Nothing But Liv

By Sylvia Anna Hiven

IT WAS A PARTICULARLY COLD DAY on the surface when I went to dig a grave for Perryn’s pregnant, dead body. The nettle field outside the prepdome was unyielding, and I sweated in my surface suit as I sliced away the poisonous plants and made jagged cuts into the earth beneath with my shovel, Perryn’s corpse in a body bag next to me.

I was fortunate it was cold, and the planet uncooperative. A young striger beast was drawn by the smell of death, and I constantly interrupted my digging and turned my shovel into a weapon to ward it off. If it hadn’t taken so long, I would have put dirt over my wife without ever knowing that inside the body bag, my daughter had been born from a three-day dead womb—a tiny baby, hands knotted into fists and body covered in necrotic afterbirth.

I forgot about the striger. I even forgot about Perryn. I tore the umbilical cord free with a sickly snap and ran back to the prepdome as fast as the dense field would allow, the baby bouncing against my chest, the nettles licking at her blood-streaked, raw skin.

She was still alive after the decontamination. The infections from the nettle cuts were severe. But she survived.

What else could I name her but Liv?

***

So much was different on Yxis. It wasn’t just the hazy-red sky, or the too-thin air. The plants we grew inside, kornet husks and canlain fruits from seeds we had brought with us, tasted nothing like they had at home. The water we recycled despite the purification processes still tasted strange, tinged with metallic unfamiliarity. The world outside the dome pressed in from all sides, seeped up through the ground, lay heavy on our thick skylights. Some of the preppers said it was how it should be: that our identity should have been left behind, along with the mortality we had already escaped. That we were becoming something different. Something better.

Perryn had believed it, too. But Perryn was dead. Immortality had no guarantees against a crushed skull.

Baby Liv had traces of the nanorobots in her system, likely transferred to her from Perryn. It really made no sense how she had escaped death, but I guessed they had kept her alive in the womb after Perryn’s own body had shut down: repairing her decaying brain and heart tissue, keeping her organs working, helping her hang onto life inside a dead husk of a mother. I couldn’t inject her with more. It would stop her growth, freeze her in eternal childhood.

The others kept their distance from Liv. I knew why. Her mortal status was uncertain, even to me—even though I was the expert. I only dared to confess to Tanner, the hydroponics technician, that I didn’t know what to do with my daughter.

“She’ll grow up,” I said as I prepped Tanner for her weekly stem-cell injections.

“Children tend to do that, Gornan.” Tanner looked at me with calm, brown eyes.

“I guess eventually I have to make her one of us.”

“She is one of us.”

“I mean ... I have to give her injections. Stop the aging.”

“When she’s old enough, and if she chooses.”

I sterilized Tanner’s skin with alcohol, the smell stinging my nostrils. “We have, what, fifteen years before the wave-two craft arrives? They were ostracized by the mortals back home for the choice they made. They won’t want traces of mortality here. They won’t trust it.”

Tanner put her hand on my arm. “Gornan, your stem cells rejuvenate us, and you can keep aging at bay to a degree with the nanorobots, but you can’t prevent death. Not completely. How many preppers have we lost since we landed?”

I shrugged, watched the needle go into her arm, trying to not think about the specifics—but the memories of our first difficult years were too vivid to forget. There had been striger attacks when we emerged from our first-wave craft. The nettles had wiped out a dozen of us before we realized the danger their dormant toxins posed. There were construction accidents as we put the modular sections of the larger dome city together. Even three years later, when we were somewhat stabilized, there were still incidents. Fires, stupid accidents. Frayed ropes snapping. Falling crates on fragile heads.

Tanner rubbed her arm where I had injected her. “We’ve lost too many to claim we can’t be touched by mortality. Death is always there, around the corner, ready to cut us down. Liv won’t change that, no matter what she chooses.”

“Death is just a biological state,” I replied. “And she can choose to not experience it, just like the rest of us have.”

Tanner put her white lab coat back on. “Did Perryn decide her state? Or do you think perhaps that crate fell because of some unseen forces that not even you can explain?”

“An accident,” I muttered. “It was just an accident.”

***

There were no other children in the prepdome. Others hadn’t been as stupid in love as Perryn and I and allowed themselves to get pregnant. I was the only playmate for my daughter, and I tried to do things with Liv that I thought a child would need to do. I made her toys, invented games.

The other fifty preppers still had to work to do: not only did they have our own prepdome to maintain, but they had a city to expand, more habi-modules for the arriving thousands to put together, a food supply to refine and grow. But my job as a physician was predictable. I injected stem-cell cocktails, checked nanorobot levels, made my familiar flourishes with chemicals to ward off the crew’s aging. Nothing changed for me. Except Liv. She grew, first into a chubby toddler, then lengthened and thinned into a gangly five-year old with large black eyes and fluoride-white complexion. She remained mostly alone, and that worried me.

When the zoologist—Marcus, a wiry man with a pocked face—captured a striger, I asked him to clone it. I spent six months removing the aggressive tendencies from the animal’s genetics makeup. I told Marcus it was an experiment with relevance to our mission, but deep down, I imagined it had a more trivial reason: I wanted a pet for Liv. I built an enclosure and showed Liv how to feed the animal. She took her task very seriously: she measured the feed on a scale, and carried water in a stainless steel bowl with an almost comical solemnity.

One day, when I handed her the bowl of kornet-grains, she shook her head. “Not today, Daddy.”

I frowned. “Don’t you think Stripey is hungry? We’ve not fed him since this morning.”

“I know.”

I stared at her for a moment, and then at the striger inside its cage. It paced impatiently. “We can’t let him starve, Liv.”

She just shook her head, her eyes still large and serious, but I didn’t argue with her. What else could you expect from the only child on a planet full of adults, than for her to develop some peculiarities. I put the grains in the feeding box and thought no more of it.

The next morning, Stripey lay dead in his cage, his orange eyes wide and glazed over, the grains untouched.

Liv clutched the bottom of her pajama shirt tiredly. “I told you it was no use.”

I looked at her. “Did you know, Liv? Did you know that Stripey was—that he was going to go to sleep for a long time?”

Liv frowned. “He’s not asleep, Daddy. He’s something else.”

I didn’t know how to react to her assertion. I ushered her out of the lab and had Marcus help me discard of the carcass.

“What a fucking waste,” Marcus said, his scarred face sour at the sight of Stripey’s remains. “This is not what I gave you this animal for. How many hours did you spend on this beast’s genes?”

“It’s just an animal, Marcus,” I said. “Not the end of the world.”

“Well, you’ve pissed off a lot of people around here. Some don’t like to be reminded of what we’ve left behind. We’ve not had an incident since—” He hesitated, but then seized the opportunity to affect me. “Well, frankly, since your wife died. Don’t bring anything mortal into this place again. We don’t want it. Any of it.”

***

When she was ten, I had expected Liv to start to ask questions about death. She was a smart child, like an adult already in some of her observations. She asked many questions about the planet outside, about strigers and nettles and the ship I had arrived on, but never about why she was the only one in the prepdome shorter than a meter, or why she was the only one whose body was changing. There hadn’t been any accidents either—fortunate for our team, and for the second-wave who now were just five years out—but it meant no opportunity for her to understand the choice that lay before her. Bringing in another animal was out of the question.

I asked Tanner for a dead canlain fruit, its orange skin shrunken and its ruby-red meat dried and gritty.

“I’ll use it to explain decay,” I said. “It’s the same thing.”

Tanner stared at me. “You’re going to use a rotten fruit to explain what death is? It’s not the same thing at all. Liv isn’t a fruit.”

“It’s all I have, Tanner,” I said with exasperation.

“It isn’t,” Tanner said. “You could tell her about her mother. You could take her to the grave.”

“And show her what, exactly? Perryn isn’t even in that grave.”

By the time I returned to finish the burial, Perryn’s remains were gone; I had closed the grave up with nothing in it but a few of her personal belongings, her favorite T-shirt, a copy of a Jules Verne novel. The rest of her was in the belly of a striger somewhere.

Tanner thrust the dried canlain into my hands. “Take the fruit, but also take her out there and show her,” she said. “She’ll understand.”

I thought about it for a few days. Then I took Tanner’s advice.

Liv, in the child-sized surface suit I had made for her, stared at her mother’s grave and the canlain. She understood what a mother was, and she understood love. She understood that the canlain and the grave represented something she’d lost. But she didn’t want to understand that she couldn’t have that something back.

“But you can keep people the same, Daddy,” she protested. “Can’t you bring her back, with your nanorobots?”

I shook my head. “I wish I could. But when you die, you can’t come back. That’s why we have decided we don’t want to age. We want to live forever and be with the ones we love without end. And when you get old enough, you have to decide what you want to do.”

“Live forever, or die.”

“Yes.”

“And you can really fight death?”

“Don’t think of death like that. Don’t give it that sort of power over you. It isn’t something that comes after you, or something you fight. It’s just something you decide you don’t want to experience. It’s your choice and you control it.”

I halfway expected her to declare her immortality right then, but she didn’t. She just nodded and looked at me with her big eyes. “I understand, Daddy.”

Her little hand found its way into mine, like a lost bird seeking shelter. I took it firmly and led her back through the frozen nettles. I felt like I had done something good. Like I had done a fatherly thing.

When we returned to the prepdome, chaos met us. Marcus had been bitten by a snake, and four preppers wrestled with his writhing, frothing form on my operating table. It was too late for me to stop the venom from corrupting his cells. He was gone in thirty minutes.

As the scrawny man died on my table, my wide-eyed daughter witnessed the ugly, bloated, poisoned version of human mortality. And if the visit to Perryn’s grave hadn’t explained what death was, Marcus’ corpse made it plain.

Years passed. She still didn’t decide.

***

The second-wave ship drew closer. We began to receive audio communication in bursts. The colonists were still in stasis, but the journey had gone well. They’d be arriving within three months, and our team was in a flurry to finish the modular city across the field from our prepdome. Another few dozen habi-modules had to be put together, solar panels erected, our water supply increased. Tanner’s hydroponics had been expanded in a temporary module on the south side of our prepdome. We were tired, sweating—but focused.

Yxis, however, wasn’t showing a particularly hospitable demeanor. After twenty years of winter, the planet was thawing. We had planned it that way, thinking a temperate spring would make the planet an easier place for the second-wave to thrive on. The temperature shifted, not by much, but enough for the the frozen fields to wake up from their slumber and start to grow wilder—which posed a problem as the modular city was across the field. Every week we had to send teams of men with machetes and scythes to cut new trails through the blooming nettles. When one member on the clearing team died from acute respiratory failure, we realized to our horror that the nettle poison had become airborne in the plants’ pollen, making the air outside unbreathable. I had to redirect my efforts into finding an antidote. Liv, who had gotten in the habit of visiting Perryn’s grave once a month, was forced to stay inside. She grew paler every day. She was only fifteen, and while I told myself I had another ten years before I should start to push the question harder, her mortality hung over me like a hazy cloud.

It hung over her, too. She had been around the lab long enough to become quite the assistant, and as I had to focus on the nettle antidote, she took over most of the rejuvenation. She measured stem cell levels, even had provided me with ideas how to program more effective nanorobots. But on the days when she assisted me with actual injections, she wore two layers of gloves.

She knew I noticed. When the patients were gone, she took them off apologetically with a snap.

“Dad, don’t look at me like that,” she said. “I know I have a decision to make about who I want to be. I just want to be sure I make the right choice.”

“Of course,” I replied. “I understand, sweetheart.”

I turned back to the pollen analysis on my screen, pretending I wasn’t bothered. But the truth was I didn’t understand. Not at all.

Our main antenna, weakened by increasing spring winds, fell into a skylight in the hydroponics bay later that afternoon, crushing down onto Tanner and one of her assistants six meters below. I managed to save one of Tanner’s eyes and three of her fingers. Her assistant wasn’t as lucky; the huge sheets of glass had decapitated him, his blood splattered all over the canlains.

What was worse, the breach had caused cross-contamination between the nettle pollen and all the crops Tanner had grown so carefully. The kornet mutated. The canlain vines sprouted slimy thorns. None of it was edible. I hadn’t even gotten close to an antidote to the nettles, and now I had to find an antidote to its mutated version, too.

We all kept working: clearing crews went out every morning to slice down the fields; construction teams followed to complete the modular city. They returned well after sunset, tired and terrified, checking their suits for tears and rips. I worked for eighteen hours a day on the antidote, but every time I beat one strain of the nettle’s poison, another harsher version appeared, mocking me with twisted incomprehensibility.

Tanner, half blind and with only partial use of her hand, came to me every morning for help with testing new crops she was working on. None of them could fight off the poison. It wrapped itself into every plant, dug into its very cells. Despair shone in Tanner’s scarred face.

“If we don’t fix this, the colonists will wake up and emerge on this planet only to die on it,” she said. “The communications team can’t fix the antenna in time to warn them about the pollen. And the nettle fields, they just won’t stop expanding. They’re growing centimeters a day. Gornan, where did everything go so wrong?”

Liv came into the laboratory as we were speaking, and I saw in her wide-eyed expression that she’d overheard us.

“Daddy, is the ship not going to make it?” she asked, her double-gloved hands quivering. “Are all those people going to die?”

“Honey, no,” I said. “Tanner will fix the plants and I’ll have an antidote ready by then. I’ve told you before, death has no place on this planet.”

Up until that day, I had gotten four hours of sleep each night. But because of the fear in my daughter’s eyes, I decided two hours was enough from that point on. I made progress, but it was slow. Too slow.

Tanner died the day before the ship landed. The autopsy report showed her lungs failed from extended exposure to the pollen. The pollen wiped out the last of the scythe team as well, and the last communications crew. The nettles grew unabashedly all around the few of us who were left.

***

Even if we’d had the time to dig graves for those who died, the planet was too dangerous for us to go outside. Even going into the contaminated part of the prepdome required us to wear suits. Without much ceremony, Liv and I laid Tanner’s body to rest in the hydroponics bay.

“The plants will overgrow her body,” Liv said. “It seems right somehow. Beautiful. Like how she was meant to end.”

“She wasn’t meant to end at all,” I said. “None of us were.”

“Death is powerful,” Liv said. “No matter how you fight, how many injections you get, perhaps you just can’t escape it.”

"We can, Liv. We will.”

“Will we?” Her tone was thorny like the nettles outside. “How many have you been able to save, Dad? How many of us are still alive? Maybe death has followed here, after all. Maybe it can’t be beaten.”

She sounded just like Tanner. I stood up and threw my shovel to the ground. “Death isn’t real,” I said. “It’s not some inevitable force that controls our destiny. It didn’t follow us, it didn’t plan to kill Tanner, or your mother, or anybody else!”

When we were back in the lab—which was still uncontaminated—Liv took off her suit, shaking her tangled black hair from her pale face. “Tomorrow, the ship will be here,” she said. “The air outside is too dangerous for them to breathe, and we can’t even warn them about it. What do we do?”

From my pocket, I withdrew the vial of blood I had taken from Tanner’s remains. After worming out of my suit, I sat down at my desk and shoved the vial into the diagnostic reader.

“I’m close, Liv,” I said. “I’m really close. Tanner was exposed longer than anybody, and she lasted longer than most. Her blood will have a clue.”

The diagnostics ran across the screen, and down, like writhing pillars
of code. I blinked tiredly, forcing my eyes to focus. Somewhere was the answer. My gaze darted across the information, desperate for a sign.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“Was this rip in the suit before you went into hydroponics?”

She held up my suit, pointing out a sizable hole in the grey fabric. Terror danced across her face. Her poking finger though that rip was my death sentence.

“No,” I said calmly. “No, that rip wasn’t there.”

“You’re going to get sick, like Tanner,” Liv said, her voice small and flat.

I swallowed. I patted the seat of the chair next to me. She sat down obediently. She looked again like that child I had taken to Perryn’s grave: thoughtful and confused.

“Sweetie,” I said. “I’ll find the cure. I’m not going to be beaten by this. But if I do get sick, I might not be able to take it to the landing site.”

She didn’t reply. She just sat there, her eyes wide, her gaze fixed on me.

“When that ship lands, there will be doctors aboard,” I continued. “As long as they have the antidote, they can duplicate it and inject all the colonists. Nobody will die. But if I can’t take it to them, I’ll need you to get your suit on, get a machete to cut through the field, and take it to their ship. That will be your task, and it’s the most important thing you will ever do. You’re the fate of those people now, you understand?”

“Yes.”

I started to turn back to my computer, but she put her hand on my shoulder. do you think you can give me the injections first?” she said. “Make me like you? I don’t know what good it will do now, but—”

“You don’t have to explain.” I squeezed her hand.

I injected her with the nanorobots and a healthy dose of stem cells. She was too young to be decaying, and perhaps it would make her fifteen-years-old forever, but I wasn’t going to take any chances. If she was going to be the only one left, I’d do my part to ensure she stayed alive as long as possible.

***

When the ship entered the atmosphere, we could see it through the skylight of our laboratory. It was beautiful: a golden streak shooting across the rosy dawn sky. Next to me, already in her suit, Liv held her breath as the ship sailed down like a bright needle of light, but the thundering quake as it landed a few miles away was too rough, too hard, for even a fifteen-year-old to think it had been a smooth landing. I tried to use our prepdome communications system to reach the ship, but I was no engineer and couldn’t even figure out how to transmit a warning. I returned to my analysis.

An hour after the landing, I began to shiver. The poison was working its ways through me, shooting through my veins and exploding pain into every last capillary. It was progressing quickly—quicker than in anybody else that had fallen ill. Another mutation, I gathered.

“Dad, they’re going to wake up soon,” Liv said, putting her hand on my shoulder. “You have done all you can. Now you have to let me do my task.”

My analysis wasn’t complete, but there was no time. I copied my files to a memory stick and jerked it out of the computer. Liv was in her suit already, her face white and serious behind the clear mask.

“Here.” I thrust the stick with the analysis into Liv’s hand. “As soon as you get in hailing range with your suit, tell them what’s happened. They have many scientists and physicians aboard. They should be able to finish what I started. There are thousands of people aboard that ship, and they depend on you now.”

Liv nodded. She hugged me tightly and I swept a blanket around her against the nettle’s harsh thorns. They had been dangerous when she’d been a baby, and they’d be even more lethal now. One rip and she wouldn’t stand a chance.

“Don’t tear your suit when you go through the field.” I handed her a clearing scythe. She took it, testing the weight of it in her hands. “Clear your path properly. Be careful.”

I didn’t see a reason not to open the hatch with her and watch her turn toward the morning, and the ship that rested in the hazy-red distance. The air, toxic as it might be, smelled fresh and cool compared to the decaying stench in the prepdome. I inhaled. It had done as much damage to me as possible already, and a few deep breaths wouldn’t make a difference.

“You can do this, Liv,” I said. “This is your purpose now.”

She smiled at me and touched my face with her gloved hand. “I know what I have to do, Dad. I’ve known for quite a while.”

Then she dropped the memory stick on the ground, and crushed it underfoot.

I couldn’t speak. I just stared at her, feeling the last bit of my strength drain out of me.

“Liv?” I reached out for her.

She backed away, beyond my reach. “You call me Liv.”

With that, my immortal child walked out into the field, the blanket fluttering around her like a cloak. She’d finally understood her purpose, she’d said—but as I watched her cut her path with the scythe with far more strength than what was reasonable, I realized she might have known what she was doing all along.

Sylvia Anna Hiven is a writer of speculative fiction from Atlanta. Her stories have previously appeared in “Daily Science Fiction,” “EscapePod,” “Stupefying Stories,” “Beneath Ceaseless Skies,” and more. She claims to be a podcast addict.