Michael walked the labyrinth of the drab concrete complex, erring often. Much had changed since his dispatch, yet nothing. He avoided eye contact. He didn’t know any of these people and didn’t care to know. There were other Korektors coming and going between missions, or in training, and their related aides and mentors, all swooshing past him. He was the oldest one in terms of experience, but still physically three shays old.
There were female Korektors as well, but they seemed harder than the men. They were totally unapproachable. They had no desire and no one could desire them. They gave him goose bumps.
A train of windows lined the passageways through the base structure. How different was this place from Old Earth, he thought. The large oval openings revealed mostly blackness, dotted by stars and their moons, far far away. This place was quiet, like someone had turned down the dial. On Old Earth he was used to being deaf. But here, sound, noise…it was considered pollution.
The planet of Proxima Centauri Vega was a harsh place. It was the closest exoplanet to Earth with habitable zones, 4.2 light years away. Due to its relative proximity to its parent red dwarf star, Proxima was tidally locked and did not revolve around its axis. They called it an eyeball planet. The sunny part facing permanently its star had scorching temperatures, with frequent radiation flares, while the dark side was freezing ice cold. Proxima then was only habitable in the belt, in the transition terminator zones. And that’s where The Order base was located.
Michael could tell, since his last mission, that the newly presiding Order had a different style, a penchant for the Gothic. Newly presiding was relative to Michael, for almost on every mission he faced a new Lord. Each with their peculiarities, tastes and—for Michael—a lack of understanding.
He arrived at his quarters. A small brown room with four single beds. The wall panels mimicked wood, as it was the Order’s favourite material. But for Michael it was the cheapest of caricatures of the real thing. From the small window he could see that it was still night. He shook his head. How dumb of me. As his window did not face the red dwarf star—-all he will ever see was the night.
He chose one bed, and stuffed his bag in his closet. At the sink, he splashed cold water on his face. Sand and sweat still clung to his skin and it almost pained him to wash it away. He looked at his face, as if for the first time. He did not age a day since he left. His blond hair was longer, and he needed a shave. He was thin. War took its toll. The siege was long, he remembered. And it was all for nothing, he sighed.
On another bed, a fellow dark skinned Korektor raised his head from his reading. He smiled and nodded “Hi”. He seemed friendlier than most, and kinder. Probably because he was new.
Michael plopped on his bed, stretched out. He longed for the sun of Old Earth. Its yellow sands, red mountains, and the blue clear water. It was a beautiful place cursed with devastation.
“I’m Sean,” his roommate said, and shook Michael out of it.
“Michael,” he grumbled.
“Oh, I know who you are,” enthused Sean.
“Is that so?”
“We studied you in training.”
Michael wasn’t sure if to feel humiliated or proud. But it was true that no one had repeated a mission 37 times. Each lasting on average 27 human years.
“Crazy stuff. Don’t blame you,” Sean said.
It was strange for Michael to think about his mission in the past. Like a string of events, and not be in it. It was his whole life, for every life. But as hard as he tried, he could not remember all 37 missions, after all this time. Maybe only half.
He turned the palms of his hands. They were callused and dry. I’ve forgotten myself, over the years, who I was. Who was I before all this?
“Tell me about realisation. I’m very curious. Because on all other planets, you just drop and go,” Sean said.
“Maybe tomorrow,” Michael said softly as he now inspected the crusty blade of his sword. He refused to wipe the blood off. It was the only thing he was allowed to bring back after 27 years. Blood.
But Sean pressed, “Old Earth is different, I know. I studied it. I’m sorry your last mission lasted so long. It was said between your full realisation and extraction, ten years passed that you just disappeared and suspended your mission. What happened, brother?”
Michael remembered it all. Realisation at age fourteen. Slowly coming to terms with who he really was and what he needed to do. Initially he thought he was going insane. His Old Earth mother took him to psychiatrists, doctors, tests. But nothing helped. At the same time, he was losing his hearing. Eventually, the storm passed, and he embraced his lot—the Correction mission, but of course kept it to himself. He was now an activated Korketor. But then she came. Her power over him disturbed the senses, compelling him to run to the frozen edges of Old Earth and wait for what he could only refer to as feelings to subside. And it took ten years.
“There was a disturbance,” Michael simply said. He closed his eyes and fell asleep, in full gear, with blood stained boots, crusted soiled hands, and the face of a dirty angel.
***
The next day over breakfast, Michael found a far away corner where he could be alone and think. The food was drab from the replicator but he didn’t care. It matched his mood. He was seriously thinking of defecting. But he knew that meant prison, harsh prison, trial and maybe even execution or murder by inmates. He toyed with the idea of appeal and making a planetmark case—that he tried his best and set up to fail. It might work. But would take years. And at the end, he already missed the colors of Old Earth. Perhaps he should just view it as another form of prison.
A pretty prison. But so lonely. He could not bring himself to participate with the sim entities, as real as they were. It’s not right. But for whom? After so much time, he could not even remember his own family and genesis. He could dig it up, but what for? He doubted he’d find any even remote relative after 1000 years…
I’m like a floating island of time. My only relative is my sim Old Earth sister.
Michael stuffed his mouth with spoonful of generated ground beef and mashed potatoes. He swallowed quick, longing to finish and leave here. The Order, the Correction. This was their most important mission. And if he succeeded in cracking it, it would catapult him to distinction in the field of Correction. He could finally settle down and build a family—have the life he always wanted. And—just stop. But for now he was trapped. How did they call it on Old Earth? Between a rock and a hard place.
Other Korektors in the dining room soon began to stare and whisper. They pointed and talked. “That’s him”, “He’s back,” he heard them say. He felt invaded and split between worlds and times. Michael pushed his chair back and took his tray before any could approach him with more hard questions. This food was vile. He dumped it, making a mental note to select another replicator program for lunch. Maybe French.
The most important order of the day was due: Material Review for the mission. Which Michael had already reviewed 37 times. But it was protocol.
He entered the Review Room and closed the steel door behind himself. It was small and dark and had a large screen. He was greeted by a stiff White Woman, with seemingly no hair but a large head cover. He remembered her from his last mission. Her skin was smoother then. But her demeanour had not changed. Cold like the steel door that slammed behind him.
“Good morning Michael. Your material is ready for review. Are you ready?” she said with folded hands.
Michael sat down. The woman carried a powdery scent to her. It was distracting. He rubbed his nose.
“Are you ready?” She repeated.
It had been twenty-seven years since he viewed this image cartridge, but he’d seen it 37 times. It was always the same, and made it just that much harder.
“Maybe we can skip it. It doesn’t really help.” He was tightly wound and could not face the task. His head started pounding. He looked to the White Woman. A strange creature. She didn’t understand. Nobody did. But why did they keep her around? What was her purpose on this planet here really?
“Michael, the Order investigated and has reached the conclusion that the Bedouin girl is the cause for the failure —“
“The cause for my failure is my Old Earth sister. She is the only cause for my failure,” he growled back. He didn’t care anymore if he was impolite or breaking protocol. These people know nothing.
The woman was unimpressed. “The Bedouin girl is the keeper of the 12 coins. That is a fact. She is the Simulation Guardian.”
“Her name is Ani. And I tried. I could not retrieve the coins from her. The result is always the same. The coins are passed on to others, dispersed, divided, divided against each other….until, until my Earth sister finds them. She always does. This profiteering bandit! I don’t know why I have to explain myself. You’ve seen it all.”
“That is not how the Order sees it,” she concluded. “The target is the Bedouin girl. Your Earth sister is negligible.”
Michael sat in defeat on the cushioned armchair. There was no way out. He was fighting the wind. And who ever this woman was—he hated her. The film started to roll, and before the first image of Old Earth history filled the room, like a Pavlovian dog, his eyes immediately filled with tears.
“Please go,” he said.
And she did.
Extraction was never easy.
***
The image started to play, first grainy, then coming into focus. The Bedouin girl, Ani, sitting in her cave. She wore a dark tunic and a white head cover, she was 8 on Old Earth. The image of her stabbed his heart. Michael knew her like she was the daughter he never sired. He could still smell her earthy brown hair. Her small voice ringing in his deaf Earth ears. He remembered the weight of her small body between his arms.
He killed her many times. And saved her just as many. All in the name of the 12 coins that continued to elude him.
On the large screen, he was forced to revisit her life:
Ani squatted on the damp sandy floor of the cave, before a turquoise pool, clutching her bedraggled doll. The doll was as old as Ani: Eight. She had her since the day she was born in the year 290 CE of Old Earth, in the Bedouin village of Khudra in the Sinai desert. The still waters reflected her visage—brown small face with large eyes, button nose and quiet lips.
She smiled, enjoying her watery mirror. “This is our home now,” she told her doll. “Even if mother and father can’t come anymore. But we’re old enough now.” She raised her head to the cave’s ceiling, the end of which was imperceptible. “You don’t need to be afraid. It’s the outside and the sun that hurt.”
Ani was glad to have that Outside chapter of her life done with. What, with all those pushy, demanding people. Sometimes they screamed at her. Often they wept. Some even chased her like a common criminal. They called her names, an abomination. Her mother and father tried their best to ward off all those mad people. It scared her. Very.
“Remember that time,” Ani told her doll, “When we went to the market to buy bread with mother. We were very young then.” she recalled. “The lady at the bakery did not have much time to live, and I just told her, but mother said I shouldn’t have done that. That it was rude. I think I did hurt her because she started crying.”
Ani was special that way. And like the accuracy of breaking dawn, the lady from the bakery died the next day in a road accident. Ani’s parents argued Ani was just a child playing, and “Knows nothing,” but they knew better. It was a secret they had to keep tight. Often, when walking with Ani, she would stop and point to a passerby. She’d say “He has a long life” or that such and such woman would “die in five winters”. It was worse with children. Infant mortality was high in her village, and she could tell who would survive.
Her parents told her to keep her visions to herself, but Ani said it was no vision. She could see Death Dates as clear as anyone had knowledge of Birth Dates. She learned to keep her mouth shut, but her eyes always gave her away. Villagers avoided her, they didn’t want to know. Or just the opposite, some sought her out, offering to even pay. They wanted to know if their lover had a long life, or about a merchant partner, or a rival. This way they could plan, there was no more uncertainty in life. They could arrange to remarry if their wife was mean and would outlive them. They could choose their battles carefully before engaging an enemy. They could calculate who to extort or thieve. There was no end to the trickery and manipulation once you knew exactly when another was to die.
Ani could tell when her father would die and her mother would perish. But it was a taboo subject. They didn’t ask, and she didn’t tell.
The villagers clamoured to know Ani’s own death date: “How long are we to stand for this?” they said.
Yet, Ani just said: “I can’t see it. It’s all fuzzy.”
Her parents wondered. Was she telling the truth or just protecting them? They took it to mean that the Gods had yet to decide her fate. She was after all, most unordinary.
By the time Ani was seven, her ability was well known to all, and caused chaos and turmoil in the palm treed oasis of Khudra. It was no longer possible to conduct normal life when everyone knew their death date. Many gave up and stopped working the groves. Others threw themselves into a frenzy to make up for lost time, breeding more camels or sheep. The most cynical called for her immediate exile. Worst, news travelled fast of the girl who can predict death. The rumours spread across the Sinai desert, crossed the Nile and travelled to Alexandria. Sages and sorcerers clamoured for her death. “This isn’t natural. We must protect the very fabric of society,” they said. Some even reckoned she was one of the great Pharos whose tombs were desecrated in Giza, reincarnated to spread destruction and vengeance.
***
The screen went black and static and the White Woman came in to change cartridges.
Michael squirmed in his seat. “She is not like other Old Earth people. Her ability is surhumain, even for a sim entity. I don’t know where she’s from.”
The White Woman said nothing. If he was looking for an excuse he wasn’t going to find it here.
“And as for my sister, I hardly recognised her wanton and lust for riches. You’ve seen her. With no regard for the power they hold. She only sees the profits and together with that boy they leave behind a trail of destruction in the simulation,” he lamented.
Michael thought back to his previous missions, those he could remember, how naive he was in the beginning. But he learned. And got smarter with each reinsertion. Until he figured out he must get to Ani and the coins before the greed of Old Earth men rises. They did not understand the greater universal implications and only saw the gold for its glitter. Men told themselves lies, that they have been wronged, short changed, deserved such and such. Little did they know their whole lives inside the sim was a lie. They thought the gold would set them free from the shackles of their lives. But in truth—there was no escape. For them, and for Michael.
In the center, you can’t see around.
“Remember Michael,” the White Woman said softly and he thought he discerned a tinge of rare empathy in her voice, “your sim sister is only a common thief. Ani is the Keeper of the Coins and the true sim Guardian. Never forget that.” She loaded the next cartridge and closed the door behind her.
And so the saga of Ani continued to unfold. He braced himself, for he knew every beat and breath of her life:
One morning, while sound asleep in her bed, the earth shook with the hooves and footsteps of hundreds. Ani was quickly scooped up by her father, Ali, and mounted on a horse. She still remembered her mother’s tearful gaze as she was whisked off. Her father rode fast and hard across the desert, north, north, with the foreboding red mountains of Sinai to his left, and the muscle of the deep Red Sea to his right. The angry mob ruthlessly questioned her mother and followed suit along the easier coastal road to cut them off. An armed force gathered to seek her out.
Ani clutched her doll, as Ali buried Ani in his chest. “The land of the prophets burns still,” he said under his breath. He spurred his horse faster, to the brink of exhaustion, gazing at the orange mountains of Arabia across the sea.
Ani was his only daughter and Ali loved her more than life itself, more than the mother who birthed her. He always knew she was special. Her birth was the stuff of legends. She came so easily, painlessly, and literally slipped quietly out of her mother, leaving her unscathed and unbothered. She was perfect and in perfect condition. But for some unknown reason, after Ani, they were unable to bring another child to the world. So she was their total world.
Tired after hours of riding, they came upon the Duat Caves. It was a huge cavern open to the sea, a popular hiding place for smugglers and thieves. Ali didn’t like this place, as it was believed to be the gateway to the demonic underworld—but had no choice. He could hear those pirates unloading and loading their stolen goods. But in the darkness of the black cave, Ani and Ali went unnoticed. They circumvented the make shift docks the smugglers constructed, and entered deep inside the caves where no one really ventured.
And it was there that Ani smiled so bright despite their dire situation. “Father, those people!”
“We best stay away from them,” he warned.
“I don’t know when they are going to die”. It was a miracle of sorts. Away from the sun, enveloped by a mountain of stone, for some curious reason, here in the Duat caves, Ani could not see any death dates. She was completely normal, her ability disabled. What a sense of relief.
And so it was, Ali decided. Ani would dwell safely in the caves. He and her mother will bring food and toys and anything she needed, and would visit often. To avoid detection and to steer clear of the smugglers, Ali, a well known builder, got to work on fashioning another secret entrance to the back of the cave using the natural terrain. He dug a special tunnel and sealed it with a door to which only he had the key.
The months went by and they never spoke of death dates again. Ali stopped questioning why his only daughter had such power or why the cave managed to block it out. For her eighth birthday, her parents came with a cake and many presents. Ani was happy, considering, though it pained her mother to see her daughter growing up in the dark alone. It was no durable solution, but Ali was planning to cross the Red Sea and resettle in the far land of Arabia where nobody knew of her. He needed a few more weeks to buy a boat and supplies so they could make their way quietly with the blessings of the Gods and the trade winds.
But what Ani didn’t tell her parents, was that the last thing she was— was alone. She’d often sneak to the smugglers’ docks, lurking in the shadows and watching them. They were always talking loud or bickering about things she didn’t care to understand. Sometimes, they drank so much from their bottles, around a cave fire, they would belt out tunes until they passed out. It was funny and made her giggle. One time, she was even as bold as to approach their camp while they slept and taste their happy drink. It was vile.
***
