Plato's Cave During the Slicer Wars and other short stories by Terri Kouba

  I think my father realized how much he loved Marla that sunny day when he risked his life for hers. She had taken us down to the Library of Metals. Even then Plato’s Cave had so many books that they had to store them in different underground rooms. They categorized the rooms; the Library of Metals, the Library of Chemicals, the Library of Wood and so on. I had personally seen twenty different Libraries, but there were even more locked doors behind which I had not yet peered.

  My father and I were trying to understand how the metal could so quickly transform between liquid and solid. The Slicers were created by man, in a sense, but that’s giving us too much credit that we actually knew what we were doing. If we had known what would happen, not one of the seven billion alive at the time would have made the choice to create the Slicers. We weren’t trying to create Slicers. We were just trying to build stronger, lighter trains and tractors and patio furniture. We had created liquid metal. It was stronger than forged steel and yet as thin as one strand of a spider’s web. We had enough knowledge to modify its DNA so it would remain stable at room temperature and then bind solid when we showered it with a mist of a special chemical wash made with chameleon DNA.

  It would have allowed us to create incredible things. Cars used to weigh at least a ton and would buckle at the slowest of speeds; we would have had cars that weighed less than I do and yet would have protected its occupants at speeds of over five hundred kilometers per hour. Our spaceships were lumbering dinosaurs; the new ones would have used almost no fuel to eject themselves from our atmosphere. Ah, the possibilities, the opportunities, the things we could do and didn’t stop to ask whether we should. They say that justice is blind but I think hubris is blind also. We were blind to the things that, in hindsight, were apparent. Whether they showed their faces to us while we were creating the Slicers, I’ll never know.

  I was only ten when the Slicer Wars started but I say we because if it was ‘we’ who solved this mess, I feel it must have been ‘we’ who caused it as well. One person does not arrive at any destination on his own. He builds upon the foundations of his ancestors, upon their mistakes and successes alike. I was there, in the very room of scientists who developed the method by which we obliterated the Slicers. It was my idea to use the particles in the atmosphere to refract Marla’s Eigengrau wavelength, but I did not develop the solution on my own. I had but one small part in its development. All of mankind had a hand in building the knowledge by which we destroyed the Slicers. And I have to believe that all of mankind had a hand in building the knowledge by which we created the Slicers as well.

  And so in our prideful blindness we created something that became something else, something which none of us ever intended. These accidents have happened many times in our past, often with positive outcomes. This outcome was not positive. It was dreadful. The metal formed itself into a round marble. Out of that round center sprouted five-inch-long tendrils which flattened and curved, spinning the center, allowing it to fly almost as fast as the speed of sound.

  The center had sensors, I cannot bring myself to call them a nose or eyes, that sought out flesh in which to plant its cloned particulates to reproduce. Upon finding the flesh, any flesh, that of humans, birds, horses, it didn’t matter, the tendrils reshaped into metal points with edges so sharp they could cut clean through a tree trunk. The Slicer would burrow its way into the flesh, plant its clone, retreat and die. Upon death the liquid metal disintegrated and all that would be left would be the decaying dust of a silver marble. The clone would emerge within twenty-four hours and in the birthing process, the newborn Slicers created a mucus that dissolved every iota of the host’s flesh.

  In a way, in a very strange, unsettling way, the loss of most of the earth’s inhabitants through Slicer death was a blessing. Had seven billion people died by nuclear war or a virulent biological agent, those of us remaining would have been overwhelmed with rotting corpses. The Slicers dissolved the flesh and left the bones. Bones don’t decompose like bodies, leaving festering pulp full of parasites and disease. Exposed bones are terrible to look at, we see them still, even after all these years there are just too many to collect or cover, but at least the bones didn’t kill us. At least the bones didn’t harm our bodies. What seeing that many bones of our own species does to the human mind I cannot say. There are those who speculated, but even they admit that their musings into how our social psyche has changed are speculations at best.

  In the library Marla brought six or seven books over to a set of soft chairs and showed us how to use the electric light. They generated electricity by undersea turbines turned by the motion of the waves. I don’t know why we hadn’t thought of that when we were in Ireland. We were close enough to the coast, we knew the Slicers didn’t go underwater, we had the equipment. Now I know why we hadn’t thought of it, but at the time I just hit my forehead and said “We should have done that.”

  I can tell you the reason now, my children, but do not think the answers came as quickly as I can write them. It took months for us to realize the difference between Plato’s Cave and every other colony. To say the difference was Marla is to buy into the ideal that she was as great as her legend makes her out to be. In truth, the difference was a simple one. Plato’s Cave had hope. They had hope that they could conquer the Slicers, that they would survive the devastation we visited upon ourselves. That hope honed their focus, enabled them to create things to serve a purpose, to accomplish a task. That focus allowed them to build things that the rest of us, in our shock and despair, couldn’t even imagine.

  Many people who didn’t live through it say that it was Marla’s hope which gave Plato’s Cave hope, but that is because they had never seen her in the darkest of days. She was not an optimistic woman, she was not a Pollyanna, a person who looked for the silver lining. She carried the grief of humanity on her shoulders and like Atlas, even while she struggled under its weight, she refused to set it down.

  I believe it was her willingness to carry the grief for all of us that inspired the rest of us to have hope. Hope that we could, actually, make things better. Hope that we might actually survive. Hope that one day the Slicers would be gone and, even though we couldn’t reset things to be like they were before, at least we could make them better than they were now. It was not her hope that gave us hope, it was her sorrow.

  Her grief was palpable. Don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t morose. She laughed at the simplest of things. I bet she laughed at least once an hour for most of her days. She could find a reason to laugh in the most dire of situations, if only sardonically.

  I swear to you, my children, her smile was brighter than the sun. We, all of us, were drawn into that smile. We wanted her to smile so we could bathe in its warmth. Her eyes would sparkle and her teeth would flash and we could feel the warmth spilling from her. But as I said before, she carried her sorrow in her voice and when she laughed, it was like hearing a child laugh in this room, her voice bubbly and fresh. But underneath that, far away as if they were in a room at the other end of the house, you could hear a thousand children crying. If I could close my ears and see her face, her smile could make any horror flee, but when I would close my eyes and hear her laugh, it made me want to weep.

  She carried the grief so we wouldn’t have to. We didn’t ask her to. She didn’t ask us if she could. Of all the things she has done for us, my children, all the science, the death of the Slicers, all the food, water and animals we have because of her, the greatest thing she did for us was to carry the collective grief of all of humanity. That alone enabled us to carry hope in our own hearts. That is why Plato’s Cave progressed while every other colony decayed. Her sacrifice is what gave Plato’s Cave its hope.