The Nile The Nyle The Nihil

The sky above her is the color of gunmetal, hammerless but deadly. She knows the light speed rockets that pierce the atmosphere are the closest things to shooting stars she’ll ever see. Celestial wonders if her name was coined by the streaks that puncture the sky, but she is old enough to understand there's something greater beyond the ash that clouds her adolescent wonder. She imagines they resemble the sparkly dots that populate her dreams, or perhaps were conjured up by lost generations whose naked eyes witnessed the Third World War.

She hates the beauty of her name. We are made of stardust, her father would say, but she’s never seen a star. Our eyes resemble nebulas, her father would remind her, but she can’t seem to grasp an interstellar cloud beyond the blackness above. One day we will be inside one of those Nile rockets, her father would promise, but the towering concrete slabs that protect them feel more like a prison.

Orestes, her father, always sees beauty through his state-of-the-art eyes. He prefers the mandatory upgrade. The organic alternative was as paltry as a boomerang, primitive and natural. For now, they were closed in deep slumber, his broad shoulders expanding and contracting, rising, then falling, again, and again, as he dreams, she hopes, of something sweeter than his laborious existence.

She is different in a way she doesn't understand. The ocular implants gifted to those born or processed into The Nile gives them a fresh perspective of the Now… but strangely, her corneal implants waver at night. Her perception flickers like hangfire, a malfunction that reveals the difference between truth and reality. Her living quarters are a dark bunker at night, but her eyes wake to a lush garden every morning. She can’t tell which one terrifies her more.

We are lucky to be here, My Celeste, Orestes would declare every morning. The Nile Mega Factory was once an open-spaced border town. People used to cross the border on open land for their freedom, to live out a dream, to build a life, and so on. Curiously, for whatever reason, sometimes those people would die. To prevent such horror, the Nile structures were built to protect us. She replays the story in her mind every night as she watches man-made antimatter-fueled comets disappear into the void above, clutching half of a heart-shaped locket given to her by a mother she no longer remembers.

These days, migrants like Celestial, like her father, all work for The Nile to earn their one-way ticket to the Red Origin and live a better life. She often wonders how much harder her mother must have worked to earn hers.

She’d heard that her mother Asra was a brilliant scientist, but Celeste couldn’t fathom a worker as zealous as her father. Orestes’s corporate pride was only eclipsed by the scalding revelations of her glitchy visions. Those migrant myths remind Celeste of her searing heartache. She remembers, every night, to tell her father that the sky is made of gunpowder. That his hope is a crater. That her mother’s abandonment lingers like regolith, growing heavier in her heart with every sleepless night despite the puzzling glee it feeds her artificial eyes every morning.

Is she confused because she is alive, or is being alive confusing? Her father must have known once upon a time, before the implants blinded him from his natural self.

This is what growing up must feel like, she thinks, repeatedly, until her eyes flutter, struggling in its search of subconscious stars… asleep.

Her favorite pastime, finally.

The night sky is so transparent and every star so lucid that the promise of his magnum opus seems just within reach. Nyle beams with pride as a successful JDR187 spacecraft autonomously lands on the corporate platform bearing his name: The Nile Foundation. An overt play on words that tickles him to this day. The crimson dust flows lightly below the Red Origin base, in contrast to the inevitable dust devils that consume the terminal between bursts of dazzling ice-clouds and searing heat waves. The duality of extremes pleases Nyle, as he fancies himself the Golden Mean of Humankind in its collective evolution towards a more perfect, stellar civilization. He revels in the extremities of his conquered Martian landscape, as there is no growth where comfort lies.

We are the giants for which future generations shall stand on, his mentor whispers, but the sentiment makes Nyle’s stomach turn. The thought of carrying greater men implies incontinence. “It is better to create the future than inspire it!” Nyle declares to no one.

Delusions of his predecessor accelerated two-fold on the Red Planet. Chronic hallucinations startle him more every day as his mind rifts with symptoms of lunacy. All the money in the universe had yet to concoct a cure for space adaptation sickness. Nevertheless, the discomfort motivates him to do more, consume more, create more, more of more, for more will never be enough and always be plenty.

We will redefine the American Dream, his mentor declares, but idealistic reinvention was far too elementary for the great Nyle, President of Emperors. One day entire nations will build a monument in our honor, his late mentor exults, but the withered Earth they once called home felt more like a bankrupt enterprise.

Even so, Nyle always knew the solution.

In honor of his Aristotle, Nyle used his entrepreneurial brilliance to restructure the American corporatocracy in service of something far greater. Where the teacher was grounded, his student was otherworldly. Nyle has, since 2081, donated more than four trillion Nile shares. An incomprehensible sum to anyone outside the orbit of his boundless hubris.

The write-off felt noble for the man whose foundation fueled Earth’s economy yet relinquished competition. Repurposed migration and revitalized commerce. Reinvented government by remobilizing technology. Revolutionized space travel to farm reproduced titans of industry, and, ultimately, recreate civilization in his image. “Humans are far too selfish to imagine achievements beyond their own planetary existence,” he proclaims.

Under his watchful gaze, countries transformed into corporate entities that consumed allies and cannibalized enemies like a plague of praying mantises. He fancies his own metaphor, but the voice of his long dead mentor troubles him.

“The one thing you never understood” Nyle whispers as his JDR187 spacecraft defuels, “is that discomfort motivates production.”

You confuse discomfort with necessity, Nyle, they are not mutually exclusive. One is the mother of invention, so universally accepted it molded itself into a proverb. The voice of his mentor snarls, The other is cruel. A twisted, sickening view of human production.

Silence lingers as a rover dismounts. Nyle’s eye twitches, his mind fissures. He stands in an empty dome, unraveling.

“Affluence is not to be shared. As affluence goes up, so does depression, desperation, and death. Yet, when a crisis is born, purpose soon follows. Societal destruction leads to communal collaboration. Psychological health improves, and everyone needs one another just as you needed me. Your death gave me freedom. I transformed border walls into mega factories. National separation evolved into tribal alliance. Shared struggle led to production. Ocular technology alleviated despair. Violent crime, eradicated! Murder, a thing of the past! The fog of my war dissipates as stories become myths, memories become imaginations, and history becomes now.”

The rover propels forward.

“Now is the future! I am Nyle, the Creator, and The Nile Foundation is responsible for the final evolution of Human Civilization. Mine is the one that will colonize the stars that made us.”

He screams at nothing, “Red Origin, the Interstellar America!”

True to form, his tormentor reveals no weakness in logic or manner. With respect, Nyle. Space travel is not a natural thing. We are earthly creatures, you brilliant fool.

A long silence twists the pit of Nyle’s bowels. Shortness of breath ensues. His vision blurs. The wraith emerges behind him…

This is what it must feel like, the ghost of his mentor softly whispers, to lose one’s mind on Mars.

Nyle closes his eyes, struggling to ignore the ricocheting comment in his vexed psyche. The effects of Martian life deteriorate everything but his thirst for more. Never enough. Always plenty. He remembers the payload from his John Davison Rockefeller 187 spacecraft, opening his eyes as the rover enters the base delivering his magnum opus.

His mentor, gone.

His American Dream, realized.

The soothing tone of a morning melody eases Orestes awake, reminding him that he is alive. Corneal nanotech subverts his consciousness, replacing concrete slabs with the vivid hues of a healthy sun. It is the same star he recognizes from his childhood before the war he barely remembers. The absence of his memory is both a gift and a curse, he no longer suffers from debilitating stress but can hardly remember his wife’s scent. Sight over mind. Always enough. Never plenty. He changes into his work clothes like a soldier in barracks, cautious not to wake his Celestial Rose. He stares at her in awe, always impressed by the ease with which his daughter can sleep through the tone that initiates their only chance at a better life.

The fitted one piece nylon suit straps onto his scarred body like a magnet, and suddenly, the aches and pains of his previous life vanish in the glow of The Nile Foundation’s logo. His cold breakfast ejects from a bare concrete wall, cascading augmented rays of UV light and simulated bugambilias. He bites into an apple as the sunlight cascades his mind’s eye, transforming into a luscious Red. The biostimulation of the Red Light permeates his simulated oasis like soil absorbs water.

His Concrete Garden of Eden.

Celeste begins to wake as her father finishes his Red apple, eager for the opportunity to make his impact on the greatest company the world has ever known. There is something about the scarlet aura that gives Orestes a youthful jolt of hope and strength. It is hypnotic in its ability to impose the Martian Now rather than the Earthly Then, on his beautiful daughter rather than his meager existence.

“We are lucky to be here, My Celeste,” he says while wiggling her big toe. She breaths in deeply, rubbing the starlit slumber from her glitchy eyes, opening them wide to an overwhelming wave of photobiomodulated Red Light, so rich and stimulating she immediately forgets to tell him about her mother’s— beauty is all around them.

The lush Redness is hypnotically reminiscent of the life they’ll soon live… on a planet they have yet to experience… beyond a ravaged Earth they’ll never leave.

Celeste stretches her arms inside their Martian replica, grateful to be alive.

An opulent floor bursts to life, illuminating the feet that step on it like nebulas that explode on a digital recreation of the Kardashev Scale. Asra observes the rover’s delivery with enviable focus. She stands before hundreds of rows of artificially grown embryonic clones, all in different stages of growth, from nucleus to infant to adult, each comfortably nested inside large intelligent pods filled with synthetic amniotic fluid, labeled with uniquely identifiable codes, trackable lineage, and a surname.

Her melancholy eyes stare deep into the hallway of what her superior has coined the greatest achievement of human civilization. She touches her temple, initiating an augmented visual field. As she walks, she studies the names and codes of Nyle’s colony: Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, Gould, Mellon, Ford, Hearst, Getty, Rothschild, Vanderbilt, Koch, Bezos, Gates, Musk…

The names continue, markedly white and male, with occasional exceptions for experimental breeding: Truth, Curie, Lovelace, Parks, Kahlo, Ginsburg, Winfrey. Her vision blurs as she clutches half a heart-shaped locket of a child she didn’t raise… and approaches a pod.

It is there she finds germinal specimen 1111CRC: Celestial Rose Cortez. Asra’s bulging eyes swell with tears of joy. “At last, I knew I could do it. I won’t let Nyle separate us again, my love.”

A quiet whisper rouses her ailing, fractured psyche…

Oh, mama. I’ve always been here.