“Monitor,” we say, “how many years until it is safe to go outside again?”
It will not be possible in your lifetime, it says.
“Monitor,” we say, “please answer the question.”
There is not sufficient data to precisely answer the question.
Perhaps the monitor is wrong. Perhaps it will, in the end, be safe for us to leave, or if not for us, for those who come after us: for the Vs, the Ws, the Xs, the Ys, and the Zs.
And what will we do when we reach the end of our alphabet? Will we move beyond it, invent new letters, new systems of designation, to mark those who come after? Or will we circle viciously back to begin again?
It is time for us to create our descendants. We set about our task, remembering how we were instructed by Tore and Ture. Our memory of the sequence is more vague and partial than we would like, but time has gone by and we are older; of course our memory is tarnished.
Unnr describes the sequence as he remembers it, and then, taking hold of the mouth myself, I describe it as I remember it. Between the two of us, we seem to have most of it.
We take our body and go in search of the tablature. It is where we remember it being, in the same room and in the same spot, and the squares of rust outlining its footing make it clear it has never been moved, or at least not moved in a very long time. We go from there to the preservation chamber, and though the chamber inside is fully functional, bitterly cold, it is empty. There is no material.
Perhaps there is another preservation chamber, says Uttr.
But why would there be another such chamber? There was no other chamber before, I am sure of it, and yet together we propel the body in search of it. We search through the warren for another preservation chamber and find only the rubbish and disjecta of all those who came before, the dwindling supplies, the blocked, dirt-filled passages. These latter we dig out, slowly and surely, and we cannot understand why they would have been blocked, until our shovel cuts through the wall at the back of one to reveal a glimpse of sunlight and open air.
Quickly, heart pounding, holding our breath, we retreat. We don the suit and return and fill the tunnel again, packing the dirt in tight. We return to the heart of the warren and there strip and scrub the body clean. A few hours later, we are vomiting a yellow fluid that slowly colors red. By nightfall, we are stumbling and dizzy and experiencing a great fatigue.
And now what do we do? Do we wait here, exhausted, on our bed, until we either die or heal? If we die, there will be no more hope for us; everything will end there. There will only be the monitor, damaged but attentive, waiting until its power source expires.
We cannot risk waiting until we know if we are dying or merely sick. We must, Uttr tells me, I tell Unnr, make a last effort, a final search.
“Monitor,” we say from my bed, “where shall we go to find more material?”
Define: material.
“That which is needed to generate another person,” we say.
Query: what do you mean by “person”?
I have that unsettling feeling of hearing something I have already heard before. And yet this is the first time I have had this conversation. We, I mean. Not I, we.
Or no, only I. For one of us is gone now, slumbering, sleeping. Where has he gone? Perhaps he will come back, perhaps not. What a strange, terrible thing to again be alone.
Query, repeats the monitor, what do you mean by “person”?
“What do you mean by person?” I ask slowly, and the words as I say them sound familiar.
It responds, Bipedal, an individual thought process enmeshed in a body, procreated through the fertilization of an ovum by a sperm and its subsequent development in a womb.
I think this over. There is much of what it says that I cannot understand, words that I think I should know but that I do not. “Me,” I finally say. “The material to make a person like me.”
The monitor’s aperture opens wider as it regards me for a long time. I might think it has ceased to function were it not for the light blinking beside the aperture.
But you, it finally says. By what definition are you a person at all?