Sassafras Moon

The crowd outside the gates had grown into a throng of anxious scabs. They stood knee-deep in red mud in the shadows of Serafina’s fiefdom on the hill, hoping for food or clean water, praying for a chance at a better life. Two red flags above the gates meant Serafina would allow entrance to two new citizens from the ranks of cave-dwelling scavengers outside.

Lara fidgeted with the hem of her shirt. She tugged a thread from the ragged burlap and wound it into a ball. It was a nervous habit that left her with a bare midriff, exposing her scabs.

As the sun set, the mob gazed up at the old water tower that stood in the town center where Serafina flaunted her abundant electricity. Each night, she bathed the water tower tank in bright yellow light, the same color as the leaves on the sassafras trees that grew in her compound. In this way she broadcasted her superiority over the scabs outside her wall and inspired her acolytes within it.

Some said Serafina was smart. Others claimed she had just been lucky. Either way, she controlled the power supply module that fell from the sky--the magic that kept her realm cool in the summer and warm in the winter. It kept the town lit up and humming with music and banter, water purifiers pumping daily. Meanwhile, the scabs outside dabbed their chemical burns with a salve made from volcanic mud.

As she always did, Serafina made the scabs wait, as the noxious fog rolled into the valley and the mud turned cold, before opening the gate. Lara held her breath and crossed her fingers as a platoon of gatekeepers, automatons pieced together from a hodgepodge of salvaged tech, glided through the entrance. They flanked two members of the elite guard who stepped into the open.

By Lara’s estimation, there were two hundred of her kind lining up to face scrutiny. The scabs held out their index fingers as instructed, while the guards walked the line, testing the finger flesh with a pinprick from one of their instruments. If selected, Serafina’s elite guard placed a hand on the head of the lucky scab who would face further consideration.

Lara gasped when she felt the hand on her head. She took two steps forward.

A man holding a bag full of belongings also stepped forward.

“If selected, one personal item is allowed.” The guard nudged the man’s bag. “One. Not two. Not three of your contaminated possessions.” His voice trailed away as he snaked along the line of hopeful scabs. “And, weapons, or anything that can be used as a weapon is NOT a personal item.”

Of the selected ten scabs, the guards sent four back to the line, examining the looks of those that remained in the running. The guard asked Lara to turn around. “How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

He nodded toward the gate.

“Simon, over here.” Lara motioned to her friend down the line.

Simon slogged his way through crowd and mud until he reached Lara.

“I can’t believe it. I made it! I’m actually going in. Do you have it?”

Simon took a step behind Lara to stay out of view. “You’re only gonna get one shot at this. Are you sure you can do it?”

Lara looked up to the water tower, round and lit up with yellow light. It reminded her of her dad, who used to tell her that, the same way the moon reflected the sun, babies born during a full moon grew up to reflect the beauty in the world. That made Lara a moon child just like her mom.

Lara’s dad had worked as a photographer, not someone of interest to Serafina like Lara’s mom who had been a plasma physicist and world-renowned innovator in quantum computing. When she refused to go to work for Serafina in her compound, without her family, the guards shot Lara’s dad in the head.

“Right in front of me.” Lara’s eyes narrowed as she clinched her fist, recalling the day. “When they turned the gun on me, my mother agreed to bow to Serafina. I was seven. So yes, Simon, I can do this.”

Simon turned Lara to face him. “No, I mean can you do this?”

Lara unraveled another stitch from her ragged shirt. “I don’t know.”

“You better be sure.” He held out his hand.

Lara reached behind her neck and released a necklace, her only possession, a gold-linked chain with two intertwined golden maple leaves as a clasp. A red, heart-shaped locket with gold hinges dangled from it.

The Honor Guard captain, recognizable by his blue and red insignia, stepped from the ranks. The crowd stirred, chattering with speculation. “Take these two.” He nodded at Lara and another girl about her age. “Take two extras just in case.”

Simon took the necklace from Lara and laid it out on his hand. Within the locket, a tiny photograph of the moon on one side and a lunar map on the other, both too small to make out any details. He slipped a glove on his hand and fished a tiny white rock from his pocket, holding it up between his thumb and forefinger.

“Is that it?”

“Yes. This is something called sodium cyanide. It will do the trick.” He placed it into the locket, under the photograph, and closed the heart.

Ten years ago, as Lara watched her dad photograph the orange glow of a harvest moon, before her eyes, the moon exploded into chunks, two of which would later strike the earth. The Sea of Tranquility displaced the Atlantic Ocean all the way to Kentucky. The other, a quarter of the moon’s mass, struck Asia along the Ring of Fire.

A mysterious celestial object the size of Ceres had pummeled the moon, but not an asteroid they soon learned. When alien metal parts and pieces and strange debris rained from the sky it turned out to be a mishap. A navigational mistake or a suicide mission, the earth’s first encounter with extraterrestrials left no trace of their technology, except what secrets Serafina guarded inside her compound.

“Remember, that is lethal poison, don’t touch it. Get it into anything Serafina eats or drinks, and we’ll be done with her for good. It’s the only way.” Simon hugged Lara. “Good luck. We are all counting on you.”

Lara followed the two guards toward the gates as the rag-tag robots closed ranks around her. She imagined what finally seeing Serafina would be like, whether she could control her rage and not choke the life out of her on the spot.

Inside the compound, a self-sustaining biodome, was everything Lara had imagined. Glistening pools, fruit trees, crops, a bandstand, fresh food. People came and went along the street wearing fitted clothing. They laughed at jokes, played dice on the stoops. The citizens under Serafina’s care bore no scars or scabs, no burns. They stepped lively with purpose.

Lara followed the guards until they stopped at an elevator.

Serafina’s minions had killed Lara’s father and stolen her mother, who was rumored to have died two years later. But surviving the earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, chemical spills, nuclear meltdowns, fires, floods, nuclear winter, and all the other calamities that ensured after the moon fell to earth had been hard with her family. Fending for herself in that inhospitable hell turned out to be even harder alone.

“So, when will I get to meet Serafina?” Lara had imagined her as a spoiled, privileged woman with a pouty lip. One faction of scabs had long speculated that Serafina had long blonde hair and a youthful radiance. Others imagined her as decrepit, cruel old woman with warts.

The elevator drop took Lara’s breath away. A rapid decent deep beneath the gleeful compound under the water tower. The doors opened to a cavernous room where Lara saw a beautiful young woman suspended in blue water with cables running from her neck. The squid-like tentacles reached from the blue pool to a cube made of the blackest metal and, despite its right angles from one vantage point, it resembled an ellipsoid and then a sphere as they walked to a door on the other side of the room.

“This is Serafina.” The guard swept his hand across his chest. “All of this is Serafina. An A.I. The Only survivor of the alien ship that took out the moon. But it requires a symbiosis. A connection with living intelligence of its choosing. And it chose her.” He pointed to the girl in the pool

“Serafina knows exactly what we have to do keep humanity alive and thriving. Exact Numbers. Supplies. Sustainability. Citizens selected for DNA diversity. So, we do what she says.” The other guard said.

Lara clutched the heart-shaped locket that contained the cyanide, the one hope for her people to escape the wasteland. She wondered if the floating girl ate or drank and if the cyanide would work if she threw it into the pool.

“Now, time to go.”

A stabbing pain shot into Lara’s neck.

When Lara awoke, she had no idea how long she had slept. The bright white room stung her eyes. The air smelled of disinfectant. Restraints held fast her arms and legs. She pulled and squirmed but could not move. A bottle at her bedside dripped into a tube that led to her arm. Machines beeped beside it.

“Hey. I’m stuck here.” Lara yelled. “I can’t move.”

From another room a voice said, “She’s awake.”

“I’ll take care of it,” another voice responded. “Finally, we found a good match. A-positive blood type. Lungs good. Heart strong.”

“Okay. Get her prepped for harvest. We don’t have much time.”

Lara pulled at her restraints. “What do you mean? Please, help me!”

A woman wearing a lab coat pushed a cart full of surgical equipment into the room. “Shh. There, there. Everything will be fine in a moment.” The woman prepared a solution from a vial.

“What’s happening. Am I sick?”

“What’s happening is, you are contributing to the salvation of the human race. We need you. You’re the only match we have found for Serafina, who needs a heart lung transplant immediately. If she dies, we all die.”

“That’s not true. I’ve lived out there alone. Since I was a kid. We can all work together. Help each other.”

“No. No. That’s not the way. Only Serafina knows how humans can survive.”

“I don’t want to die. Let me live here. I can do anything. Clean, cook, do jobs no one else wants to do.”

“There’s no more time.”

“Please. Please. No.”

The woman fitted the catheter into the I.V. drip.

“Please. One last request. Please.”

“What?”

“Just undo this arm.” Lara wiggled her left hand. “I want to hold my locket one more time.”

The woman pursed her lips and looked over her shoulder to make sure no one else was watching. She unlatched Lara’s left arm then leaned out the door for another check to make sure they were alone.

Lara kissed the locket and thought of the last time she saw here dad, with a bullet hole in his head. And her mother was in a state of duress. She and her family, all the scabs, were expendables. They had no value other than what Serafina’s chosen few could steal from them.

She opened the heart locket and realized that she had died the day the moon died, no longer reflecting the beauty in the world but resenting its ugliness. Things would change. People would have to come together now. But she wouldn’t get to see it.

She popped the white rock into her mouth and bit down. The bitter taste of her people’s last hope relied on the poison in her little red heart reaching her big one before the knife did.