Her Nuclear Family

The trees were ripe with fruit. Green turned to red, deep and dark like blood. Each one nestled in leaves, wrapped around it protectively as though the branches knew that you might steal one, and were prepared to scratch. Luca gazed up, eyes squinting at the light that fell dappled between the shapes. She could practically taste them; she had done that once, against the better judgment of the elders. At first the fruit had been sweet, then a striking bitter that had lingered on her tongue for days.

There was more than just the fruit. All around, the world was fit to burst. Seeds and swellings and lumps, fractalised and almost grotesque. Even the animals seemed that way, the way the does at the centre of the packs walked with heavy steps, deliberate and dense. The rest of their bodies were wasting away, fur bare and joints creaking, all dedicated to the bringing of new life.

The locket jostled gently in its place at Luca’s waist. Over time, she had adapted the belts and bags, tried to secure her most treasured belongings with incremental changes. Instead, the locket had sat right in its place since the beginning of her family; it sat within its nook, worn from years of overwatch, as though it had been born there. Where seams failed and leather wore, it was carefully, meticulously even, replaced. Luca herself, in her younger years, had restored a few stitches herself, working from the last of the bobbin. In her weaker moments, she admonished herself for the slapdash nature of her work, the unevenness of her placement. But there was none left to try again, so it would have to do.

Within the locket lay the future. She knew it. She had been told it. Her mother had been told it. And her mother. Luca knew that with her family lay all families. Just as inside her genes, inside the very elements of her being, lay all animals, dormant, whispering. Just as the chain of mothers, creatures of great power, stretched back to the time immemorial. Unbroken, unyielding. Sometimes full of joy and sometimes full of sorrow; sometimes beasts and sometimes more than human. From breathless, to breathing, to breathless once more. From time to time she could feel it within her, the voices that echoed through the chambers of her heart, always beating, always speaking, always pushing and propelling her forward. Sometimes they spoke with the voice of her own mother, the way she remembered her: often gentle, but rarely frightening, like the clap of the storm, like the fall of the autumn leaves, like the children that weren’t.

Sheltered in its place, the locket rattled quietly as Luca shifted her stance. She panicked for a moment, then settled and checked its place. On one side, the engravings were worn; she could tell by the mirror images on the other side. Once, she suspected, it had been worn, metal against skin, though the chain was long lost. Beneath the soil someplace, no doubt. Buried, without intention. The shape also, she had been told about, not discovered for herself. It curved symmetrically, with a point to one end. She could fold her hands to mimic it, but it brought no meaning. She knew of nothing in the world that shared its shape; everything she knew was asymmetric.

Luca took it as a sign to move on. She left the trees, heavy with fruit that crowded for space, behind and continued on her route. She had traced this way many times. If asked, she could identify where the wind had blown away a leaf the day before. If asked. No one was there to ask. But she told them anyway. She had watched stumps rot over the years. She watched the bloom of mushrooms blossom and wither. She watched the streams wind and the stones tumble. She watched the metal fade, the bulbs break, the traces and symbols fade. Even if she didn’t understand the purpose to any of it, she mourned for each loss. For just a moment, at least. She was pragmatic, despite everything.

At the entrance, she paused, even as the door was wide open, waiting for her to enter. She felt the gentle gasp from within, the air sacred and vaulted, musky and compact. It rippled against her, cleansing her. Or her cleansing it. The chainlink of fences lay rusted under her feet, broken beneath the might of the grasses. She recalled the tales, of the years her ancestors had taken to clear this route. They told of mazes and vast metal spikes. They told of ceramics, smooth but for the strange markings wrote upon them, inviting. They told of honour and power locked within. How they had craved it, just as Luca craved it now.

She stepped into the dim interior. The walls stretched low with metal, secured and tightened, scattered with rust and with circuits, long dead. She recalled her mother bringing her here when she was young. The cradle, she had called it. For Luca, it was a concept only; she couldn’t remember her own cradle, naturally, and there was no one else’s to witness. Luca’s had been the last. When she outgrew it, it was dismantled into firewood for a particularly hard winter.

What a difference that image was, a fragile coffin of wood against this metallic wonder. For miles, it seemed to stretch. Its towers ran high, penetrating the clouds themselves. Who could not feel safe within its tender, taut embrace? As she walked, as she always did, Luca laid a hand upon the cool walls, absorbing the presence of the place. The door sealed behind her, with a stark grunt, but she did not feel threatened. She waited a moment, let her eyes adjust to the dark, and saw the secrets within reveal themselves. Lights, close to the floor, began to illuminate, just the barest scrapes of glow. Around them, she knew, were the handprints of her forebears, immortalised in dust and dirt. When she was younger, she’d pressed her own against them, marvelled how they could be so large, and her body so small. There were other images as well: rays, skulls and the forms of animals she had never seen. She had no names for them and she didn’t need names, as her mother had pulled her carefully away to venture deeper into the compound. All she needed was know that they were watching over her.

She trailed the lights that guided her. In some areas they were gone, broken or expired, whichever. But Luca knew the route. As she approached the central chamber, she clutched at the locket, taking it from its sacred home within its pouch. She held it tightly, but not too tightly. It was warm from the heat of her body, and she could feel each engraving beneath her fingertips. It seemed to tingle, as though in anticipation. She felt her bones reverberate with the same energy, a giddy excitement that she couldn’t contain. It seemed that the air surrounding her trembled as well, too slow and subterranean for her to fully perceive. She could feel the heaviness of it within her lungs as she inhaled deeply, trying to calm herself. Her breath caught like thorns.

The roof of the central chamber had collapsed years ago and the zenith of the midday sun bore down. Thankfully, none of the equipment had been crushed in the incident. She stepped closer, towards the console of the chamber. It was the heart, she had been told, not just of the machine, but of humanity. Of them all. Stop a moment and listen, and you might hear it, in tune and time with your own, and beyond, to everyone’s and everything’s. That thump thump thump. Never faltering, never fleeting, ticking as it had since before you were a speck within your mother’s womb. The same beat could be felt within the locket, if you concentrated hard enough. The two had been designed together, constructed together, adored together. They surely belonged as one piece, two halves of the same whole, the question and the answer so entwined that no one could tell which was which.

Today was the day. Her mother’s words, the echoes of her grandmother and her mother in turn, layering and layering like bricks upon the foundation, until the voices vanished entirely:

“Protect it above the lives of your children. When all seems lost, let life begin anew.”

She whispered the words like a mantra, holding the locket in her hands. She had never dared to open it. None of them had. When had been the last time Luca had gazed upon another face? Hers, in puddles and broken windows, was only ever fractured. How she longed for one that was whole, one to venerate and worship and critique and despise. Anything. Anything but her own voice, her own footsteps, the weight of the past upon her shoulders, and the future resonant in her hands.

Inside the locket lay the codes for all the children she could ever want. Broken down into numbers, into the simplest binary, tightly coiled, waiting to expand into life. Protein degraded, instructions disintegrated, but numbers were eternal. Luca couldn’t give seed, like the trees outside. They had more children than they would want, could ever care for. But she held in this locket multitudes. Now was the time. Luca knew it. Every cell in her being, invisible, there since the beginning, since the first one, then two, then four, then eight; each of them knew it. She wasn’t who she began as; she was more. She was the last. And soon, she would be the first. The first again. The origin. The mother of all. The LUCA.

It took several minutes for her to open the locket. It wasn’t difficult, that wasn’t the problem. She had to gain the courage. At last, Luca forced her fingers to work. How she had imagined what lay inside it over the years. Spores, or tiny humans, perhaps. A universe, shrunk to the size of a pinhead. Or nothing. All, she had dreamt about, woken in sweats about, in the tropical heat.

Within, was an artifact. She plucked it from its place securely within the locket. Metal, holes, lightweight. A content, she calculated. And every content had its vessel, that she knew. All she had to do was pour.

She stepped up to the altar. That was the only word for it. Upon its surface, the product of centuries of devotion lay. Effigies and gifts. Prayers hung in the air. Prayers for harvest. Prayers for meaning. And heaviest of all, the prayers for children. They stacked up upon each other, grinding the oldest into dust. And on the top came Luca’s, as she placed the content upon the altar.

For a moment, as the air hung heavy and nothing changed, she felt the spark of regret and panic upon her, but she calmed herself. Children took time, her mother had told her that. Three seasons, in fact.

She looked up at the symbols above the altar, the three segments that had guided her life. She gazed at them, black emblazoned on the faded yellow, pockmarked by time. She opened her arms wide and felt the embrace of the altar upon her and her cells, an energy that penetrated her down to her bones; an energy that had long since rotted the eggs within her ovaries; that replicated her cells, broke them down and built them anew, too many and too fast, with each passing day, as it had done every day since her birth, as it had the cells of her family and all families, unravelling the painstaking dictations of her ancestors and all their wisdoms; as it did the trees outside, with too many seeds to count.