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Inktober 2019 #16: Wild
There is a hole in the world.
You went to Iowa, you bought your ticket, you stood on a very long line, and you went through the hole. That was five years ago.
They say humans can’t colonize this world. Something about it overtaxes their systems, fills them with adrenaline – fear, anger, excitement. It’s an incredible thrill to be here, breathing the air of an alien world. It looks so much like Earth, all in greens and blues, with plants that aren’t Earth plants but look like they could be… but then there’s that sky with the giant green planet that plainly is not the moon. People who aren’t avid star watchers can’t tell that the stars are all wrong and people who aren’t botanists can’t tell that the plants never grew on Earth, but everyone can tell that that thing isn’t the moon. The one constant of existence that for untold millennia has bound all humanity, that all humans see the same moon… and now, it’s no longer constant.
The atmosphere has more oxygen, substantially more – a mixture of 30% rather than 22%. No one is quite sure what the long-range effects of that are going to be. Some thought the overly oxygenated atmosphere was responsible for people’s restless energy, high arousal and inability to sleep, but then it was pointed out that on Earth, people who sleep with extra oxygen sleep better and deeper. It’s impossible to sleep well or for very long, here in the alien, untouched forests.
Or that’s what they say, anyway.
You never slept well on Earth. Everywhere you went, you felt like people were looking at you, judging you, and that most of them were out to get you. Your therapist told you it was an irrational fear. Your psychiatrist prescribed anti-anxiety medications. The therapeutic techniques you were taught felt like lies – of course one of Them would tell you that there’s nothing to worry about and there’s no one after you. Intellectually you know it’s a mental illness, you know no one cares about you that much, that they’re far more worried about what they look like to others than what you look like to them. But it doesn’t feel real. And the meds make you sleepy, and being sleepy in public terrifies you, so they really don’t do much for the anxiety in the end. Maybe they ease some of what you’d have normally felt, but at the cost of making you feel more of it.
Now here you are in a wilderness where no man has ever trod before you. There hasn’t been anything like this on the planet Earth in 10,000 years; the wilderness that invading colonists encountered in Australia and the Americas was actually cultivated and controlled by the natives living there, just in ways that users of European techniques couldn’t recognize. No one has found evidence of human or even sapient life on this planet; there are big animals, giant insects and birds somewhat bigger than what you can find on Earth because the higher oxygen supports greater sizes, but there’s no people here, not that anyone has been able to find.
It took some trial and error to figure out what you could eat. The animals over here use levoproteins, same as on Earth, and a lot of their biological structure is similar to Earth animals. They’re edible. Insects the size of an Earth hummingbird turn out to have plenty of juicy meat inside if you roast them. The plants were harder; many of them are poisonous. You had to go back home several times to update your tablet’s database with all the new plants that had been identified as edible, medicinal, poisonous or neutral. And then you had to make some money to support the next trip back over, quickly before nature took back everything you’d built, so you’d sell new specimens you’d found, bring dead insects and other animals to the biologists who studied the new world.
Eventually you figured out that if you got a company to pay you to take rubes on a tour of the tamer parts of the wilderness, the areas where humans had made inroads, and you did it within a three day walk of your own patch of the middle of nowhere, you just didn’t have to make a return trip. They’d pay you to go over rather than you spending your money, and then you wouldn’t come back when the rubes headed back a day later. It bothered you, because it meant that someone knew you could live here, someone out there knew you were able to sleep in peace on the world that makes everyone too excited to sleep, and you started to fear returning. What if they grab you as soon as you come back and do experiments to figure out how it is you do it? There’s so much of this world that the corporations would love to exploit, but they can’t as long as no one can stay here more than a few days without suffering from sleep deprivation or stress effects. You might be the key to billions of dollars for those assholes.
So you gave it up, finally. No more updates for the tablet. You can only test for poisons the hard way; trap animals, feed them the questionable substance, and then if they don’t die, consume tiny quantities yourself. You know perfectly well that even on Earth, poisons don’t always cross species; a nice chocolate bar, a snack for you, could kill a dog. And these are alien animals, eating alien plants they’re evolved alongside of. One of these days, one of the things you test is going to poison you, and you’ll die out here in the wild, and it might be a hundred years before any human being finds your bones.
That’s all right. That’d be a good way to die.
See, you know the animals are watching you, but you know why, and you know what they see. Prey are seeing a potential predator. Predators are seeing possible prey who seems to be too tough to risk tangling with. Everything here could potentially kill you, but you know why it would happen if it did, and you know how to protect yourself. There’s nothing surreptitious, nothing clandestine, about the wild. The worst you’ll find is animals pretending to be different animals, or maybe plants. Or a venomous animal, but you’re very, very careful whenever you have to handle a creature you haven’t seen before.
In the years you’ve been doing this, you’ve lugged over enough well-made tools from Earth that you were able to build yourself a cabin, out here in the wild. You’re up high enough that even if someone sees the smoke from your firepit, you’ll see them before they see you, and you pull the furs you tanned yourself closed over your windows and tie them shut every night before lighting your solar-powered lanterns… which won’t last forever, but you’ve been experimenting with different materials to make candles out of. You let the paths you took to get here overgrow, knowing that you and your machete can always hack a path back out if you need to get out of here, but that the rubes who expect trails to be made for them will never come up here and get you.
You’re wide awake and full of restless energy every day, just like every other human who comes to this planet. But when it’s nighttime, and you know there are no humans within miles of your home, and that you know all the risks facing you in the nighttime and what to do if they come to pass, and that you’ve prepared for any eventuality that might occur in a wilderness without people… then you sleep more peacefully than you ever have in your life.