Motherless
⚪ 💀 Searching for a new beginning - with an AI and a chicken.
When you realize the value of all life, you dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future. — Dian Fossey
“Lexa, there’s nothing here. Just like the last geolocations.”
“I told you, Tali, this could take some time. Your mother wasn’t able to be specific about where she would be.”
“I wish you would stop calling it that.”
“But that’s who she is, Tali. Or was. She was your mother, and now that we’re ready for the next step, she’s the best chance we have of success.”
Tali paused as she reached the end of a long, crumbling wall to survey the landscape. The silence was broken only by the creak of a metal panel dangling from the structure she’d just left, and the scratching of feral chickens in the dirt outside it. It was noon on a summer day, sunny, but with a hailstorm arriving from the east. Tali needed to be under cover by then, and she’d rather it not be here, in the dead city.
She readjusted the ancient mobile strapped awkwardly to her wrist, its screen cracked and blank. “Lexa, I’m headed to the next location. It’s at the edge of signal range, so I’ll have to wait until we get more LOSes up before I can go further.”
Tali resumed her practiced trot down the wide but potholed path, her eyes flicking between watching her footing and checking for predators.
After a few minutes, Lexa remarked, “It’s like you don’t care about this.” She paused, waiting, or perhaps gathering her words. “All the work you’ve done, all the planning that has been put in, has been with this one goal.”
Furious, Tali jolted to a stop, then forced herself forward back into a trot. She had no time for theatrics. “Of course I care! I’m an End-Xer. I’ve known since I was five that I’m one of the last humans. But I think we should have kept focusing on gene manipulation, not relied on this heil Marty buried in a bunker in an abandoned city.”
“Hail Mary.”
“What?”
“It’s Hail Mary, not heil Marty. It refers to a religion from before the Collapse.”
“Oh. I thought it was from the Nazco.”
“Nazca. That’s the name of ancient civilization in the southlands.”
“I thought they were the bad guys?”
“Those are Na—no, I’m not going to say it. I really shouldn’t have neglected civics. You are woefully undereducated.”
“Who cares about the people who blew up the Earth’s biosphere? Let ‘em rot.”
The voice over her mobile’s blank screen increased in volume three increments as it recited her rarely used full name. “Taliera Tenzin Rachel Carson Diane Fossey! How can you say such a terrible thing?”
“Well, they are rotting, if they weren’t vaporized or already plant food, so I don’t think it’s such a terrible thing to say.”
There was a long, familiar pause. Finally, Lexa changed the subject, her voice more robotic than usual. “Geo 57, Paracoxi region.”
Tali looked up at a twelve-meter tall mound of tangled, sweet-smelling yellow and pink flowers, shaggy green-headed ground cover, and vines with heart-shaped leaves. No other buildings rose above knee-high for hundreds of meters in any direction, mute evidence of a bomb’s pressure wave.
“This is the geo? There’s nothing here. It’s a dirt pile.”
“No it’s not. If your mother said it was a possible location, then it’s something. A bunker, of sorts. There must be a door.”
Tali glanced at the sky, threatening with fist-like clouds the color of spent garden soil. “I’m about to get flattened. I’ll come back tomorrow. Or next week.” Her remark wasn’t as snarky as it sounded—the hail would range in size from the end of her knuckle to the width of her fist, and it might last days.
“We need this, Tali. People are losing—” Communication broke as the clouds thickened to a night-like density, then Lexa’s voice continued. “—science just isn’t going to have the breakthrough in time, not after all the effort we’ve put into it without result.”
Tali sighed. She knew it was true. Lexa Prime, the distributed artificial mind, had worked with the last of humanity to repair its DNA, combining and splitting and refining the genome, but this was it. No more humans unless they found the key.
A key hidden during the Collapse from a desperate population by Tali’s mother, Taliera Tenzin. Humanity’s savior.
And its demon.
Circling the mound, Tali looked for any sign of an entry. She had to admit, this place was in better shape than some of the places she’d searched. Most of them hadn’t been proper shelter for anything more finicky than a snake.
Snakes had made a spectacular comeback after the Collapse.
Tali kept one eye on the ground. Lexa Prime had ensured that her generation was resistant to venom, but bites hurt, bacteria festered, and snake venom had a tendency to evolve fast in the dead cities.
Lexa hadn’t spoken in some time. “Lexa? Mad at me?”
“You know I don’t get ‘mad.’”
“So you say.”
“I’ve been speaking the whole time. You must have been out of range.”
“Great. So while I’m able to hear you, tell me about this geo.”
“I have very little. A source from the late 20th century says this is a central office where cable routing was performed for ‘Southern Bell’ telephony, an old form of communications. Apparently, it was built to withstand a bomb blast.”
While they talked, Tali explored the mound. It was roughly rectangular.
“I can’t find an opening.”
“Well, make one. The hail is sweeping your way.”
At that moment, a hollow appeared near one corner. Tali pulled aside vines and ragged flowers, and found a portico sheltering a steel door, rusted and immovable.
“I found the entrance, but I’ll still have to carve it open.” Tropical weather and salt air blowing across the peninsula weren’t friendly to metal.
She pulled out a small package from her pocket and laid it carefully against the door, programming it for a large opening. The hand tractor laser began its slow work just as hail struck the roof overhead. Tali pushed herself as close to the door as she could without interfering and waited.
“Lexa, you there?”
No answer.
All around, the hail flattened the vegetation. She marveled at the plants’ fortitude.
Then she heard pecking and looked down. A feral rooster, decorative in a fluffy red ruff and heavy spurs, sheltered at her feet.
The plants and animals of Earth had found a way to continue. But humans proved too delicate, falling to the stresses and dangers in the one hundred years since the Collapse.
Humanity was dying out.
Tali gazed into the gray wall of ice pouring just a few feet away.
Lexa is right. There’s no time left.
Behind her, a snick sound announced completion. Tali turned her back on the hailstorm and pressed her foot into the metal door—the friction produced some heat, and if she didn’t hurry, she’d need to run the hand tractor again.
A hard push and the metal rectangle leaned inward and crashed onto the interior floor.
The rooster crowed angrily and flew toward Tali spurs first, knowing she was the author of the terrible sound.
Tali leapt into the hole without looking—tangling with a feral rooster was ill-advised.
She landed poorly, twisting her ankle, and heard the snap of bone.
