Chapter 0

From staggering canyons overlooking the scrubby brush and cracked earth of the sprawling desert under the eerie moonlight, we pressed on.

“I must be fucking crazy.”

An errant thought. I muttered it to myself before I even registered thinking it. Only once I heard my own words’ quiet echo against the canyon did their meaning strike me. I would never have said it to their faces, or permitted myself to think it.

53 hours, no water. Pedro’s left thumb was dangling limply from his hand, the joints shattered and bones pulverized from the boulder that shifted as I scrambled above him up the side of the canyon, and he was grinning at me, pointing off into the distance at specks of light in the middle of growing structures with that dangling thumb of his. The nail was black and split down the middle. Pedro’s hands used to be stout and strong, deeply creased with his years of shaping steel. I thought before it was crushed that nothing could be so powerful. Small stones crunched behind me as Mia looked over my shoulder at the alluring swirl Pedro pointed at. 

“We’re close,” she said excitedly, and ominously raspily. She bounced nimbly up and down on her toes, “We could be there by morning if we keep walking, I can hear them from here.” She wasn’t doing so well herself, I noted, dark red, almost black, blood trickling down her knee. Her luminous black hair was wizened with chalky streaks of dust.

I would tell you my dry throat ached from the hours on end sucking moisture left in the nopal cactus we cooked and the small store of jackfruit we had remaining. I would tell you about the dust that collected in my lungs that I hacked up and that left my spit tasting like iron and grit. I would tell you about the harsh sun and the sweat that dug little brown trenches through the grime on my neck. But these aren’t my words. I hardly even remember these things. These, I realize, are what I should have felt. Instead, I was high on the allure of the journey; I was in a much greater organism.

Instead of registering these feelings (as if it was a choice), I followed the direction from Pedro’s gorey hand and I saw what awaited us. It was beautiful. Little shadows scurried around pillars of light, building and shaping. They were galaxies deep in the eyes of the night back in with my Chiapas rainforest. Like the chatter of the birds from branch to branch. My stomach flipped inside out with excitement, I promptly forgot my brief utterance into the canyon. The new world was unfolding before more, I felt an unquestionable urge to leap from the edge of the canyon into its depths. Flickering stars of our brothers and sister cells, building and shaping new structures pervaded my mind like an insatiable itch. I should have felt exhausted, but it did not register. I would not sleep until we reached those cells.

Then, looking just beyond the encampments of bustling cells, was the unknown. Looking i

nto it was like looking over the edge of a canyon. Your feet are at the edge and one slips slightly and lets loose a cascade of pebbles over the edge. Their fading echoes as they fall over the abyss seem to take years to come to a hollow rest. Glancing at the unknown, that same fear was evoked in me.

I looked down across the steep face we had just summited. Small bands of travelers like us slowly scrambled up the face, assembled and sent from the same commanding wave as we had received. Sometimes we merged with them, traveling as one while it suited us and breaking away as it grew cumbersome. One group traveled through the arid desert mountains with us for a week. I never learned their names, but I remember them fondly. One woman taught me to prepare nopal cactus. She transmitted where to find them, how to tend to them in dry sandy soil, how to propagate them from cuttings, and how to harvest the pads in the late morning, and most importantly, to communicate with them in a rudimentary way. Her knowledge spread in fireworks, her words were sweet and intoxicating. But when the desire was given to depart, suddenly we repulsed each other, and we parted happily. 

Slowly, sensing a deeper ache of weariness, a stench of lactic acid, and an urge to pour cool water on our wounds, I recoiled from the rabid cliff of excitement.

“We can’t push on like this. We need some rest if we want to make it there, still functional.”

“But don’t you see it? I’m doing fine. Pedro, I know you feel fine. It should just be a night of walking away, and we will lose more water in the day anyway.” Pedro nodded slightly, but largely remained silent, staring with distant fascination at his dangling thumb as if he just noticed it was crushed.

“Mia, I know you’re not fine. I know better than you. I can feel the dehydration and if you were less absorbed even you would feel it. We sleep at least two hours, then we start again,” I said firmly, my best shot at a concession a mere two hours rest. 

So we set up our meager camp, I cooked some cacti, and we disengaged for two hours, letting webbed fungal fingers try to heal our wounds. 

It may be best now, to remind you a little about our history. You have already seen the chrysalis, but you may not remember. Such is the fallacy of memory before it takes hold. It began as a small, hard, round little ball under the skin of my palm when I sensed you were coming into the world. You grew, and it grew small delicate striations under my translucent skin. When your mother gave birth to you, a stem unfurled, it erupted from my palm and held you for hours. I could do nothing else. I fed you and rocked you, and the chrysalis in my palm emanated near you. Then, it withered and fell from my hand onto the hard earth. They grow on our trees, too. Little spores of the chrysalis make their way into the leaves, into the fibers of the trees, into the space between the grains of sand in the desert and into microscopic crawling nematodes in the dirt. They metamorphosize.

Hagard, we reached the little galaxies of workers adorning the border with the menacing unknown as the sun began. When Mia led us to one of the steel structures, other cells flocked to her instinctively. They gave us water from the river which I sensed was nearby, flowing out of the mountains towards the turquoise Caribbean waters, which gently lapped at white sandy shores hundreds of miles away. It was a calm day along most of the coastline. As the mellow sun began to awaken the little pocket mice with orangish glowing shadows, we filled up with the cool water the other cells supplied us. As we drank, Chris, sent from the eastern coast, told us of their progress so far. 

“I got here pretty early on, and’ve been organizing every day since. About 100 clusters at this morning’s count. 20 came in just yesterday. Each one of them chugs about ten gallons when they get here, and we have to put them in the pueblos with someone transmitting rest so they don’t go out and try to build. I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you guys come around.” She gestured to Mia, “We don’t have nearly enough organizers to handle this flood.”

The job of cells like Mia is to transmit, and transmit fast. It was a blissful, thunderously rainy day many months ago when her radio waves bounced off the muddy orange slopes and thick dripping canopy of my home, calling me. 

“What are we building?” Pedro asked curiously.

“You see the unknown?” She glanced briefly at the wretched and dark impasse beyond the twinkling metal structures and the corner of her mouth puckered slightly like she quietly swallowed acid. “It’s been leaking.” 

I interjected naively, “It always does that. Even back in Chiapas I could hear it leak.” 

“Then you should know. We’re building defenses.”