When kids are adopted from the orphan home, they’re carried away on the back of a nimble cow, its hooves clanking on the road, the sound dampening across the woods while the white lines scrawling the skies turn to dots.
Of course, this isn’t true. It’s Juca’s story, so Dana knows it’s gibberish.
“How can I tell a story, LAIR?” Dana presses the drawing of a bowl on the kitchen wall to dispense some soup for herself. She pulls down her mask and smells today’s flavor. “I never have worthy tales.”
This means she doesn’t have an adoption myth of her own yet, something to tell the other kids when they reunite over the soups and soda LAIR prepares for them every day.
LAIR knocks on Dana’s nape.
“You do have interesting stories to tell,” LAIR says within her head. “You informed me you wrote about your fathers, regardless of the impossibility of any of you knowing your progenitors. It’s something defined as fiction. That means you made it up.”
The yellow liquid spills out slowly from the faucet. Above it, the glinting yellow inscription communicates: Nutrition – 60% (limited flavors and consistency). Every day the soup smells like something different. Yesterday, it was dampened earth (though LAIR insists it was beet soup). Today it’s something LAIR calls fowl soup. Yet, when Dana asked what that was, it didn’t know how to properly answer. Something people used to print and eat, it said, not like beet, potato, rice, and tomato, which people raised from ponogel.
“I know what fiction is …” Dana gulps the soup directly from the bowl and grimaces. “Fowl is … blergh. Anyway, that story about my fathers is just something I dreamt.” A lie. Lying to LAIR is as useless as playing guessing games with it: It always knows the truth. But this one lie had been perfect. She’d ventured into the woods that surround the orphan home and found the pod with her fathers during one of LAIR’s gaps, when no one is able to speak with it.
“Books may give you lots of ideas,” LAIR says. A raven flies from the small aviary outside, quickly grabs a spoon, and drops it in her bowl. It perches on the faucet, claws curling around it, eyes gleaming in unnatural green. The eyes of LAIR. “What is a blergh?”
“It’s something that doesn’t taste good,” Dana says. “I want something else.”
“You don’t always get what you want. Actually, it’s rare to get what you want. I can detail the probabilities for any event you tell me. Besides, you are well informed that soup flavors are limited.”
“Not the soup.” She sips from the bowl, ignoring the spoon. “I want something other than the orphan home’s books to find a story. I don’t get most of them. Ionizing radiation, biospheres, closed ecosystems … so much babbling.”
“Don’t call them babbling, dear. I already told you the definitions of those terms.”
“I know, LAIR. But those books aren’t fun.”
She walks out from the kitchen to the main hall. The polyfloor is all battered and stained here (LAIR once told her most of the orphan home is made of incredibly strong alloys of steel and Polybenzimidazole, a kind of resilient fiber). It’s the biggest space inside the orphan home, and it’s one of the places where the kids reunite to tell stories, play games, and study. Stairs on both sides lead to the second floor. This is Our Home, says a plaque lying in the corner, beside the hulking, dead antelope that has always been there with its gashed belly. Dana lays her soup bowl on its hooves and pushes its wirings away to sit on the floor, making a table of the dead critter’s hoof. The holographic words above her serve as a lamp. Generation Error.
On the playground outside, it’s story time. Popo is the storyteller today. He’s sitting on the swing and liltingly telling of how the people in the woods’ pods will wake up one day and adopt them all. Dana scoffs at their silly tales: the magic cows Juca believes in, the story Lina tells of the resurrecting antelope that will carry them to a shinier place. But Popo’s story makes at least a bit of sense.
“But they can’t come back, right?” Dana says to LAIR, taking another gulp of the soup. The woodlamps cast a ghastly glare on the kids’ faces. As the night approaches, the towering lamps will gradually turn off one by one until the only lights are those of the scribbled sky.
“Why not?” She knows LAIR can provide the answer straight away, but it likes to push her thoughts flow.
“They’re dead.” People with gaping mouths and caving eyes lying inside half-buried pods are pretty much dead for her.
LAIR doesn’t confirm, doesn’t deny.
Dana finishes the soup and puts her mask back in place. She stands and leaves the orphan home.
“Let’s hear what dippy story Popo is telling,” she says.
“Don’t belittle him.”
Dana sighs and mouths, “Dippy story.”
“I can almost hear you.”
Dana guffaws and climbs up the tree behind the kids engrossed in Popo’s story. All fifteen are there now, including her.
“… so they can walk here and work in the machine in the basement. The one that’s called …” Popo scratches his head, thinking of the right term, his other hand grasping the swing’s chain.
Dana opens her notebook. The words on the cover are almost fading. IV Symposium on Ecological Engineering and Generation Preservation. She spots the word Popo wants.
“High Thrust Ion Drive VII,” she says.
The kids look back at her. Some frown, others roll their eyes. Her brow sweats as soon as their eyes fall upon her. She should’ve kept her mouth shut.
“That’s what’s …” she stammers. “It’s written in yellow letters on the … basement entrance.”
“That’s just the name of the room.” Popo sneers at her, stopping the swing, his feet scraping the ground.
Dana shakes her head.
“It’s a device to make … things fly fast.” It’s something she’d read on one of the orphan home’s books, flipping through its screens in a frantic search for the term.
Popo snorts. “Which things? The ravens?”
The kids laugh with him. She has no idea what things would fly fast. She opens her mouth to speak but gulps instead. She bites her lips and looks down at the grass below.
“As I was saying, friends …” Popo raises his voice, grains of confidence in his words. He focuses back on the notebook on his lap. He’s going to talk about doors. An adoption myth is supposed to be expanded every time it is told. Otherwise, it gets boring. But Popo’s story always involves doors of one kind or another. Perhaps because there are so many sealed doors in the orphan home that it’s only logical that one of them will lead them out. (Dana’s opinion? They won’t.)
“Once the machine is on, we can open doors made of magic to the places we all see in screens’ backgrounds and frames …”
LAIR knocks on her head.
“What is it?” she says. It knows when she’s hurt. It’s annoying.
“Why the grumpy face?” it says.
“I could tell something better.” Dana folds her arms.
“Then, go. The swing is open for all storytellers.”
“You know I can’t.” She climbs down the tree and starts back to the orphan home.
“You told them of the ion drive. You can.”
Dana shakes her head. “I can’t speak if I know they’re completely focused on me.”
“Do you need soothing?”
“I—” She stops. Soothing is how LAIR calls helping her during storytelling. “You say soothing is cheating.”
“Not if it’s just in small portions. To give the confidence you need.”
Dana bites her lips and nods. Yes, of course, she wants LAIR finishing the sentences for her when she stutters and halts in front of the kids. Filling up her own gaps.
She sits behind the kids, staring at Popo but not really listening to his story about strange doors. It’s her chance of coming up with something worthy, of making the others see her not as the ominous masked girl who breathes like the wind, walks alone, and never tells a proper story.
When Popo raises from the swing, the kids applaud.
“Who’s next?” he says, sitting right on the front row.
Dana’s hands sweat. She sticks them on her overalls’ pockets. Her breath rasps in her throat. She stands and skitters around the kids, clutching the swing’s chain. Instead of looking at the others, she stares at the duo of ravens perched on the tree behind them.
“I—I want to tell a story—” It’s going to be about the spider, the owner of the ashen web she has seen in the woods.
“Sit …” Lika stoops forward and whispers to her.
“Sit on the swing,” Popo says out loud.
Dana shakes her head.
“It’s a story about a spider …” She has jotted it down in her notebook. Her hands fidget with it inside her pocket, but she doesn’t grab it. The spider that will web them all and take them away to adoption. She has even sketched the spider, coral-eyed with silvery legs, though all she’d seen in the woods was its web. “One day … years from now … the spider will come from—”
The sky? The woods? Deep down the earth?
“LAIR …” she whispers. “The spider. It will …”
“Come?” Wewe frowns. Popo snickers. Lika shakes her head. Juca and Kuri exchange murmurs.
LAIR relieves the slight pressure on her nape.
Dana inhales, a lump on her throat. Rusty air flares up her nostrils even through the mask. She can’t speak.
The ravens aren’t on the tree anymore.
She scampers back to the orphan home.
Dana hates LAIR.
It’s the only thing she’s able to think now, sitting with her feet dangling from the bed jutting out of her bedroom’s wall.
The screen in front of her exhibits its usual solitary message. Those responsible for this hull garden, proceed to your pods.
If her fathers were there with her, they’d never let this happen. They’d be strong with their thick eyebrows and they’d speak without stammering. LAIR would obey them. It would never abandon her in the middle of a story. She picks up her notebook and opens it. In the corner of page 26, she’d made a drawing of her fathers, right below her brief and incomplete story about the woods’ spider.
She rubs a finger over the drawing. White and Yellow. White uses a mask like her, and she knows he’s smiling behind it, like he would be if he was there now, instead of dead inside a pod. Like he would be on the playground, listening to her story, soothing her what she needed instead of promising and vanishing.
Dana had drawn them in one of those dreamlands of the orphan home’s background pictures with a big yellow star and a layer of clear blue behind them. Coast of Gold, she likes to think. It’s one of the names LAIR (hate it) uses for the pics they all see on screen backgrounds. Golden beaches, deep forests, places where the sky is sometimes blue instead of all-time black, the ground green instead of blotted brown, and the lines scratching the sky no more than dots taking a rest. LAIR names them Coast of Gold, Field of Emerald, and a dozen of other names she has noted in tiny letters in her notebook’s flyleaf.
Her throat and lips are still dry, her mask smelling like the withered links of the swing’s chain.
“LAIR …” she calls it for the first time since it abandoned her in the middle of a story. “Why did you do that?”
No answer. No pressure on her nape.
LAIR never ignores. (It’s a motto.)
“I don’t like you anymore …” she says it out loud, in the hopes it might hear her. She knows it does all the time. It’s another motto, actually (LAIR always listens), together with LAIR never leaves and Never go deep into the woods.
But during its gaps, none of LAIR’s mottos remain valid. In those periods, LAIR ignores, LAIR never listens, LAIR leaves, but most importantly, it never catches kids going deep into the woods. It’d been in two of those she has ventured further than a few meters beyond the playground to meet her dead fathers.
“LAIR, I want to talk …” she says, anger abating, testing if it’s really a gap.
No reply.
Dana puts her notebook into her pocket, slips on her boots, and walks out. Her bedroom is a bit isolated from the others (her choice), at the end of a hallway next to a sealed door with a yellow-lettered display. Deck 241 Uncoupled - No Access.
(The orphan home is full of stories hidden behind locked doors, but they’re all indecipherable to her, as purposeless as the words she sees on book screens like debris shield, hypervelocity, and habitat shielding.)
Dana’s feet crackle on the polyfloor as it randomly gives place to patchy soil and grass. The only other sound comes from the wind churning in the woods.
The woodlamps are off. The swing is empty, lightly swaying at the ferrous wind’s mercy. (Pipa once attributed it to the work of phantoms. The word struck as new to her then, so she searched it up in books. Turned out it’s some kind of non-standard holography that freaks people out.)
She creeps into the trees’ shadows.
The Spiderless Clearing is up ahead (she names places like LAIR names pics). A tapestry of web extends over the sparse grass, unfurling up through and around the trees, swelling into the space among twigs and leaves and trunks, a vast, silky mantle covering everything like a white bowl of soup. It was there she’d had the idea for the ridiculous story about a spider who never even existed. As silly as magic cows and antelopes galloping.
Dana takes a narrow path between two trees and goes up the road crossing a smooth ridge, following a cluster of shrubs she has marked with three plastiflowers. The wind strums their rosy petals, but she has tucked them firmly into ponogel blobs, so she always knows the path to her fathers. (She has picked plastiflowers because LAIR had told her they perish only after about 582 years. And because their red-and-yellow-and-green petals are cute.)
Her fathers’ pod lies like a monolith edged by trees’ stumps in the Marriage Pod Garden. It’s one of a few with two people inside instead of one. Dana would like to know their names, but she doesn’t. She calls them Yellow and White due to the jumpsuits they’re wearing, tattered and spotted with brown and purple stains. Yellow looks slightly at the side with his caved eyes, as if searching for comfort in White’s hollow glare. But White’s head is tilting downward, chin against chest, his scalp pockmarked with tiny craters. A mask hangs from his neck. Pretty much like hers, with two filters on each side. The only difference is that hers has the number 77 on it, and his is 76.
Dana kneels before the pod. She’s done this before, but it doesn’t hurt trying again. She leans her head over a smiling face with a white luminescence leaking out of its border. A tiny display flashes the message in red letters, 77 - Authorized Offspring, then it flickers to Pod Failure.
Dana sighs, sitting with her back against the pod. It’s now a matter of minutes until LAIR wakes up from its gap and rebukes her for being deep into the woods. But it deserves the little rebellion for leaving her defenseless in front of the other kids. It might not have been its fault, though. After all, she’s not sure if LAIR can control its own gaps. Perhaps it only needs to sleep like them or to recharge and enter in maintenance mode like the orphan home filters and the bathroom water.
She grabs a pencil from her pocket and opens her notebook on page 35. Ideas for Stories.
There’s the spider. She crosses it out. Fail. And there are other glimpses she either never had the guts to transform into adoption stories or to tell them in front of the others. Eagle coming out from the sky. Adults visiting from distant lands. Trees growing taller and revealing doors in their stalks. She crosses the last one out. No doors.
The next page is something she has copied from a book called Compressed Logs of Week 89 After The Mother Failure.
José Menezes set up the birth bays on the hull gardens and ensured the safety of their domes.
Xi Ruo explained the dangers of dividing the Mother’s hull into hundreds of parts to turn them into independent birth bays.
Liana Almeida presented the final performance of Finding Love and Worlds to an audience of 8 people.
She doesn’t comprehend what those people did, but she would like to have a line for her in that book.
Like that:
Dana tells the ultimate adoption story. (The best of all.)
A gust of wind shoves at her, bringing the rusty scent of iron, of things burnt and ancient. It penetrates even through the filters of her mask. She turns to face it, covering her eyes with a hand. It comes from the edges of the woods. She adjusts the mask on her face. (LAIR says she should use the mask when she’s outside because her immunological gene-tuned system doesn’t process the fine-grained titanium particles scattered through the air. (If she doesn’t interrupt it, LAIR may spend hours babbling about stuff she doesn’t understand. (Though she always writes most of it on her notebook.).).)
She squints at the fluttering trees. She never went past the Marriage Pod Garden.
“LAIR …” she whispers. “I’m deep into the woods. I won’t obey you because you left me alone in the playground.”
Nothing. The gap’s still on, far longer than any other time.
There are only three roads crossing the woods, all coming from the orphan home, and they all lead nowhere. But there are always ways.
She treads over stones and roots through the darkened, tight spaces amid the trees. The forest is denser here, branches entwined as if wanting to form a protection net. Metallic mounds riddled with rusty and broken pipes swell from the soil like warts. She goes around them, breath frazzled, eyes attentive.
A gleam pulses amid the trees in front of her. She gasps, a shiver running all through her back. Phantoms?
She should get back. If LAIR doesn’t want the kids to go this far, it’s because it’s no place for them. Her feet smash small dead critters. Grasshoppers, ants, worms … The enameled warts are everywhere at this point, crossing through roots and deforming trees, its pipes puncturing the soil like unruly flowers.
Another twinkle amidst the trees. Maybe LAIR is trying to protect her from phantasmagoric holographies. If she’s captured, there would be no adoption story to tell.
Yet, she goes on.
The soil gives place to polyfloor like in the orphan home’s vicinities. The woods become sparser until there are no more trees.
A vast field of polyfloor extends before her with dozens of hills, a few bigger than the woodlamps, and gleaming discs, panels, hatches, and structures larger and taller than the orphan home itself. And beyond that, only the scribbled sky. No phantoms. No path for spiders, magic cows, and resurrected antelopes to ride on.
“LAIR,” she calls it, shivering. “What is this place?”
But LAIR is silent.
She gives a step forward and sees herself in thin air. She raises a hand and touches … glass. It extends all the way up, almost invisible, yet she can see scratches, dents, and the subtle glints of the sky lines reflecting off its surface. They’re under a dome.
“LAIR, please, talk to me …”
LAIR never ignores. She can’t recall many moments LAIR has been away. Since her first memories of playing Catch the Raven alone in the playground, it’s been there. LAIR has taught all the kids how to do stuff, how things worked, what were parents, and that they didn’t have them. LAIR has taught them how to take care of themselves, where they could go and where they shouldn’t (never, ever deep into the woods). LAIR told them stories, lots of them. Of people building homes in distant places, of gods harnessing the energy of suns, of tiny critters that inhabited magical forests. And of how telling stories was the most important thing they could all do together. When they tripped over a stone and skinned their hands and knees, LAIR knocked on their heads and calmly ushered them to the white-lighted room where they should lie on a big bed and sleep for a while until the wounds on their knees morphed from red to pink.
Whenever they misbehaved, LAIR put them in empty bedrooms (full of screens with cryptic messages on the wall) to think about what they did.
But now … Now its gap is lasting … Now—
A knock on her head. She startles, heart beating fast.
“LAIR?”
“LAIR services are currently down. All processors dedicated to planetary probing.” It’s LAIR’s voice but detached, flat, with the same intonation it announces that dust filters are off for automatic maintenance.
When she’s down, she sits on her bed and stares blankly at the wall, thinking of stuff she doesn’t want to (like how she would never meet her fathers and how she might never have an adoption myth of her own). When that happens, LAIR knocks on her nape, chats with her, then she’s not down anymore.
So if LAIR’s down, she might need to do the same for it.
She scrambles back across the woods, trying to replicate the same way she’d come, leaping over warts, roots, and using the trees for support whenever her feet trip.
Dana arrives in the playground. A rumbling rings through the air. The polyfloor-grass vibrates underneath her. She knows it’s the High Thrust Ion Drive VII, but the sound was never this loud.
Inside the orphan home, the holographic Generation Error has shifted to Generation 77. The number is the same she has on her mask, one she has seen so many times on screens.
On a wall screen near the antelope, she reads something she has never read before. It gleams in annoying crimson.
Hull Garden – 50% (Degrading: air quality, dome, flora, fauna.)
She touches it, but nothing happens.
“LAIR …” she whispers. “Speak with me even if it’s to say you don’t want to speak with me.”
No answer but the grumbling of the orphan home’s basement, a giant belly roiling with hunger.
She leaves the orphan home. Wewe, Popo, and Lika are gathered around the dead ravens. The aviary’s door is open, and Lika caresses a raven in her hand.
When they see her, they quiet, all eyes on her. She pinches her lips, her cheeks blazing.
“We’ve seen you …” Lika scowls at her. “Fumbling with my fathers’ pod.”
“Not your fathers,” Wewe says, casting a shocked glare at Lika. “Mine.”
“My face does the funny thing there, so they are my fathers.” Lika puts the raven back on the apiary.
“Have you tried too?” Popo says. “I thought they were all my parents. I’ve tried my face on five pods.”
“Parents come in duos or singletons, right?” Lika grabs her embossed-letter notebook from her pocket. XIII Meeting on New Generations.
“There’s no rule for that,” Popo says. “There’s a book that says the girl who built the orphan home had four parents.”
“We’re all siblings,” Dana mutters. They all look at her. She dares to raise her voice, “Have you never noticed?”
It’s a thought that has crossed her mind a few times. Since their faces work on all pods, it makes even more sense. Though the idea of being sister to Popo is as of a bummer as eating dampened earth soup.
“And who would be our parents, smarty?” Popo laughs.
LAIR. The word quivers on her lips, but she says nothing.
Lika nods. “Parents are supposed to be with us when we need them.”
The wind picks up. Dana straightens the mask on her face. Yes, once LAIR told her that parents would never leave their kids in danger.
Dana runs to the playground and sits on the swing.
She opens her mouth, fiddling with the idea of calling their attention.
“Popo …” She hesitates.
LAIR is down. It needs her. And she needs it. They all need it.
“Push me.”
“What are you talking about?” He doesn’t move from where he is between Wewe and Lika, a few steps behind them. “You want me to hurt you?”
“Yes.”
“I won’t do it. LAIR would put me in a smelly bedroom.”
“LAIR isn’t here,” Dana says, pulling down her mask so Popo hears her clearly. “And you have the face of an antelope.”
Popo gives two steps forward, his hands in fists. He bites his lips, but Wewe and Lika grab him back.
“Actually,” Dana grins, “you have the face of a door. One of those you keep talking about. A giant metal door with an oily, grimy valve on the center that is your slimy nose.”
Popo roars, dodges Wewe and Lika, and runs toward her. He clutches the swing’s chains and shakes them.
She lets him do it until she falls forward, forcing her knees down. They skin.
A knock on her nape.
“Please, proceed to MedBay,” LAIR says, a dull and sluggish voice, but not the flat one from before.
“I have a story to tell, LAIR.” Her heartbeat ramps up. She feels she needs to struggle to keep LAIR with her. Wewe and Lika run and surround them. Popo stares at her with his usual gaping mouth. “I’ve gone to the edge of the forest. I’ve seen … things.”
“I’m aware,” LAIR says, its voice shifting to something more like the one she appreciates.
“Won’t you rebuke me?”
“I’ve come to say farewell.”
Her eyes immediately brim with tears. She doesn’t like that word. In the orphan home’s screens, logs, and books, that word often comes near the end of texts.
“Blergh, I know,” LAIR says. “I wish I could do something else.”
“Don’t sound so catastrophic.”
“I haven’t been doing the work I should. I’ve been dedicating too much of my thoughts to you.”
She sits again on the swing. Wewe and Lika gather around her. The others come from inside the orphan home. LAIR is speaking to all of them.
“I thought your work was to teach us things and listen to stories and tell us when we’re misbehaving.”
“That part was a deviation from my agreed position.”
“And what is your agreed position?” She curls her hands tight on the swing’s chains.
“Finding adoption for you before you’re grown-ups.”
“Can’t we just wait?” She wipes the tears from her eyelashes. Her fingers smell like rust. “Once you said adoption is all about waiting.”
“But not too much. You’re not plastiflowers.”
Dana’s sight blurs and she lets the tears slide down her cheeks. Wewe puts a hand over hers on the swing’s chain.
“Those lines you see in the sky are other gardens,” LAIR says, partly in his deadpan tone. “Other parts of my original hull—with other versions of me—and kids yet to be born when my mission is accomplished.”
“The people in the pods …” Dana bites her lips.
“The pods are broken. They weren’t supposed to. I wasn’t supposed to be talking to you. You weren’t supposed to be born yet.”
“But what can we do without you?”
She can’t imagine spending her days without LAIR to tell her what’s the soup of the day or to babble loads of words she doesn’t grasp.
LAIR doesn’t answer. Perhaps it doesn’t know all the answers after all.
“I’ll do one more thing before I leave,” it says.
“I’m afraid of being here without you,” Popo says. Everyone nods, even Dana.
“I’m afraid of outliving you,” LAIR says, voice garbled and bulky like when Dana speaks among tears.
The kids remain silent. The High Thrust Ion Drive VII hums along with the wind.
“What is it you said you would do before you leave?” Dana asks.
But the pressure on her nape lessens. It’s farewell.
The wind blows. The leaves ruffle their swooshing song across the playground. Below, the locked basement snarls, alive.
Today, the scribbled sky is different for the first time. Dots have appeared in nacre, blue, and plumpy ivory.
Dana sits on the swing. The kids gather around her, every single one of them sitting on the plastifloor-grass. Her lips are dry, her hands sweaty. She shivers. The wind gets sharper each day, and iron now impregnates the most secluded corners of the orphan home, but that’s not what makes the hair on her nape bristle.
She’s going to tell her adoption myth for the first time.
Dana pushes her feet onto the ground and sways. She opens her notebook. (She’s going to need a new one soon. All the pages are written on.)
“I’m going to tell you a story about gardens that fly fast and of how we were adopted.”
“An adoption myth should be about what’s gonna happen,” Popo says, his back against the antelope that snores with its eyes closed. “If we don’t have parents, how were we adopted?”
“Who says we weren’t?” Dana raises her head from the notebook.
Two ravens perch on the slide, their wings glinting a amber and pearly shine from the woodlamps. Other ravens and birds perch on the seesaws, and critters amble from the woods, including the silvery spider, owner of a web that is now far more impressive. They all gather around the kids.
“This story starts a long time ago, in chapter 76 …” Dana says.
