Transterrestial Apsychic disorder

Mars colonization, it was a dream.

Until the children came.

Then it became a nightmare.

They named it transterrestial apsychic disorder.

Beyond the earth, lacking a soul.

~~~

They looked like normal babies John thought. At first glance you would think they had souls - but then you began to notice how they didn’t cry, didn’t squirm - they didn’t react, they didn’t feel pain. Not that any scientist had hurt them to test it, but even a normal baby flinches when you stick the needle in for life support. These did not.

They knew that babies born off world had trouble. There were the case reports - Synthia Allomond who got pregnant on the space station - her kid had come out terribly malformed due to lack of gravity they thought - and mentally retarded, maybe because of that maybe because of lack of nutrition on the base. But then Amanda Greenway and later Chi’lin both successfully carried off pregnancies on the moon base. They were growing their own food by then, and both stayed on the moon the whole time, and spent hours every day in gravity simulators. There had been nothing to suggest Mars would be worse.

But Mars was worse.

To see what they meant, to really see what they meant - beyond the surveys and tests, mothers rejecting their newborns “take it out of my sight,” the lack of neurochemical bonding - both baby and mother had the normal amounts of Oxytocin and dopamine, they just didn’t release it - to see what they meant, you had to look into one’s eyes.

He had seen it before in the eyes of some of the worse of the mentally ill, but never this bad. These baby’s eyes were empty. Not innocent, simply vacant, as if all other eyes had light inside and these had gone out. They tracked fine. They weren’t blind eyes, simply eyes with no one inside to see.

They tried to treat them like normal babies. They touched them and talked to them and with great effort cooed and sang to them. The mothers wouldn’t. A few weeks after the twenty six colonists arrived on Mars the first pregnancy was announced, and then the next. They were all couples who wanted children - by the end of the first woman’s term all thirteen women were pregnant at once.

Then the kid was born, empty eyes. She wouldn’t look at it. Then the next - one after another they gave birth and one after another they reported how they felt the urge to fling it away, to break it, to smother it - to hide it, hide their shame. The first was diagnosed with postpartum depression, by the  fifth no one thought it was about the mothers anymore. Thirteen empty babies - none of them cried, none of them moved. Their empty eyes tracked the scientists as they sang and cooed and rocked the empty doll-like things.

They had sent one to John on Earth to do tests. Suspended animation and a lightshifted ship and it hadn’t aged at all. There had been two more babies since then - they’d radically shifted diet - put them in earth gravity simulations, monitored the whole process and they couldn’t tell where they were going wrong.

John didn’t have any ideas either but he ran through the tests and looked at all the data.

The children, none of the children dream when they sleep. No REM, no murmurs or rolling, or any indication of a child’s dream. He didn’t know why it upset him so profoundly, but it did. No dreams.

He could inject drugs into their system - the bonding drugs, and their physiology would change accordingly - heartbeat increase, change in breathing, but behavior wouldn’t change. There was no behavior. They just lay there.

Brain scans showed low mental activity, the dull blues and greens of continued life but no connections - they didn’t understand words. Normal babies, even just after they’re born are a flurry of reds and oranges, and every word sets off a cascade of color as they built new brain cells to accommodate the sound. These brains were empty. They had the starting number, the bare minimum of brain cells to survive. He’d tried stimulating them to create more, he could do it but the new cells died off in three to five days.

The children died, despite perfect life support and care, in one to five years.

Something was missing.

~~~

The missing part arrived at lunch. He’d been seeing Sarah for three months now, but they’d never touched on his work.

”They’ve been being pretty hush about all this. All I’ve heard on the news is that the mortality rate is super low.”

”Yeah, this is all so scary and new. I guess they don’t want to scare anybody.”

”But I mean the more minds you get on something the more ideas. Like for instance the first thing I wondered is what about animals? Do they die? What about plants? ”

I’m sending you a colony of mice. He wrote in his reply email. See if they breed.

And by the way - how do plants do?

~~~

Dear John.

Here are the baby mice. We had some difficulty getting the originals to breed. The young are immobile and in my unprofessional opinion strongly resemble the children. We have been successfully growing plants on base. New seeds won't germinate but the ones from earth will. Bulbs and cuttings are fine.

Thanks

Senial Tufte, senior director of the MCP

The mice showed all the same symptoms. A missing part maybe

~~~

”Fermi paradox.” Terry said. “Ever heard of it?” She was short brown haired woman, they’d only been seeing each other for a week but he already knew he liked her.

John admitted he had not.

“Basically, it’s that the apparent size and age of the universe suggest that lots of technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations ought to exist - There are four hundred billion stars in the milky way, we can look at them and document them, and read their radio waves, but there isn’t any evidence. Humans, we’re loud. We emit so many radio waves, anybody looking at us could see us across galaxies. Imagine a more advanced culture. But nada, nihil, it’s silent.”

”But that would mean. . .” John trailed off. It made sense. There ought to be. Humans, the only species in the galaxy to develop space travel? Ridiculous. Humans, the only species in the visible universe? Couldn’t be. Yet there wasn’t any evidence.

But if children off world were born like this - if a species couldn’t travel - you would still expect to see noise from home planets.

But if life - if life wasn’t alive, if life had transterrestrial apsychic disorder, there wouldn’t be life, not really.

Fermi paradox solved?

~~~

The colony continued to send in reports. Microbial life did fine, although mutations happened less often and resulted more often in failed strains. Seeds from Mars would begin germination if chemically forced, but die before sprouting. Adults didn’t feel any serious adverse effects besides the expected - they felt cramped and sick of packaged food, homesick and tired of one another - but everything had been quite peaceful all things considered. 

No treatments worked on the babies. No new babies came. Couples on the Mars team began to refuse to try again. The scientific team pleaded - but it was half hearted pleading. Molly Anderman got pregnant on accident year three and asked for an abortion. 

Transterrestial Apsychic disorder continued to be confidential material. The media continued to print hopeful things about the colonization effort. John grew less and less hopeful as each baby died. 

~~~

Jamie was short, with shoulder length wavy brown hair and a bubbly laugh. Over coffee on their third date he admitted what he did. He didn’t know why he did it. Top secret information was not to be told lightly - but she also had a seriousness in her eyes that made him think she wouldn’t get him fired. 

She pursed her lips. “That’s big. You know the first thing I thought about when you were talking was ‘what about the Greenway baby?’ - You know the one born on the moon. It’s still alive. No defects. Nothing.”

John admitted he had never looked into that. The Greenways weren’t easy to get a hold of, but he had contacts higher up.

“You know it’s interesting that the moon should be fine but mars isn’t.” She said, “In Astrology-” He grimaced, and she grimaced back at him. “-What it’s a very old system of symbols that a lot of intelligent people have found very useful over a very long time.” He gestured her to go on.

“-In Astrology the moon is the symbol for the soul. It represents our emotions and the mystery that surrounds them. It makes a kind of sense.”

He hadn’t known Astrology had anything to do with planets. He was a Gemini, that was a constellation.

“Oh yes - Astrology is really quite complex once you get into it. We have houses and all the planets - Mars is the capacity to make change in the world.”

~~~

Michael Greenway had unusually shiny eyes. He had come in a flowing loose half robe and sweatpants, but still managed to look in charge - in that way rich people did. He took his chair smoothly and confidently answered every question John put to him.

Did he have any abnormal symptoms of space pregnancy or birth? He didn’t think so. He was deathly allergic to peanuts and bee stings, and more sensitive than most to pollen and mold. Symptoms of growing up early in a space station he was told. 

Did he have any mental problems - such as an inability to connect with others? Not at all. He was on the contrary quite empathetic. 

The interview went on. John took a series of basic measurements - blood pressure, weight. Everything was ordinary.

John was just turning to pack up his things when a final question hit him, did Michael dream?

“Oh yes - One thing I’ve learned by observation is that I dream more vividly than most, in colors that don’t exist in the outside world. It’s very hard to explain. I sleep more than most people because of it - simply because I don’t want to wake up. Keita is the same way.”

Who was Keita?

“Oh, the other baby born on the moon, Chi’lin’s child.”

~~~

“So imagine it’s what you say and the moon really does somehow alter babies somehow allowing their physical processes to work right. ” Keanna said, as she sipped her coffee across from him. “What does that imply? Is it something about having a planet with a moon that has this effect - then why does it work if you’re on the moon?”

John didn’t know, but he had the feeling it wasn’t a moon, but our moon. Keanna’s hair danced and glinted in the sun in a way that kept catching his eye.

“It can’t just be our moon, the universe is a huge place - if there’s anything in it, chances are there are doubles.”

But it explained the Fermi Paradox - he’d accepted that now. If it wasn’t just something about our moon - and no he had no evidence that it was our moon - just a hunch. It was something about how the Apsychic babies didn't dream, and the moon babies dreamed in unknown colors - as if somehow it were a dreaming scale, and most people were somewhere in between.

“Okay - so it’s rare. - and let’s say that it’s really rare - maybe we’re the only planet with a special moon in a goldilocks zone. - But there are bound to be others - and if it worked more on the thing it has to be an energy state.”

He didn’t know what that implied. 

“Sorry - I study quantum mechanics.” Ah - as bad as astrology. “When quantum particles share energy states they’re linked in an odd way - that’s how quantum computing works. Two particles move the same way at the same time. Faster than light communication.”

It was cutting edge - he had seen one once, a huge thing. 

“Well if you could isolate the energy structure that makes the moon do what it does - you could isolate other places that do the same.”

~~~

A small piece of moonstone did not make a mouse on mars give birth to normal babies, although mice born on the moon did exhibit prolonged REM sleep, in colors on the brain scan he could almost imagine he'd never seen before. Over the next five years another child was born on the moon and he was permitted to run tests. It had higher brain activity and neurochemical reactions. It dreamed more vividly. 

Over ten years the word was finally released. The public panicked and got over it. John married Keanna. They worked together in the thirty years after that. His specialty had been biology but Quantum biology was fast becoming a thing. His team would isolate the energy signatures of plant life and find it lacking in the universe. Keanna would continue to study the moon.

Ten more years and they both refused to retire. They claimed they were close. John had recreated the first living being - Prochlorococcus - a photosynthetic bacteria he believed would be the best bet to establish oxygen on a foreign planet - by moving and altering quantum particles in another place. 

Another year and he’d proven it couldn’t be done on mars but could on the moon, a strike that sealed his theory on Transterrestrial Apsychic disorder as most probable.

Another year and he had died, Keanna grieved and never paused the mad pace of her research. Two years before her death she finally completed work. There were other places in the universe with the same energy signature as the moon. 

~~~

Generations would pass before they were able to construct from the quantum level up a computer that could process and send data from those worlds to earth. From lava covered Yawgoth, to Knarra where microbial life had already begun. The worlds were not endless, nor were they often as close or far from suns as the humans might have hoped. 

Still, they existed. 

More generations would pass before the first human was created. She turned and looked at the camera built into the computer, from the suit they had built around her on a world they had chosen to name Avah.

“I feel fine.” She said. Her eyes were shiny. She had a soul.