great hypocrisy. The technology your Earth-loving people reject as something treacherous and reprehensible is the very thing that has preserved your lives.”