“You, Lydia, are a Manymother. Generations before you or I were born,” the android recited, “the planet Earth was attacked. Humanity had long dominated and shaped the lands and seas of Earth. Millions became billions became tens of billions. And nothing seemed to curb the growth. Can you imagine? Nineteen billion human beings alive at once, sharing a single planet. And then suddenly, not through spite or jealousy or any human emotion but through what appeared to be pure, random, cosmic chance, humanity’s final frontier—a frontier they had only just begun to explore—spat upon them a horrible monster. Out of deep space appeared an enemy unimaginably vile.”

​

“This—this is Earth, then?” Lydia asked.

​

“Yes.”

​

“M—monster?”

​

Verity nodded her head. “It was a monster, alright. But not as you imagine. It was a planet-eater. Large enough to engulf all of Earth at once. But it came undetected, because it takes no physical form. No carbon body of flesh and bone. It wears a body of… radiation.”

​

Lydia frowned.

​

“A new kind of radiation we had never seen. It simply appeared one day. A cloud of radiation larger than the planet. It engulfed everything. It was as abundant as air. For a long time—too long—humans treated it softly, in the slow ways of old science. They studied and studied, never taking action. The Haze, as it came to be called, had no immediate side effects that they could see. So, people were cautious but ultimately inactive. Eventually, though, the effects came to light.”

​

“Effects?”

​

“As I said, the Haze is like a giant invisible cloud of radiation. As abundant as air, but more powerful. When it arrived, it permeated the mind of every living thing, shrouding the senses with a haze, permeating the mind itself. And causing horrible damage to the body.”

​

“What is it, then? A disease?” Lydia asked.

​

“For now, science still seeks the answer. Even all these decades later. But for our purposes, yes. It functions something like a disease. An enormous cloud of radiation that covered the Earth at once, screaming in the mind of every living man, woman, child, beast, and plant. The Haze took everything.”

​

“What does it do, then?”

​

“At first, nothing lethal. It simply pollutes the sensory abilities of humans and other intelligent animals. It hums and whines in the ears, agitates the nerves of touch all over the body, and fuzzes the vision. When it arrived on Earth and attacked, everyone knew something was wrong, but few died immediately. People couldn’t communicate effectively—the buzzing in the mind all but eliminates the sense of hearing. But was this the end for humanity? No. People adapted. A universal sign language began to spread across the world almost immediately. It appeared life would go on uninterrupted.”

​

Lydia nodded. “Ror’s sign language.”

​

“Yes. Ror and the other village boys sign naturally. But back to haze. After about a year it became apparent that the Haze carried another effect. One far costlier.”

​

Lydia was trying to keep up. She couldn’t remember the last time Verity had given her so much information at once. The android was a real android sometimes… It was exhausting.

​

“It took roughly nine months for anyone to notice, but it became apparent that humans weren’t conceiving children anymore, and when an organization was created to investigate, it was discovered that the worldwide birthrate had dropped an unfathomable ninety-nine point nine seven percent. Soon after, we noticed that all life on Earth had followed suit. Apex predators, farm cows, field mice, zoo animals, house pets—almost everything—had lost both their senses, and the ability reproduce. Humans were adapting to the inhibition of their senses, but animals were already dying off all around the world without their ability to hunt and find a mate. And now it appeared that almost nothing was reproducing. Any lifeform born before the arrival of The Haze lived on and died as usual. But there was no youth to replace it.

​

Lydia tried to do the math. Ninety-nine percent decrease in birthrate? It was catastrophic. Unfathomable.

​

“In just a few years, Earth’s population had halved, and there were no children. Anywhere. A few decades more and the population had shrunk to an abysmal one percent of one percent of what it had been pre-Haze. And that’s not to mention the complete and total shutdown of society as we knew it. Cities were emptied virtually overnight as people ran from the gangs. And then those same people came right back to the cities to loot for supplies. People all over the globe survived by traveling on foot to the farms and food stores nearest them. Small-scale war broke out in the beginning, and then fizzled quickly because there simply weren’t enough people to kill. In a short time, the human race was almost dead. It survived mostly in remote places like mountain forests where tiny villages of a few dozen people retained some sort of civility and worked together to live off the land for however many years they each had left. Now, there are only a few village groups on each continent. The exact number is uncertain, but there are probably less than thirty thousand human beings on Earth. Possibly as few as ten thousand. All of humanity has retro-progressed thousands of years.”

​

Lydia felt sick. It was almost too much to believe. “How could this be real?” she wondered out loud. What Verity was telling her seemed too bizarre and horrible to be believed. But while Verity had been keen on withholding the truth, she had never been a fabricator of fanciful stories. Lydia decided it must be real.

​

Verity continued, “But as with all disease, there appeared a glimmer of hope—immunity. The few true scientists left—men, women, and androids like myself dedicated to preserving the race—discovered that a very small group of humans were immune to the Haze. It was a miniscule percentage of the population, but there were a few. These people, these immunes, were invaluable. We called them Pureparents right away, because of their most valuable attribute. A Pureparent did not feel the effects of the Haze—the numbing of physical touch, the fuzzing of vision, the polluting of the hearing—and they could still, miraculously, reproduce. They were beacons of hope for the species. We also learned that some landscapes—a remote forest high in the mountains, for example—could still harbor life. It appeared that if humans stayed far away, some plants could still reproduce, though it’s unknown why. Some guessed that the Haze is attracted to Humans and grows weaker when none are around. We still know very little about the monster, even after all these years. But we had found light. We had learned that while hunting and gathering for food had become extremely difficult, it was not impossible.”

​

“So, I’m a Pureparent?” Lydia asked.

​

“Yes. In this new world, Pureparents were of paramount value. And the women especially. Female Pureparents could carry children.”

​

Verity continued, hardly skipping a beat. It was in moments like this when she could recite information for minutes on end without breaks that Lydia could see in her nature that part of her that was very inhuman.

​

“Why can’t you just copy my genetic code and use machines to help create babies with it? Copy the code of anyone who’s immune?”

​

“Because this is not a typical disease. It appears that the immunity in a Pureparent—someone like yourself—is not the body’s ability to heal from or remain untainted by a virus or infection, but an actual power or force to repel the Haze itself. In other words, the Haze cannot enter the body of an immune. It stops in the air around them. Again, think of it as a cloud of radiation that permeates everything on earth—gas, liquid, and solid—except the body of a person who is immune. Can you see why this is valuable for the survival of the race?”

​

Lydia was putting thoughts together, and finally nodded slowly. “The woman’s womb.”

​

“Exactly. Because the womb of a female Pureparent is not polluted with the Haze, a child can conceive there and live. Thus, the name Pureparent. And if a male Pureparent conceived a child with a female Pureparent, chances were greater that they would bare another immune. So, if we were to breed immunity into the population, we needed all the Pureparents we could find, but especially the females. The women were Humanity’s greatest strength.”

​

“I’m a Pureparent,” Lydia repeated quietly, thinking back on various memories from her life in the ship—err, the not ship. The mountains?

​

She shook her head, and asked another question. “You just imprisoned me and paired me with immune boys to see if we got along? But why waste the time courting us when…” She trailed off. She didn’t like where this was going. If Ver had managed to take from her one child without her knowing…

​

“Again, you dance around the truth,” said Verity quietly.

​

Lydia swallowed.

​

“You’re more than a Pureparent, Lydia. You’re a Manymother. A type of immune more powerful than the rest. A woman with more than a safety bubble around her uterus. What could be more powerful than that? Think it through.”

​

Lydia nodded slowly. “I think I’ve figured it out. And as usual, it’s because of what you haven’t told me.”

​

“Oh?” asked the voice, blue light eyes blinking softly.

​

“The crops. You haven’t said anything about the crops yet. If I truly had been living on a spaceship set to colonize a new world, learning to plant cabbage and sweet potatoes would be a valuable use of time and resources. But the people out there already know how to plant cabbage and sweet potatoes. They just can’t get anything to grow.”

​

Verity kept nodding. “Unless?”

​

“Unless there was a Pureparent. One who could make other things immune. One who could extend her immunity out of her body, so that things could grow near her. You said something about a force to repel the Haze. Well, what if you found an immune with a protective bubble much bigger than their body? That’s what a Manymother is, right? I have an immunity that can touch other things.”

​

Verity nodded. “Well done.”

​

Lydia understood. Why else was she planting small plots of generic crops over and over again? It wasn’t because she had some talent for agriculture. It was because they could grow in her presence, and they struggled to grow if they were near humans

 

“Good girl,” said Verity, genuine pride in her voice. “And we didn’t find immunes that powerful. We bred them from lines of powerful immune girls and only girls. To this day, we’ve been unable to find a male with the ability to extend his immunity to others. Only woman have the ability. But well done, again, Lydia! You have discovered, mostly through your own cunning and critical thinking, the classified nature and operations of the Earthstar Program.”

​

Lydia took a deep breath. “Earthstar?” She asked, and sat on the ground, feeling exhausted. She stowed her gun carefully under crossed legs.

​

Verity shrugged. The name is inconsequential. “It was a simple matter of a committee voting on a name for a program. ‘Manymothers are our ‘Earthstars,’ the planet’s bright new blips of hope right here on Earth!’ Or something like that. We raised you here in your own Earthstar Incubator on the Asian continent of Earth, protected by a team of androids and your own cultivated ignorance. You were far too valuable to live in one of the human villages with all of their dangers.”

Lydia had a hundred more questions.

​

“The arable plot in each dome was about the same size,” Lydia noted. “So, my bubble is that wide? Maybe five yards wide?”

​

“No. Much wider. Your aura—as it’s called—is about two-hundred and thirty-six yards in diameter, though when you are in poor emotional or physical health, it shrinks.”

​

Lydia nodded, thinking. “No matter where I went in the dome, the seeds in the soil would be protected by my aura.”

​

“The domes were designed with the radius of your Aura in mind, yes. And your aura,” said Verity, “Is the largest we’ve ever seen.”

 

Lydia took this in.

​

She was important. An aura of that size could grow crops on land of that size. Enough to feed an entire village.

​

“And my domes? My biomes? How are they all here in these mountains?”

​

Verity responded. “I’m surprised you did not figure this out as well, but I suppose there was so much information flooding into your mind at once, some of it remained concealed and unorganized. The acc pod attached to the Hab is in fact a transportation module.”

​

“And the drugs were a cover!” Lydia nodded, getting it. “There never was any need to ‘acclimatize,’ was there?! You were just drugging me so I couldn’t tell we were moving the whole time!”

​

“Correct. We needed to mask the movement of a highspeed maglev module. Your biomes are thousands of miles apart from each other, and the Hab is located underground in a central location, connected to each by long tunnels.”

​

“But what about having androids plant the crops? And, you said plants can grow far away from humans, right? So you androids can do the farming high in the mountains!”

​

“It’s being done, as much as we can. But we are few, Lydia. There aren’t many androids like us left. Our parts are valuable.”

​

Lydia looked at Verity and the other male androids. They held her gaze stoically. Verity nodded to herself. The severity of a problem like this would affect all thinking things on the world.

​

“And,” Verity added, “Breeding more Pureparents and hopefully Manymothers is the most important work any of us can engage in.”

​

“How many of us are there? Manymothers?”

​

“I cannot reveal that information. No one human being is allowed to know. Only the androids who run Earthstar know the location of all Manymothers.”

​

“And the people out there? In the village near this forest? How are they doing?”

​

“Most of the villages we know of have not produced more than one or two Pureparents. These are doomed to fail before long. Most Manymothers are weak, with auras only a little bigger than their bodies. They can still bring infants for their village, and hopefully ones that are immune. But it’s a dangerously slow and a functionally impossible process to maintain a village with only one or two fertile women. But if a village can get its hands on a girl with a large aura—one even half as wide as yours—it will be okay.”

​

“It must be chaos out there!” Lydia was imagining it in her head. “Villages would war each other for possession of the immunes! Corrupt leaders would sell their female Pureparents as slaves! The males as well! There would be kidnappings and killings of Pureparents everywhere!”

​

Verity gestured to the armed androids standing behind her. “You see, then, why we protect you. Each dome is guarded by armed sentries that never sleep or slip up in their vigilance.”

​

“And my child? The one I had with Ror? Lavender, he named her. I know how she out-aged me—stealing those years from me was probably the least complicated part of your operation. You just had to put me in a cryo booth and press the button. But Ror and I never… um… how did you get the…?”

​

“How did we get a child from you without natural insemination? The ethics parameters of the Earthstar Program require a non-invasive operation and consent from the Manymother for each birth.”

​

“Non-invasive oper—wait. Each birth?” Lydia asked.

​

Verity grew quiet. “And that, Lydia, is the final lie I must bring into the light. You don’t have a child. You have children. Twenty-six of them. Every time you passed a test and approved a pairing, we brought another child of Humanity into the world in your body, and you, Lydia, saved the Human race all over again.”

​

Lydia stumbled. Her cheeks were hot. “Children?! Twenty-six?!” She couldn’t accept it. Wouldn’t accept it. “But I’m seventeen years old!”

​

“I sense that you are not actually confused about the timing, since you already know about the time-stretching, and are simply overwhelmed and attempting to process the information. But I would correct you to point out that while you have aged a total of seventeen years and seven months, you are in fact, eighty-eight years and two months old, in Earth time. You spent a great deal of time in cryo as a young child while we built your home and the four domes. On each occasion that you consented a child, we put you to sleep, initiated your pregnancy with samples taken from you and your suitor noninvasively, accelerated the pregnancy to successful termination at about six and half months, and then removed the child by machine-perfect C-section. You were then sealed, and the baby was delivered to its village, all while you slept in a cryo booth beneath the Hab.”

​

Lydia felt at the small scar on her stomach through her shirt and slumped in the cold soil while Verity went on. She was barely listening anymore. It was too much. Every day of her life had been a controlled experiment and now her soulless android guardian was force-feeding her painful secrets like it was nothing more than unpleasant-tasting medicine.

 

“Who gave you the right to do this to me?!” Tears were falling slowly down Lydia’s face.

​

“Lydia,” Verity buzzed, seeming to grow impatient. “Government and law and civilization collapsed before us and we were powerless to stop it.” She waved her glowing blue arms at the guard androids behind her. “We androids represent one of Humanity’s greatest creations, and even we watched helplessly as the race was folded and folded again until almost nothing remained. We needed no permission to act.”

​

Lydia sobbed quietly.

​

“But if it softens the blow, your mother gave hers freely.”

Lydia looked up through her tears. “You knew my mother?”

​

“Your mother came from within the scientific community. She was intelligent and a Pureparent herself, and she offered a great sacrifice. When it became clear you had the aura, she gave you to Earthstar instead of keeping you for herself.”
          

“Is she still…?”

​

“She is long dead. She would be one hundred and forty-three, were she alive now.”

​

“How many of my children are immunes?”

​

“More than half, which is remarkable. Your immunity—whatever it really is—is very strong. All of your suitors were Pures themselves, which helped.”

​

Lydia stood up. She’d had enough. All that had been stolen from her was simply too much. She hurt so deeply in her heart, and her head spun with frightening revelations and difficult decisions and hurtful deceit. But for some incredible reason, all she could think about now were names she never used for the children she never knew. If all the revelations were true, Lydia knew that most of her children had already grown up without her. She knew it. It was unstoppable and irreversible. Lavender was already a little older than her.

​

But she didn’t intend to let the process go on.

​

A few minutes later, after she’d asked a few more questions, and answered a few of Verity’s, she stood and held high her chin. She was ready to say goodbye.

​

“Will you stop me then?” Lydia asked for a third time. She’d had enough. She didn’t know where exactly she would go, but she knew where she wouldn’t go. Back into the Hab.

​

Verity had assured her that while she had won her freedom by discovering the truth mostly on her own, she would be making a horrible mistake to leave the Hab and the Earthstar Program. She and the male androids begged her once more to 'consider the fate of the race,' and not 'her own whims and pleasures.'

​

Lydia laughed, her red eyes and cheeks still puffy and stinging from all the secrets. “I am the race,” she told them. “And you are a plastic imitation. I won’t be your tool anymore. I will help my species however I can, but not in your way. In mine. I’m leaving now. I ask again, will you try and stop me?”

​

Verity was quiet for a moment. Then she spoke, her eyelights glowing steadily in the dimming light of the dying sunset. “No. I will not. You have earned your freedom, as I explained before.”

​

Lydia clenched the gun in her hand and turned to leave. “Ver,” Lydia said. “I’m sure I will come to believe that you did what you thought was best for Earth. But you must know that I will never trust you again.”

​

The android said nothing as Lydia walked into the trees.

​

She didn’t care that she had no provisions, that she had no idea where she was. She had earned her freedom. She wasn’t looking back.

​

 

 

​

EPILOGUE

​

​

​

​

Lydia’s feet crunched over twigs and leaves as night arrived to rob the sky of its light and the air of its warmth. After she’d left the androids behind, she’d climbed toward the top of the nearest mountain. She hadn’t scaled the peak but had ascended up a hill enough to get a better view of the valley. She’d never been able to look through so much open air before. It seemed almost an illusion! But there were no field generators in sight. She’d escaped the last of them.

 

As she walked along a small river and the air grew quickly colder, she tried to hold her head high. With all the pain… all the dark secrets… it was hard to enjoy the victory of the freedom she’d won. She felt a heavy darkness hanging over. Eating at any positivity she was able to cook up.

​

But she walked on.

​

She’d surveyed from her perch on the hillside the valley that stretched out ahead. It looked promising. She didn’t know what she would find there, or if it was a terrible idea to go out into these mountains alone as a Manymother. But she didn’t really care. Hopefully, she would find a purpose and be able to help out however she could.

​

Something approached her from behind. She jumped.

​

“Who’s there?” she asked, drawing Ror’s weapon.

​

“Think it through,” nudged the voice, quiet and gentle.

​

Lydia relaxed as Verity’s glowing blue eyes and arms stepped out from behind an ancient tree. Lydia saw she was alone. She waited for the android to speak.

 

“I know you can’t trust me, Lidi, but I wanted to say goodbye in person, without the guards there.”

 

The android stepped close and did something she’d never done once in seventeen—or eighty-eight—years. She hugged Lydia.

Lydia nearly fought her off, it was so unexpected. But when Ver held on, she held back. The android had lied and lied to her. But she’d also fed her and sheltered her. She was Lydia’s… home. Lydia wasn’t going to try to process all of her complicated emotions instantly so she could forgive Verity. That would take more time. But she allowed her old friend to hug her.

 

“Your mother’s name was Sonora Able. I thought you might like to know,” said the Android. Lydia pulled away, feeling the tears return to her eyes. Verity continued, “And she loved you while she had you. Sonora saw the promise in the Earthstar program and offered you up the instant an aura was detected.”

 

Lydia was quiet for a moment. Then she asked a question that had suddenly seemed very powerful to her. “Did… did she name me, Ver?”

 

“I'm sorry, but no. Years and years ago, many Pureparents began to wait a year or more before naming their children. Many young ones experience The Haze as infants, only to exhibit immunity after a couple years. People wait to find out if their child is immune or not before giving them a name because in many villages, immunes receive special names. We don’t know exactly where the custom originated, but most villages maintain the practice. Anyway, your mother had not named you when she gave you up.”

 

“Then you named me?”

 

“Yes. I named you after my mother. A brilliant human woman named Lydia who designed and built me.”

Lydia smiled in the darkness. The sun had completely disappeared, and the night was cold and dark. “She sounds great, Ver.”

 

“She was wonderful! She caused many important scientific advancements, almost single-handedly. You remind me of her, the way you grasp concepts naturally.”

 

Lydia’s lips quivered. Her emotions were such a mess right now.

​

“And,” Verity added quietly, “I have one other piece of information to share with you.”

 

Lydia’s breath caught in her throat. “More secrets?”

 

Verity held her gaze. The lights of the android’s eyes and arms illuminated the trees around them—it was nearly completely dark outside. “You might like this one.”

​

Lydia waited.

​

“As of my last correspondence with his village eighteen days ago, Mars has not chosen a wife.”

 

This resonated like a bell in Lydia’s chest. 

​

“And the chil—” Lydia corrected herself. “And our child? The child I had with Mars?”

 

“He has cared for her on his own for nearly two years.”

 

Lydia put her hands over her mouth and whimpered. “Her? A girl? What is her name?!”

 

The android smiled with her voice and spoke very slowly. “She has yet to take one.”

 

Lydia felt an energy swell within her. She actually had to catch her breath, holding her arms against her chest like a blanket.

​

“Their village can be found along this river.”

 

Something brightened inside Lydia, like the dying coals of a dimming fire given a dry log and a breath of air. “Thank you, Ver,” she whispered, turning to look out across the dark valley ahead. She gasped. Now that it was even darker, she could see faint lights at the far end of it. “I see something out there! That’s the village, isn’t it? You say it’s at the end of—”

 

But when she turned back, Verity had disappeared.

 

Lydia felt a cold wind brush across her and she shivered. She was still wearing only a light shirt and shorts and the mountains were unforgiving. She had no idea what she would do or say when she got to Mars’ village. Worrisome thoughts surrounded the peaceful spot that was now growing in her mind, but she shook them off and started walking.

 

She would think it through.