The House of Esha (RewindTheClassics22)

Part 2: Twilight

Roddie rushed up to me, placing her hands on my forearms before bringing me in for an embrace.

"How I've missed you!" she said almost too fervently, given how flat she'd sounded only a moment ago. It was not her voice alone that struck me as jarring. Where I had the beginnings of lines across my forehead and at the corners of eyes and lips, Roddie's skin remained the same smoothness of our youth. She'd synthesized her skin, likely with the latest SmartSkin technology. Her lush hair no doubt had cybernetic follicles, as did her eyelashes.

It was not the way in which she'd enhanced her appearance with tech that alarmed me, however. It was an inward change, a flicker in the eye, the controlled way in which she spoke: Roderica Esha had metamorphosized like a cocooned moth from the inside out. Whatever she'd done to herself, it had taken a toll that all the cosmetic enhancements could not make up for. A hollowness engulfed her, even as she tried to fill it by bringing me close.

Her embrace was that of a siren. I imagined her pulling me into the depths of the methane waters, our bodies entwined as we sunk, our skin seared from the poisoned waters like we were fish on a grill.

The unnaturalness of her touch made me cringe, but she was my friend, and clearly, she needed the help she'd requested of me.

"I thought about you often through the years," she said, a wide, wrinkleless smile set upon her artificial face. "My time at college was the only part of my life I'd spent away from Rodesha, and I recall it fondly. Not that I want to leave this place, of course."

"Of course?" I couldn't help myself. "Why not, Roddie? Nearly everyone else has. You know why."

Her eyes flickered again, as though someone was flipping a switch inside her. "The reason everyone else has left is the reason I cannot."

"Will you tell me that reason?"

She placed a cold hand again upon my arm. "It's why you're here."

She explained to me then, how the House of Esha had come to be, and how it had also come to have a hold on her, as though it were a tomb she inhabited, waiting to take her last breath so that it may keep her within it forever.

The house had, in the beginning, been a marvel of Rodeshan engineering, formed from local materials and outfitted with tilanthum circuitry and walls. The original Eshas didn't know then what would take three hundred years to fully grasp: the precious mineral from which inorganic artificial intelligence functioned, worked as well as it did because it was itself intelligent. The planet, according to Roddie's imaginings, was a sentient being with a collective consciousness, and the House of Esha stood as the watchful eye in which it viewed its human interlopers.

"If humans were able to thrive for a while on Rodesha," Roddie told me, "it was only because the planet let us."

And so, Rodesha itself could be credited with the erection of the House of Esha, and with its centuries of prosperity.

"Did we know that we acted however the planet desired us to?" Roddie shook her head. "My ancestor, Rod Esha, thought he acted freely, as did his descendants. Even I did, for a while. It was his idea to clone his and Maddy Esha's children, a daughter to share his DNA, and a son to share his wife's. It was clone after clone from that time on. We never strayed from this lineage. The house wanted this."

"The house wanted it? How is that possible?" I asked. "And why?"

Roddie turned away from me, her gaze landing on a bent trumpet gathering dust in the corner. "I am engineered with tilanthum," she said. I couldn't tell if this was an answer to my question or an entirely different train of thought. "I'm organic and inorganic. Did you know?"

"No, Roddie. I didn't know." Nor had I determined, at the time, if I could believe it.

"So, you see," she continued. "I really must want what the house wants. I will die here. Organic life on the planet will end, I will end, my brother will end, and Rodesha's eye, the House of Esha, will close forever. I am the House of Esha's last human ambassador. Or I will be once my brother dies."

"Your brother?" Had I recalled a brother being mentioned during our school days? She hadn't brought him up in our recent correspondence.

"Madoc." Roddie hung her head, staring at her lap. "He's grievously ill. I've done all I can for him. He will die and that will be the end for me too. How could I go on?"

As though speaking of him had called him from the void, a man of the same undefined age as Roddie emerged from the library's threshold. If Roddie's appearance had evoked shock, Madoc's aura spoke to a primeval fear.

I shuttered in my seat as he swooped in, vacant eyes gaping at me with the same cold, dispassion I had felt from the House of Esha as I'd approached it. Roddie's declaration that she was connected to this place down to her tilanthum DNA no longer seemed so farfetched.

Thin skin with veins of purple webbed his face and neck—the same deep purple as tilanthum in its liquid form. Other than that, he was flawless. Perfect, the way an android is perfect. Madoc, and perhaps Roddie as well, seemed to answer the question of whether organic and inorganic life might be able to come together to form something new, an embodiment of a life beyond human comprehension. But how alive. And for how long?

He seemed a frightening experiment; a lab rat that escaped its maze only to find itself still trapped within a locked lab.

In my dazed state, I forgot all decorum. And so, it seemed, had my friend. She let her brother place a kiss on her brow, and then watched him leave, his gaze still returning to me every other step he took. There were no introductions. He'd spoken no words at all. I wanted to ask if he always behaved shyly around strangers, but Roddie had moved on to different topics.

Her brother, such a source of concern earlier, seemed to have fled her mind as soon as he'd fled the room. She didn't mention him that day or in the days to follow, but about a week later, after I'd asked how he was doing, she declared that I'd likely never see him again. Roddie insisted that Madoc suffered from an illness no one but he had ever been stricken with. And so, it had no name, and certainly no cure.

"We have tried," she said. "He took it too far. He wanted to remove the barriers between humanity and Rodesha. I admire it, but this is the result. There is nothing to be done but accept it."

That seemed a lie. They could leave this planet together, start over somewhere free from the reaches of Rodesha's watchful eye and I told her as much.

Her response was a humorless laugh. "Nowhere in the universe is free. Do you not understand? That was the planet's intent in the first place."

I didn't understand, but seeing my friend's agitated state, I refrained from pressing the issue. Instead, we turned to storytelling and music making. Long hours were spent at these pursuits: plucking away at out of tune instruments or turning the pages of dusty tomes. In the perpetual eventide of Rodesha's impending night and entombed as we were in the closed-up petals of the House of Esha, I could be excused for losing track of time.

Did we stay in that room far into the night, reading together stories of the dawn of the AI age, reliving the fabled battles of human versus giant robot? Did we spend hours upon hours making up melodies or trying to recall our college's fight song without looking up the lyrics? Only the comings and goings of the servants lent us a clue to the passage of time. It seemed impossible after a while that time still maintained a trajectory. It felt suspended within the House of Esha. Such was the hold this place had on me, for how could I act, how could I be anything but caught in a state of suspense? If time stood still, I did as well.

This was no way to live. I tried to imagine how the Esha family had survived here for over three centuries. And yet, the longer I stayed, the more I understood. It wasn't that they refused to move off planet: they weren't allowed to leave. The house--the whole planet—had devised itself as a fly trap for the Esha family. And perhaps for me as well.

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Thank you for reading Part 2 of THE HOUSE OF ESHA. Read on for the conclusion!