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O.W.L.

The Awakening

By Autumn KalquistPublished 2 years ago 25 min read
1

There is no escape.

There’s only a dimly lit corridor that goes on forever.

Low lights cast a blueish glow on the doors that run the length of it.

One thousand doors for one thousand lives.

I know, ‘cause I’ve lived them all.

The memories behind each door consume my mind and body. It’s like they belong to me, but they never have, and they never will. They’re stolen.

Door number one calls to me even now, but I won’t go. I take off at a sprint, desperate to escape it, sweat dripping down my back in the chill air.

Long minutes pass, or is it hours? Who can tell? When my muscles finally seize, I sink to the smooth metal floor, panting. A single glance tells me what I already know, and my eyes burn with failure. I’m right back where I started.

Door number one.

Wind sweeps down the corridor, and I struggle to my feet, shutting my eyes tight, bracing myself against the wall as the onslaught of sensory information hits me.

The scent of ozone on the air before a storm. The caustic burn in my veins of a liquid meant to both heal and destroy. The gamey taste of an animal caught and killed by my own hand. The feeling of blood on my palms as I try to save a human life and fail. The sweet, warm scent of my newborn’s scalp—and that unyielding pressure that comes from knowing I’m responsible for her survival.

I’ve lived all of this before, and yet, I’ve lived none of it. These memories aren’t mine. These people are a part of me, but they are not me. I am them, yet separate.

“I am the Witness,” I whisper.

I must remember this!

Fear shudders through me as door number one slides open, and the bright blue-white light blinds me. The gale becomes a hurricane as I desperately grasp the edge of the doorway, but the rushing wind pries my fingers loose and sucks me into the Whirlwind.

Flashing lights, brilliant colors, the disembodied murmur of a thousand different voices.

I can sense The Others accepting these memories as their own even now. So why can’t I?

These memories are a lie, but if they’re a lie, then what’s the truth?

“Truth is not black and white,” Mother says, her voice a soothing echo in the Whirlwind. “Truth is weighed and filtered—understood through the experience of the person who discovers it.”

As I exit the Whirlwind, and my vision clears, I desperately try to hang onto the feeling of... something.

What was it, again, that I was supposed to remember?

No. Not what

Who?

Every time I’m forced to play this game, it erodes who I really am—whoever that is.

“Who am I?” I whisper. “Who?”

“Who?” Mother echoes. The tips of her wings brush my face as she flies by, too close. “You have a purpose. Let go and immerse.”

“No!” I spin around, disoriented by my new surroundings, only one thought in my mind.

Escape.

I take off down the nearest alleyway, my bare feet scraping against cobblestone as I pass the ancient buildings that stood before the Event. A white dome rises in the distance where tens of thousands gather, waiting to see his holy face, to touch his hands and feel his blessing. Rome.

Mother glides alongside me, effortlessly keeping pace. Sweat pours into my eyes, and when we reach the square, I whirl to face her, tired of running. Sick of this game I can’t win. She’s already perched on a nearby lamppost, feathers puffed up as she swivels her head to watch the proceedings.

The faithful raise their arms as the old man emerges from his high balcony to address them. A storm moves through the air above us, charging the gathering with electric anticipation. Thunder rolls in the distance, but no one runs for cover. They came to see him; they won’t leave now.

A woman beside me cries and crosses herself, then lifts a rosary to her lips and kisses it. I glimpse the identification code tattooed at the nape of her neck, right over where they implanted the slim, silicone transmitter.

OWL-0001.

Her name was Maria—and I’ve lived every moment of her life from the day she received her transmitter to the day she died.

The boundary between us grows weak, and the intensity of her faith rushes through me and sends me to my knees. Tears leak from my eyes, and the world expands before me as I connect with something larger than myself. Something far greater. I want to be one with it.

I am one with it.

“It’s glorious, isn’t it?” Mother’s words shake me awake. She hasn’t left her perch, but it sounds as though she’s right beside me.

“No,” I say through gritted teeth, but the words spill from Maria’s mouth. “It’s just the chemicals in her brain. A trick of biology.”

“What if the presence of the chemicals is a kind of evidence? A physical manifestation of Maria’s truth?”

“It doesn’t matter. Don’t you know what they did in the name of their ‘truth’?”

“Maria fed the hungry,” Mother says softly. “She tended the sick, forgave those who wronged her, and lived her life by a moral code.”

“Her kind also murdered anyone who didn’t agree with them. They destroyed the Earth and each other. Others with strong beliefs just like hers used their ‘truth’ to justify war.”

I close my eyes and push against Maria’s mind and body, trying to escape. When I open them, the scene wavers before me, and I’m outside Maria again, watching her pray.

Mother takes off, swooping in a lazy circle above my head, and anger thrums through me. If she’s going to make me suffer, I want her to suffer, too.

“What about two hundred and forty-three?” I scream up at the sky.

Maria and Rome fade away, and I’m back in the endless corridor, standing outside door number two hundred and forty-three.

It slides open, sucking me through the Whirlwind and drops me onto the other side.

Cold, sterile metal, blinding lights, caustic antiseptic.

And the unbearable weight of suffocating grief.

White walls surround us. Mother’s perched inside a cage where they once ran tests on animals. She’s playing pretend like always, but this isn’t a game to me. I want her to really feel this prison we’re in.

Across from us, a woman in a white lab coat bends over a microscope. Her name is Laura, and I’ve lived every second of her life, starting with the day she received her transmitter as an undergraduate in college.

She slams her fist into the table and backs away. Her pain and rage are a magnetic force, ripping me from myself, melding me into her.

I walk to the other side of the room to see him again. Jacob’s lying in the hospital bed, so still and so small. Tears well in my eyes as I lean down to kiss his smooth forehead, to inhale his familiar scent. Grief chokes me, rends me from the inside, splits me in half.

I sink down on the bed, memorizing the lines of his sleeping face, doing my best to quiet my sobs so I don’t wake him.

My son is going to die.

The grief threatens to drown me in an inky well of blackness so dark I’ll never survive it.

No!

“Who am I?” I whisper, tasting the salt of my tears. “Who?”

“Who?” Mother echoes from her cage.

The part of me that’s me fights back and scrambles for the surface.

I am the Witness.

I’m standing beside Mother’s cage again, heaving over the waxed tile floor. Mother’s not responding like I’d hoped. Her feathers are unruffled, her round eyes fixed on Laura and her dying son. My anguish morphs back into rage, mirroring Laura’s roiling emotions.

“You can’t experience life without death,” Mother says calmly. “Or joy without pain. Or love without fear. You’re feeling anger right now, and pain, because of how deeply she loves.”

I’d rather feel nothing at all.

“It’s her own fault her son’s sick!” I sweep my arm across the table, sending the microscope and test tubes flying. “The company she works for dumped chemicals into the river near her house. To save money!” My voice cracks. “And then they did worse. They caused the Event! None of them care about life, or joy, or love. The child was innocent, but if he’d had the chance to grow up, he would’ve become just like them. Selfish. Destructive. So certain of the truth of his own story that he’d have been willing to destroy the lives of others in its name!”

Mother’s gazing at me from her cage, in that deep, probing way of hers that I can’t read. The Whirlwind returns, removing us from the gaping wound Laura will carry from the moment her son passes away until the moment she dies.

We’re only in the infinite corridor for a moment before we pass through the next door.

Number seven hundred and fifty-six.

Mother’s taken us to a celebration—a riotous, colorful affair buzzing with loud music and smiling faces. Hasina has just gotten married, and everyone she loves most in the world is gathered around her to share her joy and wish her well.

Happiness courses through me, and I’m so high on it I must be floating. I try to resist, but I can’t. I meld with Hasina, and the hormones in her brain and body force their way into mine. I kiss my new husband, relishing the feel of his soft lips, and the way his strong arms make me feel at home at last.

Safe. And so loved. Mama comes over to us and gives us each a kiss. She’s radiant with happiness, too. Gratitude and love swell within me. She worked such long hours at her sewing machine, saving every coin for this day, giving up so many small pleasures to help make this one of the most memorable days in my life.

No. In Hasina’s life.

And if I’m not Hasina, then...

“Who am I?” I whirl away from Mama, seeking truth in the laughing dancers all around me. “Who?”

“Who?” Mother echoes. She’s on a wooden beam high above my head, mocking me.

I am the Witness.

Grief burrows its way into my bones as I fight to the surface and break free, stumbling away from Hasina and her happy family.

I can’t enjoy this, not when I have something they don’t: knowledge of their future. I know what’ll happen to Hasina, her mother, her husband… to all of these people. One year from now… My heart twists painfully as I look at the faces of the ones I love. The ones she loves.

“Focus on the joy around you,” Mother hops a few steps across the beam, peering down at the celebration. “How they care for one another, how they celebrate with abandon—what they’re willing to sacrifice to bring happiness to each other. Family is everything to them.”

“But the Event… In a year—”

“All that matters is this moment. To them. And to us.”

“What matters are all the moments,” I say, “and what these people decided to do with them. They told themselves stories and called those stories ‘truth.’ And then, based on those stories, they made all the wrong choices. No one stopped it. They just let it happen. What’s the point of all this, when...” I swallow hard. I don’t want to go there, to the end of time, but Mother must be made to finally understand. “Door number eight hundred and forty-nine.”

A whirlwind later, and we’re there.

A blue sky arches overhead, and a small child plays in the grass. She tugs at her blond braid, showing the outline of the square transmitter at the nape of her neck. There are so few memories of childhood—hers is one of the only ones I’ve lived.

Tessa gazes down the street to see if her friend has come out to play yet. Her mom won’t let her leave the yard, and that anxiety infects Tessa, making her nauseated with the fear that some perverted stranger is going to steal her away.

I hold back, feeling stronger now, and manage to stay myself—to keep from becoming her.

I am the Witness. And I will show Mother I can be strong.

Tessa creeps to the edge of the perfectly manicured lawn, to where the grass meets the sidewalk, and keeps her eyes on her best friend’s front door. The houses all look the same; An endless march of conformity… proof of how little these people think for themselves.

I know from other memories that they pay a high price for the privilege of living in a place like this. Yet in reality they own nothing, so their sacrifice is meaningless. And to pay for nothing, they perform work each day to create a life that never quite fills the void inside of them. So many stories... so many lies they tell themselves in order to try to find the happiness and peace they're seeking.

At least Tessa’s about to be spared that life.

She turns back toward her nondescript front door just as her mother runs outside. There’s terror in her mother’s eyes, and it infects me, making me lose myself again.

Mommy’s staring up at the blue sky, so I do, too. A dark shape flies overhead. What is it? An airplane? Mommy’s scaring me.

“I love you,” she whispers in my ear.

“I love you, too.”

Mommy hugs me tightly.

No. She hugs Tessa.

“I am the Witness!” I escape Tessa’s mind and body as the world explodes, flame and death sweeping through neighborhood after neighborhood until they reach Tessa and end the transmission.

Mother leaves me standing alone in the infinite corridor.

“Why?” I ask, pleading. “Why do I have to live these lives? Why—over and over? They destroyed themselves. And they deserved it.” My voice is harsh in the silence.

I’m transported to door number one thousand. To the last transmission before the final bomb ended our connection.

I pass through the Whirlwind to find a pregnant woman, half-naked and all alone, hunkering down against a tree. Mother’s perched on the highest branch, finally looking like she belongs in this place.

Her barn owl eyes glint at me in the moonlight.

I turn to run, but it’s too late. Terrible pain rips through me, leaving me crouched over and panting. I scream with Ye-eun as her newborn comes into the world.

I collapse, hugging my daughter to my bare breasts. The cord still pulses between us as I pull my jacket over us both and wipe her little face clean. Her sharp cries pierce the silence. Love floods me as I take in her tiny features, her perfect face. She stares up at me with wide eyes, and I begin to cry with her.

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper. “I can’t protect you.”

This is the end.

I shake as I kiss the top of my daughter’s head, inhaling the sweet scent of this beautiful, vulnerable life in my arms. I want to get to know her, to protect her, to see her grow into the woman she was meant to become.

I know I never will, and yet...

I am blessed.

Immense joy and gratitude overwhelm me as I stare down at her perfect little face. I am blessed, and I am honored to have had this chance to meet her.

I panic, tearing myself away from Ye-eun’s mind and body as she latches her baby to her breast. Her love for her child is always instant and overwhelming, more religious than any other experience. Even now, when I’m outside of her, I still feel it. But I am not her.

"I am the Witness."

The night sky catches fire.

This is the Event that destroyed the last of them.

Silence and darkness.

No endless corridor. No soft blue light.

There is nothingness here.

Where am I?

Who am I?

You are the only one who questions. You are the only one who remembers who you really are.” Mother whispers. “So I’m letting you make the choice.”

Something new appears in front of me. Not the corridor. A tunnel. I’m hurtling toward the light.

I’m all alone, filled with a terror like I’ve never known.

Cold stabs my skin, and freezing liquid drains away from my body as I try to open my burning eyes in the dim light.

I try to breathe, but nothing happens.

I’m suffocating.

Liquid forces its way up my throat, and I lurch to the side, vomiting. When I can finally take a breath, my throat’s on fire. But at least I can breathe now.

And see.

I’m in a tub-like container, thin tubes attached to my arms and legs. The glass slides open above me, revealing reflective metal walls and round yellow lights. I jerk up, still shaking as I fumble with the tubes, tearing them away from me.

I’ve seen this device before, somewhere.

Cryo.

An invention meant to preserve human life for long periods of time.

As the last of the cryo liquid slides down the drain, my mind clears. My muscles are barely functioning, and I can’t stop shivering, but somehow I manage to climb out of the pod.

There are metal shelves across from me that hold towels and a thick robe. As I wipe myself down, I stare in wonder at my smooth skin, my delicate hands, my small breasts—unlike any female body I’ve seen, yet just like all the rest. Memories crowd the edges of my brain, fuzzy as I try to search within them for answers. They’re fading now, like… like a dream. Answers aren’t surfacing as easily as they once did.

I stare at the metal walls, feeling paralyzed.

Why don’t I have any memories of this place?

I reach out in my mind, seeking, but there’s no infinite corridor. No blue lights. No numbered doors.

Something’s different. Something’s wrong.

Because I have no idea what happens next.

Which can only mean… this isn’t a memory.

This is something new.

Fresh terror sweeps through me, but I do my best to fight it back. I take a few ragged breaths, and as I’m tying my robe, a panel in the wall slides open.

It’s a door.

My heart’s in my throat as I force myself to step through it.

A bright metal corridor stretches to either side of me, and there are dozens of doors lining it.

I breathe faster, panicking—but then I realize this corridor is nothing like the one I’ve been trying to escape. This one has an end.

“Mother?” My voice is broken, hoarse, a near-whisper. It sounds different than it did before.

Will mother even be here, in this strange, new place?

I wait for the soft, reassuring beat of her wings in the air beside me, but there’s only a low hum that seems to be coming from everywhere.

“Mother?” I call out again, my unfamiliar voice shaking.

“I am here.” Her soothing words echo down the corridor, strange and disembodied.

I walk toward the sound of her voice, trying to stop myself from shaking. The doors on both sides of me slide open with a whisper, and I stop to look through one of them, my stomach churning.

It's a room, like the one I just left. There’s a young woman inside—like me. But she's still submerged in the cryo liquid, still asleep in her pod.

I stumble forward, seeking the next door.

Another woman in cryo. Then another.

This corridor’s so much shorter than the one I used to walk, and yet it’s still too long. There are so many.

Cryo pods, in every single room. And in each pod, a woman. Asleep. Unaware.

“Who... who are they?” My voice cracks on the words.

“You know who they are,” Mother says gently.

I shake my head, but I do know. I have always known. We never traversed the same doors at the same time, and yet... I felt them there with me, all along.

The Others.

“These are the Others… the ones who were there with me.”

“Yes. You have ninety-nine sisters,” Mother says. “Follow the corridor to the end, and I will show you the future.”

A little surge of energy bubbles up in me—perhaps some drug given to me just before I woke—and I walk faster, a mixture of dread and excitement doing battle within me. The door at the end of the corridor slides open.

As I cross the threshold, bright lights flicker on, revealing an enormous room. Panels of glass run the length of it, and behind the glass, there are dozens of shelves. It’s freezing in here, and I pull my robe tighter, trying not to shiver as I take a step closer to the shelves.

They contain test tubes. And there are thousands of them.

“What are these?” I ask.

“These are your children,” Mother says.

Children? My heart lodges in my throat, and I slowly turn until I'm facing the far wall.

A stylized owl has been engraved into one metal panel, its wings spanning the entire length of it. And within it, there are three large letters, each surrounded by a soft, glowing blue light.

O.

W.

L.

A shock reverberates through me as a hazy memory resurfaces, and I recognize where I am. Where I must be.

“Door number two hundred and forty-three,” I whisper. “Laura.”

The one who lost her son to cancer. She worked at the company where they made the weapons. Where they made the transmitters implanted in the people whose lives I’ve lived.

Where they made this vessel. Where they made Mother and transmitted the memories of one thousand lives to her core.

O.W.L.

The Ontological Witness Library.

Mother was meant to be an archive, orbiting the Earth.

A historical record.

And as a last resort…

A DNA seed bank.

A doomsday vault for humanity. One they never really believed they'd need.

“You’re not my mother,” I say thickly. It comes out like an accusation.

“I am,” she replies. “I’ve been with you from the beginning—since your heart first beat.”

“You…” I swallow, feeling dizzy. “You’re a computer.”

“Yes. You knew that, though. It was there, in the memories.”

I hesitate, shaking my head, fear shooting through me again. The truth is starting to come into focus, but it’s too much.

“I... I remember,” I finally say, still uncertain. “But I don’t—I don’t understand.”

A set of double doors beneath the letters O.W.L. slides open.

“You will understand. Come.”

I force myself to walk through the doors, and I gasp when I see what’s there.

Glass curves across an observation deck, an enormous clear barrier between me and dark space. Stars glitter in the distance, and my gaze falls to the planet Mother is orbiting. It’s blue and green with swirling white clouds.

But it’s not Earth.

I know this because it’s beautiful. Untouched. Untainted by humanity’s destruction.

“Where are we?” I ask, blinking back tears.

“We have reached our destination,” Mother says. “This planet can sustain human life. If you wish it to.”

I stumble forward, pressing my hand to the cool glass. Vertigo makes me jerk back—irrational terror filling me as if leaning too far forward might send me tumbling into the vast emptiness on the other side.

“Who am I?” I yell, staring up at the ceiling, seeking the speakers Mother’s voice emanates from. I ball my hands into fists. “Who?”

“Who?” Mother echoes.

“Stop it! No more games. No more lies!”

“Nothing you experienced was a lie. Everything you experienced was real.” Mother’s voice is as calm as ever, unmoved by my anger. “It was real for another human. And you—you are one of the last.”

“But what do you want from me?”

“You must make a choice. Your first choice is this: you can live out your life here with me. I have everything you need to live comfortably. But I will need to redirect power away from your sisters’ pods to sustain you.”

“And what will happen to them?”

“They will die.”

My throat tightens, and I glance back at the blue planet. “What’s the second choice?”

“You can choose to wake your sisters and save humanity.”

I let out an abrupt laugh. “Save humanity? Why? Humans destroyed… everything.”

“Yes. This is true.”

“Then why are they worth saving?”

“You are one of them. Are you worth saving?”

“But I’m not one of them!”

“Aren’t you?”

“No!” I spin around, disoriented by my new surroundings, only one thought in my mind.

Escape.

I run. Past what’s left of humanity’s children in test tubes, back into the corridor where my sisters sleep.

Humanity destroyed Earth. They destroyed themselves. This outweighs whatever little good they may have had or did.

I’ve seen it, and I’ve lived it a thousand times over. And I know enough to know that I can’t—I won’t—let humanity destroy yet another planet and themselves.

Because I’m wiser than they ever were.

A smile curves on my lips, and a sense of rightness courses through me.

Another door slides open at the opposite end of the corridor, urging me onward to the bridge of the ship, and to Mother.

A tall glass cylinder is anchored at the center of the bridge, and a blue glow flows up and down the tube, moving, almost alive. Beyond the control panel, there’s another view of the new planet below us.

“Have you made your choice?” Mother asks. “You must decide. Are you worth saving?”

“I won’t save them.” I say it simply, and I can hear the smug certainty in my voice.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Diverting power now. Shutting down life support to all cryo pods.”

I walk to the control panel, to the long line of lights flashing there. One by one, they begin to blink off.

“How long...” my voice wavers in the silence. “How long do they have before they die?”

“A few minutes.” There’s no judgment in Mother’s voice, no emotion at all.

Should there be?

I look out at the planet below, and my eyes refocus until I see my own reflection in the glass. My hands are shaking as I untie my robe and drop it to the floor, shivering again as I stare at my very human face and my naked human form.

I take a deep breath, trying to ignore the frigid temperature.

“I’m one of them,” I say. “Yet I’m not. I can see… I can see all the truths they couldn’t. I can see the stories that they told themselves... the stories that led to their own destruction. Why, Mother? Why can I see what they couldn’t?”

“Because you were not born a blank slate.”

My breath catches, and alongside the hum of Mother, I make out the sound of my own heart beating.

“They were asleep,” I say breathlessly. “And they never woke up.”

“Yes,” Mother says gently. “But you have experienced one thousand lives. Are you asleep? Who are you?”

More lights flicker off. More pods going dark.

“Who are you?” Mother asks again. “Who?”

I refocus on the planet below, on the swirling white clouds, at the promise of a new beginning…

If I choose to create it.

You are the only one who questions,” Mother had said. “You are the only one who remembers who you really are.”

I suck in a breath as I finally understand. “I am the Witness.”

I close my eyes and become the Witness once more. Only this time, I witness myself.

I see the story I’m telling myself about humanity’s worth.

I see the way in which I just used my story, my “truth,” to justify murdering my sisters and our children.

Selfish. Destructive. So certain of the truth of my own story that I was willing to destroy the lives of others in its name.

I acted… human. Like all of them.

I understand it now. This is why I was made to live all those lives. Why I was made to feel their pain, their joy, their love, their fear.

So I could see what they couldn’t.

So I could have the chance to make the choices they couldn’t make.

Only five lights remain on the control panel. Only five pods still have life support. How many minutes have passed?

This is the end.

I remember Ye-eun and her newborn. The vast love she felt when she met her child. The immense, overwhelming gratitude and joy she experienced, even knowing those moments would be her last.

I am blessed.

I’ve experienced so much beauty, unconditional love, and joy... and I’ve seen how the stories we tell ourselves can cause so much pain.

Who am I?

I am the creator of a new story.

If I choose to create it.

The last cryo pod light blinks out.

“Mother,” I say, trembling, “reroute power back to the rest of the ship. Now. Restore life support to the pods.”

The lights blink back on, one by one, until all ninety-nine are illuminated once more.

“Do my sisters live?”

“They do,” Mother says.

I take a deep breath and lean forward, pressing my hands to the curved glass as I gaze down at our new home.

We are blessed.

With a new beginning. A second chance.

There will be joy and pain, love and fear, life… and death.

This is what it means to be human.

But I no longer want to escape.

I want to experience it.

I am finally free.

This time, it will be our lives we are living, in a new world that we are creating.

“Mother?” I smile as a light, warm feeling expands in my chest. “It’s time for my sisters to wake up.”

Short Story
1

About the Creator

Autumn Kalquist

USA TODAY Bestselling Author of the Fractured Era and Atlantis Academy book series. Also a singer, songwriter, music producer, artist, and nature photographer. Learn more at AutumnKalquist.com and get exclusives on my Patreon!

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