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Excerpt from Children of Falin

Gestation tubes line the walls of a great cathedral far from the knowledge of space-borne humanity, far from the prayers of children, far from the blinding white light of Truth. The columns line up as glowing sentinels, inscribed within their guardianship the future of an entire race; the future of a lone Woman's children.

These are the nurseries: shrouded in blackness, lit by the cyan glow of children's minds and bodies yet unformed; their bodies floating in capsules stacked up, row by row down the vaulted, endless void. Their bodies are the only lights in the darkness. And the tubes, sculpted in pristine, cold metal, held each within them the sphere of an artificial womb—womb for a growing soul, a loom upon which a girl's body is spun and spun. Bubbles, little ones, caressing the figures inside; children—children of the castes, children of Falin. This is where each new generation of a perfected, pearl-white race is born into life from the darkness of a nursery cathedral.

A bubble caresses a body within one of the many capsules—it contours to the flesh. It morphs and licks the child, moving across the heel and up the leg, running, tickling; up the back, neck, skull's crown of the unborn, yet fully-developed child's head. It lingers then, caught in the hair of the child, whose silky-pure strands have grown to the jawline, but show only white. Slowly, carefully, the bubble makes its way to the top, and floats to the beginning of the sphere to circle around again, like all of life.

The flesh of this one is crystalline white—white like sculpted porcelain, white like the skin of a pearl, white like alabaster, white like the color of her Mother's hair; white the skin of the Falinian race.

The colony of Falin, born a century after the first push of Galactic Colonization: this began when woman finally found the wings to fly from the confines of Mother Earth, Terra. Terra was reluctant to let her daughter, Fali, fly. But fly she did. And from one colonist, Mater Fali, began the propagation of a new race; a perfect human race, Fali imagined, separate from all the terrible plagues of a colonized, unsolved galaxy. Humanity was barbarous, greedy, and lost to vice. But if she could create a new race—a new race, oh, how she dreamed! So refined, so sculpted, so innocent and powerful; then perhaps the rest of humanity would see its errant ways and repent, becoming new in the face of the vision, becoming like all of Falin. And Fali herself, Falin; they would be her children—she, a mother existing in their consciousness and, therein, immortal; immortal in the hidden mind of every child.

So it was and so it was meant to be. With those first steps on a water-saturated planet, far beyond the colonized worlds of humanity, Fali made her vision real. The singular genius of a lone woman created a whole race; a family she could call her own. And Fali's holy sister, Thea, the Vicar for her spirit and vision, kept the race's purity in trust for Fali when she passed on.

But far from the cities of Falinian civilization lay these birthing chambers, far at the southernmost pole of the home planet. No hand ever touched the newborns. The chambers moved by their own will, and from them a single cell grew into, what humanity would deem, an eighteen-year-old. Those cells floated, tethered in a cyan-glowing, liquid-filled sphere; multiplying and dividing until five years later, when the maturation period was done, the child was woken.

And for this child with shining-white hair, the fifth year had come.