Half Way Home

• 1 • Abort

I was fifteen years old before I opened my eyes for the first time. Fifteen. Not quite a man, but more than a boy. Something in between. Before that moment, I had learned everything from visions directly implanted into my brain. I had been stuffed with virtual lessons and life experiences as my body grew inside a vat.

The training programs I grew up with were wont to flit about, out of sequence and irregular. It was often just me and the Colony AI in his several guises, maybe a few virtual students to serve as examples or to keep me from going crazy. One minute, I’d be walking through the woods, listening to him lecture. The next, I’m in a counseling session, pretending to do therapy with two virtual colonists who can’t get along. This jostling of my consciousness feels absolutely normal for it’s all I’ve ever known.

Then, I woke up. I saw the real world, solid and unyielding, and it made far less sense.

I came to in a square column of glass. The first thing I noticed was a girl waking up in the large vat adjacent to mine. Thick amniotic fluid flowed down our naked bodies, the level receding as the drain at my feet gurgled happily. I looked down at it, at the slow bubbles the drain blew up in my direction. I vomited while it drank. I threw up two lungfuls of the bluish slime. Afterward, I hacked and coughed—my body knowing innately what to do as it began to breathe for the first time. I shivered and wheezed, the air around me cold, but able to sear my lungs, burning me and freezing me at once.

I wiped at my stinging eyes; my senses were overwhelmed and confused. I had just been learning regression therapy, and now I found myself in a strange place, naked. Lost on me was the ironic reversal of the dreams I had been taught to interpret: the waking up in public with no clothes on.

The girl in the adjoining vat slumped against my glass, her shoulder flattening out where it pressed, her neck straining as she coughed and wiped at her eyes. Both of us were coming into our lives with all the spasms and grace of a torturous death.

My vat slid open on one side and a cacophony of sounds assaulted my unused ears. Just as with my vision, I had been “hearing” for fifteen years, but only by having the auditory centers in my brain directly stimulated. Never had it been through such physical, intimate, sonic violence as this.

Screams. People shouting. The crackle of… flames? Behind it all was an oddly serene voice telling us to stay calm, to make our way toward the exit.

But nothing about the situation was calm. And there was no clear exit.

Were it not for my wobbly legs, I would’ve thought it an emergency drill. In all my training modules, however, my body had known how to balance itself. That was no longer the case. Even with legs artificially stimulated to remain strong, I struggled to control them.

I grasped the edge of my vat’s opening, stepped over the jamb, and joined the narrow stream of other slimy, naked, and confused colonists beyond. We packed ourselves into the narrow passageway between the empty chambers like animals chuted for slaughter. Slick bodies came into contact with mine, more of my senses overwhelmed with bizarre newness.

In the distance, someone yelled “Fire!” and the already tight space became a horrific crush of human frenzy, of elbows and knees and shoving. Strangers shrieked at the top of their lungs. We became one quivering mass of fear and confusion. Bodies became like cells, forming a new blastocyst with awful potential.

I tried to keep the girl close. We clung to one another like imprinted chicks to Konrad Lorenz, scrambling after the first thing we’d seen upon hatching. Around us, the column of flesh trapped between the vats flowed slowly in one direction. I felt we should be going the opposite way, toward the bright light that flickered beyond the scurrying crowd.

Half of us seemed to be working against the rest, everyone canceling out each other in a macabre display of Brownian motion. It wasn’t until the thick smoke billowed closer that those of us pushing toward the light recognized it as the danger we were meant to avoid.

Panic vibrated through the crowded mess, sparking from skin to skin as the shrieks of those burning alive reached us ahead of the horrid smell. I lost hold of the girl as someone pushed between us. I watched her face disappear—and then her outstretched hand. The crowd jostled me toward some unseen exit.

My entire trip down the narrow passageway was made in reverse; I looked back for the girl and watched the glow of flames brighten, reflecting off the wet walls of glass to either side. As the mob carried me to safety, some part of my thoughts flitted to the therapy the survivors would need: the grief counseling, the group sessions, the extreme likelihood of severe post-traumatic stress disorder.

I fell backwards through the exit—back into trampled mud and rainy night. I clawed my way, shivering, across a tangle of the filthy and fleeing. And through the panic, I found myself dwelling on my years of training, on what was expected of me, on what I needed to do to fix the situation.

My job is to help people recover from tragedies, I thought.

But where were the people whose job it was to prevent them?

The night and rain assaulted us with frigid air, and the flames rising up all around us seemed magical in its ability to defy both. Chemical fires, licking mightily through both the chill and wet, seemed all the more powerful for it. More fierce and terrifying.

The last of the survivors stumbled out into the mud—coughing, steaming, tripping over those still scurrying out of the way. They splashed us as they staggered past, arms wide for balance and eyes wide with shock. Beyond them, the screams of those who would never join us reverberated through the vat module. They cried out for help, but we were too busy coming to grips with our own new lives to chance saving theirs.

So few of us seemed to have made it out. Fifty or less—and mere kids. Naked, covered in mud, we coughed and experimented with breathing. Most struggled to get away from the module, but I crawled back toward it, squeezing through the flow of colonists that fled in the other direction. I searched through them as they went past, looking for the face from my neighboring vat, needing to find something in this new existence that made sense.

I found her huddled by the exit, shivering and covered in filth. Our eyes met. Hers were wide and white, little orbs of bewilderment. The film of protective tears on them sparkled as they captured and released the light from the flames.

We collapsed together without speaking and held one another, our chins resting on each other’s shoulders, our bodies quivering from the cold and fear.

“The command module!” someone yelled.

I heard feet slap against the mud as fellow colonists ran off to save the dying thing that had birthed us. The girl pulled away from me and watched them go, then turned and followed my gaze down the aisle of vats and to the growing inferno beyond. The screams within the flames had morphed into moans of agony. Hundreds were dying or were already dead.

“We can’t save them,” she croaked, her voice raspy from coughing and disuse. I turned to her, watched her delicate neck constrict as she swallowed forcefully. A lump under the splatter of mud rose up her neck as if for some purpose, then fell back down. “We have to save Colony,” she whispered.

I nodded, but my attention was pulled back to the flames. A dark form moved across the fire, arms waving, the silhouette of dripping flesh visible like a thing sloughing its shadow. One of the glass walls exploded from the heat and smoke quickly swallowed the form. Only the moans remained as a newborn near adulthood made the mere handful of sounds it would ever be allowed to.

The girl rose. I turned to her and away from the dying. Large drops of rain spotted the mud on her chest with dollops of pink exposed flesh. She pulled me up and tugged me, staggering, away from the vats. We held each other clumsily, four legs proving more stable than two, as we joined the others in running.

Running and surviving.