pOST-CHILDREN pt.1

Post-Children

I remember, I remember, I remember seeing:

T.V. and God. And T.V screens. High contrast and beautiful, more realistic than real life. Over-realistic colours, a news anchor, a woman, pretty in that de-sexualised neutral way talking heads used to be. A woman wearing subtle hues of red and the brand new global insignia broached to her jacket. The symbol of the brand new “one world party” a political group promising “global socialist democratic change” and the world’s largest club night all rolled into one lovely advert for peace on earth. Peace with grins attached. It was born out of the second cold war, this time America threw in the towel. We were promised, we were guaranteed PEACE PROSPERITY and even UTOPIA. Yes a Utopian world and we were celebrating. We celebrated in the most moronically hysterical way imaginable. The climate had punished us enough they said, we should listen to Mother Gaia they said, the sun should only ever be our only source of power they said, we had been greedy for too long and nature was punishing us they said. We overreached and got what we deserved. We were wrong to try to create our own suns.

The list was this; a mantra of mayhem and deserted places now peaceful:

Fukushima Daiichi: 11th March, 2011 (Japan)

Zaporizhia: 28th August, 2014 (Ukraine)

Balakovo: 13th September, 2014 (Russia)

Grafenrheinfeld: 17th April, 2015 (Germany)

Dresden: 14th February, 2016 (United States)

Palo Verde: 18th March, 2018 (United States)

Oconee: 11th November, 2019 (United States)

Heysham: 21st July, 2022 (United Kingdom)

Earthquakes, hurricanes, spirit wind and human nature. Then; sterility, leukaemia, poisoned tumours, evacuation. From east to west and again in the middle. Fleeing, running-collapse: U.N’s and E.U’s. Binaries reasserting till the less sick won.

What was the anchor saying? The newsman was in tears, that seemed like a big no-no in the etiquette of news reporting but it was a special day, the occasions warranted tears, one way or the other…a global gesture towards the cessation, no the expulsion not only of ALL nuclear armaments but anything that made the Geiger counter purr. No more my darling fare well to the death drive!

“Over to you Comrade” (it still didn’t hit the ear right, the Californian accent making it rhyme with air raid)

“Thank you Brother-Comrade, as you can see behind me the last stages of the Icarus project are being finalised. This large grey obelisk contains within it all the old imperialist symbols of fear, oppression, resentment and warfare. It houses all the symptoms of humankind’s temporary insanity over the last century. Like its Greek namesake will fly from our newly purged land and directly into the sun…”

[Years later and the Doctor still has a chuckle over this seemingly wilful misinterpretation of the Greek Myth “indeed we never learned the true meaning of Icarus’s folly” he would say grandly, and I would ask him with my gum-toothed smile “what was that?” He would reply always in sadder tones “the consequences of overreaching my dear…”

So we watched. We watched collectively in what Psychiatrists would later claim was a “fit of mass hysteria brought on by cataclysmic trauma”, they likened it to a Child’s tendency to hold a wound, hiding it from view, hiding it instead of treating it, actually saying that, adults have that reaction too, we don’t much like looking into our insides.

Now we live in a University.

The Icarus Project

How could this idea not fail? The laws of irony almost demanded it. “It wasn’t even aerodynamic for f…goodness sake,” our engineer would later exclaim to us sarcastically “a large oblong the size of a small country how could it have not made it to the sun?” [On a side note the scorched earth left by the rocket propellant destroyed an area the size of a small country]

The Icarus Poem

Up and onwards ever ascending,

Awkwardly assailing the twilit sky

Fed with the sum total of humanity’s folly

And named after a moron who thought he could fly.

 

Until my legs went under beneath me,

And like my namesake I came tumbling down

And spread my essence through air, sky and sea

And left my creators with nothing but frowns.

(inscription written on a piece of Icarian debris, found in a suburb of north London)

The University

So we flocked south, south to the very bowels of Britain. We found our sanctuary amongst a tight formation of loosely arranged concrete buildings, it had everything; the lowest contamination levels in the country and a University library that could potentially contain the seeds of future knowledge, and that’s we are now darling…

“Hannah!” A skeleton with hanging skin shouted to the sickly blooming orchid of a pregnant girl talking into her distended belly. “If you continue to insist on this nightly ritual please do it away from the sleeping quarters, why must we do this every single night!?” The skeleton with hanging skin peered at the girl eyes bulging, not quite fitting into the beige skull anymore.  “Come on”, he continued “off to the library with you! Feed the baby some culture and not the endnotes of our deranged society.”

“Sorry Doctor,” Hannah offered, “I’ll go now.”

“Don’t forget to take a torch,” the Doctor reminded her.

With that gentle admonishment the Doctor sucked back into himself disappearing from the light. Hannah strained herself upwards and began to plod her way to the direction of the library, not forgetting to stop by a supply cupboard to grab herself a precious battery operated torch.

Onto The Doctor

When things broke down, confusion reigned, then panic, then fear. Then a sort of combination of all three descended upon the newly- bonded inmates of the university. A kind of benign nihilism. Even in those early days the Doctor had looked undernourished.  A meeting was taking place. The sort of informal communal gathering where the stronger personalities would inevitably rise and claim some kind of leadership role in this fledgling little tribe. Roles were needed and jobs were given. A general overview of their previous lives were being recited hoping that something useful in this new-old world would stick.

“I used to work on cars,” said our new engineer.

“I volunteered on a farm once in my summer vacation,” offered our new agricultural specialist.

“I used to do door work,” our new head of security said.

“I’m a stay at home parent but I love watching the news,” announced our new head of communications.

“I am an elected official, and work on behalf of the peoples parliament!” Said the well experienced sanitation expert.

“And I am a Doctor” said our Doctor.

When the Doctor had announced this there was an audible sigh throughout the meeting room. Almost immediately people began to form an orderly line and show the Doctor things that worried them. Most of the things he was shown invariably turned out to be inoperable cancers or terminal tumours. Things that at first glance appeared rather harmless were actually the early stage symptoms of acute radiation sickness. The Doctor told the queue that he would need to set up a practice before he could properly diagnose them all.  He scrambled off. What was later to be termed as “the council” caught up to ask the Doctor what area of medicine he specialised in, the Doctor hesitated before answering “history and politics mainly, I had just received my PHD before the Icarus came back.”

“Fucking academics,” one of the members spat.

“For fuck sake” said another.

“Do us a favour and please keep that information to yourself.” Said the third.

“Good thing there’s a medical school here then eh? Better put that big brain of yours to good use.” Said our last

And from hence forward our Doctor was born, or at the very least reconfigured.

Walking to the library.

The Doctor had been more insightful than he intended when he spoke of “feeding the baby culture” for that is what she was already doing in her own way. She had spoken the same words at the same time to the same spot on her stomach for last eight months or so. Her little ritual  was something she done in a semi-superstitious hope. She hoped that speaking these words each night to her foetus would in some way anchor the creature to the pre-event days. That her words would act as a shield against the damaging radiation that was no doubt already wreaking havoc on its D.N.A. When she chanted her incantations she would slip into a meditative state where she would picture her words taking on a solidity, a dark solid green colour (that reassuring dark green of the first aid kits so highly coveted in those early days) floating from her mouth and gently landing onto her distended stomach and into her fleshy house which contained a piece of her, not quite an exact copy, a blurry mix between two different masses. But the words would not stop there. They would melt into her insides, soothing all the raw radiation ruined tissue. A wax candle on a hot plate. Gliding into the womb, encasing her baby in a dull green glow. And then deeper still, passing, melting into the molecular level. Cleaning through its genetic strands. Healing all as it washes complete. Reconnecting the torn strands of the double helix, a reverse re-stringing of a snapped instrument, something that had stood the test of time for so long, now disfigured, now misused. A continuation of what had been so dramatically halted. That’s why she spoke to the slumbering collection of reflections in her body.

Hannah got to the top of the stairs and went through the double doors into the dark library beyond.

The Children

TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDING FOUND AT SITE #00876 BETWEEN TWO SELF IDENTIFIED “RESEARCHERS” ONE MALE (M) ONE FEMALE (F) DIGITAL COPY HEAVILY CORRUPTED ONLY A FRAGMENT REMAINS

F: (garbled unintelligence)…Entry 48…(long scrambled white noise) what’s completely taken us by surprise is the pattern of genetic alteration that seems to consistently occur with each new birth(.)

M: I thought,[ yes exactly, but there is something undeniably extreme for want of a better word, since we’ve established the colony here for the (voice trails off into quiet incomprehensibility) 

F: Talk into the Microphone(?) (Laughter) remember this is for posterity and our findings are of significance

M: Sorry Liz(?) yes well we predicted that the several hundred areas of impact across the globe from the Icarus(?) incident to correlate directly with cases of contamination and exposure, it being relative to the proximity of the persons to the wreckage, (.)

F: Yes exactly and for the first year or so we were mostly vindicated in our prediction those of us who came to the University(?)[of the mutations that would be prevalent in offspring. The first batch of Children bore mutations ranging from severe to almost non-existent, unsurprisingly those survivors hailing from central London bore children with more severe (2) alterations than those from the home counties with those from the southern coastal towns having both the lowest level of visible and[ molecular mutation (.) but what we didn’t expect(recording unintelligible in this moment)

M: exactly (.) apart from these two years nothing has gone as we thought it would, there has been a gradual increase mutations across the board, no longer does it matter where the survivors have come from, the Children they are bearing are more and more different appearing something other than human,  it sounds improbable, but the evidence shows that they are all coming out consistently different from their biological [ and resembling each other in their changes, their diet too is worth mentioning, we know the food supply, all of the food supply to be contaminated in some way, anything tinned is to be shunned out of muscle memory more than intuition, but they thrive on tinned goods, the more poisonous the better, they seem to readily wolf down anything canned and they don’t need tin openers (.)

F: It’s as if natural selection has just been giving a syringe full of growth hormones, what is more disturbing is that they seem to detest being around us, not quite vocally expressing when they are conscious of being apart from their kin

M: of course a threat assessment has been carried out (2) but it is too late (.) even the strongest among has some kind of leukaemia, and yet we continue to (garbled transmission) pregnant…Immaculate Conception (laughter)

F: meanwhile the council has authorised voluntary euthanasia for those of us too sick to carry..

REST OF RECORDING CORRUPTED WITH AGE AND INCOMPREHENSIBLE

END OF TRANSCRIPT

Transcription code:

[simultaneous utterance

(2) 2 second pause (.) short pause

(?) unknown syntax

The Library

Hannah stared at the projected palsied mask in front of her. At first she thought the screen was paused or indeed may have been a holographic-art installation. It was only combination of the tinny repetitions from the dusty speaker and the perpetual bobbing of the faces’ larynx that convinced her otherwise. Far from being frightened Hannah was used to such things. Often Students would forget to take their rechargeable ion-lithium power-packs with them once they had finished using the library. This never ceased to amaze her, this absent-mindedness. It took roughly between 6-7 hours to get a full charge from a static bike, (the effort sometimes killed the more determined of the maturing flock) and while she knew students to be anything but lazy, the most healthy among the tribe still suffered from some sort of chronic fatigue due to the various level of exposure they had all been subjected to. Of course it depended on the weather…

Hannah was curious to know what the face was saying and so she moved towards the volume panel in the wall. As she turned her head away from the screen she could suddenly comprehended the words being spoken. As she turned back to the screen the language became strangulated again. For some reason the gulf between vocal utterance and facial expression was too great for Hannah to understand. Instead she sat down on one of the formerly comfortable couches opposite the screen and closed her eyes. The conversation came into sharp focus. The larynx that had combated with the air to mix for language no longer sounded involuntary, instead it sounded thick as if she were eating while she replied to an incessant interviewer.

The thought of nourishment made Hannah smile and she heard the woman amusedly reply, “I wondered when you’d get round to asking me that,” Hannah imagined them, all three of them in a fancy cafeteria. Like the ones where the communal feedings were held but with actually something substantive and delicious. She was sitting between two people. The woman from before, no longer withered and masked in paralysis was as animated as the playful words that came tumbling through thick bouts of delicious stuff. The woman was named Mia she learned. And she seemed to be giving a spirited riposte to one of the more abrasive questions:

“Well it’s like I said in the prose, I had wanted to create something viable and alive! A living thing from scratch, that much was true at least.” The interviewer asked another question but try as she might Hannah couldn’t discern what was being asked. Only echoes in an empty room. “My reprimand of Richard I also felt valid to a degree, whether he actually exists or not hardly matters at this point does it? Literature has a HUGE advantage over the sciences in which I had studied under in that it is unshackled by the burden of proof and completely at the whim of intuition. For so long “scientists” scorned at the whimsy of authors of fiction yet I would argue if it wasn’t for us (yes I am including myself amongst the tribe of literary greats) where would science lead to? Have you ever met a hard-line scientist? Terrifying creatures who constantly rue the constraints that ethics place on their research. Our ability to conceive the logical ends of their beginning endeavours allows us to open the dialogue between the two equally important fields. What I tried to do and what im still trying to do before I fall away into the inky deep is negotiate the line between us and the planet we inhabit, not our planet you see the planet. That’s lesson one. Also the seventh event serves as a great summing up of my works that does nothing to give an overall view of the sum total of my works.  The imagination often leads to better sciences whereas science leads to a more believable fiction. They are both needed and something like the seventh event allowed me to go outside myself, to look at the shaved twisted simian I now resemble and see if all my ardent anger was still valid. I am pleased to announce it is.”