Chapter Ten: Biomechanics

It's crazy in here, Norm. Wish you could see it.

First thing I remember after the fire and falling was a fuzzy light, almost not there. I swear I heard someone singing. Then something hit my face, and I stopped remembering.

I got sucked back, and then I started to drift apart.

I'm still me, but I'm not really me anymore. I'm her, now. I'm lots of people.

I don't remember everything – I was away from her for a long time after I died – but I remember you. I'm not sad anymore. You'll see what I mean when you come here.

Take your time coming. You have your whole life to enjoy. Glad I could help give it to you.

"Fuck."

She was aware of her boots hitting the ground, and felt her body double up, fingers running fiercely through her hair.

Her hand came down in a fist, the impact absorbed by the gel lining of the link unit.

"Fuck!"

There was no hangover in her human body, but she still felt like shit. Hayley went rigid, body quivering, breath shallow. Closing her eyes, she willed herself to let her embarrassment and anger fade, and soon enough, the shaking subsided.

The link room was empty but for her, the lights half-dimmed. She sat on the link unit and swept her eyes around and over the various instruments and mechanisms.

All this, to make what they have in a bundle of neurons and fibers.

It made sense to her, what Norm had done. But it also didn't. He wasn't like them at all. He was an anthropologist in a world without anthropos. And what of her? It was true that there was plant life on Pandora, and it was strange and exciting, but Hayley wondered if she would ever stop feeling like an outside observer, a cold-hearted scientist and truly become a part of this world. She thought of her avatar, artificially constructed, with genes fabricated from bits and pieces of her DNA and some Na'vi they had probably slaughtered in the beginning of this whole mess. Was the woman she was half-cloned from with Eywa now?

And now she didn't even feel that comfortable in her own skin. It seemed that all was left to her was her soul, flickering back and forth between fleshy vessels.

At least Norm had that much. At least he had one body to call home.

She had never thought of him as all that attractive, either in personality or in looks, but when she stepped into her avatar he was the only one who she could connect with, tsaheylu or not. Hayley shook her head slightly. No, that wasn't necessarily true – she was becoming more and more attuned to Onui'lk's mannerisms – but with Norm it was easy. They came from the same place, from the same bubble of academia which had somehow remained nestled among the filth and fiber optics of their home world. They had been colleagues back there; they had shared a professional relationship for some time since landing on Pandora. He was the only piece of home she could cling to beyond Hell's Gate, the only human being she could find when inhuman herself.

It was ridiculous, she realized as soon as these thoughts surfaced in her mind. The Golden Age of Earth was over, and there was nothing left to even abandon, and yet she was feeling nostalgic. The Na'vi were better than humans – peaceful, harmonious, and strong – and yet she still went looking for the weak, flawed heart beating among them. Not that she really thought Norm to be weak, but he was human, and so carried with him, as she did, a destructive and violent history that was strangely attractive. Jake was also human, she acknowledged, but he was noble enough to deserve to be one of the People. She and Norm had yet to prove themselves.

But kissing him had been a mistake. They had been lonely and lost, not in love. They had been drunk – well, at least she had been drunk.

"Fuck."

And how was she supposed to face him now? She was furious at herself for the transgression – she had done the worst thing she possible could have to comfort him. He loved Trudy, and Trudy was dead, but of course that would make him love her even more for a time. He didn't need some fucked-out-of-her-mind girl on na'vi LSD trying to lay a move on him. Especially when that girl had no idea what the fuck she was even trying to do with him.

Comforting and being comforted. It just didn't work, and now she had screwed things up. And to make things worse, all of this when they were supposed to be celebrating the victory of life over death. All of this petty fucking drama.

Her hands began to knead the interior of the link unit with a passion.

After all, if she was going to go through with this, she was going to be mated for life. Grace had explained how it worked over coffee months before. Each time a couple mated, their genitalia grew more and more to fit the other. Each time they performed tsaheylu, their queues grew more and more sensitive to each other to the exclusion of others of their same species. If they tried to bond with anyone else, the signal was still there, but it became weaker and weaker. This was especially true of young Na'vi attempting to bond with another of the same age. Something about the pheromones.

The healers and spiritual leaders could still bond with most, and exert their influence in powerful ways, Grace had said. They hadn't gotten everything worked out yet, but they were trying.

They were going to try until several young Na'vi were mowed down by gunfire in the wicker-and-wood schoolhouse Grace had painstakingly constructed for them.

And she had almost bonded with Norm that night. She had, for an instant, felt his pain as hers. She would have to be more careful from now own. What if Onui'lk required her to select her mate from the Eastern Ikran clan? What if she just didn't want to be with Norm for the rest of her life? What if she decided to stay with one foot in the human and another in the Na'vi world?

It was all up in the air, and she didn't like it at all.

There was a burst of static coming from the far edge of the room, as a computer screen flickered into life. The calm female voice Hayley had heard emanating from electronics her entire life spoke:

"Incoming transmission, Earth, Tango Base. Commander Boers, encrypted frequency."

Hayley leapt from the link unit and jogged over to the computer terminal as it continued to repeat its message;

"Incoming transmission, Earth, Tango Base. Commander-"

"I got it," Hayley snapped as she swung herself into the revolving chair and pulled up to the desk. "I got it. Initiate transmission."

Superluminal communications allowed for instantaneous communication between Earth and Pandora. Something to do with quantum physics, which was definitely out of her realm of knowledge. At any rate, someone on Earth was trying to contact them, and Hayley could only imagine why.

The screen flickered once more, and the dark face of a man in his 30s appeared on the screen. Hayley took a deep breath and assumed her most professional manner, face going politely and formally blank.

"Are you with the RDA?" asked the man whom Hayley could only presume to be Boers.

"This is xenobiologist Hayley King. There are no more RDA members left on Pandora. If you like, I can refer you to the current top-ranking official, Doctor Lucas-"

"I don't have a lot of time. Selfridge sent a transmission. The networks picked it up and the whole planet began to riot. We're barely running on emergency power."

"Why? What-"

"We need unobtainum back home, Dr. King. You know about the energy crisis. We had enough resources to run until the next shipment got back here, but once people heard that it wasn't coming – well, they knew they only had so long."

Hayley had put her fingers to her open mouth without realizing.

"Jesus."

Boers nodded. "We had reserves that would have kept us going, until the news got out. People are slaughtering each other in the name of "conserving energy". There are rioters trying to break into every major RDA compound on the planet, trying to find a way onto a spaceship, any spaceship, that might bring them to Pandora."

"But they can't come here. I mean, I don't know what they should do, there must be-" Hayley stammered.

"I know they can't all come to Pandora. I would, if I could, but you guys are running out of resources yourselves, aren't you?"

"I-I don't know. We must be running on unobtainum, but we have solar too, and some water and wind power."

"Not enough to sustain an entire planet's worth of people," Boers replied solemnly.

"What are we supposed to do?"

Boers smiled. "There's nothing any of us can do anymore, but sit tight and wait. The RDA down on our end seems to be planning something but they're leaving the military out of it. They're not telling anybody, and they've kept any further transmissions from the incoming shuttle to themselves. Anything they send your way will take seven years, at any rate – plenty of time to prepare yourselves."

"What if they try to nuke the planet?"

"They won't. They're running out of resources – why waste more on trying to destroy what they need?" He paused. "You guys aren't fucked like us, not yet. I would ask you to try to speak with someone about getting the whole production up and running again, but I assume you sent the miners and technicians home too."

Hayley nodded. "I think so. Jake Sully was in charge of it. I can speak with him. I can try talking to Lucas. Maybe we can get the RDA to bring the shuttle back, see if we can ask the Na'vi to allow us take a little more unobtainum."

Boers nodded. "Maybe. It's a long shot. I can't get authorization to contact the Venture Star, but see if you can on your frequencies. I'm not sure if they left anyone out of cryo – it's generally procedure for these trips to have a rotating staff monitoring for transmissions and unusual readings. It seems that that is all you can do, for the moment. The governments are working on keeping the people calm and stopping the panic."

"I'll try contacting them right away, and I will speak with the Na'vi as soon as possible."

"Thank you. We'll keep in touch?"

"Of course."

Boers nodded.

"Boers out."

The screen went white until Hayley mumbled to the computer to end the transmission. Scrolling through documents and folders with shaking fingers, she attempted to open a link between the base and the Venture Star.

It took some time for the sensors to locate the ship, and begin to track it along its acceleration. The computer informed Hayley of these facts as she stared numbly at nothing in particular.

I should be telling Lucas about this, she thought as the screen blinked with the outgoing transmission signal. But she didn't know where he was, and she needed to get this done immediately. Every hour was another hour where the Venture Star was accelerating, moving faster and farther from the planet.

What was she going to do if they responded? Ask them to turn around and start mining again? Invite Parker Selfridge back into the base? Tell the Na'vi that sorry, the humans were more important than them after all?

The Na'vi would slaughter them.

Her fingers paused over the CANCEL option on the screen.

"Shit, shit, shit," she repeated under breath like a mantra.

Wasn't she supposed to be one of them? She didn't want to be responsible for the deaths of billions, though. Surely the Na'vi would understand – the needs of the many over the needs of the few.

Hayley started weeping, her eyes stinging and vision blurring the glowing text of the blinking OUTGOING message.

"Oh God…"

They had been doomed from the start, hadn't they? It was their fault they had gotten into this fucking mess in the first place. It wasn't right to take it out on the na'vi. But it wasn't right to take it out on the people on Earth who hadn't wished for or even conceived of nuclear war and fossil fuels and goddamn greenhouse emissions…

"Hello? Who is this?"

Hayley looked up to see Selfridge's smug face in the middle of the screen. She looked him dead in the eyes, through the pixels on the screen, through subspace, right into his eyes.

"Fuck you, Selfridge. FUCK you."

Hayley exploded out of her chair. Pulling her arm back, she launched her fist forward into the screen, smashing into it. A thin, long spider web of cracks blossomed from her lacerated knuckles.

"Transmission terminated."

She hit the screen again. More spider webs. She tried pulling it out of the terminal, but it held. She screamed hoarsely, primally, baring her teeth, tail whipping -

Then she was human again, and she saw the wreckage of the screen and became aware of the cold, empty metal room, like a cage. Rubbing her eyes hard with her thumbs, she turned her back to the screen and walked away, back to the link unit.

I need to be somewhere with life, and light, and with fresh air to breathe…