770. Hope and despair, 6
(Temee)
The city has no walls, but the guard posts are numerous and organised. They watch over the surrounding lands but don’t control the coming and going of the many people circulating. They are too many people.
The crowds impress me. I’m seeing hundreds of people and I disappear among them.
Railroads carrying vehicles and goods are set all across the city.
I regularly notice the presence of armed guards sharing the same uniform. They are the police force of the city. We don’t really speak of military forces outside historical and past contexts.
I wander around the city that is buzzing with activity and people making you dizzy.
A soft rain passes by but worries no one. This region appears particularly safe and confident.
Near the river passing through the city, I find the hospital campus. Four main buildings dominate this neighbourhood. The library and its medicine school makes wall with the city. Its wide doors remain open to all.
Behind and with a park, the tower of the hospital is illuminated like a lighthouse. It’s also the government seat of power.
Behind there, the most modern building with unlikely architecture, rough and raw, it’s the dungeon. The medical wing that occasionally studies monsters or contaminated things in security.
Bound to the previous two by junctions and bridges, the factories of slaughterhouse and butchery of the city. They are in the back and above the lower end of the river, but the bridges are visible.
The waters leaving the city below there are loaded with waste and strange smells.
Mountains of calcined bones are growing a little further, near the southern exit of the city.
The landscape is surreal to my eyes.
But since most doors are open to anyone and the guards are relaxed, I enter the temples to learn more.
~
The hospital doors open like magic as I approach.
The air inside is more neutral. I breath better.
There’s no overload of work for medical teams currently, and many of the doctors and apprentices are doing other things in town. Some old people discussing together notice me looking around and come to chat.
- You look young. You want to become medical doctor as well?
T - Hm... I’d like to learn more. About the world, and the living things.
I understand that medical education here is partially based on a system of schools and classes. But the longer time of studies is spent as apprentices following their old masters like shadows.
- Who doesn’t have too many apprentices yet... Ah.
They call on a radio for someone to come by and arrange for me to meet with him. Someone who will have the time to entertain me. They opened the door to a windowless room where they invited me to wait.
I’m feeling really nervous but hold on and sat there, fidgeting.
A few minutes later, it’s a man about as young as me who appears. The surprise marks us both.
We shake hands.
T - Hoâ de Kyam.
D - Dane... You want to become doctor then?
T - I’d like to learn...
I explain to him. He listens while avoiding to meet my gaze. My face disturbs him.
He stands up and invites me to follow him, saying a visit of the workshops will answer most of my questions.
As we begin to walk, he enquires about my knowledge of chemistry, biology and medicine. We’re coursing through endless corridors while we chat.
I share more and more easily my experience with the biology of the poisons. Dane nods often, as if to confirm what I’m saying.
We enter a workshop where we’re isolated behind a looking glass. I see fluids extracted from large tanks and reservoirs, filling small vials. He tells me about bovine serums used for biological research. This amount of bovine production is for producing that.
D - Not only for that. I guess you’re aware of the situation regarding human reproduction?
A staircase leads us to another floor. There, in the big rooms of the hospital, pigs and cows live rather peacefully. I don’t understand.
It’s another observation room with an operating table that follows, with the look of a rudimentary slaughterhouse.
The unconscious or dead cow is being opened.
Cancerous masses are extracted by surgeons, along with deformed foetus, already dead.
I begin to feel a cold shiver crawling along my skin.
Dane gazes into the distance, looking tired and bored of the show before us. He explains it without emotion.
D - Other species still manage to reproduce, and might have the ability to carry human embryos. But nothing is simple... The metabolisms are irreconcilable normally, with all that differentiates our species. But we try it anyway. And we’re making progress...
I can see he’s tired. I’m under shock. Even if I understand the reasoning of these experiments, seeing them is a little shocking to me.
One of the foetus in the operation room is changing colour rapidly. It’s becoming softer. I notice it and signal it to Dane, but the surgeons also did and already began to react.
The thing is isolated and incinerated before it’s allowed to dangerously continue changing.
We can continue the visit that was only just starting.
~
Dane explains to me the poisons are a complex system behind too simple a word. Also that the reality making impossible human reproduction is also rapidly inviting itself in their researches and experiments on hybrids. Therefore, they still haven’t had a single success. But they continue to try everything sensible and to progress, relentlessly.
D - We’ve calculated that at the current decrease rate of population, we still have about fifteen years to start the machine and reverse the trend. Beyond that, it will be over.
T - Fifteen years to manage making baby being born?
D - No. Fifteen years to manage making more humans being born than there are people dying.
He draws some graphs of decay and growth crossing each other on a piece of paper lying around.
D - If we doubled our reproduction capability each year, it would leave us fifteen years before we pass the tipping point, of no-return. But it’s unrealistic.
T - Then, when would need to be born at the latest the first baby? To make it?
D - Last year.
The silence is feeling heavy now. He looks aside, gazing into the distant nothingness.
D - This is why we’re accelerating the machine, to the maximum. To have as much capacity as possible when we’ll finally start moving.
The city chose to increase its cattle population to the extreme, on this last chance gamble.
D - Which brings us to a request where only you can help.
T - Me?
D - Would you agree to donate some ova? All the material we can have might help.
I’m getting tensed intuitively. He reassures me telling me the procedure is simple and have nothing to fear.
I sweat and end up accepting, after the promises to be neither put in danger, nor anesthetised or separated from my belongings.
Dane leaves me once I’m in an operation room.
Glasgow remains hidden in her bag, but I keep glancing nervously in her direction.
My eggs are useless to me, but I remain warry and uneasy.
A maternal looking doctor with good age on her back comes into the room and thanks me kindly.
- What you’re giving, what you’re doing, it will be able to help saving humanity.
She knows how to reassure with her soft tone of voice. I sit back and we proceed.
I brush away some tears and resist the urges of sobs coming regularly to me.
The few minutes pass by in torture. My desire to help, to be heroic, it helps me hold on.
My memory fragments itself a little still. I lose grasp and start crying. I don’t know anymore where I am and who I am.
~
I spend the night resting in a room offered to me, in the hospital campus.
A nightmare wakes me up. I’m still in my clothes and weapons near me on the bed.
My perineum itches. I have a moment of scared panic. What have I done?
Will I really help with that? A panicked impulse and pseudo-maternal instinct urges me to recover what belongs to me, before it’s lost for ever out of my control.
I reason myself, but the panic fibre is a painful rip inside of me. I’m torn between instinct to run away, desire to recover what I’ve gave and simply accept what I’ve done. Hopefully it was a good thing, but it’s emotionally painful now.
I cry. I ask advice to Glasgow, but there, she has nothing to advise me at first glance...
Still in tears, I brush my fingers along her shoulder bones that sank with the loss of her arms.
I breathe in painfully, but I hear her. I have to accept what I’ve lost, and move on. A little like her for her arms.
I can’t let fear of what my eggs could become choke me into further bad dreams.
However, even though I would have like to discuss further with scholars, to learn more, I’m now feeling too awful to stay longer. I want to find back the great and empty spaces, fast. It’s too hard for me to breathe in this city...
~
The dawn just nears when I find myself in the corridor, to leave.
I stumble upon Dane.
He invites me to follow him with some persistence now, to continue learning. But I refuse.
I’m telling him I’m leaving. He sighs. He wants to invite me to drink a tea at least before I go.
I begin to accept and follow him for a few steps to the nearest office, when something makes me shiver.
An intuition. An instinct. Something changed.
The door opened on a great office, but I don’t step inside. I can hear Glasgow screaming inside a corner of my head. My cardiac rhythm is rising.
I guess in a reflection and a shadow on the ground that two guards are waiting for me a step away in that office.
Dane walked to the desk and leans back against it, as if to chat with me. He looks tired, but calm.
D - Well, come on in, Temee.
~
