Victoria Lambinicio

Artemis I

The space capsule Artemis I contained a human sacrifice. One orphan, an abandoned baby girl found on a hill in China, rode front seat of the small capsule en route to a faraway planet. For hours, days, and years she would never know what had passed, her only mother was the constant sight of stars. They never came closer or farther. They only stayed there, and shone their secret code: brighter, dimmer, brighter, dimmer, come, reach, us, soon. And once, she did try. As soon as she was old enough to figure out how to remove her warden, the seat belt, the orphan girl reached too earnestly, and clank! bumped her broad forehead on invisible glass. She cried, as it was the only sound she knew how to make, but nothing ever changed. Her world was as small as a closet, it would never grow, but on she lived. Her one life was as important as an entire world, thrown in the Black Nothing to save the millions who polluted their planet to an unlivable extent.

The orphan’s destination was the planet most similar to what the Unlivable once was, before all its resources were exhausted. There were large valleys everywhere, full of vegetation, the landmasses encompassed more of the planet, it had abundance of resources, and oh! the oceans. It’s oceans possessed no organisms (as of yet,) but had such a clear, pristine blue you could view further, further, further down until the depth colored a deep ultramarine. The orphan’s destination was a planet made to perfection, as if it’s sole purpose was to be the Unlivable Planet’s people’s new environment. There was only one problem: there were three unknown entities Ata, Lant, and Ta in the planet’s air. The orphan girl from China was to travel for fifty years- the time travel from the Inhabitable to the New- and take steps into the Perfect Planet. The several mechanism embedded into her body would sense the three entities’ effects on her person, and transfer the information back to the scientists of the Inhabitable Planet so they could prepare defenses. She, the orphan, lived only for those few steps.

They, back there on the Unlivable Planet were proud of her, their beautiful experiment. The orphan had grown to be seventeen years old now. A beautiful seventeen with silky, straight hair that never needed a comb, and eyes impossibly deep for a girl who learned nothing. The orphan never learned to talk, walk, & eat food, but lived her seventeen years on her haunches- such a long period of time that the good scientists of the Unlivable Planet predicted that the orphan had already lost all knowledge of how to use her legs. Not that it matters, they reasoned. The orphan had her food fed to her by an IV cord that never left her skin. (She never even thought to think it as something apart from her body.) If she had wanted to walk, there was barely enough room to stand. Bathing was no problem because there were none to smell her, and Artemis I was a completely sterile environment. All in all, the orphan of Artemis I was a successful experiment so far.

Humans depended on each other for growth- she had no one. None to teach her why to cry, laugh, scream, giggle, draw back in fear, or smile. None to hate or love. None even to teach her the blushes of a first crush. Only herself, the chair she never used anymore, the whirr of the mechanism that fed her nutrients intravenously, and her mother, the stars, blinking brighter, dimmer, come, soon.

Bang.

Suddenly, something loomed. A huge, white monster covered the orphan’s mother so that the orphan girl from China could see no more but the whiteness of the strange metal animal emblazoned with the letters Artemis II (though she didn’t know how to read such letters), and eyes. Ochre eyes as deep and as dark as her own peeking out from the glass.

An orphan boy from Russia, the back-up experiment in case Artemis I should never reach its destination, met eyes with the orphan girl from China. The first heat warmed her face, and other monsters filled the sky unexpectedly, all bearing the name of the goddess Artemis. But all the orphan girl could see was wide-eyed ochre eyes, and the feel of crimson red rushing to her face.

I watched it all from my seat in a building with the homely feelings of a surgical knife, and located in a certain land mass that had taken over the entire world many, many years ago. My coworkers, the best and brightest scientists of the Unlivable Planet were in uproar, worried about who would survive the sudden, unpredicted meteor shower. And the orphans saw each other. They were never supposed to know of existence, the good scientists wailed. But I smiled, stayed quiet, and recalled Marlowe: “It lies not in our power to love or hate,/ For will in us is overruled by fate./ …/ Where both deliberate, the love is slight:/ Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?”