Arrivals mirror awakenings--that sudden surfacing from the depths of dream to the necessity of conscious action. Mornings had always filled Andri with acute anxiety, a sensation of being caught, kept, doomed to a single timeline. There was no going back. He couldn't fight the feeling that his waking hours were in fact more predetermined than those he spent sleeping.

          Midway to arrival, the shuttle slowed at the algae farms, giving Andri time to take in the bright beds of plants, gleaming beneath their coats of water: ochre, cerulean, crimson, and a green nearly fluorescent to the human eye. At the border of the black forest, the shuttle gained speed, and the captain closed and sealed the windows. The air beneath the canopy of the forest was toxified by microscopic fungal spores gathered in stagnant clouds under the heavy boughs or, worse, became airborne and traveled. Staring out the window through the tissue of his reflection, Andri tried to master the future, the coming arrival. He tried to lift the weight of everything one expected and anticipated in the day to come, a speculative moment that often seemed as real as the events themselves.

          He hadn't seen his friend Semenov in how many years? He remembered an ill-tempered man whose obsession with the unmeasurable elements of science had drawn him further into himself and away from the loss of his wife and daughter. Andri was familiar with the way grief could shipwreck a mind. Semenov was trying to solve a puzzle without a solution, and his colleagues had abandoned him long ago. He was largely discredited as a researcher. Wasn't he? Andri wiped the moisture of his breath from the window. On second thought, had he confused Semenov with another friend from his time at the university? He wasn't sure he hadn't mixed up names and faces.

          He couldn't escape it: his present speculation would inform his future, and in that way the past bequeathed the future with all its richness and yearning.

          Andri began to feel doubled, bifurcated, as he always did when he sank too low into his thoughts and memory: one Andri seated, one floating somewhere above, abstracted. A marsh unfurled outside his window, a gray green scroll laid flat by the progress of the shuttle. Some creature briefly churned the waters of a black pool. Breeding, preying, resource guarding: they were taught the lexicon of biology to reduce their subjects to something simpler, the spare vocabulary of survival. Loving, hunting, playing, Andri thought, and why not? Let them share in the language of sentiment.

          Andri grounded himself using his implant. One, two, three--he breathed, getting out of his head, coached and encouraged by the whisper in his mind. It still required effort. Technology could not, it seemed, supersede consciousness. Not yet.

          The shuttle sighed to a stop, silent and easy in its river of air.

          Andri checked the time, the coordinates. They had not arrived. He felt a small pain in his abdomen.

          The intercom crackled. "Is there a mycologist on board?"

          Andri hesitated, too surprised to act. This never happened. They called for a doctor, perhaps, or a systems analyst, but a mycologist?

          "Clearance D, or above? A mycologist?"

          Andri held down the intercom button and said, the message heard only by those who needed to hear it, "Station C here. Cabin 2b." He had never felt so important before. He wasn't sure he liked the feeling.

          Andri opened the door of his cabin, ready to hail the shuttle engineer. He was a big man bowed outwards at the stomach, his giant belly the focal point of his whole figure. His face was fat, ruddy, strained.

          "Station C?" he said, taking Andri's ID in his hand. Andri had never liked the photograph, so similar to a mugshot, and he liked it less now that someone was inspecting it. He didn't really like looking at himself at all. He was suspicious of mirrors, or what he saw in them.

          "Do you mind, uh, coming with me for a minute? We might have a problem."

          "A problem?"

          "This way. Please. And bring your diagnostic kit if you have one."

          "That's not really what it is, but all right." Grabbing his bag, Andri read the chief engineer's name, M. Pomarico, from the breast of his uniform and followed him to the junction between two segments of the shuttle. Modeled on antique trains, the shuttle was constructed so as to be interchangeable and could be lengthened or shortened depending on the purpose of its trip. Andri noticed the deterioration immediately. The surface of the ceiling and part of the wall had been eaten away, revealing a dull yellow material beneath.

          "I don't really need to test it to tell you what you've got here," Andri said, but he did anyway. He unpacked a small black chassis, an older model, but his favorite, much to the chagrin of his mentor.

          "A polymerphage?" Pomarico asked. Andri thought he seemed nervous, odd for the chief engineer of a shuttle expedition. The underarms of his uniform were dark with sweat.

          Andri swabbed a sample from the ceiling, enclosed the white wand in a gauzy film, and inserted it into the unit's dilated window. The petals closed. He stood back and watched the engineer pick at the edge of his thumb.

          "You don't have carry fungicide?" Andri asked.

          "We do." Pomarico looked embarrassed. "We used it already."

          "What do you mean?"

          "Near the beginning of the trip. We thought we had stage two malignant bryozoans."

          "You should know that's not possible. They went extinct here a long time ago. As far as we know." The engineer looked away from Andri's gaze. The diagnostic unit chirped. "Just as I thought. As you thought. It's going to keep eating."

          Andri removed the sample and placed it in a specimen capsule, sealed with a piece of bright orange antibacterial & antiviral tape. Pomarico looked over his shoulder. "Orange for destructive or hazardous species," Andri said.

          "What's red for?"

          "Parasitic species, mind controllers. Green for innocuous. Blue for the unknown. It's a little more complicated than that, but." Andri shut the case and began packing the unit away. "How did it get inside?"

          "I don't know."

          "This is an old model, isn't it?"

          "Old model?"

          "The shuttle." Andri was losing his patience, thinking already of the delay and the waiting. His arrival would be delayed, his expectation prolonged. "They should have changed them all out by now." He knew they had, or had tried, but for reasons currently under investigation, the original species of polymerphages evolved rapidly. The government couldn't keep up. Some days at his research station, Andri felt that the pace of all life on Earth was accelerating at a rate that would soon eclipse the progress of scientific investigation. They would need a new system. His mentor thought he was being unduly paranoid.

          "You'll have to shut down here. It's too dangerous to keep going," Andri said. He wondered if Pomarico had the authority. "That's my recommendation," he added.

          Pomarico made a radio call to the captain. It would be three hours before another shuttle could arrive to carry the passengers the remainder of the journey. "I'm sorry," Pomarico said.

          "It'll have to do." Andri caught Pomarico before he could leave. "Hey. This might be crossing a line, but I feel it's my duty. I suggest you get examined. I'm sorry."

          "You mean-?"

          "Yeah, maybe a neurocleansing. Just to be safe."

          The engineer put a hand to the back of his head. His left eyelid began to twitch.

#

          Andri picnicked on the ice of a frozen marsh. Two others sat with him on the clown covered blanket he had kept for too long as a child, an attachment he hadn't given up until twelve. Though he couldn't see the faces of his two companions, he sense they were older than him, his parents perhaps, or future lovers. They reached toward the small red picnic basket, smiling, and the ice cracked. Andri's teeth fell out. He was naked and falling through the ice into the green muck beneath. The muck seethed with strange, nearly microscopic animals that began to eat his skin...

          He awakened on the elevator. Perhaps the thought of descending, the illusion of motion, had lulled him to sleep. He couldn't remember falling asleep. He shook the dream away and noticed that his body took up two seats: he had gained weight recently, unusual for him. Perhaps he would see a doctor when he returned to New Egypt. With a start he noticed another man in the elevator. He was hunched, drawn, involved with his computer. He held a stylus in his left hand.

          "What are you here for?" Andri asked, but the man didn't respond. "I'm here to see Professor Semenov."

          "Better hope he's not on vacation."

          That struck Andri as an odd comment, especially from a stranger, but he tried to let it go. "When was this place built?"

          "2036."

          "It's pretty old, then."

          "Not really. Wait until you hit a hundred. Then you'll begin to understand."

          The man said it as if he himself had already reached a hundred, but there was no way. He looked forty, maybe fifty. Andri was about to lean over and get a better look at his face when the elevator stopped, and the door lifted on a dark corridor ahead.

This part of the facility had lost power. Yellowing deposits of minerals or lichens hung from gaps in the ceiling. The other man quickly packed his computer away and walked down a corridor to the left, a badge on his chest projecting a cone of harsh blue light.

"What the hell?" Andri felt lost, unexpectedly out of his element.

He heard a shuffling of feet, and then a light blinded him. "There." The man had returned. He was invisible in the flare of his light. "To your left. Check the directory."

The light diminished as the man turned his back. Andri's implant helped his eyes readjust to the darkness, and he saw the reflection of a dull red light blinking somewhere out of sight. Six passages led away from the foyer where he stood. He could just barely make out the silhouette of a few plush chairs with attached consoles, an empty vending station, and the directory, a tall stele whose normally glowing words had gone dark. He read it by the light of his implant, a tiny beam in the gloom.

The Oviductal Crypts, .7 miles.

#

          The billion seeds of the human species were gathered in ovoid vessels of milky light, each sperm cell resting in a thread of the pearly rope that hung suspended and protected inside each pod. The incubators were invisible behind the cold gleaming surfaces of the cabinets that contained them. A central computer accepted codes of entry to the directory of human men that harkened back generations upon generations.

          Andri was alone in the dark of the crypt, surnames A through D. The chamber was immense, cavernous, and Andri began to wonder how far beneath the surface of Earth he had traveled. He had dreamed on the journey down, after all. How long does a dream last?

          "Activate," Andri told the darkness. "Visitor for Professor Semenov. Initiate welcome? Request for a tour. Hello?"

          Finally, a blue light appeared at the far end of the crypt and grew larger as the warden approached the entrance.

          It looked like an antique astronaut, but in place of its helmet of dark mirrored glass was a terrarium of miniature plants entangled in a single floral network. Andri was still amazed after all the years since their creation, amazed now to be encountering one in the, well, flesh wasn't quite the word. But how astounding was it that these creatures could think with only plants? He supposed the plants were technically enslaved by the hands that had planted them, but they were given all they needed and probably had a better existence than they would have in the wild. Besides, they were given the chance to become part of a larger network--the abstract realm of all human thought.

          "We noticed it first in the reptiles," the warden said, speaking Andri's language with ease, distinguishable from human speech only by the merest suggestion of digitization. The voice was distinctly female. "They began changing sex in the egg. Those born with male chromosomes changed into fully functioning females. Fully viable, and in fact they often seemed to be better at it than traditional females."

          The warden turned around and placed a hand on a cabinet containing the sperm samples of the first men according to the alphabet. Moisture gleamed on the leaves of its mind, and the warden continued its programmed spiel.

          "These sex-changing reptiles were one of many responses to the altered climate of the Anthropocene. It also occurred in other oviparous species: amphibian, birds, fish. The male chromosome eventually died out completely, and only species that could discover parthenogenesis survived. Not everyone agreed this couldn’t also happen to humans. It was a time of uncertainty and-"

          Andri knew the history; he cut the warden off before she could continue. She. How quickly the pronoun slipped into place, given to this nearly autonomous globe of ferns, mosses, liverworts, epiphytes, and the woody stems they grew on. Maybe the assemblage was completely autonomous. Why not offer a preliminary test? The most advanced artificial intelligence still refused moral questions. “Do you blame humans for the last extinction event?”

A drop of dew winked in the blue glow of the nightlight attached to the top of the globe that was her head, and she paused. Could it be said that it was thinking? To think was to create ideas out of units of meaning. Words, numbers, images--any sustained and consistent symbol would do. What did the wardens use--packets of light?--and why were there symbols at all? That was a thought Andri had never been able to put to rest: why was a thought not simply the thing itself? Why did expression exist at all?

"I don't know," she said finally. “Coal was burned because it left nothing physical behind, but even at its advent they wondered if they might not be poisoning the air. Beavers destroy their environments. Some bacteria. The late pallbearer beetle. A difficult question. I do not know.”

Andri nodded absently, distracted, suddenly bored of the warden. A fairly stock answer, he thought, made more credible when framed by doubt. He placed his luggage on a black padded stool and called the computer awake. He thought the warden might stop him, but it only stood over his shoulder, its globe shedding pale light on his fingers. "Am I in here? Or don't you know?"

          "I am a warden. I have been here for 255 years. You might not appreciate the answer to your question, but I know it."

          The records were all hidden behind a password. This wasn't a public terminal.

          "At one point it became too expensive for individuals to reproduce," the warden said. It sounded recorded again, as if it had returned to the script of the public tour. "Raising children became financially impossible for most of the population, all but the wealthiest 10%. Governments eventually tried automating the process, with little support or success.

          "And thus, in 2047, the Oviductal Crypts project began-"

          "You said 2047?"

          "Yes."

          Andri felt lately as if he had inherited someone else's memory. He was far beneath the Earth's crust, a strange place to suddenly remember the sad summers he had spent

wandering the countryside, green and white with wildflowers. Music came back to him, wavering voices distorted by insect song. They sang in the depths of the blue sky. He never found what he was looking for.

          But he had never known such seasons. It would have been impossible. The world had changed.

          "Hello?" The warden was gone. Had it entered the password before it left? Andri scrolled through names, social security numbers, and dates of donation, alphabetical by surname. Every man who had been born since, what, 2047? Or, he supposed, only those who had produced viable sperm cells. Voluntary or not. How they managed, he could only guess. He had no memory of his sperm being harvested, but that didn't mean much in this day and age.

          He left the computer and wandered the dark aisles, his steps calling lights along the floor into action. Some were broken and his shadow, cast from many directions, made him feel dizzy. He felt suddenly unreal, and the cabinets towered over him and then he over them. It reminded him of a story his maternal great-grandmother had told him about the Little People, or was it the Hidden People? Long ago, the government of her homeland had tried to build a road whose projected path happened to cross one of their holy sites, and no matter how many times the project was begun, calamity struck the construction crew each time. Machines broke down. Workers were killed in unlikely accidents. A flood carried their supplies away.

          Andri looked at the cabinets that extended into the darkness all around. Behind the anonymous closed panels of those cabinets, cells waited for their moment, units of meaning waiting to be added to Earth's thoughts of evolution.

          One by one, Andri opened them all, exposing the sperm to the air.

#

          Andri longed to return to the comfort of his seaside weather station to continue his work of monitoring the airborne fungi that had begun to alter the humidity of New Egypt's northern coast. They, too, had been evolving unusually fast.

          When he heard a footstep in the corridor behind him, Andri realized he had been jogging back to the elevator. The hallway was lit only by a thin red line of emergency lights on the ceiling. He wondered if he had taken a wrong turn, and he was very conscious of the fact that he could vanish in the long night of the facility and no one would ever find him, or his body.

          "Sir," a voice called. "Sir, you dropped this."

          Andri stopped, catching his breath. Only a warden. He chuckled at himself. The expansive emptiness of the facility had spooked him. The darkness was getting to him. He turned to meet the warden, and a tiny fern brushed the inside of its glass head. Andri didn't remember that from before: was this a different warden, or did their minds grow new connections that quickly?

          "You dropped this." The warden held out a specimen capsule, but it was broken in two.

          "Thank you." Andri quickly pocketed it.

          "You stayed for a long time."

          "Oh." Andri wiped the sweat from his brow. "Well, you know. There's always work to be done. Time's running out." He looked down the corridor distractedly. The worst thing about being old, he thought, was to be conscious of the fact that your best days were over. "Tell Professor Semenov I'm sorry to have missed him."

          "Professor Semenov hasn't been down this deep in six years. He told you to expect him?"

          "Yes. I think so. Why would he have called me out here otherwise?"

          The warden paused. Thinking. "Your work, I assume."

          Andri removed the broken capsule from his pocket and held it to his nose. "Thank you. Goodbye." He walked away from the Oviductal Crypts, toward the elevator, fingering the small strip of red tape that held the capsule's lid tight.

          It wasn't until he was already on the return shuttle that Andri realized he didn't have a friend named Semenov.

by Robin Wyatt Dunn, with Craiyon                           

Kyle E Miller can usually be found wandering Michigan's forests, turning over logs looking for life. He currently teaches first year writing at Eastern Michigan University. His writing has appeared in Clarkesworld, ergot, and Lightspeed. You can find more at www.kyle-e-miller.com.