Success Is Failure Turned Inside Out
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It’s a simple rule. A few words, really. But I have trouble with rules that tell me what to do when things are going right as much as when they’re going wrong. So I’ve been wondering since last night why this one is so easy for me and yet so hard at the same time.
I’m sitting on my bunk staring up at the ceiling in my room aboard a ship that was once named the Star of Her People. The crew has taken a vote to change our name and we are now called the Blue Jay, but I think the captain will probably keep it because everyone likes being reminded that we are not the only humans left alive out here.
We all know how unlikely survival is. We’re just counting on luck more than anything else.
But if you want to survive, then you’ve got to be willing to fail big. If success makes you complacent, then a failure should make you afraid enough to stay alert. And maybe even make you work harder. Maybe even make you realize that there might be something wrong with your whole strategy.
My bunk is small, no more than two feet wide at its narrowest point. It isn’t meant to accommodate someone tall like me. The top edge barely clears my head, which is why I can see the blue sky through the open hatch above us. The wind blowing off the ocean ruffles the thin sheet that covers me and blows back the loose curls from my forehead.
The air outside has a salty tang. There aren’t many plants or animals here. It’s mostly sand and saltwater. That’s why we chose this location for our colony. We’d found a couple dozen survivors who were hiding in a series of caverns that had somehow escaped the destruction of life as we knew it.
They weren’t too far away from a place where a ship could dock without getting caught by any predators, and most importantly, it wasn’t anywhere near civilization. No cities, no farms, no roads, no factories. Just sand and sea.
I’ve got my legs curled under me. My arms are folded across my knees, my hands resting between my bare feet. I am wearing nothing. I haven’t worn clothes since I was old enough to walk, except during cold weather.
There isn’t any light coming down from the sky anymore, but some sunlight sneaks past the edges of my window and lights up one side of my face. This gives me a headache, and I push myself further into the curve of my bunk to try to get away from it.
That’s when I notice how tired I feel. The muscles in my shoulders ache and pull. My head feels heavy; I have to squint my eyes shut against a dull throbbing behind them.
And then I remember what happened last night.
One moment I was walking back toward my cabin with the rest of the crew. The next thing I knew I was waking up in this bed—my own bed. Only I hadn’t made it, and neither had anyone else. Someone had stolen our beds, which means that someone also stole all our weapons, the food that we brought aboard for the journey, and all the tools we needed for repairing our ship.
Our entire supply cache was gone.
They took everything, including the spare parts I’d gathered over the years.
I didn’t understand that until this morning after we’d discovered that they’d also stripped our ship of anything useful or valuable. The Blue Jay used to have four large compartments filled with all sorts of different items: spare parts, equipment, tools, food, and medical supplies. Now she had none of those things left.
Our home was an empty shell. We couldn’t even fix her if we wanted to.
So the first thought that went through my mind when I woke up was, “How did they take us completely unaware?” After that came, “Why would they do this? Why would anyone do such a thing?”
Now I know why.
Last night, one of the crew members told us about his dream. He’d dreamed that he was in a cave. In front of him, on the floor of the cave, lay the body of a young girl with a sword lodged deep in her heart. She looked dead, although I guess technically she was still alive. But she wouldn’t wake up.
She was crying.
“You have to kill her,” the little boy in the dream said to us. “Don’t let her die.”
He’d woken us up with that. Then he told us what it meant.
It seems that the people who’d murdered us and robbed us were just following the instructions in the dreams of these other children who’ve died in the same way. Their souls are trapped in their bodies and they don’t want to leave because they’re afraid we’ll hurt them.
If you can kill one of them and release them from their prison, then the others will come out and join us. They’ll bring us more stuff. More weapons and tools and food.
We’d never heard of these kids before. They’d been born in an unknown city somewhere in North America, and only a handful of them remained when we’d first found them. We were the ones who named ourselves after the place where we found them—we were the Lost Children. But I’m not sure that’s what we are now anymore, because we’re certainly not lost.
This little boy, whose name was Joshua, had told us how he’d learned to read in his old world. And so he’d taught a few of the boys and girls on board how to write and speak in their strange language so that we could communicate with the ghosts.
They say they were taken away from their parents long ago when they were babies. That they grew up in a huge building where all the other children lived.
The adults had told them that there was a monster that could eat people and that this creature was hunting them down. They kept the children confined to the building while they slept and guarded them day and night, but it turned out that the monster was real.
It was just like they described it: A huge beast that ate its victims by pulling them apart bit by bit. They didn’t tell the children that the monster was imaginary, though. They said that the monster was very real and that it could be dangerous.
The children tried to run away once, but the adults caught them. All of them except Joshua. He was too small at the time; they had thrown him out onto the street and sent him running. They’d told the little boy to hide. Not far enough away to escape the monster’s reach, but close enough that he might be able to survive if the beast actually came looking for him.
But Joshua had disobeyed, just as he’d warned us.
He’d hidden in this abandoned barn near the center of town. There, he’d waited alone for many months, terrified, until eventually, the monster had gone away without ever finding him.
Joshua had spent his days and nights watching the monsters in horror as they passed through the nearby woods, hunting each other for sport and pleasure. Some of the beasts were bigger than others, and some had sharp fangs or claws that cut into their enemies’ flesh easily.
Joshua thought that if he was lucky, the one they called the Alpha Beast would catch him and devour him. But the Alpha Beast never found him. Eventually, it stopped coming around. The other animals, the lesser predators, started disappearing, too.
Eventually, Joshua decided that he was safe. So he’d returned to the city, where he’d lived with an old couple in an apartment overlooking the sea. When they saw that he could read their ancient text and write their language, they took care of him and taught him everything he needed to know.
They’d also helped him learn to make fires and traps and other useful things. And they told him about his past life.
The woman who owned the apartment had been a scholar who’d studied ancient languages. One day, she stumbled across something in her research that sounded like a story.
It was an account of a young man who had died in a foreign land thousands of years ago and was still stuck in a terrible state of limbo: Asleep inside his own body, unable to move, trapped behind a thick glass wall that kept him separated from all of his friends and family.
She was convinced that if she could find someone else who knew the boy’s soul, then perhaps he could teach them how to free him from his awful fate.
After hearing this account of her discovery, Joshua begged to help. But he wasn’t much older than five when he’d met the old woman. His memories weren’t clear; even he was unsure whether he remembered being a ghost or just having seen a movie or read a book about what ghosts did.
Regardless of which of those things was true, Joshua had wanted to save the boy from his miserable existence. So he went with the old scholar and learned the basics of reading and writing in the boy’s strange language, as well as how to use their old symbols for the words they used to write.
One night, when the old woman had gone into the mountains to visit a library full of ancient texts, he’d snuck off by himself and followed one of the animals into the forest. He’d been careful to stay far back, not wanting to frighten it, so the beast hadn’t noticed him until it was almost too late.
It was an enormous creature that he’d only ever heard rumors of before. Its fur was bright red and its eyes glowed green in the moonlight, and it had razor-sharp teeth. The animal turned toward Joshua when it spotted him hiding in the underbrush, and its breath smelled of rot.
For a moment, the boy wondered whether it would be best to run away or try to scare it off somehow. But in the end, he’d simply stood his ground and watched. The creature sniffed the air suspiciously and growled. Then it looked straight at Joshua, and the boy froze in place.
The beast was about ten yards away and staring right at him; its massive head was cocked slightly as if it were curious. In the light of the moon, Joshua could see that it had no tail to speak of and that there were several scars on its skin—scar tissue over where claws had dug into the meat of its belly.
A pair of horns jutted from its forehead, and two curved horns grew from its forearms. The beast seemed to smile.
“What do you want?” asked the beast with unbelievability clear in the tone of voice. “Do I smell of blood? Or do I taste food?”
“I’m hungry,” said Joshua. “And I’ve been waiting for someone to come and feed me.”
A long silence ensued as the beast considered this claim. At last, it lowered itself down to the ground and leaned its chin against the rough bark of an oak tree. The beast’s lips curled up into a grin, revealing dozens of pointed white teeth that shone in the moonlight.
“Why do you need to eat, little ghost boy?”
“Because I don’t remember what happened to me,” explained Joshua. “I can’t get out. Can you take me back to where I was from?”
For the first time since it had approached him, the beast frowned. “Are you telling me that you’re trapped inside your own body, stuck outside of yourself, while you dream about eating something delicious? And that I am the only being you can think to summon up here from such a horrible fate?”
With that, the beast rose up on its hind legs, lifted the branch above its head, and brought it crashing down. There was a loud crackling sound, and the limb broke in half. The beast tossed aside the broken trunk, reached around behind its torso with one clawed hand, and pulled open a wide maw that filled with hundreds of sharp fangs.
“You’re very stupid,” it said in a gravelly voice. “But I’ll forgive you because you look tasty.”
Then the animal opened its mouth wide, took a step forward, and bit down upon Joshua’s leg. Instantly, Joshua found himself falling backward, and as he hit the ground, he felt his consciousness slip away.
The End