Birth of Man

Birth of Man

It was sunny the day the aliens arrived. Summers in Portland were always sunny. For three blessed months out of the year, the city would simmer in the light of the sun. Portland came alive then, a whole city full of waterlogged prairie dogs poking out of their burrows to eat, shop, and enjoy the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. The day the aliens arrived was a perfect summer day, breezy, dry, and a steady 104.5 degrees. A Tuesday, if memory serves. There were rumors that Portland used to get as low as the 70’s during summer, but no one really believed that anymore. Those were the days before The Change.

“Stella, finish your breakfast,” my mom said to me. “We have to get downtown before it gets too hot.”

I focused on my mom, on the dark chestnut of her hair, and the gentle green of her eyes which contrasted sharply with my platinum hair and grey eyes. Mom was never stereotypically attractive, but she was beautiful to me. I thought she was more beautiful than I could ever be. Compared to her, I was colorless and pale. I assumed, as did almost everyone else, that I took after my father.

That morning, my mother was washing dishes by the kitchen window. In those days, we used only a rinse basin and a wash basin. Water cost a premium, so we only washed dishes in the morning when the taxes were lower. Laundry was done by hand in less than a gallon of water using dry detergent. Mark, my stepfather, was sitting at the table, reading the paper on his handheld while drinking his coffee. I returned my attention to my now soggy organic whole grain sugar flakes, the ostensibly healthier rip off of the extinct Frosted Flakes, and worked on finishing my cereal.

“Huh,” Mark chuffed.

“What’s wrong, honey?” Mom asked, shuffling another plate to the drying rack.

“Giraffes are officially extinct.”

“That’s sad,” I say and get up to wash out my bowl in the tub. Mom and I bump hips, and she hits me playfully with a towel. “I liked giraffes.”

“That is sad,” she says. “Didn’t they officially declare something else extinct last week?”

“More and more every day,” Mark says. “They’re blaming it on Post-Change Incompatibility.”

Mom rolled her eyes. “Humans are a parasite on the planet.”

I laugh and she pretends to swat me again. “We know, mom. The aliens should just come down and take over the planet.”

She nodded her head. “It’s true! They would do a better job than we’re doing.” She paused and stared out the window. “You know, I was kidnapped by aliens once.”

Mark and I exchanged the same glance we’ve exchanged each time mom casually drops this factoid into conversation. “Sure, mom.” Mark shrugged and I sighed. “I’m going to go get changed.”

* * *

The Change occurred in 2030, right on time, if one believed the climate scientists of the day, which, unfortunately, a lot of people didn’t. The atmospheric temperature officially surpassed four degrees, rendering a mass extinction event, the sixth in all of earth’s history. In a blink, more than half the world’s population disappeared. Factories shut down, fields turned to ash, animals died, and the bones of the emaciated dead jutted out from sand dunes off once well-traveled highways. In 2034, four years into the extinction, governments pulled together to build climate domes to house survivors. That’s where we lived now. In order to mask the horror of those years, the remaining members of the United Nations named the event The Change which was met with both cynicism and derision.

“After all,” said one late night comic, “calling it ‘The Change’ sounds like Mother Nature went through menopause.”

Post-Change, all errands needed to be done before noon unless you liked your skin baked, broiled, and flakey. Most people stayed indoors all day long. If a family was lucky enough to have money, then homes could be kept around 80 degrees. If not, then they lived in government coolhouses, which were not much more than medieval concentration camps out of the early twenty-first century. Mark was a retired government Lackie, and mom still worked freelance as an environmental researcher, so we had money. Mom’s job was to help determine the next CO2 threshold, the point when human life would be completely unsustainable, even with the coolhouses and protective domes around the major cities. From the way she talked about her work, we weren’t too far away from that. Not that she minded. I always wondered if mom was really working to save humans or just finding the formula to expedite our demise.

Not that it mattered.

Mom and I made it into downtown before the heat crept in. Mark, for whatever reason, tagged along even though he hated shopping. That Tuesday we had plans to go grocery shop, cash in some credits for drinking water, and, if we had enough credits leftover in the budget, maybe get an ice cream at the little shop that still made it the old-fashioned way with cream, sugar, salt, and ice. Our grocery list was relatively thin, comprised mostly of government-approved staples. Because of Mark’s status as a retired government official, he was granted a few extra items that were fresh or luxuries. We could have real toilet paper, for example, rather than relying on the pressed dried grasses most people had to use. We also received three rations of fresh vegetables every two weeks. Mom and Mark agreed to donate one ration to the coolhouses, so we split the remaining among the three of us.

“I would rather we ate leaner than know another family out there never gets to have a salad,” Mom always said.

Mom was like that. Kind, considerate, and willing to sacrifice. It made her misanthropy all the more entertaining. The older I got I wondered how she tolerated the cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance. I learned that word my last year in school, just before the aliens came.

“How’s the budget?” Mark asked mom.

“We have just enough to share an ice cream, if we want to,” she said cheerfully. “I’m thinking chocolate.”

Chocolate wasn’t really my favorite, or Mark’s, but it was mom’s. It was more expensive, but the joy it brought to her face always made us smile. Mark and I exchanged another look and nodded.

“Yes, please,” we said in unison.

We paid for the chocolate ice cream sharing one bamboo spoon and taking turns. If mom noticed that Mark and I took smaller bites, she never said anything and neither did we. The ice cream was sweet and cold and slipped down my throat in a way that was both slimy and silky.

We sat outside the ice cream shop on one of the benches that overlooked the old riverbed that was now not more than a stream. In history class, we learned that the Willamette River was once a major waterway in the Pacific Northwest, crawling over nearly two hundred miles and feeding the Columbia, which was now considerably smaller according to the pictures. It always amazed me how different the world was just twenty-five or thirty years ago. The Change had brought forth all the prophesized disasters, and many new ones. The Mississippi River’s flow, once north to south, shifted in reverse somewhere around 2032. The subsequent weather and changes to the water levels caused the great beast to consume the Illinois river along with many smaller ones, eventually turning the Great Lakes into the single largest freshwater mass in the world. The problem was the heat and lack of oxygen which rendered it mostly a giant dead zone.

We finished our ice cream and deposited the container and bamboo spoon into the recycle bin, listening to the hiss as it combusted our trash into something new and, hopefully, usable. As we started to walk towards the bus stop to get back home, Mom suddenly stopped. I followed her gaze up into the sky and frowned. Soon enough, all three of us were staring at the sky, our hands shielding our eyes.

Holy shit, I thought. Was that…aliens?

* * *

The next moments were a horrific blur. Those in the streets began screaming as the vessel, a stereotypical silver disc easily the size of a large building hovered over the city. Other large discs descended as well, moving in all directions away from the center of Portland. Mom and Mark pulled me close, the three of us making a huddle as the disc settled over the downtown. Fear unlike anything I had ever known speared me in the chest. Mom was frozen, her dark hair falling down her back, her chest heaving with terror. Mark was frantically looking around, trying to find a way out of the city.

A city bus careened to a stop near us and a crowd of people began running. We took off, our feet flying over the hot pavement which seemed to be getting hotter by the minute. Mom had me in a death grip, but the bus filled quickly. I couldn’t let something happen to mom and Mark. I loved them too much.

Blindly, I remember shoving my mother and Mark into the bus. The door closed with my mother banging on it, screaming my name, but I knew we wouldn’t see each other again. I turned with the others left behind and watched as a thin door opened in the belly of the great ship. A steady, bright beam of energy shot out from the ship, crashing into the earth, appearing to rip down to its very center. Then that same beam began to pulse, a weird, almost musical beat that reminded me of classical dubstep in electronic music.

My brain temporarily short-circuited, chasing an ephemeral squirrel. The aliens were invading with dubstep?

Shaking my head, I began to run.

I had to get out of the downtown. I didn’t think about survival, didn’t think it mattered, but something animal in me took over and urged me to run even as I watched people slowly getting sucked into the earth, their bodies sliding into dark holes that ate their screams and left no evidence of their existence in its wake.

I felt it then, the pull of the earth disintegrating. The ground began to suck at the soles of my feet, a sick, muddy slurp that pulled my skin from the fascia and bone of my body. Like the earth was drinking a human smoothie. Desperate, and probably naive, I opened my backpack and wrapped the books I always carried with me around my feet, using them as makeshift shoes. I thought if I could keep a barrier between me and the earth, then maybe I had more of a chance.

I ran until I couldn’t run anymore, until I was away from the domed edges of the city looking over the bluff that used to be called Powell Butte. I watched that great beam of light pulse into the core of the earth. Buildings crumbled, their blocks of concrete swirling around the beam, creating a vortex. Trees, water, birds all swirled around the core of the beam. I heard the screams as the earth twisted and turned itself inside out. They were reversing the polarities, shifting the balance of the world. As the pulsing wave came for me, I realized it was over.

The world was ending.

I bent down and pulled the books from my feet.

* * *

I awoke to whiteness, nothing but a blank canvas landscape of blaring light. I opened my eyes, remembered falling, remembered the splitting of my atoms as I descended into the gaping maw of an angry planet. I also remembered the strange acceptance that came over me the moment I took off my book-shoes. Resignation was Novocain for the soul.

I looked down at my body and frowned. I was clothed, but the clothes were odd. I was covered in a long pale robe that glistened with gossamer colors. My hair, always silver, blended in with the mother-of-pearl swirls in the fabric.

“Welcome,” a voice said through the white.

I frowned, my eyes trying to peer through the invisible veil around me but staring at that presence was like trying to focus on something in the corner of your eye. It kept moving, shifting, never coming fully into focus.

“Who are you?” I asked. “Are you real? Is this heaven?”

The creature smiled, or at least, I thought it smiled. I was not sure how I even knew. “I am Mot. I am real. This is not heaven.”

“Why am I here?” I asked. “Where’s my mother? Where’s Mark?”

“Your mother has joined the others. The one you call ‘Mark’ has joined the others. They have all returned to the Great Source at the beginning of all things.”

“Why am I here? Why I can’t be with them?” My heart caught and I felt a hint of a sob burbling up from my chest. I was nineteen and wanted my mom.

The creature moved closer to me, its movements slick and smooth as if it floated. It was then that I saw it. Silver hair, silver eyes, pale, pale skin. It looked almost human, but not quite. It smiled down at me, in a way that was both gentle and infinitely wise.

“Because, daughter of Mot, we have a task for you.”

* * *

It was sunny the day I discovered my mother was, in fact, kidnapped by aliens. Shortly after learning the truth of my conception, I returned to earth, but not the earth that I had once known. Everything was green. Everything was new. Technology was primitive. Stone tools. Seeds. Spears and arrows flinted from stone. There were only 10,000 of us. This time, the Guardians were going to try for a smaller breeding population, a way of preventing overpopulation and rise of agricultural dominance that led to The Change and the sixth extinction. Instead, we would start small, breeding selectively, minimizing the risks associated with human evolution. The fact that we all were, half-breed Guardians, would, in theory, help. The Guardians, the aliens that arrived that summer day in Portland when I was only nineteen, were giving humans another shot.

“This is all we can do for humans,” Mot said. “We cannot do more for them after this. The Great Source will not allow our interference a second time.”

Translation: Don’t mess this up.

I looked over my clan, comprised of about fifty individuals, and felt the weight of the new world fall on my shoulders. There were just a handful of us that remembered the white, the place between alive and dead, and who were sent back with our memories intact. We agreed, once we met in that liminal space, to separate into clans to increase the chance of survival. Peace and empathy, above all else, was paramount. These new versions of humans seemed to understand that intrinsically, even if they did not understand exactly why.

Those of us who remembered agreed. They must never remember how high humans flew the first time so we would not fall again.

I raised my staff, letting my clan know that we have to keep moving for the day. There was a safe place to camp by the edge of a river. I knew this. I was not sure how I knew this, but it was if the whole map of the world was in my brain, helping me to guide these ungainly creatures into the next stage of human evolution. One clan member comes to me, pulls on my robe, and looks up at me with curiosity. It is a child, its silver hair still short and curly. She barely comes to my hips.

“What is it, small one?” I asked.

“What shall we call you, clan mother?” The child asked.

My heart swelled a bit at the title. I had no idea this was how they thought of me. I liked it. It reminded me of my mother, of the last time I saw her and the way she tried to protect me. At least, I thought, she went quickly to the Great Source and did not suffer. Mot promised me that.

I took a deep breath, remembered a story from long ago about the creation of the world, about a deity that represented all of the earth. I thought to myself. That was who I wanted to be. I wanted to be the mother to this flock, to nurture them, to grow into a future that didn’t include apathy, violence, and war. I knew it may not be possible. Perhaps humans would always be destined to fade into oblivion. The earth didn’t fuss about it. She continued on. She was patient and good. She was willing to give us a second chance. I would, too, for as long as I was able.

“Gaia,” I said softly. “I am called Gaia.”