Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Mom said, “You’ll call me often, right?”

  “Sure,” Hannah lied.

  “It’s just that college campuses are getting so weird now, ever since the second economic collapse. The things you see on the Internet. . .you’ll be careful, Hannah?”

  “Sure.”

  Annabel said, “Can I go over to Keith’s?”

  Mom said hopelessly, “But this is Hannah’s last night, Annie, and I thought we would—”

  “Oh, let her go,” Hannah said, and Annabel left. Really, her mother was so wimpy. Since the divorce, more and more often it was Hannah who made the decisions. She resented it, and liked it, and tomorrow she would begone and her mother would just have to take charge again.

  Wouldn’t she?

  * * *

  Annabel charged through the back door of the Brywoods’ house, next door to hers in the eighty-year-old housing development and identical to it, without knocking. Keith’s father looked up from a laptop on the kitchen table, said mildly, “Hi, Annabel,” and went back to the laptop. Annabel waved at him and ran upstairs to Keith’s tiny bedroom.

  Keith was her best friend. Becca, her ex-best-friend, said that it was slutty to hang out so much with a boy. Annabel didn’t know what “slutty” meant but it didn’t sound good, so she punched Becca in the stomach and went back to playing with Keith.

  He was really smart. Like her, he was in the third grade, but he knew the names of fifteen different snakes, how to get to Level 8 in Smash You!, who invented sandwiches, and why demons were waking up right now and not, say, ten years ago. Annabel was sorry the demons hadn’t stayed safely asleep until she was grown up, but it was just one of those things. Keith liked blue light and had ordered a whole lot of blue light bulbs over the Internet. His room was always bathed in a cool shade of blue that made everyone look like zombies or aliens.

  “Keith! Look what I got! I took it from Hannah’s closet—a underground cube about angels!”

  Keith looked up from his computer. “So?”

  “So we can watch it! It’s underground.”

  Keith gazed at her. He could be snotty sometimes, because he was so smart. Annabel often wished she was as smart as Keith, or Hannah. Or maybe as pretty as Mom. Or as sure of himself as Dad, who she saw once every few months. Dad always got what he wanted.

  Keith was short and round, and in his black-and-white tee he looked a lot like the soccer ball that Hannah had just given Annabel. Maybe she should have brought that, instead of the underground cube, since Keith didn’t seem very impressed. But then her native stubbornness kicked in and she put her hand on her hip. “Well, I’m going to watch it! Close that program!”

  Keith did, following their usual pattern: Annabel proposed, he objected, she overruled him and he gave in with a sigh that said he was only going along with this to be nice. Annabel dragged a second chair up to Keith’s desk and they loaded the cube. That the program was even on a cube made it exciting; the clumsy manual loading overrode the parental controls installed by Keith’s mother.

  The angel program, however, was disappointing. It started out well enough, with a spooky voice saying from drifting clouds: “Not only demons are waking on Earth—angels are returning to us as well! The apocalypse approaches!” The clouds got all thundery and lightning flashed. Annabel shivered deliciously and put her hand on Keith’s arm. But after that the cube turned out to be just a bunch of people talking about prophecies and end times. No wonder Hannah had thrown it into the back of her closet.

  Keith closed it down before it was over. “They should have had angels and demons fighting. With swords and lightning bolts and magic and stuff. But I got something better than that.”

  “Yeah? What?” Annabel was now down one, and skepticism was called for in order to even the scales.

  “This!” Keith wriggled under the bed and came up with a glittery mesh net.

  Instantly Annabel recoiled. “No!”

  He stared at her. “What’s wrong with you? It’s an N-cap!”

  “I know what it is!”

  “You do? How?”

  “I tried one once. Hannah’s. It’s. . .it’s nasty.”

  “Well, I never tried it, and I’m going to. It’s a new kind, and really strong. That’s what my cousin David said. I was saving it for us to do together, Annie!”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “I stole it from David.” Keith had a huge number of cousins, mostly male, a few of whom were in jail. Annabel’s mother was unaware of this. She let Annabel go over to Keith’s so often because she liked his parents, sweet-natured and quiet people who took walks together and held hands when they watched TV, which was another reason Annabel liked being at the Brywood house.

  She said, “I don’t want to do any N-cap. It’s a bad thing.”

  “Bad how?”

  Annabel shook her head, her face mutinous, but said nothing. Keith rolled his eyes at her and put the cap on his head. The silvery mesh changed color to match his dark curls. The tiny controller hung from the cap by a fine string, which Keith had neglected to remove. It fell across his nose, tickling him into a sneeze. He blew the string to the side—whuff!—and pressed the controller button.

  Annabel watched closely. Her stomach roiled, although she had no idea why.

  Keith’s mouth opened wide. His eyes crossed, uncrossed, and then unfocused. His lips curved upward in pure joy. As soon as the jolt of electricity to the pleasure center in his brain faded, he pressed the button again. And then again.

  Annabel tore the mesh net off his head. The string holding it to the remote snapped.

  “Give that to me!” Keith yelled.

  “No! It’s bad!”

  Keith lunged for her. Annabel, taller and with long skinny legs like a crane, was faster. She was out the door and running down the stairs before Keith could grab the N-cap.

  “Give it to me!”

  Annabel flew through the kitchen, bumping the table. “Hey!” Mr. Brywood said. “Play tag somewhere else!” By the time Keith caught up to her, she’d shoved the N-cap down the city trash compactor at the end of the street, one of the few that still worked. The compactor made its grinding noise.

  Keith screamed, “You had no right to do that! It was mine!”

  “It was bad!”

  Keith hit her, not very effectively. She hit him back, with stronger results. They both went home and didn’t speak to each other for a week.

  “Bad,” Annabel murmured to herself. Everything was bad: Hannah going away, and the stupid angel cube, and the N-cap, and the whole world. A few demons and angels and witches and fighting would greatly improve things. At least it would be more interesting.

  * * *

  The microbes were more secure. Through evolution, adaptation, and sheer luck, they had found a way to attach themselves to nerve cell membranes, along with various receptors and transport mechanisms. Microtubules connected them to the cell’s cytoplasm. From this vantage point they seemed enough a part of the cell to not attract the attention of the immune system. But they still had to evolve chemical signals that would let them communicate with each other in this strange tissue. Signaling would enable them to once again become not individual organisms but a complex and working whole.

  The microbes had time. Annabel’s body, nerves, brain were still growing, still very plastic. Her neural network was a long way from maturity. The way her brain handled information yielded to even massive modification.

  * * *

  “This is the Age of Imagination,” the professor said from the front of the class. “The previous three hundred years, from the middle of the eighteenth century on, was the Age of Science. Now the balance is being righted; the other half of the human mind is being given its rightful place; the old rationalism is being shown to be—not wrong, because obviously there is a place for science—but limited. Unbalanced when taken alone. Insufficient to encompass the incredible variety of the universe.”

  Hannah spoke into her wrister, �
�Age of Imagination, science true but insufficient, other half of human mind.” The lecture was being recorded on her tablet, of course, but she had developed her own method of oral note-taking, keyed to tablet locations. The course, “Introduction to Domains of Experience,” was a prerequisite for all history courses, and nearly six hundred students sat in the ancient lecture hall, wood-paneled in rising tiers of old-fashioned tables. There wouldn’t be much opportunity to ask questions.

  “Consider,” said the professor, young and energetic, “the basic tenet of science: that experiments be replicable. That automatically cuts from consideration hosts of phenomena that have been documented but are singular. Did miracles ever occur on Earth? Sightings of ghosts? Angelic visitations? Demon possession? The satori claimed by meditating monks? Whatever happened to Saul on the road to Damascus? Clairvoyant dreams? Feelings of déjàvu? For centuries people have claimed to experience these things, and science has said, ‘No, you didn’t experience it because it cannot be replicated.’ Were all those people mistaken? Lying? Deluded? All of them? Is faith itself nothing but a delusion?”

  Hannah lowered her wrister, frowning.

  “I ask you to consider another possibility,” the professor said. “Consider this: that there are different domains of experience available to the human mind. Science is one, and certainly valid. However, it is—in mathematical terms—necessary but insufficient. Consider that humanity has stunted itself by declaring a different kind of experience inferior. Consider that most people who are not scientists or intellectuals have not been misled by this narrowness but have gone on holding to the domain of faith. Consider that faith does not have to be religious, but rather that religion may be a subset of faith: faith that the universe contains more phenomena than we have yet explained, or that we can explain. That the phenomena which for thousands of years people have claimed to experience—demons, angels, witches, magic—all pejorative terms in the canon of science—may actually all be real. Only now are these things being acknowledged as a legitimate area of human study. Now, in the Age of Imagination.”

  Hannah bit her lip. He was charismatic, but more than that, what he was saying made sense. And wasn’t there something her mother had once said about some older cousin of hers, Paula Somebody, who’d written letters about something weird someplace in South America. . ..And yet, something here wasn’t right.

  None of the students around her seemed to share her misgivings. They were nodding, smiling. A few looked thoughtful, a few downright eager.

  Hannah raised her hand. Among the six hundred students, he saw her—maybe, Hannah thought cynically but accurately, because she was pretty. He said, “Yes?”

  “Do you believe those supernatural things are real?”

  “Do you?” he said, with what was probably supposed to be twinkling charm. Hannah didn’t charm that easily. She saw the answer in his face: Yes, he believed.

  She said, “Isn’t there another explanation for the rise of the Age of Imagination? In times of great uncertainty, people turn to whatever comfort they can find. We have all these drug-resistant infections that no antibiotics can do anything about and so people lost faith in doctors. A few years ago we had the second economic collapse in this century when China lost its markets in Japan and Europe buckled under debt and—”

  Classmates around her were tittering.

  The professor said, smiling, “Those are exactly the objections the rigid, hide-bound ‘rationalists’ make. Anything to avoid seeing what’s directly under their noses, and has been for centuries.”

  “But—”

  “There are no ‘buts’ to this. We are in a new, dynamic age of expanded perceptions.”

  “Or of wish-fulfillment delusions.”

  A boy in a tier behind her booed. Two girls in front of Hannah turned to sneer. The professor went on smiling, with gentle pity. Hannah picked up her tablet and walked out.

  * * *

  Halloween. Hannah planned on staying in and studying.

  “Oh, come on out with us!” her roommate Jenna said. “It’s going to be so much fun!”

  “Can’t. I have an exam Monday in Political Theory.”

  “I can tell you all about political theory in one sentence. The theory is that the world’s politics are fucked. Now come with me and Ava to the party.”

  Hannah looked up at her roomie. Jenna was hard to resist—warm, sparkly. Hannah knew she was not sparkly, was sometimes even dour. If she hadn’t been so pretty, she might have had a very bad time at college, despite her brains. But she was pretty, and eighteen, and it was Halloween, and Jenna was right about one thing: the political economy was fucked. Unemployment had reached twenty-eight percent, federal debt outpaced her—or anybody else’s—generation’s ability to pay it off, and economic growth was stagnant. There might not be very many parties in anybody’s future. If it hadn’t been for the great divorce settlement Mom had gotten, Hannah might not be in college at all. And Julia had only gotten that settlement because Hannah had insisted on a tough lawyer. If it had been left up to Mom—or to Hannah’s bastard father—she and Hannah and Annabel would be living in a cardboard box.

  “Okay,” she said to Jenna, “ I’ll come. Do I have to have a costume? And what is that you’re almost wearing?”

  Jenna’s brief halter and see-though skirt were Day-Glo yellow, topped by a pair of wings that kept falling off her shoulders. “I’m a fairy. See—here’s my wand.” She flourished a dowel topped by a tin-foil star.

  “You’re going to be a really cold fairy. It’s October.”

  “I can manage. What can we make you for a costume? Here’s Hannah, the great planner, without a costume! Let me see, we can—”

  “I’ll just be a ghost,” Hannah said, grabbing the sheet off her bed.

  “No!” All at once Jenna stood rigid and serious.

  Hannah stared at her in astonishment. “What’s with you?”

  “You can’t be a ghost. This is a party, Hannah—a party. I don’t want to risk an inadvertent summoning.”

  So there they were again, at that same place. Hannah tried hard to avoid that place because she liked Jenna. Jenna was sweet-natured, generous, and a believer in the supernatural all the way. In her, the Age of Imagination had become the Age of Irrationality. And there were so many Jennas on campus.

  Hannah said, “Maybe I won’t go, after all.”

  “You’re going, and you’re going now, and you’re going in costume. Here, what about this?” Jenna pulled a coat of green, very shaggy wool from her own closet.

  “A coat? What am I supposed to be—a store mannequin?”

  “No, you’re a yard! It’ll be great! We put some paper flowers on you and a picket fence on your head. . .” She was folding pink tissues and tossing Hannah scissors and white cardboard. When they were done and Hannah looked at herself in the mirror, she had to laugh. And certainly nobody else would come to the party as a yard.

  Nor a ghost, witch, demon, or angel. Hannah was surprised to even see a girl dressed as a black cat. But despite the silly superstitions, she enjoyed the party, until about eleven. Then, as everybody started to seem drunk, Hannah, a non-drinker, left. She could still get in a few hours of study.

  Halfway back to her dorm, cardboard fence and tissue flowers no longer on her head, she crossed a parking lot. A half dozen masked people dragged a boy, screaming, toward a dilapidated vehicle shed.

  Hannah raised her wrister to call Security. Before she could speak, one of the draggers sprinted to her, knocked down her arm, and tore off the wrister.

  Hannah’s breath tangled in her throat. What would they do to her, to the boy? He had stopped screaming. The masked boy gripping her arm said, “You’re going to stand here quietly with me and then you’re going to go back to your dorm or apartment or wherever you snobs live. This doesn’t concern you.”

  On his costume, some sort of antiquated soldier with a full face mask, she saw a homemade badge with red letters: SLA.

  “Let me g
o!”

  He did, but he kept her wrister, and he stood close enough to keep her from bolting. Two of the girls with the group kicked in the flimsy shed door.

  Hannah forced words up her tightening throat. “What did he do?”

  The boy said, “He put a curse on my friend.”

  Clearly, he believed it. This townie and the college kid had gotten into some sort of argument or fight—it happened all the time, usually when everyone was drunk—and the dragged boy had shouted something childish like “You’re screwed, man!” Then the other guy had fallen ill, or lost his job, or whatever. This boy and his band of whackos genuinely believed his friend had been cursed, because the domain of non-replicable experience was just as real as science. Not that he would ever phrase it like that.

  Her captor said, “Don’t move until I let you.”

  “I won’t,” Hannah said, and kicked him in the balls.

  He went down silently, which surprised her, clutching his crotch. She grabbed her wrister from his hand and took a precious moment to snatch the mask from his face and memorize him. Then she was running, knowing that none of them could catch her; she’d lettered in track. As soon as she reached a lighted area with other people, she phoned the cops.

  A curse. And they all believed it. Why not? On this campus there were courses examining the documented evidence of Dobu Islanders who died because they believed they were cursed, of Americans relieved of pain because they believed their placebos were real, of cancer victims with a higher survival rate than control groups because others prayed for them. Belief was a powerful thing.

  And, she hadn’t really grasped before, a dangerous one.

  * * *

  Hannah went down to the precinct and identified the boy she’d kicked in the groin, who was charged with assault. He didn’t give up his confederates and they were never caught. A cop told her the crude SLA patch meant Supranatural Liberation Army, a loose collective of believers in the paranormal that had started on the Internet and was growing exponentially across the nation. “Psychos, the worst of them. The FBI is finally getting interested.”