She didn’t know it yet, but when Anita DeWalt woke up on a nameless exoplanet 340 light years from Earth choking on her own blood, she had made a major step-up from her prior circumstances.

The planet was nameless because its inhabitants had never found the need to develop language; millennia ago in their evolution, they developed the ability to pass along experienced memory to their offspring. As such, society was able to flourish without any need for history, documentation, or communication. In fact, the nameless inhabitants of this nameless planet lived in total isolation from each other. Being born with millions of years worth of knowledge already in their heads, they immediately departed from their hatching grounds to isolated patches of terrain across their immense globe, where they cultivated their own means of survival and expanded their generational knowledge through extensive experimentation. When they found themselves nearing the end of their lives, they journeyed back to their hatching grounds to asexually produce their larva, returned to their solitary home, and laid down to die.

Anita didn’t know any of this yet. She knew, first and foremost, that she was dying, and that it hurt. She knew, more vaguely, that she was 25 years old, that she grew up in the affluent Highland Park neighborhood of Chicago, that she was a journalist, that she wished her mom was there to hold her hand. She knew, with striking clarity, that she didn’t want to die.

She could also recognize, through the veil of pain clouding her mind, that she was laying on her back on a large stone table in the center of a moderately-sized stone room. Directly above her was an installation of refractory glass and mirrors built into the ceiling that seemed to funnel outside light directly into a small pinpoint on her forehead.

Anita tried to send her hand the instruction to lift above the table, to wave in front of her face and prove to herself that she was real, but the message stopped short when it reached an uncrossable divide between her C4 and C5 vertebrae.

The pain swelled again and Anita struggled to hold back the crescendoing darkness. In those wavering moments along the edge of existence, Anita caught her first glimpse of her alien host.

The creature scuttled towards her across the table. About two feet wide and three feet tall, it reminded Ana of nothing more than a large blue crab with the oversized brain of a hundred combined Einsteins. Heavy plating protected the creature’s massive cranium and a dozen or so claw-like appendages extended from its body, which the creature used to interact with the world around it with remarkable dexterity. The appendages reminded Anita, in her starkly lucid horror, of surgical tools, or maybe a Leather-man whose blades and screws and pincers are all fanned out for a marketing photo.

The creature came to a stop above her head, its pincers oscillating and clicking. Dark starbursts bloomed at the edges of Ana’s vision as the creature opened its quivering maw and said, simply:

“There is nothing to be concerned about.”

Anita blacked out.

*     *     *
Because the native inhabitants of the planet never had a use for titles, it was up to the roughly two dozen humans marooned on this planet that had been lived on since time immemorial to give it its first name. They called it Akwanake, because the first human to land there happened to have a hyper-fixation on Algonquin ethnonyms. He died six weeks later, and none of the future settlers would ever have the specific knowledge to know what the name meant or dispute its somewhat shaky usage in this context.

The second time Anita woke up on Akwanake, the pain that had been coursing through her body was replaced by a dull, gentle humm that ran from the crown of her head down to her toes. In truth, it was all her billions of nerve endings quietly celebrating that they had been reunited once more. She lifted her hand to her neck and ran her fingertips along the pink scars where the creature had reassembled her spinal cord and vertebrae with expert precision. Anita felt like she could cry.

The creature hosting the interstellar castaways was fascinated by many things, especially human things, and of all the human things, they were most fascinated by proverbs. In the creature’s estimation, proverbs were one of the most common ways for humans to compound their knowledge from generation to generation; a short phrase designed to guide future humans through a particular aspect of daily life. What fascinated the creature most was how often the proverbs that the humans shared with the creature contradicted each other.

“Birds of a feather flock together” versus “opposites attract.”

“Slow and steady wins the race” versus “time and tide wait for no one.”

“Never too old to learn” versus “can’t teach an old dog no tricks.”

“Do unto others as you wish to be done to yourself” versus “nice guys finish last.”

And the creature’s favorite pairing:

“Early to bed and early to rise makes a person happy, healthy, and wise” versus “YOLO.”

The creature, by the way, was named Benjamin by its human guests. When they explained to Benjamin the complex societal structures of genders, titles, and pronouns, Benjamin declared it all hogwash and rejected the entire concept of the gender binary, as many humans are doing on Earth right now as well. So, Benjamin accepted the masculine name of Benjamin, but chose to use the feminine pronouns she/her as a protest to the whole damn thing.

Benjamin also found that humans greatly overemphasized the concept of “first impressions.” For example, Anita’s first impression of Akwanake was overloaded with terror, pain, and confusion. Traditional human wisdom would say that this experience should go on to affect her entire perception of the planet for the rest of her life, but the immense rush of positive neurochemicals that accompanied the discovery that she was not only alive, but also totally healed, so overpowered her negative first impression that, as she exited the second stone room where she woke up, she would best be described as giddy. After studying the humans for some time, Benjamin found that second impressions usually mattered a whole lot more.

Anita exited the room into a wide courtyard lined with flowering, arboreal plants. It was nestled against the end of a narrow box canyon, surrounded by towering mountain peaks and stone structures carved into the canyon walls. The structures all had entrances scaled down to the size of Benjamin’s species, as well as larger, newer doorways for the recent arrivals. It was from one of these structures that Anita emerged into the courtyard.

“Hello!” a voice, a human voice, called out.

A tall, thin man with curly dark hair strode towards Anita with hand stretched upwards in a wave. A few meters behind him, a large Sulcata tortoise rambled in the same direction.

“Hi?” Anita answered. The man reached her and lowered his hand for a shake. Anita took it.

“I’m Eleazar,” the man said. “Eleazar Alvaréz. Welcome to Akwanake.”

Anita bit her lip and nodded, absorbing the immense amount of data her brain was still cataloging. “Ok …”

The tortoise caught up with them and laid down on its belly, resting its head on the courtyard’s warm stone surface.

“This,” Eleazar gestured to the tortoise on the ground, “is Tortellini. The tortoise.”

Eleazar paused. Anita looked up at the bright, turquoise sky.

“Are you originally from the Chicagoland area?” Eleazar asked.

“What?” Anita said.

“Have you always lived in Chicago?” Eleazar asked again. “Or did you move there later in life?”

“I grew up in Highland Park, but I’ve been living in Milwaukee,” Anita said. “How did you know that?”

“Milwaukee is beautiful,” Eleazar continued. “I was born in Medellín, but came to Chicago to teach at one of the universities.”

Anita waved her hand at their surreal, foreign surroundings, which had more visually in common with Machu Picchu than the Windy City, and said something so obvious that she only felt the need to verbalize it in order to verify her own sanity. “This is not Chicago.”

Eleazar smiled. “You’re right,” he said, and then began the great explanation with one word.

“Listen —”

*     *     *
There were 26 human castaways on Akwanake and one large Sulcata tortoise. All 27 individuals marooned there had some major connection to the Chicagoland area, either by living in Cook County or having next of kin there. Most of them came from upper-middle class backgrounds. Most of them had arrived within the span of the previous 5 Earth years. Most of them were older. Tortellini the tortoise was the oldest, at 92 years old. Anita was now the youngest, at 25.

None of them remember volunteering for any kind of teleportation or spacefaring experiments. None of them had even a passing connection to anyone involved in any such experiments.

All of them arrived on Akwanake moments before death. Some, like Anita, had major injuries and no memories of how they received them. Others had serious illnesses, terminal or otherwise.

Benjamin successfully healed all of them, with the exception of the first arrival. She was still a novice at human anatomy when the amateur linguist landed on Akwanake, overflowing with uncontrollably mutating cells and a tumor the size of a coffee mug lodged in his brain. She managed to keep him alive for roughly six Earth weeks before he eventually keeled over, becoming the first and only human to die on the planet that he had named.

As for how these wayward pilgrims came to find themselves at Benjamin’s settlement in the mountains, thousands of light-years from their home, it was fairly simple. They had come in the form of the only thing that can travel fast enough to make the journey—light.

See, through sheer cosmic coincidence, Akwanake was astronomically synchronous with Earth. Akwanake’s northern hemisphere always faced Earth’s northern hemisphere, and their movements through the Universe mirrored each other exactly. Who would’ve thought.

Benjamin, some time after settling in the box canyon, discovered that a very strong beam of light was landing at the end of the canyon at seemingly random intervals and she calculated that the light was being sent in a straight line from Earth directly to Akwanake. After some extensive testing and experimentation, Benjamin was able to decode the beam of light into an exponentially long series of molecular structures that could be computed and assembled into, apparently, a sentient being.

Benjamin did not know why this distant planet kept sending broken, dying creatures in the form of light rays to her home, but she kept assembling and fixing them, anyways. At the very least, it would be a pretty damn interesting memory to pass onto her larva. Because her species held no value for the concept of communication, it wasn’t until the humans brought up the idea that she even considered that the light beam might be intentional.

When the humans figured out that they were, essentially, clones, and that all their memories belonged to a being who lived and died on Earth roughly 340 years earlier, some of them freaked out. That was probably the right response.

Benjamin observed, though, that many humans held an incredible ability to rationalize any disturbing stimuli they received into something that matched their expectations of what life was supposed to be. The human brain was constantly working to avoid any sort of dissonance with itself and was usually successful, despite reality. So, the majority of humans who arrived on Akwanake developed an internal philosophy that allowed them to see the memories in their heads as their own and focus on more important problems at hand, like food or sex or finding a comfortable place to sit.

All that is what Eleazar explained to Anita.

*     *     *
As Eleazar concluded this explanation, which had been fine-tuned by the earliest arrivals to help later arrivals understand their situation, Anita noticed a wide, grey scar that arched across the back of Tortellini the tortoise’s shell. It was like the large animal had been split in half by the wheel of a semi-truck, or maybe a guillotine.

“What’s that scar from?” Anita asked.

“Tortellini arrived on Akwanake split in half,” Eleazar answered, “as if by the wheel of a semi-truck or maybe a guillotine.”

“Oh,” Anita said.

“Are you upset?” Eleazar asked. “About the clone thing?”

Anita thought for a moment. A cool wind rustled the leaves of the tall plants swaying at the edge of the courtyard. She took a breath and looked at the sky, where she saw that Akwanake had two moons visible during the daytime.

“I think I have bigger fish to fry,” Anita said, “for right now, at least.”

Eleazar nodded.

“What do we do now, then?” Anita asked.

Eleazar shrugged. “Whatever you want. Benjamin has plenty of food and water, and is happy to care for us as long as we answer any questions she has. Some of us paint, or exercise, or design games to pass the time. I’m whittling a chess set from a branch of one of the tree-things that grow around here. Mostly, we talk with each other and with Benjamin.”

“What about … Earth?” Anita asked.

Eleazar shrugged again. “Benjamin could send a beam with your data back,” he said. “But you’re here, now. And the beam wouldn’t arrive on Earth for another 340 years, and everyone we know has been gone for the past 340 years. So … this is kind of it for us.”

Anita nodded, processing.

“What did you do, in Milwaukee?” Eleazar asked.

“I was a reporter for a news station,” Anita said. “I am, was, a writer, too.”

“A writer!” Eleazar said. “Why don’t you put together a history? Of us humans, here on Akwanake. Benjamin can keep us healthy as long as we want, but eventually people are going to get tired and might be ready to let life go, so to speak, and we’ll need something to pass along to future arrivals.”

Anita thought for a moment. “Okay,” she said. Her brain was still buzzing with adrenaline and serotonin and whatnot, and everything seemed okay to her as long as her C4 vertebra was still connected to her C5 vertebra.

“Great!” Eleazar said.

And that’s how Anita DeWalt began to write the first history book ever produced on the ancient planet of Akwanake.

*     *     *
“How do you think?” Anita asked Benjamin. Anita held out a reproduction of a tape recorder that Benjamin had designed for her to use in the process of writing her history book. It was tape, and not an alternative, because the inhabitants of Akwanake had a strong proclivity towards the tangible and analog over things ephemeral and digital.

Benjamin clicked together her mandibles. Learning how to warp her breath and throat and mandibles into positions that could mimic human syllables was one of the earliest and most challenging aspects of Benjamin’s education in humanity. Understanding the concept and structure of language, though foreign, was relatively easy.

“I think,” Benjamin croaked, “in images, motions, ideas. Concepts.”

They were sitting at a stone table overlooking terraces of agricultural fields descending a gradual cliffside. Anita’s eyes flicked between the two, pupilless orbs that Benjamin used to intake light-information into its brain, waiting for more.

“Have you ever found yourself lost in a daydream,” Benjamin said, “only for someone to ask you what you were thinking about it? And you have to take a moment to translate those loose, abstract thoughts into rational, linguistic words. It’s a common human experience I’ve heard described—and that moment, before the translation takes place and you are still lost in your own cognition, is how myself and other members of our species live our entire lives.”

Anita nodded.

Benjamin clicked together her pincers. “What is your last memory, Anita DeWalt?”

“Umm …” Anita said. “I was driving home from work on the freeway. My partner was making pasta for dinner that night, and I remember thinking that I needed to stop for basil at the store, and … then I was here.”

Benjamin clicked again.

“Do you understand all that?” Anita asked. “Has someone explained driving, and freeways, and pasta and those things?”

“Yes,” Benjamin said. “I’ve found that humans talk a lot about driving and freeways and pasta.”

Anita nodded. “That makes sense.”

“And partners, too,” Benjamin said.

“Do you have any memories of other members of your species?” Anita asked.

“Deep, deep, deep,” Benjamin said. “Blurred, lost memories. Memories of an ancient war, millions of years ago. Every member of my species is a veteran.”

“Are you lonely?”

“Are you?”

Anita thought. “I miss my partner, my family, my dog. It hurts. I don’t know.”

“Humans are lonely because they’re built to be lonely,” Benjamin said. “I’m not.”

The twin moons of Akwanake hovered above their heads. Somewhere else in the settlement, Eleazar fed Tortellini food from his palm.

“What about your siblings?” Anita asked. “The other larvae. Weren’t they born with the same memories as you? Do you feel any connection to them?”

Benjamin didn’t say anything for a while. Until eventually, she said:

“I don’t know.”

*     *     *
The human settlers on Akwanake were happy, all things considered. That was what Anita found as she moved from person to person, quizzing them on their lives on Earth and their lives on Akwanake. Their needs were met and they had time to spend on games and philosophy and art. They were healthy, thanks to Benjamin. The atmosphere was breathable on the planet, and a little higher in oxygen, which gave many of them a mild sense of elation throughout their day. Through yet another miracle of the universe, Benjamin was carbon-based and cultivated foods that were edible for the humans. There was plenty of water on Akwanake, even though Benjamin’s species had no use for it except to irrigate their crops and make lubricants and solutions from.

Benjamin was happy, too, all things considered. Her time was dedicated solely to the cultivation of knowledge and efficiency that could be passed down to her offspring. Her life was totally devoid of the conflict that caused humans so much stress. She had no scorned lovers, no hateful enemies, no fear of totalitarian governments. She had never said “you too” in response to a theatre employee telling her to enjoy her movie.

When the human settlers had conflicts, over dueling philosophy or sports team allegiances or politics, Benjamin promptly left the area and allowed it to play out between them. Generally, things eventually settled down, but the humans of Akwanake were not devoid of interpersonal strife like Benjamin.

To Benjamin, her planet’s society of solitude was perfect. From what Benjamin understood, all across their magnormous planet were settlements just like hers, where members of her species lived happy, fulfilled, utopic lives.

It wasn’t until the humans arrived that the concept of loneliness was introduced into her mind.

The humans spent all day talking about their friends and loved ones back on Earth, grieved and remembered them. They were light-years away and not even the actual individuals who had known the people of Earth, but their memories were so vivid and so valuable that that was how they spent most of their time: mourning ghosts they had never known.

The humans laughed and cried with each other, and laughed and cried about times they had laughed and cried in the past. They spent time alone occasionally, but rarely more than an Earth day. All of this fascinated Benjamin.

Sometimes, observing the humans’ obsessive compulsion towards community caused some vague pang of emotion for Benjamin, but when she mined her tremendous brain for memories of the others that were scattered across the planet, it was quickly overcome by mental quakes of pain and horror and war. Some things, Benjamin concluded, were best forgotten.

*     *     *
“Let’s find them,” Anita said.

Benjamin twisted a piece of metal into a fine coil with her nimble, powerful claws.

“Or just one,” Anita continued. “Just in case … well, just to see. Wouldn’t that be a great experiment? An incredible memory to pass to the next generation?”

Benjamin finished the component she was working on and added it to a pile of a thousand identical coils. They were pieces for an analog calculator that could more accurately calculate Pi beyond the billionth digit.

“The other humans could maintain your crops and systems while we’re gone,” Anita said.

Benjamin picked up another piece of metal and began twisting.

“Listen,” Anita said, “imagine how much technology you have that another settlement might not, and vice versa. Your development could boom. Or, they might need your help.”

Benjamin mimicked the previous piece exactly and added it to the pile.

“We all agreed, a long, long, long time ago,” Benjamin finally answered, “that this was best.”

“Is it a rule, though?” Anita asked.

Benjamin picked up another piece of metal. She had learned that humans, at least the ones in the demographic she had to sample from, were often hyper-fixated on rules. They built their lives around following them and, if an action was not against a rule, they were almost compelled to do it.

“It’s not a rule,” Benjamin said.

“Then, let’s find them,” Anita said. “It could be the greatest generational experiment in the history of Akwanake.”

In a paroxysm of social stress, Benjamin snipped the piece of metal in her claws in two. Then, she caved. “Okay.”

Incidentally, “okay” was the first word of human language Benjamin ever learned. Incidentally, it’s the most commonly used word on the planet Earth.

Every arrival on Akwanake was fluent in English. A few also spoke Spanish. One understood a little Algonquin, but we already know what happened to him.

*     *     *
The mission didn’t begin for another handful of Earth months. Benjamin spent that time training the humans on the maintenance of the settlement: the horticulture of her crops, the lubrication of the great, analog machines constantly running in the canyon’s depths, and, most importantly, the monitoring of the equipment that received beams of light from Earth and decoded them into instruction manuals on how to build a human. When she wasn’t preoccupied with this immense educational campaign, Benjamin was developing the technology for a warp device that would allow herself and any other travelers to warp back to the settlement from anywhere on Akwanake. It involved some minor tampering with space-time and had the major catch that one could warp to the device and nowhere else.

Despite their synchronicity, Akwanake and Earth’s day cycles and systems of measuring time varied wildly from each other. So, Anita had no idea that in between the proposal of the expedition and its onset, she turned 26. Nobody celebrated birthdays there much, anyways.

Once everything was prepared, Benjamin selected the team for her voyage. It had to be small and efficient. Anita was an immediate invitee. Eleazar the university professor was the next youngest, at 34 Earth years, and the clear choice for the third member of their trio. He only had one hang-up.

“I can’t leave Tortellini,” Eleazar said.

“Tortoises are, like, infamously slow,” Anita countered.

Eleazar looked at the massive reptile with pained eyes. Tortellini had little concern for cross-continental expeditions. At 94, and already an interstellar adventurer, he had seen most of what he needed to see.

“The rest of the settlers don’t care about him like I do,” Eleazar said. “I can’t leave him alone here.”

Benjamin clicked her pincers. “The creature is far too slow, Eleazar.”

Eleazar knelt down next to the tortoise and looked at its wrinkled, beaked face.

“I’ll carry him,” Eleazar said.

“Eleazar!” Anita said. “Tortellini will be okay.”

Eleazar stood up. “I’m not going.”

Tortellini and Eleazar joined the expedition.

As for their mode of transportation, a few options were considered. Akwanake had no roads or railways. There was a river, formed from mountain runoff, somewhere at a lower elevation that Benjamin encountered coming from the hatching grounds to her settlement, but Benjamin’s species were wired with primal memories that instilled a deep fear of water in their minds. Eleazar brought up the idea of launching a warp device with a cannon, and then warping to wherever it lands. Benjamin didn’t believe the technology was hardy enough to survive that kind of potential impact. Flying machines were briefly mentioned, before Benjamin struck that down as well. Her species stayed close to the ground, away from water.

Benjamin was afraid of this whole affair, if that isn’t explicitly clear.

It became evident that their best option was a slow and steady hike.

While the preparations were being made, Anita continued working on her history book. She chronicled the daily routines and habits of the 27 settlers and their host and explored their hopes, dreams, and fears with painstakingly intricate detail. For anyone who read the book, it would be like they had lived among these refugees and known them as their own friends and compatriots.

Meanwhile, Eleazar completed his chess set and went about organizing a complex tournament bracket that involved several rounds of play-in and ranking matches, losers’ brackets within losers’ brackets, and handicaps so that it was virtually inevitable that anyone who could move a piece would eventually get a shot at a championship victory. Eleazar did that because he thought it would be more fun and incentivize more investment in the game if, over the course of potentially multiple Earth years, everyone was likely to get at least one grand prize win under their belt.

With the settlement properly chronicled and the settlers ready to be entertained by decades of chess, and all of Benjamin’s preparations in place, the expedition was ready to depart, and so they did.

*     *     *
Benjamin was anxious. Rarely had she ever been anxious, or had memories of being anxious, in all the millions of years packed within her head. The last time she had been anxious was at the beginning of her lifespan, when she made the journey from the hatching grounds to where she would eventually build her settlement in the mountains.

In the hatching grounds, which was a mud patch deep in the swamps at the base of the mountains, she hadn’t been alone, in a sense. Buried in the mud around her, even though she couldn’t see them, were other larva slowly growing legs and brains. But, when she emerged from the mud, potentially the first of her lot to develop into a cognizant being, she couldn’t perceive of any of the larva beneath her and was, for all intents and purposes, alone.

She had trekked through the swamps and to the mountains in search of a location that was well-suited for the expanse of knowledge in her head to be applied and developed further. This took many, many Earth years. When Anita suggested their first stop could be those hatching grounds where her life began, Benjamin wrote it off immediately.

“It would take far, far too long to get there, and when we did arrive, it’d likely be nothing but insentient larva that wouldn’t mature until all our lifespans would be long past their expiration date,” Benjamin said.

“So, where to, then?” Anita asked.

Benjamin did some triangulations, approximating the distances and locations of the hatching grounds, her current settlement, and settlements of previous generations lodged within her memory. Coming across some commonalities in the numbers and traits involved in this train of thought that were particularly difficult to translate into language, she determined the most likely location of a populated settlement to be roughly due north, according to Akwanake’s internal magnetic field.

“Okay,” Anita and Eleazar said, and packed their bags. Mostly, the bags were packed with equipment for foraging food and purifying water, as well as changes of clothes and sleeping materials. Benjamin carried a small pack strapped to the top of her massive cranium that contained the equipment to warp back to their settlement, a communicator so that the humans staying behind could notify them of emergencies, and a small selection of measuring and testing devices. Tortellini didn’t carry much of anything. It would only have slowed him down more.

Anita also brought along the manuscript for the History of the Humans of Akwanake. It was essentially complete, but she was still working on giving it an Epigraph.

Like this, they set off on their expedition, grateful for Akwanake’s plentiful resources and Mediterranean climate.

*     *     *
The first few Earth months of the expedition went by descending from the mountain range and crossing the thick swamps at the range’s base. As they lowered in elevation, Eleazar and Anita encountered their first examples of Akwanake’s other living species. They were sparse, but present—reptilian birds that blended into the swamp’s dense canopy of vines, clouds of turquoise gas that Benjamin explained to be something akin to airborne plankton. When Eleazar or Anita inevitably fell under the weather with alien allergic reactions or strange viruses, Benjamin whipped up rapidly effective cures. She was becoming something of an expert in human medicine.

Tortellini kept their pace steady. Initially, it was a significant burden. His lumbering steps slowed their speedy descent from the settlement and Benjamin found herself growing more anxious by the day—the journey could be weeks, months, years long and the tortoise wasn’t helping. But, as the days did stretch into weeks and then months, Tortellini kept them from burning themselves out trying to shove distance behind them.

When they did want to pick up the pace or Tortellini became weary from hauling his giant shell for kilometers upon kilometers, Eleazar would stop to pick the 40-kilogram animal up and strap him to his pack. Eleazar would take a moment to grunt, then continue lumbering onwards. On days that this happened, Eleazar would spend the evening groaning from the burning muscles in his back, despite Akwanake’s slightly mellower gravity than Earth’s. Whenever Eleazar stopped to strap the reptile onto his pack, Benjamin would pause to marvel at the depths of human compassion and wonder, exactly, where its limits could be found.

Slowly, the vines of the endless swamp began to thin and give way to vast, marshy plains.

It was on these plains, during another moonless night, that Eleazar and Anita found themselves deep in another discussion as to why they had ended up where they did.

“The injuries, though,” Anita said.

“A by-product of the transmission?” Eleazar asked.

Anita shook her head. “They’re too varied. One person has brain cancer, another has anaphylactic shock, another has a broken neck. Remember, some of us had terminal illnesses back on Earth, too. Is it an experimental medical program? Beaming dying people out to distant planets in hope that they might have a cure?”

“I don’t know …” Eleazar said. “What would be the odds?”

“Well, it happened,” Anita said.

“I didn’t sign up for any program like that,” Eleazar said.

“Maybe there’s a gap in our memories prior to being beamed,” Anita said.

Eleazar looked upwards at the strange constellations filling the night sky. “Maybe.”

“Maybe it’s a military, CIA thing?” Anita said. “An MK Ultra. Testing some technology to be used to destroy enemies.”

Benjamin shuddered.

“I don’t see the connection,” Eleazar said and Anita nodded.

Benjamin considered that humans threw out notions of destruction flippantly. References to atomic weapons, oppression, totalitarian regimes, terror, and murder were often the set-ups for jokes, or talking points in philosophical discussions … but the humans of Akwanake only spoke of their home with an air of quiet longing. Anita had taught Benjamin a word one day that Benjamin determined to be crucial to understanding the mysteries of humanity: compartmentalization. Between that and their ability to rationalize away reality, life was peaches and cream as long as it remained only inside their own minds. It didn’t help that their memory seemed faulty to an almost inoperable degree.

Benjamin did not have that issue. Her memory was so deep and detailed that it took thousands of years for a day to become blurry, a million for it to be lost. And even when the memory was gone, the feeling remained.

When the humans talked about their home, it was like distance erased everything painful; the rejections, betrayals, heartbreaks, and cruelty became footnotes in a story called love. It seemed to Benjamin that only the most bitter human had the ability to look on anything with negativity, as long as it was far enough in the past.

“I don’t know if that’s true,” Anita said when Benjamin explained her theory. Anita, like any human, didn’t have a powerful enough memory to know if anything was true.

Still, they quested on.

*     *     *
Anita was nearly 27 Earth years old, though she didn’t know that, when they reached their first foreign settlement.

They were still trudging through the marshy plains when they caught their first glimpse of the hedge, growing on the horizon. From afar, it looked like a massive brick dropped onto Akwanake by a distracted, cosmic mason. It was as wide as Manhattan and as tall as the Empire State Building, and it was green.

A few days later, the expedition was close enough to the hedge to discern that the brick-shaped object on the horizon was, in fact, a tremendously large plant resembling the types of hedges that wealthy Earth inhabitants grew between their yards to separate themselves from their neighbors.

“It’s magnormous,” Anita said. Benjamin and Eleazar knew exactly what she meant.

Tortellini was unimpressed. He ate some fibers growing from the marsh.

A few days after that, the expedition was close enough to see a wide, sloped entrance to a tunnel that led into the hedge’s interior. The hedge’s tough, woody branches were molded into steps that led upwards and inwards towards the heart of the shrub.

Eleazar and Anita marvelled at the strange plant. Reptile-birds swooped through the hedge’s vines and branches and, as they approached the entrance of the tunnel, the cacophonous sounds of biodiverse life poured from the hedge’s maw.

“It’s practically brobdingnagian,” Eleazar said. He was a literature professor. His comment was too esoteric to have been worth saying at all. Tortellini ate some fibers.

They entered the hedge.

*     *     *
It took three more Earth days for the expedition to reach the settlement at the hedge’s core. As the tunnel bore on, light struggled to filter through the shrub’s dense branches and leaves, but the population of fauna only grew in density. They were constantly surrounded by the chirping, clicking, and growling of animal life. Benjamin was nearly overloaded with things to measure, quantify, and preserve in her mental database.

Bioluminescent moss was nearly ever-present and became the expedition’s sole source of light once the glow of the tunnel’s entrance faded into the past. When they stopped to rest, Anita huddled close to the moss and scribbled potential epigraphs for her History by its pale purple glow.

Slowly, more signs of intelligent life began to emerge from the hedge. Equipment that seemed to operate similarly to trail cameras on Earth hung from high branches and studied the native life. Troughs funneled water from high in the hedge towards its center. Benjamin grew in anxiety.

Eventually, she stopped in the center of the tunnel. Anita and Eleazar stopped as well, and turned towards her.

“What?” Anita asked.

Even Tortellini stopped.

“This is unprecedented,” Benjamin said. “This meeting will open up new doors … new avenues for destruction and conflict. We live happily because we’re alone.”

Benjamin clicked and rubbed her pincers together.

“Maybe we should warp back,” she said.

Eleazar shrugged. Anita shook her head. “No,” she said. “We’ve spent way too long getting here, Benjamin. And, listen—for all you know, the rest of Akwanake’s been communicating and reuniting for generations now, and just waiting for you to reach out.”

“Unlikely,” Benjamin said.

“We’re too close to turn back. If we get to the settlement and they react negatively, we’ll warp back and it’ll be like none of this ever happened,” Anita said.

Benjamin clicked and fidgeted.

“Let’s go,” Anita said and marched onwards.

Eleazar looked at Benjamin. “We’ve walked a long ways,” he said and shrugged, then followed after Anita. Tortellini continued walking, too.

Benjamin shuddered and re-joined the expedition.

*     *     *
The settlement was wondrous. A giant, hollow globe at the hedge’s center, it was a miracle of interwoven intelligent and natural engineering. Pockets formed by the hedge’s natural vines and branches became buildings and laboratories. The bioluminescent moss had been cultivated and strategically grown to give the settlement sufficient lighting, and seemed to be the resident’s primary source of nutrients. Gargantuan machinery was built from the hedge’s thick, fibrous materials.

The settlement’s sole resident was dead.

They found the creature’s body in one of the settlement’s laboratories. Before they reached it, they found prototypes for a strange device that seemed to serve no other purpose than to smash something to bits that was particularly hardy. The devices weren’t complicated, especially in comparison to the rest of the settlement’s technological wonders. They were simply brutal and brutally simple. The creature’s cranium was smashed to bits.

“Is this what happens after you lay your larva?” Eleazar said.

Benjamin hadn’t spoken for a while. She sat next to the creature’s lifeless exoskeleton, clicking and rubbing her pincers.

“Like some animals on Earth,” Eleazar said, “that give birth to their offspring and then die.”

Anita watched Benjamin’s eyes shift. Then:

“No,” Benjamin said.

Eleazar nodded.

“I can tell from their shell,” Benjamin said. “They haven’t laid any larva yet. And, after we lay our larva, we’re close enough to death to let time do the rest.”

Eleazar nodded again. The creature’s millenia-long string of memories had ended right there, in the hedge’s center.

Elsewhere in the settlement, the expedition found the first maps ever designed by a native inhabitant of Akwanake. The maps included the first written iconography by a native of Akwanake. They showed the locations of five other nearby settlements.

The expedition debated warping back to their home immediately.​​ The creature’s suicide was such a mystery, such a blow to their morale, that understanding it could take generations of processing for Benjamin and her offspring. The notion of self-destruction had never been broached within her memory. But they realized that the other settlements that the dead creature had mapped were much closer to the hedge than Benjamin’s.

They quested on.

*     *     *
They found four more brain-crushing suicide devices and four more dead creatures.

*     *     *
Anita and Eleazar decided they wanted to go back to the other humans after the second additional suicide. Only Benjamin wanted to press on. Tortellini didn’t care that much either way.

Benjamin was experiencing grief for the first time since her earliest, blurriest memories. She needed as much data on the topic as she could find if she was going to try to process and catalogue this immense new experience, to find a use for it before she passed it along to the next generation. At every settlement, she took diligent notes and measurements of the bodies, the technologies they developed before bringing their line of memory to an end, the little bits of narrative she could glean about their lives and final days.

All of them appeared to have been healthy up to the end. Their settlements were prosperous, even to the point of operating long after their keepers were gone. The creatures had all died at vastly different points in time; some even hundreds of years earlier. The chitin of their exo-skeletons remained well-preserved, like any of their species’ would.

Benjamin couldn’t understand.

*     *     *
The last settlement on the map wasn’t any different. Situated on the shore of a great lake, its resident had clearly done extensive research and experimentation on the local ecosystem, the physics of water, and erosion. Their farms were long dead, but it was evident that they had no shortage of food in quantity or variety.

Benjamin sat next to the body. Her devices whirred and buzzed, taking samples of the creature’s shell and such. She didn’t say a word.

Anita sat outside the building where the data collection was taking place. It was a sunny, mild day and she contemplated the twin moons while she mulled over the resonant themes of her History. Eleazar was feeding Tortellini nearby.

How to sum up the lives of the human settlers of Akwanake? They didn’t do much. Most of them were too old to think about building a permanent human population on the planet, and the ones who were young enough weren’t interested in the concept. The population would grow as long as beams of light kept arriving. When that stopped, so would they.

The humans created art. That was nice. Nice, Anita thought. Is that what we have to offer? Nice things?

They played games. Talked about the past, or the possible futures their loved ones might’ve lived, 340 years ago. Grew food. Ate food. Some had sex and even loved each other. They discussed philosophy and science. They waited to die.

The History had been meant for future arrivals, but it had been over an Earth year since Anita had arrived, and no one had followed. Eleazar was sure another would come; there had been long gaps in the past. But, if no one did, what was it for? Benjamin and her line didn’t need a book to remember them.

Another would come, Anita thought.

She watched Eleazar sit with the tortoise. She watched Eleazar spot something in the distance.

“Anita,” he said.

Eleazar stood up.

“Anita, look,” he said, and pointed to the sandy beach where the settlement met the lake. Anita stood up and followed the trajectory of his fingertip.

Another creature scuttled along the sand. Sunlight bounced off the ridges of its shelled cranium.

“Hey!” Eleazar yelled. He jumped up and waved his arms. “Up here!” Anita joined him.

The creature noticed them and crawled up the sand into the settlement. It stopped a few yards short of the two humans. It clicked and gestated with its claws. Where Benjamin’s shell was a deep blue, this creature was a pale yellow.

“Um,” Eleazar said. “Hold on.” He hurried into the building where Benjamin was taking data on her dead relative.

Anita waited with the stranger. The lake’s waves crashed on the beach and sent ripples of cool air towards them. Anita brushed her unkempt hair from her face.

Eleazar emerged from the building with Benjamin and Benjamin saw the stranger. She knew its yellow shell meant that it was from far, far away.

The two aliens stared at each other for a long while. The odd creatures, which reminded Anita so much of if Earth’s crustaceans suddenly had the minds of every great thinker combined, had nothing to say to each other, because they were the first of their species to interact with one another since dinosaurs lived in Montana. They had no words, no legible body language. Their clicks meant nothing. They had much in common, though, not least of all being a profound experience of grief.

They clicked, rubbed their mandibles, glanced at the humans flanking them.

Slowly, they approached each other. Benjamin looked at her friends.

Then, the two alien creatures interlocked their pincers in the first embrace their species had experienced since time immemorial.

It was all they could do.

And Anita thought of what the epigraph to her History would be:

We were here, together.

*     *     *
Benjamin finished taking her data on the corpse in the building and the new creature began putting their incredible knowledge towards understanding the grammar and enunciation of English. Somehow, this gawky, terrible Earth language was destined to become the first language of the inhabitants of Akwanake.

The humans gave the creature the name of Mercedes, after Eleazar’s grandmother and because the creature found it easy enough to pronounce.

Mercedes had traveled many Earth years, locating settlements across Akwanake’s globe. Nearly invariably, at some point in their line, the members of their species delivered themselves to oblivion. The fact of the matter is, no one is meant to be by themselves. Unfortunately for the inhabitants of Akwanake, they had erased the pain of society in favor of the bliss of isolation, and it took the arrival of strangers to remember that the pain is intertwined with the joy. The bliss, of course, always eventually dulled into numbness.

Through sheer cosmic coincidence, like the kind that governs so much of our lives and that brought these strangers to Akwanake in the first place, shortly after the discovery of Mercedes, Benjamin’s equipment notified her that another beam had arrived at her settlement. They needed to return immediately so that Benjamin could heal the newcomer’s mortal wounds.

Mercedes came with them.

*     *     *
The newcomer was a woman in her 50s named Stephanie. Her heart was clogged, until Benjamin unclogged it. She was from Chicago. She was wealthy. She was the co-owner of a high-ticket funeral service, with her brother. She knew why they were there.

After Stephanie was healed from her cardiac arrest, Eleazar sat her down in the courtyard of Benjamin’s settlement and said:

“Listen—”

By the time Eleazar was finished, Stephanie was buckled over with laughter. Eleazar watched with confusion. Tortellini chewed fiber nearby, uninterested.

“Nobody knows why we’re here?” Stephanie said, wiping away tears.

Eleazar shook his head.

“I put you here,” Stephanie said. “And my over-sentimental brother put me here.”

Stephanie’s brother was a doctor of physics at the University of Chicago. Stephanie ran a major funeral service company with locations across the Chicagoland area. Several years earlier, her brother had developed the technology to convert the molecular make-up of matter into numericals that could be translated into light waves. Stephanie started writing her pitch.

“It’s not—or wasn’t, advertised,” she explained. “But we offered it to grieving clients with some spare money. Their loved one could be cremated, my brother would calculate their molecular make-up into light, and we would beam it into the sky. It was expensive.”

“So, the hope was we would land on an alien planet like this and be reconstructed?” Eleazar asked.

Stephanie shook her head. “It wasn’t that practical,” she said. “It was all-sentiment. Theoretically, the light would travel on and on into outer space, or at least for hundreds of light-years, before it broke down into radio waves and whatnot. You know, doppler or whatever. Your loved one would exist in that form long, long after they had passed away—an unwavering band of light, extending outwards into infinity. That was the sales pitch, at least. The odds of it hitting an object or being otherwise disrupted were, well, astronomical.”

Eleazar marvelled at the reality of their situation. “It’s incredible that none of us were aware such a service existed,” he said.

Stephanie shrugged. “I mean, it wasn’t advertised, or covered by life insurance,” she said. “And, you know, sometimes that’s just how things shake out. Sheer cosmic coincidence.”

Eleazar pondered this information. His eyes drifted towards Tortellini and settled on the wide, dark scar that cut across the tortoise’s back.

“All I know,” Stephanie continued, “is that someone back there loved you a whole awful lot. It was expensive.”

Stephanie bent over laughing again. She was extra giggly due to the high concentration of oxygen in Akwanake’s atmosphere. Eleazar hadn’t told her about that yet.

*     *     *
Benjamin and Mercedes began a plan to collect any remaining native inhabitants from across Akwanake. They were still skeptical of society as humans described it, but were sure that new avenues of communication between settlements were not just beneficial but essential for the prosperity of their species.

They also initiated the development of a new language, specialized for their vocal anatomy and linguistic priorities.

The first word they worked up was a translation of “hello.”

*     *     *
Anita decided that the History of the Humans of Akwanake needed an epilogue.

It would be simple, open to amendment as new arrivals were beamed to the planet. Stephanie was confident her brother would continue providing the service as long as he could and that it could potentially even grow in scope.

“Dying humans might start littering the whole planet,” Stephanie said.

The epilogue would go like this:

No History worth its salt can ever rightfully claim to have a beginning and especially not an end, and this one won’t either. The fact of the matter is that we lived, struggled, loved, and died. A lot of people experienced this before us. So will a lot of people after us.

So will you.

But along the way, with a little help from the people around you, you might contribute your own chapter to this History. So, instead of ‘the end,’ I’ll just leave it at this:

To be continued.

It was a little pretentious.