Ember Children - 9/11/2004

Before the animation all twelve kids were superdense lumps of carbon atoms prepared in such a way as to trap light, layers of semi-reflective grids meant to slow down the rays that got through and send the rest back into the body. They were marionettes at first, three foot tall clumps shaped generally into bodies by scientists-turned-amateur-sculptors. We'd managed to make them fully articulated, two-hundred twenty-three points of movement of one kind or another, more than would be there if they'd been born human beings instead of realised concepts.

Once we'd animated them with the SunSpark they literally hopped up, each and every one of them, and began running around, bumping into walls and into each other and glowing, diffusing their light outwardly and created their own sort of burn. They left imprints of charred paint when they touched the walls and the floor was covered in ashy refuse.

Laurenn and Bobby Hughes, the specialists in training animal training, worked to teach the ember children about the world around them and the world outside. There was no reason to believe that they would have any sort of capacity for understanding. After all, there was no brain inside them. The theory began with that, though. It was the whole reason for bringing back pieces of the sun. We wanted to study those tiny flames to discover how and when the star was formed and, if possible, trace back the universe to it's earliest possible notion. And here, in one of the experiments, we'd cultivated enough SunSpark to give these dolls their own existence. It worked completely. And the ember children learned because we were of the universe and the star stuff and they were the basis of life aroused with plasma.

They watched us, more than we watched them. Every time they took a step or looked in any one direction they learned something new. They began to look more and more like people. One day we came in and discovered that number three was wearing clothes he'd chiseled from his own flesh. They talked. They were animate, fully rendered beings and we were the creator that Genesis II had been searching for when it swept past the center of our solar system and gathered data and star parts.

After a short while they childrens' glow wore away. They had no new sources of real light and the only way to give it to them would be to let them outside, into the world where they would certainly be dangerous and, quite rightly, feared. Everyone on staff, of course, having grown massively attached to them, wanted to allow for a midday jaunt into a playground or soccer field where we could control the number of people coming and going. It would be worthwhile to study their interaction in the outdoors. The solid NO came down each time from the top floor, denying us the privilege of study and ensuring the eventual demise of our beings.

And then they evolved. Overnight, number three was better than the rest. He glowed brighter, stronger. Number eight, the smallest of the group of twelve, no longer gave off any luminescence. Eight was keeled over and blacker than black, a void in the room where none of the other children walked with four feet of. Except three. Three would go past and kick at the body of eight. It was extraordinary. In order to preserve his own life, he'd absorbed the life of the other. And because of his newfound knowledge we'd postulated that he may have managed to absorb whatever information was being stored in the carbon body. In taking the SunSpark he'd removed everything the SunSpark knew. Which also meant that these children probably understood the origin of the universe in an instinctual way that surpassed our own link to the beginning.

Soon the other children began dropping away. Three, whose name we'd changed to Prometheus, swallowed the entire clan of twelve. The ember children were all gone an Prometheus wanted outside. For weeks he'd been attempting to explain his case to us. He'd been holding secrets over our head and trying to bargain. And always the answer came down from above: "Destroy it. End the project. This has gotten out of control and we need to exert human power over whatever it is that you've got in that room."

We never ended the project. Prometheus ended it for us when he disappeared one day. The door was open. There was a melted hold in the door and scorch marks on the walls and floor around it. Probably he'd always been able to get out. He just wanted it to be our decision. He wanted to know how we worked. He'd been able to study us long enough to come to some kind of conclusion about our behavioral patterns and needed no more information. Or maybe his glow was just too dim to stay any longer. We didn't know. What's more, we didn't know anything about Prometheus. In our zeal to study the children we'd begotten we managed to arrive at no conclusion about them. We didn't know what they were or how or why. I don't think anybody was excluded from the attachment that blocked out our reasoning. That's what we get for referring to our project as the progeny of man and his universe.