The Golden Lotus

Shadow buries the streets, and ash chokes the sky. The tarmac circuitry engraved from Cairo to Tokyo buzzes no longer—only carrying time and the wrinkles that leaves. No feet tread here; cabins are no different from the trees they’re carved from; dams bleed into the surrounding hills; skyscrapers stand as skeletal mountains, or collapse into hills of gravel.

Here, the only survivors are those who know no light. Archaea live as they had before—surfing cyclonic magma under torrents of sulfur dust, bashing against the gates of hell without moving them an inch. Other microbes live more exposed, like some bacteria that skirt along the surface. They’ve adapted to the new era by scavenging the ground for particles of ash, and gorging on them until they burst. Yet above them, larger life remains.

Between chunks of broken asphalt, a woody stock stretches towards the ash storm; its tip splays into a frilled bowl held under a patch of open skies, catching falling specks of ash with its grooved walls and funneling them towards an inky pit at the center. Blue silhouettes of gnarly buildings hover above it, fleshy gray terraces jutting from their sides. Thick mycelium ropes coil around the surrounding land and thread the soil and concrete like stitches. Overhead, rubbery pink and yellow disks glow. In the world’s effort to rebuild, they’ve endeavored to remake the stars.

Piercing the belly of the storm, this is what the Golden Lotus comes to see. It hails from a different fold of existence—stars away, and millennia separate. Its core is a wide, shimmering plate; leaf-like cosmic sails and root-like tripod legs furl out from its side and bottom respectively. The upper end of its stem spreads into a satellite disk molded into rows of pink sheets poking out around a long antenna in the center. Beneath its golden shell, plastic tubes filled with esoteric fluids wind among circuit boards and hardware.

It was fashioned in turquoise seas by an inflated sea serpent using the limbs around its mouth. Its species invented a way to contain antimatter decades earlier, locking Armageddon in a cage and waving the key at anyone who dared to squint their eyes wrong. The threat cancelled itself out for a while—the sheer consequences of a single use of the bombs would equate them with suicide. However, when powerful people become desperate, they become petty. A failing empire was full of these petty people, and they made sure everyone else knew it. Soon, their neighbors were being overrun. The stone sea floors were plowed smooth of all houses, markets, and roads. It was the empire’s final, desperate gambit.

These are the circumstances that created the Lotus. The serpent that built it was a career astronomer, and an engineering hobbyist. It could see the writing on the walls, too difficult to ignore. Yet, it still sat down at its telescope everyday to nestle among distant stars. One day, the orbit of its planet just so happened to align just right, and the Earth emerged behind a blanket of the sun’s light. Its deep blue skin was broken up by green and brown blemishes that caught the serpent’s eye, enticing it to zoom in even closer. A lush strip of green spanned the length of the looking glass, yet was swallowed up by an abyss of ghostly yellow. The serpent zoomed even further, and among the green trail found shining obelisks towering above the surroundings. Their surfaces gleamed so impressively, they practically smirked back at the telescope. Tiny squares of sandstone were scattered around them, and narrow cuts of blue branched off of a wider column and into the desert beyond. However, what caught the serpent’s eye most of all was a monument of a lotus flower deep in the sand. Though it stood proud, it was surrounded by ruin—cracked sandstone was strewn across the dunes, sunk beneath. In spite of everything, it remained.

The serpent knew it had to make contact with whoever built it all, with the planet. Thus, the Lotus was created to bring Earth relics of its home planet: a computer, its favorite book, a recording of its favorite song, and a picture of it with the Lotus. The Lotus would have to be capable of advanced mathematics to withstand the voyage, so the serpent made it intelligent. To its shock, though, advanced mathematics wasn’t the only complex cognitive process it possessed. The serpent watched it toy with some of the loose rocks around its home, throwing them at the serpent if it ever got close enough to get hit. This was incredibly irritating for the serpent—it had just labored over the perfect spacecraft day and night, only for it to end up being a violent dumbass. Then it caught one of the rocks, and the Lotus raised a few of its petals towards the ocean surface. Perplexed, the serpent tossed the rock back at the Lotus, which then promptly caught it with its petals, and spun in a wild twirl; it was dancing. It threw the rock back at the serpent, who then caught it and threw it back at the Lotus, who then caught it and threw it back at the serpent, and on and on until the serpent was exhausted, and went off to bed. That night, it heard a knock on its bedroom door. It was the Lotus. Its leaves and petals trembled, but stopped as the door opened to the serpent. The Lotus pushed past the serpent and laid itself down on the bedroom floor; it couldn’t stand being alone.

Months passed, and the serpent couldn’t bring itself to launch the Lotus off on a thousand year journey across a desert of existence. The Lotus wanted to be there, to live there, maybe it's better off dying with the world it knew than spending lifetimes in isolation. That’s when an emergency broadcast came on, and froze those considerations in place. There, he learned the empire was now at home with his own nation, the most powerful one in the world. There was only one way this was gonna end: the empire would be humiliated, and decide to drag the rest of the world down to the same hell it approaches. The Lotus was sleeping on the bedroom floor—its delicate gold panels flopped down in tender openness. The serpent made up its mind: the Lotus would live on, whether it wanted to or not. The serpent couldn’t bear to watch it die. As it laid there, sprawled across the floor, the serpent gently parted a bundle of tiny petals at its center, and accessed its base parts. It was programmed to sleep for twenty hours, in which it breached the familiar waves, rising above the clouds, above the sky, above off on a great and silent voyage.

It woke to nothing: no bedroom walls, no serpent floating among blankets, not even refracted light hitting the sea floor, nothing. Its head was fuzzy at first, but soon coalesced into sharp panic. It knew where it was, why it was there, and most importantly, what happened to the serpent. It had no voice to scream, and no tears to cry. Even if it did, there would be no one to hear. All it could think about was the serpent. One thousand two hundred and seventy nine years the serpent's ghost haunted the Lotus. It couldn’t help but picture the end, watching fate it dodged like a coward while the only peace it had ever known took the brunt. Space is empty—even dust hardly drifted past the Lotus. It couldn’t even sense its trajectory, not to mention its destination. The only hope it had left was that on Earth, maybe there would be someone like the serpent—someone as clever and patient, someone as caring, someone as considerate. Maybe, when he gets there, he will both make the serpent proud and live on for it.

Earth’s surface is quiet. The life that the lotus sought is a circus of idiot pillars, and the life it sprang from is buried in the past. Still, it digs its leafy sails against the ground and begins to walk. From its head, electromagnetic waves pulse out and thumb through the dull landscape. Concrete rubble crunches under the lotus’s steps. A carpet of thin blue fuzz off path ripples in a wild hypnotic pattern, another sample of the sedentary buzz bubbling from the bodies of these zombies. Between the shattered pavement poked fine silver hairs: they did not move; over in a petrified tree line, a waxy orange ring hung from the branches: it did not move. This world is haunted, the lotus realized—the shimmering euclidean mounds that once surely greeted the telescope’s lens now rot under dust and clouds, their sculptors vanishing into the aether. It will sleep now, the Lotus, for there are no voices left to hear. It imagines the serpent one last time, floating in front of the doorway of that distant house, and stills its stirring head.

Then, it feels something tap the base of one of its sails. The sensation repeats a few times, gently, like the tentative nuzzle of a cat. As it wakes, the lotus scans its surroundings: something was moving. It scans again, a thorough examination of every bump and groove in its vicinity. On its left side, four balls of translucent jelly lurched. Knotted webs of mycelium run throughout their bodies and coil together to create firm tendrils—some were thin, snapping back and forth at the subtle shift of a breeze; others were thick, maneuvering with great control and deliberation, almost like limbs. The four were each distinct from each other: one had a single supremely thick tendril rising from the top of its head, finer ones sporadically slipping out from it, and long abandoned sapphire and emerald jewelry scavenged from the rubble; another was flatter, less like a water balloon and more like a voluminous puddle, moderately thick tendrils carrying mushroom caps, mycelial nets, and compounded ash; yet another is almost formless, a cone of fluids juggled into loose shape, and long, thin tendrils like antennae; finally, the largest of group was the most radially symmetrical—both thick and thin tendrils covering its membrane in equal number and distribution, many of which carried thick strips of bark carved into splintering spears. The Lotus watched them, and they watched the Lotus. The jellies then slid towards one another, locking tendrils and waving them in a complex system of patterns. The amorphous one approaches the Lotus soon after, inching forward in trepidation. The jelly reaches towards the Lotus and brushes its tendrils against its gold shell. Tenderly, the Lotus lurches its head down to meet its touch; the jelly is comfortable now—all tendrils within range tickling the disk. In that moment, though they knew not what was being said, both knew they were being spoken to.

This is what the serpent wanted, the Lotus thought. The bundle of petals at its center split open and revealed the last traces of the Lotus’s world: a computer of clear tubes looping around a pulsing bundle of some mixture of fabric and flesh, a work of literature made from a series of knotted strings tied to a calcium board, a lumpy mound of plastic that sings a song heard through magnets and wires, and, after careful consideration, a thin green disk of tiny knobs shining stripes. The jellies may never learn what this is, they probably don’t have a reason to, but if they were to hit it with a particular frequency of radiation and catch whatever bounced off with the alien computer, they would discover an image. In it, there is a balloon-like serpent floating in a turquoise sea, and the limbs around its mouth tightly holding a long golden satellite in the shape of a lotus flower, both creatures speaking a language all life knows.

The jellies went off to the concrete mountains again, but the Lotus didn’t move—just watched the ash fall. The serpent is gone, and it’s only a matter of time until it will be too, but they’re stories are still being written. Hundreds of years from now, the largest city in the world will form about five miles from the Lotus’s body. Time has been unkind to it, burying much of it beneath dunes of ash, but the petals would never sink below. Many jellies would make pilgrimages to the site. Some thought it was God, others a humble angel, but they all agreed on one thing. Wherever it came from, whatever it was, it brought life back to this planet.