The Five Hundred Days of Ms. Between
Joshua Alan Doetsch
Can’t feel my legs. So I slither along the ground, toward the audient window, humming that song. I hear the wet-velcro rip of the thousand hands rending flesh. I see her through the window. That mocking grin.
The first thing Ms. Between said to me was, “I’m a mad woman with a lab.” The second thing she said was that I could leave at any time with no obligation. The third thing was that there could be no questions—questions would cause her and her offer to evaporate. I believed absolutely in that, so she handed me the murder weapon.
No, wait. That’s not the beginning. I don’t remember exactly when it began—some time after Ms. Between came out of our touchscreens. Everyone has seen her Tech Talk videos and all their terrible wonder. Yet nobody knows where she broadcasts from. No one ever meets Ms. Between.
But I did.
She provided no name, only an address. She said he had done a bad thing. Said he deserved it.
I swallowed all of my wriggling questions.
The Nameless Man looked old and kindly. He had one eye and smiled as he slept. Oh, how I wish he had tossed with moaning guilt. Everyone sleeps more soundly since the symbionts.
Hesitating, I stood over the Nameless Man’s bed for an hour. With the speed of a carnivorous plant, I took out the dagger. It was carved from bone and coated in lacquer that gave it a greenish hue. I raised the dagger over my head and held it there, squeezing the leather-wrapped handle. Another half hour. My arm ached. I bit my inner cheek and tasted copper. Ms. Between had said I could leave at any time.
No, Val, Lailah pleaded from inside me. You must not do this.
Lailah is my dedicated symbiont.
“Have to,” I rasped.
The Nameless Man startled. His eye opened. I brought the dagger down. I’ve never been good with knives. It took many tries. “Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry,” I said until I was nothing but tears and snot.
“Lailah,” I said when it was over, “now.”
Her coils tightened in my gut. No, Val. Don’t make me. Don’t make me.
“We have to, Lailah. Please.”
I felt her sigh and shiver. Her tendril came out the port in my wrist to snake down into the Nameless Man’s mouth. His symbiont would not live long without him, but it might have stored recent memories in synaptic backup. Through Lailah, I felt its distress. Not a dedicated symbiont, not even a thought interface. How lonely. Just a silent worm. But I don’t judge. I recognize my privilege.
As Lailah devoured the other symbiont, I put the wet dagger into a plastic bag. Ms. Between had handed it to me just before telling me the rules of time travel. It was preposterous. Time travel couldn’t exist.
I committed murder on the off chance that I was wrong.
I walked home through the street-lit glow of the city, the old and terrible city of crimes uncounted, layered and layered like rings in a hanging tree. The streets were quiet, but I couldn’t hear my own footsteps. Lailah released chemicals to soothe my nausea, so I managed three blocks from the Nameless Man’s apartment before I vomited.
The anti-symbio crowd can wallow in ignorance. The symbionts improved our quality of life. They wiped out entire diseases. They’re always there for us. We stare at our screens, pressing our Skinner-box buttons, but now, we’re all alone together.
I wiped my mouth. Lailah cleaned the stomach acid from my teeth. I hummed a song I couldn’t remember. An oldie. Very old. The song Ms. Between sang in the bar the night we met. Johnny Mercer? I couldn’t remember the words, but the lyric fragments bounced around my brain like a free radical.
“Strange days,” wheezed a vagrant from under a hooded cloak of rags.
Lailah hissed a warning in my brainpan, readying an arsenal of enhanced adrenaline. People without symbionts spook her. She can hear no voices inside them. She calls “Marco” into the darkness and gets no reply. I rubbed my belly and hummed the song to calm her. I tried to sing it.
“You’ve got to accentuate the positive … eliminate the … no … hmm …”
Through broken teeth, the vagrant muttered something that might have been, “Don’t mess with mystery?”
“No,” I said. “That’s not it.”
I gave the man my pocket cash. All he had was an empty belly and nothing to call him home. I recognize my privilege.
During the rest of the walk, I avoided eye contact. These days, pedestrians walk like zombie ants, forming curious, unthinking formations as if under the sway of tyrannous spores. I walked in the shadows of jagged buildings. When had I become afraid of the open, starry sky?
Thinking back, I don’t recall if I entered my house by the front door or the rear. I only remember lying fetal on my bed. My pillow damp and salty. Lailah shuddered silent sobs within me.
Why, Val? Why did you make me do that?
“I’m sorry,” I said over and over. Lailah’s tendril poked out, wrapping around my hand. We squeezed one another. “We’re doing it for Oliver and Nemo.”
But they’re dead, Val. They’re dead.
“Not for long,” I said. But that was stupid. Time travel was impossible.
With murder on my mind, I slept like a baby. Not so long ago—before the symbionts, during the screaming times—no one slept soundly. We screamed all through the night. Screaming was epidemic, and the city aldermen considered passing laws to ration sleep time and reduce the shrieks in the small hours. And that is when Ms. Between came streaming into our feeds.
It began when the autumn was too damn hot, and it was much too late to deny the climate change or the things crawling out of the melting icecaps, and the country was too polarized to do anything about anything, and the sciences groped in all directions, and the search engines pieced together all dissociated knowledge. It started with emails and texts with subject lines like “Don’t Fail to See!” and “Experience the Transhuman” and “Witness the Post-Mundane!” That is how Ms. Between came into our lives. She commanded our likes, our favorites, our shares, and our reposts. Billions of views. She came as an electronic zeitgeist. On the internet, everyone’s an anonymous spirit—both the message and the messenger.
She looked at you, really looked at you through your touchscreen. The show-woman scientist, her Tech Talk videos were equally artistic. The images! The non sequiturs, the absurd, the grotesque. Faces peering out of ultimate space. Images so frightful that we might not have slept if not for our symbionts singing us silent lullabies of melatonin. And just when the surreal had tripped all the tumblers in your skull and you heard the creak of the suture cracks opening, hungry and ready, that is when Ms. Between would appear. So iconic in her huge goggles, rubber gloves, and waistcoat and suit—rather like a female Tesla. She was the harbinger of the recent surge in scientific discoveries. She dared us to hope.
If time isn’t a flat petri dish poked by contemptuous fingers, if anything actually begins, then there I was at the bar. I smoked a vitamin-supplemented e-cigarette and complained to the bartender that a vice without self-destruction spoils the poetry. He nodded in the fiberoptic glow of my nauseously nutritious pull. I sighed out blueberry-scented smoke, and we lamented the good old days when cigarettes had the decency to kill.
Lailah made that happy vibration—Mmm, on my inner ear—that she makes whenever she finds a tumorous growth to eat. That’s when I saw Ms. Between, sitting on the next stool as if she had leapt from my touchscreen. She swirled a nuclear blue martini in a rubber-gloved hand. She hummed and sang that old song. What was it called? The earworm lyrics crawled into my head. Why can’t I remember?
I saw myself in her goggles, mouth gaping.
“You … you’re …?”
“A madwoman with a lab,” she said. “Don’t be a glum chum. You’re a sleepwalker, blind. How can you see the worlds within worlds? Do you know, if you rip open a gravid sand shark’s belly, what you’d find? Embryos hunting embryos. Murder in utero. A tiny, black Mesozoic sea, and only one mak
es it out. From their perspective, you won.”
Then the drinks flowed, and Ms. Between’s sentences went up and down like a rickety carnival ride. She told me my life story. She told me about my twin brother, Oliver, and how he became my parents’ favorite the day I announced that they no longer had two sons; the day they threw me out. She told me how Oliver was murdered. She told me how my mom and dad reconciled with me after his death, even paid for all my operations and changed their pronouns. How I hated them for that. As if I had to buy their acceptance with Ollie’s blood, as if he was a sacrifice on the altar of their love. Ms. Between talked of amputees trying to scratch phantom limbs and how I looked for my brother’s ghost in the bottom of every bottle. There were half-hearted suicide attempts, of course—never serious; always across, never along.
In the screaming times, before the symbionts, suicide was an epidemic. These days, it’s harder to kill yourself when you’re deciding for two. The self-murder rates plummeted, and the company building the civic-engendered suicide booths went out of business. We all pretended it never happened.
Ms. Between told me all these things.
And I believed. I had to.
Last call drove us out into the damp, hot, deserted midnight streets. And up the dizzy stairs and into her lab. She showed me strange instruments. Gaudy machines of glass, metal, and plastic. She threw a switch, and sparks flew, and my hair stood up, and there was a buzzing behind my eyes, and I could see things slithering in the air like the floaters in our peripheral. I saw grotesque shadows squatting on our heads.
I saw these things, and I had to believe. I’m so sorry, Nameless Man. I didn’t believe in time travel, but I had to believe for Ollie. I took the bone dagger.
You’ve got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive …
Can’t remember the rest of the words. Something grinds in my chest when I breathe. I remember her voice. Ms. Between talks like someone who can barely cage the punchline behind her teeth. I remember how she said the rules of time travel.
One: the window is yours and yours alone. A window is calibrated to one person. Only that person can walk in or out of it. A person can only have one window. Ever.
Two: a window can open to only one time and place. Once set, that window is set forever.
Three: you can walk in and out of your window once a day. However, every trip wriggles the gap in time wider—sometimes by a millisecond, sometimes more. You will always arrive a little later than the last trip.
When I went back up the dizzy steps with the wet dagger, when I dropped it dripping at Ms. Between’s feet, I knew she’d let loose the punchline. Time travel is impossible. It can’t be real. Silly me. Stupid, evil, wretched me. I’d murdered for a desperate hope. That idiot hope would go to that chopping block still sticky with the gore of Santa Claus, fairytales, and all manner of moon-blooded dreams.
I shivered. I waited for the axe to fall.
And Ms. Between did the most unlikely thing. She opened the window.
It made none of the gaudy, mad science sounds of the rest of her lab. There was no transition between it not being and being. It stretched in trapezoidal shapes and inconstant angles. Colors swirled like a smoking mirror before they settled and cleared.
“Ollie?”
I gulped air. I saw him. I saw the scene moments before his death as it was described to me. Frozen.
“But,” I said, “that’s too late. No time to warn him. I need more time!”
Ms. Between shrugged apologetically, said it wasn’t an exact science.
I said, “I need weapons: guns, explosives, something formidable.”
She shook her head and said, “Nothing synthetic.” In fact, she explained, with the window calibrated to me, anything that was not a human byproduct was dicey. She told me to take off my clothes, the way the Big Bad Wolf, stuffed like a sausage in Grandma’s skin, told Red Riding Hood. “You won’t need them anymore.”
She gave me a jumpsuit of supple leather, vat-grown from fetal cells. It hugged me wetly. She handed me the dagger and nodded, and I knew what species of bone it was. She injected me with something that made all the colors bleed and every molecule significant.
Then I walked through the window.
Tiny explosions. My tooth fillings. I tasted copper. Agony. Déjà vu. The feeling of a forgotten song on the tip of the tongue.
“Ollie?”
Nemo! Lailah said in jubilation. Nemo-Nemo-Nemo-Nemo! She could sense her twin, Oliver’s symbiont. They were two halves cut from the same worm when we were just children.
Oliver struggled, visible in the moonlight. He was bound and gagged on a rough-hewn stone at the center of a natural amphitheater, exactly as the police report said.
No time. I ran down the sloping semi-circle toward the killing stone. Dozens of steps from holding his hand. I had to get him out of there. No time.
And then, they were there.
“No.”
I saw them by the light of the LED crosses grafted onto their foreheads. I saw them by the moonlight glinting off the metal peeking from their flesh. Fifteen? Twenty? More? The chromies. Children of the Immaculate Machine.
“No.”
Some anti-symbios were more radical than others. Some found religion through body modification—transubstantiation through steel, the voice of the Holy Ghost through the wireless connection in their skulls. To them, a body defiled by one of the “devil worms” was a profanity. They punished the supporters of that lifestyle. Oliver had brought his medical training to this faraway place for charity work, bringing symbionts to impoverished children. And the chromies had tortured and murdered him. But not yet.
“No!”
Lailah filled my legs with adrenaline. I never ran so fast. I didn’t run fast enough.
Many hands tore me away from Oliver. I stabbed and stabbed with the bone dagger, but it was quickly slapped away. Boots and reinforced knuckles hailed down. I swallowed teeth. A knee shattered. Ribs snapped like twigs in the night. Lailah tried so hard, pumped so many endorphins, but she couldn’t keep up. My left eye socket crunched and closed, an avalanche over a cave. But crueler still, they left one eye open.
“Don’t you do it,” I tried to say through the ruin of my mouth.
But they did. They stood with perfect theatrical arrangement, so my view was not obstructed. Every detail I read in the police report. Every horrible daydream and sweat-stained nightmare. I saw it. They crucified Oliver. They slowly cut him open. They pulled out Nemo.
Oliver made a muffled scream.
Lailah screamed, and I screamed. We screamed to the stars and universe with its insane rules that allowed time to bend. Then there was only the sound of the chromies praying. Then their laughter.
Then silence.
And then a familiar humming. That old song. Lailah stirred in the wreckage of me, sensing a sibling self. A figure hunched some paces away, farther up in the amphitheater. The chromies laughed and leered at the promise of more bloody fun. My head swam, and it was so hard to see in the moon-licked dark. Were my symbiont and I part of triplet sets?
No. It was me, come back through the window. I … she shook, barely able to stand. Had it been days? Weeks? Months? However long it took medical and symbiotic care to allow her to limp back through. She fell over, bleeding out from all the places the window had robbed her of her stitches, staples, and artificial bits. Helpless, she had watched our brother murdered all over again. I could tell something had been taken from her, something that only showed in her one good eye. She just kept humming that jolly song.
And then more humming. More me. One by one. There was no transition. They were suddenly there or had been there in the dark. And with each additional hum, the glittering grins of the chromies eclipsed into frowns and uncertainty.
How many of me were there? We filled the half circle of the rising amphitheater. Every step up the slope was another me, one day more healed in body and broken in mind. The ones at the top were lean and well-muscled, marke
d everywhere with self-inflicted scars, hunched and shivering with insanity. Once a day through the window. How many days?
The amphitheater vibrated with their humming. Lailah called out to the silent symphony of symbionts. All at once, the many mes showed the graveyard of their teeth and made such faces that the youngest of the chromies fainted. And then, they charged down the slope. The ones highest up moved the fastest, taking the lead, loping down the hill. They surged over the weeping chromies like frenzied maenads. Grabbing, biting, rending, pulling flesh from metal.
And here I am, crawling up the hill. Crawling like a boneless mollusk humiliated by gravity. I can hear the Bacchic orgy behind me, sounding something like a slaughterhouse and something like lovemaking. One of the machine cultists begs for help. The thousand hands kill and defile.
Can’t feel my legs. It hurts and something grates inside of me, but I crawl toward the window. Ms. Between watches me from the opening. I crawl back to the mask of her mocking grin and all the things wriggling behind it. I crawl back to her made-up rules—the rules that make rescue impossible but revenge conceivable, the rules that tear down deniability and nurture complicity. She knew. I murdered that old man, not even believing it would work, and she knew. I know all this now, but I’m still going to do it. I’ll pay the price, once a day, every day, and walk through the window to watch my brother die.
I crawl and cough and hum. I remember the words now. The lyrics were always in my brain, the way that tentacles and gills lie waiting, safely tucked away under our DNA, hidden behind the thinnest scrim of inhibitor proteins. I crawl and laugh and sing.
Tomorrow's Cthulhu: Stories at the Dawn of Posthumanity Page 4
