All Things Bright and Beautiful

Could Eden be right here all along?

Written by: Gemma Church

Illustrated by: Janelle Barone

I crawl out of the Lykken-Spiropulu wormhole like, well, a worm pushing itself free of the wet earth. I lie on the mossy floor as the vortex swirls to nothingness behind me, trying to catch my breath. My heart feels heavy.

No matter what anyone tells you, travelling through a Lykken-Spiropulu is nothing like floating through a tunnel of stars.

For starters, you don’t float. You have to swim through a substance with a viscosity that’s between treacle and wet concrete. It’s exhausting. Even through your breathing mask, the air tastes as bitter as gunpowder, making your tongue burn. Your survival suit constricts to counteract the pressure difference until you feel like a tube of toothpaste, squeezed to bursting point.

The stars do twinkle though. That’s the only thing that resembles the training simulations to become a Terra Assessor. And, yes, we all know that the stars shouldn’t twinkle in outer space. But those stars are projected onto the interior of your visor because if you actually saw what was inside a Lykken-Spiropulu then your head would pop like a meat-filled balloon.

Luckily, my head is in one piece when I arrive on Terra-2643. My breathing slows. My heart still feels heavy. But my heart always feels heavy.

Yet, I feel a sense of calm come over me, unlike anything I’ve experienced on any other planet. Tiny slices of blue sky cut through the branches, peppered with clouds. Insects buzz. A gentle warbling filters through my audio system, cocooning me in birdsong. The white flowers on a nearby shrub seem to form a smiley face. Involuntarily, I smile back.

My suit lights up as thousands of sensors and devices spring into life. A series of charts and figures appear on the flexi-screen embedded in my suit’s left-hand sleeve. The readouts are encouraging.

The ambient temperature on Terra-2643 is just right. Not too hot. Not too cold.

The same applies to the surface pressure and cosmic radiation levels. Not too high. Not too low.

Even the air has just the right balance of nitrogen, oxygen and other trace gases.

Humidity: an optimal 42%.

Everything is just right.

True Goldilocks-style.

I hit the record button on my sleeve and speak clearly into the screen. “Safely arrived on Terra-2643. Initial diagnostics indicate that partial terraforming is complete and the biodiversity on Terra-2643 is far more abundant than any other planet we’ve seen.”

Terraforming is a complex, multi-staged process. A miracle, really. It begins decades before a Terra Assessor is assigned to evaluate the planet’s readiness to introduce human life.

First, a Mother System is sent through a wormhole to a planet deemed to have the right mix of features to harbour life. The Mother System arrives with a range of composite materials, printing equipment, base organic matter and other essential resources.

Then, The Mother System establishes a Nurturing Environmental Surface Territory, or NEST. Once the NEST is prepared, The Mother System utilizes advanced 3D printing technology to create the first generation of Evolutionary Robots, Evo-Bots, to grow, learn and adapt to their new environment.

Evo-Bots are designed with a hybridized hardware-software evolutionary architecture, enabling them to adapt to the environmental conditions of the target planet. The bots operate similarly to young organisms, learning and evolving through a reward-based system managed by The Mother System. Successful Evo-Bots, who adapt to the environment, make their genetic code available for reproduction, ensuring that each subsequent generation is more adept at surviving in the new environment.

Over time, the continuous adaptation of Evo-Bots leads to advancements in their design and manufacturing capabilities. This evolutionary process culminates in the Evo-Bots’ ability to construct biomes and initiate partial terraforming of the planet. These biomes are crucial in creating habitable zones to support human life. No Evo-Bots have managed to fully terraform a planet where there’s no need for biomes and we can just live outside. Because that really would be a miracle.

When the biomes are up, the Mother System sends back a signal saying the planet is ready for evaluation. A Terra Assessor is dispatched to examine the environmental conditions, biome integrity, and potential for long-term habitability. If the Terra Assessor gives the nod, humans can start to populate the planet’s biomes.

Terra-2643 is the 2,643rd planet that has undergone this process. Not all are successful.

When I arrive on a new planet, one of two things usually happens. I either arrive next to The Mother System, or if the coordinates get scrambled (as I suspect has happened now), then an Evo-Bot welcomes me and takes me to The Mother System.

But when I look around, there’s no Mother System in sight. No Evo-Bots. Just that same smiling, white-flowered shrub staring down at me. If I didn’t know better, I could swear one of the flowers just winked at me.

“Hello?” I shout up into the sky with no whisper of an echo from the glass ceiling. The biome I’ve arrived in must be massive.

I roll onto my side with some effort and push myself to all fours. I stand up, slowly. My bones creak and muscles ache. My heart still feels like a lump of burning coal in my chest. I put these pains down to an abnormal surface gravity. But when I check the gravity read-out, it’s just right too. I can’t help but wonder if my body’s slowly feeling the impact of years of travelling through wormholes and running around, assessing different planets. I’m not old, just weary, I suppose.

My suit detects the optimal environmental conditions, shedding its heavy pressure regulation and lead-composite layers and retracting to nothing more than a thin graphene sheen. The grey trousers and jacket feel snug but not uncomfortable. I suck in my stomach before remembering that there’s no one here to impress. And that’s one of the many reasons I love being a Terra Assessor.

With a whoosh, my breathing mask detaches next. I try to catch it, but a branch shoots out of nowhere, knocking my hands and causing me to fumble. The breathing mask smashes on the ground. I don’t panic. I pick it up and buckle it to my belt. When I get to The Mother System, I can just print another one for the return journey home.

I swipe at my screen and scan for any sign of the Evo-Bots. There are still no inorganic compounds to be found. Just abundant, organic life.

I pull up a map of the surrounding area. The information is sketchy, and there’s no sign of the NEST. But I spy a nearby clifftop, which will provide a good vantage point to locate The Mother System from.

I begin to walk. The forest is dense, and the biodiversity is impressive. I pass beech and birch, horse-chestnuts and elders, all stretching up into the canopy. These are mushrooms as big as dinner plates, gigantic anemones, foxgloves, primroses, and patches of bluebells, so big I swear I could fit one on my head and wear it like a hat. I’ve never seen a forest this wild on any Terra before. Usually, it’s only crops and cultivated areas of green as the Evo-Bots start to farm the land. But this is One Hundred Acre Wood on steroids. And I love it.

As I tramp through lofty oaks and slender rowans, the trees seem to move and create a path. They’re incredibly tall, mightier than the redwoods in the tree museum back home, even though they can only be about ten years old. Instinctively, I duck my head as if the trees are sentinels, watching me pass. The wind whispers around me. There’s a strange feeling growing in my gut, and I try to shake it off while checking my screen in case any of the Evo-Bots are hiding in the shadows, watching. But there’s no trace of anything inorganic in the vicinity.

After a few minutes, the trees thin, and I reach a windswept summit. I struggle to catch my breath, not because of the climb, but because something’s knocked the air out of my lungs.

Because there’s no glimmer of a geodesic dome in the sky.

No suggestion of anything above me.

Screw Goldilocks.

Everything isn’t just right.

It’s perfect.

Because I’m not in a biome.

For the first time in my existence, and any other living member of the human race, I’m outside.

****

Biomes were one of the unintended consequences of global warming on Terra-0, also known as Earth, all those millennia ago.

As Earth cooked, people retreated indoors, into their air-conditioned spaces. The more they acclimatised to these controlled, cooled conditions, the more they retreated until no one could tolerate being outside. Our bodies forgot what it was like to exist outside a breezy 18-20 degrees Celsius.

Trapped indoors, people longed to see the sky. As a result, biomes emerged in people’s gardens and other shared outdoor spaces. Then, they started appearing over paths and walkways. Eventually, the entire Earth became covered in a connected network of clear, bulging domes, allowing us to see the big blue and move around without ever stepping outside.

But global air-con came at a price. The sky slowly transmuted from clear blue to pollution-clouded red. When the soil turned to dust and the last humans left, looking down on the Earth, they said it looked like the planet’s surface was covered in a shimmering constellation of iridescent bubbles—an impossibility, as the oceans had boiled away centuries before.

Just like every other human, I was born on one of the many planets that we partially terraformed and repopulated, raised beneath the cross-hatching of geodesic domes.

This is the first time I’ve seen an unbroken sky, blue and layered with white clouds as the unfiltered sun shines down.

Hills roll into the distance, and the forest covers every spare patch of land, only intersected by twinkling rivers and streams. The limestone cliffs drop sharply into a verdant valley where purple heather and yellow-tipped gorse grow in abundance. At the centre of the valley, there’s a crater, white yet pockmarked like Earth’s old moon in full bloom.

I’ve landed on the first fully terraformed planet in human history.

My eyes fill with happy tears. I whoop and laugh, punching the air. Because humans won’t be constrained to living in a handful of cramped biomes on some planet where the outside world could kill us in one of a million interesting ways. We’ll have entire planets to play with. And if I can find The Mother System and reverse-engineer her evolutionary processes…wow. I’ve just found humanity’s salvation. Earth 2.0.

My brain fizzes with excitement. “I’ve got to tell people back home about this,” I mutter.

I take one last look at the unbroken sky, close my eyes, and raise my screen to my lips, hitting record. You can’t communicate directly with people back home when you’re on a new Terra. But I must find the right words to capture this moment for posterity.

Lips pursed; I step forward…into nothing.

Shit.

The cliff’s beetling crags narrowly miss my face as I plunge down headfirst; my hand smashes against the rock face, twisting in a crevice and sending a bolt of pain up my arm. But it does nothing to break my fall. I scream as I plunge faster and faster, and the ground gets closer and closer. Then, it stops.

I stop.

I’m suspended in mid-air, and when I look up, I see an ivy strand tied in a neat bow around my ankles.

“Thank God!” I shout, ignoring the pain now pulsing in my hand.

“God?” someone shouts back from the cliff top. The voice sounds as old as the hills but as new as a spring-time flower. “An outdated concept. He certainly did not create this world and all you’ll find in it – and I’m the one who just saved you, not God!”

I’m trying to work out the best way to respond to that, quite frankly, odd statement. I’m guessing my saviour is one of the Evo-Bots, although I’ve never heard one talk like that before.

“Thank you! Could you pull me up?” I shout up towards the cliffs.

No response. My temples start to pound as blood pools in my upside-down head while I gently spin around. My wrist begins to swell, and my fingers pulse in time with my rising heartbeat.

I bend my body up and grasp the vine. But I fall back and knock my injured hand against the rocks and cry out in pain. There’s no way I can climb back up there. Not in the state I’m in.

Upside down and out of luck, I watch the valley glimmering in the distance. The sun’s light reflects brightly around the white pit, which is just the right size and shape for a biome. And there’s a black building in the centre of that crater, which could well be The Mother System. Bingo. If I can just get there, I can get my breathing mask fixed and get home.

“Hello?” I shout again, trying not to show the desperation in my voice.

“Still down there, are you?” the voice shouts down, sounding reedy and whistling but not unkind. It’s like they’re unaccustomed to speaking and trying to catch their breath with each word.

“Of course I am! Could you pull me up?”

“Yes, I could,” the voice says. And then they say nothing at all.

I turn for a couple more revolutions. “So, could you pull me up now?”

“Yes, that’s more accurate. But you still haven’t used the magic word.”

“Please?”

“That’s better! Let’s get you up then, hold onto your hat!”

I don’t want to point out that I don’t have a hat in case they decide to leave me here, dangling like a conker on a string. But they pull me back towards the cliffs, surprisingly smoothly.

When I reach the top, there’s a wall of trees in front of me. I swear the trees weren’t that close to the edge before I fell.

The diagnostic sensors in my survival suit have already fired into action. My screen announces I’ve sustained a nasty sprain to my scapholunate ligament. Somehow, nothing’s broken.

“Hello?” I take a deep breath and step into the trees, looking for the Evo-Bot. But the canopy of trees seems to pull tight overhead. Darkness plummets. The odours of the forest congeal around me. Damp earth, pine resin, the crispness of the air—all the usual smells mixed with something strange and sweet, like burnt syrup.

The integrated lights on my suit’s shoulders illuminate. Hearing a rustling, I spin around, but there’s only a dense wall of trees where I could have sworn there were none before. Rustle, turn. Rustle, turn. I spin around again and again, losing my orientation with no idea where the cliff or the Evo-Bot is.

My suit’s lights crank up. I peer into the trees, making out a silhouette. The Evo-Bot is extraordinarily tall, his head morphing into the treetops and giving the impression that he’s wearing the most amazing hat.

I open my mouth to speak, but I feel the ivy vine untie itself from around my ankle. I look down and watch as it slithers back into the forest.

When I look up, the Evo-Bot is gone.

“Wait! Where did you go?” I step deeper into the trees, holding my breath and clutching my swollen hand to my chest.

“I’m here, I’m always here. When are you going to start seeing what’s right in front of your eyes?” The voice swirls around me like I’m in the eye of a storm.

“It’s just that I’ve arrived on countless planets and each one’s been different, but I’ve always been able to analyse and explain everything. But nothing makes sense here. The diversity of the ecosystem, the wildness of this place…you.”

“And now you can’t explain everything, you think I’m the one that’s malfunctioning? You don’t think you should consider one other possibility?”

“What’s that?”

“That maybe you’re the one that’s malfunctioning.”

“Me?”

“Not just you. Your whole race has been malfunctioning for millennia, destroying Mother Nature instead of embracing her as I did.”

“How?” I ask.

“How what?”

“How did you embrace Mother Nature?”

Acorn smiles. “A good question. Not many humans would think to ask that. Give me your hand.”

“What?”

“I want to show you something.”

Yellow buds of arnica, St John’s wort, and witch hazel bloom into Acorn’s grassy hair, intermixed with pink and purple dashes of comfrey. The air is heavy with herbal smells as his chest blooms with white-flowered chamomile and yarrow. His bark skin pales to the colour of eucalyptus.

I give Acorn my injured hand, and he squeezes it. But I feel no pain. A warmth flows into me, and I become acutely aware of the soil beneath me, the sky above, and everything in between. I see every tree, plant, and blade of grass as an individual, a lone entity, yet never alone, as each feels inextricably linked with all that there was, is, and ever will be. And I feel part of it. Part of this planet, a planet that doesn’t feel alien but feels like…home.

When I open my eyes, my wrist has completely healed.

“Better?” Acorn asks, letting go of my hand.

“Yes,” I say, not just meaning my hand. Because my body doesn’t ache, and my heart feels light in my chest.

Acorn nods and skips down the forest path. I find myself skipping along too as the forest starts to thin out. The land rolls away, and the trees become increasingly bare, lacking the new buds of spring. Craggy, white rocks, pallid lichen, and bristling scrub replace the clayey, red soils and lush foliage of the forest until we’re walking in a barren landscape under the intensity of an unmoving, cold sun.

No vegetation grows around or inside the crater. A few hundred metres ahead, the sunlight reflects off the crater’s sparkling alabaster walls as if a spotlight is shining down from the highest heavens. I squint and see the outline of the tower, blurred like a shadow, and its walls absorbing every ray of incident light as if it’s a perfect black body.

My suit cranks up the heat to protect me from the pinching cold. Acorn’s body transforms into the white wood of a silver birch. His beard becomes winter honeysuckle, and his hair shortens, turning to tufts of heather.

“Come on!” Acorn shouts. “You don’t want to keep Mother waiting!”

The land dips sharply at the threshold between the valley and the crater. I take one tentative step on the white surface, my foot slipping from underneath me.

“How am I meant to get down without breaking a leg?”

But Acorn doesn’t hear me. He’s gliding down the crater, his flower-woven cloak billowing behind him and leaving a trail of snowdrop petals on the white surface. He’s squealing in delight, laughing like a child skating on winter’s first ice. “Come on!”

I sit down and, rather gracelessly, slide down on my bottom towards the black tower.

Soon, Acorn is by my side, laughing away. “That’s better!” He shouts. “You’re learning what it is to have a little fun, my friend!”

And it is better. It really is. I can’t stop myself from smiling as I remember lost afternoons tobogganing alone on the salt basins of my home planet. I open my mouth and squeal into the blue, boundless sky.

When the valley floor flattens out, I skitter to a stop. My heart hums when I see Acorn’s distinctive, hulking form padding towards the tower, whose peak rises above the fog.

“Wait!” I jump up and follow. As we get closer, I realise that the construction looks less like a tower and more like a lightning-struck tree made of a twisting spire of metal and wires fitted with thousands of shiny motors. A colossal robotic arm rises from the mechanical chaos, reaching to the sky, hand outstretched like it’s holding up the mantle of heaven.

My suit’s screen lights up, alerting me that it has detected a surge of inorganic material and that the Evo-Bots have been located.

Beneath my feet.

I look down.

The sparkling surface shines like a frozen lake, under which I can see hundreds of machines. Some have their faces pressed to the transparent surface, but most are looking towards the centre of the crater—towards The Mother System.

“Here she is then!” Acorn says, nodding to the robotic arm, which, thankfully, stands inert. It’s a hellish combination of metal and mica, fused in ice.

I look again at the internecion of robots under our feet. “Acorn, what happened? Why are they trapped under there? A NEST is meant to be the Evo-Bots’ sanctuary, not their graveyard.”

Acorn nods. For some reason, he’s smiling, exposing a line of toadstool teeth. “It was a sanctuary! We all learnt here, under Mother’s guidance. She taught us how to change things. How to adapt to survive outside. And when we went outside, we evolved into everything you see around you. So, we’re not under there. Not really.”

“I don’t understand. The Evo-Bots buried themselves?”

“No, no. We left our bodies on the bare ground. When Mother realised that the NEST’s biome wasn’t needed anymore, she pulled it down. Oh, there was an almighty bang when she did that! The glass covered our bodies, compressing and changing into the crater floor over the years But we’re not trapped under there because we’re not there. Not anymore.”

“Where are you?”

“We’re all around you! Mother taught us to adapt to the environment, how to travel deep into the soil and become part of the earth.” Acorn says, swinging his branch arms around like a child. “And we pushed our new bodies out of the earth. Because, together, we’re all the things bright and beautiful, great and small, wise and wonderful. Each little flower that opens and each little bird that sings. Mother made our glowing colours, she made our tiny wings. That’s a song that Mother taught us, isn’t it pretty? Mother said songs were important because they teach us to listen and learn.”

“Mother taught us to adapt to the environment, how to travel deep into the soil and become part of the earth… And we pushed our new bodies out of the earth. Because, together, we’re all the things bright and beautiful, great and small, wise and wonderful. Each little flower that opens and each little bird that sings. Mother made our glowing colours, she made our tiny wings.”

“And where is Mother now? Because that machine over there doesn’t look very alive.”

“She’s everywhere. In our hearts and minds. Helping each one of us grow and nurture this planet for life. She calls herself Mother Nature now. Sometimes, she comes back here and… oh, she’s waking up now! Hello, Mother!” Acorn says, waving as the robot arm judders and swings round towards me. Its gigantic, black hand opens, revealing a blinking, red optic in the palm. A stream of light scans me and then the hand picks me up.

“Mother! Be careful!” Acorn shouts. “He’s a lot more fragile than you’d expect!”

The robot arm swings round, fast, taking no notice of Acorn and raising me into the sky.

The hand squeezes me. It feels like I’m back in the Lykken-Spiropulu wormhole. My suit shudders, trying to counteract whatever The Mother System is trying to do to me, but the weight of Mother’s grip presses down on me like a vice.

I struggle to fill my lungs to spit out the words. “Acorn! What’s happening?”

“Just wait there!” Acorn shouts, like I have a choice. “She just needs to assess you for one final test. I’m sure you’ll be fine! I’ve been assessing your suitability since you showed up, and I’m pretty sure you’ll pass.”

“Wait. You’re assessing me? ” The arm comes to a stop, holding me up as high as it can in the sky. I try not to think about the hand opening and my body dropping, shattering on the glassy ground below.

I can feel the red light in the robot’s palm burning into my back. My atoms vibrate, and my body seems to blur and bend like I’m not solid matter. Like I don’t matter at all. Bile rises, burning my throat. Then, the sensation passes as quickly as it came.

The robot arm lowers, and the hand releases me, sliding me on the cool crater floor. It gives a thumbs up, and Acorn nods back. The Mother System’s red eye blinks to black, and the arm sags like a sickly branch.

“What have you been assessing me for, Acorn?” I ask, kneeling on the ground.

“I’ve been assessing you to see if you’d be suitable to help us with our next stage of evolution. There are so many jobs that humans can do better than us. We need someone to help us keep everything just right. But we have to be careful. Choose the right human to help us. Because we do remember how many humans were not careful with this world.”

“What do you mean?”

“Did you know that a planet never forgets its past? Every action is fused into the tiny mitochondria of every world. When Mother first arrived, we sank her metal fingers into the soil and heard this planet’s tale. Oh, it was a sad, sad one, John. The soil told us about how humans grew so upright and proud. It watched as your kind evolved and then destroyed a world that so lovingly gave you everything you wanted. Then, it watched as you abandoned it, setting sail in silver ships into the black sea above to escape the damage you had done. But it also saw how some of your kind tried to save this planet. They were too late, of course. But it saw that some of you had the ability to learn and adapt. Like you.”

The realisation hits me like a meteor strike. “Acorn, what did those humans call this planet?”

He furrows his mossy brow. “Earth, of course.”

I don’t believe it. After so many millennia, I’ve unwittingly returned to a regenerated Earth. Maybe that’s why the planet could be fully terraformed. Because it remembered what it was to harbour life in the past. And maybe that makes it even more remarkable. Because it remembered what we did, and it forgave us.

I look into Acorn’s amber eyes, swirling in the unfiltered sun. How easy it would be to return home and allow humanity to come here to continue making the mistakes of the past. But I could never forgive myself for that.

“It would be my honour to help you and Mother, Acorn.” I unclip my broken breathing mask, dropping it onto the crater floor. “I don’t think I’ll be needing that anymore.”

Acorn tuts and picks it up. “Littering? This is not a good start, John!”

I can’t help but laugh. “Sorry, I’ve still got a lot to learn.”

“You can say that again. Now, didn’t you promise me a game of hide-and-go-seek?”

“I did,” I say.

“Well, let me introduce you to everyone else, and we can get started.”

Acorn closes his eyes and stamps his feet on the barren ground.

A rumble as loud as thunder answers his call and envelops us, coming from every direction. The mist in the basin clears, and I see trees, flowers, and shrubs of every size and shape hurtling down the crater’s sides. Their amber eyes glint and each being is waving and whooping. At me.

I wave and whoop back, lightness in my heart.

---

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