Children of Eden

  When the Earth died just a little more than two hundred years ago, humanity was doomed along with every other higher animal on the planet. Everything bigger than a paramecium became extinct—and life probably wasn’t all that good for the paramecia, either. Of course, we humans were the only ones who had it coming. It was our fault.

  We were the only animals with brains clever enough and fingers agile enough to create nuclear power, to frack the Earth and poison the sea and spew out chemicals that would destroy the atmosphere. We, intelligent humans that we are, fiddled with the DNA of our crops to make a better soybean that could survive anything and feed the world—until that soybean proved so hardy and aggressive it took over the rain forests. We raised living things for food, forcing them to live as prisoners, walking in their own feces. So we dosed them with antibiotics—dosed our children, too—and then we were surprised when bacteria mutated into superbugs.

  We killed the world and ourselves at the same time. The planet began to die. The Earth’s temperature jumped ten degrees in a decade when greenhouse gases trapped the sun’s heat, turning our planet into an oven. A team of scientists had a bright idea to inject a revolutionary new product into the atmosphere to fix it.

  Can you guess how that went?

  The Earth cooled, all right. But when the sun’s radiation reacted with the new man-made atmosphere, it created a cascade reaction that killed nearly every plant and animal on the planet.

  Except a few of us. Remember our big clever brains and agile hands? The best thing humans ever did with those assets was to create something smarter—and kinder—than us. When it became obvious that the Earth was going belly-up, a visionary created the EcoPanopticon, the all-seeing guardian of nature.

  The EcoPanopticon is god and mother and physician and king to us now. We gave it power over us, because we could no longer be trusted with power ourselves. But we don’t mind being ruled, because like a mother, the EcoPan’s only goal is to keep us alive.

  With our flesh and blood and weak fallible bodies, we didn’t stand a chance in this harsh and terrible broken world. But all the things we created went along just fine without us. The man who came up with the idea of the EcoPan, Aaron Al-Baz, created an artificial intelligence that would link into every last bit of electronics and internet and communications that we left behind. It completely co-opted the systems we created—the power plants and reactors and factories that had destroyed the Earth in the first place—and turned them toward saving the planet. The EcoPan directed factories to make robots, every one of which was linked to its all-seeing global eye. The robots in turn created this sanctuary, Eden, for the few human survivors. At the same time, it went to work on repairing the devastation we’d wrought on the planet. Fixing the world to the point where it was safe for us to live in would take hundreds of years, though. In the meantime, we lived in this paradise that the EcoPan had made for us.

  Except, as in every paradise, there are a few rules. Break them, and you get tossed out.

  Because we are a completely closed system, our resources are severely limited. With no plants or animals left to eat, we subsist on the things that were tough enough to live through the Ecofail, like algae, fungi, and lichens, as well as synthesized proteins. Everything (and I mean everything—think about that) is recycled, reused, re-consumed. We’ve been in Eden for just shy of two hundred years, and we’ll have to be here for at least a thousand more before Earth normalizes. So we have to be careful.

  It’s funny. Humans were almost wiped out, but too many survived. Too many to keep that kind of population alive in Eden for a millennium. So EcoPan figured out our ideal sustainable population, the exact number of people that will keep us going until we can leave Eden. Until we reach that, our numbers have to be gradually diminished.

  EcoPan, in its wisdom, decreed that there can only be one child born for every two living people of fertile age, until we reach the ideal population. Any more than that, and our resources will give out, and the small remnant that is left of the human race will die out once and for all.

  A more practical artificial intelligence might have culled us at the very beginning, creating the perfect population and then regulating it. But EcoPan loves us like a mother. It decided to save us with as much compassion as possible.

  And so I, and other second children like me (if there are any) really are monsters who would doom the human species if we could, simply by our very existence. I feel guilty when I let myself think about it. The food I eat, the air I breathe, the waste I produce, might be the thin edge of the wedge that makes Eden fail. I am one too many.

  But I’m glad to be alive, and I’ll hold on to my own life strongly, selfishly, if EcoPan or anyone else tries to take it from me.

  Now I start to realize the full implication of my position in this society. Mom takes my hand and pulls me gently to the sofa. Her touch is soothing. I remember when I was much younger, if I ever got sick, it was my father who healed me, but my mother who made me feel better. The touch of her hands, the look of love and kindness in her eyes, is better than any medicine.

  Now it just screams at me what I will lose by gaining my freedom. It’s not worth the price.

  “Every child grows up,” she says softly. I can see her lower lip tremble slightly. “Everyone leaves home someday.”

  “But not like this,” I say between clenched teeth. “Not forever.”

  She sighs. “It’s too dangerous for you to stay here.”

  “Why?” I demand. “If you’ve gotten the false lenses and a new identity for me, why can’t I just be that other person and live here?”

  “You’ve lived a very sheltered life, Rowan,” she begins, and I snort. Understatement of the year. “You don’t realize how it is out there.” She gestures to the vast city, unseen beyond our high walls. “There is always someone watching. Greenshirts, Center officials, even the most innocuous little cleanbot scouring the streets for refuse. They’re all on the lookout for something just a tiny bit off. With your father in such a high position, and apparently about to rise even higher . . . ,” she makes a face I can’t quite interpret, “. . . we’ll be under tight scrutiny. You’ll be taking on the identity of a stranger. It would be almost impossible to concoct a scenario in which a stranger could move in with us. You’d be investigated, and all our hard work over your lifetime would be for nothing.”

  “But Mom,” I begin.

  “This is life-and-death, my love,” she says, pulling me close. “Death if we fail, if anything goes even a little bit wrong or anyone has even the slightest suspicion. And life for you—a real life, with friends and a job and a family of your own someday—if this works.” She’s whispering, her cheek pressed against mine. I feel like this is good-bye already.

  “I don’t want to leave you and Ash,” I say miserably. My anger is still dominant, with sadness creeping along slyly at the edges of my fury.

  “You deserve to be in the world, your own person,” Mom says. And part of me thinks she’s right. But I feel like a starving girl offered a bite of poisoned food. I want to snatch what is offered and swallow it down, because I need it with every fiber of my being. And yet . . .

  “I don’t deserve anything special,” I protest.

  “But you do,” Mom says, pulling away from me. “More than you know.”

  There’s something in her tone that makes me stop. “What do you mean?” I ask cautiously.

  She bites her lip. “Never mind.”

  “Mom.” I look at her evenly. “Tell me.”

  And she does. I wish she hadn’t.

  My world flips upside-down as she tells the story of my birth.

  When my mom found out she was pregnant, she had just been named chief archivist and was in the middle of so many projects that she and my father just decided he would be her attending physician. So for the first few months of gestation, Mom didn’t miss any meetings at work, and Dad took care of all her nutritional monitoring and fetal health scans at home. As long as i
t was an uncomplicated pregnancy, there wouldn’t be any problem. They’d transfer care to a specialist when it came closer to her delivery date.

  Everything went fine until the third month, when my father heard two heartbeats.

  What Mom should have done—what the laws of Eden compelled her to do—was immediately report her condition and leave it to a Center panel to decide the babies’ fate. Most of the time, one would be terminated right away. The panel might make the decision about which would live—if one was obviously healthier than the other, or if a girl or boy was necessary to balance that generation’s gender ratio. But other times it would be random. One fetus would live, the other would die before it was born.

  “We couldn’t. We just couldn’t,” she said, tears in her eyes at the memory. “You were only three inches long, we’d never met you, but we loved you both with all our hearts and we decided then and there to do whatever it took to keep you both.”

  She says “we” but I know, from the way my dad treats me, from the coldness in his eyes when he looks into mine, that there was no “we.” Mom made the decision, and Dad followed for her sake. Because his eyes are never cold when he looks at her.

  “We hid it, and then when I went into labor we hid that, too. We told everyone it came on quickly, that there was no time to go to the hospital, but actually it lasted more than a day. I gave birth in this house, in secret. When you were born first, Rowan, and I looked into your perfect eyes, I knew it was all worth it. All the secrecy and difficulty that had already happened, and was yet to come . . . all worth it. We would show you to the world, and keep our second born a secret. But we’d treasure you both.”

  I was a first child! I stare beyond my mother, looking at the past, at a different history in which I am the real child, I am the one out in the world, with school and friends and a room of my own with my own things in it. I am the one who laughs and chats with Lark and the others, while Ash . . .

  No. I might wish it had been me, but I can’t wish it were me instead of him.

  “Then Ash was born, small and almost blue. He didn’t breathe for the first minute of his life, and when he did, it was obvious that he was in trouble. Your father diagnosed it immediately as a serious chronic lung condition.”

  Mom nods as she sees I understand.

  “We had to make him the firstborn, Rowan. We didn’t have a choice. Without being in intensive care for the first few months of his life, he wouldn’t have survived. There was no way he could have lived if we’d hidden him away.”

  Unspoken in that moment of silence is the other bitter truth: no matter what our birth order, if it had been up to the Center officials to decide our fate, they would have chosen me to live and terminated Ash even after birth. I was strong and healthy, an asset to Eden. He was not. It’s probably only because both of his parents are high officials that he was allowed to live at all. For a poor person on the fringe of Eden, a far-flung outer circle, a sickly first child would be eliminated, the parents encouraged to try again.

  My brain is in a tumult. Angry, terrible thoughts seem to attack my head, bitter thoughts that are unworthy of me. Unworthy of the love and protection I’ve known all of my life. But I can’t keep them at bay. It should have been me.

  I hardly listen while Mom tells me what will be happening next. Soon, I’ll go to a secret surgical center and have my lenses implanted permanently. Then I’ll be smuggled to my new family. I don’t understand exactly how this is possible. If my own family can’t fabricate a story to keep me, how can a stranger?

  Ash comes downstairs, his hand raised to the wall but not quite touching it as he walks, as if he doesn’t trust his legs to hold him up. He gives me a weak smile.

  I glance at Mom, and she shakes her head. Ash doesn’t know.

  I want to shout the truth to him. Go hide in the hole, second child! Let me be free, like I should have been all along.

  I hate myself for thinking this.

  I can’t be in this house anymore.

  MOM MUST JUST think I need a minute alone to process everything she’s told me, so she doesn’t follow me when I run out to the courtyard. Neither does Ash. I think she must be holding him back. Alone? How can they think I want to be alone when my whole life has been essentially alone? My world is three people, and they are gone all day having lives of their own. I exist in a state of loneliness. Alone? Solitude is the very last thing I need.

  What I need, I decide suddenly, is everything that has been denied to me. I feel angry, resentful, reckless. For nearly seventeen years I’ve left my fate up to my parents and whatever machinations and bribes they’ve been arranging to get rid of me. Now it’s time I take matters into my own hands. I may not be a real, official person according to the only humans left alive on Earth, but maybe I can be in charge of my own destiny. For one night at least.

  Dimly, miserably, I’m aware that I’ll have to conform to whatever my parents arranged for me. I’ll have new lens implants that will mark me as a different person, and somehow a new family to fit that identity. But right now I want to take a taste of everything I’ve been missing all these years. Everything I was entitled to and didn’t realize it until a few minutes ago.

  I climb once again to the top of the high courtyard wall. Eden glitters around me, a mix of the greenish-blue fairy lights of bioluminescence from the modified microorganisms that permeates the city at night, providing a base light, and the electric glow that lights up wherever a human moves. I can see a living diorama in flashes of light all around me, the people showing up as deeply contrasting shadows. There, just down the block, a neighbor I’ve never met, and never will, opens his front door and steps into the night. For a fraction of a second the city seems to examine him. Then, as if the very street itself must have decided to accept him, it lights up beneath his feet. He walks on in the direction of the entertainment district, and the light leads him on, following his footsteps just long enough to let him know he’s not forsaken. I watch his personal light grow smaller in the distance, a will-o’-the-wisp from Mom’s old stories that seems to call me.

  From my height I can see the lights of several people from our circle all heading toward another ring, where they’ll be going to parties, clubs, restaurants, the theater. If only I had someplace to go, someone who was waiting for me to arrive. I picture myself entering a party, all of my friends calling my name, beckoning me over. Someone hands me a drink, another cracks a joke about something we’ve all shared. I am welcome. I am accepted.

  Again, I swing one leg over the outer edge of the wall, but this time, I start to climb down.

  Mom sometimes uses an expression: I know it like the back of my hand. As I lower myself in grueling slow motion down the far side of the wall, I realize that defines my entire life until this moment.

  In the first few seconds of my first foray away from home, I am overwhelmed with difference. Since birth, I’ve known every detail of my whole world to a hair’s breadth. If I lost my sight I would hardly notice—I could navigate my tiny realm without any of my senses. The home side of the wall is a friend, with crevices that reach out to help me like welcoming hands. On this side, the wall almost seems to be trying to throw me off.

  I cling, frozen, just a couple of feet down from the ledge. Deliberately I steady myself, trying to feel the memory of the Earth within the stones. This helps a little, and I ease myself down another few inches. As I breathe slowly, the rock seems to breathe with me, pressing rhythmically against my chest. Smiling a little to myself, I descend again.

  I make it down two more hand- and footholds before a crevice I thought was stable suddenly collapses under my toe. My hands tense and my foot scrapes against the wall, searching frantically for a hold. I find one—barely. The edge of my shoe is just touching the tiny outcrop. Worse yet, my hands are slipping.

  The inside wall has been neglected, giving it character and, more important to me, irregularities and crevices I can use to climb. This outer facade, with its face to the world,
has been maintained so that all the plaster between the stones is relatively fresh, the rocks themselves smoother. The holds are so much narrower than I’m used to.

  I pick the worst hand grip and let go, to skitter my fingers over the wall like a long-extinct spider, searching. There’s one! I shift my weight, trying to remember not to hug the wall too much. If I try to press myself against the stones too hard, I’ll actually thrust my body out away from the wall.

  I hear voices in the distance, but I have to focus all my attention on not falling. I’m still twenty feet up. The fall would be survivable—probably. At least the effort of climbing has distracted me a little from my anger and resentment and confusion. It’s hard to think about emotions when your life, or at least your safety, is on the line.

  I have managed to lower myself another few feet, when I notice the voices are coming closer. Careful not to shift my precarious balance, I turn my head and search for the source. Bikk! At the very farthest limit of my vision, several blocks away, stands a cluster of Greenshirts on patrol. They are illuminated in a glowing orb of light, and rays of their flashlights extend from that center, making it look like a many-armed underwater creature. The Greenshirts are searching the neighborhood for any signs of suspicious activity.

  If they see me, they’ll think I’m some outer circle punk high on synthocybe looking for gelt to finance her next fix. What could be more suspicious than a girl scaling a wall in a ritzy inner circle neighborhood?

  Well, a second-child girl with no lens implants, of course. I’m not just any common criminal. I can be as law-abiding as I like. My life itself is a violation of the highest order.

  Time for this nonexistent, illegal girl to get back home. My urge to see the world suddenly begins to evaporate as the chance of capture looms. They haven’t seen me—their lights are focused in the other direction—but they’re out, and much too close for comfort.

  I lunge for a hold right above my head. As my fingers grip it, though, I have a strange, dizzying, disjointed sensation. The world seems to shiver slightly, and the entire block comes loose in my hand. I’d committed too hard, and with a sickening lurch I fall, my body scraping against the rock wall as I try to slow my descent. After what feels like an eternity—though I’ve only slid about a foot—my fingers catch and I dangle, swinging by one aching arm, still ten feet above the ground.