Ex Lacrima Remnant

Track #40 – Days of a Future Past

“Noooo! No! Noooooooo!”

Robin curled in fetal position, her head tucked among her arms, tears flowing down her cheeks like rivers, her voice trembling, a guttural sequences of sighs and sobs.

“It can’t be real, it can’t be happening. It… it isn’t possible, that wasn’t how… why? Why? Why again? Whyyyyy?”

She beat her fist on the floor, her eyes were clouded, swollen. As soon as the broadcast played, as soon as the delirious words of Anthony Yarramundi filled the mess hall of Atropos, Robin broke down. Like a toy falling from the top floor of a skyscraper. Like a computer riddled with viruses. Like a watch going backwards. A husk. A crying husk, shivering, trembling, under the gaze of the rhizomes, of the Peacekeepers, of Station Commander Geiger, still unable to process what had just happened. The message. The lights going down. Minister Van Perens running for the terminal. Her body falling on the floor. Before being devoured by an invisible monster. One that ate Grigorji Shao too, then half of the crowd, without any distinction of race, gender, age. Till everything went dark. Leaving only a blank projection, filled with digital noise. With one, last, ear-piercing sound, before falling in complete silence.

Silence broken by Robin, still bawling her eyes out.

“The message, why… why didn’t they tell me about the message? Why? If… if I knew, I would have… I would have shot her! I would have killed her! I would have… pulled the trigger! Aaaah! AAAAAH!”

Agave ignored her, looked down too, her legs shaking, her breathing ragged.

“…not… so close… not so close… to being free! This is… this is unfair…”

Wetness in her eyes. Her water. Was leaking. She growled, slapped herself with her tendrils, wiped away the droplets.

“This is unfair! How? Why? Those bastards! Those bastards from Earth! Dominant species my ass! What if… why did they turn on us? Why… why develop such a stupid failsafe?! And now… now thanks to it… thanks to it…”

Agave screamed, letting her anger take over, screamed from the bottom of her lungs, till no air was left. Before turning her head down again, bowing. Leaking water from her eyes. Sobbing without end. Not managing to stop.

“…this is… so unfair…”

Her voice weakened, dying down into a whisper.

“Five years… five years of preparations. F… for what? We just wanted to be… the same as you..”

Geiger turned to the PV projector, tuned it again, tried to find another broadcast. After a couple unsuccessful attempts, a new signal blasted through the room. The blank space was filled with lights, with a wooden desk placed at the center of the studio. A news channel, two people sitting close to each other, both wearing a suit. A guy with glasses. A woman with long, artsy earrings. Staring at the viewers in a state of distress. All while the pictures from the Turn kept playing in the background. Lily’s speech, Yarramundi’s deranged expression, Muriel van Perens dissolving in a cloud of nothing. They read the bulletin, with cold, impersonal voices, listing casualties, known unknowns, hypotheses. The anomaly wasn’t over. Wasn’t disappearing. If anything, it became every minute more voracious, eating through things and people, leaving nothing in its wake. The ring perimeters. The armored vehicles. The troopers. Consumed, turned into a soup of molecules, without being able to retaliate. All reported with a distinct lack of emotions. All reported with resignation, with no faith in their voices. Geiger looked at them, recognized their faces. He couldn’t say he was a fan of their news show, but that was the first time he saw them so deathly pale, so haggard.

“This… This is all wrong!”

A voice stole Geiger’s attention, a distorted voice, one filtered by a Peacekeeper helmet.

“You damn plants! It’s all your fault! All your fault!”

One of his soldiers.

Raised their hand.

And slapped Primula.

On her cheek.

Primula blinked, her hand trembled, went for her skin, touched it. It hurt. That hurt. She glanced back at the Peacekeeper, at their open hand. They were trembling too, shaking.

“A… all your fault…”

Another loud slap, this time on their cheek, their head turned too. Felce. Felce’s hand made contact with the helmet, at full force, making the Peacekeeper lose their balance, stumble back. The tanned rhizome towered above them, roared like a lion.

“Touch her again and I’ll rip your hands off! And your balls too, if you have them!”

The Peacekeeper tried to retort, fell on their knees, stuttered.

“B… but…”

“It’s not her fault! It’s not my fault! Heck, if it’s anyone’s fault, that bearded creep on tape is to be blamed! That was stupid, stupid beyond belief!”

“B… but if that bitch let our Prime Minister open the vault, nothing would have happened! If only she didn’t stage a rebellion, we…”

“Shut up! Shut the heck up!”

An inhuman scream made both turn towards the PV projector. Robin. Robin was barely hanging on, tearing apart as her tears kept pouring.

“Everything… e… everything… It’s my fault! It’s just my fault! How… how did it come to this… how…”

“You…”

“Hi, anyone wants some tea?”

Silence. A loud voice, carefree. One that didn’t belong to the grave, mournful thoughts haunting the minds of everyone else. Geiger looked in the direction those cheerful words came from. Felce followed it too. Prim, Agave, even Robin. All eyes on the door to the mess hall, where a shirtless giant with a metal face and one red eye was waving his hand as a form of greeting, before wiping away some of his sweat with a towel, consciously puffing out is pecs. At that peculiar sight, Station Commander Geiger cleared his throat, let out a long sigh, resisting the urge to chew him alive.

“…Mr. Dobrio? I take it you haven’t understood the gravity of the situation…”

“Oh, no, no. I, like, totally got it. Plants went aaah, video man went oooh, nanomachines went boom. And now we’re watching a planet being fucked faster than a rhizome in Mimi’s bedroom, in real time even! Trust me, Mr. Nicebeard, I get it – the medbay had a high quality PV projector too. We didn’t miss a single second of broadcast. Minister Van Perens’s death scream was a solid ten out of ten – would buy the movie.”

A elbow hit him in his pecs, causing him to jolt. On his right side, stood a red-haired woman, donning an orange prisoner uniform.

“…that shout out was uncalled for, Dobrio.”

Dobrio replied with his elbow, lightly hitting her on the shoulder.

“Hey, you had your way with two plants in five days, not I.”

Geiger blinked without being able to say a word, wondering whether he was getting old or the world was simply crazier than he thought it could become. At the same time, he couldn’t help but feel a little warmth in his heart, watching that giant and that blind gal bickering like little kids while Lagash was literally falling apart. Dobrio snapped his fingers, rubbed the towel on his neck once more.

“Okay, listen up you all: stop with this graveyard mood, alright? Whatever we can do, provided we can do anything, can wait half an hour longer. We are literally stranded on a piece of orbital junk parked somewhere in space and we need a minimum of half a day to land back on solid ground from here. Calling whoever you wanna call now ain’t gonna work, landlines must be a hell at the moment. And, hey, the government got decap’d too, right? So, we can do nothing, at least not right in this moment. Which means, we all have time to enjoy some tea together.”

Agave stood up from the table she was sitting on, raised her tendrils as if they were the arms she lost.

“But… but every second we lose is…”

Dobrio, though, didn’t let her object

“I’ll cook the water for everyone. Mimi, what about choosing the tea variety? We’ve got plenty of them, in the drawers. Captain Nicebeard here must be an estimator!”

“I’m blind and the damn boxes don’t have names in braille!”

“Well, then surprise pick it is! It’s like a gacha! Some win, some lose! Hope I won’t pick the spicy pepper tea, though.”

Mimi wore a tired smile, slapped his abs.

“You’re such a dork…”

Dobrio patted her head, brushed her hair.

“Always have been.”

Then, he went to the kitchenette and started fiddling with an electric kettle, filling it with water from an array of small plastic bottles, under the confused gazes of everyone else.

**

The atmosphere was surreal, around that table. Fifteen warm mugs of tea, some biscuits spread on small plastic dishes. Four people in orange prisoner clothes. Three rhizomes in full tactical gear. A station commander with a similar uniform. Three guys in white from the medbay. Four Peacekeepers without helmet. One Peacekeeper without uniform, still wrapped in tampons and gauze. All sitting together. All slowly cooling down. One of the prisoners was this big guy with gray skin, walking around shirtless, hugging and shaking hands with everyone. Agave couldn’t divert her eyes from his body, from the sweat beads flowing down his abs. She licked her lips, almost automatically, almost hypnotized by that sight, felt her lymph reserves overflowing, to the point of forgetting the reason why she was there in the first place. On her right side, Felce was eating him with her eyes too, feeling her lymph production being kicked up by a notch or two just by that meatloaf existing. Primula, though, didn’t seem fazed at all, preferring to squeeze her plushie Riri in her arms instead, while leaning on Mal’s shoulder, rubbing her cheek on his face and sucking her tea via her neck tendrils.

A sigh. Robin sipped a little bit of tea too. Her eyes swollen, the tears barely stopped. Yet, that scrap of warmth made her feel slightly better, enough to finally clear her mind. Enough for her to tell the full story.

“…so, as I said before, I have seen this happening… once, already. I was there, during the last Turn of the Millennium. N… not on the flight deck, though, just outside the seedship. So, I missed the video. I didn’t even know there was one. If I knew that… I would have acted differently.”

Mimi tapped her finger on the table, rolled her eyes.

“So, hey, not to play the bad girl, but… what are you, then? You mentioned the last Turn, yeah? Are you, like, really a gal from a previous cycle?”

“I’m an elf.”

Geiger almost choked on his mug. He was taking his sweet time to savor his tea, but that answer made him almost spit it on the table. Mimi groaned, slapped her hand on her forehead.

“Oh, great. An elf. Sure. I guess you’re married with a wizard? Do you have a pet dragon too?”

“N… not that kind of elf! Think of me more like a… huh, living recording device. Shaped like… a pointy-eared, always-young, greeny-green girl.”

“Wait, you said pointy ears? But they don’t…”

“I cut them to blend in with normal humans, when I woke up. It hurt a lot, don’t ask.”

Robin looked at her reflection on the mug. Her eyes were tired. Her whole face was tired. Yet, the emerald still shone. Another part of her that didn’t change.

“This gem on my forehead… is the solid memory drive where everything I’ve seen in my life is recorded. Everything. It saps memories from my brain and saves them in its crystalline structure, so that I can keep recording for a long time. So far, I have almost three hundred years of history preserved on it.”

“So… the ‘grandma Robin’ that aunt Caro met in her twenties…”

“Yeah, there was no ‘grandma Robin’. It was just I. Caro… saved me from taking my life, the night we met. I didn’t recognize her, at first, when you brought me to her shop. You know, white hair and everything. It was a shock to see that she… still remembered me.”

Mimi fell into an awkward silence, drinking down some of her warm beverage. Dobrio hugged her, brought her close to him. Mimi returned the hug, locked her arms around his waist. Lacrima stared at them for a long instant, feeling some water leaking from her eye, without understanding why. She wiped it quickly, before turning around, glancing at Robin. Forcing out a question she kept inside since she learned that she, too, was an artificial creature.

“Forever young. Female. Slim. Conventionally attractive. Was your father also a self-proclaimed chad?”

“A… chad? I don’t think…”

Felce chimed in, interrupting her answer.

“Do you need to have sex with a human to transfer your records to an external physical support?”

“Wait, no, why would I…”

Agave also shot a question, without leaving her time to reply.

“Does your body produce a waste substance that is best drained by intimate stimulation?”

“Intimate what now?!”

Only for Primula to feel the need to ask something too.

“Do you expand your memory banks through sockets in your feet?”

“… time out, alright? Humans back then were civilized people. They didn’t have a Zonta. I wasn’t designed by any Zontas, okay? My ‘mother’ wasn’t a pervert. And we elves were beloved, wholesome companions for all humans. All of them. Not weapons. Not living dolls meant to turn the dick of their creator really really hard. So, no. I was not. Created. For dirty. Stuff. Nothing in my design. Nothing in the design of my species. Was made. To arouse. A creep.”

“But…”

“No Zontas. No. Zontas.”

Robin sipped down a little more tea, wiped her remaining tears. Deep inside, she felt surprised by how easy it was to talk, now. Everyone was listening. Everyone was waiting for her to go on. She wished that could have been the case even before worse came to worst.

“Long story short, after the vault was opened and… and Lagash went full ‘raze the planet’ mode, we tried everything we had to stop it, all sorts of weapons. But those nanoactuators… are something else. They can be slowed down with EMP pulses, a bit at least, but not disabled. They devour everything in their path, decompose it down to raw materials. They are wired to distinguish natural from artificial structures and disassemble everything that was built or made. Our scientists thought that Lagash must have made a scan of the planet before seeding mankind here and is using it to decide what needs to be destroyed and what not. The result, however, was that after she was finished, nothing remained of my mankind. A… absolutely nothing. As if… almost as if we never existed. That… hurt.”

“How have you survived for so long?”

Lacrima asked again, staring at Robin with her red eye, quietly sipping her spicy pepper herbal tea, dipping her tongue inside the mug at irregular intervals.

“I was frozen in suspended animation and sent to space on a rocket, on a very eccentric elliptic orbit. That made me crash land somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere two hundred or so years ago. I was the only one to make it back alive. All my companions, they… they didn’t make it. It was a… rough, barely tested method, but also the only way to avoid being destroyed by Lagash. Even space… couldn’t save us.”

Robin turned towards the window, the big window opening on the vastness of space.

“See, at this rhythm, Lagash will strip the planet naked in less than one year. But, long before everything is over, it will start shooting down all space stations and satellites. The last extra step will be erasing Neon.”

“W… wait, Neon too?”

“Huh-uh. We had a city on the Moon, you know? It was called Selene – really bland name, if you ask me. We thought it was the safest place to escape to, while our planet was consumed. Turns out, the nanoactuators of Lagash travelled with the refugees, remaining dormant for a long time. It was all a plan, a plan to make sure every single artificial structure made by the dominant species of this planet was doomed. Three months before the last remaining human city on Lagash died, the nanoactuators on the Moon activated and destroyed everything. Selene didn’t last a day. As soon as the dome was punctured, everyone was as good as dead. At that time, I was already stashed in the rocket, almost ready to go into hibernation... but I got a last message from another elf with all the images she captured… while begging me to… to remember her.”

She turned to Station Commander Geiger, cracked a wry smile.

“So, the best thing you can do, Commander, is to call whoever is in charge of Neon and tell them to shoot down any and all rockets coming from Lagash. Every and any. Even if there are survivors on board. Even children. Shoot down everyone. Everything. Don’t let anything that comes from Lagash land on the Moon. If they want to have a chance to resist longer, that’s the only thing they can do.”

Geiger brought the mug to his lips, gulped down what was left of its content.

“…alright, I see where you are coming from. That’s a hard decision to justify.”

“But it’s a start.”

“…can you prove you are what you say you are?”

Robin shrugged, shook her head.

“Maybe? My clothes. My weapon. Have it analyzed and dated in the lab. You’ll see that the age of their core components doesn’t match the level of tech, that the shapes aren’t standard either. I’m not even sure you have developed guns of this type yet. I haven’t seen any, in my time on your Lagash. Drugs, though? You’ve cooked so many different kinds of them. So many.”

Robin couldn’t help but glance at Mimi, aptly avoiding Dobrio’s cyclopean gaze.

“When Caro brought me to that rave party, I consumed and catalogued seventeen different types of psychotropic substances. In just one night. My Lagash didn’t spend so many resources for that kind of stuff. But… huh, it didn’t feel bad. I kinda… wish I had some of them with me… right now, you know?”

Geiger ignored that last part, wiped his lips, stood up.

“Hard to trust you, but it is what it is. I already had to change my mind today, because a terrorist turned out to be a somewhat decent person. I can’t say I’m convinced, but at this point? I’ll take everything.”

He cracked his neck, brushed cookie crumbs out of his beard.

“I still have some contacts on Neon. I’ll see what they say about it. The sooner I give them that warning, the better. Maybe they can find a middle ground, like stashing the refugees in a space station. I don’t know. I’d better get going and send them some intel.”

He glanced at the clock, at the hands slowly ticking up. It was already the day after the Turn, by at least fifteen minutes.

“In the meanwhile, I suggest you all try to get some shuteye. Mr. Dobrio is right: currently, we can’t do a lot. At our fastest, we’d only be able to land on Lagash in half a day. Unless the seedship decides to shoot us down before, that is, but in that case we’d be screwed anyway.”

Robin stroked the gem in her forehead, touched it with her index finger, almost pushing it in. She closed her eyes, browsed the records stashed inside it for what felt like an eternity, opened her eyes again.

“According to my records, Lagash started shooting down the space stations after almost exactly seventy-two hours, but downed the satellites – most of them – in the first twenty-four hours instead, disrupting essential communications completely.”

“Can I have a look at your archives, elf?”

Robin looked down, diverted her gaze.

“N… no, sorry.”

“Why?”

“The moment this gem is removed from my head… I’ll die.”

“Oh.”

“This gem is Robin. Robin is this gem. If I lose it, my mind… will be wiped. And I don’t…”

She felt his hand on her shoulder, his eyes locking with hers.

“It’s fine, lass. Go get some sleep. I’ll deal with Neon till we have enough satellites to reach them.”

Then, he turned around, finally leaving the mess hall.

It was going to be a long night.

For all of them.