Ecosystem Reignited

"Everything and anything", they said.

"That’s not very scientific", we said.

But the first rule of science is to be upfront about what you don’t know.

And we never really understood our planet, to be fair. Perhaps that’s why we didn’t get along.

"Ok then", we said. "We’ll take everything. Except the fruit flies."

"Especially the fruit flies. We don’t know enough yet. They could be important."

———————————————

The time had come to move off world. Some who saw the first spaceships leave, who looked up in awe at the construction of the gateway, wondered why we didn’t apply our science instead to saving our planet.

"Science don’t work like that", we said. "You don’t get to choose what discoveries to uncover. All you can do is apply yourself and try to understand more."

Besides, the discovery of spatial warping had been merely an accident. No one could have guessed just how little power a time-space generator would need. Simply grab two quantum entangled particles, formed in the birth pangs of the universe, and fold them until you have a tunnel large enough to step through. Welcome to the fifth dimension. Piece of cake.

Much harder was figuring out how to deal with the trillions of complex life forms on Earth, where folding and entering wasn’t the answer. Right up to the very last many of us continued to study ecology, feeling around for the sick vein poisoning our world. In the cosmic game of Jenga something, or somethings, had to be the essential block upon which the tower balanced. Those who tried thought they could save Earth yet. Either that or they wanted to die trying. What were a couple of human lives sacrificed at the feet of a collapsing giant, if those lives could keep it breathing just a little while longer? I guess we were reluctant to throw away our once beautiful cradle.

The ships took everything from Earth in the end, proving something of an ‘I told you so’ for the creationists. Yet Noah clearly never had anything quite like this. Devoid of Earth’s gravity the ‘ark’ we built out of those ships could expand in all directions, without concerns about crushing itself or the ground beneath it.

We also didn’t take the literal animals themselves, in rows of two. That would be nuts. Instead, millions of seed banks thronged the aisles of the ark, each labeled in tiny, neat computer handwriting, noting specific information for reproduction down on New Earth. How many to hatch, what environment they liked, what food they ate and how often. Any missing steps we took buried somewhere deep in the spirit of the project, where we couldn’t peer through.

Since we didn’t know enough about ecology we brought, in essence, the world we left behind.

Gliding above those seed vaults I felt like an interstellar chef contemplating her cake mix. One big ol’ bowl of Earth, to be served up and baked upon arrival.

The one question we still hadn’t settled, at the time of departure, was just how many of us to take. Even considering the population we currently supported (some 14 billion persons on Earth alone) proposals for the away crew meant we’d greatly overwhelm New Earth’s fragile early ecology. It was as if, instead of one Adam for a new Eden, we were taking a thousand.

But no one wanted to die, even if it meant completely undermining the project. In the end the will to live came through.

"To hell with this", we said. "Everyone who can come comes. Humanity must survive."

Ahead of us we sent the probes, scouting and recording across deep space, scanning every entangled particle for trace signals of a nearby solar system. It took us some time, but we did fund one, stumbling in the dark. Synrix, a moon fit for terraforming.

Then we sent the seed banks and ‘cake mixers’ — the laboratories, distillers, growth tanks and environmental regulators. Everything we’d need to reignite our seed bank and begin life again once we arrived. We sent those ahead some decades before us, with a small skeleton crew — no one fancied being cooped up in space for very long, except the astronomers and maybe some astrologists. No one else fancied keeping the two together very long.

When the gate turned on I was at the ‘back’ of the ark, the last of the fleet to go through, with my part-time boyfriend. We were both of us too busy seeing other people to commit to anything serious. We had the rest of our lives and the whole human race to think about. Plus, I didn’t really like him much, out of the sack.

"If I put my foot through the gate now", he said, "would I be in two places at once?"

"No", I said, "you’d be in the same place twice. At least according to particle physics."

See, each quantum entangled particle is an exact replica of itself, as exact as quantifiably possible. Meaning any action against that particle disturbs the duplicate in exactly the same way. The distinction between the two events is meaningless.

"What does that do to the shape of the universe then?", he said.

"Makes it a whole darn lot harder to draw, that’s for sure. Come on, put your clothes back on and let’s go have a look."

We floated in free fall out to an observation port, like two weightless puppets.

"What do you think we’ll find when we get there, he said. Do you think it worked?"

"I don’t know", I said, feeling suddenly morose and slightly strange. "Maybe they’re all dead. Maybe they all died years ago."

"Cheerful as always", he said.

I gave him the look to be quiet.

If it was like anything, it was like watching, from front row seats, a giant toddler pushing a toy truck into mud. Minus the toddler. The mud too was blacker then anything we’d ever conceived of — the smallest point in the universe folded out into impossibility. The human race jamming itself where it didn’t belong. We were surely taking ourselves along for the ride, in the quest to go forth and multiply. The human race, and all its complexities, together with the ecosystem we didn’t understand or seem to care about.

For some reason, I grabbed his hand and held on. Fear, maybe. Some small thing that crept under my jaded scientific pessimism and got its hooks into me. We were standing on the brink of a hilarious cosmic joke, the distressed family member who can’t decide what to pack so takes everything. As detached as I had become, this really was the end, the giant leap of faith. You can still respect the clowns you laugh at.

I squeezed harder.

———————————————

Time has a funny way of asserting itself, without having to be in the (figurative) room. In the empty stretches of space that passed without change during our brief human lifespans, we noticed. More specifically, we noticed the lack of activity on Syrinx, the pockmarked probes and debris scattered around the moon’s gentle green. We hadn’t expected such progress so soon — the last spectral analysis had shown vast fields of ice waiting to be broken up and tempered into a thick atmosphere. Granted, that was fifty years ago, but we should have seen colonies, close-knit bubblewrap tents and bored as heck colonists who’d welcome our arrive. The scene below looked like a science fictional rendering of Venus, seen through a green lens. The supposed primeval planet that turned out to be nothing more than hot gas in a pressure cooker.

I felt much older, all of a sudden. Like a kid on a car ride who realises they’d really taking a trip to the dentist. Here was the planet we were responsible for — just what had we done with it?

"They’ll send probes first", I said, to hear my self talk.

"What about the old ones?"

"I guess we’ll sift through them too, while we wait. See what survived. Anything and everything, remember?"

He nodded, looking scared. I kissed him reassuringly, feeling the taunt line of his jaw. Our mutual anxiety in that moment seemed to bring us suddenly closer than three weeks of sharing a bed. Feeling the desire to run home, tail between legs, recounting some unexplained ghost story we’d seen from afar.

"Let’s go see the others", I said.

The main hangar quickly became a tactic in diversion over the coming weeks, a games room on rotation. Chess, checkers, Yahtzee, cards, connect four, volleyball, football, soccer, monopoly, risk, battleships, snooker. When we grew restless someone would turn off the ship’s rotational spin and we’d all float in zero gee, the security of babies in a metal womb, enjoying the novelty of touch and objects that were boring under normal gravity. All the while we waited.

"It looks like the colour of spew", one of my friends said.

"Don’t be disgusting", said another, an artist type with textbook interests. "Look at the way the clouds move, the way the light plays off the green sun, funnelling into the depths. It’s so intricately balanced. And alive."

"Spew can be intricate", I said. "And alive."

She huffed loudly.

"We’ve crossed several billion light years to get here — do we have to be so crass?"

"Seven billion", I muttered in short breaths. So far to travel in no time at all. The entanglement principal, the quantum locked universe that had destroyed Einstein, destroyed all the twentieth century giants. But wasn’t this famous green sun so much dimmer than the first pictures had shown. The path of Syrinx so much closer to its parent planet Ovid, with sister moon Pan gaining out from beyond the gas giant. In the game of cat and mouse Pan was chasing Syrinx down, down into the enormity of Ovid’s gravity well.

I took some photos of Syrinx from the port window as she passed Ovid’s horizon, then slipped off into one of the adjoining labs, looking for the digital imager. Watching planets on replay was fun when you turned the shutter speed to some 100,000 years a snap. I had a hunch I’d find something of the sort here. Tracing the patterns of the first images sent by the probes against more recent findings, calculating based off the slight elongated elliptical orbit of Syrinx around its planet, around its sun. I had enough data to know what I should see.

Synrix had moved. The light from Eden 12 showed a marked decrease.

When the probes came back they confirmed exactly that, plus a marked difference in background radiation. Eden was spilling its guts out, ejecting material which had once formed at the core of the sun. We had come some seven billion light years knowingly and crossed a threshold of time we hadn’t planned. We knew now why, back on Earth, the probes had stopped sending.

A meeting was called in the main hangar. All games were packed away.

"It doesn’t make sense", we cried. "Why the sudden acceleration in time? Why any difference at all? Quantum entangled particles should react simultaneously."

Our wildest theorists stood up, took their stand.

"But who said time remains the same inside a particle of matter? We’ve experienced time outside of the normal macro-universe, and now we’ve stepped into the micro. If time is a property of size then we’re dealing with scales that don’t even begin to correspond with our own conception of time in the ‘normal’ universe."

Us the crowd looked on exacerbated.

"But we thought we had it right", we said.

"Well, it’s just a theory", they replied.

Another set of speakers rose.

"Forget the time it took to get here. Would we ever have gone back, even if we could? There’s a planet beneath us, teaming with the life we gave it."

"It’s alive then", we cried. "Is that what the data says?"

"Oh it’s alive", they said. "Unusual but alive."

"We can go there?"

"We can. We must."

Our science had let us down, had ripped us across the universe without warning us of the consequences. We had tried to understand and we had failed.

Now it was the turn of the ecologists and the artists, the skeptics of the science world, the ones who had engineered the trip. The ones who had admitted defeat and who had, in defiance of their ignorance, scooped up Earth in its entirety and sent it hurtling into space, to land exactly as it was on the face of a distant moon. God or creation had made the Earth over billions of years — what chance had we of remaking it in our own image? The best we could do was to keep the set and shift the stage.

I decided to take another boyfriend with me down to the surface. I suppose I felt like a change in scenery. We’d experienced the jump together, stayed fairly close during the agonising months of analysis. New Earth had to be experienced with a fresh perspective. Experiences belong to certain people only once. New Earth needed a new companion by my side.

"Don’t talk", I said as we strapped in. "I want to enjoy the ride down. Just hold my hand."

The first of us disappeared into he cloud, down into the swirl of colours. At closer range one could see further variation in the light spectrum, beams playing off the sun that spelt green across the solar system. A trick of the visible wave lengths of light that disappeared under proper observation. Or did it? Was the planet really that green underneath, admitting green radiation, pulsating green light out into space. What could we really be certain of seven billion light years from home?

Even with my eyes closed I could feel the light melting against my retinas. Dorothy in a storm, waiting to wake up to reality. Only dreams can’t scratch and bite, can’t leave you stranded in time. Unless you’re in a coma, maybe.

Thruster jets thundered our arrival, breaking the pace of fall, cutting off in time for the sharper shock that was the parachute launching. If we’d timed it right we should be within five miles of the habitat. Five miles and 100,000 years.

———————————————

I wish I could have seen the landing in real time, not when I did hours later. From the view screen it had none of the properties of a true experience, more like some animated fairyland. None of us could even believe it, to begin with, as if our machines were playing a joke, switching out the .rvp files on us for some horror film by Dr Seuss.

We had all the right ingredients, proper measurements, time enough to bake something like our original Earth, but not enough for the recipe to grow original. What was Snyrix keeping from us, that she should grow like this? How little did we understand our ecology, when we scooped it up from home world and dumped it here. Our packed lunch had spoiled, but who had brought the mystery juice box, the culprit of it all?

The first night we feared to go out, listening to the hoots and howls of throats not of our Earth. Instead we erected our own tents near where base camp should have been, where our instruments picked up traces of titanium and other compounds preserved from the first mission. There weren’t even bodies to bury — time had done away with that and buried them hundreds of feet deep.

We tried to make sketches of the land we saw, the gross moving flesh that had a life of its own. No land had ever taken on such fantastical shapes. Was it alive as we understood the term? Had those been trees down below or their mutated cousins, oxygenating the atmosphere, performing some similar service to New Earth? The clearing we had landed in was strangely devoid of much activity, perhaps contaminated by the original inhabitants. We didn’t have probes enough left to check now, too many were reporting missing or coming up dead, decayed through years they couldn’t have seen.

Eventually we would have to leave our huddled fire and find out for ourselves, if we meant to survive. Somewhere out there was unexpected game, prize deer, pigs and cows we’d thought couldn’t be touched when we first arrived. They’d had some thousands of years on us now, to breed. The plan still should have worked without us, with only our machines to tend to the planet’s growth.

Days later, when we began to prepare for exploration I loaded up a travel jeep with my third boyfriend and headed out in a direction at random. We drove in silence, except for ten minute intervals where I radioed base to confirm our position and safety.

He was smaller than the other boyfriends, darker and more delicate, without the bone structure of the other two. Luckily for him though he had very beautiful eyes. He also didn’t talk much, like me, or ask questions. He scribbled ideas down on a note pad, certain sketches of the gas clouds above, the creeping horizon. Strange that I should find myself with two of the colony’s few artists — one my obnoxious, prissy friend who couldn’t stand puke references and this, my third lover.

They say we go searching in others for what we lack ourselves. What did that say about us here on Synrix? I found myself watching him more than the blank view up ahead.

No, not blank. A thin line of what looked like reaching trees began to grow larger, rapidly filling the sky. I soon realised my mistake — the clearing had been deceptively large, covered by the curvature of the moon. But we couldn’t have been so far out as to reach the forest we’d mapped last week, not unless…

The forest continued to swarm towards us. From the thickets of the trees swamped hundreds of dessert scorpions, hissing like cats on the still air. I felt for the repulser field, but soon realised it was down. All energy transmissions had collapsed. A storm perhaps? But nothing shifted in the calm dozy air. Air that tasted like thick honey, like strange new Earth.

We drove over the scorpions without harm, zipping the tent fabric around us in place of the energy field. As we drove we heard the sounds of dozens of scratches, the crunch of exoskeletons under the wheels. I slowed down to swerve, avoiding the tree line, the strange roots that twisted and grew from out of the ground as they reached for us. I turned to go back, back to camp.

———————————————

When it began to get dark we decided to park up near the river Ladon, named the day before. At least we thought it was Ladon. The land had shifted so much now that the clearing had completely disappeared, leaving us in what could have been some medieval countryside.

Lying on the hood of the jeep I wrapped my boyfriend’s arms around me, staring up at the sky. Over the months since coming we’d began to make up new myths to familiarise the unfamiliar constellations. We even had a new star chart, based loosely around our birthdays. Gradually the sky had began to feel familiar. Now where were we?

I felt him reaching for his sketchbook.

"No", I said. "No moving."

His hand complied, although I felt tension along his arm. Why did I feel such a need to be in control? Some things should have gotten left on Earth.

Suddenly he started coughing, spluttering. Convulsions that rang through his body, rippled against mine. A thick wetness in my hair.

"Billy, what the hell. What did you do?"

I stood accusingly over him, frightened. He kept coughing, looking at me with scared eyes, eyes that quickly grew red. Doubled up he pointed at something by the river, some sort of bush. Our electricity had returned some time ago, so I shone my light on it hard. What I saw was the completely unexpected. Fresh strawberries.

Billy wiped the blood off his mouth, slumping down beside the tyre.

"I analysed them", he said. "But I wanted to try first. Nothing… nothing make sense."

"Billy…"

"We have to eat. We have to eat or die that much slower."

"Billy, you stupid…"

I suddenly noticed that my light was not the only one in the night sky.

"Get up, we have to go."

He shook his head carefully.

"Look, there’s a light. We have to go now."

"All the more reason to stay."

He seemed to deflate against the tyre now. Only his eyes remained behind.

"Come back with a contamination team if you must. But just go. I’ll stay here."

I was shocked just how easy it was then to leave him, now that humanity was so close. Run and return to refuge. Run and save myself. Still, I didn’t like to leave him. I wouldn’t be leaving him, really. Just for a short while.

I turned and sprinted, fumbling in the dark up a hill that I’d hardly noticed before. Flinging my way through the night, scared of anything dark and material. I don’t know how I survived alone.

Overhead swept a shape which turned into a barn owl against the light. So normal a sight, I almost forgot my fear. Something from my childhood in the outback, those nights before we’d been run off our land, before the soil had lost its colour and the Earth had deserted us. When we had finally left, we scooped that soil into a jar, something to take with us, a reminder.

I crested the hill and came across something that wasn’t basecamp. I paused for a minute and then laughed at the night, enjoying the strain of my overexcited mind fighting down the fear. Of course — what was a barn owl without its barn?

The structure would have been brand new centuries ago. The barn illusion was only temporary — as I approached I saw the structure was made of metal instead of wood. The faint red was really oxidisation from long exposure, and smelt faintly of salt. The whole thing looked like the first colony builds I'd seen schematics for — except that this was a worn husk, presumably thousands of years old. Small, less skilful improvements had been made here and there by some unknown architect. Like the planet it stood on the structure had changed, become a caricature of the old barns of Earth. I touched it, feeling tiny particles of rust like so many pencil shavings in my hands. Quickly realising my error, I wiped them off against my pants.

At the faint smell of bird mess I looked up to see a small brood eyeing me from above. Eyes wiser than they ought to be, contemplating something in the night. Maybe me. The one in the middle suddenly gave off a hoot, cocking its head violently to the left, once, twice, three times. Was I somehow meant to follow? The birds turned in, with quick, dignified strides, disappearing like a cuckoo back into their clock, following the light from within.

I moved around the barn until I saw the door that had been left open for me to find. I pushed on it, eager to be near to someone, anyone. I felt that forgotten thing within me, my soul perhaps, reaching out as much as it had ever pushed back. Tears ran down my face. I had never before felt so alone as now, stumbling inside, waiting eagerly for the release that came from a human voice. Growing up on an overcrowded Earth, in an overcrowded family, I’d always felt the throng of people, never realising how much I relied on them before. Kept at arms distance I’d made myself into an island surrounded by others, unaware of the need I had for any of them on a deeper level.

The room was lined with hundreds of owls, nesting on shelves of straw. In the middle was a hunched figure, glistening wet, like a piece of chewed taffy all covered in feathers. Only as it began to move could I make out human-like features. Rising up on legs of pain, it turned its enormous head and looked deep into me. It had human eyes.

"You came", it said. "We waited, I don’t know how long. Why, you look scared."

The creature threw out two sickening arms, covered in feathers.

"Keep away from me", I said, half-disbelieving myself, the thing I saw.

Yet there was something in that hideous monstrosity that I desired. Some trait of consciousness, a shared understanding. Another living thing bonding with me in the dark.

"Why, we found it, can’t you see? We worked it for you, just like you asked. Carried it with us all the long way. Tested it, released it. Don’t you want your new Earth?"

The pained voice pleaded reason. I wondered if the twisted thing could see itself, if it even knew what it was, what it was asking from me.

"Anything and everything, they said. Even the fruit flies."

I gasped. The thing — I knew what it was now.

Painfully it sat back down. Again it started to speak.

"Trouble is when you pack everything it has a tendency… to shift."

It chucked strangely in hoots, mouth ill-formed in some sort of half-beak.

"I don’t understand", I said.

"Neither did we", it replied. "All we did was take the Earth with us. Everything in miniature."

"But what’s happened here is…"

It looked up, suddenly angry.

"When you don’t understand the question, what use is the answer? We got ourselves so mixed up. No idea what we were taking and why. No idea what's important."

He shifted again on a wing/arm, clearly broken from its double joints. It had an ugly laugh, like a bird being throttled.

"All mixed up, that’s it. Somehow it seems to work better that way, right? All the colours of the rainbow jumbled all together, till you can’t tell anything apart. Stronger, somehow."

Its eyes closed in pain. I thought of Billy.

"Except us. Except us. No place… to fit in. No place… left to die."

The whole scene had taken its final revenge on the broken body, used up what was left of its spirit. I backed out slowly, watched as the light in the oil lamp above, the only light that had been on the whole time, which flickered and finally died. I was again alone in the dark.

———————————————

It’s a funny thing, time. Two particles stretched across infinity can find each other in an instant, while for us it marches on, some times slowly, other times incredibly quick. Blink and it’s gone.

Madness also helps.

Somehow I arrived back at the base when the first light rose. The clearing was still clear, no trees or life forms to be seen. Less than a hundred metres from base my radio started blaring out, emergency waveband calling all parties. Apparently I wasn’t the only one missing.

No one else had seen the barn though, or Billy, although we searched for a while afterwards. Sometimes I’ll still drive out far enough so I can see a little bit over the horizon and wonder. About whether he was now part of the landscape he’d sketched once so lovingly.

We spend our time time now trying to understand. I mean really understand. No more pretending, no more wild guesses. Our theorists have all been locked up and the risk managers, the cautionary sign holders, the crack pot conspiracist let out.

"Don’t you know the planet has a devil in it", they say.

"Maybe", we reply. "We’re waiting for the results."

What we test we don’t yet know. Clearly it was never as simple as picking up a slab of ecology and planting it down. I don’t really know if we’ll ever understand this planet.

But perhaps I understand myself a little better, at least. Something I didn’t want to say at the beginning, because I was too afraid for anyone to really know me.

Let’s leave humanity behind for a moment, while I introduce myself.

My name is Nina.