Aberrant Sentimentals
Sacraments for spawn
Zuri left the lab in a daze, her mind swirling with emotions too complex to untangle. As she trudged home, her steps heavy and her eyes focussed afar, she was oblivious to the three hooded figures moving from shadow to shadow behind her.
She had become increasingly melancholic on the days of the spawn harvests – which was why the Elders had ordered that she be watched – but today her sorrow was palpable, a dark cloud that shrouded her every thought and movement.
The shift that day had started uneventfully enough, with a notification of the date set for her bicentennial cardio-refresh—a routine procedure, but a reminder of her synthetic immortality.
Yet, it wasn't this that troubled her.
Nor was it the lab work involved in that day’s harvest.
In fact, for quite some time now, she’d been able to perform the necessary microsurgery and isolate the spawn’s pluripotent stem cells virtually on autopilot. And she found it an equally mindless task to transfer the separated cells into culture vials and transport them through to the adjoining tissue differentiation and internal organ fabrication labs.
It was only after she’d reached the final stage of the procedure, homogenizing the depleted spawn, and then pumping the resulting slurry through to the Nutri-supplements centre, that the weight of her actions struck home. When she’d logged the details of that day’s batch, batch E-26, her eyes had caught the second label attached to the neck of the flask, which gave the provenance of the cells as sector VX-105.
She was suddenly then overcome with nausea as she registered that the stem cells she’d just harvested had come from spawn created using her own cryogenically preserved ova.
She had always known and accepted that her contributions to the lab's work were part of a greater good, but she had never before appreciated the full implications of her actions. Not only did she now feel remorse for yet another batch of spawn that she’d terminated, she also felt an unbearable sense of personal loss. Wiping away tears, she forced herself to focus, reciting the secret prayers that she would offer later.
***
Back in her living quarters, Zuri changed into her grey uni-dress, still unaware of the hooded figures lurking outside. She prepared and ate her Nutri-meal mechanically, her thoughts drifting elsewhere.
When the ambi-lights along the external walkways later transitioned to evening-blue, she remained fully dressed, waiting for Orren to call.
Orren was a lux engineer responsible for maintaining the sol-lines that ran down from the surface. He and Zuri had first met some twenty-five years earlier while queuing for their third replacement eye fitting. They had straightway hit it off and quickly became close friends, but the stronger bond between them – and the reason for their clandestine evening meetings – had come about only recently.
Together they left Zuri’s quarters and walked hand-in-hand, following the main passageway down toward the pleasure block.
As they passed the Maglev transport hub, however, they each looked about to ensure that no one saw, and quickly ducked down the narrow side-way that led to their local air-scrub facility.
At the facility, Orren keyed the entry code, and they joined their small covert worship group. The group met only after the spawn harvests, each time drawing strength from their forbidden faith.
Tonight, it was Zuri who led the vespers.
“Let us kneel,” she said softly, and the coverts then knelt before a makeshift altar set with two tealights flickering beside a green quartz spawn figurine. “We are as ever grateful, Unseen One,” she began, the others echoing her words. They gave thanks for the science that perpetuated their existence and prayed for the peace of the harvested spawn.
As the coverts then gave their final response and fell to silent prayer, the facility door swung wide, and an inrush of air caused the tealights to extinguish.
In the brief few moments before the Somex darts took effect, the coverts remained conscious just long enough to discern the raised epaulettes and winged faceguards of the three Wardens silhouetted against the soft evening-blue.
***
There was no announcement made of the coverts’ arrest or detainment, and there were very few who knew of their subsequent processing. The Elders simply requisitioned an out-of-cycle supply of neuronal stem cells from the Council of Primes, and Zuri, Orren, and their fellow worshippers were then fast-tracked for a pre-term frontal lobe refresh.
“The offending neurons have been successfully replaced,” the neurosurgeon reported after the operation was done. “And the interconnecting synapses have all been micro-surgically modified to excise all traces of emotion relating to spawn.”
“That’s good,” the Senior Elder said. “The ‘faith’ borne of their aberrant sentimentalism will likely not surface again for another century or so.” He then made to leave but out of idle curiosity looked over the surgical records.
He smiled as he read the record relating to Zuri’s procedure, and the neurosurgeon frowned and quizzically cocked his head.
“It’s nothing of any importance,” the Senior Elder explained. “It’s just that the neuronal stem cells you implanted to correct the female aberrant turn out to have been engineered using the harvest got from batch VX-105, E26.”
Once and Ever After upon a Pitch Dark Singularity
In space, no one can hear you scream
Once and ever after upon a pitch dark singularity there were three co-existing time entities. One went by the name of Now, and the others were Back Then and To Be.
And for a wholly unfathomable span of time (which, from their perspective, amounted to no time at all), these three were perfectly content with their lot, contemporaneously occupying the same – and as far they were concerned – the one and only pitch dark space-time event.
Until she came along, that is.
She – was Annie “Tardis” Schrödinger – and she was both a poly-dimensional framework’s worst nightmare, and their best ever dream come true.
She was the precocious, and often meddlesome, polymathic daughter of a twenty-third century Austrian astrophysicist and a quantum engineer from Stanford. She was super-intelligent, insatiably curious, and a real whizz with a sonic screwdriver.
She was also wantonly promiscuous, had big blue come-to-bed eyes, full pouting lips, and a figure that other women had freely admitted they’d be prepared to kill for.
Quite how she managed to design and construct the temportation machine, nobody really knew. But design and construct it she did, and she used it to transport her physical self simultaneously forward and back in time to the singularity.
When she arrived there and then, she completely screwed with the local space-time fabric.
She first conjoined with Now, then seduced Back Then, and straight afterwards enjoyed mutual satisfaction with To Be.
All three time entities subsequently became so universally messed up that they didn’t know whether they were alive, dead, coming, going, happened or happening – and Annie simply blew each of them a kiss and returned to California.
Yesterday, at the age of eighty-three – or possibly six thousand and eighty-three - she passed away quite peacefully while watching re-runs of Friends.
And she never yet revealed where she’d been, nor how exactly she’d got there, or what she’d done when she did.
But all will inevitably become clear in the fullness of time, and so Now, Back Then, and To be are eagerly looking forward (and for safety’s sake also backward) to whenever the same or some other Annie might come and co-exist with them again.