An Abstract Purpose by Kalvin M. Madsen

I

In a way, space ships are naturally occurring—somewhat similar to a meteor or a fungal spore launched from host. At least this was the first rationale raised by Laura Emzara when she woke up aboard the Genesis Six population transport ship. The ship’s trajectory was pre-mapped, its destination locked. Thrusters spit intermittently to adjust toward this goal: Alpha Centauri, a proposed new home for humanity. But there was little time spent on this subject, or at least, there was little she could recall. The aluminum hull creaked like an old ship and popped when bits of space debris slapped the walls at thousands of miles per hour. Massive solar arrays folded out from opposite points of the hull, ruggedly and autonomously turning toward the sun the way sunflowers do.

When Laura tried to remember her life before this place, her mind was like an overexposed roll of film. The short stock of surviving frames included a brief orientation—people in white lab coats teaching her how to feed the animals and explaining she would be sedated for the launch, which at the time was reasonable. The launch could bring a non-conditioned individual to panic, she was told.

There was no way for her to retain any of her memories before her enlistment, as a crucial element of the Genesis program was memory erasure. After her operation, it was explained that a crew member of Genesis Six could not risk the distractions and mental clogging associated with a lived life. A crew member must be fresh and canny, accustomed only to life aboard the ship. Additionally, the lab coats promoted that memories from Earth would haunt and depress a crew member when relating their old lives to ship life. The only concrete memories she was able to extract were strange frames of those lab-coated men crowding around her. At first, this blighted her and caused her to feel controlled and insecure like a rat in a maze. Though after her first week aboard, she forgot this feeling, too.

An alarm sounded in Laura’s quarters, and a moment later, she appeared behind the opened airlock door at the far end of a corridor wearing a green utility jumpsuit, ready for the day’s work. Outside her quarters, the corridor was much like all the corridors on the ship – grate metal floors with galvanized pipes lining the walls. The roof was rounded off, with elephant trunk-sized wiring running the entire length. There were several circular windows in this hall where Laura could take a moment to gaze—something she rarely found the time to do because, despite the beauty and mystery of space, its lure was lost in time. Laura was a busy individual; there was no time to ruminate on small white specks stilly in the void. Small white specks don’t feed the animals.

The corridor smelled like a farm, credited to Laura’s co-workers, or perhaps clients: the various Earth creatures under her care. They were ordered in this way: at the end, there was Laura’s quarters. Then, from right to left, there were the common chimps, the Leghorn chickens, the Angus cows, the Saanen goats, the African leopards, and finally, the American rabbits.

To her understanding, there were other crew members on Genesis Six, all of whom were just as busy as Laura with animals and ship maintenance. No connections were built between workstations, leaving the only opportunity for socialization to be through personal terminals or within the ship’s internal virtual reality system. During her training, Laura was told she would never meet these people. Each individual was taught to remain focused on their role or risk never reaching Alpha Centauri. Laura remembered this put simply in her orientation: “There is no time to socialize. This is your sacrifice.” She thought of this as she placed a slab of dried meat into the rehydration machine.

Laura prepared all the meals together, then brought them out quickly so that all the animals would be eating concurrently. Laura learned to serve the animals in this way to prevent the more aggressive creatures, particularly the leopards, from their jealousy-induced wrath when they are not the first to be fed.

Laura rehydrated a massive fruit bowl for the chimps, unpacked a bale of hay for the cows and the goats, retrieved the hydrated slab of meat for the Leopards, and cut vegetables into small bits for the rabbits. Laura organized all the meals onto labeled trays, then stacked the trays on her electric hall cart. By then, it all came to her instinctually. It’s a job she could understand and a cause she could pursue.

A moment later, she was going down the line like a prison guard checking on inmates. First, she came to the chimps. She took their tray from the cart (it weighed nearly as much as she) and slid it through the rectangular feed aperture at the base of the reinforced door. She heard the chimps cooing within, making restless, baby sounds. Laura’s heart warmed, and she was glad to be assigned to a section of the ship where she felt accepted, even wanted. She often pondered what it would have been like if she had no such work, nothing to offer the ship, nothing to motivate her or give her meaning. The only answer would be cryostasis or insanity, and cryostasis technology had been proven too unstable for use on Genesis Six—and, of course, there was no time left to delay the launch.

As Laura moved onto the chickens, she heard a familiar mechanical something, maybe a small door or flap, within the chimp’s cage. This happened with every cage every time she fed. Over her months aboard the ship, Laura taught herself to ignore the sound; perhaps it was a type of cleaning system or air conditioning she had not been briefed on. Anything was possible in the void. She delivered the seeds to the chickens and heard the noise again as she moved onto the cows.

The cows and goats were the most difficult to feed because all the cage doors were identical, with the same feeding apertures and windows. This meant the hay would need to be shoveled in, as the hay bale itself was about 10 times larger than the aperture. It was only three large scoops, though relative to the other animals, this feeding was the most demanding and required sweeping afterward. But this was a small downside to an otherwise fulfilling role. What could be more fulfilling, she thought, than to be part of one of the greatest pursuits of humankind?

Laura fed the cows and moved down the line to provide for the remaining animals. When she reached the leopards, she could hear one rapping at the door. She could hear and smell the beast’s desperate breathing, its claws and tongue together on the door. After taking the meat slab from the cart, she looked down at the aperture nervously. It was easy to assume the leopard could paw out and swipe at her, though it hadn’t happened before. She halted in this way, then heard that mechanical sound from within the goat’s cage, cut short by a dull thud. Then, directly following the mechanical noise were panicked cries from one of the goats. It yelped and moaned helplessly within its cage—but when Laura rushed over to look within, she was unable to see the goat because it was too close to the door. Laura could not open the doors herself since this was only done with permission from the admin computer, so she dropped to the ground and looked through the feeding aperture as the goat continued to whine and cry, “maaah! maaah!”.

Through the aperture, she could see a rectangular metal flap blocking a majority of her sight into the cage. Laura was confused; it seemed the flap had opened and dumped the hay she had shoveled into the cage. Laura distinguished the panicked goat as it tried to jerk its leg free from the opposite side of the flap. What is this thing? She reached in slowly to pull the flap back so the goat could draw its leg free. The flap jumped and fell with the goat’s continued jerking, clapping against the rim of the aperture.

“Calm down!” Laura shouted at the goat, “I’m trying to help you!”

She gripped the far side of the flap and pulled it back so that the goat could withdraw its leg. In this effort, her hand was caught between the flap and the rim of the aperture as the goat pulled its leg free. She screamed and withdrew her arm while the goat retreated into the cage, likely to lie in a far corner and lick its wounds.

Laura looked at her hand and saw the flap had cut a straight line along her palm, where dark blood oozed from and dripped to the ground. She rushed to the first aid station in her room.

After wrapping her hand haphazardly with a strip of tan, self-sticking bandage, she went back to the goats. Laura looked through the feeding aperture and found the metal flap that caught the goat had dropped down, and the floor was flush and uniform. The strange flap could not be ignored. It needed to be adjusted so it wouldn’t hurt another animal. The questions remained: Why did the flap open? Where did the goat’s food go?

Laura was lying on the ground, looking through the aperture as she pondered these questions. As she peered in, another mechanical adjustment sounded within the cage, and a fresh batch of hay was dispensed from the ceiling. The hay fell to the center of the room, and the goats moved in. Laura watched it collect into the same portion she has been trained to serve. The ship can feed the animals? Then why am I…

Laura resisted this thought, holding the implications as far too extreme to be true—too extreme to even contemplate. Laura stood, then looked up and down the hall. She smelled the air—hay and meat. Meat! She realized the leopards had been left unfed.

The leopards were bouncing around their cage when she returned to them. She looked to the meat slab, then to the aperture, then back to the meat. The leopards only behaved this way after eating. Typically, they waited at the door, licking and breathing heavily—like they were before the goat had gotten caught. The leopards continued jumping about in their cage, out of Laura’s sight.

Laura turned her attention to the aperture and knelt down to peek inside. On the ground, in the center of the cage, there was a puddle of blood. Beyond the puddle, a leopard sat in the shadows, ripping rehydrated red meat from a rib bone. Have they been fed? Laura looked back at the slab of meat she had yet to deliver and realized the computer fed them.

❂

After Laura fed the remaining animals, she closed herself within her quarters to rest until it was time to provide dinner. Laura’s break time was structured just as strictly as her work with the animals—she eats, organizes her room, then pulls a pair of virtual reality goggles on and logs into the internal servers. While her instructors did inform her that social interaction would be little to none on this trip, the Genesis Six’s internal Virtual Interaction Leisure Lobby, or V.I.L.L, existed as a space for the crew to interact from their isolated workstations. The lobby used the Source game engine with one downtown-themed map.

A bowl of soup was dispensed to Laura within the food reception chamber, which was a cube space sunken into the starboard wall with a transparent sliding door. There was no roof in the chamber, only the end of a long elevator shaft connected to the human food processing station. Laura took the soup and pulled off the plastic lid. Steam rose from her bowl, and Laura began eating. Without any form of entertainment or socialization available, and because the food was typically bland, she usually ate as fast as possible.

After a moment of hurried eating, she dumped the bowl and spoon into the waste disposal tube beside the door. Laura turned curiously to the food reception chamber. She crossed her arms, realizing its similarity to the computer’s method of feeding the animals.

The urge of ritual pushed her to log into the ship’s V.I.L.L. and forget about the strange metal flaps that seemed to dispose of the food she placed—to forget how the ship itself can feed the animals all on its own. Laura’s personal terminal flashed a tiny green light, which indicated that she had just received a message. She went toward the terminal, skeptically looking over her shoulder at the food reception chamber.

The terminal prompted Laura to swipe her ID, and she did. Then the computer camera turned on with a small red light, and she leaned in for it to scan her retina. With that, she was logged in. The V.R. goggles taunt her from their hook on the terminal’s right side.

Laura opened the messaging system and requested a conference with the onboard artificial intelligence. This request was accepted, and she proceeded to ask the following:

Who feeds the goats?

There was no reply.

Who feeds the leopards?

Laura Emzara. Veterinarian, familiar with exotic animals. Section 6:14

Laura was unsure of how to proceed.

Does anyone else feed the animals in my section?

There is no response. Then Laura had a thought she never considered until today.

What happens if Laura Emzara does not feed the animals?

Laura looked at the clock and saw there was still plenty of time before she was meant to feed the animals their dinner.

What happens if Laura Emzara does not feed the animals?

Request denied.

Laura impulsively powered down the terminal and leaned back into her chair, shaking her head. She avoided looking at the V.R. goggles and stood from the desk again, then walked a few feet to her bed and collapsed into the covers. This attempt at relaxation did not last, though. A few minutes later, she was sitting at her desk chair with the V.R. goggles pulled over her head.

The V.I.L.L. (Virtual Interaction Leisure Lobby) user interface was simple: you log in, and the system verifies your identity using your personal terminal. Once you are confirmed, you are virtually placed in the lobby, which appears as a town center populated solely by Genesis Six crew members.

When a crew member joined the server, their avatar spawned beside a bland, concrete fountain with a one-way road going around it, then trailing off into a featureless, unpopulated virtual city. The fountain area was considered the Town Center, but designating places in this way became useless as she rarely saw anyone else online. A two-meter-wide sidewalk encompassed the fountain, with a short redbrick border wall where the sidewalk met the street. There were numerous kinds of buildings across the street, 14 in total, all of which contained mostly empty, unfurnished space. It became her impression that the map was designed for a larger player base, possibly even for a different purpose. There were shops with ownable doors, there was a police station, and an unsettling sewer system she had never really seen for herself.

When Laura logged in, her avatar was beside the fountain, as usual. She looked around to see if any other crew members were online. They were not. Her waking hours were much different than the rest of the crew. Usually, there would only be one or two other crew members who would be logged in at that time, apart from the appointed V.I.L.L. manager, Mr. Gopher. Gopher was employed to maintain the server and was meant to stay constantly logged into the program, at least during all his working hours.

Laura looked at a tall office building directly in front of her—the building Mr. Gopher was stationed at. She rarely visited Gopher because she rarely had any issues with the ship’s computer systems. But this day was different.

The office building’s interior was as bland and tasteless as the fountain. The walls were a dull yellow, and the floors had short-cut brown carpeting. The front door was always open due to a strict rule implemented some months ago. The crew was advised to leave it this way because it often glitched and became unusable. Once, this became so bad that a programmer had to repair the code to open it, while some poor engineer’s avatar was locked in there for hours. Not to mention Mr. Gopher.

Laura found the stairwell and ascended to the second level, where Mr. Gopher spent his days alone in his virtual office. She found his hall, which appeared identical to the rest—the yellow walls and brown carpet, and the many empty office spaces lining the walls. She came to his office, number 2915, and pressed a key on her terminal keyboard to knock on his door. A few seconds passed without a sound. Then she heard crackling static that audibly morphed into a man coughing.

“Hello!” Mr. Gopher said, his microphone sounded as if it had long evaded a necessary retirement. “Someone out there?”

Laura grasped around her head, searching for the microphone, which was still folded up into her headset. She pulled the microphone down and spoke.

“Mr. Gopher, it’s Laura Emzara, from station 6:14.”

The door opened in one frame change as if it vanished and reappeared open. There in the doorway stood Mr. Gopher. His avatar was of a slightly overweight but otherwise indistinguishable businessman. The avatar’s skin was dark, and it had a thick grey mustache. Though Laura did not know if he looked anything like this, as it was impossible to know what your avatar looks like unless another crew member tells you.

“What is going on?” Mr. Gopher said.

“Well,” Laura began, entering his office behind him and selecting a seat to place her avatar in. “I just had a question about my station.”

Mr. Gopher sat his avatar in the seat behind the desk, which had nothing on it but a functionless lamp. Their avatars simply switched from standing to sitting in an instant, with no animation. A window in the office looked out over an inaccessible hill region where aberrant plant life renderings decorate an otherwise unjustifiable area. Beyond this was nothing, as it was in all directions within this place.

“Go ahead, dear. I’m listening.”

“I asked the ship what would happen if I didn’t feed the animals.”

Mr. Gopher hesitated to respond and started scratching at his microphone.

“And?”

“It told me that this was restricted information. Can you believe that?”

“Ah,” Mr. Gopher said through rising static, “this is true. You are not supposed to stop feeding the animals, Ms. Emzara.”

“No, you dont understand,” Laura said. “I am feeding the animals. But I think I saw the ship dispensing food to my animals after I fed them, and somehow getting rid of anything I place in there.”

Laura felt that she could already assume Mr. Gopher would be of no help.

After a moment, Gopher replied, “Ms. Emzara. You are not supposed to stop feeding the animals.”

“Mr. Gopher, you need to listen,” Laura said, now sitting up in her real seat, her hands squeezing the sides of her real desk. “If the ship feeds the animals automatically and just throws the food I give them away, then why the hell am I feeding them? What is this all about?”

Mr. Gopher’s avatar suddenly stood from its seat.

Then he spoke, his voice low and almost hidden by the static, “Ms. Emzara, I am logging off. It is time for me to go to sleep.”

The overweight office-worker avatar vanished before her, and she tore her headset off.

II

In her quarters again, Laura was back in reality—but this reality was much different from the one she had woken to. Her mind raced, conjuring more questions in each passing moment. If she does not need to feed the animals, why is she here? Why even make her feed and care for all those creatures?

A red light then strobed above the door—the dinner bell. Despite a Pavlovian reaction to rush the food storage, Laura was sure in a decision not to feed the animals and instead wait to see if they were fed automatically. She went to the hall and peeked into each cage and found all the animals in their typical pre-dinner behavior. The monkeys laughed; the jaguars licked and breathed against the door. The chickens ran up a tempest of feathers when she approached.

She checked the time and saw that three minutes had passed since she was required to distribute dinner. She monitored the cages for the next few minutes, waiting to see if the food would be dispensed automatically. It was not. Then she became paranoid, with thoughts like maybe Mr. Gopher turned off the auto-feeding system.

Laura became aware of sweat droplets on her forehead. She turned around to the row of circular windows that looked out into space, but there was nothing, just darkness like the deepest parts of the ocean. Laura wiped the sweat with her wrist and transferred it to her jumpsuit. She thought even if he did turn off the system, what did this mean about all the time she spent “feeding” the animals? She thought perhaps they recycled the food she placed and simply repackaged it for her. But why!?

There was no time to continue with those thoughts, as it became increasingly clear that the automatic feeding system was not operating. Laura went about with the dinner routine—hydrating meats and fruits, placing them in trays, and carting them to the cages.

She started with the Chimps, as usual. Their dinner was nearly the same as the fruit bowl she had served them earlier. The only difference was that the dinner serving had bananas. She pushed the tray through the aperture and waited. She saw how the chimps didn’t even approach the fruit, and at first, she thought this was only because she was watching. Then, right before her, a flap opened, and the tray fell through a slot. The flap closed again, and a separate serving of fruit fell from the ceiling. The chimps immediately rushed for this fruit and fought for their portion.

She had never felt so confused and lost. Internally, she became an amok ant on a kitchen counter—or an ape in a spaceship.

Nee-euoo! Nee-euoo! Nee-euoo! Nee-euoo!

An alarm erupted from her quarters, one which she had never heard before. This alarm sounded panicked and rapid, like an emergency vehicle. Nee-euoo! Nee-euoo! Nee-euoo! Nee-euoo! She rushed to her room and found a light flashing from her terminal.

The private messaging system was turned on, and there were two messages. The first was one she had received earlier, just before entering the V.I.L.L. Upon inspection, she found it to be an automated daily announcement about the happenings within the ship and the progress toward Alpha Centauri. The second was received when the alarm sounded and was sent from Mr. Gopher.

The message read:

Ms. Emzara, log back in and come visit me. We need to speak.

There was no choice for Laura. She did not care to return to pseudo-feeding, and she did not care to rot either. She sat at her terminal, pulled the V.R. headset over her head, and logged into the V.I.L.L.

Laura’s avatar appeared beside the fountain, surprised to see another crew member’s avatar a few meters away, standing in the road behind a three-foot redbrick boundary wall. This avatar was facing her, and her surprise settled and became uncanny as the man slowly backed away. Their appearance was of a man in a dark, almost black bodysuit. Though this was irrelevant. She looked up at Gopher’s building, then back down at the man, and saw he was running off. Where is he going? Laura felt uneasy; she had never seen that character before, and something about them was wrong. For a moment, she thought she would chase him—that Gopher could wait. She decided against this, realizing she is the one who cannot wait.

Laura enters the building with the awful yellow walls and brown carpeting. She finds the stairwell and ascends to the second floor again. In her maneuvers through the halls, she turned a corner to Gopher’s row and saw his avatar standing in the hall alone, with his door open next to him.

As Laura approached him, she could hear the static from his microphone again.

“Ms. Emzara, thank you for coming so swiftly.”

“How long do you usually sleep for?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

Mr. Gopher walked into his office and sat down behind the desk.

“You said you had to go to sleep,” Laura said.

“Ah, yes. Yes,” Gopher said, though it was weakly spoken and hard to hear through the static.

Laura waited for him to respond to her question, but he didn’t.

“Why did you request I come here?”

While Laura was connected to her VR system, a square section of the grate floor in the hall detached and folded over, leaving an entry port. A thin man dressed in a skin-tight, black jumpsuit crawled up through the port and crouched beside it, making sure Laura was not in the hall.

“You see,” Gopher said, “You are monitored, Ms. Emzara. Your behavior has been erratic—your efforts to trick the computer system could even be considered dangerous.”

“Trick?,” Laura asked. “The computer has been tricked? With all due respect, Mr. Gopher, I believe I am the one who has been deceived.”

Mr. Gopher coughed, and he removed his mic, making his coughs sound sharp and distant. Then Laura heard the headset being handled, and soon he spoke again.

“Look, Laura. Now, I’m not supposed to tell you this, and I doubt you will remember. But in some way, I hope telling you this will give you more peace of mind tomorrow. Maybe this information will survive in you, in an instinctual way.”

The man in the black jumpsuit comes to Laura’s quarters. Inside, he can hear her speaking to Mr. Gopher on her microphone.

“What are you talking about?” Laura said, her voice muffled through the door.

Mr. Gopher goes silent for a moment.

“You see,” he begins. “The Genesis Six is a transport ship, Ms. Emzara. A biological transport ship. This includes all those animals, as well as you.”

Mr. Gopher started to cough again, but this time he did not remove his microphone. His cough punched and ripped at her ears.

“Unlike those animals, humans need a job. The leopard can chase toys around its cage—we even release a chicken in there every so often. The goats are fine as long as they are together, like most other animals. But humans need a job; they need to have an abstract purpose.”

Mr. Gopher went quiet again. Laura wanted more, but she wasn’t even sure what to ask. Then, his voice peeked through the static again.

“Oh, what’s the use?” Mr. Gopher said, his voice weak and tired. “We just want you to survive this trip, you know? They say… with the proper why, you can bear any how. Hang in there, kid.”

His voice fuzzed. A flare of static rolled over the line.

Laura pulled the headset off and set it on the hook. None of it made sense to her. She looked down at her lap and considered whether she would finish feeding the animals their dinner.

Then, without any warning, the man in the black jumpsuit crept behind her and drew a syringe from a discrete, zippered pocket in his jumpsuit. After pulling off the needle cover, he steadied the syringe and advanced toward Laura’s neck—though he moved too slowly, and Laura caught sight of him in the corner of her eye as she adjusted to leave the chair. Instinctually, she screamed and shot up from her chair, and within the same motion, kicked the chair back at the man as he was attempting to pounce on her. The assailant became tangled with the chair and fell over headfirst as Laura sped to the opposite side of the room.

“Who the fuck are you!” Laura yelled.

The assailant tried to stand, but his leg was caught in the arm of the chair, and as he went about freeing himself, Laura looked to her feet and found the syringe had been flung to her side of the room. She took the syringe and lunged at the assailant like a pikeman with the needle ahead of her, then sank it into his shoulder, lucky not to hit a bone. She plunged the syringed fluid that was meant for her into him.

“No!” the assailant cried. “You idiot!”

Laura held him down until she felt his strength withering. The man had short black hair and tan, freckled skin. Laura was only then able to clearly look at him as white bubbles fizzed from his mouth. He looked middle-aged, and his jumpsuit was clean—who is this man?

Then Laura remembered the crew member she had seen in the V.I.L.L—the one who was dressed in black and ran off after she joined the last time. Perhaps he was watching her, waiting for her to log into the servers, so that he could be sure that she would be distracted. If this is true, Laura realizes, it wouldn’t be outlandish to assume Gopher knew.

Laura realized the assailant was unconscious, and the foam from his mouth dropped to the ground in clumps. She searched through his other pockets, wondering why she hadn’t felt any remorse. She found nothing and was soon distracted by an important question: how did he get in?

Outside her quarters, she found the entry door the man had left open on the grate floor. It seemed her assassin was inexperienced.

Laura looked down the hall at the cage doors—she had rarely stopped to question it all. She fixated on the entry on the grate floor. She wanted to crawl through, knowing she had it in her—and there was no other choice.

III

Laura fed herself into the entry from which her assassin had infiltrated. Its access was a removed square section in the grate metal floor, and below this was a cylindrical, metal air-shaft large enough for a single person to slug through. Which is precisely what Laura did. Her progression was made by pressing her hands to the walls and dragging the rest of her body forward, gaining only 6 to 12 inches with each effort. Eventually, she reached the other end of the cylinder and became sure the shaft was not for air circulation.

The cover to this end of the shaft was folded downward, the assassin left it open as well, and she emerged into a dust-coated room dominated by cubicles and computer equipment. There were four lab coat-wearing figures hunched over their keyboards among the ten or so computer cubicles. Thin cobwebs clouded the upper corners of the room, and light beaming through the exit door transom revealed airborne soot, which had been still until her entry. Her presence, her breathing, and movement sent waves through this soot, and for a moment, the area around her was cleared. Though the soot ricocheted off the far wall and reclaimed the room.

Laura was drawn to the nearest figure hunched over their desk. Their back had a thick, raw-cotton-looking layer of dust, which also covered their desk like imperious mold over a bowl of spoiled fruit. The figure had become cadaverous, their head had shrunk to the shape of the skull, and their lab coat had settled in form with their ribcage. A small light strobed at the base of their computer monitor, and she could hear its internal fan spinning. The skull’s tan/purple coloration was visible with each pulse of the light.

Laura discerned the sound of footsteps starting from the exit and ending at the shaft where she had entered. The path was left by the assassin; it was obvious. Though what stood out to Laura was how it appeared they had stopped momentarily at an unoccupied cubicle, possibly to access the controls to the shaft. She went to the cubicle and immediately noticed how the keyboard and monitor had been brushed clean of the overwhelming dust—she leaned in and pressed the space key. After a whirling boot-up sequence, the monitor flashed a white frame, then settled on a black screen with green text reading: “Incarceration Displacement.” Laura pressed the space key again, and this screen vanished and was replaced by another green text/black screen, though now with these options:

Associates

Door Controls

Inbox

Incarceration Displacement (I.D.)

Laura selected the door control option, which presented her with a single, toggleable option: Release Cell Door Lock. Though, when she tried to select this option and open the door, a warning message took over the screen in large, red text. ADMIN KEY REQUIRED. In the same instance, an L.E.D. lit up around a keycard slot on the monitor’s right side. Laura cursed under her breath. She wondered if this admin was still alive. Is anyone still alive here? And what the hell is “Incarceration Displacement”?

Then someone, or something, clattered by on the other side of the exit door. Laura’s stomach twisted. She dropped into the cubicle she had been using, though she knew whatever it was had passed on.

She peeked over the particle-board divider, focusing on the transom above the exit door—but there was nothing to see. The sound was gone, as it was before it had come. For a moment, she thought it could have just been in her head.

She looked back at the shaft she had entered from. Retreat. She thought of the animals, how she needed to pseudo-feed them so the computer would dispense their real food. Then there was the exit door. Advance. She knew it was the only choice, and seconds later, she was turning the handle and pulling the door open.

The light blinded her. It was much brighter than any light within her section. As her eyes adjusted, she found herself in a hall with similar styling to the computer room. The walls were nothing like her section. These were of concrete and wood, not in any way proper for a space-worthy vessel.

There were barred rectangular windows along the top section of the wall, and through them poured in yellow sunlight. She thought she saw a tree limb swaying in the wind at the corner of one of the windows, though she excused it as a faulty lighting system. To her left, the hall led to two doors. To her right, the hall led to a crash-bar door with another exit sign posted above it. She decided she would try each door.

First, she tore left—the initial passage locked.

The second door opened effortlessly,

and into the inky-black, she gawked.

This room was useless; she

backtracked down the hall.

Though transom light mocked her,

“Maybe Genesis suffered a fall?

That was not sol, flooding through glass.

Not Earth’s blue skies, just within my grasp!”

Laura shouldered through the crash bar,

An unexpected rebirth,

Laura Emzara found herself

Standing on Earth.

IV

There was an overgrown parking lot outside the facility with two black sedans left on the cracking pavement. The weeds had tied these cars to the ground, holding them in time like the dust in the computer room. She couldn’t believe it.

Laura turned back at the exit door, which had swung shut when she left it. She wasn’t sure if it would open again, but that didn’t matter. Continuing through the parking lot, she wondered about the other crew members and if they escaped. The V.I.L.L. servers had been abnormally empty in the past weeks, and during that time, she excused it as conflicting sleep schedules.

Laura spun in the parking lot, hoping to see something through the trees. There was nothing, only the road. She tried the doors on both cars, but they were locked—double-locked if you count the feeble vines connecting overtop. Her tears dripped to her green jumpsuit.

The sun was directly above the parking lot, and Laura had no idea what to do. An hour ago, Laura thought she was light-years away from home, and now she stands in a forgotten Earth parking lot. It was clear she had been tricked in some way, but the worst part of it all is how there seemed to be no reason in any of it.

Laura looked at the road, and for a moment, thought of walking off and leaving this all behind—and she would have if it weren’t for the animals. The wind began to pick up, and the countless pine tree limbs justled; their needles fell to become the freshest layer of decomposition. A few birds shot through the gap in the trees where the road ran, but Laura felt like none of it was real.

Again, she thought of walking down the road, but she had no food or water, and without any idea how long the road goes on for, it could mean death.

Laura could hear the burbling of a stream a few yards past the parking lot, and when she walked over to see (it had been so long since she had seen such a natural spectacle), she was stunned by the quiet beauty. A stillness took over her body as her eyes panned the length of the stream; its steep, dirt walls, which the stream had carved out—a stream’s life’s work. Laura dug her heels into the dirt and descended to the water level, stepping cautiously through a maze of moss-coated boulders and dried branches that fell from overhead.

She thought of the animals drinking from the stream and wondered if they would even recognize her. She remembered something about animals recognizing people through their smell and hoped this would be the case with those creatures who were under her care. The sun was setting; it was likely time for their dinner.

She knew then how she would flee this place, safely and with a clean conscience. She would free the animals and gather supplies for her travel down that road.

A few minutes later, she climbed back up the steep side of the creek and began toward the parking lot. When she reached the pavement, she looked to the now shaded entrance to the facility and saw that the crash door had been opened. Laura’s posture became stiff, dumbfounded, but not like she had with the stream—this was terror; a cold, curious terror. Who is here? My captor? Laura tried to comfort herself by assuming whoever it was had run off, but there was no way to be sure.

In spite of this, Laura still needed to retrieve supplies from her quarters if she wanted to survive. She continued to the entrance, past the overgrown sedans, and into the shade of the building. She looked over her shoulder as she reached the threshold of the facility, almost hoping to see someone running off.

She entered the hall with the barred, rectangular windows. The computer room door was still open, as she had left it, but the other room she had checked, which was at the opposite end of the hall, was now closed, a door which she had also left open.

Laura went to the room at the end of the hall and pushed the door open, expecting the space to be pitch black as it had been, though she was surprised to see that it was now lit up with fluorescent lights. This room was arranged identically to the other computer room, but with no dead scientists. What it did have was just as much dust coating everything there was to coat. Laura advanced through the room, passing by the cubicles as her eyes fixed on the air shaft at the far wall.

She reached the shaft and pulled the cover down, finding the same type of cylindrical shaft structure that was connected to her section. She could smell food through the shaft and thought perhaps this shaft connected to the storage room. She looked over her shoulder, scanning the dead room. The cubicle closest to her was cleaned of dust, and in recognizing this, she narrowed her eyes and went to investigate. She found this cubicle to be very different than the rest, as this cubicle had a terminal just like the one found in her personal quarters. The terminal even had a VR headset on it, and the more she stared at the terminal, the more she realized it must belong to Mr. Gopher, or at least the assassin. She debated turning on the terminal, but she didn’t want to be distracted in such a way that someone could easily sneak up on her.

Laura went back to the shaft and decided to climb in, and when she began slugging herself through, the smell of food grew so potent that she was not only sure it was food, but she was sure it was food being cooked. The shaft was just as long as the shaft that connected to her quarters, and at the end, there was a square access built into the grate floor. Laura pushed the access open and crawled through until she reached a section with the same architecture as hers, though with no caged animals. This hall was designed as a kitchen and had a line of stovetops and ovens. The personal quarters and storage room were built in the same spot as in her section, but this was a distinctly different section, with an entirely different role in mind. She wondered if that meant there was another person in this room.

Then the door to the personal quarters slid open, and a man in a green jumpsuit that matched hers stepped out. He was a middle-aged man, well-kept and physically fit. When he noticed Laura standing above the open floor grate access, his posture became defensive.

“Hey!” the man shouted, then began walking toward her. “Who the hell are you?”

Laura stumbled backward into wiring bolted to the aluminum wall. The man looked over her jumpsuit, then at the access.

“What are you doing here? Speak!”

Laura swallowed saliva and stepped away from the wall.

“I—I’m Laura....I’m ummm..a crew member.”

“How did you get in here?” he asked, then pointed to the access. “Where does that go?”

“I came from a different section. I crawled through this shaft, and I’m sorry to disturb you here, but you need to listen to me.”

His eyes narrowed. Laura wasn’t sure if it would be possible to explain what she had seen. To him, it would all be shadows on the cave wall.

“What’s your name?” Laura asks.

“Paul,” he said. “I’m the cook.”

Paul gestured down the hall at an array of ovens, stovetops, and refrigeration units.

“I’ve been cooking your meals for months.”

Laura noticed one of the ovens was lit up, and a pot sat on the stovetop, popping and spewing steam. She thought of the food dispenser in her room and found his story was believable enough. After all, she was still unsure he wasn’t the one stalking her. She had been looking off at the oven for a moment, and when she looked back, Paul was staring at her skeptically.

“What are you doing here? Just visiting?” Paul asked. “I thought we couldn’t visit one another.”

“No –” Laura began.

“– Oh no!” Paul said, looking over Laura’s shoulder at the boiling pot, which boiled over the rim.

Paul rushed off to turn down the flame, reaching it just as the first bubbles spilled over the top. The flame flickered out, and he let out a sigh of relief. As she looked him over closely, she could tell that he was not the same man who had snuck into her section—though she wasn’t sure of anything.

“Damn,” Paul said, backing away from the stove. “Close one.”

“Hey,” Laura said, pulling Paul’s attention.

“I’m waiting on you,” Paul said.

“Look, I don’t want to make you panic, but I need you to listen,” Laura said. “We are still on Earth.”

Paul smiled as soon as the words came out of her mouth, and after it settled, Paul laughed and choked in her face.

“What the hell are you talking about? You have been in the V.I.L.L. too long,” Paul said, then continued laughing.

“I’m serious,” Laura said, turning her attention to the fake space windows. “Look.”

She walked up to the window and was shocked when it looked genuine to her, still, even though she knew it wasn’t real.

“This is fake,” Laura said. “A digital screen... or something. I’m not sure. All I’m sure about is how I was just outside in the sunlight. I stood by a creek, then walked back.”

Paul looked at her with an honest expression, as if he was trying to believe her for a moment, but this look wilted.

“You know, maybe you should just get out of here… what is it— Laura?”

“You don’t understand!” Laura said. “You need to pack a bag, and we need to leave. Through this hatch.”

“Is this some kind of test?” Paul asked.

Laura went to the grate floor access and pointed down at it, but was interrupted by an alarm that sounded from Paul’s quarters. Nee-euoo! Nee-euoo! Nee-euoo! Nee-euoo! It was the same alarm that she heard when Gopher messaged her, singing like an emergency vehicle.

Paul’s face went calm, like a robot who just received an order.

“Wait one moment,” Paul said, beginning toward his quarters. “Wait right there.”

Paul went off to his quarters, and the door slid closed behind him. Laura knew Gopher was probably watching them through the cameras and would likely persuade Paul to turn on her.

Laura slid into the access alone and pulled the cover back over. She crawled through the shaft as fast as she could and fell into the dusty computer room on the other side. She slammed the cover closed on that side and slid to the ground to catch her breath. She was thirsty, and she hadn’t eaten for hours. She could tell it was nighttime because the hall outside the computer room was dark.

When Laura regained her strength, she stood and left the room, concerned only with freeing the animals and leaving this place as far behind as she could.

She went down the hall to the computer room connected to her sector, and when she entered the room, she was confused to see that someone had opened the cell door—someone with the admin key.

She stepped through the room cautiously, and as she passed through the cubicles, she saw a terminal powered on with several options in green text. When she leaned in to read the options, she realized they were controls to open each of the cage doors. She sat in the chair and began opening the cage doors one at a time, exempting only the leopards, whom she had no plan for.

After opening the cage doors, she walked through the door, back into her sector for the first time since she left. She saw the hall cart left out with all the food trays stacked on it, and she wondered why the animals weren’t already outside their cages. She approached the monkey cage and saw the monkeys all sitting content amongst each other, not seeming to want to leave. She had never seen them so clearly—their fur, their strange naked faces. In her approach, she was haunted by a thought that even the animals may not have been real.

“Come on! Get out of there!” Laura said, but she became worried they might attack her.

The monkeys did not react to her; in fact, they huddled closely together at the back of the cage. Laura moved onto the chicken cage, their cage always smelled the foulest, and now with the door open, there was nothing to hold back the smell. She held her nose and peered into the cage, finding the chickens cowering at the back of their cage in the same way the monkeys were.

She continued down the line, finding all the animals were behaving in this same manner, except the leopards, of course, who stirred in their cage, knowing something was going on.

Then the cell door slammed closed, and Laura hurried to try and pull it back open. She tugged on the metal bar connected to the door, which had become flush with the wall, but it didn’t budge, and she was trapped again in section 6:14.

When it became clear to her that the door would never open with brute force, she let go and stepped away, then turned to the open animal cages and took a deep breath.

​V​

Then the intercom sounded; it was the voice of Mr.Gopher.

“Ms. Emzara,” Gopher said. “I am sorry it has come to this.”

Laura looked up at a security camera in the corner of the hall.

“Let me out of here, you freak!” Laura yelled.

“You really shouldn’t have bothered Paul. That was a very close call, you know,” Gopher said, his voice sounding as if he was smiling.

“You need to let him out too, or this place will be swarming with police by sunrise.”

“Oh yes? How’s that? You will call them?”

Laura dropped her head and took a breath.

“There is something you really should know about Paul, Laura. He is much better off staying here. There is so much you don’t understand—and with such reckless decisions… Well, I’m not so sure we can continue with you.”

“What do you mean?”

Then Laura heard the last cage door open. The leopards. She knew they wouldn’t stay in their cage like the other animals, the leopards would creep out, and… she couldn’t imagine.

“Paul is a criminal, Ms. Emzara. The worst kind of criminal.”

“Wait, what are you doing?” Laura said, backing toward the storage room as she stared at the open leopard cage.

In horror, she watched as the hypnotically patterned face of a leopard peeked out from its cage, bearing its teeth and sniffing the air.

“And so are you,” Gopher said. “Our labs have been looking for a new way to deal with you lifers.”

“I’m not a criminal!” Laura shouted as she turned and sprinted to the storage room.

But a feeling was building deep inside of her—a feeling that bubbled with guilt.

The leopard turned its attention to her just as the storage room door slid closed, and she was sealed from its reach. Then it was quiet for a moment. At least until the leopard found the other animals.

Laura heard wild screams through the door as the leopards mauled the other animals viciously. It seemed the chickens were chosen first, them being the closest to the leopards.

“Yes, you are, Ms. Emzara. Of course, you wouldn’t know, because we took care of all those... provoking memories. You see, we believe those kinds of memories are better wiped if an inmate is serving a life sentence.”

Something crashed against the storage room door, and Laura jumped to hold it closed.

“They are killing them all! What the hell have you done!”

“There’s no sense hiding. I can open that storage door, you know. I just wanted to have a quick chat. I’m sure you have lots of questions.”

Laura heard animals sprinting around the hall and leopards bouncing off the walls and tackling them.

After a few minutes, it seemed the Leopards had killed all the other animals, at least all those that couldn’t find a place to hide. She remained on the ground, defeated.

“So, do you have any questions?”

“Why did you have me feeding those animals? It’s all so elaborate.”

“You see, our project here is called ‘Incarceration Displacement.’ Our goal is to radically alter the prison system with our new model.”

“I’m not a criminal.”

Mr. Gopher laughed into his mic, then tried to pull the mic away so his laughing wouldn’t be heard.

“Who were those scientists laying dead at their computers? How long has this been going on?”

“This may be hard for you to believe, “Mr. Gopher said. “But you have been here for nearly ten years. Those men were part of the original research group, which was replaced some years ago.”

“Years? What do you mean? How long have I been here?

“Those men wanted to terminate the project,” Gopher continued. “Which was unacceptable. They believed it was blurring moral lines, but in truth, those men were cowards—traitors. What was done had to be done. I don’t expect you to understand.”

“So you killed them?”

Mr. Gopher hesitated to respond.

“Ms. Emzara, this project is far too important. It cannot be hindered by self-described moral police. In what way is the current system moral, Ms. Emzara? Would you really have rather spent these years in a concrete cell, trapped with the memories of what you did? Or would you choose Genesis Six? Would you choose a new reality—one with purpose, one with excitement and adventure. Before the malfunction, you were a thriving, young Laura. You cared for those animals without worry. You looked out at the solar panel array and the countless stars as they drifted by. Really Laura, what would you choose?”

Laura sat with this for a moment. She heard a leopard creeping outside the door. She looked around the storage space and spotted a stack of boxes next to the sliding door. She pushed the boxes over and wedged one against the door so that it wouldn’t be able to open. Then she found a broom in the corner of the room and took it to the ground, where she ground it against the grate floor to sharpen it.

“What are you doing?” Gopher asked.

“I’m not a criminal.”

The sliding door tried to slide open, but the box blocked it.

A moment later, Laura finished grinding the broom into a spear. She stood from the ground and pushed the boxes away from the door, and it slid open.

The hall was a slaughterhouse. There were dead animals everywhere, many with missing limbs. There was blood all over the walls, and small cries from nearly dead beasts filled the room pitilessly. She saw that two of the leopards had died during the fight, but there was still a single one living, roaming the hall like a ghost.

The leopard turned to Laura. Its eyes were crazy and hungry—its face red with fresh blood. Laura readied her spear as the leopard sprinted at her, and when it pounced, she was the pikeman once again. The leopard fell onto the spear, its own weight forcing it down and helping the spear tear through its stomach. The leopard slumped beside her and squirmed with the broomstick still stabbed into its belly.

“What have you done!” Gopher yelled into the intercom.

The room was silent for a time, then Gopher spoke again, this time calmly.

“Nothing matters now,” Gopher said grievously.

The leopard twitched as Laura sat, waiting to see if Gopher would say anything else.

“What do you mean?” Laura asked, but Gopher remained quiet.

Then the cell door slid open.

“They’re all dead. Without those animals you are useless to us… and there is no goddamn way we are getting another leopard in there. Get out of here, I’m making the call. Go east.”

Laura walked to the cell door. She couldn’t understand why he was freeing her.

“East? What call?”

“Just take that road off the parking lot. It’s a few hours walk from town,” Gopher said. “At least we still have Paul.”

Laura didn’t want to wait for Gopher to change his mind, so she gathered supplies into a shoulder bag and ordered food from the dispenser in her room. She gathered what food and water she could and started for the door.

“Oh, and one last thing, Emzara, ” Gopher said through the intercom. “If you really want to, you can talk to the police. Just thought you should know that they already know all about this place. Stay safe out there, kid. You will be watched.”

Then the intercom popped, and Mr. Gopher was gone.

Laura left the facility, passing the dead scientists and out to the parking lot. It was night. When she reached the road, she turned back and looked at the facility. It seemed so innocent. So discreet. It could have been a real estate office or a service station. She tried to think of other reasons she could have ended up there, but the more she processed this, the more she began to believe Gopher.

Then that guilty feeling resurfaced, and in her walk, it was all she could focus on. The burnt-out film reels of her mind began to regress until she was able to form vague conclusions. The more she accepted the fact that she was still on Earth, the more she began to believe the criminal accusations Gopher laid against her. How else could she have ended up at this facility? And if this were all true, how bad was her crime?

As she continued down the road, she saw faint red and blue lights strobing through the dark forest. Her heart sank as the lights got closer.

An hour later, she was in a prison cell.

❂

When Laura was booked into the police station, she was reconsidering her theories on if this was all a dream or not—finding it much easier to believe it was a dream. But the way the officer explained her history—well, he just seemed so sure. He explained she was from a middle-class family in Michigan and had suffered from some kind of mental breakdown and had murdered two people in a diner. She asked the officer what the weapon was, but he gave her a strange look, thinking instead that she was joking around with him. He told her that she was transferred to the Genesis facility shortly after she was convicted, and that she signed it all off because it sounded better than general prison. He also told her that the Genesis Program faded into obscurity after its first round of prisoners were taken in—and that they were told these prisoners, Laura included, were transferred to other prisons when it supposedly shut down.

When she told them to go back for Paul, the officer said the situation was being handled by the FBI and that she shouldn’t worry about it. Despite the officer’s confidence, she was sure Paul would not be saved, and she was sure someone knew all about the project. There was no way Gopher was the only one in on it—it was just not possible.

Laura spent the rest of her life in prison, wishing she were back on Genesis Six. Not for the animals, or for the food dispenser, or the computer. She wanted to be back on Genesis Six for the abstract purpose she felt, and the illusion of adventure.

VI

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

The alarm erupted in Laura’s quarters, sounding rapid and panicked. Laura shot up in bed, her eyes adjusting to the familiar dim light of the Genesis Six. She stood, moved to the wardrobe, and pulled on her yellow utility jumpsuit.

She stepped through the door marked LIVING QUARTERS.

“Good morning, Ms. Emzara,” a mechanical voice crackled through the intercom.

“Time to steer the ship,” Laura whispered to herself .

She sat at the console, her hands gripping the joystick. On the monitor, a target reticle drifted over the void. She adjusted the controls carefully .

“Good, just like that,” the voice said . “Perfect”.

On the screen, the target turned a vibrant, electronic green. Laura stared at it, a sense of “abstract purpose” washing over her, grounding her in the only reality she knew.

VII

In a dusty room far above the sectors, Gopher adjusted his headset. Behind him, the cadaverous figures of the original staff sat motionless at their cubicles, covered in layers of raw-cotton dust.

“Sector termination complete,” Gopher said into his microphone. “Those animals were getting expensive”.

Paul, the cook, stood nearby, looking at the floor. “What about the crew member?” .

“She was transferred,” Gopher replied flatly. He tapped a few keys on his terminal. “We will need to reset Paul, too. He’s making too much soup” .

“Wait, are you going to fire me?” Paul asked, his voice trembling.

“I’m sorry again about Abigail,” Gopher continued, ignoring him . “I thought I had the correct dose, but she must have lost weight since she arrived and we gave her that physical. I really dropped the ball on that one, too” .

Gopher looked at the monitor where Laura Emzara was diligently steering a ship that wasn’t moving.

“We are getting the next batch of prisoners tomorrow,” Gopher said . “Since we lost Abigail, they are shorting us. Just three this time” .

“Gopher? Wait, please,” Paul begged, backing away toward the kitchen . “I swear I won’t talk. I can’t handle another dose” .

Gopher didn’t answer. He simply watched the screen as Laura Emzara smiled at the green light on her terminal, safe within the comfort of her lie.

“Stay away from me!” Paul’s voice echoed down the hall, but Gopher had already muted the feed .

THE END