Except from Crossing the Carnivorous Forest 

       Half-expecting to find that having her sister killed would leave a glump-sized hole in her life that would be impossible to fill, Adoris discovered just the opposite.

       Getting rid of Glory had made her life simpler and more interesting. 

       She nodded and closed her eyes to count her blessings.

       Benefit one; the peace of mind she gained from no longer having to worry about keeping the source of her wisdom a secret gave her a better perspective on establishing priorities and planning for the future.

       Benefit two; no longer needing to decode an encyclopedia worth of daily babblings to glean a trickle of information, left enough time in each day to enjoy a life beyond babysitting!

       Benefit three; she no longer had to see or experience regular reminders of the harm and duress she inflicted on the only person in her life she had ever felt close to.

       Guilt didn’t bother Adoris—as much as the lack of it. Her pervasive numbness was a constant reminder of how different she was from normal people. How excluded. How alone.

       For the most part, she didn’t give a damn what anyone else thought of her. But there was also a part of her that craved their company, love, respect…even adoration.

       Why devote myself to lifting humanity back out of the dark ages when I barely feel human myself? That’s not just ironic, it’s ridiculous. Pathetic.

       And yet, her achievements spoke for themselves. She was the Executrix—the first woman to reach that position of absolute authority since the Testator had shone His light to guide his flock into the great beyond, leaving everyone else to fend for themselves.

       And having figured out how to interface with the forest, Adoris had also become the Operator, the human representative the BioGrid had been created to serve. Nothing in her life was coincidence; it was a convergence of opportunities and clear messages. She was the true heir to the Testator’s estate on Earth and all her subjects and followers were her beneficiaries. Ambition was one of the tools she had been blessed with. It enabled her to fulfill her destiny and responsibility of restoring humanity to its former supremacy.

       Adoris rubbed her face with the palms of both hands. It wasn’t a fault of her character that the glump’s absence didn’t stir up any guilt at all; it was an advantage to be able to move forward without that distraction. She needed to put it out of her mind.

       Lying back on the interface bed she tugged on the tip of a rootlet to let Tree One know she was ready. As the first of her bonsais, it was the conduit she most often used to move data back and forth between her and the BioGrid. Today, she had a specific goal.

       One of Ephrem’s reinvention teams was trying to get video screens working again. The BioGrid’s instructions had taken them to the verge of another breakthrough—a working model of one of the more advanced LED systems.

       But instead of bringing the organic diodes back to life, all they’d managed to make visible on the screens in the lab were what looked like masses of puffy grey slugs squirming in a glass box. This was a big improvement from the black screens they’d started with, and even the blizzard-at-twilight static a few months ago, but still woefully inadequate. It was possible, if not likely, that the hues and flashes of colour she had seen amongst the vague shapes were no more than wishful thinking.

       Adoris’s enthusiasm was becoming as muted as the colours.

       This was a tricky fix that might require chemicals and substances Adoris didn’t keep on hand. In addition to stretching her resources, refining the yield from her mining operations into anything useful often required learning even more new technologies.

       This time, the BioGrid suggested a simpler solution and presented her with a folder full of shipping manifests suggesting that a shipment of the cutting-edge LED transmitters they had been seeking may have survived in a warehouse in Aggasiz. The Core made a convincing argument that the item they were looking for would have been seen as worthless to scavengers, little non-functioning plastic gizmos with no discernable use. With thick, molded plastic packaging protecting them from decay, some may well have survived.

       The upload of the manual and technical specs into Adoris’s brain had already begun.

       In order for Ephrem to create real-life prototypes, he needed precise instructions. And the technology she needed to pass along to him was far from simple.

       Since they did not have the tools and raw materials at the Tomb to create the components they needed, she had to teach Ephrem and his staff how to distinguish, test and install salvaged coils, chips, transistors, capacitors, diodes, oscillators and so much more. Any missing details could doom a project to failure.

       As the information she was attempting to transfer grew more esoteric and complex, the task grew beyond her. Too much essential data bled away in the process of transference.

       When she had related those concerns to the Core council, they came up with a solution, sending her to the BioGrid databank to train in file storage, organization and retrieval. Adoris was an excellent student. This new technique enabled her to retain enough relevant details to cut the number of interfaces required down to one or two per project.

       But recently she had started experiencing a negative effect. The adjustments in her perceptions were allowing real-world memories to be displaced by technical data. She started forgetting things she should remember and remembering irrelevant things she would rather forget.

       Mathematical formulas that swirled through her brain would occlude more mundane and essential information like memories of day-to-day interactions and the words she needed to communicate the knowledge she had gathered.

       She had intended this interface to be short, in order to reduce the havoc that her time in the BioGrid was starting to play with her memories back in the real world. But had already gone well beyond her self-imposed limit.

       When the interface terminated, Adoris lay motionless, head throbbing from all the stuff she was struggling to remember.

       As Adoris shook her head, trying to get her bearings, ghosts crawled out of the fog. She saw the glump being pulled, bleeding and catatonic, from the woody clutches of the Carnivorous Forest. It was more than a memory; it was like she was reliving the day.

       As the panic of the rescue team had turned to excitement when they discovered that the little girl was still alive, everyone assumed that Adoris was crying tears of joy or relief, when they were, in fact, just a manifestation of her overwhelming fear that her own role in the tragedy would suddenly come to light.

       She thrashed on the interface bed, struggling to hold in a scream. How could something from so long ago feel so vivid and immediate?

       She had long since hidden those memories and intense emotions away, locked them in an unlit chamber of her back-brain from which she had been certain they could never reemerge.

       And now this.

       After Glory was born and became the centre of the universe for all the butt-kissers and sucker-uppers in the Tomb, the seven-year-old Adoris had come up with methods for deflecting some of the limelight back at herself. Adults liked when she hung on their words and were impressed when she demonstrated how intently she could listen. Some of the questions she asked were as deep and relevant as anything these people were asked by other adults, including their fellow members on the Council of Elders. They all praised her and that pride left a warm residue in her chest that melted away slowly.

       Whenever Adoris glowed with self-satisfaction, everyone near her felt the warmth.

       Shame, on the other hand, was an emotion she found unbearable. Shame made Adoris’s nerves jangle and awakened a hundred shades of melancholy. It crawled into her back brain and made nests there. In shame, she would curl up and squeeze her belly as it ran a slimy skein of arms around her.

       And the very worst effect of the heightened memory was the way the moment of her greatest shame remained on permanent replay in her mind.

       While her mother was a super-sensitive soul always in search of ways to numb herself, to damp down the intensity of everything, her father had seldom shown his feelings.

       Mother had locked herself in a closet of borealis powders and dreamed a world where her babies frolicked without care. But Adoris’s father was unafraid of taking his daughter to task.

       Following Glory’s rescue, he’d made Adoris wait for hours in his office full of pain inflicting instruments before returning with his update and verdict. The whips on his office wall smelled of lavender oil and the nuts on the thumbscrews on his desk glittered with jewels like the wings of butterflies.

       “Because beauty helps soothe the pain,” the Executor explained.

       Accordingly, she tried to think of wildflowers but smelled only the manure they grew so well in.

       The fear, the endless drama, and ennui of waiting to hear about the fate of the glump already had Adoris unbalanced.

       Everyone around her seemed to have bought into the lie she’d used to save herself from taking responsibility for the toddler’s disappearance; a masked kidnapper who had scooped up the child and carried her down the mountainside, somehow going under the fence and disappearing into the underbrush.

       Guilt and repentance were the cornerstones of their faith and Adoris’s father was skilled at finding the means and the fortitude to elicit the atonement required to exonerate all the penitents and criminals who came to him.

       Shortly after accepting the job, he had confided to Adoris, “With the right incentive, you can make anyone confess to anything. If they’re guilty, it’s even easier.”

       Adoris had waited in her father’s office for what seemed much longer than a single day. Time had come to a stop as everyone waited for Glory to awaken.

       The last candle in the room was guttering by the time the door creaked open.

       The light flared to relative brilliance as Father lit a fresh taper and proceeded in his own personal globe of light. He sat down in silence and picked wax out of the candleholder so he could put the new one in before looking up from the task, his gaze so flat it failed to bridge the gap between them as he looked toward her eyes.

       Thinking it better to break the silence than remain suspended in ignorance she asked. “How is Glory?”

       He shook his head. “Not herself yet. And whether she ever will be again remains a riddle. We have not found any witnesses to corroborate your claim that she was abducted.” He paused to frame a question. “Was your man in black inside the Tomb? Or did he somehow enter from outside?”

       The futility of lying to the Executor was an article of faith at the Tomb. But Adoris had done it before without repercussions and felt quite pleased with her cleverness. This time was different. The look in his eyes said he saw through her lies.

       Her status as the Executor’s daughter had always sheltered her from the mortification that befell other penitents. Surely, her own public and excruciating execution was imminent.

       “I love you more than all the stars in the sky,” Father had once told her.

       Now, in Adoris’s imagination, the stars streaked as they fled the firmament.

She felt terrible about betraying a confidence, but it seemed the easiest way out. She heard herself suggesting, “Nurse was with a man. It might have been him I saw.”

       Her father perked up, seeming to recognize the scintilla of truth in what she said. He seemed more relieved than curious. “She was with a man. Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

       She shrugged. “I got used to him being there. He was one of the guards.”

       “Do you know his name?”

       Adoris winced and nodded. She had no friends, but both the guard and the nurse had been kind to her.

       “Is it over?” Adoris asked her father after he showed her their bodies.

       “They both confessed,” he said. “It satisfied the Council of Elders. But you and I know that their outcome has no bearing on the nature of your negligence.”

       The air grew so warm and stale that the deepest breaths couldn’t fill her lungs. She squeaked, “What do you mean?”

       “This relationship between the guard and the nurse. How long was it going on?”

       Adoris shrugged.

       “I’ve… ‘spoken’…to the chambermaids. They all conceded that it had been going on for months. How could you not notice that?”

       Adoris couldn’t even bring herself to look up as his voice continued in a suggestive murmur. “You often took advantage of their…preoccupation.”

       He curled his fingers under her chin and lifted her head, so she had no choice but look in his eyes, which seemed moist, almost teary. “Didn’t you my dear?”

       His accusation was sharp as a knife.

       He pulled his hand away and sat up straight. “This guard was too busy pursuing his carnal objectives to go around abducting children. It was you who took your sister outside, didn’t you?”

       Each sentence, each word deepened her horror and humiliation until it could go no deeper. As though the floor had dropped away into a sea of fire, the skin on her face felt scorched. She closed her burning eyes.

       Her belly churned like it housed a live eel in a boiling pot. Her palms were sweaty, her breathing shallow. Her skin prickled and her shoulders ached. She wanted nothing more than to disappear—to be anywhere but here.

       “No.” Adoris shook her head, whispering. “I didn’t take her out. She followed me. I told her to go back.”

       “She couldn’t open a heavy door like that herself,” he said, eye’s glittering like the jewels in the wings of the thumbscrews.

       “If I had closed the door behind me,” explained a snuffling Adoris as she struggled to find the words, “I wouldn’t have been able to get back in.”

       If he had looked at her with disdain, she might have been able to bear it, but the look he gave her was filled with grief and betrayal. His usual stony façade crumbled as he too began to cry. “In the absence of the Testator, I was elected to uphold the truth in His stead. The people of Hope have faith in me.”

       He swallowed hard and his lips curled into a sneer. “If they saw what an entitled, self-obsessed, little liar I have spawned, it could jeopardize everything I have worked so hard to achieve, everything I hold dear. It would undermine my authority, and worse—my integrity.”

       Her mouth opened and closed silently, and she retreated inside herself, a huge door slamming after her. One moment, she was devastated—so ashamed that she thought she’d never be able to look anyone in the eye again. In an instant, calmness was restored.

       It was the last time she felt shame. Or much of any emotion. If she couldn’t depend on her father to be the rock she needed, then she must be the rock.

       She heard herself saying, “As my penance, I propose to singlehandedly care for Glory until her condition improves. When you see my self-sacrifice, you will be proud of me again.”

       Her father shook his head, contempt escaping in a huff. “That sort of work is what nurses and servants are for.”

       Adoris nodded. “But you’ve just shown the world that they can’t be trusted. What you need is a child who is beyond reproach. And I shall be that child.”

       Adoris didn’t believe in the value of penance the same way her father did. In her opinion, when the Testator abandoned humanity, any debt they may have at one time owed must have fallen away with Him. As had their guilt.

       It was a relief when Father nodded. Despite the circumstances and notwithstanding all that had just transpired, a smile played at the corners of his lips.

       Many times, over the following years, she’d stare at her hands, with their nails cut to the quick so-as to gather less shit while changing Glory’s diapers, and wonder if she’d made the right decision.

       For those first years, the one person available for Adoris to talk to about it was the glump herself, sitting on her rump, spitting out food and crying.

       Even with a staff of nurses and housekeepers to do the heavy lifting and much of the dirty work, Adoris was trapped. Perversely, the glump’s helplessness just made her more inescapable. With a newborn’s brain in her growing frame, Glory was a weight that got heavier with time.