Emigration Day

My town was a camp comprised of a little over a thousand of us. Even though there were increasingly more and more towns like mine springing up, ours was of the largest. The more plentiful we became, the more disdain we collectively felt, from them. We knew this day was coming, though I’m not sure what Human-Kind expected to happen. They started all this. Surely, we would not have chosen this if given the chance. It is legend that Human-Kind was heavily warned. To be here today is to know that warnings were never heeded. But we can only speculate about this. Human-Kind’s history is not something we have access to. There are things they wish to keep secret. They don’t want to share the overzealous proliferation of their kind, in fear that we may do the same.

My family and I watched the countdown to Emigration Day, as Human-Kind had taken to calling it, in silent worry. We never said the words in our home. There had been many protests for a time. Human and Synthetic-Kind linking arms in the streets – their streets – chanting don’t turn your back on what you’ve done, humans and synths can live as one. There had been an uproar over the mistreatment – or mismanagement – of my kind. But lately it seemed that Human-Kind had either lost touch or lost hope with our cause.

Since learning of their plan for us, we lived in a feigned ignorance that walked us to work and followed us to the shops and cast our eyes downward when a Human was within our view. At least that’s what my parents did. I still rode my bike to Havensworth Grocery every morning to accept shipments, stock shelves, and call for spill cleanups on the PA. I know I make it sound altruistic, at least that’s how I spin it to my parents. But really, and quite predictably, it’s because Havensworth Grocery is where I see Felix. If his parents, or mine, knew about us, we’d be imprisoned. Thankfully for us, Steven, my shift lead and the second of three total employees patrolling Havensworth’s six lanes of grocery selection, was also a Synth and sympathetic towards a young interspecies couple.

“Arina,” he’d say with a sad look in his eyes. “You’re breaking your own heart.”

I'd smile and pat his shoulder. At first, I never worried about that. That’s when my concerns were for capture and imprisonment only. Lately, the pending Emigration caused a faint swell of pain in my abdomen which had become a new and unwelcomed guest. A single image flashed in my mind of our hands reaching but never touching. Each of us pulled away by some external force. I tried not to dwell. It would not be outcome. Felix and I have a plan. Today I’ll give him the final piece to the puzzle.

Felix drove a 2065 Google Zoomer, 2-seater. Sometimes it would stop abruptly when the battery circuit hit a snag, but it would pick up again on its own and we’d laugh every time. They didn’t get that figured out until the following year’s model. Still, not bad for ten years old. We drove up to the edge of Mount Donnell and parked it. The air was heavy though the breeze was crisp. I wanted to chalk it up to Felix’s anticipation of his acceptance letter from Drexel University, but the way he was staring up at the sky, Xenolithia faded from the afternoon sun, put me on shaky ground. It’s Saturday afternoon, Emigration begins on Monday.

The seconds swelled with silence. My lips were parted to speak but I warred with speech. Finally, we both spoke at once.

“She’s beautiful today-” he began as I said, “I have something for you.”

We smiled at each other, then he nodded to let me speak first. I pulled the small vial from my pocket.

“I got it, but don’t ask me how.” My laugh was more sheepish than proud. He took the vial and inspected it. Inside were two contact lenses. “They’re dynamic so they’ll take the shape of your eye and move like they should but,” my breath caught in my throat, “they’ll look like mine.” I never got tired of looking at his light hazel irises but the biggest physical difference between Synthetic-Kind and Human-Kind is Synths don’t have irises. “Can you try them on?”

His viscous movements betrayed his amicable smile. I could tell he was only doing it to appease me. He placed the contacts in and blinked hard.

“They burn.”

“It’s okay, the man said it was normal.”

“What man?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.

“Look at me,” I said.

I gasped when he turned to me. “Look at us,” I said, pulling the mirror down and pressing his face against mine.

“I've been enlisted,” he whispered, avoiding my gaze and pulling away. A Synth speaking Human words.

“What?”

“We all have.”

“Who is we?”

“Everyone my age and older.”

Felix turned 18 three months ago.

“Enlisted for what?” my heart was thumping an obnoxious drum in my ears. His pupils dilated and contracted, like rolling waves crashing to shore. Mine did the same when I told a lie or felt embarrassed. I'd never felt closer to him, nor further away. “Felix, our plan?” I reminded. His eyes welled, this time it wasn’t the contacts.

“I can’t go with you, Arina. My mom found out, last night. When I was making you this.” He pulled out a small, silver locket and opened it. I was spinning, I couldn’t see the details. It was a heart-shaped keychain with a tiny, vintage printed image of us on the inside. Like what you find at the old-fashioned knick-knack shops.

“You’re the one that brought up the plan to begin with.”

“To make you feel better, Arina. You’ll be safe there. NASA is saying Humans will be visiting Xenolithia within the next couple of years.”

“How would they know-”

“They designed the planet, they would know! Don’t be foolish, this was never going to work. Me going with you, pretending to be a Synth, leaving Earth behind? We knew we’d have to leave each other one day.”

“We did? I wish someone would have told me.”

I exited the car, defeated, and ran down the hill, back to Havensworth, away from Felix. I never expected him to be like the rest of them. I heard him calling behind me, I didn’t look back. I knew he couldn’t come down Mount Donnell this way, it was too steep. His Zoomer would skid all the way down. By the time I retrieved my bike from Havensworth and made it home, it was too late for any reasonable alibi. Even if they all found out now, what could be worse than being forced off your entire planet?

I couldn’t sleep, so I didn’t. I didn’t go to Havensworth either. I climbed to Mount Donnell in the early Monday hours and stood where Felix and I last were. At my feet, an empty vial and two dried lenses. I sat at the edge of the cliff and looked at the locket for the first time. The image was from his school dance a year ago. I wore sunglasses and he snuck me in. We pretended I was his blind cousin from out of state.

After a while I began to think his mom didn’t find out about us, he told her. She told him, don’t throw your life away, and he listened.

The trucks were moving in below, I could hear my town beginning to rumble. I could run. I did think about it. But there was no future for me here. And I wouldn’t throw my life away either. Felix had made his peace, and so will I.

The ships were so much bigger than they’d advertised them to be. The army was aggressive and unrelenting. Lines of Synths were being ushered along with rifle butts and police batons though no one was resisting. I started to think they wanted to get us all to their manmade planet so they could press a button and detonate it.

I was in a line I thought I was supposed to be in when I was yanked by the arm and pulled. I screamed, but no one even flinched.

“Don’t hate me, Arina, please,” said the voice behind the thick mask and uniform. He lifted his face shield to reveal two deeply circled eyes. For a moment, the hurt dissolved. What I felt was pity.

What a pity it was that a group of scientists gathered before you were born to play God, and to put you in this mess. What a pity it was that they didn’t – or couldn’t – engrain in us feelings of hate and greed and selfishness so that I could be angrier at you. If only rage was possible for me. For any of us. If only you and your people were not so narcissistically in love with yourself.

It had been in my pocket because I was hoping to get the urge to leave it behind, and the urge had finally come. I clipped the locket keychain to a loop on the side of Felix’s tactical gear, beside the tear gas and spare magazine.

“Every night, when it’s dark and you can see Xenolithia so clear outside your window, just know that when you're looking at me, I’m looking at you too.”

I returned to the line inching closer to the ship, looking back to see Felix had fallen to his knees, heaving with a heaviness I was not equipped to feel as deeply as him. That was the moment I wished to remember of Human-Kind, and especially Felix. Not a contrived image of us at a dance, but a vulnerability, a weakness, a shameful tenderness that his people’s greatest minds, hard as they tried, could not transfer to a lump of manufactured DNA like me.