Treasure of the Golden Locket

The golden locket lay covered in rubble, a few links of chain betrayed its place within all shattered things at the Institute of The Genetic Norm, buried under the palace grounds. An earthworm with two heads and vestigial feet curled about the locket's coolness, licking and biting with oddly human teeth seeking sustenance within swirled carvings on the heart shaped locket's surface. The locket was closed, tossed with the flick of a wrist blown apart in a blast to end all blasts. Truly, it had been held in a fierce grip as if she knew the coming of the final surprise, and the shape of the curve of the woman's cheek was burned onto the locket's golden body. Inside the locket, a sealed compartment lay beneath a watch used to note time instead of events beckoning to the abyss.

The earthworm deposited a gob of waste onto grime coating the word love on the golden surface. The waste smeared two names carved there: Emilio Huant, the dictator who ruled the pretend democracy enamoured with human perfection, like his. His name was entwined with Sophia Vertina, a woman with forest green fur, perfect limbs, and a face genetically rendered for pure beauty. Raised to believe in insatiable needs, the two amassed fortunes of art, gems, men, women, empty homes, and enough money to feed all the starving, who had still starved.

Indeed, Sofia clutched the locket in her perfect hand as she watched Emilio, his engineered blue fur spiked in rage and excitement, tap a code to open a case with pressure pads inside, and all who demanded change would be destroyed in a strike that could only happen once, and who better than Emilio Huant, to send that perfect strike?

The strained gaze of followers with furs as bright as any bird's, watched hypersonic missiles launch towards distant shores. They scattered, feeling dread, or thrill, for the coming gains. Duties related to endings hurried their steps along lushly carpeted corridors. Within a few ticks of the clocks in the impregnable structure, and with a sudden inhalation of the hot intensity of any sun, they all ceased to dread, or thrill, or covet. The enemy had found them with weapons more powerful than Huant's spies ever discovered.

Oddly shielded from the raging inferno by Sofia's hand covered in a pink metal glove everyone who was anyone wore that season, the locket fell into a crack in the marble floor that appeared as Sophia's beauty had cooked away to her silent scream. The locket lay interred until the earthworm pushed it to the surface.

An orange fly, created from a mouse, landed on the golden chain. The fly rubbed its barbed forefeet together searching for any flavour, rot preferred, and slurped up the worm's waste. It sensed the bones of Sofia's hand reaching upwards in her grave, and knew the world outside turned under ice accumulating during the never ending winter. Snow falling through the cracked, graphene ceiling, glistened on chunks of obsidian, and the fly drank. A twisted spaghetti of broken steel bled red icicles to the ground around the locket. Starved rooted things struggled upwards. The silence was so pure the sound of the fly rubbing feathery legs over its swivelling head, swished like wind through leaves of trees that would never exist again. The fly took sudden flight on four wings that punctured the stillness with a whir like a tiny band saw carving meat and bone. A rope fell through the crack in the ceiling, and a woman named Ether, dressed in a suit that covered her copper fur, with a pack on her back, and instruments strapped to hip and breast, rappelled down to a broken block of golden marble; once the chest of a statue of Emilio Huant.

“Clear,” Ether said when she'd touched.

“Check,” AI answered, her soft voice transmitting from a drone outside.

Ether's face was serene behind a shield of living crystal that drank moisture from her breath and returned it to her through fur genetically engineered to keep her warm, dry, and protected from radiation. She had an intense beauty. Her eyes were round and golden, with nictating membranes. Her chest was broad and deep to breath air thinned by fusion blasts and a lack of vegetation, and her nostrils could close, keeping water out; useful when she dove for food at her home. She lived in a marine research station beneath the sea in a fjord with thousand foot cliffs, where she'd been shielded from the holocaust for three hundred years.

Ether was the eighth clone the station's AI had made from DNA that Cecilia, the station's lone occupant, had hysterically gathered from a comb left by her lover, Ether, who'd tenderly left the station the day before the end of the world. AI's discovery of the living nature of memories led to the cloning and transfer of those to each new Ether, who was the same, and old in knowing. Her life expectancy was twenty-seven years. Her eggs lost potency from too much radiation, and her life shortened with each iteration of herself. She was twenty-three, and the last human being.

Ether inspected the Institute, then returned to her rope. “It's a ruin, and empty,” she said.

“I suggest you return home,” AI replied.

Ether hooked her foot into a loop of rope, thought a command, and began to rise. She looked down, saddened, for this was her sixty-third trip to the blasted cities looking for human cells with their precious DNA free from radiation. The search had been fruitless.

Attracted by Ether's smell, the orange furred fly buzzed upwards. It could bite through her tough suit, so Ether hit it with a sound. It spun down to land on its back and buzz weakly beside the golden locket's chain. Ether stopped rising.

Home in her underwater retreat, Ether carefully worked on the ancient locket until, with a hiss, it popped open. “Hermetically sealed,” Ether said.

“Good,” AI responded. AI appeared as a holograph of a young woman with peach fur, dressed in tan pants and a white blouse. Around her long neck she wore a gold chain, with a cipher signifying she was AI.

The locket's watch was stopped at 1:29:39, a moment as final as any. Ether lifted the watch and pried on the lid below, to open it, and gasp. “Hair!” she cried, “AI, we have hair.”

“Human?”

“It has to be!” Ether said.

“Indeed. Are there roots?”

“These kinds of lockets meant complete love,” Ether murmured, “The whole hair was used, and...” and then she cried, “Yes!”

Ether placed root cells from each hair into a genome sequencer. It coughed out codes for a male, then a female and Ether shed tears that glittered silver, and she found hope. AI and Ether created an embryo. It failed. The root cell supply dwindled and Ether's eggs were weak, yet, one year later, a baby girl cried. After Ether had given birth, she cried too, no longer the last human being.

AI coaxed Sophia's root cell to unspecialize, become a stem cell, then an egg. They took the nucleus, put it in Ether's egg, implanted that into Ether, and eight months later, a boy was born from two mothers. No solution emerged to the life shortening problem. They stopped cloning while they sought an answer.

The boy was fourteen, had blue fur, strong shoulders, and a fine face. He sat at a holograph and perused files about the destroyed civilization, flipping to a picture, that vanished. “AI,” the boy said, “Why have you removed that picture?”

AI's holograph appeared facing the boy. “I'm sorry Aldin,” she said, “It's restricted.”

“That's crazy,” Aldin replied. “What could be restricted? Release the image. AI?” But AI had vanished.

Aldin sought out his sister in her studio, whose walls boasted her beautiful paintings. She'd carved marble into people set in quiet poses, placed them on rose quartz tables, and bedecked them with jewellery made of gold and gems foraged from the cities. The two clones were long and lithe, mature through education, and took to their studies with enthusiasm, knowing study was the only way forward. “Honey,” Aldin said, “AI isn't responding.”

Honey looked at Aldin with golden eyes like Ether's. Her hair was long, brown, and densely curled, her fur short, forest green, and rippled as she straightened from the holo where she was tweaking an extinct dog's genetic structure. The dog's probable results floated before her in 3D, and her heart ached for it. “AI, are you offline?” Honey asked.

“No Honey.”

“Why aren't you responding to Aldin?”

“Ether will explain,” AI said, as Ether, a new one, and twelve years old, walked into Honey's studio.

“We have to talk,” Ether said to the two, who stood smiling, their arms linked. Ether waved her hand, and a picture formed of the dictator, Emilio Huant. “This is the picture.”

“It's Aldin,” Honey said, “But older, and different. I don't know...that one's...like my stone statues, cold.”

“Who was he?” Aldin asked.

“The source of your clone material.”

“You said you didn't know who my material came from,” Aldin said.

“I knew.”

“Why didn't you tell us?”

“Do you have a picture of mine?” Honey interrupted.

“Yes,” and Ether waved up a portrait of Sophia Vertina.

Honey clapped her hands. “She's beautiful,” she said.

“As are you,” Ether replied.

“Who were they?” Aldin asked.

Ether explained.

The children's fur turned grey. They fell to the worn carpet.

“Not me, it can't be,” Aldin howled, “I'd rather die, than be him!”

“Everyone in the whole world...gone!” Honey's face was taut with horror. And they cried.

Ether served the two a beverage tasting of lemons and honey, with tiny packets of particles that repaired minds and bodies damaged by ravaged psyches. She put soft music on, and tucked the two to bed. That night Aldin crept to Honey's room, saying nothing. They held each other tight as they dreamed their first nightmares, and made their first love.

Ether sighed as she looked at the locket: dented, framed in velvet, and hung on a crystal wall in the living area. She turned to Aldin. “You are not he,” Ether explained, “For each individual within the universe is unique. Nor are you, she,” Ether told Honey.

“And yet,” Aldin said as his hands twisted in each other, “I feel his needs and want them for myself, but no! I want them for you, Ether, and you, Honey. What do I do?”

“We'll find a way,” Honey said, as she held his hand.

Ether looked at them closely. “Are you two...in love?”

Honey blushed and Aldin smiled.

Eight months later a tiny baby was born to Honey and Aldin. AI was immensely pleased with herself and her particles that had worked so well on the children's reproductive systems, and the baby was fertile too. There was celebration.

AI and Ether kept working. They removed recessives genes, enhanced mutations, clipped and trimmed groups, and a year later, Honey gave birth to fraternal twin girls. AI and Ether were relentless as they mutated, culled, and enhanced, and the gene pool grew. Over the years, with many tears for those who could not survive, a small population emerged, and diverged, in the undersea world.

Knowing the past's destructive beliefs, children were taught responsibility for their lives, to share and cooperate even in competition, to learn to use their minds to dream, observe, listen, speak, explore their interests, and value the least, and the most.

The tenth Ether was twenty-two, very old, yet at peace and smiling. The life shortening problem had been solved, though too late for her. AI, Honey, Aldin, their children, and their clones, gathered around Ether's bed.

“It seems, quite by accident, the dictator's will is done,” AI said to Ether.

“It was the fly,” Ether whispered in wonder, as she gazed at all of humanity, and slipped away.