Post series: On the Origin of the Species

At first, Hannah was just fascinated by the changes she saw in her daughter, watching her baby evolve in a new and unexpected way. Like every first-time mother, Hannah would sit and watch her daughter for hours, enjoying her bursting life. She also read every book the colony had on record about babies and their development, as she wanted to do a good job at being a mother. And now, having watched her daughter closely only weeks after the attack, Hannah was sure Edith was not growing up normally.

And not long after that Hannah started changing as well.

Hannah hid the changes in Edith’s appearance from the other colonists. Because of her position as a nurse, it was quite easy. Hannah inspected Edith alone when no one else saw, stating the excuse of checking her at home for time constraints. On the day after she would file the fake results in her office unchallenged.

Hannah breastfed and washed Edith alone and had to manage the poor baby alone after the attack. Edith developed a monstrous temper seemingly overnight and when Edith started biting and scratching her, Hannah couldn’t make her stop.

The poor girl had been through so much and Hannah tried to be with her every moment she could. But the baby’s temper was frightening her, Hannah’s breasts and hands were slowly being covered by Edith’s bites and scratch marks. She broke the skin so many times it left gushing red marks on Hannah’s once flawless skin. Hannah cried in silence as her tears and blood mixed with her daughter’s.

 Thankfully during the day time, or what the settlers knew to be days on Dryad, Edith seemed to be no trouble at all. The baby slept through almost the entire 16 hours’ period like the angel she used to be before the attack.

The biting and scratching nightmare during feeding time didn’t really stop until Hannah started changing herself. After a while, Hannah realized it was Edith’s biting her and breaking the skin which started the changes in her own body.

Still, she kept the altercations in them both a complete secret. Hannah’s skin and hair were changing, Edith was taking on a different shape. It was easy at first when it was just Edith that needed hiding. But eventually, Hannah will run out of all the makeup she brought with her. Hannah tried to stay at home with Edith as much as she possibly could to avoid being seen and that also worked well for a little while.

Itzhak came home very late almost every night. Even weeks and months after the attack he was still joining the search teams whenever he could. Hannah encouraged it, so Edith was already in her room when he arrived.

So you see the changes were relatively easy to conceal, and for a while, she did very well. But then her makeup ran out and Hannah had meetings she couldn’t cancel. Eventually, someone will notice the green hue in her skin or the curved nature her hands were taking and trouble will start. 

She found she watched the changes appear in herself as if she was having an out-of-body experience like she took too many drugs and was having some kind of an endless bad dream. It was almost comic what a predictable ending her daughter and herself will have. Hannah could see it all as if it had already happened.

Itzhak will find her and Edith out soon enough and will then be compelled to kill them both. Hannah couldn’t see another way to spare herself and her baby a lynching by the colonists. There was another option of being kept alive as a research subject for the human’s research on how to survive what happened to her. Being a medicine practitioner herself, Hannah saw the value in that, but she would honestly rather die than become a lab rat. 

When the extent of Hannah’s treasonous actions will become common knowledge, Hannah and Edith will no longer be safe, let alone welcome, in the colony.

Hannah intentionally didn’t keep track of any of her daughter’s changes and consistently destroyed all records of her and her daughter’s vitals as soon as she got them. Those actions will have probably earned her their deaths.

As Hannah and her daughter were becoming something else, something not human, the colonists will probably want blood for no other reason than for the crushing of the happy dream of peaceful existence on Dryad. Hannah would be a perfect vent for their rage and desperation when they find her out.

In a few days, she will not be able to hide anymore. Her skin was changing into something green and slimy and her pupils were elongating and deepening their hues, Edith looked more like a tadpole than a baby with every passing day.

Looking at herself in the mirror one morning Hannah realized she couldn’t mask the changes anymore. She decided to take her baby and run. A panicked Hannah packed some food and clothes and went out into the jungle in order to disappear forever, not sure exactly where to go. It was fear more than anything that made her run, Hannah didn’t have a plan.

Walking deeper into the vegetation with its eerie music and dark humidity, something stopped her from leaving the track into the thick of the forest she walked once before. They couldn’t follow the river, that’s the first place The Watch would look.

No, Hannah and Edith would have to go into the vines. Taking that step out of civilization and into the jungle seemed suddenly very final. Standing on the edge of the living quarter and the wild green maze outside, she inhaled deeply and Edith growled. The vines stretched in their frames, seemingly making room for Hannah.

For the first time in her life she could smell how far the river was. It was calling her. She inhaled again but decided to wait before answering its call and crawling into the vines. Edith was wailing in her arms, trying to break free, the baby screeched in the dark and cold like an animal.

They had to leave the open road, anyone could hear and see them out here. Hannah found an open warehouse on the outskirts of the settlement and hauled up. Desperate and alone, she hopelessly waited for her husband and their deaths.

Itzhak showed up a few short hours later, frantic, he was terrified something had happened to his wife and child. He had the whole colony looking for them and was half out of his mind by the time he was nearing her. Feeling him approaching the creaky door, recognizing his smell out of a thousand new smells she was suddenly aware of, Hannah made a decision and stepped into the light.

She knew what she looked like, wild, disheveled, stranger to him than she had ever seemed before. Edith was hissing in her arms, her little talons pulling at Hanna’s green hair. Hannah was already crying when Itzhak ran towards her.

“Go ahead Itzhak, kill me, I won’t resist I promise.”

Hannah was determined to make him end it quickly.

“I’m begging you, I don’t want to be a lab rat and I don’t want to be lynched either. Just make sure I am dead before you kill the baby, Promise me before you kill her! I can’t – “

Hannah fell to her knees, putting her daughter carefully on the ground. Hannah saw Edith’s little face, she looked so cute, elongated lizard eyes but still so baby blue. “Goodbye my baby girl my lovely little girl, I loved you from the minute I knew you were inside me and I hope you felt it too, I really did try…” The rest was lost in her sobs.

His voice broken as well, endless minutes later, Itzhak spoke to her.

“Get up Hannah, I’m not going to kill anyone. Fuck Humanity baby, let’s take over this planet and live, I’m not giving up on either one of you. You are my wife and Edith is my daughter, change me as well Hannah, I’m with you forever.”

Hannah, Edith, and Itzhak survived, as did the rest of the colony, once they understood the inevitability of being one with us.

The search party walked the makeshift streets heading towards the river. The air was almost mute in Hannah’s ears as she walked with the rest of the searchers. She was out on the alien planet, looking for its monsters. The vines absorbed the sounds as the vegetation completely took over the surface. Within a few short steps, the small party left their budding civilization and its loud white noises far behind.  

They followed the river. The only paths carved through the greenery were made by the force of water as there were no animals to create animal tracks, or so they thought. The humans didn’t know yet where the creatures lived or moved so they started with searching places they could access.

Dryad had 48 moons which reflected its sun constantly, effectively keeping daylight constant above the canopy. The many clouds and endless rain were blocking some of the sunlight but could hardly control the jungle.

Deep under the canopy where the humans lived the sun was mostly blocked, seeing the sky was a great surprise for Hannah and a long-awaited delight. How she missed the sun. The constant darkness she lived in darkened her mind and she hadn’t noticed, not until she came into the light, looking for her daughter’s monsters.

Walking the bright green edges of the forest, the water whispering around her feet, Hannah felt in a trance. The sounds of the planet were clear and carried pure in the air, free of any vocal growls, they rang precise in her mind. Vines of all widths and colors had made an impenetrable wall to her left and right and she ravished the sights of the bright green ravine coming to life in the sharp yellow sunlight.

The bottom layers of the vines along the banks had been rotting away into compost for eons it seems, how many of them Hannah had no idea. A year here – that is, the time it takes Dryad to circle once around its star is 90 earth days thereabout. The years were short because Dryad was a big planet and its Sun a small one.

The dead plants at the base of the living walls lost their spectrum of green colors and took on a rainbow of dead earthly tones. Browns and greys, purples and mustards. Beneath the green canopy the planet was so much more colorful than Hannah ever imagined. The walls of vegetation stretched for meters above her, as far as she could see, swallowing all sunlight in its hungry pigments, leaving only a slither of  direct light Hannah saw crisscrossing across the water. Everything was so different and alien, how could they ever hope to find anything in this mass?

These animals, these taloned monsters, stayed away for years. Their attack was a complete surprise and everyone in the colony hoped it would not repeat itself again. Hannah, as well, hoped to find a weak enemy if they had to find an enemy at all.

Far better would be to find nothing despite all the searches. That would mean the two species could be separated completely, each of them ignoring the other, it was a big world. Slowly, the other species will be forgotten. Out of sight out of mind.

Hannah knew the people were angry and hurt. The attack on her daughter felt like a personal attack on each of them and they all took it to heart. They felt that after all these years thinking Dryad was the perfect planet, everything crumbled to dust the night her little Edith was attacked. Hannah knew this and the fact that if push comes to shove, humanity will do whatever it can to survive. All the aliens will have to die. If this beautiful world will have to be wiped clean, so be it. It was life above all for the humans.

The planet was full of sound even though it was almost devoid of life, Hannah was wrong thinking it was silent. The vines strained against each other and were making a moaning haunting sound as the wind picked up. The rippling gurgling of the water gushed in the gorge and bounced off of the living walls with every step she took along the shallow banks. The life of Dryad all around her made the air vibrate with a non-stop hypnotic melody. How precious was this universe, how terrifying and unforgiving to us.    

The vines when rotted looked like old bones even though Hannah knew it was just the exposed inner layers of their alien cellular structure. The sight still made her think of her own death, how one day she will die, and so will her daughter, and so will everyone else walking beside her.

The sides of the river suddenly looked like a grave, bones upon bones lay on top of each other, the colors of decay adding to the effect, receding down ever browning cliffs of doom. She must be mad, Hannah thought, walking a strange planet instead of nursing her own daughter back to health after a vicious alien attack.

Everyone in the colony was very sorry for the little girl being attacked but children were fragile and the first to suffer from any conflict or disease, unfortunately, they were usually the first to go. Many lost children and pregnancies on the voyage over and during the first few hard years of building the colony. You try your best but you can never really fully protect the children, every mother knows that.

Still, the common feeling in the community was that of hope. Most of the settlers thought that if Hannah’s daughter would survive, it would prove that life on Dryad was possible after all.

The searches continued all the while Hannah nursed little Edith back to health, but nothing new was ever found. Weeks and then months passed while Dryad kept its secrets safe.

As the days after the attack lengthened and no other encounters were reported, the settlers settled into the assumption that the whole thing was a one-time-only incident. It seemed a fragile coexistence was not impossible, as the aliens were clearly unable or just disinterested in hurting the humans any further.

Edith eventually was well enough to be released from the infirmary even though Hannah knew deep inside that she wasn’t. She wasn’t better. Edith was infected by that animal somehow and was changing right before her mother’s grieving eyes. Hannah watched in horror as her child was growing a bit more alien every day.

Alien life forms found on planets with liquid water on their surface were proving to be quite a problem to the new colonies. That life actually wiped out almost all of the colonies from the second wave of the Great Migration. The interaction with most local wildlife was short and bloody and whole settlements died within hours from disease or sudden and violent attacks.

These deadly attacks were sometimes commenced by the alien life, no one was denying that, but sometimes it was conceived by the settlers themselves. It was believed some settlers of the second wave saw it as a necessary eradication method to rid the colony of alien infections, or maybe they got sick somehow and turned mad, inflicting pain and mayhem on each other without a logical reason. Either way, very few of the settlements survived the first meeting of the species prevalent on the second wave of The Migration.

The ones that did, had to wipe out the exotic life as much as they possibly could in order to survive. In their rage and hunger for life, the colonists might not have extinguished all alien life they encountered, but they certainly tried.

The Migrant fleet spaceships that bore the humans all across the skies were magnificent beasts. A few kilometers long, hundreds of meters wide, they filled the ice fields turned into space fields of the old world. The best of human technology, their last hopes for the future, each spaceship held thousands of people on each trip off of The Earth.

There were hundreds of spaceships on each of the waves and their numbers grew as more and more were being built for each wave off the ground.

The fleet traveled through countless light-years and peppered the settlers in droplets of survival pods on their new planets. The new settlements had means of communication, construction, and medicine built into the pods themselves. The little pods were everything a human being could need on a new planet, except for a way back.

Hannah and Itzhak studied their whole lives to be admitted to the colonizing fleet and had left the earth on the Fourth Wave heading for the vegetative world LV-420 aptly dubbed by its new colonizers as “Dryad”.

Hannah was an A&E nurse while in the fleet and promoted to head nurse a few years later when they dropped. Itzhak was a botanist and worked in the greenhouses aboard the migration ship when they dropped he harvested and studied local fruit in the jungle.

They were happy. Edith was one of the first babies born in the colony and their firstborn. Itzhak had built a round cot for his daughter, it fitted the roundhouses they all lived in. The cot was made from vine and local wood, the same as the houses. The buildings sat on heavy stilts trying to escape the ever damp soil of the jungle and Itzhak made the cot with tiny stilt legs to match.

It was that round homemade cot that Hannah saw turned upside down one morning as she came in to feed her daughter. Edith was still in it, thankfully, quiet and completely terrified. When Hannah ran towards her bleeding daughter and picked her up, she jolted little Edith into sudden heartbreaking sobs. The cot, as well as the stilted houses, were not enough to keep the monsters out.

Edith’s back was cut with three long scratches, deep and ugly, they would leave her scarred for life. The house camera when played back showed a single talon, curved and cruel, pulling the bedding off the cot sometime before dawn.

The creature accidentally hooked its nails on her daughter’s back as it went through the cot. Like a piece of leaf stuck to a shoe, or an annoying bug you want to shoo, the animal violently shook Edith off its talons, tossing the baby to the side of the room. It was out the window in seconds and gone into the night.

The Watch started searching for the creature right away. The Watch was just a small after-work detail up until then, after the attack however, Hannah saw them recruiting everyone. Even Hannah joined the searches eventually, when she thought she could leave Edith for a few hours.

After those early weeks in which Edith seemed to be recovering well enough, Hannah felt she had to do something more to vent her rage and helplessness and went out into the jungle with The Watch, determined to find the animals that attacked her daughter.

Hannah hadn’t been much outside the colony, being mostly buried in her lab, but she still wanted to experience her new planet for herself.

Hannah loved Dryad, she just didn’t know it all that well until her own daughter was attacked. Hannah didn’t mind the water clogged air or the high humidity and its wet heat. Sure, it was uncomfortable most days, but every time she stepped outside the air-conditioned lab, Hannah would stop still and let the heat soak back into her once-again frozen bones.

Hannah and everyone else who was born on earth was born into the forming new reality of the human race in an ice age. That meant hunger, death, and most of all, the cold. Hannah has never been warm for a day in her life before she came to Dryad. However hot and uncompromising the weather was, it was above all and finally, hot.

The colonists decided to name their planet Dryad after a tree goddess in ancient Greek mythology. Hannah walked down the center trail of the colony and off the road into the silent canopy. The green of the exotic vines swallowed her whole and Hannah realized they had picked the perfect name. 

Once upon a time, many years ago, Hannah traveled to a brand new and far away World.

A humid jungle planet that was empty of alien life, it was nonetheless bursting with exotic kinds of vegetation. Having visible water on its surface it presented an alluring target for brave young colonists.

The human race was in the middle of what later will be known as The Great Migration. They had no hope but to leave and start again somewhere else so the human race planted their seeds all over the galaxy in a desperate act of survival and called the action Great.

Just a mere few decades before the Great Migration was conceived the Earth was changing in a way that could not support human life as it was descending into perpetual winter. Chain reactions resulting from human actions started centuries ago had caused an exponential and unstoppable change on the surface of The Earth.

The temperature inside the atmosphere that has been rising slowly since the 1900s was causing the permafrost along the globes once permanently frozen edges to melt a little bit more every year.

Unknown to anyone, the permafrost in the north and south of the planet held beneath it a million years’ worth of rotting pools and their vapors. This gruesome mass was made up of dead animals and plants buried in vast fields of death over the eons.

The gasses this mass grave omitted were luckily trapped under the permanent ice for all these years, but no more. Once five percent of all the permafrost on Earth melted one too warm a summer, it released to the atmosphere a huge amount of greenhouse gasses. Their levels in the earth’s atmosphere hit a crucial point and a few short years of never before seen climate disasters were the prologue to a permanent change in The Earth’s climate.

The countries that suffered the most, mainly the Northern Hemisphere ones, gave everything they had for the construction of the first Migration Fleet. Their sacrifice saved the human race. Even though some would say, it was the actions of the very same countries that caused the climate change in the first place.

The deal was simple and thousands took it. Hannah and Itzhak, newlyweds and desperate, went along for the ride.

Each migrant committed to working through the first tough ten years of the settlement unpaid, and if and how they survived, they were to be rewarded by receiving a share of the produce and a piece of the land.

Tiny satellites that were deployed prior to any colonists’ drop-offs supplied ample information from above for years in some cases. Later on, they will provide a means of communication for the new settlements, but first, they brought new data on each possible location and this one looked unbelievably good.

LV-420 was enveloped in comforting signs of life; it had lush hills and valleys that were cut only by enormous rivers along its landscape and the temperatures read 30º-50ºC, not very comfortable but still extremely livable. There was no movement seen by the satellites in the thick green below, orbiting the planet for a decade before the actual colonization began, strengthening the suggestion that this Planet had no life forms but plants on it.

A great find, an amazing location if it was true and Hannah and Itzhak pulled more than a few strings to get on this particular Colony. The planet known only as LV-420 was a perfect destination and was to be their new home, that is, if their colony survived.

Every migrant had a real chance of survival. Everyone who left on The Migration believed it to some degree, or they never would have left.

The odds of survival on the colonies, unfortunately, were not very high and by the time Hannah was getting ready to ship out the rates stood at a sixty percent total destruction rate. A huge improvement after the first year of the Great Migration, the one no one survived.

The first wave of colonists were sent to the dwarf planets inside the Earth’s Solar System and died out completely within a few short months. Their deaths asserted the fact that it was impossible to inhabit a planet with no presence of water in its atmosphere. Means of making, storing or reclaiming water from waste all eventually failed, and the entirety of the first wave died from thirst. The earth watched them perish in horror and desperation from above.

For the second wave of The Migration, the search widened through the galaxy to much further away Solar Systems, further than ever before thought possible, but specifically to planets with visible water on their surface.

A Planet with no animals or plants was preferable, exotic life proved fatal to the colonists almost every time. Unfortunately, alien life could not be avoided on most plants selected for colonization because water usually meant life. It turns out that life pops up almost everywhere where liquid water was found, alien life that was inhospitable and almost always fatal to the newly arrived settlers.