Becoming Echoan

Today’s the day I change. This is it, no turning back now. It’s a miracle of science, really, to alter one’s biology. After today the makeup of my blood will be changed at a cellular level to allow me to live on this new planet, my new home. My body will process the air I breathe differently so that I can subsist in the atmosphere of EchoB32. There are other changes too, smaller ones, the list was long and filled with biology jargon. I know my skin will also adapt to absorb the rays from this foreign sun, and my kidneys to process the changes in my water source. I don’t fully understand the science behind the change, even though I’ve spent my life studying math in science. Biology was never my strong suit, though, which is why I gravitated towards engineering. I only understand enough to know that the change is safe… and permanent. They studied native creatures on EchoB32 to understand how humans might survive long-term in this new world. They replicated the way the cells in those creatures transported oxygen, and other critical differences that made the creatures alien, the differences that kept us earth-bound. They spliced those changes into human DNA. I will be the 22^nd human to make the change, the 25^th human to set foot on this far away world.

Machines whirl and hum around me as a needle sinks into my arm. You want this, I remind myself, again. This is your dream. You will make human history. I do, I know I do. I’ve wanted this for as long as I could remember, for as long as I could comprehend the world around me enough to understand that I didn’t belong in it. I found solace as a kid staring into the vast reaches of space, knowing that if I could only go there, I would finally feel at home. After all, space couldn’t possibly be as isolating as Earth, at least not for me. I decided long ago that I’d rather be alone in the void of space, with stars as my only friends, than truly alone on a crowded Earth.

A small voice nags at the back of my mind, combating my mantra about fulfilling my dreams, But will you even be human after this? Honestly, not being human is a concept that I would have thought I’d be perfectly fine with, but now, it’s a question that has been bothering me with increasing frequency over the last few days. Does removing one’s ability to ever return to Earth revoke their right to call themselves human? What will I become? Echoan? I’ve heard the word thrown about, jokingly at first, but it was beginning to catch on. These thoughts overtake my confident mantra as the doctors begin to poke and prod me. I wish I could see out the windows; to stare into the starry abyss or look down at the azure glow of my new home, but the medical room on the ship has no windows.

When it is over, a doctor with a kind smile and long dirty-blond hair stares down at me. She helps me into a suit that is stiff and a little bulky as she explains that the change has begun, but it will take nearly a week to fully take hold. This suit will adjust my atmosphere slowly. The suit has to be worn until I set foot on my new planet. She smiles and explains softly that if I remove the helmet after the change progresses, but before I’m safely on the surface of EchoB32, that the atmosphere of the space station will kill me. She says this gently and matter-of-factly as if she isn’t telling me I face imminent death should I press the big shiny button she has just told me not to press.

My new normal is stiff, cumbersome and after a day, uncomfortable. After two days, I develop a fever and yearn to rip off the helmet and breathe fresh air, though I know the space station’s air is just as recycled as what I breathe in the claustrophobic confines of my helmet. I curl up and shiver as the fever dreams come and go. On day four I am lucid again, and my whole body aches. I smell the reek of myself inside the suit, and the odor holds an unfamiliar edge to it; like my body doesn’t know itself. On day five I itch all over, what is happening to me? My body feels like it wants to tear its own skin away like the real me would be underneath if I could just rid myself of this flesh exterior. On the sixth day, I load into a pod and head down to EchoB32. We touchdown with a thud and the ship unloads me into a windowless chamber where I spend the next day in pain as my ears pop and crackle and my eyes water as the chamber slowly equalizes from the atmosphere I’m used to, to that of my new home. Finally, on day seven, the doors open and a small voice from inside my helmet says, “You may now remove your Echo adjustment suit. Welcome home.” The voice conveys a cheeriness I haven’t felt this week and it adds to the eagerness I feel to get away from this suit, away from that voice that is pretending that everything is perfectly alright.

I rip the suit off like it’s burning me, my feet getting stuck and tripping me in my eagerness. I shake the last piece of fabric from me and clamber out of the front door of the chamber. I gasp for air, a white landscape stretches out as far as I can see, unbroken by hills or landscape, the white reflection is nearly blinding. The air feels wrong, my body feels wrong, everything feels wrong. Suddenly the very experience of existing feels different than everything I’ve known for the last 35 years of inhabiting a human body. I gasp and gulp, filling my lungs again and again but breathing doesn’t feel right, it doesn’t feel like it should. I collapse to my knees and look down at my hands that have taken on the color of ash. I shift the fine white dirt between my fingers, feeling the thin wispy shoots that grow from the ground. It looks like white wheat, but it isn’t wheat, it isn’t grass, this isn’t dirt, because this isn’t home. Those words have no meaning here, those are the objects of Earth.

What have I done?