CH1

Chapter 1: Seven Years

The protagonist of our story was born like this:

At an engineering facility on a planet called Ceti, a Human named Dan Loris worked for an entity called Atom GeneWEAVE. He* was tasked with writing the genetic code of a variety of engineered humans and he composed them with the skill of a master musician, for a very particular brief. The first six attempts were not viable and his computer** simulations didn’t predict a favourable outcome for them. The seventh attempt, however, would work. He implanted his genetic code in a Human egg and fertilised it in an incubation chamber, and it began to grow.

Outside his facility, under the unknowable sky of mysterious Ceti, there was a great ship called The Lonely Sailor. This ship was larger than you could ever imagine, large enough to hold thousands of Humans and the requisite cargo to let them live on a new world long enough for them to become self-sustaining there. Measurements on record state that The Lonely Sailor was more than a kilometre long.

The Lonely Sailor was owned by Atom GeneWEAVE and would carry a cargo container full of fertilised Human eggs to the new world. These were known as embryos and were mostly held in a frozen state, but there were twenty of them which were not frozen. They were placed in false amniotic sacs and allowed to continue growing throughout the entire voyage of The Lonely Sailor, even though the adult Humans themselves would be frozen instead.

Dan Loris slotted his first viable attempt at life into the cargo hold last, knowing that it would be the first to wake. He used a computer machine called a Deep Dreamer to monitor the growing life, and encoded within it an operation called ‘Athletic_Boy_Childhood_03.deepdr‘. He wrote on the amniotic sac the name of his creation: Ishmael© property of ATOM GENEWEAVE®.

Dan Loris then settled himself into a sleeping chamber which would freeze him harmlessly for the duration of the voyage.

The journey from Ceti to Siren would take seven years. Ishmael grew from fertilised egg to embryo and then became a baby in the normal period of time that these things take. But he was not born then. He remained asleep, dreaming that he was living a Human childhood.

We can only guess at what he dreamed of, as the memory encoded into him was designed to fade, leaving behind only the lessons that Atom felt were necessary for him to learn, to function normally and not emerge from the seven year journey in a feral state. He learned how to speak, how to read and write, all without ever having taken a single breath. When he was old enough, he moved his body as though he were engaging in games of chase and team sports, and this allowed his muscles to develop.

Atom was as a deity to the Humans sleeping in The Lonely Sailor – Atom decided that they were going to Siren and they were not able to refuse. Throughout every source I could find, I never came across one that described what Atom was at its heart, only that it was unimaginably powerful and had bases on several planets.

Atom was so omnipresent, so all-encompassing, that no one thought to explain it, or question it, or even remark on its presence particularly often. The Humans worked for Atom. Ishmael and his cohort of engineered embryos were born to work for Atom. Working for Atom, it seemed, was the only reason for anybody to live in Precursor society, and they were utterly shackled to its side whether they liked it or not.

Atom chose Siren for three reasons: the atmosphere had the right sort of air and had grown its own plantlife; there used to be very extensive ice caps around North; and a rival entity known as The Authorities could not interfere with Atom on Siren. The writings of Dan Loris state several times that Atom held The Authorities in contempt, but they were the only force powerful enough to punish Atom for poor behaviour. Genetic engineering such that had been planned by Atom was not permitted by The Authorities, and Atom GeneWEAVE, the part of Atom responsible for it, wanted to work with projects which would be profitable in spite of their illegality in the eyes of The Authorities.

Despite the unclear nature of Atom and The Authorities, I believe this is a story which has been repeated time and time again throughout the centuries. Whom among us has never found a secret corner to hide our trespasses? This was a game of chase, and the only thing that motivated Atom, the thing which caused it to sink a considerable amount of resources on The Lonely Sailor, was the pursuit of profit on a scale so grand that the modern Sirenian can hardly comprehend it. And, in the face of this monumental scale of profit, it was hoped that the Authorities would be rendered ultimately powerless.

The Lonely Sailor arrived on Siren on the date ‘20/07/2378’, which I am sure was significant to the Precursors. For the sake of legibility I will refer to this year as Year 1, the first year of Humans on Siren. The Sailor found pleasant weather, low winds and a water level slightly raised from the baseline in West, where the settlement began. While this was noted by the meteorologists aboard The Sailor, they weren’t to know its significance, which any one of us will recognise immediately; West was recovering from a High Tide which must have taken place only months before.

The captain of the ship was a Human called Ivana. She* was the highest authority under Atom itself on the ship, and the first to wake from her frozen sleep. She gazed down at Siren from above and wrote her observations, which I can reproduce here following extensive translation work:

Beautiful morning on Siren. What I wouldn’t give to show Dad this. A career first! We will land in seventy-two hours after finishing our preliminary rotation and once the landing crew have walked off the brain freeze.

I assume ‘Dad’ is a significant other of some kind, perhaps deceased, judging by its absence.

The landing was described in a series of cargo logbooks and completed by a small crew which had been woken up from their sleep. Supplies were conveyed to a low mesa in West and within a matter of days the settlement was born. It was built out over the surface of the sea, anchored to the mesa with powerful brackets that remain today. Throughout the entirety of its existence, the Atom Settlement continued to grow outwards, so the very heart of it was the oldest, the bowers constructed to house the first crew. One of those very first bowers was the gene laboratory, which had been transported in its entirety from Ceti.

Dan Loris offloaded the embryo cargo pod thirty-nine days after landing, still in the first year. Five days later, Ishmael’s amniotic sac was drained, and his deep dream interrupted by his birth.

The last moment of his encoded dream was common to all artificial dreams, designed to ease the transition into true waking life. He was falling asleep in his bed (an archaic sort of bower), his body feeling tired but satisfied after a day of typical, perfectly generic childhood games. He had something called a mother in this dream who pulled the blankets around his shoulders and kissed him as he drifted off, though he did not remember what their face looked like, only that they instilled within him a sense of perfect safety.

His moment of calm was soon eaten by sensation. It was cold, he realised. Colder than anything he had ever felt. The fluid that had supported him at a constant temperature for seven years was draining away and he reached out, to grab at the blanket he half-remembered. His nerves were alight with new sensations and the world was so bright it felt that he was staring into Odr’s eye.

Dan Loris described him as strong and healthy, but Ishmael did not feel that way. Everything was loud and bright and his body was so heavy. He had never truly experienced gravity, but that alone did not account for the disconnect. His dream had been the dream of a Precursor Human, a bipedal creature with a fully upright stance, straighter even than a shortwing’s, with no tail, no flippers, no phocid morphology. To the newborn Ishmael’s mind, he had just undergone a horrifying transformation, and his body was wrong.

Modern selkies and phocids are likely to imagine a child similar to their own young, but this is not the case. Ishmael was unnaturally pale and almost colourless save for a growth of hair which was a light red. His skin was very thin and translucent, with no markings aside from a blue pictogram on one shoulder, a stylised Atom emblem which had been engineered to form from his own skin pigments.

He was large and heavy compared to Human children of the same age, with a long arched neck connected to his head at the back rather than the bottom as was normal for Humans and harpies, which made it difficult for him to stand upright and look forward without inviting neck pain. He had very large and powerful hands with short webbed fingers, and a combination of long torso and short legs which would help him walk on all fours and swim cleanly with his tail fluke. His arms were quite long in comparison to a modern phocid’s and, at this age, he was exclusively bipedal.

He was born with pale eyes which were white around a pink iris, though that changed over the years. The first things he saw—that he consciously remembered seeing—were his own fingers clamped over those eyes to block out the lights at the laboratory. He opened them a crack, so that the light shone through the pink webbing. It confused him—there wasn’t supposed to be webbing there. Humans (and modern phocids) do not have webbing between their fingers, after all.

He was curled in on himself on a cold hard surface, while somebody spoke in the background. It is a great blessing that the automatic transcriber machine is still intact today, and we can access the exact words spoken in the laboratory for the entirety of its existence. After lengthy translation work, it can be rendered intelligible to us.

“He’s a concept, Ivana, we’re not putting him in the water until we know for sure the probes were right about that sea out there. And I kind of want to leave the actual bodywork to the betas, y’know, Ishmael is just our test bed before we wake them up.”

“Could you turn down the lights a little? I’d have a headache too if I was staring up into those things for the first time,” said Ivana. She had come down to the lab out of curiosity, to see the first-born Human on Siren.

“I need to be able to observe every reaction,” Dan Loris said. “Ishmael will get used to it. Delayed births can cause absolute havoc if the modifications aren’t tuned properly.”

His hands, dry and shockingly cold, caught Ishmael’s blocky wrist. Dan Loris pried the webbed hand away from Ishmael’s eyes and shone a pen light in each. Ishmael’s eyes stung and burned and he tried to wriggle away, but Dan Loris took no notice of this.

He passed a heart scanner along Ishmael’s front and watched the live feed appear on a display window in the side of the lab. Ishmael was rapidly forgetting his dream childhood in the face of this confusing start, but he did remember, for a moment, a similar scene. The childhood deep dream that he had been given included a scene of hospitalisation, to acclimatise children to medical checks.

So the footage of his skeleton and pounding heart on the wall was oddly familiar, though the shape was wrong and freakish to him. His head felt light and dizzy and he, only seven years old, had no ability to reconcile what he saw and felt with what he thought to be true. When Dan Loris pushed the wet red hair away from Ishmael’s face, Ishmael tried unsuccessfully to bite him.

“Funny little guy, isn’t he?” Ivana said, leaning into his line of sight. “Why’d you make him so pale? Like a lab rat.”

Dan Loris snorted. His medical scissors snipped by one of Ishmael’s ear holes and sliced off a chunk of hair. “Why d’you think those are white, too? He’s not here to look pretty. The betas will have proper pigment, so they won’t fry in the sun.”

It was at this point that it all became too much for Ishmael. He broke into a sobbing fit with remarkable suddenness and didn’t stop until Dan Loris clamped a mask over his nose and mouth which delivered a soothing air into his lungs. Ishmael’s eyelids drooped. He looked around for his mother and didn’t see one. Calmer, he sat on the examination table and watched over the rim of the mask as Dan Loris performed all manner of tests on him, most of which made no sense to him, and seemed pointless. Every joint was checked for smooth abduction and adduction. Skin scrapings were collected from his tail. They took his blood and his saliva, and every inch of his body was captured in image form by a roving, flashing device.

His first meal came next – a pouch of gel designed for people who had been born in similar circumstances, which might prepare a stomach that had been empty its whole life for the rigours of real digestion. He had been fed through a large blood vessel in the artificial amniotic sac, and not through an umbilical cord. As a result, he had no navel, and spent his first few days alternatively vomiting and crying as his digestive tract learned how to work.

Delayed birth, while preventing a young mind from being irrevocably damaged by sleeping through key developmental periods, was still no substitute for a true childhood when it came to mental development. Ishmael could speak and understand others, but he essentially entered life as an unusually well-educated infant in a large and overdeveloped body.

The accounts of his mental growth during his early years are somewhat sparing. There are abundant records of the tests in which he was forced to participate, the exact parameters of his growth, his weaning from gel to solid food, even records of each trip to the latrine. But nobody thought to record his mood or emotional state beyond “Ishmael was cooperative today” or “Ishmael needed sedation today”.

What I can tell you is that by age ten he stood at average adult Human height and just about average adult Human weight. He rarely spoke and gave little indication of understanding anything said around him either. By this time, the second generation of Sirenians, the beta generation, had been given their own delayed births, but Ishmael did not interact with them and it appeared that he knew very little outside the confines of the lab.

At this point in life, he met Dan Loris’s own fosterling, known as a biological child. This biological child was called Callum and he had not had a delayed birth. In fact, he had been in frozen sleep alongside Dan Loris himself. Although he was also ten years old, he had lived essentially seventeen years, even if those seven extra years had passed in the blink of an eye and left no lasting impression on his body or mind. By all accounts, this was a far more ethical way to transport someone great distances on The Lonely Sailor.

Callum’s interactions with Ishmael are well recorded, and the earliest examples we have of Ishmael expressing any desires or opinions – the daily records began to include lines like “Ishmael asked about Callum” or “Ishmael was upset at Callum’s absence”. And while there are transcriptions of every word spoken within the lab, the record banks are so huge that it becomes difficult to sift through for any clues as to how Ishmael was developing internally during this time. It seemed, in any case, that he enjoyed the company of another child his age, which is only to be expected, and that he was able to ask to spend more time with his only friend.

There is another side to this. Among other records we located a diary of Callum’s. All of the Precursors were required to write reports of their weekly activities, and the children in particular were encouraged to keep journals, to discuss their emotional reaction to the great upheaval in their lives, and their imaginings of an Atom-controlled future on this new world. Callum’s diary spans his teenage period, not this earlier time, and we will delve into its contents in a later chapter. But it does mention that, at age 10, Callum was wary of Ishmael, and that after a series of incidents which are poorly described but culminated in Ishmael pulling the laboratory door off its hinges, Callum no longer felt safe in his presence.

Indeed, the incidence of “Ishmael was sedated today” in the record logs increased quite dramatically at around this time. A reason is never explicitly stated but I would make an educated guess that Callum, growing more uncomfortable, was not spending as much time with Ishmael, causing distress in the latter. Ishmael was prone to tantrums, often wordlessly lashing out and, on the aforementioned occasion, breaking a door.

Ishmael himself was never consulted to determine the cause of these incidents, with all indications being that the lab workers did not believe him articulate enough to bother reasoning with. As anyone who has spent a season in the nursery knows, underestimating a child’s ability to understand on some level precisely what distresses him is a rookie mistake.

At the age of eleven, the tantrums had clearly become dangerous, given the damage to the lab infrastructure and Callum’s unwillingness to spend time with Ishmael. Ishmael was growing physically powerful in a way that had not been anticipated by his creator. It may seem surprising, but the art of genetic engineering was never so simple as merely picking and choosing what traits to instil in an embryo. As Dan Loris noted, the science was still relatively new, and their techniques, while powerful, were not precise enough to predict every single possibility. Thus the need for refining a design over concurrent generations, and for producing one-off ‘alpha’ variants like Ishmael himself. Either way, Ishmael was showing a tendency towards gigantism which had not been anticipated.

Management plans had to be drafted, and Dan Loris records the first ever instance of an attempt to understand Ishmael on an emotional level. He brought in a Human called Maris to talk to Ishmael once a day, in the hopes that it would calm him and provide some insights into his psyche. The notes of Maris are an invaluable resource, providing the most detailed written accounts of Ishmael’s childhood, which even Ishmael himself did not adequately record (citing trauma and distaste as his reasons).

She also captured moving ‘video’ images of Ishmael during these sessions which I have been able to access. If not for these, a critical moment in Siren’s history may have been lost to time forever, leaving nothing but a dry list of facts and figures recording Ishmael’s physical parameters as though he were little more than livestock.

_{*Humans refer to themselves as ‘he’ or ‘she’. I will leave this untranslated as I believe those are different enough to be significant to this society.}

_{**it is my understanding that a computer is a type of machine which can receive information fed to it by a person and produce a mathematical calculation based on that information which the person can interpret, or cause another machine to perform a specific operation – this was used for every facet of Precursor life to automate their machinations, from food production to predicting the outcome of specific events.}