The Loneliest Whale

by Lily Markova

  Whale greeted him, but Julius only muttered “uh-huh” without so much as turning his head. Joy, as was her habit, was standing on the balcony, her hands wrapped around a large cup of tea evaporating swiftly in a thin swirling trickle.

  “How are you doing?” He gave her shoulders a light squeeze in a clumsy attempt to mimic the demonstration of encouragement he had descried numerous times in ordinary people.

  Joy started—she must have been so lost in thought she hadn’t even heard him come in and close the balcony door—and right away, she laughed at her own reaction.

  “I’m terrified, actually,” she answered simply, still smiling—it was a tired smile, but not forced; it still rang true, very Joy-like.

  Whale nodded his understanding.

  “I’d appreciate it if someone told me I am going to be okay?” She uttered the last word in tones of inquiry, as if she was trying to prompt him to supply the right answer. She had talked this way to Julius at the pier, when she had suggested how he should reply to harmless ordinary questions. With a prick of annoyance, Whale suddenly realized he hadn’t gotten all that far ahead of Julius in that matter. Having spent so much time observing people’s interactions, he still lacked practice.

  “I can’t promise you that,” Whale said frankly, and he cringed. Here he was, sounding like Julius again.

  “Poor me!” Joy cried in feigned anguish. “I’m so fortunate as to have two human beings around who know what’s going on with me, but one of them doesn’t think there’s a problem—the ultimate support I could count on from Julius is ‘Congratulations!’—and the other is too honest. Can you stay here until I’m changed, though?”

  “Did they say anything else? The voices?”

  Joy shook her head. It seemed not so much the answer to his question as an attempt to stir up the very voices.

  “No, I tell them to shut up, and they listen.”

  Whale frowned. He hadn’t been able to switch the mental connection on and off at will. Not that he’d ever wanted to switch it off, of course. “That’s really weird. Do you feel as if something is changing, physically, I mean?” he asked, trying not to start missing the clamor in his head again.

  “Not really, no. No trunks or frills pushing through, as far as I can tell, so that’s nice. I just feel really restless. And there’s this urge. . . .Like I have something important to do. Like I have a mission.”

  That, on the contrary, wasn’t weird at all; most likely, that feeling had everything to do with Joy’s new nature calling to her, persuading her to recognize and accept it.

  Only now did Whale notice that Joy wasn’t her usual cozy, homelike self. He had been so busy studying her eyes and face for changes that he hadn’t paid any attention to her well-ironed jacket and the colorful backpack hanging off her shoulder.

  “You’re going somewhere?” he asked, confused. Going out during the transformation period seemed to him as odd and reckless as going ice-skating while on sick leave with a body temperature of forty degrees Celsius. He had, however, witnessed that among school kids, on more than a few occasions.

  “Yeah. I thought since I’m staying in the city, might as well get back to work. I called my manager, and she agreed to cancel the vacation.”

  Again, Whale was surprised. He’d thought no ordinary person in their sane mind would ask for work when they had the option of lying around the house all day. Except, naturally, in those instances when—

  He smiled. “You must love your job?”

  “Oh yes, it’s fun. I’m an announcer. Radio Jupiter, music that changes you,” Joy sang with a broad grin.

  “I’ve never had a job.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “Uh, die, I guess,” admitted Whale. “I’d try not to, but natural selection. . . . Survival of the fittest. . . . Turns out I’m a bit maladjusted. Is that ironic or just funny in a pathetic way?”

  “What about your home? You said something about China.”

  “You mean Hong Kong? Well, my parents lived there when I was born. I call it home only because that’s where I spent the first years of my life. It wasn’t really my parents’ apartment. Our kind—we have to wait until the child learns how to walk, and talk to people, and communicate with us by our means. Until then, we cannot travel much. Most of the time, we just find an apartment whose owners are out of town for a while, and we stay there, and when we know they’re about to return, we move somewhere else.”

  “Let me guess.” Joy narrowed her eyes slyly. “You grab some clothes on your way out. I was wondering where you get stuff if you don’t have any money. Is that where my earrings keep going? And Julius’s socks?”

  “We’re saving your race from extinction. Is a pair of pants such a high price to pay?”

  Joy sighed. “I just don’t understand. You could be anything. You could activate some superpower. . . . Say, tele—oh my God, teleportation?” She jumped, clapping her hands together at this idea, which appeared to have thrilled her beyond measure, and Whale cast a furtive fearful glance at the glass floor. “Is that possible? Are people going to evolve to have a built-in teleport?”

  “It doesn’t work like that. As I said, I’m just a carrier. I’m kind of immune. I cannot transform my own genetic code, but yes, technically, there is the possibility that you, people, will be able to deliberately split yourself into atoms and then rearrange yourself at some other place.”

  “Oh God. Oh God.” Joy covered her mouth with her hands, her eyes magnified to twice their natural size by excitement as if by thick glasses. “Can I have a teleport?”

  “W-what?”

  “Well, can you still do this thing? Can you make me a teleporter?” There was so much hope in her gaze, as though she were a child pestering Whale for candy. She jumped up and down a few more times. Whale’s insides contracted at every thud of her sneakers against the glass. He couldn’t help but wonder if she was doing this because she knew that it made him uncomfortable. Did she assume he would grant her the ability to teleport just so that she’d stop endangering them both by testing the endurance of the floor?

  “Joy, this is not for fun,” he said, feeling as if he were a strict parent who had to explain to her that candy could give her cavities. “There’s no urgent external reason to equip people with this ability right now. Besides, I’m not sure I can still do that. Was this the thing you wanted to ask from me yesterday?”

  Joy’s face instantly took on a grave expression of concern.

  “No! No. . . . Could you. . .could you reverse something you did?” she whispered. “Just one person. You’d still have your nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred—well, those six nines.”

  Whale nodded again, understanding what she was driving at. Joy was still looking at him with hope, but this was a different kind of hope—desperate, rather than excited. This kind of hope hovered in the air of hospitals, not children’s toy shops.

  “There is a great chance he’d die,” Whale said, sneaking a glance through the clear panel of the balcony door. From where he was standing, he could only see Julius’s bent elbow. “We can add something new, but we cannot change the part of him that has already been altered. It’s too risky.”

  He turned away from the door and peered down instead. There, far, far beneath the balcony, people scampered to and fro like a swarm of ants. Time and again, some of them paused, creating an obstruction for others, and sometimes, they stood unmoving like that for several minutes.

  Julius swore in the adjoining room, and Whale shook his head.

  “Haven’t you heard of it?” asked Joy, who was also watching the people below. “It was in the papers, even. They wrote that it was some kind of a never-ending flash mob, but I think it’s an anomalous zone. People just freeze like this. Nowhere else, only in front of this building. What the papers forgot to mention, though, is that sometimes they never get over it. They don’t die. They just sort of. . .stop.”

  Julius cursed one more time, and Whale
looked at Joy, checking for her reaction. She must have felt it, for she looked back at him and smiled.

  “Do you know what Julius is doing there?” he asked, watching her more closely still for any signs that might betray her, but she didn’t avert her eyes, didn’t blush or flinch. She kept smiling.

  “He’s freelancing.” Joy shrugged. “He’s programming things. . . . I don’t know, it’s all Russian to me.”

  Oh no, of course she didn’t know. She would never let anyone do such things. Anyone else, Whale corrected himself. It was, after all, Julius they were talking about.

  “No, Joy, that’s not what he does. Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell anybody. We don’t interfere,” he said, just in case she was being protective, not ignorant.

  “Well, he might be hacking stuff. So what?” she said challengingly. It amazed Whale how blind and defiant people could be when it came to someone they cared about. Whale didn’t want to disillusion her, didn’t want to hurt her, but she had to know. He had to warn her.

  “I’m so sorry.” He pointed downward. “He’s hacking them, Joy.”

  Joy opened her mouth to say something, shifted her gaze back to the little immobile black dots scattered across the sidewalk far beneath her feet, and she clamped her mouth shut. Her lips quivered, and she compressed them more tightly.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Whale knew she’d only asked that to buy herself some time, to process it. “I’m sorry,” he repeated.

  She stepped away from him, looking suddenly alienated.

  “I. . .I’ve got to go.”

  “Joy—” Whale began, but she was already running off, and in a moment, he heard the front door slam closed.

  After several minutes, Whale saw a tiny bright spot shoot out of the entrance, collide with one of the motionless figures, and bounce off it like a pool ball. The black ball Joy had struck remained stationary, and she turned around and strode decisively away. Whale followed her with his eyes until he could no longer tell which of the hurrying ants was Joy.

  He did feel sorry for her, so much so that he even caught himself regretting that he’d told her the truth. That had been sheer interference on his part, a violation of the basic rule his kind had honored for years, but Whale tried to convince himself that he had done the right thing. Joy could be in danger herself—it was, after all, Julius they were talking about—and she needed to know.

  When he returned to the room, Julius didn’t glower at him with contempt, but there was a hint of annoyance in his tone as he said, “What did you tell her? You told her what I do, didn’t you? You didn’t have to tell her.”

  Whale didn’t feel sorry for Julius at all—or apologetic about exposing him for that matter, but the idea of spending the entire day tête-à-tête with him made Whale ill at ease.

  He lingered beside the balcony door, gazing around and uncertain what to do with himself, until he finally acknowledged that his attempts to look anywhere but at Julius were flimsy and immature.

  “Why are you doing this, Julius?” he said, turning to him at last.

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  Julius heaved a disgruntled sigh, clicked a couple more keys, causing orange lines of code to speed across the screens of their own accord (or so it seemed), and spun in his chair to face Whale.

  “I could cure cancer, like it’s a computer virus. I could delete pain.” Julius snapped his long fingers. “I could make people emotionally and physically invulnerable. But you wouldn’t understand. Because you don’t do that. You could, right? But you don’t. You go global. My death doesn’t matter, Joy’s doesn’t. It only matters when billions are at stake. You see people, but you care about numbers. I see numbers, but I want to make our small, unimportant lives better here, now, not in some imaginary future that may not even come. I can literally change the world, make it a more efficient place. Earth 2.0. Debugged. So tell me, Whale”—Julius raised his eyebrows with an air of infallibility—“why shouldn’t I?”

  “Oh, this is all very impressive.” Whale, who was getting aggravated in earnest, raised his eyebrows even higher. He pointed at the window and continued through gritted teeth, “But so far, all you do is ruin people! You screw up their code!”

  Julius crinkled his face into a disparaging grimace, either at Whale’s raised voice (“Caps Lock voice,” Julius would probably call it) or at the naïveté of his accusations. “Because I’m learning. I will screw up a hundred people, and it will help me fix many thousands. Are you judging me? You? You, who take millions to ensure our future safety?”

  He wasn’t blaming Whale; he was merely bringing forward a counterargument, and quite a disarming one at that, Whale was forced to admit with a sinking feeling in his stomach. They had, indeed, ruined a million people, people who were now like Julius, and to what end? The sinking feeling evolved into plain nausea. He would never have doubted his kind’s actions, had they not forsaken him.

  “You’re not even supposed to care,” grumbled Whale, defeated. “You don’t feel anything. Or do you?”

  “I don’t.” Julius turned to the keyboard and resumed pounding away and looking busy. “Not in the way you think I should. But that doesn’t mean I’m evil. That doesn’t mean I’m useless. Yes, I don’t shed tears over collateral damage. I don’t waste time feeling guilty or sorry. Yes, I don’t have dreams. I have goals. And that’s why I’ll succeed.”

  Julius’s fingers dashed off virtuosic ballet steps, and the intricate rhythm they tapped out in the process was almost music.

  “I guess I wasn’t one hundred percent right about you,” Whale said quietly.

  “Your opinion is very important to us,” said Julius in a dull voice. “We will call you back.”

  “Whom are you typing now?”

  “Joy.” Julius’s tone suggested it should be obvious.

  “What?” What little tolerance Whale had allowed himself for Julius a few moments earlier threatened to flee without a trace. He swept around the desk and stared at the orange symbols. “Why?”

  “Didn’t you see the look on her face? When she stepped onto the balcony, she didn’t know who she was. When she left, she was different. You had said something that triggered her transformation. She has recognized herself already, and I’m trying to find out what she is now. I have only copied a part of her new code, so I’m going to have to wait until she comes back.”

  “Can you see anything now? Can you read any major changes in the world, some threat?”

  “No. But the part of Joy’s code that I have is pretty interesting.”

  “How?”

  “Look.”

  Julius pressed a combination of keys, and every screen split in two: one half displaying blue symbols, the other orange.

  Whale swallowed. The blue code was his. “They’re identical,” he said, with a dry feeling in his throat.

  “Similar, yeah.” Julius nodded. “Are you sure she can’t be one of you?”

  Whale shook his head. He wasn’t sure anymore, but he didn’t want to believe the possibility.

  “That doesn’t make any sense.” Except it did. It made perfect sense. His family was one member short, and it was only logical that they would want to make up for the loss. But why not just take him back? “Well, I guess we should ask Joy when she returns,” he said grimly. His lungeyeart felt wintrier than ever, and he wished he didn’t have one.

  “Strategically weak,” objected Julius. “If she hasn’t told us immediately, she doesn’t want us to know. If we let her know that we know, she might stop me copying her code.”

  “She’s your friend. You’re going to act behind her back?”

  Julius’s shoulders rose and fell. “If that’s what I need to do to keep her safe, yes.”

  “Keep her safe? How can you possibly—?”

  “If the new Joy is not something the old Joy would have wanted to be, I’ll roll her back to the previous version.”

  Whale
felt sick again at the thought of Joy still and flickering like a jammed hologram. “You can’t! It’s too dangerous!”

  “I know, I’m not stupid,” Julius said irritably. “I’ll try someone else first.”

  Whale was about to remonstrate, but instead he reeled and crumpled like a folding chair, with his mouth still open.

  “I must say your way of ducking conversations is getting old,” commented Julius, without deigning to unglue his eyes from the screens.

  Chapter 00100

  After Joy came back from work, she proceeded straight to her part of the apartment and made it explicit, with the help of the separating screen, that she had no wish for company tonight. Whale heard her clothes and blankets rustle, and then it went very quiet, except for the sound of relentless typing from the other side of the room.

  Maybe she would be ready to talk tomorrow, he comforted himself. Maybe it was denial that kept her silent. Maybe she hoped that if she didn’t tell them about her completed transformation, it would be less real.

  Julius was up the whole night, copying her code, and Whale couldn’t sleep either; he sat on the balcony, rotating in his hands a cup of thyme tea, which he’d prepared for Joy. He peered into the lemony-smelling, brass-colored liquid, as though if he looked hard enough, he might find in it the answers to the questions that so unnerved him. What was the mysterious hazard that had compelled his kind to change Joy? Whale had given up trying to remember whether there had been omens he could have missed before he’d found himself thrown out of the network. So instead of racking his brains over the general cause, he now struggled to figure out what was so special about Joy Ramonnes. Why had they chosen her, which of her qualities could they deem useful?

  He also wondered if he had made a mistake he wasn’t aware of. What if they had kicked him out, on purpose? What if this estrangement was his own fault, his punishment for some careless slip? These two events—Joy’s conversion and his exile—seemed to Whale deeply intertwined, but he couldn’t quite grasp what it was that they had in common. He felt as if his brain were a muscle, a slack muscle that would need plenty of training before it could lift such heavy problems.