J Batt: Onliest

She walked out into the night through the open garage door, nearly tripping over Eku, who had fallen asleep on the path out front. She dug her fingers into the cat’s fur and said, “Let’s go Eku. Bedtime.”

The cat yawned then stood, and the two walked to her tree, fading into the darkness, leaving Blip alone with his mirror image lifeless on the table before him.

The Unauthorized Journal of Syn

Section 7

Composed 2759

My first memories were of the white porcelain room that I later discovered was called Integration Bay One. It was also called my crèche. Integration. I was the one being integrated. Blip and I have celebrated that day as my birthday. I’m sure that I technically had a birthday, but from what I can discover, the transition from fetus to child didn’t include a mother. Or a father. Just a Blip.

That’s right. I was born in a machine, and I stayed in that machine for several years. The pod tinkered with me while I hibernated. I do remember dreaming, odd shapes, things with frightening eyes, and then words and smells and colors, all jumbled together. My brain was soaking up the constant feed of information that they sent me.

And the definition of “they” isn’t easy to answer. While the former inhabitants of the ship, the ones whose bodies are now glistening in the moist dirt of the body farms, were intelligent, they weren’t the ones that created me. I thought, at first, they might have been. Perhaps those first few weeks, maybe months, of searching through the Disc was a search for my creators. Maybe I’d run across one of them that would see me and exclaim, “Syn! You’ve woken up! You’ve found us!” That was my hope. With each new house we entered, I replayed that scenario until it faded away.

Blip helped me dig up the records. I was planned long before the ship was launched. I was the Eve—an engineered human that was just a bit stronger, smarter, and faster, and I was designed to be the first on Àpáàdì, the Earth-like planet formerly known as Kapteyn-b. I was supposed to be woken up, though, right before we made planetfall, not decades before. My designers were on Earth. I suspect I had a real mother, or at least, an egg-donor. But that egg and me were nothing alike. The videos explained how they went through each line of DNA and custom-tooled me. Entire sections of the nice TGAC code were pulled out and reinserted with others. Maybe some animal. Maybe something unseen before. I know I can see as well in the darkness as the big cats that now prowl. I know that I can hunt better than most anything I’ve encountered out there. I’m fast. I can do a kilometer in two minutes.

For all that comprehensive planning before the ship left Earth, the morons on the ship screwed it up. The entire mission went to the sewers, and someone woke me up way too early. I’ll be an old woman when we hit Àpáàdì. If the idiots had at least left me alone, the ship would’ve woken me up right as I entered the elliptical plane of Kapteyn’s Star. If that had happened, all of the ship’s mission and plans would’ve worked out. No, there wouldn’t have been any of the actual ship inhabitants to make it, but at least one human would’ve stepped foot on the second Earth. Humanity would’ve made their home on two different planets. Not now. Idiots.

A blinding light hung in the center of the integration room and it hurt to look at. My eyes hurt. My ears hurt. I woke up, slamming my head against the slowly opening glass. The shock caused me to puke. Yes, the miracle of birth—my first few moments—was me hurling the vilest green crap from my weak stomach onto the glass in front of me. I stumbled out into the ship, my first few steps, covered in my own green vomit, rubbing at my eyes and screaming because they burned. Every sound was horrible. My ears were working for the first time, and I just wanted to drown myself. I didn’t know that’s what I wanted. I just knew I wanted to plunge into something that would block out all of the sound, all of the madness, all of the absolutely insane sensations.

Being born is tough. Don’t call someone a “baby” as an insult. Babies are tough as nails. Babies come out and manage to make the whole bloody, nasty affair look cute and adorable. They cry a little but then in moments are cooing against their moms. I didn’t get that luxury. There was no mom to grab me and hold me tight and say, I love you. It’s okay. Shhh. There. There.

No, instead, I got the taste of my own puke and Captain Pote’s deep voice exclaiming, “Welcome to a new world. You are the hope of our entire endeavor. We are all anxious to meet you. We can’t wait to find out who you are. We’ve planned for you for decades, but you are unknown to us. Don’t lose heart just yet, little one, you carry the greatest responsibility on your shoulders ever given to a human. You will be the first of humanity to settle a new Earth. You will be the first one to descend to our future home and ensure its safety and survivability for us. You are both forerunner and, in a way, our guardian angel. You will protect us on that planet from forces we have yet to understand. So, prepare yourself. Use these next few weeks to make yourself ready, and I look forward to having you sit and join my daughters and me for dinner. Happy Awakening Day, little Eve!”

The video shut off and there I stood, a naked little six-year-old, just told that I would be the savior of this people. My feet stuck to the floor because of my own puke. I left a green set of footprints from my birthing capsule to the couch. I found a blanket, and I curled myself up in it, blocking out the light, blocking out the sound, blocking out the torture of this new world.

Since this is confession time, and I’m honest with you, you should know I pissed the bed a lot back then. Okay, I didn’t even know what a bathroom was until day two. Imagine that, of all the instruction videos they could have thrown at me, the location and proper use of the bathroom, was one scheduled for day two. The second day—day two! Can you believe it? Seriously, they were morons. When you’re born, the one thing you want is silence and food and then a place to relieve yourself. Babies get diapers. Not me. I got a great big bed to turn into my own personal litter box.

The first video, after Captain Pote’s wonderfully inspiring message, was on the education plan they had set up for me. I’m pretty sure that first video used the word “pedagogy.” Why did they think I would care about that? These geniuses had launched an interstellar craft with a mini-world, a small self-sustained version of Earth in a great rotating Disc, and they still didn’t understand children. They didn’t understand humans.

Maybe that’s why the whole thing went to the sewers. They knew engines. They figured out laundry, and they figured out life support. The food was solved. General biology and the entire balance of private geo-system was planned out meticulously. But they still couldn’t prepare for the uncontrollable insanity of humans.

It’s been years since they all died, and the ship’s systems are working correctly. The ship is still flying at top speed toward Àpáàdì. The Disc still spins. Gravity still works. The food producers in the lower level farms are still growing food at a break-neck pace. There’s more food than I can keep up with. The air is pure and clean. I’m healthy. The water in the great river Lokun still flows.

But the humans are all dead. Each and every one of them except me. Captain Pote killed seven himself in those last days. He had piled the bodies up in his office when I found him. He had ended up stabbing himself straight in the head. Ugh. I think the blood is still on his desk.