The Last Child of Babel

Parse

Shoni could not feel herself. Her arms and legs had both gone numb. She was sat in the pitch black with her knees pressed up against her chin. The bin was far too small for an adult to even stand in, but for once Shoni’s size and age had given her an advantage. Curled up into a ball she was just about to cram herself inside, reach up and close the lid. Now all she had to do was wait, but this was easier said than done. All she wanted was to stretch out her legs and punch some feeling back into them, well, almost all she wanted; she wanted to know what was on Level 2.

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After what felt like hours, with the hum of the settlement’s ventilation system, and the occasional irritable sigh from the bin next door, the only things to distract her from her discomfort, the sudden sound of approaching footsteps almost made Shoni jump. They were accompanied by quiet voices thick with worry, “How long?” Said a deep slow male voice.
“Hard to be precise but based on the current activity they’re saying days not weeks.” Replied a sharper female voice; a voice that Shoni knew all to well.
The man let out a slight gasp, “Lord, Sun and Stars.”
“Indeed.”

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“But its all done?” The woman cleared her throat pointedly,
“You’re not supposed to...” she paused and then whispered, so quietly that Shoni
had to strain her ears to hear, “...you’re not supposed to know about it.”
“Yes of course, sorry, Sister, but...?”
“Nearly. I believe. They say they should have time to finish.” Shoni’s eyes widened;
finish what? There was a moments silence, then she heard the familiar beep indicating an ID card unlocking an air lock door, and the soft whoosh as the door slid open. There was a slight jolt as the bin began to move forward. Then, almost immediately, it stopped. Shoni shut her eyes and held her breath, expecting the lid to swing suddenly open. Then came a second beep, one she had only heard once before; they were in the elevator.
“Going up.” A somewhat metallic voice rang out. Shoni opened her eyes, not that it made much difference against the darkness, and silently let out her breath. The bin softly shuddered as the forbidden elevator began to move upwards. She was on her way to Level 2.

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*

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You would think being the last child to ever be born would make you special. Far from it. Shoni would sometimes wonder why there were no children her age or younger, but no one would ever tell her why so eventually she stopped asking. Being the last child made her think that she must be special, that surely, in some way, she must be important, but nothing in her life so far had remotely indicated that this was true. In fact, there was nothing particularly special about Shoni. She was short for her age, thin, with mousey, sand-coloured hair. Her doe-eyes were a deep brown, their apparent innocence masking the truth of the girl beneath. Behind the plain, slightly timid exterior, Shoni was angry.
She hadn’t always been this way. She used to be as care free as you’d expect a girl her age to be. She would watch as the other children would play amongst the hanging gardens on Level 6. Stealing apples and swinging from the thick vines, which dangled into the Sun Plaza from the half covered walls of the lower pods, until they were chased away by a growling gardener or clucking priestess. Shoni would watch as they would swim in the Sun Plaza’s fountain, clambering on the imposing statue of the sun God, Helios — looking on disapprovingly from his mighty chariot — until the older children, and they were all older, were dragged away to the Solarium Chapel for school.

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Shoni was not yet old enough to go to school. In fact, she was not yet old enough to do anything, or at least that is what she was always told. For the longest time she didn’t really mind. Although she wanted to go to school with the other children, she was perfectly happy entertaining herself. She would walk among the hanging gardens, marvelling at the hard work of the bees as they darted from flower to flower, or the teamwork of a chain of ants helping each other carry impossibly large leaves back to their nest. She would spend hours by herself, sat on the edge of the fountain, dangling her feet into the cool water, watching the rays of artificially enhanced sunlight dance chaotically on the surface, shimmering and shifting in a seemingly infinite array of possible shapes and patterns. She had always found beauty in these little things, these small moments of life around her, but beyond that had given them very little thought. But recently something had changed. Recently she had began to wonder why the bees made honey and what the ants did with their leaves. She wanted to know where the water in the fountain came from. She would ask the gardeners but was largely ignored. She would ask the other children but they would just laugh at her. She was angry because no one would tell her anything, no one would include her in anything. She wanted to be part of things, to learn things, to know things. She wanted to speak to the other children more, to join them as they played and studied, but they always made her feel stupid for not knowing things in the first place, in short, today was a day that could not have come fast enough.
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The morning siren broke Shoni’s revery, signalling that the sun — the real sun — was rising over the surface, three miles above where she lay in her small, metal framed bed. Shoni had been awake for a while, busy scribbling in her tattered sketch book, its leather binder well worn from age and overuse. Shoni was very proud of her leather binder. It used to belong to her mother and was Shoni's one remaining possession from life on the surface. It was resting gently on her knees as she tried to put the finishing touches to her gazillionth attempt at a self portrait. She glanced again at her blurry reflection in the small, somewhat tarnished mirror on the stand beside her bed, but the drawing still wasn’t right. Shoni loved drawing, every individual stroke of her stub of charcoal slowly coming together to form whatever image her minds eye could conjure, but for some reason she could never quite get herself right. Try as she might, she couldn’t seem to capture what ever it was that made her her. She had no idea whether they taught art at school but was happy in the fact that she would soon find out.

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Today was Shoni’s tenth birthday, which meant, for the first time, she would finally join the other children in the Solarium Chapel. It was a day Shoni had dreamt of for as long as she could remember, which admittedly was not very long.
Shoni had not been in Babylonia all her life. She had come from the surface but try as she might she could not remember the outside world, but maybe this was for the best. She had heard the stories. The scorching sun, the floods, the bubbling oceans and unbreathable clouds of gas that would suddenly burst into flames, setting fire to the surface of the sea. She once heard one boy telling a friend that giants roamed the land and even bigger sea monsters lived in the sea. But she didn’t believe this. Giants or not, she knew the burning skies and extreme temperatures, fluctuating between lethally hot and lethally cold, were a far cry from the relative safety of Babylonia; the last refuge of humankind.
Shoni knew she was one of the lucky ones, she was part of one of the last caravans of refugees to be admitted before Babylonia closed its gates for good. Her and her mother had travelled an unfathomable distance to get here, at least unfathomable to Shoni, who’s world was no bigger than the confines of Section 42 and the rest of Level 6. Shoni’s father was dead. She liked to imagine that her father had been killed trying to fight The Great Flare, the Fay Ton Flare, or what ever it was called, the first solar flare that put into motion the chaos that began the on going destruction of Earth, but Shoni knew deep down that he could not have been old enough to be around back then. Either way, Shoni and her mother survived, and, along with almost everyone else in the world, set off to Babylonia, but, at some point on the journey, Shoni’s mother had also died, caught — at least she was told — in the greatest wild fire the world had ever seen. The fire set the biggest mountains — something like the the Hymn Las — on fire. She overheard that the peak of Ever West itself was burning above the clouds. Shoni would often feel sad about not having any parents but she could not remember her mother or father so wasn’t entirely sure whether she missed them or not. Anyway, she and the other surviving members of the caravan escaped and finally reached Babylonia, but she was separated from them on admission and, as far as she knew, hadn’t seen them since. For as long as she could remember Shoni had been alone. She had no one in Babylonia. She didn’t have a family. She didn’t even have a family name. She had always wanted a name and had thought about giving herself one, but felt that this was somehow cheating, so she was just Shoni.

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For a while now, Shoni had been eager to find out and know as much as possible about anything and everything she could, but had to rely on scraps of information she scrapped off conversations that past her by. She had only heard bits and pieces about how Babylonia was built, and it was hard to know what was true. Some said it was built by Helios himself, but most said it wasn’t. The most common story Shoni had heard is that human’s, long since dead, had built it using something called new clear explosions to make a big hole in the ground in an area that used to be called something like Magicstan. They supposedly kept blasting deeper and deeper, and when the hole was big enough, they began building an upside-down city, that dangled from a huge honeycomb structure that spanned the entire surface of the crater. Shoni loved honey when she could get it, and supposed it was probably sticky enough to build things with it.
She had heard that when people arrived in Babylonia, they would enter at the honeycomb level; Level 1. She had heard that the honeycomb structure itself acted both as a protective grid for the settlement, stopping most of the radiation from getting through, as well as the foundation for the settlement to hang from. This is where all the asylum- seekers, or Pilgrims as they were known, were processed. Shoni had been told she was an asylum-seeker, but didn’t know what asylum was and was pretty sure she had never looked for it. Once processed, they were asked about their skills so they can be assigned jobs and living quarters. Only adults were allowed jobs, which Shoni thought was terribly unfair. Children and adults alike would then receive an ID card that doubles as a key to whatever sections they were allowed in, before getting in the elevators and leaving the surface forever. The elevators went all the way down to the crater floor, stopping everywhere apart from Level 2.

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Shoni didn’t know much about Level 2. Well, she didn’t know much about anything but she knew nothing about Level 2. It was off-limits and no one ever seemed to speak about it. She was always listening out for any mentions of Level 2, but was left always disappointed, so was forced to imagine what might be there. Maybe Helios lived there, stopping the radiation from passing beneath. Or perhaps massive bees lived there, buzzing around and making sure there was enough honey for Level 1 to stay up. There was a nest of normal sized bees in the Art section of the Lower Library. No one ever seemed to go in this section, which Shoni assumed was because of the bees, so she would spend hours alone in there drawing. She found that if you left the bees alone, they would leave you alone, which is more than can be said for the other children.
Levels 3, 4 and 5 were where most of the adults worked but Shoni hardly had a clue what happened there. She was not allowed on these Levels but had once before made it

to Level 5. She managed to slip into an unmanned elevator before the doors shut. When the doors reopened she found herself in an enormous glass structure, with row upon row of plants of every colour imaginable stretching off further than she could see. The plants looked much like the hanging plants on Level 6, but these plants had a strange uniformity that sort of reminded Shoni of the girls she shared a dormitory with. She walked amongst the rows of plants for a while, examining them all and taking in the different smells, before she heard a strange squeaky bleating sound that she had never heard before. She followed the sound and eventually came across a green clearing filled with fluffy white things with four legs. They all simultaneously looked up from eating the green stuff that covered the floor and turned their bemused black faces towards her. She reached out to touch one of the fluffy creatures, running her fingers through its white hair, but was suddenly spotted and shouted at by a man with a big hooked stick. The creatures ran away almost as fast as Shoni. She hid amongst the crops but was eventually caught and abruptly forced back to the elevator and back down to where she belonged.

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Level 6 was Shoni’s home. Its was everybody’s home. Level 6 was the City of Babel itself, with upside-down skyscrapers, or groundscrapers, built of hundreds, maybe thousands, of cube shaped pod like sections of sand coloured concrete. They were piled on top and beneath each other like a jumbled staircase, pouring down the crater. The pods were connected by vast sky-bridges — if you could call a bridge miles beneath the sky a ‘sky’ bridge — and were covered in hanging gardens. Vines and moss fell over them, and down them, and around them, with flowers, fruits and insects creating a sense of life that allowed the Pilgrims to briefly forget they now lived deep beneath the surface. The pods’ glass panel ceilings allowed sunlight to drip inside, giving the murals painted on the internal walls an ever green glow as the light seeped through the vegetation. The murals showed pictures of the life that once thrived on the surface. Shoni did not know what most of the images were but loved looking at them. Small and furry, big and hairy, plain, striped and spotted animals. Men and women holding all kinds of sticks, pointed sticks, hooked sticks and other sticks hanging from their waists and backs. Buildings big and small, some round, some pointed and some that scrapped the sky. All of it painted side by side. The walls of the pods showed the life that once was, and the walls contained the life that remained. Housing units, along with shops, markets, medical centres and dining halls all piled up on top of each other. In the centre of the crater suspended in midair, only attached to the sides by four imposing sky bridges, was the Solarium Chapel; a huge globe like structure that was the beating heart of Babylonia. Stretched out beneath the Chapel was the Sun-plaza, a large platform where the Pilgrims would spend the little free time they had, moving from seat to seat in an endless attempt to avoid the large round shadow of the Chapel above. In the middle of the Plaza was Helios’s fountain, whose waters, well, Shoni didn’t know where the waters came from yet.

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She had never been lower than 6 but had heard that something called Hydro lived down there but had never worked out who or what this was. Shoni once heard a girl a few years older than her say that even if one day the Sun went out, Babylonia could harness the energy of Hydro and survive for a thousand-thousand years. Shoni didn’t believe her. In fact, Shoni didn’t believe any of it. Take Helios for example; if the sun and its flares are what sent them all underground in the first place, why would anyone want to worship a Sun God? It made no sense to Shoni, and she wanted more than anything to find out about it all, but she supposed she would have to wait to learn these things at school.
The siren finally stopped. Shoni looked up from her sketch book and glanced around the room. Five identical beds lined both sides of their pod, with five identical side stands separating them. Shoni was in the corner, which she liked. The bed next to her was empty, so she could move in closer to the other girls in the dormitory if she wanted to, but she didn’t want to, so didn’t. They were only just waking up, tousled haired and bleary eyed, none of them looking remotely enthusiastic about the days lessons ahead. Wearily they pulled themselves from their matching beds, and put on their matching uniforms — dull, faded, grey things made from a patchwork of synthetic wool and lined at the neck and cuffs by the real thing. The real wool was detachable as even this far beneath the surface, the temperature could drop and rise abruptly. Shoni loved the feeling of the wool, it reminded her of the fluffy white creatures on Level 5 and she often wondered where it came from. She didn’t have a uniform yet, but assumed she would be given one when they got to the Solarium Chapel. She, as she often did, had fallen asleep whilst drawing the evening before, so was already dressed in the same pale blue shirt and pants that she wore most days. It used to be a rich vibrant blue, which she loved, but the constant exposure to the radiation, ever present even this deep in the crater, meant nothing held its colour for long. Nearly everything in Babylonia had faded to a nearly unrecognisable shade of bland.
The other girls were heading towards the door, forming the same orderly queue that they formed every morning. Shoni looked back at her drawing, sighed, and, as she always did, put a big black cross over herself. She put down her charcoal and sketchbook, leapt out of bed, and half jogged to join them.

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“Where are you going?” Gabriela, a tall willowy girl, with a sharp chin and even sharper eyes, was staring at Shoni from the front of the queue, a mixture of pity and scorn etched across her face.
“School!” Shoni replied with a grin, “I’m ten today.”
“Lucky us.” Gabriela turned away without another word. The other girls glanced at Shoni but she did not receive so much as a smile, let alone a happy birthday. Shoni liked to tell herself she didn’t care, but she did, at least a little bit.
A beep echoed around the dormitory as the door, which was always locked at night, was automatically activated. Almost simultaneously the other girls pulled out their ID cards. Shoni had predictably forgotten her’s. She scampered back to her bed and grabbed it from where it lay next to her mirror. The ID showed a photo of a considerably younger Shoni and her signature. She loved her signature. She hadn’t meant to do it but she always thought the slightly smudged ‘o’ looked a bit like an apple that the snake like ’S’ was about to eat. The top corner of the the ID proudly proclaimed, ‘Settlement of Babylonia’. Beneath her surname-less-name, it simply read: ‘Unaccompanied Minor’. She snatched up her ID and ran to the back of the queue, just as the door slid open and the line of girls began to troop out, each pressing their IDs to the glass screened panel as they past. The screen showed each of their names and citizen numbers, as it always did. Finally it was Shoni’s turn. She held her ID to the panel and glanced at the screen, expecting to see Shoni, B642 253920 as normal. Nothing happened. She scanned her ID again. This time the screen flickered, flashed, and went blank, before flickering again and turning blue. Shoni had never seen the screens turn blue before. Suddenly a box appeared and the screen read, ‘Level 2: Terminal’ and beneath that ‘Receiver: Download in Progress’. A blue bar moved across the screen like a perfectly straight stroke of paint. As it reached the end of the box the screen flashed and changed again, it now read, ‘Thinker: Update Complete’. The screen flickered one more time and went blank. Shoni stared at her startled reflection in the black screen, and then slowly, she raised her ID and scanned it again. She froze. The screen now read ‘Shoni Parse, E305 253920’. Parse? A surname? Her family name?

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“Hey!” Shoni grabbed the shoulder of the girl in front of her. The girl turned, “What do you want?”
“Your name, when did you get your name?” Shoni was slightly out of breath. “What do you mean?”
“When did you get your second name?”
“My family name? It’s just my father’s name.”
“When?!” Shoni’s voice raised several pitches and she gripped the girl’s shoulder harder.
“When I was born of course. Why?”
“I have a name!” The girl pulled away from Shoni,
“What do you mean?”
“Look!” The girl glanced at the screen. Her mouth twitched as if she was about to
smile but she just shrugged, turned away, and followed the other girls out of the dormitory. Shoni read the screen again. Shoni Parse. “Parse.” She said the word out loud,
feeling the name on her lips, “Shoni Parse.” She glanced at the screen just as her name vanished and the screen went blank. The blue of the screen was still imprinted in her eyes. She blinked but couldn’t get it out of her vision. Thinker and Receiver. What in the name of Helios, or perhaps who in the name of Helios, were Thinker and Receiver? Shoni Parse smiled as she stepped through the door. Perhaps she would find out at school.

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