Escape Mission

Evans takes one last look around her and sighs deeply.

Jones places a hand on her shoulder. Squeezes, “it’s going to be OK,” he tells her.

Her smile sits in the midst of momentary pain and confusion. The way Jones reads that expression of hers is; it doesn’t have to be this way. He’s had more than his fair share of that sentiment in his life. Wonders sometimes whether that’s the way it’s meant to be. An ongoing conflict that provides the movement necessary for people to live. The illusion of peace a pipe dream that if ever attained would lead to stagnation and decay.

He shrugs and returns the smile, “it is what it is, kid.”

That breaks the spell. They’re both moving now. Looking up at the skyscraper that will soon be scraping the skies above them as it makes its way to another home and a future beyond the confines of this place. Spreading their wings and taking a monumental leap of faith as they fly a nest they’ve occupied for thousands of years and more.

The cockpit cocoons them in purpose. They flow with the pre-flight checks. This is a place where they belong and make sense. Everything depends upon their focus. No time to look at a past that will become a dream that fades without the maintenance of presence. And no energy to consider what the future holds in the hand that is always curled in concealment.

They feel the roar of the engines. Their entire body is an ear. Listening to God speak to them as they are propelled from the Tower of Babel towards a land of promise. To look back now would undo everything. There is only death in that place where their lives began.

Evans gasps and Jones understands why. Despite his best efforts to keep his eyes averted, his peripheral vision has betrayed him. Evans turns her head, He watches her. She is framed by the inexplicable. And then it is gone from sight and he hopes with all his heart that she remains as he tastes the bitter salt of apprehension in his dry mouth.

“What was that?” she asks without turning toward him.

“Nothing.”

He hears the word. It floats between them in the weightlessness of space. He wanted to reassure the both of them, but missed that mark entirely. That single word is an abomination. A question that would open the door to a dark, magical madness given half a chance. It lingers and he feels shamed by it. The emotionally unavailable parent denying humanity a chance at happiness.

Because it was something, and somewhere way deep down in the seldom visited collective conscience, they both know the truth of it. An overwhelming truth that shatters teeth and blinds eyes as it is spoken. 

The silence that ensues is an awkward conspiracy of ignorance. A willingness to share the secret before it can ever be spoken. They opened the book and read the words of a beginning and now they know the end. They can never take that back. But they can bury it. They are both adept at burying truth alive and smothering it until it ceases to move within them. That is how they are built and that is how everyone on this life raft is built. And everyone on the planet that they are leaving behind. They’re all the same however much they protest their difference.

Jones stares out into the welcoming abyss and for the very first time he allows the reality of the situation to rain upon him. A mist of invisible droplets that dampen his skin as he drifts listlessly through space. His eyes lose focus as the infinite stares back at him. He is in a place where there is no up and no down. Clinging onto the myth of forward momentum as a means to an end. Holding it together with a strait jacket of beliefs.

Right now, he is the father of a tribe. They slumber peacefully in the ark behind him. He could almost smile at what this makes Evans. And then he is puzzled at why he has not considered this before. Knows that his body already has. His attitude has softened towards the mother seated beside him. Everyone walked the gang plank two at a time. Everyone. He’s all that Evans has now and he tries not to think about how this came to be. Some questions are rabbit holes with the eventuality of collapse and suffocation. He distracts himself with the image in the looking glass. The two of them staring at nothing in wonder as their something fades into legend.

The Limbo is what he thinks of it as. A journey into the unknown with an outcome too fantastical to hope for. Everything could end right now and as though his extraneous thoughts can read his mind, one of them asks him how it would be if he pushed any number of sequences of buttons before him. He could end this now and no one would ever know. He reminds himself that the real him is here right now. The version that is not watched and therefore fears no consequence. Evans is asleep beside him. Maybe her presence is how the difference is made and those bright, shining buttons remain unmolested by his covetous fingers. He remains passive and resists the temptation to become a god of sorts. Stills himself as the excitement of burning the world is presented to him. As Evans awakens he wonders whether she will face the same dilemma. He drifts into a comfortable sleep accepting that craven eventuality. Has lived with such conflict all his life.

Towards journey’s end, the Big Reveal is a gradual revelation. A pin prick of light grows into the face of a welcoming goddess and the two pilots gaze in hopeful wonderment at their new home. Evans speaks for them both. Jones is grateful for her willingness to say words that he keeps at bay, “it looks like…” she trails off. They are both thinking the same thing.

“I know,” replies Jones.

The quiet that follows has a discomfiting fizz to it. It’s as though they’ve turned full circle. Going around in circles is a default. They both know this only too well. Disorientation leads to the perception of progress, but it’s a lie that needs calling out. Jones once heard of a man who parked at the side of the road and walked into the Sahara desert. A sight-seeing trip that he could tick off his bucket list and brag to his friends about. A murderous wind came from nowhere and saw its chance to undo the man, erasing his footsteps from the sand. That man never made it back to the safe harbour of the road and his car. He died of thirst having walked around in a perfect spiral, the outer edge of which was as close to the road as he could have gotten without seeing it. There is death in the repetition of the same circular patterns.

Jones does not check their course. He trusts in the process. But he communes with a feeling of loss that grows as the face of the goddess glows and smiles at them.

“Looks like the terraformers did a great job,” Evans voice breaks through to Jones and he finishes the job, pushing his concerns away like a drunken brawler, “we’ll get to see how good a job soon enough,” he says without looking at his partner in crime.

“Breathing is believing,” quips Evans.

Jones nods. Not sure what he believes anymore. Trying not to stare at a twin he never knew existed. A red planet turned blue. A painted beauty that beckons them forth. He hopes that beauty is more than skin deep. He hopes that his heretical cynicism will not be detected by the waiting deity and wrathfully punished. He does not want to be the bad difference. Wrestles with the apparent lack of choice in the matter as the prospect of calamitous collision nears. His responsibility is to broker this meeting and land a suitably peaceful outcome.

The ark now stirs. The children will awake as the ship lands in their new home. The noise of activity is jarring and unwelcome as Evans and Jones prepare to land.

“What’s that?” Evans asks over the symphony that accompanies the final journey of this vessel.

Jones attends to the instrument panel. There is nothing to be read there, but he trusts his co-pilot, “what…” he begins the question but does not need to finish it. The light show before them tells them everything they need to know.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” growls Jones.

“Best laid plans!” Evans chuckles as they attend to the curve ball before them.

“I specifically stated…” begins Jones.

Evans places a hand on his wrist and the time for any further words of recrimination ends. She calms and centres him with that one small gesture. He gets to work on the only job he has ever wanted. The one thing he’s good at, arrived at by being good at a multitude of subsidiary things. All of them overlooked by the two people he did it all for.

“Change of plan,” Jones tells Evans, “we’re going in hot and low.”

“That’s…” begins Evans.

“I know,” replies Jones.

They exchange a look. There is trust there. There has to be. Jones switches off the ship’s connection with an artificial brain far larger than his own. Measures of intelligence are parlour games for people with limited horizons and fragile egos. He grips the controls and feels his way forward. Becomes one with the hulking mass around him as it gains weight and protests as it plunges into a cold pool of gravity. The flight path has changed, “we’re going the scenic route,” Jones yells redundantly as the whale shudders and moans in an unfamiliar sea of air. 

And then he’s laughing. Laughing at the absurdity of the image he has conjured. Finding his adrenaline crazed mind slowing time and scanning the skies for a confused pot of petunias. Asking himself whether this planet will be his friend. Receiving a reply that blows his mind.

“This can’t be!” he hears Evans even through the rattling, roars of protest and their last sight of Earth makes a terrible sense now. They exchange a glance that makes of them an island in a sea of madness. 

*

“That was some landing.”

Jones is standing in an opulent office. This is a handover of sorts. Jones has delivered his people to paradise and the man behind the oversized, black and naked desk has proclaimed himself a god of sorts. After all, this is his project. He owns it. He bankrolled the entire thing so that a boy’s dream became a man’s nightmare. 

Timing, thinks Jones. It’s all about the timing. He was about to speak these words in relation to the landing, but he is silenced as thoughts of timing spread tendrils out towards this entire endeavour and snap it’s back as they clutch greedily at half-truths painted with lies.

“We saw,” is all Jones says.

Elan nods and smiles a predatory smile. The man is a machine thinks Jones. He supresses the shiver that ensues, “yes, we populated the planet with flora, fauna and animal life some time back.”

“No,” says Jones with a finality that frightens him, “we saw… the rest of it.”

Elan coldly examines him. The results of calculations are being considered, “you’d better take a seat.”

The two men stare at each other. Jones had no intention of sitting. His elevation was from the mountain of his indignation. But now he sees that there is an offering of sorts here and he wants to know. Needs to make sense of what he saw.

Elan, “so you think you know…” he shrugs, “what do you think you’re going to do about it? Look around you. This truth is far, far greater than you. And it’s a truth pill everyone will willingly swallow. In fact, everyone took that pill before they came here and they’ll keep on taking it. What’s their alternative? The decision is already made. It’s done and dusted. We’re survivors Jones. This is what we do.”

“It wasn’t just the perfect facsimile of Earth that you’ve created here, with a fake history that can’t be true. There were pyramids! You’ve copied everything as though nothing’s changed! But it has, because I saw something approaching Earth...” Jones is locking eyes with the man behind the table and he wonders whether any humanity remains, if it was ever there at all.

“Ah…” says Elan, “you saw the harvesters.”

Jones goes into freefall then. Everything he thought he knew dissolves from underneath him and he can find no purchase here. He hears the rushing of the winds of a dark change in his ears. A silent scream roaring around him and threatening to consume him. The loss of everything creating a vacuum that cannot sustain him any longer.

In the storm of his thoughts, he recalls the remnants of a saying about a man with an eye in a land of the blind. He’s no king though. He is cursed with a knowledge that he cannot contain. A knowing that is not meant for him. But he cannot take it back. This was always a one way trip. Shit or bust. The price they are paying is too high. This is a foul end, not the brave beginning they had all hoped for. The damned pinning their hopes on this last roll of the dice. The lost waving goodbye to the fallen children of man.

Harvested.

Images assail him. Apparatus making soup of the life of the miraculous gem that shone fiercely in the cosmos. The beauty that touched him was itself a lie. Sacrificial life on a farm that feeds uncaring beings.

This is how Jones learns how far down the food chain he is. The journey to this planet an illusion of freedom when all they were doing was moving to pastures new. The familiarity of this planet, the bars of captivity. Self-imprisoned by wilful ignorance. He sees the effective seduction of the trap and knows they are all doomed to play this existence out again and again. Wonders how many times this trip has been made. The harvested planet laying fallow as the other flourishes and fills to the brim with life before being emptied by the machinery Evans saw looming over their doomed home.

Always doomed. Right from the very start.

He feels as though he had led his children to the slaughter. His unwitting complicity in this sick plan tears at him along with the legion of dark revelations battling within him. He sees Elan through the fog of his undoing. Wants to leap over the desk and batter him with his balled fists as he asks his questions over and over again.

Why!?

But he is frozen. And he cannot bear to hear answers spat out into this brave new world. Treacherous lies coated with the blood that he has on his hands. He’s been used and everything is now a lie. All of it. A thought comes unbidden. Rising up in the statue the snake Elan has made of him.

Some of the animals are more equal than the others.

Jones tastes this unpalatable thought and turns it upside down in his mouth. Trying the words out for size. Elan is more of an animal than any of them. He lacks the qualities that would make him human. That is why he can preside over the slaughter of an entire planet. There is something missing and that makes the man dangerous. 

That’s what makes him alien.

Jones stares at the figure before him and clutches at a straw of hope. A belief in the goodness of humanity. A secret ingredient that someone like Elan will never understand. A mutation in the helix of DNA that was perhaps put there to make humans gullible and compliant. But in Jones’ experience, all the best laid plans have a habit of failing and that’s when people come into their own. 

They adapt.