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  We were ordered not to speak with each other. We were told not to speculate on what we were doing here, or about the project, or why we were chosen. We were informed that there would be one last test, if we chose to take it. But until then, we would be isolated from each other.

  We descended, eight at a time, in a cargo elevator. I was shown to a comfortable, but sterile, cinderblock cell. It had a bunk, a television and video player, a toilet, a sink, an intercom—and a door that had a handle only on the outside. That’s where I spent the bulk of the next month. Meals were delivered to me whenever I requested them. I was given access to the workout room for an hour every day and my pick of whatever was in the library––provided I took it right back to my quarters. But I was forbidden to speak with anyone, even the staff.

  “Why don’t you want us talking to each other?” I once asked the guard stationed outside my cell.

  He didn’t answer.

  He didn’t answer the next time, or the next twenty times, for that matter. Then, finally, scanning in both directions to make sure we were not watched, he whispered, “Personal attachments––especially either strongly held or newly formed personal attachments––can negatively affect the process.” He cleared his throat. “It seems to get jealous.”

  “It? What it?”

  “You’ll see.”

  And those were the last words I’d heard spoken for nearly a month.

  By the middle of the second week, I’d taken to lying on my twin bunk for hours, just imagining what it would be like to have a conversation with another human being. When the third week had rolled over into the fourth, I’d grown to enjoy the silence and the solitude.

  I was staring at the ceiling when I heard the magnetic seal on my cell door clack open. There were footsteps. I felt a shadow hanging over me. “Private Walker?” came the voice I’d recognized as Dr. Ramirez. “I’ll be taking you through the final phase of your testing.”

  We walked down the same stretch of hallway I’d traversed twice daily on the way to my workout sessions. We went past that door, as well as the one to the library, and into uncharted territory.

  “Ibrahim,” said Dr. Ramirez, as if he were chewing the syllables rather than speaking them, “Do you prefer to be called that?”

  No one had ever called me that––no one who wasn’t sounding my name off a roster or a manifest. “When I was a kid they all called me Raheem,” I told him. “Now everyone just calls me Walker, or Private, or . . . Hey You.”

  “And what do you prefer?”

  I thought about it and told him straight. “I don’t care much what other people call me.”

  “Interesting,” he said, more to himself than me.

  We stepped into another elevator, and down we went. I wondered just how deep this place extended––and just how deep I had gotten myself.

  It swirled, the thing on the other side of the glass. No, that wasn’t quite right. It danced. I stared at it, rapt. The closest I could ever hope to come to describing it was like a dust storm with a mind . . . no, a soul.

  Dr. Ramirez stood behind me. I watched his ghosted reflection as that reflection watched me and it. I tentatively held my palm to the glass. The particles began to coalesce against the pane. They seemed drawn to my hand like iron filings to a magnet, growing ever thicker, mirroring me. I twisted my wrist, and they followed. I slid my palm over, and they followed. I drew my fingers together until only the tips remained in contact. They tried to follow, maintaining cohesion for a little over an inch before collapsing back into the tumbling whirl.

  “What is it?”

  “We’re still not entirely sure. Our best guess is that it’s a colony of chemo- and photo-autotrophic archaea that possesses, if not consciousness, at least a rapid reactiveness––not unlike the way a plant will grow toward the sun, only much, much faster.”

  Apparently.

  “That,” he continued, “and . . .”

  “And?”

  “And the ability to act as a kind of communicator.”

  “Communicator? For whom?”

  “Someone––something––very, very far away from here.”

  I felt the weight, the solidity, of the silence between us. My mind scrolled back to the question that had set this whole machine in motion.

  What would you say if you knew that tomorrow you would leave Earth, never to return?

  “You’re telling me this is from outer space?”

  “Not exactly. The organism originated on Earth. The general consensus is that until its recent emergence, it lay dormant in a lake about a mile beneath us––trapped in the ice and completely sealed off from all other life on the planet for eons.”

  I had no words, and I could tell I was not the first to react this way.

  “About thirty years ago,” continued Dr. Ramirez, settling into an obviously well-worn patter, “some of our satellites noticed anomalous energy discharges in this vicinity. We sent in a team––or at least, the organization did. I was still watching Saturday morning cartoons back then.

  “They discovered this.” He nodded to the helix of particles still swirling on the other side of the glass. “Seems something in the energy discharge, well . . . told it to wake up, and to . . . evolve.”

  Evolve? Things weren’t just commanded to evolve. They evolved to fill a niche. That’s how evolution worked. And it took millennia, not days. “How is that possible?”

  “We’ve been trying to figure that out for three decades. We believe that the organism responds to messages coded in those energy discharges, and that they are coming from another consciousness.”

  “Messages?”

  His voice grew quiet. “Messages and commands.”

  “But where? Consciousness from where?”

  He talked slowly and calmly, as if he were explaining how to drive a golf ball and not revealing the cold truth that we were not alone in the universe. “This entity, or entities, is approximately fourteen hundred light years past the rim of the solar system. The energy discharges are one-way dispatches sent superluminally. How they get here, we don’t know. We believe it has something to do with harnessing the earth’s magnetic field. That’s why they have always been here, near the pole.”

  “And what has it been saying?”

  “We can’t just talk to it––to them––whatever. Look how hard it us for us as a species to communicate with each other. Now imagine trying to do that with an entirely alien mind. One that had an entirely different evolutionary path. One that experiences time at a different rate, in a different way. Most of what we receive gets hopelessly lost in translation, and the fact that we’ve been able to communicate at all is a miracle.” He took off his wire-rimmed specs and nervously started polishing them with the end of his necktie. “A lot of it has been decades of guesswork, but we think we know why they reached out.”

  “And?”

  He looked me square. “Are you familiar with the Gaia Hypothesis?”

  I shook my head.

  “Watch this, then,” he said, clicking a fob clipped to his lab coat. The lights went dim, and a film was projected onto the far wall. It reminded me of educational videos we would watch in grade school. Archival footage showed a much younger Dr. Ramirez and his staff. The graphics were dated, but the message got across.

  Gaia theory, simply put, posits that the earth is a living system––a meta-organism. This meta-organism interacts with the inorganic material in the planet itself and eventually develops a consciousness of its own. And that consciousness is humankind.

  “So this other consciousness?” I asked when the presentation was over. “You think what? It’s trying to talk to us?”

  “We more than think it . . . we know it. And the overwhelming sense is that it––or they––want to help us grow.”

  “Grow?”

  “If you follow the lo
gic that this planet is a living thing . . . that this meta-organism that we are a part of has now reached, for lack of a better term, adulthood . . . then what’s the next logical step for any living thing?”

  I shook my head. Logical step? None of this was logical.

  “Reproduction.” His voice had grown rhapsodic, almost giddy.

  I found my mind pulling back. Reproduction? Planetary reproduction? “Hold on. Are you saying this other world, this other meta-organism, it, what . . . wants to mate with us?”

  “Not exactly,” he said. “There are ways––yes––that you could see it that way. But I think a better term might be . . . midwife. This other consciousness has recognized another like itself and it wants to help us reach our potential. It wants us to join it in becoming more than we are. It wants, well . . . to adopt us.”

  That hit like two boots to the chest. “Adopt us?”

  He broke off quickly, knowing what a word like that meant to someone like me. “Or at least welcome us into some kind of . . . galactic family.”

  I tried to get a grip on what he was saying, and what it might mean for me. “How can you be sure? What if it’s some kind of game? What if that . . . that . . . consciousness just wants to invade us, to take us over?”

  “Trust me,” he said, his usually cheerful tone slipping into a grave and minor key, “this thing is advanced far beyond what we can even imagine. It’s mastered faster-than-light communication. It has the ability to alter life on this planet from a distance we can barely comprehend. If it wanted us dead, we’d be dead. If it wanted anything we have on earth that isn’t already abundantly available throughout the rest of the Milky Way, it would have taken it.

  “No . . . it wants to help. It wants us to grow. If there’s one single concept we’ve managed to home in on, it’s that.” He turned back to the glass and the dervish behind it. “And where you come in, perhaps.”

  “How?”

  “We’ve already detected at least a dozen planets less than twenty light years away that are all within the circumstellar habitable zone. In order for Earth––for Gaia––to reproduce, it must replicate itself using one or more of these worlds as a platform. We’ve been at work designing a fleet of ark ships that will carry human beings, as well as a wide enough sample of Earth’s biodiversity for a viable ecosystem to take hold. These ecosystems will, of course, adapt and evolve in their own right, sure, but they will be––in a very real sense––Earth’s offspring. Gaia’s children.

  “We can reach these planets. We have the technology. But even at the outer limits of our projected velocity it will take centuries, if not millennia. Every living thing on the ark ships will be kept in stasis. They’ll need someone to watch over them. And that’s what it . . .”—again, he gestured to the glass—“is providing for us.”

  Watchers. Nephilim. It wasn’t a smoke screen at all. “How?”

  “It chooses certain individuals to bond with. It infiltrates them and combines with them at the cellular level, drastically altering their physiology so that they will be better able to withstand the rigors of interstellar travel.”

  “Bond with? Like a parasite?”

  He shook his head. “More of a composite organism. Similar to lichen. We’re not entirely certain of all of the parameters, but other subjects who have bonded uniformly developed immunity to extremes in temperature, drastically increased strength and mental prowess, the ability to spend extended periods of time in a complete vacuum, and an extended life span.”

  Superpowers, that’s what he was talking about. This thing gave you superpowers and perhaps even immortality. “How extended of a life span?”

  Dr. Ramirez spread out his hands. “Centuries, if not millennia. If not more.”

  Again I looked at the thing as it swirled. I could swear it was beckoning to me. “You said it chooses. How?”

  “You go into that chamber and find out. It’s the final test.”

  “What happens if I fail?”

  “Bad things,” he said. “I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to go into the details either. But I will tell you this: we’ve managed to achieve a 90 percent success rate. The whittling-down process you underwent on the boat, it was all part of the plan. The organism favors a certain type of person to bond with.”

  “Orphans.”

  “Yes. But not just orphans. Ones who seem to hold at their heart a deep love for this world, but at the same time avoid all personal attachments. Think about it. Do you have a girlfriend? A best friend? A blood brother?”

  He knew the answers better than I did.

  “What about a favorite TV show? A football team? You don’t, do you? You are a cypher. Every candidate who makes it this far is. What we’re offering you is a chance to become something more.”

  A 90 percent success rate, I thought. Those were solid odds. But I knew all too well that there were seventy-three million children in the United States, and only 0.5 percent of them ended up in foster care as I did. I was used to pulling long odds and getting burned by them. “And if I’m in the 10 percent that doesn’t make it?”

  “You probably won’t die. It will be . . . unpleasant.” He paused. “I need to be clear about this. The sense of loss, of abandonment, that we’ve observed in rejected candidates is so pervasive that none have been able to live functional lives afterward. And it will be painful. There is a strong likelihood that you will beg for death if the organism chooses not to adopt you.”

  Death did not scare me. Death is at the end of the line for all of us. But there was that word again . . . adoption. Here it was, staring at me, my last chance to be adopted. And not just that, but to have the secret dream come true at last. For all of this to mean something.

  “The choice is yours,” Dr. Ramirez said finally.

  I took one last look at the miniature cyclone whirling hypnotically behind the glass partition. I could swear it wasn’t just dancing; it was singing. It was singing to me. Dr. Ramirez was wrong. The choice was never mine––not alone.

  I awoke on a hospital bed. My mouth tasted like melted wax, and my head pounded. Machines flanked me, and I’d been hooked to more wires and tubes than I’d thought possible. By my bedside sat Dr. Ramirez.

  “How long have I been out?”

  “About three weeks.”

  “And the process . . .” I tried to remember what had happened after I’d entered the chamber and came back empty.

  “The process went smoothly. You have nothing to worry about.”

  “I don’t remember it.”

  He shrugged. “Do you remember your birth? Why would this, your second birth, be any different? You’ve become someone––something––else. Some subjects even choose new names for themselves.”

  It was my turn to shrug. I’d meant it when I’d told him I don’t care much what people call me. “Now what?”

  “Now we wait. Eventually, when the ark fleet has been completed, you’ll be assigned to one of the ships and help shepherd in the next phase of Terran evolution.”

  “There will be training, I’m assuming.”

  “In time.”

  “Can I see the others now? The others who have also been bonded?”

  “You will soon enough.” Something about the way his eyes suddenly slid to the floor troubled me.

  “And the ark ships . . . when will they be ready?”

  Dr. Ramirez’s eyes stayed on the floor. He tugged off his glasses and once again began to polish them. “Current estimates put the launch date somewhere in the middle of the twenty-second century.

  I shook my head, not sure I’d heard him correctly. “But that’s more than a hundred years from now.”

  “Yes.”

  That’s all he said, damning me with a single syllable. “But what will I do? I can’t go back to the regular world. Not like this. Not as a . . .” As a what? A frea
k? A god?

  “No, of course not. You’ll stay here. You’ll stay here and you’ll sleep,” he said. “You’ll sleep with the rest of them.”

  “Sleep?” I’d just been asleep for almost a month. The last thing I wanted to think about was more sleep. “I don’t want to sleep.”

  “Want is irrelevant. You’ll sleep. You all sleep.”

  I sat bolt upright. “What are you talking about?”

  I could see that, again, he’d dealt with these questions before, maybe countless times. “Think you’re up for a walk?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Then come with me,” he said, already unhooking me from the machines.

  We traveled down another elevator. It opened up on onto a vast chamber. And that’s where I saw them. A field of statues. Except they weren’t statues, and I knew it. They stood, fixed and at attention, stretching back in a grid until they disappeared into the gloom.

  I remembered seeing a picture of an army of terra-cotta warriors that had been buried with the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang. This is what they looked like. A buried army. One that was alive. One that was immortal. One that I would soon join.

  “How many of them are there?”

  “One thousand one hundred and twenty-two,” he said. “You make it -twenty-three.”

  Standing here, I could tell that he hadn’t been lying to me. I would sleep, and that sleep would be long. “And when will this happen to me? When will the sleep take hold?”

  “Most likely in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours. But it could be sooner. Much sooner.”

  “Have any of them ever woken up?”

  “Not a one.”

  That night, lying on my bed, I didn’t think I’d sleep, not in the normal sense. But I did, wondering if it would be the last time I did. Wondering if I would have my last human dream, or nothing but blackness.

  And sometime in the night, the lullaby came to me. It sang to my new body from someplace far away. It sang in a voice that I recognized in the core of my being, in my DNA. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. I rose from by bed and followed it. I followed it down the hallway, to the elevator, and out into the open air.