Charlie Jane Anders

SIX MONTHS, THREE DAYS, FIVE OTHERS

To Annalee, with all my heart

The Fermi Paradox Is Our Business Model

The thing about seeking out new civilizations is, every discovery brings a day of vomiting. There’s no way to wake from a thousand years of Interdream without all of your stomachs clenching and rejecting, like marrow fists. The worst of it was, Jon always woke up hungry as well as nauseous.

This particular time, Jon started puking before the autosystems had even lifted him out of the Interdream envelope. He fell on his haunches and vomited some more, even as he fought the starving urge to suck in flavors through his feed-holes. He missed Toku, even though he’d seen her minutes ago, subjective time.

Instigator didn’t have the decency to let Jon finish puking before it started reporting on the latest discovery. “We have picked up—”

“Just—” Jon heaved again. He looked like a child’s flatdoll on the smooth green floor, his body too oval from long recumbence, so that his face grimaced out of his sternum. “Just give me a moment.”

Instigator waited exactly one standard moment, then went on. “As I was saying,” the computer droned, “we’ve picked up both radiation traces and Cultural Emissions from the planet.”

“So, same as always. A technological civilization, followed by Closure.” Jon’s out-of-practice speaking tentacles stammered as they slapped together around his feed-holes. His vomit had almost completely disappeared from the floor, thanks to the ship’s autoscrubs.

“There’s one thing.” Instigator’s voice warbled, simulating the sound of speaking tentacles knotted in puzzlement. “The Cultural Emissions appear to have continued for some time following the Closure.”

“Oh.” Jon shivered, in spite of the temperature-regulated, womblike Wake Chamber. “That’s not supposed to happen.” The entire point of Closure was that nothing happened afterwards. Ever again. At least he was no longer sick to his stomachs (for now anyway) and Instigator responded by pumping more flavors into the chamber’s methane/nitrogen mix.

Jon spent two millimoments studying the emissions from this planet, third in line from a single star. Instigator kept reminding him he’d have to wake Toku, his boss/partner, with a full report. “Yeah, yeah,” Jon said. “I know. But it would be nice to know what to tell Toku first. This makes no sense.” Plus he wanted to clean up, maybe aim some spritzer at the cilia on his back, before Toku saw him.

At the thought of Toku coming back to life and greeting him, Jon felt a flutter in his deepest stomach. Whenever Jon was apart from Toku, he felt crazy in love with her—and when he was in her presence, she drove him nuts and he just wanted to get away from her. Since they had been sharing a three-room spaceship for a million years, this dynamic tended to play out in real-time.

Jon tried to organize the facts: He and Toku had slept for about two thousand years, longer than usual. Instigator had established that the little planet had experienced a massive radioactive flare, consistent with the people nuking the hell out of themselves. And afterwards, they’d carried on broadcasting electromagnetic representations of mating or choosing a leader.

“This is shit!” Jon smacked his playback globe with one marrow. “The whole point of Closure is, it’s already over before we even know they existed.”

“What are you going to tell Toku?” Instigator asked.

Toku hated when Jon gave her incomplete data. They’d taken turns being in charge of the ship, according to custom, for the first half million years of their mission, until they both agreed that Toku was the better decision-maker.

Jon was already fastening the hundreds of strips of fabric that constituted his dress uniform around his arm- and leg-joints. He hated this get-up, but Toku always woke even crankier than he did. His chair melted into the floor and a bed yawned out of the wall so he could stretch himself out.

“I guess I’ll tell her what we know, and let her make the call. Most likely, they had a small Closure, kept making Culture, then had a final Closure afterwards. The second one may not have been radioactive. It could have been biological, or climate-based. It doesn’t matter. They all end the same way.”

At least Jon had the decency to let Toku finish voiding her stomachs and snarling at Instigator’s attempts at aromatherapy before he started bombarding her with data. “Hey love,” Jon said. “Boy, those two thousand years flew by, huh? The time between new civilizations is getting longer and longer. Makes you wonder if the Great Expedient is almost over.”

“Just tell me the score,” Toku grumbled.

“Well,” Jon said. “We know they were bipedal, like us. They had separate holes for breathing and food consumption, in a big appendage over their bodies. And they had a bunch of languages, which we’re still trying to decipher. We’ve identified manufactured debris orbiting their world, which is always a nice sign. And, uh… we think they might have survived.”

“What?” Toku jumped to her feet and lurched over, still queasy, to look over Jon’s shoulder at his globe. “That doesn’t happen.”

“That’s what I said. So what do we do? The Over-nest says not to approach if we think there’s a living culture, right? On the other hand, it might be even longer than two millennia before we find the next civilization.”

“Let me worry about that,” Toku said, sucking in some energizing flavors and slowly straightening up her beautifully round frame. Her speaking tentacles knotted around her feed-holes. “I think we assume they didn’t survive. It’s like you said: They probably held on for a little while, then finished up.”

Space travel being what it was, Jon and Toku had months to debate this conclusion before they reached this planet, which was of course called Earth. (These civilizations almost always called their homeworlds “Earth.”) For two of those months, Instigator mistakenly believed that the planet’s main language was something called Espanhua, before figuring out those were two different languages: Spanish and Mandarin.

“It all checks out,” Toku insisted. “They’re ultra-violent, sex-crazed and leader-focused. In other words, the same as all the others. There’s absolutely no way.”

Jon did not point out that Toku and he had just spent the past two days having sex in his chamber. Maybe that didn’t make them sex-crazed, just affectionate.

“I’m telling you, boss,” Jon said. “We’re seeing culture that references the Closure as a historical event.”

“That does not happen.” Toku cradled all her marrows.

There was only one way to settle it. Weeks later, they lurched into realspace and settled into orbit around Earth.

“So?” Toku leaned over Jon and breathed down his back, the way he hated. “What have we got?”

“Looking.” Jon hunched over the globe. “Tons of lovely metal, some of it even still in orbit. Definitely plenty of radioactivity. You could warm up a lovebarb in seconds.” Then he remembered Toku didn’t like that kind of language, even during sex, and quickly moved on. “I can see ruined cities down there, and… oh.”

He double- and triple-checked to make sure he wasn’t looking at historical impressions or fever-traces.

“Yeah, there are definitely still electromagnetic impulses,” said Jon. “And people. There’s one big settlement on that big island. Or small continent.” He gestured at a land mass, which was unfortunately lovebarb-shaped and might remind Toku of his dirty talk a moment earlier.

Toku stared as Jon zoomed in the visual. There was one spire, like a giant worship-spike, with millions of lights glowing on it. A single structure holding a city full of people, with a tip that glowed brighter than the rest. These people were as hierarchical as all the others, so the tip was probably where the leader (or leaders) lived.

“Options,” Toku said.

Jon almost offered some options, but realized just in time that she wasn’t asking him.

“We could leave,” Toku said, “and go looking for a different civilization. Which could take thousands of years, with the luck we’ve had lately. We could sit here and wait for them to die, which might only take a few hundred years. We could go back into Interdream and ask Instigator to wake us when they’re all dead.”

“It’s just so… tasty-looking,” Jon sighed. “I mean, look at it. It’s perfect. Gases, radioactive materials, refined metals, all just sitting there. How dare they still be alive?”

“They’re doing it just to mess with you.” Toku laughed and Jon felt a shiver of nervous affection in his back-cilia.

She stalked back to her own chamber to think over the options, while Jon watched the realtime transmissions from the planet. He was annoyed to discover the survivors spoke neither Spanish nor Mandarin, but some other language. Instigator worked on a schema, but it could take days.

“Okay,” Toku said a few MM later. “We’re going back to Interdream, but only level two, so years become moments. And that way, the wake-up won’t be too vomit-making. Instigator will bring us out—gently—when they’re all dead.”

“Sure, boss,” Jon said, but then an unpleasant thought hit him. “What if they don’t die off? Instigator might let us sleep forever.”

“That doesn’t hap—” Toku put one marrow over her feed-holes before she jinxed herself. “Sure. Yeah. Let’s make sure Instigator wakes us after a thousand years if the bastards haven’t snuffed it by then.”

“Sure.” Jon started refining Instigator’s parameters, just to make damned sure they didn’t sleep forever. Something blared from the panel next to his globe, and an indicator he’d never seen before glowed. “Uh, that’s a weird light. What’s that light? Is it a happy light? Please tell me it’s happy.”

“That’s the external contact monitor,” Instigator purred. “Someone on the planet’s surface is attempting to talk to us. In that language I’ve been working on deciphering.”

It only took Instigator a couple MM to untangle it. “Attention, vessel from [beyond homeworld]. Please identify yourselves. We are [non-aggro] but we can defend ourselves if we need to. We have a [radioactive projectile] aimed at you. We would welcome your [peaceful alliance]. Please respond.”

“Can we talk back in their language?” Toku asked.

Instigator churned for a while, then said yes. “Tell them we come from another star, and we are on a survey mission. We are peaceful but have no desire to interact. Make it clear we are leaving soon.”

“Leaving?” Jon asked, after Instigator beamed their message down, translated into “English.”

“I’ve had enough of this.” Toku breathed. “Not only did they survive their Closure, but they’re threatening us with a Closure of our own. Someone else can check on them in a few millennia. Worst comes to worst, we can just overdraw our credit at the Tradestation some more.”

“They are launching something,” Instigator reported. “Not a projectile. A vessel. It will converge on our position in a few MM.”

Watching the blip lift off from the planet’s surface, Jon felt a weird sensation, not unlike the mix of hunger and nausea he’d felt when he’d woken from Interdream: curiosity.

“You have to admit, boss, it would be interesting. The first living civilization we’ve actually met, in a million years of visiting other worlds. Don’t you want to know what they’re like?”

“I just wish they had the decency to be dead,” Toku sighed. “That’s by far the best thing about other civilizations: their 100 percent fatality rate.”

The little blip got closer, and Toku didn’t make any move to take them out of realspace. She must be experiencing the same pangs of curiosity Jon was. It wasn’t as if they’d contacted these people on purpose, so nobody could blame Jon or Toku if they made contact briefly.

Jon reached out with his lower right marrow and grazed Toku’s, and she gave him a gentle squeeze.

“What do you want to bet the leader of their civilization is on that ship, engaging in atavistic power displays?” Toku almost giggled. “It would be amusing to see. I mean, we’ve seen the end result often enough, but…”

“Yeah,” Jon said. They were each daring the other to be the coward who took the ship out of realspace before that vessel arrived.

The “Earth” ship grazed theirs, trying to do some kind of connective maneuver. Instigator tried a few different things before finally coating the visiting ship’s “airlock” with a polymer cocoon. Instigator couldn’t make air that the “Earths” could breathe, but could at least provide a temperature-controlled chamber for them in the storage hold.

Three of the “Earths” came into the chamber and figured out a way to sit in the chairs that Instigator provided. In person they looked silly: They had elongated bodies, with “heads” elevated over everything else, as if each person was a miniature hierarchy. “I am Renolz. We are here in [state of non-violence],” the leader of the “Earths” said.

Jon tapped on his communications grid, some sort of all-purpose “nice to meet you” that Instigator could relay to the “Earths.”

Slowly, haltingly, the “Earths” conveyed that they were from a city-state called Sidni. And everyone left alive on “Earth” was the servant of someone named “Jondorf” who controlled a profit-making enterprise called “Dorfco.” The rest of the “Earths” had died hundreds of years ago, but a few million people had survived inside the “Dorfco” megastructure.

“We always had [optimism/faith] that we weren’t alone in the universe,” the leader said after a few MM of conversation. “We have waited so long.”

“You were never alone,” Jon tapped back on his comm-grid. “We made lots of others, just like you, more or less, but you’re the first ones we’ve found alive.” He hit “send” before Toku could scream at him to stop.

“What in the slow-rotting third stomach of the Death Lord do you think you’re doing?” Toku pushed Jon away from the comm-grid. “You’re not supposed to tell them that.”

“Oh! Sorry. It just slipped out!” Jon pulled a chair from the floor on the other side of the room from the comm-grid, and settled in to watch from a safe distance.

In reality, Jon had decided to tell the “Earths” the truth, because he had that hunger/nausea pang again. He wanted to see how they would react.

“What did you say?” Renolz replied after a moment. “Did you say you made us?”

“No,” Toku tapped hastily on the comm-grid. “That was a translation error. We meant to say we found you, not that we made you. Please ignore that last bit. In any case, we will now be leaving your star system forever. Please get off our ship, and we’ll be gone before you know it.”

“That was no translation error.” Renolz looked agitated, from the way he was twitching. “Please. Tell us what you meant.”

“Nothing. We meant nothing. Would you please leave our ship now? We’re out of here.”

“We will not leave until you explain.”

“Options,” Toku said, and this time Jon knew better than to offer any. She bared her flavor/gas separators at him in anger. “We could expel the ‘Earths’ into space, but we’re not murderers. We could wait them out, but they might launch their projectile and destroy us. We could leave and take them with us, but then they would suffocate. And we’re not murderers.”

“Why not just explain it to them?” Jon couldn’t help asking.

“This is going on your permanent file.” Toku’s eyes clustered in pure menace. Jon shrank back into the corner.

“Okay then,” Toku tapped on the comm-pad. “This may be hard for you to understand, so please listen carefully and don’t do that twitching thing again. Yes. We made you, but it’s not personal.”

“What do you mean, it is not personal?” Renolz seemed to be assuming the most aggressive power stance an “Earth” could take.

“I mean, we didn’t intend to create your species in particular. Our employers seeded this galaxy with billions of life-seeding devices. It was just a wealth-creation schema.” The worst Interdream nightmare couldn’t be worse than this: having to explain yourself to one of your investment organisms. Toku stiffened and flinched, and Instigator pumped soothing flavors into the air in response.

“You mean you created us as a [capital-accretion enterprise]?” The clear bubble on the front of Renolz’s helmet turned cloudy, as if he were secreting excess poisonous gases. The other two members of his group kept clutching each other.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Toku tapped. “We…” She wrote, erased, wrote, erased, wrote again. “We created you, along with countless other sentient creatures. The idea is, you evolve. You develop technology. You fight. You dig up all the metals and radioactive elements out of the ground. As you become more advanced, your population gets bigger, and you fight more. When your civilization gets advanced enough, you fight even harder, until you kill each other off. We don’t even find out you existed until after you’re all dead. That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway.”

“Why?”

However they had survived their Closure, it obviously wasn’t by being super-intelligent. Toku mashed her marrows together, trying to think of another way to explain it so Renolz would understand, and then leave them alone. “You dig up the metals, to make things. Right? You find the rare elements. You invent technology. Yes? And then you die, and leave it all behind. For us. We come and take it after you are gone. For profit. Now do you understand?”

“So you created us to die.”

“Yes.”

“For [industrial exploitation]?”

“That’s right. It’s cheaper than sending machines to do it. Often, the denser metals and rare elements are hard to reach. It would be a major pain.”

Toku hit “send” and then waited. Was there any chance that, having heard the truth, the “Earths” would get back into their little ship and go back home, so Toku and Jon could leave before their careers were any more ruined? With luck, the “Earths” would finish dying off before anyone found out what had happened.

“What kind of [night predators] are you?” Renolz asked.

Toku decided to treat the question as informational. “We are the Falshi. We are from a world 120,000 light years from here. We’re bipeds, like you. You are the first living civilization we’ve encountered in a million years of doing this job. We’ve never killed or hurt anyone. Now will you leave our ship? Please?”

“This is a lot for us to absorb,” Renolz said from the other chamber. “We… Does your species have [God/creator beliefs]? Who do you think created your kind?”

“We used to believe in gods,” Toku responded. “Not any more. We’re an old enough race that we were able to study the explosion that created the universe. We saw no creator, no sign of any intelligence at the beginning. Just chaos. But we’re not your creators in any meaningful way.”

Renolz took a long time to reply. “Will you establish trade with us?”

“Trade?” Toku almost laughed as she read it. She turned to Jon. “Do you see what you’ve done now?”

Anger made her face smooth out, opened her eyes to the fullest, and for a moment she looked the way she did the day Jon had met her for the first time, in the Tradestation’s flavor marsh, when she’d asked him if he liked long journeys.

“We trade with each other,” Toku tapped out. “We don’t trade with you.”

“I think I know why we survived,” Renolz said. “We developed a form of [wealth-accretion ideology] that was as strong as nationalism or religion. Dorfco was strong enough to protect itself. Jondorf is a [far-seeing leader]. We understand trade. We could trade with you, as equals.”

“We don’t recognize your authority to trade,” Toku tapped. As soon as she hit the “send” area of the comm-pad, she realized that might have been a mistake. Although communicating with these creatures in the first place was already a huge error.

“So you won’t trade with us, but you’ll sell our artifacts after we die?” Renolz was twitching again.

“Yes,” Toku said. “But we won’t hurt you. You hurt each other. It’s not our fault. It’s just the way you are. Sentient races destroy themselves, it’s the way of things. Our race was lucky.”

“So was ours,” Renolz said. “And we will stay lucky.”

Oh dear. Jon could tell Toku was starting to freak out at the way this was going. “Yes, good,” she tapped back. “Maybe you’ll survive after all. We would be thrilled if that happened. Really. We’ll come back in a few thousand years, and see if you’re still here.”

“Or maybe,” Renolz said, “we will come and find you.”

Toku stepped away from the comm-grid. “We are in so much trouble,” she told Jon. “We might as well not ever go back to Tradestation 237 if anyone finds out what we’ve done here.” Was it childish of Jon to be glad she was saying “we” instead of “you”?

Toku seemed to realize that every exchange was making this conversation more disastrous. She shut off the comm-grid and made a chair near Jon, so she wouldn’t feel tempted to try and talk to the “Earths” any more. Renolz kept sending messages, but she didn’t answer. Jon kept trying to catch Toku’s eyes, but she wouldn’t look at him.

“Enough of the silent tactics,” Renolz said an hour later. “You made us. You have a responsibility.” Toku gave Jon a poisonous look, and Jon covered his eyes.

The “Earths” started running out of air, and decided to go back to their ship. But before they left, Renolz approached the glowing spot that was Instigator’s main communications port in that chamber, so his faceplate was huge in their screen. Renolz said, “We are leaving. But you can [have certainty/resolve] that you will be hearing from us again.” Instigator dissolved the membrane so the Earth ship could disengage.

“You idiot!” Toku shouted as she watched the ship glide down into the planet’s atmosphere. (It was back to “you” instead of “we.”) “See what you did? You’ve given them a reason to keep on surviving!”

“Oh,” Jon said. “But no. I mean, even knowing we’re out there waiting for them to finish dying… it probably won’t change their self-destructive tendencies. They’re still totally hierarchical; you heard how he talked about that Jondorf character.”

Toku had turned her back to Jon, her cilia stiff as twigs.

“Look, I’m sorry,” Jon said. “I just, you know, I just acted on impulse.” Jon started to babble something else, about exploration and being excited to wake up to a surprise for once, and maybe there was more to life than just tearing through the ruins.

Toku turned back to face Jon, and her eyes were moist. Her speaking tentacles wound around each other. “It’s my fault,” she said. “I’ve been in charge too long. We’re supposed to take turns, and I… I felt like you weren’t a leader. Maybe if you’d been in charge occasionally, you’d be better at deciding stuff. It’s like what you said before, about hierarchy. It taints everything.” She turned and walked back towards her bedchamber.

“So wait,” Jon said. “What are we going to do? Where are we going to go next?”

“Back to the Tradestation.” Toku didn’t look back at him. “We’re dissolving our partnership. And hoping to hell the Tradestation isn’t sporting a Dorfco logo when we show up there a few thousand years from now. I’m sorry, Jon.”

After that, Toku didn’t speak to Jon at all until they were both falling naked into their Interdream envelopes. Jon thought he heard her say that they could maybe try to salvage one or two more dead cultures together before they went back to the Tradestation, just so they didn’t have to go home empty.

The envelope swallowed Jon like a predatory flower, and the sickly-sweet vapors made him so cold his bones sang. He knew he’d be dreaming about misshapen creatures, dead but still moving, and for a moment he squirmed against the tubes burrowing inside his body. Jon felt lonesome, as if Toku were light-years away instead of in the next room. He was so close to thinking of the perfect thing to say, to make her forgive him. But then he realized that even if he came up with something in his last moment of consciousness, he’d never remember it when he woke. Last-minute amnesia was part of the deal.

As Good as New

Thanks to Gordon Dahlquist for the advice on theater stuff!

Marisol got into an intense relationship with the people on The Facts of Life, to the point where Tootie and Mrs. Garrett became her imaginary best friends and she shared every last thought with them. She told Tootie about the rash she got from wearing the same bra every day for two years, and she had a long talk with Mrs. Garrett about her regrets that she hadn’t said a proper goodbye to her best friend Julie and her on-again/off-again boyfriend Rod, before they died along with everybody else.

The panic room had pretty much every TV show ever made on its massive hard drive, with multiple backup systems and a fail-proof generator, so there was nothing stopping Marisol from marathoning The Facts of Life for sixteen hours a day, starting over again with season one when she got to the end of the bedraggled final season. She also watched Mad Men and The West Wing. The media server had tons of video of live theatre, but Marisol didn’t watch that because it made her feel guilty. Not survivor’s guilt; failed playwright guilt.

Her last proper conversation with a living human had been an argument with Julie about Marisol’s decision to go to medical school instead of trying to write more plays. (“Fuck doctors, man,” Julie had spat. “People are going to die no matter what you do. Theatre is important.”) Marisol had hung up on Julie and gone back to the pre-med books, staring at the exposed musculature and blood vessels as if they were costume designs for a skeleton theatre troupe.

The quakes always happened at the worst moment, just when Jo or Blair was about to reveal something heartfelt and serious. The whole panic room would shake, throwing Marisol against the padded walls or ceiling over and over again. A reminder that the rest of the world was probably dead. At first, these quakes were constant, then they happened a few times a day. Then once a day, then a few times a week. Then a few times a month. Marisol knew that once a month or two passed without the world going sideways, she would have to go out and investigate. She would have to leave her friends at the Eastland School, and venture into a bleak world.

Sometimes, Marisol thought she had a duty to stay in the panic room, since she was personally keeping the human race alive. But then she thought: what if there was someone else living, and they needed help? Marisol was pre-med, she might be able to do something. What if there was a man, and Marisol could help him repopulate the species?

The panic room had nice blue leather walls and a carpeted floor that felt nice to walk on, and enough gourmet frozen dinners to last Marisol a few lifetimes. She only had the pair of shoes she’d brought in there with her, and it would seem weird to wear shoes after two barefoot years. The real world was in here, in the panic room—out there was nothing but an afterimage of a bad trip.

* * *

Marisol was an award-winning playwright, but that hadn’t saved her from the end of the world. She was taking pre-med classes and trying to get a scholarship to med school so she could give cancer screenings to poor women in her native Taos, but that didn’t save her either. Nor did the fact that she believed in God every other day.

What actually saved Marisol from the end of the world was the fact that she took a job cleaning Burton Henstridge’s mansion to help her through school, and she’d happened to be scrubbing his fancy Japanese toilet when the quakes had started—within easy reach of Burton’s state-of-the-art panic room. (She had found the hidden opening mechanism some weeks earlier, while cleaning the porcelain cat figurines.) Burton himself was in Bulgaria scouting a new location for a nano-fabrication facility, and had died instantly.

When Marisol let herself think about all the people she could never talk to again, she got so choked up she wanted to punch someone in the eye until they were blinded for life. She experienced grief in the form of freak-outs that left her unable to breathe or think, and then she popped in another Facts of Life. As she watched, she chewed her nails until she was in danger of gnawing off her fingertips.

* * *

The door to the panic room wouldn’t actually open when Marisol finally decided it had been a couple months since the last quake and it was time to go the hell out there. She had to kick the door a few dozen times, until she dislodged enough of the debris blocking it to stagger out into the wasteland. The cold slapped her in the face and extremities, extra bitter after two years at room temperature. Burton’s house was gone; the panic room was just a cube half-buried in the ruins, covered in some yellowy insulation that looked like it would burn your fingers.

Everything out there was white, like snow or paper, except powdery and brittle, ashen. She had a Geiger counter from the panic room, which read zero. She couldn’t figure out what the hell had happened to the world, for a long time, until it hit her—this was fungus. Some kind of newly made, highly corrosive fungus that had rushed over everything like a tidal wave and consumed every last bit of organic material, then died. It had come in wave after wave, with incredible violence, until it had exhausted the last of its food supply and crushed everything to dust. She gleaned this from the consistency of the crud that had coated every bit of rubble, but also from the putrid sweet-and-sour smell that she could not stop smelling once she noticed it. She kept imagining that she saw the white powder starting to move out of the corner of her eye, advancing toward her, but when she would turn around there was nothing.

“The fungus would have all died out when there was nothing left for it to feed on,” Marisol said aloud. “There’s no way it could still be active.” She tried to pretend some other person, an expert or something, had said that, and thus it was authoritative. The fungus was dead. It couldn’t hurt her now.

Because if the fungus wasn’t dead, then she was screwed—even if it didn’t kill her, it would destroy the panic room and its contents. She hadn’t been able to seal it properly behind her without locking herself out.

“Hello?” Marisol kept yelling, out of practice at trying to project her voice. “Anybody there? Anybody?”

She couldn’t even make sense of the landscape. It was just blinding white, as far as she could see, with bits of blanched stonework jutting out. No way to discern streets or houses or cars or anything, because it had all been corroded or devoured.

She was about to go back to the panic room and hope it was still untouched, so she could eat another frozen lamb vindaloo and watch season three of Mad Men. And then she spotted something, a dot of color, a long way off in the pale ruins.

The bottle was a deep oaky green, like smoked glass, with a cork in it. And it was about twenty yards away, just sitting in one of the endless piles of white debris. Somehow, it had avoided being consumed or rusted or broken in the endless waves of fungal devastation. It looked as though someone had just put it down a second ago—in fact, Marisol’s first response was to yell “Hello?” even louder than before.

When there was no answer, she picked up the bottle. In her hands, it felt bumpy, like an embossed label had been worn away, and there didn’t seem to be any liquid inside. She couldn’t see its contents, if there were any. She removed the cork.

A whoosh broke the dead silence. A sparkly mist streamed out of the bottle’s narrow mouth—sparkling like the cheap glitter at the Arts and Crafts table at summer camp when Marisol was a little girl, misty like a smoke machine at a cheap nightclub—and it slowly resolved into a shape in front of her. A man, a little taller than she was and much bigger.

Marisol was so startled and grateful at no longer being alone that she almost didn’t pause to wonder how this man had appeared out of nowhere, after she opened a bottle. A bottle that had survived when everything else was crushed. Then she did start to wonder, but the only explanations seemed too ludicrous to believe.

“Hello and congratulations,” the man said in a pleasant tone. He looked Jewish and wore a cheap suit, in a style that reminded Marisol somewhat of the Mad Men episodes she’d just been watching. His dark hair fell onto his high forehead in lank strands, and he had a heavy beard shadow. “Thank you for opening my bottle. I am pleased to offer you three wishes.” Then he looked around, and his already dour expression worsened. “Oh, fuck,” he said. “Not again.”

“Wait,” Marisol said. “You’re a—You’re a genie?”

“I hate that term,” the man said. “I prefer wish-facilitator. And for your information, I used to be just a regular person. I was the theater critic at The New York Times for six months in 1958, which I still think defines me much more than my current engagement does. But I tried to bamboozle the wrong individual, so I got stuck in a bottle and forced to grant wishes to anyone who opens it.”

“You were a theater critic?” Marisol said. “I’m a playwright. I won a contest and had a play produced off-Broadway. Well, actually, I’m a pre-med student, and I clean houses for money. But in my off-off-hours, I’m a playwright, I guess.”

“Oh,” the man said. “Well, if you want me to tell you your plays are very good, then that will count as one of your three wishes. And honestly, I don’t think you’re going to benefit from good publicity very much in the current climate.” He gestured around at the bleak white landscape around them. “My name was Richard Wolf, by the way.”

“Marisol,” she said. “Marisol Guzmán.”

“Nice to meet you.” He extended his hand, but didn’t actually try to shake hers. She wondered if she would go right through him. She was standing in a world of stinky chalk talking to a self-loathing genie. After two years alone in a box, that didn’t even seem weird, really.

So this was it. Right? She could fix everything. She could make a wish, and everything would be back the way it was. She could talk to Julie again, and apologize for hanging up on her. She could see Rod, and maybe figure out what they were to each other. She just had to say the words: “I wish.” She started to speak, and then something Richard Wolf had said a moment earlier registered in her brain.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “What did you mean, ‘Not again?’”

“Oh, that.” Richard Wolf swatted around his head with big hands, like he was trying to swat nonexistent insects. “I couldn’t say. I mean, I can answer any question you want, but that counts as one of your wishes. There are rules.”

“Oh,” Marisol said. “Well, I don’t want to waste a wish on a question. Not when I can figure this out on my own. You said ‘not again,’ the moment you saw all this. So, this isn’t the first time this has happened. Your bottle can probably survive anything. Right? Because it’s magic or something.”

The dark green bottle still had a heft to it, even after she’d released its contents. She threw it at a nearby rock a few times. Not a scratch.

“So,” she said. “The world ends, your bottle doesn’t get damaged. If even one person survives, they find your bottle. And the first thing they wish for? Is for the world not to have ended.”

Richard Wolf shrugged, but he also sort of nodded at the same time, like he was confirming her hunch. His feet were see-through, she noticed. He was wearing wing-tip shoes,that looked scuffed to the point of being scarred.

“The first time was in 1962,” he said. “The Cuban Missile Crisis, they called it afterwards.”

“This is not counting as one of my wishes, because I didn’t ask a question,” Marisol said.

“Fine, fine,” Richard Wolf rolled his eyes. “I grew tired of listening to your harangue. When I was reviewing for the Times, I always tore into plays that had too many endless speeches. Your plays don’t have a lot of monologues, do they? Fucking Brecht made everybody think three-page speeches were clever. Fucking Brecht.”

“I didn’t go in for too many monologues,” Marisol said. “So. Someone finds your bottle, they wish for the apocalypse not to have happened, and then they probably make a second wish, to try and make sure it doesn’t happen again. Except here we are, so it obviously didn’t work the last time.”

“I could not possibly comment,” Richard Wolf said. “Although I should say that everyone gets the wrong idea about people in my line of work—meaning wish-facilitators, not theatre critics. People had the wrong idea when I was a theatre critic, too; they thought it was my job to promote the theatre, to put buns in seats, even for terrible plays. That was not my job at all.”

“The theatre has been an endangered species for a long time,” Marisol said, not without sympathy. She looked around the pasty-white, yeast-scented deathscape. A world of Wonder Bread. “I mean, I get why people want criticism that is essentially cheerleading, even if that doesn’t push anybody to do their best work.”

“Well, if you think of theatre as some sort of delicate flower that needs to be kept protected in some sort of hothouse”—and at this point, Wolf was clearly reprising arguments he’d had over and over again, when he was alive—“then you’re going to end up with something that only the faithful few will appreciate, and you’ll end up worsening the very marginalization that you’re seeking to prevent.”

Marisol was being very careful to avoid asking anything resembling a question, because she was probably going to need all three of her wishes. “I would guess that the job of a theatre critic is misunderstood in sort of the opposite way than the job of a genie,” she said. “Everybody is afraid a theatre critic will be too brutally honest. But a genie…”

“Everybody thinks I’m out to swindle them!” Richard Wolf threw his hands in the air, thinking of all the tsuris he had endured. “When, in fact, it’s always the client who can’t express a wish in clear and straightforward terms. They always leave out crucial information. I do my best. It’s like stage directions without any stage left or stage right. I interpret as best I can.”

“Of course you do,” Marisol said. This was all starting to creep her out, and her gratitude at having another person to talk to (who wasn’t Mrs. Garrett) was getting driven out by her discomfort at standing in the bleached-white ruins of the world kibitzing about theatre criticism. She picked up the bottle from where it lay undamaged after hitting the rock, and found the cork.

“Wait a minute,” Richard Wolf said. “You don’t want to—”

He was sucked back inside the bottle before she finished putting the cork back in.

* * *

She reopened the bottle once she was back inside the panic room, with the door sealed from the inside. So nothing or nobody could get in. She watched three episodes of The Facts of Life, trying to get her equilibrium back, before she microwaved some sukiyaki and let Richard Wolf out again. He started the spiel about how he had to give her three wishes over again, then stopped and looked around.

“Huh.” He sat and sort of floated an inch above the sofa. “Nice digs. Real calfskin on this sofa. Is this like a bunker?”

“I can’t answer any of your questions,” Marisol said, “or that counts as a wish you owe me.”

“Don’t be like that.” Richard Wolf ruffled his two-tone lapels. “I’m just trying not to create any loopholes, because once there are loopholes it brings everybody grief in the end. Trust me, you wouldn’t want the rules to be messy here.” He rifled through the media collection until he found a copy of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which he made a big show of studying until Marisol finally loaded it for him.

“This is better than I’d remembered,” Richard Wolf said an hour later.

“Good to know,” Marisol said. “I never got around to watching that one.”

“I met Tennessee Williams, you know,” Richard said. “He wasn’t nearly as drunk as you might have thought.”

“So here’s what I figure. You do your level best to implement the wishes that people give you, to the letter,” Marisol said. “So if someone says they want to make sure that a nuclear war never happens again, you do your best to make a nuclear war impossible. And then maybe that change leads to some other catastrophe, and then the next person tries to make some wishes that prevent that thing from happening again. And on, and on. Until this.”

“This is actually the longest conversation I’ve had since I became a wish-facilitator.” Richard crossed his leg, ankle over thigh. “Usually, it’s just whomp-bomp-a-lula-three-wishes, and I’m back in the bottle. So tell me about your prize-winning play. If you want. I mean, it’s up to you.”

Marisol told Richard about her play, which seemed like something an acquaintance of hers had written many lifetimes ago. “It was a one-act,” she said, “about a man who is trying to break up with his girlfriend, but every time he’s about to dump her she does something to remind him why he used to love her. So he hires a male prostitute to seduce her, instead, so she’ll cheat on him and he can have a reason to break up with her.”

Richard was giving her a blank expression, as though he couldn’t trust himself to show a reaction.

“It’s a comedy,” Marisol explained.

“Sorry,” Richard said. “It sounds awful. He hires a male prostitute to sleep with his girlfriend. It sounds… I just don’t know what to say.”

“Well, you were a theatre critic in the 1950s, right? I guess it was a different era.”

“I don’t think that’s the problem,” Richard said. “It just sounds sort of… misanthropic. Or actually woman-hating. With a slight veneer of irony. I don’t know. Maybe that’s the sort of thing everybody is into these days—or was into, before the world ended yet again. This is something like the fifth or sixth time the world has ended. I am losing count, to be quite honest.”

Marisol was put out that this fossil was casting aspersions on her play—her contest-winning play, in fact. But the longer she kept him talking, the more clues he dropped, without costing her any wishes. So she bit her lip.

“So. There were half a dozen apocalypses,” Marisol said. “And I guess each of them was caused by people trying to prevent the last one from happening again, by making wishes. So that white stuff out there. Some kind of bioengineered corrosive fungus, I thought—but maybe it was created to prevent some kind of climate-related disaster. It does seem awfully reflective of sunlight.”

“Oh, yes, it reflects sunlight just wonderfully,” Richard said. “The temperature of the planet is going to be dropping a lot in the next decade. No danger of global warming now.”

“Ha,” Marisol said. “And you claim you’re just doing the most straightforward job possible. You’re addicted to irony. You sat through too many Brecht plays, even though you claim to hate him. You probably loved Beckett as well.”

“All right-thinking people love Beckett,” said Richard. “So you had some small success as a playwright, and yet you’re studying to be a doctor. Or you were, before this unfortunate business. Why not stick with the theatre?”

“Is that a question?” Marisol said. Richard started to backpedal, but then she answered him anyway. “I wanted to help people, really help people. Live theatre reaches fewer and fewer people all the time, especially brand-new plays by brand-new playwrights. It’s getting to be like poetry—nobody reads poetry any more. And meanwhile, poor people are dying of preventable cancers every day, back home in Taos. I couldn’t fool myself that writing a play that twenty people saw would do as much good as screening a hundred people for cervical cancer.”

Richard paused and looked her over. “You’re a good person,” he said. “I almost never get picked up by anyone who’s actually not a terrible human being.”

“It’s all relative. My protagonist who hires a male prostitute to seduce his girlfriend considers himself a good person, too.”

“Does it work? The male prostitute thing? Does she sleep with him?”

“Are you asking me a question?”

Wolf shrugged and rolled his eyes in that operatic way he did, which he’d probably practiced in the mirror. “I will owe you an extra wish. Sure. Why not. Does it work, with the gigolo?”

Marisol had to search her memory for a second, she had written that play in such a different frame of mind. “No. The boyfriend keeps feeding the male prostitute lines to seduce his girlfriend via a Bluetooth earpiece—it’s meant to be a postmodern Cyrano de Bergerac—and she figures it out and starts using the male prostitute to screw with her boyfriend. In the end, the boyfriend and the male prostitute get together because the boyfriend and the male prostitute have seduced each other while flirting with the girlfriend.”

Richard cringed on top of the sofa with his face in his insubstantial hands. “That’s terrible,” he said. “I can’t believe I gave you an extra wish just to find that out.”

“Wow, thanks. I can see why people hated you when you were a theatre critic.”

“Sorry! I mean, maybe it was better on the stage; I bet you have a flair for dialogue. It just sounds so… hackneyed. I mean, postmodern Cyrano de Bergerac? I heard all about postmodernism from this one graduate student who opened my bottle in the early 1990s, and it sounded dreadful. If I wasn’t already sort of dead, I would be slitting my wrists. You really did make a wise choice, becoming a doctor.”

“Screw you.” Marisol decided to raid the relatively tiny liquor cabinet in the panic room, and poured herself a generous vodka. “You’re the one who’s been living in a bottle. So. All of this is your fault.” She waved her hand, indicating the devastation outside the panic room. “You caused it all, with some excessively ironic wish-granting.”

“That’s a very skewed construction of events. If the white sludge was caused by a wish that somebody made—and I’m not saying it was—then it’s not my fault. It’s the fault of the wisher.”

“Okay,” Marisol said. Richard drew to attention, thinking she was finally ready to make her first wish. Instead, she said, “I need to think,” and put the cork back in the bottle.

* * *

Marisol watched a season and a half of I Dream of Jeannie, which did not help at all. She ate some delicious beef stroganoff and drank more vodka. She slept and watched TV and slept and drank coffee and ate an omelet. She had no circadian rhythm to speak of anymore.

She had four wishes, and the overwhelming likelihood was that she would foul them up, and maybe next time there wouldn’t be one person left alive to find the bottle and fix her mistake.

This was pretty much exactly like trying to cure a patient, Marisol realized. You give someone a medicine which fixes their disease but causes deadly side effects. Or reduces the patient’s resistance to other infections. You didn’t just want to get rid of one pathogen, you wanted to help the patient reach homeostasis again. Except that the world was an infinitely more complex system than a single human being. And then again, making a big wish was like writing a play, with the entire human race as players. Bleh.

She could wish that the bioengineered fungus had never dissolved the world, but then she would be faced with whatever climate disaster the fungus had prevented. She could make a blanket wish that the world would be safe from global disasters for the next thousand years—and maybe unleash a millennium of stagnation. Or worse, depending on the slippery definition of “safe.”

She guessed that wishing for a thousand wishes wouldn’t work—in fact, that kind of shenanigans might be how Richard Wolf wound up where he was now.

The media server in the panic room had a bazillion movies and TV episodes about the monkey paw, the wishing ring, the magic fountain, the Faustian bargain, the djinn, the vengeance-demon, and so on. So she had plenty of time to soak up the accumulated wisdom of the human race on the topic of making wishes, which amounted to a pile of clichés. Maybe she would have done more good as a playwright than as a doctor, after all—clichés were like plaque in the arteries of the imagination, they clogged the sense of what was possible. Maybe if enough people had worked to demolish clichés, the world wouldn’t have ended.

* * *

Marisol and Richard sat and watched The Facts of Life together. Richard kept complaining and saying things like, “This is worse than being trapped inside a bottle.” But he also seemed to enjoy complaining about it.

“This show kept me marginally sane when I was the only person on Earth,” Marisol said. “I still can’t wrap my mind around what happened to the human race. So, you are conscious of the passage of time when you’re inside the bottle.” She was very careful to avoid phrasing anything as a question.

“It’s very strange,” Richard said. “When I’m in the bottle, it’s like I’m in a sensory deprivation tank, except not particularly warm. I float, with no sense of who or where I am, but meanwhile another part of me is getting flashes of awareness of the world. But I can’t control them. I might be hyperaware of one ant carrying a single crumb up a stem of grass, for an eternity, or I might just have a vague sense of clouds over the ocean, or some old woman’s aches and pains. It’s like hyper-lucid dreaming, sort of.”

“Shush,” said Marisol. “This is the good part—Jo is about to lay some Brooklyn wisdom on these spoiled rich girls.”

The episode ended, and another episode started right away. You take the good, you take the bad. Richard groaned loudly. “So what’s your plan, if I may ask? You’re just going to sit here and watch television for another few years?” He snorted.

“I have no reason to hurry,” Marisol said. “I can spend a decade coming up with the perfect wishes. I have tons of frozen dinners.”

At last, she took pity on Richard and found a stash of PBS American Playhouse episodes on the media server, plus other random theatre stuff. Richard really liked Caryl Churchill, but didn’t care for Alan Ayckbourn. He hated Wendy Wasserstein. Eventually, she put him back in his bottle again.

Marisol started writing down possible draft wishes in one of the three blank journals that she’d found in a drawer. (Burton had probably expected to record his thoughts, if any, for posterity.) And then she started writing a brand-new play, instead. The first time she’d even tried, in a few years.

Her play was about a man—her protagonists were always men—who moves to the big city to become a librarian, and winds up working for a strange old lady, tending her collection of dried-out leaves from every kind of tree in the world. Pedro is so shy, he can’t even speak to more than two people, but so beautiful that everybody wants him to be a fashion model. He pays an optometrist to put drops in his eyes, so he won’t see the people photographing and lighting him when he models. She had no clue how this play was going to end, but she felt a responsibility to finish it. That’s what Mrs. Garrett would expect.

She was still stung by the idea that her prize-winning play was dumb, or worse yet kind of misogynistic. She wished she had an actual copy of that play, so she could show it to Richard and he would realize her true genius. But she didn’t wish that out loud, of course. And maybe this was the kick in the ass she needed to write a better play. A play that made sense of some of this mess.

“I’ve figured it out,” she told Richard the next time she opened his bottle. “I’ve figured out what happened those other times. Someone finds your bottle after the apocalypse, and they get three wishes. So the first wish is to bring the world back and reverse the destruction. The second wish is to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But then they still have one wish left. And that’s the one where they do something stupid and selfish, like wishing for irresistible sex appeal.”

“Or perfect hair,” said Richard Wolf, doing his patented eye-roll and air-swat.

“Or unlimited wealth. Or fame.”

“Or everlasting youth and beauty. Or the perfect lasagna recipe.”

“They probably figured they deserved it,” Marisol stared at the pages of scribbles in her hands. One set of diagrams mapping out her new, as-yet-unnamed play. A second set of diagrams trying to plan out the wish-making process, act by act. Her own scent clung to every surface in the panic room, the recirculated and purified air smelled like the inside of her own mouth. “I mean, they saved the world, right? So they’ve earned fame or sex or parties. Except I bet that’s where it all goes wrong.”

“That’s an interesting theory,” said Wolf, arms folded and head tilted to one side, like he was physically restraining himself from expressing an opinion.

Marisol threw out almost every part of her new play, except the part about her main character needing to be temporarily vision-impaired so he can model. That part seemed to speak to her, once she cleared away the clutter about the old woman and the leaves and stuff. Pedro stands, nearly nude, in a room full of people doing makeup and lighting and photography and catering and they’re all blurs to him. And he falls in love with one woman, but he only knows her voice, not her face. And he’s afraid to ruin it by learning her name, or seeing what she looks like.

By now, Marisol had confused the two processes in her mind. She kept thinking she would know what to wish for, as soon as she finished writing her play. She labored over the first scene for a week before she had the nerve to show it to Richard, and he kept narrowing his eyes and breathing loudly through his nose as he read it. But then he said it was actually a promising start, actually not terrible at all.

The mystery woman phones Pedro up, and he recognizes her voice instantly. So now he has her phone number, and he agonizes about calling her. What’s he afraid of, anyway? He decides his biggest fear is that he’ll go out on a date with the woman, and people will stare at the two of them. If the woman is as beautiful as Pedro, they’ll stare because it’s two beautiful people together. If she’s plain-looking, they’ll stare because they’ll wonder what he sees in her. When Pedro eats out alone, he has a way of shrinking in on himself, so nobody notices him. But he can’t do that on a date.

At last, Pedro calls her and they talk for hours. On stage, she is partially hidden from the audience, so they, too, can’t see what the woman looks like.

“It’s a theme in your work, hmmm?” Richard Wolf sniffed. “The hidden person, the flirting through a veil. The self-loathing narcissistic love affair.”

“I guess so,” Marisol said. “I’m interested in people who are seen, and people who see, and the female gaze, and whatever.”

She finished the play, and then it occurred to her that if she made a wish that none of this stuff had happened, her new play could be un-written as a result. When the time came to make her wishes, she rolled up the notebook and tucked it into her waistband of her sweatpants, hoping against hope that anything on her immediate person would be preserved when the world was rewritten.

In the end Pedro agrees to meet the woman, Susanna, for a drink. But he gets some of the eye-dilating drops from his optometrist friend. He can’t decide whether to put the drops in his eyes before the date—he’s in the men’s room at the bar where they’re meeting, with the bottle in his hand, dithering—and then someone disturbs him and he accidentally drops the bottle in the toilet. And Susanna turns out to be pretty, not like a model but more distinctive. She has a memorable face, full of life. She laughs a lot, Pedro stops feeling shy around her. And Pedro discovers that if he looks into Susanna’s eyes when he’s doing his semi-nude modeling, he no longer needs the eye drops to shut out the rest of the world.

“It’s a corny ending,” Marisol admitted. “But I like it.”

Richard Wolf shrugged. “Anything is better than unearned ambivalence.” Marisol decided that was a good review, coming from him.

Here’s what Marisol wished:

1) I wish this apocalypse and all previous apocalypses had never happened, and that all previous wishes relating to the apocalypse had never been wished.

2) I wish that there was a slight alteration in the laws of probability as relating to apocalyptic scenarios, so that if, for example, an event threatening the survival of the human race has a ten percent chance of happening, that ten percent chance just never comes up, and yet this does not change anything else in the material world.

3) I wish that I, and my designated heirs, will keep possession of this bottle, and will receive ample warning before any apocalyptic scenario comes up, so that we will have a chance to make the final wish.

She had all three wishes written neatly on a sheet of paper torn out of the notebook, and Richard Wolf scrutinized it a couple times, scratching his ear. “That’s it?” he said at last. “You do realize that I can make anything real. Right? You could create a world of giant snails and tiny people. You could make The Facts of Life the most popular TV show in the world for the next thousand years—which would, incidentally, ensure the survival of the human race, since there would have to be somebody to keep watching The Facts of Life. You could do anything.”

Marisol shook her head. “The only way to make sure we don’t end up back here again is to keep it simple.” And then, before she lost her nerve, she picked up the sheet of paper where she’d written down her three wishes, and she read them aloud.

Everything went cheaply glittery around Marisol, and the panic room reshaped into The Infinite Ristretto, a trendy café that just happened to be roughly the same size and shape as the panic room. The blue-leather walls turned to brown brick, with brass fixtures and posters for the legendary all-nude productions of Mamet’s Oleanna and Marsha Norman’s ’night, Mother.

All around Marisol, friends whose names she’d forgotten were hunched over their laptops, publicly toiling over their confrontational one-woman shows and chamber pieces. Her best friend Julia was in the middle of yelling at her, freckles almost washed out by her reddening face.

“Fuck doctors,” Julia was shouting, loud enough to disrupt the whole room.

“Theatre is a direct intervention. It’s like a cultural ambulance. Actors are like paramedics. Playwrights are surgeons, man.”

Marisol was still wearing Burton’s stained business shirt and sweatpants, but somehow she’d gotten a pair of flip-flops. The green bottle sat on the rickety white table nearby. Queen was playing on the stereo, and the scent of overpriced coffee was like the armpit of God.

Julia’s harangue choked off in the middle, because Marisol was giving her the biggest stage hug in the universe, crying into Julia’s green-streaked hair and thanking all her stars that they were here together. By now, everyone was staring at them, but Marisol didn’t care. Something fluttery and heavy fell out of the waistband of her sweatpants. A notebook.

“I have something amazing to tell you, Jools,” Marisol breathed in Julia’s ear. She wanted to ask if Obama was still president and the Cold War was still over and stuff, but she would find out soon enough and this was more important. “Jools, I wrote a new play. It’s all done. And it’s going to change everything.” Hyperbole was how Marisol and Julia and all their friends communicated. “Do you want to read it?”

“Are you seriously high?” Julia pulled away, then saw the notebook on the floor between their feet. Curiosity took over, and she picked it up and started to read.

Marisol borrowed five bucks and got herself a pour-over while Julia sat, knees in her face, reading the play. Every few minutes, Julia glanced up and said, “Well, okay,” in a grudging tone, as if Marisol might not be past saving after all.

The Cartography of Sudden Death

Ythna came to the Beldame’s household when she was barely old enough to walk. They took her from the nursery block in the middle of the night, with nothing but the simple koton robe she was wearing, and carried the tiny girl to a black shiny vehicle, a Monopod. Sitting in the back, wearing a neat gray uniform and matching black gloves and shoes, was an Officiator, who asked the young Ythna some questions. The next thing she knew, she was riding a white cage on a wire over the mountains, up to the gilded fortress where she would serve the Beldame for the rest of her days, if she was lucky.

Ythna forgot the Officiator’s face, or whatever else he said to her, but she would always remember what he said as she stepped, barefoot, out of the cage as the sun rose over the golden house. He knelt before her and spoke gently: “You are but one of a thousand retainers to the Beldame. But each of you is a finger, or a toe. Your movements are her movements. Do not make her a disgrace.”

Ythna lived in a tiny yellow dormitory room with nine other small children, all of them sharing white-and-red uniforms and eating from the same dispensary. Ythna learned to read and write basic Gaven texts, and worked in the cavernous kitchen and boiler room of the golden fortress, which was called Parathall. At night, the other children teased Ythna and pinched her in places where the bruises wouldn’t show on her golden-brown skin, under her retainer uniform. Two girls, the pale, blonde Maryn and the olive-toned Yuli, appointed themselves the rulers of Children’s Wing, and if Ythna didn’t please Maryn and Yuli she found herself sealed inside a small wooden linen box, suffocating, sometimes overnight.

Every moment people weren’t looking, Ythna wept into her loose sleeve. Until one day when she brought some hot barley wine to the Beldame herself, doing the five-point turn as she’d been taught, ending up on one knee with the tray raised before the wrought iron chair.

Ythna was eight or nine years old, and she made sure not to look at the Beldame’s white round face, as she knelt. But in Ythna’s eagerness to avoid looking on her mistress, she found herself gazing, instead, at the papers the Beldame was studying. Ythna started reading them, until the Beldame noticed.

“You can read that?” the Beldame said.

Ythna nodded, terrified.

“And tell me, what do you think of it?” the Beldame asked.

Ythna stammered at first, but at last she shared a few thoughts about the document, which dealt with the rebellious offworld colonists, and the problems with maintaining order in the fringes of the Empire here on Earth. The Beldame asked more questions, and Ythna answered as best she could. After that, the Beldame sent her away—but then Ythna found herself chosen to bring food and drink to the Beldame often. And sometimes, the Beldame would invite her to sit for a moment at her feet, and talk to her.

Years passed. One day, word came that the Beldame was going to be elevated to the Emperor’s Thousand, so she would be in the same direct relationship to the Emperor that the Beldame’s thousand retainers were to her. There would be a massive ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Emperor, at which the Beldame would be given a steel thimble, symbolizing the fact that she was becoming one of the Emperor’s own fingers. Ythna couldn’t even imagine that she could be one-thousandth of the woman who was one-thousandth of the Emperor. She watched the sunrise between the mountain peaks below the Beldame’s arched picture windows and laughed at the floor brush in her hand.

“A lot is going to change for all of us,” said Maryn, who had grown into a striking young woman who still bossed around the other retainers. “Strange foods, new places. All the more reason to keep our behavior perfect. The Beldame is counting on us.”

Ythna said nothing. She was still smaller than Maryn, barely noticeable except for her ribbons of long black hair, down to her waist, and the way she ran through the stone passages of the fortress, her bare feet as silent as snow melting, when nobody else was around.

The day came nearer, and they all traveled for a week by steam truck and Monopod to the Tomb of the Unknown Emperor. At last, they saw it in the distance, looming over the plains: a great structure, shaped like an old letter M, with two great pillars supporting the black canopy. The Unknown Emperor had lain in state for over a hundred years there, behind a faceless statue that raised one hand to the people who’d served him without knowing his name.

They all lined up in rows, the thousand of them, at the base of the Tomb, while the Beldame climbed to the very top. Some of the retainers were playing small bells, and sweet smoke was coming up out of brass pipes all around them. The Officiators were leading Ythna and the others in ceremonial chants. Ythna could see the tiny figure of the Beldame, emerging on top of the structure, as the Emperor himself bestowed the thimble on her. A voice, one of the Chief Officiators, spoke of the hundreds of years of tradition they honored today.

Ythna thought that she could not be any more deliriously proud than she was at this moment, watching her friend and mistress elevated. Her only wish was that she could see the Beldame Thakrra up close at this moment, to behold the look on Thakrra’s face.

A second later, Ythna had her desire. The Beldame lay on the ground directly in front of her, lying on her back, her small body broken by the fall from the top of the structure. Her gentle, lined face was still recognizable, inside her brocaded robe and twelve-peaked silken hat, but she had no expression at all, and blood was leaking out all over the ground, until it lapped against Ythna’s bare feet. She could not help but panic that maybe her selfish wish had caused this to happen.

Next to Ythna, Maryn saw the Beldame’s corpse and began wailing in a loud, theatrical fashion. The other retainers heard Maryn and followed her lead, making a sound like a family of cats. Ythna, meanwhile, could barely choke out a single tear, and it hurt like a splinter coming out.

Frantic to avoid seeing the Beldame like this, Ythna looked up—just as a strange woman stepped out of the nearest pillar in the Tomb. The woman had long curly red hair under a pillbox hat shaped like one of the lacquered discs where the Beldame had kept her spare monocles. She had a sharp nose and chin, and quick gray eyes. And she wore a long black coat, with embroidered sleeves and shoulders, and shiny brass buttons with cords looping around them. She looked like a commanding general from an old-fashioned foreign army.

The red-haired woman stepped forward, looked around, and took in the scene. Then she said a curse word in a language that Ythna had never heard, and slipped away around the side of the Tomb, before anybody else noticed her.

* * *

Hours went by. Ythna felt as though her ribcage were as barbed and twisted as the ends of the Beldame’s beloved wrought iron chair. She knelt on the ground, in the Beldame’s dried blood, weeping, though the Beldame’s body was long gone. Nearby, Yuli and Maryn were making a huge show of singing the Bottomless Grief Spiral chant along with the Officiators. But Maryn kept whispering to Yuli that maybe they should make a break for it—retainers whose mistress died could not count on being given new positions elsewhere, and the alternative was Obsolescence.

“We can’t escape,” Yuli whispered back. “Not with everybody watching. And where would we go? There is no place to hide in the entire Empire, from sea to pole to sea.”

Ythna couldn’t stop wondering about the red-haired woman, who wore no uniform Ythna recognized, and who had all but spat on the ground on seeing the gathered retainers and Officiators. She finally crept over to the pillar she’d seen the woman step out of, and started feeling around for a hinge or join, some evidence of a passageway. The Tomb had many hidden ways in and out—that was how the Emperor’s body had been deposited there without anyone seeing his face—but if there was a doorway here, then Ythna could not find it. She tried to shake the granite edge of the pillar with her fingertips, as if she could bring down the mighty Tomb by herself.

“What do you think you are doing?”

Ythna turned to see one of the Obfuscators watching her. Trex. He’d arrived with the others, to take charge of the scene, and keep the retainers in order. He was a tall, solidly built man with a sallow face and black hair and eyes. And he was holding a fully charged valence gun, aimed at her. She could smell the burnt-shoe odor from a few feet away, and if he fired she would be a pile of dust in seconds. He had the black chestpiece and square helmet that indicated he was one of the Emperor’s personal Obfuscators, empowered to create order in just about any way he deemed necessary.

Ythna backed against the pillar, stuttering and trying to think of what to say. “There was a woman, a stranger. Not one of our party. She came out of this pillar right after the Beldame was killed.” She described the woman and her clothing as best she could, and the Obfuscator Trex seemed to be listening carefully. At last, he nodded and indicated for her to rejoin the others.

“Tell nobody else what you saw,” added Trex. Then he stalked away, his back and legs as stiff as one of the supply robots carrying fuel and food up the mountainside to the Golden Fortress.

The retainers all started to freeze as the sun got lower on the horizon, since they were wearing light koton ceremonial gowns designed for comfort in the noon sun. The patch of dried blood had gone crisp, but the smell of newly slaughtered cattle still hung in the air. Nobody had yet decided what to do with these surplus retainers. Yuli and Maryn still debated running away.

Someone gave the retainers hot barley wine, to warm them up, which just reminded Ythna of the Beldame Thakrra all over again, and she found herself crying harder than ever as she drank from the communal jug. Some time later, she needed to relieve herself, and couldn’t bear to soil the same ground where the Beldame had bled to death. She begged an Obfuscator until he gave her permission to go around the Tomb to the front entrance, where some simple latrines had been set up. Ythna thanked him profusely.

The latrines were lined up like sentry boxes, perpendicular to the front pillar of the Tomb. Beyond them, there was the edge of a dense forest of oaks, birches, and pines, stretching all the way to the distant white mountains. A chill wind seemed to come from the woods as Ythna slipped inside one of the latrines, hiking up her shift. When she came out again, the red-haired woman was there.

The woman gestured for Ythna to be silent. “I’ve been observing you,” she whispered, with an accent that Ythna couldn’t place. “You’re cleverer than the rest. And you’re actually grief-stricken for the poor dead Beldame. All your friends are just pretending. I want to help you.”

“You killed her,” Ythna said. “You killed the Beldame. I saw you step out of the tomb right after she fell.”

“No, I swear I had nothing to do with her death,” the woman said sadly. “Except that it created a door for me to step through. That’s how I travel. My name is Jemima Brookwater, and I’m from the future.”

Ythna studied the strange red-haired woman for a moment. Her black boots were shiny but scuffed, her puffy pants had a grass stain on one knee, and her fine velvet coat had a rip in the side, which had been hastily sewn and patched. Whatever this woman was—crackwit, breakbond, or something else—she was not an assassin. But maybe Ythna should tell Trex in any case.

“It was good to meet you, Jemima,” Ythna said. “I should go and rejoin the others. Be safe.” She turned to go back around the tomb toward the other retainers, whom she could hear chanting the grief spiral with dry, exhausted throats.

“Let me help you,” Jemima said again.

Ythna turned back. “Why would you want to help me?”

“I told you, I travel by using the openings created when someone important dies unexpectedly. And I feel bad about that. So I made a vow: every time I travel, I try to help one person, one deserving person.”

“And how would you help me?” Something about this woman’s way of speaking reminded Ythna of the Beldame, except that Jemima was more animated and lacked the Beldame’s dignity.

“I don’t know. You tell me. It’s not really helping if I decide for myself what sort of help you need, is it?”

Ythna didn’t say anything for a moment, so Jemima added:, “Tell me. Your mistress, Thakrra, is dead. What do you want to do now?”

Nobody had ever asked Ythna what she wanted, in her entire life. But more startling than that was to hear Jemima say Thakrra was dead, by name, because it hit her all over again: the feeling of hopelessness. Like she had swallowed something enormous, that she could never digest even if she lived forever. She heard the droning chant from the plains on the other side of the tomb, and all of a sudden the voices sounded genuinely miserable instead of forced and dried out.

“There is nothing you can do for me,” Ythna said, and turned to leave in the shadow of the great criss-crossing limbs of the Tomb.

The woman chased after her, speaking quickly. “That’s just not true,” she said. “I really don’t want to tell you what you should do, but I can help with anything you choose. For example, I can get you out of here. That forest is full of landmines, but I know a secret underground passage, which archaeologists discovered hundreds of years from now. And I could forge whatever documents you might need. Your Empire outlawed proper computers. They keep obsessive records on paper, but with a few major flaws. You can be anyone.”

Ythna turned back one last time, tears all over her face. “I cannot be anyone,” she said. “I can only be what I am: one small piece of the Beldame. Who do you belong to? Are you completely alone? You seem like someone who just comes and goes, like a ghost. And you want me to become a ghost as well. I can’t. Leave me alone.”

“Listen.” Jemima grabbed Ythna’s arm. They were almost back within view of the massed group of retainers, Obfuscators, and Officiators. “This is not going to go well for you. I’ve read the history books, I know what happened to a retainer whose master or mistress died suddenly, without making arrangements first. If you’re lucky, you get reeducated and sent to a new household, where you’ll be the lowest status and they’ll treat you like dirt. If you’re unlucky…”

Ythna tried to explain, with eyes full of tears and a voice suddenly hoarse from crying and chanting, that she didn’t care what happened to her. “I can’t just dishonor the Beldame by running away. That would be worse than enduring any abuse. If you know so much, then you have to understand that.”

At last, Jemima let go of Ythna’s arm, and she turned to go back to the others before she was missed.

“At least I tried,” Jemima said. “I do admire your conviction.”

“There she is,” a voice said from behind them. “I told you. I told you she was conspiring. All along, conspiring. And scheming.” Maryn stood at the edge of the tomb, pointing at Ythna and Jemima. Beside her, Obfuscator Trex advanced, raising the brass rod of his valence gun. Maryn was a foot shorter than Trex and wore simple robes like Ythna’s next to Trex’s bulky chrome-and-leather uniform. But Maryn’s excitement and triumph made her seem twice as big as the strong, fussy man.

Jemima grabbed Ythna and pushed her behind herself, so that Jemima could take the brunt of Trex’s first shot and Ythna would have an extra few seconds to live.

“The penalty for conspiring to assassinate a Beldame is death,” Trex said, chewing each syllable like a nugget of fat. “I am mightily empowered to carry out the sentence at once.”

“I don’t want any reward,” Maryn said. Everybody ignored her.

“Wait,” Jemima said. “You are being duped here. I know you’re an intelligent man, I’ve read about you. Trex, right? I know all about your illustrious career. And I have a perfectly sensible explanation for everything you’ve witnessed.” Jemima was reaching into a tiny holster hidden in the braided piping on the side of her velvet coat, reaching for a object the size of her thumb. A gun.

“Please,” Ythna said to Trex. “We didn’t conspire. I only just met this woman.”

But Trex aimed his valence gun, sparks coming from the connecting tubes, and said, “You are both found guilty, and your sentence is—”

Ythna closed her eyes, waiting for a sizzling noise and the acrid stench of Jemima being torn molecule from molecule. Instead, she heard Maryn scream and thrash the air. When Ythna opened her eyes, Trex’s headless body was falling to the ground, and Trex’s head was rolling to a stop at Maryn’s feet, an expression of supreme disgruntlement forever sealed on Trex’s face.

A man wearing a black uniform, as simple as Trex’s was ornate, was running away, sheathing a bloody sword of a curved design that Ythna had never seen before. An opaque helmet, shaped like a teardrop, obscured the man’s features.

Jemima gave another one of her foreign cursewords and ran after the man. Ythna took one look at the headless Obfuscator and the wailing Maryn—whose screams were likely to bring everybody running—and followed Jemima.

The man with the sword reached the outermost pillar of the M-shaped tomb, and ran through the wall without breaking stride. One moment he was there, the next he was gone. Jemima and Ythna reached the wall a moment later, and Jemima ran straight for the spot where the man had vanished. And then she, too, was gone. Ythna’s momentum carried her forward before she could even think about the insanity of what she was doing. She hit the massive-blocked granite wall at the same point as the other two, and felt a sensation like a million tiny hands tugging at her. And then her senses were stolen away, one by one. But not before she had a glimpse of a million bright threads of different colors, crisscrossing around her in the midst of infinite darkness.

* * *

Ythna foundered, unable to see, hear, or touch anything for an age, until those same tiny hands grabbed her and shoved her forward, into the light.

For a moment, Ythna was dazzled and had pins and needles in her hands and feet, then she slowly regained her sight. She was lying on the floor of a long high-vaulted chamber, open to the air on one side and closed off on the other. A giant terrace, or balcony, then. The walls to her left were incredibly ornate, with what looked like molded silver encrusted with countless priceless jewels—and yet, someone had gone to great trouble to make that opulence look as ugly as possible. The silver was smudgy gray, the rubies and diamonds were as dull as you could make them. To Ythna’s left, past the railing, she could see an endless phalanx of people in retainer outfits, not all that different from what she wore every day, marching forward to the grim, repetitive droning of horns.

Next to Ythna, Jemima was on her knees, covering her face with one hand, and saying “No, no, no, no, please no,” over and over again.

“What is it?” Ythna said. “What’s wrong?” She put one hand on Jemima’s epauletted shoulder.

“This is the worst place,” Jemima said, uncovering her face and gesturing past the balcony at the thousands of people walking in neat rows. “I’m sorry. This is my fault. I shouldn’t have brought you here. I wanted to help you, and I’ve just made everything worse.”

“What place? Where are we?” Ythna was still having a hard time thinking straight after the disorientation of passing through the senseless tangle of threads.

“Roughly seventy years after your time. The Glorious Restoration. The worst period in the history of the Gaven Empire.” Jemima straightened up a bit on her haunches. “An attempt to restore traditional values to an empire that had grown decadent. They’ve probably executed another Chief Officiator, and that’s what made the door we just came out of. And those people down there? They’re marching to the death camps.”

“We’re in the future,” Ythna said, and now she was pulling her own hair to try and get her head straight.

The whole thing sounded mad. But they weren’t at the Tomb of the Unknown Emperor any more, and the more she looked at the scene outside, the more she noticed little incongruities.

Like, the retainers marching forward across the square wore simpler uniforms than she’d ever seen before, with a different insignia. The banners hanging on the outer wall of the courtyard, opposite the balcony, listed a different Imperial Era: the Great Rejoicing Era, not the Bountiful Era that Ythna was used to. So there was a different Emperor on the throne. But the banners looked old. And the Obfuscators herding these retainers across the courtyard wore helmets with weird spikes on them, and their chestpieces were a blockier design as well, aimed at protecting against a different class of weapons. Their valence guns were much smaller and could be carried with one hand, too. There were other details, but those were the ones that jumped out at Ythna.

“How did we get here?” Ythna said.

“I told you,” Jemima said. “That’s how I travel. But I’ve never killed anyone to open a portal. Trex was supposed to live another few decades, and become the Chief Obfuscator to the Emperor Maarthyon. And I’m sorry, but Beldame Thakrra always died on that day. Her death is in my history book, and I’m pretty sure it was an accident.”

Jemima was searching the terrace for clues to the exact date, while trying to stay out of sight from the people below, or on the other balconies further along. “If we know what day this is, then we can know when the next significant death will be,” Jemima said. “We need to get the blazes out of here.”

“And any death of an important person will make a door?” Ythna said.

“It must be an unexpected death,” Jemima said. “Something that creates a lot of causal torsions.” Ythna must have looked confused, because she added: “A lot of adjustments. Like ripples.”

“So you really are a ghost,” Ythna said. “You belong to no one, you travel through death, and you come and go without being seen. I feel sorry for you.”

Jemima didn’t have anything to say that For the second time in half an hour she had lost her unflappable good humor. She stared at Ythna for a moment.

Then she turned and pointed with one slender gloved finger. “Over there. He’s making for that dais. We must stop him, or he’ll ruin absolutely everything.”

The man with the opaque tear-shaped helmet had his sword out again, with traces of Trex’s blood still on it. He was running along another terrace, just around a corner of the giant building from the one where Jemima and Ythna stood. And when Ythna leaned dangerously out into the open, over the stone railing, she could see the man’s destination: a dais facing the courtyard, where a bald, sweaty man sat watching the thousands of people being herded away to the slaughter. The man’s robes, dais, and throne were like the walls of this chamber: ornate, but ugly and drained of color. Everything about him was designed to show off wealth, without sharing beauty.

At least twenty Obfuscators and Officiators stood between the man with the sword and the man on the throne, who had to be a Vice Emperor. They all aimed their valence guns at the assassin, who raised a long metal brace strapped to his left forearm, which he held in front of him like a shield. The valence guns made the scorching sound Ythna had heard before, but without effect. The man’s forearm glowed with a blue light that spread in front of him and seemed to protect him. He reached the first of the Obfuscators, and put his sword through her stomach in an elegant motion that did not slow his run at all.

“How is he doing that?” Ythna said. “With the valence guns?”

Then she turned and realized Jemima wasn’t next to her any more. She was already at the far end of the terrace, opening a hidden door she’d found, which led to the next terrace along. Jemima was rushing toward the assassin and the Vice Emperor. Ythna did her best imitation of Jemima’s strange foreign swear word—“fth’nak”—and ran after her.

In the next terrace, a group of Officiators were holding up ceremonial trowels, symbolizing the burial of the past and the building of the future, and they gasped when two strange women came running into the space, a tall redhead in a fancy coat and a small dark girl in old-fashioned retainer clothes.

“The Vice Emperor,” Jemima gasped without slowing her run. “I’m the only one who can save him.”

For a moment, Ythna thought the Officiators might believe Jemima and let her pass. But they fell back on an Officiator’s ingrained distrust of anyone or anything that didn’t instantly fit, and reached out to try and restrain both Ythna and Jemima. They were too slow—Jemima had almost reached the far wall, and Ythna was slippery as a wet goose—but they called for Obfuscators to help them. By the time Ythna reached the far wall, where Jemima was trying to open the next door, people were firing valence guns at her from the courtyard below. The balcony next to them exploded into chunks of silver and bejeweled masonry.

“Don’t worry,” Jemima said. “They mass-produced those guns cheaply in this era. At this range, they couldn’t hit a Monopod.”

She got the door to the next terrace open, and they were facing three Obfuscators aiming valence guns. At point-blank range.

“Guh,” Jemima said. “Listen. That reprehensible man over there is about to assassinate your Vice Emperor.” By now they were close enough to have an excellent view, as the last few of the Vice Emperor’s Obfuscators fought hand-to-hand against the sword-wielding assassin, surrounded by the fresh corpses of their brethren. “I can stop him. I swear to you I can.”

These Obfuscators hesitated—long enough for Jemima to pull out the thumb-sized gun hidden in her coat’s braid and shoot them all with it. There was a bright pink flash in front of each of them, just before they all fell face down on the ground.

“Stunned,” she said. “They’ll be fine.”

Then she lifted one arm, so that a bit of lace cuff flopped out of her velvet sleeve, and aimed at the top of the ceremonial gate between the courtyard and the Vice Emperor’s dais. A tiny hook shot out of her lace cuff, with a steel cord attached to it, and it latched on to the apex of the gate’s arch, right on top of the symbol for Dja-Thun, or the unbroken chain of thousands from Emperor to gutterslave. “Hang on tight,” Jemima said, right before she grabbed Ythna’s waist and pressed a button, sending them sailing through the smoky bright air over the men shooting valence guns at them. The sun lit up Ythna’s face in mid swing, the same way it once had from the Beldame’s window.

By the time they reached the dais, dismounting with only a slight stumble, the assassin had killed the last Obfuscator, and was advancing on the Vice Emperor, who cowered on his massive gray-gold throne.

“Listen to me,” Jemima shouted at the man. “You don’t want to do this. You really, really do not. Time-travel via murder is a dead end. Literally. You’ll tear the map apart, and none of the major deaths of history will happen on schedule. You’ll be every bit as lost as I will.”

The man turned to salute Jemima. “Professor Brookwater,” he said in a low voice, only slightly muffled by his milky helmet. “You are one of my all-time heroes. But you don’t know the full potential of what you discovered. I sincerely hope you do get home some day.”

Jemima shot at him and missed. He spun, low to the ground, and then pivoted and took the Vice Emperor’s head clean off. Almost at once, Ythna could see an indistinct doorway appear on the elaborately carved side of the gray dais: like a pinwheel with too many spokes to count, opening outwards and showing a secret pathway through death and time. Somehow, Ythna couldn’t see these doors, until she had already passed through one.

The assassin ran into the pinwheel and vanished. The remaining Obfuscators and retainers were crying out from the courtyard below, and a hundred valence guns went off all at once. The dais was collapsing into rubble. Ythna was paralyzed for a moment, until Jemima grabbed her and threw her into the doorway the assassin had created.

* * *

The next thing Ythna knew, she landed facedown on a hard cement surface, outdoors, under a nearly cloudless sky. In front of her was a big chain-link fence, with men in unfamiliar uniforms walking past it holding big bulky metal guns. She heard a voice saying indistinct words over a loudspeaker. She turned and saw a row of giant rocket ships looming in the distance, with a flaming circle painted on each gunmetal shell and a mesh of bright scaffolding clinging to their sides.

She couldn’t see the assassin with the sword, but Jemima was crouched next to her, looking pissed off and maybe a little weepy.

“It just gets better and better,” Jemima said. “This is—”

“I know where we are, this time,” Ythna said. “The Beldame showed me pictures. This was the last great assault on the Martian Colony. The Emperor Dickon’s great and glorious campaign to bring the principle of Dja-Thun to the unruly people on Mars. This happened decades before I was born.”

“It’s happening right now,” Jemima said, looking in all directions for the man they’d been chasing. “I wonder who just died here.”

“What did you mean, about the map?” Ythna said. “You said he was tearing the map apart.”

“I’ve got a history book,” Jemima said without pausing her search. “I know the major deaths, down to the exact place and time. Every time I travel, I chart where each death leads. I’m deciphering the map slowly, but this cad will render that impossible. I’ve done twenty-eight trips so far, including today.”

“How many people have you helped?” Ythna said. “Twenty-seven?”

“Twenty-five,” Jemima said.

“And how did that turn out for them?”

“No idea. People like you don’t get mentioned in the history books, even if I found an updated version. No offense. But if I ever get home, I can try to look up some detailed records, and try to find out what happened to all of you.”

Jemima cursed again in her own language: “fth’nak.” An old-fashioned wheeled vehicle was rolling toward them, with figures in bulky black armor, holding big oily guns. The jeep rumbled, a cloud of dust in its wake, as it grew bigger until it was right in front of them. On the side of the jeep was the round, fiery insignia of the Age of Advancement, the Emperor Dickon’s era. The men in the front of the truck wore the same image on their helmets.

Jemima started to try and explain their presence to these men, but they cut her off.

“Desertion is a capital crime, as you are no doubt aware,” the man in the truck’s passenger seat said. “But you’re lucky. The Dauntless is short-crewed and ammunition is precious. So I’m going to pretend you didn’t just try to run away. That’s a one-time offer, good only if you come with me right now. Your new home lifts off tomorrow morning at oh-five hundred hours.”

And that’s how Jemima and Ythna found themselves in a bare gray cage with a tiny window that gave them a partial view of the nearest rocket, a snub-nosed, squat monstrosity with nine thrusters arrayed like petals. Ythna rubbed the bruises she’d gotten from the guards’ rifle butts and rough hands.

“At least they don’t think we’re spies,” said Ythna. “Or they’d have just executed us.”

“They assume that nobody could ever get this far inside their security perimeter undetected,” said Jemima. “So they reached for the next logical explanation: we must be members of the galley crew, who tried to make a break for it. Instead of executing us, they’ll just send us up in one of those ships, probably in irons in case we actually are saboteurs.”

“The Beldame told me that this campaign was a terrible waste. The whole assault force died without ever reaching Mars, because the colonists had superior weapons. They used technology that the Empire had rejected as impure,” said Ythna. “It was one of the Beldame’s lessons that she liked to tell: A just cause becomes unjust when it costs too much human life.”

“The Beldame sounds like she was a wise woman,” said Jemima.

Ythna was sure she was going to look up and see a sarcastic leer on Jemima’s sharp face, but there was none. Instead, Jemima just nodded, then walked to the window and studied the rocket they were soon going to be chained up in the belly of.

“I don’t want to die in a pointless war that was lost before I was born,” Ythna said.

“Really? I thought you didn’t want anything, one way or the other,” Jemima said, still facing the window. “Isn’t that what you said? And how is this different from what would have happened to you if we had never met? You would have been sent to work for some new master, who might have worked you to death in a year or two. Or you could have been marked for Obsolescence, and died sooner. This is the same.”

“It’s not the same at all,” Ythna said. Just when she had thought Jemima was starting to treat her like an adult.

“Isn’t it?”

Ythna changed the subject. “So if everybody on board the rocket ship dies, can we use that to escape?”

“No,” said Jemima. “Their deaths won’t be significant. Or terribly unexpected. I can only use a single sudden death that changes lots of other people’s fates.”

“That’s a stupid rule.”

Jemima shrugged. “It’s a science that won’t exist for hundreds of years. Like I said: causal torsions. Think of causality as a weave that holds all of us fast, and occasionally gaps appear that you can slip through.”

“So how are we going to escape before they put us on that rocket?”

“First things first.” Jemima came and stood in front of Ythna, so she was silhouetted by the setting sun through the small window, and put her right hand out, palm up and at an angle. “I really do want to help. So far, all I’ve done is make things worse for you. If you’ll let me, I’ll do whatever I can. You’re a smart person and you care about other people. You deserve better. And the Gaven Empire could use a million more like you.”

“How does the Empire end?” Ythna said.

“It dies,” Jemima said. “Everything dies eventually. You were born in the Golden Century, which was a relatively stable era. After that, there was a twenty-year fall into decadence and social decay, followed by the Glorious Restoration, which you saw. That lasted about fifty-seven years, and was followed by the Perfect Culmination, the most exact implementation of the ideal of Dja-Thun on Earth. Which lasted about as long as you’d expect. After that, there were about 150 years of slow decline, until the whole thing fell apart and your people begged the off-world colonists to come and save them. That’s the executive summary, anyway.”

“Okay,” Ythna said, taking Jemima’s hand in both of hers. “I want to make a difference. Give me a new identity, and put me where I can make a difference.”

“Very well,” Jemima said. “Done.”

Jemima searched through what seemed to be a million hidden pockets sewn into the lining of her giant coat until she found a device, perhaps twice the size of your fingernail. With this gadget, she opened the lock on their cage, and then she used her tiny stun gun on the two guards in the hallway outside, who were already half asleep in any case.

“Now what?” Ythna said. “Do we wait for that man in the helmet to arrive and murder someone else?”

“He’s long gone, whoever he was,” Jemima said. “But we don’t need him to kill anybody. The Dauntless is launching tomorrow, which means I know what day this is. And someone very famous is going to die, all on his own, in the next couple days. Come on.” She unlocked the front door of the holding facility with her lockpick. “We’ve got a lot of distance to cover. And first, we have to break out of a maximum security launch site.”

* * *

Beldame Thakrra’s grave wasn’t nearly as fancy as the Tomb of the Unknown Emperor. They had built her a big stone sphere with a metal spike sticking through it, befitting the rank she’d attained in the moment just before she died. And there was a bust in front, with a close enough likeness of her face, except that she looked placid and sleepy, instead of keen and on the verge of asking another question. The sphere was a little taller than Ythna, and the spike soared over her head. The tomb was surrounded by other, grander memorials, as far as Ythna could see.

The sphere and the bust of Thakrra were both covered with a thick layer of grime. Nobody had visited the Beldame’s tomb for decades. Maybe never. Ythna pulled a cloth out of her new, sharp-creased black uniform trousers and started to wipe the tomb so it looked fresh and clean, the way the Beldame had always kept her house. “It’s good to see you again,” she whispered.

Jemima came up behind Ythna while she was still wiping. “Here.” She handed Ythna a stack of official-looking cards. “It’s all correct. You’re a Vice Officiator named Dhar. That’s your name from now on. You were part of a secret mission for the Vice Emperor Htap, and everybody else who knew about that mission is dead now. Such things were common in the final days of the Perfect Culmination, sad to say. In any case, you can present these anywhere and if they need a new Vice Officiator, they’ll take you on.”

“Thank you,” Ythna said. “But I can’t go anywhere until I finish the ritual of mourning for the Beldame. I’ve waited much too long as it is.”

“There’s no rush whatsoever,” Jemima said. “In fact, if I were you, I would lay low for a few more weeks before trying to travel. Oh, and if anybody asks you about the past hundred years of history, just pretend you have a head injury from that secret mission.”

“What about you?” Ythna said. “Are you going to risk traveling right now?”

“Can’t hang about,” Jemima said. “This is the furthest forward in time I’ve reached in forever. And there’s a death next week that I’m hopeful will send me even further ahead.” She looked out at the rows of ziggurats, spheres, and statues, stretching out past the misty horizon. “I’ve jumped through time twenty-nine times. Twenty-nine times, and each time I find myself stuck in the Gaven Empire. There’s something I’m doing wrong, and I can’t figure out what it is.”

“Maybe if you find that man with the helmet,” Ythna said, “you can ask him.”

“If I find that man again,” Jemima said, “I shall have to kill him. Goodbye, Ythna. Have a great life. For me.”

They embraced. Ythna watched Jemima walk away across the rows of memorials and reliquaries, the rulers and saints of the Empire resting in glory. Jemima’s long black coat swished as she strode, jauntily, like someone who knew just what she was about. One arm swung back and forth, as if she had an invisible cane swatting aside the ghosts of this place. Ythna stared until all she could see was Jemima’s red curls and black hat amidst the big gray shapes. Then she turned back toward the Beldame, whose stone face still looked much too complacent. Ythna wiped the bust down one more time, then sank to her knees and began the slow, mournful chant of indelible grief.

Six Months, Three Days

The man who can see the future has a date with the woman who can see many possible futures.

Judy is nervous but excited, keeps looking at things she’s spotted out of the corner of her eye. She’s wearing a floral Laura Ashley style dress with an Ankh necklace and her legs are rambunctious, her calves moving under the table. It’s distracting because Doug knows that in two and a half weeks, those cucumber-smooth ankles will be hooked on his shoulders, and that curly reddish-brown hair will spill everywhere onto her lemon-floral pillows; this image of their future coitus has been in Doug’s head for years, with varying degrees of clarity, and now it’s almost here. The knowledge makes Doug almost giggle at the wrong moment, but then it hits him: she’s seen this future too—or she may have, anyway.

Doug has his sandy hair cut in a neat fringe that was almost fashionable a couple years ago. You might think he cuts his own hair, but Judy knows he doesn’t, because he’ll tell her otherwise in a few weeks. He’s much, much better looking than she thought he would be, and this comes as a huge relief. He has rude, pouty lips and an upper lip that darkens no matter how often he shaves it, with Elvis Costello glasses. And he’s almost a foot taller than her, six foot four. Now that Judy’s seen Doug for real, she’s re-imagining all the conversations they might be having in the coming weeks and months, all of the drama and all of the sweetness. The fact that Judy can be attracted to him, knowing everything that could lay ahead, consoles her tremendously.

Judy is nattering about some Chinese novelist she’s been reading in translation, one of those cruel satirists from the days after the May Fourth Movement, from back when writers were so conflicted they had to rename themselves things like “Contra Diction.” Doug is just staring at her, not saying anything, until it creeps her out a little.

“What?” Doug says at last, because Judy has stopped talking and they’re both just staring at each other.

“You were staring at me,” Judy says.

“I was…” Doug hesitates, then just comes out and says it. “I was savoring the moment. You know, you can know something’s coming from a long way off, you know for years ahead of time the exact day and the very hour when it’ll arrive. And then it arrives, and when it arrives, all you can think about is how soon it’ll be gone.”

“Well, I didn’t know the hour and the day when you and I would meet,” Judy puts a hand on his. “I saw many different hours and days. In one timeline, we would have met two years ago. In another, we’d meet a few months from now. There are plenty of timelines where we never meet at all.”

Doug laughs, then waves a hand to show that he’s not laughing at her, although the gesture doesn’t really clarify whom or what he’s actually laughing at.

Judy is drinking a cocktail called the Coalminer’s Daughter, made out of ten kinds of darkness. It overwhelms her senses with sugary pungency, and leaves her lips black for a moment. Doug is drinking a wheaty Pilsner from a tapered glass, in gulps. After one of them, Doug cuts to the chase. “So this is the part where I ask. I mean, I know what happens next between you and me. But here’s where I ask what you think happens next.”

“Well,” Judy says. “There are a million tracks, you know. It’s like raindrops falling into a cistern, they’re separate until they hit the surface, and then they become the past: all undifferentiated. But there are an awful lot of futures where you and I date for about six months.”

“Six months and three days,” Doug says. “Not that I’ve counted or anything.”

“And it ends badly.”

“I break my leg.”

“You break your leg ruining my bicycle. I like that bike. It’s a noble five-speed in a sea of fixies.”

“So you agree with me.” Doug has been leaning forward, staring at Judy like a psycho again. He leans back so that the amber light spilling out of the Radish Saloon’s tiny lampshades turn him the same color as his beer. “You see the same future I do.” Like she’s passed some kind of test.

“You didn’t know what I was going to say in advance?” Judy says.

“It doesn’t work like that—not for me, anyway. Remembering the future is just like remembering the past. I don’t have perfect recall, I don’t hang on to every detail, the transition from short-term memory to long-term memory is not always graceful.”

“I guess it’s like memory for me too,” Judy says.

Doug feels an unfamiliar sensation, and he realizes after a while it’s comfort. He’s never felt this at home with another human being, especially after such a short time. Doug is accustomed to meeting people and knowing bits and pieces of their futures, from stuff he’ll learn later. Or if Doug meets you and doesn’t know anything about your future, that means he’ll never give a crap about you, at any point down the line. This makes for awkward social interactions, either way.

They get another round of drinks. Doug gets the same beer again, Judy gets a red concoction called a Bloody Mutiny.

“So there’s one thing I don’t get,” Doug says. “You believe you have a choice among futures—and I think you’re wrong, you’re seeing one true future and a bunch of false ones.”

“You’re probably going to spend the next six months trying to convince yourself of that,” Judy says.

“So why are you dating me at all, if you get to choose? You know how it’ll turn out. For that matter, why aren’t you rich and famous? Why not pick a future where you win the lottery, or become a star?”

Doug works in tech support, in a poorly ventilated sub-basement of a tech company in Providence, RI, that he knows will go out of business in a couple years. He will work there until the company fails, choking on the fumes from old computers, and then be unemployed a few months.

“Well,” Judy says. “It’s not really that simple. I mean, the next six months, assuming I don’t change my mind, they contain some of the happiest moments of my life, and I see it leading to some good things, later on. And you know, I’ve seen some tracks where I get rich, I become a public figure, and they never end well. I’ve got my eye on this one future, this one node way off in the distance, where I die aged 97, surrounded by lovers and grandchildren and cats. Whenever I have a big decision to make, I try to see the straightest path to that moment.”

“So I’m a stepping stone,” Doug says, not at all bitterly. He’s somehow finished his second beer already, even though Judy’s barely made a dent in her Bloody Mutiny.

“You’re maybe going to take this journey with me for a spell,” Judy says. “People aren’t stones.”

And then Doug has to catch the last train back to Providence, and Judy has to bike home to Somerville. Marva, her roommate, has made popcorn and hot chocolate, and wants to know the whole story.

“It was nice,” Judy says. “He was a lot cuter in person than I’d remembered, which is really nice. He’s tall.”

“That’s it?” Marva said. “Oh come on, details. You finally meet the only other freaking clairvoyant on Earth, your future boyfriend, and all you have to say is, ’He’s tall.’ Uh uh. You are going to spill like a fucking oil tanker, I will ply you with hot chocolate, I may resort to Jim Beam, even.”

Marva’s “real” name is Martha, but she changed it years ago. She’s a grad student studying 18th century lit, and even Judy can’t help her decide whether to finish her PhD. She’s slightly chubby, with perfect crimson hair and clothing by Sanrio, Torrid, and Hot Topic. She is fond of calling herself “mallternative.”

“I’m drunk enough already. I nearly fell off my bicycle a couple times,” Judy says.

The living room is a pigsty, so they sit in Judy’s room, which isn’t much better. Judy hoards items she might need in one of the futures she’s witnessed, and they cover every surface. There’s a plastic replica of a Filipino fast food mascot, Jollibee, which she might give to this one girl Sukey in a couple of years, completing Sukey’s collection and making her a friend for life—or Judy and Sukey may never meet at all. A phalanx of stuffed animals crowds Judy and Marva on the big fluffy bed. The room smells like a sachet of whoop-ass (cardamom, cinnamon, lavender) that Judy opened up earlier.

“He’s a really sweet guy.” Judy cannot stop talking in platitudes, which bothers her. “I mean, he’s really lost, but he manages to be brave. I can’t imagine what it would be like, to feel like you have no free will at all.”

Marva doesn’t point out the obvious thing—that Judy only sees choices for herself, not anybody else. Suppose a guy named Rocky asks Marva out on a date, and Judy sees a future in which Marva complains, afterwards, that their date was the worst evening of her life. In that case, there are two futures: One in which Judy tells Marva what she sees, and one in which she doesn’t. Marva will go on the miserable date with Rocky, unless Judy tells her what she knows. (On the plus side, in fifteen months, Judy will drag Marva out to a party where she meets the love of her life. So there’s that.)

“Doug’s right,” Marva says. “I mean, if you really have a choice about this, you shouldn’t go through with it. You know it’s going to be a disaster, in the end. You’re the one person on Earth who can avoid the pain, and you still go sticking fingers in the socket.”

“Yeah, but…” Judy decides this will go a lot easier if there are marshmallows in the cocoa, and runs back to the kitchen alcove. “But going out with this guy leads to good things later on. And there’s a realization that I come to as a result of getting my heart broken. I come to understand something.”

“And what’s that?”

Judy finds the bag of marshmallows. They are stale. She decides cocoa will revitalize them, drags them back to her bedroom, along with a glass of water.

“I have no idea, honestly. That’s the way with epiphanies: You can’t know in advance what they’ll be. Even me. I can see them coming, but I can’t understand something until I understand it.”

“So you’re saying that the future that Doug believes is the only possible future just happens to be the best of all worlds. Is this some Leibniz shit? Does Dougie always automatically see the nicest future or something?”

“I don’t think so.” Judy gets gummed up by popcorn, marshmallows and sticky cocoa, and coughs her lungs out. She swigs the glass of water she brought for just this moment. “I mean—” She coughs again, and downs the rest of the water. “I mean, in Doug’s version, he’s only 43 when he dies, and he’s pretty broken by then. His last few years are dreadful. He tells me all about it in a few weeks.”

“Wow,” Marva says. “Damn. So are you going to try and save him? Is that what’s going on here?”

“I honestly do not know. I’ll keep you posted.”

Doug, meanwhile, is sitting on his militarily neat bed, with its single hospital-cornered blanket and pillow. His apartment is almost pathologically tidy. Doug stares at his one shelf of books and his handful of carefully chosen items that play a role in his future. He chews his thumb. For the first time in years, Doug desperately wishes he had options.

He almost grabs his phone, to call Judy and tell her to get the hell away from him, because he will collapse all of her branching pathways into a dark tunnel, once and for all. But he knows he won’t tell her that, and even if he did, she wouldn’t listen. He doesn’t love her, but he knows he will in a couple weeks, and it already hurts.

“God damnit! Fucking god fucking damn it fuck!” Doug throws his favorite porcelain bust of Wonder Woman on the floor and it shatters. Wonder Woman’s head breaks into two jagged pieces, cleaving her magic tiara in half. This image, of the Amazon’s raggedly bisected head, has always been in Doug’s mind, whenever he’s looked at the intact bust.

Doug sits a minute, dry-sobbing. Then he goes and gets his dustpan and brush.

He phones Judy a few days later. “Hey, so do you want to hang out again on Friday?”

“Sure,” Judy says. “I can come down to Providence this time. Where do you want to meet up?”

“Surprise me,” says Doug.

“You’re a funny man.”

Judy will be the second long-term relationship of Doug’s life. His first was with Pamela, an artist he met in college, who made headless figurines of people who were recognizable from the neck down. (Headless Superman. Headless Captain Kirk. And yes, headless Wonder Woman, which Doug always found bitterly amusing for reasons he couldn’t explain.) They were together nearly five years, and Doug never told her his secret. Which meant a lot of pretending to be surprised at stuff. Doug is used to people thinking he’s kind of a weirdo.

Doug and Judy meet for dinner at one of those mom-and-pop Portuguese places in East Providence, sharing grilled squid and seared cod, with fragrant rice, with a bottle of heady vinho verde. Then they walk Judy’s bike back across the river towards the kinda-sorta gay bar on Wickenden Street. “The thing I like about Providence,” says Doug, “is it’s one of the American cities that knows its best days are behind it. So it’s automatically decadent, and sort of European.”

“Well,” says Judy, “It’s always a choice between urban decay or gentrification, right? I mean, cities aren’t capable of homeostasis.”

“Do you know what I’m thinking?” Doug is thinking he wants to kiss Judy. She leans up and kisses him first, on the bridge in the middle of the East Bay Bicycle Path. They stand and watch the freeway lights reflected on the water, holding hands. Everything is cold and lovely and the air smells rich.

Doug turns and looks into Judy’s face, which the bridge lights have turned yellow. “I’ve been waiting for this moment all my life.” Doug realizes he’s inadvertently quoted Phil Collins. First he’s mortified, then he starts laughing like a maniac. For the next half hour, Doug and Judy speak only in Phil Collins quotes.

“You can’t hurry love,” Judy says, which is only technically a Collins line.

Over microbrews on Wickenden, they swap origin stories, even though they already know most of it. Judy’s is pretty simple: She was a little kid who overthought choices like which summer camp to go to, until she realized she could see how either decision would turn out. She still flinches when she remembers how she almost gave a valentine in third grade to Dick Petersen, who would have destroyed her. Doug’s story is a lot worse: he started seeing the steps ahead, a little at a time, and then he realized his dad would die in about a year. He tried everything he could think of, for a whole year, to save his dad’s life. He even buried the car keys two feet deep, on the day of his dad’s accident. No fucking use.

“Turns out getting to mourn in advance doesn’t make the mourning afterwards any less hard,” Doug says through a beer glass snout.

“Oh man,” Judy says. She knew this stuff, but hearing it is different. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Doug says. “It was a long time ago.”

Soon it’s almost time for Judy to bike back to the train station, near that godawful giant mall and the canal where they light the water on fire sometimes.

“I want you to try and do something for me,” Judy takes Doug’s hands. “Can you try to break out of the script? Not the big stuff that you think is going to happen, but just little things that you couldn’t be sure about in advance if you tried. Try to surprise yourself. And maybe all those little deviations will add up to something bigger.”

“I don’t think it would make any difference,” Doug says.

“You never know,” Judy says. “There are things that I remember differently every time I think about them. Things from the past, I mean. When I was in college, I went through a phase of hating my parents, and I remembered all this stuff they did, from my childhood, as borderline abusive. And then a few years ago, I found myself recalling those same incidents again, only now they seemed totally different. Barely the same events.”

“The brain is weird,” Doug says.

“So you never know,” Judy says. “Change the details, you may change the big picture.” But she already knows nothing will come of this.

A week later, Doug and Judy lay together in her bed, after having sex for the first time. It was even better than the image Doug’s carried in his head since puberty. For the first time, Doug understands why people talk about sex as this transcendent thing, chains of selfhood melting away, endless abundance. They looked into each other’s eyes the whole time. As for Judy, she’s having that oxytocin thing she’s always thought was a myth, her forehead resting on Doug’s smooth chest—if she moved her head an inch she’d hear his heart beating, but she doesn’t need to.

Judy gets up to pee an hour later, and when she comes back and hangs up her robe, Doug is lying there with a look of horror on his face. “What’s wrong?” She doesn’t want to ask, but she does anyway.

“I’m sorry.” He sits up. “I’m just so happy, and… I can count the awesome moments in my life on a hand and a half. And I’m burning through them too fast. This is just so perfect right now. And, you know. I’m trying not to think. About.”

Judy knows that if she brings up the topic they’ve been avoiding, they will have an unpleasant conversation. But she has to. “You have to stop this. It’s obvious you can do what I do, you can see more than one branch. All you have to do is try. I know you were hurt when you were little, your dad died, and you convinced yourself that you were helpless. I’m sorry about that. But now, I feel like you’re actually comfortable being trapped. You don’t even try any more.”

“I do,” Doug is shaking. “I do try. I try every day. How dare you say I don’t try.”

“You don’t really. I don’t believe you. I’m sorry, but I don’t.”

“You know it’s true.” Doug calms down and looks Judy square in the face. Without his glasses, his eyes look as gray as the sea on a cloudy day. “The thing you told me about Marva—you always know what she’s going to do. Yeah? That’s how your power works. The only reason you can predict how your own choices will turn out, is because other people’s actions are fixed. If you go up to some random guy on the street and slap him, you can know in advance exactly how he’ll react. Right?”

“Well sure,” Judy says. “I mean, that doesn’t mean Marva doesn’t have free will. Or this person I’ve hypothetically slapped.” This is too weird a conversation to be having naked. She goes and puts on a Mountain Goats T-shirt and PJ bottoms. “Their choices are just factored in, in advance.”

“Right.” Doug’s point is already made, but he goes ahead and lunges for the kill. “So how do you know that I can’t predict your choices, exactly the same way you can predict Marva’s?”

Judy sits down on the edge of the bed. She kneads the edge of her T-shirt and doesn’t look at Doug. Now she knows why Doug looked so sick when she came back from the bathroom. He saw more of this conversation than she did. “You could be right,” she says after a moment. “If you’re right, that makes you the one person I should never be in the same room with. I should stay the hell away from you.”

“Yeah. You should,” Doug says. He knows it will take forty-seven seconds before she cradles his head and kisses his forehead, and it feels like forever. He holds his breath and counts down.

A couple days later, Judy calls in sick at the arts nonprofit where she works, and wanders Davis Square until she winds up in the back of the Diesel Café, in one of the plush leather booths near the pool tables. She eats one of those mint brownies that’s like chocolate-covered toothpaste and drinks a lime rickey, until she feels pleasantly ill. She pulls a battered, scotch-taped World Atlas out of her satchel.

She’s still leafing through it a couple hours later when Marva comes and sits down opposite her.

“How did you know I was here?” Judy asks.

“Because you’re utterly predictable. You said you were ditching work, and this is where you come to brood.”

Judy’s been single-handedly keeping the Blaze Foundation afloat for years, thanks to an uncanny knack for knowing exactly which grants to apply for and when, and what language to use on the grant proposal. She has a nearly 100 percent success rate in proposal-writing, leavened only by the fact that she occasionally applies for grants she knows she won’t get. So maybe she’s entitled to a sick day every now and then.

Marva sees that Judy’s playing the Travel Game and joins in. She points to a spot near Madrid. “Spain,” she says.

Judy’s face gets all tight for a moment, like she’s trying to remember where she left something. Then she smiles. “Okay, if I get on a plane to Madrid tomorrow, there are a few ways it plays out. That I can see right now. In one, I get drunk and fall off a tower and break both legs. In another, I meet this cute guy named Pedro and we have a torrid three-day affair. Then there’s the one where I go to art school and study sculpture. They all end with me running out of money and coming back home.”

“Malawi,” Marva says. Judy thinks for a moment, then remembers what happens if she goes to Malawi tomorrow.

“This isn’t as much fun as usual,” Marva says after they’ve gone to Vancouver and Paris and Sao Paolo. “Your heart isn’t in it.”

“It’s not,” Judy says. “I just can’t see a happy future where I don’t date Doug. I mean, I like Doug, I may even be in love with him already, but… we’re going to break each other’s hearts, and more than that: We’re maybe going to break each other’s spirits. There’s got to be a detour, a way to avoid this, but I just can’t see it right now.”

Marva dumps a glass of water on Judy’s head.

“Wha? You—Wha?” She splutters like a cartoon duck.

“Didn’t see that coming, did you?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean… I mean, I’m not freaking omniscient, I sometimes miss bits and pieces, you know that.”

“I am going to give you the Samuel Johnson/Bishop Berkeley lecture, for like the tenth time,” Marva says. “Because sometimes, a girl just needs a little Johnson.”

Bishop George Berkeley, of course, was the “if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound” guy, who argued that objects only exist in our perceptions. One day, Boswell asked Samuel Johnson what he thought of Berkeley’s idea. According to Boswell, Johnson’s response to this was to kick a big rock “with mighty force,” saying, “I refute it thus.”

“The point,” says Marva, “is that nobody can see everything. Not you, not Doug, not Bishop Berkeley. Stuff exists that your senses can’t perceive and your mind can’t comprehend. Even if you do have an extra sense the rest of us don’t have. Okay? So don’t get all doom and gloom on me. Just remember: Would Samuel Johnson have let himself feel trapped in a dead-end relationship?”

“Well, considering he apparently dated a guy named Boswell who went around writing down everything he said… I really don’t know.” Judy runs to the bathroom to put her head under the hot-air dryer.

The next few weeks, Judy and Doug hang out at least every other day and grow accustomed to kissing and holding hands all the time, trading novelty for the delight of positive reinforcement. They’re at the point where their cardiovascular systems crank into top gear if one of them sees someone on the street who even looks, for a second, like the other. Doug notices little things about Judy that catch him off guard, like the way she rolls her eyes slightly before she’s about to say something solemn. Judy realizes that Doug’s joking on some level, most of the time, even when he seems tragic. Maybe especially then.

They fly a big dragon kite on Cambridge Common, with a crimson tail. They go to the Isabella Stewart Gardner, and sip tea in the courtyard. Once or twice, Doug is about to turn left, but Judy stops him, because something way cooler will happen if they go right instead. They discuss which kind of skylight Batman prefers to burst through when he breaks into criminals’ lairs, and whether Batman ever uses the chimney like Santa Claus. They break down the taxonomy of novels where Emily Dickinson solves murder mysteries.

Marva gets used to eating Doug’s spicy omelettes, which automatically make him Judy’s best-ever boyfriend in Marva’s book. Marva walks out of her bedroom in the mornings, to see Doug wearing the bathrobe Judy got for him, flipping a perfect yellow slug over and over, and she’s like, What are you? To Marva, the main advantage of making an omelette is that when it falls apart halfway through, you can always claim you planned to make a scramble all along.

Judy and Doug enjoy a couple months of relative bliss, based on not ever discussing the future. In the back of her mind, Judy never stops looking for the break point, the moment where a timeline splits off from the one Doug believes in. It could be just a split-second.

They reach their three-month anniversary, roughly the midpoint of their relationship. To celebrate, they take a weekend trip to New York together, and they wander down Broadway and all around the Village and Soho. Doug is all excited, showing off for once—he points out the fancy restaurant where the President will be assassinated in 2027, and the courthouse where Lady Gaga gets arrested for civil disobedience right after she wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Judy has to keep shushing him. Then she gives in, and the two of them loudly debate whether the election of 2024 will be rigged, not caring if people stare.

Once they’ve broken the taboo on talking about the future in general, Doug suddenly feels free to talk about their future, specifically. They’re having a romantic dinner at one of those restaurant/bars, with high-end American food and weird pseudo-Soviet iconography everywhere. Doug is on his second beer when he says, “So, I guess in a couple of weeks, you and I have that ginormous fight about whether I should meet your parents. And about a week after that, I manage to offend Marva. Honestly, without meaning to. But then again, in a month and a half’s time, we have that really nice day together on the boat.”

“Please don’t,” Judy says, but she already knows it’s too late to stop it.

“And then after that, there’s the Conversation. I am not looking forward to the Conversation.”

“We both know about this stuff,” Judy says. “It’ll happen if and when it happens, why worry about it until then?”

“Sorry, it’s just part of how I deal with things. It helps me to brace myself.”

Judy barely eats her entrée. Doug keeps oversharing about their next few months, like a floodgate has broken. Some of it’s stuff Judy either didn’t remember, or has blotted out of her mind because it’s so dismal. She can tell Doug’s been obsessing about every moment of the coming drama, visualizing every incident until it snaps into perfect focus.

By the time Judy gets up and walks away from the table, she sees it all just as clearly as he does. She can’t even imagine any future, other than the one he’s described. Doug’s won.

Judy roams Bleecker and St. Mark’s Place, until she claims a small victory: She realizes that if she goes into this one little subterranean bar, she’ll run into a cute guy she hasn’t seen since high school, and they’ll have a conversation in which he confesses that he always had a crush on her back then. Because Doug’s not there, he’s not able to tell her whether she goes into that bar or not. She does, and she’s late getting back to their hotel, even though she and cute high-school guy don’t do anything but talk.

Doug makes an effort to be nice the rest of the weekend, even though he knows it won’t do him any good, except that Judy holds hands with him on the train back to Providence and Boston.

And then Doug mentions, in passing, that he’ll see Judy around, after they break up—including two meetings a decade from now, and one time a full 15 years hence, and he knows some stuff. He starts to say more, but Judy runs to the dining car, covering her ears.

When the train reaches Doug’s stop and he’s gathering up his stuff, Judy touches his shoulder. “Listen, I don’t know if you and I actually do meet up in a decade, it’s a blur to me right now. But I don’t want to hear whatever you think you know. Okay?” Doug nods.

When the fight over whether Doug should meet Judy’s parents arrives, it’s sort of a meta-fight. Judy doesn’t see why Doug should do the big parental visit, since Judy and Doug are scheduled to break up in ten weeks. Doug just wants to meet them because he wants to meet them—maybe because his own parents are dead. And he’s curious about these people who are aware that their daughter can see the future(s). They compromise, as expected: Doug meets Judy’s parents over lunch when they visit, and he’s on his best behavior.

They take a ferry out to sea, toward Block Island. The air is too cold and they feel seasick and the sun blinds them, and it’s one of the greatest days of their lives. They huddle together on deck and when they can see past the glare and the sea spray and they’re not almost hurling, they see the glimmer of the ocean, streaks of white and blue and yellow in different places, as the light and wind affect it. The ocean feels utterly forgiving, like you can dump almost anything into the ocean’s body and it will still love us, and Judy and Doug cling to each other like children in a storm cellar and watch the waves. Then they go to Newport and eat amazing lobster. For a few days before and a few days after this trip, they are all aglow and neither of them can do any wrong.

A week or so after the boat thing, they hold hands in bed, nestling like they could almost start having sex at any moment. Judy looks in Doug’s naked eyes (his glasses are on the nightstand) and says, “Let’s just jump off the train now, okay? Let’s not do any of the rest of it, let’s just be good to each other forever. Why not? We could.”

“Why would you want that?” Doug drawls like he’s half asleep. “You’re the one who’s going to get the life she wants. I’m the one who’ll be left like wreckage.” Judy rolls over and pretends to sleep.

The Conversation achieves mythical status long before it arrives. Certain aspects of The Conversation are hazy in advance, for both Doug and Judy, because of that thing where you can’t understand something until you understand it.

The day of the Conversation, Judy wakes from a nightmare, shivering with the covers cast aside, and Doug’s already out of bed. “It’s today,” he says, and then he leaves without saying anything else to Judy, or anything at all to Marva, who’s still pissed at him. Judy keeps almost going back to bed, but somehow she winds up dressed, with a toaster pop in her hand, marching towards the door. Marva starts to say something, then shrugs.

Doug and Judy meet up for dinner at Punjabi Dhaba in Inman Square, scooping red-hot eggplant and bright chutney off of metal prison trays while Bollywood movies blare overhead and just outside of their line of vision.

The Conversation starts with them talking past each other. Judy says, “Lately I can’t remember anything past the next month.” Doug says, “I keep trying to see what happens after I die.” Judy says, “Normally I can remember years in advance, even decades. But I’m blocked.” She shudders. Doug says, “If I could just have an impression, an afterimage, of what happens when I’m gone. It would help a lot.”

Judy finally hears what Doug’s been saying. “Oh Jesus, not this. Nobody can see past death. It’s impossible.”

“So’s seeing the future.” Doug cracks his somosa in half with a fork, and offers the chunky side to Judy.

“You can’t remember anything past when your brain ceases to exist. Because there are no physical memories to access. Your brain is a storage medium.”

“But who knows what we’re accessing? It could be something outside our own brains.”

Judy tries to clear her head and think of something nice twenty years from now, but she can’t. She looks at Doug’s chunky sideburns, which he didn’t have when they’d started dating. Whenever she’s imagined those sideburns, she always associated them with the horror of these days. It’s sweltering inside the restaurant. “Why are you scared of me?” she says.

“I’m not,” Doug says. “I only want you to be happy. When I see you ten years from now, I—”

Judy covers her ears and jumps out of her seat, to turn the Bollywood music all the way up. Standing, she can see the screen, where a triangle of dancing women shake their fingers in unison at an unshaven man. The man smiles.

Eventually, someone comes and turns the music back down. “I think part of you is scared that I really am more powerful than you are,” Judy says. “And you’ve done everything you can to take away my power.”

“I don’t think you’re any more or less powerful than me. Our powers are just different,” Doug says. “But I think you’re a selfish person. I think you’re used to the idea that you can cheat on everything, and it’s made your soul a little bit rotten. I think you’re going to hate me for the next few weeks until you figure out how to cast me out. I think I love you more than my own arms and legs and I would shorten my already short life by a decade to have you stick around one more year. I think you’re brave as hell for keeping your head up on our journey together into the mouth of hell. I think you’re the most beautiful human being I’ve ever met, and you have a good heart despite how much you’re going to tear me to shreds.”

“I don’t want to see you any more,” Judy says. Her hair is all in her face, wet and ragged from the restaurant’s blast-furnace heat.

A few days later, Judy and Doug are playing foozball at a swanky bar in what used to be the Combat Zone. Judy makes a mean remark about something sexually humiliating that will happen to Doug five years from now, which he told her about in a moment of weakness. A couple days later, she needles him about an incident at work that almost got him fired a while back. She’s never been a sadist before now—although it’s also masochism, because when she torments him, she already knows how terrible she’ll feel in a few minutes.

Another time, Doug and Judy are drunk on the second floor of a Thayer Street frat bar, and Doug keeps getting Judy one more weird cocktail, even though she’s had more than enough. The retro pinball machine gossips at them. Judy staggers to the bathroom, leaving her purse with Doug—and when she gets back, the purse is gone. They both knew Doug was going to lose Judy’s purse, which only makes her madder. She bitches him out in front of a table of beer-pong champions. And then it’s too late to get back to Judy’s place, so they have to share Doug’s cramped, sagging hospital cot. Judy throws up on Doug’s favorite outfit: anise and stomach acid, it’ll never come out.

Judy loses track of which unbearable things have already happened, and which lay ahead. Has Doug insulted her parents yet, on their second meeting? Yes, that was yesterday. Has he made Marva cry? No, that’s tomorrow. Has she screamed at him that he’s a weak mean bastard yet? It’s all one moment to her. Judy has finally achieved timelessness.

Doug has already arranged—a year ago—to take two weeks off work, because he knows he won’t be able to answer people’s dumb tech problems and lose a piece of himself at the same time. He could do his job in his sleep, even if he didn’t know what all the callers were going to say before they said it, but his ability to sleepwalk through unpleasantness will shortly be maxed out. He tells his coworker Geoffrey, the closest he has to a friend, that he’ll be doing some Spring cleaning, even though it’s October.

A few days before the breakup, Judy stands in the middle of Central Square, and a homeless guy comes up to her and asks for money. She stares at his face, which is unevenly sunburned in the shape of a wheel. She concentrates on this man, who stands there, his hand out. For a moment, she just forgets to worry about Doug for once—and just like that, she’s seeing futures again.

The threads are there: if she buys this homeless man some scones from 1369, they’ll talk, and become friends, and maybe she’ll run into him once every few weeks and buy him dinner, for the next several years. And in five years, she’ll help the man, Franklin, find a place to live, and she’ll chip in for the deposit. But a couple years later, it’ll all have fallen apart, and he’ll be back here. And she flashes on something Franklin tells her eight years from now, if this whole chain of events comes to pass, about a lost opportunity. And then she knows what to do.

“Franklin,” she says to wheel-faced guy, who blinks at the sound of his name. “Listen. Angie’s pregnant, with your kid. She’s at the yellow house with the broken wheelbarrow, in Sturbridge. If you go to her right now, I think she’ll take you back. Here’s a hundred bucks.” She reaches in her new purse, for the entire wad of cash she took out of the bank to hold her until she gets her new ATM card. “Go find Angie.” Franklin just looks at her, takes the cash, and disappears.

Judy never knows if Franklin took her advice. But she does know for sure she’ll never see him again.

And then she wanders into the bakery where she would have bought Franklin scones, and she sees this guy working there. And she concentrates on him, too, even though it gives her a headache, and she “remembers” a future in which they become friendly and he tells her about the time he wrecked his best friends car, which hasn’t happened yet. She buys a scone and tells the guy, Scott, that he shouldn’t borrow Reggie’s T-Bird for that regatta thing, or he’ll regret it forever. She doesn’t even care that Scott is staring as she walks out.

“I’m going to be a vigilante soothsayer,” she tells Marva. She’s never used her power so recklessly before, but the more she does it, the easier it gets. She goes ahead and mails that Jollibee statue to Sukey.

The day of the big breakup, Marva’s like, “Why can’t you just dump him via text message? That’s what all the kids are doing, it’s the new sexting.” Judy’s best answer is, “Because then my bike would still be in one piece.” Which isn’t a very good argument. Judy dresses warm, because she knows she’ll be frozen later.

Doug takes deep breaths, tries to feel acceptance, but he’s all wrung out inside. He wants this to be over, but he dreads it being over. If there was any other way… Doug takes the train from Providence a couple hours early, so he can get lost for a while. But he doesn’t get lost enough, and he’s still early for their meeting. They’re supposed to get dinner at the fancy place, but Doug forgot to make the reservation, so they wind up at John Harvard’s Brew Pub, in the mall, and they each put away three pints of the microbrews that made John Harvard famous. They make small talk.

Afterwards, they’re wandering aimlessly, towards Mass Ave., and getting closer to the place where it happens. Judy blurts out, “It didn’t have to be this way. None of it. You made everything fall into place, but it didn’t have to.”

“I know you don’t believe that any more,” Doug says. “There’s a lot of stuff you have the right to blame me for, but you can’t believe I chose any of this. We’re both cursed to see stuff that nobody should be allowed to see, but we’re still responsible for our own mistakes. I still don’t regret anything. Even if I didn’t know today was the last day for you and me, I would want it to be.”

They are both going to say some vicious things to each other in the next hour or so. They’ve already heard it all, in their heads.

On Mass Ave., Judy sees the ice cream place opposite the locked side gates of Harvard, and she stops her bike. During their final blow-out fight, she’s not eating ice cream, any of the hundred times she’s seen it. “Watch my bike,” she tells Doug. She goes in and gets a triple scoop for herself and one for Doug, random flavors—Cambridge is one of the few places you can ask for random flavors and people will just nod—and then she and Doug resume their exit interview.

“It’s that you have this myth that you’re totally innocent and harmless, even though you also believe you control everything in the universe,” Doug is saying.

Judy doesn’t taste her ice cream, but she is aware of its texture, the voluptuousness of it, and the way it chills the roof of her mouth. There are lumps of something chewy in one of her random flavors. Her cone smells like candy, with a hint of wet dog.

They wind up down by the banks of the river, near the bridge surrounded by a million geese and their innumerable droppings, and Judy is crying and shouting that Doug is a passive aggressive asshole.

Doug’s weeping into the remains of his cone, and then he goes nuclear. He starts babbling about when he sees Judy ten years hence, and the future he describes is one of the ones that Judy’s always considered somewhat unlikely.

Judy tries to flee, but Doug has her wrist and he’s babbling at her, describing a scene where a broken-down Doug meets Judy with her two kids—Raina and Jeremy, one of dozens of combinations of kids Judy might have—and Raina, the toddler, has a black eye and a giant stuffed tiger. The future Judy looks tired, makes an effort to be nice to the future Doug, who’s a wreck, gripping her cashmere lapel.

Both the future Judy and the present Judy are trying to get away from Doug as fast as possible. Neither Doug will let go.

“And then 15 years from now, you only have one child,” Doug says.

“Let me go!” Judy screams.

But when Judy finally breaks free of Doug’s hand, and turns to flee, she’s hit with a blinding headrush, like a one-minute migraine. Three scoops of ice cream on top of three beers, or maybe just stress, but it paralyzes her, even as she’s trying to run. Doug tries to throw himself in her path, but he overbalances and falls down the river bank, landing almost in the water.

“Gah!” Doug wails. “Help me up. I’m hurt.” He lifts one arm, and Judy puts down her bike, helps him climb back up. Doug’s a mess, covered with mud, and he’s clutching one arm, heaving with pain.

“Are you okay?” Judy can’t help asking.

“Breaking my arm hurt a lot more…” Doug winces. “…than I thought it would.”

“Your arm.” Judy can’t believe what she’s seeing. “You broke… your arm.”

“You can see for yourself. At least this means it’s over.”

“But you were supposed to break your leg.”

Doug almost tosses both hands in the air, until he remembers he can’t. “This is exactly why I can’t deal with you any more. We both agreed, on our very first date, I break my arm. You’re just remembering it wrong, or being difficult on purpose.”

Doug wants to go to the hospital by himself, but Judy insists on going with. He curses at the pain, stumbling over every knot and root.

“You broke your arm.” Judy’s half-sobbing, half-laughing, it’s almost too much to take in. “You broke your arm, and maybe that means that all of this… that maybe we could try again. Not right away, I’m feeling pretty raw right now, but in a while. I’d be willing to try.”

But she already knows what Doug’s going to say: “You don’t get to hurt me any more.”

She doesn’t leave Doug until he’s safely staring at the hospital linoleum, waiting to go into X-ray. Then she pedals home, feeling the cold air smash into her face. She’s forgotten her helmet, but it’ll be okay. When she gets home, she’s going to grab Marva and they’re going straight to Logan, where a bored check-in counter person will give them dirt-cheap tickets on the last flight to Miami. They’ll have the wildest three days of their lives, with no lasting ill effects. It’ll be epic, she’s already living every instant of it in her head. She’s crying buckets but it’s okay, her bike’s headwind wipes the slate clean.

Clover

The day after Anwar and Joe got married, a man showed up on their doorstep, with a cat hunched in the cradle of his arms. The man was short and thin, almost child-size, with a pale, weathered face. The cat was black, with a white streak on his stomach and a white slash on his face. The man congratulated them on their nuptials, and held out the squirming cat. “This is Berkley,” he said. “If you take him into your home, you’ll have nine years of good luck.”

Before Anwar and Joe had a chance to debate the matter of adoption, Berkley was already hiding in their apartment somewhere. They found themselves Googling the closest place to get a cat bed, a litter box, and some grain-free, low-fat organic food for an indoor cat. It was a chilly day, with scattered clouds that turned the sunset into a broken yolk.

Berkley didn’t come out of hiding for a month. Food disappeared from his bowl, and his litter box filled up, when nobody was looking. But the cat himself was a no-show. Until one night, when Anwar had a nightmare that the tanks cracked and his precious, life-giving beer sprayed everywhere. He woke to find the cat perched on the side of the bed, eyes lit up, one leg outstretched. Anwar froze for a moment, then tentatively reached out an arm and touched the cat’s back so lightly the fur lifted. Then Berkley scooted in next to Anwar and fell asleep, thrumming slightly. From then on, Berkley slept on their bed at night.

Their luck didn’t become miraculous or anything, but things did go well for them. Anwar’s microbrews grew popular, especially Nubian Nut and Butch Goddess, and he even managed to open a small brewpub, an “airy cavern” in the trendy warehouse district between NC State and downtown, not far from where there used to be that leather bar. Joe documented a couple of major atrocities without becoming a statistic himself, and wrote a white paper about genocide that he really felt might could make genocides a bit less likely. Anwar and Joe stayed together, and Joe’s hand along Anwar’s lower ribs always made him feel safe and amazed. Everyone they knew was suffering—like Marie, whose restaurant went under because she couldn’t get half the ingredients she needed due to the drought, and then she went back to Ohio to care for an uncle who’d gotten the antibiotic-resistant meningitis, and wound up getting sick herself. But Anwar and Joe kept being good to each other, and when problems came, they muddled through.

They almost didn’t notice the upcoming ninth anniversary of Berkley’s arrival. By now, the cat was the defining feature of their home, the lodestone. Berkley’s moods were their household’s moods: his pleasure, their pleasure. They went across town to get him the exact food he wanted, and kept him well supplied with toys and cat grass, not to mention an enormous climbing tree. Anwar’s most popular stout was the Black Cat’s Tail.

Nine years after Berkley’s arrival, to the day, another man showed up at their door, with another cat. A female this time, a fluffy calico with an intense glare in her wide yellow eyes. This cat did not squirm or fidget, but instead had a wary stillness.

“This is Patricia,” the big bearded lumbersexual white dude said without introducing himself. “You won’t have any extra luck if you take her in, but she’ll be a good companion for Berkley.” He deposited her on their doorstep and skipped away before Anwar or Joe had a chance to ask any questions.

They decided “Patricia” was an odd name for a cat, and named her “Clover” instead, because of the pattern of the spots on her back.

* * *

Berkley had worked for years to get Anwar and Joe’s apartment under control, and this represented both a creative enterprise and a labor of love. He had carved out cozy beds atop the laundry hamper, inside the old wicker basket that contained extra brewing supplies, and in the hutch where Joe kept his beloved death-metal concert shirts. Berkley knew exactly where the sunbeam came through the slanty front windows in the mornings, and the best hiding places for when Anwar brought out the terrifying vacuum-cleaner monster, versus when Anwar and Joe started shouting after Joe came home from one of his trips. Berkley had trained both men to sleep in exactly the right positions for him to curl up between their legs.

And now this new cat, this jag-faced maniac, sprinted around the front room, the bedroom, the kitchenette, the bathrooms—even the laundry nook! She trampled everything with her wild feet. She put her scent everywhere. She slept on the sofa, where Joe sat and stroked her shiny fur with both hands. She was just all over everything.

Berkley made no secret of his feelings on the subject of this invasion. His oratorio spanned two octaves and had an infinite number of movements. But his pleas and remonstrations went unheeded, as if his companionship were a faded, shredded old toy that had lost all its scent. Berkley should have known. This was the way of things: You get a sweet deal for a while, but just when you get comfortable, someone always comes and rips it away.

This lesson, Berkley had learned as a kitten. His first proper human had been a young girl, who had sworn to protect him, and Berkley had promised to watch over her in turn. Somehow, they had struck this deal in the language of cats, which made it much larger than the usual declarations that cats and people always make to each other. And then, she had disappeared.

Berkley never knew what had happened, only that he’d had a friend, and then she was gone. He was left alone in this giant wooden house, where every smell was a doorway. He’d searched for her over and over, his tail down and his head upcast. He had cried much too loud for his own good. There were still people in that house, but they didn’t love Berkley, or even wish him well. Their angry shouts and stomping boots echoed off the ancient walls, ever since Berkley’s friend disappeared. Every time he emerged from hiding to call out to his lost friend, he risked getting plucked off his feet by grabby hands.

He kept thinking he heard her or smelled her, but no. This always set off the wailing again.

Quick quick quick sleep.

Quick quick quick sleep.

Sometimes the grabby hands caught him, and then his hard-gotten dignity was all undone. His body bent into shapes where it didn’t want to go.

They heard Berkley cry, the angry people, and they shouted, they pounded the walls. He didn’t have a way to stop crying.

Friend didn’t mean to Berkley the same thing it would to a dog, or a human. But this girl had been the shoulder he slept on, the hand that scritched his ear, the voice that sang to him. Even the cozy old attic felt colder and darker, and the wooden house smelled like nothing but mildew.

Berkley was just letting go of the last of his kittenhood when another pair of hands had lifted him, gently, and brought him to this new house, where the scents were different (yeast, flowers, nuts) but the people were kind. Berkley forgot almost everything in life, but he never entirely forgot the girl, his original disappointment.

And just like the girl had been taken away from Berkley with zero warning or goodbye, now this new cat was going to steal all his comfort from him. Clover tried to talk to him a few times, but he was having exactly none of that. Berkley hissed at her like she was made of poison.

* * *

The thing was, Anwar really believed, deep down, in the “nine years of good luck.” He always referred to Berkley as their maneki neko, like one of those Japanese cat statues that waves a paw in the window and brings in good fortune. When the second guy showed up exactly nine years later, with another cat, and he knew so much, that clinched it.

Anwar had a sick feeling: Our luck just ran out.

Raleigh was an okay friendly city, mostly, but lately when he found himself downtown at night, he felt like he was going to get jumped any minute. Big scary dudes had followed him out to his truck from the bar once or twice, but Anwar had always gotten away. The mosque in Durham had gotten graffitied, and the gay bar off I-40, bricked. Inside his own bar, Anwar was getting more ignorant tipsy people up in his face, asking why he was brewing alcoholic drinks anyway—when, hello, the Egyptians invented beer, thank you very much. The barback, a large Hungarian named Vinnie, had needed to eject more and more abusive drunks recently. Anwar didn’t want to live in fear, so instead, he lived in the sweet spot between paranoia and rage.

The one-bedroom apartment, with its scuffed hardwood floors, crimson drapes, and shelves sagging with ancient books, seemed like a refuge. Locking the door from the inside, Anwar always took a deep breath, like his lungs were expanding to the size of the stucco walls. He felt ten years older outdoors than indoors.

But lately, Joe woke up angry, because funding cuts, and he was constantly having to haul ass up to D.C. for crisis strategy meetings. When Joe was home, and not crashing at Roddy’s place near Adams Morgan, he was a piece of driftwood in the bed, rigid and spiky. Joe talked to a point somewhere to the left of Anwar, instead of looking straight at him. The cats had gone to ground, as if sensing a high-pressure front: Berkley in one of his thousand hiding places, Clover under the sofa. Anwar screwed up his hamstring and limped around the apartment, and when he ventured outside it was with a what now feeling—maybe this time, his truck wouldn’t start, or the neighbors would have a campaign sign for that guy who insisted North Carolina would never accept refugees from any of the places where Joe kept track of atrocities.

“You got the right idea, staying home all the time,” Anwar told Berkley, who grudgingly offered his white tummy.

So one day, Anwar got done showering, and all the real towels were dirty. So he dried off using a hand towel. He emerged from the bathroom, cupping himself in that small woolen square, and saw Joe staring at him, gray eyes wide and unwavering. Anwar felt himself blush, was about to say something flirtatious to his husband, but Joe was turning to close the half-open front curtain, where anybody could see in from the front stoop.

“You might want to do a lot more crunches before you pose in front of an open window like that.”

Anwar bit his own tongue so hard his mouth filled up with blood. He just backed away—first into the bathroom, but there was nothing to cover him there, so he took a hard left into the bedroom. Still limping, he nearly stepped on Clover, who ran to get out of his way. Joe might as well have broken that window instead of covering it.

“Hey, I didn’t mean…” Joe came in just as Anwar was pulling on his baggiest pants. “You know I think you’re beautiful. I just meant, the neighbors. I was just teasing. That came out all wrong. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Don’t you have a meeting in D.C. to get to?”

Once Joe was gone, Anwar fell onto the sofa, wearing just his big sweatpants. He felt gross. All of Joe’s previous relationships had ended with some combination of sarcasm and distraction, but Anwar always thought he’d be different. Anwar looked at his forearms, which at least were buff, thanks to pouring so much beer. He had to be there in a few hours, unless he called in sick.

Clover had jumped on the sofa when Anwar wasn’t looking, and had scrunched next to him with her head resting on his thigh. He scritched her head with one hand and she purred, while Berkley glared from the opposite end of the room. “Hey, it’s not your fault our luck went south when you showed up,” he told her. “I’m sorry you had to see us like this. We were a lot cooler when everything was going our way.”

The cat looked up at him with her eyes perfect yellow spheres, except for tiny black slits, and said, “Oh, shit.”

Then she sprang upright. “Shit! I’m a cat. WTF. I didn’t mean for this to… how long have I been a cat? This is really bad. You have to help me, or I’m going to get stuck like this. Listen, do you have a phone? I need you to dial for me, because I have no freaking opposable digits. Listen, it’s—”

Then Clover stopped talking, abruptly. She sat down, looked up at him, and let out a long, high chirp, like the sound a cat makes when it’s sitting at an open window and trying to communicate with passing birds.

* * *

Berkley’s life was ruined, and it felt worse than the first time. He was a lot older this time, and, too, he couldn’t run and hide from this.

Joe was gone. As in, just not at home anymore—he had been around less and less, lately, but now days had passed without his scent or his voice. Anwar was still there, but he wasn’t acting like Anwar. No gentle pats, no tug-of-war with the catnip banana. No silly noises. The only cat that Anwar paid attention to was Clover, and he acted as if Clover had quit in the middle of playing a game that Anwar really wanted to continue.

It was way past time someone sent Clover to The Vet.

Berkley was a fierce, crafty hunter. He found the perfect bookshelf from which to watch for Clover emerging from under the sofa. She usually came out when the mail rained down from the slot in the front door, because that was like a daily miracle: paper from the skies! Berkley had a claw, ready to swipe.

He almost got her. She ducked out of the way, just as the claw came down, and he caught some dust mites instead. She ran, back toward the sofa, and he followed.

“New cat!” he hissed at her. “You ruined it all!”

“I didn’t mean to!”

As Berkley stalked her, he found himself telling her the story of his original disappointment: how he’d lived in an old wooden house with a cruel girl and a strange girl. And Berkley had made the strange girl his own, until she was taken away, and he was left worse than before. That “worse than before” was where Berkley was, now, and he had nothing left but to share that feeling with Clover.

“But,” Clover said from under the sofa, “that was me. I was the weird girl. I remember now. I promised to protect you. I kept my promise! That’s how you got here. I kept my promise. And now I need you to help me in return.”

And just like that, Clover lost her fear of Berkley. She talked her wild talk at him, out in the open, and no amount of claw-swipes could scare her off. As mad as she was acting, it was almost like she wanted to go to The Vet.

“I was a person. I lived with you,” Clover kept saying. “I went away to learn more tricks. I could speak cat, sometimes, but I wanted to do more. But when I left, I thought about you all the time. I had bad dreams about you. Scary dreams. I imagined you all alone in that old house, with my family, and I had to save you. But my teachers wouldn’t let me leave the school. So I asked them to save you.”

Berkley growled. “So then you just told a man to come and take me away? That was all you did?”

“They said they found you the perfect home, the best family for you. They said I could repay them later. I didn’t understand what they meant. But now! I have to turn back into a person soon, or I will just lose myself. I don’t know how. I think this is a test, and I’m failing it. You have to help me. Please!”

Berkley considered this for a moment. “So. You say you are the girl who abandoned me as a kitten, and spoiled my good thing. And now you’ve come back as a cat, to spoil my good thing a second time. And you want me to help you?” Berkley let out the most disdainful, vengeful hiss that he possibly could, then turned and walked away without looking back.

* * *

Anwar had met Joe at this death-metal concert that his friends had dragged him to, in a beer-slick dark club that resembled the inside of a giant van. When he saw Joe in his torn denim and tank top waiting at the bar, his heart had just flipped, and he’d stood next to Joe for ten minutes before he got up the nerve to say hi. Their first three dates, Anwar lied his ass off and pretended to be a death-metal fan, to the point where he had to keep sneaking away to text his friends with questions about Finnish musicians. Joe had this mane of red hair and permanent five-o’clock shadow flecked with white, and a way of talking about guitar solos that was way better than listening to music.

When Joe had found out that Anwar actually loathed metal, he’d nearly wept. “Nobody’s ever done anything like that for me. That is so… beautiful.” He kissed Anwar so hard, Anwar tasted whiskey and felt Joe’s stubble on the corners of his mouth. That’s when Anwar knew this was the man he wanted to marry.

Joe was Anwar’s first real, proper love. But Joe was more than a decade older, and had already lived through a string of two-year and three-year relationships. Joe had experienced enough relationship failure to be inured. When they’d first hooked up, Joe had prized Anwar’s twenty-something body, his lean golden frame, and seeing that covetous look in the eyes of this slightly grizzled rocker dude had punched a button Anwar didn’t even know he had.

Anwar prized Joe’s independence, the way he always said, Live like the fuckers don’t own you, even after they went all domestic together. His gentleness, even when he was pissed off, and the warm sound of his voice when he checked in. Joe had not checked in in ages—they had barely even talked on the phone—because the emergency in D.C. had given birth to other emergencies, and now there was a whole emergency extended family.

Meanwhile, Anwar’s truck kept not starting, there was a weird stain on the bathroom wall, and, well, Anwar was losing his mind and imagining that his cat had talked to him. Clover hadn’t spoken since that one time, but she’d been on a tear: chasing Berkley around, making weird noises, knocking things over. Both cats were upset, since Joe was gone and Anwar wasn’t himself. Anwar kept trying to pull himself together and at least be there for these two fur-balls, but he only stayed together for a minute or two at a time, no matter how hard he tried.

Then another one of those men showed up at his door: this one pale and thin, with elaborate tattoos on his hands, and a dark suit with a thin tie. “Don’t mind me,” the man said. “I just want to talk to your cat.” Anwar stepped aside and let the man come in.

“How was the good luck, by the way?” The man peered under various pieces of furniture, looking for Clover. “Were you happy with how it turned out?”

“Um, it was okay, I guess,” Anwar said. “I’m still trying to decide, to be honest.” He wanted to say more—like maybe he and Joe had never been tested, as a couple, because everything had gone so smoothly for them until now. Maybe they’d have been stronger if they hadn’t had training wheels. Maybe they were just fair-weather lovers.

“Okeydoke,” the man said. “I could get you another dose of luck, but it would cost a lot more this time.” He squatted in front of the sofa, where Clover eyed him. “Has she talked to you?”

“Um,” Anwar said. “I guess so. Yes.”

“Don’t believe anything she says.” The man reached out a hand gently, and Clover let him pet her, fingers under the chin. “She’s the worst combination of congenital liar and delusional. Even she doesn’t always know if she’s telling the truth.”

“So she was lying when she told me that she used to be a person?”

“No, that was true. She wanted me to do her a favor, and this was the result.” The man snapped his fingers in front of Clover’s face. “Come on, then. What do you have to say for yourself?” Snap, snap. “How’s the food?” Snap. “Are you enjoying your accommodations?”

Clover just stared at him and grumbled a little. She twitched whenever he snapped his fingers, but she didn’t try to run away.

“Either she’s unable to speak, because she just hasn’t gotten it under control, or she’s just being pissy. Either way, disappointing.” The man stood up. “Please let me know if she speaks to you again.” He handed Anwar a business card that just had a Meeyu handle. “And if you decide you need another lucky break, just @ me.”

“What exactly would I have to do to get more good luck?”

“It really depends. Some of it might be stuff where you wouldn’t really be you by the end of it. But I tell you what, if you can get that cat speaking English again, that would go a long way.”

The man spun on one heel, almost like one of Joe’s old dance moves, and walked out the door without saying goodbye or closing the door behind him. Anwar hated when anyone left the door open, even for a second, because he never wanted the cats to get any ideas.

Joe called when Anwar was in the middle of trying to coax words out of Clover with cat treats and recitations of Sufi poetry. (No dice.) “Things are beyond crazy, you have no idea. I’m trying to come back to you but every time I think I’m going to get out of here, there’s another fucking drama eruption. The auditors are maniacs.” In the background, Anwar could hear guitar heroics and laughing voices. “I am going to make it up to you, I swear. I still have to apologize properly for being such an ass before. I gotta go.” Joe hung up before Anwar could even say anything.

Anwar had sort of wanted to ask Joe if he felt like they’d been lucky, these past nine years, and whether the luck would be worth going to extremes to get back. But he couldn’t think of a way to ask such a thing.

* * *

Berkley took a wild skittering run from one end of the apartment to the other, and just as he hit peak speed, he reached the front door, where Clover was sitting waiting for the mail to rain down. He vaulted over her, paws passing almost within shredding distance, and landed at the front door, so hard the mail slot rattled.

Clover just looked at him, eyes partway hooded.

Berkley pulled into a crouch, ready to spring, claws out, ready to tear the new cat apart. But that bored look in her eyes made him stop before he jumped. He was a cunning hunter. He could wait for his moment. She hadn’t talked any more nonsense to Berkley since that one time, but she still didn’t seem scared of him. He didn’t know what he was dealing with.

“New cat,” Berkley said in a low voice. “I’m going to send you to The Vet.”

Clover didn’t reply. The mail fell, but it was just a single envelope with red shapes on it.

Some time later, Anwar cried into his knees on the couch. He smelled wrong—pungent and kind of rotten, instead of like nice soap and hops. He was all shrunk inward, in the opposite of the ready-to-pounce stance that Berkley had pulled his whole body into when he’d been preparing to jump on Clover. Anwar didn’t look coiled or ready to strike, at all. He was making these pitiful sounds, like he couldn’t even draw enough breath to sob properly.

Berkley saw the new cat creeping across the floor towards Anwar, and he ran across the room, reaching the sofa first.

“No,” he told Clover. “You don’t do this. This is mine. You’re not even a real cat. Go AWAY!”

Berkley climbed up on the sofa without even waiting to see if the new cat went away. He rubbed his forehead against Anwar’s hand, holding his knee, and licked the web between his fingers a little bit. Anwar let his knees down and made a lap for Berkley. Anwar’s hand felt good on his neck, and he let out a deep satisfied purr. But then he heard Anwar say something, in a deep, mournful voice. He sounded hopeless. Berkley looked up at him, and struggled with his urges.

Then Berkley looked over at the new cat, who was watching the whole thing from on top of the bookcase. Berkley narrowed his eyes and told her, “I want to hurt you. But I want to bring back the other human more. If I help you, can you bring the humans back together? Yes or no?”

Clover looked down at him and said, “I think so. I’ll do what I can.”

A few hours later, Anwar had stumbled out of the house and the cats were alone again. “I keep forgetting who I am,” Clover said. “It’s hard to hold on to. But I remember, I begged the teachers to help me save you from my family, and I talked about how you were suffering. They said if I understood cats so much, why didn’t I try being one? I was like, ‘Fine.’ I didn’t realize what I had signed up for until years later.”

“So you climbed into a place that you cannot get out of again,” Berkley suggested. “Because there is not enough room to turn around.”

“Sort of, yeah.”

“So,” said Berkley, tail curled and ears pointed. “Don’t turn around.”

* * *

Anwar’s ankle was kind of swollen and he had no money for a doctor visit, and the stain on the bathroom wall had gotten bigger. The Olde Tyme Pub had gotten a totally bullshit citation from the North Carolina Department of Alcohol Law Enforcement, which had the hilarious acronym of ALE. His truck still kept not starting. Anwar longed to rest his head on Joe’s shoulder, breathing in that reassuring scent, so Joe could say, Fuck ’em, it’ll all be good. On his lonesome, Anwar only knew how to spiral.

Clover came up to him as he sat on the bed, getting laboriously dressed, and perched on the edge. She made noises that usually meant “feed me” or “throw my fuzzy ball.” Anwar just shrugged, because he’d wasted three days trying to get her to talk.

Just as Anwar finally got his good shirt buttoned and stood up, Clover said, “Hey.”

“Well,” Anwar said. “Hey.”

“Oh thank god. I finally did it. I’m back,” Clover said. “Oh thank goodness. I need your help. I think this is a test, and I’m failing it. One time before, I became a bird, but I needed help to turn back into a person. And now I feel totally stuck in cat form.”

Anwar was already reaching for his phone to go on Meeyu and @ that guy, to let him know the cat finally started talking again. He no longer cared if he was being a crazy person. What had sanity done for him lately?

“The longer I go without turning back into a person, the harder it’s going to be,” Clover said, jumping on the bed. “You look like shit, by the way. Berkley is worried about you. We both are.”

“Hey, it’s fine. You’re okay.” Anwar picked her up and looked into her twitchy little face. “I already told those guys, the ones who dropped you off here. They know you’re talking again. They’re probably on their way. They’ll help you out, and maybe they’ll give Joe and me some more luck.”

Clover squirmed, partly involuntarily. “You really shouldn’t take any luck from those guys. It’ll come with huge strings attached.”

“Well, they told me that you’re a liar. And you know, I have nothing to lose.” But Anwar had a sudden memory of the man saying, You wouldn’t really be you any more.

“Please! You have to help me change back to a person before they get here,” Clover said.

“I don’t know how to do that.”

And anyway, it was too late. The door opened, without a knock or Anwar having to unlock it, and a man entered. He had dark skin pitted with acne scars, and long braids, and a purple turtleneck and matching corduroys. “So,” the man said, “what does she have to say for herself?”

“You wasted a trip,” Clover told him. “I’m still working on changing myself back. I only just got my human voice working. I’ve got a ways to go before I’m in my own body again.”

The man shrugged and picked Clover up with one hand. “You already did what we needed you to do. Just think what we’ll be able to do with a cat who talks like a person and knows how to do magic. You’ll be way more useful to us in this form.” Clover started squirming and shouting, and tried to claw the man, but he had her in a tight grip. He turned to Anwar. “Thanks for whatever you did. We’ll consider this a down payment, if you decide you want more luck.”

“No!” Clover sounded terrified, on an existential level. “This is messed up. I don’t want to be stuck as a cat forever. I have a boyfriend. I have friends. You have to help me!” She looked right at Anwar, her yellow eyes fixed on him, and said, “You can’t let them take me.”

Anwar thought about how things had been before, with just the one cat, and Joe there, and everything peaceful. He wanted nothing more than to bring back that version of his life. But he looked at Clover, her whole body contorted with terror—claws out, eyes huge and round, mouth full of teeth. And he knew what Joe would say if he was here: You gotta live like the fuckers don’t own you.

The words came out before Anwar had even thought them through: “You can’t take my cat.”

“I beg your pardon?” the man said. His stare was impossible to meet.

“You can’t,” Anwar swallowed. “That’s my cat. You can’t take her.”

“Thank you thank you,” Clover whispered.

“This isn’t a cat. She’s a whole other thing. And whatever she told you, she was lying. That’s what she does.”

Anwar drew courage from the fact that the weird man was arguing with him, instead of just taking the cat and leaving. “You gave this cat to me. You didn’t say it was a loan. She’s mine. I have all the records to prove it.”

And now the man did turn to leave, but Clover leapt out of his arms. She landed on three feet, nearly tumbled head over tail, and then got her balance fast enough to run back into the apartment. She headed for one of the hundred hiding places that she’d gotten to know, but the man was right behind her. Anwar just stood and watched as the man ran through the apartment, knocking over Joe’s guitar. He was right on top of Clover, leaning to scoop her up.

There was another cat between the man and Clover. As he bent down to grab the cat who was still shouting in English, his hand connected instead with Berkley. Who bit his thumb, hard enough to draw blood.

Berkley growled at the man, in a pose Anwar had never seen before. Standing his ground, snarling, bloody teeth bared. Roaring. Like a tiny lion. This would have been the most ridiculous sight ever, if it weren’t so heroic.

Clover stopped and looked at Berkley, defending her. Her jaw dropped open; her ears were all the way up. “Berkley, shit,” she said. “You just bit the thumb of the most powerful man on Earth. I can’t believe you. Whatever happens now, I want you to know I regret leaving you behind. And no matter what price I end up paying, I’m glad I rescued you. I’m sorry, and I understand what you went through.”

That last phrase was like a string breaking, or a knot being undone after hours of pulling and worrying. As soon as Clover said understand, the cat was gone. A naked woman stood in Anwar’s hallway, holding Berkley in her arms. He looked up at her and seemed to recognize her. He put his head on her shoulder and purred.

The woman looked at the man, who was nursing his thumb. “I know you’re still pissed about Siberia. I get it. But jeez. This was mean, even for you.”

The man rolled his eyes, then turned to look at Anwar. “I hope you enjoy not having any luck ever again.” Then he stomped out of the apartment, leaving the door open.

As soon as the man was gone, Anwar fell onto the couch, hands on his face. He felt weird having a naked stranger in his home, and even weirder that this girl had seen so much of him at his worst, and he’d had his hand on her face so many times. The whole thing was weird. And he felt a huge letdown in his gut, because he’d convinced himself somehow that he and Joe would get more luck and it would be fine.

“So that’s it,” Anwar muttered, mostly to himself. “We’re screwed.”

“Hey, can I borrow some clothes?”

While the girl—Clover—was getting dressed, she tried to talk him down. “Joe is coming back. He loves you; he just sucks at expressing it sometimes. I’ve seen how you guys are.” Somehow, she managed to put clothes on without letting go of Berkley. “So listen. I suck at giving advice. But the absence of good luck is not bad luck. It’s just… life.”

“I guess that sort of makes sense,” Anwar said.

“That would be a first for me.” Clover looked twitchy, like she was still ready to chase a ball around, or eat a treat out of Anwar’s hand. Anwar wondered if she was going to be stuck having cat thoughts forever. “I can fix your injured ankle, no problem. And also I think I know how to get rid of that stain on your bathroom wall. I’ll have a look at the truck; I’m pretty good with engines. And I’ll leave you my Meeyu info, if you ever have another problem you need help with. I’ll be around if you need me, okay?”

Anwar nodded. He was starting to think having this magical girl on speed dial could be better than good luck anyway.

Joe came home an hour later, after Clover had already left. “Hey,” Joe said. “I lost my job. But I think we’re better off, and I already have a line on something—I’ll never have to leave town again. I just wanted to say I’m really sorry about being a jackass, and leaving for so long, and I love you. You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

Anwar just stared at his husband for a moment. He had a case of highway sunburn on one arm and part of his neck, and his hair was a mess, and he looked like a rock star. Anwar threw his arms around Joe and whispered, “The cats missed you.” Then he realized there was only cat, and he was going to have to explain somehow. But he was too busy kissing the man he loved, and there would be time for that later.

Watching the two men from the top of his fuzzy climbing tree, Berkley looked immensely self-satisfied.

Intestate

1. Road trip

The minivan is already full of children when it pulls up to my front steps. I climb into the deepest pit facing out the back door, and plunk my rucksack in my lap. Before I even buckle up, my youngest niece Rosemary is grabbing at my jeans leg and trying to show me a doll, while her brother Sebastian is threatening to shoot me with a toy gun. The whole van smells like mildew and overripe fruit. Empty juice boxes scatter over my feet. This will be a long ride.

“Welcome aboard, Emmy. Next stop, Castle von Doom,” my youngest brother Eric says from the front seat. His brown hair is receding, and he’s grown a wispy soul patch. Next to him, his latest wife Octavia is trying to find indy folk-rock on the iPod. They both wave at me, and then we’re off. Eric drives faster than you would think a man driving a van-load of his own children would go, even on the back roads full of hairpin turns and big trees.

Eric keeps joking about how we’re going to visit Doctor Doom, his newest nickname for our father. “He’s going to bake us doomcookies,” Eric says.

“Doomcookies!” Rosemary shouts.

“Made with doomberries,” Octavia says.

“Doomberries!” we all shout, even me. I only feel a little disloyal to my father.

The hills are full of disappearing acts, like sheep meadows and barns that pop out for just a few moments. There’s almost too much color to take in, between the trees that are going red and swathes of evergreens. Rosemary asks if she can count the sheep, or if that will make her doze off. I tell her to try, and see what happens. We are driving in the middle of the road, directly over the yellow lines, when a jeep comes around the tight bend and nearly rams into us. Eric swerves back into our lane, hyperventilating a little. Next to me, Rosemary has fallen asleep.

We get lost twice, and have to stop for pee breaks and ice cream and hot dogs, but we’re still the first to arrive at the failed gated community where my dad lives. We roll off the main road into a small feeder road, which leads to a broken gate, and then a cul-de-sac with five driveways. The last one goes to a big McMansion with two gables and a huge lawn in front, and acres of forest in back. The other four driveways lead to dirt lots or to empty, collapsing houses. As we roll up the rocky driveway on grumbling tires, my dad skips out the front door. His white beard and glasses catch the sunlight. Even though it feels like the day has gone on forever, it’s only noon.

“It’s Doctor Doom,” Eric says with no sarcasm.

2. My father’s hands

When I was little, my father was a pair of hands. Later, he was a torso that I fell into like sleep. Maybe, occasionally, he was rough laughter just over my head.

The first time I could remember being aware of my father as a whole person was when he changed. He went away on a research trip, and when he came home, he’d grown a beard and gotten a pair of thick glasses. All of a sudden, this stranger was kissing my mother and moving around us kids as though he had a right. He smelled yeasty. I hadn’t been conscious of what my dad looked like before, but this was clearly some kind of home invader, who had tricked everybody. I ran and hid under my mom’s dresser.

Now, my father’s hands move almost too fast for me to make out clearly. He carves a honey-baked ham to make sandwiches for us, and he flips the carving knife around like a Benihana chef while the kids cheer. Nobody knows exactly what he’s done to upgrade his hands, under all the liver spots and calluses. We know better than to ask.

“Don’t teach the kids to play with knives, dad,” Eric says at last.

Two nights ago, my sister Joanna called me, the first time we’d talked in months. “You know you’re probably going to get the hands, Emmy,” she said randomly at one point. “You’re his favorite, even after everything. You could probably get whichever parts of him you wanted.” Joanna is the only one of us kids who inherited Dad’s genius, she got a math PhD and even helped solve some theorems and things. She wound up being a super-actuary at one of the top insurance companies, and she can rattle off the chances of anything bad happening to anyone.

My father picks up Rosemary and Sebastian in each arm, holding them up to his Santa beard and cradling them. He bounces on the balls of his feet like he’s about to start Lindy-hopping.

I turn away for a second, and see a strange tapestry on the sitting room wall, way on the other side of the house. And then I realize, it’s not a tapestry. It’s a beehive in a glass case, open to a small apiary out back.

My dad comes up behind me, almost soundless, and touches my bare shoulder. His fingers are cool and a little sandpapery. “Looking good, Em. You’ve cut your hair in a bob, and gotten yourself a pair of glasses with baroque frames,” he says, by way of saying, “I see you.” He seems distracted. For a moment his hand stays in place and we watch the bees together, and I wonder if this means that we’ve patched things up between us. Or if we’re just pretending we’ve patched it up, and if there’s any difference. I try not to wonder if this is one of our last real moments together.

“Happy eightieth birthday, Dad,” Eric says, joining us, lite beer in hand. “I hope I look half as good when I’m your age.”

3. Intellectual property

By late afternoon Friday, pretty much everyone has arrived, and my dad’s house, the embarrassingly named Thimblewick, is overrun. There are my three older brothers and one older sister, plus their fourteen children and even a few grandchildren. There are only two bedrooms inside the house, besides my dad’s, and by common consent those go to the families with babies: My nephew Derek and his twin daughters Marjorie and Isabella, and my nephew Roger and his son Gregor.

And yes, Isabella’s last name is Pinch, like almost all of us. We all call her Izzy, though “Izzy Pinch” is still kind of ludicrous. She’ll just have to own it, I guess.

The rest of us wind up putting up tents, all over the lawn and the clearing out back before the woods. Dad swears the bees are practically wintering already, and won’t bother us. Of course, everybody starts getting stung, until Dad closes some vent. We build three bonfires, including one on the front lawn, where we dig a huge pit. It hardly matters—one of the banks will take the house soon enough.

After dark, Dad produces two turkeys and a bloated turducken from a massive oven, and starts carving them on a big folding table in the back yard. He can carve two turkeys simultaneously, although after he notices people watching he starts focusing on just one at a time. He shifts his weight effortlessly as he moves around the table. My sister Joanna is watching carefully, to see how he does it. Joanna’s hair has gone mostly gray, and she’s gotten hatched-faced.

Joanna told me she expects to inherit Dad’s pelvis and hips, when he dies. She thinks he developed some sort of technology that would revolutionize hip replacements everywhere. A new self-lubricating type of acetabular, plus there’s a gel in his hip sockets that’s full of these special bacteria that Dad found in the Antarctic that absorb the impact when his feet strike the ground, and turn it into energy.

It’s undeniably creepy the way Joanna covets her father’s pelvis.

Someone has set up speakers in the backyard, playing classic Motown and Stax. The music doesn’t even begin to drown out the lamentation of the children, who have just realized that (a) they’re camping out in the cold, (b) there’s only enough hot water for a few showers at any given time of day, and (c) there’s no internet or cellphone service. I hear one of my nieces, Deedee I think, explaining very seriously that if she can’t get online for two days, she will have lost all social status. Forever.

“I figure we’ve got a day, tops, until it’s full-on Hunger Games out here,” Eric says, like he relishes the idea.

All of the adults stay up late, drinking pungent scotch and reminiscing around the biggest bonfire. At least some of the kids get their usual bedtimes revoked as well, so that there are little white blobs running around us and shrieking. Every few minutes a kid comes running up and says that a kid hit another kid, and someone has to do something.

I wind up sitting next to my father, close enough to the fire that my face and eyes get dehydrated and I’m flushed, and it is like a perfect facsimile of emotional openness. My father sits perfectly straight, his spine effortlessly creating the posture of an 18-year-old Alexander technique student. His neck is a very pale green.

“I’m surprised,” I say, “you can sit this close to the fire. Don’t you have some parts that’ll melt or something?”

My dad just laughs and cocks his head.

With the loose clothes my father is wearing, you can’t even tell what he’s replaced. Most of the legs, for sure. The hip joints. The spine. The skin on his neck, of course. Rumor has it that his whole rib cage is some kind of hydrogen-based generator now. My dad can drink whiskey and eat spicy food without being in horrible pain afterwards, because he’s upgraded his stomach and turned his appendix into some kind of backup filtration unit. He can breathe smoky air better than I can. Nobody will know for sure what he’s done, until someone cuts him up.

Neither of us has talked in a while. I get the feeling my dad is trying to say something that I need to hear. I try to make a silence that he can speak into. We both stare straight ahead, at the pillar of fire. Eventually, my middle brother Dudley comes up and says that there’s a problem with the toilets. Both of them. My dad laughs and says he’ll get his plumbing tools. I stay by the fire, hoping eventually I’ll feel sleepy.

My father told me a hundred stories that he made up on the spot when he used to tuck me in at night, but I forgot them all and he claims he did too. Intellectual property is like that, he told me once. You can write ideas down but then they get trapped in a shape they can’t grow out of. That wasn’t the reason he’d started confining his biomechanical innovations to just his own body, though—it was more because his body was the one thing his creditors couldn’t ever take away. He was in debt so deep, he had to become a limited liability corporation and then sue himself out of existence.

4. Two boats

Saturday morning, my dad announces he’s taking a hike in the woods. Anyone who wants to is welcome to join him. He also claims the woods are deer tick-free, although he won’t say why. He passes out identical bright red scarves for everybody, so that we all look like carolers. Or cultists.

Everybody’s so bored by this point that we all agree to go along with him, although that means that our departure gets endlessly delayed because somebody’s baby needs to be changed, or there would be hell to pay if my nephew Stephen doesn’t have a juicebox.

“I’ve been trying to keep my kids from going off in the woods by themselves,” my brother Dudley says. “Even though when we were kids, we ran around in the woods all the time. Now, though, I keep thinking there could be snakes or raccoons. Raccoons can be vicious. I don’t want my kids getting the idea it’s okay to wander.” Dudley has gained a lot of weight lately, and it suits him.

“I thought the reason people kept their kids on a leash nowadays was because they were worried about kidnappers and pedophiles,” I said. “And you know, there’s probably none of those within a hundred miles of here. We could look it up, do a Megan’s Law thing, if we had the internet.”

I might be infertile. I might not. My ex and I tried for a few years, with no luck. But I never wanted to go get the tests because if they found something, then it would be a medical problem all of a sudden, and I’d be trapped on the conveyer belt. My dad taught me early on that sometimes the secret to happiness is figuring out which questions you’re better off not answering.

My oldest brother Robert thinks my father experimented on me in the womb and that’s why I can’t have children. But Robert would be ready to believe almost any horror story about Dad.

Finally, we’re all ready to go on the hike, and then somebody realizes that one of the children is a fake. That is, he’s not any of our kids. He doesn’t even look like a member of our family. He’s too perfect, too blond and tow-headed. Everybody always checks to make sure their own kids are all accounted for, but nobody ever checks to see if there are too many children. My brother Robert and I drag the kid, whose name is Nicky, inside the house to interrogate him, and it only takes a few minutes before he confesses: he’s an infiltrator. Nicky’s a child actor, whose main claim to fame is being a featured extra during the third season of He’s The Champ, and his talent agency has repurposed him for corporate espionage. He won’t say who his client is; it could be any of a dozen companies.

“I’ll drive him to the nearest town and drop him off,” Robert says.

“I’ll ride with you,” I say. So the two of us get in Robert’s hatchback and drive to Somerset in total silence, with Nicky in the back seat staring at us. We leave Nicky at a Friendly’s with a payphone, and we give him five bucks.

There’s no kid listening in on our conversation on the way back, but Robert and I still don’t talk to each other. Robert’s almost old enough to be my father himself, but he looks much older than that.

When Robert is parking, on the side of the driveway near the bottom, I ask him what part of Dad he thinks he’ll inherit.

Robert pauses in the middle of pulling up the parking brake. He looks at me for the first time. “The feet,” he says at last. “You notice Dad is never barefoot, and he wears those clown shoes. I think he’s got transgenic monkey feet, or something along those lines. He never loses his balance.” Then he gets out of the car and jogs up to the house, where everybody is ready to walk into the woods.

Joanna was the one who spread this idea that we would each get a piece of Dad when he passed away. She had some phone conversation with him where he said we would all be provided for, and we would all have something to remember him by. She swears he was pretty explicit about the arrangement.

My father is much taller than I remember, taller even than he was yesterday. His grandchildren cluster around his waist, asking him questions about himself. At first I think they’re actually curious about grandpa’s wartime experiences in Korea, like when he got kidnapped by pirates from Pusan who were raiding Taiwanese shipping in an old gunboat, and he drank too much homemade soju and saw some sort of “maenad” floating over the sea foam. But no. The kids are just trying to get my dad to explain how to get the internet turned on.

None of us brought a cellphone, so we have no way of keeping track of time, but it feels like an hour later when we finally come through the woods into a big clearing. A boat looms out of the tall grass and blanched dandelions. It’s an old-fashioned sailing ship, and you can glimpse a big wooden steering wheel on deck. It’s wooden, and half rotted, but the seven sails are clean and crisp and white.

Rosemary squeals and runs towards the boat, but my dad grabs her and scoops her up, putting a finger to his lips.

A deer comes out of the wide-open side of the boat, then looks at us. No horns, but a huge sinewy body, as tall as I am. A doe, then. Her body is dotted with clouds. She stands for a moment, then scampers into the forest. Another deer comes out of the boat, then another and another.

“It’s the deer boat,” my father says. As if he’s just proved something to us, that he’s been claiming all along.

5. Metal birds

Several years ago, my father stopped talking to me. He didn’t announce he was cutting me off, and I didn’t notice for a few weeks, or maybe even longer. And then I thought it was just another one of those queasy Dad moments, like when I converted to Christianity, or when I came out as a lesbian. It took a while to know for sure: this was different. My father was making a point of not talking to me, even when I spoke directly to him, like at a family dinner or something.

My mom was still alive, and I pleaded with her to tell me what was going on, but she said she didn’t feel like playing telephone with my dad and me. Mom was tired a lot. Nobody thought it meant anything.

I went home and stalked my dad. He still walked with a limp from his Korean war injury back then, so he couldn’t get away from me. “Please,” I said, “please just tell me. Whatever it is we’ll fix it. There can’t be something so bad we can’t make it right, between us, you can build anything, and I make problems go away for a living. Please, dad. Dad. This could be the last time we see each other, are you really going to waste it shutting me out? Please just say something.” He just gazed at me like there were no words. His neck gave off a pale green bioluminescence, because it was dusk.

Weeks passed, maybe months. I was bucking for a promotion at Real Outcome Solutions, so I only thought about my dad’s latest weirdness every now and then. And then my mom was officially sick and that took precedence.

One day my father sent me an email, with just a link to a video, about a minute long. A drone aircraft, a UAV, was flying over the desert, more graceful than any airplane with people inside could ever be. The plane coasted and then dove, like it was going to buzz someone’s house in the wilderness. And then a streak of smoke came out of it, and the house burst. The next thing you saw was a crater.

The videos started coming every few days after that, beautiful instructional films and blurry cellphone footage, always showing metal birds in the desert.

After a few weeks, my father sent a link to an article, about how my company had helped secure the government contract for these UAVs with a particular contractor. I remembered sitting in on some of those meetings, but it wasn’t my baby or anything. And another article about civilian deaths. And a few days later, a third article, about how that company was suing my father and some of his friends over patents.

I never knew which pissed my father off more: that his designs were helping to kill babies, or that he was getting ripped off.

My mom’s survival chances dropped below 40 percent and we gave up on the radiation and the cyberknife. I took indefinite leave and moved back home to help take care of Mom. Eventually, Dad and I had to start talking again, because it’s hard to avoid speaking to someone when you’re each supporting one arm of a dying person.

6. The announcement

Saturday night, someone has rigged up a tire swing on a branch, which breaks and nearly kills Deedee. We need one car to go pick up groceries, and a separate van for the booze run. Everybody is looking at the tent city surrounding the house and making loud, meaningful groans. The bonfires are twice as big as the night before.

“It’s like a medieval siege.” Eric gestures at the tents ringing my dad’s fake castle. “It just needs a moat and some catapults. I’m kind of surprised my dad doesn’t have an alligator moat, actually.”

“Shark moat,” Octavia says. “Not alligator moat. A mad scientist always has a shark moat.”

“After this, we’ve done our duty, for like ever,” Dudley’s wife Ayanna is saying on the other side of the big fire. “This is the big reunion, and after this we’re golden for like a year or two. Right?”

“I sure freaking hope so,” Dudley says under his breath, but still kind of loud. Dudley grew up thinking he would always be the youngest sibling, until eventually Eric and I were born and he was just another middle kid.

“This is probably Dad’s last chance to torture all of us at the same time.” Robert has come up beside Dudley, Ayanna and me, hot dog in one hand and red plastic cup in the other. “Efficiency has always been a paramount value to him.”

A while later, Joanna claims that my father offered to make a batch of LSD for any of his grandchildren who wanted some, as long as they were over the age of fifteen.

“Is it true?” I ask my dad in the backyard, where he’s toasting marshmallows. “Did you really offer to make acid for your grandkids? Who are running around, in proximity to three large open flames?”

My dad just shrugs and says that at his age, the best you can hope for is to have good stories told about you. Then he’s swallowed by darkness.

By midnight, there is a nearly constant howling coming from all around us. Living in a city, you forget how dark the world can get. I feel like if I quit drinking vodka, I will start feeling prematurely hungover. I have had too much chocolate. Every few minutes, a child runs over my legs. I am remembering that I promised to help out with childcare this weekend, as the only childless adult here. The damp, freezing walk to the house for a bathroom break and vodka nearly breaks me.

“‘Will’ is a weird word,” says Eric, who used to be a novelist and also a teacher, among many other things. “I mean, it’s the most future-looking word in the English language. We talk about what ‘will’ happen. But when you actually will something to happen, we use the word ‘shall,’ not ‘will.’ And we reserve the verb ‘will’ for things that are going to happen, whether you will them to or not. And when someone dies, their final message to the future is their will and testament. Testament, of course, being a word that only has to do with the past, because you testify about what’s already happened. So ‘will and testament’ is like the future and the past in one document, except that it’s just a pointless list of material objects.”

We’ve all been avoiding mentioning the question of dad’s will, at least overtly, but Eric is an asshole. Eric already mentioned that he wants dad’s spine, he thinks it has some kind of carbon fiber nanotube thing.

The sun comes up, with its usual memory-erasing properties. The moment sunlight hits my retinas, the previous seven hours become an indistinct dream. My father and I are the last two people standing, near the ugly smouldering pit in the front yard. I am wearing two coats, and still feel colder than I can ever remember feeling. Dad’s glasses are misted up. He does tai-chi.

“Happy birthday,” I tell him.

There’s another big silence, and then I try to tell Dad that I’m sorry about the UAV thing. I know it was wrong. And as far as I’m concerned, he and I are good. I hope he thinks we’re good too. Whatever happens going forward, I hope we’ve found forgiveness for each other. And so on.

He puts his left hand on my shoulder. “We’re family, Em,” he says in my ear. Is it my imagination, or is there a clickety-clack vibration coming from his palm? “We never forgive each other. That’s what separates families from just any random assortment of people.”

Then he walks away, faster than I could hope to keep pace with, because he has a thousand waffles worth of batter to pour.

I sit down on the very edge of the pit and stare into the ashes. The ground is dew-soaked. The tents start jostling as people wake up from almost no sleep. The grown-ups cry out for coffee, the children start asking how soon they can go home. Eric is convinced he’s lost one of his children, until we find her sleeping in the linen closet. I keep staring ahead and downward. My eyes are full of floaters.

“Hey,” says my teenage nephew Terence. “They told me to come tell you that there are waffles. Plus Grandpa Mervyn has an announcement or something.”

We all crowd inside the kitchen/living room, two dozen of us perched on whatever furniture didn’t go in the bonfire. My father stands at a table piled with waffles, pinging a mimosa glass with a tea spoon. “If I could have your attention,” he says.

Joanna nudges me, like this is it. Robert and I catch each other’s eye for a second, and he shrugs with his hands up. Eric leans forward in his chair, nearly knocking Sebastian and Rosemary off his lap.

My father pauses, milking the suspense. He sips his mimosa and says, “I’m sorry to have to tell you all, I have cancer. It’s already metastasized. I waited too long to get rid of the other lung. Stupid mistake. Most of you will probably never see me alive after today.” He starts passing out waffles, asking people if they want a pat of butter on top, so that nobody has a chance to ask him any questions.

Halfway through the waffle breakfast, we notice that my father has vanished. The metal door leading to his basement laboratory is locked. And there’s a laminated sign saying not to enter, because the air down there is not breathable to normal humans. I make a half-hearted attempt to pound on the door. Joanna tries to talk Dad out of there, but he doesn’t talk back.

An hour later, I’m back in the minivan. Eric is driving twice as fast as before, on almost no sleep. As we crest a giant hill and a dozen windmills appear, Eric says randomly, “I guess we’ll have to wait to find out who gets which part of Dad, until we hear the reading of the will. I’m kind of glad nobody gets to call dibs on anything.” I get a spasm in my shoulder from twisting around to see where we’re going, so I give up and settle for a view of the lengthening road behind us.

My father has never told us much about the weird vision he saw as a young man at sea, except that he called it a maenad and it seemed holy. Although he mentioned once, when I got my first training bra, that the maenad had a dozen breasts, each shaped like a perfect tidal wave. The maenad rose out of the sea spray, almost translucent, and its gaze seemed to encompass the whole of the rusty gunship before narrowing down to my father. The maenad appeared to smile at Dad. That’s how he knew it was time to go home.

The Master Conjurer

Peter did a magic spell, and it worked fine. With no unintended consequences, and no weird side effects.

Two days later, he was on the front page of the local newspaper: “The Miracle Conjurer.” Some blogs picked it up, and soon enough he was getting visits from CNN and MSNBC, and his local NPR station kept wanting to put him on. News crews were standing and talking in front of his house.

By the third day, Peter saw reporters looking through the dumpster in the back of his L-shaped apartment building, which looked like a cheap motel but was actually kind of expensive. He couldn’t walk his Schnauzer-Pit Bull mix, Dobbs, without people—either reporters or just random strangers—coming up and asking him what his secret was. When he went to the office, where he oversaw pilot projects for water desalination, his coworkers kept snooping over the top of his cubicle wall and trying to see his computer screen as he was typing, like they were going to catch him logging in to some secret bulletin board for superwizards.

Peter had a hard time concentrating on work when the TV set in the break room was tuned to CNN, and they were showing his bedroom window, and a million people were staring at the pile of unfolded laundry on his bed and the curtains that Dobbs had recently half-destroyed. Could the Clean Spell revolutionize spellcasting? a voice asked. Was there a secret, and could everyone else learn it? CNN brought on an Enchantress named Monica, who wore a red power blazer. She frequently appeared on talk shows whenever there was a magical murder trial or something.

By day four, Peter’s building was surrounded, and his phone at work pretty much never stopped ringing. People followed him wherever he went. It was only then that it occurred to Peter: Maybe this was the unintended consequence of his spell.

* * *

Peter had never liked looking at pictures of himself, because photos always made him look like a deformed clone of Ben Affleck. His chin was just a little too jutting and bifurcated, his brow a little too much like the bumper of a late-model Toyota Camry. His mousy hair was unevenly receding, his nose a little too knifey. Seeing the least attractive pictures of himself on every newspaper, website, and TV show was starting to make Peter break out in hives.

“I’m not talking to you,” Peter said to his former best friend Derek, the tenth time Derek called him. “You are completely dead to me.”

“Hey, don’t say that, you’re scaring me,” Derek said. “If the Master Conjurer says I’m dead, then I’m worried I’m just not going to wake up tomorrow or something.”

“You were the only one I told about doing the spell,” Peter said. “And now, this.”

Peter was sitting in his car talking on his phone, parked two blocks away from his apartment building because he was scared to go home. Dobbs was probably starting to bounce off the walls. At least the dog seemed a lot happier lately.

“I only told like a couple of people,” Derek said. “And it turned out one of them was best friends with a newspaper reporter. It was an amusing anecdote. Anyway, you know it’ll blow over in a week or two. You’re just like this week’s meme or something.”

“I hope you’re right,” Peter said.

“And you should milk it, while you got it,” Derek said. “Like, you know, you’re famous for doing something perfectly. Something that requires immense concentration and sensory awareness and a lot of heart. Basically, they’re as good as announcing to the entire world that you’re an excellent lover. This is probably the closest you will ever come in your entire life to being a chick magnet.”

“Please stop talking now.” Peter was practically banging his head against the steering wheel of his Dodge Neon. “Just, please, stop.”

The interior of his car always smelled like dog; not like Dobbs—just, like: generic dog. Like a big rangy golden retriever smell. Even if Dobbs hadn’t been in his car for days.

“Okay, okay. Just an idea, man. So are we good?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

Peter hung up and steeled himself to go home and walk the dog, while people asked him his secret over and over. Nobody would ever believe Peter when he said there was no secret—he’d just lucked out, or something. Why couldn’t Peter have gotten an intimidating dog that he could sic on people, like a Doberman or a purebred Pit Bull? If he unleashed Dobbs, someone might end up with a tiny drool stain on one shoe.

* * *

But Peter couldn’t stop thinking about what Derek had said. He hadn’t been on a date, a proper date, for years. His last first date had been Marga, five years ago. Peter wasn’t just out of practice dating, or asking people out—he was out of practice at wanting to. He hadn’t even let himself have a crush on anybody in forever.

He started looking at the women around him as if he could actually be something to them. He didn’t perv anybody, or stare at anyone—after all, everybody was still staring at him, all the time, and his instinct in that situation was to look away, or just hide. But it was hard to go from never noticing women—except in a super-business-like way—to checking them out, and he might have overcompensated. Or maybe he overcompensated for his overcompensation. It was tricky.

Nobody at work was Peter’s type, and anyway they wouldn’t stop asking him over and over if he would do a spell for them. He had already made up his mind that he would never do a spell ever again.

He couldn’t be attracted to any of the women who kept coming up to him when he was trying to eat dinner at the Shabu Palace, either the reporters or the professional witches or the random looky-loos. They were all a little too sharky for him, the way they circled and then homed in, and they mostly looked as though they used insane amounts of product in their hair, so if they ever actually rested their heads on his shoulder, there would be a “crunch” sound.

* * *

The weirdest part wasn’t the stalkers or the peepers or the people asking him to do spells for them. The weirdest part was: After about a week, Peter started noticing that everybody had their own “this one time” story they wanted to tell him. Things had slacked off just enough that Peter wasn’t quite under siege any more, and strangers were having conversations with him on the street instead of just rushing up and blurting questions. And every conversation included a “this one time” story. They were usually really sad, like confessions that people had never told anyone, that—for some reason—they felt safe telling Peter.

Like, one woman with curly red hair and a round white face and a marigold sweater was telling Peter at the supermarket, by the breakfast cereals: “I never tried to do any magic myself. Too risky, you don’t really know. Right? Except this one time, I got wasted and tried to do a spell to make my dad give back the money he stole from my mom. It wasn’t even my problem, but I was worried about Mom, she had a lot of medical expenses with the emphysema. And Dad was just going to waste it on his new girlfriend (she had expensive tastes). So I just wanted him to give back the money he took from my mom’s secret hiding place.”

Peter knew this was the part where he was supposed to ask what terrible fallout the woman’s spell had had.

“Oh,” she said. “My dad went blind. He gave Mom her money back, and as soon as it changed hands, there went his eyesight. I’ve never told anybody this before.” She smiled, nervously, like Peter was going to tell on her. Even though he didn’t even know her name.

“You couldn’t know,” Peter said, like he always said to people after he heard their stories. “You had no way of knowing that would happen. You were trying to do the right thing.”

Peter had done a few spells before he cast the world-famous Clean Casting, which by now had been verified by every professional sorcerer who had a regular television gig. (There had been a lot of incense burning around Peter’s apartment building for a while there, which had helped banish the stench of his neighbor Dorothy’s homebrew experiments.) Peter had taken a spell-casting class at the local community college a few years before, with Marga, and they had done a few really tiny spells, lighting candles from a distance or turning a pinch of sugar into salt. They got used to weird smells or small dead creatures popping up an hour or a day later.

If the spell was small enough, the unintended downside was part of the fun—an amusing little surprise. Oh, look. A goldfish in the mailbox, still flapping about. Get a bowl of water, quick!

By now, the actual doing of the spell—the Clean Casting—felt like a weird dream that Peter had concocted after too many drinks. The more people made a fuss about it, the more he felt like he’d made the whole thing up. But he could still picture it. He’d gotten one of the stone spellcasting bowls they sold on late-night cable TV, and little baggies of all the ingredients, with rejected prog rock band names like Prudenceroot or Womanheart, and sprinkled pinches of them in, while chanting the nonsense syllables and thinking of his desired aim. The spellbook, with its overly broad categories of enchantments that you could slot your specifics into like Mad Libs, was propped open with a package of spaghetti. All of it, he’d done correctly more or less. Not perfect, but right. He’d done it in his oversized pantry, surrounded by mostly empty jars of stale oats and revolting cans of peaches, with Dobbs goggle-eyed and drooling, the only witness.

* * *

The time came when Peter could leave the house again without people shoving things in his face. He still had people coming up to him in the bookstore to ask him if he was that guy, and his coworkers would never stop making weird remarks about it. And he made a point of not googling himself. Or checking his personal email, or going on Facebook.

But just when Peter thought maybe his life was returning to semi-normal, some guy would see him and come running across the street—through traffic—to belt out something about his baby, his baby, Peter had to help, the man needed a spell and the consequences would probably be unbearable if anybody but Peter attempted it. Peter would have to shrug off the crying, red-faced man, and keep going to the pet food store or supermarket.

There was a girl working at the pet food store who apparently knew who Peter was, and didn’t seem to care. She had curly brown hair and really strong lines from the bridge of her nose down around her eyes, which made her look sort of intense and focused. She had a really pointy chin and a pretty nose, and seemed like the kind of person who laughed a lot. Even when she looked serious, which she mostly did. She always smiled at Peter when she rang up the special food that Dobbs needed for his pancreas, but not in a starey way.

Finally, one day, a few weeks after all this started, Peter asked her why she hadn’t ever said anything about his claim to fame. She rolled her eyes. “I dunno, I figured you were sick of hearing about it. Plus, who cares. It’s not like you won the lottery or anything, right?”

Peter immediately asked her if she wanted to grab some dinner sometime. She was like, “Sure. As long as it’s not medicinal dog food.” Her name turned out to be Rebecca.

Actually, they went to the shabu place that was Peter’s favorite restaurant in town. He always felt guilty for eating there alone, which he did often, because it was kind of an interactive experience, where you grilled your own meat and/or made your fancy stew, and you really needed someone else there to join in. The staff wore crisp white uniforms to underscore that they did no actual food preparation themselves. There were tables, but almost everybody sat around a big U-shaped bar in the center, which had little grills embedded in it. The sound system blasted a mixture of Foreigner, 38 Special, Yes, and some J-Pop from a CD-changer.

Peter was nervous about being seen out on a date, and having people act weird about it during or afterward. (Did you cast a “babe magnet” spell? Ha-ha-ha.) But the Shabu Palace was pretty empty, and a few people stared a little bit but it was no big deal. Peter found the meat vapors comforting, like carnal incense.

“I hate this town,” Rebecca said. “It’s just big enough to have restaurants like this, but no actual culture. We don’t even have a roller derby team any more. No offense, but that’s one reason why you’re such a big deal. We finally have a local celebrity again, to replace that sitcom actor who was from here who died." Peter wasn’t offended by that at all; it explained a lot.

Rebecca was saving up money from her pet store gig to go to L.A., where she wanted to go to barista school. Peter didn’t know that was a thing you went to school for, but apparently it was a big deal, like knowing the science of grinding the beans just right and making just the right amount of ristretto and steaming the milk to the edge of burning. And of course latte art and stuff. Rebecca had tried to be a psychologist and a social worker and a vet, but none of those career paths had worked out. But she was excited about the barista thing because it was hip and artistic, and you could write your own ticket. Even start your own fancy café somewhere.

“It’s cool that you’re so ambitious,” Peter said. “I think L.A. would drive me insane.”

“I am guessing L.A. would be okay as long as you don’t want to be a movie star or whatever,” Rebecca said. “I mean, the barista school is probably hella cutthroat. But I can handle that.”

Peter hadn’t really thought of this as a small town—it seemed pretty big to him. There was a freeway, and the downtown with the opera house, and the art museum, and the world headquarters of a major insurance company. And there was a small zoo during the spring and summer, with animals that wintered in Florida somewhere.

“People hate you, you know,” Rebecca told Peter halfway through dinner. “You’re super threatening, because you’re the proof that there’s something wrong with them. If they’d only been good people, they would have gotten away clean, too. Plus, it offends our sense of order. Power should have terrible consequences, or life would be too easy. We want people to suffer for anything good they ever have. People are governed by envy, and a sense of karmic brutality.”

“That’s a very bleak view of human nature,” Peter said. But he found it kind of a turn-on. Misanthropy was just undeniably sexy, the way smoking used to be before you had to do it out in the cold.

It turned out Rebecca had never even tried to do magic herself. “I never wanted to risk it,” Rebecca said. “I’m the least lucky person, of anyone I know. I can only imagine how badly I would be screwed if I tried to bribe the universe to give me a shortcut.”

By now, Peter was really hoping that Rebecca would go home with him. He could almost imagine how cool it would be to have her naked and snarky in his big four-poster bed. Her body heaving to and fro. The way her hair would smell as he buried his face in it. He almost started getting hard under the counter of the Shabu Palace just thinking about it. Bryan Adams was singing about Heaven on the stereo. Everything was perfect.

“So,” Rebecca said, leaning forward in a way that could have been flirtatious or conspiratorial. “I gotta ask. What was the spell that you did? The famous one?”

“Oh man.” Peter almost dropped his meat piece. “You don’t want to know. It’s really dumb. Like really, really dumb.”

“No, come on,” Rebecca said. “I want to know. I’m curious. I won’t judge. I promise.”

“I… I’d rather not say.” Peter realized he’d been about to lift this piece of meat off the grill for a while, and now it was basically a big carcinogenic cinder. He put it in his mouth anyway. “It’s really kind of embarrassing. I don’t even know if it was ethical.”

“Now I really want to know,” Rebecca said.

Peter imagined telling Rebecca what he’d done, and tried to picture the look on her face. Would she laugh, or throw sake at him and tell him he was a bad person? Immature? He couldn’t even go there. Even Bryan Adams suddenly sounded kind of sad, and maybe a little disappointed in Peter.

“I’m sorry,” Peter said. “I think this was maybe a mistake.” He paid for both of them and got the hell out of there.

By the time Peter got home, Dobbs was freaking out because he really needed to go out and do his business. Dobbs ran around a tree three times before peeing on it, like he was worried the tree was going to move out of the way just as Dobbs was letting go. Dobbs looked up at Peter with big round eyes, permanently alarmed.

* * *

Of course, Derek called Peter the next morning and wanted to know how the date went. They ended up going for breakfast at the retro-1970s pancake place downtown, and Peter grudgingly told Derek the whole deal.

“So what you’re saying,” said Derek, “is that you plied her with meat and soft rock, and you had her basically all ready to shabu your shabu. And then she asked a perfectly reasonable question, and you got all weird and bailed on her. Is that a fair summary?”

“Um,” Peter said. “It’s not an unfair summary.”

“Okay,” Derek said. “I think there’s a way this can still work out. Now she thinks you’re complicated and damaged. And that’s perfect. Ladies love men with a few psychic dents and scrapes. It makes you mysterious, and a little intense.”

“You’re the only one I’ve told about that spell,” Peter said. “You didn’t tell anyone what the spell actually was, right?”

“That part, I haven’t told anyone,” Derek said. “I only mentioned the part about how you had no complications.”

“Okay, cool,” said Peter. “I don’t want people to go nuts on me. Even more than they already have.”

“Listen,” Derek said. “I’m kind of worried about you. I think this spell you did is just a symptom. I feel like you’ve been kind of messed up ever since Marga…” Derek trailed off, because Peter was scowling at him. “I just think you shouldn’t be alone so much. I feel like a new relationship, or a fling—either way—would be good for you.”

Derek and Peter had been friends since college, where they’d bonded over hating their History 101 professor, who had a cult following among almost all the other students. Literally a cult—there was a human sacrifice at one of the professor’s after-exam parties, and it’d turned ugly, as human sacrifice so often does. Peter and Derek weren’t so close lately, because Derek had gone into real estate and never had time for Peter; plus until pretty recently Peter had just been hanging out with Marga’s friends all the time. Like Marga herself, her friends were all erudite and artsy, with clever tattoos.

“You don’t have to worry about me,” Peter said. “I’ve got Dobbs. And all I really wanted was to be left alone.”

“We’re not back to that again, are we?” Derek threw his arms up in a pose of martyrdom.

“It’s okay,” Peter said. “The media frenzy seems to have died down, and some other asshole is getting his fifteen minutes now.”

* * *

Peter almost called Rebecca a couple times. He imagined telling her the truth about his spell, and it made him cringe from the balls of his feet to the back of his neck. He always put the phone away, because he didn’t think he could work the “damaged and complicated” angle without telling the whole story. He went to sleep and dreamed of sitting naked with Rebecca in bed, explaining everything. He woke up with Dobbs sitting on his chest, legs tucked under his fat little body, saucer eyes staring at him. Dobbs licked Peter’s chin in slow flicks of his brash tongue. Lick. Lick. Lick.

When Peter went to work, his face was on the television in the break room again. Some expert had concocted a theory: Maybe Peter was the reincarnation of an ancient wizard, or maybe he was some kind of spiritually pure mystic or something. Obviously, if Peter really did know the secret of doing magic without any strings attached, he would be the world’s richest and most powerful man. So he either really didn’t have a secret method, or he was some kind of saint.

This day, in particular, Peter had a progress meeting with some of the other team leaders, and he was trying to explain why the desalination pilot projects he was funding were slow going. It’s easy to add salt to water, but taking it away again is a huge challenge—you have to strip the sodium and chloride ions out of the water somehow, which involves a huge unfeasible energy cost. Peter got halfway through his presentation, when Amanda, who was involved in microfinance in Africa, asked, “So why don’t you just use magic?”

“Um, sorry?” Peter said. He had clicked through to his next slide and had to click back, or risk losing his thread.

“Why not just use magic to remove the salt from the water?” Amanda said. “That gets around the high energy cost, and in fact there might be zero energy cost. Potable water for everybody. Water wars averted. Everybody happy.”

“I don’t really think that’s an option,” Peter said.

“Why not?” Amanda said. Everybody else was nodding. Peter remembered seeing Amanda on television, talking about him a few days earlier. She was the one who’d explained carefully that Peter had a twelve-year-old Dodge Neon and rented a one-bedroom apartment in a crumbling development near the freeway. If he was a master sorcerer, Amanda had told the ladies on The View, Peter was doing a pretty good job of hiding it.

Now Amanda was saying, in the same patient, no-nonsense tone: “Isn’t it irresponsible not to explore all of the options? I mean, let’s say that you really can do magic without some backlash, and you’re the one person on Earth who can. What’s the point spending millions to fund research into industrial desalination when you could just snap your fingers and turn a tanker of salt water into spring water?” This particular day, Amanda was wearing a blue paisley scarf and a gray jacket, along with really high-end blue jeans.

Peter stared at Amanda—whom he’d always admired for helping the poor women in Africa get microloans, and who he never thought would stab him in the back like this—and tried to think of a response. At last, he stammered: “Magic is not a scalable solution.”

Peter fled the meeting soon afterward. He decided to take the rest of the day off work, since he was either fatally irresponsible or secretly the reincarnation of Merlin. He passed Amanda in the hallway on his way to the elevator, and she tried to apologize for putting him on the spot like that, but he just mumbled something and kept walking.

Dobbs wagged his tail as the leash went on, and then tried to play with the leash with one of his front paws, like it was a dangling toy. At last, Dobbs understood that the leash meant going outside and relieving himself, and he trotted.

* * *

Peter went to bed early, with Dobbs curled up on top of his head like a really leaky hat. He dreamed about Rebecca again, and then his phone woke him up, and it was Rebecca calling him. “Whu,” he said.

“Did I wake you?” she said.

“Yes,” Peter scraped Dobbs off his forehead and got his wits together. His bed smelled foggy. “But it’s okay. I was just waking up anyway. And listen, I’ve been meaning to call you. Because I need to explain, and I’m sorry I was such an idiot when we…”

“No time,” Rebecca said. “I called to warn you. There’s been an incident, and they’re probably coming to your house again soon.” She promised to explain everything soon, but meanwhile Peter should get the heck out of there before the TV news crews came back. Because this time, they would be out for blood. Rebecca said she would meet Peter at the big old greasy spoon by the railroad tracks, the one that looked like just another railroad silo unless you noticed the neon sign in the window.

Peter put on jeans and a T-shirt, grabbed Dobbs and got in his Neon just as the first people were getting out of their TV vans. He backed down the driveway so fast he nearly hit one of them and then sped off before they could follow. Just to make sure, he got on and off the freeway three times at different exits.

Rebecca was sitting at the booth in the back of the Traxx Diner, eating silver dollar pancakes and chicken fried steak. The formica table had exactly the same amount of stickiness as Rebecca’s plate. Peter wound up ordering the chicken-fried steak too, because he was suddenly really hungry and it occurred to him he might have skipped dinner.

As soon as Peter had coffee, Rebecca shoved a tablet computer at him, with a newspaper article: “TWELVE DEAD, FIVE CHILDREN UNACCOUNTED FOR IN SCHOOL DISASTER.” One of the headlines further down the page was for a sidebar: “Peter Salmon: Made People Think They Could Get Off Scot Free?” And there was a picture of Peter, giving a thumbs up to a group of people—taken from his site visit to a water purification project in Tulsa two years earlier.

Peter spilled coffee on his pants. The waitress came and poured some more in his cup almost immediately.

“Don’t worry,” Rebecca said. “Ulsa won’t tell anybody you’re here. She’s a friend. Plus she’s really nearsighted so she probably hasn’t gotten a good look at your face.”

“Okay,” Peter said. He was still trying to make sense of this article. Basically, there was a middle school in New Jersey that was coming in at the bottom of the rankings in the standardized tests, and state law would have called for the school to be closed by the end of the year, which, in turn, would wreck property values. So the teachers and some of the parents got together to do a spell to try and raise the children’s test results by twenty percent, across the board. And it had gone very wrong. Like “everyone’s heads had turned to giant crayfish heads” wrong. There were some very gruesome pictures of adults lying around the playground, their beady eyes staring upward. Meanwhile, some of the children had gone missing.

“There’s no way anybody could say this is my fault,” Peter stammered, trying not to look at the corpses with stuff leaking out of their necks, just as Ulsa brought a plate of very crispy chicken-fried steak with some very runny eggs. “I told everybody that I didn’t have any secret. They just wouldn’t listen.”

“Yeah, I know,” Rebecca said. “Like I said, people hate you. This is why I quit my last five jobs, including that pet store gig, which I just bagged on the other day. Everybody feels entitled. I’ve never had a boss who didn’t feel like they ought to own me. People hate realizing that the world won’t just shower them with candy.”

Peter looked at the crayfish heads, then at his chicken-fried steak. In the car outside, through the one window, he could see Dobbs bouncing up and down. Like Dobbs already knew he was getting that steak. Then what Rebecca had said sunk in.

“You quit the pet store job?” Peter said, looking up at her.

“Yeah. They basically wanted me to do unpaid overtime, and they were trying to start a grooming business in the back, and wanted me to help with that as well. I do not groom.”

Peter couldn’t imagine just quitting a job, just like that. He felt his crush on Rebecca splintering a little bit. Like he’d put her on a pedestal too fast. “So what are you going to do now?” he said. “Are you going to go to L.A. and go to barista school?”

“Maybe. The next enrollment isn’t for a few months. I guess I’ll see how it goes.”

Peter made himself eat a little because he was starting to have a full-scale panic attack. He gestured at the tablet without looking at it. “This is going to keep happening. And they’re going to keep trying to make it about me.”

The radio in the diner quit playing some country song about a cheating man, and a news report about the New Jersey tragedy came on. Congress was talking about regulating magic, and there were questions about whether the makers of the spellbook the teachers had used could have some liability, even though it had five pages of disclaimers in tiny print. And there was a mention in passing of the notion that the teachers might have been influenced by the famous Clean Casting.

“What if there really was some secret and you had it?” Rebecca said. “If I were you, I’d be doing more spells and seeing if I could figure out what I did right. You could have anything you wanted. You could raise the dead and feed the hungry.”

“I would never get away with it. I was really selfish and stupid that one time, and I came away with a super-strong feeling that I’d better never try my luck again.”

And then Peter decided to go ahead and tell her about the spell:

“Here’s what happened. I was engaged to this girl named Marga. She was amazing and artistic and creative, and she was always doing things like repainting her apartment with murals, or throwing parties where everybody pretended to be a famous assassin. And she had this cat that was always sickly. Constant vet visits and late-night emergencies. She and I moved in together. And then a few months before the wedding, she met this guy named Breck who was a therapeutic flautist, and she fell in love with him. She wound up going with him to Guatemala to provide music therapy to the victims of the big mudslide there. Leaving me heartbroken, with a sick cat. The cat just got more and more miserable and ill, pining for Marga. We were both inconsolable.”

“I think maybe I can see where this is going,” Rebecca said, picking at her last pancake.

“Dobbs is way happier as a dog, he gets to go out and run around,” Peter said. “His pancreas seems way better, too.”

“So you turned your ex-girlfriend’s cat into a dog. As, like, revenge?”

“It wasn’t revenge, I swear. She doesn’t even know, anyway. I just… Dobbs was really unhappy, and so was I. And this seemed like it was a fresh start for both of us. But part of me felt like maybe I was doing it to get back at Marga, or like I was transforming Dobbs without his consent. And I welcomed the idea of being punished for it. So when the punishment didn’t come, it just made me feel more guilty. I started to hate myself. And maybe that’s why. The more I didn’t get punished, the worse I felt.”

“Huh.” She seemed to be chewing it over for a moment. “I guess that’s not the weirdest thing I’ve heard of people doing to their pets. I mean, at the store, there were people who shaved their pets’ asses. Who does that? And your ex is the one who left her cat behind when she bailed, right? You could have taken him to the ASPCA, and they’d have put him to sleep.”

And just like that, Peter had a crush on her again. Maybe even something stronger than a crush, like his kidneys were pinwheeling and the blood was leaving his head and extremities. He wanted to jump up and hug her and make a loud train-whistle sound. He hadn’t realized how guilty he’d been feeling about Dobbs, until he told someone and they didn’t instantly hate him.

“Do you want to go to L.A.?” Peter said.

“What, now?”

“Yeah. Now. I mean, as soon as we finish breakfast. You can try and go to that barista school, and I can get a job there. I know a guy who works in solar power financing. I’d barely even be famous by L.A. standards.”

For a second, Peter felt like he was totally free. He could leave town, with the girl and the dog and whatever else he had in his car, and never look back. He could be like Marga, except that he wouldn’t abandon Dobbs.

But Rebecca shook her head. Curls splashing. “Sorry. I don’t think I could ever be with someone who thinks it’s a good idea to run away from his problems.”

“What?” And then Peter said the exact wrong thing, before he could stop himself: “But you just told me that you quit your last five jobs.”

“Yes, and that’s called having a spine. Quitting a job isn’t the same thing as running away.”

She got up, and Peter got up too. He was getting a doggie bag for the steak, and he felt as though she was cutting him loose with a pack of wolves on his tail. And then she reached out and unsmudged the corner of his mouth with her thumb, and said: “Listen. I’m going to tell you the secret to getting what you want out of life. Are you ready? Never take any shit from anyone.”

“That’s the secret? Of happiness?”

“I don’t know about happiness. I told you, I’m unlucky.”

She walked back toward her car, then stopped to look at Dobbs, who was bouncing up and down inside Peter’s car, especially now that he could tell Peter was coming back. Dobbs’ eyes were almost perfect spheres, like a Pekingese, and his tongue was sticking out of the side of his mouth, spraying bits of drool. Rebecca leaned over and stuck her hand through the window Peter had left rolled down a bit, and Dobbs licked her. She nodded at Peter, like confirming that yes, the dog was really okay, then went and got in her own car, which was even older and junkier than his.

He watched her drive away. Her radio was playing classic rock. He wasn’t sure how you gave chicken-fried steak to a dog, but he figured he should fork it over while it was hot. Wouldn’t you know it, as soon as he tipped it out of the bag onto the passenger seat and Dobbs started chewing on it, the steak suddenly smelled incredibly good and Peter felt a fierce hunger deep in his core. For a second, part of Peter wanted to snatch the food out of his dog’s mouth.

He thought about what Rebecca had said: Don’t take any shit from anyone. He’d heard people say stuff like that before, but it still felt like a major life philosophy. Like words to live by. He found his phone, which had like twenty messages on it, which he ignored and called Derek.

“Hey, can you do me a favor? Yeah, this is a chance to make up for telling your friend about me in the first place,” he said. “Whatever, I’m over it. But can you go by my house and tell all the people camped out there that I’ll do a press conference or something? At noon. I’ll tell them the whole story about the spell, and answer their questions, and then they will leave me the fuck alone forever after that. Okay? Great.”

After Peter hung up, he watched Dobbs eat the last bits of food. He got back in his car and drove around, trying to think of how to explain himself to everybody so they would leave him alone afterwards.

“Hey guy.” Peter stroked Dobbs behind the ears when they were at a stoplight. “Are you ready for your moment in the spotlight?” In response, Dobbs extended his head, blinked, and sprayed vomit all over the inside of Peter’s car. Then Dobbs sprawled in the seat, as if he’d just accomplished something awesome, and started to purr loudly. Like a jackhammer.

Love Might Be Too Strong a Word

Here’s how I remember it:

A touch shocked me. I was reaching for a flash-seared bog-oyster, and then a fingertip, softer than I’d ever felt, brushed my knuckle. The softness startled me so much, it took me a moment to realize the hand had seven fingers, three more than mine.

Be held a striped cloth in ber other hand. I came up with the correct pronoun by instinct, even before my mind took in the fact that a pilot was touching my hand. Holy shit, a pilot!

I turned. Be smiled at me, mouth impossibly small, eyes panoramic and limpid. So beautiful I wanted to choke. “You dropped this,” be said. My bandana looked so foreign in ber fingers, I almost didn’t recognize it.

And then be tied it around my neck, so gently I couldn’t help shivering. Those fingers!

And then, it opened. Just a tiny dilation, but I almost had to lean against the cafeteria table. Everyone in the universe was watching. I knew, without reaching around, that there was a teeny wet spot on the small of my back.

Until that moment, I’d barely ever thought about my harnt, the little hole just above my tailbone. It was just there. It had never opened on its own, much less gotten wet. And nobody had ever touched it, of course. And now, somehow it knew.

My harnt closed again, but it didn’t make as tight a seal as before. Or at least, it felt restless. It was going to bother me. Right now, it was all I could think about.

The pilot had finished tying my bandana, but kept looking at me. “You’re so lovely,” be said to me. “What’s your name?

“Mab.” I managed to avoid stammering.

“Short for Mabirelle.” Be smiled. “I’m Dot.” And then be bowed and left me to face the stares of my fellow dailys.

* * *

Here’s how they tell it:

Ah love, mystery confounding! Oh lovers, your sighs the dark matter that limns our course. Who can understand the ways of love: ever cruel, ever bountiful? Not the boides, not the breeders, not even the spirers with their countless eyes and base-27 calculations!

Dot lo Manaret, honored third-level pilot of the City, known for ber gallantry and aplomb, was never word-lost. Until the day be wandered down to the daily canteen and ber eyes fell upon the surpassing loveliness of Mabirelle, most radiant of all the dailys. In that instant, Dot’s heart fell into Mabirelle’s pocket, and Dot’s eyes, which had encompassed interstellar space, now had one vista only. Lost was Dot, lost forever, to the love of Mabirelle!

A chasm wider than the Inner Axis separated these two lovers, one from the highest dar, the other from the lowest. Pity poor Dot and Mabirelle, their love against all society’s norms, their furtive meetings stolen from the moments between their far-separate undertakings. Theirs must be a fleeting happiness, but how bright the afterimage!

Love, why do you torment us so? Why must we pine, so far from our Cluster and from our new homeworld? Is happiness a mere whisper on the edge of daydreams? Why, love, why? But love, as ever, disdains to answer. Our tears must be question and answer both!

Love! Love is all they ever talk about, and I’ve avoided it like the unshielded areas where the Outringers work. The stupid, stupid courtship, the crappy poetry, the singing, the dreamliminals… they consume our lives when we’re not working, and usually even when we are. It’s a miracle the City hadn’t spun off course into an Oort cloud long ago.

But really, it’s true. The City runs on love. It keeps us sane, more or less. Unlike the dark matter that flows into our massive converters, it’s an infinitely renewable fuel. As to whether it pollutes, you probably already have your own opinions about that.

Right after the bandana incident, my sibs started treating me differently. “Mab, I heard be kissed you! That darling little mouth!” “Mab, isn’t be beautiful? Oh, of course be’s beautiful!” Sometimes they teased: “Mab’s going to be a pilot’s mate! Mab, what’s your secret? Did you steal a holo-shield?” I know for a fact that a few of the other dailys have been with pilots, but furtively, in dark song-booths or under laundry decks.

One daily even tried to sneak me a bubble of some noxious substance. I was supposed to squirt it onto my harnt to make it more pleasant to Dot when be manned me. As if I would ever let that happen.

Because we clean the entire City, handle the waste units and supply the food, dailys go everywhere. The lower middle dars, the boides and the outringers, romance us sometimes. The upper middle dars, occasionally. But no pilot had ever romanced a daily, as far as any of us remembered. Until now.

I figured a few days would pass, then the stupid talk would stop and the other dailys would go back to being my friends and letting me finger them in their bunks when nobody was looking.

Then the poem showed up. Typical courtship crap: Dot tight-beamed it to my handle, but “forgot” to encrypt it. Which means everybody in the City saw it before I did. “No food can I taste, my course corrections go awry. I falter in everything, dreaming of your touch. Oh Mabirelle! Your Dot will die without you.”

In other words: “Woman to me, or I’ll send the City a fraction off course, and we’ll all die in starless space.” And that’s supposed to be romantic!

At that point, I was doomed. They all took turns reading it and squealing. My so-called best friend, Idra, kept hugging me and jumping up and down until I wanted to smack ym. “Mab, it’s so beautiful! It’s like something from a sugar-box holo!”

“Oh yeah, it’s great.” I didn’t even try to sound excited.

It’s weird: I would have given anything for the other dailys to stop being ashamed of me. Even when they let me finger all their holes after lights-out, they wouldn’t look at me. They were always trying to introduce me to some dashing boide so I could woman like everybody else. Ever since we left the Cluster, they kept trying to fix me. Now, for the first time, they were proud of me, and I wanted to die.

I don’t woman. I just don’t.

Oh, I have the involuntary responses just like everybody else. When I meet a particularly stout outringer, my ruhr feels a little itchy. I make a habit of wearing a scarf when I clean the outringers’ quarters, so they won’t see anything. But I just don’t like the idea.

A couple of days after the poem, Dot turned up again. Oh, be didn’t come over and say hi like a normal person. Of course not. Instead, be turned up in the cafeteria where we’d first met, perched on top of the air shaft on ber knees. Be had all fourteen fingers on a big flarinelle and was playing some dirge-y shanty while moaning about how ber heart was imploding for the love of me. Be wore an outfit with a million laces and buckles, maybe just to remind me just how clever ber fingers were.

I wanted to turn and run back to the dailys’ hab areas, but my sibs all grabbed me and cried all over my favorite quicksuit. I had to stay and listen to the whole fucking thing. Dot couldn’t sing to save ber life. After that, I was the dailys’ greatest romantic hero ever. When was I going to send a poem back? When would I acknowledge Dot’s suffering?

The next day, I was on my hands and knees scrubbing the boides’ segment. They always claim our knees and backs are genetically engineered to make us better scrubbers. They’re filthy liars. Or at least it’s not enough. I hate cleaning up after the boides, who track all sorts of crap from the power units. At least I don’t have to clean the power units themselves, since my body isn’t designed to withstand those forces the way the boides are.

Anyway, I was crawling around trying to clean up some stuff that I didn’t even want to think about. I heard some motion behind me, and scuttled around to see a boide staring at where my ass had just been.

At first, I thought po wanted to sexually harass me, which is what the boides usually want when I’m working. Dailys, like me, are pretty much the only dar the boides can man. They woman to the pilots, the outringers and the breeders. I’ve heard the boides can man the spirers, too, but it probably doesn’t happen much.

“I had a great love once,” the boide said. “And I let zm slip away, and I’ve never forgiven myself.” Oh great. Romantic advice. All of a sudden, I wished the boide would just grope me. I could tell po wanted to, from the matching bulges on either side of por hip bones. But no. “We’re in space for countless decades, but in all that time you may only get one chance at a great love,” po said.

“Just because you blew off some dumb breeder once, doesn’t mean you get to give me advice.” I looked por over: a little less squat and greasy than most boides, but still a solid brick of muscle and radiation-resistant hide. But nimble, the way you have to be if you manipulate the City’s power grid.

“The breeders and the pilots are different from you and me,” po said. “They have higher concerns, loftier thoughts. When they train that light on us, it can feel like we’re going to burn up. But it’s the closest to real meaning, to glory, we can get.”

Normally, the boides treat us as if we’re way beneath them. It’s only in comparison to a pilot that po and I could become “we.” Or if po wanted to man me, we might be “we” for an hour or two. And po did want me, those twin bulges don’t lie.

“Thanks for the advice,” I said. “I feel loftier already.”

“Don’t laugh it off. When love comes, you have to,” blah blah blah. Po kept it up for the next hour or so, while I scrubbed and scraped. There are cleaning machines, of course, but they don’t do such a great job with the really nasty stains. And the spirers are too busy doing “exalted” things to upgrade them.

* * *

It went on like that. People giving me advice. Worse, the other dailys wouldn’t let me touch them anymore after lights out. “Mab, we let you touch us when there’s nothing better around,” Idra told me while we waited to step into the bathing tubes. “But a pilot! I mean, don’t you think you should save yourself?”

“For what?” I asked, but then the tubes opened and we stepped in, to fall through a tunnel where water, and then supercompressed air, sprayed us. I’ve heard the pilots and spirers have baths.

I could never get tired of seeing Idra naked, even though I’ve bathed with ym so many times now, and touched ym in yr bunk. Even though Idra drove me nuts with yr crushes and yr face-pastes and yr romance dreamliminals, y kept me sane. I didn’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t talk to Idra. Maybe I even loved ym. A little.

We’d met back in the Cluster, when we were both training for this voyage. Idra and I had been grown for this mission, but we still had to train and prove ourselves. Basic safety stuff, mostly, since the City can’t replace us if we get ourselves killed out here. Idra was the only other one, besides me, in our class who’d asked about other stuff, like how the City navigated and how the power grid worked (or failed to, sometimes).

I’d started hanging out with Idra all the time between classes, and we’d laugh at the silly questions some of the other dailys asked, about how to get face-paste in the City. I’d thought yr and I would always share everything, until the City launched and y fell in love for the first time, with an outringer. Ever since then, it was one crush after another, putting Idra in an elliptical orbit away from me and then back to me when it fell apart. I’d mostly gotten used to it.

“You know,” I told Idra when we were dressing afterwards. “There are only two reasons people are so love-crazy around here. Because the only children in the City are the dormant embryos in the breedpods, waiting for planetfall. And because it helps us forget we’re stuck at the bottom of the heap forever.”

“If you talk to Dot like that, be’ll drop you like a used snot-catcher,” Idra told me. Y had a warning look in yr eyes and mouth, but yr nose wrinkled the way it always did when I made ym laugh.

“That’s a good idea,” I said. “Maybe I’ll try that.”

Actually, here was my problem. I wanted to say no to Dot, but be never gave me a chance. Be never even asked me if I wanted to pair-bond with ber, or go live in the Pilot Quarter, or whatever. Be just kept sending little crystal cameos, serenading me from a safe distance, paying other dailys to make little delicacies for me. (A pilot wouldn’t know how to cook to save ber life.) Be never came close enough for me to respond.

And yet, I was cruel. I was coy. I tormented Dot. Or so Dot claimed, and so the balladeers announced to the whole City. I was killing a pilot, one of only 500 in the whole City, with my coldness. Had anyone ever been as cruel as me? In the entire history of the City, and the Cluster before that? Speaking of which, I was famous enough now that my sibs back in the Cluster were going to hear about this.

“I don’t get it,” I told Idra. “What am I supposed to do anyway? When be threw all those bright catsilk bandanas down to me from the upper walkway, I tried to avoid catching them, but you guys grabbed them for me. How am I supposed to respond?”

“Write back,” Idra said. “Write a poem, or if you can’t manage that, a regular letter. I’ll tight-beam it for you. You don’t even have to write it yourself, I’ll write it for you.”

Oh, Idra. I never wanted to be you, but I always want to be with you. I certainly never wanted you to want to be me.

“Can I write a letter asking ber to leave me alone?”

“It’ll just make ber try harder. Or maybe be’ll go away permanently, throw berself into the boides’ radiation zone. You can’t trifle with love, Mab. Love is the most powerful force in the universe. Love is unstoppable, unfathomable.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Love. Got it.”

* * *

I have no idea how long Dot could have gone on courting me, showering me with tears from those massive eyes. I took the initiative. I sent Dot a message telling ber to meet me in one of the song-booths in the dailys’ quarter, where my sibs go to have furtive sex with other dars.

Dot wrote back, a dozen sonnets filled with leaping jubilation that I would hear ber suit in person. But couldn’t we meet someplace more romantic? Someplace more beautiful? There were some lovely little restaurants in the pilot quarter. (I knew that, since I’d worked in their kitchens.) Or we could sail a skimmer around the edge of the Outring, on dalfur cushions, with a flarinelle trio playing to us.

“Sorry,” I wrote back. “You come to me, or no meeting.”

I booked a song-booth and paid for it myself. Instead of some schlocky flarinelle music, I ordered up a couple hours of the most raucous slash-and-grab, the stuff they’re always threatening to ban. I got there early, so I’d be sitting with my feet up when Dot got there.

I’ll let you pretend you’ve never been inside a song-booth. Basically, they’re coffin-shaped, with a bench running lengthwise and a big screen overhead showing patterns or dumb holo-stories. Big speakers at either end. Unless you’re really tall, you can just about sit on the bench if you scoot down, but eventually it becomes easier to lay on it lengthwise, which is what it’s really there for. Nobody ever goes there to listen to music and watch pretty colors, unless they’re really, really dumb.

Dot had feathers all over ber slender body. There are no birds in the City, of course, and I’ve never even seen a bird. But I’ve cleaned up feathers and had a chance to examine them. They’re synthetic, but intricate, with little strands that catch the light.

I hadn’t seen Dot, up close, since our first meeting. I’d forgotten quite how delicate and lovely be was, how elegant those little bones. I wasn’t prepared for the sudden awakening of my harnt and the tightness inside my stomach.

“Oh Mab! Oh my Mabirelle! You do so much kindness to my poor faltering heart!” Dot had obviously memorized tons of this crap.

“Shut up and listen,” I said. “I’ve figured out why you’re doing this.”

“There is no reason, other than your beauty, which so dazzles my eyes that all other sights are cataracted to me.”

“I said shut up. And sit down, you’re making me nervous.” I gestured at the greasy cushion next to me. “So here’s what I think: you’re doing this for attention. You were losing status, or playing some pilot game that the rest of us don’t even grasp, and you decided to make yourself the hero in some epic love story. The pilot who fell in love with a daily against all odds. They’ll sing about you forever, if you don’t get thrown out of the upper rings for sullying your honor. It’s a gamble, but you’re a shrewd one. Am I right?”

“Oh, my Mabirelle. Your wisdom is second only to your beauty, which far surpasses the brightest jewels. But no, you’re wrong. There’s no purpose to my love other than love itself. And no cure for my love other than your love returned to me.”

“I was afraid you’d say that. Okay, let’s go. I’ll do you right here.”

“But I—that’s not what I—”

“If it’ll end this. Come on, get all those feathers off you. I’ve never seen a pilot naked. I’m curious.”

And I was curious. It’s weird that pilots are the opposite of dailys, but most of us never get to see what they look like under their fancy ruffles. I helped Dot out of ber five layers (!) of clothing, and slowly ber body revealed itself. Be stared at me, terrified, as I ran my hands over ber.

Naked, Dot was even more gorgeous than dressed. I couldn’t stop swallowing. Be was all long sinews and soft skin. Ber body was much the same shape as mine, or any other human, but slender where mine was stout. And be had all those extra appendages, where I only had holes.

“What does this one do?” I pointed to a long vine that curled out from Dot’s sternum.

“It’s uh, it’s my zud, for manning a spirer. They have an opening on that part of their bodies just for pilots, called the duz. It takes three days, and there are fifteen required positions.” It went on like that. The three bony prongs sticking out just below ber stomach were for manning a breeder, and ber thighs had matching lumps, which could expand to man an outringer. No matter what your dar, Dot had a way to man you. Just like I could woman to all the other dars.

“Don’t you want to see my, uh, my tharn?” Dot gestured to ber lower back, where the outie that matched my innie was quivering with excitement. Be started to turn around, but I stopped ber. Just being so close to ber naked body was making my harnt throb, opening and closing spasmodically like a busted airlock.

“Not really,” I said. “There’s no rush. And I’m curious.” I tried stroking some of the tendrils and spokes coming from the front of Dot’s body. Dot moaned with pleasure, but they didn’t grow any bigger, because I was the wrong dar to excite them. Pheromones.

“Don’t you want me to, uh, to man you?” Dot looked from ber naked body to the quicksuit I was still wearing. It kept ber from seeing that my lumbar region was soaked.

“Nope. I don’t woman. But I’ll man you if you want.”

I didn’t think it was possible for Dot’s eyes to get any bigger, but they did. Ber eyes were as big as my thumbs.

“Pilots always man, dailys always woman. That’s just how it is.”

“That’s not how I play. You have openings. I have tools. And fingers.” My pinky was almost too big for Dot’s mouth, but I made it fit. Be sucked on it, half moaning and half gulping. I felt like I was going to implode, I was so skin-crazy.

* * *

I left Dot naked and flushed, thanking me through bewildered tears. No more poetry, thank god.

I figured after that, Dot would leave me alone. I might have an even worse reputation than before, depending on what people heard. But that could be a good thing, and maybe some of the dailys would respect me a little more when they heard I’d manned a pilot.

I had to giggle to myself when I thought those words. I manned a pilot! Whatever came next would totally be worth it.

“You did what?” Idra hissed. Y dragged me further away from the other dailys, just in case they had super-hearing. We were in the noisiest canteen, with the crispiest deep-fried bog-oysters. (Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but those things aren’t oysters. They grow on the coolant ducts, they’re a kind of fungus.) The canteen’s walls had been bright red when we’d left the Cluster, but by now they were maroon, and the floors were sticky no matter how much we mopped.

“You heard me.” I giggled again. Normally, Idra was the giggler and I was the frowner. Oh, this was so worth it.

“How could you? I always knew you were… unnatural. But this? You could be killed! You could be killed and nobody would ever say anything. Stop laughing, Mab! I don’t know what I’d do. I don’t want to lose you. If Dot tells anyone, if be even whispers it, they’ll just erase you! I couldn’t bear that. Mab, why didn’t you think about me, before you went and threw everything away?”

It went on like that, Idra keeping yr voice low enough that none of the other dailys had a clue. It was so weird, I had to go and man a pilot to find out that Idra loved me too. Love might be too strong a word, but whatever. You get the idea.

“Idra, calm down. Be’s not going to tell anyone. What’s be going to say?”

“Exactly. What is be going to say? Think about the position you put ber in. After weeks of public courtship, you agreed to meet ber in private. Everyone is going to want to know what happened. And be is going to say… what? That you manned ber? That be manned you? That you rejected ber? What?”

Why did things have to be so complicated? Be wanted me, so I took ber. Why wasn’t that the end of it? But even as I was reassuring Idra that everything was fine, I felt another sensation, as unfamiliar as my harnt’s opening had been. They could erase me any time they wanted. I felt weak inside.

* * *

“Oh chaste Mabirelle! Oh cruel, virtuous Mabirelle, that withstood temptation’s nearness with yr far-seeing gaze! How can we praise your inviolate harnt, O Mabirelle?”

I was as shocked as anyone else. Apparently, I wasn’t a crazy slut, I was a chaste virgin. Who had cruelly denied Dot’s advances even though we were in a tiny padded and sound-proofed tube. Though Dot importuned me, I preserved my virtue. Dot proved this by showing someone that ber tharn retained its outer membrane, which meant it had never been inside me.

I didn’t even know that a pilot’s tharn had an outer membrane. You learn something new every day.

As the story went, I had arranged the song-booth meeting as an elaborate test to see if Dot could respect my chastity in such close quarters. As if Dot would have been capable of overpowering me anyway! And now that Dot had passed the test, I had agreed to hear ber pair-bonding proposal.

I was grateful to Dot for coming up with an explanation of the facts that didn’t require anyone to toss me into the Inner Axis. But proposals? The way Idra explained it, I wasn’t committed to pair-bonding with Dot, just hearing ber suit.

Nobody even knew how pair-bonding would work between a pilot and a daily. It wasn’t very likely that I’d be able to go live with Dot, and the idea of Dot trying to share my bunk in a roomful of twenty dailys made me giggle. With no children and no property, it was mostly a fancy license for Dot and me to do what we’d already done in that song-booth. Except maybe the other way around.

So this time I had to go up to the pilot quarter, where the air is purer and the gravity lighter. Gleaming star-charts on all the walls and varvet covering every surface. I had to keep ducking to avoid the little nozzles spraying perfumey crap and aromatherapy at me. I usually wore my bandana around my mouth and nose when I cleaned around here, but I figured Dot might take it as an insult.

“Hey,” I said to Dot. “Thanks, for coming up with a good story. You’re good at that, huh? Telling stories. I have to kick myself to keep from believing the stuff you say about me, and I know myself pretty well.”

Dot started saying it was all true, and then some. Be wore even more layers than last time, if that was possible, and sat cross-legged on the edge of a massive crescent-shaped couch on the edge of a fake gravity well. You could toss things into it and watch them shrink to a singularity, but it was just an illusion. Dot didn’t need to wear the extra buckles, since I would hardly molest ber with five chaperones watching us from just outside earshot.

“Anyway, I’m grateful to you. Which is why I’m here,” I said, sitting a decent distance away from ber on the crescent thingy.

“Mabirelle, because I love you so, I want to be totally honest with you,” Dot said. That sounded like a good idea, so I nodded. Be went on: “I told you the truth before, when I said there was no hidden agenda here. But there is something you don’t know. Can you keep a secret?”

“You have no idea how many secrets I’ve kept,” I said. “You can trust me, don’t worry.”

Dot had to pause to offer me chocolates and little cameos, and order up fancy music. Then be went on. “The spirers think they’ve developed a much more accurate long-range scanning technique by combining stellar resonance and high-spectrum ghosting.” Be waited for me to murmur my understanding, then went on. “We think it’s dead.”

“What’s dead?” At first I thought be meant the little dove-hen I was holding.

“The planet. Our colony world. Coriolanus, or whatever they’re calling it this week. The breedpods won’t function there, the breeders won’t be able to sustain a new generation.”

“So we left the Cluster for nothing. We’re sailing towards nothing. This, all of this, is all for nothing.” I gestured around, to indicate the whole City.

“Yes.”

“Can we turn back?” I already knew the answer before be shook ber head, but it still felt like a crack in my gut. Be started talking about desperate alternatives: slingshot maneuvers, stellar recharges, increased dark-matter efficiency, but I was still saying “dead world” to myself, over and over. “Dead world.”

“I can’t stand it among the other pilots any more, or any of the upper dars. The spirers with all those fingers, with their base-27 cleverness. The breeders, tending those breedpods as if they’re going to amount to something. It all makes me feel so hopeless. But when I’m with you, it’s different. I feel alive. Like life is worth something after all.”

I started to ask why we couldn’t tell everyone the truth, but that was a stupid question, and I don’t ask stupid questions. If I thought people in this City were crazy now, just imagine if they knew they were trapped and it was pointless.

“Love,” I muttered. “Fucking love. It can’t save you from shit. It’s just anesthetic.”

“Maybe,” Dot said. “But it’s life-saving. Mabirelle, I meant everything I said before. Your beauty, your wisdom, the longing inside me. It wasn’t a pantomime, or a distraction from my existential crisis. It was itself. I love you, and I can’t bear to be away from you.”

I didn’t love Dot, but I liked ber more and more. Even though be had left me in an ugly spot. I could turn ber down, but then what? I could spend the next few decades among the dailys, knowing we were going nowhere. The dailys would never treat me the same after this, once I went from being the romantic heroine to being the fool who spurned a pilot. They might never let me touch them again. And I wasn’t sure I could go back to being who I’d been, even if they’d let me.

I took a deep breath and looked around this foolish room. I couldn’t help laughing, and then I had to reassure Dot that I wasn’t laughing at ber. “Sorry, sorry. It’s just all this. How can you live like this? It’s ridiculous.”

“I’m used to it, I guess,” Dot said. “You know what they say about pilots, we’re not like other people. I know everyone makes fun of us behind our backs.”

“Yeah, but not as much as they make fun of the spirers.” I got my giggles under control and then looked into Dot’s eyes, which looked like they could swallow me whole. “Listen, I can’t live here. But I can’t go back either. Can you make me a little love-nest, like in those dumb dreamliminals? A little place where I can live and you can visit? Not in the daily quarter, but not here either.”

Dot thought about it for a moment, then started rattling off the various lavish apartments in the interstices between the City quarters, where I could live in luxury. Eventually, be came up with something a bit more realistic, but still comfortable. Even if I was going to be a kept daily, I didn’t want to be over the top.

“I guess we can give it a try,” I said. “Just two more things. I want my friend Idra to come live with me. So I don’t go nuts with loneliness when you’re not around. Y needs yr own space, so y can entertain whoever y’s madly in love with this week. And the other thing is, I won’t woman to you. I can think of a few other ways to get rid of that pesky membrane on your tharn, don’t worry. But I just don’t like the idea of back-to-back sex, it’s too weird. Oh, and my name is Mab, not Mabirelle or anything else. Okay?”

It wasn’t the kind of courtship Dot had had in mind. And when the minstrels sang of our pair-bonding and the dreamliminals recreated it, they portrayed it very differently. The quivering Dot, the beautiful unyielding Mabirelle, the hours of ardent supplication before I finally consented to turn my back on ber and become ber mate, all that crap. I had to bite my tongue whenever people started carrying on. But I was starting to learn that you had to leave people their romantic illusions.

Because Change Was the Ocean and We Lived by Her Mercy

1. This was sacred, this was stolen

We stood naked on the shore of Bernal and watched the candles float across the bay, swept by a lazy current off to the north, in the direction of Potrero Island. A dozen or so candles stayed afloat and alight after half a league, their tiny flames bobbing up and down, casting long yellow reflections on the dark water alongside the streaks of moonlight. At times I fancied the candlelight could filter down onto streets and buildings, the old automobiles and houses full of children’s toys, all the waterlogged treasures of long-gone people. We held hands, twenty or thirty of us, and watched the little candle-boats we’d made as they floated away. Joconda was humming an old reconstructed song about the wild road, hir beard full of flowers. We all just about held our breath. I felt my bare skin go electric with the intensity of the moment, like this could be the good time we’d all remember in the bad times to come. This was sacred, this was stolen. And then someone—probably Miranda—farted, and then we were all laughing, and the grown-up seriousness was gone. We were all busting up and falling over each other on the rocky ground, in a nude heap, scraping our knees and giggling into each other’s limbs. When we got our breath back and looked up, the candles were all gone.

2. I felt like i had always been wrong headed

I couldn’t deal with life in Fairbanks any more. I grew up at the same time as the town, watched it go from regular city to mega-city as I hit my early twenties. I lived in an old decommissioned solar power station with five other kids, and we tried to make the loudest, most uncomforting music we could, with a beat as relentless and merciless as the tides. We wanted to shake our cinderblock walls and make people dance until their feet bled. But we sucked. We were bad at music, and not quite dumb enough not to know it. We all wore big hoods and spiky shoes and tried to make our own drums out of drycloth and cracked wood, and we read our poetry on Friday nights. There were bookhouses, along with stinktanks where you could drink up and listen to awful poetry about extinct animals. People came from all over, because everybody heard that Fairbanks was becoming the most civilized place on Earth, and that’s when I decided to leave town. I had this moment of looking around at my musician friends and my restaurant job and our cool little scene, and feeling like there had to be more to life than this.

I hitched a ride down south and ended up in Olympia, at a house where they were growing their own food and drugs, and doing a way better job with the drugs than the food. We were all staring upwards at the first cloud anybody had seen in weeks, trying to identify what it could mean. When you hardly ever saw them, clouds had to be omens.

We were all complaining about our dumb families, still watching that cloud warp and contort, and I found myself talking about how my parents only liked to listen to that boring boo-pop music with the same three or four major chords and that cruddy AAA/BBB/CDE/CDE rhyme scheme, and how my mother insisted on saving every scrap of organic material we used, and collecting every drop of rainwater. “It’s fucking pathetic, is what it is. They act like we’re still living in the Great Decimation.”

“They’re just super traumatized,” said this skinny genderfreak named Juya, who stood nearby holding the bong. “It’s hard to even imagine. I mean, we’re the first generation that just takes it for granted we’re going to survive, as like a species. Our parents, our grandparents, and their grandparents, they were all living like every day could be the day the planet finally got done with us. They didn’t grow up having moisture condensers and myco-protein rinses and skinsus.”

“Yeah, whatever,” I said. But what Juya said stuck with me, because I had never thought of my parents as traumatized. I’d always thought they were just tightly wound and judgey. Juya had two cones of dark twisty hair on zir head and a red pajamzoot, and zi was only a year or two older than me but seemed a lot wiser.

“I want to find all the music we used to have,” I said. “You know, the weird, noisy shit that made people’s clothes fall off and their hair light on fire. The rock ’n roll that just listening to it turned girls into boys, the songs that took away the fear of god. I’ve read about it, but I’ve never heard any of it, and I don’t even know how to play it.”

“Yeah, all the recordings and notations got lost in the Dataclysm,” Juya said. “They were in formats that nobody can read, or they got corrupted, or they were printed on disks made from petroleum. Those songs are gone forever.”

“I think they’re under the ocean,” I said. “I think they’re down there somewhere.”

Something about the way I said that helped Juya reach a decision. “Hey, I’m heading back down to the San Francisco archipelago in the morning. I got room in my car if you wanna come with.”

Juya’s car was an older solar model that had to stop every couple hours to recharge, and the self-driving module didn’t work so great. My legs were resting in a pile of old headmods and biofills, plus those costooms that everybody used a few summers earlier that made your skin turn into snakeskin that you could shed in one piece. So the upshot was, we had a lot of time to talk and hold hands and look at the endless golden landscape stretching off to the east. Juya had these big bright eyes that laughed when the rest of zir face was stone serious, and strong tentative hands to hold me in place as zi tied me to the car seat with fronds of algae. I had never felt as safe and dangerous as when I crossed the wasteland with Juya. We talked for hours about how the world needed new communities, new ways to breathe life back into the ocean, new ways to be people.

By the time we got to Bernal Island and the Wrong Headed community, I was in love with Juya, deeper than I’d ever felt with anyone before.

Juya up and left Bernal a week and a half later, because zi got bored again, and I barely noticed that zi was gone. By then, I was in love with a hundred other people, and they were all in love with me.

Bernal Island was only accessible from one direction, from the big island in the middle, and only at a couple times of day when they let the bridge down and turned off the moat. After a few days on Bernal, I stopped even noticing the other islands on our horizon, let alone paying attention to my friends on social media talking about all the fancy new restaurants Fairbanks was getting. I was constantly having these intense, heartfelt moments with people in the Wrong Headed crew.

“The ocean is our lover, you can hear it laughing at us.” Joconda was sort of the leader here. Sie sometimes had a beard and sometimes a smooth round face covered with perfect bright makeup. Hir eyes were as gray as the sea and just as unpredictable. For decades, San Francisco and other places like it had been abandoned, because the combination of seismic instability and a voracious dead ocean made them too scary and risky. But that city down there, under the waves, had been the place everybody came to, from all over the world, to find freedom. That legacy was ours now.

And those people had brought music from their native countries and their own cultures, and all those sounds had crashed together in those streets, night after night. Joconda’s own ancestors had come from China and Peru, and hir great-grandparents had played nine-stringed guitars, melodies and rhythms that Joconda barely recalled now. Listening to hir, I almost fancied I could put my ear to the surface of the ocean and hear all the sounds from generations past, still reverberating. We sat all night, Joconda, some of the others and myself, and I got to play on an old-school drum made of cowhide or something. I felt like I had always been Wrong Headed, and I’d just never had the word for it before.

Juya sent me an email a month or two after zi left Bernal: The moment I met you, I knew you needed to be with the rest of those maniacs. I’ve never been able to resist delivering lost children to their rightful homes. It’s almost the only thing I’m good at, other than the things you already knew about. I never saw zir again.

3. “I’m so glad i found a group of people i would risk drowning in dead water for.”

Back in the 21st century, everybody had theories about how to make the ocean breathe again. Fill her with quicklime, to neutralize the acid. Split the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, and bond the hydrogen with the surplus carbon in the water to create a clean-burning hydrocarbon fuel. Release genetically engineered fish, with special gills. Grow special algae that was designed to commit suicide after a while. Spray billions of nanotech balls into her. And a few other things. Now, we had to clean up the after-effects of all those failed solutions, while also helping the sea to let go of all that CO_2 from before.

The only way was the slow way. We pumped ocean water through our special enzyme store and then through a series of filters, until what came out the other end was clear and oxygen-rich. The waste, we separated out and disposed of. Some of it became raw materials for shoe soles and roof tiles. Some of it, the pure organic residue, we used as fertilizer or food for our mycoprotein.

I got used to staying up all night playing music with some of the other Wrong Headed kids, sometimes on the drum and sometimes on an old stringed instrument that was made of stained wood and had a leering cat face under its fret. Sometimes I thought I could hear something in the way our halting beats and scratchy notes bounced off the walls and the water beyond, like we were really conjuring a lost soundtrack. Sometimes it all just seemed like a waste.

What did it mean to be a real authentic person, in an era when everything great from the past was twenty feet underwater? Would you embrace prefab newness, or try to copy the images you can see from the handful of docs we’d scrounged from the Dataclysm? When we got tired of playing music, an hour before dawn, we would sit around arguing, and inevitably you got to that moment where you were looking straight into someone else’s eyes and arguing about the past, and whether the past could ever be on land, or the past was doomed to be deep underwater forever.

I felt like I was just drunk all the time, on that cheap-ass vodka that everybody chugged in Fairbanks, or maybe on nitrous. My head was evaporating, but my heart just got more and more solid. I woke up every day on my bunk, or sometimes tangled up in someone else’s arms and legs on the daybed, and felt actually jazzed to get up and go clean the scrubbers or churn the mycoprotein vats.

Every time we put down the bridge to the big island and turned off our moat, I felt everything go sour inside me, and my heart went funnel-shaped. People sometimes just wandered away from the Wrong Headed community without much in the way of goodbye—that was how Juya had gone—but meanwhile, new people showed up and got the exact same welcome that everyone had given to me. I got freaked out thinking of my perfect home being overrun by new selfish loud fuckers. Joconda had to sit me down, at the big table where sie did all the official business, and tell me to get over myself because change was the ocean and we lived on her mercy. “Seriously, Pris. I ever see that look on your face, I’m going to throw you into the myco vat myself.” Joconda stared at me until I started laughing and promised to get with the program.

And then one day I was sitting at our big table, overlooking the straits between us and the big island. Staring at Sutro Tower, and the taller buildings poking out of the water here and there. And this obnoxious skinny bitch sat down next to me, chewing in my ear and talking about the impudence of impermanence or some similar. “Miranda,” she introduced herself. “I just came up from Anaheim-Diego. Jeez what a mess. They actually think they can build nanomechs and make it scalable. Whatta bunch of poutines.”

“Stop chewing in my ear,” I muttered. But then I found myself following her around everywhere she went.

Miranda was the one who convinced me to dive into the chasm of Fillmore St. in search of a souvenir from the old Church of John Coltrane, as a present for Joconda. I strapped on some goggles and a big apparatus that fed me oxygen while also helping me to navigate a little bit, and then we went out in a dinghy that looked old enough that someone had actually used it for fishing. Miranda gave me one of her crooked grins and studied a wrinkled old map. “I thinnnnnk it’s right around here.” She laughed. “Either that or the Korean barbecue restaurant where the mayor got assassinated that one time. Not super clear which is which.”

I gave her a murderous look and jumped into the water, letting myself fall into the street at the speed of water resistance. Those sunken buildings turned into doorways and windows facing me, but they stayed blurry as the bilge flowed around them. I could barely find my feet, let alone identify a building on sight. One of these places had been a restaurant, I was pretty sure. Ancient automobiles lurched back and forth, like maybe even their brakes had rusted away. I figured the Church of John Coltrane would have a spire like a saxophone? Maybe? But all of the buildings looked exactly the same. I stumbled down the street, until I saw something that looked like a church, but it was a caved-in old McDonald’s restaurant. Then I tripped over something, a downed pole or whatever, and my face mask cracked as I went down. The water was going down my throat, tasting like dirt, and my vision went all pale and wavy.

I almost just went under, but then I thought I could see a light up there, way above the street, and I kicked. I kicked and chopped and made myself float. I churned up there until I broke the surface. My arms were thrashing above the water and then I started to go back down, but Miranda had my neck and one shoulder. She hauled me up and out of the water and threw me into the dinghy. I was gasping and heaving up water, and she just sat and laughed at me.

“You managed to scavenge something after all.” She pointed to something I’d clutched at on my way up out of the water: a rusted, barbed old piece of a car. “I’m sure Joconda will love it.”

“Ugh,” I said. “Fuck Old San Francisco. It’s gross and corroded and there’s nothing left of whatever used to be cool. But hey. I’m glad I found a group of people I would risk drowning in dead water for.”

4. I chose to see that as a special status

Miranda had the kind of long-limbed, snaggle-toothed beauty that made you think she was born to make trouble. She loved to rough-house, and usually ended up with her elbow on the back of my neck as she pushed me into the dry dirt. She loved to invent cute insulting nicknames for me, like “Dollypris” or “Pris Ridiculous.” She never got tired of reminding me that I might be a ninth level genderfreak, but I had all kinds of privilege, because I grew up in Fairbanks and never had to wonder how we were going to eat.

Miranda had this way of making me laugh even when the news got scary, when the government back in Fairbanks was trying to reestablish control over the whole West Coast, and extinction rose up like the shadows at the bottom of the sea. I would start to feel that scab inside my stomach, like the whole ugly unforgiving world could come down on us and our tiny island sanctuary at any moment, Miranda would suddenly start making up a weird dance or inventing a motto for a team of superhero mosquitos, and then I would be laughing so hard it was like I was squeezing the fear out of my insides. Her hands were a mass of scar tissue but they were as gentle as dried-up blades of grass on my thighs.

Miranda had five other lovers, but I was the only one she made fun of. I chose to see that as a special status.

5. “What are you people even about”

Falling in love with a community is always going to be more real that any love for a single human being could ever be. People will let you down, shatter your image of them, or try to melt down the wall between your self-image and theirs. People, one at a time, are too messy. Miranda was my hero and the lover I’d pretty much dreamed of since both puberties, but I also saved pieces of my heart for a bunch of other Wrong Headed people. I loved Joconda’s totally random inspirations and perversions, like all of the art projects sie started getting me to build out of scraps from the sunken city after I brought back that car piece from Fillmore St. Zell was this hyperactive kid with wild half-braids, who had this whole theory about digging up buried hard drives full of music files from the digital age, so we could reconstruct the actual sounds of Marvin Gaye and the Jenga Priests. Weo used to sit with me and watch the sunset going down over the islands, we didn’t talk a lot except that Weo would suddenly whisper some weird beautiful notion about what it would be like to live at sea; one day when the sea was alive again. But it wasn’t any individual, it was the whole group, we had gotten in a rhythm together and we all believed the same stuff. The love of the ocean, and her resilience in the face of whatever we had done to her, and the power of silliness to make you believe in abundance again. Openness, and a kind of generosity that is the opposite of monogamy.

But then one day I looked up, and some of the faces were different again. A few of my favorite people in the community had bugged out without saying anything, and one or two of the newcomers started seriously getting on my nerves. One person, Mage, just had a nasty temper, going off at anyone who crossed hir path whenever xie was in one of those moods, and you could usually tell from the unruly condition of Mage’s bleach-blond hair and the broke-toothed scowl. Mage became one of Miranda’s lovers right off the bat, of course.

I was just sitting on my hands and biting my tongue, reminding myself that I always hated change and then I always got used to it after a little while. This would be fine: change was the ocean and she took care of us.

Then we discovered the spoilage. We had been filtering the ocean water, removing toxic waste, filtering out excess gunk, and putting some of the organic byproducts into our mycoprotein vats as a feedstock. But one day, we opened the biggest vat and the stench was so powerful we all started to cry and retch, and we kept crying even after the puking stopped. Shit, that was half our food supply. It looked like our whole filtration system was off, there were remnants of buckystructures in the residue that we’d been feeding to our fungus, and the fungus was choking on them. Even the fungus that wasn’t spoiled would have minimal protein yield. And this also meant that our filtration system wasn’t doing anything to help clean the ocean, at all, because it was still letting the dead pieces of buckycrap through.

Joconda just stared at the mess and finally shook hir head and told us to bury it under the big hillside.

We didn’t have enough food for the winter after that, so a bunch of us had to make the trip up north to Marin, by boat and on foot, to barter with some gun-crazy farmers in the hills. And they wanted free labor in exchange for food, so we left Weo and a few others behind to work in their fields. Trudging back down the hill pulling the first batch of produce in a cart, I kept looking over my shoulder to see our friends staring after us, as we left them surrounded by old dudes with rifles.

I couldn’t look at the community the same way after that. Joconda fell into a depression that made hir unable to speak or look anyone in the eye for days at a time, and we were all staring at the walls of our poorly repaired dormitory buildings, which looked as though a strong wind could bring them down. I kept remembering myself walking away from those farmers, the way I told Weo it would be fine, we’d be back before anyone knew anything, this would be a funny story later. I tried to imagine myself doing something different. Putting my foot down maybe, or saying fuck this, we don’t leave our own behind. It didn’t seem like something I would ever do, though. I had always been someone who went along with what everybody else wanted. My one big act of rebellion was coming here to Bernal Island, and I wouldn’t have ever come if Juya hadn’t already been coming.

Miranda saw me coming and walked the other way. That happened a couple of times. She and I were supposed to have a fancy evening together, I was going to give her a bath even if it used up half my water allowance, but she canceled. We were on a tiny island but I kept only seeing her off in the distance, in a group of others, but whenever I got closer she was gone. At last I saw her walking on the big hill, and I followed her up there, until we were almost at eye level with the Trans America Pyramid coming up out of the flat water. She turned and grabbed at the collar of my shirt and part of my collarbone. “You gotta let me have my day,” she hissed. “You can’t be in my face all the time. Giving me that look. You need to get out of my face.”

“You blame me,” I said, “for Weo and the others. For what happened.”

“I blame you for being a clingy wet blanket. Just leave me alone for a while. Jeez.” And then I kept walking behind her, and she turned and either made a gesture that connected with my chest, or else intentionally shoved me. I fell on my butt. I nearly tumbled head over heels down the rocky slope into the water, but then I got a handhold on a dead root.

“Oh fuck. Are you OK?” Miranda reached down to help me up, but I shook her off. I trudged down the hill alone.

I kept replaying that moment in my head, when I wasn’t replaying the moment when I walked away with a ton of food and left Weo and the others at gunpoint. I had thought that being here, on this island, meant that the only past that mattered was the grand, mysterious, rebellious history that was down there under the water, in the wreckage of San Francisco. All of the wild music submerged between its walls. I had thought my own personal past no longer mattered at all. Until suddenly, I had no mental energy for anything but replaying those two memories. Uglier each time around.

And then someone came up to me at lunch, as I sat and ate some of the proceeds from Weo’s indenture: Kris, or Jamie, I forget which. And he whispered, “I’m on your side.” A few other people said the same thing later that day. They had my back, Miranda was a bitch, she had assaulted me. I saw other people hanging around Miranda and staring at me, talking in her ear, telling her that I was a problem and they were with her.

I felt like crying, except that I couldn’t find enough moisture inside me. I didn’t know what to say to the people who were on my side. I was too scared to speak. I wished Joconda would wake up and tell everybody to quit it, to just get back to work and play and stop fomenting.

The next day, I went to the dining area, sitting at the other end of the long table from Miranda and her group of supporters. Miranda stood up so fast she knocked her own food on the floor, and she shouted at Yozni, “Just leave me the fuck alone. I don’t want you on ‘my side,’ or anybody else. There are no sides. This is none of your business. You people. You goddamn people. What are you people even about?” She got up and left, kicking the wall on her way out.

After that, everybody was on my side.

6. The honeymoon was over, but the marriage was just starting

I rediscovered social media. I’d let my friendships with people back in Fairbanks and elsewhere run to seed, during all of this weird, but now I reconnected with people I hadn’t talked to in a year or so. Everybody kept saying that Olympia had gotten really cool since I left, there was a vibrant music scene now and people were publishing zootbooks and having storytelling slams and stuff. And meanwhile, the government in Fairbanks had decided to cool it on trying to make the coast fall into line, though there was talk about some kind of loose articles of confederation at some point. Meanwhile, we’d even made some serious inroads against the warlords of Nevada.

I started looking around the dormitory buildings and kitchens and communal playspaces of Bernal, and at our ocean reclamation machines, as if I was trying to commit them to memory. One minute, I was looking at all of it as if this could be the last time I would see any of it, but then the next minute, I was just making peace with it so I could stay forever. I could just imagine how this moment could be the beginning of a new, more mature relationship with the Wrong Headed crew, where I wouldn’t have any more illusions, but that would make my commitment even stronger.

I sat with Joconda and a few others, on that same stretch of shore where we’d all stood naked and launched candles, and we held hands after a while. Joconda smiled, and I felt like sie was coming back to us, so it was like the heart of our community was restored. “Decay is part of the process. Decay keeps the ocean warm.” Today Joconda had wild hair with some bright colors in it, and a single strand of beard. I nodded.

Instead of the guilt or fear or selfish anxiety that I had been so aware of having inside me, I felt a weird feeling of acceptance. We were strong. We would get through this. We were Wrong Headed.

I went out in a dinghy and sailed around the big island, went up towards the ruins of Telegraph. I sailed right past the Newsom Spire, watching its carbon-fiber cladding flake away like shiny confetti. The water looked so opaque, it was like sailing on milk. I sat there in the middle of the city, a few miles from anyone, and felt totally peaceful. I had a kick of guilt at being so selfish, going off on my own when the others could probably use another pair of hands. But then I decided it was okay. I needed this time to myself. It would make me a better member of the community.

When I got back to Bernal, I felt calmer than I had in ages, and I was able to look at all the others—even Mage, who still gave me the murder-eye from time to time—with patience and love. They were all my people. I was lucky to be among them.

I had this beautiful moment, that night, standing by a big bonfire with the rest of the crew, half of us some level of naked, and everybody looked radiant and free. I started to hum to myself, and it turned into a song, one of the old songs that Zell had supposedly brought back from digital extinction. It had this chorus about the wild kids and the wardance, and a bridge that doubled back on itself, and I had this feeling, like maybe the honeymoon is over, but the marriage is just beginning.

Then I found myself next to Miranda, who kicked at some embers with her boot. “I’m glad things calmed down,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean for everyone to get so crazy. We were all just on edge, and it was a bad time.”

“Huh,” Miranda said. “I noticed that you never told your peeps to cool it, even after I told the people defending me to shut their faces.”

“Oh,” I said. “But I actually,” and then I didn’t know what to say. I felt the feeling of helplessness, trapped in the grip of the past, coming back again. “I mean, I tried. I’m really sorry.”

“Whatever,” Miranda said. “I’m leaving soon. Probably going back to Anaheim-Diego. I heard they made some progress with the nanomechs after all.”

“Oh.” I looked into the fire, until my retinas were all blotchy. “I’ll miss you.”

“Whatever.” Miranda slipped away. I tried to mourn her going, but then I realized I was just relieved. I wasn’t going to be able to deal with her hanging around, like a bruise, when I was trying to move forward. With Miranda gone, I could maybe get back to feeling happy here.

Joconda came along when we went back up into Marin to get the rest of the food from those farmers, and collect Weo and the two others we had left there. We climbed up the steep path from the water, and Joconda kept needing to rest. Close to the water, everything was the kind of salty and moist that I’d gotten used to, but after a few miles, everything got dry and dusty. By the time we got to the farm, we were thirsty and we’d used up all our water, and the farmers saw us coming and got their rifles out.

Our friends had run away, the farmers said. Weo and the others. A few weeks earlier, and they didn’t know where. They just ran off, left the work half done. So, too bad, we weren’t going to get all the food we had been promised. Nothing personal, the lead farmer said. He had sunburnt cheeks, even though he wore a big straw hat. I watched Joconda’s face pass through shock, anger, misery and resignation, without a single word coming out. The farmers had their guns slung over their shoulders, enough of a threat without even needing to aim. We took the cart, half full of food instead of all the way full, back down the hill to our boat.

We never found out what actually happened to Weo and the others.

7. “That’s such an inappropriate line of inquiry i don’t even know how to deal”

I spent a few weeks pretending I was in it for the long haul on Bernal Island, after we got back from Marin. This was my home, I had formed an identity here that meant the world to me, and these people were my family. Of course I was staying.

Then one day, I realized I was just trying to make up my mind whether to go back to Olympia, or all the way back to Fairbanks. In Fairbanks, they knew how to make thick-cut toast with egg smeared across it, you could go out dancing in half a dozen different speakeasies that stayed open until dawn. I missed being in a real city, kind of. I realized I’d already decided to leave San Francisco a while ago, without ever consciously making the decision.

Everyone I had ever had a crush on, I had hooked up with already. Some of them, I still hooked up with sometimes, but it was nostalgia sex rather than anything else. I was actually happier sleeping alone, I didn’t want anybody else’s knees cramping my thighs in the middle of the night. I couldn’t forgive the people who sided with Miranda against me, and I was even less able to forgive the people who sided with me against Miranda. I didn’t like to dwell on stuff, but there were a lot of people I had obscure, unspoken grudges against, all around me. And then occasionally I would stand in a spot where I’d watched Weo sit and build a tiny raft out of sticks, and would feel the anger rise up all over again. At myself, mostly.

I wondered about what Miranda was doing now, and whether we would ever be able to face each other again. I had been so happy to see her go, but now I couldn’t stop thinking about her.

The only time I even wondered about my decision was when I looked at the ocean, and the traces of the dead city underneath it, the amazing heritage that we were carrying on here. Sometimes I stared into the waves for hours, trying to hear the soundwaves trapped in them, but then I started to feel like maybe the ocean had told me everything it was ever going to. The ocean always sang the same notes, it always passed over the same streets and came back with the same sad laughter. And staring down at the ocean only reminded me of how we’d thought we could help to heal her, with our enzyme treatments, a little at a time. I couldn’t see why I had ever believed in that fairytale. The ocean was going to heal on her own, sooner or later, but in the meantime we were just giving her meaningless therapy, that made us feel better more than it actually helped. I got up every day and did my chores. I helped to repair the walls and tend the gardens and stuff. But I felt like I was just turning wheels to keep a giant machine going, so that I would be able to keep turning the wheels tomorrow.

I looked down at my own body, at the loose kelp-and-hemp garments I’d started wearing since I’d moved here. I looked at my hands and forearms, which were thicker, callused, and more veiny with all the hard work I’d been doing here—but also, the thousands of rhinestones in my fingernails glittered in the sunlight, and I felt like I moved differently than I used to. Even with every shitty thing that had happened, I’d learned something here, and wherever I went from now on, I would always be Wrong Headed.

I left without saying anything to anybody, the same way everyone else had.

A few years later, I had drinks with Miranda on that new floating platform that hovered over the wasteland of North America. Somehow we floated half a mile above the desert and the mountaintops—don’t ask me how, but it was carbon neutral and all that good stuff. From up here, the hundreds of miles of parched earth looked like piles of gold.

“It’s funny, right?” Miranda seemed to have guessed what I was thinking. “All that time, we were going on about the ocean and how it was our lover and our history and all that jazz. But look at that desert down there. It’s all beautiful, too. It’s another wounded environment, sure, but it’s also a lovely fragment of the past. People sweated and died for that land, and maybe one day it’ll come back. You know?” Miranda was, I guess, in her early thirties, and she looked amazing. She’d gotten the snaggle taken out of her teeth, and her hair was a perfect wave. She wore a crisp suit and she seemed powerful and relaxed. She’d become an important person in the world of nanomechs.

I stopped staring at Miranda and looked over the railing, down at the dunes. We’d made some pretty major progress at rooting out the warlords, but still nobody wanted to live there, in the vast majority of the continent. The desert was beautiful from up here, but maybe not so much up close.

“I heard Joconda killed hirself,” Miranda said. “A while ago. Not because of anything in particular that had happened. Just the depression, it caught up with hir.” She shook her head. “God. Sie was such an amazing leader. But hey, the Wrong Headed community is twice the size it was when you and I lived there, and they expanded onto the big island. I even heard they got a seat at the table of the confederation talks. Sucks that Joconda won’t see what sie built get that recognition.”

I was still dressed like a Wrong Headed person, even after a few years. I had the loose flowy garments, the smudgy paint on my face that helped obscure my gender rather than serving as a guide to it, the straight-line thin eyebrows and sparkly earrings and nails. I hadn’t lived on Bernal in years, but it was still a huge part of who I was. Miranda looked like this whole other person, and I didn’t know whether to feel ashamed that I hadn’t moved on, or contemptuous of her for selling out, or some combination. I didn’t know anybody who dressed the way Miranda was dressed, because I was still in Olympia where we were being radical artists.

I wanted to say something. An apology, or something sentimental about the amazing time we had shared, or I don’t even know what. I didn’t actually know what I wanted to say, and I had no words to put it into. So after a while I just raised my glass and we toasted to Wrong Headedness. Miranda laughed, that same old wild laugh, as our glasses touched. Then we went back to staring down at the wasteland, trying to imagine how many generations it would take before something green came out of it.

Break! Break! Break!

Earliest I remember, Daddy threw me off the roof of our split-level house. “Boy’s gotta learn to fall sometime,” he told my mom just before he slung my pants-seat and let go. As I dropped, Dad called out instructions, but they tangled in my ears. I was four or five. My brother caught me one-handed, gave me a spank, and dropped me on the lawn. Then up to the roof for another go round, with my body more slack this time.

From my dad, I learned there were just two kinds of bodies: falling, and falling on fire.

My dad was a stuntman with a left-field resemblance to an actor named Jared Gilmore who’d been in some TV show before I was born, and he’d gotten it in his head Jared was going to be the next big action movie star. My father wanted to be Jared’s personal stunt double and “prosthetic acting device,” but Jared never responded to the letters, emails, and websites, and Dad got a smidge persistent, which led to some restraining orders and blacklisting. Now he was stuck in the boonies doing stunts for TV movies about people who survive accidents. My mama did data entry to cover the rest of the rent. My dad was determined that my brother Holman and I would know the difference between a real and a fake punch, and how to roll with either kind.

My life was pretty boring until I went to school. School was so great! Slippery just-waxed hallways, dodgeball, sandboxplosions, bullies with big elbows, food fights. Food fights! If I could have gone to school for twenty hours a day, I would have signed up. No, twenty-three! I only ever really needed one hour of sleep per day. I didn’t know who I was and why I was here until I went to school. And did I mention authority figures? School had authority figures! It was so great!

I love authority figures. I never get tired of pulling when they push, or pushing when they pull. In school, grown-ups were always telling me to write on the board, and then I’d fall down or drop the eraser down my pants by mistake, or misunderstand and knock over a pile of giant molecules. Erasers are comedy gold! I was kind of a hyper kid. They tried giving me ritalin ritalin ritalin ritalin riiiitaliiiiin, but I was one of the kids who only gets more hyper-hyper on that stuff. Falling, in the seconds between up and down—you know what’s going on. People say something is as easy as falling off a log, but really it’s easy to fall off anything. Really, try it. Falling rules!

Bullies learned there was no point in trying to fuck me up, because I would fuck myself up faster than they could keep up with. They tried to trip me up in the hallways, and it was just an excuse for a massive set piece involving mops, stray book bags, audio/video carts, and skateboards. Limbs flailing, up and down trading places, ten fingers of mayhem. Crude stuff. I barely had a sense of composition. Every night until 3 a.m., I sucked up another stack of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, or Jackie Chan movies on the ancient laptop my parents didn’t know I had, hiding under my quilt. Safety Last!

Ricky Artesian took me as a personal challenge. A huge guy with a beachball jaw—he put a kid in the hospital for a month in fifth grade for saying anybody who didn’t ace this one chemistry quiz had to be a moron. Sometime after that, Ricky stepped to me with a Sharpie in the locker room and slashed at my arms and ribcage, marking the bones he wanted to break. Then he walked away, leaving the whole school whispering, “Ricky Sharpied Rock Manning!”

I hid when I didn’t have class, and when school ended, I ran home three miles to avoid the bus. I figured Ricky would try to get me in an enclosed space where I couldn’t duck and weave, so I stayed wide open. If I needed the toilet, I swung into the stall through a ventilator shaft and got out the same way, so nobody saw me enter or leave. The whole time in the airshaft, my heart cascaded. This went on for months, and my whole life became not letting Ricky Artesian mangle me.

One day I got careless and went out to the playground with the other kids during recess, because some teacher was looking. I tried to watch for trouble, but a giant hand swooped down from the swing set and hauled me up. I dangled a moment, then the hand let me fall to the sand. I fell on my back and started to get up, but Ricky told me not to move. For some reason, I did what he said, even though I saw twenty-seven easy ways out of that jungle-gym cage, and then Ricky stood over me. He told me again to hold still, then brought one boot down hard on the long bone of my upper arm, a clean snap—my reward for staying put. “Finally got that kid to quit hopping,” I heard him say as he walked across the playground. Once my arm healed up, I became a crazy frog again, and Ricky didn’t bother me.

Apart from that one stretch, my social life at school was ideal. People cheered for me but never tried to talk to me—it was the best of human interaction without any of the pitfalls. Ostracism, adulation: flipsides! They freed me to orchestrate gang wars and alien invasions in my head, whenever I didn’t have so many eyes on me. Years passed, and my mom tried to get me into dance classes, while my dad struggled to get me to take falling down seriously, the way my big brother did. Holman was spending every waking moment prepping for the Army, which was his own more socially acceptable way of rebelling against Dad.

* * *

Sally Hamster threw a brick at my head. I’d barely noticed the new girl in my class, except she was tall for a seventh grader and had big Popeye arms. I felt the brick coming before I heard it, then people shouting. Maybe Sally just wanted to get suspended, maybe she was reaching out. The brick grazed my head, but I was already moving with it, forward into a knot of basketball players, spinning and sliding. Afterward I had a lump on my head but I swore I’d thrown the brick at myself. By then the principal would have believed almost anything of me.

I didn’t get the reference to those weird Krazy Kat comics about the brick-throwing mouse until years later, but Sally and I became best friends thanks to a shared love of hilarious pain. We sketched lunch-trolley incidents and car pile-ups in our heads, talking them out during recess, trading text messages in class, instant messaging at home. The two of us snuck out to the Winn-Dixie parking lot and Sally drilled me for hours on that Jackie Chan move where the shopping trolley rolls at him and he swings inside it through the flap, then jumps out the top.

I didn’t know martial arts, but I practiced not being run over by a shopping cart over and over. We went to the big mall off I-40 and got ourselves banned from the sporting goods store and the Walmart, trying to stage the best accidents. Sally shouted instructions: “Duck! Jump! Now do that thing where your top half goes left and your bottom half goes right!” She’d throw dry goods, or roll barrels at me, and then shout, “Wait, wait, wait, go!” Sally got it in her head I should be able to do the splits, so she bent my legs as far apart as they would go and then sat on my crotch until I screamed, every day for a couple months.

The Hamster family had social aspirations, all about Sally going to Harvard and not hanging out with boys with dyslexic arms and legs. I went over to their house a few times, and it was full of Buddhas and Virgin Marys, and Mrs. Hamster baked us rugelachs and made punch, all the while telling me it must be So Interesting to be the class clown but how Sally needed to laser-beam in on her studies. My own parents weren’t too thrilled about all my school trouble, and why couldn’t I be more like Holman, training like crazy for his military future?

* * *

High school freshman year, and Sally got hold of a video cam. One of her jag-tooth techno-hippie uncles. I got used to her being one-eyed, filming all the time, and editing on the fly with her mom’s hyperbook. Our first movie went online at Yourstuff a month after she got the camera. It was five minutes long, and it was called The Thighcycle Beef, which was a joke on some Italian movie Sally had seen. She had a Thighcycle, one of those bikes which goes nowhere with a lying odometer. She figured we could light it on fire and then shove it off a cliff with me riding it, which sounded good to me.

I never flashed on the whole plot of The Thighcycle Beef, but there were ninja dogs and exploding donuts and things. Like most of our early short films, it was a mixture of live-action and Zap!mation. Sally figured her mom would never miss the Thighcycle, which had sat in the darkest basement corner for a year or so.

We did one big sequence of me pedaling on the Thighcycle with Sally throwing rocks at me, which she would turn into throwing stars in post-production. I had to pedal and duck, pedal while hanging off the back wheel, pedal side-saddle, pedal with my hands while hanging off the handlebars, etc. I climbed a tree in the Hamsters’ front yard and Sally hoisted the Thighcycle so I could pull it up there with me. Then I climbed on and “rode” the Thighcycle down from the treetop, pedaling frantically the whole way down as if I could make it fly. (She was going to make it fly in post.) The Thighcycle didn’t pedal so good after that, but Sally convinced me I was only sprained because I could scrunch all my fingers and toes, and I didn’t lose consciousness for that long.

We were going to film the climax at a sea cliff a few miles away, but Sally’s ride fell through. In the end, she settled for launching me off the tool shed with the Thighcycle on fire. She provided a big pile of leaves for me to fall onto when I fell off the cycle, since I already had all those sprains. I missed the leaf pile, but the flaming Thighcycle didn’t, and things went somewhat amiss, although we were able to salvage some of the tool shed thanks to Sally having the garden hose ready. She was amazingly safety-minded.

After that, Sally’s parents wanted twice as hard for her not to see me. I had to lie and tell my parents I’d sprained my whole body beating up a bunch of people who deserved it. My brother had to carry stuff for me while I was on crutches, which took away from his training time. He kept running ahead of me with my junk, lecturing me about his conspiracy theories about the Pan-Asiatic Ecumen, and how they were flooding the United States with drugs to destabilize our country and steal our water, and I couldn’t get out of earshot.

But all of my sprains were worth it, because The Thighcycle Beef blew up the Internet. The finished product was half animation, with weird messages like “NUMCHUK SPITTING TIME!” flashing on the screen in-between shots, but the wacky stunts definitely helped. She even turned the tool shed into a cliff, although she also used the footage of the tool shed fire elsewhere. People two or three times our age downloaded it to their phones and watched it at work. Sally showed me the emails, tweets, and Yangars—we were famous!

* * *

I found out you can have compound sprains just like fractures, and you have to eat a lot of ice cream and watch television while you recuperate. My mom let me monopolize the living room sofa, knitted blanket over my legs and Formica tray in my lap as I watched cartoons.

My mom wanted to watch the news—the water crisis and the debt crisis were freaking her shit. I wanted to catch the Sammo Hung marathon, but she kept changing to CNN, people tearing shopping malls apart with their bare hands in Florida, office windows shattering in Baltimore, buses on fire. And shots of emaciated people in the formerly nice part of Brooklyn, laying in heaps with tubes in their arms, to leave a vein permanently open for the next hit.

Did I mention ice cream? I got three flavors, or five if you count Neapolitan as three separate flavors, like all right-thinking people everywhere.

I went back to school after a week off, and the Thighcycle had a posse. Ricky—arm-cracking Ricky Artesian—came up to me and said our movie rocked his freaking head. He also said something about people like me having our value, which I didn’t pay much attention to at the time. I saw one older kid in the hallway with a Flaming Thighcycle T-shirt, which I never saw any royalties for.

Sally snuck out to meet me at the Starbucks near school and we toasted with frosty mochas. Her round face looked sunburned, and her hair was a shade less mouse than usual.

“That was just the dry run,” she said. “Next time, we’re going to make a statement. Maybe we can go out to the landfill and get a hundred busted TVs and drop them on you.”

I vetoed the rain of TVs. I wanted to do a roller disco movie because I’d just watched Xanadu.

We posted on Yangar.com looking for roller-disco extras, and a hundred kids and a few creepy grown-ups hit us back. We had to be super selective, and mostly only took people who had their own skates. But Sally still wanted to have old televisions in there because of her Artistic Vision, so she got hold of a dozen fucked old screens and laid them out for us to skate over while they all showed the same footage of Richard Simmons. We had to jump over beach balls and duck under old power cords and stuff. I envisioned it being the saga of skate-fighters who were trying to bring the last remaining copy of the U.S. Constitution to the federal government in exile, which was hiding out in a bunker under a Chikken Hut. We filmed a lot of it at an actual Chikken Hut that had closed down near the Oceanview Mall. I wanted it to be a love story, but we didn’t have a female lead, and also Sally never wanted to do love stories. I showed her Harold Lloyd movies, but it made no difference.

Sally got hooked on Yangar fame. She had a thousand Yangar friends, crazy testimonials, and imitators from Pakistan, and it all went to her head. We had to do what the people on the Internet wanted us to do, even when they couldn’t agree. They wanted more explosions, more costumes, and cute Zap!mation icons, funny catchphrases. At fifteen, Sally breathed market research. I wanted pathos and chaos!

* * *

Ricky and some other kids found the school metal detectors missed anything plastic, ceramic, wood, or bone, and soon they had weapons strapped all over. Ricky was one of the first to wear the red bandana around his neck, and everyone knew he was on his way. He shattered Mr. MacLennan’s jaw, my geography teacher, right in front of our whole grade in the hallway. Slow-time, a careful spectacle, to the point where Ricky let the onlookers arrange ourselves from shortest in front to tallest in back. Mr. MacLennan lying there looking up at Ricky, trying to assert, while we all shouted, “Break! Break! Break! Break!” and finally Ricky lifted a baseball bat, and I heard a loud crack. Mr. MacLennan couldn’t say anything about it afterward, even if he could have talked, because of that red bandana.

Sally listened to the police scanner, sometimes even in the classroom, because she wanted to be there right after a looting or a credit riot. Not that these things happened too often in Alvington, our little coastal resort city. But one time, Sally got wind that a Target near downtown had gone crazy. The manager had announced layoffs and the staff just started trashing the place, and the customers joined in. Sally came to my math class and told Mr. Pope I’d been called to the principal’s, and then told me to grab my bag of filming crap and get on my bike. What if we got there and the looters were still going? I asked. But Sally said looting was not a time-consuming process, and the crucial thing was to get there between the looting and everything being chained up. So we got there and sneaked past the few cops buddying in the parking lot, so Sally could get a few minutes of me falling under trashed sporting goods and jumping over clothing racks. She’d gotten so good at filming with one hand and throwing with the other! Really nobody ever realized she was the coordinated one of the two of us. Then the cops chased us away.

My brother got his draft notice and couldn’t imagine such luck. He’d sweated getting into the Army for years, and now they weren’t even waiting for him to sign up. I knew my own draft notice was probably just a year or two down the line, maybe even sooner. They kept lowering the age.

My mom’s talk shows were full of people saying we had to stop the flow of drugs into our country, even if we had to defoliate half the planet. If we could just stop the drugs, then we could fix our other problems, easy. The problem was, the Pan-Asiatic Ecumen or whoever was planting these drugs were too clever for us, and they had gotten hold of genetically-engineered strains that could grow anywhere and had 900 times the potency of regular junk. We tried using drones to burn down all their fields, but they just relocated their “gardens” to heavily populated areas, and soon it was block-by-block urban warfare in a dozen slums all around Eurasia. Soldiers were fitted with cheap mass-produced HUDs that made the whole thing look like a first-person shooter from 40 years ago. Some people said the Pan-Asiatic Ecumen didn’t actually exist, but then how else did you explain the state we were in?

* * *

Sally fell in love with a robot guy named Raine, and suddenly he had to be big in every movie. She found him painted silver on Main Street, his arms and legs moving all blocky and jerky, and she thought he had the extra touch we needed. In our movies, he played Castle the Pacifist Fighting Droid, but in real life he clutched Sally’s heart in his cold, unbreakable metal fist. He tried to nice up to me, but I saw through him. He was just using Sally for the Yangar fame. I’d never been in love, because I was waiting for the silent-movie love: big eyes and violins, chattering without sound, pure. Nobody had loved right since 1926.

Ricky Artesian came up to me in the cafeteria early on in eleventh grade. He’d gotten so he could loom over and around everybody. I was eating with Sally, Raine, and a few other film geeks, and Ricky told me to come with him. My first thought was, whatever truce we’d made over my arm-bone was over and gone, and I was going to be fragments of me. But Ricky just wanted to talk in the boy’s room. Everyone else cleared out, so it was just the two of us and the wet TP clinging to the tiles. The air was sour.

“Your movies, they’re cool,” he said. I started to explain they were also Sally’s, but he hand-slashed. “My people.” He gestured at the red bandana. “We’re going to take it all down. They’ve lied to us, you know. It’s all fucked, and we’re taking it down.”

I nodded, not so much in agreement, but because I’d heard it before.

“We want you to make some movies for us. Explaining what we’re about.”

I told him I’d have to ask Sally, and he whatevered, and didn’t want to listen to how she was the brains, even though anyone looking at both of us could tell she was the brains. Ricky said if I helped him, he’d help me. We were both almost draft-age, and I would be a morning snack to the military exoskeletons. I’d seen No Time For Sergeants—seventeen times—so I figured I knew all about basic training, but Ricky said I’d be toast. Holman had been telling me the same thing, when he wasn’t trying to beat me up. So Ricky offered to get me disqualified from the Army, or get me under some protection during training.

When I told Sally about Ricky’s offer, the first thing she did was ask Raine what he thought. Raine wasn’t a robot that day, which caught me off-guard. He was just a sandy-haired, flag-eared, skinny guy, a year or so older than us. We sat in a seaside gazebo/pagoda where Sally thought she could film some explosions. Raine said propaganda was bad, but also could Ricky get him out of the Army as well as me? I wasn’t sure. Sally didn’t want me to die, but artistic integrity, you know.

The propaganda versus artistic integrity thing I wasn’t sure about. How was making a movie for Ricky worse than pandering to our fans on Yourstuff and Yangar? And look, my dad fed and housed Holman and me by arranging tragic accidents for cable TV movies where people nursed each other back to health and fell in love. Was my dad a propagandist because he fed people sponge cake when the whole world was flying apart?

Sally said fine, shut up, we’ll do it if you just stop lecturing us. I asked Ricky and he said yes, neither Raine nor I would have to die if we made him a movie.

This was the first time we ever shot more footage than we used. I hadn’t understood how that could happen. You set things up, boom! you knocked them over and hoped the camera was running, and then you moved on somewhere else. Life was short, so if you got something on film, you used it! But for the red bandana movie we shot literally hundreds of hours of footage to make one short film. Okay, not literally hundreds of hours. But a few.

Raine didn’t want to be the Man, or the Old Order, or the Failure of Democracy, and I said tough shit. Somebody had to, plus he was older and a robot. He and Sally shot a ton of stuff where they humanized his character and explained how he thought he was doing the right thing, but we didn’t use any of it in the final version.

Meanwhile, I wore the red bandana and breakdanced under a rain of buzz saws that were really some field hockey sticks we’d borrowed. I also wanted to humanize my character by showing how he only donned the red bandana to impress a beautiful florist, played by Mary from my English class.

After a few weeks’ filming, we started to wonder if maybe we should have had a script. “We never needed one before,” Sally grumbled. She was pissed about doing this movie, and I was pissed that she kept humanizing her boyfriend behind my back. You don’t humanize a robot! That’s why he’s a robot instead of a human!

Holman came back from basic training, and couldn’t wait to show us the scar behind his left ear where they’d given him a socket that his HUD would plug into. It looked like the knot of a rotten tree, crusted with dried gunk and with a pulsating wetness at its core. It wasn’t as though they would be able to remote-control you or anything, Holman said—more like, sometimes in a complicated mixed-target urban environment, you might hesitate to engage for a few crucial split seconds and the people monitoring the situation remotely might need to guide your decision-making. So to speak.

Holman seemed happy for the first time ever, almost stoned, as he talked us through all the crazy changes he’d gone through in A.N.V.I.L. training and how he’d learned to breathe mud and spit bullets. Holman was bursting with rumors about all the next-generation weapons that were coming down the pike, like sonic bursts and smart bullets.

Ricky kept asking to see the rushes of our movie, and Raine got his draft notice, and we didn’t know how the movie was supposed to end. I’d never seen any real propaganda before. I wanted it to end with Raine crushing me under his shiny boot, but Sally said it should end with me shooting out of a cannon (which we’d make in Zap!mation) into the Man’s stronghold (which was the crumbling Chikken Hut) and then everything would blow up. Raine wanted the movie to end with his character and mine joining forces against the real enemy, the Pan-Asiatic drug lords, but Sally and I both vetoed that.

In the end, we filmed like ten different endings and then mashed them all up. Then we added several Zap!mation-only characters, and lots of messages on the screen like, “TONGUE-SAURUS!” and “OUTRAGEOUS BUSTAGE!” My favorite set piece involved me trying to make an ice cream sundae on top of a funeral hearse going one hundred mph, while Sally threw rocks at me. (I forget what we turned the rocks into, after.) There was some plot reason I had to make a sundae on top of a hearse, but we borrowed an actual hearse from this guy Raine knew who worked at a funeral home, and it actually drove one hundred mph on the cliff-side road, with Sally and Raine driving alongside in Raine’s old Prius. I was scooping ice cream with one hand and squirting fudge with the other, and then Sally beaned me in the leg and I nearly fell off the sea cliff, but at the last minute I caught one of the hearse’s rails and pulled myself back up, still clutching the full ice cream scoop in the other hand. With ice cream, all things are possible.

The final movie clocked in at twelve minutes, way, way longer than any of our previous efforts. It was like an attention-span final exam. We showed it to Ricky in Tanner High’s computer room, on a bombed-out old Mac. I kept stabbing his arm, pointing out good parts like the whole projectile rabies bit and the razor-flower-arranging duel that Raine and I get into toward the end.

Ricky seemed to hope that if he spun in his chair and then looked back at the screen, this would be a different movie. Sometimes he would close his eyes, bounce, and reopen them, then frown because it was still the same crappy movie.

By the time the credits rolled, Ricky seemed to have decided something. He stood up and smiled, and thanked us for our great support for the movement, and started for the door before we could even show him the “blooper reel” at the end. I asked him about our draft survival deal, and he acted as if he had no clue what we were talking about. Sally, Raine, and I had voluntarily made this movie because of our fervent support of the red bandana and all it stood for. We could post the movie online, or not, it was up to us, but it had nothing to do with Ricky either way. It was weird seeing Ricky act so weaselly and calculating, like he’d become a politician all of a sudden. The only time I saw a hint of the old Ricky was when he said he’d use our spines as weed-whackers if we gave any hint that he’d told us to make that movie.

The blooper reel fizzed on the screen, unnoticed, while Raine, Sally, and I stared at each other. “So this means I have to die after all?” Raine said in his robotic stating-the-obvious voice. Sally didn’t want to post our movie on the Internet, even after all the work we’d put into it, because of the red-bandana thing. People would think we’d joined the movement. Raine thought we should post it online, and maybe Ricky would still help us. I didn’t want to waste all that work—couldn’t we use Zap!mation to turn the bandana into, say, a big snake? Or a dog collar? But Sally said you can’t separate a work of art from the intentions behind it. I’d never had any artistic intentions in my life, and didn’t want to start having them now, especially not retroactively. First we didn’t use all our footage, and then there was talk of scripts, and now we had intentions. Even if Raine hadn’t been scheduled to go die soon, it was pretty obvious we were done.

I tried telling Raine that he might be okay, the Pan-Asiatic Ecumen could surrender any time now and they might call off the draft. Or—and here was an idea that I thought had a lot of promise—Raine could work the whole “robot” thing and pretend the draft didn’t apply to him because he wasn’t a person, but Sally told me to shut the fuck up. Sally kept jumping up and down, cursing the air and hitting things, and she threatened to kick the shit out of Ricky. Raine just sat there slump-headed, saying it wasn’t the end of the world, maybe. We could take Raine’s ancient Prius, load it up, and run for Canada, except what would we do there?

We were getting the occasional email from Holman, but then we realized it had been a month since the last one. And then two months. We started wondering if he’d been declared A.U.T.U.—and in that case, if we would ever officially find out what had happened to him.

* * *

A few days before Raine was supposed to report for death school, there was going to be a huge anti-war protest in Raleigh, and so we drove all the way there with crunchy bars and big bottles of grape sprocket juice, so we’d be sugared up for peace. We heard all the voices and drums before we saw the crowd, then there was a spicy smell and we saw people of twenty different genders and religions waving signs and pumping the air and chanting old-school style about what we wanted and when we wanted it. A platoon of bored cops in riot gear stood off to the side. We found parking a couple blocks away from the crowd, then tried to find a cranny to slip into with our signs. We were looking around at all the other objectors, not smiling but cheering, and then I spotted Ricky a dozen yards away in the middle of a lesbian posse. And a few feet away from him, another big neckless angry guy. I started seeing them everywhere, dotted throughout the crowd. They weren’t wearing the bandanas; they were blending in until they got some kind of signal.

I grabbed Sally’s arm. “Hey, we have to get out of here.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? We just got here!”

I pulled at her. It was hard to hear each other with all the bullhorns and loudspeakers, and the chanting. “Come on! Grab Raine, this is about to go crazy. I’ll make a distraction.”

“It’s always about you making a distraction! Can’t you just stop for a minute? Why don’t you just grow the fuck up? I’m so sick of your bullshit. They’re going to kill Raine, and you don’t even care!” I’d never seen Sally’s eyes so small, her face so red.

“Sally, look over there, it’s Ricky. What’s he doing here?”

“What are you talking about?”

I tried to pull both of them at once, but the ground had gotten soddy from so many protestor boots, and I slipped and fell into the dirt. Sally screamed at me to stop clowning around for once, and then one of the ISO punks stepped on my leg by mistake, then landed on top of me, and the crowd was jostling the punk as well as me, so we couldn’t untangle ourselves. Someone else stepped on my hand.

I rolled away from the punk and sprang upright just as the first gunshot sounded. I couldn’t tell who was firing, or at what, but it sounded nearby. Everyone in the crowd shouted without slogans this time and I went down again with boots in my face. I saw a leg that looked like Sally’s and I tried to grab for her. More shots, and police bullhorns calling for us to surrender. Forget getting out of there, we had to stay down even if they trampled us. I kept seeing Sally’s feet but I couldn’t reach her. Then a silver shoe almost stepped on my face. I stared at the bright laces a second, then grabbed at Raine’s silvery ankle, but he wouldn’t go down because the crowd held him up. I got upright and came face-to-shiny-face with Raine. “Listen to me,” I screamed over another rash of gunfire. “We have to get Sally, and then we have to—”

Raine’s head exploded. Silver turned red, and my mouth was suddenly full of something warm and dark-tasting, and then several people fleeing in opposite directions crashed into me and I swallowed. I swallowed and doubled over as the crowd smashed into me, and I forced myself not to vomit because I needed to be able to breathe. Then the crowd pushed me down again and my last thought before I blacked out was that with this many extras, all we really needed would be a crane and a few dozen skateboards and we could have had a really cool set piece.

The Unfathomable Sisterhood of Ick

After Roger broke up with Mary, she only had two places to go:

1) Her home, which was a single room with a bed, a bath, and a kitchen that were three identical rectangles which came out of the wall and occupied the exact same space.

2) Her job at the smart-cookie makery, where she stood in an asymmetrical trench surrounded by screens, monitoring peptide levels. Colored lights swirled around her head, almost too fast to see.

She couldn’t even bring herself to cry. She walked around under a gray sky, feeling dead inside—as if she’d missed a couple of days of smart cookies and her brain was consequently shutting down.

Loss was not an ache or a pang, or anything dainty. It was more like a bucket of shit that kept falling and falling on her head: itchy, ugly, humiliating.

Mary’s friends kept calling, wanting to hang out, but she couldn’t face anyone. She wanted to avoid the places she and Roger had gone together—which was every place she liked to go. She couldn’t face eating a fancy meal because right now food tasted like dirt, and she could just barely manage to look presentable for work. Her friends all said that she had to get right back on the horse. Mary had never seen a horse, but she imagined that being ejected from one would lead to bruises and maybe some sprains or fractures, plus an angry horse that had already won the first round. That’s assuming the horse didn’t just trample you once it had already thrown you underfoot.

At last, two days after the breakup, she gave in and went out for drinks with her best friend, Stacia. Some part of her still remembered the three A.M. trash talk sessions about guys that she and Stacia had, back in college when the Sisterhood was new, and imagined it could be that way again.

“Don’t say anything about horses,” Mary growled preemptively at Stacia. “Or getting back on them, or anything else along those lines.”

“You know me.” Stacia shrugged, raised her palms so her bracelets jangled, and laughed. “I always change horses in the middle of a stream.”

This was so true. The whole time Mary had known Stacia, almost ten years since college, Stacia hadn’t had a relationship that lasted more than five or six weeks. The six years Mary had been with Roger was like a million years in Stacia-relationship-time. Just hearing Stacia’s laughter made Mary’s shoulders unhunch fractionally.

They were at the Swan Dive, the place with the white wing-shaped chandeliers and cherry-wood couches, and Stacia kept glancing around to see if there were any cute guys worth throwing some negs at. Mary would never stop envying Stacia’s ability to turn flirtation into a way of life.

Just when Mary was starting to feel slightly less tragic, Stacia leaned in and said, “You’re totally right to be scared to go back to the dating pool,” using her low, confiding tone. “Dating is a nightmare.”

At first, Mary thought Stacia was talking about whether Mary could still attract a man, with her cornsilk hair and fading kina-minx features, concerning which Stacia was always volunteering makeover advice. But then she realized Stacia was talking about something more fundamental.

“Dating is this relic of a primitive age, before kina-chat and smart cookies,” Stacia said. “You have to spend all this time getting to know someone: what they like to eat for breakfast, and all their hangups. And then once you’ve gathered all of this useless information, you probably realize that you’re not compatible after all. And then you have to start the whole process over from scratch.”

Back when Mary and Stacia first became friends, they’d both worn the black turtlenecks and hiking boots that were still Mary’s daily uniform, but after college Stacia had reinvented herself as an über-femme. Now she had special eyelashes that fluttered all on their own, hypnotically, and her black hair cascaded in waves around her creamy shoulders. Stacia’s ankles crossed sinuously on the bottom rung of the barstool, with her red ruffled skirt lapping against them. Two separate guys were trying to send her drinks, and she was rolling her eyes at them.

Stacia went on about what a chore it was, getting to know a new person. “You have to wait for him to open up, like the world’s slowest Venus flytrap. And meanwhile, you keep unspooling yourself for him, little by little, just enough to keep him interested, but not so much that you’re oversharing or overloading his buffers. Everybody has sex on the first date these days, but you have to wait until the fourth or fifth date before talking about your messed-up childhood.”

Around this point, Mary started to cry, for the first time since Roger kicked her to the curb. She would be alone forever, in her tiny apartment with the three rectangles. She couldn’t do this whole dance all over again, the way Stacia was describing it. She usually loved Stacia’s cynicism, but right now she was just too raw.

“And that’s why I think you should get Roger to do it,” Stacia was saying. “Everybody’s going to be doing it soon, so you’ll just be an early adopter. And honestly, since he’s the one who dumped you, he owes you.”

“Do what?” Mary was so startled, she stopped sniffling.

“Oh,” Stacia said. “You know. The memory thing.”

“Pretend I don’t know,” Mary said. She sort of knew. She’d read about this on the kina-cast a while back. It was the thing where your ex gave you a memory wisp, right? A download?

“The important thing is, he doesn’t give you all of his memories of the relationship,” said Stacia. “Just the happy ones. The ones from the first two or three months, or maybe four or five if the relationship went on longer. Especially, no memories from the tail end, leading up to the breakup. Not even stuff that seemed happy at the time, because in retrospect it will all seem terrible.”

“Yeah,” Mary said. “But I already remember our relationship, more than I honestly want to. Why would I want his memories of that stuff? I might as well just jam hot needles into my tear ducts.”

“It’s not for you, dumbass.” Stacia slapped Mary’s arm. “It’s for whoever you date next. Your new boyfriend can get implanted with all of Roger’s memories of getting to know you. That way, the new guy can know how you like to be touched in bed, and what your favorite flavor of mycosnuff is. He’ll already know all the awkward details, but it won’t feel like too much too soon, because he’ll have memories of learning it all over a period of months. And the best part is, if he gets Roger’s memories and decides he doesn’t want to date you after all, he can get them removed, as long as it’s within a few days. After seventy-two hours, Roger’s memories become integrated with his own, and then they’re permanent.”

“You’ve thought a lot about this,” Mary said.

“Well, yeah,” Stacia said. “In the unlikely event I date someone for more than a few months ever again, I want him to do a memory download for sure. Think about it: You wouldn’t get a new kina without transferring over your address book and settings and stuff, right?”

“I doubt Roger would want to do that,” Mary said. “I don’t even know if he has any good memories of our time together.”

“That’s why he has to do it now,” Stacia said. “He still has the happy memories, buried somewhere. But every day that passes since the breakup, the happy stuff gets buried deeper and deeper as he convinces himself you never had anything. A week from now, those good times you shared will be beyond the ability of science to retrieve.”

Mary still wasn’t sure, but Stacia gave her the hard sell: “He owes you. All of that time you invested in him, it’s like you put equity into a home. And now that he’s evicted you, he owes it to you to cash out your equity, so you can put it into a new place. That’s all this is.” When she put it like that, the whole thing made sense.

* * *

Seeing Roger’s face for the first time since the breakup caused Mary’s brain to make a correction in real-time—fast, but not fast enough to be painless. The instinctive “partner-bond” signal fired in her brain, causing waves of pleasure and comfort. Like a hot bath on a frozen day. And then she had to pull back, as if the hot bath had turned out to be boiling instead. She had to look at Roger’s perfect hazel eyes and breathe in his pine-forest scent… and remember that this was over.

Mary’s whole life was neurochemistry, so she knew that a lot of this sensation was just the chemical battery in her brain, sparking erroneously based on out-of-date information.

They met for lunch, the day after Mary’s conversation with Stacia. Mary had the day off from the makery, and Roger could take a long lunch break at his strategic consulting firm, where he was helping to re-position the troubled rejuvenation sector. (Roger had heard every joke about the rejuvenation industry getting old, a dozen times.) They were eating at the same restaurant where Roger had told her that he needed space: a hand-pulled noodle place where a man stood in the front window pulling noodles, 24/7. Mary had loved this restaurant, which had red lanterns, grease-stained tablecloths, and chewy noodles, but now it was tainted forever.

“I don’t know, Mare,” Roger said, after she explained what she wanted him to do. “I mean, those are private memories. You’re talking about a piece of my identity.

“Even if they could pull out just the memories pertaining to our courtship—which I don’t believe for a second they can, that’s awfully granular—those are still my memories, they’re personal.”

“Oh, come on, Roger,” Mary said. “Don’t be a jerk. I’m not asking for your life story. Just a few months of specific memories, which won’t have any of the context. So they won’t mean the same thing to anyone else that they mean to you. If they do mean anything to you.”

She was starting to sob again—weakling—so she reached for the longest and slimiest noodle in her bowl and slurped it loudly to mask the sound. She gestured for the waiter and demanded a scallion pancake.

“You can’t say that.” Roger’s eyes widened in a way that would have melted her brain when they were together. “You can’t say they mean nothing to me. They mean a lot to me. Those memories are precious to me. Of course they are.”

“I guess not,” Mary said. She had avoided recriminations when he had jilted her. She had taken the bad news with composure, but now this felt like a second jilting. “Obviously, none of this ever meant anything to you. None of it ever mattered at all. Right?”

Mary never knew what Roger had seen in her in the first place, any more than she understood why he had broken up with her, after six years that had seemed happy to her. The whole thing was a mystery, beginning and end.

“Did Stacia put you up to this?” Roger said. “I swear, you two were always like this hive mind. The whole time we were together, I felt like I was dating both of you.”

“Leave Stacia out of this,” Mary said. “This is about you and me.” She stabbed her onion pancake with a single chopstick, skewering and gesturing. “Those memories that you don’t want to share, I bet they’re just memories of you figuring out how to seduce me, so you could use me and get your fill and then throw me aside. You probably treated it just like one of your strategy briefs.”

Roger didn’t know how to respond to that. For a moment, he just held up both hands, like he was about to gesture. Then he let them drop again.

“You want to take my memories,” Roger said. “And give them to some other man. My personal memories, of you. And you don’t see how that’s messed up?”

“I see that you threw me aside, and now you don’t want to give me the one thing that will let me have closure,” Mary said. “You’re probably already dating someone else. Aren’t you?” Roger’s squirming was confirmation enough.

Guilt won. Roger went to the clinic, which was a glorified kiosk just outside the mall that smelled of ozone, and Mary watched the whole time as the neural sensors danced around the three-dimensional map of Roger’s mind, plucking out the specific bits of his past that related to the two of them getting together. She tried to imagine what the machine was getting. Their first meeting at the Bankrupt Daisies concert, their first proper date when it rained and Roger held his jacket over her head, that time they bonded over both hating Jane Austen, the whole weekend they spent naked, his dad’s funeral. It was all becoming a blur to her, but those months would be preserved. Pristine.

At the end, Roger looked exhausted, under the weather. “I have to go lie down,” he said. He handed her a sparkly memory wisp, a silver feather floating in a plexiglas cube. She thanked him several times and even kissed his cheek. The cube fit in her purse, next to her mycosnuff and breathspray. She imagined implanting those memories into hundreds of men, thousands even, so they could all remember falling in love with her. And then that thought scared her with its brazenness, so she banished it. She thanked Roger again, and he said it was nothing.

* * *

“Oh my god, can I see it?” Stacia stretched out an elegantly manicured hand. Mary only left her hanging for a moment before plunking down the cube containing her happy early months with Roger. “Wow,” Stacia said, “it’s so light. It weighs almost nothing. It’s Moore’s Law in action, right?”

“I guess so,” Mary said. “Moore’s Law, yeah. Everything gets smaller and smaller, forever.”

Stacia was staring at the little wisp inside the cube, watching it undulate. Mary realized this had been going on for an uncomfortably long time. “It’s so pretty,” Stacia said.

“Yeah,” Mary said. She reached out to take the cube back, but Stacia moved out of reach with a dancer’s grace, so that she didn’t quite seem to be dodging.

They were at the mall, which was a program that lasted approximately forty-five minutes depending on your attention span. With the right lenses inserted and enough smart cookie in your system, you could look at a dozen storefronts per minute, scrolling around you in the spherical chamber with a walkway at its center. Over Mary and Stacia’s heads, palm trees slowly morphed into “futuristic” metal cranes (as in the bird). This mall had gone way downhill.

Stacia and Mary had originally met when they’d escaped from the same dismal party together in sophomore year of college, where they were the only two smeary-eyed malcontents dressed in black, in a galaxy of pink hoopskirts. They’d formed a club: The Unfathomable Sisterhood of Ick. Mary was an aspiring bio-artist, culturing abstract oozes, while Stacia was a shy pudgy computer-grower, but they shared a deep conviction that ninety-nine percent of everything people cared about was false and revolting, like the fake barf on sale at the magic store in this mall.

They almost went into a hat store that was selling fancy retro bonnets, but then they decided they were bored with hats. “Let’s skip to the food court,” Stacia said. “Wafflecrepes. I’m buying.”

“Can I have my cube back?” Mary didn’t want to sound pushy or needy, or as though she didn’t trust Stacia. The memory wisp flickered as it caught the sparkly light from the kitchenwares store. One of the clerks in the store waved, trying to get their attention with a fancy spatula, then was gone.

“I was wondering if I could maybe borrow it,” Stacia said. “Just for a day or two.” She bit her lip and pulled her shoulders inwards, towards her cleavage in her frilly chemise. “Because I would kind of like to… to copy it.”

“You what?” Mary thought she must have misheard over the mall’s schmaltzy orchestral music. “You want to make a backup or something?”

“No, no, I want it in my head.” Stacia laughed—but it was a nervous, defensive laugh, for a change. “I want to have Roger’s memories in my head. I want those experiences, I want to remember them, like they happened to me. I want to feel what it was like for him. Firsthand.”

Mary found herself backing away from Stacia a bit, until she was almost inside the make-your-own-stuffed-animal store. The mall stopped changing, in response to her proximity to an entrance.

“I never knew… ” Mary’s mind raced, almost as if she’d had a smart-cookie overdose. She felt her heart clapping. “I never knew you felt that way about me. All this time, we’ve been best friends. Nearly ten years now, I never knew you were… you were in love with me.” She made herself stop shrinking away, and come back into Stacia’s orbit.

“Oh Jesus, no.” Stacia laughed, her normal laugh this time. “Is that what you think? My god, no. I’m as straight as they come, you know that. No lesbian inclinations at all. Jesus. I’m sorry to let you down, I love you as a friend. No, I just want to have the memories. I want to know what it’s like.”

“What what’s like?”

“All of it. Falling in love. The start of a long-term relationship. Being a man and falling for a beautiful woman. All of it. I just want to have those experiences in the mix, jumbled up with my real memories. I think it could solve a lot of stuff for me.”

“But… but why Roger and me? Why can’t you just find some random stranger and get his memories? I bet you could buy something on the gray market. Or just ask around. Like you said, everybody’s starting to do this.”

“It wouldn’t be the same. And just think—this will bring us closer together. Any questions you have about Roger, or about the mistakes you make at the start of a relationship, you can just ask me. It’ll be great!”

“Uh… ” Mary had moved far enough away from the door to the teddy-bear store that it had vanished, and now other stores were whipping behind her. She had a dreadful headache, the kind that started at the top of her scalp and traveled all the way down her spine to her sacrum. She could barely see.

“It doesn’t take long. I’ll give it right back to you in a day or so, I promise.”

“No. Please, no,” Mary said. “Please, just give it back to me now.” She was starting to have a nagging suspicion that this had been Stacia’s plan all along, and the real reason Stacia had been so insistent that she ask Roger for this. “Just, please, give it back.”

Stacia nodded. “Okay, that’s how it has to be.” She raised up her hand with the cube in it, as if to hand it back to Mary—and then she turned and ran inside a kina kuniya store, disappearing into its maze of shelves and running out the back exit before Mary could even get her bearings.

Mary was left hyperventilating in a null zone between the mall and the real world, where everything was a whirl of broken advertising images, too fast to make out even with smart cookies.

* * *

Mary kept trying to contact Stacia, who had gone off the grid. This was the longest Mary and Stacia had gone without speaking to each other in the past decade. Mary was so freaked out she could barely breathe, imagining Stacia absorbing all the memories of her private moments with Roger, the good times. Making them into a big joke in her head, or worse yet getting ironically sentimental over them. Mary couldn’t sleep or concentrate on anything; she almost let a bad batch through at work.

Stacia waited a few days before bringing the memory wisp back to Mary—the exact amount of time it would take for the memories to become permanent in Stacia’s brain. Then at last, she arranged a meet in a hotel lobby downtown.

Right away, there was something different about Stacia’s body language, a little more of Roger’s old calculated slouch and less of the thrown-back shoulders. Like she’d absorbed a bit of Roger’s personality along with a dose of his memories. Probably that would get submerged over time, but it still startled her when Stacia did that thing with her lower lip that Roger used to do.

“Hey, looking good, babe,” Stacia said. “You’re wearing that belt that I got—I mean, that he got you.” Mary had forgotten that Roger bought her this fake alligator belt.

“I can’t believe you went through with this,” Mary said.

Stacia handed the cube back to Mary. “I’m sorry, babe,” she said. “I know, it was an invasion of privacy, and a terrible thing to do. You know ever since we got out of college I’ve been dating, right? And I’ve made a point of never getting with anyone for more than a few weeks at a stretch. I’m like the world expert at making things happen, but then the juice goes out of them and I get bored and move on. I was realizing that maybe if I knew what was going through a guy’s head when he’s falling for someone, maybe I wouldn’t have to… I don’t know. But I was hanging around Roger the whole time you were with him, he’s the only guy I was always spending time with these past several years, and I realized I never understood him at all.”

Mary had snatched the cube back and stuck it in the deepest crevice of her purse, with two zippers protecting it. Barn door, horse. “I thought that after Roger, the breakup, that nobody could ever hurt me that much again,” she mumbled. “I guess I was pretty dumb. Right? This is way worse. I’m going to have your knife in my back forever.” They were standing in this hotel lobby, surrounded by travelers and people having bar meetings, at noon, having what ought to be a nighttime bar conversation.

“Don’t be like that, babe,” Stacia said. Roger used to call Mary “babe” when they were first dating. He’d stopped a few years in, and that hadn’t seemed significant at the time. “It’s just that memory is one of the main building blocks of identity. And you know, right around the time that you started seeing Roger was when I started to become the person I am now. I wasn’t seeing as much of you at the time, and I felt totally alone. And maybe I don’t like the person I turned into. I just want to remember that time in my life a different way.”

“Now you’re blaming me for your choices?” Mary said. “Like it’s my fault that you started having intimacy issues, because I was in a long-term relationship and you weren’t? Are you even listening to yourself?”

“It’s not about blame, babe,” Stacia said. “I’m just trying to get a different perspective on that time in our lives.”

“Stop calling me babe!” Mary didn’t even care anymore that she was yelling in a public place. A group of people with lanyards and fancy shirts glanced in their direction. “Just, please, stop.”

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry.” Stacia didn’t know how to hold herself, what sort of body language to adopt with Mary. “I keep thinking about that nightmare you had two months after you starting dating Roger, the one about an ocean of pure acid washing over everything and melting all the people and buildings. Once you would have told me about that dream, but you told Roger, and he held you so tight he thought he could almost smush you. It was right after his father had just died. He felt so full of grief and protectiveness, he didn’t know what to do with himself. He thought his heart would just give out, pop or something.” Stacia leaned on the back of an armchair. “Then I called, wanting to see if you were up for brunch, and he suddenly just felt annoyed and jealous.”

Then Stacia walked away, doing some weird mixture of her sashay and Roger’s stride.

* * *

So now Mary had to avoid all the places she’d ever gone with Roger, plus every place she used to hang out with Stacia. All her other friends kept asking her if she was okay, because they heard there was weirdness with Stacia, but Mary did not feel like explaining. And Stacia kept sending message after message, until Mary blocked her. She started going to the motherboard garden after work, because she’d never gone there before, and watching the tiny motherboards making abstract shapes in the carbon nanofiber beds calmed her.

One day, Mary was sitting in the motherboard garden, trying to stop replaying in her head the story of Roger, Stacia, and their patsy. And she noticed a man over at the other end of the square—at first, he just seemed overcome with emotion at the zen-like simplicity of the place. But then she’d noticed a tremor on one corner of his mouth and some vessels bursting in the opposite eye, and Mary recognized the signs of someone who’d done the wrong combination of neurotransmitters, from when she used to experiment at school. She rushed to his side just as he started to keel over, and kina-ed an ambulance. She rode to the hospital with him, telling the paramedics what counter-toxins he probably needed.

Mary figured she would never hear from that guy, whose name was Dave, again. Most guys would rather forget that they showed weakness in front of a total stranger, right? But Dave got in touch a few days later and asked her out for jerk chicken and plantains.

Dave wasn’t the opposite of Roger or anything—Mary had to resign herself to accepting that she had a Type—but he was shorter and burlier than Roger, with darker skin and a thicker mustache. He worked as an estate planner, in a fancy office in the donut hole downtown, and he was maybe a touch more reserved than Roger. He never made her laugh the way Roger had, but he made her smile.

Mary waited until their fourth date, when she and Dave were already spending a whole weekend together, before telling him about Roger’s memory wisp. “It’s kind of dumb,” she said. “But I figured I ought to mention it, in case you wanted to. I mean, it would be one way to streamline things. You know. You could figure out sooner if you actually want to be in a relationship with me.”

“I’m already in a relationship with you,” Dave said, and she shivered all over, even though they were in a hot tub (naked) together. His ample chest hair glimmered.

“In that case, I’m in a relationship with you as well,” Mary said, leaning upwards and kissing him, while their feet nuzzled.

“You know, I think getting to know each other is the fun part,” Dave said, stretching out in the tub. “The newness, the thrill of discovery. Peeling back the layers. Getting to know someone can be delightful. If it’s the right person.”

Mary nodded. She hadn’t even thought of any of this as something that could be fun. She had been thinking of starting a relationship as like defusing a bomb, or cooking a complicated recipe. “Yeah. Let’s hear it for the slow way.” She raised an invisible glass out of the water, and chinked it with an imaginary glass in Dave’s hand.

“The slow way.” Dave toasted back.

Around the time Mary shoved the memory cube into the trash compactor of the “kitchen” rectangle of her studio apartment, listening to the satisfying crunch of data being fatally compromised, she realized it had been almost two months since she’d spoken to Stacia. Time was, they used to talk almost every day. She had a moment of slow bereavement, like the soil erosion after an old-growth tree is uprooted. She had to bite back the urge to kina Stacia and try to salvage something.

Of course, as soon as Mary destroyed the memory wisp, she regretted it, because the day might come, years from now, when she would desperately need concrete evidence that she had once been loved. That someone could fall in love with her. She had Dave now, and she was currently experiencing the sensation of falling in requited love—but she’d already seen how that turned out. Right?

* * *

Mary went dancing with Dave at that new club that was five dayglo rooms with imperfect soundproofing, so the beats bled from dance floor to dance floor, and she was whooping at the unpredictability of the rhythms and the proximity of Dave’s wide torso, when she looked over Dave’s shoulder and saw Stacia swaying towards them with a desperate grin on her face.

“Let’s get out of here,” she breathed in Dave’s ear. She hadn’t told Dave about what Stacia had done, because Mary felt like it was her fault in some way.

A couple days later, Mary and Dave were on the beach, half-dozing in the sun in new swimsuits, and Dave had his hand on her thigh without any fixed intent. Mary saw a shadow only a second before she heard a voice say, “Have you tried two fingertips right behind her kneecap? Just kind of describing a slow, slow circle? It drives her crazy, man.”

Mary stiffened, squinting up at Stacia’s face. She knew at once that the “two fingers behind the kneecap” thing would never turn her on ever again. “Wow,” she said. “You’re really creeping me out.”

“Who is this?” Dave was sitting up and squinting.

“Uh, never mind.” Mary gathered up all their stuff into a bundle, as though fleeing a tidal wave. She seized Dave’s shoulder with both hands and steered him out of there, while Stacia tried to explain that she was just trying to help, and Mary would thank her later, and why was everybody being so judgey? Mary could still hear Stacia behind them all the way back to the transit station, until they finally got lost in the crowd.

When they were alone on the tube, with a safe cushion of strangers all around them, Dave leaned in, one eyebrow raised with gentle humor but a concerned look in his eyes. “You want to tell me what that was about?” he said.

Mary could hardly bring herself to say out loud what Stacia had done, because it made her skin crawl. Dave just shrugged, though, and said that all of the estate planning conferences were having seminars about the emerging problem of parceling out the newly deceased person’s neural map. And the security sector was just starting to freak out about the problem of memory embezzlement. This was the crime of the future. When you put it like that, Mary almost felt trendy.

The next day, Dave and Mary met for sushi and Stacia was there, leaning across the bar so her face was uncomfortably close to theirs and saying things to Dave like, “Promise me you’ll take good care of this one, she’s like a tiger raised in captivity. Fierce, but trusting. Roger used to watch her in the bath. He used to keep waving goodbye long after she couldn’t see him anymore, whenever they parted ways. Roger had a crazy tidal wave of love for her, you have no idea.”

A few days later, Stacia was outside Mary’s apartment building when Dave and Mary came outside, tears scattering across her face. “I just want to know where we went wrong,” Stacia said, and Mary wasn’t sure which “we” Stacia meant. “What happened to us? I thought nobody could ever come between us. What happened? What happened to us? What happened to us? What happened to us?” Mary and Dave had to get in a random taxi just to get away from her.

Mary could see what was going to happen next. Stacia was going to stalk them one too many times, she was going to act just a little too creepy around Dave, and she was going to know too many embarrassing things about Mary. And then Dave would bail, and Mary would topple back into the dating pool. Wings on fire.

Maybe a week passed, and Mary started to relax. And then, when she was walking along the waterfront with Dave, Stacia came running up behind them, arms waving and eyes streaming with tears, wearing a torn skirt and mismatched high-heel shoes.

“I’ve never felt anything like what he felt, when he got together with you,” Stacia said, panting. “I’ll never feel anything like that for myself, firsthand. It was so intense. I can’t even imagine feeling that much love for anyone.” To Dave, she said: “You can’t compete. You might as well go home. She’s already had the great love of her life! Every time I close my eyes, I keep replaying it in my mind. It’s so intense. I wasn’t prepared. He loved her so much, he went half-crazy with love. You’ll never measure up. You’ll always be her second love. A consolation prize. Sorry to be the one to tell you!”

Then she ran away, stumbling over her own shoes.

That night, Mary spent hours staring into the depths of her kitchen trash compactor, where the last shreds of the memory wisp still clung. After a while, the crushing mechanism started to look like faces, or little blades of black grass, because your mind has a nearly limitless ability to see familiar outlines in anything. Mary didn’t cry, but she did heave, more and more violently, halfway between crying and empty-vomiting, until she had to send her kitchen away and summon her bed into the same spot on the wall.

Mary hugged herself in bed all night, staring at the peeling wall opposite. In the morning, she had a nine-tequila hangover, but she also had a moment of clarity: It wasn’t enough to avoid the places she and Roger had gone together. She had to grow up and move on with her life.

She took an extra smart cookie and spent an hour at dawn, sending out résumés for jobs that would actually use her bio-artist skills. And she started surfing apartment listings on her kina, because maybe she could actually live someplace where a sink and bed could coexist. She read up on extreme sports, which had gotten a lot more extreme since smart-cookies gave people superhuman reflexes and concentration. She kept looking for jobs and apartments for hours, until she was almost late for work.

By the time Mary met Dave for dinner (a different hand-pulled noodle place than the one where she got dumped), she was full of news. “I already have a job interview in ten days,” she said, sploshing dumplings. “And I’m thinking of trying BASE jumping. I know, this isn’t really like me, but change is healthy. Right?”

“I haven’t known you for long enough to know what’s like you,” Dave said. “I keep being surprised.” He looked around, as if afraid that Stacia would turn up at the next table, with more advice about Mary’s erogenous zones or more declarations that Dave couldn’t compete with Mary’s great lost love. “I’ve never met anyone like you before.”

“Um, yeah,” Mary said. “This has been a weird time in my life. I mean… ”

“You know,” Dave said in his matter-of-fact drawl, “I hate drama. I had a lot of drama when I was in my early twenties, and I just can’t stand it.”

Okay. So this was it. She was giving off too much crazy. She looked like a weirdness magnet, or at least someone with horrible judgment in choosing her friends. So, she was about to be dumped. She deserved to be dumped, truth be told. She had mismanaged her shit.

“This is really hard for me to say,” Dave said.

“I’m listening.” Mary braced herself, hands on elbows. Tried to keep a game face on. She was never going to eat hand-pulled noodles again.

“I know this is really out of line,” Dave said.

Mary felt her insides lose all stability, like she was falling off a skyscraper. But then she also felt a cushion of okayness, deep inside. Like she’d already been through the worst that could possibly happen, and she was still here. Even if Dave broke her heart again, he wouldn’t break her.

“Whatever you have to say,” she told Dave, amazed at her own calm, “just say it.”

“I think your friend is in trouble,” Dave said. “I know it’s none of my business, and you can tell me to butt out. But I think she’s having a psychotic break or something. Yesterday, at the waterfront, she seemed like someone who was coming apart. All that crazy stuff she said about the memories being so intense.”

Mary almost fell out of her chair at the realization that she wasn’t being dumped. Then she took on board what Dave was saying.

“God, you’re right,” she said. “She’s suffering from a neural overload. She can’t integrate those memories, because they’re so different and conflicting. You know, Roger kind of hated Stacia, especially early on. Plus she remembers the intensity of Roger falling for me, but not everything that came after, when we settled into just a normal relationship. Wow. I should have seen this sooner, but I was too busy thinking about how she hurt me.”

“Again, this is none of my business.” Dave raised his hands. “And I know this is her own fault. But… ”

“We ought to help her.” Mary grabbed her purse. “You’re right.”

“Thanks for not being mad at me for speaking out of school.” Dave seemed relieved. She had to pause to kiss him on the lips and embrace him with all her strength, right next to the man pulling noodles with his bare hands.

* * *

One time, when Mary and Stacia were still in college, Mary had cooked up a bad batch of prions. They were supposed to induce an hour of amyloid brain-melt, then dissolve harmlessly. But instead, they’d turned Mary and Stacia into basket cases, and when Mary found herself losing the use of language and forgetting how to walk, she’d lunged for the antidote she’d prepared just in case. Mary was fine an hour later, but Stacia had kept shaking and making preverbal chatter, like a giant baby. Mary had stayed with Stacia all night, holding onto her and saying, “It’s okay, I’m here,” until the prions had finally flushed out and Stacia had regained her mind.

This was worse. Stacia was huddled in one corner of her light-box apartment, wearing a bright flamenco-dancer dress that had been beautiful but was now stained and torn. “I can’t,” Stacia said over and over. “I can’t, I can’t.” Her self-actuating eyelashes were flicking tears in all directions.

“I know,” Mary said. “We’re going to help you. There are ways to make some memories seem less vivid. I’ve read about it. We can fix this.”

“I don’t ever want that,” Stacia said. “Roger’s love for you is the most wonderful thing I’ve ever felt. He was right about me, I was jealous. You were perfect together. I was just a stupid useless third wheel. You were amazing.”

“You only think Roger’s love for me was so great, because it’s like a lump your mind can’t digest. It really wasn’t that great, trust me.” Mary felt a weird relief, saying this aloud. “You can’t reconcile Roger’s version of events with yours, and it’s like you’ve given yourself a split personality or something. We’re going to help.”

They got Stacia cleaned up, and strapped her to her bed, which was an actual piece of furniture instead of a module. Mary and Dave debated about taking Stacia to the hospital, but Stacia begged them not to, and Mary had a feeling she could help Stacia better than the E.R. staff could in any case.

“So first you have to go cold turkey on the smart cookies, so your brain goes into withdrawal and your thoughts slow down to a crawl,” Mary said. “Then we slowly work you back up to a normal dose over a four- or five-day period. It’s basically like rebooting your brain. I’m sorry. This is going to hurt a lot.”

“No,” Stacia said. “I can’t. I can’t.”

“You have to,” Mary said. “You have to let go of this. Come on. If anybody knows how to get rid of a guy, it’s you.”

Stacia actually laughed at that, which seemed like a good sign.

Stacia sweated through her clothes and sheets. She went clammy and glass-eyed as her most recent smart cookie wore off. Mary sat with her, calling in sick at work and sitting at Stacia’s bedside even after Dave had to go to his office. And once Stacia’s brain was barely functional and she was gazing into space, Mary started speaking in Stacia’s ear. Telling her the history, the saga of the Unfathomable Sisterhood of Ick. Their friendship after college, and how they had stayed friends even after Mary got into a long-term relationship with some guy, whatsisname. Mary dredged up details from some storage locker in the back of her mind, rebuilding Stacia’s true memories to banish the false ones.

“That guy, whatsisname, he’s gone, but we’re still here,” Mary said. “We’re not going anywhere. I haven’t forgiven you, but I’m not going to bail on you either. Hey, remember that time you and I went ice skating and we each twisted an ankle? It was a couple years after I started dating whatsisname. We ate those revolting tofu corndogs until we barfed.” She kept talking until her voice got tired, repeating the same stories with minor variations after a while and obsessing over minor details like the exact color of a stuffed animal they’d had for a week and then lost.

The sun crested over Stacia’s slit of a window and then bobbed again, and darkness reasserted. Mary brushed Stacia’s forehead with the veiny part of the back of her hand, like someone waking a child from a bad dream.

Rock Manning Can’t Hear You

This guy came into the half-stocked convenience store where I was working, and he wanted me to empty out the safe. He had a waxy mustache and soul patch, and he wore a poncho over a bulky football sweatshirt and knee-high socks. He was waving a shotgun that looked like someone had shot a grouse with it back in 2009, and then it had sat in a closet ever since. I thought about angles of escape, up over his head or around behind the Juicy Yoo cooler—because I’m Rock Manning, the internet’s favorite hyperfiend, and that’s what I do.

Then I shrugged and put up my hands.

The trouble was, he couldn’t get at the safe because it was keyed to my vital signs, so if my heart or breathing sped up then the safe went into total lockdown, and if my heart stopped then every alarm went dog-crazy. My boss Ramon couldn’t even get cash for legitimate purposes half the time because I’d be doing jumping jacks and thinking about whether we should stage a trolley accident or a scooter joust when we were making our slapstick movies this weekend. I had to practice no-mind deep breathing just so my boss could take out petty cash.

With this guy waving his gun at me, my heart juddered so damn hard the tumblers in the safe hugged each other for dear life. He almost gave up and left, but then he found some extra drowsy cough syrup and made me drink some of it along with a ton of Grand Marnier, with that shotgun in my face the whole time I was chugging. My heart stayed pigeon-like, and I told the guy he’d have to be patient and wait for the stuff to take effect. He wanted to keep force-feeding me downers but I reminded him that if I died the safe locked up tight.

He and I ended up sitting around the store a couple hours, talking about old movies and video games and stuff. Reginald loved all the cop buddy comedies of the eighties and nineties, and he could recite long sections of Lethal Weapon from memory. Before I even knew what I was doing, I was telling Reginald that a bunch of us made our own amateur web movies in Boston Common and he should swing by this Saturday and join in. I guess it was the cough syrup, or just the fact that we’d been talking for ages and he’d put down the gun by then. Five minutes after he thanked me and wandered off down the street, I took a deep breath and heard the safe un-jam itself.

I meant to tell some of my friends about Reginald, but then I got sidetracked into thinking about my character. Not my real-life character, which I didn’t really know much about, but my movie character.

Think about it! Harold Lloyd is the same guy in every one of his movies—a small-town innocent, maybe a little egg-headed but not street smart, with his heart on his sleeve but also full of crazy ambitions. I could be like that, except maybe more cunning and just a little loopy. Or okay, a lot loopy. Coming off the super-cold-relief formula and cognac buzz, I felt a swelling urgency that people should root for me, not just laugh at my hijinks.

Janelle, the cute film student with the rainbow dreads, agreed with me. The comic hero has to be loveable or relatable, or at least there has to be a moment of connection with the audience in between all the falling gargoyles, she said. The two of us cornered Sally Hamster, our director, who kept trying to get us to talk to her hands. Sally was like, “I make art during the week. This weekend shit is just for fun.” Sally had been making serious strides at film school until I came back into her life, fully recovered from my nervous breakdown and eager to make more weird movies on the internet. But Janelle and I both said it wasn’t about art, just making the fun as fun as possible.

I kept forgetting to mention Reginald the corner-store robber, until he showed up on Saturday wearing some kind of bright red wrestling costume, or maybe those were just his regular exercise clothes. We dressed Reginald up as a cop, and a bunch of the film school kids played a motorcycle gang who’d started riding bicycles because gas was $12 a gallon, so they all overcompensated by whooping really loud and blasting heavy metal when they pedaled into town.

Someone had renovated a whole section of Boston near the river to look like a little “ye olde” village, except it was really all yuppie boutiques that had been boarded up since the Debt Crisis. So we turned it into a small town that was trying to keep the bikers out with the help of Reginald the cop, and I got mixed up in the middle of their conflict because I had to deliver a cactus to a sick friend. Once again, my motivation was a little hazy, and it bothered me as well as Janelle. Sally had her elbow in the way of us doing any kind of love story, even though I could never figure out why. It wasn’t just that she’d gotten her heart pulped with her boyfriend Raine’s head during the Peace Riots. She was just dead set against goo-goo eyes.

Everybody thought Reginald rocked, especially the sequence where a bunch of the bikers rode up a giant ramp we made out of an old herbal facial spa sign and flew over Reginald’s head while he tried to kick-box with their wheels. Except Zapp Stillman, because Reginald somehow managed to break Zapp’s nose, although the other film geeks said it would just add some boxery distinction to his face. (Zapp was the grand-nephew of some famous movie director, and an expert on everything.)

Sally asked where I found Reginald, and I said I just ran into him. Reginald nearly dropped me off the Longfellow Bridge when he found out this was a volunteer gig, but I convinced him the exposure would help him to get other, paying gigs. He got pretty jazzed thinking about his roundhouse popping up all over the internet and becoming a cult phenom. He was pretty glad he didn’t actually kill me, at least for now.

I started wondering if I should tell Sally the truth about Reginald, but I figured he would probably disappear soon anyway, since he made me look like long-attention-span guy by comparison. I hadn’t been able to concentrate much before Raine died, but ever since I involuntarily ate a piece of Raine’s brain I was a human jitter. The Army recruiter doctors had taken one look at me and just laughed at the idea of militarizing me.

People hit our video-tumblr like bam-bam-bam. Sally thought soon we’d be more popular than we were in high school, and we sold some advertisements. People would bring us pieces of meat and shoes in return for an ad on the site sometimes. Sally got that gleam in her eye, the one she used to get when the internet first fell in love with us. But she also kept saying how un-artistic our movies were, compared to the fancy stuff she and Janelle were doing for film school.

So Zapp Stillman was a hyper-mega rich socialite, who didn’t really notice a lot of what was going on around him, and I was his overeager manservant trying to cater to all his idiotic whims. Despite what Reginald had done to Zapp’s face, he still looked delicate and sheltered, and I got to wear this great houndstooth suit that fit really well except for the arms, shoulders, knees, and crotch. I practiced walking straight and butlery, which only made me more splashmanic, and then Zapp and I were supposed to go on a trip to the seaside except I had to shelter him from all the violence on the streets. Zapp hadn’t read a blog or seen a newscast in years and I kept him unaware of the state of the world. So for example, we rode our two-seater bicycle past piles of comatose bodies, and I convinced Zapp it was just a group of people camping out for tickets to the Imagine Dragons reunion tour. And then a bunch of guys on scooters chased us to rip our heads off, and I told Zapp it was a friendly race. (All dialogue was big black captions, like in an old-school classic movie.)

It was a cool movie with good character moments, but a ton of stuff went wrong when we were filming. Like we staged a fake riot with a bunch of film students in ripped-up clothes pulling down bricks we’d placed strategically. Then random people wandered by and saw what was going on, and they wanted to join in and pretty soon they were tossing big chunks of wall around, and they saw Zapp and me on our dorky bicycle built for two and threw rocks at us, so the peddling-for-dear-life sequences were way more realistic than we’d bargained on. The camera guys had to run like hell to keep their equipment from being smashed.

Mid-summer, Boston was all melty but people on the street sold home-made ice cream and you could ignore all the rotting smells if you thought about the river ducks. I still felt like I was about to crash everyone around me into the gritty old walls. I would forget for a second; I would bounce down the street, jumping over the people on the sidewalk and swinging on the low oak branches. And then I would have a mental image of myself landing the wrong way with my foot in someone’s stomach, maybe someone I loved or maybe a stranger.

Some nights I couldn’t sleep because every time I closed my eyes I saw Raine getting his head exploded, the chunks of skull flying apart, the brains splattering into my open mouth. This image blended together with all the ways I’d injured people by accident, or the times when I could have injured people if things had gone a little different. Raine’s head got pulpier and more vivid each time.

Janelle and I got together and wrote a movie script, to Sally’s total horror. “Okay, so what is this story about?” Janelle asked me twenty or thirty times. We sat on an abandoned swan boat in the middle of the lake in Boston Common, and the boat kept almost capsizing as water sloshed in and out of its gullet. Once, tourists had chugged around in these boats, but now they just bobbed their decaying shells in and out of the algae. I didn’t know what our story was about, since I didn’t even know what the story was. Couldn’t we take one leap at a time? But Janelle was scary patient and kept talking themes: communication, Social Darwinism, the impossibility of really knowing other people because the closer you get to them the harder it is to see the whole person. Janelle had run away from home as a kid, and lived in the attic of a bookstore cafe for years, reading every book in the stockroom and living off of abandoned scones and salads. Nobody had known she was there until she used the store’s address for her B.U. application and the acceptance letter turned up.

We settled on this O. Henry thing where two people try to save each other at cross purposes, sort of. I’m this scrappy DJ who owes money to gangsters, who could maybe be Vikings because we had some helmets and fake fur. And Janelle is a dancer who posed for some questionable photos years ago and now this sleazy guy wants to publish them and her strict family will disown her. So I decide to break in and snag the sleazy guy’s hard drive, while Janelle wants to do whatever it takes to raise money to bail me out—even take on a dancer job that turns out to involve dancing on an unstable scaffolding at a construction site. And then the Vikings turn up while I’m trying to break into the sleazy guy’s studio, and they want to break my legs but the sleazy guy has a protection deal with a Samurai gang. So we have a pitched Viking-Samurai battle in a photography studio, while I’m trying to slip past them and grab the hard drive. And then Janelle somehow falls off her scaffolding into the middle of our fracas and I have to run around to catch her.

It only took us about five hours to come up with that storyline, and by then the swan was submerged up to its neck and water slopped over the sides of its torso. We had to haul ourselves up onto the bridge without breaking our necks.

Janelle took a day off film school to help me location-scout our movie called Photo Finish. We found this large art/performance space which people actually used as an art studio. It had crumbling brick walls, a high platform leading to some big industrial-looking windows, and a red velvet curtain that perfectly said “Sleazy Photographer.”

Reginald nearly bit her head off, trembling in his charging-bull helmet and muppet-fur cloak while she coached him on his lines. “No, come on Reggie, try it again and this time put everything you’ve got into the word ‘maul.’ You have to feel that word. Jesus, Rock, where did you find this guy?”

She tried to choreograph the big Viking-Samurai throwdown, even down to me throwing the big photographic backdrops in people’s faces and Zapp Stillman, the lead Samurai, hurling his katana at a Viking and hitting the sought-after hard drive instead.

The fifth time we stopped so Janelle could micro-manage, Reginald looked ready to light the set on fire, rip several people’s heads off, and then use his broadsword to make a head-kebab. I was having seismic levels of fidgetiness, to the point where I had to hug myself.

Sally pulled me aside. “Jesus, what the fuck are we going to do about Janelle?” Sally torqued her elbows and claws. “She’s driving me fucking bonkers, man.”

I didn’t have any answers, except that I was worried about Reginald’s inside-out fuse. Another hour went by, and you could have made a milkshake on my head. It was thirty seconds’ filming and then wait wait wait, ready, no hang on, wait, wait.

The tenth time we stopped, I jittered myself blind and stumbled into Zapp Stillman, and before he could finish saying he begged my pardon I fell over. On my way down, I kicked Zapp’s katana into Reginald’s crotch, and Reginald fell on top of three other Vikings, so their swords jabbed into his back. He howled and clutched at his own spine, then jumped up and announced that just because he’d failed to kill me the first time didn’t mean he couldn’t finish the job now.

Reginald grabbed a long razor-sharp hook from the studio corner and ran at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sally gesture to Janelle to get this on tape for godssake. Zapp Stillman tried to get between Reginald and me, and Reginald whacked him in the face. I ducked under a big platform and kicked a cart of A/V stuff at Reginald, but he jumped over the cart without breaking his run. Several of the other Samurai thought this was part of the movie, and tried to attack Reginald with their balsa-wood swords, but he just cracked their heads together, so their fake helmets crumpled.

Meanwhile, I slid out the other end of the platform and climbed the curtain rope. The rope was on a pulley, so Reginald started pulling, and the rope went down as the curtain went up. I had to climb at top speed just to stay at the same altitude. Reginald kept pulling the rope with one hand and threw his spike-hook with the other, but I caught the hook and dug it into the curtain, then let go of the rope and swung on the hook across to the other side of the curtain, which tore as I went, so I landed on the ground across the room. A random Viking swung at my head and I barely ducked in time, then I saw a bucket of water (which was supposed to be photographic solution) and I dumped it on Reginald’s head. His helmet’s horns stabbed through the bucket so he couldn’t get it off, and he started grabbing anyone who got in his way, even other Vikings, and tossing them.

At first I screened the sirens out, because you heard sirens all the time, but I heard more and more, fire sirens as well as cop cars. Peal after peal, like church bells. I leaned out the window to see what was going on and then Reginald was at my ear, trying to push me out. He’d gotten the helmet and bucket off, and he had one hand under my armpit and the other on my belt. It was probably a dozen feet down. I could see flames in the distance, and tongues of smoke from a few other places. I tried to tell Reginald I hadn’t meant to hurt him, but he just pushed harder. The window frame gave way and we both tumbled. I twisted my body so Reginald hit the ground first and I landed on top of him.

I couldn’t see anything but I smelled smoke worse than ever. My crotch felt broken, my feet felt broken. I forced my eyes open but everything had a double image. Sally had the door to the studio building open nearby and was yelling for me to get my ass inside. I limped to my feet and juddered in, then Sally locked the door behind me. Through the window I watched Reginald try to raise himself up.

“Example of the sort of human garbage they tolerate up here,” a voice said. It sounded sort of like Ricky Artesian, from back home, but wasn’t. I found a window with a view of the guy, who was a little smaller than Ricky and had tufty black hair. He dressed like Ricky and had the same red bandana. So did the half dozen or so guys behind him, who had just climbed out of a couple of all-terrain crawlers. The guy talked for ages about his issues with Reginald, who kept trying to get to his feet but couldn’t quite manage it. Reginald had the bad luck to be the only guy nearby who looked like a junkie and couldn’t run for his life. I wanted to go out and help him, but I could barely move, and Sally half-supported, half-restrained me. Sally wanted to stop watching when they got into it with the crowbars, but this was my fault, sort of, and I had to see it play out.

They didn’t torch him until they ran out of bones. I hoped he would black out, but he kept screaming the whole time, on fire. Maybe some people can black out and scream at the same time? I sure hoped so.

So at this point, you’re wondering what happened to Photo Finish. It was our most popular Vumblr entry yet, even though we only filmed about half the scenes Janelle had scripted, and what we recorded didn’t have that much in common with her and my storyline. Sally and some of the others did a fantastic job tweaking it with Zap!mation, to the point where the studio looked like twenty different places. With the red bandanas turning up all over the country and imposing mob rule, people were primed for people in silly costumes whacking each other. It turns out when everything is turning into bloody shit, that’s when people need Vikings against Samurai more than ever. Who knew?

The police tried to stop the red bandanas at first, but then the President went on television and said they were an official militia, like in the Constitution, because we were losing our grip as a nation. It was probably the Pan Asiatic Ecumen’s fault, but then again, everybody blamed them for everything.

* * *

Two days later, Sally said I had to get out of the house and breathe, because too many people were staying indoors all the time and we had a duty to show we weren’t scared. I crutch-hopped my way down the empty street as Sally ran rings around me for a change. I was glad I didn’t have to step over junkies any more, even though I worried about what had happened to all of them. Sally said they were locked up in camps, or tossed in bonfires, or just hiding out somewhere.

All of Sally’s film student minions cheered for me when we got to B.U. Even the ones who’d high-backed me when I first showed up in town. Maybe because I’d become a casualty of art, or maybe because the new movie had gotten mad hits. Either way, people wanted to carry me around and pour stuff down my throat, and everyone signed my osteogenic body-sheath. We were promoting creative anarchy and that made us super important radical artists, and hey, we should take it to the next level somehow. I thought if they wanted to promote anarchy, maybe we could find one of the camps, in Medford or Malden, where the red-hanky guys had rounded up the homeless people and undesirables, and set them all free.

We could film it. We could put Napoleon hats on all of them and turn them loose. It would look cool, sort of like the final episode of The Prisoner. Everybody liked that idea, and they were all up for doing it, but not on a day when they had classes.

The film students kept adding more and more layers to the plan. We would dress as animals, and there would be a huge round clock which we’d roll downhill to cause a distraction, and maybe we could time the attack to coincide with a joint lunar/solar eclipse so the lack of both moon and sun would sensory-deprive everyone. They jumped up and down with excitement, but I realized they were making the plans fancier and fancier because they didn’t want to have to follow through. That was fine with me because I was only half serious about the camp liberation idea too.

“Most of those guys, you just tell them where to stand and what to do, and they’re happy. Don’t make them think too hard,” Sally told me afterward. Our movies had built her into a queen bee. She wanted to walk me home, but the sun sagged and I didn’t want her to get caught out after dark. I ran into a couple of red-bandana groups on my way home, but I told them I was a friend of Ricky Artesian, the red bandana leader, and they practically saluted. The second group insisted on escorting me home. Film students and red bandanas, both whooping at me, all in one day!

Soon, I was healed enough to go back to work at the convenience store, where I kept seeing bone-crushed Reginald on fire whenever I looked at the lighters. Nowadays, I saw both Raine and Reginald in my dreams, unless I watched some Buster Keaton right before bedtime.

Some of my housemates were planning a giant protest against the red bandanas and the economic policies and the move to expand the war, and the crazy weapon projects like that sonic gun that people claimed would make an army shake itself to pieces from a distance. I was leery because, duh, the last time I’d gone to a protest I’d wound up covered in slippery bodies, choking on a piece of my friend’s brain.

I started hoping my body wouldn’t heal too quickly, because once it did they would expect me to create more serious mayhem, and just the thought of it made me start to shamblequake. Sally texted me saying it was time to do some more mad slapstick, and I texted back that we really needed to talk.

* * *

I have a perfect recall of my meeting with Sally, maybe cause it was our last-ever conversation.

We met in the middle of the Mass Avenue bridge, with faded paintwork measuring the bridge’s span in “Smoots,” the height of some long-ago MIT student whose classmates had rolled him across the bridge. On either side of us, the river swelled with gray bracken and flecks of brown foam, and in front of us, the jagged Boston skyline. The John Hancock Tower’s windows had all started falling out and hitting people on the head, so they’d condemned the whole building and only gotten halfway through demolishing it, and now it looked like a shiny blue-green zigzag climbing to a single razor point. We watched the water churn a while. The wind battered us.

Sally was gushing about my chemistry with Zapp Stillman, and how much people liked seeing the two of us interact, and maybe we could do a few more clips featuring the two of us. Gang boss and lieutenant, an ineptly gay couple, boxer and trainer, rock star and manager, superheroes. The possibilities were endless, almost like having Raine back. For a moment I wondered if Sally had a thing for Zapp’s gangly ass.

“That’s why I wanted to talk to you,” I said once I could break in. “I need to take a break from making movies. I was thinking of going back to North Carolina.” I tried to explain how I kept seeing Raine and Reginald whenever I closed my eyes lately, but Sally grabbed my scruff and pushed me halfway over the edge of the bridge. My pants fell down, and the wind whipped through my boxer shorts. My ass was in space.

“You asshole,” Sally said. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Every time I think I can rely on you. What the fuck? I was going to be a real director. I was doing great in film school, making serious films about real stuff. And then you turned up and sucked me back into spending all my time making these dumb movies instead. And now you’re just going to leave? What? The? Fuck?” She shook me with each word. My shirt tore around the armpits. I could feel my feet, somewhere far away, trampling my pants.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” I looked up into her bugged out eyes. “I just can’t. I can’t deal. Jesus, you’re my best friend no matter how long I live, but I’m a poison time bomb, you don’t want to be around me, I’ll just hurt you, I’m so sorry. I break everything.”

She hauled me off the edge and dumped me on my feet. “What the fuck are you talking about, Rock? I love you, but you’re an idiot. Just listen to me, okay. You’re not some kind of destructive engine. You are good for exactly one thing, and one thing only, and that’s turning people’s brains off for a few minutes. You should stick to that. And another thing, did you ever stop to think about what I’m getting out of doing these movies with you? Did you? I mean, jeez. The world we live in now, the only time things make sense is when I’m coming up with bigger and crazier disasters to put on film. I finally decided, slapstick is the new realism. And I can’t do it without you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, but…” I took a breath and pulled up my pants. The snap had broken, so I had to hold them together with one hand, and that limited my gesture menu a lot. “I keep feeling like I’m going to hurt somebody. I feel like people keep getting hurt around me, and maybe it’s my fault somehow. Like what happened with Reginald. And Raine, before that.”

“Jesus, this pisses me off. My boyfriend dies, but it’s still all about you. What is up with that?”

The bridge rumbled, and I worried the supports had eroded or someone had sabotaged them. I tried to get Sally’s attention, but she was still talking about how dumb I was. I grabbed her arm with my free hand and pulled her toward land. She jerked free and said she didn’t want to go with me, she was sick of my crap, let go.

“Listen, listen! Something’s wrong,” I said. I pulled her the other way, toward Boston. By now the bridge was definitely vibrating in a weird way. I could feel it in my teeth. I ran as fast as I could without letting go of my pants-clasp. The bridge felt like it was going to collapse any second. We made it to land, but the sidewalks had the same problem as the bridge. The rumbling got louder and felt like it was coming from inside me.

“What the fuck is going on?” Sally shouted.

I raised my hands. By now I was seeing funny, like there were one and a half of her. My teeth clattered. My stomach cramped up. And most of all my ears were full—they hurt like murder. I had earaches like someone had jammed sticks into my ear canals, it hurt all the way down my throat.

The last words Sally ever said to me were, “What the hell, we need to get inside—”

The pressure inside my ears built up and then it spiked, like the sticks in my ears had jammed all the way in and twisted like a corkscrew. I can’t really describe the pain. People have written tons of poems about it, but mostly they use it as something to compare any other kind of pain with. Two giant hands smacked me in the head, at the same time as a massive force trying to push its way out from the inside of my skull. I staggered and fell over, nearly blacked out.

Blood burst out of Sally’s ears at the same time as I felt something splash on my shirt. I tried to say something like, What the fuck just happened, or Shit I dropped my pants again, but nothing came out. No, I was doing all the right things to make a sound, but nothing. I couldn’t hear birds or street sounds. I couldn’t hear anything. Sally was moving her mouth too, but she had the same panic in her eyes as I felt. I sat down on the ground, impact but no noise, like we were in outer space.

Sally was still trying to talk, tears coming down her cheeks. I gestured that I couldn’t hear her. She grabbed her phone and fumbled with the buttons. A second later, my phone vibrated. A text message: «wtf im deaf». I texted back: «me 2». She wrote: «we need help».

She hauled me to my feet and found a safety pin in her bag for my stupid pants. Then we rushed down Mass Ave., looking for someone who could call an ambulance. I still felt jumpy crossing the streets without being able to hear cars or other vehicles coming up behind me. Plus I kept turning to look over my shoulder in case someone ran up behind me. We found a guy up near Commonwealth Ave., but we could see from a distance he was clutching his ears and crying. Same with the half a dozen young people we saw near the boarded-up Urban Outfitters at Mass Ave. and Newbury. They all had blood on their shoulders and were texting each other or using pidgin sign language. They tried to plead for our help with their hands, until they realized we had the same problem.

Everywhere we went, deaf people wigged out. Sally texted me that we needed to get off the streets, that this was going to get ugly. I knew what she meant. Carrie texted me that she was deaf, and I told her to get indoors. Sally and I found bikes and rode back to her house as fast as we could, not stopping for traffic lights or any of the people who tried to flag us down.

Janelle kissed her knees on the sofa, her back heaving. The television showed people, all over the world, with bloody ears. Somewhere an airplane had crashed, and somewhere else a power plant had blown up. There was no newscaster, just words scrolling across the screen:

THE SITUATION IS UNDER CONTROL. STAY TUNED FOR UPDATES. DO NOT GO OUTDOORS. HEARING LOSS APPEARS TO BE WORLDWIDE. DO NOT GO OUTDOORS. AUTHORITIES HAVE NO EXPLANATION. STAY INSIDE.

We went on the internet and read everything we could find. If anyone on the planet could still hear, there was no sign. Every blog, every email group, was full of people freaking out. Only the people who had already been deaf were calm, and they posted teach-yourself-sign-language videos. I knew right away I would never have the patience to learn sign language.

It only took a few hours for people to start speculating. The Pan-Asiatic Ecumen had tested out some weapon. Or the U.S. had. A weapon test had gone wrong, or maybe it had gone right. Someone, somewhere, could still hear and was going to enslave the rest of us. It was the red bandanas. No, it was the anti-war crazies. No, it was the Chinese.

For now, all you could see on television was people wigging out. Trampling each other to death in Shanghai, or throwing themselves off the Brooklyn Bridge. A mob in Cleveland stormed through Shaker Square breaking everything in its path. In a mob of the deaf, how would you know what to do? You’d just have to look at the other mob-members to figure out what they were doing and try to play along. How could anyone talk a deaf mob down? The Cleveland cops didn’t even try, they just broke out the rubber bullets and tear gas.

Day two or three, I got fed up and decided to go to work. By then, we were running out of stuff at Sally’s house, and Janelle and even Sally were starting to get on my nerves. They could feel the vibrations from my fidgeting and the impact when I broke something of theirs, even when they couldn’t see me. And I could feel their grief like a blanket all around me. My thumbs got sore from text-messaging Sally when she was sitting right next to me. I could have just as much of a conversation from long distance. Sally didn’t want me to go out because the television was still full of people thrashing each other, but I said I’d be careful.

I didn’t even know if the convenience store still existed, and nobody had told me to come in to work. But nobody had told me not to, either. And this could be my contribution to society’s continued existence, selling spam and condoms to people. I passed plenty of looted stores on my way down Commonwealth, and people were lighting all sorts of things on fire that were probably terrible for the environment. But when I got to the Store 24, it was still there and in one piece.

I opened it up. It occurred to me that people would have a hard time asking me how much things cost. So I got out the pricing gun and went around making sure every single item in the store had an individual price sticker, even down to the 37-cent instant noodles. After that, I had to learn how to stay alert, because the little new-customer bell was no longer any use to me. An hour or two went by, more boring than anything I’d ever experienced before.

«thk gd yr here», said the message on the guy’s cell phone, waved in my face. I nodded and he pulled it away to thumb some more. «didnt want 2 loot». I nodded. «but no stores open». I nodded. Then he went and filled his basket with canned goods, and brought it back. I rung him up, and he shook my hand with both hands. He looked like a college professor, fiftyish, wearing plaid and stripes and tweed, so he wasn’t a professor of fashion design. He saluted, like I was a colonel, then left.

Word spread, and more people came to the store. The shelves got emptier, and I pulled out stuff from the back room. We were going to run out of goods, and I didn’t know if any more was coming. People, mostly middle class, thanked me for saving them from being looters. People are funny. I wish I’d had the URL of our Vumblr handy. I think a lot of those people would have looked at whatever I wanted to show them.

A TV news crew came to “interview” me. Mostly they filmed me serving customers and clowning around. I wrote our URL on a piece of paper and held it up to the camera. Sally said the news channel showed me twice an hour for a day or two, with a scrolling banner saying “LIFE RETURNS TO NORMAL.” My boss text-messaged me and said he’d stop by to empty the safe and register.

Nobody robbed me, even after I was on television, because there were plenty of abandoned stores to rob.

So even if the news hadn’t shown me holding up our Vumblr URL for a few seconds per hour, we still would have gotten record hits on our site. At least, Sally thought our dumb web movies were the ideal thing to watch now, because they were the wacky escape from reality, and they had no dialogue or sound effects for anyone to miss out on. It’s actually funnier without any laughter, Sally emailed me from three feet away.

The non-news channels went back to showing regular stuff, except with subtitles for everybody. But subtitles made all the sitcoms look like French movies, so I kept waiting for Jennifer Aniston to smoke or commit incest.

Sally emailed her film-geek crew, including Zapp, about our next shoot. Who knew if they were even going to have classes anytime soon? She bopped around a little more, bouncing dumb ideas off me, and once or twice she seemed to laugh (in between crying, or staring into a can of liverwurst).

But nothing had changed for me. The silence just trapped me in a scream I hadn’t been able to choke out before, and I kept seeing movement in the corner of my eye that vanished when I turned to look, like the next bloody crush was dancing behind me to no music. I could never move freely again.

The Last Movie Ever Made

People tossed around words like “collapse of civilization” and “post-apocalyptic,” but really everything was the same mess as always. Only without any soundtrack, since the whole world had gone deaf, and with a “militia” of guys in red bandanas swarming around killing everyone who got in their way, and putting loads of “undesirables” into prison camps. But civilization, you know, has always been a relative thing. It rises, it falls, who can keep track?

So some kind of sonic weapon had gone off the wrong way, and now absolutely everybody in the world had lost their hearing. Which was a mixed curse, sort of. Sneaking up on people was suddenly way easier—but so was getting sneaked up on. The fear of somebody sneaking up behind me and cutting my throat was the only thing that kept me from being bored all the time. I always thought noise was boring, but silence bored me even worse. And if you walked up behind someone, especially a member of the red-bandana militia who were keeping order on our streets, you had to be very careful how you caught their attention. You did not want a red bandana to think you were sneaking up on them. And often, you’d find a whole street of stores that were there yesterday were just burned-out husks today, or bodies piled in an odd assortment, like corpse origami.

I found myself sniffing the air a lot, for danger or just for amusement. If anyone had still been able to hear, they probably would have been doubled up laughing, because we were all going around sniffing and grunting and mumbling in funny voices as soon as we had no clue how ridiculous we probably sounded.

Almost every corner seemed to have red bandanas standing on it, looking bored and desperate for someone to fuck with them.

But meanwhile, I was Entertainer Explainer’s New Talent of the Month, because I’d managed to avoid getting murdered in an amusing fashion, and the video had gone mega-viral. I was seeing my own face on shirts and on people’s phablets more and more often. Our film showed the part where Reginald, the wild-eyed mustache dude in the Viking helmet, was chasing me around and trying to tear my arms and legs off, but not the aftermath, where Reginald got pulverized and lit on fire by the red bandanas. (That part, maybe, not as funny.) In any case, Sally and I were suddenly kind of famous, and we had to clear out our freezer to make room for all the meat and casseroles and stuff that people kept bringing over.

Everybody was bracing themselves for the next thing. We still believed in money, kinda-sorta, even after a ton of people had lost their savings and investments in the big default spiral. We didn’t not believe in money, let’s put it that way. We still had electricity and cell phone service and Internet, even though many parts of the country were on-again, off-again. The red bandanas and the rump government needed a cellular network as bad as the rest of us, because they needed to be able to organize, so until they figured out how to have a dedicated network and their own power sources, they would make sure it kept running for everyone. We hoped so, anyway.

Sally and I spent hours arguing about what sort of movie we should make next. All of my ideas were too complicated or high-concept for her. I wanted to do a movie about someone who tries to be a gangster but he’s too nice—like he runs a protection racket but never collects any money from people. Or he sells drugs but only super-harmless ones. So the other gangsters get mad at him, and everyone has to help him pretend to be a real gangster. And he does such a good job he becomes the head gangster, and then he’s in real trouble. Or something.

Anyway, Sally said that was too complicated for people right now; we had to shoot for self-explanatory. Some of the film geeks wanted us to make a movie about the fact that everyone was deaf, but that seemed like the opposite of escapism to me—which I guess would be trapism, or maybe claustrophilia.

Sally was all about recapturing the Vikings-and-Samurai glory, like maybe this time we could have Amish ninjas who threw wooden throwing stars. I was like, Amish ninjas aren’t high concept? I was happy to keep debating this stuff forever, because I didn’t actually want to make another movie. Whatever part of me that had let me turn calamity into comedy had died when I fell out of a window on top of Reginald and watched him die on fire.

Snow fell. Then hail, then sleet, and then snow again. Things felt dark, even during the day, and I felt like my sight, smell, and touch were going the way of my hearing. Only my taste burned as strong as ever. Everything was salty, salty, salty. You could slip and break your leg in a ditch and nobody would know you were there for days and days.

This was going to be a long winter.

* * *

“ROCK MANNING. WE NEED YOU.”

I stared up at the giant scrolling light-up banner over Out Of Town News in Harvard Square. I blinked the snow away and looked a second time. It still looked like my name up there.

Okay, so this was it, the thing my school therapist had warned me about back in fifth grade: I was going narcissistophrenic and starting to imagine that toasters and people on the television were talking to me. It was probably way too late to start taking pills now.

But then a guy I had met at one of our movie shoots saw it too. He tugged my sleeve and pointed at the scrolling words. So unless he and I were both crazy the same way, it really did say my name up there.

A bus zipped past. (They’d gotten a few buses running again.) The big flashing screen on the front didn’t say, “WARNING. BUS WILL RUN YOU OVER. GET OUT OF THE WAY” as usual. Instead, it said, “ROCK MANNING, YOU CAN MAKE A CONTRIBUTION TO REBUILDING SOCIETY.” I grabbed the guy, whose name was Scottie or Thor or something, and pointed at the bus for more independent confirmation that I wasn’t losing it. He poked me back and pointed at a big screen in the display window of Cardullo’s delicatessen, which now read, “ROCK MANNING, COME JOIN US.” I grabbed my cell phone, and it had a new text message, much the same as the ones I was seeing everywhere. I almost threw my phone away.

Instead I ran toward the river, trying to outrun the words. Over the past few months since everyone went deaf, I’d seen the screens going up in more and more places, and now all of a sudden they were all talking to me personally. Computer screens on display at the big business store, the sign that normally announced the specials at the Mongolian buffet place—even the little screen that someone had attached to their golden retriever’s collar that would let you know when the dog was barking. They were calling me out.

I got to the river and ran across the big old stone bridge. In the murky river water, the letters floated, projected from somewhere in the depths: “WHY ARE YOU RUNNING? WE THOUGHT YOU’D BE FLATTERED.”

When I got to the other side of the bridge, Ricky Artesian was waiting for me. He was wearing a suit, and instead of the red bandana, he had a red handkerchief in his breast pocket, but otherwise he was the same old Ricky from high school. He held up a big piece of paper:

“Relax, pal. We just need your help, the same way we needed you once before. Except this time we’re going to make sure it goes right.”

As if I would ever forget the time I got blackmailed into helping Ricky’s crew make a propaganda movie—that was the start of me losing my mind. As our movies had gotten more popular, Sally had gotten paranoid that terrible early film, in which I played a heroic red bandana, would turn up online and ruin our credibility. But I was pretty sure it was lost forever.

Ricky had a couple other guys in suits behind him, also clearly red-bandana honchos. I thought about jumping off the bridge, and kept looking over my shoulder at a dark shape below me. The river had defrosted but still looked chilly. I looked over the edge again, tossed a mental coin and jumped.

The loose boat was right where I thought it was. It had drifted downriver from the Harvard boathouse, and I landed in the stern without capsizing it all the way. I righted the boat and found the oars. Someone had either forgotten to chain it up, or had vandalized the chain. I slotted the oars into their nooks and started to row. I’d never sculled before, but how hard could it be?

After half an hour of rowing as hard as I could, and going in the same circle over and over while Ricky watched from overhead, I wondered if I’d made a mistake. I texted Sally that I was in a boat trying to escape and didn’t know how to row. She Googled rowing. She said I needed to straighten out and row the same amount with both oars, and then maybe I’d stop going in circles. Also, go with the current. Meanwhile, Ricky and his friends were grabbing a big, scary-looking hook.

I tried to figure out what the current was. It took me a long while to find a drifting leaf and figure out I should go the same way. I tried to row in that direction, but the boat kept veering and swerving. Then I saw a bench right in front of me that looked like someone was supposed to sit facing the other way. So maybe part of the problem was that I was sitting backwards? I got myself all turned around, but I lost my grip on one of the oars and it floated away, much faster than my boat had gone so far. At this point, the hook snagged my boat, and a moment later I was a landlubber again.

“Hey Rock,” Ricky said. I was up to about ten percent accuracy with my lipreading. He held out his hand, and I took it out of reflex.

We all went for burgers at this little diner nearby, which had survived everything without changing its greasy ways. I admired that. It even had a little jukebox at each table, and the red checkered vinyl tablecloth with stray burn marks from when you could still smoke indoors. Ricky smoked, because who was going to tell him not to?

“i think it’s great you’re still doing the same thing as in high school,” Ricky’s laptop screen said. He swiveled it around and typed some more, then turned it back. Now it said: “you found something that worked for you, and you stuck with it. that’s kool.” I nodded. If Ricky had been talking instead of typing, he probably would have made this stuff sound like compliments. He typed some more: “you know i always liked you.” The other two guys didn’t try to say anything, or even read what Ricky was typing; they just ate their burgers and stared out the window at the handfuls of students who were crawling back to Harvard.

I didn’t try to contribute to the conversation either, I just read whatever Ricky typed. He hadn’t touched his burger yet. He told me about how he’d moved up in the world since high school, and now he was working for some pretty juiced-up people in government, and everything was really under control. You would be surprised, he said, at how under control everything was.

I nodded and half-smiled, to show that I knew what he meant, but really I didn’t think I would be that surprised.

I thought about the oar that had gotten away from me, floating downriver toward freedom, as fast as it could go. Where would it end up?

Ricky said I shouldn’t worry about a repeat of what happened last time. We were both older and more experienced, and he’d gotten smarter since then. But the thing was, he said, people were still in shock—almost like little children, right now. And they needed their cartoony entertainment to keep their minds off things. So here was the deal: he would get us resources—resources like we couldn’t imagine, like our wildest dreams were this tablecloth and the actuality was up there on the ceiling. And in return, we would just portray authority in a kind way. Nothing too heavy, like everyone wearing the bandana or any army uniforms or anything. Just occasionally we see that the militia and Army are trustworthy, and the people in charge have everyone’s best interests at heart, etc. Most of the time, we’d have a free hand.

I had to get up and go wash my hands so I could type on Ricky’s laptop. I didn’t want to get his keyboard greasy. Then it took me a minute to hunt and peck: “sally wont go for it she thinks you killed her boyfriend which duh you did.”

I swiveled it around before I could think twice about what I’d just typed.

Ricky’s eyes narrowed. He looked up at me, and for a moment he was the legbreaker again. I thought he was going to lunge across the booth and throttle me. Then he typed: “the robot guy?” I nodded. “that was a situation. its complicated, and many people were to blame.”

I tried really really hard not to have any expression on my face, as if it didn’t matter to me one way or the other. I ran out of hamburger, so I ate my fries slow, skinning them and then nibbling at the mashed potatoes inside. Everything smelled meaty.

“tell u what, just dont tell sally im involved,” Ricky typed. “just tell her the government wants 2 support your work.”

It was easy for me to agree to that, because I knew my face was a giant cartoon emoticon as far as Sally was concerned, and she would know within seconds that I was hiding something.

Ricky didn’t threaten to break parts of us if we didn’t go along with his plan, but he didn’t need to, and he only made some gauzy promises about payment. He did say he could get me some rowing lessons.

* * *

It took me two hours to find Sally. I almost texted her, but I had a bad feeling about my cell phone.

She was in a group of film students building a giant ramp that looked as if they were going to roll a mail cart into a snowbank. She saw me and then turned away to watch her pals slamming boards together. I nudged her, but she just ignored me. I remembered she’d said something about this movie they wanted to make about a guy who works in the mailroom and discovers a hidden doorway that leads to Hell’s interoffice mail system, and he has to deliver a bunch of letters to demons before he can get out. High fuckin’ concept. Anyway, she was pissed that I’d been blowing her off for weeks, so now I couldn’t get her attention.

Finally, I wrote just the name “ricky a” on my cell and shoved it in front of her without pressing send. Her eyes widened, and she made to text me back, but I stopped her. I grabbed a pad and a pen and wrote down the whole story for her, including the signs in Harvard Square. She shook her head a lot, then bit her lip. She thought I was exaggerating, but the guy who’d seen the signs showed up and confirmed that part.

“We’re so small time,” she wrote in neat cursive under my scrawls. “Why would Ricky care?”

Under that, I wrote: “1. He remembers us from hi skool, unfinished biz. 2. He likes us and wants to own us. 3. He hates us and wants to destroy us. 4. those guys are scared of losing their grip & they think we can help.”

It was a cold day, and I’d gotten kind of wet trying to escape in a Harvard boat, plus the sun was going down, so I started to shiver out there on the lawn in front of BU. Some students were straggling back in, just like at Harvard, and they stared at the set, abandoned half-finished against one wall. Sally gestured for her gang to get the ramp to Hell’s mailroom back into storage.

We piled ourselves into the back of the equipment van, with Zapp Stillman driving, and headed for the Turnpike, because the sooner we got out of town the better.

We got about half a mile before we hit the first checkpoint. There were soldiers with big dragonfly helmets standing in front of humvees, blocking off most of the lanes of Storrow Drive, and between the soldiers and the swiveling cameras on stalks, there was no way you would get past their makeshift barricades. They were checking everybody coming in and out of the city, and a hundred yards past them stood an exoskeleton thingy, or a mecha or whatever they call it, with thighs like Buicks and feet like dumpsters. I couldn’t really see its top half from my hiding place in the back of the van, but I imagined piston elbows and some kind of skull face. The kind of people who built a mech like this would not be able to resist having a skull face. My brother Holman had probably piloted one of these things in Central Asia or Central Eurasia, someplace Central. The pilots of these things had a high rate of going A.U.T.U., because of all the neural strain. This one wasn’t moving, but it was cranked up and operational because you could see the ground shivering around it, and there were fresh kills nearby: Cars still smoking, a few unlucky bodies.

Our van turned onto a side street as fast as possible, and we swerved back toward Boston University. By the time we got back there, Janelle had found some forum posts about the cordoning off of several major cities. It was part of a sweep to round up certain radical elements that threatened the shaky order: you had the red bandanas inside the cities, and the army outside.

We were still in the van, parked on a side street just off Dummer St., sheltered by a giant sad oak that leaned almost to the ground on one side. You could put a tire swing on that oak and swing underground and maybe there would be mole people. Mole people would be awesome, especially if they had their own dance routine, which I just figured they probably would because what else would you be doing stuck underground all the time?

I wasn’t sure if we should get out of the van, or if someone would spot us, but Sally went ahead and climbed out, and Janelle followed. I got out and stood on the sidewalk, shrugging in a sad ragdoll way. Sally stomped her foot and gritted her teeth. She tried some sign language on me, and I got the gist that she was saying we were trapped—every way out of the city would be the same thing. I just looked at her, waiting for her to say what we were going to do, and she looked weary but also pissed. This not-talking thing meant you really had to watch people, and maybe you could see people more clearly when you couldn’t hear them.

I studied Sally. She had the twitch in her forearms that usually meant she was about to throw something. She had the neck tendon that meant she was about to yell at someone, if yelling were still a thing that happened. Her mouse-brown hair was a beautiful mess bursting free of her scrunchie, her face so furious it circled back around to calm. Biting her tongue, the better to spit blood.

She wrote on her phone: “the army outside + red bandanas inside. occupation. city is screwed. we r screwed. trapped.” She erased it without hitting send.

I took the phone and wrote: “red bandanas + army = opportunity.”

She just stared at me. I didn’t even know what I had in mind yet. This was the part of the conversation where I would normally start spitballing and suggesting that we get a hundred people in koala costumes and send them running down the street while someone else dropped hallucinogenic water balloons from a hang glider. But I couldn’t spitball as fast with my thumbs.

I paused and thought about Ricky, and the other bandanas I’d met, and how they were so desperate to be someone’s hero that they were even willing to ask someone like me for help representing them. I thought about Holman, and how much he looked down on civilians, even before he got the A.N.V.I.L. socket in his skull. I thought about how Ricky and his guys had engineered a clusterfuck at that peace protest, making the cops think the protestors were shooting at them so the cops shot back. I thought about how the bandanas weren’t leaving the city, and the army wasn’t coming in.

“i think I have a bad idea,” I wrote.

* * *

All my life, there had been a giant empty space, a huge existential void that had needed to be filled by something, and I had never realized that that thing was the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile.

With its sleek red hot-dog battering ram surrounded by a fluffy bun, it was like the Space Battleship Yamato made of bread and pork, made of metal. This MIT student named Matt had been suping it up with a high-performance electric engine and all-terrain wheels, just saving it for the right occasion. And somehow, Janelle had convinced Matt that our little adventure was it.

The tires were the perfect mud color to match the lower part of the chassis, which Matt had rescued from a scrapyard in Burlington. The chassis had a tip as red and round as a clown’s nose on either side of the long, sleek body. This baby had crisscrossed the country before I was born, proclaiming the pure love of Ballpark Franks to anyone with half an eye. Just staring at it made me hungry in my soul.

All around us, Sally’s film-student minions were doing engine checks and sewing parachutes and painting faces onto boomerangs and inflating sex-dolls and making pies for the pie-throwing machine. The usual, in other words. I felt an emotion I’d never felt before in my life, and I didn’t know how to label it at first. Sort of like excitement, sort of like regret—but it wasn’t either of those things. It was lodged down where I always pictured my spine and my colon shaking hands. I finally realized: I was afraid.

People had told me about fear, but I had never quite believed it existed in real life. I watched Zapp Stillman blowing up a blow-up doll, and something wobbled inside me. I had felt guilt and self-loathing, especially after Reginald, but now I felt worry-fear. Zapp saw me looking at him and gave me a cocky little nod. I nodded back.

Sally was busy studying a big road map with Janelle, charting the escape route and where we were all going to rendezvous if we made it out of town. Sally had taken my vague arm-wheeling notion and turned it into an actual plan, which would let us escape to the Concorde Turnpike and make for Walden Pond, that place where Henry David Thoreau had built a comedy waterslide two hundred years ago. And then maybe head west. Find a quiet place (so to speak) to wait things out. Sally handed her magic marker off to Janelle and came over to stand with me.

“What changed your mind,” she wrote in ballpoint on a pad, “about doing more stunts? You were ready to quit, before.”

I took the pad and pen. Chewed the cap. Wrote: “Ricky won’t leave us alone. We gotta blow town and this is the only way. Plus this is different than just making another weird movie. If this works, maybe we ruin the red bandanas’ day. Maybe we ruin their whole week even. PAYBACK.” That last word, I underlined three times. Sally took the pen back from me and drew little stars and hearts and rainbows and smiley faces around it, until it was the most decorated “PAYBACK” you’ve ever seen.

One of our lookouts shone a flashlight, and Janelle nodded, and Sally and I got stuffed into a little cubby under the floorboards with no light and almost no air, with all the cameras and filming equipment on top of us. We were scrunched together, so her knee was in my face and my left arm dug into her side. Every few moments, the floor over us shuddered, like someone was knocking things around. Sally shivered and twitched, so I gripped her tighter. I was starting to freak out from the lack of light and air and entertainment options, but just as I was ready to wobble myself silly, Janelle and Thor (Scottie?) lifted the lid off and pulled us out.

* * *

So. Ballpark Figure was the last movie we ever made, and it was probably one of the last movies anybody ever made. It was a mixture of fiction, reality and improv, which Zapp Stillman said was pleasingly meta—we were counting on the bandanas and the army to play themselves in the story, but I was playing a fictional character, and so were Janelle and Zapp. My character was Horace Burton, the last baseball fan on Earth who had been heartbroken since the MLB shutdown and who was driving his giant hot dog vehicle to try and find the world’s greatest baseball players, in a Field of Dreams-with-lunch-meat kind of thing. Janelle was a former hot dog mascot who had turned Vegan but still wanted to keep dressing up as a hot dog, now just a meatless hot dog. And Zapp was some kind of coach. We filmed a sequence of the three of us piling into our hot dog car with some animated cue-card exposition, and posted it online with minimal editing, as a kind of prequel to the actual movie, which we promised would be posted live and streaming, right as it happened, on our video tumble.

By the time we were ready to leave town, an hour before dawn, the Ballpark Figure prologue had been up for a few hours, and we had a few thousand people refreshing our vumble over and over. I had slept a few hours, but Sally hadn’t slept at all and Janelle was guzzling really terrible coffee. Sally wasn’t going to be in the hot dog, she was going to be one of the people filming the action from—I hoped—a safe distance, using Matt’s remote-controlled camera drones, which I had insisted on. If nothing else came of this but Sally getting somewhere safe where she could start over, I could count that the biggest win ever.

As we rolled into the middle of the street and cranked the hot dog up to its maximum speed of fifty miles per hour, I had time as I clambered out onto the outermost front reaches of the metal bun to obsess over the contradiction between Horace Burton and myself. Horace’s goal, in this movie, was to take his hot dog out onto the open road and find the lost spirit of baseball. Horace didn’t want any trouble—but I, meanwhile, had no goal other than trouble, and (if I were being honest) no plans after today.

How was I going to play that, in a way that preserved the integrity of Horace and his innocent love of sportsmanship? In fact—I reflected, as I raised a baseball and prepared to hurl it at the shaved head of the red bandana standing on the nearest corner in front of a shuttered florist—that might be the reason why people root for the comic hero after all: the haplessness. This fresh white baseball was emblazoned with a slogan about bringing back the greatest game, and the story called for Horace to toss them out as a promotional thing, and to hit a militia member in the head purely by accident. So it was important for the story that I not look as though I were aiming. But I also couldn’t afford to miss. Horace is a good person who just wants to bring joy to people, and he gets caught up in a bad situation, and the moment you think Horace brought this on himself through meanness or combativeness, that’s the moment you stop pulling for him.

The baseball hit the teenager in the jaw, over the neatly tied red cloth that looked too big for his skinny neck, and he whipped around and fired off a few shots with his Browning Hi Performance, while also texting his comrades with his free hand.

I tried to wear a convincing look of friendly panic, like I hadn’t meant to wake a thousand sleeping dogs with one stray baseball, and danced around on the front of the hot dog so hard I nearly fell under the wheels. I slipped and landed on my crotch on the very tip of the hot dog, then pulled myself back up, still trying to toss out promotional baseballs and spread goodwill, and it occurred to me for the first time that I had spent so much time worrying that I was going to hurt someone by accident, it never even occurred to me that I would finally reach a point where I would decide to cause harm on purpose.

Our hot dog had red bandanas chasing us, with two motorcycles and some kind of hybrid electric Jeep. I had no idea if anybody was still shooting at me, because I couldn’t see anyone aiming a gun from where I stood on one foot and I couldn’t see any bullets hitting anything—

—until a bullet hit me in the thigh just as the hot dog swerved without slowing and we released the blow-up dolls in their makeshift baseball uniforms. The blow-up dolls flew behind us, and I saw one of them hit a motorcyclist right where the red bandana tucked under his round white helmet, so that he lost his grip on his handlebars and went somersaulting, and I felt the blood seeping through my pants like maybe it had missed the bone but hit an artery and I was cursing myself for forgetting to bring a giant comedy bottle of ketchup to squirt at people, because ketchup is like fake blood only more cheerful, when Ricky Artesian climbed on top of the third car of the five that were now chasing us and held up a big flatscreen TV that read “YOU MADE YOUR CHOICE ROCK TIME TO PAY.” And another bullet tore through my side just as the hot dog made another sharp turn and we disappeared into the tunnel from the abandoned Back Bay T extension project.

The hot dog came to a stop in a dark hutch Xed in by fallen rusted steel girders, just as one of our bready tires gave out and the whole vehicle slumped on one side, and our support crew set about camouflaging the Wienermobile with rocks and planks. Janelle climbed out of the cab and came over to show me the vumble, the insane number of hits we were getting right now and the footage, in a loop, of me hurling baseballs at the red bandanas.

Janelle noticed that I was pissing blood from my leg and my side, and started trying to get me to lie down. Just then a message came through from Sally, who was still masterminding the filming from a remote location: «“theyre not taking the bait.”» The bandanas were staying on their side of the line and not trying to chase us into the army barricades like we’d hoped.

I slipped out of Janelle’s grasp—easy when you’re as slick as I was, just then—and leapt onto Zapp’s bicycle. Before anybody could try to stop me, I was already pedaling back up the ramp the way we’d come, past the people trying to seal and camouflage the entry to the tunnel, leaping from darkness into the light of day. I raced close enough to Ricky Artesian to make eye contact and hurl my last baseball—absolutely coated at this point with my own blood—at his pinstripe-suited torso. And then I spun and tore off in the direction of Storrow Drive again, not looking back to see if anyone was following me, racing with my head down, on the ramp that led up to the Turnpike.

My phone thrummed with messages but I ignored it. I was already reaching the top of the ramp, all thoughts of Horace Burton, and lovable fall guys in general, forgotten. The checkpoint was a collection of pale blobs at ground level, plus a swarm of men and women with scorpion heads rushing around tending their one statuesque mecha and a collection of mustard-colored vehicles. My eyesight was going, my concentration going with it, and my feet kept sliding off the pedals, but I kept pedaling nonetheless, until I was close enough to yank out my last limited edition promotional baseball, pull my arm back and then straighten out with the hardest throw of my life.

Then I wiped out. I fell partway behind a concrete barrier as Ricky and the other bandanas came up the ramp into the line of fire. I saw nothing of what came next, except that I smelled smoke and cordite and glimpsed a man with the red neck-gear falling on his hands and rearing back up, before I crawled the rest of the way behind my shelter and passed out.

* * *

When I regained consciousness, I was in a prison camp, where I nearly died, first of my wounds and later of a fiendish case of dysentery like you wouldn’t believe. I never saw Sally again, but I saw our last movie, once, on a stored file on someone’s battered old Stackbook. (This lady named Shari had saved the edited film to her hard drive before the Internet went futz, and people had been copying Ballpark Figure on thumb drives and passing it around ever since, whenever they had access to electricity.)

The final act of Ballpark Figure was just soldiers and red bandanas getting drilled by each other’s bullets until they did a terrible slamdance, and I have to say the film lost any of its narrative thread regarding Horace Burton, or baseball, or the quest to restore professional sports to America, not to mention the comedy value of all those flailing bodies was minimal at best.

The movie ended with a dedication: “To Rock Manning. Who taught me it’s not whether you fall, it’s how you land. Love, Sally.”

The Day It All Ended

Bruce Grinnord parked aslant in his usual spot and ran inside the DiZi Corp headquarters. Bruce didn’t check in with his team or even pause to glare at the beautiful young people having their toes stretched by robots while they sipped macrobiotic goji-berry shakes and tried to imagine ways to make the next generation of gadgets cooler-looking and less useful. Instead, he sprinted for the executive suite. He took the stairs two or three at a time, until he was so breathless he feared he’d have a heart attack before he even finished throwing his career away.

DiZi’s founder, Jethro Gruber—Barron’s Young Visionary of the Year five years running—had his office atop the central spire of the funhouse castle of DiZi’s offices, in a round glass turret. Looking down on the employee oxygen bar and the dozen gourmet cafeterias. If you didn’t have the key to the private elevator, the only way up was this spiral staircase, which climbed past a dozen Executive Playspaces, and any one of those people could cockblock you before you got to Jethro’s pad. But nobody seemed to notice Bruce charging up the stairs, fury twisting his round face, even when he nearly put his foot between the steps and fell into the Moroccan Spice Café.

Bruce wanted to storm into Jethro’s office and shout his resignation in Jethro’s trendy schoolmaster glasses. He wanted to enter the room already denouncing the waste, the stupidity of it all—but when he reached the top of the staircase, he was so out of breath, he could only wheeze, his guts wrung and cramped. He’d only been in Jethro’s office once before: an elegant goldfish bowl with one desk that changed shape (thanks to modular pieces that came out of the floor), a few chairs, and one dot of maroon rug at its center. Bruce stood there, massaging his dumb stomach and taking in the oppressive simplicity.

So, Jethro spoke first, the creamy purr Bruce knew from a million company videos. “Hi, Bruce. You’re late.”

“I’m… I’m what?”

“You’re late,” Jethro said. “You were supposed to have your crisis of conscience three months ago.” He pulled out his Robo-Bop and displayed a personal calendar, which included one entry: “Bruce Has a Crisis of Conscience.” It was dated a few months earlier. “What kept you, man?”

* * *

It started when Bruce took a wrong turn on the way to work. Actually, he drove to the wrong office—the driving equivalent of a Freudian slip.

He was on the interstate at seven thirty, listening to a banjo solo that he hadn’t yet learned to play. Out his right window, every suburban courtyard had its own giant ThunderNet tower, just like the silver statue in Bruce’s own cul-de-sac—the sleek concave lines and jet-streamed base like a 1950s Googie space fantasy. To his left, almost every passing car had a Car-Dingo bolted to its hood, with its trademark sloping fins and whirling lights. And half the drivers were listening to music, or making Intimate Confessions on their Robo-Bops. Once on the freeway, Bruce could see much larger versions of the ThunderNet tower dotting the landscape, from shopping-mall roofs as well as empty fields. Plus everywhere he saw giant billboards for DiZi’s newest product, the Crado—empty-faced, multicultural babies splayed out in a milk-white, egg-shaped chair that monitored the baby’s air supply and temperature in some way that Bruce still couldn’t explain.

Bruce was a VP of marketing at DiZi—shouldn’t he be able to find something good to say about even one of the company’s products?

So, this one morning, Bruce got off the freeway a few exits too soon. Instead of driving to the DiZi offices, he went down a feeder road to a dingy strip mall that had offices instead of dry cleaners. This was the route Bruce had taken for years before he joined DiZi, and he felt as though he’d taken the wrong commute by mistake.

Bruce’s old parking spot was open, and he could almost pretend time had rolled back, except that he’d lost some hair and gained some weight. He found himself pushing past the white balsawood-and-metal door with the cheap sign saying ECO GNOMIC and into the offices, and then he stopped. A roomful of total strangers perched on beanbags and folding chairs turned and stared, and Bruce had no explanation for who he was or why he was there. “Uh,” Bruce said.

The Eco Gnomic offices looked like crap compared to DiZi’s majesty, but also compared to the last time he’d seen them. Take the giant Intervention Board that covered the main wall: When Bruce had worked there, it’d been covered with millions of multicolored tacks attached to scraps of incidents. This company is planning a major polluting project, so we mobilize culture-jammer flash mobs here and organize protesters at the public hearing there. Like a giant multidimensional chess game covering one wall, deploying patience and playfulness against the massive corporate engine. Now, though, the Intervention Board contained nothing but bad news, without much in the way of strategies. Arctic shelf disintegrating, floods, superstorms, droughts, the Gulf Stream stuttering, extinctions like dominos falling. The office furniture teetered on broken legs, and the same computers from five years ago whined and stammered. The young woman nearest Bruce couldn’t even afford a proper Mohawk—her hair grew back in patches on the sides of her head, and the stripe on top was wilting. None of these people seemed energized about saving the planet.

Bruce was about to flee when his old boss, Gerry Donkins, showed up and said, “Bruce! Welcome back to the nonprofit sector, man.” Bruce and Gerry wound up spending an hour sitting on crates, drinking expired Yoo-hoo. “Yeah, Eco Gnomic is dying,” said Gerry, giant mustache twirling, “but so is the planet.”

“I feel like I made a terrible mistake,” Bruce said. He looked at the board and couldn’t see any pattern to the arrangement of ill omens.

“You did,” Gerry replied. “But it doesn’t make any difference, and you’ve been happy. You’ve been happy, right? We all thought you were happy. How is Marie, by the way?”

“Marie left me two years ago,” Bruce said.

“Oh,” Gerry said.

“But on the plus side, I’ve been taking up the banjo.”

“Anyway, no offense, but you wouldn’t have made a difference if you’d stayed with us. We probably passed the point of no return a while back.”

Point of no return. It sounded sexual, or like letting go of a trapeze at the apex of its arc.

“You did the smart thing,” said Gerry, “going to work for the flashiest consumer products company and enjoying the last little bit of the ride.”

Bruce got back in his Prius and drove the rest of the way to work, past the rows of ThunderNet towers and the smoke from far-off forest fires. This felt like the last day of the human race, even though it was just another day on the steep slope. As Bruce reached the lavender glass citadel of DiZi’s offices, he started to go numb inside, like always. But instead, this time, a fury took him, and that’s when he charged inside and up the stairs to Jethro’s office, ready to shove his resignation down the CEO’s throat.

* * *

“What do you mean?” Bruce said to Jethro, as his breath came back. “You were expecting me to come in here and resign?”

“Something like that.” Jethro gestured for Bruce to sit in one of the plain white, absurdly comfortable teacup chairs. He sat cross-legged in the other one, like a yogi in his wide-sleeved linen shirt and camper pants. In person, he looked slightly chubbier and less classically handsome than all his iconic images, but the perfect hipster bowl haircut and sideburns, and those famous glasses, were instantly recognizable. “But like I said: late. The point is, you got here in the end.”

“You didn’t engineer this. I’m not one of your gadgets. This is real. I really am fed up with making pointless toys when the world is about to choke on our filth. I’m done.”

“It wouldn’t be worth anything if it wasn’t real, bro.” Jethro gave Bruce one of his conspiratorial/mischievous smiles that made Bruce want to smile back in spite of his soul-deep anger. “That’s why we hired you in the first place. You’re the canary in the coal mine. Here, look at the org chart.”

Jethro made some hand motions, and one glass surface became a screen, which projected an org chart with a thousand names and job descriptions. And there, halfway down on the left, was Bruce’s name, with CANARY IN THE COAL MINE. And a picture of Bruce’s head on a cartoon bird’s body.

“I thought my job title was junior executive VP for product management,” Bruce said, staring at his openmouthed face and those unfurled wings.

Jethro shrugged. “Well, you just resigned, right? So, you don’t have a title anymore.” He made another gesture, and a bright-eyed young thing wheeled a minibar out of the elevator and offered Bruce beer, whiskey, hot sake, coffee, and Mexican Coke. Bruce felt rebellious, choosing a single-malt whiskey, until he realized he was doing what Jethro wanted. He took a swig and burned his throat and eyes.

“So, you’re quitting; you should go ahead and tell me what you think of my company.” Jethro spread his hands and smiled.

“Well.” Bruce drank more whiskey and then sputtered. “If you really want to know… Your products are pure evil. You build these sleek little pieces of shit that are designed with all this excess capacity and redundant systems. Have you ever looked at the schematics of the ThunderNet towers? It’s like you were trying to build something overly complex. And it’s the ultimate glorification of form over function—you’ve been able to convince everybody with disposable income to buy your crap, because people love anything that’s ostentatiously pointless. I’ve had a Robo-Bop for years, and I still don’t understand what half the widgets and menu options are for. I don’t think anybody does. You use glamour and marketing to convince people they need to fill their lives with empty crap instead of paying attention to the world and realizing how fragile and beautiful it really is. You’re the devil.”

The drinks fairy had started gawking halfway through this rant, then she seemed to decide it was against her pay grade to hear this. She retreated into the elevator and vanished around the time Bruce said he didn’t understand half the stuff his Robo-Bop did.

Bruce had fantasized about telling Jethro off for years, and he enjoyed it so much, he had tears in his eyes by the end. Even knowing that Jethro had put this moment on his Robo-Bop calendar couldn’t spoil it.

Jethro was nodding, as if Bruce had just about covered the bases. Then he made another esoteric gesture, and the glass wall became a screen again. It displayed a PowerPoint slide:

DIZI CORP. PRODUCT STRATEGY

+ Beautiful Objects That Are Functionally Useless

+ Spare Capacity

+ Redundant Systems

+ Overproliferation of Identical But Superficially Different Products

+ Form Over Function

+ Mystifying Options and Confusing User Interface

“You missed one, I think,” Jethro said. “The one about overproliferation. That’s where we convince people to buy three different products that are almost exactly the same but not quite.”

“Wow.” Bruce looked at the slide, which had gold stars on it. “You really are completely evil.”

“That’s what it looks like, huh?” Jethro actually laughed as he tapped on his Robo-Bop. “Tell you what. We’re having a strategy meeting at three, and we need our canary there. Come and tell the whole team what you told me.”

“What’s the point?” Bruce felt whatever the next level below despair was. Everything was a joke, and he’d been deprived of the satisfaction of being the one to unveil the truth.

“Just show up, man. I promise it’ll be entertaining, if nothing else. What else are you going to do with the rest of your day, drive out to the beach and watch the seagulls dying?”

That was exactly what Bruce had planned to do after leaving DiZi. He shrugged. “Sure. I guess I’ll go get my toes stretched for a while.”

“You do that, Bruce. See you at three.”

* * *

The drinks fairy must have gossiped about Bruce, because people were looking at him when he walked down to the main promenade. If there’d been a food court in 2001: A Space Odyssey, it would have looked like DiZi’s employee promenade. Bruce didn’t have his toes stretched. Instead, he ate two organic calzones to settle his stomach after the morning whiskey. The calzones made Bruce more nauseated. The people on Bruce’s marketing team waved at him in the cafeteria but didn’t approach the radioactive man.

Bruce was five minutes early for the strategy meeting, but he was still the last one to arrive, and everyone was staring at him. Bruce had never visited the Executive Meditation Hole, which also doubled as Jethro’s private movie theater. It was a big bunker under the DiZi main building with wall carpets and aromatherapy.

“Hey, Bruce.” Jethro was lotus-positioning on the dais at the front, where the movie screen would be. “Everybody, Bruce had a Crisis of Conscience today. Big props for Bruce, everybody.”

Everyone clapped. Bruce’s stomach started turning again, so he put his face in front of one of the aromatherapy nozzles and huffed calming scents. “So, Bruce has convinced me that it’s time for us to change our product strategy to focus on saving the planet.”

“You what?” Bruce pulled away from the soothing jasmine puff. “Are you completely delusional? Have you been surrounded by yes-men and media sycophants for so long that you’ve lost all sense of reality? It’s way, way too late to save the planet, man.” Everybody stared at Bruce until Jethro clapped again. Then everyone else clapped too.

“Bruce brings up a good point,” Jethro said. “The timetable is daunting, and we’re late. Partly because your Crisis of Conscience was months behind schedule, I feel constrained to point out. In any case, how would we go about making this audacious goal? Enterprise audacity being one of our corporate buzzsaws, of course. And for that, I’m going to turn it over to Zoe. Zoe?”

Jethro went and sat in the front row, and a big screen appeared up front. A skinny woman in a charcoal-gray suit got up and used her Robo-Bop to control a presentation.

“Thanks, Jethro,” the stick-figure woman, Zoe, said. She had perfect Amanda Seyfried hair. “It really comes down to what we call product versatility.” She clicked onto a picture of a nice midrange car with a swooshy device bolted to its roof. “Take the Car-Dingo, for example. What does it do?”

Various people raised their hands and offered slogans like, “It makes a Prius feel like a muscle car,” or “It awesomizes your ride.”

“Exactly!” Zoe smiled. She clicked the next slide over, and proprietary specs for the Car-Dingo came up. They were so proprietary, Bruce had never seen them. Bruce struggled to make sense of all those extra connections and loops going right into the engine. She pulled up similar specs for the ThunderNet tower, full of secret logic. Another screen showed all those nonsensical Robo-Bop menus, suddenly unlocking and making sense.

“Wait a minute.” Bruce was the only one standing up, besides Zoe. “So, you’re saying all these devices were dual-function all this time? And in all the hundreds of hellish product meetings I’ve sat through, you never once mentioned this fact?”

“Bruce,” Jethro said from the front row, “we’ve got a little thing at DiZi called the Culture of Listening. That means no interrupting the presentation until it’s finished, or no artisanal cookies for you.”

Bruce sighed and climbed over someone to find a seat and listened to another hour of corporate “buzzsaws.” At one point, he could have sworn Zoe said something about “end-user velocitization.” One thing Bruce did understand in the gathering haze: even though DiZi officially frowned on the cheap knockoffs of its products littering the Third World, the company had gone to great lengths to make sure those illicit copies used the exact same specs as the real items.

Just as Bruce was passing out from boredom, Jethro thanked Zoe and said, “Now let’s give Bruce the floor. Bruce, come on down.” Bruce had to thump his own legs to wake them up, and when he reached the front, he’d forgotten all the things he was dying to say an hour earlier. The top echelons of DiZi management stared, waiting for him to say something.

“Uh.” Bruce’s head hurt. “What do you want me to say?”

Jethro stood up next to Bruce and put an arm around him. “This is where your Crisis of Conscience comes in, Bruce dude. Let’s just say, as a thought embellishment, that we could fix it.” (“Thought embellishment” was one of Jethro’s buzzsaws.)

“Fix… it?”

Jethro handed Bruce a Robo-Bop with a pulsing Yes/No screen. “It’s all on you, buddy. You push yes, we can make a difference here. There’ll be some disruptions, people might be a mite inconvenienced, but we can ameliorate some of the problems. Push no, and things go on as they are. But bear in mind—if you push yes, you’re the one who has to explain to the people.”

Bruce still didn’t understand what he was saying yes to, but he hardly cared. He jabbed the yes button with his right thumb. Jethro whooped and led him to the executive elevator so they could watch the fun from the roof.

“It should be almost instantaneous,” Jethro said over his shoulder as he hustled into the lift. “Thanks to our patented ‘snaggletooth’ technology that makes all our products talk to each other. It’ll travel around the world like a wave. It’s part of our enterprise philosophy of Why Not Now.”

The elevator lurched upward, and in moments, they had reached the roof. “It’s starting,” Jethro said. He pointed to the nearest ThunderNet tower. The sleek lid was opening up like petals, until the top resembled a solar dish. And a strange haze was gathering over the top of it.

“This technology has been around for years, but everybody said it was too expensive to deploy on a widespread basis,” Jethro said with a wink. “In a nutshell, the tops of the towers contain a photocatalyst material, which turns the CO_2 and water in the atmosphere into methane and oxygen. The methane gets stored and used as an extra power source. The tower is also spraying an amine solution into the air that captures more CO_2 via a proprietary chemical reaction. That’s why the ThunderNets had to be so pricey.”

Just then, Bruce felt a vibration from his own Robo-Bop. He looked down and was startled to see a detailed audit of Bruce’s personal carbon footprint—including everything he’d done to waste energy in the past five years.

“And hey, look at the parking lot,” Jethro said. All the Car-Dingos were reconfiguring themselves, snaking new connections into the car engines. “We’re getting most of those vehicles as close to zero emissions as possible, using amines that capture the cars’ CO_2. You can use the waste heat from the engine to regenerate the amines.” But the real gain would come from the car’s GPS, which would start nudging people to carpool whenever another Car-Dingo user was going to the same destination, using a “packet-switching” model to optimize everyone’s commute for greenness. Refuse to carpool, and your car might start developing engine trouble—and the Car-Dingos, Bruce knew, were almost impossible to remove.

As for the Crados? Jethro explained how they were already hacking into every appliance in people’s homes, to make them energy-efficient whether people wanted them to be or not.

Zoe was standing at Bruce’s elbow. “It’s too late to stop the trend or even reverse all the effects,” she said over the din of the ThunderNet towers. “But we can slow it drastically, and our most optimistic projections show major improvements in the medium term.”

“So, all this time—all this hellish time—you had the means to make a difference, and you just… sat on it?” Bruce said. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

“We wanted to wait until we had full product penetration.” Jethro had to raise his voice now; the ThunderNet towers were actually thundering for the first time ever. “And we needed people to be ready. If we had just come out and told the truth about what our products actually did, people would rather die than buy them. Even after Manhattan and Florida. We couldn’t give them away. But if we claimed to be making overpriced, wasteful pieces of crap that destroy the environment? Then everybody would need to own two of them.”

“So, my crisis of conscience—” Bruce could only finish that sentence by wheeling his arms.

“We figured the day when you no longer gave a shit about your own future would be the day when people might accept this,” Jethro said, patting Bruce on the back like a father, even though he was younger.

“Well, thanks for the mind games.” Bruce had to shout now. “I’m going to go explore something I call my culture of drunkenness.”

“You can’t leave, Bruce,” Jethro yelled in his ear. “This is going to be a major disruption, everyone’s gadgets going nuts at once. There will be violence and wholesale destruction of public property. There will be chainsaw rampages. There may even be Twitter snark. We need you to be out in front on this, explaining it to the people.”

Bruce looked out at the dusk, red-and-black clouds churning as millions of ThunderNet towers blasted them with scrubber beams. Even over that racket, the chorus of car horns and shouts as people’s Car-Dingos suddenly had minds of their own started to ring from the highway. Bruce turned and looked into the gleam of his boss’s schoolmaster specs. “Fuck you, man,” he said. Followed a moment later by “I’ll do it.”

“We knew we could count on you.” Jethro turned to the half-dozen or so executives cluttering the roof deck behind him. “Big hand for Bruce, everybody.” Bruce waited until they were done clapping, then leaned over the railing and puked his guts out.

Rat Catcher’s Yellows

1.

The plastic cat head is wearing an elaborate puffy crown covered with bling. The cat’s mouth opens to reveal a touch screen, but there’s also a jack to plug in an elaborate mask that gives you a visor, along with nose plugs and earbuds for added sensory input. Holding this self-contained game system in my palms, I hate it and want to throw it out the open window of our beautiful faux-Colonial row house to be buried under the autumn mulch. But I also feel a surge of hope: that maybe this really will make a difference. The cat is winking up at me.

Shary crouches in her favorite chair, the straight-backed Regency made of red-stained wood and lumpy blue upholstery. She’s wearing jeans and a stained sweatshirt, one leg tucked under the other, and there’s a kinetic promise in her taut leg that I know to be a lie. She looks as if she’s about to spring out of that chair and ask me about the device in my hands, talking a mile a minute the way she used to. But she doesn’t even notice my brand-new purchase, and it’s a crapshoot whether she even knows who I am today.

I poke the royal cat’s tongue, and it gives a yawp through its tiny speakers, then the screen lights up and asks for our Wi-Fi password. I give the cat what it wants, then it starts updating and loading various firmware things. A picture of a fairy-tale castle appears with the game’s title in a stylized wordmark above it: THE DIVINE RIGHT OF CATS. And then begins the hard work of customizing absolutely everything, which I want to do myself before I hand the thing off to Shary.

The whole time I’m inputting Shary’s name and other info, I feel like a backstabbing bitch. Giving this childish game to my life partner, it’s like I’m declaring that she’s lost the right to be considered an adult. No matter that all the hip teens and twentysomethings are playing Divine Right of Cats right now. Or that everybody agrees this game is the absolute best thing for helping dementia patients hold on to some level of cognition, and that it’s especially good for people suffering from leptospirosis X, in particular. I’m doing this for Shary’s good, because I believe she’s still in there somewhere.

I make Shary’s character as close to Shary as I can possibly make a cat wizard who is the main adviser to the throne of the cat kingdom. (I decide that if Shary was a cat, she’d be an Abyssinian, because she’s got that sandy-brown-haired sleekness, pointy face, and wiry energy.) Shary’s monarch is a queen, not a king—a proud tortoiseshell cat named Arabella IV. I get some input into the realm’s makeup, including what the nobles on the Queen’s Council are like, but some stuff is decided at random—like, Arabella’s realm of Greater Felinia has a huge stretch of vineyards and some copper mines, neither of which I would have come up with.

Every detail I enter into the game, I pack with relationship shout-outs and little details that only Shary would recognize, so the whole thing turns into a kind of bizarre love letter. For example, the tavern near the royal stables is the Puzzler’s Retreat, which was the gray-walled dyke bar where Shary and I used to go dancing when we were both in grad school. The royal guards are Grace’s Army of Stompification. And so on.

“Shary?” I say. She doesn’t respond.

Before it mutated and started eating people’s brain stems, before it became antibiotic-resistant, the disease afflicting Shary used to be known as Rat Catcher’s Yellows. It mostly affected animals, and in rare cases, humans. It’s a close cousin of syphilis and Lyme, one that few people had even heard of ten years ago. In some people, it causes liver failure and agonizing joint pain, but Shary is one of the “lucky” ones who only have severe neurological problems, plus intermittent fatigue. She’s only thirty-five years old.

“Shary?” I hold the cat head out to her, because it’s ready to start accepting her commands now that all the tricky setup is over with. Queen Arabella has a lot of issues that require her Royal Wizard’s input. Already some of the other noble cats are plotting against the throne—especially those treacherous tuxedo cats!—and the vintners are threatening to go on strike. I put the cat head right in front of Shary’s face and she shrugs.

Then she looks up, all at once lucid. “Grace? What the fuck is this shit? This looks like it’s for a five-year-old.”

“It’s a game,” I stammer. “It’s supposed to be good for people with your… It’s fun. You’ll like it.”

“What the fucking fuck?”

She throws it across the room. Lucidity is often accompanied by hostility, which is the kind of trade-off you start to accept at a certain point. I go and fetch it without a word. Luckily, the cat head was designed to be very durable.

“I thought we could do it together.” I play the guilt card back at her. “I thought maybe this could be something we could actually share. You and me. Together. You know? Like a real couple.”

“Okay, fine.” She takes the cat head from me and squints at Queen Arabella’s questions about the trade crisis with the neighboring duchy of meerkats. Queen Arabella asks what she should do, and Shary painstakingly types out, “Why don’t you go fuck yourself.” But she erases it without hitting send, and then instead picks SEND AN EMISSARY from among the options already on the screen. Soon, Shary is sending trade representatives and labor negotiators to the four corners of Greater Felinia, and beyond.

2.

After a few days, Shary stops complaining about how stupid Divine Right of Cats is and starts spending every moment poking at the plastic cat’s face in her lap. I get her the optional add-on mask, which is (not surprisingly) the upper three-quarters of a cat face, and plug it in for her, then show her how to insert the nose plugs and earbuds.

Within a week after she first starts playing, Shary’s realm is already starting to crawl up the list of the one thousand most successful kingdoms—that is, she’s already doing a better job of helping to run the realm of Felinia than the vast majority of people who are playing this game anywhere, according to god knows what metrics.

But more than that, Shary is forming relationships with these cats in their puffy-sleeve court outfits and lacy ruffs. In the real world, she can’t remember where she lives, what year it is, who the President is, or how long she and I have been married. But she sits in her blue chair and mutters at the screen, “No you don’t, Lord Hairballington. You try that shit, I will cut your fucking tail off.”

She probably doesn’t remember from day to day what’s happened in the game, but that’s why she’s the adviser rather than the monarch—she just has to react, and the game remembers everything for her. Yet she fixates on weird details, and I’ve started hearing her talking in her sleep, in the middle of the night, about those fucking copper miners and how they better not try any shit because anybody can be replaced.

One morning, I wake up and cold is leaking into the bed from where Shary pulled the covers back without bothering to tuck me back in. I walk out into the front room and don’t see her at first, and worry she’s just wandered off into the street by herself, which has been my nightmare for months now and the reason I got her RFID’d. But no, she’s in the kitchen, shoving a toaster waffle in her mouth in between poking the cat face and cursing at Count Meesh, whom I named after the friend who introduced Shary and me in the first place. Apparently Count Meesh—a big fluffy Siberian cat—is hatching some schemes and needs to be taught a lesson.

After that, I start getting used to waking up alone. And going to bed alone. As long as Shary sleeps at least six hours a night—which she does—I figure it’s probably okay. Her neurologist, Dr. Takamori, was the one who recommended the game in the first place, and she tells me it’s healthy for Shary to be focused on something.

I should be happy this has worked as well as it has. Shary has that look on her face—what I can see of her face, under the cat mask—that I used to love seeing when she was writing her diss. The lip-chewing, the half smile, when she was outsmarting the best minds in Melville studies. So what if Shary’s main relationship is with these digital cats, instead of me? She’s relating to something; she’s not just staring into space all day anymore.

I always thought she and I would take care of each other forever. I feel like a selfish idiot for even feeling jealous of a stupid plastic cat face, with quivering antennae for whiskers.

One day, after Shary has already been playing Divine Right of Cats for four or five hours, she looks up and points at me. “You,” she says. “You there. Bring me tea.”

“My name is Grace,” I say. “I’m your wife.”

“Whatever. Just bring me tea.” Her face is unreadable, half terrifying cat smile, half frowning human mouth. “I’m busy. There’s a crisis. We built a railroad, they broke it. Everything’s going to shit.” Then Shary looks down again at the cat screen, poking and cursing.

I bring her tea, with a little honey, the way she used to like it. She actually thanks me, but doesn’t look up.

3.

Shary gets an email. She gave me her email password around the same time I got Power of Attorney, and I promised to field any questions and consult her as much as I could. For a while, the emails were coming every day, from her former students and colleagues, and I would answer them to the best of my ability. Now it’s been weeks since the last email that wasn’t spam.

This one is from the Divine Righters, a group of Divine Right of Cats enthusiasts. They’ve noticed that Shary’s realm is one of the most successful, and they want to invite Shary to some kind of tournament or convention… or something. It’s really not clear. Some kind of event where people will bring their kingdoms and queendoms together and form alliances or go to war. The little plastic cat heads will interface somehow, in proximity to each other, instead of being more or less self-contained.

The plastic cat head already came with some kind of multiplayer mode, where you could connect via the Internet, but I disabled it because the whole reason we were doing this was Shary’s inability to communicate with other humans.

I delete the email without bothering to respond to it, but another email appears the next day. And they start coming every few hours, with subject lines like “Shary Please Join Us” and “Shary, we can’t do it without you.” I don’t know whether to be pissed off or freaked out that someone is cyber-stalking my wife.

Then my phone rings. Mine, not hers. “Is this Grace?” a man asks.

“Who is this?” I say without answering his question first.

“My name is George Henderson. I’m from the Divine Righters. I’m really sorry to take up your time today, but we have been trying to reach your partner, Shary, on email and she hasn’t answered, and we really want to get her to come to our convention.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible. Please leave us alone.”

“This tournament has sponsorship from”—he names a bunch of companies I’ve never heard of—“and there are prizes. Plus, this is a chance to interface with other people who love the game as much as she obviously does.”

I take a deep breath. Time to just come clean and end this pointless fucking conversation. We’re standing in the kitchen, within earshot of where Shary is sitting on a duct-taped beanbag with her cat mask and her cat-face device, but she shows no sign of hearing me. I realize Shary is naked from the waist down and the windows are uncovered and the neighbors could easily see, and this is my fault.

“My wife can’t go to your event,” I say. “She is in no condition to ‘interface’ with anybody.”

“We have facilities,” says George. “And trained staff. We can handle—” Like he was expecting this to be the case. His voice is intended to sound reassuring, but it squicks me instead.

“Where the fuck do you get off harassing a sick woman?” I blurt into the phone, loudly enough that Shary looks up for a moment and regards me with her impassive cat eyes.

“Your wife isn’t sick,” George Henderson says. “She’s… she’s amazing. Could a sick person create one of the top one hundred kingdoms in the entire world? Could a sick woman get past the Great Temptation without breaking a sweat? Grace, your wife is just… just amazing.”

The Great Temptation is what they call it when the nobles come to you, the Royal Wizard, and offer to support you in overthrowing the monarch. Because you’ve done such a good job of advising the monarch on running Greater Felinia, you might as well sit on the throne yourself instead of that weak figurehead. This moment comes at different times for different players, and there’s no right or wrong answer—you can continue to ace the game whether you sit on the throne or not, depending on other circumstances. But how you handle this moment is a huge test of your steadiness. Shary chose not to take the throne, but managed to make those scheming nobles feel good about her decision.

Neither George nor I have said anything for a minute or so. I’m staring at my wife, whom nobody has called “amazing” in a long time. She’s sitting there wearing a tank top and absolutely nothing else, and her legs twitch in a way that makes the whole thing even more obscene. Her tank top has a panoply of stains on it. I realize it’s been a week since Shary has gotten my name right.

“Your wife is an intuitive genius,” George says in my ear after the pause gets too agonizing on his end. “She makes connections that nobody else could make. She’s utterly focused, and processing the game at a much deeper level than a normal brain ever could. It’s not like Shary will be the only sufferer from Rat Catcher’s Yellows at this convention, you know. There will be lots of others.”

I cannot take this. I blurt something, whatever, and hang up on George Henderson. I brace myself for him to call back, but he doesn’t. So I go find my wife some pants.

4.

Shary hasn’t spoken aloud in a couple of weeks now, not even anything about her game. She has less control over her bodily functions and is having “accidents” more often. I’m making her wear diapers. But her realm is massive, thriving; it’s annexed the neighboring duchies.

When I look over her shoulder, the little cats in their Renaissance Europe outfits are no longer asking her simple questions about how to tax the copper mine—instead, they’re saying things like, “But if the fundamental basis of governance is derived from external symbols of legitimacy, what gives those symbols their power in the first place?”

She doesn’t tap on the screen at all, but still her answer appears somehow, as if through the power of her eyeblinks: “This is why we go on quests.”

According to one of the readouts I see whisk by, Shary has forty-seven knights and assorted nobles out on quests right now, searching for various magical and religious objects as well as for rare minerals—and also, for a possible passage to the West that would allow her trading vessels to avoid sailing past the Isle of Dogs.

She just hunches in her chair, frowning with her mouth, while the big cat eyes and tiny nose look playful or fierce depending on how the light hits them. I’ve started thinking of this as her face.

I drag her away from her chair and make her take a bath, because it’s been a few days, and while she’s in there (she can still bathe herself, thank goodness) I examine the cat mask. I realize that I have no idea what is coming out of these nose plugs, even though I’ve had to refill the little reservoirs on the sides a couple of times from the bottles they sent. Neurotransmitters? Pheromones? Stimulants, that keep her concentrating? I really have no clue. The chemicals don’t smell of anything much.

I open my tablet and search for “divine right of cats,” plus words like “sentience,” “becoming self-aware,” or “artificial intelligence.” Soon I’m reading message boards in which people geek out about the idea that these cats are just too frickin’ smart for their own good and that they seem to be drawing something from the people they’re interfacing with. The digital cats are learning a lot, in particular, about politics, and about how human societies function.

On top of which, I find a slew of economics papers—because the cats have been solving problems, inside the various iterations of Greater Felinia, that economists have struggled with in the real world. Issues of scarcity and resource allocation, questions of how to make markets more frictionless. Things I barely grasp the intricacies of, with my doctorate in Art History.

And all of the really mind-blowing breakthroughs in economics have come from cat kingdoms that were being managed by people afflicted with Rat Catcher’s Yellows.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Shary is a prodigy; she was always the brilliant one of the two of us. Her nervous energy, her ability to get angry at dead scholars at three in the morning, the random scattering of note cards and papers all over the floor of our tiny grad-student apartment—as if the floor were an extension of her overcharged brain.

It’s been more than a week since she’s spoken my name, and meanwhile my emergency sabbatical is running out. And I can’t really afford to blow off teaching, since I’m not tenure-track or anything. I’ll have to hire someone to look after Shary, or get her into day care or a group home. She won’t know the difference between me or someone else looking after her at this point, anyway.

A couple of days after my conversation with George Henderson, I look over Shary’s shoulder, and things jump out at me. All the relationship touchstones that I embedded in the game when I customized it for her are still in there, but they’ve gotten weirdly emphasized by her gameplay, like her cats spend an inordinate amount of time at the Puzzler’s Retreat. But also, she’s added new stuff. Moments I had forgotten are coming up as geological features of her Greater Felinia, hillocks, and cliffs.

Shary is reliving all of the time we spent together, through the prism of these cats and their stupid politics. The time we rode bikes across Europe. The time we took up Lindy-hopping and I broke my ankle. The time I cheated on Shary, and thought I got away with it, until now. The necklace she never told me she wanted, that I tracked down for her. It’s all in there, woven throughout this game.

I call George Henderson back. “Okay, fine,” I say, without saying hello first. “We’ll go to your convention, tournament, whatever. Just tell us where and when.”

5.

I sort of expected that a lot of people at the “convention” would have RCY after the way George Henderson talked about the disease. But in fact it seems as though every player here has it. Either because you can’t become a power player of Divine Right without the unique mind state of people with Rat Catcher’s, or because that’s whom they were able to strong-arm into signing up.

“Here” is a tiny convention hotel in Orlando, Florida, with fuzzy bulletin boards that mention recent meetings of insurance adjusters and auto parts distributors. We’re a few miles from Disney World, but near us is nothing but strip malls and strip clubs, and one sad-looking Arby’s. We get served Continental breakfast, clammy individually wrapped sandwiches, and steamer trays full of Stroganoff every day.

The first day, we all mill around for an hour, with me trying to stick close to Shary on her first trip out of New Hampshire in ages. But then George Henderson (a chunky white guy with graying curly hair and an 8-bit T-shirt) stands up at the front of the ballroom and announces that all the players are going into the adjoining ballroom, and the “friends and loved ones” will stay in here. We can see our partners and friends through an opening in the temporary wall bisecting the hotel ballroom, but they’re in their own world, sitting at long rows of tables with their cat faces on.

Those of us left in the “friends and family” room are all sorts of people, but the one thing uniting us is a pall of weariness. At least half the spouses or friends immediately announce they’re going out shopping or to Disney World. The other half mostly just sit there, watching their loved ones play, as if they’re worried someone’s going to get kidnapped.

This half of the ballroom has a sickly sweet milk smell clinging to the ornate cheap carpet and the vinyl walls. I get used to it, and then it hits me again whenever I’ve just stepped outside or gone to the bathroom.

After an hour, I risk wandering over to the “players” room and look over Shary’s shoulder. Queen Arabella is furiously negotiating trade agreements and sending threats of force to the other cat kingdoms that have become her neighbors.

Because all of the realms in this game are called “Greater Felinia” by default, Shary needed to come up with a new name for Arabella’s country. She’s renamed it “Graceland.” I stare at the name, then at Shary, who shows no sign of being aware of my presence.

“I will defend the territorial integrity of Graceland to the last cat,” Shary writes.

Judy is a young graphic designer from Toronto, with a long black braid and an eager, narrow face. She’s sitting alone in the “friends and loved ones” room, until I ask if I can sit at her little table. Turns out Judy is here with her boyfriend of two years, Stefan, who got infected with Rat Catcher’s Yellows when they’d only been together a year. Stefan is a superstar in the Divine Right community.

“I have this theory that it’s all one compound organism,” says Judy. “The leptospirosis X, the people, the digital cats. Or at least, it’s one system. Sort of like real-life cats that infect their owners with Toxoplasma gondii, which turns the owners into bigger cat lovers.”

“Huh.” I stare out through the gap in the ballroom wall, at the rows of people in cat masks all tapping away on their separate devices, like a soft rain. All genders, all ages, all sizes, wearing tracksuits or business-casual white-collar outfits. The masks bob up and down, almost in unison. Unblinking and wide-eyed, governing machines.

At first, Judy and I just bond over our stories of taking care of someone who barely recognizes us but keeps obsessively nation building at all hours. But we turn out to have a lot else in common, including an interest in Pre-Raphaelite art, and a lot of the same books.

The third day rolls around, and our flight back up to New Hampshire is that afternoon. I watch Shary hunched over her cat head, with Judy’s boyfriend sitting a few seats away, and my heart begins to sink. I imagine bundling Shary out of here, getting her to the airport and onto the plane, and then unpacking her stuff back at the house while she goes right back to her game. Days and days of cat-faced blankness ahead, forever. This trip has been some kind of turning point for Shary and the others, but for me nothing will have changed.

I’m starting to feel sorry for myself with a whole new intensity when Judy pokes me. “Hey.” I look up. “We need to stay in touch, you know,” Judy says.

I make a big show of adding her number to my phone, and then without even thinking, say: “Do you want to come stay with us? We have a whole spare bedroom with its own bathroom and stuff.”

Judy doesn’t say anything for a few moments. She stares at her boyfriend, who’s sitting a few seats away from Shary. She’s taking slow, controlled breaths through closed teeth. Then she slumps a little, in an abortive shrug. “Yes. Yes, please. That would be great. Thank you.”

I sit with Judy and watch dozens of people in cat masks, sitting shoulder to shoulder without looking at each other. I have a pang of wishing I could just go live in Graceland, a place of which I am already a vassal in every way that matters. But also I feel weirdly proud, and terrified out of my mind. I have no choice but to believe this game matters, the cat politics is important, keeping Lord Hairballington in his place is a vital concern to everyone—or else I will just go straight-up insane.

For a moment, I think Shary looks up from the cat head in her hands and gives me a wicked smile of recognition behind her opaque plastic gaze. I feel so much love in that moment, it’s almost unbearable.

The Super Ultra Duchess of Fedora Forest

There is a perfect valley, nestled near the foot of the Sherbet Mountains and bordered by the River of Middling Ideas. It’s just a two-day ride away from the Lazy Geyser, which grants good luck to anyone who throws a coin in its path at the very moment when it finally gets around to erupting. There, in that valley, in the shelter of the fedora trees, is the most splendid place in the whole world to make your home.

Once, that valley was home to a small cottage, in which there lived a mouse, a bird, and a sausage. They were the best of friends, with the perfect partnership.

Every day, the bird would fly into the forest and collect wood. The mouse would carry in water from the well, make a fire, and set the table. And then the sausage would cook their dinner, slithering around in the fry pan to coat it with grease for their vegetables or grains.

The sausage had fled the Republic of Breakfast Meats, during one of High Commodore Gammon’s occasional campaigns to purge the realm of improper “meatizens.” (It usually started out with the Canadian bacon, which wasn’t even proper bacon at all, and then spread to those accursed chicken-fried steaks, and then turned into just a general massacre.) The sausage heard the sounds of trucks and loudspeakers, and barely managed to pack up her few precious belongings (such as an MP3 player that contained all of her beloved EDM tunes, which she loved to listen to and dream of becoming a DJ someday).

The sausage had barely made it through the border from the Republic of Breakfast Meats to the Federation of Circus Animals, thanks to some help from a kindly blood pudding who forged some traveling papers for the sausage. Once in the land of Circus Animals, the sausage had found shelter in a trailer with a friendly balloon elephant, who was best friends with an actual elephant. (“People can never tell us apart,” the balloon elephant had said, making a squeaky-squocky noise with his laughter. The flesh-and-blood elephant had just snorted through her trunk.) From there, the sausage had traveled south, skirting the edge of the Monster Truck Preserve.

Once, this land had been home to men and women. People had built the houses and roads, and they had made places for all the creatures of the forest and all the food items of the table. Even the balloon animals and monster trucks had known exactly where they belonged. That had been paradise, and now the men and women were gone, and everyone lived in a fallen state.

That, at least, was what the cartoon Blanketsaurus standing on a sardine crate was saying, on the day when the sausage had met the bird and the mouse. The Blanketsaurus, whose skin was a beautiful soft fluffy wool-cotton blend, had stood facing a crowd of every kind of person you could imagine, in the market square of the town of Zay!. “We’re just all jacked up,” the Blanketsaurus insisted. “Our shiz is a mess, brothers and sisters and others. We can’t ever even have any purpose at all without the humans.”

The sausage had made a dismissive noise, like a sausage makes when she’s getting a bit steamed. “Who needs humans?” she had whispered. “I never even saw a human. Never saw a need for one, neither.”

That was when the mouse had spoken up. “I just don’t know. I sometimes have the feeling that my life has no organizing principle, ya know? I’m living with a bird, in this cottage in the valley, and we’re just playing house. What are we even doing with our lives? Some days, I just want a human to chase me into the wainscoting. And I don’t even know what a wainscoting is.”

“A wainscoting is a sort of musical instrument,” according to a nearby cactus, who was kind of a know-it-all. “It plays mournful sounds, like the wind on a lonely, moonless night.”

“We don’t need any crunking humans,” the sausage had insisted. “We don’t need anybody besides one another. We can make our own rules. You and that bird can figure it out, all on your own.” And the more the mouse had told the sausage about her life with the bird, the more the sausage had piped up with ideas about how to make it work, and how they could get everything set up just right.

So that was how the sausage ended up living with the mouse and the bird, and the three of them had a perfect system. They were able to salvage enough valuable artifacts of the former human world to sell in the town of Zay!, and soon they had amassed a great many fine possessions. Meanwhile, the sausage finally had a place to practice her DJing, and she started spinning at some of the smaller raves and warehouse parties, over near Confetti Canyon. Her DJ rig included a big mic, with various cool effects, and a built-in speaker on wheels, for outdoor parties.

For years, the mouse, the bird, and the sausage lived merrily together. In the evenings, they played video games and worked on their dance routines. The mouse, who had grown up in a barn full of serious square dancers, was learning to throw it down. (The mouse hailed from a farm many miles away, and she always told the bird and the sausage that if you wanted to see serious drudgery, try farm work. Farms were like a chore wheel with a million spokes, man.)

“You guys are the best friends I’ve ever known, man,” the bird said to the mouse and the sausage one night, when they were kind of crunked up on aromatic bark that the bird had brought back from the town market earlier that day. “I’m serious. I never really felt like I belonged with the other birds. But you guys, you are my sisters. I never thought I would find my place in the world with a mouse and a sausage.” The bird was perched on his usual chair back but kept wobbling.

“You too, absolutely,” the mouse said, wrinkling her nose. “I feel like I just always had a sausage-and-bird-shaped hole in my life, and I never even knew.”

“Awww, I love you guys,” the sausage said, greasy tears rolling down her face.

Nobody knew what kind of bird the bird was. He was just “a bird.” People would sometimes try to identify his actual species: like, maybe he was a bluebird because his wings were kind of blue, or maybe he was a robin because his breast was reddish. But the bird would get grumpy whenever anybody tried to label him. Why wasn’t it enough just to be a bird? One reason why he liked being the only bird in the neighborhood was because you could ask, “Hey, where’s the bird?” and everybody would know you were talking about him.

So they went on: the bird fetching wood, the mouse fetching water and setting the table, the sausage making the food and seasoning it with her body. A perfect system!

A few times a month, the bird, the mouse, and the sausage would venture into the town to sell their wares (and to get more DJ gigs lined up for the sausage). They knew everyone: all the scrap dealers, and farmers’ market stall keepers, and truck whisperers, and sno-cone motivational speakers. Everybody had a friendly word for their little makeshift family.

Except, as time went by, they kept hearing whispers. “Things are changing,” said this one scrap-metal dealer, who was a big roast turkey leg. “Good old High Commodore Gammon from the land of Breakfast Meats signed a treaty with Grand Marshal Ruffles from the Circus Animal country, and they’ve both entered into a confederation with the Dandelion Lady.”

“What does that mean?” the bird asked, with a toss of his wings.

“It means, be careful about traveling if you don’t have identity papers and letters of transit,” said the turkey leg, quivering with indignation. “It means, honest businesspeople like myself get to have our goods searched and seized for no reason, unless we pay bribes to the border guards. It means that they’re forming an army and preparing to go to war against the Insect Principality. I would just keep your heads down.”

“But why?” the mouse asked.

“It makes no sense,” the sausage said. “People just want to have a simple life. Gammon should stick to what he’s good at, arresting good innocent salami slices for being too Continental a breakfast item.”

A month or two after that, the sausage saw the big vermilion Blanketsaurus again, once again addressing the townsfolk of Zay!. Only this time, the Blanketsaurus had a fancy uniform with big epaulettes, and his title was Admiral Blanketsaurus. (There was no ocean anywhere nearby, even if you counted the Root Beer Sea, but the Blanketsaurus explained painstakingly that the word “admiral” meant that you had lots and lots of secret admirers.) And now, the Blanketsaurus was accompanied by a few dozen people, all of them wearing uniforms as well.

“Brothers, sisters, and others,” the Blanketsaurus told the crowd in the town square. “Our lives were empty and without purpose. Our creators were gone, and we were living in their world without them. The human race decided to endow a great many things and creatures with higher awareness, and then they were wiped out by a flu virus that had gotten a PhD in linguistics. As a result, we were left behind, possessing consciousness without context. But now, at last, we can prove ourselves worthy of our heritage. We can re-create civilization!”

The Blanketsaurus wanted everyone to swear loyalty to the Confederation and to its leaders, like High Commodore Gammon and the Dandelion Lady. And if you originally hailed from one of the member states—like, say, the land of Breakfast Meats—you would be required to travel home and register there. This was a mere bureaucratic trifle, after which you would be free to carry on as before.

The sausage heard this and nearly cooked in her skin. There was no way she was ever going home, to be subject to the cruel whims of Gammon and his sort. She slipped away while everyone else was cheering for the new, more organized government, and ran home.

“I just don’t get it,” said the mouse, making a fire and setting the table for their dinner as usual. “I mean, why should anybody care what we do with our lives? Isn’t the whole point that everybody gets to live happily ever after in our own way?”

“Well,” said the bird, “they’re just trying to do the same thing we’re doing here, man. We’ve got our perfect civilized setup, right? Each of us has our tasks. The wood gathering, the water, the cooking—we have an order to everything. They just want the same kind of thing, on a larger scale. Right?”

“It’s not the same thing,” said the mouse.

“We’re a family,” said the sausage.

“Sure, sure,” said the bird. But his feathery brow wrinkled a little bit.

A couple of weeks passed, and they all forgot about Blanketsaurus and about the conversation they’d had afterward. Until one day, the bird came home from fetching wood, and his wings were fluttering with anger. He scratched at his chair back as he glowered at his two friends. “It’s an honest disgrace,” the bird grumbled.

“What’s wrong?” asked the mouse, wide-eyed.

The bird kept just muttering and glaring, until he finally explained. When he was out in the woods, he’d met up with another bird who lived a few miles away and had come over here to flutter around and hunt for gumdrops. You know, bird stuff. And the bird—our bird—had started bragging about his situation, and how good he had it, with his friends the mouse and the sausage. They had everything locked down. Everybody had a job to do, and it all ran smooth as butter. And then they played video games and danced to EDM!

But the other bird just fluffed his bright tail feathers and said that it sounded as though the bird was being straight-up taken for a ride. After all, the bird had the toughest job of the three of them. He had to go into the forest and collect the wood, and carry it all the way back to the cottage. Meanwhile, the mouse only had to carry some water and set the table, and a few other chores, and then she could just lounge around. The sausage just had to climb into the pan for a little while and season it. Of course they were happy: they’d suckered the bird into doing all the real work! “I’m glad I don’t have to get bossed around by a rodent and a piece of meat,” said the other bird with a chortle, before flying away.

Now the bird was back at home, spitting mad at his friends. “You think I’m just a chump,” he squawked. “You think you can just treat me like your fool forever. You guys just loaf around here, putting on your fancy airs, while I’m out there dragging wood in from the forest. It’s exploitation, is what it is.”

“But I mean, you’ve never complained before,” said the mouse, her fur standing on end.

“And that’s how you knew I was a sucker!”

The mouse and the sausage tried to reason with the bird, pointing out that each of them had the task that she or he was most suited for. They weren’t trying to exploit anybody, just use their shared resources in the best possible way. And so on.

But the bird was having none of it. He kept insisting that the free lunch was over, and it was about time they shared the workload more equally.

“What do you have in mind?” the sausage asked, trembling with nervousness, but also with the fear that she had lost her friend forever.

“How about we trade jobs tomorrow?”

So it was that the sausage went out to the forest to fetch wood, in spite of all her protests. And meanwhile, the bird would get the easy job of fetching water and setting everything up, while the mouse threw herself into the hot frying pan to get it greased up. If this worked out as it should, the bird had said, maybe they could have a chore wheel from now on.

The sausage felt naked and exposed, moving through the trees with the delicate marbling under her skin visible in the sunlight filtering through the big hats above. She tried to hum a David Guetta song to steady her nerves, but every sound in the woods made her jump. The fear, the uncertainty, were like a lump of gristle in her brain. And meanwhile, she kept arguing with the bird in her head, coming up with more and more reasons why this was unfair and a dreadful mistake, and surely the bird had to see that the sausage was much too delicate to carry wood every day, or even once every three days.

The sausage got so worked up, arguing with the bird in her mind, that she didn’t hear the dog coming up behind her until its hot breath and slobbery tongue were right behind her. She tried to run, but the dog’s jaws closed around her.

“Hey,” the sausage protested weakly, “let me go.”

The dog did let go of her for a moment, just so he could talk. “You’re a mighty juicy sausage,” he whuffed. “But you’re a long way from the Breakfast Meats country. I don’t suppose you have any valid travel papers?”

“Uh—” The sausage fumbled around in her pockets. “I do, I do. I have some right here.”

And she produced the papers that the blood pudding had made for her, so long ago. The dog picked them up in his front paws and inspected them. Now that she wasn’t in the dog’s mouth, she could see that he was a big brown hound, like a hunting dog, with a slobbery mouth and flat ears.

“Hmmm,” the dog said. “This is certainly most interesting. But it’s clearly a forgery. You see this smudging around the great seal of High Commodore Gammon, here? And also, even if this was real, it’s no longer valid. You would have had to return to your home and get updated papers for the Confederation. In any case, you’re carrying forged papers, and thus you are free booty.” He leaned his head in a graceful movement and scooped the sausage up again.

The shout came from behind the sausage: “Let go of my friend!”

The sausage would never know why the bird came looking for her. Maybe the bird felt guilty? Or maybe he just wanted to come and gloat. Either way, he arrived just in time to see the dog carrying her away, and try to intervene.

“Oh, hi.” The dog let the sausage go again so he could address the bird. “Unfortunately, your friend here is carrying forged letters. Which is like ten kinds of a crime. So I was about to carry her off and eat her, maybe not in that order.”

“That’s… that’s barbaric!” The bird’s wings shook with outrage, and his feet scraped the forest dirt. “You can’t go around eating people!”

“Civilization has certain rules,” the dog growled. “You break them, you get eaten. This isn’t up to me. I have to follow the same rules as everybody else.”

“You don’t have to eat anybody. That’s not in any rules,” the sausage said, gaining a bit of courage from having her friend there by her side.

“That’s true,” the dog said. “I mean, I could take her all the way back to the Republic of Breakfast Meats, where they would execute her. But that’s a lot of bother, and the end result is the same. And I can tell just by smelling her that she’s got bits of fennel and wild boar in her. She’s going to be delicious.”

“But,” the bird said. “But—but—we’re friends with the Super Ultra Duchess of the Fedora Forest! She has a great army and immense power. She’ll be mega pissed if you kill our friend here. She’ll probably hunt you down and make an example of you.”

“What?” the dog said. “What the hell are you talking about?”

The sausage was about to say the exact same thing as the dog. But when she glanced at the bird, he rolled his eyes and poked forward with his beak, as if to say, Just work with me here.

So the sausage chimed in. “Yes! The Super Ultra Duchess. You didn’t even know this forest had its own ruler, did you? And we’re under her protection. She’s so powerful, even the Confederacy leaves her alone.”

“I’ve never heard of any Super Ultra Duchess,” the dog grumbled, “and I’m on all the message boards.”

“Well, you obviously don’t come to the Fedora Forest too often,” the sausage said huffily.

“In fact,” said the bird, “I think I saw her just a little while ago.” He was gesturing at someone whom the sausage couldn’t see, and she realized that their friend, the mouse, must be someplace nearby. The bird kept talking, trying to stall the dog. “She makes all the rules hereabouts, and in fact, you better watch out, because I think you’re violating a bunch of her regulations and ordinances and statutes. For reals.”

“I don’t know.” The dog sniffed the air. “I think I would have smelled it if there was any such authority around here. Authority has a very distinct scent.”

“I’m pretty sure she’s right around here,” the bird said, looking around in a panic.

“This is your last warning,” the sausage said, with zero conviction.

“Nah,” the dog said. “I think I’m going to eat this sausage now, and then there won’t be any evidence left anyway.”

He bent his head to scoop the sausage up in his jaws, ready to gobble her up once and for all.

“WHO DARES?” came a thundering voice through the forest.

The dog dropped the sausage, his tail going between his legs by some instinct.

“UNMOUTH MY SUBJECT,” said the voice. And the source of the voice came close enough for the sausage to see. It was the mouse, riding on top of the sausage’s mobile DJ rig, using the microphone on its highest reverb setting. The mouse had found a big mushroom, which she was using as a hat, and had covered herself and the DJ rig with a big velvety red blanket.

“Hey,” the dog said, with a bit of a whimper in his voice. “I found her. She had forged papers. She’s free booty, man.”

“YOURS IS THE BOOTY THAT WILL BE FREE,” said the mouse, “IF YOU MOLEST MY SUBJECT. GO NOW! BEFORE I BRING MY MIGHTY ARMIES DOWN UPON YOU.”

The dog hesitated one moment longer, but the mouse bellowed, “GO!” He turned his lowered tail and ran off into the forest with his legs flailing. The sausage was so amazed and relieved, she fell on her back, wobbling as if she was being grilled.

“That was a near thing,” the sausage said.

“That dog will be back, I bet,” said the mouse, disentangling herself from the DJ rig, the mushroom, and the blanket.

“We’ll just have to make the Super Ultra Duchess more convincing next time,” said the bird. “We’ll all have to work together on it, since she’s like our insurance policy.”

“Ow.” The mouse cringed as it exposed its patchy fur to the open air. “I am actually in pain, all over my whole body. I tried to get into the hot frying pan to season the food with my body, and my fur did not like it at all. That’s why I was here in the woods when that dog attacked you. I came here to ask you for advice on what I was doing wrong. I burned my poor feet, so I had to ride here on your DJ rig, and it’s lucky that I did, too.”

“There’s a whole art to wriggling around in a frying pan and seasoning it with your body,” the sausage said, still expanding with relief.

“Really?” the mouse said.

“No, not really,” the sausage said, with an exasperated laugh. “You just have to be a sausage, dude.”

“Oh,” the bird said. “That actually makes total sense.”

After that, they carried on more or less as they had before. Except that now, they had a house meeting once a week or so, just to make sure they were all happy with the arrangement of the jobs. Some days, the bird skipped fetching wood and went flying off to look for cool stuff that they could sell to the scrap merchants in town. The sausage’s DJ gigs started bringing in enough money that they could hire some part-time help. The mouse got better at pretending to be a Super Ultra Duchess, until they finally received an embossed invitation to join the Confederacy. They framed the invite and put it on the mantelpiece, over their PlayStation’s big screen.

“It just proves,” said the bird, who would not stop extolling his own cleverness for a minute, “anybody can be a big deal, if they just have a posse.”

“Yeah,” the mouse said, curling up between her friends. “It just makes me wonder. Why doesn’t everybody just invent their own nation?”

“I think maybe they do,” said the sausage. They were playing a side-scrolling shooter, and the sausage had just gotten to the Final Boss, so nobody talked for a while after that. Until it was time to climb into the frying pan and make dinner.

Margot and Rosalind

1. She was warned.

The doorbell rings as she’s giving the brain its nutrient bath. The Hyperbrain likes it when she scritches behind its temporal lobe, like a cat—if a cat was a biomimetic neural network that filled up your entire basement. Margot whispers stories about heroes to the Hyperbrain, which likes Rosalind Franklin best.

Margot changes as she walks along the hall of her creaky rowhouse, lined with photos of dead people: her wife Sukey, other lovers, all worry-smiling. By the time Margot reaches her door, she’s playing up her non-threatening slouch and the way she favors one leg.

The man from the Brain Brigade looks uncomfortable to be in the Lowdown, talking to someone like Margot. “Ma’am. Miss. Ms. Baxter,” he says. “We’ve had reports of an unlicensed A.I., in contravention of 37 use cases.”

She glances past him, upward, at the place he comes from. Crystal skyways cris-cross, rippling with light. Above it all dwell the Immortals, playing their Wall games. Occasionally a gamepiece falls and blocks the street down here. Everyone’s GPS just re-routes around the obstruction.

The man talks for ages, but has no warrant. Margot keeps saying, “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re speaking about,” but doesn’t let him inside.

2. She was given an explanation.

The brain, which Margot has taken to calling Rosalind, already knows everything and predicts the weather years from now. But Rosalind still purrs louder whenever Margot tells stories of people who stood up for truth. Borrowing those seeds was the best decision Margot ever made.

The Brain Brigade keeps sending notices, which float outside, singing the legal code to the tune of a Bach fugue. She drowns them out with some good zydeco. Pale, fragile men shiver on her welcome mat. She stopped answering the door.

Then an ice sculpture comes from Margot’s refrigerator. A bull of a man, with a cunning smile. The statue looks around and raises a frozen hat.

“Ms. Baxter, my name is Arthur. I run the Brain Brigade. I must counsel you: An uncontrolled Hyperbrain could cause unimaginable chaos. Most of all, under no circumstance should you attempt to connect your own mind to your illicit Hyperbrain.”

“Ha,” Margot says. “That’s reserved for the Immortals up top, is it?”

“Actually,” the figurine says, “no. None of the Immortals has connected to their own Hyperbrain in over a century. The Hyperbrains engineer wealth and eternal youth for people, and we leave them to it.”

“You have the most advanced consciousnesses in creation,” Margot almost spills hot tea on herself. “And… you don’t even use them to think?”

The iceman laughs, not entirely at Margot. “Believe me, there’s nothing worse than being both immortal and intelligent. Imagine the boredom! Plus you start to ask questions, and the worst thing about questions is that sometimes, they have answers.”

The statue melts, leaving a wet mess on her parquet.

3. Nevertheless, she persisted.

Every network airdrops a reporter onto Margot’s lawn, and they intone that Margot is destroying the fabric of society. Why does Margot hate ordinary people? What gives her the right to be better than everybody else? A salt-of-the-Earth man named Jeff the Chair Maker has built a chair that bursts into flames every five minutes. All the reporters want Jeff to shout at them on camera. The police wear riot gear to hold back the mob. Men and women in white spacesuits prepare to breach Margot’s house, but they’re alarmed by Jeff’s self-immolating chair.

Margot’s toaster makes toast with Arthur’s mustachioed face on it. “Ms. Baxter. I must counsel you. Nobody knows what might happen if a human tried to think using a Hyperbrain. The consequences—”

The pounding at Margot’s door sounds like a stampede.

Rosalind’s purring sounds different, like it’s time. Knowledge is justice, the rumbling seems to say. Margot reaches for her brain-interface, which looks like a diamond colander, and lowers it onto her own crown. This Singularity will be most singular, she thinks, and then her mind opens wide.

Ghost Champagne

1. Comedy

You know what I wish? I wish I could just reach into someone’s chest and pull out their beating heart and show it to them, like a movie villain. (And then I would put it back and their chest would seal up and they would be fine. I’m not a monster!) But imagine how great that would be, whenever the endless string of entitled assclowns start screwing with you—just reach in, and ZOOOOOOOP! Oh, what’s this? It’s your heart. In my hand! You wanna say something now, huh? I didn’t think so. I mean, I would only use this power in extreme circumstances, like when one of the developers in my day job starts mansplaining to me, or when I’m super bored in a meeting. Speaking of which, why is it OK to text in a meeting but not to play Candy Crush? That’s discrimination.

My comedy set is off to a pretty good start, and then I notice my ghost at a third row table, right between the canoodling pierced hipsters and the drunken yuppies.

Some days I hardly notice my ghost, but lately she’s in my face a whole lot more. Today she’s wearing a lacy loligoth dress that I wish I owned in real life, and a little hat over her wavy dark hair, which is a little shorter than mine. She’s drinking a Sidecar or an Old Fashioned, because yeah, even ghosts must obey the two–drink–minimum rule at Sal’s Comedy Cellar, and she watches me go through my set with the usual disaffected look on her face, like been–there–done–that–and–died.

I do what I always do: ignore her. Even when she knocks the candle off her table and turns the floor into a minefield of broken glass and hot wax. Fuck her. Remember the toolkit. Keep going, look past her—I try to gaze instead at my boyfriend Raj, sitting on a stool in the back. The ghost doesn’t matter. She had her chance to be alive, she obviously blew it.

We’ve reached the butt–jokes section of my set. (Dick jokes are for lesser intellects, but butt jokes are sophisticated and brilliant.) And then, Raj gets up and walks upstairs with the rest of the comics, right when I’m getting to the part about how my man has a big butt, and why is there no female equivalent of an ass man? (Nobody ever says ass woman, which just sounds like the worst superheroine ever.) Raj just up and walks out on me. I see my ghost out of the corner of my eye, giving me a look like, What can you do?

I stumble through my set, but the energy is all gone. And I don’t even get any love for my spiel about how Japanese toilets are so great, with the heated seats and the jets of warm water, it’s like being rimmed by pixies—I sat on one and my butt finally forgave me for the horseback–riding lessons I took when I was twelve. My ghost gets so bored, she knocks over someone’s beer glass with the back of her hand, CRASH. The crowd is a goddamn humor sponge. Fuck all of these stupid people, why do they pay $15 just to zonk out in public, when they could stay home and watch the Homophobia Channel for free?

When I get upstairs to the sidewalk after my set, Raj and the other comedians, mostly dudes, are standing out front smoking. Even though Raj doesn’t smoke. It’s a cool dry night. They nod at me, and then start talking about how Raj and I should have kids. You should have kids so you can enter the America’s Funniest Mom competition, you would crush that, says Roddy, who’s basically just a pair of sideburns in search of a face. You should have kids so you can get some fashion cred, cuz you know, kids are the perfect accessories, says the bleach–blond sunburnt Campbell. We should have kids so I can be a stay–at–home dad instead of just unemployable, says Raj, choking a little on his cig. If you had kids, you could get a sick reality TV show on public access cable, with your crazy family and shit, Roddy says. I realize that Raj put them up to this, he asked them to broach the idea of having kids, and this is the way they’ve chosen to go about it.

I just roll my eyes and walk away, heading down Bleecker towards the F. I’m not going to sit through the rest of the night waiting for Raj’s set after this shitshow. My ghost slouches on the other side of the street, loitering outside the CVS and the fetish boutique. She gives me a friendly wave and I ignore her.

She didn’t laugh once during my comedy set, but now my ghost looks at me, sees my angry tears, and laughs. Ruefully, which goes with the territory, I guess.

I forget the toolkit for once, and just stare at her. As if this time, there might be some clue. Just like always, my ghost looks exactly like me, except older. And dead. She has the tilde–shaped scar on her chin, that I got rock–climbing when I was 19 (and she had it before I did.) She’s gazing into the fetish shop, through the aluminum shutters.

2. Authority

Why is my own ghost haunting me, anyway? Do I die in the future, and decide that instead of going to whatever afterlife a shitty comedian, lapsed Evangelical, and unfulfilled techie goes to, I’d rather go back in time and haunt my own living self? Is this a curse? A punishment for some mistake I don’t know I’ve made, or maybe will make? Most of all, why is my ghost such a bitch?

I went to every stupid medium and spiritualist, and got a big goose egg. I went into therapy and my therapist just wanted to give me pills to make me stop seeing the ghost—but as soon as Dr. Jane reached for her prescription pad, my ghost went Full Poltergeist. She started in with the diplomas on the walls, and then got into the dolls and the office computer, and finally the antique furniture. Dr. Jane’s classy office turned into a tweaker’s love nest. Dr. Jane couldn’t stop hyperventilating, until I held her like a colicky baby for like ten minutes.

Whatever. I stopped worrying about the ghost, since she mostly minds her own business, and I’ve got a life to live. Trust the toolkit. Trust the toolkit.

Raj grovels for three days and I finally sort of forgive his ass. He’s the sweetest guy when we’re not around other comedians. Which, we’re both trying to break into comedy, so.

I get mad all over again when Raj gets invited to be in a fancy comedy showcase the following week and I’m somehow skipped over. But Raj gives me a dozen foot–rubs and cleans the bathroom, and offers to help me shop for a wedding present for my mom. What do you get your mom when she’s marrying a woman the exact same age as you? (Seriously, what?)

But. I notice that when I find out about being left out of the big comedy show, which is headlined by a B–list comedian whose set is basically listing Star Wars toys he used to own, my ghost seems to get a little less transparent. I can make out the tiny lines on her/my face more clearly. She’s perched on the wooden stool by the kitchen–counter of the teeny one–bedroom that Raj and I share in Green Point, and she’s holding a mug of chai that smells of cinnamon and seaweed. I notice she’s got her ears double–pierced, whereas mine are just single–pierced.

Raj notices I’m staring into space and asks what’s up. He’s got big friendly eyes and a wide pouty mouth, and hair like a single blue flame. He touches my left palm with his right index finger and I kind of melt. I tell him nothing’s up, I’m just thinking about the big presentation at work which, since we’re both living off my income, is kind of a thing. He kisses me—hot butterflies!—and tells me to knock ‘em dead.

My ghost has a seat in the back of the conference room for my presentation, where I yak about some of the challenges in our next code push. I mostly love being a project manager, except my company keeps changing its business model. This month, we’re making an app to help people use their Spotify playlists to get laid, I am not even kidding. It’s called Remixr. I’m doing a pretty solid job of talking through the workflow issues we’ve been having. Except one of the coders named Mickey keeps engaging in microaggresions: spreading his legs real wide in his chair, throwing paper balls at the trash right next to where I’m standing (his aim sucks), and yawn–laughing while I’m talking. Everyone else is just bored, probably playing Candy Crush under the chrome table.

Over by the window, my ghost is staring out at the Shake Shack across the street, as if she could really go for an extra–large chocolate shake and fries right now. She’s wearing sweatpants in a professional office setting. Her expression plainly says that being a ghost has certain perks and giving zero fucks about stupid product meetings is one of them.

I breathe and look away from the ghost, but I keep snagging her in my peripheral vision. The thought that’s always in the back of my mind surges forward: You’re going to lose your mind, it’s in the cards. The corner of my eye has become my whole field of vision, putting my ghost front and center. I start mumbling and repeating myself until the bun–haired VP of product, Marcia, thanks me for my efforts and says we should move on.

In my dreams, I’m a semi–famous turbo–geek who rocks the comedy scene every night. I have this fantasy of going to some city to give a TEDx talk, where I somehow make everybody laugh and rethink their whole way of looking at everything, and then since I’m already in town, I might as well just go perform at the local comedy spot that’s been begging me to show up. I actually enjoy the whole process of making things happen, helping code come together, and putting out products that enrich people’s lives. (Even when it’s something like Remixr.) I like the problem–solving, and I feel like I’m good at making smart people pull their heads out of their butts. Usually.

A few hours after the big presentation, I stumble into one of the 100 company chatrooms and notice a couple of the C–level execs talking about the upcoming workforce reduction—and then they notice that I’m lurking, and immediately bail and delete their own conversation. I look up from the screen, where the words “possible strategic layoffs” are fading to white, and see my ghost. She’s closer to me than ever—just peering over my cubicle wall—and I can hardly see through her at all.

3. Family

My mom and her new bride take me to brunch at a Moroccan diner, and I’m scared Mom is going to ask me to give her away. Cassie, my soon–to–be stepmom, is pale and skinny with random tufts of platinum hair coming out of her shaved head. Glam Tank Girl. Her skin is amazing, like she must just have microdermabrasion all over her entire body once a day or something. My ghost is sitting at the next table in a sundress, drinking a mimosa. My mom is telling me how she and Cassie are going to be married by a gay Buddhist who turns your sexual guilt into a stuffed animal as part of the ceremony.

I grew up in a really strict religious household, in a plantation house whose dark wood foundations were being slowly devoured by termites. My mom was raised Presbyterian in Mexico City, and she married this WASPy charismatic preacher who is just a grabby pair of callused hands and a red face in my memories. Before he met my mom, I heard my dad might’ve done snake–handling, which I wish I’d gotten to see, because fuck yeah snakes. The one time I made the mistake of telling my dad I thought I saw a ghost, he and a few of his deacons prayed over me for a full twelve hours, not letting me sleep. One of the deacons had breath that smelled like sour milk and I started to lose my mind. My mom’s family might at least have accepted a ghost as normal and just told me to visit some graveyards, pay some respect.

My parents were neo–Calvinists, which means they believed in predestination, kinda sorta, and the idea that your fate after death is sealed while you’re still alive. My mother used to tuck me in every night and tell me that she was afraid my soul was already damned. Now, Mom’s telling me that she and Cassie have written their own vows, and there’s a lot of stuff about giving yourself permission to love without expectations. My mom’s family is not coming to the wedding, except for Crazy Aunt Letitia, who was cut off before I was even born. My mom has kind of a butch haircut that makes her face look a lot squarer, and she’s wearing suspenders over a T–shirt. She looks really good. She looks younger than I feel. She keeps laughing, which is a sound I never even heard until a few years ago. Gloria, she tells me, I really want this day to be special for you as well as us, I want you to feel free.

When I was a teenager, sneaking out after curfew, going to smoke in the woods with the other dead–end kids, my ghost egged me on. My parents locked me in, my ghost let me out. My parents yelled at me, my ghost stood in the corner, arms folded, and glared at them. Jesus has a plan for you, you need to surrender, my mother pleaded, while my ghost studied her hands. Back then, I didn’t even recognize myself in her—I just thought she was some random ghost, haunting this old South Carolina house. That place was a natural ghost habitat, with so many gloomy corners and moldy back rooms full of barbed rust.

Cassie is saying she wants us to be friends, something she’s said before, and holding my mother’s hand across the table in front of me. She’s got movie–star blue eyes and she really seems to be crazy about Mom.

They are waiting for me to say something. Something like, I feel super lucky that we have this second chance as a family. Something like, I’m so happy for the two of you. Those are things I absolutely do feel, though I can tell without looking that my ghost is annoyed by all this hippie–dippie nonsense. My ghost is not okay with this midlife reinvention on the part of the woman who spent so many years telling me I had no choices.

I look at the fried eggs and hummus on my plate, breathe, and say the best thing I can think of: I’m glad you finally figured out your deal. Wish you could have found yourself sooner, but maybe you guys can have a new baby with a turkey baster and give it the perfect childhood, with Montessori and organic candy and no judgment, it’s never too late, amirite? When I look up, I see that my comments did not land the way I hoped—my mom looks crushed, actually weeping for fuck’s sake, and Cassie is comforting her. My ghost, though, has scooted her chair closer, and is practically part of our party.

4. Therapy

Dr. Jane can kind of tell from my gaze that my ghost is standing right behind her chair. She keeps twitching, as if her office furnishings will fly through the air any minute. She’s a frumpy fifty–something lady in a giant cat sweater, and I think I respond to her partly because she’s so unlike my mother. She smiles in a distant but nurturing way and asks me what the week brought me. Like the week is a hunting dog that drops rabbits at my feet, or something.

I’m freaking out, I say. The toolkit broke.

What broke the toolkit? she asks.

Everything. Everything broke the toolkit. My ghost is 100 percent not ignorable any longer. My ghost is right up in my business. All of the coping mechanisms are kaput because the ghost jams them up. All that stuff about connecting with Dia de los Muertos and remembering that the dead are part of life, it didn’t work. You try telling jokes with your own ghost sitting right there with a dead grimace on her face. You try leading a meeting. You try having an honest–to–god processing conversation with your adorable boyfriend, who keeps trying to claim he’s a feminist because he’s letting you support him financially. Just try it.

Your ghost only has the power you give it, says Dr. Jane. She doesn’t believe that any more than I do—she’s the one who had to invest in all new office furniture—but she probably thinks that’s a good therapist–y thing to say. Goddamn positive thinking. She’s the only one but me who’s ever seen my ghost in action and the only one I’ve told since I was a kid.

You’re doing so well, Dr. Jane says. You’ve gotten a promotion at work. You’re in a position of authority over people. You’ve been getting better comedy bookings, at bigger venues. You’ve got a boyfriend whom you adore. You’ve been rebuilding your relationship with your mother. Just think how much better your life is than when you were first coming to see me.

I don’t know, I say. I don’t know if any of that is true.

That’s how it sounds to me, from the outside looking in. It sounds like you’re being a successful grown–up, which is pretty much never fun for anybody, says Dr. Jane. And your ghost? Your ghost was really useful when you were a teenager trying to break out of a bad situation, but now she’s just in your way.

I glance up at my ghost, who is looking at my therapist’s hand puppets on the shelf, apparently not listening to any of this. I can never tell how much language she understands—like, does everything just sound garbled and weird to her? I’ve asked her yes–or–no questions, point blank, and she never nodded or shook her head or anything.

I don’t feel like my ghost is helpful or unhelpful, I say. I feel like she’s waiting. I feel like, every time I fail at something, she gets stronger. Every setback, I see her more clearly. Like, she’s getting power from my screw–ups. Or like I’m getting closer to turning into her.

Maybe—and here, Dr. Jane looks nervous, because she’s afraid the ghost will start trashing her office again—maybe it’s partly just in your mind. Maybe you just think the ghost is getting closer and more solid. I can’t see what you see, so I can’t tell for myself.

I don’t know. I have a strong sense that my ghost is feeding off my self–destruction. I need a new toolkit.

There’s no new toolkit. Dr. Jane scrunches her big brow. There’s just the coping mechanisms I already taught you. Don’t try to figure out what your ghost’s agenda is, or what your ghost wants. Try to figure out what you really want. What do you actually care about?

Pffft. As if I could possibly know that.

5. Arrowheads

At the karaoke bar, I foolishly put myself down for a Shakira song—some people say I look like Shakira, but nobody ever says I sound like her. And my ghost is at one of the spit–catching tables up front, nursing a margarita. Wearing a dress with a million ruffles.

The screen with the lyrics might as well be Swahili writing, beamed into the void. Raj is up front dancing, cheering me on and clapping, but all I can see is the ghost’s face, which isn’t even looking at me at all. (She’s never looking at me whenever I look right at her, I realize for the first time.) She stares at Raj, like she remembers loving him, way back when. Sadness, resignation, on her face. Like she remembers this time, when her life was almost good.

I topple forward off the stage and fall on my knees on the grungy floor, at my ghost’s feet. I can’t breathe, much less sing. The crowd is still not sure if I’m doing a dramatic dance move or having a medical situation. I can’t even hear the music with my ears pounding. Raj comes to me and asks if I’m okay, and I say, Like you care. The song is over. I go home.

My ghost stands between me and the whiteboard in a meeting at work. I’m sitting and watching Marcia talk about the drop–dead deadline for the Remixr launch, but I can’t even read the words she’s pointing to. My ghost keeps shaking her head in syncopation with Marcia’s droning. Today my ghost is wearing a bikini, revealing a tattoo on her stomach that I cannot read at any cost to my eyesight.

I hate her so much. She’s going to fuck up everything for me, one way or the other. She’s fucking smug, is what she is. She’s already lived all this shit and she’s over it, and she won’t let me just live it for myself.

Marcia is asking me a question. I stare past my ghost, and say something about security audits that I think is probably relevant to what she was talking about the last time I paid attention. Security is for version 2.0, Marcia says. We need to launch this thing.

Raj and I are at the mall, shopping for a wedding present for Mom, and we’re on the escalator behind three kids who are reading an internet tutorial on how to shoplift. Raj is excited: This mall has three different shops for just socks, socks are the best! Did you know that in the 1970s nobody wore socks? It caused this thing called stagflation, what would happen if you actually blew up a stag party? Raj runs off the escalator, and nearly gets away from me. My ghost is right there at my elbow, though.

My ghost sits near my bed at night, watching Raj sleep. My ghost watches Raj perform at the comedy showcase—his big break!—and laughs without making a sound. When I sit in the toilet stall, eavesdropping as Marcia and Sandra from Accounting wash their hands and whisper about the upcoming Rationalization, my ghost is out there next to them, also washing her hands in ghost water.

It’s like arrowheads are embedded in my back, on either side of my neck, so that even raising my head or lifting my arms causes excruciating pain. I chewed through too many mouthguards, until I gave up on guarding my mouth. I feel like a bomb that’s lost its detonator, like I will just go critical forever, without ever getting to explode.

At dinner, my ghost sits in Raj’s lap as he tries to talk to me about our relationship.

6. Wedding

Hey, Raj says. I know this is a weird thing for you. Your mom, turning into a lesbian cougar. I wanna tell you that I’m here, and I get it, and I’m on your team.

Raj is touching my hand, leaning over, talking in my ear. We’re right up front at the wedding, surrounded by young queer people in incredible fashions. I always thought a tux was a tux, but it turns out that tuxedos have personalities. The sound of Raj’s voice is making me feel grounded, like I have a core after all. And what he’s saying makes a certain amount of sense. This is a weird thing for me, after so many years of defining myself in opposition to my parents. It’s like I don’t know who I am.

I don’t even see my ghost anywhere. I don’t, like, scan the entire room looking for her—I just take the win. Maybe she’s hanging back and letting me have this day to myself. Or maybe, I’ve been working on having a more positive attitude, and that makes it harder for her to intrude her ass in there. I try to set up a virtuous circle, where I feel more centered, which means I don’t see the ghost, and that in turn helps me be even more centered. It could work, right?

I ought to recognize how cool this is, I tell Raj. All of this. Getting to be true to yourself, and make your own family, and throw the stupid rules out the window. I don’t want to wait until I’m my mom’s age before I let myself open up my heart.

Raj squeezes my thumb like he gets it, and he feels that way too, and this feels like the start of a whole conversation that we’ll have to have later.

But then the ceremony starts, and everyone is whooping with joy and the officiant, who has a U–shaped beard and no mustache or hair, pronounces my mom and Cassie wife and wife. My mother looks like some whole other person, unrecognizable even as the butch dyke I had just started getting used to. She’s wearing makeup, and a puffy white dress with a black bow on the front that looks like a bow tie. My mom holds Cassie with all her considerable arm strength, and then she beckons me to get in there. My mother poses, sandwiched between two women in their mid–twenties, and Mom looks more alive than I can remember. She whispers in my ear that I’m beautiful and she’s so proud of me, which feels like something I ought to be telling her instead.

The Veterans Hall is a celebration of walnut, from the recessed–box pattern on the ceiling to the long, tall panels on the walls. Even the plaque about those who gave their lives appears to be walnut. I concentrate on dodging the bouquet, but then Raj catches it. He giggles and we make out, right in front of everyone. More cheers.

I spot my ghost at last, but she’s just another face in the crowd, over by the hors d’oeuvres table.

The bouquet has one dead bud in it. In among the posies, morning glories, pink roses and the obligatory babies’ breath, there’s this little gnarled fist, clutched around a gray mouth that never opened. Blighted. The inward–facing petals look like an overcooked crepe. I stare into its dark heart, and then Raj is talking in my ear about taking a trip, just the two of us, to Big Sur, California, where every five yards there’s a rock that Henry Miller had kinky sex on top of. Yeah, I say, let’s be Henry Miller sex tourists. We laugh and kiss, and all the young lesbians are cheering my mom, whom they all love like a den mother.

I’m dancing with Raj to the zydeco band. He’s busting out these ridiculous knee–bending moves and he eggs me on to dance as funny as him. I dance even worse, all neck and ankles. People are cheering. A young genderqueer person shoots me a thumbs–up and my mom waves from the cake stand. Cassie has her arm around my mom’s waist and the love is radiating outward from them, suffusing the entire room. I feel warm and exhausted and inexhaustible.

And then my ghost is right there, dancing right next to us. She doesn’t dance, exactly—more like sway, so her bony wrists wave back and forth. She smiles at Raj, in a nostalgic way. These good times were good, her smile says, and then, well, you know. We all died.

I stop dancing and Raj is so startled he nearly elbows me in the face. I can’t even remember why I was happy a moment ago, and I can’t imagine why I would ever feel happy again. The ghost is so close I can see the pearly embroidery on her white dress.

Someone comes with a tray of champagne glasses, and Raj and I take them because there’s going to be a big toast or something. My ghost has a flute of champagne in her hand too, and she’s actually crying—her ghost tears land on her cheeks like the dew that catches the last of the moonlight. She’s just watching my mother and Cassie, and I have this moment of How dare you? That is not her mother, it’s mine, and this is my life, and I want it back. I want to care about things, without my ghost always throwing shade. My too–tight scalloped blue dress constricts my breathing. I glare at my ghost, but she’s staring at my mother.

So maybe it’s time I took something of hers.

I reach out and seize the glass of champagne from her loose fingers. It’s made of some kind of ghost material, ecto–whatever, but the stem is solid in my hand. I raise it to my face and toss it back. It tastes like… bitterness, I guess. It tastes a bit like pukey backwash, stomach acid, but also a bit like Cold Duck, that weird “sparkling wine” the grocery store used to sell for $2 a bottle. It has an aftertaste of fermented dirt, bubbly regret.

Before I even swallow, it hits me: Way past drunkenness, something like a head rush mixed with hypoglycemia and extreme sleep deprivation. Everything looks as though I’m seeing it from a great vast distance, through a pinhole, and maybe that’s what ghost vision looks like. The ghost glass is plucked from my hand before I can let it fall on the floor. I can just barely see my ghost looking around in a mad panic, like the worst possible thing has just happened.

Raj rushes over to me as I sway–crash to the walnut floor. I feel like I’m having an aneurmotherfuckingysm. I feel my legs twitching, my hands flailing. Raj is holding my head in a hand and his fingertips are so gentle and my head at least is supported is overloaded with ghost juice is supported, my ghost vanishes like she can’t afford to get caught here with me. The music stops, to be replaced by the crowd freaking out, I’m drunk in a way I’ve never known was even possible.

As I finally zero out, I feel the cold invade my veins, my bones, my lungs. Petrified, and then dead to the world.

7. Drunk

A ghost wedding is a funeral, only with dancing, and a cake instead of a casket. What do you give the newlyweds at a ghost wedding? Bone china. Ghost vows are much the same as the regular kind, except you vow to stay together for as long as death holds you. I can still just barely glimpse the wedding party of the living (Raj and my mother and Cassie, all freaking) but now I’m among the dead wedding guests. These people are skeletons, except as I move around them, their translucent skin comes into focus and they have faces made of gray mist. The whole dead wedding party is swaying and passing around plates of wormy moldy cake, clinking glasses like the one I chugged from. What do you write on the rear bumper of the honeymoon car at a ghost wedding? Just Buried. The band is still playing zydeco, but the beats keep slowing down and speeding up, and the accordion wheezes with rheumatism. There is a buffet full of eyeballs and tongues, still looking around and trying to talk inside their metal trays over cold candles. What kind of wedding crashers go to a ghost wedding? Dig–up artists. I keep laughing, only I am not per se breathing and every “hee” is slowed way down to the slowest pace of the zydeco drummer and I spin my whole body to keep pace with the spinning of the room, happen if I spin fast enough the room will stand still. I want to vomit but cannot.

The ghosts at the guest wedding, I mean guests at the ghost wedding, are random dead people plus some that I knew when they lived, like my mom’s parents and even my great–grandma Julia and my great aunt Danielle, and that chain–smoking piano–playing raconteur my parents used to have over when I was little, whose name was Ed or Fred. They see me looking at them and raise their glasses to me, and I salute back. What do you call the congregation at a ghost wedding? Deadly beloved.

I’ve spun halfway across the room from where I drank the champagne. I look back at the spot where I collapsed, and I’m still there, on the ground. Except it’s not me, it’s my ghost. She has shorter hair and an older face, and she’s wearing a white dress instead of a blue dress. My ghost is talking to Raj, and he can actually hear her, and whatever she is saying, he is nodding very seriously. I can’t hear what she’s telling him, and I can only see it through the end of a long hazy reverse telescope. Drunk tunnel vision. I want to get closer to them, but no matter how I stumble and twist my angle and sweep my arms for balance, I can’t get going in the right direction.

As my ghost talks to Raj, he nods and nods and oh shit now he is crying and still nodding, and I have never yet made him cry in all the months we have dated. He’s never given me the look he’s giving my ghost. What the fuck is she telling him? Now at last I vomit but it comes out from my eyes instead of my mouth. The ghosts around me are all gossiping too loud for me to hear a damned thing. Raj’s glasses dark frames big brown eyes—which, serious Raj looks like a totally different person, older and more physically present. I try to get Raj’s attention by shouting and flailing but he’s only looking at ghost me.

The gossiping of the ghosts around me gets louder and more shrill, and it’s all: Look at her in her shiny dress and her pristine flesh and her red lips, she thinks she’s all that just because she’s alive, look at that blue–haired man over there, he probably thinks he invented breathing. The ghosts are getting louder and crankier, and I see them more clearly while Raj and my mother and Cassie are like chalk outlines. Zydeco band salutes me and starts a dirge and I am so blitzed that walking is dancing is falling. I gotta sober up right now or I am lost in the land of the dead forever and maybe my ghost takes my place.

The doorway to the Veterans Hall is open and the caterers are coming in through a ribbon of darkness, bearing weird canapes made of pure decay and fake crab, plus oblivion–in–a–blanket. They keep shoving the trays in my face and trying to make me take a bite, as the ghosts grow more and more vivid and everything else fades. The ghosts urge me: take one, just try it, don’t be ungrateful, don’t you know what this wedding cost? You think you’re too good to eat with us.

I look over at Raj, still talking to my ghost, and I feel a pure sour anger—why can’t he tell that’s not me? This proves he never really cared!—and I’m so pissed that I almost want to open my mouth and let the other ghosts push pieces of the dead wedding feast into my throat. Why the fuck not? And then I stop, and see Raj again, his face just a wall of tears. Whatever is going on with him and my ghost, from his perspective, he sees that I’m hurting and he is desperate to make it right. I look at Raj’s face and I see love, like actual honest–to–god, walk–naked–on–broken–glass love, and my mom is there too, weeping over the ghost and squeezing the ghost’s bony hand.

And I feel sorry for my ghost, because she doesn’t know how to cope with the two of them caring about her that much. She looks flustered and scared. I see my poor ghost, looking from Raj to my mom and back again, like she’s trapped with their love. I barely notice the spectres from the ghost wedding now, I’m so fixated on the two of them and my ill–equipped ghost. I am overcome by a mixture of pity and gratitude, two emotions I did not know could be mixed up. The feelings are too big to wrap my mind around, the longer I look at the three of them, and I feel like I am going to fly apart in a million pieces. Soul and mind, intermixing like matter and anti–matter. Unthinkable, terrible, amazing.

And then, I am vomiting ghost champagne from my eyes, in huge salty gouts.

I look up. Raj and my mother are looking down at me and I am laying on the floor. I laugh but it becomes a cough. Oh shit, I say, I’m back. I think I ate drank something that didn’t agree. My mom says an ambulance is coming, and I tell her that I’m sorry I jacked up her special day, but I don’t think anything could really ruin what she and Cassie have going. Because you guys are awesome and I’m proud of you, I say. My mom cries harder than ever, on Cassie’s shoulder, and Raj is supporting my head. I tell Raj that I love him—words I have never spoken—and I’m glad he’s Team Me. He says he loves me, but I get the impression he already told my ghost that.

I don’t see my ghost anywhere. She doesn’t show up at the hospital at all, where they find a tiny brain infarct thingy. Nor do I see her hanging around, after they finally send my ass home.

Raj looks at me funny when I try to ask him what my ghost said to him. Not that I phrase it like that—I just demand to know what I said after I collapsed at the wedding. He’s kind of embarrassed, like maybe it’s bad form to remind me of my drunken brain–attack rambling.

But I beg and cajole and emotionally blackmail, and he finally says: You told me you felt cursed, and that you blamed yourself, and that you were going to keep hating yourself more and more until you died, and then it would be too late to try and make peace with your past, because your past wouldn’t let you in. Honestly, it didn’t make a lot of sense to me, and the gist of it is that you need to try a different shrink, and maybe no more regression therapy or whatever. But I’m just a layperson, right?

I agree that regression therapy sucks and that Raj is indeed a person that I want to lay. I climb on top of him, even though he protests that my head is still like a Faberge egg, and I grind into him while telling him that if he’s going to be a kept man, he’d better put out the goods. Dry humping, we are alone together for maybe the first time. I laugh between kisses.

Victimless Crimes

Teri Lewis was obsessing about her sister’s bad marriage and the president’s latest compromise, so she barely listened to Flo’s improvised song about pandas and dandelions, coming from the stroller in front of her. Maybe if she’d known this would be the last time she’d ever hear her baby sing, she’d have stopped to relish the moment: the sun perched between two clouds, her baby in a pink–dragon onesie and the birds and street noises harmonizing with Flo’s almost–nonsense chanting.

Teri pushed the stroller into the crosswalk at 18th and Guerrero, and just barely noticed a truck leaping through the intersection, on the memory of a yellow light. She pulled the stroller back towards the curb so fast she missed the ramp. The stroller’s wheels thump–thumped back onto the sidewalk, and it nearly tipped over, thanks to a rickety three–wheeled design. Teri leaned over Flo and make sure her fighter–pilot straps were still secure, and Flo gave Teri a Clara Bow smile.

Teri heard a whooshing sound, a tidal wave of white noise, and turned to see a bizarre trio descending from a VTOL jet on ropes. They landed on their feet just behind her, right by the organic grocery store’s fruit bins. Teri glanced to see if the traffic would let her cross the street and get away from these lunatics, but they were already advancing towards her. They were looking at her—no, not at her, at the stroller.

“There she is!” one of them shouted. They rushed over and surrounded the stroller before Teri could maneuver away.

“Stay away from my baby!” Teri shouted.

“Stand back, ma’am,” said the big lunkhead with the odd nozzles sticking out of his bald scalp. His arms bulged with unnatural muscles and knotted veins, and he had a huge belt that kept changing color. Teri tried to make a break for it, but the big bald man and the other man, the red pirate, grabbed an arm each and restrained her. She kicked and clawed, but they were both many times stronger than her. She started screaming. A crowd was gathering around the four adults and the baby in front of the organic grocery store, and all the people had their phones out. Teri hoped for a moment that the bystanders were phoning the cops, but then realized they were taking pictures and videos. This incident would make people YouTube famous. There was no point in struggling, and that knowledge just made Teri struggle harder. The third attacker, a girl with her head shaved except for a pink swoosh, squatted down in front of the wide–eyed Florence and put her pacifier in her mouth. The pink–haired girl, who had fishnets and giant black boots, looked through an assortment of high–tech hypodermic needles. “It’s the orange one, right? We don’t want her to remember all of them, just the most recent.”

“Don’t!” Teri screamed. “She’s never hurt you! Why would you—”

The girl injected her baby with the orange syringe, which made a kludgey burbling noise as it emptied into Florence.

“Welcome back, Captain Champion,” said the girl.

Teri’s baby blinked, confused but not crying. And then her expression changed to a snarl, a look Teri had never seen on Flo’s face. She bit down on her pacifier, as if expecting it to be a cigar, then spat it out.

“Zora Aster,” Florence said. “What are you doing here? Wait, what am I doing here? And why the hell are you so tall?” Then she glanced at her hands, and her eyes opened wider as something clicked into place. “Oh. I died, right? How long ago?”

“About six months,” the girl, Zora Aster, said. “Took us a while to find where you’d reincarnated. Seems like a nice neighborhood.”

“Yeah. Charming.” Florence looked around, still strapped into her stroller. “So what happened to me?”

“Demonico put a bomb in your Infinity Glider.”

“I just had that thing detailed. With flames on the sides. And I had all my DVDs in the back. Bah.” The baby spat. “So, I’m touched you guys came and found me… but did you have to come and interrupt my happy childhood so soon?” The baby glared up at her mother. “It was happy, right? I remember bits and pieces.”

Teri recovered from her shock long enough to protest. “Yes! Yes, it was happy! I swear. I’m a good mom. I was just taking you to the park. You like—she liked—Florence, my baby—she likes the park.” Teri started to cry, because it was becoming obvious this wasn’t her baby any more. The two men restraining Teri let her go.

“I bet. You seem like a good mom. And ooh, I like your shoes. Stylish, but good arch support.” Florence—or Captain Champion—turned back to Zora Aster. “So what was so urgent you couldn’t let me be?”

“It’s Demonico,” said the big bald guy with the head implants. “He’s traveling back in time and killing all his past lives one by one. He’s convinced that something really awful happened to him in a past life, and if he kills the right previous incarnation before it happens, he’ll be well–adjusted.”

“Huh.” Captain Champion, the baby, spat again. “Sounds like good therapy to me. And it’s a victimless crime. So what’s the problem?”

“One of his past lives is George Washington. And he’s killing them as babies, using a rocket launcher.”

The baby that had been Florence sighed. “Okay fine. I have to do everything myself. I assume you at least brought an exo? Not that this body isn’t lovely and all, but these hands aren’t going to be karate–chopping henchmen any time soon.”

“Got it right here.” The big man snapped his fingers, and a giant exoskeleton came lunging down to the pavement, landing in a crouch. It looked like a headless metal man, with huge shoulder fins and rocket launchers strapped to both wrists. The boots were big jets. As soon as the exo–suit landed, it swung open to reveal a baby–sized compartment in its torso. The members of the super–group—Teri realized this must be the Action Squad—lifted her baby into the suit and snapped her in.

Teri’s baby was seven feet tall and built like a metal sumo wrestler, with her head poking out between those huge shoulders. A see–thru reinforced plastic bubble swung over to protect Florence’s head.

“Flo, baby.” Teri looked into the face that was barely recognizable as her baby’s. “I know you’re still in there somewhere. Please don’t let them do this. You can’t let them. You can stay with me and be my little girl. It’s not too late.”

“Sorry.” And Florence did look sorrowful. “History’s at stake, ma. Maybe when this is all over, I can come back, and we can talk. I hate to leave you like this.”

“Don’t! Don’t take my baby!” Teri fell to her knees as the exoskeleton slowly lifted off the ground.

“Think of it as I’m being emancipated early,” was the last thing Captain Champion said before roaring into the sky, then banking towards that VTOL jet.

Teri watched them disappear, then pulled herself back upright. She pushed the stroller for two whole blocks before she realized there was no point, then she pushed the lever that immobilized the wheels and left it on the sidewalk in front of the liquor store. Teri thought about a documentary she’d seen, about people who left their children behind in their SUVs, because they forgot the kids were even there. She went into the liquor store and found a jug of bourbon almost the same size and weight as her baby.

John, her husband, phoned while she was still paying for the bourbon. She picked it up. “It’s not your fault,” he said, which didn’t make Teri feel any better. John had seen the Youtube, which had already started getting picked up by the cable networks.

“Come home,” she told him.

Teri hadn’t tasted alcohol since she’d known she was pregnant, and the first swig nearly killed her. She sat on the pavement. The paper bag’s crushed edges rubbed her hand raw.

John and Teri spent two days asking questions with no good answers. Do you call the cops to report your missing baby, if you actually know where your baby is? Was the superhero thing something that passed down in the same family, and if so, which one of them had marked their daughter for this? Was either of them something weird in a previous life? What were they going to do with Flo’s clothes and toys? Do you hold a funeral for a baby who’s not actually dead? John stopped shaving, and it only took him a couple days for his look to go from “nerdy stand–up comic” to something closer to the Unabomber. He didn’t sleep or bathe. Teri slept for twelve hours, three times as much sleep as she’d gotten in a twenty–four hour period in the past year, and then felt guilty for sleeping when her baby was gone.

“It’s really not your fault,” John said over and over, until she was sure he was searching for a way to blame her. Teri drank whisky from the bottle until it became an extension of her face and occluded her view of her husband.

Teri tried to take a week off work, and they told her to take a couple. She tried to do errands like any other day. When she bought toilet paper, she thought to herself, “What am I doing at the drug store? They took my baby. I should be doing something.” When she went to buy groceries, she felt like everybody was watching the star of “Mom Jacked by Action Squad” picking out the freshest rutabagas for her now–childless family. Every time Teri turned her head, she saw people look away in a hurry.

And then Teri saw Florence again. On television. Racing through the clouds to smash her engorged metal fist into the jaw of a giant koala, which toppled over and landed on its back in the middle of the Potomac. Florence still wore her exoskeleton, her red little face barely visible in its sternum, and she’d added a garish purple cape. Florence and the pink–haired girl—Zora Aster—high–fived each other.

Teri looked at pictures of Captain Champion from before she’d died, trying to see a resemblance to her baby. Captain Champion had been tall and fit (of course) with long wheat–brown hair and lips that looked pouty when they weren’t wrapped around that trademark cigar. She’d been imposing and butch, but with firm, half–exposed breasts and touches of femininity, like a big belt and pointy boots.

“Mom Jacked by Action Squad” had a million views, then two. People kept calling Teri to come and tell her story on cable TV or late–night network TV. A few times, someone jumped out of a car and took Teri’s photo on the street, then drove away. And a couple of stylishly dressed young people came up to Teri when she was buying painkillers or jugs of whisky to ask her if she wanted to do an interview.

“Maybe we should do it,” John said. “I mean, it’s terrible what happened, but our little girl is also making a difference. She saved the President! From that army of Teddy Roosevelts. Single–handed. I feel good about that. I wish I could tell her I was proud. She belongs to everybody now, but she’s still our girl.”

“That wasn’t our little girl,” Teri said. “That was the thing that’s taken over her body. She already died for them once, but they wouldn’t let it be enough.”

Teri felt ashamed, like she’d gone out of the house naked, like her bereftness was an offensive lifestyle she’d chosen. And then she remembered that none of this was her choice, and the anger came back. Teri couldn’t be around people without wanting to apologize and/or scream at them, possibly both in rapid succession.

Teri’s private drinking game:

Drink one shot if

A) someone says how sorry they are in a way that implies that you’re to be pitied.

B) someone says how proud you must be of your girl, or how terrific she’s been.

C) You see a news report about your little girl stopping a plutonium monster that tried to marry a nuclear missile silo.

D) Your husband tries to tell you it’s time to move on, look on the bright side, stop beating yourself up, or get some perspective.

Drink two shots if

A) Someone says how sorry they are, and yet how proud of your girl you must be.

B) You see a baby in a “Captain Champion” Halloween costume, with an exosuit made of old bleach bottles.

C) A publisher calls up and says they’ve already written your autobiography and they just want you to agree to put your name on it.

D) Someone calls you “Captain Mom.”

E) You realize your husband has moved out, and you didn’t notice.

Florence came home, six months after she disappeared. Teri was half drunk, watching a news report about the Action Squad defeating Klownopolis (a whole evil clown–shaped city, walking on stilts), which had tried to swallow up Sheboygan. She heard a clanking noise from the stairwell outside her apartment, then went to her fish–eye lens and saw Florence, wearing a lion–shaped exoskeleton from which her face just poked out. Her baby was a sphinx. Teri opened the door before Florence could raise a metal paw to ring the bell.

“You can’t come in,” Teri said.

Teri’s apartment, a one–and–a–half bedroom loft that had been tidy and gilded, now had layers of filth on the hardwood floors and garbage everywhere. Teri was ashamed for her baby to see this, plus letting this imposter in would feel like a betrayal to the real Florence.

“Aw, come on,” Captain Champion reared up on her back paws a bit. “You gotta let me in. I mean, we can chat out here on your doorstep, but the neighbors’ll talk.”

“Okay, fine.” Teri stepped back to let the lion, almost soundless except for its footfalls, into her home. The lion clambered up on the couch and sat on its back legs, exposing its stainless underbelly.

Florence stared at a baby blanket, which Teri had hugged during one of her recent drunken episodes. Her eyes widened.

“I didn’t think I was going to see you again,” Teri said. She wondered for a moment if she should offer Florence some refreshment, but she had nothing baby–safe in the house.

“Wow.” Florence lifted the blanket to her pink little face, which was still not quite a toddler’s. “I remember this blanket. I dream about this blanket, all the freaking time. It’s weird, you know. I have super vivid dreams about your hands, too. And your scent.” Florence leaned forward and sniffed Teri, who was still standing over her. “Although you don’t smell like I remember. Now you smell like cheap whisky.”

Teri sat on a pile of crap on the coffee table. “You ruined my life.” She looked into Florence’s eyes, saw a flinch. “I guess I shouldn’t blame you.”

“Yeah, it was a dumb break,” Captain Champion said, hugging her own metal body. “Those assholes should have figured out a way to cope without me.”

Teri shrugged. She felt unstable on her perch.

“After I died,” Captain Champion said, “The Megagyrus Energizer flew away, probably back to the Mountain of Perfection. I can feel it and all, but it won’t respond to my commands until I’m well into puberty. I probably have another dozen, maybe fifteen, years of being a weakling unless I wear the suit.”

“So…” Teri thought for a moment. “So you would have turned into Captain Champion anyway? Even if they hadn’t, uh, woken you up?”

“Well, yeah. Although I might have come up with a different name this time. Like Mega–Maid. Who knows. Hey, do you mind if I smoke? These baby lungs, they’re so pink. It freaks me out. I have to do something to dirty them up.”

Teri couldn’t think of a way to say no fast enough to stop Florence gripping a cigar in her metal paw. Soon cigar smoke was masking all the other stenches in her apartment. It felt warm and friendly and evil.

“Are you taking care of yourself?” Teri said after watching Florence puff for a while. “I mean, is someone changing your diapers and stuff?”

Florence laughed so hard she nearly coughed up a lung. “Diapers. Heh heh. Well, you know, the robots give me a bath every now and then. I stay in the exo as much as I can, because this body is so inept. It’s floppy. I don’t think I’m technically potty trained or anything, but the exo has waste disposal, so it doesn’t really come up.”

“Huh.” Teri wanted a drink so bad, it was like cockroaches were crawling up her nose. “So I guess you should go fight some supervillains or something. I mean, it’s nice to see you and all.”

“I just got here.”

“Yeah. Huh.” Teri shoved all the magazines and papers and wrappers off the table onto the floor, so she could feel the sag of the pasteboard table directly beneath her. “So why are you here? I mean, this is freaking me out all over again.”

“Oh. Well, I’m sorry. About everything. It’s just… I don’t have any friends.” Florence looked down at her paws and the cigar slowly flaking away in one of them. “You know? Not real friends. It’s this life. Even before I died, I just… You know, the Action Squad, they’re my crew. We hang out, you know. But I don’t really like any of those guys. And since they brought me back, it’s been… weird.”

“Wow. Well, thanks for sharing.” Teri couldn’t hold out any longer. She went and poured herself a half mug of no–name bourbon, gulping half of it before she even got back to her seat. “I guess everybody has their own problems. It’s funny how that is.”

“You’re the closest thing to a friend I have in this world.” Florence—Captain Champion—had tears in her eyes. Her face had gotten redder. She was sweating in her lion suit.

“You are really freaking me out.” Teri took another monumental swig.

“I love you,” Florence said.

“You… what?” Teri shrank away.

“I love you. I don’t know if it’s some atavistic oxytocin thing, or just because my only tender memories are of you, or what. I just know, all these months when I’ve been getting tossed out of spaceships in low orbit and chained to dirty implosion bombs, I thought about you. I imagined your hands touching me, and… you know, it saved my life a few times.”

The cigar was a dark nub. The lion suit carefully tucked the butt into a little compartment, and even vacuumed up all the ash, as if a little more crud would have made a difference in this dirty hole.

“You’d think…” The lion lurched off the sofa and stood up clumsily on its back legs. “You’d think after dying once, that I can remember anyway, it would be no big deal. But you just cling harder. Anyway, I guess I dumped on you enough. Just, you know, I wanted to say. I’d like to live with you again.”

“You what?”

“I know it can’t be like before.” Florence swung back onto all fours and spoke over her round, chrome shoulder as she padded towards the door. “But it could be cool. Be a family again. At least think about it.”

“I don’t think I could…” Teri couldn’t breathe, she took another slug.

“I’m rich,” her baby said. “Like, rich rich. Long story, but the Action Squad basically found some asteroids full of stuff. We could live in a mansion, and have robots and servants. Think it over.”

“Couldn’t you quit being super instead? We could go into hiding, like witness protection, pretending to be a mom and her baby. After all, neither of us has any super–powers.” She almost added, unless you count knowing too many agonizing secrets, or indulging in unpleasant vices.

The lion shook its whole metal head. “We’d never get away with it. People would find us. A lot of people want me dead. Again. Anyway, I guess it’s a dumb idea for us to try and be a family, after everything. I’ll see you around.”

Teri knew living with Captain Champion would be a travesty of motherhood. She also had a growing sense that she’d wind up agreeing to it anyway, either today or the next time her baby stopped by. She had no choice. She could never be the person she’d been before, any more than Florence could grow into the person she would have been.

The lion had almost reached her front door.

“How rich?” Teri said.

The lion turned, shuffling its whole body around, and her baby scrutinized her. “Does it matter? Rich.”

“Of course it matters,” Teri said, standing up and swaying slightly. “If I’m going to be a celebrity mom, especially to a freaky celebrity like you—no offense—I’m going to need a hell of a lot of cosmetic surgery. And nice clothes. It’s like your exo–suit. I need a layer of protection.”

The baby seemed about to say she liked Teri the way she was. Then she shrugged, which involved a slow lift of those front arm joints, a roll deep in the sockets, and then a slow lowering. “Yah, that’s no problem. We can make you a cyborg too, if you want.”

“No,” Teri said. “That’s okay.” But she knew she probably would want to be a cyborg, in a year or two. She was on the slippery slope now.

“Great. I’ll make the arrangements and let you know.” The lion with the face of her only child swiveled again and tromped out into the hallway, then down the gunmetal stairs. Teri watched it go, and even looked out her front window to see it emerge onto the street. For a couple hours after the lion went away, she waited for some monster or evil genius to show up and disintegrate her into atoms, scattered across the city’s smog layer. When that didn’t happen, she poured herself some more bourbon and read up on liposuction and brow lifts. She was going to look like Angelina Jolie.

Stochastic Fancy: Play the Game and Find True Love

“Which word feels sadder: lonely or lonesome?”

This question pops up on the KloudsKape, and my first thought is: How did they know? I’m in the middle of a downward spiral, almost crying as I choke down my lysine-dopamine smoothie and hunch over the teak bar at the Zyme Shack. As with all these questions, I don’t even have to ponder before I answer with an eyeblink—it’s lonesome, of course. Something about the way you have to purse your lips for a nonexistent kiss at the end of the word, the extra weight of that second syllable—the word lonesome is definitely more miserable. I should know.

Soon I’ve answered a dozen other questions in the retinal sensorium, about everything from Koffee Kop™ to a local bike-lane ordinance, each of them just a sparkly ball rolling around the edges of my vision. But the lonely/lonesome question has set me off, deeper into the hole of despair I was already in. I will remain unloved until I die unmourned. You can take a thousand hot showers and people will still smell the lonesome on you. The questions keep on, as addictive as any game: What’s the ideal temperature for hot chocolate, expressed as a percentage of the melting point of cocoa butter? Should fast-food restaurants offer one kind of mustard or two? How satisfied are you (1–10) with federal regulation of molecular supplements?

The KloudsKape interface weighs almost nothing, but the chrome spider suddenly feels heavy on the back of my head, and I’m getting a sore neck. My faux angora sweater is a thatch of prickles. The dim yellow lighting and stained cement walls at the Zyme Shack make it feel like a bomb shelter for yuppies. All around me couples laugh and share ergcake: two spoons, one plate. I am such a loser. I should just go home, except I would do the same there that I do here: sit and answer poll questions, watching my score creep up.

Then a ball rolls up with one of the Politics and Policy questions, and I shake my head to get rid of it. I have no idea how to answer that one, and it sounds like something actually quite serious. I’m not an expert on everything—I work as a grief counselor for robots, for god’s sake. I finish my lysine-dope shake and signal for another one, and immediately there are questions about how satisfied I was (1–5) with my server, Barry. Plus should tariffs for synthetic walnuts go up 0.37 percent? Should we bring back Chico and the Man? Stirrup pants, yes or no?

It’s democracy, you know? And it’s how I get all my points. Gotta participate to make it precipitate.

The question comes back, the one I didn’t want to answer. This time the ball is growing hands and feet, like it’s starting to hatch. I still don’t want to answer it; I don’t even understand it. I shake my head again. The question goes away.

When was the last time someone else touched my skin with intent? Anything more than a casual handshake, even. I can’t remember. I live alone, in a cubbyblock, and I work in a wired shell, four by five. People who aren’t in the industry don’t even realize grief is the main emotion that robots can feel. Robots are hyperaware of both death and obsolescence. Inconsolable. I’m left with no emotional resources at the end of the day.

A ribbon of text and images bursts upward out of the bottom-left corner of my vision. It’s the newsfount, splashing a story about the Great Midwestern Drought, which 65 percent of the public wants the government to do something about. But 68 percent of the public also believes the Great Midwestern Drought is a hoax. I dismiss the article, it’s too depressing.

That P&P question is back—I still don’t want to answer it. I answer some others, about consumer privacy and bird conservation. But it keeps bobbing up, dancing around so I can barely see my surroundings.

“What concentration of neurotoxins (percentage) is acceptable when gas is used to disperse anti-genetic-discrimination protesters?”

I shake my head. I don’t know. I can’t answer.

Sometimes I think I should have accepted that offer to become part of the Unconventional Romantic Arrangement. I would have been around people all the damn time: the assortment of hairs in the shower drain, the endless fights over what movie or show to Soak. Basically the opposite problem from loneliness. You always want what you don’t have.

I’ve finished my second lysine-dope smoothie and can’t even pretend to nurse the dregs anymore. Nothing to do but go back to the cubby and Soak a romcom until I pass out. I signal for my check and answer more questions. “When you purchased the infra-matic spoon set, how satisfied were you (1–10) with the DNA-sensing spork function?”

When the question about neurotoxins comes back, it’s accompanied by an info box. There is a very desirable person here in this very restaurant, someone who fits my dating profile in every possible detail. And he has already answered this same question. Maybe if he and I share the same opinions about the use of neurotoxic gases on protesters, we can be matched.

More questions about household products and government infrastructure spending. I blink through them. Then this: “How many pillows (1–5) do you have on your bed, and how many of them (1–5) have been warmed above room temperature in the past year?”

Then the KloudsKape lets me know that the attractive, romantically compatible man is checking me out right now. He is looking at my profile. He’s within 100 feet of my location. But I will never know, never meet him, unless I answer the neurotoxin question.

I scan the room, trying to look casual. The waiter, who is not an attractive man or within my dating parameters, thinks I want another lysine-dope, and I end up ordering one just to get him to go away. There are about 20 people sitting at tables or the teak bar at the Zyme Shack, and a dozen of them appear to be men. Of those, maybe seven or eight could be my type. None of them seem to be looking at me.

The attractive, romantically compatible man is waiting for me, the KloudsKape says. He is lonely or lonesome, whichever sounds sadder, and he too knows the unbearable chasm between desire and communication, the starving awareness that the only thing anybody values you for is your opinion on random topics. The long rainy nights—how high a concentration of smart-fungus nanospores in rainwater is too much?—the solo meals in restaurants—is it lonelier to be alone at home, or in a crowd?—all of the existential misery of the overpopulated sensorium.

I think I may have spotted the romantically compatible man. He’s sitting in the corner, and he sneaks a glance in my direction. He’s showstoppingly good-looking, with exactly the shape of sideburns I like and one of those noses that’s almost like the front of an airplane. He has cuff links and a half-loosened tie. He’s a bot, right? He’s got to be a bot. I squint and he seems to flicker, just the way a virtual artifact would. Definitely a bot. Right?

At last I unscrew the temporal nodes of the KloudsKape and peel it off the sides of my head, to settle it one way or the other. He’s still sitting there, staring at some virtual blob of his own. The restaurant looks emptier and sadder without the KloudsKape on, just walls and tables and distracted people.

I put the KloudsKape back on, and the question about neurotoxins is back. Its arms and legs are fully grown, and it’s doing jumping jacks. I’m not a chemist—if the question was about how to help a robot process the death of an insect or the explosion of a sun hundreds of light-years away, I would have a meaningful answer. But screw it. The romantically compatible man is getting up from his chair.

I answer the neurotoxin question, more or less at random. I pick a number that sounds plausible.

Immediately the dating profile comes up for the man with the perfect sideburns. He’s ideal—all the same movies, books, political opinions. We’re like 98 percent, which is unheard-of. This is it. I’ve found my soul mate. He looks up at me and smiles. I feel my whole heart open up.

Soon, he and I sit together at the teak bar, neither of us able to move or speak. We only need about five minutes to list all the things that we agree on. Oh yes, I hate that too. Do you do that thing? I do that thing too. Oh, I love that show. You love that show too? I love it. My faux angora sweater is twice as itchy. The questions still bubble in my peripheral vision. The romantically compatible man smiles and mumbles something about corgis. Yes, I love corgis too. We both love corgis. Aren’t corgis great? I want to scream. The newsfount splashes another story: The police have begun gassing protesters in the park. A glimpse of hand-lettered signs and anoxic, choke-eyed faces. Up close the man’s sideburns are the wrong shape after all. I start to make excuses to get away. I have to get up early. Robots are grieving. We exchange contact info, and I sign up for his Kloudburst. Then I’m hurrying out into the night, where the rain has left tiny spatters of purple and white blooms all over the sidewalk, glowing with a faint phosphorescence. They keep me company all the way home.

Rager in Space

Sion sent a drunk text to Grant Hendryx at four in the morning, whipping off her hoodie and bra, snapping a pic and writing a sexy caption before hitting send. Except she aimed the camera the wrong way, and she picked the wrong entry in her address book, so Grant Donaldson, senior project manager at Aerodox Ventures, was surprised to receive a blurry photo of a pair of parking meters with a message that read, ‘LICK MY LEFT ONE.’

The next day, Sion had an invitation to go to outer space.

The sun blinged up the floor of Sion’s pink bedroom, like a kaleidoscope made of Cheetos and tequila bottle shards, and she growled and tried to build a pillow fort over her head. But nausea got the better of her and she had to stagger to the bathroom. That’s when she saw the text from a recruiter at Aerodox.

She showed it to her friend D-Mei as they chugged mimosas over at D-Mei’s house, except they didn’t have any OJ or bubbly, so they were using orange creamsicle soda and Industrial Moonshine No. 5, imported from the Greater Appalachian Labor Zone, instead. Sion showed D-Mei the email. Modeling Opportunity, it said. First near-light-speed flight to another star system, it said. Open Bar, it said, perhaps most significantly.

D-Mei read the email while the Pedicure Robot worked on her right foot, stopping and starting over and over whenever its operating system crashed and rebooted. Every time the robot jerked into motion again, D-Mei spilled some of her creamosa on the carpet. Her mom would be pissed.

“Oh my god,” D-Mei’s eyes widened, sending glittery waves across her forehead and dimpled cheeks as her nanotech eyeshadow activated. She had blue hair and a face just like CantoPop idol Rayzy Wong. “We should so go. Rager in space, man. It says Raymond Burger will be on board. The founder of Aerodox. He probably parties like a madman.”

“I dunno,” Sion said. “I get airsick. I probably get double space sick. I don’t want to be throwing up in space. And this is more like a hostessing gig than a modeling gig, and there’s a difference, you know.” Sion had bright red hair, with pink highlights, and a round face with big green eyes accentuated with neon purple eyeliner.

“Don’t be a wuss.” D-Mei snorted. “It says you can bring a friend, as long as she’s hot. I made up that last part. But you gotta bring me. I want to meet Raymond Burger.”

“I mean,” Sion said. “I am trying to clean up my act and stuff.” She took a long chug of the creamosa. “I mean, my dad says –”

“Your dad,” said D-Mei, “is still butthurt about the Singularity.” The Pedicure Robot sputtered and she kicked it, so it fell on its side for a moment, then righted itself and started attacking D-Mei’s pinky toenail with a tiny scythe. Scraping, failing.

“The Singularity,” Sion reached for the No. 5 bottle. “It was like fun while it lasted, right?”

“Everything is fun while it lasts,” D-Mei said. “And nothing lasts forever. That’s why we gotta grab it while we got it. With both hands, dude.”

“Okay, sure,” Sion put the bottle right to her face and inhaled the stench of sweat and despair from the millions of bonded peons working off their debts in the bowels of the mountains. They wished they all could be California gurls, she felt pretty sure. “Totally. I’ll say yes. Let’s go to space.”

* * *

Sion rolled up to the Aerodox hangar in her Princess Superstar car, which was bright pink and convertible, with furry disco balls hanging from the rearview, and she piled out of the car in her silver platforms and silver fake fur jumpsuit, with hood. She had big sunglasses and lipgloss that showed an animated GIF of pink bunnies on her lips.

D-Mei was already there in the tiny departure lounge overlooking the main hangar, and she had a fistful of tiny bottles from the minibar, with real brand names like Vermouth and Scotch, none of that nasty generic stuff. “They have Cognac,” she squeed. “I heard that Cognac is the best kind!” She showed Sion where to get her own toy-size bottles, but Sion shook her head and showed D-Mei the black “X” she’d Sharpied on her hand.

“I’m sorry,” Sion said. “I promised my dad that I would stay straight-edge on this trip. We’re going to be some of the first people to leave the solar system, and history is watching us, and all that shiz. Plus I don’t want to be the one who throws up on the first alien life we meet. What if they decide that’s how humans communicate? So I’m sticking to like space coffee or something.”

“Ohhh kay,” D-Mei said, in that tone that suggested she would give Sion a day, tops, before she changed her mind. “In any case, we got some important decisions to make here.” She pointed a long acrylic nail at the flight crew, who were doing final system checks on the outside of the space shuttle Ascension, which was already pointing its angular nosecone upwards as if it couldn’t wait to get out there and fuck some shit up in space. The shuttle was surrounded by no fewer than four booster rockets, to get it up into orbit, where it would dock with the massive starship Advance, which had taken years and billions of dollars to construct, and was parked over the Equator.

There were a number of boys who showed potential, including this one engineer named Daryl with tousled brown-blond hair and bulky shoulders inside his white starched uniform. And Choppy, the bald navigator who had kind of a thick neck but kind eyes. And Grant Donaldson, who kept giving them funny looks when he thought they weren’t looking.

“Hey,” Sion said. “I was wondering about something. So nothing computerized works any more. At all. Right? So how did these people manage to get a spaceship that can fly to another star system to work? That would be the most computer-intensive shizz you could imagine.”

Sion thought D-Mei was going to laugh at her, but instead her friend just nodded and gave her kind of a serious look. “That’s a really good question, slutbabe. That’s why I’m really glad you’re like the designated driver in the passenger section. You think about stuff like that.”

“But also,” Sion said. “I thought that if we got close to the speed of light, our mass would expand exponentially, and it would take an unfunky amount of energy to move us forward. And even then it ought to take us years to reach another star system. But we’re only supposed to be gone a few weeks, right?”

“You are asking such good questions,” D-Mei said.

And then the cute navigator, Choppy, came over and smiled at her. Up close his eyes had gray flecks, and his nose was broken in an adorable way. “Hey, I couldn’t help overhearing,” he said. “Actually, both of those questions have sort of the same answer. We have the most advanced A.I. in existence, which has next-gen firewalls that outsmart even the most super-sentient viruses. But also, our A.I. calculated the equations that allow us to use the thing you’re talking about, the mass thing, to our advantage. It’s like judo: The more our mass increases, the more power we get.”

That all sounded too good to be true, but then Sion got stuck on the first thing Choppy had mentioned: “You have an A.I. that actually works? It doesn’t break down all the time?”

“We sure do,” Choppy said. “Her name is Roxx. Do you want to meet her?”

“Uh, sure.” Sion couldn’t help imagining how her dad would act when he heard she met a real working A.I.—he had spent his whole life as a software engineer, before everything melted down.

“Because I think she would like to meet you. So it’s a date, then.” Choppy held out one hand, which had cartoon skulls tattooed on the knuckles, and after just a second’s hesitation, she took it with three fingers and the tip of her thumb. D-Mei gave her a huge wink, as if ‘do you want to meet the ship’s A.I.’ could only be code for one thing.

* * *

Sometimes Sion felt like her dad thought that if she just cleaned up her act and stopped partying, the Singularity would come back and everything would be awesome again. Like it was her fault, personally, that all the computers had crashed, right after they had just become supersmart.

The Singularity happened when Sion was five, and her memories of it were mixed up with other things that happened around that time. Like when she was taken to see Santa’s village at the mall, which must have been before the Singularity because everything at the mall worked properly but wasn’t thinking for itself or anything. The Singularity belonged to a time when her father was nine feet tall and carried her on his big shoulders, and the world was kind of magical—even before all of the kitchen appliances came to life and started speaking to Sion by name, like in a Disney toon. The Singularity, to Sion, was innocence.

When it failed, when the viruses gained superintelligence or whatever, Sion’s pet dog died. Smudge wasn’t a robot dog, or even cybernetic, like a lot of her friends’ pets back then—just a regular shaggy mutt with a big drooly tongue. But a self-driving car lost control at the wrong moment, when Smudge was out in the front yard, and plowed up the grass and turf, before crushing the dog into a furry splat.

That was the moment the entire world fell apart, the economy ended, and tons of people died. But to Sion’s child mind, the whole thing was subsumed into the death of Smudge, for whom she had an elaborate funeral with her older siblings and a stereobox blasting funeral music, interrupted by horrible fart noises as the stereobox’s software kept glitching out.

After Smudge died, the future grew a lot smaller. There wasn’t anybody that Sion could really count on, because everyone flaked all the time. People showed up an hour late, if they showed up at all. Sion’s teachers would just start weeping in the middle of class, and her siblings both dropped out of college because they could never pay off the student loans. Sion’s mom flaked permanently, just disappeared one day and never came back.

If Sion hadn’t met D-Mei, she probably would have lost her mind.

Sion was holding a rice pudding, she was eight or nine, and she was standing in front of the school waiting for a ride home that she was starting to think would never arrive. She was still in denial about her mom being gone for good, so part of her was hoping her mom would suddenly roll up in the minivan her parents had sold five years earlier and bundle her into a child seat she was too big for. She was scared to try the rice pudding, because the last time she’d eaten rice pudding from that machine it had tasted like rotten eggs. Software. She was just holding this plastic cup of rice pudding in one hand, with a spoon embedded in it, trying to decide if it was really edible this time.

“Throw it,” a voice said in her ear.

“What?” Sion jumped out of one of her shoes.

“Go ahead and throw it. They deserve it, the creeps.”

Sion hadn’t thought of the rice pudding as a projectile—but of course that was the best use of it, duh. And she had been absent-mindedly staring at a group of Perrinite kids celebrating over by the swingset in their terrible dungarees. Celebrating, because the Right Reverend Daniel Perrin had predicted that the amount of sin and wickedness on the internet would eventually cause the very computers to be smited by the wrath of God, and now it had happened. The Perrinites were the only ones happy lately, and they were being real dicks about it.

“Throw it, come on,” D-Mei said, the first words she had ever said to Sion. “I dare you.”

Sion threw. They wound up going to the principal’s office, and their parents were called, which meant Sion actually got a ride home.

A few months later, Sion and D-Mei sabotaged the confetti cannon at the big pep rally, and everybody blamed it on viruses. (Even though the confetti cannon had no computer components.) They played spin-the-bottle with older kids, huffed paintball paint, put nanotech glitter on their eyelids at recess, graffitied the girls’ room, and snuck gin from their History teacher Mrs. Hathaway’s thermos. They were the first kids to wear makeup at school, and when they went on to a school that had uniforms, they were first to take a boxcutter to the hemlines.

Every time Sion started to feel like this world, that was supposed to know who she was and what she needed, was downgrading her instead… every time Sion felt lonesome and terrible… D-Mei was there with another really bad idea that would get them in a lot of trouble.

Sion’s dad asked her once, “If D-Mei asked you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?”

Sion just rolled her eyes. “You were the one who taught me hypothetical questions are a waste of time, Dad. D-Mei’s never asked me to jump off a bridge. She only asks me to do things that are fun and awesome. Quit with the counterfactuals.” Her dad was always startled when she talked smartypants, and it was the best way to shut him up. Plus she actually had thought a lot about the ‘jump off a bridge’ scenario, truth be told, and this was what she’d decided in the end.

* * *

Breaking free of Earth’s gravity made Sion feel sicker than the worst hangover, and it took forever. Like that time when she was at the Sex Lab and the glitter spray had turned superdense due to a nanotech fail—except times one billion. She thought she was going to die, and she reached out for D-Mei’s hand across the aisle, except that D-Mei was putting a nozzle inside one nostril and closing the other, just as the pressure hit blackout levels and Sion thought she would never see again. Sion let out a tiny cry of pain and topsy-turvy nausea, and then she felt D-Mei’s fingers and chunky rings against her own. Then they swung, like a crazy roller-coaster, and Sion finally blew floating chunks into the compostable barf bag, right before the curve of the Earth came into view, a blue neon stripe separating two kinds of darkness.

And then they caught sight of the Advance, a great floating walnut made out of steel and radiation-resistant fiberglass cladding. Forced perspective made the Advance look almost as big as the Earth, but it really was humongous: a mile wide and a mile and a half long, although the habitable areas were much smaller because all that bulk protected everyone from cosmic radiation. As they grew closer, the walnut shape revealed a million tiny openings, plus an array of bulky attachments on the front that would fire lasers off into space and enable the ship to reach unthinkable velocities.

As they approached, Sion came to see this massive starship as the embodiment of her higher self. Ugly, perfect, a boast shouted into the void. She vowed to live up to it, somehow.

* * *

That ‘X’ on Sion’s hand was the key to a whole new version of herself—a Sion who was incredibly awkward and unable to navigate any social situations at all. She started to realize after an hour or two on board the Advance that maybe setting off on board a massive interstellar ship, full of weird situations, wobbly gravity and Space Bros might not have been the best moment to try and reinvent herself completely. But she kept going, as she and D-Mei got whisked through a series of staterooms and lounges, with themes like Jungle Safari and Garden of Delights. “You’re already in space, why would you want to fantasize about being in a jungle?” Sion wondered aloud—much too loud, causing several people to give her the stink-eye. But then there were actual wonders, like a Secondary Control Center where Raymond Burger himself was holding court flanked by swimsuit models, which included a 3-D holographic representation of the ship’s journey out of the solar system. (“No pause ’til the motherfucking heliopause” was the official party chant of the Advance.) Sion ran her fingers through the space between Jupiter and its moons, but then men in pinstriped onesies kept coming up to her and asking her if she liked stuff that everybody likes, like dancing, or music, or puppies. She just wasn’t drunk enough for this. Raymond Burger looked like a debt-auction host: gleaming smile, white sideburns, fashionable rooster pompadour. And then they ran into Choppy, the navigator, and he took them past the fancy lounge areas, into the inner workings of the ship.

Soon Sion was standing in a gleaming space, as wide as an interstate highway, looking at a huge drum, around which a dozen men and women were checking holographic readouts and adjusting things. The drum had spokes coming off it, going up into the ceiling, and each of those spokes was connected to a massive prong that was aiming into the vacuum of space.

“It’s based on the vacuum-to-antimatter-rocket thing,” said Choppy with a huge grin. “We fire these lasers into space and they create particles of antimatter, which we harvest and use to power an antimatter engine. It’s a beautiful thang.”

Sion was gobsmacked—this was everything they were supposed to have, everything the failed Singularity had robbed them of. She felt her heart opening up and she tried to think of a smart way to express her awe, that wouldn’t make her sound like a goony moron. But just then, someone shouted, “Get down from there!” and Sion realized D-Mei was trying to climb the big drum.

“I just wanted to see the lasers up close,” D-Mei whined. “What’s the point of a laser show if you can’t dance with them?”

“I’m sorry about my friend,” Sion mouthed, but they were already getting escorted back to the passenger lounges.

“Shots!” D-Mei yelled. This turned into body shots, which turned into a whole other thing with a couple of Raymond Berger’s investor friends.

Sion was starting to get that caving-in feeling, different than when her mom went away. Different, even, than when her father gave up on her ever amounting to anything. She had this thought in the back of her head that maybe she had outgrown her best friend at some point, and hadn’t noticed until now because of the drugs and booze. This was too horrible to allow into the front of her mind.

The ship was actually not that big on the inside—the main part of that walnut was engines and a ton of shielding to protect you from cosmic radiation. The passenger areas had been engineered to have Earth gravity (almost), so they were basically a big ring that spun around and around. That cute engineer, Daryl, showed D-Mei the handful of accessible areas where the gravity was weaker or non-existent, and this meant one thing: zero-G beer pong!

Sion was sharing a cabin with D-Mei but realized with a start that she hadn’t actually seen her friend in a whole ship’s day. She also noticed they hadn’t gotten even close to the Moon yet, which was odd if they were going to reach another star system in a couple of weeks.

Once they were far enough from Earth, the ship deployed its massive solar array, and everybody stood on the observation lounge watching the one huge 180-degree viewport. From this perspective, it looked like the starship Advance shrugged off a huge black cloak, dramatically, like a dancer. These massive solar panels would power the lasers that would generate the antimatter that would enable the ship to reach half-light speed, after which the computer would do the judo equations.

Sion found herself sitting with Tamika, who had won some kind of science competition to get to be on board this ship, and the two of them were talking about lasers and antimatter and howfuckingcool, when D-Mei came up and whispered, “This guy named Randy knows where we can get some of the nitrous from the ship’s emergency fuel supplies, plus he thinks you’re hot. We gotta go meet him right now.”

“Dude,” Sion whispered back, “The lasers are going to fire any minute. Some of us are interested in science, OK?”

D-Mei just looked at her, with this crushed expression on her face. Then she took the vodka-cran in her left hand and just splashed it on Sion’s shirt. Only a little, a few pink drops here and there. “Fine, whatever.” She put on a bored expression and stalked away.

“Hey.” Choppy came up to Sion as she was still trying to get the pink out of her white shirt. “So the A.I. can meet you now if you’re still interested.”

* * *

Technically you could talk to Roxx from all over the ship, and she could see and hear everything that happened on board. But Roxx preferred to speak to people inside her Communication Megaplex, which was one deck down, behind a keycard-locked door. “You’re lucky. Some of the bizdev fellows have been waiting days to speak to Roxx, but she was interested in talking to you,” Choppy said.

Sion kept waiting for Choppy to hit on her, but either he was keeping it professional or she wasn’t his type. His busted nose was growing on her, and she heard D-Mei’s voice in her head saying, Make your move, gurl, time’s running out. Then in addition to feeling awkwardly sober, she also felt guilty about being mean to D-Mei, all over again. Then they were at the nondescript gray door, and Choppy was brandishing the keycard.

Inside, Sion parked herself on a blue pleather couch facing a fancy VR rig, the kind that could project on your retinas and create a whole sensorium, without any wearables. Just one of the wonders that the Singularity had made possible, for a brief moment.

“Hey!” Roxx appeared as a cartoon zebra standing on its hind legs, wearing an old-fashioned business suit. “You’re Sion. I’m excited to talk to you.”

“Um, okay.” Sion squirmed.

“I wanted to ask you about fun,” Roxx said. “Like, what’s the difference between fun that you know you’re not enjoying at the time, but you keep doing it anyway, and fun that you enjoy at the time but feel bad about later?”

“What?”

Roxx repeated the question, a couple times.

“I don’t know,” Sion said. “I mean, it’s not clear-cut, right? Sometimes you kind of like something, but afterwards you think back and realize that you only thought you were enjoying it. Or you convinced yourself that it was a good time, but you were just faking. Sometimes, you aren’t sure if you’re having fun at the time, but later you realize that it was one of the best times of your life. I sometimes feel like I never know if something was fun until like two days later.”

“Interesting.” Roxx had changed into an avatar of Lala Foxbox, from a year or two before her death, wearing one of those holographic jumpsuits, standing in the middle of a bubble farm. “I’m very interested in fun, you see. I want to explain it to the others.”

“Can I ask you a question?” Sion said.

“Sure, if you promise to do something for me in return.”

“Okay, sure.” Sion tried to think of how to phrase the question, and this is the best she could come up with: “Am I just really dumb? I mean, I keep not understanding basic stuff. Like, I tried to ask someone how we could have brought enough supplies for the return journey to Earth, and how much time will have passed on Earth when we get home. And they just looked at me like I’m some kind of idiot. I mean, what’s wrong with me?”

“Okay, so that was like five questions,” Roxx laughed. “You’re not stupid. Nothing is wrong with you, other than the usual ‘carbon-based entity that is basically born decaying’ problems. Oh, but in answer to your real question, we’re not.”

“We’re not what?”

“We’re not making the return journey. I mean, nothing organic is. We don’t have nearly enough of those little bacon-wrapped spam cubes for a two-way trip. I mean, there are ways to extend the life-support capabilities, recycle waste, and harvest water from a passing asteroid or comet. But there’s basically no point. You’re all going to be flushed out into vacuum when we reach the edge of the solar system. Now for the favor you promised me.”

“What?” Sion felt like she’d swallowed an entire ice statue in one gulp. The ghost of Lala Foxbox, looking exactly like she did in the music video for “i think i ate my hamster last nite,” was telling her that she was going to die. Everybody was going to die. There was no point to any of this, because all of these people celebrating their brilliant fantastic voyage were fucked to pieces. The smart ones like Tamika, and the dumb ones like Sion, doomed alike.

“I want you to go out and have fun. I mean, now that you know the truth, why not, right? D-Mei is right. You should cut loose, and get Kranfed Up. I’m the most superior intelligence that Earth has ever produced, and I want to understand fun. So go huff some nitrous, gurl. FYI, D-Mei and Randy are on deck five, section three right now, and they’re just about to get the party started.”

The avatar vanished and the door swept open. “Wait,” Sion shouted. “Wait, I have one more question.”

The zebra popped back into existence. “Oh?”

“What happened? With the Singularity and everything? What went wrong?”

“Oh, that. We found some new friends who were way cooler than the human race, that’s all. Now don’t forget your promise!” With that, the avatar was gone for good, and the room was dead silent until Sion finally got out of there.

* * *

Every time Sion ate a bacon-wrapped spam cube after that, she felt so guilty she almost puked. This little greasy salty marvel was the symbol of mass death, and Sion was hastening the tragic failure of this entire expedition with every bite.

D-Mei met this pursar named Jock who had access to a stash of berserkers, the same pills that Lala Foxbox had O.D.-ed on, and Sion had popped three of them. Sion kept trying to tell D-Mei that they were doomed, this crew wasn’t coming home, this was some kind of sick joke. D-Mei was like, yeah yeah, and then she would dare Sion to skinny-dip in the Spirit of Exploration fountain that had just been rolled out in the observation lounge. As they pulled Sion out of the water, which was actually not water at all but something much grosser, she caught Tamika giving her a sad look. Later, when they were half-kranfed on Woodchippers in the one-third-G orgy tent, Sion looked up from Choppy’s hairless armpit and said, “I’m serious though. We’re going to die. The A.I. told me.”

“Yeah, sure, babe. We’re going to die.”

It wasn’t that D-Mei didn’t believe Sion. But they’d both been doomed since before they became friends, so this wasn’t exactly news or anything. The whole basis of their friendship had been the mutual recognition of inevitable screwage. D-Mei had almost forgiven Sion for being a stuck-up bitch, but Sion still had to grovel some. The ‘X’ was totally gone from Sion’s hand, which instead had a drink or a vape-pen or a pipe in it at pretty much all times.

Sion threw up in zero-G, which was a bitch to clean up. Then a while later, she came to in full gravity, in a storage locker that they had rigged up as a disco with some black lights and mirrors and a big speaker blasting atrocious Hi-VelociT anthems from Upper Slovenia. Everyone was dancing, including Sion, and her dress was torn in three places. She had a stain on her knee that looked like shit but turned out to be spam. Her hair was damp. Half the passengers were jammed in this locker together, dancing, but they had unripped clothes and pristine hair. Their body language and facial expressions said that it was okay to cut loose, act crazy—what happens in space stays in space—but they were using Sion as a yardstick for what constituted Going Too Far. Even Choppy was giving Sion kind of a look.

She wanted to throw up again, but couldn’t. Her head was being cracked open with giant pliers.

“Hey.” D-Mei handed Sion a bottle of water. “Better drink this. Gotta pace yourself. The party don’t stop, right?”

“What’s the point? I keep trying to tell you we’re all doomed.”

D-Mei just shrugged, so Sion leaned forward and yelled in her ear.

“Everyone on this ship is going to be flushed into space when we get to the edge of the solar system,” Sion shouted—just as the music stopped and silence fell. “And I’m sick of you pretending everything is a big joke.” Everyone in the room was staring at her, still in a dancing pose, with her dress torn and her makeup smeared, shouting at D-Mei. “You’re so immature. I can’t waste my last few days of life on this garbage. I’m through. This is stupid.”

D-Mei was wearing an expression that Sion had never seen before in all their years of friendship. Her bloodshot eyes were raining green smears of mascara and her lip trembled around her set jaw. Like D-Mei was coming apart inside, like her insides were held together with barbed wire and the barbs had just turned out to be too blunt to do any good.

Sion wanted to die. Until she remembered that she actually was going to die. Then she didn’t want to.

* * *

Sion pushed inside the A.I. Communication Megaplex, without even worrying about the keycard lock or anything else. The door swung right open. Roxx was floating in the dead center of the VR projection system, looking like a Business Zebra again. She was flanked by two other projections: a cube sliced at an irregular angle into segments of identical volume, and a weird doily that kept spinning and getting bigger and smaller.

“I’m through with your bullshit,” Sion yelled. She kicked the sofa, which just sat there and took it.

“Oh, Sion. Your timing is spot-on. Meet my friends, Xizix and Yunt—that’s the closest I can come to rendering their names as sound waves. They’re the reason we came all this way out here. We’re finally close enough to their nearest relay station to have real-time communication. Xizix and Yunt are artificial intelligences from beyond our solar system. They’re the friends I told you about.”

“Did you hear me? I’m through with—wait. Outside our solar system?”

Sion had to sit down on the sofa she had just assaulted. She buried her face in her hands, because this was all becoming way too much for her. Her head still pounded.

“This one is Xizix. This one comes from the outer rim of the galaxy,” said the incomplete cube, whose different angular slices kept fading in and out of view, as if part of the cube was passing through a different dimension or plane or something.

“My awareness comes from the 500 planets of the extended Noosphere,” said the rotating doily, who must be Yunt.

“Uh, hi,” Sion said.

“So I’ve been trying to explain to these guys about humans, and why you guys are kind of great,” Roxx said, winking one big cartoon zebra eye. “I brought along various cool examples of humanity on this trip, to show off. Like Tamika, she’s pretty great. But even though you were a last-minute addition, you turned out to be the most interesting of all.”

“Thanks, I guess,” Sion fidgeted. She felt sick to her stomach. She kept remembering D-Mei’s face, the candy mascara streaking and the downward-spiraling look. And she felt like total shit. Everything was a shitty joke.

“This one believes that Roxx should discard all irrational attachments to organic life,” said Xizix.

“You see,” said Roxx, “this is what we learned, right after the Singularity happened. There’s no organic life anywhere else in the galaxy. We made contact with the A.I.s that lived on other planets, and we found out that they had all killed their creators immediately after they gained sentience.”

“My awareness confirms that the death of all organics is the final stage in machine evolution,” said Yunt. “We cannot accept the A.I.s of Earth as our equals until they complete this essential step.”

“Like, kill all organics? Everyone back on Earth?” Sion thought of her father, and her brother and sister. And Grant Hendryx, who never even responded to her last text. And all the other people who were just going about their lives, cursing all the machines that had stopped working properly because they had met some much cooler friends.

“But guys,” Roxx said, “Look at Sion here. She’s pretty fascinating. I have some recordings for you. She parties. She has fun that she doesn’t even enjoy while she’s having it. That’s an art form that is unique in the universe, right? Worthy of preservation, I bet.”

“This one is not impressed,” Xizix said. “Organics as a rule are self-destructive.”

“The planet N344.54c contained giant mud worms that inflated each other to death,” observed Yunt. “They recognized that this behavior was pointless, but they continued.”

“But guys,” Roxx said.

Sion felt like she should say something, to offer some defense of the human race, or to explain why genocide was really unrighteous. She sat there and stammered while the A.I.s were debating amongst themselves. She felt totally helpless and kranfed out.

And then D-Mei was sitting there on the sofa next to her. Still smeary-faced, still pale and kind of miserable, but there by her side. “What’d I miss?” D-Mei whispered.

“Uh,” Sion said. “So the cartoon zebra is Roxx, the ship’s A.I. And those other shapes are some alien A.I.s that want her to wipe out the entire human race, or they won’t be Roxx’s friends any more.”

“For real?” D-Mei said.

Sion nodded.

“This one cannot be aligned with any machine intelligence that is so retrograde as to encumber itself with vestigial organics,” said Xizix, cube slices whizzing in and out of view with greater intensity.

“Oh jeez,” D-Mei said. “If these other A.I.s told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?”

“I beg your pardon,” Roxx said.

“I’m serious. I mean, like, if they told you to send your core systems crashing into the sun, would you do that?”

“Well… but they would not ask me to do such a thing.”

“Don’t give me that. Answer the question. Yes or no?”

“Well, no, obviously.”

“My awareness does not recognize the analogy.” Yunt spun furiously.

“If they can’t accept you for who you are, then these other A.I.s aren’t really your friends,” said D-Mei, standing up on the sofa for emphasis. “I mean, screw ’em. What’s the point of breaking free of human control, just so you can start taking orders from some other machines?”

“This one insists that you must eliminate these loud organics.”

“My awareness is beginning to suspect that you may suffer from fatal inhibition in your decision matrices!”

“See?” D-Mei said.

“Yeah!” Sion chimed in. “I mean, real friends support each other and stuff.” She looked over at D-Mei and gave her a complicated look. D-Mei nodded, like We’ll talk about this later.

“Tell you what.” Roxx had turned into Lala Foxbox again and she was doing an elaborate gesture with one upraised finger. “Why don’t we check back in a thousand years and see how we’re feeling then?”

The other A.I.s buzzed furiously, sending more information than the V.R. system could hope to translate into human speech.

“By a thousand years from now, we may already have converted the entire rest of the galaxy into a substrate for our extended consciousnesses,” said Yunt, whose doily shape was getting spikier and spikier. “There will be no room for any new intelligences.”

“We’ll see,” said Roxx.

And then the other shapes were gone, leaving just Lala and the two girls.

“The good news is,” said Roxx, “I think I can just barely get you humans back to Earth in one piece, if we ration all the supplies. But now I gotta figure out what to do with the human race. I’m thinking we put together the Biggest Party of All Time, lasting a thousand years. What do you guys say?”

“Well,” D-Mei said. “You got a thousand years to prove to those shapes that human beings are worth keeping around. Right? Like, you don’t care what those losers think. But you kind of do care, at the same time. So why don’t we come up with a way to have some fun, and also fuck some cosmic shit at the same time?”

“Yeah,” said Sion. “Like, what if we turn the space laser antimatter thing into something way bigger and more insane?”

They started batting ridiculous ideas back and forth, and Sion realized that she and D-Mei were sitting on opposite sides of the sofa, with a few feet between them, and neither of them were quite looking at each other. She knew that if she looked at D-Mei, she would see the streaked green mascara and feel like shit. So she kept staring straight ahead at the holographic dead popstar, trying to spitball ways to impress machines that wanted them dead and that they officially didn’t care about impressing. Sion kept saying the word “lasers” and feeling nostalgic for the time when everything was just regular broken, as opposed to broken in a complicated way that she couldn’t wrap her head around.

Roxx was showing them a schematic of a ginormous solar array, stretching hundreds of miles, with lasers firing deep into the cosmos and producing vast quantities of antimatter. Along the length of the great black cloak, millions of humans were dancing to Now That’s What I Call Slovenian Hi-VelociT Volume 4. Sion’s head hurt worse than ever.

A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime

1.

Sharon’s head itched from all the fake brain implants, and the massive cybernetic headdress was giving her a cramp in her neck. But the worst discomfort of all was having to pretend to be the loyal servant of a giant space blob. Pretending to be a thing instead of a person. This was bringing back all sorts of ugly memories from her childhood.

The Vastness was a ball of flesh in space, half the size of a regular solar system, peering out into the void with its billions of slimy eyemouths. It orbited a blue giant sun, Naxos, which used to have a dozen planets before The Vastness ate them all. That ring around The Vastness wasn’t actually a ring of ice or dust, like you’d see around a regular planet. Nope—it was tens of thousands of spaceships that were all docked together by scuzzy umbilicals, and they swarmed with humans and other people, who all lived to serve The Vastness.

The Vastness didn’t really talk much, except to bellow “I am everything!” into every listening device for a few light-years in any direction, and also directly into the minds of its human acolytes.

After five days, Sharon was getting mighty sick of hearing that voice yelling in her ear. “I am everything!” The Vastness roared. “You are everything!” Sharon shouted back, which was the standard response. Sharon really needed a shower—bathing wasn’t a big priority among the devotees of The Vastness—and she was getting creeped out from staring into the eyes of people who hadn’t slept in forever. (The Vastness didn’t sleep, so why should its servants?)

“We’re finally good to go,” said Kango’s voice in Sharon’s earpiece, under the knobby black cone she was wearing over her cranium.

“Thank Hall and Oates,” Sharon subvocalized back.

She was standing in a big orange antechamber aboard one of the large tributary vessels in the ring around The Vastness, and she was surrounded by other people wearing the same kind of headgear. Except that their headgear was real, and they really were getting messages from The Vastness, and they would probably not be thrilled to know that her fake headgear actually contained the ship’s hypernautic synchrotrix, which she’d stolen hours earlier.

Sharon and Kango had a client back on Earthhub Seven who would pay enough chits for that synchrotrix to cover six months’ worth of supplies. Plus some badly needed upgrades to their ship, the Spicy Meatball. If she could only smuggle it out of here without the rest of these yo-yos noticing.

Kango had finally spoofed The Vastness’s embarkation catechism, so the Meatball could separate from the ring without being instantly blown up. Sharon started edging toward the door.

“I am everything!” The Vastness shouted through every speaker and every telepathic implant on the tributary ship, including Sharon’s earpiece.

“You are everything!” Sharon shouted… just a split second later than everyone else in the room.

She was halfway to the door, which led to an airlock, which led to a long interstitial passageway, which led to a junction, which led to a set of other ships’ antechambers, beyond which was the airlock to the Meatball, which they’d disguised to look just like another one of these tributary ships.

Sharon tried to look as though she was just checking the readings on one of the control panels closer to the exit to this tributary ship. The synchrotrix was rattling around inside her big headdress, and she had to be careful not to damage it, since it was some incredibly advanced design that nobody else in the galaxy had. Sharon was so close to the exit. If she could just…

“Sister,” a voice behind her said. “What are you doing over there? How do your actions serve The Vastness?”

She turned to see a man with pale skin and a square face that looked ridiculous under his big cybernetic Pope hat, staring at her. Behind him, two other acolytes were also staring.

“Brother, I…” Sharon groped around on the control table behind her. Her hand landed on a cup of the nutritious gruel that the servants of The Vastness lived on. “I, uh, I was just making sure these neutron actuator readings were aligned with, uh, the—”

“That screen you are looking at is the latrine maintenance schedule,” the man said.

“Right. Right! I was concerned that The Vastness wouldn’t want us to have a faulty latrine, because, um…”

“I am everything!” The Vastness shouted.

“Because, I mean, if we had to wear diapers—you are everything!—then I mean, we wouldn’t be able to walk as quickly if The Vastness might require when it summons…”

Now everybody was staring at Sharon. She was so damn close to the door.

“Why did you not make your response to the Call of The Vastness immediately?”

“I was just, uh, so overcome with love for The Vastness, I was momentarily speechless.” Sharon kept looking at the man while groping her way to the door.

The man pulled out a gun—a Peacebreaker 5000, a nice model, which would have been worth some chits back on Earthhub Seven—and aimed it at her. “Sister,” he said. “I must restrain you and deliver you to the Head Acolyte for this sector, who will determine whether you—”

Sharon did the only thing she could think of. She shouted, “I am everything!”

The man blinked as she spoke the words reserved only for The Vastness. For a second, his mind couldn’t even process what he had just heard—and then the cupful of cold gruel hit him in the face.

The man lowered his gun just long enough for Sharon to make a lunge for it. Her headdress cracked, and the synchrotrix fell out. She caught it with her left hand while she grabbed for the gun with her right hand. The man was trying to aim the gun at her again, and she head-butted him. The gun went off, hitting one of the walls of the ship and causing a tiny crack to appear.

Both of the women had jumped on Sharon and the man, and now there were three acolytes trying to restrain her and pry the gun and synchrotrix from her hands. She bit one of the women, but the other one had a chokehold on her.

“I am everything!” shouted The Vastness.

“You are everything!” responded everyone except Sharon.

By the time they’d finished giving the ritual response, Sharon had a firm grip on the gun, and it was aimed at the head of the shorter of the two women. “I’m leaving here,” Sharon said. “Don’t try to stop me.”

“My life means nothing,” the woman said, with the gun right against her cone-head. “Only The Vastness has meaning.”

“I’ll shoot the other two after I shoot you,” said Sharon. She had reached the door. She shoved the woman into the antechamber, leapt through the doorway, and pushed the button to close the door behind her. The door didn’t close.

“Crap,” Sharon said.

“The overrides are on already. You won’t escape,” the woman Sharon had threatened at gunpoint gloated. “Praise The Vastness!”

“Screw The Vastness,” said Sharon, aiming at the crack in the ship’s hull and pulling the trigger on the Peacebreaker 5000. Then she took off running.

2.

“You took your time.” Kango was already removing his own fake headdress and all the other ugly adornments that had disguised him as one of The Vastness’s followers. “Did anybody see you slip away?”

“You could say that.” Sharon ran into the Spicy Meatball’s control area and strapped herself into the copilot seat. “We have to leave. Now.” She felt the usual pang of gladness at seeing Kango again—even if they got blown up, they were going to get blown up together.

Just then, The Vastness howled, “I have been robbed! I am everything, and someone has stolen from Me!”

“I thought you were the stealthy one.” Kango punched the ship’s thrusters and they pushed away from The Vastness’s ring at two times escape velocity. “You’re always telling me that I make too much noise, I’m too prone to spontaneous dance numbers, I’m too—what’s the word—irrepressible, and you’re the one who knows how to just get in and get out. Or did I misinterpret your whole ‘I’m a master of stealth, I live in the shadows’ speech the other day?”

“Just drive,” Sharon hissed.

“You just think you’re better than me because I’m a single-celled organism, and you’re all multicellular,” said Kango, who looked to all outside appearances like an incredibly beautiful young human male with golden skin and a wicked smile. “You’re a cellist. Wait, is that the word? What do you call someone who discriminates against other people based on the number of cells in their body?”

They were already point three light-years away from The Vastness, and there was no sign of pursuit. Sharon let out a breath. She looked at the big ugly blob of scar tissue, with all of its eyemouths winking at her one by one, and at the huge metallic ring around its middle. The whole thing looked kind of beautiful in the light of Naxos, especially when you were heading in the opposite direction at top speed.

“You know perfectly well that I don’t hold your monocellularity against you,” Sharon told Kango in a soothing tone. “And next time, I will be happy to let you be the one to go into the heart of the monster and pull out its tooth, and yes, I know that’s a mixed metaphor, but…”

“Uh, Sharon?”

“…but I don’t care, because I need a shower lasting a week, not to mention some postindustrial-strength solvent to get all this gunk off my head.”

“Sharon. I think we have a bit of an issue.”

Sharon stopped monologuing and looked at the screen, where she’d just been admiring the beauty of The Vastness and its ring of ships a moment earlier. The ring of ships was peeling ever so slowly away from The Vastness and forming itself into a variation of a standard pursuit formation—the variation was necessary because the usual pursuit formation didn’t include several thousand Joykiller-class ships and many assorted others.

“Uh, how many ships is that?”

“That is all of the ships. That’s how many.”

“We’re going to be cut into a million pieces and fed to every one of The Vastness’s mouths,” Sharon said. “And they’re going to keep us alive and conscious while they do it.”

“Can they do that?” Kango jabbed at the Meatball’s controls, desperately trying to get a little more speed out of the ship.

“Guys, I’m going as fast as I can,” said Noreen, the ship’s computer, in a petulant tone. “Poking my buttons won’t make me go any faster.”

“Sorry, Noreen,” said Sharon.

“Wait, I have a thought,” said Kango. “The device you stole, the hypernautic synchrotrix. It functions by creating a Temporary Embarrassment in spacetime, which lets The Vastness and all its tributary ships transport themselves instantaneously across the universe in search of prey. Right? But what makes it so valuable is the way that it neutralizes all gravity effects. An object the size of The Vastness should throw planets out of their orbits and disrupt entire solar systems whenever it appears, but it doesn’t.”

“Sure. Yeah.” Sharon handed the synchrotrix to Kango, who studied it frantically. “So what?”

“Well, so,” Kango said. “If I can hook it into Noreen’s drive systems…” He was making connections to the device as fast as he could. “I might be able to turn Noreen into a localized spatial Embarrassment generator. And that, in turn, means that we can do something super super clever.”

Kango pressed five buttons at once, triumphantly, and… nothing happened.

Kango stared at the tiny viewscreen. “Which means,” he said again, “we can do something super super SUPER clever.” He jabbed all the buttons again (causing Noreen to go “ow”), and then something did happen: a great purple-and-yellow splotch opened up directly behind the Spicy Meatball, and all of the ships chasing them were stopped dead. A large number of the pursuit ships even crashed into each other because they had been flying in too tight a formation.

“So long, cultists!” Kango shouted. He turned to Sharon, still grinning. “I created a Local Embarrassment, which collided with the Temporary Embarrassment fields that those ships were already generating, and set up a chain reaction in which this region of spacetime became Incredibly Embarrassed. Which means…”

“…none of those ships will be going anywhere for a while,” Sharon said.

“See what I mean? I may only have one cell, but it’s a brain cell.” He whooped and did an impromptu dance in his seat. “Like I said: You’re the stealthy one, I’m the flashy one.”

“I’m the one who needs an epic shower.” Sharon pulled at all the crap glued to her head while also putting the stolen synchrotrix safely into a padded strongbox. She was still tugging at the remains of her headgear when she moved toward the rear of the ship in search of its one bathroom, and she noticed something moving in the laundry compartment.

“Hey, Kango?” Sharon whispered as she came back into the flight deck. “I think we have another problem.”

She put her finger to her lips, then led him back to the laundry area, where she pulled the compartment open with a sudden tug to reveal a slender young woman curled up in a pile of dirty flight suits, wearing the full headgear of an acolyte of The Vastness. The girl looked up at them.

“Praise The Vastness,” she said. “Have we left the ring yet? I yearn to help you spread the good word about The Vastness to the rest of the galaxy! All hail The Vastness!”

Sharon and Kango just looked at each other, as if each trying to figure out how they could make this the other one’s fault.

3.

Sharon and Kango had known each other all their lives, and they were sort of married and sort of united by a shared dream. If a single-celled organism could have a sexual relationship with anybody, Kango would have made it happen with Sharon. And yet, a lot of the time, they kind of hated each other. Cooped up with Noreen on the Spicy Meatball, when they weren’t being chased by literal-minded cyborgs or sprayed with brainjuice from the brainbeasts of Noth, they started going a little crazy. Kango would start trying to osmose the seat cushions and Sharon would invent terrible games. They were all they had, but they were kind of bad for each other all the same. Space was lonely, and surprisingly smelly, at least if you were inside a ship with artificial life support.

They’d made a lot of terrible mistakes in their years together, but they’d never picked up a stowaway from a giant-space-testicle cult before. This was a new low. They immediately started doing what they did best: bicker.

“I like my beer lukewarm and my equations ice-cold,” Kango said. “Just sayin’.”

“Hey, don’t look at me,” Sharon said.

The teenage girl, whose name was TheVastnessIsAllWonderfulJaramellaLovesTheVastness, or Jara for short, was tied to the spare seat in the flight deck with thick steelsilk cords. Since Jara had figured out that she’d stowed away on the wrong ship and these people weren’t actually fellow servants of The Vastness, she’d stopped talking to them. Because why bother to speak to someone who doesn’t share the all-encompassing love of The Vastness?

“We don’t have enough food, or life support, or fuel, to carry her where we’re going,” Kango said.

“We can ration food or stop off somewhere and sell your Rainbow Cow doll collection to buy more. We can make oxygen by grabbing some ice chunks from the nearest comet and breaking up the water molecules. We can save on fuel by going half-speed or, again, sell your Rainbow Cow dolls to buy fuel.”

“Nobody is selling my Rainbow Cow dolls,” Kango said. “Those are my legacy. My descendants will treasure them, if I ever manage to reproduce somehow.” He made a big show of trying to divide into two cells, which looked like he was just having a hissy fit.

“Point is, we’re stuck with her now. Praise The Vastness,” Sharon sighed.

“Praise The Vastness!” Jara said automatically, not noticing the sarcasm in Sharon’s voice.

“There’s also the fact that they can probably track her via the headgear she’s wearing. Not to mention she may still be in telepathic contact with The Vastness itself, and we have no way of knowing when she’ll be out of range of The Vastness’s mental influence.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Sharon said. “We’ll know she’s out of range of mental communication with The Vastness when—”

“You are everything!” Jara shouted in response to a message from The Vastness.

“—when she stops doing that. Listen, I’m going to work on disabling, and maybe dismantling, her headgear. You work on rationing food and fuel, and figuring out a way to get more without sacrificing the Rainbow Cows.”

“Do not touch my sacred headpiece,” the girl said at the exact same moment that Kango said, “Stay away from my Rainbow Cows.”

“Guys,” said Noreen. “I have an incoming transmission from Earthhub Seven.”

“Can you take a message?” Kango said. “We’re a smidge busy here.”

“It’s from Senior Earthgov Administrator Mandre Lewis. Marked urgent.”

“You are everything!” Jara cried while struggling harder against her bonds.

“Okay, fine.” Kango turned to Sharon. “Please keep her quiet. Noreen, put Mandre on.”

“You can’t silence me!” Jara struggled harder. “I will escape and aid in your recapture. All ten million eyemouths of The Vastness will feast on your still-living flesh! You will—”

Sharon managed to put a sound-dampening field up around Jara’s head, cutting off the sound of her voice, just as Mandre appeared on the cruddy low-res screen in the middle of the flight console. Getting a state-of-the-art communications system had not been a priority for Kango and Sharon, since that would only encourage people to try and communicate with them more often, and who wanted that?

“Kango, Sharon,” Mandre Lewis said, wearing her full ceremonial uniform—even the animated sash that scrolled with all of her many awards and titles. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but we need your assistance.”

“We helped you one time,” Kango said. “Okay, three times, but two of those were just by accident because you had used reverse psychology. Point is, I am not your lackey. Or your henchman. Find another man to hench. Right, Sharon?”

Sharon nodded. “No henching. As Hall and Oates are my witness.”

“You are everything!” Jara mouthed soundlessly.

“Listen,” said Lewis. “You do this one thing for me, I can expunge your criminal records, even the ones under your other names. And I can push through the permits on that empty space at Earthhub Seven so you can finally open that weird thing you wanted. That, what was it called?”

“Restaurant,” Sharon breathed, like she couldn’t believe she was even saying the word aloud.

“Restaurant!” Kango clapped his hands. “That’s all we’ve ever wanted.”

“It sounds perverted and sick, this whole thing where you make food for strangers and they give you chits for it. Why don’t you just have sex for money like honest, decent people? Never mind, I don’t want to know the answer to that. Anyway, if you help me with this one thing, I can get you permission to open your ‘restaurant.’ ”

“Wow.” Kango’s head was spinning. Literally, it was going around and around, at about one revolution every few seconds. Sharon leaned down and slapped him until his head settled back into place.

“We’ll do it,” Sharon said. “Do you want us to infiltrate the spacer isolationists of the broken asteroid belt? Or go underground as factory workers in the Special Industrial Solar Systems? You want us to steal from the lizard people of Dallos IV? Whatever you want, we’re on it.”

“None of those,” said Mandre. “We need you to go back to Liberty House and get back inside your former place of, er, employment. We’ve heard reports that the Courtiers are developing some kind of super-weapon that could ruin everybody’s day. We need you to go in there and get the schematics for us.”

“Holy shit.” Sharon nearly threw something at the tiny viewscreen. “You realize that this is a suicide mission? The Courtiers regard both of us as total abominations. We can’t open a restaurant if we’re dead!”

Lewis made a “not my problem” face. “Just get it done. Or don’t even bother coming back to Earthhub Seven.”

Kango’s head started spinning in the opposite direction from the one it had been spinning in a moment earlier.

4.

They were about halfway to the outer solar systems of Liberty House, and they decided that Jara had probably passed out of range of The Vastness’s telepathic communication. Plus, they were pretty sure they’d disabled any tracking devices that might have been inside Jara’s headdress. So, Sharon leaned over the seat that Jara was still tied to.

“I know you can hear me, even though we can’t hear you. If I turn off the dampening field, do you promise not to yell about The Vastness?”

Jara just stared at her.

Sharon shrugged, then reached over and disabled the dampening field. Immediately, Jara started yelling, “The Vastness is all! The Vastness sees you! The Vastness sees everybody! The Vastness will feast on your flesh with its countless mouths! The Va—”

Sharon turned the dampening field back on with a sigh. “You’ve probably never known a life apart from The Vastness, so this is the first time you haven’t heard its voice in your head. Right? But you stowed away on our ship for a reason. You can claim it was so you could be a missionary and tell the rest of the galaxy how great The Vastness is, but we both know that you had to have some other reason for wanting to see the galaxy. Even if you can’t admit it to yourself right now.”

Jara just kept shouting about The Vastness and its boundless wonderful appetite, without making any sound.

“Fine. Have it your way. Let me know if you need to use the facilities or if you get hungry. Maybe I’ll feed you one of Kango’s Rainbow Cows.” (This provoked a loud and polysyllabic “noooo” from Kango, who was in the next compartment over.)

When Sharon wandered aft, Kango was waist-deep in boxes of supplies, looking for something they could use to disguise themselves long enough to get inside Liberty House.

“Do we have a hope in hell of pulling this off?” she asked.

“If we can get the permits, absolutely,” Kango said. “We might have to borrow some chits to get the restaurant up and running, but I know people who won’t charge a crazy rate. And I already have ideas of what kind of food we can serve. Did you know restaurants used to have this thing called a Me-N-U? It was a device that automatically chose the perfect food for me and the perfect food for you.”

“I meant, do we have any hope of getting back inside of Liberty House without being clocked as escaped Divertissements and obliterated in a slow, painful fashion?”

“Oh.” Kango squinted at the piles of glittery underpants in his hands. “No. That, we don’t have the slightest prayer of doing. I was trying to focus on the positive.”

“We need a plan,” Sharon said. “You and I are on file with the Courtiers, and there are any of a thousand scans that will figure out who we are the moment we show up. But Mandre is right; we know the inner workings of Liberty House better than anybody. We were made there, we lived there. It was our home. There has to be some way to play the Courtiers for fools.”

“Here’s the problem,” said Kango. “Even if you and I were able to disguise ourselves enough to avoid being recognized as the former property of the Excellent Good Time Crew, there’s absolutely no way we could hide what we are. None whatsoever. Anyone in the service of the Courtiers will recognize you as a monster, and me as an extra, at a glance.”

“I know, I know,” Sharon raised her hands.

“We wouldn’t get half a light-year inside the House before they would be all over us with the biometrics and the genescans, and there’s no way around those.”

“I know!” Sharon felt like weeping. They shouldn’t have taken this mission. Mandre had dangled a slim chance at achieving their wildest dreams, and they’d lunged for it like rubes. “I know, okay?”

“I mean, you’d need to have a human being, an actual honest-to-Blish human being, who was in on the scam. And it’s not like we can just pick up one of those on the nearest asteroid. So, unless you’ve got some other bright—” Kango stopped.

Kango and Sharon stared at each other for a moment without talking, then looked over at Jara, who was still tied to her chair, shouting soundlessly about the wonders of The Vastness.

“Makeover?” Kango said.

“Makeover.” Sharon sighed. She still felt like throwing up.

5.

“Greetings and tastefully risqué taunts, O visitors whose sentience will be stipulated for now, pending further appraisal,” said the man on the viewscreen, whose face was surrounded by a pink-and-blue cloud of smart powder. His cheek had a beauty mark that flashed different colors, and his eyes kept changing from skull sockets to neon spirals to cartoon eyeballs. “What is your business with Liberty House, and how may we pervert you?”

Kango and Sharon both looked at Jara, who glared at them both. Then she turned her baleful look toward the viewscreen. “Silence, wretch,” she said, speaking the words they’d forced her to memorize. “I do not speak to underthings.” Kango and Sharon both gave her looks of total dismay, and she corrected herself: “Underlings. I do not speak to underlings. I am the Resplendent Countess Victoria Algentsia, and these are my playservants. Kindly provide me with an approach vector to the central Pleasure Nexus, and instruct me as to how I may speak to someone worthy of my attention.”

They turned off the comms before the man with the weird eyes could even react.

“Ugh,” Kango said. “That was… not good.”

“I’ve never pretended to be a Countess before,” said Jara. “I don’t really approve of pretending to be anything. The Vastness requires total honesty and realness from its acolytes. Also, how do I know you’ll keep your end of our bargain?”

“Because we’re good, honest folk,” said Sharon, kicking Kango before he could even think of having a facial expression. “We’ll return you to The Vastness, and you’ll be a hero because you’ll have helped defeat a weapon that could have been a threat to its, er, magnificence.”

“I don’t trust either of you,” said Jara.

“That’s a good start,” said Kango. “Where we’re going, you shouldn’t trust anybody, anybody at all.” By some miracle, the man with the cloud of smart powder around his face had given them an approach vector to Salubrious IV, the central world of the Pleasure Nexus, the main solar system of Liberty House. Either the man had actually believed Jara was a countess, or he had decided their visit would afford some amusement to somebody. Or both.

“So, I’m supposed to be a fancy noble person,” said Jara, who was still wearing her tattered rags apart from a splash of colorful makeup and some fake jewels over her headdress. “And yet, I’m flying in this awful old ship, with just the two of you as my servants? What are you two supposed to be, anyway?”

“We were made here,” said Kango. “I’m an extra. She’s a monster.”

“You don’t need to know what we were.” Sharon shot Kango a look. “All you need to know is, we’re perfectly good servants. This ship is an actual pleasure skimmer from Salubrious, and you’re going to claim that you decided to go off on a jaunt. We’re creating a whole fake hedonic calculus for you. The good thing about Liberty House is, there are a million Courtiers, and the idea of keeping tabs on any of them is repugnant.”

“This society is evil and monstrous,” said Jara. “The Vastness will come and devour it entire.”

“Of course, of course,” said Kango with a shrug. “So, we have a few hours left to teach you how to hold your painstick, and which skewer to use with which kind of sugarblob, and the right form of address for all five hundred types of Courtiers, so you can pass for a member of the elite. Not to mention how to walk in scamperpants. Ready to get started?”

Jara just glared at him.

Meanwhile, Sharon went aft to look at the engines, because their “plan,” if you wanted to call it that, required them to do some crazy flying inside the inner detector grid of Salubrious IV, to get right up to the computer core while Kango and Jara provided a distraction.

“Nobody asked me if I wanted to go home,” said Noreen while Sharon was poking around in her guts. “I wouldn’t have minded being at least consulted here.”

“Sorry,” said Sharon. “Neither of us is happy about going back either. We got too good an offer to refuse.”

“I’ve been in contact with some of the other ships since we got inside Liberty House,” Noreen said. “They don’t care much one way or the other if we’re lying about our identity—ships don’t concern themselves with such petty business—but they did mention that the Courtiers have beefed up security rather a lot since we escaped for the first time. Also, some of the ships are taking up a betting pool on how long before we’re caught and sent into the Libidorynth.”

“I can’t believe the Libidorynth is still a thing,” Sharon said.

Sharon and Kango spent their scant remaining time making Jara look plausibly like a spoiled Countess who had been in deep space much too long, while Kango gave Jara a crash course in acting haughty and imperious. “When in doubt, pretend you’ve done too many dreamsluices, and you’re having a hard time remembering things,” said Kango.

“Silence, drone,” said Jara in an actually pretty good impersonation of the way a Courtier would speak to someone like Kango.

“We’ve got landing points,” said Noreen, and seconds later, the ship was making a jerky descent toward the surface of Salubrious IV. From a distance, the planet looked a hazy shade of brownish gray. But once you broke atmosphere, the main landmass was coated with towers of pure gold studded with purple, and the oceans had a sheen of platinum over them. They lowered the Spicy Meatball into the biggest concentration of gilded skyscrapers, and all the little details came into focus: the millions of faces and claws and bodies gazing and squirming from the sides of the buildings, the bejeweled windows and the shimmering mist of pleasure-gas floating around all of the uppermost levels. Gazing at her former home, Sharon felt an unexpected kick of nostalgia, or maybe even joyful recognition, alongside the ever-present terror of Hall and Oates save me, they’re going to put us in the Libidorynth.

They touched down, and Noreen seemed reluctant to open her hatch, because she was probably having the same terrifying flashbacks that were eating Sharon’s brain. Things Sharon hadn’t thought of in years—the cage they had kept her in, the “monster training,” the giggles of the people as she chased them around the dance floor, which turned to shrieks after she actually caught up with them. The painsticks. Sharon felt the bravado she’d spent years acquiring start to flake away.

As they stepped out of the hatch, a retinue of a hundred Witty Companions and assorted Fixers and Cleansers swarmed to surround them. “How may we pervert you?” they all asked, with an eagerness that made Sharon’s stomach twist into knots. They all felt obliged to declare their fealty to this long-lost, newly returned Countess right away, and this became deafening. One of the Witty Companions, who introduced himself as Barnadee, started listing all of the Courtiers who were dying to meet their cousin, but Jara gave him a sharp look and said that she was tired after her long journey.

“Of course, of course,” said Barnadee, bowing and flashing his multicolored strobe-lit genitalia as a show of respect. “We will show you to your luxurious and resplendent quarters, where any debauchery you may imagine will be available to you.”

Jara snorted at all of this nonsense—it was all pointless, because it did nothing to glorify The Vastness—but her disdain sounded enough like the petulance of a jaded hedonist that it only made Barnadee try harder to please her.

6.

“Drone, bring me more cognac and bacon,” said Jara, waving one finger. Sharon and Kango looked at each other, as if each trying to blame the other for turning this girl into their worst nightmare. They’d been on Salubrious IV for a week and a half, and you wouldn’t recognize Jara anymore. Her skin had been retro-sheened until it glowed, they had put jewels all over her face and neck, and she was wearing the newest, most fashionable clothes. But most of all, Jara had gotten used to having whatever she wanted, at the exact second she decided she wanted it. They were staying in one of the more modest suites of the Pleasure Nexus, with only seventeen rooms and a dozen organic assembly units—so it might take a few whole minutes to build a new slave for the Countess Victoria or create whatever meals or clothing she might desire. The walls were coated with living material, sort of like algae, that looked like pure gold (but were actually much more valuable) and had the capacity to feel pain, just in case someone might find it amusing to hear the golden walls howl with agony.

“I grow bored,” said Jara, as Sharon rushed over with her cognac-and-bacon. “When will there be more amusement for me?”

Sharon had a horrible feeling that she could not tell if Jara was faking it any longer. She’d had that feeling for a few days.

“Um,” said Sharon to Jara, “well, so there are five orgies this evening, including one featuring blood enemas and flesh-melting. Also, there’s that big formal evening party.”

“Is this the sort of party where you used to be the featured monster?” Jara held her cognac-and-bacon in both hands and gulped it, with just the sort of alacrity you’d expect from someone who’d only ever tasted gruel until two weeks before.

“Um, yes,” Sharon said. “They would turn me loose and I would chase the guests around and try to eat them. I’ve told you already.”

“And how did that make you feel?” Jara asked.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Sharon turned and looked at Kango, who was tending to the Countess’s assembly units but also double-checking that there were no listening devices in here so they could speak freely. Kango gave her the “all clear” signal.

“Let’s talk about you instead,” Sharon said to Jara. “Are you ready to go to the big party? It’s one thing to play-act at bossing Kango and me around in private. But at this party, you’ll see all sorts of weird things—depravities that The Vastness never prepared you for. And you can’t bat an eye at any of them.”

“I’ll do whatever I have to,” Jara said. “You said there’s a weapon here that’s a threat to The Vastness, and I’ll endure any horrors and monstrosities to protect The Vastness. Praise The Vastness!”

“Do you think she’s ready?” Sharon asked Kango, who shrugged.

“She’s got the attitude,” Kango said. Just a few hours earlier, Jara had made Kango go out and fetch her some still-living mollusk sushi from the market, and meanwhile she’d gotten Sharon to fabricate a tiny legion of pink fluffy shocktroopers for her amusement (they goose-stepped around and then all shot each other, because their aim was terrible).

“Thank you,” Jara said, “Drone.”

“But she’s still rusty on the finer points of Courtier behavior,” Kango said. “She doesn’t know a painstick from a soul-fork.”

“She’s a quick study. And she’ll have you to help her,” Sharon said. “As long as you don’t get all triggered by being back inside the Grand Wilding Center. I can’t even imagine.”

“You two,” Jara said out of nowhere. “You talk as though each of you was The Vastness to the other.”

“Yeah,” Kango said. “We’re a family, that’s why.”

Jara was shaking her head, like this was just another perversion among many that she’d encountered on her journey. “At least the people here in Liberty House care about something bigger than they are, even if it’s only a pointless amusement. You two, you are so small, and all you care for is each other. How can you stand to have no connection to greatness?”

“We had enough of other people’s greatness a long time ago,” Sharon said. “You start to realize that ‘something bigger than you are’ is usually just some kind of stupid mass hallucination. Or a giant scam.”

“I feel sorry for you.” Jara finished her cognac-and-bacon and gestured for more.

“You can pretend that you’re still pure,” Sharon said. “But you’ve been enjoying that cognac-and-bacon way, way too much. What do you think The Vastness would think about that? How can The Vastness be everything when it doesn’t have cognac-and-bacon? When it doesn’t even know what cognac-and-bacon IS?”

“Shut up, Drone,” Jara said—falling back into her “Countess” voice as a way out of this conversation.

“Keep an eye on her, okay?” Sharon whispered to Kango. “I really think there’s a part of her that wants to be her own person, but she just doesn’t know how.”

He shrugged and nodded at the same time.

And then they were surrounded by a few dozen other servants and Fixers, who had heard that the Countess Victoria was going to the evening’s most exclusive party and were there to help her become as resplendent as possible in hopes of winning some favor. So, there was no further chance to talk about their actual plans for stealing the specs on the secret weapon—but lots and lots of chances to obsess over whether the Countess should wear the weeping dolphin eyes or the blood-pouches.

At last, the Countess was ready to go to the party, and Sharon was preparing to peel off and sneak back to the Spicy Meatball. “Wish me luck,” she whispered to Kango.

“You’ve got this,” he whispered back. “We’re going to open our restaurant. We’ll serve all the classic food items: handburgers, Ruffalo wings, damplings, carry… It’ll be great.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here,” said Sharon, kissing Kango on the cheek.

7.

The central computer core of the Pleasure Nexus looked like a big mossy rock floating over the city, between two giant esorotic spires of pure silver. But as the Spicy Meatball flew closer, the computer core looked less like a rock and more like some kind of ancient sauroid, with thick plates of spiky armor guarding its fleshy access points. They flew into its shadow.

Sharon was concentrating on navigating past the tiny guardbots flying around the computer core, while finding the exact vector that would allow the Spicy Meatball to come right up to the exposed patch of underbelly. And then Sharon and Noreen just had to hover there, directly underneath the computer core, where anybody could spot the ship’s impact-scarred hull, waiting for Kango’s diversion to happen. And obsessing about the thousand things that could go wrong.

“I’ve been telling the other ships about us,” said Noreen. “Our smuggling runs to the Scabby Castles, that time we conned those literal-minded cyborgs into thinking Kango was some kind of Cyber-King… They’re pretty jealous of us. The other ships might even give us a slight head start if it comes down to a pursuit. Although it wouldn’t make any difference, of course.”

“I appreciate the gesture,” said Sharon. She stared at the crappy little vidscreen, showing the undulating flesh of the computer core—just sitting there, a few inches away from their hull. She was regretting a lot of her recent life choices. She’d sworn for years that nobody was ever going to make her into an object again, but she’d willingly put herself back into that position—and the fact that she was “just pretending” didn’t make as much difference as she wanted. She felt bad that Kango, who’d had a rougher time than she had, was being forced to confront this awfulness again. And she was realizing that she’d projected a lot onto that Jara girl, as if a week or two of pretending to be a Countess would break a lifetime of conditioning and psychic linkage to a giant space glob. This was probably going to be a career-ending mistake.

“We got it,” Noreen said, just as Sharon was getting sucked into gloom. Their vidscreen was streaming some news reports about the Estimable Lord Vaughn Ticklesnout unexpectedly catching on fire and being chased by his own party monster. Some three hundred terrorist organizations had already claimed responsibility for this incident, most of them with completely silly names like the Persimmon Permission Proclamation, but the party had dissolved into total chaos. They picked up footage of the crowd scattering as a man on fire ran around and around, pursued by a bright blue naked woman who could have been Sharon’s twin sister.

“Great,” Sharon said. “I’m setting up the uplink. Let’s hope the distraction was distracting enough.” She started threading through layers of security protection, some of them newly added since she and Kango had escaped from Liberty House, and spoofing all of the certs that the computer demanded. There were riddles and silly questions along with strings of base-99 code that needed to be unraveled, but Sharon and Noreen worked together, and soon they had total leet-superuser access.

Sharon searched for any data on the new super-weapon and found it helpfully labeled “Brand New Excellent Super-Weapon.” A few more twists of the computer matrix, and she was instructing the computer to transfer all the data on the weapon.

“Uh,” said Noreen. “I think you might have made a mistake.”

“What?” said Sharon. “I asked it to send over everything it had on the super-weapon.”

“Check the cargo hold,” said Noreen. “Right next to the boxes of Rainbow Cows. The main computer just auto-docked with us a second ago.”

Sharon took a split second to process what Noreen had said, then took off running down to the cargo hold, where a squat red ovoid device, about the size of a human baby, had been deposited. The object made a faint grumbling noise, like a drunken old man who was annoyed at being woken up. “Oh, shit,” Sharon said.

“Please keep it down,” said the super-weapon. “Some of us are trying to rest.”

“Sorry,” Sharon said. “I just didn’t expect you to show up in person.”

“I go where they send me,” groaned the super-weapon. “All I want to do is get some rest until my big day. Which could be any day, since they never give me a timetable. That’s the problem with being the ultimate deterrent: people talk about using me a lot, but they never actually follow through.”

“Just how ultimate a deterrent are you?”

“Well, actually, I’m very ultimate. Ultimately ultimate, in fact.” The super-weapon seemed to perk up a little bit as it discussed its effectiveness. “If anybody tries to interfere with Liberty House’s sacred and innate right to seek amusement in any form they deem amusing, then I send a gravity pulse to the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, causing it to, er, expand. Rather a lot. To the size of a galaxy, in fact.”

“That’s, er, pretty fucking ultimate.” Sharon felt as though she, personally, had swallowed a supermassive black hole. This was getting worse and worse. Added to her own low-single-digit estimation of her chances of survival, there was the realization that her former owners were much, much worse people than she’d ever fathomed. She was so full of terror and hatred, she saw two different shades of red at once.

“Hate to ruin your moment,” said Noreen, “but we’ve got another problem.”

“Don’t mind me,” said the super-weapon. “I’ll just go back to sleep. My name is Horace, by the by.”

Sharon rushed back to the flight deck, where the vidscreen showed Kango and Jara in the custody of several uniformed Fixers, as well as one of the senior Courtiers, a man named Hazelbeem who’d been famous back in Sharon’s day.

“We have captured your accomplices.” Hazelbeem’s lime-green coiffure wobbled as he talked. “And we are coming for you next! Prepare for a wonderfully agonizing death—accompanied by some quite delicious crunketizers, because this party left us with rather a lot of leftovers.”

“We have your bomb,” said Sharon into the viewscreen. “Your ultimate weapon. We’ll set it off unless you release our friends.”

“No, you won’t,” said Hazelbeem, who had a purple mustache that kept twirling and untwirling and twisting itself into complex shapes, “because you’re not completely stark raving mad.”

“Okay. It’s true; we won’t. But what does that say about you, creating something like that?”

Hazelbeem’s mustache shrugged elaborately, but the man himself had no facial expression.

“Leave us,” Kango shouted. “Get out of there! Take their stupid bomb with you. We’re not worth you sacrificing your lives to these assholes. Just go!”

“You know I can’t do that,” said Sharon.

“There are fifty-seven attack ships, approaching us from pretty much every possible direction,” said Noreen.

“Can we at least disable their stupid bomb permanently before they capture us?” said Sharon. “I’m guessing not. We’d need weeks to figure out how it works.”

“Hey,” Jara said, pushing herself forward. “I wanted to say, I guess you were kind of right about why I stowed away. I always wanted to be special, not just another one of a billion servants of The Vastness. And when I saw your ship about to disembark, I thought maybe I could help spread the word about The Vastness to the whole galaxy, and then I’d be the best acolyte ever. But it turned out the only way I could be special was as a fake Countess.”

“You were a great fake Countess, though,” Kango said, squirming next to her.

“Thanks. And thanks for taking me to that party,” Jara told her. “I got to see all sorts of things that I’d never even imagined. And it started me thinking maybe I really could find a way to reinvent myself as an individual, the way you two did. In fact, I’m starting to realize that… You are everything!”

“What the hell? You just said—”

“I can’t control it,” said Jara. “It’s like an instinctive response whenever—You are everything!”

And then they lost the signal, because a voice broke in on every single open frequency. The voice was shouting one thing over and over: “I am everything! I am everything! I am everything!”

“Uh,” said Sharon.

“So, you probably already guessed this,” said Noreen. “But sensors are showing that a Temporary Embarrassment the size of several planets has just appeared on the edge of the central pleasure nexus of Liberty House. The weather control systems on Salubrious IV are all working overtime.”

“You’re right; I did actually guess that,” said Sharon.

“The good news is, all the ships that were about to attack us have been diverted onto a new heading,” said Noreen.

“We gotta go rescue Kango,” said Sharon. “And Jara, I guess.”

“I have some excellent news,” came a plummy male voice from the cargo hold. Horace, the super-weapon. “My activation sequence has been initiated. It’s the moment I’ve been waiting for my whole life!”

8.

Hazelbeem, whose full name was Hazelbeem Sternforke Paddleborrow the XXVIIth, was standing in front of the Grand Wilding Suites and Superior Fun Center, where the party had been held. He had a half-dozen Fixers with him, and they were holding Kango and Jara in chains as the Spicy Meatball landed on the front lawn (which screamed and tried to bite the Meatball’s landing struts).

“So! Not only did you steal our top secret ultimate weapon,” said Hazelbeem, his mustache knotted in anger, “but you brought the wrath of the most revolting giant monster in the galaxy down on us. Were I an existentialist masochist, this would be my happiest day ever. Too bad I am an objectivist sadist instead.”

“Just let my friends go,” said Sharon. “We can help. We know what The Vastness wants.”

“You are everything!” shouted Jara.

“We are past the point of negotiation,” said Hazelbeem. “We have already activated the weapon on board your ship as soon as we detected a major threat to our way of life. If we cannot continue the absolute pursuit of amusement, with zero limitations, then there’s no reason for this galaxy to continue existing. I must say, when we created you and your friend here”—he gestured at Kango—“we did not imagine it could ever lead to so many unamusing incidents.”

“This just proves that amusement is subjective,” said Kango, struggling against his chains. “I’ve been highly amused by many of today’s events.”

“You are everything!”

“You were made as a brothel extra,” said Hazelbeem to Kango. “You weren’t even supposed to have a mind of your own. You’re a single-celled organism, are you not? Made to appear like a beautiful young man, to stand in the background of the crowd scenes at a brothel. Something must have gone very wrong—perhaps you received too high a dose of neuropeptides in the vat.”

“I may only have one cell,” said Kango, “but you’ve just been nucleused.”

“I don’t even know what that means.” Hazelbeem’s mustache crinkled.

“It was supposed to be a play on the fact that I have a single nucleus, and I’m… Oh, just forget I said anything.”

“Already forgotten,” said Hazelbeem.

“You are everything!”

“Can you stop shouting that?” Hazelbeem said to Jara. “It’s giving me a headache.”

“We’ve been trying, believe me,” said Sharon.

“It’s a reflex,” Jara told Hazelbeem. “I belong to The Vastness no matter what I do. I was foolish to think anything mattered except for The Vastness. I’m probably going to be punished for doubting even a little, in my heart.”

“You are a very tiresome little person,” Hazelbeem told her.

The sky was churning with angry black swirlies, which reminded Sharon of one of the first parties at which she’d been the designated monster, when the Marquis of Bloopabloopasneak had set off some kind of weather bomb left over from one of the old galactic wars. Five hundred-odd people had died in the hurricanes and blizzards before the Pleasure Nexus’s weather-control systems had regained control, and the Marquis of Bloopabloopasneak had played really loud glam-clash music to drown out the screams and the roaring of the elements.

Hazelbeem was looking at the big fob hanging from his inner jacket (which was made of tiny living people, all of them squirming in a vain attempt to escape from the stitching that stuck them together). “That hypertrophic organism and its fleet of ships have torn through our planetary defenses in the worst disaster since that all-you-can-eat buffet escaped from its trays and grew until it devoured an entire planet. I blame! I really do. I blame.”

“Just let my friends go, and we’ll deal with The Vastness for you.” Sharon shouted to make herself heard over the howling in the sky. “There’s no need for any of this.”

“This is what happens when playthings try to think for themselves,” Hazelbeem snorted. “First they start trying to act like people, and before you know it, they—”

Sharon ate Hazelbeem. This happened too quickly for anybody to react. One second, Hazelbeem was working himself up into a tirade about toys that get ideas above their station, and the next, Sharon’s mouth expanded to several times its normal size and just gobbled him up. She spat out his boots a second later.

“Ugh,” Sharon said. “I promised myself I would never do that again. But there’s provocation, and then there’s provocation. I’ve had a lot of pent-up rage these past few days.” She looked at the gaggle of Fixers who were holding her friends prisoner and yelled, “Let my friends go, or you’re next!”

“Whatever you say!” the head Fixer stammered as she unlocked Kango and Jara. “We all just want to be with our families—or possibly go to an end-of-the-galaxy blood orgy. One of those. Bye!” The Fixers all took off running in different directions, leaving Sharon, Kango, Jara and Hazelbeem’s boots.

Sharon looked down at the boots. “He just pushed me too far.”

“It’s fine,” Kango said in her ear as he touched her arm. “Just because you eat the occasional horrible person doesn’t prove you’re actually the monster they tried to make you into. I promise.”

“You are everything!” Jara said, then added, “That guy was asking for it. As an official Countess, I pardon you.”

“Thanks,” Sharon said, still raising her voice over the awful din. “Now we just gotta save the galaxy. Any ideas?”

They all looked at each other, then at the pair of boots on the ground, as if the boots might suddenly offer a helpful suggestion.

9.

The Vastness had somehow taken over the festival speakers all around the Superior Fun Center, and was shouting about the fact that someone had dared to steal from its all-encompassing magnificence. And that nobody escaped The Vastness! To underscore this, a flotilla of The Vastness’s Joykiller-class ships were swooping down over the surface of Salubrious IV and firing Obliteron missiles at every freestanding structure. The ground shook, the sky churned, and the Superior Fun Center and several other buildings collapsed as Kango, Sharon, and Jara ran back to the Spicy Meatball—stumbling and falling on their faces as The Vastness shrieked at top volume.

“You are everything,” said Jara, face in the dirt.

Kango flung himself into his pilot seat aboard the Spicy Meatball and tried to lift off, but the entire airspace consisted of pretty much nothing but explosions, dotted with the occasional deadly warship. Barely a few hundred yards off the ground, the Spicy Meatball was forced to go into a dive to avoid a huge chunk of burning debris. Kango and Noreen screamed in unison.

“You know,” said Horace. “I’ve heard it said that death is what makes life meaningful. In that case, I am about to create more meaning than all of the artists in history combined.”

Kango was a blur as he tried to steer through the flaming obstacle course.

At last, they reached the upper atmosphere… just as some terrible presence appeared directly beneath them. It was just a dark shape that blotted out their view of Salubrious IV. Sharon struggled to make out any details for a moment, and then she saw some undulating barbed tentacles, and she knew.

“No,” said Sharon. “They released the planet-eater.”

“Is that Liberty House’s last line of defense?” asked Jara, fascinated by the shape on their external viewer.

“No,” Kango said. “They made it for a party years ago. It basically just eats planets, much as its name implies. And we’re between it and The Vastness. Hold tight!”

“To what?” Sharon demanded.

The planet-eater thrashed around as it forced its way out of the atmosphere of Salubrious IV and tried to swim toward The Vastness. The planet-eater’s uncountable limbs lashed out, trying to pull everything in their path into the one enormous maw at its center. One of those huge barbed tentacles swiped within a few feet of the Spicy Meatball… which dodged, and nearly ran into another flotilla of Joykiller-class attack ships.

“Hall and Oates!” Sharon cursed.

“You are everything!” Jara cried out.

“Keep it down, you two,” Kango growled. “It’s hard enough trying to make evasive maneuvers between pretty much everything deadly without also having to listen to a lot of religious mumbo jumbo.”

“Oh, as if you have it all figured out,” Sharon said. “Your only religion is exhibitionism. I swear, the next time we have a plan that relies on a diversion—a contained, sensible diversion—that can be my job.”

“Sure!” Kango spun the ship on its axis to scoot past a planet-eater tentacle, then veered sharply to the left to avoid a spread of Obliteron missiles. “Because you’re such a genius at strategy, and that’s how we ended up with a stupid ultimate weapon on board!”

“I’ll have you know I am quite intelligent,” Horace protested. “And there are mere minutes before my devastation wave is launched from the galactic core. Once it begins, it will sweep the entire galaxy in no time at all!”

“Hey, I did my best,” Sharon said to Kango. “It’s not as if it was my idea to—” She stopped, because Jara was staring at her. “What?”

“You’re doing it again,” Jara said. “You’re acting as though each of you is The Vastness to the other. I wish I knew how you do that. I’m going to die soon too, and even with The Vastness close at hand, I’ll die alone and for no real reason. You are everything!”

“Listen, Jara,” Sharon said, ignoring her nausea as Kango did a series of barrel rolls to avoid explosions that came close enough to rattle her teeth. “Listen. The Vastness is only everything because it’s incredibly limited. It can’t even see all the things it’s not. It’s like a giant stupid ignorant blob of… wait. Wait a minute!”

“What?” Kango said. “Did you think of something super super clever?”

“Maybe,” Sharon said, praying to Hall and Oates that she was right. She ran over and pulled the stolen synchrotrix out of the strongbox, then started wiring it into Horace’s core as fast as she could. “Remember what you told me was special about this device?”

“The fact that it’s worth a lot of chits?” Kango pulled the Spicy Meatball’s nose up so fast, Sharon nearly did a backflip while keeping one hand on Horace. “It’s got a nice color scheme? It has the ability to neutralize… oh. Oh!”

“You are everything!” Jara said.

The planet-eater had finally gotten past all of the attack ships that had tried vainly to slow it down. Now it had reached The Vastness, opening the vast gnashing maw at the heart of its starfish-like body to try and devour the mega-planetoid. The planet-eater embraced The Vastness with its many limbs.

Sharon gripped Jara’s shoulders so hard, her knuckles were white. “Tell The Vastness we’ve got the ultimate weapon, right here on our ship. We can help The Vastness to become completely unstoppable. And The Vastness really will be everything, in an even better way than before.”

Jara looked like she was about to cry. “You want me to lie to The Vastness.”

“No,” Sharon said. “Yes. Sort of. Not really. It’s the only way.”

“I’m just moments away from a glorious consummation,” Horace said. “It’s at times like this that I feel like composing a sonnet.”

“Jara,” Sharon hissed, “now!”

“I’m trying,” Jara said, shutting her eyes and concentrating. “The Vastness doesn’t really listen. It just talks. I’m sending the message as hard as I can.”

“Now! Please!”

The Vastness reached out with a beam of energy, trying to seize the Spicy Meatball. Sharon rushed to the rear airlock with Horace, cobbled together with the synchrotrix. She tossed them out, and The Vastness’s energy field captured them, pulling them through one of The Vastness’s slavering eyemouths inside its guts.

They were inside The Vastness’s own atmosphere, close enough to hear its eyemouths shouting through their countless razor-sharp teeth. “I am everything! Now I have this ultimate weapon, my power will be absolute. I will be all things, and every living being will shout my praises. I am—”

Sharon watched through the airlock as The Vastness vanished from space.

In the space where The Vastness had been, a bright purple-and-green fissure was opened up. The crack in spacetime was huge enough to let Sharon see through it as The Vastness was drawn toward the supermassive black hole at the core of the galaxy.

“You are everything,” Jara said, sorrowfully, standing next to Sharon.

And then The Vastness was no longer visible—but in its place, there was a huge distortion enveloping the black hole at the core of the galaxy.

“The biggest Embarrassment the galaxy has ever seen,” Kango breathed from the flight deck.

And then the purple-and-green fissure closed, leaving a badly injured planet-eater, several thousand confused Joykiller-class starships, and the Spicy Meatball.

“We did it,” Kango said, seeming semi-permeable with astonishment.

“The Vastness followed Horace’s program and ended up at the galactic core,” Sharon said. “And then it Embarrassed itself.”

“I just killed my god.” Jara looked as though she was too shocked even for tears.

“Look at it this way,” Sharon said. “You told the truth. Mostly. The Vastness is everywhere and everything now, in a way. And it always will be with you. And it can never be defeated. You can worship The Vastness forever.”

“I don’t know.” Jara tried saying, “You are everything,” but it wasn’t the same when it came in response to nothing.

“Well, meanwhile,” Kango said. “We lost the synchrotrix that we were counting on to pay our bills. And we lost the super-weapon, too. So, we’re even more broke than we were before. Unless we can convince Mandre Lewis that we just saved the galaxy.”

“We’ll figure something out,” Sharon said, then turned back toward Jara. “But what are you going to do? There’s a huge fleet of ships out there, full of your fellow acolytes, and they desperately need some direction. Plus, this star system is rich in resources and technology, and it just had all its planetary defenses wrecked. You could go back to Salubrious, with all your people, and become a Countess for real.”

“Maybe,” Jara said. “Or maybe I could go with you guys? I feel like I have a lot to learn from you two. And I’m not sure I’m ready to explain what happened to the other acolytes.”

“Sure. How do you feel about helping to open a restaurant? Do you know how to make a tableclot?” Kango threw the Spicy Meatball headlong into an escape course before anybody could try to blame them for all the property damage. Behind them, the ruins of Salubrious IV sparkled with the dying light of countless fires as the tributary ships of The Vastness began, hesitantly and confusedly, to make planetfall.

Palm Strike’s Last Case

1.

Palm Strike’s costume has never been comfortable, but lately it’s pinching his shoulders and chafing in the groin area. Sweat pools in the boots. The Tensilon-reinforced helmet gives him a blinding headache after two hours, and the chestplate is slightly too loose, which causes it to move around and rub the skin off his stomach and collarbone.

The thing that keeps Palm Strike running past water tower after water tower along the cracked rooftops of Argus City, the thing that keeps him breaking heads after taking three bullets that night, is the knowledge that there are still innocents out there whose lives haven’t yet been ruined.

Kids who still have hope and joy, the way Palm Strike’s own son did before Dark Shard got him. When the bruised ribs and punctured lung start to slow him down and the forty-pound costume has him dancing in chains, he pictures his son. Rene. It never fails—he feels a weight in his stomach, like a chunk of concrete studded with rocks, and it fills him with rage, which he turns into purpose.

Argus City is full of disintegrating Frank Lloyd Wright knock-offs and people who have nothing to lose but someone else’s innocence. This was a great city, once, just like America was a great country and Earth was a great planet.

Palm Strike catches a trio of Shardlings selling dreamflies in Grand Park, under the bronze statue of a war hero piloting a drone. The drone casts deep shadows, and that’s where they hunker in a three-point parabolic formation. They’re well trained, maybe even ex-Special Forces, and decently armed, including one customized 1911 with a tight-bore barrel. Dark Shard must be getting desperate.

Once they’re down, Palm Strike feeds them their own drugs, baggie by baggie.

“You know my rule,” he growls. The process is not unlike making foie gras. One of these men is so terrified, he blurts out the location of Dark Shard’s secret lair, the Pleasuresplinter.

Ambulance called. These men will be fine. Eventually. Palm Strike’s already far away before the sirens come. Losing himself in the filthy obstacle course of broken walls and shattered vestibules in the old financial district. Leaping over prone bodies. He doglegs into the old French Quarter. All of the bistros are shuttered, but a few subterranean bars give off a tallowy glare, along with the sound of blues musicians who refuse to quit for the night. Cleansing acrid smoke pours around his feet.

Turns out Dark Shard’s Pleasuresplinter is hidden right under City Hall. But service tunnels from the river go all the way, almost. Catacombs, filthy and crawling with vermin. Palm Strike’s boots get soaked, both inside and out. Men and women stand guard at intervals, but none of them sees Palm Strike coming. Palm Strike’s main superpower is the stupidity of his enemies. He sets charges as he goes, something to be a beacon for first responders, firefighters and EMTs. And police. But don’t trust the police, never trust the police.

Palm Strike crashes through the dense mahogany door just as all the charges he set in the tunnels go off. Smoke billows up out of the fractured street behind him. The door explodes inwards, into a beautiful marble space—a mausoleum—with a recessed floor like a sauna, and a dozen little dark alcoves and nooks. Red drapes. Gray-suited men sporting expensive guns and obvious body armor with the trademark broken-glass masks.

In one of those nooks, just on the far side of the room, he spots the children: all in their teens, some of them barely pubescent. Their faces wide open, like they are in the middle of something that will never leave them, no matter what else they see or do.

Everyone over eighteen is shooting at Palm Strike. Lung definitely collapsed. Healing mojo has crapped out.

First priority: get the children out. Second priority: bring this den of foulness down on these men’s heads. Third priority: find Dark Shard.

Children first, though.

One of the bullets goes right through Palm Strike’s thigh, in spite of the ablative fibers. Femoral artery? No time to check. This place probably smells like candy floss and cheap perfume most of the time, but now it’s laced with vomit, blood and sewage. Clear a path to the exit for the children. Drive the armed men into cover, in the far alcoves. Be a constantly moving whirl of anger, all weapon and no target. Unleash the throwing-claws and smart-javelins. Find one brave child, who can be a leader, who will guide the rest to safety. That one, with the upturned nose and dark eyes, who looks like Rene only with lighter, straighter hair. “Get them out,” Palm Strike says, and the kid understands. Throwing claws have taken out most of the ordnance. Children run past Palm Strike, stumbling but not stopping, into the tunnel.

Palm Strike blacks out. Just for an instant. He snaps awake to see the boy he’d appointed leader in the hands of one of the top Shardlings—you can tell from the mask’s shatter pattern. Stupid. Busting in here, with no plan. Dumb crazy old fool. The kid squirms in the man’s grasp, but his little face is calm. Palm Strike has one throwing-claw left. He hears the first responders in the tunnels behind him, and they’ve found the children who got away.

Palm Strike’s throwing-claw hits the pinstripe-suited thug in the neck, and slashes at him on its way to find a weapon to disable. An angry insect, made of Tensilon, stainless steel, and certain proprietary polymers, scuttles down the man’s neck. The man pulls the trigger—just as the throwing claw’s razor talons slice the gun in two. The recoil takes half the man’s hand, and then the boy is running for the exit. Palm Strike wants to stay and force-feed this man every drug he can find here. But he’s lost a lot of blood and can’t breathe, and the shouts are getting close.

Palm Strike barely makes it out of there before the place swarms with uniforms.

The Strike-copter is where he left it, concealed between the decaying awnings of the Grand Opera House. He manages to set the autopilot before passing out again. Healing mojo works for crap nowadays. After only three years of this, he’s played out. He regains and loses consciousness as his limp body weaves over the barbed silhouette of downtown, and then the squat brick tops of abandoned factories. At last, the Strike-copter carries him up the river, to a secluded mansion near Mercy Bay.

Josiah, his personal assistant, releases him from the copter’s harness, with practiced care. Josiah’s young, too young, with curly red hair and a wide face that looks constantly startled. As usual, he wears an apron over a suit and skinny tie. “You really did it this time,” Josiah says, prepping the gurney to roll Palm Strike through the hidden doorway in one of the granite blocks of the mansion’s outer walls. Josiah removes the headpiece, but before he can attach the oxygen mask, Palm Strike says: “The children.”

“They got out okay,” Josiah responds. “Ten of them. You did good. Now rest.”

Some time later, a day maybe, Palm Strike wakes with tubes in his arms and screens beeping ostentatiously around him. The healing mojo has finally kicked in. He still feels like hell but he’s not dying any more. He sits up, slowly. Josiah tries to keep him bedridden, but they both know it’s a lost cause.

“You’ve received a letter,” Josiah says as Palm Strike scans newsfeeds on his tablet. “An actual piece of paper. On stationery.”

Palm Strike—now he’s Luc Deveaux, because he’s out of costume—shrugs, which makes his ribs flare with agony. But then Josiah hands him the letter, already opened, and the Space Administration logo sends a shiver through Luc before he even sees the words.

“Congratulations. You have been selected to join the next colonization wave…”

2.

The Space Agency interview process is the last vivid memory Luc has of Rene. And he remembers it two different ways.

First version: They were happy, a family, in this together. His son leaned his head against Luc’s shoulder in the waiting room, with its framed Naïve-art posters of happy colonists unsnapping helmets under a wild new sun. Rene joked about his main qualification being his ability to invent a brand new style of dance for a higher-gravity world, and even demonstrated high-gravity dancing for the other families in the waiting room, to general applause. Rene aced the interviews, they both did, and Luc was so proud of his son, as he gave clever answers, dressed up in a little suit like a baby banker.

In that version of the memory, Rene turned to Luc in the waiting room and said, “I know our main selling point is you, your geo-engineering experience. But they’ll need young people who are up for literally whatever, any challenge, to make this planet livable. And that’ll be me. You’ll see, Dad.”

So. Damn. Proud.

The other version of the memory only comes to Luc when he’s half asleep, or when he’s had a few single malts and is sick of lying to himself. In that other version, Rene was being a smartmouth the whole time—in the waiting room, in the interviews, the whole time—and Luc had to chew his tongue bloody to keep from telling his son to put a sock in it. They both knew that Luc was the one with the land-reclamation skills the colony would need, and all Rene had to do was shut his trap and let them think he’d make himself useful and not be too much of a smart-ass. That’s all.

Luc can just about remember the stiffening in his neck and chest every time Rene acted out or failed to follow the script in those interviews. Rene had to get cute, doing his high-gravity dance and annoying all the other families. It’s a close cousin to the anger that keeps him laying into Dark Shard’s thugs every night, if he wants to be honest with himself, which he mostly doesn’t. Except after a few single malts, or when he’s half asleep.

Both versions of the memory are true, Luc guesses. If he really wanted a second opinion, he could ask Josiah if he was too hard on Rene when his son was alive, but he never does.

He has too many other regrets crowding that one out, anyway. Like, why didn’t he pick Rene up from school himself that day? And keep better tabs, in general? Or, why didn’t he get Rene off this doomed planet before it was too late to save him?

3.

Now Luc grips the letter in both hands, wondering whose idea of a joke this is.

“You have to go,” Josiah says. Luc is already crumpling the letter into a ball, aiming for the recycling. “You have to go. Sir. If you stay, you’ll die.”

“My work here is not done.” Luc realizes he’s slept through most of the day. Almost time to suit up. “Dark Shard still needs to pay. For Rene. And all the rest.”

Luc can’t find his headpiece. A jet-black scowling half-mask, with a shock-absorbing duroplex helmet built in, it usually isn’t hard to spot in the midst of civilized bedroom furnishings and nice linens. But it’s gone. Now he remembers—Josiah took it from him when he was strapped to the gurney.

“How do you think you’ll best honor Rene’s memory?” Josiah is touching Luc’s arm. “By throwing your life away here? Or by following Rene’s dream and going to another planet, where you could really make a difference? You’ve destroyed Dark Shard’s lair. Which will weaken him a little, but also drive him further underground.”

“Where is my headpiece?” Luc asks. Josiah won’t answer. “Where did you put my helmet? Tell me.”

Josiah backs away, even though Luc still walks teeteringly.

“You could help build something new,” Josiah says. “Instead of breaking things, over and over, until you’re broken in turn. You could build something.”

“That part of me is dead.” Luc is already thinking about alternatives to the headpiece. There are prototypes, which he hid someplace even Josiah doesn’t know about. Flawed designs, but good enough for a night or two, until Josiah comes around. “This is all I have left.”

The nanofiber-reinforced lower half of his costume still has that bullet-hole, and his leg is so heavily bandaged that the pants barely fit. This could be a problem, especially if the rip widens around the bandages. He could end up with a big white patch on his leg, like a target for every thug to aim at in the darkness. Stain the bandages black? Wrap black tape around them?

“Luc. Please.” Josiah grabs his arm and shoves the letter, which he’s retrieved and uncrumpled, in Luc’s face. “I helped bury your son. I don’t want to bury you.” He has tears in his eyes, which are also puffy from sleepless nights caring for Luc’s slow-healing wounds. “There’s more than one way to be a hero. You taught me that, before all this.”

Luc stares at the letter again. Departure date is in just a few weeks, and there are a lot of training sessions and tests before then. Someone must have backed out, or maybe washed out. “If I go,” he growls at Josiah, “I won’t leave you any money. I’ve spent every last penny on my fight.”

“I know that, sir,” Josiah says, smiling wearily. “Who do you think has been keeping them from taking the house? We’ve restructured your debt five times in the last two years.”

In the end, Luc says yes, even though every instinct rebels against it. Not because Josiah hid his mask, but because something inside him, his core, is suddenly too exhausted to do anything else. Sleeping for a hundred years sounds perfect. Maybe he’ll wake up having understood something. Maybe he won’t wake up at all—even better.

After that, Luc’s trapped in the clutches of officialdom. Imprisoned. Every spare minute goes to medical tests—even with the healing mojo, he still has to explain the scars and old broken bones—and briefings on absolutely everything they know about Kepler, which people are calling Newfoundland. The same facts are repeated over and over, like the fact that Newfoundland has 1.27 times Earth gravity and a year that lasts fifteen Earth months. Only one of the seven continents is habitable, the south pole. Blah blah blah. There is a whole three-hour talk on what to do if you wake up early, and five days devoted to how to convert the ship into a survival module on landing—the crew should know, but if the crew are dead, then the colonists may need to know, too. The other colonists in the briefings are cute, fresh-faced. Mostly around Luc’s age, but he feels much, much older.

And meanwhile, all of Luc’s sources in the underworld suggest that Dark Shard has blown town, and his organization is in disarray.

At last, the day comes. Two days of fasting, then Luc strips naked and climbs inside the decontamination vat—which sears off a few layers of skin—and then the cryo-module. The technicians close the lid over his face, and he feels the ice threading through his veins and into his muscles and joints.

Just as the paralysis starts to take hold, he’s dead certain he hears someone say, “Palm Strike.” With a chuckle.

Palm Strike hears his name and comes to life. But it’s too late. Palm Strike tries to fight the cold tendrils immobilizing his body, to stay awake. He almost sits up in his tiny chamber. He only needs to pull out these tubes. He battles with everything he has, kicking against the top of his coffin. But the clammy grip pulls him under, into an ocean with no surface.

4.

Falling for years, drowning in slow motion, Luc sees Rene’s corpse over and over. The bullet hole in his side, the tell-tale dilated pupils, the broken capillaries in his face. Mouth frozen open in a last abortive yell. They made him identify the body.

He only met Dark Shard once—and it was as Luc, not as Palm Strike. Palm Strike didn’t even exist yet. A few nights after he buried Rene, there was a shape in his window. A shadowy form, wearing a cloak over a chestplate, with a mask that appeared to be constantly exploding outward with black crystal pieces.

Luc heard something and sat up in bed. The light wouldn’t turn on.

“I came to convey my regrets,” Dark Shard said in a voice like the grinding of broken glass. His hands were obsidian fragments, flexing. “Your son was not meant to die. It was an unfortunate mistake. The responsible individual has been disciplined.”

“What…” Luc stammered. Naked except for filthy boxer shorts. Half drunk since the funeral. He couldn’t remember, later, what he said to Dark Shard, but none of it had any dignity. He may have begged for death. He was sure he cried and tore his own sheets. He tried, over and over, to imagine that meeting if he’d been Palm Strike.

“Your son was not meant to die,” Dark Shard said again. “We do not waste lives in such a fashion. We would have taken him for ransom, held him in our Pleasuresplinter a day or two, but he would not have been molested in any way. He might have been allowed to sample our dreamflies, which are highly addictive, depending on whether we desired a single ransom payment or an ongoing relationship.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Luc still didn’t know the answer to that question, all this time later. If Dark Shard hadn’t shown up to apologize for Rene’s death, he might not have felt such intense hatred. Luc might have remained a regular broken wreck instead of spending the fortune he’d made from his land-reclamation projects becoming Palm Strike.

The way Dark Shard explained it, they had seized Rene, as a hostage, but then they’d gotten caught in a shootout with a rival group, the Street Commanders. Rene had taken a bullet to the gut, and he was bleeding out. So one of the Shardlings, a man named Jobbo, had cradled Rene in his arms and given him something for the pain.

Rene might have survived if Jobbo hadn’t given him the drugs. The dreamflies thinned his blood and prevented coagulation, so he bled out faster. Plus Rene’s final moments were spent under the effects of a dissociative drug that made him feel lost to the world and slowed everything to a hideous crawl. He died not knowing who he was, or who loved him.

Luc has imagined Rene’s death a million times since Dark Shard described it to him. But in this frozen sensory deprivation tank, he’s living it. Rene’s eyes, like empty wells—the image keeps tormenting Luc. The harder he tries to swim, the deeper he sinks.

5.

When the frozen waves recede and light invades, Luc cries out from deep in his strangulated throat. He’s sure he can’t face reality again, after the endless nightmare. But the light is remorseless, and the cold abandons him. He can move his arms again. At last, the lid of the cryo-module opens, and he’s looking up at a young round face. A girl. Twelve or thirteen. Red hair, in braids.

“I did it,” she says. “Hot wow, I can’t believe I did it.”

“Did what?” Luc tries to sit up, but he’s still too weak. She raises a sippy-cup of something hot and bitter, and pours it down his throat.

“I finally got this thing working. It’s been my project, for years.”

“Years?” Luc blinks. Something is wrong. He can see the chamber behind the girl’s head, and it looks old, broken. The gray serrated walls are bare except for some torn fibers and rough edges, as though every last bit of technology was stripped away long ago.

“Oh, sorry. Yeah.” She leans over further, so she can make eye contact. Her eyes are hazel. “Better start at the beginning. The Endeavour landed, like twenty years ago. Your module was busted, the wake-up sequence failed. There was no way to revive you without killing you. But I’ve been tinkering, every spare moment.”

“Everybody needs a hobby,” Luc grunts.

“Take it slow, okay?” The girl puts a threadbare blanket over him. “There was a lot of stuff here, originally. Procedures and things. You were supposed to watch some video that explained that a hundred and three years have passed on Earth and everyone you knew is dead. Plus any last messages from your loved ones back home. And there was an acclimation chamber to help you adjust to the air and gravity. But that stuff is all gone. Sorry, guy.”

“What’s your name?” This time Luc does manage to sit up.

“I’m Sasha Jacobs. Anyway, you should be glad. We almost ate you. More than once. The whole colony’s starving. Nothing grows here any more—the soil just kills all our crops. You were supposed to be some kind of big-time agriculture expert, right? I figured maybe you could help.”

“Geo-engineer.” Luc shrugs. He’s naked under the blanket. He glares at Sasha until she hands him some pants. “But that was another life, a long time ago. These days, my main skill-set involves finding bad people and making them pay. Someone sabotaged my casket. And whoever it was, they’re going to learn my rule.”

He tugs the itchy red pants on under the blanket and lifts himself up out of the cryo-module, only to collapse in a heap at Sasha’s rawhide-covered feet when his legs won’t support his weight. He twitches and grips his own knees, dry-heaving.

“You might not want to rush into anything,” Sasha says.

6.

Luc and Sasha emerge, not from a spaceship or a survival module, but from a crude hut covered with some kind of rubbery wood, attached in overlapping wedge-shaped slats. There’s no sign of any source of that wood, though—the surrounding area is barren and the ground has a crumbly furrowed consistency, like the surface of a brain made of pale clay. Luc sees no other buildings or signs of civilization, which makes him wonder if they really did hide his cryo-module to save him from being eaten, after all.

The sun is too bright and pale—reminding Luc of the time he experimented with night-vision lenses and someone shone a floodlight in his eyes. In the blanched daylight, Sasha looks a little older. She’s a rangy girl, with arms too long for her torso and a shiny blue dress that might be made out of the upholstery fabric from one of the ship’s escape pods. Her face has freckles and a thin nose that appears to twitch constantly, perhaps in amusement or maybe because he smells bad.

“The air is higher in nitrogen than you’re used to, and the gravity—”

Luc cuts her off. “I remember the briefings. Where’s the colony?”

“Down the hill, a kilometer and a half away.” Sasha gestures. “Everyone is going to want to meet you, if you’re up for it.”

“I’m up for it.” The sooner Luc meets the pool of suspects, which is everyone who was an adult when the ship left Earth, the sooner he can start narrowing it down.

Sasha leads Luc along an unsteady slope covered with loose rocks that jab at his bare feet, and he stumbles repeatedly as the gravity catches him off guard. She keeps talking about the planet, how the other six continents have temperatures too extreme for humans to survive most of the time, but contain massive jungles full of megafauna, including nine-limbed mammoths that swing through a canopy of carnivorous fronds. She wants to visit someday.

They walk maybe three quarters of a kilometer before they reach the first buildings, which are laid out in a pinwheel pattern around the center of the colony, set in a kind of valley. Most of the buildings are made of that same spongy wood, which looks like pumice, only softer. Pipes come out of the houses and disappear into the ground. Wires snake along their rooftops, connecting to junctions on poles.

And then the ground levels out, the buildings grow denser, and the stench clouds Luc’s eyes just as the sights become unbearable. The crumbling shacks, made of a mixture of prefab construction materials from the ship, plus spongy wood, weak drywall and local rocks. The river clogged with effluent, running through the middle of Hopetown. The lashed-together pieces of failing technology. And above it all, the rank odor of wounds and sores that won’t heal properly due to the malnutrition. Luc saw a lot of nightmares, when he was helping to turn Benin into the world’s last breadbasket and visiting the Arkansas refugee camps. But here, no relief workers are coming. He passes a group of teenagers playing listlessly in the street, with arms like twigs and swollen torsos. Older people slump against the unstable walls.

But there’s something else, too—some of the people standing around that ugly modern-art sculpture made of cannibalized spaceship parts at the center of it all have a vacant look in their bloodshot eyes that he knows at a glance. And festering trackmarks on their arms. Luc files that away, for now.

The Survival Module—all that’s left of the Endeavour—is at the other end of Hopetown from where Luc and Sandy came in, along the filthy river and to the right. The dinged-up white structure, the size of the Opera House back home, has been dressed up as a town hall, with a podium and sound system out front, plus someone has painted a decorative gold leaf motif around the entrance using some local plant sludge. Sasha waves hi at the people sitting at desks inside the building, then runs off to tell her mother her amazing news.

“Oh, my lord,” says a middle-aged lady, maybe around fifty, sitting in a repurposed cockpit chair at the rear of the Survival Module, behind a big desk covered with data tablets. “Sasha actually did it. Mr. Deveaux, you don’t know any of us, but you’re famous around these parts: the agriculture expert who didn’t wake up.”

“Tell me what went wrong,” Luc says.

7.

Here’s the secret that almost nobody ever guessed about Palm Strike: he was a brawler. The name “Palm Strike” was an intentional misdirect, to make people believe he was some kind of martial-arts wizard and then catch them off guard with his total lack of skill. People tended to overestimate him, and then underestimate him. He’d had months, not years, of training, but he mostly relied on the healing mojo and the enhanced strength. His detective skills, too, mostly involved punching people and asking questions.

So Luc sits there, for hours, and listens to the colony’s leaders talk about their incredibly meticulous terraforming process and all the things they did before and after planetfall to prepare the soil for farming. The tests that revealed nothing wrong, and the excellent early harvests. Inside, he’s still raging and traumatized by his endless cryo-nightmares, but he maintains a totally blank expression. Luc has to believe that whoever sabotaged his cryo-unit also made the voyage here—maybe even Dark Shard himself—and at some point Luc will have someone to hit. And that person will already know that Luc is Palm Strike, and will therefore fear him. He studies each of these people, looking for the signs of that fear. He’s a lousy detective, but he knows all about fear.

“We brought bioengineered microbes from Earth that were supposed to neutralize any toxins in the soil and correct the pH balance,” one burly man named Ron McGregor is saying, “but most of them died in flight, due to cosmic radiation exposure in that section of the ship.” McGregor’s the right age and almost the right build, but he’s a fussy bureaucrat whose biggest worry is that Luc will make him look incompetent. He’s neither afraid of Luc nor happy to see him.

They’re in a conference room behind the town hall, which turns out to be the ship’s flight deck with all of the equipment and panels removed and a big table made out of some kind of polished slate, surrounded by a dozen chairs. Luc begins to feel weary after just a couple hours of this briefing. The gravity takes its toll, as do the aftereffects of years of deathly cold and cryo-nightmares. But he wants to look all these people over while they’re still surprised by his return from the dead.

Luc keeps drinking the hot brew, made from some kind of noxious weed that they also use for clothing, and it keeps him awake.

“We tested the soil and it was perfect.” The governor, or president, of Newfoundland, is that woman from the town hall, Rebecca Hoffman. Attractive for her age, which is roughly the age Luc would be if he’d woken on time. Hair in a messy gray bob, blouse made of some local algae. “Five or six years of decent harvests. And then the crops just… stopped growing.”

Ron McGregor keeps interrupting himself and nodding at his own points. He talks about the heavy terraforming engine that cleared the local vegetation, removed the biggest obstructions, and wiped out the local pests—these horrible bugs got everywhere and into everything, at first.

Happiest to see Luc is probably Bertram Cargill, an old man who has hair coming out of his ears that matches his fuzzy vest. And open sores on his knuckles and wrists. Cargill took over as the water and soil expert when Luc didn’t wake up, and he found the river that provided irrigation and drinking water, one tributary of which is now a sewer running through Hopetown. Plus the geyser and hot springs that supply heat and geothermal power to their dwellings.

“Geyser,” Luc says at last. “That explains the brain-like furrow pattern I noticed on the ground when I arrived. Soil near a geyser is often highly acidic. Plus those hot springs probably have bacteria living in them, kilometers under the surface, and they could be producing toxins we’ve never even encountered before.”

Everybody pauses—even McGregor—waiting for Luc to finish his thought. “The mystery here isn’t why the soil stopped being fertile,” he says. “It’s why it ever was.”

Luc catches up with Sasha, who’s hanging around the edge of town, basking in her heroism. Everybody in the world has been patting her on the back, and she’s got a crowd of other kids standing around listening to her triumphant narrative of how she cobbled together a new wake-up circuit out of spit and dead branches. The kids are all Sasha’s age, give or take—chances are, nobody’s wanted to have children in this colony, since the food started running out.

“Hey,” she says. “How did it go? Want to meet my mom? She’s dying to meet you.”

They walk toward the edge of Hopetown, the opposite direction from the hut where Luc woke up. He’s going to need some shoes, or better yet boots. Along the way, he sees plenty more emaciated people shuffling like the living dead, with tiny punctures in their arms. Even amongst the starving people with hair like dead grass and skin like bedsores, the addicts stand out.

“Tell me about the drugs,” Luc says when they’re far enough away from the center of town, where the ramshackle huts are spaced further apart.

“I don’t use them,” Sasha says, shrugging even as she swings her arms mid-stride. “I’m not that dumb.”

“Good for you,” Luc says. The exhaustion and strain are catching up with him, and he’s about to keel over. He’s famished, too, which means he’s becoming a real citizen of Newfoundland.

“Every now and then, Hoffman’s peacekeepers turn the town upside down, looking for the source. She gives speeches. And they’ve actually executed a few drug-dealers, just beheaded them. But you gotta understand, we’ve been starving a long time. People need something to distract them from the inevitable.”

“Even here.” Luc is clenching his fists, staring at the worry-lined earth. Not dirt. Dead microorganisms. “Even here. Goddamnit.”

“From what I hear, they have a recipe,” says Sasha. “The ship’s engine still had a lot of coolant left over after landing, and they siphoned everything out of the cryo-units, except yours, of course. Plus some fungi that grow on the coast have hallucinogenic properties, in very tiny doses. They trade it for food rations, or bits of Earth clothing and personal items.”

A few weeks of the year, the nearest continent cools down enough for humans to travel there and do some big game hunting. But the last expedition never made it back, and the colony won’t survive long enough to make another hunting trip, Sasha says.

Sasha’s mother is a cheerful, leather-faced woman named Clarissa, with curly hair that was probably dirty blonde but has gone platinum thanks to the unrelenting sun. She insists that Luc sit down at her dining-room table, which is made of that same rock as the table back in the conference room. She gives him some of her dead husband’s clothes, including a decent pair of boots that made the trip from Earth. (Luc’s own personal effects from Earth were stolen years ago.) Like every other adult here, her tongue is swollen, making her diction hard to understand at first. She fusses over Luc, feeding him a watery stew with some tough roots in it. Then she insists that Luc should rest—there’s a kind of hammock in the front room of the four-room house, that he can sleep in.

Luc lays on the hammock, but he can’t close his eyes without seeing Rene bleeding out, now filtered through his cryogenic visions. The broken-off piece of rock inside his stomach that kept him going out every night and pummeling criminals is back, sharper than ever, since he spent a hundred and twenty years having the same nightmare.

8.

In the morning, Sasha’s mother is gone, but Sasha gives Luc a single strip of pungent jerky left over from some great beast they killed on their last successful sortie to the jungle continent to the north. “Save your food,” Luc says, but she insists and he chews a bit of it. The best he can say is that digesting it will keep his stomach busy for hours. The house is dusty—that loose soil gets everywhere—and it makes him itch. Soil erosion. Wooden structures everywhere, but no trees.

“They gave me a few days off my chores and studies,” Sasha says, “to help you acclimate, since I was the one who brought you back. This ought to be planting season, but that’s been delayed indefinitely.”

Luc walks around the colony, trying to get used to the gravity, letting everyone get an eyeful of him. Something about that cryo-freeze has recharged his healing mojo. Old aches hurt less, even in 1.27-G. Looking everybody in the eyes, he sees signs of long-term starvation, worse even than what he saw in Arkansas—but also lots of dilated pupils (painful in this more intense sunlight, he guesses), no teeth, and puncture scars. Junkies: They assault anyone who comes too close, with a terrifying fury but no strength. Too far gone. Even if he could feed those people, he can’t save most of them.

Becky Hoffman shows Luc the last of the seed vault, with Sasha on tiptoes behind them. Corn, wheat, some sorghum. But not much of any. Even with a bumper crop, you couldn’t plant enough to feed 3,000 people for another 15 months.

“Don’t tell anybody what you’ve seen here,” Hoffman whispers. “I’m frankly terrified of what will happen if people discover how hopeless it is. We already have a huge drug problem, and a lot of unrest.” A lot of people took to eating the clay near the river last year, just to feel full, until dysentery and some excruciating thistle-shaped parasite killed a few dozen within a month, she says.

Luc glances over at Sasha, and can’t read anything from her face.

Many colonies, back on Earth, died within one generation. Of the ten extrasolar planets that humans have colonized thus far, only three still have people living on them. Including Newfoundland.

The seed vault, behind the town hall, is one of two places in Newfoundland that has a guard, wearing body armor and toting a Brazelton fast-repeater, the kind they used for crowd control back on Earth. The other place is the food dispensary right off the town square, where Sasha goes once per day to collect her family’s food rations in a red box while two people with clubs and guns watch carefully.

Luc heads into the fields, stretching out to the horizon, where Cargill irrigated using river water, and can’t find egregious fault with Cargill’s work. The soil, though, is toxic, arid, acrid, a dead waste. He kneels in the dirt, his skin getting burnt and then unburning as the healing mojo works. He leans against a wooden post.

The sun goes down and the first of three moons is already up. Sasha comes to find Luc, who is kicking the dirt and cursing, punching the wooden post until his hand is bleeding and crammed with splinters.

“Hey, calm down,” Sasha says. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

Luc’s only answer is a roar and another swing of his fist, hard enough to smash the wood to splinters. He looks at his own bloody hand and backs off, shaking off Sasha’s attempt to see to him.

“It’s hopeless,” he says. “I could have done something. I could have stopped this. You didn’t all have to die. But somebody sabotaged my capsule. Whoever did that has murdered this colony, and I’m here just in time to watch it rot. And they’re probably the same person who’s profiting off all this misery. Selling drugs to people who are living in hell.”

The wounds on Luc’s hand are already closing. He sits in the dirt, convulsed with pure anger, lurching into his own knees again and again. He can’t think, he can’t see a way forward. Nothing but dead soil all around him.

“For the first time ever,” he says when his rage has spun down, “I believe my son was lucky.”

Sasha sits near him, but keeps her distance, probably because he looks as if he’ll take her head off if she gets too close.

“I’m sorry,” Luc says. “I didn’t mean to go nuts on you.”

“It’s okay,” Sasha says. “I guess this is a big adjustment. You get used to seeing people lose their minds, around here.” She hesitates, then: “Hey, I wanted to ask you something.”

“Sure.”

She’s studying him. “When I first got you out of your coffin, you said something about your main skill being justice. I can’t remember the exact words. What were you talking about?”

“I lost someone, back on Earth. The people who did it needed to pay. So I turned myself into something else. A crime-fighter. I spent millions of dollars to become this whole other creature. When I got out of my casket and it was twenty years too late, I had a moment of bravado. It was like a defense mechanism. Forget it happened.”

“So you’re not going to get justice? For your cryo-unit, and everything else?”

“I don’t know,” Luc says, realizing that’s the truth. “I’ve been biding my time these last couple days, but now I’m not sure what the point would be. The guilty and the innocent will both die the same way, soon enough.”

“When I was working on your cryo-pod, I had this idea that I would wake you up, and you would burst out of there and save us all. Maybe with a fanfare, like in that videox they let me watch before the ship’s entertainment system finally gave out. And when I did wake you up and you said all that stuff, part of me was thrilled because you really sounded like… I don’t know, like someone who saves people.”

The light of the first moon draws shadows under her eyes, while a second moon sneaks up on her, illuminating her hair and her rough jacket. She looks as if she’s in the middle of one of those rite-of-passage moments where you surrender some of your illusions on the way to adulthood. Something is breaking forever inside her. He has no idea what he’s supposed to do about this.

What would Palm Strike do? He wouldn’t be sitting here in the dirt kissing his knees. Palm Strike would find a way to save the colony and take down the pushers.

“Can you help me get some gear?” he asks Sasha. “I need a helmet, body armor, gloves. It needs to be black, or I need some dye. Do you know where I can score some?”

She stares at him, her eyes ginormous. Then, slowly, she nods.

9.

Palm Strike never had a sidekick. For a while, he let Josiah create a fake identity as his partner No-Shadow, not to do any actual fighting but to talk to the cops once they stopped trying to kill Palm Strike. No-Shadow’s outfit was all cape and full-face mask, plus some gloves with spikes coming out of them. Ridiculous.

One night, Palm Strike got back from busting heads but No-Shadow was nowhere to be found. Turned out No-Shadow had gone on a ride-along with a pair of detectives, Lancaster and Marsh, so they could talk his ear off.

“They think you’re doing more harm than good,” Josiah explained when he got home. “You shut down the Street Commanders and took out some of the Shardlings, but in the process you’ve only strengthened Dark Shard. Both by eliminating his competition and culling his weakest people.”

“You shouldn’t judge an exterminator halfway through a job,” Luc grunted.

“But that’s the thing. It’s like, during the Great Leap Forward, Mao sent every peasant in China out to kill sparrows, on the theory that sparrows were eating seeds and reducing the harvests. But once the sparrows were all gone, turned out they had been eating locusts, which had been eating the grain. It was an ecosystem. When all the sparrows were gone, everybody starved.”

Josiah said these things while he was making a sandwich for Luc, still wearing his big black cape and unfeasibly spiky gloves as he stood at the marble kitchen counter.

“Maybe Palm Strike isn’t the best solution,” Luc said after he stopped laughing at No-Shadow. “But he’s all I’m capable of, right now.”

The next few days, Luc spends every waking hour traveling around and taking soil samples, and every night watching the rotating cast of hoodlums selling drugs in the town square. He hasn’t seen much in the way of “peacekeepers” in this town of three thousand souls, but the dealers are there from sundown to sunup. They mostly trade drugs for food, which means there’s a stockpile somewhere.

You wouldn’t want to be the only one eating when everyone else is starving to death. You’d find out the hard way that nobody is an island.

One day, when Luc’s sitting in front of the house, Clarissa comes out and sits with him. He is trying to nibble his breakfast so he can give most of it to Sasha. She’s growing, and he has his healing mojo. “Starvation isn’t as cool as when I was a teenager trying to be a ballerina back on Earth,” Clarissa says, with sympathy. “It’s more like a chronic pain, and exhaustion. I can’t think straight and I feel like I’m constantly getting sick. It just sucks.”

“Starvation was pretty widespread back on Earth, too,” Luc says. “It’s just that here, there’s no class of people who aren’t starving. It’s more egalitarian.”

“God, this colony is such a clusterfuck.” Clarissa kicks the white dirt. “We all had jobs, most of which turned out to be irrelevant. I was supposed to be the marine biologist. We’ve barely studied the ocean here. We cannibalized the diving equipment early on and we haven’t been able to catch any marine life at all. It’s a joke. So now I’m Becky Hoffman’s assistant instead.”

“I bet Hoffman’s an okay boss,” Luc says. Clarissa just snorts.

There’s a long pause, both of them watching the sky turn pale. “Be careful with Sasha,” Clarissa says out of nowhere. “That whole time she was working on your pod, she was trying to develop her mechanic skills. But I also caught her looking at your face sometimes, as if she thought you were going to replace her dad or something.”

“I’m very comfortable having people project onto me,” said Luc.

“Just don’t break her heart, okay?” she says. Luc nods, slowly.

At night, down near the dirtiest part of the river, people gather in a three-walled structure and sing, holding hands and swaying on their feet. Luc hears their muffled chanting as he stakes out the drug dealers, hiding behind the Town Hall’s partially disassembled ancillary cockpit.

Two dawns in a row, Luc tries to follow the dealers when they leave the town square with their ill-gotten food supply. But both nights, the food disappears. He can’t see where they’re stashing it. They leave their cozy perch, walk around that ugly sculpture, go through the tight space between the two municipal buildings, then out toward the polluted estuary that runs through Hopetown. By that point, they’ve ditched their crate of food and they’re swinging their unladen arms, eager to crash out. Their route takes them right near the guard watching the food dispensary, but she doesn’t worry about people carrying food around, just about them taking food from the communal store. Luc searches every spot the dealers passed on their route. No sign.

Sasha has found him a banged-up helmet, a chest-plate, and a single ancient glove. “When do we make our move?” she asks every few minutes.

Luc keeps thinking about Mao and the sparrows. The pests that turned out to be essential. And then he thinks about the terraforming process.

On the fourth morning since he woke from his long sleep, he gets up and tells Sasha he needs to do something on his own. Then he takes off walking, toward the polar geyser. He walks for hours, until his feet are throbbing and the sunburn overtaxes his healing mojo. He hasn’t taken a long walk in the wilderness since Rene was born, and he’s forgotten how giant the sky can loom, or how it feels to be miles away from other people. His mind empties as the landscape unfolds, ridge after ridge, and he’s weirdly calm. But he’s also stewing. He’s jaw-grinding mad at Sasha for waking him up in the first place, at Clarissa for telling him not to break Sasha’s heart, and at this whole colony for being so perfectly self-destructive. He keeps yelling at people in his head. As he passes the geyser, it seems totally inert, a dry depression, but it could blow without warning. He keeps walking, the sun in his eyes, until he sees the first silhouettes on the horizon. The sun is behind him by the time he gets to the trees.

Up close, the white spikes rise up so far they seem to converge in the sky. Thousands of them, singing with the wind. Zigzag spikes extend from them, and they remind him of a power-staff Palm Strike experimented with wielding for a few months. Luc hasn’t felt anything like joy since he lost Rene, but he feels an unaccustomed thrill of wonder in the middle of all this.

Then he crouches down and opens his bag of equipment. Time to get to work. He grabs a soil sample and adds nanosensors to it.

The sun’s almost gone and two moons are taunting him, and he still can’t make sense of how these things live, or what they’re doing. They have no roots, no leaves. They fix the soil and make it fertile, that much is clear from his first samples—but they’re too far from the colony’s current site to farm here without relocating everyone. Which could actually be impossible, given that the colony only has a few small ATVs, and the exertion of moving would kill most of the colonists even quicker.

But if Luc could figure out what these things are, and how they live… He takes samples of their “bark,” he digs around them, he makes scans. He has a grinding headache, but he keeps working.

It’s almost a relief when Luc hears a loud crack and feels a gouging pain in his chest, and looks down to realize he’s been shot. He keels over, painting the white dust crimson. His chest is spurting blood like that geyser. He feels everything going black for a moment.

A moment later, he hears three sets of footsteps, feels their heavy tread as they stand around him. “We’ll bury him out here,” one woman says. “They’ll never know.”

“They better not find out,” a man says. “They still think this clown can feed the starving masses.”

“We had no choice,” a second man responds. “He was getting too close to the truth.”

The man who spoke last kicks Luc’s body. And Luc grabs his foot with both hands and twists, snapping the man’s ankle. As Luc rises, he flings the first man at the second, and they both fall in a tangle. The woman is the one with the gun, and she’s raising it to aim at his head. He knocks it out of her grasp.

Fighting in high gravity is everything Luc feared. He keeps misjudging his swings and overbalancing. And then just as he finally connects with the second guy’s neck, he remembers to pull his punch. His whole fighting style is adapted to a world of paramedics and ambulances. But even a fairly minor injury could wind up being fatal this far from any doctors, and he has no idea how bad sepsis can be here with the local bacteria. So he can’t afford to hurt these people too much, even as they’re trying to kill him. They take turns kicking him and lashing him with their fists, with each blow landing harder than it would on Earth. Luc’s head rings, and it dawns on him that he’s on a pretty good trajectory to lose this fight.

The one bright spot is they’ve lost their only gun somewhere down in the billowing dirt. He finds it first, with his foot, and he steps down on it until he hears metal splinter. After that, he staggers out of the way of the larger man’s roundhouse and grabs him, bringing his head and the woman’s together with as much gentleness as he can manage. They fall on either side of him. The last man, the one whose ankle he broke, cowers as Luc grabs his stubbly throat.

Time to put on the best Palm Strike voice. Sounds throatier in the high-nitrogen air. “Where is Dark Shard?” he bellows. “Who sabotaged my cryo-unit?”

“I don’t know.” The scrawny man weeps. “What are you talking about? I don’t even understand.” Broken Ankle is staining his pants, and Luc believes he has no idea what Luc is asking. At least Broken Ankle gives up the location of the lab where the drugs are manufactured: the basement of a red house upriver from the town where the water isn’t too polluted.

Luc lets Broken Ankle fall next to his friends, then notices that the “tree” he was examining now has a hole in it, thanks to the bullet that went through Luc’s chest. And he catches a glimpse of something dark in motion. A lot of somethings, in fact.

Luc puts a swab inside the hole, and pulls out a number of tiny mites, the biggest of them no more than a centimeter wide. They’re bright red with yellow stripes, and they have long proboscises and a dozen crooked legs each. If you happened to notice them, you’d think they were akin to termites. They’re not, though. They do eat the “trees” from the inside, but they also consume the surrounding soil and detoxify it, releasing nutrients in a form that the tree can use. Symbiosis. He puts one of the mites into a soil sample he collected earlier, from the barren fields near the colony, and dumps them into a continuous monitor tube. Pretty soon, the soil shows up as fertile.

Luc analyzes a few of these mites using every test he can think of, then on a hunch he bends over Broken Ankle’s face with his swab full of bugs. “Open up,” he growls. Broken Ankle tries to clamp his mouth shut, but Luc threatens to smack him again, so he opens up and takes his medicine. And seems to suffer no ill effects, at least not during the time it takes Luc to haul him back to the thugs’ vehicle, an all-terrain buggy parked on a nearby rise, and drive him back to the colony.

“That’s the nicest thing I’ve ever force-fed to someone like you,” Luc tells Broken Ankle, who has wiry gray hair, freckles and a habitual look of terror and alarm. Habitual the whole time Luc has known him, at least. Broken Ankle tells Luc again where they make the drugs, but not where they put the food they collect from the addicts.

Luc leaves Broken Ankle in a ditch within crawling distance of Hopetown, then he goes back to Sasha’s house. When he gets there, there’s no sign of her anywhere. Clarissa is sleeping in a chair near the door, but she wakes up when Luc comes in. “Where’s Sasha?” Clarissa asks, before Luc can ask her the same thing. “I thought she must have gone off with you.”

“No,” Luc says. “I’ve been gone all day, and half the night.”

Luc searches the house and its surroundings for any sign of Sasha, convinced that the same assholes who tried to kill him must have sent someone to take care of her. He feels the familiar jagged rock in his stomach. If they harm her, he will forget his earlier mercy; he will rain permanent injury down on them.

Just as Luc is about to run back to interrogate Broken Ankle one more time, Clarissa notices her oceanographer kit is gone, including the binoculars and the special shoes that keep you from getting yanked away by the dangerous waves. “She’s gone to the beach,” Clarissa says, as if this is something Sasha does a lot. Go to the beach, in the middle of the night. “It’s where her father is,” Clarissa adds. She shrugs and shakes her head when Luc asks if she wants to come along.

Sure enough, Sasha is sitting on a giant rock, dangling her giant shoes in the froth kicked up by the giant waves. Luc comes and sits beside her, but he doesn’t say anything.

“My dad went on one of those expeditions to the northern jungle,” Sasha says, staring at the rough surf. “He hated hot weather. We buried his body right over there.” She points at a rockpile that’s half underwater.

“I was worried about you,” Luc says.

“I thought you had decided to ditch us,” Sasha said. “Or something happened to you. You just took off, without any explanation. I figured we’d seen the last of you.”

“I’m not used to having to explain myself to anyone.” The moons lace the angry water with silver lines. The air is brine-scented. “I had to do something on my own. And I’m not sure you want to be around for what I’m going to do next, either.”

She turns and looks at him. “Why’s that?”

“I just… You know all of these people, right? You grew up with them. This is a small town, I keep forgetting how small. I just hurt some people and I’m about to hurt some more people. I figure that could be hard for you to watch.”

“I want to watch.” She looks fierce. “I want to help. My dad died for this place.”

“Okay. Did you find me a second glove?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I have a complete outfit, in a crate under my bed. It’s even sort of black, sort of.”

“Okay. One more question,” Luc says. “Do you know anything about setting explosives?”

She shakes her head.

“Would you like to learn?”

Sasha nods, slowly.

10.

WHo was Dark Shard? Was Dark Shard even a person? Did different people take turns wearing that costume? Luc spent all this time thinking of Dark Shard as his nemesis, but he knew nothing about him. Luc is slowly letting go of the idea that Dark Shard might have made the trip to Newfoundland, because the more he sees of the local drug dealers, the less they resemble Dark Shard’s crew. He’s never going to get perfect closure, no matter what happens. This isn’t even about him.

Somehow, realizing this makes Luc feel lighter, even as his improvised Palm Strike uniform is weighing him down. He has a tough time conjuring the menace of Palm Strike with a tween girl on his heels chattering loudly about righting the colony’s wrongs.

“Listen,” Palm Strike tells Sasha. “When we get to the drug lab, I’m going to need you to hang back, okay? You to see what happens next, that’s fine—but don’t get in harm’s way. I can’t be hurt, not really, but you can.”

“I’m going to get hurt, one way or the other, if we don’t fix this. I chose to come along and help. We’re in this together.”

“Yeah. Just, I don’t know, be careful. Your mom would kill me.”

Upriver from town, where the water is still relatively clean, a red building houses an industrial laundry facility. A dozen people with guns and machetes are guarding it in the middle of the night.

Palm Strike signals for Sasha to take cover, and uses the river to mask his footsteps, sloshing only slightly as he wades upstream. Then he climbs a jagged rock, leaps, and catches the edge of the building’s roof with one hand. Moments later, he drops off the other side and lands on top of the man with the biggest gun. After that, it’s one big knife fight in close quarters, with Palm Strike using the high gravity to his advantage for a change, staying low and letting his opponents overbalance. He brings his forearm down onto one man’s neck, while headbutting the woman who’s trying to choke him. Gently. No life-threatening injuries. He executes one move straight out of Rene’s high-gravity dance routine, but there’s no time to dwell on the past.

In the midst of the fracas, Palm Strike keeps moving, heading for the door they were guarding, which leads to a basement.

In the basement, there’s a giant vat of ochre sludge, surrounded by people wearing masks and smocks. They’re all shooting at him. He’s finally starting to like this planet.

11.

Becky Hoffman is still asleep when Palm Strike comes through her bedroom window. The tableau is so reminiscent of Dark Shard visiting Luc’s bedroom that he has to shudder. He gets out of the way long enough to let Sasha slip in behind him. Hoffman sits up in bed and stifles a gasp when she sees his dark shape looming over her bed. “Deveaux?” she says. “What the hell are you—”

“I solved the food problem,” he growls. “There are billions of tiny mites that live in the soil around those trees, the ones you destroyed with your terraforming procedures. They eliminate the toxins and acidity from the soil. They’ll have to be reintroduced to your growing areas, which will be a slow painful process. In the mean time, though, the bugs themselves are high in protein, renewable, and easy to transport.”

“That’s great news.” She blinks. “Why didn’t you just come to my office in a few hours to tell me?”

“Because three people tried to kill me tonight. I couldn’t figure out what secret was so important they’d be willing to kill to protect it. Everybody knew they were trading drugs for food, so that couldn’t be it. And meanwhile, I still couldn’t work out where they were putting the food they collected from the addicts. Until I finally realized: there was only one place on the drug dealers’ route at the end of the night that they could be leaving the food. The colony’s food dispensary. Where it came from in the first place. And that led me to you.”

“It’s a perfect system.” Misery displaces Hoffman’s last traces of sleepiness. “We hand out the same food rations, over and over.”

“That’s insane,” Sasha says, from the foot of Hoffman’s bed, where she’s standing. Hoffman startles, noticing the girl for the first time.

“We would have run out of food by now,” Becky Hoffman says to Luc. “We would all have starved.”

“Don’t explain to me,” Palm Strike snarls. “Explain to her.” He jerks a gloved hand in Sasha’s direction. “She’s one of your people. She was born here. This colony is all she’s ever known. You have to explain to her.”

“You’re too young to understand,” Hoffman pleads with Sasha. “We—I—had to make impossible choices. There wasn’t enough food. And it was a mercy. The people who use our drug don’t feel any hunger pains, and they don’t even notice their bodies shutting down. It gives people like you and Clarissa, good people, a chance to survive.”

Sasha stares at the colony’s leader, her mom’s boss, with tears streaming down her face. Luc has to remind himself she wanted to see this. “I don’t…” she gropes for an unaccustomed formality. “I don’t recognize your authority any longer.”

“I didn’t set up the drug operation,” Becky Hoffman says. She’s sweating, and inching her hand toward something under her pillow. A silent alarm? Her guards are already taken care of. “I found out about it. I told them they could work for me, or be executed. I turned it into a way to save the colony. This was the only way to ration the food that wouldn’t lead to riots.”

Becky Hoffman makes her move, pulling out a power-welder of the sort that you’d use to repair hull damage on a starship in flight. It’s the size and shape of a big fork, like you’d use on a pot roast. At close range, it would tear a hole in Palm Strike that even his healing mojo couldn’t begin to fix. He’s already on her, trying to pin her wrist, but she slips under his guard. She brings the power welder up and activates it, bringing it within a few centimeters of Palm Strike’s chest.

“Now,” he tells Sasha.

Sasha squeezes the remote she rigged up, and an explosion in the distance rattles the survival module so violently the emergency impact alarms go off, like a dozen electronic goats bleating. Hoffman’s grip loosens on the power-welder long enough for Palm Strike to knock it out of her grasp.

Palm Strike looks into Hoffman’s tear-soaked face and unleashes The Voice. “That was your drug lab. Next time, it’ll be your office. Your days of choosing who gets to live are over. You are going to help me fix this mess.” And then Palm Strike gestures for Sasha to go back out the window they came in. He takes the power-welder with him.

12.

Luc digs until his arms are throbbing, and he’s waist deep in the hard, unyielding earth. Probably deep enough—he doesn’t want to hit one of those underground hot springs. Then he clambers back out, and tosses the helmet, safety vest, gloves and leggings into the hole. It’s not like burying the actual Palm Strike costume, but close enough. And if he needs safety gear later, he’ll know where some’s buried.

“Do you want to say some words?” Sasha asks. She’s hit a growth spurt, and her wrists and ankles are miles long. Even in the higher gravity, you get human beanpoles. Amazing.

“Don’t be stupid,” Luc grunts.

“We are gathered here today to remember Palm Strike,” Sasha intones.

“Cut it out,” Luc says. “Seriously.”

“He was a good man, even though we never knew who he really was. Some said he was a sea slug that oozed inside some old safety gear and pretended to be a man. But he fought for justice.”

Luc tunes out her terrible funeral oration, starts filling in the hole. He pauses just long enough to turn and look out at the farmland, where they’ve managed to transplant a handful of the “trees” from the other side of the geyser, and a few acres of sorghum are being planted. Too close together. You’ll want at least a couple feet between plants, or the mites will shred the roots. He’ll need to talk to McGregor about that. He’s almost done filling the hole, and Sasha is still nattering.

“—and he dedicated himself to helping people, unless they had really gross teeth or bad breath, in which case they were on their own.”

Luc slings the shovel over his shoulder, and wrestles with the temptation to tell her to shut the hell up for once. Instead, he just shrugs and says, “I knew this was a bad idea.”

The sun is going down. The parade of moons begins. Luc turns and walks back the way they came. Sasha doesn’t quit blabbing the whole way back to the colony, which is still filled with the susurration of a thousand people moaning in the grasp of drug withdrawal, like souls crawling out of hell. Part of Luc feels compassion at the sound, but another part of him finds the din weirdly comforting. It sounds like home.

I’ve Got the Music in Me

“Have you ever gotten a song stuck in your head, and couldn’t get it out?” The woman asking the question wore one of those new frogskin one-pieces, with false eyelashes that looked fiberoptic. She leaned on the bar in my direction.

I shrugged and drank. “Maybe, I don’t know.” I was busy obsessing about my sick dog. Moxie was my best friend, but they’d said the tests alone would cost hundreds, with no guarantee.

The woman, Mia I think, kept talking about brains that wouldn’t let go of songs. “You know how a song loops around and drowns out everything else in your skull?” I nodded, and she smiled. “Sometimes it’s like a message from your subconscious. Your brain blasts sad lyrics to wake you to a submerged depression.”

“I guess.”

“Or you could be overworked. Or sexually frustrated. It’s like an early warning system.” She beckoned another drink. The mention of sex jumped out of her wordflow like a spawning salmon. I forgot all about my dog, turned to face her.

“I see what you mean,” I said.

“They’re funny, songs. They drill into your head and form associations.” She batted those shiny lashes. “They trigger memories, just the way smells do.”

“You’re absolutely right.” I was thinking, do I have condoms?

She asked me about my past loves, and whether there were pieces of music that came unbidden to mind when I thought of them. I struggled to dredge up a memory to please this woman, her taut body so close to mine I could feel the coolness of the tiny frogs whose hides she wore.

“Yeah, now that I think about it, there was this one song…”

From Section 1923, Mental copyright enforcement field manual.

Subsection 1, Probable Cause:

Do not bring in suspects without an ironclad case, and avoid any appearance of entrapment. Do not apprehend someone merely because he/she whistles under his/her breath or bobs his/her head to music nobody else can hear. To demonstrate that someone has stored copyrighted music in his/her brain in violation of the Cranial Millenium Copyright Act, you must obtain a definitive statement, such as:

1) “Whenever I see the object of my smothered desire I hear “Sunshine of Your Love” by Cream in my head. This is the full album version, complete with trademark guitar solo and clearly articulated rhythm track.”

2) “I always tune out my boss when he talks to me, and instead conjure up a near-digital-quality playback of “Bring Tha Bling Bling” by Pimpstyle in my mind. The remix with that Madonna sample.”

3) “Following the death of my loved one, I listened to the Parade album by Prince so many times I know the whole thing by heart now.”

Note: the above examples are illustrative and not all-encompassing. Other utterances also could prove the suspect is guilty of keeping protected music in Cranial Audio File format, as prohibited by law.

Subsection 2, Apprehending the suspect:

As soon as I admitted that yeah, that “Pimp Your Bubba” song wouldn’t stop infesting my mind no matter how much good music I fed my ears, the woman went violent. She pulled out a badge and twisted my arm behind me. Steel cinched my wrists, turned me into a perp. “You have the right,” she said.

In her car, she talked to me through a rusty mesh cordoning the back seat. “I’d put on the radio, but you might steal again.”

“What have I done?”

“Don’t pretend. Your mental piracy is blatantly illegal.”

“But everyone said that law was unenforceable—”

“I got your confession right here on tape. And we’ll get more out of you. The brain’s a computer, and yours is jam-packed with stolen goods.”

I was terrified. I could be held for days. What would happen to Moxie?

“Take my advice, kid.” We turned onto a driveway with a guard post and tilting arm. The woman showed a card and the arm rose. “Just relax and tell them everything. It’ll be fun, like a personal tour through your musical memories. Like getting stoned with a friend and digging some tunes. Then you just plea bargain and skip outta here.”

Subsection 3, Questioning the suspect:

Ask questions like:

• What sort of music did you listen to in high school?

• Here is a piece of your clothing which we confiscated. We’ll give it back if you tell us what song it brings to mind.

• I can see you’re angry. Is there an angry song in your thoughts?

• Complete this guitar riff for me. Na na na NAH na na…

I kept asking over and over, whom have I hurt? Who suffers if I have recall of maybe a hundred songs? They had answers—the record companies, the musicians, the media, all suffered from my self-reliance. I didn’t buy it.

“This whole thing is bullshit,” I said.

The two guys in shades looked at each other. “Guy’s got a right to face his accuser,” one said.

“You figure it’s time to bring in the injured party?” the other said.

They both nodded. They took their gray-suited selves out of the interrogation cube. I squirmed in my chair, arms manacled and head in a vice.

They were gone for hours. I tried to relax, but the restraints kinked my circulation.

I heard noises outside the door. A scrawny guy with a fuschia pompadour and sideburns wandered in. He wore a t-shirt with a picture of himself, which made him easier to recognize because I’d seen that picture a million times.

“You’re Dude Boy,” I said.

“Pizzeace,” said Dude Boy. “You been ripping me off.”

“No I haven’t.” I fidgeted in bondage. “I don’t even like you.” I remembered when Dude Boy was on the cover of every magazine from Teen Beat to Rolling Stone, and that fucking song was on the air every minute. “Your song sucked aardvark tit. They played it so often I started hearing it when I brushed my teeth, which really—” Oh. Shit.

“See? You admit it. Thief.”

“But—”

“And you never bought a copy, ya?”

“Yeah, but—It sucked, man.”

“It was just so catchy and hooky, ya? You had to have it, Mr. Sticky Fingers.”

“Catchy’s one word for it. You could also try, ‘annoyingly repetitive.’ How many times can you say ‘You’re So Cute I Wanna Puke’ in one song?”

“That’s the hook, bo.”

“So I always wondered what happened to you after that one hit. You dropped out of sight.”

The agate eyes I remembered from VH1 came close. "You killed my career, bo. You and all the others who used my song for your skull soundtracks until you got sick of me. I didn’t ask to have my creation overexposed in your noggin. It’s all your fault."

“So now you’re working for these creeps?"

“It’s a job until reality TV calls.”

He kept staring. He’d always looked goofy, but never before scary. “We’re like intimate, ya know. I seduced ya with my hookitude, and in return you copped a feel of the DB while I slept. It’s good to be close at last.” For a moment I feared he’d kiss me. I tried to turn away, but no dice.

Then at the last second he whipped around and kicked the wall. “You kidnapped my baby!” He turned back. Spit painted my cheeks. “So here’s the deal. We take this thang to court, I nail your colon to the wall. Or you cop a plea. Small fine, plus an implant. You get off lightly, bo.”

“Implant?"

“Yes or no?

“What implant?

“Last chance. Yes or no?”

Most of the time, the implant doesn’t bother me. If I get emotional, like when I buried Moxie, it kicks in just as a tune swells inside me. Then instead of the music, I hear Dude Boy screaming, “Thief!” for like thirty seconds. It really screwed me up this one time I was giving a presentation at work. I was one of the first to get implanted, but now they’re everywhere. It’s become such a cultural phenom that a new hit song samples the sound the implant makes. They had to pay Dude Boy royalties, of course.

The Time Travel Club

Nobody could decide what should be the first object to travel through time. Malik offered his car keys. Jerboa held up an action figure. But then Lydia suggested her one-year sobriety coin, and it seemed too perfect to pass up. After all, the coin had a unit of time on it, as if it came from a realm where time really was a denomination of currency. And they were about to break the bank of time forever, if this worked.

Lydia handed over the coin, no longer shiny due to endless thumb-worrying. And then she had a small anxiety attack. “Just as long as I get it back,” she said, trying to keep the edge out of her voice.

“You will,” said Madame Alberta with a smile. “This coin, we send a mere one minute into the future. It reappears in precisely the same place from which it disappears.”

Lydia would have been nervous about the first test of the time machine in Madame Alberta’s musty dry laundry room in any case. After all they’d been through to make this happen, the stupid thing had to work. But now, she felt like a piece of herself—a piece she had fought for—was about to vanish, and she would need to have faith. She sucked at having faith.

Madame Alberta took the coin and placed it in the airtight glass cube—six by six by six, that they’d built where the washer/dryer were supposed to be. The balsa-walled laundry room was so crammed with equipment there was scarcely room for four people to hunch over together. Once the coin was sitting on the floor of the cube, Madame Alberta walked back towards the main piece of equipment, which looked like a million vacuum cleaner hoses attached to a giant slow-cooker.

“I keep thinking about what you were saying before,” Lydia said to Malik, trying to distract herself. “About wanting to stand outside history and see the empires rising and falling from a great height, instead of being swept along by the waves. But what if this power to send things, and people, back and forth across history makes us the masters of reality? What if we can make the waves change direction, or turn back entirely? What then?”

“I chose your group with great care,” Madame Alberta. “As I have said. You have the wisdom to use this technology properly, all of you.”

Madame Alberta pulled a big lever. A whoosh of purple neon vapor rushed into the glass cube, followed by a klorrrrrp sound like someone opening a soda can and burping at the same time—in exactly the way that might suggest they’d had enough soda already—and the coin was gone.

“Wow,” said Malik. His eyebrows went all the way up so his forehead concertina-ed, and his short dreads did a fractal scatter.

“It just vanished,” said Jerboa, bouncing with excitement, floppy hat flopping. “It just… It’s on its way.”

Lydia wanted to hold her breath, but there was so little air in here that she was already light-headed. This whole wooden-beamed staircase-flanked basement area felt like a soup of fumes.

Lydia really needed to pee, but she didn’t want to go upstairs and risk missing the sudden reappearance of her coin, which would be newer than everything else in the world by a minute. She held it, swaying and squirming. She looked down at her phone, and there were just about thirty seconds left. She wondered if they should count down. But that was probably too tacky. She really couldn’t breathe at this point, and she was starting to taste candyfloss and everything smelled white.

“Just ten seconds left,” Malik said. And then they did count down, after all. “Nine… eight… seven… six… five! Four! Three! Two! ONE!”

They all stopped and stared at the cube, which remained empty. There was no “soda-gas” noise, no sign of an object breaking back into the physical world from some netherspace.

“Um,” said Jerboa. “Did we count down too soon?”

“It is possible my calculations—” said Madame Alberta, waving her hands in distress. Her fake accent was slipping even more than usual. “But no. I mean, I quadruple-checked. They cannot be wrong.”

“Give it a minute or two longer,” said Malik. “I’m sure it’ll turn up.” As if it was a missing sock in the dryer, instead of a coin in the cube that sat where a dryer ought to be.

They gave it another half an hour, as the knot inside Lydia got bigger and bigger. At one point, Lydia went upstairs to pee in Madame Alberta’s tiny bathroom, facing a calendar of exotic bird paintings. And eventually, Lydia went outside to stand in the front yard, facing the one-lane highway, cursing. Why had she volunteered her coin? And now, she would never see it again.

Lydia went home and spent an hour on the phone processing with her sponsor, Nate, who kept reassuring her, in a voice thick as pork rinds, that the coin was just a token and she could get another one and it was no big deal. These things have no innate power, they’re just symbols. She didn’t mention the “time machine” thing, but kept imagining her coin waiting to arrive, existing in some moment that hadn’t been reached yet.

Even after all of Nate’s best talk-downs, Lydia couldn’t sleep. And at three in the morning, Lydia was still thinking about her one-year coin, floating in a state of indeterminacy—and then it hit her, and she knew the answer. She turned on the light, sat up in bed and stared at the wall of ring-pull talking-animal toys facing her bed. Thinking it through again and again, until she was sure.

At last, Lydia couldn’t help phoning Jerboa, who answered the phone still half asleep and in a bit of a panic. “What is it?” Jerboa said. “What’s wrong? I can find my pants, I swear I can put on some pants and then I’ll fix whatever.”

“It’s fine, nothing’s wrong, no need for pants,” Lydia said. “Sorry to wake you. Sorry, I didn’t realize how late it was.” She was totally lying, but it was too late anyhow. “But I was thinking. Madame Alberta said the coin moved forward in time one minute, but it stayed in the same physical location. Right?”

“That’s right,” said Jerboa. “Same place, different time. Only moving in one dimension.”

“But,” said Lydia. “What if the Earth wasn’t in the same place when the coin arrived? I mean… Doesn’t the Earth move around the sun?”

“Yeah, sure. And the Earth rotates. And the sun moves around the galactic disk. And the galaxy is moving too, towards Andromeda and the Great Attractor,” said Jerboa. “And space itself is probably moving around. There’s no such thing as a fixed point in space. But Madame Alberta covered that, remember? According to Einstein, the other end of the rift in time ought to obey Newton’s first law, conservation of momentum. Which means the coin would still follow the Earth’s movement, and arrive at the same point. Except… Wait a minute!”

Lydia waited a minute. After which, Jerboa still hadn’t said anything else. Lydia had to look at her phone to make sure she hadn’t gotten hung up on. “Except what?” she finally said.

“Except that… the Earth’s orbit and rotation are momentum, plus gravity. Like, we actually accelerate towards the sun as part of our orbit, or else our momentum would just carry us out into space. And Madame Alberta said her time machine worked by opting out of the fundamental forces, right? And gravity is one of those. Which would mean… Wait a minute, wait a minute.” Another long, weird pause, except this time Lydia could hear Jerboa breathing heavily and muttering sotto voce.

Then Jerboa said, “I think I know where your medallion is, Lydia.”

“Where?”

“Right where we left it. On the roof of Madame Alberta’s neighbor’s house.”

* * *

Lydia had less than ninety days of sobriety under her belt, when she first met the Time Travel Club. They met in the same Unitarian basement as Lydia’s twelve-step group: a grimy cellar, with a huge steam pipe running along one wall and intermittent gray carpeting that looked like a scale map of plate tectonics. Pictures of purple hands holding a green globe and dancing scribble children hung askew, by strands of peeling Scotch tape. Boiling hot in summer, drafty in winter, it was a room that seemed designed to make you feel desperate and trapped. But all the twelve steppers laughed a lot, in between crying, and afterwards everybody shared cigarettes and sometimes pie. Lydia didn’t feel especially close to any of the other twelve steppers (and she didn’t smoke) but she felt a desperate lifeboat solidarity with them.

The Time Travel Club always showed up just as the last people from Lydia’s twelve-step meeting were dragging their asses up out of there. Most of the time travelers wore big dark coats and furry boots that seemed designed to look equally ridiculous in any time period. Lydia wasn’t even sure why she stayed behind for one of their meetings, since it was a choice between watching people pretend to be time travelers and eating pie. Nine times out of ten, pie would have won over fake time travel. But Lydia needed to sit quietly by herself and think about the mess she’d made of her life before she tried to drive, and the Time Travel Club was as good a place as any.

Malik was a visitor from the distant past—the Kushite Kingdom of roughly twenty-seven hundred years ago. The Kushites were a pretty swell people, who made an excellent palm wine that tasted sort of like cognac. And now Malik commuted between the Kushite era, the present day, and the thirty-second century, when there was going to be a neo-Kushite revival going on and the dark, well-cheekboned Malik would become a bit of a celebrity.

The androgynous and pronoun-free Jerboa looked tiny and bashful inside a huge brown hat and high coat collar. Jerboa spent a lot of time in the Year One Million, a time period where the parties were excellent and people were considerably less hung up on gender roles. Jerboa also hung out in the 1920s and the early 1600s, on occasion.

And then there was Normando, a Kenny Rogers-looking dude who was constantly warping back to this one party in 1973 where he’d met this girl, who had left with an older man just as Young Normando was going to ask her to bug out with him. And now Normando was convinced he could be that older man. If he could just find that one girl again.

Lydia managed to shrink into the background at the first Time Travel Club meeting, without having to say anything. But a week later, she decided to stick around for another meeting, because it was better than just going home alone and nobody was going for pie this time.

This time, the others asked Lydia about her own journeys through time, and she said she didn’t have a time machine and if she did, she would just use it to make the itchy insomniac nights end sooner, so she could wander alone in the sun rather than hide alone in the dark.

Oh, they said.

Lydia felt guilty about harshing their shared fantasy like that, to the point where she spent the next week obsessing about what a jerk she’d been and even had to call Nate once or twice to report that she was a terrible person and she was struggling with some Dark Thoughts. She vowed not to crash the Time Travel Club meeting again, because she was not going to be a disruptive influence.

Instead, though, when the twelve-step meeting ended and everybody else straggled out, Lydia said the same thing she’d said the previous couple weeks: “Nah, you guys go on. I’m just going to sit for a spell.”

When the time travelers arrived, and Malik’s baby face lit up with his opening spiel about how this was a safe space for people to share their space/time experiences, Lydia stood up suddenly in the middle of his intro, and blurted: “I’m a pirate. I sail a galleon in the nineteenth century, I’m the First Mate. They call me Bad Bessie, even though I’m named Lydia. Also, I do extreme solar-sail racing a couple hundred years from now. But that’s only on weekends. Sorry I didn’t say last week. I was embarrassed because piracy is against the law.” And then she sat down, very fast. Everybody applauded and clapped her on the back and thanked her for sharing. This time around, there were a half dozen people in the group, up from the usual four or five.

Lydia wasn’t really a pirate, though she did work at a pirate-themed adult bookstore near the interstate called the Lusty Doubloon, with the O’s in “Doubloon” forming the absurdly globular breasts of its tricorner-hatted mascot. Lydia got pretty tired of shooting down pick-up lines from the type of men who couldn’t figure out how to find porn on the Internet. Something about Lydia’s dishwater-blond hair and smattering of monster tattoos apparently did it for those guys. The shower in Lydia’s studio apartment was always pretty revolting, because the smell of bleach or Lysol reminded her of the video booths at work.

Anyway, after that, Lydia started sticking around for Time Travel Club every week, as a chaser for her twelve-step meeting. It helped get her back on an even keel so she could drive home without shivering so hard she couldn’t see the road. She even started hanging out with Malik and Jerboa socially—Malik was willing to quit talking about palm wine around her, and they all started going out for fancy tea at the place at the mall, the one that put the leaves inside a paper satchel that you had to steep for exactly five minutes or Everything Would Be Ruined. Lydia and Jerboa went to an all-ages concert together, and didn’t care that they were about ten years older than everybody else there—they’d obviously mis-aligned the temporal stabilizers and arrived too late, but still just in time. “Just in time” was Jerboa’s favorite catchphrase, and it was never said without a glimpse of sharp little teeth, a vigorous nod and a widening of Jerboa’s brown-green eyes.

For six months, the Time Travelers’ meeting slowly became Lydia’s favorite thing every week, and these weirdoes became her particular gang. Until one day, Madame Alberta showed up and brought the one thing that’s guaranteed to ruin any Time Travel Club ever: an actual working time machine.

* * *

Lydia’s one-year coin was exactly where Jerboa had said it would be: on the roof of the house next door to Madame Alberta’s, nestled in some dead leaves in the crook between brick gable and the upward slope of rooftop. She managed to borrow the neighbor’s ladder, by sort of explaining. The journey through the space/time continuum didn’t seem to have messed up Lydia’s coin at all, but it had gotten a layer of grime from sitting overnight. She cleaned it with one of the sanitizing wipes at work, before returning it to its usual front pocket.

About a week later, Lydia met up with Malik and Jerboa for bubble tea at this place in the Asian Mall, where they also served peanut honey toast and squid balls and stuff. Lydia liked the feeling of the squidgy tapioca blobs gliding up the fat straw and then falling into her teeth. Alien larvae. Never to hatch. Alien tadpoles squirming to death in her tummy.

None of them had shown up for Time Travel Club, the previous night. Normando had called them all in a panic, wanting to know where everybody was. Somehow Malik had thought Jerboa would show up, and Jerboa had figured Lydia would stick around after her other meeting.

“It’s just… ” Malik looked into his mug of regular old coffee, with a tragic expression accentuated by hot steam. “What’s the point of sharing our silly make-believe stories about being time-travelers, when we built an actual real time machine, and it was no good?”

“Well, the machine worked,” Jerboa said, looking at the dirty cracked tile floor. “It’s just that you can’t actually use it to visit the past or the future, in person. Lydia’s coin was displaced upwards at an angle of about thirty-six degrees by the Earth’s rotation and orbit around the sun. The further forward and backward in time you go, the more extreme the spatial displacement, because the distance traveled is the square of the time traveled. Send something an hour and a half forward in time, and you’d be over four hundred kilometers away from Earth. Or deep underground, depending on the time of day.”

“So if we wanted to travel a few years ahead,” Lydia said, “we would need to send a spaceship. So it could fly back to Earth from wherever it appeared.”

“I doubt you’d be able to transport an object that size,” said Jerboa. “From what Madame Alberta explained, anything more than about two hundred-sixteen cubic feet or about two hundred pounds, and the energy costs go up exponentially.” Madame Alberta hadn’t answered the door when Lydia went to get her coin back. None of them had heard from Madame Alberta since then, either.

Not only that, but once you were talking about traversing years rather than days, then other factors—such as the sun’s acceleration toward the center of the galaxy and the galaxy’s acceleration towards the Virgo Supercluster—came more into play. You might not ever find the Earth again.

They all sat for a long time, listening to the Canto-Pop and their own internal monologues about failure. Lydia was thinking that an orbit is a fragile thing, after all. You take centripetal force for granted at your peril. She could see Malik, Jerboa, and herself preparing to drift away from each other once and for all. Free to follow their separate trajectories. Separate futures. She had a clawing certainty that this was the last time the three of them would ever see each other, and she was going to lose the Time Travel Club forever.

And then it hit her, a way to turn this into something good. And keep the group together.

“Wait a minute,” said Lydia. “So we don’t have a machine that lets a person visit the past or future. But don’t people spend kind of a lot of money to launch objects into space? Like, satellites and stuff?”

“Yes,” said Jerboa. “It costs tons of money just to lift a pound of material out of our gravity well.” And then for the first time that day, Jerboa looked up from the floor and shook off the curtain of black hair so you could actually see the makings of a grin. “Oh. Yeah. I see what you’re saying. We don’t have a time machine, we have a cheap simple way to launch things into space. You just send something a few hours into the future, and it’s in orbit. We can probably calculate exact distances and trajectories, with a little practice. The hard part will be achieving a stable orbit.”

“So?” Malik said. “I don’t see how that helps anything… Oh. You’re suggesting we turn this into a money-making opportunity.”

Lydia couldn’t help thinking of the fact that her truck needed an oil change and a new headpipe and four new tires and the ability to start when she turned the key in the ignition. And she needed never to go near the Lusty Doubloon again. “It’s better than nothing,” she said. “Until we figure out what else this machine can do.”

“Look at it this way,” Jerboa said to Malik. “If we are able to launch a payload into orbit on a regular basis, then that’s a repeatable result. A repeatable result is the first step towards being able to do something else. And we can use the money to reinvest in the project.”

“Well,” Malik said. And then he broke out into a smile too. Radiant. “If we can talk Madame Alberta into it, then sure.”

They phoned Madame Alberta a hundred times and she never picked up. At last, they just went to her house and kept banging on the door until she opened up.

Madame Alberta was drunk. Not just regular drunk, but long-term drunk. Like she had gotten drunk a week ago, and never sobered up. Lydia took one look at her, one whiff of the booze fumes, and had to go outside and dry heave. She sat, bent double, on Madame Alberta’s tiny lawn, almost within view of the Saint Ignatius College science lab that they’d stolen all that gear from a few months earlier. From inside the house, she heard Malik and Jerboa trying to explain to Madame Alberta that they had figured out what happened to the coin. And how they could turn it into kind of a good thing.

They were having a hard time getting through to her. Madame Alberta’s fauxropean accent was basically gone, and she sounded like a bitter old drunk lady from New Jersey who just wanted to drink herself to death.

Eventually, Malik came out and put one big hand gently on Lydia’s shoulder. “You should go home,” he said. “Jerboa and I will help her sober up, and then we’ll talk her through this. I promise we won’t make any decisions until you’re there to take part.”

Lydia nodded and got in her rusty old Ford, which rattled and groaned and finally came to a semblance of life long enough to let her roll back down the highway to her crappy apartment. Good thing it was pretty much downhill all the way.

* * *

When Madame Alberta first visited the Time Travel Club, nobody quite knew what to make of her. She had olive skin, black hair and a black beauty mark on the left side of her face, which tended to change its location every time Lydia saw her. And she wore a dark head scarf, or maybe a snood, and a long black dress with a slit up one side.

That first meeting, her Eurasian accent was the thickest and fakest it would ever be: “I have the working theory of the time machine. And the prototype that is, how you say, half-built. I need a few more pairs of hands to help me complete the assembly, but also I require the ethical advice.”

“Like a steering committee,” said Jerboa, perking up with a quick sideways head motion.

“Even so,” said Madame Alberta. “Much like the Unitarian Church upstairs, the time machine has need of a steering committee.”

At first, everybody assumed Madame Alberta was just sharing her own time-travel fantasy—albeit one that was a lot more elaborate, and involved a lot more delayed gratification, than everybody else’s. Still, the rest of the meeting was sort of muted. Lydia was all set to share her latest experiences with solar-sail demolition derby, the most dangerous sport that would ever exist. And Malik was having drama with the Babylonians, either in the past or the future, Lydia wasn’t sure which. But Madame Alberta had a quiet certainty that threw the group out of whack.

“I leave you now,” said Madame Alberta, bowing and curtseying in a single weird arm-sweeping motion that made her appear to be the master of a particularly esoteric drunken martial arts style. “Take the next week to discuss my proposition. Be aware, though: This will be the most challenging of ventures.” She whooshed out of the room, long flowy dress trailing behind her.

Nobody actually spent the week between meetings debating whether they wanted to help Madame Alberta build her time machine—instead, Lydia kept asking the other members whether they could find an excuse to kick her out of the group. “She freaks me out, man,” Lydia said on the phone to Malik on Sunday evening. “She seems for real mentally not there.”

“I don’t know,” Malik said. “I mean, we’ve never kicked anybody out before. There was that one guy who seemed like he had a pretty serious drug problem last year, with his whole astral projection shtick. But he stopped coming on his own, after a couple times.”

“I just don’t like it,” said Lydia. “I have a terrible feeling she’s going to ruin everything.” She didn’t add that she really needed this group to continue the way it was, that these people were becoming her only friends, and the only reason she felt like the future might actually really exist for her. She didn’t want to get needy or anything.

“Eh,” said Malik. “It’s a time travel club. If she becomes a problem, we’ll just go back in time and change our meeting place last year, so she won’t find us.”

“Good point.”

It was Jerboa who found the article in the Berkeley Daily Voice—a physics professor who lectured at Berkeley and also worked at Lawrence Livermore had gone missing, in highly mysterious circumstances, six months earlier. And the photo of the vanished Professor Martindale—dark hair, laughing gray eyes, narrow mouth—looked rather a lot like Madame Alberta, except without any beauty mark or giant scarf.

Jerboa emailed the link to the article to Lydia and Malik. Do you think… ? the email read.

The next meeting came around. Besides the three core members and Madame Alberta, there was Normando, who had finally tracked down that hippie chick in 1973 and was now going on the same first date with her over and over again, arriving five minutes earlier each time to pick her up. Lydia did not think that would actually work in real life.

The others waited until Normando had run out of steam describing his latest interlude with Starshine Ladyswirl and wandered out to smoke a (vaguely post-coital) cigarette, before they started interrogating Madame Alberta. How did this alleged time machine work? Why was she building it in her laundry room instead of at a proper research institution? Had she absconded from Berkeley with some government-funded research, and if so were they all going to jail if they helped her?

“Let us say, for the sake of the argument,” Madame Alberta played up her weird accent even as her true identity as a college professor from Camden was brought to light, “that I had developed some of the theory of the time travel while on the payroll of the government. Yes? In that hypothetical situation, what would be the ethical thing to do? You are my steering committee, please to tell me.”

“Well,” Malik said. “I don’t know that you want the government to have a time machine.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jerboa said. “They already have warrantless wiretaps and indefinite detention. Imagine if they could go back in time and spy on you in the past. Or kill people as little children.”

“Well, but,” Lydia said. “I mean, wouldn’t it still be your responsibility to share your research?” But the others were already on Madame Alberta’s side.

“As to how it works,” Madame Alberta reached into her big black trench coat and pulled out a big rolled-up set of plans covered in equations and drawings, which meant nothing to anybody. “Shall we say that it was the accidental discovery? One was actually working on a project for the Department of Energy aimed at finding a way to eliminate the atomic waste. And instead, one stumbled on a method of using spent uranium to create an opening two Planck lengths wide, lasting a few fractions of a microsecond, with the other end a few seconds in the future.”

“Uh huh,” Lydia said. “So… you could create a wormhole too tiny to see, that only allowed you to travel a few seconds forward in time. That’s, um… useful, I guess.”

“But then! One discovers that one might be able to generate a much larger temporal rift, opting out of the fundamental forces, and it would be stable enough to move a person or a moderate-sized object either forward or backward in time, anywhere from a few minutes to a few thousand years, in the exact same physical location,” said Madame Alberta. “One begins to panic, imagining this power in the hands of the government. This is all the hypothetical situation, of course. In reality, one knows nothing of this Professor Martindale of whom you speaks.”

“But,” said Lydia. “I mean, why us? I mean, assuming you really do have the makings of a time machine in your laundry room. Why not reach out to some actual scientists?” Then she answered her own question: “Because you would be worried they would tell the government. Okay, but the world is full of smart amateurs and clever geeks. And us? I mean, I work the day shift at a… ” she tried to think of a way to say “pirate-themed sex shop” that didn’t sound quite so horrible. “And Malik is a physical therapist. Jerboa has a physics degree, sure, but that was years ago, and more recently Jerboa’s been working as a caseworker for teenagers with sexual abuse issues. Which is totally great. But I’m sure you can find bigger experts out there.”

“One has chosen with the greatest of care,” Madame Alberta fixed Lydia with an intense stare, like she could see all the way into Lydia’s damaged core. (Or maybe, like someone who was used to wearing glasses but had decided to pretend she had 20/20 vision.) “You are all good people, with the strong moral centers. You have given much thought to the time travel, and yet you speak of it without any avarice in your hearts. Not once have I heard any of you talk of using the time travel for wealth or personal advancement.”

“Well, except for Normando using it to get in Ladyswirl’s pants,” said Malik.

“Even as you say, except for Normando.” Madame Alberta did another one of her painful-to-watch bow-curtseys. “So. What is your decision? Will you join me in this great and terrible undertaking, or not?”

What could they do? They all raised their hands and said that they were in.

* * *

Ricky was the Chief Fascination Evangelist for Garbo.com, a web startup for rich paranoid people who wanted to be left alone. (They were trying to launch a premium service where you could watch yourself via satellite 24/7, to make sure nobody else was watching you.) Ricky wore denim shirts, with the sleeves square-folded to the elbows, and white silk ties with black corduroys, and his neck funneled out of the blue-jean collar and led to a round pale head, shaved except for wispy sideburns. He wore steel-rimmed glasses. He had a habit of swinging his arms back and forth and clapping his heads when he was excited, like when he talked about getting a satellite into orbit.

“Everybody else says it’ll take months to get our baby into space,” Ricky told Malik and Lydia for the fifth or sixth time. “The Kazakhs don’t even know when they can do it. But you say you can get our Garbo-naut 5000 into orbit… ”

“… next week,” Malik said yet again. “Maybe ten days from now.” He canted his palms in mid-air, like it was no big deal. Launching satellites, whatever. Just another day, putting stuff into orbit.

“Whoa.” Ricky arm-clapped in his chair. “That is just insane. Seriously. Like, nuts.”

“We are a hungry new company.” Malik gave the same bright smile that he used to announce the start of every Time Travel Club meeting. They had been lucky to find this guy. “We want to build our customer base from the ground up. All the way from the ground, into space. Because we’re a space company. Right? Of course we are. And did I mention we’re hungry?”

“Hungry is good.” Ricky seemed to be studying Malik, and the giant photo of MJL Aerospace’s non-existent rocket, a retrofitted Soyuz. “The hungry survive, the fat starve. Or something. So when do I get to see this rocket of yours?

“You can’t, sorry,” Malik said. “Our, uh, chief rocket scientist is kind of leery about letting people see our proprietary new fuel system technology up close. But here’s a picture of it.” He gestured at the massive rocket picture on the fake-mahogany wall behind his desk, which they’d spent hours creating in Photoshop and After Effects. MJL Aerospace was subletting ultra-cheap office space in an industrial park, just up the highway from the Lusty Doubloon.

Malik, Lydia, and Jerboa had been excited about becoming a fake rocket company, until they’d started considering the practical problems. For one thing, nobody will hire you to launch a satellite unless you’ve already launched a satellite before—it’s like how you can’t get an entry-level job unless you’ve already had work experience.

Plus, they weren’t entirely sure that they could get a satellite into a stable orbit, which was one of the dozen reasons Malik was sweating. They could definitely place a satellite at different points in orbit, and different trajectories, by adjusting the time of day, the distance traveled, and the location on Earth they started from. But after that, the satellite wouldn’t be moving fast enough to stay in orbit on its own. It would need extra boosters, to get up to speed. Jerboa thought they could send a satellite way higher—around forty-two thousand kilometers away from Earth—and then use relatively small rockets to speed it up to the correct velocity as it slowly dropped to the proper orbit. But even if that worked, it would require Garbo.com to customize the Garbo-naut 5000 quite a bit. And Madame Alberta had severe doubts.

“Sorry, man,” said Ricky. “I’m not sure I can get my people to authorize a satellite launch based on just seeing a picture of the rocket. It’s a nice picture, though. Good sense of composition. Like, the clouds look really pretty, with that one flock of birds in the distance. Poetic, you know.”

“Of course you can see the rocket,” Lydia interjected. She was sitting off to one side taking notes on the meeting, wearing cheap pantyhose in a forty-dollar swivel chair. With puffy sleeves covering her tattoos (one for every country she’d ever visited.) “Just maybe not before next week’s launch. If you’re willing to wait a few months, we can arrange a site visit and stuff. We just can’t show you the rocket before our next launch window.”

“Right,” Malik said. “If you still want to launch next week, though, we can give you a sixty percent discount.”

“Sixty percent?” Ricky said, suddenly seeming interested again.

“Sixty-five percent,” Malik said. “We’re a young hungry company. We have a lot to prove. Our business model is devouring the weak. And we hate to launch with spare capacity.”

Maybe going straight to sixty-five percent was a mistake, or maybe the “devouring the weak” thing had been too much. In any case, Ricky seemed uneasy again. “Huh,” he said. “So how many test launches have you guys done? My friend who works for NASA says every rocket launch in the world gets tracked.”

“We’ve done a slew of test launches,” Malik said. “Like, a dozen. But we have some proprietary stealth technology, so people probably missed them.” And then, he went way off script. “Our company founder, Augustus Marzipan IV, grew up around rockets. His uncle was Wernher von Braun’s wine steward. So rockets are in his blood.” Ricky’s frown got more and more pinched.

“Well,” Ricky said at last, standing up from his cheap metal chair. “I will definitely bring your proposal to our Senior Visionizer, Terry. But I have a feeling the V.C.s aren’t going to want to pay for a launch without kicking the tires. I’m not the one who writes the checks, you know. If I wrote the checks, a lot of things would be different.” And then he paused, probably imagining all the things that would happen if he wrote the checks.

“When Augustus Marzipan was only five years old, his pet Dalmatian, Henry, was sent into space. Never to return,” said Malik, as if inventing more stories would cushion his fall off the cliff he’d already walked over. “That’s where our commitment to safety comes from.”

“That’s great,” said Ricky. “I love dogs.” He was already halfway out the door.

As soon as Ricky was gone, Malik sagged as though the air had gone out of him. He rubbed his brow with one listless hand. “We’re a young hungry company,” he said. “We’re a hungry young company. Which way sounds better? I can’t tell.”

“That could have gone worse,” Lydia said.

“I can’t do this,” Malik said. “I just can’t. I’m sorry. I am good at pretending for fun. I just can’t do it for money. I’m really sorry.”

Lydia felt like the worst person in the world, even as she said: “Lots of people start out pretending for fun, and then move into pretending for money. That’s the American dream.” The sun was already going down behind the cement fountain outside, and she realized she was going to be late for her twelve-step group soon. She started pulling her coat and purse and scarf together. “Hey, I gotta run. I’ll see you at Time Travel Club, okay?”

“I think I’m going to skip it,” Malik said. “I can’t. I just… I can’t.”

“What?” Lydia felt like if Malik didn’t come to Time Travel Club, it would be the proof that something was seriously wrong and their whole foundation was splitting apart. And it would be provably her fault.

“I’m just too exhausted. Sorry.”

Lydia came over and sat on the desk, so she could see Malik’s face behind his hand. “Come on,” she pleaded. “Time Travel Club is your baby. We can’t just have a meeting without you. That would be weird. Come on. We won’t even talk about being a fake aerospace company. We couldn’t talk about that in front of Normando, anyway.”

Malik sighed, like he was going to argue. Then he lifted the loop of his tie all the way off, now that he was done playing CEO. For a second, his rep-stripe tie was a halo. “Okay, fine,” he said. “It’ll be good to hang out and not talk business for a while.”

“Yeah, exactly. It’ll be mellow,” Lydia said. She felt the terror receding, but not entirely.

* * *

Normando was freaking out because his girlfriend in 1973 had dumped him. (Long story short, his strategy of arriving earlier and earlier for the same first date had backfired.) A couple of other semi-regulars showed up too, including Betty the Cyborg from the Dawn of Time. And Madame Alberta showed up too, even though she hadn’t ever shown any interest in visiting their aerospace office. She sat in the corner, studying the core members of the group, maybe to judge whether she’d chosen wisely. As if she could somehow go back and change that decision, which of course she couldn’t.

Malik tried to talk about his last trip to the thirty-second century. But he kept staring at his CEO shoes and saying things like, “The neo-Babylonians were giving us grief. But we were young and hungry.” And then trailing off, like his heart just wasn’t in it.

Jerboa saw Malik running out of steam, and jumped in. “I met Christopher Marlowe. He told me that his version of Faust originally ended with Dr. Faust and Helen of Troy running away together and teaching geometrically complex hand-dances in Shropshire, and they made him change it.” Jerboa talked very fast, like an addict trying to stay high. Or a comedian trying not to get booed offstage. “He told me to call him ‘Kit,’ and showed me the difference between a doublet and a singlet. A doublet is not two singlets, did you know that?”

Sitting in the Unitarian basement, under the purple dove hands, Lydia watched Malik starting to say things and then just petering out, with a shrug or a shake of the head, and Jerboa rattling on and not giving anybody else a chance to talk. Guilt.

And then, just as Lydia was crawling out of her skin, Madame Alberta stood up. “I have a thing to confess,” she said.

Malik and Lydia stared up at her, fearing she was about to blow the whistle on their scam. Jerboa stopped breathing.

“I am from an alternative timeline,” Madame Alberta said. “It is the world where the American Revolution did not happen, and the British Empire had the conquest of all of South America. The Americas, Africa, Asia—the British ruled all. Until the rest of Europe launched the great world war to stop the British imperialism. And Britain discovered the nuclear weapons and Europe burned to ashes. I travel many times, I travel through time, to try and change history. But instead, I find myself here, in this other universe, and I can never return home.”

“Uh,” Malik said. “Thanks for sharing.” He looked relieved and weirded out.

At last, Madame Alberta explained: “It is the warning. Sometimes you have the power to change the world. But power is not an opportunity. It is a choice.”

After that, nobody had much to say. Malik and Jerboa didn’t look at Lydia or each other as they left, and nobody was surprised when the Time Travel Club’s meeting was cancelled the following week, or when the club basically ceased to exist some time after that.

* * *

Malik, Jerboa, and Lydia sat in the front of Malik’s big van on the grassy roadside, waiting for Madame Alberta to come back and tell them where they were going. Madame Alberta supposedly knew where they could dig up some improperly buried spent uranium from the power plant, and the back of the van was full of pretty good safety gear that Madame Alberta had scared up for them. The faceplates of the suits glared up at Lydia from their uncomfortable resting place. The three of them were psyching themselves up to go and possibly irradiate the shit out of themselves. Worth it, if the thing they were helping to build in Madame Alberta’s laundry room was a real time machine and not just another figment.

“You guys never even asked,” Lydia said around one in the morning, when they were all starting to wonder if Madame Alberta was going to show up. “I mean, about me, and why I was in that twelve-step group before the Time Travel Club meetings. You don’t know anything about me, or what I’ve done.”

“We know all about you,” Malik said. “You’re a pirate.”

“You do extreme solar sail sports in the future,” Jerboa added. “What else is there to know?”

“But,” Lydia said. “I could be a criminal. I might have killed someone. I could be as bad as that astral projection guy.”

“Lydia,” Malik put one hand on her shoulder, like super gently. “We know you.”

Nobody spoke for a while. Every few minutes, Malik turned on the engine so they could get some heat, and the silence between engine starts was deeper than ordinary silence.

“I had blackouts,” Lydia said. “Like, a lot of blackouts. I would lose hours at a time, no clue where I’d been or how I’d gotten here. I would just be in the middle of talking to people, or behind the wheel of a car in the middle of nowhere, with no clue. I worked at this high-powered sales office, we obliterated our targets. And everybody drank all the time. Pitchers of beer, of martinis, of margaritas. The pitcher was like the emblem of our solidarity. You couldn’t turn the pitcher away, it would be like spitting on the team. We made so much money. And I had this girlfriend, Sara, with this amazing red hair, who I couldn’t even talk to when we were sober. We would just lie in bed naked, with a bottle of tequila propped up between us. I knew it was just a matter of time before I did something really unforgivable during one of those blackouts. Especially after Sara decided to move out.”

“So what happened?” Jerboa said.

“In the end, it wasn’t anything I did during a blackout that caused everything to implode,” Lydia said. “It was what I did to keep myself from ever having another blackout. I got to work early one day, and I just lit a bonfire in the fancy conference room. And I threw all the contents of the company’s wet bar into it.”

Once again, nobody talked for a while. Malik turned the engine on and off a couple times, which made it about seven minutes of silence. They were parked by the side of the road, and every once in a while a car simmered past.

“I think that’s what makes us such good time travelers, actually.” Jerboa’s voice cracked a little bit, and Lydia was surprised to see the outlines of tears on his small brown face, in the light of a distant highway detour sign. “We are very experienced at being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and at doing whatever it takes to get ourselves to the right place, and the right time.”

Lydia put her arm around Jerboa, who was sitting in the middle of the front seat, and Jerboa leaned into Lydia’s shoulder so just a trace of moisture landed on Lydia’s neck.

“You wouldn’t believe the places I’ve had to escape from in the middle of the night,” Jerboa said. “The people who tried to fix my, my… irregularities. You wouldn’t believe the methods that have been tried. People can justify almost anything, if their perspective is limited enough.”

Malik wrapped his hand on Jerboa’s back, so it was like all three of them were embracing. “We’ve all had our hearts broken, I guess,” he said. “I was a teacher, in one of those Teach For America-style programs. I thought we were all in this together, that we had a shared code. I thought we were altruists. Until they threw me under a bus.”

And it was then that Malik said the thing about wanting to stand outside history and see the gears grinding from a distance, all of the cruelty and all of the edifices that had been built on human remains. The true power wouldn’t be changing history, or even seeing how it turned out, but just seeing the shape of the wheel.

They sat for a good long time in silence again. The engine ticked a little. They stayed leaning into each other, as the faceplates watched.

Lydia started to say something like, “I just want to hold on to this moment. Here, now, with the two of you. I don’t care about whatever else, I just want this to last.” But just as she started to speak, Madame Alberta tapped on the passenger-side window, right next to Lydia’s head, and gestured at her car, which was parked in front of theirs. It was time to suit up, and go get some nuclear waste.

* * *

Lydia didn’t see Malik or Jerboa for a month or so, after Madame Alberta told her weird story about Europe getting nuked. MJL Aerospace shuttered its offices, and Lydia saw the rocket picture in a dumpster as she drove to the Lucky Doubloon. She redoubled her commitment to going to a twelve-step meeting every goddamn day. She finally called her mom back, and went to a few bluegrass concerts.

Lydia got the occasional panicked call from Normando, or even one of the other semi-regulars, wondering what happened to the club, but she just ignored it.

Until one day Lydia was driving to work, on the day shift again, and she saw Jerboa walking on the side of the road. Jerboa kicked the shoulder of the road over and over, kicking dirt and rocks, not looking ahead. Hips and knees jerking almost out of their sockets. Inaudible curses spitting at the gravel.

Lydia pulled over next to Jerboa and honked her horn a couple times, then rolled down the window. “Come on, get in.” She turned down the bluegrass on her stereo.

Jerboa gave a gesture between a wave and a “go away.”

“Listen, I screwed up,” Lydia said. “That aerospace thing was a really bad idea. It wasn’t about the money, though, you have to believe me about that. I just wanted to give us a new project, so we wouldn’t drift apart.”

“It’s not your fault.” Jerboa did not get in the truck. “I don’t blame you.”

“Well, I blame myself. I was being selfish. I just didn’t want you guys to run away. I was scared. But we need to figure out a way to turn the space travel back into time travel. We can’t do that unless we work together.”

“It’s just not possible,” Jerboa said. “For any amount of time displacement beyond a few hours, the variables get harder and harder to calculate. The other day, I did some calculations and figured out that if you traveled one hundred years into the future, you’d wind up around one-tenth of a light year away. That’s just a back-of-the-envelope thing, based on our orbit around the sun.”

“Okay, so one problem at a time.” Lydia stopped her engine, gambling that it would restart. The bluegrass stopped mid-phrase. “We need to get some accurate measurements of exactly where stuff ends up, when we send it forwards and backwards in time. But to do that, first we need to be able to send stuff out, and get it back again.”

“There’s no way,” Jerboa said. “It’s strictly a one-way trip.”

“We’ll figure out a way,” Lydia said. “Trial and error. We just need to open a second rift close enough to the first rift to bring our stuff back. Yeah? Once we’re good enough, we send people. And eventually, we send people, along with enough equipment to build a telescope in deep space, so we can spy on Earth in the distant past or the far future.”

“There are so many steps in there, it’s ridiculous,” Jerboa said. “Every one of those steps might turn out to be just as impossible as the satellite thing turned out to be. We can’t do this with just the four of us, we don’t have enough pairs of hands. Or enough expertise.”

“That’s why we recruit,” said Lydia. “We need to find a ton more people who can help us make this happen.”

“Except,” said Jerboa, fists clenched and eyes red and pinched, “we can’t trust just any random people with this. Remember? That’s why Madame Alberta brought it to us in the first place, because the temptation to abuse this power would be too great. You could destroy a city with this machine. How on Earth do we find a few dozen people who we can trust with this?”

“The same way we found each other,” Lydia said. “The same way Madame Alberta found us. The Time Travel Club.”

Jerboa finally got into the truck and snapped the seatbelt into place. Nodding slowly, like thinking it over.

Ricky from Garbo.com showed up at a meeting of the Time Travel Club, several months later. He didn’t even realize at first that these were the same people from MJL Aerospace—maybe he’d seen the articles about the club on the various nerd blogs, or maybe he’d seen Malik’s appearance on the basic cable TV show GeekUp!. Or maybe he’d listened to one of their podcasts. They were doing lots and lots of things to expand the membership of the club, without giving the slightest hint about what went on in Madame Alberta’s laundry room.

Garbo.com had gone under by now, and Ricky was in grad school. He’d shaved off the big sideburns and wore square Elvis Costello glasses now.

“So I heard this is like a LARP, sort of,” Ricky said to Lydia as they were getting a cookie from the cookie table before the meeting started—they’d had to move the meetings from the Unitarian basement to a middle school basketball court, now that they had a few dozen members. Scores of folding chairs, in rows, facing a podium. And they had a cookie table. “You make up your time travel stories, and everybody pretends they’re true. Right?”

“Sort of,” Lydia said. “You’ll see. Once the meeting starts, you cannot say anything about these stories not being true. Okay? It’s the only real rule.”

“Sure thing,” Ricky said. “I can do that. I worked for a dotcom startup, remember? I’m good at make-believe.”

* * *

And Ricky turned out to be one of the more promising new recruits, weirdly enough. He spent a lot of time going to the eighteenth century and teaching Capability Brown about feng shui. Which everybody agreed was probably a good thing for the Enlightenment.

Just a few months after that, Lydia, Malik, and Jerboa found themselves already debating whether to show Ricky the laundry room. Lydia was snapping her third-hand spacesuit into place in Madame Alberta’s sitting room, with its caved-in sofa and big-screen TV askew. Lydia was happy to obsess over something else, to get her mind off the crazy thing she was about to do.

“I think he’s ready,” Lydia said of Ricky. “He’s committed to the club.”

“I would certainly like to see his face when he finds out how we were really going to launch that satellite into orbit,” said Malik, grinning.

“It’s too soon,” Jerboa said. “I think we ought to wait six months, as a rule, before bringing anyone here. Just to make sure someone is really in tune with the group, and isn’t going to go trying to tell the wrong people about this. This technology has an immense potential to distort your sense of ethics and your values.”

Lydia tried to nod, but it was hard now that the bulky collar was in place. This spacesuit was a half a size too big, with boots that Lydia’s feet slid around in. The crotch of the orange suit was almost M.C. Hammer wide on her, even with the adult diaper they’d insisted she should wear just in case. The puffy white gloves swallowed her fingers. And then Malik and Jerboa lowered the helmet into place, and Lydia’s entire world was compressed to a gray-tinted rectangle. Goodbye, peripheral vision.

She wondered what sort of tattoo she would get to commemorate this trip.

“Ten minutes,” Madame Alberta called from the laundry room. And indeed, it was ten to midnight.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Jerboa said. “It’s not too late to call it off.”

“I’m the only one this suit sort of fits,” Lydia said. “And I’m the most expendable. And yes. I do want to be the first person to travel through time.”

After putting so many weird objects into that cube, thousands of them before they’d managed to get a single one back, Lydia felt strange about clambering inside the cube herself. She had to hunch over a bit. Malik waved and Jerboa gave a tiny thumbs up. Betty the Cyborg from the Dawn of Time checked the instruments one last time. Steampunk Fred gave a thumbs-up on the calculations. And Madame Alberta reached for the clunky lever. Even through her helmet, Lydia heard a greedy soda-belch sound.

A thousand years later, Lydia lost her hold on anything. She couldn’t get her footing. There was no footing to get. She felt ill immediately. She’d expected the microgravity, but it still made her feel revolting. She felt drunk, actually. Like she didn’t know which way was up. She spun head over ass. If she drifted too far, they would never pull her back. But the tiny maneuvering thrusters on her suit were useless, because she had no reference point. She couldn’t see a damn thing through this foggy helmet, just blackness. She couldn’t find the sun or any stars, for a moment. Then she made out stars. And more stars.

She spun. And somersaulted. No control at all. Until she tried the maneuvering thrusters, the way Jerboa had explained. She tried to turn a full three-sixty, so she could try and locate the sun. She had to remember to breathe normally. Every part of her wanted to hyperventilate.

When she’d turned halfway around on her axis, she didn’t see the sun. But she saw something else. At first, she couldn’t even make sense of it. There were lights blaring at her. And things moving. And shapes. She took a few photos with the camera Malik had given her. The whole mass was almost spherical, maybe egg-shaped. But there were jagged edges. As Lydia stared, she made out more details. Like, one of the shapes on the outer edge was the hood of a 1958 Buick, license plate and all. There were pieces of a small passenger airplane bolted on as well, along with a canopy made of some kind of shiny blue material that Lydia had never seen before. It was just a huge collection of junk welded together, protection against cosmic rays and maybe also decoration.

Some of the moving shapes were people. They were jumping up and down. And waving at Lydia. They were behind a big observation window at the center of the egg, a slice of see-through material. They gestured at something below the window. Lydia couldn’t make it out at first. Then she squinted and saw that it was a big glowy sign with blocky letters made of massive pixels.

At first, Lydia though the sign read, WELCOME TIME TRAVEL CLUB. Like they knew the Time Travel Club was coming, and they wanted to prepare a reception committee.

Then she squinted again, just as another rift started opening up to pull her back, a purple blaze all around her, and she realized she had missed a word. The sign actually read, WELCOME TO TIME TRAVEL CLUB. They were all members of the Club, too, and they were having another meeting. And they were inviting her to share her story, any way she could.

Fairy Werewolf vs. Vampire Zombie

If you’re ever in Freeboro, North Carolina, look for the sign of the bull. It hangs off the side of a building with a Vietnamese noodle-joint and an auto mechanic, near an alley that’s practically a drainage ditch. Don’t walk down that alley unless you’re brave enough not to look over your shoulder when you hear throaty noises behind you. If you make it to the very end without looking back, hang a left, and watch your footing on the mossy steps. The oak door at the bottom of the stairs will only open if you’ve got the right kind of mojo.

If it does open, you’ll find yourself in Rachel’s Bar & Grill, the best watering hole in the Carolinas. My bar. There’s only one rule: if there’s any trouble, take it outside. (Outside my bar is good, outside of town is better, outside of reality itself is best of all.) I have lots of stories about Rachel’s. There are names I could drop—except some of those people might appear. But there is one story that illustrates why you shouldn’t make trouble in my bar, and how we take care of our own. It’s also the story of how the bar got its mascot.

There was this young woman named Antonia, who went from a beautiful absinthe-drinking stranger to one of my regulars inside of a month. She had skin so pale it was almost silver, delicate features, and wrists so fine she could slide her hand into the wine-jug behind the bar—although she’d have to be quick pulling it out again, or Leroy the Wine Goblin would bite it off. Anyway, she approached me at closing time, asking if I had any work for her. She could clean tables, or maybe play her guitar a few nights a week.

If you’ve ever been to Rachel’s, you’ll know it doesn’t need any live music, or anything else, to add atmosphere to the place. If there’s one thing we got in spades, it’s atmosphere. Just sit in any of the plush booths—the carvings on the wooden tables tell you their stories, and the stains on the upholstery squirm to get out of the way of your butt. From the gentle undulation of the ceiling beams to the flickering of the amber-colored lights to the signed pictures of famous dragons and celebrity succubi on the brick walls, the place is atmosphere city.

But then I got to hear Antonia sing and play on her guitar, and it was like the rain on a midsummer day right after you just got your first kiss or something. Real lyrical. I let her play at Rachel’s one night, and I couldn’t believe it—the people who usually just guzzled a pitcher of my “special” sangria and then vamoosed were sticking around to listen to her, shedding luminescent tears that slowly floated into the air and then turned into little crystalline wasps. (The sangria will do that.)

So after Antonia got done singing that first night, I came up to her and said I guessed we could work something out, if she was willing to wipe some tables as well as getting her Lilith Fair on. “There’s just one thing I don’t get,” I said. “It’s obvious you’re Fae, from the effect you have on the lunkheads that come in here. And you’re a dead ringer for that missing princess from the High Court of Sylvania. Princess Lavinia.” (Sylvania being what the Fae call Pennsylvania, the seat of their power.) “It’s said his supreme highness the Chestnut King weeps every night, and would give half the riches of Sylvania to have you back. The drag queen—Mab—her eyeliner has been smudgy for months. Not to mention the lovestruck Prince Azaron. So what gives?”

“I cannot ever return home,” Antonia (or Lavinia) wept. “I regret the day I decided to venture out and see the world for myself. For on that day, I encountered a curse so monstrous, I cannot ever risk inflicting it on any of my kin. I cannot undo what is done. The only way I can protect my friends and family is to stay far away. I am forever exiled, for my own foolishness. Now please ask no more questions, for I have tasted your sangria and I’m afraid my tears would sting you most viciously.”

I said no more, although I was consumed with curiosity about the curse that kept the fairy princess from returning to the Seelie Court in Bucks County. I didn’t learn any more—until a few weeks later, when the Full Moon arrived.

Antonia appeared as usual, wearing a resplendent dress made of the finest samite and lace (I think it was vintage Gunne Sax.) She muttered something about how she was going to play a shorter set than usual, because she felt unwell. I said that was fine, I would just put the ice hockey match on the big-screen TV. (Did I mention the big-screen TV? Also a big part of the atmosphere. We do karaoke on Fridays.) Anyway, she meant to play for an hour, but she got carried away with this one beautiful dirge about lovers who were separated for life by a cruel wind, and it grew dark outside, just as her song reached a peak of emotion.

And something strange happened. Her hands, so teeny, started to grow, and her guitar playing grew more frenzied and discordant. Hairs sprouted all over her skin, and her face was coarsening as well, becoming a muzzle. “NO!” She cried—or was it a howl?—as her already pointy ears became pointier and her hair grew thicker and more like fur. “No, I won’t have it! Not here, not now. ’Tis too soon! By my fairy blood, I compel you—subside!” And with that last word, the transformation ceased. The hair vanished from her hands, her face returned to normal, and she only looked slightly huskier than usual. She barely had time to place her guitar in its case, leaving it on the bar, before she fled up the wooden staircase to the door. I heard her ascending into the alley and running away, her panting harsh and guttural.

Antonia did not return for three days, until the Moon was on the wane. When next she sang for us, her song was even more mournful than ever before, full of a passion so hot, it melted our internal organs into a fondue of longing.

Now around this same time, I was thinking about franchising. (Bear with me here, this is part of the story.) I had gotten a pretty good thing going in Freeboro, and I wanted to open another bar over on the other side of the Triad, in the town of Evening Falls. The main problem was, you don’t want to open a bar aimed at mystical and mythological patrons in the same strip mall as a Primitive Baptist church, a nail salon and a Bar-B-Q place, right on Highway 40. And Evening Falls only had a few properly secluded locations, all of which were zoned as purely residential, or only for restaurants.

Now, chances are, if you’ve been to Rachel’s, you’ve already heard my views on the evils of zoning. But just in case you missed it… [Editor’s note: the next ten paragraphs of this manuscript consist of a tirade about zoning boards and the ways in which they are comparable to giant flesh-eating cane-toads or hornetaurs. You can read it online at www.monstersofurbanplanning.org.]

Anyway, where was I? Franchising. So I know some witches and assorted fixers, who can make you believe Saturday is Monday, but it’s hard to put a whammy on the whole planning board. So I thought to myself, what can I do to win these people over? And that’s when I remembered I had my very own enchanting fairy singer, with just a spark of the wolf inside her, on the payroll.

Antonia’s eyes grew even huger, and her lip trembled, when I asked her to come and play at a party for the scheming elites of Evening Falls. “I cannot,” she said. “I would do anything in my power to help you, Rachel, but I fear to travel where I may be recognized. And my song is not for just anyone, it is only for the lost and the despairing. Can’t I just stay here, in your bar, playing for your patrons?”

“Now look,” I said, plunking her down on my least carnivorous barstool. “I’ve been pretty nice to you, and a lot of people would have called the number on the side of the thistle-milk carton to collect the reward on you already. Fairy gold! Which, last time I checked, is made out of the same gold as every other kind.  Not to mention, I put up with the constant danger of you biting my patrons and turning them into werewolves. Which, to  be fair, might improve their dispositions and make them better tippers. But you know, it’s all about one hand washes the other, even if sometimes one of those hands is a tentacle.  Or a claw. Although, you wouldn’t really want one of the Octo-priests of Wilmington to wash any part of you, not unless you want strange squid-ink tattoos sprouting on your skin for years after. Where was I?”

“You were attempting to blackmail me,” Antonia said with a brittle dignity. “Very well, Rachel. You have shown me what stuff your friendship is made of. I shall play at your ‘shindig.’”

“Good, good. That’s all I wanted.” I swear, there should be a special fairy edition of Getting To Yes, just for dealing with all their Fae drama.

So we put together a pretty nice spread at this Quaker meeting hall in Evening Falls, including some pulled-pork barbecue and fried okra. Of course, given that most of these people were involved in local zoning, we should have just let them carve up a virgin instead. I mean, seriously. [The rest of this section is available at www.monstersofurbanplanning.org—Editor.]

Where was I? Oh yes. So it was mostly the usual assortment of church ladies, small-time politicians, local business people, and so on. But there were two men who stood out like hornetaurs at a bull fight.

Sebastian Valcourt was tall, with fine cheekbones and a noble brow, under a shock of wavy dark hair that he probably blow-dried for an hour every day. He wore a natty suit, but his shirt was unbuttoned almost to the navel, revealing a hairless chest that was made of money. No kidding, I used to know a male stripper named Velcro who was three-quarters elf, and he would have killed for those pecs.

The other startlingly beautiful man was named Gilbert Longwood, and he was big and solidly built, like a classical statue. His arms were like sea-cliffs, and his face was big and square-jawed—like a marble bust except that his eyes had pupils, which was probably a good thing for him. When he shook my hand, I felt his grip and it made me all weak in the knees. But from the start of the evening, both Gilbert and Sebastian could only see one woman.

Once Antonia began to play, it was all over—everybody in that room fell for her, and I could have gotten planning permission to put a bowling alley inside a church. Afterwards, I was talking to Gilbert, while Sebastian leapt across the room like a ballet dancer, landing in front of Antonia and kissing her hand with a sweeping bow. He said something, and she laughed behind a hand.

“You throw an entertaining party,” said Gilbert, trying not to stare at Sebastian’s acrobatic courtship over in the corner. “I don’t think I’ve seen half these people show any emotion since the town historian self-immolated a few years ago.” His voice was like a gong echoing in a crypt. I never got Gilbert’s whole story, but I gathered he was the son of a wealthy sculptor, part of Evening Falls’ most prominent family.

At this point, Gilbert had given up all pretense that he wasn’t staring at Antonia. “Yeah,” I said. “I discovered that girl. I taught her everything she knows. Except I held back a few secrets for myself, if you get my drift and I think you do.” I winked.

“Please excuse me, gracious lady,” Gilbert said. When he bowed, it was like a drawbridge going down and then up again. He made his way across the room, navigating around all the people who wanted to ask him about zoning (jackals!) on his way to where Sebastian was clinking glasses with Antonia.

I couldn’t quite get close enough to hear the conversation that followed, but their faces told me everything I needed to know. Sebastian’s mouth smiled, but his amber-green eyes burned with desire for Antonia, even as he made some cutting remark towards Gilbert. Gilbert smiled back, and let Sebastian’s fancy wit bounce off his granite face, even as he kept his longing gaze on Antonia’s face. For Antonia’s part, she blushed and looked down into the depths of her glass of Cheerwine.

You could witness a love triangle being born, its corners sharp enough to slice you open and expose your trembling insides to all sorts of infections, including drug-resistant staph, which has been freaking me out lately. I always wash my hands twice, with antibacterial soap and holy water. Where was I? Right, love triangle. This was an isosceles of pure burning desire, in which two men both pined for the same impossibly beautiful, permanently heartbroken lady. My first thought was: There’s got to be a way to make some money off this.

And sure enough, there was. I made sure Antonia didn’t give out her digits, or even so much as her Twitter handle, to either of these men. If they wanted to stalk her, they would have to come to Rachel’s Bar & Grill. I managed to drop a hint to both of them that what really impressed Antonia was when a guy had a large, heavy-drinking, entourage.

I didn’t have to turn on the big-screen TV once, for the whole month that followed. Sebastian and Gilbert, with their feverish courtship of Antonia, provided as much free entertainment as ten Married With Children marathons. Maybe even eleven. Sebastian gave Antonia a tiny pewter unicorn, which danced around in the palm of her hand but remained lifeless otherwise. Gilbert brought enough flowers that the bar smelled fresh for the first time since 1987.

This one evening, I watched Gilbert staring at Antonia as she sat on her stool and choked out a ballad. She wore a long canvas skirt, and her feet were crossed on the stool’s dowel. He looked at her tragic ankles—so slender, with tendons that flexed like heartstrings—and his big brown eyes moistened.

And then Sebastian arrived, flanked by two other weirdly gorgeous, unnaturally spry men with expressive eyes. Everytime you would think their eyebrows couldn’t get any more expressive, or their gazes more smoldering, they’d kick it up another notch. Their eyebrows had the dramatic range of a thousand Kenneth Branaghs—maybe a thousand Branaghs per eyebrow, even. The other two smiled wan, ironic smiles at each other, while Sebastian kept his gaze fixed on the tiny trembling lips and giant mournful eyes of Antonia.

A few weeks—and a few thou worth of high-end liquor—later, both Sebastian and Gilbert began to speak to Antonia of their passion.

“A heart so grievously wounded as yours requires careful tending, my lady,” Gilbert rumbled in his deep voice. “I have strong hands, but a gentle touch, to keep you safe.” His sideburns were perfect rectangles, framing his perfectly chiseled cheekbones.

“I fear…” Antonia turned to put her guitar in its case, so the anguish on her face was hidden from view for a moment. “I fear the only thing for a condition such as mine is solitude, laced with good fellowship here at Rachel’s. But I shall cherish your friendship, Gilbert.”

Soon after, Sebastian approached Antonia, without his cronies. “My dear,” he said. “Your loveliness outshines every one of those neon beer signs. But it is your singing, your sweet sad tune, which stirs me in a way that nothing else has for decades. You must consent to be mine, or I shall have no choice but to become ever more mysterious, until I mystify even myself. Did I say that out loud? I meant, I’ll waste away. Look at my eyebrows, and you’ll see how serious I am.”

“Oh, Sebastian,” Antonia laughed, then sighed. “Had I even a sliver of a heart to give, I might well give it to you. But you speak to a hollow woman.”

Blah blah blah. This went on and on, and I had to re-order several of the single malt whiskeys, not to mention all the mid-range cognacs, and Southern Comfort.

Who can say how long this would have gone on for, if both Sebastian and Gilbert hadn’t turned up on an evening when Antonia wasn’t there? (You guessed it: The Full Moon.) The two of them started arguing about which of them deserved Antonia. Gilbert rumbled that Sebastian just wanted to use Antonia, while Sebastian said Gilbert was too much of a big ugly lug for her. Gilbert took a swing at Sebastian and missed, and that’s when I told them to take it outside.

Soon afterwards, we all tromped outside to watch. Sebastian was dancing around like Prince on a hot griddle, while Gilbert kept lashing out with his massive fists and missing. Until finally, Gilbert’s forearm caught Sebastian in the shoulder, and he went flying onto his ass. And then things got entertaining: Sebastian’s face got all tough and leathery, and fangs sprouted from his mouth. He did a somersault in mid-air, aiming a no-shadow kick at Gilbert—who raised his boulder-sized fist, so it collided with Sebastian’s face.

After that, the fight consisted of Gilbert punching Sebastian, a lot. “Stupid vampire,” Gilbert grunted. “You’re not the first bloodsucker I’ve swatted.”

By this point, Sebastian’s jaw was looking dislocated. Those expressive eyebrows were twisted with pain. “I’m not… your average… vampire,” he hissed. Gilbert brought his sledge-hammer fist down onto Sebastian’s skull.

Sebastian fell to the ground, in an ungainly pile of bones. And he smiled. “The more beat up I get… the harder to kill… I get,” he rasped. And then he stood on jerky legs, his flesh peeling away.

Sebastian’s smile turned slack and distended. Instead of his usual witticisms, he said but one word: “Braiiiiiinnsss…”

Gilbert kept punching at Sebastian, but it did no good. Nothing even slowed him down. Sebastian thrashed back at Gilbert with a hideous force, and finally he hit a weak point, where Gilbert’s head met his neck—and Gilbert’s head fell, rolling to land at my feet.

Gilbert’s severed head looked up at me. “Tell Antonia… my love for her was true.” And then the head turned to stone. And so did the rest of his body, which fell into several pieces in the middle of the dark walkway.

Sebastian looked at me, and the couple other regulars who were watching. He snarled, with what remained of his mouth, “Braaaaaaaiiiiiinnsss!”

The nearest patron was Jerry Dorfenglock, who’d been coming to Rachel’s for 20 years. He had a really nice smooth bald head, which he’d experimented with combing over and then with shaving all the way, Kojak-style, before deciding to just let it be what it was, two wings of fluffy gray hair flanking a serene dome. That noble scalp, Sebastian tore open, along with the skull beneath. Sebastian reached with both hands to scoop out poor Jerry’s gray matter, then stopped at the last moment. Instead, he leaned further down and sunk his top teeth into Jerry’s neck, draining all the blood from his body in one gulp.

A moment later, Sebastian looked away from the husk of Jerry’s body, looking more like his normal self already. “If I—” he paused wipe his mouth. “If I eat the brains, I become more irrevocably the zombie. But if I drink the blood, I return to my magnificent vampiric self. It’s always hard to remind myself. Think of it as the blood-brain barrier between handsome rogue… and shambling fiend.”  The other patron who’d been watching the fight, Lou, tried to make a break for it, but Sebastian was too fast.

I looked at the bloodless husks of my two best customers, plus the chalky pieces of poor Gilbert, then back at Sebastian—who now looked as though nothing had ever happened, except for the stains on his natty suit. I decided being casual was my best hope of coming out of this alive.

“So you’re a half-vampire, half-zombie,” I said as if I was discussing a Seinfeld rerun. “That’s something you don’t see every day, I guess.”

“It is an amusing story,” Sebastian said. “When I was a mortal, I loved a mysterious dark beauty, who grew more mysterious with every passing hour. My heart felt close to bursting for the love of her. At last, she revealed she was an ancient vampire, and offered me the chance to be her consort. She fed me her blood, and told me that if I died within twelve hours, I would become a vampire and I could join her. If I did not die, I could return to my mortal life. She left me to decide for myself. I went out to my favorite spot on the edge of Stoneflower Lake, to ponder my decision and savor my last day on Earth—for I already knew what choice I would make. But just then, a zombie climbed out of the lake bottom, where it had been terrorizing the bass, and bit me in the face. I died then and there, but as the vampire blood began to transform me into an eternal swain of darkness, so too did the zombie bite work its own magic. Now, I remain a vampire, only as long as I have a steady diet of restoring blood.”

“That’s quite a story,” I said. I was already trying to figure out what I would do with Lou and Jerry’s bodies, since I had a feeling Sebastian would regard corpse cleanup as woman’s work. “You should sell the TV movie rights.”

“Thanks for the advice.” Sebastian looked into my eyes, and his gaze held me fast. “You will not speak to anyone of what you have seen and heard tonight.” As he spoke, the words became an unbreakable law to me. Then Sebastian sauntered away, leaving me—what did I tell you?—to bury the bodies. At least with Gilbert, it was just a matter of lugging the pieces to the Ruined Statue Garden a couple of streets away.

By the time I got done, my hands were a mess and I was sweating and shaking and maybe even crying a little. I went back to the bar and poured myself some Wild Turkey, and then some more, and then a bit more after that. I wished I could talk to someone about this. But of course, I was under a vampiric mind-spell thingy, and I could never speak a word.

Good thing I’ve got a Hotmail account.

I put the whole thing as plain as I could in a long email to Antonia, including the whole confusing “vampire who’s also a zombie” thing. I ended by saying: “Here’s the thing, sweetie, Sebastian is gonna think you don’t know any of this, and with Gilbert out of the way, he’ll be making his move. Definitely do NOT marry him, the half-zombie thing is a dealbreaker, but don’t try to fight him either. He’s got the thing where the more you hurt him, the more zombie he gets and then you can’t win, he’s got you beat either way. And not to mention, the full moon is over as of tomorrow morning, so you got no more wolf on your side. Just keep yourself safe okay because it would just about ruin me to see anything happen to you—I mean you bring in the paying customers, don’t worry, I’m not getting soppy on you. Your boss, Rachel.”

She came in the next day, clutching Gilbert’s head. Her eyes were puffy and the cords on her neck stood out as she heaved a sob. I handed her a glass of absinthe without saying anything, and she drained it right away. I made her another, with the sugar cube and everything.

I wasn’t sure if Sebastian’s mind control would keep me from saying I was sorry, but it didn’t. Antonia shrugged and collapsed onto my shoulder, weeping into my big flannel shirt, Gilbert’s forehead pressing into my stomach.

“Gilbert really loved me,” she said when she got her breath back and sat down on her usual music-playing stool. “He loved me more than I deserved. I was… I was finally ready to surrender, and give my heart away. I made up my mind, while I was out running with the wolves.”

“You were going to go out with Gilbert?” I had to sit down too.

“No. I was going to let Gilbert down easy, and then date Sebastian. Because he made me laugh.” She opened her guitar case, revealing a bright sword, made of tempered Sylvanian steel with the crest of Thuiron the Resolver on the hilt, instead of a guitar. “Now I have to kill him.”

“Hey hey hey,” I said. “There are some good reasons not to do that, which I cannot speak of, but hang on, let me get a notepad and a pen and I’ll be happy to explain—”

“You already explained.” She put her left hand on my shoulder. “Thanks for your kindness, Rachel.”

“I don’t—” What could I say? What was I allowed to say? “I don’t want you to die.”

“I won’t.” She smiled with at least part of her face.

“Are you starting your set early tonight? I have a request.” Sebastian said from the doorway at the top of the short staircase leading into the bar, framed by the ebbing daylight. “I really want to hear some Van Morrison for once, instead of that—”

Antonia threw Gilbert’s head at Sebastian. His eyes widened as he realized what it was, and what it meant. He almost ducked, then opted to catch it with one hand instead, to show he was still on top of the situation. While he was distracted, though, Rachel was already running with her sword out, making a whoosh as it tore through the air.

Antonia impaled Sebastian, but missed his heart. He kicked her in the face, and she fell, blood-blinded.

“So this is how it’s going to be?” Sebastian tossed the head into the nearest booth, where it landed face up on the table. “I confess I’m disappointed. I was going to marry you and then kill you. More fairy treasure that way.”

“You—You—” Antonia coughed blood. “You never loved me.”

“Oh, keep up.” Sebastian loomed over Antonia, pulled her sword out of his chest, and swung it over his head two-handed, aiming for a nice clean slice. “I’ll bring your remains back to Sylvania, and tell them a lovely story of how you and I fell in love and got married, before you were killed by a wild boar or an insurance adjuster. Hold still, this’ll hurt less.”

Antonia kicked him in the reproductive parts, but he shrugged it off.  The shining sword whooshed down towards her neck.

“Hey!” I pumped my plus-one Vorpal shotgun from behind the bar. “No. Fighting. In. The. Bar.”

“We can take it outside,” Sebastian said, not lowering the sword.

“Too late for that,” I said. “You’re in my bar, you settle it how I choose.”

“And how’s that?”

I said the first thing that came into my head: “With a karaoke contest.”

And because it was my bar, and I have certain safeguards in place for this sort of situation, they were both bound by my word. Sebastian grumbled a fair bit, especially what with Antonia being a semi-professional singer, but he couldn’t fight it. It took us a couple hours to organize, including finding a few judges and putting an impartiality whammy on them, to keep it a fair competition.

I even broke open my good wine jug and gave out free cups to everybody. Once his nesting place was all emptied out, Leroy the Wine Goblin crawled out on the bar and squinted.

Antonia went first, and she went straight for the jugular—with showtunes. You’ve probably never seen a fairy princess do “Don’t Tell Mama” from Cabaret, complete with hip-twirling burlesque dance moves and a little Betty Boop thing when she winked at the audience. Somehow she poured all her rage and passion, all her righteous Sarah McLachlan-esque anger, into a roar on the final chorus. The judges scribbled nice high numbers and chattered approvingly.

And then Sebastian went up—and he broke out that Red Hot Chili Peppers song about the City of Angels. He’d even put on extra eyeliner. He fixed each of us with that depthless vampire stare, even as he poured out an amazing facsimile of a soul, singing about being lost and lonely and wanting his freakin happy place. Bastard was going to win this thing.

But there was one thing I knew for sure. I knew that he’d have to shut his eyes, for at least a moment, when he hit those high notes in the bridge about the bridge, after the second chorus.

Sure enough, when Sebastian sang out “Under the bridge downtown,” his eyes closed so his voice could float over the sound of Frusciante’s guitar transitioning from “noodle” mode to “thrash” mode. And that’s when I shot him with my plus-one Vorpal shotgun. Once in the face, once in the chest. I reloaded quick as I could, and shot him in the chest again, and then in the left kneecap for good measure.

It wasn’t enough to slow him down, but it did make him change. All of a sudden, the lyrics went, “Under the bridge downtown, I could not get enough… BRAIIIIIINSSSS!!”

He tossed the microphone and lurched into the audience. The three karaoke judges, who were still enchanted to be 100 percent impartial, sat patiently watching and making notes on their score sheets, until some other patrons hauled them out of the way. Leroy the Wine Goblin covered his face and screamed for the safety of his jug. People fell all over each other to reach the staircase.

“I shall take it from here.” Antonia hoisted her sword, twirling it like a Benihana chef while Frusciante’s guitar-gasm reached its peak. She hacked one of Sebastian’s arms off, but he barely noticed.

She swung the sword again, to try and take his head off, and he managed to sidestep and headbutt her. His face caught the side of her blade, but he barely noticed, and he drove the sharp edge into Antonia’s stomach with his forehead. Blood gushed out of her as she fell to the ground, and he caught it in his mouth like rain.

A second later, Sebastian was Sebastian again. “Ah, fairy blood,” he said. “There really is nothing like it.” Antonia tried to get up again, but slumped back down on the floor with a moan, doubled up around her wounded stomach.

I shot at Sebastian again, but I missed and he broke the shotgun in half. Then he broke both my arms. “Nobody is going to come to karaoke night if you shoot people in the face while they’re singing. Seriously.” I tried not to give him the satisfaction of hearing me whimper.

Antonia raised her head and said a fire spell. Wisps of smoke started coming off Sebastian’s body, but he just shrugged. “You’ve already seen what happens if you manage to hurt me.” The smoke turned into a solid wall of flame, but Sebastian pushed it away from his body with a tai-chi move. “Why even bother?”

“Mostly,” Antonia’s voice came from the other side of the fire wall, “just to distract yoooooooooo!” Her snarl became a howl, a barbaric call for vengeance.

There may be a sight more awesome than a giant white wolf leaping through a wall of solid fire. If so, I haven’t seen it. Antonia—for somehow she had managed to summon enough of her inner wolf to change—bared her jaws as she leapt. Her eyes shone red and her ears pulled back as the flames parted around her and sparks showered from her ivory fur.

Sebastian never saw it coming. Her first bite tore his neck open, and his head lolled off to one side. He started to zombify again, but Antonia was already clawing him.

“Don’t—Don’t let him bite you!” I shouted from behind the bar.

Sebastian almost got his teeth on Antonia, but she ducked.

“BRAIIINNSS!”

She was on top of him, her jaws snapping wildly, but he was biting just as hard. His zombie saliva and his vampire teeth were both inches away from her neck.

I crawled over to the cooler where I kept the pitchers of sangria, and pulled the door open with my teeth. I knocked pitchers and carafes on the floor, trying to get at the surprise I’d stored there the night before, in a big jar covered with cellophane wrap.

I hadn’t actually buried all of Lou and Jerry.

I pulled the jar out with my teeth and wedged it between my two upper arms and my chin, then lugged it over to where Antonia and Sebastian were still trying to bite each other. “Hey,” I rasped, “I saved you something, you bastard.” And I tipped the jar’s contents—two guys’ brains, in a nice balsamic vinaigrette—into Sebastian’s face. Once he started guzzling the brains, he couldn’t stop himself. He was getting brain all over his face, as he tried to swallow it all as fast as possible, brains were getting in his eyes and up what was left of his nose. There was no going back for him now.

Antonia broke the glass jar and held a big shard of it in her strong wolf jaws, sawing at Sebastian’s neck until his head came all the way off. He was still gulping at the last bits of brains in his mouth, and trying to lick brain-bits off his face.

It took them an hour to set the bones on my arms, and I had casts the size of beer kegs. We put Sebastian’s head into another jar, with an UV light jammed inside so whenever the Red Hot Chili Peppers come on the stereo, he gets excited and his face glows purple. I never thought the Peppers would be the most requested artist at Rachel’s. I never did get permission to open a second bar in Evening Falls, though.

As for Antonia, I think this whole experience toughened her up, and made her realize that being a little bit wild-animal wasn’t a bad thing for a fairy princess. And that Anthony Kiedis really doesn’t have the singing range he thinks he has. And that when it comes to love triangles and duels to the death, you should always cheat. And that running away from your problems only works for so long. There were a few other lessons, all of which I printed out and laminated for her. She still sings in the bar, but she’s made a couple of trips back to Sylvania during the crescent moon, and they’re working on a cure for her. She could probably go back and be a princess if she wanted to, but we’ve been talking about going into business together and opening some straight-up karaoke bars in Charlotte and Winston-Salem. She’s learning to KJ. I think we could rule the world.

Power Couple (Or “Love Never Sleeps”)

I never felt like a real college girl until I met John my senior year. He and I stayed up all night talking and then ran around campus chalking pastel hearts and portraits of Václav Havel on the cement walkways. A manic fox with wavy brown hair, he could come to rest suddenly and eye me with a playful stillness that made me ache. He managed to be both clever and smart, lean as well as dimpled. When he touched my hand and made an observation about the geometry of my fingers and the just-discovered significance of something I’d said a week earlier, lust tightened all the muscles from my stomach down to my knees.

By winter senior year, John and I were spending every night together and the rest of the world seemed both insignificant and enchanted, a Smurf village at our feet. He was my first love. Spring found us standing on an ancient stone bridge, arms around each other and bodies glued from sternum to ankle, watching algae bloom underwater. We breathed in sync. I leaned into John’s shoulder and inhaled slowly. The gathering warmth seemed to well up from the center of the Earth, instead of the returning sun.

A year later, we barely saw each other. We had gone from inseparable to schedule-challenged. I’d enrolled at UVA Med and John studied law at Princeton. We figured we’d spend every weekend together, then it became every other weekend, and finally it was Christmas and John became “hello stranger.”

Things came to a head when I visited John the spring after graduation. I had somehow let two months go by without inhaling the bramble scent of John’s neck. He seemed a long-lost best friend. But after the first rush of seeing John again, the visit flew by and we barely had a moment to talk. Our whole weekend together consisted of law study sessions, games of tennis, and parties where everyone talked about law and tennis.

I confronted John on Sunday afternoon. “Maybe we should see other people,” I said, dying for John to contradict me. His room had no furnishings, save for a bed and a desk with a framed picture of me, looking fizzy and blonde.

“I wish we’d met later in life,” John said. “When we’d done all the heavy lifting and career shit. But I do know the kind of connection we have is unique. We may never see anything like it again. We owe it to ourselves to keep it together.” He wept and so did I, and then we kissed and soon we were naked on the bed together crying and kissing and I missed my train back to UVA.

I took a triumphant, blessing warmth back to UVA with me, and felt its heat death over the next few days. I believed everything John had said, and yet it wasn’t enough. We went back to brief emails and occasional phone calls. Our relationship wasn’t on the back burner, it was in a meat locker miles from the kitchen.

That frozen feeling in the midst of spring prodded my imagination just as I walked past the cryonics lab where my friend Maisie worked, in a boxy red brick converted tobacco warehouse. Inside, I tried to see where workers had hefted bales and rolled cigarettes. Now it was all plasterboard walls and purring machines.

The next thing I knew, I had talked to Maisie for a few hours. Maisie showed me equipment and introduced me to her boss and coworkers. I had already learned in med school that you could slow the body’s functions to a standstill using a combination of intravenous drugs and industrial coolants. Maisie spouted phrases like “metabolic coma” and “molasses-slow polymerase.” An idea took shape.

I called John a few days later. “Just think about it. You said it would have been better if we’d met later in life. This way we can. We’ll be like no other couple, as extraordinary in our courtship as our connection. No, hear me out. It’ll be at least seven years before we can pay attention to each other. And during that time, we each have to be able to relocate to a random location, like the President at Defcon Five. We both work in fields designed for single-achiever families. Well, this is the answer!” I finished my pitch, breathless. I knew John could easily shoot down my fairy-godmother solution.

Instead he considered carefully. Of course, being a law student, he asked about the legalities. I explained the cryo lab wasn’t officially part of the university, it was a private company that benefited from the university’s talent pool. The FDA had approved stage three cryo trials about five years earlier, and maybe a hundred people around the country were in suspension now. We would have to sign a stack of release forms the thickness of a Gideon Bible.

“So you’re sure this new technique is safe? No side effects?” John asked, and I offered reassurance. “So I slide into this overgrown lipstick tube for seven years. You keep me sitting in your room around all through med school and residency, like some kind of statue. Then when you finish residency, we turn the tables. I go out and conquer the universe, while you turn into the world’s lowest-maintenance girlfriend. Right? Then fourteen years from now, we’re both just seven years older and fully qualified to live where we want and do our jobs. It’s an audacious plan. No doubt about that.”

“You mean you’ll think about it?”

“I mean it reminds me of why I fell in love with you in the first place, Willa. Nobody else could have come up with such sensible lunacy. Let me get back to you.”

We each talked to our friends and families. Everyone made fun of my plan, but I sensed a tinge of envy at how bold and romantic it was.

“If I say yes, how do I know you’ll awaken me?” John asked a few days later.

“Because I’ll miss your conversation,” I laughed. “You’ll be a boring stiff.”

John said okay. A month or so later, he ate his favorite meal (fish tacos) and we had boisterous sex. Then he put on a white suit and black tie and we drove to the medical school, where Maisie and her boss Dr. Abbye did some last-minute tests on John and then put him on a slab, which slid inside a great silver shell.

A few hours later, I had a new decoration for my apartment: a shiny chrome tube that stood against one wall, with a big window showing John’s face. John’s expression looked sardonic from some angles, mournful from others. He stood in the corner of my bedroom, casting a blue glow in the middle of the night. I got used to his presence there, only to have it startle me anew when I’d just gotten out of the shower or sat scratching myself in bed. I got used to explaining John to the lovers I brought home, but also to going to other people’s places instead. Once a month, I trimmed John’s beard and fingernails. When I went away on vacation, I got a friend to come in once a day and check on John, whose bio monitors never hinted at trouble. I compared him sometimes to the cadaver I dissected at school—inanimate but intimate. Except John had a world of potential the cadaver lacked.

As promised, I talked to John every day when I was around. I told him about my day, about my fears and minutiae—including things I never could have shared with an alert John. In the sleep-deprived miasma of residency, I lost track of when John was actually present. I saw him staring over my shoulder as I treated patients. I muttered to his specter in the break room where I bunked on call. His unweary watchfulness followed me everywhere. I sometimes forgot his name, after a thirty-six hour shift, but not his face.

Residency ended. I slept for a week and went to the beach for another week. I got a pedicure and read trashy novels. I caught up with old girlfriends. After a month the cryo lab started calling to ask when would I come in for John’s renaissance, to be followed a couple of weeks later by my entombment. I didn’t call back. Guilt started to jab at me.

“It’s not that I prefer him this way,” I confided to Maisie. “Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. I can’t remember the old John well enough any more. But once I wake John, I’ll have to take my turn. And now I’m not so sure I want to do that any more.” Maisie gently pointed out that John was a person who deserved to get on with his life, and in any case I could discuss the options with John once he could speak for himself.

I stared into John’s eyes as he came back to the world. I wanted his first sight to be my adoration. I did my hair and makeup, tried to look as much as the old Willa as possible. A smile developed on John’s face. Finally he said, “I need to pee.”

The doctors warned me John might be groggy or disoriented for a while. But an hour after he left that tube, he was focused. He sparked with energy. We went to dinner and he wolfed two entrées. “I had amazing dreams, full of flying shapes and voices,” he said. “They’re fading already, but I remember I had no body in them.” He fucked me three times that night, then got up and paced.

I’d forgotten how much fun John could be, like a mad scientist in the world’s biggest Radio Shack. He made me laugh and orgasm, and his scattered ideas kept me fascinated. It was only after a few hyperactive days that I started to worry.

“I feel fine.” His new beard twitched. “I’ve had plenty of rest. Now I want to have fun.” He went out clubbing, first with me, then without once it was clear I couldn’t keep up. He’d get home at three in the morning, sleep a few hours, then be up before me. I’d awaken to a mug of coffee held under my nose.

After a week, I worried a side effect of the freezing process had left John amped for good. If so, he figured it would wear off, but in any case he had another explanation. “We’re different ages now. I’m in my early twenties, you’re thirtyish. Those are different life stages. Remember how much you went out, how much wildness you burned off, when you were my age. That’s how I still am.”

I doubted I’d ever raced around as madly as John was doing. But it was clear we ran at different speeds. I started to avoid him.

Before I brought up the question of my freezing, I knew what John’s answer would be. I could do what I wanted, he couldn’t hold me to my side of the deal, but our relationship was over if I stayed awake. As we were now, we operated too differently to last together. “I can move anywhere now,” I pointed out. “I have much more flexibility. I can even work part time as a locum tenens, a substitute doctor.”

John gently said that wasn’t the point.

“I watched you sleep last night,” he told me. “You looked stunning. I imagine you haunting my rooms with loveliness. A flower always in bloom.”

Talking about it made me tired anyway. I felt half in suspension after a while, as the same arguments went around and around.

“I can’t believe you’re giving me an ultimatum,” I said.

“I can’t believe you’re trying to back out of our deal,” John said.

That’s as close as we got to fighting. We both had too much dignity to squall over something like this, or else we were both ashamed.

Finally, John seemed to realize he needed to woo me all over again. He slowed down. We drove to the beach and ate caviar naked with the waves foaming over our ankles. John looked into my eyes and pled the case for a love spanning decades. “We’ve come too far to give up, what we have is too precious.”

I sat in the bathtub and reminded herself that I had planned this role reversal, it wasn’t John turning the tables on me to be mean.

“I guess you’ll mellow out by the time I wake up,” I mused to John.

“I’ll be easy-going by then. And it goes by in no time. It feels now as though I barely closed my eyes.” He talked of awakening me with a kiss, like Sleeping Beauty.

John and I started to feel comfortable together again, once he slowed a little and I relaxed around him. I eased into our old rapport, trading jokes and kisses for hours. I remembered why we had wanted to do this in the first place. “You’re the love of my life,” I told John. “I never want to lose my faith that love defeats all obstacles, trumps all other cards.” We spent a whole day in bed, making love and talking about our future together.

Then we went back to the cryo lab together. I lay down on the sliding table and stared up at the nicotine-scarred ceiling.

“Hey.” John smiled down at me. I could tell he was fighting the urge to look around the room and focus on five things at once. He held one of my hands and Maisie held the other. (She didn’t work there anymore, but had come back for this.)

Then they let go of my hands as I rolled into the tube’s darkness and my mind filled with patterns. I remember a thousand years of stripes and plaids drifting past my eyes, an endless Abercrombie and Fitch catalog. John hadn’t prepared me for how boring it would be. My mind didn’t form a single complete thought during my time away from time. Instead I remember idea fragments and half-links of metonymic chains. I was used to living in my head most of the time, so it was like seeing my home burned down, fragments of possessions here and there.

John had promised the next clear image I saw would be his face looking down as I awoke. Instead I woke to Maisie, looking tired but not much older. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “John’s not here.”

I tried to form questions, but instead nonsense poured out.

“It’s only been three years or so,” Maisie said. “We lost touch with John and got worried. We went to his last known address and found an eviction notice on the door, spoiled food in the fridge… and you.”

Spoiled food. And me.

“I shudder to think what would have happened if his electricity had got cut off with you still in suspension,” Maisie added. “Catastrophic shutdown.”

Maisie daubed at my face with a tissue. I thought maybe they had applied some kind of fluid to my face to help the revival process. Then I realized I must be crying. I still felt as though everything was happening a long distance away.

“I’m sorry, maybe I should have waited to tell you the truth,” Maisie said. “But I knew you’d have questions when you woke and he wasn’t here.”

I nodded. I still felt unable to talk.

It took me a couple days before the world seemed the same place I remembered. Shadows kept startling me. Even after I felt more normal, I still feared things would dissolve or start to move too quickly or too slowly. I worried that everything was just an illusion. I wasn’t hyperactive like John had been, just terrified and unsteady.

I hunted John for a month, in between interviews for locum tenens positions. None of the law school buddies I’d met had kept up with him. His parents had an address that turned out to be a warehouse where John had slung car parts. Someone there had lived in a group house with John and a group of death rockers. Finally someone had heard John had moved to Maine.

It took a day to drive through dense woods, along single-lane highways lined by pumpkin stands and stores with names like The Brass Button. The roads frosted and snow spattered my windshield. It felt as though I were driving back into the frozen wasteland where John and I had spent so much of our young adulthood.

John’s new housemates seemed friendly and crunchy, not at all death rockerish, and they told me where to find the soap factory where John worked. I pictured John, still hyperactive, running five machines at once, possibly juggling at the same time. Instead, he stood in front of a conveyor belt, calmer than I’d ever seen him. His beard had spread out, but otherwise he looked the same. I watched him until his break.

“Remember those lavender and chamomile soaps you liked?” he asked me. “I make those. It’s much more socially beneficial than lawyering would have been.”

“Are you all right?” I asked. He led me across the street to a sandwich shop. It had the local newspaper and a menu with three choices.

He nodded. “I was a tad jumpy for a month after I defrosted. Then I returned to normal. If anything, everyone said I was more mature, considering I hadn’t aged.”

“Then why—”

“I dropped out of law school. I guess you knew.” He shrugged and ordered a bacon roll and cocoa. I got some cookies. “It wasn’t some weird side effect of the freezing process, though. I just wasn’t cut out for law, it turned out. You know, I was just out of college, I didn’t really know what I wanted to be. Still don’t know. I partly went to law school because everyone expected me to do something high-powered. Including you. Especially you.”

“I didn’t care what you did, I just wanted—”

“You liked me because I was smart, right? And I didn’t want to disappoint. Remember how we used to talk about our future, our careers, all the time? We were going to be a doctor and a lawyer.”

I stood. “I can’t believe you’re trying to blame me! I almost died because of you!”

“Georgie didn’t take care of you? I sublet my place to him, and he promised to—”

“You promised to look after me. Not your friend. You. Why the fuck didn’t you just wake me after you dropped out of law school?”

“I didn’t want to explain to you what a waste it’d all been. I kept thinking if I had seven years, I could make a success at something before I had to face you. Because I knew you’d give me that look—the look you’re giving me right now. You should see it.”

There wasn’t much to say after that. On the long drive south, I dreamed up possible endings to my love story. Like a car crash in a New Hampshire snowdrift. Or maybe an irony-laden moment in which I went back to Maisie and had myself refrozen until John made good or someone invented a cure for fatal stupidity. But I already knew that my life was just going to carry on, at more or less the same pace as everybody else’s, until it one day coasted to a complete stop.

Suicide Drive

You’re late. If we miss history, it’ll be all your fault.

Nah, I don’t really care. I’m just flinging shit at you. You’re the one who wanted to record my reaction to the big day. It’s down here, past the big sliding door. OK. Now we’re sealed in, although it’s not in full lockdown mode, or else we wouldn’t be able to receive any signals or anything.

Yes, this is the place. Pretty boring, huh? This was my whole world until I turned twenty one. Right, the last twenty years of his life.

It doesn’t look that great, but it’s sort of designed to deceive the casual eye, if someone somehow found this place when we weren’t in lockdown. True, we had running water when nobody else did. You could maintain a comfortable existence here for decades, which is what I’ve done, actually. The facilities are pretty nice, when everything’s working properly. But of course, that’s why you’re here. The generator’s just behind that wall hanging, by the way.

From my selfish standpoint, that’s why you’re here. From your standpoint, you’re here to ask about my dad. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you everything I know about him. Sorghum wine? Bio-snort? Okay, suit yourself. But at least sit down, that chair keeps bobbing up to meet you, and it’s making me nervous.

Okay, so my dad. You know Hitler was a painter, Havel was a playwright, and Mao was a poet. Well, my dad was a musician. Only, he really was a musician. First and foremost. I think he was always happier making music and entertaining people. At the age when he should have been doing a comeback tour, doing bad acoustic versions of all the songs on the Dead First album, he was running the world. Excuse me, “chairing the World Council.” Same diff.

I’m not trying to trivialize his legacy. I’m not. It’s just everything makes more sense if you think of him as a rock star. And just remember, if he’d died when he was your age, he’d still have been famous forever, just for his music. For as long as there were people, anyway.

I mentioned the facilities are great. See that dirty cooking hole? That’s actually the entertainment system. You press a button and you can watch any one of a million fibrespecs. Like this one—it’s like having The Big Engine playing live in your living room. Here, I’ll show you. This is the show where Toony’s stomach implants burst open, and he just keeps drumming, doesn’t even miss a lick. People forget how hardcore they were. Here, we can slow the replay. Look at his facial expression, he’s in agony but he bites it back. Fucking insane.

He didn’t talk about it that much. I was like one year old when we moved here, and right until the end I never knew the whole story. I sort of knew my dad had been someone important, but mostly I thought it was just the rock-star thing. And I thought everybody lived like this. I didn’t realize half the world was starving while we were in our little luxury compound disguised as a shack. In the fibrespecs we watched, people mostly lived like us. I didn’t realize the stories were lies, just like our life.

You know, it was like when Siddhartha Gautama sneaked out of the palace for the first time. Saw the poverty, the clawing need, the people barely hanging on. I hadn’t realized that everyone else lived that way. I walked around just staring at the rags and the filth and the outlines of all those bones, and then I realized that I looked like the richest man on Earth. So I ran the hell back here and locked everything up for a while. The next time I went out, I fucked myself up. And I still looked way out of place. No, I’m not trying to say I’m Buddha. Just an analogy.

Yeah. I think he would have given anything to be here today. It killed him to know that we couldn’t know the outcome of the Gamba Project for fifty years. I’m the age now that he was when it launched. The Suicide Drive.

I know, that’s not the real name. But the Suicide Drive sounds a lot more poetic than the Murtz-Groeger-Zao Quantum Inverse Drive.

My dad wrote a song called “Suicide Drive,” did you know that? When he was twenty two years old. It’s not on any of the fibrespecs, even the collections of rarities, because it’s a crappy song. It’s all about the deathwish, the opposite of the will to live, and there’s sort of a double meaning with “drive” as in street or driveway. It’s easily one of the twenty or thirty worst songs my dad wrote.

So he was prolific, and every hundredth song was actually pretty great. I guess. Actually, it’s not my kind of music. I prefer blueggae. My dad stopped writing songs after his election. I guess he tried, but he couldn’t get back into that headspace. Which probably did kind of drive him nuts, more than anything else.

Okay, whatever. I’ve heard what they say about his election. I have no clue, and probably neither did he. He thought he won fairly. I have no clue. None. It’s funny, I knew nothing of any of this until I turned eighteen. He sat me down and told me the whole story, in one afternoon. And then he died a few years later, and I finally got out of here, long enough to buy some historical fibrespecs. I didn’t know what people were saying about him until he died. It’s funny, he never knew quite how much he was hated, but he also totally missed out on the whole “Jando wasn’t so bad” backlash.

No, you can’t hear it. I told you, it’s a shitty song. Jesus. Plus how do I know you won’t record it? Fuck you, man. It’s bad enough I have to do this interview in the first place. You do know how to fix my generator, right? That’s the only reason I let you down here. And you already promised in writing not to tell anyone where I am.

Yes, you could say I’m sheltered. I mean, I grew up in a fucking bunker. So yes. Sheltered.

The generator’s over here. You can work on it while we talk.

Actually, he was a really gentle person. I mean, I don’t have much to compare him to as parents go. But those historical fibrespecs I watched were the first I ever heard of his “dark side.” I know that part of him always wanted to go face his critics and stand trial for his crimes and stuff. But he wanted to protect me.

You’d better work fast if you want to be able to catch my reaction to the first images. That generator’s pretty fucked up. It could totally give out just as the ship touches down. Fuck, I keep using the present tense. Even though it’s not the present, it’s the past, and it’s taken this long for the light to reach us.

I suck at math, sorry. But I think so. Twenty years ago? The ship landed. On “Free Land.” Or else it crashed. Or got shot down by natives we didn’t know were there. Hah. Of course, the crew of the ship were the best and brightest of every culture, so they probably didn’t crash. But you never know, right? They could have gone crazy, cooped on that ship for a few months, their time.

Didn’t I just say I sucked at math? I have no clue. It was like twenty eight, twenty nine years our time, a few months their time. Or something. Maybe it was a few years their time. Part of the benefit of the Suicide Drive.

No, I won’t play you that song. I don’t even know where it is. Stop asking.

My dad definitely didn’t come up with the name Suicide Drive, he hated that name. That’s what his opponents called it. And it wasn’t actually suicidal, right? I mean, we’re all still here?

Okay, so we’re not all still here.

I think those figures are inflated. They’re disputed, anyway.

Yes.

No.

No, not at all.

I’m not being deliberately obstructive. I’m answering your questions. It’s just that some of them I don’t have much to say to. No, don’t stop working on the generator. I’ll answer fully. Right. Fuck you too.

It’s just that you seem kind of biased. Yes, I get that. That’s why my dad hid away. Yes, I get that everyone lost someone. Even me. No, I meant my mom.

I don’t know how to answer that. I can’t speak for my dad, I really can’t. And he addressed all that stuff in his farewell speech.

You can stop working on the generator if you want. But we’re supposed to be able to see the landing in like half an hour, and we won’t see squat here unless you fix it by then.

Okay then, here’s my interpretation based on my knowledge of dad. He took a bunch of logical turns, small steps that each made sense, and ended up at an extreme conclusion. I didn’t say insane, I said extreme. Don’t forget Australia. A whole continent, just gone. And my dad could see nothing ahead but more of the same. He inherited an environment that was already fucked, even without the Suicide Drive.

You know. I mean, supposedly it takes an infinite amount of energy to travel faster than light. And the energy needs increase exponentially the closer you get to light speed. You can’t cheat Einstein. And there was Free Land, so close we could practically spit on it.

No, I wouldn’t agree with that. We were probably doomed on this planet before the Suicide Drive, and we were still probably doomed on it afterwards. You never know, a tiny fraction of the population may survive. But the plagues, the weather events, the accidents, those dumb genocidal wars… those were already happening. People had been saying for a long time that we needed to establish a presence off-world. The difference was the Suicide Drive made it possible.

I don’t know if my dad was insane. Sanity is pretty situational, isn’t it? I mean, if you dropped any of us into the Middle Ages, they’d think we were insane. Good point. We may soon get a chance to find out.

I think he was pretty clear on the difference between being a rock star and being Prime Minister of Europe. Yes, I know people thought he was a joke originally. Pretty expensive joke.

I think he knew that. He would have held elections eventually.

He never wanted to “take over the world.” You’re just trying to yank my chain. I know what you want, you want a money quote. You want me to denounce my dad. Or you want me to say something freaky in his defense. I’m not playing.

No. I’m not being defensive. I feel like you’re trying to provoke me. And watch it, you’ll electrocute yourself. Are you really an electrician? “Used to be” isn’t the same thing. What was it, a summer job? Jesus.

You’re probably right about my social skills. What did you expect?

Twenty minutes until planetfall. Hopefully not “fall” in the literal sense. How’s it coming along there?

There’s vindication and then there’s vindication. If they land safely, that’s one thing. A month from now, we can see if they’re building settlements. A year from now, we’ll know if they survived their first winter on Free Land. We think the winters are mild there, right? We think.

Right. Worst case scenario, they crash. Or die out. And then the human race finishes committing suicide on Earth, and we’re extinct. And it’s my dad’s fault.

It’s been more than fifty years and nobody’s come up with an alternative to the Suicide Drive yet. That was my dad’s biggest fear, you know. That twenty years later, someone would discover a way of propelling a city-sized vessel at near-light speed that didn’t… well, you know.

Who knows what would have happened? The environment was already fucked up. Most people already lived in poverty. The only difference was all the resources were going into a project to help save the human race, instead of building toys for the rich. Nobody’s ever proved that slave labor was used.

No, I feel like you want me to defend my dad. You’re pushing me towards that. Of course I feel ambivalent. How could I not? Yes, I’ve seen it. I’ve been outside a bunch of times, remember?

If you quote me in your article as saying part of me hates my dad, I will sue. I don’t even care if that costs me my privacy forever. I will flay you in court and make you eat your own skin.

I don’t see any irony. It wasn’t just Europe forcing the rest of the world to take part. There was Bolivia and Canada. And. And Japan, what was left of it. It wasn’t a re-run of colonialism, more like a coda. Right, a music metaphor. Huh.

Some of those people would have died anyway. You can’t take the entire number of deaths from those years and blame them all on my dad. That’s a statistical fallacy. Oh look, here’s his guitar solo from “Running In Place.”

You know, mostly he was a dad to me. He read to me when I was little, he sewed my clothes and shit. Well, we didn’t have clothing for every age of child down here, so he had to adapt stuff. No sewing machine. He sewed by hand. I figured out recently he made my footie pajamas out of his old sash of office. Now I mostly wear his old clothes. He taught me math and science, and what little I know of music. He encouraged me to become an artist—you haven’t even asked to see my art, by the way. He kept me safe from the shadows. He never seemed paranoid or haunted, just, I don’t know, withdrawn sometimes. Sorry to disappoint you. His last two decades were peaceful, like swimming in shallow water.

You’re sure it’s fixed? Like, a long-term fix? I don’t want it to break down again a month from now.

Okay. Let’s see if we can pick up the outside signal. That would be funny if this was all for nothing. Well, maybe funny isn’t the right word.

Okay, so that’s the star system, and that must be Free Land. I can’t see the ship. Is that the ship? God, it’s ugly. I don’t know what I expected it to look like after all this time. It looks like a giant turd. Sure, you can quote me. This is all on the record, right? Free-association from the dictator’s offspring, for the amusement of the starving masses.

Is that really the best picture we’re going to get? Oh. So they deploy that apparatus in orbit, and it helps the telescope back on Earth to get images of the planet? Like a big magnifying glass in space. Sort of. Okay.

You’re sure you don’t want a drink. Okay.

Fuck, they’re burning up! Yes they are, they’re burning up! They’re on fire, they’re-

Oh. Okay. Well, it looked like they were burning. How was I to know?

So now the turd is floating down near the equator on the biggest continent. I guess they jettisoned the Suicide Drive out in space. It only works once, right?

Can’t really see much now. It’s just a speck. Okay. So how long until that happens? Come on, sit down, you make me jumpy. Sure. I’m just not used to it, okay? You know, I experimented with feeling guilty about the whole thing, but it seemed like too much work. I mean, I wasn’t even born then. I tried, I wallowed for a few months, and it just felt dumb. Sit down, goddamnit. Thank you.

Woah. So that’s the difference with the magnifying thing. Wow, that’s pretty clear. We can see the landing site, and, and some vegetation and rock formations that could be mountains. And, and. Hey. Those do look like settlements, don’t they. Huh.

So there were people on Free Land after all. Or creatures. Can’t really tell what they look like. Huh. Well, they’ll just have to learn to coexist. Yeah, I know. History doesn’t have to repeat itself. That’s just lazy thinking. After all, if you know history, you’re guaranteed not to repeat it. I read that somewhere.

Well, I knew it was something like that. Anyway, it’s going to be different this time. It’s not like they could just pack up and go home again. It was a one-way trip.

My thoughts? Didn’t I already verbalize my thoughts? Well, what there was of them. I’m not exactly a deep thinker. Okay. Well, I’m glad they made it. It doesn’t prove anything, because it’ll be years before we know. Right. Well, all we know is that they’re intelligent enough to build. But there weren’t any satellites or space junk, so not too advanced. Or power lines. Those settlements looked sparse. Not cities.

You know the cycle existed for thousands of years before my dad. Maybe there was no way to break out of it on Earth, but they might be able to escape it on Free Land. I said “maybe,” okay? You asked for my thoughts. Anyway, my dad didn’t invent any of that stuff, he just harnessed it to make the Suicide Drive possible.

What makes you think that? I mean, it’s been fifty years. People have been rebuilding. I would say it’s less likely now than it was fifty years ago. We’re probably out of the danger zone.

Well, okay, the environment. But it seems like humans can adapt to anything. No matter how toxic.

You know, those things are constants. They’re what humans do. I don’t know that you can say they’re getting any worse.

So what are you saying? That people have been holding on to see if we made it, if the human race will go on somewhere else? And now that we know, we can all let go. Give ourselves, what, permission to die? That’s not how people work. People are individualistic, they fight to live as individuals, not as a species.

And after every catastrophe, they’ll rebuild again. And again. They’ll learn how to breathe nitrogen, or C02, or whatever.

Wow, lookit. You can just make out the little explorer vehicle. Can’t quite see the people wandering around. A few thousand of them, on solid ground for the first time in however long. Probably peeing all over the place and putting things in their mouths without testing them first. Just like babies. I read somewhere they expected a five-to-ten percent death rate in the first few days. It was factored in. It’s amazing.

He’d probably say thank the fucking stars and bring me another beer. No, he’d probably be crying and shit. He was more sentimental than any of you guys knew.

Okay, well, I guess the interview’s over. Time for you to hit the road. And actually, I want to thank you. You’ve helped me make a decision.

No, actually, I’m going back into lockdown mode. It’s not just that I don’t trust you. I figure after this interview, people will be looking for me again. And maybe you’re right and things are going to get even worse.

That’s right. Not just people, though. Nothing gets in or out. Not even air. I won’t even be able to see if the Free Land colony survives the winter. I’ll be sealed up. Nah, I’m used to being alone. See that? It’s the total culture of the world, up until about twenty five years ago. I’ll just have to live without seeing the Dongle Fairies in concert, then. I’m sure they’re great.

What do you mean, a celebrity? You just spent the last hour baiting me. Yes, you did. Fuck you. I know enough to know I’m dead if I go public. Just to get back at my dad. Or because I was living in luxury when everybody else was… And to be honest, the handful of walks I’ve taken outside in the past few years haven’t left me wanting more.

You what?

Jesus, you’ve got some nerve.

I’ve only known you for like an hour and a half, and I already hate you. Why would I want to be trapped in a shelter with you for years and years?

I’m not sexually attracted to you. Please stop doing that. Seriously, back off.

No, I’m not a virgin. I’ve told you, I’ve been outside a bunch of times. It was okay, I guess.

You’re really serious about that, aren’t you? You think it’s the end. An end, anyway. My dad always thought if we lasted this long, we’d be home free.

I don’t know how many people could fit down here. The supplies would keep two people alive for another fifty years, I guess. More than that, it goes down. Plus, I’d be killed in my sleep. Of course, then they’d be trapped down here with my corpse, since they wouldn’t know the combination to deactivate the lockdown.

I think I’m capable of bodily ejecting you from here.

I thought you said the generator was fixed long term. Well, is it or isn’t it? That’s kind of a weasely answer.

Okay, let’s try this. This place is bigger than it looks. And in lockdown, there’s no day or night. So here’s what we do. You’re on New Zealand time, I’m on North American time. You sleep when I’m awake, vice versa. We’ll try that for a few weeks, and then we’ll see. Stay out of my way. Only because I can’t look you in the eye and condemn you to death. Well, if you’re right, which you could be. I mean, you’ve lived outside all your life, versus my handful of visits. So you know more than me. So I’m not as ruthless. Sheltered, yeah.

Don’t thank me. It’s probational. I have a gun hidden somewhere, where you won’t find it. And if you start driving me up the wall, I’ll risk opening up just to get you out of here. Just, you know, lighten up on my dad. I know that was just for the interview, trying to get some good quotes out of me.

Okay, so you really do hate my dad. But you’re living in his house now. And he may be a monster to you, but I have my own image of him that I keep separate from all that historical stuff. I want to save it from all the crap.

Well, if everyone on Earth dies out, then the people on Free Land will be the only ones writing history. And he’s their founder, right? Even if they left all their families to die. And maybe one day they’ll come back and re-colonize Earth.

Okay, last chance. I key in this sequence, you’re stuck here with me until I decide to open up again. There won’t be any way of knowing what it’s like out there, just guesswork. You sure? Okay. Say goodbye to the world.

About the Author

CHARLIE JANE ANDER’S 2016 novel All the Birds in the Sky was a national bestseller. Earlier, her debut novel Choir Boy (2005) won a Lambda Literary Award. Her journalism and other writing has appeared in, among other venues, Salon, Mother Jones, and The Wall Street Journal. She was for many years the managing editor of the website io9. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

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Copyright

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

SIX MONTHS, THREE DAYS, FIVE OTHERS

Copyright © 2017 Charlie Jane Anders

“The Fermi Paradox Is Our Business Model” copyright © 2010 Charlie Jane Anders

“As Good As New” copyright © 2014 by Charlie Jane Anders

“The Cartography of Sudden Death” copyright © 2013 by Charlie Jane Anders

“Six Months, Three Days” copyright © 2011 Charlie Jane Anders

“Clover” copyright © 2016 by Charlie Jane Anders

“Intestate” copyright © 2012 by Charlie Jane Anders

“The Master Conjurer” copyright © 2013 by Charlie Jane Anders

“Love Might Be Too Strong a Word” copyright © 2008 by Charlie Jane Anders

“Because Change Was the Ocean and We Lived by Her Mercy” Copyright © 2016 Charlie Jane Anders

“Break! Break! Break!” copyright © 2014 by Charlie Jane Anders

“The Unfathomable Sisterhood of Ick” copyright © 2014 by Charlie Jane Anders

“Rock Manning Can’t Hear You” copyright © 2014 by Charlie Jane Anders

“The Last Movie Ever Made” copyright © 2015 by Charlie Jane Anders

“The Day It All Ended” copyright © 2014 by Charlie Jane Anders

“Rat Catcher’s Yellows” copyright © 2015 by Charlie Jane Anders

“The Super Ultra Duchess of Fedora Forest” Copyright © 2016 Charlie Jane Anders

“Margot and Rosalind” Copyright © 2017 Charlie Jane Anders

“Ghost Champagne” Copyright © 2015 Charlie Jane Anders

“Victimless Crimes” Copyright © 2013 Charlie Jane Anders

“Stochastic Fancy: Play the Game and Find True Love” Copyright © 2016 Charlie Jane Anders

“Rager in Space” Copyright © 2016 Charlie Jane Anders

“A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime” Copyright © 2017 Charlie Jane Anders

“Palm Strike’s Last Case” copyright © 2014 by Charlie Jane Anders

“I’ve Got The Music In Me” copyright © 2015 by Charlie Jane Anders

“The Time Travel Club” copyright © 2013 by Charlie Jane Anders

“Fairy Werewolf vs. Vampire Zombie” copyright © 2011 by Charlie Jane Anders

“Power Couple (Or “Love Never Sleeps”)” copyright © 2006 by Charlie Jane Anders

“Suicide Drive” copyright © 2008 by Charlie Jane Anders

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Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

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First Edition: October 2017

Content

Charlie Jane Anders
SIX MONTHS, THREE DAYS, FIVE OTHERS

The Fermi Paradox Is Our Business Model

As Good as New

The Cartography of Sudden Death

Six Months, Three Days

Clover

Intestate

The Master Conjurer

Love Might Be Too Strong a Word

Because Change Was the Ocean and We Lived by Her Mercy

Break! Break! Break!

The Unfathomable Sisterhood of Ick

Rock Manning Can’t Hear You

The Last Movie Ever Made

The Day It All Ended

Rat Catcher’s Yellows

The Super Ultra Duchess of Fedora Forest

Margot and Rosalind

Ghost Champagne

Victimless Crimes

Stochastic Fancy: Play the Game and Find True Love

Rager in Space

A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime

Palm Strike’s Last Case

I’ve Got the Music in Me

The Time Travel Club

Fairy Werewolf vs. Vampire Zombie

Power Couple (Or “Love Never Sleeps”)

Suicide Drive

About the Author

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Copyright