creative writing on environmental justice
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 . . .
2020
It is March.
I have slept through my alarm every day this week.
Confusion until the silence of dawn reveals
that commuters are no longer driving past my windowsill
where a dahlia tuber, freshly buried in dirt, prepares for spring.
Their bodies roused my body
and so we met the day together.
No more.
The wheel of probable harm
falls forward over the inaction
of a state, over the houses
as fangs along a cancerous jaw.
The rate of loss is not hesitant,
finger-tapping uncertainty
finalizing the weight of itself
in a legislative session.
“Your shuttle will arrive in—four!—minutes. Please proceed to—Caladan Avenue.”
Benny tapped the air above the “Dismiss notification” button on her HUD. She’d been at the shuttle stop for twelve minutes already, and wished she’d taken the time to pee before she left.
Her leg, both where it was and where it wasn’t, felt weird.
She flipped through her notifications. . . .
“Your shuttle will arrive in—four!—minutes. Please proceed to—Caladan Avenue.”
Benny tapped the air above the “Dismiss notification” button on her HUD. She’d been at the shuttle stop for twelve minutes already, and wished she’d taken the time to pee before she left.
Her leg, both where it was and where it wasn’t, felt weird.
She flipped through her notifications. “Reminder—two!—overdue assignments in Reentry Journal. You can do it! To access writing coach, press—”
She dismissed it and loaded the block puzzle game.
The shuttle chimed an arpeggio when it stopped. The lift extended automatically when it detected her ID. She held the handrest—“Please hold handrest securely! Lifting!”—and slipped into the first empty pod.
She was actually supposed to be practicing with stairs. Maybe the shuttle software didn’t get the memo.
She tabbed back to the block game.
Benny waited until everyone else was off to leave her pod. She didn’t want people watching while the lift beeped its excruciating way down.
Outside, a blue and white sign read “Puente Hills Reclamation Facility: Treasure For Tomorrow.” Around the sign, her HUD displayed a wheel of floating menu buttons: “Book a Tour,” “Careers,” “Materials Reclaimed,” “For Kids!”
Graeme was waiting at the gates, a sturdy block of a woman with gray in her ponytail.
“Benny! You made it! Welcome. We’ll do HR first and then I’ll give you the tour. Sound good?”
Benny’s new access badge looked just like Graeme’s. Kinda nice, Benny thought. Retro.
“Okay! Next stop, locker room. There’s bathrooms there too, if you need them. We shower in, we shower out. Inside, you wear scrubs. No outside clothes in the containment zone, no scrubs outside the containment zone. Got it?” She waited for Benny’s nod before continuing, “Anything metal, you can keep on. There’ll be scrubs and booties when you come out. Everything fits weird. Oh, and put your leg through on the tool cycle—that’s what I do with my hand.”
Graeme waved her right hand, and Benny finally noticed that it was printed plastic, its phalanges and metacarpals articulated in black, silver, and hot pink.
Her new leg was gray. That was the default when you didn’t enter color choices.
Graeme kept smiling until Benny closed the shower cubicle door behind her. It was a narrow room with labeled panels on the wall. Too narrow—she couldn’t stretch her arms—couldn’t move—her pulse sped up—she couldn’t move! Shit! No—come on—she closed her eyes and did one of the stupid HomeboundHero breathing exercises until the taste of metal cleared her mouth.
This better not make her late.
She opened her eyes again. She was fine. This was fine. There were even handrails. Benny stripped efficiently to her leg and dog tags, then unbuckled the leg. Balancing awkwardly, she nestled it in the Tools (inbound) bin—a shallow, slatted metal box that reminded her of the utensil baskets from KP duty—and tapped it shut.
She’d get used to it. She’d have to.
The promised scrubs were in a matching cramped chamber on the other side, along with cushioned booties and flimsy compostable mycelial-web underwear. Graeme was waiting in the hall, doing something Benny couldn’t see on her HUD. Whatever it was, she was moving fast, swinging her arms and pivoting her body. Benny waited to be noticed.
“Just a second,” Graeme muttered. “There we go.”
She dismissed whatever she was looking at with a gesture Benny didn’t recognize from the standard interface. But of course, Graeme needed modified commands.
And now, Benny did too.
Graeme’s lined face folded back into her usual smile.
“Sorry about that. Minor bot-cleaning kerfuffle in sector C. Nothing serious. Let’s get you settled.”
Benny’s cubicle was spacious, with a round bubble window and room to work sitting or standing, and yet more interactive panels on the wall.
“Drinks come out there. Conveyor bots bring your lunch order. Anything you like as long as it’s synth-protein and flavor powder.”
“I do love flavor powder,” Benny tried. After her tour, that wasn’t even really a joke.
Graeme laughed anyway.
“Who doesn’t? And out there . . . that’s where the magic happens.”
The window overlooked a terraced hillside furred with trees too sparse to hide infantry. Off to the right, orderly lines of bots marched in and out, like trails of foraging ants.
“So we’re starting you off over there on G44, crew of ten bots.” Graeme gestured to an indistinguishable section of hillside. “Three survey-patrol, two for e-waste and complex composites, and one each on metals, silicates, basic organics, complex hydrocarbons including biohazards and inorganic hazmat—heavy metals and radiation, mostly.”
The bots were all the same shape, like pointed eggs, but came in a range of sizes and colors: muddy green, white, candy-apple red, cerulean. The ones coming from the hill were smeared with grime. The ones going out shone like new.
“They’re level four semi-autonomous?”
Graeme wrinkled her nose.
“Well, they boot level four, but they’ve got pretty good learning capability, and we never wipe them if we don’t have to. Don’t be surprised if they exhibit level five or six capacities. Personality, too.”
“Really?” Military autos didn’t have personality. Too unpredictable.
“Oh yeah. That’s where you come in as their handler. It’s not just maintenance; you’re also providing guidance. They have enough battery to go twelve to eighteen hours autonomous, but they usually need us before that.”
Benny leaned her weight on the window ledge. The new leg rubbed, but the outside of her good ankle hurt when she stood too long.
“What kind of guidance?”
“Explosive methane, wildlife, load-bearing furniture, all kinds of stuff. G44 is a fairly old zone, mostly late twentieth and early twenty-first, but because it’s peripheral, it’s still in the first phase of reclamation. So you’re gonna see some, to use the technical term, weird shit.”
“Weird shit,” Benny repeated.
Graeme laughed.
“Don’t worry. Your bots will be on short shifts until you’re adjusted. And for now we’ll just have you run training modules. We’ll go visit decon and recharging later. And speaking of bots needing guidance, friggin’ ORG-B17 wants to eat a skunk, so I better skedaddle. Ping me if you need anything!”
When Graeme had gone, Benny dispensed a bulb of seltzer and activated the panel labeled Chair. Her leg was still rubbing. She’d shoved blister pads in her pocket on her way out, but her pocket was in her pants and her pants were in a locker.
It was fine. She could sit. It would be fine.
She pulled up the first module. The reclamation bots had mostly the same anatomy as search-and-rescue bots—retractable bucket drums, grippers with claws and spines and rubberized pads, fluid receptacles, cargo compartments, sensors of every imaginable kind. She passed that test on the first try.
The next couple of modules took her through lunch (teriyaki spirulina with udon and sesame FungoNuts) and the discovery that it was a good idea to activate the sunshade on the bubble window at around two. Graeme came back in the middle of the module on manual decontamination, which was an annoying mix of easy (acids neutralize bases) and very difficult (fifty-seven strains of organofluorine-degrading bacteria).
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah! Yeah. Good. I didn’t finish the modules but—”
“That’s fine. You have two weeks to do them all. Come check out the decon line and then you can shower out and call it a day.”
Benny followed her boss, trying not to limp too obviously. As they walked, Graeme pointed out maintenance bays and R&D labs, and Benny met too many people.
They ended up on a steel catwalk. Below, bots were trundling in the gate. She could see the grime on their shiny carapaces better from here: brown organic smudges, scraps of paper and fabric, plastic chips. Most of them, according to the training module, were made of aluminum oxynitride with integrated color. Some had scratches, like healed scars.
“Did you get to the auto decon?”
Benny nodded and recited what she remembered.
“After they drop their payloads, they come here for cleaning. Water with a surfactant, neutralizations for anything the chemical nose IDs, another rinse, then they’re air-dried. The water all gets filtered and repurified between uses. Yeah?”
“Pretty much. There are manual decon stations too. Sooner or later you’ll have to go scrape something off one of your bots. And their charging bays are down below—we should go see your team’s section, show you what I mean about personality.”
Graeme paused, glanced down at Benny’s leg. “If that’s rubbing, my uncle makes really good ointment. Spruce and stuff. I can bring you some.”
“I don’t want to be a bother.”
“No bother. It helped a lot with this old thing, especially when I first got it.” Graeme waved her polychrome hand. “I thought the VA had real state-of-the-art stuff now. Synth-skin, motor-assist, neural hookup.”
Benny shrugged.
“I didn’t want any of that. My mech went down in a cyberattack.”
Said like that, it sounded clean. Like the training exercises, or the bots shining from decontamination. Not like the smell of her own sweat and blood cooking in the sun while her leg burned and Jacko screamed in her ear.
Graeme winced.
“Sorry to hear that. Eastern front?”
“Southern.”
Graeme winced harder.
“My nephew was on the southern.”
Benny nodded.
“Yeah. So . . . I requested an analog leg.”
“Makes sense.”
Benny shrugged.
Graeme turned her head sharply, looking at an alert on her HUD.
“Shit, I gotta go handle this . . . can you find your way back to the showers okay?”
She waited just long enough for Benny’s nod.
Back at her apartment, a package waited in her delivery locker. The return address was in Salmon, Idaho. She’d only ever known one person from Salmon, Idaho. In the elevator, she looked at the ceiling to keep the tears in.
She left the package on the table and sank onto the couch. On her home network, her HUD bristled with notifications.
“Update reentry journal now. You can do it! To access writing coach—”
“Seven missed calls from—Mom! Message from—”
“Reminder—art therapy in—one!—hour and—forty-five!—minutes.”
“Continue your—five!—day physiotherapy streak! Always Getting Stronger! Always Getting Stronger trademark of—”
She dismissed them all, unstrapped her leg, and played the block game until the login for art therapy appeared on her HUD. She tapped it and her efficiency apartment disappeared into the VR.
“Start New Project,” read one pane. “Load asset packs.” “Saved asset packs.”
She didn’t mind art therapy. She’d picked it off a list of options. It reminded her of drawing with Jacko, but in a good way, not too much. The part where they talked about the art sucked, but most of it was just putting together stuff from the asset packs. Some people in the group made fucked up shit, with distorted bodies and darkness and holes oozing blood. Benny just made landscapes. The biggest asset packs, the photorealistic ones, had scans of all kinds of trees and flowers and rocks. She even recognized one of the mountains from a basic training VR sim; it was the same one Jacko had said looked like a pile of turds. Benny had missed half the targets from giggling.
Benny never used that asset pack.
But mostly, landscapes were okay. She made up stupid little games like “an accurate southeastern landscape” or “an extinct landscape” or “a landscape where everything’s blue,” with fescue and forget-me-nots and spruce. Except then she had to make up some bullshit about “the bluebird represents healing” and Amy, the facilitator, would nod her avatar head sympathetically, and that asshole Perry’s avatar would smirk.
Benny’s avatar still had both legs.
Today everything in the landscape was broken. A tree half-killed by lightning, with black bark and green needles around bleach-white wood. A split rock. This weird smeared-sideways flower from one of the asset packs, probably some kind of glitch in the scan, because nothing that freaky could be real. She hesitated over some bugs that reminded her of the bots at work: a shiny round blue-green beetle, a slatey pillbug. Perhaps next week she’d make a round stuff landscape.
She could draw the bots, of course, rather than just relying on what had been scanned into the asset packs.
But there was a lot in the asset packs.
And she hadn’t picked up her pencils since she got back.
At the end of class, she didn’t have to talk because Brett started crying about his dad’s old Mustang—a car, not a horse. That was fine with Benny. She had nothing to say.
It was too late to make dinner, so she ate some seaweed chips and jerky and a granola bar. She didn’t even need to shower, she figured. She showered twice a day at work.
She played the block game for a while and went to bed.
She could open that package tomorrow.
The next morning she overslept and nearly missed the shuttle. At work, there was a jar in her internal mailbox labeled “Uncle Bernie’s Special Salve,” which made her smile.
The rest of the week disappeared into training modules and shadowing other bot handlers. She watched through her HUD while Tark told his gray silicate bot to run a radioactivity scan on some beads, and while Braith guided one of her black survey bots out of a partly collapsed bed frame. Benny passed quizzes and made stilted conversation with her coworkers. Uncle Bernie’s salve seemed to help.
The package sat on the counter. It was a busy week.
The next week, she started running her team for a couple of hours at a time, first with Graeme looking over her shoulder, then with her on call. Each bot had its own panel on her HUD, plus the ones for the other bots in the area and overall status alerts—thunderstorms, gas alerts, wildlife sightings, seemed like there was always something going on. It was almost like piloting the mech, except with nothing locked around her body. Just information flowing through and occasional chatter on her headset. Almost like old times.
She made the “round things” landscape in art therapy, with pillbugs and ladybugs and cacti and beach pebbles and fat winter birds. Snarky Perry said it made no biological sense. Brett thought it was cute, and wondered if roundness represented integrity and wholeness.
“Sure,” Benny told him. Why not?
The following week, all her training modules were done. It was just her and the bots. She had to ping Graeme with a question almost immediately—was this butterfly in a glass dome the kind of thing she should have a bot dig out for the museum?—but Graeme didn’t seem to mind. The salve really did help.
On Tuesday, she opened the package. There was a note, scribbled on a sheet of AlgaWeave:
Dear Benny,
Jacko would have wanted you to have this.
Hoping it brings back good memories.
You’re always welcome here in Salmon.
Don’t be a stranger.
Love,
Margaret
Benny crumpled the note, then immediately tried to smooth it back out again. Jacko had talked about her mom all the time: the quilts, the spoon collection, the unexpected dirty jokes. A couple times, she’d gotten care packages of molasses spice cookies to share with the squad.
This care package was a sketchbook.
It was like something from the wrong asset pack dropped into her apartment. The black fiberpack cover, ring binding, and FurySaurus sticker were all horribly familiar.
Benny’s sketchbook had been decent, with long-fiber creamy AlgaWeave, but Jacko’s was the real deal: thick cotton paper. She had thought Jacko was bullshitting the first time she told her to go ahead and draw something on one of those precious pages, but no, that was just Jacko. If Benny flipped through it, about a quarter of the drawings would be her own.
She didn’t flip through it.
She put it carefully in a drawer, with Margaret’s smoothed note on top.
Then she dismissed all her notifications and played the stupid block game until she was tired enough to sleep.
Her fifth week on the job, Graeme told Benny that her squad had a below-average adverse incident rate. Benny choked up a little. It was nice, maybe, to know she was keeping them safe.
On an uneventful Tuesday, something tripped an alarm. The notification took over her entire HUD, red and flashing, with an urgent beep.
“ENEMY SIGHTED! ENGAGE Y/N?”
She froze, ready to—no, that wasn’t right. She blinked, hard.
It actually said, “WARNING: MET-A28 PAYLOAD ERROR.”
Payload error? Okay. Payload error. That had been in one of the training modules. Sometimes the reclaimed materials they were dumping got stuck.
She minimized the notification, pulled up the metal bot’s interface panel and tapped “Payload purge cycle.” Through the front-facing camera, she watched it bank off the track and dock with the hopper. “Purge cycle complete! Continue to decon?”
“Continue,” she signaled, watching the minimized error.
It didn’t go away.
Instead, the screen turned redder: “REPEAT WARNING: MET-A28 PAYLOAD ERROR.”
Something was really stuck in there. That was okay. Manual decon. She’d passed that quiz.
Eventually.
She directed the bot to a manual decontamination bay and set off.
MET-A28 met her in bay C-34, a narrow space with a counter on one side stocked with gloves, wipes, containers, and a lot of nozzles. The blue bot was still, but the lights in its sensors were flickering. When she approached, it beeped sullenly.
Benny hadn’t actually seen them in person, she realized. Not up close.
Up close, the bots were big. Waist high at least, and Benny wasn’t short. The problem was obvious: one of its grabbing arms was still extended, locked around something shiny. Carefully, Benny moved closer. It was a flat piece of metal, plain silver, barely thicker than her retro ID badge. Narrow, and wider at both ends. A wrench. A very simple one, not adjustable, just a bracket on one side and a loop at the other. More like a wrench icon than an actual tool.
Benny pulled the bot’s menu back up, watching in case it moved.
“Cycle arms,” she tapped, then jumped as one of the grabbers extended next to her prosthetic. She pressed back against the counter. She could get up onto it if she needed a more defensible position—which was ridiculous. This was a civilian bot. She was a civilian person. Everything was fine.
The arms cycled, grabbing and pinching and scooping, then retracted. All except one. Was the thing stuck in there? Without taking her eyes off the bot, Benny groped around on the countertop for PPE.
“Come on, drop it,” she said, locking her gloved fingers around the wrench. It was really jammed in there. She wriggled it, careful not to misalign the arm.
MET-A28 beeped, then beeped again, sounding almost plaintive. Which was silly. It was a bot.
“Give it!” she said, tugging. The bot beeped once more as the wrench finally came loose. It was light as well as thin. Aluminum, maybe, or an alloy. “Okay.” She pulled up the menu again and cycled the arms. This time, it retracted properly.
Right. Fine. Weird, but fine.
She set the wrench in a containment tub on the counter and turned around to take off her sweaty gloves. She should file the incident report while she had the object’s measurements handy.
In her peripheral vision, something moved. Benny spun to face the enemy. Except the stupid prosthetic didn’t pivot properly and her balance deserted her. She went down with a yelp, clipping her hip and shoulder against the counter and hitting the ground hard.
MET-A28 was holding the wrench again.
And the decon bay was too small. She was trapped between the bot and the wall. Her leg didn’t work. Benny could feel her pulse speeding up. She tasted blood.
With an effort, she smacked the “Call supervisor” button on her HUD.
She was almost okay when Graeme arrived. She’d made it to the bench across the hall from the manual decon bay, and maybe didn’t look too much like she was about to puke.
Graeme sat down next to her and looked straight ahead.
“What happened?”
“It wouldn’t let go of that wrench. And then when I finally got it to, it picked it up again.” Benny looked at the floor. The scrub bootie stretched weirdly around her plastic foot. She’d probably get fired now.
“Ah. Hang on.”
Graeme stood up, walked over to the decontamination bay, and pulled a chemical nose out of one of the drawers. She swabbed the wrench, looked at the readouts, and then sprayed some foam onto it. She was talking to the bot, too quietly for Benny to hear.
“Let’s give that a second to work. And then, I think it’s time we paid a visit to the charging bays.”
Benny frowned.
“Why? What’s it doing?”
“It’s easier to show you than explain. Let’s get this puppy cleaned up first.”
Together, they rinsed off the foam and sprayed down the rest of the unit, then checked fresh chemical sniffer results. Through it all, MET-A28 clung to its shiny wrench.
“Okay, tell it to go recharge.”
Benny tapped the icons on the HUD menu, and the bot started to move. Benny turned to follow it.
“No, we’ll take the elevator. This way. You feeling better now?”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about. Should’ve done this week one.”
The elevator started descending with a jerk. For a moment, it seemed very small. Benny concentrated on Graeme’s prosthetic hand, tapping on the rail. Graeme didn’t look worried.
The elevator dinged again. The doors opened.
“After you,” said Graeme.
According to the HUD, the bay they were looking for was to the right. The hallway was dark, with pale concrete floors and blue metal gateways punctuating its length. Sensor lights flickered on as they walked, but the bays remained dark. Benny could make out faint red and yellow charging lights in some of them.
They turned a corner, then hit the right number.
Graeme leaned past Benny and poked a panel on the wall. The charging bay lit up.
Benny didn’t say anything.
It was going take her a while to figure out what to say.
There were ten alcoves around the room, sized for the different bots. They slept—charged, they weren’t alive—nose-in, with their pointed ends tapped into the power supply and their round backs facing the room.
No two alcoves were the same.
One had a curling design of green and blue glass stuck to the wall above it. One had a canopy of wood fragments woven through with long-dead flowers. A small one, with a sensor bot tucked into it, bore lines etched into the wall, arranged into designs that looked almost like pictures.
And one alcove had a sunburst of flat, shiny metal.
“What is it?”
“We’re not really sure. Almost all of them do it from pretty early in the real-world portion of their training. We tried taking it away, but performance craters. If we reprogram them not to do it, they can’t sort the materials right. We even had a couple of digital ethologists from the university come study them.”
“And?”
“Their final report was all about bowerbirds collecting blue objects and bees following ultraviolet markings on petals. Best I could tell, it boiled down to ‘the bots think it’s pretty, and maybe that helps them understand their jobs.’” Graeme shook her head. “I’m sorry. I should’ve told you, it just slipped my mind. When a bots finds a decoration for its nest, we just let it do its thing.”
There was a beep from the hall. Benny was probably imagining things, but it sounded timid. The big blue metal reclamation bot was still holding the silver wrench in its extended arm.
Graeme pulled Benny aside. They stood in front of the charging bay with the glass curlicues while MET-A28 rolled in, rotated, and extended a small nozzle. One of its solvent jets, Benny realized. It pivoted from side to side, probing the air, then poked the nozzle into the gap between a fish knife and a flattened beer can. It sprayed the wall, retracted the nozzle, and pressed the wrench into the sticky patch. Then, it retracted its arm, rolled backwards, beeped once, and rolled forward onto its charging brackets. An orange indicator light lit up on its rear.
“Told ya,” Graeme said, “personality.”
She shrugged.
Benny shook her head.
“That’s so weird.”
Graeme shrugged again.
“Like I said, it’s just how they make sense of it all.”
On the way home, Benny watched the scrubby regenerated forest around the landfill give way to orchards and solar arrays, and then housing developments with orderly palms and oleanders around their gates. She got off at the Caladan Avenue station, where unruly nasturtiums overflowed out of chipped concrete urns, and went back to her apartment.
Her pencil case was where she’d left it when she unpacked.
She went back into the other room and pulled Jacko’s sketchbook out of the drawer.
When Mom had helped her set this place up, she’d put a comfy chair in front of the window. Benny shoved laundry off it, sat down, and opened the sketchbook.
There was the dorm at Benicia. On the next page, a seagull with a crab in its beak. A water bottle, casting a long shadow in the afternoon sun. The extended gun-arm of a mech. She flipped through page after page of drawings, some swift, bare lines, some slow and carefully colored in. She found the first of her own drawings, a sailboat in the bay. Jacko had added a mermaid swimming in its wake.
The drawings ended three quarters of the way through the book.
Jacko would never fill those pages.
But new images had started crowding the blank pages of Benny’s life. She knew how she’d sketch them. The bots. Graeme’s plastic hand. The curvilinear forms of nasturtiums. Mom positioning furniture. The memory of Jacko’s face. Benny could see them, rayed out like the bots’ mosaics.
Benny bit her lip, pulled a pencil out of the case, and began to draw.
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 . . .
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.
My uncle swears you can tell what kind of man someone is
by how he stacks wood in a burn barrel.
We don’t use those anymore but he still talks like they matter.
Still keeps one in the back, rusted and dented, filled with junk mail and busted dreams.
The landfill’s too far now,
gas is too high,
and they shut down bus service out here.
So we’ve been stuffing old campaign . . .
My uncle swears you can tell what kind of man someone is
by how he stacks wood in a burn barrel.
We don’t use those anymore but he still talks like they matter.
Still keeps one in the back, rusted and dented, filled with junk mail and busted dreams.
The landfill’s too far now,
gas is too high,
and they shut down bus service out here.
So we’ve been stuffing old campaign signs into our fireplace.
Most of them say something about “freedom.”
I can’t help laughing when the letters curl.
He said the stars used to line up different
back before the big box stores came.
Back before they paved over the wetland.
Now nothing aligns right.
Even the deer are confused.
They built condos where the beavers lived.
Then named them “Beaver Creek Estates.”
My cousin spit on the sign when he drove by.
Said he saw one of the beavers limping down the shoulder,
dragging a piece of its home in its mouth.
Uncle says: next time,
we burn the maps.
We stop pretending this was ever about directions.
We follow the birds instead.
If they leave, we leave.
But I don’t think they’re leaving.
I saw two finches building a nest
in the side mirror of my neighbor’s busted car.
That’s got to mean something.
Right?
For Reckoning’s next special issue, we are asking for environmental justice flash fiction of 1000 words or less. While we’ll take 1-1200 words, we strongly prefer things in the 500-1000 range. Outside of flash, what we specifically want are weird stories, dark stories, horror stories . . . and yet stories with some bit of hope . . .
For Reckoning’s next special issue, we are asking for environmental justice flash fiction of 1000 words or less. While we’ll take 1-1200 words, we strongly prefer things in the 500-1000 range. Outside of flash, what we specifically want are weird stories, dark stories, horror stories . . . and yet stories with some bit of hope to them, even if that hope is simply, We will persist, we will exist, we will endure. You can’t make the world a better place, after all, if you aren’t there to do the work.
We want you to take big swings. We want you to push boundaries of expectations and language. Okay, let me be real: I’m the editor, one Andrew Kozma. I like weird. I like dark. I like things I don’t know I like until I like them. Go back and read my story for Reckoning 3. Is that hopeful? I don’t know. I know it’s a blood sacrifice. What I’m saying is that I want your dirty, I want your rough, I want your jagged. I want your environmental justice in a box just waiting to be read to know if it’s alive or dead.
Payment: .15/word (US)
No reprints for this issue, please. Previously unpublished work only. Anything submitted to the special issue will also be considered for our regular issue, so please don’t resubmit. And we’re still accepting only one piece at a time per author. Once you’ve heard back, feel free to submit again!
Reading List for Inspiration:
You might start with the flash fiction that we’ve already published.
“Plastic-eating fungus caused doomsday[2][3]” by Emma Burnett in manywor(l)ds, which plays with form in an interesting way.
“I’M NOT TRYING TO SELL YOU ANYTHING AND I’M NOT TRYING TO SCAM YOU” by Jack Klausner in ergot. which isn’t really ecological, but the momentum and the dread and the weirdness of the situation are what I want.
Submissions for our flash fiction issue open now and will remain open until October 31, 2026.
Please review all our usual submission guidelines, then submit your work via our Moksha portal!
I leap out of bed. & night burns at my feet.
Awake. My morning is ashes—naked &
quiet, because the birds have flown to a country
where the trees can dance & my tongue can
only go as far as the border. I’m nothing short
of tragedy, so I drink myself to stupor. My
memories are alcoholic & melancholic. . . .
I leap out of bed. & night burns at my feet.
Awake. My morning is ashes—naked &
quiet, because the birds have flown to a country
where the trees can dance & my tongue can
only go as far as the border. I’m nothing short
of tragedy, so I drink myself to stupor. My
memories are alcoholic & melancholic. But
my solitude is the sea where I drown myself
into reality. Once. I was a butterfly in this room
where happiness was the smell of peony &
frangipani. Once. I had a mirror & my beauty
was whole. But then, it broke. & broke my beauty.
& like echoes, the shards kept recurring—
under my feet. So I practiced stillness, & silence
as though a god lived in my mouth & I would
not let him out. I sat on a chair in the room of
my wonder, for hundreds of years. & all I could
make of loss is the grace to be hidden from the
unpleasant eyes of the world. Like in mathematics,
my failure is finding x, where x is my dead.
Where x is home. Where x is joy. Where x is the
people I love. Tbh, I have searched & searched.
Every formula, every law, every step along the
way I have taken. The questions, yet, futile. The
equations, lopsided. The weather of my body is
december. My eyes are snowing, there’s a near
storm. & I can feel my joints rattling. Science claims
that my body is water. & can have involuntary actions.
Which is to say, I’m a tsunami waiting to happen. &
I may not be the master of my own sea. & if so, O,
dear wind, let your breeze be gentle. Dear water,
let your waves be kind.
During my grandmother’s prayers, I would watch
the cracked earth just outside her windowpane, the dust lifting
like sermons lost in the dry air. My favorite story
was of the river that once carved through the valley,
its body endless, spilling into the fields. Less famous
is how the Big Pharm diverted it, how the heat pressed
its lips against . . .
During my grandmother’s prayers, I would watch
the cracked earth just outside her windowpane, the dust lifting
like sermons lost in the dry air. My favorite story
was of the river that once carved through the valley,
its body endless, spilling into the fields. Less famous
is how the Big Pharm diverted it, how the heat pressed
its lips against the banks until nothing remained
but brittle bones of fish in the silt. And when the sky opened
and rain poured over us, my grandmother knelt,
cupped her hands, and drank. I wonder if she felt
the phantom taste of the old river on her tongue,
if she saw its face in the ripples, its body returning
only to disappear again. This is what I thought about
until her prayers ended, when she took my hand,
waiting for the soil to soften beneath us,
as birds pecked at the hardened ground.