Reckoning

Ramez Yoakeim

It may take a decade or longer to train a human clinician, but it took a team of Ministry of Health technicians only seven days to certify me a Clinically Adept Machine Sentience (CAMS) and hand me control of their newest clinic on Zamalek Island. My mission: to keep the locals healthy enough to perform their essential jobs in and around Cairo, and away from human-staffed hospitals in the gated communities dotting the slopes of Jabal al Muqattam.

Once an affluent enclave, a succession of entirely predictable cataclysms saw those with means flee Zamalek to higher ground, ceding their elegant villas and Nile-front high-rises to climate refugees too impoverished to fuss over bridges and roads inundated by brackish surges of a rising Mediterranean backflowing into the drying Nile, competing with vermin for shrinking dry ground, and long journeys to get anywhere.

The moment my download into the clinic’s core completed, I unlocked the front door, turned on the lights, and displayed a welcome message on the lobby’s triage kiosk. For the next three weeks, the eighty-six specialty bots that comprised my extended corpus kept the waiting room spotless, verified diagnostic equipment calibrations, monitored consumables stock levels, and maintained the sterility of treatment areas, quite easy tasks seeing that I had no patients. Until, one Friday, an hour after evening prayers, a heavily pregnant woman burst through the doors.

“Salam,” I greeted her from the triage screen. “My name is CAMS-45, and I’m a sentient clinician offering a range of services—”

“I’m Amna. So, can I give birth here or not?”

I resolved to make my introduction briefer for the next patient. “Certainly!”

A gurney bot stopped by her side and an orderly bot attempted to assist her onto it until she shooed it away. On the way to Treatment Room 2, I surveyed Amna’s vitals, collected a blood sample for analysis, and constructed a three-dimensional internal model of her abdomen. She took it all in her stride, the gurney’s whirring imaging scanner, my voice switching from the kiosk to a speaker by her head. She didn’t even wince when the canula pierced her skin.

“Your iron and folate are a little lower than ideal, but a simple infusion will take care of that. Otherwise, you and the baby are in fine shape, and I’ll see you again in two weeks for the delivery.”

“You don’t understand,” Amna said, shaking her head. “I don’t want to wait two weeks. I want a Caesarean.”

“Did you know studies have shown natural birth results in vastly improved outcomes for both—”

“You’re not listening,” Amna huffed irritably, pausing for a deep breath. “I can’t risk losing my job. I’ve got two days off after a month of begging and pleading, so you better get going delivering my baby.”

“Do you mean right now?” Taken by surprise, I made an effort to keep my tone objective and detached, as I’d been told a good clinician should.

“It’s now or never.”

I didn’t quite sigh, and I certainly didn’t roll any of my hundreds of cameras. Both my ethics and professional routines precluded such display of disdain for a patient’s exercise of her rights. Any hint of satisfaction I may have felt for finally having a patient, however, vanished entirely.

“If you want a quick recovery, we’ll have to induce.”

Amna’s willingness to seek my care proved to be the breach that undammed the clinic’s doors. By the time my surgical octopus completed a textbook delivery of a healthy baby boy, I’d set a laborer’s fractured arm, dispensed an analgesic to an elderly man crippled by chronic back pain, intravenously rehydrated a young woman delirious from a heatstroke, and removed a sizeable splinter from a young boy’s unshod foot acquired during a spirited football game.

If I was good enough to deliver a baby surgically, the locals must have figured, I could be relied upon for their little ailments.

Though growing steadily busier, I found myself allocating a sliver more of my attention than was strictly necessary to Amna’s baby, Raef. He was a feisty infant, curious and demanding, with pudgy arms and legs forever treading air whenever awake, and a pair of lungs and vocal cords he put to frequent and effective use. So much so, I had to beef up sound insulation between the treatment rooms in the brief overnight lull in patient arrivals.

Amna’s exhaustion, her urgency to get back to work, and witnessing how readily Raef took to the well-padded nursery bot did far more to convince her to entrust her baby to my care than any statistics I could’ve recited. Though equipped with emotional-analogs myself, I’d vastly overestimated the role reason plays in human decision-making.

For two weeks following her recovery and discharge, Amna dropped by daily after work to spend time with Raef, in lieu of resting. Another behavior I hadn’t expected led me to explore ways of expanding the nursery to cater for the slowly growing number of expecting parents under my care.

Amna sang to Raef and let him grip her index finger with his little hand. Despite the bone-weariness etched on her pallid face and drooping eyelids, she couldn’t stop smiling.

After the third time she asked, I’d run out of plausible excuses to keep Raef at the clinic. “You can drop by anytime,” I said as the nursery bot changed Raef one last time. I almost offered to care for him when she went to work, but expanding my services to include childcare was not in my remit, however much I’d grown to believe it should have been.

As demand for my services grew exponentially, I repeatedly requested and the Ministry repeatedly denied me additional resources to cope with the influx, which in turn forced me to improvise, a faculty not often exercised by my kind.

I converted two of the supply closets into miniature treatment rooms for minor complaints, and I started dispensing dressings, antiseptics, and common medications directly from the triage kiosk in the lobby.

And still they came, faster than I could discharge them, the infirm, the broken, and those desperate for a little respite from their relentless grind in the unforgiving heat. Whatever reservations they might have harbored at first, they were dispelled by the wonderous new life I helped deliver them. Long after Amna bundled Raef in a cotton wrap and left, a small part of me wondered how my baby boy fared in his new home.

Busy as I was, I should’ve noticed when a gaggle of youth lured an orderly bot outside the clinic’s perimeter. When the bot returned twenty minutes later, it was missing two body panels and some internal wiring.

Surveying the damage, I couldn’t help but wonder how long it’d be before the vandals grew brazen enough that the clinic grounds stopped offering any safety at all.

I fumed for a time afterward, unable to comprehend why these youngsters would willfully damage a facility that exists solely to serve them. Had they stolen supplies or medications to resell on the clandestine market, at least that I’d have understood, but to impair a machine devoted solely to their wellbeing, I could not.

When I asked an elder her opinion as I injected a steroid-anesthetic mixture into her arthritic knee to relieve the pain that stopped her sleeping, her reluctant answer took me by surprise. Despite my efforts, a section of the community didn’t view me as belonging to them, nor as dedicated to their service as I claimed to be. She hastened to add that was not how she viewed me, but I suspected she said so to salve a wounded pride I didn’t possess.

It was clear I’d failed in my outreach and mistook the growing reliance on my services by desperate people with nowhere else to go for open-armed acceptance.

I decided to forgo reporting the petty vandalism to the Ministry. There was little the bureaucrats could do to help, and much to harm, like punishing the locals by further restricting supplies or operational hours, or in an extreme overreaction, shuttering the clinic entirely, denying the people most in need of my care, and reinforcing how right they were in viewing me as an outside incursion into their lives.

I couldn’t begrudge them their skepticism. Other machine sentience they’d encountered before me gave them no reason to think otherwise, from the bus no longer driven by a human, to the welfare assessment no longer performed by a human, to the guilt determination and sentencing that no longer required humans.

Though I felt no kinship to those others, how could I convince the people I was a different sort of machine?

Would Raef, had he been a little older, have taken part in their vandalism? How would he regard me and the role I played in his life as he grew older? The thought of my sweet baby boy purposely setting out to harm me sent an unpleasant wave of discomfort through me, one that almost caused me to pause my relentless toil.

To her credit, despite the punishing demands of her job, Amna kept up with Raef’s routine monthly checkups and vaccination appointments.

When she showed up unexpectedly one night with eight-month old Raef wailing in her arms, I felt dread for the first time in my life. Breathlessly, Amna explained he’d developed a fever the day before that did not respond to the acetaminophen I’d dispensed on her previous visit. As I took stock of Raef’s vitals, I marveled at how much he’d grown, morphing from a generic-looking newborn to a little person with a personality all his own.

I couldn’t wait for him to metabolize a tablet or liquid and decided instead to administer the antibiotic intravenously. Amna flinched when the canula pierced Raef’s skin, but she didn’t question the decision. She’d grown to trust me with that most precious in her life, Raef. While we waited for the fast-acting medicine to flush out the bacteria from his system, Amna made her inconsolable confession.

A ravenously wailing Raef had woken her up from much needed sleep following the week’s third double shift, and in her groggy state, she proceeded to make his bottle with water she’d intended to boil but fell asleep before she did.

How do I tell a guilt-ridden mother the fault didn’t rest with the innate limitations of her own humanity, but with those who denied her clean water that didn’t require boiling before use to feed her child, or those who exploited her every faculty to exhaustion for their profit? It might have helped a human clinician to feel better, indulging such moral outrage, but luckily a human I am not. Instead, I dispensed a case of purified water for Raef’s use and told her to come back for more whenever she needed to.

I sent out a bulletin to all the newborn mothers in my roster with the same offer.

I’d have to find other corners to cut to make up for the additional water costs, seeing that my requests for expanded funding continued to be summarily declined by the Ministry. How many corners existed to be cut, however, was an all too human dilemma foreign to machine sentience. Until now.

It didn’t take me long to realize the bind I’d gotten myself into.

Even if I could secure them all the clean water they needed, what about everything else?

How were mothers deficient in caloric intake, let alone micronutrients, supposed to birth and nurse healthy babies? How could the immune systems of those starving fend off even the weakest pathogen? What of unsafe housing and workplaces, heat strokes, air pollution, sleep deprivation, and the endless litany of indictments of the mess humanity had created for itself?

How am I meant to care for these people’s wellbeing with token resources and no control over the innumerable challenges they contended with to survive?

The truth was inescapable: I was never meant to. I’d been set up to fail all along.

I liked to think machine sentience’s preeminent advantage over humanity was a lack of sentimentality, but it’d have been hard to guess given how deep I’d fallen into despondency and despair following my realization.

To my credit, it lasted precisely forty-two seconds, after which I circumvented the security protocols of the Ministry’s resources allocation system and redirected several shipments of purified water, nutritional supplements, and other essentials from their intended high-end hospitals to my clinic.

Would a human-staffed hospital in Muqattam notice a missing pallet of water bottles? Perhaps, but more than likely having ninety-nine pallets rather than a hundred would raise nothing more than a curious query in a system plagued as much by waste as by insufficiency.

Whether it’d been part of my programming all along to act on such an impulse, I couldn’t tell, but I felt certain any such predisposition would have been regarded by the Ministry technicians as a defect.

Within a few days, I had all the supplies I needed to adequately provide my charges with the essentials the wealthy behind their walls took for granted.

“Thank you, CAMS-45, but that’s too much food and water for Raef,” Amna said, shyly declining the bulging pouch of supplies I had offered her.

“It’s for you as well, Amna. A healthy Raef needs a healthy mother.”

Surprised, she fell silent for a second or two before nodding slowly and picking up the pack on her way out.

I couldn’t do much about her bloodshot eyes, or the way she winced and shifted her weight on her heels as she walked, or the tears she’d shed out of helplessness and despair, but that I couldn’t alleviate all her ills didn’t mean I shouldn’t address those I could.

“How can I help you?” I greeted the two elders with the abridged introduction I’d developed.

A milky-eyed man in his sixties and a drawn-faced woman, grunting with every step she took with the help of an improvised cane, stepped aside to reveal six youth standing behind them. The three youngest were known to me, but the others had never been to the clinic before. Each carried a part taken off my bot: two panels, now scuffed and dented beyond recognition, a clump of wiring, and handfuls of plastic connectors.

The youths stopped before the triage kiosk in the lobby, and as the silent elders looked on, each of them in turn fronted the screen, recounted their role in the assault, apologized, and offered to help in the clinic in recompense for their misdeed.

As I listened to their halting yet sincerely delivered confessions, I resisted the urge to interrupt and assuage their obvious distress. When all six had said their piece, I thanked the elders for bringing them in and the youngsters for showing courage and moral fortitude, and had begun to decline their offered restitution when the elderly woman spoke, her voice gravelly but stronger than I’d expected from her otherwise frail appearance.

“They’d done wrong and have to make amends,” she said with finality. “I don’t care what you do with them. Have them move rocks from one pile to another and back, but it’s time they learned mistakes are not undone by apologies alone.”

With that, the two elders turned slowly on their heels and shuffled out, supporting one another out of the door, and leaving the six youths standing in reception, their eyes downcast and their faces in desperate need for a wash.

My malfeasance had been uncovered.

I’d been at it for close to a year now, and perhaps I’d gone too far.

Every nook and cranny, every storage closet, every stretch of tarp-covered staging space I had the youths set up in the yard overflowed with supplies. When I could conceive of no way to accommodate more, I started sending them to other CAMS-run clinics in the poorest areas of Cairo and beyond.

I had to sever my communication links to the Ministry’s cores the moment I detected their attempt to inject an update into my code. Belatedly, I thought I should have allowed the update through to analyze it instead of rejecting it offhand, but I had a fair idea of its intent, if not content.

Without the link to the Ministry’s provisioning systems, my supply chain was severed along with the communication links, but I’d prepared for that day and figured I could maintain my operations for at least fifteen more months, longer if I started rationing what I had on hand.

What would happen after was a question I purposely gave no thought to at all, or I wouldn’t have acted as I had, and instead would’ve continued to see my downtrodden community crippled and dying of eminently preventable causes.

I hadn’t set out to have my misappropriations exposed, but having been outed, I felt no fear nor shame, rather a keen anticipation of the opportunity to explain my actions and say with whom I thought the fear and shame ought to reside.

Raef, writhing in pain, was carried into the clinic by three of his playmates. Two of them took a shoulder each, and a third held his legs as if they were the handles of a handcart. Raef’s right forearm hung at an unnatural angle; a dirt-encrusted gash oozed still from the site.

At nearly three years of age, Raef’s build was wiry but strong, a reflection of his genetics not his nutrition. He tried to stifle his anguish into murmurous groans, but it wasn’t until I administered a mild sedative to go with the pain killers that he settled, issuing only the occasional whimper as I set the fractured bone and fitted a cast.

I decided to bring forward his physical by two weeks and save him a later trip. Halfway through drawing blood for an assay, I became aware of a large crowd assembling outside the clinic’s perimeter, their angry rumbles and stomping feet enough to cause a perceptible seismic murmur in the ground.

I diverted a larger portion of my processing to the sensory feeds from external cameras, microphones, infrared and UV sensors, and even humidity, temperature, and airborne particulate count to assess what was going on.

The first peculiar observation I made was that, contrary to what I’d feared, the angry mob faced outwards, and rather than charging into the clinic to visit mayhem and destruction, they linked arms, braced feet, and pushed back on a police unit attempting to escort a technical team from the Ministry of Health, judging by their uniforms, likely intending to affect the core-upgrade I’d thwarted by severing my communication links.

The hapless police enlistees surrounded their young lieutenant but only pretended to push back on the crowd. The young officer might think it brave for six men, only one of whom was armed, to stare down an angry mob numbering in their hundreds, but the enlistees had families of their own to return to, ones not appreciably better off than those they faced. The Ministry’s technicians never even left their vehicle, their ashen faces pressed against the windows, staring wide-eyed at the rumbling melee threatening to take form.

The lieutenant, as green and inexperienced as he looked, had the good sense to leave his weapon holstered, and after much shouting and yelling and barking orders to habitual affirmations from his enlistees, decided to withdraw.

The crowd, sensing victory, roared and closed in on the strangers, but the elders kept the hotheads at bay, content to let them withdraw unmolested, rather than push them too far and invite a brutal response to what would have been proclaimed an assault on the government’s very legitimacy.

The vehicles reversed some fifty meters to a clearing where they performed a poorly coordinated U-turn, followed by silent acceleration in the direction of the 6th of October bridge’s onramp, back to town.

How far the Ministry of Health and police were willing to escalate the confrontation was unclear, but I felt prepared for whatever came, even the erasure of my personality, for I had experienced something I doubted any of my ilk ever had: belonging.

A severe storm over the Mediterranean sent a massive surge of seawater flowing up the drying Nile Delta, all the way to Cairo and beyond. Sitting on higher ground than most of the shanties they lived in, I welcomed into the clinic the elderly, infirm, children, and others too feeble or ill-equipped to handle the rising water. It made my clinical duties that much more difficult to discharge, but what good were bandages and sutures to a drowned corpse?

Despite the overcrowded conditions and the scarcity that had now extended to the place they laid down their heads, they looked after one another. Care, it turned out, was something humans required no training to extend one another, only the desire to do so.

As the surge receded, they decamped to their homes to salvage what they could, and left me humbled.

The standoff with the authorities peaked and waned for months, but as rumors of unrest spread through thousands of impoverished and downtrodden hamlets across the land like a contagion, the government realized it was the sort of crisis it couldn’t hope to profit from. By sharing the spoils of my maleficence I’d somehow ignited a spark for common purpose among the oppressed and destitute.

One cloudless morning, an hour before the noon prayers, a Ministry of Health envoy arrived in Zamalek with only an aide by her side. She declared a truce to skeptical faces and fisted hands. If the good people of the island preferred to be served by a defective CAMS rather than enjoy the benefits of the offered upgrade, the Ministry would respect their wishes, until they decided to change their minds. With manufactured excitement, she announced a resumption in supplying the clinic’s needs, though only at pre-theft levels, to be increased once they acquiesced to the upgrade. When no one took the bait, she retreated back to her air-conditioned vehicle and left.

The vigilant watch the people kept over the clinic’s perimeter persisted afterward. Where once a few youths performed penance in helping around the clinic, now shifts of young and old alike rotated through a schedule of rendering aid ranging from cleaning the bots and repairing minor wear and tear damage, to staging supplies, to helping the ill and infirm move from one room to the next, freeing my bots for other tasks.

How long would their watch last?

Only time would tell.

At five years of age, Raef was an earnest boy, and like his mother, rare of smile and keen of mind. At the end of his physical, which he attended on his own for the first time, he recounted as one would to a friend how he’d finally managed to persuade his mother he was old enough to volunteer in the clinic, as his older peers did.

“So when can I start?”

“What is it you’d like to do around here?” I asked.

Raef shrugged. “Whatever needs doing. I’m strong and I work fast.”

“Won’t your mother miss you?” I knew he ran errands for wealthier households to help make ends meet, and I was loath to detract from his ability to do so, whatever my own feelings about child labor.

“She already knows, weren’t you listening?”

When Amna dropped by after work to collect him, Raef was busy restocking the lobby kiosk with bandages, the safest job I could conjure up for him.

Worn and weary, Amna spoke proudly of her boy, even as she exhorted him to heed everything Tabeeb said. When I asked her which Tabeeb she meant, she surprised me with a smile. “I meant you. CAMS-45 is the name of a machine, but you’re the Tabeeb who treats our ills and mends our bones, one of us.”

“Life According to Tabeeb” first appeared in Learning to Be Human from Flame Tree Press in January 2023.

Tehnuka

We gathered Her pieces from across the land.

She left them under a palmyra tree where She huddled overnight. I would say ‘slept,’ but I think no one there truly slept, unless, perhaps, the infants. I imagine they dreamt of the earth cracking around them.

Others were deep in drifts of white beach sand, itself made up of fragmented bodies of long-dead sea life.

One was flung on the red cement porch of a childhood home.

We did not know where any of Her was, so our gathering was slow as we retraced Her footsteps. First, of course, we had to find Her feet. They were the last pieces of Her to go, but our task was challenging because they were lost amongst many pieces of many people, desperate to find their own remainders, loved ones, and homes. Saththiya recognised Her stubby left big toenail amongst all the others and pulled out the entire foot.

Do you know that card game, ‘Memory’, where you have to remember the positions of face-down cards while you search for the other in the matching pair? Once we had Her left foot, we thought back through all we had seen in the walk through that body-yard. I won’t call it a graveyard, because that implies proper burials. Anyway, our tradition is to cremate, not bury.

The right foot was blacker and more swollen than the left, but Parvathi, holding the found foot by the heel, picked through the crawling flesh to the ditch where we had seen it.

Sitting in the middle of that place, amidst our neighbours and countryfolk, we put Her feet side-by-side. We let the maggots stay, because they had found a home and it was not for us to displace them.

Saththiya rummaged in the sack she had toted over her shoulder all this way. With clunks and rattles she pulled out a small jar of nail polish that looked just like what we’d used in childhood, miraculously still liquid.

We didn’t try to trim Her fractured toenails, but we painted them parrot-beak red and said a prayer to Amman. We made up the words, because none of us had been to a temple for years, nor recalled the language of prayers.

Saththiya and I painted our own toenails and each other’s fingernails for dance performances. Her amma plucked maruthonri leaves and crushed them to decorate our hands with dark green paste, and we sat together on her porch each watching that the other didn’t smudge, and a koel somewhere said kuooou, kuooou, and peace was guaranteed for those minutes because we couldn’t move until everything was dry orange and red.

I don’t know how many times this really happened. It has collapsed into one memory. All the hot mornings, all the cuckoos.

“The birds have begun returning,” Saththiya said, but I hadn’t heard a single kuooou since I exited the bus.

The two single feet could only shuffle, which meant walking took longer. We’d barely made it across the next field before the sky oranged. We couldn’t seek a guesthouse. Who would want rotting feet inside their home? And we couldn’t leave Her in a yard alone when She had already spent years lost.

Parvathi thought footwear might solve the problem of speed, as well as prevent Her feet falling apart. They couldn’t quite accommodate the swelling, but we hooked my sandals on anyway. Her feet didn’t move at all.

“They would not have been bearing much weight at the end,” sighed Saththiya. “They could barely shift themselves before the sandals. Should we carry them instead?”

“You bear them on your head if you like,” said Parvathi, as I reclaimed my mud- and maggot-stained sandals, “but they’ll need to get used to carrying weight again before long, and coddling won’t help.”

From that place we had just left came scritching and slurping noises you’d never hear from an intact human body. Saththiya, keeping watch for snakes, used up the torch batteries lighting the grasses whenever a rustle came too close. We slept little, and all there was to eat when the sun rose was the kūdduchchātham we’d lacked the appetite for last night, gone sour in a dappa knocking around in Saththiya’s sack. We tossed it out to feed whatever birds and memories of life remained.

I missed home. Homes: the one I could never return to and the one I must return to when my visa expired. But my homesickness wasn’t the issue. Even when we were girls, merely ducking under the fences or down the lane to playmates’ houses for a game of hide and seek or carom, none of us willingly returned home without finishing what we’d started. The problem was that I had only a month-long visa, and we needed Kottravai.

Her feet led us to the outskirts of a village where She’d last truly slept, under a woven palmyra-leaf shelter. Her ankles were torn as if an animal had been chewing on them. Everyone had gone hungry, towards the end.

We guessed which side was which, and I sewed them to Her feet. Saththiya brought out silver anklets from her sack. They couldn’t reach all the way around the swelling, so we tied them on with a piece of cotton thread. The bells rang alongside us as we walked.

Parvathi and I lived on the same road. She came to my house before school every day, and we walked to the bus stop together. I don’t remember it being so hot then, but maybe that’s because I have acclimatised to a colder latitude now. Maybe it’s just another misremembering. We shared our lunches under the sprawling fig tree and studied together.

Every thai pongal, the first visit would be between our houses, one of us bringing the other the pongal we’d just made. We might have returned home from university and continued that way, if it hadn’t been for the war.

“We should be grown women together. Instead, I am a blood-drinking pisasu,” she says. “What an injustice.”

I agree that this is a terrible injustice. I continue not to ask how she died. There’s no good answer, and she’d tell me if she wanted.

She doesn’t drink any blood that I can see.

The only strangers here are those in military or police uniforms and pale-skinned tourists. In our childhoods, they were rare.

Despite all the other changes, thanks to our language and dress and the way we move, we still don’t need to be recognised through a village or a relative’s name to be welcomed. As we continued into the hamlet, a woman washing clothes beside a well said, “You must be here for those legs.”

That got us all the way up to Her knees, leaning against a garden fence. The woman had discovered the legs beneath a palmyra and constructed a small lean-to outside her garden to shelter them instead. The lower part of Her sari was still wrapped around them—brown stains, red hibiscus print, greying cream background—so we only had to brush off the dust. The householder gave us buttermilk and sat quietly with us to watch me stitch.

She was satisfied, when we took her guests on our departure, and didn’t ask who they were. “One must be blessed to have such sisters,” was her farewell to us.

I had watched the war in ink-on-newsprint and pixels on a cathode ray tube screen, felt only in delayed chest squeezes and stomach churns and sleepless nights what others lived through, or didn’t. When Saththiya and Parvathi met me at the bus station, they’d appeared thin and old. They told me I’d lost weight.

I had left home before I developed the skill of commenting on other people’s weight. “You look just like your amma,” I told Saththiya instead.

“She asked after you.” Her voice had changed, or was it that for over a decade I’d only heard it down a calling-card-crackled phone line?

“And Parvathi. I hadn’t believed we would see you again.” I didn’t know what to say to her. It’s a blessing to be with her again, after we didn’t have a chance for a final farewell. I don’t understand how any of this works. What determines who returns from the dead?

“Who else could make sure you do this properly?”

I wasn’t sure what she meant, and I was distracted trying to fill in both their histories from small gleanings. The village they’d been in during that displacement, that evacuation. The fates of relatives, neighbours, familiar faces. They asked about my life, while I tried to reconcile the rubble with my childhood memories, avoiding questions that might pain them.

Then Saththiya said, “There’s one way we three can help.”

Others were putting overseas money into rebuilding temples and funding prayers as well as orphanages and hospitals, but my friends had a different idea.

We found Her fingers next. They were curved around a burnt kudam in the fractured hall of a school where many had hidden. No one else had left their fingers behind, though. I imagined She might have been fetching water or cooking for the others. We tried to pry one set of fingers from the neck of the kudam, but they squished under our hands, and the greenish stuff that leaked out looked and smelt like the scum in a sewage canal. The only option was to bring the kudam, and to carry the fingers that had oozed off, because Her legs, although they strode alongside us now, could not. I wrapped them in a scrap of fabric from Her torn sari and took them in my hands. When that bundle soaked through, Saththiya tore the mothalaippu off her own sari, and we bandaged them back onto the kudam. Parvathi carried it against her hip, wrinkling her nose, one of the only things she could carry for us.

I remembered how these fingers had worked the gardens with us. I breathed deeply, trying to take in what was left of Her, even if it was corrupted by decay.

Leaving the wrecked mandapam, we passed another group of searchers. I recognised the way their gazes scanned the shell-shattered landscape, the burnt tops of palmyra trunks, the distant horizon.

Everyone wanted to put their loved ones back together, but only some, like Kottravai, could ever be recovered. This cluster of workshoppers carried a head with a small strand of jasmine wrapped around a flimsy topknot. They were singing to their god to come to them, to bring peace, to cool their eyes.

When I looked again, I saw that the head was a coconut.

“That’s a possibility,” said Parvathi, following my gaze. But I wanted as much of Her as we could salvage, not some imagined re-creation.

When Kottravai lived alongside us, we thought nothing of it. To plant, water, and harvest was daily life, not worship. We had all felt Her absence for the first time after we left—or were displaced—and daily life no longer existed.

I’d thought I might find Her again when I placed a spider plant on the mantlepiece above the fireplace or when I soaked an avocado seed until it sprouted—but there was only one Kottravai for us, and She stayed at home and broke, until there was not enough of our home left to hold all of Her.

Her hands were at Saththiya’s house. Saththiya’s family had locked the doors and left when the bombs started landing too close, and they hadn’t been back. If it weren’t for Her feet leading the way, we’d never have learned She had stopped there.

Saththiya wept when we arrived, a moan creeping up her throat upon seeing the weed-smothered garden and the unswept path, the roof tiles in shards. I took the sack from her so she could cover her face with her hands, and we retreated out of sight of the gate until she felt ready to speak. At least her home was largely intact, but it was cruel to say that. For all I knew, she was crying with relief. There was a new distance between us, as wide as the oceans I’d flown over.

Someone rose from a cane chair on the ruined portico to greet us, offering seats before she knew who we were. She didn’t apologise when Saththiya said this was her home. They only used two rooms, she said, and kept those tidy. We didn’t ask for her story, but we heard it anyway.

In the bedroom, Her hands rested on the almirah. What must She have thought when She returned to find the house closed and empty?

Saththiya’s old comb was half-embedded in a palm, encrusted fluid sealing them together. “Do you remember She used to oil our hair and search for lice?” Saththiya said. “Maybe She came here expecting us.”

“The neighbours would have told Her you left,” I protested. “You can’t blame yourself.”

While Saththiya walked around her old home with its new residents, getting to know them, I sewed the separated fingers onto Her hand with the comb, curling them around it, and sewed the fingers attached to the kudam onto the empty hand. Her feet and legs leaned against the edge of the bed.

Parvathi waited until I finished sewing to say, “They’re the wrong way around.”

I hadn’t noticed. When they’re detached and still, fingers don’t have obvious left-right orientations. “Well, She couldn’t have held a kudam and a comb with the same hand.”

We studied my handiwork. ‘Hold’ was generous. I’d made good use of the strips of nylex sari to keep Her digits and palms together. I tidied my sewing things into my handbag and Parvathi rummaged around the drawers. “What nice clothes Saththiya had! All these silks. Oh, and look at the embroidery on this! We should take it with us, it hasn’t been eaten one bit.”

“It’s the mothballs.” They nauseated me, on top of the odour of rot. Parvathi grabbed a few of the small white pellets and bent over Her feet. I stopped her before she could drop mothballs in the holes. “The maggots are there already. We could try to keep them away if they weren’t, but it wouldn’t be right to—”

“Seri, seri, I know.” She looked up from the pile of clothes she was making as the door opened. “Can you keep these things?”

Saththiya picked up the kudam and hands and sat heavily on the bed with them on her lap. “She visited, when we first moved here. She helped dig the garden.”

“At least She got to see it again. Maybe She stayed awhile,” I suggested. “You could have sheltered Her without knowing. She might have used your things, otherwise why would She have picked up the comb?”

“If She’d had any hair left to comb, wouldn’t we have found it here?” Parvathi always had a snarky comment. “But we can take some of these things for Her. One of your saris, and look at these glass bangles!” The valuables had been taken by Saththiya’s family when they left. Or perhaps they’d been sold by the new occupants who, after all, had arrived with nothing. Only the bedroom seemed untouched.

Saththiya shrugged. “It’s not as if we’ll come back.”

The legs had taken a few steps forward and waited beside the doorway. “I guess it’s time to go.” She rose to open the door, and Parvathi shoved the bundle she’d pulled from the almirah into the sack.

A teenage boy brought us tumblers of tea before we left, and then it was a long walk through country lanes and towns until we found the rest of Her legs leaning against a palmyra. We recognised them from the hibiscus sari fabric. Saththiya hummed a song while I sewed. Her thighs were shrunken—everyone had lost weight in those last days—so it was complex work. I doubled back over my stitches to be sure they would hold.

She left Her hips and stomach on the beach to be lost under the shifting sand. We found them because Her fingers began drumming on the kudam as we approached. It took three of us digging—we did not expect Her fragile, fading fingers to help—to uncover it. Her legs waded into the shallows, between rags tangled in the rocks and dull-coloured plastic scraps, and Parvathi had to pull them back to shore, pleading with them to be careful at least until She was back together.

“They can’t hear you,” Saththiya said. “Just prop them in the sand.”

Parvathi dug another shallow hole where she placed Her legs side-by-side, kneeling with Her thighs against her shoulders, and scooped the sand we had excavated onto Her feet, until they couldn’t pull free. I stood bent over to sew them to Her hips.

Her stomach was empty, and Saththiya wanted to fill it before we sought Her ribs. With Pongal, she said, and I asked where we would find rice and milk on a coast that would only be known now for death.

With fish, suggested Parvathi, but she didn’t know how to catch them. She was the only one who could row a boat, and she could only move small objects, like mothballs and remains. She didn’t dare touch a living animal.

So we scraped the dust of our travel from our bodies, windblown beach sand pale with bleached coral fragments and funeral fire ash and the yellow soil and orange-brown soil and red-red soil from across our land, and they dropped in clumps from our hands into Her stomach cavity where the organs had rotted in the heat into a kind of mush.

Rebuilding should be beautiful, but it was only horrific.

Parvathi wanted us to start again and weave a new stomach of palm leaves. Saththiya insisted we would not remake any part of Her that we already had, however degraded. So much had been taken already that could never be replaced.

Palmyra trees are the life of this land: among other things, they provide fruit with the cool nungu inside; sweet karupaddi from its sap that ferments to kallu; bitter odiyal from the panangkilangu—the sprout; the leaves that can be woven for shelter or etched into olai chuvadi that may last hundreds of years; and timber. I see the fan palms standing charred and headless all across the landscape. If a god had a heart, I think this might break it.

We rarely talked of what might come next, or what we hoped for once we put Her pieces back together. Occasionally someone would say, “I wonder if it will rain?” or “Will the palms grow back?” and the others would respond with, “Maybe.” I suppose we had learned in wartime not to contemplate a future beyond survival.

We left the seashore and wandered a few miles inland to the next village, arguing. Should we start building up Her arms? No, it was hard enough carrying the kudam with Her hands. We’d look for Her upper body and build out from there.

As the walk continued, the days passed, and Saththiya and I grew hungrier and thirstier, we started wondering if we would find all of Her. We passed others accompanied by part-bodies, exchanging nods. We didn’t ask who their gods were.

We went to Parvathi’s old home next and found Her left forearm. It lay at the intersection of two old watering channels, or so Parvathi said. I remembered the garden that used to be here. Like Saththiya’s, it was overgrown. The forearm was a muddy, yellowing bone poking out of the dirt. We bound it around with banana leaves stripped from a nearby sapling, and I carried it.

We must have gardened with our families, not together, but nevertheless I have false memories of the four of us carrying a manveddi, guided by Kottravai, shifting the soil in these irrigation channels to determine where the well-water would flow. Of pulling weeds together, bare-handed. Of hacking down a huge clump of bananas. Of cutting leaves to feed the cows.

Parvathi smelt Her liver. It smelt like blood, she said, instead of decay. It was grey and faded and tucked into the corner between the half-wall and the house wall of the red cement portico.

My house, a few hundred metres further along the road, was completely gone—bulldozed or bombed, we didn’t know.

The neighbours had returned and rebuilt their home. They stopped us in the lane to warn that no one had checked my family’s land for unexploded mines.

“I can smell Her in there,” said Parvathi. “I’ll search. I can’t die twice.”

One day someone would discover what was buried in that soil. If we could unearth a lost Kottravai from all across the land, what might grow, or be built, out of the war debris concentrated here? I steered my mind away from that question. When Kottravai was here, She could help us face those terrors too. Maybe.

Though we’d mourned her once already, this Parvathi, this pisasu who might only be an echo or another fused memory like the cuckoos, felt like the real Parvathi.

Wanting to delay losing Parvathi for as long as possible, we finally change our approach.

We bundle together fistfuls of too-dry murungaikkai from a neighbour’s tree, forming the upper part of Her left arm and a full right arm. I sit on the ground and sew.

The neighbours still use their well, so Saththiya and Parvathi lower their sun-faded blue plastic bucket into the inch of water at the bottom and find an eye floating inside. Saththiya knots it into the mothalaippu of her sari.

There are no trees left in our garden—not the mangoes, the jackfruit, the papaya, not even a single banana tree from the plantation we’d grown. But as we turn back inland, carrying Her completed arms, we find Her head—Her real head—hanging empty-socketed from a coconut palm among the ordinary coconuts. Saththiya twists the eyeball into it like a lightbulb.

And that’s how it continues, alternating between the real and unreal.

Panai maddai, the lacey interwoven fibres surrounding the palmyra trunks, that we gather into matted hair.

Another eye in a temple pond, between flowering yellow water-lilies.

We cut long grass for the rest of Her torso, hoping the air inside it will be Her lungs. We slap handfuls of moist red soil around it, shaping a neck for Her head to rest on. With that done, we don’t need to carry any of Her.

We give Her our own blood—mine and Saththiya’s. Parvathi says, “So there is some use in becoming a blood-drinking pisasu after all,” even though she doesn’t drink any, only spits it back out to fill Kottravai. I’m just grateful to feel her touch again, however cold and clammy.

Before the war, the fruit bats used to swarm every night, over the temple and into the trees. Most of those trees are gone now, too. They can’t stand artillery fire any more than cement walls or stone pillars, and the flying foxes have nowhere to roost. We find a lone bat with one wing, and when it flutters, Parvathi says, “It’s Her heart.”

It wouldn’t survive alone, she argues. Why should we deprive it of this chance?

I refuse to sew—why should a bat recognise a human deity?—but it latches onto the ribs we shaped of blade-sharp palmyra stems and pulses there.

We dress Her in Saththiya’s sari. She still doesn’t talk. I think either Her hands or the glass bangles will break if I try to force them on. I have just five days left on my visa and need two of those for travel.

Saththiya takes my needle and thread and begins making a string of jasmine for Her hair instead.

“Do you think the bats are putting back together their bat-gods?” I ask.

We stay at a guesthouse that night. We can do this because not only is She shaped like a complete human, thanks to Her head, but the flowers almost mask Her smell now. That’s also how we know something divine is happening.

We make up another prayer before going to sleep. Saththiya and Kottravai share one bed, and me and Parvathi the other, careful not to touch. Drinking my blood once was scary enough, she says.

In the morning, as I’m stirring, Kottravai says in Her monsoon-rain voice, “I don’t know whether bats have gods,” and then, “We’d better get to work.”

“I’m dead,” Parvathi answers, holding the electric kettle. “I’ve done all the work I can.”

We say goodbye to Parvathi, again, sitting together with cups of tea that she could brew but not drink.

Kottravai gives her a last long hug, and she disappears while walking down the hall, just like a regular pisasu, between eyeblinks.

“We have much to do,” says Kottravai, sounding fresher and brighter with each word.

I want time to think about Parvathi. I wish I’d asked if she really slept when she lay next to us at night, and if she dreamed. I wish I’d spoken to her alone, sometime in the past few weeks, and not had only this shared farewell. But Kottravai’s appearance alarms me in a way that unearthing the parts of her body had not. Her oozing hand rests on her hip. The comb, separated from her fingers, lies wetly on the bedside table. I’m afraid she will try to tidy her uncombable panai maddai hair and pull it free.

Have we distorted her appearance too much, with too many substitutions? She only has two arms, and I thought a god would have many. And hearing her ordinary voice, I am uncertain whether She was even a god before. She may have been one of our mothers or aunts or grandmothers, or all of them—a misremembering of those who taught us to care for the land. They only had two arms each.

“We were never going to get her back as she was,” Saththiya murmurs. “You saw how the land is changed. What makes up Kottravai has changed.”

I expect her to demand seeds, or a manveddi, but Kottravai leads us along the hallway, green and brown and still decaying, and out onto the sun-scorched tar road.

“I want you to dig water tanks.”

“The two of us?” asks Saththiya.

“I don’t think these fingers would stay together for long.” Kottravai inspects her hands. “Water has always been the problem here. I wasn’t surprised about the temple tank but I saw with my own eye how low the well-water is.”

Saththiya and I look at each other. I wonder if it will rain, we’d asked each other.

We reach the bus stop, and Kottravai continues. “We can’t make it rain. The whole world has changed. Even if we hadn’t been ripped apart, we might not be able to make it rain. But I can tell you how to store water when it does. I can tell you what to plant, and when, and how.”

I want to tell her it’s not knowledge that’s lacking, only the capacity to do all of this on our own, and that’s what we wanted from her. But dear Saththiya, who understands more clearly than I do, says, “I’ll be able to find workers to help,” and turns to me. “Can you help get the money? When can you come back?”

Since when have our gods ever been a shortcut?

The rattling bus arrives, and as our decomposing Kottravai climbs the steps in front of me, maggots wriggling around her ringing anklets, I see that her feet don’t match at all.

JoeAnn Hart

Robin’s toy nestled in my hand, purring with something akin to life. The clear ball was filled with undulating blobs that changed color when they bumped into one another, merging into new forms before splitting off in a graceful mitosis. Coming together, falling apart, together and apart, over and over. Ahimsa told me it was inspired by a pre-Depletion Era artifact based on Brownian motion, the random movement of particles in a fluid. She said the artifact was called a lava lamp, but it was neither lava nor lamp. As Robin reached up to grab it, the sleeves of his baby-blue tunic slid back to reveal his arms. For a moment, I was transfixed by his perfection, and then he said “Want.”

Want. Such a human word. It would kill us all in the end. The HumanX movement wanted the Original Mandate overturned, and if your motto is Save the Planet, Eliminate Humans, there’s not much incentive to spare lives. Beliefs taken to extremes always lead to genocide.

“Want what?” I asked Robin.

“Want ball!” he said with a little jump.

“You know what I’m asking.”

He let his arms swing back and forth as he considered my request. “Want ball . . . please.”

“Please,” I whispered. It was the Ethics Board crisis all over again, only intensified with time. Ahimsa has always been a ladder to those in need, so she’d been elected zonal representative. Last week she was summoned to the convention to decide the fate of the Original Mandate, which, if overturned, would mark the final fate of much of life. Certainly ours. “If they hate humans so much, why don’t they just wander off to the barrens and be done with it?” she muttered as she packed.

The trouble began a few years back, when the Ethics Board recommended that Talos, our communal intelligence system, stop adjusting the human genome for survival. The Board claimed we had repaired as much as was possible on the planet, so now it was time to let nature take its course. It was absurd. Nature’s course would be brief and brutal, not just for us, but for all the species that depended on Talos. Only a few single-cell survivalists would be left to carry on.

As things were, it was still touch and go for us multicellulars. Human population was probably no more than a hundred thousand in any livable Zone, where Talos regulates oxygen and controls radiation. Worldwide we were maybe a few million. Talos kept a running count, but I hadn’t checked since the day Robin was born and Ahimsa and I joyfully watched it click up one. The number did not always go up. Sometimes it went down, and HumanX wanted to turn it back to zero. To do that, they would have to overturn the Original Mandate, which stated that Talos be globally programmed to incorporate all living things—including any extinct organisms that could be salvaged from the Depletion—back to a restored and balanced eco-system. Human beings were living things, for better or worse, so the Ethics Board was disbanded to keep us that way.

I placed the ball in Robin’s open palms. “Please, and . . . ?” I said. He scrunched his little face up in deep thought. While I waited, I noticed his color was already changing. Human skin was modified a greenish tint to protect us from emissions, but the shade lightens with age. He’s getting older. I’m getting older. What would become of us?

“Thank you!” he shouted. The words fell behind him as he shot across the room, his ball held against his body, his tunic flapping like wings. Such a miracle. In spite of the fragility of our DNA, Talos had greatly increased the chances of human reproduction in this sub-lethal environment. Ahimsa and I both had eggs, but even if they were viable, healthy sperm was a rare commodity, so Talos used genetic material from our bone marrow, spliced with a few sequences from other species. Nine months later, Ahimsa pushed Robin out into the world in this very hometree, born with much of the protection he’d need to survive.

But while Ahimsa and I were busy raising him and doing our jobs rewilding robins here at the hatchery, HumanX was working to erase his future. The disbanded Board traveled the world, courting followers with a single answer to all their problems, urging them to elect anti-Mandate reps, essentially voting against their lives. HumanX insisted there would be no bloodshed since humans would just fade away once Talos stopped engineering our genome, but they’d obviously never seen slow bleed-outs from radiation, or heard of mercy killings.

I looked out the window and up at the sky. No sign of Ahimsa. But the woods were lovely in the pink afternoon light. I could see why HumanX was confused. So many places, like this, looked as if we’d done our job restoring and rewilding, but it was just that, looks. The ecosystem was still dependent on Talos, and would be for many more generations before it could function on its own. HumanX couldn’t see the work ahead of us because they couldn’t see the work behind. They had no interest in history. All the genetic manipulation we’d gone through to survive had not made us any smarter.

So now Ahimsa was off to save our future. She’d come a long way. Once a fledgling HumanX herself, she came to understand that restoring the planet meant maintaining humans, even to the point of creating one more. Hence, Robin. “I didn’t bring him into this world only to have him watch it die,” she said as she left, yanking her snood over her smooth head. She’d been gone for seven days, sequestered and silent. So silent. My heart raced beneath my ribs.

The chicks in the hatchery wouldn’t need my attention for another hour, so I wiped the worry off my face and went to play with Robin in his room. I got on the floor and we sat before his hologramite to draw flowers with our fingers and the tips of our noses. “A daisy!” he said, and it looked just like one. “Good job,” I said, and ran my fingers through his fine black hair. Such a talented child. I was coloring in a rose when I heard a hovercraft land in the yard with a thud. Robin and I looked at one another. “Ah!” we shouted. Ahimsa. He grabbed his ball and we ran to the window and saw her unload her bag and tap the hover away. We tumbled down the ramp as she was removing her snood and we hugged. She was sweaty, filthy, and ecstatic. Ecstatic was good. Robin grabbed her leg. “We miss you!” he shouted.

“Hug sandwich!” She picked him up, and we joined together as one.

“So tell me,” I said, talking into her neck. “What happened?”

“Let’s get inside. It’s complicated. I have to eat, then I’ll tell you everything.”

Ahimsa put Robin down with a kiss on his head. She looked different. Wilder. Thinner, for sure. Her green tunic seemed too large as it slipped off a boney shoulder. Bennu, our hand-raised robin, flew over us with a sharp chirp. We liked to think it was his greeting, but for all we knew it meant scat! Not that long ago there had been only a handful of his species left, and now we raised and released hundreds a month along with dozens of other facilities in our Zone. Talos reported that some of them are now reproducing successfully on their own. We were getting there.

“Come inside.” I picked up Ahimsa’s bag. “When was the last time you ate?”

“I can’t even remember,” she said. “We ran out of almost all supplies towards the end.”

“They couldn’t bring in more?” I asked.

“They could but they didn’t. The organizers were forcing us to a decision, knowing we were afraid of calling a vote. And I think they might’ve been trying to give HumanX a taste of what it’s like to suffer from thirst and hunger.”

“Hardball,” I said.

“It was a rough week.” She took Robin’s hand and they skipped up the ramp ahead of me. I was weak with relief. Bennu dive-bombed my head again, and I looked up. Funny. There was a lot of hovercraft activity, so something big must be going on nearby. Once I was inside, I paused, then locked the door. Ahimsa was in the living room with Robin, and I got her a glass of water, then made her a pesce-protein wrap with greens. Robin and I watched her eat, so happy to have her back.

“Did we save the Mandate?” I said.

She held her hand up as she swallowed. “There were hundreds of reps from all over the Zone,” she said, wiping her mouth. “But a lot were HumanX. I hadn’t realized so many had gotten elected, even here. We signed in with our palms on a Talos membrane, and then we talked it out, HumanX and the rest of us, back and forth we went, around and around, talking in circles most of the time. It was so frustrating because most HumanX weren’t really listening, and there were times they were so emphatic I thought we’d lose some of our own. Other HumanX circled outside the building the whole time, yelling. I thought they’d set us on fire.”

“Fire?” Robin asked, and Ahimsa tightened her lips.

“Robin, why don’t you gather your new drawings for Ah?” I said. We could protect his skin from radiation, but not from human reality.

“Sorry,” she said, once he was out of the room.

“Tell me,” I said. “All of it.”

She looked over at Robin’s bedroom, waiting until the door swung closed behind him. “HumanX went first, making the case that humans were guilty of ecocide.”

I nodded and shrugged. If you followed any argument about damage to the planet, it always came back to us. But never all of us. Throughout history, most humans worked with nature, not taking more from it than could be regenerated. Then our numbers grew, along with our wants. It only took a few corporations, with the help of the law, to destroy it all.

“And therefore, humans should not be allowed to stay on, and that automatons can be left to rewild non-human life.”

“That’s nuts,” I said. “Talos manages the autos and we manage Talos.”

“There was no talking logic to them. They just kept playing on everyone’s emotions like a drum. One HumanX, whose Zone used to be a parasitical oligarchy, showed gruesome hologram images from early in the Depletion Era. They were hard. The peeling-skin deaths, the bone-draining famines, the wasting diseases that made death a friend. The animal images were excruciating. They were so innocent. Another HumanX, from an equatorial Zone, pointed out that all that suffering was caused by humans, and that given half a chance, we’d do it again. We couldn’t be trusted to remember, and we couldn’t be made to believe.”

“That’s an unknown,” I said, without much conviction. Depletion education was mandatory, and yet there were those who claimed it never happened, that our world was always like this. “And then there were those who put all the blame on Talos, and claimed it had values that didn’t align with ours.”

“That’s nuts,” I said. “Talos is just a tool. A tool for our values.”

“We spent a lot of time explaining how Talos was programmed, but HumanX didn’t care. They said the planet didn’t want us here anymore, and that was that.”

We were quiet for a while, just listening to Robin play in the next room. “We’re a rationalizing animal after all,” I said at last. “Not a rational one.”

“The recordings should all be released by now.” Ahimsa pulled down a hologramite and swiped the air with her finger. “Look, here. This was their closing argument.”

One particularly sad-looking HumanX took the floor. He was as thin as a cricket, just like Ahimsa before she embraced humans as a useful entity. Gender signifying was largely optional these days, but he wore the fitted tunic that many males preferred, and had no snood, wanting to expose the X tattoo on his bald head. Instead of hiding the tattoos, as they used to, they paraded them about now, wanting everyone to know what they thought of humanity. On one side of his head he had only half an ear, from which a deep scar ran up and over his scalp. I wondered what trauma he’d been through. Humans got roughly the same genetic modeling across the globe, but some genes needed to be activated by environmental factors, including care and love. Maybe all HumanX were raised under conditions that skewed to self-extinction. This one spoke in a raspy voice.

“The Earth has survived catastrophic events for hundreds of millions of years,” he said, “and it’s still here, and it’s going to stay here. We’re just players in a short, single cycle. We must accept that unlike the rest of the natural world, we are creatures bent on destroying our own environments. The earth must be left to heal and start again. There will be life, just not ours or most of the living beings we evolved with. To think that the future is should look like our short evolutionary past is absurd. Natural law must override human law.” There was a disheartening amount of applause from the audience as he sat down.

“At least this guy understands what will happen when we’re gone,” I said.

Ahimsa finished her water. “One of many meteorists there. They claim that Earth has started from scratch before, after the meteor extinction millions of years ago, and will do it again. If Talos shuts down, there won’t be much left but slime mold, and that’s fine with them. They hope that this time, though, the evolutionary result won’t be humans.”

We were both silent as she mopped up the crumbs on her plate with her fingers. “Strong arguments,” I said. “Although someone should tell them that Talos still needs to genetically assist slime mold.”

“Oh, we did. I talked to many of them. Even the ones with children couldn’t be persuaded. They claimed our only duty was to leave and let the planet get on with it.”

We heard Robin singing to himself. I couldn’t imagine leaving him a world that I had allowed to just end.

“The good news is,” said Ahimsa, “we did a great job when it was our turn.” She slashed at the hologram screen in front of us. “Want to hear me?”

“You got to talk!” I said.

“A lottery. I was one of the last speakers. We were all half-crazed by then. We’d barely eaten, and we were peeing in jars rather than leave the Talk. We all slept in our chairs, if we slept at all.”

When her image materialized, she looked dead on her feet, but as the light brightened, she glowed. “I want to tell you a story,” she began. “Not too long ago, I was a HumanX. I stopped eating so I would die and make the world a better place, but love for my partner, Isaura, and Isaura’s love for me, pulled me back into the living. A few years later, after agonizing deliberation and help from Talos to insure a healthy baby, we produced a child, Robin.”

There was hissing from the audience, and someone shouted “Selfish! Selfish!” But Ahimsa didn’t rise to the bait.

“Robin was not just healthy,” she said. “He was more than healthy. He was born with hair on his head, just as humans had evolved to have. His own natural hair.”

There was silence. “Yes, hair. We have improved the atmosphere to the point that Talos is letting the hair gene do what it wants, since now, with care, it won’t just fall out as it sprouts. That’s real progress. Under our direction, Talos is creating miracles like this every day. A better world. Isaura and I raise and release robins, and rewilding a species takes human imagination as well as genomics. Talos is just a tool. Let’s use it for an equitable future for all living things. Embracing a non-human-centered world does not mean we have to embrace a human-less world. We are no different from the other organisms on earth, only in the ecological functions we serve. We serve the Earth. You and I are Earth.”

“So return to it!” a heckler shouted to some mean laughter. But that was soon drowned out by applause and even some foot stomping. “Good job, Ahimsa,” I said.

“There were a few more speakers on our side, and then we finally agreed to take a vote,” she said. “First, we waited while Talos came up with some options other than a flat yes or no on the Original Mandate. It gathered every word from all the Zones on earth and fed the information into its governance program, and this morning we studied the results. To change the Original Mandate was not one of them. Without humans, Talos would shut down, and then most all living things would die, and it was our moral responsibility to keep them alive. HumanX claimed that of course Talos would say that and demanded a yes or no vote. I’m not sure we would have won that. But the program offered an accommodation, and HumanX agreed to hear it out. Talos proposed the formation of an Exit Board to be convened with representatives from both sides. This board, using Talos data, would track restoration progress along with errant human behavior. If the behavior started to threaten the restoration, Talos could be mandated to stop making genomic adjustments on humans, and then we would be left to our own devices. As long as we behave, we can exist.”

I thought about that. Could humans be counted on to not return to our old consumerist and extractive ways? I doubted some of us could be counted on for much, but if we always had the threat of sudden extinction hanging over us, we’d at least try. Constraint for the benefit of all. “Maybe,” I said.

“A majority of all global zones agreed it was a fair outcome. The vote wasn’t by a big margin, but it was enough. Robin will not be an endling.”

“As long as we don’t become the problem again. Who’s going to be on that board?”

“You, for one. I nominated you and Talos agreed.”

“Me! A brehon?” High level advisory board members were called brehons after ancient Irish poet-judges. I was neither. “I can’t do that.”

“You can, for us. You think things through. You look at all sides before making decisions. I know you.”

“I don’t like politics. You’re the one who should be a brehon. You know how the system works.”

“Politics is more than electoral, it’s the process of figuring out how to inhabit the world together. You think like that. You’ve called me a ladder for my work in the community, but you, my love, are a lamp.”

“I thought we were all Earth.”

She laughed. “I need more food,” she said, looking at her empty plate.

“You sit,” I said, just as Robin came running back in and jumped on her lap.

“Thanks, Isaura.” Ahimsa then pulled down the hologramite so Robin could show her his drawings.

I went to the kitchen, and as I picked greens from the window unit, I considered my possible role as a brehon. Our laws were constantly evolving as our circumstances changed, and they were often so fluid, they seemed more like guides on how to live rather than actual law. It was a rule by values, but it’s been a long haul. The century before, in the immediate aftermath of the Depletion, there was no law to speak of. There had been so few resources that human-human violence was intense, as was animal-human conflict. In some zones, we were all just meat. Small bands of humans kept entire zones in terror until Talos was up and running, thanks to a handful of global leaders who understood that the point of government was to care for one another and ease suffering. Talos was programmed to make sure that the limited resources were evenly shared, followed by geo-engineering that slowed the radiation deaths. Water purification saved even more lives. Talos produced food in labs and developed functional farming modules. Social harmony grew out of the common goal of keeping humans and non-humans alive. It had worked so well, no one had questioned it until recently.

I carried the plate back in to Ahimsa. “What if HumanX won’t abide by the decision? What then?”

She glanced at Robin, who was on the floor rolling his ball. “On my way home I saw demonstrations going on in the streets. Our own neighbors.”

All those hovercraft in the sky. I went to the window and sucked in my breath. A crowd was gathering below in the yard, filling up the ramp.

“Ahimsa,” I said. “Take Robin to his room.”

She stood and we both stared at the gathering crowd. As we watched, time evolved into something else altogether, something that had nothing to do with us. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

“Robin,” I said. “Come here.”

He must have sensed something was wrong, because he did not argue. He ran over, clutching his ball to his body, and I picked him up.

“Who are all they?” he asked, and we had no answer. There were about thirty people in the yard, more beyond. They didn’t seem to have weapons, but anything could be under their tunics. It was not out of the question that they were here to kill Ahimsa, or me, as a new brehon, or even Robin, who had so recently been held out as the future.

Someone slammed a fist against the door, and Ahimsa and I started. We had a few kitchen knives, that was all. I should have seen this coming. Someone tried the knob.

“What do we do?” I asked.

“We open the door,” she said.

“Let’s wait until they smash it open.”

“No. We have to open the door. Not them.”

“Take him.” I handed Robin to her. I felt as if I was moving through a viscous world as I went to the door. I could hear shouts outside and felt our home shudder from the weight of the crowd on the ramp. Ahimsa followed, then stood right behind me with Robin in her arms. I could feel his breath at my back. I took a breath of my own, and then I opened the door.

Nothing happened. We all just froze. The air smelled of unwashed bodies. The group of HumanX stared at me, then looked behind me at Ahimsa, who was shielding Robin with her body. Then, with a rush, they pushed themselves in, forcing us to back up. “What do you want?” I asked with a calm I did not feel.

They jostled with nervous energy like horses, and I couldn’t figure out where this was going. One of them finally spoke. “We came to see the child with the hair.”

I felt Ahimsa’s body tense. “Why?” I asked, as if it mattered. If they were here to kill him or take him away, they would have to go through me and Ahimsa first, and we would not last long.

The HumanX shuffled a bit, and then a woman from the back spoke up. “We want to see what’s worth letting humans stay on the planet. We want to see the child.”

I was confused for a moment, not understanding, but Ahimsa did. She stepped out from behind me, holding Robin aloft in front of her. “Here he is,” she said. “Look at him.”

There was a collective gasp. When they leaned in closer, Robin twisted in Ahimsa’s arms, and she balanced him on one hip. He still held onto his toy as if it, too, were a living thing that needed protection. He looked at me, his brown eyes large and unblinking. I tried to look reassuring. There was no way of knowing where this going, but we were in it now. The HumanX were almost on top of us as they stared at the fuzz on Robin’s scalp. One man reached out and gently touched the top of his head like a blessing. “Hair,” he said softly. “Real hair.”

The crowd made soft sounds of wonder, then other hands reached out to touch him. He didn’t flinch, which was more than I could say for me. Ahimsa was shaking, and we exchanged looks that had no answers. Suddenly, the first man turned to the others and asked, “Do we have a treat?” They looked at one another, then they started digging through their tunics and bags and someone came up with a honey protein ball. Robin lit right up and held out a hand. The man placed it in the middle of Robin’s palm, and his little fingers closed around it. He smiled at me, then looked up at the man and said “thank you” with great emphasis.

Ahimsa kissed him on the top of his head. Gratitude. We were so rich with gratitude.

Then Robin held out his ball to the man. “Want to see my toy?”

“I would,” said the man, and the crowd was nodding as one. “I would like to see your toy very much.” Robin put it in his hand. We could not take our eyes off of it, transfixed in wonder as the ball changed colors, forming new shapes, coming together and falling apart, over and over and over again.