She realises that the kid's almost as tall as Perry but he's a wet, lanky shape. There's no mass to him. Perry's going to knock him through shoulder-high stacks of kumara tubes. Perry's grin signals a suspension of the usual rules of engagement. For once, he's too impatient to lay the groundwork. He wants mayhem now, no waiting.
To his credit, the kid sees it coming. He backpedals fast and gets out of the path of Perry's first exploratory swipe. It's not a real punch, but the kid doesn't know that. His foot catches the base of the pyramidal display and kicks off an avalanche of baked-not-fried snack foods. The kid wallops midsection-first into the shelf and puffs out his breath, eyes bulging. He folds forward, merging with the collapsing tower of cardboard tubes into a chaotic sprawl on the worn grey linoleum floor.
On a better day, it would be enough to instil humiliation without laying a hand, but tonight has crawled under Perry's skin. His mouth worked into an unsatisfied line, he closes in a couple of steps and raises one size twelve stomping boot. The kid cringes, his glasses hanging by one crimson ear. Gina grabs for an arm and pulls, but Perry's got his balance. She can't shift him.
"Perry! What in the world do you think you're doing?"
The voice isn't loud at all but as the resonating chime of cascading tubes subsides, it cuts through the charged scene like scissors. Perry's foot freezes. Like gravity just got switched on again, Gina's weight on his arm takes effect. He tumbles, she lets go just in time.
She thinks, Yes, that's right. Let go.
"Mum?"
Gina doesn't know this little old biddy with protruding teeth and square pensioner sunglasses. Her silvery rinse is wrapped in a hairnet and she's wearing a deli-stained striped apron. Her arms are folded and her jowls are shivering. "Perry, I asked you a question. For Jiminy's sake, help Damien up at once."
At either end of the aisle, small crowds of late-evening shoppers are clumping together. They sense a good show in the offing. Random aggro against shop assistants is one thing. Family drama, though? That's rubbernecking gold.
"Muh-hum?"
Gina can't believe her ears. Perry's gone from scowling alpha-jerk to the verge of tears in the space of a breath. No, scratch that—there are two streams already plunging down either side of his creased and darkened face. He's full-on bawling now.
She says, as calmly as she can, "Perry, you told me your parents were dead."
"Mum?" It's like he doesn't hear her. He just repeats again and again: "Mum? Mum?"
The biddy's face tightens up into sharp folds for a second, her teeth sucking back behind rose-glossed lips like a startled reef fish. She's uptight about something and it's not just Perry's random hostility. Under the searing halogen glare, Gina watches the biddy's brow unfurl, and sees a slackness spread down her face like one of those wartime films showing Germany's relentless march across Europe.
The woman plucks the glasses off with gristly fingers and looks down at Perry with sad, milky eyes. "Oh, child," she says, understanding washing the anger from her voice, "you aren't where you belong, are you?"
Gasps and whispers from that way up the aisle and this way down. Everybody has something to say to that, it seems, but Gina can't hear what's discussed. A camera flashes from one direction and she can see that a couple of people are holding up their hands palm-forth. Darkened lenses of various designs are attached like oversized rings to upturned middle fingers; the owners are watching screens on the backs of their wrists.
Perry doesn't seem to be up to saying anything, if that lip quiver is any sign. Gina asks "Sorry, but—what's your name?"
The old girl wobbles forward on sagging chubby legs, clearing a path through the debris with her feet. She kicks herself some space and kneels between Perry and the kid, who is sitting up and rubbing the back of his head.
"Damien, are you all right?" When the kid nods, his eyes locked on Perry like he was watching a growling pitbull, she says "Go and find the manager, please. Tell him we've got more visitors."
Gina tries again. "Are you Perry's mother?"
Damien's uncomprehending stare finally breaks at the sound of the question. Clambering up with ungainly effort, he sets off another small tumble of cardboard tubes. When he bends to start picking them up, the biddy shoos him away. He flees down the aisle, where the amateur film crews part with reluctant shuffling and redoubled mutters.
"My name is Jo,' the biddy says. "I'm Perry's mother." Somehow it sounds like a lie.
Perry rushes the old woman into a fierce bear hug, burying his face into her shoulder. His sobs sound like a bodybuilder working a bellows. Each breath is a declaration of something between relief and sorrow and horror. In a few seconds, he's become someone Gina doesn't recognise, someone vulnerable and small. A child. She finds herself aching with sympathy and revulsion.
She hates that she feels either one.
"I don't understand what's going on."
"I am Perry's mother," she says, "but I have never seen this young man in my life."
She sees Perry stiffen, sees the red flush across his nape. He doesn't break the hug. Perhaps he's scared to.
"You've made a wrong turn, I'm afraid. It happens from time to time. You wandered into Aisle Nine."
"Aisle Nine?"
"Round here, that's where it usually happens. I suppose you didn't notice anything at all, did you? No unusual sounds or flashes of light? Just went to your supermarket and found yourselves here?"
"Mum, mum," says Perry. His stupid Batman bass growl is gone. Without it he sounds like an eleven year old. She never realised he did that all the time. His commitment to artifice surprises her. "Can I stay with you?"
In turn, she sounds like a mother, firm and resolute. "You have to go back, Perry. You can't stay. There's no room for another you here."
The babble from the onlookers is louder now. The crowd has grown denser. Now the talk stops and they part again, revealing Damien leading someone back to the scene. The companion is tall and muscled. His stride is confident and relaxed. A playful flop of hair drops over cheerful eyes creased in confusion.
Perry but not Perry. The supermarket manager, she presumes. Perry, as if he were played by a young Brad Pitt.
Manager Perry pulls Damien by his collar to a stop. They stand there. He's watching his mother like a meerkat.
"You need to go home," Jo says again. Perry whimpers. The angry belligerent man is gone. What remains is an uncertain boy, drowning in wait of a kind word. "I'll take you as far as I can but you'll have to walk the last part by yourself."
"Home?"
"I'm sorry," she says. She looks Perry in the eye, not unkindly but with unflinching hardness. "You probably want to stay more than anything. I just bet you do. But I already have a son to care for. I can't have a matched pair."
She helps him up. He doesn't resist as she leads him down Aisle Nine, away from Damien and Manager Perry. Away from Gina. He glances back once but not to look at her. He locks eyes with his mirror-image and half a lifetime's pain is compressed in his unmasked jealousy. Then Jo walks him around the corner and out of sight.
A hand falls on Gina's shoulder, familiar and wrong at the same time.
The touch doesn't trigger her instinct to flinch. Manager Perry says "You can follow in a minute. We used to send visitors back in groups but it sometimes looked like it hurt them. Now all visitors go single-file. It's store policy."
His little joke lights up his face. He's happy, he's cool; this is all no big deal.
"So you're another him. Is there another me around?"
He laughs at that and a chuckle runs through the watchers. They seem to love him. "Probably not. One doppelganger per tour group seems to be the rule. I guess it had to be my turn sooner or later. Pretty weird though."
"I guess it's like looking into a broken mirror?"
He nods. "Like that, but knowing that sooner or later the reflection would try to kill me. That always happens with the doubles, once they get over the shock."
"So you se
nd them back before they clue in." Another nod, pleased and impressed this time. It's an expression that makes her disorientation easy to take. "How did I get here in the first place?"
"He brought you. Not on purpose. He just wanted it badly enough." Manager Perry frowns. "I don't know what I'd do without Mum around. It'd mess me up."
"It probably would."
Perry was a key, one she never knew she needed to turn. Now Gina's on the far side of the door and the shape of the key doesn't matter anymore.
She drops to one knee and starts tucking cardboard tubes under her arm.
"Do you have any jobs open? I'm not in any hurry to go."
'Imported Goods – Aisle Nine' was only the second story I finished after I started getting serious about writing for publication in 2012. (At the time I was sick of my job and sleep deprived, so nothing much has changed there). It was also my first story accepted for publication, in the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild's anthology of that year.
I'm a fan of parallel universe stories, which tend to come in two flavours: either the differences are over-the top spectacle - airships are commercially viable, the dinosaurs never became extinct and everyone's Over-There doppleganger wears an eyepatch or a goatee to denote their evil intent –or, as in this case, the changes are small and unsettling, and the dopplegangers are, perhaps, the better option.
'Imported Goods – Aisle Nine' was first published in Next (CSFG Publishing, April 2013), edited by Simon Petrie and Robert Porteous.
Red Fire Monkey
Take me higher than the canopy branches
Gravity's a memory, vanilla can't stand it
Klaxons burst through King's mid-forties geneticore playlist. The noise hits his modded cerebral cortex like panic pheromones and the smell of smoke. He kills the headstream, music forgotten as he drops into his flow. He's already on the move, heading upstation. Hand over hairy hand out of his chillpod; his tail scoops up his breather and breach kit as he passes.
Colourful emoji glide across his artificial corneas like leaves on a mountain stream. Incident reports: black clouds mean a hull breach; a purple bandage for injuries; red fire means uncontrolled combustion. And King's icon: a chattering, laughing chimpanzee. Nobody should confuse simians for monkeys, but the sysadmins laughed off his discrimination complaint. The software is an off the shelf package from an ignorant Australian startup.
Grown up in a lab with the surgeons and the hackers
My own mother don't know me cause she don't got access
Vermillion Station's central concourse is in a buzz of urgent confusion and babbling concussion. King ignores the triage teams shepherding bloodied stretcher capsules. The brusque commands of the incident coordinator have nothing for the Fire Monkeys; King shunts her feed to a low-pri stream. Nobody is shouting anything he needs to hear.
He picks a line clear of loose debris and the weeping wounded. He propels himself along the path laid out by the crisis management AI; the visual overlay depicts a trail of bananas. So offensive.
Rook and Noon sling themselves into his wake as he passes the therapy lab, greeting him with tight squawks of static over restricted telecoms. They bare their teeth, eyes bright with excitement, and strap vacuum seals over their faces.
Incident data refreshes with detailed assignments. Up ahead, the Agronomics module is burning and buckling as fire and void battle over it for bragging rights.
Rook touches King's shoulder in a comforting gesture. Eve is assigned to Agronomics.
I got personal space, I got thoughts nobody asked for
Am I under your dominion? Do you think you can task your
Monkey? Beast of burden? Go to hell.
Autonomous safeties locked Agronomics tight at the first sign of danger. Spiking thermals or falling pressure? Doesn't matter; the protocol's the same in either case. The blast doors are rated for re-entry. They cut off everything: expanding clouds of burning oxygen; the vampiric siphoning of oxygen into space; and anyone stuck on the wrong side of the airlocks.
Station telemetry shows three weak sets of life signs – two hominids, one cebid. They also show rising heat and a steady pressure drop.
The good news for the station is that the slow breach will suffocate the fire soon. The bad news all depends on who has an independent oxygen supply.
Rook flings override codes at the access hatch to the secondary duct network, known to most as the Monkey Tubes. Vermillion Station is enveloped by a lattice of narrow conduits; too small and claustrophobic for vanilla humans but comfortably proportioned for jacked-out rescue monkeys modded to navigate disorienting zero-grav crawlspaces.
Noon mines sensor data. The atmospheric integrity for their fastest route to Agronomics shows green. He grabs the tip of his own tail and claps his feet, signalling all-clear.
King pops the hatch release and pulls himself into the darkness.
Never knew nothing of fresh fruit and foliage
Never nothing in nature like a rescue soldier
King's optics kick in filters and image enhancement as he clambers into the smoke haze. Streams of fire like burning ribbons stretch from a blazing shuttle buggy's battery chamber to the outer walls of the agricultural chamber. The stream splits into three writhing tributaries, marking the hull's fracture points. Fatigue patterns expand through strata of ceramic, titanium and nano-woven diamond. King consults his data feeds and selects the worst of the ruptures, tapping the same parts of his amygdala evolved to spot a weak branch or a camouflaged predator.
Agronomics is a broad, pebble-shaped module nearly two hundred metres in diameter, spindle-mounted and spun up to simulate Earth gravity. Not right now; automatic braking has already killed most of the spin. That suits King. He doesn't need invisible weights trying to pull him to the floor while he works.
But he is tempted. Eve is down there.
He spares her a glance. Bloody cuts and singed patches mottle her gold and black hair, and her tail is kinked and limp, but she's masked and mobile. She injects coagulant foam into an ash-faced, moaning biotechnician's stomach wound. He can't catch her scent through his self-contained breather but his neck hairs ruff in relief. She's beautiful and alive.
But she's not safe yet. Her skin enhancements aren't rated for hard vacuum. His implants turn his attention to the buckling superstructure overhead.
Argue all you like, say we're gonna come to harm
It only rains in orbit when you call a fire alarm
Noon drops in beside Eve and attaches a resuscitation kit to the crashing technician.
Rook clambers under the burning buggy to disengage the fuel cells. His hair is already alight when he sets off a grenade full of retardant foam. His vitals start spiking instantly.
King mutes the distress alerts; Rook's done his job.
King zeroes in on the fissures, skirting the perimeter of the fiery vortices swirling into the ruptured wall.
He pops a sealing cap from his utility harness; it begins to expand in reaction to the falling air pressure. In two heartbeats, it's the size of a banana. Then a coconut. When it's an off-white sponge-surfaced watermelon he slaps it on the damaged wall section. His knuckle hairs singe and hiss, but King's nervous system is monitored from one microsecond to the next; he barely registers the sensation before pain blockers smother the distraction.
Atmospheric monitors register a decrease in the rate of pressure loss. Noon flashes him a toothsome-grin icon. Eve's congratulations come on their secure personal channel; they're not for public consumption.
King patches the next fissure. It scans as vacuum-proof but something is wrong; the pressure drop is accelerating again. The third fissure opens up, the structure around it weakening at an unstoppable rate. New fissures are opening, spreading like a web spun out to every branch at once. King shrieks in frustration as he feels the drag of suction grab hold. His next sealing cap has begun to inflate but it's already too late.
A piece of ceramic plating a little larger than King's head tears
loose and draws him feet-first into the Open. He can't keep his grip on the spongey sealing cap. Between one blink and the next, King is outside Vermillion Station and moving away fast. His expert systems send emergency calls; patches of bare skin on his feet, hands and face fluoresce bright red to aid search and rescue attempts.
They won't come in time. He's an angry red dot against the vastness of the Open. His hair is already brittle with frost and the skin beneath is purpling as his capillaries burst. He spins slowly.
His feed confirms the seal behind him is holding. Rook's vital signs are dropping into critical levels across the board; it's touch and go which of them will outlive the other.
Eve's surprise and horror hits him in a flood of icons. Tears. Hearts. Broken branches in the high canopy.
Spread out ahead of him is the wide green of Earth. He knows the large inverted tear shape below; the lab technicians showed him pictures of South America once. He finds the green swathes of the continent's easternmost bulge. He shunts the image to temp memory, tagged for Eve. If they recover his remains, she will see what he saw.
King drops out of the Vermillion feed. His music resumes; a clatter of drums, whistling pipes and flutes, and snarling vocals. He soars over his ancestral home and wonders if anyone is looking up tonight.
You took me out and I won't ever go back
I make the calls for myself out here in the black
I am sometimes a volunteer organiser for Canberra's annual speculative fiction convention, Conflux. I wrote this story for the publicity release which informed prospective attendees about the 'Red Fire Monkey' theme and invited them to buy a membership.
I doubt it convinced anyone to come to the con, but I'm still very fond of the story. I'm always up for a story about the hazards of space travel, and the existential weirdness of uplifted animals (i.e. animals modified by scientists to given them human-level intelligence and communication abilities) is too good an idea not to play with.
Mnemo's Memory Page 15
