My, My, Little Firefly
By Dylan Fox
Copyright 2013 Dylan Fox
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My, My, Little Firefly
More from Dylan
Finding Dylan
My, My, Little Firefly
My shard snapped as definitely as the thump-thump-thump of the turbine blades beating above my head. The crimson twilight jungle stretched beneath me, a vast welcoming mat which beckoned me in with the faint, alluring lights of the fireflies. It promised an end to my sudden emptiness. I shuffled to the edge of the platform, pressed my palms against its cold metal, let my legs dangle over the jungle and held on with the last few inches of thigh. I sat beneath the roof of red clouds that never parted, and above the gentle glow the arc lights which gave our colony light, gave us night and day, regularity and meaning. It was a long way down to the jungle.
“I don't see why you grew that fucking tree anyway,” Kay said, a man fifteen years my senior with red skin hardened like a crustacean’s shell. He used his body like most people use tonal inflections, and the platform moved as his arms and fingers and eyebrows gesticulated. “Fucking motleys. Give me the fucking creeps.”
I couldn't turn to face him. My shard had snapped. Broken pieces fell through my cognitive space, through every thought and memory and limb and cell I possessed. My legs twitched like Kay's gesticulating fingers. Tears formed in my eyes and pooled in the bottom of my goggles. The wind pushed me towards the jungle canopy, then pulled me back.
Kay quickly and skilfully tucked the butt of his rifle into the flesh of his shoulder, sighted, and shot at the pale glow of a firefly straying to the perimeter fence. I watched the rainbow trace of the bullet’s passage as it burrowed its way though the sky, the smell of baking cinnamon mixed with its multi-coloured tail. It passed within a foot of the firefly, and the firefly dropped twenty-feet into the tree-line before it ricochetted off the fence, its simple senses overwhelmed by the colour and smell and sensation of the bullet.
“They give me the creeps,” Kay said again as he set the gun down and made himself small against the wind. The Rorschach on his left forearm glowed slightly from his pin-point shot and the sight of the firefly falling into the confines of the jungle. The endorphins pricked the corners of his mouth and sat heavily on his eyelids.
“They give everyone the creeps, those trees,” he said, voice soft like the breeze. “It's like there's someone behind you, staring into the back of your neck the whole time.”
I didn't have the mental space to think about the motley tree growing in my courtyard, a trophy stolen as I walked home from my first day at work, a prize claimed from the wild to celebrate my place in the world, to congratulate me for finding the box I'd been designed to fit into. A box that suddenly wasn't mine, was suddenly hostile, was a coffin.
I slung my rifle over my back, gripped hold of the soft rubber handles and swung myself around and onto the ladder. Kay pulled his black breathing mask from his face and left it dangling around his neck like a burst tumour. He twisted to look at me.
“Where are you going, Gal?” he asked.
“I'm going home,” I said.
He stared at me. “We've still got another four hours before the shift ends. Why the hell are you going home?”
“I'm going home,” I said again. “I don't want to be here.”
He looked at me for a long, cold moment, suspicion and confusion in his eyes. Then he pulled the tumour from his neck and used it to smother his nose and mouth, the moment of intimacy allowed by my glancing his wet and glistening lips gone.
“I'll call base,” he said. “Tell them you're not feeling well.”
“Sure,” I said. I descended.
Not feeling well. I was broken. I don't know how it happened or why it happened, but I was empty. I didn't know what I was supposed to do.
~*~
My feet touched the ground. I closed my eyes. Breathed. Felt the air in my lungs, the dry spot at the back of my mouth as I breathed in and the pressure against my lips as I breathed out. I opened my eyes.
A firefly stared up at me, its big, fat, stupid eyes fixated on me like I could offer it the answers to every question in its life. It crawled across the ground towards my boot.
“How did you get past the fence, you little fucker?” I asked, crouching down beside it. It kept crawling. “You're supposed to fly away when we shoot at you.”
Its eyes followed me, milky white, glinting like greasy glass. They were almost useless organs, playing out their last hurrah before evolution finally sewed them up.
The fireflies were ugly as sin. The size of a human toddler, its body was three uneven lumps joined together with twists of sinews and muscle which looked like a bodge-job by a six-year-old terrified her parents would find out she'd broken their vase. Its wings were tacked onto its thorax with the same infantile engineering, muscles spread over the carapace like viscera bursting out of the skin. The purple bioluminescent streaks covering its black body had no regularity or pattern and its antenna were fat and furry as fox tails. Perhaps the old God of Minas had known we'd come, and designed a creature that would repulse us with enough ferocity to send us back to Earth.
But that old God had never met humans and had certainly never seen them when they believed they could make a quick buck. When the company landed and saw the fireflies, it spent decades erecting the comforting perimeter of pylons around our settlement. They kept the jungle out, rose the artificial sun every morning and set it every evening. Just like we were back on Earth, not some distant world which spun around a star that those back on humanity's maternity ward couldn't even pick out of the sky.
I poked the firefly experimentally with my finger. Its wings twitched and it stared at me. I hated the industrial air on the streets, suffocating and dusty and sneaking into your lungs like a night time prowler aching to take more than just your valuables. I kept on breathing, the dry spot at the back of my throat and the pressure against my lips.
A party of surveyors had gone beyond the fence a month ago, looking for space to build new homes. Two dozen fireflies watched them from the branches, grotesque eyes reflecting the twilight. The surveyors found their way blocked by fresh-fallen branches and avoided the path marked with the still-warm corpse of a jungle animal. Their last transmission was a long way off the path they'd planned to take. The jungle belonged to the fireflies and they used it to distract, to mislead, to kill. Only the stupidly brave expected to come back from their kingdom. The thing at my feet stared at me, waved its antenna and tried to stand.
A swarm of fireflies was as dangerous as a thunderstorm. One firefly was as harmless as a raindrop. They couldn't even learn to stay away from our bullets.
I scooped the bug up, wrapped it in my jacket, and took it home with me. I felt as lonely, broken and lost as it looked. A single raindrop without a storm. Maybe that's why I did it.
~*~
My apartment was a small, concise wooden box with three rooms which still smelt of tree sap and saw dust. It was distinguished from all the other apartments only by the rows of books I kept stacked
on top of each other against the east wall; by the cream and red rough woven mat I kept on the floor for when the dirt was too hot or too wet to stand on; by my bed, resting beneath the window and not against the east wall.
I put the bug on the low table in the main room, went into the bathroom, turned on the taps and filled the subterranean bath with cool water. A skin of dirt lifted off me as I slipped into it. My legs drifted gently, and the dirt settled on the water's surface. My breath stuttered and my skin goosebumped. I pressed my fingers tightly together to form my hands into paddles and gently moved the water, letting it take the heat away from my body. It was always hot on Minas.
My shard had snapped. I had slipped backwards down humanity's evolutionary ladder, fallen from grace and back into the primordial Terran swamp we paid thousands of millennia to crawl out of. I was Earth-bound. Without my shard, I was little more than a monkey.
Those humans still on Earth, those we'd left a few rungs beneath us on the ladder, were strange creatures, small and slow and wilfully blind. They said we'd been made, an artificial construct designed to fulfil a job. No more so than them, who had built themselves with language and mathematics and art, constructed a cognitive space for themselves to farm crops and fight wars.
They said we were company property, endorphins designed to be released whenever we were good little drones. Maybe that's where it started.
We'd left them centuries ago. Earth was running out of ores, the scarcity driving up the price. Earth was running out of metal people wanted to recycle because replacing the old with the new was too expensive. Earth was passing more and more laws, laws about pollution and workforce relations and corporate monolithic megalomaniacs who annihilated the competition and assimilated the remains, pausing only to excrete the excess fat onto an ever-growing pile of jobless and homeless and hopeless workers. Unless the company changed the way it did business, Earth would become unprofitable. So the company built a spaceship and ejaculated it into the hydrogen drifts of space, shot it out at superlight speeds to distant ovum of Minas.
On Minas, the only law was the company's law. It owned the mountains. It owned the ores. It owned the factories which made the dynamite, the digging machines and the crushing machines, the factories, the trains, the ships which carried the finished and packaged goods back to Earth. It supplied everything its workers on Minas could need and the money it paid them can back to the company when its workers brought food and furniture and cinema tickets and anything else. They owned all the shops, all the cafés, all the banks. It was all going to be perfect.
They even owned the workers. It was too taxing to send real live humans to Minas along with all the materials needed to dig the first mine and refine the first ore. So they sent millions of frozen human eggs and sperm and thousands of fertilized embryos in case they couldn't piece the workers together themselves. And, on that spaceship, the caretakers got bored of playing with themselves, and so they played with their frozen charges. Just a little dabble here and a little tinker there. A little something to make us more comfortable in our new home.
The settlement on Minas stopped being profitable a long, long time before I was born. The more the money ran through their fingers, the more the company convinced themselves they never came here for the money. They huddled around expensive, single-grain tables and talked about how they were on a moral mission, a mission for all of humanity. They talked about how they were out here to create a blueprint, to show those back on Earth that extreme remote colonisation was a real possibility. They stopped sending home car chassis and skyscraper girders and spaceplane fuselages and started to send home evangelicals bearing artist's renderings and meretriciously worded project proposals.
And somewhere along the generations of tub-breeding and workforce management, we'd found our shards, and found our Rorschachs. Our shards. The company had redesigned us to make it rich, make it happy. But we in turn redesigned the company, so that it made us happy. We created jobs to fulfil people, not people to fulfil jobs.
We pitied the Earth-bound humans, fumbling around in their dark caves without a suggestion of light to guide them.
I had no light to guide me. My mind was mosaic mess of my thoughts, my books, my conversations, my blood, my hormones, my fingers, my house, my memories, my job. They formed clusters and patterns and drifted apart like the dirt on my bath water. We are the world we live in and we are master of none of it.
In all our shared DNA and shared history and shared culture, our shared homes and lives and the air we all breathed, all those molecules and proteins and ideas and thoughts and dreams and dust motes that flitted from body to body like drunken bees in a flower garden, our shards were the tiny sliver which made us unique. It was our special part of the universe. How could you spend your life with no stable centre? How could you spend your life as nothing more than the transitory fragments that the Brownian motion of the universe pulls through you?
I lifted myself out the bath and left wet footprints in the dirt around the edge of each room, the dry earth clinging to the soles of my feet. I sat in the courtyard and stared at the motley. Its cream flowers hung off the thin branches, listing in the lazy mountain-blown breeze. Kay was right: I stared at the tree and it stared straight back at me, each one of its flowers a perverse, inhuman sensory organ probing me, working its fingers of scent and pollen and colour inside me. When the wind was high and I lay in bed trying to sleep, I could hear it scream or sing or cry, a ghost of someone I'd never met fanatically scrambling against the glass of the afterlife.
Is it wrong to personify it like that, a uniquely human attribute to find a mirror in something we had no right to claim as our own, to stare into that mirror whether it was truly there or not? I didn’t much care. I wanted company and the motley was there for me.
~*~
I needed to see my boss. I was dying from the inside out. That thought of working--of being sat on that platform as I scanned the jungle mat for the streaking glow of fireflies--sat in my chest like a tree. It sucked up every drop of nutrition with its fine winding roots in my guts, every particle of energy I had earned through mastication and digestion and daydreaming. It drained everything which animated and excited me. It turned me into a flaccid lump of flesh only sustaining itself through habit.
There had to be something. There had to be some virus, something engineered by the company and kept in a four-kelvin freezer. Some magical serum they could inject into my veins that would fix me.
I hadn't gone into work in three days. I couldn't. I'd lain in my bed and listened to the thump-thump-thump of the ceiling fan blades as they cut the air with futile urgency, or to the gentle moaning and cajoling of the motley in the courtyard.
I hated my job, detested the thought of my expression. How can a human being live when they detested the thought of waking up to work? I wished to any and all gods that may be listening that something could be done, because I couldn't go on like this.
~*~
The arc lights strung out between the pylons faded, slowly dimming from east to west. The small boat I'd hired bobbed gently at the jetty, tethered to dry land and yearning to get back on the waters of the Kaleidoscope.
My boss's office was as small as I remembered it being. It was a flimsy wooden box with a veranda jutting from its side like a lolling tongue, no guard rail against the twenty-foot fall it promised the careless the or the unlucky. The sole window was nothing more than a picture frame cut into the wall with no picture, just a paper blind that could be rolled down when the heat or the wind or the world offended. Dunlin sat behind a slowly-rusting metal desk, on a metal chair too tired and worn to object to the weight he forced it to support. A computer as old as I was sat on the desk, still working out of spite and pride.
Outside, it rained. A capricious wind bumbled down from the mountains and whipped the emaciated raindrops into eddies and drifts.
“Perhaps you should go see a movie
,” Dunlin said. He tapped his pen on his desk and licked his lips, his Rorschach glowing ever-so-slightly as he nursed his shard. It responded, filling him with a comfort and security and happiness I had lost.
“What the fuck?” I said.
“We've just got a new shipment from Earth,” he said. “You would be one of the first to see them. In fact, I think there's a new movie screening tonight.”
He leaned forwards earnestly.
“If you could lose yourself in the movie,” he said, “really lose yourself, it would be a sort of palette cleanser for both your conscious and non-conscious space. Everything you've been thinking and feeling for the past few days has become a huge tangled knot and there's no way of unpicking it. You just need to sweep it aside and start again, then we can start working out a way forwards.”
Why did the company keep sending us those Earth shows? I hated them. I hated watching those stubby, shardless creatures who still had the gall to call themselves human flailing around in-front of the cameras, agonising over their petty and meaningless love-lives or staring into their blue sky and waiting for answers or hopes or anything at all. I hated their squat, compressed bodies, their torsos like someone had taken a lump of dough and rolled it out into a cylinder, stuck two stunted legs onto it, grafted on clumsy and clumpy arms and topped it all with a boiled egg scrawled on with a marker pen. The Earth gravity screwed up their physiography like a petulant child. On Minas, the human genome could grow and stretch and find its true shape, its natural form.
“Seriously Dun, what the fuck?” I asked. I threw myself back in the seat and let out the air I had in my lungs. “I'm telling you I'm dying here. I'm dead, Dun. My shard's gone. It's... it's gone. I don't want to work. My whole world is falling apart and your solution is, 'go see a movie'? If I'd come to you with my belly sliced open, would you tell me to eat some starchy food?”