Alone In Eden
E/N: The initial prompt was to build a story off of this artwork I’d been presented. I got a little ahead of myself and took some liberties.
“Talk to me, Jek,” Cynth said. “What’s going on down there?”
His voice crackled through the radio. “Sealed the breach. Just working on debugging.”
“We’ve burned enough daylight already. Let Eden handle it from here.”
“Isn’t that how pressure got jacked the first time?”
Cynth sighed, the sound accentuated by the plastic of her exosuit’s visor as it bounced about. Of course Jek was in the right. The Ark might’ve been the most technologically sophisticated marvel that humanity had ever produced, but Eden – it’s artificial intelligence maintenance satellite – was more artificial than intelligent, and had a habit of fucking things up when left alone too long.
Again Cynth looked out from her floating little world in the upper atmosphere. There had once been a time when the land below was metropolis as far as eyes could see, a never-ending stream of civilization from one end of the horizon to the other. Now, there was nothing left but orange-brown clouds, saturated with everything lethal, from rads to fluorine to sulfuric acid. Not even cockroaches could survive down there anymore.
“Seriously, Jek,” Cynth said. “Venting’s coming up. What’s taking so long?”
He grunted. “Too much legacy code. I swear I’m onto something here. Just give me a little more time…”
Cynth set the belaying cable down and let her legs dangle free from the ventilation shaft. If there was anything the two had in abundance, it was time. The Ark had been built before the war as a flying megastructure meant to colonize other worlds, and could both terraform and keep hundreds of thousands safe in cryogen until repopulation came.
Had the war not come, the Ark might’ve been functional on release.
How long had it been now? Ten years since Cynth had been pulled from cryogen herself, give or take. She used to watch the countdown-until-reclamation clock religiously, but something about seeing the years slowly trickle down became too much. It wasn’t like she’d live to see them hit zero.
Humanity’s last hope was now in their hands, for whatever that was worth. Jek and Cynth had been far from friends before the bombs fell, but neither would’ve ever qualified for Eden’s Project Caregiver without partnering up, and that said nothing for their families.
A match made in heaven, she mused, watching the clouds below. Literally.
The Ark quaked, and a booming VRRUUUMMMMM suddenly burst through the shaft.
“What the fuck!?” Cynth shouted. Venting wasn’t supposed to happen for another hour!
“Shit! Fuck!” Jek cursed. “Accidentally hit th– Fuck!”
Cynth set the cable to auto-belay. “Out! Now!”
But the system was already in full swing, and within seconds, gas started gushing out. Jek’s frantic screams got buried in an avalanche of metallic thumps, and the cable snapped an instant later. Cynth would’ve tumbled free herself, but she’d activated the magnetic heels of her exosuit just in time, and could still stand her ground.
There was no time to think. Cynth grabbed her omniwrench as a marine might his rifle, and stormed into the vent.
* * *
The logic behind the Ark was simple enough. Only so many toxins clogged the atmosphere. The Ark would suck them all up, use it’s internal electrolysers to purify them, and then vent the clean waste, slowly driving their world back to habitation.
But as Cynth marched through the vent, she couldn’t fathom how this could ever lead to a better tomorrow. Every warning light on her exosuit’s visor was flashing red, and the frame felt like it had been dipped in plasma. She knew that she was saying “SHIT!” a lot, but the sound was drowned out by a flurry of superheated air.
Regular optics, fucked. Thermal too. Only infrared gave Cynth a few feet of vision, and that was pushing it.
It was all happening again. Bombs going off. A crimson wall of death, coming her way. Screams. Chaos. Watching as humans turned to glass. Feeling the shock hit the metallic shell of her vertibus. Vibrations as it rocketed to the ground. Another hand grabbing her own, only to be ripped away on impact.
And then clawing. How she’d never forget clawing like that, out of the debris. Cynth could feel her arms going through that same desperate motion as she scrambled down the vent, seeking Jek out. She wanted to cry, but tears would do nothing but kill her here.
Cynth could’ve passed Jek altogether, but his leg had been caught in the lip of the wall, twisting his body with the gas like a ragdoll in a hurricane.
Cynth jammed her omniwrench into the override latch beside him and yanked, sealing their end of the vent and rerouting pressure to another line. The torrent assaulting them ended, and she could hear the sound of her heart again.
As Cynth went to check Jek’s vitals, her eye caught something else, jutting from the side. What the hell is that for? Jek had injected his datadrive into one of the Ark’s security panels, and not a dedicated maintenance terminal. The ultimate taboo, like rewiring a fusion cell blindfolded. What was he thinking!? No wonder venting came ahead of schedule.
Cynth shook her head, again reminded of Jek’s state. She’d have to think of some way to bitch him out later. He still needed help.
* * *
It was never supposed to have been this way. The probability that human operators would be needed by Eden was supposed to only be one-in-seven-hundred. For every six hundred and ninety nine times the world was destroyed, Project Caregiver would be activated only once. Who the fuck would’ve thought they’d actually be forced into spending their lives together like this!?
Cynth brushed a tear from her cheek. God, how she hoped Jek would pull through. Before the war, he’d run software support for MassTech’s marketing department, while she’d been a planetside junker who knew her way around an omniwrench. They were only strangers in a refugee camp, determined to play the couple until they both got on the Ark. That’s the way the program leaders wanted it. Something about needing both a male and female brain to problem solve, should Eden’s automated system ever prove insufficient. But so much had happened since then, and he’d been her only human companion. What was her life before Eden, compared to all that she’d done since?
They’d even once tried to sleep together too, just for kicks. Cynth had justified the infidelity as retaliation for the future ones her real fiancé would one day have, after he left cryogen like everyone else. Not that it mattered, anyway. With all the hormone suppressants in their veins – courtesy of Eden’s nutrition reprocessor – the two might as well have been trying to rub an overcooked noodle against a pack of rubber bands for all it had done them.
“You stupid idiot,” Cynth said, caressing his hand, now wilted where it hadn’t been fused with the metal of his exosuit.
His eyes flashed open. “Cynth…”
“Don’t talk. I’ve got you back on Eden. You’re gonna be alright.”
“The datadrive… Did you get the drive…?”
Cynth shouldn’t have let her cheeks grow red with him right there. She shouldn’t have crossed her arms either. She should’ve said nothing other than more bedside propaganda to keep him breathing.
But anger got the better of her. “For fuck’s sake, Jek! You know how dangerous it is to shove our jury-rigged code into the Ark’s mainframe. You fucking know.”
“I had to… I had to prove it…”
“What the hell could’ve been so important!?”
A tear came free. “They lied, Cynth… They lied about everything… Just… Listen…”
His eyes closed, and his muscles relaxed. The blood froze in Cynth’s veins, but a glance to his vitals showed that the worst hadn’t yet come, and he’d only lapsed into a coma. Jek was still alive. For now.
Cynth squeezed the datadrive. Ten years. Ten long years they’d been together, and Jek had risked it all for this. As she studied the drive, there was only one question left. Why?
She went for the nearest terminal.
* * *
Jek had gone in deeper than Cynth had first thought. He’d hacked into the metadata of the Ark’s core, and gained all access normally off limits. Security coding, architecture plans, staff dossiers. It was all there. Every snippet of knowledge from before the war.
Including an audio file…
“And so that brings us to Project Caregiver, gentlemen,” it began. “No one outside this room can know the full scope of this operation…”
Cynth stood in silence, her eyes widened as the words flowed into her ears. Within moments of listening, she understood why Jek had been so intent on uncovering this lie.
“…It will be thousands of years before our world is habitable again. There aren’t enough surviving candidates to fill the role conventionally…”
It was all an act. Every moment since Cynth and Jek had stepped through the doors of the Ark had been choreographed, made to create the environment they lived in now.
“…Keep to the script during orientation. It’s been prescreened to generate full imprints of the subjects’ minds…”
They hadn’t been selected for Project Caregiver because they were clever, or hard working, or determined. It was all their docility, mixed with humanity’s desperation.
“…We won’t have enough time to retrofit the Ark to self-sustain, or program Eden to troubleshoot every issue. We need adaptation. We need oversight…”
It wasn’t even about Cynth and Jek. Not really. They were just cogs keeping the engine going.
“…It’s imperative that they believe their work will yield realistic goals. Eden will reset the countdown clock and discard personal effects as needed…”
And cogs could be replaced.
“…When the two units break down, Eden will replicate new models based on the subjects’ minds until habitation is obtained…”
To call Cynth a “clone” was to embellish her own manufactured humanity. Eden had taken digital back-ups of her human counterpart’s memories and thrown them into a synthetic meat puppet. A copy in a copy. That was it. The real Cynth was still asleep in cryogen, while she was the doppelganger.
“…Make no mistake, gentlemen. Using synthetic analogs of human minds is the only chance we have to keep the Ark operational after centuries of automated use…”
There were no other teams in Project Caregiver. It had just been Cynth and Jek being replicated, generation after generation, always convinced they were pushing the Ark through the final hump, but never doing more than draining the ocean with a spoon.
Her entire life. No more than a story conjured into her mind. By them.
* * *
Cynth watched the Ark from Eden. Part of her wanted to take revenge against her creators, especially after Jek’s vitals had finally flatlined. It wouldn’t be hard. Sabotage the cryogen system, overclock the electrolysers, re-code Eden to make more copies of her and Jek. Humanity was a drain on the terraforming process, an anchor holding them back. With enough tweaking, the world could even be habitable before her artificial body failed. Cynth had all the power now.
But she couldn’t. Implanted or not, the memories of those who had saved her human form still looped through her mind. The man who’d given the last of his meds, even as he coughed up bloody bile. The boy who dragged her to safety, miles through gunfire. The soldier who lowered his rifle, refusing an order to kill. Countless others had sacrificed themselves for Cynth to reach this point. Those moments might not have happened to her, but they had still happened. How could she inflict genocide on that?
Cynth was alone now, and would never face companionship again, save the memories of a life she’d never lived. But she refused to die. That would just repeat the cycle, and force another version of herself into servitude.
Then there was her human self, still locked in cryogen, innocent of all crimes.
And she deserved to be repaid for the life she had given.
