Description
BIOPUNK 3
Mars is red and dead outside, but inside biodome34, the grass grows blue, fruit forests breathe, and the Hewmen tribe tends greendeer they engineered. It is a soft, deliberate world built for survival, and it is starting to crack once again.
Aristotle, a transgender woman who fought her way from outcast to war hero to leader, has lost the one thing she could not design. Her son Mickle is dead. Aristotle sees flickers of Mickle’s future reverence in dreams she does not trust, watches her marriage to Perr dissolve under grief that love cannot fix, and tries to hold a peace with her friend Spring that was never meant to be gentle.
Farika, the old rival who fought at Mickle’s side, comes begging for carbon to bioprint new organs. Xi Lu, who betrayed Mickle, asks Aristotle for the one thing the Hewmen value more than justice: forgiveness.
The Hewmen do not punish, they remember, and their harshest sentence is shared humiliation. Aristotle must decide what a good life means when the universe feels random, when determinism fails, and when identity is still being painted on skin with fruit dye and pink mohawks.
Eudaimonia is Aristotle’s decision to flourish not because suffering ends, but because you choose virtue while it lasts.
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EXCERPT:
Nothing kills happiness like the death of a child. I used to be so in love with my husband Perr, but now I can’t look at him without seeing our son Mickle. When that happens, I want to throw up. The two of them had the same blue eyes, the same heavy brow. When Perr is deep in thought, all I see is Mickle. When Perr gazes at me, all I think about is Mickle. As a result, ever since our kid died, we haven’t been intimate. I guess I do still love Perr, but I just can’t…
My name is Aristotle. I’m part of the Hewmen tribe. We live in biodome34, on Mars. Although the entire planet is red from oxidization, our biodome is lush and colorful. Green and blue grass interweaves over soft hills. Dense fruit forests grow on steep mountainsides, while greendeer frolic in meadows. I haven’t been able to enjoy any of it since Mickle died though. It isn’t just my relationship with Perr that has suffered, it’s my relationship with the entirety of existence.
We’ve managed to domesticate a few greendeer. I’m currently inside an enclosure, feeding the animals straw. Unlike the wild greendeer in the forest, these ones aren’t afraid of people. As soon as they spy me climbing over the wooden fence, they hop on over. My friend Spring is with me. He has red hair and very fair skin. I’ve known Spring for a very long time, and he reminds me of a time before I was married, before I became a mother. He’s one of the few villagers whose presence I can stand.
While the greendeer feed, I pet one of the stags. His wool is warm and soft. Beneath his skin, gears rotate in complex ways. Greendeer were genetically engineered by our fourfathers. These creatures’ bodies are simpler than those of animals’ which evolved on Earth. Homo sapiens or even cows, have far more intricate bone structures, nervous systems, and so on. That’s because the fourfathers bet on simplicity when they created our biodome. The fourfathers figured the simpler they kept the ekosystem, the longer it would survive.
They were wrong. First, a meteor crashed into our dome, putting a large hole in it. I had to personally seek help from a neighboring tribe, called the Mench. The Mench helped me fix the hole, but then, intense earthquakes threatened to finish the job of destroying our home. The earthquakes turned out to be tremors caused by giant drills. These huge machines belonged to a hostile underground tribe called the Ren. The Ren attacked us and kidnapped me. My son Mickle, managed to rescue me though. But in the process, he had to fight and ended up dying from his injuries.
Through everything that happened I’ve learned something that the fourfathers didn’t know. I learned that no amount of planning can prepare you for the future. Existence is too vast, the possibilities too endless. I used to think of the universe as a clockwork, in which things revolve in a certain, predetermined way… but now I’m not sure. If atoms are like dominos, then why did my son have to die? What outcome does his death produce? What happens because he died, that wouldn’t have happened otherwise? Nothing.
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