Nothing New to Report

Nothing New to Report

“Nothing new to report. Outside observable area status: unchanged. Inside pod status: unchanged.” Petra turned off the observation cameras surveilling the ten-mile perimeter around the RUSH. She couldn’t shake the uncanny feeling that enveloped her whenever she was on duty and had to hear her own voice on the security recordings. She ignored it and recorded the status message in the three other languages that she had been assigned. First in French, then in Japanese and Romanian. Everyone on the pod was assigned languages and cultures to assimilate and preserve. Petra’s pod was a small one with only twelve residents in six couples, so she had been assigned one additional language. But she was happy about the Japanese. She had become quite fond of it over the years and watching old recordings of performance arts shows had become one of her favorite things to do on the pod. The haunting masks and chanting in the nō plays were one of the most spiritual experiences she has ever had.

Granted, there wasn’t much spirituality to invoke when it came to her life. One of the designated rescues from Romania, Petra had been brought to the underground habitation fifteen years ago, when she was four, a couple of weeks before the Cataclysm. Each culture had been assigned an equal number of spots on the three Rescue Underground Sites of Habitation that was revealed to have been set up by world governments in extreme hurry as soon as it had become evident that the Cataclysm was unpreventable and unavoidable with the scientific means humanity had at its disposal. In addition to the designated rescues, more than half of which were children and teens and had been selected based on their parents’ genetic material, education history, achievements in life, etc., a few thousands of Earth’s mega rich had embarked on some twenty odd spaceships to escape the planet to whose demise they had brought a hefty contribution. A select few, the richest of the rich, headed to the almost-completed space colony on Mars. The rest, on about two-thirds of the ships, were forced to head for further away planets that were not even nearly ready to have colonies established. Even the pride and joy of the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, the planned colony on planet M, had been so mired in corruption and bribery, the exorbitant public funds allocated to the project constantly syphoned in private pockets going all the way to the president of the United States and the royal family, that it was not at all clear that the ships heading in that direction could survive until the colony sites would become habitable. Plus, so many of those heading there were no longer in the prime of their life and completely unaccustomed with the hard labor required by terraforming and colonizing a new planet, that there was little chance for them to become a true hope for humanity. In fact, contact between the underground habitations on Earth and the ships en route to Planet M was lost only a couple of years after the Cataclysm.

*****

She wasn’t hungry, so she headed straight back to her room, unwilling to pass through the common area, where she knew she’d run into someone either eating or hanging out looking for companions to play games or watch movies together. She didn’t feel like it that day. The room she shared with Obi was one of the six on the pod. The small pods were assigned to young couples expected to have children in a few years, and they were connected with the rest of the pods in the anthill-like underground structure of the RUSH, although movement between pods was strictly controlled and limited. As she was of reproduction age, she had been assigned Obiefune as a male partner and had been living with him for three years now. Obi was Nigerian and the same age as her. When they moved in together, they were both sixteen and Petra thought for a while that they could become a great couple, have children and then move together in one of the family pods. She also thought it must have been absolute fate that they ended up together. His name sounded so Japanese, that there could not all be a mere coincidence. She immediately translated his Nigerian name as if it were Japanese, as the “boat with obi paintings” and called him Obi, like the cloth belt worn in traditional attires, yet another auspicious meaning for their relationship since an obi was a garment designed to tie together and bind.

Obi was not amused by her name explanation and did not seem at all interested in her. It took him a few good months to come out of his shell, and only then they became friends. An even longer while after, he admitted to her that he was gay and very much in love with Oscar, one of the Mexican designated rescues. The two had sworn eternal love to one another before they were moved in with their assigned reproduction partners. Obi however understood very well that there was no other way for him to see Oscar again unless he had a child with Petra, and they could join the larger pod communities again. In order to avoid emotional confusion while couples were expected to reproduce and perpetuate the species, only very limited interactions were allowed with the other pods within the RUSH. Petra did not feel particularly anything after learning that Obi could never be interested in her as a love partner. Or maybe she felt somewhat relieved. They had however both agreed that it was best to try to conceive, birth and raise a child, as prescribed by the community laws. It was the only sensible choice and at least they could seek different partners as soon as they were allowed to join larger family pods.

It has been more than two years since that decision, but no matter what they tried they could not get pregnant. After about a year, Obi was tested. There was nothing wrong with him. Then came Petra’s turn. It all seemed in order with her reproductive system as well. However, after many months of trying, there was still no sign of pregnancy. As the community medical resources were growing increasingly limited, as were all other life-supporting resources, the doctors determined that they could only try the fertility treatment once. Six more months had passed since and there were still no signs of improvement.

*****

Obi wasn’t in the room, and Petra congratulated herself for having avoided the common area. He was probably there hanging out with Aleksey for whom he seemed to have developed a particular fondness. Aleksey and Yukiko had already had a baby, but they had been allowed to stay in the couples’ pod because Yukiko became pregnant again before the usual sterilization process scheduled at about six months after the one birth allowed per couple. And since cases like Petra and Obi’s were growing within the RUSH community and not all assigned couples could reproduce, she had been allowed to continue a second pregnancy.

Petra pulled the couch in the crammed room and laid there, her eyes closed for a good while. Once she was off work, she wasn’t always sure of the time. There was never access to sun in the Rescue Underground Site for Habitation and the only glimpses of natural light she got were through the observation cameras scanning the surface for signs of new life. Measuring time had lost all meaning and it was now kept out of habit. When she opened her eyes, she happened to look at the embroidery hanging above the door. The story she had been told and that she wrote down on a piece of paper as a child was that this was one of the few things she had been allowed to take from her parents’ home when she was relocated to the ancient underground site of Derinkuyu in Turkey, rebuilt and adapted as a RUSH. The stitch embroidery had been handsewn by her paternal great-great grandmother and it was an inscription in Romanian. It read, “Pace celor vin/Bucurie celor ce rămân/Binecuvântare celor ce pleacă”, followed by a smaller font script reading “Mănăstirea Brâncoveanu, 2005”. She didn’t know anything else about it, once red thread on white linen, now yellowed and faded by the more than a century that had passed over it. Petra whispered the words to herself, “peace to those who come/joy to those who stay/blessings to those who depart”, as if trying to peer through something hidden meaning, some mystery beyond them. Or rather inside of them. She turned away from the wall above the door and stared at the ceiling until her eyes began to sting and burn and tears came down her cheeks.

*****

That’s when she felt the need to finally look through her memory box. Like all designated rescues, she had a few other things to remind her of her long-lost family. They were kept in a small metal box only her fingerprint could open. A couple of letters from her parents that she refused to read because she could not remember what their voices sounded like, her mother’s gold ring inherited from a long line of female ancestors, adorned with an intricate dome of gold wiring that was now squished a bit and flattened on one side, a three-century old Russian icon of Christ Pantocrator that must have adorned her parents’ house, a few photographs of grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins and relatives that she could not remember at all, and a few other small things. She had not looked at any of those ever since she had moved in with Obi. She had forgotten about many of them, so she was truly surprised to find in a corner of the box a small heart-shaped locket hanging on to a silver necklace. As she picked it up, she thought for a split of a second that she had a flash bolt memory of her mother handing it to her, eyes red and swollen from days of crying, staring right at four-year old her. She had put the locket in her hand and was saying something. But Petra could no longer remember what the words coming out of her mother’s mouth might have been. Or maybe that was not even a real memory.

Unsure what to expect, she opened the locket attached to the silver chain. Suddenly, her mother and father were looking at her from inside that heart. And in the middle, right between the two of them, arms clenched tightly around her father’s neck while her mother’s arms were holding both of them, was her, Petra, on her fourth birthday, a couple of months before she was taken away from them. More than her father, more than her mother, Petra was enraptured by those small arms, her own, holding her father tight, so tight almost as if to suffocate him. Tears welled up again in her eyes, and she started crying. Not just tears running down her cheeks, but crying. She sat on the side of that pullout couch, crying. Sobbing loudly, letting big tears fall on the floor and splash with a sound on the plastic tiles. Those were no tears of sadness, however. Some other emotion was causing them. Another feeling, one forgotten long ago, of love, and care, and heartache, and passion mixed together. And Petra was feeling it shake her entire body only to install itself in her womb. And for many minutes, time suddenly relevant once more, she cried like that. From her womb.

Then she knew what she needed to do. It was finally time. She wiped her tears, kissed the locket and put it back in the memory box. She pressed the button on her uniform transmitter. “Obi, where are you? Can you please come back to the room? I need you…”