Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction

by Nalo Hopkinson

  You told her that I’d vanished on you with no warning. She said she was surprised at that; she’d always thought of me as good for you.

  You were an odd combination of fragile and tough, and I’d fallen in love with the intensity that accompanied that mix. You needed undivided attention to feel loved. You didn’t give your trust easily, but, once you did, you trusted without question. Being with you was a heady experience that left little time or energy for anything else. I indulged like an addict: your intensity was a powerful narcotic. You had tended to attract lovers who abused your fragility, who took pleasure in shattering someone so strong who could nevertheless be so easily broken. Your sister had liked that I made you laugh, had seen how it thrilled me to have you permeate my whole world.

  Eventually, life outside our bubble intruded. Friends, work, whatever. And I drifted away. I let you suffer, even though I knew you were suffering; I let my growing indifference chip away at you. And, like a coward, instead of talking to you and trying to mend the rift, I just ignored it. I ignored you.

  Sex with you was so beautiful, such a complete escape, sad and hard, silly and serious, in all the best ways. How could I let anything get in the way of that? Of being close to you?

  I’ve never wanted to comfort you as much as when I heard you tell your sister how much you’d been hurt by my disappearance. But I’d started to disappear much earlier than you were telling her, and I hated myself for that. For betraying you. For betraying myself.

  Do you remember when, the week before we moved in together, you stopped by my office and took me out to lunch? Warming your hands on my cup of tea, a fleck of something green stuck between your teeth, you asked me what I needed, and we bonded because of our common goal: your happiness. When did that stop being important?

  Your sister couldn’t see me either. She cleaned the bathroom. After she put you in a hot bath, she turned off the TV and put on the radio instead. Classical. Worse: opera. Then, she attacked the embarrassing mess of our apartment. I’d like to say that most of it was due to your recent binge, but our place was always a disaster area.

  And then she changed the bed.

  The weakness disappeared when the weight of the blankets was lifted off me.

  And, just like that, I was free. I was free! I danced and leapt and twirled and ran and—

  And then I caught the words “missing” and “disappeared” on the radio news report.

  There was, all around the world, an alarming increase in missing-person reports. The prime minister of Canada. The CEO of Toshiba. The US ambassador to the United Nations. The populations of whole villages in Africa. Hundreds of Afghan women. And so on. From the most disenfranchised to the most powerful, people everywhere were vanishing.

  The news that I probably was not the only victim of this peculiar condition did not reassure me, but rather filled me with overwhelming dread. I walked into the bathroom, needing the security of your presence, and sat on the edge of the tub. You had no reaction when I reached out and stroked your face. Was I that insubstantial?

  I could no longer take comfort in the slight plumpness of your cheek. To my touch, your flesh was as hard and unyielding as concrete.

  When your sister left the apartment, I took advantage of the open door — all physical objects now being immovable, impassable obstacles — and left with her. I didn’t follow her. I had been cooped up inside for so long. I needed the open air. I just wandered around. And I mulled over what I had heard on the news. I was already so used to the pain from the sensory overload that it was no longer even a distracting irritant.

  Were all the vanished in the same situation I was? If I met another vanished person, would we see each other?

  Outside I discovered that rain, even the mildest precipitation, knocked the strange substance of my nearly insubstantial body to the ground, raindrops hammering into me like nails. Yet, for all that I had some, if almost negligible, physical presence, I cast no shadow. I was truly invisible.

  There were fewer and fewer people about every day. Obviously, we vanished could not perceive each other. What people were left acquired a haunted or persecuted look. They knew that their time would soon come.

  Less than a week after I escaped from the apartment, civil order broke down. Vandalized and overturned police cars burned on street corners. All the stores I passed had their windows broken, their stock looted or destroyed.

  The city grew quiet, as traffic dwindled away and industry stopped dead.

  The silence was occasionally punctuated by bursts of gunshots and quickly silenced screams. Those sounds filled me with more dread than my inexplicable vanishing ever did. I was always careful to walk away from such noises and never discovered exactly what was happening.

  Dogs wailed and wandered everywhere, searching for their vanished human companions, scavenging through garbage for food.

  I saw stray cats hunt some of the smaller wildlife that was reclaiming the city. They gave the bears a wide berth, though. Often, I thought I saw George, but the cat was always gone before I could be sure.

  During that time, I returned to the apartment only once. The door had been torn off. Everything had been trashed. A raccoon family was living in our bedroom. By then you must have vanished, like me. I wanted to find you, hold you. But you were beyond my reach.

  I was following a bear around, excited by what would have been in normal circumstances suicidal behaviour, when a giant shadow fell over me. I looked up. Swift grey clouds covered the afternoon sky. Scraps of old newspapers were being blown every which way. There was so much wind — wild, chaotic wind. Before I could think to take cover, I was hit on all sides — by a ragged shirt, a torn magazine, a broken beer bottle, cigarette butts, gum wrappers. I was jabbed and crushed and flattened and stabbed and twisted. It hadn’t hurt this much since that first morning.

  The storm erupted; the sharp, heavy rain felled me, knifed through my prone body.

  The storm ended; the clouds parted and revealed the moonlit sky, glittering with stars. I lay there on the ground, recovering from the storm, and gazed at the sky. There were more stars visible than before: when people had vanished, so had the city lights that had made the nighttime too bright for starlight.

  I stayed like that until dawn, and then someone stepped on me.

  I looked around; the streets were filled with people. Naked as newborns, they walked calmly but with a sense of purpose, murmuring softly to each other, casually touching each other, sharing complicit glances.

  I recognized a few faces — no-one I knew well, but people I’d seen in shops or cafés.

  Still wobbly, I stood up. Was this ordeal finally over? Was I back, too? A quick test — trying in vain to see my hands or any part of my body — told me I wasn’t. I tried to call out to the people around me, but I was still mute.

  What about you? Could you have returned? I ran to our apartment.

  When I neared home, I saw them. They were also heading there: hand in hand, smiling and laughing, so obviously deeply in love with each other.

  It was you and me. More beautiful, more in love, more confident, more at peace than we’d ever been. Serene.

  But it wasn’t you, was it? No more than it was me. You must still be vanished like me. Neither dead nor alive. And so it must be for everyone.

  Do you, like me, spend your time watching our doppelgangers? Are you frustrated at being unable to understand their language? Are you jealous at how much better they are at being us — at loving each other — than we ever were? At how much even George seems happier with them? Are you envious that all these new people have made the world a better place?

  I want to end my life, but I don’t think I can. I’ve tried jumping off roofs, but all I get out of it is more pain — never death.

  Are you here with me, my love?

  I long to die with you.


  To be really dead. Together. Forever oblivious.

  Mayfly

  by Peter Watts and Derryl Murphy

  “I hate you.”

  A four-year-old girl. A room as barren as a fishbowl.

  “I hate you.”

  Little fists, clenching: one of the cameras, set to motion-cap, zoomed on them automatically. Two others watched the adults, mother, father on opposite sides of the room. The machines watched the players: half a world away, Stavros watched the machines.

  “I hate you I hate you I HATE you!”

  The girl was screaming now, her face contorted in anger and anguish. There were tears at the edge of her eyes but they stayed there, never falling. Her parents shifted like nervous animals, scared of the anger, used to the outbursts but far from comfortable with them.

  At least this time she was using words. Usually she just howled.

  She leaned against the blanked window, fists pounding. The window took her assault like hard white rubber, denting slightly, then rebounding. One of the few things in the room that bounced back when she struck out; one less thing to break.

  “Jeannie, hush….” Her mother reached out a hand. Her father, as usual, stood back, a mixture of anger and resentment and confusion on his face.

  Stavros frowned. A veritable pillar of paralysis, that man.

  And then: They don’t deserve her.

  The screaming child didn’t turn, her back a defiant slap at Kim and Andrew Goravec. Stavros had a better view: Jeannie’s face was just a few centimeters away from the southeast pickup. For all the pain it showed, for all the pain Jeannie had felt in the four short years of her physical life, those few tiny drops that never fell were the closest she ever came to crying.

  “Make it clear,” she demanded, segueing abruptly from anger to petulance.

  Kim Goravec shook her head. “Honey, we’d love to show you outside. Remember before, how much you liked it? But you have to promise not to scream at it all the time. You didn’t used to, honey, you—”

  “Now!” Back to rage, the pure, white-hot anger of a small child.

  The pads on the wall panel were greasy from Jeannie’s repeated, sticky-fingered attempts to use them herself. Andrew flashed a begging look at his wife: Please, let’s just give her what she wants.

  His wife was stronger. “Jeannie, we know it’s difficult—”

  Jeannie turned to face the enemy. The north pickup got it all: the right hand rising to the mouth, the index finger going in. The defiant glare in those glistening, focused eyes.

  Kim took a step forward. “Jean, honey, no!”

  They were baby teeth, still, but sharp. They’d bitten to the bone before Mommy even got within touching distance. A red stain blossomed from Jeannie’s mouth, flowed down her chin like some perverted re-enactment of mealtime messes as a baby, and covered the lower half of her face in an instant. Above the gore, bright angry eyes said gotcha.

  Without a sound Jeannie Goravec collapsed, eyes rolling back in her head as she pitched forward. Kim caught her just before her head hit the floor. “Oh God, Andy, she’s fainted, she’s in shock, she—”

  Andrew didn’t move. One hand was buried in the pocket of his blazer, fiddling with something.

  Stavros felt his mouth twitch. Is that a remote control in your pocket or are you just glad to—

  Kim had the tube of liquid skin out, sprayed it onto Jeannie’s hand while cradling the child’s head in her lap. The bleeding slowed. After a moment Kim looked back at her husband, who was standing motionless and unhelpful against the wall. He had that look on his face, that giveaway look that Stavros was seeing so often these days.

  “You turned her off,” Kim said, her voice rising. “After everything we’d agreed on, you still turned her off?!”

  Andrew shrugged helplessly. “Kim…”

  Kim refused to look at him. She rocked back and forth, tuneless breath whistling between her teeth, Jeannie’s head still in her lap. Kim and Andrew Goravec with their bundle of joy. Between them, the cable connecting Jeannie’s head to the server shivered on the floor like a disputed boundary.

  Stavros had this metaphoric image of her: Jean Goravec, buried alive in the airless dark, smothered by tonnes of earth — finally set free. Jean Goravec coming up for air.

  Another image, of himself this time: Stavros Mikalaides, liberator. The man who made it possible for her to experience, however briefly, a world where the virtual air was sweet and the bonds nonexistent. Certainly there’d been others in on the miracle — a dozen tech-heads, twice as many lawyers — but they’d all vanished over time, their interest fading with proof-of-principal or the signing of the last waiver. The damage was under control, the project was in a holding pattern; there was no need to waste more than a single Terracon employee on mere cruise control. So only Stavros remained — and to Stavros, Jeannie had never been a ‘project’. She was his as much as the Goravecs’. Maybe more.

  But even Stavros still didn’t know what it was really like for her. He wondered if it was physically possible for anyone to know. When Jean Goravec slipped the leash of her fleshly existence, she awoke into a reality where the very laws of physics had expired.

  It hadn’t started that way, of course. The system had booted up with years of mundane, real-world environments on file, each lovingly rendered down to the dust motes. But they’d been flexible, responsive to the needs of any developing intellect. In hindsight, maybe too flexible. Jean Goravec had edited her personal reality so radically that even Stavros’ mechanical intermediaries could barely parse it. This little girl could turn a forest glade into a bloody Roman coliseum with a thought. Unleashed, Jean lived in a world where all bets were off.

  A thought-experiment in child abuse: place a newborn into an environment devoid of vertical lines. Keep her there until the brain settles, until the wiring has congealed. Whole assemblies of pattern-matching retinal cells, aborted for lack of demand, will be forever beyond recall. Telephone poles, the trunks of trees, the vertical aspects of skyscrapers — your victim will be neurologically blind to such things for life.

  So what happens to a child raised in a world where vertical lines dissolve, at a whim, into circles or fractals or a favorite toy?

  We’re the impoverished ones, Stavros thought. Next to Jean, we’re blind.

  He could see what she started with, of course. His software read the patterns off her occipital cortex, translated them flawlessly into images projected onto his own tactical contacts. But images aren’t sight, they’re just … raw material. There are filters all along the path: receptor cells, firing thresholds, pattern-matching algorithms. Endless stores of past images, an experiential visual library to draw on. More than vision, sight is , a subjective stew of infinitesimal enhancements and corruptions. Nobody in the world could interpret Jean’s visual environment better than Stavros Mikalaides, and he’d barely been able to make sense of those shapes for years.

  She was simply, immeasurably, beyond him. It was one of the things he loved most about her.

  Now, mere seconds after her father had cut the cord, Stavros watched Jean Goravec ascend into her true self. Heuristic algorithms upgraded before his eyes; neural nets ruthlessly pared and winnowed trillions of redundant connections; intellect emerged from primordial chaos. Namps-per-op dropped like the heavy end of a teeter-totter: at the other end of that lever, processing efficiency rose into the stratosphere.

  This was Jean. They have no idea, Stavros thought, what you’re capable of.

  She woke up screaming.

  “It’s all right, Jean, I’m here.” He kept his voice calm to help her calm down.

  Jean’s temporal lobe flickered briefly at the input. “Oh, God,” she said.

  “Another nightmare?”

  “Oh, God.” Breath too fast, pulse too high, adrenocorti
cal analogs off the scale. It could have been the telemetry of a rape.

  He thought of short-circuiting those responses. Half a dozen tweaks would make her happy. But half a dozen tweaks would also turn her into someone else. There is no personality beyond the chemical — and while Jean’s mind was fashioned from electrons rather than proteins, analogous rules applied.

  “I’m here, Jean,” he repeated. A good parent knew when to step in, and when suffering was necessary for growth. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

  Eventually, she settled down.

  “Nightmare.” There were sparks in the parietal subroutines, a tremor lingering in her voice. “It doesn’t fit, Stav. Scary dreams, that’s the definition. But that implies there’s some other kind, and I can’t — I mean, why is it always like this? Was it always like this?”

  “I don’t know.” No, it wasn’t.

  She sighed. “These words I learn, none of them really seem to fit anything exactly, you know?”

  “They’re just symbols, Jean.” He grinned. At times like this he could almost forget the source of those dreams, the stunted, impoverished existence of some half-self trapped in distant meat. Andrew Goravec’s act of cowardice had freed her from that prison, for a while at least. She soared now, released to full potential. She mattered.

  “Symbols. That’s what dreams are supposed to be, but … I don’t know. There’re all these references to dreams in the library, and none of them seem that much different from just being awake. And when I am asleep, it’s all just — screams, almost, only dopplered down. Really sludgy. And shapes. Red shapes.” A pause. “I hate bedtime.”

  “Well, you’re awake now. What are you up for today?”

  “I’m not sure. I need to get away from this place.”

  He didn’t know what place she meant. By default she woke up in the house, an adult residence designed for human sensibilities. There were also parks and forests and oceans, instantly accessible. By now, though, she’d changed them all past his ability to recognize.