The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📕

provisions, a hovercraft, and a chip with the new program for the Tree. When the sensors confirmed that there was no biological form near the limits of the dome, I was allowed to leave. I didn’t look back, but I heard the gates creak shut behind me.

I flew, as stealthily as I could, toward the other side of the planet. Long ago abandoned to its fate, it was a pasture of runagate medical nanobots. The bones of biological forms, cloned from terrestrial DNA reserves, populated the wasteland in great numbers and varieties – a whitish forest of rigid structures stretched out below me. The earth cracked, affected by the toxic chemicals mishandled by the nanobots. Puffs of dust rose beneath my hovercraft.

The disaster that led the planet to ruin only happened because the alarms didn’t go off until it was too late. The Tree was corrupt and didn’t detect the danger posed by the free-rein nanobots: swimming through our bloodstreams, plucking small genetic traces, nibbling tiny bits of discarded food. For the sake of reproduction, they created endless copies of themselves. Each copy contained several corrupt lines, errors from its original program.

The ones that controlled the flu rebelled. The insulin generators and psychoactive drug liberators followed suit. They released more medication than necessary, with immediate effects, without limits. What was supposed to be salvation became death. The antivirus came too late. The nanobots had rewritten themselves to become immune. The only way to eradicate them from the human body was to undergo a risky electroshock session to fry their circuits.

Calm descended upon those of us who survived. But not for long. The nanobots took shelter in other biological forms. They analysed. They rewrote themselves. And they started invading their original hosts again, determined to take their lives away. We humans gave up ground. We lost contact with animals. We now interacted without touching each other. The nanobots didn’t spread by air or land – only through physical contact.

When the star of this planet slid beneath the horizon, the darkness of the night engulfed me. Spending so much time in stress took its toll on me. I missed sleeping under open skies.

I stopped the hovercraft and stepped onto the ground, onto a path carpeted with bones that once belonged to a thriving herd of mammals.

I felt no fear. It no longer mattered what happened to me. I crawled out of the airtight suit and stood naked. A faint breeze caressed my thighs, hardened my nipples, and fiddled with the crocodile’s eyes. The dormant nanobots on the skeletal remains woke up. A swarm of them started snaking between my toes, producing sharp, pinpricks of pain.

A shiver shook me. I was alive. My entrails trembled. I took a deep breath and stretched my arms above my head, reaching toward the vastness off-limits to us. After all, leaving the planet meant spreading the disease to the rest of the universe. We, the scarified ones, were doomed to solve the problem on our own.

Now wide awake, the memory nanobots shot a mixture of rituals into my mind, into my mouth. I mumbled and hummed a tune.

‘Omi omo Yemayá!’ My body trembled, twisting in elegant, haughty gestures. I looked back over my shoulder, turned my head, and mimicked the flow of the current, the rivers and the seas of Earth, which was long ago my ancestors’ home, so lost in time.

I stroked the invisible waves with my hands. My fingertips touched the wet foam. I shook my womb and watered fertility over the bones scattered along the path.

‘Odò Ìyá!’ I changed the rhythm of my dance, surrendering myself to euphoric ecstasy, joining the thousands who came before me. I rowed a boat. I raised my arms. I shook them, covered with imaginary copper bracelets. I swore I heard the rattle of copper.

‘Ore Yèyé o!’ I was a tapestry of history. My skin was embroidered with crocodile scales. The eyes on my breasts glanced over the dying planet.

The following morning, I woke up shivering with cold. I curled up on the pile of crushed bones. I rose and felt burning pain in my joints. The nanobots kept up with their task of carving my back. My scarification was almost complete. I didn’t want to know how close they were to making a fatal error. They could certainly tear my scales open and make me bleed, like what happened to Chioke. I didn’t know what to make of the new nanobots, so eager for a new biological organism.

I slipped into the airtight suit just as the fever began to curl up in my head. I returned to the hovercraft and continued on my way to the Tree. When we had fled to the shelter, we began developing programs to find a way to prevent the nanobots’ code from corrupting. We succeeded. I took part in the creation of a patch. The one I carried on the chip.

The city was silhouetted in gray against the clear, decaying sky. The ruins posed more serious obstacles than the pieces of bones scattered across the wasteland. An aborted terraforming station had been swallowed by the planet’s natural environment, as if in vengeance. Nature recovered, little by little, what once it possessed. Gray moss spread wherever green vegetation would have proliferated.

I ditched the hovercraft when the path narrowed. The nanobots crawled across my back, tireless weavers. For a few minutes, I forgot them and recalled bamboo cane tips. Together with their co-conspirators, the memory nanobots plotted a deceptive farce. The cramp in my thighs let me know how close they were to completing their task. How close I was to death. Fear lodged in my chest.

Hobbled by pain, I trod among the ruins of the city. I had to reach the Tree and place the chip. Save my tribe. Save myself. Shut them up. Become a crocodile woman in honor of my Chioke. Show that we wore our scales with pride. Carry history in our skin, the future of the human race, so