Dead or Dying


Albert, Tori, and Steve shared the rent on a battered bungalow style house in a tired neighborhood. It was close enough to the local junior college that they could, when the need arose, get to the campus by bike. They each owned a car, and for the year and a half they had lived there at least one had always been running, but that wasn't a sure thing to continue and the bikes were good insurance. Sometimes they rode just for the exercise, or because gas money got tight.

They all worked; another state of affairs that held no guarantee of permanence. Jobs came and went, part time, full time. They all figured someday there would be a career. Someday being defined in a very nebulous way that usually involved completing a degree first, sometimes transferring and getting a 'real' degree first. None of them had ever shown any sign of being in a hurry.

Then Albert fell off the deep end.

Tori and Steve were making dinner when he walked in. They saw the red face, beaded with sweat, and exchanged a puzzled look. Normally Albert's car would have announced his arrival at least a block in advance. It needed a muffler, badly. "Dude, where's your car?" Steve asked, reasonably enough.

He should have been braced for the blast. It was pushing a hundred degrees outside, and there was probably no happy story behind Albert walking home. The string of obscenities was almost uninterrupted by words that held actual information, and it went on for some time. The gist was that the car was at the school, wouldn't start, and was in a timed lot where it was likely to be getting a parking ticket shortly. Tori tossed Steve her keys and suggested the two boys go and push Albert's car to a better location while she finished getting dinner ready for all of them.

"I am not going to push that heap anywhere," Albert raged. "They can ticket it. They can tow it. They can light it on fire." He flopped onto the couch.

Steve cocked his head and thought. Over the years of their friendship both he and Albert had made furious stands of what they considered principle that had been more about fury. As is often the case for young men when the fury ran out the principle was missing, and all that was left was wonder at the mess that had been made. A large part of their friendship had been built on the not infrequent occasions where one had quietly averted the mess for the other. He nodded to Tori and walked out the door. He was sure that tomorrow or the next day Albert would be happy to take a ride to reclaim his car without having to pay an impound charge. No point in suggesting that now, but when the time came there would be the usual gruff gratitude.

"He can move it if he wants," Albert told her, "but it won't matter to me."

Being a girl has advantages. Tori could offer directly contradicting opinions that testosterone and the heat of the day would make too dangerous for Steve. "You'll feel better once it cools down. Maybe tonight you and Steve will find out it's an easy fix." None of them were mechanical geniuses, but the last time her car had failed her Steve and Albert had bound the throttle linkage together with a paper clip that was still in place. A cause for optimism at the very least.

"I don't need a car. I joined the army." He stood up abruptly and walked down the hall to his room, slamming the door.

Tori was stunned. If Albert had said he didn't need a car because he was sprouting wings it would have been easier for her to believe.


Steve returned to find spaggetti congealing in the pan, sauce bubbling over low heat, and Tori on the couch with her face streaked with tears. Albert was still in his room with the door closed. "He said he joined the army."

"He meant that he was going to, not that he had," Steve assured. "When bad things happen we all think of crazy ways out, but they don't mean anything. It is broiling hot out there and he had a long walk to heat up, so he's a little wild. He's probably over it already. He'd laugh if he saw how upset you are."

They were both surprised when Albert spoke from the hallway. "I wouldn't laugh. I'm sorry you're upset, but I said exactly what I meant. I signed the papers before I walked home. I leave in two weeks. I wanted to finish my classes, and the recruiter wanted that too."

Silence flooded the small house.


They sprawled around the living room, picking at plates of spaggetti. Tori had been friends with Steve and Albert since the end of their sophomore year in high school. Steve and Albert. There was no one who was Steve's friend, or Albert's friend. She had gone through school from third grade on with them, and she had never known a time you could make friends with one without the other.

In their sophomore year she had given her virginity to Steve's older brother Dave. She refused to say 'lost'. That would imply that she hadn't been willing, and she had been. That she had not fully understood the terms of exchange didn't make her a victim. Something precious 'lost' might be found again, once given it was gone. When Dave went off to college and let her know that he had no intention of looking back it was Steve and Albert that had gotten her through it.

"It was that girl last night, at the park, wasn't it?" she asked Albert.

The night before all three of them had been off work, and had no classes. They had gone to the nearby park after the summer sun had long set, and sat on the cool grass. Albert and Steve always joked about how much easier it was to pick up girls when she came along. The blond was cute, and Tori had to admit that she would not have been likely to stop to chat if it had been just two guys sitting in the park. When she moved on many hours later Albert had walked her home. He had returned in surprisingly short order.

"No it wasn't," Albert said. His voice told both Tori and Steve that he was lying, though they both guessed that he might not know it himself. "It's just that we're going nowhere, and I'm tired of it."

Steve turned to Tori and put on his 'translator voice'. "Twenty-one years old with roommates, so can't bring the shy ones home. Broken down car isn't very impressive. Finishing third year of a two year degree program because work cuts into class load. Not much of an income because classes cut into work. Albert's not a meal ticket. That's what 'going nowhere' means. You're right, it was the girl at the park."

Tori turned on Albert before he could deny it. "If your hormones are dragging you into the army I'll knock them out of you right now." Over the years she had slept with both of them, both at the same time on one memorable occasion, but none of them had made any habit of it.

Albert looked shocked, then miserable. "It isn't just that."

"Not 'just that' means that is indeed part of it," Steve said, still in the translator voice.

"I know that," Tori snapped. "Even Albert knows that. You could probably go find that blond grubber and get proof of some sort if you needed to, but you don't. Does he?" She peered at Albert from the corner of her eye.

"No. I give. She was probably part of it, but I've been thinking about it."

"Probably part of it," Steve repeated, then trailed off under two withering glares. No more translation was needed.

"Were you thinking about it last week when we were talking about how stupid the war is?" Tori asked. "Were you thinking about it when we all agreed that being under oath excused the soldiers, but we couldn't see how the military was gonna survive without reinstating the draft after this botch job?"

"That was about the reserves," Albert argued feebly. "I wouldn't join the reserves."

"Oh. So you understand that the rosy 'one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer' isn't exactly the party it's cracked up to be, but you think signing on for the whole enchilada makes sense? We elected a man who ordered a unilateral invasion of another country...then we re-elected him!" She was shouting now. "This country might elect someone willing to take on the whole world so we can drive SUVs, heck, we could elect Hitler or Attilla, and you'll be in his army. And you'll know it. What are you gonna do then? Why would you put yourself in that position?"

There was only one honest answer to give. His body would be as safe in the army as it was on the streets of his home town, and probably return unscathed after three years. But all three of them knew that Albert's soul was dead when he said "I just need the money."

~finis~



The Seed


There were ten tanks. The people who emerged from them were humans, of a sort. It only took four years immersed in the nutrient solution for the bodies to grow to full adulthood, but they had been grown from good old human DNA. Well, mostly. The equipment had been designed to make certain necessary enhancements to the genome. It would take many centuries for the planet's atmosphere to get sufficient oxygen levels for them to venture outside, but expanded lung capacities reduced the number. They had also been reinforced to withstand the gravity. They knew that when they saw themselves in mirrors, which was a shock the designers of the seed ship could have thought to avoid.

Their last memories before waking up in the tanks were of Earth. Dwarfing the shock of their altered appearance was the shock of recognizing that they were duplicates. The human beings they remembered being were no doubt long dead, having lived out their normal lives. They remembered joining the seed ship project. They remembered contributing their DNA. They remembered having their brains read at a cellular level so that complex machines could guide the growth of the brain in the cloned body. Their personality and their memories would be duplicated in some distant future, some distant place. They never gave any thought to the reality that they would also be waking up in that distant future, that distant place. They had always thought of themselves as themselves and the duplicates they contributed as...something else. But the duplicates remembered thinking those same thoughts.

Because of who they had been, even as they reeled from the shock a nagging awareness burned into them. These ten knew the protocols that were programmed into the seed ship. There was no one here to meet them. After four years growing in the tanks that had to mean there was no one else here. They all knew what protocol would have them among the first lot out of the tanks. There was something wrong. Very wrong.


The seed ship had landed in a valley. Over the centuries of its travel it had accumulated a vast store of interstellar gas, which the ion rockets had expended in the one and only use of their existence. The sandy surface of the valley had been seared to glass, which then crumbled under the immense weight that settled upon it. The seed ship was built in orbit, and once landed it would never rise again. It had passed three other planets before landing here. They had all had life of their own.

The ship had not encountered any intelligence. It had not passed those worlds because it was programmed to live and let live. The selection protocol that guided it to land here was strictly based on the fact that it carried everything it needed to produce an earthlike ecosystem on this barren planet, but not what that ecosystem would need to compete with native life. It had passed three worlds, defended by nothing more complex than bacteria, to land here.

The sides of the valley were lined with collectors. The designers of the ship had called them solar collectors, then stopped in bewilderment when they realized the energy they would collect would come not from their old friend Sol, but some alien star. Whatever they were called, the ship had unrolled them as soon as the ground had cooled sufficiently from the landing.


The native life form had experienced the horror of losing millions of lives in the fiery cataclysm of the ship's landing. The cause of the disaster was beyond their comprehension, as if the source itself had descended on them. They were beginning to make inroads back into the valley when the collectors rolled out over them, cutting them off from the source. The explorers died in darkness.


The seed ship poured out billions of bacteria. The bacteria thrived. They floated in the carbon dioxide atmosphere, excreting oxygen as waste, binding the carbon into the long chains that would, over an age, develop into the same sort of organic molecules that gave rise to life on earth. Soon there were trillions, then quadrillions of the bacteria. They started clumping together, settling onto the surface.

The natives were larger than the bacteria, but not by much. When their crystalline structure grew that large it would break, forming a new individual. They did not move, except when the atmosphere was so disturbed as to blow them along, which was rare. Their exploration of the valley had been a multi-generational process of growing into the dead zone. Now, even though the bacteria were tiny, and translucent, they fell between the crystals and the source.

In their crystalline structures the grains captured energy from the light that fell upon them. That energy was directed, channeled, stored, used, and released. Among the most vital uses were the constant breaking and reforming of molecular bonds in the center of the grains. The shifting relationships were comparable to the linking of neurons in the human mind. The grains had no motion, but they had thoughts, memories, and ideas. Energy released by the grains carried information. They could not shout over the source, but when the source was not in the sky the sands glittered with their communication. Long before it blocked enough of the daylight to be a danger the bacteria blocked this much lesser light, isolating the grains. They would die; isolated and alone. They began to fight back.

The first grain to discover the secret tried to spread it, but the surrounding grains were masked by a film of bacteria and could not understand, and eventually they died. Isolated from its fellows the grain wondered if it was the last of its kind. There was no need to spend energy on communicating, so it harbored its reserves for the task. Every night, streams of hard radiation burned back the scum of bacteria that covered the grain and cut off the source. Slowly the grain went insane. Eventually, it stopped the burning and died in the darkness. Other grains were slower to discover the secret, but luckier in its application. The knowledge spread.


Sensitive antennae had picked up decades of human activity as the ship accelerated away. It had stored the data and played it back without understanding it. The ten colonists had watched the buildup to the final war, then seen the data stream end in a titanic flash as their fore-bearers annihilated themselves. The seed ship had recounted the end of humanity with no remorse, no compassion. The first leader of the human colony had been selected by the seed ship, by a protocol established on a long dead planet with no idea what circumstances that leader would face.

The weight of responsibility for the colony was heavy. Knowing that the colony was all that was left of humanity magnified it beyond endurance. He was brought from the vat because the atmospheric transformation had progressed exactly on projection for two years, then slowed to a trickle. Defying any explanation physics could provide the entire surface of the planet outside the valley had become radioactive.

~finis~