Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  “Sex is magic,” Sadie said, catching her breath. She leaned back and kissed the underside of his jaw. “I mean really, when all is said and done, it is sex I will miss the most. I know, I’m supposed to say I’ll miss snuggling with puppies or that fresh baby smell, or flowers or wine or science or something, but my God, I am very fond of sex and will miss it greatly.”

  “Would you believe I haven’t had much of it?” Benji said.

  “I would not believe that. You’re too good at it. Either you’ve had considerable practice, or you’ve an ingrained talent.”

  He chuckled and pressed his cheek against the top of her head. “No, really. I’ve had girlfriends, some serious, most not, but I was always so…busy. And we were in such mad places: crawling around caves slick with bat guano or poking through a factory gummed up with the pink slime of rendered chickens, or a hospital that was home to hemorrhagic fever. Never mind the fact we studied sexually transmitted diseases and—”

  “Your sex game is an A-plus, but your pillow-talk game is an F-minus, Benjamin Ray.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I forgive you.” She paused. He heard her take a deep intake of air—the sound of someone about to jump off a cliff. “I hope you forgive me.”

  “I do,” he said, and that was that. No further discussion was required. They kissed. It lingered. Something passed between them, something more than just the heat of the moment or the vestiges of lust: something curiously spiritual. Two souls mingling, if not joining entirely. Benji knew in the back of his mind it was probably just the heady concoction of chemicals forming a blissful cocktail—but as a faithful man, he also had to believe in something more, something greater. The divine in a shared kiss.

  A really fucking good kiss, at that.

  “We did not use protection, by the way,” she said.

  “I don’t think any prophylactic efforts would work here. We just made love in an abandoned rest stop.”

  “Oh no,” she said, tsking her tongue. “You’re the type who says made love. That just won’t do, Benji.”

  He laughed. “What do you call it?”

  “I prefer the good old-fashioned salaciousness of screwed. Or humped, banged, fucked. Hit that shit,” she said, overenunciating those three words in a British accent, crisp as a fresh apple. “Beast with two backs, if you prefer The Bard. The horizontal bop. Boff, boink, balls-deep—if balls are part of the equation, and they would not need to be. Lay pipe. Roger. Scromp. Shag. Shaboing. Slap and tickle. Bubbles and squeak. Quack the duck, mount the pony, a right proper deep dicking, tap that ass like a whiskey barrel—”

  Now he was cracking up so hard he felt tears in his eyes. “You’re just—come on, you’re making some of those up.”

  “Some of them, maybe.” Her eyes glittered in the half dark.

  “And what, may I ask, is wrong with made love?”

  “It’s a little too romantic, innit? As if we’re forging some ball of loving energy between us instead of happily getting our rocks off. Plus, it puts a bit too much pressure on sex, and sells short the very idea of love. Making love is about connection, not sticking Tab A into Slot B—it’s two people talking, laughing, being together like we are now. Not tongues and fingers. And I quite like tongues and fingers.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “And it also sounds like we’re making a baby. Like we’ve produced something from this union of sweaty flesh.” She shrugged. “Though, again, we did not use protection, so who knows?”

  A chill suddenly fell over them. They both seemed to feel it. Benji was content to let it pass. Sadie, apparently, was not.

  “Shana Stewart is pregnant. And she’s now one of the flock.”

  He wanted to back away from the topic—because he knew that this sudden interjection of reality was surely lancing the careful bubble they’d just inflated around themselves, a bubble of momentary pleasure. But what could he do? Not talk about it?

  “She is,” he said.

  “What do you think will happen to her?”

  “I don’t know.” It wasn’t a lie. “Black Swan doesn’t seem to know, either. I’m not sure if the child will continue to grow, or if it, too, will remain in stasis along with the young woman. If it keeps growing, will she die? Will it die? I just…I don’t know. We must hope for the best.”

  “At least we know what happens to us.”

  And there it was.

  Bubble, popped. The ride, over. The exit chute fast ejecting them from the dirty Disney World park of their postcoital bliss.

  Sex might be magic. But reality was cruel, and devoid of any true sorcery.

  “We don’t know,” he said. “We don’t know until we know. We’re sick. It was to be expected. But maybe there will be a way forward.”

  “The antifungals,” she said. “I know, they’ll…slow it down. And that’s great. I want that. I want more time. But we don’t have enough.”

  “We’ll get more.”

  “You sound so sure. But triaconozole is the only one that works, and only one company even produces it—or produced it, because who knows if they’re even still in business? Chicago…” Her voice trailed off. Last they’d heard, Chicago had fallen to martial law. The police siding with Creel, the National Guard siding with whatever ragtag government was left behind in President Hunt’s name—rest in peace, Madam President—and the people caught in the middle. Curfews and checkpoints reigned.

  Out here, at least, things were quiet. The desert brought with it a certain eerie peace, as if the world had already fallen and gone silent.

  “I don’t know. Las Vegas is an option. They have a few boutique pharma companies there—Blackmoore-Wells, Nova-Hydesty, CCR—Cargill Catalyst Research. Word on Vegas is that it’s still…functional, at least. As functional as Vegas ever was, I guess.” People, he thought crassly, must still want to gamble, even up to the end. He wondered how that worked. Money was still worth something, but what? And for how long?

  And if they didn’t gamble with money…

  What did they gamble with?

  “You can’t go to Vegas. The Black Swan path takes us around the city—and for good reason, Benji.”

  “I have to try. A hundred pills between the two of us isn’t enough. The math isn’t favorable: two people, two pills a day apiece, means every day, four pills disappear from our stash. That’s twenty-five days where we…slow this thing down, maybe stave it off. We need more.”

  When that was gone, and dementia settled in, that meant they’d have to start taking the Ritalin…

  Arav had already begun. His cognitive decline hadn’t shown yet in full force, but he’d had a day recently where he couldn’t remember what year it was, or what state he was in. Benji chalked it up to anxiety and fatigue, but the young man was certain that it was R. destructans taking its toll—the threads of White Mask, reaching into his brain like hands pulling apart a loaf of freshly baked bread. So he began taking half a dose of Ritalin a day.

  He was a little manic. He didn’t sleep well as a result.

  But Arav was holding it together. And the dementia did not return.

  Yet.

  He would need more antifungals, too.

  That settled it. He had to head to Vegas. Before now, before he knew that Sadie was sick—never mind himself—the matter was not as urgent.

  But if they were sick, other shepherds would fall ill, too.

  He kissed Sadie on the cheek. Gentle and slow. Then he sat up and toed around the dirty linoleum floor for his pants. “Time to get back to the flock. I have to head to Vegas.”

  “You’re not going alone.”

  “I am going alone.” She started to protest but he held up both hands in an act of placation. “Sadie, listen to me. I need someone here who can handle the flock, who more important can still hold on to and communicate with Black Swan—”<
br />
  “Black Swan barely wants to talk to me anymore—”

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s you.”

  “Arav can handle it—”

  “Arav is on Ritalin. And he’s still young. His head is…look, he’s more advanced than we are, and his girlfriend, and the mother of his child, is in thrall to whatever fate Black Swan and the nanite swarm have lent them. I need you. In case something happens.”

  Sadie didn’t like it. He could see that look on her face—it wasn’t just that she didn’t like it. She was mad about it. She lifted her chin and crossed her arms over her naked chest. “Fine. No. Wait. Not fine! Shit. Fine.”

  He kissed her again.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “I love you, too, you heroic prick.”

  01101101 01100001 01111001 01100010 01100101 00100000 01110111 01100101 00100000 01100100 01100101 01110011 01100101 01110010 01110110 01100101 00100000 01101001 01110100

  —mysterious billboard text posted in seven cities:

  Chicago, Philadelphia, Newark, Fort Lauderdale, Sacramento, Reno, Salt Lake City

  NOW AND THEN

  The Ouray Simulation

  SHANA HAD THAT SONG STUCK in her head:

  “Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls.”

  It was an old song, right? Like, early 1990s or something. Before she was born. TLC, and one of them had one eye, right? And died young?

  Whatever.

  Point was, it was in her stupid head.

  Probably because she was standing here, staring at a waterfall.

  It wasn’t a real waterfall, of course. It was a simulation of a waterfall. Shana recognized that fact abstractly—but staring at it, you’d never know. The waterfall, Box Canyon Falls, was just southwest of town, and you could—as she had done now—go down to its base, where the water had carved its way through the mountain and dumped water into the Canyon Creek and Uncompahgre River. Some waterfalls were calm, placid, and meditative—but these falls slammed down with firehose force, roaring as the rush of water punched through the stone to the stream below. The cacophony of it drowned everything else out.

  Except the damn song.

  Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls…

  And then Shana wondered, what if that wasn’t the song? What if it wasn’t real? What if it was…Black Swan pumping some version of the song into her head to make her think her memory was true? Maybe that was its secret: not that the waterfall in front of her—or the song about waterfalls inside her head—was truly simulated, but that it was using her brain against her, all in service to convincing her how real it was.

  Which was a very long and circuitous way of getting her back to worrying about her mother.

  Shana’s mother was here.

  Or so Black Swan wanted her to believe.

  This was the story her mother told her: The day in the grocery store, the day Shana had last seen her, Daria Stewart was planning on killing herself. She didn’t want to; she felt she had to. (Suicidal urges, Shana figured, didn’t have to make much sense.) Recognizing how bad that would be, she called the suicide hotline there in the store, but someone else answered. Someone who was not the prevention hotline, but who was pretending to be one.

  That someone offered to help Daria.

  They told her where to go. And off she went.

  There two people, Moira and Bill, offered Shana’s mother an unconventional cure: They had invented something that was like a drug, but not a drug. Not strictly, because it was not based on chemical intervention.

  Rather, they offered her a kind of mechanical intervention.

  Tiny, eensy-weensy, itty-bitty machines.

  Nanotechnology. Micro-machines. A whole swarm of them.

  Daria Stewart was unsure, at first. But then she thought: What choice did she have? If this killed her, then it would be what she had been drifting toward all this time. And as Daria told Shana that first night here in the simulation, “We all die, one day. That day, I guessed, was as good as any.”

  The goal of the machine swarm was to enter Daria’s body, find any and all chemical or hormonal imbalances, and attempt to correct them.

  It did not perform as advertised.

  It plunged her into a coma. Not a dreamless one, either.

  “Dreams fed into nightmares, and nightmares turned back into dreams,” Daria explained to Shana. “I didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. Until one day…the dreams turned off, and this place turned on.”

  Black Swan had seized the nanotech swarm of Firesight—Moira and Bill’s mad tech venture—and brought that swarm online into the simulation of Ouray, Colorado, intended to be the flock’s final destination. What Black Swan had not realized was, Firesight had been keeping twelve original test subjects alive and in stasis down in a secure sub-basement of their Atlanta location. These test subjects—The Twelve—included Daria Stewart.

  “We were the first,” Daria said. “Which means we were also the first to go and talk to Black Swan. To learn about what was coming.”

  Daria, it turned out, was now a true believer.

  And that really baked Shana’s lasagna, because Daria had never been much of a true believer in anything. Which forced upon Shana the question:

  Was that really Daria?

  How much of that story was true? How much was a lie?

  How much was just a simulation?

  After all, Black Swan was able to craft a whole town out of, presumably, just ones and fucking zeros, right? (Shana suspected something as powerful as Black Swan was not so primitive as that, but okay, she also knew dick about how computers really worked.) This waterfall was perfect. No pixels. No hitching frame rate.

  Could it conjure a pitch-perfect version of Daria Stewart?

  Further, this version here wasn’t a pitch-perfect version, was it? She’d changed. This wasn’t the mother Shana knew. This one was more serene. More confident and comfortable. More loving, too, in a way.

  Which made it all the more suspect.

  Shana began to fear that this was not her mother at all, but some strange digital specter—a phantom forced upon her.

  And as if on cue, she heard someone walking down the metal steps that were bolted into the rock around Box Canyon Falls: Even with the gush of the rushing water, it was impossible not to hear the approaching clong, clong, clong, or feel the faint vibration where she stood.

  Shana turned to meet whoever it was that came to see her, even though she knew who it would be:

  Sure enough, it was her mother.

  “Daria,” Shana said.

  Her mother stood there, her hair in humid curls framing her porcelain face. She had a gray hoodie and a peach T-shirt underneath it. Jeans. Looking like some cool young mom, the hip mom down at the playground.

  “I wish you’d call me Mom,” Daria said.

  “And I wish I could, but right now, I can’t.”

  The woman puffed some air into her cheeks and let it out before walking closer and saying, “I love these falls. When I first…came to this place, I would walk here just like you and I would choose to really be here and take it all in. I honestly thought for a while that this was Heaven or maybe even Hell—the Good Place or the Bad Place, I wasn’t sure.”

  “That’s great.” Shana injected those two words with as much shitty teenage sarcasm as she could, weaponized in just such a way that she didn’t even have to roll her eyes, because it would be neatly inferred. “Well, thanks for coming by, Daria, good talk. I’m really glad we had this time together.”

  “Shana. Don’t be like that.”

  “Don’t be like what, Daria? Pissed that my mother abandoned her family years ago? Mad that my dad is dead and never got to see her again? Irritated and confused that of all places to find her, I find her here, in what feels like some half reality but is very likely
a simulation inside an artificial intelligence, which makes me wonder, gosh, could she be a robot, too?”

  “Black Swan is not a robot.”

  “See, of all the things I just told you, that’s the one you answer. You didn’t talk about being suicidal or about how I should have a little sympathy—which I should, totally, you’re right. No, you mouth off about Black Fucking Swan. It’s like you’ve been programmed.” Shana leaned in and hissed these next words: “Or are a program yourself.”

  Daria reached for her, a soft touch on her arm—

  Shana swatted it away. “Fuck off. Don’t touch me.”

  “I’m not a program.”

  “Says the program, because the program has been programmed to say, I’m not a program.”

  “Shana, I love you. I missed you. I didn’t mean to leave. I was…I was fucked up, okay? You don’t understand what it is to be depressed—like, not just sad, not just anxious, but where there’s nothing going on upstairs. It’s like, your brain is a blank chalkboard and you want to write on it, some message, some profound thought, but you can’t think of anything. You can’t even will the muscles in your arm to pick up a piece of damn chalk. So it’s just blank, and you stare at it again and again, and the longer you leave it blank, the worse and worse it feels.”

  “Very poetic.”

  “I’m sorry I left. I shouldn’t have. But it was what it was. It happened and I’m sad every day about that.”

  Shana scoffed, half turning away from her, arms crossed. “So I guess Black Swan didn’t magically cure your depression.”

  “I’m sad, but not depressed. My regrets are no longer the building blocks of me.”

  That’s some real self-help shit, Shana thought.

  Daria continued: “Black Swan did give me something. My levels are different now. I’m balanced. It has given me life, and I’ve given my life to it in return. As one of The Twelve—”

  “This is creepy. You talk like it’s a god.”