by Cat Rambo
“Are you crazy? The counsellors—”
“Screw the counsellors. They don’t know everything.”
“Malik—”
“No, listen. What if the nanites don’t just protect our health? Maybe some of us are adapting to them, using them to see things we’ve always been blind to.” He gazed at the bees buzzing among the flax. “Just because we can’t see ultraviolet light doesn’t mean it’s not there.”
She backed away.
“You’re a sky full of dreams. It’s a metaphor for our future: kids, love, that whole grow-old-together thing.” He smiled. “Vanda, I see metaphors.”
“You’re hallucinating.” Afflicted.
“What if the counsellors are wrong? Maybe the affliction is a feature, not a bug. The nanites translate my abstract thought into a visual. And when I think: ‘I’m branded with her love,’ they write words on my skin. I can control my nanites through metaphors.”
Vanda was yanked from her reverie by the pounding of her heart. She would not think about what happened next. Could not. But her nani-chem fugue dispersed like morning mist, baring her memories to the unforgiving light of day.
She’d reported him.
She was terrified he was delusional, that he would die by his own hand. The counsellors were his only hope, that’s what she told herself. And at least he wouldn’t be institutionalized like the children who needed intensive therapy. They still saw each other while he spiralled into depression. While he screamed at hallucinations. His genetic seal darkened to the colour of old blood before it faded away; his nanites had chemically neutered him to prevent the passing of defective genes.
Until one miraculous day his seal returned, so brilliant it seemed to burn. He was better than cured. She had never seen him so full of life. They cried and made love for hours before falling into an exhausted sleep, their arms around each other.
When she woke, his eyes were open, unseeing, pebbled and dry as an old riverbed.
“What did you do?” She screamed and shook him until her body quaked, until her voice broke, until his words crept up her hands and twined around her arms and settled over her heart.
You’re a sky full of dreams.
She sucked in a breath and snatched her hands from him. How? How was this possible? It was a love letter composed in dying nanites, inscribed in living flesh.
He had swallowed nanocide before their final time together. Overdosed on the stricken nanites’ massive release of neurotransmitters. Like a dying sun going supernova, that final flare of power allowed him to burn an afterimage of his love over her heart. That shouldn’t have been possible. Only the counsellors could remotely control nanites. And nanites were non-transferrable.
Supposedly.
She hid those covert words and planned her own death. Until her genetic seal turned blue, for a boy.
Toby.
More memories broke, dragging Vanda toward the surface.
You’re a sky full of dreams: I love you, Vanda.
I want pocket. For dolphins. She could see them now, Toby’s dolphins. They squealed and leapt, arcing spray across sunlight, scattering rainbows. Dolphins were love. Toby sensed Vanda leaving him and he needed a place, a pocket, to keep her love safe. I want pocket. For dolphins.
I love you, Mommy.
Vanda staggered with the unbearable weight of guilt.
Not just guilt for Toby. Guilt for Malik. Because he didn’t fall ill until after she reported him.
She put both hands over her mouth.
If Malik could control his nanites, maybe he could instruct them to ignore the counsellors’ commands. The afflicted were a threat. A threat the counsellors needed to neutralize.
She turned him in. She had killed Malik.
Mommy! Spider eat me!
And given them Toby.
She screamed while orderlies flooded her room and held her down, each shriek punctuated by a parabola of light ending in a flash of brilliance.
The fireworks effect. Oh, God. I’m afflicted.
Counsellor Fen stormed in. “Hold her.” His eyes were flint-hard, spitting sparks like a vintage birthday candle.
Vanda, I see metaphors.
Oh, Malik. I see them, too.
Orderlies gripped Vanda’s limbs while Counsellor tapped his wrist console. “I said hold her!” Pustules rose across his skin and broke, leaking yellow viscous fluid. Another metaphor. It was fear. He was terrified of her. Why?
I can control my nanites through metaphors. Malik had said that. But she wasn’t him; she couldn’t do it. He was the abstract thinker.
But she had surfaced from her nani-chem trance. Because you were thinking of busy-bee nanites and shadow-cloud words.
Metaphors.
She spiralled down toward a nanite-induced stupor.
Malik gave his nanites to you, Vanda. What if they infected yours before they died? What if they taught yours?
She closed her eyes. She couldn’t resist the delicious pull of exhaustion, of sleep. Just as she couldn’t resist Malik. She would find him in her dreams. And what about Toby, Vanda? Will you find him in your dreams, too?
Or your nightmares?
Her eyes snapped open. FORCE FIELD. The air rippled and enveloped Vanda in a viscous coat.
“Sedation’s not working,” said Counsellor. “She’s afflicted.”
It worked. This is what they’re terrified of.
Counsellor ran his hands through his hair. “I’ve never seen it happen so quickly. Right. We’ll sedate her manually.” He tapped his wrist console and released a transdermic nanite-pistol from within the recesses of his uniform. It shimmered and morphed into a poison-tipped arrow.
It’s not a sedative; it’s nanocide. He’s going to shoot me with homicidal nanites programmed to relay instructions to my nanites, namely, die. And my nanites know it. They’re remotely communicating with his and relaying it to me through a metaphor. My God, I can read his mind.
He aimed for her heart, for the words hidden there. You’re a sky full of dreams.
It’s a metaphor, Malik had said, his smile full of hope. For our future: kids, love, that whole grow-old-together thing.
Grief twisted her mouth. The counsellors had destroyed him. They destroyed everything.
A low scream surged in her throat, a tornado of loss and regret, warping, churning, spiralling into a thunderbolt. She snapped her head forward and shrieked it into Counsellor’s eye.
He toppled to the floor, convulsing. She whipped her head toward an orderly. “LIGHTNING!”
He dropped.
The others released her, holding up their palms, backing away.
I can control them. Without a console.
Vanda scrambled from the bed and stomped on Counsellor’s flailing arm. She wrested the pistol from his grip and raced from the room.
She was a child-seeking missile blasting through armories of orderlies, counsellors, enforcers. Legions of convulsing bodies littered her wake.
She stormed the Afflicted Children’s Center, her heart a piston, her brain laser-focused on a lament of clicks and whistles as she tore down the sterile hallways. Dolphins. Toby. She could sense him through a web of glowing threads crisscrossing around her. A nani-network. It must have been there all along, but she’d been blind to it. They had all been blind to so much.
Rigid blocks of aggression steamed through the network around her. Security was closing in. Vanda whirled, firing pulses through the filamentous strands; shockwaves of felled guards ricocheted back.
Vanda whipped around. She could sense her.
Counsellor Evra lay in wait, beyond the door to Toby’s room, Vanda inexorably drawn toward them. She stumbled down the entrance to Counsellor’s funnel-web like a hapless insect and kicked open the door.
“I knew your love—your biochemical o
bsession—would bring you here.” Counsellor’s eyes: shiny black beads.
Toby lay in a transparent pod. He reached for Vanda. A cable snaked from his head, through a medical console, and into a port in Counsellor’s neck. That part was real. Counsellor morphed into a spider. That part was not.
But it meant—Vanda let out a strangled cry—Counsellor was draining him.
Something broke inside her. She shrieked and hurled the resulting torrent, a malignant bleeding mass, at the meat of Counsellor’s brain.
Counsellor blinked. “You just tried to kill me, didn’t you? But we’ve been experimenting, preparing for this. Children like Toby have been helping us protect ourselves from the afflicted. His talented nani-chems are responsible for my interference shield, much like the one you have.”
Vanda yanked the pistol from her waistband. “Interfere with this!” She levelled the weapon at Counsellor.
“Drop it, or I’ll instruct Toby’s nanites to liquefy his brain.”
The pistol shook in Vanda’s hands.
“You won’t be able to protect him. The cable is shielded.”
Tears slid down Toby’s cheek, mirroring Vanda’s own. A shimmering ribbon of longing emanated from each of them, growing, reaching, until it intertwined in patterns as complex as love.
Vanda trembled. The nanites had merged with the afflicted to create something beyond either, an evolutionary telepathic poetry with consequences both beautiful and terrifying. And it would all die here. Everything Malik was, everything Toby could have become.
Unless Vanda killed Counsellor, exposed them all. But Counsellor would kill Toby first. And if Counsellor didn’t kill him now, she would keep him alive only to drain him, use him as a weapon against his own kind before driving him to suicide.
Logically, he should be sacrificed. Vanda shuddered.
But her love for Toby was more than logic. Counsellor was right; Vanda was a victim of a biochemical obsession. But that obsession, it was life. She lowered the pistol.
“Look at you,” said Counsellor. “You’d give anything to murder me. Driven to violence by your own biochemicals. It was never about the weapons, dear. Enraged hormones and faulty neurotransmitters: They were the weapons.”
“Mommy. Dolphins. Pocket.” Toby’s fathomless eyes bored into hers, so much like his father’s.
Malik.
“Drop the weapon, Vanda.”
Malik burned so brightly after he took the nanocide.
“Drop it now!”
It gave him a final flare of power.
Vanda gazed at Toby. I’m so sorry. She squeezed her eyes closed.
She fired into her own foot, again, and again, until the pistol was empty, until Toby’s wails penetrated the ringing in her ears. The pistol clattered to the floor.
Counsellor frowned.
A dying sun going supernova.
My God. Vanda could see Toby’s dolphins so clearly now as her dying nanites released massive amounts of neurotransmitters. The dolphins broke the surface and scattered spray, whistling and clicking. And Counsellor’s interference shield. Thick, powerful: a gelatinous barrier clinging to her like armour. But each time the dolphins leapt, their spray sizzled and wormed holes into that viscous shield. Toby’s nanites were remotely interfering with it.
Vanda could see that, because time was moving oh, so, slowly. She had eons to compose a memo to the world: a declaration of everything the counsellors had done. Eons to make a pistol with her fingers, to fire a paralyzing cord of twisted crimson light into one of those holes. Vanda’s words wormed their way up Counsellor’s frozen arm. That nanite manifesto was not only remotely snaking its way across the nani-network and assembling on every arm in existence, but carrying instructions that would make everyone afflicted.
Vanda dialed her finger gun up to purple and aimed, poking her tongue in her cheek for accuracy. The gun was just a metaphor for the remote signal Vanda’s nanites would transmit to Counsellor’s: explode. But, damn, wasn’t it awesome? She shot a brilliant violet cord through a hole in Counsellor’s shield. It ricocheted inside, spitting and sizzling, before burning a hole between Counsellor’s eyes. Her mouth formed a ring of surprise and she toppled face first to the floor, the cable snapping from her port.
Time sped up. Sound caught up. Vanda fell to her knees.
Toby. He was crying. She crawled to him.
A final flare of power.
She was used up. A star collapsing.
“Toby.” She folded his small hands in hers. “I didn’t know,” she whispered. “I didn’t know what the pocket was for. The dolphins.” She smiled through her tears. “Love.”
Toby nodded, sniffling.
“My pocket”—she swallowed and touched her forehead to his—”it’s so full of dolphins. There isn’t a pocket big enough to hold them all. I’m giving them all to you, now.”
Dolphins broke the surface, sunlight glinting off their skins, spray mingling with tears. Vanda slumped. But before her grip loosened and she crumpled to the floor, nanites flowed from mother to son, flaring into pixels, letters: words that settled into the flesh over Toby’s heart, a metaphor he would share with his own children whenever the swell of love overflowed him.
A pocketful of dolphins.
About the Author
Judy Helfrich grew up on the Canadian prairie where long stretches of nothing persisted in at least four dimensions. Since there were no smartphones, Judy filled her space-time with reading science fiction, avoiding team sports, and hiding from school bullies.
Judy has worked mainly in IT, most recently as a GIS (geographic information systems) specialist. Her fiction has appeared in the journal Nature, won second prize in Storyteller Magazine’s Great Canadian Short Story Contest, and is forthcoming in an ebook of selected Quantum Shorts stories. When not writing or painting, Judy enjoys raising killifish, loading Linux on unsuspecting computers, and not being in high school anymore. More at www.helfrich.ca.
Editor’s Note
A lovely story about parental love and what that parent does when their child is the exception rather than the rule. In Vanda’s society, internal nanites monitor one’s emotions and stress level and furthermore are monitored by the state in order to discover anomalous or aberrant actions. And, beyond that, they’re used to alter the state of individual’s biochemicals, shaping mood and attitude in a deeply invasive act of social control, removing emotions in order to remove unpredictability. (Something to think about next time you’re clipping on that Fitbit.)
It’s Malik’s ability to control his nanites through metaphor that makes him different, and in using that, the story touches on the ways we use metaphor to understand the world. Once Vanda understands how to do the same, she can escape the system bent on destroying her son Toby.
Publisher’s Note
Judy is a writer living and working in Canada. As such, we have preserve the Candian English spelling in her story. Some words may seem unfamiliar to American readers, but we like the way they colour her text.
Tasting Bleach and Decay in the City of Dust
Beth Dawkins
An angel sits on the edge of a roof. Her tarnished stone is covered in a blanket of radioactive dust. It’s the same gray dust that sticks to our lungs. It’s black when we cough it up. Heather said it’s like ink that way. She scripted the first part of the alphabet with it—A to G, on the last page of an old biology textbook.
Along with the angel, I gaze down from our perch and dream of changing the decayed city. When the clouds turn into bruises, tossing angry light and rumbles, when the wind stings my skin, buildings fall, and walls tumble into the street. Their dust joins the rest.
Watching won’t turn our sky blue or bring the corn silk orb out of dishwater clouds.
“Because if you reach out far enough, you will always catch what you want,” Heather
recites from an old book of poems. The leather cover is peeled back. Some of the pages have disintegrated in her hands. All of the things on our rooftop are like it—peeling, tattered, and full of dust.
“Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,” I say.
She rolls her eyes.
Heather is unlike anyone. I imagine her in one of my mother’s stories, before the breaking. My mother told me about all the bright and vibrant colors, but even the brightest yellow paint left from before the breaking is a burnt sienna in our world, my world. Here we don’t feel the sun on our skin, the grass between our toes, or the wind cooling our brows. That happy history is left in faded pictures.
A new person—someone’s aunt, mother, or father drops dead every day. The end comes fast with sores, weakness, and nausea. Bleeding comes next; from the nose, ass, and mouth until every orifice is draining. Babies, if they’re born, don’t last that long.
Occasionally one does. Heather is the oldest child that was born in the year of the breaking: She’s sixteen.
“That stuff is bullshit, you know it.” It’s not the poem that pisses me off but the way she reads it—like she believes it. I can’t reach for a blue sky. I can’t heal the sick. I can’t make the world a better place for any of us, including her.
I see death in the shadows under her eyes and I know I shouldn’t have said anything.
“You don’t have to be so damn angry all the time,” she snaps. The book of poems thuds, a body dropped, left to dry and turn into dust at her feet.
“Shouldn’t we be angry? We’ve inherited shit and more shit.”
She tugs at my sleeve. Her face fills my line of sight. A sore peeks out of the hem of her shirt. Her eyes are fever bright and bloodshot.
I want to kiss her. Not because we’re lovers, but I do love her. I want to kiss her because this is the cusp of a new end. Soon her hair and teeth will fall out. Bruises will swallow her already too thin body. She will never be as beautiful as this.
I want to die with her in our city of death.
It’d be poetic.
She’d like that.
