position whose duties would occupy me for many years to come.
The wall flashed life colors, as I had expected, and rewarded me with the immortality that I had always wanted so very much. I thought my life was perfect. But then it gave me my new assignment, which was to last until completed. It would take longer than eternity to complete this task.
I turned dark green and almost brown. I could not restrain myself. This time, the always-silent wall broke its usual silence about assignments and offered me insight.
An old proverb. One I should have remembered.
I watched most of my brethren leave. Soon, a new crew would arrive to construct the factories and hire employees. Another crew would arrive not long thereafter to provide continual oversight.
I would not be at those factories. I was to walk among the humans and convert them to the way of truth, light, and profit margins.
I will live forever and I must spend that eternity among the heathen humans, attempting to save them from themselves.
How I envy Feerow!
ANAKOINOSIS
by Tobias S. Buckell
DAYS AGO MY AEROKRAT left me at the edge of the forest. Now I ran back toward the break in the thick, tall woods, hoping to find him again. I wanted to return to his safety and bondage.
The sun fell behind the knobby trees, and heavy clouds killed the light. Rain exploded through the leaves, drenching the world in so much darkness and moisture I could hardly breathe.
Before long I fell down, and crawled on my hands and feet, slimy with mud, leaves, and sticks plastered to my thin clumps of fur.
I felt very alone, trying to find my way home. The trees loomed over me, threatening in the darkness. Creaks, snaps, and the sounds of animals skittering around in the darkness scared me.
Stumbling around in the night, I found a burrow in the space between a large root and the moist ground. Dirt caked my hands as I dug in for the night.
Overhead, streams of water cascaded down through large leaves and drooping limbs to soak me.
It would be a shivery night. My fur was only just starting to regrow after the anakoinosis.
I wasn’t sure what to do next. There was no advice, or past memories, to guide me on my path. It would be a shameful, lonely night, devoid of new learning.
When I was born, I broke free of my shell with my own hands. I picked the insides clean until I had a full stomach, and the brittle remains fell apart easily with a few punches and kicks.
I remembered this, as I remembered all things from long ago, and far away.
Many aerokratois stood around me when I broke free. They were pale and twice my height, with disgustingly smooth skin. The only visible fur grew on their heads.
Yet what fascinations they brought!
Until this point all the memories of my parents had swirled around through my body, mixing and intermingling, growing with me as I knit myself from egg.
So I understood what they said when they looked at me. Many of my parents understood their languages, though it had taken fifteen generations of anakoinosis to spread those memories all throughout.
None of my kind could absorb aerokratois memories, not the way our own foreparents’ memories were etched in each of us. The aerokratois defied true understanding because of their alienness. So we observed, watched, and learned to imitate the aerokratois ways.
Maybe, we thought, if we imitated them long enough, we could come to understand them without anakoinosis.
“Bob,” one of the aerokratois pointed at me. “This is your whiffet.”
“My what?”
“It will be your… assistant.”
Bob, I knew from the memories, looked upset.
“Assistant? I don’t want one of your little slaves, I want nothing to do with this.”
Another aerokratois stepped forward. “It is merely indentured servitude. Look, the leaders of the whiffets gave us their young willingly in exchange for the technology we gave them. It’s a fair trade.”
The memory of the aerokratois descending from the sky on a loud wind popped into my mind. They came with gifts: glittering objects, rare metals, strong spear-tips for better hunting, and diagrams for even more interesting machines.
“That doesn’t make it okay,” Bob shouted. “It’s wrong. You know it. Just because they were given to us doesn’t make using them right.”
The conversation, and my new master’s concern made me nervous. I walked forward and grabbed his hand. I formed words.
“I will serve you well, aerokrat. You will teach me all I can absorb.”
Bob’s mouth hung upon.
“How can it learn to speak so soon?”
The other aerokratois made
“They learn in the egg, we think.”
“You think?” Bob shouted. “Why haven’t we thawed out anthropologists yet? This needs to be studied. To be learned.”
I was excited. I would understand new things, things my foreparents had not known. Very few of the aerokratois seemed to care about learning. They had a desperate air about them, and only cared about one thing: the Great Repair.
But this aerokrat seemed different.
“We don’t have time,” the others told Bob. “The repairs must continue if we want to make the launch window. We have to fix the ship first, then we can study the whiffets with whatever time we have left. We can leave the scientists behind.” They made
“That would be all right by me,” one of them said.
I stood and watched them all.
That was the day I was bonded to my aerokrat. The cycle of learning new things continued.
Huddled under the root of the tree in the steady rain by myself, I sorted through long buried, and a few recent, happy memories. They comforted me.
More of my fur had grown in by morning. I took a few moments to carefully groom myself with twigs, trying to comb over the few bare patches still left in my fur.
It was the fourth time I’d lost and regrown my fur. I was proud of the memories I imparted to each of my children with every new generation I sired.
The mud hadn’t dried, but it was walkable. Outside the treeline, bare ground stretched for miles and miles. Big yellow machines roved over the roads, driven by aerokratois inside.
The yellow machines shoveled and ate dirt. They burrowed into the ground sniffing for Metal. Then the Metal got taken back to the Hopper, which digested Metal in huge, fiery belches, and created Spare Parts for the Great Repair.
The bare ground of the aerokratois had spread outward quickly. When the first of us were taken over the ocean to work here, there were only trees and the Hopper.
Whiffets clung to the backs of the yellow machines, waiting for their orders. Others walked along the roadsides with picks, keeping the roads in good order.
More worked deep in the earth, their fur thick with dirt, pulling Metal from the ground.
