This is a journal. This was my life.
It started with a touch. The following events spiralled out from that moment. I had been trying to get close to him all evening, holding dirty plates or glasses as I stood, waiting. He hadn’t noticed me — I could see the fibres on his jacket, the movement of his hair in the breeze.
Until, under the haloes of cloud, he elbowed me in the side. I fell. His stone face shifted from anger to recognition: I was young, a woman. His people formed a quiet ring around us, backs turned, as he helped me off the mica floor and away from my own reflection.
Maybe, by then, he knew who I was. He never did tell me afterwards. I’m convinced all he knew of me was my context: the way my clothes moved beneath the splashing fountains and designer scents, my point in time and space.
I could see the vastness in his eyes, his empire focusing in on me. I hadn’t been invited, wasn’t on any guest or staff list, and he didn’t seem to care. I knew then that he wanted to own me, and I knew that to submit was my only lifeline. I had lost all self-respect, all notions of family or heritage, and saw a future threaded through one of the richest men on Earth, his mines and factories and cloning facilities.
I was a journalist, and I thought I had a story. I was naïve. I wasn’t really me.
She was born below the castle and the water to a mother who looked just like her. She grew up amongst the gardens and the leaves, trailed by her billowing dress of carved marble. The mornings were all mist and light, all hanging avenues of brambles and blooms.
She breathed it in, nourishing. Her hair would catch and entangle itself in a stem or twig before being plucked painlessly, like a story, from her scalp. Others would fall to dissolve in one of the lakes or rivers, their chains of amino acids dissolving in the primordial soup. The double helixes would unspool themselves, molecules breaking down into base components. She never noticed these details, the soft edges of her world.
Others out there seem so complete. They act like they know where they’re going.
Her world was a limited one, with walls and a ceiling, but that sense of the infinite prevented any desire for open spaces. Instead, she would sit in her room, feeling even that space to be too big, and build a blanket fort where, deep in her castle, the universe would reel inside her.
In the end he fell for me, and I fell for him. I never could tell if those first few months were actual infatuation, or just the results of our plotting to be with each other. I don’t think it mattered in those moments of passion, when I would raise my arms in anger, out amongst the boulders and hills. Or when he would take my arms in his, feeling the pores with all the attention of an engineer. I knew he wanted to clone me, but the extent of those desires remained unseen.
He was forever in my presence like a wall of rock. Faced with my inability to climb, I put the rest of the world to one side. My story was my own reincarnation. I felt myself changing. He took me to his high country station in New Zealand via a system of private jets and personal airports. I had turned a corner and found myself lost, alone in that house and surrounded by monoliths of stone — with few guests or maids, and all my outgoing calls and internet traffic monitored. I was where I wanted to be, but had no choice except to turn inwards. In my reporting I was always going to be my own subject, so I began my autoethnographic study, using the empty stretches of time and land around me. I strung together a narrative, starting from my ancestry and genetic makeup — the beginning of life itself — through to those idle days of pale light that composed my childhood. I sat, and I plunged inwards, noting each year, each day, as I examined my journals and photos. All the dreams I have ever had. I was moulding my life in my hands.
I would wake in the sun, damp with sweat, and walk out into the golden hillside and feel like it was all meaningless. The dew in the browning grass, the flies like planes in atmospheres of their own.
At times it was only the salt of the earth, his sweat, that seemed worthwhile. The rest of reality fell through my fingers like so many small stars, concepts, ideals. Taking a walk, catching a movie after he returned home. Sitting and moving in two directions simultaneously, away from and into me. Discovering, with more and more precision, the moment I was trapped within. So went the study of myself.
She would wander the paths of her world wondering why so much of it was in her image. The valleys like folded skin and the rivers like arteries beneath. Turn, and the ground shifts beneath her. Reorientated, as if taking one more step would untangle all these frayed threads of her heart.
The strands of a billion decisions. This world, her ship of one, with all its interior inconsistencies.
Back in her bedroom, things seem distant. The sense of security only lasts until she looks in the mirror, blinking her purple eyes, trying to touch the glass.
That woman is in the third person. She is real, with a body and eyes and tears. She breathes and feels her vellus hairs shift, the molecules rearranging along her back and neck. Invisible. Can you see the difference between those two skin cells? How about those other two? She can. That is her.
He would come home and start a fight about something geopolitical and abstract in nature. It was more interesting to be outside at night amongst the flowers by the lake, listening to the frogs burble away in morse code.
I continued to turn myself into a story, a textbook, an article.
The problem was that he had access to all of that, too.
It was then, when I was deepest inside myself, that they invaded. Now I see that it wasn’t so much a ’they’ and there wasn’t so much an ‘invasion’, but just another process. One that may even have been inevitable.
We fought valiantly for a few years. He, the overachiever, was absent from every public event and opportune wartime venture.
I, meanwhile, finished examining my mind and matter and felt like a newborn, taking my first shaking steps with fresh skin and a clear conscience. As if emerging from some drawn-out hibernation, the world had changed drastically in my absence.
An uncountable number of ships of pointed crystal had approached Earth, falling out of deep space on all sides and splintering to hang in orbit. Half the human population was killed in the first year.
People died in the streets with blood like tiny gemstones encrusting the ground around them. Children, animals, all life and intelligent systems below or above ground were hunted down and petrified; rendered as fossils. Even the computers were turned to dust. They, too, were considered too intelligent by our enemy.
I leveraged my position in his absence, spinning what was left of his empire into a weapon. I placed myself on the front line, down in the trenches or on the edge of the atmosphere. My determination impressed as I rendered them obsolete. Because nobody could kill them. They were death itself. And I had already lived my life.
Projectile weapons still worked. So did heat, if there was enough of it. But we had to be selective about which cities to defend, so as always, the poor suffered the most. There would be pictures, drone footage from Syria or Bangladesh, of thousands of kilometres of dry, lifeless, soil. Of skeletons and scattered bones, whole families together on their death beds. The air, barely breathable, filled with an asbestos-like substance.
Most of the people from my old life had been killed in the first weeks — the nights of fiery plane crashes, surging mobs at guarded borders — when there was still a fighting chance. I thought of that as I swallowed sleeping pills, deep in the rattling core of a battleship, in a bunk room with fifty others.
She closes her eyes and dreams of the solid universe, as if she lives underground and can dig in any direction for a billion years and only ever find more dirt. In that universe she feels comfortable; more than she does now, face to face with nothing.
Nothing. Vacuum now constituted her being as much as those first cascading particles from the big bang, as much as that fluid chain of events, from water to land to tree. As much as she ever wished he did. She was no longer a person, but instead, a process. As much as anything ever was. Because time is physical, remember; it hangs heavy.
Think of all that cannot be imagined. Next, write it down. Burn it and forget about it. Send it off to sea in a bottle. Send it across the world. Then, hope desperately, with everything you don’t have, that it will come back to you. Spend ten thousand years waiting by the shoreline; another combing through lost letters. These things we do with words. These things that were done to her.
This is what she feels as she explores frontier after frontier; sheet after sheet of time unfolding in open space.
It was because he failed to own her in any meaningful sense that he set about replicating their relationship in art. He was new to art for art’s sake, to that part of his personality, but figured it was just another skill he could derive through sheer determination. That, and it was just one project. He wanted to see how much he could get away with without anyone really knowing what he was doing. None of the biologists, evolutionary experts, or physicists could grasp the sheer scale of it. The areas of consultation were too broad, the end goal too unique, even for a passion project of someone of his eccentricity. She, as she was, was simply not enough.
So, he set in motion her rebirth.
Not on Earth nor in any sort of lab, neither now nor in any comprehensible number of years. He left those details to chance. His job was to provide the right conditions for life itself to develop, from nothing, into her. Someone like her.
The ambition of it all was like an entire ecosystem rushing on a new high.
Her ark, during the first part of its flight, would be as simple as possible. All of it emergent from first principles and few moving parts. No AI or computational capability until necessary: all low-level, the data stored in stone to be read, physically, a billion years from now. Information would speed through valves and pipes, drain from reservoirs, and pool into ponds until, floating forgotten, the ship will find the right planet and all the millions of variables will fall into place.
So focused, he was oblivious to the world around him and became frustrated when his experts took longer and longer to respond.
A life is never a singular thing. No beginnings, middles, or ends. Not even a transition between the varying states. No, it just is, like these words: far too concrete for their own good, too much like carving phrases into a marble tablet using only a toothpick. She is not abstract.
He thinks: I did this for her.
We go about our lives not grasping the true size of things. After all these years of tumbling slowly through the cosmic dust, chain after chain of events that lead to now. She sits at home and works or colours or goes out for a run having forgotten the rest of the universe, passing people in the street that wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for her. Maybe we are better off not knowing. That the human race was killed off a long, long time ago.
I found out he had died, alone, towards the end of the third year of the war. He had remained absent, as if he were afraid, for some reason, of confronting me. I’d been promoted to general, but there were so few people left alive it hardly mattered.
The news made its way to me as I prepared my last stand, setting up the last of the trigger missiles and timed explosives at the bases of several dams. Others around the globe were preparing similar traps for long after death had taken them.
I had forgotten about him. All that intensity of our early honeymoon phase had vanished, aged away in the war.
I commandeered a fighter ship and flew to the asteroid belt to see what I could make of his remains. To see if I could spit on his grave. Maybe it was because I was fighting my last fight. Maybe it was because I realised I still hated him.
I found, instead, a vast and empty shrine to myself: a seething mass of cables with flickering ends of electricity, all knotted around an asteroid shaped like an egg, itself over a thousand kilometres long. He’d reduced me to an ark. Inanimate now but ready, one day, to facilitate the necessary conditions for life. My life.
His body lay in the middle of his factory complex. Here was all the industrial might that had been absent from the war effort. It’s not like it would have made a difference. Around him, permanently displayed on the monitors, was all the ephemera of my autoethnographic study; that version of me from before the war.
It was like walking into a child’s nursery.
It wasn’t like I understood the engineering, but I understood him, and I understood self preservation.
And I didn’t want that version of myself to be the one to last.
I am a being built from time, a billion years old. I feel it in my every cell like crystals bursting forth, each one containing the sum of my evolutionary processes. I am trying desperately to be alive, reconstructing myself from so many words. I persist and rewrite the world in my wake.
Those who killed us, simply, no longer are. I outlived them by being dead. Time, I used it as a weapon.
2024