A Good Male
by John Knych
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
“Where’s the body?” Mother blustered into the tent adjoining the hydroponic gardens, an hour after Jig had left.
“I let him run.”
Mother scowled, her flabby face flushed and sweaty.
I was sitting on the ground with daughter, playing with her magnetic blocks. I noticed that one of them had tiny, strange markings, but was pulled out of my observation by Mother’s scathing voice.
“Of course you did. Always complicated, ever since you were a spoiled girl.” I wrapped daughter in my arms and lifted her up as I stood. She nestled into my neck and glared at Mother. They had never bonded.
“He was a good male.”
“Listen to you. A good male. Pathetic. He’s nothing but a water strider.”
“He never caused any problems. He loved daughter. He loved me.”
“How sentimental to believe males can feel love. But you were mistaken to allow her to form memories of him. I eliminated your father before you were three, as the E.S.P. prescribes.”
“My generation is doing things differently than yours. We believe fathers during the early years can be beneficial for development.”
“Your generation is weak, idealistic, and blind.”
Ignoring Mother’s unflappable prejudice, I continued: “Will you feed daughter while I hunt Jig? I don’t expect to return until dinnertime. He’s resourceful.”
“Still calling him by his pet name? Disgusting. Your hunting won’t be necessary.”
“Why not?” But I already knew the answer to the question and felt my insides clench.
“I knew you’d be weak and let him run. I put out a public hit.”
“Mother! Do you care nothing about my reputation?”
“Your reputation was already tainted by letting him raise your daughter to this age! And I don’t trust you to finish the job.”
Daughter began to sob.
“I can’t believe you! You promised never to interfere in my couplings!”
Daughter was now writhing and squirming in my arms. “I want Daddy!” she wailed. Mother’s face went pale with shock and horror.
“See what you’ve done?”
“She’ll forget this.”
“No, she won’t.”
* * *
I woke up with my throat on fire and my body bruised and sore. Gamsey was kneeling over me, his protuberant eyes trembling.
“He’s alive,” he said. “I can’t believe he’s alive.” Another man shuffled into my field of vision.
“This was a mistake, Gamsey. They will kill us all now.” Another man sidled next to the speaker.
“You have jeopardized us. Including the plugged-in ones. They won’t be able to flee.”
“What are you saying?” replied Gamsey. “Wake them up and take them with you.”
“We don’t have time. How could you do this? We should have let the women murder him.” I felt a heavy, mutinous air in the room. I leaned up and saw the two women with the red ponytails and orange face paint dead at my feet, their bodies burned by a laser or a flame projectile. Nearby were the dead bodies of the hunters.
“The sympathizers defended you,” said Gamsey, a wild light in his eyes as he gestured at their corpses. The accusatory speaker pointed in my direction while looking at the other men.
“He is just another male, not worth sacrificing us all.”
“Just another male?” Gamsey gawked and cleared his throat. “Have you not heard his story?”
“His story is noble, but it is just a story. Killing three hunters to protect him is condemning us all.” Gamsey put his bony hand on my shoulder and I had a flashback to him engaging in the same gesture at the door.
“Can you stand?”
“Yes.” He helped me to rise and looked around defiantly at the crowd. Half of them glared at me with loathing. The others were looking nervously at the open entrance.
“Just a story? How many of you have ever heard of man raising a daughter until the age of five?” None of them responded. “That is right. I did not think so.” He spat at the ground. “What are you water striders living for, besides seeing the next, wretched day?”
The men seemed sullen or embarrassed.
“Jig has a chance, a chance to leave behind his story for a daughter who will remember him. A chance to tell his story that could change the fates of men.” He turned towards me and nodded vigorously. I thought he was being overly zealous and naively idealistic, but I nodded back anyway. “I will protect Jig until he has accomplished his task. Those of you not prepared to help us, you may leave now.”
Half the room vacated, two of the men bringing along three of the plugged-in ones, who woke up screaming and weeping before falling unconscious and being hauled over shoulders and carried out.
“The journey to the rendezvous point for the R.O.A.M. upload will be dangerous,” Gamsey continued. “Are those of you here prepared to fight to the death for Jig?” The remaining men nodded their heads. “Then follow me.”
We left Hivingo and— ERROR IN UPLOAD — it’s been five hours since we left Hivingo and nobody has survived except me, Gamsey, and Torin. I feel my virtual uploads have been compromised.
We were huddled in the abandoned observatory on the summit of the mountain, waiting for the R.O.A.M. ships to pass. Old, decaying astronomy equipment and dead electronics surrounded us. Frayed wires and exposed piping hung from the ceiling like frozen cobwebs and metal stalactites.
Torin shook in fear. He pulled out a vaping device. “Feckstin?” he asked. Gamsey and I declined. Torin inhaled and shivered with delight. We looked up at the sky through the holes in the ceiling and continued to wait for the automated R.O.A.M. ships. Every twenty years they arrived, leaving their orbiting mother ships which passed the planet, and scanned the surface, obtaining data concerning their most successful social venture.
I was fourteen years old when the last ships came, but I was locked in the basement of a school during the visit. I remembered hearing the ships, the roar of the atmosphere being cut and the girls above us cheering, but that was it. I remembered wishing that I could somehow board the ships and leave this forsaken world.
“Here they come,” said Gamesy. A distant roar came from above. The mountain began to tremble. “Do you remember my instructions?”
“Yes.”
“Have you uploaded your final message?”
“Yes. But I think there was a failure to upload what occurred after we left Hivingo. And I don’t think I correctly uploaded the final message with the mission.”
“That is all right. You did what you could.”
At the horizon, a hundred spaceships descended from above. A sense of awe and yearning rose up within me.
“We are not alone for the spectacle,” said Torin. He began to laugh maniacally. I saw outside the windows a group of women approaching on all-terrain vehicles from below, hollering and screeching as they weaved around boulders and deteriorating piles of construction materials. More hunters. Their faces were painted purple and pink, and they were wearing protective armor.
I looked at a Gamsey for guidance. His grouper face was somber and determined. “Stay at the transmitter. We’ll hold them off as long as we can. Wait to upload until the ships are within range.”
“When is that?”
“You will know. The machine will inform you.” He stood up, grabbed Torin by the shoulder, and they ran out of the room and to a balcony. Shots were fired outside of the building. I focused on the device in front of me.
The R.O.A.M. ships were now almost overhead. I felt the upload device buzz and blink to signal a connection. I stared one last time at the ships through the holes in the ceiling, humanity’s awesome achievement, and sent my encrypted message. Then I turned off the machine, ran deeper into the building, and waited to die.
* * *
My mother never answered my questions about my father. I grew up with faded and distorted memories of who he was. If I ever pressed my mother for information about his identity, she grew angry. Little did she know that her reticence and ire only stoked my curiosity.
In a moment of weakness, she once let slip one piece of knowledge about my father. I was going through my old toys, trying to pick which ones I would give to my daughter and which ones I’d throw way, when she said, “Your father bought those magnetic blocks for you. He was a good male.” I kept them for my child.
Not long after, I was playing with my daughter and the magnetic blocks, thinking about my father giving them to me as a gift, when I noticed tiny, strange markings on one of the pieces. I used a magnifying glass to inspect it, and realized that it was a passcode for an encrypted network.
When my family was asleep that night, I accessed the network, which must have been coming from a hidden router in the house’s vicinity. It contained detailed, convoluted instructions from my father. They mapped out a route, virtual breadcrumbs for me to follow, to learn who he was.
For months I solved riddles and problems to discover the location of my father’s final upload, which he entitled, “Final Message for my Daughter.” Eventually, I learned that the location of the data wasn’t even on Kepler 618b, but on the R.O.A.M. ships that passed every twenty years. I considered myself lucky: I was twenty-four years old, and the ships would be passing the following year.
Many women consider the passing of the R.O.A.M. a spiritual experience, so it was not unusual for me to express to my friends and family that I’d be camping alone during the week of the passing.
A week before the passing, I took my backpack from beneath a floorboard in my room, prepared with a survival kit, and left for the journey without saying goodbye to anyone.
The clues my father left behind led to an abandoned observatory on the summit of a mountain. The only way to access the encrypted file on automated R.O.A.M. ships was through a specific type of receiver in the observatory.
On the morning of the passing, I arrived at the bottom of the mountain in front of a chain-link fence marked with radioactive symbols that blocked off an access road. I climbed through a hole in the fence and, since the crumbling road was littered with debris, found a parallel, beaten path. For two hours, I hiked through a gradually thinning industrial wasteland.
At the summit, inside the observatory, I found the receiver. With so much decaying equipment around me, I wondered why the place had been abandoned and not repurposed. I also thought about my father’s final moments. He must have died here while on the run.
The R.O.A.M. ships arrived. When they were overhead, my receiver connected with the archive and downloaded the hidden files. There were three batches of data.
The first batch contained videos and photos of me as a baby and a toddler: my father bouncing me on his knee in front of a mirror, helping me draw flora on a piece of paper, dancing to music. I watched them for hours. I noticed that my father and I had the same smile.
The second batch was a corrupted video file that detailed the last day of his life and how he had arrived at this location.
The third batch contained only a vocal recording. I played it and heard my father’s voice:
My daughter, my love. If you have made it this far, it means that you remember, it means that you care to learn. The purpose of leaving behind these files is to show you how much I loved you and to give you a mission. I hope the videos of us together have proven to you my love and how much I wanted to see you grow. Now I must share the mission with you:
Man is violent. Man is flawed. And man has been punished. While it is believed that the male is the seed of destruction for all human societies, that progress has been made on Kepler 651b, we must— ERROR IN UPLOAD
The recording ended. I replayed it again, and it stopped in the same location. For a minute, I sat there in corroded silence.
The star had set and the R.O.A.M. ships had departed. I realized, sitting there in the dusk, that I did not need to know what my father wanted me to do, nor the mission that he wanted to leave behind. I felt his love for me course through my being. My memories, enflamed and made vivid by the videos and his voice, were now palpable and real.
I knew the next step that I was going to take, the long path ahead sustained by love, the fight for man to exist peacefully alongside woman that I would begin. I wiped away tears, deleted all of the files, then made my way back down the mountain.
Copyright © 2024 by John Knych
