Grace Augustine, H.R. Director
ARIES Customer Service and Collections Intergalactic, LLC
Private Journal
March 18, 2015
Contrary to popular belief, I'm not dead.
There have been some fanciful stories going around to that effect. A lot of misinformation.
Sadly, due to the various non-disclosure policies within ARIES, I am not permitted to correct these errors, except in the form of this journal, which probably not see the light of day until decades after the date of my actual death.
Believe it or not, I was not killed by a heavily armed mining operation, and therefore was also not subsumed into a giant tree.
I am alive and well, gainfully employed by a struggling branch of a massive interplanetary customer service conglomerate that just so happens to have the ability to send office buildings through time and space.
I do not expect you to believe me. It's a hard pill to swallow. I barely believe it myself, but it's true.
Of course you don't want to hear about that. You want to hear about the Na'vi and Pandora and Jake Sully and all those myths and legends obscuring rather unglamorous fact.
Well this is my story, and I'm going to tell it the way it needs to be told. If Corporate ever makes this journal accessible to the public, I want them to hear my side of the story, not Pocahontas with blue noble savages.
First and foremost, Pandora is not a moon. It is a planet.
I repeat, not a satellite.
And there were missions set up on it.
Churches paid good money to send groups of missionaries into space to convert the natives, most notably the Holy City.
The Pope actually had a space program.
I was a mission baby, born in St. Teresa's Evangelical Center, a hive-like arrangement of prefabricated concrete huts in the region of Blessed Virgin. The mission targeted Tamtiwa, adults and children, teaching them the bible, English, and civilization.
What are Tamtiwa? You should already know, but you don't because of all the misinformation. This brings me to my second point:
Blue cat people do exist on Pandora, but they aren't called Na'vi. Their proper name is Tamtiwa. Na'vi are large stupid pig creatures, also bipedal, but excessively brutal, their greatest contribution to society being a sexually transmitted disease.
Our mission was built on a beautiful location, one side overlooking the jungle with all its multicolored exotic foliage, the other end looking out over a hillside, equally overgrown, leading to a picturesque series of cliffs with a waterfall. Day and night I dreamed of going there, walking underneath the falls, skinny dipping, but nobody ever let me.
Apparently, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, for as soon as I began to speak and walk, I was thrown in among them oxygen equipment and all.
I hated those air masks. The liner always itched and they never fit my face, and I had to wear them every time I went outside.
Still, it was either that, or stay cooped up inside a concrete igloo day and night and slowly go mad. It wasn't like I could breathe cyanide.
I would sit on the ground with all the Tamtiwa boys and girls in their bright yellow robes, wearing my mask, enduring their stares as I half listened to Steve or Mary Scott or one of the other elders reading bible stories, watching with envy as the Tamtiwa freely breathed the cyanide rich air.
Somehow they could breathe both oxygen and cyanide, so they could go anywhere we humans went, but I couldn't do the same. It was horribly unfair.
Human kids stayed with the human kids, Tamtiwa with the Tamtiwa. It wasn't just prejudice, it was survival. If someone's oxygen was running low, or the equipment wasn't working right, one of us could run and tell an elder.
Even more disharmoniously, we further subdivided by our home huts.
My little clique consisted of me, Gabe Martinez, Lacy Delgado, Mary Wright and Kamara Stevenson. Oh, and Buddy Bear, of course, but he was a robot.
Our every hour was structured, sunup to sundown.
In the morning, we processed to the largest prefabricated structure in the complex for morning worship. Afterwards, and never before, we bathed, ate and went off to our assigned educational modules, rotating from concrete hut to concrete hut, depending on the time of year, our age, and stages of course completion.
The course load of any given day was always something like: Bible, Math/Science/Agricultural Studies, Bible, English/Literature, Bible, Indoor P.E., History/Sociology (which includes the bible), Bible, and Pandoran health classes, which reviewed oxygen equipment maintenance and nature survival, various arts and crafts modules, Bible.
Our foreign language classes were rather awkward. Obviously, we had no use for Spanish, French, Italian, Chinese, whatever. We had Latin classes for the bible, but otherwise we studied only two languages: English and Tamtiwa.
Tamtiwa was a joint alien and human effort, the human mostly to keep the Tamtiwa in line, you know, make sure they weren't filling the children's heads with the wrong ideas.
My first Tamtiwa teacher was named Sacaza Nayeri. Maybe that's where they got this `Neytri' name from, I don't know. She was with us for many years before someone decided to expel her for teaching the children about the nature goddess Etowah.
My second instructor, Volbacha, taught us dirty words in her language, but no one said anything because she slept with elder Travis.
We lost Mary Wright a week after my eleventh birthday.
She thought she had gills.
It was after Christmas, technically the Feast of Saint Stephen, though no one could tell in a jungle where it's warm and humid all the time.
We ate breakfast in the common room, a large drum shaped room with a domed ceiling. Metal cabinets along each wall, judging from the open ones, contained dishes, no porcelain visible. A small light up Christmas tree stood at one end of the room.
The room had doors in all four cardinal directions, and had a plain beige color to it. On one wall I saw a framed picture of Christ in Gethsemane, and I stared at it, it turned into DaVinci's Last Supper. Photo frame, I thought, but a huge one.
A screen on another wall showed what looked to be camera footage of a jungle, and another showed a choir singing, and I could hear strains of Rock of Ages above the sizzling of food.
The air was thick with the smells of something like ham and diesel exhaust, pancakes, eggs and WD-40.
Mom was standing over a sort of futuristic electric skillet situated on top of an aluminum sideboard thing, cooking eggs alongside met with gray and purple spots that definitely did not look like ham, and gave off that ham-ish diesel odor. Amfubvi, it was called. A little local flavor. Pancakes crackled in a strange little plastic cabinet on little shelves.
In the center of this room stood the table where we broke bread every day. Our chairs were specially designed so we could sit with the grownups, but none were usually present in this particular hut.
We all wore gray jumpsuits, standard issue. We were light years away from the nearest clothing store, and none of us were brave enough to dress in the local attire. For this reason, we never fought about clothing.
Gabe was a dark skinned boy with black hair. Handsome, though a little plump. Across from him sat Lacy, a freckly brunette, narrow in the face and body, kind of a cornpone tomboy type. Always had her hair braided or tied back. Letting it down interfered with her rough gymnastics.
Kamara, an adorable little black girl with an afro exploding from her head, always seemed to be talking, except when she stopped to eat, or people were forcing her to be quiet.
And then there was Mary. Poor sweet Mary. She was Lacy's polar opposite. Always prim and proper, doing what she was told. Regular little evangelist. Spent hours styling her hair to make it look just perfect.
Buddy Bear, our furry mechanical friend, sat on the floor by the wall outlet, getting his batteries recharged.
"So what do you think of this new kid?" Lacy was asking.
"Henry, you mean?" Kamara said. "He seems all right."
Henry Bechark was the son of Mussie Bechark, one of the Tamtiwa tribal elders. Mussie typically avoided our compound, visiting only to see the childrens' program or to partake in the holiday festivities. He even came by on Easter, for the amusing spectacle of seeing Tamtiwa children picking up all the eggs while the human kids fumbled blindly around.
If Henry was going to the mission, all that would change. None of us knew what Mussie's increased involvement would mean.
"He seems nice," I found myself saying as I dug into my food.
The so-called `bacon' tasted like turkey livers, mincemeat pie and sauerkraut, but I was used to it.
"Henry is cute," said Lacy.
"He looks like a stringy alley cat," Gabe muttered. "And what's with his left ear? It's always laying crooked."
"That's what's cute about him," I blurted. "He's different."
There was an awkward silence.
Mom brought a skillet over to my friend with the `fro. "More eggs, Kamara?"
"Yes, please."
Lacy giggled. "Did you see how high Eugene jumped when I snuck that Omnodwa into his helmet?"
Eugene Fleming was a little guy we often picked on. It was surprisingly easy to send him crying and running to his home hut.
I saw what Lacy did the day before. The six legged rainbow colored frog crawled up across the kid's faceplate, and his mouth got really big as he went "Waaah" and flailed his arms around. When it got into his mouth, he jumped in surprise. In such a cloistered environment, that kind of thing was our entertainment, our Funniest Home Videos.
"You're too cruel to that boy," Mom said as she dropped some eggs on Kamara's plate.
"It's harmless," said Lacy. "We're just having fun."
"At Eugene's expense."
"I want to marry Starlea," Mary said.
Starlea Kiedra was a handsome athletic looking Tamtiwa boy, the most popular of his kind at St. Teresa's. This was not a normal choice for human girls. Most of us preferred Curtis Haron, the top rooster in the human kid flock.
Upon hearing Mary's announcement, mom laughed. "What would the children look like?"
"Marbles, I suppose," Mary said very seriously. "But they'd be beautiful, just the same. And they'd have noses instead of cat muzzles."
Mom chuckled. "I see you've been giving this some serious thought!"
"I have to!" Mary said. "You don't marry someone without first thinking it through!"
Mom covered her grinning mouth. "So you think it will actually work."
"It worked for Travis and Volbacha, didn't it?"
The mirth vanished from mother's face. "That's just a rumor. Just because two people are good friends doesn't mean they're sleeping together."
"I saw Travis chewing on Volbacha's ear," Kamara said. "That's not just a rumor."
"Maybe he was hungry!" Gabe joked.
Mom waved her hand dismissively. "Adults play around like that all the time. It doesn't mean anything is going on." But I could see a note of disdain on her features.
Glancing at the clock on a monitor, she muttered, "Well, you guys had better get going to your morning lesson, or you're going to be late."
I didn't really care, but I knew it was pointless to argue. We put our dishes up, marching over to the hut's inner airlock.
"C'mon, Buddy," I said to the robot, but it shook its head.
"I am not fully charged. Please go ahead of me. I will rejoin you at Ms. Penny's learning station."
That's what we called our classroom huts. `Learning stations.'
"Right, bear," I muttered in annoyance, and we went on into the equipment room, donning our oxygen masks.
Our morning lesson was about David and Goliath. Children of both species sat on the cracked ground, listening to the muscular black man in a breathing apparatus flipping through an electronic picture book as he retold the old story. His delivery was passable, but when you're getting bible lessons every other hour, it takes more than that to sustain your interest.
"Jack Sully says he has a baby Ikran," Kamara whispered to my little circle of friends. "I've only seen them flying in the air. Sounds really neat. Want to go see it later?"
For the record, there is no Jake Sully. The only Sully I know is named Jack, and he's really not someone you'd want to spend time with.
Upon hearing the man's name, Lacy visibly shuddered. "No."
"What's wrong?" Kamara said. "Scared?"
Lacy looked pale. "No."
"Well, then. What is it?"
"I don't want to talk about it."
"I knew it," Kamara grinned. "You are scared."
Lacy sighed, looking frustrated.
My friend with the afro squeezed her hand. "It's okay, Lacy. It's just an animal. We'll be there with you!"
Lacy swallowed hard. "That's not what I'm scared of."
Kamara laughed. "What then? What are you scared of?"
Lacy looked around the the crowd nervously. "I can't tell you."
"Why can't you?" Kamara said. "What's the big deal? I'm your friend!"
Lacy was unconvinced. "I just don't want to talk about it, okay!"
She said that last part so loud that everyone was staring at her.
I put a hand on Kamara's shoulder. "Leave it alone."
And then, as the children continued to stare, I turned to Mr. Odum and loudly said, "If we're supposed to forgive our enemies and love them, then why did God tell David to saw off Goliath's head?"
My feigned misunderstanding of key bible points earned me a ten minute lecture, effectively taking the heat away from my friend. Lacy smiled at me gratefully.
All of a sudden, Gabe clutches his throat, his helmet filling with foam as he collapses backwards in the dirt.
His face and arms were turning purple, his hands swelling like a rubber glove with too much water in it. His whole body shook with convulsions.
"Gabe!" I cried, but I didn't know what to do.
