The Gift that Saves Us From The Ice

'Ísdís!' I cry. She's at the third airlock looking back at the cameras. The yearning I'd tried to lock away had never been as strong. It is unbearable. Everything has slowed down, even more than her heartbeat I had listened for with my head on her breast. I watch a single white hair drift across her face, caught by the breeze of the second door closing. Her eyes are as cool as ancient glaciers. It is as if ice is right inside of her, struck by light, absorbing the red end of the spectrum and scattering light into the most vivid hue. The older the ice, the deeper the colour.

<p dir="auto"><br /> <sup><a href="https://www.science.smith.edu/climatelit/glaciers-in-art/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" title="This link will take you away from hive.blog" class="external_link">Francois-Auguste Biard, View of the Polar Sea.<span><img src="https://images.hive.blog/768x0/https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/riverflows/Ep7u5B7CDw653MRnRS8rKsqXbH8qtCEGVpxSmtDQEwNbePxaX959FeEqWjye2F7oaWZ.png" srcset="https://images.hive.blog/768x0/https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/riverflows/Ep7u5B7CDw653MRnRS8rKsqXbH8qtCEGVpxSmtDQEwNbePxaX959FeEqWjye2F7oaWZ.png 1x, https://images.hive.blog/1536x0/https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/riverflows/Ep7u5B7CDw653MRnRS8rKsqXbH8qtCEGVpxSmtDQEwNbePxaX959FeEqWjye2F7oaWZ.png 2x" /> <p dir="auto">This moment is insanity. If I allow her to leave, I risk the future of everyone in the Vault. - her DNA holds our future. If I restrain her according to protocol, I risk destroying the only being I have ever loved. I could never imagined a choice like this would be so difficult. When we were at school in the underground classrooms deep in the underground chambers of the Vault, we would be tested on such hypotheticals. The answer would be easy: do not open the door. She is a test subject. Desire does not have a place in such an equation. Hundreds and hundreds of years before our forebears made brutal choices, shutting the vault doors against anyone who begged to enter as the ice nipped at their heels. Once, a distant grandmother was admitted because she was a biotechnologist, selected to help with our survival through agriculture, and her husband a botanist whose speciality was the preservation of the thousands of seeds in the deepest Vault should earth ever thaw. I was only here because they sacrificed everything they ever loved. That's the creation story Vaulters grew up hearing. No one <em>ever would open the Vault's doors. <p dir="auto">Blue tears are streaming down her cool cheeks. I sob. Everyone is looking at me. I'm suffocating, as if I'm trapped under the ice flow. The team that brought Ísdís to life stands paralysed. Salvador, the psychologist, stands closest to me. He has studied her mind before she was even revived, mapping every synapse, every connection. He understands the delicate balance between what she was when she took breath, and what she is now. Later he will argue that he expected this, but we know better. Who would have thought she would have chosen the ice over us? <p dir="auto">Then there is Isaak, the adaptive specialist and geneticist, standing by the console, his hands trembling. He was the one who pieced together the genetic code. He had always been obsessed with survival, with adapting humanity to the world outside instead of just waiting out the millenia for the ice to thaw. He was so proud, so excited. Yet he'd overlooked her humanity too. To him she was a stepping stone. Her DNA could be cloned, perhaps, or merged with ours, so that our species could finally step outside of the vault and feel the cold sun on their face at last, begin anew. <p dir="auto"><br /> <sup><a href="https://www.alaluz.org/blog/morrison-walker" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" title="This link will take you away from hive.blog" class="external_link">Bergs, Otto Fiord III James Morrison<span><img src="https://images.hive.blog/768x0/https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/riverflows/EoeGrkA4kHWSuPvLuYAaay98snZPEBN9eCdVHkjSv1uBSUuZ9du116QukaxbtpPzKwE.png" srcset="https://images.hive.blog/768x0/https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/riverflows/EoeGrkA4kHWSuPvLuYAaay98snZPEBN9eCdVHkjSv1uBSUuZ9du116QukaxbtpPzKwE.png 1x, https://images.hive.blog/1536x0/https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/riverflows/EoeGrkA4kHWSuPvLuYAaay98snZPEBN9eCdVHkjSv1uBSUuZ9du116QukaxbtpPzKwE.png 2x" /> <p dir="auto">To my left is Andrea, her face tight with restrained emotion. We were in the same pod together as children, and I know she churns with the same conflict - to restrain the subject, or free the life before us. Like me, she is pragmatic, seeing the science first, just as we were raised to do. But underneath the covers at night, we wrote poetry together in hidden notebooks. Our bonds, she used to say, go beyond the formulas. I know she is torn between duty to the Vault and the gut instinct that Isdis’s life is not ours to map and monitor and control. <p dir="auto">When we first woke her to life, fully formed, I was so hopeful. Her lone form was the answer. My first adult occupation was tending the vast collection of dormant seeds for a future that might never come, and I despaired in those dark corridors monitoring humidity and selecting the rare seed for the botanists to carefully tend and bring to life, reseed and revault. Because of this despair I retrained as a biotechnologist like my ancestral grandmother, driven by the desire to find answers beyond the seeds of long extinct plants. I learned how to manipulate genetic codes, how to rewrite the future of our species from the fragments we carried within us. Such is the hopefulness of youth. Isdis, and woman like her, could bear children that would walk on the ice. <p dir="auto">Perhaps even my children, I thought, though I dared not speak such things. I was disciplined enough, I thought, to keep the scientist and the man in love separate. <p dir="auto">Falling in love with Isdis was unexpected. How complex were our human connections, how beautiful were the deep bonds that form between us and those we tend. How naive I was to believe we could be reduced to formulas and genetic codes. Isdis, I learnt over the years, was not just a project or a solution. She was life. She was <em>my life. <p dir="auto">'Is this what you want, my love?' she whispers at the camera. 'To hide me from the ice?'. Her nictitating eyelids blink. I did not need to protect her from the freezing temperatures of the Arctic at all. She was perfectly adapted to it. Whilst I shivered in her pod, wrapped in layers, she was stripped to a modest singlet and shorts, her adipose tissue protecting her against the cold. Even when we were illicitly coupled, the cams turned off for blissful moments we stole, our skin could not touch for long. She would burn up, I would violently shake with the cold. Love makes do with the differences between us. <p dir="auto">I never meant to tell her there were others like her. It was meant to console her in her abject loneliness, forever in her freezing hallways, unable to bear the heat of a dying humanity trapped in caves under the ice. I loved her and believed she loved me. The poet in me overcome the scientist. I had thawed, completely. Yet when she learned their were others before her, she stiffened, refused my touch. Perhaps she only loved me <em>because she thought she was the only ice human. My beautiful Isdis, ice goddess, would scream, every night, for months, begging to be with her kind. Suddenly a part of her was unlocked. She knew she was not like us. I was angry with myself for how I had treated her. She was not, I realised, truly mine because she was not free. She was a test subject of the vault. She was not Isdis until she could be freely <em>of the ice. How had we not anticipated this, with a thousand years of genetic science at our disposal? <p dir="auto"><br /> <sup><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sea_of_Ice" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" title="This link will take you away from hive.blog" class="external_link">The Sea of Ice - Caspar David Friedrick<span><img src="https://images.hive.blog/768x0/https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/riverflows/242rsEJuMeS365hfihSJoHajATk5f8Fez5hGVPBzVLemZFdMQTcdTpnGGWwUL9vXx6YGy.png" srcset="https://images.hive.blog/768x0/https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/riverflows/242rsEJuMeS365hfihSJoHajATk5f8Fez5hGVPBzVLemZFdMQTcdTpnGGWwUL9vXx6YGy.png 1x, https://images.hive.blog/1536x0/https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/riverflows/242rsEJuMeS365hfihSJoHajATk5f8Fez5hGVPBzVLemZFdMQTcdTpnGGWwUL9vXx6YGy.png 2x" /> <p dir="auto">It was understandable, we quickly conceded, that she wanted to run outside, to see the beauty of the world humanity had been longing for since it had been trapped here. The subjects before also were keen to be free of their pods. We had released them <em>conditionally, but they never returned. We didn’t know where they were and didn’t have the ability to recapture them. They'd sliced the trackers from their own flesh. I had been imagining them out there for years, but our cameras and drones had never found them, only one family group far, far out west. There was a mother, and a father, and a baby held on a hip. They had been hunting, we presumed, dragging a dog or a bear behind them on skins, a revelation in itself. Life had persisted, after all. They were beautiful, unclothed, immodest by our standards I suppose but gaspingly beautiful in the eyes of the scientists that created them. The father took aim at the drone with a rock, and the picture was lost. <p dir="auto">'Isdis', I cried. I sobbed over the key that would unlock the last door, that only I could open. Andrea was crying too. Even Isaak, who had failed to really see her until this moment, and Salvador, who was beginning in that moment to understand the human heart, for all his expertise about how our minds worked. It was her last words that did it - the ones that the Vault upper leaders would interrogate us for a long time, but eventually accepted our explanation that she was talking about the people in the Vault. But she wasn't. We all knew what she meant. <p dir="auto">'My love', she cried. 'Please don't hide us from the ice'. There was the tiniest of gestures then, a hand passing over her belly. I thought of humanity's survival, and all the forms that might take, and the secret gift she would carry out onto the ice with her. <p dir="auto">Perhaps this was how we lived. <p dir="auto"><center> <h1><code>With Love, <p dir="auto"><img src="https://images.hive.blog/768x0/https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/riverflows/23t6xT1abr5kFMeEirKwZ2QqT6MK9U4SBpKCQZAjVEojgm7uSSGL9AJSuwtBsUmMAV5jv.png" alt="image.png" srcset="https://images.hive.blog/768x0/https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/riverflows/23t6xT1abr5kFMeEirKwZ2QqT6MK9U4SBpKCQZAjVEojgm7uSSGL9AJSuwtBsUmMAV5jv.png 1x, https://images.hive.blog/1536x0/https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/riverflows/23t6xT1abr5kFMeEirKwZ2QqT6MK9U4SBpKCQZAjVEojgm7uSSGL9AJSuwtBsUmMAV5jv.png 2x" /> <p dir="auto"><strong>Are you on HIVE yet? Earn for writing! 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