By Rebecca Green

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Mars. It has a human space station on it. I, myself, am not human. But I’m working with them, the human scientists that are stationed here.

I walked into one of their buildings in the middle of the night. It was not a home, just a concrete floored and walled shelter for the scientists. The windows had glass with wire mesh embedded in them. 

I remember thinking the windows were significant, because it said a lot more about the mentality of the humans than it did about the environment on Mars. Who did they expect to throw a brick through their window? And how would they throw a brick in 38% gravity?  As I looked at this building, I realised they had brought their minds here, as they are on earth. Their mentality is the same as it is there.  They haven’t travelled anywhere. 

The scientists, two men, were lying in sleeping bags on the concrete floor.  As I came into the room, I woke them up.  One of them sat up, startled in his sleeping bag and looked at the doorway I was standing in.  His manner was defensive, jumpy. 

“Oh, it’s you” he said, then added, “I thought you were from Genetics”. 

Genetics was a department on the space station.  And I realised he’d said that because I was female. Because he’d seen a female figure silhouetted in the doorway.  

“Sometimes they let us . . .” he said, by way of explaining his comment, and then trailed off and I saw a sneer cross his face. It was not at me particularly, but it was definitely inclusive of me. It was at women, in general. 

“Let you do what?” I said.  As it simultaneously dawned on me. 

It seemed their genetics department was sending in some of our women to have sex with these men in an effort to cross breed two species, so that eventually a human could have sufficient characteristics to survive the environment of Mars. 

That was their intention, the human colonisation of Mars. It was not an amalgamation, a dialogue, a quest, or a conversation. It was a colonisation. Their intention was to use the body of another to produce something they wanted; the ability to survive in low temperatures, a skeleton that doesn’t degrade in 38% gravity like theirs does. 

And the manner in which they were going about this . . . the fact that women were being sent in ‘under the cover of night’ in this clandestine way said it all, really.  Along with that sneer.  And the statement ‘they let us’.  Like open season had been declared on the women. It seemed that they were already being considered as property of this project and not as their own selves anymore and I wondered if they, the women, really knew what was going on in these ‘relationships’.  Because we don’t think like that here.  I suspected that they may be starting to realise it.  And that it hurt.  We were learning something.  And it wasn’t very nice.

I looked into him, the man in the sleeping bag, and I saw a bear, then a shark. Wide mouthed creatures, mouths open wide and blank, black eyes – and I saw the helplessness of the creature and its basic innocence, just trying to feed. I saw where he’d come from, this man, and why he was the way he was. 

But this approach towards us women, the lack of respect, the derision and the using – there was no innocence in that. I realised that the humans here on Mars are going to make the same mistake that they make on their own planet. They are going to conceive their children in lust and not love. They are bringing their illnesses here, to another planet.  Mine. 

“They still don’t understand creation”, I thought. 

“Sometimes they let us . . .”, he said.

I looked at him.

“Who?  Who ‘lets’ you?”, I asked.

He meant the directors of the project.  His bosses. I knew that.  But I wanted him to say it. To say it out loud so that his own brain could hear his words and the implications of them, for him.  For his own self.  Not for us, we were already realising it.

Humans overestimate their technology.  They create new material forms but when it’s only powered by the very references that created it, it’s not advancement. When we arrived on Earth there was no war, as they would have been so outclassed.  We simply spoke to them, and told them we were amalgamating.

We don’t use biology to accomplish something like this. We don’t weaponise conception. Nor even death.

While they were busy firing bullets at each other, as they have done for centuries, we took them.  And they didn’t even know it.

I would like them to remember what they were before we came here. It doesn’t matter if they think they have done this themselves, achieved this leap, or if they work out that they had help – but it’s good that they see what they chose to say no to.  And that they didn’t really choose, that is their next chapter.

The paradox of realising the absence of free will. It was our gift to them.  Given by virtue of the most precious of things, in my world as well as theirs; time.  A bit more time.  5000 years more than they would have had, had it not been for us.  

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Earth 1

To amalgamate, I must become human then the human surrenders to me. I have walked this out as a being on my own planet, but never as a human. I am a general in my own world, so I was posted in war zones across this earth and over several lifetimes. 

I knocked on the door of the training facility.  It was a utilitarian building, like a warehouse, made of new bricks and metal in the middle of a desert. The door opened and an Alsatian attack dog sprang out, but its rage and will to kill dissipated in the air it leapt through, and it disappeared. 

A man showed me into the building. 

“Wow” he said, looking at me with genuine admiration and respect “what did we do to deserve you?”

Inside the building, I could feel hatred in the air – thick, like a body and crackly, like static.  Like a storm you could get sucked into. I pushed it to one side. 

There were shelves lining the walls. High shelves. Out of reach shelves. Fifteen to twenty feet up.  All the equipment on them was neatly placed, clean and well maintained. 

The man saw me looking at the shelves. 

“Oh, it’s just a hobby of mine”, I said casually, “I used to do it a lot.  I was pretty good”.

All true.

I felt myself wanting to brag but I stopped. I wasn’t there to do that. I was there to learn. 

The man opened a door onto a shooting range. Fifty feet away, in front of us, there was a familiar humanoid body shape drawn on a target board, with bullseyes on the head and chest.

I practised for a while.

The range began to fill up.  It was interesting to watch the people. How someone handles a gun says a lot about them.  There were all kinds of people there, men and women from different backgrounds and of different ages and nationalities. 

It was a kind of ‘army’. I think I realised that when I saw them all.  I wondered how many there were in total, all over the world. 

I noticed they didn’t seem aware of each other.  That they were asleep. Unaware. They were going through the motions of loading and firing the guns but they weren’t really conscious of what they were doing.  Some of them were very good. They were good shots. But they were asleep. 

They weren’t choosing to fire the gun. They were loading it and firing it but they weren’t choosing to fire the gun. I was. For that reason they were more dangerous than me, not less.

We were being trained.

To wake up. 

You, yourself, are what makes a gun what it is

Nothing else.

No buts, no excuses, it’s your hand that’s holding it. Nobody else’s. 

Time to grow up.

No blaming.

No more history.

Memory isn’t an excuse.

It’s over

War is over.

We were being trained.

To fire one good shot.

One thought

One wish

One word

One smile

One ‘no’

One ‘yes’

One bow.

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Earth 2

I am becoming more and more human. An ordinary girl. It’s 1941 and I am a traveller. 

It was dark and I was packing stuff up. Trying to get out of danger. I was used to it, packing up and moving on, that was my life but I always hated having to do it at night when it’s dark and you can’t see. Folding tents and tarpaulins.

I saw and heard two fighter jets go overhead. They were flying very low. It was a loud noise. It was dark and the planes roared overhead at speed.

“This is it”, I thought to myself, “we’re in a war. It’s happened.” 

Then my perception changed. I was on a ride, a Ferris wheel. The light had changed. There was daylight, or some kind of light. It was fun. There was still a war going on, I could hear the planes overhead, but they had moved down my list of priorities. My priority was now the joy that my life had brought me, and my gratefulness for that. And I realised I could die. I didn’t mind. I could live. Or I could die. I was ready for either. Because life or death wasn’t the question anymore. To love or not was the question.  And I’d answered it. 

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Earth 3

Going from lifetime to lifetime, I found myself lying underneath a man who seemed very conflicted about this idea. To love or not.  And I could see he was trying to do the right thing. But he was dangerous because he was highly confused inside and the confusion was rattling him at a speed that was agitating him emotionally and mentally, and he couldn’t handle himself in it.  He pressed himself against me to make sure that I knew my place and glared at me hotly. 

Yet the glare coming out of his eyes, full of fear and anger and confusion also told me that he wanted to do the right thing. It’s just that . . . no one does that. Not in his world. This man was a politician. This man was the President of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump. 

Donald Trump is an open goal.  For thugs and gangsters for sure.  But also for something else. For something like me.

Later we were at a barbecue and I was eating a burger that he’d cooked, and he walked behind me and pulled out one of the grill trays from the brick outdoor oven, bawled at one of the house staff for the state it was in, and then scrubbed the steel rack with a hard wire brush until it was clean, looking at me to see if it impressed me. It did. He did a good job of it. He’s a simple man.  He went off into the house.

I looked at his people and they looked at me.  Their alarm at my presence on his arm was obvious. 

“Isn’t he good”, I said to them, with my mouth full, and munched my burger.

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Sun

I had a stream of thoughts about surrendering. It was quite specific but going too fast for me to catch it, to make it into a memory. 

And then I found myself in the shadow between two buildings.  They were typical military buildings; single-storey, flat-roofed and constructed of concrete blocks.  Like the buildings that the army used during the cold war, at Balnakeil in Durness. 

I was in a cold shadow in between these two buildings.  Whichever way the sun moved, or rather this earth moved around it, there would be no sun in this place. It was always in shadow. 

They were of the mind, these structures. Created by thought. Intelligent, therefore, of course. But there was no life in them.  And they cast a shadow between them that no sun could get to. 

I sank down onto one knee, exhausted.

“I’ve spent too long in the shadows”, I thought.  And I realised that those buildings could not be moved, though I’d been trying.  They are highly intelligent and immensely stupid at the same time.  And they are totally unconscious of themselves, that they even exist. 

If I had been down on both knees, I doubt I would have ever got up again, the gravitational pull of that space between those buildings, in that shadow, was immense.  It is massively intelligent and an ordinary person is no match for it.  No human mind could ever be any match for it.  It’s too old. 

And – it’s not mine. It’s not my war. It’s got nothing to do with me.  But I suspect I’ve had a hand in constructing those buildings.  They’re in my world.  They’re inside me, somewhere.  And I am the architect of that.  But I don’t know what I did.  So I can’t undo it.

Yet, I had engineered it. But ignorantly. I don’t know what I am.  You can say, ‘human’, but that’s not it, that’s just a label.  We have no idea what we are.

Then I realised. We are engineers. 

From my position between those buildings, in that shadow, I raised my head and looked up at what was taking place in front of me.

A river of creatures were running straight into the sun. Birds, mammals; big ones, little ones, ones with fur, with wings, with hooves.  Ground hogs, flyers, gallopers, all sorts.  I remember the birds and the white horses the best.  And they were all running directly into the sun.  With no thought.  An impulse driving them. They were not conscious of it, what it was, this impulse.  But they had no doubt.  And without doubt, you can’t even say it was brave.

They had no thought at all.  Yet – it was intelligent, what they were doing.

I was faced with a choice – whether to join them. I think it’s a matter of time only, that I do.

I couldn’t see the sun itself.  Just the light it emitted, that the creatures were running into. It was hitting them on their faces, brows, chests and shoulders. 

I couldn’t see the source of it. But I knew it was the sun.

It was a living sun. 

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