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.