The Green Lady
art by Jay Rollins – words by Ian Mondrick
When all onboard systems failed, leaving her deaf and blind sixty miles above the surface, Esmer didn’t bat an eyelash. As her hand-made interplanetary spacecraft was instantly turned to a feeble metal glider, not a bead of sweat crossed her brow. When her life— and more importantly, her life’s work— relied on safely crash landing into unfamiliar terrain at three-hundred miles an hour, she maximized her cool and used her own two green hands to bring the ship down safely.
Her name was Esmer Dandelion Deliquiss, and she was a child of Titan. Master of emotion, explorer of the solar system, and now, it seemed, castaway on her ancestral home of Earth.
She shifted slightly in the overstuffed leather cushion that served as a captain’s chair. Calmly, carefully, she combed through her hair, searching for the brass fixtures drilled skull deep. She made sure all connections were firmly rooted, that the turbulent re-entry hadn’t jarred anything loose. The EER, or Encephalic Emotional Register, used her lower brain functions as a CPU to fly the ship subconsciously, reducing stress & the possibility of pilot error. It was her finest invention (excluding the spaceship at large) and gave her the airs of Medusa: five coiled snakes twisting out of her scalp, slithering their way into a nearby monitor.
It was this monitor Esmer now inspected. Her fingers, working at a well-rehearsed speed, attempted to pinpoint the cause of the craft’s failure. Her hyper-empathic sense of touch was capable of gleaning emotional states from any living creature, but against the cold, unforgiving edifices of technology- nothing. And if Esmer was unable to repair her navigational tools, this ancient planet would be her permanent home. Undaunted she pressed on, casting one eye toward the external sensors for nearby signs of life. Again, nothing. She pried deeper into the EER, sliding out bespoke circuit boards and inspecting them for damage. She calibrated her wrist-mounted wellness display, re-ran the hundred-point checklist for planetary descent, quickly reviewed every diagnostic report available, and nevertheless…nothing.
Against the bedrock of Esmer Dandelion Deliquss’s mind, fear began to dapple and pool like so much rainwater. Panic attempted to pry open the steel-jawed trap that restrained her darkest emotions. And in defending herself against these attacks, she felt her mind reeling backwards, lost in thought, questioning why she would leave a home so perfectly engineered for human happiness…
Titan was Jupiter’s first moon, and the second, final stop of Humanity’s journey across the solar system. What started as an outpost designed to propel man deeper into the galaxy instead produced a literal utopia for the human race. A society so optimized to negate suffering, so perfectly engineered for harmony & peace, it was near impossible to compare its people to their ancestors on Earth. But against humanity’s darkest and seemingly inseparable impulses, the first generation to live on Titan built a foundation that could eliminate fear and forever forget a life framed by challenge.
Which meant Titan was no place for Esmer Dandelion Deliquiss.
Never satisfied with what was given, her true happiness lied in grasping what was just out of reach. On a planet of eyes focused on each other, she cast hers towards the stars, compelled towards the mysteries they might reveal.
In her suffering on Titan the elders, as well as her parents, took predictable mercy on her. There was no strife allowed, even for those that would inadvertently upset the balance. She was allowed to run any experiment she chose, so long as they were done outside the population centers and posed no human or environmental risk. But denied discovery of anything new, Esmer’s goal became fully realized: Recovery of what was lost. She would go back to Earth, to rediscover the birthplace of her species, and see what lessons could be learned there. This drive would lead to the invention of the EER, her spacecraft, and no fewer than three dozen other unique designs required for a voyage to Earth.
She remembered the look on her parents faces when she told them she was leaving. Sorrow mostly, but somewhere in their eyes Esmer could sense a quiet relief, knowing that their daughter’s solution to her problem would also be the answer to theirs: A voluntary expulsion of the iconoclast from Saturn’s moon. This pleased Esmer, as the happiness of others was as important as her own. Alone, in the middle of the night, she sealed up the ship’s door, and calmly exhaled her last breath of Titan’s atmosphere. The stress of interplanetary flight was more than any human had suffered in generations, but Esmer unceremoniously summoned the explosion that divorced her from the only home she had ever known.
BOOM. Something heavy thumped the door to Esmer’s grounded ship. She cursed herself for the mental digression. Losing one’s self in thought was the first step to emotional instability; her problem was here, now, and growing larger. In the space of one second, she pulled herself from the thick soup of self-pity, steeled her resolve, and checked the external sensors: But still no signs of life.
BOOM. Cordoning off a bubbling sense of panic, Esmer unscrewed the snakes from her scalp, stood up inside the small cabin, and placed her hand on its hatch release button. With clear eyes and a calm mind, she drew one slow breath, and reassured herself: I gave myself willingly to the cosmos, in search of knowledge and enlightenment. If these are my last breaths, I take them freely and without fear.
BOOM. Esmer’s steady hand released the hatch, and the cold, pre-dawn air of Earth came rushing in to greet her. It was the sweet stink of a verdant country field, and the memory of her parent’s farm blossomed in her mind.
Between her and the smell stood an imposing silhouette. It filled the hatch and stared down with a pair of red pinpoint eyes. Esmer stood transfixed. For a moment that seemed ages long they stared, waiting for some inclination of each other’s intent. Slowly, hesitantly, its pair of trunk-like legs receded from the opening, and in the murk of the fading night, Esmer thought she saw its hand waving her outside. She took a step towards the hatch, now more curious than cautious.
A symphony of lights awaited her outside. As the sun rose slowly in the east, a hundred pairs of red lights lit up at the sight of Esmer. The spreading daylight revealed them for what they truly were: Robotic humanoids, dipped in an unbroken metallic skin with sinew, muscles & bone structure identical to the homo sapien. But their faces were smooth and blank, only those two red eyes peering out from featureless masks. They stared up at her, motionless and unblinking.
Esmer disembarked the spacecraft, and took her first step on Earth’s fresh, fertile soil. She raised her hand at the elbow, and gave a gentle wave to her audience. One of the crowd took a step towards her, raised its hand in a similar fashion, and offered it towards her. Esmer took a deep breath and leaned forward, pressing her palm to the cold steel appendage in front of her. She closed her eyes, and reached out.
Boom. Flashes in the dark behind Esmer’s eyes. Something inside the metal pulsed. Faint and far-away, but present nevertheless.
Boom. Again, it came, rhythmically, and with a familiar pattern. she felt a warmth within it, obfuscated by the metal, but resonant still. In her mind she saw small branches, flashes of electricity, and below it all…a feeling of excitement and fear.
BOOM. Esmer saw it clearly now: A pulse! Below the augmentations and the impenetrable armor, humanity persevered. Her heart swelled, and Titan’s first astronaut struggled to maintain her composure. She felt excitement surging in her ancestor’s cold hand. She could feel it reaching out wirelessly to the others, their minds synchronizing, a miasma of emotions, thoughts, and ideas, all exposed to her now, a raw and vulnerable hive mind. A distant voice spoke inside her head.
We saved the planet, but not ourselves. We restored mother nature, but can not restore what made us human. Have you come back to teach us?
Esmer looked back inside the ship, to the dangling copper wires & blacked out monitors. Surely, something could be made from that, she thought. Her mind began to race with the hurdles involved, the tools and time she’d need, the problems still yet unseen….
She turned back to her ancestral ambassador, and saw its red eyes had switched to green. Green like her skin, peering out hopefully from a featureless steel face. Whatever had become of Earth’s denizens, they were still human, and to feel them was to know them. She opened up her heart and let her people feel the breadth of her love and compassion. One by one, she saw their eyes turn the same shade of green, and she knew a spoken “yes” would be unnecessary. She would reconnect her people to their humanity, no matter how many challenges stood in her way.
And for once, nothing could have made Esmer Dandelion Deliquiss any happier.
(The Green Lady story inspired by Jay Rollins’ artwork. )
